091020/101020/111020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Opening this edition without lenses and fortified by no more than hope - i ask again, “does anyone need anything i can provide?” . .  . anxiety about the day’s events force this post into a “2fur”. The river “Thu Bon” is still rising and there is a tropical depression forming off the Southeast cost - i don’t know what that means, but i can say the relentless drumbeat of rain on the ceiling is no longer a comfort, nor nostalgic, rather a portent of the days to come for all of our species. As a young mind, when i realized that close study of anyone discipline was not appetizing to my hungry mind, i began an effort to gain understanding of the underlying principles of many studies from those conventional wisdom deemed “expert.” This strategy has been useful in discerning the thinking of many wise men. For example, with regards the “climate change” or “rape of mama Gaia,” however you can her the common event, i learned that the most predictable bell weather for future climate events was former behavior - if it was dry, it will be more dry; if it was cold, it will be more cold, etc., etc., etc.

This is proving true in much of my travel over the past 5 years across as many continents; now here on the Central Coast of Vietnam (Viet Nam). We’re facing innundation, that while has historical foundation - is only going to grow worse as a coastal city · It breaks my heart, but not like it will affect the families who have tilled this land through the ages of war, trade and invasion. What can be done is the same question as “when is the best time to plant a tree - twenty years ago; when is the 2nd best time to plant a tree - today.” Barely a paragraph into two days and i am exhausted. Have done what i could to buoy people, likely more exhausted with more at stake; my fear seems only to be of the unknown - something i’ve been frightened of since birth.

Not sure if i want to remain with the people i am surrounded by. It goes in and out of focus with one moment great affection and the next - “who the fuck are you¿ and why are you talking to me · do i owe you money?” Kidding sort of, i received an email ballot from 1,000’s of miles away and my confidence of being counted is a nearly far. There is something mysterious in the unrelenting rain around my home and within the community i feel great ______fill in the blank. The problem being that this disquiet seems to haunt my steps like the hateful elder siblings of my youth. Do you think there might be a connection?

 

We are all now faced with the consequence of our decisions - mine is in a drunken stupor or a rained soaked estuary - yours i cannot know of, nor particularly care about if you don’t. The heat has relented to where i might sleep, un-assaulted but not beguiled by continued confusion about meaning that is clear enough. Our species, you and i, are subjects in a grand experiment about how much destruction can one DNA strand endure before it breaks and runs for higher ground? not much further from where i stand. My family cohort has been entirely dismantled by by an ideology of Dielectrics and Materialism that has been no more useful to humanity than hinduism, buddhism, or omnism - yet retains a stranglehold on our collective unconscious about which way to evolve · fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

I know a pink skinned pony of a woman in the flat lands of B-Town California who can even from this great distance evoke spasms of (thought interrupted by storm #6, (now 3 days later 121020 _______fill) in the blank; but even as late as 1st, or 2nd thing this morning am remembering features i meant to post to our last fb exchange, yet just now when i traveled back to finish my thought the conventional rigidness of the land where she lives and i fled from was brought into high relief when i found my unfinished comment deleted from that thread. The bitter ironic truth that i must face is that the same narrow-minded censorous behavior i fled from in the oil fields of Kern County, CA “McCarthy Land” are as entrenched and enabled in the entrepreneurial expat community where i have fled to in a Socialist Republic in Southeast Asia. I am an existential buffoon - here on earth to provide mirth to Madame Paradox and her offsprings “’Tis and ’Tisn’t,” during the wheezing last gasps of our much hoped from, but greatly disappointing “exceptional species.” 

jts 09/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

081020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The waters of the River Bon are surging and the rain is now in it’s 4th day, with 2 days said to follow, but for now is unrelenting. I am too ignorant of much to contribute outside of demonstrating a ready willingness to be present. I have my own fish to fry - received my ballot and if i can follow the footsteps of others of my gringo cohort who have cast faxed ballots, may still make my voice heard in a timely fashion, though i’m more an adherent of Leonard Cohen’s “the fight is fixed,” i’m game for representing an alternative to the corporate mayhem that is being served up as “soup du jour” by the withered dead branch of the billionaire class. However, from simple empirical and current data about the fair distribution of important facts, i have grave doubts about our hierarchal orientation about power. My experience has been that within any group, regardless of size or culture - there are personalities whose training leaves them believing themselves superior to all others · i know this from my own “taste” of the poison fruit.

My pathology is from the other end of the ruling class spectrum with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) at the head of the table. When my own parents decided, or had decided by them from the divorce frenzy of the late 1960s, to dissolve their 2o year matrimonial bonds - it was decided that the two elder siblings in a family of four evenly distributed within 2 year-increments would learn of this mutually important event a full 2 months prior to that of myself and my younger brother - ostensibly to protect we the more vulnerable members of the clan from the inevitable damage that everyone eventually enjoyed, but led to a conceit that the two elder siblings somehow possessed greater maturity to face · would that that presumption have become a reality, but no.

Rather, it has led to a circumstance wherein the same siblings are somehow protecting me, a 66 year-old adult male with many more miles under my belt than they two put together, must now “divine” how our mother fairs in a “nazi blackout of 'mutual importance' while simultaneously gagging down my own bile of fury from a passive aggressive cruelty coming from individuals who, in my limited understanding of who they are as humans because of the “shunned identified patient” conceit they would rather attribute to a hatred they have and have possessed for decades using that same justification of “superior insight” and a reluctance to hear any idea but what confirms the “ultra-progressive” righteousness of their socialization that was foisted on them by a confused however loving parent - the now dying "identified patient". What is more difficult to express in this passage is how much i have been infected by this shared pathology, but which i resist only for its toxic effects on whatever growth i can manage in the time left to me for love.

The individuals i’ve described in this chronicle are decent and caring human beings and any confusion about their worthiness in today’s world is a defect in my ability to convey such finely parsed realities between my own evolving need to remain open and honest about what i feel and an historical family dynamic i have found was bent on keeping my voice quashed, not just silent - but invalid. Never again, for anyone, loved or hated will i mute my objection to injustice or cease in any exploration of finding fairness in an unfair world. I will love to my dying day, not just because i am growing closer to my death with each wheezing breath, but because my effort to discover my own very real contributions to my misery, may be useful to unborn children to preserve a peaceful loving DNA strand viciously coopted by unrestrained greed and unexamined existences that could have been otherwise attenuated with small measures of kindness and large measures of good humor - good luck to us all · it may be all there is left to us between here and the charnel floor of our unique and ever loving species.

so much for the discipline of relentless 5 paragraph essays - read later editions, you might have better luck ·

jts 08/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

071020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

For many reasons i have been forced to face my personal proclivities for substance abuse - from an early age onward. The bad news is i have them; the good news is moderation is as legitimate an ambition as greed, and possibly a damn sight more beneficial over the haul. For example, while vegetarianism is more efficient per hectare ·: per gram of protein - even the Dalai Lama - OM · cops to a bite of flesh for medicinal purposes. I used the word Omnism in a welcomed and searching conversation today with a man, his daughter and his 2nd wife, not her mother to try and explain my openness to any idea or belief that bears fruit. In the cloistered hot-house environment where this unique triumvirate has gained traction - i welcomed the opened exchange as a portent of hope in what i’ve thus far found to be a rigid, doctrinaire environment of unnecessarily protected positions - any projections found herein are certainly my own ·

I want to die in love, surrounded by a contingent of supported and happy campers confident about their future, not because of anything i have brought to the equation, but because of a mutually relentless quest into the inner turmoil of finding peace within oneself in a world of digital goons that has literally stolen calm from the soul of our species. Don’t believe me look at your own commentary and declare openly and forthrightly how much is “reaction” and how much is keystroke “action” based on the most quiet and profound realizations and that you are prompted by nothing more than personal reflection and profound gratitude for each breath you take - go ahead · this is not a test and i could give a fuck how you respond.

I want to love a gentle companion and support her most erotic, poetic and philosophical ambitions that she has courage enough to share with me. Just now the rain is surging almost like the voices around me declaring you are “old, your time has past and there is nothing left to you to savor.” This rain will pass because that is the nature of our spherical atmosphere, however sorely taxed by gluttonous entrepreneurs declaring that the solution to their poverty lies in the acquisition of your family’s future - an ignorant and short sided assertion. The only way forward for our species is through what Leonard Cohen and Frank Scott described in the “Villanelle for our Time” - 'a bitter searching of the heart.' The conversation i alluded to earlier with father and daughter included references to Ayn Rand and her premise of “survival of the fittest.”

Fit for what ¿? occupation of a desiccated, ionized planet unable to support life having extinguished ____fill in the blank of native species to enable a coterie of effete trophy hunters confusing virile with virulence and murdering cogent creatures using arms no different than the Neo Liberal weapon of choice - drones · Soldiers too frightened of their own culpability anymore to look into the eyes of their supposed enemies whose only offense was to be born to a faith different than that of those who attack? These are not warriors but slave murderers on the leash of a master they dare not face - their own mortal souls. Buy back your freedom - reason your way from genocide at the behest of a corporate overlord lacking gonads to even represent their contempt for your blood.

Me - i’m gonna wander off the radar and continue to search for a gentle companion who may teach me how to curb the rage in my faint heart. I refuse to hate, but find the temptation around every corner and within each scroll. I will know i am making headway when i find in my path gaggles of handsome young maidens asking me for my time in their bedrolls to teach them the arcane, but not entirely lost art of love - they will then demand from me that i show to history my graphic appreciation of their lithe loving persons with the rapidly fading vision i have, but with which each measure of deficiency gains a small measure of existential finesse i could not have found under any other condition. 

jts 07/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

061020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Amidst my extensive and vivid but rapidly aging memories - is an abandoned afternoon in the rain with my friend Rick Grierson · We had our selection of more than ample galoshes and WWII-informed rain gear to protect us on our walk from my house to his. I was maybe 15 and he having failed a year - a year older; we lit out like modern day Huck Finns in our adventure and spent the next 5-6 hours getting drenched to the bone in ceaseless spring or fall rain. I remember it to this day for the pure pleasure of disregarding every caution beaten into me about the danger of being exposed to the “elements.” Who knew that weather could be so fun, or that one did not melt like a “sugar cube” my sage Uruguayan poet friend would remark on our journey back to her loving renegade paramour Herr Mauch’s palace of Asado Delight - arm’s full of boxes of Tinto Rojo - if you read no further · please take a moment to concur love of that thought. 

We are all of each of us suffering distress that is too often not of our own making but always our responsibility, yet - there is no one else to fill the breech · “t’was ever thus” - Larry Golden; carpenter & artist, formerly of the Brewery artist ghetto. So why not create a late-stage-capitalist morality play of the whole charade¿? that is a question. The calvary rescue was bogus while actually committing genocide on a population that honored nothing more than that of the perpetuation of verdant and abundant land - i don’t want to be rescued by the calvarly · i don’t want you to rescue me, unless you come with love in your heart to listen to the last efforts toward compassion from me that i have in my heart for you and yours.

I do not surrender to anything but a loving conclusion to all that i have witnessed - the destruction and gratuitous grab by a handful of MT souls of more than they could ever make good use of for no other reason than to delineate the perimeters of their emptiness. Why they lacked the courage to come and ask me, i may die never knowing. You have nothing if you cannot give all - each gesture toward the wellbeing of another is a judgement call · the same for me as it is for you, only i have little to give and want to give all, even to the ruling class. How is that for a conundrum - after stealing everything from everyone; now my soul is debating giving to you what i have and you do not?

I am now inundated by rain and listening to songs by a foreign icon - a friend i’ve never met but, but whom i remain more loyal to than many i’ve met demanding much less. I feel close to death which is a reality so many i’ve met would evade without ever confronting the lack of actually living through something as miraculous as this unexplained presence in a world full with paradox - why do you listen to what i, a hated invader who may love you more than i might those from whence i came · what message do i bring that is indecipherable by the lords of meaning?

More importantly, how can my failures as a human contribute to a successful outcome for you and yours when nothing that my culture has ever rendered you is misery and pain¿ it is a fair question worthy of response by the wisest amongst you that may still count me as enemy. I am sorry for all that my culture has presumed on your history - it was never of my making once i learned how shallow is the ambition of greedy small people invading your world for nothing more than profit. But it is now in your lap to intervene and interrupt stupidity toward, not just your noble culture, but all those that would destroy our planet to gain a few more “dollops” of gold to accompany them to their doom.

jts 06/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

051020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Today i learned from the youngest brother that Ma has contracted the virus - she is 92; she’d have to live twice that long for me to fathom what’s she’s on about. Not because she is particularly inarticulate - anything but, she is an inveterate literati. Likely reaction-formation to being married to my father the High School English Teacher for twenty years left compensation scars that were not entirely his fault - professional pedagogue that he was. She, my mother is one of the most competitive individuals i’ve ever known. “Competitive” might not be the right word - indomitable would be a more apt description. If there is a 92 year-old female on the planet that could kick Covid’s ass - it’ll be ma, or forgive the pun · she’ll die trying. This is the same woman who turned in her seat to remark on the 405 south just past Sunset Blvd, transitioning into the carpool lane while traffic was backing up into the South Bay and an angry laborer in a 3/4 ton pickup tailgating me as i was braking from 70 mph on a day i will have traveled 300+ miles to squire her to a Vermeer exhibit - her remark · “You don’t respect me.”

And oddly, she’d be right; as the 2nd middle child in a family of four with the sole sister above me - a ravishing beauty as well, my efforts to distinguish myself as a normal crosseyed cyclops in a family of movie star good looks did not play well · that i was her father, the “rough cob” itinerant miner’s namesake in an Alabama blue blood matrilineal line was just icing on the cake, and that i love her in a way she cannot deny can only have been frustrating to a woman who raised “denial” to a high art. Hopefully, were she ever given occasion to read this narrative, she would appreciate the humor that she beat into me over countless exchanges that never seemed to contain the warmth i felt toward her, but not from her. I needed love more than anything in the family i was born to, but they are a cold lot which i have come to understand is not anybody’s fault, just as Pop might have opined “the way the mop flopped.”

I am racing the rain just now, but welcome the incongruous opportunity to have mined just the right location to commence this parting exploration of one of my life’s challenges. The young woman at the bistro where i am now plumbing the most complex emotions in my existential palette has not entirely rebuffed my aged interest. I have to reconcile the rejection of a parent in order to find a loving end to my own existence. Ma - i love you and wish you had been kinder to me, but it is my responsibility to create relationships that reflect a love toward myself you seemed unable to express and i forgive you for that, because it is a challenge for me as well to make known my affection for people i love. May your journey be rich in wonder and lacking all the terror about death that created the inconsolable fear you expressed to me so openly - an honesty of spirit i will continue to emulate.

You are surrounded now by what you conceived as your “best security” and still this monster virus found its way to your bedside. I can only hope that the fear of those tasked with protecting you from what is your own journey does not exacerbate what could be a lot of fun on your ride out of this reality into your next. What i don’t think you ever understood from me is how much regard i have for your simple force of thought. In my journey i’ve encountered many who affected the mantle of reason, but did so by using totems and allusions to well-trodden paths of conventional thought. What has always calmed me in my confusion about your seeming antagonism toward the person i have become has been a constant surprise from you about those things i have achieved not born of your ambition to “improve me” and what i experienced as a near hysterical ambition to save me from my “self.”

I can only hope the from our long isolation from each other, you have encountered a pattern of affection and regard from my actions toward you that give you relief from any fear of having failed your one “marred, but spectacularly unusual and loving offspring,” not to take anything away from the other remarkable creatures born of your womb and raised in the loving sparse bosom of your _______fill in the blank: 

+-+-+-+-+-

Ode to Mama on the occasion of her 92nd birtday - 19 july 2020 ·

My first iambic pentameter in

A very long time; i am not sure why,

It’s not a complaint, i am just sharin’

Could be ‘cause Ma’s ninety-two years high.

From where i stand, that’s a lot to command

She did me well and doing me well still.

From where i stand, that’s a lot to stand;

To hear it from her, she’s had her fill.

At her age her stand’s not so solid

I would represent, but neither is mine.

I do my best by showing what i did.

Even so, it seems not enough in time.

Where she goes, or how, is not up to me;

She’ll embrace whatever’s her destiny.

jts 05/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

041020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Today i posited on fb that _rump is faking the virus simply to evade prosecution - the greater reality is that the digital overlords and their thug AI algorithms that determine who sees what on your “newsfeed” will never allow that post to see the light of day (Michael Moore conjectured the same the following day) · It is not each other we struggle with any longer, but the wraiths and demons conjured up on our screens by unscrupulous but highly indoctrinated and well compensated geeks. Don’t believe me, ask Julian Assange who is about to be murdered no differently than the pedophile procurer to the rich and famous, Jeffery Epstein. Each was in a position and willing to betray sordid details about the extent that you are dominated by cowards unwilling and unable to argue their positions, because they don’t care what you think or feel - they don’t feel they have to. 

Until human beings resist the further slaughter than the 3/4 of the other species with whom we once shared this miraculous moist blue lit sphere in the nether regions of a universe full with what they've only been able to describe thus fare as being comprised of “dark matter,” you haven’t got a hope in hell of fulfilling much more than an empty existence punctuated by moments of visceral delight that have cost you more than you will make in a lifetime, much less in the 40 hours of weekly servitude you shackle yourselves to for a “kiss and a promise,” don’t believe me - look at your bills · then look at your paycheck. My family lived “on the square” or as a broker i once served described as dealing with both hands on the table - popular Wild West allusions mostly fall short of picturing at any deep level, like the insult of being called a “tin horn” which is to say that your horns will crumple like tin should you ever really want to gore someone.

These allusions to power and strength fall short of the human’s innate capacity to rise to the occasion. Mahatma Gandhi a man with a dubious loyalty to all the oppressed in the world, but lauded for his leveraging one colonial oppressor from the scene so that the Hindu caste system could more completely decimate the Dalit “Untouchables” and their equally legitimate quest for liberation that has simply given way to _rump’s homie Modi who has no more qualms about obliterating the Dalits than Bolsinero has of murdering the rain forests on behalf of the fast food industry to provide Palm Oil and industrial level bovine flesh to the corporate slough that is used in the post-industrial Pre-Soylent Green era of our mutual climate demise. Talk about your tin horns. These fuckers don’t possess the gonads to come out and describe what they are doing to you and your family - they pass that tax-deductible expense along through to the “Ad Men” tasked with making poison, not just palatable but addictive.

Hysterical you might mutter to yourself, if you’ve managed to choke down your star-spangled bile this far into this essay - nightmarish in its own way as the “bell that cannot be unrung,” for anyone capable of parsing such arcane prose or comprehending the grammatical logic of considered rhetoric - is also likely of the ilk that shops organic, drives tesla vehicles, contributes to “quell the mayhem in yemen” and all other manner of hipster doofus cognitive dissonance that allows a $500k salary to drive past the homeless despair that is getting harder and harder to evade by route, but soon will have an app for navigating the more lethal districts until such time the corporate compounds are entirely self-contained and you can live within the castle walls like the vassals you be and your computer controlled environments protect you from - that is everything but yourselves.

I no longer feel threatened by my deeper intentions - as erotic, and impassioned and egocentric as they have been · i find the longer i dwell with the beast i’ve been raised to fear, my self; the more i prefer it to the vagaries and empty loyalties i’ve encountered in my travels. Whatever is the shape of my existence is less vile and more loving than the assertions of those who would condemn me, or more accurately, condemn my back. Few people anymore will come right out and say to your face - "you are a fuck, and these are the reasons why .  .." · More importantly is all the loving kindness from others that i have fought off for having felt myself unworthy based on vain and short-sided reasons that others will have to deal with here on out, i don’t see it. The avatar of a person in front of you on your screen is correctible to a fault, as long as you have your ducks in a row and respond to what it is, and will articulate what it is i am guilty of rather than vacuous positioning to enforce some concept you are too frightened to assert or play on what you may perceive as my excessive sensibilities - they are that indeed, but only in service of our mutual pleasure · so, by all means get at it, or get gone; time’s a wasting and we all be dying until someone shouts loud enough - LET US FUCKING LIVE · i’ll be there, if not in the flesh, at least in spirit.  

 

jts 04/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

031020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I don’t think, nor feel i’ve ever lived in as loving a country as where i now reside - without counting · i’d imagine that to be 12+, but i also used to tout a 1,000 as the number of different jobs i’ve turned my hand to - an inflated number, but not by much · It mystifies me how i can find so much dense affection for existence as i feel from the people i pass daily on my bike ride. They barely notice me, a blessing in and of itself; the culture from which i flee is subsumed by celebrity - the “who is” and the “who ain’t” of modern consumer marketing. I fear that fictional identity is not far off from this culture given the pernicious infiltration of fb ideology of who likes what and who doesn’t like who. This morning at the end of my ride with the last wheezes of my withered frame, my kind neighbor allowed me to confiscate his garden utensil to pull a few weed roots from the crop ground. He and his friend were more than gracious as i spewed sweat after 10 minutes of desultory tilling and surrendered my commandeered tool back to the masters of the soil.

Nor am i being kind to them anymore than they me - i don’t possess the discipline or standing to evoke the growth they have teased from a war torn and ignominiously poisoned fertile soil, patiently revitalized crop after crop and year after year, but i appreciate the generosity of soul they demonstrate, allowing me to take, as the say where i hail from, “a whack at it.” This is not to say that as i mend and my heart grows more acclimated to the toil born of decency, that i may too contribute more substantial effort than my few arrogant whacks, that i am even allowed the handle of a tool is more than the rigid hierarchy of job development designed by the bean-counters of my homeland. There anymore, one cannot deliver newspapers on a bicycle, because all the stories are now published on phones that have been programmed by wannabe digital tycoons based on the “bezos ‘take it all and let them eat cake’ school of economics.”

I had to chuckle coming back down the hallway from my last cigarette chewing on Pema Chodron’s observation about “getting kicked out the nest again.” Were i politic, i’d restrain my tongue, or in this case, fingers and find quiet language like what my family had tried to evince from my confused cycloptic existence - from where i stand evrything that has had any meaning to my socialization has been ripped from me by a universe clearly more informed about my future than those sage voices who murmur, “if you would only do this .  ..” life would become _____fill in the blank. I don’t want that life. I want to hear from myself an inexplicable love, i feel but rarely find. I have tried many strategies to encourage its presence, but all seem hollow efforts to effectuate the normal pattern of existence - love begets love · I’m not sure at this stage of my death whether my lack of understanding about love explains my seeming predicament or whether my delusion about predicaments explains my understanding about love.

It doesn’t matter, for i shall certainly pass and without children; what you read here are my only progeny - (look it up, language is your friend · opinion not so much) Why shouldn’t i be entertained by an angel of the caliber Master George Carlin enjoyed ¿? Where is it written in the everlasting log of “rightness” that my base desires and expressed wants constitute devaluation of my wants and desires for the well being and comfort of all my brethren - known friend or known enemy ¿? What does that even mean anymore ¿? We as a species are on the brink of extinction - we, as near as i can tell have exterminated ourselves based on manipulation and misrepresentation between ourselves of our more noble instincts by a selfish cadre of greedy souls who bear less resemblance to the greater number of humans than your knowledge of who i am is based on, what i have written - don’t be that stupid · stand up and fight for your loved ones; present, past and future.

 

jts 03/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞