Sewing in Kampot

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 in Bursa, Turkey.

“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.

Take Amazing Risks

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“Learned helplessness. They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, Lucky said, “When I was nine I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” Zeynep said lighting a candle in darkness.

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

Oh the shame.

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company

We Had An Encounter

(Post coup, July 2016 - Turkey's government solidifies control over military, judiciary, medias, education. Over 120,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants suspended or dismissed, together with about 40,000 formally arrested.)

On a 5th floor balcony in Ankara, Turkey, Lucky fed wild birds, nurtured roses and played in good dirt.

He collected poetic and photographic evidence.

The rise and decline of Byzantine civilizations heard historians standing on street corners, lost highways or walking arduous mountain paths amid sweet smelling manure with tattered hats in hands pleading, “Give me your wasted hours. Give me your wasted hours.”

Besides helping students discover the courage to speak another tongue with an active voice at The Language Company he got a part-time job driving a taxi-bus.

At 9:11 p.m. he drove a 15-seater minivan to a Soviet-style apartment in a middle class neighborhood. A swarthy man named Pida Pie apple of his mother’s eye opened a sliding door.

A symphony of high heels announced a parade of skintight blond Russians. They purred into the taxi-bus. He smelled cosmetics, lip-gloss and sex. The night was young.

Sly Pide Pie got in.

“Go man go.”

Lucky delivered the ladies to The Kitty Cat Night Club and returned to the apartment for another load. By 10:10 p.m. he’d transported thirty.

“Pick them up at 5:15,” said Pide.

Lucky went home for a catnap with his estranged wife from an arranged marriage. She’d traded her sex for security and knew how to rub a ruble together.

After collecting women smelling of dancing, drinks and cold-blooded sex with diplomats and Turkish tycoons he took them home. High heels and acrylic language laughter faded. Dawn broke bread.

He stopped at a cafe for muddy coffee and aired out the taxi-bus.

Beginning at 7:00 a.m. he picked up kids for their daily dose of force fed feedlot education. They stumbled out of apartments piled in and fell asleep. Weeping mothers on balconies waving soiled red/yellow hammer and sickle cleaning rags sang good-bye to despondent sons and daughters.

A Chinese waif dreaming of autonomy had her eyes wide open. “Patience is my teacher,” she said.

“I remember you from the Fujian university. How did you get here?”

“I graduated with an M.A. in Languages, Humor and Courage. I stowed away on a ship leaving Shanghai. It sailed through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal and into Izmir. I hitched here and got lucky. I discovered a nanny position with a family. I tutor their kids and teach Chinese calligraphy at the school.”

“Great wild future. What happened to your dream about being a waif?”

“No fear. It’s in The Dream Sweeper Machine. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am Curious.”

“Nice to meet you. I'm Lucky.”

“Sure you are. May I drive?”

“Why not,” giving her the tantric wheel of life.

“Wow,” she said, shifting gears, “this is fun. Let’s see how slow we can go.”

At 8:15 a.m. he returned home for a shower, good eats and dreams.

At 2 p.m. he walked to The Language Company. Students were doctors, lawyers, health care workers, engineers and university students. He was a guide from the side through etymology, phonology and morphology. The majority had passive verbs down.

“How are you,” he asked.

“So-so,” sang the chorus. “Tired. We need Xanax.”

Finished at 9:00 p.m. he started the Russian roulette acquisition cycle. “Put one in my chamber,” whispered a leggy blond. “My safety is off and I am well lubricated.”

Every morning, working with Omar, a blind Touareg amanuensis from the Sahara, whom Lucky befriended by fate in Morocco two days before 9/11 while on a six-month hiatus from the united states of consumption, they finished polishing a gonzo memoir. A Century Is Nothing. Omar sent it out.

Fifty unemployed suicidal literary agents huddled around a fire in a Benaojan cave south of Ronda, Spain read Omar’s epic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings and dancing shadows displayed bison, deer, archers, and crude time-comb slashes. Red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

Agents concurred. It isn’t mainstream and too experimental. We can’t realize 15% from this. Thanks but no thanks. Let’s burn it to keep warm.

Omar published it independently in October 2007. He loved the do it yourself process: text, blurb, design, basic marketing and cover image of a Chinese girl.

“Yes,” Omar said, “it’s almost as true as if you can believe it.”

Few read it and fewer understood it.

Lucky shared it with friends and strangers. His best friend buried a copy in an Arizona time capsule.

Omar sent copies to nomadic Blue Men in the Sahara.

Through Constantinople publishing contacts it was available at D&R Books in Ankara, Bursa, Timbuktu and a big river in South America.

They selected the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality in Maija, a poor village in Fujian, China.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at Lucky, a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared. She didn’t know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words, singing and dancing. His laughter and smiles were a relief from the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn’t want to be prisoners any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, fear, paranoia and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers struggled behind oxen in rice paddies. Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

Leo said, “Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic for years. Why are so many students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers.”

Self-censorship, shame, insecurity and humiliation devoured steaming white rice and subversive dreams.

In Ankara with Omar’s blessing Lucky signed copies. It was a strange sensation spilling green racing ink from a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen on parchment fibers.

The first copy was for Attila the Hungry, a large bald man with a spectacle business. He sold Omar BanSunRa-Ray glasses on spec-u-lay-shun.

“The future looks brighter than a total eclipse,” said Omar.

In 2012 while living in Cambodia, Lucky and Omar cut the original to shreds, polished it and published the 2nd edition with Create Space on Amazon. Omar selected a new cover image of a serene Nepalese grandmother and granddaughter.

The Language Company 

Weaving A Life (Volume 4)

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Collecting data. Field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos beginning in 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 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 and 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, religions and states 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 yourself.

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.

"As a literary outlaw 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 authoritarian figurines."

Leo 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 her 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. 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, humor, gratitude, abundance, and wonder as a free thinking individual. I have my junior philosopher's badge."

"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," Rita said. "It's about people reading it."

Shit Detector in Turkey (48% said no thanks)

One Sunday evening Lucky walked along a narrow Bursa street in Turkey.

Kurdish mothers in headscarves extended thick manicured necks beyond balconies observing street life. Women swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules out over blood stained escarpments.

They married newly consecrated relatives during fifty-minute encounter sessions designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering old memories overlaid with new linguistic impressions.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult.

The president plays his hand.

Glorious grand immediate silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling, tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings, resonance, and chromatic silence paused with reflection and flight. Symbols of forgotten strumpets playing music between notes wailed solitary notes across an abyss.

Creased faces ironed brilliant red roses petals. Faces embedded themselves between pages in a worn black unlined notebook.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions eating lonely tears in a tomato based culture buried ancestors.

Water exploded off pools as happy hour birds heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears after assembling French cars at a Bursa eco-friendly green plant.           

“Welcome to Earth. Hello babies.”
            “Were you punished for being a dreamer?”
            “No. I was fortunate my family understood my nature. They respected my need for solitary time.”
            “I see,” said a blind beggar.
            “Wipe your glasses with what you know.”
            “I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician.”
            “Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”
            “Brilliant.”
            “Fascinating. We learned to say fascinating in finishing school instead of bullshit.”
            “You have a built-in shit detector.”
            “Ain’t that the fucking truth? Everyone needs a shit detector here in Turkey."

Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable fiction-memory?”

Lucky passed his double identity twin theory below the surface of appearances at Ozmanhomogenized Gazi metro station. Two gravediggers wearing long black overcoats carried umbrella projectiles. Stepping into unknown futures they stabbed cement in cadence.

Green Metro cars slid into the station. Lucky sat across from a boy, 10, his mother and father. His father’s hands were hard calloused. They were simple working people from Van in the east. The boy smiled, fascinated by whirling prisms of light flashing past windows.

His father pulled up his son’s shirt. On his chest were two plastic suction cups and a small machine the size of a deck of cards. Ace high. A heart monitor measured his beats, his life rhythm, and his regularity. His father checked the display, saw the cups were secure and dropped the shirt.

“It is a machine for my son. It helps him,” he said with tired eyes. “We got it at Hospital A. Doctors said it was essential for his life.”

After the shirt covered his chest the boy and Lucky smiled, cupping their hands around eyes scanning the universe. They were explorers with magnifying glasses.

He’s a happy kid. Not afraid of a thing. We should all be so fortunate. Especially all the tired Turkish adults streaming their life tales, “Oh pity me. I am so, so tired.”

Talk to the kid. He’ll tell you how tired really feels.

Echoes of digger umbrella projectiles on stone faded near young lovers huddled on benches, a beggar crash landed on tarmac, head scarfed wrapped women with sacred scared eyes, children on curious adventures and wide eyed echoes along green tracks leading into dark tunnels disappearing into a wilderness of snow blanketed forests where two black shawled women negotiated muddy paths through foliage waiting for spring to thaw out relationships with nature.

Rabbits running in the ditch The Season of the Witch.

Living breathing biped accidents craved a place to happen with clarity insight and precision. Pearl letters played out on a fragile necklace of water bead molecules in an instant in eternity.

Time is a strung-out pimp looking for salvation, a fix an exit.

The Language Company

Playing a Turkish lament in Trabzon.