Along the road with Other
Share Article Lucky sang, “Farewell. Got my traveling shoes, traveling hat and walking stick. To travel is better than to arrive. I got the walking blues. Everything I do is an experiment. This was the perfect place to be a stranger in a strange land between two cultural land messes. Wandering among Anatolian tribes long ago, near and far away as Other Muse.”
“Who’s Other Muse?” said Zeynep.
“You are Other Muse with an absorbent mind. We are stream winners. Fifty-one days were enough of enough. It was beyond wild.”
Other spoke: Black Sea pink dawn light layered blue waves of beauty. Blue kills me. It’s nothin but the blues. Blue kills me with the solemn tenacity of melon colon only. Get to the verb, said Beauty. It’s a free form jazz poem. It has enough true fictionalized material and verifiable facts to be plausible. You are a crazy genius.
“Y were many Turkish, besides being hospitable and generous so aggressive, paranoid, psychotic, and sullen?” said Rita in a nutshell.
“It’s DNA genetic fear based insecurities + too much meat and not enough sex,” said Lucky. “In cultures like Cambodia where food is scarce, people have more open sex, but dream of food. In cultures where food is abundant like Turkey, sex is more taboo and people dream of sex.”
Get it in writing.
The act of writing isn’t life and it isn’t you.
It's ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters.
There’s book learning and there’s street learning, said Cosmic Education. Memory is desire satisfied. Memory is a lie layered with truth. Memory creates fiction and fiction creates memory. Preserve memory in a story. Memory bank.
“Today your life and destiny are the same. Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone,” said Zeynep.
Veni, Vidi, Vinci.
I came. I saw. I helped. I walked, said Lucky.
That’s life. The end is the beginning, said Zeynep. The beginning is the Middle Way. Not too detached. Not too sentimental.
Discernment. The day after tomorrow belongs to me, said Other Muse.
Start in the present, flashback and write to the end, said Z. I can’t tell where the real ends and artificial begs for precision.
Lucky bought rope from a grizzled Giresun man selling tools in a wooden shack near a teahouse where idle men stirring sugar cubes discussed local hazelnut production sales figure estimates while watching Ankara political parrots on an idiot box extoll their insensitivity to dissent while demanding extreme Deep State censorship to cope with poverty’s tyranny as the smell of fresh silver fish held a Blade Runner. Honed well. Lucky faced rope choices:
Hang up.
Hang laundry.
Hang yourself.
Hang your head with a dangling modifier.
Hang around, the art of creative travel writing.
Be various, said Curious. Punctuation is a nail. Here’s a box of punctuational.
Accept loss forever, said Zeynep. Death is beautiful because it doesn’t exist. That's not the real reason you’re leaving is it?
No.
What is your R-7 variant motivation?
Dying here by the Black Sea is my fear. I want to die dancing in my mute Cambodian lover’s arms. I am dying from an inexorable beautiful sadness. My heart-mind is shattered. One dies twice. When they are born and when they face death, according to a Nam survivor. One should die once in their life to begin new.
I was born dead and slowly came to life like you, said Z. We helped each other cope with the collective insanity.
