Tuk-tuk by Rita

A Cambodian loudspeaker blasted: Now Here This!

The tuk-tuk leaves in five minutes departing for points unknown. A massive short celestial event known as Your Sweet Life on the tourist conveyor belt departs in five minutes.

You are advised to assemble all necessary documents, certified approval stamps, water, greasy guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on. You will visit Raw Mind on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you and a glossy germane Laughing Cosmic Planet guidebook with creased missing pages.

If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - you will discover a new sensation and perspective in another dimension beyond sight and sound.  

You are a vanishing particle in space. You will be surprised or traumatized depending on your sensitivity to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing and feeling temple magic and energy.

You will DO Angkor. Check it off your to do list. Less is more. Please conclude all private and group discussions, agreements, disagreements or false reasonable arguments with your fellow travelers. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. He will lose his job.

If he loses his job he will return to his village with his ten children sleeping in hammocks. He will plant rice and provoke white cows with Marxist control sticks. He will manipulate plowshares through mud. The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to be a tuk-tuk driver.

If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family may starve to death. This is a common problem here - Death by starvation. If you survive you win. Life loves a winner.

If he dies you will be held in escrow. - Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment.

A tuk-tuk driver has an easy job. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. You pay him and he goes home. He gives his wife some money. He spends the rest drinking Angkor Draft with friends.

He makes $15-25 for the day.

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $3.00.

Woman drivers are rare in Siem Reap. Like clean drinking water, sanitation, quality health care, OK condoms and student talking time in robotic factory schools.

Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guesthouses. They are the guest and you are the house. Your house has 1,001 symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious demon fears and ocean dreams live-breath-laugh and dance revealing inner visions.

Clean all your rooms. Your word janitor takes out the garbage.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff. Atoms make up everything.

You are a housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols, silence & nothing.

A woman doesn’t work as a tuk-tuk driver because:

- it’s too dangerous

- it’s inappropriate

- it’s foolish

- they lack the cash

- they lack education, intelligence, drive, initiative

- they haven’t broken free of ingrained social and cultural stereotypes. Practicality. The System believes her place is in the home, producing offspring, nurturing kids, cooking, feeding the dead incense, feeding the dying, feeding the elderly, feeding the kids, feeding hubby, washing, and cleaning. She’s happy.

- her family will kill her with love and affection.

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish primary or 9th grade like in Sapa, Vietnam. She married young. She stayed home forever and a day. She produced children in assembly line operations with high quality control standards, modern medicine and umbilical cords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers.

Your mother was appointed to have you. 

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.