Extinction Chronicles - 150520 ·

For all my whining, i’ve had an incredibly fortunate existence - good friends · not that many, but really good friends. When i was a young turk not yet living in Santa Ana, i threw in for a while with the Herrera Familia such that i was made godfather to Joseph Herrera’s 1st born son - Joseph Baldano Herrera. I haven’t seen the child since the age of one and have no idea where the Herreras are or who lives. Ernesto was the oldest son of Mr. Herrera, who with his wife were salt of the earth people. Joseph was the 2nd son, and for the 2 years that i knew the family was in prison more than not - though they were crazy days, i was not and knew it. It was around the same time i met, married and divorced my 1st wife and got 60 stitches in my right forearm, but i learned much more than pain. For one thing, when Ernesto after a day of drinking got it in his head “i can shoot an apple off the top of your head” no matter how many time he repeated, or how drunk i got - i still declined this too kind invitation from another “walking wounded Vietnam Vet; this refusal and the fact i was a guedo made me untrustworthy en los ojos de la familia, but more than worthwhile in mine. Ernesto’s father Senor Herrera worked 5 days out of the week, sober as a judge; supported his 8 children; and untold grandchildren and was wise. One example is when with with considerably patient enthusiasm he explained to me “when you die and you have as many friends as you have fingers on one hand - you were a lucky man” for emphasis he raised his right hand with his fingers splayed prominently displaying the missing middle finger of his right hand - they liked me, and for the better, they liked to laugh at me.

But this discussion isn’t about the Herrera family it’s about Dr. “Mac” Mac O’lash - my very best of friends, though i was no where around when he died. It is likely from his kindness toward me and patience with my confusion that i had the presence of mind to resist the very tempting invitation to have an apple shot off my head by a drunken Mexican. Dr. Mac knew me from a very young age and always had the coolest things. His garage was always open and if you ever needed anything for your bike - he had it, and more. One xmas my heart was set on a “sting ray” bicycle with the riser handlebars and banana seat - i got it, except it was a girl’s. I couldn’t look Mac in the face for months. His manner, no matter what kind of a snot-faced-spoiled kid you were, was the kind you find in stories; he reminded me of my Great Grandmother Munner - each possessing the most affirmative language i can remember anyone in my growing up years using; “how grand; isn’t that fine; take good care.” His daughter Carolyn, my older sister’s age is and was the most mysterious, fetching and alluring females i have ever known. Knock as i might - that door never opened. Mrs. Mac O’lash was a different story. Orange County being one of the cattiest of locales, in the cattiest of times, Mrs. Mac O’lash wasn’t cool enough, and her fussy ways made her the perfect target for the gossips that somehow could always be found drinking coffee at our house, before ma became liberated and went back to school. Many decades later and worlds away from that neighborhood, i would still be calling Mac, and on occasion got his wife Polly on the phone.

Over time, when Mac was not available, my conversations with Polly grew longer and i found Mrs. Mac O’lash to be one of the keenest minds i’ve known, with an uncommon generosity toward the world in general and abandoned cats in particular. As with most good things in life, she died shortly after we became friends by phone. As unfortunate this was for Mac, it was fortunate for me. I was better able to understand what the sudden loss of his wife to an aggressive brain tumor meant to my friend Mac. I’d like to have been as much help to him as he had been to me over the years - but that will have to remain one more regret. When i returned to California after conquering the Art World of NYC - a legend in my own mind · it was more than unsettling to find my success in NYC meant shit in California, and i would have start all over again on my climb to the top of the heap, though i hadn’t yet learned there is no top - just a big heap. Mac invited me to visit him in his office on Sundays which i did every Sunday for some years. By this time Mac had married me twice, once to the Cherokee propellor blade and then my 2nd wife, a younger woman and her child who had joined my aerospace coed softball team “Ma’s Marauders” sponsored by “Ma Spring ‘Em” Bail Bonds of Anaheim. We lost every game that season but one, but that one victory felt awful good. It was a very hard time for everyone involved, but mostly the 18 month old child who i couldn’t have loved more if she had been my own. 

By this time, our Sundays had ceased because i felt my particular “crazy” required a more traditional approach, and Mac had retired from his role as Reverend at the State Hospital for “retarded, challenged, exceptional,” all those expression society uses to allay its discomfort with human beings who are different. I don’t know how many decades Mac was the reverend for this unique ministry, but i can say for certain there are human beings alive today whose lives are significantly improved from having known him - i know this because it is true for me. This doesn’t make me solipsistic, just aware. I worked for a time with that population that is so different from mainstream that people still do not know how to address them with the dignity that every living thing on the planet deserves. Are they “retarded, are the handicapped” - this language is no longer used to describe that population, and it is certainly in part because of the efforts of my very determined and very loving friend the RR Dr. “Mac” Mac O’lash. I know this because our conversations often had to do with perception and language. The modality he employed was long before self-help glommed onto the role of linguistics in changing people’s behavior simply by changing the language used to describe themselves or their relationship to others.

For example - the difference between “you are a fuck” and “you behave like a fuck” are vast and largely unconscious. In the first instance your statement depending on to whom you said it can be remarkably destructive - especially for a young child. The 2nd example, you are addressing a manageable component that is neutral “behave” and you are not diminishing the person you are addressing. And it gets more interesting, for example, if you preface either statement with “I feel” . . . you are immediately defusing a potentially volatile exchange by owning your own opinion and making it possible for the exchange to be a dialogue rather than an accusation. Dr. Mac lost the sight of one eye in a freak racketball accident at the age of 90. It is testimony of what right living can provide, for he lived another number of years after that because he was adaptable and rugged from a life of giving and encouragement to others. I’d like to have been built more like him, but my solitary pursuit of the creative life effectively prevented such generosity. I can hear his voice now, “bullshit” - he was a Taurus and could be quite point blank as the best often are. So i’ll employ one of my favorite quotes and keep trying to help the as i can using his “successive approximation” — Dr. Francis, “Mac Mac O’lash

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” - Archimedes 

jts 15/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 140520 ·

Did not sleep well last night but to my credit still managed the bicycle circuit this morning. Am now treating this chronicle more as a journal without monitoring my thinking as i might with a strictly essay form - while this might be taxing for you the reader, for me it is helpful to dwell in more of a stream-of-consciousness mode if i am to keep it up day in and day out. Today i will shift gears and focus on other characters, because there is just so much one can say about oneself without others beginning to get a good idea of just how crazy you are - we wouldn’t want that would we¿ Scott Paulsen was a 26 year old charismatic 6th Grade teacher at Mesa Verde Elementary School where my family lived. The housing tract we lived in was brand new and were we lived in the North of what before it became the City of Costa Mesa, was reputedly named Goat Hill - more mythical than actual. We moved there because Pop had trained at the Santa Ana Air Station which became the site of one of my Alma Maters, Orange Coast College. Each of the 4 children attended Mesa Verde Elementary and all had had Mr. Paulsen for the 6th grade except the oldest brother who lucked out with Dame Beaumont who could have been a stand in for Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane”

Mr. Paulsen was a keen and thoughtful educator of the “old school”, so much so he inspired my mother to become an instructor when it became clear we could not keep up with Joneses on Pop’s salary as a teacher, and ma was big on keeping up with the Joneses. The first day of classes when it was my turn to learn, Mr. Paulsen had all the students stand up and introduce themselves  to the rest of the class - so did. “Good Morning class, my name is Joseph Stevens.” Mr. Paulsen promptly interrupted me and declared, “you’re not Joseph - your name is Todd, I know your Mother and father, Harold and Marty; I know your oldest brother is named Bradley; I had your sister Kristin in my class two years ago; and I know you have a younger brother Casey - your name is not Joseph, your name is Todd.” It is true what he said, though not entirely accurate. My namesake is Joseph Vernon, my maternal grandfather who died long before i was born. What could i do? Years later when it came time to open a checking account the nice lady asked me what name i would like printed on my checks, i said “Joseph T. Stevens” - patience is our friend. After this event, i was not quite the same eager student i had been on the first day, but a curious child by nature. So when Mr. Paulsen rearranged the seating and i was given i seat in the front row i once again felt the spark of learning in my heart - and of course enjoyed sharing with anyone who would listen, obviously.

Well what a surprise while entertaining the youngster to my left with my erudite understanding of that day’s lesson - “Thwack” · my head rang for minutes until i realized Mr. Paulsen very much didn’t like competing for the class’s attention and he was a dead aim with the chalkboard eraser. School, was a frolicsome environment, and a complex social incubator. For example, we would play softball against the other 6th grade classes, and Mr. Paulsen opened the naming of our team to competition - he picked mine · “Paulsen’s Pulverizers”, i could bust a gut so proud was i, though as a ballplayer - it just wasn’t in the cards for me. Quite the opposite, one lunchtime Mike Lambert convinced me to steal Mr. Paulsen’s Winston cigarettes from his coat pocket while he was busy pitching during lunch recess. Yeah, you guessed me and mike got busted smoking in the dirt piles back of the Kinney Shoe Store. But Mr. Paulsen was a good egg, so much so that when our dog Snoopy the beagle would break out of the yard so he could follow the scent of younger brother Casey when he became a student with Mr. Paulsen, and instead of making a big stink, he just allowed my brother to bring the dog home - one more eccentricity of the Stevens’ clan.

Scott and Liddy - Mr. and Mrs. Paulsen are woven into the very fabric of my life many decades later. I owned an old building with my last wife near Eagle Rock. Scott and Liddy came for breakfast and we stood on the roof patio toasting champagne in the direction of Occidental College where they had been college sweethearts. It was also the same house where sitting in the den commiserating about the breakup of my marriage when Scott announced, “No I’m not a Democrat, I’m a lifelong Republican.” It was as though all the underpinnings of assumptions i had made throughout my life was simply pulled out from under me in one swell foop, and not. He, Mr. Paulsen more than any other conservative i have ever known, and having worked thirteen years in aerospace, i’ve known many - is as principled and loving toward all people of our nation with a profound regard for the complexities of we are faced with. For a while, i was a wage slave as a broker’s assistant in a commercial real estate firm, later an agent able to make my own calls. Though generally one of the least exciting and more venal assignments in my long employment history - there were moments. On one occasion hammering the phones i struck up a conversation with a nice enough guy and started reeling him in - what turned out, was that he and his brothers owned a 215,000 sf shopping center at the SW corner of Hollywood Blvd & Vermont, just down the hill from Frank Lloyd Wright’s, Hollyhock House.

The reason i share this is that one of Mr. Paulsen’s children was in the real estate trade entered his firm into the bidding for this property; also it happened just as the Los Angeles real estate market was taking a nosedive in the 2005 recession. For me it was a lesson in greed and stupidity - in my initial conversation with the owner i had thrown out a figure od $100 million, which he could not get out of his head. The bidding eventually stalled at $80 million something, and the brothers wouldn’t budge. Months later the market had tanked and the property was finally sold years later at a 1/3 of what they could have had in hand without greed as their guide. Now i sit removed from the “sturm and drang” decades and portraits later loving my friend that hit across the side of the head with a projectile when i deserved it. I ask you reading now what you can do to relieve the suffering at your elbow? “Humans of New York” started as a phenomena much different than it started, just like when Mr. Paulsen loosed his cannon across my disrespecting cranium - we can learn · i did enough to encourage him Mr. Paulsen to paint him and his wife Liddy, knowing me to be not only “Liberal” but radical to the point of dying in Vietnam. (he heartily approved of my travel plans to VN when we spoke last - likely our last). Scott Paulsen is a loving influence in my life that i am grateful for · i struggle to say that about everyone i meet, for no other reason than how much his kindness has made me a better human being.

jts 14/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 130520 ·

Dingo-deli use to be my favorite writing location, yet when i realized i couldn’t order my delivered veggies and had to travel, even if it is as copacetic a location as D-d it was adaptive time. As i rode away from my clean laundry hangin on the open windows, i fantasized them getting blown into the pile dirtdung in which my earthworms had recently arrived and it just sort of sucked the wind out of my sails; never mind that it is 91 degrees and 62% humidity; or that D-d no longer offers whiskey for my beer .  .. i must write because it is the most worthwhile activity i can conceive of doing in these perilous times we all live. And i like to write, now that drawing is more and more difficult with my vision dimming - not just ocular, but dreams of recognition for my years of hard work and ostensible sacred devotion; albeit impure and ego-driven, however much moments of creative ecstasy may have whispered otherwise. Yet it is all the same road and those lessons i fought hard for continue to inform my work. G_d bless pop and his keen training and insistence on discipline, for it has rendered me productive and relatively sober where without his guidance, i’d have been just one more schlock dilettante, drunk at openings and lazy in front whatever fake shit i wanted to call art, instead of the sterling example of a flawed genius you read before you.

With drawings i struggled mightily to convey what i could see about the character of my chosen subject, and i was coming close just as my already visual dicey acuity fogged beyond any workaround that i have found yet - besides it was no longer a fun chase, whereas the prospect of describing with words any one of the many characters i meet in a day remains eminently accessible, once i get over the spelling hump. For example, i’ve always been attracted to beauty; it goes back a long ways - aside from the fact ma was a beauty queen and sister K___ was not just freshman princess, but homecoming Queen taboot.he One of my earliest memories is standing at the shoreline on an overcast day with a young girl ugly boys are accustomed to being thrown together with. Blustering my way forward i asked her about her boyfriends and she shared her love interest in the honest way the children are want to do - my crestfallen response was to declare before god and nature, “i could beat him up,” and her entirely understandable response was to pick her feet up from the washed over sand of our patient happy feet and move yards down the shore - the pretty girls are still moving down the shore · and i have no more clue today about the feminine now, than i did when i was 7 or so.

But these are the “Extinction Chronicles” and i owe you the reader at least a nod in the direction of solidarity about what to expect, much less what to do about it. We’re in a pile of shit and not understanding each others has a lot to do with it. I wouldn’t look to FB or the computer screen for a way out - the less you understand about yourselves or what is happening the more pliable and easily fooled you are. Look around you - is anybody close that you can trust? If you are within a cloistered community of likeminded people, you might answer yes - depending on your age. The young tend to keep the faith more easily, perhaps because their betrayals have not damaged them too deeply yet, or they know something important about life, as i did when i was young, like solidarity. Just now one of the kingpins of the expat community where i live rode up and studiously passed me without a nod. Were i young, i might have been stung to the core, now i accept it as a fact of life - what good is power if you cannot diminish others. I understand that Hitler was so mindful of this fact that the chairs on the other side of his desk were inches shorter than his own - only so those he spoke with had a physical reminder of something he didn’t believe himself · superiority. 

I find this behavior of asserting superiority through ranking rampant in this tiny agrarian community i find myself ensconced in, nor is it entirely racial. Locals who have bet the farm on wealthy tourists naming Hoi An as a worldwide destination have sacrificed much believing in the generosity of a cohort of privilege and merit that lacks any foundation in fact. The “rich” as Billie Holliday sang so well are generous as long as you don’t ask for too much; that this conceit ripples its way back down the consumer chain is what drives me to distraction. We will not survive as long as we laud the selfish as an example of the good life. There is nothing i have found in my life that would suggest possession of excessive wealth has ever made anyone more generous. Elon Musk - the electric car entrepreneur who finagled himself into “progressive automaker kingdom” has shown his true colors in post the post virus economy by abandoning his workers like his was a slaughterhouse lord in the deep south - we do not have the margin for benefit of doubt at this turn in our species` evolution · you support all or you are an enemy.

I have trouble with the expression “enemy,” for when i saw _rump coagulating the ill-gotten gains of the DNC and assuming his path to emperor was a foregone conclusion, i had no reason to disbelieve. Even the channel, whatever that may be you read these earnest feelings on is subject to the whims of a finely tuned digital thug - Art Intel (AI). If the internet had been allowed to propagate information in its original configuration, there would be no priority - first come, first served. The traitors to the species have altered this to include, if you wanna play - you pay. Unfortunately for them there are wild cards in the hypertext that are not so easily channeled and for those seeking to grow and survive; there are paths open, for now. Just like it is not necessary for me to pay obeisance to supposed kingpins of the vagaries of my particular social construct - my obligation to the future is to be more generous in my thinking and to not accept assumption i make that are born of ancient and foreign wounds while struggling to see more deeply into the known native goodness that is our birthright as human beings.  

jts 13/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 120520 ·

I’d like to be all cheery and tell you everything is going to be okay, but i’d be lying and from that i would lose your confidence. Not that i lie late at night wondering how i can inspire your confidence but there is little in life that is sadder than someone who has lost the ability to trust · i know this because it is difficult for me to trust anyone but myself; and that has taken me 65 years to accomplish not well. What i’ve learned in the process is to recognize when others are not trusting me, and often for very good reasons. I am selfish, i can be uncommonly cruel in my judgements which are often erroneous and ill-considered. From this i am learning to rely less on judgement and more on what is in front of my face, e.g. it is light outside it must be daytime - the Randy Slocum, rock on a string weather report, if the rock is wet, it might be raining, so to speak. People are a much harder read than the weather or time of day; i know this mostly based on how much effort i’ve exerted to obscure what is apparently all to obvious to everyone but me. 

Here’s an example of just how obtuse i can be; it was back at the release of “Independence Day.” At the time i was casting about for a career and my 1994 Bachelors in English was started to get stale, never mind that I was 42 years, about to be married to a woman i’d only just discovered owed $64,000 in credit card debt and had just plunked down my retirement savings to purchase my 1st Mortgage for a 68 year-old house just up Figueroa from a heroin shooting gallery in East L.A. So i was schmoozing my cousin Charlie on the phone, hoping to impress him with my erudite analysis of the movie industry, and does he know of any pathway into the studios. “I mean Charlie, there has to be some hunger there for quality writing - look at the bomb ID 4; it’s been out for weeks now and no one is going to see it - it’s pig.” Ever gentle Charlie snickered as only a New York jew can, “what are you stupid; “Independence Day” is the most successful movie of 1996” Needless to say i got no introductions from Charlie into the film industry. I never connected the swarm of “ID 4” advertising with with the rave reviews for “Independence Day.” Were that that was the only occasion of being slow on the uptakes. 

Living in OC, we’d vacation in Mexico often, during one unfortunate excursion Pop got roped into buying firecrackers one of my older brother had fronted him money for, only no one thought to clue me to the illicit nature or this extraordinary change of heart by dear old Pop. When i say change of heart, i mean as July 4th would approach and we’d go to Pop for money he’d ask first, “do you have a dollar,” and always curious what pa had up his sleeve, a bill would materialize. Pop would make a big show of finding matches and set about lighting the dollar on fire, which of course never happened; then he would remark, “same difference - give them your money for fireworks, ya’ may as well just burn your money” - he was cool like that. But back to my  unfortunate intro to the finer points of smuggling contraband; so we are returning back across the border everyone in the car being cool as cucumbers when the Border Guards asks, “any vegetables any fruit, any .  . ..” Pop looking right into the guard’s face, “no, noo . … Then it happened, “Sir do you have any firecrackers¿” Pop again, “no . ..” Well, ever helpful me, and proud to bust a gut, “but pop, don’cha remember, you let Brad buy those firecrackers for . ..” Brad never forgave me, and apparently it was one of those life lessons one must repeat over and over again to learn its meaning, which to this day, i’m not sure i have.

Lao Tzu says always be truthful and you’ll never need fear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. I do not fear knocks in the middle of the night, but am not sure that isn’t simply from my cantankerous manner, or bloodthirsty dreams which i rarely remember. I am far more honest with myself than at anytime i can remember, hoping that acceptance eventually translates into tolerance of others though, i’m not holding my breath. Fake people give me a rash, and the process if who i determine is real and who is fake is still too much of a witching stick kind of process to be confident about my estimation of others. I have learned that projection is a bitch, then you die. I should have known early on just from discovering how many kids my age owned black tennis shoes as i walked out of the shoe store wearing black tennis shoes, only to discover they were wearing white tennis shoes when i next walked out, too soon i’m sure for Pop, wearing white tennis shoes. What does this say for self-knowledge which from what little i’ve learned is the only viable data any of us can acquire - aside from Rick and his rock · As Pop’s star began to flicker, i hung on to each word by phone like a puppy dog - it was his humor, now a decade or more later i value and would share if i knew how - with each earnestly framed and obnoxiously impossibly complex question i put to him in his retirement lair and me on some street corner of hollyweird when i owned a phone, he’d fish up from the caverns of his wit nearly always the same answer, “i don’t know, but i’m sure glad i’m old.”

What was funny then is no longer funny with my liver getting “fatty” and my bright prospects twinkling more and more and .  … you get the picture - still it is not complaint because i am having fun in the only way i know how in a world full of entirely unnecessary misery and upheaval - i am trying to help · even if that is no more than words typed into a tattered digital page shifted into a likely indecipherable future aether that seems controlled by amoral and empty profiteers wiggling toward an immoral swirling drain running one way or the other depending on your GPS location on our majestic sphere, like a bunch of maggots in a pile of shit going one way or another of their own conceit - still i can giggle with the joy i was taught by humans likely as confused as i, only distinguished from me by a nominal sequence of our once oh-so-hopeful DNA strand. Go ahead and tell me g_d is not not the ultimate ironist, or that she has not the finest sense of humor our species has had the pleasure to imagine. In the in-between-time, i will singe a few more rhizomes from our molten sphere cycling within a void, that has evolved for, apparently no better reason than my health and to fight my way into a slumber that refreshes me in ways i do not understand, despite a lifelong indoctrination to do so. Should i be kissed by two naked women who found a moment between their happiness to shed some affection on my wracked frame - i will know it was a dream and better understand my resistance to my dumb luck upon waking to see clearly into my own unconscious - neener, neener, neener .  ..  ···

jts 12/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 110520 ·

So just as i sat down to write, my friend and her friend who come periodically to clean my house - appeared; i was not prepared and have no idea how their presence will affect the narrative i’d been contemplating throughout the day. The essence of my thinking about this essay had been how to organize the planet against the successful oppression and near complete destruction of our species. I have trouble with cliques and social groups of all kinds and so am not the most effective organizer for obvious reasons. The challenge for me is how to use what native intelligence i possess to contribute to the greater good. I tend to the acerbic which if you don’t find humor in someone finding a way to drag their nails across your chalkboard, can be very off-putting. I make no apology for this it saves me time in distancing myself from shallow self-serving individuals of which the world is just about up to its rafters. So what to do if you are not given to glad-handing charlatans? For a long time i sought to distill the danger into understandable for lack of a better expressions jingos, or in today’s vernacular, tweets. There are too many in the media spectrum to distinguish one message from the rest. Early on in the day it occurred to me that Jesus of Nazareth faced the similar challenge and you can see how the advertising world has spun his message into the most lethal killing machine on the planet.

What then, fear is of no use, for humanity is so full with terror today of a microbe, it is hard to induce more caution than most families feel just touching doorknobs. Love, as Mr. Cohen pointed out so clearly is the only engine of survival. Yet from my experience this useful emotion has been so conflated with romance as to render it more toxic than healing. Barack diverted hope, back into lockstep with the corporate overlords piggybacking his own avarice into the greatest missed opportunity for leadership of the 21st century to date, so much so that his 2nd in command is now deflecting quite plausible sexual misconduct allegations. It’s as the the goddess of irony is going to ride our election right into the box canyon we’re running for. It is sad beyond measure for the simple fact that with some intelligence and a little heart we could avert certain disaster, but just now asking the nice cleaning lady through googol translate she looked at me like i was from another planet when i asked if she had any way to repurpose the cache of plastic containers i am loath to discard. 

Earlier in the week i was tempted to ridicule the poster in the cloistered expat page who was trumpeting the possible opening of an apple factory here in VN. This zeal was of course accompanied by the hick from Missouri explaining to the Russian objector who pointed out the obvious. This stalwart yank wanted to point out to all concerned the backward nature of this country, who with bicycles and sharpened bamboo stakes handed Uncle Sam his ass on a plate. This young acolyte who was likely indoctrinated by the Koch Bros representatives who have infiltrated every educational institute in the country, simply by paying the registration fees for anyone who wanted to join A.L.E.C. and mouthing the epitaph “Liberal” as though it was synonymous with traitor or coward, however given the behavior of the DNC toward the popular leadership of Bernie Sanders, their imprecations are entirely accurate and earned. Yet all of this verbiage amounts to one more “talking head” holding forth with little or no hope of accomplishing what is needed - a sea change in the heart of humanity.

If it is love, or a better understanding about how love can change our future, i will be of little help as a 3-time divorcee and no prospects on the horizon. If it was a question of pigheadedness i might be of some use, having a stable of stone carvings and a lifetime of failure to show for it. If you don’t believe me about my lack of tact - when my friends arrived to help me to keep a house that contains a rat in the attic whose shit cascades into my neat-freak world, i suggested they needed to be more “thorough” than last time they helped. Now i cannot get them to cease their efforts an hour and 1/2 into the hottest part of the day sweeping debris which will come cascading down this evening when the rat moves its infested self over the room i sleep in because the cool air which i must use to sleep. Maybe i’m blunt, maybe emotionally retarded to be unable to find wiser language to get my wants fulfilled. I don’t know, what i do know is if i cannot encourage good-hearted people to reach a little higher when dusting how the fuck am i going to stop some armed hick who is willing to kill to open an economy that hasn’t been his in 4 decades¿ that is a question?

If questions are all i can leave behind i will not feel so bad in a world that has forgotten how to ask such things. Everyone is in such haste to be on the inside, to know what the masses don’t to trade in stocks that are about to fall - we have forgotten the biggest question of all · why are we here¿ what is the reason we have been given paradise to without strings; plant life to nourish and mend us, and animals to teach us lessons about humility and compassion. How can we have allowed ourselves to be so mislead by a pissant crew of carnival barkers led by the bozo bezos who care only about their flim-flam and nothing about our families¿ that is a question? and i welcome any cogent reply - but find most trolls to be wilting lilies hiding behind their gov’t stipend as keepers of the faith to actually mix it up with those they are ostensibly keeping free. The more i reflect the more i realize they are the childhood bullies who would invariably prey on the weakest child in the schoolyard to aggrandize their supposed superiority. I fell sucker to one such as a 6th grader, 7th grader, 8th grader, etc. · you get the picture. The saddest part of my too personal example is that my cowardice did not originate in the schoolyard, but in my home the very instant i conceded to the bad opinion presumed upon me by those who discovered they could evade their own fear by convincing another to be afraid.  

jts 11/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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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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