“Greed,” was the french journalist’s reply when explaining why humanity will survive. I was riding in transport from the airport in Kuta, Bali to Ubud on my 1st journey in a very long time; i was sanguine, strong, and fiercely determined to arm the planet for what i was, and remain convinced will be a protracted struggle for the high ground of humanity’s future - 20 years later only less sanguine, less strong, and more fiercely determined · However what seemed ‘protracted’ then, has become more like an episode from the sainted Mr. Serling and a more ethical use of Maester Tolkien’s ‘Palantir’ - using our planet to exemplify the shift of the fungible nature of ‘Brownian Physics;’ that or the loaf of bread theory of the universe is responding to my traverse across the paradox of the ’everything is now spectrum’ of reality; whatever it turns out to be, my sense is that Leonard Cohen’s statement about getting older and being more convinced about having absolutely no control over anything was just a ‘contraband quote’ smuggled from Orwell’s gulag of the future, “But what do I know¿” - Michel de Montaigne ·
Prior to my ‘Journey to the East,’ i spent 14 years in the company/married to a wounded Walloon i met the thanksgiving day after the end of my 2nd marriage; they were joyous times with much learning and much suffering - rich. One standout was the slow, almost glacial transition of the culture. She, my consort was a tangle of realities, but mostly starved for ‘meaning’, so everything took on a brilliance of just having been discovered and the pristine quality purpose one gets from zeal. One such enthusiasm was food and food supplies which coincided with the mutation of Ms. Gooche’s to Whole Foods; and like the couplet/theme movie releases of the big studios; from: Trader Joe’s to Trader Joe’s Inc. The reason i belabor the point is here where i live in Southern Mexico, after the highjacking of ‘Hipster Doofus’ Easter Vacation locations “Trending” by the Obama starlets the same has happened to the zocolo, “El Viejo de Agua,” and possible the saddest the mutation by ’success’ of my favorite food store, which i’ll not name for fear of effecting its evolution; suffice it to say; what had been at one time an earnest service-oriented supplier of health oriented foodstuffs, has fallen prey to its own press - “bigshotville” · claims another victim.
How much of this screed/essay is from projection of my own fear of success or lack thereof, et. al., i can’t say; like a blind man with a gimp i’m limping my way forward toward that pool of brilliant ‘white’ light allegedly found in the bardo. I do believe, however if the notion of what constitutes ‘success’ is not retrieved from Freud’s nephew Bernays’ unconscionable ‘bait and switch’, the damage of integrating the body politick’s concept of appetite with the capacity for nutritional contamination by the boogeyman, “a iEye” will not only have assassinated our species by thirst for its greed of water, but from starvation from nutritional degradation in the bargain. Part of why it is so sad for me to watch a store begin from an orientation for wholesome foods and service to the population it serves, to then be seduced by a siren song of “fame and fortune” chained to an addiction for a mythical focus from a virtual world by a +/-5v shackle affixed to one’s wrist where it is in perpetual traverse toward the ‘brainstem’ like the creature inside of Ensign Chekov’s Helmet in Star Trek “Wrath of Khan” - that’s just fucking sad..
“Enough or Too Much.” - William Blake · My Bachelors in English took me 22 years to complete, the quote seemed so appropriate for my graduation cake - living in a quonset style warehouse off an abandoned railroad spur with my 3rd wife in an art colony hogged from the former Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery, very close to the origins of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles. The twin towers still stood, i was in love and erosion to the republic was just nuisance white noise, rather than the shrill ‘shitstorm’ of today; a naive calm with optimism fitting the Optimist Home of Figueroa was the hothouse fiction i breathed. So, on one of those post B.A. afternoons, the Hungarian Belà and i while doing the Bohemian Fandango - (redwinebefore12) convinced each other the time was ripe to become millionaires doling out our creative elan to the ‘great unwashed’ enhancing a future waiting to reward our unique originality; him for his fotos; me for my stone carving. I was then 12 months into a commission, i’d accepted against my better judgement; a pair of hands for a POMmy, ‘JagUar’ mechanic repairing the low hanging fruit of old money Pasadena and his ’Septic’ dame. When i say ‘naive calm’; i was 12 months into a project i couldn’t price for lack of foundation: nor had i demanded a ‘good-faith’ deposit for what i expected would yield $15-$20k - a reasonable figure for an ‘object d’art’ hand carved by a student of Jose deCreeft and well into any industry standard for a ‘stone mason’s apprenticeship’ having carved much granite over many years under the tutelage of Anthony Amato, an autodidact artist, 5 generation stone mason from NYC in whose close supervision, however tempestuous i carved: 1 meter long screwdriver, a 3/4 x 1 1/4 meter square knot, a 2 3/4 meter long double helix and a 2 meter long left femur.
Clue: a product line of well-engineered one-off stacked-rock fountains fed from solid granite cisterns; augmented with Olmec masks of faux rock resin geared to move by the thousands is not the path to riches. Within nine years from that bucolic afternoon of unrestrained greed: i was gutted from an emergency appendectomy at County U.S.C. for the indigent, my wife bailed 5 days later having hijacked the granite femur for blood money from my best man at our wedding in order to repair her last remaining front tooth rather than the affront of full dentures. (the femur was later abandoned in Denver as part of a real estate transaction - the ‘best man’ was still skedaddling); when refinancing our dream she’d had no hand in; the deed became ‘shared’ which only pertained when i’d been given notice; the hands are still mine, JagUar mechanic; had changed his mind sometime around that bucolic drunken wet dream of ‘enlightened self interest’ as opposed to the adult confrontation with the “shadow” of unmet needs of having been publicly ridiculed by a parent as a 15 year old ‘vampire’, for grieving differently for her failed marriage than she was able to understand, or Greed might manifest as the demi- narcissist rantings of someone unable to articulate the actual threat his envy of other’s more tangible success has created for the general public. Maybe greed is the inability for self-sacrifice that peers out from the labyrinth of human archetypes at the most unexpected moments in our curious history; i really don’t know anymore yet remain convinced our ability for self-reflection isn’t always found at the dead end of a solipsistic cul-de-sac.
solidarność
(˚ㄥ _˚)
jts
14 April 2o26
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