Now 4:59 election day and i am only just beginning - joe, you ain’t it · you as Bob Dylan said so well, are just pumping out the piss. I realized blindingly and painfully before i began writing today that i am as entrenched with more fascists than had i remained on the coast of California where i was raised. Nor are the people i’ve met in this leg of “the” journey any more evil or vile than those smarmy, ignorant and hate-filled hearts i fled from at the check stands and cash registers of where i was raised. William Shakespeare - “Hell is empty, all the devils are here.” What to do¿? remains the question as if as a 15-year old i'd never left not welcomed home and simply stood my ground, refusing the aggression and injustice of my family of origin and mirrored the hatred i could feel but lacked the wisdom to reflect.
Now is not too late to do so, the channel is just so much weaker that there is little volume for anyone whom i’ve loved for so long and so fruitlessly to hear. I remember a number of calls my eldest brother made after he and my sister absconded with my soon-to-be-dying father; i shut off each call relentlessly; this many decades later Brad, i remain astonished by the number of efforts you made to communicate · i have no one to blame for that missed opportunity at communication between us, each full of pain. I am sorry - i know you tried, and i did as well. Our father understands wherever his soul listens as carefully as though we were alive and on that long last walk we three strode together - however complex and painful it seemed at the time · a high point in my memory of our father’s resolutely decent ambition.
I sit in a mold shrouded villa on the central coast of Viet Nam listening to Neil Young, and if you ever read what i’ve tried to share with the world about our upbringing; know that i have loved you as best i could, as i’m certain you have me. I hope any ambitions for decency and justice have been as condemned, but sincerely emulated the poetic conviction of our too decent and too soon departed voice of our shared paternal reason. I cannot blame my feelings of fear and vulnerability on the squalls of the child across the table from you anymore than i can assure my friend across the neighbor wall that his current feelings of fury and antagonism during his matrimonial squabble are temporary, than i can change the complexion of our family’s pathology - though there is no one but myself who can.
It is the unique condition of our human kind that in the midst of massive change, we - each of us is as powerful and more powerful than what the “powerful” proclaim, and alone possess the power to affect change. I love my father and my family for that conviction which will not be altered by all the events i am about to face in my private march to a demise i have no control over - if it is to be from plague, or ants eating the flesh from my face, the only recourse in front of me is to embrace my suffering with the love and willingness to transfigure that discomfort into something more useful to those that follow me or my absence of self into another plateau of existence than this silly cul-de-sac i have led myself into and hopefully allowed you the reader a path out from - stranger things have happened, i know - for i still breathe, as can you you to your everlasting pleasure at the service of others.
Fuck - once again the painter’s corner of 4 vs 5 paragraphs, past the “witching hour.” When i say witching hour, i mean where i grew up they are casting ballots to determine which flavor of tyrant our kind will enjoy for the proximal end of our kind - the ants who leave pustule filled bites on my tender “white boy” skin are, as i type, waiting for the oily residue from my fleshy meal to find pathways to their next meal, while the mewling child screaming at a possibly similar discomfort groans close enough to disturb my solipsistic preoccupation with a pain in my ear no one will know of if i don’t remark about that here and now · the problem is that i’m not sure if the pain is from an overlong exposed molar root or just fear at what Leonard Cohen described about death as the “preliminaries.” The irony is that is doesn’t much matter, for as certain as i type my thoughts, i will die - and there is not fuck all i can do about that · are we having fun yet ¿? i am, sort of.
jts 03/11/2020
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