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.

Myths became stories - TLC 38

Zeynep said, “I am a rose thorn and Winter Hawk. Wings instinct and heart. My razor talon tears meat from bones to feed my creative Hunger Angel.”

“I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist,” said a gravedigger. “My specialty is languages. Lost tongues. Wandering deep in the Tarim Basin following the Silk Road through Central Asia I discovered the 4,000 year old Tocharian language and Afansievo culture. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorers. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA based on an Iranian dialect.”

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions said, “Myths tell what really happened. Myths suggest a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth is truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on fear and belief containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.”

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

Myth became story.

This anthropological fact accompanied Lucky wandering among unfinished construction projects and abandoned manuscripts in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

He joined millions of emaciated migrant refugees passing shattered bricks, broken hopes and strangling dangling cables connected to nothing in particular.

Shoddy incomplete dust dreams and quick profit schemes thrived where political thugs disguised as beauticians, missionaries and NGO social workers living in penthouses and driving Land Rovers exploited villages stealing land, rivers, mountains, children. Extorting money.

Their rule of law was a truncheon named GREED.

* 

Sophisticated command and control procedures thrived. Corruption stole millions. Substandard schools pancaked 10,000+ children from one-child families in a Sichuan earthquake.

Garment factories in Dhaka crushed wage slave workers stitching designer labels at a discount.

In May 2014 an inefficient unregulated profit-oriented private coalmine in Soma, Turkey caught fire, exploded, burned and collapsed killing 301 miners.

The angry Teflon Prime Minister visited the disaster. “This is a fact of life for poor illiterate underpaid miner slaves. It happened in Britain in the 19th century,” he said to widows and families. An angry miner booed him. He slapped the miner. “If you boo the Prime Minister you get slapped.”

His aide, a frustrated soccer player wearing a suit of armor kicked a miner on the ground being held by police. Aide screamed, “Dissent is TERRORISM!”

The ruling AKP Justice and Development party said it was all a mistake: the mine explosion, slap and penalty kick.

Violence, denial and repression are a way of life here, said Zeynep the younger creating a myth.

The Language Company

TLC - what is life?

Two Ankara university girls fantasying about sex bought Zippo lighters.

An engraved lighter in a dusty Saigon display case read:

         Once people were born alive and slowly died.

         Now some people are born dead and slowly come to life.

Two high-heeled boys bought flaming gas to impress the girls. “Come next to my fire,” said one. Demurring she said, “I create my own fire. If you come any closer I’ll incinerate you faster than Tarek Bouazizi, a famous fruit and vegetable seller in Tunisia.”

“Amnesia?” said one boy.

“Tunisia, you fucking idiot. Don’t you know anything about the world, geography and Arab Spring dignity, human rights and self-respect? Pay attention shit for brains. Here’s what happened.”

Tarek Bouazizi, 26, sold vegetables on the streets in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. The unemployment rate was 30%.

He supported his mother, uncles and five brothers and sisters at home. He loved poetry.

One morning a policewoman demanded free oranges. He said no. She threatened to take everything because he didn’t have a license. He had enough of the endless cycle of poverty, bribery, threats, and corruption and complained at a local government office. They refused to see him. He bought some gasoline. He set himself on fire. He died flaming his life.

Tunisians grabbed their chance for freedom. Their dictator of twenty-three years ran away.

Middle Eastern, North African, Asian despots and autocratic international power hungry madmen went into denial mode.

Oh no, we're next. Needing to maintain power and control, dictators in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia among others, gave the military and police free BIG money with strings attached to protect and sustain their intractable insatiable greed.

Contacts = contracts.

They decreased rice prices to appease angry hungry people.

Protect us in our castles and mansions, said dictators. Protect us from educated empowered individuals demanding human rights, social justice, equality, education, jobs, medical care and an end to the charade of our reign of economic terrorism. Protect us from desperate citizens setting themselves on fire. Protect us from the aftermath.

You have to sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit, said Arabic Spring. Fear sells.

Hearing this story the boy backed off. Trailing flames the girls departed.

A confidence man, 60, in a worn beige leather jacket entered with his son. A stocky bodyguard with a thick neck, alert steel pupils, and short hair followed them. He was Russian or Tartar sauce. Brown suit, black wing tips. He clasped meaty hands together. He never moved. He watched his boss negotiate with the owner. He glanced at Lucky with meticulous eyes. He swiveled his gaze back to father and son.

The confidence man purchased a lighter and pen. There was a problem with the credit card transaction. He pulled out a cell phone called his bank, slathered words and disconnected. The owner punched in numbers. The sale sailed through.

Taking his purchase he turned to Lucky, “How do you like it here?”

“Everyone is hospitable. Fresh tomatoes are delicious. Anxiety is a national problem. The drug industry is making a fortune.”

“My accountant calculates steady pharmaceutical investment growth in my diversified portfolio. What’s your job?”

“I’m a designer of mysterious linguistic projects. I freelance as a literary prostitute and ephemeral word gravedigger. Alphabets, pictograms and ideograms contain no sound.”

“So I’ve heard. What’s your name?”

“Keyser Soze.”

“Ha. One who talks too much. We have many verbal fools here. Where are you from?”

“I am from the source. We are stardust. I am a stream winner. I don’t belong anywhere.”

“Good luck.”  Clouds opened. The father, son and Holy Ghost disappeared in a flash of blinding light.

“Who do you think he was?”

“Maybe the head of a big organization, maybe a bureaucrat, maybe the Mafia.  Maybe Deep State. Well connected. I never saw him before.”

People entered his shop.

“Goodbye,” said Lucky, “thanks for the tea and hospitality. Suited me to a T. Oh, and one more thing, what is life?”

“Excellent quest-ion. There are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. Let me guess. A bitch? A miracle? A dream? Paranoid attachment? A meaty meal with black and green olives smothered in red chili powder? Getting laid? Randomized coalescing atoms forming cytoplasmic hysteria? What you make it? How you grow? A beautiful mystery? An experiential game we get to play? Answers seeking/discovering quest-ions validating cosmological and deep philosophical significance? I give up. All I know is that you brought me good luck today. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. It’s my fate. I show up, sit a spell, strangers visit and look around. Some buy some don't. I go. The journey is the destination.”

The Language Company

Omar's Book Club

Omar turned a page and read to his book club.

They were among the lost and looking tribe.

They were figments of someone’s imagination, caricatures of wild inventions in abstract designs spinning webs from the center. They laughed at everything with cosmic perspective.

Through laughter they regained their sense of delight inside the mystery.

Someone somewhere rang a bell. Noon’s mechanical hands said hello. Calibrated craftsmen hands read luminous dials. The facade of a Catholic church on a Spanish hill in a pueblo contained fissures and cracks in its foundation.

Long spider tentacles streamed from the base into dusty shadows where birds rested from flights of fancy along Roman walls covered in soft green moss. The church bells were old hollow iron shells with a broken clapper. Rusting heavy metal shreds in weeds weighed down wet script reading ‘O come all ye faithful’ in Sanskrit next to a book of poems written on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Blood flowed down white walls soaking green stems in brown soil feeding roots beneath the surface. Roots had no shadows, below the surface of human awareness.

Their expectations were Southwest desert creation myths.

A young Anasazi girl shared her wind note vision.

My name is Kokopelli the humpbacked flute player. I am 1,000 years old. My image is found on petroglyphs or rock carvings and also on rock paintings or pictographs in kivas, on ceramics and woven baskets. The ancient ones, the Anasazi, regard me as a symbol of fertility, a roving minstrel or trader. People also call me the rainmaker, a hunting magician, trickster and seducer of maidens.

In the Pueblo myths my hump carries seeds, babies and blankets to maidens. I wander along the upper Rio Grande between villages carrying seeds and bags of songs on my back. Because I represent fertility I am welcomed during the corn- planting season and sought by barren women and avoided by maidens. If you listen well, you will hear my flute music echoing through canyons playing traditional songs.

She disappeared along fault lines in long undulating dry washes full of sagebrush playing her flute near rainbow mesas strewn with geological strata.   

Listen, said Little Nino, do you hear the music, clarity, gentle sweetness echoing through space? It’s sublime.

A flute joined the tribal tolling bell. Form whom the bell toiled and told?

Someone had passed on.

Sublime, said a person named Art, an unemployed American realtor. Survivors gathered around him admiring torn muddy glossy brochures of multilevel and split-level green and white pastel clapboard low mortgaged homes financed with borrowed capital surrounded by security walls decorated with barb wire and shards of glittering green glass.

Venomous Diamondback rattlesnakes, cobras, and African pit vipers attacked soft city folks on their trail of tears inside shadows coalescing like shape shifters, said Artsyfartsy. 

Domestic violence erupted inside hearts, homes, cities, villages, towns, and countries between resentful, bitter out-sourced wives, their alcoholic husbands, frustrated lovers, and their catatonic, aggressive video game programed kids. Someone called the feds.

The feds arrived, said everyone in the compound was Waco and leveled the place with heavy tank fire.

Prime time news, baby.

And then O Art?

Down on Mean Street near the Tigris River someone detonated a land mine under a diplomatic silver Suburban, shredding level-5 armor designed to protect it from RPG's, killing three American intelligence agents on the West Bank of heaven. Their cover was blown. Blood rivers flooded streets. An old woman of a displaced tribal nationality with a mop began her clean up operations. Shit happens.

Everyone in the region denied responsibility for the attack. Analysts said it was very sophisticated and similar to attacks against an evil empire in Iraq fueled by sectarian strife, poverty, greed, hatred, animosity, and stupidity fighting for power and control dating back to the Assyrian empire in 689 BC.

Thanks Art. Speaking of empires, how about this tasty morsel of history? Omar said, thumbing a page.

A Century is Nothing

TLC - Ankara Knife

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner.

Inside another series of interlocking blades was a Cambodian landmine museum. It revealed Geiger counters, radiation blast suits, screwdrivers, shovels, hi-tech metal sensors, fertile green rice paddies, farms, fields, 1,000 Angkor temples built with laterite stones by 300,0000 slaves in the 9th century, 6,000 starving overworked broken hearted pachyderms, topographical satellite survey maps showing extensive ancient agricultural irrigation systems, statistical charts, refugee relocation centers, rehabilitation co-pay deductible insurance policies, cremation ceremonies, and bereaved starving survivors accepting the loss forever of two million genocide family members.

1.5 million lost strangers disguised as tourists talking with full mouths spilled desire, fear, regret, ignorance and superstition while rappelling through nouns and verbs near stilted bamboo shacks inside submerged mangrove forests resembling Monet paintings replete with jungle vine hammocks, floating villages in a floating world, charcoal cooking fires, naked begging children, amputees, short term Australian nurses discovering dehydration in Siem Reap slums, laconic robotic Khmer teachers making $40 a month, 269+ orphanages with 12,000 orphans, a butterfly farm with 232 species and a silk worm weaving center in Stung Treng, Ratanakiri empowering fifty singing women threading thick and thin yellow salvia protein based fibers on spindles and looms near Son Le Tap Lake, the largest in Asia.