THE TROJAN HORSE AND GLADE VALLEY ROAD

brice marden 

The sky is turning light. The sun is not yet up, but on its way. Mind realizes I've not slept all night and am wider awake than if I had slept. In the bed writing a short story in my mind until telling self I need some sleep. I turned the radio on all night BBC. Most often, the chatter sends me into sleep within two minutes. Not this time. Listened to Putin's popularity rating, republicans continuing attempted murder of Obama care, assassination one of their specialties, smoke-screen news covering up the real news. My interest in the news is waning fast. I've come to see that even the network news that is not the Fake channel gives misleading news. In this time when the Fake channel has made news into absurd fiction, the other channels follow suit wanting to compete for the  most exciting presentation. All of them gloss over and cover up police state. NPR cannot be counted on anymore for news. I listen to NPR, now that the Koch Bros own it, like I watch cartoons. I take what I hear for smokescreen of what I don't hear. Much talk about how terrible it is for the families of the two NY cops shot down. There is never a mention of how terrible it is for families of unarmed young black men killed every day someplace in USA by cops. Their families come up and they're discredited, made to look like jungle bunnies that rob dumpsters. Gradually, I'm learning to pay the news little mind. I like to watch the processes, how things work out, to read the patterns of the political trends. I'm learning to withdraw emotional attachment to one side or the other. I can't involve self with any kind of attachment. 

brice marden

Watched a two and a half hour documentary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I found to be good history. I was paying attention to how he worked a crowd, his charisma, his intelligence, noting that everything he put in place, the John Birch right wing party, funded by Koch Bros and others of like mind, has fastidiously  been dismantled since the Trojan Horse Reagan of 1980. We the people are now what I've come to think of as citizen criminals. It means, for me, that we are now regarded criminals because we are citizens. Cops have become police state bullies, as always happens with police state. Their role is to serve and protect the rich and the corporations "too big to fail." We the people don't even have a lobbyist. In 2005 this police state Supreme Court declared the police are only about "law enforcement," not to serve and protect. Then why do they still have the fake slogan on their car doors? I don't want to think about this anymore, though when I see it spelled out in front of my face, it's difficult to ignore. I don't want to ignore context and how things work. I'd say this comes under the world we live in the way it is. This is the political world I live in. I have to accept it as the nature of that kind of reality, the way things are, be aware of this fake reality as such and let it go by, not be of it. This has been a problem all my life, how to live in a fake world where denial is the culture of white people.

brice marden

I went to bed after writing the above, too weary to go on. Slept all day. Up now at sunset. Stayed up too late last night, drove home between 12:30 and 1:00, then couldn't sleep. Driving at night has begun to mess with my eyes. Glade Valley road, crooked as as a running snake, mostly has little to no cars. Last night, Christmas, I found at least twenty cars on the way home. Headlights blare in my eyes. Looks like everybody has their brights on. Going into a sharp curve with three cars coming through it the other direction, one after the other with bright lights on, can be disorienting. I watch the white line on my side of the road, focus my attention there unconcerned as possible about the oncoming cars. I tend to want to steer too far to the right to avoid them. I tell self, they have to stay in their lane, like I stay in mine. One of them crosses the center line and plows into me, nothing I can do--I'm in my lane. Air bag. Glade Valley road is not a good one to drive fast on. Surprise curves just over the top of a rise that you can't see until you're in them. The first several times on the road I was hitting the brakes often to stay on the road. I've found a good pace at 30-35 mph where the car can flow with the road at this speed, brake seldom, and glide through the curves with no problem. I feel more relaxed driving at this rate than going up to fifty in a short stretch, then hit the brakes to go through a curve at 20. I've driven GV road in every weather condition by now, including snow and ice. I've learned how to drive the road, making it an easy drive, rolling with the road itself. I resisted the road for quite awhile, until I learned to flow with it instead of attempting to drive it like other roads. Used to think it a hateful road, and now I like driving it, find it relaxing.

brice marden

The kids were happy with their presents. Vada had been center of attention all day, first half with daddy's family, second half with mama's family. I went by after they'd done all the family get-togethers. Vada had been buried in presents. She loved her little earrings. First thing she said after she saw them, "What else do you have for me?" Cheyenne took the back seat all day, was quiet and had gone inward. She loved her dragonfly necklace, put it on immediately. Later, when we had a moment together, I said to her, "The necklace is all yours, only yours, not anybody else's." She said, "What if I come back and it's not in the box?" I said, "You taking it home?" She said, "No, leaving it here." I assured her it will be safe at daddy's house. I felt so deeply for her having to be in the background Christmas day, all attention on Vada. The situation is such I'd like to snap my fingers and make it right for her, but can't do it. I was grateful to Carole for suggesting jewelry. At the end of the day, Cheyenne received her prize. There isn't much I can do for Cheyanne to help her issues. It made my day to give Cheyenne something that meant so much to her. I went into it wanting her to have something she could value, a nice piece of jewelry, of which she has none, By the end, I was almost sorry I'd deepened her sadness, gave her something to worry about somebody taking. I saw that she is working things out for herself. She's learned she has to take care of herself. I'd like her to grow up to be an independent woman. I feel like her experiences in this part of her life are pointing her in that direction. I'd like, in what time I have left, to encourage in Cheyanne her own inclination to look out for herself

brice marden himself

*

  

TURNING FROM OUT THERE TO IN HERE

nancy graves

Again, I feel lonesome on the day after an election. Lonesome because the ones I vote for win very seldom, and lonesome because I've seen ignorance used successfully for political marketing. This could be a transition time from appealing to our intelligence to appealing to our ignorance. It's been a long transition time, thirty-four years, that the master propagandists have appealed to below average intelligence. Easy targets. White Man is in crisis in democracy when Others have begun to outnumber White. This is where police state comes in. The South gives historical evidence that White Man outnumbered by Others will retain power by force and throw away democracy for racial control. All over the nation in this time White Man is facing the threat of being outnumbered by Others, emphasis on black Others. I was alarmed when I learned white people hate black people so much, to the point they're official targets to kill or imprison. A black president has threatened White Man more than population statistics are able. The white John Birch Society billionaires are saying, Aint no GDN gonna tell me what to do. It seemed ridiculous to me today that I made the decision to participate in the great American delusion, pretend democracy, again. Historically, police states are predictably popular in the early years. The more resistance grows, the more the black people are targeted, to keep the police popular, just like on tv. I see police brutality videos on facebook and mourn to see the videos as cop commercials saying to White Man, We got em under control. It makes great corporate tv and keeps the news exciting, hopeful. 

nancy graves

It makes me turn further inward, turn away from the world Out There. I feel like the range of mountains where the Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the ridge is my Great Wall of Air Bellows, a half mile from home, beyond which is Out There, This side of that line people live with space between each other and enough forest to allow habitat to some wildlife. It seems like there is some balance this side of that great wall between me and the world of the false. Going inward to dream images of Home Sweet Home, like guided imagery. I have yet to do something I learned some years ago, though have only done it once. Put on some kind of music you resonate with, emphasis on relaxing music, classical, whatever. Sit quietly and imagine the most peaceful spot on earth you'd like to be. Start there, self in that place. I chose what I call the donkey meadow beside the house, when in that time the donkey shed was a chicken house. I feel good energy in that meadow. Now the meadow has donkey love energy added to it. This meadow is the place I would go to again, if I ever do a guided imagery again. The purpose is to allow the music to be the movie soundtrack to visuals that occur in the mind's eye, follow them as a story and see where it goes, follow it to the end of the music. Then write down the experience as something like a dream, which it is. If I remember correctly, it's supposed to have some woo-woo connected with it, like manifesting what you really want, something like that. I wasn't interested in it as something to do toward wanting. I was curious to see what it was. I found it gave me a beautiful story to follow, and by the time the music ended, I felt good about the story my subconscious mind made up spontaneously. I came away from it feeling like my interior self, the subconscious, or another way of naming it, the super-conscious, was in good balance and beaming with light. Perhaps my super-conscious mind would visualize a very different story if I'd put on the Murderdolls. 

nancy graves

I feel so inward, I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and flow with some music. Just happen to have a cd in the player by Malian guitar picker and singer, Carcar, accompanied by Ali Farka Toure. Yes, beautiful music is what my super-conscious wants. This is good music to flow with. The vocals flow beautifully. I closed my eyes and followed the music. I saw the musicians, saw their fingers picking their acoustic guitar strings, heard the vocals like sinuous colored silk flowing upward into the air above the trees into the sky, dancing to a subtle rhythm. A good change of mental imagery after seeing the Babylon the rest of the world wants to see fall, breaking down. I tell myself to listen to more music. In the classical realm, in this time of the life, I want to hear quartets of Brahms and Schubert, and quartets of Dvorak by the Alban Berg Quartet. I will listen to more music, keep in the cd player something I'm wanting to hear, like this one by Carcar of northern Africa. Want to hear the news, turn on the cd player and let it play. Turn all the more inward. I've taken to driving the back roads when I go anyplace. They have few other cars on them. They are the roads people live on, not the traffic roads. The veins, not the arteries. The back roads have better scenery. I have found that the world the way I like it is all around me, the reason I settled in my Blue Ridge Mountain home for the duration. I have the world as I am happy with it all around, this side of the great wall. Why look Out There at the horror show when I can look In Here at a community of people who think something of one another? The changes from generation to generation are happening here as they are happening there, all guided by television, 

nancy graves

I must teach myself not to hope against the flow of history. Must allow historical destiny to run its course; first, because I have no choice. Next, it will run its course no matter what I think about it. Any wishing I could do something about it goes only toward making me a grumpy old bastard. I like my life this side of the wall. So why do I pay attention to the deception coming in from Out There. I have control. I can turn it off as easily as turn it on. Before the corporate takeover of our government, I believed it important to keep up with current events to stay educated in a democracy, bogus then as bogus now. I don't have a need to stay educated anymore. Indifference is setting in. The indifference that follows disappointment. I hear in my head Perry Ferrell of Jane's Addiction wail, Idiots Rule. The song had meaning then, even more meaning now. I will read more and listen to news less. I will listen to more music. I will focus on art projects more. The hard part is realizing that Out There is also In Here. It's all In Here. It only exists for me in my head. I have a choice about what goes into my head. I don't need to hear about Ebola til the next big Fear comes in to replace it. I like being out of touch with the corporate pop world in this time of the life. I like staying at home all the more. I could give the donkeys more attention. I could give the people of my world, my friends, more attention. Caterpillar would like more attention. I could have more naps. The best part will be less of that energy in my mind. In Here is the squirrels at the bird feeders, the donkeys, Caterpillar, good music, writing in this blog journal, which has turned out to be a meditation, even a prayer. It has become a mediation I want to do daily, zooming the mind in on whatever comes forward. 

nancy graves herself

*

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

 

 

*

 

TURNING AWAY FROM THE FALSE

 

Frequently, almost daily, on facebook I see people and organizations with agendas telling me to get angry because the ocean has become a sewer, because the bees are dying, because the trees that make oxygen are being mowed like grass, because we have been hoodwinked into accepting police state in place of democracy. As you know, it's an infinite list. I choose not to get angry. It's the same as cussing at the sky because I didn't get my way. A month or more ago, I resolved to pay less attention to the news and commentary, not as a New Year's resolution, but because I mean it. I hear the news now, but give it no more response than, "Of course." Stupid results from stupid decisions? Of course. I saw "eco warrior" a little bit ago pressing for action to stop polluting the oceans. Like I can stop international corporations from doing anything, or I can stop Japan from shooting whales, or I can stop Florida from legalizing murder, or I can stop China from invading Tibet sixty-some years ago, or I can stop racism in Russia, or I can get democracy back in America. It's not even a matter of powerlessness. That's only perceived. That mind only takes my power when I give it my power. My power is my attention. I withdraw my mind from the false. First thing I do when I want to clear my life of false influences, the news is the most obvious first deletion. I'm not talking about not hearing the news. I mean hearing it with such dispassion I don't even laugh. I hear about another law made by our corporate supreme court, another nail in the lid of democracy's coffin, I receive it the same as hearing Silvio Berlusconi was caught in Italy partaking of the privileges of power.  

 

?

 

 

I mentally embrace Obama because the racists hate him so much. I can tolerate looking at a picture of him about as long as I can tolerate a picture of Dick Cheney, a nanosecond. It's not the news stories themselves or the individuals involved as much as it is the entire belief system they advertise and embody. I'm not of that mind, so why pay attention to it? Why get angry about it? There is never anything in the realm of "the media" that is from happy instead of sorrow. When they do happy, it's false, like Duck Dynasty. I've been questioning myself over the last months for giving attention to the world of mass manipulation by way of media, even just watching it from afar. I can't realistically want anything for the world at large. I can be one of many praying for peace, which I believe works. It's just that the train is so long it takes a very long time for a habit of mind that goes all the way back to pre-civilization to slow its momentum toward stopping some time in the unforeseeable future. The world that the world of media focuses on is not my world. It is a members-only mind that I don't want to be a part of. It's about money, greed, power and the rest of the "seven deadly sins." By which I mean it is simply false, all of it. I don't care to have people like that in my own immediate world of people I know and interact with. So why should I pay attention to them because they have a spot in national news? It's only the false people media pays attention to. I am not attracted to people I think of as climbers, always wanting more money, groveling for it, kissing ass up the ladder. I stay away from those people in my everyday life, so why give the ones on the news my attention? Their world is not my world.

 

 

 

 

An image I saw a week or so ago stays with me symbolic of the false that is the whole media circus. American television pop star basketball egomaniac, Dennis Rodman, drunk, sings Happy Birthday to Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who watches with contempt in his eyes. Nothing but fakery going on. What can I do? What's the point of even having an opinion? Opinions are as nothing as a dream of sugarplum fairies. The best I know to do when I see something like Rodman and Un is laugh and let it go. Beavis and Butthead. A cartoon in everyday life. Dysfunctional people famous for their dysfunction. What do I care? I know someone who puts up links on facebook, several a day, to every sorrowful cause in the world. I think she must google something like sorrowful causes. I knew plenty of sorrow was going around the earth, but nothing like the catalog she's found. Girls and circumcision in Africa, Walmart sweatshops in Asia, are only the most obvious ones to come to mind. How righteous it has become to be for gay marriage; now, for raising the minimum wage; next, for marijuana legalization. It's like the Fifties beatnik slang, Be there or be square, forefingers of both hands indicating a square. If you're not into legalizing this month's pop cause, you're nowhere, definitely uncool. Where did that come from? This pop zeal for getting everybody to think alike. It's new in American conformity. Now evil is being attributed to racists. Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty cannot hold my attention for a minute on his tv show or on the news. What do I care what he said? What do I care what's the latest you-gotta-or-you're-square belief? That's for the people who voluntarily want to pay attention. Whatever it's form of media, it comes with an on/off switch. I have a choice. I don't have to turn it on. My car has an excellent motor I would rather listen to than anything available on the radio, unless Diane Rehm is interviewing Ralph Stanley again.  I listen to the monitor kerosene heater's fan at home. It sounds like crickets in the distance. Or maybe it's the field of crickets between my ears.

 

 

 

None of that is my world. My world is the people I know, the people I interact with, people I see in passing, Whitehead, the grocery store, coffee shop, drugstore, highways and the county line for the outside boundary. That line defines my world. My part of that world is Waterfall Road. In my world, I was driving a tenth of a mile from the house and saw a red-tail hawk cross the road in front of me, sailing like an arrow, as they do. This particular red-tail is Justin's hunting friend. It visits him when he is in his deer stand. It will glide to a branch unnaturally close to him, and sit. He said within a few minutes a deer would walk into his arena. The hawk sat on the branch and watched him shoot the deer. It did not fly away. This has happened so many times with Justin that he has come to see the hawk his hunting companion. The hawk sits on the telephone wire that spans the donkey meadow, scanning for mice. The donkeys and the calf graze the hay, their shadows on the ground beside them. A family of red squirrels live in a white pine behind the house, away from the birdfeeders. The red squirrels use one feeder and a family of gray squirrels from the woods across the road go to the other. They evidently have an agreement worked out. The squirrels crawl around the squirrel guards. The guards only stop the chipmunks. If they could get into the bird feeders, that would be it. The squirrels don't monopolize the feeders. They allow the birds some too. I throw a good bit on the ground to occupy the squirrels so they don't need the feeders. This is my peaceable kingdom. This is my world. I'm at peace with everyone I know inside myself. I don't need that world of mass manipulation to bring me down. The world that is my home has a lot of happy in it.   

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

A NEW YEAR AHEAD

Jessica stockholder

We're into a new annual cycle, and it starting with a new moon. A good time to start new projects. Ruth at the facebook artist group, Daily Creative Practice, asked everyone to make a statement about what we envision for ourselves through the course of 2014. Not a resolution, but what one sees on the horizon, so to speak, the direction one is moving, projects in sight. Intent. Seeing that it's a new moon, it's a good time to address intent. I'm not one to look that far ahead, a year ahead, so this thinking is new for me. I prefer not to think about the future, except to look at the evolution of police state that has trumped American democracy, view changes in the progression of specifically American fascism, and the changing cartography that will go with global warming. I pay attention to it for self-preservation. Like I know not to use the word Be Oh Hem Be. Or Hen Eye Gigi He Are. NSA will nail me with insta-word check for key words. I'll end up in the deepest darkest dungeon under the maximum security prison in Alaska for using forbidden language. YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! I just did. Targeted potential terrorist. He used the B-word. I figure everything I write here is surveilled in a nanosecond when I click on the publish button. That's the internet landscape as I see it, all of it reviewed by NSA with word check. A satellite can see a quarter in my driveway. I don't see this Snowden episode changing anything. It's a surprise speed-bump for the propagandists and no more.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

I saw the young actress Jennifer Lawrence, whose name I only know because I saw her on the Jon Stewart show,  is campaigning with her celebrity influence to eliminate the word FAT from the language. Now we have another forbidden F-word. Issues of forbidden words have been going on in my homeland for several years now. You really have to watch what you say around white middle-class women. I've become so weary of watching what I say around them that I just make it clear when you're around me, you're on your own where handling forbidden language is concerned. I'm not vulgar, but I'm not obedient to priestesses of Political Correctness either. Get in my face and you just might make me laugh. We have an alphabet now of forbidden words that you get fired on television for saying. It's as bad as the preacher's wife syndrome in the old days. The preacher and his old-lady disapproved. Whatever it was, they disapproved. Middle-class women who get bent over the alphabet of forbidden words have fun disapproving of me. I'll never forget a brief conversation with a white middle-class woman I've been acquainted with for several years when she was informing me the N-word needed to be banned from the dictionary, "and while they're at it, they can ban the C-word." I thought: Oh no, another letter of the alphabet with a banned word! I said in jest, "What is it, Cool?" Answer in no uncertain terms, "No! CUNT!!!" I said, "Oh." I did not see that coming. I couldn't imagine what a C-word would be. Colored? Coon?

 

jessica stockholder

 

All this time we're throwing away our freedom of speech as something reprehensible in need of controls, I'm in awe to see the American people, after two-thirds of a century of television, don't want democracy or freedom of speech, these precious aspects of America The Land Of The Free our flag stands for. Not just let fade away, but thrown out like broken children's toys. In the Fifties it was called the Throw-Away Society. We're so far advanced in tossing out that we're spoiled by it like we're spoiled with what we want by Wal-Mart. We've gone from landfills to making mountains of trash. I remember seeing a trash mountain beside I-95 near Stuart, Florida, that was so high the bulldozer on top looked like a matchbox toy. I point to television, because it has rendered the American people collectively unconscious. It's purpose. Crowd control. It worked. Keep the masses ignorant and they vote republican. Like it matters how they vote. It's a game, like a card game, a cyber poker game between propagandists using hate to divide us into Us against Them. Divide and conquer. Because I see how conquered we-the-people are, I can't involve myself in paying attention to politics or the news anymore. I say "paying attention to." I hear it on radio a time or two a day and see internet bits of current events, but will never again let political, religious, or ideological influence clutch at my heart with a pang that says: It hadn't oughta be that way. Maybe it hadn't oughta, but the Titanic hadn't oughta neither.

 

jessica stockholder

 

Because this is how I see the world that is the landscape I live in, I chose to abandon a life of supporting the military machine USA has evolved into. Fear created and cranked up by the tv to a stress level that longs for security. Tv cop shows kill offenders, criminals, the unspeakable word, the enemy. I choose every day not to live in such mind. Even though I am not manipulated by the corporate belief system directly through television, I get it from everybody around me. I live in television culture even though I don't watch it. I see it once a week for a few hours. It reminds me why I care nothing for it. I'm grateful to God every day for landing my parachute on a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I need a gun to take a walk in the woods anymore. I see images of cities around the world in movies and feel claustrophobic. I remember standing on the highest point in London and seeing city to horizon all the way around. It was the reverse of being at sea out of sight of land. The place I'm located geographically and mentally is about as good as, "at sea out of sight of land," as is reasonably accessible. I don't want to live someplace it takes a Land Rover to get to. I'm ok with a road running by the house. I'm ok with neighbors. I need trees desperately. I can't participate in the mind that values only money and the appearance of money. Tv is about money and money only. I don't value money. A guy in a gold-chrome Cherokee wanted to buy my house one day. I told him it's not for sale. He said there is a price I would sell it for. I laughed. Didn't say it because it wouldn't sound the way it was meant, I don't think you know who you're talking to. Our conversation went nowhere.

 

 

 

jessica stockholdeer

 

A month ago I decided to let go of listening to the news in any form. I asked myself one day, Why am I giving attention to people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Bachman, Boner, Mitch and Paul? Any of them? I have no respect for anyone involved in American government anymore, would cross the street to avoid one. I need to get my mind out of that thinking. I say that's the landscape I live in, but it's not only that. It is that if I turn it on. I have a choice. To turn it on, or not to turn it on. It is my creation. I scroll through the facebook political images that used to amuse me as if they were commercials, which they are, propaganda commercials. The republicans are taking us on a downhill run, I can't stop it, and I don't like to watch it. I see it enough at the grocery store, rising prices and the huff-n-puff swat-team mind of town cops these days. State cracking down on citizens with outrageous fees for everything. Mandatory sentencing and outrageous prison sentences. I'm so paranoid about getting out in the world anymore, I want to stay home all the time. I'm stuck to it and there's nothing I can do but acquiesce, stay at home, draw minimal attention to myself, watch international movies, read international books, pay attention to international art. I can ignore as much as possible, while at the same time not being in denial. I know what it is to my own satisfaction and praise God every day for the insight to get out of that mind. Beyond the writing and the art projects for 2014, I want to separate myself even further from concern about anything to do with American politics. I want to hear American political news with the same dispassion as if it were North Korean news. I want to sit with picture books of Ai Wei Wei, Larry Rivers, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Constantin Brancusi, books in reach of where I sit. I tell myself to look at art more, not corporate mind-rot.     

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

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HILLBILLY BARNYARD WINTER

 

ice in the grass

The day was cold and wet after a night of light rain and fog at 30 degrees that put a coat of thin ice on twigs and leaves. It made the ground slippery covered with last summer's grass and pine needles ice coated. It was only on a slope of the ground that it was slippery. The donkeys had frosted hair tips and their black manes were tipped in silver. I wanted more shelter for them, but they did not seem to be suffering. The two calves go into the shed at night to get out of the weather. It's their toilet. The floor is getting thicker with mashed cow pies. The donkeys don't seem to take an interest in the place. The calves don't even seem to notice. I'd like to clean it out for them, but not every day in the winter. The shed was one of those good ideas that only works in the realm of ideas. Out here in everyday life it doesn't work. In the morning and later in the day I carry an armload of hay out into the meadow to spread around for them to eat with plenty of room for the birds-on-a-wire phenomenon. The birds stay a pecking distance apart and the donkeys eat best out of kicking range. Jenny and Jack are jealous when they eat too close together. They act like children saying, "Mine!" Ears go back and they start kicking. I enjoy feeding them. I like going out in bad weather to take hay and grain to them. I like being with them. I like their personalities. They are very different and at the same time both donkey natured. Though their eyes are exactly alike, they are very different eyes to look into.  

 

frosty manes on the donkeys

 

I go out in the morning to take hay to them. I don't want to put a whole bale out when the weather is so wet. I like to take them enough to last a few hours, then take them some more. They like to stay up close to the fence, the warmest spot in the meadow, sheltered from wind by the house and under a big maple tree, where they can keep an eye on me. It turns into slipping and sliding as soon as I step through the gate. Mud, cow shit, donkey shit, doesn't matter, it's all slippery. I dodged the big lumps first day, but it's nothing anymore. It's just the surface of the earth I have to walk over to get out into the meadow where I can spread the hay on the ground and it not be a toilet. By the Hindu standard, this makes me an untouchable. It's looking like a hillbilly barn lot out there. It's the way farms looked in my early years here when a few farms continued to function. The donkeys are not messy with their droppings, but the calves let it go wherever and whenever. The physical part of feeding them through the winter is good exercise. It gets me out of the house. It gives me a chance to walk a ways, stir my blood, and to visit with the donkeys and the calves. It gives me opportunity to step out into the weather, whatever it is, to feel it for a short time, just enough to get the feel of it. Taking hay to them carries me back to winters feeding the cattle with Tom Pruitt, standing in the back of Tom's pickup, cutting the baling twine with a pocketknife, tossing sections of hay bales off the back of the truck, Tom driving through the meadow and the cows following us in the snow.  

 

hillbilly barn lot

 

I have created a barn lot right here beside the house. Cracks me up. I do like the scent. This is what the air smelled like all over the world in the time before it smelled like petroleum smoke. This new scent in the air of my immediate world is so refreshing I feel as clean as after a shower. This new scent coming into my air space coincides with letting go of concerns about the corporate takeover of my democracy, the cancer in American politics, ignoramuses front and center in the news. I have cut the umbilical cord that connected me to the country club belief system that only money matters. Paying attention to that mind, I carry in myself its belief system. The mind those people represent is the mind that, in fact, worships Mammon, holds money (gold) up the highest of the high, is actively destroying my earth on such a scale I can't do anything to stop it or slow it down. I can only accept that's how it is and watch the logging trucks carry mountains of trees by on the highway. What can I do? Live out on the mountain where I can't see or hear the highway. I see pictures of Obama and think he's president of something that is not my country anymore. He's president of a corporate league, president of the corporations. He and the other politicians are supported by, dined by, talked to on the golf course by, talked to over drinks by corporate execs in high style. Not one of their decisions takes me or anyone I know into consideration. I have no recourse in the court system. Why do I pay attention to people who are only arrogant to me, dismissive? Fake people all the way around, from the soul to the surface. I can do nothing to change their thinking, stop them or get their attention. I have withdrawn my attention and will not give them my power by way of paying them anymore with attention.

 

jack and jen with frosted manes

 

Certainly, I have to participate in all that goes with driving a car, owning a spot of property, eating, and listening to music. It's all corporate. That's the nature of the landscape I live in. I can't help it that Florida grocery stores sell California oranges. I can't help the population explosion. I can't change poverty. I can't stop racism. I can't make any difference to the educational system. Nor do I really want to. The only thing I can do with any actuality is let it all take care of itself like water flowing in pipes and stream beds, trust that the whole game of humanity is being played out on schedule, all the parts in place. The pace is crazy now and what we call reality has become false. I've worked at labor jobs to keep out of work situations where I have to pretend to believe what I don't believe, the belief system of Mammon culture, the Bank, corporate hierarchical mind, identifying with a medium of exchange. It's the same as identifying with the body, an extension of it, branches of it. The body is the frame my consciousness operates like driving a car, the car being my body's tool, this laptop my mind's tool. I have never been able to identify with one thing throughout my entire life. Of course, I can identify with God, when you consider that God is consciousness, which is your very self, my very self, the part of self that sees our dreams, that never sleeps. I can identify with consciousness, and I can identify with mind, not as something accurate, but familiar, where my own customs live. I can identify with the body in that it's the body I'm familiar with that carries my consciousness from place to place, person to person, adventure to adventure, keeps it in motion, tries to prevent consciousness from being too bored.  

 

ice tree 

 

I am happy with my own personal livestock next to the house. I have certain old shoes to wear out there. They used to have a kind of tread on the bottom that is now smooth, the reason I put them aside for newer shoes. Lots of sliding about. And I don't dare fall down. I probably will fall at least once before the end of winter, but it will be a goal every day not to. It makes me laugh to myself at what a surprise from last winter to this winter, two donkeys, two calves, and suddenly the meadow is alive with livestock and I'm playing farm again. I think of the old feller Sherman Scott, who was probably about the age I am now, walking through the herd of his cattle petting them, talking to them, his friends. People who drive up and down the road get a kick out of hearing Jack bray. He cuts loose with one several times a day, three, four or five. Depends on motivation, whatever the motivation may be. Feeding livestock through the winter. It feels good to be shifting my mind from inside my head to outside it at least a little bit. Having animals to take care of is a kind of zookeeper. I saw Marlin Perkins at YouTube a few days ago on his tv show Wild Kingdom from the Chicago zoo. I watched him for years on Zoo Parade, then Wild Kingdom. I watched Marlin Perkins like other people watched Captain Kangaroo. I had forgotten about him until this video I saw of one of his Wild Kingdom tv shows about the Bush people of the Kalahari. Marlin Perkins taught me a great appreciation for animals during my childhood. I had not thought to give him credit for his role in that aspect of my life until I saw him on Wild Kingdom again after so many years he looked to be from another consciousness.  

 

jack

 

 

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FOCUSING ATTENTION

louise nevelson

 

Something big has changed inside me in the last week. I've seen it coming for quite awhile, without knowing that's what I was seeing. An understanding I've entertained for several years has finally soaked into my head until I got it. It came to me like a minor Eureka experience, maybe what is meant by a peak experience, a moment when multiple observations add up to understanding. Finally, I realized what I already know: our entire system of government from Whitehouse to county commission and town council does not consider the working people of the country or the county in even the breath of a thought except for manipulation by propaganda, marketing targets, and all possible ways to take our money to the Cayman Islands and keep it out of circulation, sinking us deeper every year in poverty quickly. We the working people of America are consciously being pushed into a poverty class of crime and killing each other. Population control. I don't even care to take it any further than that, when the problem is what has already been done, how deep we of the working class are into the process of our own undoing. Unions have been busted in a step by step process of denying us rights. The American working class does not even know itself as a working class, because those words are seldom unto never used in corporate media. Post WW2 the American working class has had its identity and its cohesion as a group force stripped away systematically by the corporate powers funneling the money of the working people up to their tax-free off-shore bank accounts.

louise nevelson

Finally, it has hit me that the ruling class regards the working class the enemy to be controlled by manipulation, by hate radio distracting the working people by inspiring us to hate one another. The right-wing hate machine is about population manipulation, and we fall for it, keep it going by believing it. I have a feeling the atmosphere was something like we have it now in the time before the Civil War. Conservative and Liberal, whatever they were called then, stirred unto hate by money interest of the Bank to manipulate the population to the Bank's will. Keeping the population focused on money as the highest ideal, by way of Manipulation Central, television, has the people of the working class working against themselves in every stitch of work they do. I realized that any attention I give to our political hacks is working against my own interest. My interest being my life. Any attention I give to that system of politics and economics works against my own interests. The Corporatocracy, the ones manipulating the people who work for a living, are bleeding us of our resources the same as they're doing with the surface of the earth. We are left in a slag heap when they're done with us and move on. Bristol Compressors in Sparta, one example of countless many. Moving factories from the South, the lowest paying region of the country, to Asian sweatshops put the South into an unacknowledged Depression.

louise nevelson

In pop culture we see the national popularity of vampires that drain us of our vital resource, blood, symbolizing our other vital resource, money. Zombies are the living dead, completely uninspired by a lifetime in front of television, manipulated without noticing, lullabied into the zone of hypnosis by explosions, gunshots, screaming, murder, killing, nudity, sex and displays of wealth, seductions to debt. Control. If you want to check these observations out by testing them, stop watching television for a year. If you can't do that, then simply pay attention to what is going into your unconsciousness by way of eyes and ears. Get your head out of that world of manipulation telling you to spend more money on things you neither want nor need. The message of television is that ignorance trumps knowledge. This has become the American belief system after two-thirds of a century. The less educated we are, the easier we are to manipulate, the more quickly we give up our resources by way of debt. I've known all this for years and years. The part that stopped my mind was realizing that anything I do that participates in this political / economic system goes against my own interest as a human being, as an American citizen who prefers Democracy, as a drop in the ocean of the working class, as one who mourns seeing cultures replaced by the television belief system that emptiness is fullness, that money is the only reason for being. Religion television sells the same belief system.

louise nevelson

What do I do? For one thing, the corporate web of dependency is so pervasive there is no way out of it. I say I won't want to support big corporations that are destroying our country and the world, but I have to deal in money. I need gas, groceries, shelter, etc. So I don't want my money going to Walmart for a host of reasons. I want to buy locally. I'm of the attitude if I can't get it in Sparta, or by mail, I don't want it. Corporate bookstores have shut down thousands and thousands of small bookstores all over the country. Amazon has the market on books. My spending is down to the minimum. About everything I spend money on is a corporate product. I can't help that. It's the nature of the society I live in, and I must perform at least that minimum for sheer existence. But I don't have to buy the belief system. I already have, to a great extent, but think of it as "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's." Then as now, Caesar, government, wants our money. Jesus' take on the matter was to let them have it. Money is worthless anyway. I don't need to buy the philosophy or the belief systems. I can give less attention to the serial comic strip called the News, give less attention to wanting new things, put my money, my energy, in the hands of small businesses in my community as much as possible. I will limit the focus of my attention on political machinations in DC and the breakdown of American life, and give more attention to my own world, my community, the people I know and care about. It's not a lot that I have to ask of myself, except just shifting attention from the toxic to the nontoxic.   

 

louise nevelson

 

 

*

 

 

 

  

WHEEL OF FORTUNE TURNING

all paintings by feng dakang, china

Every day I hear concerns on the news that NSA is surveilling our email accounts and facebook accounts, and everything else. I wonder whence this pose of naiveté. I took it for granted from the beginnings of emails and facebook that they were available for government surveillance and were at least set to key words like bomb. I've taken it for granted that this daily blog is surveilled for key words from the beginning. I went into it aware of cyber surveillance. I tend not to use key words that ring alarm buzzers. I read and hear indignant accusations of government for spying on us. We the people are the enemy, anyway that's how the rich, our elected "representatives," the corporate world and the Supreme Court view us. By regarding us the enemy, they are making themselves our enemy and they're now working against us to drain us of the last drop of our blood/energy/money. That we have been subjects of surveillance has been the case all my life. In the Fifties when we talked on the telephone, it was characteristic of everyone to suspect a crackle on the phone line a sign of surveillance, then it was called wire-tapping, and sometimes we would say things to insult whoever might be listening. Of course, no one was listening to teenage chatter over the phone. Then, they were interested in communists, now it's terrorists.

feng dakang

I can't help but think it a fake naiveté to pretend it's a surprise we're being surveilled. It won't be long before interstate traffic is patrolled by drones that just happen to gather other information too. Police state is here and it doesn't appear to me that surprise is authentic. It is a popular police state. I believe Marx said that if change doesn't come by legislation, it will come by revolution. Legislation is on HOLD and revolution is in the air. Not like in the Sixties when every band was required to have a song about revolution and it meant nothing, but the Occupy movement and all that goes with it is becoming a problem. The suppression of the movement by corporate media, including NPR controlled by republicans, is making it into an internet underground that is growing all over the world. Big change is at hand. Big change is happening. As always, our government is the last to get it. Government has become a behemoth with a life and mind of its own like Hal the spaceship computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the last 30+ years government has been our enemy. If you've ever paid your liability insurance for the car a day late, you know what I mean. The State of North Carolina has already informed me with certainty that it doesn't give a shit about me, only wants my money. All I can say is, that's all right---it runs both ways. Since I was informed by the State of NC of my status, I see NC as lines on a map and that's it. No emotional identification.

feng dakang

I have a feeling it would be a good thing to withdraw my interest in what government is doing. I've learned it has nothing to do with we-the-people except as the enemy. All I can do is accept and go on. The world of the people I live among is far more interesting than the news. Our political parties have minimalized to the not very bright vs the truly ignorant. It has reached such a low it isn't worth paying attention to. They say if you don't pay attention you're not participating in democracy. Well, we don't have democracy, the interest of we-the-people is nothing of consideration except for polls that inform the manipulators, the propagandists. I always hang up when I find it's a poll on the phone. I don't care to participate. I don't care to hear about Sarah Palin, for or against, and a long list of the others. They only make me puke when I hear them talk or read something retarded they said. That these people win elections tells me republican gerrymandering over the last 30+ years has successfully shut down democracy. Or that half the American population identifies with stupid. That's the part I find scary. So easy to manipulate they're boring for the propagandists.

feng dakang

The people around me are so much more interesting than our present run of politicians. Yet, I don't recall a time when they were better. There used to be the occasional bright light, like Fulbright and Moynihan, not many. Every president I've admired as a man was annihilated by relentless republican dirty tricks, starting with Kennedy. It's time to listen to more music. I like hearing news from Africa on BBC in the night when I'm up late. I like being aware of what's happening in Syria now and Turkey. I'm curious about China, how it is evolving. China is evolving now while USA is devolving. We are in rapid devolution. China is moving forward. We're moving backward. The wheel of fortune is turning. We're about ruling the world. China is about doing business with the world. We can't do business with other countries without controlling interest. China doesn't do that, so the developing countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East turn there for business. China does not have historical interest in expansion or the Western urge to rule the world. USA made a mess of its time at the top, squandered its wealth and influence. The 20th Century is called the American century. The 21st Century is already China's century. They will have Taiwan back before long and then China will be whole. It has been important to China since the day it became China to be its own version of united states. China means Our Land. When China is whole, I can't imagine a Chinese attempt to rule the world. But that doesn't really mean anything, my imagination. It is what it is and will be what it will be.

feng dakang

 

 



I have noted several times as a kind of refrain that the people I live among are so much more interesting than the people who compose our government. I live among people who work for a living, work at the low wage rate of the Reagan Revolution that froze wages from then to now, thereby running profits way up to pay CEOs multiple millions. We the American people have been easy targets. I won't let myself get involved in any of the political belief systems enough to feel the tug of wanting to do something to make a difference. I discourage that kind of thinking whenever it arises. The only "difference" I can see that I, as an individual digit, a pixel, can make is person to person in the world of my friends and neighbors, to help somebody having a hard time, to be a friend who can be trusted. I don't dare presume to aspire to any more than that. I don't have the last word or the answer to anything. Seeing my baby friend Vada once a week has become something of far greater value than anything to do with political systems. Time spent sitting on the floor with Vada watching her draw or helping her put shoes on is time spent at the apex of possibilities. Right now, at this time in my life, I can't think of anything I regard more valuable than time spent on the floor with Vada, watching her play. In the not too distant past I could not have foreseen saying such a thing now and meaning it from the heart. It tells me my heart is alive and well. In that way I can say my life has been a success.   

feng dakang

 

 

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