Journeys
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in Cambodia (275)

Monday
Jul192010

Update Makeup

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of This Is Your Little Life. Your little life is taking on pernicious perceptual potential poetic personifications without a preamble. To amble to ramble and gamble enjoying risks with enormous ramifications. Waking up is a risk. Paying attention requires risk analysis and consequences. 

A stranger arrives in town. He wanders around with optical tools.

 

When in doubt, update your life. Put on makeup. Change your appearance. Get a new identity theory. Reinvent a corner cooking operation billowing smoke from cracked charcoal chips harvested from old trees near a woman sawing ice with a rusty see-saw as children play. Numerous forlorn stressed out drivers in huge SUV's negotiate narrow provincial streets singing their Status. Beep-beep.

The Asian Children's Driving School is open for business. Son, his father said, Someday all this will be yours. Gee, dad you're the greatest. Let's go for a spin around the block, down life's little highway and out into the lush expansive rural countryside filled with amazing green rice paddies, our essential food source. Ok, son, Let's roll. Batteries not included.

The smiling boy walks into his future. He works for a collection agency called Consume and Waste and Recycle. He found a life instruction book and put it in his bag. His bodyguard is a girlie-boy. Not too shy to try with tolerance, gratitude, dignity and self respect.

Somewhere in Cambodia a boy is carrying the world on his back.

Metta.

Tuesday
Jul132010

Kill the dog

Greetings,

In Baghdad, Iraq they sent out dog killer squads. They liquidated 58,000 stray dogs in three months. Point and shoot.

This morning before 6:00 a.m. in a small sleep southern Cambodian river town the frustrated alpha simian male next door to a guesthouse finally had enough of his barking mongrel, one of many roaming yapping and screwing in the street.

His wife was sweeping (a national sport) around tables and chairs in an open covered room of computers where students visit in the afternoon to connect. The dog was a nuisance, like her kids and husband. The dog ran around yapping, causing her and her husband anxiety. Rising anger exploded when her Tarzan grabbed a big stick and started beating the dog.

It didn't take a humane society expert to know by the sound of the beating and canine screaming that the dog was doomed. This orchestra of rising screams, fear, panic, anguish, and whimpering rose, climaxed and dropped dead.

Neighbors ignored the reality. His wife swept. Life is short, nasty and brutal. The law of the jungle.

Neighbor dogs, sensing death, howled in their chorus as orange and black butterflies danced at dawn.

Metta.

 

Sunday
Jul112010

Mind at large

Greetings,

Your filters are up-to-date. What's a filter?

Filters are variables. Human brains have diverse filters. Give us an example. Humans evolved to survive. They were the prey. Life is short, nasty and brutal. Nature is kind and cruel. A paradox. A contradiction.

Human brains filter or eliminate non-essential sense data. Keep it simple stupid. KISS. 

Flight or fight central nervous system filters operating with naturally produced chemicals and produce reactions. Do I stay or do I go (fight or flight) is a basic immediate automatic response when a human faces what they perceive to be a potential life threatening situation. Do I run? Hide? Find a weapon? Create a diversion? Signal for help? Attack? Develop patience? Laugh because it's fucking hysterical? 

It's simple. Humans make it complex. There's a difference between complex and complicated but we won't get into the semantics now.

Metta.

Saturday
Jul102010

smell

Greetings,

I love the smell of Cambodian garbage and rubbish in the morning. It is a sweet sick smell.

Did you know the nose has trillions of sensors? It's one of the most highly developed human senses. This delicious aroma wafts through the air on ballet slippers. Why do you love the smell of garbage and rubbish in the morning? It reminds me of human consumption and dancing dervishes in Konya. Where is Konya? It is in Turkey. Turkey is a tomato based culture with a long history between east and west. Sniff.

Really? How is it possible to live between east and west? Well, they have an Asian side and a European side, like a double edged sword. One edge of said sword is fired to a fine point in Asia with Chinese propaganda tools. The other side of said sword is forged near Greece by Amazonian warrior women. 

They wear sunglasses and ride around in horse drawn carts finding tomatoes, natural gas (a buy product of consumption) expired optical dioramas and an emotionally withdrawn fictitious computer hacker named Salander in Sweden.

Can you show us the connection between: the smell of garbage in Cambodia, Konya, Turkey, a computer hacker and one breasted Amazonian warrior women? The mathematical uncertainty principle is an equation.

Metta.

 

Wednesday
Jun232010

Sam and Dave Part 3.5

Greetings,

After I’ve made them yell three times I will answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. 

Finally, to teach them a lesson I will answer. Softly. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with the other yellers around them. I reject them for yelling at me. I am easily distracted and I nurture the chaos. Ah, the glare of bright artificial ancestor passion for pain and tongue lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper. ‘Give them 1,000 lashes. With your tongue.’

‘I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes. I am infinite wisdom on the ocean of wisdom.’ 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell and make racket and talk over each other and don’t listen and yell louder to be heard and others block them out or ignore them completely and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, “Feed Me!”

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents which is how they evolved into this higher intelligent life form. So they can reproduce.

Strange true tale. The other day I passed one of those narrow minded little hovels guarded by doors and rusting sliding gates. The narrow alleys are filled with these sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in the alley using round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, stones, creating methods of production: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant, stick. All fine, well and good means.

In the street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broke bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog, splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted all the people pouring from their shops; sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens held a leaf, a man oiling a bike held a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her balloon, a retired man held his glass of urine beer, a grandmother held her future - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient noise trying to negotiate through the crowd so they could get home to families, lovers, food, television and their beloved pet. If they had one.

A man came out of his small dark space (millions live in the dark where you can’t see history and hide from strangers) and grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up and lifted it into the air. It hung down. He resembled an old painting of a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful hunt. After wild dogs flushed it running wild, running filled with fear, afraid and free.

He was in shock so he just stood there, holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool on the street surrounded by all the angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, strangers pealing like bells in his brain saying something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, no appropriate words inside, outside the mystery so he stood there holding the legs and then he gently laid the dog closer to the gutter and the dog’s body eased itself into itself and the man turned away from the people, noise, confusion and returned to his dark interior space.

Metta.