The Language Company

A knife contained a collapsible battery-operated emergency room in Achebadem, an expensive private Bursa, Turkey hospital with heart rate monitors, respirators, and dialysis machines, transplant mechanisms, microscopes and high-tech life support goodies.

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.

Dreams pondered historical inevitabilities: What is life? How did I grow? How did I get here? What if I die here? Who will be my unconscious role model? Who will save me from ultimate absolute reality? Who will feed me in a Peoples’ Communist Paradise dream reality where everyone shares toilets, kitchens and spoiled whining children? Where education is considered a waste of time and money? Where bribes are a way of life buying your future?

Bored Asians with an emotional level of -7 exchanged drab artificial lives playing on Fakebook, a glorious virtual electronic frontier of equality and equity enjoying hi-tech distractions with firewalls, corroded barbwire and rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent. Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

A boy brought brown tea, silver spoons and sugar cubes.

 “Prison is a refuge and a release,” said Lucky. “Solitary confinement, junkyard blues and an environmental impact statement: No one gets out alive. I was abandoned at five.”

 “We are all orphans sooner or later. What trauma happened in your childhood?” said the owner singing circular music clinking a teaspoon, “Twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder...”

 The Language Company

 

Your life is a work of art

Editor's note: Chapter 1 excerpt. The Language Company. Enjoy the ride.

Carpe Diem in Ankara, said a reliable narrator, Pluck the day when it is ripe.

Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.

He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.

“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.

“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”

“Is it a way, a path?”

“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”

“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”

“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”

“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”

“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.

Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.

 “Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage. 

"Becoming. Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”

 “Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”

 “Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”

“You don’t say.”

A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools. 

The Language Company

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Unpleasant facts are littered through TLC like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Creating field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos since 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English with fluency minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices

Dear of accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, and religions fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for your self.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden.

Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country. I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. Dissent is terrorism say our corrupt manikin authority figures.

Leo, the Chief of Cannibals revealed dystopian China. I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society.

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about Khmer culture and Cambodian history. We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. Rice comes first.

I dream I am a free person in a free country.

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, gratitude, abundance and wonder as an independent individual.

If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly, said Zeynep. You either let go or get dragged along. 

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

It's not about people buying this book, Zeynep said. It's about people reading it.

Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Zeynep the heroine genius.