200720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I stayed up late fretting over a fury passed, but one i had regrettably acted on. When i was finally prepared to atone, the unfortunate subject of my righteousness had just left - now i must simply poor my regret into the aether along with so many others looking to make shit right. It would seem the best thing i can do is to reflect enough on my defective behavior to interrupt the impulse when i see it coming down the pike, and contain my own ignorance. What is complicated for me is not that i was angry about what i felt was an unjust action, but that i did not breathe enough to present my feelings in a more useful light - Madame Paradox of course is cackling at my back, “chocking back our gorge again are we¿” · ? I have moved two houses over to escape the pandemonium of construction that is part and parcel of any boom-or-bust economic model we are all too familiar with. Domicile for me is fraught with loose ends - broken marriages, broken homes, broken promises .  ..

From where i sit just now, i see new shoots. C.G. Jung once used the analogy of a rhizome to describe the human cycle. I find his choice of forms fascinating given his largely mental focus of study. As an inveterate aesthete in constant search of meaningful metaphor, i find the leap from our emotional yoke to an organism in constant renewal a worthy of any bridge i can find. I live in a city of bridges, so somehow unconsciously i have landed where simple transit requires constant bridging - is that a random coincidence or the workings of a more complex organization we have yet to submit to · ¿ that is a question ? As importantly, to what end what do i labor so assiduously ? as though there is some governing rule, where when once found allows all the stops to fall away and the fluidity of neutrino star dust rules all dimensions without impediment. 

It seems to me that i have lived my entire life to be just where i am, so it confuses me to no end that i should feel such a failure, as though my life is any different than any other boulder in the road. Are we impediments to growth or the moisture of life that is unique to our world? How can it be that such a smart species as we have been maneuvered into the corner we collectively face, yet faintly see? I D K, but i’m gonna keep asking until i die or find answers. There is no alternative, there is no “magic bullet” anyone can fire - friend of foe · If find no common ground to dispel the vapor of hate a cadre of small minded humans of evoked over our cooperative loving history, we deserve to die for being so stupid as to believe we are not all brothers and sisters on a marvelous, however fragile quest for greater meaning than our pain.

I have enough pain to recognize that most of what i feel is of my own design. Last night i tossed and turned over behavior i could attribute to no one but myself and feelings i was trying to process; mostly about things i turn away from for whatever reason. I was raised to fight in the most loving way a warrior scholar could conceive in tumultuous time not all that much different from what we face today. My father had the good fortune to face fascism at the end of a Norden bomb site - the problem is that no one told him that Norden Inc. had been sold to Hitler months before. There are rats in the nest showing us to be the Washichu we be - if you aren’t familiar with expression - Wasichu is Lakota Sioux for “he who takes the fat from the bone.” It is a contemptuous moniker, however accurate for the same population with hubris enough to carve the faces of murderers over an edifice of stone that had venerated elders for untold generations.

This is the predicament we as humans now live - do we recognize the vacuous sound of contemporary digital who-ha as legitimate, or do we dig deeper and search for perilous meaning in traditions we have been indoctrinated to disregard as ______fill in the blank? Frankly, i don’t give a fuck what you think. Most people i converse with in media or in person lack any manner of love that resembles what i am willing to lay on the line just to see that some portion of what i find to be a magnificent achievement in metaphysical alchemy to have reached fruition. It is hard enough for me to accept my role as a dying human on a planet of many others dying with much sadder stories than my own - i refuse to surrender and implore anyone reading these chronicles to rise up as least as far as your own self respect will carry you - as Yogi Berra the famed racist catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers once said, “It ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings;” for my money with so many fat ladies singing it’s a real challenge to know which one to listen to - peace and love from Ringo Star, the richest fucker from the fabulous four .

jts 20/07/2020

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190720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Today 19 July 2020 is ma’s 92 birthday - Hapy Birtday Ma · so you know if i had my way, i’d be sitting at your side fetching what you can’t, but by your own design and the bizarre interpretation of your wishes by those you placed in charge, i am as far removed as is possible and as quiet as a mouse · at least where you’re concerned. You’ll be glad to know your unerring discernment remains entirely accurate and even today where i live, there are those, i am sure, would rather i dummy up than remain the same old “mouth” as you disparagingly called me to anyone who would listen. But i gotta tell ya’ ma, that was a really mean thing to do, especially to me who loves you, after what Leonard Cohen describes as “bitter searching of the heart. Yes, i am intractable when it comes to expressing myself - ironically, this trait seems in short supply in the nation pop fought to defend. There are secret police on the streets of our country today, jailing citizens for no more than expressing themselves · so ma, i’m glad i ignored your imprecations when it comes to saying how i feel.

Today i took possession of new digs; the house is on the other side my neighbors - the farmers next door; they are salt of the earth people and in the hipster doofus town where i now reside it is wholesome to live close to people i can admire. I understand that you have been fortifying yourself for years against what you yourself described to me as an “inconsolable fear of death,” so kudos for your resolve in negotiating your own pace - but i gotta ask, “is it worth it”? There was a movie in the grand tradition i watched starring Lionel Barrymore - “On Borrowed Time”. The gist of it was not so much different than the trick of unweaving her day’s work which Penelope played on the suitors waiting to usurp Odysseus. I can almost see your eyes rolling back in your head, then asking, “why are you telling me this?” As with most things that pertain to you; ma, for no other reason than to render aid. If it doesn’t, at least i tried.

What i’ve discovered for myself, there is no obedient loving son, or daughter out there looking to bring me kindness as i have you; and between us, i’d think my position to be the more fortunate. I think about how you stopped picking up after yourself in your golden years - as though the privilege of having others do for you was some compensation for inequities in your life; what terrifies me is when i see this same inclination in my own living - looking at the dirty floor and saying to myself, “i can pay to have this done.” Pop was very stringent about radical accountability - unrealistically stringent · so i welcome the kindness toward yourself that you arrived at late in life; i am searching for a middle ground to a point where i can be pitching in and contributing to my dying day. Our species as i see it is at the “all hands on deck stage” where we cannot really carry dead weight. I learned, possibly too late to be of any use to you, just how shy you are about what you are feeling.

I value you your unusually sensitive nature, but i do not concur with all the conclusions you arrive at; i might have been a better son, had i defended my positions as fiercely as you have learned to defend yours. Or, because there was no one backing me up in family squabbles i learned to see beyond the “court intrigue” and take positions that were indisputable such that i simply removed myself from the fray. The problem with that tactic is that it gets very lonely once the need to secure allies is removed and you learn to live with a take it or leave attitude toward nearly everything in life. I honestly don’t know. I miss conversing with your razor intellect and feel the world will have lost a uniquely original character when it comes time for us to bid each other adieu. It pains me to this day to feel in my heart that you are repulsed by what i’ve become as a human being, but paradoxically owe my cussed independence in large part to the terms of “individuation” that our relationship has forged.

So maybe the best place to start is with a “thank you ma” for having the gumption to create a one such as me, for whether you have ever recognize me as the loving man i have become - i don’t require any external validation of my worth · from what i see around me and what i see on the horizon there are not many who can make that claim. If anything circling-the-wagons has become the goto strategy for the choice between balkanization or solidarity our species is faced with. My own siblings lack the backbone to approach me as individuals, rather as i see it - which by no means - defines any reality but my own, they aspire to emulate the ineffable quality of self through clustering at all costs, a quality you have achieved simply by breathing and being yourself · bless you Mommy and all those you have come in contact with over your long and meaningful life. In closing, as i exited my new domicile with a complete set of keys, i also backed into a cacti hitherto outside my goofy awareness - simultaneously eliciting the kindliest cackle of derision over my shoulder one could hope for in such circumstances. When i faced my audience; she was a gapped-tooth hag with the sweetest smile of shared humor one would want to meet under similar circumstances · somehow on this birthday of yours, and as incongruous as it may seem, she reminded me poignantly of you. 

Lovingly yours,

son - joseph T.   

jts 19/07/2020

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180720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

In the preface to his book “Love and Will,” Rollo May described a clinical anomaly that has always resonated with me. He described a study of “at risk” youth wherein he could not explain a spike of adaptable behavior in reams of otherwise predictably dismal results. He went back and interviewed the subjects succeeding beyond ever expectation and found; the parents of these kids told them flat out - “I got nothing for you, all you can expect is a life of shit.” Most other parents in the study attempted to soften the blow and look for ways to buffer them from reality. My parents were the former, pop not so much, but definitely ma. To her credit, ma plowed through a lot of personal shit before she ran out of steam and just surrendered to the luxury of decadence. She got played by a lot of charlatans in the process. I remember a psychologist she dated for a while - greasy - is the only adjective that comes to mind; but lord have mercy, that same woman still got pluck and savvy enough to weather a pandemic of unknown dimensions - specifically dangerous to old people ·

When ma got the “self-improvement” fever, it had not yet become the shrinkwrap industry you see on your screens today. Most people were just feeling their way through the emerging science of mind; one has to give credit to anyone brave enough to plunge into the unknowns of the unconscious, but did it have to be my mother. At first it was just edgy literature in the family bookcase - Ayn Rand · “Atlas Shrugged,” but even as a boy child trying to fathom the undercurrents of an emerging gender conflict i could see ma’s hackles tearing at my father’s poetically chivalrous notion of man/woman roles. He even said to me in one of those uniquely parental discussions, “it is the woman’s role to submit to your will.” Well folks i can tell you when ma hit the university circuit to finish her BA, ostensibly to add to the wherewithal of the sagging family fortune, one could almost feel all hell was about to break loose. 

It began innocently enough with explanations about why she had to be gone, “your father does not earn enough for us to live on, so I must go back to school.” We never lacked anything and there was always a box of oranges in the garage to help yourself to. Burgers and Root Beer floats were a regular Friday night event one could count on outside of the intractable prompting to carry groceries inside, one did not know of any deficit. We each got an “allowance” that was hierarchal, not necessarily merit-based, for the eldest son was mostly occupied Saturdays when chores were to be done with fashioning mystical bubbles from his gullet that he could miraculously blow free into the air, and the sister could never be importuned to occupy herself with yard work. When is say yard work, i mean plucking the scum of the flowering peach tree that was never meant to bear edible fruit from the Korean grass that grew in the same mounds it had been planted in according to the Sunset magazine - picture plucking paper bags of vomit poured into the Grand Canyon from dump trucks ·

I was more than saddened when the news came from on high that both were jumping the good ship matrimony, and even more dismayed that it had been determined the eldest brother was to remain with pop, while i was assigned to the more “maternal” influence. Those are 3 years of hell that i have seemingly replayed throughout my life in one variation or another. There is no place to point the finger - each and everyone was doing there best as they saw fit at the time. It is today where i sit as an aged man fraught with self-doubt and an entirely rational fury about things done to me at a time when in nearly the exact same location i now sit, my own nation was enacting heinous brutality on a peaceful population that wanted nothing more than to determine their own destiny, free of foreign influence, any foreign influence. Now tell me Madame Paradox is not one the funniest spirits to ever wander freely on our pitiful celestial body ¿ please ?

If ma can sit up and take nourishment under the questionable auspices of siblings i know to be emotionally myopic and possibly dangerous, then the best i can do is stay healthy and happy searching for some meaningful disentangling of a karma that goes back to the first dead body at the hands of another, moreover - to find that thread of joy and pleasure our ancestors felt watching a newly discovered waterfall empty into a canyon full with fragrance from unknown flora and nurtured in the droppings of fauna that, like us wanted little more from existence than to be petted, loved and played with. The sad as fuck truth which few in the reading audience will own, much less act on - we are not all that far from renewing those conditions and perpetuating whatever truth you can find in that assertion for the next gazillion generations rather than perishing like maggots at the bottom of some crusty tin can whose contents are about to become so desiccated as to be unsupportable to any but the most fundamental of life forms - are we having fun yet ¿ · Where’s Greta Thunberg anyway ?

jts 18/07/2020

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170720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

In two days it will be my mother’s 92nd birthday - from me she will receive no card, no call no notice · yet somehow she will know that i am thinking about her deeply. She is in a locked ward, hopefully safe from the virus, but unprotected from my siblings. When i told her many months ago that i would not fight my way through my siblings to her bedside as i had for my father, she replied with typical wryness, “thanks a lot.” Nothing would be accomplished by my presence except the continued rancor of brothers and a sister she had trained from birth to regard me as _______fill in the blank. She knows that i love her and that my love comes from a deep forgiveness for behaviors of hers toward me i doubt she is any closer to understanding than the day we parted. She is a “Moon child” in every connotation that expression can have; the eldest brother is on the cusp Leo/Cancer and by her own accounting, suffered the most from her parental learning curve. She met, married and bore my brother within 10 months of meeting my father - with 3 more children quickly @ 2 year intervals ·

I was named after her father who married her mother - 20 years his junior in the silver fields of Nevada · he died 20 some years later in the front room of the house on 116th St in Los Angeles my maternal great grandfather; a doctor in the Confederacy had built somewhere around the turn of the century. Shit gets a little hazy trying to line up a Medical professional from the Civil War building a house in the early 1900s of Los Angeles, but that is how it was conveyed to me, or at best how i remember it. Ma took pains to show me places in Nevada where she was a kid/blossoming ingenue righteously fending off the advances of WWII soldiers passing through on their way to glory. Whichever the case, ma gained enough confidence to remain chaste to the extent she proudly described an event to me when she shamed my grandfather for his “dirty mind” when he had cautioned her one too many times about soldiers wandering through the desert towns of WWII ‘merica.

I doubt only-son pop had any clue about what he was walking into having been barely relieved of duty as a bomber pilot in post WWII ‘merica; she was 4 years his junior and a ravishing young woman by all accounts. No one told him how smart she was and i’m sure he barely saw past her radiant smile enough to look. They did what all post war couples do and made a family - 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956 · bada bing, bada boom. Within 18 months of marriage ma had one child, one on the way with two more to follow in close succession. Ma is an inordinately ambitious woman and entertained modeling and acting along with her scholarly ambitions, so to find herself up to her earholes with screaming babies was not part of the bargain. Pop was a gallant enough guy and made from rugged stock, but making a “killing” didn’t figure high in his concept of fun. His father was a happy-go-lucky hard drinking tile-setter, chewing-gum selling orphan from an equally dysfunctional household where bathtub beer was more important than keeping up with the Jones’s.

It wasn’t a match made in heaven and when the 60’s lurched into view the exhaustion of tracking 4 uber-humans overtook any love they may have retrieved from their early years. Ma kicked pop to the curb in my 2nd year of High School, and someone had to pay - i was loud rebellious and angry for having been saddled with vain disinterested elder siblings lacking any empathy for what it meant to grow up as a cyclops in ‘merica’s heyday of pretty things and ugly truths no one wanted to face · the perfect “identified patient.” Now nearly 40 years later the chickens have come home to roost; ‘merica is aflame with an entirely containable contaminant attended to by a corporate buffoon bent on goosing the Dow Jones bottom line by assassinating as many Americans of Color as can be accomplished without international intervention.  

I have to see beyond the brutal accusations levied against me by self-serving siblings whose only demonstrated interest in family, is to gain the greatest possible return from any death in the family that does not include their own. I wish them well and am ambivalent to beat the band. My sister’s jocular email to me while absconding with a family heirloom for her eldest child who didn’t posses gumption enough to ask for it himself, included the bullshit expression of “what a caper”, forgetting entirely it was i she was stealing from and traveling 2,000 miles to aid her in the process - that is on me, and no one else, but g_d help me if i can forget how my blood feels about my place in the family. Why ma encouraged this pathology eludes me, but does not prevent me from facing it full front in order better understand how the family of man has done itself in, and to try and advocate for a more generous distribution of what is all of our world - planet earth · mama gaia.

jts 17/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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160720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Greed may be the single most destructive trait i’ve witnessed in the human species; i cannot recall a single instance in my personal experience where that inclination has enhanced my life - even just now wanting to write a balanced essay, my greed to be righteous steamrolled over any penetrating examination of whether, in fact, greed has contributed anything worthwhile to my life · because of the luck of the draw, i was born to parents who professed progressive values and searched earnestly, as near as i can tell, for a meaningful existence; to those ends - i am an admitted addict, so you see, not only am i greedy; i’m a greedy addict. No one’s hands are clean, essayists, scientists, lovers and haters we’re all guilty of egregious short-sidedness in this sinkhole of history we find ourselves. If i had to take a guess; greed is hard-wired into our DNA, but not as a manipulated emotion designed by digital-wizards doing the bidding of corporate advertising/social engineering cowards - rather a practical measure of frugality in a precarious existence back to our earliest ancestors; you eat all the summer corn · there is nothing to feed on in the winter months.

We are far more cooperative than we are adversarial; just look at how many suck-ups you’ll find in any clique, in any enclave, of any recognizable group on the planet. The growth spurts for our human tribe has been where individuals stood up on their hind legs and bucked whatever status quo impeded human advancement: Michelangelo told the Pope to fuck himself, Martin Luther said “read the writing on the door.” The irony for me just now is witnessing the boon in individuals distinguishing themselves from the crowd by thumping their chests and pointing to some fucking capacity for creating viral code, or skinheads pointing to longhairs, whites pointing at blacks, women pointing at men; and on and on an on. We have been tricked for the benefit of a handful of leeches, parasites; better organized assholes bent on maintaining a state of war between people who love and people who are not sure.

I’ve been played enough times to accept my own stupidity and move on - this one cannot stand · i’m not talking about the morbid revenge scenarios that have seized more of my life than i am comfortable talking about to someone whose eyes i cannot look into, we’re just discussing the asshole neighbor that brings his dog into your yard to shit and laughs in your face as s/he walks away. I don’t know you, but i’d bet my next 3 ss cheques that would not play well with you anymore than it would with me; and i’ve been cuckolded 3 times at bat, so my tolerance for abuse isn’t what could be described as excessive. I know this - violence is the the very weakest form of resistance. So those that i struggle with, are those who suggest i should be afraid of their might; they are about the weakest opponents in the vast array of opponents to my peaceful, loving ambitions for us as a species that i’ve met.

It was a “Country Joe and the Fish” song ‘i feel like i’m fixing to die’ when i first heard the expression - “we have met the enemy and they are us.” I couldn’t have known at the time it was simple plagiarism of the WWII comic strip character POGO channeling its author Walt Kelly. This is how dishonest cultural appropriation works, but that doesn’t make it okay. If we are to remain a viable communicating species, we have to preserve the capacity to peer into our own hearts and reflect outwardly the truth of what we find there - talk about your Covid-19 terror. Honestly, i am only filling in the 5th paragraph of my daily obligation, because i fear the repercussion of not meeting my quota, a function of how i was raised. Whether such manic behavior will have any positive bearing on escaping our impending doom is anybody’s guess, but i’m having a blast laughing at such irrational unconscious revelations as any other sport i could be occupied with, including “sport fucking” which i used to sublimate my fear of intimacy and a shitty self image for longer than i care to share.

I have yet to meet my female ally who has not bought into the advertising bullshit: “if you own this, you will be immune to heartbreak and invulnerable to emotional distress,” and the dudes i know are mostly little boys looking for a mommy-type confirmation of their worth and power represented by some mystical ability to hold sway over everyone they meet and hearing the only voice in the room that will confirm that elusive pat on the head; the hardest part of this unkind, ungenerous and possibly scurrilous observation is that it is my best guess about how i might appear to others - and to you brothers and sisters out there reading · that is a fucking lonely place to be. However, if it helps an iota in your personal journey for solidarity with other life forms on our planet looking to love, cherish and honor the unique privilege of breathing and aiding life around you to flourish - stay close for we are friends. peace and love out of the aether .  ..  ··· 

jts 16/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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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 

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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

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