Year of the Bore

The Chinese locusts have invaded big time.

All of SEA is feeling the effect of their economic power, leverage and appetite for development and profit good, bad or indifferent. They promote and develop the “new” Silk Road. They need ports, railroads, electricity and access to markets while creating monster debt diplomacy.

The Chinese are here to stay with currency exchanges, grocery stores, hotels, tour agencies and casinos.

Many need a refresher course in polite public manners. It’s like Big Brother the zookeeper forgot to lock their cages one day and they all escaped to wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens in other countries.

When I see them wearing cheap farmer straw hats, talking louder than an exploding volcano, browbeating shopkeepers to lower the price on cheap souvenirs and following the leader down the street like good communist party members I remember sitting with Bozo, an English major at Poetry University in Fujian in 2007.

We’d share noodles on “old” student street. Hundreds of students passed by going or coming from cheap eats.

She turned to me. “See all these people? They are all peasants.”

Confident with marketing and language skills she found work with a multi-national in Beijing or Shanghai joining the rising middle class.

Happy new year!
 

Fresh street food

Draw the dead

How did I get here?

You Are Blank

It says nothing.

It reveals deep dark silent secrets, heart pulsating memory.
It is a short string of letters with blank white face spaces in places. It says nothing.
Nothing is filled with _________ . (fill in the blank)

You are blank. You draw a blank. The blank is created by your subconscious dream machine. 
Eye - mind - hand - heart. Your machine is fully functioning and capable of emitting highly charged radioactive electrons.

You are a spinning swirling mass of electrons existing in space.
Space is empty. You are a vacuum in space filled with absolutely nothing.

I have nothing to say and I am saying it.

There is no final exam or grade. However, the elemental particle grade may be a little warped in space places so please watch your step near edges. Nothing is clear.

"We are all born mad, some remain so." - overheard on a Chinese bus filled with pigs going to market.

Mandalay, Burma

Black Coffee & Vinyl

Ice is the theme.

Willona Sloan, Curator & Managing Editor of Black Coffee & Vinyl selected one of my ice images for the January edition. Cool.

They feature high quality Sound, Art, and Words.

Check it out. Share with friends.

Black Coffee & Vinyl

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."