150720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

What a lucky fuck i am to have been raised by father who helped me to see words as toys for play, and a mother who taught me to feel color like sound to hear and odor to smell; though to this day, i’ll be damned if i know how that upbringing will help our species to survive¿ I do know that my father was very physical about pressing my shoulders upright, much like most chores are taught to Balinese children; in psychiatric terms i understand this manner of teaching as “modeling.” I remember one vivid morning when i had been instructed to vacuum under the younger brother and my built-in desks, though upon inspection the “The Great Santini” took my puny fist and wrapped it over the vacuum handle and forced the roaring machine into each nook and cranny of his architectural learning stations; i was humiliated, but properly instructed about the consequences of cutting corners on a sunny spring Saturday morning when the prospect of pickup baseball beckoned at Corsica Park.

This lesson certainly informs my manic preoccupation with providing 5 paragraph essays to a mythological reading public - little different than the 1,000s of his late age poems sitting on the hard drive of his one and only IBM 286 computer rotting in the mildewed  crawlspace under the 2nd house of my young brother’s suburban understanding of possible meanings about our upbringing · go ahead, tell me i’m not a little bit lyrical. I’d rather you explain to me how i might be more meaningful; “live as though this is your last day, learn as though you will live forever.” — Osho, et. al. At this turn these writings are more like the original “Enterprise” limping to some way station searching for Dilithium Chrystals to reconnect Warp Drive, rather than the Impulse Power, Commander Scott has so valiantly rendered to keep you the reader online.

Last night i took another tumble; i generally will not travel on my bicycle after twilight, both for visual and substance issues. I reserve my quaffing hours for late afternoon, early evening so as to aid rest; facilitate creativity; and to lean on the delusion of connectivity that alcohol provides in its peculiar fashion. I normally feel safe from the excess; either from hubris, design or discipline, but now must be mindful that my bicycle conveyance is no longer the obedient steed of my young years when i lived on one before i could afford the luxury of motorized conceits. Fortunately my muscle tone absorbed the shock of tilting into the dirt on a tight quiet corner - it is the existential terror that pinned my eyes open from 1 am to 3 am, more so than the paltry two bottles of the so sweet rice wine of my adopted homeland.

Xmas of 2015 i spent in a hostel in Bejing as a hated Guilo - festivities included a midnight wakeup with a 1/2 dozen enthusiastic cadre cheering my sleep starved frame, “hapy, hapy, hapy.” and the lodging of 2 dozen backpackers in the room next door on the night of my departure who were hellbent on drinking China under the table. During this 14 day, not-enough exploration of momma China, i click-baited one of the emerging tellusnothing and we’lltellyoueverthing apps about my past life - it turns out i was a trader in 16th century Southeast Asia and have a trail of karma that requires attention. Here i sit in a 16th century trading village on the coast of the South China Sea 5 years later, not because i’m a sap, but because asian women are incredibly beautiful to my thinking and thought i could do justice 2-dimensional justice to that beauty prior to my sight falling fainter - too late

 Now i wheeze myself awake in the morning and scrub the scum of 100 + degree humid heat from my frame searching for a loving heart who will not laugh while i close my eyes for the last time. Before that happens for reasons i seem to have no control over i feel compelled to do right dharma for generations i hope to help survive the capitalist rape of our planet - small wonder pop gave me the Don Quixote pen, and the little brother Sancho Panza. Yet in the scheme of things, the fairy threads of our skein of life, what a lucky fuck i am surrounded by buffoons trumpeting their station in life and lording their _______ fill in the blank over anyone that seems susceptible to such bullshit at a time when the oceans are boiling; ancient lethal illnesses frozen into the melting tundra are now meeting newly contrived micro organisms lacking explanation and a population withering under a temperature few are prepared to face, much less surmount for the sake of survival. And yet, we laugh, we cry, we fuck our way into an unknown future full of ______ fill in your blank. 

jts 15/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

140720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I generally analyze from the particular to the general. When i travel to a new location, my strategy is to land and learn as much as i can about the environment where i have arrived, and then make decisions about where to expand to based on what i’ve learned. The same is true for people; i find it is more helpful for the way i think to learn as much as i can about an individual, or group of individuals and how they interact with their environment, then choose where to expand my circle from there; i understand this to be “inductive reasoning” - a prejudice from a passing comment by a lower division math instructor who i respected greatly, and from whom i learned a great deal. The downside is that as a strategy it borders on an inflexible, one size fits all approach to understanding - the opposite of what our world requires just now to extricate itself from the tar pit it is sinking into.

As a youth, i turned 16 one year after Woodstock - wide open is the only expression that fits. I remember friends disappearing and reappearing weeks later sporting knee high moccasins from Haight Ashbury in San Francisco with stories of sexual free-for-alls; drug portals to a new universe and continued victories against a war machine that was vacuuming up young men to kill strangers who’d never caused a moment’s grief in our quiet suburban “wonder years.” Based on this heady experience i had every faith in deductive reason and searched far and wide for particulars that conformed to the general euphoria of the time; that search soon began to resemble a drain with the good shit circling an increasingly violent police presence, and what had been a magically musical phenomena, more and more resembling the pinball gates of a slaughterhouse designed to separate you from your money rather than connect you with the loving others of your emerging tribe.

Given the wild card of synchronicity, i just met a friend that i never expected to find - i am grateful more than i can say. It is heartening and at the core of what i search for in existence. Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls it Sangha and was a prominent feature of the turbulence attributed to the 60’s: the spontaneous sexual escapades with strangers, the long distance rides with people you’d never known and will never forget. They were useful and loving times and i don’t care what Thomas Wolfe says about “you can’t go home,” it is worth the search. Last night i had an aborted virtual tryst with a former landlady who lives in Oaxaca. She is a member of this exalted tribe and i reached out from loneliness and too much selfishness having convinced myself my former virility would be sufficient to provide her what actual sex could not. What i accomplished with my sexual greed was not to assuage her loneliness or help mend wounds not of my making, but what the Dalai Lama cautioned against, “if you cannot help, at least do no harm.” 

Nor can i say that what i experienced squares with the facts; because she did not immediately respond to my need, does not necessarily mean she does not welcome a sexual distraction from the tedium of living in a country adhering to the practicality of “shelter in place” and that she is simply waiting for the mysterious tempo of a woman’s sexual appetite to ramp up - i d k · I do know that the Calvinist tradition of my birth nation has created a monster of denial and shame about all things sexual that i have no interest in preserving and find no useful purpose for in the last years of our existence. Sex is good; non-attachment is good; romance is distorted beyond meaning and jealousy of another’s happiness is destructive. So where to go from here¿ i am 65 and not what young maidens seek for satisfaction to their biological imperative. I also understand that sex in all its manifestations contains enormous information and potential growth for me about the pathology i was raised with however well meaning. 

Madame Paradox once again comes to promenade with me, though she is too distant to hold my hand and comfort me in my despair - i have gotten far enough to recognize the despair is of my own design and no one else has responsibility for its outcome but me. Need and attachment create their own vortex that like my own reluctance to inflict pain on a woman who would use me for her sexual satiation, can also be vulnerable to the pain of a love breech, the same as my sitting here aware of how vulnerable my new friend is for a lack of simple communication that he waits to finish a conversation that can never be finished. I struggle to contribute meaningfully to my brethren and often feel guilt for not being able to fulfill all the deficit i perceive in this world, but i keep trying. The question remains why and to what end¿ i am not jesus, unless i can be jesus to myself, or help others see the same. I sense great loneliness from the individual sitting to my left, how do i honor that and make amends for 1,000s of years of failure, while honoring my own pain? May we all entertain such complex questions in the decades that are left to our species. 

jts 14/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

130720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I’m thinking of covering my goofy eye with a patch - as if i need more distinction from the herd · Based on the warrior/scholar/scientist/engineer history that has been thrust in my lap, it is a purely practical notion. From as long as i can remember i have tried to be “normal.” This was a Doctor Spockian notion popular during the age of my birth, mid 50s ‘merica; same fucking conventional wisdom that told the my parents to stay away from me when i contracted pneumonia in my 1st year of life and was hospitalized for two weeks. I never had a shot at normal in the conventional sense, and now 65 years later, i’m still winging it wondering if a patch to make me a proper cyclops instead of the emotional kluge with which i hazard the roads of the currently quiet hamlet in a Southeast Asian nation where i remain healthy largely due to free access to miles of flat roadway and an inordinately courteous driving public. I am flat fucking lucky by any means or measure - whether i can convey gratitude adequate to my circumstance, seems to be my only responsibility.

That and finding a loving squeeze who is not completely revolted by my heinous exterior and undaunted by my ingenious invisibility. There are so many human beings i shrink from on a daily basis it makes me wonder about the warmth of my own heart, for an instant. I can viscerally remember playing footsies in the sand with L_______ O/H_____ a deeply wounded Basque vixen one summer at 15th St in Newport Beach, CA - i couldn’t have been 15 years old if i was a day. We moved from there to her condominium with the same gaggle of kids and played “spin the bottle,” probably the 1st and last time in my convoluted teenage experience. L______ and i established a strong bond that lasts to this day and i wish her well with the new love interest she ignited at our 40th high school reunion. She taught me much about love - the feeling · not so much the preservation thereof. It seems my love fate was to lay in the hands of faith - a lesson i am still trying to understand.

I am far less impatient about that reality, if indeed there is a “reality.” Master Thich Nhat Hanh is very clear about his reservations toward romantic love. I would like nothing better than to be a good student, but my wayward heart is what it is and wants what it wants. Perhaps that is the lesson - desire born of ego can never fill the reservoir of the soul · My family was a very pretty group, and then there was toi. Even after 65 ravaged years it is sticks in my craw to imagine myself as attractive, though compared to some of the faces i have looked into over my life, i understand ugly better than most. I seem to inspire repulsion, sort of like “Beauty and Beast” or “Cyrano de Bergerac” were written expressly as an object lesson for me, however narcissistic that might sound. I can still hear ma querulously objecting any time i use the personal pronoun “i”, but then she has the same fixation on anytime i use the determiner “that,” or the color of my teeth, or my nose hairs, or my tattered raiment . .. ··· etc., etc., etc., 

And i love her still, because there is no alternative. If i cannot surmount my own mother’s objections to my existence, what fucking hope is there for a warm loving relationship in my life? - that is a fair question, but as the goddess of paradox would have it, it is not an answer for my dear dying mother to answer - but for me to reckon with. So be it, i do what i can to stay open hearted within parameters of good counsel that the spiritual masters far beyond me i am able to hear. My hearing defect from a ruptured eardrum makes for some distortion in what i can hear, so sometimes i think i hear “oh fuck, that feels so good, do it to me some more”, and sometimes i think i hear, “if you touch me again, i will scream to the gods that your testicles be pulled up through your throat.” Most of these conversations take place late at night when i am trying to quiet the anxiety in my soul which manifests as pain in my joints or pressure in my lungs - but that is my problem, not yours.

The best it seems that i can do for you is to keep track of the paragraphs, in the unlikely event anyone is reading, after all these aren’t called the “Extinction Chronicles” for nothing. The psychiatric term, i had to look up recently is “reaction formation.” I am dying, as are we all, and my reaction to that inexorable fact is to reflect as openly as i am able; to remain healthy and happy as long as i am able; and to render you strangers as much aid and love as i am able. This only gets to be complicated when i accept that people who know me shy away - i kid you not · my eldest brother has trouble touching things i have touched, and my youngest brother cannot use my name, Joseph; my sister - bless her heart - straight up replied to my question, “no, I don’t like you.” These are good decent people you’d be lucky to have in your corner, while once again Madame Paradox has made it my good fortune that they not be in my corner. If anything i have said herein offends, i apologize and hope you may take the love i can offer and travel your path in peace - the same i bid my blood ·

jts 13/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

120720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

"Wars are fought over who owns the land, but in the end it is she who owns us. Does not one who dares to claim to possess it rest under it?"

 - Cochise, Apache Chiricahua

I was not refreshed on waking - i think it’s because Bob Dylan was telling me something in my dreams · Lucky me; now if i could only spread the good fortune i’d feel better about what i do. Just singed the vegetables, did not wash the bicycle; learned an ugly truth about an icon i’d elevated in my moral cosmology based on my myopic perception, and realized at the beginning of today’s writing, i’d stiffed my readership of 3, their 5th paragraph; so how’s your day going? The upside: i pulled more dead skin from my wounded ear; managed a nap that seemed to refresh the painful part of last night’s rest and am still willing to pull my heart out through my fingertips for no other reason than to help the human species survive itself.

Maybe if i keep the paragraphs short i won’t be tempted to finish abruptly. What confounds me is the dichotomy of expressing clarity in a world “off-the-rails.” A handful of profiteers have so polluted the environment with plastic that it is now found in the organisms at the deepest parts of our oceans; i’ve read that 91% of the plastic made which has increased 200 fold between 1950 and 2015 is not recycled, and as of 20 December 2017 the “talking heads” expect an increase of 40% over the next decade - just for laughs you might look at the graph describing that increase and the one describing Covid-19 infections in the U.S.

I’ve said this elsewhere in my writing trying to convey the complexities of dear old dad - but when we would shoot the shit, me on some street corner in Hollywood and he in some supervised capacity thanks to my elder siblings; when the discussion came around to the “the world” and what was going on, however he understood that to mean at the time, his quip was usually the same, “man am i glad i’m old.” He was a deeply caring man who suffered all that any pilot who crushed one of his own crew due to failed brakes on a B-17 bomber might, yet his orientation was always in support of the “little guy.” He put his money where his mouth was as a career High School English teacher and long time union representative. 

As one of his sons who witnessed his life up close, it is for those reasons i refuse to relinquish the floor to the mythology of meaning that the social engineers today are shoving down the gullet of a population faced with its own extinction for no better reason than the caprice of a pampered gentry made fat on no more than the +/- 5v impulses flashing before your very eyes as you try to decipher my meaning. The only weapons in my arsenal of resistance are words, and logic to put them in an order that might help you to understand the danger you are in, and to encourage you to save yourselves and the lives of those you love.

If that is even possible - the chief scientist at googol is staking the future of our species on the transformation from the carbon-based organisms we inhabit to some silicon based android of an indeterminate but corporate sponsored design. The conceit is based on a mythical state of technological development described as the singularity - "a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization." It is for this reason and others that the princes of the world seem to have no compunction about hoarding the world’s wherewithal, for they like the nazi sympathizer Walt Disney, whose remains are stored in liquid nitrogen, are waiting to “upload” what they believe to be invaluable about the human condition - their minds, ergo their egos. You and the struggles you have lived through are unimportant to these conceited fools. The only thing they believe is important is the preservation of their silly egos - and on that note · i bid you good night and sweet dreams.

jts 12/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

110720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Back again walking the tightrope of expression in a world that has way too much hear - that is not a complaint, i’m accustomed to being ignored · just not reconciled to it as “terms of endearment.” It is important to me to learn how to hear what others want to express, for i lost most of the hearing in my right ear at a young age and it took a great deal of determination just to get as far as i have & you’d be amazed at how interesting the stories are of those people around you - even just now, if you take the time to look around you and wonder what each person you see is experiencing. My father was an ace; as the “ex husband” who had been kicked to the curb by my mother because he didn’t make adequate income for her concept of security - i watched him attend one of her soirees in Beverly Hills at the house of her and my stepfather, a CEO of an insurance brokerage firm taking notes in his spiral notebook interviewing any guest that caught his attention, just to find out something more than when he arrived · the 3rd wheel of all 3rd wheels. 

Sitting here now in a foreign nation as a “3rd Wheel” i realize what testis it took to be his authentic self in hostile territory. I had sat in similar soirees in this same house where Ma had recounted embarrassing stories in his absence of their young married life e.g. when he had hit on a known lesbian oblivious to that fact; ma ridiculed pop in the same household where he was then taking copious notes (probably to many of the same people who had laughed at ma’s betrayal; at the party i remember he was only interested in learning what was important to the person he was speaking to at the time - that my friends is disinterested decency · may we all find some. I’ve nothing to protect as he had at the time, carrying his tarnished “knight’s armor” on his back like some knackered knapsack, but he did it with heart. Ma too - they both rose to the occasion for the sake of their children. Everybody i find is doing their best with what they have to work with at the time, some just have more to work with than others. That doesn’t make them superior people which was the “blood sport” of the household i grew up in - it just aids each of us in finding our place in the spectrum.

Death is a fascinating prospect compared to the mysteries i’ve encountered thus far; anything the frees me from the insipid vanity of broken souls looking to strengthen themselves at the expense of others, which seems, forgive the cliche, “de rigueur,” sort of like the urbane apple spellcheck that doesn’t recognize a foreign expression, no matter how much tax revenue it can steal for its effete product. There is no continuum, save this moment, i write and you read which paradoxically is not at the same time. I can live with that, for so much of my life has been occupied by fantasies of either future events or past circumstance that it has nearly blinded me to the splendor of the moment - this with the vivid memory of reading Baba Ram Dass’s purple book “Be Here Now” some 45 years ago in a barn in Santa Cruz, CA trying to figure out what “the marijuana growers handbook” meant by changing the plant from diploid to polyploid oranism. 

“Everything i believed has been proven wrong” - Bob Dylan. Tom Waits was right · there is no magic bullet and the more Sober AF you can become the better off our entire planet will be; having said that, Dionysius was here for a reason - transcendent states as Daniel Odier stated can be provoked by substance, Maria Sabina altered the course of modern history by betraying her knowledge to fools, but how was she to know that the ego states she was communicating with had little more than self-aggrandizement in mind. We have resources, scientific, metaphysical, philosophical and empirical such that with what Buckminster Fuller described as “trim tab” application we could almost save ourselves from the cresting destruction we have allowed into our Arcadian world. Without love - we are doomed · Leonard Cohen nailed it when he sang “love is the only engine of survival.” This complex metaphor is beyond the reach of the 5 second intellect being nurtured by the digital overlords. The beneficiaries may never know what hit them, but i know and i will continue to expound with my addle-pated ways until i breathe no more, or have been muted by the big “button pusher” in the sky. So until that happens love and peace to one and all .

note: if you want the 5th paragraph - you’ll have to send a written request ·

jts 11/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

100720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The heat has relented to a point where i am cogent - with help from the kind local bistro that delivered sliced fresh vegetables that i can either sauté, or eat raw. My power is waning and it is disconcerting to accept that i am past the zenith of any force i ever imagined i possessed as a puny human - and i’m okay with that. Now it becomes an issue of meting out the droplets of my time left in such a way that benefit the most with the least effort on my part · sort of like every other day of my life. There is no lock, there is no, as Leonard Cohen said so well, “perfect offering.” There is a gruesome future we all face that can be mitigated with kindness and determination. Heat is nothing new to our species as is ignorance and stupidity. That my birth culture is facing a massive comeuppance for heinous behavior is nothing new - whether she contains, again as Leonard Cohen suggested “the best and of the worst” · remains to be seen. The world has now witnessed our dirty laundry, whether there is any grace left in the fabric remains to be seen.

As a young turk, utterly convinced of my worthwhile contribution to the legacy of fine art i was absorbed by fashioning my link to the chain of fine art that Master Cézanne  described; today i would be content that anything i ever made was treated kindly with some respect for the sincerity of my efforts - and i possess grave doubts about that hope. I was raised by inordinately creative parents · with all the detritus that comes from that volatile mix. They spun so heavily against each other that they barely made it out of their 2nd decade together, yet they bore four powerful children who demonstrate much of the dissonance one might find considering closely their life together. That discomfort is less and less important to me as i approach my own demise as finding out what was successful in their pairing and advocate on behalf of more.

I read Buckminster Fuller and find little sunlight between his thinking and my own (plagiarism in its most useful form.) - one quote of particular interest at this turn is “There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis; there is only a crisis of ignorance.” It is beyond belief that we as a species can aggregate for the celebration of physical prowess, but cannot manifest cooperation enough to protect the medical community from an airborne particle. I believe it is rooted in passive aggressive resentment toward a medical industry that routinely charges $50 for a single aspirin, but lacks the gumption to question why a medical MBA executive is more valuable to the world community than any individual scrubbing a lethal microbe from the floors of any hospital on our suffering planet? Consider me mystified.

But not acquiescent. My father was a tough motherfucker for a high school English teacher/poet. It seems he saved his hardest lessons for me; he gave no quarter, and i gave him none, but in the end it was his death alone that taught me the value of loss and love. Ma, she’s an entirely different equation that demonstrates thoroughly his attraction for her as mate and mother of his children, but belies understanding of her as an individual. She has sat in a room full of our nuclear family and stated to all that i had suffered more than any of the other children, and yet has heaped more abuse on my shoulders than any of my siblings for reasons that elude me to this date - July 10, 2020, in nine days she will turn 92, and by her design as near as i can tell she wants me no where near her for that event. 

As it happens i am quarantined in one of the few nations Covid-19 free, and i wouldn’t put it past her to have arranged this circumstance, by hook or crook. She is my mother and i love her dearly, though she would deny that to anyone listening, as she has maligned me to each of my siblings for some sacred purpose only she can know. My task is only to love her as best as i can with the cards that have been dealt me - alone as i feel she wishes to be when she faces her greatest adversary - death · She is not the warm fuzzy mama depicted on all the channels we read, as i have learned is more common than any of us wish to share. My mother is an uncommonly decent human who was confused by shotgun blasts in desert cabins and hitched rides through barren wastelands when no more than a little girl - i accept that about my parent and hope that she feels the deep love i feel for her struggle to pass into the great beyond with some measure of peace at a time when the entire planet is struggling to do the same - love to all · with intransigent peace. 

jts 10/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞ 

090720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Yesterday i attempted an essay on simplicity which devolved into more esoteric complexity, but at least i am trying. At the conclusion of yesterday’s writing, i had the good fortune of being visited by the buffalo herder. I take the inclusion as a great honor, and was rewarded by the calf taking a drink of the water i put out each time they visit. The herder returned today and is standing at the back of my chair watching me write which i do not find offensive or threatening in any way. The struggle is to find a way for him to feel at home where i live while he takes his charges from fallow field to fallow field. It is possibly delusional to think that i can contribute to relieving his suffering, if in fact it is suffering he experiences. His life is rural - his friends are patient buffalos and i know nothing more about his life than that · yet we share tobacco and he seems content to watch me write.

Somehow this constitutes success for me - to be accepted as a feature of the landscape and a resource like the poem about the “shade tree” the children in the school in Nepal would recite when their teacher was not available. As an elder traveler without family or knowledge about who is friend and who is not, this peculiar arrangement leaves me happy. Whether it will detract from an already goofy writing regime, we’ll just have to wait and see. When he returned this afternoon, i knew that i must establish a priority for this chronicling, otherwise it would become fictional posing of an effort to recount life at what may be the end days of our species. I have written in many environments since i took up the banner of writing after my father pulled me by the collar to his face and made me promise to never stop writing - this after he broke his hip and was in the midst of expiring.

My vision is such that drawing which had once been a great comfort is now more like looking for water with a witching stick than the culmination of a lifetime of chasing the “masterpiece.” I am luckier than most to have backup outlets, but it doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to do my level best at some meaningful expression regardless of the form. I used to say that it didn’t matter about pop’s senility, if he was reduced to a vocabulary of two words, those two words would have more meaning than much of the noise that passes for literature, or in the modern vernacular - “content”. I just had the most meaningful conversation with a buffalo herder through googol translate than i’ve had in the past year. The buffalo herder is open and curious surrounded by a supposedly sophisticated closed culture - tell me i’m not the luckiest duck on a planet about to ________ fill in the blank.

The manager’s of content have successfully conjured as Noam Chomsky suggested they might: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” I’ve heard expressions of “turnkey tyranny” with regards to what had once been euphemistically described as the “information super-highway” - more like “highway to hell” · 3 years into the 1st fascist of the free world’s rape of Washington D.C. and what had once been the cradle of democracy now struggles with the fundamental logic of masks in a plague, or whether to preserve the lives of children by removing them from school. My family has for too long enjoyed the delusion that shutting me up would some how benefit the family’s honor and i find their honor is as dishonest as the honor of my birth nation which today murders people with impunity based on skin color and rewards corruption with greater and greater ill-gotten gain.

My friend the herder let himself out the door when i described “back to work,” i can only hope he returns and brings friends. I welcome friends, not allies - because those days are long past - the delusion that there is anything that separates us as a species but each other is suspect. I welcome the flesh of a lithe loving companion, but am unwilling to abdicate the values i’ve fought hard to learn, much less apply. I know what i know, not from conventional allegiance, but from pain and confusion that Pop was able to show is the lot of each and every one of us - anyone claiming that fictional state of arrival · is suspect and all who cluster to share their anguish, their pain · their open hearts are welcome at whatever table i sit, but if you come to persuade me of my evil, my weakness or my dishonor, i can only ask that you look deeper into your own reason for seeking my company. peace and love friends. 

jts 09/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞