Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma

Fragmentary

My imagination is a monestery and I am its monk.

*

Sometimes I am so happy I depress people. - David Bowie

*

"Similarities b/t writing and drawing -

both tend toward the imaginary;

both are fragmentary and unfinished." - Kafka

*

Absurd Language

Do you want the short version or the long version, asked a reliable narrator of dubious credibility.

A perfect question in life’s chess game of experiences and conversations as people play with choices and consequences inhaling, exhaling, living, traversing, falling, flying, exploring, and walking on the spinning Earth rock, said Devina. Rock your world.

Mandalay construction site.

*

The celestial rotation makes people dizzy, confused and disoriented and many fall down, said Tran. Hello gravity. WE fall up, said Rita.

If you flesh out the short narrative version with specific details it grows, said Z. Character threads develop. Destiny and action forms character.

Destiny weaves a rope of hemp fibers, or woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia, or Cambodian cotton, or Lao silk worm threads designed to hang yourself if life becomes unbearable, perhaps too sweet, too beautiful, too sad, said Desire.

Determining your fate suicide is a daily choice and a way to escape a terminal adventure travel disease. You are manipulated by someone in the story before, during or after you finish a random simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on. It evolves a life of its own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten word lava from a highly charged pressurized center.

The reader and writer are one.

Short, fast and deadly.

This explains how silence between words sees language as absurd, irrelevant and a burning ring of magma fire.

This molten conglomeration of Voice and Sign language, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, dust  ...  

24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and geological logical particles discovered by humans and other alien life forms  ...

Blasts out of the deep red hot core of finite transient human Mind-At-Large existence into a blue atmosphere where it cools, as the gravity of thinking, the scourge of civilization, agrees to ignore the abyss it’s malcontents and expectations of loss fear and Death contributing to its infinite force.

The dense mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, dances flowing down engulfing everything in its path melting landscapes, carving new strata, grand canyons and Leaping Tiger gorges, gouging out tributaries for cooling debris, slowing to a glowing light as you open a vein and scribble one true sentence, said Z, O my word, let it cool, heat and serve.

Book of Amnesia, V2

O yeah, said blossom tree, Life is dance.

Deeper

A husband and wife from India visited C.

They went swimming in a hotel pool at sunrise.

Happy, she sings swims sings swims.

He dives down.

She stands slapping blue water chanting a song measuring his breath below the surface.

Her red sari seals her.

Smiling and laughing she chants.

He stays under a long time.

She skips blue water. Her voice is angelic. Flowing water over the edge.

Her laughter is a happy child.

Burma

Lizard Brain

Fight
Flight
Feed
Freeze
Fornicate

*

Decisive Moment - ephemeral & spontaneous

Image represents the essence of the event itself

Work the scene

Use your intuition

Poetic

Lose yourself zone

Or creative flow state

The beauty of shape & form

A sense of simplicity expression

*

Yangon, Burma, 2015

Breathe & Move

I am the rebel angel and my tears the trace of one virtue: patience.

You can beat me my time will come. - Max Jacob

Laos

Good writing is about telling the truth.

Write one true sentence.

Write the truest sentence you know.

Find meaning in an experience or feeling.

Perfectionism is a high end version of fear.

Writing needs to breathe and move.

Stay curious & amused by yourself.

*

North Burma

Ride the rails click clack click clack click clack

Nature visions and bamboo forests

silver rivers feel fresh air hanging out the door of a rock’n roll train

rail alliteration starts at 4 AM

space stars open the sky

A red shaped leaf

Fields of lilacs, purple black and gold, butterflies,

sense of stillness, renewal of free rolling spirit,

yellow bamboo leaves at lower elevations,

then green exploding in high lush gardens with fir, pine, evergreens.

Fields being planted

Women and men and children hoeing, watering, turning soil

Say yes to everything.

 

Laos