31 flavored daze

yes, exclaimed elf, we made it through march. march was a real adventure.

what did you do, queried weary bleary eyed orphan. 

oh, i had so much fun with the kids, like us. they were young curious playful energetic experiental wild and free.

that's a long verbal sentence, laughed orphan.

life is a long laughing sentence, said elf.

can we go out to play now, asked orphan.

yes, let's take the day off and be creative, said elf.

please give me a hug, said orphan, people need five hugs a day for emotional well being.

elf hugged orphan.

orphan hugged elf.

close march

let's close march, elf said to orphan.

yes, agreed orphan, march is still a day to go such a hot furnace of yellow laos skies as farmers burn fields 

o my yes indeed, agreed elf, all this sticky humid trapped hot air mixed with flying black ashes permeates pristine air water and soil

such a beautiful mess, said orphan donning a cotton gauze multi-threaded mask to prevent malaria and dengue

what's a dengue, wondered elf, scrubbing for an open heart surgical operation in hanoi

it's the fluid relaxation of intellectual reasoning as a shaman mask proclaims, confessing to the world 

see this face

i am you

pee wee play

a kid who had no idea
what was going on besides i want
grabbed for the yellow plastic ball
mine mine mine he screamed in Lao demanding

ball kid gripped tight
grimace
pulling away

suddenly 
four armed pee-wee power stranger rangers
with interlocking plastic
red, yellow, green, blue 
guns entered the fiasco 

hand it over or else
we blast you with our supersonic death ray
grabbing kid looked astonished
distracted

ball owner ran away
laughing, you can't BE serious

Taureg

Tuareg Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?” 

“Great morning prices.” 

Five hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning to invade Spain, married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had ten kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time.

Now he was on a 50cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slick black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

Used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool.

Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d arrived in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm. He was a hunter gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence — Metis — a hybrid form.

Metis

As an entomologist, a hunter-gatherer with Metis, a cunning intelligence, seeking visual epiphanies, he opened his aperture to f/1.4 and let in light. All of it. Blinding light, prisms of kaleidoscopes, muted spectrums in waves and particles guided his vision to see and stop time. 

Manipulate a tool. A well designed black foreign range finder. A camera obscura. It had the finesse of a magnifying glass, a Hubble telescope looking into an expanding infinite universe, illuminating distant black holes sucking matter into a void. He couldn’t see the black holes but he knew they were there.

It was one thing he carried. He started carrying it in Nam.

It was just a tool. It allowed him to stop time. Divide time in two.

The kairos of his eye allowed him to discriminate intuitively. An eye and a mirror. It refined his being, one with the subject, how silence worked, a detached observer, a photojournalist. How to disappear inside the scene, move with the quickness of a wild animal, see, visualize, anticipate the impending decisive moment stalking his prey with cunning. How to freeze, compose in the viewfinder, breath, squeeze, advance with a quick flick of the opposable thumb, load, unload, develop, fix, print, label, and file his work. Film was his prayer wheel.