Eudemonia

What is life?

Autonomy.

Personal growth.

Self-acceptance.

Purpose.

Environmental mastery.

Positive relationships.

Eudaimonia.

Near Jakarta he shared a universal story with Grade 4. “Many tribes love to look back. Passion and grasping creates suffering. It's a genetic molecule of fear, healthy doubt, fantastic uncertainty, surprise and adventure. Monkey mind. No worries, no memories. A child’s innocent curiosity lives in the present.”

“Every little thing is in front of us,” said a genius kid.

“Yes,” Lucky said, “focus on your essential needs not your wants. Imaginary wants manifest desire. Attachment and grasping creates suffering. Suffering is an illusion. We are all passing through. Humans look back in their vivid reptilian imagination hoping to see a ghost memory, a figment of their imagination."

Is it safe?

“Change is scary. They look back to remember where they came from. They look back because they are afraid they will never see the village and people again. They use their disappearing energy to look behind wondering and wandering and milling around in a perpetual state of shock and distraction.

“Humans seek clues at their personal ground zero. They’ve evolved from distant galaxies. Java man evolved here 40,000 years ago. Accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance. We are stardust. Never trust an atom. They make up everything. The world is made of stories not atoms. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t let school interfere with your education.”

He lived in talking monkey zones. They ate rice, drank water and fucked. They washed one set of clothing and hung it on bamboo.

They killed all the animals and burned down all the forests. They bred, worked and got slaughtered. Shamans brought rain. Tropical downpours gave humans free showers.

Food was cheap. Let’s eat mantra. This had nothing to do with simian behavior. It had nothing to do with two women sitting in a dark warung food joint near a private school facing a tall cinder block wall.

Chickens goats and cats prowled pecked and foraged in garbage. One woman sat in a deep meditation as her friend cleaned her scalp. They took turns exploring and inspecting. This genetic ritual was practiced in world zoos, jungles and rain forests.

Chattering storytellers. Musicians played ancient gamelan tunes. Heal people with music. Music is the fuel.

Idle Indonesian males after washing taxis studied accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. Waiting for passengers they played chess in Banyan tree shade. Checkmate, said Death, You lose.

Drivers visited the warung chatting up girls, devouring spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chilies and deep-fried snacks.

One lucky explorer created a Brave New World.

Culture is what you are.
Nature is what you can be.

The Language Company

Before Indonesia - TLC 75

Behind reinforced plate glass Istanbul airport windows near conveyor belts and x-ray security machines was everyone who stayed behind - guards, cleaners and Konya dervish dancers.

An attractive thin-legged blond duty free clerk finished her day shift and stripped down for her baboon floorshow at Kitty Cat Night Club. Get down sweet thing, said a Turkish Deep State operative. Shake your moneymaker, said his bodyguard.

She drifted through life with clowns, misfits, literary outlaws, gravediggers, social deviants and manic depressed tourists waiting for airline workers to clean toilets, load beverages and MSG processed food onto Luftwaffe flight 3343 destined for Bang Cock as late afternoon light slashed through terminal dungeon zones of serenity.

“Travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s an adventure,” an American father said to his whining son on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Phosphorous. Staring at golden needle mosques, blue waves and catamarans sailing the seven seas they slathered red jam on toast.

After a year soaking in a wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject polite and emotionally distracted future tense void-like dream sequence passed through frequencies where idle people sat around showing no incentive and no desire to be creative or think for themselves as if their loss, their fate was always a long now.

They’d failed to take control of their lives as willing victims in life’s short sad joke.

One was the sullen masked security woman in her 20’s, forced by economics to meet and greet departing strangers. Lucky put his Eagle pack on the conveyor.

A laptop, 120-year old Monte pocket watch out, Leica rangefinder and cell phone went in a plastic tray. Stuff rolled away. She approached. “Do you have any knives in your luggage?”

“Yes,” he said to her death mask, “in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are silver with turquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone streaked with brown earth colors.”

Insecure security personnel wore death masks to confuse angry spirits eating incense minus verifiable identification. 

Her mask said, I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything in general and nothing in particular I could shit a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of torpedo feces grilled to perfection in a tomato based food culture served with onions and wedges of lemon garnished with sour reality. 

“Open your bags,” said her edgy mouth behind cotton fibers.

“Which bag would you like me to open, big or small?”

“The small one and where’s your passport?”

She’d never have one. He handed it to her and she really wanted to be important, self-sufficient, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventurous, and other impossible to imagine allegorical brave daring metaphorical nightmares in her short sweet life controlling the situation with this Bardo traveler free on parole from a dusty Byzantium archeological dig caressing pottery shards, glazed Ottoman tiles, castles and mosques while stirring musical sugar cubes in brown tea and weaving magic carpets in Kurdish villages under perpetual attack by Predator drones released by aggressive profit motivated war mongers to keep the anxious populace guessing and manipulated 24/7 by terrorist media FEAR propaganda machines controlled by moronic corrupt inefficient political idiots serving as an excuse to waste money on expensive military toys as global environmental, educational and health care systems collapsed under the weight of corruption, greed and eight billion starving mouths. 

After dusting off Patriot mussels and fixed-wing Turkish military aircraft for Syrian no-fly zones, hand carved Meerschaum pipes, glazed ceramics and Roman ruins he unzipped the small Eagle bag.

Winter Hawk flew free.

Lone Wolf ran free.

Shocked back to a fake reality she rummaged. She found music. She couldn’t hear beatific notes blooming along broken-hearted trails of Turkish and Kurdish women fleeing from arranged marriages.

She didn’t hear singing, keening women drumming soil above a wooden Ankara casket six feet down or melodies composed at transcendental borders coalescing with feminine songs birthing, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. 

She went through the motions.

“You can go,” she ordered in a short, fast deadly sentence.

Go was music to his ears.

The Language Company