Journeys
Words
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in story (471)

Wednesday
Jan222020

Read

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it.

Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, paths, and destinations obliterated through discovery reminding memory.

They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences. Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry.

Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice.

Voices of reason, imagination, comedy and tragedy are skintight drum stories. They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road I gifted the brick to three Asian women in Saigon. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

It took all three to carry it. They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome. After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening.

People need to break down before they break through.

Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART

Wednesday
Dec182019

Ankara

Brown rolling hills said, Open sesame. Shazam. 1,001 Arabian Nights shared stories inside stories. Dervish mystic dancers wheeling in trances welcomed his spirit.

Lucky learned the majority of Turks suffered from anxiety. They took anti-depressants called Xanax to calm psychotic neurosis. Symptoms of overwhelming sadness dressed citizens in rose petals between self-pity, loathing and thorns.

Ankara was a boring, cold capital city filled with sad administrative paper-pushing androids.

He’d accepted a teaching/facilitating TLC job with an acquisition cycle.

A part-time female teacher from South Africa married to an English environmentalist studying seal habitats along the southern coastline helped Lucky buy a DNA cell phone. He’d never had one.

It was a 1984 red gadget with buttons and functions like calendars, tools, SMS, IM, Teams, Bluetooth, internet access, GPS and To Do, Did, and Does it work? Connections. Locations.

It displayed points of interest at low interest rates.

Instant,

Everywhere You Are

Or Imagine You Are

or Need To Be

Where You Are Now

at this precise moment

with dimensional proportions

suited his nomadic status

acquiring mobility extremes.

One morning he walked to the Ulus garden nursery below an old Roman castle. A red hammer and sickle flag waved above ramparts. He discovered white, red and purple roses, cactus, ten small plants, containers and potting soil. Good dirt.

A word gravedigger craves good dirt.

The Language Company

Saturday
Dec142019

Write

“Beware of naysayers, soothsayers and book doctors,” said a kid. “We are together through thick and thin, health and illness. Writing is a disease. We lie for a living. We make things up and write them down. No editor will drink champagne from our skulls. We’re trapped in our bodies, this hospital and labyrinth. You’d think there’d be a word doctor around here moonlighting as a heart specialist. Shine on bright star.”

“Ok,” said the writer kid, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook at the beginning of every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next is a reader’s quest.”

“People are born, live and die. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. We are the architects of our actions and live with glorious or tragic consequences. Is this a fill-in-the-blank life test?”

“I only want you to bring two things to class,” screamed an overworked, underpaid, undersexed Hanoi teacher afraid of losing face in front of eighty robots. “Your ears.”

She pounded on a podium with her Marxist pedagogical elephant control stick, “Memorize the text idiots so you can vomit the material on a test.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said a bulimic kid.

“It’s ok to be horrible,” said a kid. “Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash between birth and death. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess. Release the monster into the world.”

“Yeah,” said Tran, “a work of art is never finished. It’s abandoned. Like an orphan.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving a rejection letter. “You don’t want to make the reader work too hard, do you?”

“No, most humans are lazy. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost and sex texting with short attention spans. CONTROL owns them. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Be cold and unsentimental. Polishing is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who red lines manuscripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They kill words and sentences.”

“Writing is like digging a well with a needle,” said Orhan Pamuk.

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan boy, one of 12,000, “and then you don’t have to remember what you said.” His parents rented him to an NGO on weekends for donor sympathy advertising.

“The truth is I need a fix. Does anyone have any spare drugs?” said a gazebo group addict, “I need to get out of here and mainline an adventure.”

A Vietnam veteran screamed, “More drugs, nurse, more drugs. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” A nurse shot him up.

ART

Burma

Wednesday
Dec042019

Fairy Tale

I am sorry are our three favorite words in Cambodia.
It’s the last thing 2,000,000 genocide victims cried out before a complete stranger slammed a
shovel against their skull. I am sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

One survivor said to another survivor, what a beautiful fucking mess. Help me drag this one away.

You either let go or get dragged along, said a Buddhist monk lighting incense for world peace.

Same in China said Leo, We learn life’s hard bitter lesson to accept loss forever, I am sorry. What is the most beautiful word you know Zeynep?

Freedom. And yours? Food, said Rita and Leo.

Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, Z said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach existential levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.


The asylum is a prison and protection, said Rita.

You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, Z said, drawing her future.

Make the right choice for the wrong reason, Leo said.

Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, Rita said.

Z discovered questions were repeated. 1,001 questions ran around her Turkish restaurant looking for answers. Questions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one question. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless.

Think of it as a test, said another question. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another question. Yes, said a question, these non-listeners have a distinct tendency to say nothing and say it louder than empty silence when they’re leaving, when their faces are turned away from eye contact, potential real heart-mind communication and growth.

Echoes drifted in through around silence and ignorance. I’ve seen that too, said a question, who, until this moment was silent. My theory is that it’s because of genocide, fear and ignorance. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another question. I suggest it’s their innate Buddhist belief. They suppress their ego. Non-self.

Why is the most dangerous question, said Lucky addressing questions. Remember Leo asking why and ended up carrying shit at the Reform Through Re-education Labor Camp near the Gobi before becoming Chief of the Cannibals wearing an alarm clock around his scrawny neck reminding everyone of Time?

Yes I remember said a timeless prescient question. Leo was one smart cookie, whatever that means. He figured out unique survival skills in a desperate situation. He knew the fundamental difference between book smarts and street smarts. Anyway before we drift off the subject, how do you explain fear, asked a question.

Rita (author of Ice Girl in Banlung) - Fear is a basic instinct. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the amygdala. Flight or fight? Is it safe, eyes say scanning a potentially dangerous environment since Day One. You see it everywhere, all day, everyday all the scared uncertain eyes asking is it safe?

They peek left, glance right, double check. The coast is clear. Let’s go. People ran away to survive. Instinct.

People had a panic attack, started running and others would ask them a question like why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going or what’s the matter or when did you become afraid or why are you afraid, or why don’t you stay longer and the running one would keep going trailing abstract question words behind them like memories of dead or missing families or disembodied spirits or exploding landmines or molecules of indifferent breath.

I see, said a question, that explains everything. Yes, said an open-ended question. Being correct is never the point.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. We are assassins.

The Language Company

Burma

Monday
Oct282019

Gazebo Group

Abracadabra - Hurl your lightning bolt even unto Death.

You must break down before you break through.

In 1997 my writing and life were shit.

One wet winter Pacific Coast morning, I drove to a Tacoma hospital and checked into the chemical dependency unit for three days of alcohol detox.

After admission I took an elevator to the third floor. Workmen stripped, sanded and plastered walls.

Room #310 had a bed near a window, old metal locker, sink, mirror, ancient radiator and TV. The window overlooked a grassy area with a wooden gazebo, flowers and basketball court.

Mike was next door and Tom was across the hall. Tom resembled a skeleton with skin. He stayed in bed until he died.

“The hospital was originally used by railroad workers and was a TB unit at one time which is why there is no pediatric unit,” said Nurse Blossom. One wing of the third floor was for Bipolar, multiple dependencies and mental illness. Suicide cases lived in a penthouse on the fifth floor.

She took a urine sample and gave me Ada-van medication for withdrawals. Pills replaced lost chemicals.

By evening my journal writing evolved from large loopy letters into a tight microscopic form. Form the formless. I wandered down to the gazebo to smoke and write in cold night air.

My new drug was water. I swallowed meds and slept well. In the morning I felt the meds were erasing alcohol and cleaning my system. I scribbled in my journal.

My legs feel like rubber. My mind is a monkey. I write in the garden. Substance abuse evaporates. Alcohol relinquishes Control of mind-body mass.

In late afternoon I sat in the gazebo feeling drained, suffering extreme headaches. Light danced through clouds.

I pass through dragon firewalls. I can’t spell. A crow calls. Healer. Breath. I am calm with no monkey mind. Just sitting. I adapt with clear thinking, less agitation, mental and emotional anxiety. I begin accepting my new reality.

On the third day a doctor reviewed my chart. “The next step is Phase II outpatient group therapy.”

Addicts smoked in the gazebo. Fifteen plastic chairs circled stone block ashtrays. Addicts surrounded me in withdrawal stages from heroin, crack, speed, depressives and alcohol.

Gazebo people tried to sort out their lives. They talked about insurance payment scam problems, families, nurses, the lack of doctors, and institutional care histories. I wrote it down among lost lives and despair.

Moist air holding illness confronted recovery. Dead eyes, laughter, faint hopes, repressed angry regrets. Addicts huddled against slashing rain. Smokers coughed collective misery. Addicts bummed quarters for a pay phone to call friends and family.

A film explained how endorphins help us feel good. Alcohol creates a false reality by blocking transmitters known as TIQ.

Mike remembered relapsing after twenty-five years of sobriety. “I just stopped. I was driving down the street one night and plain stopped when I saw a neon liquor sign flashing.” Vodka calling. He started all over again.

On the 5th floor screaming suicide patients smashed heads against walls.

Addicts tried to regain self-esteem. It was about surrendering Control and accepting trust. We turned our lives over to someone who knew what they were doing.

ART

Adventure - Risk - Transformation