Script

“The future is in garbage, I’m telling you. Be a trash collector and find all kinds of cool, interesting stuff people throw away,” said one. “They buy it, use it, forget about it, get bored with it and trash it. I’ll start a recycling center. We can exchange old stuff for new stuff. Like blood.”

“That smells nice,” the garbage collector said to the sage burner.

Yangon, Burma

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

ART

Yangon, Burma

Mindfulness - TLC 67

They met on the Metro. Lucky carried an aromatic red rose through green sliding doors. Z sat in a permanent change of scene.

He inhaled fragrance. He handed her the rose. “Here, for you. Everything we love dies.”

“Infinity is behind us, eternity is in front of us.”

“Nothing behind. Everything ahead.”

The National Director of Barbarian Natives at TLC resigned after pressure from Sister #1. Her father Sir Franchise was King of The Money Tribe.

The National Die Rector was wishy-washy. Making personnel decisions was a stressful heartless job. Native barbarians were transferred to Siberia with Tundra Dragon and his consort Phoenix rising from ashes of self-pity, loathing, shame, guilt and fear to regenerate, reinvent and reincarnate themselves with critical thinking skills, social intelligence, mindfulness, courage, humor, gratitude, curiosity, fairness, integrity, diligence, perseverance and discipline wearing liberal amounts of delicate compassion.

Players wrote themselves into the story. They invented plots. Plots invented players with assignations, fake artifices, palace intrigue and three-act Greek plays featuring desperate insecure and courageous thematic holistic variables.

Greed and betrayal discussed intention and motivation.

A, an, the - old article men in teahouses reading newsprint verbs whispered syllables out loud memorizing lies, myths, Soma mine disasters, political denial, unaccountability, football results and obituaries. One reader said, “Thank God. Death hasn’t found me yet.”

“Don’t worry,” said Death, “I’m busy with others. Patience. I’ll get back to you. You can begin living the rest of your rare days meditating on the process of your death. Impermanence and non-existence.”

“Tell that to the guy selling fire and knives in Ankara.”

“I will,” said Death, “when his time is up and only then.”

Bursa mountain winds seeking plains became strong, sudden and slashing. They flew across thermal bath waters after plumping mist into rain’s arranged marriage. Spirit-winds reached back circling prey without saying anything of value or meaning joining relatives and strangers floating inside fog moisture captured from distant seas like dancing children, circling, spinning out from nothing, evolving from the center of their stillness, caressing flayed onion skinned fragments inside Zeynep’s black book where people didn’t reallylisten know or care in Comabodia  - an imaginary country trapped between Nam, Siam, and Laos  - swimming with 2,000,000 genocide ghosts spreading superstition and repressed violent DNA psychosis while sleeping with wide open eyes struggling with regret, low grade anxiety, big FEAR, swallowing happy Xanax pills, wearing huge magnificent watch this time machine on thin wrists in a witness protection program using a false identity theory.

Hand-me-down my walking stick, said L. Here you are, said Z. Let’s go.

Travelers arrived in a village on the Marmara Sea. Olive orchards dressed hills. A white butterfly skimmed blue sea. It’s wings created a breeze around shadows sitting in shale shade. Feet caressed geology. Waves washing the shore day by day rolled millions of pebbles creating a gentle musical interlude.

Rinse and repeat.

Ocean waves. Earth peoples.

The soft propaganda machine selling media’s tired old lies broke down. Desperate neglected broken-hearted ADD people fingered a remote or mobile.

Tribes in remote jungles created fire with Leo. Spirit-winds sailed smoke signals across oceans, seas, tributaries, rivers, bays, fjords, streams and inlets to Anasazi, Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Tiwa, Cherokee, Ainu and Tibetan ancient ones. Flying clouds acknowledged ethereal messages.

Imaginary fears of poverty and starvation gripped humans.

Beauty dispatched monarch butterflies skimming over a cresting white wave tumbling above blue water lapping land.

The Language Company

 

Plot is a character - TLC 34

 “I will tell you the secret,” said a silver shop owner in Istanbul. “Be honest. If you rip someone off, if you cheat them in the slightest, you will lose them and then you will lose others.”

“Thanks,” said Lucky, “it’s a karmic lesson. I will share life’s secret with you. Laughter.” Wind-spirits howled.

“I am a gelotologist,” said Bamboo conducting a careful study of laughter. Ha, ha.

He wandered with Leica and Nikon tools. Visual experiments. Shoot through things. Breathe and squeeze. Smile and sit still. Patience. Dance around your subject. Focus on spectators at an event. Move like a ninja. Geometry. Spontaneity. Hunt and trap. Embrace extreme situations. Be an invisible non-shadow.

The Museum of Archeology in Istanbul offered historical perspectives of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian sagas singing civilizations.

Cuneiform writing symbols told Sumerian stories. Scribes etched symbols in wet clay with narrow sharp reeds.

Greek and Roman statues surveyed visitors.

Greeks idealized the human form.

Romans focused on realism.

Bust heads.

Apollo, Aphrodite, Pan, Marcus Aurelius, Sappho the poet.

* 

Human-propelled factory buses roared around Bursa collecting worker aunts and uncles intent on daily toil and simple job satisfaction inside production and consumption machines. Rusty neighborhood loudspeakers imported from Hanoi exhorted:

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Turkish/French car companies and textile factories proliferated with a bumper crop of shirts and pants.

Asian babies had babies.

Fat happy housewives dusted, mopped, moped, morphed and scrubbed lives. Simmer tomatoes. Women rolling grape leaves filled with their husband’s crushed nuts gossiped in alleys near crumbling stone and thatch homes below the Ulus Roman citadel overlooking the Plain of Jars laid waste by relentless U.S. bombing in a nine-year covert war.

They destroyed lives to save them from future suffering.

TLC in Bursa made arrangements for a new teacher. TLC went through teachers like a hot knife through butter or a serrated scalpel through cancerous tissue.

“To cut or not to cut,” is the literary polishing process, said Omar.

“Caress one line of sharp description,” said Zeynep. “I love divine details the reader can visualize or imagine. My job is to give you the situation. Your job is to experience it. Recreate the human experience as truthfully as possible.”

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals,” said Bamboo. “Plot is not something that happens to a character. Plot is a character dragging others around.”

“Save the strong, lose the weak,” whispered a word surgeon walking their rounds from Tibet to Sichuan to Fujian to Ankara before Bursa along The Silk Road with Doner and Pide, surviving on handfuls of Lao sticky rice, iced java, dreams and sliced diced tomatoes while transporting Bamboo baggage filled with laughter’s fugue as Amnesia, smashing chopsticks wrung out wash and wear drip dry holidays near flashing factories before zooming along Metro subway tracks where world weary pedestrians completed a simple sentence with a full plate of shopping nouns dancing inside fire breathing verbal ovens stoking blind love’s fire feeling fear and inevitable death closing in for the kill before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother, and grandparents decked out in traditional morals, values and ethics strangling medicated ma-scared necks before handing someone life’s spare change by showing a gentle reader’s fragile receipt after paying at the Cosmic Bowling Alley for strikes and spares dude, and were you aware Ataturk the great father liberator of Turkey in 1923 has a green train carriage car parked at the main Ankara station?

It was a gift from Adolph The Further, everything surreal and imaginary in Turkey where idle men stood around bored, unemployed and uneducated drinking brown tea massaging a microscopic silver spoon around a rim swirling deep into a universal void of sugar stars clanging scrap metal against fractured glasses destroying perfect mathematical cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so a female inspection engineer with a Masters in Food Quality Control and a TLC student whispered, “don’t use the sugar” to Lucky in strict confidence across a plate of Alfredo pasta one winter night a traveler before they attended a wedding in an underground Ulus cavern filled with Roma Gypsy musicians playing illegal anvil hammer and dulcimer music as wild free dancers and families celebrated an arranged marriage near testosterone driven shy lovers grasping hands below tables craving privacy as their short flaming life illuminated fatal attraction desire passion lust suffering loss courage joy gratitude and grand illusions.

Two elderly women in silk floral headscarves smoked exploding droplets plummeting from icicles on tiled roofs above the cafe where Omar released indigo ink flowing from his 149 fountain pen magnifying shadows seeing with a blind why eye.

L(if)e. No why.

Falling water molecules was music to his ears. If only it were true, he sighed.

The Language Company