290620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“this could be heaven or this could be hell” - Hotel California · It is hot where i am but heavenly; lucky me my father was an “existentialist” given to slapping me upside the head anytime i veered from parental wisdom, kidding, sort of. Yet here i sit 5 decades after the conversation facing heaven or hell knowing in my heart that he was right and the responsibility rests squarely in my lap which i will find. The paradox is that things are not always what they seem and heaven sometimes has horns, while through hell can appear to be the only path to heaven. I do not nest well with other birds of my species because my visage is different - the children i grew up with told me my eyes were “crossed,” professionals assured me it was either “Dwayne’s Retraction”, or “Palsy of the Sixth Cranial Nerve” in either case there is no escaping the 2nd take one sees when encountering strangers. For the longest time, i’d have sold my soul to be normal - even pretty like the rest of my family · the longer i live the more i realize my appearance has been a gift to me in a world demanding convention.

I couldn’t be conventional if i tried, and we’ll never know which came first: the chicken or egg. There is a sweet gentle core so deep inside of me that i have found few kindred spirits in my travels. To be fair, i have been described as “espinoso,” though i’d be hard-pressed to say honestly how much was projection from the observer, and how much was reaction formation on my part to be confronted by an unappealing perception from a relative stranger. Lao Tzu - “Care what other’s think and you will always be their prisoner.” What i struggle with today is taking no prisoners, yet here i sit searching for prose to convince you the reader to take pity on yourself and save the human race. It is almost enough to welcome the end; how much more confusion can one mind take? I live in a land where the language is not my own, so i must resort to body language and inference - communication modalities that were the norm in my emotionally retarded family, so when you factor in my growing blindness, ya’ may as well add a factor for blind terror.

My first wife was a schizophrenic Cherokee - our time together was less than 6 weeks · that year i broke the outside metacarpal in both hands and sliced my inside right forearm requiring 60 stitches and poured 60 gallons of simmering spaghetti sauce across the front of that same forearm - i sought therapeutic aid in resolving my stress · The friend i turned to was an MD intern in psychiatry living across the street in Santa Ana who remains a friend to this day, but he would not therapize me; only advocate on behalf of “psychoanalytic psychotherapy.” What he didn’t tell me in his role as mentor to mentee was that when he ridiculed my notions about unconventional thought, primarily metaphysics, was that he was parroting a party line about Freudian superiority to the, at the time, much disparaged take on the mind’s workings by a student and close confidant to Freud, C.G. Jung. It is entirely forgivable that my friend would labor strenuously to disparage unscientific thinking, but he did not own his prejudice, nor cross the threshold to explain his fascination with fine art as pertained his relationship to me.

People are not honest, or better said, are as honest as they are able to face their own existence. It is why i take pains to uncover in this chronicle a naked truth about myself, for i no longer have anywhere else to turn. I find the characters in my world today as frightened as any i’ve met - fear is not a positive motivator for candor, unless that fear is so great that in can shred your ego and leave your soul flapping in the wind. I do not find that sort of fear where i live - the fear here in VN is too contemporary and digitally manipulated to be of any real use · the corporate overlords and their Artificial Intelligence thug have so chopped and diced the channels of communication that there is no “commons” only the pandering clickbait of economic functionaries interpreting what responses that can be mined, and regurgitating that data back onto the population’s screens as “what you should BUY, if you really want to be happy.”

As angry as i now understand that i am with the cowardly abandonment of my family when faced with my “differentness,” i would still prefer 5 minutes of laughing at their effete reasoning than spend a day hearing what the googol bully thinks i need to watch or pay any attention at all to zuké the wannabe nazi, or his opinion of who are my friends. There is much to be said for independence; authoritarian regimes rely on clusters - the sort of cliques that make high school marketing such a success and fine art such a failure. Any shame i feel about my life cannot be attributed to poor parenting, sibling rivalry or lousy interpersonal skills - not being kind to myself is the only explanation for any unfriendliness i experience deep at night when reconciling the pleasure of deep sleep with the very real need to peer into the deepest recesses of my own discomfort and unhappiness we all share alone with ourselves and no one else because at heart we care about those around us and do not want them to feel pain - peace ·

jts 29/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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280620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The esprit d’corps of the Marines says rather than flee, their response is to run toward “gunfire.” I don’t hold with martial - anything, and share this because we as a species are in a fight like no other we have ever witnessed · so much so: we hear no cannon fire; we see no bombs bursting in air, and yet more people have died on our planet in the last 3 months than have died in all the wars for the past ________ years. We are experiencing “battle fatigue” and all we have to defend ourselves is a mask and clean hands. I am fortunate to be of an age where “The Twilight Zone” has more contextual meaning than a line item on the googol feed. There have been times in my existence where when possible i literally devised my weekend around a Twilight Zone Marathon, and was happy for it; if only because today in a world awash with a pathogen of lethal dimension i find myself at an age nearing death in one of a handful of nations on the planet who has managed to stymie the virulent reproduction of that pathogen - tell me that’s not weird ·

It doesn’t mean anything really more than my lifespan is now predicated more on my personal habits (which doesn’t bode well for the home team) than my zipcode. Where i grew up is aflame in death because of an irrational and arrogant response to the same threat i now face with all the world, even closer to the pathogen’s origin, yet paradoxically safer in a zero-case zone, biding my time for the death tormenting so many others on the planet. What am i to do with that “found” time¿ it is not the first time in my life that serendipity has rewarded my personal misfortune with questionable favor. Shenanigans from my youth blew out an eardrum that was rendered a monetary value due to “white privilege” that was within a few years lost to greed from my own lumpin proletariate ignorance. Whether that lost monetary value translated into any worldly use - who knows · who cares ?

At 65 years old, i believe, maybe for the first time in my life, deep inside that someone does care - it is me · i care about me. Laugh if you must, it strikes me kind of dumb as well. My core is more at peace accepting that there may be no one else but myself to look down upon me as i die, while relinquishing any fantasy of being loved by others to the end is important. I no longer wake daily wondering which account i may have neglected that might render me - alone at the “end” · The weird result of that introspection is i am more liberated to search for ways to relieve others of discomfort they might face; however knowing their suffering will not be relived by any action i might take, only by the actions that they themselves take - if i can help good · if i cannot help good.

The world will not be rescued by any virtue i have been able to articulate here in these chronicles - nor is she condemned by any lapse in rectitude i might enjoy · horn dog that i am, and hopefully for the sake of the species, remain. My responsibility as near as i can tell is to cause no harm - and that, my friends is a conundrum to beat all · given the prissy sensitivity our species has been trained to respond to: “if your toilet paper is not soft enough, buy everyone else’s until you find one that makes your butthole feel clean; if she does not want to kiss you, keep changing your toothpaste until she does; if he doesn’t recognize your beauty, make him suffer until he does.” and the beat goes on & on while your wallet grows lighter and and lighter and your happiness falls further and further away.

I do not know what the answer is to all the misery i describe herein - i do know for myself the more simple i make my life · the happier i am. I no longer share my thinking seeking allies; more like i try to imagine what my friends look like in my heart so that when i finally see them with my eyes coming toward me, i will not be distracted by their disheveled, broken and faithless appearances - but rather will be guided by the gentle kindness toward those around them and their glee at still being alive. If we are not living on behalf of the generation 6 times away from the one we are enduring - we are already dead and deserve no more from the universe than whatever quiet death we have asked for, if that is what we have beseeched. 

I believe my father died because he had convinced himself he was no longer useful - but he was valiant to the end · Poetry had been the “identity” he had given himself where his life experience did not enrich his sould; so he taught poetry to the end of his days, or at least until convinced his poetry no longer mattered. Maybe it is the same for me - he and i warred all through my adolescent years · he the high school English teacher, me: no one’s student. He managed to hammer into my mind the good use of a “5  paragraph essay” - the thesis in paragraph One describing what you believe followed by Three examples you will use to demonstrate your logic; with a conclusion in paragraph Five describing how you had used your Three examples to establish the validity of your thesis. How anyone ever managed to convince my father that he was no longer useful is unimportant; what is important is that i do my level best to find enough Five Paragraph essays to discover, uncover and expand useful work that can be accomplished by every woman, man and child on the planet which may result in the survival of our species - 6 generations hence · are we having fun yet¿ 

jts 28/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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270620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I woke up this morning profoundly troubled, but not so put off-balance as to abandon my training; the unexplained sneering of the Banh Mi maker had to stay with her, and i suspect it is conflict about believing she had been “looked at” admiringly by one of my aged cohort - i am very careful who i admire here in VN · as i am anywhere in the world. My game is intact, but largely removed from the arena, for i have little patience any longer with dalliance - a game for the young · i am far too old. I seek the “heart of gold” i heard sung about in my youth, but never found or found but was too emotionally retarded to know. I ended up with a nap prior to writing that invigorated me more than i’d have thought possible given my suspicion about other’s ideas as to what benefits me. My friends in Oaxaca are suffering from their recent earth surfing “set”, and there is not fuck all i can do - i am finding that truth more and more common the weirder my life gets.

For example; in the midst of a perfectly reasonable emotional miasma facing death in a foreign nation where i had quixotically fantasized a “worker’s paradise”, is more likely a resort enclave surrounded by reactionary billionaire “investment” money, yet i also enjoy from a tree growing adjacent to my wall a plethora of grapefruit that my lily white, most likely cajun sympathizing Nova Scotian paternal great grandmother Munner ate religiously which i am sure aided her in reaching the ripe old age of 99 before giving up the ghost. My father her grandson once explained to me when asked “why did you become an English Teacher” - “because i love to play with words” he remarked without losing a beat. Munner’s vocabulary, at least the one she used with me, was uniformly “superlative.” Every action, thought or childish exclamation was met with some variation of “how Grand, how Wonderful - how Remarkable.” It is a small wonder that my father had been a high school cheerleader at Bell High School, before he became a B-17 pilot to fight Nazis - it would seem · the same Nazis occupying the White House today, some 77 years later.

So I shouldn’t be too surprised to find myself at times shoulder to shoulder in VN with _rumpf emisaries who nurse aspirations of reeducating Ho Chi Minh’s warriors to the superior wisdom of “Anarchistic Capitalism,” i mean look at how successful the Koch Bros’ health care for profit has been in combating the latest plague to hit the planet - like “greed” wasn’t the preeminent threat to our species. It’s not. When i woke this morning i had a brief encounter with a friend in Uruguay on FB. If it was 10 sentences i would be surprised; but because we had once shared air, i as a lodger - her comments cut to the core of my waking pain and i felt touched · soothed. I would welcome the ability to accomplish that on command, but all i seem to manage is to deflect aggression with some withering response that i had learned somewhere in the emotional battlefield and now have great difficulty dissolving, or at least transforming to a more constructive end. I do not want all close to me - many i find are too toxic to my bizarre makeup and only wish to be far from before they see in my eyes how little attraction they have for my attention.

Or more accurately, how difficult it is for me to suggest another approach toward communicating; my father and mother were both teachers and in their own way struggled to help each of us to learn. I was unable to make the leap and utilize teaching as a platform for propagating thought, maybe because i am crazy or maybe because the schools in which i tried to teach were - it doesn’t matter · all that matters is that someone learns. Not knowledge which can be forged and appropriated to dubious ends, but the ability to see each condition one faces in a unique light and make the most constructive use of that vision to aid the next person in line. C.G. Jung - described our species as a rhizome, living just under the surface of death/dirt but alighting new to the turning of the seasons full with each lesson we had learned from a previous turn at breathing - i fantasize and he said no such thing, but you get the gist.

We face a similar quandary about how to perpetuate our deeper knowledge to children and parents who will be literally plagued by much worse than what to eat, or where to stay - the world we are leaving our posterity will involve more fundamental issues, like how to breathe in a superheated environment, what collective behavior will aid the propagation of food and protection of water in a world laid wast by generations of greed; what steps can be taken to neutralize: atomic, chemical and nutritional degradation ? This is not an academic consideration, but simple logic that needs be addressed with what little resource remains to the commonweal. Scientists have been coopted - my own family contains executives of corporate concerns feathering their nests with proceeds from asbestos as talc for POC - and these are decent caring people who have more to gain by ignoring the consequence of their complicity than they do by pulling up stakes and throwing their lot in with all who have been abandoned by the “economy.”

fuck the economy - protect your brothers and sisters as best you can with whatever emotional wherewithal you can find close · love, might be a good place to start. “But what do I know” - Michel de Montaigne 

jts 27/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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260620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Pema Chodron rightly describes hate as covering fear, and that behind the fear is a soft core of humanity within each of us that is unquenchable. Lao Tzu said similarly that each individual contains a kernel of goodness and it is our collective responsibility to uncover and nurture that kernel in all we meet. The challenge is to fulfill that wisdom within ourselves before we succumb to the honest desire to help others. I miss that vulnerable place in myself that used to be so accessible and invulnerable to what Leonard Cohen described about when the “blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.” It is i who determines my fate - not the purveyors of style or the gatekeepers of “attention.” You’d do your soul well to reverse your click-bait mentality for larger game than the lemmings your corporate overlords have deemed worthy of you fierce and hungry skill.

I was young once and there was no wound that could lay me low, save that of love - she was as she is · just waiting for the right moment to render me helpless. Why it is that women need for men to be infants to work their magic, i do not understand; but clearly all the force that is leaking from my once formidable frame is useless in the struggle i would have hoped we could have engaged in together. Instead i find “her” yoked to Amazonian fantasies of value and worth based on a materialism she has been shamefully seduced to with assurances that the more you own - the safer will be your children · much like the bigger his muscles the safer will be your pussy. When will we once again work as a well-ordered team, me slitting its throat, while you restrain its weakening limbs? I don’t see this time coming soon enough to save our species, but i comfort myself for having tried.

My mother couldn’t destroy me, so she ordered her children to perceive me as “ugly” in a family of “beauty.” What she discounted, ma - was that as one of her progeny however deformed or “odd” i held her well-being close to my heart and have trained myself to love her hatred of me, because it was good for her. This does not make me a saint - simply practical, for when one is born to find she who you were born to holds hatred for this act the only practical avenue available is to help. Nearly 7 billion people on the planet earth are faced with this same dialectic - they did not ask to be born, yet from the moment of their inception they have been hounded, and herded and attacked for little more reason than breathing air - that is not right.

I would change the conditions of existence for all if i could, i cannot - i have tried. The only person i have control over is myself and there are damn few who give a flying fuck about how it is going for me. It would take me a number of lifetimes to explain why something so obvious has taken so long to manifest - let us remain with first things first · These are the “Extinction Chronicles” which means you are reading for clues about what destruction is taking place that will materially affect you, or what steps you can take to protect those you love and those you hope to love from what you can see with your own native intelligence about what is coming down the “pike.” It ain’t pretty, but we as a species have faced worse. The “64$ question” is how much game do you have on the ball, how determined are you to remain free and independent, and how deeply can you see into the “bullshit” that is propagated as development, or distinguish what is of your own reasoning vs what you are told?

Don’t whine to me about complexities; i live in a country my birth nation tried to destroy, and 89% or so of the population i meet on a daily basis, sees me as “white devil” aged invader or opportunistic predator looking for profits to skim off the top. Meanwhile, the reality is i am a tired old man, not angry, not vengeful, without a friend looking for some quiet corner of the world to die peacefully murmuring nonsense to all save those who would like to create a loving world for any who follow however how few that number might be because of reckless stupidity by “responsible” members of a mythical economy designed to aid a “one” rather than a “one” x 1,00o,ooo,ooo . go figure ¿

jts 26/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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250620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“What fresh hell can this be?” - Dorothy Parker · The euphemism used to describe heat in Viet Nam during June is “oppressive,” horrid i think from today’s ambient condition would be more accurate, but i’m a whiny occidental, what do i know¿ This morning i was invited to a lunch with former neighbors, some of whom were conspicuously absent to the degree i felt awkward having accepted the invitation. I will be 66 on my next birthday and am as far from a place to rest as i’ve ever been - i spent my 16th birthday sleeping off a drunk on the deck of the ferry between Antwerp and London · Yet, everything will turn out okay. I refuse to accept that this is the best our species can accomplish - capitulation to corporate trust-fund babies posing as govt. thugs, or dislocated religious charlatans pitching for pennies in Kathmandu or organizing pay as you go Moon Trance Dances in Phucket Thailand.

I am no better, and that is disconcerting that after a lifetime of sanctimonious denial all the further i have gotten is 3 rude wives, and a two-room bungalow on a rice field in the lower rent district of a pony world heritage site in a war ravaged nation willing to do most anything to retrieve the world respect it commanded having handed “Uncle Sam” his ass on a platter only to find the “god almighty buck” was never even wagered in the war. No the only patriots in today’s world are obscure wraiths condemned to mysterious deaths like Aaron Swartz whose soul objective was to free data from the corporate overlords - or Michael Rapaport who coined the all too accurate levy - “infinite growth paradigm” · In my early days hoping to reclaim territorial family respect, i would sign on to any program that might elicit some regard to the lengths i was willing to go to - “be one” · with the program. 

Remember please the concept i was chasing was supposedly progressive and solidarity for all things decent and upstanding - as upstanding as a family could be where my greate grandfather was a doctor in the Confederate Army. Cognitive dissonance was literally mother’s milk for me - given ma was a collegiate beauty queen and i 3rd born Breech Birth with Dwayne’s Retraction who suffered pneumonia in his first year requiring material expense that deprived the two already-arrived-pretty-children of time and emotional nutrition - already the “enemy” at age 1 what chance was there for rapprochement¿ 65 years later, i’d have to say little - ironically you’d think this inclination toward muteness would agree with all concerned · save the telling of one’s own story that should never be sacrificed to the “sacred cow” of any cause, heterodoxy, or orthodoxy.

I find at this late hour Mssr Montaigne’s focus on cabbage for why and wherefore, or Κύριος. Σωκράτης reasons for learning a new song useful:

“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.”

― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

What we are facing now as a species preparing to vacate our opportunity in paradise are issues of content and meaning: how have we misunderstood the privilege of breathing, of loving, of growing in favor of concepts which Maya Angelou nailed - 'Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.' In my minimalist ways had to look up “hate” and its origins - it’s not prejudice, it’s not fury; it is closer to “aver.” This made more sense to me for it explained my personal confusion with the expression “unconditional love”. I mean this to happen, yet like Neil Simon’s “Cool Cool River” there is no safety in numbers, nor in isolation · as a reality that defies logic when we are simply wiggling protoplasm looking to be comfortable. Today giving Kiwi fruit as an offering, i could not but be mindful of some previously imagined “faux pas” regarding Kiwi; ’scuse me, let it go.

I want no harm to you or your ego, and i shrink from every illumination you feel i must see that says otherwise. I know for certain at this stage of my decrepitude, it would give me great giggles to surreptitiously execute the god of greed in the hearts of all - and foster an angel of generosity to minister to the dying of a species · i’m not holding my breath; as a matter of fact i’m doing all those things advocated by the wise: de-stressing, defenestrating fake friends - ego oriented projects and anything robbing me of wholesome reflection with peace in my heart · I do not recommend this course for anyone; it is lonely, there is no reinforcement and as Leonard Cohen remarked “the judgements can be severe. Though i have to say as the air becomes more rarified and the clamoring dies to a din one can almost hear the echo of a soul born into a world created to crush souls and elevate the vacuous to a pedestal that can be easily monetized and sold off to the empty of heart hungry for purpose.

jts 25/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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240620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Tomorrow my rent comes due - my former agent was forced to take a more practical income stream · my visa expires 20 days or so later, i do not know whether i can buy a year’s extension, or even whether i should be here in VN or in Uruguay. The metrics say weather would be oppressive for where i live at this time - “oppressive” is a polite euphemism for the sweltering heat the population adjusts to on a minutely daily effort. It is now 3:3o pm and my vegetables are done simmering: my drink has drained too much moisture, and still i like whiskey + beer seems as close as i can get to the memory of flesh to flesh, or family as haven. Somehow as a i wilted into sleep, youtube miraculously presented each of the tracks from Bob Dylan’s latest release: “Rough and Rowdy Ways” - what could i do as i fought my way to sleep but to publish each track on the fb fake utility · I do not feel strong, but i have not surrendered, only stepped back a pace.

Bless you Bob Dylan - to be able to reign from such distance and such pain is an example of a focused mind · i would willing be one more if i could figure out how. I’m two paragraphs into into a 5 paragraph commitment that doesn’t always pace with what i wish to share or want to question, yet there is nothing beyond. Each night i wake and fight myself back to sleep only to remain fresh while i try to formulate useful thought which near as i can tell is read by no more than 3-6 other humans; don’t i feel kind of stupid and not. It is the impartation of anything useful that qualifies worthwhile sharing - do i give a fuck about what kind of penis you wish to worship, or am i consumed by whether in all this detritus of pandering and supplication there is one soul whose burden i can lessen and warm in the glow of welcome respite.

The farmer mother climbed up on the wall this morning to retrieve grapefruit off the branches while they remained succulent and easily digested. Didn’t i feel a little guilty handing down the fruit she cut and helping her lithe ankle find purchase on the cap to my waste bucket. Language is a huge barrier, and when combined with the wounds i process from a life in “family hell” it is important to me that i find a spirit that can forgive me my wild ways, but not extract a pound of flesh for sins that are my own to pay. I have drawings in me still, maybe even paintings; but they can only be accomplished with the help of one who wishes to be seen clearly and nakedly. I worked with Edward “Chic” Rogers  long enough in aerospace engineering for him to be the “bestman” at two of my three weddings, his expression to me has always been, “I have one good fight left in me - you don’t want to see it.” I believe him still.

Yet this same man would state categorically his faith in “rapture, _rump, and redemption,” he’d have even taken me in to the bosom of his home rather than bid me farewell to the land of Viet Nam, where i now reside. I do not own a phone and do not enjoy the conceit of connection by being able to dial those i love and those who do not wish me to dial them - family; ex-lovers; ex-wives; ex-friends - etc., etc., etc. · But what the fuck to do with 7 billion other living, breathing, loving souls asking for no more than a chance to raise a family free from hate, fed nutritious healthy food and afforded and opportunity to learn all our fragile culture has accumulated that might be of worth - like the “Giaconda” or the “Pieta” or “The Great Gatsby.” Be mindful that the stakes we play for are not Daisey’s whims, but the survival of a species.

I watch patches of internet that supposedly propagate income for the greatest good, yet from my unfortunate perspective is simply more exploitation by a handful in the midst of what is both militaristic and economic, “a target rich environment”. As long as this perspective of superiority over minority is utilized as a metric for evaluating force - we are doomed as a species, yet the moment such unique monikers as “opportunity and yield” become descriptions of what we as a species with all of our might and our heart can accomplish, there is no success we cannot call our own. Fuck Fascism - lest there be any doubt in your minds as to what i advocate · ever . fuck off and die .  ..  $$$

jts 24/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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230620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Fun is the key to retrieving sanity back into our world - regardless of hope, or a viable future · to die having fun is a noble quest; though not the type of fun propagated on internet pages designed to separate you from your wherewithal. No, the fun i am imagining is that which can be had alone in an empty room not knowing when the door will open again. The fun that is conceived under such conditions is what has informed the minds of liberators of the human race from time immemorial. Ho Chi Minh was imprisoned, and wrote poetry that proved instrumental in fortifying the spirit of a Nation in a successful war for freedom against the most powerful and well-funded imperial military force the world has ever known. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for the criminal act of opposing apartheid - he transmitted his writings on rolls of toilet paper that proved instrumental in the liberation of South Africa from a determined apartheid regime.

My oldest brother reps himself as a member of the working class - a leader · and like every workers’ union i’ve ever joined, his allegiance has been to consolidation of his own power. I live in a small, ancient coastal village in Viet Nam, and it is doomed by the greed of its own leaders and the business interests it has invited to demonstrate “modern economics” to centuries of a commonsense population fortified by the cauldron of strife, but annealed and quenched in the waters of poverty. Because i only glimpsed a “snapsot” of this locale prior to the Covid miasma - i do know that just prior to the plague here shit had gotten so distorted that one glutton entrepreneur had even begun the building of a castle on a beach south of Da Nang. I am not hooked up, and so won’t confirm the truth or lie of such an image on the internet, but based on the naked greed and egregious cultural arrogance of the most recent “economic occupying force” - i have no reason to doubt the truth of such a “Villa” - popular nomenclature for rich people exploiting poor people. 

And don’t i sound so high-minded and pure of heart, it’s a genetic defect - fictional obfuscation, just like my eldest hermano calling himself, proletariate while gulping all he can get down his throat before someone finds him at the refrigerator door. Please understand it is the rancor of language you are reading and not a proper understanding of the human being my brother is. We shared the same mother who when i was, maybe 13 years old threw a pair of onyx bookends that had been purchased in Mexico through her bedroom window screaming at me “You have no idea how much pain you caused during your birth” - and who promptly dismissed the event from her memory leaving me to ponder its meaning even to this day. Ma has confided to me, how honestly i can’t say, that of the four children she’d had - she was the hardest on my oldest brother · i try to imagine what that must have been like, but i have to imagine beyond the cruelty he has shown me as a younger sibling through years.

In one of the last visits i’ve had with Ma, i arranged to have a school age chum of hers come to visit her in her locked - memory challenged quarters · i was pretty proud of myself for arranged such an unexpected visitation given they were both +90 and had known each other since -20; shifting from one room another, she, Ma turned her attention to me from this confusing specter of her razor memory and declared - “you are obsequious” · and returned her fawning attention to this old friend. I was wounded, i am wounded, we are all wounded but my lesson is to find the love in my heart that will aid her transition to death which she described to me of her younger years, “an inconsolable fear.” How does one, or all of us, which i am sure share some similar story of turbulence and anguish to that of love and support to all around us - wherever we may be and however incongruous that situation may seem · that is a question ?

My visa expires in days, and my hosts are broadcasting that the borders may be opened soon - i have no place to go and no one to be with · this does not sadden me; this does not gladden me - it is simply what i face · these are the “extinction chronicles”. The best i can hope for is one person to find fun in what has been written and to find comfort with that possibility. Ugly, horrendous events are about to envelope the veil of development that has been employed to obscure the raping of an entire planet andye species to satisfy an irrational appetite for abundance by a handful of emotional ciphers - i could be angry, and have been, but more i am perplexed by the paradox that those in greatest need of love and kindness have situated themselves in the trajectory of all the force and umbrage a betrayed people can demonstrate · as they say in L.A. can you s’plain this¿

jts 23/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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220620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Tomorrow the 23rd of June is a birthdate for 3 principal people in my life - unrelated by race, creed or age - though each had a telling influence at critical junctures in my life. The 1st would be M______ whom i have described elsewhere in these chronicles - My first memory of M_____ was from the back of a Dodge station wagon parked at a swank hotel in Berkeley, CA. My elder sister had been deemed best suited as envoy from our distant branch of our common tree - all i could remember is a tallish slender young lady holding court with my “Medusa” sister with composure and kindness. I’d long grown accustomed to illogical disconnects - like why K_____ could get out of the car and meet this vision, while i remained sequestered; made one wonder then, but no longer. Later M____ and i enjoyed a tryst that failed due to a lack of patience and imagination on both our parts - but mostly my own. The universe in its inimitable wisdom was simply preparing the ground to drive a point home · whatever that elusive point might be.

M_____ taught me much, which is small surprise, for her father, my distant relative was a professor of Shakespeare at a major University in the depths of the “Midwest.” My romance karma with his daughter is not from a lack of sincerity, but from confusion with shifts in the fabric of the universe. Just as i was growing into an awareness of M______ as a human and the complications of a 900+ mile long distance romance, J______, who was to become my 2nd wife and her 18 month-old baby J_____ joined my corporate softball team - “Ma’s Marauders - ‘Ma Spring’um Bail Bonds · was our corporate sponsor”. Baby J_____’s dad was allegedly rank and only proved himself more so the further down the path we all traveled together - so ya’ know, Baby J_____’s birthday was also June 23rd. 7 years later and a divorce from mother J______ whose reply when i asked her, “why did you marry me?” was, “at the time i didn’t think i could do any better, now i do.” Baby J_____ is now 36, and i pray often that my wayward ways in her world at a difficult time for her and us all, have not scarred her by my ignorance or the learning of lessons i faced at that time.

Enter entirely a self-centered wounded me 10 years or so later struggling to make sense physically, emotionally and existentially of a life that resembled more the landscape of an Hieronymus Bosch than the well-ordered execution of life by the child of an educated progressive instructor from the “greatest generation” in post WWII euphoric, and as it happens largely mythological U.S. of A. The downside is expectation about what can or can’t be accomplished from this heady time of freedom and victory over an authoritarian regime that rather than be vanquished, simply leaked back under the rocks of dishonesty to to wait for a more opportune time to re-emerge and “assume facts not in evidence” about royalty and the history of monarchs in the development of human wellbeing, and Voila we have America does _rumpf.

It is of little use to point the finger at a ruler who has outmaneuvered you, for all you accomplish by that surrender is to increase that ruler’s contempt for your will. If you want to live, and you wish a life for your children - you must own your desires, your mistakes and your future. Every other avenue is closed to you; you may not accommodate the presence of an economy that serves you not - to hanker after objects you don’t need and cannot afford is an insult to every sacrifice any ancestor in your life made to your wellbeing and to do anything but to work tirelessly for the ecological safety of your children and you children’s children is a cowardice i’d prefer to be far from. So go - away from me and my heretical notions that saving humanity is worthwhile and your pursuits of egotistical chimeras is a laughable affront to all that is noble in our noble but tenuous human history.

And now to the last birthday for June 23rd as it pertains to this chronicle. P____ reigned over a massage parlor on Hollywood Blvd at a time my body was more than broken, more like mangled. During this time i sought comfort from this 2nd Story enclave of Thai body workers in downtown Hollywood, i endured the surgical repair of an inguinal hernia post Laparoscopic Appendectomy - a softball size contusion on my left elbow after slipping on a rain slickened terrazo sidewalk of the Avenue of the Stars, prior to the Academy awards - call it luck of the draw, i call it a miracle that P_____ P_____ managed to squeeze a 12 fl oz of blood from my elbow into my lymph system - that weeks later she honored the last weeks of my father’s complicated history with a Thai rubdown i know he carried with him as a part of the blessings of life. I have little contact with any of the three women i’ve just discussed and that is your loss to have missed an opportunity to spend any moments with them as i have - for i am better for simply trying to describe each of their kindnesses to the world. 

jts 22/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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210620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Back at the Dingo-Deli because it’s good to mix shit up; they are going to tear down the “old school” architecture immediately next to me and that foretells much dislocation and disquiet - literally · noise. I’m way past the delusion that i have any control over anything accept myself - having said that; i can say i once attended a late morning weekend meeting of the Northeast Community Planning Advisory Committee for the city of Los Angeles wherein, Mickey roused herself from her pondering the footprint of the Home Depot “big box” that was being shoved down the throats of most savvy citizens in this barrio against their wills · Mickey simply traced the footprint of the gazillion sq foot “big box” made a paper cut-out and rotated it 180 degrees - the corporate sponsors had no good argument for why the store had to face the boulevard snarling traffic, so to some degree Mickey improved the quality of life for many for a long period of time in Northeast Los Angeles just by being creative and looking at an old problem with fresh eyes.

My sense is that the ‘merican public is not so polarized as the stories depict, and if you could calmly interview even the most virulent racist citizen without judgement but with intransigent resistance to racial animosity, common ground could be discovered. Strife is in nobody’s best interest except those profiting from it, and that is only a handful of humans in every case. It is very hard to advocate for slow growth in a land where poverty has been imposed on an industrious and thrifty population by the machinations of greed and exploitation - s population who are then thrown a sliver of the cake, if only they would open up their land to well-healed travelers looking to spend the very least and get the very most. So we’re clear; i understand this dynamic very well because it is the same strategy i have employed in my later working years trying to maximize my savings in the service of creating the finest art i could conceive and execute - i overreached · hubris, conceit and emotional disorientation dictated my understanding of fine art was greater than market demand.

And if i could do it all over again, i would. “Not steering by the venal chart” of Leonard Cohen’s “Villanelle for our Time” has been an anchor of irrefutable logic in a world unmoored by the reckless humbug of a handful of human beings, but i had known this about where my allegiance resided for a long time. I would be lying to say “fame and fortune” did not animate much of my lonely hours carving, painting, drawing or writing, but after many decades and many encounters with “reality”, i am more grateful that my life has been improved through the process of creativity - the ineffable shift that comes from plumbing deep into one’s own soul to see more deeply than what is allowed or encouraged by the lives mapped out for us based on an “economy” that is transparently self-serving at best - vile and depraved at worst.

Where i used to believe that if i could formulate the correct perspective, or conjure the right sequence of sentences, the results would benefit all; now i am coming to believe that the best thing my ambition has accomplished is not for all mankind, but for my small corner of the universe. I cannot imagine what my world would have looked like had i not spent years of my existence searching for creative solutions to graphic, sculptural or literary puzzles. Nor is there solidarity within all ranks of all people - if you believe there is “no honor among thieves” try communicating with the egos of people who have staked their futures on landing a spot in the collection of “the” patron of the moment - smoke and mirrors is all there can be to popular taste - if you are in any way vulnerable to the whims of your buyer, as an artist you have already capitulated your free will · egos be damned.

Yet the peace of having sat in front to nearly any pastoral magnificence from the broken down corner of an abandoned lot in the densest decay of any city in the world to the pristine elegance of untouched nature in those few places on the planet that can still declare such - just to try and understand what nature is telling us as an insignificant, but highly destructive element in “paradise lost” is worth everything. If you won’t do it with paint or pencil, at least try to convey to your children the splendor of a birdsong, the importance of a worm’s wiggle, or the subtle shift in vibration as shade passes over a small area familiar to you - be aware, remain aware · struggle to help others be mindful of the beauty that we are born to and which for the sake of generations to come, and to which we owe our loving obedience, reverence and care.   

jts 21/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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200620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Pop used the diminutive “burro” when he wanted to slap me upside my head, but elected not to - though with pop, fathoming was always a dicey prospect. Yet it is he who taught me the most important lessons about going the flow - “path of least resistance” · reality 101. My last conversation with him was at 2 am the morning i arrived at the youngest brother’s home in Mount Vernon, WA, from Los Angeles. The miracles of technology allowed we four children to speak with one voice into the ear of our sire just prior to his death, though the eldest two siblings were across the continent at the elder sister’s home in Ithaca, NY. Nearly a decade later - we four are further apart than we were the night Pop died. The next day my younger brother forbade me to speak of “obesity” while a guest in his home - my character shrank from the task and i left him and his family in an “obesity” free zone · because i was too arrogant to shut my mouth about fat while my kid brother grieved. 

I am no better today as a human, evventhough i have a better understanding about why my little brother might not feel safe in my company - i can be “burro”, but where my father mocked and encouraged my fervor, family recoils · always have, likely always will. I have no other skin to leap into and must make peace with what i have to work with. What i have found is anymore when i begin to relish the experience of how stupid, or wrong, or _____fill in the blank that person passing across my attention is, the only logical recourse is that particular person, or behavior or objectionable act is nowhere near and i am stuck with a surrogate of my own conceit for some unknown reason. Whatever energy that i glommed onto to has to, by physical law dissipated and resides elsewhere with others, so any attachment i maintain is entirely of my own making - how fucking stupid is that¿

That’s not really a question for you to answer - rather one for me to expire · I’d genuinely like to ease the suffering of all i encounter, but have found wisdom in reducing my wants to what i have control over; the further i go down that road the more i find there is no one i can help, until i have relieved myself of my own self-imposed cruelty. Just writing that down makes me scratch my head in wonder - lucky me · Here’s a leap, if i cannot find compassion in my heart for the virulent stupidity of the current leader of the “free world,” how can i expect to find kindness for myself - an infinitely flawed person from a family in so much pain that it cannot, or will not coalesce as a unit in the midst of the most horrendous suffering our planet has ever endured, much less conceived¿ I am locked into a location that somehow has rendered me immune for the time being from a pathogen wreaking death and destruction across whole swaths of the land i was born to and there is nothing more available to me aid my friends and lovers than language - how’s that for fucking paradox¿

Each day this continuing effort toward understanding the impossible falters at paragraph 3; all i can do is press ahead in what can mostly be described as a trance-state. I ride my bicycle for and hour in the morning so my body contributes to some semblance of acuity; i struggle to contribute to a culture i know only as a robust body of echoes from different times in my own development. Sometimes i see the names of cities which represented a vacant media fear and loathing that i resisted out of the gate for the luck of my upbringing which demanded justice for a people who were not my enemy, but who suffered heinous acts of egregious violence from money that was being stolen from the coffers of what had once been a righteous nation, but has since become little more than a “chop shop” for the corporate thugs who to this day prey on the same nation i now live in, but under the pseudonym of “development.”

The last community i lived in within the continental U.S. was once the domain of outlaws and rebels, but now is so yoked to a media-induced identity that iy no longer recognizes its capitulation or adherence to a morality of such a distorted fabric one must ask - “how fucking stupid are you¿” · These people where i lived fully believed that they are the most free on the planet - free to hate, free to cluster in compounds that require obedience to a code defined, not from discussion or examination, but ascertained on a digital shackle which they have willingly placed on their own wrists and which they monitor on an irrational frequency - looking for the next ______fill in the blank · Cloistered is the best description for their condition in Kern River Valley - Lake Isabella · land of the never gonna be free because that requires too much thinking. Even Orange County, CA where i grew up has transitioned to the progressive agenda, but the ruling class is banking on pockets of fascists, armed and prepared to defend whatever the  corporate voice dictates, because ______fill in the blank. 

jts 20/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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190620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

the "art industrialist's concept of elan" - Hollywood, CA; 2012 ·

“Tabula Rasa” - i remember the first time i’d ever heard the expression; i was passionately in love with a 2nd cousin twice-removed who lived a mere 853 miles from where i lived at the time. Our correspondence was old school, there were no cell phones, no internet - and each exchange was a relief from the vacuum of waiting · ah, romance, ya’ can’t beat it with a stick, nor can you convert into bytes, or emoticons. For all my garrulous ways, i am remarkably reserved - thank god for education. One of my formative high school experiences was to enact scenes from “Inherit the Wind” with an elder classmate - he as Clarence Darrow, i as William Jennings Bryant. I’d have liked to remain closer to my counterpart in this vignette, but like my 2nd cousin twice removed - some things are just not fated to be. It is the story and the points made by the authors of “Inherit the Wind” which was about the Scope’s Monkey Trials in Tennessee. He, Scopes was a high school teacher who was charged with and prosecuted for teaching “evolution” in the schools. The authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert “E”dwin Lee used keen metaphors to dismantle the stigma of change.

“When we invented the telephone, we lost the charm of distance” bellowed the character of Clarence Darrow at the aged, overmatched, proselytizing William Jennings Bryant - an ironically populist character advocating many progressive values, but locked into a “vision” passing out of favor. Oh that we could call on the spirit of Master Mark Twain to guide us through eddies and sand-bars we face in our shorter and shorter trek on this river of life to the ocean of eternity - that some time back could have been a simple transition from living to dead; but because of the egregious greed of a handful of gluttons modeling eat all you can before anyone else can take a bite, or as the Sioux Nation has so accurately described the “white man” - Wasichu · he who takes all the fat from the bone. I understand this moniker, ironically, emotionally and culturally: my family is pretty in a “privileged kind of way,” & as it would happen, the two eldest are the prettiest - almost like the story of Cinderella · except my oldest brother is not evil and my older sister is as i experience her, simply existentially forlorn. 

I, however am nothing but thrifty clean and reverent - noble honest and true · lacking fault or fiction except that which all can see . pretty much, everything. What the fuck do i have to hide¿ i’m gonna die just like you - only i got a little further along and my cover only depends on enough protein to keep me alive and rest enough for me to not go “crazy.” Just now as part of my cover, i was trimming the green plants that are only in the houses of the foreigners for effect, i think likely because the locals believe the expats too stupid to grow food for purpose, but no one will say this to my face. There is simply an unrelenting air of contempt and hostility toward anyone not homegrown or vetted to the nines as _____fill in the blank. I’ve never been good at fitting a mold to someone els’s specifications, as ma - she tried for many a long year for me to fit her version of “okay.” In the end, she simply forbade entree and commanded those in control that i was persona non-grata. 

That is a harsh thing to conceive about one’s parent, but a harsher thing to ignore and not embrace as a condition of loving the world around you: women, children, brothers, fathers and wanna be friends. I have just now staunched the flow of blood from a finger i cut in my yard - a yard as near as i can tell, i am no longer welcomed to - how would that be for me as a soul with a family i do not have, or more accurately, a family who will not own me as a member? I don’t know, but there is no other outcome but to discover that truth - how sad · how joyous. They are flip sides of the same coin. The hamlet i live in is counting on an influx of renters they hate on sight - not because the influx is evil or wrong, but because the premise is unnatural and ill-conceived. The movie “Field of Dreams” is a link in the chain of fantasy about the “infinite growth paradigm”.

We live on a finite ecosphere, governed by lunatics claiming license over water, air, food, time and resources - with nary a whimper of organized objection. The media moguls who manage appearance and attractiveness have determined what is fuckable, what is disgusting, what is jailable and what is worthy of extraction, while the “intellectually acute,” assume pretty postures of preening for the camera that counts only for the seconds it transmits; what horse shit is that? There are a handful of punk-ass pretty boys and girlfriends galore that are punking an entire planet for a few weeks of celebrity focus - and i’m very sorry to tell you all · go fuck yourselves. If in your daily effort you are not searching for ways to relieve the burden of hypocrisy, stupidity and fakeness from every corner of your world - you are my enemy and will remain so to my dying breath. Having said that, if any of you bodacious spirits would like to engage or have cojones enough to quarrel my position - step right up you pinche putas and tell me to my face your objections to my arguments, rather than the pissant backstabbing posturing of an arrogant occupying force, lacking the courage to fly a flag that is the modus-operandi of the current security apparatus.

jts 19/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 180620 ·

What would a world that was based on love and generosity look like¿ I was raised to believe that was the world i was living in, but the same people teaching me this assertion were brutally dishonest and criminally self-involved - i love them all to this day · However i have found in the course of mending from these realizations - real or imagined, that distance is the safest course for them and myself. I learned well how to peer into the soul of another and identify those needy places, only because it seemed that is all i had to offer the world - a reservoir of need. Because of this skill and the ability to perceive others wielding such, i have found too many who value that capacity for no more than the advantage it affords them. I sort of understand delusions about control, mostly in the sense of resistance. I can accept other’s hunger for that illusion until it crosses over the line and becomes an issue of “will i, or won’t i”?

For me it is best to move away from that kind of energy - it is too taxing to demonstrate the delusion of such thinking and generally results in humiliation · never a useful emotion. I like like love, always have, and have no clue about keeping it around - except by exertion. Nearly anything i’ve ever done that was fun or constructive involved some act, or many small acts of love. What i have yet to learn is how to inculcate that intellectual conviction into my soul; or more accurately to displace the influence of self-serving personalities in my history without hating on them - hatred being he “goto” emotion of post WWII euro-centric thinking. I was too young to be a proper hippie, and only got the dope, and electric thrill of charged music which was making huge profits for a handful of cultural traitors. Now, having invested years of my existence in the myth of common ground, i have reached an age where death is a more companionable companion that many of the giddy youth i find occupying the tavern tables of my own young years.

This conceit, however does not absolve me from wanting to share precaution with strangers or other “travelers,” a McCarthy era dog whistle for communists. I like communists, some of my best friends have been communists; but as a worker i have yet to be well-served by any union representative - now that i am retired · i doubt the Unions will lift a hand to protect my social security, money i have paid and am owed. Not in the sense of entitlement, or privilege - just simple quid-pro-quo. I have been taken by thugs for money due me from a settlement for a ruptured eardrum when young. I was wrong to speculate, like all “lumpenproletariate” are, but not so wrong that what is mine - becomes yours. It waa a bitter lesson to learn at too young an age - but harder to know for certain · family is no guarantee of loyalty.

I am a man without a country - living in a land of solidarity with socialism, if you are of the correct racial composition, or are of an entrepreneurial ilk from the land i was raised in which at one time in recent history waged an unconscionable war of egregious violence, culturally, morally and materially - but now is being welcomed as an example of “proper” profit taking - as they say in BLM or Antifa, FTS - like WTF, but different. For me it used to be a race with time for that moment when my cultural patience would cross over the line and i would become “collectible.” Now thanks to good karma hygiene and emotional reticence, there is a good chance that i will recede into the fabric of mineral matter that i have staked so much of my life upon and become indecipherable from any of the other veins that make up this miraculous molten sheen of moisture we, who used to be known as “human beings” will ride into the long forgotten ages.

I read an account once that said it was not intellect that served our species best, but patience. In this study the author asserted that it was not the ability of our kind to corral greater amounts of protein to feed our growing greed, but the ability to out wait the prey. The author made a solid argument that the hunter of the gazelle enjoyed its flesh only after an exhaustive run whereupon the gazelle, though capable of fleeing time and again, was not able to anticipate the determination of the hungry hunter who simply ran again each time the gazelle stopped. It is this same place i believe we as a species find ourselves, though we are surrounded by plenty, but immersed in dearth. The profit takers are little more than gazelles running each time mankind approaches and declares it hunger - they can run for so long because they are fleet of foot and nimble with wealth, but ultimately unsuited for the game of survival - bon appetite mes amis · share wisely.

jts 18/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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