Situations

                 18 November 2009

Rain on the roof at the right time this morning,

all caught up on my jobs,

no reason to get up until the rain stopped.

Just one tiny job in my inbox when I do –

looks like it's gonna be a skint xmas.

              We Exotic Refugees

Refugees and migrants from all over the world

make life much more interesting and colourful

and – if they venture into food enterprises – flavourful

here in Hamilton.

It would be even better, for me at least,

to benefit as much as possible

from contact with their diverse cultural outlooks

if they’d venture out more from the safety

of the company of their own people

into situations in which I could meet and joke with them,

as I’ve been lucky to do with a few.

I know how they must feel, though,

about mixing with other people

who seem unsettling to them.

Shit, how I know how they must feel!

           Drawing A Distinction

When I’m composing and performing

these little observations, recollections,

musings, narratives, and rants

I’m completely without fear

of any audience, or of anything

in regard to trying to tell the truth.

At almost all other times, however,

I’m paralysed by constant terrors.

       Another Distinction

Solitude is when being all alone

seems to be the most preferable

of several attractive alternatives.

Loneliness is when being all alone

seems to be the least noxious

of several unattractive ones.

                    New Year’s Eve

My younger daughter was born on New Year’s Eve –

most considerate of her,

tax-wise,

there on Guam,

but it’s never been a celebratory time for me.

I’ve never been all that big on New Year’s Eve.

The last time I stayed up past midnight to welcome in a year,

drinking and carrying on and stuff,

was at the end of 1962 and the start of 1963.

The next year I was on an airplane

on the evening of December 31,

and by the following year

I was staying up drinking almost every evening anyhow,

and saw it as amateur night.

Then I got a dog whose birthday was December 30,

and for several years

entertained guests on the eve before new year’s.

Going to bed early on December 31

has become a point of honour for me.

It suits my critical viewpoint,

my social deficiencies,

and my misanthropic reclusiveness.

It’s a part of my identity,

something that my last wife

was incapable of understanding.

              My Status

My relationship status is divorced –

divorced from too many wives and lovers,

divorced from people in general,

divorced from family in any meaningful way,

divorced from nature,

divorced from life.

             I Do Have A Friend

I do have a friend –

a real friend,

more than just a pleasant acquaintance,

or a facebook cyber-friend

or somebody I get along with

the rare times we encounter each other –

I actually have one actual friend

who comes by about once every week or two

to visit for lunch and to show me her creations

and to see if I’m doing okay.

Sometimes when she doesn’t come by

she calls to check in with me –

or maybe it’s to see if I’m still alive.

My friend sometimes worries about me.

My friend confides in me and asks my advice.

My friend respects my integrity, my intellect,

and my specialist skills, and I respect hers.

My friend takes things of mine that need fixing,

and either she or her husband fixes them.

My friend hugs me when she’s excited,

or when I’ve helped her or her husband,

or when I just look as if I could use a hug.

My friend shares her triumphs and sorrows with me.

My friend listens to my weird-shit music without complaint.

My friend discusses complex ideas with me.

My friend expresses appreciation

when I help her with her English.

My friend knows when she’s upset me

and seems upset about it herself.

My friend seems to understand

and condone my unhappiness.

                            It Figures, Eh?

The only time for years that people just dropped in to visit me

was the only time that I requested that nobody do so.

                           The Last Job

Signing on in September 2005

as a contract editor with a Melbourne-based online editing agency

with the unfortunate name of WordsRU

almost literally saved my life.

I don’t know whether that was fortunate, unfortunate, or neither,

and I’m not going to explain it here.

For several years my work for WordsRU

provided me with a living,

mental stimulation,

a sense of accomplishment,

and a way to pass the time –

sometimes all too well.

I had to take a stress break in 2008 after a long stretch of working

eleven and twelve hour days seven days a week.

Then the bloke who owned WordsRU had a stroke,

his middle-aged son took over, and things started to go downhill.

The son’s management style, for example,

relied heavily on threats and bullshit,

and my talented chief editor consequently quit-got-fired.

Eventually he decided that we needed a new website,

and through arrogance and incompetence

he fucked it up,

and business nose-dived.

Fortunately, this happened just a couple of months

before I qualified for national super,

so I didn’t have to sell my house in order to survive.

I spent a year with plenty of time to compose verses,

then saw an ad for copywriters on facebook from a newish agency,

answered it, and signed on at the end of February 2012.

My last job for WordsRU was grossly undersold to an irritating client,

but I didn’t mind,

and shined on till I finished it,

and when I was done I felt a whole lot better

than I had for a long, long time.

Ranting

                Chopping Block Envy

Maybe the aspect of my

self

that disgusts me the most is my timidity –

my ineffectual freezing in the face of aggression,

my inability to slam my dick onto the chopping block

in defence of what is both right and important.

Courage, in my personal context,

has turned out to be just

what it takes to make it through the day.

I envy people who have the courage

to stand up to personal or corporate bullies

who, in whatever context,

intend to do them harm unless they watch their step,

and who have the power to carry out these intentions.

I try not to back down, myself,

but I also try to avoid

putting myself into positions

of confrontation.

I admire enormously such people

as Malala Yousafzai, who got shot,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Kailash Satyarthi,

whose colleagues have been murdered,

but have continued to flaunt their principles, anyway,

and all those who have sacrificed personal freedom,

their own comforts and well-being, or their lives

for things that really matter –

because I lack that kind of courage.

I wonder what, if anything,

the plutocrats – or just one or some of them –

will pay to take out Bernie,

or any other burrs under their saddle,

when the time is ripe.

    Incomprehensible Razorwork

I am completely unable to comprehend

why so many men shave their faces,

or shave trendy shapes into their beards.

The reasoning eludes my grasp.

Doing that just doesn’t

make sense

to me.

                Ha Ha Ha  

As far as I can recall,

in all my many decades of life

(and I have an amazing memory),

every time I’ve heard the phrase,

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you have a sense a humour?’

the speaker has been somebody

who had said or done something

that wasn’t funny at all

and who either had a shit sense of humour

or whom the great DNA-and-experience lottery

had left without any trace of funniness

anywhere within their being,

and I can’t recall ever once

hearing a person with a good sense of humour,

wit, basic funniness, and comedic timing

say it.

Except maybe as part of a joke.

                  The Time of the Year

Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m a prude,

far from it,

but it deeply offends me

when various members of the plant kingdom

insist on having their nasty, disgusting sex lives

inside my nose.

                    Black Sunday

One of the more oppressed minorities

to which I belong

is that of sun avoiders and shade worshippers.

For decades now

I’ve therefore referred to the first Sunday

of daylight savings time as Black Sunday.

It throws me off and my body clock never adjusts

until the blessed arrival of real time

some weeks after the onset

of the following autumn.

I think that

at least subconsciously

it’s the self-absorbed need to dominate

that makes that enjoying-the-sunshine mob

force the rest of us to adjust our lives

to their altered clocks

instead of just leaving for work

and returning home

an hour earlier themselves. 

       Reciprocity

I’ve always tried to be

as generous as I can be

with whatever my resources

have been at the time,

but I’ve received little

generosity in return,

and have long expected none.

I’ve always tried to be

as kind as I can be,

but I’ve received little

kindness in return,

and have long expected none.

I’ve always tried to be

as considerate as I can be,

but I’ve received little

consideration in return,

and have long expected none.

I’ve always tried to be

as helpful as I can be,

but have received little

help in return,

and have come to expect none.

I’ve always tried to be

as respectful as I can be,

but I’ve received little

respect in return,

and have come to expect none.

I’ve always tried to be

as friendly as I can be,

but I’ve received little real

friendship in return,

and have come to expect none.

Well, hard cheese, old boy

(I say to myself),

what do you expect

without signed contracts?

                Maturation

Babies are indeed beautiful,

and we’re genetically programmed

to respond with intense, positive emotions

to just the sight or even the thought of one;

the trouble is that most of them

grow up to be

adolescents and adults

who are hideous or pathetic

or both

in one way or another.

                         Disrespect

In 2010 I utilised my considerable research-based expertise,

not to mention my talent and skill,

on two copywriting projects that I didn’t finish,

one commercial and one political.

The commercial client decided

that he felt – felt! – that it should be done otherwise

and let me know this dismissively,

ignoring my invitation to discuss it.

The political client,

to whom I was donating my services,

just ignored me

and made wholesale changes for the worse

without ever getting back to me at all.

It does not make me feel good

that the political campaign lost the election

by an embarrassing number of votes,

or that the company’s monthly business

fell by from fifty to seventy-five percent

after launching its new website,

although I’m not surprised.

All I can do is wonder

with my mind filled with pain

what it is about me

that inspires such disrespect.

          Laws

He was one of those

nasty, brutish, and short

neo-fascist politicians

and media wankers.

What was particularly

evil and egocentric about him

was that he went beyond

the usual arrogance

of hectoring people

about what to think

to the egregious effrontery

of cold-heartedly

telling vulnerable families

suffering personal crisis and loss

how they should feel.

                   Keyboarding

I do love our language’s marvellous flexibility,

but sometimes the survival of a word

into new meanings in a changed environment,

when newer, more purpose-coined words are available

makes me involuntarily uncomfortable, wanting to do right –

my life being, as it is, one of words.

In particular I find it fascinating

that the word for what I do – writing –

has stretched and extended to mean

any form of non-spoken verbal communication

in preference to such perfectly good

and considerably more accurate words

as keyboarding, keying, screen-touching, printing, and composing.

I like language to be precise,

but usage always wins out in the end.

Imprecision, however, can really frost my buns

when it’s done just to put on airs.

Anyone who has had the misfortune

to have read much of what various media

have published about pop music –

the term, ‘pop music journalism’ being misleading –

may have noted that the producers of such verbiage

like to fancify their sentences

with words with which they intend to give the impression

that they’re kinda artistically poetic and learnéd themselves,

but which actually come across, to me at least,

as cliché and pretentious as well as semantically inaccurate;

particularly irritating is their tendency to say

that songwriters and such

‘pen’ the products of their creativity,

as in, ‘he penned his most recent album’,

rather than to ‘compose’ or, well, just ‘write’ them.

I wonder who the last songwriter or composer

who actually used a pen was.

I use one sometimes.

              Personality

Some people –

and you know who you are –

seem to think that

aggressively and repeatedly expressing

excruciatingly conventional and banal

opinions and statements of taste –

“It’s such a beautiful day to enjoy the sunshine!”

“I’m so glad that winter’s almost over!”

“I just love chocolate!”

or, alternatively,

“I’m a real chocoholic! Nom! Nom!” –

that they’re impressing others

with their insightful observations,

colourful personalities, and uniqueness.

Give me a break.