The thing about getting old is there is nothing you can can learn about how to do it - it is literally make it up as you go along. I remember the pains i took as a young man to design an existence which would result in _______fill in the blank. The blank changed from decade to decade and from wife to wife, but my training never really allowed that there was nothing but awareness to buoy me up in this, as Tom Waits sings so well, “Sea of Love”. So now as i grow close to the big portal, while portals all around me are closing - there is the portal of death from which no one can deprive me access - that is a remarkably liberating notion in a world up to its eyeballs in fake secrets. If you don’t feed someone, they die, if you don’t touch someone, they wither, if you don’t listen to someone, you never learn - that’s me with my deaf one ear advocating listening · there’s a hoot for ya’.
Sadness is one part biological - hangover, breakup, fatigue · and too parts surrender. I agree with MLK about refusing to allow a man to drag me so low as to hate him, but there is also “illegitimus nonstoppus carbarundom” - don’t let the bastards grind you down · Pop was a high school cheerleader and incorrigibly cheerful, you’d need to have known his grandmother Alice Content Foster to understand. Ma in her faux sophistication liked to demean Pop for his “cuteness.” I love because she is my dame, but that yoke of birth has not blinded me to her gratuitous cruelty from unexamined fears she foisted onto any available surrogate - which all too often meant, me. My siblings were no help, for i am sure that occurred to them - “better ye than me.”· I was angry for too much of my life about this convenient arrangement, until i began to understand my own anger and how utterly useless it had become. Nothing will change anyone else based on rage - that is a fact, and i would be happy to argue the point if you have no objections about leaving such an argument - naked and trembling · the same way you came in.
I was raised with all the progressive tropes of the time, but it mostly consisted of contempt for the other position. I can understand the fear of conservative men about being emasculated by strong women, because it is not a fantasy and brute force is no reply. She, whoever she is must answer for her own cowardice at the crucial moment she crushed his ego with her love - to use such a powerful emotion for destruction is nothing but cowardice. I compensated, and continue to compensate for the intellectual inequity, the same as i advocate for liberation from all exploitation, be it white on black, black on white, elder on younger or younger on elder. Force is tired and describes a spirit lacking imagination and faith. We are, and have been a lazy lot enjoying a scant 200 years of industrial muscle - muscle we have tragically mismanaged as we have our rich and wondrous sentiment.
I am in favor of a drastic reduction of the population, for no other reason than as Ricky Rivera said “it’s gonna happen.” What do we do with a rotted festering core of a former ecological paradise full of indigenous wisdom and vast compassion for the delicacy of all the life our world support¿ that is a question? Reform is a word i am terribly uncomfortable with only because there have been so many close to me clamoring for mine. I would, but like Leonard said “when they said repent, i wondered what the meant.” I don’t want to change you as much as i would celebrate your own embrace of a radical re-evaluation of all you cherish. I remember as a prepubescent teenager listening to the “Association” sing “Cherish” on the 45 long play turntable and the sacred feeling of love that song elicited in my heart; the same turntable that she who a few short years later would bring the hammer down on my heart with the good-bye xmas gift of Stephen Stills singing “Love the one you’re with.”
How can we as a collective organism commiserate with the misery of a dumb as a post constituency with the pitchforks and wrinkled heart muscle to find enough common ground to defend all of ourselves from an amoral corporate demographic camouflaged as a “person” and using funny money as not-so-funny speech, holding the collective economic might of 7 billion humans hostage in Cayman Island accounts using nothing more than a “flick of the wrist”¿ that again, is a question? Computer modeling allows what had been the sage advice of consorts and charlatans holding the ear of monarchs - now they are simply bought and paid for geeks, having digital sight, but lacking what Helen Keller described as “vision.” I have been through enough gangland logic to know, there is no loyalty within the cohort of the uber-greedy; watch carefully, clearly enough and long enough - the rat bastards will demonstrate their betrayal - whether we as a species have backbone enough to quarantine such contamination from the commonweal is the only real question left to us as a population of free people - and no i do not consider “corporations as people” or “money as speech” · come and get get me, if you possess the gumption and courage you think your incognito status has provided you despite the face of fact that you are few and we are many.
jts 12/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment