Well where the fuck to go from here, like there is anyplace else to go. I sat in the yard of my loving farmer neighbors after my bike ride this morning, and i think i was invited to live within their compound which i learned has been in the family for 4 generations - circa 1850, this based on a googol translation; so i pitched a book idea using 170 years of their family recipes coupled with a family tree and explication of farming methods and the influence of foreign traders in this unique seaside town about to mortgage itself to its neck chasing the Disneyesque yoke of Corporate-Flavored-Tourism. I’m pretty sure something got lost in the translation, if not everything, but it was fun and encouraging to be absorbed by something other than languishing in the miasma of waiting for the whiz-kids from corporate heaven to kick start a fictional economy that has served 7 human beings out 7 billion human beings so well.
Ya’ wanna know what’s a hoax - the notion of an “infinite growth paradigm” foisted on a planet of “finite resources;” that my friends is an inequality dressed up like an equation; if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck - it’s a fucking duck · and you ought to duck; squealing like a pig, clearly ain’t gonna get you more tit. Back to my friends the farmers; i am not going to change the world at this late date, the best i can hope for is some small comfort in my dying days. From what i’ve learned in my too short a time on this luminescent spherical film of moisture covering its molten iron core like some virginal maid with carnal thoughts is that it’s really fun to do shit for other people, more fun than riding down a mountainside from the “Great Wall” on a ersatz toboggan behind a timid Latvian hitting her brakes at even the slightest hint of turn.
I think it is that - to give - which made the xmas holidays fun before it was overrun by the corporate consumer overlords - that look of delight on a child’s face receiving a gift that had only the scent of a relationship to behavior or on too many occasions some stink of relationship to one's place in the family constellation · mostly just “manna from heaven.” Even the poor fool parents enjoy the thrill of delight a child finds in a gift from out of the aether; however much those same parents were complicit in the con, or yoked with the bill that was maneuvered onto their shoulders by a bloodless economic parasite financing its prisons onto the backs of those same loving parents; ya’ gotta love xmas, cause if you don’t you’re a “godless communist” and you’re going to hell for masturbation no matter how many times you pray for forgiveness of your sins.
Back to my friends the farmers, and me without a friend in the world. There was a passage in “The Good Earth” - Pearl Buck, when the parents of the newborn spewed out vile epithets about their newborn · the thinking being if the deities felt jealous, they would loose their wrath on the life of that child; so too i fear commenting with fond regard about my friends should any internet curse of celebrity befall them. This is not an uncommon theme in literature; John Steinbeck found grist for the same mill in “The Pearl” wherein an impoverished family in Mexico was harried into obscurity by the sudden riches of a harvested pearl, a windfall that provided anything but the relief and security its absence and concommittant fantasy suggested. It is no different for this small seaside hamlet i may die in, it is already congested with speculator’s egos and tabled fortunes piling up interest debt against the gains imagined by the fictional “infinite growth paradigm.”
I am old, and hope that the four generations of wisdom accumulated against the pent up fury of greed at their gate will neuter the further Disneyesque delusion of boatloads of strangers disembarking on their shore for no other reason than to deposit money in the hands of all they meet. Rather I would continue to advocate to my farmer friends that the real harvest is in plumbing the depths of their history, their land and that of their families to develop compelling stories so vivid that the increasingly immobile but hungry for adventure world we are facing will pay dearly for finely crafted stories describing well the fortitude and courage of their forebears such that no one need leave their doorstop, but rather establish a strong exchange of ideas and cultures whereby everyone benefits except the corporate overlords and their fictions of unending wealth which always seems to evaporates at the drawer of the capitalist’s till - kaching · kaching · kaching ·
jts 14/09/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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