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Entries in documentary photography (91)

Saturday
Oct222016

Asia for sale

Across a porous border is the dry season in Khmer civilization.

Leaders, bleeders and corrupt businessmen sell forests to furniture, chopstick and toothpick fact stories in China/Nam. Let’s eat.

Greed is a hungry animal.

Asian developers buy Cambodia and Laos to build garment sweatshops paying slaves $61 a month, golf courses, shopping centers filled with morose manikins and hundreds of empty glass and brass hotels financed by prostitution, opium, wild animals, natural resources, imperial emerald jade, rubies, Blue Zircon, sapphire.

Appliance factories, baby production machines and Mandarin language schools babble tongues.

China owns northern Laos. Vietnam owns the south. Thailand owns the electricity from twelve Lao dams on the Mekong. Sixty million farmers and fishermen starve downstream. Lights are on and nobody’s home.

In Phonsavan - Plain of Scars, Jars and Wars - before dawn every morning logging trucks carrying trees from Laos rumble toward Vietnam furniture factories.

$10,000 a tree.

Log in log on log out. The hills are alive with the sound of chainsaws.

As of August 2013, Asian investment in energy, mining and agriculture according to a financial source was:

Vietnam has 449 projects in Laos worth $5 billion.

Thailand has 760 projects in Laos worth $4.8 billion.

China has 800 projects in Laos worth $4 Billion.

Lao capital investment has twenty-nine hydropower projects valued at  $739 million, $271 million in mining and $100 in construction.

Asia is for sale. Act Now. Cheap. ABC.

The National Museum in Seems Ripe is 50% owned by Thailand. Khmer people don’t visit. It’s a tourist how now cash cow?

Angkor Wat is managed by Japan. Pass the sushi. Domo arigato.

The Language Company

Plain of Jars. Archeologists say giants created them for drinking 4,000 years ago. I know. I was there.

Saturday
Oct152016

Mai

Her back to a silent world, a beautiful deaf mute dancer in Cambodia scrubs foreign laundry. Her becoming is loneliness, heartbreak and joyful silence.

Her silence is her freedom.

She wrote her story in a spiral notebook. I dreamed a deaf mute woman is married to a literary butcher. She hates him. I am she.

My life is a tedious slave labor laundry-washing job. A hall of mirrors faces me. I am beautiful. I speak-sign love laugh, sing, and dance.

Spoiled whining children and adults run around screaming. I can’t hear them. It’s a blessing.

I read lips pleading I want food. I want clean drinking water. I want love. I want education. I want medicine. I want a chance. I want a little luck.

The Children’s Hospital down the street has twenty-two beds in one room. They are filled with infants wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia and tuberculosis. A parent holds a tiny hand. The infant mortality rate here is a tragedy.

I.C.U. has five beds. They are occupied.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. She dispenses free generic orange pills.

Life is a killer. Life is a generic placebo.

Mothers are happy to get something, anything. They have no knowledge about modern medicine. One effective blue pill costs $1.00. Parents need fifteen. $15.00 is a fortune. Out of the quest-ion. Rice comes first. Parents accept free ineffective orange pills. Parents need a lucky miracle.

How much does a miracle cost?

Life is a $1 blue pill, said a mother.

Mothers are hopeful. They wait in silence after riding on the back of motorcycles from remote villages. Everyone there had an answer for the child’s sickness. Babbling female genocide survivors sang remedies. Men pounded drums. Relatives and monks prayed and burned incense. A shaman dancing with death smeared chicken blood over a tiny chest. A healer waved smoking banana leaves over a child running a fever.

400 mothers wait forever to see a nurse to get an orange pill. Mothers know the answer to what is life quest-ion. A pill payer prayer, blind luck.

May your short sweet life dance be lighter, faster, cleaner than cool autumn winds caressing ebony’s laugh.

I am an unfinished symphony. I live with visual touch holding a small spinal kiss. Feathers caress my skin. Shivers inside skin love this sensation. Everything is sensation-intuition in my quiet world. A lotus blossoming from mud opens a purple petal. 

My love is voiceless and tenacious. I am passion releasing tension and lust trust. Gentle. Respect. Dignity. Grace. Luminous. Pure. My silent joy is a breath. I inhale suffering and exhale love. 

He comes to me in the heat of the day. I welcome him with my dark eyes gesturing a fingertip on lips...quiet. We share the present. My passion is deep and strong. My language - a smile, brown eyes, calloused hands, worn fingers and rolling sounds whisper: 

time

relationships

secrets

fear

family

passion

laughter

a heart

I dream traditional ignorant silence kills others. Truth is a powerful weapon.

People are afraid of truth. When I express truth I don’t have to remember what I said. I sign-say what others are afraid to express. My secret lover and I share the same frequency.

I am an anarchist, a linguistic magician. Speaking, living and realizing truth entails risk. If you want to do amazing things you must take amazing risks and suffer greatly.

Daring is not fatal. I am truth incarnate.

I am an objective mirror free of dust.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh. Fingers on my lips. I am secretly engaged to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family. He works for an NGO here. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and unconscious rescuer. Fat chance.

I come from a poor rural village. I was the last of eleven children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married Kiwi. She had a daughter named Moaning Lisa. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity.

She set up a hair salon business in a 1,001 year-old tourist temple town. It fell through. Salons are a dime a dozen. Thousands of uneducated poor girls from distant provinces can’t/don’t read. They cut. Do their nails. Digit phones. Staring at mirrors is their fate. Some moonlight as beer girls and hostesses. Where is Mr. ATM? Who’s going to save me wearing gloss in the dead of night masking eternal hopelessness.

Unspoken quest-ions, broken lives and starvation seek short-term financial solace.

My sister put me to work with a niece washing clothes. In reality I am a happy slave. I have my sister, niece, food and a safe place to sleep. I make some money. An Australian girl gave me a scooter. I dress nice.

My sister started selling massage service. If I meet a good man - more rare than verbal speech - I maybe let him touch me trusting he’ll take care of me. Short term.

I need help.

 

Massage has no emotional connection. Touch and go. I have the power to say NO. I have a 5th degree black belt.

I’ve killed more men with silence than you can imagine.

I tell aggressive idiots they can get laid somewhere else. Go find a beer girl. Flash your cash honey.

I do all the washing, ironing and massages. I make small tips. My sister pockets the money. She sits around admiring herself in mirrors, playing with Lisa and talking rubbish on her cell.

I am a voiceless voice of quiet resignation.

Shhh. I have a secret lover while Thorny is in OZ. I am easy going with a willingness to share my honest emotions. No commitment is a concrete-abstraction. My passion is immediate visual truth. My eyes are sensory awareness.

I see voices.

I am a voiceless one quivering lips and tenacious touch with my secret lover. He taught me a Tibetan mantra:

I would rather be a tiger for one day

Than a sheep for a thousand years

My sexual joy is shy. I dance tactile tenderness with silent breath.

My lover comes to me in the heat of the day. He is kind. I welcome him with smiling eyes, gesturing a finger on lips, shhh. My unfinished symphony lives with visual touch holding his kiss on my spine. I do this because I love it. It is my heart-mind fate.

He brings me luck. You can’t see it, measure it or hold it.

I say it I hear it I feel it I got it I know it.

My passion is deep and strong. My unlimited languages speak eyes, smiles and hands. Gestures create us in space. Gestures use me.

My speech voice is missing. I make rolling guttural sounds expressing metaphors, similes, intonations, frequencies, meaning, sensation, time, space, ideas, dreams, relationships, secrets, traditional family values, gratitude, health, wonder, contentment, passion, and joy.

By the time I learned the alphabet it was late in life toward primordial dusk. It was late in the moment before then and now.

I am a long now.

It was late in the whisper of silent air singing from the trash collector’s plastic bottle. Pulling his rolling cart filled with cardboard his muscular rhythm stirs somnolent red dust on broken stones. The majority of people here exist on less than $1 a day.

Rich land, poor people, greedy corrupt politicians.

I see, said a blind girl playing a cello in a demined cemetery. You can’t step in the same river twice.

Possibilities and probabilities, chance and coincidence flutter from my finger fragments like butterflies. Unknown mysterious sensations fling from signing hands. Fingers and hands are language wings. Blossom being.

My lover visualizes me in brown toned tropical worlds. He imagines I join a hearing impaired community, get an education and a real life. He’s a dreamer.

I jump ahead in my story. It won’t happen. I am a slave.

He realizes my movements say I was born to dance.

My gratitude is stillness.

There is a big difference between sitting still and doing nothing.

The hardest thing to do in life is to do nothing with intention as it takes the most out of you as a person mentally and physically.

Some people say nothing exists. I do nothing everyday.

I smell roses. I swallow fresh orange juice. I engage my senses in direct, immediate, raw, emotional experience.

He cannot save me from my destiny. He can only allow the process to flow. My existence is a long flow state.

One day he brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. We spoke with non-speech. He sees our passion is a glimmer of emotional security in the long now. Inside my deep-eyed mischief strangers comfort each other without discrimination.

I am a singularity.

Sensing passion we decipher riddles forecasting speechless tongues. We accept mindfulness with gratitude in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom’s fear carves a niche in my soul.

Dance saves me.

He is a Lone Wolf with a DNA variant comprehending my inherent instinctive intuitive needs.

It’s a blessing to understand another human being without words.

I hang laundry near the street. Memory’s lie is tempered by talking monkeys. Two boys harvest trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber. The other twirling a walking stick used for prodding garbage carries a plastic bag. Papa’s got a brand new bag.

Local people mill around. Milling around is an art form. They exist with a pure innocent childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent Buddhist nature. They’ve suppressed their ego. Ease god out.

Others voice imaginary alien freedom ideas. I am Other. I live in my heart-mind luminous universe.

A sofa with a roof on wheels towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 8th century Angkor temples. They are the look and leave people. They are too busy passing through life to feel anything.

Eternity a young handicapped man wearing his new skin-tight artificial plastic left leg and foot shuffles through dust. He walks home. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t go home again.

My lover-friend was away for six weeks. He brought me pineapples, a yellow mango and passion fruit. Washing clothes in my silent world, my hair tinted golden hued, I felt ebullient. He touched my spine. Soft, I turned, smiling.

My silent world and calm joy are disguised potentials. We share a silent clear intention. Our private time contains no fear. It is a gentle soft and slow passion. My awareness is trust and authenticity.

I remember everything.

I paint my nails a shade of red-pink. My old thin brown fingers are tired after a day scrubbing clothes. My infinite silent no voice is all. He watches my intense angelic face focus on cuticles. One-by-one. My heart understands his sense of eternal loss in exile, a form of suffering.

He cannot save me.

I sign: I hate the French spies next door. He and his fat wife run a restaurant. He spies for Thorny. They are creeps. Before he left Thorny gave me money to stop doing massage. I agreed. The spies keep an eye on me.

In my silence only my voice is missing.

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is all.

I am one with everything. A singularity.

I am a stream-winner.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

I live inside a net of light.

I live in a world of forms.

Everything floats away in a floating world.

Mu. Nothing.

Maya. Illusion.

Attachment is suffering. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, texture and blind love feeling hope, regret, loss and spiritual death and rebirth as a pure being?

Did suffering invent our genocide in a utopian fantasy?

I witness many sad lost blank faces. Strangers eat their face. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

Synesthesia.

What color is sound? What does it taste like? Is it sweet and sour?

Facts and truth have nothing in common.

Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara dancer, a dancing revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire creating new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

I dance to escape the tyranny of life.

My dance expresses life. I’ve danced all my short sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisper dance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots dancing below the surface of appearances in burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. 

Dance is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. Dance is a free playful existence. Life is a silent dance.

My spirit is destined for obscure happiness. Dancing my existence I welcome intention and intuition by communicating with gestures. My beauty. Symmetry. I am a formless form in a world of forms. Skin textures are perfect. Complete. My life is pure essence. Radiant. I dance with energy and freedom.

I am free. Clear. Pure. Luminous.

When you dance you are connected to the Source. I am the Source, the vast self.

My lack of speech and hearing is a blessing. I am grateful.

My body is my instrument.

I am a golden sprite, a fairy maiden. I am a young, innocent, shy, ferocious wild tiger. My claws feel this intensity. I dance with death deferred.

My needs are met on every level of being. It is sensual, playful.

I gesture to him. Go upstairs. Shhh.

I lock the door. We are safe. I am safe. I take off my clothes. My dance flows. My childlike love caresses air. It is the stillness of dance my free form.

Touch me. Nibble my ear lobes. Kiss my neck. Use your tongue. Ask me without words if I want it gentle, medium or hard.

I lie down. Hold me. Breathe deep. Exhale eighteen inches out. Deep space. Empty your mind.

Give me a full body massage. Start with my feet. They are erogenous zones of pleasure. Touch pressure points on my souls. My brain is an erogenous zone. Work up my calves massaging lower back along the spine expanding out across muscles and shoulders. My neck muscles are tight from doing laundry. Knead tension out. I’ll tell you how it feels with gestures of pleasure.

Listen and feel my body. Hear my breath exhaling sensation. Roll me over. Let your tongue do the talking. Stimulate me slow and easy. I feel your tongue caress ear lobes and neck down across breasts. Caress aroused purple nipples. Move south to my belly. Clear the department of the forest before tonguing my little button and labia rose. It’s highly sensitive. Slow. This is a powerful erogenous spot. Explore my blood filled flowers. Tongue lips deeper. Inhale my fragrance.

Feel my response as I move with you. Dance with me. Explore my mysterious cave with a slow moving tongue. Feel my response. Sense my breathing. If it’s fast and shallow I’m excited. I press your face deeper into my forest getting what I need.

My body is your teacher.

Relaxed, he signs asking what I dream about. My imagination, perception and sensation means scrubbing cloth, wringing out water, hanging cloth on hangers, ironing cloth, folding cloth, bagging cloth, weighing cloth, handing cloth to strangers, accepting money, smiling and dreaming of freedom.

I dream dance.

He traces my forehead, breasts and jealous thighs. He dreams I have a real life with real opportunities.

Courage. Self-esteem. Dignity. Authenticity.

He takes me far away to a beach. I see silent crashing blue white waves. Feeling hot sun on my face I run into blue/green/white water shouting The Sea! The Sea!

A long white cotton dress feels invisible on my skin. I am brown and content. I feel free. He memorizes my small brown hands, heart, head and lifelines. They are heavy deep real and calloused from laundry. He is gentle with me.

I am a hungry animal. I release my repressed sexual energy. I trust him. I give myself to him.

I am a slave. He cannot save me. This is an unpleasant fact.

Edging my skin realizing sensations I feel safe and protected. I curl into his arms.

Without words I say my family is poor. There is no chance for us. He’s been in country long enough to know how my culture works.

My father is seventy-three and ill. I have many aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and abandoned relatives. When they see a white face they smell money. They beg for money with fake reasons. They play their woe is me sympathy card. They are traditional and narrow-minded. They suffer from ignorance, envy and jealousy and want.

Desire, greed and survival is their master. I told them Thorny is my benefactor. Thorny thinks I was abused as a child. He found a doctor in Phony Baloney to assess my condition. They said it was too late to do anything to help me. My life is more silent laundry.

Thorny talked to my father using an interpreter. Thorny asked specifics - was she abused? Father said I wasn’t abused. Was she hit in the head as a child? Did she suffer from a head injury? No, no, no, my father said. He said something happened to me when I was two. I think they are afraid of Thorny and don’t want to tell him the truth. He flew home for three months. He plans to come back and get paperwork so I can leave and join his family in OZ. Fat chance.

My luck ran out.

I don’t hold my breath. I dance.

I exhale my dancing quest. I showed my lover some documents and he’s happy for me. If it’s possible, he signed. He knows my father has to approve any relationship with Thorny depending on cash amount. Marriage is a big maybe like my sister did. She was smart, played her guilt card, hooked the Kiwi and got pregnant. He paid.

If my family agrees they determine a pre-paid wedding dollar amount, say $3 grand. There’s a pre-nuptial waiting period, filing papers. Pay greasy greedy officials. The government requires foreigners to prove they make $2,500 a month. Everyone has a hand out. A wedding party will cost $200-$5,000 to impress friends with our social status. Big deal.

My father is afraid to lose me. He will say no. My lazy sister needs a slave. This is my fate. I am happy. It’s all I’ve known and will know.

My life dance is ambiguity, acceptance, independent detachment and creative imagination.

Dance is isolated yet cooperating and independent. I believe in the magic of dance.

When you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

What do I see? I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, language in space. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth. Then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos is next, a combination of a circle and line where male and female energies interact. This istransformation.

After chaos is the lyrical. A leap. A release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

I’ll dance until I die.

What is life?

Dance.

The Language Company

Saturday
Oct012016

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.

The Language Company

Sunday
Jul242016

Turkey in 2012 - TLC 88

Lucky Foot-notes:

In 2008 at TLC in Bursa, Noor, a personal tutor told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. I was born there and it’s beautiful.

In the summer of 2012 he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon. They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar. Reconnect with Z, meet diverse people, make images, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom. Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

 

My Beautiful Surprise - 51 days in TURNKEY

 

Lucky scribbled make it new day by day make it new.

Get it down now and make sense of it later, said Other Muse.

Giresun and Black Sea. BS.

Write a simple declarative sentence. Telegraph. Stop.

I travel my life. If I stay too long in a place I go blind.

Economics 101. Opportunity cost. Cost-benefit ratio. ROI.

Probation is a 2-way business arrangement. Trust and verify.

If you want to play you pay with time/money.

Trade your time for a handful of dimes.

You play the game or the game plays you. Roll the dice.

Theme: Deterioration of Turkish educational quality and FEAR. Citizens choose religious fundamentalism or nationalism with totalitarian leadership. Emulate idiotic TV soap opera programs.

Blind Turkish citizens are worried about money and personal appearance.

Turkish women laughing in public are shamed, arrested and exiled.

Consumerism: Phones, watches, clothing, cars, guns. Artificial empowerment is achieved by buying things. Economic development. Greed is a hungry insatiable animal.

Insecurity and ego love the chaos. Embrace your fear.

Gun culture. Emasculated.

Repressed aggression.

The Language Company

Wednesday
May112016

diamond mind

He's been here many times, many places on earth.

He passes through with a diamond in his mind.

A man in a white hat rings a bell. He pushes his orange three-wheeled ice cream cart down the street. He passes a woman unloading stacks of kindling at a cafe.

12,000 orphans from 269 safe houses huddle for warmth.

Humans are nature's tools.

Fuel for cooking and heating water.

Men sit staring at a ghost. Trembling eyes pursue the endless stream of life.

When a conversation dies someone picks up their cell to call another conversation.

I just called to see if you're alive. Have you eaten, Yes. Today was eggs and rice, Tomorrow it's lobster. Ha. Laughter is perfect therapy.

Listening is a lost art. The majority of people don't listen to understand they listen to reply. Lost art wandered around Laos discovering Listening. 

Sullen is one kind of conversation. Surly married Indifference.

People die from neglect suffering from no love.

I work. I breed. I get slaughtered.