Writing Is Adventure

“’I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally memory gives way.” - Nietzsche.

“The interpreter” in the left brain strings experiences into narratives. A novelist in our heads. A novelist called memory ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call “My Life.”

"Writing and telling a story is all about detail and realising the significance of the insignificant." 

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." -Goethe

...In both Irish and Welsh myth and saga, the art of foretelling the future is an essential part of the story. More often then not, it is to escape their fate, prophesied by the Druid, that leads the protagonists into adventures which inevitably lead them to the fate they seek to avoid. 

...At one point, the narrator irreverently criticizes the author and the book, saying: "You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend- like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!" -Soul Mountain by Gao

"I want to know one thing. What is color?" - Picasso

The Language Company 

Shoes For Sale

Hello 2019

Here are two quotes for your philosophical diet in 2019.

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

"I have sought, I am searching, and I will search for what I call the Total Phenomenon, that is the Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, possibilities and impossibilities." - Paul Valery

*

We recently passed a woman working at a sewing machine. Her fingers bled a red color into life's fabric. A nearby sign read, "Plenty of work, no shoes."

Around life's corner, down a street, across a rope bridge, up a steep trail, through a green meadow, over a treacherous mountain and behind a sprawling desert at an oasis near a stream of life rested a young internally displaced boy. A nearby sign read, "No work, $150 shoes."

BS Backstory

Dark, a tour guide for Get Out, a Cuban travel company, visited Never-Never Land in 2009.

He met Strange, an H’mong man among men speaking excellent English. His nickname was Wandering Buffalo.

He worked with UXO, the Unexploded Ordinance Organization demining land in the morning and teaching English afternoons. He developed a soccer team.

Dark and his co-founder cohort Thor, a Viking singing sagas while invading Ireland helped Strange.

They established soccer team funding to take the Lao team to an international football event in Havana with caviar, cigars, goat cheese and noodle soup.

One week before leaving Strange died.

Dark and Thor made the Lao kids’ dreams come true. They went to Havana by steamship.

In 2012 they created BS offering English education to H’mong students in memory of Strange. Memories are strange.

Dark called Wick his best friend in Beijing asking for teaching help and setting up the school. Wick, a 55-year old Cuban trained lawyer and former financial analyst on Walled Street arrived.

Wick and Dark enrolled H’mong kids, used Sharp Cutting Edge texts and developed community awareness.

Dark did the marketing and publicity - embassies in China, Mongolia, South America and international companies. He filed NGO non-profit charity application documents in Greenland to facilitate Ice-9 donations.

After eighteen months of self-induced torture at BS Wick accepted a teaching job in Ulan Bator, Mongolia with yurts and steppes. Big money at a private school, he said, I need travel money for Uruguay. Try Patagonia, said IT, fresh off the banana boat.

Dark advertised for a volunteer teacher.

In the summer of 2013 Wick went to Ulan Bator, confirmed his new big money job and bought seventeen boxes of textbooks for elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced students at BS. He shipped them back by raft on the Mekong.

IT arrived in August. He met Dark in Luang Prabang overlooking the wild wide wet Nam Ou River and rolling green hills.

Dark was nervous about the situation and teacher transition. It was his baby. He’d invested his time, money and efforts in BS. He needed to feel secure in his choice.

He practiced micro-management with high anxiety.

It’s going to be ok, said Prophetic. Relax.

Dark left for Papa New Guinea seeking Mama Guinea and baby Guinean head hunters and cannibals while leading well heeled British tourists carrying clean drinking water through dengue malaria infected jungles, 5* menus and 300-count Egyptian linen.

IT began a new adventure at BS.

A Little BS

Beginning BS

There was a traveller. He was invisible.

IT - Invisible Traveller not Internet Technology.

He wandered Earth helping people discover their English courage, doing street photography and writing.

In April 2013 while polishing a new book, The Language Company in Seems Ripe, Cambodia with eagle-eyed daily discipline from 6-10 a.m. to be independently published in late 2014, he applied for a volunteer teaching position with Buffalo Strange (BS) an English school and Cuban charity in NE Laos.

He communicated with Dark, the co-founder.

The traveller first visited Laos in 2010 for a month, sailing north up the Nam Ou River for three days from Luang Prabang to Phongsali in the wilderness bordering China and Vietnam before wandering south to Pakse and entering Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

By 2019 Chinese financed damns block the flow. Electricity is sold to Thailand. 60 million people downstream in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam suffer from the economic and environmental impact.

In Cambodia he met Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung. They collaborated life stories forming the frame of a self-published novella.

He returned in 2011 helping grades 6 & 7 develop character and critical-thinking skills with curiosity and humor at a private school in Vientiane before graduating to a Montessori School in Luang Prabang to practice ABCs with new young friends.

In May 2013, before going to BS he went to Mandalay, Myanmar for ten weeks with Montessori kids at a private school. Ineffective management.

It didn’t meet his psychic needs. Burmese children taught him see say understand I am a miracle.

He learned. He wrote it down. He did documentary photography work. He left. He returned to Seems Ripe.

Dark contacted him in June 2013 in the off chance he was still available and interested. They talked specifics. IT went to Never-Never Land, Laos in August.

19 degrees 27’ 36” N, 103 degrees 10’48” E

A Little BS

Cut Ice

Ghosts said, we are nothing but historical history.

Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.

Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.

Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out of a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love and an easy ten bucks blinked.

An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit. An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder.

Where are we going? muttering to his feet wearing red dust. #1 man said, down this endless road.

The Wild West town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.

A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.

His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders, carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.

The Language Company