Fear Mentality

People in Cambodia love to look back, said Rita, It is a passionate DNA genetic molecule of fear, doubt, healthy uncertainty, adventure and surprise, a childlike innocent curiosity wanting or needing the past tabla rasa. Yes. Focus on needs, not wants.

Needs manifest desire. A desire for something to believe with clarity. We are all passing through. They look back to see if they see a ghost in their vivid reptilian imagination.

Hungry ghosts of family, friends and lost strangers seek identity. They seek clues and meaning at their personal ground zero. Post genocide reality and perpetual fear of the dead. One point seven million (+-) hungry ghosts wander around looking for relatives, homes, fields and imaginary memories.

They’ve arrived from distant galaxies. Human habitation sites were discovered in Khmer jungles 500,000 years ago. Primitive agriculture began 7,000 years A. Go. So it figures, mathematically speaking with evolutionary premise and factual data, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance today.

We live in talking monkey zones. They pretend to be exactly who they are. They use their faint star energy to look w/o seeing. All the wondering. 

They look without understanding.

Food is cheap here. Medicine and education are expensive.

This has nothing to do with simians, said Devina in Jakarta. It indicates two women sitting in a neighborhood food joint. Plastic chairs face a tall cinderblock wall. Chickens, goats, cats and orphans prowl, peck and forage through garbage dreams.

One woman sits in a deep meditation. Chattering oral storytellers play Bronze Age drums, pounding out 3rd century you tunes.

Heal the people with music.

Males wash their literary typing machines. They study accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. They play chess at knight along roads waiting for passengers. People eat spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies and green and red chilies.

Have you eaten yet is what we ask people first in Utopia, said Leo.

Eat your dreams. Masticate. Emasculate. Procreate. Protect. Kill.

One human creates a Brave New World.

See literary outlaws create new futures with existential joy. It’s their assessment on process in a data based star cluster. Dream mask mirrors swim to Cambodia.

We are Visceral Realists, said Devina, Zeynep, Rita, Leo ToldStory, Tran, Omar, a Grave Digger and Laughter, a reliable narrator. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Clean Ears

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Paradise. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion oratory

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance                      

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your heart, open your eyes, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Zeynep

Escaping an insane world Zeynep enjoyed a long sauna. She scrubbed off dead cells.

She walked into a spacious white marble room with a high vaulted dome and thermal pool as 32-points of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles and eight recessed ochre cubicles where women soaped, slathered, scrubbed, melted and relaxed in thick mist heat.

They were divorced from anxieties, fears, husbands, lovers, kids, tedious housework, tomatoes and brown tea. Natural mineral water was a simple luxury of musical respite. Zeynep savored an extensive massage. A muscular woman worked sandpaper fibers over her skin.

Zeynep dove into unconscious thermal waters. Renewed, she enjoyed fresh squeezed orange juice and meditating in spring air below snow covered mountains and blue sky, I’ve defrosted my imagination.

She sat on a stone wall seeing a brown valley, plains and distant rolling green hills where lights on cooling towers at a nuclear reactor blinked red. She discerned movement inside a sloping field of yellow wild flowers and tall spring grass. Animal alert.

Working its way through and down was something large. A cat perhaps a snake. A large green brown turtle waddled into view. Splendid. Carrying the world on its hard shell back with a hexagram, it covered terrain headed for green.

A rusty wire fence enclosed its universe. It turned away from dreaming and exploring, its instinct directed it toward green, around trees, through forests brimming with life, soil, smells and textures foraging forward in paradise. Turtle memory.

The hexagram on its back was clear. You will travel far. Slow is natural. You will live long.

It was uncanny how Z discovered one word in a poem about an orchid feeling loss, rectifying it’s beautiful existence in white light and black shadow.

Possessing consciousness, Orchid was imprisoned and comforted by charcoal. Blooming free it released scents rendering humans comatose with pleasure.

Zeynep stood on a Metro platform. When it arrived neurotic impatient passengers rushed glass doors like hungry tigers attacking their brother’s keeper with hormone free meat  ... They believed by rushing the door it would spring open quickly  ...

They were stymied in their desire, their quest for immediate gratification arriving on steel, an air conditioned nightmare of lightning bolts as they pressed relatives and strangers against glass trapped & staring at shimmering reflections of their grimacing faces.

Word Factory doors opened.

Today is a good day to be happy & empty.

Practice emptiness and non-attachment, whispered Leo, a Tibetan monk.

Not too detached and not too sentimental, said Zeynep, his telepathic artist friend in her Bursa restaurant drawing stick figures with wild forested hair living in paper mâché houses beneath a startled sun in a well-thumbed black Moleskine as ravenous shopaholic eaters crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat and rice mixed with gaseous beans. They stuffed food into bland faces while texting erotic pornographic messages to lovers.

To eat is to love.

Food sex shelter air water are essentials. It’s the Middle Way, said Z.

Leo was grateful to meet Zeynep. She renewed his faith and trust in art, friendship, free play and creativity without expectations, outcomes or ego with clear childlike curiosity. Expectations and reality are illusions.

A Lao monk wrapped in orange robes danced in cool dust before morning alms. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Bursa Hammam by Z

Crows cackled at sunrise. Bamboo Nomad opened the blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment in Bursa, Turkey, riding the blinds a metaphor for rails, a cryptic railroad life of drifters and literary outlaws hopping a freight out of town, rolling.

Light particles streamed to a pink and red veined orchid in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled in white light. Red gladioli, oh so glad, petaled their beginning. Piano Etudes tinkled by P. Glass.

Fear, a handful of dust in an urn labeled Gratitude, celebrated laughter.

A piano fell silent. Violins and a cello picked up the slack hemming their garments at intersections on life’s loom, said Devina.

In the new world order all the police and security forces are children they know how the world works. Kids have a shock proof built-in shit detector.

Storytellers agreed.

Elegant cirrus clouds swirled around pachyderms and Staunton pieces fighting to control the four center squares.

A quixotic knight errant with a curving silver scimitar followed by Panache on a donkey waving a red one-star Vietnamese Communist flag sailed through Russian thongs and throngs driving a Turkish turbo-bus near Hanoi hair salons where women trimmed Winter Hawk’s talons.

Bright yellow coughing taxi engines heard Arabesque musicians fingering Ouds lamenting loss forever as percussionists hammered goatskin drums  ...

Turkish silver merchants sang, Lucky sale, First sale, Cheap, Make my day.

In a Bursa hammam built by the Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha in 1555 filled with blue and green geometric tiles and vaulted ceilings, steam rose through rusting bars to locate a Wi-Fi signal from the private Achebadem Hospital emergency room staffed by stressed out C-19 doctors looking over thin shoulders with lost bewildered aimless fear in trepidation toward lost bewildered aimless fat ugly white idiot tourists named ATM dragging their lives and dusty packs on tired shoulders through Asia as hungry heartbroken wolves paced tight narrow cages lamenting loss of freedom howled the blues.

Humans are wolves in sheep’s clothing, said Tran.

Chekhov said there are three paths. Choose one.

Turn left wolves eat you, go right you eat wolves, go straight you eat yourself.

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.