all paintings by anthony green
Suddenly, I'm in everyday life up over my ears. It's time to do some scheduling. I've taken on one thing more than I can handle. I can't hang out at a welding shop because I got nothing else to do. I have so much else to do that everything is thrown into a snit right now. I stay up til three, four and five, then sleep til noon and start again. By now, I have my days so full that there aren't enough hours in the day, and I'm jumping into something terrifically time consuming that I want to do. But, I'm worn out all the time now. Every minute I'm awake I want to be sleeping. Today was first nap in a couple weeks. Haven't touched Gide's Journals in a couple weeks. I see movies on the run now. Tomorrow I deal with motorcycle parts and then drive to Woodlawn. I see my life going away. I need my home time. At home is where my energy recharges. It has always been the case that when I make a run to Sparta, I need a nap when I return home. All I can figure is other people's psychic energy exhausts me. I believe there is something to it. The day of the Henderson fest I drove home racing in my mind to get to the bed as fast as I could. I spent more time there than the body was able.
anthony green
I am seeing my energy level change radically. I've been a stay at home body for so long that it really wears me out when I leave here. A drive to Woodlawn is not exhausting, because the psychic energy there is so smooth I feel at home, and feel at home in the car listening to a Skeeter & The Skidmarks tape. One thing that has happened is I am living almost totally in my mind, where I've always lived. I figure everybody else is living in their own minds too. Civilization's advance has been toward living more and more inside one's own mind. What they call "social media" I take for living all the more in one's own mind. Tweeting and facebooking, one is entirely involved inside one's mind. The other is not standing in front of you; the other is in your mind. I don't worry over the so-called social media dumbing down the generation of now because I see it taking us further into living inside our minds. We used to think everything was Out There, and are collectively coming to see that it is actually In Here. Like the universe is within. God is within. Living in the mind is one step closer to finding that everything outside is already on the inside, and the outside is the projection from our own inside. That's a hard saying.
anthony green
I've come into a time of the life when I don't much give a shit for just about anything. And then there are departments where I give a great deal of a shit. I used to care about preserving the green world, keeping it healthy, allowing the wild critters their lives, appreciating the whole. But after a lifetime of seeing logging trucks on the highway---a couple days ago, I came up on one with two trailers and the logs piled so high they were frightening just to look at, let alone to see on the highway coming toward me. It's ok though; he's making money and I'm not. The people making their money destroying the world we live in without any regard for our well being are the champions. They belong to exclusive clubs where all the other people destroying our lives gather to pat each other and themselves on the back. I remember a few years ago seeing an article in Time or someplace about loggers bulldozing the smaller islands of the SE Asia archipelago. By the time they'd leveled about two-thirds of the island the tigers started attacking the bulldozer operators. Of course, they killed all the tigers and leveled the island. What else? Screw environmentalists. They're not making money.
anthony green
One day some city people were visiting some city people I know here. I was asked to take them on a walk to the waterfall. I carried a can of beer. When we reached the top of the big waterfall I tossed the can in the creek and watched it go over the waterfall. It is something I would never do on my own, but did it that day to make a statement. I think the statement was, don't think I'm one of you, think of me a redneck. I'd lived here awhile and came here with environmentalist idealism that got changed right away. Changed by hopelessness. The only way I've come to see that we can save anything environmentally is to let the economy collapse. When the people of the upper middle class no longer have their shareholder checks coming in, they're going to shit. By then, the working class will be the criminal class. The rising ocean will change much of the human plunder of the earth. The Capitalist attempt to destroy the planet will end of its own exhaustion. I'm thinking in the next century cartography will be a booming business. Coastlines everywhere will have to be remapped. With the economy going away at the same time, businesses located on the coast will not be able to afford to move inland, much will change. I look at China. The greatest part of the population is in the lowland along the coast. Inland is desert, vast desert. When the water rises and the air currents change, the edges of the desert will begin to turn green.
anthony green
I look at what the international corporations are doing to humanity and our earth, and it makes me furious. There is nothing I can do, so it makes me frustrated; hence, angry. The anger makes me brace up within unable to enjoy what "environment" I have left. Then I have to throw off the frustration by simply not giving a shit. How can I care that the big cats on the SE Asian islands are being killed and their green islands reduced to desert? How can I care that the Appalachian mountains themselves are being killed by fracking? I can't stop it. If I went and martyred myself to the cause, it would amount to no more than a minor headline for a day. Another environmentalist dumb shit. If I sent all my money to Sierra Club and Greenpeace, it wouldn't change the least little thing. It might pay an ad agency to write a fundraising letter.
anthony green
The Jeff Goldblum movie Independence Day continues in my mind. The movie amounted to no more than a moving picture comic book, but it had quite a lot to say and said it simply in easy to understand two-dimensional terms, a singing to the choir moment. Bob Dole used it in a speech as something patriotic like the flag, when neither he nor his script writer had seen it, totally missed the point. The point is that the mining of the earth's surface and draining its oil has to come to an end if we want to go on living on earth. We don't want our planet made into a Mars while we're living on it. To allow it to go on will be the same as the European Jews allowing themselves to be rounded up. In the history of the Galaxy, the people of Earth will be laughed at for letting the love of money destroy the very ground they lived on. The film's theme amounted to a low-tech revolution; an alcoholic crop-duster pilot saved us from the behemoth corporate spaceship scooping up the surface of the earth for the minerals, by martyring himself, a man with nothing left to lose.
anthony green
The problem is so huge a force of human making that by now it is overwhelming us. It was made of human greed. I'm recalling as a kid older men talking about it doesn't matter whether you learn anything in college, only the sheepskin matters. What? What's the point of the sheepskin if you didn't learn anything? I remember so constant a litany that it became the music in the sky, that it doesn't matter how you get the money, just get the money. I grew up in a world that taught me money is the ONLY. I didn't buy it. In my adult life I've lived among people who believe money is the only and I see how shallow it has made them in relation to the old people I knew of the mountain culture who had never lived by that code. It wasn't even a consideration. They needed the money, of course, to get by, to raise their kids, to maintain their existence at least, to sustain what is important in life, everyday life with people you care about, who care about you. That is the first thing out the window when money takes over as the purpose. Relationships become false, second to the public persona. Maybe now that the international corporations, the Bank, are taking our money and giving nothing in return but landfill, we will be left without resources and will return to living like people of the South lived during the Civil War, the worst poverty, out of which Southern culture arose. Southern culture, itself, is evidence the War of Yankee Aggression is not over. The Yankee occupation held the South in intense poverty for a century. USA is not a forgiving empire.
anthony green himself
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