150820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I like it - doesn’t matter what · i like it. I’ve lost track of the continuous days that i have sat down to write a 5 paragraph daily and am conflicted about checking. If i were to verify how many continuous days it would introduce an ego component into something i work hard at partitioning, for that is an aspect i find distracting from what it is i want to accomplish - fluid logic that remains outside the strictures of “stream of consciousness” writing (seemingly an oxymoron) - orthodoxy has never been my long suit. What i was chewing on prior to commencing this late in the day essay was opening with a litany of my fears in search of Pema Chodron’s description of “our” soft spot she posits, i think quite accurately, which lies directly behind the fear we all front as foundation for our aggressive behaviors. My family is known for its paunch; i say family, but i mean the three sons (& and daughter, but that’s too scary a prospect for this essay). Pop carried his birdlike frame and ham hock hands pretty much most of his life, save a period in the assisted living facility where his “belly” seemed to fit the Pasha roll he took on the couch with some lady’s hand in each of his mitts.

Ma really was a desert rat to the bone, her itinerant miner father - my namesake resides deeply in her makeup, though her Steel Magnolia, Alabama mama will ever be her North Star. Grandma Maude, and Grandpa Joseph met in the wilds of Nevada circa late 1920’s - She a single woman 1918 UCLA graduate, school marm in a one room schoolhouse Mina; he passing through. From what i recall, they met at a dance - he 20 years her senior · she escaping an obligation to return to Los Angeles and put her elder sister Eula through school as she had done Maude. I’m sure it was not that simple, anymore than i am certain who was the elder of the two; But within 4 years Maude was married with 3 children and 20 years later her middle daughter, my mother - a checker at the new Von’s Supermarket, met my father with whom within 8 weeks of meeting married and then bore him 4 children within 6 years - i be # 3 of 4 ·

Ma has now turned 92 and though i don’t fear her as she would seemingly desire - i do respect her. She locked me out of the home i’d grown up in at age 15, then changed the locks. This happened after she’d “kicked pop to the curb” citing his ________ fill in the blanks. Her last constructive comment to me during a reunion i had arranged for her with the husband of her deceased college chum was “you are so obsequious;” this was just prior to my departure for the country i now live in, and though it was over a year ago - i am still smarting from her gratuitous cruelty. I accept that it is as much a feature of the dementia for which she was cloistered as integral to our troubled relationship, but i do not hold with the segregation of meaning that the “experts” like to promulgate. I stayed close to pop to the end, though my siblings placed thoughtless and cruel impediments in my path. Pop lived the last 10 months of existence with a broken thigh knuckle and was stewed to the gills on “the magic patch,” but like the “exceptional children” i had the privilege of serving in one of my career incarnations as a Psych-Tech intern, communication is where you find it.

Now i hammer a keyboard in a Covid-19 locked down commune of a world heritage site chomping at the bit to pulse my blood better on my bicycle in this flat bicycle heaven while doing my level best to do what my mother’s sister advocated “leave the world a better place than you found it.” I loved my Aunt Jane, and she loved me - i love all of my family, but as Bob Dylan said better than me, “I’m not ready to pull down my hedges.” This morning i sent a photo to the eldest brother, who sadly strikes me now as a bad version of a proletariate Martinet having reigned over the looting from our mother’s flat files of over 4 years of drawings i had made while in seclusion in the high desert of the Southern Sierras. The photo was of a city and a time when ma had been “farmed out” while the maiden Aunt and my grandmother consolidated there forces in pre-war Los Angeles. My mother’s banishment to the perimeters of Death Valley in the custody of her father wounded ma deeply, but also provided her with the gumption to survive to 92 in a plague infested inner-city convalescent home - a fine point i’m sure will have been lost on the eldest brother who i hope would place the photo in front of our mother just for the endorphins it would produce, but i sadly doubt his wounds would permit such a kindness.

Still that is not my problem - my problem is to frame my history in such a way that it permits a loving orientation to share with the world about the unique history we are all abandoning to a corporate putsch · mid stride. I am not strong like i used to be and it seems even the universe is conspiring to weaken me further by the rainy season and a general proscription from unnecessary travel in the hamlet i reside. So i go where my mind still allows me access where due to the irrepressible joviality of my sire is a loving place; ma too, but her’s is more the torture of an ambition that never quite joined with the wounds she has suffered. I can pray for her comfort with confidence, for she is a crafty soul who has peeked out at me kindly from time to time, me her offspring nemesis. She even had the gaul to proscribe me from accurately describing myself as a two-eyed cyclops so deep is her vanity about birthing “perfect” children. What she regrettably did not, but maybe somewhere deep in her being understands, is it is was not obsequiousness that prompted me to arrange a visit from an old friend, but deference to her feelings which i cannot begin to understand, but value for their depth and complexity - she is a grand dame and i am grateful to have been her son · that is as close as you will ever get to my “soft spot”, until next time . .. 

jts 15/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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140820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

 

What a scary time this must be for all - i am at times ashamed to include myself in the human species: 4:30 pm Viet Nam time, Quang Nam province in the midst of quelling a Covid-19 outbreak of questionable origin; my own home province Orange County, CA is under assault for the casting of ballots that might indicate who wants what from whom by a fascist corporate cabal, which has incidentally installed its fictional future in this same country it could not defeat by military means, so then resorted to the Neo-Liberal lingua franca · bucks for ballots. I am surrounded in my dying days by a “limp-wristed” cultural effete promulgating a boon for mankind based on nothing more than the yoke of greed - “if you can take it from him/her, it is because they didn’t value it enough to keep it from you first, WHAT A CROCK OF SHIT”, he said to no one listening.

There are memes on fb about “shit getting real” - the fact is, it has been getting real for a long time. The assault on the U.S. Postal system to steal a national election should be proof enough about the danger we as a species face from a bunch of corporate thugs, yet not. So i appeal to anyone within reading distance and free of conceit about their future at “the grownup’s table,” are you too stupid for blinkers or did you just walk into the paddock and let the dumb motherfuckers raping the planet blind you with some vacant promise of "future riches”¿ i understand, sort of, because it was the same con the pissant pukes used to send 58,000 of my kin to a death killing people with no more on their minds than feeding themselves and living free.

We, as the books might say, “have bigger fish to fry.” have you ever read a book that suggested your suffering was unnecessary and nearly entirely the result of some suspicious character in the shadows lacking testicles enough to say "it is 'I' who fucked your future and stole your grandparent’s bank account, but don’t look too closely because i am in the process of stealing your grandchildren’s future as well BTW it’s a really neat flick your paying me to watch - you better pay attention · you don’t want to miss anything important.” I, in the meantime have to ask myself whether this prose is aiding and abetting, or informing you of avenues of escape - lucky me ·

I’m not much better than those who’d enslave you, for i have little respect for your demonstrated capacity to distinguish the real from the illusion. Every penny you spend seeking distraction, confirmation or ownership in a system that has shown you no regard or respect says to me that you are too stupid to understand the pit you are in, much less have any ideas about helping our world to survive. So let me ask you this - if you were in my shoes, how would you go about encouraging a planetary uprising that might result in the survival of our species and a blossoming of reason in a world willing to starve infants, poison plants and induce free thinking of a population that has barely figured out how to reason much less grow¿ that is a question?

One of the advantages of being old - “i don’t really give a fuck what you think, but value highly the affects of my actions” · with what time is left to me which seems to be a more and more complicated equation with each wheeze; i revere the ability to do a good that i do not understand more than any conceit of contribution to which i cling. I cannot even say in what venue my thinking will be read, much less ascertain its usefulness - how much more vanity do you wish me to demonstrate¿ I accept that there are those with conceit enough to destroy a species, so i have little delusion to what ends the monsters in our midst will go to review and allot appropriate, _____ what’s the word i am looking for? “means” to gain their dubious ends - an end that cannot ever be accomplished for the sheer ignominy of its purpose, sort of like watching your neighbor slit his/her puppy’s throat without your objection - good luck · let me know how that works out for you - ya’ pissant fucks who do the murders and those who refuse to object ·  

jts 14/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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130820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Here i sit, once again - staring at a blank page · delicate flower that i am, that blank page almost feels violent. Age, however, precludes that easy assumption and i realize at some level i am simply staring at my own emptiness. When younger and full with ego, i might have seen a rich future of recognition and understanding of my valiant effort to help mankind, help herself. Now it is just one more opportunity to honor the privilege of breathing at a time in human history when so many are being robbed of that simple pleasure. I say robbed, because i am certain this plague is manageable and has only risen to a threat due to incompetence and greed, again by that same August Body of “leaders” who are no doubt clustering in highly sanitized bunkers and possibly too frightened to count their money, much less take a vanguard position to save others. We, all of us already know in our hearts how little the “powerful” in this struggling world of ours esteem our wellbeing and safety, for if it is not war that gets us, then it will be: poverty, gratuitous destruction of the eco-system; arrogant technical manipulation of the agency of free people, racist division of the species in service of war from that same technical manipulation; or just plain old fucking fatigue.

Last night, i spent the better part of the night in a twilight zone of a semi-conscious state, not from excessive substance abuse, but from a conscious decision to pray as best i know how by chanting my homegrown mantra believing more and more with each breath that we are powerful in what we think, and what we hope for - a power that is magnified a gazillion times when it is on behalf of people we know, and a googol times more powerful when we pray on behalf of people we don’t know. Don’t believe me, i’m crazy, but i’m happy. When i woke finally after having given myself permission to sleep my fill, it was not with the weight of the world that had kept me semi-conscious throughout the night, but with the joy of having tried to help, however stupid my effort may have sounded at the time to my rational indoctrination. Peace of heart is important, don’t believe me, ask the Dalai Lama, but more importantly ask yourself if you have ever gained an inch from strife.

My young family life was fraught with the conceit of the time - later to be described by the Neo-Liberals as exceptionalism · what a crock of shit, John Kennedy was shot dead by a cabal of petrol nazis and there was nary a peep from the “Sargent of Arms” as though Bob Dylan was more than a minstrel but an actual agent of the great beyond trying to warn us against our own hubris. My family is comprised of decent people to a fault, parents and progeny. We lived next door to a family who were soon to become Mormons and who to this day i hold dear to my heart, though young T____dy in our few exchanges after 4o years, soon deteriorated into a vituperative rant of such violent and indiscernible nature i yanked the plug within hours. His namesake father was a kind gentle man, though daughters within the home suffered from physical violence i only understood 30 years after the fact. My family’s violence was more genteel and of an insidious nature that is now described as “gaslighting.”

We are awash in violence, and to keep one’s head above water is a continual challenge - while the greater challenge is to not return fire. This is hard for me, for i had no example but the streets and the bare knuckle vernacular that allows wounded people worldwide to love in a violent world. For the longest time i wanted to believe the repartee i had learned in the streets was received in the same vein i had delivered it - tongue in cheek · that violent dishonesty is my own covert violence toward myself and personal shame for a softness i protected without really knowing why. I am slowly understanding better that the insults that came so quick to my tongue were defensive in nature for a fiction i had constructed about the nature of a world i experienced, and continue to experience as cruel and unfeeling. What i discounted was the force of my own orientation and responsibility for wounding people who were not even aware of their unkindness, much less in a position to defend themselves against fantasies that were in large part created out of my own fears.

Now i am going to die, if not tomorrow or the next day, much sooner than my date of birth. When i was very young i tried to conceive of what the word heaven used by adults meant. At the time there was much writing that got filtered down, even to the young about cosmology and what the expanse of the universe might be; this may have even predated the “big bang” theory of spontaneous expansion and certainly was before any “string theory,” but there was enough vague references about the enormity of our universe to capture my young imagination. Just like all thinking, i had difficulty embracing any thought that did not include my family constellation, much less the concept of death - but i tried, because that is how my family rolled, at that time. Later such visions of family became much more self-centered and narrow from renegotiation and betrayal, which is the inherent process of all learning. Today, i don’t know; which is the single most valuable lesson i have taken from my upbringing. Sometimes that ignorance is so overwhelming i am fraught with fear, but due to the focus on curiosity from my parents it always gives way to the same feeling i might have had on an early summer morning wondering what new adventures i could find in that long coming day in front of me.

jts 13/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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120820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

"Sirena"

Then there is synchronicity - another 40 minutes i’ll never get back, opening the not to open easily-serrated cap to my newest bottle of whiskey · also robbing me of the dolorous timber of thunder heralding the pitter patter of the coming rain. I wanted to open this with a description of the strident voices of fear across the road from me, from whom i have learned are visitors to the ward where i live. Just as i was formulating my question of whether i sound that strident in my writing after a few belts - i was faced with the mechanical refusal of access to my attachment · an attachment my conceit has convinced me i am free from. So now rather than being 2 1/2 paragraphs into my daily responsibility, i face 4 1/4 of emotive honor to fulfill what it is allows me to dwell in the comfort of my sleepless nights figuring out how i might have done better. (note: the abbreviated 1st paragraph - the indication of a con on the horizon)

Peace has become such a convoluted equation for me, i no longer understand friend from foe. When i arrived where i now live i reached out to the artist community, out of habit and from a consultation i’d once had with a local authority in the volatile Los Angeles art world - “make friends with local artists” he said; i am still searching for that mythological companion after 20 or more years. L.A. was super-heated at the time and i lived in an artist ghetto known as the “Brewery.” I made friends, even married the dame that introduced me to the locale - a deeply wounded Belgium paper maker · hooked up and 7 years older than i, but all i could see was her blue eyes and svelte, seemingly sexually luxurious physique; lousy model that she turned out to be. I  quickly realized that there was little interest in raising the art bar in L.A. but great interest in getting known which included a slavish adherence to the “Banksky” school of art, modeled on the FB school of patrons “move fast and break things.”

I had arrived in Los Angeles at the tail end of that delusional episode at financing my own art production through education and had gambled big on the support of a creative companion in mutual pursuit of a better world; i failed; we failed, but we tried. In the end i was left like a flopping fish out of water in the wilds of a post-creative Hollywood that was, sucking any and all funds from the tanking, but not yet vanquished “dream machine.” My father died - my family disintegrated · i left for the Far East. What i found is that the same ailments and delusions you bring with you anywhere, will be transplanted and nurtured wherever you land. However i was too vain and determined that i would not be thwarted in my effort to justify the years i had spent chasing “fame and fortune,” and sought seclusion upon my return in the high desert of the Southern Sierras. I met the _rump army coming and fled, because by that time i knew i was neither brave nor noble.

I was, however deluded that art was important to the world in which i lived and began a journey in search of where to make art with the support of the local culture, but first i did penance as a school teacher in Nepal, a roll for which i was wholly unprepared. I believed at the time what had been useful to me from my training would translate into usefulness by students who trudged 3-5 kilometers uphill and 3-5 kilometers downhill just to glory in the conceit of educators believing they knew better than 1,000s of years of information being conveyed word of mouth, fuck by fuck and with a heart that can only be gained by trudging across mountain paths for generation by generation. My humiliation was not yet then complete, and i sought more fertile fields of sharing in the South Americas - again, my conceit prevented me from sharing much less from learning anything but how wrong i was · however helpful that has been, still of little value to the people i’d hoped to “enlighten.”

Ultimately i resorted to the fiction of love after having wallowed in a nostalgic, sensual, but ultimately vain reconstruction of a family adventure gone wrong and returned to my hometown a beaten man to attend the death throes of a woman who deemed me worthy of sweeping up her funeral bier, but not worthy of her candor. “No fool, like an old fool,” and when my dear, dear friend made her request more unctuous through threat and guilt of a time long since gone - i gathered the shreds of my existence and cast them into the vortex of unrequited love and found myself in a mythological circumstance entirely of my own doing · old, alone and unprepared for what Leonard Cohen had so eloquently described as the “preliminaries” to what is all of our great transition. Then Covid-19 came and explained how a fascist had absconded with every honorable thing from where i had been raised and i sit facing a “tabula rasa” daily because it is the only decent thing i have left with which to describe my future · go figure.

jts 12/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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110820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

So doing my part to protect the community and gorging myself on what youtube fare has been left in the public domain, i stumbled across a delightful “film” - i use the term loosely · “Billionaire Ransom ·” That is an hour and some odd minutes i will never get back, but i was mesmerized by its sheer mendacity in service of the billionaires who are only now capping off their greed tanks, and as has been said better elsewhere, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” On one hand i was disheartened to the core knowing how much money is being spent framing the worth or our economic parasites in a positive light, and on the other hand i cannot remember when my moral compass writhed with such mirth at the utter cupidity of such stupidity; (and yes, tommy cruise could be found in the equation, tangentially - like all things tommy cruise; why do you ask ¿?). I mean that in the nicest possible way to all the Scientologists in the audience.

What pains me more is how many seemingly intelligent, well meaning - even forward thinking humans i know who would have no clue about the naked aggression of this inept, however innocuous “action film” of the early 2010s is. The story arc advocated redemption; something of which everyone on the planet is in favor, and in need. What was glossed over throughout the storyline is truth - the white washing of vacant personal responsibility of a drunken driving accident · the unrealistic rehabilitation of lifelong habits of disregard for the value and worth of all people through vacuous casting and vicious dishonesty about a mythological “rainbow bridge” at the higher echelons of society. However, critiquing this yellow journalism is not how i wish to spend my afternoon; if you are tempted to make your own evaluation about a hack film, by hack artists about a hack gentry, please do - but on this subject · i bid you adieu. 

MLK Jr. - “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war” ·

In that regard the capitalists got it right, and Upton Sinclair had is righter - “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I put myself through college designing war components, and it is a fucking crying shame that what i learned during that time could not be put to better use now with what we face as an occupied species. I do what i can and use what i learned after refusing to participate in the warehousing and indoctrination of children of color in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I liked teaching, kids are way more fun to be around, and they are by far the better teachers of the important things in life; like how to hide a lie, bully the weaker, make war with anyone who is different .  .. 

My greatest experience in teaching was at a school on Sunset Blvd in East Hollywood. Of the diverse student body in LAUSD at the time this was the most diverse with nearly even split between Armenian and Latino with the remaining 20% divvied up between a dozen other demographics of color. It was maddening to watch the needless deterioration of relations between the two dominant cultures when they had so much in common - love of music, beauty, independence and fierceness. But nothing i could do or say with the time i was allotted could bridge the gulf - and so it is with likely every other warring faction on the planet, including the pissant billionaires. It makes no sense to struggle for another’s discomfort when everyone on the planet is so uncomfortable. I was, and am at a loss as to how to reason that gulf into the awareness of anyone who does not want to know otherwise. 

I don’t do billionaires, because they seem to be terminally tone deaf and i prefer to work with musical people. Men and women have no excuse, for they are the progenitors of our species and have enslaved themselves to a dichotomy seemingly based on vanity which serves neither. As a man it would be normal for me to point the finger, but i also know what a remote asshole i can be, so i think it better to own that defect and search for understanding with she whom i have loved so often and on occasion found sanctuary from the pain. I have not yet learned how to not cause suffering, but i think Lao Tzu knew the way when he advocated that we each show compassion to ourselves and thereby become reconciled with the world; when i figure that one out, you’ll be the 1st to know .  .. now for the love of g_d, go wash your hands; you know in your heart she knows best.

jts 11/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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100820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

My parents were both pedants - literally and philosophically · I don’t mean that in the pejorative of someone constantly parroting things they’ve not reflected on deeply, though there is that, but that they earned a living as teachers, and were both very interested in learning the lessons this life offers in its myriad ways · learning and teaching, a combination that is almost paradoxically mutually exclusive, one from the other. I am currently experiencing a crisis in faith, for i had been raised with a rock solid conceit in the efficacy of scientific thinking; just now in history the most fascistic combine of corporate power and religious fundamentalism is doing all in its power to discredit the entire “age of reason,” and there is much to what they say. Science has provided the corporate laboratories limitless funds to create poisons based on fossil fuel extraction that are purported to be for the benefit of our species; psychology has been employed by the “military industrial complex” to devise ways to penetrate and undermine the will of the individual on an unparalleled scale and the entire computer technology has been subsumed into a deviant effort to peep on people without warrant or invitation in order to override the “1st law of salesmanship” - you cannot create motivation.

I would surrender if i could find someone brave enough or worthy to whom i could deliver my weapon of reason, but the enemy lacks gumption enough to step out from the shadows and say “it is my algorithm that has enslaved you,” or “it is my ad campaign that has captured your attention,” rather i am surrounded by surrogates of the ruling class proclaiming their fierce independent thinking all the while measuring their success by how many adherents they bring to the fray. It is on rare occasion i meet anyone willing to dialogue about the peril our world faces without them bringing all those who concur with their thinking as though that is foundation enough to believe what they say. We live in a world where coercion is the lingua franca, and if you can intimidate enough that should suffice - the old saw · “might makes right.” I say bullshit, i’m old and growing more feeble by the day, but unfortunately for the powers-that-be, i have less and less to lose daily from my outright defiance of the status quo. 

The only advantage the ruling class possesses over me is the outmoded belief that i am responsible for whatever change i can accomplish - no retreat, no surrender · so to speak. But that ego oriented metric won’t last much longer, for what had once been the corral within which i have been kept docile; that irrational and impossible quest for approval and sanction dims daily. My mission is to distill language that cannot be twisted - to find logic that is impermeable to the legions of greed sucking the last resources of the delicate orb of moisture that has decanted our mysterious human elixir of misery and marvel; compassion and cruelty; of accomplishment and abysmal failure. I believe the solution lies in individual confidence - not the blustering foolishness of the business end of a weapon, but the conviction of each person that what they experience, whatever the valence +/- is of worth, and that each individual is not only expected but valued for contributing their best effort.

The capitalists have contrived this to mean “he who dies with the most toys, wins.” and nearly every person with whom i attended high school believes just that - my own semi-proletariate progressive, hipster doofus brethren are believers, as long as you adhere to what they tell you to adhere to. One of the profound ironies of the entire Ayn Rand epoch is the subornation of the individual to the will of the “one” - the one that got there 1st, the one with more “seniority”, the one with more friends on the “inside,” the one that won’t show him/herself to the light of open and transparent dealings. People have been trained to follow the leader to such an extent, that anyone who veers from leadership is a threat, rather than a fresh thinker, or new influence or fertilizer for growth. Those i meet where i live give great lip service to bonhomme, but in fact level enormous restrictions on who is “in” and who is “out.” This is nothing unique to where i live, for i have lived in 4 continents in 5 years. I am 65 and can tell you there is nothing unique about clustering for comfort.

Why the fuck do you think 2,000 billionaires are able to bullshit their way through the heist of the Holocene era - they picture in their heart of hearts · that they are worthy of 90% of the world’s wealth when in fact they are only worthy of 0.000028571429% .  The great fiction of the conservative battle cry of “individualism” is its missing component - the golden rule · The ruling class interprets “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” as “those who have the gold, make the rules.” I’ve lived with these bullshit artists all my life - they were big shots in the high school cafeteria; big shots @ far too many art openings to say; and in every corporate environment i’ve ever been in where their only contribution was how many they could cow by bluster or bullshit; all the while the important work that was worthy of recognition waited patiently with dignity for a hearing - not from fear, but from correctness. If what you do is worthwhile there is no need to trumpet or bully, the work itself speaks. The ruling class has found if you are loud enough you can make bank on bullshit, all the while everyone in the room knows that you are no more than a naked emperor wearing an "empty suit."

the truth hurts, then you die.

jts 10/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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090820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“do dum dum dum de do dum dum; do dum dum dum de do dum dum, do dum dum dum de do dum dum .  ..” - Leonard Cohen (the secret of the ages) · Leonard don’t lie.

“There’s always a reason why someone’s life has been spared.” - Bob Dylan, & Bob don’t lie.

What are we doing if not for each other? I cannot think of a single instance in my life where the quality of my life has been enhanced ignoring the need of another. This is not to say that i have always been able to provide what another needs, or that my needs complete the purpose for another - but we are connected. Not in the back-channel gossipy way that phones enable cliques to try and define the nonconformist - that shit goes back to barnyard wisdom about how when once one chicken is bloodied, the rest go in for the kill; you can see that shit in any gang in Los Angeles, fierce battle-ready vatos armed and cold, ready to kill whomever the “mero mero deems kill worthy. The irony is getting the go-ahead from the shot-caller, always the shot-caller. These are a bunch of mama’s boys unable to stand upto “blood in, blood out” thinking that makes them men because they have been indoctrinated to believe the creed will protect their back, even after they have seen their homies murdered by a word from the “mero mero;” i’m talking about the Nelson Mandela kind of cajones that resists an entire regime alone and unprotected by anything but his integrity.

Where i live, a lone monk refused both sides of an international conflagration - siding with the population in favor of peace and personal growth, regardless of the political outcome · he was banished from his homeland, and only allowed back after many years. I commend both; he for his integrity and love, they who allowed his return for their wisdom and compassion. We as a species will not survive without an independent agency for the solitary individual. If we succumb to the ever popular “like” meter contrived by the Ad Men of the vanquished handful of capitalists currently holding an entire planet hostage to greed, there is no reason to continue the struggle. The beauty of our planet has been supplanted by conceit of consumer vanity wholly fabricated for no more than the “good life” of 2,000 people out of 7 billion - that my friends is stupid. I am no longer welcome in my family because i would not brooch injustice in the distribution of our commonweal. My siblings, who proclaim progressive values, seize more than is their fair share and wish to quiet my objection to their excessive greed - ergo i am “persona non-grata” and they are _______fill in the blank.

I thank them for their banishment, without which i would not be attempting to formulate logic worthy of the survival of species now - not that that is what you are reading, but at least i am trying and not sleepwalking myself into a sanctimonious demise convinced that what i have done is right, rather invite anyone with gumption enough to say to my face, “call me out.” I’m not hard to find, though i own no phone for i eschew surreptitious surveillance preferring to listen to those with balls or pussy enough to object directly to my face my admittedly seditious ambitions. We, our species, are on a trajectory toward self-destruction with nary a peep .  .. let me rephrase that - there are mass protests to the authoritarian usurpation of a free people · what is missing is the determination of all to protect the sanctity of the individual. I favor solidarity with all my heart, but a solidarity that is based not on subscription to a cause, but one born of deep reflection on what it means to be alone and alive and a respect for that mystery.

“Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.” - Albert Einstein

I just spent 45 minutes simply looking for an unexpurgated version of that quote, “the powers that be” have made sure it is not easily discoverable or transferrable - that is evil · by a company which had the hutzpah to, when a member of the human race, to state in a “not quite” mission statement · “do no evil.” (kurzwell, you a punk) and your punk puppy jaron lanier ain’t far behind - or i guess he’s really close to your behind · These are otherwise ordinary human beings who were given an opportunity to be great and opted for greed. There is no reason on g_d’s green earth why the above quote should not be easily rediscovered and propagated, unless some prissy executive with access to social upheaval computer models ordered her/his AI thug to bury the search criteria where no one could find it - laugh if you must · it’s good for your immune system.

I am old, i cannot carry the cart uphill and it looks like i will be censored from your newsfeed simply because what i say and the way i say it is unpalatable to the effete reigning over your doom. Know this, i have tried with all my might to be honest and open about what i see and what i believe is intentionally hidden from you - not because your are stupid or disinterested, but because you are not bold and  are wounded from repeated betrayals by those you have loved and have tried to love. Do not give up the fight; you are powerful and that is why “they” spend so much energy and your money convincing you that you ain’t shit without them - that my lovely friends is a pile of bullshit. You do not need much to be happy and anyone that tries to convince you that you are useless without them is suspect and possibly dangerous to your wellbeing depending on how much LOVE you have learned to wield like a sword and how much of your useless ego has been sheared from your soul by the growth of your loving self. 

jts 09/08/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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