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

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD FREAKS OUT

georges braque

Every day I see something in internet news items, interviews, about the importance of changing the world. It appears this generation of the young, teens and twenties, is fixed on changing the world. My generation came up believing it was important to change the world for the better. That was the guiding thread that ran through the generations, wanting to make the world a better place. Until 1980 when the political coup shifted our government into reverse. Thirty-four years later the young are now saying again they want to change the world. Possibly this is the wave of the near future. We have six more years of the Reagan Trojan Horse coup that usurped our government, systematically put an end to democracy and our individual rights to control us by police state. Once something like democracy has gone away, it doesn't come back easily. The American television viewing audience is evidently happy to see it go. But now that we've had time to see the difference between democracy and police state, democracy is becoming appealing. Anyway, to the black people. Now the republicans are using redneck militias to intimidate black people who want to vote. It tells me the vote must matter for something or the fascists wouldn't feel so threatened. I have no confidence in voting, re: the Supremes overruling the popular vote in 2000, rulings they've made before and since. I have completely lost confidence in the American government since the Reagan coup. The American pendulum has a forty year swing of progress and reaction. We've been in thirty-four years of reaction to the progress of the Roosevelt era, during which the John Birch Society was hatched. They organized and took the government by coup. In this time of John Birch Society running our government, more and more people are growing in number to make the world a better place after almost forty years of destruction. 

georges braque

The working class was defeated long ago, left without a voice, and when they did get a voice it turned out to be a propaganda-created delusion, the teabaggers. I'm so weary of the mind of Karl Rove, the master propagandist, it's hard for me to respect a republican. A country club woman in the coffee shop was talking in praise of Charles Krauthammer of False News Network. All I could say was, "You embarrass yourself." Last Saturday I came face to face by chance with our congressional "representative," the Bush-Cheney parrot herself, live, in person, Virginia Foxx, in my face, introducing herself, handing me a business card. I froze. I freaked. I realized demons are not mythological creatures, but go among us in human form. Pretended I didn't recognize her. I only wanted her to go away. I was in friend Crystal's tent she put up at Sparta's downtown "festival," The Mountain Heritage Festival, selling her items and advertising her new sign making business. While Virginia was trying to talk to me I pointed at Crystal, "Talk to her," acting like I was Crystal's grandpa hanging out with nothing to do, don't know nothin, don't wanna know nothin. Crystal had never heard of her, knew nothing of her, pays no attention to news or anything in DC, doesn't vote, doesn't care. Virginia handed Crystal a card and received as blank a look as she got from me. She turned and went on to the next tent. She was going up and down the street introducing herself, handing out cards. As soon as she left, I dropped my card into our trash bag. A little later, thinking I might want to use it for a satirical art project, I picked it out of the trash and put it in my pocket. Reckon I could sell it on e-bay?

georges braque

I might write the date on the business card to have a number for one of my most freaky moments in a long time. I felt in the presence of the false, the totally false with intent to be false. Somebody who cannot recognize an honest word, unable, herself, to speak one. I remind myself that souls new to the human form have a hard time understanding something like the earth a ball rolling around the sun. So what does that have to do with a Budweiser commercial? When a parrot from the dark side "represents" me in DC, I am not represented. I sound like a teabagger harping about liberals. Yin and yang. Duality in action. Opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one. That's all I'm doing here is articulating my opinions. I'm not looking to missionarize my opinions, just to bring them up and look at them, confess to them, examine them, change them. I like my opinions to be fluid as water, not locked into place like a cement block. I'd rather not have opinions, but they somehow seem inevitable, simply as point of view. This is how I see a given opinion in relation to my own experience and assessment of experience. I didn't know what an opinion was until I was out of high school a year or two. Had them before, but didn't know that's what they were. Coming up Baptist, I believed my opinions were truth. I didn't see them as opinions, but as truth. God sez. I'm in van Gogh's mid twenties in the biography, feeling like I have an understanding of his thinking, of his spirit. He came up as I did in church with his male parent the church enthusiast. His family did not alienate him, so it was not easy for him to expand his vision beyond the absolute beliefs of father and mother. His spirit was reaching beyond the confines of tradition, though the tradition he lived in held him in its orbit. He was a born free-thinker, did not want to be a rebel, but the need to follow his own light made him an involuntary rebel within. 

georges braque

Books Vincent read expanded his thinking. He was like a kite on a string, wanting to fly up into the sky, but the umbilical cord of a loving family held him to the tradition his spirit needed to fly away from. Vincent's searching mind led him away from the tradition he was expected to perform in as an obedient employee, make a lot of money, property, family, position. He could not do it. He went on long solitary walks into the country. He was a nerd, somebody with zero social skills. He just did not know how to connect with other people. He had no social skills to start with and finding himself so unsuccessful with people, he went within. He read Thomas Carlyle, who was writing at the time, in English. He could get around in four languages. His absence of social skills made keeping a job difficult for him. Family and the others around him saw him a failure, a loser. And they convinced him he was a loser. I suspect he discovered his own mind on his long walks, went on the walks to enjoy his mind. Nobody understood him anyway, and when he started expanding his mind reading non-academically, which he did much of the time he wasn't working or walking, the people around him understood him less. I've seen Dutch countryside and cities. I've seen London where he spent a year or less. I'm sure we walked in some of the same places, saw the same buildings, experienced the English. This gives me a sense of place when I'm with him there, getting by the best he can. The work he loved doing was teaching children. But it didn't pay anything, just a room and meals, and a jerk to work for. No future in that. I'm having a good time watching him soul search, identifying with myself in that time of my life when all I knew was I could not live the rest of my life under the smothering pillow of religion. Vincent sought on his own as I have sought on my own. It even feels like his life was another version of my life in 19th Century Netherlands. The particulars are very different, but the spirit is awfully close. I've never read somebody's life that paralleled my own so much it feels like I'm reading about me. It's uncanny and it's fun. 

georges braque himself

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