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Entries in asia (464)

Friday
Apr022010

Fooling and Tooling

Greetings,

On Earth inside the Milky Way galaxy filled with 100 billion stars is a small town. In the town is a market where people meet, eat, drink, walk around, sleep, talk, gossip, sell, barter, trade, buy, cry, beg, laugh, and use tools to make things.

What are tools? Tools are things to make things. They make something and use it to make other things. This is called human activity. People once used stones to sharpen other stones to make tools.

Can you show us someone making something?

Ok. Here is a man using a mechanical tool to make a gold bracelet. His tool is made of iron, steel and other materials. It uses energy to work.

Where does the energy come from? The energy comes from machines converting sun, wind, ocean currents, burning coal and processing high grade uranium 235 isotopes into energy. 235 is capable of sustaining chain reactions producing energy to run machines called plants.

Do you mean a plant is a tool? Yes. A plant is a living organism and very valuable. As well, there are plants that kill humans, like hemlock. Plants collect energy from the sun to grow. Humans harvest plants for medicine and food and so on.

If a man and woman combine their tools can they make things grow like plants? Yes. More like weeds. This human activity is called procreation. Earth has about 6 billion examples and signs of intelligent life is rare.

Show us another tool. Ok, A woman's fingers are tools. She uses her tool to sew colorful objects on a piece of fabric with another tool. The tool is a metal needle. Humans evolved opposable thumbs enabling them to grasp objects. Her thumb is opposable to her forefinger allowing her to use the tool with precision.  

We have time for one more tool. Show us a good one.

This man lives in a poor rural village in Sichuan, China. He is a tool like the gold worker and the seamstress. They are controlled by others and used to perform unpleasant tasks for someone else. They are the means of production in a social and economic sense.

He is using a tool to make new tools. I said this at the beginning of today's story. The stone tools he makes will be used to make a wall, another tool. 

Why do they need to make another wall? They already have a famous wall.
The Chinese have been building walls for 5,000 years. It's in their genetic makeup. 
What is genetics?
A sledgehammer. 

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

 

Wednesday
Mar312010

Fools

Greetings,

I'm a fool weather I dance or not so I may as well dance. This is what one fool said to another fool.

They fooled around behind naked dark glasses studying human fool stupidity, volatility of desire's rampant manifestation inside a radiant energy field. Fools are particle colliders, small sub-atomic energetic expanding fields with a distinct glowing full moon dancing overhead.

Dancing fools practiced calligraphy with a calm open mind. Fools danced with silence between notes. The infinite white space is silence.

  • it's clear because there is no meaning
  • laughter forgets everything inside dawn's vapor
  • a young girl remembers how to draw outside the lines
  • a tongue quickly adapts to a violin
  • colors become silent inside forests
  • a wok needs heat to play the piano
  • fireflies are dead relatives of stars remaining on Earth to help fools
  • dancing memories create a new fiction
  • sleep is popular among large groups of sheep
  • destiny is determined without knowing
  • a mountain and a sword create harmony
  • whistling causes earthquakes
  • a good fool is hard to find
  • fools speak of joy and poverty's boredom with theoretical lightness
  • how can we speak of joy on this dark suffering planet asked a fool
  • how can we speak of anything else, said a fool. we've heard enough of despair
  • 1984 is a reality in many countries where a woman carries the world on her back
  • this is what some fools learned, dancing

Metta.

 

Monday
Mar292010

Listless the listener

Greetings,

Before I became a storyteller I was a listener. I traveled the world listening, collecting creation stories, myths and legends. I listened and collected sharing these stories with others so they would know, understand and feel the energy, the power inherent in the stories. They listened. They absorbed the creation stories into their creation stories, expanding their universe. They became storytellers. They accepted their nomadic storyteller destiny to listen, walk and tell stories. 

One listener in a village was not really a listener. Listless was, in their language, lazy. Pure and simple laziness. Listless passed their lazy disease to others like a story, or in Listless's universe, a nightmare. Listless was a living, breathing artifact of Neanderthal survival instincts. Hunt, eat, sleep, procreate, dream.

Listless loved dogs. Listless was clever, trapped wild dogs and beat them. Listless was the Alpha animal. 

Every night Listless and their pack of dogs hunted. It was around midnight when the dogs began barking. They patrolled around rusty steel gates, junk yards filled with broken machines, abandoned colonial buildings, detention centers and narrow paths near caves where women addicted to controlling their men continuously gave birth to howling children. 

Around midnight wild dogs flushed rats. Big rats. Rats prospered because humans casually discarded fruit rinds, meat gristle, fat, corn, fish paste, vegetables, and children in trash containers fashioned from old tires. Listless sent 20-30 dogs after the rats, all yipping, baying, quarreling, angry, hungry for blood. They cornered a rat, it cried Yip! Squeak! as sharp white teeth pierced its neck. 

All the dogs howled, shrieking long guttural ravishing celebrations of the kill. Deep, shallow, sharp. This chorus echoed inside a black night, as Listless listened to Hellhound on My Trail by Robert Johnson.

Metta.

 

Friday
Mar262010

Opportunity Cost

Greetings,

The opportunity of being on location, scouting film destinations is how you become native. You speak in mono-syllables and sleep forever as long as forever is. Be resilent, strong, cunning, exiled in cast off pajama clothing with floral designs and cartoon characters from dead regimes.

Especially on a Sunday near blue flowing rivers wearing tattoos along its arms climbing over sun burned shoulders as a tall Jaguar reveals her skin song. Her French big game hunter takes his time scaling long limbs, drowning inside wild black eyes exploring a thin Apsara dancer neck smelling desire unlike pleasure, a source of suffering, pain and hatred hearing rainbow heartbeat, exploring mountains, clearing brush, lighting a fire as his dogs flush prey.

What you don't see is fascinating.

Orange sun fires trees. 
Six people on a cycle pass. 
A voice asks for help. 
A woman desperate for love/security frames her vision through SLR optic glass. 
Before and now mean the same.
A neglected girl learns how to sew in a safe environment. 
A silver spoon decorates glass with music. 
A young girl draws portraits with poise and serenity. 
A gardener waters yellow and purple orchids at dawn.  
A stranger sits in a local market.
Cui Weiping, a female Chinese literature professor prevented from attending an international poetry conference as punishment for believing in free speech.

Read more... 

Metta.

 

  

Monday
Mar222010

Texts without Contexts

Greetings,

You may find the New York Times article linked below worth reading. 

It refers to the ubiquitous Web, capitalized as if it were a capital of a place. It's an artificial state of mind.

I live in Web city where everyone is connected by instant glowing all to brief emotional attention spans. I am too poor to pay attention. Web's impact on personal and social development, reshaping human lives is good, bad and plain ugly.

For example, I'm sitting in a remote sleepy Cambodian town breathing, writing in my Moleskine and typing new human texts because my mind is a computer and the hand is faster than the eye. Electricity goes out. No juice. No power. All the local internet service providers are out of work. Having no internet connections is a profound joy meaning writers get, the joker word in English, writing done.

I've enjoyed many books lately balancing out creativity, sitting in the local market absorbing language and pedaling my black bike. Real paper books like, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago which won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1998 and now Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, the Kafka of Japan, among others noted in the Amazon side bar.

What's a side bar? Part of a river bank? A side bar according to the International Bar Association is a bar frequented by people on the side, content knowing their direct bar is indistinguishable from, say a bar not on the side.

A quote from the article. "As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” 

So, what did I do while reading the article? Using my handy-dandy gadget phone I traveled by wireless to Amazon Kindle downloading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. 

As Lanier writes, links and tags may be the most important inventions in the last 50 years. Incredible!

Before closing this entry I upgraded my MotionX-GPS to version 9.4 and added the application Star Walk to find my blind way home in the dark walking along a bridge in a constellation. 

 Texts Without Contexts...read more.

Metta.

 

An original computer using binary operations.