Bushido

Way of the warrior:

justice, courage,

polite, truth,

personal dignity

the world is

a simulation run by aliens

time manipulation

silence

comic commentary

on the tragedy

of forgetting

Boudhanath, Nepal

51 Days

The cost of the thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. - Henry Thoreau

*

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 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 Control 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 it’s too late - to file the required paperwork requesting work permits for your native speakers born and raised outside our glorious land of sea, sky and succulent tomatoes, speaking 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 warrior hero riding 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 and massacred like 1.5 million Armenians. 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. Desire, love and passion create suffering. Suffering is an illusion.

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

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

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

No paper no chance. Please note this text message to Lucky from Sit Down.

51 Days In Turkey

Earth Speaks

Earth is a spinning rock with a core, mantle and crust. It is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It’s round, wet and crowded. Fortunate humans live 100 years. A blink of an eye. Just be kind.

The core is 1,800 miles below the surface. The inner core is 750 miles thick. The temperature is 6700F. It is a dense ball of iron and nickel.

The outer core is 1,370 miles thick. The mantle is above the core. The mantle is 1,800 miles thick. The crust is 3.14 or apple Pie. A genius said, ‘there are lies, damn lies and statistics.’

Deep inside the core fire burns through levels of shifting Teutonic plates, shuddering massive pressure, blathering hot embers, fumes, mixing gases, molten silica and impatient promiscuous sulphuric acids.

This natural evolutionary pressure creates a gigantic orgasm, spewing, releasing, exploding, melting through the mantle to the crust, surface and into the atmosphere.

My volcano blasts ash cinder and molten rocks the size of small projectiles into the atmosphere where they fly, float, fall, dance and evaporate in wind.

Curling tsunamis wave goodbye to land.

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is an awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic teacher. Magma at work. Do not disturb.

Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. You die anyway, said Death. No Exit. This is natural selection.

You have a brain and a big toe. You are destined by natural selection to walk many journeys as a storyteller. Simple as that …

Nature said, I have no plan, agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, economy, government, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

I have total power … I am unpredictable … I am violent and benign … I am gentle, kind and generous … I giveth and I taketh away … Humans with their limited intelligence will never control me, manipulate me or own me … I create and I destroy. That’s my Nature.

Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds, said Oppenheimer witnessing an atomic test blast on the Bikini Atoll, according to Vishnu.

Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Tibetan Lord of Time.

Humans are naïve and lazy. They don’t pay attention to Nature until I shift plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake or rattle their sushi along The Ring of Fire. Blast off!

Humans use fire to cremate bodies. There are not enough vultures to eat the remains.

Ash, a natural by-product, goes with the flow.

Dummies

Blossom

Attention Ladies & Gentlemen!

Civilization is sterilization - an agreement to avoid the abyss. You look into the abyss and the abyss looks back at you.

History is the symptom and people are the disease.

This is a long dream sequence, said Zeynep, author of The Language Company. Mirrors are metaphors like Banlung, Cambodian nill gemstones of the Mind-At-Large. Keep a diamond in your mind, reflecting 10,000 points of light.

WE create myths and stories … We build sandcastles … We used to be someone else and we traded them in.

Hold a mirror to the sky reflecting Beauty. Hold a mirror to the ground reflecting a muddy path. Hello Truth. Hello Beauty. See all the Beauty without hope or fear. Life is sad & beautiful.

It’s a long walk. Walking makes the road. Nothing more. Nothing less. Less is more. We play with reality, impermanence and illusions of reality. We cultivate ambiguities, create imaginary identities and play with fact and fiction. We use lies to tell the truth. Fast, short and deadly. In the future more than five words is a run-on sentence. A life sentence ran away.

What’s the next question, said Grave Digger. I love good dirt. I know two things. Look at my hands.

I know the solution and wait for the problem, the opportunity, the big SURPRISE, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. Can we know death, said Leo, Good question, said Z. One should die at least once to appreciate life. One must die before they live. Most people are born alive and slowly die. Born dead we come to life.

Kill the Buddha. Kill yourself. Suicide is an honorable Asian way of saying goodbye with honor, dignity and respect.

Buddha said, I show you sorrow.

A blossoming voice has purity, love and truth. We know illusions of desire, anger, and ignorance. Pain, suffering, fear, loneliness and alienation kills the spirit, said Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung.

Alienation embraces uncertainty … Embrace the chaos.

A heartbeat contains a universe of infinite possibilities, said Zeynep, What is the difference between possibility and probability, asked Tran, polishing his prosthetic left leg.

How do we we dissolve monkey mind thought clouds and fleeting sensations to enhance our awareness and potential, said Omar a blind Tuareg Ghostwriter. Let it go, said Z. What does it mean to be a human being? Are you a human being or a hungry ghost? The reader completes the work of art. Yes, said Devina, Buy a ticket take the ride.

We are in exile with stealth and cunning.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Omar's Dream

A month later Omar returned to the caves to wait for me. He had a dream.

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw my scarred climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away since September 1, 2001?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, seventy guns.”

“Look like things have improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Along the concourse I studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware!

This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on neighbors and report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Be a Patriot Act.

Big Brother Is Watching 24/7

I’d created this reality with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Amnesia after centuries on the ground in Morocco and Spain I sat in my Tacoma tree house. I worked in a room bathed in light.

I had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter.

Inside shifting forest tides, I was buried beneath 150- foot tall Douglas firs waving in wind.

A blade’s swinging, singing weight edge sliced through old growth tree time rings with ferns, moss, and rain.

I sat down spinning out tales, weaving spider webs on a loom of time. My mirrors reflected everything.

I carried Omar’s palimpsest through the forest. It was a bird song trill and spring music with owls, ravens, crows, eagles and vultures circling on thermals offering shamanic visions of clarity, insight and ancient wisdom.

I established a refuge from the storm with simplicity, serenity and sanctuary.

Living on the edge I savored shelter in a bird’s song. Trimmed cuticles spiraled into spring. It snowed flowers.

I looked deep into the forest of the mysterious manuscript. It was true and filled with sensory details. I connected new narratives with Omar’s animal skins revealing adventures, quests, dreams, conversations and awareness blended with joy, delight, courage and healing energies.

People wondered and wandered, chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes. We see through our eyes not with our eyes.

I resumed my Spanish exile.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir