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Anymore than my outdated Dionysian fantasy of the right mixture of sex and alcohol will grease the skids for a smooth ride into the ever-after.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
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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