Trust your intuition

Trust your blazing intuition on a hot Saturday after walking along the green leafy river street. Walk down an old familiar broken unsaved path. You know left and right. Go forward. The road is made by walking.

Thread follows needle.

It's a small self-contained place. A room. A bed. Small kitchen.

She is in a plastic recliner watching tv. He has a feeling. It reminds him of the V woman in Kampot, with the massage sign. He stops. Steps past bamboo. She's maybe 30, lipstick, smile, good eyes. They talk money. She locks the glass door covered in old newspapers. Pulls a curtain closed. Kills the tv. She is not a chicken.

They shower. They scrub each other.

Her naked body is white. She caresses him and goes down slobbering, noisy, sensations - she moves so he can tongue her essence. He eats, saliva, lips, long luxurious. He discovers her need. She moves faster. Yes. Yes. Yes. She shudders, releases. He pulls her closer increasing the desire. She can't move, her passion flows again, again, until she's exhausted.

She turns over. He enters her, moaning her lips, her legs up, over his shoulders, her pain pleasure, joy - kissing his ears, cheeks, and he never comes. It's only about her pleasure.

She gives him mouthwash. He swishes it around and spits it out. They shower, dress and he hands her paper. She smiles. He leaves.

Tropical sun penetrates atmospheric conditions.

Trust your intuition. Yum-yum.

Look Back - TLC 73

Asian survivors looked back with reinforced healthy doubt and fear rather than face courageous futures.

In Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia genocide/war survivors said more to a person’s back than their face. Leaving was abandoned. Bye-bye and good luck to your family.

Zeynep and Rita turned a page.

Rice grains in a broken bamboo basket sustained crows blacker than shadow faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Rita, their eyes dance over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice or staring at palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding stilted bamboo thatched homes as naked children playing above buried landmines sail dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. Patient forever they wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON observing minute cosmic details and subtle imperceptible movements across miles of flat land mined country penetrating thick green foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers feeling fluttering lids and soft retinas tremble with visual sensory information data sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen.

Their life is a sitting meditation.

Seeing without understanding is their life.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

Tropical heat destroys my DNA.

Living in perpetual internal darkness they cultivate essential immense critical survival intentions. They stare far away with telescopic acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, dancing making music and singing.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent.

They watch past another person during a conversation.

They watch each other’s back.

We survived by paying attention, said survivors. That’s life.

They face watching beyond wild where everything known and unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

         Everything goes and nothing happens.

         Everything happens and nothing goes.

One anxious dreaded moment in their life recognizes fear. Disguised as ignorance and indecision fear asks is it safe?

What if never entered the conversation.

What is the difference between watching and seeing, asked Zeynep expanding passive and active verb signifiers.

Real eyes realize real lies, said Leo.

Survivors read sky for rain. Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in deserted black broken streets without electricity, said Rita. Screaming yelling male adolescents and genocide survivors read kick boxers fighting on national television every Saturday/Sunday afternoon at 2. It’s standing room only in packed tea/java houses.

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

Killing as Entertainment. I love this, said Death. They are really into Power, Humiliation and Revenge. Reminds me of millions shouting their anger at killing fields while murdering 1.7 million. If I kill enough maybe I will survive. No one kills the killer. You prove your ability and allegiance by killing. Don’t push your luck, said Authority.

Violence never changes only the players, said Zeynep.

It’s our latent repressed anger gene, said Rita. Denial will kill you and anger is expensive.

Women meditate talk and laugh. They live longer.

Boy men scream at televisions.

Idle youth squeezing pores waiting for Godot read acne in a motorcycle mirror. They haven’t seen the play. They are the players.

No one shows up, nothing happens.

Hungry girls wait for Freedom at night.

Destiny rested as noon heat waves reflected improbable shimmering anxieties. Sad working girls washed beige underwear in a lazy brown river. Water’s exhilaration introduced a cloud. Thunder clapped. Lighting flashed. Tears flooded dirt roads.

Banlung children wearing red and white Santa caps dragged expectant mothers toward dusty chrome plated display cases in the market. This one! This one!

“Your life is an art project. The world is one big art museum. Buy a ticket. Take the ride. Yeah, yeah,” said a UXO worker in a bright yellow Mines Advisory Group (MAG) vest fanning soil with a detector near The Plain of Jars outside Phonsavan, Laos.

The Language Company

Love is

Love is a blind whore
With a mental disease
And no sense of humor.

+

Slow.

Lesson? Sustain the art.

Siem Reap

1)    motorman sings his sad tale of "no money"

2)    the endless hard luck story

3)    rows of empty ugly hotel monstrosities line the Highway of Death

4)    being Sunday Someday, SR is more destitute than a hungry girl waiting to go to bed with a hungry man

5)    people salvage trash in the rain

6)    air is thick with moisturizer and masks

7)    Carl died. He left a young Cambodian wife and two boys, 12 & 6. Heart attack.

8)    I feel this deep loss. Profound sadness.

Needs. Drama. Story. Conflict.

Give it an edge.

Theme : loss, passion, alienation, boredom, loneliness.

One week ago he sat in a Lao garden. It rained.

Everything smelled deep, pure, beautiful.

Five months in Vientiane helping grades 6/7 be more human.

Sitting in the garden writing - polishing manuscripts about Turkey, China, Indonesia, affectionately called Amnesia.

For the last three months while playing with kinder garden kids from 8-3 he'd been involved with Ling who came from the war ravaged interior and worked the massage biz.

During the course of their pre-meditated hot sexual relationship interspersed with gestures and broken Lao-English guttural intentions, he bought her a phrase book and dictionary and English primers, and a hand-made paper notebook. He gave her colored pens and watercolor paints. She had the skill and artistic eye.

At night he read as she created in precise detail large Lao images of dancers, village life, coiled serpents, and vivid representational fantasy/reality cultural art.

He was astonished and supportive.

She was happy. They were in temporary attraction, lust, desire, passion. They shared lives. She relished the generous and serene outpouring of her emotion and creativity.

He told her he'd leave the school, town, country and her after a month.

They cried. They hugged. She painted a final picture of the holding hands, walking up the street lined with flowering lilac trees. Another had them hugging, shedding tears.

He suggested she keep her art alive. She said she would. He suggested she make a portfolio of her work and show it to galleries.

He flew away.

A vanishing point on life's canvas.

Ling's Art 

Not True

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention. Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where 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 rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Just get to the verb.

“Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

“Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

“1,7,000,000 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around. Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

“Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

“Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

“Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory, a form of history, re-write history.          

“Your memory is the world, and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

“I will, will you?” said Rita.

“I have a question for Lucky.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

“Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

“During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and 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 fucking boring.”

It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

“Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

“Dead or blind, there’s no difference,” Flower said.

“People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”

We gave them everything - TLC 66

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, 1.5 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 and 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 SEA.

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.