300720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I vacillate between fear and outrage - “social media” juggernaut fired a shot across my bow suspended my account for posting a dolphin dancing with a surfer, this after my having made inflammatory remarks concerning the cowardice of a United States senator referring to another United States senator - a female colleague as a “fucking bitch.” I should have included in my rebuke a more broadly phrased condemnation of the cowardice of the corporate overlords strangling the voice of dissent at a time when dissent is the only rational response to the straits into which our leaders have lead us, (i use the expression “leaders” advisedly, for there has been damn little of value coming out of the “have’s” that is of any real benefit to the “have nots”). And still i am in a quandary about what steps to take to contribute to the commonweal.

Violence is not an option, if you bring a knife into a street brawl - the likelihood of being stabbed with your own knife is about even. We are talking about militarized, goose-stepping thugs outside the boundaries of law and motivated by delusional dreams of resurrecting a “white” homeland that never existed. What is being lost on the melee is the fact that our environment is exhausted and the once powerful capacity of the earth to regenerate life is being subsumed by a continent sized hijacking of the very essence of life as we know it - trees. There are quotes from Henry Kissinger who in effect said diminishing or eliminatin populations of color is the first priority of the developing world - that my friends is lunacy on a grand scale.

At the personal level - to have been deprived access to fb “friends,” however virtual they may be for no better reason than my having posted a dancing dolphin on an ocean wave is a very clear indication of how removed our world is becoming from reality. Along with “wash and wear” i tend to be a what you see is what you get kind of guy. I don’t have time or energy to fashion some palatable public persona that is anything but what i feel when i feel it. I am not saying this is how all should be, but anything that pertains to our survival that is not rooted in the most ancient history of our species is suspect - concepts of the mind, the heart and economy all inclusive. What i see is a lot of flim-flam and little to show for it. I watch those who are at the pinnacle of achievement and find smug, snide and exclusive exuberance that reflects a remarkably selfish concept of advancement - mostly of the sort “i got mine - so fuck you.”

I try to distinguish personal reaction formation from the equation and remain objective without judgement, but it is very difficult to be around or influenced by people whose seemingly sole North Star is acquisition, if for no other reason - how stupid do you have to be to collect anything you can’t carry with you into the great beyond. Look at the Pharos and the enormous lengths they went to to design an ever after which was ultimately raided by plunderers seeking gold and defying curses just to convince themselves of their importance the same as those whose bones they plundered. More importantly to me today is to find a language that contributes to a greater appreciation of how remarkable is each breath we take or spectacular is each vision we see that reminds us of the power of the first time we saw such beauty.

I remember waking up on a summer morning after school was out and the prospect of an entire day playing baseball was not enough of a distraction to disturb the quiet outside my bedroom window. Monarch butterflies were in abundance and even the rank odor of peaches never meant to be eaten moldering from a flowering peach tree surrounded by a dank but richly fertilized Korean grass was not enough to disturb the quiet of birdsong filling the sky. These are not images i could find when i owned a phone and woke in the middle of the night to see what i missed, nor were they present when my excommunication from the church of zuké was reconsidered and i was once more allowed access to relationships, however tenuous and often insubstantial - but mine, and not remotely within the purview of some social engineer wannabe piling up kudos for exemplary scrutiny of shit that was none of his/her for his/her next performance review.   

jts 30/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

290720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Pop used to call me “burro”, which in its native language is an insult meaning “stupid” - but from pop and his metaphorical mind i have to believe it was a term of affection meaning “stubborn.” It took me a lot of years to understand that no single personal trait is universally useful, much less one that renders you intractable - but i got to tell ya’ at this point in history, i’d rather be known for my recalcitrance than my obeisance. I watch the “statesmen and captains of industry” of our time and want to puke - my feelings are more murderous than somatic, but all violence at this time in our possible extinction trajectory shaves off as much green wood from the species’s vulnerable trunk as it does dead wood. Education on how to survive through cooperative loving application of our unusual human history is of the most likely viable paths i can see, but don’t listen to my i am a myopic cyclops feeling my way from one doorway to the next.

Though in too many ways to admit publicly - the “stupid” definition of burro applies too well for comfort. It is one of my closely guarded jealousies that there are so many who see the “ruse” more quickly and have greater restraint about it, after all any one of our species who actually believes the 70’s saw about “he who has the most toys in the end wins” is too dense to really want to spend my any portion of my last few moments on this plush fantasmagoria we describe in places as terra firma, but more accurately treat like “mommy do this.” There is a passage in Henry the V by Shakespeare called the “The St. Crispin Day’s” speech where history and literature crossover in a seamless transition. There was in fact a battle where an inferior force defeated a force 10x its size - and the speech is a martial refrain exhorting any hopeless battle to victory. The digital overlords have robbed us of such subtlety and through sleight if hand somehow proclaimed “1984” ipso facto fait accompli. 

Fuck you and the ponies your rode in on. The only battles you trust-fund babies have ever engaged in are the ones where you cannot lose - if you show up on the field, you get a trophy · if you fuck her without consent, you get a pass. That vain assumption my pitifully lacking character nemeses will be your undoing. There is no doubt in my mind about the extent you pissant, imagination-less specters of people will go to aggrandize your accomplishments such that you can ride past the havoc you wreak convinced in your heart of “what the fuck happened to it, it was here a minute ago” hearts. I am friends, of a sort of with Edward Colver who is progeny to a member of the forest service of the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Pasadena, enough so to have had a mountain peak named Colver Peak. That may be my 15 minutes of fame allotted by Andy Warhol, and the least i can do is own what Edward the son of Mr. Colver did with his portion - famous punk rock photographer that he was was born to be · but prescient mountain poet he is and will be ever more. “When the shit comes down, there will not be walls high enough for them to hide behind.” - Edward Colver, somewhere in Los Angeles, sometime in the late 1980s.

What was witty then is now simply practical - these mooks who establish “social media” and then yank the plug on the most vulnerable to the channel and possess the authority and execute the prerogative to mute the most important voices on that channel, e.g. #ArundhatiRoy, #GretaThunderg, #PemaChodron, #ThichNhatHanh, #DalaiLama is not worth a shit as a utility for the good of all. We are awash in profit for a handful that is doing its level best to convince the remaining 4% what a good idea greed is deserve every slight, oppression and disappointment we discover with our denuded, debilitated capacity for critical thinking and simple stupid adherence to an unworthy authority we submit to, be that beauty, vanity, or riches just over the hill.

Dalai Lama - “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck·” I do not want to die believing the virtual affection i found from people distant from me on a social platform was the closest i could come to love. Nor can i denigrate the genuine kindness that i have found through faint threads of communication coupled with powerful imagery shared with a common purpose of uplifting those that view such content - as much as i must caution the titillating effect of righteous violence suggesting somehow there is victory from overcoming a foe. We are trained seals barking at bouncing balls that enrich a stable of effete managers with pedigrees who deserve much less than the man i found rowing his stomach board with his elbows from An Bang to “old town.” The most you can do for yourself right now is find some way to show yourself a compassion that can be easily shared with the next person you meet - are we having fun yet · ¿? 

jts 29/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

280720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Interesting day - i woke up to find myself banned from fb. Choosing not to live with a phone i had no channel to object to this obviously politically motivated and egotistically questionably scurrilous charge of violating “community standards-“ like i should be surprised that spitting on a well-connected shill for the corporations would not result in some petty annoyance, sort of like having my ticket pulled for outing some hanky-panky in the probate process at the L.A. Superior Court - we all have our cross to bear, and karma is truly a “Yoho” when it comes down to crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s. I would do it again, and to my fb friends who’ve been torn from my loving care by an penis envy and hubris - know that i love you and will continue to care whether we are allowed to communicate in the digital Gulag the snotty-faced billionaires are concocting for our own good.

My digital domain stoneartist.com is being subsumed back into the “information superhighway” and i hope that someone has better luck with the creativity i poured my heart and soul into, but made not one thin dime - because while hyper text was at one time a laudable conceit, once the “haters” got their hooks into it, there was no longer commerce, just gates onto the killing floor. Googol is ruled by a maniac - the chief scientist Kurzwell - is such a coward he cannot defend his notion of singularity - just pitch it at the next corporate cocktail party to effete finger wizards so removed from the suffering and destruction they have wrecked that they sleep well and drive fine vehicles on streets devoid of conflict, controversy, contradiction - or backbone ·

Yet there is hope on every street corner on the planet. My experience with being banned from a social media platform to which i brought good faith and honest content is timely. Early on i would not accept that the CIA was scrutinizing and capitalizing on persons utilizing this ostensibly public thread - and i stand corrected. Just like believing the no one in my home country could accept the lies and buffoonery of an empty suit past his prime doing the bidding of a ruling class which has no longer rule, nor class - just money stolen from the coffers of a population doing its best to raise loving children who will not be killed by senseless violence, but rather contribute to a heritage of human history that cares.

What is more likely is that by digital manipulation of public channels there will be fewer and fewer people who read any of this literary vomit, but those who wade through the pain and rancor of injustice may find formulas for combatting an enemy lacking the gumption to raise his/her head to the threshold of ownership and say straight out to your face “this is me, and this is what i think and why.” More likely you will face manipulation and clickbait supposedly representing your fondest desires to be helped and heard. Know this, that any information you share with the corporations is used only to separate you from what you have worked to earn - and they do it with nothing more than “keystrokes” because they are efficient.

This has been a difficult day in a year full of difficult days - nor do i claim distinction by that. I am saddened to be separated from virtual friends, but knew always this day was coming. So onward i will slog searching for friends who’d been stolen by uncaring servers fulfilling the duties of digital corporate overlords making gazillions as traitors to their species and lacking heart enough to question their own behavior, but damn if i don’t feel better than i have for years for the simple fact of having a fb free existence - see ya’ wouldn’t want to be ya’ ·

jts 28/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

270720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

To my brothers and sisters, real and imagined - i love you · thank you. To my parents ______fill in the blank, for myself and any other child who wasn’t quite sure where the point of correction, coercion or condemnation lie. There is a enough suffering on the planet that can be directly attributed to shitty parenting skills that i am not alone in my reservations about “honoring thy mother and thy father.” I took that shit seriously and in an effort to placate a mother who once through onyx bookends through her bedroom window after she had kicked my father to any curb outside of the home i’d grown up in, while screaming at me, a not quite 15-year old snot-faced kid what a difficult birth i had been; only to find pop suckling the breasts of his 20-year junior Mormon Princess who made clear her door was to be knocked on, not walked through, i concede confusion.

The owner’s husband has arrived and demonstrates fairly clearly the differing male/female roles of the country where i now reside. He will not do anything until he has conferred with her, or is that a blindspot from my “chauvinist” upbringing. I find it charming that they have a close working relationship where he honors her leadership and where he is not threatened by deferring to her. What i am not seeing is his “return” for such an arrangement. The women in the United States who have demanded such a configuration - seemed to think that subservience was part of the bargain. I am not getting that in the limited view i have as yet in the far more “gender neutral” country i now reside. My fond hope is that there will be a woman i meet here who has tolerance enough to look beyond my poor training and help me to help her.

Mixed in with that innocent fantasy is a vibrant relationship to Jack Nicholson’s depiction of an author given everything he wanted only to find _______fill in the blank. I have no excuse, if art was my passion i’d resort to what Matisse did and draw with long sticks in my convalescence · or the haters have won and entirely undermined my confidence in my own creative capacity and rendered me as one more “deer in the headlights.” i d k, what i know is there was a time when i could surf the subways without handrails and draw viable portraits of personages near and far on a lurching train in the flickering light - ignoring those who’d like to know but lacked my own mother’s lack of boundaries and would not peek where she had no compunction about interrupting any creative process just to _____fill in the blank.

I was once a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, CA - and one of the axioms of that duty was that people seem incapable of looking at beautiful objects no matter how ancient or fragile without wanting to touch them somehow for some reason · and the guard’s duty was to see it coming and intervene in the “nicest possible way.” It seems to be a postulate to the axiom or vice-versa that the public must move around to the back of an artist and witness the process. Any longer my once rock-solid confidence to draw anything anywhere at anytime is now reduced to faint scratches of graphite indicating ideas that just remain outside the concrete. I don’t even know when that happened, one minute i’m drawing handlebars of motorbikes in Bali, and the next i’m spending weeks trying to fathom the girth of one of the largest trees on the planet. Please s’plain that to me.

Nor is it any longer of any importance to me that anyone see what i can, or understand how long and how much effort it took to reach that point - anymore i would be content to hear the voice of an 18 month-old telling some negligent fool to pick up the trash s/he just threw to the ground. I know - more pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but at least it would be an indication that rather than waiting for the rapture, the rebuke of a small child would encourage me more than the re-animation of Mozart the Kurzwell the monster has set his sights, hopes and future of our species using the dubious Artificial Intelligence (AI) the corporations have bet the farm on - your farm, my farm the whole fucking planet’s farm. So in the end, the best i can hope for and what i wish for more and more is the gentle touch of a loving woman looking into my fading sight and asking me to paint what i see.

jts 26/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

260720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I am now moved from one home to another, and as the loving neighbor lady would say, “the book is closed.” Even though the new house is hotter, has ants and as luck would have it may almost know the sound of demolition adjacent to my old location as clearly - i like it better · This is one of those ineffable realities which do not admit logical reason, but has the “feel” of being right, more than another. I once battled wits with a psychiatrist who nearly convinced me that my “instincts stink” - much like my siblings nearly convinced me they have reason to act superior · neither was accurate and both conditions most certainly defined them as much as it described me. Yet there is good reason for them to be wary, i can be as cruel as i can be kind, and it took me way to long to reach a place of peace with this insight to ignore its intrinsic truth.

The best i can do is to continue mining the caverns of my soul in search of what i once described as the shaggy beast of my soul. But now rather than hunter after an elusive quarry, i wish to find friendship with this unknown creature of whom i still have had only the barest glimpses and rely on the metaphysical sight of the 3rd eye to track its whereabouts but remain rationally skeptical of such an irrational possibility. The happy fact is i remain open to such a possibility regardless of all personal experience to the contrary. My good fortune is to have lived in a time when there were song lyrics stating “reality has always had too many heads.” I have no real conceit that this same wisdom is new to my age, and was simply stated differently through the ages, but i remain grateful that it was reconfigured into a recognizable form while i lived.

The challenge is to find how much more of our species’ history has also been restated differently and to evaluate its worth based on "bitter searching of the heart", and even more importantly apply it in a more useful way for as has been said elsewhere in our history, “time is nigh.” Mahatma Gandhi was a bigoted racist who oppressed a huge portion of his population because of outmoded beliefs, yet on balance he was able to liberate an entire nation from colonial occupation through personal conviction & truths he had discovered within the confines of his prejudice; we, each of us can do the same thing and rather than liberate a nation, possibly liberate an entire planet - if there is time enough left to us. If not, very shortly our DNA strand will be struggling to remain animated in a superheated toxic cesspool created by a handful of humans for apparently no more good reason than greed.

It is not terribly hard for me to imagine this scenario having watched my own “atomic” family blown to bits by no more than proximity to riches beyond the limited understanding of our semi-impoverished roots, though it is not that simple by a long shot. But the conceit of any solidarity with a righteous proletariate is as mythical as its attachment to social standing simply through marriage, or wisdom conferred by education. The key is that my people struggled hard for a better life, and never in agreement about what that meant. Where we have fallen solidly on our faces is allowing division within our actual relationship. These are people i struggled with for space in front of the toilet and more accurately time in front of the mirror - i grew up in the midst of the manufactured importance of “image is not important · it is everything.”

And i am luckier than most for no other reason than my image did not match any identifiable cluster, and from that limitation my demeanor varied even more - lucky me. Now my ambitions follow suit where i once craved recognition for my heroic efforts on behalf of art and humanity, now i welcome quiet and any opportunity to be of service to those who suffer. I am no closer to understanding how that modified ambition can be accomplished, but i keep trying - even sitting here in a worthy bistro in a borrowed nation having moved a 3rd time in year just to get a breath of fresh air and quiet, i am far more okay than anytime in my long history, because as long as i am harming no one and not causing anyone to harm anyone else - my heart is at peace · may yours be as well.

jts 26/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

250720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

It is the last day of my old house and i have already managed to antagonize the new hosts, and i’m not sure exactly how. When i moved into the last house it was stocked with multiples of everything, including the rats in the attic, and here there is no pot, no plate, no toilet paper - so i asked, forgive me if i eschew aluminum. I come from an Alzheimer’s family whether it is an accurate diagnoses or not, we are certainly demented. My friend the carpenter quoted me 1.2 million dong when i asked for 2 shelves; i was only more surprised after taking possession of the first and asking for the 2nd to be modified to 3 equal spaces instead of the original 2 - “how much would that cost”, 1.5 million dong, but when i tried to settle up, it turns out we’d been talking apples and oranges, or “for each” instead of together.

You could almost call that the story of my life if you were a creative person looking to distill these 65 weird years of mine into a paragraph, and you might even be more successful than this quixotic quest for meaning in a meaningless age using nothing more than words and unrelenting ownership of my fuckups as well as my attributes to create focus about a worldwide calamity that can only be resolved by much larger percentage of the population working in concert than the time sucking occupation of creating content for the digital wizards that you didn’t even realize you’d been hired to do - gratis. Anymore, you’re not really considered an employee, rather an eternal intern just outside of the googol/facefuck/apphole campus.

Well i just watched my 1st month deposit evaporate like spit on a hot sidewalk - sort of like your life savings if you contract Covid-19 in the oh-so-much-Gr8r U.S. of Corporate ‘merica. What makes no sense is how much of this havoc is adjustable. We have all the computing power to resolve most every situation on the planet that jeopardizes life or property, so it makes no sense that all these servers are serving nothing more than tracking how to take every last dime from every last person - no sense at all · not even for the rational billionaires, however much of an oxymoron that expression is. And wisdom really does remain a viable alternative, if for no other reason than that the most high holy reasoning i’ve heard yet is to be kind to yourself in order to be kind to others.

I couldn’t secure a skillet in the move so that will probably come out of the last of my deposit - deposit for a property i probably spent out of pocket no less than 2 million dong improving and leaving 500k dong on the table, but the nouveau riche landlord couldn’t see clear to sell me the mismatched skillet and lid because he was so blinded by the fantasy that i kept a mythical extra set of keys, which apparently i had secreted away in order to sneak back in and still the big screen TV that was only utilized when the deeply troubled neighbor nephew took advantage of the one hot night in my tenancy that i left the door adjar, and sort of like “counting coup” left the TV ablazing in the dead of night - that or one of the rat mischief was a refugee from Ben’s herd and turned on the set just to demonstrate to me who’s running the show - i d k ·

No matter how many times i ride the Cua Dai, An Bang, Cua Dai circle i ain’t getting any younger and there ain’t fuck all i can do about it. However vis-a-vis what Leonard Cohen described as the “preliminaries” it pays to get exercise, to stay hydrated, to smoke less and love more. Anger is indeed poison that corrodes any path you walk, while simultaneously good cheer insulates better than styrofoam on a hot day, and doesn’t poison the environment, however much confusion it causes the haters in the audience. The hardest truth to swallow is how much i fit that profile of someone who irrationally holds to a conviction that has no merit and was largely formulated and a time long since past - it dumbfounds me to know i cannot excoriate that part of my being that waged war for so long that peace of heart seems like an affectation of one of those praying to “ET”, but i have to laugh in closing to know that i am in fact “E-something” to some creature somewhere gazing into the ______fill in the blank just like you and me.

jts 25/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

240720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Well, the deed is done and i no longer live in the house i used to live in, once again. You’d think after this much time changing domiciles i’d have managed to be more unruffled - or at best tolerant of when i am ruffled. I understand, though have never been told that i reside within the autistic spectrum (whatever the fuck the means); i gravitate toward order because that is how i was trained: Pop, “put it back where you found it.” At the same time our neighbor was a lineman for ATT, and one of the features of our garage was a 10 foot high by 14 foot wide x 18 inch deep set of cubbyholes, each with a small riser that contained former naming conventions for what must have been an excess of a 100+ spaces that became our “tool chest” - picture “Thing” in the Addams Family. You could put a screwdriver in space X, a 1,000 times and never find it there again - remembering this was a home with 6 other people and a bizarre imbalance of 3 lefties out of 6.

This training has come in quite handy with Homeland Security gaining access to the ‘merican public’s hard drives in it’s valiant fight against terrorists worldwide, except those found within the border of the “homeland,” having “Sneetch Stars on ‘thar’s” apparently exempting them from the turmoil of a militarized constabulary originating in the repatriation of escaped slaves during the more corrosive and incomplete transitions of  our historical experiment in multiculturalism. When i say “our,” i mean we. The thing about growing up in ‘merica is that there was no homeland; we all shared different homelands and that seemed a miracle, but now it seems there one homeland and only a segment of the public belongs - that my friends is bullshit.

I remember clapping and clapping some more when Bill Murray described us as “mutts” - Heinz 57 was an actual heritage in over-the-line pick up games at Corsica Park; mine own is Scottish, French, (apparently no Czech) that i’d always been rooting for, but two of my grandfathers were orphans, one paternal, on maternal - so to say what my blood is has always been a complicated equation. I grew up as J. Todd Stevens (read silent J), but always had an affinity for my mother’s father, my namesake - Joseph who’d been dead 10 years by the time i was born. I am proud to be the mutt Bill Murray described in the movie  “Stripes” but am dismayed the film did not go further in it’s social critique, almost suggesting that if the military could embrace multi-ethnicity and killing and maiming for profit would magically become legitimate. 

Here we sit counting decades toward our doom, rather than steps away from our past. And no one seems to be ruffled. The leaders - lead; the followers - follow and the oceans are churning up dead fish rather than bounty; there’s an irony for you “Mutiny on the Bounty” does “Extinction” in technicolor - of course there will be subtitles from the DHS deleting expletives, and tailoring the body count from the latest viral infection, but people are no longer able to distinguish - “virtual” from actual · 130,000 million ‘mericans dead: 43.3333333 times more live’s lost than 9/11 and people are quarreling about wearing face masks, because they lack the basic education to parse “epidemiology fundamentals.” I was faced with cautioning a discerning intellect in the country i reside from watching “Deliverance” because, it was just too close to fact, and too far from her reality.

Last night, the only solution i could find to my anxiety was to lay sleepless chanting mantras of my own concoction - it helped · far more than searching the virtual reality that is being supplanted into the body politic by unscrupulous “social engineers” so gorged on their digital whimsy as to believe that through the power of numbers which they are able to process with increasing facility - they can control what no person has ever been able to do, everything; all the while losing sight of the simple truth of logic. The zero “O” revolutionized human thinking the same as pulling the right sliver from a log jam will release an inert untold mass into a fluid dynamic. That my friends is not the purview of human beings and it is simply arrogance manifest that we would ever want to control anything more than the human anatomy that we are passing through. 

jts 24/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

230720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“karma’s bitch, then you die.” - A. Nonymous · it’s as though every fun thing in my life has been sucked dry by conventional wisdom; just using the pejorative (however the fuck you spell it) “bitch” takes all the fun out of using a convenient sleight that goes back 60 years into my sense of humor - and i am willing · once a suitable replacement rises to the occasion, but i don’t see much on the horizon. Too little funny, too much bullshit - so my own admittedly bizarre reaction formation is “radical accountability”. I moved out of my “Charming Homestay” after 3 months acclimating to Viet Nam - there was really no return ticket and where i landed seemed perturbed by my ways. I took a house close enough to where i landed to gauge my fictions from facts - it didn’t work out that way · Madame Viet Nam being more mysterious than my limited experience could perceive. The late stage Villa development catty corner to my new digs should have clued me.

Within a month it was occupied and all seemed peaceful enough with recognizable lilt of French bouncing off the walls of the tight corner. At the time i was trying to sync with the farmer’s early hours and relished the dawn mornings until the Villa mounted a three foot neon bulb i can only imagine was meant to dissuade the lurking presence of locals. In kindly cooperation, its light was relegated to the dangerous hours after midnight. My computer ruptured a screen requiring 2 weeks docking in Da Nang, 2nd time of xptr free existence in my short stay. 3 days into the loss of my translator a crew landed eviscerating the old growth bamboo strand that allowed me privacy from the rice field thoroughfare and cool air for the small cluster of houses i live within - i was dismayed and saddened by the further burning destruction of a “canopy” which had endured so much brutality and survived as a legacy part of Vietnam. 

Once i was back on line and able to inquire with the neighbor farmer family what logic determined the clear cutting of such beautiful growth - i was told it was at the request of the inhabitants of the new Villa. All i could figure was the wanted a better “view of the rice fields” in which they lived in the more “tony” section of a boutique heritage site. I was not amused, nor was i tolerant of such _______fill in the blank. This is where my history of any kind of character quest breaks down and my own cruelty created more pain and suffering than i would have ever imagined possible from “bitter searching” of my heart. I was unrelenting in my unwelcome at almost the same instant that Covid-19 was encroaching the tourist shores of Viet Nam. Within days and a weeks the poor damsel with a child in her household, a mother who likely innocently enough only wanted a better facebook photo had the ire of yours truly.

I have pondered long and hard about how to rectify my error in behavior, and when i had determined the only viable solution was a face-to-face apology to this individual i know not at all nor have any real reason to wish anything but kind passage, and a more developed sense of our planet’s precarious future · she moved out within days of my taking possession of a house catty-corner to what had been her front door. Everything about my move seems fraught with conflict - from an increasingly entrenched landlady who imagined i’d pay six months in advance for the privilege of living with the cigarette scarred sofas of her “foreigner bungalow” to being treated like the virus itself, as though just because i am of the age and nationality which had caused so much havoc in her country 50 years ago, disrespect and hostility would be acceptable. (a paragraph largely forged in fear, fatigue and resistance to change.)

My quandary and why i share - i am okay with reparations for Viet Nam, my country was wrong out of the gate and it pleases me to no end to spend copious amounts money in the country - having said that, i find the open invitation to the bourgeoisie a reckless and limited consideration of what is possible to the demonstrably resourceful and relentlessly enduring workers of Viet Nam, especially with respect to the survival of the species. I have listened to the laughter of free people, which i miss more than i can describe with words. I welcome the insight that that laughter may only be the visible portion of the “iceberg” of authentic human existence, but lacking calm and allies, it is the best i can come up with - find people who are laughing and follow them · therein may be hope. 

jts 23/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

220720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I once ran in Death Valley at noon in the middle of summer - just to be able to know i could · that was a scant 9 years ago; today i can barely hobble from my bicycle to the porch without evincing wincing pain; see what you have to look forward to. I cling to the illusion i am not decaying piece by piece by holding to a routine and monitoring my changes in capacity from day to day. I measure my ability to work by these 5 paragraphs, and how challenging they are to produce. This morning the workman installing the canopy over the patio of my new digs arrived not entirely unexpectedly, but threw a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an orderly transition from one home to the next, and left me with the quandary about leaving doors open if i were to go on my morning cycle; instead i chose to whine to the neighbor lady about how there were no pots and pans in the new house when all i was really doing was procrastinating about moving the balance of things because i didn’t want to track construction dust into the new house which was really a ruse to keep me from finishing a move whose wisdom i was beginning to question.

This from a man who would spend weeks on the road following my nose under the guise of a quixotic search for the “perfect studio” which was really a ploy to distract me from the real question of selling art. In the end, i never made a living as an artist though i devoted every free minute i could shoehorn to carving stone, painting and drawing while earning a living, an English degree, and 3 divorce decrees. I’d always felt at some point the sheer gravity of my relentless quest to make the finest art i could manage, would, excuse the ironic expression - trump · the paucity of quality art being produced at the turn of the 2nd millennium. I was wrong. H.L. Mencken said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Having overestimated that taste - i can say he knew from what he was talking about.

And i’d do it again in a heartbeat; i think i could have done it a little longer had i been less of a purist, but that is just what all the artists do - whack off a little integrity here, concede to a patron there · pretty soon you have made your bargain with the devil and whatever was recognizable about your spark is dimmed and dead. What’s left for me is figuring out how to or whether to destroy the carvings i’ve made so that the predatory billionaire class cannot exploit a creative process they refused to support in my lifetime - yes i have some self-respect left to me. Somewhere on a documentary about my clandestine art career i am recorded saying that “i will destroy all the carvings before i die.” This was after 9/11 and before _rump’s secret police kidnapping of 'merican citizens off the streets of Portland.

Sitting here foggy from a late ride in the noonday heat - think 101 degrees · followed by an anomalous burger and beer, i’ll be lucky to get the doors closed and the gate locked behind me before i collapse into a fitful sleep worried about all the loving i left undone today. What strikes me dumb is how fucking lucky i am and still manage to find something to grouse about. Late last night was the first time i gave myself permission to listen to the Ho’ponopono spiel - i didn’t dislike it. Anything anymore that is making an effort for us to come to grips with our confusion about loving to be alive while others around us are loving to kill is of use. I cannot, nor would i change you - if you wish to kill me · have at it you stupid motherfucker. My greatest satisfaction will have been that i spent no more time than the writing of this sentence to consider your silly ambition · i’m gonna die anyway and you wasted whatever precious minutes you possess to make that happen; i’m laughing out loud to myself just thinking about it - mean i know, but still it’s funny.

I value my time in Viet Nam for her relentless embrace of the unknown - she waged an un-winnable war and won · if you don’t love that kind of shit, i’m not really too interested in much else about you. And zuké you a punk; she deserves much better than your fucking hubristic pitch about revolution and your pissant empty gestures toward helping her people. If you and i are ever  sitting in the same room, know that i’ll be doing my level best to demonstrate your cowardice to her - one way or the other. These are called the “extinction chronicles” because we dying, our species is running off a cliff, for no better reason than to keep a handful of greedy human beings convinced they aren’t wrong. Fuck, i am wrong, i’ve been wrong since i learned the difference - but i am fucking trying. _rump and company are not even doing that - i include you zuké in that category, not because you couldn’t have, but because you didn’t · you lack my respect and while clearly that is meaningless to you; to me it is everything, mine is based on self-respect while yours is based on greedy delusion. Know this, i am a judgmental fuck - you may not be · so there is hope. 

jts 22/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

210720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Nearly 4pm - in between houses · a free fall i’m too familiar with to _______fill in the blank. There is nothing left to us as a species, but to, as Mr. Bukowski so presciently pointed out - “find what you love and let it kill you.” I enjoy having fun, always have. Early in my hedonistic career, i vaguely remember an occasion when arriving home to Costa Mesa from Pasadena - where spirits had been plentiful enough that minors purloined at will from older sister Aunt Jane, that i stood in the middle of Baker St well past midnight beckoning for more “Spaghetti Juice.” An innocent enough event depending on which repository or story you are wishing to convey, for me it just meant a love of Spaghetti with an astonishment that there was no more juice, for those who would malign and remain afraid of what specters reside deep within, an example of my wayward ways.

It wasn’t that simple, nor that scabrous - i was to later learn from a similar but less benign event the dangers of invoking Dionysus when you have no idea what you are doing. Joe, my cousin’s squeeze and friend i shall never see again - though he taught me how to heft Culligan soft water canisters as tall as i was without damaging the important parts of the male anatomy - also how to smoke, while you and your homie’s honey were boinkig without making too much noise · When Ma & Pa Kettle AKA mom & dad decided to sever the un-severable knot of matrimony, it was decided i’d spend the summer in the basement of Joe & Lisa’s craftsman-like bungalow just off Colorado Blvd, sometime circa 1969. There was a rhesus monkey in the house, Tommy and the Who; Frank Zappa and his kindly admonition to not eat the yellow snow along with Joe’s personal friends singing about “incense and peppermint” while my family was losing my Beagle “Snoopy” to dog thieves that were harvesting that particular breed for “science” that summer.

Joe drove an Austin Healy really well, and had been a Junkie in Chicago at about the same age i was losing my parents. He gave me a lot of rein, suggesting i apply for work on “dude ranches” instead of returning to the lame family i was in the process of being ejected from; had i listened then more carefully, how much differently my life might have been. But this one night my lifelong learning about how and when to stop drinking was to be fortified; it began normally enough on the porch knocking back “Red Mountain” fortified red wine from the gallon jug, me snotty, angry and only dimly aware of how much my life was about to be changed by the end of summer. In Viet Nam - the expression is “Một – Hai – Ba – dzô; 1, 2, 3, In” was channeled on that Anti-War porch · so why not¿ I’ll tell you why not, after a few, Joe thought it would be fun to take the “Arroyo Seco” in into Hollywood in the Austin Healy. What i remember besides asking “where are the girls¿” was waking up at sunlight with the Austin parked in the front yard of the bungalow; my fine knit sweater covered in vomit and a sore jaw.

Joe’s solution to my youthful inability to go the distance was to just fling his right fist across the gearshift into my jaw to stifle my “technicolor yawns.” I spent that memorable morning gaining a strong appreciation for the downside of hangovers and scouring the cockpit of Joe’s beloved sports car of any remnant of my apparently pissant puke wondering whether there would ever be a normal again. There was sort of - if you call your senior year of High School in Sussex England normal, because your father had taken a youngish, soon to become Mormon Princess and her Turkish son as surrogates for the family he had been forced from for lack of ______fill in the blank. He and prim young vixen were on the Sabbatical adventure of his lifetime to live in Greece with the echoes of the ancients.

Transitions are fraught for me, but probably a lot less than those who’ve never mustered out the chair they share with the “tit” TV and her programmers. The people i discuss are dear to me dead or alive and i have little shame that i am willing to share with you, strangers - though there be an abundance of dancing anxiety just outside of the threshold of my awareness · @ 65, i’m only just getting the gist of how ethereal that can be. The kitchen i am now vacating has a black oven hood against a white wall that is sized for a cook 12” shorter cook; when i began cooking in this kitchen i wrapped a white plastic bag around the corner of the hood i kept hitting - good for 6 months and within the day i removed this slight white bumper that had no physical role · i’ve hit the corner 3 times. As they say where i come from. “s’plain that to me.” Or more importantly ask yourself if i am lying, and investigate your own experience to discover about how sensitive the unconscious mind is, as we lurch from chore to chore in our own end days: are we having fun yet - oh fuck yes !

jts 21/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

200720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I stayed up late fretting over a fury passed, but one i had regrettably acted on. When i was finally prepared to atone, the unfortunate subject of my righteousness had just left - now i must simply poor my regret into the aether along with so many others looking to make shit right. It would seem the best thing i can do is to reflect enough on my defective behavior to interrupt the impulse when i see it coming down the pike, and contain my own ignorance. What is complicated for me is not that i was angry about what i felt was an unjust action, but that i did not breathe enough to present my feelings in a more useful light - Madame Paradox of course is cackling at my back, “chocking back our gorge again are we¿” · ? I have moved two houses over to escape the pandemonium of construction that is part and parcel of any boom-or-bust economic model we are all too familiar with. Domicile for me is fraught with loose ends - broken marriages, broken homes, broken promises .  ..

From where i sit just now, i see new shoots. C.G. Jung once used the analogy of a rhizome to describe the human cycle. I find his choice of forms fascinating given his largely mental focus of study. As an inveterate aesthete in constant search of meaningful metaphor, i find the leap from our emotional yoke to an organism in constant renewal a worthy of any bridge i can find. I live in a city of bridges, so somehow unconsciously i have landed where simple transit requires constant bridging - is that a random coincidence or the workings of a more complex organization we have yet to submit to · ¿ that is a question ? As importantly, to what end what do i labor so assiduously ? as though there is some governing rule, where when once found allows all the stops to fall away and the fluidity of neutrino star dust rules all dimensions without impediment. 

It seems to me that i have lived my entire life to be just where i am, so it confuses me to no end that i should feel such a failure, as though my life is any different than any other boulder in the road. Are we impediments to growth or the moisture of life that is unique to our world? How can it be that such a smart species as we have been maneuvered into the corner we collectively face, yet faintly see? I D K, but i’m gonna keep asking until i die or find answers. There is no alternative, there is no “magic bullet” anyone can fire - friend of foe · If find no common ground to dispel the vapor of hate a cadre of small minded humans of evoked over our cooperative loving history, we deserve to die for being so stupid as to believe we are not all brothers and sisters on a marvelous, however fragile quest for greater meaning than our pain.

I have enough pain to recognize that most of what i feel is of my own design. Last night i tossed and turned over behavior i could attribute to no one but myself and feelings i was trying to process; mostly about things i turn away from for whatever reason. I was raised to fight in the most loving way a warrior scholar could conceive in tumultuous time not all that much different from what we face today. My father had the good fortune to face fascism at the end of a Norden bomb site - the problem is that no one told him that Norden Inc. had been sold to Hitler months before. There are rats in the nest showing us to be the Washichu we be - if you aren’t familiar with expression - Wasichu is Lakota Sioux for “he who takes the fat from the bone.” It is a contemptuous moniker, however accurate for the same population with hubris enough to carve the faces of murderers over an edifice of stone that had venerated elders for untold generations.

This is the predicament we as humans now live - do we recognize the vacuous sound of contemporary digital who-ha as legitimate, or do we dig deeper and search for perilous meaning in traditions we have been indoctrinated to disregard as ______fill in the blank? Frankly, i don’t give a fuck what you think. Most people i converse with in media or in person lack any manner of love that resembles what i am willing to lay on the line just to see that some portion of what i find to be a magnificent achievement in metaphysical alchemy to have reached fruition. It is hard enough for me to accept my role as a dying human on a planet of many others dying with much sadder stories than my own - i refuse to surrender and implore anyone reading these chronicles to rise up as least as far as your own self respect will carry you - as Yogi Berra the famed racist catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers once said, “It ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings;” for my money with so many fat ladies singing it’s a real challenge to know which one to listen to - peace and love from Ringo Star, the richest fucker from the fabulous four .

jts 20/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

190720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Today 19 July 2020 is ma’s 92 birthday - Hapy Birtday Ma · so you know if i had my way, i’d be sitting at your side fetching what you can’t, but by your own design and the bizarre interpretation of your wishes by those you placed in charge, i am as far removed as is possible and as quiet as a mouse · at least where you’re concerned. You’ll be glad to know your unerring discernment remains entirely accurate and even today where i live, there are those, i am sure, would rather i dummy up than remain the same old “mouth” as you disparagingly called me to anyone who would listen. But i gotta tell ya’ ma, that was a really mean thing to do, especially to me who loves you, after what Leonard Cohen describes as “bitter searching of the heart. Yes, i am intractable when it comes to expressing myself - ironically, this trait seems in short supply in the nation pop fought to defend. There are secret police on the streets of our country today, jailing citizens for no more than expressing themselves · so ma, i’m glad i ignored your imprecations when it comes to saying how i feel.

Today i took possession of new digs; the house is on the other side my neighbors - the farmers next door; they are salt of the earth people and in the hipster doofus town where i now reside it is wholesome to live close to people i can admire. I understand that you have been fortifying yourself for years against what you yourself described to me as an “inconsolable fear of death,” so kudos for your resolve in negotiating your own pace - but i gotta ask, “is it worth it”? There was a movie in the grand tradition i watched starring Lionel Barrymore - “On Borrowed Time”. The gist of it was not so much different than the trick of unweaving her day’s work which Penelope played on the suitors waiting to usurp Odysseus. I can almost see your eyes rolling back in your head, then asking, “why are you telling me this?” As with most things that pertain to you; ma, for no other reason than to render aid. If it doesn’t, at least i tried.

What i’ve discovered for myself, there is no obedient loving son, or daughter out there looking to bring me kindness as i have you; and between us, i’d think my position to be the more fortunate. I think about how you stopped picking up after yourself in your golden years - as though the privilege of having others do for you was some compensation for inequities in your life; what terrifies me is when i see this same inclination in my own living - looking at the dirty floor and saying to myself, “i can pay to have this done.” Pop was very stringent about radical accountability - unrealistically stringent · so i welcome the kindness toward yourself that you arrived at late in life; i am searching for a middle ground to a point where i can be pitching in and contributing to my dying day. Our species as i see it is at the “all hands on deck stage” where we cannot really carry dead weight. I learned, possibly too late to be of any use to you, just how shy you are about what you are feeling.

I value you your unusually sensitive nature, but i do not concur with all the conclusions you arrive at; i might have been a better son, had i defended my positions as fiercely as you have learned to defend yours. Or, because there was no one backing me up in family squabbles i learned to see beyond the “court intrigue” and take positions that were indisputable such that i simply removed myself from the fray. The problem with that tactic is that it gets very lonely once the need to secure allies is removed and you learn to live with a take it or leave attitude toward nearly everything in life. I honestly don’t know. I miss conversing with your razor intellect and feel the world will have lost a uniquely original character when it comes time for us to bid each other adieu. It pains me to this day to feel in my heart that you are repulsed by what i’ve become as a human being, but paradoxically owe my cussed independence in large part to the terms of “individuation” that our relationship has forged.

So maybe the best place to start is with a “thank you ma” for having the gumption to create a one such as me, for whether you have ever recognize me as the loving man i have become - i don’t require any external validation of my worth · from what i see around me and what i see on the horizon there are not many who can make that claim. If anything circling-the-wagons has become the goto strategy for the choice between balkanization or solidarity our species is faced with. My own siblings lack the backbone to approach me as individuals, rather as i see it - which by no means - defines any reality but my own, they aspire to emulate the ineffable quality of self through clustering at all costs, a quality you have achieved simply by breathing and being yourself · bless you Mommy and all those you have come in contact with over your long and meaningful life. In closing, as i exited my new domicile with a complete set of keys, i also backed into a cacti hitherto outside my goofy awareness - simultaneously eliciting the kindliest cackle of derision over my shoulder one could hope for in such circumstances. When i faced my audience; she was a gapped-tooth hag with the sweetest smile of shared humor one would want to meet under similar circumstances · somehow on this birthday of yours, and as incongruous as it may seem, she reminded me poignantly of you. 

Lovingly yours,

son - joseph T.   

jts 19/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞