Life Goes On At Home

              Evening at Home

A belly full of chestnuts and chicken

A fox terrier on my lap

Jean-Luc Ponty being sublime on the box

Too drunk to read any more

Nobody giving a shit,

Not even my progeny, or so it seemed

The long-term outlook becoming bleaker

The burning flavour of blessed whisky on my lips

Writing this in a shaky hand

                  It Wasn’t the Usual

Patterns are safe,

even when they’re dangerous.

I can’t afford pub prices

for either drink or food,

but instead of drinking

and either eating or starving

at home as usual that Saturday,

I met some mates at a pub

to watch a FIFA World Cup qualifying match

on large-screen TV.

It was all right,

but it left me broke,

so when I returned to the safety

of my unhealthy but workable pattern

of drinking myself to sleep

alone at home each night,

for about two or three weeks

I had to starve whilst doing it

instead of eating my usual two hot-bread-shop rolls

filled with steamed red onion, garlic, and chili peppers

with my poison.

                        Note to Myself

Sitting in my grog-drinking chair

with my second bottle of after-work plonk

and some Philip Glass string quartets on the box,

I put down the historical novel I was reading,

knowing full well that I’d have to re-read the last five pages,

took my pen and notebook from my shirt pocket,

and wrote, “Made it through

another day – whew!”

At least it was there in my handwriting the next morning.

            Not Exactly A Happy One

After glorious early-morning,

drought-breaking rain

the day went straight downhill.

Sticky humidity set in,

and my body responded badly

with pins and needles

up and down my arms and legs,

relentlessly fluctuating body temperature,

tachycardia, and a queasy stomach,

especially after returning from my walk into town

to buy a lottery ticket,

return a book at the library,

get a haircut and beard trim,

and then – ill-advisedly –

treating myself to some greasy pakoras at the mall

because it was my fucking birthday,

of all things.

Sixty-seven is such a non-round number.

My body finally came right after drinking a bottle of wine

at three pm – two o’clock real time;

it’s so hideous keeping idiotic daylight savings time

more than two weeks after the equinox.

The trouble was that my bad-day-physically thing

had kept me from doing my dumbbell exercises,

wrecking my sleep,

so I awoke at eleven – which was really ten –

in the evening,

unable to return to my dreams.

Another bottle of wine did the trick,

but that was one more

than my body or budget really needed.

                        The World of Fiction

I was getting to the end of a Doctor Siri novel,

reading about hard-ass, big-time, high-level

intrigue, corruption, smuggling, and blackmail,

plus, of course, the cold-blooded employment

of cold-blooded professional assassins

by ruthless American megalomaniacs in Southeast Asia,

when I looked down at the hard-headed innocence

of my elderly fox terrier

snoring blissfully under the coffee table,

and then turned my head to gaze

at the explosion of floral colour

growing out of the pots on the patio

outside my open front door,

and still I reached for my bottle of cheap wine.

                          Palatable

During the beastliness of high summer,

the most palatable period of daytime

is in the early afternoon,

when the sun is no longer blistering

my east-facing front patio,

allowing me to gaze

at my increasingly shaded garden

through the open door

with the fan blowing,

whilst I’m about halfway

through my first bottle of wine.

It’s more a matter of feeling not dead

than of actually feeling alive.

                  My Vista

Whenever I’m doing the washing up

or otherwise doing kitchen stuff

at or near the sink,

I can take a moment to cast my gaze

out the window and watch

my potted lemon and bay trees

dying from neglect –

unless, of course, if it’s dark outside.

   My Days’ High Points

Pissing.

Shitting.

Showering.

Sometimes reading.

The first drink.

Falling asleep.

         The Pots On My Patio

I went off marigolds in 2012

after cultivating them for decades

and decided to embrace begonias instead.

Fickle me.

Composed As the Grog Takes Hold

Shit! What a fucking day!

And there’s another one tomorrow.

Shit!

More Spiritual Stuff

          Context

It strikes me

that my conceptions

in regard to spiritual reality

would be totally irrelevant

if I were a politician

or an insulation installer,

but are at the nitty-gritty

of my bizarre pretensions

to be a superannuated

creator of verbal art.

                   Just Is, That’s All

Considering the enormity of the universe

and the absurdity of my unlikely and insignificant presence in it,

the experience of overwhelming pleasure

on the skin of my face and forearms

due to the late-summer-afternoon high-overcast sky

combining with a gentle breeze that ruffled my pelt

as we made our circuit of Claudelands Park

completely stunned me,

as if that mattered.

                   Funerals

I don’t do funerals.

I think they’re barbaric,

rites of some cult of the cadaver.

Once the life, the spirit, the energy,

the self

has left the body,

whatever’s left has no sanctity for me at all.

Sure, people like to remember love,

and dispose of corpses

in some sanitary and dignified way,

but the fervid need

to put the remains on an alter,

and sometimes visually drinking in its lifeless contours

before disposing of it

doesn’t suit my values at all.

It seems to me like worshipping an empty whisky bottle.

I can remember attending only three funerals:

My daddy’s, when I was nine,

was an open-casket affair.

It confused me deeply

and provoked troubled dreams for a long time afterward.

At my grandfather’s they at least kept the coffin closed,

but all the Hebrew chanting meant nothing to me.

The last one was for a neighbour at my mother’s condominium

one time when I was visiting her in Florida.

The casket was closed and they kept it short.

Lonely old people must die there often.

Then all the remaining oldies

retreated to another neighbour’s place for drinks.

I approved of that part.

                             My Will

I’ve always disliked the cult of the cadaver.

It seems to me that once the life energy leaves a body

that body ceases to be the person –

or dog or cat or cockatoo –

who used to inhabit it

and becomes a thing to be utilised if possible and then disposed of.

Funerals also leave me cold for many reasons,

not the least of which is the voluminous amounts of bullshit

that always seems to accompany them.

Since I have both property and progeny

I also have a will.

What’s important to me about the will –

I mean, how complicated is it to split

whatever’s left 50-50 between my daughters? –

are my instructions for the post-mortem

arrangements.

I’m too old for most of my organs to be useful for transplant,

so I’ve bequeathed my body

to the University of Auckland School of Medicine

to use for instructional purposes.

This also removes the liability

for cremation costs from my estate.

In order to be true to my principles –

and also to save my daughters some money –

my will also stipulates, and I quote,

“I wish no funeral or other formal memorial service be held.”

This doesn’t prevent any of the people who knew me

from using my demise as an excuse

to get together and drink heaps of grog, though.

                          The Flu

The news bulletins seemed so strange to me.

I’d really like to get

H1N1, y’know?

– although not as much

as the plain old seasonal flu,

because swine flu’s symptoms

are milder.

I’ve always enjoyed

having the flu,

ever since I was little.

I like having a few days

to a week or so

of lying in bed

all day

without guilt or restlessness.

I like the luxuriously fatigued feeling in my muscles.

Most of all, however,

I love the fabulous fever dreams

of flying

or bouncing lightly

through a reality far removed from my own.

When I die I want it to be from the flu.

I want to float peacefully off to sleep,

shedding all discomfort and pain,

and whilst soaring through a dream

of spiritual reality,

escape and never come back to Earth.

             Humanists, My Arse

The Yale University Undergraduate

Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics Club

signed a letter opposing a guest lecture

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

a human-rights and women’s-rights activist

who gets up various Islamic organisations’ collective noses

to the extent that the many threats on her life,

and the murder of her former colleague,

have resulted in her needing constant bodyguard protection.

They said that the reason for this letter

was that they did not believe that she,

“represents the totality of the ex-Muslim experience.”

What horseshit! Nobody does. Nobody could.

She has a voice that educated people need to hear,

whether it offends them or not –

or in this case, most probably, threatens them.

I have little doubt that it was fear

of violent Islamic backlash

that intimidated this club

into this hypocrisy.

I watched a video of her speech,

and the subsequent Q&A session,

and I disagreed with a reasonable amount of what she said,

especially things emanating

from her blinkered admiration of the USA,

but she also made some intriguing points

about Islam’s relationship

with various types of Muslims

that I thought were more than worthy of discussion

by elite undergraduate

atheists, humanists, and agnostics,

including ex-Muslims.

        The Obvious

This moment,

although incorporating

and having been conditioned

by all that’s gone before,

is still all that is.

                        Wonder and Imagination

The Bible is indeed an impressive work of the imagination

of Bronze Age drylands pastoralists

as they sought to amaze their mates

with wondrous tales around the campfire.

The evidence is clear that

some species of dinosaurs

developed and flourished

for fifteen million years or more

before extinction,

and that our species,

which appeared more than ninety million years later,

has been around for only about a million years –

with new discoveries continually

bumping our knowledge of the time

of the first biologically modern humans around a bit.

The realities that science unfolds

reveal a world more wondrous

than those illiterate, long-ago herders

could have ever imagined,

and it’s the people who cling to those biblical campfire tales

as if they were unalterably true

who have little or no imagination,

being disgraces to their distant predecessors.

                             Obituary

Somebody – her name escapes me at the moment

– died yesterday.

She wasn’t exactly famous,

depending on what definition of famous is operative here,

but a bunch of people knew her,

and even more used to know her,

when she was younger.

She’d touched the lives of many;

not millions, but many.

Each of them is important, of course,

just as important as she was,

just as important as you,

just as important as the wife of a motorcycle mechanic

in the village of Troitskoye in Russian Siberia.

They’ve all touched the lives of others in some way,

often for the better, most of them,

just as you have,

but sometimes for the worse.

This interconnectedness of affect isn’t limitless, though,

and over generations,

and centuries,

and millennia,

and aeons

will become diluted to an almost homeopathic extent,

fading from immediate relative insignificance

to eventual undetectable oblivion.

Ripe plums, however, taste good.

Moment by Moment

Death, apparently,

doesn’t want me

for the moment,

no matter what I want,

but even so,

I stumble on

without it.

General Observations II

                            Individualism

Moseying along the riverside footpath

underneath the summer tree canopy

keeping the old fox terrier company

shortly after dawn,

we came upon a flock of maybe a couple dozen ducks

who’d been up in some bush on a steep rise

between the footpath and River Road,

foraging for food, I suppose,

but maybe for some other reason.

I’m no expert on the Anatidae family’s species, after all.

Detecting our approach, one let out five rapid quacks,

and they proceeded to decamp from the parkland

and retreat into the river.

Some took off flying immediately, flapping furiously,

some of these quacking frantically, some not.

Others waddled at top speed, then flapped themselves into the air,

some quacking, some not.

Others started slowly, then sped up, then flew,

some quacking, some not.

Others hustled on foot all the way to the river,

some quacking, some not.

One insouciant female, however,

strolled at a leisurely waddle all the way to the riverbank,

paused there, looked at us with disdain,

or insouciance,

or so it seemed to me –

I don’t know if human language

can capture a waterfowl’s attitude, anyway – 

until we were almost upon her,

and then eased herself gracefully through the air into the water.

They all looked about the same to me,

but they obviously weren’t.

I wonder how we look to them?

                      River Rats

I’ve walked along the Waikato River often

since shifting to Hamilton from Otorohanga in 1993 –

at first by myself and then with my dog –

first along the western walkway stretch

from across from either Radnor Street or the archery range

to as far north as I had time to go,

later over a loop on both sides of the river

between the Fairfield and Claudelands bridges,

and then back and forth along it in Day’s Park.

In all that time I never saw a river rat

until July 2011, when I saw two

about a week apart.

It had been raining hard, on and off, for several days,

and the river was high and fast,

reaching almost to the riverside footpath.

I saw the first rat scuttle

from the side of the footpath into the river,

swim out to where a tree’s branch dipped into the rising water,

and climb up it into the tree,

where I lost sight of it.

The second rat I saw also saw us first and dove into the river,

but since it had no convenient tree branch handy,

it dove under the surface.

I watched for a while but never saw it resurface.

They must’ve floated down with the flood from upriver,

because with so many dogs almost always at that park,

most of them, unlike mine, being water dogs,

it’d be no place for a river rat

to call home.

                             Not Shaving

I decided in 1965 that I didn’t want to shave any more.

It just seemed to me to be

pointlessly stupid, physically irritating, and expensive.

In 2014 it amuses me to see

that full beards, not those idiotically narcissistic sculpted wanker ones,

are coming increasingly into fashion

among professional athletes in a variety of sports.

It’s somewhere between bemusing and sad to me that,

being just a fashion and not an expression of underlying principle,

it will have its season and then be replaced

by some other trend.

              Just Blotted Out

A juvenile mantis

maybe two cm long

was climbing the woodwork moulding

around the door

to one of my lounge’s

storage cupboards.

I squooshed it.

Then I thought about what it’d be like

to have my own life similarly squooshed.

It’d make no difference, I concluded.

Endless sleep is endless sleep.

                  Natural Nature

It aint natural;

you’ve felt that.

Or maybe it is,

depending on who you are.

After all, everyone just knows

what’s natural and what aint.

Don’t we?

Nature is natural,

like a scene of a misty forest

snapped with a digital camera

and disseminated on facebook.

What aint natural, some say,

is stuff people think up and make,

like artificial sweeteners

or pharmaceutical medicines,

or chemical fertilisers,

although even Natural Health remedies

and organic fertilisers

are composed of chemicals,

as is everything else in the universe.

Fuck that!

We all just know, we can just tell

what’s natural and what aint.

But people are part of nature.

Our DNA is pretty much the same stuff

as the DNA of a blue whale or a beaver,

only ours, like the beavers’, impels us to make things,

so everything we make must be natural,

because everything in the universe is.

Our nature also impels us to make things up,

to imagine and invent bullshit along with pollution,

which means that even what’s supernatural

is actually natural, too.

        Ecological Repercussions?

Vegans mean well and are mostly good people,

but what environmental niche

and what environmental impact

would cattle have today

if set free and released into the wild

after more than ten millennia

of domestication?

I sure as shit don’t know.

                  Summertime!

It amazes me

and makes me feel hollowly lonely

that most of the people

whom I’ve heard mention it

deeply love summer

and consider it to be,

as the seasons go,

the mutt’s nuts,

and their favourite time of year.

                   Doctors & Empathy

Not every doctor I’ve encountered

has been arrogant and domineering –

what they commonly call

having the God thing –

just most.

I’ve had three as close relatives,

and for the past few years

I’ve been picking up

the occasional lump of dosh

playing patients

in GP-registration practical exams

and in mock exams they use for training.

A med-biz cliché maintains

that a GP sees a heart,

whilst a surgeon sees a pump.

Well, the two surgeons I’ve known intimately

have both been astonishingly insensitive people,

sure enough,

but I’d estimate that eight out of ten

of the GP-registration candidates

in whose training I’ve assisted

have had about as much of an

aptitude for empathy

as I have for diamond-cutting.

               Academic Prose

These people with pee-aitch-dees

who either believe

that what they write

would lack credibility

if it isn’t as turgid and impenetrable

as they can make it,

or who just don’t know or care

how boring they’re making

really interesting and even important stuff

for others,

do no favours

for the advance

of the life of the mind

or the quality of civilisation.

          It Could’ve Been Worse

On the subject of superficialities,

since I was an adolescent

I’ve always wanted a striped shirt

with a white collar and cuffs,

but have somehow managed to do without one

throughout my long life

without suffering unduly

for that reason,

at least.

        Tackiness and Suchlike

I thought that the courtroom squabble

between some of BB King’s children

and his manager and care-giver

over the ownership of some of his jewellery

and other such things

while he was still fucking alive, for shit sake!,

was more than a bit on the tacky side.

I hope that I’m saving my daughters

from similar expeditions into tastelessness

by not owning any jewellery or suchlike

myself.