Dead Dog

Hope is the last thing that dies, yells Dave’s wife. Take out the garbage fat man, lose face idiot, hide your shame, raise your voice like a torn flag of authority, signaling your displeasure with infants, get them in line, shape them up because you can’t ship them out.

You will raise them to yell with the best of them. They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep and cackling crows sending shivers down your spineless pitiful form filled with regret, anger and fear manifesting your tight choking life under long cold florescent lights in a shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will burn you and carry your photo to the village artist who will memorize your face in black and white tones. On the family altar we will look at your frozen 8x10 face forever and give you fruit and water offerings.

We  burn incense so your spirit can eat, so it will not be angry and return as a yelling, demanding, hungry ghost or an invisible reliable scripter. You will perform your filial duty

One day in the near future of now, your dead ancestors will remember sounds, words, phrases and life sentences called talk-speak until they achieve the decibel level required to rejoin the family’s formless form. They will compete in yelling contests with speaking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, spouse, child, boss, lover, or stranger yells. I ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells again a little louder. No answer. I wait for them to yell louder, said a ghost hiding in Silence.

Silence is Form, Style, Sensation, Nothing and the Reality of Death.

After I’ve made them yell three times I answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. To teach them a lesson I answer with a Whisper. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with other yellers around them.

They are distracted by sensory stimuli overload.

I embrace chaos in the glare of ancestor memories. My sweet revenge.

I reject them with silence, a deadly comprehensive weapon.

Two ghosts whisper - give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes.

My name is Avalokiteshvara.

I am a Bodhisattva of compassion for all beings.

I churn the Ocean Of Milk at Angkor Wat.

I am infinite wisdom in the ocean of wisdom.

*

Ha Noise people evolve in small tight spaces where voice people practice perpetual eternal racket over each other and don’t listen and yell louder while others ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Angry Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas, the Vietnamese national costume  ... They are a cheap red pastel cotton decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had no choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to pay big money and marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents while growing up which is how they grew into this higher intelligent life form  ... to reproduce.

Their destiny is to breed, work and get slaughtered down on the killing floor.

I pass narrow minded little hovels guarded by locks, doors and rusting metal curtains. Alleys are crammed with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in alleys using round perforated compressed coal, workers haul cement, bricks, wire, and stones creating glorious Marxist production methods using a knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, and control stick elephant. All fine well and good being a means to an end everything.

An end to a means the end, the means steams beans, streams data.

Lying in a neighborhood street packed with screaming, beeping careening manic cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling wilting produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert. This spectacular spectacle attracted everyone. They escaped homes/shops holding something valuable and precious.

CUT! yelled the Director

Characters froze in place.

Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood  ...  

a girl held her red balloon, a retired man his glass of urine beer  ...  

a grandmother gripped her grandkid everyone staring at the dead dog as twilight rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient musical cacophonies negotiating through the blind crowd to get home to families, sex, food, television and safety before dark.

ACTION!

A thin old man emerged from his small dark space, perfect for hiding from strangers, invaders and dust. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs lifting it in the air, dripping blood. He was a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful adventure on the moors. Wild hounds flushed it running wild, filled with fear and free. They treed it, trapped it and killed it.

His inscrutable face showed no emotion. He held the dripping dead dog.

Blood formed a small pool on pavement surrounded by angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his cerebral cortex offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas and significant silences minus appropriate words inside or outside the mystery and quality of death personified so he stood there holding the legs until he laid the dog in the gutter and the dog’s body relaxed itself into itself.

He turned away from neighbors and beep-beep fascination. He entered his dark interior space with shadows and ghosts.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Children of the dust

Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.

A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

June

June from Stockholm, Sweden visited Cambodia for a month. 36-years young. She was married for ten angry years to an African American from Atlanta. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties.

She opened up. I don’t know what I’m running away from. I don’t know what I'm running toward. We talked about the amazing labyrinths inside Angkor temples, an allegory of her life.

One door closes and one door opens but the passages can be a bitch, whispered Omar.

She’d evolved as a willing victim of old manipulative lies from authority figures like family, husband, boss and friends in her life. How she’d believed old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others.

Her new day in Cambodia, this beginning offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth. To become authentic she’d face her fears and shadows or run with a hellhound on her trail.

I want to cut off all my hair, she said. It was long curling blond movie star mane quality. We went to a salon. She was nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off.

I feel lighter now, transformed, said June.

She altered her outward appearance releasing old anxieties. By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors as a complete symbolic gesture, June realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues in freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path.

One day June went thirty miles north to experience a village influence on her consciousness. She visited My Grandfather’s House and the local school. What do you need, she asked. She bought them a water purifier. She purchased a battery so they’d have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop. She purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through dry brown flat countryside past bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and talking. We were far away from the town filled with fat happy white tourists doing Angkor.

June talked a blue streak unloading her honesty, hopes and dreams mixed with anxieties and fears.

I feel good doing this. I’ve never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Now that I’m in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I’m beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better.

We turned off a paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Women and men sat in the shade. June met the kids and a young mother.

Here, she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste. For you. The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year-old woman, a former Apsara dancer, performed quick delicate hand movements. June copied her to the delight of everyone.

I’ll be back, she yelled as kids ran waving goodbye. Now I feel more fulfilled, she said.

We stopped in a small market village for ice coffee. Young girls selling colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us.

Buy something? Look at my things. June met Leaf, 13, in the 5th grade. Leaf learned English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. Leaf showed us her village home.

See you here tomorrow at 2 p.m., June said to Leaf.

I saw a leader in the girl’s eyes, said June as we rolled back to the city. Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow.

June had to modify her dream for the girl.

Let’s be practical, I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $1,000 a month is like finding clean drinking water.

The next day June bought a brand new pink bike for Leaf with a bell and basket. It said, NEW STAR on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore. She bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers, twenty English books, picture dictionaries and storybooks. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village.

Leaf, her family and friends were waiting for June. They raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market and older sisters hustle male tourists hoping to find a boyfriend, get married and escape.

Here Leaf all this is for you, said June. The bike will help you get to school, temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English.

Leaf smiled. Thank you. Leaf jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust and broken leaves around the house. June spread the books out and kids explored images, words, letters and colors.

I feel really good about this, said June. Real good. I’ve made a small difference in a young girl’s life. I am so grateful. June had a humbling life changing experience.

That’s a good idea for a children’s book, said Rita.

Nature is what you can be and culture is what you are, said Leo.

One day on a toothbrush run June traveled along another dusty red road and stopped at a village shop selling soap, coconuts and bananas. A girl wore a t-shirt with a picture of a skull and bones.                                  

Danger! LANDMINES!

She wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling.

She said. Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 18 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have enough medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground. I’m really good at numbers. Talk to me before you explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

June woke up in Cambodia, returned to Sweden and changed her life around.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Cadiz

Omar and Akiko entered a student cafe for pan, butter, strawberry jam and coffee. The place hummed with readers, writers, calculators, talkers and dreamers. Students checked their phones to tell time. They told time where to go. Silent time told them to eat faster and get their sweet ass to class. White gamma rays bathing the room sang through skylights.

I visited Ashiakawa on the island of Hokkaido one fall, said Omar. Speak memory, said Akiko. Beached summer red and yellow canoes were tied up for winter. Ducks and mallards rested on water. Women gathered leaf shadows along wide paths. At a Shinto temple on a small island an old brown structure imposed its sentinel protection. Sacred space.

There was a Tori gate, cement bridge and guardian lions in the small courtyard. Crows cackled. At the temple was a square stone basin of water with four wooden ladles resting on a crossbar. A single cup of water dipped and poured back into the basin created a visual ripple effect. A drop on the surface released a thousand colors as a golden and brown pebble bottom exploded. One drop created smooth colors before emptiness and stillness.

A visitor dropped single splashes. Ephemeral beauty. I inspected paper prayers and 1,000 white crane offerings fluttering near stone steps. Two women arrived at the water basin, drank deep, spat water out, walked up steps, clapped their hands three times, bowed in prayer, clapped three times, threw coins through wooden slots into the temple, clapped twice, walked down stone steps and threw remaining water on stone lions, laughed and crossed the stone bridge. Leaves floated reflection shadows in the world.

Akiko laughed, I don’t have a particular god.

The Dali Lama said the only true religion is one of love and kindness, said Omar.

I understand.

They walked to the Playa de la Caleta beach past a shit-covered statue of Simon Bolivar on his bronze horse singing his mercenary exploits in Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Bolivia. They felt sand below a blazing sun. Men in blue coveralls raked and shoveled trash into a wheelbarrow. Violent foaming wild southern flanks of green blue black sea smashed rocks. East water was calm.

Spanish women under umbrellas knitted gossip with bright red yarn. Memory cards captured digital coastlines, long human shadows and a solitary cane as an elderly person performed her rebirth in water transformation therapy.

She swam to Kampot, Cambodia and married a pepper farmer. She gave him twins named Alpha and Omega. She taught them Spanish and oral storytelling magic. They introduced her to orphanages and Zen meditation practice. She swam back to Cadiz to find her crutch. It was gone.

Tavia Tower next to the Music Conservatory displayed a 360-degree perspective with tight white Moorish cubist homes slanting into cupola cathedral spires tolling eternal songs.

Religion is larger than human existence because we promise eternal salvation, said a friar, a monk and adept Brahmin.

History’s ocean was vast, spectacular, sad and incomprehensible.

Akiko cried farewell. Waving into an empty blue sky Omar vanished in Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Shinto shadows. Akiko’s energy spirit, strength, freedom and dignity was a sweet memory called the past. Stable and fluctuating mirages.

Playing his Honer blues harp in the key of C he wandered deserted Cadiz noon streets singing about a train leaving the station with a red light on behind. Taking my baby away. All my love’s in vain.

Good love story said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Akiko

The fear of living, observing and experiencing in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them, said David Foster Wallace.

Sheep fear watching other people make things happen and not knowing what the fuck is going on, said Z. Sheep and robots fear taking a risk.

They know it’s easier to do nothing than take a chance, said Leo.

I cut useless meaningless vague words blocking the narrative river. I am innocent, happy, empty and brave. I am not afraid to make wise selections when it comes to editing this massive amount of verbiage, said Zeynep.

Where’s the burn bag, said the janitor.

I fear Room 101, said Winston Smith in 1984.

Leo - In Utopia we learn the less we do the fewer mistakes we make. The fewer mistakes we make the less we are criticized. I remain safe and happy. It’s called THE SYSTEM. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian education systems. Students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution that is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic. Social conditioning.

A teacher is Parent #2.

Big Brother is watching. Save face.

The fear of humiliation is greater than the fear of death, said Death.

Karma is the universal law.

Will your characters discuss moral ambiguities? Yes. They will speak with nouns and verbs and use specific adjectives for description, playing with words like Joyce. They will play with ideas, like Borges, said Zeynep.

Attributes of good ideas said Devina.

a.         Simple

b.         Unexpected

c.         Concrete

d.         Credible

e.         Emotional

f.          Story-containing

Good writing is clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. There are people who talk about things, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas, said Z. The life of the mind. A wave in the mind.

Is a place a character, asked Tran, Sure, said Devina, A place has character like Kampot, Cambodia, a sleepy river town, famous for pepper, Sunflower’s hands, Milling Around and the SIGN ones, said Rita.

Writers use a specific location in their work, said Omar. Cadiz, Spain worked its way into my morning pages. I traveled with a word butcher after the Spanish Civil War. His laughing axe synthesized metaphors of death sacrifice and letting go. His mirrors became gifts (hello beauty) and gifts multiplied gifts with gratitude.  

The gift keeps moving. It was imperative to leave the united states of confusion and Morocco behind.

Exile suited my spirit. It was the irony of ironies, pressed irons with heavy starch in the collar please I told the world’s dry cleaner. Wash and wear. Dry a tear.

Nothing is true & everything is permitted, Omar said to Akiko, a Japanese fashion designer in Cadiz.

Everything is permitted with fabric and threads she said naked in the dark exploring their personal puzzle maps, tracing contours through the Sierras in Andalusia toward beaches woven with linen and silk. They were two orange and black butterflies dancing in a courtship ritual. They slept together in a Hokkaido love hotel filled with mirrors.

At 2 a.m. Cadiz garbage workers in fluorescent yellow tiger stripes collected discarded words along narrow streets.

Omar wrote the morning down as sky painted orange, pink and cerulean colors. A crescent moon hung in the west. He walked down Benjumeda Street as uniformed school kids gripped parental hands passing veiled grandmothers wearing widow market black at intersections on their daily economic briefing. Roman cobblestones rested in white shadows. Cool clear air dusted lungs.

The Plaza de Falla Moorish red brick extremities shimmered in soft light. Arches formed prayer hands. Golden, cast iron, bronze, brick, tile, and papier mâché arch models in the world prayed for non-violence, dialogue, a ceasefire and arms control. Arms out of control waved goodbye to sanity and millions of orphans.

Weary serious sad med students gripping texts crossed plazas toward class. Matriculation was a fading dream. Two men grimaced a ladder past a hospital and a fortune teller selling lottery tickets. Gambling was a big deal in Cadiz. Machines in bars with three virgin cherries rotated. ONCE lottery tickets bought the population where 40% were unemployed.

Pay now pray later. The best is yet to come, said an unemployed Roma fortune teller. A nurse in white perfection entered a cafe for coffee. Old people hobbled in and out of a hospital. A woman left the hospital carrying one crutch. Needing Grave Digger she walked past an ambulance.

I’m busy, he said, See my calloused hands.

Death stood watch 24/7 in the big leagues.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged