A Time on Turley Lura

Nobody remembers Gambar anymore. If anybody recalls Gambar at all, they get him mixed up with the Orangatang who picked his scabs for twenty years at the Seneca Park Zoo.
I'm not talking about that Gambar.I'm talking about the Gambar that Gambar at the zoo was named after. The Gambar, I'm talking about lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago in a land that exists but no longer exists under the name that Gambar and his pals called it when they lived in it. They called it Turley Lura
At that time, “living” on Turley Lura was shorthand for hunting and gathering.
Gambar wasn't much of a hunter and an even worse gatherer. Gambar was good with the women though. Not.
About the only thing Gambar was good at was holding his breath.
He could go for nine minutes (or what we today call minutes) as “time” in Turley Lura was also up for grabs and generally measured in tas.
Nowadays only a few of us can go for one minute. Only a few of us would even be tempted to try for five unless our life was passing in front of us and planet waves were crashing above us or we were trying for a part in Avatar 2
Just in case YOU are one of the FEW…… Then go ahead and try right now.
I'll count.
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two, tenty three, twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty.
Okay that's good enough.
Don't kill yourself. It's only an exercise in appreciation of the seemingly hapless Gambar.
If I was counting for Gambar while he was holding his breath, I'd still have another five hundred and ten numbers to type.
Forget that concept.
My life ain't passing before my eyes although a segment of Gambar's life will be passing before yours if you keep reading. So keep inhaling and exhaling.Including and excluding.
You'll find it hard to read if you're not breathing.

Back in Gambar's day, there wasn't a lot to do besides standing around and staying alive. Staying alive depended on hunting and gathering.  Since Gambar was a tribal liability to both of those life sustaining and time consuming activities, he spent most of his hours standing around. When even that minimum exertion proved too strenuous, he devolved to sitting around and then lying around.
While sitting around one day Gambar and his companion, another total tribal incompetent named Glork, decided to pass the time by seeing how long they could hold their breath. Gambar's competitor had a much stronger will than Gambar. Glork held his breath until he thought he had killed himself.
In that one moment of stupendous obstinancy, Glork reached his full potential with his discovery that death was nothing to fear. 
Unfortunately for Glork (but fortunately for his descendants who went on to become politicians)his involuntary respiration system kicked in and forced him to breathe after he had blacked out.
Thus literature arrived at its first anti-climax.
Even the apparent death of his competitor didn't stop Gambar from holding his breath. When Glork returned to his senses, the first sensation he experienced along with his surprised inhale was Gambar's massive exhale.
Glork mistook Gambar's exhale as a sigh of relief and  thought he had made a friend.
Gambar was amazed that he had won at something.
The two outcasts shared a moment of illusional ecstacy.
Then they got up and started standing around again. Glork thinking he had a friend. Gambar thinking he had a future. Whatever that was.

In Gambar's culture, the only sport less popular than breath holding was starvation. Outsiders, alienated from their tribes through their own helplessness, incompetence and sullen personalities, competed in the fundamental arena of who could live the longest with zero food.
Starvation was not technically a spectator sport aside from the starving stick figures themselves who had nothing else to do but sit there and watch each other shrivel up and die.
The most popular competitions were running, throwing rocks and staring. The starvers did a lot of staring too but since starving was considered an advantage in staring contests, the starving outcasts were not allowed to compete in organized staring contests.
Breath holding contests held a place between staring and starving contests in the pecking order of primitive sport.  
Glork was a formidable starer, who was moving down the competitive ladder in status when he engaged Gambar in their one sided breath holding competition.
After recovering from his blackout and mistaking Gambar for a sympathetic soul, Glork decided that Gambar might have a talent for staring.
It would seem that the ability to hold one's breath would be very advantageous in a staring contest. However, it is even more important to be able to look your competitor in the eye when in the contest. Gambar, due to his profound alienation, found it impossible to look Glork in the eye as they stare sparred.
Still Glork believed in Gambar.
And he had a secret to pass on when Gambar confessed that the problem was looking into another human's eyes. 
Glork passed on his secret to Gambar.
If you can't look 'em in the eye, look 'em in the eyebrow.
And hold your breath.

Glory suspected that he might gain an advantage on the “talent” of Gambar but for God sake they had to get the hell out of Turley Lura if it was the last thing that they ever did. They didn’t know which way to go, Glork said “let’s follow the big red ball. 

If you're the type of person who pronounces nuclear as nukeyeller or ginseng as jingjang or orangutan as rangatang, then you're probably a lot like Gambar who would have been one of those persons if he had any idea of the concepts of nuclear, ginseng or orangutan or even the future.
You're also a lot like Gambar if hundreds of years from now, they name an orangutan after you in a zoo in a declining city.
You're also a lot like Gambar and an orangutan if you're immature. If you're male and immature then the similarity between you and Gambar and an orangutan intensifies. 
A fully adult orangutan male is flanged. When fully flanged, the orangutan has the large cheek flaps and throat sac which enables him to emit a deep booming sound which surpasses a lions roar in volume and intensity.   
Male orangutans are not fully flanged until about thirty five years or older.  No other animal takes that long to reach full maturity, with the exception of the human male, who in most cases is only fully mature just before death, and even not then in all cases.
Gambar, in our story, was a typical male which means exasperatingly immature.  Yet, in spite of his immaturity or perhaps because of it, Gambar was closer to death than he suspected from the moment he locked eyeballs with Glork.
Then, of course, all of us are closer to death than we think.
That's why God invented Doctors.
And witch doctors
And politicians
And security alerts
And executioners
And staring contests.
And that's why the most common last words we speak, when maturity and mortality are knocking down the door are these two words.
"oh !shit”

The people who lived near the beach called themselves islanders. They were familiar with stragglers like Gambar and Glork and referred to them as inlanders.
The islanders had never encountered two men as inland as Glork and Gambar.
When Gambar first saw the surrounding water, he thought it was blue land with ripples.

That's about as inland as ya can get. 

The islanders were sophisticated in their staring. They were very aware of the "look em in the eyebrow rather than the eye" technique which Glork in his ignorance thought he had invented and which Gambar in his innocence obeyed.
The islanders had outlawed this technique. Anyone using the technique was referred to as a "brow beater". 

After Gambar had won a few staring contests near the shore, the word started to spread that Gambar was a brow beater. Eleeza would put Gambar to the test. 
Eleeza had been born a unibrower. Her parents decided that rather than have their daughter go through her life as a unibrow, they would shave off her brow entirely. Without her brow, Eleeza became a litmus test for inlanders suspected of browbeating.  Those inlanders would be in for a surprise.
The Islanders had never seen inlanders as inland as Glork and Gambar.

Three years before Gambar and Glork followed the red ball to the edge of the island, a restless crab irritated a relaxed oyster.
We'll call the crab Buster and the oyster we'll call Paul.
Paul hadn't moved in years. A strong set of organic threads attached Paul to a reef named.......
Okay, we're not gonna name reefs.
That would be as silly as naming organic threads. We're not gonna do that either.
Although I am tempted to call the organic thread Fred.
Let's resist that temptation and get back to the oyster named Paul.
Anyway, Paul was serene and content, filtering plankton through his gills when Buster, always looking for an advantage and passing for plankton, managed to find a place within Paul.
Of course, Paul was insulted.
When irritated by Buster, Paul did what pearls always do. They cover it up.
Paul secreted epithelial cells from the inside of his shell. 
Scientists know these cells as nacre.
We know the cells, if we know them at all, as mother of pearl.
Paul had another name for Buster, the filter, the mother of pearl and for the hollow in his soft tissue, near his gonad.
Paul called them nuisances.
He clung to his reef even as the nuisances grew more perfect.
As if a nuisance could ever be perfect.

Meanwhile back on the shore…..Eleeza entered the staring contest with a blue veil over her face.
The staring starter counted down  to the start of the stare.
At the command to "stare", Eleeza removed the veil from her face.
Gambar held his breath and honed in on her eyebrow.
There was no eyebrow upon which to focus.
Gambar exhaled and looked into Eleeza's eyes.
He fell in love.
He blinked.
He lost.
Two seconds into the match, it was all over.
Gambar's gimmick was revealed to all.
He was a brow beater.
Eleeza replaced her veil and departed. She was shaken and all awhirl as nobody had ever looked her in the eye before.

The Islanders seized the inlanders.
They loaded the inlanders onto a boat made of the skins of previous brow beaters.
They tied a rope around Gambar's leg. They attached a seventy five pound stone to the rope around Gambar's leg.
They paddled the boat away from the shore for "fifteen"  minutes which they called tatatatas
They explained to Gambar and Glork that after ten tatatatas underwater, they would pull Gambar to the surface. If he was still alive, his brow beating would be forgiven. He and Glork would be allowed to become slaves.
If not, the skin boat would get a little more fortified.
They threw Gambar, the rope and the stone into the blue earth with ripples.
Glork watched Gambar disappear into the blue earth.
Gambar thought only of Eleeza and her eyes.
He held his breath.

Gambar instinctively held his breath when thrown from the boat of many bodies.
He expected to land on the rippling blue land, he didn't expect to land in the land.
He also didn't expect to be flying within that land. it took him a moment to realize that he wasn't flying, he was falling
The rock hit bottom before Gambar did.
When Gambar hit bottom, he began to look around.
This land had all kinds of activity that Gambar had never seen on the land he had lived upon until the moment he was thrown into this new land.
Still holding his breath and dragging the rock behind him, Gambar began to explore his new domain.
Beautiful.
He noticed what we would call a reef.
He noticed something attached to what we would call a reef.
He went over and like you and I might pluck a rose from a garden, he plucked the something that was attached to  that which we would call a reef.
That something that was attached to the reef was something that today we would call an oyster.
While he was looking at what today we would call an oyster, he felt himself flying again; a lot like some people today would imagine something called the ascension.
He took the oyster up with him.
An oyster that we would call Paul.
And within Paul, the imperfect nuisance of a memory named Buster.
When Gambar's ascension broke the surface, he opened his eyes and exhaled.
When Gambar opened his eyes and exhaled, the Islanders on the skin boat exhaled as well.
I guess we can call a scream an exhale.
The Islanders had never before seen a dead guy open his eyes and exhale.
They pulled Gambar upon the boat.
They knew that he had died.
Now they knew that he had come back to life.
He had visited the land unknown.
He brought something back from that land.
That something knew itself as Paul.
This was the first time that anyone, Islander or inlander had ever seen an oyster.
We call it an oyster.
It called itself Paul.
They thought it was a souvenir from heaven.
They called it knowledge.
Gambar was the bearer of knowedge.
Glork was his friend.
Glork realized what he wanted to do. He immediately dropped the K from his name and added a y
Upon this realization his future as a slave disappeared and his life as a prophet known as Glory began
Glory would tell the world about Gambar, the bearer of knowledge. Gambar who had returned gloriously from the dead.