Good at two things - TLC 63

 “Mind yourself,” Z said in cursive Latin as she and Lucky exploring diverse civilizations cradled a bamboo candle on their quest for an illuminated translation.

One morning while walking to the Metro he received a rose from a kind Kurdish woman who tended a small grocery below a quadrant of grey cookie-cutter Soviet apartment blocks filled with crying children and sad adults devouring emotional immaturity content in a guilt-based context between a physical object and a precise concept.

“We are good at doing two things,” sang a Turkish man swirling a silver spoon in his tea...'around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows, tinkle, tinkle little star how I wonder where you are, way down in the glass so low with processed sugar’...sitting and singing, here we go.”

“I thought you said reading and writing,” said Rita, the anarchist writer of Ice Girl in Banlung and H20 seller in Ratanakiri. To make ends meet on weekends her family of eleven rented her out to a NGO scam at an artificial orphanage.

Buy her beware.

Rita knew what was what.

“According to UNICEF, there has been a 65% rise in the number of orphanages since 2005. There are more than 300 and yet, only 21 of those are run by the state.”

“Say more,” said Lucky.

“UNICEF estimates that 72% of the 12,000 children in Cambodian orphanages have at least one living parent or close relative. Desperate poverty makes it easy to persuade uneducated families that their kids will be better off in an orphanage.”

Her Banlung machine world roared, reversed, revered and resounded with operatic overtones. Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

Ghosts said we are nothing but historical history. Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.

Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.

Startled birds flew.

A brown river changed course.

A woman stopped sweeping dust.

A rich man getting out of a black SUV smiled at prosperity.

A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused.

A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love and an easy ten bucks blinked.

An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep.

A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight.

A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit.

An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder. Where are we going? Muttering to his feet wearing red dust, one said down this endless road.

The Wild West town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.

A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections. His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.

Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

Rita opened a big orange plastic box. She picked up a chunk of ice in her left hand, cradling it in a blue cloth slamming a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines and imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. Holding global warming in her left hand she smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.

A sharp piece of frozen ice pierced Lucky’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and directly cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of perception altering his visual organic sensation as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses. 

Enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of water seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes. Illusions of truth, pleasure, pain and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.

Sibylline language.

She dropped the block of ice into the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to him. Here, you look tired and thirsty, I am, thanks, I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious. You’re welcome.

She assaulted ice with a hammer shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He gave her crumbled Real notes.

An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.”

History, war, violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodians, said Rita handing Zeynep, Leo, Lucky cold impermanence.

“Reading and writing is for idiots,” a Turkish man said to his attachment’s delight. “I am proficient at eating and fighting. I’ve been killing people for 4,000 years little thing.”

Z said: I am a camera. Close my aperture to f/8 or f/11 for depth of field. I am a snow leopard in hot sun on Himalayan ice. I am a human mirror reflecting mud and meadows of reality. I am Winter Hawk winging free. I am resilient Bamboo.

I am love - a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor. Love is in the air. Run for cover. I am Patience, your great teacher.

I am mindfulness.

I am breath.

I inhale life and exhale death in a random universe.

I am blood red ink drawing in dust and unloading words for a book called TLC to be explored, experimented and abandoned.

Wearing a burgundy pashmina shawl from Lhasa before the Chinese invaded in 1959 with Re-Education propaganda/publicity machines of terror, fear, suffering and death I smell like fresh Anatolian laundry in a gentle spring breeze.

Ice Girl in Banlung

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About Face - TLC 62

“Such a querulous quandary laundry list of regrets, what ifs, and maybes,” said a vein-veiled mother sweeping hopes, plans, and dreams down a drain-o with should, would and could tyrannies.

Turkey witnessed a long lilting laborious laughing list littered with the bones of Hunters-Gatherers, phony Phoenicians, Romans give me your ears, Greeks, Hiatus, Coitus Interuptus, Arabs, Turkmen, Templar Knights, Mongols, nomadic pastoral hoards, Sultan-A-Mets from a Botox Bronx, Uighurs and literary rascals.

“The law of fear, uncertainty, healthy doubt, adventure and surprise in real time is implicit,” said Incense feeding dead ancestors their daily diet of guilt, shame, self-loathing and remorse fortified with essential vitamins.

A Turkish slave protected by a silk scarf hiding frontal lobotomy scars after perception was removed for analysis closed her balcony door killing world music. She didn’t hear wind-spirits sing dance and drum on shattered mirrors made of sand.

Bamboo leaves shuddered inside a kaleidoscopic reflection of sky, clouds and Lung-ta prayer flags above Lhasa. They danced with drifting chorten sage smoke.

Chinese boy-soldiers marched into a blind alley next to Rampoche Monastery on March 10th, Year Zero. They were surrounded by burgundy wrapped monks chanting, “Om Mani Padme Hum, Om...The Jewel in the Lotus.”

“Lock and load,” yelled Li Bow Down. “Fire. Ready. Aim.”

They blasted chanting monks.

“About face, save face.”

The Language Company

Two Zeyneps. I am sorry. TLC - 61

A wandering Mesopotamian tribe missed a crucial evolutionary step in their 10,000-year history. Collective schizophrenia evolved between Europe and Asian geographical worlds, two calibrations, two frequencies, two imprecise incomplete halves of one whole. Gestalt. Yin/Yang.

“Are we Asian or European?” said Zeynep the elder playing her cello resembling the human voice in a Bursa cemetery.

“Sadly,” said young Zeynep scribbling with black, red and blue ink on Moleskine parchment, “we'll never know our true identity. We suffer an existential identity crisis. 90% of Turkey is in Asia. We need talking foreign monkeys with clear pro-nun-ci-a-tion at TLC. Wow, it’s another day in a magical paradise.”

Zeynep knew her ABC’s. Always Be Closing.

Her grandparents had a restaurant near a Bursa shopping center.

He wandered in one day before going to TLC. Shy and curious she watched him writing and drawing. He smiled, Hello. She stared. He pushed red, green, blue and black pens across the table, turned his notebook toward her showing a page of color gesturing to materials and a chair, come and sit down. You can draw. It’s fun. She was curious with courage.

Trust. They became friends.

Zeynep and Lucky created art daily in a ravishing food zone.

Bored anxious depressed adults devouring their dreams, nightmares and anxieties with plain white yogurt swallowed shock and awe. Opium and lotus-eaters stared from deep vacuums with hard dark brooding eyes.

Want to make a deal? How’s it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?

When Z or L made eye contact adults glanced away with fear, uncertainty and incriminating disbelief. Not to mention psychosis, repressed aggression and guilt complexes. They didn’t see regular professional strangers here, let alone one talking, laughing, playing and creating art with a kid as an equal.

Adults listened at 10% or less saying yeah yeah or I am tired with panache.

They asked Z many quest-ions without speaking.

What’s the melody? How can you revert to primal childlike innocence? Is the music in the cello? How do you get it out? Why do you risk being free and independent? How did you escape the tyranny of social conditioning? How do you develop your wings after jumping? Why are you always scribbling words or drawing or playing the cello? Do you have mental disorder? Are you on medication or meditation? Is it contagious this art and music process of creativity? Is it the food, air, water? Am I this or am I dreaming?

All of the above said Z. Good things happen when you take risks. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything?

Adults were afraid to express repressed feelings, too risky.

Rita entered the conversation: I know the feeling of fear believe you me when the bad people killed our families to teach us a lesson. Survivors are conditioned by this memory.

I am sorry are our three favorite words in Cambodia.

It’s the last thing 2,000,000 genocide victims cried out before a relative or a complete stranger slammed a shovel against their skull. I am sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Strangers threw their useless, lifeless, worthless corpse into a ditch all the rabbits ran singing, Must be the season of the witch.

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?

Kindness. 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 quest-ions were repeated. 1,001 quest-ions ran around her restaurant looking for answers. Quest-ions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one quest-ion. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless. Think of it as a test, said another quest-ion. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another quest-ion. Yes, said a quest-ion, 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 quest-ion, 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 quest-ion. I suggest it’s their innate Buddhist belief. They suppress their ego. Non-self.

Why’s the most dangerous quest-ion, said Lucky addressing quest-ions. 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 quest-ion. 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 quest-ion.

Rita - 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 quest-ion 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 quest-ion 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 quest-ion that explains everything. Yes, said an open-ended quest-ion. Being correct is never the point. 

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

One more thing said a quest-ion eating fear try this.

Fuck Everything And Run away.

Or

Face Everything And Recover.

Quest-ions took the 5th. We refuse to incriminate ourselves.

Ignoring blind eaters Z traced ideograms, symbols and ageless archetypes with red, blue and black collective unconscious lines on white paper. She was blank paper, invisible ink and flow. Be the ink, she said. Be the paper. She connected dots forward.

I am a flow state.

Holding out two small hands she said, “I only know two things.”

They played guess which empty hand holds the answer to the BIG quest-ion. What is Life?

“That’s an excellent quest-ion to ask people as you pass through multifaceted adventures with an open heart-mind,” she said. “If you can hold it in your hand it’s not important.”

“You are a stream-winner,” said Lucky.

Red roses bled fragrance into blue sky turning it magenta.

Zeynep leaned across the table whispering an irrefutable truth. “All these adults were punished for asking quest-ions or dreaming. They’ve had creativity, curiosity and a sense of humor beaten out of them. They’ve been conditioned by fear.”

“That’s an unpleasant fact. There are two kinds of stories in the world,” said L.

“What are they?”

“A person goes on a journey, like us. A stranger arrives in a village, like us.”

“Some people never leave their village. It is their world.”

“The world is a village.”

Z and L laughed sang and played all day making a beautiful fucking mess.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream....”

Zeynep said, “A work of art like this tome is never finished. It is abandoned with intuitive wisdom and courage.”

“I was abandoned at five. My mother left me for poliomyelitis in 1955,” said L.

“What's that?”

“It's an acute viral disease marked by inflammation of nerve cells of the brain and spinal chord. She was paralyzed from the waist down and lived her final twelve years in a wheelchair. She processed heavy frustration and anger. She took it out on her three kids and being the oldest I was first in line. She was a witch with a switch.”

“I see. My mother puts me in a box under the cash register when we get busy. That’s a form of abandonment. We have neglect in common. We learn to accept loss forever.”

“Seeing her do this to you makes me feel sad. She needs to keep you safe. Reminds me of lone wolves I met trapped behind fences away from mountain freedom. Maybe you can help her to think outside the box.”

“It’s my temporary fate. She means well, knowing I’m safe and she can keep an eye on me. It’ll stop when I grow taller and start helping out. I just imagine there’s no box.”

“It’s your sitting meditation practice.”

A stranger stood up in the restaurant. “Attention everyone. You came from somewhere else. We were all inside someone once. I am an exiled dissident North Korean nuclear rocket scientist living in Utopia developing invisible toxic laughing gas for export. Let’s create slave labor gulags and form collective socio-logo-gamma-ray-logical Anatolian ghettos with starving illiterate peasants morphing into a harmonious society.”

“We trust your vision,” drooled an eater. “Let’s take a vote. All in favor raise your hand.”

Hands holding bread crusts went up.

“All opposed?”

Falling hands crammed bread in gaping mouths.

“Let’s eat,” said the majority.

“What’s a vote?” said a woman dressed like a manikin.

A murmur ran out the door.

The Language Company 

Shame sings in Tibet - TLC 60

My name is Li Bow Down. I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform Program.

My masters called me out of retirement. I was screwing concubines playing mahjong and enjoying Fujian tea with friends at Shangri-La Free Land Resort. Authority ordered me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem.

They gave me a fire extinguisher to douse immolating monks. Ah, the ignobility.

Give a man a match and they’re warm for a moment.

Set them on fire and they’re warm for the rest of their life.

Li showed Lucky a grainy B&W image. Here’s an uncensored image of what happens to people in the pogrom program. See this woman. She is denouncing her family, friends and most important, herself in public. We are big on shame.

We are the masters. Peasants are the puppets.

“Shame on you,” yelled 1.7 billion puppet people. “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

This is one of our most popular and effective methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders because memory serves me well and it does, mind you, serve me like a slave.

We’ve been coercing people for 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty.

We use to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town. They confessed. We call it self-criticism. Samzen. They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval.

Now we just shoot them down like dogs in the street.

Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. I didn't make it to the top of the egalitarian scrap heap by bowing down to big nosed foreigners telling me how to maintain Control and Power in Tibet to keep monks serfs and slaves quiet.

They are all illiterate peasants.

As you know because I say so the Lhasa monks provoked the young, naive, scared, armed and alarmed People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th in Year Zero.

The rest is history, well, not real history because we rewrite history when it suits our propaganda purposes. It’s easy and convenient. Speak memory.

Life is cheap here. More tea?

History is the symptom. People are the disease.

The Language Company

Article 301 in Deep State - TLC 59

“Deep State is a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime,” said Zeynep.

*

“In summation your honor,” said a defensive attorney from the Land of Smirking Tomatoes, “my client is innocent of personal responsibility and conspiracy charges to overthrow the Deep State. We rest our case.”

 “Your discovery evidence in Article 301 while standing accused of insulting the Deep State is weak and inconclusive,” said a Turkish judge on a political payoff hiding Graft behind his back. “Your motion for acquittal and adjudication is forthwith dead and denied.”

“May I change my plea your honor? May I resume my please bargaining and negotiating hardball tactics on behalf of free speech? May I speak without fear of insulting the schizoid Turkish state, dead hee-haw headless horsemen heroes, nationalism, conservative Fascism and fundamentalism in the form of Islamic religious heroin addiction?”

“That’s a mouthful of here say. File a brief size small with elasticity.”

“Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than Iran and China,” said Zeynep. “Turkey ranks 154th out of 179 countries for Freedom of the Press.”

“Freedom is knowing how big your cage is,” said Lucky.

“Freedom is having no choice,” said Zeynep with an existential twist of sour lemon.

The Guardian

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