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Entries in novel (29)

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

Monday
Oct022017

Ice Girl in Banlung, Cambodia

Chapter 1.

It’s fucking hysterical.

Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodian animist jungle languages.

Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

How long have you been here, said Rita a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

Ok, she said cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation and form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity and evolution of humans in this total phenomena? My name is Rita.

Good to meet you. I’m Leo the Lionhearted. Yes, if you slow down. How is life here?

I work, I breed, I get slaughtered. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and destiny are two sides of the same coin.  Janus. Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. She smiled. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies.

They are same word. I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath a whisper. Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice with a rising sound on the k sounding like a meaning I understand without internal meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? Many people have conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok? Ok?

Ok. Address the very low literacy rate.

Hello, literacy rate, how are you, she said.

I am well and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. I know my English is not grammatically correct but I know my English is fluent. The more I see the less I know.

Well said, said Ice Girl. Someone said literacy means reading and writing.

I doubt it, said Literacy, Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, shelter, clothing and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth. It’s the last thing that dies.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold. I love myth, fiction, truth and inventing stories.

I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. Poor people see education and school as a waste of time and money. Education and medicine are expensive.

I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate direct sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence in the big picture. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge fast. Spoken words float around looking for a character, like plot.

Too many people talk out their stories. Lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills and rejuvenates magic and mystery. Ghost stories.

World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

Here’s my secret. I look for a literary agent. Someone said they help writers. I sent one a query. One wrote me a letter. I will share it with you later. I write at night. During the day I’m busy with school and selling ice. If they ask me I will send them a manuscript. Maybe they will love it. Maybe they’ll find a publisher with a big marketing budget and the rest is history as they say. If not I’ll be independent and publish it myself. Ice is my life and I will never give it up. Besides writing, laughing, loving and living, it’s my life.

Wow, that’s lovely, said Leo.

Yes, she said, I follow my bliss. If it’s not in your heart, it’s not in your head. I’ll tell you about the agent later.

A man arrived on a broken motorcycle. She gave him a blue plastic bag of ice. He gave her Real currency.

Sure. I follow my blisters, laughed Leo.

Where are you staying, she asked.

I don’t have a home. I live in small houses along the road. For now I sleep at Future Bright.

I know it. The woman owner smiles and lies at the same time.

What’s the difference between hearing and listening, Leo asked.

98% are asleep with their eyes open, she said. They don’t know and don’t care. It’s endemic.  They look without understanding. The remaining 2% are dead and long gone.

She opened her notebook. She spilled red ink on white paper. Red is a lucky color of wealth and prosperity. Living in a red dust town brings everyone good luck.

Tell me about your visionary skills, said Leo.

I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I connect the dots forward. I practice detached discernment. My job is to pay attention to direct immediate experience, get it down and make sense of it later.

People here live in a perpetual disconnect. They are talking monkeys looking for a place to happen. They can’t focus. Their attention span is ZERO. Like Year 0 in 1975 before I was born. No attention span? No problem.

How about your town, asked Leo.

Red dust roads in Banlung are paved with blue Zircon and Black Opals (nill) reflecting Ratanakiri, or “Gem Mountain.” Rich city women wear blue Zircon, gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, sparkle bling. Rural women do not wear this wealth.

Married women wear red bead strings. They fashion yellow, red, blue, green, glittering plastic bangles on necks and wrists.

Here it’s about food and honoring Earth spirits. Animists believe taking stones harms the spirits, creating an imbalance in the natural order of things.

Thanks for Life Lesson #3, said Leo. I’m going to have a look-see. See you later.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Friday
May262017

Room 317, Yang-en University, Fujian, China

He liked her immediately.

She knew how to wear her sadness with dignity. It was a warm, comfortable security blanket woven in threaded hopes, dreams, lies, beauty and love. He didn’t feel pity for her potential rising like a bird leaves a branch toward higher sky.

Her meditation involved multiple personalities - student, wife, lover, worker, artist, laborer, dancer, commodity broker and teacher. She played an actress pretending to be someone else in her life’s play. Do not break character.

She was all he had at the moment. Time stopped for him swallowing all the tears she’d never cry. Perhaps it was deeply ingrained Confucian cultural modesty masks forbidding her the luxury of being open, real, honest, and human. Hide your true face, said Mask. Your face eats your mask.

 

She lived in a time warp where emotions were controlled and rationed by parents, Party leaders and invisible social ghosts.

A tight feeling constricted her throat. She wanted to scream, ”Help me please, I am dying of infinite inexorable sadness.”

No one heard her silent scream. Peasants, students and teachers were busy, busy, busy staring at cell phones reading/texting 5,000-year old characters. Word pictures.

Ideograms symbolized the idea of a thing without the sound used to articulate it. A day in the life peering down, down, down at a green ionized electronic glowing screen. Their universe encapsulated screaming screened electrons.

They were auditioning for walk-on roles as student and teacher character actors at a private Chinese business university of 15,000 students.

They needed to stand out, to find the essence of robotic behavior where daring wasn’t fatal. Express their inner emotional state with abject distraction. Where their self-esteem and courage nurtured support, respect and empathy in their longing.

They had latent desire.

Their struggle was for jobs, money and social position.

They’d accept financial filial piety responsibility for aging parents. If married they’d support four parents. The iron rice bowl theory of a guaranteed collective security network collected dust in history’s rubbish bin. It was discarded with state housing, state jobs, and state health care.

She lived in a Brave New World.

She knew this and failed to accept it. Her consciousness shift grasped fragmentary what ifs and maybes.

“If students spent as much time looking forward as they do behind they’d make amazing profound progress,” she thought, approaching old campus.

She inhaled the sweet scent of yellow, pink and red wild roses outside barred windowed classrooms near the stinking W.C. basement where school guards planted green vegetables in trash strewn plots.

She trimmed dead stems with her Tibetan knife, caressed a thorn piercing her heart and severed one fresh rose. She carried it through a gate and up uneven cement stairs evolving into a paradigm shift. She was always early and well prepared.

White chalk dust covered the teacher’s podium in room 317. She lived, breathed, swallowed and spoke white chalk dust. On a broken blue table in the corner was a small green plastic bucket filled with water. Dust floated on the surface.

She opened the window, picked up a torn crumpled rag, soaked it and squeezed it out.

She placed the rose in a cup of water and put it on the podium.

Stubs and nubs of white chalk littered the podium. She collected fragments of academic history, an ancient educational memory scattered by a previous teacher. They always left a mess of exculpatory evidence.

She placed them in a box of discarded chalk next to the water bowl and blew white dust scattering flying powder elements into the air dispersing particles. After wiping down the podium, she rinsed and squeezed out the rag, hanging it to dry on the windowsill. She looked out.

Rolling green Fujian hills and a large blue lake escaped her eyes. An old weather-beaten woman farmer behind a red brick wall tilled soil to plant vegetables. Motorbikes heavy with woven wicker baskets spilling vegetables, toilet paper, apples, gas canister and wide-eyed children chugged along a cracked cement road.

Ancient blue one-cylinder rusty miniature dump trucks loaded with white granite blocks rumbled past fuming diesel exhaust, throwing red clay dust into the air where it collided with white chalk dust escaping room 317.

 

It was a poor landlocked rural peasant infected paradise.

The Boss died last year. She attended his ceremony in the Great Hall at his campus villa. She wore white as a sign of respect for the dead. Her ghost persona sang a comfortable sadness past rows of flowers to the casket. She bowed. His thin white mustache face reflected glass smudged with fingerprints.

He reminded her of a Tang poet living in solitude inside a long Chinese painting where wind whispered songs with trees, mountains and stars.

After his death and passing tribute, students began holding hands in public. His private army of guards lost their power to intimidate, coerce and extort money from adolescents displaying affection in public. Guards roared around on bikes with flashing red lights looking important and, if motivated to survive, begged for jobs slinging hash, cleaning tables, and peeling vegetables behind student restaurants.

Hundreds of local villagers, officials, educational specialists, farmers, teachers and drones followed the funeral procession to a hill overlooking the campus.

They put him in the ground and exploded fireworks to scare away running capitalist dogs and ghosts. They returned to fields, kitchens, gardens, offices and classrooms.

A year later the school started building a grand tomb for their dead leader on a hill above the computer center building. It cost $261,591,79.

Small change.

Turning away from the window she selected yellow, blue, orange, and green chalk from a seldom-used box.

She wrote on the blackboard:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

She drew a picture of a face with bubble words - “I am an autodidact. You are responsible for your learning.”

She splashed rainbows, suns, faces, laughter's wild memory and imaginary abstract colors on a green canvas, barely scratching the surface of appearances.

An obnoxious loud rusty metal bell clanged for fifteen seconds. She turned and faced 100 university students. They were physically eighteen with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old. This disparity explained why the university treated them like children to keep them in their childlike space place.

They had “Sports Meetings” on the “Playground.”

They had “Nap” time after lunch.

Maybe twenty-five cared about learning. Most just wanted to pass. Some might ask questions and develop a life long love for learning, knowledge and wisdom.

Anyone asking why was reported by spies to authorities and disappeared. Poof.

A rare one possessed an innate creative playful inquisitive nature. The majority slept with their eyes open. Lights on and no one home paradigm.

She smiled. Her sadness evaporated. She inhaled delicious dust and spoke in tongues.

“What color are your dreams?”

“Stop making sense!” yelled a student. “What’s the context? Critical thinking skills with humor and curiosity are forbidden! ”

They whined in unison, “We are worried about our marks, not learning the material. 60 is heaven. 59 is hello.”

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” she said.

“We know so much and understand so little,” said Curious, a bright star in the universe. "I want to be a waif when I grow up. A real person with dignity and self-respect.”

During meditation they heard an authoritarian Mandarin voice yelling next door.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A Century is Nothing

 

Sunday
Feb122017

Chinese Education System

In China everyone is safe, happy and well adjusted, Leo said to Ice Girl one torrid day in Banlung, Cambodia.

They sat on an operating table next to a sewing machine and an umbrella.

I cut, you talk, she said. A drop of sweat from her nose landed on a block of ice.

It’s called THE SYSTEM, he said. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian educational systems. Laconic students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution, which is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic.

Big Brother is always watching you.

Save face.

The fear of public humiliation is greater than the fear of death.

Intention is karma.

Tell me about your life in China, said Ice Girl.

After completing five years of a night soil shit job in the Re-Education Through Labor experience for questioing Authority I visited my family graves in Sichuan. I offered prayers and burned incense. I prayed for strength, courage and humility. Then I walked east. Fortune smiled on me.

I worked as a facilitator at a private business university in Fujian with 15,000 replicants.

I faced eighty stone-faced freshmen in a long cement tomb. It was a required speaking class. Desks were bolted to the floor in groups of four. They had year zero English skills. I gave two a test. How are you, I asked a boy. I am 18. How old are you, I asked a girl. I’m fine, and you?

I paired eighty off, boy girl, boy girl. They didn’t like this. They got used to it.

Will someone please share a story?

A girl raised her hand.

The less I do the less likely I am to make mistakes and the fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized then I feel no shame.

It’s easier to do nothing, said one clever robot.

Correct, I said, you’ve both expressed the essence of your cultural and intellectual education.

That’s a long sentence filled with verbs and significant philosophy said Ice Girl, waving a Blue Zircon reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe. Don’t let school interfere with your education. Say more about Becoming.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Thursday
Jun112015

Kabul Doctors - TLC 12

Ankara streets were dead one Sunday.

Everyone disappeared to vote for someone well connected and wealthy.

He passed shuttered watch shops and clothing stores.

Moneychangers yelled, “Mr. Lucky Foot come here. Invest in your future. Change money. Change your wife. Change your life. Change or die. Change into a nine-year old meditative Buddhist monk in Luang Prabang, Laos walking with a begging bowl.”

A man selling Simit, a common seedy pretzel meditated near his small carnival cart in stone cold shadows.

Five jabbering women in shimmering sea green blue fabrics decorated with mirrors and silver balls danced along plate glass windows. Dark skin sharp noses deep black eyes and long hair. Headscarves reflected light waves.

Three posed in front of a clothing store and Caucasian mannequin. The dummy wore a dark pinstriped suit. A tall woman stepped back with a point-n-shoot camera.

Finished, she turned. He gestured if she wanted him to photograph the group.

“Yes,” in impeccable English. “Please.”

He pointed at foliage. “Ask your friends to stand over there.” Two hid behind flowing skirts. She coaxed them into the frame. Click.

He handed her the camera. “Where are you from?”

“We are from Kabul.’

“Why are you here?”

“We are doctors. We have been attending seminars and return home this week.”

“Are you all from Kabul?”

“No,” gesturing to women hiding behind sisters, “they are from distant provinces.”

“I see. How is the medical situation in Afghanistan? Do you have enough medicine?”

“It changes. We are fortunate to receive medicine from international aid agencies. Our hospitals need more equipment. It’s a struggle at times especially outside the capital.”

“How are the children doing? Are they receiving medical care and enough food? Can they go to school?”

“We are doing our best to take care of the children.”

“I wish you well. You face large responsibilities. It was nice meeting you.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “Good-bye.”

He shared this encounter with a female student at TLC.

“Were they open or closed?” she said referring to veils not their state of mind.

“They were open.”

TLC

Dr. Suit and fashionable Ankara friends.