The Elegant Beggar and Christ said, "Ask!..."



A health Message for Dummies

I am back to minor aggravations such as not being able to enter directly on to my Blog page to write, so i had to go about it by uploading from my sketches and then get to write; weird! I thought I had it worked out or my friend David Carlson did a few entries back but the demon of vexations is back to haunt me. What is going on with my life? Well i am making attempts to apply for a visas to the United States and it is proving to be not an easy task and the more i get into it the less easier it gets. Perhaps my mind is at last giving in to not being as sharp as it used to be when it comes to the computer, oh well, live and let live.
Got an email from my niece in New York and from what I can deduce it looks like she wants me to practically be her restaurant manager if can find my way there. I am not so sure I am up to it as a matter of fact especially when it comes to dealing with cash registers and banks. But then again I will never know if i am up to it unless i try and what can go wrong? Yeah like having a nervous breakdown when you cannot figure out the credit card machine or getting  sparking ticket for every trip to the produce market after buying the wrong stuff, it has happened before.Yes i have a weird defeatist attitude most of my life and i cannot seem to shake it off even now that i keep saying to myself "I don't mind what happens," in my life.
Anyway i am still figuring out how to get my visas application online worked out and what with the fasting and being absolutely broke, what with not being totally happy with the fact that my eldest son decided that i should be the last to learn that he is married; yes life is a bitch but you just to get on with it cause what else can you do? No matter how hard you try to detach yourself from it, life will still have its hold on you for so long as you breath in and out. Looking on the bright side, while making my search for all possibilities like addresses in the States, I came upon my close friend Jerry Sule of the Sule Family in Green Bay ,Wisconsin and we chatted on Face book, he can't wait get together after all these years. I can look up one or two more long lost friends while I am at it. I might even try to have an art show here and there if i can pull it off, but if only i can get this visa application doing. What a pain these days to travel the paper chase alone will drive you nuts Nope, not like the good old days when you just have to show your passport and walla!
So back to basics, it is all a test, a test to see your endurance, it is what has been keeping you going over the years, like you thrive under pressure, so why not now? Old age? Crap! That is just a lame excuse, just got to figure out one step at a time, one hurdle at a time and start to untangle the tangle, start making sense out of all non-sense. it takes time and will power no doubt but what else is there to do? If i had been giving up at every stumbling block that i came upon i would not have the life that i had the past sixty odd years, so let me take this thing from top to bottom and see where it takes me; I could end up in Green Bay than New York.Not that I am overly excited about going anywhere anymore at this stage in my life anyway, so why make it a cancer case. Right now i got more or less one week to go fasting and then figure out where the money is going to come from to stay afloat in the meantime.

There is an element of insanity hidden within all of us, just how much are you willing to let it show ?
Perhaps if there is any regret I might have in the course of my life it is the fact that I turned down from becoming an unscrupulously  passionate money maker and instead chose to honor my so called God given talent as an artist. I could have been a very wealthy man right now if i had pursued the hard earning money making trait in my nature but as I said sometime ago somewhere in this blog, i would also most probably be dead or a total jerk with money. In a way having taken the more spiritual route and kept true to being creative all this while had kept me from sinking into a quagmire of decadent of which i am positive I would have succumbed to. I am not so good with having allot of money.
So i opted to being in the lower income bracket not expecting to be at the lowest most of the time but still being an artist i have come to realize if less than being a prostitute and often times it is a pain to keep reminding myself this. So i experimented with what the lat Alan Watts once called the 'Elegant beggar' persona as an artist. Living like in the old days benefiting from  good hearted patrons of the arts, those who are sympathetic towards artists who are in need due to their inability to make it in this dog-eat dog world. Persons who sees the genuine artist behind the struggle, those who can afford to give with faith and trust and less of judgement and condemnation. I think i am a fool to have this idealism in my head as i am beginning to find out. You cannot depend on anyone or anything for that matter but your own will to survive and in God's will to make it happen. So i am ending this experiment with immediate effect by turning away from asking for charity. I quit being an elegant beggar. I will stop asking or hoping for, Christ was not all correct when he said Ask and ye shall be given, or He should have added depending on who you ask from and what you can give in return.
At my age it don't really matter one way or the other anymore. I have survived sixty odd years and will live on perhaps a few more by God's grace and through it all i have experimented my life with every aspect of so called living. I have as the song goes, "squandered all my resistance for a pocket full of marbles... such are promises" ('The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkle). Will i be singing this song in New York in the next few months? It would be poetic..

"Without a clear. institutionalized framework for funding. even the discretionary grants from the then Culture, Arts and Tourism Ministry, which held the portfolio for the arts for a time, eventually began to diminish...People often say ,you must be doing this because you really love it.," muses Kukathas."And yes I do. But shouldn't mean i(I) shouldn't be getting paid for it...People can only sacrifice so much; for things to grow..."
 Malaysian Actor and Director ..Jo Kukathas.