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Entries in ice girl in banlung (60)

Thursday
Jul042019

Take The Orange Pill

Another brilliant Banlung day bloomed bright. Infinitesimally small intense waves and particles traveled at 186,000 miles per second.

What you don’t see is fascinating, said Ice Girl. She and Leo heard the clatter of tourist utensils singing near dumb thumbed Angkor Wat guidebooks dancing with dusty beggar children hawking vignettes at a medical clinic.

The Angkor Children’s Hospital in Siem Reap has 22 beds in one room. They are filled with infants wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia, tuberculosis and dengue. This is common. A parent holds a tiny hand.

I.C.U. has five occupied beds.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. She dispenses free orange generic pills.

Life is a killer. Life is a generic placebo.

The mothers are happy to get SOMETHING, anything. They have no knowledge about modern medicine.

One effective blue pill costs $1.00. Parents need to buy 15. 

$15.00 is a fortune. Out of the question. Parents accept free ineffective orange drugs. Parents need a miracle.

How much does a miracle cost?

Mothers are hopeful. They wait. They have ridden on the back of cycles from distant villages. Everyone there had an answer for the child’s sickness. Babble voices of genocide female survivors sang remedies. Men pounded drums. Relatives prayed and burned incense.

A shaman dancing with death smeared chicken blood over a tiny chest. Another healer waved smoking banana leaves over a child running a fever.

400 mothers waited forever to see a nurse and get an orange pill.

Chapter 22 Ice Girl in Banlung

Ling's art in Laos

Sunday
May052019

Feel Experience With Camera

How many tourists see only through their phone camera? Millions, said Rita.

She is a tour quide, archeologist and author of Ice Girl in Banlung. She continued...

They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor only with their cameras, cold impersonal little tools. Their experience is defined by camera. Obscura.

Do you remember Li, the trek leader in Sapa, Vietnam talking about Hanoi day trippers with cameras? How she said, it’s fucking hilarious? Same here.

For the majority of tourists it’s not about understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It’s about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

Rita (L) and friends

They’ve learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don’t comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image of their faded memory. They judge it. Crimping. Evaluate. DELETE.

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick. They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. Death is closer than white on rice.

The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when tourists slept, while they screwed. He waited as they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry. They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara - the Bodhisattva of Compassion smiles.

Thursday
Jan042018

Chimaera - Ice Girl

Chapter 25. (The Beginning)

Dawn light greeted green jungles along Heart of Darkness. A Banlung mother sawed ice into manageable chunks as glistening elements dripped moisture into dust.

  Women swept red dust in front of wooden doors up and down a red road.

  Four-foot long blocks of ice were loaded on antique battered black and red motorcycles driven by delivery boys wearing baseball caps with glittering golden stars.

  Ice lives and dies every morning. Sun makes ice cry.

After school the mother’s daughter saws ice using a rusty serrated blade rescued from a genocide ordeal.

  What are you doing? Leo asked.

  Rita smiled. I am a seller pronounced with confidence.

  She opened an orange box. She picked up a chunk of white ice in her left hand, cradling it inside a blue cloth. She slammed a hammer on ice. It cracked.

Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines, imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. She held global warming in her left hand. She smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.

  A piece of cold sharp ice pierced Leo’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of tissue, altering his visual organic sense as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses. 

  Leo’s enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of ice, he reflected, seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes.

Illusions of truth, suffering and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. The world is ice. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.

  A sibylline language of clarity.

  She dropped the small block of ice back in the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to Leo.

  Here, you look tired and thirsty. 

  I am. Thanks. I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious.

  She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He handed her crumbled Real notes.

  She sawed in oppressive heat.

  You are a good seller, said Leo.

  Yes, I am, she said. I greet the buyer and sell. I cut. I bag. I talk. I sell. Ice is moving. What’s your name? Where are you going?

  My name is Leo. I am walking down this red dusty road. See where it takes me. One life, no plan, many adventures. What’s your name?

  Chimaera, she said, handing him diamonds.

  The road is a river, she said. Like a human’s life it doesn’t know why it is born until it reaches the end. 

  This is the day of my dreams.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Monday
Jan012018

Literary Agent Orange - Ice Girl

Chapter 24.

On Khmer New Year’s Day a bitter mother at a Kampot guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.          

  “Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

  She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

  She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Rita, the Ice Girl.

  Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

  It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating twenty years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

  Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

  Beauty is the mother of Death.

  Leo and Ice Girl turned their morning pages away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

  They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

  They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always observing minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

  Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers do: close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual sensory information, data, sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient. Watching without seeing is their Zen.

  Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and talking louder.

  Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

  One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear. Fear is disguised as indecision and loss.

  What is the difference between watching and seeing, asked Ice Girl, expanding passive and active verb signifiers.

  Real eyes realize real lies, said Leo.

  Survivors read the sky for rain. Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in the middle of empty black streets without electricity.

  Screaming, yelling male adolescents and old survivors read kick boxers fighting each other on national television every Saturday/Sunday afternoon at 2. It’s standing room only.

KILL HIM!

KILL HIM!

KILL HIM!

  Killing as Entertainment. I love this, said Death. They are really into it. Power. Reminds me of millions shouting their anger at killing fields.

  Violence never changes, only the players, said Leo.

  It’s their latent repressed anger gene, said Ice Girl. Denial will kill you and anger is expensive.

  Women meditate.

  Boy men scream at televisions.

  Survivors Waiting For Godot squeezing pores read a face in a motorbike mirror. They haven’t seen the play. They are the players.

  No one shows up, nothing happens.

  Hungry girls wait for Freedom at night.

  Destiny rested as noon heat reflected improbable anxieties. A bored working girl washed her blue underwear in a lazy brown river. Water’s exhilaration introduced her to a cloud. Thunder clapped. White lighting flashed. Tears flooded a red road.

 Children wearing red and white Santa caps dragged expectant Banlung mothers toward dusty chrome plated market display cases.

  This one! This one!

  In primary schools Khmer children learn a story about survival skills, said Ice Girl.

  Once upon a time there was a hungry rabbit.

  It saw a woman coming with a basket of vegetables on her head.

  The rabbit thought, I will play dead and see what happens.

  The woman stopped when she saw the rabbit.

  She said, “A dead rabbit. Meat. We will eat good tonight.”

  She picked up the rabbit, put it her basket and continued walking.

  The rabbit ate all the vegetables and ran away.

  What a clever rabbit.

  The woman went home. “We are going to eat good tonight,” she said to her family. “I found a rabbit.”

  Everyone was happy. She put down her basket. “O my.”

 I see, said Leo. Will you please share your story about the literary agent?

  Ok, said Ice Girl. The working title is:

 

Geological Sub-Strata Section

 

  The protagonist is a literary agent dying of thirst.

  The beginning needs work, said a visually challenged agent at Blind Lead The Blind Agency.

 Ok, said Ice Girl, I’m working on it, thinking, She doesn’t know shit. She wants to make her glorious 15%. Actually I don’t have an agent. I am secret agent B-8. An agent of prescient psychic abilities.

 Not true, said the agent. You make your own truth from embroidered lies. I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, sustaining a story, plot, narrative flow and full character development. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist. Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention.

Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a marketing platform in sleazy cheap plywood Asian brothel where evil greedy men and women controllers threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, use them, abuse them and discard them. On the mean old street.

  They are a commodity like rice.

  Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like wailing Chinese opera, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and weeping Apsara dancers on laterite Angkor ruins from the 8th century. Show me how superstitious men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds.

 Ice Girl listened. The agent droned on. She was a Predator drone at 18,000 feet or a GRIM REAPER at 17,500 feet zeroing in for the kill sale.

 Unemployed internally displaced literary agents reading manuscripts huddled around a fire in a cave filled with 26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings. They witnessed bison, deer, archers, and time-combs. Slashing red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

  Big mama agent said: I need to feel the female pain, their sense of hopelessness, their loss of being abandoned for eternity. Through their painful memory fear and sheer terror I need to feel comprehend and identify with their anguish inside vulnerable skin. Dig into their skin, their brain, and their heart. Show me terrible, tragic and flawed the lost road of innocence by the Cambodian con artist. She had good intentions.

  Through their desperation with poor economic fate, choices, intention, karma, motivation, growth and action allow them to develop courage and truth. Their arc shows how they adapt, adjust and evolve in a Darwinian sense to a higher form of consciousness.

 Mindfulness free of fear, anger and ego.

Their quest for personal empowerment, self-esteem, dignity and freedom from tyranny, exploitation and slavery will appeal to readers. Awareness of the human condition. Volunteered salivating slavery. Get it in writing, ha, ha, ha.

 She reiterated required mainstream literary criteria for Ice Girl. Show how they support each other in their collective communal misery sharing tissues. Show how they maintain a strong sense of self-esteem and personal identity after being abandoned, battered, raped, whipped, starved, screwed and chained in cold rooms for five years to break their spirit. It’s called seasoning. If you want to train a wild animal you need to break their spirit.

 Sounds like a global educational conspiracy to beat, de-story, traumatize and obliterate any and all creative spirit out of children for twelve deadly years. Dead before adulthood, thought Ice Girl.

 Call the gravedigger. He's never out of work.

  Agent diatribe: Structure the tedious narrative from A to Z engaging my senses in their broken, shattered narratives illustrating truth, pain and anguish, sorrow, showing how love, fate, and chance manifests through silence, cunning and exile with passion and dire consequences leading to redemption and a happy, sad or what have you end. Give me the drama.

Give me the living dead girls, the VICTIMS in life’s cruel unrelenting heart breaking drama, with dead eyes lying flat on their back their legs wide open staring at plywood walls filled with torn glossy images of smiling feminine coiffured hair salon advertising myths as strange wild men fuck them 24/7 crushing their emotional life. Structure their tragic consequences trusting a manipulative greedy mama-san running the business under the protection and tacit consent of local police. She gives the police a free fucking discount or goes to jail. Yes, create a colorful mind map of their personal and collective journey. Show me. Don’t tell me about their tragic love and tragic passion and tragic suffering. Make sadistic things happen to them. Rip my heart out. Build the tension with cinematic pace. Then, in a dramatic climax en masse they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a safe community women’s shelter based on healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment.

  They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice.

  They learn how to weave. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. They take control of their life.

 They form love killer groups and hunt down men and women who betrayed them. The women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest.

  BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading obscure vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, mysteries and dime store romance, not to mention salacious graphic comics. Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a scene. Paint a voice. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms from recycled manuscripts. Pulp. Keep me turning the page. Make the characters want something, even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi. Everyone needs water. Leo can tell you about the value of water in the Gobi.

 Ice girl asked: You mean it’s like standing on a dark edge staring into an abyss called civilization with a courageous noble savage cannibal king named Leo wearing an alarm clock around his neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles with brave stone cold clarity immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom seeing their immortality, their deepest fear in ROOM 101, alongside brave OTHERS unflinching in their love, compassion and goodness, this infinite potential? Where all points end at infinity? Where eternity plays with time? Before jumping over the abyss Leo yells, People think art is easy! Just tell them it’s like jumping off a 12 story building every day. JUMP!

 Yes, said the agent. It has to be heart breaking. You develop your wings after jumping.

  You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak said Ice Girl. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. Once I witnessed an old man wearing a rainbow knit cap write Eternity on a paper napkin in Planet Paradise, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon. He torched Eternity with a match. His tired traveling blazing eyes watched Eternity burn to a cinder. Black and white eternal ash and dust fluttered from his fingers. He mumbled incoherent incantations about fate’s joke, meaningless life, existential choices, irony and consequences.

  Something like that, said the agent with ineptness. Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

 The burning seer found his inner light, said Ice Girl. He walked into a world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart. Sun burned his retinas. Time tides in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon blurred his cognitive facilities. He lapsed into a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence talking to shadows, ghosts and shamans. He approached the point of universal consciousness with mind-at-large where fiction and memory and dream and imagination are the same exact thing. He confronted the endless abyss. He jumped. He saved himself.

 Really, said agent. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me mythical evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

  Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne. Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

 Keep it simple. Woman meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, sex, love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story etc.

 Woman loses man. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a 5-year courtship, (he will save me) discovers blind love exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another. Man promises her BIG money.

She gets engaged accepting with resignation that sex business is money business. She keeps writing. She sends her story out. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. The independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and 11 siblings. Family demands $5k as a minimum down payment. She is a valuable child bearing resource.

  They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

 My body is a work of art. It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

 Man facing family greed suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and doubt. He agrees. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

  Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. Man pays for her eleven sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read. Man pays for a water pump. Man pays for solar panels. Man pays for her grandparent’s medicine. Man pays for rice seeds, rabbits, vegetables, for eternity.

  Parents give expensive village party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children and propitiate their poverty cycle. Give us someone to love. Someone who will work, breed and get slaughtered. Someone to take care of us. Someone to bury us.

  Feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

 Agent: That’s a mouthful of pay. Write about a heroine on a quest. Give me twisted international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Cambodia or Laos with exorbitant administrative costs, an orphan with no motivation but survival, profit and greed and tons of CORPORATE monopoly play money.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, forged land ownership papers, jealousy, revenge, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashing empires, resolving conflicts.

Give me disabled unemployed (15%) homeless angry Iraq and Afghanistan USA war veterans and their struggles with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine, The System and revenge, a central motivating factor, best served cold. Give me imaginary borders in a crazy fucked up world. Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage.

 Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Ice Girl.

  The agent climbed a literary mountain. If there’s no literary mountain, she said, the publishing road would be flat, straight and short.

 Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism, said lit agent. Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts. Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem. Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive.

  Give me short simple sentences.

 Give me a life sentence with no chance for parole. Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts. Give multiple characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe. Like Orwell give me some unpleasant facts about a condemned man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water. Give me his gesture, his feeling, this quick generous insight into the human condition. Strap me into my literary electric chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, give me a metaphor of mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling heart drama, intrigue and chaos. Entropy. Find the big metaphor, my dear ice girl.

 Give me REVENGE, served cold, which is how and why war started. The why factor. Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust. Give me humans selling their soul or young virgin brothel bodies to the d-evil to achieve their nefarious ends. Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in faint hope, a great EVIL and the last thing that dies with gravity and arc. Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, reactions and growth with total comprehension and the unpleasant scientific fact that the universe is 3.5 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY.

 Some refer to TOTAL COMPLEXITY as God. You may want to move this fact to the very brutal yet incomplete satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the LONG NOW or 20,000 years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge mind-at-large difference between complicated and complex.

 If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried, few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile.

 Earth, this is God. I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month. How’s that?

 Imagine an accelerated space program as humans escape Earth, said Ice Girl. Only the very rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes. Everyone fends for himself or herself. Noble savages are free to do anything, rape, plunder, take a vacation, build an ark, move into abandoned slum mansions, print money, form armies, buy and sell bananas and have unprotected sex with strangers. A doomsday scenario plus or minus friend links, likes, tags, share buttons, categories, electronic social networks and technological wiz gadgets.

  Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis, said the agent. They stop me cold.

 Punctuation is a nail.

 Give me thesis, coma and commas. Rational certainty. How about quotation marks, asked Ice GirlPeriodically. Or, just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work. Have you read The Stone Raftor The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Blindness, said Ice Girl.

 No, I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Tons of garbage lies near the summit. Talk about mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, frozen bodies and rejected manuscripts. Dreams diehard.

  They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago, said Ice Girl. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

  Facoinating. That’s all well and good, said agent. Mainstream readers do not want a slow paced, intelligent memoir, novel or non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded saga. They like stories with Swedish journalists, oligarchies, and smart crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt? The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

 A reasonable personification of mystery. Add sex by a smart Vietnamese woman. Readers want dreams, fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real situations, romance and delicious date rape recipes filled with evil hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in Comabodia.

 Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

 How about talking chickens in Cambodia and Vietnam, rendered Ice Girl. Chickens with beautiful faces. Innocent, naive, dirt-poor chickens.

  If you must. Sex sells. Can they read? No. Can they write a synopsis? No. They fuck for a living. Yes, well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same but different.

  I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and publishing eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader here in Amnesia has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap fish. Read the fine print, go digital. The average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha. I am a cynical realist with the attention span of an infant. Many are too poor to pay attention. Their lives are, is, was, were a constant struggle for food and clean water.

One billion humans do not have access to clean water. Billions are illiterate. 17,000 children die of starvation every single day. Write about that unpleasant fact, dear Ice Girl.

 Literate types want something to read while sitting stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their horribly mundane and superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Stupid humans feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR. Intelligent people grow doubts. Stupid people grow confidence.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret. It’s very comfortable. Why me? They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminally bored condition. They feel the need to experience virtual reality on cell phones devolving into soft machine material. Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

  I see, said Ice Girl. I’ll ask an animist gravedigger about plot development. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear their hopeless future. Not me! Why me? The ego monkey mind loves the CIRCUS, the daily entertainment. It wears them down making them lethargic, depressed, suicidal, and lazy.

  Lazy people never kill themselves.

  They die of boredom. Checkmate, said Death.

  Fate and Death conversed.

  I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

  Yes you are, said Death.

Ice Girl: Here’s how it works. Mindful people respect the monkey mind. They are present and grounded in the long now. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. They are mindful. Others don’t read because they don’t know how or are lazy to learn anything true about themselves, the human condition or paradigm shifts in an amazing world. Mindfulness perceives their meager microscopic self is nothing more than pure energy. Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? Atoms. We are pure light. It’s all about energy, frequency and vibration. Others are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level.

  Lit agent: Sure. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plaza screen with 500 channels. They want to read simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest. They want happy endings like orgasms. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Just give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities. Don’t write about what you know.

Write about what you don’t know you need to know. Write to find out.

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foiled packaging, like a love sock named OK#1 condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the guy who steps around a puddle on his way to Burmese gallows.

The Savage Detectives is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another piece of work to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more microscopic essential unpleasant fact about publishing. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher. Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor worked with us. Maybe a new editor thinks it’s garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, tax deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations. If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it?

  Yes, said Ice Girl. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no ethics, morals or higher principles?

  It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ and eyeballs. Everything has a price, a user and exchange value with utility infielders shagging hot grounders up the middle in the world market game of ideas, weapons, drugs, sex and OK love socks. Don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

  You’ve been very helpful, said Ice Girl. Now let an omniscient illiterate invisible scripter tale the show.

  It’s all yours. I have one question, said lick clit lit agent. How long have you been here?

  All fucking day, said Ice Girl, breaking the ice. Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth. You have a front row seat.

 You are a fluke of the universe, said Leo. Take advantage of it. Thanks, said Ice girl. Just doing my work.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

 

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.

Ice Girl in Banlung