Turkish coffee - hotter than hell, black as death, sweeter than love

“Where are you? I needed the documents on Saturday, you promised.”

“Yes. I wasn’t here. I was leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes, leaving.”

 “Leaving what?”

“Leaving a comedy of errors.”

Lucky was a now. He delayed Sit Down. He learned to say maybe later in Turkey. It was lingua franca in inefficient micromanaged bureaucratic countries. Yeah, yeah.

Layers and years of later. He invented a tale. “I'll get them to you by Monday.” Ha, ha, ha. Monday turned into Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday. Lucky was a moss free rolling stone.

Please return to your seats. Fasten your seatbelt. Put your tray in an upright position and open your window blinds. Only the blind can see, said Omar adjusting his acuity.

Tuesday, October 30. Smell the scent and scene the screensaver scream team. His disappearance was discovered if you can discover a disappearance in a 4,000-year old historical zone.

Someone tried his line. A cold metallic message sang, “The number is no longer in service.”

It's a numbers game, said Profit Before People. They tried again. Ha, ha. No luck.

On the 30th, after the holiday, when Lucky was late for class, Ebru, the TEOL secretary in Giresun overlooking a Black Sea low cost coast harbor and Roman candle candy castles called him. No answer.

The previous week on the 23rd, she’d screamed in his cellular ear, “Where are you? You have a speaking class now.”

“I’ll be there in no time.”

At that decisive moment he was retuning his traveling shoes and salivating grilled meat. Coffee grounds coated his throat.

Turkish coffee should be hotter than hell, black as death and sweeter than love.

He showed up that afternoon and pushed TEOL students through a magic lantern language acquisition mirror.

A week later he was history.

Kill SIM

A German woman coughing on Flight 007 between Istanbul and Bratwurst via Bang Cock showed a refugee from Kiev how to fill out an arrival card for immigration.

A nervous confused Crimean woman wearing large silver hoop earrings fiddled with her passport and immigration documents misunderstanding quality of life values en route to sweet and sour Southeast Asian menu escapades with two daughters.

Ebru couldn’t find Lucky. His phone was dead. He’d turned it off and discarded the red Vodaphone SIM card into a green Re-cycle Through Re-Education Reform Labor Camp container at Gate 214 in the Istanbul pre-boarding zone while meditating on his death.

Passing through with élan.

He relaxed in 39B on an Airbus 330 with Winter Hawk gaining altitude.

Free to fly.

Bamboo exhaled.

The Language Company

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

Fujian is Workers' Paradise - TLC 87

Passing through vibrating unified energy fields Lucky walked home to visit his common-law wife and ghost relatives in Fujian.

The gravity of thinking observed the abyss between rich and poor in China was wide, deep and expanding faster than the universe. Rural annual wages - $1,600. Yearly city wages - $2,600.

Communist atheist leaders prayed economic stimulus incentives and cheap Yuan currency would encourage free citizens to buy rice cookers, plasma televisions, washing machines, microwaves, air conditioners, generators, refrigerators, motorcycles, electric bikes, luxury cars, destroyers, submarines, communication satellites, stealth fighters, Predator drones, labor saving robots and Dream Sweeper Machines.

Rusty loudspeakers squawked:

Consume Comrades. Get with the fucking program.

Lucky fantasied about owning a 4-wheel drive super-duper dream sweeper machine to ferry his merry family to Bursa, Hanoi, Sapa, Vientiane and Banlung animist cemeteries along the Heart of Darkness and renew relationships with Rita writer and Leo cannibal.

Where life is simple. Where gentle people never left their village, the world. No need or desire. Everything I have is here, said a shaman weaving life threads. The world is a village.

Lucky fountain penned Zeynep in Bursa, Turkey a postcard illustrated with an imperial yellow dragon protecting a luminous pearl:  

Dear Z,

I walked. I worked. I saved. I got lucky and bought a Flying Pigeon bike at a fire sale from a corrupt wealthy village official.

One-speed black. It got me from home to rice paddies. I reaped what I sowed.

We had a radio in our work unit. The publicity machine blasted Life Is A Party revolutionary anthems 24/7. Accelerate production comrades.

I saved and got a radio for home. My wife was beyond pleased.

She produced our required female child. Miracle. We desired a boy. She got pregnant again. Sex is fun. Responsibility is a duty.

Forced Abortion Committee officials visited at midnight. They screamed NO! It is forbidden. You do not qualify for two children. They tied me up and held a gun to my head. I was forced to watch. They aborted our child and sterilized her. We cried. They laughed, Always Be Closing.

We lost face in the village. Blending in was impossible.

Out of the quest-ion.

She wanted a TV to distract her from sorrow, guilt and shame. Ok, we’ll get a 24” flat screen with a remote. I worked. I saved. We hung it on a brick wall above our aborted fetus in a hermetically sealed glass jar and grainy images of our ancestors eating incense.

How about a new rice cooker, she said. Ok.

How about a used refrigerator, she said. What’s wrong with the plastic orange icebox? You buy cabbage, cauliflower, onions, leeks, turnip greens and fresh ice from writer Rita every morning. Why do we need a refrigerator?

Our neighbors have one. Oh, I see, got to keep up with the Yin- Yang’s. Envy and I scrounged around. I developed connections. Connections in China make the world spin and people feel dizzy. Millions fall down. I remember when you said fall up, Z. I’m still laughing at your insight. Anyway, here it’s whom you know not what you know. Greed is god, I mean good.

I traded twenty kilos of Quality Of Life rice for two brothel chickens from Human Province. I traded the chicks for Burmese teak, rubies and a sharp knife stained with Karen blood. One trade led to another. If you’re not fast you’re last.

Buy dirt sell sky.

I brought luck to others by walking around.

I found a filthy frigid fridge and traded the teak and rubies. My wife was beyond pleased. Wild. We filled it with cheap baby formula. The formula was tainted with a poisonous chemical to increase protein. We didn’t know this small unpleasant fact.

Our girl became sick. Her luck ran out.

Peoples’ Worker’s Hospital #9 said I had to pay BIG money for imported medicine or she’d die.

Life is cheap here.

I sold the fridge, downsized the TV and sacrificed my bike to buy pharmaceuticals.

She’s on life support. Now I walk to see her. It takes forever and a day. Walking makes the road. Bus #11 means legs. Next to an optimistic amputee in Laos or Cambodia I’m lucky to have a leg to stand on.

I dream of rich cities - bright beacons of prosperity with automatic cash machines for consumers like me flashing fake plastic. Dream on sucker. Polluted cities filled with food smells, construction projects, appliances and economic class warfare. I hope against hope for sustainable work and some blind stupid luck.

Party leaders say millions of workers will return to villages on Chinese New Year. To make matters worse six million college graduates flood the job market every June. Three million drown screaming I Need Help!

Radio static flickering radioactive images and disembodied voices order us to stay home. Be quiet. Keep your fat fucking mouth closed unless you are eating. Practice social stability and harmony. Save face. Blend in. 

May your life be interesting dear Z and filled with adventure - something that’s going to happen - and magical surprise from the get go.

I remember you saying we will abandon this manuscript with intuitive wisdom and courage, Z. Here it is, here it goes, free as Winter Hawk and Lone Wolf. Thanks:-)

Omar will gift you the manuscript when he passes through Bursa.

If you see Curious dancing with Humor and you will, hug her for me. People need five hugs a day for emotional health.

Love and gratitude with honeyed memories,

Lucky

P.S. You are a miracle.

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.