Creative output sputters and stalls in the face of tapering life energy, with far too many menial tasks absorbing the dregs. Future creative engagement requires that I relinquish this living situation and move on, sooner than later. Sure, the maintenance, ordering, and re-wilding process may be understood as creative in a wide, cosmological sense: a performative action affecting the state of the macrocosm. The amount of time siphoned off into property upkeep, along with the demands of the ‘regular’ j-o-b has precipitated a high level of social isolation—something that I’m not used to, and something that’s not good. Driving the maintenance desperation is an acute and currently unavoidable fear-of-the-future. Sheesh. The ratio of my embodied energy level to the overall entropy of the situation is in the negative orders-of-magnitude level.
e–::E(s) ≥ 10-5
With no capital to exploit in this terminally oligarchic nation, aside from whatever I can physically manipulate.
There is a limit to what I can do to ‘catch up’ on years of zero wealth accumulation in the stead of transnational creative engagement (aka, bottom-feeding). Options are limited, but success depends more on the vitality of will—closely allied with physical stamina these days—along a simple fearlessness to make it happen. Fear is so diffuse—and previously not a factor—that surely it can be overcome (again) with focused human engagement.
Plans are developing. The first is leaving full-time work-for-pay despite compromising long-term viability. The second is to liquidate the property. Optimizing it for resale will require maybe six dedicated months, maximum, before moving on. The real estate market will be in better stead next year, barring civil conflict or another irruption of the Gaian system. Expatriation now the first choice. The extremities of Babylon’s current incarnation—hardly imagined by even the most cynical internal critic, well-known to those looking on from the outside—are a grinding black hole.
I arrived at this working/living situation having prioritized human connection over a stable and lucrative career (in the extractives industry where I started, or elsewhere). Unlike a lot of folks who follow a specific, planned trajectory, honing their talents in a particular field, gaining seniority and capital, I bounced around. Partly to maintain face-to-face contact with a widely dispersed human network, but also to sustain a flexibility that allowed for spontaneous participation in particular creative situations appearing along the way. Some, once trusted, have decided to label that as opportunism. I’ll deal with that hurtful critique in another posting. My general trajectory, though, despite that label, in other ways, was a mistake even with the rich array of participatory experiences it brought me into. Prioritizing stability, the known, the familiar rhythms of regular and predictable employment (and cash flow), ensuring (insuring!) future viability: this is the leitmotif of survival in the capitalist system, the rewards for a reliable prole. I prioritized change, instability, serendipity, spontaneity, and am paying the price of that. The time value of the abstracted instrument of social viability—money—requires long-term dependence and living-for-the-future. Well, the future has arrived: viability and life is emphatically transitory, there’s only one go-round. As Richard Pryor extolled: “I don’t give a FUCK!”
And what of Art? and Creativity?
It all started a 17th of January, one million years ago.
a man took a dry sponge and dropped it into a bucket full of water.
who that man was is not important.
he is dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
as I was saying, at about 10 o’clock, a 17th of January. one million
years ago, a man sat alone by the side of a running stream.
he thought to himself :
where do streams run to, and why?
meaning why do they run.
or why do they run where they run.
that sort of thing.
personally, once I observed a baker at work.
then a blacksmith and a shoemaker.
at work.
and I noticed that the use of water was essential to their work.
but perhaps what I have noticed is not important.
normal voice:
anyway the 17th goes into the 18th
then the 19th then the 20th
the 21st the 22d the 23d the 24th the 25th the 26th the 27th
the 28th the 29th the 30th the
31st.
of January.
thus time goes by.
[ED: a decidedly gendered, old-school statement from a Fluxus founder … there are contemporary, open, and ongoing events that arose around this text, establishing 17 January as Art’s Birthday. I used to participate, but haven’t lately. The last major Fluxus-related happening was Fluxus Akademie discussion/lunch at Mary‘s in Rösrath in 2013. And in the incommunicado haze of the past few months, I discover Mary’s gone, back in March. Yet another remembrance to craft, reminding: no time to lose.]
Calmness accompanies the whole. Fear accompanies the part. Intuition goes beyond the figure-ground focus of conscious perception.
Learn sorrowfully from the network (from Karen (T.)) of another passing. John Wester was a great friend from junior and senior high days. we maintained contact after the college diaspora and when we were both living in Los Angeles after college (he doing his law degree, me finishing my tenure with corporate oil) and later through email, thinking that at one point we would cross paths. an obituary is a terse framework that little shows the life, only the social situation. I’ll add some words and, if I can find some, photos soon. Karen calls — the first time we have spoken in, what, maybe 30 years? nah, a few less than that. it is strange and nice to hear a voice that slowly stirs older memories — of those humid summer days down at the North Shore dock of what was a not very large lake in one of the first planned communities of the 1970’s, Montgomery Village. I would cycle down Brink Road from home to the Village on occasional summer days before a drivers license made more of the world available. At the dock, John, Richard, Taryn, Karen, Mark, Gary, Bruce, Sharon, and others would hang out — some of them working (boat rentals), some like myself, just hunting for summer friendship. 
