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Entries in social conditioning (13)

Sunday
May132018

Lucky in Ankara

Richard, The Language Company director in Istanbul called Lucky in Fujian, China for an interview. “Why Turkey?”

“I’ve never been there.”

He laughed. “Good enough for me. How’s Ankara sound? We have a big center there. See you when you get here.”

“Ankara’s fine. Thanks for the opportunity. It’s my lucky day.”

He gifted Chinese teachers plants, bamboo mats, the I Ching and The Diamond Sutra, the worlds oldest printed book circa 868.

Non-attachment illusions of freedom were gift-wrapped.

Winging away as Winter Hawk he exhaled on western winds.

*

On a 5th floor balcony in Ankara he fed wild birds, nurtured roses and played in good dirt.

He collected poetic and photographic evidence.

The rise and decline of Byzantine civilizations heard historians standing on street corners, lost highways or walking arduous mountain paths amid sweet smelling manure with tattered hats in hands, pleading, “Give me your wasted hours. Give me your wasted hours.”

Besides helping students discover the courage to speak another tongue with an active voice he got a part-time job driving a taxi-bus.

At 9:11 p.m. he drove a 15-seater minivan to a Soviet-style apartment in a middle class neighborhood. A swarthy man named Pida Pie apple of his mother’s eye opened a sliding door.

A symphony of high heels announced a parade of skintight blond Russians. They purred into the taxi-bus. He smelled cosmetics, lip-gloss and sex. The night was young.

Sly Pide Pie got in.

“Go man go.”

Lucky delivered the ladies to The Kitty Cat Night Club and returned to the apartment for another load. By 10:10 p.m. he’d transported thirty.

 “Pick them up at 5:15,” said Pide.

Lucky went home for a catnap with his estranged wife from an arranged marriage. She’d traded her sex for security and knew how to rub a ruble together.

After collecting women smelling of dancing, drinks and cold-blooded sex with diplomats and Turkish tycoons he took them home. High heels and acrylic language laughter faded. Dawn broke bread.

He stopped at a cafe for muddy coffee and aired out the taxi-bus.

Beginning at 7:00 a.m. he picked up kids for their daily dose of force fed feedlot education. They stumbled out of apartments piled in and fell asleep. Weeping mothers on balconies waving soiled red/yellow hammer and sickle cleaning rags sang good-bye to despondent sons and daughters.

A Chinese waif dreaming of autonomy had her eyes wide open. “Patience is my teacher,” she said.

“I remember you from the Fujian university. How did you get here?”

“I graduated with an M.A. in Languages, Humor and Courage. I stowed away on a ship leaving Shanghai. It sailed through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal and into Izmir. I hitched here and got lucky. I discovered a nanny position with a family. I tutor their kids and teach Chinese calligraphy at the school.”

“Great wild future. What happened to your dream about being a waif?”

“No fear. It’s in The Dream Sweeper Machine. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am Curious.”

“Nice to meet you. I'm Lucky.”

“Sure you are. May I drive?”

“Why not,” giving her the tantric wheel of life.

“Wow,” she said, shifting gears, “this is fun. Let’s see how slow we can go.”

At 8:15 a.m. he returned home for a shower, good eats and dreams.

At 2 p.m. he walked to The Language Company. Students were doctors, lawyers, health care workers, engineers and university students. He was a guide from the side through etymology, phonology and morphology. The majority had passive verbs down.

“How are you,” he asked.

“So-so,” sang the chorus. “Tired. We need Xanax.”

Finished at 9:00 p.m. he started the Russian roulette acquisition cycle. “Put one in my chamber,” whispered a leggy blond. “My safety is off and I am well lubricated.”

Every morning, working with Omar, a blind Touareg amanuensis from the Sahara, whom Lucky befriended by fate in Morocco two days before 9/11 while on a six-month hiatus from the united states of consumption, they finished polishing a gonzo memoir. A Century Is Nothing. Omar sent it out.

Fifty unemployed suicidal literary agents huddled around a fire in a Benaojan cave south of Ronda, Spain read Omar’s epic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings and dancing shadows displayed bison, deer, archers, and crude time-comb slashes. Red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

Agents concurred. It isn’t mainstream and too experimental. We can’t realize 15% from this. Thanks but no thanks. Let’s burn it to keep warm.

Omar published it independently in October 2007. He loved the do-it-yourself process: text, blurb, design, basic marketing and cover image of a Chinese girl.

The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality in Maija.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at Lucky, a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared. She didn’t know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

 

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words, singing and dancing. His laughter and smiles were a relief from the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn’t want to be prisoners any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here.

You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, fear, paranoia and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers struggled behind oxen in rice paddies. Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

Leo, a Chinese friend said, “Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic for years. Why are so many students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers.”

Self-censorship, shame, insecurity and humiliation devoured steaming white rice and subversive dreams.

“Yes,” Omar said, “it’s almost as true as if you can believe it.”

Lucky shared it with friends and strangers. His best friend buried a copy in an Arizona time capsule.

Omar sent copies to nomadic Blue Men in the Sahara.

Through Constantinople publishing contacts it was available at D&R Books in Ankara, Bursa, Timbuktu and a big river in South America.

In Ankara with Omar’s blessing, Lucky signed copies. It was a strange sensation spilling green racing ink from a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen on parchment fibers.

The first copy was for Attila the Hungry, a large bald man with a spectacle business. He sold Omar BanSunRa-Ray glasses on spec-u-lay-shun.

“The future looks brighter than a total eclipse,” said Omar.

In 2012 Lucky and Omar in Cambodia cut the original to shreds, polished it and published the 2nd edition with Create Space on Amazon.

The Language Company

Saturday
Apr072018

Leo

“A human life in China is worthless,” said Leo, 14, born in a Re-education-Through-Labor Reform Camp in Hubei.

His mom worked in the empty university library.

After school exploring forested hills on mountain bikes Lucky and Leo shifted gears where the rubber met the road. One day they stopped in an old quarry to play in dirt.

It was an abandoned country. An abstract concept.

They stood in a deep excavated canyon. High dirt walls bordered by pine, evergreen and blue sky wore sharp deep gashes after machine teeth gouged out dirt.

Workers harvested red clay for imperial jade tombs at the university where 15,001 students struggled to survive in a harmonious society. Students hiding from recycled Mao-styled uniformed security guards mastered eating, texting and casual sex.

They stood at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

“Everyone is a spy,” said Leo.

“How did you surmise this theoretical fact?”

“Life is my teacher. It’s our 5,000-year history plain and simple. Their job is to keep an eye on us. Think about it. We have too any people here and so, to monitor our behavior, attitudes and thinking, they recruit students and teachers as spies. Informers. Minders. They’re paid with passing grades or cash. My father was an informer during the Cultural Revolution. It’s Darwinian logic, evolution of the species. Survival.”

“I’m not surprised. This was common through dynasties. Perpetuate control and authority. The Central Party created a climate of fear. Husbands reported wives. Wives reported husbands, sons and daughters. Daughters and sons reported fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles. Concubines reported lovers. An evil cycle.”

“Yes,” said Leo, “evil is a myth. Everyone is a charter member of the 

Big Ears Sharp Eyes No Mouth Society.

Our generation of informers and spies make good money. Knowing their place they keep their mouth shut to survive. Creativity is my meditation. I meditate on the comic, the absurd. Don’t take life seriously. It’s too short. If you laugh you last.”

“Thanks for life lesson #5.”

Lucky shared writing-living suggestions with eight new Chinese teachers.

Make your characters want something right away, even if it’s a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of life need water from time to time.

It’s your job to create conflict so the characters will say or do surprising and revealing things, educating and entertaining us.

Characters change/grow.

Kill your darlings. If a writer can’t or won’t do that they should get out of the trade.

A writer is a hustler.

A writer treats their mental illness every day.

Write like you’re dead. Someday you will be.

Ah the drama - the unfolding play observing sensational phenomena. 

Entertainment is alive and well in Asia. It’s the entertainment capital of the world. Keep them stupid and happy. Children of all ages stay amused by cell phones, Lose Face fake social sites and the idiot box. They surrender their consciousness. Watch TV. Miss the show.

 “Keep your hand moving,” he said to lazy Chinese robots. “The hand is directly connected to the heart. You are pure sensation. Be an anarchist. Take risks. Take a line for a walk.”

As a foreign language barbarian wearing a Tang Dynasty five-clawed red dragon, yin-yang symbol, a rising Phoenix and a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains he witnessed emperors screwing concubines inside Forbidden Cities with red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams wove silent abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss.

Manifestations of superior phenomenal detective analysis and forty questions of the soul redlined final exams.

“We know so much and understand so little,” said Lucky.

“I don’t understand a thing. People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said Leo. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’” Hear ye, hear ye.

The Language Company

The Street - Quanzhou, Fujian, China

Friday
Mar172017

Finch's Cage, Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside a plate glass door. It’d escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her brother worried about dying of boredom or her old mother worried about dying alone had left the cage open.

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw a deep blue sky. It inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but didn’t understand them.

They sang about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finc, being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang, “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

 

Monday
Jan092017

Mandalay 

Hi. My name is Timothy Mouse. I am a wanderer. I wander and wonder. Like Alice, I try to think of six impossible things before breakfast.

I was in Mandalay four years ago at a private school playing in the Montessori program.

The kids taught me to say I am a miracle.

Street photography was sublime.

The management wasn’t professional so I left after ten weeks. Probation is a two-way street. A friend who stayed for two years said they bled teachers after my departure.  

Dr. Scary and Mrs. Marbles were a strange dysfunctional couple. 

I really enjoyed Burma. The people are gentle, kind and smiling.

I had the chance to return with a language company in Yangon. It was fantastic combination of helping others develop vocabulary, critical thinking, facilitate teaching skills, laughter and do street photography experiments.

Everything I do is an experiment.

The CEO was mean and selfish. He lost the lease on one building where we had classrooms so I was downsized with three other teachers after five months.

I was grateful for the opportunity.

I returned to Seems Ripe, Cambodia doing a volunteer English project in a dusty rural reality for two months with low-income families.

I independently published a new book of black and white images called Street 21, about Yangon. O joy.

I published two short literary works – My Name is Tam, erotica from Vietnam and A Little BS from living and facilitating heart-mind in Laos. All the works are on the side bar.

Hungry, I scoured potential sources in Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Comabodia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Laos.

It’s a wonderful life part 42.

In June, 2015 I accepted an offer to return to Mandalay and here I is. Third times the charm said Lucky Mouse. The food is spicy. The rainy season is here, said clouds. They know me by now.

I speak perfect broken English.

As a Turkish lawyer said in The Language CompanyI know my English is not grammatically perfect but I know it’s fluent. Yeah baby.

It’s an English language company. Teachers. Someone with a pulse.

Similar to TLC with more engagement diversity.

My classes begin with 9th graders at an expensive private school 6-7 and 7-8 a.m. Courage to speak and vocabulary while having fun in a non-threatening environment. Draw your dream.

Next are anxious college prep seniors. I came from Cambodia on an elephant. Really, said one sharp girl. Yes, really. His name is Packy and he’s in the secret garden having lunch.

They wait in a fancy air-con room on the fifth floor near the broken elevator for university entrance results so they can apply to a school and become a doctor or engineer or real human. They are the future. We focus on speaking fluency. Take a risk, kids.

Afternoons are with Primary 1 & 2 at a rural private school forty-four minutes out of town from 1-3.

Reminds me of the primal experience outside Shuangliu, China in 2005 – trees, farmland, rivers, birds, wildlife and subsistence living.

Kids there easily said, “Let me try!”

It’s the first time any have had a native speaker. Open your head, heart and mouth. Draw your dream. Write what you don’t know. 

Say please and thank you. Practice good manners. Share. Be kind.

Say I need help. Three little important English words.

The assistant primary teachers and admin are supportive and understand my small character development.  

Young learners teach me songs. We hold hands, share hugs, dance, sing and play games using the alphabet, animals, and colors. Storytelling imagination. We practice cursive writing. The hand is directly connected to the heart.

We meditate on our breath. Posture.

I act my age.

It’s the same Asian educational story - young ones have no fear. O joy.

Older ones have been tyrannized into passivity. It’s a cultural/educational reality. Big ears no mouth authoritarian social conditioning. A few have the courage to ask questions. Group work allows people to speak freely.

The culture taught them to respect other people’s integrity. Silence is the norm. Silence is the loudest noise in the universe. 

As Einstein said, "Learning is an experience. Everything else is just information."

I respect their situation. Students are emerging from imaginary shells and discarding social context masks with a new sense of love, responsibility, leadership ability, polite manners, teamwork and courage.

They experiment in creative notebooks. I bring objects to sterile classrooms – a yellow leaf, an apple, a feather, rocks, plants, and bouquets of yellow and white daisies.

Smell this.

Draw this and write your feelings.

Your creative notebook will be with you long after textbooks gather dust. It’s your best friend.

Share with your pod people.

It’s a joy to be a small part of their process. Let’s have an adventure.

The 9th graders live in a hostel, sixteen to a room. Sexes don’t mingle, when I shift them to team tables with each other they freeze initially. Patience is my teacher. Say hello. Ask questions about name, family, food. Spark it.

Next week I expose them to Emotional Nourishment. Share hugs. Hold hands. Dance like nobody’s looking.

THE WORKERS

Let’s go.

One day the 12th graders walked down five flights of stairs to sit out of the broiling sun in small groups drawing, sketching, coloring and writing about the workers.

Seventeen young male and female laborers inside the front gate shoveled sand, mixed it with water, carried piles of rocks on their heads to a cement mixer, welded metal and created a new cement floor. Earth needs more floors.

Local teachers couldn’t get their heart around this essential activity. A young student from elementary said teachers nicknamed me Free Man.

Amazing Victory (his English name) a local teacher said he appreciates the students having this opportunity. He said it’s a welcome sight in their system focusing on texts, marks, exams and rote learning.

We returned to the classroom and wrote about the experience. Share details with your partner. How did you feel? What did you smell, hear, visual awareness? Where’s the real education value?

One girl drew the back of a woman in a floral designed Longyi balancing a basket of rocks on her head. Clear description. Her essence. Too shy to share with the class I did it for her.

Look at this amazing art.

Homework – go for a walk with your notebook and colors. No gadgets.

Basics. Ten teachers stay in a hotel. It’s an old funky comfortable place with a blue shimmering swimming pool and well-established interior meditative garden with palm trees, wild flowers, ponds, lotus, ferns, and green life. Birds and cats. Like China 1,000 years ago.

The smiling laundry woman wears red and orange and green tie-dyed blouses. Ebullient. She’s been here thirty-one years. Her ironing skills are immaculate as we converse. I will invite her to come to my classes and teach the kids how to apply gentle pressure to cloth. The young ones will get it.

I wear a Longyi, a form of sarong, the male national dress, every day. Delightful. Soft fabric, thread, colors. Students and teachers appreciate this. Ventilation.

Conservative morose foreign teachers strangle dreams with a tie. Tuck in your shirt. I imagine their classes border on boredom. So it goes. 

AIS prison school where I did the Montessori program for ten weeks is east of town.

I hitch into town for supplies and street photography. This location is central, easy for walking, exploring and connecting with the local community. A bike would be sufficient however it’s too fast for street work and engaging people.

The road is made by walking.

You know how much I love dust.

I enter a pharmacy near Paradise Hospital for powder anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals to add to water.

Where are you from, said the smiling man of Burmese-Indian heritage. Tibet. He got it. Tibet? I see. Yes, I walked here. Come visit again. We can talk. You can be my friend. Ok. See you later.

The camera entered a narrow lane. It passes wooden and bamboo homes with families sitting outside or indoors watching a soapy opera, men reading papers, kids playing, women bathing at a community zone. Draw water.

A plane flew overhead. Three kids sitting on a bamboo platform waved at the plane. Good-bye, ha, ha.

Thanks for your patience, a great teacher.

Truth, love and compassion.

Saturday
Aug272016

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