Sam and Dave Part 2
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It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.
Dave releases stream of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Ha Noi cement or is Ha Noise the block walls? His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.
He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.
His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling
steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and
pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.
Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did.
Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle, she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembering forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above the eternal red glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue, and white electric bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food - hearing her father whisper in her burning ear as he carried her away from the burning village.
‘Remember where you came from.’ She never physically returned.
It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, this collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.
She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles
breaking the light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were being moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from villages poor and very far away laboring their wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers,
young homeless Sapa H’mong children speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education being reduced to selling handicrafts to tourists, all their bright beaded bags, the embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on the war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their eternal nightmare reduced to self-pity, no exit and dust inside infinity’s spiral. A shattered mirror reflected her face.
