010820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I was +50 before someone suggested to me that self-soothing is an option - that is not to say i simply whimpered to anyone who would listen the many physical calamities of my adult light, whining wasn’t well received where i grew up · it’s a hand-me-down generational kind of strategy. I know this because on long drives through the deserts of Nevada where ma grew up and later in the confines of her sheltered compound for old rich widows she would recount how her own father felt about complaint; according to her it went something like this, “if you want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about.” This is consistent with a woman who would invite you out for a weekend holiday in the “Joshua Tree  desert home”, where I would find a pile of gravel that had been delivered and needed to be spread across the access road to the house from the access road from the highway to the access road to the house that was to be given to my sister.

Understand this - lord love a duck as my witness · she is a grand dame and as devious as any three of you reading this put together, which i happen to know are not my siblings · they’d been warned off long ago and lack the intestinal fortitude to defy her; i was not so lucky. It became pretty clear as the marriage collapsed that someone had to take up the guilt, and what better than a 15 year-old two-eyed cyclops with poor social skills in a family of very pretty people¿ that is a question, sort of? Judging only from the text in the previous paragraph and one half, you can probably imagine how it felt to ma, at the time when all she wanted to do was say how much pain she was in, and to have a pissy, beaten-to-fuck man-child reply with the sort of heresy you are now reading; and still i love her, she is my only mother and i have no alternative but to find peace with that.

Sort of like living my most vulnerable later years on a planet being decimated by a handful of sociopaths so removed from the suffering they have precipitated as to render Hieronymus Bosch the graphic equivalent of Nostradamus - not that history needed anyone to accomplish that feat of synchronicity. So all that is left to me at this turn is some happy humor about the ineffable pleasure of hearing people laugh with abandon, and watching families squire the youngest safely from curb to curb. It didn’t have to turn out this way, and there is still enough resilience in what C.G. Jung described as the Archetype of the human species to accomplish a revival of our birthright - happiness and love, rather than endless war and greed.

I am too old to manifest something that grand, but because i have been yearning for it in my very being for my entire life there is nothing to say the momentum in some metaphysical way will not bring my hopes a little closer to fruition. Jung suggested our species resembled the rhizome that multiplies under the surface of the ground sending up shoots of new growth but continues to replicate below. I am sure he was referring to the cultural reality of human development rather than the anatomical survival of our threatened species, in which case i take heart that those aspects of my upbringing which allows me to absorb myself with the questionably constructive act of manically producing essays that are not read by a population that does not want to face its own doom may be propagated.

Within that thinking is the very real requirement that i find some peace in order to continue my quixotic pursuit of meaning even as my own mind through heredity and the self-inflected injury of a harder than necessary life narrows the capillaries that feed my mind, my fingers and my limbs i continue to grow in ways that i never expected or could have prepared for. Happiness is indeed a birthright to our species, but it cannot be found in conformity, acceptance or pursuit for the conditions necessary for such contentment reside in the embrace of that which you find yourself to be - miserable, alone, ecstatic or delusional. This condition is distinguished from acceptance which carries the onus of judgement · embrace is more the act of loving what you find, how you find it. My life has been comprised almost entirely of acceptance for i could not pluck my eyes out and ask for a new pair and the family i landed in had not the capacity to accept what even i do not understand about my existence - only that it is weird as fuck and then i die · oh boy .

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310720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

i have heroes; do you ¿?

I remember the first time i saw the expression “Tabula Rasa” - latin for blank page · I was 23 just before meeting my 2nd wife. The expression was in a letter from a consort that never quite jelled, or i queered the deal by leaping in the sack with my 2nd wife, thus betraying the possibly much truer heart of my consort a 1,000 miles distant - i say this not to defame a woman you don’t know but because 7 years later she “rolled me over” for my immediate superior · he was not fucking around when he sang “instant karma’s gonna get you.” Yet let us be clear in the light of valence, shit cuts both ways; each and every act of dharma you execute without attachment will move the balance for the whole universe. That is an incontrovertible reality you know the truth of with any honest examination of your existence.

Where we trip ourselves up is with “payback;” each of would like to believe our lives so unsullied that we will be standing there when the bully from your 6th grade torment is faced with _____fill in the blank. The reverse is as equally true the only happiness you will find is in abandoning each selfless act on behalf of another, the more anonymous the better. Which brings us full circle to the homely arena of “heart” where everyone battles their demons in private and exalt the angels modestly and in private lest they see the baseness of our hearts. And i have no idea where to go from here. If i could, i’d stand at your shoulder and pat away the tears, or caution the conceit - it is hard enough for me to be there for myself much less the gazillions of spirits i have passed in my travels.

Had i my way, i’d introduce you to them all - they were that fun to know · on both side of pleasant. Some were so taxing it was like lifting weights just to spend time in their presence; others so exhilarating it was like swimming in “Whiskey River.” So i am leery enough from my own mixed experience with Whiskey River to subject anyone else to something so powerful that must be by their own selection for it to have any meaning. My youngest brother would freak whenever i handed the phone to whomever i was talking to at the time we were speaking; they were often interesting characters i wished each to share with the other; i may be too far ahead of the technology or too far behind · i just don’t know anymore, but care less daily. Our father was a fierce advocate of “adapt, improvise and overcome” though he was Air Force down to the wings he used to flee this mortal coil. 

He was also one of the funnest people i have known; he could find amusement with a popsicle stick on the shoreline, or the worst misery from which you would want relief. Ma in her own fashion is as unique, but far more stodgy and wounded which rendered her proud and conceited. She is not an unfeeling person, but i feel that her wounds were such that the scabs prevents her from touching that which cover the softest parts of her - which must be many. I mostly wrote the last sentence in past tense though she lives still. The projection is entirely my own - i miss my family · but feel in my heart of hearts that my presence precipitates the same pain which prevents my youngest brother from playing with the phone and entertaining people i would spontaneously introduce him to when i owned a phone. Now i try not do delude myself that what i feel is important to anyone but myself; my only reservation about such a selfish strategy is the joy i feel listening to happy music like Bob Dylan’s “Narrow Way” without jumping out of my seat and shouting to anyone listening - “doesn’t that,” as Bob Holdsworth might exclaim “bar you up?”

So much so, had i not counted paragraphs the next day, i’d have cheated you my illusionary reading public of the 5th paragraph - and it wouldn’t have been the first time · there was much hay in the air for the city had just gone into “lock down” which in this SE Asian nation is very serious business. My own country is blowing up in slow motion with a sitting president suggesting the election should be postponed - this after sending up test balloons about whether he would step down from elected office if he didn’t like the results. I was recounting my steps most of yesterday trying to remember as accurately as possible what public interactions i’d had and where so that if i come down with the demon virus, at least my last memories will have been in the hopes of serving those around me to avoid the same fate. Riding the bicycle was not possible but my “poison” is working very well and not interfering too much with my daily life unless you count missing the 5th paragraph of a 5 paragraph essay as a defect - in which case · ya’ got me. 

jts 31/07/2020

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300720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I vacillate between fear and outrage - “social media” juggernaut fired a shot across my bow suspended my account for posting a dolphin dancing with a surfer, this after my having made inflammatory remarks concerning the cowardice of a United States senator referring to another United States senator - a female colleague as a “fucking bitch.” I should have included in my rebuke a more broadly phrased condemnation of the cowardice of the corporate overlords strangling the voice of dissent at a time when dissent is the only rational response to the straits into which our leaders have lead us, (i use the expression “leaders” advisedly, for there has been damn little of value coming out of the “have’s” that is of any real benefit to the “have nots”). And still i am in a quandary about what steps to take to contribute to the commonweal.

Violence is not an option, if you bring a knife into a street brawl - the likelihood of being stabbed with your own knife is about even. We are talking about militarized, goose-stepping thugs outside the boundaries of law and motivated by delusional dreams of resurrecting a “white” homeland that never existed. What is being lost on the melee is the fact that our environment is exhausted and the once powerful capacity of the earth to regenerate life is being subsumed by a continent sized hijacking of the very essence of life as we know it - trees. There are quotes from Henry Kissinger who in effect said diminishing or eliminatin populations of color is the first priority of the developing world - that my friends is lunacy on a grand scale.

At the personal level - to have been deprived access to fb “friends,” however virtual they may be for no better reason than my having posted a dancing dolphin on an ocean wave is a very clear indication of how removed our world is becoming from reality. Along with “wash and wear” i tend to be a what you see is what you get kind of guy. I don’t have time or energy to fashion some palatable public persona that is anything but what i feel when i feel it. I am not saying this is how all should be, but anything that pertains to our survival that is not rooted in the most ancient history of our species is suspect - concepts of the mind, the heart and economy all inclusive. What i see is a lot of flim-flam and little to show for it. I watch those who are at the pinnacle of achievement and find smug, snide and exclusive exuberance that reflects a remarkably selfish concept of advancement - mostly of the sort “i got mine - so fuck you.”

I try to distinguish personal reaction formation from the equation and remain objective without judgement, but it is very difficult to be around or influenced by people whose seemingly sole North Star is acquisition, if for no other reason - how stupid do you have to be to collect anything you can’t carry with you into the great beyond. Look at the Pharos and the enormous lengths they went to to design an ever after which was ultimately raided by plunderers seeking gold and defying curses just to convince themselves of their importance the same as those whose bones they plundered. More importantly to me today is to find a language that contributes to a greater appreciation of how remarkable is each breath we take or spectacular is each vision we see that reminds us of the power of the first time we saw such beauty.

I remember waking up on a summer morning after school was out and the prospect of an entire day playing baseball was not enough of a distraction to disturb the quiet outside my bedroom window. Monarch butterflies were in abundance and even the rank odor of peaches never meant to be eaten moldering from a flowering peach tree surrounded by a dank but richly fertilized Korean grass was not enough to disturb the quiet of birdsong filling the sky. These are not images i could find when i owned a phone and woke in the middle of the night to see what i missed, nor were they present when my excommunication from the church of zuké was reconsidered and i was once more allowed access to relationships, however tenuous and often insubstantial - but mine, and not remotely within the purview of some social engineer wannabe piling up kudos for exemplary scrutiny of shit that was none of his/her for his/her next performance review.   

jts 30/07/2020

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290720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Pop used to call me “burro”, which in its native language is an insult meaning “stupid” - but from pop and his metaphorical mind i have to believe it was a term of affection meaning “stubborn.” It took me a lot of years to understand that no single personal trait is universally useful, much less one that renders you intractable - but i got to tell ya’ at this point in history, i’d rather be known for my recalcitrance than my obeisance. I watch the “statesmen and captains of industry” of our time and want to puke - my feelings are more murderous than somatic, but all violence at this time in our possible extinction trajectory shaves off as much green wood from the species’s vulnerable trunk as it does dead wood. Education on how to survive through cooperative loving application of our unusual human history is of the most likely viable paths i can see, but don’t listen to my i am a myopic cyclops feeling my way from one doorway to the next.

Though in too many ways to admit publicly - the “stupid” definition of burro applies too well for comfort. It is one of my closely guarded jealousies that there are so many who see the “ruse” more quickly and have greater restraint about it, after all any one of our species who actually believes the 70’s saw about “he who has the most toys in the end wins” is too dense to really want to spend my any portion of my last few moments on this plush fantasmagoria we describe in places as terra firma, but more accurately treat like “mommy do this.” There is a passage in Henry the V by Shakespeare called the “The St. Crispin Day’s” speech where history and literature crossover in a seamless transition. There was in fact a battle where an inferior force defeated a force 10x its size - and the speech is a martial refrain exhorting any hopeless battle to victory. The digital overlords have robbed us of such subtlety and through sleight if hand somehow proclaimed “1984” ipso facto fait accompli. 

Fuck you and the ponies your rode in on. The only battles you trust-fund babies have ever engaged in are the ones where you cannot lose - if you show up on the field, you get a trophy · if you fuck her without consent, you get a pass. That vain assumption my pitifully lacking character nemeses will be your undoing. There is no doubt in my mind about the extent you pissant, imagination-less specters of people will go to aggrandize your accomplishments such that you can ride past the havoc you wreak convinced in your heart of “what the fuck happened to it, it was here a minute ago” hearts. I am friends, of a sort of with Edward Colver who is progeny to a member of the forest service of the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Pasadena, enough so to have had a mountain peak named Colver Peak. That may be my 15 minutes of fame allotted by Andy Warhol, and the least i can do is own what Edward the son of Mr. Colver did with his portion - famous punk rock photographer that he was was born to be · but prescient mountain poet he is and will be ever more. “When the shit comes down, there will not be walls high enough for them to hide behind.” - Edward Colver, somewhere in Los Angeles, sometime in the late 1980s.

What was witty then is now simply practical - these mooks who establish “social media” and then yank the plug on the most vulnerable to the channel and possess the authority and execute the prerogative to mute the most important voices on that channel, e.g. #ArundhatiRoy, #GretaThunderg, #PemaChodron, #ThichNhatHanh, #DalaiLama is not worth a shit as a utility for the good of all. We are awash in profit for a handful that is doing its level best to convince the remaining 4% what a good idea greed is deserve every slight, oppression and disappointment we discover with our denuded, debilitated capacity for critical thinking and simple stupid adherence to an unworthy authority we submit to, be that beauty, vanity, or riches just over the hill.

Dalai Lama - “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck·” I do not want to die believing the virtual affection i found from people distant from me on a social platform was the closest i could come to love. Nor can i denigrate the genuine kindness that i have found through faint threads of communication coupled with powerful imagery shared with a common purpose of uplifting those that view such content - as much as i must caution the titillating effect of righteous violence suggesting somehow there is victory from overcoming a foe. We are trained seals barking at bouncing balls that enrich a stable of effete managers with pedigrees who deserve much less than the man i found rowing his stomach board with his elbows from An Bang to “old town.” The most you can do for yourself right now is find some way to show yourself a compassion that can be easily shared with the next person you meet - are we having fun yet · ¿? 

jts 29/07/2020

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280720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Interesting day - i woke up to find myself banned from fb. Choosing not to live with a phone i had no channel to object to this obviously politically motivated and egotistically questionably scurrilous charge of violating “community standards-“ like i should be surprised that spitting on a well-connected shill for the corporations would not result in some petty annoyance, sort of like having my ticket pulled for outing some hanky-panky in the probate process at the L.A. Superior Court - we all have our cross to bear, and karma is truly a “Yoho” when it comes down to crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s. I would do it again, and to my fb friends who’ve been torn from my loving care by an penis envy and hubris - know that i love you and will continue to care whether we are allowed to communicate in the digital Gulag the snotty-faced billionaires are concocting for our own good.

My digital domain stoneartist.com is being subsumed back into the “information superhighway” and i hope that someone has better luck with the creativity i poured my heart and soul into, but made not one thin dime - because while hyper text was at one time a laudable conceit, once the “haters” got their hooks into it, there was no longer commerce, just gates onto the killing floor. Googol is ruled by a maniac - the chief scientist Kurzwell - is such a coward he cannot defend his notion of singularity - just pitch it at the next corporate cocktail party to effete finger wizards so removed from the suffering and destruction they have wrecked that they sleep well and drive fine vehicles on streets devoid of conflict, controversy, contradiction - or backbone ·

Yet there is hope on every street corner on the planet. My experience with being banned from a social media platform to which i brought good faith and honest content is timely. Early on i would not accept that the CIA was scrutinizing and capitalizing on persons utilizing this ostensibly public thread - and i stand corrected. Just like believing the no one in my home country could accept the lies and buffoonery of an empty suit past his prime doing the bidding of a ruling class which has no longer rule, nor class - just money stolen from the coffers of a population doing its best to raise loving children who will not be killed by senseless violence, but rather contribute to a heritage of human history that cares.

What is more likely is that by digital manipulation of public channels there will be fewer and fewer people who read any of this literary vomit, but those who wade through the pain and rancor of injustice may find formulas for combatting an enemy lacking the gumption to raise his/her head to the threshold of ownership and say straight out to your face “this is me, and this is what i think and why.” More likely you will face manipulation and clickbait supposedly representing your fondest desires to be helped and heard. Know this, that any information you share with the corporations is used only to separate you from what you have worked to earn - and they do it with nothing more than “keystrokes” because they are efficient.

This has been a difficult day in a year full of difficult days - nor do i claim distinction by that. I am saddened to be separated from virtual friends, but knew always this day was coming. So onward i will slog searching for friends who’d been stolen by uncaring servers fulfilling the duties of digital corporate overlords making gazillions as traitors to their species and lacking heart enough to question their own behavior, but damn if i don’t feel better than i have for years for the simple fact of having a fb free existence - see ya’ wouldn’t want to be ya’ ·

jts 28/07/2020

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270720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

To my brothers and sisters, real and imagined - i love you · thank you. To my parents ______fill in the blank, for myself and any other child who wasn’t quite sure where the point of correction, coercion or condemnation lie. There is a enough suffering on the planet that can be directly attributed to shitty parenting skills that i am not alone in my reservations about “honoring thy mother and thy father.” I took that shit seriously and in an effort to placate a mother who once through onyx bookends through her bedroom window after she had kicked my father to any curb outside of the home i’d grown up in, while screaming at me, a not quite 15-year old snot-faced kid what a difficult birth i had been; only to find pop suckling the breasts of his 20-year junior Mormon Princess who made clear her door was to be knocked on, not walked through, i concede confusion.

The owner’s husband has arrived and demonstrates fairly clearly the differing male/female roles of the country where i now reside. He will not do anything until he has conferred with her, or is that a blindspot from my “chauvinist” upbringing. I find it charming that they have a close working relationship where he honors her leadership and where he is not threatened by deferring to her. What i am not seeing is his “return” for such an arrangement. The women in the United States who have demanded such a configuration - seemed to think that subservience was part of the bargain. I am not getting that in the limited view i have as yet in the far more “gender neutral” country i now reside. My fond hope is that there will be a woman i meet here who has tolerance enough to look beyond my poor training and help me to help her.

Mixed in with that innocent fantasy is a vibrant relationship to Jack Nicholson’s depiction of an author given everything he wanted only to find _______fill in the blank. I have no excuse, if art was my passion i’d resort to what Matisse did and draw with long sticks in my convalescence · or the haters have won and entirely undermined my confidence in my own creative capacity and rendered me as one more “deer in the headlights.” i d k, what i know is there was a time when i could surf the subways without handrails and draw viable portraits of personages near and far on a lurching train in the flickering light - ignoring those who’d like to know but lacked my own mother’s lack of boundaries and would not peek where she had no compunction about interrupting any creative process just to _____fill in the blank.

I was once a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, CA - and one of the axioms of that duty was that people seem incapable of looking at beautiful objects no matter how ancient or fragile without wanting to touch them somehow for some reason · and the guard’s duty was to see it coming and intervene in the “nicest possible way.” It seems to be a postulate to the axiom or vice-versa that the public must move around to the back of an artist and witness the process. Any longer my once rock-solid confidence to draw anything anywhere at anytime is now reduced to faint scratches of graphite indicating ideas that just remain outside the concrete. I don’t even know when that happened, one minute i’m drawing handlebars of motorbikes in Bali, and the next i’m spending weeks trying to fathom the girth of one of the largest trees on the planet. Please s’plain that to me.

Nor is it any longer of any importance to me that anyone see what i can, or understand how long and how much effort it took to reach that point - anymore i would be content to hear the voice of an 18 month-old telling some negligent fool to pick up the trash s/he just threw to the ground. I know - more pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but at least it would be an indication that rather than waiting for the rapture, the rebuke of a small child would encourage me more than the re-animation of Mozart the Kurzwell the monster has set his sights, hopes and future of our species using the dubious Artificial Intelligence (AI) the corporations have bet the farm on - your farm, my farm the whole fucking planet’s farm. So in the end, the best i can hope for and what i wish for more and more is the gentle touch of a loving woman looking into my fading sight and asking me to paint what i see.

jts 26/07/2020

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260720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I am now moved from one home to another, and as the loving neighbor lady would say, “the book is closed.” Even though the new house is hotter, has ants and as luck would have it may almost know the sound of demolition adjacent to my old location as clearly - i like it better · This is one of those ineffable realities which do not admit logical reason, but has the “feel” of being right, more than another. I once battled wits with a psychiatrist who nearly convinced me that my “instincts stink” - much like my siblings nearly convinced me they have reason to act superior · neither was accurate and both conditions most certainly defined them as much as it described me. Yet there is good reason for them to be wary, i can be as cruel as i can be kind, and it took me way to long to reach a place of peace with this insight to ignore its intrinsic truth.

The best i can do is to continue mining the caverns of my soul in search of what i once described as the shaggy beast of my soul. But now rather than hunter after an elusive quarry, i wish to find friendship with this unknown creature of whom i still have had only the barest glimpses and rely on the metaphysical sight of the 3rd eye to track its whereabouts but remain rationally skeptical of such an irrational possibility. The happy fact is i remain open to such a possibility regardless of all personal experience to the contrary. My good fortune is to have lived in a time when there were song lyrics stating “reality has always had too many heads.” I have no real conceit that this same wisdom is new to my age, and was simply stated differently through the ages, but i remain grateful that it was reconfigured into a recognizable form while i lived.

The challenge is to find how much more of our species’ history has also been restated differently and to evaluate its worth based on "bitter searching of the heart", and even more importantly apply it in a more useful way for as has been said elsewhere in our history, “time is nigh.” Mahatma Gandhi was a bigoted racist who oppressed a huge portion of his population because of outmoded beliefs, yet on balance he was able to liberate an entire nation from colonial occupation through personal conviction & truths he had discovered within the confines of his prejudice; we, each of us can do the same thing and rather than liberate a nation, possibly liberate an entire planet - if there is time enough left to us. If not, very shortly our DNA strand will be struggling to remain animated in a superheated toxic cesspool created by a handful of humans for apparently no more good reason than greed.

It is not terribly hard for me to imagine this scenario having watched my own “atomic” family blown to bits by no more than proximity to riches beyond the limited understanding of our semi-impoverished roots, though it is not that simple by a long shot. But the conceit of any solidarity with a righteous proletariate is as mythical as its attachment to social standing simply through marriage, or wisdom conferred by education. The key is that my people struggled hard for a better life, and never in agreement about what that meant. Where we have fallen solidly on our faces is allowing division within our actual relationship. These are people i struggled with for space in front of the toilet and more accurately time in front of the mirror - i grew up in the midst of the manufactured importance of “image is not important · it is everything.”

And i am luckier than most for no other reason than my image did not match any identifiable cluster, and from that limitation my demeanor varied even more - lucky me. Now my ambitions follow suit where i once craved recognition for my heroic efforts on behalf of art and humanity, now i welcome quiet and any opportunity to be of service to those who suffer. I am no closer to understanding how that modified ambition can be accomplished, but i keep trying - even sitting here in a worthy bistro in a borrowed nation having moved a 3rd time in year just to get a breath of fresh air and quiet, i am far more okay than anytime in my long history, because as long as i am harming no one and not causing anyone to harm anyone else - my heart is at peace · may yours be as well.

jts 26/07/2020

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