VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE NEWS

The news has become so objectionable with Ebola as something to fear, another in the never-ending list of fears we cannot live without, I can't listen anymore. It's either proving Obama is the cause of Ebola or proving he is not. Cops kill unarmed people across USA daily, yet we're expected to trust the police state and fear a disease that killed one. Fear Isel or Isis, whichever. Fear immigration of poor people of color. It's kind of Old Testament, fear the Lord thy God. I was raised in that paradigm, fear the Father, fear God, fear the Law, fear Church, fear parents, and be hysterically afraid of Satan, cause he's gonna getcha if ya don't be afraid enough. Love was never an issue. Of course we love, cause we're s'posed to. That's understood. But fear comes first in the s'posed-to list and love is last, down there with no consideration at all. The fundamentalism I grew up in, the same as is purported to be Christian now, was all about fear and nothing about love. Love might be misunderstood by the "common" people to be carnal, and that aint it. So we don't go there, while the preacher is screwing this one and that one, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. The nonsense quoted from fundamentalist politicians is so ridiculous, I can't believe he or she is so free of embarrassment. My estimation of politicians has hit rock bottom and is furiously drilling a hole to take it deeper. Confidence in a politician, a fundamentalist, a cop, is not possible in me anymore. These three have shown themselves incapable of rational thought, which I already knew, but denied, looking to allow for exceptions. Never found any. 

Remember a short time ago the preacher in Kansas screwing a teenage boy to cure him of his homosexuality? Remember the tv evangelist, Jerry Lee Lewis's first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, he of crocodile tears on tv, who went to whores to peruse and sniff? Talk dirty to me, baby. To touch makes it a sin. Making the people two-fold more children for hell than they, themselves, is not a sin. Nor is hypocrisy. It's tradition. And to complicate the news further, it's election time. The Supremes recently ruled, predictably, lying in a political campaign legal. News? Really? Insurance against lawsuits for republicans. Now white man militias in cammo, carrying assault rifles, are talking of intimidating democrat voters at the polling places, black and tan people, women, profiles, anybody that looks like a Ay-Rab, or appears to be of an IQ above ten. Of course, white men would be free to pass, How y'doin, Bro? In my very most jaundiced thinking pre-1980, I'd have never guessed this would be the nature of the fix we're in during the course of time when everything that never worked became policy. Only thing the news is telling me: This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. I had no idea back in 1961 when I turned my attention away from television, how just that separation would separate me so definitively and so distantly from the world I live in. We who read books are the tiniest minority of all, unworthy of notice politically, unfit for consideration socially. I tell myself the absurdity "out there," in DC and Raleigh, is not my world. I don't believe in the entire system anymore. I have no confidence in Capitalism, no confidence in religion, no confidence in police state, no confidence in voting. The Supremes nipped what little confidence I had in voting. That the republican party goes to such ridiculous extremes to inhibit anti-republicans from voting, it makes me think there might be something to it.   

Before 1980, I voted against the worst of the candidates. Only found one to be for in my long history of voting, and he was crucified. Carter. Since 1980, I vote to be one digit that says, I want democracy. Voting has been my act of protest in police state. I know my vote  has no value outside myself. One party or the other, like Ralph Nader said of his direct role in turning the election over to Bush-Cheney, the losers, "the republicans will get us there first." Both parties are marionettes of the billionaires club. The democrat politicians like to pretend they're not in it for the money, we're here for you, while the republican campaign approach is fuck-all-y'all, and it works for them. The entire American political/economic system needs to break down entirely to restructure. As in construction, you want to put up a new building in the place of an old building, the old one must be taken down. Democracy wasn't real democracy before the word was used tongue-in-cheek, anyway. Considering the absence of value in my voting to the point that I fool myself in the act of voting, whatever the justification, I must vote. It is too important to the republican party that I not vote. Like I told the country club woman who said, I bet you voted for o-BA-ma, He's a sharp stick in the republican eye. When I take a moment to vote, it will be motivated only by an opportunity to be a sharp stick in the republican eye, albeit a minuscule grain of beach sand. I doubt the militias will actually appear at the polling sites, taking it for a propaganda sound-bite using the news to inhibit black people from making the effort. I don't even care anymore. I care about like I care who wins a football game. The game was amusing to see, but the outcome is the same, whoever wins, another game tomorrow night. Even though I see it for this is how an Empire crumbles, like reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, witnessing history in action, it continues to be distressing. Better to stop listening to the news than to start a Zoloft addiction.  

I wonder how republican politicians think up the stupid things they're saying, and it doesn't take long to find the answer. The Heritage Foundation. The politicians are scripted to appeal to the ignorant. Considering half the population is below average, they have 50% at the start. Strategy. I cannot participate in this belief system, can't listen to it anymore, don't even want to see pictures of the cast members. I've come to a place where I feel envy toward my friends who pay no attention to the news, don't vote, have never heard of Ted Cruz or Ann Coulter, unaware that democracy is over. At the same time, I'm grateful that I've followed our political system unto my own disillusionment. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. In my enlightenment, I look out the window and see my world, the world I live in. I look around this room and see the world I live in. The donkey meadow, the trees of autumn, a nice day with door open, recent paintings drying, Caterpillar outside lying in a patch of sunlight, the ground drying a little bit after five days and nights of rain. The fog that accompanied the rain made my world into a wonderland. Today, the sunlight makes my world into a wonderland, too. I can't see wasting my attention on the intentionally false when a fly just now flew into a spider web in the window's corner, the spider tying it up using Wonder Woman ropes, and the fly broke free. I am that fly. I broke free of the paralyzing power of the false. It has been amusing along the way, but amusing in a dark way. I am pulling my attention inward to my friends I care about who care about me. I will read in the life of van Gogh, paint when I feel it, write in my journal as blog, watch films from around the globe, read the columns of Chris Cox in his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye. The vacancy left by extraction of the false will fill up immediately like the hole left by my hand when I pull it from a bucket of water. I will vote because I believe it is important to vote as an American citizen, whether I believe in the political system or not, just to be a sharp stick in the republican eye.  

photos by tj worthington

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JEAN'S STORY: JUST SAY NO

Frequently in recent days I find myself thanking God I chose not to participate in the American Dream hierarchy, the climb for money, position, influence, power. I wanted to live my life outside that belief system. My friend Jean told me, and accurately, that I live like a perpetual student, like my home is my dorm room and what I do is study. I took that for a good call. I liked Jean's insights. She was a nurturing spirit whose nurturing was abused all her life. When it was used and tossed aside, she would be punished for being so vulnerable. She was the bottom of the pecking order, pecked at by her sister, her daughter, her grandkids. Everybody in her family looked down on her and used her like she was their slave. She fell for it. It was the only role she knew. I met her in her early 50s. By then she'd been through mental institutions, tossed around as a willing guinea pig. They want to test a new drug, use Jean, she can't say no. She was taking drugs for schizophrenia, which she did not have, and other bizarre things she did not have. She was a neighbor and friend of Jr Maxwell when I started going by to see him after work. Jr was in his shop when I stopped by this one evening. I stopped and sat with him in a wooden chair facing the open garage door that looked onto the highway of cars and trucks passing by. Jean appeared. She had walked from her house maybe two tenths of a mile down the road. She was a little  hazy in the head, shy, even backward seeming. Yet, when she spoke, I thought this woman is awake. She sat in a wooden chair and picked up the local paper from the floor next to Jr. She knew I wrote the weekly column on the editorial page. She read it while Jr and I talked. She spoke of what she'd read when she was finished in such an insightful way, I became curious what was going on with this woman I'd only seen walking beside the highway between her house and Jr's. He suggested we go to the house and have a drink. Jean made coffee for herself while Jr and I had some delicious white liquor. 

The three of us sat at the table and talked for two hours. I wanted to learn more about Jean. She came across meek and beaten down, while her spirit was radiant. She was like a dog that goes around with its tail between its legs, friendly and charming while suffering inside. We all three learned each other's stories over the next weeks, months and years, sitting at the table in the evening over liquor and coffee. Sometimes Jean would cook us a meal just because she wanted to. Jr, it turned out, was the only friend she had, the only person she knew who did not judge her. She was called the Crazy Woman of Whitehead. She liked to walk. The side of the highway was the only way she could walk to Jr's, so everybody saw her and took it for proof she was every bit as nutty as they'd heard. First thing when we met in Jr's shop, she said, "I'm bi-polar." She told me later that she would know somebody and be friendly, then she mentioned she was bi-polar and they abandoned her. She started telling everybody she met, up front, "I'm bi-polar." She also told me later that what struck her about me was I had no reaction, she never saw that it mattered to me. I told her what I was thinking at the time she said it: Who isn't? We're in duality. Everything about our existence wavers between two poles. Jr didn't hold it against her either. Out of the blue, she had two people in her life who did not look down on her and did not talk down to her. She sat at the table with two men older than herself listening to her and not judging her, not abusive in any way, nor dismissive in any way. The three of us were, each, one of us. Jr and I regarded Jean with the same basic human respect we gave one another. Jean was a valid individual, and an interesting one, 

She'd lived in mental institutions since she was about fifteen. Age 14 she married a guy in the Army, home on leave, to get out of the house, away from her mother and sister. She was taken to Army housing in Georgia and he went off to Nam, leaving her pregnant. At the base, she was a pregnant hillbilly kid and an outsider. She fell into a deep depression after the baby was born, was put in an institution, baby turned over to sister to raise. Periodically, they let her out and she had something of a life in puzzle pieces. Another husband who beat her and treated her like shit. He was a mean bastard. Then another version of same, even worse, and she gave up getting married. She had three kids that grew up with her off in institutions much of the time, and going about zombified by medications at home. Her oldest boy was on death row in Florida, the next boy had been murdered by way of something to do with the drug trade, the daughter was a Fundamentalist preacher with a gang of kids and a husband, all of them disrespecting Jean like she was their slave. I became appalled at what I saw happening to Jean as I came to know her better. One evening at the table she was singing the blues about what they were doing to her at the moment. It was without conscience, and she understated rather than exaggerated. I found a piece of paper and pencil, wrote "Just Say No." I pushed it to her across the table while she was talking, like passing a note in school. She looked at it, double-took, and said, "I can't." I said, "Yes, you can." She said, "I can't." I said, "It's the first word you learned, the easiest word in the English language, only two letters, one syllable." She maintained she is unable to say no. I said, "You have a problem and No is the solution. Just say No and the problem goes away." She thought it over for a few days and said No. It worked. Her daughter suddenly had issues with hate where TJ was concerned. 

I stood by Jean in her decisions, supported her. In the past, daughter called the authorities and had her institutionalized whenever she said no. Talking about what she'd done, the line she'd crossed when she said no, she said, "Next time they send me off...." I interrupted her and said, "There won't be a next time." I meant it as to say I'd lie down in front of the bulldozer; they'll have to go through me. She took it that I saw it psychically. Her interpretation of how I meant it gave her vision into the future with no more returns to the Thorazine shuffle. She wrote it off as done and never again worried about going back. By then, I knew Jean was the sane one in the whole bunch. In a time of trimming her budget, she decided to change car insurance for a few dollars less. She was required to have a form filled out by the director of mental health at the local facility. When she picked it up to return it to the insurance office, she saw under Diagnosis, Unknown. She came straight to me at my store, showed me the paper in an impotent rage that she was on drugs for schizophrenia and bi-polar and others, a guinea pig, and all along the diagnosis was Unknown. She was furious. All she had been through and all the horrors she'd been told she had and was medicated for did not exist. She was all right and had been all right all along. They'd used her for a guinea pig. She wanted to stop taking the medications, but I suggested she do it through Dr Cahn, who could bring her out of the dependency slowly. She was a short time shaking those drugs that kept her woozy of mind all the time. When her self came forward, she was the happiest she'd ever been. She put an end to the ongoing abuse from family under her own power, and she lived her life. She and my friend Carole became friends. She had support all around her. She only lived a couple more years and they were happy for her. She was, for the first time in her life, among people who appreciated her for herself. And she flowered.  

photos by tj worthington

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ASSHOLE

Rain all day, sometimes big rain. Wind. Yellow leaves fly through the air on the way to the ground. This year, the trees with the yellow leaves turned first. The trees with red leaves are largely still green. We'll have an extended fall color season this year. First yellow, then orange, then red. The color change is so particular year to year, I wonder how it can be said what weekend will be the peak time or what kind of a coloration it will be. I don't recall but one prediction being accurate, the year the talking heads said it would be a poor year for color. It was a dry year. The leaves just turned brown. I pay little to no attention to predictions for what kind of winter we'll have. Already, I've seen two projected forecasts for the winter. One said it will be long and extra cold with much more snow than ever. The other said it will be the mildest winter ever. Winters are like Nascar races: impossible to predict. We've had four days and nights of dense fog accompanied by sprinkling rain, until today when it poured in torrents. It's on the verge of tiresome. Yet, no matter how muddy the ground gets, I prefer wet to ground so dry it cracks and the springs dry up. Springs are largely dried up anyway. So many exurban houses in the landscape draining the underground water. Wells have to go deeper and deeper. The society of waste comes to the mountains, drains the water, poisons the land, dismisses as ignernt hillbillies the people whose home this land is, impatient, intolerant, wanting everything now, just like on tv. I was about to compare it to white people pushing the Indians off their home continent, killing them by the millions, and say the exurbanites are all but killing us. But, they are killing us with cancer. County government doesn't care. The ones poisoning us are paying more taxes than we are, so we have no voice. 

I'm seeing an experience a few weeks ago when I was introduced to someone I already knew, though wished I didn't. She looked at me, nodded and turned away. I said in my head, Thank you. A few months ago in the coffee shop I mentioned to a woman I was talking with at the bar I watch Nascar races. The one above who nodded, who I was not talking to, said, "They just drive around and around in circles," smug, proving she's more sophisticated than I, doesn't waste her college-educated intelligence watching working class tv shows. I wanted to be vulgar, nasty vulgar, the kind of vulgar that makes an enemy for life, though condensed and softened my response to, "In the very most minimal way of looking at it, yes." Her nose shot straight up and she was gone. Again, I said in my head, Thank you. Made an enemy for life without even trying. It hurts so good. Such moments remind me that I left the city for the mountains to get away from people like her, the white middle-class suburbanites. Now they've packed in around me so tightly I am glad the Republicans are squeezing the middle-class into the working class. I actively despise how they regard and treat the mountain people. I told Selma at the beginning of the coffee shop that when the right people find this place, I'm gone. Turns out, Selma was Cuban and the right people stayed away. Now Becca has it and she's run off the wrong people, so now I go in there and all I see is the right people. I have no reason to be there. The people I used to go in there to see have been run off. Not high end. Not PC enough. The end came when a country club woman in there said to me, "I bet YOU voted for O-BA-ma." I said, "Sure did. He's a sharp stick in the Republican eye." She said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I thought, duh, and said, "I'm a SO-cialist!" I don't want this kind of conversation, ever, anyplace, with anybody. The coffee shop is past tense for me. Another one of those moments when I get with self and say, I didn't come here for this shit. 

The fun part in saying I'm a SO-cialist, she told within a few days everyone she knows that knows of me, he's a socialist. Hooray. Five or so people I never want to meet will see to it for me. I don't even have to think about avoiding them. They avoid me first. I'm pretty sure I have a name for being arrogant among those people. I can easily give them cause to call me much, much worse. Recalling a line from a Steven Segal film. A woman warning him about the people he's going up against, they're bad, really bad. He said, "I'm worse, much worse." And a line from Runaway Train when Voight was told he was a beast. He said, "Worse. Man!" That's how I feel in the company of people that look down their noses at the mountain people. I want them to call me arrogant. I want them to call me as bad as they can make it, inspire the people they talk to to avoid me, so when they're introduced to me they nod, turn away and think: asshole. Alas, I have some neighbors, the most openly fickle people I can think of, fake from the surface to the core, totally informed by tv, Republican, Christian, who once wanted me to be their friend. Didn't last long. Didn't get started. They really tried my ideal of loving neighbor as self. The closest I can come is to allow them who they are, recognizing we do not connect in any way. I'm old enough to know from repeated experience that attempts to go against the recognition never works, leads only to hard feelings and another cluster of enemies, their gossip circles, for life. An aunt passed to me something her husband told her when he was living, If you don't want it started, don't start it. Confucius could have said that. Often I am called to remind self of original purpose coming here, none of it social. 

Talking with my friend Jay at Chris Cox's reading at intermission, he was saying he has too much going on, too much he's involved in, it's stressing him. I said, Man, you don't need that shit. You live on a mountain. Get to know your mountain. It will be your friend. I mentioned that I've had spells of involvement in more than I was comfortable dealing with, going to meetings. Periodically, I've had to pull back to the people I care about who care about me and let the rest go. He's not of that kind of temperament. I didn't want to tell him to do as I do, because my way is not his way. I only told him how I've solved the issue for myself. Not to say do it my way. Only to illustrate how I chose for my own circumstances. He will find his way according to his own circumstances. I wouldn't want to influence him any other way. He's not as comfortable yet with being disliked as I've become. Or so I guess. It would not do for me to advise him. He has good brains. He'll figure it out. I just wanted to say he can find a solution to his satisfaction. If I were to hear myself start a sentence, you should, I would have to do penance for at least two days. First thing I'd do is retract everything said, immediately. Then I'd go inside to the place that sentence came from and educate self again that I have no right, any way I look at it, to presume to know anyone else's should, when there is no should to it. I can't name my own shoulds, sure as hell can't name somebody else's, especially when I don't even believe it is a word worth being in the language. I don't, and would not, rule the world, so I just don't use the meaningless word. When I don't use it, it's not in my world. I feel like I've found a good balance of involvement / non-involvement that keeps me engaged without stress. It has not always been this way. It comes from allowing the flow and flowing with it. Now that I think I've found my own flow, it feels really awkward when I step outside it. I have to pull back into it. As I get used to it, it becomes easier to keep in tune with and easier to jump back into when distracted out of the flow for a period of time. The flow is in my center, feels like solar plexus is where I connect with it. In my own flow is where I belong. I want for nothing else.  

photos by tj worthington

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GOING HOME

air bellows rock formation

My surprise disappearance for three nights, two full days and two half days has left Caterpillar unhinged. She was shut in the house the whole time. I'd told her I'd return soon when I went out the door, just going for a doctor appointment. I always close her in the house when I leave for assurance she's safe from dogs and coyotes. It's a dangerous world around here when you're the right size for a Happy Meal and slow. She has safe places outside she likes to lie still and watch the bird activity, and the places sunlight falls different times of day. I attempted to send her messages by way of telepathy that I'm detained for a few days, but will return. First time I entered the house was for ten minutes, to change clothes, put down some food for her, put fresh water in her bowl, turn around and leave. She did not bother to come out from her hidden sleeping place to see me. Cats mourn so deeply, I've seen when I am gone too long a cat will pretend it doesn't see me, hasn't noticed I'd returned. This will go on for an hour or more. I called to Caterpillar and told her I was back. Then left. Chris Cox was reading from his new book, The Way We Say Goodbye, at the library from 10-1 Saturday. I wanted to be there, and I had four copies of an Old-Time Herald issue for him and his manuscript of the book he'd sent me to read. I felt it imperative to be there to deliver the items as Chris lives down around Asheville and doesn't get up this way a whole lot. I never drift that far from home anymore. Chris is someone I think of as a friend, though I see him so seldom, I see people I don't know at all more than Chris. We met in the mid 1980s and since then maybe we've been in touch a dozen times at most. Every time we meet, it's like last time was last week.

chris cox reads out loud

I was anxious in the back of my mind at the hospital hoping to be out of there in time to make it to Chris's reading. I'd been told I might go home Saturday morning. If not, I'd have to stay all weekend. It was a horrifying prospect at first, but after being in there a few days, I could have easily relaxed into a few more since it's a new day at the hospital in Sparta. I wanted to be back with Caterpillar, knew she was worried and lonesome. I'd asked a neighbor to keep her fed. I hoped to be out Saturday morning in time to go home, change clothes and return for Chris's reading. Without these two concerns, I'd have been happy to stay. Crystal brought my Van Gogh biography. I was fine. It was crazy-making, however, to be in a room with a tv that had 50 channels and all of it nothing. I caught a few minutes of Jimmy Fallon on Tonight. He's funny sometimes. He failed to hit my funny bone and I clicked him off. Surfing the channels, a few seconds at each one, I saw murder, killing, shooting, investigating killings, guns, pointing them rudely at others, threatening with them. People I know who watch television all complain there's nothing worth seeing on a hundred channels. I watched ten or fifteen minutes of two soccer matches. I like to see the perfect control those guys have kicking the ball. Nonetheless, I never took to sports for the main reason I saw no point in wasting energy, attention and time chasing a ball. Dogs chase balls. I can watch tv football with company, but cannot watch two minutes of it alone. Alone, I'd rather have silence. In my brief idle moments channel-surfing, it made me shake my head to see so much furious violence, so much police state activity. I understand why we have police state--just like on tv. Life imitating kitsch. Kitsch imitating life. Which is it? It's both. 

air bellows outdoor museum of contemporary art

I lay there in the hospital bed watching the images of killing by gun, one after the other, unable to watch more than three seconds each, surrealist tv, feeling sorrow for the American people. No wonder our "representatives" are so nuts. They "represent" people whose heads are full of these images continually, at work, asleep, as are their own heads. All I saw was distraction by destruction. The tv shows were distractions. The commercials were distractions. The news shows were distractions. Cell phones are distraction. I saw us a nation of people whose heads are loaded with extremely violent distractions, static. The static, itself, has become appealing, relaxing white noise. Our "representatives" operate by the television standard that only money matters. I feel sorrow for the American people when I have my periodic insight into what is happening on the television. Everything interrupted by commercials. This, I suspect rather strongly, is the source of conversation in America characterized by interrupting anecdotes with interruptable anecdotes. I do my best not to be annoyed by interruption anymore, have come to accept it's what happens, that I live in a world of people whose attention span makes a cat's attention span appear controlled. I talk with people as if an interruption were not coming soon, though when it happens, and it always happens, I am now able to shut it down easily in my mind. It's over, done, don't even attempt to get it back, just go on. I've got so rude that when I see somebody in town, stop and talk a few minutes, their cell phone goes off in whatever personal touch ring they've chosen, they go straight to the phone and start talking, I leave. I don't even say goodbye. I'm never missed. It's not even noticed I left. Once interrupted, I'm done. That's the grumpy old bastard within. This is my major problem with television, its alarming numbing effect on the people I live among anywhere in America.

caterpillar

I was able to make it to the library half way through Chris's reading, walked in during intermission, was directed to the snack table where I had lunch; meatballs, raw broccoli and carrot slices, in memory of Jack and Jenny I missed as much as I missed Caterpillar. Chris's reading was supreme. He read some of the humorous stories. He couldn't make it through the ones close to the heart. Chris's writing is automatically close to the heart, as he writes from the heart, just like his mountain musician grandpa, Clif Evans, made music. Chris chokes up and can't go on when it's emotional for him. One can write the memories from close to the heart much easier than one can read them publicly, even sometimes alone. Most notable for me, since I already knew his writing was music, was his ability to read in his talking rhythm. A few times I wondered if he might be telling something as an aside or actually reading. He was reading. It seemed like he was ad libing from time to time, and I remembered he writes like this. This is part of what I think of as his mastery. Good public reader. I was happy for him to see him having a good time and being received so wide open by the people there to listen. I went straight home from the library. Jack saw me drive down the road and brayed his excitement. I took some sweet grain to the donkeys as soon as I reached the house and put everything down. I let Caterpillar come to me in her own time. I put on a Warren Miller documentary of Xtreme skiing in severe mountains around the world, a visual distraction. I held Caterpiller and talked to her. She purred, I purred, relaxed and in place, telling each other how glad we are to be together again. I explained to her what happened; the doctor would not let me go home, they put me in the hospital and wouldn't let me out. I tried to send her messages by telepathy, though I don't know how. She started crying. I knew the four-leggeds cried, but did not recall ever seeing one cry before. She wept. I realized she was deeply hurt by fear I was not coming back, had nothing to go by that I would, locked in the house, food just about gone. It tore me up that Caterpillar was crying. I let her cry and comforted her, shedding some tears with her. She wants me to hold her more than ever and she stays close by. She's so comfortable now when I hold her she falls asleep and snores. A cat who has never liked to be held for very long since she was a kitten is now falling asleep in my arms and wants me holding her all the time. I don't mind. We're both in our later years, all the more precious to each other.   

caterpillar

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