good at two things

“Mind yourself,” Z said in cursive Latin as she and Lucky exploring diverse civilizations cradled a bamboo candle on their quest for an illuminated translation.

One morning while walking to the Bursa Metro he received a rose from a kind Kurdish woman who tended a small grocery below a quadrant of grey cookie-cutter Soviet apartment blocks filled with crying children and sad adults devoured emotional immaturity content in a guilt-based context between a physical object and a precise concept.

“We are good at doing two things,” sang a Turkish man swirling a silver spoon in his tea...'around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows, tinkle, tinkle little star how I wonder where you are, way down in the glass so low with processed sugar’...sitting and singing, here we go.”

“I thought you said reading and writing,” said Rita, the anarchist writer of Ice Girl in Banlung and H20 seller in Ratanakiri. To make ends meet on weekends her family of eleven rented her out to a NGO scam at an artificial orphanage.

Buy her beware.

Rita knew what was what.

“According to UNICEF, there has been a 65% rise in the number of orphanages since 2005. There are more than 300 and yet, only 21 of those are run by the state.”

“Say more,” said Lucky.

“UNICEF estimates that 72% of the 12,000 children in Cambodian orphanages have at least one living parent or close relative. Desperate poverty makes it easy to persuade uneducated families that their kids will be better off in an orphanage.”

Her Banlung machine world roared, reversed, revered and resounded with operatic overtones. Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

Ghosts said we are nothing but historical history. Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.

Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.

Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust.

A rich man getting out of a black SUV smiled at prosperity.

A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused.

A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love and an easy ten bucks blinked.

An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep.

A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight.

A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit.

An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder. Where are we going? Muttering to his feet wearing red dust, one said down this endless road.

The Wild West town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.

A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections. His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.

Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

Rita opened a big orange plastic box. She picked up a chunk of ice in her left hand, cradling it in a blue cloth slamming a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines and imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. Holding global warming in her left hand she smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.

A sharp piece of frozen ice pierced Lucky’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and directly cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of perception altering his visual organic sensation as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses. 

Enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of water seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes. Illusions of truth, pleasure, pain and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.

Sibylline language.

She dropped the block of ice into the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to him. Here, you look tired and thirsty, I am, thanks, I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious. You’re welcome.

She assaulted ice with a hammer shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He gave her crumbled Real notes.

An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.”

History, war, violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodians, said Rita handing Zeynep, Leo, Lucky cold impermanence.

“Reading and writing is for idiots,” a Turkish man said to his attachment’s delight. “I am proficient at eating and fighting. I’ve been killing people for 4,000 years little thing. Nobody knows who the king is.”

Z said: I am a camera. Close my aperture to f/8 or f/11 for depth of field. I am a snow leopard in hot sun on Himalayan ice. I am a human mirror reflecting mud and meadows of reality. I am Winter Hawk winging free. I am resilient Bamboo.

I am love - a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor. Love is in the air. Run for cover. I am Patience, your great teacher.

I am mindfulness.

I am breath.

I inhale life and exhale death in a random universe.

I am blood red ink drawing in dust and unloading words for a book called TLC to be explored, experimented and abandoned.

Wearing a burgundy pashmina shawl from Lhasa before the Chinese invaded in 1959 with Re-Education propaganda/publicity machines of terror, fear, suffering and death I smell like fresh Anatolian laundry in a gentle spring breeze.

Ice Girl in Banlung

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Diamond in your mind - TLC

Secret literary agent accepted a covert mission. 51 days led here.

He knew in mid-September, after being in Trabzon, Turkey for two weeks doing street photography at dawn, writing field notes, helping students develop speaking courage and bringing prosperity to everyone along a wandering path, his essential choice for freedom brought him to today October 25^th.

Savoring thick java and sweet flaky pastry in a Trabzon establishment he observed people on Sacrifice.

Every day is a celebration when you practice the art of letting go.

You either let go or get dragged along.

Miniature buses disgorged humans: head scarfed heavy-set women clutching canes, swaggering males, well dressed couples, a sleek woman twirling a red rose, old men trailing texting generations and desperate parents gripping children’s hands.

A tan joyful man released from his daily grave digging soil toil danced away from angry confused faceless ones anticipating a long uphill walk past shop windows where they’d purchase flaneur reflections.

Shoppers entered to buy pastries, cakes and cookies. We have to show up with something a wide wife said to her mousy husband. Children begged for sugar, Feed me.

Three obese Saudi males bought bags of hand wrapped candies. Our caloric families will love this stuff said one from the house of Saud cramming it into his designer bag on plastic wheels of fortune.

You brought us good luck today, said the smiling woman behind the counter when Lucky prepared to walk on. You’re welcome. It’s a never-ending adventure.

A Trabzon taxi driver taking him to the airport said, “Today is like Christmas in Turkey.”

Deck the halls with boughs of folly tra-la-la-la.

Near the check-in zone a girl of four didn’t see her mother’s knife-like eyes inside the chador. A black veil masked her face. Closed for respectful preservations.

Everyone stared in amazement as a literary outlaw enjoying random encounters with evanescent beings sang your life is a work of art. We are stardust riding a blue marble through space.

The flight from Instant Bull to Backpack took eight hours.

In a transit zone he discovered Mont Blanc Fine and Medium Rollerball refills and a large bottle of dark blue fountain pen ink for Omar. He bought a 12-pack of multicolored pens for Zeynep.

Do you travel the world, asked the clerk as look n’ leave passengers examined the art of writing instruments. It is my destiny, You brought me good luck today, I am a calm lunatic assassin, I am not saving anyone.

The plane to Seems Ripe banked left to the imagination before climbing to 33,000 feet in an invisible night as he journeyed to the center of the Earth.

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Ride like the wind.

A gravedigger is never out of work.

Crossing borders - transcendental act

TEOL gave Lucky a $300 monthly housing allowance. SOL (shit out of luck) found a ground floor flat next to The Department of the Forest.

He helped Lucky get a used fridge and a gas cooker. Lucky paid $125 for the fridge and $25 for the propane. No propane no gain.

Being a short-timer in paradise he never bought cooking tools. After surviving Nam he’d answer the eternal quest-ion, how long have you been here? All day. I pass through.

Repeat - most popular word in global English classes. Say it again dear robot. All day.

SOL borrowed his grandmother’s pliable mattress from the Ottoman dynasty. He loaned Lucky a blank sheet of paper and blanket. No hot water. You can wash/spin clothes and shower in the upstairs bathroom where everything is shiny and modern, said SOL. Thanks, I wash clothes by hand. I need tactile textile texture. Zen.

You need to buy a water heater, said SOL. It will cost you years of tears and regret. I love showering with cold water. Keeps you alert and you dry faster. This went over SOL’s head and he was very tall. He slouched forever.

He manifested the Turkish I Am Defeated Posture.

* See illustration on page 101 in The Department of Fear & Conditioning Manual.

The TEOL director in Giresun, a graduate of a Stalin training camp for Authority Figurines waiting for his funeral said to Lucky, You pay for water and electricity. We will deduct $500 from your salary to pay for imported Russian coal to heat your flat in winter. Erroneous pays for heating.

Everything in Turkey breaks down in 4-5 years speaking of children, said Zeynep, a writer kid friend in Bursa, That’s nothing, said Rita cutting, selling ice and publishing her small life story in Banlung, Cambodia. Kids here are broken before they’re born. It’s a mutant besmirched genetic strain in our DNA. Paranoid adults murder their darlings with benign dependency and passive hopelessness the dreaded disease of the heart-mind.

Rita shared a story - up river from Banlung in a remote jungle village they carve images of their dead.The Chunchiet animist people bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle. They believe in the universal inherent power of the natural world. 

The Tompoun and Jarai tribes have sacred burial sites. The Kachon village cemetery is one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok River from Voen Sai.

Heart of Darkness flows through the jungle.

The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site. The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit dream story the shaman meets Loth, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief knows sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy Loth. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, whittle wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village. 

New tombs have cement bases and wooden effigies with cell phones and sunglasses. Never out of touch. See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area. The future looks brighter than a day in a sacred jungle.

Wow, said Zeynep, that’s an amazing cultural celebration. Yes, said Rita, life and death are beautiful mysteries.

How did you meet each other in Banlung, Zeynep asked Lucky. I traveled the narrow road from Pakse, Laos south to Stung Treng then east to the remote Northeast. Here’s what happened.

A rusty red and white metal border bar weighted by rocks in a wire bucket hung suspended. The VIP double-decker candy cane bus was packed with babbling European flash packers destined for the 9th century at Angkor Wat. They had a long way to go to get back in time. They were doing SEA.

The more they see the less they know, said a shaman.

The busboy handed out departure and arrival forms, collected passports, a $2 Lao departure fee, a $25 Cambodia visa fee and $2 entry fee. He took everything to a Lao shack. The border bar went up. The bus rolled through no-man’s land at the speed of a snail and stopped.

Being landless is fun, dramatic and exciting. No country, no documents, no money, no food, no water, no medicine, no family, no friends, no chance. Abandoned on Earth.   

A female Cambodian health care worker wearing a facemask got on the bus. Pointing a small medical toy gun into faces she registered body temperature.            

Someone said, “If you’re sick you stay here.”

“On the bus?”

“No, between countries. On the road.”

Sounds like a novel.

Crossing a border is a transcendental act.

On the C side it’s business as usual. Immigration shacks, money changers, women hustling fried food, beverages and fruits, naked children, scavenging emaciated dogs, ripped cell phone umbrellas and haggard tourists drinking H2O in blazing heat waiting for the boy to return with passports. An incomplete grandiose empty glass and brass Cambodian immigration building with fake Angkor temple motifs and plastic elephants, surrounded by landmines signifies exotic investment.

Money = tourism  = money. 

Stung Treng in Ratanakiri province was eight-seven clicks south along the Mekong. Swim with dolphins. Tourists passed through this small faded colonial town. They had a schedule. Time chases them, Hurry up! Hurry Up! You’re going to be late for an important date with destiny. Get a move on.

I visited Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center. Fifty women do a six-month silk weaving course. They feed larva, harvest cocoons, dye and create silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner known for superior quality, creativity and originality. 

They have Mulberry trees for leaves. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and is stronger than steel. Silkworm cocoons are boiled to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long. It is separated into soft and fine threads.

They dye the threads using natural materials: banana (yellow), bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink).

They also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL. There are 200 motifs.

The center improves their quality of life. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs. They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

Then I traveled east on dusty roads to Banlung.

A cool educational adventure, said Z weaving through life.

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Humble Attention

Earlier in the tale of two cities, Sit Down in Trabzon called Lucky in Giresun.

There’s a meeting tomorrow of all the native speakers. Catch a bus today, this afternoon, tonight, there’s no hurry, the meeting is tomorrow. What time? 9:00 a.m. All the native speakers will meet here and go to the local police station. And then? You need to bring your passport and four passport photos. Ok, and then?

Lucky was through this process before – bureau crazies, clerks, bored administrator traitors, self-important regal dignitaries well fed, others less so, intent on pushing, writing, typing, folding, stapling, sorting, reading, mutilating, massing papers, filing, speaking cardiovascular wage slave vocabularies pretending to be busy intent on bent necked acquiescence of humble attention to DUTY as complacent dreams explored new fantasies filled with vague prospects of retiring before dying of tedious boredom.

And then? We will go to the bank and get you a tax number, oh and by the way, you don’t happen to have $2,500 or $3,000 in your pocket to open an account do you? No? I didn’t think so, well it’s not important, don’t worry about it, Ok I won’t, Ok then see you later, what time are you coming, Around 6-7 keep the key for me, Yes, I don’t know where it is, I’ll ask one of the other teachers to wait for you, don’t worry about it, Ok thanks see you later.

On the G to T bus a father and son sat squeezed like fresh orange juice and nervous son with his fish mouth open conditioned by his father to be afraid of TIME kept checking his gigantic round watch.

Black Sea extended its long blue story.

Amazon Women Kill Males

After eating, Turkish businessmen splashed aromatic tonic on their hands, patted jowls and slicked back thinning hair. One man adjusted spectacles. Eating fish fast made him sweat. Sharing a joke about bones he smiled at an assassin writing a character sketch.

Ancient serious women in scarves accepted mountain village hard life. Young women divorced from confronting nature, soil and invisible roots appeared dazed and confused facing steep cobblestone Trabzon streets confronting miles of shops, window dummies and aggressive male textile hawkers yelling, “BUY FROM ME. SPECIAL MORNING PRICE. HAVE A LOOK-SEE. GET LUCKY.”

Shoppers’ visual examination loved text-based consumption paradigms.

Lucky hung out observing the flow as cats prowled for scraps, bodies with a voice cautioned parking spaces and lost souls attempting sad cellular telecommunication connections stumbled through temporary life inconveniences below Roman walls.

An abandoned Roman castle overlooking Giresun had a secret tunnel to a nearby is-land where Amazon women lived. They mated annually. Keep the race going. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, said an Amazon woman to her Black Sea lover. Take your time. After you make love to me I will kill you and eat your heart. I have something to look forward to he said, Yes, death is a new adventure. Nothing ever happens again.

Mosque mullahs calling the pious echoed exhortations swirling down cobblestone alleys past Giresun boys riding spoke less bikes between crumbling yellow Ottoman walls and mackerel sellers admiring haphazard silver fins lying dead eyed glossy on ice crystals melting into a refrain, The Sea! The Sea!

12 October 12

Turkish peasants love guns in a hunting culture.

Bang-bang, you shot me down. Bang-bang I hit the ground. Bang-bang that awful sound, Bang-bang my baby shot me down.

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Giresun munitions shop until you drop dead sold rifles, double-odd, pistols, bullets, calibers, double gaged gangrene, lock, stock and barrels of talking monkeys and circus clowns. Guns on weary authoritarian desperadoes waists itched bedraggled large breasted concubines as hip-hop head wrapped plastic hearted lovers cried.

Hearing suffering’s universal broken laughter a stranger composed a melody....”I Am So Tired.”

I didn’t get here by whining, said a sad neglected child bride victim of sixteen conceiving a child out of fear and loneliness facing future abandonment in an arranged marriage. Have a healthy progeny or get stoned to death for adultery, said her mother stirring tomatoes.

- Citizens play ‘walking chicken’ on narrow sidewalks.

- Drivers confront mechanical anxieties with bravado.

- Everyone's so excited as emotional paleontology squirmed dialogue with an EIQ of -7.

- Citizens remain traumatized since birth and younger than memory’s fascination.

- Sex is a DUTY said The Posture Police.

*

The creature behind the black curtain at the shooting gallery in a Giresun shopping center was s-l-o-w on the trigger to hide two graphic red and black bulls-eyes on a target screen after Lucky, exploring as usual parted the curtain asking what, oh what’s behind the blackness? Low and behold. Tear guts. Targets galore, said the creature. Lock n’ load. Fire when ready Freddy keep hands steady.

Happiness is a warm gun.

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Along the road with Other

Lucky sang, “Farewell. Got my traveling shoes, traveling hat and walking stick. To travel is better than to arrive. I got the walking blues. Everything I do is an experiment. This was the perfect place to be a stranger in a strange land between two cultural land messes. Wandering among Anatolian tribes long ago, near and far away as Other Muse.”

“Who’s Other Muse?” said Zeynep.

“You are Other Muse with an absorbent mind. We are stream winners. Fifty-one days were enough of enough. It was beyond wild.”

Other spoke: Black Sea pink dawn light layered blue waves of beauty. Blue kills me. It’s nothin but the blues. Blue kills me with the solemn tenacity of melon colon only. Get to the verb, said Beauty. It’s a free form jazz poem. It has enough true fictionalized material and verifiable facts to be plausible. You are a crazy genius.

“Y were many Turkish, besides being hospitable and generous so aggressive, paranoid, psychotic, and sullen?” said Rita in a nutshell.

“It’s DNA genetic fear based insecurities + too much meat and not enough sex,” said Lucky. “In cultures like Cambodia where food is scarce, people have more open sex, but dream of food. In cultures where food is abundant like Turkey, sex is more taboo and people dream of sex.”

Get it in writing.

The act of writing isn’t life and it isn’t you.

It's ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters.

There’s book learning and there’s street learning, said Cosmic Education. Memory is desire satisfied. Memory is a lie layered with truth. Memory creates fiction and fiction creates memory. Preserve memory in a story. Memory bank.

“Today your life and destiny are the same. Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone,” said Zeynep.

Veni, Vidi, Vinci.

I came. I saw. I helped. I walked, said Lucky.

That’s life. The end is the beginning, said Zeynep. The beginning is the Middle Way. Not too detached. Not too sentimental.

Discernment. The day after tomorrow belongs to me, said Other Muse.

Start in the present, flashback and write to the end, said Z. I can’t tell where the real ends and artificial begs for precision.

Lucky bought rope from a grizzled Giresun man selling tools in a wooden shack near a teahouse where idle men stirring sugar cubes discussed local hazelnut production sales figure estimates while watching Ankara political parrots on an idiot box extoll their insensitivity to dissent while demanding extreme Deep State censorship to cope with poverty’s tyranny as the smell of fresh silver fish held a Blade Runner. Honed well. Lucky faced rope choices:

Hang up.

Hang laundry.

Hang yourself.

Hang your head with a dangling modifier.

Hang around, the art of creative travel writing.

Be various, said Curious. Punctuation is a nail. Here’s a box of punctuational.

Accept loss forever, said Zeynep. Death is beautiful because it doesn’t exist. That's not the real reason you’re leaving is it?

No.

What is your R-7 variant motivation?

Dying here by the Black Sea is my fear. I want to die dancing in my mute Cambodian lover’s arms. I am dying from an inexorable beautiful sadness. My heart-mind is shattered. One dies twice. When they are born and when they face death, according to a Nam survivor. One should die once in their life to begin new.

I was born dead and slowly came to life like you, said Z. We helped each other cope with the collective insanity.

The Language Company