Less Is More

Part 2.

Mr. ON, a Chinese teacher, speaks to his English class
at Pineapple Appliance Factory #8...

Some of you clever cunning ones may use English skills to escape this dystopian existence.
Get out there.
Take risks.
Embrace uncertainty.

Daring is not fatal. Have more sex.
Wear a condom in the rain.
Make friends.
Create art.
Play with children.
Never grow old or up.

Stay 9 forever.
Erase your shadow.
Write a poem.
Draw in a creative notebook.
Take a line for a walk.

Play a cello in a cemetery.
Dig your grave and see if it fits.
Water rose thorns with tears.
Drum dirt.
Cultivate bamboo.

Release wolves into the wild blue yonder.
Dream big.
Shave your head.
Get your ears cleaned.
Weave ikat on the loom of time.

Expand your comfort zone.
Practice Zazen meditation for three centuries, three years, three months, three days and three breaths.

Lean against nothing.
Make a sandwich with baboons.

Discover a sharp utilitarian knife in an Ankara display case.

Operate The Dream Sweeper Machine in Hanoi and beyond wild.
Explore jungles with Leo the King of Cannibals.
Kill your father and marry your mother.
Fly free with Winter Hawk.

Travel a lonely planet gifting luck to strangers
as an aberration of their psychological
insecure projections

and defense mechanisms
based on their imaginary expectations
of greed garnished with kindness.

Security is an illusion.
Everything you know is a lie.
Everything is permitted.
I am an assassin in drag.

The Language Company

Chinese Pineapple Appliance Factory #8

Part 1.

Good afternoon students. My name is Mr. ON.

It rhymes with song, gong and long gone.

It is 5:59 p.m. if it was 6:00 p.m. I would say good evening, however it is still afternoon. It is late in our short sweet life.

Class meets twice a week for two hours. Show up on time, stay awake, do your assignments and bribe me. Cash only. No plastic. Nothing more. Nothing less. Less is more.

We are gathered here today in the glorious Chinese People’s Pineapple Appliance Factory #8 to begin our English lessons.

Your supervisor informs me you are here by choice and chance.

You don’t have a choice.

This is your chance.

Life gives you one chance. Am I clear?

Do you understand me? Yes no maybe.

Now. I know. You have been slaving in #8 since dawn. It is the end of another long, mind numbing grueling tedious day down on the killing floor. Work is hell for people. It’s also logical to say hell is other people.

English has brought us together. You face unique challenges to acquire English, the language of noble barbarians, running capitalist dogs, curs and canines.

Their bark is worse than their bite. You will try or don’t try is perhaps appropriate to say considering our passive cultural indoctrination and conditioning, to use said target language with meaning in context.

To maybe baby become fluent minus accuracy. It will require your undivided attention, chemical and electrical energy.

You will practice speaking, reading, listening and writing. These are the four basic language skills.

Output: Writing and speaking are active. You do it. Yeah-yeah.

Input: Reading and listening are passive. However, reading is active if a character’s internal/external emotional conflict engenders your feeling and identification with said character’s actions.

Learning is a never-ending dramatic process.

All of you will die before it’s complete.

That’s a humble unpleasant fact.

The Language Company

ABC

“Are we Asian or European?” said Zeynep the elder playing her cello resembling the human voice in a Bursa cemetery.

“Sadly,” said young Zeynep scribbling with black, red and blue ink on Moleskine parchment, “we'll never know our true identity. We suffer an existential identity crisis. 90% of Turkey is in Asia. We need talking foreign monkeys with clear pro-nun-ci-a-tion at TLC. Wow, it’s another day in a magical paradise.”

Zeynep knew her ABC’s. Always Be Closing.

Her grandparents had a restaurant near a shopping center.

Lucky wandered in one day before going to TLC. Shy and curious she watched him writing and drawing. He smiled, Hello. She stared. He pushed red, green, blue and black pens across the table, turned his notebook toward her showing a page of color gesturing to materials and a chair, come and sit down. You can draw. It’s fun. She was curious with courage.

Trust. They became friends.

Zeynep and Lucky created art daily in a ravishing food zone.

Bored anxious depressed adults devouring their dreams, nightmares and anxieties with plain white yogurt swallowed shock and awe. Lotus-eaters stared from deep vacuums with hard dark brooding eyes.

Want to make a deal?

How’s it feel

to be on your own

with no direction home

like a complete unknown

like a rolling stone?

When Z or L made eye contact adults glanced away with fear uncertainty and incriminating disbelief. Not to mention psychosis, repressed aggression and guilt complexes.

They didn’t see regular professional strangers here, let alone one talking, laughing, playing and creating art with a kid as an equal.

Adults listened at 10% or less saying yeah yeah or I am tired with panache.

They asked Z many questions without speaking.

What’s the melody?

How can you revert to primal childlike innocence?

Is the music in the cello? How do you get it out?

Why do you risk being free and independent?

How did you escape the tyranny of social conditioning?

How do you develop your wings after jumping?

Why are you always scribbling words or drawing or playing the cello?

Do you have mental disorder?

Are you on medication or meditation?

Is it contagious this art and music process of creativity?

Is it the food, air, water?

Am I this or am I dreaming?

"All of the above," said Z. "Good things happen when you take risks. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything?"

Adults were afraid to express repressed feelings. Too risky. Ain't nothing but the blues, sweet thing.

The Language Company

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.

“Here,” she said gesturing around the restaurant, “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 express their honest feelings, their innate desire for independence. 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,” said Lucky.

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was nine I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on 9. I exist outside adult time.”

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

The Director in Istanbul offered Lucky a new TLC adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in Ankara. 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 Ankara student articulated her desire to move to Istanbul for an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend.

She cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life," said Lucky.

"Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company

Simple Voice

After a reliable narrator

established a voice

geography, atmosphere, tone, conflict and cinematic jump cut action

employing minimum wage universal themes

like time, boredom, passion, loneliness and alienation

in an unforgiving universe of meaningless existence

with humor and curiosity holding hands

casting characters like plot

dragging others around

chained to their personality defects and character flaws

wearing original death masks

surrounded by distracted

simple, noisy, gadget addicted

compassionate illiterate peasants

in a play waiting for Godot

no one shows up

nothing happens

writing with a Mont Blanc 149 fountain pen

using Royal Blue invisible ink

on blank parchment

was pure luminous joy

Yangon, Burma