RAINY DAY RAMBLE

foot of somebody's bed

by tj worthington

Woke up in the morning, saw the new project I thought was finished with the white against the blue. Didn't like it at all. I knew in a tenth of a second the original vision I'd rejected was It, afraid it would be too dark. Conceptual vision was all blue. I put the blue I wanted to use on the frame and thought it too dark to make the whole thing such dark blue. None of the other colors worked out that I thought might be better. Two colors somehow trivializes the composition, raises it to its least potential. Even before taking carrots to the donkeys, I took brush and painted blue over all the white, and it sang. The blue was it. I like how the shadows work on the dark blue better than on white. The shadows are black. And the light lightens the blue considerably. The reclining T, the foot of the bed, is outlined with a black line. In dim light across the room, as it is now, it is a dark rectangle with a ghost of the reclining T, and the ghost of the frame's edge. I like how the blue makes such black shadows. Brings to mind the Stones album, Black and Blue, a favorite. It was one of their blues albums. I like how the blue paint changes with the light. This is simple as it gets. I was concerned that two colors on this one might be toeing in a little too close to complex. Needed to step back to original shape and nothing else. All one color and dark, it is subtle. Two colors, it is not subtle at all. This particular one I feel works best subtle. Good to have it settled.

Rain all day today and the forecast says big rain tomorrow with storm. A good time to open the door for Caterpillar to look outside, see the rain, back up and say she's seen enough. She doesn't climb trees or stalk birds anymore. Before, she would go into the woods across the road, sit still until she became a gray rock. Birds paid her no mind, another gray rock. The camouflage gave her the advantage. Now, she sits or lies on the ground where I feed the birds, sits still and watches the birds peck all around her. Her whiskers twitch and she makes involuntary squeaking sounds. She never jumps at them anymore, only watches. She quit hunting five or so years ago. I have seen her leap straight up about four feet and swat at a flying snowbird. The time I saw it, she hit a wing, set the bird to wobbling, but it caught control and flew away. I realized then she was experienced swatting birds out of the air. I didn't like it, but accepted it as the way of nature, advancing the birds to their next lifetime. I never felt right about the cats killing so many birds, but I don't feel right taking so much trash to the dump, either. Maybe a snowbird becomes a nuthatch next time around. Environment consciousness has been an issue with me all my life. It took awhile for our polluted condition to get into corporate news, like it took a long while for the press to dare note police brutality. Propaganda news tells us about Russia and China not being free like we are. They don't have even remotely near as much killing as we in USA have, not near the prison population, not near as many people bullied by cops and killed by cops. The press calls the killer cops rogue. When it is the same all over the country, cop murders turning up daily as randomly as school shootings appeared a few years ago, all giving the same justification, "I feared for my life," it's scripted.

Who speaks Elizabethan English in working class America unless scripted? The attitude is that the cops are at war with the population. They are trained and equipped for war with us. The orders come from on high, and I don't mean Jesus. This is the law enforcement of corporate police state serving prisons for profit, and keepin the niggers scared. He had a gun. He had a knife. He reached for my gun. I appreciate the people making cell phone videos of the mafia style beatings and the killings at their own serious risk. It requires a readiness to take whatever comes next. I see DOJ investigating the Ferguson killing like I see police departments investigating themselves. If DOJ is not where orders come from, DOJ is complicit with where they come from. We had an internal investigation and found everything according to protocol. The protocol must be the problem, not rogue cops. Of course, they're careful only to kill or brutalize the poor, who lack the resources for recourse in court. It is a physical manifestation, a measure of how much the American working class, middle class and ruling class hate the poor. It used to be indifference. In corporate police state, propaganda has turned the indifference to active hatred. And the people wanting them to kill even more niggers call themselves Christians, brag about it aggressively, the fundamentalists who want to force everybody else to worship their vengeful God of racial purity, fear and punishment. They give all other Christians a bad name, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians and other varieties I can't think of. It's something like ISIS usurping the name Islamic State.

It's at this point I don't like to think about it further. It's merely an explanation of how things got this way, and to follow the line of thought from there on drifts into the bog of engagement, which I don't care to commit to. I'm just reading what I see. Yesterday, at the gas station talking with the woman at the register I know to be a False News watcher, which is ok by me. I like her, we have brief conversations when I pay for gas. Two black women came in while I was paying. My heart opened to them with a loving empathy, sorrow for having a glimmer of an idea of the genuine fear they have of the police and white people, growing up and living their whole lives knowing their pigmentation is a target. I felt an impulse to kneel down, touch my forehead to the nearest woman's feet, and bawl in shame. Now that I've seen what police have done to black people all my life that I did not know about, no attention given it by the press, I feel a deep repentance when I see someone black, not for anything I've done, but for the color of my skin. They bring the shame I feel to the surface, identification with my pigmentation for the pain and sorrows "my people" do and have dealt "her people." I can't do anything to change any of it, but I don't have to be it inside myself. I'm grateful to see in myself that I have become someone unable to hate. I don't hate the so-called Christians, because I feel like I understand them to some degree. I came up in the world of people who usurped the word Christian, and ran for my life. So grateful I had what it took to run.    

*