20 Years

Once upon a time there was a man in a village.

For twenty years he went into the mountains searching for gold. Everyone said he was crazy.

One day he discovered gold. He took the gold to a bank and exchanged it for money.

He bought some rope. He tied one end of the rope around his waist.

He tied the other end to the pile of money.

He ran through the village dragging the money.

Everyone said he was crazy.

He said, "For twenty years I've been chasing money and now money is chasing me."

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Omar's Daughter

Omar remembered his daughter in Cadiz.

Faith worked at Mandarin Duck selling paper and writing instruments. She practiced a calm stationary way.

“May I help you,” she said one morning, greeting a bearded forcestero. Their eyes connected loneliness minus words. She averted her eyes. He was looking for pain free intimacy and ink.

“I’d like a refill for this,” he said, unscrewing a purple cloud-writing instrument with a white peak.

Recognizing the Swiss rollerball writing tool she opened a cabinet filled with boxes of cartridges.

“Fine or medium?”

“Hmm, lets try both.”

“One box of each?” she said.

“Yes please. I don’t want to run dry in the middle of a simple true sentence.”

“I agree. There’s nothing more challenging than running empty while taking a line for a walk,” she said.

“Isn’t that the truth? Why run when you can walk? Are you a writer?”

“Isn’t everyone? I love writing, sketching, painting, drawing, watercolors moistly,” she said.

“Moistly?”

“I wet the paper first. It saturate colors with natural vibrancy,” she said.

“With tears of joy or tears of sadness?”

“Depends on the sensation and the intensity of my feeling. What’s the difference? Tears are still tears in the rain. The heart is a lonely courageous hunter.”

I twirled a peacock feather. Remembering Omar’s Mont Blanc 149 piston-fountain pen, I said, “I also need a bottle of ink.”

“We have Black, Midnight Blue, and Cornflower Silk Red. British Racing Green just came in.”

“Racing Green. Sounds fast. Let’s try it.” Omar would be pleased with this expedient color.

I switched subjects to seduce her with my silver tongue.

“Are you free after work? Perhaps we might have a drink and some tapas? Perhaps a little mango tango?”

“I have other plans. I am not sexually repressed. I am liberated. I have a secret blind lover. He peels my skin to enjoy the fruit. Here you are,” handing me cartridge boxes and a bottle of green ink with a white mountain.

I paid with a handful of tears and a rose thorn. My ink stained fingers touched fine and extra fine points of light.

Faith and her extramarital merchandise were thin and beautiful. She was curious.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“It was nice meeting you,” I said. “By the way, have you seen the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, from 2006, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro?”

“Are you crazy or what? 2006 is five years from now. How could you know about it?”

“I live in the future. It’s about your Civil War from 1936-1939, repression and a young girl’s fantasy. It’s a beautiful film on many levels. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Wow,” she said, “I loved that film, especially when Alice meets the Mad Hatter. Poor rabbit, always in a hurry, looking at his watch.”

“Funny you should mention time. A watch plays a small yet significant role in the Pan film.”

“Really? How ironic. I’ll see it in the future.”

“Yes you will. The future memory will inspire your spirit, art and life.”

I pulled out my Swizz Whizz Army stainless steel water resistant Victoria Abnoxious pocket watch, laughing.

“My, look at the tick-tock. Got to walk. Thanks for the ink. Create with passion.” I disappeared.

Faith sang a lonely echo. “Thanks. Enjoy your word pearls. Safe travels.”

Sitting on a park bench under a Banyan tree I fed cartridges into a mirror, clicked off the safety and turned a page.

It was a musical manifesto with a touch of razzamatazz jazz featuring Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Getz to the verb.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Burma, 2015

Public relations - TLC 40

The other TLC cranium belonged to the Director of Natives. From the Big Apple core with a PR background she recruited them, interviewed them, hired them, trained them and centered them. She was off center. She took orders from two daughters managing her, accountants, center service managers, personal tutors and eloquent savages.

At a teacher training class in Constantinople chaired by a Spanish princess burning witches at an Inquisition running behind schedule because nobody knew what the fuck was going on the Director kept asking Lucky, “Where’s your watch? Where’s your watch?”

He put an hourglass on the table. He turned it over addressing the gravity of the situation. Sand dancing through time sang, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

Everyone creates his/her sandcastle.

The Director achieved her position because the owners knew she’d cause no turbulence during their ambitious tricycle. Training wheels had rusty mudguards and broken spokes.

“We have time,” said a native to foreign explorers in rain forests, “but you have the machines to controls time. Time is free.”

Leo, the Chief of Unemployed Cannibals showed white invaders the alarm clock strangling him, “Time is an abstract infinite concept. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. In your world when you retire they give you a gold watch and not enough time to wind it. Life’s little joke. Here we have all the time in the world.”

The Language Company

Fragments - TLC 36

At high noon Bursa emergency medical crews pried a suicidal man from below engines after he was electrified, illuminated and eliminated by Metro lightning. His famous last words: Goodbye cruel world. Goodbye mother.

As medical teams slid his mangled body into an ambulance Lucky explored a cemetery. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates and memories slept below towering pines and evergreens.

A grave-faced widow sobbing on a fresh plot pounding her breasts keened, gone…gone. Her sister drummed topsoil. A friend, mother, aunt or grandmother from Asian Steppes whispered to a child in Tamashek, “She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming death, remembering.”

The child wailed to grave women, “Auntie, Auntie.”

The silent woman playing drum soil remembered her son, brother, father, husband, uncle and grandfather with love. Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. I brought you into the world. I give you back to Earth. The circle of life is complete.

A sharp rose thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair through a humid rain forest covering 6% of Earth. Smoke from burning coconut and banana leaves circled through heart’s four clamoring chambers. Love echoing from the Forest Floor to Zeynep’s Understory rose to the Canopy before emerging through the Emergent where Bird of Paradise, Screaming Eagles and Winter Hawk flew free.

He passed chiseled Arabic script stones. Explosive metal shattered rock. A man pounding a sledgehammer disseminated graven memory shards. Pausing, he removed exculpatory evidence before slamming hammer’s voice, “I love the fragments.”

Sun sought asylum. Rose petals rained. Musical drum soil melodies echoed from a woman’s fingers.

 

wheel of time

Tibetan monks created a Kalachakra universe at the Denver Art Museum.

They meditated on the impermanence of life.

After completion they destroyed The Wheel of Time mandala.

 In a procession blowing horns and clanging symbols they carried it to the Platte River. They released it into the river to eliminate violence in the world.

Seven billion humans celebrated.

“Not all the clowns are in the circus,” whispered a dying girl trapped in streaming media selling FEAR.

In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance returns souls of ancestors.

“You got that right!” yelled a boy spilling secrets from Pandora’s box.

“Yeah,” said a girl. “Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s impossible to take any of this seriously.”

“True. When I grow up to be big and strong I will be an archeologist. I will play and dig in dirt. I will brush things off revealing stories. I will destroy things to learn things.”

“I want to swallow the world but I am too full of sorrow,” said one poignantly.

“I’m going to start a club for procrastinators,” another suggested, “anybody want to sign up for unlimited access?”

“Are your needs being met?”

“Excellent question. I have a need for freedom and a freedom from need. Perhaps I’ll end up taking care of people like us,” said a girl named Hope. “I’m the last myth that dies.”

“Yeah, you can work in a day care center for adults.”

“That’s a-dolts.”

“Hah! Everyone is heading back in the direction they came from,” acknowledged Martha Ann, fixing her broken glasses with duct tape. She died of leukemia at thirteen holding courage.

“Remember what Joyce said? Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said a kid watching her experiment with optical illusions.

“Are you plagiarizing again?”

“Not exactly. It’s taken out of context.”

“Textile, tactile, texture, context, content, abstract, where’s it all going?”

“Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract,” screamed an emotionally abused child after being whipped with a fishing pole by his neurotic scared angry mother condemned to a wheelchair.

“Are we wondering or wandering?”

“Where’s eternity end?” the astronomer kid asked.

“I’m going to study the bottom line,” said a boy raising a digit in air testing incisive imprecise global market index indicators based on economic assumptions. “If we control the debt, we control the country.”

“International financiers run the show, babies. Politicians are their slaves.”

“Welcome to the American Suffering Society, ASS,” said another.

“I thought this was the Academy of Healing?”

“You’re in the right place at the right time. Let the clinical studies begin. I feel free!” sang the chorus.

“Who’s got the placebo?”

“I’m going to cut cage locks, release birds, lone wolves and screaming eagles into the wild beyond where they belong,” sang a girl, “and then I’m going to cut through the net of ignorance.”

“They will never escape the sky,” said a child doodling on polished glass with a diamond mind.

“I’m going to take up the flute, lute, harp and violin,” chimed a musician. “Small ensembles are the coolest, Baroque style. The suites are the small sections.”

“Can you play The Four Seasons?”

“Depends on the time of the year, dear. I’m working on it. Violin solos are tricky. They’re intense without being tense. Be patient.”

“We’re all intensive patients it should be easy. Now there’s a lesson, to be sure. Patience is our great teacher. We should be grateful to people who make our lives difficult. They are teachers.”

“You’re a poet and don’t even know it,” said a kid with bedside manners.

“But your toes show it because they are Longfellows,” replied a youthful sage.

“They smell like the Dickens,” said a disembodied voice.

“I was born a poet like a bird’s born to be a musician. It’s all instinct, play, imagination.”

“Well, I’ll be smudged,” a kid yelled, lighting sage for a kiva ceremony.

“The future is in garbage, I’m telling you. Be a trash collector and find all kinds of cool, interesting stuff people throw away,” said one. “They buy it, use it, forget about it, get bored with it and trash it. I’ll start a recycling center. We can exchange old stuff for new stuff. Like blood.”

“That smells nice,” a garbage collector said to a sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one to all, “and we’ll be in it.”

“Hey, cool idea, then we can use episodes for stories or vignettes or salad dressing.”

“We need stories, air, water, sex, shelter, food and...”

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello.

“I am a plot looking for a character. I am a plot dragging characters around with cinematic jump cuts.”

“It will have characters and conflict,” said a young scripter. “It will be full of irony, symbolism, weather and sex. Vietnam is a woman having her field plowed.”

“Absoultely,” said a writer. “More than that it will have want, obstacles, rising and falling action and resolution with emotion as characters change and grow and realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters feel, taste, touch, hear and see revealing themselves through action. Socrates subordinated character to action. Just get to the verb.”

“Sleeping alone is boring,” said Sunflower, a blind masseuse at Seeing Hands in Kampot, Cambodia. Her hands were all.

 “Wow! Let’s make it immediate and dramatic like focusing a lens. I’ll play director.”

“Exactly. A series of conscious and unconscious levels, you know, kind of like a maze or something, a puzzle palace. I need your help with internal and external dialogue as characters reveal their insecurity and fears in the dark night of the soul, how they trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight, how they are comfortable with their insecurities and their desire for self-preservation by scheming because they want to be important. They don’t have principles or morals. They want recognition not fame. They have to survive.”

“Let’s act out their fears, hopes and worries.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs and use specific adjectives for description. The slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital, a character?”

“Sure, a place has character doesn’t it? Writers have used geographical settings: Vietnam, Morocco, Bhutan, Ireland, Cambodia, Tibet...Room 101.”

“That sounds like a nature versus man struggle or man versus man. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the truth with literal actuality moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China.

“Get is the joker word in English. A lick my clit agent at a Willamette Writer’s Conference said this is a beautiful word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic work in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ice Girl in Banlung, Ratanakiri, Cambodia. It was a wild west town of 25,000 filled with red dusty roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries.

“Beware of naysayers, soothsayers and book doctors,” said a kid. “We are in this together. Through thick and thin. Through health and illness. Writing is a disease. We lie for a living. No editor will drink champagne from our skull. We’re trapped in our bodies, trapped in this hospital, trapped in a never-ending labyrinth. You’d think there’d be a moonlighting word doctor around here disguised as a heart specialist. Shine on bright star.”

“Ok,” said kid writer, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook beginning every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next? If there’s no plot, nothing happens.”

“People are born. People live. People die. People wait. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. Is this a fill-in-the-blank trick life test?”

“Life gives you the test first and lessons later,” screamed a overworked, underpaid and undersexed Hanoi teacher losing face in front of 80 robots. She pounded a podium with her pedagogical Marxist elephant control stick.

“It’s ok to be horrible. Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving a pile of rejection letters. “You don’t want to make the average reader work too hard do you?”

“No, they’re lazy to begin with you know. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost, and sextexting with short attention spans. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Cold hard detached. Revision is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who fixes man-u-scripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They rearrange words and sentences. Writing is like digging a well with a needle.”

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan. 1 of 12,000.

“The truth is, speaking of a fix, does anyone have any spare drugs?” said an addict in a gazebo group, “I need to get out of here and take a trip.”

“We, you, he, she, us, them, they, little old me and I ain’t going anywhere,” they chorused.

“Where’s the scissors? We need a sharp edge here.”

“Cut it out! Who’s got the cosmic glue holding everything together?”

“I have two scissors and one brother.”

“Your English is fluent.”

“Paste it where the sun don’t shine!”

“In your wild creative dreams!” yelled a kid.

“Super cosmic glue keeps everything from happening at the same time.”

“Living well is the best revenge. Best served cold.”

“Revenge and ambition are why humans have wars. 4,000 years of killing each other and no knows who the king is.”

Rose knew they were doing hard time. Have mercy. A child chimed in, “I’m going to be a historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.”

“Where have I heard that before?” asked a Chinese refugee child from an orphanage flooding the Yangtze with dead children.

“What will you do with the time you collect?” asked her friend.

“Visit sick children in hospitals where they do evolutionary experiments to stem the cells.”

“Or is it sell the stems?”

“Speaking of stems, I’m going to be a gardener, can’t imagine anything more beautiful than making nature astonishing to the eye. Leave something for future generations.”

“If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of thorns give me a shout,” said Tran, a brave one-legged Vietnamese warrior child wearing his heart on his sleeve.

“I’m going to study Donatello,” said another.

“Who’s he?”

“He was one of the greatest Renaissance artists. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy.”

“And?”

“Well, he was very honest, had integrity and was super original for his time. Technically he worked with anything. You name it, wax, bronze, marble, clay, rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist. He was always discovering new tricks of the craft.”

A child painting with smoke on mirrors blasted light, “Hey! That’s what the Greeks believed. Everything was beauty and order.”

“Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, seven musical notes. Beauty originated with them didn’t it?”

“You got it,” said the painter. “Hey, you know what? I think I’ll take the day off and be creative.”

“The present moment is eternal reality,” whispered a child, “We live in the eternity of the instant.”

“It’s about process not product.”

“Whew, that’s deep!”

“Yeah, we’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes.”

“Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else.”

“Fools speak the truth.”

“Fools are everywhere. We are fools whether we dance or not so we may as well dance. If fate doesn’t make you laugh you don’t get the joke. The value of truth value meaning is in the mystery.”

“Tunkashila is grandfather’s spirit. It’s wisdom and calmness,” said children inside a sacred circle. “It is the way of the warrior. We are all warriors.”

Rose listened with her heart-mind. She knew others were not ready to receive their insight and blessings. Terminal black tires left skid marks through lives. People they hadn’t met, contacted, or connected with would feel the heat and smell fire where their wheelchair rubber met the road. They were true spiritual road warriors with distinct calibrations, shifts, vibrations and energy frequencies. The future would be a scary time for older generations unaccustomed to their authenticity.

Rose knew it would be a real beautiful mess figuring out where to put the disability act in their short sweet Ghost Dance. Perhaps in rising action leading to the epiphany, or in the falling action leading to a beautiful heart breaking emotional catastrophic epiphany. Cut. The end. Cue applause.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” a child said out loud with reported speech. Their wheel of life pealed skin down, playing tag inside crazy wisdom.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones?

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a PH.D in psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity of oneness with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said a seer named Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said. “I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly, or you can unravel the weaving back to the first mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with authenticity and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” Rose said to the children.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about reading and writing,” a child told Rose. “I thought you said eating and fighting. I know about that.”

“Perfect, let’s go together,” said Rose.

Subject to Change