Kid Genius

Good travel writing is creative hanging out.

Can Zeynep do this? Yes, she’s around 19 now in 2023.

Fate introduced us when she was 5. I was 50 going on 10. We connected immediately. It was about trust and authenticity. She’s a fine storyteller and visual artist. She has stories to share.

She contributed to The Language Company.

She travels with storytelling kid friends: Leo from Lijiang, Utopia, Devina from Jakarta, Indonesia, Tran from Danang, Vietnam, Rita from Banlung, Cambodia, Omar a Tuareg Berber from Morocco, a harlequin, a word janitor and Grave Digger.

Omar is blind. Eyes lie. Real eyes realize real lies.

Question? What is your interpretation of visual sensation?

Data based evidence is impermanent impaired observation … Energy, frequencies and vibrations. Storytelling, exposition, myth, jazz poetry, and system analysis flow in the stream of life. Glow with your flow … Many stories are recycled, retransmitted and translated from, into and beyond languages, like SIGN speak.

Language is a virus. You need it to get in. You need it to get out. Input & output. Language in language out.

There are word photographs. You cannot photograph a memory … Every photograph has an aura of death. A photograph is a kind of haiku. Life is a grand experimental adventure in evolutionary nature … Nature is the teacher. Language is a living organism … a repository of culture. No language means no culture.

Kid storytellers have the courage to speak the truth. Speaking truth they don’t have to remember what they said. They express in absurd detail what others are afraid to say. They speak with pinpoint precision. They speak using Voice.

There are VOICE Ones and SIGN Ones. SIGN ones speak love.

Curious kids live now without expectations or discrimination. They play the long game. Adult’s biology, culture, social conditioning and fear of shame, humiliation and death focus on limited narrow results … outcome … product … they eat, live, fuck around and breathe product … end game … pawn traps King … Checkmate.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mandalay, Burma

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

TLC

One engraved knife revealed The Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam.

It remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares surviving American B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Hallucinations and bliss evolved from a point of light traveling at 186,000+ miles per second.

Space folded.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories.

From inside narrow Nam alleys where death-worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense screaming FEED ME dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, clarity, understanding and interpretation.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The Language Company

I Lost One Day

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.9 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Asian locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

I lost today, said the Jewish man.

What do you mean, said his friend. You made 3,000,000 Lira.

Yes, but I lost one day.

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed, revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

The Language Company

“So you should view this fleeting world –
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.” – Diamond Sutra

*

This is what happened, more or less.

One of his names is Lucky Foot. What does that mean?

He elucidates in simple, clear, precise, concise English the language of savage barbarians.

It means, as an experience junky possessing genetic variant DRD4-R7 addicted to new adventures, he brings prosperity to merchants, rest-a-rant owners and nondescript sad, neglected, abandoned and emotionally well adjusted hot to trot red sheen women among humans struggling to survive life’s labyrinth without a center.

He gifts luck to money changers, manicure girls, beggars, banana women, landmine amputee survivors, ice and rice sellers, student-teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, textile merchants, weavers, artistic genius children, orphans, noodle mama, tea and java purveyors, gardeners, gravediggers, literary outlaws and craggy faced Dan, a boat captain in Hoi An who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the Vietnam War.

Fate chance and destiny.

If he grows up he dies.

Security is an illusion.

He presents good fortune to Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung, barbers cleaning his ears, high-heeled sandal ladies, love sock purveyors and rent-a-life companies.

HCE. Here comes everybody.

90% of life is showing up. When he shows up their day, life, fate and glittering fortunes improve. Karmic destiny.

Fate laughed with him in Morocco on 9/11. He was in the Sahara. He did not take possession of that event and perpetual aftermath. Fear sells.

Destiny danced with him on the is-land of Amnesia in Southeast Asia and exploring Turkey, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Before returning to Nam in 2009 he lived on a string of 15,000 archipelago islands between Malaysia and Papa New Genie gathering evidence about the human condition.

Each island is a letter. If you string letters together you create a word. This word depending on your imaginary perception of truth-value may or may not have meaning for you like Beauty - your true reflection in still water.

Beauty needs no tongue.

A small journey expands life’s tapestry.

He’s a needle without a compass. His needle leads a thread. Threads weave a conversation.

Move like a river, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo.

The Language Company