Ice is the theme.
Willona Sloan, Curator & Managing Editor of Black Coffee & Vinyl selected one of my ice images for the January edition. Cool.
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“’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
Shoes For Sale
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
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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."
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.
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
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