after ice

One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower. 

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up The River Of Darkness. Up the Tonle Srepok River. The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience.

They love hunting and killing. She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story.

I weave after ice.

dance alive

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.
Martha his girl friend considered it essential.
Music made her edgy and alive.
When she heard music she danced.
She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.
Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.
He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.
They wrote, danced and lived like they were dead.
One day they would be. 
They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Nature is what you can be.
People are nature's tools.
Children are parent’s tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don't think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository. They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia. In music like life, the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A Cambodian orphan popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

kids speak truth

After a year and a half in a Wild West town,

Pounding Stick dragged his sorry angry alcoholic brilliant ass to Hanoi. 

Down a dusty road. Out of a dusty little town.

Past the Plain of Scars.

Past men and women de-mining, defining soil.

Harvesting ordinance.

To be recycled as garden planters, fences, restaurant fixtures, bracelets,

Spoons and impossible fragments explaining how the world works.

Going to get a life teaching spoiled rich kids, said Pounding Stick. $30 an hour.

He needed travel money for South America. 

A long way from England.

A long way from anywhere but here turning Earth.

Life is good.

Short, said a H'mong student.

It was the rainy season.

Tears ran down the street.

Yes, said another. He evaporated his limited patience here.

Yes, he did, said another kid. He absolved the dilemma of his loss. 

He projected his shadow, fear, and ignorance on us, said one.

It'd be nice if we had a more gentle teacher.

Accept loss forever, said a quiet kid. Happiness is small.

A small mansion.

A small fortune.

A small ____.

Smaller and smaller. Poof.

Less is more

The more we learn, the less we know.

WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

Leaving early

On September 1, 2001, Mr. Point was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade Mountains. Next to him in economy was an overweight happy couple anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Ten days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, an alcoholic, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food. I’d like to go to Costa del Sol. I’ve heard the culture is wide open, if you know what I mean,” rubbing his secret jewels and winking to the stranger.

His spouse wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh. Their combined girth was conspicuous consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. If your top-secret security clearances are valid. The more you know the less you need. 

“I’m heading to Morocco to meet my female nomad lover and extraneous fascinating strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the Extraordinary Rendition Program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer suspected terrorists to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fake companies.”

The shadow of Little Wing, a weaver, passed them.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they boil them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap or country music twenty-four hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect Chinese harvested internal organs and upright pianos to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh? Business profit has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth. 

His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain promised another road, village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic potentials. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of history.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone, somewhere on the spinning rock when they asked him where was he was going and why he did what he did with the who, when, and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

A Century is Nothing