Fight
Flight
Feed
Freeze
Fornicate
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Decisive Moment - ephemeral & spontaneous
Image represents the essence of the event itself
Work the scene
Use your intuition
Poetic
Lose yourself zone
Or creative flow state
The beauty of shape & form
A sense of simplicity expression
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Yangon, Burma, 2015
“Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment.”
*
A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.
He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.
A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.
A heavy Chinese rain mutes voices with refined elegance. Moisture softens edges where words slash and stab, committing heinous crimes inside the imagination of lovers stranded in the long sad misfortune of falling water.
The moisture is a blessing for farmers huddled below brown and yellow ponchos planting rice in geometric rows as shallow water stalks reeds.
Rice steams in cauldrons being stabbed by steel spatulas as 15,000 university students stare at empty bowls. Farmers don’t know them, see them or begin to imagine the spoiled ravishing eaters with heads bowed over chipped white rice bowls, not in gratitude but in hunger’s anger being never satisfied and talking with their mouths full spilling grunts of MORE.
The farmers plant rice. They walk along brown dirt dikes inspecting a precious state owned agrarian middle kingdom as pouring rain music bounces off the surface, slides down leaves, collating green feathers.
Twilight’s heavy mist collects in thick clouds rolling over green forested Utopia mountains caressing valleys, streams and rivers, layering fields where silent men and women plant rice stalks one by one becoming invisible. It’s a poetic Tang landscape painting.
Book of Amnesia V1
The cost of the thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. - Henry Thoreau
*
Here we go. The alert went out on Saturday 27 October before Halloween when Sit Down, a native with a degree in Business Management from Tupperware College, living at home and working as admin guy at the TEOL school in Trabzon, tried to reach Lucky in Giresun - cherry in Latin - 2.5 hours away.
Sit Down needed his documents to apply for a residency permit.
The all-knowing, all seeing, all powerful and all believing Turkish government of bored drones, wanting to force everyone in the food chain to be accountable so they could maintain Control had told TEOL:
You, Profit Before People, running an educational business intent on brainwashing and dumbing down children, young adults, old adults and diseased heart-mind dead humans in quest of an English certificate from your institution have ... according to the grand and glorious proclamation from our dead fearless and forever glorified leader Ata Boy, ten calendar days - yes only ten - act now before it’s too late - to file the required paperwork requesting work permits for your native speakers born and raised outside our glorious land of sea, sky and succulent tomatoes, speaking with their clear pronunciation, these specific barbarians, after filing for their residency permits.
Failure to do so, said Authority, Means:
1) they cannot be employed by the state of Confusion & Sorrow & High Anxiety
2) they cannot order Allah cart in Kofte diners featuring grilled shit burgers slathered with yogurt
3) they will be decapitated at dawn tomorrow by a warrior hero riding a white stallion waving a diamond mind blade
Failure to comply with our Ten-Day Decree means you will need to start the complete bureaucratic sham process all over again. You will lose face. You will suffer personal & national humiliation & our brutal revenge.
You will become a hunted dog and massacred like 1.5 million Armenians. We do not acknowledge this genocide in 1914. We erased the Armenians. We deny their existence.
Prove it.
Denial kills you.
Anger is expensive.
Failure to comply and lie with intentional cunning means you will have to haul more word shit and process tedious official documents. You will spend years seeking a stamp from a performing seal of approval.
You will raise your greasy baksheesh palms to heaven imploring Ali Baba the leader of forty thieves for redemption and solace.
Tell me you love me. Desire, love and passion create suffering. Suffering is an illusion.
WE, Authority do our best to make the paperwork process cumbersome, illogical, frustrating, idiotic, mind numbing, depressing, heavy deep & real shit for brains.
We love paper. It’s why, as you've seen in Bay (male) or Bayan (female) toilets the absence of paper products. We use holy water imported from the Vatican via Syria to blast orifices. Water is sweeter than pleasure principles smothered with honey.
Everything here needs an official government issued signed stamped document permit for: breathing, laughing, dreaming, dancing, drawing, writing and meditating.
No paper no chance. Please note this text message to Lucky from Sit Down.
51 Days In Turkey
I am the rebel angel and my tears the trace of one virtue: patience.
You can beat me my time will come. - Max Jacob
Laos
Good writing is about telling the truth.
Write one true sentence.
Write the truest sentence you know.
Find meaning in an experience or feeling.
Perfectionism is a high end version of fear.
Writing needs to breathe and move.
Stay curious & amused by yourself.
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North Burma
Ride the rails click clack click clack click clack
Nature visions and bamboo forests
silver rivers feel fresh air hanging out the door of a rock’n roll train
rail alliteration starts at 4 AM
space stars open the sky
A red shaped leaf
Fields of lilacs, purple black and gold, butterflies,
sense of stillness, renewal of free rolling spirit,
yellow bamboo leaves at lower elevations,
then green exploding in high lush gardens with fir, pine, evergreens.
Fields being planted
Women and men and children hoeing, watering, turning soil
Say yes to everything.
Laos
I am loving awareness.
Help others with the art of escape, thinking outside the system.
I feel your presence in my heart.
Music makes me stronger.
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