I know very little about meditation. I have read about it a couple of times, enough to know that I’m more of a person that appreciates mindfulness rather than meditative thinking.

The concept of having thoughts enter your mind, intrusive or otherwise, and simply acknowledging them and sending them back on their way is maddening to me. I much prefer a bombardment of thoughts, to ponder, to ruminate, to laugh, to enrage, to snack upon. Whatever.

It’s 7:53am and fans are spectating sports recaps at the bar. Baseball, tennis, the bartender repeatedly telling patrons that the bar dining area is closed and to go into the gated section if they want a table. That’s where I’m at, in the dining arena. This place was heavily branded on the outside but I can’t see a name on anything inside. I think it’s Big Daddy’s Burger? I’m in Charlotte’s airport. What a weird, sexualized name for a place to tell me that they’re serving breakfast only when I try to order a burger from the menu the waitress handed me.

I paid by QR code already, she took my order and handed me my plate of food and coffee. Had I ordered from the same QR code, she’d nearly be obsoleted. The cascade of unnecessary jobs in the future will certainly make its way to me sooner or later. This person buys things from retailers, my business supports those companies, my job supports that business, etc. Food web, ecological disaster, ecosystem collapse in capitalism.

I wonder about for how long animals have been eaten alive. I mean, not in the duration of each incident, I’m sure that varies. It seems most of being an animal, is chasing protein or running away from other moveable chemistry chasing energy exchange at your expense.

A few people I know have died very recently on short notice. I remember my dad told me once that as you get older, the people you know die at an accelerating frequency. That seems about right, middle age where heart attacks and cancers are picking off those who avoided drinking or falling asleep at the wheel or gunfights in the streets, or brain aneurysms on a soccer fields, or whatever path death comes for your children. Anyways, it’s been a noticeable number of middle aged friends and coworkers passing lately and it’s tragic and upsetting.

Then I’m at my gate. Big Daddy’s henchwoman was pressuring me to wrap it up, so I did. What is it with all these cancers and heart attacks? Cancer rates are actually increasing, at a time when I think most people have quit smoking, maybe it’s all the alcohol or sugar? Two carcinogens we’re still pretending are fine because stress. Could be that this planet loves detonating nuclear warheads sometimes for murder but mostly just to see if they work. Maybe eating as much plastic as we do, has its downsides? We wonder and we let the thought go.

In Philly, (that’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA for those readers who need extra data for clarity) they started putting the salt content against recommended allowance on their menus. Bad news, everything in the restaurant has too much sodium. I read once that salt could be treated more as a poison than as a dietary need, don’t let your arteries look back as Gomorrah is obliterated if you’re thinking about finishing those very salty buffalo wings.

There are a lot of things that would get you if humans hadn’t been so clever. As mentioned, most animals get hurt, or move to slow, or are sleeping, or find themselves cornered and the next thing they know wolves are eating their intestines or birds are pecking out their eyeballs. This was probably the first human invention, probably even before hunting, or language even. The very first problem humans likely wanted to solve was not being eaten alive. They did a good job too, I rarely wake up with sweats from that dream.

You can still sense the psychological urgency of not being eaten. In our most recent, American presidential election, the winning party debated that foreign born citizens were secretly eating out pets. They ran on that fear, and they won. Because our fear of being eaten is so close to us, that at a time where pets are family, we’re expanding that dome of security over our designer dogs and stray cats. “Nobody in this house is getting eaten by cannibals!” is what we tell ourselves when voting for greater economic hardships and reductions of previously secured rights.

Cannibals, that’s the other clue. Being eaten alive is so distasteful that humans decided that homosapiens cannot be food, under any circumstances. We’re not going to be food for sharks and grizzly bears, and we’re not going to be food to each other. Under absolutely no circumstance! There are cannibal laws, I’m not going to look it up, but I’m betting there are. It happens so infrequently that there might not be. I know when there are survivors of human strandings in the remote wilderness, that even eating the already dead meat of your own party, solely to keep alive and to make it home, is an offense so great that upon your arrival nobody will ever be your friend again. You’re probably reading this thinking “I would be nice to an incidental cannibal” but would you? If you can’t talk about that one thing, how would you think to talk about anything else?

It’s hard for me to finish this thought. A guy with a pair of readers halfway down his nose is sitting four seats to my right. His eyes focused at his hands in his lap and is playing some sort of internet clip on his phone at full volume. It’s some sort of jock jam sounding rhythm with cheers and screaming and he keeps restarting it. You can’t ask people if they’re retarded anymore. The R word isn’t even to be used in public. Having been born in the 1980s it’s the only natural response I have. Instead, I’m letting it occur. This annoying man’s disregard for public spaces and obliviousness to other’s discomfort, along with those horrific sounds are all entering my mind as a single intrusion, I’m acknowledging it, and I’m letting it go.

I am zen. This is nirvana.