Michael Minetree – malcontent on the loose…

When I called to him he immediately jumped up and ran toward me – and flopped down on top of my feet. To me that is doggie language for “hang out for a while”.

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Cooking over here is always an interesting procedure for me.

For starters – all of the ingredients are foreign, the knives are dull, none of the spices are labeled and must be identified by smell, there isn’t a pepper mill to be found anywhere and the salt smells very strong of iodine from time to time.

However, not to be deterred, I stuck with what I know well. Fish. And here there is hardly anything better than some fresh Hamsi – that is if you’re in the mood for finger food.

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Ever since I laid eyes on this pooch I’ve wondered what it must be like to be such a rogue character.

It was just a week ago when I heard, or read the line “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals.” I assume you could say the same thing about a country. Don’t expect me to get all PETA on your ass or anything. I just happen to really like dogs and I find the way Turkey deals with wild strays to be a much more humane response to the issue of feral animals. Simply treat them like members of the community.

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As I sit here in a predominantly Islamic country on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I am somewhat torn emotionally as one might expect. I don’t have enough time to fully dissect those emotions or to try to bring them to the forefront completely. So I will simply say a few things.

It is hard for us as Americans to face a faceless enemy. One without a state, without a flag, without borders, buildings or visible leaders. We don’t do well with it. We want someone to blame, to pin the target to. It damages our psyche to not have a tangible foe to do battle with. And that is what leads us to want to reach out and grab the next closest, available person in line.

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I never intended for this to be a food tour of the city – or to be a reporter or a critic while I was here and I don’t think I’ll go back on that lack of intention. Plain and simply put, there are some things here that are so wonderful in their simplicity that they simply have to be talked about, or at least noted for future reflection.

My decision to plant my ass in Sariyer, Istanbul rather than in some other part of the city was an easy one to make, but I cant take all the credit for it. This is where my wife’s family lives most of the year and the house was available while they were away on holiday down on on the western shore of Asia Minor.

My other option was to stay in Cevizlibag with all of the in-laws. Cevizlibag is one of those areas on the outskirts of “real” Istanbul – where poverty and piety, oft bedfellows, are rife and after certain hours one doesn’t want to be strolling down the road looking around with wide wonder. It certainly isn’t a place for a big fat westerner to be roaming around after dark.

When you pull up a ring-side seat in a Sariyer waterfront cafe along the edge of the Bosphorus,  you are promptly greeted by schools of small fish which have been coaxed toward the shoreline by locals tossing bits of bread to them. The schools of fish attract more locals who stand in lines a hundred yards long to fish them out with rod and reel with seemingly little concern for time, as I have seen the same fishermen stand in one place over the entire course of a day to score a small pail of them.

Bosphorus fish

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So it’s 1am back home on the east coast of the US – and most are tucked away in bed. It’s 8am here… and the roosters are crowing and the minarets are squawking, dogs are barking and people are out and about. Fortunately no horns are honking yet – but I guess that’s soon to come… It’s another beautiful day and I’ve been up most of the night. Sleeping comes at a real premium when you first get here as there is so much going on and you have to have the windows open most of the time to breathe and get some air across your body at night.

Generally it gets better after the first week and sleep is usually something that just ends up happening rather than being something that is planned. Yesterday I was doing the “Hey that guy’s passed out” head nod for an unknown amount of time and ended up bouncing my head off a cement wall about four times before I realized I had dozed off. And as it’s always entertaining for people to watch, my brother in-law Ozcan (ooz-john) was watching with amusement when I woke up.

Though I had good reason to be sleepy on top of the jet lag… The night before I had been up until 5am running around Taksim Square with Turkish voice over talents Andy Boyns, Mehmet Onur and my sister in-law Cigdem (Chee-dem).

Though a grainy photo does it little justice, Taksim Square is a raucous place which caters to many people and many different desires.

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The countdown is on for my trip to Turkey.

My father – his birthday is on the 7th of September – asked me where I’d be for his birthday and in true family fashion I told him I’d either be toasting him with a beer in Istanbul or floating around in the Atlantic. He asked, “Please don’t ruin my birthday. ” I’ll try dad… I’ll try…

The anticipated separation from my wife is hard to deal with. Normally we travel together but this time I’ll be leaving a month before her so I can have a little more “me” time in-country. It seems a touch selfish… You know paddling the “Good Ship Me” around “Lake Me” for a while.

Ben Turkce pratik ediyorum...

I’ve wanted some time to clear my head of the daily monotony and tedium of normal existence. It seems we get so caught up just existing from day to day. Years pass and we seldom realize that our stagnation is a byproduct of our own fears keeping us encased in our own little castles. It’s hard to venture outside the castle gates after a while. The brevity of our excursions is filled with little more than trips to the store for milk and cat food and hardly ever takes on anything of any sort of seriousness… and that is just the way we like it.

Being able to make it to the store without encountering any misfortune or angry people becomes an occasion to celebrate. We relish anonymity and event-less moments and count our blessings when we can make it through the days, weeks or months with a collection of opaque, anecdotal stories to tell. We’ve become satiated with such comforts.

Some new neighbors moved in across the street about a month ago. So far – not even so much as a wave hello, or an acknowledgement of existence. Just a steady stream of service trucks installing televisions and sound systems. Who knows if the old neighbors who lived there told them to avoid us – because in 8 years they never said hello either. Just time filled with empty stares while they let their little 4lb fuzzball of a dog out to take a crap. I thought I might get all Mayberry on their ass and bake them an apple pie to break the ice, but hell, they never tried either.

It just seems that at some point we have to break our own rules and venture out into the wild blue yonder for a while. Otherwise we should just be content to simply curl up and die – it’s bound to happen – on the inside anyway – if we continue to wander through the days trying to safeguard the simple, predictable, plain-Jane lives we cherish so much.

I’m tired of dying inside… I’m ready to go.

If someone had told me over 15 years ago that I would still be sitting here surrounded by recording equipment, wondering what the future would bring in the production business – I would have told them they were crazy. I also seriously doubt I would have taken the first steps down this long and dusty road.

I was anything but patient when I began my quest for voice over success. I really did believe that I would be rolling in riches and all things material after a few years in the craft. I didn’t know at the time how foolish those assumptions were and I certainly had no way of telling who and what I would be when time began to tick by. I didn’t know that years later I’d be sitting here counting my blessings and basking in the glory of riches made not of paper and coin, but surrounded by scant material items which reach just outside the lines of necessity . I certainly never envisioned myself as being happy with so little.

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Early this evening my father handed me a plastic grocery store bag about 1/3 of the way full of old cassette tapes from our family’s past. My grandmother (on my father’s side) used to tape record everything, certainly around the holidays. Upon a brief inspection of the contents I came across tapes labeled “Christmas 1968″ “Mom playing guitar and singing” and “Moon landing”.

I can’t wait to dig in and digitize them to preserve them. There is so much history in them, and the voices of those who are no longer with us. It will be a way to take a time machine back and visit for a while. I’m anxious to see what lies within…

I have too many blogs – or too many WordPress installations depending on how you look at it. The only real problem is that I like to write about a lot of things and the blogs on my studio, coaching and food pages aren’t really appropriate for off-topic or as is often the case, off-color material. So I finally installed yet ANOTHER blog here in hopes that I would feel more comfortable to write about this and that and not have to worry about whether or not it was appropriate. It might still be inappropriate – but what the hell. I feel better writing here.

Here soon enough I’ll be on another trip to Turkey. I’m busy getting ready and I’m hoping to share most of that trip here and on FB. Between Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and every other media platform, I’m about ready to pull my hair out.. To this point I still really fail to see what the deal is with any of them – other than platforms to waste a TREMENDOUS amount of one’s day.  But still – I piss around with them on a daily or weekly basis.

Right now I just don’t have that much time to dick around. Too busy tying up loose ends here – getting ready for the trip… More on that later…

M