Pedal Red Road by Rita

Rita pedals her New Star bike into Siem Reap for ice java. Cold and delicious.

Men playing chess slap wooden pieces, gesticulate & yell at high decibels.

On the idiot box in a tea house Thai kick boxers pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of millions suffering displaced latent aggression.

WHAMO. KILL HIM. KILL HIM. YES.

Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. features local boys and men screaming at a TV, Kill Him. Kill Him. Kill Him.

Fernando Pessoa

Idle men playing cards sit with their backs to a river in the shade of empty white tourist vans waiting for bodies brushing dust. Looking busy is fun.

She pedals across a bridge over a wide brown river bisecting the town. She goes to a car wash business with a small restaurant. The woman owner is pleasant and happy with high cheekbones. Pregnant with her second child. She employs four kitchen kids and six for the car wash. Her husband is a driver. He sleeps in a green hammock. She plays cards with the workers.

The car wash business has two raised cement bays for cars. Today it is empty.

Rita eats a simple meal of wide egg noodles, carrots, bamboo shoots, pork and eggs.

A car wash boy wears a green sarong towel. He lays his one white shirt on a rusty brown cement platform. He scrubs his shirt with a bar of soap, turns on the high-pressure hose blasting flying soap from the shirt. He rinses it.

He walks over to a metal rack shakes out his best shirt and hangs it up. He adjusts the collar and fixes the top button. He slaps water out of a yellow t-shirt, a small towel, another dark shirt and hangs them.

He owns two pairs of long dark pants. He turns them inside out on hangers to dry in tropical heat. He disappears behind a green plastic screen for a nap. No cars today. Dreaming in dust he hears hysterical males across the river of time yelling, Kill Him. Kill Him. Kill Him.

Culture is what you are. Nature is what you can be.

Down south two French women arrive at the Blissful Guesthouse in Kampot. Kampot is famous for pepper and old decrepit French colonial buildings filled with literary hooks along a river flowing to the sea and packs of vicious starving canines.

It took Iraqi gunmen three months to kill 58,000 stray dogs in Baghdad after the war.

A traveler writing in a bougainvillea garden said to the women, Welcome to Paradise.

Is this paradise, said one woman.

Paradise is wherever you are, said traveler.

One woman with a cloud of white hair smiled, You give us a great power.

You already have the power, said traveler. You are a light warrior.

We can talk about that later.

I am a now not a later.

They went to reception. There were no rooms. They wheeled their bags through sands of time. They discussed life’s vagaries in fluent French while laughing at the absurdity of it all with existential wisdom.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged
 

Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

In Hanoi by Ku

Ku said, I feel embarrassed when I go to Hanoi. They call me Little Cat.

She is from the Black Hmong tribe. She is 16 and Sa’s youngest daughter.

I am confused there. Too many cars and buildings. It’s hard to see the sky. The city is too big. It is noisy and scary. I get lost. She smiled.

Do you know what we call the Hanoi city people, talking monkeys. They go to Sapa to buy cheap Chinese junk. They miss the noise, motorcycles, tall buildings, endless clatter and traffic confusion. They run into buildings. They hide. They are afraid of nature. They complain it’s too cold it’s too hot it’s too weird say the city people with all these noble literate savages trying to sell us things like bags and embroidery and nature walks.

They don’t fool me.

Yes, they are strange animals. Because I am smart I speak many languages; our Hmong dialects, Dzao, Tay, Vietnamese, Mandarin learned from Chinese traders in the mountains, English, European words, even some Tibetan.

Cool eh, I love languages, especially nature’s language, like animals, mountains, clouds, rivers, sky, and wind.

Many people need more life experiences, she reflected on a cool rainy day in Sapa sitting in the market overlooking valleys hearing birds and noble savages sing their authenticity and integrity. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Drum

From the 4th floor balcony you see the yellow elementary school building. Students are obedient. Teachers are bored, overworked and underpaid. Drones. Going through chalk and talk with dry drab emotions. Memorize the text. Grammar rules. Close your mouth and open your ears. Vomit the material.

A red flag with a bright five-point yellow star is silent. All the hot air is in the classroom. The educational skin drum at the school echoes a long deep resonating thunder. Vibrations bounce off clouds and granite mountains. It is large and stretched tight. Clouds and mountains? No the skin drum.

Remember all the amazing drums at the Ethnology Museum over centuries and A Century Is Nothing, but a long now, drums here are essential for communicating over distance.

Drum language has two tones.

Be the drum, frequency and vibration, said little drummer boy pounding out his message. Thump. Thump. Thump. Three heavy beats. Vibrations echo across Sapa space and curl around the lake into eastern mountains.

Drums call young tribal members. All the children gather. Be the drum with mind-at-large.

It is seasonal mountain music saying plant, weave art, make children, tend animals, harvest fields, celebrate life, all the gathering of Black, White, Flower Hmong, Red Dzao, Tay. Community.

Spirit. Storytellers. Animism. Integrity. Authenticity. Nature is your inspiration, guide and teacher.

You live in an amazing art museum.

Cheap foreign plastic factory junk overwhelms natural fiber markets, threading globalization.

Joyful female cloth sellers in the old fabric market sustain energies in their sewing community.

The Hmong and Red Dzao women walk from their villages to stay in Sapa for 3-4 days like their daughters. If they sell or don’t sell they return to their village.

It’s a long walk. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Structure

Trees are the most inspiring structure. - Godel