060820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

As a prepubescent teenager steeped in my father’s library of Greek Mythology, it was not abnormal for me to explore the abundant metaphysics of the 1960s - drug induced or otherwise. My misfortune was to have been quite so young as to accept on face value flummery that was easily vetted by older humans with more personal experience, and not. I read Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan” at the same time it was possible to purchase the Peyote Buttons described in those stories and spent a memorable afternoon (though like all psychedelic insights - none made the return trip) in the tide pools of South Laguna - two of those friends have since died which is entirely incidental to this essay. Try as i might that afternoon, i was unable to dislodge my reality to the separate reality espoused in that very profitable literary enterprise. However some few years later on an uptown bus in Manhattan, it struck me dumb what the author had accomplished - sifting through the recorded annals as a sociology professor, the professor simply “cherry picked” principles of philosophy across the spectrum of world history and inserted them as the spoken wisdom of a Yaqui Shaman, making millions and million of dollars in the process.

That my friends is the sacrificing of learning at the alter of greed - nothing more · nothing less. A man in the building i lived in in Hollywood was determined to do a documentary about my stone carving - the stresses of such a collaborative effort across cultural boundaries eventually rended our friendship asunder · but not before he expressed his greatest fear to me, “being laughed at.” I share this not to divulge a confidence, for you can never know his name or find the documentary, but because it was a common fear we shared. The idea of this professor leading impressionable minds by their existential noses down fictional rabbit holes, which i am certain he meant as edifying, but in reality was nothing more than a deposit slip in his account · he laughed all the way to the bank at my expense. It was a lesson i will never forget, i can almost picture the point in the bus ride when i had that epiphany - that would be 40+ years ago.

How many other delusions do i nurture with nothing more than faith - there is a song from the late Leonard Cohen when he is parsing similar reservations singing, “I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim”, this coming from an ordained buddhist monk, gives pause to every tenant i hold sacred about violence and harm, as i’m sure it did him when he wrote it. Yet we are witnessing the manifestation of George Orwell’s vision of the future - “Picture a boot stomping on a human face forever.” I don’t take abuse well, ask any of my last three wives, but i like it less when i find those i love suffering at the hands of bullies. My father was a valiant fellow striving for the underdog to his dying day; i don’t think we ever spoke regarding Albert Einstein proclaiming himself, not just a pacifist, but a militant pacifist - i wish we had. Pop usually found a way to de-escalate conflict, and if he didn’t find one · he just kept searching; he was that kind of hero.

That was then, and this is now - i am sucking down vegetables and elixirs as best i’ve learned, following regimens of habit i understand to stave off illness and stress · i search for ways to relieve the suffering of my brethren, but feel mostly unwelcome at their tables which i am only now beginning to realize is more my doing than anyone else’s; and i am content. The heat grows daily and the sun is back out after of few days of relenting overcast while in the back of my mind i remember Pop’s kindly admonition - “ya’ get burnt worst on overcast days ‘cause the clouds don’t filter the UV rays · that had to have been 60 some years ago, always a man ahead of his time. He also told stories of the horse owners bringing the horses to the beach to strengthen their legs for the races - a notion confirmed by one of my carving teachers saying, “if you can cut granite, when you get to marble it will be like cutting butter.” Were it that simple.

The same teacher could not understand why i had to “come up on the stone” rather than position the rock like any practical stonecutter would and simply cut downward like s/he were cutting a piece of steak. Perspective is everything, and he had no real clue what a challenge it was for me to tease 3 Dimensions from stone as though i could see anything but a flat surface, no matter how round it got. So the prospect of leaving a violent world a little closer to peace and a little freer from greed is no great stretch - an aerospace adage comes to mind · “we who have done so much with so little for so long are now qualified to do anything with nothing. How’s that for a little philosophical cross-pollination¿ stealing from the Masters of War to train the Guerrillas of Peace? 

jts 06/08/2020

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050820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Reaction formation to my congenital visual imbalance i think has made me a creature of uncommon regularity in my habits, but the times i have lived have helped me to welcome a plethora of cultural variations as normal - i spent my 17th birthday, minus parents, on a ferry between Amsterdam and Sussex, England where i lived a year, and though never declared “emancipated” - neither parent could say who was responsible for me after age 15. By the age of 18, i was living in the Lower East Side of NYC, where i stayed until age 20 - after that it became a blur. My 1st wife when i was 23 turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic, according to the psychiatric intern living across the street - her only constructive remark in our month-long donnybrook was, “i’ve never known a man who shit on a more regular schedule than you.” I took that as a high compliment coming from a crazy Cherokee out of the city of Long Beach - it took me 8 years to recover from that propellor blade · though some of her delusions have corroded parts of my life to this day.

As well as prompted new growth and better awareness of others. Throughout my calamitous life regularity has dictated the wiser decisions. When in NYC, i was lucky to fall under the influence of a 90 year-old Spanish stonecutter who seemed to find something worthwhile in my cycloptic method of developing 3 Dimensional objects, enough so that for the next 40 years of my life i spent arranging ways to continue carving stone - welcomed or not wherever i was and with whomever i was with. Manic regularity and hand carving stone you’d think was a match made in heaven, until as Bob Dylan pointed out so well, “greed got in the way.” The 2nd stonecutter to hold sway in my creative journey, may he rest in peace, was a tradesman cum “artiste” who nearly convinced me that machines were the way to make-a-buck in the sculpting game. I am a journeyman stonecutter without accreditation, save 40 year of my life shearing stone in the service of beauty - though truth be told · i fought for fame and glory more than is healthy for anyone as sensitive as i, and listened to others when my first master had explained quite clearly how to listen to the stone, and yes Madame Paradox added an “emphasis on the syllable” by rendering me nearly deaf in one ear.

The gist of this convoluted explication is that i do not possess the physical capability to perceive 3 Dimensions - my life’s sculptural effort i cannot see 3 Dimensionally. My entire visual experience is comprised of oscillating 2 Dimensional glimpses of what you consider reality, while i remain in awe that i am able to walk through a door, much less lovingly ride a bicycle, though i say that in a whisper lest g_d, bless her heart, sees hubris in the last of my pleasures. Yet in her infinite wisdom i fear, truly fear that my life is not only not over but that there are many more manifest surprises in store simply through the act of breathing gently - in with the pain · out with simplicity, patience and compassion. Laugh if you must, but when it comes time to slumber, i’ve yet to find a more effective recourse than wishing well to the myriad of suffering we, meaning “i” have brought down on our own heads.

I am even encouraged to discover whether i may actually be able to continue drawing, even painting were i to find resources and a surface to struggle upon. I think my romantic delusions of a companionable model/business partner have been existentially excoriated from my ambitions, and if i could resume the struggle close to where i’d left off - 2D or 3D · i somehow remain free of the ravages of cancer or viral contamination, and may just be because i do not consult doctors. But i gauge my wellbeing by my capacity to exert and respirate while cycling and maintaining muscle mass. People are sometimes best avoided in that conceit though, my neighbor from Sơn Mỹ could barely restrain his pride, laughing at my aged visage compared to his much older father - but that is my problem · not his. He is young and the best i can do is to help him remain that way as long as possible. That is the reality of our collective future, find ways to enable the strength of those younger still facing a world-wide autocratic corporate putsch determined to enslave and monetize the very essence of our human existence.

But fuck ‘em - we’ve been struggling to be free since we crawled out from the caves of the last Ice Age. These mooks running the game seemingly designed to destroy anything but their conceit are short on courage and lacking character which has been the only determining factor in adaptation known to our species. The Dalai Lama is not spouting empty platitudes when he exhorts us to be “kind whenever possible, it is always possible,” he is clueing us about an existential reality that we know to be true in our hearts, but are afraid to accept because we fear death. There is no escape from that transition, nor is there cause for any more concern than that of becoming a husband from having been a single man - same circumstance for our sister women · We are human and change much like all the animals in our earthly domain. There is nothing, corporate, religious or philosophical that will change that reality - except you. The same life changes you face from life to death are the same life changes you make each time you breathe with one thought to the next. Fear is a construct that makes our existence yoked to a fiction which cannot be forestalled, nor should it be - we are dynamic like the waterfalls, like the butterflies, like the decomposing flesh of our ancestors that does not release them from our memory · sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

jts 05/08/2020

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040820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Rumi - “Live life as though everything is rigged in your favor” · It was not the quote i was searching for, but it will do. I am surrounded by death and yet am able to do exactly what it is i want. The nation i grew up in is either experiencing growing pains, or death throes, and i am too far removed to know which. Early on i found that if i drink too much i do not rest and have reached a point where i am threading that needle fairly well. Bruce Lee said to become “one with your enemy” which i interpreted liberally applying to conflict, study, relationships, personal habits etc., etc., etc. Tobacco recedes further and further from demand and more and more toward the sacred that i have quested for since watching Ernesto Herrera, et al, smoke one cigarette a day. One of my earliest art projects was a driftwood pipe holder i carved for my father who inherited Winna’s husband Henry the Polynesian’s pipes when i was 7 or so. It didn’t occur to me that i’d never seen Pop pick up a pipe, but that didn’t prevent me from finishing his birthday present by going to the Market Basket and adding a pouch of Prince Henry tobacco to my proud gift.

But tobacco is a powerful sacrament, and doesn’t give a shit if you’re kid or not, so when Michael Lambert proposed we steal the 6th grade teacher, Mr. Paulsen’s Winston cigarettes from his coat pocket behind the backstop while he pitched during lunch hour, i was ripe for larceny, and if i remember correctly Michael was nowhere around. Be that as it may, what a coup. We met back up in the dump truck stacks of dirt behind the Kenny’s Shoe store that had become bicycle heaven long before motocross was even on the horizon and i was feeling, but not knowing, too big for my britches. Couldn’t resist calling out to Scott Anderson in my brother’s grade just passing by in the alley minding his own business. “Hey Scott, come here” where Mike and i sat furiously puffing on the demon weed. “Look, i’m smoking, but i don’t want you to tell anyone - okay?” Off he rode peddling furiously to rat me out to Pop who showed up minutes later to put me in lockdown and then “play” with my brother’s and sister - first time in months · or at least how i remember it. (talk about your punishment.)

So effective was that punishment, 55+ years later i’m still grousing about the injustice of my own acts; imagine what our species is going to look like at the seat of g_d whining about how the capitalists came in and took over everything and shared nothing that we couldn’t buy or steal. Michael died 20 years or so ago from acute alcohol poisoning - having distinguished himself by releasing himself from military duty by driving a U.S. Army tank off the base where he was stationed in Germany so he could have a beer at the local beer hall. His father, Mark had made a killing as an Ad Man, creating a character for Builder’s Emporium which allowed him to become a fine artist as a 1st or 2nd generation Afghani out of Detroit into the quiet OC suburbia where much of this chapter took place. These are my people, my sangha, and when i write this down i see how futile it is for me to search for my community in the world of today - as an embarrassed yank, i have to accept the “traitor in office” may just make good his boast.

Our country might become great again, but only through profound humiliation and failure of its claim for exceptional manifest destiny. Rather we are like all entities who have tripped up on our own conceits and have fallen face first into the pit of hubris where all arrogance lands. Mike’s father Mark found his place in painting and AA, as my own brother found his place in labor activism and AA. I may not have a place, but because of my father i have a quest - i am comfortable with the unease · i can sit with my appetites for women, for fame for accomplishment, not well, but well enough to function with pain, solitude and old age in a foreign nation while the world is in peril. I may not be the keen revolutionary of my youth, but i have not surrendered to despair or depression. I do the things i need to to keep my teeth, my independence and my love in tack. 

I’m even curious about what the future brings. I’ve learned enough about the world to accept the dichotomy of opposites; what i haven’t discovered is the path to unity, if there is a path, or if there is unity. They say that Einstein still struggled for the “unified field theory” up to his dying day - a way to reconcile the threads of his thinking which diverged unexpectedly but tantalized him with the possibility of correlation. I am not convinced that my life is meaningless though i possess none of the outward signs of success, i have no companion, no family that will acknowledge that truth - no wealth outside of what i can give away as much as is practical and my friends are mostly otherwise occupied, still i am happy. Not because the “easy open” can of beans just now cost me 4 minutes out my life because the fastener would not unfasten, or because i am soused seven sheets to the wind from despair - which i`m not · nor do i envy the readership of those with greater internet social savvy. I am happy because i am doing what i want to do and am mindful of the importance of that simple truth.

jts 04/08/2020

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030820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I tried to make my morning bike circuit between the two beaches in the city i live - i found the link North closed; it was the first time i’d ridden in two days and given the viral onslaught i felt the tradeoff of exposure vs exercise a fair one. But this is where the equation gets dicey - because of my own recent errands prior to the outbreak it was as much a question of who was exposing who to what · Tensions are running high where i adjusted my domicile to the other side of my farmer friends, lacking facility with the language it is hard to know why people i’ve never met, but are now new neighbors with are giving me the stink eye. Happily i’m reaching a point closer to my own demise where such popularity contests affect me less and less - unhappily it confuses me to know that just by my taking breath i cause another human being to succumb to hatred. So i hew close to what i have learned to do and try to find ways to do just that · the goofy thing is that i have done so many things in my life, one never knows how it will play with others.

For example: the neighbor to my east came blustering over two mornings ago banging on the gate loudly calling my name - it was just as “lockdown” was looming and barely a week after my taking up residence. As it happened he had a sickle in his hand and was hellbent to get the offending bamboo on my side of his metal frame barrier cut down so that leaves would not drop in his enclosed porch. As much as i’d like to think of myself as a Cadillac human being easily steered and capable of going very fast, i don’t take easily to peremptory demands - child of the 60s residue · so when he commenced to hack away at plants that were not on his property, i gently disengaged him from his task and began to shape the offending plants with my newly acquired shears. When through, i hollered, then louder; “Tommy, HEY TOMMY are you going to come and help carry this debris away?” He finally appeared and made it clear it was a “one way street,” i help him, but not vice/versa. I loudly pointed this out, for when he interrupted my morning with his demands, i was in my clean clothes that were now soaked through with sweat and not in any mood to broach more impertinence. 

But it wasn’t impertinence for him - a day earlier he had shared that the town he came from was Sơn Mỹ, where the My Lai massacre had taken place during the American war in Viet Nam. Mr. D____ has a business as a tour operator in the world heritage site where i live. Mr. D_____, when business is not impacted by the virus, spends his days sharing his nation with travelers, many who come from countries that supplied armed combatants during the ‘merican provoked conflict, and to have a man living next door to him who is that same age as those who committed the atrocities at Sơn Mỹ is testimony to the lengths this country has gone to push past a heinous violation of her sovereignty and embrace a world barely recognizable to the one she had so valiantly struggled in for her independence. The saddest part of this entire paragraph is that the same financial forces that had been responsible for the ‘merican invasion have simply traded ordinance and are now firing bucks instead of bullets.

I am an outlier, i came to this country believing that a population willful enough to defeat the ‘merican armada using bicycles and mud could coalesce into a force capable of defeating the “capital” arrayed against the people of planet earth - true to my ·: dollar-short-hour-late-going-in-the-wrong-direction life-timing the bourgeoisie had arrived about a decade ahead of me and ensconced their greed into the impoverished but victorious population so much so that rather than raising proper proletariate vanguard - they are busy raising condos, and rents · My, “the sky is falling” refrain falls flat and the expats are miffed that one of their own cannot, or will not participate in the re-raping of one of the world’s finest warrior/scholar populations. It’s okay, i’ve never felt comfortable around expats - why would i go to a foreign nation to live in compounds of likeminded people who don’t like their own minds, but feel okay enough to overlay their convictions wherever they go · unfair, judgmental and certainly the beam in my own eye and not the mote in another’s, but still .  ..

It may be possible to stave off cancer, beat back Covid-19 even mend the deep wound in my heart that keeps my love tucked away out of the good service that it yearns for, but i am doing the best i can with what i have available. Writing has turned out to be a god-send, and demonstrates an obedience to one’s parents can have fruitful outcomes; pop pulled my lapel down to his crusty face over the catheter evacuating his bladder and made me promise two things - don’t change who i am, and never stop writing · At another time i will try to find a gentle way to share ma’s last imprecation which i experience now as the bluster of a too-young miss thrown into the maelstrom of mid-wwII ‘merica alone except for her ravishing auburn beauty, and too adult physique for a 15 year-old on desert highways flush with young GI’s looking to defeat the fascist terror which now occupies our white house; that paradox, or is it irony, will have to wait for another day and another episode of “Extinction Chronicles”

jts 03/08/2020

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020820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

It all seems such a mystery; this morning i was communicating with a boyhood chum, think 1965, describing the photo he was looking at which i conceive of as recent but was in fact taken 15 years ago. It is “shelter in place” once again where i am, and without a phone to chat with people - real time takes on a completely different complexion. I am not bemoaning the missing conversations, for they can be as much of a distraction as the youtube fare i’ve convinced myself that i am “studying” as social anthropology in the same way that i have convinced myself that these chronicles constitute “end days” literature. Who’s to say¿ I translated an article which in effect advocated treating the Covid-19 like any other number of viruses that have plagued our species. I’ve never had a flu shot, while pop got them religiously each year. I do not get sick often, and would rather weather the suffering in hopes of building a stronger immune system. 

The last time i visited a doctor for an illness, the sore throat was such that i could not swallow. I relented and allowed an antibiotic to be injected into my body. At the time i lived in a high desert mountain valley which i suspect was as inbred as it was reactionary; i’ve used antibiotics maybe a dozen times in 30 years. What was explained to me by an MD, was that each time you use an antibiotic you “lower the threshold” of diseases you are able to combat using your own immune system. I credit this good advice for much - this coming from a human being who contracted pneumonia in his 1st year of existence and would not have reached his 2nd year without penicillin. 

I do not know; i do know i am my own worst enemy - and also the only true friend i have. My experience dictates that manmade solutions are often inferior to the wisdom of the planet herself. Water for example was strongly recommended in the article i had translated and that most people die from dehydration and not properly reducing the fever that is a bell weather for this virus, just as depression, anger and fear have been demonstrated to reduce the inherent strength of our immunes system, but the race to be rescued by a vaccine trumps all practical measures. The one sector of the crashing economy that is making out like bandits are - you guessed it · the capitalists. Just like Greta Thunberg has been muted from the “news stream” so too has our own native wisdom been undermined. They say processed foods are very dangerous to good health, but even in the Southeast Asian nation where i reside renowned for its healthy cuisine - fear has supplanted native instinct and people are resorting to instant noodles - laced with MSG, the phenol TBHQ, dangerous levels of sodium lacking fiber or protein.

And i am a hypocrite swallowing two bowls of Potato Salad and continuing my own self-destructive smoking and drinking all the while claiming some moral high ground that no longer exists if it doesn’t exist in your own heart toward your own existence. Lao Tzu says to show compassion to yourself and the whole world will reconcile itself to you. I struggle to get to that place, and this act of writing is the refuge i have sought once drawing no longer met my exacting standards of beauty. Nor do i wish to expound on the defects of the world around me for i am certain of only one thing - i cannot know what another suffers, or as Leonard Cohen once sang, “I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.” If you hear me declaring any right action - know i am speaking to myself · far more than suggesting i know what is best for you.

Pema Chodron, bless her heart, says when you resist, or feel the sting of hatred, what you are more likely experiencing is fear; that if you can embrace and dwell with that fear you will find behind it the “soft spot” we all know exists. I have spent 65 years of my life armoring myself against a world i found to be hurtful and mean sprited. There is no protection, the only safety is to reach as close as possible into that vulnerable soft place in your your heart where love exists. I remember it more daily, but still find the ego rises to the occasion as often - declaring danger. We are dying as a species, and nothing is going to change the fact that there is no one to take your place or relive you of your suffering. The best one can hope for is to reach as deeply as possible into your own suffering so as to separate your pain from another and by doing so, you can then own the love it took to get that far.

jts 02/08/2020

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010820 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I was +50 before someone suggested to me that self-soothing is an option - that is not to say i simply whimpered to anyone who would listen the many physical calamities of my adult light, whining wasn’t well received where i grew up · it’s a hand-me-down generational kind of strategy. I know this because on long drives through the deserts of Nevada where ma grew up and later in the confines of her sheltered compound for old rich widows she would recount how her own father felt about complaint; according to her it went something like this, “if you want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about.” This is consistent with a woman who would invite you out for a weekend holiday in the “Joshua Tree  desert home”, where I would find a pile of gravel that had been delivered and needed to be spread across the access road to the house from the access road from the highway to the access road to the house that was to be given to my sister.

Understand this - lord love a duck as my witness · she is a grand dame and as devious as any three of you reading this put together, which i happen to know are not my siblings · they’d been warned off long ago and lack the intestinal fortitude to defy her; i was not so lucky. It became pretty clear as the marriage collapsed that someone had to take up the guilt, and what better than a 15 year-old two-eyed cyclops with poor social skills in a family of very pretty people¿ that is a question, sort of? Judging only from the text in the previous paragraph and one half, you can probably imagine how it felt to ma, at the time when all she wanted to do was say how much pain she was in, and to have a pissy, beaten-to-fuck man-child reply with the sort of heresy you are now reading; and still i love her, she is my only mother and i have no alternative but to find peace with that.

Sort of like living my most vulnerable later years on a planet being decimated by a handful of sociopaths so removed from the suffering they have precipitated as to render Hieronymus Bosch the graphic equivalent of Nostradamus - not that history needed anyone to accomplish that feat of synchronicity. So all that is left to me at this turn is some happy humor about the ineffable pleasure of hearing people laugh with abandon, and watching families squire the youngest safely from curb to curb. It didn’t have to turn out this way, and there is still enough resilience in what C.G. Jung described as the Archetype of the human species to accomplish a revival of our birthright - happiness and love, rather than endless war and greed.

I am too old to manifest something that grand, but because i have been yearning for it in my very being for my entire life there is nothing to say the momentum in some metaphysical way will not bring my hopes a little closer to fruition. Jung suggested our species resembled the rhizome that multiplies under the surface of the ground sending up shoots of new growth but continues to replicate below. I am sure he was referring to the cultural reality of human development rather than the anatomical survival of our threatened species, in which case i take heart that those aspects of my upbringing which allows me to absorb myself with the questionably constructive act of manically producing essays that are not read by a population that does not want to face its own doom may be propagated.

Within that thinking is the very real requirement that i find some peace in order to continue my quixotic pursuit of meaning even as my own mind through heredity and the self-inflected injury of a harder than necessary life narrows the capillaries that feed my mind, my fingers and my limbs i continue to grow in ways that i never expected or could have prepared for. Happiness is indeed a birthright to our species, but it cannot be found in conformity, acceptance or pursuit for the conditions necessary for such contentment reside in the embrace of that which you find yourself to be - miserable, alone, ecstatic or delusional. This condition is distinguished from acceptance which carries the onus of judgement · embrace is more the act of loving what you find, how you find it. My life has been comprised almost entirely of acceptance for i could not pluck my eyes out and ask for a new pair and the family i landed in had not the capacity to accept what even i do not understand about my existence - only that it is weird as fuck and then i die · oh boy .

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310720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

i have heroes; do you ¿?

I remember the first time i saw the expression “Tabula Rasa” - latin for blank page · I was 23 just before meeting my 2nd wife. The expression was in a letter from a consort that never quite jelled, or i queered the deal by leaping in the sack with my 2nd wife, thus betraying the possibly much truer heart of my consort a 1,000 miles distant - i say this not to defame a woman you don’t know but because 7 years later she “rolled me over” for my immediate superior · he was not fucking around when he sang “instant karma’s gonna get you.” Yet let us be clear in the light of valence, shit cuts both ways; each and every act of dharma you execute without attachment will move the balance for the whole universe. That is an incontrovertible reality you know the truth of with any honest examination of your existence.

Where we trip ourselves up is with “payback;” each of would like to believe our lives so unsullied that we will be standing there when the bully from your 6th grade torment is faced with _____fill in the blank. The reverse is as equally true the only happiness you will find is in abandoning each selfless act on behalf of another, the more anonymous the better. Which brings us full circle to the homely arena of “heart” where everyone battles their demons in private and exalt the angels modestly and in private lest they see the baseness of our hearts. And i have no idea where to go from here. If i could, i’d stand at your shoulder and pat away the tears, or caution the conceit - it is hard enough for me to be there for myself much less the gazillions of spirits i have passed in my travels.

Had i my way, i’d introduce you to them all - they were that fun to know · on both side of pleasant. Some were so taxing it was like lifting weights just to spend time in their presence; others so exhilarating it was like swimming in “Whiskey River.” So i am leery enough from my own mixed experience with Whiskey River to subject anyone else to something so powerful that must be by their own selection for it to have any meaning. My youngest brother would freak whenever i handed the phone to whomever i was talking to at the time we were speaking; they were often interesting characters i wished each to share with the other; i may be too far ahead of the technology or too far behind · i just don’t know anymore, but care less daily. Our father was a fierce advocate of “adapt, improvise and overcome” though he was Air Force down to the wings he used to flee this mortal coil. 

He was also one of the funnest people i have known; he could find amusement with a popsicle stick on the shoreline, or the worst misery from which you would want relief. Ma in her own fashion is as unique, but far more stodgy and wounded which rendered her proud and conceited. She is not an unfeeling person, but i feel that her wounds were such that the scabs prevents her from touching that which cover the softest parts of her - which must be many. I mostly wrote the last sentence in past tense though she lives still. The projection is entirely my own - i miss my family · but feel in my heart of hearts that my presence precipitates the same pain which prevents my youngest brother from playing with the phone and entertaining people i would spontaneously introduce him to when i owned a phone. Now i try not do delude myself that what i feel is important to anyone but myself; my only reservation about such a selfish strategy is the joy i feel listening to happy music like Bob Dylan’s “Narrow Way” without jumping out of my seat and shouting to anyone listening - “doesn’t that,” as Bob Holdsworth might exclaim “bar you up?”

So much so, had i not counted paragraphs the next day, i’d have cheated you my illusionary reading public of the 5th paragraph - and it wouldn’t have been the first time · there was much hay in the air for the city had just gone into “lock down” which in this SE Asian nation is very serious business. My own country is blowing up in slow motion with a sitting president suggesting the election should be postponed - this after sending up test balloons about whether he would step down from elected office if he didn’t like the results. I was recounting my steps most of yesterday trying to remember as accurately as possible what public interactions i’d had and where so that if i come down with the demon virus, at least my last memories will have been in the hopes of serving those around me to avoid the same fate. Riding the bicycle was not possible but my “poison” is working very well and not interfering too much with my daily life unless you count missing the 5th paragraph of a 5 paragraph essay as a defect - in which case · ya’ got me. 

jts 31/07/2020

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