John Lennon - 32 years ago

Here's a excerpt from a book he wrote. He was living in Ireland, the emerald green isle and preparing to move to Donegal in the remote northwest.

He met a shopowner in a Liberties, Dublin antique shop to buy mirrors for his travels. He gifted her a piece of gringseng cloth, a healing fabric from Bali.

“Wonderful," she said, "many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry.

"Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

edit the monster

A week of absence make the heart grow fonder. 

What have you been doing, asked Elf.

I've been red-lining a manuscript, said Orphan. I printed it out and did a line-by-line edit.

Been spilling red ink like blood for a week.

How short is it?

550 pages. 

If I had more time I'd make it shorter.

Rewriting is the party. Dance like nobody's looking.

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." - Henry James 

typewriter man

My office is outside the postal building. I am fast, clean and efficient.

People show up. They ask me to write a letter. They talk. I write. 

Sure I say. I roll blank white 8x11 paper into my heavy duty, all purpose magic machine and off we go!

Dear _______,

I am in Trabzon. It is on the Black Sea. It's really blue green. It's big, deep and cold. I don't know where the color Black came from. Perhaps from a lack of light or enough photons.

It is famous for hospitality, fish, jokes and ancient stories. 4,000 year old stories include pre-Greeks, Romans, Laz dialects, Marco Polo, Thespians, Ottomans, Herculean tasks, romantic voyages and 15 (anxious) brave intrepid university students majoring in medicine and engineering practicing for English speaking tests this week after having developed personal courage to open their head heart and mouth. Say ahhhhh.

I am lucky I found a writer. He is lucky I needed help to get it down now and try and make sense of it later. It was an overcast day and, as you can see he was free. I like free don't you? He was so happy to meet a complete perfect stranger he wrote down his name and address on a clean white envelope so I can send him this picture.

It's grainy. Don't ask me why. It's the camera's fault. Maybe the ISO was too high, in the 800 range. It's about 52 KB here and now. The texture and subject and composition is ok. It's not going to win a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism I can tell you.

You get the picture.

What else can I tell you in this letter? I already mentioned the weather. It was overcast but mostly blue sky. It rained one afternoon. Clouds assembling for a meeting gathered above southern mountains. They opened their release mechanism and gave us poor humans a drenching. Weather threw in some thunder for good measure teaching us a lesson in auditory significance. Someone said the sky gods were bowling.

Makes sense to me.

Other than weather the food here is various and tasty; fish, cheeses, olives, fresh bread, meats, lentil soups, tomatoes, manti-ravioli, salads and, can you believe it, they grow cabbages bigger than children. If I grow up I die said one cabbage patch kid. No lie butterfly.

After paying for all these words I will buy an envelope from the writer and then walk into the post office to stand in line for a couple of centuries and hopefully get a stamp.

I hope they have one with orchids.

The writer can scribble my General Delivery return address on the back so you can pen me a word. I'll be happy to hear from you. 

Take care of the broken walnuts.

Love,

Orphan

crossing a border

He talked to Irish women on a Donegal bus.

“My family, while emotionally cold, distant and abusive yet well intentioned, kind and loving were rather dysfunctional, trying to understand my vagabond nature. They had no choice in the matter. By now they’re used to receiving strange word-strings full of mysterious symbolic metaphorical tragic truths from twilight zones. They receive illustrations as I transmit between crystals and gringsing decorated with universal binary codes.”

“Really now?” said Mary.

“Yes, I gave my folks a world map for their anniversary. They loved it, inviting friends, neighbors and strangers over for trivia games using postmarks, stamps, decals, flotsam, thread, needles, bark, cactus fiber, beads, charts of tributaries, topographical maps, animal skins, hieroglyphics, and Tibetan prayer wheels with Sanskrit characters. They caressed burned broken shards of Turkish pottery, Chinese bamboo brushes dripping blood, torn out pages from esoteric Runes, Paleolithic fertility symbols, vitreous writing, and one of my favorites, a Quetzalcoatl image full of written narration based on the oral performances of myths in Central America.

“Fascinating,” said Deirdre.

truth police

I speak on the condition of anonymity because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So, help me. Help me. Truth is classified. The source of truth about Everything is classified.

Ossified.

I am authorized to say, with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

The crypto key is classified top secret, for your blind eyes only. A gravedigger has the combination, the algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your faceLost, mind, heart or Spacebook personal profile timeline. Lost time.

If only time would behave and stay inside the lines the world would be a safer, saner place. As if place cares. Real friends are a dime a dozen few and far between. Truth, as Pessoa said, has few friends and they are suicides. Artificial friends are aliens on life support.

The key, for the Time Being, is inside the sharp arrow of time flying into Greater Complexity.

A woman, man, child somewhere in Cambodia, or XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.