Adventure, Risk, Transformation

The narrator, a soldier, talks to a priest while serving in Vietnam.

"The histories speak about humans shedding old habits, attitudes, values, and beliefs and loved ones to go on journeys with new opportunities and compassion.

"How they renewed their spirit with pure gratitude and joy. It’s amazing. I mean here I am sacrificing my youth, desire, ignorance and anger to be cleansed, to be made whole, to integrate my unconscious into oneness with the ALL as an authentic being. We are stardust. We are one third the life of the universe.”

“Yes, my son, using religion I sacrificed bodies and souls. I created sorrows and depravity. I wandered through Sumerian, Greek, Roman, and Spanish villages where I administered suffering, pain and death. I burned 12,000 innocent men, women and children at the stake during the Inquisition. Ah, such a time I had condemning heretics to damnation and life everlasting. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“Did you record these events?”

“I dictated my myths, legends and story-truth to Omar, a blind Touareg scribe. My amanuensis. You’ll meet him in Morocco on 9/11. You will combine stories and adventures in this tale. Anyway, to continue my little saga, I licked civilization’s fire. As a fire-eater in a traveling carnival I blessed sinners with ashes on Palm Sunday. I drove a tank through Middle Eastern deserts converting the heathen with fire and brimstone. I kneeled and prayed in mosques facing Mecca five times a day.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. I survived in Afghan caves near destroyed statues of Buddha hearing Taliban confessions. I tended to suicide cases in GITMO. I meditated in Tibetan caves for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three minutes and three breaths. Ah, the blessed trinity. At Tibetan sky burial ceremonies north of Lhasa after flaying skin off bodies, I ground human bones to mix with blood for vultures so the departed spirit could, would, should be reborn. Karma and reincarnation.”

“You did all that?”

“Yes. I walked the length of the Silk Road from Venice to Guangzhou bringing comfort to the lame, blind and destitute. I traveled with Italo Calvino from Italy a scribe blessed with magical realism insight when he created Invisible Cities in Kublai Khan’s court. Perhaps you know of it?”

“Yes, he and the great Khan played chess.”

“Ah the great game and a metaphor of life. Castle early. Control the center. Divide and conquer.”

“Checkmate,” whispered Death.

ART

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Kids Talk

“Are you a ticket taker or a risk taker?”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks and suffer greatly.”

“Anybody have any spare change?” asked a panhandling waif on an aspirator with wealthy aspirations.

“Hmm, I see a faint star at the conjunction of the head and heart life lines. Does that mean anything?” said a kid fingering green palms approaching Easter Is-land on a bamboo raft.

“Depends,” ranted a child orator standing on a soapbox. “Do you mean faint as in non-distinguishable or feint meaning to throw one off a socially agreed upon tacit path implied by pretending to understand anything while processing information with a deft movement?”

“Yes,” philosophized a child with the wit of Camus, “it’s a sublime paradox, this absurd metaphorical life theater. We have aspects of knowing. We know so much and understand nothing. We are affected, infected, rejected or injected by how we feel not what we think we understand. Life is short and sweet. Art is long. Our lives are works of art. It’s not so much that there is something strange about time. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

“You’re just saying that,” said a voice.

“Sounds like a description of the food they serve here, speaking of strange,” one resident commented to no one in particular.

“No lie flutter by,” sighed a Monarch’s wings in Greek.

“What’s that have to do with the conservation of angular momentum and a parabola?” queried a child spinning wheelchair tires on a tennis court and making a racket while performing real alignments for friends.

“Do I love you because you are beautiful,” said Rose, “or are you beautiful because I love you?”

“Both,” sang the Greek chorus.

“You get what you pay for,” said a kid ironing words with grit, perseverance and discipline.

ART

Every kid needs a bike.

Gazebo Group

Abracadabra - Hurl your lightning bolt even unto Death.

You must break down before you break through.

In 1997 my writing and life were shit.

One wet winter Pacific Coast morning, I drove to a Tacoma hospital and checked into the chemical dependency unit for three days of alcohol detox.

After admission I took an elevator to the third floor. Workmen stripped, sanded and plastered walls.

Room #310 had a bed near a window, old metal locker, sink, mirror, ancient radiator and TV. The window overlooked a grassy area with a wooden gazebo, flowers and basketball court.

Mike was next door and Tom was across the hall. Tom resembled a skeleton with skin. He stayed in bed until he died.

“The hospital was originally used by railroad workers and was a TB unit at one time which is why there is no pediatric unit,” said Nurse Blossom. One wing of the third floor was for Bipolar, multiple dependencies and mental illness. Suicide cases lived in a penthouse on the fifth floor.

She took a urine sample and gave me Ada-van medication for withdrawals. Pills replaced lost chemicals.

By evening my journal writing evolved from large loopy letters into a tight microscopic form. Form the formless. I wandered down to the gazebo to smoke and write in cold night air.

My new drug was water. I swallowed meds and slept well. In the morning I felt the meds were erasing alcohol and cleaning my system. I scribbled in my journal.

My legs feel like rubber. My mind is a monkey. I write in the garden. Substance abuse evaporates. Alcohol relinquishes Control of mind-body mass.

In late afternoon I sat in the gazebo feeling drained, suffering extreme headaches. Light danced through clouds.

I pass through dragon firewalls. I can’t spell. A crow calls. Healer. Breath. I am calm with no monkey mind. Just sitting. I adapt with clear thinking, less agitation, mental and emotional anxiety. I begin accepting my new reality.

On the third day a doctor reviewed my chart. “The next step is Phase II outpatient group therapy.”

Addicts smoked in the gazebo. Fifteen plastic chairs circled stone block ashtrays. Addicts surrounded me in withdrawal stages from heroin, crack, speed, depressives and alcohol.

Gazebo people tried to sort out their lives. They talked about insurance payment scam problems, families, nurses, the lack of doctors, and institutional care histories. I wrote it down among lost lives and despair.

Moist air holding illness confronted recovery. Dead eyes, laughter, faint hopes, repressed angry regrets. Addicts huddled against slashing rain. Smokers coughed collective misery. Addicts bummed quarters for a pay phone to call friends and family.

A film explained how endorphins help us feel good. Alcohol creates a false reality by blocking transmitters known as TIQ.

Mike remembered relapsing after twenty-five years of sobriety. “I just stopped. I was driving down the street one night and plain stopped when I saw a neon liquor sign flashing.” Vodka calling. He started all over again.

On the 5th floor screaming suicide patients smashed heads against walls.

Addicts tried to regain self-esteem. It was about surrendering Control and accepting trust. We turned our lives over to someone who knew what they were doing.

ART

Adventure - Risk - Transformation

ART

ART, (Adventure, Risk, Transformation) a memoir, covers 1997-2002.

Backstory includes Colorado childhood and a year in Nam when he cheated Death.

He was in Morocco on 9/11.

Writing there and in Spain, satire and facts met creativity and humor. Published in October 2019.