Dance the Paperwork Shuffle in Turkey

Editor's note: Dancing in Turkey became more chaotic in July 2016.

Fill us in on the exciting and rousing conclusion from October 26-31, 2012 to be exact, said Zeynep.

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 with mom and dad 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 their power and authority game 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 its too late - to file the required paperwork requesting work permits for your native speakers born, raised and reared outside our glorious land of sea, sky and succulent tomatoes 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 sad warrior hero on 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 in Armenian forests and massacred like 1.5 million. 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. Love and passion create suffering.

WE, Authority do our best to make the paperwork process cumbersome, illogical, frustrating, idiotic, mind numbing, depressing, sushi ideal and heavy real deep shit for brains.

We love paper. It’s why, as you've seen in Bay (male) or Bayan (female) toilets absence of paper products. We use holy water imported from the Vatican via Soapy Arabia to blast orifices. Water is sweeter than pleasure principles smothered with honey.

Everything here needs a permit: breathing, laughing, dreaming, dancing, drawing, writing and meditating. A government issued signed stamped official document.

No paper no chance.

Please note this text message to Lucky from Sit Down.

The Language Company

Turkey in 2012 - TLC 88

Lucky Foot-notes:

In 2008 at TLC in Bursa, Noor, a personal tutor told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. I was born there and it’s beautiful.

In the summer of 2012 he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon. They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar. Reconnect with Z, meet diverse people, make images, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom. Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

My Beautiful Surprise - 51 days in TURNKEY

Lucky scribbled make it new day by day make it new.

Get it down now and make sense of it later, said Other Muse.

Giresun and Black Sea. BS.

Write a simple declarative sentence. Telegraph. Stop.

I travel my life. If I stay too long in a place I go blind.

Economics 101. Opportunity cost. Cost-benefit ratio. ROI.

Probation is a 2-way business arrangement. Trust and verify.

If you want to play you pay with time/money.

Trade your time for a handful of dimes.

You play the game or the game plays you. Roll the dice.

Theme: Deterioration of Turkish educational quality and FEAR. Citizens choose religious fundamentalism or nationalism with totalitarian leadership. Emulate idiotic TV soap opera programs.

Blind Turkish citizens are worried about money and personal appearance.

Turkish women laughing in public are shamed, arrested and exiled.

Consumerism: Phones, watches, clothing, cars, guns. Artificial empowerment is achieved by buying things. Economic development. Greed is a hungry insatiable animal.

Insecurity and ego love the chaos. Embrace your fear.

Gun culture. Emasculated.

Repressed aggression.

The Language Company

trabazon turkey education

Critical mass.

Diamond in your mind.

Siem Reap-bandaid-Istanbul-Trabazon on the Black Sea

Movement ~ artificial airline plastic environment.

In the air. Renewal of awareness. (Transit)

Caresss divine details: landing, arrivals, departures.

5.9.12 Trabazon, Turkey

TEOL (crazy English)

Administrator teaches teachers about SYSTEM.

Free notes based on observing her.

1. People see in pictures. Visual.

2. Set clear objectives. "Today we...."by the end of class you will be able to...

3. Input-output

4. ESA (engage, study, activate)

5. What do you see?

6. Can you say more? - expand line of questioning...

Daring is not fatal. Take a guess.

How it works. Flexible. Changes. Communication.

How you feel IS more important than what you understand.

Before Indonesia - TLC 75

Behind reinforced plate glass Istanbul airport windows near conveyor belts and x-ray security machines was everyone who stayed behind - guards, cleaners and Konya dervish dancers.

An attractive thin-legged blond duty free clerk finished her day shift and stripped down for her baboon floorshow at Kitty Cat Night Club. Get down sweet thing, said a Turkish Deep State operative. Shake your moneymaker, said his bodyguard.

She drifted through life with clowns, misfits, literary outlaws, gravediggers, social deviants and manic depressed tourists waiting for airline workers to clean toilets, load beverages and MSG processed food onto Luftwaffe flight 3343 destined for Bang Cock as late afternoon light slashed through terminal dungeon zones of serenity.

“Travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s an adventure,” an American father said to his whining son on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Phosphorous. Staring at golden needle mosques, blue waves and catamarans sailing the seven seas they slathered red jam on toast.

After a year soaking in a wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject polite and emotionally distracted future tense void-like dream sequence passed through frequencies where idle people sat around showing no incentive and no desire to be creative or think for themselves as if their loss, their fate was always a long now.

They’d failed to take control of their lives as willing victims in life’s short sad joke.

One was the sullen masked security woman in her 20’s, forced by economics to meet and greet departing strangers. Lucky put his Eagle pack on the conveyor.

A laptop, 120-year old Monte pocket watch out, Leica rangefinder and cell phone went in a plastic tray. Stuff rolled away. She approached. “Do you have any knives in your luggage?”

“Yes,” he said to her death mask, “in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are silver with turquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone streaked with brown earth colors.”

Insecure security personnel wore death masks to confuse angry spirits eating incense minus verifiable identification. 

Her mask said, I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything in general and nothing in particular I could shit a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of torpedo feces grilled to perfection in a tomato based food culture served with onions and wedges of lemon garnished with sour reality. 

“Open your bags,” said her edgy mouth behind cotton fibers.

“Which bag would you like me to open, big or small?”

“The small one and where’s your passport?”

She’d never have one. He handed it to her and she really wanted to be important, self-sufficient, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventurous, and other impossible to imagine allegorical brave daring metaphorical nightmares in her short sweet life controlling the situation with this Bardo traveler free on parole from a dusty Byzantium archeological dig caressing pottery shards, glazed Ottoman tiles, castles and mosques while stirring musical sugar cubes in brown tea and weaving magic carpets in Kurdish villages under perpetual attack by Predator drones released by aggressive profit motivated war mongers to keep the anxious populace guessing and manipulated 24/7 by terrorist media FEAR propaganda machines controlled by moronic corrupt inefficient political idiots serving as an excuse to waste money on expensive military toys as global environmental, educational and health care systems collapsed under the weight of corruption, greed and eight billion starving mouths. 

After dusting off Patriot mussels and fixed-wing Turkish military aircraft for Syrian no-fly zones, hand carved Meerschaum pipes, glazed ceramics and Roman ruins he unzipped the small Eagle bag.

Winter Hawk flew free.

Lone Wolf ran free.

Shocked back to a fake reality she rummaged. She found music. She couldn’t hear beatific notes blooming along broken-hearted trails of Turkish and Kurdish women fleeing from arranged marriages.

She didn’t hear singing, keening women drumming soil above a wooden Ankara casket six feet down or melodies composed at transcendental borders coalescing with feminine songs birthing, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. 

She went through the motions.

“You can go,” she ordered in a short, fast deadly sentence.

Go was music to his ears.

The Language Company

 

King Louis Says Bye-bye - TLC 68

King Louis’s temp visa expired. Someone conspired. Who did it? Only the Shadow knows. And then, lo and behold, the tall handsome paranoid excommunicated hulk of a Roman ruin fled.

He gifted two native teachers a used bottle of stomach medicine, an empty pickle jar and a keening Irish green bottle of olive oil.

He carried eight bags of Roman history to his lover’s car. Ms. Linguist, his x-factor for what it was worth considering their short-term tumultuous erotic relationship headed for the auto-gar bus station. Next stop – Instant Bull.

On July 5th management called THE HULK into the office.

“We are not sending you to Moscow.”

He shriveled into his seat. Whoops, I really fucked up big time.

“Yes, you did,” said the Director. “You made life miserable for Bursa staff. Your archaic cavalier chauvinistic attitude was abysmal. In other words you were a colossal jerk.”

“I need to get this down now and make sense of it later,” said Zeynep scribbling a film noir treatment.

Louis thought he was smarter than the average bear. He was Yogi-Fide, denied, stratified, petrified and ossified.

“Anyway,” continued the Director of Barbarians, an obscure title minus power, “you won’t see Moose Cow with this company. There’s no way José we’d even consider sending you to a sister company in the frozen north with your attitude.”

“What’s going to happen to me? O my goodness gracious great balls of fire. Don’t tell me I have to return to the glorious land of unemployed free Mandingo slaves hawking refrigerators, microwaves and washing machines.”

“As you well know you’ve overstayed your tourist visa,” said big D. “This is a legal problem and we can’t help you there. You are in violation of residency laws and will leave today. You will not be allowed to return to Turkey for 3,000 years. We are giving you official notice that your contract with TLC is terminated effective immediately.”

“Great Scott. I had such grandiose plans for conquests and adventures roaming ruins, scaling Byzantium towers and feeding beggars Simit as freezing dawn broke bread while eating delicious black olives, freshly sliced tomatoes, winding my big time watch out and,” pausing for dramatic effect...“I need to get to the verb.”

“You’re fired.”

Charbroiled on searing heat. Skewered. King Louis was flame grilled and basted with spice is-land juice.

 The Language Company