adaptation - the essay / resistance · a sonnet

“Real Artists Don’t Starve - They Thrive · “ was enough of a trigger to provoke me to my last version of this essay begun at the end of last year and has been stalled for the past 3 months having deteriorated into a miasma of self-indulgent dreck. I capitulated this morning when i sat upright out of an existential stupor hoping the change in surroundings i landed in due to a precipitous decision to evade “The inevitable;” my neighbors where i live are ‘noise thugs’, meaning that to make their pound of flesh, they think nothing of coopting the tranquility of the entire colonia to whatever variation of ‘music’ deemed popular for whatever crowd by whoever is making those choices, nor to they give a fig whether their volume of entertainment might disrupt anyone else’s activity for a radius of 300 meters; the insult is their contempt for the sleep of those who depend on their weekends for rest - these ‘masters of music’ feel their creativity is so sacred that 1, 2, or 3 in the morning is too soon to interrupt their cultural ‘elan’.

So i took a room in a lodge away from the gossips who have ascribed ‘hatred’ of the culture as motivation for my seemingly bizarre choices - or so it seems to me. The irony is that the hope to ‘evade’ rather than adapt has only created a cascading gaggle of ‘ducklings’ waddling after my every effort to control my environment. The room i was placed in was catty-corner to the ‘off-cycle’ kitchen at precisely the moment when the chef-master wished to do his most creative work on the same Sunday morning i was hoping to disentangle myself from real vs fantasy impediments of my creative process. “En Vino Veritas” once again saved the day and kept me from acquiescing to rudeness and so found my self further complicating the scene by sharing my ‘unframed-inarticulate’ objections with the Dame/Manager on her Sunday morning, knowing i’d be calling down the dogs of sanctimonious indignation for my arrogance.

I’m really not sure what to do next; it is impractical to change countries every time a cultural rift sticks in my craw, the equivalent echo would be to change families when yours will not alter their preferred brand of toxin when you object. The problem for me is that my yen for kindness is retreating more quickly than my ability to adapt to solitude and rationalize my circumstance as a form of existential dignity without any attending support. Media and its orchestrated distraction is a poor substitute for flesh and blood; while fear and isolation are poor compensation for the courage it takes to defy coalescing into the ‘pod’. The irony is that it “T’was been ever thus.” - Larry Golden · I did not sleep well after the kerfuffle but could’ve; it was the anxious child in my looking forward to the pleasure i know can be found in massage + temezcal (steam bath). Sadly i no longer access easily the metaphysical wonder found in not understanding some things. In my earlier pilgrimages to where i now live; may die, i’d channel Don Juan, and find magic under every rock.

Now i’m just tired, possibly besotted, having found sober allure in the wisdom of Mescalito - ‘the more things change the more they remain the same.’ - old french proverb. Mescal is the most benign intoxicant i’ve found, while the catechism is oddly the same; moderation, all things moderation. Days ago, I thought for a moment i’d fallen for a woman; mostly because i’m a ‘hopeless romantic’ but i know in the darker chambers of my being i want to vindicate myself and be worthy of what lovers know, rather than the hard-bitten realist i have become. The paradox is for those 60 seconds that i flirted with this woman, i lost 10 lbs of angst and added 15 years to what is increasingly looking to be a telescoping future. My bravado has met its match in degenerative osteoarthritis of the hip, even if i can analyze whys and wherefores and maintain an optimum physical condition - the world i face doesn’t admit my type of genius, and as much as it galls me to say, George’s boot on the throat is as courageous a commentary as i’ve found.

And it would be a lot of fun to devise an existential ‘Hail Mary’ that might provide some leverage for liberty to those who’ve peeled the digital claw from their skullcap and stand outside the tangle of what had at one time been a human vista which yielded the Shakespeares, the Dylans, Rembrandts, and Einsteins of our world. I don’t know what it takes to gain traction over the blare of computer models and their handmaiden, artificial intelligence. I am proud to think i can continue to stand here with my ‘little wild bouquet’ of aphorisms cobbled together in the manner of a modern day Montaigne, and would love to leave you reading with a lighter heart than the one you brought to the screen; the best i can tell you is it will be more valuable to you when you find it within your own tool box, because the same as you are peering over my shoulder is a search for the right size screw to cinch this ‘bad boy’ in place, there is no doubt someone in your world peering over your should assessing and evaluating what you read, why and noting what you build - good luck to us all.

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resistance · a sonnet  

Adaptation isn’t resistance, it’s life;

and what resists, persists - a paradox

for both states - life and death · describe much strife:

life through fullness, death’s void walled off by locks.

To what end persist, if both states lack peace?

What state teaches peace; can it be acquired

If it can’t be learned, what about hired - a lease?

My flesh is borrowed, why can’t calm be hired?

“A bunch of words” - how’d they learn to fight back?

Do words resist writing, to serve a poem birth

adding strength to its life ducking’n ai hack

Does it matter to this world’s shrinking girth?

so goes the saga - ‘Willy or Won’t he -

performed on the stage of ‘Don’t get a Fee’ ·

(˚ ㄥ _˚)                  

jts 7/9/2024

http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com 

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

prohibited from AI sampling in any form

reprinted with permission; all rights reserved

∞

raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonnet ·

10 days from today is my birthday; none of your damn business how many - think ‘old as dirt’, 4 days from now is my sister’s, she is older than dirt. We are estranged; in my waking fog today, she was traveling to China, an image which provided emotional leverage to explore unresolved issues that only the unconscious mind can navigate; it was very helpful. It is now late on a wet Oaxacan afternoon; a good day overall, though i fell riding my bicycle back from the outdoor gym. Given events of the past year, much less the past week, i applaud my pluck. Pancreatitis is the new Sherrif in town, which should make for an interesting denouement from my honest efforts to pluck as much creative gristle from the Bohemian bones that have comprised nourishment during much of my flicker of existence. Without being ‘wasichu’ about it, know, i’m in no hurry to check out, but more accurately; before i do, i'd like to honor the miracle of breath that has taken me so long to percolate up to the surface of my persona. 

One Christmas, while my father was gaining his supine footing at the onset of his end days and the elder siblings had circled the wagons in an effort to quarantine his peace from the ‘wild indian’ my spirit apparently manifests within the family mythology, i wrote my first sonnet as an homage to his journey. In that sonnet, i blithely foreswore my raison d'être as emanating from stone - if there’s afterlife, Pop is getting a good yuck’ off of my dawning awareness of such hubris. Well pop as long as we’re laughing: of the handful of times you laid a marshal hand on me for developmental emphasis was the the time i was ratted out by “the poor weak 'sister' creature” for nominating her to her face as a ‘she dog’- she was then/whether she still is i can’t say, she now eschews ‘simple existential dialogue’ - Pop’s enlightened reaction at that time was to corner me in the elder brother’s ‘premium’ primogeniture accommodation and ‘bitch’ slap my head from side to side, something i can only imagine the two siblings regaled, and continue to regale for my existential comeuppance, according to their ‘lights'. However, i am no longer fresh, not even confident, but am curious what morsels of understanding can be teased from this aged writing implement that had once represented liberation and redemption, which are now no more than a warm presence, like that of the murmuring from an old friend waiting to hear the end of your last sentence. There is also the bulwark against the contemporary terror foisted on the population by a cynical ruling class well aware of how deeply they have failed in their responsibilities to honor the privilege that chance and circumstance have provided their human experience. My creative elan is no longer manic - weighted by the gravity of destiny. Rather i would extrude each tidbit of beauty found through the prism of curiosity. 

Bob Dylan opined a parent’s wisdom still oozed out of his ears, my parents were never short on opinion; of my earliest memories is a photo of a ‘perplexed’ me looking up into the camera whilst my bright red cape was being affixed to my neck, not unlike that of a noose. The consummate craftsmanship of my devil costume was dwarfed by the weight of its horned symbolism. All of 3 years old, if that, and yet little more than a projection screen for the too active imagination of my exceedingly smart Dame and her gaggle of ready-made stories waddling behind her Hannibal-esque march to her destiny. All of this to say; there never was room or awareness adequate for a crosseyed sensate in the superheated cauldron of narcissist apprenticeship that was my childhood. I developed what innate mimicry i possessed, modeled the ‘cocktail hour vignettes’ that constituted the cognoscenti in the dead space south of San Francisco. I glommed onto the detritus of art supplies and open books that reflected the interests of my fascinating parents, substituting the proficiency i gained from factotuming in my parent’s faux bohemian billet in exchange for the dearth of affection and simple human acknowledgement that i grew up starved for in that house full of ‘vain’ appetites.  

So true-to-form on my elder sister’s birthday, i participated as uninvited interloper, sending a sonnet and sundry photos reflecting my obtuse, however sincere effort to be what i’ll never be - welcomed. Her birthday occurs on 9-11. For a time my strategy was to send whatever humor i could picture might serve as counterweight to someone i am welcome to ignore, and whose grief i’m not welcome to commiserate. Fb in it’s mechanical stupidity only serves to exacerbate my isolation and relational confusion. Zukè prompted me with an exposure of a statue that is magnificent in its own right and weighty in its failure to rise like cream into the cultural stratosphere, In the spirit of frolic i conjured for my birtday, i posted the foto only to discover an innocent remark from a stranger asking if the form the subject carries ‘is a cat?’ I held my tongue, but more importantly did not react, except here; out of context, in an essay attempting to parse the complexity of ‘raison d'être’ for my existence which i more and more suspect has less raison than d'être that one might find in the accretions of the same stones i have spent my life shaping into congruous shapes which at best are ambiguous, at worst opportunities for commentary by other isolated aesthetes. Yet in the scheme of things, though the nice lady from the South meant nothing more than to pose an interested question that through no fault of her own caused me grievous existential perturbation, my life is so configured that i sit content in the afternoon sun chewing on morsels of events that do little more than feed my soul - and feeling tremendously grateful for such nutrition in a starving world.

A shot and a half of Reposada, after a week and a half of vibrant good health; give or take a day, and this birtday morning the kindly Doctora at the local clinic teased Lima Bean-size, or at least large Pinto Bean-size detritus from both ears - i knew it was there, but took successive visits for liberation. I have been lucky so far in life debriding them myself since my patron saint of ENT Dr’s, Doctor Sammy Lee was called back to the mother ship; or at local Vietnamese Barber shops; (why the American war there was doomed out of the gate.)  There’s an autoerotic fascination about holding molted tissue that is so primary as to mimic an infant’s fascination with feces, and the world’s equally irrational repulsion - don’t believe me, try looking up the psychiatric expression for infantile interest in feces. My fascination with the intrinsic nature of esoterica formed on rainy days inside a weekend-empty home drenching myself in the encyclopedias my loving parents invested in. The comforting plethora of what was ‘known’ then against my increasingly insatiable curiosity about what is known now, nestles nicely in the paradox of our “monkeys with guns and money” reality that we drag behind our gimp; traipsing with our fragile skeletons onward past the chimera of oh-so-certain signposts into the nearly unfathomable enormity of our, forgive me Leonard, “invincible defeat;” 

don’t know about y’all - i had a blast wiping this one off the slate · 

“what’s the numerical equivalent of sex¿

68, one more and you eat it.” - A. Nonymous ·

Oscar Wilde — 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.'

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breathing - the sonnet ·

There is little much more than breath to life

yet we fill our days with such distraction

what explains our fascination for strife

except as diversion from examination 

Of what, for why¿ permission to enjoy

the act of creation from deep within?

who would dare to arbitrate - with what ploy ·

‘We’ll need to see papers you were given,

to make something out of nothing, ain’t right; 

breathing must have authorization - 

how else can we know you have seen the light?

You might have knowledge without condition.

our system is made to give you comfort

that’s why we gloss your pain, you say it's hurt 

jts 070923 raison d'être; an essay - breathing; the sonntet ·

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · an essay and sonnet

 

110623 the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · an essay

This, my last essay, ‘the Macabre New Year’ was written at the beginning of the year in another country, different narrative; never published - too macabre. Suffice it to say, after a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and a broken wrist from getting knocked off my bicycle at Thanksgiving; my whining about getting Covid after Christmas was pretty predictable · the vestiges of that confluence of inequity are locked in the PDF file that refused my tortured efforts this morning to open and complete my mission. But rather than beat a ‘dead horse’, let’s see if it is not possible to invent a train of thought inaccessible to the fake-as-fuck jargon the ruling class is passing off as entertaining prose, because why not? I can say this because i’m likely much closer to death at my age than your ‘presumed’ younger demographic. And unless you’re a bored, aged operative tasked with supervising the slightly nefarious rantings of any miscreant jeopardizing public harmony with disaffected, however diffident, evocations for generalized mayhem, the possibility of your casting off the yoke of your carefully fitted mental manacle are next to nothing.

But then again who’d have thought anyone surviving an automobile collision from a blue-tooth distracted officer of the Kern County judicial establishment, could muster the gumption to swim upstream south to the land of Emilio Zapata and the much younger Mexican Revolution? And to what end; it’s not like the boink on my head knocked anything out of place or even jarred loose cogent meaningful narrative capable of derailing the ai choo choo and its mission of world domination by using carefully crafted, however verbose snippets of rhetoric seasoned with emotional denial and the sour grapes of a life wheezing into its end days without an African Queen fitted for any kind of ‘Hail Mary’ gesture to bracket its quest for meaning.

I forgot how much fun it was to just write minus the ego orientation of accomplishment and need to present for recognition proof of how much one knows by what one writes, rather than how much one feels by sharing what one has discovered. For example, in this perfect cocoon of creativity that i have been searching for since i left my last studio, i have enjoyed the most blissful hours of focused work that i can remember for a long time; and yet that thorn - the pebble in the shoe Muhammad Ali referred to in his aphorism about ‘it’s not the mountains ahead you have to climb that wears you out, but the pebble in your shoe’, almost like the universe has to add emfasis to the sylahble by infecting the metal door on my patio with a mechanical chirp so i won’t get too comfortable and get all blissful with the creative - but that’s just a mean way to see the world, almost like some pathology of my own can’t stand the thought of my having fun and wants to drag me back to the world of .  .. help me, what’s the word i’m looking for?

Same for the lover i was about to take until she fit the mold of previous ‘harridans’, i’ve known and left me hanging without a nod, or was it that i was just too dam close to that happy threesome, but too dam fundamental in my thinking? I really don’t know. I know there is no perfect relationship and that my siblings are not superior to me for having carried their harnesses in the conventional way for so much longer than our poor tormented and not so tormented parents had been able. I have also burnt the fingers of my soul trying to fly too close to the sun and would rather fight for a lifestyle that permits me to explore my world and its language of ideas as best i can without censure or fear in the hopes that simple gravity of ‘too much to ignore’ may one day escape the confines of the facile conceptions where social engineers render curiosity and imagination to such narrow confines as to be easily defined by 'affectless' algorithms.

In engineering the ‘go to’ whimper for losing scads of work to an ill-placed keystroke was, it’s always easier to rebuild 'it' - no matter what ‘it’ was. In this instance, the simple pleasure of writing without an ax to grind, has been more fun than i’m inclined to waste time explaining, but if as was posited by the erudite photographer of the Hollywood YMCA, who later looked the other way when i tried to associate in Aix, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” i will come visiting again and more often. I like the act of sharing and while i make no claim that what you read or learn herein is of any use to anyone but myself, i can say what you've read is as open and honest as i can make it without charging you a whit for its reading; Good luck to us all, and to all a good night.     

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the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · and sonnet

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Habits are great if they don’t make you sick

“what doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger.”

Not my words, but they are still pretty slick, 

though they’ll do fuck all to keep you younger.

“Fountain of youth” another fuckin’ myth,

designed by greed to keep you in great need.

for if you could just find out who to tithe,

the hunger you work for wouldn’t need feed.

Then again without form, Kaos might reign;

Maxwell Smart made it clear how that worked out.

The truth people feared might happen, became -

The good guys lost, and evil reigned throughout.

a sad parable, if you can listen,

might present itself past a distant din.

  

jts 110623 the Macabre New Year - 6 months L8r · a sonnet

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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Christmas Eve & Xmas Day - the essay / joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

 

The year my father died he melodramatically, as only he could, pulled me by my lapel down to his bedridden face and elicited a solemn promise that i would never quit writing - ergo i write, however painfully. If you have been reading the saga of my journey to face certain death, my last blog entry contained besides my usual smarmy self-righteous sanctimonious observations about my relative moral superiority - an account of having been knocked to the ground by a holiday hasty Mercedes Benz.’ (my christmas eve gift was a polite declination by the injury attorney i’d approached about the ‘scene of the crime’ due to the grey area of my ‘green light does too short of a yellow light’ transgression; however i was trumped by the offender’s apparent relationship clerking for a ‘cheese’ in the local star chamber.) 

I used to believe with conviction in my capacity to overcome physical adversity of any kind, but this youthful fiction was always consistent with the ‘hothouse’ cultural environment my semi-privileged  upbringing that suggested such a conceit was my birthright when my mortality and the un-prosecutable afore mentioned chariot of power drove over my arrogant presumption; i’m okay, having started out a little cock-eyed; i now possess just a little more character, a lot like gilding the lily. However, my existential stamina which has never been in short supply due to an apparently inexhaustible supply of cosmetic raison d’etre; is now nearly exhausted as an aged ex-expatt itinerant stone carver with a broken wrist and no prospects save an ignorant willingness to cross the DMZ of post-Jan 6th corporate insurrection ‘merica to stand shoulder to shoulder with any anti-corporate renegade brigade looking to face off against the nascent pre-apocalyptic ‘merican apologists. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, or as the now deceased, but not forgotten Doug Rubardt, late of 60’s Telegraph Ave, Berserkly sandwich shop, cum restauranteur fame, “Joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck” R·I·P·, may your personal decency ride through the eons of space and time to lovingly inform cosmic cardiac muscles anywhere.

Ma is in her deathbed and the ever mindful eldest has organized a ‘zoom’ Christmas that included me; though he was present on my arrival back into the states when i bought my first telephonic device in 8 years abroad - a ‘Consumer Cellular’ flip phone incapable of such techno feats; well played elder brother - you do Cain proud. The great thing about writing is that no matter what sanctimonious rabbit hole you wish to wander down in search of the holy grail of innocence - there you are - facing no one, but you yourself the author. In the background just now is the Xmas day gift opening ‘feeding frenzy’ that the holiday has become replete with matchbook toy track that has its own propelling device that sounds just like a poorly tuned sewing machine. The shrill captive birds understood this morning’s noise explosion as an invitation to ratchet up their incessant piercing plaintive squawk as though with the right decibel their ‘music’ might crack the barrier of my self-referential flinty heart which finds no welcome for the shrieks of delight that the material-gain of this holiday has come to represent.

The upside is that the dearth of feeling that object oriented’ celebrations have choked off, leave the region of compassionate understanding wide open - fallow fields long untilled and lacking appropriate DNA, ’heritage seed stock’ to grow anything other than what the corporate consumer shills have picked to propagate. I do not know what to plant and consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to string words together - the existential doubt that has replaced my former implacable confidence is now icing on the cake · my own twist on Marie’s sage pronouncement of “Let them eat cake.” Pop was right to wring from me the solemn promise to never stop writing, for having slogged through the past 48 hours cherry picking ideas from a shattered future and attempting to forge meaning in a life that is no longer anchored by the chimera of delusion i’ve used to hammer out meaning - my opinion about this holiday has no bearing for anyone but myself and my creative lodestone which had been yoked to recognition and ego is now fleeing down the ‘rabbit hole’ searching for any feeling of relevance which only ‘work’ can provide.

Previously my youthful focus on power, force, and grace created an endlessly uniform panorama that obscured the crevices and pitfalls that one can only recognize from within whatever limited perspective into which one has tumbled - much like the Arizona landscape one views on approaching the Grand Canyon. To get in and out of those vastly different terrains, one must know and understand the use and function of which skill to use when - a skill which when developed using slight modifications, and clear well thought out purpose allows for a much easier and effective transition from smooth uninterrupted landscape to many varieties of challenging landscapes; all that is necessary to master these gifts is that desire which Martin Luther King so eloquently articulated “If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

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joyeux du noël - a sonnet ·

what i love - laughing at a poem title;

don't knock it 'til you've tried it, like blank verse -

starts out oafish but skeins to pin-point subtle

nestling nicely with guffaws plucked from tears 

what's to any holy day without joy?

solemnity devoid of nurturing; 

compulsory gifting · love me - buy toy

seating in our soul's throne a long dead king?

we calcify if we will not alter

the Tao said when you die, you are rigid

when are born you flex and are like water;

odd that men’s life maker is called turgid

frolic has no place not knowing sorrow

just as now is becoming tomorrow

jts 122422 Christmas Eve Day

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