JUST SAID NO TO HIERARCHIES

howdy!

I must withdraw my interest in the workings of the world that do not directly play a part in my life. That Obama has shown his hand I can't worry over any of it. I held out with a little confidence in Obama I wanted to have. I trusted him because I wanted to. I forgot, however, that he has to behave as required by the .0001% that rule. When he became president, he became a member of their club.(I'm your puppet.) That's all. I'm disappointed by him. I understand that the republicans are tripping him up in every nit-picky way the lowest mind among them can think up. In the end, he bends over for the republicans. Democrats continue in their spineless ways since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Since the beginning of Reaganism (Ayn Randism) democrats have conceded to the right wing unto encouragement, put down the red carpet for them. The democrats are taking us to police state, but like Ralph Nader said in the election campaign of 2000 that the republicans will get us there faster. The republicans are showing it too. The Boston bombings showed me the city police are now trained and practiced in taking charge of urban populations.

air bellows rock formation

I came to the mountains in 1976, a time when the oil corporations were shutting down independent oil companies and gas stations by what they called the Oil Embargo. We are not in the hands of people who make decisions in our interest. That time is long past over, if it ever was. We, the American people, are on our own. Government preys on us, does not protect us. What is labeled Defense is actually Offence. I feel sorry for every poor clod who joins the military believing he's "serving" his country. Going through what they go through in jungle and desert warfare for tax free corporate profiteers is dispiriting to the troops when they finally get it, minus a pair of legs. I did my Navy time in the time of the draft knowing this to be the case before I went in. It was sail the seas and play military for two years or take that much time in prison. I picked the Navy for the ocean. I longed to be on the ocean. I think it really sucks, though, to be born male and have no choice but to go through military. I was one of the examples of why the draft is self-defeating for the military. I don't like living by military rule. Not that I'm afraid of them; I don't like being one of them. I don't like their culture. I don't like adhering to a false belief system because it is expected. It is outside the military too, but the military is the core of that kind of hierarchical thinking learned from the Catholic church, which by now everybody knows aint what it's held itself up to be.

jackson pollock was in whitehead

I've refused to live my life in hierarchical work conditions. In the last year at the College of Charleston corporate recruiters were talking with seniors with job interviews. I didn't even want one of them to see me. I turned my back to that kind of thinking very early in the life, in childhood. I saw the republican recessions in the 50s and saw the advance of corporate influence such that to sign over for a job in a corporation I give up all my rights that are guaranteed an American citizen. I like those rights. I'm not signing over my basic rights and I'm not kissing ass of all the men on the ladder above me, none of whom I respect as an individual human being. From very early on it was a guiding light that I never live by hierarchy. I would live among and work with people I respect. It has been my way of life to work for an individual with a small business. I seldom made anything more than minimum wage, and then temporarily. I chose not to participate in the money making game because I did not want to shut down my self for a job, for money, for Mammon. Not that I think in Mammon terms, but that's the bible name for the god of money. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows Mammon is not a benevolent god. The US of A is on the verge of finding out how fickle Mammon can be. I've spent my life using money as immediate gain for immediate need. Paycheck to paycheck, as they say. How else in the working class? I never worked for a corporation or a factory. Worked for the state of SC for a year and learned all I needed to know about that.

roadside sculpture in sparta

In retrospect I can see I've lived my life as close to person to person, individual to individual as I could, hanging on to that connection with humanity, the other people in my life. Taking a high powered job takes one away from the world of people who appeal to one's heart and forces one into a world of people that don't give a shit about you in any way you look at it, except maybe sexually, until the next one comes along. A world of pretend. A world of continuous climbing. They never get tired of it. It's like their emotional vibration is wound up so tight they can't live without that tension. It takes that degree of tension (stress) to keep the pretend going. It's for the paycheck, and sometimes for the neurosis. In my early job years I had a crappy job and after a couple weeks the boss asked me why I was working there, I said, The money. Response: If that's all, then why don't you leave. OK. It was a moment, like about all moments, when you can't say what you're thinking, I wanted to say, What? But I didn't care. The feeling was mutual, as it usually is. Because I won't work for a factory, system or government, it has kept my job opportunities humble. That's what I wanted for myself. I did not want to be high up over anybody. How else but in the laboring class. I came to the mountains to do hard work, to labor body and mind. I can't even estimate the number of post-holes I've dug with a hand-held post-hole digger and how many miles of barbed wire fence I've stretched. I've done some dangerous tractor commandeering, enough to teach me that when IT happens, it's now, not a ten thousandths of a second from now, but now. By the time you realize what happened, it's in the past. The second experience with IT learnt me. I wasn't going for strike three. End of working with a tractor.

barn windows in whitehead

I was something of a spiritual idealist diving into my own humanity that I'd not valued sufficiently before. I was going by a premise of my own that manual labor would work off the anger within that had been a problem all the way along, to the point that I finally caught on it was in me, not out there. It is said awareness is the first step toward healing, and my experience affirms it so much I take it for granted. To come back around, I think I'm coming into an awareness that it does not serve me, my understanding, my life, my reason for being, my mental health to go on paying so much attention to the fake human beings we call celebrities, both Hollywood and DC. It can be said of DC as David Hockney said of Hollywood  in his film, "Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood and you get brighter tinsel." He laughed from seeing in his mind's eye a simulcast slideshow of several examples of his meaning. Over a period of years in California he gradually drifted away from the tinsel, spending more time at home focusing on the people close to him. He took a step deeper within going back to Yorkshire over a period of three years to stay with his sister and live in the house and neighborhood he grew up in. Going home, you might say. Going within. I'm feeling that impulse to withdraw my attention from the fake people and focus it on the people around me, the people I live among, my friends. That's my "real world." In the first half of my life, I have to say I did not value others. In the second half it's in others that I find value. I learned true values in the mountains.

 

 

    


*

 

THE OUTSIDER

     rb kitaj


It's a new moon in Leo. This evening I saw Roman Polanski's TESS, starring Natassia Kinski, who was then Polanski's wife, daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski. It was a good Thomas Hardy story. I think he has the name the First Modern novelist, something like that. I think I had to answer a test question on why he was the "first modern" novelist. It's been so long ago, I forget. Yet, watching the film, made by most modern Roman Polanski, he brought out the mind of Thomas Hardy. A story about a young woman who makes up her own mind was possibly on the borderline of scandalous in its time and place. Like Tom Wolfe's I Am Charolotte Simmons was not enjoyed by people of Charlotte's home town because it was so vulgar, so modern. Younger people see it as how things are and the older people see it in shock. Part of that shock has to do with a certain smugness that comes with getting older. I make conscious efforts to avoid that old age way of looking down on the young as completely out of control, uninformed criminals. I see it in my peers and I want to smack them. I want to say, You know better than to act like that!


In college, everybody I knew swore they wouldn't be anything like their parents. At a 30 yr class reunion, I saw they all became clones of their parents. I came from a different climate, and a summer night in Charleston, even in a seersucker jacket, was boiling hell. I'd sworn off cocktail parties when I left Charleston, and this class reunion was a giant cocktail party full of people I didn't know, people I'd forgotten, people who had forgotten me, and like usual, I'm at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder. Judges and lawyers galore and doctors, lots of doctors. Me? I didn't even have a career. Painted houses in the mountains for relatively very little, have spent the second half of my life rurally where katydids, crickets and tree frogs sing after dark. I had jumped out of the career oriented frying pan before the heat was turned on. It wasn't my way of life. In childhood I knew I did not want to be a social climber and did not want to marry one. In childhood I decided not to live chasing the dollar except as necessity, like for keeping expenses paid up. Money has never been worth to me what it takes to get it. When I finish a painting and sell it, the money in return is like nothing at all, like I gave the painting away for scraps of paper. What do I do with the money? Pay bills. How boring.


At the 30th reunion I stood around and my clothes were soaked with sweat. I was constantly drinking water, acting like it was a "drink," to keep myself hydrated. The sweat popped out all over. Nobody else was sweating like I was. They were living in the lowcountry and were acclimatized to the heat. I used to be, but no longer. I couldn't have felt more out of place if everybody spoke a foreign language. I didn't even want to be there, but went out of curiosity, not believing I'd be as bored as I foresaw. It was worse. I didn't want to be like them and they saw it. They belonged to country clubs and had a lifetime of cocktail party experience, knew how to talk and hold interest, how to sound important. I just wanted to be back on my mountain with my dog, not posing, not sounding erudite, not climbing. I never wanted any of that. Of course, as a child I lived what I'd been taught and wanted the rewards of the climb, like impressive house and impressive car. Impressive the key word. When I came to the place of finding out what it took to have impressive things, I wasn't willing to dive into total commitment to pursuing money. No corporation tells me I have to be married with 2.3 children, 2.7 new cars and live in a suburb where the houses "are all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."


I'm disposed to want to tell you something impressive about why I came to the mountains, but it was just a matter of self-healing, getting myself among trees in a semi-wilderness world where the human spirit feels comfortable. We are, after all, the hairless ape. There is no missing link. If there is, we're it. We don't thump our chests like gorillas, but we do look down our noses conspicuously. We drive expensive cars instead of swinging through trees on grapevines. In some ways it can be said we're advanced. In other ways it can be said we're retarded. We have a lot of machines. Buying and selling machines is a great part of the economy. Golf carts, electric razors, televisions, vehicles, cameras, tractors, chainsaws, and a list so long it appears there is no end to it. We're retarded in that we don't know how to live among ourselves as a species. We're operating on patterns carried down through animal ways from way, way back. In human form we have ourselves to civilize the best we can, home-schooling where the student is the teacher too. The school of trial and error experience. I've never wanted to be the one running on a rat race treadmill. I'm the sort that if I'm staying in place running, I'll get off the treadmill and stay in place standing still.


*