Two Hearts

After detox and affirmations in Tacoma I accepted a new tennis teaching job at a Richland athletic club in the high eastern desert.

I lived between the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leaking toxic waste and a military high-grade uranium destruction site.

Sweet earth. Delicious water.

Glowing in the dark improved my writing visibility at night.

Clean and sober I wrote a small children’s book about trust and love.

Two Hearts On A Grand Precious Adventure has The Prince of Yogurt and the Princess of Chocolate on a quest for the beginning of the ocean. I self published it as an e-book.

I turned my attention to big work. I sifted through worn travel journals, old letters, faded yellow evidence papers, typed manuscripts, stories, fragments, poems, and photographs gathered from wandering Earth.

For two years I wove threads into a non-linear draft of epic adventures entitled A Century is Nothing.

I murdered my darlings and rearranged sentences in the farrago. They were stories about people telling stories about people in stories experiencing courage, transformation and impermanence.

I researched markets. I mailed out the synopsis with query letters. Fifty rejection letters from literary agents sang a refrain. “Sorry, doesn’t meet current mainstream needs. Too edgy. Needs more heavy, deep, real, personal Vietnam insight and growth. Fewer characters. Bottom line: I can’t make my 15% selling this.” Wallpaper. So it goes.

*

One morning I went to the Richland P.O. for stamps.

Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope they were named Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

I enjoyed a stimulating discourse with a young unarmed postal woman about the amazing galaxies and how incredible it was to contemplate them living five miles away from fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste left over from W.W. II seeping 130 feet down toward water tables along the Columbia River.

“Fascinating,” she said.

Editing material for my book I read a faded yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.

“It’s called Technetium, TC-99m,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as corporations vying for energy contracts with D.O.E. discussed containment options and emergency evacuation procedures.

Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

As the postal worker and I talked, a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps!” because at her precocious age, curiosity about the expanding universe developed her active imagination.

Holding a Nebula space dust galaxy in my hand I told the postal woman how we are a third the life of a 13.7 billion year-old universe. She handed me change and said, “That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before.”

“What happens next?” said Plot.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Ethnology Museum, Hanoi

Hanoi Memory

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Tranquility

Sandman flow waves
Flat line horizon
Tattoo queries with That Song in Sin City

Dancing orange sunset light
Collapsing blue waving rhythm
Flow

New water sparkles light waves/particles
Sparrow wing free flight wing seashell

Gauguin’s primitive visions - imagination

A shudder passed through his body tingling every nerve cell.
It was predicted by a long deep slow meditative breath

this inhalation staring at blue green gray waves

emanating from a flat purple horizon line.

Every afternoon is the same after four winds dance waves

Glitter, details, flow, tranquility, Wushu focus

Wind dances waves. Turbulent music.

Chinese visitors hide under umbrellas

gripping wrists walk the shore staring blindly at white Europeans on sun beds sucking beverages.

Dazed and confused by everything

shrouded women wear gaily painted floppy hats, sunglasses,

face masks devour their faces, shawls, long sleeved gloves and blind terror.

Self easy foam at the mouth.

The sea waved. Two white jet skis danced twirled and exploded over waves as wind pushed water.

A Khmer woman balances a large bamboo platter on head.

Light reflects bananas, mangoes yellow pineapples.

A man with a tray of sunglasses walks past with visual acuity.

In cheap mass-produced red and white soft-soled squash shoes

Tourists abandon exposure to ultra violet radioactive light

running into hard fast shade. Safe at last.

“Protect my fair skin,” they sang saving face,

a fear greater than death. Shrill echoes.

Grow Your Soul - Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Economic Terrorism

The 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit-motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

750,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Widow Remembers

In the United States of Amnesia it was all too clear to Marian sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen staring out a double reinforced storm window into spring’s garden.

She hadn’t slept well. Again. Last night was difficult with perpetual arthritic sore joints and eternal emptiness next to her in the brass bed. She’d stayed under the comforter reading longer than usual this morning. It was a clean sparse room with a thick Persian carpet.

Closets were crammed with clothing she’d give away.

While she had hardcover nonfiction stacked everywhere in the living room, her bedroom reading were intellectual monthly magazines and estate agent ads.

She sat on the chair where Richard sat for thirty-odd years in his frayed blue terrycloth bathrobe perusing the newspaper. He rose early to feed sparrows, bring her the morning paper and coffee, tease and laugh with her, talk and return to the chair.

She was shifting into another reality.

Sparrows arrived at the rusty bread pan feeder hanging from the split brown patio roof. The structure sagged toward earth. Jackdaws, jays and robins patrolled dew diamonds as light shaved crabapple, cherry, maples and elms. She needed to call the mower man. She needed to check the pressure on the old black pump down near the fence. It was going to be a hot day and it was wise to water early or late.

The hands on a grandfather clock above the yellow cabinet lined with medication bottles were dead just after one. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The key collected dust.

She didn’t know where she wanted to live the rest of her life. She was surrounded by memories and basement stuff.

Tons of tools, collectables and junk: lathes, hammers, chisels, planers, boxes of screws and widgets, papers, books, clothing, boxes of seventy-eight RPM records going back fifty years, canned goods stacked on dusty shelves, sturdy battered suitcases, moth balled suits, boxes of vintage wine, shoes, an old broken pinball machine, photo albums, European and Russian travel guides, a forgotten pool table, lumber, a black Singer sewing machine in working order, a crimson pin cushion, needles and spooled multicolored threads.

And that was just part of the mess down there. She never descended anymore. No need or desire. She’d seen it all, throwing up her hands accepting his passion for collecting stuff and messing around, resigning herself to inevitable destiny and retreated to the sanctuary of erudite literature and domestic tasks above ground zero in light and air. She prospered in the realm of intellectual property in life of the mind.

Thirty years is a long time to be with someone. Nancy, the hospice worker was a big help, her stepsons assisted make arrangements. A retired young brother lived north off I-25. He gave her connection and comfort.

Being Steamboat Springs natives they survived the depression in the 30’s by ranching, coal mining and power plant maintenance in Nucla.

Education formed their character. All of them escaped mountains for city schools. Universities gave them the opportunity to use their intelligence. They became engineers, teachers and geologists.

She was a secretary at ARFC in Denver when she met Richard a year after his wife died. She was a single mother and her son Timothy lived in Steamboat taking care of his grandfather until he passed on.

Timothy was in Mensa, had a degree in geology, built a Harley from scratch and resembled Custer. He was a friendly no-nonsense individual in the spirit of the West.

He worked long tough hours on the Western Slope as a supervisor for a mining operation dealing with poor maintenance records, inept management and the frustrations of trying to keep all the heavy equipment up to standards.

“It’s 8,000 miles to the center of the Earth and we’ve only drilled down 7.5 miles,” he said one afternoon to Geronimo sitting on a plateau as sunset light played across red, brown, golden sediment strata.

She knew everyone would help when she got around to making the decision. This chapter in her journey was letting go by accepting the fact she couldn’t stay here forever. The place was forty years old.

She’d sell it and get an apartment on a bus line near shops, a library and friends. She was only seventy and mobile. She didn’t need assisted living.

She missed knowing he was tinkering with something down there. She missed his dry sense of humor. It was going to be a long hot day.

ART Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir