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A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
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Subject to Change Subject to Change
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Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
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Entries in Cambodia (278)

Thursday
Mar142013

Ministry of tourism

Welcome to The Ministry of Tourism in Kampot.

It's near The Ministry of Fear and The Ministry of Truth.

You can't miss it.

It's next to The Genocide Museum. S-21. 

2,000,000 skulls are waiting for you.

They are delighted to have company in their silent vigil

Colonial French buildings will delight your memory of commercial conquest.

It's all a facade. 

Kampot is a sleepy little southern river town.

It is famous for pepper. Pass the sneeze please.

Quack-quack.

Hold hands. Relationships are precious. Life is short.

Let's have a look-see.

Thursday
Mar072013

ah blood

Operatic actors offstage fashioned masks for their performance in a funeral formula.

         “This is not a fucking rehearsal,” directed the director. “Just get to the verb.”

         “Arrive on time, know your lines and wait for the check,” Leo sang as clouds shafted sunlight across mountains.

         Rational, thinking, speaking animals mumbled sounds, words, coalescing consonants, vowels and syllables. Etyms and atoms and axioms of choice.

         The logic of pain met pain’s tolerance, pain’s loss, pain’s memory, and pain’s fascination. The awareness of pain danced, creating itself, developing a heavy lidded dull throbbing sensation with kindness, a specific joy of pain pulsating through exposed jaw nerves sliding along invisible blood red threads you can’t see, dare to see or acknowledge, all minute tentacles of laughter. You know they are there. 

         Roots of pain bellow below the surface of appearances, in cold-hearted tissue. It needs a biopsy. What’s that? A lab techie’s evaluation analysis under a microscope, in a dust free, germ free sterile environment.     

         Tissue in the same sentence after five days of Bursa whiteout blizzards is the perfect moment to sit drinking iced coffee at dusk near a water fountain pen resolving a molar pain issue tissue, having had it yanked out after inserting 3-4 needles filled with antiseptic solutions into pink red gum soft pliable tissue.

Doctor Death massaged tissue preparing it for a needle, a heavy- duty stainless steel syringe cast in Turku, Finland, with a perfect circle for an index finger. The downward thrust of pressure was constant and bewildering. This is what happened and it didn’t take a well trained discerning eye more that a Nano-second after the partial was removed to see the tooth witnessing interior monologues, dialogue, and soliloquies of red stormed flesh dancing with pain - a sickness leaving the body - as Winter Hawk flew free from pain winging one true sentence.

         The old recalcitrant reclusive tooth had to come out. It had served it’s animalistic purpose dancing with food and multiple labia, clicking gum lined oral stories dazzling extreme pleasures of pain with comforts worth nurturing as a heartbeat’s death defying rhythm pulsated, vibrating faster than shadows divorcing themselves in blind love’s labyrinth. In theory.

         Ah, donating blood.

         Traveling is giving. Giving blood gives the gift of life. Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, Giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. I have rare A-. I donated yesterday. Turkish medical authorities permitted a donation. The blood mobile bus sat near a busy intersection. I walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains, shit covered statues of frozen WWI soldiers firing rusty iron guns into cobalt skies and climbed on the bloodmobile express.

         A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to a left arm saying, “You have excellent veins.”

         She swabbed a vein and slid the needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood rivers flow.

         Outside tinted windows in a blinding sun immigrant parents gripped children’s hands. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of fresh red tomatoes from a white truck. Light reflected off sunglasses of cheerless pedestrians. Salvage operation boy teams folded, crushed and loaded cardboard boxes into metal carts. Recycle sales potential.

Sad, oh so seriously affected disordered businessmen carried battered brown briefcases filled with top secrets and nuclear fission material. Suchness is a burden and moral responsibility.

 

 

Wednesday
Feb202013

eat grass

someone

bless their beating heart

stenciled
my iconic image
on a cambodian
river town
wall

i smile at the masses

celebrating my ignorance

devour my little red book
it's a Brave New World

in 1984

eat grass comrades
45-60 million died of starvation

black is the night
cold is the ground


Saturday
Feb162013

do the mango tango

I go, we go, you go. Mango. Super fruit.

Buy one, get one free. Peel it down. Peel my skin. I am a bed rabbit. Plow my field. Honey needs money. Hungry girls go to bed. Savor my succulent mass of alfa bet your sweet ass anti-oxidants.

A, C, E. Ace a mango.

The humility of a mango. Skin releases it’s interior daily monologue. Flowing sensations dance a mango simplicity with serenity. 

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

“What are they?” said Star, a Cambodian kid rented from mom by an NGO needing global media publicity.  

“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."

“I see,” said Star. “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,” laughed Mango doing the tango with Taoist monks at The Temple of Complete Reality in Sichuan.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” said Star.

"You are bright," said Mango. "Shine on."

 

 

Sunday
Feb032013

inee

Once upon a time Inee was a weaver in Kampot.

She wove cotton and studied English at PTC, a training center. She met Orphan. He was passing though. He helped her with educational resources.

He passed through years later. They met again. They were estatic to see each other. 

She'd graduated from PTC and worked at a real estate company.

I study electricity at a local university, she said. I teach Khmer to foreigners. My plan is to attend university this fall. I will study to be an accountant and a teacher.

Great, said Orphan, I am so pleased. You're doing fantastic. Realize your dreams.