Greetings,
Today Vietnam celebrated 35 years since the end of the war.
58,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese were killed. The images are from the HCMC museum in Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi History Museum.
Metta.
Greetings,
Speaking of Earth day and all the planting, reaping and enjoying a bountiful harvest here's a line from a recent NYT piece about the civil disturbance in Bangkok. In context. Down below where it says MORE...
Like more affordable food, clean water, opportunity, health care, fair wages, education, and so forth.
Dancing go-go- girls in the red light district have not been affected. Check your piece at the door.
It has been reported, via movement sensors they dance a little faster as explosions scatter metal, debris and death outside the neon splashed venues. The DJ simply turns the music up a decibel level drowning out the yelling and screaming of red shirts, yellow shirts, polo shirts, ambulances, innocent victims and bass driven hip-hop tick tock.
Red shirts represent the poor people. Yellow shirts represent the middle class.
"Poverty and corruption has absolutely nothing whatsoever to say or do about this issue," said B.S. Sympathy, a well respected scion of foreign banking firms, investment and real estate development companies. She spoke from her heavily fortified villa in an undisclosed location while eating caviar, drinking champagne and petting twin poodles named Lucky and Fortunate. "Let them eat cake."
The Department of Tourism said this will have no effect on:
a) tourists desperate to get out
b) tourists desperate to get in
Ships from England are now standing by in Bangkok sewage canals to evacuate nationals.
"....But taken together, they suggest a campaign by shadowy elements in Thailand to stir fear and create a sense of instability." more...
It's highly plausible to insert the country of your choice in the aforementioned sentence rather than Thailand. You have roughly 170 choices. Start with the letter A and work toward Z, say, Algeria, Afghanistan, Burma any central Asian country, China, and so on.
Metta.
Greetings,
Ash heard two jokes in Iceland.
After Iceland caused a financial meltdown in 2008 Europeans wanted cash not ash.
Icelandic people don't want their ashes spread all over Europe.
Europeans, rather than accept accountability, escape the responsibility by blaming someone, somewhere, somehow for this beautiful majestic natural mess.
According to Mr. Bisignani of the International Air Transport Association, "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess. The decision that Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no co-ordination, no leadership," he said.
"Europeans are still using a system based on a theoretical model which does not work... instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment."
Ash currently holds 6.8 million travelers hostage around the world. It is the largest hostage situation in the history of mankind since Red China held 1.6 billion citizens hostage in the spring of 2010.
Ash flew to China to verify this unpleasant fact. Ash rested inside 1.6 billion pairs of ears.
Easy to say and hard to do they say in China.
Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.
What! Really?
Yes. Now it happened at the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.
Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!
You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.
She probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.
While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING BUZZ BUZZ as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo.
She has opened your aural chambers big time taps the tongs again, and you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!
So she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.
She attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away.
BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! Far away. She caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.
Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.
Metta.
Greetings,
It's the new year here.
People get together, celebrate, travel home for three days to their village if they have cash and places get cleaned up. Everything increases in cost; food, transportation, quietly depressed bar girls, medicine, education, laziness and boredom. Boredom was cheaper last week in a free market economy.
In front of the ornate French colonial court house teams of boys chew up old soil removing dead tree trunk roots with crude effective Paleolithic stone tools slabbing the area with miles of bland red tiles. The amount of stone work is tremendous. Across the street at a government building boys slap a fresh coat of white paint on pillars. Women weed a grassy plaza featuring a huge seagull. It needs a coat of paint.
White shirted men supervise garden teams and completion of tall heroic patriotic statues at an intersection.
Boys rapidly pave a huge swath of land in front of a new grocery store with red tiles. The owners brought in outdoor fern planters and steel shelving for consumer goods no one will want.
Frantic men salvage gutter weeds and wild grasses for their livestock before someone chases them away. A young girl tries to focus on copying texts under the watchful eye of a private tutor while adults with a lack of focus and direction distract them with meaningless chatter.
Countless people with nothing to do practice the endless art of milling around. They practice the timeless art of pretending to be busy. They pay more attention to see if anyone is watching them than to what they are actually doing. This is an unpleasant fact.
Across the street from a small place where I enjoy noodles, carrots, spuds, eggs and fine green tea, boys in straw hats protecting them from a blistering sun create four new rooms with high brick walls at a primary school. No windows. Window dressing. A new year, a new wall.
Metta.
Vietnam
Turkey
Shaman - Vietnam
Greetings,
At dusk as an orange flaming ball of gas drifts toward blue mountains, setting trees on fire, painting the sky red, the Kampot river drive comes alive. I sit across the street with an iced coffee at a rolling stall. It costs 1500 Real or 75 sense.
The woman is friendly because I am Mr. Lucky Foot and bring her good fortune. People are curious about the stranger so they visit her and buy something cool and refreshing. They stare. They drink. They mill around. They pay. They leave.
She's been here since dawn. She stakes out the corner across from the Post Office every day. She has everything she needs; a hammock for a mid-day nap, sugar cane grinders, apples, oranges, dragon fruit, mangoes, bananas, java, tea, umbrellas, plastic chairs, folding tables and a fine view. Her husband and two sons help her in late afternoon.
Fifteen fishing boats return south from up river, chugging through wake reflections of sky. A woman with her daughter perched on the running board of a motorcycle putts past. Men and wives with their kids pass. A man with his dog blowing white hair cruises along.
Blue vans serve as a local buses. They're crammed with millions of humans and their market shopping. The roof is covered with lashed bamboo baskets, boxes, tires, and assorted packages. The open back door exposes material threatening to explode and spill into the road.
Heavy-duty construction dump trucks filled with labor boys blast their horns and spit gravel.
Chattering Muslim girls in colorful scarves, having finished their day shift at the local P.T.C. weaving center for 200 disadvantaged youngsters from rural areas pedal home. Teams of young chattering cycle boys prowl for girls. Prim girls in blue school uniforms pedal bikes, ride scooters. Blond fat Europeans walk the front as serious local women on a weight-loss program of infinite proportions march along, swinging their gaited arms like puppets in a play.
A man with his rolling cart near the curb pulverizes ingredients with a mortar and pestle. He serves dinner noodles, vegetables and spices to sidewalk lovers, kids, moms and dads cradling infants. A busy woman next door with her rolling restaurant grills meat and fish using pieces of charcoal fired below a clay pot.
Wealthy people blast past in 4-wheel drives. One day I saw a Hummer. It was humming black money. The people inside were invisible. Someone said there are 200 very, very rich people in this country and millions of poor people. How many poor people can fit in a hummingbird?
Humans trapped inside vehicles scream, "Look at the people outside. They are eating, breathing, living, laughing, talking, dreaming and loving. What if I die here in this cartoon graveyard? Who'll be my role model?"
Accidental children inside rolling machines pound their tiny craniums against reinforced tempered glass barriers yelling, "Look, mom! See the kids by the river. They're playing a game in fresh air. They have air-conditioning. I want to play. I'm hungry!" Mom ignored their plea of temporary insanity.
Dad steps on the gas blasting loose gravel and dust into the air. He wants to get home to his gated house with high fences wearing shards of glittering sharp green glass. To keep them out.
A young boy and and his sister finish eating corn-on-the-cob. He runs to the edge of the world, pulls out his imaginary pistol and fires at the flaming orange sun. It explodes and disappears. He laughs, "Bulls-Eye!"
He and his sister find their father's comforting hand and they walk.
Metta.
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