Eat fast or starve - TLC 8

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery. They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing. Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and Ankara dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' glazed befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus. It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

TLC

New Garden - TLC 78

Lucky shifted to a serene garden zone after sharing a house for two months with a sad young Filipino math teacher in the gated community of Alam Sutra.

The boy/man fathered a five-year old girl and left her with her mom in Manila Vanilla. His favorite expression was, “Let's Eat.”

Truth is powerful. You don’t have to remember what you said. Lucky mentioned choices and consequences. Math man didn’t hear, listen or care. Being a calculating teacher he figured a job with a decent salary in Amnesia was worth the emotional compromise cost.

A Hanoi survivor yelled, “Any fool can have a kid. It takes courage to raise them as independent free thinking individuals.”

In the new garden Lucky planted thirty flowers, red and pink roses, apple trees, deciduous shrubs, watercress, dill, oregano, parsley and thyme.

He refocused healing energies an hour west of Joke & Choke plus trolls tolls by taxi nightmare traffic due to poor urban highway planning. City pollution was a killer. It blasted throat and eyes. All east-west traffic passed through the city center. No ring roads. Duh.

“The center cannot hold,” said W.B. Yeats.

Air quality was refreshing in walled estates with tropical flora. Butterflies, songbirds, cockroaches, big brown beady-eyed rats and contemplative speckled frogs existed with copious little people.

Some homes were Mac Mansions. Greek and Roman columns with Ironic and Corinthian spiral decorations shouted, Look at my huge monster home. I made it. Empty palatial rooms collected dust as in China where it was all external appearances. Goes to show ya. Most homes in the gated communities were a bland 1-2 story cookie-cutter style. 

Everyone had a maid in Java jive some older than spoiled offspring. They cleaned two cars, swept dust, watered stone passages, cooked, scrubbed clothes and fed kiddies while parents were making money. It’s a job. 

Making money is a job. You need plates, ink, paper, press, a paper cutter, distribution system and government backed IOUs.

Illiterate slaves supported families surviving in a no-name village memory. A never-ending human supply system on an archipelago swarmed with 230 million hungry worker bees.

Food was cheap. Medicine and education were expensive.

Keep them poor barefoot and happy.

Favorite Jakarta sports were: 1) Driving huge 4x4s. Gas was $2.40 a gallon. Sitting in endless long traffic jams. Paying parking fees to paramilitary uniformed men blowing stainless steel whistles.

2) Wandering around enormous prosperous numerous say it fast three times vast shopping centers, huge playgrounds for brats.

Out-of-control kiddies expended spoiled energy. Families enjoyed A/C climate controlled conditions admiring Ankara-like dummies behind glass in a museum quality of artificial life filled with diversionary stimuli and unsatisfied desire.

The private Alam Sutra School named for a fictitious beatific saint had 1,800 students from kindergarten through high school. It began in 1993 when a Catholic priest from Yoga Posture escaping Interpol child molestation charges joined community leaders using a fake I.D. to promote formal educational tyranny and religious intolerance.

Five barbarian elementary English teachers complemented friendly local teachers. Oh, I just love your hairstyle. Your diamond-soled shoes are divine. Your handbag woven from creeper vines is elegant and eco-friendly.

Native teachers had seen colonial invaders come and go for centuries. Lip service.

The English supervisor was an anthropologist from New Hamster, Nova Scotia. Formerly a tenured professor in Malta, she left the job, house, marriage, mortgage, cars, airplanes and yachts for a meditative life. Her resume extolled extensive international educational administrative experience with time and space.