Give Blood

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” said a girl to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

The Language Company

Beauty's Mirror

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Oregon tree house.

Getting down and dirty after 1,001 years away from the typewriter.

Covered in construction dust needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine.  It’s capable of transforming life energies and weaving adventures. Threads follow the needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler, literary outlaw, photographer and journalist.

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

Punctuation is a nail.

My mirror reflects everything.

Beauty needs no tongue.

I’m confidant and self-reliant. I explore the human condition. Visual storytelling.

Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes.

I absorb being, joy, anger, jealousy, ignorance, desire, fear, greed, passion and suffering.

Hurl your thunderbolt unto death.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

The world is an illusion.

Grasping is suffering.

Values, attitudes, joy, belief systems and dreams evolve in my mirror.  

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is free of dust.

I evolve emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

I experience forgiveness with emotional honesty.

Creativity dances in language.

These truths don’t surprise you after 1,001 years of wandering.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

 

The world is made of stories not atoms

I’m filled with wild passion.

A mind-expanding drug of curiosity, delight and freedom increases my awareness.

The eternal present is a long now.

My power is big medicine. It’s a sacred connection to Gaia after 60,000 years of paying attention to details.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping an insect with thin microfilaments. Spider recycles her old web on the periphery. They haul it to a diamond center. It vibrates in a soft breeze.

Does the spider have any intention when building the web of catching the insect?

Does the flying insect have the intention of finding the web?

Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to sit in meditation. Another instinct is to take risks.

To do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly.

JUMP over the abyss.

My serenity is not purchased over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting an elegant universe in my heart. In my expanded state I am a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing fear, doubt and uncertainty.

I shatter myth.

Lightning bleeds off my charge creating transformation.

I am an unemployed fortuneteller. I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me.

I am a gravedigger/archaeologist. Soil is my groundwork. Look at my hands. I know two things. See good dirt under fingernails. I am the soft sand of sleep calming tortured hearts.

Abracadabra! My feminine nature hurls her lightning bolt even unto death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a short reprieve. My tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

It’s 100 degrees in blistering sun. I work hard and fast pounding typewriter keys, digging graves, discovering artifacts.

I dust history off history. I destroy the present to discover the future.

I hammer keys in a new form of construction business. Before bits, bytes and gadgets.

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

Shovels plow archaeological deserts reflecting passion and curiosity. An archaeologist inside a tomb waving Diogenes’s lamp yells, “Every bit we dig out tells a little more about the story.” They unearth a story revealing communities, customs and cultures.

A digger explains how it works. “This stuff we roughly estimate is between 1,800 to 1,990 years old. We use a method called carbon dating. It measures the amount of carbon-14 remaining in ancient material.”

“What is it?”

“Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon found in all organic matter. Scientists determine the age of fossils and artifacts by comparing test results to an international standard. We’ll send it to a lab for analysis.”

“Beautiful. Let me know what you discover, what you learn.”

Tourists find. Travelers discover.

Explorers sift discoveries through mesh screens. A delicate camel hairbrush caresses historical fragments. They dig toward 8,000 well-rested Chinese terra-cotta warriors in battle formation standing ready for excavation.

Chariots, horses and supplies with trapped Mandarin survivor voices echo toward the surface causing vibrational shifts.

Confucian scholars join them. Buried since 210 B.C., guarding Qin Shi-huang-di, the first Emperor of China, their collective consciousness breath creates tremor waves near Xian, the capital of Imperial China.

Warriors stand silent on the edge of the Gobi desert along the Silk Road. Voices sing swirling word storms. They hear brushes shovels, earth moving equipment and hammering keys approach their hidden truth.

“They are coming for us,” said a warrior.

In my inner garden of crimson stimulus I tend wild roses. Nostrils scent sense.

I have a responsibility to the thorns.

Ice Girl in Banlung

  It’s fucking hysterical.

  Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodian animist jungle languages.

  Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

 How long have you been here, said Rita a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

  All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

  Ok, she said cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation and form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity and evolution of humans in this total phenomena? My name is Rita.

  Good to meet you. I’m Leo the Lionhearted. Yes, if you slow down. How is life here?

  I work, I breed, I get slaughtered. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and destiny are two sides of the same coin.  Janus.

Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. She smiled. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies. They are same word. I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath a whisper.

Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice with a rising sound on the k sounding like a meaning I understand without internal meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? Many people have conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok? Ok?

 Ok. Address the very low literacy rate.

  Hello, literacy rate, how are you, she said.

  I am well and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. I know my English is not grammatically correct but I know my English is fluent. The more I see the less I know.

  Well said, said Ice Girl. Someone said literacy means reading and writing.

  I doubt it, said Literacy, Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, shelter, clothing and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth. It’s the last thing that dies.

  Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold. I love myth, fiction, truth and inventing stories.

 I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. Poor people see education and school as a waste of time and money.

Education and medicine are expensive.

 I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate direct sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence in the big picture. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge fast. Spoken words float around looking for a character, like plot.

 Too many people talk out their stories. Lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills and rejuvenates magic and mystery. Ghost stories.

 World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

 Here’s my secret. I look for a literary agent. Someone said they help writers. I sent one a query. One wrote me a letter. I will share it with you later. I write at night. During the day I’m busy with school and selling ice. If they ask me I will send them a manuscript. Maybe they will love it. Maybe they’ll find a publisher with a big marketing budget and the rest is history as they say. If not I’ll be independent and publish it myself. Ice is my life and I will never give it up. Besides writing, laughing, loving and living, it’s my life.

  Wow, that’s lovely, said Leo.

  Yes, she said, I follow my bliss. If it’s not in your heart, it’s not in your head. I’ll tell you about the agent later.

  A man arrived on a broken motorcycle. She gave him a blue plastic bag of ice. He gave her Real currency.

  Sure. I follow my blisters, laughed Leo.

  Where are you staying, she asked.

  I don’t have a home. I live in small houses along the road. For now I sleep at Future Bright.

  I know it. The woman owner smiles and lies at the same time.

 What’s the difference between hearing and listening, Leo asked?.

98% are asleep with their eyes open, she said. They don’t know and don’t care. It’s endemic.  They look without understanding. The remaining 2% are dead and long gone.

She opened her notebook. She spilled red ink on white paper. Red is a lucky color of wealth and prosperity. Living in a red dust town brings everyone good luck.

  Tell me about your visionary skills, said Leo.

  I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I connect the dots forward. I practice detached discernment. My job is to pay attention to direct immediate experience, get it down and make sense of it later.

People here live in a perpetual disconnect. They are talking monkeys looking for a place to happen. They can’t focus. Their attention span is ZERO. Like Year 0 in 1975 before I was born. No attention span? No problem.

  How about your town, asked Leo.

 Red dust roads in Banlung are paved with blue Zircon and Black Opals (nill) reflecting Ratanakiri, or “Gem Mountain.” Rich city women wear blue Zircon, gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, sparkle bling. Rural women do not wear this wealth.

Married women wear red bead strings. They fashion yellow, red, blue, green, glittering plastic bangles on necks and wrists.

  Here it’s about food and honoring Earth spirits. Animists believe taking stones harms the spirits, creating an imbalance in the natural order of things.

  Thanks for Life Lesson #3, said Leo. I’m going to have a look-see. See you later.

Ice Girl in Banlung

not true

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development, conflict and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence.

Make me pay attention.

Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls.

Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka and season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, Indonesian gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Get to the verb.

            “Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

            “Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

            “1.7 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.

"Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

            “Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

            “Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

            “Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory a form of history. Rewrite history.          

“Your memory is the world and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

            “I will, will you?” said Rita.

"Maybe baby. I have a question for Lucky.”

            “He’s here.”

            “What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

            ”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

            “Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

            “During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

            Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

            It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

            “Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

            “Dead or blind there’s no difference,” Flower said. “People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”

The Language Company