Imagine

Imagination tells the truth, said Zeynep. It is curious how this beautiful monster evolved. It began in 2010. The working title was Big Work.

It’s raw material, mirrors, reflections, experiences and journeys in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia. The journey is the destination. I’m happy to get it down now and make sense of it later.

Live every day like it’s your last because one day it will be.

My responsibility is to document stories from diverse cultures. A record of people, places and growth with Direct Immediate Experience.

D.I.E.

I will create a small book about Amnesia … I am an experience junky and a hack journalist gifted with the ability to see the future … I murdered many darlings. Some darlings survived. I already revealed I am also a gardener and word janitor collecting vignettes … flash fiction, and diamonds cutting through desire, anger and ignorance, with be-bop jazz poems, dreams, visions, fragments … word plays and miscellaneous elements of truth-story and fiction-memory threads whistling like a blind person in the dark.

This is not a novel. It is not linear … characters detest the formulaic A to Z  ... I am Z and the beginning needs work.

What will you be at night when you reach the end of the road?

It is experimental in nature, like Omar’s literary memoir, A Century is Nothing. In fact, unpleasant as it is and I’ve faced many unpleasant enlightening facts, being all of 18 now, which is INFINITY standing sideways…part of his epic performance is included here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Question … did children invent infinity and eternity? No. They are abstract concepts. Like elastic time. Time is a circle. Children live forever. WE are immortal.

We begin with children’s voices. I say WE because it is everyone. The WE are you and I, us, them, he, she, it, all … universal pronouns. Language is communication not rules…grammar means rules … tedious shit.

One voice many voices. Storytellers. The world is made of stories not atoms. They are essential with heart-mind. Wisdom mind burns bright. The Mind-at-Large spirit is motivation. Karma. Here is one of my kid friends.

Hi. This is the day of my dreams, said Tran, 10, amputee and dust collector, Da Nang, Vietnam.

Let’s create a book, said Zeynep, And we’ll be in it. I am a central scripter because I am young enough to know how much I don’t know which means I don’t know anything…the first thing, the last thing, the only thing, the main thing about the literary publishing game…I imagine literary means being accepted and commercial means selling and establish marketing platforms and becoming addicted to social media because media buys people.

I understand the meaning of meaning, subjective truth values, I am curious and question everything and like my friends in this chess game of life experiences I am fearless.

I never take yes for an answer.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

We are Bushido warriors with Zen clarity insight and wisdom. The majority of adults are, in my little clear, concise, precise deadly specific opinion based on empirical experience tyrants, rigid, autocratic, blind in one eye, easily distracted, idiots, depressed, angry, insecure, resentful, neurotic, suffering from illusions, greedy for money and power and CONTROL and so on. I love their personality and character faults.

They take drugs or escape into phone madness to erase pain and memory. They struggle to forget. They take Soma to BE on a perpetual holiday from mind numbing tedious monotonous life. They become soft and pliable sheep…easily manipulated by viral media machine messages. Burroughs called it The Soft Machine

Every person counts.

To relieve a low level of fear called anxiety they need a high dosage of feel good prescription drugs and/or phones. Same-same but different.

Here in Turkey, said Z, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, is prescribed for the nationalist sheep. It is safe, effective, addictive and abused. Adults take the easy way out because they are lazy, anxious and afraid after July 2016. Coup de ta da. They live their personal FEAR.

Adults boss us around because we are small. Big ones manipulate us through fear, intimidation and bribery. Eat your vegetables and you can have desert.  Don’t tell your parents what happened in the dark chapel and I’ll give you some money. Give me a bottle of expensive French wine and you’ll pass my class.

Give me your daughter and you can have some land. Give me your sword and I’ll spare your life.

I buy your freedom with candy, money and things.

Give me your tomorrows and you can have some food. Give me your soul and you can go to heaven and live with twenty-four virgins after I kill you.

I will give you clothing

shelter and food

if you give up your free speech.

What a great deal. And so on.

Adults think they are omnipotent. They are physical giants but believe you me many are smaller than a neutrino quark in my humble estimation, interpretation, elaboration, shun. This creates a tragedy.

“Life is a tragedy when seen closeup but a comedy in long shot.” – Charlie Chaplin

Book of Amnesia, V1

Adventure

This is a memoir from 1997-2002 with a Nam flashback when I cheated Death. I was in Morocco on 9/11. Call it luck or fate.

Humor and Satire dance with Courage and Creativity.

Travel meets storytelling, creative non-fiction and social autopsy in exile.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

He is a peripatetic traveler, literary outlaw, and street photographer. As a Vietnam Veteran, international TEFL facilitator he lives loves and laughs in Asia south of the moon.

Author Page

In Cadiz when citizens were old, toothless, white haired, slow and content with life, residents in Europe’s oldest city attended a different church every Sunday.

Family was all. Spanish culture fostered an implicit understanding of the collective.

Simplicity. Serenity. Harmony married balance. Yin-Yang.

The dancer and the dance are one.

Generations walked in the Parque Genoves along the Atlantic admiring sculpted trees. Well-dressed spoiled children whined and complained to their compulsive-obsessive guilt ridden parents.

Parents organized pram races for amusement, a new spectator sport. GO baby GO from birth. Spin them wheels.

A daughter supported her mother. Their olive faces had identical furrowed lines, brown eyes and black eyebrows. In drab gray clothing they turned their heads in unison glancing at the same thing. The only difference between them was time.

One morning I decided to get my beard trimmed before tripping on it and shattering fragility. I folded up a narrative map, finished coffee dregs, lowered jazz volume and backed up empirical forensic data evidence. I slipped into yellow wool socks and worn sandals.

“I’m off to see the Berber, I mean barber,” I said to blind Omar writing on the balcony. He spilled, smelled and spelled green racing ink on yellow legal paper. He loved the beautiful messy process.

Omar laughed at this tongue slip. “Ha. I know where to find you. Oh, by the way, a letter arrived today.” He handed it to me.

“It’s for you Omar. It has a New York postmark.”

“It’s from a literary nerve agent about my query letter from a gravedigger’s quarry. Please read it to me.”

Dear Mr. Omar,

Thank you for your recent submission to our literary agency. We read your cover letter and synopsis.

The Typist, Butcher, and Gravedigger is an obtuse title. Very bizarre indeed and we see a lot of eccentric, abnormal, unconventional, unorthodox, and supersonic weird work fly through here. We have peculiar stories stacked in a slush pile higher than Everest. We are drowning in words seeking a life preserver believe you me.

You are a fine writer yet we feel there is enough for here for five or six books. Less is more. We suggest you pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. We would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words. No more, no less. KISS for readers.

Boil it down baby. Refined elegance, if you will.

To make money in the publishing business we need mainstream books that appeal to the general reader. We are looking for our 15%. Publishing isn’t a business. It’s a casino.

As you know, 175,000 books were published in this country last year. Your typical hardcover book sells for $25.00. You, the author, make $3.00, if that. It’s a hell of a deal we’ve got going here. The shelf life of a book is, at best, four months and the mid-list is the Kiss Of Death. Remainders are shipped to furnaces in Ohio where illegal immigrants play with fire at Fahrenheit 451.

Give us a product with a platform. Our marketing department will drive literature consumers to independent bookstores before they kowtow to corporate giants and e-books, mind you.

Historically many cultures boil books and weave clothing rags from the raw material. The insight of your stories reveals your passion for weaving threads from diverse locales. We suggest you consider this viable and lucrative publishing option.

Imagine the reception when readers arrive wearing your book! You will autograph fashionable apparel. Paris and Milan catwalks will be filled with exotic tactile textile places like Tacoma, Vietnam and Spain starring blood donor clowns, terminally ill children, Tibetan monks and this is only the beginning.

We’ll live with addicts, a dying American father receiving ice from his son, a bipolar manic suicidal woman, Native Americans celebrating a Ghost Dance and secret oral languages transmitted on your loom of time.

Your prescient awareness of 9/11’s catastrophic global aftermath is psychic. It’s a sensitive subject considering readers want happy fiction. You need to edit references to fear and economic terrorism.

Cut the heavy, deep and real shit.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled. Fear is ignorant bliss.

All your nomadic adventures from surviving Vietnam to your transformation in a 26,000-year old Paleolithic Spanish cave were tales from beyond wild. 

However, it’s a hell of a thread speaking of weaving metaphors in a nonlinear literary gonzo style.

We couldn’t decide if your work was a dispassionate detached journalist, a raving Vietnam veteran or a wandering mystical blind man. Get help. See a therapist or a shrink-wrapped doctor with a degree in abnormal personalities. Fast. Act now before it’s too late to save you from this dreaded literary disease.

Before closing I will relate one experience to you. The strangest thing happened in our office. One of our junior readers with a liberal arts degree making $30,000 a year suffered sensory overload while reading your manuscript and dozed off in a souk.

When she woke up she called herself Touareg, the noble ones, speaking fluent Tamashek. We didn’t have an interpreter for this oral transmission and called emergency services. They removed her from the premises citing The Patriot Act as justification.

She will be missed wearing her iridescent nacreous coruscating cobalt blue Moroccan robes begging from shadows where Poverty and Despair raise their children. Where one person supports thirteen and 90% of the population is unemployed. Where children are exploited w/o labor laws. Where parents see education as a waste of money and time.

Uncontrolled population growth, lack of job opportunities, substandard education and no medicine are unpleasant global facts.  

Handle With Care.

Please do not let this decision encourage you. We mold our client list from the many submissions we receive. The selection is subjective and based on our bottom line.

Money.

We hope you find an agent brave enough to consider this epic mess. Thank you for contacting Creative Artists Blink.

We wish you every success in your writing endeavors.

Sincerely, Just B. Kind, Literary Agent

Hanoi

Book of Amnesia V1

Creative nonfiction, systems analysis and social autopsy.

Five genius kid storytellers meet, explore and share adventures in Cambodia, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam and Utopia.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

Book of Amnesia, Volume 1

Available for Kindle and in paperback. O joy.

Freedom

“We are caretakers of Mother Earth,” said the shaman girl.

“I want to swallow the world but I am too full of sorrow,” said one.

“I’m going to start a club for procrastinators,” said another, “anybody want to sign up for unlimited access?”

“Are your needs being met?” said Rose.

“I have a need for freedom and a freedom from need. Perhaps I’ll end up taking care of people like us,” said a girl named Hope. “I’m the last myth that dies.”

“Yeah, you can work in a day care center for adults.”

“That’s a-dolts.”

“Hah. We are all death deferred,” said Martha Ann, fixing her glasses with duct tape.

Seeing her experiment with optical illusions, a kid said, “Remember James Joyce? He said, ‘Wipe your glasses with what you know.’”

“Are you plagiarizing again?”

“No. It’s taken out of context.”

“Textile, tactile, texture, context, content, abstract, where’s it all going?”

“Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract,” screamed an abused child being whipped with a fishing pole by his neurotic mother in a wheelchair.

“Are we wondering or wandering?”

“Where’s eternity end?” said the astronomer kid.

“I’m going to study the bottom line,” said a boy raising a digit testing imprecise global economic market index indicators based on assumptions. “If we control the debt, we control the country.”

“International financiers and corporations run the show, babies. Politicians are their slaves.”

ART

Mandalay Palace

Not True

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development and action. 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 mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities 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 Chinese opera, gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil 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. Just get to the verb.

“Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

“Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

“1,7,000,000 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around. Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

“Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

“Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

“Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory, a form of history, re-write history.          

“Your memory is the world, and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

“I will, will you?” said Rita.

“I have a question for Lucky.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

“Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

“During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

“Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

“Dead or blind, there’s no difference,” Flower said.

“People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”