Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho.

He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying. I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Spiral Foundation

In Hue the Healing The Wounded Heart shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization in Nepal and Vietnam.

            Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love.

At the SPIRAL workshop they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. All net proceeds from handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries.

Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

Hue Help, an educational charity, works with an orphanage, mobile health care units and supports volunteers creating educational vocational projects. They work with the visually challenged. They have three schools providing supplementary education.

The Vietnamese attitude is to be perfect in school so they fear failure, said the short-term British volunteer coordinator.

How do you survive here? I said. Always incorporate a condom in your lesson plan, hide your money and trust only 10% of the people.

The Hue Embroidery Center on the bank of the Perfume River has a fine art gallery.

*

The House of the Artist at Night with 12 Emotions

30 breaths whisper leaves changing color

invisible dialects dance mysteries

open heart women do embroidery

30 Japanese tourists in wheelchairs with guidebooks

behind a white haired woman in a rickshaw dawns attention span

30 single-minded awareness diamond minded white butterflies flutter

Perfume River flows as women laugh at unknown possibilities

30 singing girls on 30 bikes under 30 trees on 30 paths see

30 lightning bolts escape 30 clouds inside 30 central nervous systems. three o boy o

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

lanterns

Hoi An women unload the night catch of screaming silver fish into baskets, weighing, selling, slicing and frying protean. I wander through the market smelling fish, meat, vegetables, inspecting fruit in broken light.

I am Lucky Foot. Wherever I am I bring good luck to universal money exchangers, manicure salon girls, banana woman, schools kids, tailors, cloth sellers and craggy faced Dan the local boat captain who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the war.

I bring good fortune to the 125cc motorman, water seller girl, barber, high-heeled sandal seller, massage love sock girls, noodle mama and rent-a-life companies. HCE – Here Comes Everybody.

A girl searches Tailor Town for magic silk, linen, cotton cloth and an invisibility cloak. Everywhere every day everyone on their quest meets the old woman with a basket sitting outside the cloth market discovering the exact threads they need.

Everyone has a quest. Some have quests for air, water, food, sex, shelter, clothing and money. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs feeds the sheep. Someone else owns the grass.

I stop at a salon. I ask for a pedicure. The women are shocked. They are familiar strangers. Everyone smiles and laughs. Ha they chatter in musical frequencies. The old snake wants to shed his skin.

It’s good to know all the walking, treading movement and sole memories are so easily erased as curling epidermis falls away.

How slow can you travel?

You discover ice in the market. It is a floating world of light and shadows.

Ukiyo-e.

In the old town past the Japanese bridge is a serene shady street lined with trees, homes and shops. An abandoned temple once used as a school is jammed with jumbled desks and dusty forgotten Communist party political posters. It is now a workshop for bamboo lantern production.

Hoi An is famous for circular red bamboo lanterns. Their reflections line the river at night and decorate streets and homes. Boys carry long bamboo poles into a courtyard, set them on a chopping block and split them lengthwise with a machete. They cut long pieces into ten-inch sections and split them into the thin fragments. Three women chat while shaving the narrow green bamboo pieces.

Boys drill holes in the pieces using a simple punch machine. Girls and women assemble wooden lacquered bases for tops and bottoms by wiring pliable bamboo staves into bases to shape and curve frames with circular dialogue.

A young girl does her homework using a chair for a table as her mother works. An old frail woman arranged lines of fresh lacquered staves to dry in the sun. Every generation has their role to play.

A boy loops piles of round bamboo skeletons on his bike for merchants who’ll wrap diaphanous red cloth skins around frames.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Phu Bai

In Phu Bai I shared my story of arriving when I was older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow. I arrived from Saigon in 1969.

I stayed at the 8th Radio Research Field Station for a couple of days and volunteered to join the 265th Radio Research Company supporting the 101st twenty miles north. Screaming Eagles. Chicken Hawk. Saigon bar girls called us the Chicken Fuckers. They were the chickens.

Going north was a wise choice. The 8th enjoyed stateside amenities. Rosie cheeked donut dollies from O Hi O gave crochet lessons on Saturday and banged officers.

The 265th was a life lesson in teamwork, respect, trust and relationships. People rotated in. People rotated out. I put in my time and paid my dues for 364 days.

I returned to the world and became a happy ghost on a flight from S.F. to Colorado in 1970. Traveling became my mistress, motivation and meditation. I collected and invented stories about life’s ebb and flow in a long film with diverse characters, fate, chance and opportunity.

I put my Nam experience in a memoir called ART, Adventure, Risk and Transformation, a memoir published in 2019.

I discovered a piece of paper in the parking lot at Phu Bai airport. I turned it over. It was from a Vietnamese Airlines container/pallet cart. In big blue letters it said EMPTY. I slipped it into my Moleskine.

A perfect Ah Ha moment.

*

In 1970 three of us drove over the Perfume River and through the Ngan Gate into the Citadel in Hue. It is a masterpiece of Nguyen architecture. Five massive stone slabs with Five Phoenix Watchtowers and nine yellow glazed tiled roofs resembled five birds in flight.

A benevolent Blue Dragon sculpture guarded the East. The aggressive White Tiger protected the West. Harmony. We passed through the Southwest Ngo Mon Gate (Noon), one of five into the Imperial City.

The citadel was built in an auspicious location preserving the harmony of heaven and earth, man and nature. Welcome, said a Vietnamese intelligence liaison officer. He led us through a courtyard to the Thai Hoa Palace, or the Palace of Supreme Harmony, constructed in 1805 for ceremonies, coronations and receiving foreign ambassadors. It glowed with red and gold lacquers.

There were once large bronze pots and urns in this courtyard, he said. During the Tet offensive in 1968 they were melted down for ammunition.

Twenty-five days, including ten days of house-to-house combat killed 5,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, 384 Southern troops, 142 Americans and 1,000 civilians. Described by one journalist as the bitterest battle of the war. War is hell.

A two-story building with pink paint was divided into classrooms for artists studying music, art and sculpture. Painters created behind easels as a young man posed as a Greek archer. Off a verandah sculptors worked around a kiln with tables of bronze warrior figures.

Music students tuned delicate instruments creating soft melancholy sounds, weeping energies, ancient cultural memories. It was the perfect place to meditate and inhale venerable music in a calm way.

The Swiss and I visited eight ostentatious tombs south of Hue. Ancient sites with pristine carvings of dynasties. We climbed stone steps and wandered corridors seeing gilt carved thrones and photographs of kid emperors. History was guarded by statues of civil and military mandarins, horses and elephants.

Hard to imagine they built all this for one little emperor, said Sam.

In twilight we explored old tombs, thick forests and an ornate wooden pavilion extending over a lake where 108 concubines recited poetry to a lucky little emperor once upon a time.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life.

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