Article 301 in Deep State - TLC 59

“Deep State is a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime,” said Zeynep.

*

“In summation your honor,” said a defensive attorney from the Land of Smirking Tomatoes, “my client is innocent of personal responsibility and conspiracy charges to overthrow the Deep State. We rest our case.”

 “Your discovery evidence in Article 301 while standing accused of insulting the Deep State is weak and inconclusive,” said a Turkish judge on a political payoff hiding Graft behind his back. “Your motion for acquittal and adjudication is forthwith dead and denied.”

“May I change my plea your honor? May I resume my please bargaining and negotiating hardball tactics on behalf of free speech? May I speak without fear of insulting the schizoid Turkish state, dead hee-haw headless horsemen heroes, nationalism, conservative Fascism and fundamentalism in the form of Islamic religious heroin addiction?”

“That’s a mouthful of here say. File a brief size small with elasticity.”

“Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than Iran and China,” said Zeynep. “Turkey ranks 154th out of 179 countries for Freedom of the Press.”

“Freedom is knowing how big your cage is,” said Lucky.

“Freedom is having no choice,” said Zeynep with an existential twist of sour lemon.

The Guardian

The Language Company

Gili Air - TLC 58

After going cold Turkey he began this episode between dawn and noon on a ten-day December reprieve from a private Jakarta school. He sat on a green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery.

Gili means water. The small island, one of three off the coast of Lombok had 1,000 residents and zero motor vehicles. The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand-rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one was big and blue. Across water Rinjani volcano meditated above grey clouds at 3,500 meters.

A Muslim cemetery with twelve small grey plots decorated with coral borders and eroded headstones rested in a grove of small trees. Weeds, trash and buried lives treasured memories.

Roaming Earth he discovered cemeteries in Lakewood, Hue, Donegal, Bursa, Grazalema, and Ratanakiri animist sites in Cambodian jungles where dead dreamed and he slept with shamans.

In 1999 his stepmother carried her husband’s ashes in a carved box through Colorado fall foliage to Sec. 9 Blk. 9 Lot 11A, Grave NGSW/MGSW at Mt. Olivet west of Denver. She placed them in the ground near his mother, Elizabeth (42-cancer) and sister Martha Ann (13-leukemia).

*

He was in Morocco on 9/11. Chance. Aptitude. Timing. CAT.

Pure luck and perfect timing, the secret of everything.

He teamed up with Omar the blind, a Touareg seer. After six weeks they moved to Cadiz for a month polishing A Century is Nothing.

Omar returned to Cueva De La Pileta caves south of Benaojan where he created 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings for archeologists and suicidal literary gnomes.

Lucky shifted to Grazalema, a small Andalucía pueblo for three months of winter writing with Little Wing, a weaver.

Across the valley was a cemetario near a small church. Empty white crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels. Behind iron gates plastic flowers, names and dates faded curling black and white photographs of the dead collected dust where a procession of men laid a forty-year old friend to rest. 

They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity and said hello to the blessed Trinity with fast fingers before returning to the tight white community of 2,300 for sherry and conversational memories about the shepherd who died alone.

Gray dolomite cliffs and peaks above crypts welcomed a watercolor sky as white, grey, orange and blue hurtled east. Egyptian vultures expanded wings on thermals. 

Lucky manipulated a rangefinder in fading light imagining interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and pueblo life. He focused down cavities cement shells and rectangular rows of empty passages named Eternity.

Invisible stories whispered desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors and silence.

Silence required air to reach the faithful. Silent stories evolving in silent stories exhaled a silent night of the pious silent in collective breathing. World’s cemeteries died at dusk.

Relatives watered red, pink, white, yellow roses in lost light.

A single drop of water on a leaf’s fragile edge reflected scattered clouds as an old Spanish woman, a sabiawith mystical abilities, stared over graves’ territorial expansion from her Grazalema balcony and down at a sleeping infant in someone’s arms as three juveniles wrestled near shuttered fruit shops among scattered orange skins.

She heard ash falling from a burning stick of meditation nonsense in Hanoi.

It whistled a white hair on a sliver of tongue’s laughter.

Hungry ancestor ghosts eating incense begged feed me, feed me.

The Language Company

draw the dead - TLC 54

Below shattered shouting Fujian mountains a patient Maija village artist sketched the dead near the university where Lucky and Leo biked through forests along narrow dirt paths seeing black and orange butterflies mate in dust as farmers planted, harvested and threshed rice. Women lugged exploding white cauliflower in bamboo baskets suspended on pliant poles balanced on emaciated shoulders.

Easy riders zoomed past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and bent-backed forgotten women huddled over clacking Butterfly sewing machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until they reached a steep narrow street where they entered a small shop to enjoy high quality Fujian green tea with a purveyor of leaves. 

Uphill were red slat wooden home/shops, street noodles, rice, doughy steamed buns, appliances, a primary school filled with teachers screaming Blend In and hacking butchers.

The artist sketched dead people. His stoic art decorated family altars. Dusty faded ancestor images in temples and home altars ate bowls of fresh fruit and burning innocence. Death worship is a cultural way of life. 

The Language Company

Agent Orange - TLC 50

Omar's suicidal literary agent said, this creative nonfiction gonzo jazz poem is impossibly probable.

We invent truth, said Zeynep and Rita, dazzled by needles, threads and embroidery. Our thread creates art.

I know everything and can say nothing about character arc, rising tension or sustaining a plot, said Agent Orange. Something needs to happen to move it along with narrative flow and character development. Make me laugh, cry, scream, get angry, suffering the joyful painful slings and arrows of time.

Create emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist. Grab me by the throat in the first sentence. Strangle me with emotional words visual truth and dramatic action. Make me pay attention. Let me anticipate the mysterious unfolding process. Cinema.

Give me a sharp emotional hook hanging above a mainstream literary marketing platform in plywood brothels where evil greedy men with MONEY & POWER threaten and abuse orphaned, abandoned sex slave girls.

They buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in locked rooms, use them, abuse them, trade them, sell them and discard them on Mean Street for The Dream Sweeper.

They are commodities like rice.

Ignorant rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop goes the weasel. Open my legs. Plow fertile financial soil between my literary legs. Educate my feeble, nonchalant passive innocent broken heart-mind.

Throw in Chinese opera starring Curious a genius waif on quest.

Give me idiotic Thai family soap operas with a mean grandmother, a confused gay boy seeking his identity, a beautiful older sister crying all the time because she can’t find true love running through guys like a meat grinder, a younger brother who understands her beautiful anguish consoling her apparent disdain for affection and emotional honesty, a younger sister obsessed with passing university entrance exams to get a scholarship in OZ and brain dead parents too busy working to spend time with the family.

For good measure include Indonesian gamelan music, 3-act weepy-eyed Turkish dramas with a courageous girl named Zeynep, an ice girl author in Banlung, Laotian silk weavers, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancing slaves at 8th century Angkor Wat temples being strangled by cotton roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them strength/power enabling them to leap over tall nymphs with a single organismic shudder. Give me an organic boom-boom death in eight seconds.

Come on baby, she sighed. Get to my hot wet verb. Omar explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow dusky shoulders, pinpoint purple nipples with tongue talk, flat belles letters and long legs playing his way toward her heart of darkness. He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep. Slow sweet my sweet slow.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated by playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precise ambition whispering,Give me a baby. Give me a baby. He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there’s no way under the tropical ball of fire I’ll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here's the pitch in twenty-five words or less, said Rita gripping her two-seam knuckleball. Watch this baby dance.

Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

History, wars, innate violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodia. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. China purchased more than 15% of Cambodia. They’ve invested billions. They bought the government. One hand washes the other.

Crazy human genocide killers massacred 2,000,000 Cambodians between 1975-1979.

40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. They are subsistence farmers in a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck, breed, plant, harvest rice and relax. Quality of life sings with survivors. Milling around is an art form, like the Lao kid said.

Truth is stranger than fiction, said Zeynep.

Rita: Any day above ground is a lucky day. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. However, they live in fear. Conditioned by paranoia they are afraid the past will become the present. The past chases them 24/7. Time is a scary circle.

Red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of our genocide regime blasted black sky. An orphan sang, the wicked witch is dead!

Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $200,000,000 UN genocide show trial.

What a waste of economic resources.

Killers deny their role.

Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.

That’s what they all say.

No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah, yeah, said survivors.

Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories. Media buys people, said Rita. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.

Truth is at one end of the spectrum and imagination is at the other.

Numbed silence covers rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns send in the politicians, bankers, NGOs, thieves and Chinese manipulators.

Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.

Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody. I am a calm lunatic.

Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive. They started over after Year Zero. Fourteen million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a perfect NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.

Culture means you can forget.

It will take another generation or sixty years given our short average life expectancy to recover, revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.

Down the road, Alice in Slumber Land, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You must blend in if you’re going to survive. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.

They vanished. Extinct. Evolution is unpredictable.

Asking quest-ions then and now was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is perceived as strange, startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People asking WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, motivation, incentive and daily comatose poverty existence.

People who ask why are terrorists.

Accountability is a foreign language.

Khmer are soft and kind. We have a good heart. Let’s pretend to be who we are. Be careful who you pretend to be, said Rita, and one more thing, Buy some ice from me so I can eat rice.

Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful, said Agent Orange shoveling rice dialogue into her yap.

Yeah, yeah, said Zeynep. We spill sounds and smell metaphors with contextual sensorial context. Caress the divine details. Read history and weep. Create memory a form of history re-write history.

If you re-write can you re-wrong?

There are no metaphors, only observations.

Everything is a metaphor, said Other Muse.

Your memory is the world, said the agent. Cry me a river. Create a rainbow bridge. Get over it.

Between an object and a concept, said Rita laughing with Zeynep as the agent droned on like a Predator or GRIM REAPER at 18,000 feet zeroing in for the kill sale. I need to feel the females’ pain, their sense of hopelessness, their loss and being abandoned for eternity. Through their painful memory, fear and sheer terror, I need to feel comprehend and identify with their anguish inside vulnerable skin.

Dig into their epidermis, brain and heart. Show me tragic magic.

Conflict. Conflict. Conflict.

Give me desperate humans with inevitable poor economic fate, choices, intention, karma, motivation, growth and action allowing them to develop courage and truth. Their arc reveals adaptation, adjustment and evolution in a Darwinian sense to a higher form of cosmic consciousness.

They become the thing they fight the most.

A shadow discovers light.

Mindfulness is free of fear anger and ego. Grasping is suffering.

Their quest is for personal empowerment, self-esteem, dignity and freedom from tyranny, exploitation and slavery. Volunteered salivating slavery. Get it in writing, ha, ha, ha.

Orange reiterated mainstream literary criteria for R&Z. Show how women support each other with hope in their collective communal misery sharing tissues and issues. How they maintain a strong sense of self-esteem and personal identity after being abandoned, battered, raped, whipped, starved, screwed and chained in cold rooms for five years to break their spirit. Seasoning. If you want to train a wild animal you must break their spirit.

Sounds like a global educational conspiracy to beat, de-story, traumatize and obliterate any and all creative spirit out of children for twelve deadly years. Dead before adulthood, thought Rita.

Call the gravedigger. He’s never out of work.

Agent diatribe: Structure the tedious narrative from Z to A engaging my senses in shattered fragmented narratives illustrating truth, pain, sorrow, showing how love fate and chance manifests through silence, cunning and exile suffering with passion and dire consequences leading to redemption and a happy, sad or what have you end.

Give me the fucking drama.

Give me Living Dead female VICTIMS in life’s cruel unrelenting heart breaking saga with hollow eyes lying flat on their back legs wide open staring at plywood walls filled with torn glossy images of smiling coiffured feminine hair salon advertising myths as strange men fucking them 24/7 crush their emotional life.

Structure their tragic consequences while trusting a manipulative greedy mama-san running the business under the protection and tacit consent of local police. She gives the police a free fucking discount or goes to jail. Yes, create a colorful mind map of their personal and collective journey. Show me. Don’t tell me about their tragic love and tragic passion and tragic suffering. Make sadistic things happen to them.

Rip my bleeding heart out.

Build tension with cinematic pace. Then, in a dramatic climax en masse they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a community shelter experiencing healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment. They take control of their life.

They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice, sewing in a garment factory, looming silk, assembling circuit boards or guiding tourists at Angkor Wat.

Some master the art of weaving word threads. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. Free from self-censorship they write and draw in notebooks. They self publish art and stories.

The sequel.

They form Love Killer groups hunting down adults who betrayed them. The girls and women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest.

BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, heartbreak, tyranny, ambition, greed, revenge, mysteries and dime store romance not to mention salacious graphic comics. Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a cinematic scene. Words lie. Visuals reveal truths. Paint a voice. I need to see patterns. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms with recycled manuscripts. Pulp Fiction. Keep me turning the page. Make the characters want something even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi as they carry shit to fertilize gardens of Eden. Everyone needs water. Leo knows about the necessity of H2O after hauling excrement.

Zeynep said: You mean it’s like staring into an abyss called civilization with a courageous intelligent noble cannibal named Leo wearing an alarm clock around his neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles seeing eternity with stone cold clarity, immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom aware of immortality confronting our deepest fear in ROOM 101 alongside brave others unflinching in our love and compassion, this infinite potential?

Destiny danced for eternity’s delight.

Where all points end at infinity?

Where eternity playing with time folds space?

Before jumping over the abyss Zeynep, Rita and Leo yelled, People think art is easy. It’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day. JUMP!

Yes, said the agent. It has to be heart breaking with huge risks. You develop your wings after jumping.

You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, said Rita. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. I witnessed an old man write Eternity on a paper napkin at Planet Perfect, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon.

He carried an engraved Zippo talisman from Saigon.

I was born dead and slowly came to life.

He preferred wooden matches. He torched Eternity. Strike one, said Empire Umpire.

His blazing eyes watched the Big E burn to a cinder. Black and white ash fluttered from fingers. He mumbled incantations about life’s joke, formless form, void, Bardo and absurd existential choices.

He was so poor a matchbox held his clothes.

Why did he burn everything, said Agent O. Don’t you see, said Rita, the burning seer became his luminous inner light. Pure energy. Walking through an impermanent world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart, sun burned his retinas. Time tides in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon coalesced his cognitive facilities. He lapsed into a meditative stream-of-consciousness run-on life sentence befriending shadows, ghosts and shamans. He became a point of universal consciousness in his wisdom mind. Fiction and memory and dream and imagination are identical triplets. He confronted the abyss. He jumped and saved his skin bag.

Agent O. - I don’t get it. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. Stay on task. I like the LOVE KILLERconcept. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne.

Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

Keep it simple. Woman meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, rice, sex and love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story, readers love it.

Great, said Zeynep, how’s this sound? Woman loses man because she treasures her virginity. It's worthsomething. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a five year courtship thinking he will save me, discovering blind love by exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another.

Man promises her BIG money. Accepting with broken-hearted resignation that sex business is money business she gets engaged to satisfy her parent's perpetual demands.

Breed baby.

She keeps writing. She sends her experimental story out. It flies away like Winter Hawk. Blind myopic agents in a Spanish cave burn it. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. Independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and eleven siblings. Family demands $5k as a down payment. She’s a valuable child bearing resource.

They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

My body is a work of art.

It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

Man agrees. Facing family greed man suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and healthy doubt. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local greasy greedy officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. He pays for her eleven sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read, write and walk the

talk. He pays for a water pump. He pays for solar panels. He pays for her grandparent’s medicine. He pays for rice seeds, rabbits, chickens, pigs, water buffalo and vegetables for eternity.

Parents give expensive village wedding party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children to propitiate their poverty cycle, Give us someone to love, someone who will work, breed and before getting slaughtered care for us and bury us. Feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

Agent: That’s a mouthful of pay. Create a heroine on a quest-ion. Give me twisted international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Cambodia or Laos with exorbitant administrative costs, an orphan with no motivation but survival, greed and tons of CORPORATE monopoly play money. Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, forged land ownership papers screwing peasants, jealousy, revenge, pride, and make sure ambition is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashing empires, resolving conflicts and creating new dramas.

Give me 15% disabled unemployed angry homeless American war veterans and their struggles with attempted suicide, PTSS, divorce, drug addiction, domestic famine, The Broken System and revenge, a central motivating factor. Cheap guns filled with copious ammo. Give me transcendental borders in a crazy beautiful fucked up world.

Ascertain the intuition before the motivation, said Rita.

The agent climbed a literary mountain, No literary mountain means the publishing road is flat, straight and short. Give me one sentence with short dirty realism. Brevity.

Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts. Give me romance, treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem. Give me short simple sentences. Give me a life sentence with no chance for parole. Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts. I need characters feeling fear, forgiveness, shock and awe. Like Orwell give me some unpleasant facts about a condemned man on his way to the gallows stepping around a puddle of water. Show me his gesture his feeling this quick generous insight into the human condition. Strap me into my literary electric chair in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes give me a metaphor of mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling heart drama, intrigue and chaos. Entropy.

Find the big metaphor, my dear ice girl.

Give me REVENGE - the how and why war started. The why factor. Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faustian deals. Give me humans selling their soul or young virgin brothel bodies to the d-evil to achieve their temporary nefarious ends. Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in faint hope the last great evil thing that dies with gravity and arc. Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, reactions and growth with total comprehension and the scientific fact that the universe is 3.5 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY.

Some see TC as God. You may want to move this fact to the very brutal yet incomplete satisfying conclusion. This means the LONG NOW or 20,000 years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. Many believe everything happens for a reason. Up to you. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex.

If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried, few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile with HELP on top.

Rita: Here’s a rough draft with God’s voice. Try it on for size.

Day 30

Earth this is God. I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month.

The countdown begins today. Day 30. Get your shit together. Pay any outstanding bills. Tie up any loose ends. Place your bets ladies and gentlemen. I’m rolling the dice. Somebody said God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well guess what? I do. Kiss people you love bye-bye. Forever.

You’ve had your miraculous chance.

Have mercy, screamed seven billion humans.

You had your time. Time I was gracious enough to give you. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to do good work for others and improve the quality of life for humanity. You wasted it. I am very disappointed in your individual and collective behavior and attitudes. Actions speak louder than words. I’m sick and tired of seeing male idiots in suits whining like brats, talk, yak and disagree on common humanitarian principles. It’s time to pay the piper and I’m calling the tune.

I’m playing and all of you will dance.

I’ve given you plenty of time to get it right but no, you never solved problems of your own making. Petty squabbles. Selfish and violent. Adults act like spoiled children and enough is enough. I’ve seen enough children and women suffering to last me a lifetime.

I may give women and kids the benefit of the doubt when we get closer to Day 1.

Stay awake and stay tuned. See what happens.

It appears to my old tired eyes it’s the males who are responsible for this travesty of justice. Correct me if I’m wrong in my omniscient Tao. No, they screamed, you’re right, always were and will be. Males are to blame. Let me give you an example. Ok said whimpering humans. Give it to us straight. Let’s go way back. Earth is 3.5 billion years old. You humans have existed for what? 50,000 years give or take a century. That's a blink of eye. You know the Empire State Building in NY yes well that represents how long earth has existed through my good graces. I’m a benevolent creator. Put a dime on top, that’s how long you idiots have been around. Brief. Your average life span is what, maybe 80 years? That’s like me taking one long deep cleansing breath in a walking meditation. Generations of your ilk have left a long trail of tears. You’ve been killing each other for 4,000 years and still no one knows who the king is.

Get this fact this hard irrefutable truth.

I’m the king.

Always was and always will be.

I created the big picture.

I see the big picture.

I am the big picture.

Omnipotent. All knowing loving and compassionate.

There but for the grace of God go I. I have renovation plans and you’re not in the grand equation. Your puny existence expires in thirty clicks. No whys maybes ands if or buts.

You’re kidding, said humans.

Oh yeah? Want to see an example of divine justice? Sure. Ok, call a meeting of the worthless, toothless, useless UN General Assembly in NY. Every country’s representative, king, leader, dictator whoever runs their show will be present. No exceptions. Tomorrow. 8 a.m. Oh and one more thing, I expect the IMF, World Bank and related global financial big shots and their lawyers to be there as well. No one’s excused. It’s mandatory. No shows die.

Humans had nightmares.

At 8 a.m. the UNGA was SRO.

Delegates, political hacks, lawyers and financiers fidgeted, fretted and frowned. It’s too early for a meeting, said the new President of Turkey. Traffic was chaos, said a dictator from South America.

Mr. Moon Glow, the UN High Commissioner called the meeting to order.

We are here today because God said so.

Delegates from ______ and ______stood up shouting, I don’t believe in God.

Zap! Zap! Lightening bolts incinerated them. Smoke and the smell of burning flesh wafted toward an air conditioning ventilation system.

Who’s next, said a calm invisible voice.

The auditorium became very quiet.

I thought so, said the voice. Now that I have your attention let’s discuss specifics.

Wait a minute interrupted a shrill voice. A lawyer for Big Global Business (BGB) stood up. See here God, we control the flow of oil and money. When we decide crude prices and fiscal policy establishing our greed and profit intentions the world listens to us. They have no choice. You’re delusional. Who are you to decide anything? This is divine terrorism.

Zap!

Come people never learn, said God. Anyone else?

It’s a work in progress, said Rita.

Z: So far so good. Let it flow. Imagine an accelerated space program as humans escape Earth to avoid the end of the world, cannibals and Ebola plagues. Only super rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes. The poor fend for themselves in a global free-for-all. Leftovers. Savages rape, plunder, take vacations, build arks, move into abandoned slum mansions, create currencies, disband armies, begin new civilizations, grow and sell high potassium bananas and enjoy unprotected sex with strangers. It’s a doomsday scenario plus or minus friend links, likes, tags, share buttons, electronic social media and technological wiz gadgets.

Interesting said AO. I like Rita’s treatment. Expand it. Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis (  ). They stop me cold.

Punctuation is a nail.

Give me thesis and coma commas. Rational certainty. How about quotation marks, asked Rita. Periodically, or just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work. Have you read The Stone Raft, or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Blindness, said Rita.

No, I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Tons of garbage lies near the summit. Mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, frozen bodies and rejected manuscripts.

They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

Facoinating. That’s all well and good, said agent. Mainstream readers do not want a) to work too hard b) slow paced reads with historical and cultural fragmented facts c) philosophical narrative non-fiction experiments wandering all over the map or d) non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded sagas. They like stories with Swedish journalists, oligarchies and smart crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt?

The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

Add sex by a smart Vietnamese woman or mute Cambodian woman washing cloth dreaming of dance killing sexual predators with karate. Readers want fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real fictionalized situations, romance and delicious date rape recipes filled with evil hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in Comabodia. Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

How about talking chickens in Cambodia and Vietnam, rendered Rita. Naive dirt-poor chickens wearing mascara? Or Russian baboons, said Zeynep.

Agent O - Sex sells. Can they read? No. Can they write a synopsis in 25,000 words of less? No. They fuck for a living yes well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same butter different. I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and publishing eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader in America has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap dead fish. Read the fine print, go digital. Bits bytes. 0’s and 1’s. Matrix. The average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. I am a cynical realist and skeptic with the attention span of a meditative mendicant.

Many are too poor to pay attention.

The majority faces a constant daily struggle for food and clean water. One billion humans do not have access to clean water. Billions are illiterate.

17,000 children die of starvation every single day.

Write about that unpleasant fact, dear Rita and Zeynep. Literate types want something to read while sitting stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their horribly mundane and superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Humans feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Intelligent people have healthy doubts. Stupid people have courage.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s a fucking adventure.

No plan, one life, many adventures.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret. It’s very comfortable. Why me? They absorb static or moving pictures to escape terminally bored conditions, situations and inconveniences. They feel the need to experience virtual reality on cell phones devolving into Soft Machine material. Addictions. Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

I see, said Zeynep. I’ll ask a Bursa gravedigger about plot development. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear a hopeless future. Not me. Why me? The ego monkey mind loves the daily entertainment CIRCUS. It wears them down. It makes them lethargic, depressed, suicidal, and lazy.

Lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom. Checkmate, said Death.

Fate and Death conversed.

I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

Yes you are, said Death. You're a lucky lunatic.

Rita: Here’s how it works. Mindful people respect monkey mind. They are present and grounded in the long now. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Mindful. Survivors don’t read because they don’t know how or are lazy to learn anything about themselves the world, the human condition or paradigm shifts in this amazing life.

I don’t know and I don’t care is their mantra.

Their focus is on survival. Food. KISS.

Mindfulness perceives a microscopic self of pure energy. Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? We are pure light, energy, passing through frequency and vibrational shifts. Atoms. Others are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level.

Agent Orange: Sure. They want fast food and a remote to operate a 46-inch plaza screen with 500 channels. They love simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest, happy endings like orgasms. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities. Don’t write about what you know. Write about what you need to know. Write to find out. Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover a recycled idea with shiny tin foiled packaging, like an OK#1 love sock. Express a decisive moment, like the guy who steps around a puddle on his way to Burmese gallows.

Consider The Savage Detectives by Bolano about poets searching for a lost Chilean scribe in Europe. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end - one more microscopic essential unpleasant fact about life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher. Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors vanish. Others reading the work die laughing, you can’t be serious. A new editor thinks its garbage needing a major rewrite, tax deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations. If so a narrative hook leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it? Remaindered books get shipped to furnaces in Akron, O-Hi-O.

Paper burns at Fare An Height 451.

Yes, said Rita. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no ethics, morals or higher principles?

It’s all about money honey, said Agent O and eyeballs. Get your shit together sweetie. Everything has a price, a user and exchange value with utility infielders shagging hot grounders up the middle in the world market game of ideas, money, power, weapons, oil, drugs, and OK latex socks. Don’t give me philosophical proofs.

Zeynep: Speaking of numbers in the publishing racket, besides Rita and I the authors, there is you our potential agent as most authors who make it to publishers have one then there’s the editor who works on the book, an assistant editor, a proofreader, a copy editor, a fact-checker, a cover designer, a layout person, a marketing department, a dedicated publicist. Whether a book is printed or digital, all those people are involved in bringing the book to market.

Let’s do it ourselves, said Rita. Kill ten literary characters, said Z.

Cut them out, said Rita. No editor is going to drink champagne from our skulls.

That’s how the game works, said Agent O Yeah.

You’ve been very helpful, said R & Z. Let an omniscient illiterate invisible scripter tale the show.

It’s all yours. I have one quest-ion, said lick clit lit agent. How long have you been here? All fucking day, said Rita breaking the ice, care for some crystalline shards in high-octane java to help your blood pressure, sweet milk sweet thing?

Here’s your End Of Sub-Strata Geological MOLECULAR ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth, said Zeynep, you are a fluke of the universe, take advantage of it.

The literary bridge and market share percentages are longer and higher than this manuscript, said Agent O. I have a question for Lucky. He’s here drinking ice java with figments of melting perfection. What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were water, air, earth, and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing her physical awareness engaged everything. Touch was her essence. She knew every pressure point.

Soft, medium or hard, she said.

During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. I incorporated 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 boring.

It’s easy remembering Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way breathing awareness and kindness. It was wisdom, wonder, abundance, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower lived between detachment and sentimentality.

Eat the world with your blind eyes she said. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They provide you with the opportunity to develop patience, Yes I said yes I will my flower yes.

Life lesson #5 - TLC 49

What is life, said Lucky.

I’m a big seven as in seven, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator. Your life is not a test or a dress rehearsal. If it is an actual life your invisible friends protect you from ignorance and fear with courage.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It’s the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

It’s pouring like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver passenger van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress a dry writer polishing words by using his intelligent hose running wealthy water over rain. Cleaning. He gets a free shower.

He ignores me. I am a tool.

Grandmother sits on our austere 1924 colonial dark-brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong offering Buddhist monks handfuls of rice. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

My grandfather stares at rain, forming lakes.

Daddy’s very busy. He disappears for hours drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for cash. A poor girl from a poor family in a poor country needs to make a living poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever? Maybe that’s the answer to your life quest-ion.

Survival with a capital S.

After the rain when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she incinerates plastic garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell let me tell you. Like when Duvall in Apocalypse Now said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery service. What’s another mouth? She manages home, kids and cash. I’m worth $3,500 on the stolen kid market in China. My older sister would’ve been aborted. Bad luck for her.

Mom ignores me. I am a tool.

She’s super busy doing her gentle mother routine. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

Parents and teachers and millions of lazy humans here love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life value.

Milling around is an art form with style. Art transforms life.

Lao are soft and kind. We have a good heart. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera in a gentle breeze.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you alone. Zap like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

Nature’s a great teacher. We are nature’s tools.

For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg after discovering a landmine in paradise. 

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom a dreaded lethargic tedious disease.

Boredom is fear’s patience.

Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get a life and accept personal responsibility for choices and consequences.

Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam are alive with unexploded ordinance, amputees, superstition and ghosts.

Existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it. We breed, work, get slaughtered and mill around. We are told to blend in to survive. My mom taught me this hard cruel life lesson. She reminds me every time I open my mouth to express an original freethinking idea. That’s what parents and teachers teach us by example and they have extensive Life Experience - another amazing teacher.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, courage, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you develop self-control and courage?

By failing. Fail better. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Life is trial and error and taking risks. Daring is not fatal.

Thanks for life lesson #5. You are the future of Laos.

You’re welcome. I have my junior philosopher’s badge.