Friday, June 5, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 040620 ·


Bad mouthing people is chickenshit; ennobling people is a gas (especially if you can do it without leaving tracks). Pain can be very educational, i’m not a very good student; there was one vacation i remember particularly, wherein my siblings thought it great sport to offer me money if i could last the 2 week journey without crying - i’m really glad i lost that money, but wish i was still that honest about what i feel. These essays are, in part, an effort to preserve that sensibility. Today i look around me at efforts by the social engineering “shot-callers” pulling the levers and cranks on this vast Rube-Goldberg digital contraption we are all so enamored of, and feel much like i did crawling into the bed of a prostitute, maybe my first, in Santa Ana, CA and wondering how there could be such a difference between my first loves and how we touched each other just a few short years earlier? As an art student in NYC i had the privilege of studying anatomy with a remarkable professor from an August family of Doctors who managed to make his general patrician contempt for all, seem specific to me, (a gift of the emotionally retarded) or so i imagined with my own outsized ego starved for love and attention. He posed a question to the students in my class which i doubt anyone but myself ever solved - more outsized ego, bullshit ·

“Why” he asked, “does a child, just learning to draw invariably show the eyes near the top of the head in its drawing?” - the answer came to me 4o years or so later; it is because of foreshortening - one of the thorniest issues for sincere artists to grasp, an intersection of what one has been trained to know and what one can see. Much like we puny humans loved in our parents arms, only to be introduced into a world of strife and cruelty - talk about your cognitive dissonance. The difficulty for me with my family is how people i was raised to share with; to love - to admire and defer to could be the same people who would betray my kindness, my confidence and my love for a meager advantage? It confused me as a child and it confuses me as an adult, an aged adult. My parents were intellectuals parroting all the popular progressive mantras of the time - outrage at the assassination of a sitting president by a cabal so entrenched that the lords of justice cowered before the truth. 

Who’s kidding who - the digital overlords filtering the speech you pour into your feeble skullcaps to suit their nefarious whims, or the outraged hoards pounding at the gates of heaven - “give me liberty, or give me death”¿?  What is reality; how is it parsed by what we have determined is “civilization”? Not very well as near as i can tell. In the year 2020 we are paying thugs to thug us, with the same lame guarantee, “the last Gr8 war” as soon as these mongrels _______ fill in the blank, are eliminated from the landscape - you will be safe once again. I struggle now with the accomplishment of my task - 5 paragraphs each day · But in the back of my mind i know, it is as dishonest as my siblings bribing me not to cry and so disturb their tranquil story of a family and its Arcadian journey toward stories that can be recounted and shared demonstrating some mythological solidarity with a happiness borne from compliance. I spit on your approbation and welcome my death as a relief from this festering lie that shackles the weakest i see each day and lauds the arrogant and most selfish i find, regardless of where i find myself on the planet.

We have available to us every instrument to feed, clothe and educate every man woman and child on the planet, but allow ourselves to be divided by fears that are solely resident within our own experience. I veer from you, not because i know anything about you or your struggles, but because it was what i have been taught by people looking to exploit my need for belonging. Ironically, the same affect you find most offensive about me - my reluctance to join in your frolic is the same affect that demonstrates as best i can my love and affection for you as a member of my same species. I do not cluster for fear, but from respect for your capacity to make your own judgements - conversely, my contempt and disregard for your opinion is based on your demonstrated need for support about what you think. I love to know others - i relish each opportunity to learn about the struggles of everyone i encounter and am as equally prepared to sever any union that yokes me to your agenda without your having asked - how do you feel about ____ fill in the blank.

I do not trust easily, and yet i do nothing but trust in every action of every person i encounter - except myself · that truth, however is changing the closer i move toward the death i will share with no one. Not because i am selfish or unwilling to share with those interested to learn what i have discovered, but because every discussion i have read about the experience, which in reality is, that that and birth, are the only things any of us do share. As much as i would want to discover language that might encourage you to fun, or love, or solidarity - you are alone as much as i am: no matter how popular you become, or beautiful you are acknowledged to be, there is no more knowledge you can learn or possess than what you can know about your own self and your ability to orient in a cosmology we presume to be reality, but in fact we can barely discern within the fabric of space and time we occupy. I can tell you this with candor and love; i wish you pleasure; i wish you comfort and i wish you deep experience in a place that seemingly presumes to know better than you what it is you find in front, around or on top of you - be well, be happy; comfort all you find · for it and they are you.

jts 04/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 030620 ·


Am back at Dingo Deli - the weather is hot and humid · my heart is calm and i have a salami sandwich for nourishment. Exercise is very important during the worldwide upheaval we now experience. The city of Hoi An, Vietnam is in pain from the absence of tourists which renders its bucolic terrain remarkably peaceful. My neighbors are grandparents of a small girl child whose squeals of growth can be heard, prior to breakfast, during breakfast - in time for naps and with all the surprises found in the course of a day by an 18, or so - month old human. I try to keep the walls damp so the air blowing into their yard is cool because it gives me a great feeling of accomplishment. I left the Kern River Valley for Europe in April of 2014 - i was on a mission to draw the finest drawings i could manage, and to seek the hand of a French Cameroonean woman i had met leaving Bali 6 years earlier - in the intervening time while renovating a beat-to-shit lakeside home in KKKlan valley, i may have drawn her some dozen times and sent letters to her of my experiences, letters that were primarily addressed to my estranged mother, but in an anthropological/conceptual art piece, i thought - what the fuck and shared these highly personal examinations of a problematic relationship with a (maybe) muse who had consented, only by not declining. Yeah, i know, weird - but it’s weirder for me, than it is for you. 

I arrived in Paris and felt that it was important that i be welcomed by her after all this time pitching woo into the aether - when she declined to step out from behind her Sphinx avatar · i moved on; i’d sold a home, left a country, and crossed an ocean: one cannot be more clear than that. That was 2014, it is now 2020 - my sight is failing, and my spirit is flagging · sort of. I understand that life is not over for me, but it has certainly changed. Love is no less important, if only - more so. But not the superheated romance of youth, love has taken on the dimension of compassion for those i do not know, like the necessary awareness of discomfort for the child across the wall enduring a heat her forebears acclimated to, but has become lethal due to no fault of her or her family - almost entirely manufactured by the superheated greed of the culture in which i was raised and to too large an extent i have participated in while a planetary environmental catastrophe through ignorance and arrogance unfolds all around me.

Where and how does one alter patterns, environmental, emotional, and existential? I am now on my 4th beer and am reaching the saturation point where cogency becomes gibberish; yet the shackles of convention are simultaneously relieved - some call it threading the needle, others describe it as walking the tightrope, for me it’s just figuring out which eye and which hemisphere i am viewing the world with at the time. My family spent a lot of time in front of the mirror; it has never been a pleasant experience for me. Even without the mirror, i was never sure which side was my left or right. I do remember one period of my life wearing contacts; it was the first time i could remember seeing my face without glasses - that was strange. The mechanics of understanding the human head became a study as early as 13 when i tried to sculpt the head of George Washington in paper mache based on the “Athenaeum Portrait” by Gilbert Stuart, but it wasn’t until my 60s that i came to realize i have utterly no capacity to see 3-dimensionally - this is only worthy of mention because i had spent almost 45 years of my life attempting to create 3 dimensional objects that demonstrated my understanding of 3 dimensions.

My younger brother who represents my domestic address in the United States has fallen off the grid - this while the country of my birth is in the midst of a possible coup d’etat by a fascist corporate cabal that has for too long manipulated the channels of communication: interpersonal, national and digitally. It is no longer possible to discern who sits where much like it is for me trying to visualize a 3 dimensional object using my rapidly decaying visual acuity. Writing now represents a workaround - workarounds that i ought to be accustomed to by this point in my life, but which are always disconcerting - like walking in a darkened room that one knows by daylight but must parse by memory at night. To have my last link to the land i grew up in grow dark has the same effect; it is destabilizing. Days ago, i thought a walking stick which i know i will need shortly just to motivate upright caused me such distress, i fictionalized culprits and reported them to my neighbors, rendering myself a crazy person in the process; what i experience losing communication with my brother is no different, if only worse.

All i know to do now, is stay the course and be kind to myself, for it seems every time i point a finger of accusation at another, i only find my own self and my personal involvement with that accusation at its origin. It is more than perfectly confusing - it is a downright conundrum. I have not surrendered, for that begins with my last breath, a breath i have taxed to the max with my fixation on tobacco, or as Bob said better, “I left all my hopes and dreams buried under tobacco leaves.” How can i possibly condemn a world so full of insights that i have chosen to ignore through hubris or inattention. We are capable and able to vanquish all we face - me my loneliness, you your ______ fill in the blank. But we choose to blunder forward rather than stopping, even for a moment to relish the splendor just beyond our wrist or out of earshot. The paradox of course, being that all we need to understand about the universe is found mostly between our two ears - understanding ourselves and why we do what we do can be challenging, but will ultimately inform each of us about where we fit and why - good luck · one and all.  



jts 03/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 


Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 020620 ·


Hopes are high for a peaceful transition - not much different than the feeling i got immediately after the destruction of the “Twin Trade Towers” in 2001 · it is not going to happen .  .. ··· not because i am a negative person or cannot imagine how to transition, that as Buckminster Fuller has pointed out is relatively simple. It is the hearts and souls of humanity that must change before it can effectively enforce the leadership it deserves. We have allowed ourselves to be divided by greed and ego, and until we resolve that defect of character - we will continue to cluster in convenient cliques that reflect the level of our commitment to the planet and the survival of our species; it don’t look good for the “home team - ” and for those just tuning in, “home team” doesn’t mean those the look like you, act like you agree with you · could, but not necessarily, home time will be those homo sapiens left to the planet to clean up “our mess.” There is no way that our species will exterminate itself. We have proven too adaptable - too adaptable our own good. But before this is over our ranks will have been so greatly diminished as to prove insignificant within the life force that rises to the occasion for the next epoch. The chief scientist for googol - is banking on the “singularity” that will render our consciousness up-loadable, also extraordinarily manipulatable.

The same haters who have purchased the prime real estate whereupon they savor their ill-gotten gains to witness the ensuing apocalypse are envisioning an “idyll” where the life to which they have become accustomed, will be easily managed by a greatly reduced number of human attendants. Sadly, many who read this would do exactly the same thing given the opportunity and means - i’d like to say - not me, but human history and Dr. Faustus have established facts to the contrary. My oldest brother fancies himself as proletariat of the 1st order - black panther tattoo, shop steward in the boatyards of San Pedro and everything · i’ve lost all respect for him, based only on his behavior toward me; believing me to be deranged, but never actually stating his position because of the entitlements he feels due him based on antiquated primogeniture mythologies - i guess, but i’m only guessing. Shunning is a blood sport in my family, and his wife has his gumption in a jar by the door; like most men in ‘merica, including r. reagan when alive, m mcconnel, d_rump and mssrs pelosi, biden, clinton and obama. It is my greatest objection to the fakeness we wallow in, that one half of the species, pleads oppression from the almighty dick - yet the fact is they largely determine the character of the sel-same scoundrels from age 0 to 3 the most formative years are almost always a feminine environment: Bob Dylan - ‘I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do, or encouraged him to do.’

My problem it would seem is i have yet to find a woman who wants me to do what i want; ma was a sticky wicket out of the gate - my birth was a Franks Breech, which from what i gather by the imprecations ma had made during her problematic divorce from my unworthy sire · is very painful to the bearer; as to the bearee, i can only surmise by barely sentient data about my arrival, it was more intrusion than celebratory. Having lived with ma through some of her more depressive episodes, and her concomitant convictions about my intrinsic nature, it has been a challenge to keep faith with the balance of an emotionally somnolent humanity - i never had the leisure provided my pretty siblings to coast on my good looks, and as bitter as that may sound, from where i sit - the universe has been uncommonly kind to me; i can feel pain in a world hell-bent on denying its presence, not just denying as in biting off the expression “fuck you, you ignorant slut” when it is most warranted, but refraining from a mortar assault when it is operationally “tidy.” There have been occasions in my life that i have contemplated murder, and from the good fortune of a philosophically enlightened parent balanced by a compassion born of an unawakened, but otherwise earnest other parent - violence has never been an option for me.

I am doomed to play - put that in your pipe and smoke it · all you salacious editors from empire, perusing without purpose; attempting to fit words into your etymology of dishonor, afraid to peer into your own hearts about your betrayal to the commonweal. I do not covet recognition, or success - unless that success can be defined by the the well-being of every baby birthed to planet earth for the next 10,000 years. There is a cohort of cocky wonks peering into my screen and determining, either by algorithm or conceit who sees that i write - i spit on your paucity of purpose and delicacy of your ambition. You who determine for others what is and what isn’t of value lack courage about your own place in the world - so much so that you cannot or will not presume the next person you meet in your journey wants the best for you · and that my conceited digital plumber is pathetic. You’ve been turned to the “darkside” and mostly angle for a seat at the “grownup’s” table because you believe that is from where the bounty flows. I spit on your ambition and your lack of imagination for enslaving your souls to a column of +/- 5v pulses easily tweaked by wraiths too tweaked to care. 

The ruling class will not gracefully dethrone themselves - and any delusion to the contrary is fueled by hopes of a place in the next regime or self-centered compensation based on an astute investment that was not meant to benefit anyone but the investee. We live with this reality and people spend money based on appearance and then establish relations intended solely to further that agenda - to you i say, good luck, let me know how that works out for you and your successive generations .  .. ··· We can survive, if we learn to see the other’s safety, comfort, and development as a reflection of our ingenuity and resourcefulness rather than our canny awareness of the vulnerability of those we wish to exploit. The drawing shown with this essay is my effort at a complicated time in my history and the hostile folds made by my own artist mother’s unguarded sentiment about my self portrait. I would be lying to the core of my being to say that the violence she wreaked on my self did not wound me deeply, but i would also be lying to the core of my being to say that the information she gave to me by her act of violence did not school me more deeply than any of the dishonest gestures she has struggled with to express to my siblings honoring in kind her best understanding of love with what she had to work with - the same as me · go mama Go, you are the baddest broad on the block . 

jts 02/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 


Monday, June 1, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 010620 ·


Apparently i haven’t exhausted the meat from 1976, for i woke up this morning thinking about what i’d written; the litany i created for that year - just to keep track of the moving parts was: 5 jobs, 5 residences, broke both hands, 60 stitches in one arm, an industrial size vat of simmering spaghetti sauce poured over the other and rear-ended into the middle of 17th St and Broadway by a truckload of drunken Mexicans. I was driving an Ice-Cube Blue Turquoise Toyota Corona that was the only car i’d ever been given. I’d like to say it was only driven by a little old lady from Pasadena, but my step-mother was close enough - we never bonded, though i may have finally forgiven her for taking a powder when Pop wouldn’t join the Mormon Church; her excuse was that she didn’t want to spend eternity alone - my take is she was fake all along, and just took the ride as far as she could get. I know that my lack of generosity toward her is a lesson i am still puzzling. Back to 1976; at this turn after experimenting with having roommates i realized i needed a locked door, or more fluency with what i thought was passable Spanish but in fact was execrable, and remains so to this day even after recently living in Mexico for close to 2 years.

I had found a 2nd floor room in an old school rooming house on East Broadway in Santa Ana; there may have been as many as 14 rooms with a common kitchen. By this time i was working in an industrial soup kitchen in Irvine, CA - “Todd’s Enterprises”, an irony only to myself because my cheques all read “Joseph T. Stevens.” I had narrowly avoided voluntary induction to the U.S. Army, the thinking being how to finance a college education, and 1976 being a lull in the emerging “war for profit” using an all volunteer army; i tested off the charts - i always do, but the Recruiting Sargent kept looking at my eyes · people always do. When he didn’t return to the office from some necessary cosultation, i chose to Carpe Diem and booked it with my complementary P-38 can opener as a souvenir of the occasion. I couldn’t say exactly where in the sequence of events i was pushed into the middle of 17th and Broadway, but i remember that i couldn’t chase the mother fuckers because their truck had left tire tracks on my trunk and crushed the wheel well to the point of shredding valuable tire tread were i to give chase. 

What i remember is staying with boyhood chum down the street from where i had grown up, and sitting in the bathtub trying to figure out how to soap myself with one hand in a cast and the other covered in gauze where the simmering spaghetti had lifted the skin off of my arm like a skin off a boiled potato. Scott was kool, in a wannabe Trump kind of way if there was such a creature in those days. He was a mechanic poet, who had endured a compound fracture of his thigh bone recently enough to have compassion for my predicament, and very handy with industrial tools of all sorts. The Toyota was a unitized frame so the rear right quarter panel could simply be cut out with an oxy acetylene torch, and with view deft swings of a large size ball peen hammer and a 3 inch diameter marine red lamp mounted in the gaping cavity wired just so, i was street legal again, laughable at stop lights, but street legal. 12 months earlier during anytime in 1976 i was in my element - confident and happy, but terribly alone in city whose only real attraction was museums within walking distance of many subways stops and many, many interesting people.

To give you an idea of how arrogant i was, after two years of intensive studio drawing, before i left NYC for the last time, i burned a stack of drawings 3 inches high in the courtyard of where i was staying in the Lower Eastside. They represented 2 years of work with some of the finest instructors i have known, nor was it simple hubris. The elan of artists at that time and the passion for competent and authentic work was fierce and honorable - product was contemptible · but process was lauded; if you were one with your work there was nothing Art could not accomplish. It was in that spirit, that and a loneliness and longing for family and home that i could not reconcile that drove me back to California and my comeuppance for my lordly thinking and reckoning with just how little the world really believed in the power of creative determination, or more accurately how little i understood about the egos of Pop’s two wive’s - both artists - factored into equation of a precocious, however crazy offspring and his own concepts of what art is, could be, or could have been.

I was not welcome, or more accurately, i was welcomed as long as i adhered to the conventions of a family torn asunder by greed, ego and agism. For the longest time i tried to behave with decorum and respect only to find it was not reciprocal as part of what was to become the “fame game” between these to ex’s. Following on the heels of the desultory 70’s was the roaring 80’s and the two maternal dames beat me to the patron trough. I was on my own; nothing was much different, ma had changed the locks in the house i grew up in when i was 15 - justifiably · i was an “unruly child”. But these were different circumstances than simple differences about upbringing, i was fighting for a passion that had effectively rescued me from a dissipated youth. Rather than fame, what has turned out is my faith in my abilities was mostly denial in the process of becoming human. Art had been a crutch which distracted me from dealing with the wounds of growing up in a family that well-reflected the upending of a civilization born of deceit and based on profit. The superheated art markets of the last 100 years has demonstrated; there is no taking reality away from Paul Cezanne: his conviction, discipline and execution of fine art need no interpreters; but to try and equate value for the works of Kinkade, Neiman, Dali, etc as accomplishment, is like discussing the statesmanship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the same breath as d_rump; comparing a vision of our future between Arundhati Roy and jeffery bezos; or the importance of candor between Walter Winchell and mark zuckerberg - get up on your hind legs humanity and carry yourselves into the future · ain’t nobody else gonna, and ya’ damn sure can’t buy it, or steal it from Target.

jts 01/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 310520 ·


Memorial Day is one of those hinkey holidays like president’s day that used to have a date, but got shifted for commercial reasons - but don’t take my word for it · do your own research. I remember one Memorial Day, which 40 years or so later, remains memorable. I was back in Costa Mesa after conquering the art world of NYC, or so i’d convinced myself at the time & apparently for a long time afterwords; living in a house that was a nexus for many transitional adventures. I was working for “Crazy Cliff”, one of many characters that were about to enter and exit my life at the time. He was older and mysterious having been in prison for “marijuana sales” but living in his Mommy’s house in tony part of Eastside Costa Mesa. Cliff was the character “King Rat” from James Clavell’s novel, only as a felon he’d never served in the military. His business was landscaping and junk, with enough contracts to keep afloat and his right hand man in beer - i was considered temporary, and barely made enough for beer. This particular Memorial day after he’d set up is right hand man, he and i drove in his 54’ faded Teal Green 3/4 ton Chevy to one of the rental yards - i covet that truck to this day, may have even driven it once or twice. 

The only thing about Cliff that you could count on, was the unexpected - that morning was no different. We picked up a contraption that was the weirdest fucking lawnmower i’d ever seen, with metal wheels about 3 feet(1 meter) in diameter in the rear and some kind of swivel mechanism on the handles that made no sense at the time. Cliff liked being mysterious and when asked questions would just bulge his eyes out and look up into your face, because he was short and pugnacious in a gregarious kind of way. We drove some distance out of Costa Mesa using mostly alleys, and pulled up to a gate, yanking the contraption off the back. With some trouble, he was able to push the gate open to reveal a yard about the size of a little league diamond 60 feet(20 meters) to a side, could’a been smaller, but not by much. The weeds in the yard were foxtails taller than Cliff. The trick to operating this contraption was to push down on the handle such that rotary blades could be gently dropped onto the offending vegetation in such a way, one did not stall the engine or jam the rotors. It was late may, so the vegetation was no longer green, but early enough in the day for much of it close to the ground to me moist enough to gum up the rotors or stall the motor - 2 cycle engines have a rope crank, and i won’t try to explain what that means to all you, neophytes in the audience. 

Cliff made a cursory demonstration and was out the gate to be gone for the rest of that very long Memorial day. The owner of the house was a kindly sort and took pity after a 1/3 got cut to ground and brought water. I was goofy strong in those halcyon days, and actually got closer to completion prior to exhaustion than i would have imagined before this experience - like the man said “you gotta know your limitations.” I don’t remember the particulars, whether the debris was picked up, if it was dark before Cliff got back or whether i woke up the next day or not. He got the weirdest contracts: one time dragging trimmed Cypress off the glass enclosed patio where Coast Highway is no longer Corona Del Mar except the patio was lined by the early version of astro-turf and the owner was retentive to beat the band; another occasion a line of apartment yards fronting Susan Street in Santa Ana, easily 3 football fields in length, or it just seemed that way. Cliff was a character and was the first in my memory to suggest adversity was a great advantage rather than a curse to the idyllic Lotus Eating quest for the perfect high of the time. His expression, from his guru, (talk about your cognitive dissonance) problems are like traction in mud - they give you something to dig into.

Ultimately, Cliff was a Con to the bone because everything was based on keeping the other in the dark to your advantage, or retrieve castoffs he wanted to decorate his Mommy’s house with. I have to distrust those who are not forthright - who will not declare up front the agenda and intent, but i learned a lot from Cliff, like learning to see behind the curtain. In his case it was a 57 T-Bird 2-tone Coupe that you could just see through the smudged window of the garage in the back, if you moved the flower pot with the plastic flowers on the shelf full of pots of plastic flowers. Would that were all i learned from Cliff, or that i had learned more than i could have, my life may have been much different, but the story doesn’t end there. Some time later in the company of my new paramour who had either just become, or was to become my 1st wife, we visited Cliff, thinking she might be impressed by the caliber of people i knew - little did i know. In our short visit, Cliff proceeded to cock-block me and ask Joy point blank, “are you free and unencumbered.” I must have been in the thrall of both to ignore her affirmative response, but too hungry and ignorant to let her out at the next corner.

Instead we drove back to my back bedroom of a duplex the creative owner had divided into a triplex where upon she turned to me on the couch and said, “what can you tell me about Cliff?” In those days i had much repressed emotion that i didn’t pay much attention to, and little restraint on my behavior. The only response i could muster was to turn away from her and pivot in my seat to hit the wall with my closed fist. I had grown up in the modern houses whose walls were gypsum board with much give, but this house was old school - lathe and plaster and my outer 5th Metacarpal of my right hand gave way before the wall did. By the time this particular learning experience reached a conclusion i had married and divorced Joy, broke the same bone on my left hand and while it was in a cast rent a gash in my right arm requiring 60 stitches - 1976 was a long year, but ultimately very useful for distinguishing fact from fiction when faced with wants vs facts. It is difficult anymore to supersede the behavior of people with a desire born of an unexamined desire or belief. I may not want to die, but i am going to - i may want to kill you, but that doesn’t require me to act on that impulse. It is a good thing to live deep within one’s soul for there are few people who give a fuck about what they are experiencing, much less have an active interest in your understanding of the world - peace and love people · everything else is bullshit.

jts 31/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Extinction Chronicles - 300520 ·


For two days i have written about problematic things, and for two days i have not posted - so for all my disclaimers to the contrary, i balk at sharing some things, or i process shit differently · and beat myself up for being different. Anymore, i’m not sure, and i feel safer there than with the conviction i listen to and watch in the world. My parents were both teachers, for a pa a vocation; ma, an escape pod. Hers was a torturous experience teaching art to the well-heeled children of Newport Beach, CA.; pa’s last transition included his “poetry class” coming to the locked facility where he was deemed safe from his “diagnosed” non compos mentis state of mind. He loved the process of helping others to find their passion - ma struggled with spoiled children who didn’t appreciate the opportunity she provided them to expand their horizons. He crashed into a low water-dam for the “designed-accessible” shower his next to last domicile had provided. Ma quit washing dishes about 15 years ago, and from what news i can gather from my passive-aggressive siblings with a penchant for hoarding news, she fares well in a Covid-19 high-risk old people place for the well-heeled.

Mark Twain said somewhere, and i’ve never been able to find where in hyper-text “those things I despise most in others, I find in myself to a greater or lesser degree.” And like Madam Paradox and her minion, this poses thorny issues each time i am inclined to point the “fickled-finger-of—fuck-off-and-die” at D_rump and his spiral descent into infamy. Much less my siblings whom i’ve deemed too toxic with whom to tarry, but find dislodging from the heart a cavernous task. Mostly because i find their echoes in each challenging relation, i’d rather not have. It is at precisely that locus where shit gets dodgy, for it is not the person i am resisting, but the aspect of my own unpalatable history which eludes resolution. Yet Madam Paradox dictates - non-acceptance is surrender to the lord god Ego. I think pop was hot on the trail when he was committed to a locked facility - Fun is the answer, for from fun, follows happiness. I am certain master Thich Nhat Hanh is enjoying a far more profound happiness with his measured breathing and relentless facing of facts, but still - a shot of good bourbon goes a long way in the struggle for joy.

Name of my first wife - Joy; that should give you a clue how much of a misnomer names can be. “Life” for example in the dictionary, “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change prior to death.” I’m not going to get tedious with a blow by blow contradiction, but to say that a rock does not grow, even if it grows smaller, or that if you cleave it just so, there are two where there was one, or that a step on a cathedral floor has no significant place in the universe - if anything · a rock like an irrational number will reduce itself to its constituent matter, but never be destroyed. “Newton’s Law of Conservation of Mass.” What in the world would suggest that we humans, or living matter would behave any differently than inanimate matter¿ that’s a question.?

If anything the intrusion of consciousness into the equation seems to render cogent creatures far dumber than their insentient counterparts who have no trouble with accepting their role in a chaotic universe; transitioning to different functions - entirely at peace with a single rule of the universe · “change is constant.” While we mortals make haste to preserve the unpreservable with myth and money as our primary levers to alter the inalterable · to stop change. This goofy ambition, so close to my heart as to condemn me to a life of carving 3-Dimensional objects i cannot see with my uniquely 2-Dimensional eyesight; small wonder i would hanker for a the hand of Madam Paradox - though she has exposed me repeatedly for the charlatan i am, and as which i will likely die · lucky me. So if life is all smoke and mirrors with each of us popping in and out the the other’s lives as though our presence has significance - who’s to say we don’t. Why is not possible that some curious youth didn’t read some editions of the “Extinction Chronicles” and decide for themself - “no i am not doomed” · it is a phantasmagoria and there is not determined outcome, but death .  ..  ···

Which according to Newton’s Law of “Conservation of Mass” and myself being comprised of mass, with a sentient twist cannot perish and so need no armature of myth or money to hold me aloft in the cosmos¿ it’s a fair question, however unlikely to be answered in this or any other chronicle found here on earth or in our hiccup of time. I will say, given the torment of the last two posts - it is a relief to once again find fun in the act of asking questions, questions without answers, but questions all the same. Now whether to move to Hue, or remain in the land of delusional hyper-entrepreneurial “build-it-and-the-will-come-and-destroy-5-centuries-of-agrarian-solidarity”, i don’t know. I do know when the borders open and the capitalists are reunited with their capital, it will be very difficult for the local farmers to resist the rampant speculation that breeds the blood-in-the-water behavior of every greedy soul that has walked the surface of our planet, and i know i’d rather be in the arms of a loving woman who admires the miles i’ve managed to endure with my unconventional approach to growth as pertains the species - so what am i gonna do · change the rhythm of the “Gimme, Gimme Tango” or find a sweetheart that wants to teach me how to grow ginger and turmeric for our romantic dinners - tough call · eh ¿? that’s not really a question .  .. ··· ciao baby, see ya’ in the funny papers.


jts 30/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞ 

Extinction Chronicles - 290520 ·


Drinking my morning coffee and having my 1st cigarette of the day - i could not locate my walking stick and after a 1st, 2nd and 3rd search of the house · assumed the worst. My neighbor Mr. Tranh, was minding his own business and about to begin his day’s labor; I had to share my pain with somebody, he was it. I couldn’t contain my anguish and sweeping up the debris of the shedding tree was not enough to banish the evil suspicion that because i couldn’t find my walking stick, it thereby had to have been stolen by some hateful wretch who coveted my labor and wanted me to know how unwelcome i am Vietnam · i can only apologize for my unfair accusation about all the people of Vietnam. This meanness was born of an unwillingness to peer into the recesses of my own soul and confront the pettiness of my being and the scope of my own fears. And as Dr. “Mac” MacO’lash might have said to me - “well that’s kind of mean”

What began as a hideous day with fears about an entire nation ended with an exquisite downpour on the porch of my kind neighbors - the same people i as much as accused of stealing my conceit, as i had judged determined to vanquish me from this land of mystery. Nor is it the first time in my history i have experienced such irrational threat: driving to NYC, 1st or 2nd time i don’t remember - what i do remember is sitting in the passenger seat of a “cooperatively rented conveyance” at the apogee of the counter-culture entirely certain that the 10 or so other human beings reacting unfavorably to my obnoxious fear and contrary nature were arrayed and prepared to set my out of the van at the earliest opportunity. Sitting here now - i realize that my fears at that time echoed earlier journey’s whereupon older siblings in greater solidarity, excluded me and made clear my unwelcome · and today i have a younger sibling who has taken umbrage to my non-responsiveness to banking queries has, again “shut me out.” Not because he is a vicious mean spirited human being, but because he is approximating the feeling he experienced by not hearing from me in a timely manner about fiduciary concerns that he had kindly undertaken on my behalf.

“If you think everything is someone else’s fault, your will suffer a lot; when you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.” - 14 Dalai Lama · Man, when you’re right, you’re right. How do you argue with the facts. There is also talk about radical accountability, as an inveterate “free thinker” i have much to account for - and teasing guilt from shame is not always clear. I am, and have been in a great deal of pain for a very long time; i have yet to learn how to distinguish emotional from the physical. I know from personal experience that depression can animate physical distress, not just from my own experience but listening the to the stories of others as we try to understand our shared contours. Couple that with a righteous fury toward a family that has committed betrayals that were inexcusable as a unit, but entirely “passable” as grown ass adults. For example - left 4 years of drawings, as fine as i could make in a flat file within the jurisdiction of a mother who could barely stand my birth, much less my existence.

My eldest brother when the time came accused me of “living off the fat of the land” expecting to find my work in tact where i had left it.” That is an injustice that i must swallow for the vanity of a man that has turned his back to me from the time i squalled like a stuck pig at the torment he felt was my lot as the younger “identified patient” on the other side of his cloying and as vain as my beautiful mother could ever be if she lived to a “hundred” - she is 92 and going well in the midst of a viral epidemic · she has good teeth, the only useful thing my sister ever shared with me about our mutual upbringing, floss your teeth. I sustained myself growing up with “mea culpa”, but as i near my intersection with the great beyond, it lacks nutrients. What i struggle for in my end days is usefulness, either with words, actions or both. I would like to nurture you as much as i may with what patience i have left, yet i have learned at a late date - it is a good thing to “leave the table when love is no longer being served.” - Nina Simone.

So what to do - there has been a blessed rain storm today that has blunted the cruel heat that regardless of how acclimatized you might be, by birth or discipline will be become only more lethal as time marches across our once benign planet. I am not reconciled to this outcome, no matter how you dress it up as “development” or ______ fill in the blank: stupid people are making book on how stupid you are, and if that is not the height of folly, i don’t know what is. I have few years left - i would prefer they be spent in the loving embrace of one i can adore - the prospects are not good. The locals view me with patience and tolerance, because they have a war torn logic that separates the lethal, from the bullshit - it is what i love about VN. Whether that translates into a companionship with some loving other that can look past my decrepitude to the earnest lad still wondering where his mother’s hand went on the 1st day of school is anybody’s guess  - i know i am still wondering. 

jts 29/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
 ∞