Ketchup

I am not dead. Quite alive actually. In the land of the BeautifulPeople and realizing that the small little ants in the workline, carrying the dead lizard in small pieces into the anthill, really can make an impact in the yard. The world is ours for the taking.

And with that abstraction, I will write out a few lines from the journal I carry around everywhere I go. These snippets will make sense to me, and most likely will convince you I am a crazy woman, so more power to me.

--
why is the ocean so long?

--

That his thin skull where you could feel where the surugeons had drilled in to free up the hemorrahge... that it no longer exists.

The whispy grey hair.

The early morning hours tearing the dastaar into thin strips.

"Sat Sri Akal Mata Ji!"

Dada Siba. Lahore. Malloo.

The empty box white room.

Bathing all the time in the summer.

The rough thin skin. You could pick it up and roll it between your fingers. And it woulf fall back on to the thin bones.

I have his wrists. A love for pen and paper. And a smigdeon of his curiousity.

--------

The room was filled with Good People. Good People doing Good Things.

The delegates flowered the room with their country's saris, blacksuits, African formwal wear draped on bodies. The negotiations droned and some of the delegates fell asleep as the details were wrestled through. But that never made the cover of the NY Times.

The Norweigens asked for more meetings. "We need to fine tune the process!"

The Africans demanded the money, the trickling pennies, somehow make it to the small village doctor who has to pay for clean needles from his own pocket and then decides to flee, like the rest of his compatriots, to the city or to a hardened hospital in NYC or inner city Chicago, because anything would be better than this, small small trickle.

------

An Alpine glacier awoken like a sleeping giant. Chiselling through a mountain, fine like artwork. A thousand years of work.

A roar like ten oceans. And a future, a small gurgle, as a thousand quiet streams.

---

On the city edge, a small Roma woman, face covered in black cloth, a small plastic cup outstretched, as the tourists walk by.

---

Eiffel Tower. Banana and chocolate crepes. Fireworks overtaking the sky.

---

The kabootars of Punjab, all over Paris, quitely pushing the bullock cart of the city's tourist industry. In the subways selling imitation Louis Vutton bags or cheap toys from China. At the Eiffel, young men from Punjab, most likely the children of the Canary Island trek, look empty from years of selling iced plastic bottles of water and cheap imitation keychains for 1 Euro. A hanger of junk hanging from their arms, a spectacle of the modern day dancing monkey for the revelers to come gawk at, offer a coin or two.

I talked to one young man yesterday and he seemed so thrilled to talk in his mother tongue. He kept checking my kara. I asked him how long he had been in Paris and he said 3 years.

He was from Hoshiarpur, dark from being in the sun, so many days trying to peddle his wares, a struggle not very high up the scale from the farming life he would have led had he stayed home. Had we all stayed home.

---

Letting go of a paper kite.