watch women work

sunday song

cambodia is a funny place. ha, ha, ha.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision.

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing.

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now.

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain.

it smells like an art project.

it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows.

***

welcome to a new reality game show. it’s called “Watch Women Work.”

work to eat now OR evolution of the species and social organization (+-)

log on, log in, log the forest. yeah, yeah. i am mr. monosyllable, your creme filled hostess cupcake for this week’s exciting program. yeah, yeah.

contestant #1. a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. (poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd)

contestant #2. a housewife. she has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

her, his, their children are naked. they play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining.

contestant #3. a housewife. she is milling around. she has no focus, plan or direction. she is a teacher. she teaches by example. she hopes the lazy boys and men understand. she’s knows many won’t and don’t.

she pounds things like metal. all day. she is a tool. she is a worker. she is a tool of production in life’s assembly factory. she is a simple person. she spits out many children. this is her duty. children are tools.

contestant #4. a housewife. she works. her lazy adult son watches her. he is bored watching her. he wants to stare at the long and winding dirt road. he wants to feast his small beady rat eyes on dirt. his eyes are dirt. pure clean red dirt. she sweeps him into the river. swim, little fish. bye-bye baby, bye-bye. he floats away.

contestant #5. a housewife. she has a diamond in her mind. she is calm and focused. she exhales beauty, truth and love.

she sings all day long.

pick one to emulate. find one with incentive and initiative and win BIG prizes.

what’s the prize? a broom, a brick, an SUV smashing a green cow patty and a monster home shaped like a wedding cake surrounded by a moat, high walls, silver barb wire and iridescent colored candles.

anything else?

a year’s subscription to your favorite illustrated color glossy advertising magazine:

“Dreams, Lies, Wishes, Hopes, and Great Expectations While Driving a Blue Dismal Diesel Dump Truck Needing an Overhaul Loaded with Charcoal.”

cool prizes. let’s play. what’s the first question about the quality of life? said Socrates.

meanwhile: destiny’s child disguised as a black and vermillion butterfly nurtured red and orange exploding flowers above a cool brown flowing river.

see you next week on WWW.

 

i'm working on the world

I'm working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here's one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple "Hi there,"
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time's unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won't be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don't whine that it's steep:
you'll stay young if you're good.

Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn't insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you'll be dreaming
that you don't need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it's part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you'd feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach's fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
 - Wislawa Szymborska  Read more…

two kinds of people

From a work to be abandoned.

Mango said, “There are two kinds of people in the world.”

“What are they?” said a Cambodian orphan.

“They are subdivided into specific sub-species. There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you. There are people who want control or approval. There are people who face the music and there are people who run for cover.

"There are people who pay attention and people who don’t know or care what the fuck is going on. They are too poor to pay attention. There are people who make things happen and people who dream about making things happen.”

“That’s a mouthful of mango logic if you ask me,” said the orphan. “You mean, according to the philosopher, Damon Younger Than Yesterday, ‘distraction is an inability to identify, attend to what is valuable, even when we are hard working or content.’”

“Yes, that’s what I said I mean because I mean what I say and say what I mean jellybean,” laughed Mango doing the tango with Taoist monks at the Temple of Complete Reality in Sichuan.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” said Confusion. 

 

Halloweenie

"I wish everyday could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks."
 - R. J. Palacio

"There was a time when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea."
 - Robert Bloch  Read more…

  

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc engines, and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.