Immigrant Story - The Mark - TLC 76

After a year eating Turkey with a side order of Mudanya olives he landed in Jakarta. If you don’t have an onward ticket blue uniformed ones shake you down. You know the drill. Extract a crisp green C note. Insert into a worn passport. Slide it across a counter. Man smiles. His golden shoulder braid shudders. He gestures just a minute.

You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed internally displaced desiccated immigrants stream past paying with their lives to receive an entry stamp for thirty days before heading to another gold braided computer man.

Your man comes out. He escorts you through The Quest-ion Line. Incoming. Quest-ions screaming help ran for cover. He hands your documents to another gold braided scam man.

He says, Wait outside the NO ENTRY zone. You observe men, women and orphans waiting for one last stamp, one final slim to nil chance for freedom from tyrannical vagabondism a disease with no known antidote.

Computer friend nods, accepts documents and does his thing. Opens removes cash slides passport through a scanner darkly stamps it hands it back. Hands down. Deal. Ace high. Genius returns it to you, Good-bye my little butterfly.

You grab your bag and hit the bricks.

230,000,000 (+/-) humans struggling to survive with a little luck eat you with their eyes.

On one side are 1,001 females with Women For Hire signs. They swing brooms, caress irons, dance with mops, feed infants, hang washrags, burn trash and stir woks. Visual acuity. Rancid re-cycled cooking oil penetrates universal collective unconscious. 

On the other side are 1,001 males with I Will Do Anything placards.

Small print reads, “I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, carry bricks, stack bricks, break bricks, sleep, eat, pretend I am busy and freelance vaginal come and go construction projects are my specialty.” 

A gamelan orchestra of eighteen copper gongs and brass symbols creates a melodic meditative refrain with gentle persuasion. You follow effervescent notes into the dark night of the soul with lost quest-ions whispering to you, The Mark.

Quest-ions tout you:

Want a maid? Want a driver? Want a cleaner? Want a cook? Want transport? Want boom-boom? Want a room? Want a job? Where do you go? Where are you from? Want a quick fix? Want an exit permit? Want a new passport? Want inoculations? Want to get lucky? Want to meet my sister? Want a butterfly? Want to change money? Want to die here? Want to be cremated here?

Want to hang out with talking monkeys near Ubud? Want to eat? Want to meet my friends, liars, cheats and thieves? Want water? Want a map? The map’s not the territory. Want to take a chance? Want an answer? Want a way out? Want love? Want massage? Need AIDS or HIV? Want a friend?

Want boredom and loneliness and alienation your highness? Want a guide? Want a SIM card? Want a taxi? Want ice?

Want to join a Brave New World? Want to be a charter member in a New World Order manipulated by politicians, greedy geo-political banks and fraudulent financial institutions? Want a secret identity theory and off shore tax-free bank account? Want to torture humans with water molecules in a friendly country’s secret black prison?

Want to die before you get old? Want to fade away? Do you have plan tomorrow? Where do you go? Where do you go tomorrow? What’s you (sic) name? Where is this line of quest-ion-ing going? Are you the hammer or the nail? How did you get here? Why, tell me why. What is life?

All the quest-ion words were brought in for interrogation. Zeynep, a savage detective looked for motive and opportunity.

A ghost plays a six-string Kemil instrument in shadows. You follow phantom notes into the night.

Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

The Language Company

 

Simple Voice - TLC 72

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 MontBlanc 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 Wallbecause 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.

The Language Company

 

A private Jakarta school - TLC 70

Monday at 6:45 a.m. is formal education tyranny time.

Players call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday is just as bad. Wednesday is kind of rough and Thursday’s oh so sad. The eagle flies on Friday. Saturday I go out to play. On Sunday I go to church get down on my knees and pray. They call it Stormy Monday.

Lucky stood in front of an open rusty iron green gate wearing a pressed green shirt made of palm fronds. He waved an iridescent peacock feather wrapped in a Native American leather braid decorated with rainbow beads welcoming students at a private school.

Parents rule fool. 

Martial Catholic music blared from tinny church loudspeakers at the nearby church of the Immaculate Misconception. Religion was under permanent construction. Empty false hope the greatest evil based on blind faith filled towering grey artificial plastic golden arches with compressed dust.

Air conditioning ducts lay scattered in the vestibule. Purple priest garments hung by a broken thread in a chastity of lotus blossoms. Heaven’s holy light played along a contorted floor jangling cracked tolling bells.

The incomplete church thrived underground. Shadows and illusions named shame, guilt, sin, jealousy, regret, sloth, and lies had enough parking spaces for a choir of angelic forms in the rising Indonesian middle class.

Humans invented religion in their free time. We need meaning and intention sang priests, poets and philosophers. We is educated. Order poor uneducated slaves to get back to work, said a king of dubious origin waving a jeweled mind-sword.

Black tinted SUVs arrived at the gateless gate. Sleepy-eyed kids extricated themselves from air-conditioned nightmares. A green uniformed whistle-blowing male slave directed traffic. Blue clad office boys unloaded suitcases of textbooks, water bottles, lunch baskets, severed cultural connections, identity theories and universal mind maps.

Sleep deprived children waited for a maid, a driver, a mom, a dad, or a perfect stranger to hand them a suitcase handle, a plastic get a life grip. 

Children said good morning to Lucky before dragging cumbersome baggage along slick mopped tile floors down a hall-like crypt. They manipulated life luggage around corners before hoisting it onto little shoulders killing back muscles or pulled it clattering up two flights of stairs. Click-clack-click-clack music echoed through corridors absorbing childhood.

After leaving her vehicle Amanda a 4th grade genius waited in tropical sun. Her right hand was empty. It held everything.

Exhaust from idling cars, vans and flaming plastic bags filled the air. Everyone choked. Feeling exasperated she was angry tired and bored. She opened and closed her empty right hand suffering a desperate spasmodic fever.

She stared straight ahead. Her brown eyes focused beyond green gates. Retinas explored tropical subterranean rain forests. Wild purple orchid aromas permeated shade near a flowing river. Blue-green waterfalls crashing into jungles gave her a cool essential meditation in her heart-mind.

“Give it to me. Give it to me,” shouted her grasping hand. Someone handed her a plastic suitcase handle. She dragged educational baggage into a cave. It would take eight more tedious years to exterminate her innate childhood curiosity and sense of humor.

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

Your life is a work of art

Editor's note: Chapter 1 excerpt. The Language Company. Enjoy the ride.

Carpe Diem in Ankara, said a reliable narrator, Pluck the day when it is ripe.

Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.

He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.

“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.

“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”

“Is it a way, a path?”

“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”

“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”

“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”

“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”

“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.

Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.

 “Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage. 

"Becoming. Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”

 “Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”

 “Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”

“You don’t say.”

A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools. 

The Language Company