Department of Truth

According to Zeynep, a scripter in the present, I speak because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So. Help. Me.

1. Truth is classified. The source of truth about everything is classified. I am authorized to say with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

1a. The crypto key is top-secret for your blind eyes only. Grave Digger knows the combination and algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your face, mind, heart, consciousness or Lifebook personal profile time bandit. Real friends are few.

1b. Artificial friends are aliens on life support. The key for Time is inside an arrow piercing Greater Complexity with Entropy. A woman, man, child in country XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.

2. Truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke, the laugh track.  If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get the joke. Your tears speak and mangle fictional truth-story. They distort and strangle it. Truth is a figment of your imagination. Literary outlaws lie to tell the truth.

3. Truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia, author of Voices, being authorized to speak said, Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

4. Truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source. Eat your broccoli, walnuts and almonds. Biolabs will purify water and distribute free medicine and C-19 vaccinations to every human on Earth. Genetics will create Socratic open-ended educational dreams.

4a. Truth is a starving homeless mother pulling a heavy two-wheeled trash cart with flat tires through a dusty Cambodian town as her daughter forages in garbage containers for food, water and medicine. She is a qualifier, a split infinitive in infinity where someone’s leftovers are another’s banquet.

5. Truth will provide more than 1 billion people access to safe drinking water.

6. Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people who cannot read. Women are 2/3 of this number.

7. Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world who have ZERO access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

9. Truth is a terminal disease like peace, love and blindness.

10.Truth is a sledgehammer in Mandalay, Burma.

Love is not truth.

11. Truth is food in your stomach.

This is The Truth Channel. Game, Set, Match.

Media dumbs down sheep.

Technology eats humans.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Natasha From Kiev

Zeynep said, I read about how women are treated in many countries. Here in Turkey health care workers report 65% of all wives are beaten by their husband.  It’s considered normal behavior because women are treated as property.

We’ve all read stories about arranged marriages, child marriages and the desperate plight of women on Earth. Men never learned how to kiss and make up, the women know about makeup and suffering in silence, women are literally and figuratively screwed, she said.

I tell the truth. I don’t have to remember what I said, said Rita.

Zeynep’s story about domestic abuse reminded Omar of Natasha.

On September 1, 2001, ten short days before an Apocalypse in the big apple, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Your Self, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months.

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5-year-old son. Her name was Natasha, tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They’d met at the university in Kiev and now he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son. He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home.

Natasha had heard rumors, myths and fabricated lies about her fate but had never seen it because she was blind. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family and live. She did not speak French or Arabic.

Her cheap red, white and blue plastic Russian baggage fell apart at the seams. Her son pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself.

I’d finished a draft of A Century is Nothing that summer. I was jumping through a window into hunting and gathering adventures discovering new material.

Everyone spoke the same language as unanimous night collapsed around roaring planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere. We were buried at graveyard gate 54D, miles from gleaming duty free shops with exotic perfumes, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, diamond rings, watches, customs, clothing stores.

Wealthy shoppers carried yellow plastic bags saying, Buy and Fly.

A homeless Asian elf dragged a purple bag saying, Buy & Cry.

A destitute shadow of a former self had a clear bag saying, By the By.

An orphan had an empty bag saying, Why Tell Me Why.

No one in particular had Papa’s Gotta Brand New Bag.

Everyone carried his or her bag of skin & bones to the graveyard.

At midnight in Casablanca passengers walked through a towering hall of intricate inlaid blue mosaic tiles and waterfalls. Huge framed images of a smiling monarch watched people.

Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited. Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through nothing to declare green zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her broken bags on a cart and she disappeared into humanity with her son. Her husband’s Berber family approached - his father, mother, brother-in-law and grandmother in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy. As the old couple walked away I knew they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their DNA connection to their son.

Natasha, an alien aberration in their world would be relegated to a harsh new reality. She moved into their world with a Ukrainian passport, speaking an unknown tongue to be a slave serving her new family. She would be many things to them. They would manifest their loss on her. She’d carry water and chop wood. She’d cook, clean and slave away. Fate gave her new opportunities.

She’d carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and memories. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a sprawling chaotic city of five million.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his dark eyed nomadic destiny life. When Natasha was trapped in the airport he was with a prostitute and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

Omar whispered this fairy tale to Natasha. She didn’t believe it.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life.

Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.

A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point.

Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

The Language Company

1st International Children's Conference

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

*

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about:

slave labor, hunger,

exploitation, corruption,

human trafficking

and the terrorism of economic poverty.

 “Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $96 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

Cambodian women making $190/month stitched garments for export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.