stormy monday

They call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday's just as bad...

I stepped outside of myself and witnessed a blind man walking down life’s street. You breathe in. You breathe out.

Neither of us had seen each other before. Dressed in rags, he stooped under a torn shouldered bag. He had no left hand. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff.

In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle. Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide eyes.

I remembered. If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. A blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives. Enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in humble existence. He scraped his staff against shuttered shop steps. He massaged a long concrete wall. A beggar sat in rags made from boiled books. His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him. 

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!” 

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.” 

“This is my space! Pay attention. Keep moving you fool.”

“Sorry to bother you. Maybe you’re a little sad, angry or lonely? Maybe I can help you.” 

“What! Are you completely fucking crazy as well as blind? I have no wife, no children, no parents, no friends, no home and no job. I live here hoping people will take pity on me.”

“I see. I know the feeling. I’m on my own. Maybe we could work together, be a team.”

The beggar rubbed his stubble. “Hmm. Let me think about it.”

“Take your time. Knowing our destiny means there’s no hurry.”

“How can you be so sure?” 

“Call it a hunch,” laughed the beggar, “Fate’s a great teacher. Ha, ha, ha.” Kids passed. One coined the bowl. 

“Thanks kid. Good luck on your exams next week.” 

“I hate school. Too much homework. It’s so boring and tedious. I rather be home playing violent computer games or chatting online with my friends. I am an only child. I am a little Titan in my universe of want, want, want.”

“Your attitude sucks. Only 5% of the Chinese population has a university degree. Did you know every June, four million students graduate from a university. 60% will not find a job. They will work the street like us. Your so-called developing society faces hard cruel lessons.

"Reality outside your textbooks. Your people have fucked up the environment. Do you sleep where you shit? Sixteen of the most twenty polluted cities in the world are in this country. You sound like one of those single pampered little emperor kids I see, hear and smell every day. Busy, busy, busy. Get used to it or you’ll be out here with us.”

“A fate worse than death,” said the kid. “My father owns a factory. He is rich man making huge profits off the sweat of poor illiterate fools and idiots like you. Bum. My future is filled with money, a big house and a new car.

"Thank God for the one-child policy. I will buy a trophy wife. I will give her blood diamonds imported from African mimes. My country is investing huge amounts of capital around the world to export raw materials. We feed our machines of consumption 24/7.

"As you know our country was squeezed, manipulated and exploited for years by big nose foreigners. Now it’s our turn to cash in billions of T-bills and let them dance to our sweet tune. And...my family has a multiple-entry visa for Macau so we can leave whenever we feel like it. So, fuck off beggar man.”

“Yeah, begging isn’t a job, it’s an adventure.”

Rural Chinese school, Sichuan. A paradise to learn. Cradle to become a useful person.

chinese cover story

One essential joy was selecting the cover photograph of a young Chinese girl.

Her image revealed heavy, deep and real emotional honesty. She stood trapped behind the steel grate at a Chinese nursery school enduring a hard dismal Chinese educational process seasoning her childhood character and personality in the poor village of Maija where the tea man and artist drawing the dead lived.

Her eyes held all the secrets of the world and unfilled wish-dream potential. She stared at the stranger, a diversion in her expanding universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her, trapping her against the gate.

It was locked by an old woman who feared persecution and execution if any kids escaped. He was on the other side. Being invisible has its advantages. He held a small black metallic machine to his blind eye.

She heard a series of curious clicks as a shutter opened and closed, an interval between life and death, trapping, freezing time, one decisive moment in the eternal present, a decisive instant, capturing her image on a memory-fiction circuit card. He smiled, whispered, Thanks, disappearing past pig farms on a dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing, because she was younger than tomorrow or older than yesterday remembering spring how her image on the cover, her clear child eyes were visible for everyone.

Her small dark eyes held archetypical memories of dynasties and great Chinese electronic fire walls evolving with the speed of electron particles illuminating her face, sadness, fear and curiosity at that precise moment. Stories about stories inside stories manifested the girl in alchemical truth, alive, breathing, unaware of her immortality in infinity.  

He'd visited her primary school with a university student who worked in the Maija pharmacy after school to make ends meet helping her aunt dispense cheap placebos to poor illiterate women and men alleviating their suffering, pain and fear of death singing, dancing speaking unintelligible Mandarin words.

Laughter and kindness were blessings after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored women teachers who didn’t want to be in a class tomb any more than the students. Teacher’s mantra was Push them through. No one had free choice. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability.

The dead, dying idiots sputtered stuttering in Beijing opening rusty doors of perception being a communist-socialist Marxist dream removed from poor villages where rich well connected officials raped and reaped huge financial benefits practicing oppression, coercion, bribery, graft, slander, using death threats as powerless simple peasants tilled soil, followed slumbering oxen, stalking mud and rice paddies. Where green rice stalks revealed a blue sky with Beauty.

Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years.

Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking, besides the commercialization of education? The absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers. The one who dares to open their fat little face and question authority gets killed.

Bang. 

I want More

Namaste,

A foreigner put a pile of gold on a table in Laos, turned to the old man squinting through one good eye and said, “I will give you this pile of gold for your daughter.”

“I want more,” said the old man. “Her face and body and heart is Lao. She has Vietnamese blood. It is supply and demand. Business is business. It’s all about user value. It’s about exchange value. No plastic. Cash only. See this machete?”

He waved it in the man’s face, cutting him off.

Nearby, two male tourists hadn’t decompressed. They tried to speak in complete sentences. It was impossible. One started, trying to release sounds, impressive words, phrases, sentences and, like a game of chess, war or conquest wearing stupidity and a clear lack of respect the OTHER one cut him off at the throat with sharp sophisticated annunciation.

A verbal machete.

Frustrated, he grimaced suffering severe brain damage. Short circuit. Transmission lines went down. Thud. Crash. Burn.

In their remote jungle village near the River of Darkness they carved images of their dead. 

Metta.

truth has few friends

Namaste,

Take a plane to the airport. Take a taxi across the sky. See Himalayas. Open your window. Breathe deep.

Truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read.

Woman are 2/3 of this number.

Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day.

Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world having no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools. Truth is a fatal disease, like peace, love and blindness.

Truth is a sledgehammer.

This is the Truth Channel. Your eyes lie. You cannot eat technology. Truth has few friends and they are suicides.

Metta.

Bye Bye Mr. Murbarak

Greetings,

The Egyptian people have spoken with one voice. People power. 

They speak and demonstrate and march and suffer and sacrifice and create a unified community demanding their basic human rights, an end to BIG BROTHER police state dictatorship, corruption and endless cycle of poverty. They finally had enough. 

The Egyptian dictator and their cronies pocketed all the money. Playing their game they manipulated countries to increase military money. They pretended to be open and democratic. They created a police state where FEAR ruled. They put 60 million Egyptians in jails. They tortured innocent citizens.  

Now they will run away dragging their pitiful lives and join the Tunisian dictator in Saudiville, a remote luxurious villa filled with slaves, swimming pools, palm trees and a short future in the long now. 

Metta.