King Louis - TLC 42

In Bursa the wireless signal from the Achebadem hospital emergency room was weaker than a heart monitor in Room 101 where you confront your deepest fear.

It’s the last room you want to enter next to the Genocide Museum in Nom de’ plume, Cambodia filled with 2,000,000 skulls. Ghosts inhabit The Killing Fields.

In the 1527 hammam near Culture Park hairy muscular men using eucalyptus tree bark scrubbed soapy clients and pummeled epidermis into oblivion. Pinpoint light filtered through stain glass. Illuminated businessmen relaxed in arched cubicles. An octagon hot pool rippled reflections of mosaic light.

Across town King Louis, a native barbarian, moved into the teachers’ apartment in a 10,000 year-old neighborhood. He was green, neurotic and angry. A tall invincible insatiable invisibility corrected his mean variation.

He’d escaped to Turkey after selling Chinese appliances and silicone breast of chicken implants in Berkeley-by-the-sea. He hated women. He loved Roman history. His perpetual fantasy was to be a Roman general leading warriors from Troy to Crete to Bursa.

“Take care of my horse,” he ordered the male TLC receptionist.

“Serve my food,” he commanded the female receptionist after a day expanding his imaginary empire.

They despised his attitude and character.

He sat around the apartment watching The History Channel. He loved German U-boats, planes, bombs, destruction, concentration camps, gas chambers, the Holocaust and death. He kept the volume LOUD while eating dill pickles from a jar. He was a big, loud, sad, passive-aggressive lonely jarhead. 

He’d last a month. He made everyone’s life miserable. He expended zero effort to understand the culture because he felt like he was entitled to be stupid and paranoid.

“I’m afraid they put something in my food,” he said one day referring to a restaurant below walls covered with graffiti screaming, “Romans OUT!”

“They’d have a good reason,” said a receptionist.

He washed his plastic clothes every day. He wasted hours, days and his pitiful life in the bathroom coloring his hair, trimming nose debris and afraid of germs, washing his hands until they disappeared.

develop character

The world is a myth. We live in a fable.

I used to be someone else but I traded him in.

Vientiane, Laos.

Helping grades 6-7 how to be more human. Develop character - strength, optimism, persistence, social intelligence, gratitude, with curiosity and humor.

Practice good manners. Treat everyone with respect. Be aware of other people's feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt. Help others.

Moral character: fairness, generosity, integrity.

Trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, caring, citizenship.

Performance character: effort, diligence, perseverance.

Are you fair?

Are you honest in dealings with other people?

Are you a cheater?

Are you a good person?

Behavior and values.

Kids needs challenges - hardships and deprivation. Trial and error. Taking risks.

How do you build grit and self-control? Through failure.

Think for Yourself Academy exam questions.

Why do we exist?

Why are we here?

What's it all about?

When your legs get tired walk with your heart.

If its not in the heart it's not in the head.

Focus and simplicity.

Have the courage to follow your heart & intuition.

Real eyes realize real lies.

keep it simple

Everything is vague and uncertain.

The Cambodian brick factory blues. 2500 Real ($.60) = 4 hours after school.

397 kids. Primary school. World food free breakfast. One family - 10 kids. Brick owners encourage DEBT.

Live in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

He absorbed reflections, it was a small village in SR. Attracted by no tourists, partly cloudy skies. She slowly undressed. In her silent beating heart she knew he, the old foreign man couldn't, wouldn't, save her. She was happy with him. Not for the money he gave her when their hour was complete rather for his playful kindness.

She signed. He seemed to understand or attempted to understand. It was her willingness to accept, sharing their intimacy. He was a slow patient lover. She trusted her instincts. After knowing him for nine months she'd eventually relax accepting soft passions with certain conditions of intimacy. No kissing. No cunning linguists.

One-eyed blind.

He said, Yes, I prefer doubt to certainty. I am more interested in the traces than the object. I love the fragments.

Where do I place it, this story?

What country on what continent, in what city, village, town or heartbeat?

How do I keep it simple yet moving like a breath?

She asked him, Do you like small? Skin on skin? Yes kneading her shoulder muscles, easing out tissue from her supine sublime spinal chord erasing tension. Her smile said, Yes. Her relaxation exhaled.

She spoke with her hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

She drew a picture. It looked like this. 

tyranny of impossible sheep

dawn garden is quiet

closed lotus waits for light

burmese teachers gave me lesson #5

lecture students

control students

feed students

so parents see the school is doing it's job

I lost one day - TLC 31

Crows sang sunrise.

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

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

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

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

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

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

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

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

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.5 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Chinese locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

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

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

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

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

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

“Yes, but I lost one day.”

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

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

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

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

The Language Company