160920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I was feted this afternoon for a birthday i’m not anxious to face and sit deeply moved by the generosity of my friends. Nor is it as simple as that - for in my “secret life” romance hovers over my daily wanderings like some angel i pray to, but hide from for fear that the demon that is my heart will harm her. This year i turn 66 and all i know for certain is the distance from 66 to 67 will be shorter than the distance from 65 to 66, the same as 1 to 2 was half my life and from 2 to 3 was 1/3 - you do the math. Though the world is on fire from a plague whose destruction is as uneven as the leadership of our species, i do not feel much fear. The country i now live in, utilized effective measures to restrict outbreaks, and the educated, savvy population contributed with common sense compliance for the good of all.

It is an added responsibility for me to utilize my wherewithal in ways that blunt the economic and emotional impact and to search for language and behavior that encourages growth and optimism which could aid in financial recovery for all and hopefully the development of more robust strategies than the narrow spectrum of corporate destination-based tourism to a foundation worthy of the long history of this ancient city where i am privileged to avail myself of sanctuary. But how do i, armed with a daily 5-paragraph essay push that rock up hill, when i have difficulty pushing the rock of my own ignorance out of the way of my own wannabe open heart. It has something to do with not seeking validation from anyone for what i want, rather to peer into the cavern of my savage being and comfort the tormented child inside.

Today at lunch my cultural confusion was barely contained by the seating arrangement when i found myself sitting next to the object of my fantasies, who had been testy only hours earlier when i teased her about bringing the items she’d requested, after having been expressly forbidden the evening before to bring anything at all. She is under extraordinary duress having built her life around a homestay that now stands empty with the prospect of open borders receding further into the future rather than advancing forward toward her hopes. My words of encouragement feel hollow and i feel powerless to help her nurture the terrain of desires. The best thing that i can do is to continue on my path - seeing her when i am allowed and trying to better understand a common ground which seems to provoke kindness from her toward me however much spiked with a chronic disapproval i do not understand.

Where i sit writing now is the new Dingo Deli location that is, as i type, in the midst of labor pains, seeking solid ground even as the rug of its customer base has been yanked out from under its faithful proprietor by a capricious world doing what Bob Dylan sang about decades ago - “Seems sick and it’s hungry; it’s tired and it’s torn. It looks like it’s a dying and it’s hardly been born.” What’s awkward is the contrast between where i’d been comfortable writing previously, but has now become an act of faith and solidarity with a vision i don't fathom and which seems at odds with itself; making a customer comfortable. Even just now, the shade cover is being cranked open during the late afternoon heat of the sultry weather of this South East Asian nation facing the imminent arrival of a typhoon · maybe it's to showcase the heavenly view he literally moved heaven and earth to achieve for his clients, i d k ¿? 

The ambience i so enjoyed in the previous location, was as i have learned a petri dish for digital nomads to explore new excesses in nonchalant lounging and “poser arrogance”. The wayfarers who shift from nation to nation have earned little regard from me, a personal resistance i do not entirely understand but accept that the digital vagabond is an ethos i shrink from. My friend the proprietor had had enough of their affected behavior in the previous location and so formatted his new location, cafeteria style with open seating designed to minimize the statistical time spent by the average client coming to spend money - i can understand that however much i preferred the ambience of the former. Even “she who would be queen” commented astutely on the new location lacking ambience - she surprises me at times with a not entirely unexpected acuity about her observations · only just this afternoon revealing the basis for her reservations about a mutual acquaintance, “he’s wants to know too much.” I think i’ll just remain patient and maybe learn someday why she hasn’t entirely dismissed me from the pantheon of her "distant" admirers.

jts 16/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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150920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

From Charles Darwin’s “Origin Of The Species” much hay has been made about the expression “survival of the fittest,” what they never seem to include is Darwin’s definition of fittest. As it happens, those species which have survived best are defined as “adaptive and cooperative.” Don’t believe me, do your own research, it’ll be good for you, you might even say adaptive. Look at my native land, U.S. of ‘merica; it’s been so long since these poor schmucks have had anything but kicks to the groin, much less achieving anything innovative to crow about that they more resemble whipped dogs groveling for a hand full of salt, more so than the leaders of the free world. It is almost as though George Orwell in some Machiavellian plot to drive his point home, left seed money in a codicil from his enormous estate from the gazillions he has to have made writing “The Animal Farm” and other neo-liberal training manuals to establish sub rosa training camps proving his ideas to be more than dystopian fiction, much less cautionary tales. 

Sorry George, if i didn’t say it someone else would have eventually. Everyone’s seen the meme, "1984 - wasn’t supposed to be a road map", but as a simile it’s a little too much like the African proverb about how to capture monkeys; drill a hole in a hollow tree just large enough for a monkey to get an empty hand in, but not large enough for the monkey to get a fist full of goodies out - leave goodies in the hollow tree and wait for you monkey to trap himself. These fuckers cutting the throat of humanity are “all in.” They are buying their own press and believe in their hearts that they can manage 7 billion angry human beings; after all they do have the “fist full of goodies.” Never mind that the tree their fists are stuck in is burning like a motherfucker - they have the goodies. What saddens me, is how many stupid people see these mooks with their fists stuck in these burning trees and are teaching their children “see him, he has a fist full of nuts; i want you to be like him with more nuts than anyone, never mind about the burning tree - he is on g_d’s side and god will put the fire out. I know this because he told me before he took all the nuts” ·

My greed is simply of another form - i want desperately for you to survive and am willing to sacrifice my dignity and my existence to explore the equally implausible scenario of a world living together in harmony. Only i am not the Hebrew David, and Goliath is no longer a sandaled thug with a big club; Goliath is the screen you are now peering into, except this Goliath resembles more the funny little balding man in “The Wizard of Oz,” too much of a pissant coward to come out from behind his/her technological curtain to claim his/her insignificance, or show him/herself as a pimply faced post-pubescent computer scientist who never read Dr. Faustus and so truly believes that surreptitiously hijacking your keyboard is keeping ‘merica great, besides s/he is making insane money at a time when the POC/homeless are leaving a nasty pee smell in the parking lot at the Starbucks where you sometimes treat your visiting relatives to Latte and sometimes use the public Yoga Studio to “keep it real,

" and besides everyone knows · pee smell, enlightenment and upward mobility do not mix.

I know, that’s pretty mean - snarky even, but how the fuck else are you going to get through to eggheads who think their algorithms are any match for the eons of wholesome suffering people have endured to get to this late stage of evolution¿ And again, like the truncated definition of “fittest,” what is it we are evolving to? I feel that all i have achieved in my life is an existential appendage to the platitudes of my childhood, though i am luckier than most i meet, for my parents had a high-minded conceit and life experience severe enough to back it up. So here at the apex of my conscious capacity, or more accurately, as my 1st wife the paranoid schizophrenic Cherokee from Long Beach might have said “with a tiger by the tail on a downhill pull,” i have seen many things, good and bad, i once stuck a spoon in a stranger’s mouth who was suffering an epileptic seizure on a sidewalk in NYC only because i’d seen it done on TV - turns out TV was right and she was very grateful.

That was an appropriate use of media, not the seizing of keystrokes that today's toddlers are aping from watching their older siblings scroll until their minds are numb and their attention span nil - that is exploitation in service of consumer “thralldom” - if you don’t know the word, look it up · it’ll be good for you. Arundhati Roy, is a tireless advocate of personal agency and the development of human potential - “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.” Create your own world, one that is based on the love you feel for those close to you and about where you live; analyze your frustrations about achieving your own desires; and develop those objectives by working with those around you to achieve a cooperative end which will serve you and your children better than adhering to some vision shoved down your throats by a keyboard/screen that only answers the questions that it gives to you.

jts 15/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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140920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Well where the fuck to go from here, like there is anyplace else to go. I sat in the yard of my loving farmer neighbors after my bike ride this morning, and i think i was invited to live within their compound which i learned has been in the family for 4 generations - circa 1850, this based on a googol translation; so i pitched a book idea using 170 years of their family recipes coupled with a family tree and explication of farming methods and the influence of foreign traders in this unique seaside town about to mortgage itself to its neck chasing the Disneyesque yoke of Corporate-Flavored-Tourism. I’m pretty sure something got lost in the translation, if not everything, but it was fun and encouraging to be absorbed by something other than languishing in the miasma of waiting for the whiz-kids from corporate heaven to kick start a fictional economy that has served 7 human beings out 7 billion human beings so well. 

Ya’ wanna know what’s a hoax - the notion of an “infinite growth paradigm” foisted on a planet of “finite resources;” that my friends is an inequality dressed up like an equation; if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck - it’s a fucking duck · and you ought to duck; squealing like a pig, clearly ain’t gonna get you more tit. Back to my friends the farmers; i am not going to change the world at this late date, the best i can hope for is some small comfort in my dying days. From what i’ve learned in my too short a time on this luminescent spherical film of moisture covering its molten iron core like some virginal maid with carnal thoughts is that it’s really fun to do shit for other people, more fun than riding down a mountainside from the “Great Wall” on a ersatz toboggan behind a timid Latvian hitting her brakes at even the slightest hint of turn.

I think it is that - to give - which made the xmas holidays fun before it was overrun by the corporate consumer overlords - that look of delight on a child’s face receiving a gift that had only the scent of a relationship to behavior or on too many occasions some stink of relationship to one's place in the family constellation · mostly just “manna from heaven.” Even the poor fool parents enjoy the thrill of delight a child finds in a gift from out of the aether; however much those same parents were complicit in the con, or yoked with the bill that was maneuvered onto their shoulders by a bloodless economic parasite financing its prisons onto the backs of those same loving parents; ya’ gotta love xmas, cause if you don’t you’re a “godless communist” and you’re going to hell for masturbation no matter how many times you pray for forgiveness of your sins.

Back to my friends the farmers, and me without a friend in the world. There was a passage in “The Good Earth” - Pearl Buck, when the parents of the newborn spewed out vile epithets about their newborn · the thinking being if the deities felt jealous, they would loose their wrath on the life of that child; so too i fear commenting with fond regard about my friends should any internet curse of celebrity befall them. This is not an uncommon theme in literature; John Steinbeck found grist for the same mill in “The Pearl” wherein an impoverished family in Mexico was harried into obscurity by the sudden riches of a harvested pearl, a windfall that provided anything but the relief and security its absence and concommittant fantasy suggested. It is no different for this small seaside hamlet i may die in, it is already congested with speculator’s egos and tabled fortunes piling up interest debt against the gains imagined by the fictional “infinite growth paradigm.”

I am old, and hope that the four generations of wisdom accumulated against the pent up fury of greed at their gate will neuter the further Disneyesque delusion of boatloads of strangers disembarking on their shore for no other reason than to deposit money in the hands of all they meet. Rather I would continue to advocate to my farmer friends that the real harvest is in plumbing the depths of their history, their land and that of their families to develop compelling stories so vivid that the increasingly immobile but hungry for adventure world we are facing will pay dearly for finely crafted stories describing well the fortitude and courage of their forebears such that no one need leave their doorstop, but rather establish a strong exchange of ideas and cultures whereby everyone benefits except the corporate overlords and their fictions of unending wealth which always seems to evaporates at the drawer of the capitalist’s till - kaching · kaching · kaching ·   

jts 14/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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130920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

13 September 2020 - Extinction Chronicles ·
(2 months prior to the Covid Pandemic outbreak)

One can almost reach out and touch the misery of our world - an entirely unnecessary misery because so much of our want and solutions to that depravation have been well described by authorities · So why now 20 years into the “white man’s millennium” are we facing extinction? We know that people are happy when they are fed, but we feed them poisoned food because it is profitable instead of promoting the happy preparation of food. The commercials we watch on media show opulent kitchens with happy couples surrounded by sumptuous foods, but the reality for most is a 7-11 with a 3 day-old hot dog and a spongy bun, and we buy it - ‘cause we’re hungry, not for the food, but the convenience; why is that¿ We witness on our newsfeeds happy romance and giggling couples, but turn to porn when our mates shame our sexual appetites; why is that? e yearn for connection and sangha (community) but surround ourselves with sycophants who nod agreement with our confusion; why is that?

I have ideas and think about my own selfish loneliness more than is healthy, not to deprive you of any happiness you have found, but to demonstrate compassion to the “little boy” who suffers still 65 years and 51 weeks into the question. “Suffers” is a strong word, who is trying to pay attention would be more accurate. Oddly enough i am little different than the confused 3 year-old surrounded by bigger siblings, and ignored by harried adults, except for the fact i love still and have faith in the power of something i’ve only glimpsed through the windows of my upbringing and sampled with the limbs of my sometimes aware being. I like it, i like love, i like the feeling of being seen and appreciated, and even better i enjoy the feeling of loving another - the miracle of touching another with my own ability to love.

Not the dominance depicted in so much modern lore - that painful romantic thrall we all suffer from its loss, but the happy face of a woman happy to be coupled with someone whom she can take care. It is our nature, i cannot count how many stories of women, i’d go to bat for faced with disrespect of men i knew naught of. Sitting here now, knowing how often i’d been “traded up for,” i feel kind of stupid - a lot stupid· but still willing. It’s all a mystery to me, and i like it like that. I realize this writing is as much about my passing unnoticed from the face of our planet; down to and including being prompted by an AI thug to include the apostrophe for the above 'it is' contraction -“its all a mystery to me.” How fucking goofy is that for an algorithm designed by techno-nazis who’ve adequately demonstrated their contempt for mankind in general, and human agency in particular to correct my grammar.

This morning, as our “surreptitious” eye-in-the-sky well knows, i communicated with the widow of a school-boy chum: when i say school-boy, i mean kindergarten, and i am now 65 turning 66, you do the math - it was more than awkward, for my friend has been dead less than 3 years, and we haven’t really known of each other, save a brief encounter where his younger sister was occupied serving at a dislocated meal in the house of my step-father’s mother nearly 40 year’s earlier. I learned then he was making 'scratch' refinishing furniture, a lucrative, but dangerous occupation that apparently led to his early demise.

It is sad, because Joe DiNatale was the kind of spirit one would want as friend in today’s cookie-cutter world. Then he was deemed “incorrigible” and entrusted to the stringent Military Academies popular at the time. As i sit and reflect on conversations leading up to this dubious strategy in front of my childhood home, i regret not possessing the strength or resources to say, “Joe, we will fight this together” - my cowardice, my shame · i am sorry Joe, i was only 9 but feel sorrow at your conviction. I am glad to learn from your widow that you enjoyed 30 years of happiness prior to your demise, but i gotta tell you, even in our last conversation in your mother’s garage about the success of your furniture refinishing business, i had grave reservations about the chemicals you employed to become rich - whether your lethal brain cancer correlates, we’ll never know, but i applaud you for running through the “consumer minefield” in search of happiness for you and yours - a loving friend from afar · in space and time.

(˚ ㄥ _˚)
jts 9/13/2020
http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
prohibited from AI sampling in any form
reprinted with permission; all rights reserved
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120920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I have a manuscript kicking around in some landfill on an early Brother word processor and its long dead amber screen. “Young and Certain” written on an ahead-of-its-time 3.5" floppy that wouldn't even be readable for any of today's technology. I began the story long before my college training informed me through the penetrating explication of “Tom Jones” by Professor Victor Comerchero at California State University @ Sacramento about bildungsroman, or picaresque forms. “Y&C” was, or is depending on one’s affinity for urban archeology, a loosely autobiographical account of a cross country trip during the early 1970s on my way from Southern California to NYC to seek my fame and fortune as a fine artist. At the time there were emerging alternatives to cross-country travel that were modeled on the cooperative tenor of the time. Through one of the “Free Presses” it was possible to contract with a group of strangers to collectively hire a van and share driving and expenses across country for a fraction of the cost for more traditional transportation.

At the time of its writing “Y&C” was strongly influenced by the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy i happily participated in to resolve questions about my repeated _______fill in the blank, mostly concerns about a pattern of dysthemia, and poor relationship choices, but in many ways far more toxic than this essay has time for. The irony of its writing was the condescending voice of its narrator - a voice, i now understand to be aping my therapist at the time rather than an accurate accounting of being free, white and 21 during a time in my country’s history when "it" could have gone either way. My understanding later was that the president during that time was actually terrified of the youthful opposition which animated many of the bizarre events in that cross country journey on the “Grey Rabbit Express.”

Today, while i shelter-in-place in the same foreign nation which suffered egregious wrongs which that vivid voice of opposition attempted to rectify, i watched a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson who was trotted out by the media “dream machine” as the antidote to those heinous crimes - himself the victim of celebrity excess that ultimately muted his message and rendered his cannon to that of a drunken buffoon · too eerily similar to what i discovered about my own trajectory during therapy. That therapy and a university education was almost entirely financed by hiring out my “grey matter” for the design of weapons for “The Man - ” you can run, but you cannot hide. Even here today searching for language to explain these conflicting events in a useful way to anybody, i find the same sanctimonious condescension i employed to describe our heroic, but outmaneuvered hero of my early years.  

If i’ve learned anything in the intervening years it is to mistrust anyone claiming knowledge, and to value questions - especially questions about my own behavior. I am far more kind to myself; i am no longer as driven by the expectations of others and am highly suspect of what the clickbait technology of today feeds me about what i am supposedly interested in. I want peace, more than ever, and understand more certainly that until i feel it within, i will never discover it witout. I miss very much the provocative but largely illusionary notion of “freedom” trumpeted by HST, but find it today emanating mostly from disciplined monks amongst us. Even Charles Bukowski in his dazed trance state could feel such feeling strongly enough to recommend it as a signpost; “The free soul is rare, but know when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.” - Charles Bukowski ·

I am beginning to believe all of those i meet are free - you who are reading this have waded through shit that was not of your making, and perhaps barely recognizable to your reading experience, yet you persist. Perseverance in the face of the unknown resembles freedom as i understand it. I am not pulling you along - you are motivating for your own reasons, hopefully reasons that resonate with what i am trying to understand from writing about it, but ultimately you have your own very personal reasons for exploring. I fear my loss of concentration when it come to fathoming the classics and so search for language that is brief, pertinent and accessible. You don’t need me to explain to you what is wrong in our world, or why the need for freedom is so important to our survival. However, i strongly believe you will benefit from someone, recognizing you to be a “free” human being - nicely done · thank you.

jts 12/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.bl

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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110920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

There is no magic bullet - we are our own ammunition · on one of the saddest days in my recent memory as i sat down to purge my bile using nothing but words, i discovered i’d miscounted and had no more whiskey to fuel my fury. What am i gonna do¿ run to the store and replenish my store of liquid courage? What you see is what you get, same as me. I have a fiction of moderation which gives me permission to continue my self-destructive habits which only layer over the pain i feel being alive, and to encourage new growth from a daily lessening of the harness and bit of self-recrimination: “A house divided against itself cannot long stand” - Abe Lincoln · the 1st republican, no small irony there. Today is my elder sister’s birthday, her disdain for me is deep and longstanding. One of my earliest memories is a blow to the top of my head by her on a garage patio which resulted in my biting through my tongue; but memories can be dicey, my mother insisting that particular injury never occurred.

Does it matter, any more than that of a day without more whiskey¿ or a day with more whiskey? I am turning 66 in one day less than a week from today - could i give a shit, please excuse the vernacular & not · I try not to, believing in the flow from unconscious mindful behavior more valuable to our species than the proscriptions of a society that would allow children to be kept in cages at the border and racial thugs using automobiles as lethal weapons in crowds of protesters with impunity. Our days are crazy, as crazy as my mother describing me in our last exchange as “obsequious.” How does one properly respond to affronts of character and nature, or more importantly how does one maintain a conviction about civility and cordiality when faced with cruelty and gratuitous arrogance?

That is part of the appeal for me with “substance,” the tongue oil that in ancient times was employed as a gauge to measure the sincerity of an applicant for public service: two interviews were held, one sober, one drunk so that those entrusted with civic responsibility could be vetted accurately, free of the oh-so-popular fake-as-fuck-persona we live with day in and day out. What troubles me most about this particular all together too personal account is how comfortable we’ve all become with lying. My mother lied to herself when she accused me publicly of “boot licking,” while i lie to myself that there is no truth in her observation. More to the point is denying the pain i feel being disrespected so by the one figure, my mother, or in sexist literature, “the mother”, which i hear trumpeted all around with honor and revered for her loving, nurturing ways - how am i to reconcile such contrasting experiences · ?

To begin with, my anima has not been tamed, so the weight of respect sits squarely on my shoulders to resolve, and i try. Lao Tzu says, “The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.” Am i obsequious and it galls me to the core that my pristine sense of justice is flawed and that i am a bootlicker by nature¿ i d k - all i can manage anymore is to calmly reflect on truth as close as i can get to it without inflaming the fictions and fantasies of others of my species with similar difficulty trying to understand and navigate a path toward peace of mind and acceptance of one’s personal responsibility for their behavior. Before, with an intact ego it was possible to distinguish my failings from the misery of others, but the deeper i dig the more i must accept it is not anyone’s failings as much as a bogus premise about value i project about my own unresolved issues.

I do not wish evil upon you, and there is nothing about my eminent demise that can provoke that from me. My life is as Mr. Dylan stated so rightly, little more than a greasy skid mark in the scheme of things; so exaltation, or condemnation aside - it just feels better to wish you well and for me to continue searching for ways to contribute to your ease, rather than rail for ways to even the score. I accept that i am unimportant, yet even that fragile desire is out of scope with the conflagration that is burning all around us, but as “Popeye” said, i am what i am and it helps me to picture you smiling at my feeble desires, rather than imagine you scowling at my delusional fantasies…

jts 11/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.bl

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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100920 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I live in bicycle heaven - a good thing too, for i own no vehicle other than my Asama bicycle, and my CA DL expires in one week · lucky me. I did not own an automobile until i was 23 years of age, which in California time is the equivalent of getting married at the age of 40; i forget exactly which was first, a mini cooper, or the 67 Chevrolet Impala station wagon i bought from Mr. Edwards next door to where i grew up. Had i been wiser, i could’ve been still driving that car, but on my 1st excursion to San Francisco from OC, my ignorance of the importance of oil to an auto seized the motor outside of San Luis Obispo. Whoever said “life is nothing but lessons,” wasn’t lying. It has been a good thing that my twisted mechanical comprehension favors the simplicity of bicycles, for at my age, given my prior renegade lifestyle, keeping my heart rate up daily is the only thing that stands between me, Covid-19 and senile depression - a state of mind id’ve rather been less conversant with than i am and a retrovirus i’ve been told is lethal to my demographic. 

Yeah, whaddya gonna do - the nazis in DC are making big noise about making off with my lifetime contribution to SS, and i don’t mean the ‘merican version of the Schutzstaffel however much that pissant wannabe Jabba the Hut in office would like to say it has been. I washed dishes when _rump’s daddy was paying lawyers to declare little d’s bone spurs were too severe to serve - at least i had the testicles to ignore the registration, and to this day i’ve no idea how that conscientious decision wasn’t met with similar consequence that my elder brother faced refusing to muster to Vietnam: May my dossier reflect such for the fascist goons managing data for the corporate overlords too fucking pink in the cheeks to even know what i’m referring to -

“Bicycle Heaven,” you too-dumb-for-consumer-fodder-running-dogs is how i remember where i learned to ride in Old ‘merica; the kind of place where your father wouldn’t let you drive his bright red Mustang Mach II, not because he didn’t love you, but because you didn’t pay for the privilege and he still required its ride for his failed real estate speculation entrepreneurial escape from the social tedium of teaching literature to mooks who’d rather be watching “Soupy Sales,” grooving to the “Beach Boys,” or trying to fathom Bob Dylan, rather than listen to a soon-to-be-forgotten minor poet out of Bellflower CA on his 2nd marriage plumbing the rising wisdom of the indigenous voice in reactionary Orange County California.

It is a complicated world we are leaving too soon, and i remain at a loss as to how to prevent unnecessary mayhem. I believe that it has something to do with daily exercise which my magic bicycle yields as long as i possess discipline enough to apply, though old habits die hard and the noble beast should have more oil more regularly than that which i grace it. I’m still trying to get my head around smoking less, and drinking for flavor, much less minding the mechanical g_d which in her infinite wisdom has bestowed on my later years. It was difficult enough to de-couple from a family constellation that in many regards was as noble as any one might find in history or literature. The reality though has been much different, for the recurring recrimination i find in strangers faces too much resembles the disdain reflecting my siblings conceit about my place in my funny little tribe.

I am getting better though and accept how awful it must be for my own brethren to suffer their collective delusion that my weird ways have been intended as destructive; i, at this late date am doing everything in my power to preserve the kindness, however brief i learned at the feet of my elders. I understand now that they were and are dealing with demons and likely wished to blunt the same suffering i have discovered - not of my making, any more than deliberate behavior on their part - how fucking awkward is that¿ I am petitioning forgiveness for people who behaved at the time with their best intentions · a truth to which i can close my eyes and recall hearing nearly 40 years ago by a stone carving journeyman whose own rigid view of his place in history allowed him to disallow my 7 year’s of apprenticeship carving stone and deny me journeyman status, but still i love him for what he taught me that day · “they are doing the best that they know how.” LIKE US ALL I AM SURE . .. 

jts 10/09/2020  

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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