Tuk-tuk by Rita

A Cambodian loudspeaker blasted: Now Here This!

The tuk-tuk leaves in five minutes departing for points unknown. A massive short celestial event known as Your Sweet Life on the tourist conveyor belt departs in five minutes.

You are advised to assemble all necessary documents, certified approval stamps, water, greasy guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on. You will visit Raw Mind on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you and a glossy germane Laughing Co(s)mic Planet guidebook with creased missing pages.

If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - you will discover a new sensation and perspective in another dimension beyond sight and sound.  

You are a vanishing particle in space. You will be surprised or traumatized depending on your sensitivity to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing and feeling temple magic and energy.

You will DO Angkor. Check it off your to do list. Less is more. Please conclude all private and group discussions, agreements, disagreements or false reasonable arguments with your fellow travelers. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. He will lose his job.

If he loses his job he will return to his village with his ten children sleeping in hammocks. He will plant rice and provoke white cows with Marxist control sticks. He will manipulate plowshares through mud. The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to be a tuk-tuk driver.

If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family may starve to death. This is a common problem here - Death by starvation. If you survive you win. Life loves a winner.

If he dies you will be held in escrow. - Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment.

A tuk-tuk driver has an easy job. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. You pay him and he goes home. He gives his wife some money. He spends the rest drinking Angkor Draft with friends.

He makes $15-25 for the day.

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $3.00.

Woman drivers are rare in Siem Reap. Like clean drinking water, sanitation, quality health care, OK condoms and student talking time in robotic factory schools.

Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guesthouses. They are the guest and you are the house. Your house has 1,001 symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious demon fears and ocean dreams live-breath-laugh and dance revealing inner visions.

Clean all your rooms. Your word janitor takes out the garbage.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff. Atoms make up everything.

You are a housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols, silence & nothing.

A woman doesn’t work as a tuk-tuk driver because:

- it’s too dangerous

- it’s inappropriate

- it’s foolish

- they lack the cash

- they lack education, intelligence, drive, initiative

- they haven’t broken free of ingrained social and cultural oppressive stereotypes. The System believes her place is in the home, producing offspring, nurturing kids, cooking, feeding the dead incense, feeding the dying, feeding the elderly, feeding the kids, feeding hubby, washing, and cleaning. She’s happy.

- her family will kill her with love and affection.

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish primary or 9th grade like in Sapa, Vietnam. She married young. She stayed home forever and a day. She produced children in assembly line operations with high quality control standards, modern medicine and umbilical cords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers.

Your mother was appointed to have you. 

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

Wisdom Mind

Dear Mischief Maker, 

How is your wisdom mind? What is your motivation? Intention is limitation. 

Every day is a gift day. In Hanoi dreaming of Northwest Mountains I project a film of elevations, exploring, climbing steep rocky slippery trails in fog, mist, sunshine and smiles. Clean. Integrity. Authenticity. Everything is light energy. Ritual. No fear or expectations. Frequencies. Vibrations. 

I’m traveling to meet hill tribes in Sapa. A wonderful adventure to learn, share and create.

Ethnologists classify the Montagnard tribes into three main groups:

             ▪           Tay - Tay-Thai language group

            ▪           Hmong  - Hmong-Dzao group; their language resembles Mandarin 

            ▪           Dzao - Mong Dzao language group. 

These three groups splinter into complex sub-groupings.

*

I begin at the beginning, said Zeynep. The hand is directly connected to the heart. Eye & hand & heart. Two won’t do. 

Computers are useless they only give you answers, said Picasso. 

It felt great to put on the pack, walk through narrow lanes, get to the street and station early. Weight steps remember terrain in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, now destined for Sapa, mountains, trails, rocks, water and good dirt leaving footprints on Earth's surface. It’s a walking meditation. Rapturous joy meets synthesis of love.

The Hanoi train station has a Free W.C. House, yes, a free W.C. with Wi-Fi, electronic crap-a-rama go with the flow. Download into the hole. Delete from system, get some green tea and walk to platform #7 between trains and a sleeping berth in a room for four. 

Riding the rails, this rhythm. Comfortable in mid-week without humanity’s crush. 

 Mr. Metaphor by Devina

Dear lover of numbers, mathematics and logical contradictions.

Life is an absurd paradox, said Devina and we are a metaphor. How’s it feel to be a breathing sensing metaphor, contemplating perception and sensation, seeing others overwhelmed by the stimuli of sensation and perceptual data flow? Impressions flow like water. Quiet the monkey mind. Open Pandora’s (all gifts) box.

Look around, said Rita. You’ll see many insane neurotic humans suffering perceptual overload. Their hardwired receivers are overloaded with INCOMING low quality data from phones. Entertainment loves Attention Deficit Disorder. Short attention span? No problem. 

Write short, fast and deadly. 

Omar witnessed this reality in Morocco after 9/11. It’s scary living with pure fear and distractions. Zombies and automatons are willing slaves to their perceived hell on earth. Volunteered slavery loves a monkey mind ego with perpetual distractions. It’s all they know this life of distractions. 

Zap from stimulus to stimulus. They are engaged by a fleeting stimulus. Dopamine fix. A blind eyeball uses up 85% of their daily energy. No wonder they’re tired being hard-wired to this genetic addiction, a flow of stimulus, grasping nothing. It’s a pervasive learned behavior.

I’m having coffee yesterday with Ang in Hanoi. Don’t fuck with a beautiful black belt. She looks demure and can kill you with one fatal gesture. We hadn’t seen each other for six weeks. She kept pulling her phone out of her pocket. Reading the screen. Texting someone. 

I didn’t say a word. I stopped talking when she did this. I observed her. She never said, Excuse me. Must be really important. Can you imagine how she may have felt or reacted with the calm way of a Zen ninja killer if, during our brief visit, I said, Excuse me but you are really boring me and it is rude. I need to text someone. I need to use my phone to connect with someone who is not here but I really wish they were because you are boring me. 

Text me baby. Tell me about your situational awareness and sweet distractions. 

Text me your insecurity, loneliness, alienation and BIG plans. 

Text me about wanting to fuck long and hard tonight while our ancestors eat incense in their death dream if you want to get my undivided attention. 

Speaking of distractions, what’s scary is seeing all the crazy Hanoi motorcycle drivers texting while zooming along narrow crowded streets in heavy traffic. Talk about a death wish. Text this - Meditate on the complete cessation of your perception. No sensation.

You disappear into bliss. No time, dualities, boundaries.

It’s not the answers we need to ask but the questions we need to know, said Leo. All this. 

Hanoi sign: 

If you don’t know much about infinity 

you are invited to check into Hilbert’s Hotel 

with its infinite number of rooms. 

It can miraculously accommodate additional guests 

even when it’s completely full.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged 

Barbers

Inside a Bursa barber shop at 9:30 a.m. TV wall news blasted Kabul heavy alliterative artillery literary fire.

Dust explodes. Images flood the consciousness - trains filled with tanks, armored cars, firefights in Iraq and Syria, suicide bombers, machine guns, rata-tat-tat-tat, expose yourself for a flash of sight, aim, fire, reload, as smiling wealthy diplomats shake hands for the cameras and media propaganda value.

They gesture peaceful intentions. We agree to disagree.

Smile.

An old man gets a close shave. The barber is short, white haired with trim black mustache in a white smock, brown loafers, working the silver blade down elastic cheeks erasing yesterday’s growth. The old man closes his eyes, feeling steel blade sensations as lather evaporates his existence in a calm, gentle way.

A small bell rings as a man pedals his portable mango and pineapple fruit cart along a dirt road in Cambodia. Does the sound come to the ear or does the ear go to the sound, asked Rita.

*

One morning Tran and I located a street barber in Saigon. He’s on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.

His place was bare bones marketplace essentials. He works a small corner of a cement box surrounded by a wire fence. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table and a cracked mirror completes the ensemble. Cheap blades, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.

Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to recycle stuffing stuff.

The Dark Years

It was curious seeing the Cambodian barber open on the last day of Khmer New Year. The river town was dead quiet. Merchants and families slept in shuttered shops behind metal gray accordion sheets. A tropical afternoon sun beat down. White cumulus clouds billowed in the east. The barber had a customer. A white haired war veteran. He’d fought against Vietnam, Khmer Rouge, Death and his Ghosts.

He didn’t talk about it. He survived. Silent conversation was his destiny.

He sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. He saw a long thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. A long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. The mole saved him from Khmer Rouge executioners. They were superstitious peasants. They believed he was the Devil. They released him.

He and the barber conversed in French. The thin barber had thick black parted hair. He’d lived here all his life. He survived four genocide years by killing his dreams and hiding with his family in mountains where the French later constructed and abandoned a post office, hotel and casino. All bets are off. They were The Dark Years. No one talked about The Dark Years.

The old man closed his eyes. Besides gardening and playing with his grandchildren, savoring blade sensations and ointment aromas with small talk were his simple luxuries.

Using small steel clippers the barber trimmed hair. It fluttered to a cement floor meeting piles of black hair. Electric trimmers with old frayed wires collected dust on a narrow wooden table under a fractured mirror. Hello Beauty.

After trimming neck hairs he adjusted the chair, easing him back. The old man meditated on miracles and impermanence of life.

The barber extracted a thin razor blade from a small piece of paper. He severed both ends into a soda can. Clink. He opened a wooden handled straight razor edging the blade in.

He sprayed water mist around the man’s head. Moisture refracted light prisms and dust. He trimmed microscopic hairs around the outside edge of an ear lobe before shaving above sideburns angling the man’s head with his left hand. The razor slid from temple to temple across the scalp line rasping skin.

He was quick, silent and efficient. Smooth artistic hands shaved skin fast and light. Short, fast and deadly. The blade danced on skin under the eyes. He wiped the blade on a white towel lying on the man’s chest. He shaved lower sideburns. He returned the man to a sitting position. The man smiled at his reflection. Hello Beauty.

The barber snapped the towel across shoulders removing dead cells. The man eased out of the chair. He removed a roll of money hidden near his waist. He peeled musical notes to the barber.

Merci. Au’voir.

He shuffled out. His son waited for him on a motorcycle. He tried to swing his right leg over the rear seat. He hesitated. He couldn’t manage it. His left hand reached for a shoulder. His frail contorted right arm was useless. The executioners broke the Devil’s arm. They wanted to hear the Devil scream.

Bursa barber. Cádiz barber. Hanoi barber. Cambodia barber. Faces shaved, haircut, clip, clip scissors, storytellers all.

All vocal music, choral tales of imaginary love, kindness, forgiveness, journeys, beauty, creativity, travel, adventure, risk, authenticity, truth and maladaptive trust with barbers.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Flower

process is more alluring then product

Dimmi - tell me your secrets ... fundamental laws of nature ... synthesis ... geometry + shadow + light

Barthes - photographs attract us because they are pensive, they think

ideas in living laboratories

*

History, war, and violence screwed us, said Rita. Human genocide animals massacred 1.7 million out of 11 million between 1975-1979. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need. They eat, sleep, plant, harvest, fuck and sit around.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart.

As Buddhists they visualize a positive future with good education, health care, quality medicine, job opportunities and community strength.

They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The lesson is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing staring humans. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap said Rita.

Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. Let’s pretend to be someone else in life’s play.

Whew what a mouthful, said Tran, an amputee from Vietnam, Yeah spilling sounds and metaphors, the human condition reads history and weeps, time history is a play, create memory history and re-write it. Your memory is the world, said Omar, And the world is a village.

Everything I need is here.

Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.

Question?

What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were all. Her hands were water air soft gentle sensations. Learning sensing and feeling is her physical way. She engaged all her senses. Touch is her essence.

She knew your pressure points. Soft, medium or hard, she said. During her meditation we considered this fragment. We discovered immediate direct experience with structure form and literary vulgarity.

We slow down inside a labyrinth contemplating a lotus growing from mud.

A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive. They write naked, in blood and in exile.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Burma