Ugly this Ugly that

Ugly this Ugly that is written in capital letters on an abandoned cart at the abandoned trail station by the abandoned village I live closed to in a remote location in the abandoned Portuguese south countryside. It crossed my mind, while happily gluing the usual tobacco papers and golden chocolate wrappers on yellow and blue paint over some crockery cardboard that I saved from the recycled trash, that this piece is not even a tiny fraction as ugly as it should be. The war and its spin-offs go on with varying degrees of cruelty everywhere indeterminately, as much in the Ukraine, as in Palestina, in forgotten parts of Africa and other continents or in our own streets, but mostly in our conflicted hearts and minds - unable to understand how can we conserve any hope for alternative, healthy futures in the midst of all these billion-dollar businesses at the cost of the most infamous human frailties. You only have to look at any corner of the global world, particularly that which is broadcast from both the algorithms and the official communication channels, dominated as they already are by the criminal markets, to begin to believe that it is in all this never-ending growing horror, i.e. greed and thirst for power and petty power, that the nature of humanity really lies. That's what they want us to believe, the criminal markets, as well as those who obey and promote them, so that we finally give up, completely and utterly apathetic in our atrocious and suicidal consumerism.

I was approaching the train station today, where we now have a recycling point, prepared to remove the drawing pins someone who stole our last poster didn’t bother to, when I came across three Cape Verdean women, a grandmother, mother and granddaughter, somewhat lost. They approached me, the dog and the bag of plastic to recycle, while I was reaching for the empty noticeboard to remove the aforementioned drawing pins before stubbornly putting up a new poster. The grandmother needed to pee, the granddaughter was afraid of the dog, the mother wanted to have a coffee. Mum, who had studied in Odemira and now wanted to reunite with a friend and show the village to the other two, couldn't believe that there is no other mean of transportation from and to here. She had never been to this railway station, the only one with connections to the country's main cities and the only transport within a radius of many kilometres. So I invited them to mine, where there is a bar at the cultural and ecological association we persist in developing despite the boycotts, the indifference and the contrary interests of a few individuals around here who feed those destructive machines against goodwill and the common good. Mário, our neighbor, the always busy cowboy, passed by and helped them to get a taxi. Meanwhile they came in for the toilet and mum had a coffee, daughter a red fruits juice and grandmother a ginjinha (cherry brandy) - she had never had one before. The youngest faced a little of her fear of dogs, I told her it is important never to give in to fear, wether reasonable or irrational. I charged 1,5 €, they gave me 3 and left smiling. I went out in the garden to keep the chickens safe with a fresh smile too. 

Mail Art Call by Museum of Mail Art, A/C 9875, 79038, Lviv, Ukraine: https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/13066581658?profile=original