Haiku Otres

Life is a beach then you fly.

You sit on a bamboo chair next to bald water sport mannequins wearing snorkeling masks, Lycra shorts, inflatable vests and dusty flippers. They are chained to the wall to prevent mermaids, nymphs and water sprite thieves.

Birds twitter in hydra grandma trees. Slow gentle blue-green waves brush a long empty shore day after day.

Across a red dirt road are bamboo, wood and fancy shacks disguised as guesthouses and restaurants.

Signs litter little red road: Island Tours, Laundry Service, Boat Trips, Late Night Pizza, Sand Removal Renovation, Transport & More, Green House Effect (with excellent bookstore), Mushroom Villas, Dance Until You Die, My Kind of Place, Sandy Crotch Heaven, Barefoot Only the Lonely, European Spoken Here, Massage To Go, WE Serve Sad Depressed Super Serious Fat White Rich Humans Like Russian Mafia and Rude Pushy Inconsiderate Chinese, We Are All Refugees When Everything IS Said and Done 24/7.

Digs run $15-100 a night. Gypsies, Backpackers, Europeans, Japanese and Chinese.

Selfie nirvana.

Here I am on the shore with arms raised. Here I am drinking beer with friends. Here I am all wet. Here I am doing absolutely nothing in particular and everything in general. Here I am in a sitting meditation zoning into universal mindfulness. Here I am in a net of light. I am a rainbow.

Ice coffee runs $1-1.50.  Pay For View. At an upscale Italian joint a ravioli dinner of spinach filled pasta smothered with carbonara sauce, side of garlic bread, tonic water and espresso is $12.65. Smiles are gratuitous.

Cheaper eats decorate red road. Rice is nice.

At 6:15 a.m. you stash your bags in a simple bamboo room, cut through a distorted distracted disrupted deserted zone of empty rattan chairs to the beach. It stretches from northern Sin City to expensive southern resorts. Local m/f teams rake mourning sand.

Sand complements musical melodic waves breaking on the shore day after day. You enjoy a slow walking meditation on a long empty beach. Breathing in - out. Water music laps ankles. Yellow dawn streaks sky. You salute the sun. Celebrate another day of living.

Three green islands float long ago and far away on an event horizon. Bright red, blue and yellow tourist boats plant anchors.

Engines hum.

Day unfolds as a lotus grows from mud.

International couples stroll sand staring inland at strangers staring back. Shades of ignorance.

The majority of walking eyes survey tables, chairs, people and eateries. Strangers all. Scarce few see sea.

No drugs. No weapons. Leave your ego at the door.

Sweating runners with pulse armbands tread grains.

Workers set up beach lounges, switch on expresso machines, fire up kitchen stoves, hack ice, replenish beer supplies.

Waves erase footprints. Sleeping dogs cur into sand.

The beach orchestra builds its daily tempo.

A young Italian woman unfolds a blue towel on sand. She lies face down. Pushing up with her arms she assumes a yoga posture eyes straight ahead on a blue green sea. Her spine weaves vertebrae like a wave. Calm and focused.

Visitors stagger from beds, walk foam, eat, stare at waves evolving from a flat lined horizon holding green island hideouts. People plan to sit or go. Yes go. Go for a walk, a swim, adventure. Discover reality below the surface of appearances. Dive deeper than unconscious.

Nail girls protected by large floppy hats seeking cuticles needing trim canvass sand sun lovers.

String theory bracelet girls traverse grains of the universe. Boys ply sunglasses. The future is bright.

A girl balancing a bamboo platter of pineapples, mangoes, bananas, paring knife, plastic bags and sharp sticks prowls sand from dawn to dusk.

People watch people watching people. It's the thing - look without understanding.

A narrow blue and white boat arrives on sand. A boy throws out a rusty anchor.

Backpackers from islands unload kilos of memories, dreams and reflections. Boatman throws five large empty water bottles toward land grab.

Mid-day sun shimmers above shaded tables as massage clients smothered with oil feel muscled women knead bronze skin tone epidermis as children laugh, run and play in surf near extreme serious a-dolts and retirees wondering how they ended up in paradise removed from frozen Europe hearing dulcimer hammers at a nearby five-story cement project.

Swimmers plunge into H2O covering 70% of Earth.

Couples embrace cold drinks behind mirrored sunglasses.

Fat white Russians slobber UV 30 on skin and drink cold beer.

99.9 % of beach people stare at phones.

Strangers accustomed to cement pavement feel sand. Danger. Watch your step. Cautious sensation.

Babel languages whisper a Sappho wind singing iambic pentameter odes with save face time.

Spit in the ocean.

Restless orange diamond light crashes into sunset.

Red sun, white waves, blue sky, green islands. Floating world.

Silver waves lap shore.

White crescent moon hangs by a thread.

Stars sing with their light. I am twinkling.

Create your sandcastle.

Rinse and repeat.

A brown butterfly dances with green waves singing sand.

Blend In

“You have a criteria for beauty,” said an austere Chinese business university teacher-mother in an apartment elevator going to ground zero. “You should just blend in.”

She was petrified like 1.7 billion of being singled out, purged, tried and executed or sent to the countryside and re-educational brainwashing for expressing bourgeoisie ideology in a harmonious Marxist society.

Her paranoia meant no one dared talk about June 4, 1989. No one whispered about freedom, human rights or democracy. Their collective hardwired brains were wiped clean by Big Brother.

“I’ve learned,” she said, “to keep my mouth shut unless I’m eating fast before starving thieves steal my food or laughing to myself at the stupid laconic narrow-minded ways of our leaders. They are old despotic men. They sit behind blood stained teak desks imported from Burmese dictators. They chop seals and devour dolphins and whales with malice. They swallow tiger bone extract for sexual potency and wash it down with bear bile. Silence is our golden mean. My husband works in a distant province. He has a mistress named Orgasm. No money, no honey.”

Pouring restaurant slop in Mandalay Burma market

She cried silent tears, raised her son and wrote life lesson plans. “By the book,” she screamed in silence facing eighty comatose students scrambling for a pass. It fell incomplete.

“Sixty is heaven and fifty-nine is hell,” said a thin girl in a freshman speaking class of 80. “My parents will kill me if I fail.”

“What is your dream?” said Lucky.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”

Her naive honesty surprised him. “What is a waif?”

“You know, a homeless person existing on the street. Living on their wits with silence and cunning, like a mercenary, assassin or literary outlaw. Authentic experience. A free person has courage. They take risks. Not taking a risk is a risk. They don’t live off state handouts in a broken down system filled with graft, corruption and nepotism. They overcome suffering and hardship and deprivation. I mean a real person with dignity, self-respect and courage.”

Seventy-nine others failed to grasp her awareness and honesty.

“You are wiser than your years.”  

 

The Language Company

Fried Ego

In Ankara and elsewhere Lucky suggested to students they pay attention. Many were too poor to pay attention, pay themselves first, or practice meditation calming their tortured heart-minds.

“Feel light about it, let go of your fragile ego. Fried ego is dust floating on the fluid of your eyes.”

Some released expectations.

Others relaxed from grasping imaginary fears perceived as reality.

Reality is a crutch or as Freedom said to his once-in-a-lifetime paramour a crotch.

So-called reality is a crock of shit said a passive girl getting a leg up.

Hurry and finish money said to time. Take your time didn’t listen.

Other, acknowledging deeper emotional feelings, sensing heart’s wisdom-mind of intent practiced simplicity, serenity and compassion with gratitude.

The Language Company

Crossing borders - transcendental act

TEOL gave Lucky a $300 monthly housing allowance. SOL (shit out of luck) found a ground floor flat next to The Department of the Forest.

He helped Lucky get a used fridge and a gas cooker. Lucky paid $125 for the fridge and $25 for the propane. No propane no gain.

Being a short-timer in paradise he never bought cooking tools. After surviving Nam he’d answer the eternal quest-ion, how long have you been here? All day. I pass through.

Repeat - most popular word in global English classes. Say it again dear robot. All day.

SOL borrowed his grandmother’s pliable mattress from the Ottoman dynasty. He loaned Lucky a blank sheet of paper and blanket. No hot water. You can wash/spin clothes and shower in the upstairs bathroom where everything is shiny and modern, said SOL. Thanks, I wash clothes by hand. I need tactile textile texture. Zen.

You need to buy a water heater, said SOL. It will cost you years of tears and regret. I love showering with cold water. Keeps you alert and you dry faster. This went over SOL’s head and he was very tall. He slouched forever.

He manifested the Turkish I Am Defeated Posture.

* See illustration on page 101 in The Department of Fear & Conditioning Manual.

The TEOL director in Giresun, a graduate of a Stalin training camp for Authority Figurines waiting for his funeral said to Lucky, You pay for water and electricity. We will deduct $500 from your salary to pay for imported Russian coal to heat your flat in winter. Erroneous pays for heating.

Everything in Turkey breaks down in 4-5 years speaking of children, said Zeynep, a writer kid friend in Bursa, That’s nothing, said Rita cutting, selling ice and publishing her small life story in Banlung, Cambodia. Kids here are broken before they’re born. It’s a mutant besmirched genetic strain in our DNA. Paranoid adults murder their darlings with benign dependency and passive hopelessness the dreaded disease of the heart-mind.

Rita shared a story - up river from Banlung in a remote jungle village they carve images of their dead.The Chunchiet animist people bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle. They believe in the universal inherent power of the natural world. 

The Tompoun and Jarai tribes have sacred burial sites. The Kachon village cemetery is one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok River from Voen Sai.

Heart of Darkness flows through the jungle.

The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site. The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit dream story the shaman meets Loth, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief knows sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy Loth. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, whittle wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village. 

New tombs have cement bases and wooden effigies with cell phones and sunglasses. Never out of touch. See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area. The future looks brighter than a day in a sacred jungle.

Wow, said Zeynep, that’s an amazing cultural celebration. Yes, said Rita, life and death are beautiful mysteries.

How did you meet each other in Banlung, Zeynep asked Lucky. I traveled the narrow road from Pakse, Laos south to Stung Treng then east to the remote Northeast. Here’s what happened.

A rusty red and white metal border bar weighted by rocks in a wire bucket hung suspended. The VIP double-decker candy cane bus was packed with babbling European flash packers destined for the 9th century at Angkor Wat. They had a long way to go to get back in time. They were doing SEA.

The more they see the less they know, said a shaman.

The busboy handed out departure and arrival forms, collected passports, a $2 Lao departure fee, a $25 Cambodia visa fee and $2 entry fee. He took everything to a Lao shack. The border bar went up. The bus rolled through no-man’s land at the speed of a snail and stopped.

Being landless is fun, dramatic and exciting. No country, no documents, no money, no food, no water, no medicine, no family, no friends, no chance. Abandoned on Earth.   

A female Cambodian health care worker wearing a facemask got on the bus. Pointing a small medical toy gun into faces she registered body temperature.            

Someone said, “If you’re sick you stay here.”

“On the bus?”

“No, between countries. On the road.”

Sounds like a novel.

Crossing a border is a transcendental act.

On the C side it’s business as usual. Immigration shacks, money changers, women hustling fried food, beverages and fruits, naked children, scavenging emaciated dogs, ripped cell phone umbrellas and haggard tourists drinking H2O in blazing heat waiting for the boy to return with passports. An incomplete grandiose empty glass and brass Cambodian immigration building with fake Angkor temple motifs and plastic elephants, surrounded by landmines signifies exotic investment.

Money = tourism  = money. 

Stung Treng in Ratanakiri province was eight-seven clicks south along the Mekong. Swim with dolphins. Tourists passed through this small faded colonial town. They had a schedule. Time chases them, Hurry up! Hurry Up! You’re going to be late for an important date with destiny. Get a move on.

I visited Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center. Fifty women do a six-month silk weaving course. They feed larva, harvest cocoons, dye and create silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner known for superior quality, creativity and originality. 

They have Mulberry trees for leaves. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and is stronger than steel. Silkworm cocoons are boiled to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long. It is separated into soft and fine threads.

They dye the threads using natural materials: banana (yellow), bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink).

They also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL. There are 200 motifs.

The center improves their quality of life. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs. They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

Then I traveled east on dusty roads to Banlung.

A cool educational adventure, said Z weaving through life.

The Language Company

Humble Attention

Earlier in the tale of two cities, Sit Down in Trabzon called Lucky in Giresun.

There’s a meeting tomorrow of all the native speakers. Catch a bus today, this afternoon, tonight, there’s no hurry, the meeting is tomorrow. What time? 9:00 a.m. All the native speakers will meet here and go to the local police station. And then? You need to bring your passport and four passport photos. Ok, and then?

Lucky was through this process before – bureau crazies, clerks, bored administrator traitors, self-important regal dignitaries well fed, others less so, intent on pushing, writing, typing, folding, stapling, sorting, reading, mutilating, massing papers, filing, speaking cardiovascular wage slave vocabularies pretending to be busy intent on bent necked acquiescence of humble attention to DUTY as complacent dreams explored new fantasies filled with vague prospects of retiring before dying of tedious boredom.

And then? We will go to the bank and get you a tax number, oh and by the way, you don’t happen to have $2,500 or $3,000 in your pocket to open an account do you? No? I didn’t think so, well it’s not important, don’t worry about it, Ok I won’t, Ok then see you later, what time are you coming, Around 6-7 keep the key for me, Yes, I don’t know where it is, I’ll ask one of the other teachers to wait for you, don’t worry about it, Ok thanks see you later.

On the G to T bus a father and son sat squeezed like fresh orange juice and nervous son with his fish mouth open conditioned by his father to be afraid of TIME kept checking his gigantic round watch.

Black Sea extended its long blue story.

Amazon Women Kill Males

After eating, Turkish businessmen splashed aromatic tonic on their hands, patted jowls and slicked back thinning hair. One man adjusted spectacles. Eating fish fast made him sweat. Sharing a joke about bones he smiled at an assassin writing a character sketch.

Ancient serious women in scarves accepted mountain village hard life. Young women divorced from confronting nature, soil and invisible roots appeared dazed and confused facing steep cobblestone Trabzon streets confronting miles of shops, window dummies and aggressive male textile hawkers yelling, “BUY FROM ME. SPECIAL MORNING PRICE. HAVE A LOOK-SEE. GET LUCKY.”

Shoppers’ visual examination loved text-based consumption paradigms.

Lucky hung out observing the flow as cats prowled for scraps, bodies with a voice cautioned parking spaces and lost souls attempting sad cellular telecommunication connections stumbled through temporary life inconveniences below Roman walls.

An abandoned Roman castle overlooking Giresun had a secret tunnel to a nearby is-land where Amazon women lived. They mated annually. Keep the race going. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, said an Amazon woman to her Black Sea lover. Take your time. After you make love to me I will kill you and eat your heart. I have something to look forward to he said, Yes, death is a new adventure. Nothing ever happens again.

Mosque mullahs calling the pious echoed exhortations swirling down cobblestone alleys past Giresun boys riding spoke less bikes between crumbling yellow Ottoman walls and mackerel sellers admiring haphazard silver fins lying dead eyed glossy on ice crystals melting into a refrain, The Sea! The Sea!

12 October 12

Turkish peasants love guns in a hunting culture.

Bang-bang, you shot me down. Bang-bang I hit the ground. Bang-bang that awful sound, Bang-bang my baby shot me down.

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Giresun munitions shop until you drop dead sold rifles, double-odd, pistols, bullets, calibers, double gaged gangrene, lock, stock and barrels of talking monkeys and circus clowns. Guns on weary authoritarian desperadoes waists itched bedraggled large breasted concubines as hip-hop head wrapped plastic hearted lovers cried.

Hearing suffering’s universal broken laughter a stranger composed a melody....”I Am So Tired.”

I didn’t get here by whining, said a sad neglected child bride victim of sixteen conceiving a child out of fear and loneliness facing future abandonment in an arranged marriage. Have a healthy progeny or get stoned to death for adultery, said her mother stirring tomatoes.

- Citizens play ‘walking chicken’ on narrow sidewalks.

- Drivers confront mechanical anxieties with bravado.

- Everyone's so excited as emotional paleontology squirmed dialogue with an EIQ of -7.

- Citizens remain traumatized since birth and younger than memory’s fascination.

- Sex is a DUTY said The Posture Police.

*

The creature behind the black curtain at the shooting gallery in a Giresun shopping center was s-l-o-w on the trigger to hide two graphic red and black bulls-eyes on a target screen after Lucky, exploring as usual parted the curtain asking what, oh what’s behind the blackness? Low and behold. Tear guts. Targets galore, said the creature. Lock n’ load. Fire when ready Freddy keep hands steady.

Happiness is a warm gun.

The Language Company