State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers tell sheep what to think not how to think.

Poor schools makes it easier for systems to control citizens.

Serious factoid. Push passive kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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

Pack Light

After completing a one-year English teaching-facilitating job with Devina as my mentor near Jakarta, Indonesia in 2009 I returned to Nam.

Farewell to the tyranny of a private school with dusty clanging Catholic church bells. Devina guided the educational program with unconditional love and compassion.

Omar advised: Travelers need to remember when packing for adventures like going to the grocery store or the eye doctor to see clearly, because eyes lie…or walking across rice paddies to see friends  ... break bread, have sex, visit neighbors  ... greet strangers, marry aliens and burn or bury relatives whispering GOODBYE  ... I’m off to join the circus maybe forever  ... because one never knows if they’ll return, to pack their sense of humor.

Why do people look back at their bamboo shack, camp, home, village, invisible city or continent as their stone cold empty lost eyes see & remember with terrible clarity?

They are Visceral Realists.

They need to remember it because they are afraid they’ll never ever see it again.

They need to burn the image into their heart-mind memory in case it’s potentially, probably, possibly their final chance. In other words Don’t Look Back.

Nothing behind, everything ahead.

Are your needs being met, Rita asked Tran.

Yes, I have a prosthetic limb, I get around.

Omar walked the walk and talked the talk. Many travelers forget to pack their sense of humor. Perhaps they don’t consider their sense of humor essential on their super serious adventures into foreign worlds.

Worlds are filled with transcendental borders, beauty, humans, languages, sensations, smells, sights, sounds, dirt, dust, sweat, mirrors, and reflections without a GPS, compass or app.

It’s a long walk.

You’re never lost, there’s only healthy uncertainty about your position, said Rita, speaking of landmines, rice paddies, napalm, orphanages and terrified acid scarred abused girls and women.

Strange, said Omar, You’d think they’d remember to keep it light, stay calm, focused, let go of ego and expectations and enjoy their travails, I mean travels with a sense of humor… packing a sense of humor means less baggage and less fear.

Before you swim past a wand man/woman at airport security you don’t need to put your sense of humor in the plastic box so it can roll through the x-ray machine, said Devina, You don’t see travelers collecting their sense of humor after passing through security, intuitive travelers keep it with them  ... Many forgot it at Home Sweet Home where Serious lives.

After you pack everything cut it in half. Caress your sense of humor. After immigration laugh through the Nothing To Declare green zone, said Omar … Walk into freedom.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Akiko

The fear of living, observing and experiencing in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them, said David Foster Wallace.

Sheep fear watching other people make things happen and not knowing what the fuck is going on, said Z. Sheep and robots fear taking a risk.

They know it’s easier to do nothing than take a chance, said Leo.

I cut useless meaningless vague words blocking the narrative river. I am innocent, happy, empty and brave. I am not afraid to make wise selections when it comes to editing this massive amount of verbiage, said Zeynep.

Where’s the burn bag, said the janitor.

I fear Room 101, said Winston Smith in 1984.

Leo - In Utopia we learn the less we do the fewer mistakes we make. The fewer mistakes we make the less we are criticized. I remain safe and happy. It’s called THE SYSTEM. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian education systems. Students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution that is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic. Social conditioning.

A teacher is Parent #2.

Big Brother is watching. Save face.

The fear of humiliation is greater than the fear of death, said Death.

Karma is the universal law.

Will your characters discuss moral ambiguities? Yes. They will speak with nouns and verbs and use specific adjectives for description, playing with words like Joyce. They will play with ideas, like Borges, said Zeynep.

Attributes of good ideas said Devina.

a.         Simple

b.         Unexpected

c.         Concrete

d.         Credible

e.         Emotional

f.          Story-containing

Good writing is clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. There are people who talk about things, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas, said Z. The life of the mind. A wave in the mind.

Is a place a character, asked Tran, Sure, said Devina, A place has character like Kampot, Cambodia, a sleepy river town, famous for pepper, Sunflower’s hands, Milling Around and the SIGN ones, said Rita.

Writers use a specific location in their work, said Omar. Cadiz, Spain worked its way into my morning pages. I traveled with a word butcher after the Spanish Civil War. His laughing axe synthesized metaphors of death sacrifice and letting go. His mirrors became gifts (hello beauty) and gifts multiplied gifts with gratitude.  

The gift keeps moving. It was imperative to leave the united states of confusion and Morocco behind.

Exile suited my spirit. It was the irony of ironies, pressed irons with heavy starch in the collar please I told the world’s dry cleaner. Wash and wear. Dry a tear.

Nothing is true & everything is permitted, Omar said to Akiko, a Japanese fashion designer in Cadiz.

Everything is permitted with fabric and threads she said naked in the dark exploring their personal puzzle maps, tracing contours through the Sierras in Andalusia toward beaches woven with linen and silk. They were two orange and black butterflies dancing in a courtship ritual. They slept together in a Hokkaido love hotel filled with mirrors.

At 2 a.m. Cadiz garbage workers in fluorescent yellow tiger stripes collected discarded words along narrow streets.

Omar wrote the morning down as sky painted orange, pink and cerulean colors. A crescent moon hung in the west. He walked down Benjumeda Street as uniformed school kids gripped parental hands passing veiled grandmothers wearing widow market black at intersections on their daily economic briefing. Roman cobblestones rested in white shadows. Cool clear air dusted lungs.

The Plaza de Falla Moorish red brick extremities shimmered in soft light. Arches formed prayer hands. Golden, cast iron, bronze, brick, tile, and papier mâché arch models in the world prayed for non-violence, dialogue, a ceasefire and arms control. Arms out of control waved goodbye to sanity and millions of orphans.

Weary serious sad med students gripping texts crossed plazas toward class. Matriculation was a fading dream. Two men grimaced a ladder past a hospital and a fortune teller selling lottery tickets. Gambling was a big deal in Cadiz. Machines in bars with three virgin cherries rotated. ONCE lottery tickets bought the population where 40% were unemployed.

Pay now pray later. The best is yet to come, said an unemployed Roma fortune teller. A nurse in white perfection entered a cafe for coffee. Old people hobbled in and out of a hospital. A woman left the hospital carrying one crutch. Needing Grave Digger she walked past an ambulance.

I’m busy, he said, See my calloused hands.

Death stood watch 24/7 in the big leagues.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged