041120 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Typhoon #11 has taken on the complexion of that new TV Drama the mavens of media were fond of introducing at the conclusion of whatever super bowl being played at the time - that is until, they the mavens shot themselves in the foot and hype became a blur with little marketing thrust - oh well · They always have the next election cycle and with all the new ecological tragedies in play, there will never, ever be a lack of EMERGENCY to propagate in service of ratings. My morning was spent searching internet “subtext” for clues about who will become the next “leader” of merit - of course the result of popular ballot and completely responsive to the voice of the people, be they haters or lovers; so long as their keystrokes can be monetized - VIPs all ·

Reactionaries run in packs - they require the confirmation of crowds, and possess the mind of the hive · much like the Borg; however resistance is not “futile,” resistance is the Prime Directive. Anyone who comes to me and claims to be speaking for another has usurped a voice which does not belong to them. If one is not powerful enough to stand on its own feet without the acclaim and confirmation backup would likely do the same and try to use my voice for its end - that is suspect behavior. I feel the sharpening of blades around me while some bluster and make loud their power, yet in any fight i’ve ever witnessed where skill, conviction and correctness prevailed - it was the quiet voice that did not demand, nor seek allegiance which demonstrated the deepest heart and the greatest determination.

It is for this reason i believe the current ‘merican administration lacks credibility and legitimacy regardless of the outcome of this referendum. In 1954 after the battle of Dien Ben Phu where the French were roundly defeated and their puppets dislodged from positions of authority, the Corporate Putsch that occupied the United Nations Security Council determined that a vote would be taken 2 years later, where the population of a “united” Viet Nam could express its voice. When that vote was taken, Ho Chi Minh won the popular vote by a “landslide” but the results were disallowed and the functionary French administrator Diem was installed as the “President” of South Viet Nam - in a land which even the Chinese invaders had been unable to divide for over 2,000 years of continuous incursion.

This year’s tide of adversity has been very instructional, especially for an old man with delusions of dying in a “worker’s paradise.” Capital has invaded and the bought souls proselytizing Ayn Rand’s vision of greed as salvation for our species is as tired as her paramour fronting his affection for her cold heart as any ex-wife i've ever had - 3 and counting. My affection for affection, however remains intact, and i believe that love is more powerful than the chimera of acquisition the ruling class manifests on the screens of deceit it is has fashioned to the wrists of so many believers in “buy until you die” then "pay for your grave". I still, sitting here alone and old believe there is a better world possible, predicated on generosity and love for the other greater than one’s own depravation born of, “if i could take from them, i would not only be complete, i'd be richer.”

Until we as a species understand fully and in the deepest recesses of our pain that only by helping that dying person next to us will we be enriched and our loved ones saved, we will be scrabbling for morsels tossed from the tables of those who care nothing for anything except that which enriches them. Many know this from personal experience and many more are only learning this from daily exposure to the cruelties of a world based on selfishness and power. I’ve never met another person who presumed to control me who did not possess more fear in their heart than kindness. It would seem that they who would control, presumed me to hunger for something in their empty hand extended full of "give me, and/or i will .  ..; i've yet to meet any possessed of the courage of character to finish that sentence honestly; though many have given unexpectedly what i never asked for, and for which i will remain grateful long after my voice is silent with my spirit at peace.

jts 04/11/2020 

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031120 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Now 4:59 election day and i am only just beginning - joe, you ain’t it · you as Bob Dylan said so well, are just pumping out the piss. I realized blindingly and painfully before i began writing today that i am as entrenched with more fascists than had i remained on the coast of California where i was raised. Nor are the people i’ve met in this leg of “the” journey any more evil or vile than those smarmy, ignorant and hate-filled hearts i fled from at the check stands and cash registers of where i was raised. William Shakespeare - “Hell is empty, all the devils are here.” What to do¿? remains the question as if as a 15-year old i'd never left not welcomed home and simply stood my ground, refusing the aggression and injustice of my family of origin and mirrored the hatred i could feel but lacked the wisdom to reflect.

Now is not too late to do so, the channel is just so much weaker that there is little volume for anyone whom i’ve loved for so long and so fruitlessly to hear. I remember a number of calls my eldest brother made after he and my sister absconded with my soon-to-be-dying father; i shut off each call relentlessly; this many decades later Brad, i remain astonished by the number of efforts you made to communicate · i have no one to blame for that missed opportunity at communication between us, each full of pain. I am sorry - i know you tried, and i did as well. Our father understands wherever his soul listens as carefully as though we were alive and on that long last walk we three strode together - however complex and painful it seemed at the time · a high point in my memory of our father’s resolutely decent ambition.

I sit in a mold shrouded villa on the central coast of Viet Nam listening to Neil Young, and if you ever read what i’ve tried to share with the world about our upbringing; know that i have loved you as best i could, as i’m certain you have me. I hope any ambitions for decency and justice have been as condemned, but sincerely emulated the poetic conviction of our too decent and too soon departed voice of our shared paternal reason. I cannot blame my feelings of fear and vulnerability on the squalls of the child across the table from you  anymore than i can assure my friend across the neighbor wall that his current feelings of fury and antagonism during his matrimonial squabble are temporary, than i can change the complexion of our family’s pathology - though there is no one but myself who can.

It is the unique condition of our human kind that in the midst of massive change, we - each of us is as powerful and more powerful than what the “powerful” proclaim, and alone possess the power to affect change. I love my father and my family for that conviction which will not be altered by all the events i am about to face in my private march to a demise i have no control over - if it is to be from plague, or ants eating the flesh from my face, the only recourse in front of me is to embrace my suffering with the love and willingness to transfigure that discomfort into something more useful to those that follow me or my absence of self into another plateau of existence than this silly cul-de-sac i have led myself into and hopefully allowed you the reader a path out from - stranger things have happened, i know - for i still breathe, as can you you to your everlasting pleasure at the service of others. 

Fuck - once again the painter’s corner of 4 vs 5 paragraphs, past the “witching hour.” When i say witching hour, i mean where i grew up they are casting ballots to determine which flavor of tyrant our kind will enjoy for the proximal end of our kind - the ants who leave pustule filled bites on my tender “white boy” skin are, as i type, waiting for the oily residue from my fleshy meal to find pathways to their next meal, while the mewling child screaming at a possibly similar discomfort groans close enough to disturb my solipsistic preoccupation with a pain in my ear no one will know of if i don’t remark about that here and now · the problem is that i’m not sure if the pain is from an overlong exposed molar root or just fear at what Leonard Cohen described about death as the “preliminaries.” The irony is that is doesn’t much matter, for as certain as i type my thoughts, i will die - and there is not fuck all i can do about that · are we having fun yet ¿? i am, sort of.

jts 03/11/2020 

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021120 - Extinction Chronicles ·

At the last election of such moment, i lived in Uruguay and was finishing the finest drawing i’ve ever made. My friends were renegade bohemians and very progressive Anti-Capitalists led by a benevolently maniacal grandson carpenter of an SS Commandant from the Third Reich whose last days were lived in infamy, save the loving affection he held for my dear friend Friedmann Mauch the genius Organ Builder of South America whose singular ambition has been to accomplish the greatest number of Medio Tangue Asados on record for the Guinness Book of Records for this planet in any given year. Tell me again how my life has been wasted and i will introduce you to the crones who visit next door to where i now live, so they can cackle at your impudence as they may do mine, if i’m even remembered tomorrow. Pray with me now: that Herr Friedmann Mauch survives this plague, and if not that, then his widow the famed poet/activist Luz Del Alba Nicola Dinperio is well loved and cared for.

Though i began a full two hours earlier then yesterday, i'm only now on the 2nd paragraph at 4:44 pm. It would seem dame time is laughing at my efforts to measure my output against a tick Herr Einstein was never sure whether it be wavelength or particle and here i sit in my vanity+ attempting to measure it in alphabetic symbols representing words representing sentences representing ideas in a language which may, or may not be familiar to you - does that or does that not describe vanity++¿? It matters not much to me, the last electio night i spent like this, i was again alone. My neighbor as Herr Mauch speculated was an cocaine addled Argentinian who delighted in ratcheting up the volume on his TV as the hours progressed into late evening/early morn just as the harried off-duty cop/landlord in the Pensione in which i found a bed sank deeper and deeper into troubled sleep.

World traveled-sophisticate i fancied myself to be at the time had no idea my neighbor the wannabe street artist making a living inhaling aerosol paintings of planets on horizons i realize now must have seemed very real to him, as unreal as his volume control at 2:30 am on our shared speaker-like plenum wall and its 14 foot ceilings, but that was then; this is now. Herr Mauch was a tobacco enthusiast and i willingly ran back down that rabbit hole to nowhere, for it was winter and all socializing took place inside, which after a decade hiatus from tobacco and alcohol, like most things bad - seemed like a good idea at the time. Hours of barbecue, remarkable live songs of that nation coupled with copious tinto rojo and laughing women - ¿what could go wrong?  

6 years later i’m wheezing like i’d never ran a marathon 15 years ago; drinking like a fish for cowardice about realities i publicly proclaim are resolved and am alone because my shaggy exterior and aged frame no longer excite the erotic, but biologically practical fairer sex. Better to learn now than on my death bed. I am not sure what steps to take next, and am entirely reluctant to slough that decision off on the results of an election so fraught with deceit and machinations of an economic class i am beginning to wonder whether my vow of militant pacifism is worthy of - i guess we all have our doubts.

At this turn, i’m sort of okay with passing through my existential transition into the next dimension not knowing - mostly because there is fuck all i can do to know differently. Sort of like the imbalance the ruling class has enacted just prior to this worldwide referendum on planetary leadership. I would have no problem whatsoever ever voting my neighbors to my west as leaders of the planet for a century, while possessing a reciprocal measure of skepticism toward my neighbors to my east. For the record, “therein lies the rub” - that same confidence i bestow is of a myopic and largely uninformed nature which in no way begins to account for the complexity of the lives of those i mistrust vs the lives i believe i do trust - one is pretty much the same as the other. There is no one vs another that does not resonate with doubt and confusion - we’ve reached a state of evolution where we are all d.j. _rump, or none of us are he. I wish i could put it more kindly, but there ya’ have it · my best guess. 

jts 02/11/2020 

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011120 - Extinction Chronicles ·

a blank page @ 4:38 pm - oh my · i’d planned avocado sandwich on dark rye and found my toaster not only with too narrow an opening but the 3-prong male plug without a willing and accommodating 3-hole female receptacle - metaphor is everything. The news reports describe a weather condition the size of the entire country which has provided me refuge, sanctuary and education since July of 2019; i am indebted with little resource to repay besides a cash outlay which may evapaporate after the election referendum 3 November 2020. The results may provide humanity with a breather while the corporate overlords fashion the last links in the chain, or result in a  full scale putsch that will render Burning the Reichstag of 1932 a minor trashcan fire as a footnote of little historical import.

Last night i expressed my sincere admiration for the beauty of a “doe eyed serving wench”, who if one peered deeper is profoundly funny with an acerbic wit beyond her years. I know this from fb video of her displaying her new T-Shirt booty scripted with “If Sad was a Bird, I’d be High as Fuck.” Though she be just 21, this alone was enough to coax me from my lair, 2 full decades younger than my grandmother was when she married my grandfather 20 years her senior. Time is nigh, and if Rembrandt’s angel model is to arrive in time enough for me to create with whatever crumbling creative capacity the universe wishes to preserve of my beleaguered existence, i’m game, for i’m way past the catechism of my youth and completely prepared to embrace - “as you wish is as you end.”

I want to be happy, what provides me happiness in my world has been intense creative effort with the minimum of strife and rancor, however much my own built-in instigation inflamed each new opportunity to the contrary. I sit here, aging and more timid by the minute knowing that whatever bravery i may have felt in life has mostly been the result of a beautiful woman working the tethers of my soul. I’m not even sure anymore whether i would entertain that ever receding conceit of autonomy i had set my compass to guided by the hand of many generations' hubris of self-will, hiding behind obeisance parading as independent thought.

One can hope, and one can determine, but what one cannot do is fake it. The deeper i plunge into the caverns of the only terrain i will ever know for sure - my own heart · the more i doubt all that what i’ve held sacred and have wondered about is simply what i have abjured. “What you resist, persists.” - C.G. Jung · How is it possible to reconcile the depravity of our entire species with condemnation of any one element. How can i sit here and claim superiority over d. _rump, when i cannot faithfully renounce the greed and hatred he has uncovered in my own heart, if only by my repulsion to every gesture he makes and every nerve he scabs.

I do not want to be shut off by the cartoon character who may very well be appointed Hizzonner of planet Gotham. If i am to die, i would, as he will certainly do so - naked to the bone · If there are stories to be told or anyone left to tell them to, i'd like to have died content knowing that i was as honest to you as my times would allow; and i allow between the darkness that is my own heart and what i have torn loose to share is a vast gulf. This chasm between what i know to be true about myself and what i share is not from deceit on my part, but from a lack of courage. I know how hard it has been for me to face my defects, my evil and my fear; i honestly see no point in rubbing your nose in my, what i feel to be filth; this reluctance of mine is from shame, and excoriating judgement which is mine alone to shoulder. Were i to open my heart to you and describe the depth of my depravity as i see it - i will have in some way asked you to carry a burden that is not yours. Where i am willing and able to share another’s burden, that is a choice i make, but to leave mine by the side of the road like toxic waste in a walmart sack for another to carry away is chickenshit; that is as honest as i can get for this writing.

jts 01/11/2020 

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311020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

All Hallows Eve - oh boy · this should be interesting, if i could just get this mask of kindness off and be my plain old really scary self. You think i’m kidding - the table i write at in my rain-soaked mold stinking boutique (fake) Villa within a World Heritage Site there are many i’m sure i cross paths with but repeal away from me like a Small Pox infected “injun” from the Gr8 Plains after the buffalo slaughter & i’m not entirely sure why. As a dual-eyed cyclops from birth, i’m more than accustomed to people backing away from my gaze since birth, but this crusty scarred maniac in their midst suspects it is my utter contempt for their conceit to turn an ancient community into the 21st Century Côte d’Azur for Southeast Asia, replete with castles on the coastline and a well-trained servant class convinced that the next rung on the capitalist ladder from servant to "lord of the manor" will be “Entrepreneur 1st Class” just as the hoards of aerospace workers from my generation were persuaded that as soon as they finished building weapons, they would gain research positions in Astro-Physics that would make Richard Feynnman proud.

The allusion to a castle on the central coast is no joke, and with anyone capable of simple financial research devoid of wishful thinking will find the massive capitalization in Viet Nam benefits a handful of colonialists as has been the “boilerplate” of occupation throughout the world - I will likely be expelled for such counter-revolutionary observations, but i would rather die in a gutter in some foreign land than allow the smarmy conceit that claps for herr _rumpf clap anywhere else but the Harley Hog’s Head death camps of Sturgis South Dakota, and the 462,000 super-spreaders of hate, pestilence and death; i mean that as my dearest Aussie friends immune to the arrogance and hubris of a cartoonish conceit fashioned in the clone factories of Stephen Miller’s hate mills might say - “in the nicest possible way” ·

How sad for the too rich born and too stupid digital doofuses lost on the “wrong side” of history for all their arrogant fantasies about “social engineering” fueled by unscaled wealth lacking “real world collateral,” such as values, empathy, history or self-awareness. “Pride goeth before the fall,” in biblical spades. Just like the charlatans of ancient times with a little chemistry under their belt able to bend the faith of the “great unwashed”, you cling to your surveillance conceits like pathways of escape for the rats scampering down the chain of a sinking ship. Your “zeroes and ones” are all for naught and the empty place in your heart is like a bull’s eye on the target of existential survival - “Love is the only engine of survival” · 

Get a fucking clue, you’ve lost - the boot George quoted about on the face of man was as much a caution to humanity as a road map for your peculiar concept of a future of opulence for a handful; and depravation for billions - how fucking stupid can you get, or is it arrogance that made you believe your vision of hoards of humans lined up to provide you votes, cash, pussy, drugs - even forgiveness for your deceit and dishonesty is something you’ll need to take up with those that presumed to teach you manners when they themselves, had no clue. Come and see me if you possess the gonads to face a fierce and honest repartee, rather than the covert manipulation that narcissists cling to for confirmation of a mythical power born of no more than petulance and whining. 

We are entering the late stage of capitalism and you are on the wrong side; you lack perception and intelligence adequate to guide the last vestige of our kind to anything that resembles sanctuary, and though i’d prefer to spit than laugh - laughter at your fatuous ignorance and pathetic weakness is all that is left to this weary voice · you obviously possess nothing that resembles gumption, valor or whiskers enough to face the mayhem you have wrought without the aid of your trusty slut AI - good luck with that. When i am laying naked and happy with the last woman on earth who has taken pity on my unredeemable soul and your are, as Spiro T. Agnew learned to do “twisting in the wind,” by training and by determination, i will wish you Bon Voyage, because that is how i was raised - ciao baby ·

jts 31/10/2020 

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301020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Curiosity is what dame Chodron proffered for why to continue on the path of Dharma, regardless of the dislocation of getting “tossed out of the nest,” weekly, daily or hourly. I go in and out of focus depending on how easily what constitutes "i" can slip away from the mantle of “ego,” which however shredded or fractured, seems to cling to my mortal coil like the stink of muck from some bad plumbing assignment. Still when despair is the alternative and the thrill of happiness punctures the day’s events like the trill of a happy chick or quacking duck - i know she, dame Chodron is right in the deepest places of my heart. Just know i am listening to Grandpa Tran mimicking clucking sounds for his latest attentive grand baby and i know all is right and will be right in the world as long as such simple exchanges are made; i can hear baby Tao mimicking sounds and the two of them are utterly absorbed in the bliss of life and i am redeemed, though i can hear barely with one ear and know nothing of the words they exchange - except for the language of love ·

My storm ravaged meal concoction is simmering and i walk the continual plank of vaporizing too much nutrition from the mixture while fashioning some elixir that purges the mold from my eustachian tubes and am just grateful i have an internet pulse with which to check spelling. All of the staging and fantasy about fashioning powerful prose has evaporated with the dull throb of congestion in my troubled ear canal complicated by a silly addiction to the tar of tobacco and the defect of character for not riding in the rain soaked pathways of where i’m still not sure why i remain. Judgement is the theme i dwelled on prior to sitting down to actually write - thoughts full of self recrimination and forgiveness and all the whys and wherefores of such self absorbed nonsense · however useful and necessary for self awareness and growth. I don’t give a fuck about you is what i tell myself, yet the truth is i am never far from the voice that renders one prisoner when you care what others think - channeling Lao Tzu ·

I sleep well enough, maybe too well and reflect on relationships that barely reach the threshold of such. I fantasize about the angel of my death who will hover over my shroud and lament my passing after she has allowed me days, weeks maybe even years of study of her supple young body informed by tender expressions of her value for my living breath tempered with fierce protection for my fragile state that she misconstrues and continually relents and warms to my tender caresses at the end of each long day's work: drawing, painting, sculpting or just fucking. Go ahead tell me i’m not delusional and i will happily concur with you if it wasn’t for the decades of preparation i’ve applied to such a passing.

I began serious study of the female anatomy before my 21st birthday in the city of New York at the prestigious Art Student’s League. I was a custodian and otherwise on full scholarship. I was a renegade and smoked pot on the roof where now rests the pointed coccyx of the capitalist’s Sword of Damocles comprised of Penthouses cantilevered over my Alma Mater because a gangster whore ingratiated himself into a leadership function and then brokered the sale of the “air rights” over the school for blood money from Nordstroms for their penthouse super tower. It was shoved through by greed, threat and financial might - no different than ensconcing the current fascist administration in what was once a “Great Notion.” Now 4 years into the 4th Reich ‘merican traitors are enjoying 230,000 deaths and still voting for their demise.

Form follows function was a platitude of the intellectual art class that sold its soul long before Pablo Picasso the master Art Speculator stooped to withholding 80% of his known works from the marketplace for no other reason than to goose the price of his work - and you wonder why we can’t have nice things. Artists are human and as such are subject to the same greed as amoral, asocial, narcissistic trust fund babies faced with the choice between a lifetime of opulence at the expense of a starving humanity besieged by climate havoc wrought by a bunch of petronazis and the spoils of a merchant class hooked up to the “Digital Information Super Highway” milliseconds ahead of any other investment dollar, shekel, dong - what have you · It can only be from “bitter searching of the heart” that any of us will have the remotest effect on the survival of our collective species - wake the fuck up and VOTE · then “praise the lord and pass the ammunition” - A. Nonymous ·

jts 30/10/2020 

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291020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Anyone thinking the storm has passed is not paying attention; near as i can tell there are a lot of people not paying attention - especially those with no storm in their laps, as yet · yet even those knee deep in muck or ash depending on the “fire or ice” in their particular universe are resorting to business as usual and leading with their chins hoping the “market” will recover, progressives secretly pulling for the herd immunity his highness the “stable genius, father to Barron _rump has glommed onto as a foil for further perfidy and mayhem the rubes just seem to gobble up. Makes one wish for the good old days when they just made movies about the “Rainmaker” instead of whole scale slaughter in the wake of “Sturgis Hog Day.” And again it comes down to what night star you are following, and whether or not that illumination is a star, or a stain on the emotional lens through which you perceive your particular corner of the universe. 

Of late, i’m coming to the blindingly bright dawn of realization that i’m not the dewey-eyed romantic i over-compensated with using my emotionally starved childhood as foundation for making ignorant decisions about unavailable companions attributing qualities of character fashioned out of whole cloth to satisfy the slightest fantasy of acceptance not unlike growing up in my family of narcissistic predators - i jest, sort of. Any defect i attribute to them, is but a myopic amplification of my own hunger for respect and belonging twisted into some justification for feelings that are my own but that i’m just too fucking scared to deal with in between super Typhoon #9 and the possibly even greater #s 10 & 11 soon to follow - if not this year than next - lucky us ·

I used to be funny, but now i feel like the cartoon character in Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” My floor is beginning to feel slimy from the crushed ants and the spilled beer from late-in-the-evening denial and the vinegar dripping from my ceiling in an organic attempt to abate the rain induced mold from capitalism’s ultimate product - neglect. Yet all in all, i’m sitting upright, have some wherewithal to do lord knows not what with, and my heart is light enough to crack “wise,” though again it is braggadocio of too much solitude coupled with too much conceit and not enough self awareness to render an accurate description however much i try. I accept, without the guidance of a loving companion or admission to a sangha that embraces freaks such as myself - there is not much left to me, but complaint; try as i might.

I routinely lose track of paragraphs much less trains of thought, i seem only able to discipline an unfortunate indoctrination about attributing to others feelings that are clearly mine own - how fucking embarrassing is that ¿? It would be cool if i remained stout and stalwart, but i’m barely able to navigate a slippery patio without mincing baby steps, and any chauvinistic response i might have had for the wannabe shrews in our midst is now reduced to sniping and simple avoidance of loud and aggressive people, for i have lost most delusions of a gentle ending to my violent life regardless of any sanctimonious efforts on my part to shore up the persona whose wrist i clutch because i fear it would slip out of a hand hold.

And still i try, because that is how i was raised, both mother and father had endured enough adversity in their lives to make every effort to fortify this misbegotten soul to a life of futility, however delusional that sanctuary has become as haven. I would rather have endured 20 lifetimes in which to achieve a single noble fantasy they entertained watching over the gangly loudmouth cyclops they alone had courage to own. They, my parents in the brave conceit of victors from a single war against the fascist incursion and flush with feelings of success as “the greatest generation” lived and live utterly oblivious to the betrayal and subterfuge enacted on their noble “dimes” by the agents for deceit and betrayal “voted” on daily in boardrooms of the barely conscious fascist overlords to achieve what Mein Furer _rumpf has stomped his foot about - this time · putsch by fit of pique, who knew ¿? save maybe those few who can remember the tantrums of Herr Adolf .  ..  ···

jts 29/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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