Where to begin - the cow was left to trim the last of the peanut crop and my genial nature wanted water for her · the bucket was stolen from her station before i could retrieve it in the morning, (returned the following day). That’s how my day started after a fretful night hoping to resolve shit started by others, but waking to know for certain the problem resides entirely within my “mortal coil.” - oh Joy.! Yet here i sit a scant 10 hours later, happy as a pig in mud for no other reason than to be able to offer the same cow more water in another bucket i don’t even own. I tried, this morning to replace the one stolen, but could not easily locate the “object of my desire” though i am certain there are 100’s if not thousands within a good golf swing from where i live. Just now i am occupied by mightier concerns, like how to lay into as many seams of the “drop roof” with peppermint essential oil onto the high ceilings of my aged but rat infested villa in the oh-so-tony-zip-code-of-Hoi-An.
Yet, despite the theft of a water bucket i did not own, used mostly for the moistening of a water buffalo that may, or may not have been thirsty - i am delivered. The cow came back and her driver allowed me to share tobacco with him. I lacked the existential courage to leave a second bucket to be pilfered but do not feel all that bad about it. The joy of knowing my friend the cow knew i wanted her to slack her thirst in the midst of cultural confusion that includes the “greed” of destination junkies for rice field views of the 3rd world to assuage their unexamined guilt about propagating exploitation as a survival strategy was trumped.
So much so, i feel no guilt, or very little for shorting you the 2nd paragraph of a chronicle which is unwelcome and un acknowledged as much as the years of drawings i sweated bullets to produce only to have stolen by unconscious members of my own family for apparently no better reason than “i am crazy” - go figure. The heat is oppressive where i think i have chosen to die. The best looking women are considering their mates in a far more biologically savvy metric than any broad i ever met in any Orange County, or U.S. bar looking for the right “genes” for her oh-so-precious ovulation. And i wish them all the best; from the few families that have allowed me to peer further than the mercantile stand that tourists are allowed to see into the dynamic culture of the only nation in the past 200 hundred years to serve “defeat on a platter” to the U.S., i can appreciate that my wrinkled, withered and generally confused person is less than a “catch,” more of a curiosity.
What the darlings don’t quite see, is that i have been a “curiosity” from the day of my birth, and will likely remain a curiosity to the day i die, whether that innate capacity contributes to the greater good is a fucking mystery to me - my selfish ambition to to love and to be loved, yet throughout my time on this planet my ambition seems to be a bone of contention for myself and others; and i have no clear reason why or wherefore. I know as a small child it bothered me terribly by the death of even the smallest of creatures - this before i could grasp the cessation of life. Now as an old man facing certain end, it confuses me no less. I see people around me who suffer, and i try to aid how i can, but find literal admonishments from valid sources - “try and help someone sometimes you end up making things a thousand times worse.” How does one argue with logic like that which squares with your own experience?
We reside right now at a nexus in our history where our best intentions can aid the survival of our entire DNA strand, or destroy 10,000’s of years of humping and laughing about it to the detriment of and entire species. I find this sad, and hopeful beyond compare. There is no need for you to destroy me in your mind or in your heart - i am gone and have been gone for more generations than i can count. What i have been unable to ignite in your selfish ambition it the green pastures of your futures; i am no longer deranged by my inability to foster a loving future for you, because if you do not choose to help yourselves there is no one following on my heels that will want more for you than i have declared openly and without restraint - be kind to yourselves and all you meet · that is your future.
jts 10/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment