Children Are Tools

Leo said, The rich make money.

The poor make babies, said Rita.

Children are tools in Utopia, said Leo.

In Vietnam with a population of 95 million, 50% are under 30. That’s a lot of babies.

You see babies everywhere: they are busy writing books, painting, driving taxis, motorbikes, buses, boats, trucks, flying planes, cooking along the road, selling fruits and vegetables in markets, building new fake glass brass cities in suburbs, hauling cement and bricks, fixing broken machines  ... waiting  ... sleeping in empty shops, hustling dreams, screwing, selling anything and everything possible with an infant on their hip, chopping down forests, harvesting kindling for fires and hunting animals until they become extinct.

Do babies become extinct, asked Tran.

Yes, if they don’t run fast enough, said Zeynep.

Humans slave for money. Trade their time for a handful of dimes.

Monkeys don’t talk because they are afraid of being put to work.

Humans scheme and deceive and lie and cheat. This is a huge advantage in systems with social organization, organic relationships and political structures.

They laugh at their mortality and contemplate death feeling happy or sad accepting destiny.

What if I die here, said Tran. Who’ll be my role model?

One has to die before they can live, said Rita.

You die twice, said Devina. When you’re born and when you die.

Many humans spend their lives dying, said Omar.

WE were born dead and slowly came to life.

It aint about pleasure making a baby. It’s a business deal with long term opportunity cost.

Marketing and branding saves the day, said Leo.

I know families with ten kids, said Rita. You can have as many babies as you want, like grains of rice.

You hear parents and grandparents whisper to their children’s children, Accelerate Production, comrades.

The bitter fruit is their legacy of love. Love is a legacy and economic practicality. It’s a pure and simple matter of numbers, money and pragmatic reality.

Long-term Asian child investment resources establish a genetic social security plan.

Billboards exclaim:

Invest sperm and fertilize eggs for the future

Create your legacy

Live forever 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Li's Little Tale

Hi, my name is Li.

I live in Sapa, Vietnam. I am a mountain trekker guide. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English.

I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. I use really a lot. As someone said, You don’t want to let school interfere with your education. How true.

Tourists visit Sapa. It’s in the mountains close to China. I’ve never been to China. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. A dream.

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at the nightclubs and buying cheap foreign products. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh because you can always tell who they are:

1) they arrive on big white tour buses

2) they wear bright red tour baseball hats so they don’t get lost

3) they travel in packs like scared animals

4) they stay in the government hotels and eat at local Vietnamese places

5) they ignore you

I'm talking and I speak excellent English, about the foreigners.

My friends and I work the street selling, politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts and offering guided treks, we don’t call the foreigners travelers they’re more like tourists really because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. It’s a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. They’re just passing through going somewhere else.

Everyone is passing through life.

They are in a big fat hurry. They have a vacation schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn’t it? Someone said time is the greatest luxury.

They eat, sleep, wander around maybe trek to a local village and then, poof, like magic bubbles they disappear.

Then the tourist machine spits out more visitors for us to sell to, pester and offer treks to our village.

Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature. They want to experience the real Sapa. Some even stay overnight in my village which is great by avoiding the Vietnamese hotel owners and middlemen, the greedy ones after all the profit, my farming folks can make some small money.

For instance, the hotels charge a tourist $25 for a trek. So, let’s say they get 10. Do the math. $250.

I show up and take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys into villages and we have lunch. Then we take trails through pristine forests, crossing rivers, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. The hotel guy gives me $5-10 because I am cheap labor. This is why I deal directly with the tourists and trekkers.

I am a smart, aggressive little business woman. Travelers are super friendly people. I’m learning English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza with cheese.

I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese. It’s hilarious. They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical box. What’s up with that?

Many really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work, play, evolve and grow as human beings. They don’t leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us girls stay in Sapa. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet the backpackers who want to go trekking. We are private operators.

It’s more convenient than going all the way home which takes two hours and...you understand. My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It’s simple with a bed and toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work.

I’m a great little trek leader. It's nice to do what you love and love what you do. Nature is my teacher. Life is good in Sapa. Bye-bye. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Department of Truth

According to Zeynep, a scripter in the present, I speak because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So. Help. Me.

1. Truth is classified. The source of truth about everything is classified. I am authorized to say with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

1a. The crypto key is top-secret for your blind eyes only. Grave Digger knows the combination and algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your face, mind, heart, consciousness or Lifebook personal profile time bandit. Real friends are few.

1b. Artificial friends are aliens on life support. The key for Time is inside an arrow piercing Greater Complexity with Entropy. A woman, man, child in country XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.

2. Truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke, the laugh track.  If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get the joke. Your tears speak and mangle fictional truth-story. They distort and strangle it. Truth is a figment of your imagination. Literary outlaws lie to tell the truth.

3. Truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia, author of Voices, being authorized to speak said, Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

4. Truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source. Eat your broccoli, walnuts and almonds. Biolabs will purify water and distribute free medicine and C-19 vaccinations to every human on Earth. Genetics will create Socratic open-ended educational dreams.

4a. Truth is a starving homeless mother pulling a heavy two-wheeled trash cart with flat tires through a dusty Cambodian town as her daughter forages in garbage containers for food, water and medicine. She is a qualifier, a split infinitive in infinity where someone’s leftovers are another’s banquet.

5. Truth will provide more than 1 billion people access to safe drinking water.

6. Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people who cannot read. Women are 2/3 of this number.

7. Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world who have ZERO access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

9. Truth is a terminal disease like peace, love and blindness.

10.Truth is a sledgehammer in Mandalay, Burma.

Love is not truth.

11. Truth is food in your stomach.

This is The Truth Channel. Game, Set, Match.

Media dumbs down sheep.

Technology eats humans.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hoi An

I took a bus to Hoi An. We passed through Da Nang, a mess of glass and brass mega resorts swallowing farmland with miles of beachfront developments creating imaginary golf courses faster than speeding high finance and rabid speculation.

I am on the street early. A winged shadow caressed my forehead. A black and orange butterfly fluttered in front of my eyes. Touched, grazed, blessed by Psyche. Magic.

I am a prime lens on a 35mm tool. I capture soft light inside the old city. I slow down, feeling free, curious and open wandering. Before noise and lightning bolts of laughter’s language fills the air. Tourists sleep off heavy European food and distilled beverages. Streets are empty.

A young woman under a bamboo hat shovels sand. It takes her 21 gestures to fill up a wheelbarrow. No more, no less. 21. Blackjack. She pushes it down a street to a new home project. She dumps it. She repeats the process. All day. Every day. Her Tao.

I walk to the river near an ancient Japanese Bridge built in 1593 and sit near two elderly women. They’re surprised to see a foreigner sitting alone with coffee. Black with ice. I smiled. They smiled and whispered strange man alone has a camera it’s so early for him to sit here with us. We shared humanity, silence and morning light.

We communicated without words. I see their lives, childhood, growing up here, families, surviving wars, and meeting every morning for conversation, walking and tea.

Supporting each other they walk through quiet streets, past yellow walled homes with red tile roofs protecting long deep brown wooden interiors. Ancestors whisper stories from the 15th-19th century when Hoi An was the major port in Southeast Asia and the first Japanese settlement in southern Vietnam. Ships unloaded cargo and loaded high-grade silk, paper, porcelain, tea, sugar, molasses, medicines, elephant tusks, Sulphur and mother-of-pearl.

Now 400 tailors measure, cut, sew, iron, hang, and sell threads.

Women in teddy bear floral pajamas play badminton chasing a shuttlecock. Pajamas make utilitarian sense. Cotton is cheap and easy to wash. You sleep in them, get up, cook, eat, talk to your pajama neighbors, sweep dust, yell at your kids because they are spoiled brats and terrorized since escaping the birth canal, go to the market, buy food, admire new pajamas, return home, eat lunch, talk to your pajama neighbors and take a nap. Pajamas have a warning label on the collar. Remove Before Sex.

Pajamas are cool. One size fits all.

Residents stretch and talk. A leather-faced canoe woman set up her small clay figurines under a tree. The two women finished their tea, gestured goodbye, held hands and walked across a wooden bridge taking care of each other.

 *

Nature is my inspiration, said Eric, a sculptor from Europe. He has a gallery with an elegant hard gray marble sitting Buddha in the central window facing the street. Eric is 45 and thin with a deep lined brown face and brown eyes. He sits below a large leafy tree surrounded by his huge marble flowers, Buddhas, Jesus, bowls and delicate petals. He drinks milk. I drink green Chinese tea.

I’ve been depressed for three months. I feel sad and empty now. I haven’t had any new ideas for a long time.

He’s had his gallery for four years. The landlord wants the place back I need to find a new space for my gallery, he said. He has a workshop six kilometers outside town near Marble Mountain. I lived in a Swiss forest for thirty years. Nature is my teacher. I studied with a Hungarian master. I have to go now. Goodbye.

*

I wander along the river and stop at a food stall. A young German eating noodles shared his story.

He looked at the river as blue boats ferried people back and forth.

This place is a little Disneyland, I love Mali and Ethiopia, it’s what happens when countries and governments save historical places and they become well known to tourists. Governments develop them with monetary and cultural motivation to capitalize on a place with potential profit. Local people often get squeezed out. Others adapt and make a decent living.

Tourism = money = tourism.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Teamwork

Let's have a meeting! Yes. English teachers unite!

Get dressed and take our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Collect one piston-driven fountain pen filled with green racing ink.

Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Pedal to a class tomb on old campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief. Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It is shimmering. You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new great wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting - bags of cement, trowels, shovels, a few plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, some boards and a couple of wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful you feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

During a brief moment of silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter.

Another day dawns in paradise.