So here's the rub of ... I don't even know what to call it... globalization (?)- but that's not even it really, I mean, it is and it isn't, but it is:

So I went to the Walmart to get thread- Walmart 'cause this is Clemson and that's what we have, though I could have driven a more annoying drive to Michaels.  Anyway, while getting thread at the Walmart, I got some cheap t-shirts to print "nastee" on. Cheap being 6 bucks a t-shirt, which is what I think t-shirts should cost; though maybe I only think that because I am old (theme of this weekend 😅). 

The T's were "hecho in Nicaragua and Honduras", and I thought to myself, "Great, not China," which is actually a pathetic thought, but one nonetheless... And that sent me into a long string of guilt ridden thoughts:

1) k, can you imagine what the conditions are for those women (you know it's women) working in those countries and what they must be making if you are only paying 6 bucks a t-shirt?

2) Pima-cotton: can you imagine the working conditions of the people picking this horrible plant, cotton, that is used to make these t-shirts that you're paying only 6 bucks for? Not to mention the conditions they are working in to produce it (my father had textile factories in a somewhat more civilized banana republic, I know the environmental conditions).

3) But k, at least they are working and earning something, and not feeling the need to walk millions of miles to come work here under some better but still terrible conditions. Isn't that good?

4) Great cotton, but the sewing is not the best; but then, what do you want for 6 bucks. And remember the pressure those women probably are under to get their quota sewn everyday...

5) I will look into buying American made t-shirts!

So I just looked into buying an American made t-shirt.  They sell for 40 and 50 dollars... Who can afford to buy something unseen that costs that much to get ink on in the studio?

This is one more example of put all the social responsibility onto the consumer and let them choose bullshit.  And honestly, yeah, I can buy a couple 50 dollar t-shirts; but most people in that Walmart just can't afford to buy American, and they can't because the jobs they used to do, the same exact ones that South Americans are doing now, have moved to, well, South America.

I have no answers, but questions are a beginning. I know it's not my fault, but that's what 50 years of weird republican use of Chicago School of economics thinking wants me to believe.

Fuck 'em.

Older and Maybe Gentler

It might or not be a cliché that when one gets older and has a conscience (something not evident in the entire republican party and their voters) one starts evaluating one’s life. Cliché or not, I find myself doing that sometimes.

Being an introvert who starts sweating every time I have to pick up a phone to call someone lest I disturb them, I don’t ask to follow anyone on social media; but if people I know ask to follow me, I follow back. That’s how I have come to follow some of the amazing students that have crossed my path; and sometimes, getting these mediated snippets of their lives triggers sessions of “life evaluation”.

Thinking back, I must say that I was totally unqualified to teach at the high school level for the eleven years that I did. I was fully qualified to teach art, but because of the (clusterfuck) way the school was structured, one did not need an education degree or certification with which one might have learned something about teaching young minds. … Though as it turns out, the one visual art teacher that had such a degree turned out to be a predator; but I digress (and here I go, opening my big mouth that always gets me in trouble- hahah- bring it on trouble, I am used to you)…

Anyway, when I look back at those eleven years, eight of which seemed idyllic (though I now know to have had deep structural flaws), and from whence so many great kids came out, I know I made mistakes I wish I hadn’t, most of them having to do with my temper and my expectations. I wish I had been more gentle and that I had understood the fragility of young minds. But, my god, when I look at “my kids” (the ones I know about), I am so amazed and so very happy to find out what they all have accomplished in all kinds of different ways. For all of them, I hope for a gentle future.

Well, there - back to trouble and cats …

I've tried; but I just don't like Halloween

The worse thing about Halloween, other than being held hostage by kids duped by crappy candy conglomerates into disrupting your evening and eliciting from you the automatic response (because it is the easiest way to react to being held hostage) of giving them the crappy candy you bought from an industry known to use child labor to harvest the crap the crappy candy is made of, the display of expensive cheap Chinese decorations made of materials that will clog waterways and kill wildlife for millennia, the constant disruption of dinner, and the panicked scampering of cats every time the doorbell rings, is how lame most the costumes worn by the little extortionists are.

Yellow Star

The cunt who thought she was being cute by making those yellow Stars of David with the words “not vaccinated” on them, to sell for 5 bucks to other bigoted morons, got me thinking. My Jewish parents did not live in Europe at the time of the WWII genocide, they lived in Cairo, Egypt.  They did not feel the negative impact of that war directly; and they did not have to wear those yellow stars.

Throughout the war, Egypt was under British control, and Cairo, where my parents lived, was spared.  But had the war not changed course when it did; Rommel, who was on the outskirts of Cairo, would have invaded; and my parents and their families (which at the time consisted of numerous tight members) would most likely have been taken, maybe even to a new camp, and would have been forced to wear those stars. My parents were lucky; and the dissolution of their family through coerced immigration, the “police interrogation” of my father for mistaken identity, and the confiscation of all their wealth would come only later at the hands of, not a German authoritarian, but an Arab one, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

So the Nashville Cunt got me thinking.  Until after WWII, when Israel was created, Arabs and Jews lived side by side peacefully.  In fact, it took decades for my father to call Israel by that name; most of my life, he referred to it as Palestine. Imagine if there had been no yellow Stars of David. Imagine if the Brits and the Americans, and all the other European countries had not turned away their Jews, and more pointedly, had not handed them over so willingly to the Nazis.  Imagine if the Brits, through guilt, had not carved up (well, carved up more of - but that’s another story) the Middle East and given that land, which got called Israel, to those displaced walking dead.  Imagine if Palestine had evolved in a natural way into a state with both Jews and Arabs living side by side; just as Egypt had been when my parents lived there, and just how all the other Arab countries were before that war. Imagine….

So... that cunt’s actions got me thinking of all this. And of how different this world would be; and how different my life and that of my family, broken into pieces through trauma because of people just like her, would also be.

 

Public Confession

 

Today I got frozen out of Facebook for taking a picture of bails of pine needles I had to spread, and posting it, tongue firmly held in cheek, with the Nazi motto, in German, about freedom and work; a phrase I am afraid of posting again lest I get kicked out of the entire internet. The following thoughts came to me after seeing a friend before I "arbeiten" spreading pine needles in the yard while getting “frei” on a glorious day. I always taught art from a very personal point of view, so maybe this is a teaching moment; though it’s probably just more contemporary exhibitionism from my uncensored mind.

What prompted this reverie is a phrase you never really want to hear from a friend whom you haven’t seen in decades, and whose parents were best friends with yours, while she introduces you to her son.  She said, "When my parents met Katya’s parents, they visited and spent all day at their place; when they came home they said they had an orgy."  Or words to that effect.😆  ….Ahhh the swinging 70’s… Though for my parents it was the swinging 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. No wonder I was never home while growing up. As a child, I think I was aware of it, but blocked it.  I was aware of something, I just didn't look into it very closely - so very unlike me...  

I’ll hand it to my sex-crazed parents; their fun never happened when I was home. Were my parents actually sex-crazed?  Looking back on it, as I often do these days on my sixth decade on this planet, maybe. Sex certainly defined their relationship; and my mom defined her entire being in terms of her sexuality, something that seriously messed her up. And I am not saying this because I am a prude, I don’t even know how I feel about it; but I saw her mind break down at times, for long periods, due to her lack of having any other center; and then I saw her die a miserable and lonely death because of it.

I kept thinking of this while spreading my pine needles.  And I kept thinking about my parents' miserable relationship at the end of their lives when sex was no longer possible, while my dad, 15 years my mom's senior, battled prostate cancer.  And while doing yard work towards freedom, I kept thinking, as I am prone to do lately, about how all this marked my life.

My mother…  Another thing I often hear from people about her is how they loved her. And my mom could actually be wonderful; and often I loved her too, but like an abused dog who always goes back to its owner because the owner is not always abusive.  People who say they loved her did not have to live with her; I did not have that privilege. On her 3 last miserable years on this planet, after a lifetime of her bamboozling male psychiatrists into diagnosing her with depression, she was finally diagnosed, by a great woman psychiatrist, with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  And that explained EVERYTHING I always knew, but never had words to explain. …And no, I have not forgotten my beloved father in this story.  Him I really did love unconditionally; but he was complicit, he enabled her.  He should have walked away from her long before he realized, also without words, what the family dynamic was; which with Narcissists is that they actually call all the shots.  He could have maybe saved himself a lot of pain (like the Republican party could have, had they not enabled, to the bitter end, the one who shall not be named).

It has been 3 years since my mom died, and I still don’t know how I feel about her. I want to love her; often, I miss her. 

Teach your children well.

I'm no farmer; but I've been listening to a lot of soy farmers being interviewed by NPR about their predicament due to Donnie's tariffs on China, their largest consumer. Let's face it, a lot of them voted for him; and when asked about him, they ham and haw because they have choices to make that they don't like.

The Chinese system is horrible, their social practices are despicable, their trading practices really do disadvantage us, their political repression is well known, their labor camps continue, so.... fuck 'em. That said, I would like the "fuck 'em" to come in a different form than Donnie's way....

Soooo, here we are: stuck with Donnie's way, and a climate change that Donnie dismisses and that has dumped too much water on the "soy land", making it impossible to get a good crop of the stuff this year anyway. In addition, despite government bailouts and subsidies (because, like every other nation, we do subsidize our farmers, even though the Republicans hate to admit it- and by "farmers”, I mean Big Farma...) the suicide rate for farmers is increasing....

Again, I'm no farmer, I can barely keep up with my garden; but what if, given these political and real changes, we changed farming practices in this country and actually supported that change? What if, instead of giving out Band-Aids to big monoculture farms, we looked for better ways of working the land? It has to be better than current practices for the new world that is coming our way. What if farmers were incentivized to find out what the land can sustain? What if they diversified their production and were supported for doing so? ....Of course, Conagra and ADM etc would balk at lining politician pockets with such an interruption in their profit stream...

And one more again, I'm not a farmer...

In the kitchen

me: putain do caralho!

Curt: He was a French general.

me: who? Putain?

Curt: Yeah

me: and Caralho was a Brazilian one.

😊