Extinction Chronicles - 030520 ·

Yesterday i spoke about pain with the authority of the wounded; and almost as though guided by the universe i stabbed myself in my Achilles Tendon while sitting outside on the low wall. If it wasn’t so dangerous to have a somewhat deep puncture wound in one’s foot in this microbe rich nation where i only wear sandals - it would almost be funny · actually it still is. From the number of injuries i’ve known large and small i was well aware the sooner i could smear Neosporin and seal the wound the better my odds of not adding insult to injury. The equivalent would be burning yourself on the stove and knocking people down in your haste to get ice on the wound because you had read somewhere the sooner you can reduce the temperature to a burn, the sooner the flesh stops cooking. And as long as you’re curious i do have personal experience with burns having spilled an industrial sized kettle of simmering spaghetti sauce across my forearm in unfortunate lesson in triage. But this is another day, and when i looked at the knife wound this morning while changing the dressing i was more than relieved to find it sealing up nicely as though i there had not been a 1/2 inch of razor sharp agricultural stiletto pulled from it within the last 12 hours.

You’d be right to be thinking “fucking clutz,” however - you’d be more accurate asking “how did that fuck get this far?” Last night pondering my klugey dressing and it’s toilet papered dollop of Neosporin, cut-in-half too large bandage finally affixed to my ankle with increasingly precious blue painter’s tape - were this wound to go septic, i’d have to seek “professional” help, which i am loathe to do · having developed a healthy mistrust and concomittant profound gratitude for the medical profession - those who have not sold their souls to the medical/insurance racket. But this discussion is about triage and the danger of focusing on one’s wounds when the objective is the stasis our remarkable human vehicles are built for. Somewhere along the line, we stopped listening to our own bodies - to the signals they give us about hunger, anger, happiness - the multitude of information our remarkable sensory apparatus provides us 24/7 for the entirety of our lives. We have been conditioned to ignore our own awareness of self and to substitute the questionable advice of those who have demonstrated repeatedly they could give a flying-fuck about our well being - sort of like that broad that blew in your ear late one night and left sometime before morning with your wallet, your confidence and your heart.

Are we really collectively that stupid; i have to ask because i know that collectively they can barely grab their asses with both hands. When i say “they,” i am not misogynistically referring to my better half, i am referring to the emotional ciphers that have condemned an entire planet to extinction for no more than a shiny bauble on their pinky finger. That my brothers and sisters is pain of the 1st Order and it is a complete paradox for me to summon my hard fought compassion to their aid - but then that is the nature of paradox, ¿mais oui? All the yammering about we’re all in this together only gets real when one holds solidarity with the lowest common denominator - i got that far in mathematics. What is hard to reconcile is the betrayal by those capable of understanding Dr. Einstein the best for no more than a tic in their stock portfolio. It gives one pause about the sacredness of science, and i was (emphasis on WAS) a believer in the magic of science. But like all disillusion - on both sides of the aisle · there is a limit to my faith. You cannot fuck all and hope to get away with it - that’s just plain stupid.

So i sit quietly with a self-inflicted knife wound in my ankle, alone in a foreign nation unwilling to surrender to a war i never started, but will damn sure fight to the end. I am human, and it is good. I have enjoyed the most remarkable experiences 6 disjointed sensory inputs can commingle; i have watched misery transformed in an instant into boundless joy and gratitude. Where else can you find such contrast, except “everywhere.” The delusion that there is a single way, a single form or a simple truth is almost like a strand from the conversations i had with my dying father. “Don’t get stuck in concrete” he would say to me as though he could se the tricycle wheels in my brain turning toward how can i make this “forever” when there is no forever, and there is nothing but forever . .. ···: The closer i get to death and the lower my liquor stock gets the more i understand what dear old dad was getting at. If you ain’t happy or safe where you are, anyplace you go will provide you that same conviction. Whereas if this is your stand, your hope, your dream - there ain’t fuck all that can relieve you of it - now matter what the “dream machine” says otherwise.

Humility about the, as Bob Dylan might say “greasy skid mark” you are is a start. There is no  everlasting anything but the that which encourages your finest warmth, your heartiest hello and your most forlorn - oh fuck! How much better do you want it? You are in complete control and there is no other agency but your own heart. Be loving - no one owes you shit for it · yet there is no organization of thought or wealth on the planet that can provide you more than that which you freely give to yourself. Make it love, for that emotion is the only renewable resource our species has ever discovered. To love all cost your nothing and gives everything to everybody it encounters. Pain is not an excuse to close down - that is what greed does - it convinces you if you have not gained your heart’s desire that somehow you have failed - you have not. Our planet does not need us; you do not need me - i value you and will die defending my right to believe that, whether you are an emotional cipher preying on the bulk of humanity, a woman blinding me by her beauty or my own mother struggling to convince herself she loved me - it is my choice and my choice alone what i believe · you are fine, now do finer . ..  ··· : PLEASE

jts 03/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 020520

I am reading a story from a lent book; it should be more painful than it is, for it involves artists and dysfunctional families. I do not understand the person who handed me the book though i have tried, my fantasy is that she would like me to know what she discovered in the book and thereby understand her a little better. This form of communication in psychiatric jargon, as best i understand is called referential thinking. I know this because i met a young couple who lived across the street from me in Santa Ana, CA during my first marriage fiasco. He was a Psychiatric Intern and she was a newly minted dance professor at the local Jr. College. Later after the whirling propellor blade who was also my 1st wife left for parts unknown the young Dr. looked at me very earnestly and said, “you know she was a paranoid schizophrenic, right?” In retrospect i have to ask myself how someone could graduate from University with 4.0 GPA and a degree in Chemistry could be quite so obtuse, but that’s psychiatry for ya’. Nor am i defaming the study of the mind, my life would have been far more chaotic than it has been without the years of therapy i spent answering pointed questions which as often as not reflected the pain of the questioner as did my own - but that’s another essay, altogether.

There is no escape from pain, that much i have learned. No substance on earth is strong enough to dissolve the incessant ache that comes with breathing. My first awareness of that physical pain related to breath was contracting Pneumonia at age 1. The conventional wisdom of the time dictated that the infant should not be exposed to the parent, lest it impair the healing process. That was my 1st real introduction to the emotional pain that accompanies so many physical maladies. When i was 7 or so, our family took an extended driving trek through Mexico - 2 weeks into the adventure, while wading very far out into the shallow bay of Guaymas with my eldest brother i stepped on a what was later learned to be a Sting Ray, it responded like any animal might and whipped stinger into the heel of my foot. Our family had always been close to the ocean and so up until that time had no fear of the water. From that moment forward i gained a very real and immediate fear of pain. I had to walk back to shore, because my bellowing offended my older brother such that he refused to carry me once i could no longer contain my pain silently. That was a good lesson, for there are few i’ve met who can abide the howl of another’s misery - myself included.

I’ve gotten better over the years as the injuries piled up, both at quieting my own shrieks of discomfort, but also in abiding the ache of others - articulated or not. It is not a healthy place to be where one does not feel free to express their discomfort, or at least to face whatever it is that is causing one to ache. Healing, i have found starts when one can sit closely to the source of pain, be it a broken heart, a broken foot or a broken eardrum all of which i have endured - not always quietly, but to the extent i am, as a fine friend once remarked oh so ironically, “sitting up and taking nourishment.” What was harder to mend than what i have endured is the fear of pain, and it has proven to be the most dangerous of my many injuries. There are a vast array of strategies in today’s world designed to alleviate physical and emotional discomfort - sitting here now pondering the question i cannot honestly say whether fear of pain is an emotional discomfort or spiritual. I have spoken elsewhere in these chronicles about the bungalow in Costa Mesa, CA that seems to have been such a nexus for my early years, to the degree that it from that same neighborhood i departed for my journey to Vietnam 45 years later - and that will also have to wait another essay.

They were heady days 1975-76 and in my young poetic mind i had conceived 4 of us as “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse”, there was even an Albrecht Dürer poster honoring this referential conceit of mine; though i’m sure i was alone in this fantasy. In truth these young friends, were surrogates for my family which was dissolving before my very eyes. Today i believe this dissolution was due to greed, hatred and delusion - the same poisons i have resorted to throughout the years for quelling pain. I did not understand then how much of that pain was inflicted by my own hand. In 1976 - the year from hell, as i fondly remember it, I broke the #5 metacarpal in both hands on different dates; met married and divorced my first wife, the Paranoid Schizophrenic Cherokee from Long Beach, and dropped through a covered hole in a roof we were replacing dragging my right forearm down across an unspooling role of flashing and opening a gash in the inside of my right arm which required 60 stitches to close - my left hand was in a cast from the 2nd broken bone of the year, but the Cherokee was gone.

Oddly, i could go on and on, but that could become tedious; besides it’s almost the drinking hour, and i know you have better things to do. The point of all this is that there is no hiding from the misery of existence. The best any of us can hope for is 1) discover of the injuries you acquire those that were avoidable. Not avoidable in the sense of a castle and drawbridge you construct to protect yourself from the serfs you have been exploiting on your royal road to success, but avoidable through mindfulness, looking both ways crossing a street - leaving unkind people to their unkindness, being cheerful and of service where you can help, and letting yourself off the hook if you can’t. 2) Accept your frailty and do not deny your discomfort. If someone repeatedly is abrasive and cruel, know they suffer far more than you. When you find yourself being abrasive and cruel, look it in the face; find the wounded child that would lash out as you have and listen to their hurt - try to speak to that part of your nature seeking revenge, soothe him or her as you would like to be soothed at the injustice of existence. What i am recommending is not easy, i know only because i am so shitty at it - what i also know is that when i use words like shitty to describe myself it is dishonest and untrue but also useful in pointing the way to where i can heal my own pain. Are we having fun yet?

jts 02/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 010520 ·

Today is May 1st - International Workers Day · the ‘merican worker should have known they were in a heap of trouble when its day was splintered off to September 1st and renamed Labor Day. But as we can all see by the armed mooks storming government buildings demanding their rights as consumers to freely spend their money, just how successful the coopting of that holiday honoring work has been in service of the corporate overlords. Me, i like to work - always have though i’ll damned if i understand just how weak i’ve become in my older days. The farmer neighbors were clearing a field some months back, and in solidarity i tried to contribute. There have been days when i would dig hard ground with a shovel for 10 hours a day, and get up and do it again, day in and day out - no more. I was lucky to spend two hours with a hoe scraping shallow weeds in  sandy ground, but i tried. That is the thing about labor - all you can do is your best. Where work gets dicey is when it becomes sedentary, or worst cerebral. I know this because i spent 13 years in engineering bullpens, drawing, figuring, calculating and counting. l won’t lie and tell you it was to build bridges or anything useful - i rented my grey matter to the military industrial complex - it paid for my college degree in English.

My last job of the many i’ve had as a failed artist was as a private investigator/probate analyst for a shady outfit out of Tucson Arizona. On the surface it would seem to be the ideal occupation. I spent my days at the superior court of Los Angeles monitoring estates as they became public. The problem is no one in my office explained that i was expected to monitor estates by any manner or means, legal or illegal, public or private. The objective was to control the unknown heirs of intestate decedents - the richer the decedent the better. There was a lot of gray area, as well as money to be made in this racket; for example if an estate entered probate court with a thrice-removed 2nd cousin as the sole heir, you can bet, which is what my company banked on, that there was an unknown blood relative closer to the decedent than those claiming. Find them and 50% of the estate could become yours. It was a dirty job for the simple fact that it was dead people’s money that was being played for - faceless dead people whose dreams and ambitions no longer figured into the equation - it was simply a foot race to discover unknown heirs, and without revealing who was dead, explain that for a hefty percentage of the inheritance you would reveal who had died and how much they could expect as a blood relative.

I’m very good at parsing things and didn’t know how my competitors continued to get the jump on estates - i had good ideas, but messenger services that were the weak link resented my scruples. However when after 3 years i figured a way to link who was getting documents stamped at the probate window by simply drawing their portraits at the time when when the probate window was busiest; I was also fired within a week of being able to determine which law firm filed which document at what time. It was a revelation amongst others about working with Judges, Attorneys and dead people. When i began that job i told the fellow who hired me when asked, that the list of jobs i haven’t done was growing smaller than those i had. I once drove horse cabs in NYC, worked on the Space Shuttle, and was a building superintendent in a Salvation Army group home for unwed mothers in East Los Angeles. My all consuming passion however and the reason i’ve been in so many different occupations was that of artist. So much so that i could barely acknowledge that to anyone who might ask, though i might have been carving stone decades or 1,000s of studio hours drawing live models. Somewhere along the line my art training became a sacred act, and those dilettantes who, like those who preyed on dead people’s money, published, schmoozed into fame and fortune were no longer amusing, but usurpers.

I do not share this myopic conceit proudly for it was formed from bitterness and resentment about my own failures, yet here is the magic that art has always provided - once that pattern of small-mindednes within my own normally cheerful heart became incessant, it also became an object of study which is the soul of the creative process. I could no longer dismiss Bob Dylan as a dilettante just because he could sign his name to his paintings and they would command astronomical prices simply by virtue of his autograph. I had long known of this aspect about the celebrity nature of fine art; as a young turk my instructor Jose De Creeft was able to tell 1st person accounts of many famous figures in pre and post war Europe. One was about Pablo Picasso and his mendacity - one example my instructor shared was that Pablo virtually spent no money during the last years of his existence because he would pay for everything using cheques - depending on the item being purchased, Pablo’s autograph was often of more value than that which was being bought. Along with anatomy, color theory and composition i was exposed to the darker aspects of the art market.

If i had to do it all over again, i would - my life has been infinitely richer from having studied fine art and literature. The only thing i might have given up is my “tin ear.” It is a function of the confusion between my brain hemispheres i am sure - oh well. In the scheme of things while i watch the young so easily subverted by a digital shackle which when techno-nazi chief scientist at googol kurzwell has his way and devises uploads to the human soul they will no longer have to carry phones with to get their instructions, like elon’s electrical cars, the young will simply have to sidle up to the nearest bluetooth and presto-chango the transfer of knowledge will be accomplished, and we all know how time is no longer money - date is. Still i will go to my grave grateful to my farmer neighbors for the temporary lone of a hammer these past few indolent “shelter in place” days if only for the muscle memory of the months and years hammer in hand looking to hear that ring of metal to metal and watching the mystery of a stone shedding its skin at my own hands like some mineralized butterfly shedding its skin for a new incarnation into a planet which may very shortly not even have humans left to criticize its less than artful shape.

jts 01/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 300420 ·

Today, 45 years ago i had just returned from NYC, or was precipitously leaving from a two-year scholarship awarded to me by the Art Student’s League of NYC. Events get hazy this much time later. What i remember about that time is that i would miss the July 4th 1976 celebration by my decision to vacate my scholarship, and i remember a red haired model with a remarkably long curly mane who i had just broken up with for, probably really stupid reasons and who showed up at my door shorn of her locks just prior to my journey back to SoCal. This was not the first time a woman in my romantic life had committed such a determined act and then demonstrated to me her resolve. When I left England, some short 3 years earlier in early 1972 to what i told myself at the time, to finish my last semester of High School, again precipitously and after a quarrel, Ms. A_____ Potter showed up at the door to bid me adieu where i lived under the roof of U.S. Army Master Sargent Joe Walls and his English wife Peggy - Angela had plucked her exquisitely voluminous eyebrows into 2 hideously arched pencil marks, and if she had taken a dagger and stabbed it into my heart at that moment i had opened the door that day, she could not have done more damage.

Now, i am old and my passions are less hasty - and i am living in a land with far more weighty memories than my picayune whimpering. 45 years ago today the entire mass of U.S. Empire was evicted from the land i am now welcomed to stay - sort of. I rode my bicycle early today and was greeted by a mixture of tolerance and curiosity far more kind than that i know was proffered to their kin from this land of Vietnam when they landed on the shores of ‘merica 45 years ago. I was living in, or in transition to Santa Ana, CA from Costa Mesa, CA where i had grown up. I understood even then that the price of rents where i had been raised were out of reach for the money i could earn as an unskilled wannabe artist recently returned from the “Big Apple” and yet to be discovered by the Art Brahmas that constituted “good taste” then as now. I had no fear for i was young and had conquered the big apple with ease, though young and arrogant about how culture and “good taste” worked.

Empire media quietly used diplomatically approved pablum about “peace with honor” to explain the reversal of 20 years of purpose and obscured views of the evacuation of diplomatic staff airlifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, nee Ho Chi Minh City. The fact 45 years later is clear, Ho Chi Minh was correct, John F. Kennedy was wrong. It was not an issue of communism vs democracy, but people vs oppression. Today the United States has been overthrown and successfully occupied by the same economic forces that sent 58,000 ‘mericans to their death. Within the past 3 days that same number of lives, 58,000 ‘mericans have again been sacrificed to the same greed and self-interest cloaked in the mantle of democracy during my youth - only now it is “g_d” and christianity against whom we are waging war against nearly every other free nation on the planet - while Viet Nam quietly continues to grow the best food, produce the finest music and flaunt the most beautiful women on the planet.

I am beyond shaming my countrymen for their insurmountable stupidity, or point to the merchants of my country about how to follow cooperative socialism for real growth and social calm. I do not have that many years left to me. Even within the confines of a post Covid-19 planet there are fewer and fewer avenues available. The entrepreneurial wolves have already landed in the land of Victors and like some twisted Greek Mythology are singing the praises of “ profit is your friend, there is ‘money’ just for the taking - if they are too stupid to know, that is their problem.” all the snide self-serving exhortations one could find in post WWII ‘merica. What people are not told is the mechanics of such greed ultimately lead to smaller and smaller yields to a smaller and smaller segment of the population, while the amoral and soul-less of the population simply shift the killing gates to fewer and fewer and the expense of more and more.

Don’t believe me - look at who had been comrades, months earlier and who are now climbing over your shoulder for the smallest advantage. there is no future but that which cooperative love for each other’s well being will provide. i have just now spent 10 minutes in the hammer drumbeat which only a working community is capable of hearing or drumming to. i will regret no longer being able to sample the skepticism of a war torn population through simple correspondent hammer thumping. Where i live is already awash in the conceit of communication through texting and the bleaching of meaning that comes such monosyllable exchanges. What i do not want to leave is a memory of the insincerity and fakeness that comes from cultivating approval by “emoticons” or admittance into the right “clique” - i spit on your conformance and reject the notion that i will become whole once i have surmounted your collective approval - while at the same time i accept each and every warmhearted exchange i have with every new stranger i meet · put that in your pipe and smoke it .  .. ··· : 

jts 30/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 290420 ·

I am sitting back at Dingo Deli and feel comfortable and encouraged. 4 weeks of intense inactivity have taken their toll on my wellbeing - wellbeing is not my long suit. However age and circumstance have made clear that without learning something more about that state of being, my dotage will be a short one. Moments ago the proprietor arrived with supplies, and in our short exchange i commented on how i will miss this location when he moves to a grander arrangement; his comment was “yeah, well change is good.” My historical resistance to the truth of his observation probably drove me to carve stone many years ago; at the time i was a snot-faced lad in the bowels of NYC - a veritable cauldron of change. I felt terribly alone and certainly afraid that my family would forget me, now that they no longer had to ignore me. I could not look at it quite so clearly then which i’m sure had something to do with the appeal of a material such as stone with its ageless promise - perfect to memorialize my grandiose vision of art that could not be ignored - little did i know · then or now. 

But like the song says, “i wish i didn’t know now, what i didn’t know then.” For example, a rule of thumb for occupations is to pick what you’re good at; and while i enjoyed some initial success, there was always a wrinkle in quality between my 2D drawings and paintings, and any 3D work. It wasn’t until nearly 40 years later that it dawned on me that as a virtual 2-eyed cyclops, i cannot see 3 dimensional form. Snicker if you must, i do, am. It was not as though there are people you can consult about such suspicions, nor was there any outward indication except for the disquiet about the wrinkle i’ve just described. In the course of the inevitable occupational rehabilitation artists in the audience might appreciate, the state of California tested and ranked me in the upper 99% for spatial recognition - what could go wrong? As it happens, a lot. The abundance that characterized our mid 20th century ‘merica, was to gradually erode to the degree we find ourselves today where commonly held assets such as National Parks and the U.S.Postal service are being liquidated to the highest bidder.

Not an auspicious time for being recognized as a cultural treasure much less being stuck paying the freight on a 1/2 ton of unsold stone carvings of wrinkled rather than ageless value, gathering dust in a storage unit in the backwaters of a Halliburton stronghold in Bakersfield, CA. The challenge of writing a chronicle focused on Extinction is considerable, for i tend to remain in a solitary state, but am fascinated by the human condition and constantly seek ways that i might put words to practical use. Just now, overhearing a lone traveler searching for accommodation, i engaged lone woman calling about a lodging - in the span of no more than 15 minutes i discovered she is Scandinavian on a voyage of exploration, now stranded for the time being. My interest was objective - 1) to discover whether she was in danger - she is not 2) to determine if there was anyway that i could help - no 3) i’m not gonna get laid. In the process i lost the privacy of my corner and interrupted this train of thought - and she left in umbrage when i retook my quiet corner seat.

Now based on no more than an inclination to help - my social distancing is substantially compromised and the couple who are nesting in the cubicle are loud with their appliances - when will i learn, or more importantly, what did i learn¿ In the short course of our communication i did learn that smokers for whatever reason are less susceptible to the virus, or so the story goes. Once you yield space, it is difficult to reestablish and that the thread of an essay is more precious than curiosity when one has not so much time left to think. Is there room still available to develop the relationship of perception as regards struggle. My most recent project was a walking stick after the shape of a femur and it is the ball of the ball&socket joint that has given me more insight into the carving process than the past 40 years of hand to stone has yielded. More accurately trying to shape a small spherical shape that has vastly more views immediately available than that of a 200 lb granite version disproves my carving master Jose De Creeft’s observation “when you work large, your mistakes are more easily perceived.”

I owe much of my life’s value to the simple act of hewing stone into some recognizable shape; it was my own arrogance and hubris which led me to harvest my concept of accomplishment from a prior world of masterpieces. I am humbled by having stretched beyond what my own experience constantly described - I am fortunate that i could arrive at this personal insight through perseverance, though the result is no more successful than the prior 40 years of effort. Truth be told, I am probably the only human alive that would be able to discern there is a fold in the head of my walking stick which cannot be resolved by determination or resolve i am faced with two hemispheres that will never join - this is likely biological, metaphorical as well as actual . . . i then fled my seat at Dingo Deli because a young turk and his dame snuck into the corner i’d been writing while inquired about the circumstance of an apparently stranded damsel; just as well the explanation was not developing as i’d hoped, so this is all you get - “a day late, a dollar short and going in the wrong direction” - A. Nonymous

jts 29/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

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Extinction Chronicles - 280420

I just finished watching a clip of the Rachel Maddow show, and if i had more character, i would be weeping about the tragedy that is unfolding in the country of my birth. The number of Covid-19 deaths is rapidly approaching the number of Americans sent to their deaths in the American War in Viet Nam - yet there are ‘mericans rallying in the streets to “open for business.” It is this self-serving distortion of all that was once good and decent in ‘merica by the capitalist thugs and their media shills that rends my soul at the seams. The greater tragedy, by far, is to have traveled enough in recent years to see how successfully these thugs have exported their brand of wildly effective exploitation of everything and everyone except that .01% of the world’s population that they consist of. 

I have been a school teacher in one of my incarnations; so i can appreciate the dynamics of a single student attempting to hijack the resources of an entire class - time, materials, attention etc. This experience translates into a horribly unfair and ofttimes inaccurate judgement of people in simple social situations - that woman who cannot have enough men admire her; the killer-diller who fears nothing; or the entrepreneur who has mastered greed and for a small fee will teach you how. I was recently described as a cynic - and it breaks my heart to say, but he was right. Somewhere along the line, my zeal to help the world save itself was overtaken by the family curse of sanctimony, however that does not mean that i have surrendered. 

When it became clear to me how shallow my accomplishments were stacked up against the work of actual warrior/scholars, i began to listen more carefully to the suggestions made by those i truly admired. Invariably what i heard was “look to your own heart,” i don’t know about any of you, but i’m 65 and am only just now beginning to see the barest outlines of what an asshole i can be - not the “you naughty, pathetic vile creature - but i love you still, because we’re family” one learns in the bosom of upbringing; but the look in someone’s eyes when something you thought was amusing caves in one more crumpled corner of the paper mache persona they’d just gathered courage enough to trot back out into the fray, or the look of anguish when the woman you have sworn fidelity to sees naked hunger in your eyes, knowing the lengths you will go to prove your love as you gaze in the direction of that other woman. The list could go on, and on.

And it did for far too long. It was when i stopped listening to the formative language used to evince a desired behavior during socialization and rather than deny the insults or praise used to create adherence and began to forgo any definition at all, but just to listen and watch that things began to make sense. No longer was my brother an asshole that i was going to prove wrong by being the most decent, loyal and superior member of the family - my family no longer existed · it was me having a dialogue with myself about people who have long since vanished from my daily life. From this catharsis i began to be mindful of how often what i thought i was responding to was clouded by feelings that had nothing to do with the fatigue, or joy or fear that i was facing just at that precise moment.

So today when as i watched example after example of my nation spinning seemingly irretrievably out of control and began to feel my mood shift from curious to morose, i began to count the good fortune of my existence. I did not smoke cigarette after cigarette, my neighbors are such that i can express irrational concerns, and they will tell me, “no you’re full of shit”, or “yes, i’d be careful about that” - the echoes of deceit that swamped the ‘merican ship-ship-of-state are not yet waves enough to crush the spirit of criticism which disciplined and forged a people enough to care about each other and strangers such as myself enough to halt and unknown threat in its tracks. This was accomplished with patience and calm, the same sort of behavior i rely on more and more to hear the faint voice deep inside my soul that is not cynical - that has a sight which can see far enough into the soul of another to find that kernel of goodness we all possess if one can just listen patiently enough.

jts 28/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

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Extinction Chronicles - 270420

Yesterday i described a shotgun blast in a room of an itinerant mining shack my mother shared with my grandmother and uncle - the discharge was precipitated by an unwelcome “suitor” at a back porch door while my grandfather was absent. The ripples of this violence still hold sway thousands of miles away and many decades after the fact. It gives me pause when i think about my own feelings toward young locals roosting at vantage points near my current home posing as fishermen. Nor can i say they are not in earnest or give a fuck about my “foreigners” hovel, save the fact that just days ago someone entered my home in the dead-of-night and left the never-used television toggled on. About this event, i have no real strong feelings, for in the best case it is simply disaffected young bucks “counting coup” in a city harboring predatory “alien digital entrepreneurs” seizing all the easy pickings, and in the worst case the manifestation of a sexually confused post adolescent man-child wanting to sort out his yearnings in entirely inappropriate, and possibly destructive ways. More to the point is how it relates to choices i make about my own lodgings. To stay or go, seems to be a theme from the day may changed the door locks to the home i had grown up in - i was 15. My scar is simply new skin growing from ma’s own brutal upbringing.

She was in her day a remarkably bountiful personality, yielding much to many for selfish and unselfish reasons as near as i can determine. Today i can only hope that the likely suffocation from the latest plague is quiet and peaceful. However it seems by the vigor i feel mentally, spiritually and physically despite the corrosive learning curve i’ve put my “mortal coil” through - i fear there are years left to me, when i would rather accomplish more than sampling the googol/youtube fare the ruling class would like to distract me with. For example, where would i go should i choose to vacate this, in its peculiar fashion, opulent domicile. The small ancient fishing hamlet/hipster doofus digital bucket list destination is flat, hence bicyclable, for the time being; more agrarian than the metropolitan destiny of its closest neighbor - Da Nang. I admire the culture and the people of Viet Nam, and have for many decades. Having lived in dozens of countries on 4 continents in the past 5 years, i can say i have a fair flavor of a broad swath of what the planet has to offer in amenities. The pressing consideration is my dotage. As a cantankerous solitary creative, i have reason to be concerned about who is nearby when i breathe my last gasp, and why.

The fiction my father, the wolf pack leader left me with was complex to say the least. His last “squeeze” took a powder, much the same as his last wife did once he could no longer, _______ you fill in the blank. How much i will have been influenced by his behavior can only be known upon my death, but between then and now the choices of my existence remain my own. There is a house next door to where i live that was occupied when i moved in by the “ebullient” young father-to-be mentioned prior in the chronicles. This house is decrepit and on the verge of collapse on one side and able to support a man, wife and child on the other. My position worldwide is to use as much as possible domiciles in place and not fall prey to the “speculation class” that depicts pots of gold at the end of every new trend formulated on the digital shackles most of the planet wears at the end of their wrists. I do no own a phone - do not want to own a phone · can picture a time in my future when i am “ordered” to own a phone. Until such time i will continue to plumb the imagination i was given and search for alternatives to the “infinite growth paradigm” and to propagate sustainable and planet friendly solutions to the seemingly inexorable demise of our film of atmosphere over the surface of our molten satellite to the star that we owe our light to.

Synchronicity determined that the restaurant i chose to patronize open or closed also is somehow related to my “ebullient” friend. So it is not outside the realm of possibility for me to simply move sideways into the actual hovel my friend and his family mysteriously vacated some months ago. The fantasy i have developed is to slowly renovate this older building and in so doing occupy the later years of my existence and leave to this community more than the Disneyesque echo that Hollywood has become and establish something of a multicultural island of research/study/and love. I cannot own property here in Viet Nam, but i can partner with persons to establish long term leases. I don’t require much to be comfortable so any preservation would be most importantly in what would be easily secured from speculation; would have an established function within a community about to be besieged by rising tides in an estuary mined for decades of its natural sand bank subjecting it to the coming “King Tides” which it seems only the shamans and foreign real estate speculators are paying attention to.

The irony of this post is that i do not ask for much, but in the context of what the world is facing it would seem i am asking for, as the movie said the “Full Monty”. Why not ¿? what else am i going to do - flee for a some international high ground with a history of stability and low economic growth resisting the unknown propagation of the latest plague; and in so doing, that the nest egg i invested into what had once been the backbone of a world economy, but which is now little more than the side yard of the fascist chop shop of empire remains solvent. It is within this lens of projection about our world’s future, i utilize the vehicle of essay to explore mine, and others possibilities. I think it would be fun to invigorate renovation as an economic engine in a World Heritage Site. There is much talent, local and foreign which i believe wants the very best outcome possible - despite the forlorn projections of a “4th Estate” long since rendered to nothing more fish bait brokers for the billionaire class wallowing in a phantasmagoria of fictitious “capital”. The boys at the irrigation channel fronting the site i am proposing as a “last stand” constitute more credible potential as investors for the future than any digital “coin” i have come across in my years of travel. So i will close this episode casting my hopes for a pacific passing into the vortex of a wind, both brutal but real that can only end in the results of those steps we humans now take to preserve life on our planet for those we love and those we could have loved with more time and more wisdom.

jts 27/04/2020

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