Saigon Woman Metaphor

You are an object of fascination and speculation. A stranger among strangers is alive, happy singing a blues song about creative disorientation and the dynamic unfolding process. You are a ghost and survivors have seen millions of them before now and later. 

Survivors pray to soul spirits because they are afraid of ghosts.

Many sheep have an EI or Emotional Intelligence of -7. This simple truth or unpleasant fact is revealed through behavior, attitudes and verbal communication. It’s a lack of maturity, a generation’s reality.

Zero incentive, initiative and opportunities have nothing to do with chance, fate, destiny, luck, education or life social skills.

I witnessed this reality facilitating in Utopia, said Leo, a survivor of Gulag #101. Living and learning comes before teaching.

Everyone is a student where life’s lessons are small and magnificent, said Zeynep.

There are book smarts and street smarts, said Tran.

The Theatre of the Street is opening on Broadway and coming to a country near you, SRO, every performance is sold out for infinity. Its free for amputees and orphans in Asia where life is pure street theatre, hustler heaven on earth and I am pretending to be exactly who I am. My little story is filled with contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguities.

Discover a Metaphor, said Devina.

Ok, said Tran, Here’s one. Vietnam is a Saigon woman, 18, she costs $28 an hour, living in a room with other girls down a long series of narrow twisted dead end back alleys in Area 51 on the dark side of town. They are radioactive rural chickens. They have no identity cards. They are the living dead. It’s an in-out job.

The fat boss plays cards with friends. Neighbors chew the fat. A customer arrives on the back of a cycle. The boss tells his son to get three chickens.

They walk into view and stand silent. Which one do you want, asked the boss. He doesn’t care. They are a commodity with an exchange value. Human life is cheap.

The man looks at the girls picks one the others shrug and leave the man hands the boss money he unlocks a green metal door the man and girl go in the boss locks the door behind them you can never be too careful there are two dimly lit curtained areas with thin mattresses and a bathroom in the back shy she undresses with her back to the man she is supple they play around like greased monkeys getting warmed up for the big climatic scene they’ve forgotten their lines and ad lib their silent film in slow-motion her breasts are small points of light it isn’t about her pleasure she warms up big daddy applies a love sock climbs on for the ride takes control of the action priming the pump she majored in Vertical Mergers & Acquisitions at Quick & Easy U moving with the grace of a river reed caressed by warm sea air in suspended animation finished with the climatic action they wash dress knock on the door the boss unlocks it she returns to her room friends TV and boredom waiting for another curtain call the man rides into night smelling naked metaphors and the boss deals another hand. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Down in the Delta

Three days in the Mekong Delta swirling endless flow past, present and future. It’s Tibetan source runs 4500 kilometers through China refreshing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Tourists shared short stories. Icelandic, German, English, and French. They are on quick 2-3 week vacation through Southeast Asia. I felt their anxiety and time pressure. Some adjusted to Asian rhythm. Others suffered from sensory overload or beggar fatigue in a hurry to get somewhere else.

An open tour to My Tho, Ben Tre and Can Tho included a home-stay with a family deep in the jungle along a tributary.

Villages on small islands were a coconut candy production operation, honeybee processing, a python wrapped around your neck, fish farms, an alligator farm, a floating market, a rice paper making village, a Cham weaving village and Sam Mountain offering 360 degree visions of the huge delta and Cambodia to the west.

At a village home I awoke at 4 a.m. to sit by the river with the crescent moon and stars reflected in water.

Returning to Saigon life of dreams and hustlers I became a mercenary. Be aware. Be alive. 

Be a depressed pregnant woman. Hide behind a face mask below a conical hat. Silent. Passive. Quiet. Watching.

You see Truth and Beauty without evaluation, expectation, judgment or curiosity with a mercurial mercenary attitude, the quick and the dead.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Spirit Dream

Spirit dream rides clouds. Ancestor ghost eats incense. Feeling slow and clean in the temple zone.

Leo discovered new Chinese ink, stone and brushes. He remembered Mr. Li, his calligraphy teacher in Utopia.

How to stand.

How to hold the brush.

How to rub the ink stone inside the black oval with water.

How to caress the brush and black ink along an edge.

Create simple strokes.

Be the ink, be the brush, be the paper.

Museum

The Saigon Museum is filled with glorious death defying historical struggles: wars, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead dying wounded and ammunition, statues of men making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, a burning monk in 1963 as Kodachrome blazes his life, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, guns, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and skeletons.

Papier mâché people exhort the masses, Independence or Death!

They’ve traded illusions of independence and freedom for a one-party Socialist state filled with greed, corruption, nepotism and economic opportunity.

Life - contradictions and paradoxes.

Where does the artificial end and the real begin, asked a blind beggar.

Thich Quang Duc

The Amputee  - Knife Sharpener

After eating noodles in a cold alley, a man, 60, remembering how wars and hard survival ages humans, sat sharpening a knife for a woman customer redefining steel. No left foot. He rested his curled leg stump on a boot.

In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He’s wearing a green fatigue shirt, floppy hat, motorcycle helmet and carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. I know his truth not his story. A landmine or a stray bullet?

His left boot is a discarded war object and split down the front.

It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.

I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my boot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street. 

I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in. I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections.

I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. Without legs they wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys low to the ground truth.

____

A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes, and pressed pants with shiny belt buckles.

He takes off his hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him. He puts it on his arm stump, runs his good hand through his black hair, puts on his hat and moves down the street.

I am in the army now, he said. An army of the legless armless physically and emotionally wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Gratitude danced through life.

Be The Brush

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.

It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ...

Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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