The Legend of Plaseebo

“AWAKEN” ( The Leg­end of Plaseebo )

copy­right Bob Conge 2007

Thun­der­ous light­ning slashed the thick black sky from above like claws of some demon’s hand and his mighty breath blew the tur­bu­lent waters of the East China Sea on shore with the power of a great tsunami.

A child was born this furi­ous night amid the most vio­lent storm the eldest in his vil­lage could remem­ber. It was the year 2039 BC and the vil­lage was near the south­ern shore on the Island Kyushu in the arch­i­pel­ago known today as Japan.

The child was the first born boy to the tribal leader of his vil­lage of fish­ers and hunter-gathers, bring­ing great joy with the morning’s relief.

As the months became a year and then two, the fathers joy turned to fear as his son’s body refused to grow. When the boy was almost five it was clear he was a dwarf and his father, filled with the pain of dis­ap­point­ment, sent him away from the vil­lage to live with his grand­fa­ther until his tenth birth­day, at which time accord­ing to tribal law, he would be put to death.

The aging mas­ter boat builder and fish­er­man lived alone on the coast a few miles from the vil­lage and wel­comed the com­pany of the boy. And as was the cus­tom, on his fifth birth­day he gave the boy his name, ” Tsu ” , in homage to his birth dur­ing the night of the great storm.

Over the fol­low­ing five years he taught Tsu both the craft of boat build­ing and the art of sail­ing. He was a fine stu­dent and also devel­oped a phys­i­cal strength far beyond the his small stature, thus earn­ing the honor of his name, Tsu ( Great Storm ). Together they built a most sea wor­thy boat to the scale of his dwarfed but mus­cu­lar body and Tsu painted on its sail the graphic sym­bol for his name, the angry face of a fierce storm with opened mouth and out­stretched tongue.

A few weeks before his tenth birth­day the old man told Tsu of the fate that awaited him and handed him an ancient map of the coastal waters run­ning south­west and away from his homeland.

Tsu set sail the next morn­ing know­ing well he was embark­ing on a jour­ney of heroic pro­por­tion, as no one in his vil­lage had ever trav­eled more than five or six miles from the place of their birth.

Within days he was in the waters of the Yel­low Sea off the coast of South Korea. Then fol­low­ing the coast of China through the Tai­wan straight into the South China Sea and along the coast of Viet­nam, he turned North off the South­ern tip of Malaysia and sailed along the West­ern coast of Thai­land into the Bay of Ben­gal. While nav­i­gat­ing the south­ern most reach of India the hori­zon of the Ara­bian Sea turned a deep blue-black at midday.

It was a wall of water rush­ing towards his small boat at a ter­ri­ble speed. The sound was deaf­en­ing as Tsu lashed him­self to the mast inside the cabin. The advanc­ing wall broke from the sur­face form­ing a fun­nel and lifted his sturdy craft a thou­sand feet up inside the giant Typhoon.

Trav­el­ing at speeds of five hun­dred miles an hour the Typhoon car­ried Tsu across the sea into the Gulf of Aden and up the full length of the Red Sea, before turn­ing west over the Egypt­ian desert. Loos­ing energy as it filled with sand, the shrink­ing fun­nel gen­tly set Tsu in his boat down in the great City of Cop­tos ‚whose king had died unex­pect­edly a few weeks before.

As morn­ing sun washed the evenings stars from the sky, the griev­ing peo­ple of the court awoke to a most amaz­ing sight. Set­ting inside the impen­e­tra­ble walls of the palace court­yard was a sail­boat, twenty three miles from the Nile.

The priests pro­claimed this must be the boat they buried with their King and he had sailed back to them from the under­world. One look at the sym­bol painted on the rav­aged sail ver­i­fied this to all, as it was clearly the mark of their King, “PLASEEBO “.

The crowd fell silent as Tsu climbed out from the cabin onto the deck, rub­bing the sand from the eyes of this large head that sat upon a twisted stump of a body, look­ing to them as they imag­ined how their rein­car­nated King might appear hav­ing tra­versed the sea of the underworld.

Tsu reigned as “PLASEEBO” with great wis­dom and com­pas­sion over the peo­ple of Cop­tos for the next fifty-seven years. He brought many years of peace and pros­per­ity to the land and was hon­ored with the title of Pharaoh.

When Plaseebo died in 2106 BC he was buried with his boat deep in a great pyra­mid, where his spirit longed for the soil of his birth­place, Japan.

He would lie entombed for the next three thou­sand nine hun­dred and nine years. In 1803 AD two British quasi-archeologists broke into his bur­ial cham­ber and awak­ened the Mummy PLASEEBO who to this day roams the earth in search of his homeland.

Two hun­dred and one years later, in 2004 PLASEEBO became the name­sake of our stu­dio PLASEEBO.