watch women work

sunday song

cambodia is a funny place. ha, ha, ha.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision.

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing.

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now.

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain.

it smells like an art project.

it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows.

***

welcome to a new reality game show. it’s called “Watch Women Work.”

work to eat now OR evolution of the species and social organization (+-)

log on, log in, log the forest. yeah, yeah. i am mr. monosyllable, your creme filled hostess cupcake for this week’s exciting program. yeah, yeah.

contestant #1. a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. (poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd)

contestant #2. a housewife. she has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

her, his, their children are naked. they play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining.

contestant #3. a housewife. she is milling around. she has no focus, plan or direction. she is a teacher. she teaches by example. she hopes the lazy boys and men understand. she’s knows many won’t and don’t.

she pounds things like metal. all day. she is a tool. she is a worker. she is a tool of production in life’s assembly factory. she is a simple person. she spits out many children. this is her duty. children are tools.

contestant #4. a housewife. she works. her lazy adult son watches her. he is bored watching her. he wants to stare at the long and winding dirt road. he wants to feast his small beady rat eyes on dirt. his eyes are dirt. pure clean red dirt. she sweeps him into the river. swim, little fish. bye-bye baby, bye-bye. he floats away.

contestant #5. a housewife. she has a diamond in her mind. she is calm and focused. she exhales beauty, truth and love.

she sings all day long.

pick one to emulate. find one with incentive and initiative and win BIG prizes.

what’s the prize? a broom, a brick, an SUV smashing a green cow patty and a monster home shaped like a wedding cake surrounded by a moat, high walls, silver barb wire and iridescent colored candles.

anything else?

a year’s subscription to your favorite illustrated color glossy advertising magazine:

“Dreams, Lies, Wishes, Hopes, and Great Expectations While Driving a Blue Dismal Diesel Dump Truck Needing an Overhaul Loaded with Charcoal.”

cool prizes. let’s play. what’s the first question about the quality of life? said Socrates.

meanwhile: destiny’s child disguised as a black and vermillion butterfly nurtured red and orange exploding flowers above a cool brown flowing river.

see you next week on WWW.

 

wather, Winning the Turf, Work in the stones

From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend. 

Wather

There was a mad poet
Hawking his verse
On the streets of Galway City.
And I watched him pronounce Wather in Irish.
His mouth, a kiss around it:
Ooowhishka, he said.
The whisky in aqua vitae,
The Fionn Uisce in Phoenix Park,
That the conquerors’ tongues
Had such a hard time with.

Winning the Turf

I swept out the ashes, cold on the stones,
Bent to the task in the dawn gloom.
The wind skirled laments in the too skinny flue
And out the window, the threat of more rain.

There on the stones, fumbling for cold
I stacked and balanced the turves
Built there a redoubt sturdy and heaped
As Brigid Moran had once shown me.

The Morans have turbary rights in the bog
She’d said, as she struck the match smartly
It’s Moran turf, surely, we’re burning this morning,
As her yellow flame danced and grew bold.

She’d bent to the task, all business it seemed,
And mid-wived the flickering flame.
Blew on it once, then twice, like a bellows
Brought it forth in the forge of the hearth.

***

I’d seen all the boghollows hewn in the heather
As I’d ambled the brambled boreens
Seen turves helter-skelter, heaped up from these rents
Slane marks etching the faces.

I imagined her da at the face of a bogbank
Where the bog water rilled at his heels
Inelegant, red-faced, in blue overall
His Wellingtons thick with muck spatter.

Slaning it deftly, six bars deep,
And heaving sods high to the spreader
Who barrowed them heavily by donkey and creel
And footed the turf stacks in clamps.

Sputtering, puffing, like a kettle at gallop
Delving and heaping the sods
As the slow day turned down and a blanket of mist
Tucked them into a distant soft weather.

***

My match flared up hugely in the grey morning cold
And I touched it to paper and shavings
Watched it there kindle, smoulder, and smoke,
Hesitate, catch, and then take.

My turf fire blossomed all orange and bright blue
Putting chase to the slate day’s cold weight
This light, heat, and life, all up from the mud -
The mud of fair young Brigid’s home.

Work in the Stones

They bled the fields of the stones
Back breaking
And by the thousands.
Snaked the walls right round
Fitting and snugging flat the faces.
They tucked the dead weight tight
Sinuous and sturdy,
Running from here to nowhere
But not in the fields now.
‘Til the hills were striped and boxed.
And the work,
The low-down, rain-sodden work,
Held forever
Like a breath
In these stone walls.

Up close, the copes, some fallen,
Bear down on the batters
The throughs and the heartings
Buried in the heap of them.

The binders hewing them
Together from the heap fall
The batter lines spreading out
To the wet foundations
The wall heads at the corners
The joints broken with coverstones.

And the squeeze stiles
To pen the bulls
But a lunkie or a smoot
For the wayward lambs.

The work,
The heavy dull-thudded work,
Deft and thumb smashing,
Cunning and cruelly hard,
Here, forever, by the side of this road,
Admired and ignored. 

family stupidity

Ok so I'm a big seven as in 7.

My dad's not very smart. It's probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee.  Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Laos. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

So it's pouring like honey. What's dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he's trying with intention, to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running water over rain. Cleaning.

He ignores me mostly.

He's very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. Starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living poor thing.

My mom's really smart also. After the rain, when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell, let me tell you. Like that Duvall character when he said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kinda like that. Smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she's not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She's a baby machine. What's another mouth?

She ignores me mostly.

She's very busy. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

People here like parents and teachers and lazy passive humans love, and I mean love to pretend to be busy.

I guess it gives their short life meaning.

Their existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

As Jobs said, You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it.

Well, I gotta go. Feed the sparrows. Crumbs. They sing. They fly down. They eat. They fly away.

I'm too young to know much. Ain't nothing but the blues. Dust my Broom.  

I am a seller, said the Ice Girl

Greetings,

As dawn light savored green jungles along rivers a young Banlung woman-mother, one of many, cut ice. She sawed ice into manageable chunks as glistening elements dripped their moisture into delicious red dust. Red dust is stirred by countless women sawing and sweeping in front of their red dust covered wooden shuttered doors. Up and down the red dusty street.

Ice slides into blue plastic bags. Four foot long blocks of ice are loaded on the backs of antique battered black and red motorcycles driven by delivery boys wearing dusty baseball caps with glittering golden stars. Women in front of their shops open large orange plastic boxes to hold fresh clear frozen ice. 

Ice lives and dies every morning in a red dusty paradise. Sun streaks water. Ice cries.

After school the mother's daughter, 12, saws ice. A man sees her. What are you doing? he asked. She smiled. She is happy. I am a seller, she said. Her English is clear, distinct and filled with confidence. She bags a block of ice and hands it to a cycle man. He hands her crumbled red dusty notes.

She saws ice in afternoon heat. You are a good seller, said the man. Yes, I am, said the girl. I greet the buyer and sell, I cut, I bag, I talk, I sell. Ice is moving.

See you later, she sang playing her saw through crystals inside red dust. 

Metta.

No education, no chance

Greetings,

Editor’s note: this entry contains material which may not be suitable for children under 100.

It is 6:00 a.m. It is raining. Rain is not part of this short tale. It’s only purpose is to clean the air, turn dusty red rutted ragged roads into quagmires and provide essential moisture to roots.

It is important, gentle reader to understand the context. I have written extensively about the reality here on the ground the last eight months. Unpleasant facts are more plentiful than health care, education or clean drinking water. See Travel Tales for material.

Some Cambodian people, like other people on planet Earth are cunning, devious and scheming. They, like others, have little or no formal education for various reasons. 

For many impoverished adults on Earth educating their children 

wastes time and m-o-n-e-y.

Food is their daily priority.

This means many mill around, stare, interrupt others, are rude, do not LISTEN and demonstrate behavior and attitudes similar to simians with a very limited vocabulary.

Their daily existence involves searching, finding, preparing and eating food. It involves searching, finding and having sex. It involves sleeping. Sleeping is popular before, during and after food. 

Sex is popular whenever the male, the ALPHA animal in the tribe demands it. This is Natural Selection. People live on Earth for two main reasons: to breed and to work. Read and write? No, breed and work. 

Female members are Passive. They are conditioned through DNA genetics and environment and family education and expectations to be Passive. 

If they refuse to submit to the male they are beaten. If they talk about it they are beaten. If they enjoy it they are beaten. If they run away they are captured and beaten. If they suffer humiliation they are beaten. If they are beaten they are beaten. If they live to tell the tale they are beaten. If they die while being beaten their corpse is beaten. They are beat.

In Afghanistan they are stoned to death by members of their Taliban community. 

She was 19. He was 25.

However, females display acts of aggression when they perceive their offspring (and they have 100’s) are in danger. The longer she breeds the longer she lives, the longer she works the longer she lives. In theory.

Their main task in life is to breed and work. Then they are slaughtered. Life is a bitch.

Across the rural street from my little space behind a green garden I am a witness. I extrapolate, illuminate, illustrate, and desiccate. A family has moved into a long shack across the street where they live. They set up a food joint. They sell steamed corn and fast fried foods.

There is a mother, two older boys 17 & 20 and two girls, the youngest is about 13. The girls may belong to the mother or, as is common, they're from poor areas needing domestic work. They are highly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

No papa. He is history in the tragic family tale, one of millions throughout the Magic Kingdom. Long gone in the long now. 

Incest Is Best, a boy about 17, touches one girl’s rear while mom is at the market. He’s wearing his towel-sarong. She’s setting up a glass display case on a wooden counter with her back toward him. He slides up behind her and presses his crotch against her. 

She freezes. He imitates sexual movement. He whispers to her, Little ‘sister,’ this is what happens to you. I have a little red rooster. Do you like it? 

She is powerless. She has to stand there and take it. She is silent. She feels like crying.

Rule #1. Boys and men run the show. They pay lip service to girls and women. It’s the old breed and work paradigm. 

Sexual harassment by immature boys and older men (with money, power and control) and a high level of testosterone, IS a game. Simple sex. No education. No responsibility. No morals. No ethics. No education. 

This explains why millions of girls have babies and the guy runs away. Zero responsibility. 

Girls and women tolerate it because:

it’s an unpleasant hard, cold cruel fact of life

they are told to submit to males
they live in Fear 
they are considered stupid and second class citizens
they have no human rights
it’s an unpleasant reality here
it’s the LAW of the jungle
it’s expected
they have no Voice, no way out
they don’t have the power to say or do anything to stop it
mother is not sympathetic. it happened to her. that’s life

(Translated by Rain)

Metta.