Simple Voice
Share Article After a reliable narrator established a voice, geography, atmosphere, tone, conflict and cinematic jump cut action employing minimum wage universal themes like time, boredom, passion, loneliness and alienation in an unforgiving universe of meaningless existence with humor and curiosity holding hands and casting characters like plot dragging others around chained to their personality defects and character flaws wearing original death masks surrounded by distracted simple, noisy, gadget addicted compassionate illiterate peasants in a play waiting for Godot, writing with a Mont Blanc 149 fountain pen using Royal Blue invisible ink on blank parchment was pure luminous joy.
Lucky sat at an Indonesian warung - a cheap eatery serving white rice, spicy chili, eggs, green veggies, tempeh, tofu and deep-fried crackers behind a cement wall. Smoking teachers called it The Berlin Wall because they could inhale nicotine poison developing cancerous tumors away from inquisitive prying eyes of parents and school admin moles.
He’d escaped the tyranny of kind plaid dressed Bahasa robot educators trapped in futile expectations of perpetual childhood.
A village woman piled trash near a grove of banana trees and flamed it. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Billowing smoke obscured a thin man pushing a blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cloth, tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and household goodies through neighborhoods from dawn to dusk.
Cumulus clouds gathering mass and momentum discussed future seismic activity 7.5 miles below Java and inevitable roaring tsunamis pounding Japan land. Let’s destroy a nuclear reactor in Fukushima Daiichi, said a roaring wave, spreading radiation far and wide.
Ok, agreed another tumultuous wave, we’ll teach irrational h-saps not to mess with Mother Nature by developing cheap power on a coast at cost. Yeah, said a breaking wave, everyone pays in the long now. Radiation spread her wings.
Yelling villagers revealed frustrations as a thin woman teased her four-year old boy-monkey child. Pregnancy and birth gave her a one-way ticket out of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger into a parallel universe of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger. She worked, bred and got slaughtered.
In world villages women traded sex for fake temporary security. Father ran away to impregnate and abandon new naive victims. Hungry girls and mothers went to bed in a perpetual security-sex-money-childbirth-food cycle.
Species evolved.
She tormented the kid. He cried. He depended on her for safety and food. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster who hated women now and later. He’d kill her with a silent machete honed on his hatred’s hard-hearted wet stone.
A mother and daughter uttered primal grunting sounds. The mother combed daughter’s hair scavenging protein rich nits and lice. Crying children and distracted zombies savored -7 emotional years of miserable maturity.
Life is a temporary condition, said Beauty.
Primordial darkness is a cosmic birth.
Society is a cave.
Solitude is the way out.
Two women balancing scrap wood on heads took a shortcut through village mud. A white and yellow-flecked butterfly danced in spring’s breeze. Goats with tinkling bells foraged in trash and weeds.
Across town at Sukarno International Airport pale disoriented tourists waited to get passports stamped at immigration before exploring Balinese temples, hands-on erotic organic massage parlors and swimming in blue-green waves of surfing laughter with sharks on porpoise.
Removed from their naive traveling eyes palm oil plantation owners in Sumatra destroyed rain forests to feed their families so rich women could consume sweet facial cosmetic balms.
Poor Javanese farmers killed elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade providing Chinese consumers with aphrodisiacs.
