TLC - Ankara Knife

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner.

Inside another series of interlocking blades was a Cambodian landmine museum. It revealed Geiger counters, radiation blast suits, screwdrivers, shovels, hi-tech metal sensors, fertile green rice paddies, farms, fields, 1,000 Angkor temples built with laterite stones by 300,0000 slaves in the 9th century, 6,000 starving overworked broken hearted pachyderms, topographical satellite survey maps showing extensive ancient agricultural irrigation systems, statistical charts, refugee relocation centers, rehabilitation co-pay deductible insurance policies, cremation ceremonies, and bereaved starving survivors accepting the loss forever of two million genocide family members.

1.5 million lost strangers disguised as tourists talking with full mouths spilled desire, fear, regret, ignorance and superstition while rappelling through nouns and verbs near stilted bamboo shacks inside submerged mangrove forests resembling Monet paintings replete with jungle vine hammocks, floating villages in a floating world, charcoal cooking fires, naked begging children, amputees, short term Australian nurses discovering dehydration in Siem Reap slums, laconic robotic Khmer teachers making $40 a month, 269+ orphanages with 12,000 orphans, a butterfly farm with 232 species and a silk worm weaving center in Stung Treng, Ratanakiri empowering fifty singing women threading thick and thin yellow salvia protein based fibers on spindles and looms near Son Le Tap Lake, the largest in Asia.

on loan

Our loved ones are not given to us. They are only on loan.

Marcus Aurelius

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” 

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” 

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” 

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” 

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” 

Marcus Aurelius

The Language Company - C 1

“Mother had me before polio condemned her to an iron lung. She had another boy, lived in a wheelchair and produced a daughter with Irish will power. I survived in a dystopian dysfunctional family coping with physical and emotional abuse. Whippings, sadistic beatings, trauma and abandonment, the usual childhood shit. Feeling guilt for her illness I developed stone cold manipulation skills and independent survival skills. Trust in woman was MIA.

"Vietnam is a woman. We fucked them during the day and they fucked us at night. Love them and leave them. Abandoned ones become abandoners. Mother died at forty-two. My sister died of leukemia at thirteen. Only the good die young. She taught me courage. By chance do you have any?”

“It’s rarer than something that doesn’t exist. Courage is an intangible feeling of wellbeing and supreme confidence. You know this from your mind full Tibetan experiences. I sense you are a stream-winner. Sensation, perception, desire, fear, and ignorance ceased. Frequency shifts. Transformations. What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”

“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.

“Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk. Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner stirring tea.

The Language Company

A knife contained a collapsible battery-operated emergency room in Achebadem, an expensive private Bursa, Turkey hospital with heart rate monitors, respirators, and dialysis machines, transplant mechanisms, microscopes and high-tech life support goodies.

One engraved knife revealed The Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam. It remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares surviving American B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Hallucinations and bliss evolved from a point of light traveling at 186,000+ miles per second.

Space folded.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories.

From inside narrow Nam alleys where death-worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense screaming FEED ME dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, clarity, understanding and interpretation. There are no facts, only interpretations.

Dreams pondered historical inevitabilities: What is life? How did I grow? How did I get here? What if I die here? Who will be my unconscious role model? Who will save me from ultimate absolute reality? Who will feed me in a Peoples’ Communist Paradise dream reality where everyone shares toilets, kitchens and spoiled whining children? Where education is considered a waste of time and money? Where bribes are a way of life buying your future?

Bored Asians with an emotional level of -7 exchanged drab artificial lives playing on Fakebook, a glorious virtual electronic frontier of equality and equity enjoying hi-tech distractions with firewalls, corroded barbwire and rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent. Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

A boy brought brown tea, silver spoons and sugar cubes.

 “Prison is a refuge and a release,” said Lucky. “Solitary confinement, junkyard blues and an environmental impact statement: No one gets out alive. I was abandoned at five.”

 “We are all orphans sooner or later. What trauma happened in your childhood?” said the owner singing circular music clinking a teaspoon, “Twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder...”

 The Language Company