Beauty of travel

The beauty of travel is the anonymouse sensation in a crowd.

On a Sunday all the Khmer men gather for coffee, tea and stories.

Do you take milk with your stories, asked one. No, straight.

Some study another's face and words.

Others study cell phones or the unposed their music video on a tv.

TV is great, said one, it allows you to give up your consciousness.

Still others study a conversation disguised as a peddler pulling his trash cart

Down a street squeezing air out of a worn plastic bottle to summon the attention of a person waiting to hear the air knowing they can pawn some junk, perhaps an old family heirloom or weaver's word loom in Lao village along a river stream of consciousness.

Or a real loom with or without threads of a dangling modifier; cotton or silk having created clothing for relatives now since gone.

The silence of conversations attracts flies.

No one bothers the stranger writing or drawing in a notebook. 

DO the Mango Tango - TLC 77

I go. We go. You go. Mango. Super fruit. Buy one. Get one free. Peel it down. Peel her skin. I am a bed rabbit. Plow my field. Honey needs money. Savor my succulent mass of alpha bet your sweet ass anti-oxidants.

A. C. E. Ace a mango.

Mango’s humility skin released interior monologue. Flowing sensations danced mango simplicity with serenity. 

Mango said, “There are two kinds of people in the world.”

“What are they?” said a Cambodian named Orphan.

“They are subdivided into sub-species. There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you. There are people who want control or approval. There are people who face the music and there are people who run for cover.

"There are people who pay attention and people who don’t know or care what the fuck is going on. They are too poor to pay attention. There are people who make things happen and people who dream about making things happen. Yeah, and one more thing - there are people who are willing victims of their auspicious fateful situation playing the blame game.”

“That’s a mouthful of mango logic if you ask me,” said Orphan. “You mean, according to the philosopher, Damon Younger Than Tomorrow, ‘distraction is an inability to identify, attend to what is valuable, even when we are hard working or content.’”

“Yes, that’s what I said I mean because I mean what I say and say what I mean jellybean,” laughed Mango doing the tango with Taoist monks at The Temple of Complete Reality in Sichuan.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” said Confusion.

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.

 

illusion of truth and drama

The big general picture (floodlight)

The small specific picture (spotlight)

Sleeping alone is boring, said Sunflower, a blind masseuse in Kampot.

The blind man plays a flute.

His young son leads him through life.

Music guides their quest.

Mindfulness, breathe, ease god out.

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

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