Question Authority - Ice Girl

Chapter 4.

Leo carried buckets of night soil shit. It was the price he paid for quest-ioning Authority.

  -why, do we have to read Mao’s little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

  -because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

  -this shit stinks.

  -here, said Authority. Carry some more.

  After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

  He didn’t suffer from PTDS. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic.

  He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus. He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth.

He did not attend pre-9/11 flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

  Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese.

  He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

 I am a camera, he said to Rita, cutting ice. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It's the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

  It’s all small stuff, said Rita. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details.

Checkmate, said Death. I only make one move and it’s always correct.

In Cadiz, Spain a well-dressed bald man with gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag to collect his dog’s shit off Roman cobblestone. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

  Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”                                              

  “History.”

Ice Girl in Banlung 

see with camera

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. 

According to Orphan, They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor only with their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. Obscura.

It's not about knowing, understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the virtual image of their faded memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. Death is close.

The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept, while they screwed. He waited as they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Japanese explorers among others

Greetings,

Tomorrow is the BIG new year day here in the kingdom. I am a shamanic camera. SNAP!

It is morning. The four Japanese tourists left on 125cc motorcycles for a day in the country. The man had long gray streaked hair and wiggled his bare feet when the authoritative diminutive black haired elf woman spoke. Food was more important to her than conversation. Nodding her head in agreement helped her chew.

They agreed on everything. This helps them avoid losing face. Losing face is the worst thing in the whole wide world in their culture.

Her female friend was bigger than an exploding astroid eating space at the speed of sound. The man talked with his mouth full of pliable eggs. Another woman hiding behind big dark sunglasses appeared. Everyone talked in staccato preparing plans to have a grand adventure along the river, through flat countryside filled with land mines far away from Tokyo. 

An arisotocratic French couple sat in front of the lodge facing the river. He was 40. Fat and morose. He blamed everything on her and she cared less and less. He covered his mouth while speaking with her blocking his deep unconscious emotional secrets about guilt, desire and fear. She was 32, wore new brown Birkenstock sandals and picked her toenails out of boredom. Sex was their glue.

Wearing biased blinders they comfortably ignored small brown faced humans as they traveled through Asia.

A Swedish man in a safari hat with his conservative white checked shirt tucked into his pants asked another Nordic man how to work his digital camera. He ran across the street, took a photo of the river and mountain and ran back to show his friend. He was very excited. 

Five bored tuk-tuk drivers sat across the street in their chariots of fire playing with their cell phones.

A foreigner's girlfriend had a simian face. He rescued her from a bar called The Heart of Darkness. She knew how to peel his banana. She deserted him. She ran to the market to find Boredom, her secret lover.

"I love Boredom. I can't get enough Boredom. It's a genetic necessity. Goodbye." He returned to The Heart of Darkness to find a temporary replacement. Life is a temporary condition.

Metta.

Sappho, the Greek lyric poet of Lesbos

Feel with camera

Greetings,

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. They feel the experience of 8th century artistic splendor with only their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. It's not about knowing, understanding the people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image, their memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept. He waited when they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see with their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. 

They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press, ever so lightly, the Down Loadswitch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker and play on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Metta. 

Interior, Banteay Srei, 9th C. 

No lost, no found

What is your motivation?

What is your intention?

What is speaking to you?

I am a Camera.

A patient tiger in the sun, swimming deep waters. I sleep with the tiger.

I am cooling love, love shoved in, chewed, swallowed, digested. A 47 million-year old fossil. An Eagle nebula, swirling cosmic.

Destiny's child. A figment of your imagination speaking of memory.

I am hot red ink inside dust unloading cans of paint for a project to to abandoned,

Wearing a burgundy shawl from Lhasa, before the Chinese invaded with

Patriotic re-education pogroms, programs and propaganda machines.

I smell like clean laundry’s spring dance.

where people don’t listen

don’t really listen

don’t really care

sleeping with their eyes wide

open

struggling with anxiety

swallowing daily happy pills

by the by

hand me down my walking stick

Metta.