Big Time - TLC 13

One curious phenomenon in Turkey was the predominant and fashionable Big Time watch.

Big Time displayed itself in grandiose opulent design styles, rainbow spectrums and analog displays. He observed huge pieces illustrating manifestations of invisible time delighting wrists with panache and glamour. Frequent sightings of super-sized chromatic sundials featured a Kurdish weight lifter struggling to keep time overhead. For the majority of volunteer wage slaves heavy time dragged them through life.

A sweeping second hand swept piles of debris stranded on corners past idle bored women studying their undulating singular reflection in store windows between numerals 12 and 6.

A wild rabbit dragging a pocket Watch Out down Dreamtime Street yelled, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date, no time to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I’m late, I’m late.”

Rabbit passed Curious, a Chinese linguist at the intersection of Imaginary Fear & Enlightenment.

“What are you doing?” said Rabbit.

“I am begging people to open their head, heart, mouth and get to the verb. Where are you going in such a hurry Mr. Rabbit?”

“Through the looking glass.”

“May I go with you?”

“Do you have courage?”

“Yes. It's my most important virtue.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye. Let’s share an adventure.”

TLC 

How am I supposed to feel? - TLC 14

A brilliant kid in his second year of medical school expressed uncertainty in a TLC encounter. “How am I supposed to feel when I see these patients?”

“It’s about objective detachment with compassion. Emotional distance. Doubt is good. Do what you can. The rest is silence.”

“I am one of them. I am a patient. It's hard being a doctor. I don't know enough to help them. I am learning from more experienced students and doctors.”

“Pay your dues. We are all terminal cases. What do they tell you in the emergency room?”

“They tell me how I will learn how to keep my perspective over time.”

“True. What do you do to relax?”

“I go out with my friends to a club. I go to movies. I want to forget about all the terrible things I've seen at the hospital. But I am happy being a doctor. When someone puts on the white coat they feel special. They help people. I thought about becoming an engineer like my father but I saw how he only worked with machines, how at the end of the day he would come home and talk about electricity. It was interesting but I wanted more out of life. I wanted to understand DNA and genetic structures. I wanted to help others.”

“Helping others with kindness is your gift. You’re doing good work. Thanks for sharing with me.”

“You’re welcome. Being a doctor is hard. I don’t know how I am supposed to feel.”

TLC

King Louis - TLC 42

In Bursa the wireless signal from the Achebadem hospital emergency room was weaker than a heart monitor in Room 101 where you confront your deepest fear.

It’s the last room you want to enter next to the Genocide Museum in Nom de’ plume, Cambodia filled with 2,000,000 skulls. Ghosts inhabit The Killing Fields.

In the 1527 hammam near Culture Park hairy muscular men using eucalyptus tree bark scrubbed soapy clients and pummeled epidermis into oblivion. Pinpoint light filtered through stain glass. Illuminated businessmen relaxed in arched cubicles. An octagon hot pool rippled reflections of mosaic light.

Across town King Louis, a native barbarian, moved into the teachers’ apartment in a 10,000 year-old neighborhood. He was green, neurotic and angry. A tall invincible insatiable invisibility corrected his mean variation.

He’d escaped to Turkey after selling Chinese appliances and silicone breast of chicken implants in Berkeley-by-the-sea. He hated women. He loved Roman history. His perpetual fantasy was to be a Roman general leading warriors from Troy to Crete to Bursa.

“Take care of my horse,” he ordered the male TLC receptionist.

“Serve my food,” he commanded the female receptionist after a day expanding his imaginary empire.

They despised his attitude and character.

He sat around the apartment watching The History Channel. He loved German U-boats, planes, bombs, destruction, concentration camps, gas chambers, the Holocaust and death. He kept the volume LOUD while eating dill pickles from a jar. He was a big, loud, sad, passive-aggressive lonely jarhead. 

He’d last a month. He made everyone’s life miserable. He expended zero effort to understand the culture because he felt like he was entitled to be stupid and paranoid.

“I’m afraid they put something in my food,” he said one day referring to a restaurant below walls covered with graffiti screaming, “Romans OUT!”

“They’d have a good reason,” said a receptionist.

He washed his plastic clothes every day. He wasted hours, days and his pitiful life in the bathroom coloring his hair, trimming nose debris and afraid of germs, washing his hands until they disappeared.

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 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.