The Commander's Wife Buys Confectionary

In Shan State, Burma in the long now, there was a running insurgency - land, freedom, peace, justice, jade, teak, gold - golden triangle profit and greed with Chinese dynasties.

A shiny green army pickup truck pulled up at the New Moon bakery in Lashio.

A soldier in green jumped out and opened the door. The wife got out – longhair tied bun tight, white and silver longyi, designer purse, imperial jade necklace, diamond studed serious face.

Six soldiers exited the back of the truck. They were on a mission to liberate cakes, cookies, sweets from glass shrines.

The commander got out. Short, wearing a camouflage jacket like a forest with depressed green pants and black shiny shoes. Epaulets on his shoulder.

His sharp black eyes stared at a stranger scribbling at an outdoor table. Zero expression.

His eyes lay buried in his face with recessed emptiness. The commander's war camo boonie hat sat at a rakish angle folded in the front. Decorated with a golden military symbol of happiness, compassion and love.

His wife climbed into a new sun. Her husband uttered quick syllables to #2.

Number two had military bearing without a care in the world. He barked into a walkie-talkie.

A military policeman guarded the front of the truck. Smoking soldiers stood around as motorcycles loaded with succulent strawberries streamed goodbye.

She exited followed by a salesgirl trundling bags of roles and sweet goodies. A soldier jumped to attention, took them and put them in the truck. She spoke to her husband. His face said he was an obediant child.

He followed her to the market for shopping. Soldiers marched behind the queen.

Years later they returned with strawberries, apples and bananas. Soldiers loaded everything into the truck.

Someone called the commander. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt. He opened his mouth. Perfect white teeth. He smiled. He barked. A soldier open the door for his wife life. She got in.

He got in and removed his party hat. He smoothed his hair. The military police stopped traffic. They drove into a dream come true.

Myths became stories - TLC 38

Zeynep said, “I am a rose thorn and Winter Hawk. Wings instinct and heart. My razor talon tears meat from bones to feed my creative Hunger Angel.”

“I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist,” said a gravedigger. “My specialty is languages. Lost tongues. Wandering deep in the Tarim Basin following the Silk Road through Central Asia I discovered the 4,000 year old Tocharian language and Afansievo culture. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorers. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA based on an Iranian dialect.”

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions said, “Myths tell what really happened. Myths suggest a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth is truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on fear and belief containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.”

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

Myth became story.

This anthropological fact accompanied Lucky wandering among unfinished construction projects and abandoned manuscripts in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

He joined millions of emaciated migrant refugees passing shattered bricks, broken hopes and strangling dangling cables connected to nothing in particular.

Shoddy incomplete dust dreams and quick profit schemes thrived where political thugs disguised as beauticians, missionaries and NGO social workers living in penthouses and driving Land Rovers exploited villages stealing land, rivers, mountains, children. Extorting money.

Their rule of law was a truncheon named GREED.

* 

Sophisticated command and control procedures thrived. Corruption stole millions. Substandard schools pancaked 10,000+ children from one-child families in a Sichuan earthquake.

Garment factories in Dhaka crushed wage slave workers stitching designer labels at a discount.

In May 2014 an inefficient unregulated profit-oriented private coalmine in Soma, Turkey caught fire, exploded, burned and collapsed killing 301 miners.

The angry Teflon Prime Minister visited the disaster. “This is a fact of life for poor illiterate underpaid miner slaves. It happened in Britain in the 19th century,” he said to widows and families. An angry miner booed him. He slapped the miner. “If you boo the Prime Minister you get slapped.”

His aide, a frustrated soccer player wearing a suit of armor kicked a miner on the ground being held by police. Aide screamed, “Dissent is TERRORISM!”

The ruling AKP Justice and Development party said it was all a mistake: the mine explosion, slap and penalty kick.

Violence, denial and repression are a way of life here, said Zeynep the younger creating a myth.

The Language Company

mouthful of pay

The publishing world is a crapshoot, said literary Agent Orange. A casino. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me mythical cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers, politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne.

Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

Keep it simple. Woman writer meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, sex, love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story etc.

Woman loses man. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a 5-year courtship, (he will save me) discovers blind love exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another. Man promises her BIG money.

With resignation she gets engaged accepting that sex business is money business. She keeps writing. She sends her story out. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. The independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and eleven siblings. Family demands $5k as a minimum down payment. She is a valuable child bearing resource and baby production machine.

They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

My body is a work of art.

It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

Man facing family greed suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and doubt. He agrees. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local greasy greedy officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. Man pays for her sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read. Man pays for a water pump. Man pays for solar panels. Man pays for her grandparent’s medicine. Man pays for rice seeds, rabbits, vegetables. For eternity.

Parents give expensive village party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children and propitiate their poverty cycle. Give us someone to love. Someone who will work, breed and get slaughtered. Someone to take care of us. Someone to bury us.

Someone to feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

Ice Girl in Banlung

good at two things

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produced Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

a jungle story

Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a landmass floating on water. White people called it Asia on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and insatiable appetites for diverse languages, customs and cultures lived in jungles and forests.

OTHER preferred living on distant and remote mountains. 

Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played and learned life lessons from nature with extended families. 

One day a boat filled with white men sailed down the river to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people could not understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared everyone. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

Every day more white people came down the river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their historical evolution on other continents.

Their mantra was: cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, cheap markets and much profit.

White people said, we are civilized and you are savages. We have religion. It is called Wealth.

It is Greed.

We are on a mission from the great chief. We control fire. We control time. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

The village gave them hospitality, shelter and friendship. The white men were greedy. They took control of the village, the people and the jungle. 

Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, We control Nature. We shall overcome.

They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided people against people. Divide and conquer against each other. History taught them well.

They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every raw material of economic value. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

If we want to survive we must move to a new jungle forest far away, said the village shaman. This is the story they told people one night below stars singing with their light.