171020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I am in the midst of a deluge listening to the once cherished sound of rain that now threatens friends of mine with an interminable syncopation representing flood and destruction. It is difficult to explain to those i love that they must adjust or die to this incessant reality, for no other reason than every item i can learn from says, it, the velocity of rain will only increase; and any peaceful future is in accommodating and working with that unpalatable reality - these my friends who had been seduced by the corporate siren song of unrelenting profit from inexhaustible resources based on some fiction of an “infinite growth” paradigm conceived by parasites counting on a herd mentality of greed at the expense of all they, my friends, hold noble and true from stories passed down from generation to generation - interrupted now by the conceit of a digital whore pulling down billions to yoke wrists to compelling algorithmically induced keystrokes.

Fuck you, ya’ pissant cowards unwilling to include into the digital lexicon the entirely legitimate expression - pissant · I spit on your aspirations of social engineering and defy your myopic conceit of herding humanity to some killing floor of existential control. You may still hold the reigns of who reads what i write, and even tempt intellectual cowards to report to you my seditious remarks and writings on an ongoing basis · and i expectorate more, i’d do it in your faces if you possessed gonads capable (gonad, being an entirely gender neutral word) of confronting my continued contempt for your cowardice, yet as Sun Yet-Sen would advocate - leaving you a path of retreat. · lay down your arms and go in peace.

Join the inevitable link of DNA that is not yoked to your delusion of control over a population you do not understand and therefore cannot manipulate. People are not “money” and the more you can fool is not equal to the amount of money you can spend. You are said to be “educated” but from where i sit you are simply conned, no differently than the fool who returns to the shell game looking for someplace that doesn’t exist - good faith from the con · And it is not your fault, you would not practice such an empty occupation if you hadn’t been fooled so thoroughly as to believe the person, or belief that conned you originally was not somehow: wiser, stronger or more worthwhile than your own applied weakness. Look to your interior - if you find someone that you believe has your interest more at heart than your own · they are bullshitting you into believing them not only more powerful than you, but that you somehow require them for your success: how fucking stupid it that ¿?

Don’t think for a minute i am laughing with you, i am not; i am laughing at you, just as they do the minute they take possession of your own better opinion of your own self-worth. If you wanted to claim yourself amongst my trusted advisors and declared out of the gate: “listen to me because your own thinking is flawed, i would have to eliminate you from the sacred inner sanctum out of hand. I do not wish to be surrounded by persons who feel me so stupid that i could not fathom “reality” without their help. I grew up with that “con” and find myself digging daily to be free of the belief that each person i meet is wiser, more interested in my welfare and more capable of taking care of me, than myself - fuck you and the horse you rode in on ·

The reciprocal is as equally true; if i engage another as i have a woman i still do not fully appreciate nor understand well enough to declare my love for: were i to listen more to my fear-based opinion that i know best, i would be unable to appreciate the grace she has shown me by listening however difficultly to what i say. Now at least i can, like some small plant with tender roots, learn to listen to her as she has, through simple logic and discipline demonstrated superior reason. This education is scary, because to accomplish this she has insulted me, thrown me off balance and neglected the scarred wounded child i shield daily from further abuse. But as long as i believe that her interest is in growth and better understanding of correct living, i will carefully pay attention to her, odd and often difficult to follow indications of learning while paying attention to personal truths that i have allowed to be blunted by pain in my heart that she seems to perceive but not give much weight to - somehow seeing something more worthwhile in the skein of my peculiar soul than pity · thank you dame, whoever the fuck you are and wherever ye be. Please reveal yourself while i can still see ·

jts 17/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

141020/ 151020/ 161020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The river Thu Bon is receding with a palpable sigh by the local community - an ancient consortium most nobly represented by my best known constituent and neighbor farmer Anh Ay Tran and his family · As a foreigner adventurer, my position is and will always remain dubious; that i am allowed to evacuate shit stained puddles into the irrigation ditches to the sea is more testimony to the millennium’s of human history's mismanagement of simple equations about survival, and negation of the fundamental wisdom of those closest to the solution - “rui tay” · is the expression i could discern as my pride soaked - shit stained, egotistically satisfied hands passes off the squeegee, to my “friend” thinking i’d somehow closed a karmic loose end only to realize the flood waters “my” culture’s depravity are not lost on anyone, least of all those most affected by effluence, affluence and exaggerated flood waters exceeding the normal behavior of nature. 

The snot now running down my face commingling with the tears of my role, not as sacrificial lamb of deeds not of my design or intention but as willing vanguard to a new day for all whose ideas transcend the ignorance of profit in favor of service to all who breathe - sentient life or not. I am not the best representative, for i am wounded as an elder from a time when faith in leadership was nearly sacrosanct; it is my own scholar father’s willingness to trade insults about the worthiness of personal beliefs that gave me confidence to continue in my youthful doubting about a culture rife with flaws, but lacking any constructive vocabulary for critical analysis - including the precious, and as i experience it specious reasoning of my own brethren. 

I am tired now and am in no great haste to fulfill some arbitrary compilation of any number of paragraphs describing my journey just now, and will join you in the morrow, for i am free and intend to remain free to my dying day - may you ever now such illimitable rejoice. ..  ··· 

··· ..  . and shit just gets weirder and weirder. The Tao said to me once years ago that if you are kind and gentle, people will make the assumption that you are weak and unwilling to resist aggression. Ugly angry people whose “goto” behavior is violence are tedious and lack self-awareness. I am not, nor purport myself to be anything but a struggling lover looking to leave the world a little better than i found it. My response to people’s behavior often mystifies me. A neighbor who i find to be problematic was walking past the front of my house, as i was making a payment for a delivery; the neighbor made snide and disparaging remarks, after he returned to his yard and we were speaking privately, i asked him why he tried to insult and shame me.

It did not go well, his next remark was “we no longer talk - you give me no more things.” I pressed for a few more sentences for my water faucets had just moments earlier mysteriously ceased, and i asked him did he have water? Turning his spigot to demonstrate he did, he said to no one in particular, for i had ceased to exist as a human being, “i have water, if you have problem you speak to your landlady.” Whoever said when it rains it pours was not kidding, for the same landlady had just left after inspecting the roof that leaked like a sieve during the last 155mm rainfall a day earlier and which i had spent 3 hours the day after sweeping water from the inside of my house trying to protect her flooring. While she was inspecting the roof, felt compelled to question my housekeeping habits, remarks i was no mood to entertain given the ground fault that leaves bulbs glowing with the light switches “off.” 

I don’t take abuse well and do everything in my power to control myself, rather than struggle with weak-minded individuals who labor under the delusion that they can control anything but themselves .  .  . (two days later - 141020) · as one which i once experienced as melodious pitter-patter recedes another thrumming takes it’s place, and rather than days or weeks, the “talking screen” is posing forecasts of months. I’ve written in many environments, including the kitchen table of my then octogenarian independent, but adorably conflicted mere - now nonagenarian and sequestered from any contact: by choices of hers, those of siblings frightened that my particular craziness is contagious and virus circumstances no one could have anticipated mean i must utilize the telepathic link she seemed most comfortable with. So ma, know this, i am still alone, and continue to confuse people i try to communicate with from the heart - i do not share your oft expressed beliefs that if i would only ______ fill in the blank, my life would correspond more closely to my well-adjusted and imminently successful brethren, but also the same people who partition news from each of us to the other - so you have to hear it here through the thunder of ceaseless rain of empathic wonder where i live but which oddly correlates to the days of your passing, suffering from a malady those around you hide so as to protect you from what cannot be eluded - one’s destiny · i love you and it has been a privilege to do so. PEACE 

jts 14/10/2020, 15/10/2020, 16/10/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

131020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

There are more “tropical depressions” coming, and now they are more than an environmental euphemism to denote a weather pattern on a media map - they are my brave hearted neighbors sweeping flood waters into the irrigation channels; they are fighting your way back to sleep at 2:30 am because without rest you will not have strength to evacuate when the water breeches your doorstep, or if it does be able to rise and muster to your Delicatessen and its employees who count on you for their support and the support of their families. It is the months of sweat nurturing an organic garden to yield fresh vegetables to an entire community faced with the Agro-Industrial model foisted on a nation by the corporate hubris of billionaire chemists with too much time on their hands and histories of Joseph Mengale pressed in between the pages of their grandparents hymnals that were all you got after your uncles absconded with the family’s inheritance.

The sad truth is i came to this Southeast Asian nation with a naive fantasy that the same culture capable of turning back the military onslaught of my birth nation’s much lauded military superiority, would have answers to the perils of our planet’s survival. And it is true - only the truth is that my lion-hearted farmer friend and his wife are now sweeping the flood waters from in front of their house - flood waters that the petro-nazis from my homeland have precipitated and continue to merchandize in the guise of “more & greater _____ fill in the blank”; investment real estate; manufacturing based on single use plastic and gew-gaws of every conceivable shape and function, or a fashion industry predicated on a style shoved down the throats of frightened youth still sweating from bringing in the harvest or too exhausted from their 2nd shift at the pavement bistros fronting as an “economy”.

So here i sit, an old beaten refugee from the “beatnik” halcyon days of ‘On the Road’, a story from a desperate soul forged in the fires of his burnt-out liver for the amusement of a leisure class no more committed to the future of mankind than they would be to the wellbeing of their gardener’s grandchild’s future, meaning not-at-all. And all i possess as an amulet of protection is some conceit about the sanctity of creativity and a rapidly receding memory of something promulgated as Camelot, but more accurately described by a generation’s poet laureate as a “Murder Most Foul.” I live amidst the best and the brightest this same poet described in an earlier creative tragedy written to the tune of “row, row, row your boat - gently down the stream”, nearly run over by the scrolling wizardry anxious and more than capable of obscuring the cautionary irony of “Tempest” album #35 from the same poet laureate content to be:

’n Scarlet Town, you fight your father’s foes

Up on the hill, a chilly wind blows

You fight ‘em on high and you fight ‘em down in

You fight ‘em with whiskey, morphine and gin.

Clint Eastwood, a renown Republican and once Mayor of the liberal bastion of Carmel cut his teeth in “Rawhide” a cowboy TV serial i am humoring the last of my grey cells as a nod to my conceit of constructive behavior as a “cultural anthropologist,” but more accurately described as one more flawed creature, dishonest to its potential and shirking honorable duties better understood by my noble neighbors the farmer couple, not only sweeping the flood waters my loving friends let me join in and sweep some of the very likely fecal-soaked puddles into the fields and sharing their bounty with me, not for my labor but because ______fill in the blank. What a privilege at this stage of my demise to find such kindness that it is almost beyond my limited scope of learning, but like Leonard said - “I will make it all up to you.” 

jts 13/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

091020/101020/111020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Opening this edition without lenses and fortified by no more than hope - i ask again, “does anyone need anything i can provide?” . .  . anxiety about the day’s events force this post into a “2fur”. The river “Thu Bon” is still rising and there is a tropical depression forming off the Southeast cost - i don’t know what that means, but i can say the relentless drumbeat of rain on the ceiling is no longer a comfort, nor nostalgic, rather a portent of the days to come for all of our species. As a young mind, when i realized that close study of anyone discipline was not appetizing to my hungry mind, i began an effort to gain understanding of the underlying principles of many studies from those conventional wisdom deemed “expert.” This strategy has been useful in discerning the thinking of many wise men. For example, with regards the “climate change” or “rape of mama Gaia,” however you can her the common event, i learned that the most predictable bell weather for future climate events was former behavior - if it was dry, it will be more dry; if it was cold, it will be more cold, etc., etc., etc.

This is proving true in much of my travel over the past 5 years across as many continents; now here on the Central Coast of Vietnam (Viet Nam). We’re facing innundation, that while has historical foundation - is only going to grow worse as a coastal city · It breaks my heart, but not like it will affect the families who have tilled this land through the ages of war, trade and invasion. What can be done is the same question as “when is the best time to plant a tree - twenty years ago; when is the 2nd best time to plant a tree - today.” Barely a paragraph into two days and i am exhausted. Have done what i could to buoy people, likely more exhausted with more at stake; my fear seems only to be of the unknown - something i’ve been frightened of since birth.

Not sure if i want to remain with the people i am surrounded by. It goes in and out of focus with one moment great affection and the next - “who the fuck are you¿ and why are you talking to me · do i owe you money?” Kidding sort of, i received an email ballot from 1,000’s of miles away and my confidence of being counted is a nearly far. There is something mysterious in the unrelenting rain around my home and within the community i feel great ______fill in the blank. The problem being that this disquiet seems to haunt my steps like the hateful elder siblings of my youth. Do you think there might be a connection?

 

We are all now faced with the consequence of our decisions - mine is in a drunken stupor or a rained soaked estuary - yours i cannot know of, nor particularly care about if you don’t. The heat has relented to where i might sleep, un-assaulted but not beguiled by continued confusion about meaning that is clear enough. Our species, you and i, are subjects in a grand experiment about how much destruction can one DNA strand endure before it breaks and runs for higher ground? not much further from where i stand. My family cohort has been entirely dismantled by by an ideology of Dielectrics and Materialism that has been no more useful to humanity than hinduism, buddhism, or omnism - yet retains a stranglehold on our collective unconscious about which way to evolve · fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

I know a pink skinned pony of a woman in the flat lands of B-Town California who can even from this great distance evoke spasms of (thought interrupted by storm #6, (now 3 days later 121020 _______fill) in the blank; but even as late as 1st, or 2nd thing this morning am remembering features i meant to post to our last fb exchange, yet just now when i traveled back to finish my thought the conventional rigidness of the land where she lives and i fled from was brought into high relief when i found my unfinished comment deleted from that thread. The bitter ironic truth that i must face is that the same narrow-minded censorous behavior i fled from in the oil fields of Kern County, CA “McCarthy Land” are as entrenched and enabled in the entrepreneurial expat community where i have fled to in a Socialist Republic in Southeast Asia. I am an existential buffoon - here on earth to provide mirth to Madame Paradox and her offsprings “’Tis and ’Tisn’t,” during the wheezing last gasps of our much hoped from, but greatly disappointing “exceptional species.” 

jts 09/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

081020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

The waters of the River Bon are surging and the rain is now in it’s 4th day, with 2 days said to follow, but for now is unrelenting. I am too ignorant of much to contribute outside of demonstrating a ready willingness to be present. I have my own fish to fry - received my ballot and if i can follow the footsteps of others of my gringo cohort who have cast faxed ballots, may still make my voice heard in a timely fashion, though i’m more an adherent of Leonard Cohen’s “the fight is fixed,” i’m game for representing an alternative to the corporate mayhem that is being served up as “soup du jour” by the withered dead branch of the billionaire class. However, from simple empirical and current data about the fair distribution of important facts, i have grave doubts about our hierarchal orientation about power. My experience has been that within any group, regardless of size or culture - there are personalities whose training leaves them believing themselves superior to all others · i know this from my own “taste” of the poison fruit.

My pathology is from the other end of the ruling class spectrum with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) at the head of the table. When my own parents decided, or had decided by them from the divorce frenzy of the late 1960s, to dissolve their 2o year matrimonial bonds - it was decided that the two elder siblings in a family of four evenly distributed within 2 year-increments would learn of this mutually important event a full 2 months prior to that of myself and my younger brother - ostensibly to protect we the more vulnerable members of the clan from the inevitable damage that everyone eventually enjoyed, but led to a conceit that the two elder siblings somehow possessed greater maturity to face · would that that presumption have become a reality, but no.

Rather, it has led to a circumstance wherein the same siblings are somehow protecting me, a 66 year-old adult male with many more miles under my belt than they two put together, must now “divine” how our mother fairs in a “nazi blackout of 'mutual importance' while simultaneously gagging down my own bile of fury from a passive aggressive cruelty coming from individuals who, in my limited understanding of who they are as humans because of the “shunned identified patient” conceit they would rather attribute to a hatred they have and have possessed for decades using that same justification of “superior insight” and a reluctance to hear any idea but what confirms the “ultra-progressive” righteousness of their socialization that was foisted on them by a confused however loving parent - the now dying "identified patient". What is more difficult to express in this passage is how much i have been infected by this shared pathology, but which i resist only for its toxic effects on whatever growth i can manage in the time left to me for love.

The individuals i’ve described in this chronicle are decent and caring human beings and any confusion about their worthiness in today’s world is a defect in my ability to convey such finely parsed realities between my own evolving need to remain open and honest about what i feel and an historical family dynamic i have found was bent on keeping my voice quashed, not just silent - but invalid. Never again, for anyone, loved or hated will i mute my objection to injustice or cease in any exploration of finding fairness in an unfair world. I will love to my dying day, not just because i am growing closer to my death with each wheezing breath, but because my effort to discover my own very real contributions to my misery, may be useful to unborn children to preserve a peaceful loving DNA strand viciously coopted by unrestrained greed and unexamined existences that could have been otherwise attenuated with small measures of kindness and large measures of good humor - good luck to us all · it may be all there is left to us between here and the charnel floor of our unique and ever loving species.

so much for the discipline of relentless 5 paragraph essays - read later editions, you might have better luck ·

jts 08/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

071020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

For many reasons i have been forced to face my personal proclivities for substance abuse - from an early age onward. The bad news is i have them; the good news is moderation is as legitimate an ambition as greed, and possibly a damn sight more beneficial over the haul. For example, while vegetarianism is more efficient per hectare ·: per gram of protein - even the Dalai Lama - OM · cops to a bite of flesh for medicinal purposes. I used the word Omnism in a welcomed and searching conversation today with a man, his daughter and his 2nd wife, not her mother to try and explain my openness to any idea or belief that bears fruit. In the cloistered hot-house environment where this unique triumvirate has gained traction - i welcomed the opened exchange as a portent of hope in what i’ve thus far found to be a rigid, doctrinaire environment of unnecessarily protected positions - any projections found herein are certainly my own ·

I want to die in love, surrounded by a contingent of supported and happy campers confident about their future, not because of anything i have brought to the equation, but because of a mutually relentless quest into the inner turmoil of finding peace within oneself in a world of digital goons that has literally stolen calm from the soul of our species. Don’t believe me look at your own commentary and declare openly and forthrightly how much is “reaction” and how much is keystroke “action” based on the most quiet and profound realizations and that you are prompted by nothing more than personal reflection and profound gratitude for each breath you take - go ahead · this is not a test and i could give a fuck how you respond.

I want to love a gentle companion and support her most erotic, poetic and philosophical ambitions that she has courage enough to share with me. Just now the rain is surging almost like the voices around me declaring you are “old, your time has past and there is nothing left to you to savor.” This rain will pass because that is the nature of our spherical atmosphere, however sorely taxed by gluttonous entrepreneurs declaring that the solution to their poverty lies in the acquisition of your family’s future - an ignorant and short sided assertion. The only way forward for our species is through what Leonard Cohen and Frank Scott described in the “Villanelle for our Time” - 'a bitter searching of the heart.' The conversation i alluded to earlier with father and daughter included references to Ayn Rand and her premise of “survival of the fittest.”

Fit for what ¿? occupation of a desiccated, ionized planet unable to support life having extinguished ____fill in the blank of native species to enable a coterie of effete trophy hunters confusing virile with virulence and murdering cogent creatures using arms no different than the Neo Liberal weapon of choice - drones · Soldiers too frightened of their own culpability anymore to look into the eyes of their supposed enemies whose only offense was to be born to a faith different than that of those who attack? These are not warriors but slave murderers on the leash of a master they dare not face - their own mortal souls. Buy back your freedom - reason your way from genocide at the behest of a corporate overlord lacking gonads to even represent their contempt for your blood.

Me - i’m gonna wander off the radar and continue to search for a gentle companion who may teach me how to curb the rage in my faint heart. I refuse to hate, but find the temptation around every corner and within each scroll. I will know i am making headway when i find in my path gaggles of handsome young maidens asking me for my time in their bedrolls to teach them the arcane, but not entirely lost art of love - they will then demand from me that i show to history my graphic appreciation of their lithe loving persons with the rapidly fading vision i have, but with which each measure of deficiency gains a small measure of existential finesse i could not have found under any other condition. 

jts 07/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞ 

061020 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Amidst my extensive and vivid but rapidly aging memories - is an abandoned afternoon in the rain with my friend Rick Grierson · We had our selection of more than ample galoshes and WWII-informed rain gear to protect us on our walk from my house to his. I was maybe 15 and he having failed a year - a year older; we lit out like modern day Huck Finns in our adventure and spent the next 5-6 hours getting drenched to the bone in ceaseless spring or fall rain. I remember it to this day for the pure pleasure of disregarding every caution beaten into me about the danger of being exposed to the “elements.” Who knew that weather could be so fun, or that one did not melt like a “sugar cube” my sage Uruguayan poet friend would remark on our journey back to her loving renegade paramour Herr Mauch’s palace of Asado Delight - arm’s full of boxes of Tinto Rojo - if you read no further · please take a moment to concur love of that thought. 

We are all of each of us suffering distress that is too often not of our own making but always our responsibility, yet - there is no one else to fill the breech · “t’was ever thus” - Larry Golden; carpenter & artist, formerly of the Brewery artist ghetto. So why not create a late-stage-capitalist morality play of the whole charade¿? that is a question. The calvary rescue was bogus while actually committing genocide on a population that honored nothing more than that of the perpetuation of verdant and abundant land - i don’t want to be rescued by the calvarly · i don’t want you to rescue me, unless you come with love in your heart to listen to the last efforts toward compassion from me that i have in my heart for you and yours.

I do not surrender to anything but a loving conclusion to all that i have witnessed - the destruction and gratuitous grab by a handful of MT souls of more than they could ever make good use of for no other reason than to delineate the perimeters of their emptiness. Why they lacked the courage to come and ask me, i may die never knowing. You have nothing if you cannot give all - each gesture toward the wellbeing of another is a judgement call · the same for me as it is for you, only i have little to give and want to give all, even to the ruling class. How is that for a conundrum - after stealing everything from everyone; now my soul is debating giving to you what i have and you do not?

I am now inundated by rain and listening to songs by a foreign icon - a friend i’ve never met but, but whom i remain more loyal to than many i’ve met demanding much less. I feel close to death which is a reality so many i’ve met would evade without ever confronting the lack of actually living through something as miraculous as this unexplained presence in a world full with paradox - why do you listen to what i, a hated invader who may love you more than i might those from whence i came · what message do i bring that is indecipherable by the lords of meaning?

More importantly, how can my failures as a human contribute to a successful outcome for you and yours when nothing that my culture has ever rendered you is misery and pain¿ it is a fair question worthy of response by the wisest amongst you that may still count me as enemy. I am sorry for all that my culture has presumed on your history - it was never of my making once i learned how shallow is the ambition of greedy small people invading your world for nothing more than profit. But it is now in your lap to intervene and interrupt stupidity toward, not just your noble culture, but all those that would destroy our planet to gain a few more “dollops” of gold to accompany them to their doom.

jts 06/10/2020 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

∞