Hanoi Job

After walking through a narrow Hanoi concrete passageway and dodging motorcycles on chaotic dream streets I ate in silence with young desolate hardhat construction workers.

I visited Jasmine, 21, a tall regal aristocratic beautiful virgin with a trembling lower lip allowing her to develop English fluency and confidence. She has a university degree and works as an office girl at DUMB, an international shipping company. Their office is on the 101st floor of Ocean Parking, a silver & glass business monster with many empty offices.

Her manager, Sonny Boy, invited me over for breakfast on the top floor overlooking Lenin Park and massive traffic gridlock. He has an MBA from Hollandaise.

This is how it works in a Socialist country, he said, People are not paid enough so they figure out how to make more money by ... shall I say, using their position, their opportunity to increase their profit ...

at Level One people need to get a good education and get a job with a multinational company ...

at Level Two they need connections with the authorities, they need to move up the food chain with government people having no ethics and no morals it’s all about Survival, this is the empirical reality derived from experiment and observation and connections and facts rather than theory.

Dancing wind and lightning bolts send shock waves through the atmosphere.

Jasmine sleeps her noon dream.

Her mother cleans glass display world windows downstairs in unconscious soup zones.

A woman adjusts her bamboo hat above a face mask resting her lungs from morning’s bike pedal adventure loaded with heavy duty plastic five-gallon containers of cooking oil.

A temporary consumer boredom passes through a metamorphic Carpe Diem, 24/7 below a solace solarium.

Wagging tongues inside language laughter weave a crème silk linen blend as an old blind woman wielding a bamboo staff leads her blind husband along a narrow cement path past high cracked walls dreaming about their long lost free orphan children prospering in green villages away from the madness.

Hanoi LOUD Speakers by Tran

Garden is a green dawn. Mynahs high in early breeze whistle Living Is Happiness.

Keep your hand moving yes no maybe automatic central nervous system electrical impulses dance ink in a notebook as a Hanoi train whistle signals its approach to a crossing.

A low frequency of rumbling engines pulling thirteen green cars penetrates a thick hazy pollution cloud cover.

An authoritarian female voice echoes from rusty loudspeakers at Lenin Park.

SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY

LOVE YOUR PARENTS

REMEMBER YOUR ANCESTORS

REPORT UNUSAL BEHAVIOR

PRACTICE GOOD SOCIALIST BEHAVIOR

DO NOT PEE OR SPIT IN PUBLIC

CARE YOUR NEIGHBORS

WASH YOUR PAJAMAS

CLEAN OUT YOUR DREAMS

SACRIFICE FOR THE COLLECTIVE HARMONY

Every street corner in Hanoi wears million-year-old wired concave loudspeakers mounted on tall grey cement pilings. The city is crisscrossed by pilings, black spider wires and speakers before, during and after wars.

At 7:45 a.m. they blare out tinny indistinguishable news propaganda blather and martial music. Residents marching to new economic tunes ignore ha noise.

Making Money Is Glorious Comrade!

Impatient frustrated motorcycle people beep-beep-beep to negotiate a thin street filled with kids, elderly walkers and young exercise addicts going or coming from Lenin park after crossing congested wide boulevards as mercenary maniacs increase 125cc speed.         

Women carrying bamboo baskets filled with vegetables, bricks, recycled steel, bread and dreams mix with residents sitting on tiny plastic kindergarten forever young chairs crowding homes and store fronts, drinking beer, peeling, peeing, cooking, eating incense, screwing, living and dying.

Inside numerous open portal homes fronted by rusty gray metal accordion gates motorcycles nestle in the front room. Central parking. Volume idiot box images flickers phosphorescence, marketing, branding and economic advertising:

WE DON’T HAVE WHAT YOU WANT

WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED

into brains and faces of comatose kids, parents, grandparents and dead ancestors. An old woman sits slumped against a doorframe staring at the box.

She hasn’t seen the sky for years.

If she looks left and up she can see a slight sliver shiver that’s it, said Tran.

Let’s eat. Let’s watch TV. Let’s look at our phones. Give up your consciousness.

Fill your stomach. Everyone is happy. Life is amazing and short.

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

Department of Truth

According to Zeynep, a scripter in the present, I speak because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So. Help. Me.

1. Truth is classified. The source of truth about everything is classified. I am authorized to say with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

1a. The crypto key is top-secret for your blind eyes only. Grave Digger knows the combination and algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your face, mind, heart, consciousness or Lifebook personal profile time bandit. Real friends are few.

1b. Artificial friends are aliens on life support. The key for Time is inside an arrow piercing Greater Complexity with Entropy. A woman, man, child in country XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.

2. Truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke, the laugh track.  If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get the joke. Your tears speak and mangle fictional truth-story. They distort and strangle it. Truth is a figment of your imagination. Literary outlaws lie to tell the truth.

3. Truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia, author of Voices, being authorized to speak said, Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

4. Truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source. Eat your broccoli, walnuts and almonds. Biolabs will purify water and distribute free medicine and C-19 vaccinations to every human on Earth. Genetics will create Socratic open-ended educational dreams.

4a. Truth is a starving homeless mother pulling a heavy two-wheeled trash cart with flat tires through a dusty Cambodian town as her daughter forages in garbage containers for food, water and medicine. She is a qualifier, a split infinitive in infinity where someone’s leftovers are another’s banquet.

5. Truth will provide more than 1 billion people access to safe drinking water.

6. Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people who cannot read. Women are 2/3 of this number.

7. Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world who have ZERO access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

9. Truth is a terminal disease like peace, love and blindness.

10.Truth is a sledgehammer in Mandalay, Burma.

Love is not truth.

11. Truth is food in your stomach.

This is The Truth Channel. Game, Set, Match.

Media dumbs down sheep.

Technology eats humans.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Pay Attention

A monk asked Yang-chi.

How to escape the clamor of the mind?

Read the ancient text.

What is the ancient text?

The moon is bright in space. The waves are calm on the ocean.

How does one read it?

Watch your step.

*

Creative Hanging Out by Tran

Please put the blue sky on the white table. It is fragile and creased along the horizon.

Pay Attention.

There are:

People who want to control you

People who want to blame you

People who want to distract you

Samuel Beckett was very precise. He didn’t want theories or any level of intellectualization. He paid a lot of attention to the tone of voice and to the relationships among the characters. He cared a great deal about the silences and the pauses. It’s as beautiful as the chance encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, the essence of surrealism.

Freedom is being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience, said David Foster Wallace.

DFW had the courage to express in absurd detail what it feels like to live, observe and experience life. He knew many humans lacked the sincerity and honesty to really voice their awareness. He gave us deep exquisite work and then checked out. He suffered from depression. Pale King.

Every feeling waits for its gesture. Gestures use people as their instruments, bearers and incarnations. Impressions exist in a distinct serene zone of imprecise calculation. Observations dance with empirical data structure. Art, symbols and metaphor.

Language is a virus, like C-19.

Blue dragonfly eyes create a lightning bolt. Flashes of brilliance in the DNA helix reveal spiritual and truth-value meaning in your play. The poetic inspiration rebels against science and math.                                 

Dancing color spectrum

Jellyfish aqua laughter smells sweet fresh cut grass

Yellow butterfly voices perspiration’s inspiration

Transparent wave energies wash your interior/exterior dream

I love to doodle, said Zeynep. It’s my meditation. Everyone doodles their noodle while splashing in their life puddle.

Good travel writing is The Art of Creative Hanging Out, said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Natasha From Kiev

Zeynep said, I read about how women are treated in many countries. Here in Turkey health care workers report 65% of all wives are beaten by their husband.  It’s considered normal behavior because women are treated as property.

We’ve all read stories about arranged marriages, child marriages and the desperate plight of women on Earth. Men never learned how to kiss and make up, the women know about makeup and suffering in silence, women are literally and figuratively screwed, she said.

I tell the truth. I don’t have to remember what I said, said Rita.

Zeynep’s story about domestic abuse reminded Omar of Natasha.

On September 1, 2001, ten short days before an Apocalypse in the big apple, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Your Self, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months.

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5-year-old son. Her name was Natasha, tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They’d met at the university in Kiev and now he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son. He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home.

Natasha had heard rumors, myths and fabricated lies about her fate but had never seen it because she was blind. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family and live. She did not speak French or Arabic.

Her cheap red, white and blue plastic Russian baggage fell apart at the seams. Her son pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself.

I’d finished a draft of A Century is Nothing that summer. I was jumping through a window into hunting and gathering adventures discovering new material.

Everyone spoke the same language as unanimous night collapsed around roaring planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere. We were buried at graveyard gate 54D, miles from gleaming duty free shops with exotic perfumes, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, diamond rings, watches, customs, clothing stores.

Wealthy shoppers carried yellow plastic bags saying, Buy and Fly.

A homeless Asian elf dragged a purple bag saying, Buy & Cry.

A destitute shadow of a former self had a clear bag saying, By the By.

An orphan had an empty bag saying, Why Tell Me Why.

No one in particular had Papa’s Gotta Brand New Bag.

Everyone carried his or her bag of skin & bones to the graveyard.

At midnight in Casablanca passengers walked through a towering hall of intricate inlaid blue mosaic tiles and waterfalls. Huge framed images of a smiling monarch watched people.

Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited. Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through nothing to declare green zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her broken bags on a cart and she disappeared into humanity with her son. Her husband’s Berber family approached - his father, mother, brother-in-law and grandmother in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy. As the old couple walked away I knew they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their DNA connection to their son.

Natasha, an alien aberration in their world would be relegated to a harsh new reality. She moved into their world with a Ukrainian passport, speaking an unknown tongue to be a slave serving her new family. She would be many things to them. They would manifest their loss on her. She’d carry water and chop wood. She’d cook, clean and slave away. Fate gave her new opportunities.

She’d carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and memories. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a sprawling chaotic city of five million.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his dark eyed nomadic destiny life. When Natasha was trapped in the airport he was with a prostitute and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

Omar whispered this fairy tale to Natasha. She didn’t believe it.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged