Extinction Chronicles - 300420 ·

Today, 45 years ago i had just returned from NYC, or was precipitously leaving from a two-year scholarship awarded to me by the Art Student’s League of NYC. Events get hazy this much time later. What i remember about that time is that i would miss the July 4th 1976 celebration by my decision to vacate my scholarship, and i remember a red haired model with a remarkably long curly mane who i had just broken up with for, probably really stupid reasons and who showed up at my door shorn of her locks just prior to my journey back to SoCal. This was not the first time a woman in my romantic life had committed such a determined act and then demonstrated to me her resolve. When I left England, some short 3 years earlier in early 1972 to what i told myself at the time, to finish my last semester of High School, again precipitously and after a quarrel, Ms. A_____ Potter showed up at the door to bid me adieu where i lived under the roof of U.S. Army Master Sargent Joe Walls and his English wife Peggy - Angela had plucked her exquisitely voluminous eyebrows into 2 hideously arched pencil marks, and if she had taken a dagger and stabbed it into my heart at that moment i had opened the door that day, she could not have done more damage.

Now, i am old and my passions are less hasty - and i am living in a land with far more weighty memories than my picayune whimpering. 45 years ago today the entire mass of U.S. Empire was evicted from the land i am now welcomed to stay - sort of. I rode my bicycle early today and was greeted by a mixture of tolerance and curiosity far more kind than that i know was proffered to their kin from this land of Vietnam when they landed on the shores of ‘merica 45 years ago. I was living in, or in transition to Santa Ana, CA from Costa Mesa, CA where i had grown up. I understood even then that the price of rents where i had been raised were out of reach for the money i could earn as an unskilled wannabe artist recently returned from the “Big Apple” and yet to be discovered by the Art Brahmas that constituted “good taste” then as now. I had no fear for i was young and had conquered the big apple with ease, though young and arrogant about how culture and “good taste” worked.

Empire media quietly used diplomatically approved pablum about “peace with honor” to explain the reversal of 20 years of purpose and obscured views of the evacuation of diplomatic staff airlifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, nee Ho Chi Minh City. The fact 45 years later is clear, Ho Chi Minh was correct, John F. Kennedy was wrong. It was not an issue of communism vs democracy, but people vs oppression. Today the United States has been overthrown and successfully occupied by the same economic forces that sent 58,000 ‘mericans to their death. Within the past 3 days that same number of lives, 58,000 ‘mericans have again been sacrificed to the same greed and self-interest cloaked in the mantle of democracy during my youth - only now it is “g_d” and christianity against whom we are waging war against nearly every other free nation on the planet - while Viet Nam quietly continues to grow the best food, produce the finest music and flaunt the most beautiful women on the planet.

I am beyond shaming my countrymen for their insurmountable stupidity, or point to the merchants of my country about how to follow cooperative socialism for real growth and social calm. I do not have that many years left to me. Even within the confines of a post Covid-19 planet there are fewer and fewer avenues available. The entrepreneurial wolves have already landed in the land of Victors and like some twisted Greek Mythology are singing the praises of “ profit is your friend, there is ‘money’ just for the taking - if they are too stupid to know, that is their problem.” all the snide self-serving exhortations one could find in post WWII ‘merica. What people are not told is the mechanics of such greed ultimately lead to smaller and smaller yields to a smaller and smaller segment of the population, while the amoral and soul-less of the population simply shift the killing gates to fewer and fewer and the expense of more and more.

Don’t believe me - look at who had been comrades, months earlier and who are now climbing over your shoulder for the smallest advantage. there is no future but that which cooperative love for each other’s well being will provide. i have just now spent 10 minutes in the hammer drumbeat which only a working community is capable of hearing or drumming to. i will regret no longer being able to sample the skepticism of a war torn population through simple correspondent hammer thumping. Where i live is already awash in the conceit of communication through texting and the bleaching of meaning that comes such monosyllable exchanges. What i do not want to leave is a memory of the insincerity and fakeness that comes from cultivating approval by “emoticons” or admittance into the right “clique” - i spit on your conformance and reject the notion that i will become whole once i have surmounted your collective approval - while at the same time i accept each and every warmhearted exchange i have with every new stranger i meet · put that in your pipe and smoke it .  .. ··· : 

jts 30/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 290420 ·

I am sitting back at Dingo Deli and feel comfortable and encouraged. 4 weeks of intense inactivity have taken their toll on my wellbeing - wellbeing is not my long suit. However age and circumstance have made clear that without learning something more about that state of being, my dotage will be a short one. Moments ago the proprietor arrived with supplies, and in our short exchange i commented on how i will miss this location when he moves to a grander arrangement; his comment was “yeah, well change is good.” My historical resistance to the truth of his observation probably drove me to carve stone many years ago; at the time i was a snot-faced lad in the bowels of NYC - a veritable cauldron of change. I felt terribly alone and certainly afraid that my family would forget me, now that they no longer had to ignore me. I could not look at it quite so clearly then which i’m sure had something to do with the appeal of a material such as stone with its ageless promise - perfect to memorialize my grandiose vision of art that could not be ignored - little did i know · then or now. 

But like the song says, “i wish i didn’t know now, what i didn’t know then.” For example, a rule of thumb for occupations is to pick what you’re good at; and while i enjoyed some initial success, there was always a wrinkle in quality between my 2D drawings and paintings, and any 3D work. It wasn’t until nearly 40 years later that it dawned on me that as a virtual 2-eyed cyclops, i cannot see 3 dimensional form. Snicker if you must, i do, am. It was not as though there are people you can consult about such suspicions, nor was there any outward indication except for the disquiet about the wrinkle i’ve just described. In the course of the inevitable occupational rehabilitation artists in the audience might appreciate, the state of California tested and ranked me in the upper 99% for spatial recognition - what could go wrong? As it happens, a lot. The abundance that characterized our mid 20th century ‘merica, was to gradually erode to the degree we find ourselves today where commonly held assets such as National Parks and the U.S.Postal service are being liquidated to the highest bidder.

Not an auspicious time for being recognized as a cultural treasure much less being stuck paying the freight on a 1/2 ton of unsold stone carvings of wrinkled rather than ageless value, gathering dust in a storage unit in the backwaters of a Halliburton stronghold in Bakersfield, CA. The challenge of writing a chronicle focused on Extinction is considerable, for i tend to remain in a solitary state, but am fascinated by the human condition and constantly seek ways that i might put words to practical use. Just now, overhearing a lone traveler searching for accommodation, i engaged lone woman calling about a lodging - in the span of no more than 15 minutes i discovered she is Scandinavian on a voyage of exploration, now stranded for the time being. My interest was objective - 1) to discover whether she was in danger - she is not 2) to determine if there was anyway that i could help - no 3) i’m not gonna get laid. In the process i lost the privacy of my corner and interrupted this train of thought - and she left in umbrage when i retook my quiet corner seat.

Now based on no more than an inclination to help - my social distancing is substantially compromised and the couple who are nesting in the cubicle are loud with their appliances - when will i learn, or more importantly, what did i learn¿ In the short course of our communication i did learn that smokers for whatever reason are less susceptible to the virus, or so the story goes. Once you yield space, it is difficult to reestablish and that the thread of an essay is more precious than curiosity when one has not so much time left to think. Is there room still available to develop the relationship of perception as regards struggle. My most recent project was a walking stick after the shape of a femur and it is the ball of the ball&socket joint that has given me more insight into the carving process than the past 40 years of hand to stone has yielded. More accurately trying to shape a small spherical shape that has vastly more views immediately available than that of a 200 lb granite version disproves my carving master Jose De Creeft’s observation “when you work large, your mistakes are more easily perceived.”

I owe much of my life’s value to the simple act of hewing stone into some recognizable shape; it was my own arrogance and hubris which led me to harvest my concept of accomplishment from a prior world of masterpieces. I am humbled by having stretched beyond what my own experience constantly described - I am fortunate that i could arrive at this personal insight through perseverance, though the result is no more successful than the prior 40 years of effort. Truth be told, I am probably the only human alive that would be able to discern there is a fold in the head of my walking stick which cannot be resolved by determination or resolve i am faced with two hemispheres that will never join - this is likely biological, metaphorical as well as actual . . . i then fled my seat at Dingo Deli because a young turk and his dame snuck into the corner i’d been writing while inquired about the circumstance of an apparently stranded damsel; just as well the explanation was not developing as i’d hoped, so this is all you get - “a day late, a dollar short and going in the wrong direction” - A. Nonymous

jts 29/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 280420

I just finished watching a clip of the Rachel Maddow show, and if i had more character, i would be weeping about the tragedy that is unfolding in the country of my birth. The number of Covid-19 deaths is rapidly approaching the number of Americans sent to their deaths in the American War in Viet Nam - yet there are ‘mericans rallying in the streets to “open for business.” It is this self-serving distortion of all that was once good and decent in ‘merica by the capitalist thugs and their media shills that rends my soul at the seams. The greater tragedy, by far, is to have traveled enough in recent years to see how successfully these thugs have exported their brand of wildly effective exploitation of everything and everyone except that .01% of the world’s population that they consist of. 

I have been a school teacher in one of my incarnations; so i can appreciate the dynamics of a single student attempting to hijack the resources of an entire class - time, materials, attention etc. This experience translates into a horribly unfair and ofttimes inaccurate judgement of people in simple social situations - that woman who cannot have enough men admire her; the killer-diller who fears nothing; or the entrepreneur who has mastered greed and for a small fee will teach you how. I was recently described as a cynic - and it breaks my heart to say, but he was right. Somewhere along the line, my zeal to help the world save itself was overtaken by the family curse of sanctimony, however that does not mean that i have surrendered. 

When it became clear to me how shallow my accomplishments were stacked up against the work of actual warrior/scholars, i began to listen more carefully to the suggestions made by those i truly admired. Invariably what i heard was “look to your own heart,” i don’t know about any of you, but i’m 65 and am only just now beginning to see the barest outlines of what an asshole i can be - not the “you naughty, pathetic vile creature - but i love you still, because we’re family” one learns in the bosom of upbringing; but the look in someone’s eyes when something you thought was amusing caves in one more crumpled corner of the paper mache persona they’d just gathered courage enough to trot back out into the fray, or the look of anguish when the woman you have sworn fidelity to sees naked hunger in your eyes, knowing the lengths you will go to prove your love as you gaze in the direction of that other woman. The list could go on, and on.

And it did for far too long. It was when i stopped listening to the formative language used to evince a desired behavior during socialization and rather than deny the insults or praise used to create adherence and began to forgo any definition at all, but just to listen and watch that things began to make sense. No longer was my brother an asshole that i was going to prove wrong by being the most decent, loyal and superior member of the family - my family no longer existed · it was me having a dialogue with myself about people who have long since vanished from my daily life. From this catharsis i began to be mindful of how often what i thought i was responding to was clouded by feelings that had nothing to do with the fatigue, or joy or fear that i was facing just at that precise moment.

So today when as i watched example after example of my nation spinning seemingly irretrievably out of control and began to feel my mood shift from curious to morose, i began to count the good fortune of my existence. I did not smoke cigarette after cigarette, my neighbors are such that i can express irrational concerns, and they will tell me, “no you’re full of shit”, or “yes, i’d be careful about that” - the echoes of deceit that swamped the ‘merican ship-ship-of-state are not yet waves enough to crush the spirit of criticism which disciplined and forged a people enough to care about each other and strangers such as myself enough to halt and unknown threat in its tracks. This was accomplished with patience and calm, the same sort of behavior i rely on more and more to hear the faint voice deep inside my soul that is not cynical - that has a sight which can see far enough into the soul of another to find that kernel of goodness we all possess if one can just listen patiently enough.

jts 28/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 270420

Yesterday i described a shotgun blast in a room of an itinerant mining shack my mother shared with my grandmother and uncle - the discharge was precipitated by an unwelcome “suitor” at a back porch door while my grandfather was absent. The ripples of this violence still hold sway thousands of miles away and many decades after the fact. It gives me pause when i think about my own feelings toward young locals roosting at vantage points near my current home posing as fishermen. Nor can i say they are not in earnest or give a fuck about my “foreigners” hovel, save the fact that just days ago someone entered my home in the dead-of-night and left the never-used television toggled on. About this event, i have no real strong feelings, for in the best case it is simply disaffected young bucks “counting coup” in a city harboring predatory “alien digital entrepreneurs” seizing all the easy pickings, and in the worst case the manifestation of a sexually confused post adolescent man-child wanting to sort out his yearnings in entirely inappropriate, and possibly destructive ways. More to the point is how it relates to choices i make about my own lodgings. To stay or go, seems to be a theme from the day may changed the door locks to the home i had grown up in - i was 15. My scar is simply new skin growing from ma’s own brutal upbringing.

She was in her day a remarkably bountiful personality, yielding much to many for selfish and unselfish reasons as near as i can determine. Today i can only hope that the likely suffocation from the latest plague is quiet and peaceful. However it seems by the vigor i feel mentally, spiritually and physically despite the corrosive learning curve i’ve put my “mortal coil” through - i fear there are years left to me, when i would rather accomplish more than sampling the googol/youtube fare the ruling class would like to distract me with. For example, where would i go should i choose to vacate this, in its peculiar fashion, opulent domicile. The small ancient fishing hamlet/hipster doofus digital bucket list destination is flat, hence bicyclable, for the time being; more agrarian than the metropolitan destiny of its closest neighbor - Da Nang. I admire the culture and the people of Viet Nam, and have for many decades. Having lived in dozens of countries on 4 continents in the past 5 years, i can say i have a fair flavor of a broad swath of what the planet has to offer in amenities. The pressing consideration is my dotage. As a cantankerous solitary creative, i have reason to be concerned about who is nearby when i breathe my last gasp, and why.

The fiction my father, the wolf pack leader left me with was complex to say the least. His last “squeeze” took a powder, much the same as his last wife did once he could no longer, _______ you fill in the blank. How much i will have been influenced by his behavior can only be known upon my death, but between then and now the choices of my existence remain my own. There is a house next door to where i live that was occupied when i moved in by the “ebullient” young father-to-be mentioned prior in the chronicles. This house is decrepit and on the verge of collapse on one side and able to support a man, wife and child on the other. My position worldwide is to use as much as possible domiciles in place and not fall prey to the “speculation class” that depicts pots of gold at the end of every new trend formulated on the digital shackles most of the planet wears at the end of their wrists. I do no own a phone - do not want to own a phone · can picture a time in my future when i am “ordered” to own a phone. Until such time i will continue to plumb the imagination i was given and search for alternatives to the “infinite growth paradigm” and to propagate sustainable and planet friendly solutions to the seemingly inexorable demise of our film of atmosphere over the surface of our molten satellite to the star that we owe our light to.

Synchronicity determined that the restaurant i chose to patronize open or closed also is somehow related to my “ebullient” friend. So it is not outside the realm of possibility for me to simply move sideways into the actual hovel my friend and his family mysteriously vacated some months ago. The fantasy i have developed is to slowly renovate this older building and in so doing occupy the later years of my existence and leave to this community more than the Disneyesque echo that Hollywood has become and establish something of a multicultural island of research/study/and love. I cannot own property here in Viet Nam, but i can partner with persons to establish long term leases. I don’t require much to be comfortable so any preservation would be most importantly in what would be easily secured from speculation; would have an established function within a community about to be besieged by rising tides in an estuary mined for decades of its natural sand bank subjecting it to the coming “King Tides” which it seems only the shamans and foreign real estate speculators are paying attention to.

The irony of this post is that i do not ask for much, but in the context of what the world is facing it would seem i am asking for, as the movie said the “Full Monty”. Why not ¿? what else am i going to do - flee for a some international high ground with a history of stability and low economic growth resisting the unknown propagation of the latest plague; and in so doing, that the nest egg i invested into what had once been the backbone of a world economy, but which is now little more than the side yard of the fascist chop shop of empire remains solvent. It is within this lens of projection about our world’s future, i utilize the vehicle of essay to explore mine, and others possibilities. I think it would be fun to invigorate renovation as an economic engine in a World Heritage Site. There is much talent, local and foreign which i believe wants the very best outcome possible - despite the forlorn projections of a “4th Estate” long since rendered to nothing more fish bait brokers for the billionaire class wallowing in a phantasmagoria of fictitious “capital”. The boys at the irrigation channel fronting the site i am proposing as a “last stand” constitute more credible potential as investors for the future than any digital “coin” i have come across in my years of travel. So i will close this episode casting my hopes for a pacific passing into the vortex of a wind, both brutal but real that can only end in the results of those steps we humans now take to preserve life on our planet for those we love and those we could have loved with more time and more wisdom.

jts 27/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 260420 ·

I don’t like bullies; never have, never will. One could go so far as to say i hate bullies, but that person would be lying, i don’t hate - i evacuate. Early on this urge to flee was based on fear, i was young and weird looking - perfect prey in the schoolyards of the incubator of hate which the country of my birth was to become much later · like now. I remember the afternoon John F. Kennedy was shot; the adults vanished into corners and dark recesses to nurse their grief and we children were sent to the play yard. It was not my first experience with moral outrage for i was an ugly human born to a family of beautiful people, but it was formative for its grotesque contrast. One of the other “midget people” came up to me innocently trying to process what was a complete mystery at the time and said to me, “boy, i bet he’s got a splitting headache.” There could not have been a malignant splinter in what he said because he was just too fucking young to formulate such a cruel statement. Sitting here now trying to reflect on what i know about hate, it is clear this 6-8 year old child was parroting something a supervising adult had just said to him - an adult full of glee and gloating about an action s/he may have wanted to do themselves but lacked the courage to say or do up front. The best they could accomplish at that time was to use the now too familiar snarky remark lacking compassion that flavors so much of today’s ‘merican discourse.

To be fair, it is not an American infirmity, the reaction-formation is a planetary reaction which turns our civilization’s blind eye to the world’s wrong course to self-aggrandize and heroizes vacuous gestures of “chest thumping” to replace the hard work called for by those who have “been set apart by wealth” as Leonard Cohen stated so clearly. I accept this behavior is to  assuage a refusal to deal with the rape of a planet and enslavement of our home and its people for profit - that does not mean i accept it; so i remain alone. I find bullies tend to cluster because they lack the strength of character to act alone. I learned this having been born into a family of bullies - and not · None of my kin could be described as evil by any stretch of the language or distorted by the pain of having to grow up quiet so close to such grand egos, for the experience has been more than informative - it was thankfully formative. I cringe whenever someone attempts to lord anything over me, not from fear - i’m too old to be animated by that exclusively, but from simple physical repulsion. I yet lack the patience to entertain anyone who demands that i love them more than they are willing to love themselves. 

From what i have learned about love it requires expression much larger than my own deficit. My father was fairly brutal in his insistence that i learn to fend for myself; from this Jesuit-like indoctrination - i keep a good account of my ledgers. I am far enough ahead to give constantly more than i take · My mother’s sister - Jane told me in one Jack Daniels’s fueled discourse late one night “leave the world better than you found it.” My aunt had a great influence on me; i could not know at the time that each was using me to say “I am sorry” to the other. It doesn’t matter except for the fact that my Aunt Jane wounded my mother terribly by being a bully i know as sure as i sit on this chair she, my aunt would never have done if she were aware, nor ma - bless her tired soul. One day driving on the 60 Hwy out of San Bernardino toward one our many treks to Beatty Nevada where ma had been boarded out with my grandfather Joe - estranged from his wife my grandmother Maude, ma shared the story about a my grandmother discharging a shotgun in the bedroom of the mining camp room where they were lodged. Maude did this because an acquaintance of Joe’s had made a “pest” of himself on the porch while Joe was gone.

I do not know how old ma was when this occurred, but i know somewhere in her being trembled such that she had to share it many, many years later. As always with such disclosures our journey was not a peaceful one as i had hoped, yet is value her humanity all the more that i was the child of all her beautiful offsprings she opted to share this with - much to my chagrin · sort of. In the scheme of things this bizarre equation of confiding such a personal fear with one in whom she had already instilled vast unnecessary fears demonstrated a perverse confidence that I needed to know such things. There is no doubt (my limitation) that not one of my siblings has any idea about this event, or can begin to understand just how cruel our mother has been. I know that they, like myself run, armed with the only emotional device our family could create out of the maelstrom of confusion that described the post assassination crazy ‘merica of the 60’s - sanctimony of the “industrial strength” sort. To believe oneself superior to those one would hate is a convenience i miss, but am in no hurry to welcome back. 

Our world has grown far too small to sustain the weight of hate - it is why i run from haters and the clusters they create. My family is affronted by my presence - the same presence you have read this far into. I cannot blame them, the same as i would applaud you for wading this far into such misery. I do not know of any other way to purge my being of this toxic morass except to explore in deeper and deeper circles that which blocks my naturally loving heart. I do not want to die without getting as close as i can to the child i was before the world demanded i be afraid. It is for this reason i veer from cliques - bodies of humans who seek confirmation of their worth by surrounding themselves in some agreement that must be validated by others. I’d love nothing better than join humanity, but not if it is at the exclusion of anyone who wishes to remain apart for whatever reason. You cannot drag me anywhere i do not wish to go for reasons that will forever remain within my purview. I am alone and will remain so until such time i meet others who accept and expect such. I love you, but will not absolve myself of the higher responsibility of loving myself such as i am - warts and all · it is for this reason and this reason alone i do not hope bad things for the leader of the world’s haters - if i was to give myself over to such a passing inclination, i will have relinquished the most dear thing in my life · a natural and powerful ability to love strongly what i do not understand, lucky me - lucky us ·

jts 26/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 250420 ·

Climbing out of the bath i struggled to retrieve the word “misogyny;” two days earlier i struggled for the names of two prominent painters in my training Monet, and Manet. Certainly this lapse could be attributed to stress and a certain laziness about physical hygiene as pertains elevating the heart rate, and/or it is a function of death-denial that visits every self-aware living organism moments prior to .  ..  ··· C.G. Jung bandied about the human archetype, nor will i quarrel with such a notion based on too many personal experiences, even with monocular vision, of a fairly clear apprehension of individuals from many meters out. Projection is a bitch, and i cut it to the bone each time i find judgement in my gaze - yet i’d be a fool to disregard any repeating pattern the same as night follows day and winter follows fall. It is the openness to understanding what one is seeing while gazing as deeply into whatever aspect of existence one can summon in this “demand for attention” environment encroaching on every waking moment of our short life span.

So it is with pertinence about this narrative - anymore that i maintain some conceit about control over my smear on the planet i am yoked to the delusion of meaning within this prose murmuring. Our time is nigh as a life form on terra so by my thinking as much as we can infuse each moment left to any of us with meaning is, ipso facto the entire dimension of the universe. It’s now 3:30 and Mozart’s Requiem is 7/8ths through youtube, while i am only 1 1/3 thru this exercise in futility. I climbed out of the bathtub fortified by clean skin and an epsom salt soak facing no more than a par-broiled week-old chicken and wilted vegetable dinner that is further wilting under the weight of a requiem i hold little solidarity with, so i shall switch to rockabilly via heartbreak hotel hoping for some existential common ground . .. ··· yeah that’s a lot better, though Elvis caved into a reactionary echo in his latter days - my heart remains open to real feeling.

I have no idea 2 paragraphs into this day’s obligation and if that is too uncomfortable for you to follow - see ya’ in the funny papers. Youtube to its credit follows up with more Elvis “now or never” schmaltz. I wonder if this is what it was like for that persona that was left of Elvis “leaving the building” after he had sold his soul to Tricky Dick¿ am losing the thread and resorted to Youtube’s cue for Robert Johnson, for is this is actually a chronicle there is small percentage of the readers regardless of the date who have no clue who Robert Johnson is anymore than they might recognize my obscure self. How to find language that conveys the fundamentals of our crisis. “You keep walking down this path, and you gonna die!” doesn’t seem enough, but like the empty plate at a table full of appetites, @t’sal there is’”.

I’m in foreign territory literally and must follow words as the emerge from the morass. The world i was born to has dissolved and all the recognizable signposts of meaning point in contradictory directions as though the Master of Paradox had begun directing existential traffic. Me, the only sea anchor i know to follow is the drift from my love chain that pulls on my heart strings. It use to be features i could replicate reminding me of a home life which dissolved like the solids that evaporated in front of Magritte’s eyes when he conceptualized atoms. What is left of my intellect understands the flesh falling from my bones wherever they cease motion; however that concept does not absolve me from a genetic responsibility to leave wherever i rest better than when i found it. If you have never occupied yourself with this conundrum, no amount of explanation will help you to understand the paradox this poses. If you feel that your presence is no more than burden to all you encounter, then there is no act that aids all you meet, yet if you accept the responsibility to relieve one person you meet from any burden you may - the entire equation for life is changed.

It only becomes really fun when you multiply such a conceit by the the numbers available to our feeble and weak imaginations that real fun emerges. What if all of our collective fantasies manifested at one moment outside of the “singularity” posited by the corporate overlords and their henchman’s pernicious claim by “Art Intel”¿ What if our dying planet harvested the inexhaustible energy of all human effort and it more resembled “Jerry Springer” ¿ would you be able to abandon your vision of Madonna’s, Soulmates, Perfect-Jobs, Honest Leaders .  .. ··· ? Have we reached a level of desperation that we can appreciate the wisdom of pre-pubescent savant pointing simply and accurately at the doom we are forging through cowardice and greed? It is hard enough for me to complete 5 paragraphs resembling anything useful to a world absorbed by the dishonest media demise of one more danger far less dangerous than the perpetual war a handful of haters have successfully yoked humanity for no better reason than perpetual profit - yeah don’t i feel dumb as fuck · what about you ¿?  

jts 25/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 240420 ·

Fri 5:07 pm Running late, but the gas tank got filled, so i am able to cook - i have no fever different from that fucking love bug that has haunted my steps from an early age; don’t believe me, ask anyone of my 3 wives and they will tell you the same - convince me that you love me and i am putty in your hands · & and i have been molded into some damn funny shapes. What took longer to form than those funny caricatures i was left wearing at the end of each marriage as each wife took a powder for a variety of very good reasons, is the person writing to you now who loves themself. Enough so, that i take pains to be clear to people i’ve never met about truths i barely understand about myself. Today i stepped on the tail of my fate, and you could have pushed me over with a feather. I was slogging through my day attempting to rekindle the simple joy of not dying from a plague whose danger has been plastered over the skien of screens which now virtually controls, at least the digits of a majority of the world population.

As i rode up to a small vegetarian bistro of unique character today after businesses had been reopened in the ancient coastal city where i have been cloistered for over a month - I was met quite unexpectedly by a person of ebullient vibration who had until recently been a neighbor adjacent to the “foreigner” hovel i live in. When i say hovel, i mean: flushing toilets, well appointed cabinets, no exits out the back and walls that can be easily scaled, but a gate that cannot be broken open - all the luxuries people seeking protection from those around them might need. I was saddened when this person and his young growing family disappeared in the course of a day - the language/cultural barrier precluded pointed questions so i cast banknotes toward the wind of his family’s upcoming birth and let it go, like so many other mysteries about where i live. I had taken it upon myself to obscurely replenish the tills of this bistro during this passing downturn but seeing my friend and his wife looking at me as i rode up - i knew i had been made. 

You can run, but you cannot hide was said by many much wiser than myself - i’d like to think i am a professional at hiding · but i’d be bullshitting you my only reader; this i refuse to do, however painful. I am fake as fuck, but not like i’m trying to deceive you for some seedy reason, but because i am uncomfortable with anyone knowing how tender i am and how easily broken i can be. The magic of the event today is that my selfish conceit and ulterior motive - the “con” Pema Chodron so sagely descibes was thrown up into my face like a windswept sheet from a no longer whole newspaper being blown up into your face, or the more dangerous variety of a car hood improperly latched suddenly blocking your view as you are entering the freeway. I have met few people with which i resonate; i no longer demand fault from myself for this isolation so when someone looks at me kindly it is terribly apparent. I returned to this bistro and tried to contribute anonymously during the “shelter in place” order simply because i was treated kindly. I accept that my contribution was self-serving, but make no apologies for wanting to protect such kindness. 

It is the delusion i must now face - in the confusion of ordering my meal once again and joining my former neighbor at a prominent table rather than my preferred quiet corner i had to accept that the entire restaurant now recognized my appreciation of this young woman’s kindness and, not to add insult to injury - my ebullient father-to-be-former-neighbor-friend wanted to memorialize the event with a photo revealing in living color my beaten-to-fuck visage in a sadly accurate depiction of my surprise and despair - yeah life is good · but it gets better; my hungry heart has not yet surrendered and so there are echoes of “would you like to¿; can we look at this together?; what about if we . ..¿” floating all over this backwater asian port that i am responsible for. I believe strongly in love karma and if you fuck with someone’s heart - someone is going to fuck with yours. It is a tightrope in today’s superheated, consumer fueled hall of mirrors, but i try to thread the needle and continue to drag this battered core of love i have found deep in my being to each possible, help me what’s the word i’m looking for ¿ love ? 

So while i accept there are many, many who are wildly distracted by issues of death, loss, and fear about something no one can foretell - the future. i am grateful that you the reader could be amused enough about something as simple as the pleasure of another person looking without seeing and read this far. The reason i feel such strong attraction for this young woman is that when i looked into her eyes of her already mask-covered face prior to the outbreak, i found curiosity. From a young age as basically a cyclops with two eyes, i have faced many expressions from family to friends to wives to thieves and so have an internal reservoir full with feeling about each new expression i face. The difficulty has always been that the gaze runs both ways - inside and out. For far too long my inner hatred for that which i was unable to become for others colored much of my perception about others - i was deficient, but it also was a cauldron of sorts that burnt away a lot of bullshit that people often are completely unaware of when they are looking at someone else’s face - my dumb luck with my failing vision is i can no longer see the burnt away bullshit, but where someone is looking when they look at me - is it my heart, or theirs¿

jts 24/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 230420

Thu 4:13 pm and the gas tank has finally expired; am more and more amazed how the gummed edge of the rolling paper comes up licked to the outside, ah - the delectable pleasures of age. My saucepan was loaded and ready to simmer when the gas gave way, the local burger emporium is now open and fortunately willing to deliver, so if the creek don’t rise, i’ll have paid rent for a month; my stimulus check will have been deposited, ma may still be wheezing in Long Beach @ 92 in a high risk medical circumstance - nothing more than an intellect willing to face an early on and oft quoted “inconsolable” fear of death · go Mammy, Go ! At this point i could honestly give a fuck about my own passing, though i admit to an inordinate curiosity about what comes next. ..  ... as it happens it was my vegetarian burger and bottle of cold rice wine - makes one almost want to “believe what the scriptures tell” - Bob Dylan. Grateful beyond measure to Pop, for being able to vomit prose though i am not sick in a world immersed in illness. My elixir of homemade expectorand and confused trachea managed to hack phlegm just at the moment i was utilizing the digital voice of google translate to convey my earnest gratitude to my neighbors and now i have an un-eaten vegetarian burger, likely made with much love; a saucepan lightly brazed with the end of a small bottle of olive oil and non response from my real estate agent whether the non response is reaction formation to an office environment likely resembling some perverse permutation of “Glengarry Glen Ross” - hold that thought · she’s notifying me on another channel .  ..  ··· 

1 paragraph down, 4 to go - like at the end of this mysterious journey with a dubious conclusion my sum total will be informed by this fluttering flag of - what would you call it ¿ it doesn’t even possess the resonance of a small bell ? Baha next door is moistening her verdant garden that yielded the only thing necessary to catch fish in the irrigation channel rent bare from its old growth bamboo by a sadly entirely understandable desire by an expat to have an unimpeded snapshot of how close their villa sits in proximity to the rice fields - a long ass earthworm. I once lived with a hoard of Staten Island immigrants in a two bedroom bungalow on a 1/4 acre of land in the city of Costa Mesa which i moved to at the age of 6. I met the point man of this influx while still at High School and could not know then what an impact on my life this passing wind would have. For two examples: my father and i stood at a hedge bordered by the much lauded picket fence and i peed during one momentary parental exchange - he had just told the local hero - Dave Haley how he hated anyone “darker than him.” Minutes later, the normally placid Hawaiian was at the overhang on the East 4o with a machete and a vehemence that did not mesh easily with his patient rehabilitation of a 650 Triumph which had been abandoned in the former cell of the Iguana who had recently languished in captivity.

2 paragraphs in i cannot, or will not disclose how difficult this personal disclosure is - for there is more, much more than the same Iguana wandering into the shower enclosure after you had watched it cram an Easter chicken thigh into its throat by swiping it back and forth against the recognizable glass door from some from abandoned suburban patio that had within months held all of the important parts of said 650 Triumph - whose running purr was a truly heavenly sound · Threatening insurrection i am playing “Thunder on the Mountain” in a backwater of Viet Nam where my entire existence is as Ricky Rivera might say “at your pleasure” I could give a fuck just about in the song where he sings “I don't give a damn about your dreams”. My front wheel squeaks like a motherfucker and i have just paid $100k vnd to a local mechanic to oversee and silence the concerns of my limited investment in this limited investment market. The same kind of community speakers that announced Muslim prayer in Lombak with similar fervor i hear the Karaoke singers of where i live now prepare for their post Corona defense of culture.

Oh boy 4of4 and i am delivered - if that is an expression for a 65 year old cohort to a 5o year old invading force that reeked untold destruction in a land minding its own business. In the interest of brutal candor i will share a story - a hard share · of an event in this land of _______ fill in the blank. I was struggling at the time for occupation and had fallen in with a local industry building “hang gliders” - a temporal conceit as though one could fly like “Icarus” - editorial note: of the family of 5 original members of W_____ W____g - only the unrelated manager eluded personal death with the destruction of his right Ulna - due it this labor deficit it was decided at the higher levels of management i would deliver the cardboard canisters to points South. It is at this point in the story where things become tragic. I had picked up a young couple hitchhiking south and invited them and their puppy to spend the night in CM. The puppy was hit by a car in the course of the night and i believed that i could put it out of its misery with a blow to the curb - i was wrong and this poor creature sustained many blows at my earnest hand to end its life · 45 years later i still grieve my inability to end life mercifully.

Now i witness an entire species dying on the vine, not because of error, but for a lack of necessary awareness that i do not possess now, anymore than i possessed then. I pray for the comfort of the life i could not take effectively and hope my own suffering created by my own defects does not contribute to other´s efforts to evade suffering while trying to live a happy life in unhappy times. My sincere hope is that by sharing as openly and honestly about reservations i have had in my myopic but sincere quest for happiness will animate another life to enjoy that remarkable pleasure of seeking the welfare of another though it is not clear how to help. I will not last much longer and to not know where my bones will come to rest, but i am not particularly concerned about that as much as somehow this small step i have taken full of fear will somehow add peace and comfort to someone's life i have never met. 

jts 23/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 220420 ·

Too late 11 am - i was about to conduct a sober test to find out if my writing was still accessible without the chin oil that libation liberates. Lo the spin cycle has commenced so those clothes must now be hung to dry and i will needs be get my heart rate up and buy blue cheese. My real hope that that some resentful local will not demonstrate h/her disrespect for my humble efforts toward reparations while i am out infusing the local economy with what little i have coming to me from Uncle Sam. So clearly the bitterness that fuels so much of my literary efforts is not much blunted by any lack of alcohol. That’s a big relief, i’d hate to think that nirvana was simply a question of putting the cork in the bottle. Truth be told, i am as much of an endorphin addict as dependent on any substance i’ve discovered in my long history of “looking for love in all the wrong places.” So while i cannot yet run again from some perfect storm of physical maladies which visit old people, i have found that once i got moving, i was able to harness much muscle memory and do quite well here in bicycle heaven, so take note and be sure to flag any obvious differences between sober me, and drunken me - said Rip Van “wannabe” Winkle to no one ever .  ..  ···

2 pm fortified with 2 liters of Pomelo IPA, clean sheets and 2 borrowed hammers i am well on my way to resurrection. As i’ve noted elsewhere in other chronicles i once spent a year commuting with the purloined right femur of the class skeleton because i was in the process of carving a granite femur and the commute seemed a perfect time to study a form this form that defied my feeble comprehension. For anybody who has ever carved granite, they would understand the pace and very real requirement of a hammer hand capable of sustained accurate throws - lest one’s cutting hand bear the brunt of shots off the mark. Ergo in addition to my driving distraction of sublimating an impossible form into the inner recesses of my being - twirled a forged Trow & Holden 2 lb hammerhead affixed to a Trow & Holden hickory bell handle long after the femur was complete. So as my enforced lethargy broken by spurts of sanctioned bicycle rides aids my lower extremities and neglected core - my upper body strength has dwindled. Just now as i type single handed, i’m amused by the ghastly image of my borrowed exercise tool whiffling down at the drop cycle of an errant twirl and clipping a 1 x 1” isosceles triangle from my latest laptop .  .. ···

Though i woke late last night from the 1st deep rest i’ve had in weeks; (there is nothing in my schedule that can account for such slumber) - more accurately, i lost the thread and had to find filler. The downside of drunken writing - that profound insight evaporates more quickly than the digits can execute, nor ao much different than arriving back from an LSD journey only to find the celestial discovery remained back in the dimension you’d just returned from. As an aging intellect wounded from life battles, this lapse in concentration is not unfamiliar (mostly pointing to Thich Nhat Hanh’s kind advocacy of “mindfulness”) But we are talking about extinction and not reminiscence. The world is at a standstill relative to days earlier, and if we’re not careful along with awareness of just how WRONG things were going prior to the standstill. Besides the blatant corporate assault on human existence, our species is facing a reevaluation of its very purpose - are we living to support a handful of “hateful appetites” dressed up as leaders, or are we going to fully appreciate this pause to refocus and utilize the mindfulness Master Thay points to ?

I came to Viet Nam because of fantasy born of loneliness fueled by a virtual relationship with someone i’d “just missed” in more ways than one. My rationalization became this is a land that has a demonstrated capacity to beat the odds. Viet Nam essentially told Uncle Sam to “get the fuggoudda here” and made it stick. In accordance to my left-brain mechanics, i figured if any cultural entity was going to be able to establish a protocol for perpetuating our endangered DNA it was going to get a better chance here than the dozen or so other cultures i’d recently domiciled in search of study i now find is not longer really required - [details for another chronicle]. Politically i find myself shoehorned against new-age entrepreneurs off-loaded from the cell-channel into the virtual imagination of the world. No, i don’t own a phone; why do you ask¿ not even sure how long i’ll be able to make that claim in post Corona-19 anti-body-id hysteria. And like Pop said - “man am i glad i’m old”

Fun anymore is what i think constitutes leadership - yet here i sit chomping goobers infused with condensed milk parsing what a childhood hero George Washington Carver declared about the unlimited potential of peanuts against what i later learned about candida and gut health relative to excess peanuts. It is just this dichotomy our species faces not me alone trying to write with milk greased fingers and returning one of two hammers because i only need the one. And not to add insult to injury - the hammer i kept had a huge divet just at the neck, and though i had a Jr. High school shop teacher slam the bellyboard fin off my project because i had the temerity to reconsider a 3/4 incursion to the fin a structurally insignificant wound - i now 60 years later realize that i could possibly add 100 years to the life of my borrowed and well hafted hammer with small effort and great gain - i’m going for it. The sky has darkened, my sheets, while not crisp and sunny will not mold before i saturate them with sweated salt enough from my fitful rest. My larder is full enough, i’ve retrieved adequate funds for my billet for another month - i have 2 months and some days on my visa and enough left over to lighten the load of many whose burden is greater than my own - life is good, and i am lucky · i share willingly any link you might make to such good fortune. 

jts 22/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 210420 ·

It’s not 3, but it ain’t 10 am & i like to write; i like to drink while i write - if this is cheating on myself, so be it. FB is choosing to share stories about ATMs kicking cards out in the foreign land in which i reside and is still in lockdown, and the promised stimulus check has not been deposited in my account; the troubled rat-faced next door neighbor boy who likely turned my tv on in the middle of the night after i left the doors open for some draft has got a snarky grin on his face i’d like to slap into next week. All the conventional wisdom says to get down into that shit and feel it for what it is, but i’m cooking beans; doing the laundry and cooking beans. The question is whether drinking while writing yields finer work - like Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway, or what they wrote so much frightened the editors of culture that the stink of substance abuse has filtered down into the plebeian’s finely tuned decorum and sucked out the last breath of rebellion from a population believing god’s gonna protect them from the virus and kill their enemy.

Anymore than my outdated Dionysian fantasy of the right mixture of sex and alcohol will grease the skids for a smooth ride into the ever-after. What i like about writing is it forces one to place in print the thoughts that seem to grip one’s destiny - there is no grip · but there is a lot of lessons. Lao Tzu - “you can ask anything you want, but must be willing to accept the answer.” Would i be rescued from my destiny and break the karmic chain if i petitioned for a billet in Thich Nhat Hanh’s ashram¿ or would it be more evidence of the depth of my wound to search for vindication in the house of another? It is not so much the smarmy grin on the boy next door’s face flaunting his heroic intrusion - he was just counting coup as he understands it · more it is my own relationship to the act of gloating that disquiets me - that same snide defiance i feel as i pull tobacco into my aged lungs during the time a new pandemic is attacking weakened lung tissue - specifically that of older people like me.

Fucking paradox - kindness to my self seems incased in relinquishing recognition fantasy, love, fantasy, death fantasy · so why the strife¿ I have no control over any of what has reigned over my existence since i learned how naughty and unformed i was and without a by your leave i’m about to perish loved by strangers who know me not except how they feel about that feeling of inexplicable love we seem to see together. Just now i sat perplexed with clean clothes, a closed gate; pot full of food + gifted peanut desert. I’ve never been more convinced of my temporariness which is not be confused with immortality. My laughter exists like a familiar friend on some nightfall corner. The delusion of meaning has as Leonard Cohen described so clearly by saying “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul”, yet so few channels will respond to questions about laughter with this tidbit of history. Fucking-A, i’m a tad discouraged. 

More fucking paradox - beaten into me as though the ’60s was not beating enough for a teenager · “finish what you set out to complete” - said Pop ’til it was as Bob Dylan described “oozing out of my ears. Here i sit 3 paragraphs into my 5 paragraph slog - drunk sort of, and sappy as hell about how to covertly retch candor onto your 30 second evaluation of worth of attention at a time our entire planet is about to school us about what not to do with an ecosystem our film adheres to tenuously, but not really. The thing about language is that it resembles the system it stems from. For example, i am a dying member of a cohort which has asserted an inequitable influence into a quite limited smear, for lack of a better expression, onto the face of a boiling rock floating in a semi-vacuum we are just now learning apparently too late to understand, constitutes 99% of our known universe.

And i’m stressing about finishing another 300 words for fuck’s sake that may or may not ever be read - either i am insane, or you are. I managed to produce a bowl of beans today along with a clean floor, a Glenn Ford weird as fuck western · my beans, i’ll end up chocking down because i understand them to be full of immune building ingredients. Dorothy Parker said “i hate writing, but love, having written.” I feel the same about bicycling and opening up my oddly scarred core. Much of my life has been spent disappearing from what i deem as hateful people, only to discover that hateful person was myself. My flesh is withering from neglect - i’d be better off fucking daily and hammering stone or depicting what my cycloptic vision has learned as work arounds, but the universe has seen fit to demand immobility and patience. Tell me again how the universe is a place in which we exist and not the designer of its own future.

jts 21/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 19-200420

Bath time : 3 hours later “Catch-22” is finished and my grime is down the drain for the time being. For a classic the story was hard to digest. This book had been touted as the definitive reply to war mongering, and yet for all its incisive wit was not up to the task of impeding the drums of war; what then will stop such folly¿ i am old and on my way out - my faculties fading and my influence nearly nil, i cannot have food delivered in a timely fashion nor incite the pretty young maids to learn all i know about the flesh, or more accurately, to teach me all they know about flesh. Master Thich Nhat Hanh spurns romantic relations and that proscription cuts me to the core. I had imagined my latter years much like what Rembrandt had organized - a young lass loving to see my wonder of her figure manifest in fine art. Instead i find the young lovelies are repelled by my vile decay and happy to ridicule my courtly approach: (cackling in the background). 

I sit in a spillway to what was of the first expat properties in the boutique destination of Hoi An Viet Nam. My neighbors are salt of the earth and tolerant of my otherworldly ways. I have a bicycle that infuses my battered frame with a vigor that is more fantasy than fact. I am no longer dogged in my determination to learn language and therefore isolated from the simple pleasures of “Hey man, what the fuck is going on?” However, because it is a land informed by struggle of the honest sort - those activities that benefit the most abound; rice is harvested and dried on roadways knowing that traffic will respect the product. Elders are unmolested and food is communal, even to the unwashed foreigner that demonstrates proper respect. Where the nation in which i was raised now entertains petulant thugs spitting on simple pragmatic hygiene during a worldwide viral conflagration the population that surrounds me quietly endures measures that prevent the spread of a common enemy.

Still i am lost. I choose not to pursue the cliques that constitute cultural belonging available to foreigners for i have little in common with what i find - (i am a cultural snob, thinking my mining of the local reality is closer to truth than any other ‘disease of conceit). What i find in most cases is a predatory orientation that involves concealment of motives that are consistent with the dominant world view - “more is better; i have more stuff than you, so i am more powerful; or my motor is bigger, so the way you drive is stupid, etc. etc. Sadly it is most likely projection of my own fears onto others - glorifying, and romanticizing that which i identify with, and diminishing and dehumanizing that which i reject; the only real therapy i have available to me is this chronicle i pursue, now that i am going blind and no longer able to nurture any delusion of an artistic contribution to our species’s last gasps.

. . . sometime into the next day - last night was interesting, for i woke in the middle of the night to find the television i have never turned on on. I had left the two doors ajar for the heat is growing and i wanted to create normalcy of draft, knowing that it jeopardizes my security. Sure enough; the only conclusion i could make is that someone came in and cased the joint, leaving the television on without a station. Fortunately i am at the “fuckit” stage of existence so as i walked out to investigate - it was only “fight, no flight” available · My neighbors next door were sympathetic, but break-ins are a part of the texture of life in a formerly war-torn nation now harvesting as best it can the bounty of today’s “destination—economy-hipster-doofus-digital-late-stage-catpitalistic-where-can-i-get-drunk-and-not-arrested” higher aspirations. Then again there’s a lot of money riding on the SEA success of reversing Uncle Ho’s dangerous incursions into the hearts and minds of a population that has yet to be conquered by Chinese, French, ‘merican - or any other invading hoard unwilling to plumb the proper integration protocols of this mysterious Warrior/Scholar/Monk/Emeritus/Worker/People melange. 

Because i am a good son, and mean to obey my father’s deathbed request that i never stop writing, i must persist. Whether this yields helpful ideas to those that live on and possess the curiosity and technical prowess to uncover these chronicles is not important, only that i do my best to honestly plumb the caverns of my dying being in such a way that others might be encouraged to see into the mystery of their own souls stripped of as much convention and indoctrination as i am able demonstrate through a candid discussion of my own fears and struggles to be a decent member of a dying species (Pop would chuckle, just about now - murmuring with his eyebrows ‘arrogant whelp’.) Gaslighting is a all that i can come up with as to why someone would take the trouble to invade my home in the dead of night to activate an electrical appliance which aside from my pc and knapsack are the only items of value here. Too bad for them if that is true that my curious upbringing includes graduate level studies in how to fake people out for one’s own aggrandizement - be advised, it is an empty ambition that only points deeper into one’s own delusions and gives little influence over any organism worthy of control.

jts 19-20/04/2020

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