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.    

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THE LAND OF FORBIDDEN WORDS

Have been questioning what to write about. Don't want to bring readers down by being honest and don't want to misrepresent my meaning by pretending to be up when I'm not. My being, from blood vessels to aura, rejects s'posed-to for s'posed-to sake. Comes under grandmother saying, "What will people think?" I want to ask her what people? Everybody will think what they think and it will be about themselves, not me, whatever it is they think. I'm torn between two worlds, one going out and one coming in. The one going out is familiar, the one coming in is not. The police brutality I've been seeing lately disturbs me. It's only new because cellphones with video cameras are new recording the brutality that has always been going on. Ask anyone black. Since the "patriot act," we-the-people is a concept of the past. We the people have no recourse with "law enforcement" invasions or executions. White people subject to police brutality are enraged, while the black people know to take it as the way things are. I did not realize that black people were in the cops' cross-hairs to the degree they are. Every day an unarmed black man, woman or child is killed. He had a gun. I was afraid for my life. Meaning: it was a nigger. That's all the evidence needed to clear the cop of "wrong-doing." It's looking like our judicial system is dead set on eliminating the black people by way of prison or killing. 

Sometimes when I read Cornell West or hear him in an interview, he surprises me, but never shocks me. I did not understand, before the Ferguson, Missouri, murders, how consciously black people are targeted by "law enforcement." That cops kill is now policy. The closest to punishment they're given is a paid vacation--lay low a few weeks until the press forgets about it. White corporate media looks the other way, white people pay it no mind. In the world of white people, black people don't figure at all, except it's unacceptable in white middle class circles to say nigger. Not that black people matter to them. It's a code indicating status. It's about self and has nothing to do with black people. Cornell West surprises me when he reveals what black people are thinking. It's not shocking, because it's what an oppressed people would be thinking. White people keeping black people down is denied in white circles and a way of life in black circles. Black people, rightfully for self-preservation, know to keep their thinking to their own circles. Thus stretching the racial divide even wider. This just one of the many divisions widening in our time. I saw a video clip today from a courtroom where a black woman was in the witness stand talking to and about the cop that shot her granddaughter in the head while sleeping, after breaking into her house, and wrongfully accusing her of resisting the thug invasion. My heart wrung dry for the woman wailing openly in public with a courtroom full of white people looking at her, the stone faces of statues. Totally indifferent. But nobody will say nigger. That's disrespectful. 

If you want to know what the cops are thinking, listen to Rush Limbaugh. Angry. Angry cause the enwords are living on welfare white folks are paying into. Yer taxes is going to pay enwords not to work, make em lazier'n ever. I was thinking in the UK they have a law about hate speech in media, so Rupert Murdoch crossed the sea where corporate control wants hate media. Keeps the masses divided, keeps them hating each other while they all get fleeced. The cops there kill very few. I won't venture that the Brits are less racist than Americans, but they are much less violent about it. Also, they're not a gun culture. I don't want to play the game of one place is better or worse than another. Though we live in the most violent culture on earth, I am able to live my life in peace, except for the violence that comes through the news. I saw a preview, a trailer, of a movie a few days ago with a title I made it a point not to notice, guns pointing, guns shooting, guns threatening, gunshots echoing. Fast forward. I do like the occasional men-with-guns movie, but only as a genre, now and then. The little tv I see a week, Sunday afternoon races, football, basketball, baseball, golf, commercials, does something to my head, especially the commercials, the interruptions by commercials. I see them, but turn them off in my head, a fiction I like to believe for self-justification. After seeing a Burger King commercial, driving through town, seeing the Burger King building, the commercial gives it something of a golden glow. It bothers me to see the fakery of corporate media creating a fake world that gives propaganda reality. "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Spoken by William Casey, 1981, CIA director. Their program is accomplished. We are there. 

I've been snapping in my mind today at people who want everything to be sweet and lovely, blue skies every day, the bluebird of happiness flying by, perish a negative thought. Positive thinking is only half of it. I'm laughing at self thinking of the Carter Family, Keep On The Sunny Side, and Jimmy Martin's Sunny Side of the Mountain, how I love these songs for their meaning, understanding the sunny side of the mountain is where things grow best. I tell myself to forget about cops killing black people, and white people now too. The only thing it tells me is the police hate us. We read that loud and clear. And they don't like the hate that's coming back at them. Makes them hate us all the more. Justice isn't even a word anymore. I tell myself to quit thinking about such as this. And I do. Yet it lurks in the back of my mind when I'm acting like it's not there. I tell myself it's not my concern, I'm neither black nor a cop. However, what it tells me is when they decide to put me in the cross-hairs, I have no recourse either. To ignore this is to ignore police state. What else can I do? They have the guns and the law literally on their side. In this time, I am a criminal just by being a citizen. I think it's called fascism, another word it's not polite to use in public. The other F-word. This is the north side of the mountain, the part that's in the shade when the sunny side of the mountain is in full sun and I'm thinking it's wonderful. It is. And it's also the other. It's both. It's the yin and yang, balance. Though I like the peace where I am, I still live in this landscape of commerce and state that I live in. It's the broader landscape. I cannot deny it. Have no reason to deny it. The sunny side has no meaning without the dark side. The dark side has no meaning without the sunny side. Sorrow for my black brothers and sisters overwhelms me in a time when this understanding of the racist nature of the justice system is new to me. I knew it was racist before, but not like what I see now. Even the pope can't do anything about it. All I know to do is not be part of the problem. I can't change the justice system. It's the world I live in. I don't have to be of it. I continue to go my own way. 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD REBEL WITH ATTITUDE

antoni tapies

This morning talking on the phone with my friend Carole, I was talking about how paranoid I've become about driving. An alarming number of people I know have been given tickets over the last year. I've not seen it in the past anything like it is now. The state has it set so you don't get out of a ticket for less than $200. The ticket may be less, but court costs and fees run it up. Obviously, the highway patrol has increased the quotas for patrolmen, keeping state revenues up in a time when the working people of the state are bringing in less income, hence paying less taxes. What do you do? Screw the working poor. They're easy to rape. They have no recourse. You never see a Cadillac by the side of the road with a highway patrol car behind it, blue lights flashing. The attitude of cops toward we the people has become more hostile, year by year, to the point we "citizens" (a dead word) are taken for criminals, treated like criminals, spoken to as criminals. They think they're being smart in the manner of arrogant people. They're making enemies and stand all the taller for it. This is why we did not want police state. Now it's a law that police departments are right to exclude the more intelligent applicants from a job as a cop. I thought that was already a natural law. It's like making a law requiring us to observe gravity. Throw something up in the air and if it keeps on going you're arrested. I said a whole lot more than this, talking with Carole, that I'm too paranoid to repeat in print. Paying the fine is bad enough, then the hell you're put through from the moment you see the blue light until it's finally over, regarded a criminal every step along the way. Franz Kafka and George Orwell were prophets. We are now living in the adult world they foresaw. I lived it throughout childhood and youth, as have many. It is particularly reprehensible to see Kafka become the way of American enforcement. It must be inevitable, a process, a pattern. We laugh now at the old slogan, to serve and protect, like we laugh at wind, rain, sleet or snow, except in a Jerry Lee Lewis song.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I was telling Carole that all my adult life cops and people in authority positions dislike me on sight. I don't have to make a face, say something smartass, nothing. They look at me and they see the enemy. It's so close to a hundred percent that I'm used to it. I've learned to go slack in the face of authority the way black people have learned that when a cop stops you, you go slack, be passive, no resistance. Otherwise, they beat the shit out of you, and might anyway. When you're white, it's not so overt. They don't give you respect, but they also don't treat you like a coon. People that go about with a superior attitude regard me exactly the same. On sight, like reading an aura, an authoritarian of any sort, official or self-styled, sees the enemy when they see me. I think my eyes have something to do with it. My eyes do not show respect for uniform or position. Nor do they show fear. They show absence of interest. That's what I feel. I know people I would call friends who have been involved in law enforcement in one way or another, people whose egos don't require they be deferred to as authority. The ones that need to be looked up to the most are the ones that hate me. I have this objectionable way of regarding people as who they are themselves, seeing through the transparent mask of appearance. I have this odd way of knowing people for who they are. Like when I saw Maureen Stapleton play Stella in Streetcar Named Desire, I saw Maureen Stapleton playing Stella, an actress, an artist performing a role. I don't know that I've ever lost sight of a performance enough to see just the role. Maybe in childhood I could have, but don't recall. Pre-teens I was in love with actress Claudette Colbert. Susan Hayward, too. Colbert as mother, Hayward as whore. My grandfather kept a picture on the wall of reclining Susan Hayward in his garage. It was the only thing I wanted after grandpa died, but couldn't ask anybody to attempt to mail glass. I imagine it's in a landfill by now.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I'm recalling the time of the music store. The parking lot was across the street. PhDs were a riot. I could see it in them getting out of the car. It's a certain trim of a beard, a stance, presentably dressed in something English, and professorial patterns in behavior. I like talking and visiting with intelligent, educated people. I like it very much. One comes in the door, I speak, we engage  in brief conversation. Right away I see he is sizing me up, asking test questions, assessing my knowledge in relation to his. That's when I say them for those. It's all it takes. Don't even have to go so far as to say aint. I see the conclusion register in his eyes that it's just another yokel, exactly as per expectation in his wife's home town. I realize in that moment this is not an intelligent, educated individual, and I lose interest too, at the same time. Its in my horoscope. Not many years ago I found a friend from the years just after high school by way of internet. We emailed quite awhile. Turned out he had a PhD in Psychology; mental institutions, teaching at a university, in charge, authority, retired. I got really tired of his emails full of instructions that I am to read Henry Kissinger's memoirs, lists of assignments and essay test questions. I didn't do any of the assignments and sure as hell did not read Henry Kissinger's self-praise. I started writing the blog and he'd quiz me on what I'm talking about, told me to explain this and that, explain, explain, you're wrong, something else is the case. The worst, according to an old Sufi saying, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when he told me to explain something I'd put up in the column on the right, of quotations, the one from the Tao te Ching, Not knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. Another essay question to be graded. All I answered was, "You had to be there." Explain the Tao te Ching to a PhD in psychology? He's Doctor Science: he knows more than I do. Of course he'd heard of Carl Jung. No matter how I would have explained it, he'd have known better than I did. He really didn't get it and I couldn't help him with it. It was too wide a strait for a bridge. It wasn't long after that I told him to quit writing me and unfriended him on facebook. Next thing, I got another list of essay questions to answer. I blocked him from my email. He had become an authority. He let me have it for not addressing him Dr, saying, I have a lot invested in my PhD. I said, I don't give a shit.

 

antoni tapies

 

It's the same with people who believe having more money than I have makes them my superior. I tend not to see it that way, nor do I honor the expectation. They call me strange because my eyes don't light up and grovel in the mud of greed when they speak down to me. I am able to give authority to someone I assess deserves it, like a martial arts sensei, or a meditation master, a teacher of something I want to learn. Just because somebody puts on a certain kind of clothes doesn't mean shit to me. I see an individual human being; their clothes usually show what they want me to think about them. Carole suggested my resistance to authority personnel goes back to daddy. Bingo. He was not right in the head. He did not adhere to the rational. Didn't pay much attention in school. He never saw but one look in my eyes after a certain point, indifference, nothing. Sometimes he'd explode, I want some respect outta you! The kid would think and dare not say: Show me something to respect. My eyes came to show absence of interest. This is what authoritarians trigger in the look they see. I could not talk back or defend self or explain. You cannot control my mind, I am the enemy. I used my eyes to say it. This, I suspect, is the root of why authoritarians and people who need to be seen high up hate me on sight. They see no light of respect in my eyes, the look of the enemy. It kept me in trouble all the time in the Navy; authorities everywhere requiring obeisance in the form of a salute and being called sir. Out of the Navy, I never said sir again but in irony. It runs awfully deep, so deep I choose to leave it be and not bother with changing it. I feel like it serves me well. It keeps me away from people I don't want to be around without any effort on my part. The same as my attitude that anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me keeps the pretentious away, indifference to self-importance keeps authoritarians away, too. Win-win.    

 

antoni tapies himself

 

 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD WAKES UP

romare bearden

This morning waking around 7, I turned over to go back to sleep. Lying there waiting for unconsciousness to take me away, my mind went to grumbling. I'd switch channels, think about something else, the grumbling continued. The gripe that ran from one concern to the next was seeing so much hate boiling throughout the country. Remembering in childhood what we used to call American individualism, gone now, given over to you're right or you're wrong. We've gone from individualism to a rage for sameness, from attempting to understand to zero-tolerance. It used to be important to "let your conscience be your guide." In today's world going by one's conscience is a direct line to prison. Cops used to just kill poor black people and say, he had a gun. Now they're killing poor white people too. "You're wrong," is something spoken freely now like it's good grammar. It wasn't long ago that saying, "you're wrong," was rudeness its very self, though it's how we talk now, meaning my opinion is valid, yours is not. I can't give over to it. I'm still locked down in individualism, rights of the individual to be cool or a geek, following conscience and allowing others their individual rights. It's like everyday life has become a true-and-false test. You're either right or wrong. Too, sameness has been every bit as much an American passion as individualism, two sides of the same coin. The time of individualism was in what I call the Acoustic Age, before electricity. In this time when all traditions are breaking down, evidently American individualism and reverence for conscience had to go as well. Historians will have a ball deciphering this time when, as usual, the politicians can only be counted on to lie to us, and the press is corporate-controlled propaganda telling us even bigger lies than the politicians.

 

 

I'd turn again, switching channels, telling self I pay too much attention to a world I have absolutely no say in; what I think and feel is of zero consequence. Vote? The Supreme Court put an end to belief in the validity of voting. The general falseness in human society, civilization, pulled me into resentment, wanting to do something about it. What? Cry? Growing up being taught in school and believing the individual is an important entity, it's hard to see the individual reduced to a marketing target and a product in one. I tell myself over and over, let it go. Some months ago I turned my back to news about politicians and started paying attention to the news among people. Killings. I see fascist-minded teabaggers strutting about, AKs slung over their shoulders, making noise about Constitutional rights, confronting cops and intimidating people around them. If they'd been black, the news would have been about the cops killing them, not just one or two cops, but an army of cops. When it's white boys: Zup bro? Seeing the hate in racism that has been hunkering down out of sight come to the surface, it's like seeing a volcano spewing steam just before it blows. This is the part that concerns me most. As for the people involved, I say let them do what they gotta do. They're the guys I avoided in school, bullies and the jerks that hung around with bullies. Morons is what I thought of them then, and I was not an A student. Didn't take much to see it. I don't like to use the word anymore, like idiot or stupid. When it comes to invalid sweeping generalizations, it's the apex of egoism to say such of another. Other people use the words, I don't care. The restriction is only for myself by way of my own reasonings that are not necessarily somebody else's.

 

 

I lay in the bed thinking, What are you doing to yourself? Paying attention to the swirling shit in a wastewater treatment plant. I was seeing my mind occupied with what's wrong, injustices, hate, killing, racism, and in one word, the false. From channel to channel I found resentments, judgments, dislikes aplenty. I started to see it was my own resentments and judgments that drew me to these pie slices of the news. I was drawing these details into my mind the way iron filings fly to a magnet. The theme went on relentlessly until I started getting it that I am bringing myself down. That somebody killed somebody in a Waffle House is over and done. Me thinking about it isn't going to do anything but mess up my mind with details so not relevant to my life they're only distraction. I hate it for a suburban American college student pepper-sprayed in the face by a cop for wanting a better world where this doesn't happen. But it's something every day. I find that caring for all the mournful causes around the globe and people being mean to each other takes me into my own dark side and holds me there in resentments, aggravation, disgust, suppressed rage: drama for drama's sake, something to do when there's nothing to do. I see movies and read to entertain my light side, and pay attention to news to entertain my dark side. I can call that balance, but it's out of balance. It appears the static of the distractions rules in my mind. I think of listening to the Charlotte FM station, 90.7, driving on the Parkway. When I pass a wall of mountain on the south side of the road, the Charlotte station is gone and a station from Blacksburg, Virginia, comes in with static. When the south side of the road opens again, the Charlotte station comes back, sometimes with the Blacksburg station in the static background. Both stations carry the whole range of static along the stretch north of here for several miles. I saw my mind this morning divided between two stations, neither one coming in well.

 

 

I turned over again wanting to stop that thinking and it wouldn't end. I thought, meditate or something, focus on empty mind, see one thing  and stay with it. I saw Jenny and Jack and the meadow glowing in sunlight. I felt love well up from heart into mind and flush it clean. Tears of joy welled up in my eyes. I let the donkeys stay in my mind for awhile and felt my heart glowing with a feeling similar to how it felt seeing Mongolian landscape and the people. It was love. I caught on that my innermost self has a love for Mongolia I was not consciously aware of, except for a deep longing when I see or hear of Mongolia. Eighties band Devo comes to mind: Mongoloid, he was a Mongoloid. Seeing Jenny's face draped over the fence chewing carrot got me going. I said, It's time to get up. I'm not going to lay here and cry over donkeys. Get up and go see them, rub their ears, enjoy them. I stepped into my shoes, went to the kitchen, filled a couple of cups with bird seed, took four carrots from the refrigerator and went out the door. The donkeys were standing at the gate looking at me. I said, "Hey, Donkey Jen. Hey, Donkey Jack." They watched me go to the two birdfeeders. When I started toward them, both went to squealing like they do going into a bray, Jenny with her head over the fence and Jack pacing back and forth with his head down. My heart welled up and I felt a wave of tremendous happiness handing each one a chunk of carrot. I talked to them like usual. Jack likes for me to call him friend. Jenny likes it when I call her beautiful donkey. They understand. I told myself if I can turn down the electro-magnetic attraction to the false, to that which has no bearing on my life in any way except to wreck my mind, it would really be to my benefit. Don't have to do it all at once. Just turn it down and keep on turning it down. Withdraw further from that mind. What's left when it goes? Love, a meadow in sunlight.

 

jack and jenny

 

 

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