Still Ranting

                      Dog Years

She asked me pleasantly how old my dog is,

and I answered pleasantly that she’s eleven.

Then she asked me how much that is in dog years,

and I answered that it takes the Earth

the same amount of time to go around the sun

for every species on the planet.

The whole notion of dog years

is pathetically fraudulent

and shows a deep ignorance

about dogs.

Dogs don’t follow the

same developmental curve

as humans.

They mature quickly,

remain physically active for a long time –

if their people let ’em –

and then decline rapidly.

Their life expectancy,

furthermore,

varies enormously

with their breed and size,

with small dogs and mixed breeds

tending to live longer

than large ones and pure-breds.

Some pop-offs

have asserted dogmatically

when I point this out

that a dog year is six human years,

sometimes seven,

and that’s that.

If that were the case,

then every dog I’ve ever had

has been sexually mature at the equivalent

of about five or six years old,

and still sprinting at full speed

when they’ve been older than 70.

                       Charmism

Every civilised, intelligent, decent person

knows that it’s totally uncool

– and in most places illegal –

to discriminate against people

based on ethnicity,

ancestry

(I refuse to use that horrid word ‘race’),

sex,

disability,

religion,

health,

sexual orientation,

gender identity,

political opinion,

or cultural beliefs.

Nearly everybody, however,

discriminates against people

with deficient social skills

and unsettling or irritating

personal behaviour characteristics.

I call this Charmism, and it stinks.

Show your dedication

to a truly inclusive society

by every once in a while

inviting somebody with a shitty personality

to your home for dinner.

Well, maybe that’d be pushing it.

Take ’em to the pub for a burger and a beer

– if you can afford it, that is.

                                Truth

Some people seem to take great delight

in presenting themselves

as more profound thinkers than they really are

when someone is trying

to tell them some truth

by asking as portentously as they can,

‘What is Truth?’

I think the best way to describe

what telling the truth is

is by saying what it isn’t.

If it involves:

lies

evasion

trickery

deception

dishonesty

face-saving

arse-covering

perjury

unfairness

pretence

posturing

insincerity

spin

disingenuousness

fraudulence

dissimulation

subreption

or

prevarication,

or any combination of these

… it just ain’t the truth.

     PS: The emperor, by the way, is buck naked.

                Oxymoron or Not?

It’s án astounding phenomenon,

yet I observe it all the time.

An apparent contradiction

at least in terms, but there it is.

I’ve seen them when I’m walking

my dog across the road,

and often when I’m driving

my car on city streets,

also in the checkout line

at the Pak n Save.

One ranted on the footpath

before the veggie stand.

I encountered one when trying

to buy a roasting pan.

One egregious specimen

was at a parent-teacher night.

My mother, oh, have mercy,

was one all her life.

It seems absurd,

but there they are –

destroying gender stereotypes –

with determination every day:

dick-headed women,

what the hell just makes them

turn out to be that way?

        Fashionably

It’s something about which

I’ve had solid cognitive knowledge

for at least a half a century,

but on a visceral level

I’ve never been able

to become accustomed

to eight o’clock

really meaning eight forty-five.

The rationale for this

is completely beyond

my ability to understand.

                 The Atrocity Menu

We live in a time of atrocities.

Maybe every time has been

a time of atrocities,

but the availability of almost-instant information

about whatever atrocity or atrocities du jour

any particular individual or group

finds particularly appalling

makes them seem to be never-ending.

So many of them erupt, or drag on,

across the global computer screens

that people world-wide

can pick and choose

from the current menu of outrages

which one or ones they deem to be

most deserving of their disgust

due to their perceptions

of the victims’ similarity to themselves

or some other capricious criteria

before being distracted

by tomorrow’s reports

of some other explosions of inhumanity.

                     Litterbug Picnics

They come to city parks,

whether by the river or by the lake or elsewhere,

and enjoy the serenity

of sitting or reclining

on well-tended lawns

under leafy trees

as they consume their junk food,

leaving their McDonald’s packaging,

KFC buckets,

fish-and-chips newspapers,

chippie bags, chocolate wrappers,

empty fizzy-drink bottles,

energy-drink cans, and RTD containers

lying on lawns that suddenly need more tending

for anybody else to enjoy serenity on them.

One late afternoon in early 2012,

when I was doing a one-off job at Hamilton Gardens,

I saw two young couples in hip-hop drag

walk in carrying plastic supermarket bags

filled with bags of chippies

and bottles of fizzy drinks

in vivid colours unknown to nature.

I couldn’t bring myself to smile at them

or even to think,

“Now, isn’t that nice.”

                               Whores

I dislike it when I hear people use the word ‘whore’

in a disparaging, derogatory, or belittling way

in regard to sex workers,

whether female, male, or otherwise –

in reference to scientists employed by Monsanto

and right-wing academic economists, yes,

but I have great respect for sex workers.

I respect their courage,

their senses of humour and irony,

and their honesty about money.

They harm no one,

and provide a needed service,

selling self-esteem

and the soothing warmth

of intimate physical contact

to socially inadequate,

fearful,

emotionally confused,

psychologically crippled,

clueless,

and otherwise lonely

members of the public –

not to mention obnoxious assholes

whom nobody else, not even their wives,

would touch with a barge pole,

and rightly so.

Perhaps most of all, then,

I respect sex workers for their strong stomachs.

At least they don’t sell their souls

or future generations

down the river.

               Rank Favourites

The bloke who took my money

at Kiwi Liquor in the Fairfield shops

asked me what my favourite whisky is,

as I always buy the cheapest,

whichever that is at the time.

I told him that it was impossible

for me to have a favourite,

as each has its own flavour and its own charm.

They’re just different to me –

neither better nor worse,

although I do tend to prefer blends to single malts.

He apparently found this hard to swallow,

as it were,

as every time I’ve gone in there since

he’s interrogated me on the point.

So many people’s apparent need to rank things –

to have a favourite

food, piece of music, city, friend,

brand of anything,

celebrity of the opposite sex –

to decide which ones are better and which are worse,

and their seeming inability, and even refusal,

to acknowledge that they’re just different,

seems an odd and ugly and foreign

way to think about life,

to me, at least.

                    Pseudo-Inspirational Crap

The word that comes immediately to mind is smug,

although the term arrogant ignorance would also fit.

Although now that I’m more reclusive than ever,

I don’t have to listen to it as much as before,

I run into it too damn often on facebook –

these little homilies superimposed

over inspirational artwork

saying that we can do whatever we want to do

and that we are whoever we choose to be

and that every aspect of our personalities

is the result of our own choices

and that if we don’t like it we can choose to change it

and all that sort of rubbish.

It’s the “I’m all right, Jack, and if you’re not it’s all your fault” crap

that probably seems correct to people

who’ve never been severely traumatised,

either by violence or torture as adults

or daily by family-member abuse as children.

      Win That Prize

She asserted confidently

that artistic competitions

like TV’s The X Factor

are necessary for innovation,

and that without competition

creativity would stagnate.

I wonder in what

winner-take-all contest

Van Gogh was competing

when he painted Starry Night,

or Jane Austen

when she wrote Pride and Prejudice,

or Miles Davis

when he recorded Bitches Brew?