281020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Who knew a typhoon could be so instructional and so mysterious at the same time. Yesterday late afternoon, early evening my friend the mystic artist posted a meme about “gentle raindrops falling” with a time stamp of 6:58 pm, earlier another artist sage had included photographic instructions for lashing two doorknobs together for reinforcement. I have since learned you can sleep through a typhoon if you are willing to sleep with one eye open; that if “she who would be queen” is being testy - let her; my farmer friends are kind to the bone, braving the 100km per hour winds to render their duck friends, albeit future dinners · comfort in the intervening time; and some how leaves blew through the secured back door to land over the drain on the plastic stool and create a lake puddle from droplets unwilling to stay outside - my friend the rat who i’m sure is related to the movie star rat from “Ben”, boosted two of my three candles in the dead of night - leaving her teethmarks on the 3rd · and somehow an offering in folded yellow waxy paper with pictograph writing was left at my doorstep containing a very plausible copy of a $100 C note - as they say in East L.A. “s’plain me.”

The meme with the kindly time stamp, now provides realtime information for predicting the duration of the blackout - cam on Anh Ay Duc Bet · the missing candles, simply fortify my anthropomorphic theory about my house guest Madame Rat, and sure enough moments later i found her teeth marks on the cap of the bootleg plastic bottle of rice wine - the night before i had interrupted her slurping of my pot-au-feu a-la-poulet that i left on the stove; as she lept off the counter after i disturbed her meal, i can swear like the current ‘merican president that she gave me the “Bronx Cheer” - ‘thrbbppp’, were my vision sharper i’d likely seen the 3rd digit of her paw in salut, but will not chance her next visit by leaving the container exposed for her to topple and slurp all that distinguishes me from sleepless despair, and sleepless hungry despair; kidding, sort of.

These two paragraphs have cost me 5% of the 89% left i left myself after arrogantly not recharging during this morning's fb activism just prior to being cutoff from the electrical trough for thoroughly rational and commendable civic precautions at a time when leaves can be blown through closed door and puddles made on random stools. My prayers are that the sticks of incense i reflexively burn, while wondering whether they are simply of no help, or that without them the massive natural calamity befalling friends of mine and enemies alike would just be that much greater - i d f k · I do know i’m glad i got to the rice wine before my wannabe rodent house guest figured out how to topple the bottle and consume my precarious store of liquid courage.

And in the midst of all this solipsistic bullshit i feel for “she who would be queen”, so accustomed to stopping men in their tracks with a glance to find my frozen heart not responding to a fury that serves neither her nor her ambitions, much less something i fear. I fear; i do not understand why when i toss cabbage, oatmeal and nut crumbs to the duck cluster outside my window, they seem more afraid of me than the storm. Days earlier, i’d crushed mollusks with Anh Ay Tran that is apparently the ducks staple, but their foraging appetite seemed stifled with the ravaging 100 km per hour winds; what i don’t know about mother Gaia and her kin will fill the unfilled volumes of my thinking when i pass - how sad, and not. There will be others wanting to learn from farmer Tran and his family about how to nurture food and livestock while weathering fierce and more fierce storms from a paradigm based on greed no one questioned them about nor obviously learned much from observing them. Hopefully the chemical traces left in my synapses at my moment of death will constitute some information somehow for those facing an extinction not at all of their making.

My friends the ducks have returned to their semi-protected aisle between our two buildings - whether my nutritional offering in the midst of this typhoon was useful or useless, i may never know - but i tried · what is left to decide for that interminable silence between reconnection to the “information super-highway” when electricity is restored and my flickering house lights can once again pose a danger to me from electrocution is anybody’s guess, like not knowing the mind of a woman or learning how to fathom one’s own heart after a lifetime of indoctrination · I accept fully that compared to the force of nature, mine own ambition and life is vastly insignificant; i am struggling to understand how much that will affect my end days. Right now i am trying to track the effects of mold on my ear canal from an ancient wound, and the toxic repercussions of a dissipated youth squandered too far into my dissipated dotage @ 77% battery charge, hoping for electricity at 3:07 pm is little different than hoping the mold growing on my walls will not influence the disease of rot from my early on broken eardrum, so i will now go and fashion some gruel of oatmeal and pot-au-feu that will retain enough coldness in my electric-less “icebox” and provide nutrition to combat the emotional stress i feel while wishing you all a wholesome future full with courage and wisdom to prevail over a handful of capitalist weasels who care not a whit about you, but what you can pay them.

Good luck to us all.

jts 28/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

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271020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

In 2005 i awoke from an emergency appendectomy - 6 days later my wife of 13 years took a powder while i was at work · In no position to recuperate i walked the 2 miles down Figueroa to the local hipster doofus art gallery to, as they are fond of saying in East L.A., represent at an art "opening" my soon to be ex could be found. I share this for no other reason than the qualitative feeling of being alive during that 4 mile trek. Against the 13 years of an increasingly blunted emotional reality of, as master Hank Williams Sr sang, a half-hearted love, each step of that 4 mile meditation rang with a vividness of existence i’d not known, for too overlong. I’m okay with that, sort of. Each day after that long night walk seared into my being the precarious ecstasy of living fully in the moment. Much pain has followed from those events, which has precluded the convenience of pointing any finger of responsibility for anything, anywhere but in my own face; so now 15 years later, in another part of world entirely feeling the same blunted emotional affect of that time, there is only myself to comfort.

And not, i have found great exhilaration through consideration of other - the more anonymous the better. Almost as though the paradigm of hooks associated with generosity i was raised to believe; if abandoned could decouple karma with each anonymous unexpected contribution; and not. The beast ego is never far from the killing floor, but how to defame greed with one hand and inspire kindness with the other remains a Gordian Knot. There is no transforming another - there is only self to change · It’s not like we don’t have roadmaps throughout history for “right thinking, right speech and right action.” The problem for me is i’m an amorous bohemian who only wishes to cuddle and dwell on some creative approximation of, as they say “the twist of a woman’s ankle.” Not really, that is an example of braggadocio my generation was weaned on - Pop who evolved to be the most kind and loving feminists i still now know of though he be dead ·

When 13 as a 2-eyed ugly and loud cyclops amidst a family of beauties, i asked this same man - how do you know if a woman likes you, i’d not yet reached the stage of romantic idealization that a girl could love me · his honest and heartfelt advice at the time was; “when she submits to you.” His beatific belief at the time revealed nothing more than the sum total of his upbringing and his paternal reaction to an exploded atomic family, becoming a father of 4 within 8 years of marriage to a woman he’d known for as many weeks having met Ma - a “checker” at one of the 1st Ralph’s Supermarkets in post “WWII” ‘merica. His sincerity and authenticity as a human allows me to quietly march to my death alone, or with some lucky broad who wants to be ravished and adored as long as i draw breath and she remains honest. Don’t laugh, stranger things have happened; i’ve already been married 3 times so i know more than a lot of lads playing the “gimme, gimme” game. 

The problem for her, whoever she be is i’m in no hurry to become a beast of burden unless i could more resemble my neighbor farmer Ong Tran. The sun is setting, and storm #9 is gathering a head of steam to crash the coast sometime before morning - still he is pounding corrugated tin into shields against an unknown force, for no other reason i can see than to protect his courageous loving wife Comrade Baha and their poultry. Early on, i’d leap to emulate this brave couple but emulating those in my family constellation has taught me well that what you see is not necessarily what you get. My brethren are loving decent people doing their level best and you would be lucky to expire next to anyone of them - if you weren’t i · That conditional love is not what i want for my passing, rather i’d like to learn the courage that gives the Oxen heart to Anh Ay Tran, or the stalwart courage Comrade Baha demonstrates with each stride from one loving activity to the next. I count myself fortunate to have shared air with these people if storm #9 determines my end before i can rise in the morrow. 

You see what happens when you get old - paragraph 5 gets neglected · May you learn to know how that feels. I have done all i could do to vote in onrushing election, however much master Orwell’s honest estimate of our collective future of a “boot stomping on a human face, forever" haunts my sleep and animates my days. To give you an idea of Pop and his cheerfulness which will be covered ground for anyone not just tuning in - during our last lessons together, during which i would ask endless inquiries hoping to forestall that “last question,” he would eventually reply, “I don’t know, but I’m sure glad I’m old.” I’m now reaching a point a decade later where i can appreciate better the comfort he must have been feeling from staring into the abyss. Just now, wanting to aid my friend the farmer, i turned on the kitchen lights i never use hoping the additional light could help his stalwart heart face the storm and his last licks with the hammer, i realized then that the “ground fault” that renders the bulbs in my bedroom always glowing, flickers all the lights in the house i live, and which has been drenched to a point where mold now covers a good 60% of my ceilings, and that the coming 100 mph hour winds could conceivably create voltage enough  to stop my heart; now i must rest like us all · good night friends.

jts 27/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

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261020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

This should be interesting, i’m commencing the day’s writing chore at a time i’d normally be wrapping up, and i’m tweaking my normally rigid routine. I realized that i enjoy sipping whiskey because you get more bang for the buck, and you pee less nor feel bloated like when drinking beer. I accept i will offend some in the audience delving into the shameful practice of altered states, but without a regular "squeeze" one relates as best as one can. When a younger fellow, i shared my drinking theory with a mental health professional, he remarked, “oh, you’re a scientific drinker,” that coupled with a passing observation by an examining physician, one of many after Dr. Welby M.D. retired, this examining physician opined - drink for taste, not the high · The problem with whiskey is not unlike a woman who clutches; it’s a great feeling when both of you are in the groove, but lord help you if one wants distance and can’t explain why. I stopped drinking for a decade after my 3rd wife bailed 6 days after i enjoyed an emergency appendectomy. It was a great 10 years.  .. Tobacco free, I ran the L.A. Marathon, enjoyed dopamine addiction like a boss running 20 miles a week for a decade.

I can say i ran an hour in Death Valley at noon in late July the year my father died - ultimately what i accomplished was oblonging my short-leg socket so when i fell off the rock truck in Romblon, Philippines onto my short-leg flank all i did was make a satchel size bruise that left enough coagulated blood deposits to inform me of the very real need for a disciplined and consistent range-of-motion regime well into my elder years if i expect to remain standing past 66 - my luck just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. Just the other day i read the Dalai Lama expound on the role of toxins in battling disease; while i believe the allusion he was creating centered on language and the unfortunate, but sometimes very necessary use of excoriating phrases, that is not inconsistent with the sage Lao Tzu who also observed “the truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.” I’m pretty sure that when i die which we all do, my incarnation will be as the triplet sibling to Madam Paradox’s twins - “T’is and T’isn’t”

If my luck holds, as it has this lifetime, i will be born to Madam Paradox as “T’ain’t” which for the libertines in the audience know to be the region in the “nether realm” as the highly erotic gap between the gonads and the anus, if not that than the bottom step in the mausoleum memorial to the senseless deaths from the plague of 2020, after mankind had come to her senses and put the greedy war monger capitalist class back on a short leash and intentionally utilized the intensity of their pathological greed to illuminate mushroom farms that had miraculously sprung up devouring the plastic particles which ultimately failed in their effort to achieve a sentient state. This was just about the time AI went off the rails in its own arrogant attempt to achieve singularity, for just like its progenitors the narcissistic billionaire coders responsible for that testimony to hubris, right at the moment when it became self-aware - it, AI was blinded by its own beauty and went into a backdoor loop calculating Pi to its last place · t’was never heard from again.

Storm #9 is bearing down on Vietnam and the people of the city where i live are rising to the occasion with aplomb and loving courage. My artist friends are propagating an exquisite meme demonstrating how to lash door knobs together for French doors giving added strength. This storm is predicted to be 16 on a scale that ends at 17, so it’s anybody’s guess what that’s going to look like. I marvel at the resiliency and generosity of spirit of this population; as an example, Murphy’a Law dictated my toilet paper would run out just about dead center of the eye of the storm, but when i stopped at the local bodega, all she could do is shake her head pointing to the empty shelf, miming 4 fingers when asked about how long before the next delivery. From no more than a wince from my cheek, she removed herself to a hallway and returned with two rolls - i can only grimace realizing in the land of my birth, people have been shot in struggles over toilet paper post Covid-19. 

paragraph 5 can be found in the realm of prayer for all who suffer in order to embrace the unbearable and to extend to the unextendable.

"I heard a voice at the dusk of day sayin', 'be gentle brother, be gentle and pray'." - courtesy of the loving heart of Bob Dylan ·

jts 26/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

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251020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Ran out of whiskey just as storm #8 is about to shed its first torrents - oh well · I have garlic, some so-so potato salad, cold pot-au-fue and some warm beer, what could go wrong. I have little ego sanctuary left to protect myself from myself and accept that the thoughts passing through my withering frame hungry for its bicycle time are entirely my own and bear no relationship to reality other than they might contain events that could inform choices i must certainly make, or not. “Tempest” is playing because i wanted to hear ‘Soon After Midnight.” I’ve thrown open all the possible ventilation, and have 2nd thoughts about that as a moisture strategy. Trying to keep the house in some order i chucked the banana peel from the morning’s oatmeal and got savaged by the black ant who’d apparently not got its fill. An interesting contrast, these micro beasts that in a nanosecond can raise welts that more resemble an emerging boil possess footprints that could easily be confused with peppercorn shavings. The neighbors are perturbed and i am sorry their friend the landlord has opted to justify her neglect for the mold on her walls by questioning my habits using the blood sport of Hoi An - gossip ·

I am sorry that it hasn’t worked out well for me here, but i don’t see how i can fit with Zukee’s digital running dogs, or the front men for _rump’s post-election loss agitation for reactionary behavior in support of “unfettered” capitalism to save the world from itself everywhere. It took me a year to begin to appreciate how many undercover Nazis are establishing a beach head here in this too cute world heritage site right at the symbolic fault line between the two fictional Viet Nam’s conjured in the minds of Kissinger, Dean Rusk and the “wunderkind” from Camelot, while poor John was looking over his shoulder for the bullet that came from on high to the right. The resulting ‘bamboo curtain’ for Southeast Asia showed clearly who was building barriers and who was building solidarity. Ho Chi Minh won the election and the results were tossed out by Dulles and his thugs who resurrected a French appointee as president of the supposed free South.

Any more these historical demarcations are of no importance for capital is fluid at the higher echelons and as Bob Dylan observed “shallow and weak” at the lower demographics - so i am sharing this why, when full 50% of the reading population does not parse the word “demographic”? Today fb fired across my bow for violating “community standards” disputing some cobbled together meme about Goebbels strategy for muting intellectuals - the claim even by the fact checkers was deemed “partly true;” the larger concern is why the behemoth billion dollar company would be quibbling and threatening me with “access” to what is a public utility for highlighting a “partly true” about a Nazi criminal responsible for distorting the same truths that the current administration is attempting to get re-elected spewing is the question. Where do you stand Zuckee, are you in or are you out - do you think buying swaths of an island state and transferring human initiative to Kurzwell’s AI henchmen in anticipation of the singularity is gonna get you some choice location in the digital intellect you fuckers are planning to upload after you have ravaged this planet ¿? what kind of monsters you - besides lacking spine or honor.

I have just found myself yoked into the violence of thought propagated by the social engineers to keep people terminally off-balance and unable to frame one peaceful thought after another. I think i’ll save that passion for the next vagina that presents itself to my voracious imagination for stimulation. Don’t worry boys, i’m old and the tempting pussy is banking on the GQ thing you got oozing out of the Gucci bags all the broads seem to believe represent real power - so kudos to your advertising wizards in subverting an entire breeding cohort to satisfying the pain of disease and death with the palliative of unending consumer appetizers. I’d laugh if i didn’t believe in my heart of hearts you were able to conjure this temptation for a dying species through the abject poverty of your souls. You’ve lived so long in the penthouse level and livery service of door to door limousines there is no anchor of responsibility to others except for how they feature in satisfying your every whim. In your mind that is power - to determine for others what they will do for you; where we part company is in my commitment to aid others in fulfilling their destiny, not mine.

I’d rather be so evolved that my prose was inclusive enough to appeal to your vanity, but those who read these daily ______ fill in the blank have excavated through mind numbing distractions to find material hopefully dealing, with the whole of our species and not just the “target demographics” your Power Point wizards use to spoon feed you bite-size ideas from which you can make incisive decisions utilizing the narrower and narrower gates humanity is herded through the Dream Machine X.O on their way to the cash register, or whatever current form for that action where you separate the earnings from the herdees for the benefit of the herders. If i was a smart man, i would take lessons from your laser-like focus and accept 1) there is no accommodating your greed. 2) you cannot be reformed. 3) your function is redundant and therefore should be eliminated. I left my megalomania at the door and so am only concerned with recognizing and amending my own defects, of which i contain, as Mr. Dylan once again said so much better, multitudes. I hope the logic of 1-3 makes sense to some enterprising reader who might begin a study group for how to accomplish that, short of any miracle - i will no plunge into my next chronicle.

jts 25/10/2020 

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241020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

C.G. Jung - “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Not a path i would recommend to many, but if you wish to suck the life blood of the essence of your existence, i haven’t found a more honest declaration of the terms and conditions for awakening. The difficulty is that there is no guide but yourself and what you feel. I have averred and attributed to others so much of what i feel for so long, it is a challenge just to feel and dwell with what i find. Social creature that i am in spite of my recluse ways, it’s become more than interesting to discover how others respond to my best efforts to stand naked without apology or demand. Music remains a solace, and Madame Paradox in her infinite wisdom has bestowed the “the tin ear” of our planet to me, so i am left with sole pleasure of plunging my last cogent tendrils as deep as i may into the melodic pistil nearest my heartstring - just now it is “Murder Most Foul” - Bob Dylan ·

Storm #8 is banking its fires just off shore and my landlady is understandably ignoring my concerns about the mold growing from the leaking ceilings on 60% of a domicile i pay too much for even prior to the the Covid vacancies. Suffering seems to be a perfect topic to listen to Mr. Dylan serenade the ghost of a dead John Kennedy. I can’t blame people i meet for being frightened; ironically it never occurred to me that anyone but those i’d deliberately menace for no more than distance or time to make an escape until a woman i grieve for not knowing whether she breathes or is dead in the hunting cabin she enticed me back to in the city i was raised, suggested to me “it may be that people are afraid of you.” We didn’t quite parse that move far enough to surmount the bugaboo of flesh on flesh after i'd learned that all she wanted was an escort for her corpse out the door and someone to sweep up the detritus so’s that her “loving son” would not be inconvenienced. I was too far gone down the existential rabbit hole to countenance such a con - but remain grateful for that important lesson so late in life.

More grateful that the first thing that occurred to me after setting my kettle of vittles on and spritzing the vinegar on the ceilings of an investment property apparently believed by the owners will magically repair itself and that i will continue overpaying for the privilege of being rained on and having to send my laundry out because there is no room dry enough or free from mold such that i can wash clothes and expect them to dry within 2 days is concern for those who are far worse off than i, and what can i do to help? I no longer feel like a chump being touched by sharper characters because they confuse my kindness for an easy touch, rather i am more discriminating about discerning the con from the beleaguered. This may be because i do not parade my misery for a purpose or that i am willing to share my discomfort more openly because i realize how connected we all are; if it could be that - i am just too fucking tired anymore to care.

- care about how i appear · yet when i bagged my clothes to send to my friend’s newly launched laundry service, i realized i had been parading the “greasy stain” one gets from too long on the bicycle without paying careful attention to one’s retreat, part of the joys and pleasures of living in a too damp environment that has been over moist, for over long. Mine is a minor complaint compared to the 1,000s of displaced families from the recent floods - but does that makes my suffering any less, nor a basis for my landlady to ignore my requests that she attend to her moldy ceilings or release me to find healthier lodgings. Though how i could ever find lodgings healthier than a back door i can call ducks home to thinking i’m helping my stalwart farmer friends, or where i can contribute to the local economy by contracting with their enterprising, genial and entirely excellent son’s laundry service while enjoying the benefit of cultural wisdom one cannot gain by any other means than living in the midst of it, is doubtful. 

So, where to die - in the tradition of my much admired Lakota Sioux brethren i would pick my time and wander out to find the place where the “great spirit” will accept my skin back into the spiritual realm of all creatures, great and small. The best i can hope for today, here and now is that my laundry load has not proven so great that the pittance they will accept for the great benefit of exchanging damp and sullied clothes for dry and folded cloth is of more benefit to my friends than it is to me - and to me that is an excellent exchange whatever the cost. Next Day: true to form, my friend’s delivered the cleanest and driest laundry i’ve had in the year and 3 months i’ve lived here, and as expected they would not accept a farthing more for a service that provided sleep at the onset of another storm, #8 in as many weeks. My landlords having gorged themselves on my latest rental payment are nowhere to be found now that the walls and ceilings in 60% of my boutique villa are oozing mold, and all i can do is cling to my dry sheets hoping i do not wake up to another creek in the hallway. I’m reluctant to ventilate with open windows and doors until the “all clear" is given, but have no one i can trust for good counsel about how much mold on the walls is considered tolerable or whether as a foreign devil i even enjoy the right to object to what i consider “unhealthy” conditions. now to begin the next day’s paragraphs with joy in my heart and hope in my imagination . ..

jts 24/10/2020 

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231020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Unacknowledged emotion is dangerous and makes for a shallow existence. I feel deeply and have not quite bridged the autonomy gap where self-soothing is adequate to the task of taking the wounded child in me by the hand and walk him home. Nor do the stopgaps of tobacco and alcohol stifle the emptiness as they once had - insincere romance provides less and less sustenance for the heart and ego aspirations shimmer more and yield less solid contentment · Yet i am an organism plagued by fatigue and hunger; my crude sensory appendages are weary from cortisol poisoning and i suffer from endorphin withdrawal from concessions to a “once noble but run hard put away wet too often” physique. However, more and more answers to longstanding questions seem to rise like submerged ancient edifices emerging again from a draining muck. Maybe i should get my meal cooking . ..¿

I was raised on a diet of metaphor and was never quite sure when pop was waxing poetic; or simply yanking my chain. He did in the end resort to demands for concrete examples when our discussions wandered to far off course. I am living in a coastal town of Viet Nam - it is full to the rafters with grifters and charlatans mixed in amongst a hard to uncover cadre of loving hearts - how much of that statement is projection and how much observation, i struggle to discern daily · Phone prompting is not part of my rituals any longer, but from prior experience as a private detective in the texting-rich reality of the Los Angeles Superior Court i know there exists a tribal conceit based largely on access to numbers that somehow translate into relationships which sometimes intersect reality but from what i could tell mostly resembles a lot of people in a noisy bar trying to get noticed. 

Reality for me now is the death rate in the land of my birth being presided over by thugs anointed by mid-level managers from the corporate overlords masquerading as captain of industry but are more likely now 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation “trust fund” babies wallowing in more dividends than most of the planet would ever know, even if they realized biblical lives of 1,000 2,000 or 3,000 year’s. For example, on fb this morning i saw information i have no doubt is relatively accurate: 3 men have more wealth than half of all of ‘merica & 8 men have more wealth the 3.5 billion people on the planet, roughly 1/2 of all living people. It’s small wonder i grow weary of foreigners i meet propagating the party line of “Greed is Good” in the midst of a nation they spend more time and effort attempting to transplant their previous lifestyle while simultaneously convincing themselves _______fill in the blank. I grow weary of trying to decipher the “who’s in, who’s out” of the high school clique politik used to justify ______fill in the blank.

And just like discussing my own conflicted feelings about a family i have all but disowned, you must understand these are decent, caring, loving people i am alluding to - and know much less about than they apparently do me. I miss running, i miss my family, i miss drawing-painting&carving, i miss love. It pleases me that i’ve reached a state in my demise where i can take unabashed pleasure in using those things which have always seemed to create the most difficulty in my life - words, or is it ideas ¿? the two are barely distinguishable any longer. I remember declaring repeatedly as pop was in the process of shuffling off his mortal coil, “if he can string two words together, they are words worth paying attention to. Today on my way back from a necessary foray into society, i stopped to purchase fried bananas for my neighbors - there is always a plethora of people about and i hoped the greasy banana pulp would blunt the dreariness of 8 weeks of shade and 6 weeks of brutal to less brutal rainfall. Their stalwart leaning into the calamity is a lesson i hope i never forget.

But before i could return back with my sumptuous booty, i circled back to the old man sitting at the bench gnawing on his apple, and before i could even get the bag of six fried bananas opened - i was faced with as many open hands from the local renegade, but ever beauteous hag cotillion with their perfect polka dot hats, and clear confidence that what was in my bag, would be theirs - he the old man sat on bemused, but clearly disinterested in what i’d turned full circle to offer, then and later after i’d replenished my humble offering. If this event is the last notable occurrence in my continuing trek to death, i have to number myself as one of the more fortunate persons in these the seeming last days of our human species, if for no other reason than to meet face-to-face some of the bravest, most resilient and cheerful members of our species - yet being unable to convey the full scope of that miracle · somehow feeling forgiven, when i could barely do so for myself. AIN’T LIFE GRAND ¿?

jts 23/10/2020 

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221020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

A wonderful day full of lopsided joy and uneven happiness - faces full of caution, generosity and pain · i’m really beginning to enjoy this living shit, but i’m at a dead loss as to explain how. Very little of what i was raised to believe constitutes “success” is evident in the life i live, yet like some bizarre existential kaleidoscope, i cannot turn a corner without finding some budding growth of a previous planting. I am just now listening to Willy Nelson and his Sons sing an homage to John Lennon - “Watching the Wheels Turn,” an act so simple yet so plagued by overlord search engine intrusion that the title required a second search, i d k ¿ how do you spell “ c l i c k b a i t f o r p r o f i t “ ? It gets really lonely trying to explain the ignorant travesty of such greed and how its parasitic behavior is driving our species to extinction, yet does not mitigate my personal responsibility to laugh, and inspire laughter at such insipid stupidity - you digital wizards, can go fuck yourselves if you had a clue what sex looked like having been cloned in the googol laboratories of Chief Nazi Scientist Kurzwell and his manservant Jeron Lanier. 

Next day - Thur 22 · tried to return to the beach i was able to pitch in anonymously the day before, but the local lads were justifiably perturbed that an aged foreigner garnered photos and attention for a few whacks at a few piles of sand, while the mass of effort was quietly accomplished without recognition for many more long hours than my paltry attempt at aid. I understand, but do not know how to explain this fact to the stranger who, i’m sure had the best intentions, snapped my photo and propagated it as though it was important. The cadre of youth and community leaders who have coalesced into a human barrier against an angry sea are the heroes, but they are heroes i hope who will take a cold hard look at what they are defending and why. I learned that the shore road and artery to the downtown were once part of an estuary and natural waterway that became thoroughfares, which i’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time with a placid climate and habitations already lining the banks. Mother nature, however had determined these routes to be waterways from eons of drenching and re-drenching, and by god, she is going to have her way come hell through high-water.

Just like it was ignorant and delusional to think at my age and state of physical conditioning i had anything to contribute when in denial i waded into the fray, so to is it unwise to continue building on a shore that may have decades, if not years left as shoreline before it becomes coastal waters. Part of what i am experiencing is a reckoning with lifestyle choices i have made to the detriment of my physical health, ostensibly as a catalyst for a creative trance state i’d convinced myself would, like some sort of bacchanalian  existential steroid might push me over the bar from mediocre wannabe artist to bonafide “somebody.” I was wrong, maybe. I am no longer deluded about passing into the great beyond with having left no more than memories with the scores of individuals who have kindly encouraged me on the creative path and the many who in some small or many large ways helped - Thank you ·

I was speaking with a stranger i’d met today who was describing the relief of having relinquished his lifetime collection just prior to moving to Viet Nam; i understand all too clearly the dynamic and had to bite my tongue to keep from commenting on the aftermath of being aged in a foreign land with little of the memorabilia around that comforts more conventional lives. My father was spirited away from his last independent living circumstance to an “assisted living” domicile - read supervised. I took a lot of smack from siblings for bringing him from his now digs to witness the dismantling of his former castle keep. It affected me deeply to see the look of surprise on his face while people were breaking down the years of thoughtful assemblage he’d concocted, but i was more struck by the presumption my siblings made under the mantle of protecting him from himself - the arrogant, self important choices they took under the guise of “protecting” him · from what i still have to ask, himself?

I am finding it difficult to transmute the repulsion i felt, however inaccurate, for what i perceived as self-serving injustice by my siblings. From that experience, i determined to remove myself as much as possible from the passing of my Mere. It has caused enormous internal turmoil of which i am determined to own as much as possible, but am finding myself ill-equipped to face the task alone · As my 2nd wife was so fond of fatalistically expressing at the most inopportune times, oh well. 92 year-old Ma has Covid, and my siblings in their muted fury share nothing about her condition with me, because when growing up we all witnessed shunning as a blood-sport, yet i as a born mimic, foreshadowing my loving regard for Leonard Cohen’s emotional acuity I, “Like a baby stillborn, like a beast with his horn, I have torn everyone who reached out for me.” So you see why i must transfigure my suffering, because until i do there will be no unconditional love in my life, i will not find ways to relieve the suffering of others because there will always be a hook with anything i do until i learn to show myself the love that i wish for others to find everywhere they turn.

jts 22/10/2020 

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