clean your ears day

Greetings,

Today and everyday is International Clean Your Ears Day.

It's a big deal considering ears are so small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time I had my ears physically deep cleaned was in China. A woman at the empty opera place in Chengdu one Saturday morning. I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were clean and disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax, cotton swabs soaked in liquid. I wrote about it in 2004.

It's a great feeling. BUZZ!

WHAT?

Today was another opportunity to get the old ears cleaned. Bliss baby.

I've located a street barber here in Saigon. He's on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.

His place is an example of real bare bones marketplace essentials. He has a very small corner of a cement area surrounded by a wire fence with a gap on the sidewalk. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table with a mirror. On the table are his ancient well used tools; blades in cheap paper, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.

Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to collect and recycle it. Makes good stuffing. 

The aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed this debris and clutter:

1. cycle of cycles
2. incessant trajectory of love and passion
3. bird songs
4. laughing children
5. crying, whining, screaming children (many over 25)
6. heart broken lovers
7. distraught wandering tourists
8. dancing fools (you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance)
9. distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels
10. minstrels
11. singers, dancers, hustlers
12. motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, wage slaves
13. laughing slaves
14. lonely philistine Filipinos in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in a park bothering travelers, talking about the weather and shoes and jewellery on sale at discount stores
15. bored frustrated wives and their husbands
16. unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, homeless, and orphans
17. nutritional experts and particle collider scientists
18. fortune tellers and assorted prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations and clear intentions
19. visions of a supreme creator laughing at all of us
20. people who say, "I don't have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem." 
21. your choice. All for $2.77.

What? Open ears, open mind.

Metta.