Devil's Lake Monastery

"You are a true immortal. You stay sane by hanging out with the descendants of friends that are long dead. Today, one said a very familiar phrase you haven't heard in a long time."

I am a true immortal. I stay sane by hanging out with the descendants of friends that are long dead. Today, one said a very familiar phrase you haven't heard in a long time, “Sumus quid sumus.” We are what we are. That’s what my old friend John used to say. John was very successful and worked very hard to accumulate money. He found love and success, founded a huge family and created institutions that live on today. I founded nothing, and have no family. They call me the great malingerer. Or lazy. I never really saw the point in doing something because I had forever to learn or earn or build or do. I found it enough to just be. But being becomes old, but I got into a habit of not doing things. 

Then John the twentieth or something like that said, “we are what we are.” And I decided to activate. I was going to earn, then learn, then build. I looked out at the business world and saw that more than our needs were being met. So I got into luxury items. That’s not an easy game to get into. First I got into diamonds. Turns out they’re pretty common but controlling how many are available inflated the price. So to raise the price, I bought out a bunch of businesses and dissolves them. As my trove of diamonds rose in value, I sold high and collected a sum that could sustain me and grow in perpetuity. I would now turn to study.
I followed my interests in a zig zag fashion. I read Shakespeare and Darwin. I read the Greeks, and literature that just came out. I studied the various sciences, social sciences, math. I went to England and studied maths and saw some Shakespeare. I studied economics and reinvested my money. I read poetry for a year and wrote a few books myself, of poems and on Mary Oliver, Allen Ginsberg and the early American Buddhists of poetry.

I spent a year on butterflies, a year on tulips in the Netherlands, and a year excavating archaeology sites in India. I spent a year in a monastery meditating. I say “a year” but sometimes it was 8 months and sometimes it was 15 months. Rounding onto my second year of meditation I realized I wanted to build a monastery in my hometown of Madison Wisconsin. 
I went back there. When I was growing up the city was only 100,000 people. Now it was a sprawling metropolis that almost extended to Milwaukee in the east, La Crosse in the west, Janesville in the South and Dells in the north. It was a sprawling metropolis with bike lanes and green spaces. The university and the state capital were at the heart of it, on the isthmus between the two lakes.

I decided to build the monastery on the west bluff of Devil’s Lake. It took me years and years of political corruption to acquire the land since it was a state park. No worries, I had time. Meanwhile I searched the earth for the greatest architects. I decided to go with someone who wanted to build a monastery based on Frank Lloyd Wright because he was from Wisconsin. It seemed like a cliche, but when I saw the drawings I knew it had the winning design. 


The building would have a minimalist presence on the western bluff and I took ads out in all the newspapers in Wisconsin to tell the people of my plans and to hold a town hall meeting. Many people were upset, and expressed their feelings. Some people liked it. Some were upset it wasn’t a Christian monastery. I decided to include a non-denominational guest house for visitors of all faiths. I found that to be a great improvement. The more and more I read spiritual writing the more and more I saw how they all converged because that is what I wanted to see. 

Fudgies

Writing prompt: It's 2031, unhealthy food has been outlawed and you run a clandestine underground diner.

It's 2031, unhealthy food has been outlawed and I run a clandestine underground diner called Fudgies. Sugar was the biggest sin, but there were also people devoted to meats. Normally you saw people looking perfectly healthy, not overweight, no teeth missing. Inside my diner, all the people were not perfect, there were flaws. They were almost a badge of courage. Toothless husseys hooked up with fatsos. Meat loving animals hooked up with like. I expanded into the next building and made a disco for people to dance and copulate. Things got pretty viviparous so I opened up a hotel above the disco. The hotel attracted more oddballs and it became a kind of hookup hotel for the strange. I added a bar, for people who were unusual but not into unusual food. They were unusual in other ways. Then people complained that they didn’t want to drink but still meet up so I created a cafe for the strange. The Cafe for the Strange was a hit, and I had to expand and create a restaurant. The restaurant had conventional food. From one end of the block you got the ordinary food, but strange people, and then at the end of the block was strange food. It became a block that attracted people and soon like business grew up on the other side of the street and down the block. Pretty soon I was the king of StrangeTown, and the cops started raiding my diner, trying to put it out of business. There were a lot of cops eating there when they raided it, and they let them all go, and the cops went back to the precinct and talked to the whole group about letting it remain open. Kind of like Paddy’s the bar that stayed open throughout prohibition. I had to make it a bit of a speakeasy, without glass windows. But aside from hiding it from plain sight, I kept getting and making all the banned unhealthy foods. A vegan version opened up across the street. They focused more on sugar. With that business being drained off I had to focus more on meat. It was pretty gruesome in the back, chopping up all that flesh, grinding up the meat for hamburgers. Pork chops and hotdogs. You could get all the banned foods.
Marijuana had been legalized 22 years ago, and people would get very high and then go out to eat. They were more impulsive, and I opened up a donut shop, the perfect high food. The block was booming. The cops allowed the illegal stuff if it wasn’t flaunted. The neighborhood grew and grew and grew. The size became a problem. When it was small, you could ignore it, but when it got bigger, the politicians began to want their cut, and when we resisted the shake down, they started writing vindictive legislation to force the cops to break it up. It was during the riots of 2045 that my daughter was born. My wife was vegan, like almost everyone now, and wanted me to close Fudgies, but was a regular at the bakery, gobbling down the sugary treats. We used only ethical sugar that didn’t use animal parts to process it. We only used ethical dyes, no crushed red bugs.
My business partners wanted to open a gambling parlor. I drew the line there, and they opened one anyway. Pretty soon gangsters began to lurk around the neighborhood, lending money and shaking people down to get money back. That drew more law enforcement and legislators who wanted to only win. The bullets flying made me move out of the hotel and into the suburbs, driving in daily to review yesterday’s take, and make sure everything was running well. The business ran itself and I began to take more days off to spend with my daughter. I knew there was some skimming by some managers, but they kept it reasonable so that I didn’t have to intervene because it was so obvious. In the end I sold out everything and just retired. I put my money into a portfolio and bewitched by a new business, I went into the money markets. I hired hordes of math students just out of college, and listened to them. Soon they were spinning off business of their own and the whole ecology of money market was altered by my involvement in it. That is when my story begins. My daughter just graduated from college with a math degree, and I was going to get her into the family business. But she wasn’t into it. I should have listened to her.