When everyone hates you, and you hate that everyone hates you, and all hate has its basis in fear then what is being feared? I have this blog site that I've been posting to for years. I can't remember where the photo mysteriously came from, the rider, horse, and dog, but I know only a couple people follow because I can see if someone’s viewed the latest post. I don't know if I ever told you but in the mid-1990s I was involved in an industrial accident. I was gopher for a start up biotech company that was pulling apart the DNA of various food crops. There were seven wet labs at a research facility, and I checked in millions in equipment and took care of lab ware washing and autoclave disposal. It was a dream job where I got to walk around in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, even got to surf at lunch. I wasn’t careful enough to take precautions washing lab wear with gloves on. Also, because it was a start up with a bunch of young scientists in the lab, and things moving fast, I didn't know the chemicals would affect my memory. It had been about six months in, when I had a moment where there was something I went to recall, and knew I knew the answer, but couldn't retrieve it. Over the next couple months or so, it happened again a handful of times. Then, one day when I was doing lab ware and one of the young scientists saw I did not have gloves on. Dude! You're not wearing gloves?! It's not like it did holes in my memory like holes in Swiss cheese, but then kind of; the thing is, when it happens now, and I'm in a conversation, or composing art, and I need to retrieve something, and there's no transmission, if I am queued to it, I can speak on it at length. I wonder often, where I might be, had I never had that accident. Now today, as I try and salvage whatever I can from an unrecognized life in the arts. This far down the road, and such an unusual past I really am a problematic person in polite society. All I can say is that when I was young, I vowed to change the world for the better. I remember going to sleep one night during the Vietnam war, where I had seen some black-and-white photos from that war on television, and I went to sleep that night, saying to myself that I knew I was too young to do anything at that moment, but I would grow and find out, and make it end. There are some indications, that that vow will be fulfilled, honored, legitimated, authenticated, and in some critical analysis of the situation, it might even be all those things but just in a subtle manner that will never be known, that I have already fulfilled that vow. With all the disappointments in life, how typically an artist in an age of deceit, thinking they can redirect the course of affairs, would naturally live to fight another day, if doing so was how the war could be won. One in fifty are artists, the type that burns for the truth all day and every day, that they would eventually identify and secure the ground to make a stand.
I remember when I did that play at Pepperdine, where, in my pursuit of acting at that time; called A Game of Chess, I played the king who played a game of chess against his assassin, knowing his drink had been spiked; but that he had taken little doses of the poison leading up to the match, so that he was not the one to lose and die. It was a one act play, and I worked with the director and other actor, all three of us late teens/early 20s, in an apartment with little furniture and no food. While we worked on the play, there was a moment where we were all hungry, but had little money, bought some pasta, butter and Parmesan. Of all my struggling artist episodes, one of them was as an actor, and had life unfolded differently, had I decided to suck cock for a part, as I did have that offer a couple times, maybe. I can get on stage and carry an arc to a point of laughing or crying for the audience. Was I always just a revolutionary with an artistic bent, or was I an artist who took himself too seriously in a battle that could never be won; just deluded, thinking I was one to end it all and bring justice to Earth. In my digging as an artist I discovered the legal mechanism in which to honor my vow. Maybe I was just a kid, never had a vow to honor, but had a life to live and enjoy. But I saw it all, and subsequently discovered, and subsequently chose to act, to pursue the one over the other. I saw it from so far away, even on a recent Zoom call with a bunch of people for election integrity, few of them knew Bev Harris whistleblew that twenty years ago.
Two people in their 60s, finding out they're still curious, still principled, and make each other laugh. I’ll do it. If not, as long as two or three people view this blog, I’ll just pretend it’s someone super special. At the very least everyone still has the beauty of Sun and Earth to wake up to.
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