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Entries in travel (554)

Saturday
Apr302016

New Garden - TLC 78

Lucky shifted to a serene garden zone after sharing a house for two months with a sad young Filipino math teacher in the gated community of Alam Sutra.

The boy/man fathered a five-year old girl and left her with her mom in Manila Vanilla. His favorite expression was, “Let's Eat.”

Truth is powerful. You don’t have to remember what you said. Lucky mentioned choices and consequences. Math man didn’t hear, listen or care. Being a calculating teacher he figured a job with a decent salary in Amnesia was worth the emotional compromise cost.

A Hanoi survivor yelled, “Any fool can have a kid. It takes courage to raise them as independent free thinking individuals.”

In the new garden Lucky planted thirty flowers, red and pink roses, apple trees, deciduous shrubs, watercress, dill, oregano, parsley and thyme.

He refocused healing energies an hour west of Joke & Choke plus trolls tolls by taxi nightmare traffic due to poor urban highway planning. City pollution was a killer. It blasted throat and eyes. All east-west traffic passed through the city center. No ring roads. Duh.

“The center cannot hold,” said W.B. Yeats.

Air quality was refreshing in walled estates with tropical flora. Butterflies, songbirds, cockroaches, big brown beady-eyed rats and contemplative speckled frogs existed with copious little people.

Some homes were Mac Mansions. Greek and Roman columns with Ironic and Corinthian spiral decorations shouted, Look at my huge monster home. I made it. Empty palatial rooms collected dust as in China where it was all external appearances. Goes to show ya. Most homes in the gated communities were a bland 1-2 story cookie-cutter style. 

Everyone had a maid in Java jive some older than spoiled offspring. They cleaned two cars, swept dust, watered stone passages, cooked, scrubbed clothes and fed kiddies while parents were making money. It’s a job. 

Making money is a job. You need plates, ink, paper, press, a paper cutter, distribution system and government backed IOUs.

Illiterate slaves supported families surviving in a no-name village memory. A never-ending human supply system on an archipelago swarmed with 230 million hungry worker bees.

Food was cheap. Medicine and education were expensive.

Keep them poor barefoot and happy.

Favorite Jakarta sports were: 1) Driving huge 4x4s. Gas was $2.40 a gallon. Sitting in endless long traffic jams. Paying parking fees to paramilitary uniformed men blowing stainless steel whistles.

2) Wandering around enormous prosperous numerous say it fast three times vast shopping centers, huge playgrounds for brats.

Out-of-control kiddies expended spoiled energy. Families enjoyed A/C climate controlled conditions admiring Ankara-like dummies behind glass in a museum quality of artificial life filled with diversionary stimuli and unsatisfied desire.

The private Alam Sutra School named for a fictitious beatific saint had 1,800 students from kindergarten through high school. It began in 1993 when a Catholic priest from Yoga Posture escaping Interpol child molestation charges joined community leaders using a fake I.D. to promote formal educational tyranny and religious intolerance.

Five barbarian elementary English teachers complemented friendly local teachers. Oh, I just love your hairstyle. Your diamond-soled shoes are divine. Your handbag woven from creeper vines is elegant and eco-friendly.

Native teachers had seen colonial invaders come and go for centuries. Lip service.

The English supervisor was an anthropologist from New Hamster, Nova Scotia. Formerly a tenured professor in Malta, she left the job, house, marriage, mortgage, cars, airplanes and yachts for a meditative life. Her resume extolled extensive international educational administrative experience with time and space.

 

Wednesday
Apr202016

pen fountain

Sublime beauty near and far
golden butterflies
bamboo homes rolling hills golden rust colored
labor in fields waving raving children

urination

copious food sources, roses

Staring at a writer sitting in tea place cold morning
broken lights curious faces, voices whisper
is doing this
being flowing

“pen fountain” said a laughing boy
standing on a cement slope all the men staring at this transit tori process

The market is excellent.
No foreigners enter hilly labyrinth of morning. A source of fascination.
Zen of sitting nourishment. Monks barefoot meditation. An open hand holds everything. 
Burning coals. Tea.  Fractured light flowing energies.

Character is action.
Tell me a story. At the train stop in Hsipaw 24 lost european souls pulled on their acts

wasted the way onto shoulders
descended to the platform
unloaded packs into tuk-tuk for Golden Dragon hotel.

They took self declined fake images and left.

The lone traveler stayed on the train. It rolled north. The conductor walked through the empty car. He stopped at an empty seat, collected empty plastic water bottles, chopsticks, food wrappers, Styrofoam containers, dreams, nightmares and fantasies mixed with rising expectations, desires and needs.
He dropped everything out an open window.

The train rolled through night.

Monday
Apr112016

Train to Lashio

Ride the rails sixteen hours north

click clack click clack click clack
nature visions bamboo forests
silver rivers
feeling fresh air

hanging out the door of a rock’n roll train
rail alliteration starts at 4 AM.

Stars open sky

A red shaped leaf
fields of lilacs purple black and gold, butterflies,
sense of stillness, renewal of the free rolling spirit,
yellow bamboo leaves at lower elevations, then green exploding higher lush gardens, fir, pine..

Fields being planted
Women and men and children hoeing,  watering, turning soil
Say yes to everything.

The hard scrabble reality similar to northern Laos, oxen, weathered faces,

wood homes thatch, small train station shops in the middle of nowhere,

women loading loading baskets of greens vegetables,

men timber and iron on board
teens shuffle loads of wood from dirt into a train car door
Spaces race long lonely whistle blasts.

20 German Italian Japanese Australian tourists & senior citizens – ugly idiots on train platforms snap Burmese people no interaction real true relationship
attitudes behavior selfish selfies T Bow exit. 
Farewell my lovely.

The lone stranger rides the last four hours to Lashio. 

Sunday
Apr102016

experience. imagination. write.

"They symbolize the alternatives of hope & despair to which mankind is forever subjected."

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. - Keysey

Write. Experience. Imagination. Observation. The wilderness.

A novel: the bear and the dog.

Class and style. Let it run. Let it go w/o perverting it.

I am a shaman. A storyteller feels the wonder.

Chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of eyes.

Here it is all free and easy w/o any sense of past or future.

When the young girl in the java/tea shop began crying all the old men shut up.

Her wails penetrated their distant half-buried, half remembered memories of loss and fear.

Two million grinning Khmer Rouge skulls said here we are.

In 20 words or less communicate: sense of character. feel of a room. action.

After the excellent full body massage he came out singing, "give me your funny papers."

Mindfulness.

 

Friday
Apr012016

Immigrant Story - The Mark - TLC 76

After a year eating Turkey with a side order of Mudanya olives he landed in Jakarta. If you don’t have an onward ticket blue uniformed ones shake you down. You know the drill. Extract a crisp green C note. Insert into a worn passport. Slide it across a counter. Man smiles. His golden shoulder braid shudders. He gestures just a minute.

You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed internally displaced desiccated immigrants stream past paying with their lives to receive an entry stamp for thirty days before heading to another gold braided computer man.

Your man comes out. He escorts you through The Quest-ion Line. Incoming. Quest-ions screaming help ran for cover. He hands your documents to another gold braided scam man.

He says, Wait outside the NO ENTRY zone. You observe men, women and orphans waiting for one last stamp, one final slim to nil chance for freedom from tyrannical vagabondism a disease with no known antidote.

Computer friend nods, accepts documents and does his thing. Opens removes cash slides passport through a scanner darkly stamps it hands it back. Hands down. Deal. Ace high. Genius returns it to you, Good-bye my little butterfly.

You grab your bag and hit the bricks.

230,000,000 (+/-) humans struggling to survive with a little luck eat you with their eyes.

On one side are 1,001 females with Women For Hire signs. They swing brooms, caress irons, dance with mops, feed infants, hang washrags, burn trash and stir woks. Visual acuity. Rancid re-cycled cooking oil penetrates universal collective unconscious. 

On the other side are 1,001 males with I Will Do Anything placards.

Small print reads, “I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, carry bricks, stack bricks, break bricks, sleep, eat, pretend I am busy and freelance vaginal come and go construction projects are my specialty.” 

A gamelan orchestra of eighteen copper gongs and brass symbols creates a melodic meditative refrain with gentle persuasion. You follow effervescent notes into the dark night of the soul with lost quest-ions whispering to you, The Mark.

Quest-ions tout you:

Want a maid? Want a driver? Want a cleaner? Want a cook? Want transport? Want boom-boom? Want a room? Want a job? Where do you go? Where are you from? Want a quick fix? Want an exit permit? Want a new passport? Want inoculations? Want to get lucky? Want to meet my sister? Want a butterfly? Want to change money? Want to die here? Want to be cremated here?

Want to hang out with talking monkeys near Ubud? Want to eat? Want to meet my friends, liars, cheats and thieves? Want water? Want a map? The map’s not the territory. Want to take a chance? Want an answer? Want a way out? Want love? Want massage? Need AIDS or HIV? Want a friend?

Want boredom and loneliness and alienation your highness? Want a guide? Want a SIM card? Want a taxi? Want ice?

Want to join a Brave New World? Want to be a charter member in a New World Order manipulated by politicians, greedy geo-political banks and fraudulent financial institutions? Want a secret identity theory and off shore tax-free bank account? Want to torture humans with water molecules in a friendly country’s secret black prison?

Want to die before you get old? Want to fade away? Do you have plan tomorrow? Where do you go? Where do you go tomorrow? What’s you (sic) name? Where is this line of quest-ion-ing going? Are you the hammer or the nail? How did you get here? Why, tell me why. What is life?

All the quest-ion words were brought in for interrogation. Zeynep, a savage detective looked for motive and opportunity.

A ghost plays a six-string Kemil instrument in shadows. You follow phantom notes into the night.

Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

The Language Company