Journal - Journeys

Tuesday

Dec262017

Ambiguity - Ice Girl

Chapter 23.

Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

Voices blended billowing black diesel dust with forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Ice Girl. One looked content. He wore simple tattered white cotton cloth. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head.

He carried their possessions in three white rice bags on a bamboo pole balanced on a shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed their trail of tears.

Man #1: These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. He dropped the bags and pole on red dirt. Crash!

Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love blinked. An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother waiting for medicine holding her child shifted her hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of script. Ice girl massaged cold reality with an edge.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep.

His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting the pole and bags onto his shoulder.

Man #2: Where are we going?

Man #1: Muttering to his feet in red dust, Down this road.

The Wild West red dust town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wore Blue Zircon, seeing harlequins.

A boy near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see while standing in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding his rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.

His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders. He carried melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him Real notes. Thank you for the cold.

Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

The woman assaulted ice with a hammer, shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential.

An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist.”

History, war, violence and predatory politicians have screwed Cambodians, said Ice Girl.

Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and increasing) of Cambodia has been sold to foreign investors. 1.7 million out of 11m were massacred. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.

Any day above ground is a joyful day in paradise, she said. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. But they live in fear. They are afraid the past will become the present. Time is a scary circle.

Annual red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of the genocide regime blasted black sky. A child sang, “The wicked witch is dead!”

Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four old dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $100,000,000 dollar international show trial for genocide between 1975-1979.

They deny their role.

Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.

That’s what they all say.

No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah yeah.

Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories.

Media buys people, said Ice Girl. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.

Numbed silence covered rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns. Send in the politicians and bankers and thieves and Chinese manipulators.

Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.

Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody.

Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive, said Ice Girl. They started over after Year Zero. 14 million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.

Culture means you can forget.

It will take another generation, or sixty years given the average life expectancy, to recover revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.

Down the road, Alice in Slumberland, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You should just blend in. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.

They vanished. They became extinct.

Asking quest-ions was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, incentive and robotic daily comatose poverty existence.

Accountability is a foreign language.

Economic terrorism is an unpleasant fact. Personal incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho, ho.

An a priori communication theory without facts or truth or thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity or hard quest-ions is a male land mine survivor without legs living on Ground Zero. He rests near a pagoda waiting for compassion from strangers. A bookseller of genocide memories smokes a cigarette w/o hands.

Where are the female land mine survivors? Leo asked. Maybe they are dead and gone, said Ice Girl. Maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their daily needs. Removed from Fibonacci’s spiral and the golden mean.

Ready for a trick quest-ion, she asked. Sure. What’s louder than a group of Khmer people? I don’t know. Another group of Khmer people.

Get used to it, she said. Volume. Signal-Noise. They love distractions. They live, eat and breathe distractions and signal-noise. They love talking over each other. The one who talks the loudest without saying anything is the winner.

Most are too poor to pay attention.

Listening is hard work, said Leo.

Silence kills people, she said. Fear of death is one long conversation. They’ve been traumatized by their past into the immediate present facing unknown scary futures. It’s a time machine, a time warp and a shift in consciousness.

For example, said Leo it’s curious seeing the FIRE inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack at 0615 along a muddy road in Battenbang. Orange and bright red flames heat water, consume kindling.

Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat. Kindling stands stacked like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places waiting to exonerate memories of loss and abandonment.

It’s a male thing. They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. The men wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, big plans, construction projects, myths and ghosts. They eat fried bread drinking brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass.

1.7 million ghosts dance through their silent conversations. Ghosts whisper, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone.

Feed me, feed me, cried an Asian ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about it. Silence is golden. Men prefer to talk about the long now. Ghosts live in the past. Living in the past is time consuming. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty said another. They have no memory of the past.

Education is the key, said another. We missed our chance. The only chance I had, said one, was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I spend my days in an office rewriting our sanitized history. History is time, said another. Geography is space.

My dream is to be a gardener, said one. He watches Leo mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

He works at Bliss, a meditation retreat.

I love gardening, he said in Khmer. We have nature as our common teacher. Yes, said Leo, Your work here is beautiful.

He’s a 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contain all the secrets of his survival.

How did you survive, asked Leo. I ran away, I hid in the jungle, then into the mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature.

I was running from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, murdering everyone, kids like you, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated, dead.

Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.

When I thought it was safe I emerged, crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I walked over 1.7 million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattled freedom and food. I never sleep. Death sees me. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

It will take another generation before the Khmer adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Leo. Life is found in a desperate situation, the man said.

They meet every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. He waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. He smiles as water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

He sits curled up on a straight-backed brown chair smiling and silent watching Leo typing notes from a black book. I don’t know this tool, he said pointing to a plastic screen and floating artificial letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

The gardener and Leo heard a voice from a local classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, screamed overworked, underpaid and undersexed Asian teachers named Authority and Social Control.

Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity.

Curiosity is fatal, said Ice Girl. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor and curiosity are basic elements of intelligence.

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative at Bliss.

We colonized this place, said one, Giving them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination, fake NGO bureaucracies, administration tools, wide boulevards, imaginary legal systems, an eye for an eye, corruption possibilities and designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics and principles, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow.

She is a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover has flabby upper arms. She scribbles her serious fiction-memory and sense of entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examine a microscopic map of Angkor Wat
filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,
gold lame Apsara dancers,
232 species of black and red butterflies,
1.9 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,
crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks,
begging illiterate children speaking 10 European languages
hawking gimcracks
whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education
accompanied by miles of flaming plastic bag garbage,
narrow boned white oxen,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment,
cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense,
1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu Khmer temples stretching from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam in a boomerang circular dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes

as the French ladies whisper,
Where did we go,
What did we see,
How did we feel,
Where are we,

Did we discover the magic eye of sudden insight or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re on their grand Asian tour. One describes fragments of her short life with an animist talking stick.

She cuts out brochure pictures and ticket stubs. She pastes them into her book. It will make a fine future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span is shorter than a grisly tour for eternity at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 skulls.

Here we are.

writing |

12.26.2017 |

Saturday

Dec092017

Life in Hanoi - Ice Girl

Chapter 14.

Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells.

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement 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.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

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 soap 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 yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance 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 willing. She’s able. 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 does.

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

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, a 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 light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving

No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange.

“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory.

writing |

12.9.2017 |

Tuesday

Nov282017

Life in Cambodia - Ice Girl

Chapter 10.

Ice Girl told Leo about Cambodia life. People here are cunning, devious and scheming.

They smile but behind the smile is repressed anger. Darkness.

It’s pure survivor behavior. They have little or no formal education. Impoverished adults think educating their children wastes time and m-o-n-e-y. Food and survival is their daily priority.

Let’s Eat is their mantra.

Millions here mill around, stare, interrupt others, are rude, and do not LISTEN, preferring to talk over others.

They think the louder one is the smarter one. They are easily intimidated by a speaker’s volume.

Signal-noise.

They demonstrate behavior and attitudes similar to chimps. Yeah, yeah.

Their #1 priority involves searching, finding, preparing and eating food. Priority #2 is searching, finding, preparing and fucking females. Sleeping, #3 is popular before, during and after food or suffering a small sexual pleasure death in eight minutes. Sleeping is the best meditation in the tropics.

Fucking is popular whenever the male, the ALPHA animal in the tribe demands it. This is natural selection. People live on Earth for two reasons: work and breed.

Read and write, asked Leo.

No. Work and breed. Female members are passive. They are conditioned by DNA genetics, environment and family expectations to be passive. Produce more workers, more tools.

Children are tools.

If they refuse to submit to the male they are beaten. If they talk about it they are beaten. If they enjoy it they are beaten. If they run away they are captured and beaten. If they suffer humiliation they are beaten. If they are beaten they are beaten. If they live to tell the tale they are beaten. If they die while being beaten their corpse is beaten. They are beat.

The longer I work the longer I live. The longer I breed the longer I live. In theory. My main objective is work and breed. Then I am slaughtered. Life is a cheap bitch.

I see, said Leo, same in China. Our one-child policy is genocide.

Later, sitting across a rural red road in Battenbang, Leo is a witness. You have to cross the road to learn something. He extrapolates, illuminates, illustrates, and desiccates.

A family moved into a shack near muddy waters. They set up a food joint selling steamed corn and fast fried foods.

There’s a mother, two boys 17 & 20 and two girls, the youngest about 15. The girls either belong to the mother or they’ve come from poor areas looking for domestic work. They are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

No papa. He’s history in the tragic family fairy tale, one of millions throughout the magic kingdom. Long gone in the long now.

Mom is at the market. Incest Is Best, male, 17, wears a towel-sarong. A girl sets up a glass display case on a wooden counter with her back toward him. He slides up behind her and presses his crotch against her.

She freezes. Imitating sexual movement, he whispers, little girl, this is what happens to you. I have a little red rooster. Do you like it? I have big power.

She is powerless. She stands there taking it. Silent. She feels like crying. Her tears create a river. She floats away searching for compassion and meaning in a cruel world without freedom.

Rule #1: Boys and men run the show. They pay lip service to girls and women. It’s the old work and breed paradigm. You are my property.

Sexual harassment by immature boys and older men (with money, power and control) and a high level of testosterone, IS a game. Simple sex. No education. Zero responsibility. No morals. No ethics. No education.

This explains why millions of girls have babies and boys run away. Zero responsibility.

Girls and women tolerate it because:

a) it’s an unpleasant hard, cold cruel fact of life

b) they are told to submit to males

c) they live in Fear & Ignorance

d) they are considered stupid and second class citizens

e) they have no human rights

f) no quest-ions allowed

g) it’s the LAW of the jungle

h) it’s expected

i) they have no voice, no way out

j) they don’t have the power to say or do anything to stop it

k) mother is not sympathetic. it happened to her. that’s life so they say

writing |

11.28.2017 |

Wednesday

Oct252017

Land Mines - Ice Girl