THE WAGES OF GREED

air bellows in the fog

 

Last trip to doctor's office, I went to the window to check in before taking a seat in the waiting room. A white-haired white flatlander couple in chairs immediately to my right, I took them for about my age, the woman spoke to a local man older than me sitting directly across the room from her, "Were you in the service?" He affirmed he had been. She said, "Thank you for your service." I thought: Barf! A Fake news enthusiast. My immediate dread was she might ask me the same question. Thought I'd answer I was a draft dodger like Dick Cheney, W Bush and Rummy, but, again, thought better of it: if you don't want it started, don't start it. I acted like I heard nothing, preoccupied with the pretty girl at the window, Winter, whose brother and parents I knew, all of them recently dead, a girl I applaud with all my heart for getting on so well with her life. I about break into tears when I see her, though for Fake news woman I wanted to appear flirtatious so she'd judge me a rake, insurance she'd leave me alone. No television in the waiting room set on the Fake channel, I did not want her focusing her boredom on me. 

 

 

In today's news another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino at a Social Services office where the purpose is to help the poor. I saw that Bill Moyers posted a statistic this was the second such shooting today in America. This year, 2015, has already produced more mass shootings than days into the year, 355. The 355th day is two weeks yet to be. Every time it happens, every day, big surprise in the news. The shooters fit an obvious pattern, white, right-wing racist republican-minded Christian enthusiasts of Fake news, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and the host of hate-television, -radio, -internet, -print of a purpose to divide and conquer. It works for them. They have conquered the entire media to the point the 355th shooting this year is a surprise to all corporate tv networks. Oh look, somebody did it again. How did that happen? Buy a new Cadillac, now. Pizza with lots and lotsa cheeZ. Over the last 35 years of watching the increase in hateful attitudes inspired by Fake news, hate-radio and hate-religion, I've come to the place best for me is at home with silence.

 

 

I used to be disposed toward my peers and people older, but so many white men and women my age and older have poisoned their minds by their own potential for hate brought to the surface, the flames fanned by the corporate billionaires to divide and conquer We The People, the haters included, and render us powerless while they make all the legislation against us, take all our money and resources. Who would ever think greed could bleed out an entire population and land mass? Maybe this is why it is listed as one of the deadly sins. Greed has shown itself to be deadly to American Democracy, the American government and the American people. Even a devotee to Fake news sees it, but they've been told from the news desk greed is good, and they're good Americans, they believe what they're told. I have actually heard with my own ears someone say, "I know that for a fact. I heard it on television." 

 

 

In town at the library Monday, picking up art objects from show, standing in front of the display in the glass case of somebody's collection of Star Wars toys, Doug at the desk, we spoke of our appreciation of the Star Wars movies and looking forward to the new one. Our brief conversation segued somehow into him saying he's not seen hate in the air like it is now in his lifetime. I said I've never seen such in my lifetime, either, double his. We came to it must have been something like this in the time leading up to the War Between the States. I mentioned to him I have recently come to see we may be in a civil war. Terrorism is the nature of war now. We have every day occurrences of terrorism from white right-wing racist Christians having convulsions inspired by propaganda from Fake news and Rush Limbaugh, now Carly Fiorina and the whole clown bus, who publicly side with the shooters. They, in their minds, are at war with the rest of us. And we still don't get it.  

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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GUNS AND NOT GUNS

 

along brown road / air bellows

 

Made a town run today for groceries and gas, light rain, light fog on the mountain. Had lunch at my new favorite restaurant, La Mexicana, good food, good conversation with Manuel, the owner operator. I have to listen closely to his accent, yet when I listen too closely I lose it. I was looking for the best way to listen to him. I could easily understand about half what he said and had to figure out some of the other. Listen too closely, I don't hear anything, though listening casually I miss about the same. It is a zone in between where I understand him best paying attention without trying to make out everything. I got most of what he was saying. He was talking about the socialist governments in Bolivia and Venezuela. He was talking Latin American politics from the inside, and I know very little, only enough to keep up with what he was saying. What little I know came from reading. The politics of everyday life is quite different from the second-hand historical perspective interpreted from a different culture, belief system and language. There is a difference between reading about it and a gun pointed at your head.

 

along brown road

 

Every day in news is something about guns and the varieties of killing. Everybody is questioning what to do about guns, from the polar opposites to everything in between. The one thing I never see or hear by not watching television is guns solve problems. It would take Hollywood to agree to make less gun movies and tv shows, and that's not going to happen like Exxon is not going to support solar energy. Guns have obsessive entertainment value, exciting, the cheapest thrill. The philosophy of television says, if  you don't like it, kill it. It doesn't do to blame television when you consider the audience creates its own entertainment. Young guys in a new band go with what excites the crowd. Young stand-up comics learn from their audiences, learn how to give them what they want. Television gives us back to ourselves. It is a stretch of the imagination to call television art, though it figures when you look at it like everything is art. Art reflects life which reflects art which reflects life. It is a constant feedback going both ways from television to viewer to television. Television is not going to self-destruct by advising viewers to be less obsessed with guns, because the viewing audience was already obsessed with guns before television.

 

along brown road

 

The only solution I see for the gun problem is to live what I believe and allow others to live what they believe. For my part, I don't want any guns. Had two that were given to me over time, not wanting any of them. I gave them to somebody who appreciates them and is glad to have them, somebody who values guns. There came a time I wanted them out of the house, didn't even want money for them. I believe guns attract guns. They also attract thieves. I've seen the propaganda about security spread since the Nixon administration, Joe McCarthy's right hand man, until by now an awful lot of people believe they need multiple guns for security. And so many people are hoarding ammo these days the supply cannot keep up with the demand. Fear has pervaded the land so much through television that I, who am not subject to propaganda through tv, see changes in the people around me that diminish them as human beings and they go with it like it's the latest thing since a recliner. The fear by now, half a century into the propaganda of fear, has become aggressive. Found a good meme attributed to Frank Zappa, "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex."

 

along brown road

 

I'm not with the anti-gun people and I'm not with the gun people. I see they all have a right to their points of view, all of which I believe are valid, like I have a right to mine. My point of view is to let them fight it out and I'll watch good movies, listen to good music, read good books and make a string dance for a kitten. This is how I live in the world not of it. I look at the television once a week, see appeals for me to go in debt over a new Lexus I couldn't afford a set of tires for. The pizza commercials make me never want another pizza. The Viagra and Cialis commercials make me laugh out loud every time. The first half is suggestive testosterone prowess and the second half an endless list of warnings that this product will kill you. If your erection lasts more than four hours call your doctor. I'm not interested in my doctor like that.  I don't want anything I see advertised on tv. If they advertised books by contemporary poets or picture books by contemporary artists I might take an interest. I don't need it, because I know how to find them without advertising. I divorced self from television in 1961, and, like Robert Frost said, that made all the difference. I like to see the television from time to time to keep up with what the people around me are believing, glad deep down I don't believe that mind anymore.  I've grown wary of it. 

 

along brown road

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

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DO ABOUT WHAT?

andy warhol

 

What are we going to do about gun violence? A question I hear repeated again and again, every time we have another public attack by somebody frustrated unto suicide, so mad he wants to take everybody/anybody with him. Reading or hearing the question, I answer in a comment box of the mind, Nothing. Nothing at all, according to pattern, tradition. Every time the question pops up, What are we gonna to do about it?, what gets done consistently amounts to nothing. A run of articles, anti-gun people use the moment to advertise their agenda, make a lot of noise. It's like the question of capital punishment that surfaces from time to time is never resolved. The question, whether or not guns, is only answered with blame. Black people in church killed. A white boy done it, blame the whiteman flag. Easy target. This new one, black man killing white woman and white man on tv in Roanoke, looks more like he went postal from the frustration of being let go from a job. They say he had a bad attitude and deserved to be fired. Maybe so. But it's not how he saw it, like the post office employees who "went postal" out of frustration over losing their jobs in a time of republican downsizing post office staff to set USPO up for corporate takeover.

 

andy warhol

 

I tell self it doesn't matter to me, what I think about it is of no relevance to anyone but myself. It is other people's karma someplace far from where I am. The only part that matters to me is hearing the same old question every year of my life, What are we going to do about it? The only thing I've ever seen happen is the next crisis to come along replaces last week's old crisis. The question about guns is forgotten until next made-for-tv slaying by gun. It's talked about by talking heads with renewed urgency for a week, replaced by a smokescreen politician who said something notably stupid. What are we going to do about it? Nothing. What are we going to do about racism? Blame the South. Nothing. Blaming American rednecks and banning a flag increased sales of the flag by double, affirmed the white American working class identity with the flag and recruited for the Klan. Nearly everybody guided by propaganda through television, the tv renders everyday life insignificant, dysfunctional, a waste of time to notice. Homeland terrorist slayings are television. Racism is television. Police brutality is television. Let television settle it with guns and explosions. Television doesn't worry over logic or good sense in settling issues. Guns settle things on tv, the real world in America/Oceania. It naturally follows, guns solve problems in the unreal world of everyday life.

andy warhol

 

"Click and Share if you care." Thus concluded a brief video I saw not knowing what it would be. A white guy in plaid shirt and ball cap on backwards, I felt like it might be at least funny. The occasional redneck rant that appears on facebook is indeed funny. I don't share the politics, but I do understand their point of view and believe it valid. This guy was funny and not. He ranted about guns saying he was being practical about them by teaching his children, a boy and two girls, how to shoot a gun. He had the boy shoot a replica of a movie pistol, an air gun. He was being practical in a gun culture. I felt he was sensible. In the working class, everybody has guns, and I'm with them that it is important to teach the kids about guns before they find one and do something stupid with it. He talked about gun control as teaching the kids to control a gun. I, as myself, think it's nuts, yet I understand we live in a gun culture. When daddy has guns in the house, it is better for the kids to be taught to respect them than it is to label them taboo. I appreciated that he taught the kids with an air gun, comparatively harmless. Though he was a bit much of a Fake news enthusiast for my appreciation, I respected his point of view. I live in a world of people like him and know them to be good people. I could see in him if he lived in my community, he is what I'd call a good man. In the way I call Frank Dillard a good man, Randy Hampton a good man, Joe Willey a good man, three of many, only the first ones to come to mind. He ended his rant, "if you care, click and share." I didn't care enough to share, though I obviously cared enough to think about it after it was over and share my thoughts with you.

andy warhol

Thought about sending it to a friend for its comic value, but it felt too much like demeaning its purpose. The man had something to say, something he had reasoned out for himself, and I felt very well. I could not demean him so. He was doing something about gun violence. He was teaching his kids to be responsible by way of the gun for example. He was doing his part concerning an important issue that can only be dealt with one individual at a time. To see on television one side make noise and the other side make noise, it amounts to no more than a racket. I do my part by not having a gun and not intending to have one. I think they're cool for somebody else, but not for me. I don't like that I like the feel of one in my hand. They fit the hand like a glove, made for the hand. I feel like guns attract guns. They also get stolen. It would not do for somebody, whose aim is to live as close to the heart as can be done, to have at hand an object with only one purpose, to kill. I am not about killing. I don't even want a rabbit running under my tire. My path is love, not fear. I can't deny a gun's necessity to somebody else, anybody else. For myself, I see a gun illegitimate power, power I do not want. As a conscientious human being, I do not allow myself the right to kill, not even the dog that killed my cat.

andy warhol

 

 

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THE AMERICAN TRAGIC FLAW

george bellows

 

 Back in the time fascism was introduced to America with police in the airports, I swore off flying, glad I did. I was taking a short flight and carried a small bag with one day of clothes in it. I was told to stand aside, regarded as a criminal in a police station. A humorless government man went through my things, found nothing but clothes, what a disappointment. I watched to be sure he didn't plant something on me to be found at next inspection station. Standing with my back to the wall being looked at as a criminal curiosity by everybody walking by, I swore to myself I would never enter another airport. Somebody invariably says, "Never say never." I say, "Never. You said never twice." I've let my passport go. I don't want to leave the country. I refuse to submit to fascism. I have no choice, but I do have a choice about going someplace by plane and putting myself through suspicion for being an American citizen, at home, herded like cattle, paying for the opportunity.

george bellows

 

Everyone who lives beyond an hour's drive of my home will not see me in future unless they come to where I am. I don't even like to go to town anymore. One day last week I'd gone to town for groceries, donkey grain and bird seed, and came home to a big Ford 150 pickup parked in my parking space. I thought it was funny at first, presumptuous to the max, and parked across the road by the mailbox. My jewelweed almost waist high grows around the parked car, but for the path that goes around the left front fender to the house. The jewelweed was so tight up against his truck, he had to trample some getting out, and I had to trample some more to walk around the truck to the path. I was ok with him parking in my spot. The place really does look like nobody lives there, exactly the way I want it. I took it as my fault he chose to park there. But it pist me off for the jewelweed to be trampled just as it's orange orchids are opening. He'd also gone over the chain with the no trespassing sign on it. I put a note under his wiper blade noting this is not a parking lot. It wasn't somebody I know, because I don't know anybody with that new a pickup.

george bellows

I've seen disrespect come into the mountains, generation by generation, each generation a little bit more disrespectful of others than the generation before. I don't feel safe leaving the house now for somebody wanting to go look through that old house nobody lives in. Respect for others is a thing of the past. This is the quality of life in police state. The state shows no respect to anyone, and pass it on to the people. The television solves all problems instantly with guns and explosions. I'm seeing a condition of rapid decay, entropy, throughout the American land. I'm seeing a people who have lost touch with the basically practical down to even the last lick of good sense. Two-thirds of a century of television's anti-intellectualism have advanced traditional American anti-intellectualism to anti-intelligence, to anti-learning, to anti-paying attention, to anti-noticing, to anti-awake. In our politicians, Ted Cruz got into Harvard law school somehow and passed the tests somehow and evidently graduated somehow. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana went to Oxford, in England, and he makes Cruz look brilliant. School failed these people. They got nothing from it. This whole generation of the young politicians is college educated airheads.

george bellows

It makes me glad I got my schooling half a century ago. I'm thinking of somebody in my Shakespeare class I ran into a few years after we were out of school. In our conversation I mentioned a memory from the class and was told, "I forgot everything about Shakespeare when I turned in my final exam." This is how Lindsay Graham, Jindal, Cruz, the Bushes went through school, forgot it the moment they turned in the final exam. This is an absurd polar extreme of anti-intellectualism. Hundreds of thousands of dollars put into an education forgotten graduation day. I'm sad, somewhat, to see the USA imploding of its collective willful anti-intelligence. It is not going to reverse any time soon. Television won't allow it. The Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch will not have it. The implosion is so far advanced it will have to complete the process before it can start up again. America historically, traditionally squanders its benefits. We're on our downhill run now, created and generated by the particularly American tragic flaw, anti-intelligence.

george bellows himself

 

 

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ANOTHER LIFE DISMISSED BY THE MEDIA SPIN MACHINE

richard shelton

The last few days I've seen headlines and pictures of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who identifies black. I was disposed toward indifference. Not interested in seeing interviews with her. I didn't care about her getting busted for being a wannabe and it working for her. I couldn't help but feel like she was thrown under the bus for smokescreen, to distract attention from something else that matters. This morning I went to an interview with her and found it interesting. Found another and found it equally interesting. I even felt like I understood her. I don't have an inclination to do such a thing, but she did. It's her story, not mine. I was able to pay attention to her once I got it settled it has nothing to do with me or anybody but her. It's her's. I like hearing other people's stories, and took an interest in Rachel's. I see the liberal news talking heads, pundits, in full judgment, belittling her, talking about her like she's a fraud. The white male interviewers attempted to make her story a lie, and she kept saying it's more complex than true or false, right or wrong. Seeing her exasperation with them talking down to her, I felt like she was being true to her meaning. All she said is she identifies black and has felt closeness with blackness since childhood, age five. 

richard shelton

It's at about that age kids sometimes tap into their previous lifetime. Maybe she was black last time and more comfortable living in black culture over white culture. Growing up in northern Idaho seems to me to have a dreariness factor the equal of Kansas. When a child has a passion for making music, picks up an instrument, figures it out and starts playing, it's a good sign the kid played music in the previous lifetime. I wanted to paint as a child, but due to circumstances and a bad case of low self-esteem, I didn't even try it until I turned forty. I already knew what to do and how to do it. Everything about it seemed obvious. This could have something to do with why I don't paint any more than I do. I lose patience with the obvious. It has to do with why I stay away from television, for having raised the obvious to a lucrative art form. Television swallowed up irony the same as it swallows the life spirit. Listening to the interviewers badger Rachel Dolezal, and the pundits making fun of her, it came to me that just a week or two ago they were praising Kaitlyn Jenner for growing up wanting to be a girl and going ahead and doing it. So transgender. So PC. So de rigeuer. So awesome. So cool. Cover of Vanity Fair. The time Jon Stewart slipped up and said Bruce, he instantly apologized, red-faced, hand over mouth. 

richard shelton

This week we have a white woman saying she grew up wanting to be black and one day committed to live as a black woman from then on. She's being called a liar, her motives questioned, her credibility questioned. They give the impression they believe outing her is going to make her go back to being a white woman in shame and defeat. She will go on living as a black woman. She likes black culture, the company of black people, like I like mountain culture and the company of mountain people. Nobody calls me a liar or questions my credibility, that I know of, for adopting a culture for my own that I did not grow up in. I like living among these people. She, too, grew up in a place without a culture and likes living among black people for their culture. The pundits say she can't call herself black. Then I can't call myself a hillbilly. But I do and will, because I am a hillbilly, a working class white guy living in the mountains who has adopted the culture, naturalized. Somebody interviews me and tells me I can't call myself a hillbilly because I grew up in Flatland, how do you tell a television interviewer, who is unable to step beyond the obvious for a thought, "it's more complex than true and false," in words more obvious?

richard shelton

I saw a clip from the women's tv show, The View. They were theorizing about this and that, and Whoopie Goldberg said, if she wants the black woman experience, come on and get it. It's not so popular an experience that white women are lining up to pay admission. I came out of reading a few brief articles and seeing some videos of interviews, including with her parents. sympathetic with Rachel. The comedy for me was seeing the talking heads so righteous about transgender acceptance, gay wedding acceptance, we're just human beings, after all, last week. Then mocking Rachel when she said she's a human being with a deep inner longing to be black, who let herself live as a black woman. Why is Rachel a liar and Kaitlyn Jenner not a liar? He didn't grow up in the girl locker rooms? Not a problem. Tres PC. I saw something saying the black people of Spokane, where she was president of the NAACP, embrace her now as before, like about her that she wants to be black. The community may bond with her like never before. The only problem I saw she had on the television interviews was her attempts to be honest were cut off by presumptions and Joe McCarthy statements in question form, Are you an African-American? I can't see changing racial identity any bigger a deal than changing gender. It's no more than a cultural change. I don't see any of it a big deal, and had the impression Rachel Dolezal didn't see it a big deal either. But she's caught in media spin, the novelty of the week, somebody exposed being true to self in a false world, and shamed for it at will. 

     

richard shelton himself

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BELIEVING AND LIVING

Oh good, the rain has begun. The green world is ready. A couple weeks have gone by without rain, but for a welcome shower one night. I went to Carpenter's house earlier to water a young mountain laurel I'd transplanted from the woods a couple weeks ago. They are hardy. I'm watering it every other day to keep it wet, give it a liquid diet while it grows new root hairs. The leaves are perked up and happy. The Dutch irises transplanted a couple weeks ago stand straight up like green rapiers, telling me they're happy. The large patch of wild violet leaves, out the window, flutter in random patterns, make a dance, bring to mind Philip Glass music. It's a visualization of his music, like the continuous flow lines in the films he scored, Koyaanisqatsi and the unspellable others. I heard him in a radio interview a few days ago, the occasion of his new memoir's release. I actually allowed self to spend $45 on the cd collection of Einstein On The Beach. That was when $45 was $45. Never regretted it. Haven't yet gone to amazon to see about his book. If it is under 500 pages, I may look into it. I'm still stuck in the middle of a thousand page Van Gogh biography, taking a diversion after 500 pages, like gimme a break. I feel like I'm creeping up on getting back into it, but facing 500 more pages is like, Lord have mercy. I've read six books during the respite from Van Gogh, and may yet read a few more.  

While looking within at the trails of destiny leading to today, I have a note on the desk to my right written on a piece of pocket-sized nobebook paper, "to see what you believe, see how you live." It has been here for a few weeks. I look at it fairly often, awareness it's there. I have never been able to answer the question, what do I beleive. NPR used to have people write in their stories of what they believe. Every time I'd hear them start, I'd wonder what I'd say, and couldn't put what I believed into a capsule form of one thing that makes a good story. Where do you start, and where do you end? I believe that if I cross the yellow lines in front of an oncoming car I'll have a problem. Haven't tested the hypothesis, but believe it. It's a belief I've gained by noting other people's experience. It's part of what I like about reading. I like reading someone else's story, seeing through someone else's point of view, good practice in awareness that others do, indeed, have a point of view particular to their own experience. Somebody I used to have lunch with regularly was convinced, by a belief about his point of view, that his was the only one valid---he's right, everybody else is wrong. A time came I was unable to put self through the torment again of my own volition, to take the first step toward the door. The people I know who read are comfortable with a point a view besides their own. Someone else's point of view tells me I share this world with others of very interesting points of view, if I can put my own out of the way enough to allow the other. 

How I live will tell what I believe. On the obvious level, when you walk in the door you see clutter. My workshop is the footstool to the chair I read in, watch movies in and listen to music in. A piece of plywood on the footstool is the workbench. Parts for things I'm putting together lie around in stacks, boxes filled with jars and tubes of paint, finished objects, magazines, books on shelves, books in stacks, a variety of pictures and African masks around the walls. Two of them are the real deal, three of them made for tourists. I don't care if they're all made for tourists. Some people are afraid of them. I believe they're good medicine. One has pointed teeth. It looks frightful to a Westerner. I've looked closely at the person it was modeled on in the mask itself and see a striking likeness. It's just a human face. The feeling I get from it is balance, so I think of it as balance. It is the image on the wall daily reminder of balance. I think the masks are beautiful, the purpose for having them. Pictures of Meher Baba on each wall. Asked, Don't you think you have enough pictures of Baba? I say, No. He has a great deal to do with my destiny. set me on the path to being able to find my destiny within, my path itself within. My work along the way has been to keep bills paid and basic needs taken care of. The way I'm living now is the way I wanted to live in my youth, but wasn't ready.

By here, I mean the place I see from, gazing out the window at the donkey meadow, green, the fence, a fly exploring the pane of glass looking for a hole in the invisible wall. He can see where he wants to go, but can't find a hole. I live simply. It doesn't mean self-sufficient. That's too much work, requires too much focus of attention, more than I'm willing to pay for something I can buy at the grocery store for so little. Growing it costs more than buying it. I know, better for ya, but if eating like I eat is deadly, because I didn't grow it, why am I not dead yet? I know the answer to why I'm not dead yet: science. Praise the Scientific Method! I live below the poverty line by choice. Don't have much to offer the world of money flow. The boycott of one says no to a belief system I don't share. Because I don't want to participate in the System, does not imply resistance. My form of resistance is nonparticipation. Be like water, flow around it. I believe television has wrecked American life, but can't struggle against something so big. I lose before it starts. I go around it and stay out of television, I don't like to infect my head with the mystery of the obvious, preferring a life where everyday life is not so obvious. The subliminal application of graduate-school Psychology is not guiding an ongoing effort to seduce my attention when I'm not watching tv. None of the books in the house are spun by the propaganda fear machine, nor is the music. No Tom Clancy novels. No commercials here. No pop radio. Only NPR for absence of commercials. 

photos by tj worthington

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YES TO DIVERSITY

diego rivera

I'm having a drink of half Canada Dry, half Jumex mango nectar and a squirt of lemon juice. The mango nectar is a bit flat; the Canada Dry spritzes it with carbonation, the nectar flavors the ginger ale, and the lemon juice adds a zip. Good drink. I'm glad we have a Mexican aisle in the grocery store. I like black beans and everything else along the aisle. I like seeing Mexicans in the grocery store and around town. I grew up with Mexicans and found them to be as good a people as the Anglo kids. Only the Mexicans did not have in them the arrogance of whiteness; thus, I preferred them. We were segregated then. Anglo kids were afraid of the Mexicans and the Mexicans were afraid of the Anglos. It was commonly understood the Anglo kids were superior in numbers, if no other way. I think I identified with the oppressed races because I was oppressed at home by white man. I knew that the white world would be willing to give me a chance for my whiteness, and if I, the same person, were in Mexican skin, it would not be the same. I did not feel right with the privilege that went with white skin. Never have. By this time in the life, a lifetime of experience seeing how arrogant white people automatically present themselves to black or tan people, I'm embarrassed in the company of someone black or tan. I want to say, "I'm not like that," but know how empty it sounds before saying it. And am not so sure I'm not like that. I only know it from my mind, not from my behavior as seen by someone black or tan. If I'm really not like that, let it show in my actions, the only place it counts.    

diego rivera

I am so tired of racial tension after a lifetime of living with it, in it, aware of it, not in denial, it's become one more of the reasons I left "the world" and came here to Air Bellows Mountain where racial tensions don't apply. Nor does any other sort of tension, except drama for the sake of drama. Plenty of that goes around. I prefer not to think so, but plenty of drama for drama sake goes on inside my head. It's what gossip is about. Even continuous drama on television does not supplant gossip. It seems like gossip is a way of making celebrity of the familiar. I'm recalling my first years in the mountains, listening to old man Tom Pruitt talk about different people, who, in our way of seeing, are just ordinary people, talk about them the same way people who watch movies and television talk about the stars, the celebrities. It struck me curious why, when he talked about a preacher who once lied about something Tom said, his reason he left his church, he talked like he expected me to know who he was talking about. He lost respect. He spoke of the preacher the same way people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher talk about lying Republicans. Louie Gohmert said, Joni Ernst said, Ted Cruz said. A celebrity said. Tom's brother, Millard, too, when he talked about the people of his life, I had the same feeling of listening to a celebrity talk about a celebrity I never heard of, but should have. The only television Tom watched was baseball and the news. He didn't get a tv until he was seventy, given to him by a neighbor from Away who believed everybody must have at least one. It's a sight how many used tvs I've been offered, even told in no uncertain terms to take.

It wasn't right, no tv in the house. I need to be connected to what is popularly called the real world, the world I turned my back to as too unreal to sustain life. A human without a tv was unexpected and weird as a rock on a fence post. It's even more now, but I have good camouflage. I bought a tv to watch movies with when so many movies became available on VCR. Netflix sends three movies a week of my choice from a selection of almost everything. One of my major sacrifices coming to the mountain was giving up movies. Had to drive seventy miles for an America movie, a hundred miles to see a foreign film. Now I can have film festivals from almost any country. The tv is not connected to cable, antenna or satellite. The people that freaked out because I don't have a tv in the house are ok about it now. He conformed at least a little bit. He's toeing in. He's slow, but he'll get there. When they put him in a nursing home, he will have no choice but to watch tv, like when he's in a hospital. I suspect the reason I noted how the old people of the old ways talked about each other, is taking it for granted I knew who they were talking about, the way Dick Cheney is mentioned on the evening news, assuming the name needs no introduction. Evidently, before television, people talked about each other the way we talk about celebrities now. We talk about each other and we're talking about people who don't figure as celebrities, what they call on the news, ordinary people. All who are not celebrities, whose names it is taken for granted we do not know, are the ordinary people. We used to be the common people. Now we're the ordinary.

diego rivera

Becoming aware that the people pre-television talked of each other as stars everyone knows, I began to take exception to we who live in the world of non-celebrities, nearly everybody, being reduced to a non-person, a statistic, the viewing audience, ordinary, finding it socially troubling. I watch the people of the world I live in accepting themselves as the ordinary to the point of not even noticing. And I withdraw to home, reminding self I'm not here to change anybody, only self. I want to flow with the living flow of the world I live in. Without wanting to be of it, I have no choice but to be in it. Since I'm in it, I live best flowing with it. My world is three-quarters right-wing statistically. but it doesn't mean a wall is between me and the rest of them. Everyone I know thinks different from how I think. All have opinions different from mine, and very few intersect with my opinions. I don't care, because I assess opinions the same as nothing. Some of my best friends want to bomb Iran and say Obama is a monkey. I don't care. It only tells me what they think about one subject neither of us knows anything about, but what we get from different propaganda sources. No matter where I live in America, I live among people with no interest in art, reading, poetry or foreign films. I talk with people of similar interests, and we never agree where opinions are concerned. One may say Picasso is the great artist of the 20th century, while another says Duchamp. Both for valid reasons. I'm uncomfortable with this time wherein we are expected to be in full check-list agreement with somebody or they don't like you, you get labelled. Whenever I hear somebody describe themselves, very liberal, it puts me on alert to watch everything I say.

diego rivera himself

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SUNDAY TV AND VADA'S DANCE

vada and toys

I spent Sunday in front of the television. The race at Martinsville first, then March Madness, Duke wins again. And possibly a thousand commercials, several of them multiple times apiece. It amuses Justin and Melvin that I laugh every time a viagra or cialis commercial flashes on the flatscreen. They miss the humor and I can't explain, it would sound too condescending. A hot middle-aged babe, dressed in the appearance of satin, lounging on a hotel bed, twisting slowly and writhing. The one that slays me is the white-haired cowboy in a big dually pickup pulling a horse trailer with two horses in Utah or someplace similarly rugged. He is stopped by a mud puddle in the dirt road his power vehicle can't mud-sling its way through to completion. He lets the horses out of the trailer and hitches them to his truck. The spare horsepower pulls him on through, manhood intact. I laugh at the brief sex cartoons about old people. A man and a woman, painting a bench together with dry paint brushes, get romantic all of a sudden, like, let's get it on baby, people who just met when they got the roles in the commercial after auditions. They look more like models chosen from an agency. It's Dick Clark and Connie Francis falling in love all over again. Once the old boy is convinced he no longer has to be a sheep, but can be a wolf, the second half of the commercial warns of imminent death. If you use this product, you're on your own, sucker. This shit will kill your ass. The funny part is the list of ways it will kill you is so long it requires as much air time as the seduction to buy the product. 

vada's dance

Half way through the list, I break out laughing. I think it can't go on much longer and it does. It keeps on promising at least a heart-attack if you give yourself over to lust. Just like in church. Ask your doctor if your heart is up to getting off. You already know it's a sin. If fear of God doesn't inhibit you, listen to the long sermon of the thousand agonizing ways you will die. Take a chance on love, indeed. Next, the tubular frame of a race car painted white inside a big empty garage. Engine is inserted, a body and wheels put on it, Dale Jr crawls in the window and burns rubber leaving the pit stop to go back into the race. It was a fun commercial to watch the first hundred times. Yesterday I didn't think to count how many times this commercial played during the race. It must be popular. I have no recollection what it was selling. I see the commercial an art form, each one created by artists who are making their living in advertising. The Budweiser horse and dog commercials make a brief movie full of emotion. They're good the first hundred times, too. Dale Jr has become a favorite among the drivers for commercials. He's the most popular driver, his fans are vehement and he's somewhat photogenic. He has become the Paul Walker replacement on NASCAR. Mr Cool who races at 200 mph. Mountain Dew. I'd venture that a high percentage of the newer houses built in the South have Mountain Dew cans in the walls, left by working men putting up the sheet rock, a disposal place for lunch trash. Nabs wrappers, Vienna sausage cans, empty cigarette packs. It satisfies a graffiti impulse, an anonymous way of saying, "I worked on the construction of this house." A signature. 

vada dances

Vada, three, going on four in two months, kept us entertained in an interactive way. She danced, she played with her toys, showed dolls. She came into the room wearing the blue Elsa dress from the movie Frozen, "Who am I now?" I said, Elsa, and she danced out the door, returned shortly in another dress, "Who am I now?" I said, Anna, pronounced Ah-nah, European style. Vada had instructed me earlier it is Ah-nna, not Anna. She danced out the door again and returned in a red gown of a dress and danced. I was ready for her this time. I kicked myself for not getting pictures in her different outfits. I made several pictures of her dancing. Most of them were terrible because I could not anticipate her next move. She was like a flame, unpredictable, flowing with whatever happens. Daddy and Melvin were locked in on the race. I was open to Vada. She brought in a pink plastic pumpkin full of her little dolls. She put them out on the floor. She showed me this one and that one. Mermaids, mini-Barbies, several different kinds. I stood one on top of a box that held toys, and Vada knocked it off. I put another one there. Vada knocked it off. Crystal walked in the door and said, "What are y'all doing?" I said, "We're playing doll suicide." I picked up the Cinderella doll, about three inches high, stood her on the edge of the box, saying, "Cinderella jumps from hotel window," and sent her to the floor. Crystal said, "You're nuts." Crystal in the room distracted Vada's attention from the dolls and me. Crystal came in for a rest from housecleaning and Vada jumped on her wanting to play as soon as she sat down. 

vada's room

Vada took me to her room to see what was playing on her tv. Jurassic Park. It was a scene with a man in a yellow rain jacket and a big lizard. What I saw of a moment of script and visuals confirmed this really was the children's movie I suspected when it was new. Vada pointed at it saying something was about to happen. Whatever was on the verge of happening scared her. She said, "This is mean. I don't want to watch it," and ran from her room back to the tv room. She has taken to acting. Elsa, in the movie, Frozen, has become Vada's alter-ego. She now acts Elsa scenes as if she were Elsa, herself. And she sings Elsa's song as her own. Elsa's world is a magical world for a three-year-old. From time to time, Vada will point at me like she's casting a spell and say in a threatening tone of voice, "I will freeze your heart." It has significance in Elsa's story, though I have no idea what it could be. I clutch at my heart and act like I've been zapped. It's important to Vada that I act the role she assigns me. If I don't know what it is, she explains. It is so much better for me to have a living child in the room. Vada gives me a break from the tv. Daddy and Melvin are pre-occupied and I am ready to let her show me the dolls, tell about each one, tell about her magic snowflake. She begins a performance, "Wanna see what I can do?" I say, yes, and she does a twirl, or whatever comes to mind. Vada gets me through the 1pm to 8pm tv. We snack on junk food and pizza. The flatscreen flickers, tells me where I can eat the cheapest, buy the cheapest insurance, and get more for less.   

grumpy old bastard by vada

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THE SPECTRUM BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

bert stern

The windows after sunset are black. It is an odd feeling to look up from the monitor to the window and see black after seeing white all day. I look at the window and return to the monitor snow-blinded for awhile. The windows are white or black these days of snow on the ground. This is the only way I can see dividing the whole spectrum of life into white or black. Day with snow on the ground and night. Another reason I must withdraw my mind from politicians is the way they divide everything into black and white, not only racially, going with the polar opposites, ignoring the spectrum of life in between. It is between the poles we live, not at one end or the other. It is in good writing I see the spectrum between, which turns my attention to everyday life where I never see anyone who is completely good or completely bad. The good are probably dead. It's said the good die young. I don't believe it, but it's fun to use for the humor. I know one man who is 103 and would be at the top of my list of people I could say I've known who can be called good. Also knew a woman who lived up into her nineties, was bad unto making it easy to think her evil. I think we all know a few people we'd call bad unto evil who are not in prison, except the prison of their own minds. And we all know some people we'd call good according to our individual ideas of what it means to be good. I don't think of good a chalk line to walk without sin. I think of it more as an attitude toward life. 

bert stern

Somebody whose attitude toward life has compassion in it tends to be somebody we call a good person. Somebody whose attitude toward life has compassion absent turns out to be somebody we might call bad. We all know somebody we believe has no conscience. People without conscience tend to end up behind bars, get killed, or just fade from the picture, while people without compassion thrive in this phenomenal world, or seem to. The old hymn, Farther Along, plays in my head. Farther along, we'll know all about it, farther along, we'll understand why, cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine, we'll understand it all by and by. One of the things I love in this life is sitting in a hillbilly old-time religion church with everybody singing this song in their slow, one word at a time way. I think way down deep it's the lack of compassion in the world of making money that I have a hard time living with. In the early 1970s I read a book, Small is Beautiful, that rang my bells. If I were to go back and read it now, I have an idea I'd find I have lived its principles. I want to maintain my spot on the earth's surface I have dominion over with integrity unto the ground itself. I want my ground to be rich in trees and topsoil. I don't want to use it to make money, like lease it to pumpkin growers, or Christmas tree growers or any of the other possibilities that poison the land and the ground water. I can't help it that the ground water has been poisoned at the source, but I don't have to add to it. 

bert stern

My little spot that Spring Lizard Creek runs through, I've allowed my land to be itself. I've only made more money than I needed to get by on, living frugally, a few times. They didn't last long, just enough to catch up from falling behind. Some years ago I came to see the importance of living the way I want the world to be. I can't change the whole world. But it is my world that I live in, the community, the people I know, neighbors, my spot I pay taxes on. I don't live in LA, NY or DC. Those places are somebody else's concerns, not mine. I'm all the time hearing somebody start a sentence, "The world would be a better place if everybody would (fill in the blank)." The only thing everybody is going to do is ingest, evacuate and expire. So the whole world is not going to do any one thing. I can't change or benefit anything beyond my own small world I interact inside. In my own world, at home, here in the house, inside my head I have a degree of control. If I live the principles I believe the rest of the world would benefit from, then my world benefits. If I believe compassion would benefit the world, then I can regard the people and wildlife of my world with compassion and see if it does or does not. I've tried it. It does benefit. It benefits all concerned. My world turns into a better place. Out there in the flatland and across the sea is other people's worlds. Mine is here where I live. If I lived in NYC, there, too, my world would be the people I know, the people I interact with. If I treat the people in my world right, they treat me right. It comes down to how I want to be treated by the people around me. I regard them with respect and respect comes my way too. 

bert stern

Live the changes I want to see in the world, and my world becomes the way I want the world to be. I've found a good place where my world is the way I want it to be. My interactions with the people I know are friendly without suspicion, open to who the other is, and my world has become a world I enjoy living in every day. I've committed to the path of love, which is not a matter of pink teddy bears. Regarding the people around me with basic human respect is an act of love. Taking hay to the donkeys in the morning is an act of love. Lending a hand to somebody who needs an assist is an act of love. It doesn't need to be noticeable as such. It's the motivation in the heart, where it comes from that matters. Like in old-time hillbilly singing and music making, it must be from the heart or it's not music. If what I say in conversation comes from the heart and what I do comes from the heart, I've made my world a better place as I speak and as I do. Inside myself it's a very big deal. Outside self it may be a ripple, and that's ok. It doesn't even need to be a ripple. It doesn't need to be anything outside myself. When my attitude toward life says everybody around me is good people, then they are. If my attitude toward life were to say everybody around me sucks, then they do. And they get the blame. In my world is no television, except in the houses of everybody I know. I avoid everything on tv as corporate misinformation, deception its purpose. One of my rules of thumb is don't eat anything advertised on tv (except pizza). I don't want a new car and don't want the latest shaving equipment. I don't like being told with pants on fire urgency I need to buy something I don't want. Absence of television is automatic quiet and peace in my world.   

bert stern himself

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THE DECORATED MANCAVE

vada's chalk

Race season is upon us. This year we have a new mancave. Before, we went to the basement where a corner was the mancave with radio/cd player we listened to the race on that was playing upstairs on tv. On the basement's cement floor we stomped our cigarette butts. We talked as we felt like it without editing for kids. Times when the race was boring, Justin put radio on a heavy-metal station, long-hair auditorium rock, Led Zeppelin clones. My preference when listening to rock is punk, but Justin and Melvin don't care for punk. It doesn't matter that I'm not particularly a fan of auditorium rock, because I can listen to it without reaction. If I were to take control of the music for my own enjoyment, like they do, both of them would say, Uncle, before the end of the first minute of the first song. I like for my music to move ahead, have some drive. Long, slow guitar solos get boring after fifty years. For my enjoyment in the mancave, I'd want to hear The Used, Hole, Garbage, Jane's Addiction. Justin and Melvin would hate it. So I listen to snail slow heavy metal, long guitar solos, very few of them worth hearing a second time, or the first, Every once in awhile the dj will play a Stone's song and I send a mental thank you to the dj. And sometimes they play Billy Idol, who started as a London punker, in his American heavy metal period introducing punk rhythms into American metal. Also, we had the thrill of listening to Rodney Carrington, Larry the Cable Guy, David Allan Coe and others on cd. For me, who would rather be listening to a Dvorak quartet, there comes a time hearing somebody talk dirty the hundredth time, it turns into a chore to hear it. I confess, these comedians double me over laughing, the first, second and third times, but not the tenth.  

Justin and Melvin's smart-phones have rendered the mancave more or less irrelevant the last months. Each one will go to some video game they're playing and totally zone out. They're playing different video games, though in their minds they're communicating, like watching television together. When they're both completely gone into their cell phones, I sit back and relax and visualize art projects I'm working on. Invariably, I come to resting my elbows on my knees and chin in the palms of my hands, looking in my head at different possibilities in a new art project, how to construct something, steps to take. It won't be long before somebody says, "You doin all right buddy?" Woke out of my reverie, I say, "Yeah, I'm just making art." "OK, just wantin to be sure you're all right." "I'm all right. No problem." They go back to cell phone games and I return to whatever construction I was working on. Neither one has any idea about things I call art. And I don't have any idea about what's important to them, hunting. We all see it like we have our own interests. I don't make like knowing about art makes me any better than them knowing about hunting. In fact, from my point of view, their interest is more practical than mine.  I can't shoot an arrow down the shaft of the arrow I shot before it. Politically, they're of white working class Limbaugh mind, and I'm not. They can talk all they want from their point of view, and I can talk freely from my point of view. We don't argue. We just accept that each of us has our own point of view. They let me say the F-word, the C-word, the S-word, the L-word, the whole alphabet of forbidden words one is required to edit from one's speech to qualify a liberal. I'm not a liberal either. When I'm with my friends we say anything we want to say.

The mancave was really over when both Justin and Melvin got smart-phones. Vada had to wear shoes to come into the mancave, and somebody had to escort her on the steps. Crystal came to the mancave to have a cigarette and visit while Vada played before an audience. They want to do some serious work on the basement, inspiring Crystal to make a room upstairs into a mancave. Cheyanne not living with them anymore, her room was repainted and refurnished into the mancave. Even two pair of antlers were brought up from the basement. And the mancave has its own tv. Now the floor has carpet, meaning we have to use ashtrays. The television means we never can take a break from the tv, essential for my mental health. The door stays open and Vada likes to play on the floor with us around her. Crystal joins us. Crystal doesn't mind how we talk. We keep it cool when Vada is around. It wouldn't do for her to tell things we say at day-care. Vada is a spirit of light. I like having her in the room to distract me from the hours of television. If it were just the race, it would be ok, but with a thousand commercials it beats me down, makes me want to go home where it's quiet. I never listen to commercial radio at home, so I live free of commercials. By intent. Television on Sunday from one til nine at night and my circuits are fried. I enjoy watching the cars, then it's over, followed by hours of golf, and whatever sport is current. The mancave, before, was where I got away from the television. Listening to Aerosmith and Journey, bands I did not listen to in their time, is a welcome break from pictures of stringy cheese pizzas and cutting your cell phone bill in half with a chainsaw. Television has become surrealism, itself, but that still doesn't make it interesting enough to hold my attention for very long. 

We don't talk anymore in the upstairs mancave like we talked down in the basement mancave. In the basement, we sat in a circle and talked. In the upstairs mancave, we sit in line, like on the seat of a pickup with space between us, all facing forward. We sit and gape at the tv. Somebody says something from time to time. It's more a den than a mancave, painted and decorated. A clean floor for Vada to play on is a plus. Where the mancave before was my distraction from the television, now Vada playing on the floor is my distraction. She doesn't just play on the floor. She is in motion all the time. She has learned and knows well her charm holds our attention. She makes us laugh. All of us love her as our own. She loves Melvin like a giant teddy bear. She found her plastic bucket of colored chalk. Brought it into the middle of the floor. She sat on the floor, took all the pieces of chalk out, one at a time, spread them over a small space on the floor. I picked up the camera to get some pictures of the universe of her colored chalk spread on the floor. I got the first picture and Justin told Vada to put them up. She started putting them back into the bucket, one at a time. I got a picture of Vada picking up the pieces of chalk. Cheyanne saw me with the camera, an opportunity to photo-bomb. It's in her and can't be trained out of her. She jumped in and scooped up as many pieces as she could hold in both hands, dumped them into the bucket, went back for more, cleaned them right up. I was sitting there in awe of what had happened just as I went to take some pictures of Vada's chalk. They went away. Zip, they were gone. All I could do was laugh at what happened before my eyes. Whatever pictures I wanted to get were not meant to be. It was so much like an act of God, a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, I accepted it as such and had a good laugh at the curious sequence of events. It was like focusing in on a good photo of a bird and just as I'm ready it flies. 

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