Journeys
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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Tuesday
Jul282015

Down dream street - TLC 24

An unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad serene women facing arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love, happiness and financial security enlisted to become engaged to strangers across transcendental borders. 

This wave resembled an open hand gesturing the eternal present in a long now as one Turkish mother gifting her daughter fare well gestures watched her disappear into life’s teeming stream.

“Be well my love. You are in our hearts.”

Her daughter joined a tribe of singing women. They lived their dream making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation and mindfulness. The entourage of women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Mountains of Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.

Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.

“The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer. “It is a linguistic philosophy.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations,” said a monk in Kyoto writing seventeen syllable haiku. The moon is not your finger and your finger is not the moon.

“Where is this place?” said Curious in a strange village in a strange country on a strange continent on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.

“It is far away,” said a gravedigger with earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, corrupt politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust in dust, make millions off the sweat of wage slaves and congratulate each other on their mutual stupidity and insatiable greed.”

Winter Hawk winged women, “Go home. Return to your families and friends. Live in peace.”

Women followed their heart-mind.

“It’s tough living in dystopia where women are beautiful and sad,” said Zeynep. “Millions don’t know whether they are coming or going, going, long gone. They’ve fashioned well-defined living death masks from loss, hopelessness, confusion and uncertainty selling their tears and fears wrapped in silence, the loudest noise in the world. Millions wait for a forced marriage.”

Potential Turkish husbands gathered to draw lots. They drew with ink, pastels and charcoal. The charcoal came from a deep black shameless unconscious well of women singing, “Give me your sperm, your love juice. Give me a child, give me someone to love and protect carry forever, cherish and spoil with benign neglect. Give me your future. Give me a child who will help me bury your worthless corpse. We don’t care about adverbial labial love, it’s all arranged. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor. It’s an impossible love. It’s a matter of practicality. Business is business. Marriage first. Love later.”

“Here,” said a marriage broker offering his son, “accept this boy/man stranger into your heart. Give him a child and user-value with implicit assessment for money in a temporary security agreement. Open your legs swallowing his thick purple verb. Practice dramatic rising action, climax and falling asleep action with a happy ending. Sensational.”

“We breed, work and get slaughtered,” said a baby-bearing slave. Daughters wrapped these constricting words around their hearts in love’s tangled jungle.

Lucky never saw women taxi drivers in Turkey. It’s a male ego thing. Bright tires, spinning wheels. Toy’s For Big Tots show.

Idle retired or unemployed guys sat around in cafes from opening to closing playing backgammon and drinking tea. They slid wooden pieces carved from youth’s forgotten toy story. Young idle macho guys, the next generation of backgammon players played taxi symphonies in the horn section. Beep-beep.

Women knew better. They were more intelligent than men. They expressed their feelings. They lived longer. They knew how the world worked.

Courageous young women confronted parents. “I respect your traditional ideas about arranged marriages however to be honest, heavy, deep and real, it’s old fashioned conservative values and morals. This is 2014 not 1987. I am a member of a new freethinking educated generation. I am not willing to be a victim of your narrow-minded attitudes. I will choose my friends and lovers and potential husband based on my needs and our mutual sense of self-respect. I know why the caged bird sings chirp, chirp, set me free.”

 

Monday
Jul272015

Three Baboons - TLC 23

Watering red roses one rosy dawn on the Ankara balcony he met three baboons from a Russian tribe.

A blond corn-plaited hairy one stuck her head out a 3rd short story window and spit past trees. SPLAT. She looked around, smiling. Her upper teeth were small and sharp. He smiled. She jabbered sounds and articulated questions.

“Where do you come from?”

"Do you have money?"

“Are you alone?”

“Do you want sex?”

She strangled sounds but that’s the essence. Baboon language is simple and direct. Humans should be so lucky. He smiled. She smiled. They smiled at each other. She disappeared. She returned with two friends. One had dark hair, hard eyes and big floppy breasts. She shook them side-to-side.

“Look at these watermelons,” she said.

They were heavy fruit. Good enough to eat. Another baboon joined them. Blond, with sapphire eyes and straight short spiked bangs. She stuck out her tongue. A shiny silver post glistened. She was the playful one. Laughing like a child she rolled her tongue around, up and out, like a little snake, kissing phallus. Every now and then a one-eyed snake needs to find a cave. All three jabbered with inarticulate clear syntax.

“Where are you from?”

“Do you have any money?”

“Do you want sex?”

The plaited hair one got halfway out on the narrow balcony crouched down and opened her legs. She rode an imaginary wild mustang. Her eyes and face assumed a state of fluid ecstasy. Shake your moneymaker. The hard-eyed one massaged empty space.

He smiled at this spectacle. They laughed savoring the power of erotic visual suggestion. The silver-posted one flicked her tongue in and out like breathing. Full of energy they needed a verb.

Monkey see, Monkey say, Monkey do.

He waved currency at them. They smiled. He gestured I’m coming. They nodded and disappeared. He skipped downstairs, out the door, ran to their apartment and rang the bell. Ding-dong. Honey, I’m home. The blond plaited woman dragged him in and down a hall. “Ssh,” pointing at closed doors, “they are dreaming about their families in Kiev.”

They were polite. They played all morning introducing him to well lubricated Kama Sutra gymnastics. International relations improved. They made a triple-decker sandwich with trimmings. Let’s eat. 

 

Saturday
Jul252015

Take amazing risks - TLC 22

“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, “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. 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, he said, “When I was nine I was going on fifty. Now I am fifty going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she 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.”

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

The Language Company

 

Sappho

Thursday
Jul232015

Fried ego - TLC 21

In Ankara and elsewhere Lucky suggested to students they pay attention.

Many were too poor to pay attention, pay themselves first, or practice meditation calming their tortured heart-minds.

“Feel light about it, let go of your fragile ego. Fried ego is dust floating on the fluid of your eyes.”

Some released expectations. Others relaxed from grasping imaginary fears perceived as reality.

Reality is a crutch, or as Freedom said to his once-in-a-lifetime paramour, a crotch. So-called reality is a crock of shit said a passive girl getting a leg up. Hurry and finish money said to time. Take your time didn’t listen.

Other, acknowledging deeper emotional feelings, sensing heart’s wisdom-mind of intent practiced simplicity, serenity and compassion with gratitude.

Saturday
Jul182015

Zeynep the heroine - TLC 20

He expanded humans’ courage at TLC. This extraneous mixture contained Kiwi, American, Scottish and Turkish dialects. Distinctive voices contained ash, clouds, wind and intrinsic human needs for healthy unconditional loving relationships.

“Are your needs being met?” he said.

“Yes,” said Freedom. “I am free from need and the need for freedom.”

Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling Banlung sun tempered by a soft breeze he carried buckets of cement over exposed sewage drains and poured it on red dirt. He shoveled twenty-one muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. He pushed it to a New World Order construction site filled with profound greedy expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

Off a dusty road after dark Freedom caressed a hungry passive $10 lover inside a plywood shack with a dirt floor, bed and OK condom removed from neon, Blue Zircon and the tooth fairy.

Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang long lost hope. Her dead eyes said plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom, grinding desire assaulted heaven’s gate. Get to the verb faster, she whispered.

After fifteen minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below twinkling stars. See who shows up the night’s young, said one. We are tools, said another. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings up the Heart of Darkness.

The fat male moneyman slouching in a porch hammock watched flickering reruns under a red light special.