Radio Activity

After she left to explore the Snake he went to buy stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

He launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young unarmed postal worker woman about how amazing and beautiful were the colors and definitions of the galaxies mentioning how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse them while trapped inside a federal building five short miles down wind from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor where fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste seeped into water table levels near the Columbia River.

Department of Energy teams dived into, under, and through Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth snaking, roaring past abandoned nuclear plants as radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II was flowing 130 feet down, down toward water tables.

Fascinating. He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence or T.S.E. “It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

“The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations, and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations.

"Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.”

The postal worker and the nomad talked over a counter while a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T Touch The Stamps” because at her precocious age, curiosity about colors blended itself toward planetary exploration developing her active imagination.

Holding a nebula in his hand he told the woman how, up in the invisible sky, are all these really cool galaxies which means we are a third the life of a 3.5 billion year old universe and she said, "That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before." 

Editor's note: originally published in A Century Is Nothing.

one day

One day I went to the market with my brother and grandmother. We scavenged for food. She looked for money. My stomach comes first. I found a rope. It smelled like food. It tasted sweet. My brother found a piece of sugar cane. He is older, smarter and faster and needs the energy. 

My grandmother sat down at life's intersection. She held out her begging bowl. 

At dark we went home.

Thank you for your attention.

it's all mine

She wore a permanent tear imbedded on her left cheek. She is not smiling.

She said, Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt?

Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-( They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

On the mean old street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky. 

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Metta.

3 wise men

Greetings,

According to the situation on ground zero in Egypt, A Committee of Wise Men has been appointed by the Director of Intelligence, the acting VP with dubious CIA rendition connections to feed the media stream and poor citizens a low fat diet using advanced bait and switch marketing techniques.

The DOI knows the wise men. They worked together at STATE SECURITY perfecting torture tools. Their budget was $1.5 billion a year from their US big brother. Read the fine print called maintain the status quo. Wear down the masses. Starve them out. Play the extremist fear card.

One wise man is from the Bureau of Shackles & Chains. One is Waiting for Godot. One writes propaganda lyrics for the daily melodrama, This Is Your Life With an 82-year old Senile Dictator.

Wash and rinse. Repeat.

Metta.

The Ministry of Fear

Greetings,

My job is to control the flow of disinformation here in Egypt. Let's be as clear as the day is long. In Egypt GROUND ZERO is a square. Mathematically this is impossible. A zero is a circle, a complete and comprehensive series of events colliding to express totality and unity and harmony in a community.

For 3,000 years give or take a pharaoh, our ministry developed highly scientific methods to restrict, control and in 99% of the cases eliminate people from expressing their opinion, views, frustrations, repressed anger, poverty and related daily abuses to their dignity and self respect. 

Using paid government thugs we harassed, intimatidated, threatened, imprisoned, tortured and often killed the traitors, running capitalistic dogs

(to borrow a phrase from 1.6 billion oppressed Chinese people who have no idea what's happening here because their government restricts media coverage fearing blowback and social unrest, can you imagine)

and devious illiterate yet courageous freedom loving Egyptian people to suit our purposes. We were in past tense very efficient. Everyone was afraid, even Winston Smith.

What was our purpose? To stay in control. To manipulate the system, create chaos, divide and conquer. To get rich. To redeem insurance policies against revolutionary poor marginalized common people for valuable prizes on game shows.

The emperor has no clothes. Now the shoe is not on the other foot. It is in the collective hands of the common people and they are waving it at the dictator, his cronies, his lackeys like me, yelling, Enough, Give us liberty or give us death.

The red emergency light in my steel reinforced bunker is flashing. I've gotta run, run, run.