Extinction Chronicles - 100520 ·

It’s mother’s day, and nearly every fiber in my being resists writing about my mother because it is too painful - so i will go ahead and honor her in the only way i know how · by mending through the creative process. When i say painful, here is a vivid memory from my pre-pubescent post-divorce childhood. She and my soon-to-be aunt were sitting in the living room of the house i grew up in. By this time ma had employed pop to see her through her college degree, and as soon as she was a woman of independent means, she fired his ass. It was all the rage at the time, the movie “Bob and Carol; Ted and Alice” was popularizing marriage breakups as only the media can. Marty and Gerry were getting hammered on red wine and making witty as only divorcee broads can in the safety of their husband’s former living rooms, Ma turns to Gerry and, referring to me remarks, “how can you talk with something that has fangs.” They cackled, i likely said something as equally cruel or tried to and slunk off to wallow in my self-loathing preparing for my next encounter with the emerging feminists of Orange County. It is not ma’s fault, her genteel mother from Alabama would routinely refer to her husband as a “rough cob” because she was Southern Belle, and he was an itinerant miner orphan who wooed and won her in the wilds of Nevada.

And ma was a middle child, whose older sister was the “fair haired one” who was also a bully who routinely savaged the younger sister - small wonder that dominance and bullying were a blood sport in the home i was raised in. To her credit, ma shepherded the youngest brother who would have been a fatherless child - to hear her tell the tale. Tales which always somehow came out with her as the aggrieved, as was the case with my long suffering father, or the heroine, as was the case when she married Gerry’s brother Leo. My mother Marty, then become Martha, and was ensconced in the Hills of Beverly, and sister-in-law Gerry became Edith. Times were good and the desert rat from the badlands of Nevada, became the munificent regaler of all that was good and noble in the upper echelons of Los Angeles during the heydays of the raging 80’s, or so i’m told. At the time i was a wage slave by day putting myself through college at night; i had met my 2nd wife by then and her 18 month-old - we were doing battle with her ex. I held the couple in BH in the highest esteem for very standup reasons. When there was question of molestation my stepfather stepped in without batting an eye and secured an attorney that effectively rescued the daughter from further danger. 

Though nothing is ever black and white. For example, when leaving ma’s new home with my soon-to-become, and then not - first wife, the paranoid schizophrenic Cherokee on what i remember as my first visit to the house in the hills of Beverly - my crazy filly turned to me in her exciting street jargon and said, “you know those people are punking you, right?” It had never occurred to me, or as i was to latter learn through years of therapy, i refused to look objectively at my role in this family - besides, i’d never heard the expression “punking” in those days - how could i be what i didn’t know existed? I began to suspect something was amiss in the land of all good things. I knew it when they contracted with my younger brother to build a room addition which included room and board for him, and the crust of bread washing the plate glass windows of the back patio for me. I began to understand as a pattern this punking would never change, and so when i came years later to retrieve the 3rd carving i’d ever made from the patio to find rivulets had etched their way into what had once been a polished sheen, i realized i needed to reorient my thinking about expecting a fair shake from these loving people - know this, that the statue was allowed for years exposed to sprinkler water to its detriment is no one’s fault but my own · it was just a harsh lesson on “who’s got your back.”

They are burning the harvested rice fields just now, and at some level i wonder if i am not doing the same. My purpose is not to defame a 92 year-old woman in the memory impaired wing of a geriatric hospital - a comfort i’m not likely to enjoy as a foreigner in a country my nation once tried to bomb into the dark ages, but reconcile the paradox of the determined love i have in my heart for this sad life my mother has lived to its fullest. She once confided in me that as a child she had an inconsolable fear of death, so when i was in Bejing i made an offering at the Taoist Temple for her - she seemed to takes some solace; that she is 92 and going strong in the midst of the Covid-19 holocaust gives me comfort for the amount of influence i have given to Lao Tzu. Ma is one of the funniest people i’ve ever known once you get past the acrimony and self-serving narcissism, but you must be alert because it is a dry humor that is almost as shy as the child she hides. I learned that she was handed over to strangers to ride the “stagecoach” - a bus service from Las Vegas to Reno when she was barely 13 or so. I also know that she took off on a midnight ride on the back of a motorcycle with her half-brother Clyde riding from Fallon to Reno - some 50 miles, and willing to take her comeuppance for it.

She did the best that she could with what she had and a lot of it is pretty remarkable - and a lot of it is incredibly selfish and mean-spirited, that makes her human in every meaning of the word. I doubt that she knows how much i love and respect her, and i imagine she feels pretty much the same about me. That is unnecessarily sad, nor am i confident that i will acquit myself any better. I believe that she loved he 2nd husband Leo for more than his wealth, and i believe that Leo loved her for more than her beauty - that is enough for me. She poisoned the well at the sacred circle of family and that is hard to forgive. Each of my siblings, as i understand it would like to attribute our estrangement to anything or anyone other than themselves. I accept that i am difficult to get next to, but not malignant or hateful. I wish it had turned out otherwise and in this time of great upheaval we could turn to each other for comfort - but as my first wife the crazy Cherokee would have said “wish in one hand, and shit in the other - see which gets fuller faster.” Ma introduced me to my last wife at one Thanksgiving Dinner for the books - and like all things ma, she liked to take credit for the romance and her prescience - but when my last wife left me 3 days after an emergency appendectomy 14 years later - ma was the first to say “i never trusted her.” Still - warts and all, like my friend Bob Dylan might say, “i love women, and she loves men.”

Happy Mommy’s Day - Ma

jts 10/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 090520 ·

Fighting my way into slumber last night using my FB addiction to narcotize my wounded mind, and what should a find - a new Bob Dylan Album · yes i’m trying to write while listening to “False Prophet” for a 2nd time, but it’s hard to memorize while you’re struggling to be worthy. It is more than useful to remember when the whimpering whinges its way into my behavior that i have lived the better part of my existence listening to the inspiration of one the planet’s most humane poets - that is miraculous by my understanding of miracles. Albert Einstein suggested there are two ways to view the world, one as though nothing is a miracle, the other as though everything is. It is one of the things i love about listening to Mr. Dylan, his words seem to be full with the results of a mighty struggle between himself and world. I admire struggle in ways that are not always helpful - i attribute my wounds to that curiosity, when it is only because i am alive that i am wounded. There is no path any of us can walk wherein there is not pain and affliction. The path is the joy one finds regardless of the demands otherwise. You know you are, forgive the vernacular, in the groove when happiness follows you like a song of Mr. Dylan during times of decision - do i smile or do i weep.

Nor is his wisdom straightforward - it all too often confuses the shit out of me · for example: “the more i take, the more i give.” What the fuck is that supposed to mean¿ On the surface i feel great relief, but that is mostly because i am card-carrying member of the Wasichu tribe of North America, (Wasichu - is Sioux for “he who takes from the meatiest part of the bone”) and because i was raised in da’Nile region of Orange County, Ca; i have spent a good deal of my life living down what my ancestors had accomplished. One of my forbearers had been a Medical Doctor for the Confederacy, while one of my first arrests had been the result of good advice i’d gleaned from Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice.” I had been stopped late one spring afternoon in Newport Beach, Ca by an officious cop who wanted to bust my chops for bicycling 50 yards in a pedestrian zone. Mr. Cleaver had advocated in his book to follow the commands of law enforcement to the letter, but do not once look them in the face. You’d be amazed at the effect this had on my arresting officer - ultimately charging me with “public intoxication” though all i’d drank that afternoon was a single beer at Blackies.

The English language description for the officer’s demeanor is that he was “beside himself.” I was finally released after midnight. Whether i signed the waiver declaring the officer had had probable cause escapes me, it is the fact of how little control any of us have over another if we cannot control ourselves that remains. I suspect this truth remains to this day and no matter how shrill the media would like be - the .o1% got shit · 7 billion hard charging, capable people of whom i’ve had the privilege to meet my share in passing, control everything but you. It is hot as hell where i am writing and just barely the witching hour for drinking, yet if i want this effort to seem cogent to the handful who are curious it is wiser for me to put my elixir in the freezer to chill while i pace myself to the 5th paragraph which feels almost possible, despite my self-inflicted frailty and insatiable desire to be cared for, or at least commended for my courageous effort. Laugh if you must, but i can’t be more clear. I have tried any number of devices from self-deprecation to passive-aggression, and the only really satisfying scratch for the itch is to day it straight. Pop was like that; we’d be talking on the phone and he’d just stop and say, “come here i want to look into your eyes,” as though he could read a cyclops skilled at the oblique. 

I was to learn later he was not looking in my eyes, he was looking in my heart. When we spoke he wanted to know truly what i felt - it is a privilege i sorely miss. Ma to her credit for all the years we knew each other was able to only commiserate this one point - she would out of nowhere say to me. “you miss your father, don’t you?” She and i were too far along in our struggle to demonstrate compassion to each other for me to give her proper credence for her question; but sitting here now sifting through the detritus of my life, i know she was doing her level best to be sincere. Ma hid her wounds so well, i may be the only child who recognized just how much pain she has suffered. If you think i’m kidding; i have a sister who would only allow ma to visit her in 3 day increments - i don’t say this to shame my sister, but to demonstrate how much we can be our own worst enemies. Another example, ma and her insurance had a skin cancer excised from her 87 year old once lauded beauty, and my eldest brother could only come across with “hey scarface, how are you feeling?” And again neither or these two individuals will read this for themselves because their strategy for pain is to like cancer excise it, so as persona non grata i am comfortable they will only hear my betrayal 2nd hand.

What they won’t hear is my love for them, as ma could never understand that though i never surrendered, i love her to this day. You cannot seize someone through force, just as i could not establish for my family that they could not revoke my membership simply because i am too fucking weird for words. Though this may seem a solipsistic approach to reality there is logic to what i am trying to say. The billionaires cannot win because their’s is a game of exclusion; i cannot be defeated because i refuse to accept their horse shit. This doesn’t mean i’m holding out a warm and fuzzy flag of truce so that they may continue the destruction of a planet anymore than i will accept the conceit of my brethren that the family is theirs to exclude me from. I welcome all and work hardest at welcoming myself. As much as i would like you to join me in having fun to the end of time, i don’t require you to do that. I will find something to turn my hand to because that is what i understand life to be about - if you can’t serve yourself, you damn sure can’t serve others .  ..  ··· maybe this is what Bob Dylan meant when he said “the more i take, the more i give.” - i don’t know, “i used to care, but things have changed” mo BD

jts 09/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 080520 ·

I am frightened - heat bothers me · and it is very hot where i live. I am okay with injury, but do not know how to adjust the thermostat on my body to accept extreme conditions - hot or cold. That is not entirely true - i learned at an early age that if you drink a warm beverage on a hot day it will fool your body into cooling itself. I also learned when driving Horse Cabs in NYC, that you will be warmer the more you empty your bladder. It may just be i don’t like weather extremes, or i am using the weather to lament about other features of my life in a foreign nation, sort of like being married to someone who doesn’t treat you well, so you make a big thing out of the way they leave toothpaste in the sink - i really don’t know. People i admire suggest that happiness is the absence of three poisons to the spirit - Greed, Hatred and Delusion. Of course if you believe this premise it requires you to carefully consider each as it relates to your own behavior - a lot easier to think about than actually accomplish. Greed for example; am i greedy to believe at my age there is anything but decrepitude and increasing vulnerability? Is there doubt in my own mind about acquisitions - are there things that i wished to own that i didn’t fight hard enough to acquire¿ Do i envy those people who think nothing about running air conditioning day in and day out regardless of the cumulative cost to the entire planet - i just don’t know.

Hatred is an interesting behavior. For far too long i could only understand it in terms of the white hot fury that was the goto emotion for having your way while growing up. Anger and hatred are vastly different, and both nearly useless. Hatred in the Indo-European root is to aver - move away from. There was also lots of that growing up, but it manifested as judgement, more than avoidance, though there was still plenty of that. As i grow closer to my death i try to understand myself better, for there is no one else i have a better chance of understanding. Judgement is a nearly useless as a measure of self knowledge. Once you have arrived at that too convenient a place in reasoning, the mind tends to cease functioning and move on to other curiosities. Yet if i am as complex as my failures and successes would suggest there doesn’t seem to be a unified expression that explains my special brand of - what’s the word i’m looking for? You begin to see what i mean about the weakness of judgement as an analytical utility.

As for delusion - don’t even get me started · too late. The way i was raised, surrender was not an option. I’m pretty sure my father was a Jesuit Priest in another lifetime and was sent back to torment the world with the four minds of his children which he molded, cajoled and toyed with like some medieval sorcerer never accepting good enough as an excuse to cease whatever the pursuit was at the time. It is for this reason i’m reluctant to simply say it’s too fucking hot and move on to cooler, more temperate climates - which from what i’m reading is likely to be fewer and fewer locations on the planet. I once lived in a quonset hut that abutted abandoned railroad tracks in a former Beer Brewery. It was the 1st lodging my last wife and i shared. Life was good and there was nothing we could not conquer together. Cross ventilation was not easily managed for this cavernous space with two small window on the back wall and a large framed double door for the front. At the time i was renting my brain to the aerospace industry and so had access to very skilled thermal engineers. So for the cost of a Niçoise Salad conjured by French Dame we were able to learn that the best insulation yet discovered is air. However the prospect of creating an air pocket over the arched surface of our 40 foot ceilings would have been delusional - but now you the reader know why fiberglass makes for such good insulation - it’s not so much the material but the air pocket in creates. 

I have seen a model of a swamp cooler using stacked ceramic cylinders that could quite easily be installed as an architectural accent in this water rich nation, yet i could not build excitement enough for it to take off. That is part of my delusional thinking that enthusiasm is enough to overcome inertia. The other more insidious aspect of my delusions would be wish fulfillment - as though to want something bad enough it will happen. This as i have come to learn is much different than many more mature and effective personalities operate. Say for example the billionaires who apparently want no more than a lot of money - where i would go and work very hard to fulfill my wished for objective - that’s how i arrived in Vietnam · a face i saw on FB, billionaires apparently don’t employ logic in the selection of their objectives. For example - i understand a face is not enough to establish a foundation for a relationship, but i also understand in order to make things happen it is necessary to build a foundation. I also understand that if you want to keep your disappointments to a minimum, you must keep your desires to a minimum - I want to be loved in return · so i love until i see it coming back and then move closer, or so i’ve convinced myself - remember we are discussing delusion.

With billionaires it starts out similarly. The bozo bezos i understand left Manhattan to piggyback on the mythos of garage startups of the gr8 Northwest - it is at this juncture mimicry as a form of flattery just gets fucking weird, for both apple and bezos · success was not enough, domination and comparing phalluses trumped hope and ambition. They, the digital overlords got lost in hubris - a malady as old as our species. Not to be sanctimonious, but when i arrived in VN and made contact with the mysterious face i deluded myself into traveling across the planet to meet, and she did not demonstrate reciprocal interest, my purpose and determination wilted and faded like another blossom on my “crazy tree”. Not so with the goobers running the virtual reality of our world into and an actual concrete conclusion - and they don’t seem to have a clue about what they are doing. My heart was not broken by some, probably very decent human being that cares not a whit for me except for how my extraordinary interest in her gooses her FB ratings; rather much older & hopefully a little wiser, i will wander down the road looking for the same “heart of gold” i have always sought, but remain entirely unwilling to stake the future of our entire species on whether i am successful - instead i will as he said so well so long ago - “go out not with a bang, but with a whimper” · lucky me .

jts 08/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 070520 ·

“The more things change, the more they remain the same” - Old French Proverb; i was just preparing to make some snarky argument about, “yeah well, you didn’t have Covid-19, or D._rump or .  .. then i realized they had it in spades and we’re the lucky ones who don’t have the Bubonic Plague or Caligula, or .  .. It would seem that everyone would like to believe their misery trumps all others - and i am as guilty as the next guy, likely more so. So where is the “meaning in the mere darkness of being” Jung describes. Why am a casting about to find some universal solvent to relieve the obvious burdens of others. It is so bad that today buying a handful of vegetables from a local stand, loading my 6 tomatoes into the scale that is supposed to have been part of civil reform preventing overcharging, and making the nice lady take more than she asked for, only to find when i got home she took back 2 tomatoes, leaving me 4 and charging me for 6. I feel for the torment that would drive someone to be so sharp, yet have it seems, i have no mercy in my heart for the billionaires who are consigning our species to death row.

Is that why i’ve been given this instant of awareness in a life that goes in and out of focus like a six-pack from the movie “Groundhog Day”? There are international readers who will likely have no clue what that reference might mean - think hangover that is only made better by the next beer · or in old-speak the fuck who got stuck rolling the boulder out of Hades forever. There are many stories about the eternal punishment we humans face because we search for meaning and control in a powerless existence, yet i feel very fortunate to have been born to parents who would ask such questions. So many humans today are forced into the delusional state that they know what the answer is, they hardly ever had a chance to ask a question - even my nemeses · the poor billionaires doomed to a life of smug luxury and denial. I can think of anything sadder than to have climbed over the dead bodies of those whose lives you had determined to be less important than your own and to find yourself on your deathbed like Ivan Ilyich with great doubt and no time to sort it out.

Not that sitting alone in Vietnam’s sweltering season with your skin telling you, “you’re not healthy” is any better position to be in - but at least i get to laugh at my own jokes from time to time, and occasionally find a singed soul that is not burnt to the core and has an honest to god smile which can’t be bought for love our money. Poor ‘merica, everything can be bought for love or money, but there’s not an item on the shelves that’ll last past its planned obsolescence expiration date; and if your thinking of buying it for your girlfriend, you’d be wise to make sure the price doesn’t include some backroom deal with the financing agent - Dr. Faustus. I would settle for a little happiness which from what i’ve learned thus far is best found trying to share what little you got, with someone who has less. It is not a path i recommend to everyone, for the simple reason that there are so many souls starving for a little happiness in the world that they will simply take all that you offer, and then pilfer whatever else they get away with.

I agree with Lao Tzu, the more you give away, the more you gain - though i was born to refugees from the Great Depression - not the great depression we’re facing today now that things are finally great again in ‘merica, i’m talking about the one just after the “War to End All Wars” WWI - and for all their progressive protestations otherwise, ma and pa were/are as tight fisted a couple as i’ve ever met. It is hard to give freely in the sense of (just spent a full 1/2 hour searching this expression) unconditional love, when the givers are starving. Then again my entire live may have no other reason for being than to gain a better understanding of this important concept - i’m sleeping better already · When i began this essay i wanted to talk about raison d’etre, and so went searching my files for a copy of the 1st sonnet i’d ever written - it was sappy and printed on a sheet with multiple images including a body outline left for me by the grufyti thugs in hollywood who’d taken exception to my scathing critiques of the effete scribbles, another essay, at another time.

This sonnet was written just as pop’s existential star was beginning to twinkle - he’d been herded into a locked facility by my oh-so-cautious siblings for exhibiting, for lack of a better expression - exactly who he was. The sonnet was full of conviction about how stone carving had encapsulated my my soul and was achieved in generational cooperation between a loving father and his son. I am not ashamed of the effort, nor will i live or die on discovering some version of it somewhere the digitally mismanaged ether. More it was the mutability of even in the short span of 15 years one’s purpose in life can be utterly altered by new discovery. If i was ever a sculptor, which 40 years of my life say i was - it was the “flawed genius” Emile Zola dared to use describing his childhood friend Paul Cezanne. Me, I could give a fuck - people talk and like Bob Dylan said most of them are “lying there dying in their own blood”. I sit here and think how fortunate i am to have lived at a time to actually hear Mr. Dylan sing in person - once in a sports stadium along with the Grateful Dead in the reactionary, now progressive county in which i grew up watching my, now 92 year-old mother taking a joint being passed around and sucking on it as though it might give life - apparently it did · she’s still kicking, long may she run .  .. ···

jts 07/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 060520 ·

One can almost feel the heat coming, though there may be a silver lining· When i arrived in Vietnam last year it was July which for where i came from in Southern California is typically the hottest time of year; nothing could have prepared me for the sweltering heat of Vietnam; i simply assumed it was the same for VN, and it got hotter. Yet just today researching immigration to VN, i discovered that April/May are considered the two hottest months of the year. Perhaps this is a case of anticipating the worst only to discover how little one knows, or is affected by preconceived notions. What on May 6th, i am only at the apex and the July heat i’d been dreading will be cooler than what i’ve already passed 1/2 way through¿ and what if that same logic holds for many difficult events i have conjured in my loneliness and pain? It was Mark Twain who said “I’ve lived through 1,000s of terrible things - some of them even happened.” My father’s notion of camping was a string and a knife - you can imagine how this affected ma as the catchall caretaker with 4 children in those camping trips that constitute vacation for a teacher’s family on a single salary. They were truly the best - driving to Pismo Beach with a kettle to scoop up thumbnail clams to cook on a beach campfire, or stopping at the Service Station on the way to the Yuba River to buy patched inner tubes with which to ride the child sized rapids of late summer.

It is only with the convenience economy foisted on the world only more so using cellular marketing conjured by the sell-out nephew of Sigmund Freud - Edward Bernays that we here faint objections about children preferring the box to the gift, or parents placing themselves into perpetual debt satisfying the ever increasing cycle of holidays which of course require some confirmation from one to each other in the form of some bought item. This twisted concept eventually morphed into the delusion that buying anything somehow supported “The Economy” which has brought us full circle into a world awash in some new lethal viral contamination (not of the digital variety) wherein paid thugs are agitating against all logic to forego simple antiseptic strategies to preserve life for the sake of this now “holy economy” which ironically enriches only the .01% of the wealthiest humans on the planet - anywhere on the planet. The question remains how to reverse course, or as Buckminster Fuller would suggest - effectively use the “trim tab” that helps to correct course on the largest of the ocean going vessels. I D K, but i mean to find out with my dying breath, or preferably prior.

The human species has been in tight spots before - famine, tyranny, drought etc., etc. What distinguishes our lot is adaptability. What i don’t understand is how a handful of mooks seem to enthrall the lot, or why. I had an stone carving teacher who was more stonemason who found money in fine art, but he had proletariat logic ingrained in his being - one of his goto expression was - “you don’t shit in your kitchen”. You’d think these fucking billionaires steering the population toward doom could appreciate this wisdom without it having to be said. How fucking stupid are these ciphers willing to blowup their entire marketplace that is stacked in their favor top to bottom - just to goose the bottom line a few more point? If it was just greed, you’d think they’d be satisfied with the 99% market share they command and the 75% ROI (i’m guessing) they’ve leveraged - so why “kill the goose that laid the golden egg? I’m at a loss to understand. If murder was the solution, i might consider assassination as a method of adjustment, but like Orwell’s classic “The Animal Farm” demonstrated so well - they’d just be replaced by Pig 2.0.

Sadly it is “we” the lot of us who keep plugging quarters into “the bozo bezos show” expecting that somehow the next acquisition will put us over the top and finally establish our worthiness as complete human beings - insofar we are superior to our neighbors by having more toys. Yet even without this material veneer of accomplishment where would we be¿ back in the caves cowering before a physically superior sperm donor or willing to commit mayhem just to lie for an hour in the arms of the sublime water carrier? What about work - when did it become a competitive sport rather than a cooperative venture for the good of all¿ how did authority ever trump the glory of the group? Is it possible that as our distinction as individuals has been subsumed by the value of our belongings the value of our individual contribution has correspondingly shrunk¿ I watch people who normally congregate and derive power from their place within social strata during these days of “shelter in place”. All bets are off though one might not be convinced the way some cling to hierarchy. It has become more primal with strength and youth asserting dominance not so much differently than how humans may have organized themselves in caves.

And conversely the force of thought and logic is asserting itself in spiritual ways wherein greed is more easily contrasted against the simple beauty of generosity. Bertrand Russell advocated in a message to the future “be guided by the fact - don’t be influenced by your wishes and hopes when making a decision, use only the facts to decide on a course of action”. The fact is that when you wish ill for another, it can only adversely affect you. Hate has been described as a poison you drink thinking the other will die, but it is you who will suffer. I know this to be true from personal experience. My 2nd wife betrayed me with an immediate superior of mine who i had spent months confiding all the shortcomings of my marriage. After i discovered this hideous betrayal, i spent months of my life plotting the fornicator’s demise - he still lives; likely has no idea how close to death he had been - while there is no way i can ever retrieve those hours back into what i want to do with what is left to me in this life · However, the experience may still be a lesson i must mulch for additional value - whether this experience ever translates into value for you - who knows · as long as i continue to search for ways to make that happen is all that matters to me. see ya’ in the funny papers . .. ··· 

jts 06/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 050520 ·

Anxiety is fucked up, so be not anxious. Were it that simple, yet by all accounts - it is. Paraphrasing the Dalai Lama - “if it’s fixable, there’s no need to worry, if it’s not worrying about is of no benefit.” Lao Tzu describes our perseverating as “monkeys swinging through the trees, and paraphrasing Pema Chodron - “you are the sky, everything else is just the weather.” Fat lot of help this is, huh¿ Why not, what am i gonna tell you that you don’t already know? So the best thing i can do is try to find ways to lessen your burden. When i was a young turk, as part of the job training that was available in those days of LIBERAL rule, i paid for my classes by working as a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. It was good duty, and i learned a lot more than guarding from Arnold Brown and D.E. Tuppins, two of my colleagues. From Arnold, i learned just the right places to stand so that the back lighting would describe a woman’s legs better than her skirt might - Arnold was salacious like that · in a very loving way. D.E.Tuppins was a deeper subject - one might even say encyclopedic, for he was old, and he was from Detroit; built like the buddha and a dead-ringer for Duke Ellington. At one point he was persuaded by the Dr’s wife across the street to give tap-dance workshops to her dance students; when he was young he had danced in Vaudeville.

Mr. Tuppins was old enough to live in Senior Housing, though his wife was in her late 20’s. The Senior Housing had a pool table where Mr. Tuppins would school me in the ways of the world - as much as a 20 year-old Weisenheimer can be schooled. By the age of 25 i’d already conquered the art school of New York City, or so my conceit convinced me. I had been married and divorced and was embarking on a career in Engineering because “others” wiser than myself convinced me. More accurately; i was a frightened young adult adhering to whatever reinforcement said “you are ‘doing good’”, such was my hunger for approval. I do not blame anyone in my life for this predicament, including myself - anymore than i might blame myself for an ugly rash that might suggest poor hygiene. Yet, here i sit sandpaper in hand prepared to excoriate my own skin to appear clean, and to lie about my history to best frame my own delusions of grandeur. I do not know any other way to convince you that you are not alone in your misery, and to share my own with as little judgement as i am able, while encouraging you to pursue your dreams regardless of validation or inclusion. That you are alive is all you need to know about your value and worth.

Ironically in the scheme of things this truth will only become known to the handful of hardy human beings that survive what is about to transpire on this #Our@OneTimeParadise. And as ironical, i predict, rather than the anarchistic capitalism so popular amongst the popular purveyors of the “infinite growth paradigm” it will be cooperation and consensus which proves to be the more useful, and ultimately adaptive society that will emerge to carry our now obvious, to some, fragile DNA strand into the future. What kind of society will this abbreviated version of civilization look like - “Terminator” and it’s machine world · every fucking machine i’ve ever owned has broken - the vaunted Dodge Dart and its heroic Slant Six, my 66 El Camino - the most broken of all. Remind and i’ll tell you the story how my last wife left me. But the conceit of kurzwell and his googol cronies about singularity is no more than unexamined lives floating on an effluence of funny money born of digital technology, which from where i sit has done very little to prove its worth to our species - except grab attention · sort of like 45, big surprise there.

Me, i’ll just be happy enough to get a few more bicycle rides - perhaps get laid by a sensitive, but nasty loving woman once she has established her emotional bonafides · from what i’ve seen, she ain’t on the horizon. Sure there’s lots of broads trumpeting how lucky i’d be to get next to them with tits and ass to prove it, but its been decades since i’ve felt anything near the allegiance i still feel to my own mother’s sincere brand of insanity. She is not really crazy - just wounded to an unreasonable degree. For example, as her stars began to twinkle and it was possible for me to still squire her somewhere - i drove 3 hours South to her home to drive her another 2 hours North to see the Vermeer’s “Blue Lady” at the Getty - my 2nd time, (another essay altogether). Ma and her walker moved like an asphalt roller on road construction - g_d love her; when it became time to head back to her white-bread enclave, i could not find the car, nor did she much care - only that she had to wait. As we transitioned onto the 405 Sth into the blessed carpool escape, she turned to me in her car seat and declared “you don’t have any respect for me,” because g_d is also a woman with an insatiable appetite for mirth it was exactly at the same moment a 3/4 ton Chevy with a solitary, but very aggressive driver decided to show me what his vehicular mass could accomplish against my, as hard i could push it - sweet Toyota Corona companion of many, many miles. I looked in my rear view mirror at 65-75 seeing only the grill of this oversized automotive demon, and i looked over at my waiting for an snswer mother against the wall of slowed to a stop traffic over her shoulder and realized once again “love is the only engine of survival” - Leonard Cohen.

Once we reached her sanctuary, there was nothing left for me to do, but turn around and drive the 3 hours back to my wish-it-would-have-become-sanctuary in the _rumpland of Klan Valley - Lake Isabella. If this soundw bitter or full of recrimination, the error is mine. Ma taught me love in ways my father never could have, though he gave me spirit which ma could never fully understand - but to her credit, she tried. To you who reads now - i can only hope for you that you have been, or will soon be in the company of as interesting people as my parents. For all the meanness and unnecessary selfishness that informed my upbringing - they were and are not, for ma still breathes at 92 in the very most dangerous bowels - a “convalescent hospital” in Covid infested ‘merica which they both deeply believed in. If you read this now, or the digital wizards finally got their shit together you read this many years later, know this: we were not all bought off with the same $24 that paid for today’s Manhattan Island. There are pockets of loving people wanting no more than for you to survive for even a minute’s happiness in your life. I apologize for the conditions in which you must exist, and yet even now - years or miles apart, i feel solidarity with your hopes for a better future - Fuck you, now go wash your hands ·

P.S. it is as though all i have to do to stick needle in ma's being is to use the word "that" - go figure ·

jts 05/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 040520 ·

It was only a matter of time with all that goes on in the world - i have a rash on my forearm · not the 1st and i’m sure not the last. I tend to cleanliness and so i wonder if i am suffering from hygiene fatigue after more than a month in quarantine. When i stabbed my heal, i determined to hold off bicycling until i was sure there was no danger of infection or damage to my tendon - fresh air helps everything. But the body is a mystery, i’d once had a catheter wound turn to MRSA, and later watched a recluse spider bite on the same hand begin to cannibalize my flesh in the same manner as MRSA. Yet the emotional component of the immune system cannot be blown off as metaphysics. I once spent the night at a young friend’s house where i was so uncomfortable i gave myself Hives, which if you’ve never enjoyed, is something i’d only really recommend for your next lifetime. With all the foul chemicals scientists have poured into our environment, i wonder how we are able to breath at all, much less ever trust science again. I was raised by rational thinkers, and so even doubting the wisdom of science is almost heretical, though the very foundation of its practice is to question.

My sense is we crossed over the boundaries when we created authority. I believe in civil order, for i’ve been in to many rock and roll riots to have much faith in mobs or the congenial nature of humans in mass, however much i wish it were otherwise. Part of the reason i experience cognitive dissonance regarding the effectiveness of science is a learned belief that study of the subject can solve nearly any problem. And here we sit barely 20 years into the 21st millennium and our species may not last to the end of the century for no other reason i can see than greed; not even greed from the majority of our species but phenomenal greed from less then .01% of the entire population. I know a lot of smart people, and i can’t seem to explain myself well enough to demonstrate the problem, much less gain cooperation in solving the problem of our eminent demise. The mechanistic view of existence no longer squares with my growing suspicion of synchronicity and the relationship of the unknowable with our high defined experience.

I just finished a fascinating story by Celeste Ng - “Little Fires Everywhere”. It had the seamless quality to it which Jane Austen mastered so well. What is troubling is the predictable outcome; not with regards the denouement which was satisfactory and logical - but just its very presence seemed illogical for a novel about an open-ended existence vs a structured life. Shit is not neat and tidy, people are sketchy - even the stalwart ones. Family is no bulwark against anything nothing ends with the last chapter, no matter how well nested it is. So why do we as a species yearn for this “unified theory” with which, Mr. Einstein cursed us all [with], and who the fuck determined a sentence cannot end in a preposition¿ (or prepositional phrase?) for that matter - damn, did it again. Of Pop’s many favorite expressions distilled from a lifetime of humble, yet thorough scholarship was “don’t get stuck in concrete”. I know he’d say this to me specifically, as well as i know he shared this personal truth with anyone else it would seem to fit. He came to believe this i believe responding to my youthful and oft times shrill declarations of “FACT” - an intellectual cul-de-sac i am still winding my way from - fucking prepositions.

I’ve now crossed over the line of pre-hydration post-saturation barrier where we are now traveling as pilots of old might say, by the seat-of-our-pants. Trinh Cong Son plays, though i still have to googol the unfamiliar name - hazards of cross-cultural intrusion. My mission is to have some fun while i try to document as honestly as a sculptor-cyclops-refugee might in the later days of his happy life. When i say synchronicity, chew on this: where i now sit with population of 95 million people has had less than 300 cases of Covid-19 and O deaths, the nation where i lived last with a population of 328 million - 2/3 larger, has had 1.18M cases, and 68k deaths, for the math challenged that is 68,000 more deaths than where i now live. Why is that? It explains for me why i feel grateful to live here - yet, mindful i do not belong. Where and why i feel such kinship for here and now, is love: love has no location and does not understand my complaint - in a good way. I can whinge and wiggle as much as i like, but cannot ignore my appreciation of a way of life which i would like to contribute, but must accept as one more wound, i can only hope to find a way to mend - just like where and when i started out from what i thought was home 5o years ago. 

For many years i owned a tool box which resembled a compressed version of what i tried to carry with me from my youth; affixed to the outside of this miniaturized cubbyhole toolbox was a prescient green plastic 5¢ imprint used in markets no longer, but will prompt thought until it falls off - don’t say i didn’t warn you of the coming wrinkle · i am afraid of dying, though i have decreed otherwise throughout my life. It is disconcerting to have no other body to say this to, but you. I am not troubled by your confusion, for if you have gotten this far in this “essay”, it is not my interest that is carrying you forward, but yours. For my money, the kindest thing i’ve heard in many months about our collective troubles is s pure warm-heartedness for being curious about what comes next. I can’t say whether this is a function of literary training and its inherent demand for tidy endings as regards storylines, or if it just make sense to remain open about the future until we again see patterns of behavior emerging that dictate stupid decisions in which 68k out of 328M human beings are murdered by greed, contrasted with 0 people dying out of a population of 95M who are then encouraged to continue struggling toward fulfillment - however you understand that word to mean.  

a quiet adherence to some principles does not preclude happiness 

jts 04/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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