Bursa Hammam by Z

Crows cackled at sunrise. Bamboo Nomad opened the blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment in Bursa, Turkey, riding the blinds a metaphor for rails, a cryptic railroad life of drifters and literary outlaws hopping a freight out of town, rolling.

Light particles streamed to a pink and red veined orchid in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled in white light. Red gladioli, oh so glad, petaled their beginning. Piano Etudes tinkled by P. Glass.

Fear, a handful of dust in an urn labeled Gratitude, celebrated laughter.

A piano fell silent. Violins and a cello picked up the slack hemming their garments at intersections on life’s loom, said Devina.

In the new world order all the police and security forces are children they know how the world works. Kids have a shock proof built-in shit detector.

Storytellers agreed.

Elegant cirrus clouds swirled around pachyderms and Staunton pieces fighting to control the four center squares.

A quixotic knight errant with a curving silver scimitar followed by Panache on a donkey waving a red one-star Vietnamese Communist flag sailed through Russian thongs and throngs driving a Turkish turbo-bus near Hanoi hair salons where women trimmed Winter Hawk’s talons.

Bright yellow coughing taxi engines heard Arabesque musicians fingering Ouds lamenting loss forever as percussionists hammered goatskin drums  ...

Turkish silver merchants sang, Lucky sale, First sale, Cheap, Make my day.

In a Bursa hammam built by the Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha in 1555 filled with blue and green geometric tiles and vaulted ceilings, steam rose through rusting bars to locate a Wi-Fi signal from the private Achebadem Hospital emergency room staffed by stressed out C-19 doctors looking over thin shoulders with lost bewildered aimless fear in trepidation toward lost bewildered aimless fat ugly white idiot tourists named ATM dragging their lives and dusty packs on tired shoulders through Asia as hungry heartbroken wolves paced tight narrow cages lamenting loss of freedom howled the blues.

Humans are wolves in sheep’s clothing, said Tran.

Chekhov said there are three paths. Choose one.

Turn left wolves eat you, go right you eat wolves, go straight you eat yourself.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers - parent #2 - tell kids what to think not teaching how to think.

Serious factoid. Push kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Absurd Language

Do you want the short version or the long version, asked a reliable narrator of dubious credibility.

A perfect question in life’s chess game of experiences and conversations as people play with choices and consequences inhaling, exhaling, living, traversing, falling, flying, exploring, and walking on the spinning Earth rock, said Devina. Rock your world.

The celestial rotation makes people dizzy, confused and disoriented and many fall down, said Tran. Hello gravity.

WE fall up, said Rita.

If you flesh out the short narrative version with specific details it grows, said Z. Character threads develop. Destiny and action forms character.

Destiny weaves a rope of hemp fibers, or woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia, or Cambodian cotton, or Lao silk worm threads designed to hang yourself if life becomes unbearable, perhaps too sweet, too beautiful, too sad, said Desire.

Determining your fate suicide is a daily choice and a way to escape a terminal adventure travel disease. You are manipulated by someone in the story before, during or after you finish a random simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on. Adventures evolve a life of its own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten word lava from a highly charged pressurized center.

The reader and writer are one.

Short, fast and deadly.

This explains how silence between words sees language as absurd, irrelevant and a burning ring of magma fire.

This molten conglomeration of Voice and Sign language, dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and geological logical particles discovered by humans and alien life forms blast out of the deep red hot core of finite transient human existence into a blue atmosphere where it cools, as the gravity of thinking, agrees to ignore the abyss and it’s malcontents and expectations of loss fear and Death contributing to its infinite force.

The dense mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, dances flowing down engulfing everything in its path melting landscapes, carving new strata, grand canyons and Leaping Tiger gorges, gouging out tributaries for cooling debris, slowing to a glowing light as you open a vein and scribble one true sentence, said Z.

O my word let it cool, heat and serve. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Saigon Ice by Tran

Tran requested ice java in an alley off Dream Street filled with jolly plastic Santa Claus armies and tinsel. Tis the season.

Rita opened a large insulated orange box. Her left hand wrapped in a blue cloth picked up a chunk of white ice. She slammed a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released pressure, jagged lines, perfect beautiful lightning spread deep through ice.

She held global warming in her hot little left hand.

She smashed it again with all her power and strength creating fragments of elemental particles.

A sharp piece of ice pierced Tran’s left eye. The sensation of pain was immediate and direct cushioned by a delicious feeling as ice melted through his retina, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue and layers of perception altering visual organic matter as light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex.

Ice quality reflected everything around him. The stimulant of ice was a mirror.

The world is a mirror, he reflected with crystals shimmering inside kaleidoscopes of ice.

Illusions were smooth and clear. Buried inside the chunk of white ice he witnessed long jagged magic, mystery and sparkling universes emitting glowing crystal rivers.

The world is ice. Everything you see, hear, touch, taste and feel is ice, a sibylline language of clarity.

She dropped the block of ice back in the box.

She collected chips in a glass, added thick brown coffee, condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon.

Here you are, she said, handing it to Tran. You look thirsty.

I am, thank you.

End of ACT 1

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

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

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce 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.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

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

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Gratitude danced through life.