Anxiety is fucked up, so be not anxious. Were it that simple, yet by all accounts - it is. Paraphrasing the Dalai Lama - “if it’s fixable, there’s no need to worry, if it’s not worrying about is of no benefit.” Lao Tzu describes our perseverating as “monkeys swinging through the trees, and paraphrasing Pema Chodron - “you are the sky, everything else is just the weather.” Fat lot of help this is, huh¿ Why not, what am i gonna tell you that you don’t already know? So the best thing i can do is try to find ways to lessen your burden. When i was a young turk, as part of the job training that was available in those days of LIBERAL rule, i paid for my classes by working as a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. It was good duty, and i learned a lot more than guarding from Arnold Brown and D.E. Tuppins, two of my colleagues. From Arnold, i learned just the right places to stand so that the back lighting would describe a woman’s legs better than her skirt might - Arnold was salacious like that · in a very loving way. D.E.Tuppins was a deeper subject - one might even say encyclopedic, for he was old, and he was from Detroit; built like the buddha and a dead-ringer for Duke Ellington. At one point he was persuaded by the Dr’s wife across the street to give tap-dance workshops to her dance students; when he was young he had danced in Vaudeville.
Mr. Tuppins was old enough to live in Senior Housing, though his wife was in her late 20’s. The Senior Housing had a pool table where Mr. Tuppins would school me in the ways of the world - as much as a 20 year-old Weisenheimer can be schooled. By the age of 25 i’d already conquered the art school of New York City, or so my conceit convinced me. I had been married and divorced and was embarking on a career in Engineering because “others” wiser than myself convinced me. More accurately; i was a frightened young adult adhering to whatever reinforcement said “you are ‘doing good’”, such was my hunger for approval. I do not blame anyone in my life for this predicament, including myself - anymore than i might blame myself for an ugly rash that might suggest poor hygiene. Yet, here i sit sandpaper in hand prepared to excoriate my own skin to appear clean, and to lie about my history to best frame my own delusions of grandeur. I do not know any other way to convince you that you are not alone in your misery, and to share my own with as little judgement as i am able, while encouraging you to pursue your dreams regardless of validation or inclusion. That you are alive is all you need to know about your value and worth.
Ironically in the scheme of things this truth will only become known to the handful of hardy human beings that survive what is about to transpire on this #Our@OneTimeParadise. And as ironical, i predict, rather than the anarchistic capitalism so popular amongst the popular purveyors of the “infinite growth paradigm” it will be cooperation and consensus which proves to be the more useful, and ultimately adaptive society that will emerge to carry our now obvious, to some, fragile DNA strand into the future. What kind of society will this abbreviated version of civilization look like - “Terminator” and it’s machine world · every fucking machine i’ve ever owned has broken - the vaunted Dodge Dart and its heroic Slant Six, my 66 El Camino - the most broken of all. Remind and i’ll tell you the story how my last wife left me. But the conceit of kurzwell and his googol cronies about singularity is no more than unexamined lives floating on an effluence of funny money born of digital technology, which from where i sit has done very little to prove its worth to our species - except grab attention · sort of like 45, big surprise there.
Me, i’ll just be happy enough to get a few more bicycle rides - perhaps get laid by a sensitive, but nasty loving woman once she has established her emotional bonafides · from what i’ve seen, she ain’t on the horizon. Sure there’s lots of broads trumpeting how lucky i’d be to get next to them with tits and ass to prove it, but its been decades since i’ve felt anything near the allegiance i still feel to my own mother’s sincere brand of insanity. She is not really crazy - just wounded to an unreasonable degree. For example, as her stars began to twinkle and it was possible for me to still squire her somewhere - i drove 3 hours South to her home to drive her another 2 hours North to see the Vermeer’s “Blue Lady” at the Getty - my 2nd time, (another essay altogether). Ma and her walker moved like an asphalt roller on road construction - g_d love her; when it became time to head back to her white-bread enclave, i could not find the car, nor did she much care - only that she had to wait. As we transitioned onto the 405 Sth into the blessed carpool escape, she turned to me in her car seat and declared “you don’t have any respect for me,” because g_d is also a woman with an insatiable appetite for mirth it was exactly at the same moment a 3/4 ton Chevy with a solitary, but very aggressive driver decided to show me what his vehicular mass could accomplish against my, as hard i could push it - sweet Toyota Corona companion of many, many miles. I looked in my rear view mirror at 65-75 seeing only the grill of this oversized automotive demon, and i looked over at my waiting for an snswer mother against the wall of slowed to a stop traffic over her shoulder and realized once again “love is the only engine of survival” - Leonard Cohen.
Once we reached her sanctuary, there was nothing left for me to do, but turn around and drive the 3 hours back to my wish-it-would-have-become-sanctuary in the _rumpland of Klan Valley - Lake Isabella. If this soundw bitter or full of recrimination, the error is mine. Ma taught me love in ways my father never could have, though he gave me spirit which ma could never fully understand - but to her credit, she tried. To you who reads now - i can only hope for you that you have been, or will soon be in the company of as interesting people as my parents. For all the meanness and unnecessary selfishness that informed my upbringing - they were and are not, for ma still breathes at 92 in the very most dangerous bowels - a “convalescent hospital” in Covid infested ‘merica which they both deeply believed in. If you read this now, or the digital wizards finally got their shit together you read this many years later, know this: we were not all bought off with the same $24 that paid for today’s Manhattan Island. There are pockets of loving people wanting no more than for you to survive for even a minute’s happiness in your life. I apologize for the conditions in which you must exist, and yet even now - years or miles apart, i feel solidarity with your hopes for a better future - Fuck you, now go wash your hands ·
P.S. it is as though all i have to do to stick needle in ma's being is to use the word "that" - go figure ·
jts 05/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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