Priests Fool with boys

Greetings,

(Editor's note. Due to extreme pressure from conservative groups, abused children and hysterical media corporations involving the Catholic Church scandals revealing deep dark secrets, here is an excerpt from the vaguely popular epic, A Century Is Nothing.)

“May we resume our deliberations now?” said a pedophile priest with a Big Unit mobile attached to his ear. He listened to a long distance confession from Boston. Not wanting to make an ass of himself in public, he knew he’d face felony charges when they found his big hand had been on the little hand. 

 He’d knew he’d never make Cardinal being a stool pigeon without a prosthetic leg to stand on. He whispered to the congregation. “We have to make plans for the conquest. The heathen are massing their calvary as we speak, as we procrastinate on these most important matters of church and state.” 

They were in rapture and supported his religious ideology. A woman named Faith based her initiative in him.

Worm Hole, a mathematician, manipulated division tables on a child’s place mat covered with carnivores from a cereal box high in fiber. He created a series of black holes to explore their gravitational pull. Space, to him, was more beautiful and more mysterious than Time. 

“And now we’re here,” he said pointing to a small blue marble floating on a universal map. “Did you know the amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it?” 

“Yes,” said a knight errant, “and there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the earth’s beaches. Try putting that into your hourglass!” Everybody laughed except Bumsfeld and his buddy Dicky Chainsaw from Why O Ming.

Some knights spinning around the round table predicted the campaign might end by spring. They didn’t know what year so they surmised seasons. 

Veterans, children and women knew it’d be years if not decades. Someone had to take the fall. Someone had to clean leaves clogging rivers of tears out of the way. Seasons were theirs for the taking. It was a crap shoot and they all knew it. 

The dice man played his hand. “Snake eyes!” he shouted and the room became quieter than a field of mass graves where children played with unexploded ordnance. 

“We hit a Blue Cross building yesterday,” a psychotic coalition general said. “Was it red or blue, I can’t remember. You know how confusing things get in war.”

“Oh no,” said the priest, “not another cross to bear.”

At the word bear the mathematician looked up from his predator place mat in horror. A huge Alaskan brown bear with red fire in his eyes charged out of the forest carrying a decapitated wildlife ranger. 

“We have a situation,” radioed a Cobra helicopter pilot circling the grizzly scene.
“You have permission to fire,” crackled his radio. 

He pressed his magic red button. A $50 million dollar Hellfire Tomahawk Missile blasted the beast to kingdom come.

“We’re saved!” yelled gangs of orphan children. They gutted the beast immediately with their knives and daggers salvaging every part of the animal. A kid named Export packed the testicles in Ice-9 for shipment to a Hong Kong pharmacy. 

Easy money.

Authorities arrived and took the priest away for questioning after numerous children accused him of sexual abuse. He requested to speak with someone at the Holy See.

“We’ll see what we can do,” said a member of the Vatican SWAT team busy preventing anguished angry parents from strangling him with his rosary.

“Crucify the hypocrite!” yelled the high masses.

Priests in crisis management modus operandus looked at new cardinal points on their compass. They needed a new direction, an alibi. 

“Roast him over an open friar,” sobbed a sacred heart mother of all prattle battles.
“Rest in Peace,” sang a choir of angels.
“Let him write a check,” a banker said. 
“There’ll be a penalty for early withdrawals,” drawled a teller selling used condoms.

“Any causalities?” queried a Foreign Legion officer just back from the North African front where he was shortlisted as MIA. He’d hitched a ride with a camel caravan across Oman heading to southern Iraqi marshlands.

“Friendly fire wiped out a few of our forces which is to be expected,” reported an analyst. “Some journalists, photographers and an Italian intelligence agent bit the bullet so to speak. They’ve filed their final report. Wrong coordinates I’d suggest. They’ll be embedded forever. We also have unconfirmed reports that local Iraqi and Afghan hospitals are overwhelmed with dead, dying, mangled, amputees, grieving mothers and widows. 500,000 and rising.”

“So it goes,” said a historian turning their hourglass over watching Sands Of Time fall in love with gravity.

“We suspect they are executing their own,” a common house junior minion added. “Meanwhile, we’ve bombed beans, rice, blankets, cooking oil, water treatment facilities, power plants and oil refineries. The price of crude is escalating as members of OPEC agree to disagree. Over $50 a barrel by now. Any sheik maintaining four wives has to keep pumping. Basic staples went through the roof at the fire sale. The cost of staples are driven by supply and demand.”

“Humanitarian aid is a noble casualty for the price of peace,” said an officer from a Rio slum waiting for extradition on mass murder charges. “Politically cheaper than body bags.” 

“Those are back ordered,” said a supply clerk from Kansas City with an 8th grade education. “77,000 body bags were shipped to a southern Italian military installation before we invaded with the intention to occupy. Boxes of imported democracy lie stranded offshore of drained Basra marshes. Pallets of democracy on trucks are melting in desert heat along the road from Damascus and Kuwait.”

“We can’t wait. We’re screwed,” said a two-faced selected Fascist president from O-Zone. “They bought the ranch and I’m moving to Argentina a.s.a.p.”

“No we’re not,” whined a minimum wage slave. “When the factories are finished making more precision weapons of mass destruction, recycled petroleum products for happy meals and flags, they will reconfigure their machines and production quotas.”

“May I speak?” requested a poet. 

“If you must,“ replied an officer long in the canine tooth buffing his medals with Brasso.

The poet tuned his Arabic oud instrument of mass distraction.

Parts were back ordered 
including body bags
their future called for heavy lifting
 
heavy duty cleaning materials
manipulation of material 
inside entropy
 
Refugees streamed into screaming 
broadband media found work 
in multinational international conglomerates
 
manufacturing sectors grinded poverty 
constructing their dream for export
 
Near the door to their cave of hunger 
at refugee camps 
they blended barley seeds 
with leaves of grass for delicious breads

“Ingenious,” said a literary critic from The Times. “Uses language in free imaginary and metaphorical ways. Gives it a goof feel.”

“We’ve allocated a percentage to Asian sweat shops,” said a textile importer. “To be specific, China, Thailand, Saipan, Malaysia, Burma and Cambodia - where one-third of the 14 million people make less than 56¢ a day - and Laotian factory slaves are working overtime. They have absolutely no choice in the matter and a buck a day is a hell of a deal. Once the feds and W.T.O. leave us alone we should realize a handsome profit when all is said and done.”

“That’s nothing,” said an analyst, “it’s a two prong effort. We construct air bases and military installations to control Middle East air space and two, we let American corporations buy all the Iraqi assets. We’re sitting on vast oil fields. Sweetmeat.”

“Perfect,” said the V.P. “Where’s my cut?” staring at a fleischer dripping blood.

A security advisor spoke. “Last March we launched the largest psychological operations in our 225 year history. We have 11 Psychological Operations Companies with 1,000 PSYOP personnel working to sway Iraqis and Afghans to join the rebuilding effort.”

“Are the PSYOP leaflets proving effective?” asked Colonel Sanderson with extra crispy clipped wings on his shoulders. He was molting. “We want them to see the democratic side of our occupation and walk on the bright side of life.”

“It's a fine line, but propaganda is more based on untruth,” said a philosopher.

End of transmission.

Metta.

Mr. Math

Greetings,

Mr. Math took a month off from teaching in Germany. Well traveled. He had much to say.

Austrians have 17 paid government holidays, the most in Europe. By the time you add on extra vacation days they, along with other European countries have almost two months off a year.

I read Marx. It's a fine idea but pure Communism won't work for probably a couple a hundred years. Hitler's longest speech was 23 minutes, he knew the value of propaganda and marketing. Keep it simple and short.

The problem scientists face is trying to find the missing link between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Other people consider Germans to be too blunt. We like to get to the point. American's say things like, 'This part is good but we need to consider x,' because they don't want to appear too confrontational. It's the politically correct way for them. The Japanese just say, 'We'll consider it. This means no.'

Germans are efficient when it comes to work. This why we have a strong economy. Other countries may not like it, so they find something about the system to criticise. It was like Bush talking about 'Old Europe.'

When Colin Powell addressed the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction our Foreign Minister told him, 'We don't believe you.'

When you think about it, it's amazing what the Spanish and Portuguese explorers did by sheer will alone. It's like the Chinese. They needed an irrigation system deep in the country. What did they do? They carved a mountain in half to divert water south. They did what they needed to do. Sheer will power. 

Once when I was in Australia I talked with an Aborigine chief. He said, 'People only think the English were brutal against the indigenous people here. We had many inter-tribal massacres. We were busy fighting and killing each other. And, had we been in a stronger position we'd have done the same thing to the English.'

Once when I was in America I met a man in St. Paul.  When I told him I was from Germany he asked me, 'Do they have cars there?' He wasn't joking. No, I said. We have donkeys.

And? Be calm. Keep and open mind. See what happens.

Metta.
 

Crossing the border

Greetings,

The title comes from "Travels With Herodotus," by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist, poet, photographer and travel writer. Herodotus wrote, "The Histories," 2,500 years ago. Ryszard is a student in Poland. It is a repressive time. Stalin is in power. 

He writes, "My route sometimes took me to villages along the border. But this happened infrequently. For the closer one got to the border, the emptier the land and the fewer people one encountered. This emptiness increased the mystery of these regions. I was struck, too, by how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me.

"I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side?...I wanted one thing only - the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border. To cross it and come right back - that, I thought, would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my quite inexplicable yet acute psychological hunger."

Ryszard worked as a journalist for the Polish Press Agency. He wants to go abroad. A year passes. It is 1964. One day his editor-in-chief tells him, "You're going to India." He is astonished. He panics. He knows nothing about India. She gives him a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth, "Here, a present for the road."

It was "The Histories," by Herodotus. 

For the next ten years he is responsible for fifty countries. He reports on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.  When he returns to Poland he has lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences.

Two more excellent reads by him are: The Shadow of the Sun about Africa and Imperium about Russia. They're listed on Turn The Page, Amazon resource for your reference.

The mystical and transcendent act. Crossing the border.

Metta.

How's this compare to where you've been?

Greetings,

That's the question three fat white guys discuss at a garden restaurant on a breezy Saturday. They were dropped off by a van. They meet friends.

One wealthy self assured Arab man with forehead sunglasses and his tall sleek jaguar girlfriend in tight jeans, tighter top and rattling high heels. Her feet are small and beautiful. Coiffeur hair. Originally, "inner part of the helmet." She leaves half her noodles. A Frenchman and his pregnant wife. She laughs a lot.

The weekend escape exercise from the capital. The three amigos booked rooms for their Cambodian honeys coming down from Phnom Penh and now they're drinking beer. The waft of suds and distinct European body odor drifts along the river. Intelligent life on Earth is a rumor.

The answer? "Now we've got women," said one man.

Sounds like a history story about a group of seafaring men who raided a Mediterranean city. They kidnapped all the women. The city men were pissed off and raided another coastal town, kidnapping all the women there. This is how war started. Revenge baby.

One day the women were asked about this event. "No," they said. "We weren't kidnapped. We went willingly."

No squeeze, no please.

This is a five minute free writing exercise. Keep your hand moving. The birds are singing. 

I live at Orchid. Orchid is important because I love orchids. They have many yellow and purple orchids growing, hanging, from planters. I feel great with orchids. I am a traveling gardener with unlimited potentials. Plural.

I remember many orchids in Indonesia. They were cheap. I decorated the front porch with multiple colorful orchids - red, orange, purple, white, and yellow in clay pots with a charcoal base. Orchids took me to the mountains to see my wild friends. (5 minutes)

At 7:30 a.m. the Orchid restaurant is filled with the smell of burning fires from refuse, plastic bags, and organic material. German travelers spit out their harsh dictatorial guttural sense of determination. It is harsh. They are planning to invade, to provoke a war to justify their extreme greed for land and slaves.

Teutonic tongues mix with screeching Khmer tongues. Question. What is louder than a group of Khmer people? Answer. Another group of Khmer people.

Babbling comparisons display firm purpose. They establish their memory-fiction with a drunken slow administrative tone. A singing bird says, "Good-bye, I'm taking wing. The sky is my refuge from description. The divine details create uncertainty in my grand plan."

Khmer children bleed water.

ROUGE: a rainbow with the smell of laughing birds, clouds and rivers. Milling around.

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

The Temple of Literature, Ha Noi.

Warrior statue, ink. Xiamen, China.

Mine

Greetings,

Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. 

Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture?

I don't know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have working medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-(

They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

Metta.

Cambodian Land Mine Museum...

Landmines in Cambodia...