Labor

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: how to paint a curb in Cambodia.

Part 1. Get a plastic bucket. Throw in white language. Tie a blue and white checkered scarf around your neck. It's hotter than the mid-day sun on the Tropic of Cancer. South of the Equator. Slather it on with a broom. David Foster Wallace wrote: The Broom of The System.

DFW said: "what it feels like to live, to observe, to experience in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them."

2. Your four emaciated brothers walk past on their way to work. Three carry shovels. One carries a sledgehammer. They will transform the small sleepy river town into: (a) a hot tourist location (b) frozen ice inside the hard cold fact:  how necessities become luxuries which happens around Earth. Consider ice. Frozen water. Necessity. Yesterday it was water. Today it is white rice. Close as white on rice. Tomorrow it's Medicine. The day after tomorrow in the long now it's Education. Life's little luxuries. Plural.

They suck on life's plastic straw. They discard the plastic straw and cup on the ground. They walk. They paint. They shovel. They slam sledgehammers.

Their daily efforts will revitalize world economies. They will speak at G-20 economic forums. They will address important powerful people. They will speak to 5% of the world's richest people who control 98% of the total wealth.

They will have a voice. They will represent millions of peasants and poor people. Their labor will wear them down. They will lose the resolve, the focus the vision to alter history. They will be replaced by new workers.

They paint. They shovel dirt. They pound sledgehammers. They suck ice. They mill around. They watch the world pass by hearing inadequate impossible language. Their DAILY language is pure, raw labor. 

A Cambodian woman carries the world on her back. 

Metta.

new year boredom

Greetings,

It's the new year here.

People get together, celebrate, travel home for three days to their village if they have cash and places get cleaned up. Everything increases in cost; food, transportation, quietly depressed bar girls, medicine, education, laziness and boredom. Boredom was cheaper last week in a free market economy. 

In front of the ornate French colonial court house teams of boys chew up old soil removing dead tree trunk roots with crude effective Paleolithic stone tools slabbing the area with miles of bland red tiles. The amount of stone work is tremendous. Across the street at a government building boys slap a fresh coat of white paint on pillars. Women weed a grassy plaza featuring a huge seagull. It needs a coat of paint.

White shirted men supervise garden teams and completion of tall heroic patriotic statues at an intersection. 

Boys rapidly pave a huge swath of land in front of a new grocery store with red tiles. The owners brought in outdoor fern planters and steel shelving for consumer goods no one will want.

Frantic men salvage gutter weeds and wild grasses for their livestock before someone chases them away. A young girl tries to focus on copying texts under the watchful eye of a private tutor while adults with a lack of focus and direction distract them with meaningless chatter.

Countless people with nothing to do practice the endless art of milling around. They practice the timeless art of pretending to be busy. They pay more attention to see if anyone is watching them than to what they are actually doing. This is an unpleasant fact.

Across the street from a small place where I enjoy noodles, carrots, spuds, eggs and fine green tea, boys in straw hats protecting them from a blistering sun create four new rooms with high brick walls at a primary school. No windows. Window dressing. A new year, a new wall. 

Metta.

Vietnam

Turkey

Shaman - Vietnam