Extinction Chronicles - 170520 ·

I like to laugh at VIP’s - i’m sure it’s reaction formation · and i’m just really conflicted about my own self worth. Still in all, as a spectator sport, we are living in what the military politely describes as a “target rich environment” for laughing at VIP’s. If i had to take a guess, my trouble stems from being the 3rd child to a family of really pretty people. Where i sit today i struggle to leave go of the judgements i have made about them and their favorable appearances, because judgements are just fucked up; i don’t know better place to start. It is clear that to judge another is mostly highlighting those aspects of self one finds unappetizing. However it’s scary when i watch “woke people” and my skin crawls, or conversely it is those i imagine are suffering who get the greatest part of my concern; that doesn’t say much for my peace of mind. I once worked in a commercial real estate office that was populated by trust-fund babies, that portion of the population born on on 3rd base thinking they’d hit a triple and the behaviors i witnessed tracks with the leadership in place today, and often the leadership that steps into vacuums such as we’ve seen in post Covid-19 planet earth. From what i understand, the ultra-right anarchistic capitalists have had a large role to play in the agitation to “return to normal.”

I was working on the 17th floor of a Los Angeles office building when 9/11 occurred, and then spent an unnatural amount of time shooting Osama in an app that materialized within days of the event. However, i seemed to be the only person in Los Angeles who perceived the world’s outpouring of concern for the ‘merican people. Watching the drumbeat for war banging its way down the pike, turned my stomach, because of the wasted opportunity to alter history - i feel the same about this virus. I know how little 9/11 changed the hearts of those extracting profit on that 17th floor; if anything the tragedy seemed to inflame greed that is inherent to commercial real estate, or speculation of any kind. This may be why i am sensitive to the efforts to educate Viet Nam on the “promise” that profit uses to gain a foothold in the hearts of a people tempered by a war to protect their nation from the aggression that capitalism employs for easy pickings, and the seduction capitalism reverts to to deceive the war weary. Viet Nam defeated the world because she understood deceit after years of betrayal by imperialist powers - the world has changed, but the motivation has not.

It is why the hair on the back of my neck stands on end when someone who would not give me the time of day when i was a stranger, but all of a sudden wants to play paddy-cake if there is any sense my influence can benefit them. The game is the same worldwide - Viet Nam is no different. VIP’s live and die on how popular they can be - VIP’s want influence, i do not. My ambition wherever i have gone is to learn and help people achieve their goals. I realized this while teaching in downtown Los Angeles schools. My employers enjoyed the fact that i could establish rapport with students as long as i was as compliant as they deemed appropriate for the students, however once i made clear it was the student’s interests to which i remained obedient, my usefulness as an instructor sort of evaporated. There was one occasion that stands out in my mind while mining the commercial real estate market of Los Angeles which corresponds - because familiarity is part of the “con” i sat in the Regional Manager’s office one afternoon with one of the top salesman exploring ways to increase sales, and i suggested: “why not treat the market like one might behave toward a grove of valuable fruit trees, like avocados?” The two eminently successful by the $ metric looked at me like i was from another planet. The conventional wisdom for property is to squeeze until there is pain, then sell. The concept of compassionate transactions was, and is entirely foreign to the captains of industry - part of the “infinite growth paradigm” delusion. 

The stakes are much greater today than the egos on the table 15 years ago - now it has become clear that what John Lennon imagined so many years ago was more truth than idle speculation, “I think we’re being run by maniac for maniacal end, and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” What is disturbing is how many of the doofuses protesting masks intrinsically understand what John said, but are unable to make the connection because .  ..  ··· because of what¿ the billionaires are capable, willing and actively buying a lot of friends? Yes that is part of it, but it is the same in the small ancient village i live on a different scale. The big shots, VIP’s and their running dogs perform much the same on an abbreviated scale - but with much greater consequence. This is why the koch bros, unfettered by morals were able to unleash bullshit into ‘merican schools on an unprecedented level. Everyone want’s to be a big-shot; what better bait for the ancient con of “bait and switch” than moolah, (you know, fast cars, broads - the more willing the better · suck-ups galore) all the shit one found in high school while fending off bullies and Christian confidants - “tell me your nasty, and i will save you.” The same old salacious snake oil salesman that want to peek at you “user” history to determine which side of the “law” you stand, so they can jack-off in the privacy of their corner offices.

Much as i didn’t want to, i am laughing at the mockery of compassion that passes to today as “aid to developing nations.” The foreigners i find on nearly every continent i’ve been to want mostly to ingratiate themselves enough with the local culture to be important, or VIP’s, after which overlay whatever conceit it is they are running from where they ran from; and this is important - MYSELF INCLUDED · This myopic self-centered blindness to the greater danger we all of us face - extinction · is what i live and breathe. At my age and given my questionable embrace of the “at risk” parts of our world, and i know some pretty at risk characters, my time is not long, nor is my patience. When i see creative, intelligent and caring personalities around me vying for a piece of the fat meat at the buffet table - be it cruise ships left at sea without a care for the 1,000’s of displaced workers, or the oil tankers waiting offshore to crash asunder into shore by the bad weather we all know is coming - or the “leader of the FREE world” willing to sacrifice millions of his faithful to gain ratings, i don’t give a fuck anymore if i prick your sensitive places, unless of course you still possess enough spirit in your heart to look into my wounded eyes and say to me “i don’t care if you are old, ugly, and poor - i still love you.”

jts 17/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 160520 ·

When people talk about the 60’s, they often have no clue what they’re talking about - i know, i was there, and i still don’t know what happened. The ruling class, then known as the “establishment” likes to excise that period from history much like it gussied up the racial hatred of ‘merica until the truth-teller Covid-19 crashed the party. Years after the trash got picked up at Woodstock, i would try and puzzle how one’s comrades could so easily forget how close to upending the established order people were. I understand that Richard Nixon was terrified of the protests that swamped his administration, so much so he shot himself in the foot with Watergate. Humanity should have known the gig was up when he and Chairman Mao took to schmoozing over tea. I was keeping body and soul together in a crash pad that was to become a nexus to other nexuses. I couldn’t even keep the names straight of the characters traipsing through where i lived in a garage sleeping on a sheet of plywood suspended over a workbench and a discarded chifferobe - once calling the police asking if they had a Rick Ronzoni in custody (no one told me Ronzoni was his nickname after the pasta maker). One night enough into the wine to chance most things, a stranger Christina Christofferson waltzed into the kitchen and asked “would anyone like to take a hit of acid with me?” She was big and blond and charismatic, and though i prefer my women svelte - she looked like an interesting conversation, so i said “yes.” We stayed up and talked all night; by morning we had parsed the universe - although like all good LSD trips, and Las Vegas - what happens there stays there. (and what Gertrude Stein said still holds true - “there’s no there, there”)

Though this chronicle is not about Christina it’s about S_____ S_____ whom i met shortly after at the dance studio Christina lived at on the SEC of 4th and Main in Santa Ana. This dance studio was another nexus in a chain of nexuses one finds if they live long enough, and it was a hoot. She lived there there with the gay Rasputin Gerry who couldn’t have been slimier if he’d washed his laundry in petroleum. But that was then and this is now. It was in Gerry’s anteroom that i met S_____ S_____. There were many architectural wings to this dance studio that were bracketed from the Great Room out - a mock balcony, porthole double doorways into the checkerboard tile kitchen and sunburst cutout panels in its 30’ ceiling. The dance room also contained a working 5’ high fireplace and its 8’ long mantel. Showers were taken in the atrium at the top of the staircase using a garden hose into a child’s wading pool. It is where S_____ S_____ sat bold as fuck and forward to beat the band - as in “would you like a piece of candy little boy?” Of course this was 40 years ago looking through the haze of 3 marriages and too many careers to count, but you get the gist of it. I don’t know if we had sex that day or soon there after. She was a single mother of 2 boys and like most of the contingent at the dance studio worked at Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, tending the “tard’s” as they liked to say. S_____ S_____ was fun to be around, but very regulated. There were certain hours to be welcome and when you weren’t, that too was quite clear. She is 7 years my senior and i couldn’t tell you if that influenced my choice with my last wife, being the same difference older.

S_____ S_____ likes to drink - which certainly had a roll to play in my own history of substance strategies, as well as my appreciation for the power of En Vino Veritas. She was an erudite woman until she sacrificed her mind on the alter of Television, the same mausoleum ma left her’s. Besides the sex that was mercurial but lush, conversation was often scintillating, however as i was to later learn of the William F Buckley variety, rather than the William Burroughs my left-handed brain groks. S_____’s mother was a college professor and that S_____ had no sheepskin, i think it left her with a chip on her shoulder that eventually crushed her. This is sad for no other reason than the fact she had spent her entire working life ministering to the ‘tard population which other members of my community could barely look at much less change diapers for; wipe tears and make a home for in the wards of Fair View State Hospital. I took a run at the occupation myself. To give you an idea how upside down that world can be; i was working in a local facility closer to the college i was attending for my credentials as a Psychiatric Technician - S______ was grandfathered in, but it eventually became an Associate Arts Degree; and was called “on the carpet” for some infraction or other; when i left that manager’s office i was feeling smug and superior in a defensive kind of way, asking myself “why work with stupid ’tards.” As i passed one room back to my station, i was beckoned by in by a young man with severe Cerebral Palsy; he wanted a game of chess - i know chess well but am no master. The short answer is this man who could not line up a straw to his mouth without assistance crushed me at the game in fewer than a dozen or so moves.

In this same facility there was a hydrocephalic case whose cranium was easily twice her body. If you have never been inside such an institution - do so · you’ll be a better human for it. S_____ S_____ worked for 25 years attending these individuals and i am lucky to have known her, and not. Like all modern relationships, people fall away and others fall into place - you can’t know from one year to the next who’s in, who’s out. I am always amazed by the changes life reeks on us all. Whilst out of touch S_____ S_____ lived an entire lifetime including a savage betrayal by someone i had just met coming into her life as i was exciting. I had been living in her garage carving my 3rd piece and sleeping on another plywood sheet - that i didn’t die from the charcoal brazier i used for heat is a wonder for the ages. It was about this time i was really beginning to have my suspicions about art and why nothing i carved resembled the subject as well as what i drew or painted. Years later after her ex had taken everything he could lay his hands on including her heart, S_____ was a changed woman - not just older but broken in spirit. I would swing by when in town to chew that fat, and commiserate, for i had by that time my own wounds which had knocked the cockiness right out - so what was there left to share - horror stories?

When i left the United States, it became increasingly difficult to arrange visits with ma, though she had a spare room, my peripatetic lifestyle grated on those in the family who were circling the wagons around her fortune and viewed my solvent however rootless existence as evidence of a flawed character. Somewhere late in my travels, i got an email from S_____ S_____ suggesting i return to the states and that we throw in together - “buffer each other” was the expression. By this time my lopsided vision was making drawing more and more difficult - and i thought what the hell. What Thomas Wolfe said about “You Can’t Go Home Again” is true. What had been eccentricities during short visits rendered cohabitation impossible. On its face, it was a great idea that might have worked were we the young questing minds that had met, oh-so-long ago, but calcification had taken its toll. The masks had come off and the presumptions were no longer assumable. I will be grateful to this grand dame who i believe genuinely thought she could play avatar for my mother and actually soothe the grief of a dead parent; however I have been grieving the loss of ma since she abandoned me 40 years ago. What i didn’t understand when i accepted the role of roommate/caregiver was the expectation i would substitute for her son who moved to the other side of the country precisely when she’d needed him the most. It is a karmic debt that is mine alone to carry - if i am to be punished for abandoning my mother to my brother’s best efforts or rewarded for helping an old friend leave-go of her sanctuary and join her son, where he had fled, where - according to her, she is welcomed and loved. I may never know; i do know if i don’t find somewhere that i am welcomed and loved, i will still try to help others find the same - just like my old friend tried to do for me - even if it is only within their own skin.

jts 16/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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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

 ∞ 

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

 ∞ 

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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