- Saturday 13 September 2o25 ·

 

Journaling is different than writing ¿ that is a question; have fallen on my bike twice since I bought it; went to sleep to dream of burro, not sure i got there but braided my hair may be taking mushrooms L8r, didn’t send off my carving tool request and cut mustard for a raspberry cactus fruit parmesan cheese sandwich on sourdough rosemary raisin bread. Am struck dumb by the enormity of calamity our world careens to the extent I focus far more closely in front of me than elsewhere. Am drawing and contemplating a canvas (board) with Cezanne’s pallet - Frank Tauriello’s, still ranks highest for pure surprise. Have labored long on El Viejo de Agua, and unless I wished to become gun shy, ought to undertake ‘her’ portrait¿ or not . I know not a her to portrait . 

Would still parse the whys and wherefores of rigidness which seems to have conscripted an otherwise intransigently autonomous agency . The darks of El Viejo de Agua muddy into miasma while my shrieking kibitzer don’t give it a rest . Distinguishing the inclination to walk chocolate to the Doctora Leo, from Bob Marley’s observation about awakening the love of woman without intention to act being the epitome of cowardice . Yet she who would be queen still echoes with her conventional narrative about ‘we have to talk’ being so “contrived” ¡ .

No idea W T F brother Winston is on abou; anymore than I have any idea about brother Brad . unlicensed unprovoked unscrutinized journaling is an editorial comment of its own anymore than streamofconsciousness is clichè . the longer Pop is gone the more i appreciate his good company, truly leadership . I feel vulnerable in a comfortable sort of way in so far as i know not where to go from here and that is perfectly alright .

Bugs, I’m not seeing near enough bugs to suit my foreboding; countertops, moist ground, spiders, etc. It is as equally possible I am looking for disquiet to counterbalance the unaccustomed ebullience of foraying back to the world of happy carving, intentional creativity, unashamed embrace of my shadow, its appetites minus the reaction formation of furtive curiosity. The ‘voice’ of ____________ chirping chisme, Bob Dylan attributed such gossiping as well to the cult of celebrity rather than the more horizontally distributed reality of pluralism .

“I hate writing, but I love having written.” - Dorothy Parker · My good fortune to have fallen into the company of writers early, either through reading or writing . Before we’d unload at Thrifty’s for Rocky Road ice cream, we’d go to the River Jetty and park at the Yellow house to walk across ‘Tornado’ alley and bang a right at the ice plants where Pop’s promptly discarded shirt laid flush against the fascinating fatty lump lodged at the anterior interior shelf of his scapula and adorned his floppy fishing cap over his bald pate to script poetry .

until L8r (help yourself to other creative vagaries below) ·

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                    

jts 13 September 2o25

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

Extinction Chronicles - Friday 12 September 2o25 ·

Is it an embellishment to add a day of the week to the title¿ do i care? in my ‘driven’ rubric, i’ve uncovered the voice i’ve searched for in my writing, anonymity. it is much easier to use proper grammar and capitalize the beginning of a sentence when one cares not who is reading. For a time i used writing as augmented reality, ‘the conversation' I’d like to have had with my mother, and not. I veer from scathing and unreasoned rage as expression, for there is no percentage. Like my personal experience with psych0tropic drugs, my salvation has mostly been reason; for example the accumulation of objects has never been my forte: what to do with them once you've collected them? or power¿ At first it was reaction formation; if I identified with the bullies, maybe they wouldn’t pick on me, but I was too egotistical for the ’swarm’ mentality coming from a tribe of refined narcissists, I wanted distinction, more than what a pair of “crossed eyes” provided. For a time, it was enough that I was related to beautiful people, a long time. 

However that ‘ego-thang’, Osho’s ghost that doesn’t want to die, didn’t want to share the fictional limelight that comes from having entree to the Beatles' ‘beautiful people,’ however vacuous and empty such promise was. About then in my existential timeline, maturation was giving way to doubt and the burden of ‘realizing one’s promise’ kicked into high gear. Life became a kaleidoscope of schedules, certificates and appointments whizzing by, commingling with the fictional accumulation of security which one adheres to as a child of Depression Era parents. Somewhere in the miasma a voice tried to echo the logic found in intangible treasures of human existence. Music was never an option for creative sustenance, no models to draw on, and a ruptured eardrum sort of added to the lopsided nature of my cycloptic-monocular vision, while a short-leg syndrome gimp at times makes me wonder if there is such a thing as ‘TV Series Karma’ for having made such ridicule of Walter Brennen’s hobbling? that's a question.

Yet for a chronicle to have teeth, it wants to be more than entertaining vignettes seeking approbation: like the fear and frustration of dying alone in a foreign nation surrounded by language and traditions that go in and out of focus, or the confusion of resisting the real disparity of transposing a ‘retired gringo’ wherewithal on an impoverished, ‘destination’ aspiring colony at an ancient crossroads containing the roots of a 2,ooo-6,ooo year old tree bearing the fortunes of a ‘wannabe famous’ suburb of a never-quite-known hipster-doofus foreign-owned post-Columbian, never gonna be as metropolis, cultural dumping ground too far from CDMX to claim anything but the birthplace of the most potent of Mexico’s revolutionary leadership.

Ya’ can’t make this shit up, I know I’ve tried. For example within this same blog is the carcass of a novel, “Pre-Extinction People”, I wrote during a typhoon season while stranded in Viet Nam by the pandemic of 2o2o. Now I am ensconced within a community I am regarded sincerely enough by its population to be hated by some and cared for by others; this at a time in my own human development to become mindful of how little I know about myself, much less how others experience my presence. The real fact is that I am close enough to my objectives to order a set of stone carving tools; a yard in which to carve, And garden; an upstairs studio where I now sit and write, (gibberish or not); and am closing in on the sourcing of a studio easel on which to puzzle over compositions which may have been living inside of me since I gave up painting because my well-intentioned father told me one 'young adult' day, “You’re not a painter, you’re a sculptor”. I wish he was alive to provide succor to my sister.

If not this season, than next I will again take a psych0trop with the intention of jarring my assumptions loose, in s way similar to what Daniel Odier advocates in his book “Tantric Quest”, amongst others. I am going to die: I’d like to face that event with aplomb Michelangelo possessed when he painted his empty hide being held up by St Peter. I know of no other way to find that sense within without asking questions, which for some reason some time back I abandoned in favor of ‘certainty’, - a condition that has mostly resulted in fatuous defense of erroneous thinking serving no practical end except _________ fill in the blank : 

until L8r (help yourself to other creative vagaries below) ·

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                    

jts 12 September 2o25

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

- 2o25 September 11 ·

 

Today is my sister’s birthday and on another blog i’ve posted a sonnet i wrote years ago, now she is dying from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP); we communicate through multigenerational trauma, and texting. Yesterday in conversation with our younger brother i had to voice out loud the very real understanding that my presence in the upcoming distribution of our mother’s ashes in the desert of her youth would not be welcome - how does one acknowledge such pernicious antipathy ‘cheerfully’¿ · I share this extremely personal snippet of existence, because it tracks with another time in our lives at a family intervention’ promoted by our mother, i said to my sister ‘my sense is that you don’t like me very much.’ to which she replied, ’No, I don’t.’ During this same intervention where we were ostensibly tasked with clearing the air, our mother described my sister as ‘brutally honest’ and myself as ‘suffering’ more than my siblings.

Another passing moment from the ’touchy-feely’ 60’s, long on potential - ripe for the plucking by those less scrupulous amongst us. Keep in mind during this same period ‘Brown and Williams’ were knowingly murdering, by way of their Nicotine Delivery Vehicle, countless clean lunged voters; legislators were consciously poisoning one of the densest vegetation biomass climes on the planet, because it had been deemed the most efficacious way to gain access to an mineral rich terrain, while containing the red menace of socialism/communism/anti-capitalism. Old Money at this time was interbreeding with the rapidly mutating Aristocracy cum Oligarchy; the fossil fuel cheeses were in the process of expunging from the public record any reference to carbon fuel and deterioration of the atmosphere vis-a-vis breathable air, and computer pundits were only beginning to envision the enhanced capacity for social manipulation via ‘digital technology’.

The arms industry in whose service i financed decades of ‘therapy’ and acquired while still affordable my bonafides as an ‘educated man’ - though it took me 20 years compared to the normal 4 years to graduate from college: 1972-1992. I was ill suited for a life as teacher that my psychiatrist glibly proposed one early morning session, anymore than i was aptly suited to carve stone for the balance of my life, because a 90 year-old charismatic Spanish stone-cutter patted my oh so lonely noggin, like the puppy dog i was in NYC at the ripe old age of 19-20; l’enfant terrible·scholarship anomaly @ the Art Students League of NYC - alum to Jose dé Creeft, (legend in my own mind) super dooper veterinary pooper scooper, wannabe Hansom Cabdriver, for real Falafel Vendor - seducer of anything that moved; though cautioned by the verisimilitude of trans-craft; (New York City is the place where they said:

Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo

Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo)

Sentenced next to Leonard Cohen’s “20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within,” shoehorned a trifecta of marriages - and ipso facto i sit in Oaxaca parsing as much together as i can before i become a disembodied series of +/- 5v pulses in an analog universe. Come and see me if you want advice on how to rinse or evade Blastocysts in an E-Coli rich environment; searching for ways to misunderstand the greatest number of people while confusing the other half of that equation, or piss off the whole batch with a single gesture at the appropriate ‘influencer’. However look not this way if what you seek is tranquility and equanimity of the ‘Zen’ kind; he too was harried from my friend’s list - know not why · pretty sure i never will .  ..

Still and all back to the task at hand of living, while a dear sister mortificates over her more pressing schedule on, what has to be ‘a confounding’ revolution about Sol. Will buy tools, i already own, but are stored in another country being overrun by fascists and zeolotgoofballs feeding on a media maze of rabbit holes and existential cul-de-sacs devised by some of the hollowest humans i’ve yet encountered (aside: similar in nomenclature to the aforementioned ‘intervention’ - but squishy like so much meaning in our days of ending. There are actually by all accounts members of the ruling class who are rooting for the ‘rapture’, not rooting in the way a Cheesehead might paint his gut mustard and get plastered on a Sunday TV camera opportunity, but rooting as in: devising, scheming, financing, seancing, hiring, scheduling and other various sundry activities the HNWI delude themselves into thinking constitute meaning. 

until L8r (help yourself to other creative vagaries below) ·

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                    

jts 11 September 2o25

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞