There are more “tropical depressions” coming, and now they are more than an environmental euphemism to denote a weather pattern on a media map - they are my brave hearted neighbors sweeping flood waters into the irrigation channels; they are fighting your way back to sleep at 2:30 am because without rest you will not have strength to evacuate when the water breeches your doorstep, or if it does be able to rise and muster to your Delicatessen and its employees who count on you for their support and the support of their families. It is the months of sweat nurturing an organic garden to yield fresh vegetables to an entire community faced with the Agro-Industrial model foisted on a nation by the corporate hubris of billionaire chemists with too much time on their hands and histories of Joseph Mengale pressed in between the pages of their grandparents hymnals that were all you got after your uncles absconded with the family’s inheritance.
The sad truth is i came to this Southeast Asian nation with a naive fantasy that the same culture capable of turning back the military onslaught of my birth nation’s much lauded military superiority, would have answers to the perils of our planet’s survival. And it is true - only the truth is that my lion-hearted farmer friend and his wife are now sweeping the flood waters from in front of their house - flood waters that the petro-nazis from my homeland have precipitated and continue to merchandize in the guise of “more & greater _____ fill in the blank”; investment real estate; manufacturing based on single use plastic and gew-gaws of every conceivable shape and function, or a fashion industry predicated on a style shoved down the throats of frightened youth still sweating from bringing in the harvest or too exhausted from their 2nd shift at the pavement bistros fronting as an “economy”.
So here i sit, an old beaten refugee from the “beatnik” halcyon days of ‘On the Road’, a story from a desperate soul forged in the fires of his burnt-out liver for the amusement of a leisure class no more committed to the future of mankind than they would be to the wellbeing of their gardener’s grandchild’s future, meaning not-at-all. And all i possess as an amulet of protection is some conceit about the sanctity of creativity and a rapidly receding memory of something promulgated as Camelot, but more accurately described by a generation’s poet laureate as a “Murder Most Foul.” I live amidst the best and the brightest this same poet described in an earlier creative tragedy written to the tune of “row, row, row your boat - gently down the stream”, nearly run over by the scrolling wizardry anxious and more than capable of obscuring the cautionary irony of “Tempest” album #35 from the same poet laureate content to be:
’n Scarlet Town, you fight your father’s foes
Up on the hill, a chilly wind blows
You fight ‘em on high and you fight ‘em down in
You fight ‘em with whiskey, morphine and gin.
Clint Eastwood, a renown Republican and once Mayor of the liberal bastion of Carmel cut his teeth in “Rawhide” a cowboy TV serial i am humoring the last of my grey cells as a nod to my conceit of constructive behavior as a “cultural anthropologist,” but more accurately described as one more flawed creature, dishonest to its potential and shirking honorable duties better understood by my noble neighbors the farmer couple, not only sweeping the flood waters my loving friends let me join in and sweep some of the very likely fecal-soaked puddles into the fields and sharing their bounty with me, not for my labor but because ______fill in the blank. What a privilege at this stage of my demise to find such kindness that it is almost beyond my limited scope of learning, but like Leonard said - “I will make it all up to you.”
jts 13/10/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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