Last year i was in Cambodia. This was my first visit to Phnom Penh and the cliche "Sea of Humanity" was never far from my mind. At times it was so often in my consciousness, it crowded out other cliches like "never kiss a prostitue on the mouth".
Anyway, there are alot of people in Cambodia. Amd one day, while walking thru a crowded market place, I found myself thinking that every one of them has a story. Each individual in this endless teeming throng has experienced joy, heartache, success, failure, fury and despair. They've all struggled with love, money, family, friends, illness and death. Just like an actual sea contains an endless array of living organism, this "sea of humanity" contains unique, poignant, hilarious and tragic stories. Which is when I realized, my true purpose in life, my true calling is to be a fisher of stories. And all I need for bait is simple curiosity.
Armed with this insight, I walked up to an old, prune faced woman, at a seafood stand, and asked her if she enjoyed her work. She looked at me with a toothy grin and said, "Indian?" I said, "Yes." She said. "How can your people be so incompetent that they need almost 330 million GODs...?".
"You have the elephant god, the peacock god, the one with 3 heads, the blue one, and the one with the snake and....she went on and on".I replied dumbfoundedly. "I guess we're really just a large and religiuosly frightened society that we need so many Gods to lean on".
She laughed and said " You try my octopus balls.. very tasty and good for real balls." And so I did.
And we went on sharing tales of our childhood, families, her marriage and children and how her husband lost both his legs while drunk and running butt naked in a minefield.
Afterwards, I realized i've learned a powerful lesson. In order to succesfully fish for stories, you need more than curiosity. You need octopus balls.
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