Street Talk

Captain Tremendous Tremor here again with an update from the dead zone of grieving Chinese parents and crushed kiddies. One reality shows to go ya where Big Brother wraps barbwire around collapsed schools preventing parents from rescuing 10,000 kids. Educational corruption and fear thrives in a Brave New World.

If you want to play you must pay. We know so much and understand so little.

“I don’t understand a thing. Let’s take the day off and be creative,” sang Zeynep, “grab our cameras and tale a walk.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed through ephemeral effervescent worlds healing strangers. Free non-transferable luck was distributed to the needy.

Air simmered grilled meat aromas in a tomato culture as swirling silver musical spoons tickled tea glasses. Seven tonal notes create cosmic spectrums.

Inside Ulus alleys near Ankara laughing blacksmiths with calloused hands burnished musical metallic containers. Friends forged balconies, grates, bars and enclosures on anvils with Thor’s hammer. Gateless gates.

A coal man loaded bags of black on his back. A cornered Russian mistress wearing diamonds on the sole of her shoes waited for rich monkeys. A weaver loomed geometric silk ikat threads. A father taught his son the art of carpet repair. Needle led thread. Dusty stories coagulated and copulated on teakettles rusting atop Roman burial slabs covered in binary codes.

Expanding universal maps and NSA spy satellites collected data.

Total information awareness. TIA.

A peasant woman rolled dough to make ravioli-like manta pasta. A brown snail carrying its spiral galaxy home scaled green and white stones as waving antenna received signals from orbiting space-time Dream Sweepers.

Head scarfed Kurdish women inside stone path shadows near crumbling straw packed homes with broken wooden slat shutters sat in a sacred circle talking and rolling spicy grated seeds into grape leaves. Thick meaty fingers toiled. Heavy 24-caret golden bracelets reflecting scattered light led to undiscovered archaeological sites for sore eyes and a doctoral thesis on amalgamated dust.

“It’s true to report that everyone in Turkey is psychologically well adjusted, employed and content with their free life,” said Zeynep.

“You’re dreaming, delusional or telling real lies,” said Curious.

“Made in the shade, cool baby,” Lucky said. “This is to say with precise specific clarity they have the courage to speak, are never tired or afraid of falling in love and marrying someone outside their rigid social and/or economic class. They take amazing risks and suffer greatly with gratitude.

"Photographing the universe they rent time-share apartments in black holes sucking matter into a void. Some scribble or doodle unintelligible non-linear calligraphic ideograms. The majority disappears into phosphorescent television monitors where they absorb political blather and fake reality shows. Media buys them. They give up their consciousness and miss the show.”

In Bursa a father + two son trash collection team pushed a rolling cart loaded with discarded plastic computers past crumbling Ottoman buildings secured behind barbwire and rusty locks. Faded orange and blue pigments peeled a long lost hollow bell.

One freezing morning a grandmother staring at Ottoman history lifted her child’s child to an iron-grated window. Zeynep, an invisible street photographer present with empathy squeezed a soft shutter release. A whirling dervish painting with light in continuous mode murdered time.

“Freedom is essential in my life. I control the result with spontaneity. I develop real relationships and embrace extreme situations. I’m a photographer who needs to travel. If I stay in one place I go blind.”

“Our images communicate light, story, form, emotion, information and raw aesthetics,” said L.

“Emotional impact. Photography is more art and intuition than process and procedure,” said Z.

In a warm art studio overlooking a fast icy river flowing from Uludag a female flute player fingering emptiness explained melancholic notes. Her chattering laughing friend created marbled flower art using pinpoint dabs of color in a tray filled with hot wax.

A white seagull’s calibrated internal navigation system negotiated air currents with Winter Hawk, Lone Wolf, 101 Screaming Eagles and Labrys of raging violin string theories. Piano melodies and hard bop jazz improvisation reinforced Bamboo resilience.

A 19% waxing crescent moon danced with clouds. Moon remembered moons in Augustine Fujian. Eat moon cakes, said Curious. Feed dead ancestors with filial duty. A cruel heartless forgotten forgiving month heard sky welcome moon. Clouds explored atmospheric conditions.

HELP screamed in a literary agent’s slush pile.

Help was a bulldozer leveling forests to harvest trees outside Phonsavan, Laos.

Vietnam bought them all. One tree = $10,000.

Chopsticks chairs tables toothpicks. Wood you believe it?

Lighter than Winter Hawk’s feathers, HELP made fun of people.

Invisible howling soft wing energy manifested Beauty. Letters. Signs. Symbols. Metaphors. Observations. Unpleasant facts.

Help expressed brevity. How are you? I'm short, said Brevity.

Help played with variable truth-value meaning.

Help, a landmine in Cambodia below the surface of appearances in a luminous landscape reaching infinity weighted for sensation.

 The Language Company

It's not a problem. It's a surprise.

Between wild bonsai and Bamboo he regained consciousness at 5:18 a.m. outside Jakarta.

“Twilight in reverse,” sang a full-throated songbird in a Banyan tree stretching gnarled roots, “be diverse and grateful.”

It warbled a short trill, trilled a long solitary note, trilled short and silenced.

Bye-bye blackbird.

He lit Tibetan incense and unlocked the front door. Hearing bolts slide the bird sang. He stepped out. He whistled in return, establishing a connection. Mimicry. White and purple orchids shared aromas. Inhaling petals and bird melodies he scattered breadcrumbs on a path. Black snails snaked through roses leaving slime trails. He watered apple trees, flora and fauna.

His mind reflected a diamond.

Dew on a spider’s web glistened silver pearls.

Villagers awoke before dawn. Girls swept leaves from stones. After wringing flesh fibers dark eyed laconic women wrapped raw silk around female skeletons before hanging laundry on portable stainless steel structures to dry inside gray billowing fumes from fired garbage dancing over a sky high chipped wall decorated with green glass shards and oxidized barb wire.

Plastic bags, banana and coconut leaves, discarded clothing, feathers, Styrofoam happy meal containers, cardboard, chopsticks, plywood, grammar textbooks, comprehension checks and balances and IMF social network addictions LIKE ME burned with ferocious addictive intensity.

Phobia sang a rising middle class song accompanied by an Indonesian servant spoon-feeding Chinese infants before boys were stolen by coastal trafficking mafia retailing for $3,500 - $5,000. Negotiate. Keep talking about price. Always Be Closing.

The one-child family planning genocide policy created a desperate daily search for heirs. Losing face with facile piety meant public humiliation. Shame.

“There are 119 males for 100 females,” said Chinese Statistics at The Office of Mandatory Abortion and Population Control next door to The Morals and Re-Education Office down the street from The Ministry of Truth Myth & The Dark Arts.

“All the A men with a career, condo, cash, credit card and car are taken. Single women will have to settle for a B or C man.”

Millions of women facing single status shame committed suicide to preserve filial family honor. Goodbye cruel world. Good luck to you and your non-family.

Before an Indonesian girl swept she wept. Birds whistled. Humans yapped emotional SOS distress signals as leaves veined. Rats, geckos and butterflies laughed. A faint step slapped gravel. A piano note reverberated. Broom music whisked stone. A crescent moon sex slave on her back massaged ink in sky islands floating on blue water. Awake for the living.

Be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Art is what everything else isn’t.

Lucky survivors composed tongue bone oracles inside Tibetan meditation thangkas creating a Kalachakra ceremony with rainbow sand particles.

Mandala. Center. Release.

Silk weavers fingered golden threads. Miners harvested Blue Zircon near Ice Girl in Banlung. Read everything backwards. Backwards everything read. Write right left to the imagination sitting on a Metro subway sandwich as sensations explored labyrinths without a center. Mystic Arabic dervish dancers spinning on the Wheel of Life rejoiced in ecstasy. Angels danced on a pinhead.

Give female orphans sewing machines training and they’ll change the world with endless job opportunities, low population growth, free medicine, clean water and free education, said The Dream Sweeper.

Your needle leads thread, said Kairos. I am a compass without a needle, said Lucky.

The heart-mind gift of writing allowed Zeynep to meditate in the present as a stranger to herself: Mindfulness gives me time and time gives me choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. I’m not swept away by my feelings. I can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

I love the crazies, it’s the fools I can’t tolerate.

A Zen writer is an artist, said Zeynep the younger, heroine of The Language Company.

They love making a big bright, beautiful mess, cleaning it up and making another mess. You are a Lone Wolf blessed with R/7. Free is your quality of life.

The world is a stage and we are but the players. The play’s the thing. A risk taking adventure using asemic language sensing joy and mystery winds down. A poem begins in wisdom and ends in delight. Visionary mystics blossom radiant beauty.

Water-stone. Yin-Yang.

Wear a star on your forehead. 

Small powerful stars sing with their light.

Zeynep, a curious star visited a blue marble hurtling through space. What is Earth like? Are inhabitants gentle and compassionate? Do they share calm heart-minds? Do they create archetype wisdom art using multi-colored pigments on cream-colored paper dreaming with their eyes open spilling rainbows in meditative blissful silence? 

What is life? Autonomy. Personal growth. Self-acceptance. Purpose. Environmental mastery. Positive relationships. Eudemonia.

Along the road with Other

Lucky sang, “Farewell. Got my traveling shoes, traveling hat and walking stick. To travel is better than to arrive. I got the walking blues. Everything I do is an experiment. This was the perfect place to be a stranger in a strange land between two cultural land messes. Wandering among Anatolian tribes long ago, near and far away as Other Muse.”

“Who’s Other Muse?” said Zeynep.

“You are Other Muse with an absorbent mind. We are stream winners. Fifty-one days were enough of enough. It was beyond wild.”

Other spoke: Black Sea pink dawn light layered blue waves of beauty. Blue kills me. It’s nothin but the blues. Blue kills me with the solemn tenacity of melon colon only. Get to the verb, said Beauty. It’s a free form jazz poem. It has enough true fictionalized material and verifiable facts to be plausible. You are a crazy genius.

“Y were many Turkish, besides being hospitable and generous so aggressive, paranoid, psychotic, and sullen?” said Rita in a nutshell.

“It’s DNA genetic fear based insecurities + too much meat and not enough sex,” said Lucky. “In cultures like Cambodia where food is scarce, people have more open sex, but dream of food. In cultures where food is abundant like Turkey, sex is more taboo and people dream of sex.”

Get it in writing.

The act of writing isn’t life and it isn’t you.

It's ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters.

There’s book learning and there’s street learning, said Cosmic Education. Memory is desire satisfied. Memory is a lie layered with truth. Memory creates fiction and fiction creates memory. Preserve memory in a story. Memory bank.

“Today your life and destiny are the same. Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone,” said Zeynep.

Veni, Vidi, Vinci.

I came. I saw. I helped. I walked, said Lucky.

That’s life. The end is the beginning, said Zeynep. The beginning is the Middle Way. Not too detached. Not too sentimental.

Discernment. The day after tomorrow belongs to me, said Other Muse.

Start in the present, flashback and write to the end, said Z. I can’t tell where the real ends and artificial begs for precision.

Lucky bought rope from a grizzled Giresun man selling tools in a wooden shack near a teahouse where idle men stirring sugar cubes discussed local hazelnut production sales figure estimates while watching Ankara political parrots on an idiot box extoll their insensitivity to dissent while demanding extreme Deep State censorship to cope with poverty’s tyranny as the smell of fresh silver fish held a Blade Runner. Honed well. Lucky faced rope choices:

Hang up.

Hang laundry.

Hang yourself.

Hang your head with a dangling modifier.

Hang around, the art of creative travel writing.

Be various, said Curious. Punctuation is a nail. Here’s a box of punctuational.

Accept loss forever, said Zeynep. Death is beautiful because it doesn’t exist. That's not the real reason you’re leaving is it?

No.

What is your R-7 variant motivation?

Dying here by the Black Sea is my fear. I want to die dancing in my mute Cambodian lover’s arms. I am dying from an inexorable beautiful sadness. My heart-mind is shattered. One dies twice. When they are born and when they face death, according to a Nam survivor. One should die once in their life to begin new.

I was born dead and slowly came to life like you, said Z. We helped each other cope with the collective insanity.

The Language Company

DO the Mango Tango - TLC 77

I go. We go. You go. Mango. Super fruit. Buy one. Get one free. Peel it down. Peel her skin. I am a bed rabbit. Plow my field. Honey needs money. Savor my succulent mass of alpha bet your sweet ass anti-oxidants.

A. C. E. Ace a mango.

Mango’s humility skin released interior monologue. Flowing sensations danced mango simplicity with serenity. 

Mango said, “There are two kinds of people in the world.”

“What are they?” said a Cambodian named Orphan.

“They are subdivided into sub-species. There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you. There are people who want control or approval. There are people who face the music and there are people who run for cover.

"There are people who pay attention and people who don’t know or care what the fuck is going on. They are too poor to pay attention. There are people who make things happen and people who dream about making things happen. Yeah, and one more thing - there are people who are willing victims of their auspicious fateful situation playing the blame game.”

“That’s a mouthful of mango logic if you ask me,” said Orphan. “You mean, according to the philosopher, Damon Younger Than Tomorrow, ‘distraction is an inability to identify, attend to what is valuable, even when we are hard working or content.’”

“Yes, that’s what I said I mean because I mean what I say and say what I mean jellybean,” laughed Mango doing the tango with Taoist monks at The Temple of Complete Reality in Sichuan.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” said Confusion.

Immigrant Story - The Mark - TLC 76

After a year eating Turkey with a side order of Mudanya olives he landed in Jakarta. If you don’t have an onward ticket blue uniformed ones shake you down. You know the drill. Extract a crisp green C note. Insert into a worn passport. Slide it across a counter. Man smiles. His golden shoulder braid shudders. He gestures just a minute.

You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed internally displaced desiccated immigrants stream past paying with their lives to receive an entry stamp for thirty days before heading to another gold braided computer man.

Your man comes out. He escorts you through The Quest-ion Line. Incoming. Quest-ions screaming help ran for cover. He hands your documents to another gold braided scam man.

He says, Wait outside the NO ENTRY zone. You observe men, women and orphans waiting for one last stamp, one final slim to nil chance for freedom from tyrannical vagabondism a disease with no known antidote.

Computer friend nods, accepts documents and does his thing. Opens removes cash slides passport through a scanner darkly stamps it hands it back. Hands down. Deal. Ace high. Genius returns it to you, Good-bye my little butterfly.

You grab your bag and hit the bricks.

230,000,000 (+/-) humans struggling to survive with a little luck eat you with their eyes.

On one side are 1,001 females with Women For Hire signs. They swing brooms, caress irons, dance with mops, feed infants, hang washrags, burn trash and stir woks. Visual acuity. Rancid re-cycled cooking oil penetrates universal collective unconscious. 

On the other side are 1,001 males with I Will Do Anything placards.

Small print reads, “I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, carry bricks, stack bricks, break bricks, sleep, eat, pretend I am busy and freelance vaginal come and go construction projects are my specialty.” 

A gamelan orchestra of eighteen copper gongs and brass symbols creates a melodic meditative refrain with gentle persuasion. You follow effervescent notes into the dark night of the soul with lost quest-ions whispering to you, The Mark.

Quest-ions tout you:

Want a maid? Want a driver? Want a cleaner? Want a cook? Want transport? Want boom-boom? Want a room? Want a job? Where do you go? Where are you from? Want a quick fix? Want an exit permit? Want a new passport? Want inoculations? Want to get lucky? Want to meet my sister? Want a butterfly? Want to change money? Want to die here? Want to be cremated here?

Want to hang out with talking monkeys near Ubud? Want to eat? Want to meet my friends, liars, cheats and thieves? Want water? Want a map? The map’s not the territory. Want to take a chance? Want an answer? Want a way out? Want love? Want massage? Need AIDS or HIV? Want a friend?

Want boredom and loneliness and alienation your highness? Want a guide? Want a SIM card? Want a taxi? Want ice?

Want to join a Brave New World? Want to be a charter member in a New World Order manipulated by politicians, greedy geo-political banks and fraudulent financial institutions? Want a secret identity theory and off shore tax-free bank account? Want to torture humans with water molecules in a friendly country’s secret black prison?

Want to die before you get old? Want to fade away? Do you have plan tomorrow? Where do you go? Where do you go tomorrow? What’s you (sic) name? Where is this line of quest-ion-ing going? Are you the hammer or the nail? How did you get here? Why, tell me why. What is life?

All the quest-ion words were brought in for interrogation. Zeynep, a savage detective looked for motive and opportunity.

A ghost plays a six-string Kemil instrument in shadows. You follow phantom notes into the night.

Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

The Language Company