Remember ABC - TLC 37

Said the Director of Sales at TLC.

“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.

“Always be closing.”

Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be homeWaiting For Godot.

Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.

An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.

Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:

Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.

The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.

That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.

The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.

Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”

Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.

“He’s here,” said the receptionist.

“Who?”

“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”

“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”

Buy low sell high.

Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.

Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.

“Who’s next?”

The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.

“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.

“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.

 TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”

He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.

“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”

 *

L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

Temporary management art - TLC 35

Bursa brought in a young teacher named Instant Bull. He didn’t last long. He missed the nightlife, friends and mommy who after 100 tearful years still did everything for her little baby boy. He was spoiled like everyone. He ran home pleading, Mother, may I grow up to be free and courageous? No. Go to your room, no dinner and no social network time bandits. Self-censorship is everything we believe and practice with mind body and soul so shut your trap.

Management brought in Spin, a schizophrenic alcoholic from Down Under. Night after night he carpet-bombed the teachers’ apartment with demonic deliriums.

“They’re here, they’re here,” he wailed in catatonic fits thrashing on the floor flailing nuclear arms into space. “Help me. They will kill me. Look, can’t you see them?”

“What can I do about this idiot?” said a scared shitless rail thin female Turkish/English teacher on temporary duty. The brilliant neurotic girl from Hoagie Sophia, her black hair clogging shower drains, addicted to TV, sugar and perpetual sadness missed her mother.

Communicating through sewer channels she told Constantinople management Spin had to go. They yanked him out like a bad molar.

She’d been with the company for five years as a Personal Tutor doing bi-linguine translations. Her English placation skills enabled students with false modesty. She’d quit for a translation job with another Istanbul company, discovered it wasn’t so hot after all and returned to TLC dragging her miscalculation.

Now she worked as a management spy. Istanbul gave her a title: Director of Personal Tutors. She traveled to nine centers evaluating and training tutors. She knew the system. Her social skills were shit. She was the perfect corporate drone head. 

Lucky met her in Ankara where she spied for a month. She spent her time chatting with her yet to be met and later to be left boyfriend in Johannesburg. “I hate Ankara.”

“If you want to play the blues you gotta pay your dues,” said Lucky.

“I’m tired of dealing with shallow minds above and below me,” she said sipping tea on the balcony. Bamboo listened.

“I am one of them, sent around to keep an eye spy on barbarian natives. They told me to train the tutors who’ve seen through my transparent disguise. I’m not fooling anyone but myself. I got the promotion I wanted and they used me.”

“Welcome to The Dream Machine.”

“In the future I will escape to Johannesburg and live with a paroled heroin junkie running a safari eco-outfit. I will wear an orange day glow jumpsuit emotionally attached to my despondent mother in Istanbul. Mama spends her life chained to a sink filled with life’s dirty dishes.”

Late one day as Lucky tended rose petals, thorns and fed Winter Hawk day old bread annoying idle businessmen slouched against a BMW downstairs yelling, “Where in the hell are all these crumbs coming from?” the director called from Constantinople.

“Would you like to move to Bursa?”

“Yes. When?”

“Next Monday. We need stability and maturity in the new center.”

“The center is a spiral of stardust. I’ll bring Bamboo. Thanks for the chance.”

His life was walking, writing, photography, helping others be more human, and spreading prosperity. Nurturing Bamboo as a calm lunatic he passed through with detached discernment. He was Mr. Fix-it, Mr. Dependable and a stable element in the periodic language table.

After he settled into Bursa, management realized they needed more temporary help. They brought in an experienced sadomasochistic Australian misogynist from another center to manage the show for ten days. He was fifty, a divorced womanizer with relationship and alcohol issues, an aggressive fool pawing female students and chatting with his twenty-one year old girlfriend in city E. He knew the TLC system and little else. He had a long running feud with management. They fired him.

The revolving TLC door circled through ineffective zones.

* 

 “People here in Turkey,” said Zeynep, “are good at two things, eating and sitting. Sleeping and fighting are close behind.”

“Yes,” said a rag and bone merchant boiling clothing and animal skins for Omar’s palimpsests, “we are surrounded by fools and incompetents. Reading and writing is for people with time, money, critical thinking skills, courage, humor and a future. Not to mention social intelligence. Natives make perfect excuses. They celebrate their perceived victimization and prolonged adolescence with self-pity and loathing.”

“Have you eaten yet,” asked Curious. “We always ask people about food first in China.”

“It’s the same here,” replied Zeynep, “satisfying basic needs.”

A chorus of 15,001 Chinese university students sang, “The less I do, the less likely I am to make mistakes, and the fewer mistakes I make, they less I am criticized. It’s easier to do nothing.”

“Thanks for a long sentence filled with verbs and truth-value meaning,” said a Cambodian orphan caressing a Burmese ruby reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe.

“My name is May Be,” said a Turkish woman filing for divorce after centuries of emotional totalitarian terror. She faced her family, friends and strangers with fresh self-esteem.

“He lied to me. I saw through his deceit and irresponsibility. I sent him home to his mama. When he realized his stupid shallow emptiness he ran back pleading, exhorting, crying, bribing and threatening me with personal, physical and emotional disaster, trouble, death and so forth. I didn’t buy his song and dance. It’s rare for a woman here to file for divorce.”

Winter Hawk sang a single throated bird song: freedom’s knowing how big your cage is.

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” said Zeynep doodling on papyrus.

“Memories are for navigating now,” said Lucky. “What I’m telling you is true, or at least as much of it as I remember. I know I have false memories. Everyone does. Imagine people in a world without memory. No past. No things, objects, identification, grasping or attachment. Only patterns and sensation forms like flowing water or butterfly wings brushing air. Living in an eternal present.”

“You are brilliant. Let’s practice ZaZen.”

After meditating on the nature of comedic existence they witnessed human temerity, guilt, fear, shame and humiliation. Heavy sadness. Adult maniac manikins wore artificial death masks decorated with perpetual mediocre distracted confusion.

He’d seen it in the Middle Kingdom as Li Po and Tu Fu's poetic ink danced on parchment, expanding nature’s sublime story.

He absorbed it in Asia Minority seeing bored, tired idle people swallowing Xanax by the handful, eating grilled meat, playing backgammon and twiddling idle retired thumbs as Metro cars crammed with morose living dead idle humans dressed in black mirroring idle heart-minds zoomed to metallic industrial Ostim wasteland o-zones outside Ankara before returning at midnight filled with carved wooden caskets of wasted youth from the never-ending war in Serious on the Syrian border.

Gravediggers and headstone carvers enjoyed steady work with dead matter.

Defrost your imagination - TLC 32

“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.

“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook. She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.

Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.

A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.

A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.

“I need to move you.”

“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”

“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”

“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”

“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”

“I need a new adventure.”

“Don’t we all. Here you go.”

Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.

“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”

The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”

The Language Company

 

Another day in Mandalay

Sewing - TLC 29

A sewing woman returned to her Kampot guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and rode to the local market inside a dirt labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling silver stars, moons and small reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement attiring engagements, weddings and cremations.

She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her universal process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections and ironing.

Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative behaviors, attitudes and opportunity-value cost. Thread followed their conversations. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.

All explanations have to end somewhere.

Sky darkened

Ceremonial tribal drum thunder sang

Vocal intensity

Lonely lost suffering

Foreign faces

In Cambodia

Shuddered with fear

What if I die here?

How will my family and friends realize my intention to witness 1200 years of dancing Angkor laterite stoned history in gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes? 

Lightning flashed skies

Giant flashbulbs

Illuminated petrified children

Buried inside cement caverns

Floating bamboo homes

Eyes

Eating cartoon images

On plasma screams

Skies opened

Rain lashed human crops

Rice blossomed green

Cloud tears cleaned earth

Sweet dreams baby

Rita, Ice Girl in Banlung smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest.

Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.

Aggressive market women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied value in exchange for meat, fruit, vegetables, gold, cotton and silk.

Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams above fractured cement and mislaid wooden planks covering sewage channels with debris, feathers, jungles and jangled light particles, financial dealers surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery.  

Lucky and Zeynep played a musical interlude.

“I know the music but forgot the words,” said an adult swallowing Xanax.

“Music is the fuel,” said Zeynep spinning her Sufi dervish trance dance.

An Anatolian mother intent on cleaning disorder - afraid of losing control of chaos because nature loves a beautiful mess - on her apartment balcony after shaking out wet underwear, dish towels and frayed family threads, hung them in shameful angry regret and slammed her door on dervish music, It's the devil's music.She loved sitting in dark rapacious self-pity waiting for a jingle jangle phony tone.

“Are you alive?” she said to her cellular daughter.

“I survived,” said a disembodied voice.

“Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“I’m with a tribe of women. We’re breaking down and breaking through old conservative values. They are so narrow we’ll need a crowbar or acetylene torch or C-4. We’re developing personal empowerment and dignity. I’ll be home someday mother. I’m doing my healing work.”

Her voice died. Swallowing ignorance mother lapsed into healthy doubt’s quicksand.

At sunset an imam’s recorded voice twittered from a mosque near Achebadem, “Allah is great and merciful. Buy a ticket.”

Push Play.

The Language Company 

Bamboo - TLC 27

Reflects vigor, life, energy, zeal, endurance, integrity, patience and resilience.

Lucky carried small strong Bamboo to Bursa.

Freezing January snowflake feathers fell. Adults in the Ankara bus terminal stared at thin green life floating through their transition zone.

Luminous leaves remembered spring, soil, light and resilience. Smiling children understood Bamboo’s natural motivation, intention and freedom.

He propped Bamboo into a meshed container, fronting seat sixteen. They travelled west for six hours.

They passed glittering snowfields. Solitary brown-feathered Winter Hawk rested on ice-crested branches above frozen animal tracks. Silver-white trees sparkled crystal diamonds under a blue sky. 

After winter they scaled steep mountains into autumn. Bamboo witnessed silent snow peaks. Late afternoon light played in red wispy clouds.

Descending they departed seasons. Winter became fall in reverse, green moss, summer fruit trees. A farmer on a tractor plowed spring soil. “Ah,” whispered Silent Spring, “I am ready for my turning. I feel blades in my furrows dancing with roots...”

Bamboo pressed green leaves against a window.

“Where am I going?”

“Yes,” said a leaf, “it’s an amazing Zen meditation in a long now.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a leaf turning a page.

They reached Bursa on the western edge of The Silk Road. Bursa began in 200 A.D. below Uludag (Mountain of Monks) 2,543 meters high, edging snow stone above forests toward Roman thermal baths and mineral rich waters.

They found a temporary room at Achebadem, a private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care visual spectrum color theory filled with young lovers living emotional zombie lies of healthy doubt and uncertainty.

Downhill from the hospital a crying middle-aged man holding an orange hospital folder waited above groundat a Metro subway station. Folder contained papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis and a definitive medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying - a wife, child, uncle, someone he loved.

He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to transport him down the line to his 700-year old Ottoman mountain village of Cumalikizik.

Sharing his tale he’d spill the unabridged package of loss and memory on a hand-hewn oak table surrounded by friends and relatives. Say it’s not true, said a grieving ancestor thumbing medical leaves. It’s a true fact, he said, they left us, alone, we are grateful for their love and our memory. We cry for the living, not the dead.

Hypodermic needles named Pain and Pleasure sharing fabulous silent conversations laughed on life support.

Walking past the hospital Lucky smelled red, white and yellow roses. A bird pressed itself against a rose thorn to make her self sing. He whistled hello. Bird’s refrain was a short sharp interlude trilling a deep symphonic vibration-throated free mystery with harmonic warbling scales.