Fly

Ireland.

One night a Donegal fly arrives while I’m typing.

It lands on the lampshade.

A muse watchdog fly, one eye, many eyes.

It rubs its feelers together in anticipation of finishing off someone’s meal. Flies have lived on Earth for 93 million years. They symbolize death and decay.

There is no food lying around, only papers, magnifiers, books and clothing.

The fly’s aware of magic power and pure intention drawing it to the writer. The lamp is hot. The wind is cold. The fly reads my mirror mind, sees bleeding fingers, feeling the loneliness and freedom.

Fly appreciates and comprehends this must go down just as it must land to rub it’s feelers together sitting on the precipice of light beams with wonder, fury, delight, ramifications, responsibility and repose. Karmic fate.

-I saw you from a foreign window, said fly. -You were on a path.

-True. Suffering is an illusion. It’s a grand precious adventure. The road is made by walking. It’s a long walk.

-Seems full of fools, dead ends, bookends, trails, trials, tribal ramifications and tribulations. Where is the beauty and truth in this tale? Where is the narrative structure? Where is the plot of formless form?

-We live in a world of forms. It’s in the exposition. The big show. It’s in the thread of fates’ fabric. How do I know where it will go? Part of my job is to gather material, get out of the way and allow a writer to organize it. I’m lucky to get it down and figure it out later. I’m a conduit. I’m a figment of your imagination.

-So it would appear, said fly, -who lives it, writes it, rewrites it, polishes it, reads it, kills it, ignores it, abandons it. I am a drop of water on your mirror. Feed wild birds daily crumbs. Water flies from sky. It explodes into earth. I disappear into dust. Burn baby burn. Cry baby cry.

-You’re a fly. An insect. Short attention span, like some humans I’ve met. No attention span? No problem.

-Hey. Take it easy. Listen. Stay focused. Stay on task. You were in the jungle, the real deal amigo. You were dazed and confused, stupid, naive, dressed in green, following blind orders. Blind led the blind. You were the willing doing the ridiculous for the ungrateful. You survived to tell the tale. Give me a break. Start with one true declarative sentence. Punctuation is a nail. Write what you know. Write the ending and work backwards. Center ripples out. Use verbs and nouns. Murder adjectives and adverbs. Use active tense. Give me dirty realism. Surface. Write with passion. Keep it simple. Seduce the reader.

-It was hot and humid. It was November. I was a climatic cinematic spotlight-floodlight focus. I was a thick stream of gracious fear, healthy doubt, glorious uncertainty, wild adventure and unlimited surprise. 

-How did you feel?

-Shit, I was young and scared. Apprehensive. We were all young and petrified & naive packed into a tin can flying low over green jungles. I smelled the green lieutenant’s shit next to me skimming jungles before they opened the doors, before some sergeant got on yelling at us to get out and get going. We walked down the stairs into heat exploding off pavement. A brown and white striped tent waved in the distance. We walked toward it. There were hundreds of guys yelling and screaming at us.

-So what. Kinda Blue by Miles Davis

-Man it was weird, I gotta tell ya. All these guys in earth  brown uniforms, caked with dirt laughing, smiling, yelling, crying, taunting us, thanking us for bringing in their plane, yelling “man we’re going home, what’s your honey’s name jack and I’ll take good care of her, man am I short,” all kinds of verbal incantations.

-So what. (take 2)

-You don’t get it do you? Man we were just getting there and I said, shit here I am at 19 and I’ve got 365 days to go. These guys are done, finished, out of here and it was the biggest longest looking instant of future time in the immediate present tense sense you could imagine. I couldn’t even begin to see it, 365 what? Are you kidding me? Others went into shock knowing they had no idea what was in front of them, only seeing 365 days staring them in the face. You knew life expectancies disappeared fast being a numbers game maybe, at the most six months if you were lucky and then after surviving 180 days you stayed on edge trying to make it through the rest. We swallowed salt pills three times a day. The weak dropped like flies.

-Not funny.

Weaving A Life V1

Director of Brooms

Book of Amnesia V1

Inarticulate Questions Mill Around.

Editing is form of self-censorship.

Punctuation is a nail…Be the hammer not the nail.

Language is a virus.

Today in the long now WE are literary outlaws. Many people … Multiple selves. A reliable heroine scripter named Zeynep and her storytelling friends.

“The scripter has no past but is born with the text.” – Roland Barthes

They de-storied all the rules. Like deconstruction and postmodern and literary osmosis. Play with it. There are no arbitrary drivel rules.

Five kid characters play literary outlaws. System Analysts. An amanuensis, word janitor, Grave Digger, a blind seer and others in the stream of life share stories. Get it down now and make sense of it later.

Death joins them for laughs. Everyone comes to me at the end.

 Book of Amnesia, V1

After a year at TLC and a year in Indonesia he rented a room near Lenin Park for four months. Dream Sweeper Machine evidence verified life in Hanoi.

He planned to burn a hardback copy of A Century is Nothing near Hue where he was transformed. Sacrifice.

Omar said, please gift to three Vietnamese-Australian girls you meet in Ho Chi Minh before you walk to Cambodia. They’ll carry it back to Sydney. Sharing is caring. He did.

His Hanoi neighbors were Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is Daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin or new Yin and old Yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife had someone to yell at. They needed someone, anyone to take care of them in old age sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 dancing kitchen smells with the sweet memory of insistent incense. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000 cash up front or no deal. Pay to play. Dave and his wife pretended to need kids so offspring would feed them later. When you’re young and naive multiple pregnancies are paramount. Accelerate production comrades.

It’s easy to produce kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are ninety million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the popular Communist Party bestseller, Produce & Consume.

Get married early the pressure is on. Honor off her.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, and forgotten. Loneliness and alienation increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and instability in a well-mannered informer-driven paranoid society. 

Extreme pressure is on females to get a husband.

*

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English. I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street of life. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. What I really needed to sustain my curiosity and sense of humor. I use really a lot.

Don’t let school interfere with your education.  

More tourists than travelers visit Sapa. It’s near The Middle Kingdom. I've never been there. It’s an old civilization. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail better. I have a dream, to be.

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at the nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese products. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh. You can always tell who they are:

1) they arrive on big white buses polluting pristine air

2) they wear bright red baseball hats so they don’t get lost ha, ha, ha

2) they travel in packs like scared animals

3) they stay in government hotels and eat at Vietnamese places

4) they ignore me

No, I’m talking, and I speak excellent English among other languages about the foreigners. My friends and I working the street politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts, embroidery work and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners real travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. Sapa is a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. In and out people.

Tourists have a holiday schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? A Greek guy named Arrest Throttle said time is the greatest wealth or maybe it was health. They’re related.

Anyway, they eat, sleep, wander around and maybe if I’m lucky take a trek to my village and then, POOF - like magic they disappear. 

Then the tourist machine spits out more day-trippers for us to sell to pester and offer village treks. Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature and the real Sapa. Life is all about meeting, engaging and establishing emotional connections with people.

It’s about how you feel not what you understand. I feel free.

Engage-study-activate.

Some stay overnight in my village, which is fantastic because by avoiding the greedy hotel middlemen after profit, my folks make some small money.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels - H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses because we are free - charge tourists $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get ten. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet trekkers the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that. One said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. I am a wise owl.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They slow down. They sit and talk with my mom and dad. They take some snaps. Here we are.

Then we follow trails through forests, crossing rivers, trekking along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal directly with tourists and trekkers. I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman, ha, ha. Does that make me a middle woman?

I live in the middle way.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow.

I love pizza with cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical box. What’s up with that? Squeeze a memory. Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work-play, evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand at a cultural level why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don’t leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than walking home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It has beds and a toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work. I’m a great little trek leader. I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do. Nature is my teacher. Life is good in Sapa. Bye-bye and good luck.

Weaving A Life V1

Borders

“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

*

He took a night bus to Cadiz, an ancient city of Neoclassical churches where stained glass baroque explorers named Colon sailed west, dear Nina, in search of gold importing their assimilated desire, converting heathen slaves into worlds of persecution and misery.

It was expensive raising funds from skeptical kings and queens expanding their empire. Rumor said Queen Isabella was convinced of Chris’s project over a game of chess. The queen became the most powerful piece in the game, hiss- story-ically speaking.

This explained why Cadiz women were draped in gold. Remnants from ages of reason, enlightenment and discovery. Ages of illumination, prosperity and knowing the unknown gifts of the Magi evolving from bronze to iron to gold. Alchemical reactions turned base metals into gold. Chains around wrists and necks sold by the gram were heavily displayed by Spanish patrons.

Butchers in Cadiz didn’t wear gold. Their hands gripped the sharpened edge of well honed Spanish knives paring off fat, cutting through layers of gristle.

A shop bell rang. A stranger paused in a doorway.

A steel mesh glove protected a butcher’s left hand holding meat. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through flesh and bone. The table was littered with blood. Women lined up to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs hung in windows as white quality funnel tags attached to hoofs collected fat.

Wild boar and stag heads stared down from walls next to color photos of local bullfighters. Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway posed with famous Ronda matadors. Red rivers painted capes as bull blood flowed down muscular necks.

Dancing along the devil’s whiplash big black hungry flies buzzed around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust. A dog’s ribs rolled over scraping grounded shade, begging for water. A drop in the ocean, is all H20 no matter how deep you dive. A wave washed the shore day by day. Stones sang.

The sausages sounded sweet, retaining a sharpness, inextricably swaying like dancers in a choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under a mass of weighted meat.

Manuel, the butcher stared through his jagged window of broken glass remembering the Spanish Civil War. His face was a mask of weary, solemn stillness. A quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, the expected surcharge on an empty stomach, a tax for services rendered as reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys, heard waves of German bombers over Guernica on April 26, 1937.

Beleaguered International Brigade freedom fighters held their own inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees Mountains spinning, standing grounded, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

Survivors fled to fields or huddled in shelters. They knew the best way to survive was to remain silent. Their town was reduced to rubble. Manuel was required to remember old Fascist propaganda - the spreading of information.

He is a fleischer, one who slaughters.

In order to eat and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, wine, and dancing after burials he was forced by economics to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, his vision, his hope, his dream and village identity. Everything else was stolen by dictators, thieves and Fascists. All he had was his dignity, integrity, and self-respect.

Time arrived short of sympathy, sentiment or condolences. He sharpened his short axe. Standing under the brutal Spanish sun he worked steel across a grindstone removing old edges. It was sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into the center of the red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner. He approached the bull and held out his hands lined with pulse rivers. The bull slowly emerged from the shade. Looking into the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul.

He sighed, clapped his hands together twice, bowed to the bull, as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority. He asked for forgiveness, for his act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck.

The bull froze and slumped, straining to escape the blade carving through weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, snapping final bones. Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered as a final breath exploded in red dust.

He clapped his hands again, severed the head and dragged the body to his shop. He cut it up. He hung the head in his broken window. “For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors toasting his wisdom. They consumed his life’s work. Sharing is caring.

I witnessed this.

A Century is Nothing

TLC

One engraved knife revealed The Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam.

It remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares surviving American B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Hallucinations and bliss evolved from a point of light traveling at 186,000+ miles per second.

Space folded.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories.

From inside narrow Nam alleys where death-worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense screaming FEED ME dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, clarity, understanding and interpretation.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The Language Company