Extinction Chronicles - 070520 ·

“The more things change, the more they remain the same” - Old French Proverb; i was just preparing to make some snarky argument about, “yeah well, you didn’t have Covid-19, or D._rump or .  .. then i realized they had it in spades and we’re the lucky ones who don’t have the Bubonic Plague or Caligula, or .  .. It would seem that everyone would like to believe their misery trumps all others - and i am as guilty as the next guy, likely more so. So where is the “meaning in the mere darkness of being” Jung describes. Why am a casting about to find some universal solvent to relieve the obvious burdens of others. It is so bad that today buying a handful of vegetables from a local stand, loading my 6 tomatoes into the scale that is supposed to have been part of civil reform preventing overcharging, and making the nice lady take more than she asked for, only to find when i got home she took back 2 tomatoes, leaving me 4 and charging me for 6. I feel for the torment that would drive someone to be so sharp, yet have it seems, i have no mercy in my heart for the billionaires who are consigning our species to death row.

Is that why i’ve been given this instant of awareness in a life that goes in and out of focus like a six-pack from the movie “Groundhog Day”? There are international readers who will likely have no clue what that reference might mean - think hangover that is only made better by the next beer · or in old-speak the fuck who got stuck rolling the boulder out of Hades forever. There are many stories about the eternal punishment we humans face because we search for meaning and control in a powerless existence, yet i feel very fortunate to have been born to parents who would ask such questions. So many humans today are forced into the delusional state that they know what the answer is, they hardly ever had a chance to ask a question - even my nemeses · the poor billionaires doomed to a life of smug luxury and denial. I can think of anything sadder than to have climbed over the dead bodies of those whose lives you had determined to be less important than your own and to find yourself on your deathbed like Ivan Ilyich with great doubt and no time to sort it out.

Not that sitting alone in Vietnam’s sweltering season with your skin telling you, “you’re not healthy” is any better position to be in - but at least i get to laugh at my own jokes from time to time, and occasionally find a singed soul that is not burnt to the core and has an honest to god smile which can’t be bought for love our money. Poor ‘merica, everything can be bought for love or money, but there’s not an item on the shelves that’ll last past its planned obsolescence expiration date; and if your thinking of buying it for your girlfriend, you’d be wise to make sure the price doesn’t include some backroom deal with the financing agent - Dr. Faustus. I would settle for a little happiness which from what i’ve learned thus far is best found trying to share what little you got, with someone who has less. It is not a path i recommend to everyone, for the simple reason that there are so many souls starving for a little happiness in the world that they will simply take all that you offer, and then pilfer whatever else they get away with.

I agree with Lao Tzu, the more you give away, the more you gain - though i was born to refugees from the Great Depression - not the great depression we’re facing today now that things are finally great again in ‘merica, i’m talking about the one just after the “War to End All Wars” WWI - and for all their progressive protestations otherwise, ma and pa were/are as tight fisted a couple as i’ve ever met. It is hard to give freely in the sense of (just spent a full 1/2 hour searching this expression) unconditional love, when the givers are starving. Then again my entire live may have no other reason for being than to gain a better understanding of this important concept - i’m sleeping better already · When i began this essay i wanted to talk about raison d’etre, and so went searching my files for a copy of the 1st sonnet i’d ever written - it was sappy and printed on a sheet with multiple images including a body outline left for me by the grufyti thugs in hollywood who’d taken exception to my scathing critiques of the effete scribbles, another essay, at another time.

This sonnet was written just as pop’s existential star was beginning to twinkle - he’d been herded into a locked facility by my oh-so-cautious siblings for exhibiting, for lack of a better expression - exactly who he was. The sonnet was full of conviction about how stone carving had encapsulated my my soul and was achieved in generational cooperation between a loving father and his son. I am not ashamed of the effort, nor will i live or die on discovering some version of it somewhere the digitally mismanaged ether. More it was the mutability of even in the short span of 15 years one’s purpose in life can be utterly altered by new discovery. If i was ever a sculptor, which 40 years of my life say i was - it was the “flawed genius” Emile Zola dared to use describing his childhood friend Paul Cezanne. Me, I could give a fuck - people talk and like Bob Dylan said most of them are “lying there dying in their own blood”. I sit here and think how fortunate i am to have lived at a time to actually hear Mr. Dylan sing in person - once in a sports stadium along with the Grateful Dead in the reactionary, now progressive county in which i grew up watching my, now 92 year-old mother taking a joint being passed around and sucking on it as though it might give life - apparently it did · she’s still kicking, long may she run .  .. ···

jts 07/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 060520 ·

One can almost feel the heat coming, though there may be a silver lining· When i arrived in Vietnam last year it was July which for where i came from in Southern California is typically the hottest time of year; nothing could have prepared me for the sweltering heat of Vietnam; i simply assumed it was the same for VN, and it got hotter. Yet just today researching immigration to VN, i discovered that April/May are considered the two hottest months of the year. Perhaps this is a case of anticipating the worst only to discover how little one knows, or is affected by preconceived notions. What on May 6th, i am only at the apex and the July heat i’d been dreading will be cooler than what i’ve already passed 1/2 way through¿ and what if that same logic holds for many difficult events i have conjured in my loneliness and pain? It was Mark Twain who said “I’ve lived through 1,000s of terrible things - some of them even happened.” My father’s notion of camping was a string and a knife - you can imagine how this affected ma as the catchall caretaker with 4 children in those camping trips that constitute vacation for a teacher’s family on a single salary. They were truly the best - driving to Pismo Beach with a kettle to scoop up thumbnail clams to cook on a beach campfire, or stopping at the Service Station on the way to the Yuba River to buy patched inner tubes with which to ride the child sized rapids of late summer.

It is only with the convenience economy foisted on the world only more so using cellular marketing conjured by the sell-out nephew of Sigmund Freud - Edward Bernays that we here faint objections about children preferring the box to the gift, or parents placing themselves into perpetual debt satisfying the ever increasing cycle of holidays which of course require some confirmation from one to each other in the form of some bought item. This twisted concept eventually morphed into the delusion that buying anything somehow supported “The Economy” which has brought us full circle into a world awash in some new lethal viral contamination (not of the digital variety) wherein paid thugs are agitating against all logic to forego simple antiseptic strategies to preserve life for the sake of this now “holy economy” which ironically enriches only the .01% of the wealthiest humans on the planet - anywhere on the planet. The question remains how to reverse course, or as Buckminster Fuller would suggest - effectively use the “trim tab” that helps to correct course on the largest of the ocean going vessels. I D K, but i mean to find out with my dying breath, or preferably prior.

The human species has been in tight spots before - famine, tyranny, drought etc., etc. What distinguishes our lot is adaptability. What i don’t understand is how a handful of mooks seem to enthrall the lot, or why. I had an stone carving teacher who was more stonemason who found money in fine art, but he had proletariat logic ingrained in his being - one of his goto expression was - “you don’t shit in your kitchen”. You’d think these fucking billionaires steering the population toward doom could appreciate this wisdom without it having to be said. How fucking stupid are these ciphers willing to blowup their entire marketplace that is stacked in their favor top to bottom - just to goose the bottom line a few more point? If it was just greed, you’d think they’d be satisfied with the 99% market share they command and the 75% ROI (i’m guessing) they’ve leveraged - so why “kill the goose that laid the golden egg? I’m at a loss to understand. If murder was the solution, i might consider assassination as a method of adjustment, but like Orwell’s classic “The Animal Farm” demonstrated so well - they’d just be replaced by Pig 2.0.

Sadly it is “we” the lot of us who keep plugging quarters into “the bozo bezos show” expecting that somehow the next acquisition will put us over the top and finally establish our worthiness as complete human beings - insofar we are superior to our neighbors by having more toys. Yet even without this material veneer of accomplishment where would we be¿ back in the caves cowering before a physically superior sperm donor or willing to commit mayhem just to lie for an hour in the arms of the sublime water carrier? What about work - when did it become a competitive sport rather than a cooperative venture for the good of all¿ how did authority ever trump the glory of the group? Is it possible that as our distinction as individuals has been subsumed by the value of our belongings the value of our individual contribution has correspondingly shrunk¿ I watch people who normally congregate and derive power from their place within social strata during these days of “shelter in place”. All bets are off though one might not be convinced the way some cling to hierarchy. It has become more primal with strength and youth asserting dominance not so much differently than how humans may have organized themselves in caves.

And conversely the force of thought and logic is asserting itself in spiritual ways wherein greed is more easily contrasted against the simple beauty of generosity. Bertrand Russell advocated in a message to the future “be guided by the fact - don’t be influenced by your wishes and hopes when making a decision, use only the facts to decide on a course of action”. The fact is that when you wish ill for another, it can only adversely affect you. Hate has been described as a poison you drink thinking the other will die, but it is you who will suffer. I know this to be true from personal experience. My 2nd wife betrayed me with an immediate superior of mine who i had spent months confiding all the shortcomings of my marriage. After i discovered this hideous betrayal, i spent months of my life plotting the fornicator’s demise - he still lives; likely has no idea how close to death he had been - while there is no way i can ever retrieve those hours back into what i want to do with what is left to me in this life · However, the experience may still be a lesson i must mulch for additional value - whether this experience ever translates into value for you - who knows · as long as i continue to search for ways to make that happen is all that matters to me. see ya’ in the funny papers . .. ··· 

jts 06/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 050520 ·

Anxiety is fucked up, so be not anxious. Were it that simple, yet by all accounts - it is. Paraphrasing the Dalai Lama - “if it’s fixable, there’s no need to worry, if it’s not worrying about is of no benefit.” Lao Tzu describes our perseverating as “monkeys swinging through the trees, and paraphrasing Pema Chodron - “you are the sky, everything else is just the weather.” Fat lot of help this is, huh¿ Why not, what am i gonna tell you that you don’t already know? So the best thing i can do is try to find ways to lessen your burden. When i was a young turk, as part of the job training that was available in those days of LIBERAL rule, i paid for my classes by working as a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. It was good duty, and i learned a lot more than guarding from Arnold Brown and D.E. Tuppins, two of my colleagues. From Arnold, i learned just the right places to stand so that the back lighting would describe a woman’s legs better than her skirt might - Arnold was salacious like that · in a very loving way. D.E.Tuppins was a deeper subject - one might even say encyclopedic, for he was old, and he was from Detroit; built like the buddha and a dead-ringer for Duke Ellington. At one point he was persuaded by the Dr’s wife across the street to give tap-dance workshops to her dance students; when he was young he had danced in Vaudeville.

Mr. Tuppins was old enough to live in Senior Housing, though his wife was in her late 20’s. The Senior Housing had a pool table where Mr. Tuppins would school me in the ways of the world - as much as a 20 year-old Weisenheimer can be schooled. By the age of 25 i’d already conquered the art school of New York City, or so my conceit convinced me. I had been married and divorced and was embarking on a career in Engineering because “others” wiser than myself convinced me. More accurately; i was a frightened young adult adhering to whatever reinforcement said “you are ‘doing good’”, such was my hunger for approval. I do not blame anyone in my life for this predicament, including myself - anymore than i might blame myself for an ugly rash that might suggest poor hygiene. Yet, here i sit sandpaper in hand prepared to excoriate my own skin to appear clean, and to lie about my history to best frame my own delusions of grandeur. I do not know any other way to convince you that you are not alone in your misery, and to share my own with as little judgement as i am able, while encouraging you to pursue your dreams regardless of validation or inclusion. That you are alive is all you need to know about your value and worth.

Ironically in the scheme of things this truth will only become known to the handful of hardy human beings that survive what is about to transpire on this #Our@OneTimeParadise. And as ironical, i predict, rather than the anarchistic capitalism so popular amongst the popular purveyors of the “infinite growth paradigm” it will be cooperation and consensus which proves to be the more useful, and ultimately adaptive society that will emerge to carry our now obvious, to some, fragile DNA strand into the future. What kind of society will this abbreviated version of civilization look like - “Terminator” and it’s machine world · every fucking machine i’ve ever owned has broken - the vaunted Dodge Dart and its heroic Slant Six, my 66 El Camino - the most broken of all. Remind and i’ll tell you the story how my last wife left me. But the conceit of kurzwell and his googol cronies about singularity is no more than unexamined lives floating on an effluence of funny money born of digital technology, which from where i sit has done very little to prove its worth to our species - except grab attention · sort of like 45, big surprise there.

Me, i’ll just be happy enough to get a few more bicycle rides - perhaps get laid by a sensitive, but nasty loving woman once she has established her emotional bonafides · from what i’ve seen, she ain’t on the horizon. Sure there’s lots of broads trumpeting how lucky i’d be to get next to them with tits and ass to prove it, but its been decades since i’ve felt anything near the allegiance i still feel to my own mother’s sincere brand of insanity. She is not really crazy - just wounded to an unreasonable degree. For example, as her stars began to twinkle and it was possible for me to still squire her somewhere - i drove 3 hours South to her home to drive her another 2 hours North to see the Vermeer’s “Blue Lady” at the Getty - my 2nd time, (another essay altogether). Ma and her walker moved like an asphalt roller on road construction - g_d love her; when it became time to head back to her white-bread enclave, i could not find the car, nor did she much care - only that she had to wait. As we transitioned onto the 405 Sth into the blessed carpool escape, she turned to me in her car seat and declared “you don’t have any respect for me,” because g_d is also a woman with an insatiable appetite for mirth it was exactly at the same moment a 3/4 ton Chevy with a solitary, but very aggressive driver decided to show me what his vehicular mass could accomplish against my, as hard i could push it - sweet Toyota Corona companion of many, many miles. I looked in my rear view mirror at 65-75 seeing only the grill of this oversized automotive demon, and i looked over at my waiting for an snswer mother against the wall of slowed to a stop traffic over her shoulder and realized once again “love is the only engine of survival” - Leonard Cohen.

Once we reached her sanctuary, there was nothing left for me to do, but turn around and drive the 3 hours back to my wish-it-would-have-become-sanctuary in the _rumpland of Klan Valley - Lake Isabella. If this soundw bitter or full of recrimination, the error is mine. Ma taught me love in ways my father never could have, though he gave me spirit which ma could never fully understand - but to her credit, she tried. To you who reads now - i can only hope for you that you have been, or will soon be in the company of as interesting people as my parents. For all the meanness and unnecessary selfishness that informed my upbringing - they were and are not, for ma still breathes at 92 in the very most dangerous bowels - a “convalescent hospital” in Covid infested ‘merica which they both deeply believed in. If you read this now, or the digital wizards finally got their shit together you read this many years later, know this: we were not all bought off with the same $24 that paid for today’s Manhattan Island. There are pockets of loving people wanting no more than for you to survive for even a minute’s happiness in your life. I apologize for the conditions in which you must exist, and yet even now - years or miles apart, i feel solidarity with your hopes for a better future - Fuck you, now go wash your hands ·

P.S. it is as though all i have to do to stick needle in ma's being is to use the word "that" - go figure ·

jts 05/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 040520 ·

It was only a matter of time with all that goes on in the world - i have a rash on my forearm · not the 1st and i’m sure not the last. I tend to cleanliness and so i wonder if i am suffering from hygiene fatigue after more than a month in quarantine. When i stabbed my heal, i determined to hold off bicycling until i was sure there was no danger of infection or damage to my tendon - fresh air helps everything. But the body is a mystery, i’d once had a catheter wound turn to MRSA, and later watched a recluse spider bite on the same hand begin to cannibalize my flesh in the same manner as MRSA. Yet the emotional component of the immune system cannot be blown off as metaphysics. I once spent the night at a young friend’s house where i was so uncomfortable i gave myself Hives, which if you’ve never enjoyed, is something i’d only really recommend for your next lifetime. With all the foul chemicals scientists have poured into our environment, i wonder how we are able to breath at all, much less ever trust science again. I was raised by rational thinkers, and so even doubting the wisdom of science is almost heretical, though the very foundation of its practice is to question.

My sense is we crossed over the boundaries when we created authority. I believe in civil order, for i’ve been in to many rock and roll riots to have much faith in mobs or the congenial nature of humans in mass, however much i wish it were otherwise. Part of the reason i experience cognitive dissonance regarding the effectiveness of science is a learned belief that study of the subject can solve nearly any problem. And here we sit barely 20 years into the 21st millennium and our species may not last to the end of the century for no other reason i can see than greed; not even greed from the majority of our species but phenomenal greed from less then .01% of the entire population. I know a lot of smart people, and i can’t seem to explain myself well enough to demonstrate the problem, much less gain cooperation in solving the problem of our eminent demise. The mechanistic view of existence no longer squares with my growing suspicion of synchronicity and the relationship of the unknowable with our high defined experience.

I just finished a fascinating story by Celeste Ng - “Little Fires Everywhere”. It had the seamless quality to it which Jane Austen mastered so well. What is troubling is the predictable outcome; not with regards the denouement which was satisfactory and logical - but just its very presence seemed illogical for a novel about an open-ended existence vs a structured life. Shit is not neat and tidy, people are sketchy - even the stalwart ones. Family is no bulwark against anything nothing ends with the last chapter, no matter how well nested it is. So why do we as a species yearn for this “unified theory” with which, Mr. Einstein cursed us all [with], and who the fuck determined a sentence cannot end in a preposition¿ (or prepositional phrase?) for that matter - damn, did it again. Of Pop’s many favorite expressions distilled from a lifetime of humble, yet thorough scholarship was “don’t get stuck in concrete”. I know he’d say this to me specifically, as well as i know he shared this personal truth with anyone else it would seem to fit. He came to believe this i believe responding to my youthful and oft times shrill declarations of “FACT” - an intellectual cul-de-sac i am still winding my way from - fucking prepositions.

I’ve now crossed over the line of pre-hydration post-saturation barrier where we are now traveling as pilots of old might say, by the seat-of-our-pants. Trinh Cong Son plays, though i still have to googol the unfamiliar name - hazards of cross-cultural intrusion. My mission is to have some fun while i try to document as honestly as a sculptor-cyclops-refugee might in the later days of his happy life. When i say synchronicity, chew on this: where i now sit with population of 95 million people has had less than 300 cases of Covid-19 and O deaths, the nation where i lived last with a population of 328 million - 2/3 larger, has had 1.18M cases, and 68k deaths, for the math challenged that is 68,000 more deaths than where i now live. Why is that? It explains for me why i feel grateful to live here - yet, mindful i do not belong. Where and why i feel such kinship for here and now, is love: love has no location and does not understand my complaint - in a good way. I can whinge and wiggle as much as i like, but cannot ignore my appreciation of a way of life which i would like to contribute, but must accept as one more wound, i can only hope to find a way to mend - just like where and when i started out from what i thought was home 5o years ago. 

For many years i owned a tool box which resembled a compressed version of what i tried to carry with me from my youth; affixed to the outside of this miniaturized cubbyhole toolbox was a prescient green plastic 5¢ imprint used in markets no longer, but will prompt thought until it falls off - don’t say i didn’t warn you of the coming wrinkle · i am afraid of dying, though i have decreed otherwise throughout my life. It is disconcerting to have no other body to say this to, but you. I am not troubled by your confusion, for if you have gotten this far in this “essay”, it is not my interest that is carrying you forward, but yours. For my money, the kindest thing i’ve heard in many months about our collective troubles is s pure warm-heartedness for being curious about what comes next. I can’t say whether this is a function of literary training and its inherent demand for tidy endings as regards storylines, or if it just make sense to remain open about the future until we again see patterns of behavior emerging that dictate stupid decisions in which 68k out of 328M human beings are murdered by greed, contrasted with 0 people dying out of a population of 95M who are then encouraged to continue struggling toward fulfillment - however you understand that word to mean.  

a quiet adherence to some principles does not preclude happiness 

jts 04/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 030520 ·

Yesterday i spoke about pain with the authority of the wounded; and almost as though guided by the universe i stabbed myself in my Achilles Tendon while sitting outside on the low wall. If it wasn’t so dangerous to have a somewhat deep puncture wound in one’s foot in this microbe rich nation where i only wear sandals - it would almost be funny · actually it still is. From the number of injuries i’ve known large and small i was well aware the sooner i could smear Neosporin and seal the wound the better my odds of not adding insult to injury. The equivalent would be burning yourself on the stove and knocking people down in your haste to get ice on the wound because you had read somewhere the sooner you can reduce the temperature to a burn, the sooner the flesh stops cooking. And as long as you’re curious i do have personal experience with burns having spilled an industrial sized kettle of simmering spaghetti sauce across my forearm in unfortunate lesson in triage. But this is another day, and when i looked at the knife wound this morning while changing the dressing i was more than relieved to find it sealing up nicely as though i there had not been a 1/2 inch of razor sharp agricultural stiletto pulled from it within the last 12 hours.

You’d be right to be thinking “fucking clutz,” however - you’d be more accurate asking “how did that fuck get this far?” Last night pondering my klugey dressing and it’s toilet papered dollop of Neosporin, cut-in-half too large bandage finally affixed to my ankle with increasingly precious blue painter’s tape - were this wound to go septic, i’d have to seek “professional” help, which i am loathe to do · having developed a healthy mistrust and concomittant profound gratitude for the medical profession - those who have not sold their souls to the medical/insurance racket. But this discussion is about triage and the danger of focusing on one’s wounds when the objective is the stasis our remarkable human vehicles are built for. Somewhere along the line, we stopped listening to our own bodies - to the signals they give us about hunger, anger, happiness - the multitude of information our remarkable sensory apparatus provides us 24/7 for the entirety of our lives. We have been conditioned to ignore our own awareness of self and to substitute the questionable advice of those who have demonstrated repeatedly they could give a flying-fuck about our well being - sort of like that broad that blew in your ear late one night and left sometime before morning with your wallet, your confidence and your heart.

Are we really collectively that stupid; i have to ask because i know that collectively they can barely grab their asses with both hands. When i say “they,” i am not misogynistically referring to my better half, i am referring to the emotional ciphers that have condemned an entire planet to extinction for no more than a shiny bauble on their pinky finger. That my brothers and sisters is pain of the 1st Order and it is a complete paradox for me to summon my hard fought compassion to their aid - but then that is the nature of paradox, ¿mais oui? All the yammering about we’re all in this together only gets real when one holds solidarity with the lowest common denominator - i got that far in mathematics. What is hard to reconcile is the betrayal by those capable of understanding Dr. Einstein the best for no more than a tic in their stock portfolio. It gives one pause about the sacredness of science, and i was (emphasis on WAS) a believer in the magic of science. But like all disillusion - on both sides of the aisle · there is a limit to my faith. You cannot fuck all and hope to get away with it - that’s just plain stupid.

So i sit quietly with a self-inflicted knife wound in my ankle, alone in a foreign nation unwilling to surrender to a war i never started, but will damn sure fight to the end. I am human, and it is good. I have enjoyed the most remarkable experiences 6 disjointed sensory inputs can commingle; i have watched misery transformed in an instant into boundless joy and gratitude. Where else can you find such contrast, except “everywhere.” The delusion that there is a single way, a single form or a simple truth is almost like a strand from the conversations i had with my dying father. “Don’t get stuck in concrete” he would say to me as though he could se the tricycle wheels in my brain turning toward how can i make this “forever” when there is no forever, and there is nothing but forever . .. ···: The closer i get to death and the lower my liquor stock gets the more i understand what dear old dad was getting at. If you ain’t happy or safe where you are, anyplace you go will provide you that same conviction. Whereas if this is your stand, your hope, your dream - there ain’t fuck all that can relieve you of it - now matter what the “dream machine” says otherwise.

Humility about the, as Bob Dylan might say “greasy skid mark” you are is a start. There is no  everlasting anything but the that which encourages your finest warmth, your heartiest hello and your most forlorn - oh fuck! How much better do you want it? You are in complete control and there is no other agency but your own heart. Be loving - no one owes you shit for it · yet there is no organization of thought or wealth on the planet that can provide you more than that which you freely give to yourself. Make it love, for that emotion is the only renewable resource our species has ever discovered. To love all cost your nothing and gives everything to everybody it encounters. Pain is not an excuse to close down - that is what greed does - it convinces you if you have not gained your heart’s desire that somehow you have failed - you have not. Our planet does not need us; you do not need me - i value you and will die defending my right to believe that, whether you are an emotional cipher preying on the bulk of humanity, a woman blinding me by her beauty or my own mother struggling to convince herself she loved me - it is my choice and my choice alone what i believe · you are fine, now do finer . ..  ··· : PLEASE

jts 03/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Extinction Chronicles - 020520

I am reading a story from a lent book; it should be more painful than it is, for it involves artists and dysfunctional families. I do not understand the person who handed me the book though i have tried, my fantasy is that she would like me to know what she discovered in the book and thereby understand her a little better. This form of communication in psychiatric jargon, as best i understand is called referential thinking. I know this because i met a young couple who lived across the street from me in Santa Ana, CA during my first marriage fiasco. He was a Psychiatric Intern and she was a newly minted dance professor at the local Jr. College. Later after the whirling propellor blade who was also my 1st wife left for parts unknown the young Dr. looked at me very earnestly and said, “you know she was a paranoid schizophrenic, right?” In retrospect i have to ask myself how someone could graduate from University with 4.0 GPA and a degree in Chemistry could be quite so obtuse, but that’s psychiatry for ya’. Nor am i defaming the study of the mind, my life would have been far more chaotic than it has been without the years of therapy i spent answering pointed questions which as often as not reflected the pain of the questioner as did my own - but that’s another essay, altogether.

There is no escape from pain, that much i have learned. No substance on earth is strong enough to dissolve the incessant ache that comes with breathing. My first awareness of that physical pain related to breath was contracting Pneumonia at age 1. The conventional wisdom of the time dictated that the infant should not be exposed to the parent, lest it impair the healing process. That was my 1st real introduction to the emotional pain that accompanies so many physical maladies. When i was 7 or so, our family took an extended driving trek through Mexico - 2 weeks into the adventure, while wading very far out into the shallow bay of Guaymas with my eldest brother i stepped on a what was later learned to be a Sting Ray, it responded like any animal might and whipped stinger into the heel of my foot. Our family had always been close to the ocean and so up until that time had no fear of the water. From that moment forward i gained a very real and immediate fear of pain. I had to walk back to shore, because my bellowing offended my older brother such that he refused to carry me once i could no longer contain my pain silently. That was a good lesson, for there are few i’ve met who can abide the howl of another’s misery - myself included.

I’ve gotten better over the years as the injuries piled up, both at quieting my own shrieks of discomfort, but also in abiding the ache of others - articulated or not. It is not a healthy place to be where one does not feel free to express their discomfort, or at least to face whatever it is that is causing one to ache. Healing, i have found starts when one can sit closely to the source of pain, be it a broken heart, a broken foot or a broken eardrum all of which i have endured - not always quietly, but to the extent i am, as a fine friend once remarked oh so ironically, “sitting up and taking nourishment.” What was harder to mend than what i have endured is the fear of pain, and it has proven to be the most dangerous of my many injuries. There are a vast array of strategies in today’s world designed to alleviate physical and emotional discomfort - sitting here now pondering the question i cannot honestly say whether fear of pain is an emotional discomfort or spiritual. I have spoken elsewhere in these chronicles about the bungalow in Costa Mesa, CA that seems to have been such a nexus for my early years, to the degree that it from that same neighborhood i departed for my journey to Vietnam 45 years later - and that will also have to wait another essay.

They were heady days 1975-76 and in my young poetic mind i had conceived 4 of us as “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse”, there was even an Albrecht Dürer poster honoring this referential conceit of mine; though i’m sure i was alone in this fantasy. In truth these young friends, were surrogates for my family which was dissolving before my very eyes. Today i believe this dissolution was due to greed, hatred and delusion - the same poisons i have resorted to throughout the years for quelling pain. I did not understand then how much of that pain was inflicted by my own hand. In 1976 - the year from hell, as i fondly remember it, I broke the #5 metacarpal in both hands on different dates; met married and divorced my first wife, the Paranoid Schizophrenic Cherokee from Long Beach, and dropped through a covered hole in a roof we were replacing dragging my right forearm down across an unspooling role of flashing and opening a gash in the inside of my right arm which required 60 stitches to close - my left hand was in a cast from the 2nd broken bone of the year, but the Cherokee was gone.

Oddly, i could go on and on, but that could become tedious; besides it’s almost the drinking hour, and i know you have better things to do. The point of all this is that there is no hiding from the misery of existence. The best any of us can hope for is 1) discover of the injuries you acquire those that were avoidable. Not avoidable in the sense of a castle and drawbridge you construct to protect yourself from the serfs you have been exploiting on your royal road to success, but avoidable through mindfulness, looking both ways crossing a street - leaving unkind people to their unkindness, being cheerful and of service where you can help, and letting yourself off the hook if you can’t. 2) Accept your frailty and do not deny your discomfort. If someone repeatedly is abrasive and cruel, know they suffer far more than you. When you find yourself being abrasive and cruel, look it in the face; find the wounded child that would lash out as you have and listen to their hurt - try to speak to that part of your nature seeking revenge, soothe him or her as you would like to be soothed at the injustice of existence. What i am recommending is not easy, i know only because i am so shitty at it - what i also know is that when i use words like shitty to describe myself it is dishonest and untrue but also useful in pointing the way to where i can heal my own pain. Are we having fun yet?

jts 02/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 010520 ·

Today is May 1st - International Workers Day · the ‘merican worker should have known they were in a heap of trouble when its day was splintered off to September 1st and renamed Labor Day. But as we can all see by the armed mooks storming government buildings demanding their rights as consumers to freely spend their money, just how successful the coopting of that holiday honoring work has been in service of the corporate overlords. Me, i like to work - always have though i’ll damned if i understand just how weak i’ve become in my older days. The farmer neighbors were clearing a field some months back, and in solidarity i tried to contribute. There have been days when i would dig hard ground with a shovel for 10 hours a day, and get up and do it again, day in and day out - no more. I was lucky to spend two hours with a hoe scraping shallow weeds in  sandy ground, but i tried. That is the thing about labor - all you can do is your best. Where work gets dicey is when it becomes sedentary, or worst cerebral. I know this because i spent 13 years in engineering bullpens, drawing, figuring, calculating and counting. l won’t lie and tell you it was to build bridges or anything useful - i rented my grey matter to the military industrial complex - it paid for my college degree in English.

My last job of the many i’ve had as a failed artist was as a private investigator/probate analyst for a shady outfit out of Tucson Arizona. On the surface it would seem to be the ideal occupation. I spent my days at the superior court of Los Angeles monitoring estates as they became public. The problem is no one in my office explained that i was expected to monitor estates by any manner or means, legal or illegal, public or private. The objective was to control the unknown heirs of intestate decedents - the richer the decedent the better. There was a lot of gray area, as well as money to be made in this racket; for example if an estate entered probate court with a thrice-removed 2nd cousin as the sole heir, you can bet, which is what my company banked on, that there was an unknown blood relative closer to the decedent than those claiming. Find them and 50% of the estate could become yours. It was a dirty job for the simple fact that it was dead people’s money that was being played for - faceless dead people whose dreams and ambitions no longer figured into the equation - it was simply a foot race to discover unknown heirs, and without revealing who was dead, explain that for a hefty percentage of the inheritance you would reveal who had died and how much they could expect as a blood relative.

I’m very good at parsing things and didn’t know how my competitors continued to get the jump on estates - i had good ideas, but messenger services that were the weak link resented my scruples. However when after 3 years i figured a way to link who was getting documents stamped at the probate window by simply drawing their portraits at the time when when the probate window was busiest; I was also fired within a week of being able to determine which law firm filed which document at what time. It was a revelation amongst others about working with Judges, Attorneys and dead people. When i began that job i told the fellow who hired me when asked, that the list of jobs i haven’t done was growing smaller than those i had. I once drove horse cabs in NYC, worked on the Space Shuttle, and was a building superintendent in a Salvation Army group home for unwed mothers in East Los Angeles. My all consuming passion however and the reason i’ve been in so many different occupations was that of artist. So much so that i could barely acknowledge that to anyone who might ask, though i might have been carving stone decades or 1,000s of studio hours drawing live models. Somewhere along the line my art training became a sacred act, and those dilettantes who, like those who preyed on dead people’s money, published, schmoozed into fame and fortune were no longer amusing, but usurpers.

I do not share this myopic conceit proudly for it was formed from bitterness and resentment about my own failures, yet here is the magic that art has always provided - once that pattern of small-mindednes within my own normally cheerful heart became incessant, it also became an object of study which is the soul of the creative process. I could no longer dismiss Bob Dylan as a dilettante just because he could sign his name to his paintings and they would command astronomical prices simply by virtue of his autograph. I had long known of this aspect about the celebrity nature of fine art; as a young turk my instructor Jose De Creeft was able to tell 1st person accounts of many famous figures in pre and post war Europe. One was about Pablo Picasso and his mendacity - one example my instructor shared was that Pablo virtually spent no money during the last years of his existence because he would pay for everything using cheques - depending on the item being purchased, Pablo’s autograph was often of more value than that which was being bought. Along with anatomy, color theory and composition i was exposed to the darker aspects of the art market.

If i had to do it all over again, i would - my life has been infinitely richer from having studied fine art and literature. The only thing i might have given up is my “tin ear.” It is a function of the confusion between my brain hemispheres i am sure - oh well. In the scheme of things while i watch the young so easily subverted by a digital shackle which when techno-nazi chief scientist at googol kurzwell has his way and devises uploads to the human soul they will no longer have to carry phones with to get their instructions, like elon’s electrical cars, the young will simply have to sidle up to the nearest bluetooth and presto-chango the transfer of knowledge will be accomplished, and we all know how time is no longer money - date is. Still i will go to my grave grateful to my farmer neighbors for the temporary lone of a hammer these past few indolent “shelter in place” days if only for the muscle memory of the months and years hammer in hand looking to hear that ring of metal to metal and watching the mystery of a stone shedding its skin at my own hands like some mineralized butterfly shedding its skin for a new incarnation into a planet which may very shortly not even have humans left to criticize its less than artful shape.

jts 01/05/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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