General Observations I

     Hollywood & Otorohanga

Once upon a time, long ago,

I lived and worked in Hollywood.

Yes, that Hollywood.

And then I didn’t any more.

Then, after about sixteen years

of living in various other places,

but still once upon a time, long ago,

I lived in Otorohanga,

a tiny rural town

in the New Zealand King Country.

Although the two places were different,

one thing they had in common,

when it came to places to live,

was my paucity of discretionary income,

so that one of the key differences

was that in Otorohanga

only a few things went on at night

that I couldn’t afford to enjoy,

whereas in Hollywood

thousands of attractive activities

that I couldn’t afford

went on every night.

          Rush Hour

I sold my car,

so I walked

to Boundary Road

and across Whitiora Bridge

to the Pak’n Save

and back

every other morning

because mornings are cooler

and I could only manage

to carry comfortably

one shopping bag

with five bottles of wine

and some other stuff in it

for the twenty-minute walk.

On the way back across the bridge

I stayed on the street side of the footpath

to avoid vertigo from the bridge’s height

and kept my eyes on my feet

to avoid the glare from the rising sun.

Every person I passed

walking in the other direction –

on their way to work,

I suppose –

smelled like

a perfumed consumer product

rather than like

a human,

because human isn’t good enough,

I suppose.

     Einstein’s Piss

One of the many things

that I love about rain

is that every drop of it

contains a homeopathic amount

of Einstein’s piss.

                              Car Porn

Walking past the Giltrap Prestige car sales premises

and other upmarket showrooms and car yards

along Auckland’s Great North Road,

the sight of the gleaming array

of line after line of obscenely expensive luxury cars –

from sleek and flashy sports cars to behemoth land yachts –

appalled me and filled me with a sense of disgust and revulsion.

The cost of even the lowest-priced one

would be enough to provide a nutritious lunch

for every impoverished child in New Zealand for a year

or more,

and none of them could transport a person

from one place to another

in noticeably more comfort

than taxicabs,

or even well-maintained ten-year-old economy cars.

This ostentatious display of car porn

has nothing to do with transportation, of course –

the agency’s name makes that clear.

The point is to assert superiority over others,

and of course to foster the illusion

of enhanced sexual attractiveness.

The expressions on the faces

of Giltrap Prestige’s shoppers and sales personnel

confirm that.

I used to dream of owning cars like those

back when I was sixteen-seventeen-eighteen

and under the spell of Sean Connery’s James Bond,

but I outgrew that shit before Thunderball,

as my values matured.

               Russians, History, and the Law

Some years ago

I somehow became thick

with Hamilton’s Russian community,

and it struck me at the time

how just about every one of them

had an offhand, casual, automatic,

sneering contempt for the law and law-enforcement,

and inconvenient rules in general.

This is not to say that they all

were immoral or criminal people,

although some of course were,

but just that they seemed

unable to conceive

of the state having any legitimacy.

Of course, Russians seem, to me at least,

to have a certain fondness for sneering in general –

just listen to their language.

I was inexplicably wondering recently

about the extent to which

Russian law and law-enforcement

is the way it is

because it is a part of Russian culture,

and the extent to which Russian culture

is the way it is

as a response to Russian law and law-enforcement,

how Russian history has affected both,

and how both have affected Russian history.

My affiliation with that community ended

several years ago.

I don’t miss it,

and I’m glad that my grandparents

fled from that empire

more than a century ago.

   Uh, Wait a Minute …

When I lived in Micronesia

on the island of Guam,

the semi-indigenous people,

whom the Spaniards

had tagged Chamorros,

had a fraught relationship

with the Americans,

and especially

with American cultural imperialism.

Still, it put me back a step

to see a car bumper sticker

that read,

“Save Our Culture:

Speak Chamorro”

             A Standardised Aesthetic

Despite being soulless displays of meat on the hoof,

the obligatory parades

of beauty-pageant contestants

wearing the obligatory swimwear

in countries where such contests

– and therefore cosmetic surgery –

are big business

– Venezuela and South Korea come to mind –

also call into question what criteria

the judges employ to decide who wins,

as the contestants all look almost identical.

     The View’s Great, Though

I looked at the TV screen

and behind the talking head

I saw images of tall buildings

with countless windows,

and behind each of those windows

is one or more lives

trying to make sense of it all

trying to find meaning for it all

and either bullshitting themselves, or failing,

or just giving up and forgetting about it.

                 Individual Choice

Staff meetings,

meetings in general,

team-building exercises,

organisational get-togethers,

political party talks,

art openings,

large family dinners,

after-match functions ―

any time when time moves slothfully,

but for social or personal or employment reasons,

or because the potluck awaits

on long tables in the next room,

or maybe because they’re providing free plonk,

or for any other reason

it seems unwise or counterproductive

just to hoof it ―

these are opportunities for me to cast my eyes downward

and to observe the amazing variety of shoes

that the other people there are wearing, and wonder:

Why did they select just those shoes?

What was going through their minds when they bought them?

Are those shoes specific to that outfit

or do they wear them with everything?

How, if at all, did those shoes influence their decision to wear

those socks, those stockings, those tights, or nothing at all under them?

And so on. Shoes provide much food for wonder and speculation.

If everybody’s sitting around a table, though,

and I can’t see their feet,

I can still observe and wonder in a similar manner

about people’s shirts and blouses.

                    Two Words

My native language has two words,

which every time I hear them,

or read them, or think them

make me feel a deep sense of well-being,

blanketing comfort,

and connection to all that is good.

This may be so partly because of the way they sound

in English,

even though the things they stand for are almost global,

and have been for many millennia,

the origins of their connections with human life

lost back into the mist of time.

This is also true even though many people

have, being people, corrupted and sullied

the phenomena that both of these words signify.

These words, of course, are ‘beer’ and ‘dog’.