Dream Sweeper

A Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares and B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Laos, Nam and Cambodia with hallucinations and bliss evolving from a point of light traveling at 186,000 miles per second.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories. From deep narrow Ha Noise alleys where death worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense, dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, pity, clarity, understanding and interpretation. How did I get here? What if I die here? Who will be my unconscious role model? Who will save me from ultimate absolute reality? Who will feed me in a Peoples’ Communist Paradise dream world where everyone shares toilets, kitchens, spoiled whining children and education is a waste of time and money?

Bored Asians existing with an emotional level of -7 exchanged drab artificial lives playing on Fakebook, a glorious electronic frontier of equality, equity and endless hi-tech distractions with firewalls, barbwire and rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent. Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

Anaemic

My name is Yeah Yeah and here's one of my favorite fairy tales.

Once upon a time I was in power since 1900. A century is nothing. I am not going anywhere. A black hole named Greed swallowed my country. Delicious. Burp. 

Greed is good.

My buddies go to the bank in Land Rovers. Cruise control.

China is my best friend in the whole wide world. They've invested a cool $12 billion since 2002.

They know BIG profit when they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it, feel it and cash it.

Money in-money out is their mantra.

Here's some recent World Bank numbers to verify our stellar accomplishments.

1. Our economy expanded at an annual rate of 7.2% in 2012. Domestic consumption is up. Toilets are expensive and rare. Cell phones are cheap and plentiful.

2. Direct foreign investment last year was $1.5 billion.

2. Our per capita income is $946 a year. Thailand is $5,474 and Indonesia $3,557. 

3. Less than 14% of my people, by the people and for the people are enrolled in tertiary education. Education wastes time and money.

4. 55% of our children under five are anaemic. I don't know what that means speaking of vigor or energy. I hope it's not contagious. If it is we need another hospital filled with empty rooms to impress foreign investors.

5. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies costs my country $146 million each year.

6. Malnutrition and poor health stunts the growth of 40% of our children. 

It's a numbers game.

Robust growth is one thing. Inclusive growth is another.

Turkish attitude

Adult Ankara language students said they were tired.

They loved being addicted to a phenobarbital phenomenon reality altering life, taking anti-depressants (Xanax) by mouth. He processed their fear and anxiety.

A national Turkish problem, according to a male psychiatrist is anxiety.

A clinking small musically inclined silver spoon dissolved square sugar cubes made in a factory where the hygiene conditions were abysmal.

We sat in a teahouse filled with Turkish and Iranian carpets, blue amber oil paintings and thick embroidered cushions near a well-thumbed Zen tarot deck. Fortune telling is an art and science depending on a suspicious, auspicious way. We gifted each other the state of relaxation. Reading, feeling, absorbing the future is the process.

These a-dolts eat their fear, humiliation and guilt with yogurt, said Zeynep in Bursa drawing in a Moleskine. 

ordinary experience

"There exists a world. In terms of probability this borders on the impossible. It would have been far more likely if, by chance, there was nothing at all. Then, at least, no one would have begun asking why there was nothing."
 - Jostein Gaarder

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"In our ordinary experience, there is the world and there is you. Recognizing this does not mean that you are going against the Buddha's teaching of egolessness. There is definitely something there, which is the working basis and magic of the path. You cannot negate that you taste a good cup of coffee. You cannot say that there is no coffee and there is no you to taste it - there are such things! Mindfulness of life is based on that kind of immediate appreciation."
 - Chögyam Trungpa
Mindfulness of Life  Read more…

Dr. Scary and Mrs. Marbles (2/4)

The Managing Director hired Dr. Scary Snobson two years ago to open the facility. He had a Ph.D in Reports and Updates. He loved organization, management, forms, protocol, procedures, paper and bureaucratic drone head duties. 

He recruited former Peace Corpse teachers to establish foreign faces and mouths in front of spoiled elementary kids and parents. Marketing 101. He practiced Hathaway yoga and invested his princely salary in offshore rice paddy accounts near Burmese refugee camps bordering Thailand. He was thrilling and running scared.

Did he run for fun?

He ran in the tropical sun for sums. Kids in = count cash. Numbers numbed wealthy Burmese wallets. Pay here. Drop kid at classroom ABC. Minders/babysitters/Myanmar female educators in training will take care of them until you pick them up at 3:30. If you're late we sell them to China. A boy is worth $3,500 in a one-child Orwellian culture.

I have two boys, said a Burmese parent. Do I get a discount?

It depends on their passing a physical with Nurse Dull, said Dr. Scary. Let me ask my passive Taiwanese wife. She's very proud of her green card. She talks like her mouth's full of marbles. She believes in acquiescence.

You mean the sad-eyed, lights on-no one home, reactive space cadet wearing the cheap floppy Chinese hat, Gloria Swanson sunglasses and magic slippers inherited from her grandmother outside the gate-less gate standing lost and forlorn Monday-Friday mornings as horrendous traffic spewed noxious hydrocarbons into faces of emotionally deprived children next to struggling nanny slaves dragging children's suitcases of books and carrying bright plastic baskets of food as parents, wearing diamond and imperial green jade jewelry necklaces, yakked on cell phones strolling to classrooms with their darlings at the tall gleaming metropolis of a school?

Her marble mouth machine droned her official mandatory sequence. Park here. Leave kids here. Parents ignored her.

That's her. She's his baby. Her attention span was shorter than an apology to Burmese parents of neglected children about the hidden cost and quality of grandiose theoretical classless plans. Read the fine print. You paid suckers.