SPINNING WHEEL

listening to the rain

Applied paint to the fiddle today, bringing it closer. As of today it's beginning to look like a fiddle by color as much as shape. It appears to have the lightness of a fiddle, deceptively light every time I've picked one up. If I can keep that or even enhance it is essential. I don't want the fiddle to look like it weighs 10 pounds. For the darker part of the wood I need darker than raw umber, which I can't use at all because it has a green base and I'm using red tones. Many ways I can get it. Red and green put together right can make black. Same for orange and blue. I'll make the dark part one of these ways. Orange and blue makes a warmer tone. I want all warm tones on the wood. I've studied his face all day and will approach it tomorrow. One of the eyes needs a tiny touch and nothing more, but it has to be right. His left eye makes him look Japanese. Funny, when I look at it and see the eyes oriental, the entire face becomes oriental. I see his eyes as western and he looks like a white man. I'd never noticed before the powerful influence of the eyes on the entire face.

I would venture, meaning I don't know, that our use of language has weakened and cell phones have demolished our original way of communicating through our eyes the way they do in the world of the dumb animals, dumb only in that they can't talk with language we understand. The language they talk we don't understand either. I've never heard the cats say a word to each other. I've learned with them and the dogs before them that I don't need to talk to communicate with them. Nearly all my talking to them is hearing my head roar, has nothing to do with anything. The cats have learned a lot of words, which I use for triggers. Like catfood. They also understand, You want out? That's in response to pleading eyes saying I want.

There are certain words, just a few, like friend. First time I told TarBaby he was my friend, he went into deep relaxation and purred out loud. I don't know that he'd ever heard the word before. This happened 5 or so years ago. Since then, every time I tell him he's my friend, he relaxes and purrs like that's telling him the very thing he wants to hear. I didn't say it any special way, but he got something. I doubt it's in the sound of the word itself because the same word in German is said something like froint. I asked TarBaby if he was my froint--he acted like he didn't hear. He's an American cat. Talk English.

Speaking of which, it bores me unto weariness when I hear somebody go on about why they oughta make em speak English if they want to live in this country. This is a English speaking country. Same as the immigrant issue. Defenseless people to bash. That's bully mind. Switzerland uses 3 languages on their currency, French, Italian and German. Those are the languages people tend to speak in the 3 regions of Switzerland surrounded by these countries. Anything I buy that's electronic and needs an instruction manual has the book divided into 2, 3, 4 or more languages. So what. All the better for people to understand you with. I like walking on a New York sidewalk and hearing every language spoken and occasionally my own. I've always loved the sounds of other languages. As a kid, my mother worked with a Mexican girl, Juanita, high school senior. I'd ask her to speak Spanish to me just so I could hear it. Bob Dylan has a song, Spanish Is A Loving Tongue. We don't have much that's loving going on, so it might be nice to have the Spanish language spoken more frequently.

It's just that old colonial racist belief that you keep the people of color down. The problem with Spanish is brownish skin tones. That's a no-no in the land of denial. The arrogance of whiteness was challenged this most recent election when we learned people of color are 50/50 with the white population. Being kept down, they're relatively poor, and sometimes totally poor. The poor tend to have more kids, meaning from here on, the people of color outnumber white in USA. When the Civil War was over, the freed slaves outnumbered the whites in the Deep South states. In a democracy, that's power. As long as white man has power that shit aint happening. That's where requiring education to vote in the South and keeping the black folks away from education started. The Randy Newman song, I think it's called Rednecks, comes to mind.

White man is in crisis at this moment. White man used to control the money, but now Yellow man controls the money. Yellow is non-white. Chinks. Slopes. Gooks. As America's white man star is fading, the Asians are coming on in the stock market world, outdoing us at capitalism. They used to be them dirty commies. Now they own us, thanks to the expense of two wars on poor people brought to us by white men. It looks to me like USA passed over the top of the wheel of fortune between the time of WW2 and Kennedy's assassination. The 20th Century is called the American Century. This century looks like it will be called the Chinese Century in retrospect. We're on the downside of the wheel as China and India are ascending. When I was little, those were the poorest places on earth. The wheel won't stop for them either. I hope they do better than we did, though I don't dare expect. They are, after all, human.