Ice Girl in Banlung, Cambodia

Chapter 1.

It’s fucking hysterical.

Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodian animist jungle languages.

Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

How long have you been here, said Rita a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

Ok, she said cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation and form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity and evolution of humans in this total phenomena? My name is Rita.

Good to meet you. I’m Leo the Lionhearted. Yes, if you slow down. How is life here?

I work, I breed, I get slaughtered. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and destiny are two sides of the same coin.  Janus. Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. She smiled. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies.

They are same word. I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath a whisper. Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice with a rising sound on the k sounding like a meaning I understand without internal meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? Many people have conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok? Ok?

Ok. Address the very low literacy rate.

Hello, literacy rate, how are you, she said.

I am well and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. I know my English is not grammatically correct but I know my English is fluent. The more I see the less I know.

Well said, said Ice Girl. Someone said literacy means reading and writing.

I doubt it, said Literacy, Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, shelter, clothing and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth. It’s the last thing that dies.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold. I love myth, fiction, truth and inventing stories.

I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. Poor people see education and school as a waste of time and money. Education and medicine are expensive.

I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate direct sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence in the big picture. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge fast. Spoken words float around looking for a character, like plot.

Too many people talk out their stories. Lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills and rejuvenates magic and mystery. Ghost stories.

World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

Here’s my secret. I look for a literary agent. Someone said they help writers. I sent one a query. One wrote me a letter. I will share it with you later. I write at night. During the day I’m busy with school and selling ice. If they ask me I will send them a manuscript. Maybe they will love it. Maybe they’ll find a publisher with a big marketing budget and the rest is history as they say. If not I’ll be independent and publish it myself. Ice is my life and I will never give it up. Besides writing, laughing, loving and living, it’s my life.

Wow, that’s lovely, said Leo.

Yes, she said, I follow my bliss. If it’s not in your heart, it’s not in your head. I’ll tell you about the agent later.

A man arrived on a broken motorcycle. She gave him a blue plastic bag of ice. He gave her Real currency.

Sure. I follow my blisters, laughed Leo.

Where are you staying, she asked.

I don’t have a home. I live in small houses along the road. For now I sleep at Future Bright.

I know it. The woman owner smiles and lies at the same time.

What’s the difference between hearing and listening, Leo asked.

98% are asleep with their eyes open, she said. They don’t know and don’t care. It’s endemic.  They look without understanding. The remaining 2% are dead and long gone.

She opened her notebook. She spilled red ink on white paper. Red is a lucky color of wealth and prosperity. Living in a red dust town brings everyone good luck.

Tell me about your visionary skills, said Leo.

I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I connect the dots forward. I practice detached discernment. My job is to pay attention to direct immediate experience, get it down and make sense of it later.

People here live in a perpetual disconnect. They are talking monkeys looking for a place to happen. They can’t focus. Their attention span is ZERO. Like Year 0 in 1975 before I was born. No attention span? No problem.

How about your town, asked Leo.

Red dust roads in Banlung are paved with blue Zircon and Black Opals (nill) reflecting Ratanakiri, or “Gem Mountain.” Rich city women wear blue Zircon, gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, sparkle bling. Rural women do not wear this wealth.

Married women wear red bead strings. They fashion yellow, red, blue, green, glittering plastic bangles on necks and wrists.

Here it’s about food and honoring Earth spirits. Animists believe taking stones harms the spirits, creating an imbalance in the natural order of things.

Thanks for Life Lesson #3, said Leo. I’m going to have a look-see. See you later.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Ice Girl in Banlung - Chapter 9

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and an insatiable appetite for diverse languages, customs and cultures lived in jungles and forests. Others preferred living in remote mountains. 

  Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and tools like looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played in extended families learning life lessons. 

  One day a boat filled with white men sailed down the river of darkness to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people didn't understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared the people. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

  Every day more white people came down the river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their historical evolution on other continents.

  Their mantra was, cheap people, cheap labor, cheap raw material, cheap goods, cheap markets and much Profit.

  We are civilized and you are savages, said the white men. We have religion. It is called Greed & Wealth. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control fire. We control time. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want. The village gave them hospitality and shelter and friendship. The white men were greedy. They took control of the village, the people and the jungle. 

  Every day the white men marched slaves deep into the jungle singing, we control nature. We shall overcome. They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided and conquered, one against the other. History had taught them well. They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every useful raw material. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

  One night a village shaman said, to survive we walk to a new jungle.

  We are here to go.

  Eighty applauded. They cried, Tell us another.

  Ok, I said. Maybe you will see a connection. In Turkey divorce is seen as a failure. It’s a schizophrenic country where women know their role and stay in it. A place where mothers control and manipulate their daughter’s behavior, attitudes and imaginary freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Chains of love are heavier than the gravity of thinking.

  One woman I knew was different. She confided in me. I listened. After seven months of marriage she’d decided to leave her husband and filed divorce papers.

  “I feel so much better,” she said. She had a lot to say. She’d believed her husband in the beginning.

  “He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn’t honest...so after some time measured in weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn't contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down emotionally and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really, really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart. Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it’s too late. I told him to move out. He returned to his mama. He tries to bother me every day in his childlike whining way but it’s over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”

  “In China it’s always about saving face,” I said. “Appearances. In Anatolia, it’s about your self-respect, growth and personal dignity. Some grow, some die day by day.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I am not living the lie anymore.”

  “Now your heart is calm. You’re taking responsible for your life. I am happy for you.”

  “It’s tough,” she said, “living here where women are beautiful and sad with synchronicity. They’ve fashioned these well-defined skin-tight PERSONA masks out of loss, hopelessness, confusion, and serious misguided misunderstood maligned relationship blues using tears wrapped in self-pity, shame, guilt and silence.

Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage at a fake bus stop to deter male Alzheimer patients from wandering off."

  “Here,” ordered the Byzantium Great Father Authority Figure disguised as a religious or political fundamentalist zealot, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart of hearts and give us many poor deprived children. He bought you. Produce more.”

  A gravedigger blessed their union. Dearly beloved, an unpleasant global fact is unregulated population, no medicine or education and lack of job opportunities.

  That could never happen here, said a Chinese female student. I was born to pay for my parent’s sins.

  Yeah, yeah, said another. My mother was appointed to have me. Eighty applauded.

  Yes, and one more thing ladies, said Leo. After graduating, while living at home and trying to find a job along with six million recent college graduates, if you consider marriage you can forget the A men; the ones with cash, car, career, credit cards and condo. They are taken. You’ll have to settle for B or C quality.

  A feminine sigh ran through the room and jumped out a 10^th floor window. Goodbye cruel world.

  I’ll kill myself first, said one girl. It’s an honorable alternative to facing family shame and humiliation.

*

In the Under Story, fire from burning bamboo, coconut leaves and plastic garbage in world jungles circled its veins through a heart’s four clamoring chambers. Smoky love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rising to the Canopy emerging through the Emergent. Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws took wing.

*

  Monsoons arrived. Ice Girl played her unpublished symphony for children under 100.

Shaman: Monsoon’s intention is to clean air, turn dusty red rutted ragged roads into quagmires and provide essential moisture to roots below the surface of appearances.

What you don’t see is fascinating.

Unpleasant facts on life’s road of eternal suffering are more plentiful than 14.7 million forced abortions in China, universal health care, education or clean drinking water. Twelve million stateless humans live on Earth. 17,000 children die of starvation every day.

Sewing in Kampot

A sewing woman returned to her Kampot guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and rode to the local market inside a dirt labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling silver stars, moons and small reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement attiring engagements, weddings and cremations.

She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her universal process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections and ironing.

Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations.

Needles talked about traditional conservative behaviors, attitudes and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversations. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.

All explanations have to end somewhere.

Sky darkened

Ceremonial tribal drum thunder sang

Vocal intensity

Lonely lost suffering

Foreign faces

In Cambodia

Shuddered with fear

What if I die here?

How will my family and friends realize my intention to witness 1200 years of dancing Angkor laterite stoned history in gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes? 

Lightning flashed skies

Giant flashbulbs

Illuminated petrified children

Buried inside cement caverns

Floating bamboo homes

Eyes

Eating cartoon images

On plasma screams

Skies opened

Rain lashed human crops

Rice blossomed green

Cloud tears cleaned earth

Sweet dreams baby

Rita, Ice Girl in Banlung smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest.

Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.

Aggressive market women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied value in exchange for meat, fruit, vegetables, gold, cotton and silk.

Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams above fractured cement and mislaid wooden planks covering sewage channels with debris, feathers, jungles and jangled light particles, financial dealers surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery.  

Lucky and Zeynep played a musical interlude in Bursa, Turkey.

“I know the music but forgot the words,” said an adult swallowing Xanax.

“Music is the fuel,” said Zeynep spinning her Sufi dervish trance dance.

An Anatolian mother intent on cleaning disorder - afraid of losing control of chaos because nature loves a beautiful mess - on her apartment balcony after shaking out wet underwear, dish towels and frayed family threads, hung them in shameful angry regret and slammed her door on dervish music, It's the devil's music. She loved sitting in dark rapacious self-pity waiting for a jingle jangle phony tone.

“Are you alive?” she said to her cellular daughter.

“I survived,” said a disembodied voice.

“Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“I’m with a tribe of women. We’re breaking down and breaking through old conservative values. They are so narrow we’ll need a crowbar or acetylene torch or C-4. We’re developing personal empowerment and dignity. I’ll be home someday mother. I’m doing my healing work.”

Her voice died. Swallowing ignorance mother lapsed into healthy doubt’s quicksand.

At sunset an imam’s recorded voice twittered from a mosque near Achebadem, “Allah is great and merciful. Buy a ticket.”

Push Play.

we gave them everything

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving.

Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,

gold lame Apsara dancers,

232 species of black and red butterflies,

2 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,

crying elephants,

super tour buses,

125cc motorcycles,

tuk-tuks,

begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks

whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage,

narrow boned white oxen pulling carts,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered,

Where have we been,

Where did we go,

What did we see,

Where are we,

How do we feel,

Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in Cambodia.

One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

The Language Company 

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Collecting data. Field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos beginning in 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices and accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, religions and states fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for yourself.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden. Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country.

"As a literary outlaw I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. 'Dissent is terrorism,' say our corrupt manikin authoritarian figurines."

Leo revealed dystopian China. "I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society."

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about her Khmer culture and Cambodian history. "We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. I dream I am a free person in a free country."

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. "I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, humor, gratitude, abundance, and wonder as a free thinking individual. I have my junior philosopher's badge."

"If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly," said Zeynep. "You either let go or get dragged along."

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

"It's not about people buying this book," Rita said. "It's about people reading it."