A wonderful day full of lopsided joy and uneven happiness - faces full of caution, generosity and pain · i’m really beginning to enjoy this living shit, but i’m at a dead loss as to explain how. Very little of what i was raised to believe constitutes “success” is evident in the life i live, yet like some bizarre existential kaleidoscope, i cannot turn a corner without finding some budding growth of a previous planting. I am just now listening to Willy Nelson and his Sons sing an homage to John Lennon - “Watching the Wheels Turn,” an act so simple yet so plagued by overlord search engine intrusion that the title required a second search, i d k ¿ how do you spell “ c l i c k b a i t f o r p r o f i t “ ? It gets really lonely trying to explain the ignorant travesty of such greed and how its parasitic behavior is driving our species to extinction, yet does not mitigate my personal responsibility to laugh, and inspire laughter at such insipid stupidity - you digital wizards, can go fuck yourselves if you had a clue what sex looked like having been cloned in the googol laboratories of Chief Nazi Scientist Kurzwell and his manservant Jeron Lanier.
Next day - Thur 22 · tried to return to the beach i was able to pitch in anonymously the day before, but the local lads were justifiably perturbed that an aged foreigner garnered photos and attention for a few whacks at a few piles of sand, while the mass of effort was quietly accomplished without recognition for many more long hours than my paltry attempt at aid. I understand, but do not know how to explain this fact to the stranger who, i’m sure had the best intentions, snapped my photo and propagated it as though it was important. The cadre of youth and community leaders who have coalesced into a human barrier against an angry sea are the heroes, but they are heroes i hope who will take a cold hard look at what they are defending and why. I learned that the shore road and artery to the downtown were once part of an estuary and natural waterway that became thoroughfares, which i’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time with a placid climate and habitations already lining the banks. Mother nature, however had determined these routes to be waterways from eons of drenching and re-drenching, and by god, she is going to have her way come hell through high-water.
Just like it was ignorant and delusional to think at my age and state of physical conditioning i had anything to contribute when in denial i waded into the fray, so to is it unwise to continue building on a shore that may have decades, if not years left as shoreline before it becomes coastal waters. Part of what i am experiencing is a reckoning with lifestyle choices i have made to the detriment of my physical health, ostensibly as a catalyst for a creative trance state i’d convinced myself would, like some sort of bacchanalian existential steroid might push me over the bar from mediocre wannabe artist to bonafide “somebody.” I was wrong, maybe. I am no longer deluded about passing into the great beyond with having left no more than memories with the scores of individuals who have kindly encouraged me on the creative path and the many who in some small or many large ways helped - Thank you ·
I was speaking with a stranger i’d met today who was describing the relief of having relinquished his lifetime collection just prior to moving to Viet Nam; i understand all too clearly the dynamic and had to bite my tongue to keep from commenting on the aftermath of being aged in a foreign land with little of the memorabilia around that comforts more conventional lives. My father was spirited away from his last independent living circumstance to an “assisted living” domicile - read supervised. I took a lot of smack from siblings for bringing him from his now digs to witness the dismantling of his former castle keep. It affected me deeply to see the look of surprise on his face while people were breaking down the years of thoughtful assemblage he’d concocted, but i was more struck by the presumption my siblings made under the mantle of protecting him from himself - the arrogant, self important choices they took under the guise of “protecting” him · from what i still have to ask, himself?
I am finding it difficult to transmute the repulsion i felt, however inaccurate, for what i perceived as self-serving injustice by my siblings. From that experience, i determined to remove myself as much as possible from the passing of my Mere. It has caused enormous internal turmoil of which i am determined to own as much as possible, but am finding myself ill-equipped to face the task alone · As my 2nd wife was so fond of fatalistically expressing at the most inopportune times, oh well. 92 year-old Ma has Covid, and my siblings in their muted fury share nothing about her condition with me, because when growing up we all witnessed shunning as a blood-sport, yet i as a born mimic, foreshadowing my loving regard for Leonard Cohen’s emotional acuity I, “Like a baby stillborn, like a beast with his horn, I have torn everyone who reached out for me.” So you see why i must transfigure my suffering, because until i do there will be no unconditional love in my life, i will not find ways to relieve the suffering of others because there will always be a hook with anything i do until i learn to show myself the love that i wish for others to find everywhere they turn.
jts 22/10/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
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