Thoughts on the death of an empire or personalization run amok.

One reason I stayed here was a curiosity I had, given I tend towards a disastrous life, to sit right down in the belly of the beast and witness the destruction of an empire. I arrived just before Bush the anti-clown pulled off his coup . And I've been here and there ever since just watching this thing being dismantled. Ny blackout, the infrastructure broke we are led to believe because a tree fell on a line somewhere and started a cascade. Then 9/11, then Katrena then, and it's only been ten years, a slow creep of the survelience police state and prisons for profit using the slave labor within to produce most of the refrigerators and all the flak jackets to the new record of over a million citizens in prison, to the straight up fraud followed by the pillage called the bailout, two ongoing wars without end and the gulf poisoned while oily shrimp are sold to the plonkers and scrotums searched at each airport and now just recently at railway stations and get this, it's after you get off the train. They don't even bother to disguise it's just there to get you used to the brownshirts.

And I put my face on and make like I'm not very pleased with it all and glare at millionares at private parties and now have come to a point where even those I'd trusted to tolerate me not jumping wholeheartedly into the system reject me because, well not to put to fine a point on it I lack a certain motivation and drive. Self medication also. So I'm still in the market, still on my feet so to speak and noticing too how the stylized hopelessness I do for a living is being matched in uglier forms by the society around me. I've learnt in ten years what a couple of generations of Americans are themselves waking up to. You live beyond your means and take that shit for granted and the plummet that follows it's withdrawal is a bitch.
So I'm focusing on tomatoes, 11 varieties, heirloom, got over 120 plants up and running. All new to Hawaii so some of them will fuck up but I'm taking care of them and protecting them and watching over them because as those of us here who lived off the streets know because we proved it to ourselves. The oldest currency is small useful things and sometimes moments of laughter in an otherwise complicated and grinding existence is a small useful thing. And those who receive it instinctively want to return the favor and so the purists, without even asking, get money in their hats.

People like laughing however I'm banking on them being more grateful for exotic tomatoes in the next wee while. Tomatoes can handle me popping off to gigs also so they are a good death of an empire transitional fruit or vegetable or whatever the fuck they are.
I sometimes feel like one of those mad guys who mutters gibberish and you're scared to lean in and listen in case they make sense.