Hoi An

We took a bus to Hoi An. We passed through Da Nang, a mess of glass and brass mega resorts swallowing farmland with miles of beachfront developments creating imaginary golf courses faster than speeding high finance and rabid speculation.

Up early I am on the street. A winged shadow caressed my forehead. A black and orange butterfly fluttered in front of my eyes. Touched, grazed, blessed by Psyche. Magic.

I am a prime lens on a 35mm tool. I capture soft light inside the old city. I slow down, feeling free, curious and open, wandering. Before noise and lightning bolts of laughter’s language fills the air. All the tourists sleep off heavy European food and distilled beverages. Streets are empty.

A young woman under a bamboo hat shovels sand. It takes her 21 gestures to fill up a wheelbarrow. No more, no less. 21. Blackjack. She pushes it down a street to a new home project. She dumps it. She repeats the process. All day. Every day. Her Tao.

I walk to the river near an ancient Japanese Bridge built in 1593 and sit near two elderly women. They’re surprised to see a foreigner sitting alone with coffee. Black with ice. I smiled. They smiled and whispered  ... strange man alone has a camera it’s so early for him to sit here with us.

We shared humanity, silence and morning light. We communicated without words. I see their lives, childhood, growing up here, families, surviving wars, meeting every morning for conversation, walking and tea.

Supporting each other they walk through quiet streets, past yellow walled homes with red tile roofs protecting long deep brown wooden interiors. Ancestors whisper stories from the 15th-19th century when Hoi An was the major port in Southeast Asia and the first Japanese settlement in southern Vietnam.

Ships unloaded cargo and loaded high-grade silk, paper, porcelain, tea, sugar, molasses, medicines, elephant tusks, Sulphur and mother-of-pearl. Now 400 tailors measure, cut, sew, iron, hang and sell threads.

Women in teddy bear floral pajamas play badminton chasing a shuttlecock. Pajamas make utilitarian sense. Cotton is cheap and easy to wash. You sleep in them, get up, cook, eat, talk to your pajama neighbors, sweep dust, yell at your kids because they are spoiled brats and terrorized since escaping the birth canal, go to the market, buy food, admire new pajamas, return home, eat lunch, talk to your pajama neighbors and take a nap. Pajamas have a warning label on the collar. Remove Before Sex.

Pajamas are cool. One size fits all.

Residents stretch and talk. A leather-faced canoe woman set up her small clay figurines under a tree. The two women finished their tea, gestured goodbye, held hands and walked across a wooden bridge taking care of each other.

Book of Amnesia V1

Destiny

“Books are an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” - Franz Kafka

+

After a war everything is easy.

In 1969 he volunteered for the Army, left the world and flew over the pond to Nam. He walked out 364 days later with his shadow - a bag of bones.

He is a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust riding a rock floating through space.

Fear Nothing.

Transformed, he experienced free time in the long now.

This is what happened, more or less.

One of his names is Lucky Foot. What does that mean?

He elucidates in simple, clear, precise, concise English the language of savage barbarians.

It means, as an experience junky possessing genetic variant DRD4-R7 addicted to new adventures, he brings prosperity to merchants, rest-a-rant owners and nondescript sad, neglected, abandoned and emotionally well adjusted hot to trot red sheen women among humans struggling to survive life’s labyrinth without a center.

He gifts luck to money changers, manicure girls, beggars, banana women, landmine amputee survivors, ice and rice sellers, student-teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, textile merchants, weavers, artistic genius children, orphans, noodle mama, tea and java purveyors, gardeners, gravediggers, literary outlaws and craggy faced Dan, a boat captain in Hoi An who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the Vietnam War.

Fate and destiny is the same thing.

If he grows up he dies.

Security is an illusion.

He presents good fortune to Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung, barbers cleaning his ears, high-heeled sandal ladies, love sock purveyors and rent-a-life companies.

HCE. Here comes everybody.

90% of life is showing up. When he shows up their day, life, fate and glittering fortunes improve. Karmic destiny.

Fate laughed with him in Morocco on 9/11. He was in the Sahara. He did not take possession of that event and perpetual aftermath. Fear sells.

Destiny danced with him on the is-land of Amnesia in Southeast Asia and exploring Turkey, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Before returning to Nam in 2009 he lived on a string of 15,000 archipelago islands between Malaysia and Papa New Genie gathering evidence about the human condition.

Each island is a letter. If you string letters together you create a word. This word depending on your imaginary perception of truth-value may or may not have meaning for you like Beauty - your true reflection in still water.

Beauty has no tongue.

A small journey expands life’s tapestry. He’s a needle without a compass. His needle leads a thread. Threads weave a conversation.

Move like a river, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo.

The Language Company

Attitude

This is Metafiction with a Gonzo attitude; master journalist, photographer’s eye and the balls of an actor.

“Start at no particular time of your life. Wander at your free will all over your life.” – Mark Twain

There are not many things you need to remember about your visit here to Earth.

The world gave me a strong sense of querencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place - like a bull facing death in the ring -  where you feel comfortable dying.”  - Lorca

Flow like a river, reflect like a mirror and respond like an echo.

On the meridian of time there is no injustice; there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.

“He didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: borders of dreams – musty borders of love and indifference, borders of courage or fear – golden borders of ethics.” - Roberto Bolano

*

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 

A Century is Nothing

Lao Girl Bubble

Leica Fotographie International (LFI) selected one of my images for their KIDS gallery.

Thanks to them and here she is. Happy, strong and brave. It's good to be alive.

I Need Help

I took a night bus to Cadiz where a stain glass explorer named C. Colon sailed west dear Nina searching for gold, importing greed and converting heathen slaves with persecution and misery.

It was difficult raising funds from a skeptical king and queen intent on expanding their empire.

My inner child, poet and literary outlaw spent six days in the San Francisco Hotel establishing geographical bearings enjoying bistro tapas, meat, cheese, bread, fruit and veggies from the central market or Mercado. It was a 30-year flashback after the kissing the army goodbye when I passed through carrying a pack Jack.

I walked into the tourism office off De Dios Plaza. I got to the point with in and out dialogue.

“I need help.”

Three little English words said everything.

Patricia helped me make some calls. After settling in with a Romani family I visited her to say thanks. She said, “You know, we get a lot of people in our office, all nationalities looking for something and while most of them are nice some are really terrible.”

“I understand. Kind ones are a blessing. I’ve met some disconnected neurotic people on life’s road. Too many are rude and not sensitive to diverse cultures. Others fall into two distinct groups. The whiners and the complainers.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “that’s a good one. The reason I decided to help you was the way you just came in and said, ‘I need help.’ It was refreshing.”

“I’m fortunate,” I said, “seeing the challenges. My limited Spanish wouldn’t help me find a room. That’s why I came to see you.”

“It was the way you did it,” said Patricia.

“A three-year child taught me those three little words. I really appreciated your help. I’ll be back.”

My room with meals for thirty days was $500.

Amelia was an overweight diabetic who ate extremely fast, her husband Jesus resembled Ichabod Crane and son Janus, 20, was a mental case. He studied engineering in school and lay around the flat watching soccer on television with the volume at full blast or playing computer games.

His father hustled cheap scarves along chipped yellow walls outside the Mercado across from his local bar where Amelia nursed her daily wine.

Another resident was Dortmund, a gay German flight attendant for ABC airline working the South American circuit. He had a room for a month studying Spanish with a private teacher from 9-12.

“It’s great being here, no one knows where I am and I like it like that. Nothing to do but study.” He carried a cell phone. One day we met in an Internet cafe. “Hi Dortmund. How’s it going?”

“Great. I’m on-line with a guy in Germany. This is a great chat room. We’re talking about getting together when my studies are finished.”

Dortmund spent a lot of time chatting with guys on-line and looking at his mobile. The city was a relaxed place for his midnight encounters as bars and cafes spilled fictional people into romance novels. He was overjoyed. Spanish was a language of lust. Exotic perfume. Forbidden fruit hung heavy and ripe for the picking.

My Cadiz room was small, noisy and perfect for completing a sentence. My life sentence was a metaphor savoring my time on Earth. Living on the edge has the advantage of being sharper there.

There is no there there.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

A writer in Burma.