Music below

This genre may be considered a short-short story or if you prefer, a “vignette” in the elegant, distant, surreal French tradition. Here, It’s a fictional post (versus an essay, poem, partial novel, or diatribe). It’s meant to be enjoyed, like a quick afternoon martini. Add to, comment on, dismiss, or praise as you like.

Bee and Jo

Bee was a recycler from Busan, South Korea. In the West, he would be equivalent to the scavenger of aluminum cans and the like, but here in the wild, wild East, in the sing song post-war prairies of Dong-nae City, practically everything short of edible food was carried off to recycling centers, centers that sunk into the urban landscape like bad poetry.

Splintered metallic objects, their parts wrangled and unidentifiable, were stacked up in absurd but slightly elegant piles. Artwork by accident at best. They awaited grumbling trucks with gigantic holds. The stationary loader had mantis-like hydraulic grips. It ripped into the sky to feed refrigerators and car parts to the trucks’ empty holds poised like the mouths of monolithic hungry dinosaurs. It dropped the resistant metals into the beds of these hermetically sealed shaking vehicles. Such crashing, resounding elegance. Such delicate catastrophe.

Jo befriended Bee because Bee allowed it and it benefited his empty heart. Members of the community would have to measure the plusses and minuses of a relationship between them. Truth be told, Bee was South Korean but had no cares regarding his community. In this way, he was independent. But Jo, she was North Korean and she was sensitive and wounded. Perhaps her pains were greater than his and this made him empathetic. She had survived the war and somehow made it south…maybe she was a miracle.

“Bee… Can I make lunch now?”

“Why do you ask me? You are not my servant.  I’m Bee… Just a normal man Ha!”

“No… You’re Bee… Expert in Junk. What’s that name mean anyway?”

“Bees make honey Ha! No thanks!”

“Ah… What?”

“It means “No thanks!”

“Why are you called “Jo”?

“Ji eye Jo gave me the name.”

“Who the hell?”

“Yah, who the hell…”

“Who the hell gives us theeese cans of meat and… phoey.”

“I’m tired of this canned food… Jo… Let’s make a garden!”

“I know how to do that!” Jo raised her smiling face.

“Don’t ignore me Jo. I want you to be my partner.”

“Yes Bee. We will be partners and make a large garden”.

“Demmit! We will make a wonderful life.”

Jo appeared exhausted but happy. She was unbathed but beautiful.

“So let’s have lunch…” They looked deeply into one another.

Then they had lunch.

The Jackhammer

The jackhammer began its insane choppy drone at eight am on Sunday morning. What a relief. On Saturday, it was seven am. Now coffee. Now tolerance. And this is the ‘Land of the Morning Calm’. I beg to differ. This is the “Land of the Painful Hangover”.

But this distinction does not belong to Korea alone. All across the world people drink in social places or alone or on cruise ships, and even in prisons. Well, as nature demands, we wake up with nausea and odd forms of headache and anxiety. Pardon the cliche: “Pay the fiddler.”

But the jackhammers (so much concrete to crush) and the barkers selling goods on bongo pick-up trucks, well, they get up quite early in the morning, and they multiply the deleterious effects exponentially. Thus jackhammers and bongos are to be avoided by most drinking folk.

Then came Monday. Along came the jackhammers at 6:43 am. At 6:44, I heard a muffled cry. I looked at my bed table clock and it was 6:45. No jackhammer. I fell on the floor and spilled an open bottle of water. Picked myself up and looked out the window. I saw a flash. Black like silk in rain. I Shook my head and went back to bed. Waiting for the cacophony. Nothing. And in seconds there was the humming of cicadas in the early summer morning. Bewildered, I got up and made coffee. Often looking out my window.

The next day, Tuesday, nothing woke me up. In fact, I was late for work. And I was happy. Since that day, at least in my neighborhood, this has been a “Land of Morning Calm”. No jackhammers, no barkers, only the sweet sounds of bird songs, light traffic, and cicadas. But I’m sure the jackhammers and morning barkers in bongo trucks will return. I only hope the mysterious figure will return as well. Until then, all is like a ship on calm water in an uncharted sea. What winds will come to soothe or ruin our wonderful mornings. No one knows.

The Gambling Den

My apartment was on the seventh floor with a veranda overlooking shoulder to shoulder small buildings. There were many one or two-story homes and businesses. The view was a 280-degree radial circumference perched on a diamond-like platform in a neighborhood that was noisy, busy, and near a high school. “From the apartment, It’s like looking down on a crowd of concrete chess pieces on a crazy confused chess board with ant-like people running around and all through it.” My friend Aims was known to say. Then I died.

But I’ll get back to that. By the way, Jean-Eugène Buland painted this wonderful image. His work is unsurpassed and beautiful. See the faces, all looking up in bewilderment. They look away as soon as they meet your eyes. How curious that seems until you realize that when people see you, in fact they see themselves. Healthy people look, smile, and go their way. There is nothing they need to see.

If you walked out the door, went down the elevator and connected with reality, you would be in the world of sound and fury as one writer put it. “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Macbeth. But did the bard really mean it like that. Faulkner. I don’t know. I guess they call that irony. Pages upon pages of a challenged individual. Not so much an idiot… Anyway my point is that it can be “harmony and passion” and let the fury burn out. Or use sound and fury when you need it. Emphasis: Choose to use it.

The proprietor of the bar was a skinny narrow-eyed pesky fellow with an absence of any social capacity at all. He’d drag down one cigarette after another and fill a beer glass like a laboratory tech. His clientele… almost all, no, correct me. They were all gamblers of the losing kind. End of their rope so to speak. All in debt to bad sources and unable to quit.

As in all card games, there is an origin derived from divination…. It isn’t remarkable that the modern Western deck of gaming cards had arisen from Tarot. And Tarot is as ancient as card structures come. I was in the neighborhood, literally. I was a writer researching this gambling den. I was announced as a gambler. I was looking for a story. I was sweating and felt agitated. The atmosphere was akin to the latrine in a submarine. I sat down to the table. I reached in for my wallet.  Guess what card came up.

Measuring Souls

“Clear skies and copious flasks of ambrosia strapped to our shoulders we ride and we travel like giant birds with strange wings across a very long stretch of land eventually reaching our next birth or our ultimate death…

Like the Egyptian gods with scales testing all souls’ departure. They are no less alive in the ether…

placing the invisible heart on a scale against a featherwhich will take the weight north or south…

yes, this determines the path of the departed whether toward heaven or toward earth again as there is no hell…

Hell has been established beyond a million times on Earth…

As the illusion has always been a ruse for power and injustice.”

Thus the experience millenia past rings true to this day. Therefore we begin the story of the modern-day Khufu (around 122 generations later) and I (no one in particular) from the brothels of Cairo (longer delay than planned) into the desert (by jeep taxi) then into the Great Pyramid (simple bribery).

And who am I but a guide and a friend. To bring Khufu back to his roots. His motherland. Umm… OK…

When we arrived at the entrance we were fantastically entranced. It was beyond our expectations in size and architecture. I was stunned but compelled to enter.