1655 Hanoi Alley Bell - TLC 56

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

She thought of her father whispering as he carried her away from their burning village during the war, “Remember where you came from.”

She never physically returned. Memories saved her.

It didn’t really matter what went where because after she’d carried her garbage down the high walled alley blocking sincere fading daylight she tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of neighborhood garbage was tremendous.

Growing day by day it evolved as a collective socialistic mess and community consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She felt content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Enough to get her away from homeland security prison walls to gossip with neighbors waiting to die as twilight filtered past musical hammers, creaking broken carts pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight alley chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at a visual epiphany as exactly 21 shovels of earth were manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks and suicidal dreams.

Laborers were light years away from young H’mong Sapa mountain sellers and trek leaders speaking fluent English with no further hope of a formal education after ninth grade surviving with indigo blue stained fingers hands and hearts living through long dark cold mountain winters as storms howled, “I feel free.”

They cheerfully offered their bright beaded bags, embroidery and natural world experiences to strangers.

Cynical war weary logic infested objectivists burning inside towering twin infernos of their psychosis ate self-pity with no exit for dessert inside Fibonacci’s eternal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Lucky sat on a Hanoi garden balcony cleaning The Dream Sweeper Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door with an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids like the man tormenting his child until the kid balls. Tears stream. Mother rescues her darling from endless emotional abuse stunting the child’s development.

Children learn how to reject this yeller. They learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They are passive-aggressive. As they age they turn off their brains. Genetic engineering. Essential healthy neural paths lie dormant. They turn off their ears. Blend in. This attention deficit disorder is deader than an ancestor eating incense. Ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reactionary recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to generations raised with fear, intimidation, suspicion, insecurity, starvation, poverty, informers, paranoia, empty promises, false hope and loud voices. Some voices are real others are pure nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Put on your social identity mask and hit the bricks. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with your children. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.

They will bellow like stuck pigs, bleating sheep and cackling crows breaking heart-minds and transmit shivers down your spineless self with regret and anger and fear manifesting in narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare. They grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

Time is a circle.

They bury you and take your photo to the artist who memorizes your face with graphite on parchment. Generations and friends stare at your black/white frozen face. Kneeling in supplication they offer you fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to consume, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding and pleading. Survivors live in fear of ghosts. How we live and how we remember. Let’s eat.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, words, phrases, sentences called speech, then louder until they achieve the decibels required to re-join the family so to speak. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

We work. We breed. We get slaughtered.

Someone - a parent, teacher, sibling, boss, lover, or stranger - yells at them and they ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells a little louder. No answer. 

The child plays the game waiting for them to get their yell going strong. Louder says listener hiding inside silence. After they’ve made them yell three times child answers with a whisper. They can’t hear the child. They yell again and again. The child has conditioned them to their catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

A kid whispers to teach them a lesson. A-dolts can’t hear them. They raise their voice competing with other yellers. Kid rejects them for yelling at him/her. He/she is easily distracted. He/she nurtures chaos, confusion and distractions. He/she loves the fragments. Ah, the glare of artificial ancestor passion for tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, “Give them 1,001 lashes with your tongue. I have 1,001 arms and 1,001 eyes. I am infinite on the ocean of wisdom.” 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell, talk over each other, don’t listen, yelling louder trying to be heard as others block them out or ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs howling, Feed Me.

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother ordered him to marry the slob who learned to yell while ignoring her parents which is how they evolved into this intelligent higher life form.

Every morning Lucky walked past homes guarded by rusty sliding gates. Narrow alleys and sardine dwellings. SHOCK was spray painted on a wall near a discarded sofa among residents cooking with round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, and stones creating magnificent futures with Marxist production tools: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant.

All fine well good ends to a means.

In a narrow street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs and glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from shops/homes. Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens fondled a veined leaf, a man oiling a bike gestured a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother hugged her young future yeller - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beep-beeped impatient music twisting through the crowd to get home to families, lovers, food, television, sex, dramas about heroes and heroines, their beloved pet and hungry dead ancestors.

A thin old man emerged from his small dark narrow utilitarian space where millions living in the dark hid from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up, lifting it into the air. It hung down. He resembled aristocracy holding a wild hare after dogs flushed it running wild filled with freedom’s fear.

He was in shock holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool surrounded by confused voices of friends, neighbors and strangers pealing like bells in his brain muttering something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery of death standing alone holding the legs before laying the dog near the gutter as the animal’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion, meaning and returned to his dark interior unconscious space.

Buried inside his family’s deep dark home was an altar for candles, fruit, dead relative images and burning incense.

The black and white imitations resembled the Chinese artist's work. He drew the dead. A relative gave him a common small black and white photo from 1949 when the country declared itself free and independent and benevolent Chairman Mao dear grandfather leader bless his heart smiling at the masses ordered peasants, “Eat Grass.”

45 million died of starvation.

Their small iconic image was used in documents for residence, work and party politics. People had the three iron rice bowls. Guaranteed living space. Guaranteed work unit. Guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same grey clothing, ate the same gruel, saying the same thing following the leader like condemned criminals playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled an undersexed Chinese teacher in a university class tomb pounding her point home with a Marxist control stick.

The Maija artist accepted a photo from a grieving relative set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass. His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion. 

This day he sketched an old stoic sad resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty. 

An emaciated friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. They shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted ascetic.

Images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts was a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they met ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes. 

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Hanoi family noise. “It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

music muse

A word mercenary is free and roaming.
Roaming changes may apply.
Smiling is a virus.
Intuitive improvisation is a sign of genius.
Slowing down is the name. Exploring is the game.
Vientiane airport. A man pushes an empty wheelchair across airport tarmac.
Boarding pass woman does eyeliner.
The modern stainless steel global glass hair port design hasn't reached Vientiane time warp.
Laughter is the Beauty.
Transitions are radiant and clear.
One life, no plan, many adventures.
Intention. Mindfulness. Impermanence.
Ancient stories.
Music is the muse feeling alive on the ground in Luang Prabang.

Clean air, excellent light, brown scared rocks, elevations, green rolling hills, deep valleys and long visions.

Ancestor Worship - TLC 55

After a year at TLC and a year in Indonesia he rented a room near Lenin Park for four months. Dream Sweeper Machine evidence verified life in Hanoi.

He planned to burn a hardback copy of A Century is Nothing near Hue where he was transformed. Sacrifice. Omar said, please gift to three Vietnamese-Australian girls you meet in Ho Chi Minh before you walk to Cambodia. They’ll carry it back to Sydney. Sharing is caring. He did.

His Hanoi neighbors were Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is Daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin or new Yin and old Yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife had someone to yell at. They needed someone, anyone to take care of them in old age sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 dancing kitchen smells with the sweet memory of insistent incense. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000 cash up front or no deal. Pay to play. Dave and his wife pretended to need kids so offspring would feed them later. When you’re young and naive multiple pregnancies are paramount. Accelerate production comrades.

It’s easy to produce kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are ninety million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the popular Communist Party bestseller, Produce & Consume.

Get married early the pressure is on. Honor off her.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, and forgotten. Loneliness and alienation increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and instability in a well-mannered informer-driven paranoid society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to get a husband.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English. I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street of life. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. What I really needed to sustain my curiosity and sense of humor. I use really a lot.

Don’t let school interfere with your education.  

More tourists than travelers visit Sapa. It’s near The Middle Kingdom. I've never been there. It’s an old civilization. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail better. I have a dream, to be.

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at the nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese products. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh. You can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses polluting pristine air 2) they wear bright red baseball hats so they don’t get lost ha, ha, ha 2) they travel in packs like scared animals 3) they stay in government hotels and eat at Vietnamese places 4) they ignore me.

No, I’m talking, and I speak excellent English among other languages about the foreigners. My friends and I working the street politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts, embroidery work and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners real travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. Sapa is a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. In and out people.

Tourists have a holiday schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? A Greek guy named Arrest Throttle said time is the greatest wealth or maybe it was health. They’re related.

Anyway, they eat, sleep, wander around and maybe if I’m lucky take a trek to my village and then, POOF - like magic they disappear. 

Then the tourist machine spits out more day-trippers for us to sell to pester and offer village treks. Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature and the real Sapa. Life is all about meeting, engaging and establishing emotional connections with people.

It’s about what you feel not what you understand. I feel free.

Engage-study-activate.

Some stay overnight in my village, which is fantastic because by avoiding the greedy hotel middlemen after profit, my folks make some small money.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels - H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses because we are free - charge tourists $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get ten. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet trekkers the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that. One said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. I am a wise owl.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They slow down. They sit and talk with my mom and dad. They take some snaps. Here we are.

Then we follow trails through forests, crossing rivers, trekking along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal directly with tourists and trekkers. I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman, ha, ha. Does that make me a middle woman?

I live in the middle way.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza with cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical box. What’s up with that? Squeeze a memory. Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work-play, evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand at a cultural level why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don’t leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than walking home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It has beds and a toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work. I’m a great little trek leader.

I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do.

Nature is my teacher. Life is good in Sapa. Bye-bye and good luck.

The Language Company

go slow

How slow can you go?

Walking at the speed of a camel.

Designing charcoal elements of crisp fire

Infants screaming at talking head women drives young ones crazy

In out in out their tongues banging like pistons on a desultory 125cc engine

Propelled by virgins returning home with their unblemished shy dignity intact.

One woman fans skewers buffalo meat to a crisp.

A grandmother suffering from diabetes Type II cradles an infant. 

Shuddering wedding photos are frozen on a wall. It never turns out like people imagine.

They breed, work and get slaughtered.

They trade hands and hearts.

She skewers another hypnotic form of laughter to preserve her ugh, ugh conversation.

Fat lost European tourists waddle past.

With an accusatory tone men get smashed on beer Lao.

A mechanic hammers one sharp line of description vs mundane observation.

Agent Orange - TLC 50

Omar's suicidal literary agent said, this creative nonfiction gonzo jazz poem is impossibly probable.

We invent truth, said Zeynep and Rita, dazzled by needles, threads and embroidery. Our thread creates art.

I know everything and can say nothing about character arc, rising tension or sustaining a plot, said Agent Orange. Something needs to happen to move it along with narrative flow and character development. Make me laugh, cry, scream, get angry, suffering the joyful painful slings and arrows of time.

Create emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist. Grab me by the throat in the first sentence. Strangle me with emotional words visual truth and dramatic action. Make me pay attention. Let me anticipate the mysterious unfolding process. Cinema.

Give me a sharp emotional hook hanging above a mainstream literary marketing platform in plywood brothels where evil greedy men with MONEY & POWER threaten and abuse orphaned, abandoned sex slave girls.

They buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in locked rooms, use them, abuse them, trade them, sell them and discard them on Mean Street for The Dream Sweeper.

They are commodities like rice.

Ignorant rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop goes the weasel. Open my legs. Plow fertile financial soil between my literary legs. Educate my feeble, nonchalant passive innocent broken heart-mind.

Throw in Chinese opera starring Curious a genius waif on quest.

Give me idiotic Thai family soap operas with a mean grandmother, a confused gay boy seeking his identity, a beautiful older sister crying all the time because she can’t find true love running through guys like a meat grinder, a younger brother who understands her beautiful anguish consoling her apparent disdain for affection and emotional honesty, a younger sister obsessed with passing university entrance exams to get a scholarship in OZ and brain dead parents too busy working to spend time with the family.

For good measure include Indonesian gamelan music, 3-act weepy-eyed Turkish dramas with a courageous girl named Zeynep, an ice girl author in Banlung, Laotian silk weavers, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancing slaves at 8th century Angkor Wat temples being strangled by cotton roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them strength/power enabling them to leap over tall nymphs with a single organismic shudder. Give me an organic boom-boom death in eight seconds.

Come on baby, she sighed. Get to my hot wet verb. Omar explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow dusky shoulders, pinpoint purple nipples with tongue talk, flat belles letters and long legs playing his way toward her heart of darkness. He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep. Slow sweet my sweet slow.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated by playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precise ambition whispering,Give me a baby. Give me a baby. He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there’s no way under the tropical ball of fire I’ll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here's the pitch in twenty-five words or less, said Rita gripping her two-seam knuckleball. Watch this baby dance.

Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

History, wars, innate violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodia. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. China purchased more than 15% of Cambodia. They’ve invested billions. They bought the government. One hand washes the other.

Crazy human genocide killers massacred 2,000,000 Cambodians between 1975-1979.

40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. They are subsistence farmers in a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck, breed, plant, harvest rice and relax. Quality of life sings with survivors. Milling around is an art form, like the Lao kid said.

Truth is stranger than fiction, said Zeynep.

Rita: Any day above ground is a lucky day. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. However, they live in fear. Conditioned by paranoia they are afraid the past will become the present. The past chases them 24/7. Time is a scary circle.

Red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of our genocide regime blasted black sky. An orphan sang, the wicked witch is dead!

Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $200,000,000 UN genocide show trial.

What a waste of economic resources.

Killers deny their role.

Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.

That’s what they all say.

No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah, yeah, said survivors.

Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories. Media buys people, said Rita. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.

Truth is at one end of the spectrum and imagination is at the other.

Numbed silence covers rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns send in the politicians, bankers, NGOs, thieves and Chinese manipulators.

Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.

Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody. I am a calm lunatic.

Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive. They started over after Year Zero. Fourteen million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a perfect NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.

Culture means you can forget.

It will take another generation or sixty years given our short average life expectancy to recover, revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.

Down the road, Alice in Slumber Land, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You must blend in if you’re going to survive. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.

They vanished. Extinct. Evolution is unpredictable.

Asking quest-ions then and now was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is perceived as strange, startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People asking WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, motivation, incentive and daily comatose poverty existence.

People who ask why are terrorists.

Accountability is a foreign language.

Khmer are soft and kind. We have a good heart. Let’s pretend to be who we are. Be careful who you pretend to be, said Rita, and one more thing, Buy some ice from me so I can eat rice.

Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful, said Agent Orange shoveling rice dialogue into her yap.

Yeah, yeah, said Zeynep. We spill sounds and smell metaphors with contextual sensorial context. Caress the divine details. Read history and weep. Create memory a form of history re-write history.

If you re-write can you re-wrong?

There are no metaphors, only observations.

Everything is a metaphor, said Other Muse.

Your memory is the world, said the agent. Cry me a river. Create a rainbow bridge. Get over it.

Between an object and a concept, said Rita laughing with Zeynep as the agent droned on like a Predator or GRIM REAPER at 18,000 feet zeroing in for the kill sale. I need to feel the females’ pain, their sense of hopelessness, their loss and being abandoned for eternity. Through their painful memory, fear and sheer terror, I need to feel comprehend and identify with their anguish inside vulnerable skin.

Dig into their epidermis, brain and heart. Show me tragic magic.

Conflict. Conflict. Conflict.

Give me desperate humans with inevitable poor economic fate, choices, intention, karma, motivation, growth and action allowing them to develop courage and truth. Their arc reveals adaptation, adjustment and evolution in a Darwinian sense to a higher form of cosmic consciousness.

They become the thing they fight the most.

A shadow discovers light.

Mindfulness is free of fear anger and ego. Grasping is suffering.

Their quest is for personal empowerment, self-esteem, dignity and freedom from tyranny, exploitation and slavery. Volunteered salivating slavery. Get it in writing, ha, ha, ha.

Orange reiterated mainstream literary criteria for R&Z. Show how women support each other with hope in their collective communal misery sharing tissues and issues. How they maintain a strong sense of self-esteem and personal identity after being abandoned, battered, raped, whipped, starved, screwed and chained in cold rooms for five years to break their spirit. Seasoning. If you want to train a wild animal you must break their spirit.

Sounds like a global educational conspiracy to beat, de-story, traumatize and obliterate any and all creative spirit out of children for twelve deadly years. Dead before adulthood, thought Rita.

Call the gravedigger. He’s never out of work.

Agent diatribe: Structure the tedious narrative from Z to A engaging my senses in shattered fragmented narratives illustrating truth, pain, sorrow, showing how love fate and chance manifests through silence, cunning and exile suffering with passion and dire consequences leading to redemption and a happy, sad or what have you end.

Give me the fucking drama.

Give me Living Dead female VICTIMS in life’s cruel unrelenting heart breaking saga with hollow eyes lying flat on their back legs wide open staring at plywood walls filled with torn glossy images of smiling coiffured feminine hair salon advertising myths as strange men fucking them 24/7 crush their emotional life.

Structure their tragic consequences while trusting a manipulative greedy mama-san running the business under the protection and tacit consent of local police. She gives the police a free fucking discount or goes to jail. Yes, create a colorful mind map of their personal and collective journey. Show me. Don’t tell me about their tragic love and tragic passion and tragic suffering. Make sadistic things happen to them.

Rip my bleeding heart out.

Build tension with cinematic pace. Then, in a dramatic climax en masse they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a community shelter experiencing healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment. They take control of their life.

They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice, sewing in a garment factory, looming silk, assembling circuit boards or guiding tourists at Angkor Wat.

Some master the art of weaving word threads. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. Free from self-censorship they write and draw in notebooks. They self publish art and stories.

The sequel.

They form Love Killer groups hunting down adults who betrayed them. The girls and women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest.

BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, heartbreak, tyranny, ambition, greed, revenge, mysteries and dime store romance not to mention salacious graphic comics. Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a cinematic scene. Words lie. Visuals reveal truths. Paint a voice. I need to see patterns. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms with recycled manuscripts. Pulp Fiction. Keep me turning the page. Make the characters want something even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi as they carry shit to fertilize gardens of Eden. Everyone needs water. Leo knows about the necessity of H2O after hauling excrement.

Zeynep said: You mean it’s like staring into an abyss called civilization with a courageous intelligent noble cannibal named Leo wearing an alarm clock around his neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles seeing eternity with stone cold clarity, immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom aware of immortality confronting our deepest fear in ROOM 101 alongside brave others unflinching in our love and compassion, this infinite potential?

Destiny danced for eternity’s delight.

Where all points end at infinity?

Where eternity playing with time folds space?

Before jumping over the abyss Zeynep, Rita and Leo yelled, People think art is easy. It’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day. JUMP!

Yes, said the agent. It has to be heart breaking with huge risks. You develop your wings after jumping.

You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, said Rita. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. I witnessed an old man write Eternity on a paper napkin at Planet Perfect, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon.

He carried an engraved Zippo talisman from Saigon.

I was born dead and slowly came to life.

He preferred wooden matches. He torched Eternity. Strike one, said Empire Umpire.

His blazing eyes watched the Big E burn to a cinder. Black and white ash fluttered from fingers. He mumbled incantations about life’s joke, formless form, void, Bardo and absurd existential choices.

He was so poor a matchbox held his clothes.

Why did he burn everything, said Agent O. Don’t you see, said Rita, the burning seer became his luminous inner light. Pure energy. Walking through an impermanent world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart, sun burned his retinas. Time tides in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon coalesced his cognitive facilities. He lapsed into a meditative stream-of-consciousness run-on life sentence befriending shadows, ghosts and shamans. He became a point of universal consciousness in his wisdom mind. Fiction and memory and dream and imagination are identical triplets. He confronted the abyss. He jumped and saved his skin bag.

Agent O. - I don’t get it. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. Stay on task. I like the LOVE KILLERconcept. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne.

Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

Keep it simple. Woman meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, rice, sex and love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story, readers love it.

Great, said Zeynep, how’s this sound? Woman loses man because she treasures her virginity. It's worthsomething. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a five year courtship thinking he will save me, discovering blind love by exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another.

Man promises her BIG money. Accepting with broken-hearted resignation that sex business is money business she gets engaged to satisfy her parent's perpetual demands.

Breed baby.

She keeps writing. She sends her experimental story out. It flies away like Winter Hawk. Blind myopic agents in a Spanish cave burn it. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. Independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and eleven siblings. Family demands $5k as a down payment. She’s a valuable child bearing resource.

They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

My body is a work of art.

It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

Man agrees. Facing family greed man suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and healthy doubt. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local greasy greedy officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. He pays for her eleven sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read, write and walk the

talk. He pays for a water pump. He pays for solar panels. He pays for her grandparent’s medicine. He pays for rice seeds, rabbits, chickens, pigs, water buffalo and vegetables for eternity.

Parents give expensive village wedding party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children to propitiate their poverty cycle, Give us someone to love, someone who will work, breed and before getting slaughtered care for us and bury us. Feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

Agent: That’s a mouthful of pay. Create a heroine on a quest-ion. Give me twisted international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Cambodia or Laos with exorbitant administrative costs, an orphan with no motivation but survival, greed and tons of CORPORATE monopoly play money. Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, forged land ownership papers screwing peasants, jealousy, revenge, pride, and make sure ambition is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashing empires, resolving conflicts and creating new dramas.

Give me 15% disabled unemployed angry homeless American war veterans and their struggles with attempted suicide, PTSS, divorce, drug addiction, domestic famine, The Broken System and revenge, a central motivating factor. Cheap guns filled with copious ammo. Give me transcendental borders in a crazy beautiful fucked up world.

Ascertain the intuition before the motivation, said Rita.

The agent climbed a literary mountain, No literary mountain means the publishing road is flat, straight and short. Give me one sentence with short dirty realism. Brevity.

Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts. Give me romance, treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem. Give me short simple sentences. Give me a life sentence with no chance for parole. Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts. I need characters feeling fear, forgiveness, shock and awe. Like Orwell give me some unpleasant facts about a condemned man on his way to the gallows stepping around a puddle of water. Show me his gesture his feeling this quick generous insight into the human condition. Strap me into my literary electric chair in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes give me a metaphor of mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling heart drama, intrigue and chaos. Entropy.

Find the big metaphor, my dear ice girl.

Give me REVENGE - the how and why war started. The why factor. Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faustian deals. Give me humans selling their soul or young virgin brothel bodies to the d-evil to achieve their temporary nefarious ends. Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in faint hope the last great evil thing that dies with gravity and arc. Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, reactions and growth with total comprehension and the scientific fact that the universe is 3.5 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY.

Some see TC as God. You may want to move this fact to the very brutal yet incomplete satisfying conclusion. This means the LONG NOW or 20,000 years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. Many believe everything happens for a reason. Up to you. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex.

If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried, few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile with HELP on top.

Rita: Here’s a rough draft with God’s voice. Try it on for size.

Day 30

Earth this is God. I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month.

The countdown begins today. Day 30. Get your shit together. Pay any outstanding bills. Tie up any loose ends. Place your bets ladies and gentlemen. I’m rolling the dice. Somebody said God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well guess what? I do. Kiss people you love bye-bye. Forever.

You’ve had your miraculous chance.

Have mercy, screamed seven billion humans.

You had your time. Time I was gracious enough to give you. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to do good work for others and improve the quality of life for humanity. You wasted it. I am very disappointed in your individual and collective behavior and attitudes. Actions speak louder than words. I’m sick and tired of seeing male idiots in suits whining like brats, talk, yak and disagree on common humanitarian principles. It’s time to pay the piper and I’m calling the tune.

I’m playing and all of you will dance.

I’ve given you plenty of time to get it right but no, you never solved problems of your own making. Petty squabbles. Selfish and violent. Adults act like spoiled children and enough is enough. I’ve seen enough children and women suffering to last me a lifetime.

I may give women and kids the benefit of the doubt when we get closer to Day 1.

Stay awake and stay tuned. See what happens.

It appears to my old tired eyes it’s the males who are responsible for this travesty of justice. Correct me if I’m wrong in my omniscient Tao. No, they screamed, you’re right, always were and will be. Males are to blame. Let me give you an example. Ok said whimpering humans. Give it to us straight. Let’s go way back. Earth is 3.5 billion years old. You humans have existed for what? 50,000 years give or take a century. That's a blink of eye. You know the Empire State Building in NY yes well that represents how long earth has existed through my good graces. I’m a benevolent creator. Put a dime on top, that’s how long you idiots have been around. Brief. Your average life span is what, maybe 80 years? That’s like me taking one long deep cleansing breath in a walking meditation. Generations of your ilk have left a long trail of tears. You’ve been killing each other for 4,000 years and still no one knows who the king is.

Get this fact this hard irrefutable truth.

I’m the king.

Always was and always will be.

I created the big picture.

I see the big picture.

I am the big picture.

Omnipotent. All knowing loving and compassionate.

There but for the grace of God go I. I have renovation plans and you’re not in the grand equation. Your puny existence expires in thirty clicks. No whys maybes ands if or buts.

You’re kidding, said humans.

Oh yeah? Want to see an example of divine justice? Sure. Ok, call a meeting of the worthless, toothless, useless UN General Assembly in NY. Every country’s representative, king, leader, dictator whoever runs their show will be present. No exceptions. Tomorrow. 8 a.m. Oh and one more thing, I expect the IMF, World Bank and related global financial big shots and their lawyers to be there as well. No one’s excused. It’s mandatory. No shows die.

Humans had nightmares.

At 8 a.m. the UNGA was SRO.

Delegates, political hacks, lawyers and financiers fidgeted, fretted and frowned. It’s too early for a meeting, said the new President of Turkey. Traffic was chaos, said a dictator from South America.

Mr. Moon Glow, the UN High Commissioner called the meeting to order.

We are here today because God said so.

Delegates from ______ and ______stood up shouting, I don’t believe in God.

Zap! Zap! Lightening bolts incinerated them. Smoke and the smell of burning flesh wafted toward an air conditioning ventilation system.

Who’s next, said a calm invisible voice.

The auditorium became very quiet.

I thought so, said the voice. Now that I have your attention let’s discuss specifics.

Wait a minute interrupted a shrill voice. A lawyer for Big Global Business (BGB) stood up. See here God, we control the flow of oil and money. When we decide crude prices and fiscal policy establishing our greed and profit intentions the world listens to us. They have no choice. You’re delusional. Who are you to decide anything? This is divine terrorism.

Zap!

Come people never learn, said God. Anyone else?

It’s a work in progress, said Rita.

Z: So far so good. Let it flow. Imagine an accelerated space program as humans escape Earth to avoid the end of the world, cannibals and Ebola plagues. Only super rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes. The poor fend for themselves in a global free-for-all. Leftovers. Savages rape, plunder, take vacations, build arks, move into abandoned slum mansions, create currencies, disband armies, begin new civilizations, grow and sell high potassium bananas and enjoy unprotected sex with strangers. It’s a doomsday scenario plus or minus friend links, likes, tags, share buttons, electronic social media and technological wiz gadgets.

Interesting said AO. I like Rita’s treatment. Expand it. Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis (  ). They stop me cold.

Punctuation is a nail.

Give me thesis and coma commas. Rational certainty. How about quotation marks, asked Rita. Periodically, or just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work. Have you read The Stone Raft, or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Blindness, said Rita.

No, I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Tons of garbage lies near the summit. Mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, frozen bodies and rejected manuscripts.

They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

Facoinating. That’s all well and good, said agent. Mainstream readers do not want a) to work too hard b) slow paced reads with historical and cultural fragmented facts c) philosophical narrative non-fiction experiments wandering all over the map or d) non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded sagas. They like stories with Swedish journalists, oligarchies and smart crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt?

The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

Add sex by a smart Vietnamese woman or mute Cambodian woman washing cloth dreaming of dance killing sexual predators with karate. Readers want fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real fictionalized situations, romance and delicious date rape recipes filled with evil hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in Comabodia. Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

How about talking chickens in Cambodia and Vietnam, rendered Rita. Naive dirt-poor chickens wearing mascara? Or Russian baboons, said Zeynep.

Agent O - Sex sells. Can they read? No. Can they write a synopsis in 25,000 words of less? No. They fuck for a living yes well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same butter different. I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and publishing eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader in America has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap dead fish. Read the fine print, go digital. Bits bytes. 0’s and 1’s. Matrix. The average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. I am a cynical realist and skeptic with the attention span of a meditative mendicant.

Many are too poor to pay attention.

The majority faces a constant daily struggle for food and clean water. One billion humans do not have access to clean water. Billions are illiterate.

17,000 children die of starvation every single day.

Write about that unpleasant fact, dear Rita and Zeynep. Literate types want something to read while sitting stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their horribly mundane and superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Humans feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Intelligent people have healthy doubts. Stupid people have courage.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s a fucking adventure.

No plan, one life, many adventures.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret. It’s very comfortable. Why me? They absorb static or moving pictures to escape terminally bored conditions, situations and inconveniences. They feel the need to experience virtual reality on cell phones devolving into Soft Machine material. Addictions. Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

I see, said Zeynep. I’ll ask a Bursa gravedigger about plot development. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear a hopeless future. Not me. Why me? The ego monkey mind loves the daily entertainment CIRCUS. It wears them down. It makes them lethargic, depressed, suicidal, and lazy.

Lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom. Checkmate, said Death.

Fate and Death conversed.

I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

Yes you are, said Death. You're a lucky lunatic.

Rita: Here’s how it works. Mindful people respect monkey mind. They are present and grounded in the long now. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Mindful. Survivors don’t read because they don’t know how or are lazy to learn anything about themselves the world, the human condition or paradigm shifts in this amazing life.

I don’t know and I don’t care is their mantra.

Their focus is on survival. Food. KISS.

Mindfulness perceives a microscopic self of pure energy. Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? We are pure light, energy, passing through frequency and vibrational shifts. Atoms. Others are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level.

Agent Orange: Sure. They want fast food and a remote to operate a 46-inch plaza screen with 500 channels. They love simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest, happy endings like orgasms. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities. Don’t write about what you know. Write about what you need to know. Write to find out. Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover a recycled idea with shiny tin foiled packaging, like an OK#1 love sock. Express a decisive moment, like the guy who steps around a puddle on his way to Burmese gallows.

Consider The Savage Detectives by Bolano about poets searching for a lost Chilean scribe in Europe. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end - one more microscopic essential unpleasant fact about life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher. Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors vanish. Others reading the work die laughing, you can’t be serious. A new editor thinks its garbage needing a major rewrite, tax deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations. If so a narrative hook leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it? Remaindered books get shipped to furnaces in Akron, O-Hi-O.

Paper burns at Fare An Height 451.

Yes, said Rita. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no ethics, morals or higher principles?

It’s all about money honey, said Agent O and eyeballs. Get your shit together sweetie. Everything has a price, a user and exchange value with utility infielders shagging hot grounders up the middle in the world market game of ideas, money, power, weapons, oil, drugs, and OK latex socks. Don’t give me philosophical proofs.

Zeynep: Speaking of numbers in the publishing racket, besides Rita and I the authors, there is you our potential agent as most authors who make it to publishers have one then there’s the editor who works on the book, an assistant editor, a proofreader, a copy editor, a fact-checker, a cover designer, a layout person, a marketing department, a dedicated publicist. Whether a book is printed or digital, all those people are involved in bringing the book to market.

Let’s do it ourselves, said Rita. Kill ten literary characters, said Z.

Cut them out, said Rita. No editor is going to drink champagne from our skulls.

That’s how the game works, said Agent O Yeah.

You’ve been very helpful, said R & Z. Let an omniscient illiterate invisible scripter tale the show.

It’s all yours. I have one quest-ion, said lick clit lit agent. How long have you been here? All fucking day, said Rita breaking the ice, care for some crystalline shards in high-octane java to help your blood pressure, sweet milk sweet thing?

Here’s your End Of Sub-Strata Geological MOLECULAR ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth, said Zeynep, you are a fluke of the universe, take advantage of it.

The literary bridge and market share percentages are longer and higher than this manuscript, said Agent O. I have a question for Lucky. He’s here drinking ice java with figments of melting perfection. What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were water, air, earth, and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing her physical awareness engaged everything. Touch was her essence. She knew every pressure point.

Soft, medium or hard, she said.

During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. I incorporated formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.

Flower whispered I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s boring.

It’s easy remembering Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way breathing awareness and kindness. It was wisdom, wonder, abundance, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower lived between detachment and sentimentality.

Eat the world with your blind eyes she said. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They provide you with the opportunity to develop patience, Yes I said yes I will my flower yes.