Japanese explorers among others

Greetings,

Tomorrow is the BIG new year day here in the kingdom. I am a shamanic camera. SNAP!

It is morning. The four Japanese tourists left on 125cc motorcycles for a day in the country. The man had long gray streaked hair and wiggled his bare feet when the authoritative diminutive black haired elf woman spoke. Food was more important to her than conversation. Nodding her head in agreement helped her chew.

They agreed on everything. This helps them avoid losing face. Losing face is the worst thing in the whole wide world in their culture.

Her female friend was bigger than an exploding astroid eating space at the speed of sound. The man talked with his mouth full of pliable eggs. Another woman hiding behind big dark sunglasses appeared. Everyone talked in staccato preparing plans to have a grand adventure along the river, through flat countryside filled with land mines far away from Tokyo. 

An arisotocratic French couple sat in front of the lodge facing the river. He was 40. Fat and morose. He blamed everything on her and she cared less and less. He covered his mouth while speaking with her blocking his deep unconscious emotional secrets about guilt, desire and fear. She was 32, wore new brown Birkenstock sandals and picked her toenails out of boredom. Sex was their glue.

Wearing biased blinders they comfortably ignored small brown faced humans as they traveled through Asia.

A Swedish man in a safari hat with his conservative white checked shirt tucked into his pants asked another Nordic man how to work his digital camera. He ran across the street, took a photo of the river and mountain and ran back to show his friend. He was very excited. 

Five bored tuk-tuk drivers sat across the street in their chariots of fire playing with their cell phones.

A foreigner's girlfriend had a simian face. He rescued her from a bar called The Heart of Darkness. She knew how to peel his banana. She deserted him. She ran to the market to find Boredom, her secret lover.

"I love Boredom. I can't get enough Boredom. It's a genetic necessity. Goodbye." He returned to The Heart of Darkness to find a temporary replacement. Life is a temporary condition.

Metta.

Sappho, the Greek lyric poet of Lesbos

How's this compare to where you've been?

Greetings,

That's the question three fat white guys discuss at a garden restaurant on a breezy Saturday. They were dropped off by a van. They meet friends.

One wealthy self assured Arab man with forehead sunglasses and his tall sleek jaguar girlfriend in tight jeans, tighter top and rattling high heels. Her feet are small and beautiful. Coiffeur hair. Originally, "inner part of the helmet." She leaves half her noodles. A Frenchman and his pregnant wife. She laughs a lot.

The weekend escape exercise from the capital. The three amigos booked rooms for their Cambodian honeys coming down from Phnom Penh and now they're drinking beer. The waft of suds and distinct European body odor drifts along the river. Intelligent life on Earth is a rumor.

The answer? "Now we've got women," said one man.

Sounds like a history story about a group of seafaring men who raided a Mediterranean city. They kidnapped all the women. The city men were pissed off and raided another coastal town, kidnapping all the women there. This is how war started. Revenge baby.

One day the women were asked about this event. "No," they said. "We weren't kidnapped. We went willingly."

No squeeze, no please.

This is a five minute free writing exercise. Keep your hand moving. The birds are singing. 

I live at Orchid. Orchid is important because I love orchids. They have many yellow and purple orchids growing, hanging, from planters. I feel great with orchids. I am a traveling gardener with unlimited potentials. Plural.

I remember many orchids in Indonesia. They were cheap. I decorated the front porch with multiple colorful orchids - red, orange, purple, white, and yellow in clay pots with a charcoal base. Orchids took me to the mountains to see my wild friends. (5 minutes)

At 7:30 a.m. the Orchid restaurant is filled with the smell of burning fires from refuse, plastic bags, and organic material. German travelers spit out their harsh dictatorial guttural sense of determination. It is harsh. They are planning to invade, to provoke a war to justify their extreme greed for land and slaves.

Teutonic tongues mix with screeching Khmer tongues. Question. What is louder than a group of Khmer people? Answer. Another group of Khmer people.

Babbling comparisons display firm purpose. They establish their memory-fiction with a drunken slow administrative tone. A singing bird says, "Good-bye, I'm taking wing. The sky is my refuge from description. The divine details create uncertainty in my grand plan."

Khmer children bleed water.

ROUGE: a rainbow with the smell of laughing birds, clouds and rivers. Milling around.

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

The Temple of Literature, Ha Noi.

Warrior statue, ink. Xiamen, China.

Elephant Tears

Greetings,

A girl from Argentina who arrived in Siem Reap after midnight broke down after breakfast. Tears streamed down her face. Her boyfriend stood helpless. He handed her a tissue. He didn't know what else to do. She cried and cried. He suffered in silence.

She blubbered in Spanish. "I miss mama...I miss mama. Where are we? What is this strange place? Everyone is trying to cheat us. The food is terrible. They charge extra for butter. Where's the beef? The bus scam from Thailand was long, bumpy, grumpy, expensive, a drag, a mistake, a terrible tragic drama. I can't understand the people here. O woe is me, us." She discarded a soggy tissue.

Her macho man suffered in silence. 'She's a basket case,' he thought.

They'd argued recently. About their trip, lack of good sex, decent food, hot sticky weather, poor planning, lack of planning, expenses.

'Maybe it all comes down to sex and money,' he thought. Clean and clear understanding. In Spanish or Splanglish or deeper emotional levels of complexity. 

She blew snot into another tissue. She crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on a plate glass table. It shattered under the weight of her sticky mucus. It's not what she thought it would be. Her expectations were shattered by illusionary possibilities. Her life was one big question.

She gradually composed herself. They started to leave the restaurant. They paused at the top of the stairs. It was a long way down. He whispered to her. Calming poetic words. He put his arm around her shoulder. She was frigid. Mr. Romeo had his work cut out for him and there was nothing to fix.

Metta.

Dream street

Greetings,

I am dancing down the final farewell sing Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble down 20 words. Write one true sentence. 

Twenty little words. Twenty quick painless mini-stories about the 60-year old man last evening in the BLINKING LIGHT. An American or European, retired, a widower. Smoking, drinking a beer. He wears a drab flower print shirt. Alone. He calls someone.

Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He greets her, grasping both her hands expressing a deep gratitude, welcoming her. Back into his life. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love - his salvation from loneliness, sorrow, suffering and the pain of living.

He hands her the wine list.

'Anything you want. It's yours.' He is eternally grateful to know her. Receive her. 

'I want your heart,' she says. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation.

After a romantic quiet candlelight dinner they return to his hotel. They will smell and taste and laugh and sing and dance with each other for dessert. She will trace his spine with her fingers. He will rest his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Hearing the thump-thump-thump of the muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arteries. They will hold each other until dawn sweeps dream street.

For one night they know peace inside their healthy loving mutually beneficial addiction.

Metta.

A Room in Shanghai

In Chinese cities a local foreigner is surrounded by millions of curious people in crowded living situations, a relic in a poorly maintained zoo. 

Animals are abused and neglected, but that’s beside the point of the doors on family compounds in big Chinese cities made of thick heavy metal. They close at night with a clang on old worn hinges. An adult voice is heard admonishing a child.  

“Get in, the night is here. It is late. You have to fold the clothes. You have your work for school. You have to clean up after dinner. You must study harder. Harder! If you fail your exams we will lose face. You will be an unemployed migrant child wandering lost cities looking for your future.”

The demanding accusatory tone of voice is always an admonishing attitude of voice in the way things exist. Shanghai commands are simple and direct. 

Outside the window heels strike cold hard pavement in darkness. The sharpness belongs to a girl escaping from family going out for the night. Muted voices of an old couple walking through narrow concrete canyons echo as her heels fade.

The elevator door opened on the 11th floor of a five—star business hotel in Shanghai. 

A beautiful young Chinese girl, maybe 20, in a white dress clutching a small black purse stared at a scuffed marble floor. Small puddles of rain water gathered around her shoes.

The American stopped talking to the Indian accountant and looked past him. 

She raised her face from the ground. 

Deep dark brown rings circled old, tired, fearful eyes hiding her heart's knowledge, revealing her soul. There was no place to hide, no magical cosmetic to conceal the truth of everything she knew. The woman and man instinctivily understood each other. She was passing toward another temporary hope, another ethereal reality.

She was on the wrong floor and pressed another number. Doors closed. She was going up. Up to the room of a foreign businessman who would take her through night into morning.

Everyone in town was making money. 

Billboards shouted, “Making Money in China is Glorious!”

She carefully folded hard earned hard currency into her black purse after a long hot shower and took the elevator back down. Gliding through a revolving glass and brass door, she passed a deserted dark empty Japanese restaurant and negotiated gray stained industrial steps to Nanjing Xi Lu.  

Serious adults in blue industrial clothing practiced Tai Chi with controlled balanced concentration. Every methodical movement had meaning. Dawn's collective breath formed a mist crashing around her well worn heels as she skipped over cracked city stones through their shadows. 

A neighbor cried out to a neighbor asking for something at high decibels.  

A motorcycle roared past followed by a bike bell ringing a sharp corner warning. Two old women wearing thick clothing talked about the price of vegetables, cool days and the fate of their children. Their words adjusted to musical volumes and surreptitious encounters in careful dark corners where sexual repressed couples groped for meaning. 

This is a small corner of the world. This is a small corner of the sky. This is all there is and it is enough for now.

Days, weeks and months later the foreigner finally exploded in anger and frustration. His bitterness understands locals don't know it's OK to lock the door. There are bars on his windows and he feels like a prisoner. 

Boredom, his enemy, has carved out a niche, a river in the soul.  

He declined offers to eat with the family. He needs distance. He is a dream they had, an intrusion on their language acquisition and their personal desire for growth caught up in unknown varieties of kindness. 

How many words will it take to explain this to them as anger grows from giving in? Listening to the wild wife talk on and on as her husband tries to wheel and deal. Nothing but endless questions. 

Interrogations during the Cultural Revolution.

His imagination engine kicks in. It's a ghost. A predator eating living beings, flesh. Tearing them apart as they sit and rest and doze off after playing cards. 

They shout at the deaf man in a small room with bars on the window.  Help us! they scream. 

His last week is the longest. The finest. 

Metta.