180720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

In the preface to his book “Love and Will,” Rollo May described a clinical anomaly that has always resonated with me. He described a study of “at risk” youth wherein he could not explain a spike of adaptable behavior in reams of otherwise predictably dismal results. He went back and interviewed the subjects succeeding beyond ever expectation and found; the parents of these kids told them flat out - “I got nothing for you, all you can expect is a life of shit.” Most other parents in the study attempted to soften the blow and look for ways to buffer them from reality. My parents were the former, pop not so much, but definitely ma. To her credit, ma plowed through a lot of personal shit before she ran out of steam and just surrendered to the luxury of decadence. She got played by a lot of charlatans in the process. I remember a psychologist she dated for a while - greasy - is the only adjective that comes to mind; but lord have mercy, that same woman still got pluck and savvy enough to weather a pandemic of unknown dimensions - specifically dangerous to old people ·

When ma got the “self-improvement” fever, it had not yet become the shrinkwrap industry you see on your screens today. Most people were just feeling their way through the emerging science of mind; one has to give credit to anyone brave enough to plunge into the unknowns of the unconscious, but did it have to be my mother. At first it was just edgy literature in the family bookcase - Ayn Rand · “Atlas Shrugged,” but even as a boy child trying to fathom the undercurrents of an emerging gender conflict i could see ma’s hackles tearing at my father’s poetically chivalrous notion of man/woman roles. He even said to me in one of those uniquely parental discussions, “it is the woman’s role to submit to your will.” Well folks i can tell you when ma hit the university circuit to finish her BA, ostensibly to add to the wherewithal of the sagging family fortune, one could almost feel all hell was about to break loose. 

It began innocently enough with explanations about why she had to be gone, “your father does not earn enough for us to live on, so I must go back to school.” We never lacked anything and there was always a box of oranges in the garage to help yourself to. Burgers and Root Beer floats were a regular Friday night event one could count on outside of the intractable prompting to carry groceries inside, one did not know of any deficit. We each got an “allowance” that was hierarchal, not necessarily merit-based, for the eldest son was mostly occupied Saturdays when chores were to be done with fashioning mystical bubbles from his gullet that he could miraculously blow free into the air, and the sister could never be importuned to occupy herself with yard work. When is say yard work, i mean plucking the scum of the flowering peach tree that was never meant to bear edible fruit from the Korean grass that grew in the same mounds it had been planted in according to the Sunset magazine - picture plucking paper bags of vomit poured into the Grand Canyon from dump trucks ·

I was more than saddened when the news came from on high that both were jumping the good ship matrimony, and even more dismayed that it had been determined the eldest brother was to remain with pop, while i was assigned to the more “maternal” influence. Those are 3 years of hell that i have seemingly replayed throughout my life in one variation or another. There is no place to point the finger - each and everyone was doing there best as they saw fit at the time. It is today where i sit as an aged man fraught with self-doubt and an entirely rational fury about things done to me at a time when in nearly the exact same location i now sit, my own nation was enacting heinous brutality on a peaceful population that wanted nothing more than to determine their own destiny, free of foreign influence, any foreign influence. Now tell me Madame Paradox is not one the funniest spirits to ever wander freely on our pitiful celestial body ¿ please ?

If ma can sit up and take nourishment under the questionable auspices of siblings i know to be emotionally myopic and possibly dangerous, then the best i can do is stay healthy and happy searching for some meaningful disentangling of a karma that goes back to the first dead body at the hands of another, moreover - to find that thread of joy and pleasure our ancestors felt watching a newly discovered waterfall empty into a canyon full with fragrance from unknown flora and nurtured in the droppings of fauna that, like us wanted little more from existence than to be petted, loved and played with. The sad as fuck truth which few in the reading audience will own, much less act on - we are not all that far from renewing those conditions and perpetuating whatever truth you can find in that assertion for the next gazillion generations rather than perishing like maggots at the bottom of some crusty tin can whose contents are about to become so desiccated as to be unsupportable to any but the most fundamental of life forms - are we having fun yet ¿ · Where’s Greta Thunberg anyway ?

jts 18/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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170720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

In two days it will be my mother’s 92nd birthday - from me she will receive no card, no call no notice · yet somehow she will know that i am thinking about her deeply. She is in a locked ward, hopefully safe from the virus, but unprotected from my siblings. When i told her many months ago that i would not fight my way through my siblings to her bedside as i had for my father, she replied with typical wryness, “thanks a lot.” Nothing would be accomplished by my presence except the continued rancor of brothers and a sister she had trained from birth to regard me as _______fill in the blank. She knows that i love her and that my love comes from a deep forgiveness for behaviors of hers toward me i doubt she is any closer to understanding than the day we parted. She is a “Moon child” in every connotation that expression can have; the eldest brother is on the cusp Leo/Cancer and by her own accounting, suffered the most from her parental learning curve. She met, married and bore my brother within 10 months of meeting my father - with 3 more children quickly @ 2 year intervals ·

I was named after her father who married her mother - 20 years his junior in the silver fields of Nevada · he died 20 some years later in the front room of the house on 116th St in Los Angeles my maternal great grandfather; a doctor in the Confederacy had built somewhere around the turn of the century. Shit gets a little hazy trying to line up a Medical professional from the Civil War building a house in the early 1900s of Los Angeles, but that is how it was conveyed to me, or at best how i remember it. Ma took pains to show me places in Nevada where she was a kid/blossoming ingenue righteously fending off the advances of WWII soldiers passing through on their way to glory. Whichever the case, ma gained enough confidence to remain chaste to the extent she proudly described an event to me when she shamed my grandfather for his “dirty mind” when he had cautioned her one too many times about soldiers wandering through the desert towns of WWII ‘merica.

I doubt only-son pop had any clue about what he was walking into having been barely relieved of duty as a bomber pilot in post WWII ‘merica; she was 4 years his junior and a ravishing young woman by all accounts. No one told him how smart she was and i’m sure he barely saw past her radiant smile enough to look. They did what all post war couples do and made a family - 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956 · bada bing, bada boom. Within 18 months of marriage ma had one child, one on the way with two more to follow in close succession. Ma is an inordinately ambitious woman and entertained modeling and acting along with her scholarly ambitions, so to find herself up to her earholes with screaming babies was not part of the bargain. Pop was a gallant enough guy and made from rugged stock, but making a “killing” didn’t figure high in his concept of fun. His father was a happy-go-lucky hard drinking tile-setter, chewing-gum selling orphan from an equally dysfunctional household where bathtub beer was more important than keeping up with the Jones’s.

It wasn’t a match made in heaven and when the 60’s lurched into view the exhaustion of tracking 4 uber-humans overtook any love they may have retrieved from their early years. Ma kicked pop to the curb in my 2nd year of High School, and someone had to pay - i was loud rebellious and angry for having been saddled with vain disinterested elder siblings lacking any empathy for what it meant to grow up as a cyclops in ‘merica’s heyday of pretty things and ugly truths no one wanted to face · the perfect “identified patient.” Now nearly 40 years later the chickens have come home to roost; ‘merica is aflame with an entirely containable contaminant attended to by a corporate buffoon bent on goosing the Dow Jones bottom line by assassinating as many Americans of Color as can be accomplished without international intervention.  

I have to see beyond the brutal accusations levied against me by self-serving siblings whose only demonstrated interest in family, is to gain the greatest possible return from any death in the family that does not include their own. I wish them well and am ambivalent to beat the band. My sister’s jocular email to me while absconding with a family heirloom for her eldest child who didn’t posses gumption enough to ask for it himself, included the bullshit expression of “what a caper”, forgetting entirely it was i she was stealing from and traveling 2,000 miles to aid her in the process - that is on me, and no one else, but g_d help me if i can forget how my blood feels about my place in the family. Why ma encouraged this pathology eludes me, but does not prevent me from facing it full front in order better understand how the family of man has done itself in, and to try and advocate for a more generous distribution of what is all of our world - planet earth · mama gaia.

jts 17/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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160720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Greed may be the single most destructive trait i’ve witnessed in the human species; i cannot recall a single instance in my personal experience where that inclination has enhanced my life - even just now wanting to write a balanced essay, my greed to be righteous steamrolled over any penetrating examination of whether, in fact, greed has contributed anything worthwhile to my life · because of the luck of the draw, i was born to parents who professed progressive values and searched earnestly, as near as i can tell, for a meaningful existence; to those ends - i am an admitted addict, so you see, not only am i greedy; i’m a greedy addict. No one’s hands are clean, essayists, scientists, lovers and haters we’re all guilty of egregious short-sidedness in this sinkhole of history we find ourselves. If i had to take a guess; greed is hard-wired into our DNA, but not as a manipulated emotion designed by digital-wizards doing the bidding of corporate advertising/social engineering cowards - rather a practical measure of frugality in a precarious existence back to our earliest ancestors; you eat all the summer corn · there is nothing to feed on in the winter months.

We are far more cooperative than we are adversarial; just look at how many suck-ups you’ll find in any clique, in any enclave, of any recognizable group on the planet. The growth spurts for our human tribe has been where individuals stood up on their hind legs and bucked whatever status quo impeded human advancement: Michelangelo told the Pope to fuck himself, Martin Luther said “read the writing on the door.” The irony for me just now is witnessing the boon in individuals distinguishing themselves from the crowd by thumping their chests and pointing to some fucking capacity for creating viral code, or skinheads pointing to longhairs, whites pointing at blacks, women pointing at men; and on and on an on. We have been tricked for the benefit of a handful of leeches, parasites; better organized assholes bent on maintaining a state of war between people who love and people who are not sure.

I’ve been played enough times to accept my own stupidity and move on - this one cannot stand · i’m not talking about the morbid revenge scenarios that have seized more of my life than i am comfortable talking about to someone whose eyes i cannot look into, we’re just discussing the asshole neighbor that brings his dog into your yard to shit and laughs in your face as s/he walks away. I don’t know you, but i’d bet my next 3 ss cheques that would not play well with you anymore than it would with me; and i’ve been cuckolded 3 times at bat, so my tolerance for abuse isn’t what could be described as excessive. I know this - violence is the the very weakest form of resistance. So those that i struggle with, are those who suggest i should be afraid of their might; they are about the weakest opponents in the vast array of opponents to my peaceful, loving ambitions for us as a species that i’ve met.

It was a “Country Joe and the Fish” song ‘i feel like i’m fixing to die’ when i first heard the expression - “we have met the enemy and they are us.” I couldn’t have known at the time it was simple plagiarism of the WWII comic strip character POGO channeling its author Walt Kelly. This is how dishonest cultural appropriation works, but that doesn’t make it okay. If we are to remain a viable communicating species, we have to preserve the capacity to peer into our own hearts and reflect outwardly the truth of what we find there - talk about your Covid-19 terror. Honestly, i am only filling in the 5th paragraph of my daily obligation, because i fear the repercussion of not meeting my quota, a function of how i was raised. Whether such manic behavior will have any positive bearing on escaping our impending doom is anybody’s guess, but i’m having a blast laughing at such irrational unconscious revelations as any other sport i could be occupied with, including “sport fucking” which i used to sublimate my fear of intimacy and a shitty self image for longer than i care to share.

I have yet to meet my female ally who has not bought into the advertising bullshit: “if you own this, you will be immune to heartbreak and invulnerable to emotional distress,” and the dudes i know are mostly little boys looking for a mommy-type confirmation of their worth and power represented by some mystical ability to hold sway over everyone they meet and hearing the only voice in the room that will confirm that elusive pat on the head; the hardest part of this unkind, ungenerous and possibly scurrilous observation is that it is my best guess about how i might appear to others - and to you brothers and sisters out there reading · that is a fucking lonely place to be. However, if it helps an iota in your personal journey for solidarity with other life forms on our planet looking to love, cherish and honor the unique privilege of breathing and aiding life around you to flourish - stay close for we are friends. peace and love out of the aether .  ..  ··· 

jts 16/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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150720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

What a lucky fuck i am to have been raised by father who helped me to see words as toys for play, and a mother who taught me to feel color like sound to hear and odor to smell; though to this day, i’ll be damned if i know how that upbringing will help our species to survive¿ I do know that my father was very physical about pressing my shoulders upright, much like most chores are taught to Balinese children; in psychiatric terms i understand this manner of teaching as “modeling.” I remember one vivid morning when i had been instructed to vacuum under the younger brother and my built-in desks, though upon inspection the “The Great Santini” took my puny fist and wrapped it over the vacuum handle and forced the roaring machine into each nook and cranny of his architectural learning stations; i was humiliated, but properly instructed about the consequences of cutting corners on a sunny spring Saturday morning when the prospect of pickup baseball beckoned at Corsica Park.

This lesson certainly informs my manic preoccupation with providing 5 paragraph essays to a mythological reading public - little different than the 1,000s of his late age poems sitting on the hard drive of his one and only IBM 286 computer rotting in the mildewed  crawlspace under the 2nd house of my young brother’s suburban understanding of possible meanings about our upbringing · go ahead, tell me i’m not a little bit lyrical. I’d rather you explain to me how i might be more meaningful; “live as though this is your last day, learn as though you will live forever.” — Osho, et. al. At this turn these writings are more like the original “Enterprise” limping to some way station searching for Dilithium Chrystals to reconnect Warp Drive, rather than the Impulse Power, Commander Scott has so valiantly rendered to keep you the reader online.

Last night i took another tumble; i generally will not travel on my bicycle after twilight, both for visual and substance issues. I reserve my quaffing hours for late afternoon, early evening so as to aid rest; facilitate creativity; and to lean on the delusion of connectivity that alcohol provides in its peculiar fashion. I normally feel safe from the excess; either from hubris, design or discipline, but now must be mindful that my bicycle conveyance is no longer the obedient steed of my young years when i lived on one before i could afford the luxury of motorized conceits. Fortunately my muscle tone absorbed the shock of tilting into the dirt on a tight quiet corner - it is the existential terror that pinned my eyes open from 1 am to 3 am, more so than the paltry two bottles of the so sweet rice wine of my adopted homeland.

Xmas of 2015 i spent in a hostel in Bejing as a hated Guilo - festivities included a midnight wakeup with a 1/2 dozen enthusiastic cadre cheering my sleep starved frame, “hapy, hapy, hapy.” and the lodging of 2 dozen backpackers in the room next door on the night of my departure who were hellbent on drinking China under the table. During this 14 day, not-enough exploration of momma China, i click-baited one of the emerging tellusnothing and we’lltellyoueverthing apps about my past life - it turns out i was a trader in 16th century Southeast Asia and have a trail of karma that requires attention. Here i sit in a 16th century trading village on the coast of the South China Sea 5 years later, not because i’m a sap, but because asian women are incredibly beautiful to my thinking and thought i could do justice 2-dimensional justice to that beauty prior to my sight falling fainter - too late

 Now i wheeze myself awake in the morning and scrub the scum of 100 + degree humid heat from my frame searching for a loving heart who will not laugh while i close my eyes for the last time. Before that happens for reasons i seem to have no control over i feel compelled to do right dharma for generations i hope to help survive the capitalist rape of our planet - small wonder pop gave me the Don Quixote pen, and the little brother Sancho Panza. Yet in the scheme of things, the fairy threads of our skein of life, what a lucky fuck i am surrounded by buffoons trumpeting their station in life and lording their _______ fill in the blank over anyone that seems susceptible to such bullshit at a time when the oceans are boiling; ancient lethal illnesses frozen into the melting tundra are now meeting newly contrived micro organisms lacking explanation and a population withering under a temperature few are prepared to face, much less surmount for the sake of survival. And yet, we laugh, we cry, we fuck our way into an unknown future full of ______ fill in your blank. 

jts 15/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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140720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I generally analyze from the particular to the general. When i travel to a new location, my strategy is to land and learn as much as i can about the environment where i have arrived, and then make decisions about where to expand to based on what i’ve learned. The same is true for people; i find it is more helpful for the way i think to learn as much as i can about an individual, or group of individuals and how they interact with their environment, then choose where to expand my circle from there; i understand this to be “inductive reasoning” - a prejudice from a passing comment by a lower division math instructor who i respected greatly, and from whom i learned a great deal. The downside is that as a strategy it borders on an inflexible, one size fits all approach to understanding - the opposite of what our world requires just now to extricate itself from the tar pit it is sinking into.

As a youth, i turned 16 one year after Woodstock - wide open is the only expression that fits. I remember friends disappearing and reappearing weeks later sporting knee high moccasins from Haight Ashbury in San Francisco with stories of sexual free-for-alls; drug portals to a new universe and continued victories against a war machine that was vacuuming up young men to kill strangers who’d never caused a moment’s grief in our quiet suburban “wonder years.” Based on this heady experience i had every faith in deductive reason and searched far and wide for particulars that conformed to the general euphoria of the time; that search soon began to resemble a drain with the good shit circling an increasingly violent police presence, and what had been a magically musical phenomena, more and more resembling the pinball gates of a slaughterhouse designed to separate you from your money rather than connect you with the loving others of your emerging tribe.

Given the wild card of synchronicity, i just met a friend that i never expected to find - i am grateful more than i can say. It is heartening and at the core of what i search for in existence. Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls it Sangha and was a prominent feature of the turbulence attributed to the 60’s: the spontaneous sexual escapades with strangers, the long distance rides with people you’d never known and will never forget. They were useful and loving times and i don’t care what Thomas Wolfe says about “you can’t go home,” it is worth the search. Last night i had an aborted virtual tryst with a former landlady who lives in Oaxaca. She is a member of this exalted tribe and i reached out from loneliness and too much selfishness having convinced myself my former virility would be sufficient to provide her what actual sex could not. What i accomplished with my sexual greed was not to assuage her loneliness or help mend wounds not of my making, but what the Dalai Lama cautioned against, “if you cannot help, at least do no harm.” 

Nor can i say that what i experienced squares with the facts; because she did not immediately respond to my need, does not necessarily mean she does not welcome a sexual distraction from the tedium of living in a country adhering to the practicality of “shelter in place” and that she is simply waiting for the mysterious tempo of a woman’s sexual appetite to ramp up - i d k · I do know that the Calvinist tradition of my birth nation has created a monster of denial and shame about all things sexual that i have no interest in preserving and find no useful purpose for in the last years of our existence. Sex is good; non-attachment is good; romance is distorted beyond meaning and jealousy of another’s happiness is destructive. So where to go from here¿ i am 65 and not what young maidens seek for satisfaction to their biological imperative. I also understand that sex in all its manifestations contains enormous information and potential growth for me about the pathology i was raised with however well meaning. 

Madame Paradox once again comes to promenade with me, though she is too distant to hold my hand and comfort me in my despair - i have gotten far enough to recognize the despair is of my own design and no one else has responsibility for its outcome but me. Need and attachment create their own vortex that like my own reluctance to inflict pain on a woman who would use me for her sexual satiation, can also be vulnerable to the pain of a love breech, the same as my sitting here aware of how vulnerable my new friend is for a lack of simple communication that he waits to finish a conversation that can never be finished. I struggle to contribute meaningfully to my brethren and often feel guilt for not being able to fulfill all the deficit i perceive in this world, but i keep trying. The question remains why and to what end¿ i am not jesus, unless i can be jesus to myself, or help others see the same. I sense great loneliness from the individual sitting to my left, how do i honor that and make amends for 1,000s of years of failure, while honoring my own pain? May we all entertain such complex questions in the decades that are left to our species. 

jts 14/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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130720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I’m thinking of covering my goofy eye with a patch - as if i need more distinction from the herd · Based on the warrior/scholar/scientist/engineer history that has been thrust in my lap, it is a purely practical notion. From as long as i can remember i have tried to be “normal.” This was a Doctor Spockian notion popular during the age of my birth, mid 50s ‘merica; same fucking conventional wisdom that told the my parents to stay away from me when i contracted pneumonia in my 1st year of life and was hospitalized for two weeks. I never had a shot at normal in the conventional sense, and now 65 years later, i’m still winging it wondering if a patch to make me a proper cyclops instead of the emotional kluge with which i hazard the roads of the currently quiet hamlet in a Southeast Asian nation where i remain healthy largely due to free access to miles of flat roadway and an inordinately courteous driving public. I am flat fucking lucky by any means or measure - whether i can convey gratitude adequate to my circumstance, seems to be my only responsibility.

That and finding a loving squeeze who is not completely revolted by my heinous exterior and undaunted by my ingenious invisibility. There are so many human beings i shrink from on a daily basis it makes me wonder about the warmth of my own heart, for an instant. I can viscerally remember playing footsies in the sand with L_______ O/H_____ a deeply wounded Basque vixen one summer at 15th St in Newport Beach, CA - i couldn’t have been 15 years old if i was a day. We moved from there to her condominium with the same gaggle of kids and played “spin the bottle,” probably the 1st and last time in my convoluted teenage experience. L______ and i established a strong bond that lasts to this day and i wish her well with the new love interest she ignited at our 40th high school reunion. She taught me much about love - the feeling · not so much the preservation thereof. It seems my love fate was to lay in the hands of faith - a lesson i am still trying to understand.

I am far less impatient about that reality, if indeed there is a “reality.” Master Thich Nhat Hanh is very clear about his reservations toward romantic love. I would like nothing better than to be a good student, but my wayward heart is what it is and wants what it wants. Perhaps that is the lesson - desire born of ego can never fill the reservoir of the soul · My family was a very pretty group, and then there was toi. Even after 65 ravaged years it is sticks in my craw to imagine myself as attractive, though compared to some of the faces i have looked into over my life, i understand ugly better than most. I seem to inspire repulsion, sort of like “Beauty and Beast” or “Cyrano de Bergerac” were written expressly as an object lesson for me, however narcissistic that might sound. I can still hear ma querulously objecting any time i use the personal pronoun “i”, but then she has the same fixation on anytime i use the determiner “that,” or the color of my teeth, or my nose hairs, or my tattered raiment . .. ··· etc., etc., etc., 

And i love her still, because there is no alternative. If i cannot surmount my own mother’s objections to my existence, what fucking hope is there for a warm loving relationship in my life? - that is a fair question, but as the goddess of paradox would have it, it is not an answer for my dear dying mother to answer - but for me to reckon with. So be it, i do what i can to stay open hearted within parameters of good counsel that the spiritual masters far beyond me i am able to hear. My hearing defect from a ruptured eardrum makes for some distortion in what i can hear, so sometimes i think i hear “oh fuck, that feels so good, do it to me some more”, and sometimes i think i hear, “if you touch me again, i will scream to the gods that your testicles be pulled up through your throat.” Most of these conversations take place late at night when i am trying to quiet the anxiety in my soul which manifests as pain in my joints or pressure in my lungs - but that is my problem, not yours.

The best it seems that i can do for you is to keep track of the paragraphs, in the unlikely event anyone is reading, after all these aren’t called the “Extinction Chronicles” for nothing. The psychiatric term, i had to look up recently is “reaction formation.” I am dying, as are we all, and my reaction to that inexorable fact is to reflect as openly as i am able; to remain healthy and happy as long as i am able; and to render you strangers as much aid and love as i am able. This only gets to be complicated when i accept that people who know me shy away - i kid you not · my eldest brother has trouble touching things i have touched, and my youngest brother cannot use my name, Joseph; my sister - bless her heart - straight up replied to my question, “no, I don’t like you.” These are good decent people you’d be lucky to have in your corner, while once again Madame Paradox has made it my good fortune that they not be in my corner. If anything i have said herein offends, i apologize and hope you may take the love i can offer and travel your path in peace - the same i bid my blood ·

jts 13/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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120720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

"Wars are fought over who owns the land, but in the end it is she who owns us. Does not one who dares to claim to possess it rest under it?"

 - Cochise, Apache Chiricahua

I was not refreshed on waking - i think it’s because Bob Dylan was telling me something in my dreams · Lucky me; now if i could only spread the good fortune i’d feel better about what i do. Just singed the vegetables, did not wash the bicycle; learned an ugly truth about an icon i’d elevated in my moral cosmology based on my myopic perception, and realized at the beginning of today’s writing, i’d stiffed my readership of 3, their 5th paragraph; so how’s your day going? The upside: i pulled more dead skin from my wounded ear; managed a nap that seemed to refresh the painful part of last night’s rest and am still willing to pull my heart out through my fingertips for no other reason than to help the human species survive itself.

Maybe if i keep the paragraphs short i won’t be tempted to finish abruptly. What confounds me is the dichotomy of expressing clarity in a world “off-the-rails.” A handful of profiteers have so polluted the environment with plastic that it is now found in the organisms at the deepest parts of our oceans; i’ve read that 91% of the plastic made which has increased 200 fold between 1950 and 2015 is not recycled, and as of 20 December 2017 the “talking heads” expect an increase of 40% over the next decade - just for laughs you might look at the graph describing that increase and the one describing Covid-19 infections in the U.S.

I’ve said this elsewhere in my writing trying to convey the complexities of dear old dad - but when we would shoot the shit, me on some street corner in Hollywood and he in some supervised capacity thanks to my elder siblings; when the discussion came around to the “the world” and what was going on, however he understood that to mean at the time, his quip was usually the same, “man am i glad i’m old.” He was a deeply caring man who suffered all that any pilot who crushed one of his own crew due to failed brakes on a B-17 bomber might, yet his orientation was always in support of the “little guy.” He put his money where his mouth was as a career High School English teacher and long time union representative. 

As one of his sons who witnessed his life up close, it is for those reasons i refuse to relinquish the floor to the mythology of meaning that the social engineers today are shoving down the gullet of a population faced with its own extinction for no better reason than the caprice of a pampered gentry made fat on no more than the +/- 5v impulses flashing before your very eyes as you try to decipher my meaning. The only weapons in my arsenal of resistance are words, and logic to put them in an order that might help you to understand the danger you are in, and to encourage you to save yourselves and the lives of those you love.

If that is even possible - the chief scientist at googol is staking the future of our species on the transformation from the carbon-based organisms we inhabit to some silicon based android of an indeterminate but corporate sponsored design. The conceit is based on a mythical state of technological development described as the singularity - "a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization." It is for this reason and others that the princes of the world seem to have no compunction about hoarding the world’s wherewithal, for they like the nazi sympathizer Walt Disney, whose remains are stored in liquid nitrogen, are waiting to “upload” what they believe to be invaluable about the human condition - their minds, ergo their egos. You and the struggles you have lived through are unimportant to these conceited fools. The only thing they believe is important is the preservation of their silly egos - and on that note · i bid you good night and sweet dreams.

jts 12/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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