Labor

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: how to paint a curb in Cambodia.

Part 1. Get a plastic bucket. Throw in white language. Tie a blue and white checkered scarf around your neck. It's hotter than the mid-day sun on the Tropic of Cancer. South of the Equator. Slather it on with a broom. David Foster Wallace wrote: The Broom of The System.

DFW said: "what it feels like to live, to observe, to experience in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them."

2. Your four emaciated brothers walk past on their way to work. Three carry shovels. One carries a sledgehammer. They will transform the small sleepy river town into: (a) a hot tourist location (b) frozen ice inside the hard cold fact:  how necessities become luxuries which happens around Earth. Consider ice. Frozen water. Necessity. Yesterday it was water. Today it is white rice. Close as white on rice. Tomorrow it's Medicine. The day after tomorrow in the long now it's Education. Life's little luxuries. Plural.

They suck on life's plastic straw. They discard the plastic straw and cup on the ground. They walk. They paint. They shovel. They slam sledgehammers.

Their daily efforts will revitalize world economies. They will speak at G-20 economic forums. They will address important powerful people. They will speak to 5% of the world's richest people who control 98% of the total wealth.

They will have a voice. They will represent millions of peasants and poor people. Their labor will wear them down. They will lose the resolve, the focus the vision to alter history. They will be replaced by new workers.

They paint. They shovel dirt. They pound sledgehammers. They suck ice. They mill around. They watch the world pass by hearing inadequate impossible language. Their DAILY language is pure, raw labor. 

A Cambodian woman carries the world on her back. 

Metta.

Street 2

Greetings,

Summer's here and the time is write for dancing in the street. Hanoi style. You can't photograph a memory. The Ministry of Obfuscation welcomes you with open arms. I am an accident that can think. Celebrate your imagination.

Metta.

Street 5

Greetings,

On behalf of the Hanoi Department of Tourism and One Party Neighborhoods filled with millions of well adjusted content poetic calligraphic citizens, welcome to our fair city! Stroll through parks and gardens. Smell the roses.

Enjoy wandering around. See amazing historical and cultural mysteries. Our number is on the wall. Call now. Make new friends. Get lost. Explore. Discover.

Metta.

Gadget man to the rescue!

Greetings,

Well before human fingers painted with blood, animal fat and ash on French and Spanish cave walls, and scratched images and dreams on sacred Aborigine sites; and well before humans in Mesopotamia etched Sumarian symbols on wet clay using sharp reeds and animal skins and dried parchment; and well before Gutenberg invented the printing press and well before paper, pencil, pen, illuminated vellum manuscripts, canvas and diverse materials there was THE GADGET!

Early humans were busy hunting and gathering. Survival was the game.  

To connect or not to connect, that is the question. Let's do the numbers. Text me baby. 140 characters dance.

Here is an image of a calculating machine gadget morphing into a super human computer capable of crunching millions of numbers, data and esoteric trivia. In REAL TIME.

...A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated...

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows. Read the small print.

  Hooked on Gadgets...

Save my life! Save my marriage! Save me from electricity! Give me ash, blood, paper. Give me real time.

Give me a Cambodian man pedaling laboring a one gear gadget bike pulling a cart loaded with bags of cement. Give me two men pulling a cart loaded with discarded cardboard. One man squeezes an orange plastic toy - SQUEEK, SQUEEK telling residents to bring out their paper products. The plastic toy is his 21st Century gadget. 

Give me a man ringing a bell. Give me 221 seconds inside a time tunnel to cement a deal before I have a heart attack from the stress. My gadget addiction is killing me. Before we have sex my wife and mistress make me wear a gadget. This gadget nullifies the sensation of direct and immediate experience.

I'm a gadget. A living breathing, laughing gadget. I have a gadget son and a gadget daughter. They are artificial intelligence personified.

I have the precision of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table. 

Metta.

Asia's long now.

Symbolic collisions

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: Things are symbols of themselves.

People pretend to be exactly who they are. Infinite diversity through infinite combinations. Somewhere in the world a woman is carrying the planet on her back.

It was a Sunday and The Big One (Supreme Deity) rested. They took out their slingshot. They looked at Earth. They witnessed very stupid humans practicing REVENGE. This made them unhappy. They decided to send them a message to stop the foolishness, learn how to play together and how 2 share.

They picked a country at random after analyzing levels of violence, fear and intimation. (Fill in the blank_____) They sent a message. I will give you 24 hours to cease your revenge actions, war and reciprocal suffering. It's a waste of lives, time and money.

If, after 24 hours, I see you are continuing your collective madness, I will send you a little message. I will destroy part of your civilization to teach you a little lesson. Do you read, over?

Naturally, the ego-manics running the country ignored this message. They persisted in war-like behavior with weapons of mass destruction. They persisted in starving people to DEATH. They persisted in their greed and stupidity.

The BIG ONE had infinite patience. 24 hours for talking monkeys is a long now. For The BIG ONE it's a blink. They sent another message.

I gave you a chance. You ignored my request for peace, harmony and equality.

The BIG ONE loaded a rock the size of a small planet into their slingshot, took aim and let it fly toward a specific, particular location on Earth. It flew through the atmosphere at light speed. Meager powerless humans attempted to divert it with ultra-sonic flyswatters. It was useless. 

The rock zeroed in on a city in a country on a continent. It was a direct hit. Millions died. Vaporized. The leaders said it was only a freak of nature. For domestic consumption they blamed their imaginary enemies because they ate and worshiped Revenge. Sweet revenge. Survivors rolled the dice. 

Metta.

Poets & Writers...