030720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Closing my favorite writing table at the old Dingo Deli - preparing to find a new favorite writing table when it opens at its new location on Sunday the 5th. I felt the best show of solidarity i could observe is to bring business as it closes and then bring business as it opens. This morning while restocking from “Refillables” an eco-friendly store doing its level best to relive the landfills here i, of course, forgot the peppercorn. The proprietor is as close to kindred spirit i have found, but i have no way to know if that feeling is more a function of communication between peers or actual understanding. She has been here much longer and acclimated well as anybody .  .. ···: the proprietor of D-Deli just passed by and took a load off for a moment to share. He’s a grand fellow in an “old-school” kind of way. It is a relief to reach a place in my own dismantling of the ego to hear more clearly the lives of others, and how their own processes have informed their struggles. I realize that i need very much to stay open and not react to anything, rather peer at patterns as they emerge without judgement and share what i know when useful to what i see emerging.

Though try as you might that will never be possible. For example, they are moving the kitchen past where i sit, and as always it is the simple truths: plugs getting run over, dirty equipment carrying dirt to the new location - but Gordon bless his heart is much like Freidemman Mausch with a radically open heart · i recognize, but have yet to manifest, or have manifested but don’t recognize in myself just yet. What’s really neat about what i am witnessing just now is its heroic aspect - i guess a little bit like the city fathers of Hoi An realizing there is a tsunami of worldwide interest in their city which they are doing their best to accommodate, even if the response is one dimensional by adding housing units to meet demand, rather than peering deeper into the future and examining how can the community be best served and the energy of such demand be harnessed wisely.

My last recommendation to Gordon was to get someone assigned to taking video footage of the move - i try to imagine those aspects of any event that get lost, like children in shopping malls, and old people without children during holidays. He is elated with his accomplishment, and it is a fine feeling to witness. Our world would be a better place to live if more people could enjoy the type of success Gordon has arrived at. What i perceive is best about this event is Gordon is outside of his own ego and only dealing with what i used to experience when the point of the pencil dissolved into the portrait in process; i miss that aspect of the creative process and wait for it to occur while i write. It may that solipsistic essays are too thin a vehicle, it may be i am old and the elan has been beaten from my being, or it may just be too fucking hot and my patience is cowering in the corner frightened by a world disintegrating around me.

I have drunk 4 Heinekens and have only finished 3 paragraphs of today’s essay; a fairly apt metaphor for the world we occupy. In Vino Veritas has it’s limits and even the ancient cultures that employed such a crude metric for ascertaining accuracy used both states as have authors who advocate writing with alcohol, but editing sober. There is no prescription of substance that will prevent its abuse - even sobriety has its limits. What is more important is what objective you are pursuing in your efforts. If it is to blind yourself to pain, then that is what you shall accomplish, yet if the shackles of convention weigh so heavily that you are more constrained than clear - do something, anything to stay fluid and expressive.

For writing is no more than a momentary glimpse of a fluid existence that contains the makeup of a life. Ostensibly writing is to share with others who are curious about the thinking of others, and find it informative to read how others have managed pain, solitude, joy and fear. Any state of existence which helps one to peer ever more deeply into the labyrinth of our souls is useful. To shut down as so much of our modern lifestyle demands us to be - unconscious while we do the things we have been directed to do, to buy, to say without mindfulness deadens the possible blissful feelings and saps the joy we each can experience moment to moment even if it is only feeling a trickle of sweat riding down our back or witness the painful indifference of someone else attempting to weather the suffering they may be experiencing at any given moment. What is most important is that whatever strategy you choose, helps you to awaken to your life and all you feel rather than close up and hope the misery will pass without causing you greater distress not knowing if it is distress, discomfort or distraction, or discovery.

jts 03/07/2020

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020720 - Extinction Chronicles · cont’

The rain blessedly arrived yesterday just around the 2nd paragraph of writing - g_d how i do love the rain · I seem to be in a state of lassitude which in another period of my life might have rendered me anxious and insistent. I feel neither. I am quietly cooking food and planning further rectitude, not even knowing where that might take place. I have made vulgar virtual passes toward paramours and have been rebuffed, but don’t necessarily feel the need for a hair shirt. As i said in my last essay, i like sex - always have · hopefully always well, even had the good fortune to hear professors posit in classes at an early age “if you’ve never made love to an artist, you don’t know what you’re missing.” I no longer delude myself about romantic closure. I am lucky each day that passes and i am not murdered for the hearts i may have broken by stupidity, negligence or confounded curiosity. What i struggle with today is honesty and openness, if i cannot be that for any love interest, i must move on.

To where, i know not. Between the last period and this sentence i cut overgrowth with the kindly, indefatigable neighbor lady who has blessed my yard with more than one flowering plant and many small delicacies, but it has always been awkward due to my qualms about married women - much less the profound regard i hold for her lion hearted husband who has only shown his care by his, subtle and constant disapproval of my tepid insobriety. I believe myself riddled with cancer, only based on the length and duration of pain from inflammation over an extended period of time and my “at risk” behavior amplified by the ignorant and malicious shunning by my birth family instigated by my birth mother who i am certain suffered a prenatal fall somewhere in my gestation that resulted in my “Frank’s Breech;” a congenital bald spot at my left temporal lobe and anomalous vision that has rendered me a “dual” cyclops against my will - and i am not complaining, simply trying to embrace my suffering and move on.

From my experience i believe very strongly that one can behave poorly and atone for bad behavior; i also believe it takes very little to live a happy fulfilled existence predicated on constructive acts that satisfy some inner yearning for meaning that only individuals seeking answers to the mystery of existence can identify. I don’t think anyone can maintain any control over another; and any effort contrary to that belief reflects only on the person attempting to control another rather than any susceptibility by those hungry for approval - we all want to be acknowledged · especially the control freaks in our midst presuming that their notion of correctness is any more correct than any other.

I have no clue what is going to happen next - whether around the next bend in the road, i will meet back up loving soul sent to redeem my broken heart, or the broken heart i was sent to redeem. I am ready to die as much as i have ever been, but in no more hurry to do so than i have been in my life - though outward manifestations of purpose driven by reaction formation of worthlessness diminish, i find it more and more natural to do nothing more than open to whatever it is about this world i do not understand, and focus my withered mind on ways to comprehend. 

Where once i valued my life based on efficiency and a well-honed ability to do the maximum number of chores in the minimum amount of time - it wasn’t until recently that i began to understand my real reason was to preserve my ability to do nothing without attracting attention. I cannot any longer deflect my pain - the best i can accomplish is to find a way to dwell with my own pain in such a way that it does not expand and become a part of yours. I do not know how to accomplish that and hold little hope for a time in my future where my loving heart is what animates the energy around me; i have about lost hope with each failed experiment at honoring my truth - whatever gruesome aspect that might take · (read tongue-in-cheek) i’m not a vile creature; (horny as fuck, but not vile); i have gotten that far, but i also realize that i have the capacity to create disturbance and that self-knowledge causes me too much distraction to be of much use; so like a guest in the Monkey forest of Ubud, i try and train myself to simply observe without valence or interest but to bring as much love as i have witnessed in our blue orb back into focus in this obscure spot in the middle of nowhere, overflowing with love while abiding in the real danger of dying from too little · LOVE .

jts 02/07/2020

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010720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I never would have thought myself fortunate to think like a rat, yet here i sit in a 1st rain-soaked sort-of modern home in an agrarian foreign gulag of a UNESCO site. I beat back the vermin invasion with no more than odor - who’d have thought a boutique “peppermint” essential odor would render me the pied piper of an ancient asian trading post - up to its gills with predatory capitalists · and it just gets weirder and weirder. The rats are not happy that i burned peppermint incense just as their domicile received its 1st rain, and i feel their pain. Sort or like seeing images of Mussollini’s hanging upside down at the end of WWII. Fascists are rats for no more than they are at the service of corporate thugs, and have always been .;

and i am no better for my cultural arrogance - in U.S. today understood as “white privilege”. This cultural assertion is not something i have always understood - during the 60’s i often envied Black Men the solidarity they seem to enjoy by belonging to a cohort that was indivisible. I grew up in a suburban Southern California demographic that claimed a whole lot more than it delivered. The police arrested me on numerous occasions - some; on infractions, some on no more than “differences of opinions.” In the high school i attended, that was enough, but once those i disagreed with became authorities, that was no longer enough.

Now i sit wondering who gives a fuck about my rotting body and it’s no longer funny. .. 020720 so i stopped pressing and went to relax. Now a day later and another bicycle circuit under my belt, and while not entirely feeling better i am more at peace and comfortable about where i am at - alone, older and still curious · i am not seeking counsel outside of what comes to me from my interior; nor is it always palatable. I have always been sexual which doesn’t dovetail easily with a solitary stature that that corresponds to a fallacious belief that others are more worthy of company than myself. After 20 years of intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy and another 65 years of sacred devotion to plumbing the mystery of life, i have found no easy answers - but i am more comfortable with the bad answers i find and no longer evaluate my success or failures based on other’s approval · i hope.

Nor is that a cut & dry condition with many cul-de-sacs and false starts, but i no longer berate myself for using cliches, or ending a sentence with preposition. Whatever compensation i utilize in defense of reaction formation get vetted with what one therapist described as “hyper vigilance,” actually two separate Doctors described the behavior in different ways - one using the description i just described; the other Doctor using jokes to illuminate one oblivious to the good around them: for the sake of literary development, we’ll try abbreviating both - the first was a Jew seated next to two SS operatives during the 2nd WW; Jew oblivious to his danger and thirsty, “Oye, am I thirsty, oye am i thirsty & on & on.” finally Heinrich tells Drumpf, “for god’s sake give the schmuck some wasser to shut him the fuck up.” Drumpf good nazi that he was obeys orders and gives the poor schmuck a drink of wasser, only to hear; “Oye was i thirsty, oye was i .  ..” The 2nd was about a sophisticated traveling salesman who got a flat tire in the wilds of the cornfields of Iowa and had nothing he could do but walk because there was a time when cell phones didn’t exist. This salesman, walked and walked and talked to himself a lot. “Fucking hicks, here in the middle of nowhere - what am i gonna find but fucking hicks. Mile after mile and hour after hour until finally the poor wound up city slicker spied a farmhouse alight, but it was too late for when he knocked on the door to ask for help, all he could articulate was - “Fuck you, you can keep your goddamn jack and spare tire, i wouldn’t use them if you begged me.”

We all could benefit from therapy, not the over inflated “wellbeing for a profit” kind found in the US of A and those medical industries modeling such a selfish business model, but the kind oriented by suffering of those around us who have been helped by a consistent attention to probing the difficulties we each face in daily life · probing in such a way that helps each of us move toward wellness as we conceive that state to be. I should have died any number of times in my life, beginning with pneumonia at age one - that i have not yet died does not make me feel brash, nor has it cornered me in a state of constant fear wherein i believe my next move could be my last. And my survival has not encouraged me to be reckless with the time i have left, nor manic about making every last second count for something. I sit closer to wonder than i ever have, and i’ve always sat fairly close to that state of confusion. What i strive for in these chronicles is to establish and maintain a friendship with one the world has not often been fair to, nor friendly with - myself. .. continued on 020720

jts 01/07/2020

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300620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“Make it simple, but not simpler” - Albert Einstein; Lao Tzu - “Simplicity, patience, compassion · these are my three greatest treasures.”

That two of the smartest guys in human history would advocate simplicity should tell us something about a world where corporations are selling, at a premium, electrical gadgets that require an advanced degree in Computer Science to open, much less operate, and like most flimflam have a “backdoor” used by the house to skim even more off the top. Don’t believe me, look at your own bills and count up how much you spend on shit you cannot touch, have no way to save and likely have forgotten 3 days hence. Nor do i advocate that you toss your phone, because paradoxically, one adds a layer of complexity to one’s existence trying to unshackle the +/- 5v shackle ostensibly there to ease your suffering, but in reality, something you yoked to your own wrist with greed and hubris & pay for the privilege of doing so - they tell me i’m crazy · you should listen .

But in the scheme of things the nation i was born to is burning up in a conflagration of disease which has oddly increased the wealth of its richest citizens:

• U.S. billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation’s lockdown between mid-March and mid-May, according to a new report.
• Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains.
• Bezos added $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg picked up $25 billion.

This my friends, if any are still alive does not bespeak a world aright, rather a world in “Dire Straits” described well by the “Talking Heads” song - ‘burning down the house’· However intellectually satisfying such a question might be, it does not absolve all who read this sappy renunciation of the status quo to formulate a rational reaction to my statement of despair based on no more than reading as Bob Dylan “the writing on the wall”. Aren’t ya’ glad you took time out of your busy “shelter in place” schedule to soak your soul in more “OH FUCK”¿? I can’t help myself, or more accurately, i don’t want to stop; these chronicles are the only itch that scratching satisfies my dying being just now. 

I do not want you to die - What i want is for you and your relations · all of them good and bad to make it through this rough patch. Moreover, my deepest purpose as my days wane is for each of you to find some venue for our DNA to resolve itself into new life - free from and unencumbered by cortisol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol, this is just a guess, but i’d be willing to stake a portion of my meager fortune of “my nut” that is principle and not leveraged by debt to pay for concrete evidence that if one were to look deeply enough there would be trail of “capital” related to cortisol as it affects health directly into the pharmaceutical’s revenue stream - the hunt is on · “so i declare that 15% of my net worth goes to the first actionable discovery that the HNWI are betting on stress manufactured by their fiduciaries to harvest your cortisol for profit.”

Me, i think love is where the “smart” money is going go - though not with a fuck whole lot more transparency than exists today. We human beings are not necessarily a stupid species, and there are a lot who are not so distant from as Garrison Keillor, pointed out - “Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.” Small wonder that John Lennon used “Imagine” as a catch basin for his evolved thinking. Our species seems so enthralled with the “bells and whistles” that come each new packaged tchotchke, we would like to ascribe our adherence to sobriety societally palatable conformance, because that behavior denies the abandon of the unknown that is dangerous to the “economy.” I posit, and am convinced the only rational economy for our planet is one that enriches from the bottom up. I am not willing to debate this logic with anyone, but am entirely open to exploiting how this superior survival tactic can be enacted - because i am an asshole, and you are not ·

Just to add “emphasis on the syllable”; i’d just about abandoned you without your due fill - a 5 paragraph essay deserves its conclusion · don’t be a jerk and let your entire DNA strand, strand itself because you were too vain, or too stupid to act in a timely manner. I’d like to be polite and encourage cordial exchanges wherever possible, but given there is all the planet’s wherewithal in the hands of a maniacal cabal bent on kissing each other’s arses into the apocalypse, i think i’ll just abstain and picture myself in the arms of one or another of the more sexually intriguing trysts that see past my withered frame into the ardent heart of my “i hope you feel my love;” it hurts me to imagine Thay’s disapproval of my standards for “Sangha,” yet somehow - what he, Master Thich Hhat Hanh has taught me about breathing and love, i remain confident that the universe will forgive me whatever soft embrace i might find on my path to death - as i hope the universe blesses you for your kind touch for all .

jts 30/06/2020

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290620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“this could be heaven or this could be hell” - Hotel California · It is hot where i am but heavenly; lucky me my father was an “existentialist” given to slapping me upside the head anytime i veered from parental wisdom, kidding, sort of. Yet here i sit 5 decades after the conversation facing heaven or hell knowing in my heart that he was right and the responsibility rests squarely in my lap which i will find. The paradox is that things are not always what they seem and heaven sometimes has horns, while through hell can appear to be the only path to heaven. I do not nest well with other birds of my species because my visage is different - the children i grew up with told me my eyes were “crossed,” professionals assured me it was either “Dwayne’s Retraction”, or “Palsy of the Sixth Cranial Nerve” in either case there is no escaping the 2nd take one sees when encountering strangers. For the longest time, i’d have sold my soul to be normal - even pretty like the rest of my family · the longer i live the more i realize my appearance has been a gift to me in a world demanding convention.

I couldn’t be conventional if i tried, and we’ll never know which came first: the chicken or egg. There is a sweet gentle core so deep inside of me that i have found few kindred spirits in my travels. To be fair, i have been described as “espinoso,” though i’d be hard-pressed to say honestly how much was projection from the observer, and how much was reaction formation on my part to be confronted by an unappealing perception from a relative stranger. Lao Tzu - “Care what other’s think and you will always be their prisoner.” What i struggle with today is taking no prisoners, yet here i sit searching for prose to convince you the reader to take pity on yourself and save the human race. It is almost enough to welcome the end; how much more confusion can one mind take? I live in a land where the language is not my own, so i must resort to body language and inference - communication modalities that were the norm in my emotionally retarded family, so when you factor in my growing blindness, ya’ may as well add a factor for blind terror.

My first wife was a schizophrenic Cherokee - our time together was less than 6 weeks · that year i broke the outside metacarpal in both hands and sliced my inside right forearm requiring 60 stitches and poured 60 gallons of simmering spaghetti sauce across the front of that same forearm - i sought therapeutic aid in resolving my stress · The friend i turned to was an MD intern in psychiatry living across the street in Santa Ana who remains a friend to this day, but he would not therapize me; only advocate on behalf of “psychoanalytic psychotherapy.” What he didn’t tell me in his role as mentor to mentee was that when he ridiculed my notions about unconventional thought, primarily metaphysics, was that he was parroting a party line about Freudian superiority to the, at the time, much disparaged take on the mind’s workings by a student and close confidant to Freud, C.G. Jung. It is entirely forgivable that my friend would labor strenuously to disparage unscientific thinking, but he did not own his prejudice, nor cross the threshold to explain his fascination with fine art as pertained his relationship to me.

People are not honest, or better said, are as honest as they are able to face their own existence. It is why i take pains to uncover in this chronicle a naked truth about myself, for i no longer have anywhere else to turn. I find the characters in my world today as frightened as any i’ve met - fear is not a positive motivator for candor, unless that fear is so great that in can shred your ego and leave your soul flapping in the wind. I do not find that sort of fear where i live - the fear here in VN is too contemporary and digitally manipulated to be of any real use · the corporate overlords and their Artificial Intelligence thug have so chopped and diced the channels of communication that there is no “commons” only the pandering clickbait of economic functionaries interpreting what responses that can be mined, and regurgitating that data back onto the population’s screens as “what you should BUY, if you really want to be happy.”

As angry as i now understand that i am with the cowardly abandonment of my family when faced with my “differentness,” i would still prefer 5 minutes of laughing at their effete reasoning than spend a day hearing what the googol bully thinks i need to watch or pay any attention at all to zuké the wannabe nazi, or his opinion of who are my friends. There is much to be said for independence; authoritarian regimes rely on clusters - the sort of cliques that make high school marketing such a success and fine art such a failure. Any shame i feel about my life cannot be attributed to poor parenting, sibling rivalry or lousy interpersonal skills - not being kind to myself is the only explanation for any unfriendliness i experience deep at night when reconciling the pleasure of deep sleep with the very real need to peer into the deepest recesses of my own discomfort and unhappiness we all share alone with ourselves and no one else because at heart we care about those around us and do not want them to feel pain - peace ·

jts 29/06/2020

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280620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The esprit d’corps of the Marines says rather than flee, their response is to run toward “gunfire.” I don’t hold with martial - anything, and share this because we as a species are in a fight like no other we have ever witnessed · so much so: we hear no cannon fire; we see no bombs bursting in air, and yet more people have died on our planet in the last 3 months than have died in all the wars for the past ________ years. We are experiencing “battle fatigue” and all we have to defend ourselves is a mask and clean hands. I am fortunate to be of an age where “The Twilight Zone” has more contextual meaning than a line item on the googol feed. There have been times in my existence where when possible i literally devised my weekend around a Twilight Zone Marathon, and was happy for it; if only because today in a world awash with a pathogen of lethal dimension i find myself at an age nearing death in one of a handful of nations on the planet who has managed to stymie the virulent reproduction of that pathogen - tell me that’s not weird ·

It doesn’t mean anything really more than my lifespan is now predicated more on my personal habits (which doesn’t bode well for the home team) than my zipcode. Where i grew up is aflame in death because of an irrational and arrogant response to the same threat i now face with all the world, even closer to the pathogen’s origin, yet paradoxically safer in a zero-case zone, biding my time for the death tormenting so many others on the planet. What am i to do with that “found” time¿ it is not the first time in my life that serendipity has rewarded my personal misfortune with questionable favor. Shenanigans from my youth blew out an eardrum that was rendered a monetary value due to “white privilege” that was within a few years lost to greed from my own lumpin proletariate ignorance. Whether that lost monetary value translated into any worldly use - who knows · who cares ?

At 65 years old, i believe, maybe for the first time in my life, deep inside that someone does care - it is me · i care about me. Laugh if you must, it strikes me kind of dumb as well. My core is more at peace accepting that there may be no one else but myself to look down upon me as i die, while relinquishing any fantasy of being loved by others to the end is important. I no longer wake daily wondering which account i may have neglected that might render me - alone at the “end” · The weird result of that introspection is i am more liberated to search for ways to relieve others of discomfort they might face; however knowing their suffering will not be relived by any action i might take, only by the actions that they themselves take - if i can help good · if i cannot help good.

The world will not be rescued by any virtue i have been able to articulate here in these chronicles - nor is she condemned by any lapse in rectitude i might enjoy · horn dog that i am, and hopefully for the sake of the species, remain. My responsibility as near as i can tell is to cause no harm - and that, my friends is a conundrum to beat all · given the prissy sensitivity our species has been trained to respond to: “if your toilet paper is not soft enough, buy everyone else’s until you find one that makes your butthole feel clean; if she does not want to kiss you, keep changing your toothpaste until she does; if he doesn’t recognize your beauty, make him suffer until he does.” and the beat goes on & on while your wallet grows lighter and and lighter and your happiness falls further and further away.

I do not know what the answer is to all the misery i describe herein - i do know for myself the more simple i make my life · the happier i am. I no longer share my thinking seeking allies; more like i try to imagine what my friends look like in my heart so that when i finally see them with my eyes coming toward me, i will not be distracted by their disheveled, broken and faithless appearances - but rather will be guided by the gentle kindness toward those around them and their glee at still being alive. If we are not living on behalf of the generation 6 times away from the one we are enduring - we are already dead and deserve no more from the universe than whatever quiet death we have asked for, if that is what we have beseeched. 

I believe my father died because he had convinced himself he was no longer useful - but he was valiant to the end · Poetry had been the “identity” he had given himself where his life experience did not enrich his sould; so he taught poetry to the end of his days, or at least until convinced his poetry no longer mattered. Maybe it is the same for me - he and i warred all through my adolescent years · he the high school English teacher, me: no one’s student. He managed to hammer into my mind the good use of a “5  paragraph essay” - the thesis in paragraph One describing what you believe followed by Three examples you will use to demonstrate your logic; with a conclusion in paragraph Five describing how you had used your Three examples to establish the validity of your thesis. How anyone ever managed to convince my father that he was no longer useful is unimportant; what is important is that i do my level best to find enough Five Paragraph essays to discover, uncover and expand useful work that can be accomplished by every woman, man and child on the planet which may result in the survival of our species - 6 generations hence · are we having fun yet¿ 

jts 28/06/2020

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270620 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I woke up this morning profoundly troubled, but not so put off-balance as to abandon my training; the unexplained sneering of the Banh Mi maker had to stay with her, and i suspect it is conflict about believing she had been “looked at” admiringly by one of my aged cohort - i am very careful who i admire here in VN · as i am anywhere in the world. My game is intact, but largely removed from the arena, for i have little patience any longer with dalliance - a game for the young · i am far too old. I seek the “heart of gold” i heard sung about in my youth, but never found or found but was too emotionally retarded to know. I ended up with a nap prior to writing that invigorated me more than i’d have thought possible given my suspicion about other’s ideas as to what benefits me. My friends in Oaxaca are suffering from their recent earth surfing “set”, and there is not fuck all i can do - i am finding that truth more and more common the weirder my life gets.

For example; in the midst of a perfectly reasonable emotional miasma facing death in a foreign nation where i had quixotically fantasized a “worker’s paradise”, is more likely a resort enclave surrounded by reactionary billionaire “investment” money, yet i also enjoy from a tree growing adjacent to my wall a plethora of grapefruit that my lily white, most likely cajun sympathizing Nova Scotian paternal great grandmother Munner ate religiously which i am sure aided her in reaching the ripe old age of 99 before giving up the ghost. My father her grandson once explained to me when asked “why did you become an English Teacher” - “because i love to play with words” he remarked without losing a beat. Munner’s vocabulary, at least the one she used with me, was uniformly “superlative.” Every action, thought or childish exclamation was met with some variation of “how Grand, how Wonderful - how Remarkable.” It is a small wonder that my father had been a high school cheerleader at Bell High School, before he became a B-17 pilot to fight Nazis - it would seem · the same Nazis occupying the White House today, some 77 years later.

So I shouldn’t be too surprised to find myself at times shoulder to shoulder in VN with _rumpf emisaries who nurse aspirations of reeducating Ho Chi Minh’s warriors to the superior wisdom of “Anarchistic Capitalism,” i mean look at how successful the Koch Bros’ health care for profit has been in combating the latest plague to hit the planet - like “greed” wasn’t the preeminent threat to our species. It’s not. When i woke this morning i had a brief encounter with a friend in Uruguay on FB. If it was 10 sentences i would be surprised; but because we had once shared air, i as a lodger - her comments cut to the core of my waking pain and i felt touched · soothed. I would welcome the ability to accomplish that on command, but all i seem to manage is to deflect aggression with some withering response that i had learned somewhere in the emotional battlefield and now have great difficulty dissolving, or at least transforming to a more constructive end. I do not want all close to me - many i find are too toxic to my bizarre makeup and only wish to be far from before they see in my eyes how little attraction they have for my attention.

Or more accurately, how difficult it is for me to suggest another approach toward communicating; my father and mother were both teachers and in their own way struggled to help each of us to learn. I was unable to make the leap and utilize teaching as a platform for propagating thought, maybe because i am crazy or maybe because the schools in which i tried to teach were - it doesn’t matter · all that matters is that someone learns. Not knowledge which can be forged and appropriated to dubious ends, but the ability to see each condition one faces in a unique light and make the most constructive use of that vision to aid the next person in line. C.G. Jung - described our species as a rhizome, living just under the surface of death/dirt but alighting new to the turning of the seasons full with each lesson we had learned from a previous turn at breathing - i fantasize and he said no such thing, but you get the gist.

We face a similar quandary about how to perpetuate our deeper knowledge to children and parents who will be literally plagued by much worse than what to eat, or where to stay - the world we are leaving our posterity will involve more fundamental issues, like how to breathe in a superheated environment, what collective behavior will aid the propagation of food and protection of water in a world laid wast by generations of greed; what steps can be taken to neutralize: atomic, chemical and nutritional degradation ? This is not an academic consideration, but simple logic that needs be addressed with what little resource remains to the commonweal. Scientists have been coopted - my own family contains executives of corporate concerns feathering their nests with proceeds from asbestos as talc for POC - and these are decent caring people who have more to gain by ignoring the consequence of their complicity than they do by pulling up stakes and throwing their lot in with all who have been abandoned by the “economy.”

fuck the economy - protect your brothers and sisters as best you can with whatever emotional wherewithal you can find close · love, might be a good place to start. “But what do I know” - Michel de Montaigne 

jts 27/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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