190620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

the "art industrialist's concept of elan" - Hollywood, CA; 2012 ·

“Tabula Rasa” - i remember the first time i’d ever heard the expression; i was passionately in love with a 2nd cousin twice-removed who lived a mere 853 miles from where i lived at the time. Our correspondence was old school, there were no cell phones, no internet - and each exchange was a relief from the vacuum of waiting · ah, romance, ya’ can’t beat it with a stick, nor can you convert into bytes, or emoticons. For all my garrulous ways, i am remarkably reserved - thank god for education. One of my formative high school experiences was to enact scenes from “Inherit the Wind” with an elder classmate - he as Clarence Darrow, i as William Jennings Bryant. I’d have liked to remain closer to my counterpart in this vignette, but like my 2nd cousin twice removed - some things are just not fated to be. It is the story and the points made by the authors of “Inherit the Wind” which was about the Scope’s Monkey Trials in Tennessee. He, Scopes was a high school teacher who was charged with and prosecuted for teaching “evolution” in the schools. The authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert “E”dwin Lee used keen metaphors to dismantle the stigma of change.

“When we invented the telephone, we lost the charm of distance” bellowed the character of Clarence Darrow at the aged, overmatched, proselytizing William Jennings Bryant - an ironically populist character advocating many progressive values, but locked into a “vision” passing out of favor. Oh that we could call on the spirit of Master Mark Twain to guide us through eddies and sand-bars we face in our shorter and shorter trek on this river of life to the ocean of eternity - that some time back could have been a simple transition from living to dead; but because of the egregious greed of a handful of gluttons modeling eat all you can before anyone else can take a bite, or as the Sioux Nation has so accurately described the “white man” - Wasichu · he who takes all the fat from the bone. I understand this moniker, ironically, emotionally and culturally: my family is pretty in a “privileged kind of way,” & as it would happen, the two eldest are the prettiest - almost like the story of Cinderella · except my oldest brother is not evil and my older sister is as i experience her, simply existentially forlorn. 

I, however am nothing but thrifty clean and reverent - noble honest and true · lacking fault or fiction except that which all can see . pretty much, everything. What the fuck do i have to hide¿ i’m gonna die just like you - only i got a little further along and my cover only depends on enough protein to keep me alive and rest enough for me to not go “crazy.” Just now as part of my cover, i was trimming the green plants that are only in the houses of the foreigners for effect, i think likely because the locals believe the expats too stupid to grow food for purpose, but no one will say this to my face. There is simply an unrelenting air of contempt and hostility toward anyone not homegrown or vetted to the nines as _____fill in the blank. I’ve never been good at fitting a mold to someone els’s specifications, as ma - she tried for many a long year for me to fit her version of “okay.” In the end, she simply forbade entree and commanded those in control that i was persona non-grata. 

That is a harsh thing to conceive about one’s parent, but a harsher thing to ignore and not embrace as a condition of loving the world around you: women, children, brothers, fathers and wanna be friends. I have just now staunched the flow of blood from a finger i cut in my yard - a yard as near as i can tell, i am no longer welcomed to - how would that be for me as a soul with a family i do not have, or more accurately, a family who will not own me as a member? I don’t know, but there is no other outcome but to discover that truth - how sad · how joyous. They are flip sides of the same coin. The hamlet i live in is counting on an influx of renters they hate on sight - not because the influx is evil or wrong, but because the premise is unnatural and ill-conceived. The movie “Field of Dreams” is a link in the chain of fantasy about the “infinite growth paradigm”.

We live on a finite ecosphere, governed by lunatics claiming license over water, air, food, time and resources - with nary a whimper of organized objection. The media moguls who manage appearance and attractiveness have determined what is fuckable, what is disgusting, what is jailable and what is worthy of extraction, while the “intellectually acute,” assume pretty postures of preening for the camera that counts only for the seconds it transmits; what horse shit is that? There are a handful of punk-ass pretty boys and girlfriends galore that are punking an entire planet for a few weeks of celebrity focus - and i’m very sorry to tell you all · go fuck yourselves. If in your daily effort you are not searching for ways to relieve the burden of hypocrisy, stupidity and fakeness from every corner of your world - you are my enemy and will remain so to my dying breath. Having said that, if any of you bodacious spirits would like to engage or have cojones enough to quarrel my position - step right up you pinche putas and tell me to my face your objections to my arguments, rather than the pissant backstabbing posturing of an arrogant occupying force, lacking the courage to fly a flag that is the modus-operandi of the current security apparatus.

jts 19/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 180620 ·

What would a world that was based on love and generosity look like¿ I was raised to believe that was the world i was living in, but the same people teaching me this assertion were brutally dishonest and criminally self-involved - i love them all to this day · However i have found in the course of mending from these realizations - real or imagined, that distance is the safest course for them and myself. I learned well how to peer into the soul of another and identify those needy places, only because it seemed that is all i had to offer the world - a reservoir of need. Because of this skill and the ability to perceive others wielding such, i have found too many who value that capacity for no more than the advantage it affords them. I sort of understand delusions about control, mostly in the sense of resistance. I can accept other’s hunger for that illusion until it crosses over the line and becomes an issue of “will i, or won’t i”?

For me it is best to move away from that kind of energy - it is too taxing to demonstrate the delusion of such thinking and generally results in humiliation · never a useful emotion. I like like love, always have, and have no clue about keeping it around - except by exertion. Nearly anything i’ve ever done that was fun or constructive involved some act, or many small acts of love. What i have yet to learn is how to inculcate that intellectual conviction into my soul; or more accurately to displace the influence of self-serving personalities in my history without hating on them - hatred being he “goto” emotion of post WWII euro-centric thinking. I was too young to be a proper hippie, and only got the dope, and electric thrill of charged music which was making huge profits for a handful of cultural traitors. Now, having invested years of my existence in the myth of common ground, i have reached an age where death is a more companionable companion that many of the giddy youth i find occupying the tavern tables of my own young years.

This conceit, however does not absolve me from wanting to share precaution with strangers or other “travelers,” a McCarthy era dog whistle for communists. I like communists, some of my best friends have been communists; but as a worker i have yet to be well-served by any union representative - now that i am retired · i doubt the Unions will lift a hand to protect my social security, money i have paid and am owed. Not in the sense of entitlement, or privilege - just simple quid-pro-quo. I have been taken by thugs for money due me from a settlement for a ruptured eardrum when young. I was wrong to speculate, like all “lumpenproletariate” are, but not so wrong that what is mine - becomes yours. It waa a bitter lesson to learn at too young an age - but harder to know for certain · family is no guarantee of loyalty.

I am a man without a country - living in a land of solidarity with socialism, if you are of the correct racial composition, or are of an entrepreneurial ilk from the land i was raised in which at one time in recent history waged an unconscionable war of egregious violence, culturally, morally and materially - but now is being welcomed as an example of “proper” profit taking - as they say in BLM or Antifa, FTS - like WTF, but different. For me it used to be a race with time for that moment when my cultural patience would cross over the line and i would become “collectible.” Now thanks to good karma hygiene and emotional reticence, there is a good chance that i will recede into the fabric of mineral matter that i have staked so much of my life upon and become indecipherable from any of the other veins that make up this miraculous molten sheen of moisture we, who used to be known as “human beings” will ride into the long forgotten ages.

I read an account once that said it was not intellect that served our species best, but patience. In this study the author asserted that it was not the ability of our kind to corral greater amounts of protein to feed our growing greed, but the ability to out wait the prey. The author made a solid argument that the hunter of the gazelle enjoyed its flesh only after an exhaustive run whereupon the gazelle, though capable of fleeing time and again, was not able to anticipate the determination of the hungry hunter who simply ran again each time the gazelle stopped. It is this same place i believe we as a species find ourselves, though we are surrounded by plenty, but immersed in dearth. The profit takers are little more than gazelles running each time mankind approaches and declares it hunger - they can run for so long because they are fleet of foot and nimble with wealth, but ultimately unsuited for the game of survival - bon appetite mes amis · share wisely.

jts 18/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 170620 ·

I once sat on a couch in Santa Ana, CA with a loaded rifle in my mouth, my toe on the trigger, and a quart of “Mickey’s Big Mouth” balanced in the corner; i’ve also been addicted to endorphins running barefoot @ low tide between the piers in Santa Monica listening to an iPod i won’t tell you how much i spent keeping fed with iTunes - apple inc. boosted close to a $1,500 in music i bought and paid for but can’t play because of a change in email address that doesn’t “compute.” I do not share these highly personal experiences to be your buddy, because we are not buddies and you’d have contacted me if you wished to explore common ground. The most important reason i have to write to you each day is to share any ideas that might help you or yours to survive our impending extinction; i could give a fuck if you see it coming or are in the “waiting room for rapture.”

I am asymmetric, but spent the better part of my young existence attempting to resolve the differences between my right and left sides. I have an older brother, i’ve spoken of too often who could spend hours staring in the mirror - yet when i looked, all i could see is _____ fill in the blank - it was not favorable · i thought it was his fault, because what i saw so matched the language he used with me, but differed with the confusion with which  i wept myself to sleep, and he’s not a bad guy. In fact he was a hero who taught me to not trust heroes, how much more heroic can you get? (for those just tuning in - that is a what is known as a “left-handed” compliment - sincere · without sincerity.

“Snarky” is the attribute media used to describe each of us destroying the other without ever actually owning the act. So here we sit within an inch of our lives, frightened by intimacy, intimidated by power, grieving loss we were never allowed to own. All for the name of “profit,” as though if you could accrue enough LIKES, CASH, or FRIENDS; like some scene out of Vegas the lights will pop up or the ghost of Groucho’s toy duck might plop down in front of your current hurrah and declare vindication for all your suffering - bullshit · you stupid motherfuckers. That was a joke engineered by a freeman to keep you humble about the hijacking of your world by a group of thugs that sat in the wings with goodies that had no bearing and never meant anything to you but surprise.

I could be wrong, but you’ll have to stand in line with the rest of the “cultural anthropologists” waiting to declare my thinking heretical. (a clue for the hungry, line up behind my family, they have the “inside dope”). Secrets are what i really wanted to talk about in this and most essays, but it took me all this time to approach such an explosive concept. In a universe so vast we have yet to fathom its dimensions, it is pure conceit that there is anything in our personal lives worthy of interest. What i find for myself is the illusion there is someone, somewhere laughing at something i think only i know about myself - that my friends, is funny.

But when you amplify that by all the sordid secrets we firmly believe ourselves capable of keeping, or keeping others from - the notion of hiding becomes ludicrous. If you sit in front of any table on the planet long enough · all you wish to be revealed to you will be. Don’t believe - develop adequate patience to discover the fact for yourself, then call me a liar. I only wish to speak with the authority on love, for i know there is at least one person who has parsed the subject better than myself, and who may be willing to share those discoveries that may help me be better to the woman, or women i have yet to love. I know that so far, i have not been successful; that each time i have tried to take love - she has shown me it is only something one can give, but only when one is open enough to receive. This is a confusing conundrum for me - only because that love i hold in reserve is the same love that she requires to free me · 

and you doubt for a second that g_d is a feminine spirit - jajaja ·  

jts 17/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 160620 ·

Like a cave painter in Lascaux trying to fathom which imagery is going to add to the flesh from a hunt - i ponder what and how i can find anything useful to you in this time of trouble · Some of you are so absorbed in your misery, that waking up from a blow to the side of your head would be little different to you than your normal, “rest,” or so i imagine. I was raised to believe in “all things possible” about the same time jfk was murdered in cold blood, in plain sight - successfully · The flip side of that equation is what the ruling class must parse in the next few years to evade vile consequence for vile behavior. I don’t know what the answer is, but i’m fairly confident that i am more ready to stare death in its eye, than many of my “kindred spirits.” There is residual - neenure, neenure, neenure, in such an arrogant assertion - but take a look around you people · an entire species has been sold down the river for a few wanks on the ole’ pecker; go ahead - tell me again what’s stupid .  ..

I can only measure my efficiency by comprehension - face to face · as “dual-orb·cyclops”, i’ve found damn few capable of looking me in the eye and pull a con at the same time · and yes, that is a very lonely place to be. Last night - late i considered a patch over one way a way to reconcile myself to an irreconcilable world. I do not own a phone, though i am registered in the “DB” as super user - this anomaly alone rises my profile to the surface of “algorithm” anomalies.” It does not mean that the reviewing agency a-la “Blade Runner” has any better understanding about my communication on “my” channel, only that those who can parse how easily we are divided and sifted also know how savvy “we” are to to the digital betrayal of those with resources, are to those without. 

Try and excavate your gray matter from the pool of fictional worth, back into the planet of love and value - please · you claim penetrating awareness about the value of “tallying” and for all who read and are honest with themselves - “tallying” is really lame, when you consider those who do the counting, vs those who do the “paying.” Everybody would like to win, except that what it is to “win” has taken on such suspect notions as “like it or leave it,” or “the fuck are you looking at¿ her gun is much bigger than yours”. Who’s kidding who - no i am not as sober as you, i do not have as consecutive family history as yours, and yes, of course you know many more ‘important peole than i’.

But still, i gotta ask you, “how is it just because you command greater attention, more resource and greater cultural loyalty, does your pitch have more validity than my own questionable and unworthy efforts toward ‘ecological, gender, political and cultural solidarity¿, that is a question? I got little left to lose, some flesh, a little soul and a whole lot of misery i’m willing to own, whence i find ‘face’ enough to step up and say ______ fill in the blank, and there a lot of “spitting, askance glances and chickenshit unsupported and why and wherefore points that might render better benefit for the all, rather than the curious overthrow of nothing - .  .. ··· but the horse you rode in on . 

jts 16/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 150620 ·

“Make it simple, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein. I feel good for doing something, like riding my bicycle each morning along the same route, not really exploring but seeing more and more each day. Perhaps it is like that with families, i don’t know because the “terms of endearment” for my own family required a fealty, i feel is insulting to my soul. I accept full responsibility for my decision and so live a life outside the bosom of belonging - it is so painful that just now i will interrupt this work to post Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” on the nazi utility - fb (i treat it more like a note in bottle, than any actual communications channel)· Hank was born on my birthday, and i was born on his birthday the year he died. My oldest brother once found a catsup bottle sealed with wax and a note inside petitioning a rescue by any Chinese Prince who found the bottle which washed up on the shores of Honeyman State Park, OR - 1960·something· after having been launched from a bridge over the Columbia River by a 13 year old, or so girl and her younger brother 70 or some years earlier.

As luck would have it, our family was camped next to another family who lived near the town with the bridge from which this catsup bottle was tossed into the Columbia River - when they returned they did some researched and discovered the 80 year old, or so woman who recalled the event, and who was astonished to find, rather than some Chinese Prince coming to her rescue, it was a post pubescent teenager from Orange County California with a sharp eye in the driftwood piles left from a tidal wave some years earlier who had discovered her “message in a bottle.” I could give a fuck if you believe this, for it is shared for no other reason than to confirm the “synchronicity” of a world we are about to be chased out from by a handful of amoral sociopaths with nothing more than profit on their minds to show for it - that my friends is sad beyond all meaning and definitions one might find in a world with very little but sad to explain its short presence in paradise. 

So sad that the same brother in this story won’t address me to my face for the pain he cleaves to in his heart from an open-hearted discourse in the presence of our sire, which i understood to be for no other reason than a “clear the air, encounter” but for which he apparently found nothing useful in my gut-wrenching disclosure of the pain i felt from having been his next younger brother · nor is this discussion meant to be a come on con for us to be friends. I am hearing the farmer father next door working with his son to teach him how to build a bamboo door, and my heart is full. Not because the better part of my day was with the feeling of tears welling up behind my eyeballs with no place to go, but because my friend the farmer and his son have a chance at reconfiguring a world gone haywire and for all the loneliness i might be feeling - the reality is i sit very close to the very best our world has to offer.

We all do - that is what i learned from my father when i would whine to him about my misery · “everyone is feeling a similar suffering” he would say to me, and in the next breath he would point to a glass of water and ask the confused waitress to put her finger in the glass for him. When she’d ask “why” his reply was - “because it is not ‘sweet enough’.” We are each other’s keepers and i do not know how to convey to my own brother - “i am not damaged from your cruelty, i am damaged from my own cruelty - please be kind to yourself.” Time is short, and i find it a challenge to ride my bicycle, time and again over the same route, as though i might develop more patience or see greater meaning in my journey. I’m beginning to suspect, just as pop had pointed out “everyone is suffering” that everyone is searching for meaning that is right in front of them.

As my friends the farmers close up their life door, and the son has an experience to reflect on the rest of his life, i can hope for all who read these feeble phrases - there is meaning all around you, and our world is rich with purpose. It is not going to be found in the tiny screens beseeching you for your hard-earned attention, but in each moment you can find to share with your parent or your progeny. Each of us has a right to be at peace, and if you cannot make peace for another - the very least you can do is to work tirelessly at not depriving peace from another, be that someone who has deliberately and maliciously maligned or harmed you to the very core of your being, or to own the damage done to you by those you have relied on for support only to find an empty embrace or vacant place in your own heart you must take possession of or relinquish agency. 

jts 15/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 140620 ·

I have been watching reruns of series from u.S. television - 70’s to 80’s to 90’s · if you asked me why, i’d likely spew vomit explaining such stupidity; yet from an anthropological place it makes sense to try and understand from whence you came. But does it inoculate me from what comes next - will my having witnessed my surrender twice make my betrayal of truth any less venal¿ Let us together walk that road and find some truth - yes? At 65 years of age i am barely digging out from under shit poured on my soul by people i loved and trusted, so forgive me if i find your disinterest in what i share worthless.

I no longer understand what others need, yet i have a compulsion to give; this irrational behavior give others my quotient of beer because somehow i believe it helps them to feel “not ripped off” - i cannot protect you from what you feel, i can barely keep straight what goes on within me. I love and am betrayed, time and again - it is not the other’s fault but my own. My only responsibility to the world we live in is to continue my solitary effort to love and be loved.

It is lonely, and sad, but also rich with learning. I accept that what i feel is mine alone and not the result of any other spirit or prior payback. If i go after someone for revenge that is on me; i have long since given up the irrational belief that if i can cause pain in another, somehow my suffering will be lessened. What i have yet to arrive at is coincidence with love whereupon the joy i have felt and understand is available with each breath is also a birthright that is not removed from me for wrong behavior. I do not behave wrongly when i have a choice; sometimes i am repulsed by the ugliness i perceive in others - only to find that perception resides wholly within me.

If i find no friends in my life - it is not because i do not have friends, but because i insist on a version of reality that conforms with a spurious assumption · i am unlovable. There is no one on the planet that can remedy such a delusion but myself, and that is a hard pill to swallow. This also means that if there is love in my world, it is as the Beatles righteously declared “.  .. in the end the love you take is equal to the love, you make.” What a privilege to live within such dynamic bookends of a civilization that still, as we speak remains viable and capable of distributing care and concern to a population of over 7 billion human beings torn and wounded by their own minds by the minds of a handful for other humans who deserve little more than patient compassion for a wound inflicted by greed and solidified by hatred. 

The fact remains that there is nothing we cannot accomplish using what C.G. Jung described as “archetypal awareness” of our collective subconscious - and i hate to tell you this, this late in the game - but his reasoning makes a whole lot more sense than a lot of bullshit i hear, and read on a daily basis. From here on out in this, today’s daily purge, i am “phoning it in.” Sign off as though there is anything else to be gained by reading to the bitter end - but know this · if you take an incense stick and soak it in Peppermint oil and burn it in a house full of any size rat Mischief, they will turn tail and run just like telling a fascist to his face - you’re not only ugly, but you’re stupid · SOLIDARITY  

jts 14/06/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 130620 ·

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." 

"To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

― Michel de Montaigne

The talking heads are bandying about with figures of 120,000-140,000 Americans dead by the 4th of July - today, there are 116,000 · according to the NY Times. There are still medical personnel wearing trash bags for scrubs while police in the latest military assault uniforms have arrested 10,000 people protesting the murder of George Floyd and continuing assault by police against citizens exercising their constitutional right to redress their grievances. The 2nd wave of virus death has not begun, but the 3rd wave of climate havoc is only a faint swell still far out at sea - how are you doing ?

If you feel the need to give jeffery bezos one more thin dime to bolster your flagging self-esteem with another vanity purchase, i propose instead that you send me a nickel of that dime and i will personally send you an authored paragraph affirming my respect for you as an valiant resistor of consumer fraud and my solidarity with you on the front lines of change. Each and every nickel you send to me will go to buying food for hungry children. Laugh if you must, but you also know that what i say is true and it beats the shit out of buying gilded toilet paper for one of jeffery’s palaces - you’d be 5¢ richer, instead 10¢ poorer, you do the math. This is not rocket science - $50 billion in stimulus money, aka your tax dollar went to schnooks lacking the testicles to step up and their ill-gotten gains out of the public trough - what kind of chickenshit tough guy are you to let a “suit” rob you without a raising a finger in your defense - i don’t give a fuck how deep in the heart of Texas you life · you a punk in the neighborhoods i’ve spit on grufyti in.

It is love that will preserve us, and if you look to your left or to your right - you will find yourself sitting next to somebody who cares more deeply about your world than any avatar you hope to find scrolling on this contraption. Don’t believe me, i’ve been trolling for love in the digital universe since before 976 party lines and have yet to find one sincere exchange more meaningful than the “fuck you” in the eyes of the clerk i paid good money to for a wilted cheeseburger or broken bean burrito. The flip side of the coin is that each of you who are reading this chronicle has a personal story about having had a bad day reversed by one simple - “i feel you” · or “thanks for your kind comment.” It is this power of horizontal distribution that the corporate digital overlords have attempted to hijack for personal gain - rather than propagate as a greater good · ladies and gentleman, that manifestation of greed is rather than pathetic - an abomination worthy of outrage, censure and stringent closure like an gaping wound in your body you understand must be staunched and then healed.

Again, it is not rocket science. Due to my goofy eyesight i’d be willing to bet i have enjoyed more personal injuries than odds dictate. From that unique roll of dice, i possess a formidable understanding about capacity for healing which few of you reading this could begin to imagine - even the homies with multiple gunshot & knife wounds would be hard-pressed to match misery with misery · lucky me. I built a surfboard in the garage of the house i grew up in; after waiting patiently for the fiberglass to cure i used a double boiler to melt the paraffin to pour over the virgin surface - the aged saucepan didn’t make it to the surface of the virgin board and instead poured over my bare foot, possibly the same foot which the 5th metatarsal was to be broken a few short years later on the same right side i was to pour an industrial vat of spaghetti sauce over my forearm which was to own a broken 5th metacarpal a few short years after - it is not “accident prone” it is luck of the draw. Just like you born at the moment an entire species became aware of its fragile mortality.

I refuse to accept that all the spirits and misbegotten lives i have intersected with in my short trajectory on the “3rd Rock from the Sun” has been for naught; sitting just now on my porch nursing the last of my “medicine”, i believe it is possible to make another stand regardless of the of simpletons arrayed in front of me. I have been carving stone for the better part of my life, enough to have more than years of labor stolen for no other reason than gratuitous greed. I am inured somewhat to the cruelty of our times and remain faithful to the origin of our species - cooperation. We did not crawl out from under animal blood lust without a healthy measure of mutual organization - the sort of organization that is not found in the back channels of sordid transactions between amoral corporate cowards and other amoral corporate cowards. I am addressing the sort of initial cooperation between stalwart humans capable and willing to outrun an animal buck for the protein it could afford a small tribe of like minded hominids. I could give a fuck, if you are Neanderthal or pure bred Australopithecus, as long as you are gentle with children and kind to old people.    

jts 13/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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