Extinction Chronicles - 220420 ·

Too late 11 am - i was about to conduct a sober test to find out if my writing was still accessible without the chin oil that libation liberates. Lo the spin cycle has commenced so those clothes must now be hung to dry and i will needs be get my heart rate up and buy blue cheese. My real hope that that some resentful local will not demonstrate h/her disrespect for my humble efforts toward reparations while i am out infusing the local economy with what little i have coming to me from Uncle Sam. So clearly the bitterness that fuels so much of my literary efforts is not much blunted by any lack of alcohol. That’s a big relief, i’d hate to think that nirvana was simply a question of putting the cork in the bottle. Truth be told, i am as much of an endorphin addict as dependent on any substance i’ve discovered in my long history of “looking for love in all the wrong places.” So while i cannot yet run again from some perfect storm of physical maladies which visit old people, i have found that once i got moving, i was able to harness much muscle memory and do quite well here in bicycle heaven, so take note and be sure to flag any obvious differences between sober me, and drunken me - said Rip Van “wannabe” Winkle to no one ever .  ..  ···

2 pm fortified with 2 liters of Pomelo IPA, clean sheets and 2 borrowed hammers i am well on my way to resurrection. As i’ve noted elsewhere in other chronicles i once spent a year commuting with the purloined right femur of the class skeleton because i was in the process of carving a granite femur and the commute seemed a perfect time to study a form this form that defied my feeble comprehension. For anybody who has ever carved granite, they would understand the pace and very real requirement of a hammer hand capable of sustained accurate throws - lest one’s cutting hand bear the brunt of shots off the mark. Ergo in addition to my driving distraction of sublimating an impossible form into the inner recesses of my being - twirled a forged Trow & Holden 2 lb hammerhead affixed to a Trow & Holden hickory bell handle long after the femur was complete. So as my enforced lethargy broken by spurts of sanctioned bicycle rides aids my lower extremities and neglected core - my upper body strength has dwindled. Just now as i type single handed, i’m amused by the ghastly image of my borrowed exercise tool whiffling down at the drop cycle of an errant twirl and clipping a 1 x 1” isosceles triangle from my latest laptop .  .. ···

Though i woke late last night from the 1st deep rest i’ve had in weeks; (there is nothing in my schedule that can account for such slumber) - more accurately, i lost the thread and had to find filler. The downside of drunken writing - that profound insight evaporates more quickly than the digits can execute, nor ao much different than arriving back from an LSD journey only to find the celestial discovery remained back in the dimension you’d just returned from. As an aging intellect wounded from life battles, this lapse in concentration is not unfamiliar (mostly pointing to Thich Nhat Hanh’s kind advocacy of “mindfulness”) But we are talking about extinction and not reminiscence. The world is at a standstill relative to days earlier, and if we’re not careful along with awareness of just how WRONG things were going prior to the standstill. Besides the blatant corporate assault on human existence, our species is facing a reevaluation of its very purpose - are we living to support a handful of “hateful appetites” dressed up as leaders, or are we going to fully appreciate this pause to refocus and utilize the mindfulness Master Thay points to ?

I came to Viet Nam because of fantasy born of loneliness fueled by a virtual relationship with someone i’d “just missed” in more ways than one. My rationalization became this is a land that has a demonstrated capacity to beat the odds. Viet Nam essentially told Uncle Sam to “get the fuggoudda here” and made it stick. In accordance to my left-brain mechanics, i figured if any cultural entity was going to be able to establish a protocol for perpetuating our endangered DNA it was going to get a better chance here than the dozen or so other cultures i’d recently domiciled in search of study i now find is not longer really required - [details for another chronicle]. Politically i find myself shoehorned against new-age entrepreneurs off-loaded from the cell-channel into the virtual imagination of the world. No, i don’t own a phone; why do you ask¿ not even sure how long i’ll be able to make that claim in post Corona-19 anti-body-id hysteria. And like Pop said - “man am i glad i’m old”

Fun anymore is what i think constitutes leadership - yet here i sit chomping goobers infused with condensed milk parsing what a childhood hero George Washington Carver declared about the unlimited potential of peanuts against what i later learned about candida and gut health relative to excess peanuts. It is just this dichotomy our species faces not me alone trying to write with milk greased fingers and returning one of two hammers because i only need the one. And not to add insult to injury - the hammer i kept had a huge divet just at the neck, and though i had a Jr. High school shop teacher slam the bellyboard fin off my project because i had the temerity to reconsider a 3/4 incursion to the fin a structurally insignificant wound - i now 60 years later realize that i could possibly add 100 years to the life of my borrowed and well hafted hammer with small effort and great gain - i’m going for it. The sky has darkened, my sheets, while not crisp and sunny will not mold before i saturate them with sweated salt enough from my fitful rest. My larder is full enough, i’ve retrieved adequate funds for my billet for another month - i have 2 months and some days on my visa and enough left over to lighten the load of many whose burden is greater than my own - life is good, and i am lucky · i share willingly any link you might make to such good fortune. 

jts 22/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 210420 ·

It’s not 3, but it ain’t 10 am & i like to write; i like to drink while i write - if this is cheating on myself, so be it. FB is choosing to share stories about ATMs kicking cards out in the foreign land in which i reside and is still in lockdown, and the promised stimulus check has not been deposited in my account; the troubled rat-faced next door neighbor boy who likely turned my tv on in the middle of the night after i left the doors open for some draft has got a snarky grin on his face i’d like to slap into next week. All the conventional wisdom says to get down into that shit and feel it for what it is, but i’m cooking beans; doing the laundry and cooking beans. The question is whether drinking while writing yields finer work - like Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway, or what they wrote so much frightened the editors of culture that the stink of substance abuse has filtered down into the plebeian’s finely tuned decorum and sucked out the last breath of rebellion from a population believing god’s gonna protect them from the virus and kill their enemy.

Anymore than my outdated Dionysian fantasy of the right mixture of sex and alcohol will grease the skids for a smooth ride into the ever-after. What i like about writing is it forces one to place in print the thoughts that seem to grip one’s destiny - there is no grip · but there is a lot of lessons. Lao Tzu - “you can ask anything you want, but must be willing to accept the answer.” Would i be rescued from my destiny and break the karmic chain if i petitioned for a billet in Thich Nhat Hanh’s ashram¿ or would it be more evidence of the depth of my wound to search for vindication in the house of another? It is not so much the smarmy grin on the boy next door’s face flaunting his heroic intrusion - he was just counting coup as he understands it · more it is my own relationship to the act of gloating that disquiets me - that same snide defiance i feel as i pull tobacco into my aged lungs during the time a new pandemic is attacking weakened lung tissue - specifically that of older people like me.

Fucking paradox - kindness to my self seems incased in relinquishing recognition fantasy, love, fantasy, death fantasy · so why the strife¿ I have no control over any of what has reigned over my existence since i learned how naughty and unformed i was and without a by your leave i’m about to perish loved by strangers who know me not except how they feel about that feeling of inexplicable love we seem to see together. Just now i sat perplexed with clean clothes, a closed gate; pot full of food + gifted peanut desert. I’ve never been more convinced of my temporariness which is not be confused with immortality. My laughter exists like a familiar friend on some nightfall corner. The delusion of meaning has as Leonard Cohen described so clearly by saying “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul”, yet so few channels will respond to questions about laughter with this tidbit of history. Fucking-A, i’m a tad discouraged. 

More fucking paradox - beaten into me as though the ’60s was not beating enough for a teenager · “finish what you set out to complete” - said Pop ’til it was as Bob Dylan described “oozing out of my ears. Here i sit 3 paragraphs into my 5 paragraph slog - drunk sort of, and sappy as hell about how to covertly retch candor onto your 30 second evaluation of worth of attention at a time our entire planet is about to school us about what not to do with an ecosystem our film adheres to tenuously, but not really. The thing about language is that it resembles the system it stems from. For example, i am a dying member of a cohort which has asserted an inequitable influence into a quite limited smear, for lack of a better expression, onto the face of a boiling rock floating in a semi-vacuum we are just now learning apparently too late to understand, constitutes 99% of our known universe.

And i’m stressing about finishing another 300 words for fuck’s sake that may or may not ever be read - either i am insane, or you are. I managed to produce a bowl of beans today along with a clean floor, a Glenn Ford weird as fuck western · my beans, i’ll end up chocking down because i understand them to be full of immune building ingredients. Dorothy Parker said “i hate writing, but love, having written.” I feel the same about bicycling and opening up my oddly scarred core. Much of my life has been spent disappearing from what i deem as hateful people, only to discover that hateful person was myself. My flesh is withering from neglect - i’d be better off fucking daily and hammering stone or depicting what my cycloptic vision has learned as work arounds, but the universe has seen fit to demand immobility and patience. Tell me again how the universe is a place in which we exist and not the designer of its own future.

jts 21/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 19-200420

Bath time : 3 hours later “Catch-22” is finished and my grime is down the drain for the time being. For a classic the story was hard to digest. This book had been touted as the definitive reply to war mongering, and yet for all its incisive wit was not up to the task of impeding the drums of war; what then will stop such folly¿ i am old and on my way out - my faculties fading and my influence nearly nil, i cannot have food delivered in a timely fashion nor incite the pretty young maids to learn all i know about the flesh, or more accurately, to teach me all they know about flesh. Master Thich Nhat Hanh spurns romantic relations and that proscription cuts me to the core. I had imagined my latter years much like what Rembrandt had organized - a young lass loving to see my wonder of her figure manifest in fine art. Instead i find the young lovelies are repelled by my vile decay and happy to ridicule my courtly approach: (cackling in the background). 

I sit in a spillway to what was of the first expat properties in the boutique destination of Hoi An Viet Nam. My neighbors are salt of the earth and tolerant of my otherworldly ways. I have a bicycle that infuses my battered frame with a vigor that is more fantasy than fact. I am no longer dogged in my determination to learn language and therefore isolated from the simple pleasures of “Hey man, what the fuck is going on?” However, because it is a land informed by struggle of the honest sort - those activities that benefit the most abound; rice is harvested and dried on roadways knowing that traffic will respect the product. Elders are unmolested and food is communal, even to the unwashed foreigner that demonstrates proper respect. Where the nation in which i was raised now entertains petulant thugs spitting on simple pragmatic hygiene during a worldwide viral conflagration the population that surrounds me quietly endures measures that prevent the spread of a common enemy.

Still i am lost. I choose not to pursue the cliques that constitute cultural belonging available to foreigners for i have little in common with what i find - (i am a cultural snob, thinking my mining of the local reality is closer to truth than any other ‘disease of conceit). What i find in most cases is a predatory orientation that involves concealment of motives that are consistent with the dominant world view - “more is better; i have more stuff than you, so i am more powerful; or my motor is bigger, so the way you drive is stupid, etc. etc. Sadly it is most likely projection of my own fears onto others - glorifying, and romanticizing that which i identify with, and diminishing and dehumanizing that which i reject; the only real therapy i have available to me is this chronicle i pursue, now that i am going blind and no longer able to nurture any delusion of an artistic contribution to our species’s last gasps.

. . . sometime into the next day - last night was interesting, for i woke in the middle of the night to find the television i have never turned on on. I had left the two doors ajar for the heat is growing and i wanted to create normalcy of draft, knowing that it jeopardizes my security. Sure enough; the only conclusion i could make is that someone came in and cased the joint, leaving the television on without a station. Fortunately i am at the “fuckit” stage of existence so as i walked out to investigate - it was only “fight, no flight” available · My neighbors next door were sympathetic, but break-ins are a part of the texture of life in a formerly war-torn nation now harvesting as best it can the bounty of today’s “destination—economy-hipster-doofus-digital-late-stage-catpitalistic-where-can-i-get-drunk-and-not-arrested” higher aspirations. Then again there’s a lot of money riding on the SEA success of reversing Uncle Ho’s dangerous incursions into the hearts and minds of a population that has yet to be conquered by Chinese, French, ‘merican - or any other invading hoard unwilling to plumb the proper integration protocols of this mysterious Warrior/Scholar/Monk/Emeritus/Worker/People melange. 

Because i am a good son, and mean to obey my father’s deathbed request that i never stop writing, i must persist. Whether this yields helpful ideas to those that live on and possess the curiosity and technical prowess to uncover these chronicles is not important, only that i do my best to honestly plumb the caverns of my dying being in such a way that others might be encouraged to see into the mystery of their own souls stripped of as much convention and indoctrination as i am able demonstrate through a candid discussion of my own fears and struggles to be a decent member of a dying species (Pop would chuckle, just about now - murmuring with his eyebrows ‘arrogant whelp’.) Gaslighting is a all that i can come up with as to why someone would take the trouble to invade my home in the dead of night to activate an electrical appliance which aside from my pc and knapsack are the only items of value here. Too bad for them if that is true that my curious upbringing includes graduate level studies in how to fake people out for one’s own aggrandizement - be advised, it is an empty ambition that only points deeper into one’s own delusions and gives little influence over any organism worthy of control.

jts 19-20/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 180420

I’m going to drink early, and drink early - a Pomelo Growler from Pasteur House Brewing Company · i confide this with you because it is contrary to my best intention when i finished writing yesterday and posted. When i went back in the middle of the night to read the day’s labor i found the writing to be flabby and verbose - big words replacing clarity and candor. I would much rather have In Vino Veritas than market ready prose any day. Damn this Pomelo IPA is quite fine. Did you know that in 16th century England they preferred beer to water for the process rendered of brewing beer rendered the beverage pure compared to the water available at that time - sort of like Flint Michigan. The difference is that in today’s ‘merica a president is successfully serving up a cultural Kool-aid Jim Jones could only but admire. What is sad to me is that Michigan is also the epicenter of the progressive educational system that drove much of ‘merica’s period of enlightenment guided by John Dewey’s pragmatic approach to learning. Don’t believe me - look it up for yourself.

Now i will order an English meal from one establishment for tomorrow, and a ‘merican burgers for myself and others (local friends) if it works. I like trying to connect the dots that people won’t normally entertain, always have - though it has gotten me into more difficulty than any real good shit that abandon might have yielded. Fuck it - whaddya gonna do ¿ - “it is the habit of men to quit just before success” - Lao Tzu ? So the computer so widely reported as friend to man - just now took 2 solid hours of fb text to order 1 hamburger for myself and two hamburgers for my friends · given they are at another address and there is the language barrier, but lord have mercy we have placed the future of our species in the lap of this efficiency expert and it has yet to do after 2 hours what a simple conversation would accomplish in 5 minutes, language barrier or no. When we factor in age, gender and political blindspots it is a small wonder we are still treading water - which for the coastal communities of our planet is all they can look forward to.

Nor am i complaining - others may describe my oblique approach to communicating as whimper, whinge or outright whining · again FUCK YOU. I see damn few willing to look at the facts, much less take steps to help those around them, except for that popular refrain “look at me - look at what i have done” I do not want you to know what my dharma strategy is, not because i doubt your sincerity, which i do (my defect, not yours) but because i believe what the Bhagavad Gita said “The secret of human freedom is to act well without attachment to the results” My father for all his domination and ungentle ways, i believe wanted me to be free in the highest meaning that he could gather - he was a scholar of the nondescript type · fervent and relentless, i am only a son of 3, middle though that be with a sister above - oh well. My skin is about to rot about my flesh and my mind to collapse like a withered nut within a hard shell, yet i would have you believe there is a better life than what you are being forced fed like a gaggle of geese yielding Foie Gras to some medieval banquet does “Blade Runner”

Clueless joe has come out and declared war on pot as a “gateway” drug while sea levels are rising; a virus is laying bear the perfidy of a healthcare system bending ‘mericans over the profit table and a tally of desire that gives 1,000,000,ooo yeses to 5 empty suits, and then ignores 1,000,000,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo no’s because they lack introductions. Again, FUCK YOU - i don’t ask your concordance, confirmation, or commiseration; what i demand is that you peer into your own history and future and ask whether you have done all that you can to relive those you know and wish to know of suffering. Nor do i necessarily give a rat’s ass if you do or don’t; sadly i’m pretty sure you are only tuned in at this point of the narrative whether you are named or indicated in terms of notoriety, for that is how you have been “tuned” willingly or not by the lean forward click bait technology of those whose self indulgent bells and whistles have driven this feckless herd of ours to the precipice of doom.

Now i await news of whether it was possible to arrange a foreign meal of dubious want for friends i have only just made - i am past the 2 liter mark for bia; it was outstanding and i am now plumbing my heart for salacious tidbits that might aid you the reader in focusing on our inexorable calamity. To give you an idea how mean my kindly father was at his core when asked about “our collective future” his go-to remark about “going down the road” was “man am i glad i’m old.” For the younger arrogant members of our audience this aside may seem unimportant, yet for me as your guide, it carves divets into my soul to know there is so little i can do to protect you. Just now on my I tunes library Art Intel is sharing BD’s lay across my big brass bed, so few of you understand how poignant these lyrics are it saps my will - sort of. You will have to find ways to discern fake from fact - who gives a fuck about your future against your myopic fantasy about your everlasting glory, you are dead - your grandchildren are dead and you handed their future to them without pity; i spit on your vanity and applaud all the steps you have taken to allow something resembling peace to those who manage to follow your mangled conceit.

With much love and pity .  ..  ··· your former and future friend

jts 18/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 170420

I sit in Hoi An, Viet Nam 17 days into “shelter in place” orders from the central committee. My circumstances given what the world faces are comfortable, if not benign. As ever, most torment in my life is at my own hand. My vices are in check and what relations i allow are kind, or gone, yet i would presume to take your time for complaint¿ WTF is that all about? I have music, means to express myself and a vehicle for expression though it be a 50 cc 2 cycle in a world ruled by Maserati technology. My faculties are intact if that is a word to describe my framework some 65 odd years past my breech - more accurately a Franks Breech · ass 1st i arrived and from what i understand about intestinal rectitude on death - ass first i shall depart. (coughing jag @ during the corona-19 epoch not withstanding)· Los Lobos visits just now on my music channel which is restricted to a single processor, owning no phone and eschewing apps of all kind. Internet is highly suspect due to the obtuse supervision and contribution of Art Intel which may or may not have misinterpreted the human’s fascination for the word “viral” and zigged when it should have zagged.

Who knows, and who cares is a condition which seems to remains fundamental and immune to interpretation, or it’s polite euphemism - spin · Yet from where i sit watching a country struggle to remain close to the blessed wonder of a leader who actually led - such that by simple loving logic, Ho Chi Minh literally handed Uncle Sam his ass on a platter. Yet in less time than it has taken my life to past, the land my nation once conspired to denude, destabilize and destroy is even at this time of “defense against contamination" building more and more “units” for entertaining that same destructive wolf now wearing the cloak of entrepreneurial infusion - this deceit drives me to distraction. However, i am old facing my death spiral and my progressive zeal is blunted by self-awareness and fatigue - i will not help those who will not help themselves · I search my experience for unconditional love and see my own selfishness at each turn - that ego declaration i am repulsed by from others handing out bezo bounty calling it the “future”.

I do not wish to wallow in my history which is unique and rich, for if past is prologue, where i sit now is as rich and worthy of my entire focus - such as it is, as anyplace i have ever been in my life. Just now my farmer neighbors with whom i hold most solidarity are entertaining the newest child in the clan. I editorialize my excoriating judgement about tobacco infestation and cultural contamination which are norms for me, but can be seen as newfound “social distancing” for the world i have yet to find a place in. I love Hoi An, there is a rich history which allows for immersion into an environment which can only recognize itself in hindsight, but is yoked to the present by how to "make a living" - not much different than my own world view. My limited strategy has been to evacuate at the first sign of dissension - while in many ways practical, also is in many ways a precipitous life strategy· If that sounds like complaint, it is not - what you read is simple fear, mine own. Having been birth-evacuated to a ‘merican beauty besought by two prior births and a husband as poetic as his life’s trajectory to which he and his loins were condemned - a confused infusion to a regional DNA strand delaminating from the greed of a WWII victory.

How does greed fit into a limitless universe said every billionaire who has ever raped and pillaged from the dawn of time¿ From what i can see around me, the answer to that question has been the ability to frame such a selfish ambition as honorable - “if i were ‘he/r’ i would be different; i would disperse my gain, however achieved more equitably, because i am more noble." I say this because of my own conceit that i am better able to give to others by simple virtue of my “enlightened” upbringing - (picture tongue piercing cheek) · still i press forward in my mist of fatigue and surrender. I have now finished my allotment of vice as it closes in on the witching hour which contains my few hours of substance surcease. My sole objective is the partial paragraph of personal profile i can provide to strangers who do not join, but from data the googol state provides, preview.

Pop was a HS english teacher who advocated the elegance of a 5 paragraph essay for expressive clarity, and who also demanded of me on a phase of his death bed to never quit writing. The past weeks have challenged that pledge which he pulled from my chest - not because i don’t enjoy the act of sharing, but because i am afraid that what i hold dear is unimportant to anyone but myself - so i say to you “unknown reader” Fuck you and the thge horse your rode in on" - an expression i learned from my mother’s 2nd husband. I loved him with great respect, mostly from the calm he brought to ma's brutal heart. My mother is 91 facing 92 in a locked facility in LB CA; her last exclamation to me was “you are obsequious” and as with most of any of the other unkind declarations she has ever made, i join it to the same confused judgement of those i’ve met and who do not possess imagination enough to peer beyond the harsh persona i struggle not to be, while focusing more closely with the character i am learning i consist of;

or as Bernie Mac said so much better - “Fuck you, i’m not afraid of you.” 

jts 17/04/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

 ∞

another fucking Nuyier - oh Boy · !

weird day, again · and again ·· and ··· am writing this with 24 point type and the xptr lid closed to 80 degrees because the hinge to my screen is failing. and i will have to relinquish xptr connection for 2 weeks beginning feb 3. it is still 2 weeks prior to lunar new year in Viet Nam and the country is fairly quaking in anticipation. tomorrow morning, hell or high water i leave Hoi An for Laos at 4:50 am and tonight my landlord decided was the best time to combat the broken screens in his overpriced house. i have taken refuge in the Aussie bistro Dingo Deli and am nursing my affliction to the tune of sonic aggression under the guise of patriotic assertion · 

it is now 5:58 pm and i have two hours to sink into sleep if i am to have a fair shot at driving alert and understandingly through some of the most war torn parts of a horribly abused land. the irony that i selected this land to die and to love my last breath in grows daily both for the lessons of my own ignorance and lessons i am still capable of processing as well as the possible resolve i cam seeking on behalf of the global community - sadly it would seem the haters have arrived sowing seeds of dissension and nationalism blinding all to the dangers of, forgive me the coining of new expressions “Big-Shotism”. be not disfigured by the egos of small people · grow large and be so to others.

i am faced with the very real prospect of dying alone in a foreign land friendless and possibly robbed of my life savings by the same govt. that dropped more bombs than dropped in all of WWII on a country the size of the state of Delaware, then left defeated. what i hope for past this possibility, is that others join forces with all they are near rather than those small cliques which arise from the familiar, and also logically coalesce into fictional pockets of solidarity; when the reality is we are being splintered by a hateful handful using the delusion that if you recognize the appropriate cadre somehow you will mysteriously land a seat in the “big house” - bullshit but powerful enough to distract the feeble and tired mind of those greedy enough to wage war on their brethren - how fucking sad ·

there is no total that does not include the most vulnerable amongst us - our mothers our broken brothers, our beaten sisters · the world we understand is on its last legs and no amount of clinging to the familiar will save the unborn children of our dying planet until we each accept our limited desires and seek a greater happiness only found in the fulfillment of those we do not know · your struggle is my struggle, and yet you reject my aid because i am afraid and show it. that is my error and i strive daily to show my brave love for who you are and what you have tried to accomplish · it is in my weakness that i shrink from cruelty that i am sure you do not want me to possess - while my struggle remains to give you what i do not have.

it is now 6:32 pm and i must rise at 4:00 am· i`ve no qualms about paying the high price of the sandwiches and two drinks i had at the western oriented establishment, because by all accounts the locals enjoy their work and the management makes every effort to enlarge understanding . my homestay was not as generous and cast aspersions about it being a “fancy” place but then rode off with one of the fancy patrons clinging to her exquisite figure · i am a hypocrite, she is a hypocrite - no one’s hand’s are clean and as long as we search for a divine other to redeem us from our wicked hatred rather than take that weakness in hand to comfort and acknowledge it for the source of our cruelty to others which it is - we are fucked 

7 jan 2020

it is 7 days past the new year 2020, i have given notice on my home in Hoi An and made plans to leave for Arequipa Peru - and changed my mind. the neighbors who four days ago were inexplicably plaguing me with very loud Vietnamese music most of which i really like, but some sounds like the textbook definition of caterwauling - today when the electricity went down i was in their field to visit in the guise of calming the waters. i did not sleep well last night though i drank little - comparatively speaking. i find in my solitude it is very important that i express myself and continue to push the limits of my company with humans. i have not seen Ms N___ since christmas-eve-day-morning when she rode off with her kuta-cowboy pressing his blue-jeaned phallus into her shapely shift on her scooter set off with tangerine lipstick, but what i remember is her crimson blush when she realized this ride had to be initiated under my bewildered expression· i do not understand the chemistry between us, but it requires considerable mindfulness to keep the mixture benign. i am glad to have not booked a ticket for Peru, and look forward to my introduction to D___ H___, though we have been in seemingly constant communication for some 10 years. she still believes that when i visit HCMC in late jan-early-feb that i leave from there for Peru, it will be interesting to learn how that innocent deception plays out.

meanwhile back at the ranch, i’m eating beet-root-pumpkin-seed salad              (note: devoid of pumpkin seed) at Dingo Deli which seemingly reserves a table for me to write at, or the facility is just so large that my table at the door remains empty mostly. i like Viet Nam very much despite its quirks and inherent misunderstandings, i've been reading war histories and Uncle Ho’s Diary - a collection of poems written while in prison prior to the ‘merican war; it is fascinating reading emphasized by the French conversation i hear murmuring in the background while i write now. ironically the hatred of the French is greater than that of the “My”, but my sense is blunted by my isolation and pain. if i am patient and loving it may be i have landed in a place where when my physical force withers and am left with little more than a creative legacy spread across the continents i have been - i may be safe to die. speaking of which, ma is certainly where i left her and heard her last best admonition of my failings - “you are obsequious”, though i’m not sure i can agree with her which may be the root of all our estrangement.

what i don’t want to happen is for her rage at my disobedience to define the last loving relation for which i have waited so patiently. it seems there is a flaw in every conviction e.g. when i was prepared to join the sangha at Từ Hiếu in Hue, i listened to Thay describe how the elder wounded were often too “afflicted” to learn the practice - well shit howdy, d’ya think¿ so what do i do? rail and resist a loving revolutionary lover because his concept excluded my peculiar “affliction” or hunker down and swim upstream like some weakened salmon sperm hoping my DNA strand actual, rather than being spilled into some passion-frenzied-hanky finds residence in the loins of a loving mother which may possess the requisite nurturing skills to allow my strand to join those of the greatly reduced human genome about to wage real war with survival¿ that is the question. 

i am now 65 and find certain “holes” in my normally locked thinking - abnormal vacancies as well in my normally ordered existence of desperation-does-life - coming soon to a screen near you. today while attempting to splice my most recent retreat to a stand of sorts i had to face the shortage of electricity which interrupted my “escapist” movie entertainment, dressed up as cultural anthropology cum - youtube nostalgia for the decency of actor Richard Boone - i faced that very real vacuum of naked self with nothing to distract me. what i resorted to was digging in the garden with the neighbors - it is what i grew up with; children today have no such memory to fall back on. i am at a loss how to create pathways for others to follow. fb is not a public utility but rather the outgrowth of an obscene amount of money and research in how to affect the thinking of the population. it seems i am often surrounded by cliques believing by the the uniformity of their thinking that they are invulnerable to such influence - that somehow the solidarity they enjoy in groups renders their thinking independent - oddly similar to the smugness with which i’ve enveloped myself by solitude.

yet just like finding myself deprived of late-afternoon entertainment seeking sobriety the solace i seek in companionship may be nothing more than a chimera which when pulled aside like some curtain of old reveals the same singular fear of death from which no one escapes. so is it escape we seek or a deeper participation in the panoply of reality in which we are all immersed, including the intransigent resistance to ending a sentence with a preposition, or the perverse pleasure of blasting Trinh Cong Son back against the wall of cultural struggle at my back in the “foreigner” enclave where i write now - an illusion consistent with riding back to my lone room drunk in the dark. this coming Monday i will ride to my 2nd visa extension to Laos. it is a 6 hour drive along with the meal at the border where when i was last there i was refused service as much as was possible; it will be curious to see the memory of me picking up plastic and sharing my nothing with the urchins guarding the border. what was hardest was driving past the killing fields my country initiated and which Uncle Ho prevailed by simple decency.

i remain confused by how to mitigate cruelty that is so much a part of where i now live, and rather nurture a loving solidarity for our species. even how to reconcile my egotistical reaction about Nhi’s rejection of my heart offering, down to the “sonic” attack by my neighbors - we are so close, yet so far. it is health i need and for that i require love for which my history hasn’t prepared me well. but why not¿ i’m not a bad guy and don’t want much but peace and kindness. i accept i have hackles that hurt others. i will continue to blunt them as i can, and in the opposite effect a positive force for the betterment of all, because that is how i was trained; what can i do to train others than what i am doing - that is a question .? 

jts 05/06/2019

http://stoanartst.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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