Entries in mandalay (11)
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Practice
Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring ... light shadows bamboo leaves ... practice calligraphy ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink ... Zen.
Practice allows you to wake up.
Mandalay
*
After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.
He needs the antioxidants.
He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.
Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.
Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.
Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.
She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.
Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.
Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.
Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.
Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.
Golden Garbage
Gold draped Cadiz women.
Inanimate visual remnants of Reason, Enlightenment, Illumination and Prosperity revealed gifts from the Magus.
Alchemists transformed base metals into heavy symbolic chains weighing wrists and necks of Spanish matrons and patrons.
The Fleischer - a butcher - wore no gold.
Paring fat his sharpened edge severed layers of gristle. A steel mesh glove protected his left hand. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through tendons, muscles, bone and meat. Blood littered his table.
Customers gathered to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs dangled in windows with funnel tags attached to cloven hoofs collecting fat. Wild boar and stag heads rested above color photos of famous Ronda bullfighters partying with Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway. Red was the cape’s color. Bull’s blood rivers flowed down muscular necks.
Mandalay, Burma
People in deep state covert operations discussed ambiguities in conspiratorial coded languages.
Airliners slammed into towers of Babel on televised reruns between detergent, automobile and sherry commercials.
I murdered words in their sleep after they had their say.
Word garbage was hauled down to green plastic curbside trash containers. Midnight men in blue garbage uniforms with yellow safety stripes rolled through Cadiz. Teams of men hosing down narrow cobblestone streets sang, “Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. Everything must go. Going out of business sale.”
Water flooded grateful city grates. Spanish civilization collapsed without street cleaners and women with mops.
Humanity’s narrative explored adventures, quests, dreams, relationships, and historical facts mixed with courage, curiosity, joy and serenity.
Yellow streetlights illuminated a man walking his arthritic Labrador. The well-dressed bald gentleman with Romani DNA wearing polished black wing-tip shoes carried a newspaper and paperback entitled, A Century is Nothing by Omar.
He collected his dog’s shit from cobblestone using the financial section. He downloaded it into a metal trash basket nailed to a wall. Five minutes later a neurotic woman cleaning everything after midnight because she hated chaos and disordered dust in her ground floor flat wailed, “What in the hell is that smell?”
“History baby, history,” he said, walking toward the sea. “The more I see the less I know.”
One if by land, and two if by sea…
Easy Rider.
Oh say can you see? Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might dream the impossible dream and throw the first pitch for a called strike on the inside corner.
“We’re headed to extra innings and the bullpens are empty,” cautioned a radio announcer on armed forces shortwave, “and now this,” cutting to a commercial from a mechanic offering an interest free no down payment deal on the finest internal combustion machine money could buy.
“Drive it away today.”
Every vehicle on the road is used.
This was followed by an ad for cheap fuel and a political proposal to open Alaskan wilderness for drilling. Unemployed dentists signed up. Their mantra was, “The more you drill the more you bill.”
Two unemployed poets holding hands walked down a cobblestone street discussing Spanish deficit economics, European financial bailouts, 40% unemployment numbers and financial insolvency. Andalucía was the poorest province in Spain.
Sexually repressed women pacing poverty’s alienation prowled streets seeking future lovers, husbands and fathers for contraceptive children. Lonely-heart club ads assaulted missing persons with conjecture, possibilities and probabilities. Hope floated in a breeze.
Cadiz scooter boys felt genital heat as their girlfriend’s arms held them tighter than tomorrow. After escaping narrow traditional parental attitudes they zoomed past pedestrians.
An old couple supporting their fragile bipedal existence took immediate steps into a long now. Small significant gestures of love and affection rained flowers.
I wrote under a desk lamp with jazz music providing rhythm, harmony and improvisation.
Dreaming of a new environment I studied a provincial map tacked on the wall.
Spanish church bells buried in the Plaza de Dreams, a fictitious conglomeration of unpleasant historical true facts in this tale tolled as mystics hearing hollow Zen bells toiled.
Mary sells seashells by the seashore before crossing to the other side of paradise after paying the troll a toll.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
Mandalay, Burma
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.”
Mandalay Palace
Dr. Scary & Mrs. Marbles
Tell me a storybook about Burma. Your first time was in 2013. How long were you there?
All fucking day.
No. Really is an adverb.
Five weeks. I was the first teacher in and the first one out. They bled teachers after I left.
Why did you go?
To grow. To experience a Montessori learning environment at an expensive private school in Mandalay. See how things worked. On the ground. Wander around. Scribble words. Make images. Meet kind, curious, smiling people.
(Alarm bells clang)
A private school sounds dangerous. I spell uh I smell money. Cash for kids.
Education is a busine$$. Profit before people.
Didn't you learn this lesson in 2008 for a year at St. Laurensia near Jakarta when you helped 4th graders develop social and moral character with humor and curiosity?
Private school, parents rule fool.
Yes, however I needed to see Burma for myself, analyze the management and system. Connect with smiling people. Learn, laugh, grow, glow and flow with the go.
Trust and verify. That's what I say.
And you say it with clear pronunciation.
Make it new day by day make it new.
The school had 700 kids from Montessori (3-6 years young) through grade 9.
That's big money. It's a numbers game.
Yes it is. Don't ask me how much. Big.
Bigger than the infinite sky?
Almost. The financial bean counters wore out abacuses. Click-click. They'll raise tuition next year. The Burmese Managing Director lived happily ever after.
I love fairy tales and fragments. It’s all I trust.
He hired Dr. Scary Snobson as principal two years ago to open the facility. He had a Ph.D in Reports and Updates. He loved organization, management, forms, protocol, procedures, paper and administrative drone head duties.
He recruited former Peace Corpse teachers to get foreign faces and mouths in front of spoiled rich kids and parents. Marketing 101. He practiced Hathaway yoga and invested his princely salary in offshore rice paddy accounts near Burmese refugee camps bordering Thailand and Bangladesh. He was thrilling and running scared.
Did he run for fun?
He ran in the tropical sun for sums. Kids in = count cash. Numbers numbed wealthy Burmese wallets. Pay here. Drop kid at classroom ABC. Minders/babysitters/Burmese educators in training will take care of them until you pick them up at 3. If you're late we sell them to China. A boy is worth $3500 in a one-child Orwellian culture.
I have two boys, said a Burmese parent. Do I get a discount?
It depends on their passing a physical with Nurse Dull, said Dr. Scary. Let me ask my passive Xaimen wife. She's very proud of her green card. She talks like her mouth's full of marbles. She believes in acquiescence.
You mean the sad-eyed, lights on-no one home, space cadet reactive one wearing the cheap floppy Chinese hat, Gloria Swanson sunglasses and magic slippers inherited from her grandmother outside the gate-less gate standing lost and forlorn Monday-Friday mornings as horrendous traffic spewed noxious hydrocarbons into faces of emotionally deprived children and struggling nanny slaves dragging children’s suitcases of books and carrying cheap bright plastic baskets of food while parents, wearing diamond and imperial green jade jewelry necklaces yakked on imported cell phones walking their kids to classrooms in the tall gleaming metropolis of a school?
Yes. Her marble mouth machine droned her official mandatory sequence. Park here. Drop off here. Parents ignored her.
That's her. She's his baby. Her attention span was shorter than an apology to Burmese parents of neglected children about the hidden cost of grandiose theoretical classless plans. Read the fine print. You paid suckers.
Sounds like the blind leading the blind. Where did they meet, these educational super heroes?
They mated at the Day Grow Country School in Manila. She was head babysitter. He ran a doctoral marathon between Tainan and Rota.
What does she do in this improbable profitable scheme?
Yeah-Yeah is the bureaucratic stone face of the Macaroni Monti Sorry Money Story program.
She hired thirty female Myanmar university graduates for the Monti Sorry program. They signed a five-year - no option out contract - same as teachers were required in China. She and the good Doctor sold the Burmese Managing Director great expectations of wealth. The school paid a discounted rate of $3,500 for each teacher's training and certification program. Sublime slavery. Yeah-Yeah took her cut.
Is she a certified Monti Sorry trainer?
No. She learned the methodology in Havana ten years ago. She's not certified for anything. She’s a little fish out of water.
For three months the local teachers have been training from scratch. Yeah-Yeah goes through the motions. School started on May 20th. Now it's on the job training, learning and laughing plus six tedious hours on Saturday. They watch videos featuring an OCD state side teacher, create materials and practice lessons. They "graduate" next year after being certified by a real Monti Sorry woman in the states of confusion.
Smells like a shell game.
Teachers make $200 a month. The average Burmese makes $804 a year. A SIM card costs $300. One percent of the population has Internet. 26% are unemployed. 16% do not have electricity. If local teachers are late thumbing a fingerprint after 8 a.m. at the admin office the school charges them 25 cents. Live and learn fear school.
She and Dr. Scary run and mismanage (if intimidation, fear and stupidity is management) the Great Educational Scam Machine. She reminded me of Chinese teachers in Fujian schools screaming, Just blend in. I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears!
Welcome to my nightmare, said Yeah-Yeah.
She invested her princess sums in offshore rice paddy accounts near Burmese refugee camps bothering Thailand.
Why did you leave?
I'd witnessed enough of the dystopian Kafkaesque-like suffering. The teachers' apartments resembled prison cells. I've more useful things to do with my time, energy, love and compassion.
Give me a urine sample.
Yeah-Yeah in her infinite wisdom minus kindness and compassion expected me to write a lesson plan for the Kindergarten experience in the library.
You're joking.
It was Friday, June 8th, 2013 at 1:17 p.m.
I'd taken the geniuses to the bibliotheca for thirty minutes. They found books, sat reading, looking at pictures and sharing with friends. She wandered in and sat down.
I see you brought the kids to the library.
You are very observant.
Where's your lesson plan for the library?
You're kidding.
At 3:10 p.m. I gave seven-days notice to Dr. Scary. Here's my lesson plan. Probation is a 2-way street.
Good for you.
Yes. Life is too short for this nonsense. I shredded the truth with kids. I helped you. We helped each other grow. We walked slowly. We danced. We sang. We discovered sharing. We meditated. We had fun. Now it's time to ride my elephant through jungles back to Cambodia.
I left a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table in the teachers' cellblock. I departed Burma without delay. It was a close shave.
That's another story about creativity, independent thinking and free choice.
Yes it is.