I’d like to be all cheery and tell you everything is going to be okay, but i’d be lying and from that i would lose your confidence. Not that i lie late at night wondering how i can inspire your confidence but there is little in life that is sadder than someone who has lost the ability to trust · i know this because it is difficult for me to trust anyone but myself; and that has taken me 65 years to accomplish not well. What i’ve learned in the process is to recognize when others are not trusting me, and often for very good reasons. I am selfish, i can be uncommonly cruel in my judgements which are often erroneous and ill-considered. From this i am learning to rely less on judgement and more on what is in front of my face, e.g. it is light outside it must be daytime - the Randy Slocum, rock on a string weather report, if the rock is wet, it might be raining, so to speak. People are a much harder read than the weather or time of day; i know this mostly based on how much effort i’ve exerted to obscure what is apparently all to obvious to everyone but me.
Here’s an example of just how obtuse i can be; it was back at the release of “Independence Day.” At the time i was casting about for a career and my 1994 Bachelors in English was started to get stale, never mind that I was 42 years, about to be married to a woman i’d only just discovered owed $64,000 in credit card debt and had just plunked down my retirement savings to purchase my 1st Mortgage for a 68 year-old house just up Figueroa from a heroin shooting gallery in East L.A. So i was schmoozing my cousin Charlie on the phone, hoping to impress him with my erudite analysis of the movie industry, and does he know of any pathway into the studios. “I mean Charlie, there has to be some hunger there for quality writing - look at the bomb ID 4; it’s been out for weeks now and no one is going to see it - it’s pig.” Ever gentle Charlie snickered as only a New York jew can, “what are you stupid; “Independence Day” is the most successful movie of 1996” Needless to say i got no introductions from Charlie into the film industry. I never connected the swarm of “ID 4” advertising with with the rave reviews for “Independence Day.” Were that that was the only occasion of being slow on the uptakes.
Living in OC, we’d vacation in Mexico often, during one unfortunate excursion Pop got roped into buying firecrackers one of my older brother had fronted him money for, only no one thought to clue me to the illicit nature or this extraordinary change of heart by dear old Pop. When i say change of heart, i mean as July 4th would approach and we’d go to Pop for money he’d ask first, “do you have a dollar,” and always curious what pa had up his sleeve, a bill would materialize. Pop would make a big show of finding matches and set about lighting the dollar on fire, which of course never happened; then he would remark, “same difference - give them your money for fireworks, ya’ may as well just burn your money” - he was cool like that. But back to my unfortunate intro to the finer points of smuggling contraband; so we are returning back across the border everyone in the car being cool as cucumbers when the Border Guards asks, “any vegetables any fruit, any . . ..” Pop looking right into the guard’s face, “no, noo . … Then it happened, “Sir do you have any firecrackers¿” Pop again, “no . ..” Well, ever helpful me, and proud to bust a gut, “but pop, don’cha remember, you let Brad buy those firecrackers for . ..” Brad never forgave me, and apparently it was one of those life lessons one must repeat over and over again to learn its meaning, which to this day, i’m not sure i have.
Lao Tzu says always be truthful and you’ll never need fear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. I do not fear knocks in the middle of the night, but am not sure that isn’t simply from my cantankerous manner, or bloodthirsty dreams which i rarely remember. I am far more honest with myself than at anytime i can remember, hoping that acceptance eventually translates into tolerance of others though, i’m not holding my breath. Fake people give me a rash, and the process if who i determine is real and who is fake is still too much of a witching stick kind of process to be confident about my estimation of others. I have learned that projection is a bitch, then you die. I should have known early on just from discovering how many kids my age owned black tennis shoes as i walked out of the shoe store wearing black tennis shoes, only to discover they were wearing white tennis shoes when i next walked out, too soon i’m sure for Pop, wearing white tennis shoes. What does this say for self-knowledge which from what little i’ve learned is the only viable data any of us can acquire - aside from Rick and his rock · As Pop’s star began to flicker, i hung on to each word by phone like a puppy dog - it was his humor, now a decade or more later i value and would share if i knew how - with each earnestly framed and obnoxiously impossibly complex question i put to him in his retirement lair and me on some street corner of hollyweird when i owned a phone, he’d fish up from the caverns of his wit nearly always the same answer, “i don’t know, but i’m sure glad i’m old.”
What was funny then is no longer funny with my liver getting “fatty” and my bright prospects twinkling more and more and . … you get the picture - still it is not complaint because i am having fun in the only way i know how in a world full of entirely unnecessary misery and upheaval - i am trying to help · even if that is no more than words typed into a tattered digital page shifted into a likely indecipherable future aether that seems controlled by amoral and empty profiteers wiggling toward an immoral swirling drain running one way or the other depending on your GPS location on our majestic sphere, like a bunch of maggots in a pile of shit going one way or another of their own conceit - still i can giggle with the joy i was taught by humans likely as confused as i, only distinguished from me by a nominal sequence of our once oh-so-hopeful DNA strand. Go ahead and tell me g_d is not not the ultimate ironist, or that she has not the finest sense of humor our species has had the pleasure to imagine. In the in-between-time, i will singe a few more rhizomes from our molten sphere cycling within a void, that has evolved for, apparently no better reason than my health and to fight my way into a slumber that refreshes me in ways i do not understand, despite a lifelong indoctrination to do so. Should i be kissed by two naked women who found a moment between their happiness to shed some affection on my wracked frame - i will know it was a dream and better understand my resistance to my dumb luck upon waking to see clearly into my own unconscious - neener, neener, neener . .. ···
jts 12/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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