Extinction Chronicles - 240420 ·

Fri 5:07 pm Running late, but the gas tank got filled, so i am able to cook - i have no fever different from that fucking love bug that has haunted my steps from an early age; don’t believe me, ask anyone of my 3 wives and they will tell you the same - convince me that you love me and i am putty in your hands · & and i have been molded into some damn funny shapes. What took longer to form than those funny caricatures i was left wearing at the end of each marriage as each wife took a powder for a variety of very good reasons, is the person writing to you now who loves themself. Enough so, that i take pains to be clear to people i’ve never met about truths i barely understand about myself. Today i stepped on the tail of my fate, and you could have pushed me over with a feather. I was slogging through my day attempting to rekindle the simple joy of not dying from a plague whose danger has been plastered over the skien of screens which now virtually controls, at least the digits of a majority of the world population.

As i rode up to a small vegetarian bistro of unique character today after businesses had been reopened in the ancient coastal city where i have been cloistered for over a month - I was met quite unexpectedly by a person of ebullient vibration who had until recently been a neighbor adjacent to the “foreigner” hovel i live in. When i say hovel, i mean: flushing toilets, well appointed cabinets, no exits out the back and walls that can be easily scaled, but a gate that cannot be broken open - all the luxuries people seeking protection from those around them might need. I was saddened when this person and his young growing family disappeared in the course of a day - the language/cultural barrier precluded pointed questions so i cast banknotes toward the wind of his family’s upcoming birth and let it go, like so many other mysteries about where i live. I had taken it upon myself to obscurely replenish the tills of this bistro during this passing downturn but seeing my friend and his wife looking at me as i rode up - i knew i had been made. 

You can run, but you cannot hide was said by many much wiser than myself - i’d like to think i am a professional at hiding · but i’d be bullshitting you my only reader; this i refuse to do, however painful. I am fake as fuck, but not like i’m trying to deceive you for some seedy reason, but because i am uncomfortable with anyone knowing how tender i am and how easily broken i can be. The magic of the event today is that my selfish conceit and ulterior motive - the “con” Pema Chodron so sagely descibes was thrown up into my face like a windswept sheet from a no longer whole newspaper being blown up into your face, or the more dangerous variety of a car hood improperly latched suddenly blocking your view as you are entering the freeway. I have met few people with which i resonate; i no longer demand fault from myself for this isolation so when someone looks at me kindly it is terribly apparent. I returned to this bistro and tried to contribute anonymously during the “shelter in place” order simply because i was treated kindly. I accept that my contribution was self-serving, but make no apologies for wanting to protect such kindness. 

It is the delusion i must now face - in the confusion of ordering my meal once again and joining my former neighbor at a prominent table rather than my preferred quiet corner i had to accept that the entire restaurant now recognized my appreciation of this young woman’s kindness and, not to add insult to injury - my ebullient father-to-be-former-neighbor-friend wanted to memorialize the event with a photo revealing in living color my beaten-to-fuck visage in a sadly accurate depiction of my surprise and despair - yeah life is good · but it gets better; my hungry heart has not yet surrendered and so there are echoes of “would you like to¿; can we look at this together?; what about if we . ..¿” floating all over this backwater asian port that i am responsible for. I believe strongly in love karma and if you fuck with someone’s heart - someone is going to fuck with yours. It is a tightrope in today’s superheated, consumer fueled hall of mirrors, but i try to thread the needle and continue to drag this battered core of love i have found deep in my being to each possible, help me what’s the word i’m looking for ¿ love ? 

So while i accept there are many, many who are wildly distracted by issues of death, loss, and fear about something no one can foretell - the future. i am grateful that you the reader could be amused enough about something as simple as the pleasure of another person looking without seeing and read this far. The reason i feel such strong attraction for this young woman is that when i looked into her eyes of her already mask-covered face prior to the outbreak, i found curiosity. From a young age as basically a cyclops with two eyes, i have faced many expressions from family to friends to wives to thieves and so have an internal reservoir full with feeling about each new expression i face. The difficulty has always been that the gaze runs both ways - inside and out. For far too long my inner hatred for that which i was unable to become for others colored much of my perception about others - i was deficient, but it also was a cauldron of sorts that burnt away a lot of bullshit that people often are completely unaware of when they are looking at someone else’s face - my dumb luck with my failing vision is i can no longer see the burnt away bullshit, but where someone is looking when they look at me - is it my heart, or theirs¿

jts 24/04/2020

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Extinction Chronicles - 230420

Thu 4:13 pm and the gas tank has finally expired; am more and more amazed how the gummed edge of the rolling paper comes up licked to the outside, ah - the delectable pleasures of age. My saucepan was loaded and ready to simmer when the gas gave way, the local burger emporium is now open and fortunately willing to deliver, so if the creek don’t rise, i’ll have paid rent for a month; my stimulus check will have been deposited, ma may still be wheezing in Long Beach @ 92 in a high risk medical circumstance - nothing more than an intellect willing to face an early on and oft quoted “inconsolable” fear of death · go Mammy, Go ! At this point i could honestly give a fuck about my own passing, though i admit to an inordinate curiosity about what comes next. ..  ... as it happens it was my vegetarian burger and bottle of cold rice wine - makes one almost want to “believe what the scriptures tell” - Bob Dylan. Grateful beyond measure to Pop, for being able to vomit prose though i am not sick in a world immersed in illness. My elixir of homemade expectorand and confused trachea managed to hack phlegm just at the moment i was utilizing the digital voice of google translate to convey my earnest gratitude to my neighbors and now i have an un-eaten vegetarian burger, likely made with much love; a saucepan lightly brazed with the end of a small bottle of olive oil and non response from my real estate agent whether the non response is reaction formation to an office environment likely resembling some perverse permutation of “Glengarry Glen Ross” - hold that thought · she’s notifying me on another channel .  ..  ··· 

1 paragraph down, 4 to go - like at the end of this mysterious journey with a dubious conclusion my sum total will be informed by this fluttering flag of - what would you call it ¿ it doesn’t even possess the resonance of a small bell ? Baha next door is moistening her verdant garden that yielded the only thing necessary to catch fish in the irrigation channel rent bare from its old growth bamboo by a sadly entirely understandable desire by an expat to have an unimpeded snapshot of how close their villa sits in proximity to the rice fields - a long ass earthworm. I once lived with a hoard of Staten Island immigrants in a two bedroom bungalow on a 1/4 acre of land in the city of Costa Mesa which i moved to at the age of 6. I met the point man of this influx while still at High School and could not know then what an impact on my life this passing wind would have. For two examples: my father and i stood at a hedge bordered by the much lauded picket fence and i peed during one momentary parental exchange - he had just told the local hero - Dave Haley how he hated anyone “darker than him.” Minutes later, the normally placid Hawaiian was at the overhang on the East 4o with a machete and a vehemence that did not mesh easily with his patient rehabilitation of a 650 Triumph which had been abandoned in the former cell of the Iguana who had recently languished in captivity.

2 paragraphs in i cannot, or will not disclose how difficult this personal disclosure is - for there is more, much more than the same Iguana wandering into the shower enclosure after you had watched it cram an Easter chicken thigh into its throat by swiping it back and forth against the recognizable glass door from some from abandoned suburban patio that had within months held all of the important parts of said 650 Triumph - whose running purr was a truly heavenly sound · Threatening insurrection i am playing “Thunder on the Mountain” in a backwater of Viet Nam where my entire existence is as Ricky Rivera might say “at your pleasure” I could give a fuck just about in the song where he sings “I don't give a damn about your dreams”. My front wheel squeaks like a motherfucker and i have just paid $100k vnd to a local mechanic to oversee and silence the concerns of my limited investment in this limited investment market. The same kind of community speakers that announced Muslim prayer in Lombak with similar fervor i hear the Karaoke singers of where i live now prepare for their post Corona defense of culture.

Oh boy 4of4 and i am delivered - if that is an expression for a 65 year old cohort to a 5o year old invading force that reeked untold destruction in a land minding its own business. In the interest of brutal candor i will share a story - a hard share · of an event in this land of _______ fill in the blank. I was struggling at the time for occupation and had fallen in with a local industry building “hang gliders” - a temporal conceit as though one could fly like “Icarus” - editorial note: of the family of 5 original members of W_____ W____g - only the unrelated manager eluded personal death with the destruction of his right Ulna - due it this labor deficit it was decided at the higher levels of management i would deliver the cardboard canisters to points South. It is at this point in the story where things become tragic. I had picked up a young couple hitchhiking south and invited them and their puppy to spend the night in CM. The puppy was hit by a car in the course of the night and i believed that i could put it out of its misery with a blow to the curb - i was wrong and this poor creature sustained many blows at my earnest hand to end its life · 45 years later i still grieve my inability to end life mercifully.

Now i witness an entire species dying on the vine, not because of error, but for a lack of necessary awareness that i do not possess now, anymore than i possessed then. I pray for the comfort of the life i could not take effectively and hope my own suffering created by my own defects does not contribute to other´s efforts to evade suffering while trying to live a happy life in unhappy times. My sincere hope is that by sharing as openly and honestly about reservations i have had in my myopic but sincere quest for happiness will animate another life to enjoy that remarkable pleasure of seeking the welfare of another though it is not clear how to help. I will not last much longer and to not know where my bones will come to rest, but i am not particularly concerned about that as much as somehow this small step i have taken full of fear will somehow add peace and comfort to someone's life i have never met. 

jts 23/04/2020

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 

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