Stuff From May 2017

     The Butterfly Effect

I’ve seen the maths,

even if I didn’t understand it,

but mathematics is mathematics,

there’s no arguing with that.

So a small change in one state

of a deterministic nonlinear system

(How’s that for mathspeak?)

can eventually bring about huge changes

in a distant place and time.

SciFi authors love it.

But if the flapping of one butterfly’s wings

in the Amazon jungle

can cause wild weather in Northern Japan,

what about the flapping wings

of the other billions of butterflies

in Brazil and everywhere else.

Seagulls and hummingbirds, of course,

flap their wings all over the place, too,

each having its own effect,

I suppose.

It’s obviously too complicated to comprehend,

and I like it like that.

                       Tunkela

My first wife was a strikingly beautiful woman,

and judging by her facebook photos

she still is one in her late sixties,

the product of a magnificent mixture

of ancestral DNA:

Mayan, Mestizo, and Lombard.

In Louisiana, of course,

some people considered her to be a nigger,

maybe because of her curly reddish Italian hair

and hard-to-pin-down facial features,

despite her creamy complexion,

which is much lighter than my skin tone.

After our divorce, which tore me up painfully,

one of my older relatives told me,

“Okay Richard, now no more tunkelas,”

‘tunkela’ being the Yiddish word for ‘darkie’.

How deeply racism sends its roots!

How bullshit those roots are!

‘White’ is clearly an ogre of the imagination

and not a description of skin colour.

Only albinos are actually sorta white,

but in racist minds albino Africans or Asians

or Native Americans aren’t white at all.

Shit, lots of bigots don’t think that Jews are White,

so where does that leave the anti-tunkela crowd?

After we sketched out our ancestries,

the nice clerk in the New Orleans courthouse

wrote ‘White’ for me and ‘Indian’ for my love

on the part of our marriage licence

that demanded our races.

For statistical purposes only.

          Not Gonna Guess

Intermittent light showers;

brolly up and down;

the distant sky in slapdash

watercolour-wash greys;

the close and distant treelines

also awash with faded autumn tones;

sauntering with my dog

through a hazy, sometimes-light,

sometimes-medium mist

that emphasised a sense

of blurred, indefinite other-worldliness

– okay, enhanced by my cataracts

and analgesic medication –

resulting in a powerful illusion of spirituality

that was probably really something else.

There’s no way of knowing.

                         Emotion

I distrust emotions; I think they’re archaic

and evolutionarily anachronistic,

counterproductively vestigial

hormonal reactions that we’re stuck with, like it or not,

but which people seem to like to flaunt and glorify,

as if they’re noble and filled with some higher fineness,

with hyper-emotional music and song,

stage and movie dramas,

and drama-queen displays in everyday life,

all of which turn my stomach and frost my arse,

but are unfortunately natural and universal

amongst us humans.

My own emotions have almost all

eventually ended up causing me trouble,

and often internal agony,

when I’ve been unable to control or manage them,

which of course I’ve often failed to do,

despite my awareness of the grinding internal conflict

with my knowing better,

when I’ve been fooled into the illusion of romantic love,

or when my daughters were little

and reached out for me to pick them up,

or when my dog’s gone missing,

or when I recall certain aspects

of the trauma of my childhood.

I know what hate feels like,

and it doesn’t feel at all good.

             Passive Aggression

All my personal relationships,

as it were,

are so fucked up

that in most cases my available

relational options

for communicating directly with those I know

are to:

   a) be untruthful, or at least dishonest,

   b) express thoughts that can only result in

conflict,

   c) acknowledge the validity of their

documentable indifference to me as a feeling person

due to my multiple personality flaws,

behaviour most people incorrectly

deem to be passive-aggressive, or

   d) just shut the fuck up.

Since I can’t bring myself to follow options a) or b),

and since people treat c) like some sort of

unforgiveable sin subject to accusational judgementalism,

I’m stuck with d), hiding out at home by myself,

communicating only indirectly

and judiciously

by keyboard

like this.

      Don’t They Award Ribbons Or Something?

Considering all the medications I need to keep going,

I feel as if my survival and ability to function okay

are largely a matter of my GP doing

something like a project for a high-school science fair.

bullshit

claptrap

malarkey

baloney

bilgewater

hogwash

tommyrot

horsefeathers

nonsense

nonsense on stilts

flapdoodle

balderdash

poppycock

bunkum

humbug

rot

bosh

bunk

Irish bull

drivel

rubbish

taradiddle

garbage

tosh

cobbers

hokum

twaddle

tripe

kak [S.Africa]

guff

hooey

crap

bollocks

heiferdust

barmpottery

bollocks

               Shark Cage

Do you trust people?

I don’t.

Oh, I trust some of them

to do the most dickheaded thing possible

in any situation,

but that’s not the same thing.

So I’ve come to live my life

in an invisible shark cage,

satisfying my hyperactive curiosity

by looking out,

and reading,

because even when the ocean seems clear,

whenever I’ve let any part of me,

with puppylike trust,

stray outside of my cage,

the sharks,

disguised as unique human beings,

some wearing friendship masques,

have ripped that exposed part off of me

painfully,

and made it disappear.

It’s definitely safer inside my cage,

and I intend to stay here,

but of course as a fool I never learn,

no matter how much I know.

Do you trust people?

I don’t.

But there they are.

All over the place,

    No Longer A Beardo Weirdo

For half a century my beard

made nice people look at me askance

wondering why I just didn’t shave,

prospective employers balk at hiring me,

as if I’d scare their customers,

and cops think that I looked suspicious,

probably up to something unlawful;

what was worse was

that I, perhaps consequentially,

found myself feeling

an involuntary bonding

with other bearded men,

even though they were probably

as likely to be shitnozzles

as anybody else.

Now beards have come into fashion,

and although my facial hair no longer marks me

as an enemy of polite society,

and the cops no longer give a shit,

heaps of them being bearded now too,

I shamefully miss

being so obviously out of fashion.

At least it takes more than just not shaving

to keep my head’s exterior up-to-date,

and I don’t sport that swept-up hairdo

that fashionable men all copy each other wearing.

  

  

Religion-Type Stuff

             Carolling

Working in a home office

with work that comes to me online

and being paid by the job,

rather than by some unit of time

has its advantages and disadvantages.

Probably its greatest advantage

is that I more or less set my own hours

for when I work,

which enables me to express

several of my values

by working on xmas day.

That tickles me.

I’ve also never had to wear a silly hat

in December

in order to keep my job.

             The Inarajan Missionaries

Everybody knows that Mormon missionaries

consist of teams of two young males

who wear black suits and white shirts

and plastic name badges,

and who ride around on bicycles,

smiling at people and pestering them.

When I was living in the rural part

of the Micronesian island of Guam

the Mormon missionaries who were staying in an apartment

over a store in the village of Inarajan

developed a sexual relationship

with each other,

then fell out

over who-knows-what,

and one of them bashed the shit out of the other one.

The locals,

almost all of whom were devout Catholics

and ill-disposed to conversion anyway,

thought that this was hilarious.

I have no information about what their Mormon Elders thought,

of course,

but hilarity probably wasn’t involved.

             I Wasn’t On A Mission

I wonder if I should have been more polite

to those aggressive Mormon missionaries

who didn’t take my, “Go away – I’m not interested,”

as conclusive

when they intruded into my consciousness

as I was walking my dog along Piako Road,

and if it was okay for me to say,

“Fuck off, you superstitious bastards.”

                                  Difference

I never did understand this Jewish thing when I was growing up.

I knew that I was Jewish, sure enough,

but I couldn’t understand how that made me different,

or why I was supposed to socialise with the other Jewish kids

more than with the kids who weren’t Jewish,

even though I didn’t particularly get along

with most of those in either category.

There was that religion thing, of course,

but none of it made any sense to me – Jewish or Christian –

and how one was right and the other not so;

I only knew that mine was different,

which made me different,

even though I had no idea in hell why.

I loathed the sabbath services, by the way,

despite the imposing visuals and rituals,

remembering them most

for having to wear excruciatingly painful suits

– I’m allergic to wool –

resulting in my mother nudging and elbowing and kicking me

and hissing, ‘Stop fidgeting!’ non-stop,

while some operatic tenor in a robe vocalised interminably

in Hebrew, which I didn’t understand.

I’ve hated operatic tenors ever since.

I gave up on that religious shit for good when I was fourteen.

Over time, of course, I’ve settled into the realisation

that I’m not different to and disconnected from others because I’m Jewish.

Fuck that bullshit.

I’ve always felt different to and disconnected from other Jews, too.

No, I’m different and disconnected just because I’m me,

and that’s all.

                     Astronomy

A white dwarf star is zooming around a black hole,

so close to it that the astronomers say

it does two revolutions an hour.

And we feel a thrill of sci-fi horror-show fear

for that little star’s fate,

which is ridiculous of course,

because it’s so far away,

and so out of scale

with a cabbage or a plum or a basketball,

and unconnected to human life on Earth,

where we have our own problems,

not nearly so huge as having

a black hole nearby,

but huge in our lives,

which we refuse to admit

are inconsequentially tiny,

and huge for the future of our species,

which we refuse to admit

is pathetically insignificant

astronomically.

  Three Pointless Unanswerable Questions

Why can’t love just fucking win for a change?

Why do bullshit and pointless mental convolutions

have to send love packing every time?

Why must children lose out on love

for their own protection?

No coherent reasons at all, I suppose.

I guess that that’s why the Greeks developed

tragedy as a form of art.

      An Observation Of Orthodoxy

I remember once when I was ten or eleven

I had a Sunday School teacher

who was one of those hyper-religious Superjews;

she’d shaved her head

as a sign of her devoutness,

or so I was told,

by my mother, I think.

She wore a wig,

so I probably would have had trouble knowing

if nobody had told me.

I wondered why,

if shaving her head was a statement

of her devotion to God,

she’d gone and covered it over with a wig,

but I didn’t dare to ask my mother.

She wasn’t that kind of woman.

                            Amazing

   

Marketers have done a stellar job

of selling the world on how desirably amazing

their digital gadgets are,

but they’re really no more amazing, deep down,

than such other products of human ingenuity

as hammers, violins, and cookery.

The universe, which is more amazing than anything else,

is itself a cosmos chock-full of amazing stuff.

It amazes me that the universe even exists.

I’m amazed that I was actually born into it,

and I’m amazed that the lottery of birth

dealt me parents who were white, professional-class

beneficiaries of the twentieth-century Western world.

It also amazes me that my mother was a psychopath.

It’s amazing that I’m not dead yet.

My dog amazes me daily.

I wonder if anything amazes my dog.

Waking up in the morning amazes me.

Getting my arse out of bed amazes me more.

The glorious enjoyment of my hot shower amazes me.

It amazes me that I can still, at my age,

do what I have to do to get by,

think faster and deeper than I ever have before,

and manage to have an occasional erection.

I’m amazed that, compared to most old people in the world,

I’m living a life of relative plenty in a warm, dry house.

Human cruelty and stupidity amaze me,

as does human kindness and intelligence.

DNA is endlessly amazing stuff.

I’m amazed that so many human adults

are actually able to believe

religious and other superstitious codswallop,

but that I can’t.

My own insignificance doesn’t amaze me at all.

Isn’t that amazing?

           Effing the Ineffable

spiritual, adj. Descriptive of that part of you

and the universe in general

that isn’t anything else.

                   From Out of the Desert

The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph

announced that he and his boys

are – with God’s help – gonna destroy Western civilisation

and that their flag is gonna fly

over the domes of Washington and Rome.

I wonder what effect this would have

on the Finnish snowboarding scene?

Political Theory

                             A Political-Economy Ideology

The basic problem

of all human groupings,

from families and acquaintanceships and tribes

to workplaces, governments,

and cultural and global systems,

has always been the same,

probably since before humans

evolved into the species that we are.

It seems so pointless to me

when people point fingers

and denounce the Left Wing or the Right Wing

or religious fundamentalism or soulless secularism,

or coalition, two-party, or single-party governance,

or any other genus or species of ideology or system.

Russians used to joke that

although under capitalism man exploits man,

in the Soviet Union it was the other way around.

The problem, of course,

is and has always been bullies.

Aristocratic bullies and theocratic bullies.

Capitalist bullies and state-socialist bullies.

Bureaucratic bullies.

Bullies with weapons.

Bullies who enjoy humiliating others.

Sneering bullies; sniggering bullies.

Pompous, self-righteous bullies.

Patriarchal-misogynistic bullies.

Corporate bullies.

Local-government bullies.

Workplace bullies.

Cyberbullies.

Fucking, dick-headed bullies.

Forget the other shit.

Bullies are bullies and they rule the world.

                             Other People …

These people really do exist –

I met one of them once –

and they make a big public deal

a big public deal –

Writing letters to the editor every week,

hijacking meet-the-candidates get-togethers,

badgering councils,

issuing press releases –

and all because they have this obsession

and all because they have this obsession,

that consumes their lives

that consumes their lives,

about other people having sex

(I’ll just say that once)

sex of which they don’t approve

sex in brothels

sex with call-girls and gay escorts –

women – presumably solo mums and divorcées – and queers,

turning tricks in their houses!

with children maybe living next door!

Or maybe two doors down.

Or maybe they’re just having heaps of one-night stands –

In exchange for what?

who can tell?

but what the hell – what difference does that make?

We have to legislate against loneliness and greed

and hammered self-esteem!

We have to legislate against mutual exploitation!

We have to legislate against fucked-up people being willing saps and mugs!

We have to legislate against sadness!

That’s always worked, hasn’t it?

Don’t argue – God wouldn’t like it,

and they don’t like it, either,

those people – obsessed with other people’s sex lives.

Me, I’d rather not think about other people’s sex lives.

It’d just make me jealous.

      Chicken Little’s Prescience

I used to be active in the Green Party,

holding provincial party offices,

going to national party meetings,

helping to organise protests,

escorting visiting party leaders

and other visiting MPs,

convening policy proposal groups –

including initiating a policy proposal

that parliament passed into law,

naming, then editing

the party’s national members-only magazine,

and so on.

All I do now is vote,

and stuff letterboxes when asked,

and that’s just going through the motions.

I don’t really believe

that all this is going to matter;

what I do believe is that

the Bad Guys are going to continue to win

until everything’s gone.

I don’t believe

that writing this shit matters, either.

My audience is tiny

and my impact is miniscule.

I do it sometimes anyway, though,

but with ever-diminishing enthusiasm.

It’s just a way to pass the time

until I get to die.

Chicken Little was probably right, after all.

                Politicians & Morality

Ever notice

how ego and empathy

seem to be inversely proportional?

The more a person has of one

the less that person seems to have of the other,

and vice versa, eh?

Yeah, and it’s hard to be politically ambitious

without having a potent ego,

isn’t it?

                          Freedom and Fashion

Some time around the turn of the century,

when I was working around the edges of the university racket,

the new, young, opinionated grad-student partner

of a false friend of mine whose job was lecturer

responded to a joke of mine

about the black-out attire of the crowd at an All-Blacks test

looking like a convention of Iranian women

by denouncing the hijab and all Islamic cultures as oppressive,

denying women the freedom to choose what to wear.

The thought entered my mind of one of my daughters

telling me that on the previous mufti day at Girls’ High

all but a few of the 1,200 or so girls

had been wearing red, white, and blue Russell Athletic USA sweatshirts,

and recalling this to her I wondered aloud

which culture was more oppressively conformist.

She responded by getting more pissed off than she’d been before.

I wonder if she would now.

               International Diplomacy

I like the way they squirm, these diplomats –

American or Russian, it doesn’t matter which –

when they know that what they’re saying

is obviously bullshit

and in the defence of cruelty

and nationalised criminality.

They sometimes look as if

they’d much rather be conducting

a graduate seminar in international politics

or be working on a farm raising ducks,

but they know that if they didn’t lie

and disavow the basic principles of humanity

for their political masters,

someone else would be all too keen to take their places.

I like the way they squirm, these diplomats,

but often I really don’t.

         Leadership

A baby dies of the cold;

he doesn’t give a shit.

Refugees have nowhere to go;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He torments a young woman

until she snaps and sets up a public howl;

he doesn’t give a shit,

and thinks that those who do are inferior.

He gets caught out lying continuously;

he doesn’t give a shit.

Solid evidence of serious corruption

within his government

sticks its head up out of the muck;

he doesn’t give a shit.

All the evidence reveals

large numbers of hungry kids in New Zealand;

he shrugs it off as ‘one or two’ because

he doesn’t give a shit.

The changing climate

brings more destructive weather events;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He sells out his country

to his greedhead mates

for not-inconsiderable sums of dosh,

even though it means fucking it up

further on down the line;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He knows that history

is going to barf all over his name;

he doesn’t give a shit.

              Bullshit & Tear Gas, 12-2014

Unlike the United States, Haiti, Turkey, Egypt,

and other police states,

in New Zealand the state doesn’t supplement

the ample amounts of bullshit that it spreads

with shooting tear gas at its opposition.

Yet.

It doesn’t stint on the bullshit, though.