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Entries in chess (12)

Sunday
Jun182023

I Lost One Day

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.


Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.9 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Asian locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

I lost today, said the Jewish man.

What do you mean, said his friend. You made 3,000,000 Lira.

Yes, but I lost one day.

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed, revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

 

Saturday
May132023

Eat Fast or Starve

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.

He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.

They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.

It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

Saturday
Jan072023

South of Mandalay Part 3

An eight-car train from Yangon to Mandalay rumbles past. Lonely whistles blow. Ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Horse cart traps jingle jangle hoof tarmac music, prancing and dancing along dirt paths - On Comet, On Cupid, Dasher and Dancer.

The peripatetic facilitator of English, Courage, Creativity and Fun is here until 12 February on a three teacher team from Mandalay. 

He arrived in early December to prepare the English program for 365 G 10 students. Two additional teachers will arrive for one month. He’s here for the duration.

His sleeping room is spacious, light, leaf shadows. He salutes the sun and burning stars every morning through leaves of time.

Food in the family kitchen prepared by a smiling auntie is delicious; spicy curries, chicken, fish, pork, fresh veggies, soup, rice, fruit. Everyone is soft and attentive.


Native barbarian speaker focus is English exposure; Writing, Reading, Listening and Speaking with respect enabling Courage. 

In addition to text stuff  - artists, writers and dreamers explore and discover their infinite beauty and potential with Creative Notebooks. SOP. Mind map yourself. How to be more human.

How did I grow?

Chess lessons, strategies, and tactics improves their critical thinking skills, planning, logic, accepting responsibility for their actions, visualization, time management, and teamwork.

Learn. Play. Share. 

Students live in separate dorms at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.

The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.

Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys. No social testosterone distractions.

Zero gadgets.

They study Burmese, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m.  Sonorous voices echo daily.

They leave school one day a month with parents. Freedom.

Saturday
Jan072023

South of Mandalay Part 3

An eight-car train from Yangon to Mandalay rumbles past. Lonely whistles blow. Ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Horse cart traps jingle jangle hoof tarmac music, prancing and dancing along dirt paths - On Comet, On Cupid, Dasher and Dancer.

The peripatetic facilitator of English, Courage, Creativity and Fun is here until 12 February on a three teacher team from Mandalay. 

He arrived in early December to prepare the English program for 365 G 10 students. Two additional teachers will arrive for one month. He’s here for the duration.

His sleeping room is spacious, light, leaf shadows. He salutes the sun and burning stars every morning through leaves of time.

Food in the family kitchen prepared by a smiling auntie is delicious; spicy curries, chicken, fish, pork, fresh veggies, soup, rice, fruit. Everyone is soft and attentive.


Native barbarian speaker focus is English exposure; Writing, Reading, Listening and Speaking with respect enabling Courage. 

In addition to text stuff  - artists, writers and dreamers explore and discover their infinite beauty and potential with Creative Notebooks. SOP. Mind map yourself. How to be more human.

How did I grow?

Chess lessons, strategies, and tactics improves their critical thinking skills, planning, logic, accepting responsibility for their actions, visualization, time management, and teamwork.

Learn. Play. Share. 

Students live in sepearet dorms at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.

The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.

Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys. No social testosterone distractions.

Zero gadgets.

They study Burmese, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m.  Sonorous voices echo daily.

They leave school one day a month with parents. Freedom.

Sunday
May172020

Butterfly Shadow

Outside fog shrouded morning 4 a.m.

Sitting meditation Zen heart-mind

Engage senses

Talented person hits the targets others miss

Genius hits the target others cannot see

How you learn. How you feel.

How you grow

Wisdom of heart-mind

I used to be someone else. I traded him in. - Other


Writing in Mandalay, Burma

+
Storyteller fragments imagination

Shadow of butterfly

Blue sky enjoys clear pronunciation

Intonation rising falling sounds

Language chunks

Spill shred synchronicity symbols

Learn. Play. Share.

Chess bishops develop long line of attack

Knights are unpredictable

Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play

River song butterflies

Moored on bank

Wake flow electric H2oh

Feeling mid-day sun

Gestures use us

Cloud song white air

Floating world

Up a lazy Mekong river

Turn the boat around

Huck said to Jim

Mark my words

If I had more time I’d make it shorter - Twain

Patterns

Elemental dance

Particles

Wheel of Time

Rainbow Earthman

Poet

Shaman

Grow Your Soul