Emotion Stuff

                                 Happy

They’re odd words that have many meanings,

happy and happiness,

but nothing in the dictionary enlightens me

about the meaning most people have for it.

Pleasure, satisfaction, joy, gladness –

those just don’t convey the meaning of,

“Just as long as you’re happy,” or

“She’s a happy person.”

Happiness is a complex phenomenon.

I did some rough internet research

and in a short time found hundreds

of ideas of what happiness is,

written by hundreds of people.

I can’t tell you what it is myself, though.

Although I experienced joy

when my first daughter was born,

and magnificent pleasure each time

I picked up and hugged either daughter

when they were small enough,

and satisfaction every time I’ve done a difficult task well,

and gladness every time a woman

has made herself close to me for a while,

I can’t say that I’ve ever been

all-the-way-through just plain happy –

because I don’t know how to be.

It’s a skill I just never learnt

when I was growing up,

and that’s when people have to learn it.

             Forms of Sadness

When I see images on the internet

of such horrors as

newly hatched male offspring of layer hens

on conveyor belts to their doom,

and hopeless people whose lives

have been blown to rubble over bullshit,

and on and on with other evidence of the cruelty

upon which the world of power seems to depend,

I feel a deep sense of sadness and helplessness

about the nature of things,

but I move on.

When I remember images in my mind’s eye

of my then-adolescent daughter,

who had apparently inherited

my frustrating lack of terpsichorean talent,

spending hours on the porch

practicing for the jazz-dance exams

which she hadn’t a hope in hell of passing,

I weep real tears uncontrollably for hours.

        History

One of the things

that make historical

murder mysteries

attractive to me

is that I

don’t feel

any great sorrow

at the fate

of their victims,

because they’d all

be long dead

by now, anyway.

              People, Patience, & Prudence

Barbra Streisand always got right up my nose.

Not only was she the sort of Jewish girl

that my inhuman mother was always pushing on me,

but she had that insufferably self-confident, self-assured attitude,

not to mention that whiney, drama-queen voice

that always made me want to puke,

and her signature song,

that crap about people who need people,

is the opposite of the way

things seem to me.

I’ve discovered that reclusiveness

suits me better than anything else,

and that there’s not a person I know

whom I can’t get along without,

if that’s the only way to avoid

some emotional or psychological distress or another,

even if that means limiting my human contact

to the people who sell me the shit

I need to survive.

It seems that all I really need

is a secure supply of wine, cheese, tomatoes, gluten,

weird-shit music, and mystery novels from the library.

I can cuddle and kiss my wine bottles.

                   Death and Lachrymosity

I don’t know how many songwriters, lyricists,

and other types of rhyme-makers

have mined the obvious connection

between ‘died’ and ‘cried’.

I never have.

Neither have I ever cried

in response to the death of anyone.

I was just bewildered

when my daddy died when I was nine,

and no death since then has affected me as much,

not even that of my favourite dog.

Death just inspires no emotion in me,

but then, I’m an emotional cripple,

                     No Meaning

I feel curiously detached from myself

and have done so, by and large,

since my world fell apart,

doing my best to live only from moment to moment.

The only emotion I seem able to feel is pain,

although sometimes anger flares up, unwelcome, for a moment,

and I deeply dislike feeling pissed off,

so my conscious objective is to feel nothing.

Sometimes, however,

such as when I look at the patterns

painted on the ceramic bowls out of which I eat,

or stamped onto the linoleum on the floor of the loo,

my mind becomes clearly focused

on the pointlessness

of everything,

including my pain.

                   Failure

Failure is a state of being

rather than an event.

I’ve always been a failure,

for example,

even from birth.

My mother wanted a girl,

but I failed her by being born me,

so she never forgave me,

and always made it clear

that although I was sometimes

a possession that provided her with a benefit or two,

I was always a failure as an offspring.

One of the strangest days of my life

was my twenty-sixth birthday,

when I took the most eclectic combination

of psychoactive substances

I’ve ever consumed

and entered into a well-populated party

with the theme

of “26 years of failure”.

In recent years I’ve consoled myself

with the hubristic illusion

that at least I haven’t been a failure

as a daddy,

but now it turns out that

that isn’t true, either.

It’s my state of being, after all.

         Cringing

I often think of myself,

metaphorically,

as an innocent puppy,

unable to understand

when the people

scold and punish me,

but automatically,

and unreflectingly

accepting and internalising

those judgements.

             Can’t Help It

When I watch Usain Bolt run on TV

I can’t help it,

but the absolutely pure

technical beauty of his stride

makes me want to cry.

Punk Politics & Love

I’m in love

with all the members

of Pussy Riot.

Their courage,

their audacity,

their politics,

their style,

their energy,

their singing,

their dancing,

their poetry,

their smiles,

their body language,

and yes, their bodies

turn me on completely,

even though

they could be

my granddaughters.

It doesn’t matter

that none of them

will ever know

that I’ve existed, either.

It’s not that variety

of love.

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.

The Return of Dog Stuff

     At the Park on a Rainy Morning

My dog may have enjoyed a few things more

than drinking fresh puddle water,

but after the drought in 2010

it became more of a rare pleasure for her

than chasing sticks in the shade,

sleeping in the sun,

or chewing on bones, I think.

                 Practical Intelligence

My bedroom has a glass-wall ranch slider

leading onto a narrow balcony

facing east.

My fox terrier likes to lie there

in the glass-amplified sun

on winter mornings.

As I’m composing this

on a winter morning,

she’s sleeping by the heater

in my west-facing home office.

I think she knows

that the sky to the east

must look like a fast-moving,

grey watercolour video

with no direct sunlight

because of the occasional sound

of rain on the roof.

    Another Transition

My dog,

at age twelve,

no longer wanted

to be on my lap,

preferring to take her ease

on the floor.

I supposed the floor

didn’t keep recrossing

its legs.

About six months later

she fell sick and died.

                          The End of Stick

On the last day of 2009,

when I was taking Rhonda, my fox terrier,

on her afternoon walk around the neighbourhood on her lead

we were cruising along Sale Street in Fairfield

when three other fox terriers

zoomed off a house’s front porch barking wildly

and attacked her, one with its teeth.

In less than a minute the father of the dogs’ owner

came running out and forced them to retreat.

The owner of the dogs did the right thing

and reimbursed me for the emergency New-Year’s-Eve treatment,

but Rhonda was forbidden to run

for the next six weeks,

until they took the stitches out.

Before that incident,

I’d been throwing sticks for her to chase and return

for a half an hour every morning at the park.

After it, and the long hiatus,

she started giving up after only short games of stick,

rarely being up to it for as long as ten minutes,

and within a year rarely as long as five.

Then three minutes became a long game.

By the second anniversary of the attack

it had become more a matter of just two or three throws.

One morning in mid-January she chased the first throw

but didn’t bring the stick back.

Then, after a two-day layoff I tried again,

but she didn’t even chase the first stick.

Playing stick or ball had been a joyful part of my daily life

for about twelve years,

generally the only one.

The end of stick was a sad day indeed for me.

My newly adopted dog doesn’t chase sticks at all.

               Death and the Dog

Other than some sensory pleasures,

my entire life has been crap –

hardly worth the time it’s taken up,

for me at least.

Every day now when I wake up

I wish that I hadn’t,

and start counting the hours

until I can drink myself to sleep.

Every day when I finish work

I suffer from an inner conflict

between my body and my mind –

my body craving survival and food,

and my tortured mind craving

ascetic self-destruction

through self-induced anorexia.

It’s nip and tuck.

My dog knew nothing of this,

only that she depended on me completely

for all facets of her life.

I worried about

what would become of her

if my mind triumphed.

After she died

and I had no responsibility

for a helpless other

justifying ongoing, daily

psychological, emotional, and spiritual suffering,

I wondered why I spent time

thinking about boiling pasta.

Adopting a senior dog three years later

did little to change this.

                       Dogs In Bondage

They’re not up there with taggers and tailgaters,

but people who bring their dogs to the dog exercise park

and keep them on a lead

get right up my nose.

Okay, maybe they have valid reasons

for keeping those poor pooches in bondage,

but they should do it somewhere else.

It’s just plain cruel

to restrain their movements

when they can see heaps of other dogs

running and playing and swimming

and chasing balls and sticks and birds and each other

and engaging in natural canine social interactions,

all of which their masters deny them,

and cruelty to animals – especially to people’s own companions –

is simply wrong.

          Tandem Observations

One conclusion that’s become inescapable

after a lifetime of observing both

is that dogs are better at dog stuff

than people are at people stuff.

     The Desirable and The Desired

The cruelty that factory farming inflicts

on sensitive, intelligent individuals

tramples on my deeply held values

about the ugliness of indifference to terror

and therefore about what behaviours are desirable

for those engaged in food production.

When I saw that ham bone

in the meat-scraps fridge at the supermarket, though,

I bought it for my dog

without remorse.

I wanted it.

I craved the flavour and texture

of the bigger chunks of ham

still attached to it,

and I craved the vicarious pleasure

of watching my dog enjoy the hell out of it for weeks.

The Devil made me buy it, I suppose,

if that’s what the Devil is.

           Guapito

He’s such a prettyboy.

People notice

and comment

every day

about his looks.

Oh, he’s more than just cute –

he’s a real, catch-your-eye

prettyboy.

But when I look into his eyes

I can see a hint

of the depths through which

he experiences his world,

as himself,

distinct from being a schnauzer,

even distinct from his enormous talent

for just being a dog.

I mean, he’s an expert

who’s mastered most of the skills

involved in dog stuff.

I don’t think he knows

that he’s a prettyboy, though,

just that random strangers walking by

often stop to make nice to him

and coo.

He likes that.

I can tell.

                   Seasoning For The Season

Winter is what it is,

and the morning was wintry;

a nasty cold and wet southerly breeze

accompanied my adopted old dog and me

as we made our way around the park

for the first time that day.

It made me feel chuffed about myself –

I felt righteous;

I felt noble;

I felt heroic;

I felt, uncharacteristically,

almost worthwhile even –

for taking the Little Fella into my home, at his age,

and walking him twice a day,

whatever the weather,

even when none of the park’s other dog-walkers

were braving the inhospitably windy iciness.

I comforted myself with thoughts of hot soup

and maybe some slightly warmed wine

for when we returned home

but when, after completing the circuit,

I had divested myself of my top two layers,

doled out a packaged dog treat,

and gone snuffling around in the kitchen,

I decided instead on a summery cold seafood salad

and a fridge-cool tropical rum punch.

The inside of my house is, after all, warm and dry

without the atmospherics of a wood fire.

It was a good call.

                     Reality And The World

The world is what our nervous systems tell us it is.

Reality, unlike the world, is reality,

no matter what we sense and feel.

My dog and I occupy the same reality,

but we live in radically different worlds.

I’m unable to imagine what it would be like

to have a sense of smell a thousand times more sensitive

than the one I have now

– and I have a fearsome imagination –

and conceptualising a world dominated by odours,

in which I’d identify and remember people and places

more by their distinctive, individual scents

than by the configuration of their faces and landmarks,

is well beyond my mental capabilities.

Eagles, earthworms, dolphins, bats, bees, trout …

so many discrete, finite worlds we ourselves can’t know

in the reality of just this infinitesimal but ordinary

corner of the cosmos –

it’s all so incomprehensible that it’s no wonder

that people invent so much intricate codswallop

to convince themselves

that they understand what’s going on

and have actually made sense

of it all.

Uh-huh.