not true

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development, conflict and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence.

Make me pay attention.

Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls.

Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka and season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, Indonesian gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Get to the verb.

            “Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

            “Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

            “1.7 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.

"Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

            “Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

            “Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

            “Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory a form of history. Rewrite history.          

“Your memory is the world and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

            “I will, will you?” said Rita.

"Maybe baby. I have a question for Lucky.”

            “He’s here.”

            “What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

            ”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

            “Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

            “During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

            Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

            It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

            “Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

            “Dead or blind there’s no difference,” Flower said. “People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”

The Language Company

Simple Voice

After a reliable narrator established a voice, geography, atmosphere, tone, conflict and cinematic jump cut action employing minimum wage universal themes like time, boredom, passion, loneliness and alienation in an unforgiving universe of meaningless existence with humor and curiosity holding hands and casting characters like plot dragging others around chained to their personality defects and character flaws wearing original death masks surrounded by distracted simple, noisy, gadget addicted compassionate illiterate peasants in a play waiting for Godot, writing with a Mont Blanc 149 fountain pen using Royal Blue invisible ink on blank parchment was pure luminous joy.

Lucky sat at an Indonesian warung - a cheap eatery serving white rice, spicy chili, eggs, green veggies, tempeh, tofu and deep-fried crackers behind a cement wall. Smoking teachers called it The Berlin Wall because they could inhale nicotine poison developing cancerous tumors away from inquisitive prying eyes of parents and school admin moles.

He’d escaped the tyranny of kind plaid dressed Bahasa robot educators trapped in futile expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled trash near a grove of banana trees and flamed it. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Billowing smoke obscured a thin man pushing a blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cloth, tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and household goodies through neighborhoods from dawn to dusk.

Cumulus clouds gathering mass and momentum discussed future seismic activity 7.5 miles below Java and inevitable roaring tsunamis pounding Japan land. Let’s destroy a nuclear reactor in Fukushima Daiichi, said a roaring wave, spreading radiation far and wide.

Ok, agreed another tumultuous wave, we’ll teach irrational h-saps not to mess with Mother Nature by developing cheap power on a coast at cost. Yeah, said a breaking wave, everyone pays in the long now. Radiation spread her wings.

Yelling villagers revealed frustrations as a thin woman teased her four-year old boy-monkey child. Pregnancy and birth gave her a one-way ticket out of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger into a parallel universe of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger. She worked, bred and got slaughtered.

In world villages women traded sex for fake temporary security. Father ran away to impregnate and abandon new naive victims. Hungry girls and mothers went to bed in a perpetual security-sex-money-childbirth-food cycle.

Species evolved.

She tormented the kid. He cried. He depended on her for safety and food. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster who hated women now and later. He’d kill her with a silent machete honed on his hatred’s hard-hearted wet stone.  

A mother and daughter uttered primal grunting sounds. The mother combed daughter’s hair scavenging protein rich nits and lice. Crying children and distracted zombies savored -7 emotional years of miserable maturity.

Life is a temporary condition, said Beauty.

Primordial darkness is a cosmic birth.

Society is a cave.

Solitude is the way out.

Two women balancing scrap wood on heads took a shortcut through village mud. A white and yellow-flecked butterfly danced in spring’s breeze. Goats with tinkling bells foraged in trash and weeds.

Across town at Sukarno International Airport pale disoriented tourists waited to get passports stamped at immigration before exploring Balinese temples, hands-on erotic organic massage parlors and swimming in blue-green waves of surfing laughter with sharks on porpoise.

Removed from their naive traveling eyes palm oil plantation owners in Sumatra destroyed rain forests to feed their families so rich women could consume sweet facial cosmetic balms.

Poor Javanese farmers killed elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade providing Chinese consumers with aphrodisiacs.

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.

Fujian is Workers' Paradise - TLC 87

Passing through vibrating unified energy fields Lucky walked home to visit his common-law wife and ghost relatives in Fujian.

The gravity of thinking observed the abyss between rich and poor in China was wide, deep and expanding faster than the universe. Rural annual wages - $1,600. Yearly city wages - $2,600.

Communist atheist leaders prayed economic stimulus incentives and cheap Yuan currency would encourage free citizens to buy rice cookers, plasma televisions, washing machines, microwaves, air conditioners, generators, refrigerators, motorcycles, electric bikes, luxury cars, destroyers, submarines, communication satellites, stealth fighters, Predator drones, labor saving robots and Dream Sweeper Machines.

Rusty loudspeakers squawked:

Consume Comrades. Get with the fucking program.

Lucky fantasied about owning a 4-wheel drive super-duper dream sweeper machine to ferry his merry family to Bursa, Hanoi, Sapa, Vientiane and Banlung animist cemeteries along the Heart of Darkness and renew relationships with Rita writer and Leo cannibal.

Where life is simple. Where gentle people never left their village, the world. No need or desire. Everything I have is here, said a shaman weaving life threads. The world is a village.

Lucky fountain penned Zeynep in Bursa, Turkey a postcard illustrated with an imperial yellow dragon protecting a luminous pearl:  

Dear Z,

I walked. I worked. I saved. I got lucky and bought a Flying Pigeon bike at a fire sale from a corrupt wealthy village official.

One-speed black. It got me from home to rice paddies. I reaped what I sowed.

We had a radio in our work unit. The publicity machine blasted Life Is A Party revolutionary anthems 24/7. Accelerate production comrades.

I saved and got a radio for home. My wife was beyond pleased.

She produced our required female child. Miracle. We desired a boy. She got pregnant again. Sex is fun. Responsibility is a duty.

Forced Abortion Committee officials visited at midnight. They screamed NO! It is forbidden. You do not qualify for two children. They tied me up and held a gun to my head. I was forced to watch. They aborted our child and sterilized her. We cried. They laughed, Always Be Closing.

We lost face in the village. Blending in was impossible.

Out of the quest-ion.

She wanted a TV to distract her from sorrow, guilt and shame. Ok, we’ll get a 24” flat screen with a remote. I worked. I saved. We hung it on a brick wall above our aborted fetus in a hermetically sealed glass jar and grainy images of our ancestors eating incense.

How about a new rice cooker, she said. Ok.

How about a used refrigerator, she said. What’s wrong with the plastic orange icebox? You buy cabbage, cauliflower, onions, leeks, turnip greens and fresh ice from writer Rita every morning. Why do we need a refrigerator?

Our neighbors have one. Oh, I see, got to keep up with the Yin- Yang’s. Envy and I scrounged around. I developed connections. Connections in China make the world spin and people feel dizzy. Millions fall down. I remember when you said fall up, Z. I’m still laughing at your insight. Anyway, here it’s whom you know not what you know. Greed is god, I mean good.

I traded twenty kilos of Quality Of Life rice for two brothel chickens from Human Province. I traded the chicks for Burmese teak, rubies and a sharp knife stained with Karen blood. One trade led to another. If you’re not fast you’re last.

Buy dirt sell sky.

I brought luck to others by walking around.

I found a filthy frigid fridge and traded the teak and rubies. My wife was beyond pleased. Wild. We filled it with cheap baby formula. The formula was tainted with a poisonous chemical to increase protein. We didn’t know this small unpleasant fact.

Our girl became sick. Her luck ran out.

Peoples’ Worker’s Hospital #9 said I had to pay BIG money for imported medicine or she’d die.

Life is cheap here.

I sold the fridge, downsized the TV and sacrificed my bike to buy pharmaceuticals.

She’s on life support. Now I walk to see her. It takes forever and a day. Walking makes the road. Bus #11 means legs. Next to an optimistic amputee in Laos or Cambodia I’m lucky to have a leg to stand on.

I dream of rich cities - bright beacons of prosperity with automatic cash machines for consumers like me flashing fake plastic. Dream on sucker. Polluted cities filled with food smells, construction projects, appliances and economic class warfare. I hope against hope for sustainable work and some blind stupid luck.

Party leaders say millions of workers will return to villages on Chinese New Year. To make matters worse six million college graduates flood the job market every June. Three million drown screaming I Need Help!

Radio static flickering radioactive images and disembodied voices order us to stay home. Be quiet. Keep your fat fucking mouth closed unless you are eating. Practice social stability and harmony. Save face. Blend in. 

May your life be interesting dear Z and filled with adventure - something that’s going to happen - and magical surprise from the get go.

I remember you saying we will abandon this manuscript with intuitive wisdom and courage, Z. Here it is, here it goes, free as Winter Hawk and Lone Wolf. Thanks:-)

Omar will gift you the manuscript when he passes through Bursa.

If you see Curious dancing with Humor and you will, hug her for me. People need five hugs a day for emotional health.

Love and gratitude with honeyed memories,

Lucky

P.S. You are a miracle.

The Language Company

The Commander's Wife Buys Confectionary

In Shan State, Burma in the long now, there was a running insurgency - land, freedom, peace, justice, jade, teak, gold - golden triangle profit and greed with Chinese dynasties.

A shiny green army pickup truck pulled up at the New Moon bakery in Lashio.

A soldier in green jumped out and opened the door. The wife got out – longhair tied bun tight, white and silver longyi, designer purse, imperial jade necklace, diamond studed serious face.

Six soldiers exited the back of the truck. They were on a mission to liberate cakes, cookies, sweets from glass shrines.

The commander got out. Short, wearing a camouflage jacket like a forest with depressed green pants and black shiny shoes. Epaulets on his shoulder.

His sharp black eyes stared at a stranger scribbling at an outdoor table. Zero expression.

His eyes lay buried in his face with recessed emptiness. The commander's war camo boonie hat sat at a rakish angle folded in the front. Decorated with a golden military symbol of happiness, compassion and love.

His wife climbed into a new sun. Her husband uttered quick syllables to #2.

Number two had military bearing without a care in the world. He barked into a walkie-talkie.

A military policeman guarded the front of the truck. Smoking soldiers stood around as motorcycles loaded with succulent strawberries streamed goodbye.

She exited followed by a salesgirl trundling bags of roles and sweet goodies. A soldier jumped to attention, took them and put them in the truck. She spoke to her husband. His face said he was an obediant child.

He followed her to the market for shopping. Soldiers marched behind the queen.

Years later they returned with strawberries, apples and bananas. Soldiers loaded everything into the truck.

Someone called the commander. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt. He opened his mouth. Perfect white teeth. He smiled. He barked. A soldier open the door for his wife life. She got in.

He got in and removed his party hat. He smoothed his hair. The military police stopped traffic. They drove into a dream come true.