OVERWHELMED BY COMPASSION

 

vada

all photos by cheyanne

My heart feels immense sorrow today over junkie friend on his way to the bottom. Yesterday I didn't call him my friend, but today I do. He's somebody in my world I care about. He stays in the front of my mind, heart feeling sorrow for his suffering that is evidently unbearable. Mama put an appeal to prayer in facebook for her son. Justin told me something about himself yesterday I did not know, though could have imagined easily. In his early 20s he spent three months on crack, cell phone one of The first things to go, a bill so high he couldn't pay it and couldn't use the phone anymore, so he threw it on the ground and stomped it with his heel. Then he lost his trailer his grandmother had given him. Everything went away. Mother and her new husband wouldn't let him in the house, his sister wouldn't have anything to do with him. This was in his wild-thang time when I didn't see him for three or four years. I didn't want to know what he was going through, knowing it was far beyond any realm of my interest. I told him when he was 17 that he had about five years of mayhem ahead, running like a dog unchained. He came close to prison, came close to getting killed several times, carried a "nine" all the time. His closest friend in that time ended up dead. He went to Indiana, knew somebody in the drug world there, and nobody ever heard of him again. I asked one of his friends here if she'd heard anything of him. No. Any ideas what happened? She said, "He probably shit somebody there like he did everybody here." It was easy to see. That's what he did. Again, he was a great guy, big heart, and fun to be around with good sense of humor. He was what I call "good people," but he had addiction issues far beyond what he could handle. At the time he disappeared, both is mother and dad were in prison, both for selling stolen oxytocin. Here, it's called oxy-codeine.

 

vada

 

At the same time my heart is dampened by sorrow, I feel such an overwhelming joy my eyes are wet much of the time from being on the verge of tears with love energy flowing. I know not why, but there it is. I took carrots to the donkeys this morning feeling like crying the whole time from the love I was feeling, looking at their eyes, feeling my affection for them. At this moment, at the outside corner of each eye rests a tear waiting for a chance to run down my cheek. This is constant today. And it's tears of joy. I don't know where the joy is coming from. I'm guessing it comes from the immense compassion I'm feeling, the joy accompanying the compassion. A tear just now took a ride down my cheek. The other one is about to go. And it's joy I'm feeling. During the time my friend Jr Maxwell was fading into death, toward the end I was stressed, feeling tremendous sorrow, and felt overwhelming joy all the time. It came to the place joy and sorrow had woven together such that I could not tell them apart, it was one feeling. As time went by, they came together such that I couldn't pick one from the other. It was like they were two sides of the same coin flipping in the air so fast it was a blur. The day Jr left the body, I felt joy all day with the sorrow of losing someone I respected way up high. Eventually, the feelings separated unto themselves again, and today they are back together where they become indistinguishable. Both eyes are running now. Out the window I see it is running time of day for the donkeys. They were grazing and Jack had a fit of wanting to run. He looked at Jenny to see if she wanted to run. No, she'd rather graze. He grazed a little, looking at her waiting to see if she wanted to run. He took off running and she followed. They are running around and around in the meadow, they have a circle they run, taking turns in the lead, ears up, having a ball.

 

 

vada

 

I'm remembering Justin's 21st birthday, ten years ago. He'd been on his own in his wild-thang time a few years. I said, "Its your day. Whatever you want." He wanted to go to Winston-Salem to see Insane Clown Posse playing at Ziggy's. I thought: Oh God! Why did I ask? Why couldn't I just buy him a present? Ok, that's what we'll do. I ordered tickets online. It came time to go. He wanted to go to Laurel Springs, a bit of a drive, to get some crack. We drove to Laurel Springs where he picked up a white woman living in a trailer in a small Mexican trailer park community, living with a very dangerous man. She needed to go to town to get it. We drove her to town to a suburban neighborhood where she wanted to be let out on a corner and us to go away and return in twenty minutes. She was there in twenty minutes. They took care of their transaction and we drove her back to Laurel Springs. Then he wanted to go to my place to smoke some crack. I thought: Oh shit! I told myself this is Justin's day. I sat and watched  him "chasing the high," as they call it. I watched time go by. Four bands were playing and it was an hour and a half drive. When it came time for the show to start, I told him the show started. I told him when the second band started. He didn't care. He offered me a hit and I declined. He said he knew I would decline, but wanted to give the courtesy of offering. Eventually, he reached the place he wanted to be. We left soon after the third band started. Insane Clown Posse was the last band. We arrived in the middle of their show. On the way back, it was around 2am, he showed me how he could drive up what we call 21 mountain, 21 being the highway, with 27 curves, in less than four minutes. He used the entire road, was seldom under 60. I sat fixed on a little word on the dash that said, airbag. I did not get in a car with him for several years after that experience. 

 

vada

 

Justin lit into our addict friend day before yesterday, giving him the lecture of his life. He said, You can pull yourself together! He said, I've been on the bottom, hit hard with a crash, had nothing, alienated everybody. He said, I pulled myself together and you can do it too. Justin's wife, Crystal, extended herself, ending up giving friend an hour and half talk in his face. She told him to think about what he's doing to his mother. He said he didn't care, she doesn't have much longer anyway. It ran all over Crystal. Justin said later, "If he said that to me, I'd have put him on the ground, I don't care, you don't talk like that about your mama." Crystal had to pull back her concern. She told his mother that she'd been through it with her first husband who OD'd. She said too much was coming up for her to deal with any further involvement. Her first husband was Justin's friend all the time growing up. Justin and Crystal bonded in their grief and they fell in love. This was in the time Justin had left my world. I believe he intuited I did not want him around. Guns and the drug world made me nervous. I met Crystal about a year after they'd married. First thing I said to her, "You're a brave woman." She said, Why? I said, You just are. I believed throughout Justin's wild-thang time that he would come back from it, knowing it is a pattern of kids raised by severely abusive daddies. I had my own wild-thang time, just experienced differently. I love Justin as though he were my own, even better, because we don't have father-son tension. I love Crystal the same, so much it brings the tears up again. I have a great respect for the man Justin has become. His intelligence and his heart blow my mind every time I'm around him. I'm happy to see him with a good life, fabulous kids and a good woman. His number one goal in his life is to be a good daddy. He's the kind of daddy his kids will love like crazy all their lives. The tears are flowing again. It's been like this all day.      

 

cheyanne selfie

 

 

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A GLITCH IN MY WORLD

all photos by vada, 2

I'm feeling neither here nor there. I feel connected to the blogathon, like I need to write for it, but am done with it, can't go on. I went into it open, giving it the chance to be what it is, to be a beneficial exercise if that's indeed what it is, but I didn't find anything. The thing was about mixing art up with business. It's not that simplistic. It didn't speak to me, didn't take ahold of my interest. Reading a new book, if it doesn't take ahold of me by page 50, I'm done. I'm all with what the blogathon group is doing, but it does not include me. My interests in this time of the life are more philosophical than studying how to be an artist entrepreneur. I'm not laying blame, pointing the finger or even suggesting it is something about the project I found objectionable. Not at all. It doesn't serve my interests any more than a workshop on how to take a gun apart and put it back together. I don't even want to know. I couldn't help but think my blog is my blog. It doesn't feel right making it essay answers to somebody else's questions. It felt something like an awkward vibration. I don't have a great deal of calendar time ahead. It's not like I have a checklist I am working on to complete before I croak. My attitude about the end is when it happens, nothing about this world matters. Two seconds after the spirit leaves the body it does not matter any more to me that a threatening letter came in the mail today from the tax office. The county is desperate too. Income has gone way down in the county since year 2000, businesses closed, less tax revenue coming in. The world of money is so objectionable to me it makes the blogathon emphasis on art business of no interest. The American emphasis on money sees everything in relation to money, takes the word value for price. I do tend to see this period of collective obsession with money an interesting time in our collective spiritual path.

 

vada

 

This time we're in appears a dead time in our "progression," but I'm not sure it's really a progression and I doubt it is a dead time. American history is a continuous string of wars and the country's only purpose has ever been money. We Americans have contributed a great deal to this time of rapid change. In a time of old calcified belief systems falling away from inability to function in light of the scientific method, money seems a neutral point to fix upon to facilitate shedding old belief systems that don't work anymore. When money is the one and only, peripheral stuff is nothing. The business ethic that it doesn't matter who is spending their money your way as long as they're spending it, clears the trail for whatever is coming next, the new that fills in where the old fell away. It makes me sad to see that the American obsession with money will ultimately come to nothing. An awful lot of people will be damaged. Money is not a loving god. I'm recalling an illustration Joseph Campbell made of modern man, who spends his life climbing the ladder of success and when he reaches the top, he finds it was the wrong ladder. I see television with a role similar to money's, to bring everything to neutral, flush all belief systems, one at a time, focus attention on the flickering screen and fleeting cash while everything changes around us, diverts our collective attention, pushes our reactive ignorance out of the way. It's a time of big change, evidently best got through unconsciously. Sleep through it. Dream it. Evidently democracy is a belief system that has to go, too. At least in the American form. The international corporations have crippled our democracy and our economy, perhaps irreversibly. To go on with democracy, it will have to take another form. But that's not my concern. It means I have to be more paranoid about government and law enforcement excesses. Don't give a cop an opportunity to shoot me; they shoot to kill now. It's legal now for them to break my door off its hinges, charge in here, empty their pistols on me sitting at the computer, and it be the wrong house. All they have to do is say, "He had a gun," and nobody questions it, procedure. It's a dangerous time for the poor people, white as well as black, the expendables.

vada

 

News today of someone I know, someone I like, a junkie attempted to OD a couple days ago, was sent to emergency room where they detoxed him and sent him home. Mother wouldn't have him in the house, let him fill a backpack with what he wanted and sent him on his way. There's nothing she can do. Largely because she's his enabler. He's looking at a trial coming up for selling pills he'd stolen from his mother to a cop, and his horizon has at least six years of prison. He's been acting like it's no big deal to such an extent I and a few others believed he ratted and got off. Now it turns out he's scared literally unto death. I feel a longing to extend myself to him, but can't do it. He has no resources, no job, no place to stay. He can't stay here and I don't have what it takes to deal with a junkie. Maybelle Carter was good with junkies, saw Johnny Cash through his junkie period, and I have a friend who is good with junkies, but I am not. I already know it, don't need to learn again. I have empathic feelings about what he's going through, but also know he is beyond any help I can give him. There is too much he doesn't get, and I don't need a giant baby to take care of. I had to talk to somebody like that years ago, who wanted to take up temporary residence, saying, "I hate everybody but you." I had to say, "Inside a very short time, less than two weeks, you will hate me like you hate  everybody else. Include me in that number now." I don't anticipate seeing this guy in the world much longer. He is terrified of prison. Plus, I've been around when he was given a straight-forward talk about what it's like in prison by somebody who had done a couple years. It scared the hell out of me, and he acted like, no problem dude. His direction all his life has been a downhill slide. He paid no attention in school. Had a job at Hardees until he was arrested, has been drifting downward the few years I've known him. He has no motivation to help himself, wants to be asleep all the time. I imagine he'll be successful next OD attempt. I can't help but see it inevitable, karma, like he didn't come into a body this time to stay. With no education, he can't live in this world. There is more to it than watching tv and listening to Wide Spread Panic in a stupor.

vada

It bothers me to see someone I know and like falling into a pit. I know how easy it is. All the time, all the way along in my life I have felt like it wouldn't take much to fall into homelessness and drop to the bottom. Let go of the will to get by and it's an easy drift downwards. In my own case, I have no motivation to do well in this world because I don't believe its belief system and don't want its rewards. The only interests I have that keep me going are aesthetic. And I have enough aesthetic interest to keep my interest going all the time. I'm more interested in aesthetic and philosophical concerns than making money. I'd rather live poor with a rich interior life than live in wealth with inner self in poverty. I never wanted to be somebody who works his way up a skyscraper and jumps off the roof. My heart is heavy this evening with concern I can do nothing about, the same as I can't cut firewood on somebody else's land without permission. I already know I can't help him, by knowing him and by knowing myself. My friends who know him agree prison may be what he needs, though I don't see him surviving prison if he survives the anxiety of the wait. I'm sad for him because he's as innocent as a three year old. I feel like it is a criminal society that makes a criminal of him. He's not a criminal. He's just somebody who can't take care of himself in this world. Whence his lifetime drift downward. He likes to talk peace and pacifism, but they're only clichés to him. I'm in full empathy with him, but dare not jump into his pit with him. He does not want to come out. Nor is he the charming baby he pretends to be. He's past thirty, has run out of excuses and justifications. He needs help, not prison, but our society doesn't help people like him. And I can't either. Perhaps this bothers me the most, that I am unable to help him. I learned long ago I am not capable of helping other people with mental/emotional issues. I dare attempt to do no more to "help" somebody than I can do metaphorically with my hands. I dare not play psychiatrist. I know that. I have to allow other people to make their own decisions. It's hard to care and it's hard not to care.

vada

 

 

 

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LIKE A ROLLING STONE

     edie factory girl by nat finkelstein

Bob Dylan's song Like a Rolling Stone stays in my mind today. Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you. People call, say Beware doll you're bound to fall, you thought they were all kidding you. You used to laugh about everybody that was hanging out. Now you don't talk so loud, now you don't feel so proud about having to be scrounging for your next meal. The arrogance of youth and wealth brought down by junk. The song is an appeal to Dylan's then girlfriend-interest, Edie Sedgwick, a rich California babe who arrived in NY with a splash, a spread of photographs in Vogue as the hottest new item in NY society. From there her descent was a straight line downward. She hung with Andy Warhol's Factory bunch of hangers-on junkies. They kept her high. She was also Bob Dylan's sometimes girlfriend who would go with him for awhile, then she'd drift back to the Factory and the drug euphoria there. He struggled with her trying to get her away from that crowd and the junk, but she was on the downbound train and reversing her direction was not a consideration. She'd been her daddy's sex partner since she was a child. She didn't have a chance in this world. Even her daddy's wealth couldn't save her.

Edie Sedgwick's story is told in a page-turning biography, EDIE: AMERICAN GIRL, by Jean Stein. Edie's story is almost a parable. But there are so many junkies over the years who have taken the downbound train straight down, and one generation doesn't learn from the generation before. Nothing is learned from generation to generation, because the people who start using don't know anything about its history of destroying everyone who takes to it. They've heard legends and know the dangers, but believe they're immune. It rendered the Clash's drummer incapable after a certain number of years and the band died on account of the drummer going under. Many a band went under as a result of discovering junk, the ultimate temptress. The punk scene in both London and New York went under soon after junk was introduced into the scene. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a John & Yoko type love affair with fellow dingbat junkie Nancy Spungeon of the film SID & NANCY. They went through the bottom together and he ended up stabbing her to death with a Bowie knife on a NY hotel bed. He went to prison a short time, got out on bail and OD'd right away. With no direction home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone.  

According to Edie's biography, Dylan had serious antipathy for the Warhol crowd for the fools that the lot of them were and for their hold on Edie. Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. The biographer tells of a visit to the Factory by Dylan, evidently cajoled into it by Edie's influence, to sit before a Warhol movie camera for a given amount of time. Dylan was boiling inside. He saw a stack of Marilyn silkscreens leaning vertically against a wall. Dylan pulled a pistol out of his pocket and shot a hole through all of them, a half dozen or so, before he left. Warhol raised the price on them and called them Marilyn with bullet hole by Bob Dylan, probably dated on the back. For about a year Warhol's glamorous Super Stars, junkies with several drag queens among them, played pretend fashion publicly, poseurs of the absurd anti-strutting about, being seen. They were fun. The films were stupid and fun. Chelsea Girls. Lonesome Cowboys. So terrible they were NEW. They were Art. The Super Stars created a sensation in the art world of New York, showing up at openings and the right bars, being seen. They, themselves, were Art, junkies playing pretend they were on the way up when they were on the way down. Like the Bob Marley song, you think you're in heaven when you're really in hell. Then Warhol was shot; his castle of pixels fell to the floor with him. When he came out of the hospital, all that illusion of the Factory junkie scene went away as fast as a breath on the wind.

It was the time of Pop Art in New York, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman, Robert Indiana, Marisol, Warhol and others, at the same time that Minimalism, too, was branching off from Abstract Expressionism of the Fifties. The public responded to Pop shows at NY museums like to Star Wars movies. The spirit was festive among the people milling about in the museums. It was new, it was art, and it was something people who wanted to feel they understood art could get their minds around without having to be an Art History major to get it. Viewers feel like they get it when they see a Claes Oldenburg large soft sculpture of a pie slice or a hamburger. Oldenburg is a wildly imaginative artist. You had the Warhol entourage weaving in and out of these art scenes at gallery openings, affecting spectacularly bizarre, getting their kicks from a stoned confidence they're shocking the people seeing them, when the only thing anyone who saw them thought was: you see everything in New York. Edie Sedgwick, little miss Like a Rolling Stone, wove in and out of the New York society scene with famous Andy Warhol at her side, Andy adoring his vacant new Super Star who'd been featured in Vogue and came from big California money, was glamorous and played pretend well. Aint it hard when you discover that he really wasn't where it's at, after he's taken from you everything he could steal. Just like a rolling stone.

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WOOLLY WORM, SUBURBANITE AND JUNKIE RAMBLE

     hillbilly sculpture by tj worthington



A very wet cloud sits on the mountain today. Earlier, when I stepped outside without putting on a jacket or sweater to walk to the mailbox, I stepped into the outdoor air anticipating getting top of head and shoulders dampened by slight sprinkles. Didn't get wet at all. The air is so damp it's just short of manifesting liquid form. I heard soft rumblings of thunder around noon. Second thunder in February. The first one was the 22nd. The country wisdom says the date of a thunder in February is the date in May of the last frost. Maybe the second one means a frost will come on the 29th, but not a damaging frost. I mark on the calendar in May to check it out. It used to be said the wooly worm predicts the winter by its color sections. One that is orange in front and back, with the black in the middle, translates into a hard winter in the middle and mild before and after.



If there were ever a time woolly worms were exactly alike, I've not been there to see it. I've paid attention to them since 1976 when I arrived in the mountains and Tom Pruitt told me his understanding of the woolly worm legend. He didn't believe there was anything to it, for the same reasons I've come to. Next question: what does it mean when no two woolly worms you see are alike? Over about the last 10 or more years I've seen more all-black woolly worms than ever before. The black ones I've seen come with the milder winters. Like snowflakes, it appears no two woolly worms are alike. I'm willing to suppose that in the olden days the woolly worms might have all been alike. Maybe the weather was more consistent in those times. If the nature of the winter does show up in the woolly worm, the only relationship I've seen is more black ones, more predominantly black as our winters are less cold every year. The old sayings about the weather don't apply anymore.



Fogs in August used to predict the snows of the winter. Think of the month of August as a 6-month winter. Each week in August would correspond to two months in the winter. If fog occurs on the 6th of August, snow could be expected around the 1st of December. If the 22nd, snow might happen on or around the beginning of March. I paid attention to fogs in August the first several years, and found them an accurate forecasting method. Gradually, we quit having fogs in August and we get little to no snow in the winter. Every winter is uniquely itself. It's difficult to hold the winters to a pattern. Looking at a span of 35 years, a general pattern does emerge, in waves, (close your eyes if you're a republican) global warming. Scientists say, scientists say. Real scientists, not the ones on corporate payroll, say global warming is obvious fact, not something to have an opinion about. It's absurd to be mentioning it. We've known it was global warming for the last 40+ years, but it's politically incorrect to admit to it. The problem I have with political correctness is you can't have a feeling or thought of your own without checking to see if it's ok. Kinda like in North Korea and China.



Just now got an image of recollection. A woman I knew in the late 1980s, not well, but well acquainted. We were friendly. A few months ago she came into the coffee shop while I was there. We sat down together to talk. The talk amounted to her talking without drawing a breath, sentences starting you needta, you gotta, you oughta, you better, you should. Sounded like a gospel song to me---you better, you better, you better, or else. I was looking at her, someone I'd not seen in a quarter century, trying to imagine how she could divine all that I, of all people, needta-gotta-oughta-better-should do or have. The nature of the list she was spelling out for me, I didn't have the heart to tell her, had nothing to do with me. Running out of needta's and gotta's, she started a sentence, You're supposed to....



I broke into her monologue and said, "I don't do s'posed-to." She jumped from her seat like a firecracker went off in it, hugging her laptop, and speed-walked out the door in a bee-line. She wasn't suffering from colony collapse disorder, either. She went straight through the door with conviction that it was not a plate glass window. I don't like to laugh at people I like, and I do like her quite a lot. But when what you have to say starts with you needta, you needta be talking to somebody else. That's not conversation, it's giving orders. Sorry, baby, I'm not a waiter. I dismissed it as unconscious white middle-class American chatter, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Another theater of the absurd in everyday life moment.



Sometimes, not very often, somebody makes me wonder if they're out of their league in a human form. Maybe they're not ready to make it without a tail. Maybe they missed a chimpanzee lifetime in a hurry to get to human. For what? Meth addiction? Just as well go back to swinging in the trees some more and try the leap to human form again after you've learned something. Maybe meth addiction is a way of learning something. Surely major cities have young evangelists that testify to Jesus helping them get off the track to self destruction. Alcoholism and drug addictions have served a large number people spiritually in the long run. A way is a way. It seems like churches would want to put rehab places in every city, conducted with the authenticity and working reality of AA. Every junkie is at his or her own bottom. The only way from there is up. Free rehab centers operated with integrity of purpose would go a long way toward bringing urban crime way down. Like everybody blazes their own trail up the mountain. This is where the Master comes in handy. He knows the way of each one's own particular path. Without the Master's help, it's like being in a sailboat at sea in a fog, or in a maze that goes this way and that without clues. We've had a serious hard drug problem in USA for almost half a century, and still, rehab as a possibility is so rare it's next to nothing toward addressing the problem.

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