Applied Appliance English

Good afternoon students. My name is Mr. On. It rhymes with song, gong, long gone.

It is 17:10 p.m. If it was 18:01 p.m. I would say good evening, however it is still afternoon. It is late in the day. Class will meet twice a week for two hours. Show up on time, do your assignments and be prepared. Nothing more, nothing less.

We are gathered here today in the glorious People's Appliance Factory #8 to begin our basic, simple English lessons.

Your supervisor informs me you are here both by choice and chance. You have the choice and this is your chance. Am I clear? Do you understand me? Choice and chance.

Now, I know most of you have been working since early morning in the factory. It is the end of another long mind numbing tedious grueling day on the killing floor.

English has brought us together. We face unique and amazing challenges to acquire a foreign language. To use said language with meaning. To hopefully become fluent. It will require your undivided attention, focus and electrical energy.

We will practice speaking, reading, listening and writing. These are the four basic skills. Reading and listening are foundations in your learning process. Learning occurs in the context of task-based activities. In other words you learn by doing. You do and you understand, as the Chinese say, said, did, done.

We will cover, in exhaustive detail, four important appliances and their English connections.

They are: washing machines, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens!

These machines are now an important part of everyone's life. You know this because it is your job to put them together. It's like English, putting words together makes a simple sentence. Some have meaning and some are gibberish.

Please open your creative notebook. Using a simple writing tool I would like you to consider the following questions. Please answer them using your basic English.

Why am I here? Am I a machine, a tool? What exactly is a machine? What is my motivation to learn English?

Your supervisor has instructed me to motivate you. She expects me to motivate you to complete the assigned tasks and arrive on time. Her management style instructed me to use fear as a form of discipline with you. We are all well aware how the power and threat of fear motivates humans.

Fear of starvation. Fear of poverty. Fear of failure. Fear of not meeting social expectations. Fear of ______.

Thank you for your attention. See you next week when we discuss parts and functions of a washing machine. 

Metta.

Bone script

Once he started, establishing a voice, setting and characters in the human condition on paper surrounded by illiterate simple, loud, noisy, volume addicted humans with royal blue ink it was a joy.

He sat at a warung, a cheap food place - plain white virgin rice, spicy chilly, egg, green veggies, tempe, tofu, deep fried crackers - on the other side of the Berlin Wall. He'd escaped from the tyranny of noisy educational sad robots trapped in their expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled her trash near a grove of banana trees and lit a fire. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Smoke curled around a man pushing his chipped blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cheap cloth, simple tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and basic household goods. Rolling the wheels through neighborhoods.

Cumulus clouds gathered momentum.

Nearby were the yelling village people. A tall thin woman with her 3-4 year old, monkey boy child. Pregnancy was her ticket out of hell, loneliness and misery. In a village you traded sex for security.

She and her mother tormented the kid. He cried. They laughed at him. They created a mini-monster. A boy who hated women now and later. He was dependent on them for food and affection. Mother and daughter uttered primal grunt sounds. The mother combed her daughter's hair scavenging follicles for nits and lice. Protein.

Crying children. Perpetual distractions.

Time-death.

The primordial darkness. Cosmic birth. The cave of inner being.

He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.

Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.

It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.

She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45.

She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away.

She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.

Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.

She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face.

The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.

She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

Two old women balancing collected piles of scrap wood on their heads took a shortcut through village mud.

A perfect white and yellow winged butterfly danced in a slight spring breeze.

Kurdish whispers

“We are understaffed and overworked,” lamented a brilliant happy personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep and she came from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French and Esperanto. She collected magic stones from the Black Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her stories in Kurdish. Her language was out loud. It was outlawed by the scared politicians in Ankara. Kurdish people whispered.

In an unprecedented wave of support, millions of sad, yet strangely serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to engage strangers on distant borders.

This wave of support resembled the open handed movement in the moment, the long fare well gesture a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter recently before watching her disappear into the teeming stream.

"Be well my love," sang the mother. Her daughter joined a band of women, singing and sighing.

Before

Before planting MK 69

between a wild bonsai and bamboo he regained consciousness around 5:18 a.m.

The village was dark. "Twilight in reverse," sang the full throated song bird. It was in a large tree nearby. It cautioned him to be diverse, peaceful and open. It warbled one short trill, paused, trilled a long solitary note, paused, trilled short and silenced.

He heard it. Clearly. He lit a stick of Tibetan incense. He unlocked the front and back doors as a floor fan fanned new air. The bird trilled, hearing bolts slide open. He stepped out. A series of open white and purple orchids shared their aroma dream. Inhaling smells and bird songs he scattered bread crumbs on a path.

He whistled in return, establishing a connection.

People in the village woke before dawn. Young servant girls swept leaves from stones. Dark eyed laconic girls wrapped linens around skeletons, wringing their flesh, their fibers before hanging them on portable stainless steel collapsable folding structures to dry inside gray flowing fumes of billowing smoke from burning trash dancing over a chipped sky high wall decorated with gleaming shards of green glass and rusty barb wire - plastic bags, boxes, banana and coconut leaves, clothing, feathers, Styrofoam happy meals, cardboard, plywood, textbooks, comprehension checks and balances, monetary social addictions and so on.

Fear sang her song accompanied by a young girl spoon feeding Chinese children before they were stolen by a gang of traffickers from the coast. A young boy's value was between $3,500 and $5,000. Negotiate.

The one-child policy created a desperate daily search for heirs. Losing face in the village was tantamount to public humiliation.

Before a girl swept she wept.

Metta.

more...

The sun is hiding

After watching emergency crews pry a suicidial man from below Asian Minor subway engines after being struck by lightening, I walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.

A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, her sister, her mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming, remembering."

The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie!" but the woman didn't say anything. She played the soil like a drum. She was sad and remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.

Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.

Smoke from a fire created by bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.

This is where the Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws live.

I walked on, passing chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.

Suddenly there was a quick explosion of metal on stone. An old man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.

The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes.

Metta.