stateside fear

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw Point’s scarred Swiss climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away?” said Point.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift ?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, and seventy guns.”

“Look like things have really improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Point removed his boots and passed through detectors. Along the concourse he studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware! This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on your neighbors.

Report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Big Brother is watching.

He knew it’d come to this. He’d been far away, in Morocco and Spain imagining this Brave New World with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Advertising after centuries on the ground he sat down in a cabin on 8,000 year old Kalapuya Indian ceremonial soil. He had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter. 

A Century is Nothing

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc engines, and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.