More Personal Stuff

                   The Situation

People, of course,

have always terrified me,

one-on-one and face-to-face,

but for more than 60 years

I tried to pretend to myself

that this fear didn’t exist

or struggled against it

when it was all too obvious to ignore.

Neither of those strategies worked.

For more than a year now

I’ve given myself over to the truth,

and just avoided those

face-to-face situations

as much as I can,

especially if they’re purely social,

and have used my reliable old

perform-instead-of-interact technique,

which has served me poorly since childhood,

only now with no hope

or expectation from it,

except to escape

as soon as I politely can –

or impolitely if that’s what it takes.

                  Adolescence and Me

Probably the main reason that I never made a career

out my certification as a secondary-school teacher

is that I just plain dislike most adolescents

and don’t get along with them.

It was like that when I was one, too.

           Blowing Off and Shining On

Back in the mid-seventies in San Antonio,

when I was in my late twenties and early thirties,

the people I knew – dopers mostly,

and a few theatre folk and musicians –

used a couple of phrases that I’ve recently realised

refer to behaviours that I’ve only embraced

as functional for my approach to life

in my mid-sixties.

The jargon in that far-off time and place

involved blowing things and other people off,

which refers to dismissing them

from our minds and lives,

and shining on,

which refers to finding serenity by gliding above the storm.

That’s what I do now.

I’ve discovered that I can do without

almost anyone or anything

by avoiding the news, being reclusive,

and limiting my social activity

overwhelmingly to the internet and emails.

It’s marvellously easy just to remove people

who like to piss me off, disrespect me,

provoke petty conflicts with me,

or any combination of these behaviours

from my facebook so-called friends list.

Click-click, Poof!

I’m only in danger of not shining on

when I have to leave the house

to exercise the dog or go to the shops –

the world is full of dickheads –

but I can go numb again and shine on

when I get home.

                 Tachycardia

There it goes – speeding up:

I can feel it going

thump-thump-thump

hard and fast

in my chest

and in my arms and in my belly,

accompanied by light-headed dizziness

and a thin film of sweat on my forehead;

the insides of my elbows also start to sweat,

and my stomach begins churning,

making me belch,

my intestines also shift into high gear,

as my lower abdomen expands.

Streams of sweat roll down my sides.

My knees start to feel cold.

A nagging soreness creeps over one of my biceps.

Pins and needles dance here are there on my back.

Sometimes it awakens me in the middle of the night

and doesn’t let be fall back asleep

until it slows to normal

again,

as it always has

so far.

                 Performing

As a full-time performer

rather than a person

with adequate psychosocial development,

I’m aware of several different types

of performances.

Performing in real life

face-to-face with someone,

performing these verses I compose,

performing in front of a theatrical audience,

and performing in front of a camera or two

are profoundly different to each other.

The only one of these types of performance

that produces any stage fright at all in me, however –

other than auditions, of course –

is performing in real life

when I’m face-to-face with a real person.

                Politeness and Concern

‘HowAHyuh?’

People look at me funny

when I’m unable to manage

the expected polite-but-dishonest, ‘Good, thanks,’

and make snappy evasions instead:

‘Same as yesterday but older.’

‘About as well as could be expected.’

And so forth.

Okay, most of them don’t give a shit

one way or another about how I’m feeling;

they’re just being polite,

which is fine and natural.

The real danger is with people I know,

the ones who actually look at me

and ask, ‘Are you all right?’

and then feel obliged to hit me,

if I open myself to them and don’t lie,

with salesmanship-seminar-level inspirational advice

that belongs superimposed over the photo of a landscape,

as if in all my many years

I’d never before heard

their glibly superficial

and inherently judgemental and hideous

you-just-gottas or similar simple solutions.

I’m best off if I answer these people

with something like,

‘About as well as could be expected

under the circumstances,

the circumstances being what they are.’

They might look at me annoyed,

but at least I won’t be making myself vulnerable

to their shit by opening up.

    A Robustly-Based Forecast

Nothing good

is ever going to happen

to me

for the rest of my life.

I may be wrong,

but it would surprise me greatly if I am.

             Brilliance & Inadequacy

Slogging my way through The Picture of Dorian Gray

fifty years too late,

Oscar’s brilliance stunned me of course,

as well as bogged me down.

My ex-lover, meanwhile, posted a vignette

on her ill-subscribed ‘community page’

that also stunned me with its brilliance – her brilliance.

I felt completely inadequate as a writer

in addition to feeling inadequate as a person,

which is how they had conditioned me to feel

so long ago,

and as life has rolled on.

      Emotional Disability

On a stormy Thursday,

with intermittent hailstorms

keeping me from taking my walk,

the realities involved

with being a lonely old man

in constant physical pain,

and with nothing in the bank,

a crumbling house,

a past mostly best not remembered,

an emotionally detached dog,

and no family anywhere close

put me on the edge of tears

about three times during the morning.

It would, I think, have been helpful

if I’d been able to shed some of them,

but I couldn’t.

The next day was clear and cold.

The Comfort of Autoapathy

   Not caring about anything

   having anything to do

   only with me

   is a beneficial state

   in which to be.

  The Storm and the War Were Inside

A big, howling storm was stirring things up

outside,

but I was inside my warm, dry house,

my belly full of nutritious food,

no murderous agglomerations

of self-righteous sadists waving assault rifles

or launching air strikes

anywhere even halfway near

my part of the world.

What right did I have

to be unhappy?