General Observations I

     Hollywood & Otorohanga

Once upon a time, long ago,

I lived and worked in Hollywood.

Yes, that Hollywood.

And then I didn’t any more.

Then, after about sixteen years

of living in various other places,

but still once upon a time, long ago,

I lived in Otorohanga,

a tiny rural town

in the New Zealand King Country.

Although the two places were different,

one thing they had in common,

when it came to places to live,

was my paucity of discretionary income,

so that one of the key differences

was that in Otorohanga

only a few things went on at night

that I couldn’t afford to enjoy,

whereas in Hollywood

thousands of attractive activities

that I couldn’t afford

went on every night.

          Rush Hour

I sold my car,

so I walked

to Boundary Road

and across Whitiora Bridge

to the Pak’n Save

and back

every other morning

because mornings are cooler

and I could only manage

to carry comfortably

one shopping bag

with five bottles of wine

and some other stuff in it

for the twenty-minute walk.

On the way back across the bridge

I stayed on the street side of the footpath

to avoid vertigo from the bridge’s height

and kept my eyes on my feet

to avoid the glare from the rising sun.

Every person I passed

walking in the other direction –

on their way to work,

I suppose –

smelled like

a perfumed consumer product

rather than like

a human,

because human isn’t good enough,

I suppose.

     Einstein’s Piss

One of the many things

that I love about rain

is that every drop of it

contains a homeopathic amount

of Einstein’s piss.

                              Car Porn

Walking past the Giltrap Prestige car sales premises

and other upmarket showrooms and car yards

along Auckland’s Great North Road,

the sight of the gleaming array

of line after line of obscenely expensive luxury cars –

from sleek and flashy sports cars to behemoth land yachts –

appalled me and filled me with a sense of disgust and revulsion.

The cost of even the lowest-priced one

would be enough to provide a nutritious lunch

for every impoverished child in New Zealand for a year

or more,

and none of them could transport a person

from one place to another

in noticeably more comfort

than taxicabs,

or even well-maintained ten-year-old economy cars.

This ostentatious display of car porn

has nothing to do with transportation, of course –

the agency’s name makes that clear.

The point is to assert superiority over others,

and of course to foster the illusion

of enhanced sexual attractiveness.

The expressions on the faces

of Giltrap Prestige’s shoppers and sales personnel

confirm that.

I used to dream of owning cars like those

back when I was sixteen-seventeen-eighteen

and under the spell of Sean Connery’s James Bond,

but I outgrew that shit before Thunderball,

as my values matured.

               Russians, History, and the Law

Some years ago

I somehow became thick

with Hamilton’s Russian community,

and it struck me at the time

how just about every one of them

had an offhand, casual, automatic,

sneering contempt for the law and law-enforcement,

and inconvenient rules in general.

This is not to say that they all

were immoral or criminal people,

although some of course were,

but just that they seemed

unable to conceive

of the state having any legitimacy.

Of course, Russians seem, to me at least,

to have a certain fondness for sneering in general –

just listen to their language.

I was inexplicably wondering recently

about the extent to which

Russian law and law-enforcement

is the way it is

because it is a part of Russian culture,

and the extent to which Russian culture

is the way it is

as a response to Russian law and law-enforcement,

how Russian history has affected both,

and how both have affected Russian history.

My affiliation with that community ended

several years ago.

I don’t miss it,

and I’m glad that my grandparents

fled from that empire

more than a century ago.

   Uh, Wait a Minute …

When I lived in Micronesia

on the island of Guam,

the semi-indigenous people,

whom the Spaniards

had tagged Chamorros,

had a fraught relationship

with the Americans,

and especially

with American cultural imperialism.

Still, it put me back a step

to see a car bumper sticker

that read,

“Save Our Culture:

Speak Chamorro”

             A Standardised Aesthetic

Despite being soulless displays of meat on the hoof,

the obligatory parades

of beauty-pageant contestants

wearing the obligatory swimwear

in countries where such contests

– and therefore cosmetic surgery –

are big business

– Venezuela and South Korea come to mind –

also call into question what criteria

the judges employ to decide who wins,

as the contestants all look almost identical.

     The View’s Great, Though

I looked at the TV screen

and behind the talking head

I saw images of tall buildings

with countless windows,

and behind each of those windows

is one or more lives

trying to make sense of it all

trying to find meaning for it all

and either bullshitting themselves, or failing,

or just giving up and forgetting about it.

                 Individual Choice

Staff meetings,

meetings in general,

team-building exercises,

organisational get-togethers,

political party talks,

art openings,

large family dinners,

after-match functions ―

any time when time moves slothfully,

but for social or personal or employment reasons,

or because the potluck awaits

on long tables in the next room,

or maybe because they’re providing free plonk,

or for any other reason

it seems unwise or counterproductive

just to hoof it ―

these are opportunities for me to cast my eyes downward

and to observe the amazing variety of shoes

that the other people there are wearing, and wonder:

Why did they select just those shoes?

What was going through their minds when they bought them?

Are those shoes specific to that outfit

or do they wear them with everything?

How, if at all, did those shoes influence their decision to wear

those socks, those stockings, those tights, or nothing at all under them?

And so on. Shoes provide much food for wonder and speculation.

If everybody’s sitting around a table, though,

and I can’t see their feet,

I can still observe and wonder in a similar manner

about people’s shirts and blouses.

                    Two Words

My native language has two words,

which every time I hear them,

or read them, or think them

make me feel a deep sense of well-being,

blanketing comfort,

and connection to all that is good.

This may be so partly because of the way they sound

in English,

even though the things they stand for are almost global,

and have been for many millennia,

the origins of their connections with human life

lost back into the mist of time.

This is also true even though many people

have, being people, corrupted and sullied

the phenomena that both of these words signify.

These words, of course, are ‘beer’ and ‘dog’.

Old Age

                             Okay, I’m Old

Okay, I’m old.

Although some people insist on insisting

that I don’t look as old as I am,

as far as I’m concerned that’s no

Big Fucking Deal.

Numbers may indeed be abstractions,

but numbers, meaning years of age, are scary,

and numbers, meaning years of age, are silly,

sometimes.

It all depends –

on how dependable

or dependent things are –

doesn’t it?

First, the scary:

I’m 71.

Scared the shit out of you didn’t I?

Oooh, I hope that filthy old fart doesn’t want any intimacy with me!

Next, the silly:

I mean – despite the numbers, I’ve always been who I am, y’know?

and part of me’s always been eight years old,

since I was eight,

and at moments still I’m that 10-year-old at camp,

or that suffering, clueless teenager,

and I don’t particularly like the part of me

who was at my idiot testosterone peak when I was 25,

and too much of me remains of the doormat I’d become 20 years later,

and have in some ways always been,

and of course part of me’s always 15 years old –

especially when I see long, well-toned female legs, and so forth.

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

Because that’s ridiculous

because I’m old,

and because I don’t think I deserve ridicule –

at least not for that,

but Big Fucking Deal, eh?

                                 Old

It gets right up my nose;

I mean, it really sticks in my craw

when, in the flow of conversation,

in regard to, say, riding on city buses,

I off-handedly refer to myself as being old,

and another party to the conversation,

usually with a patronising or condescending smile,

contradicts me and insists, ‘Oh, you’re not old!’,

or some crap like that,

and asserts the superiority of using some euphemism.

This always offends the shit out of me.

I know it shouldn’t, but not giving a shit

about what I should or shouldn’t feel

is one of the advantages of being old.

It offends me because it’s an affront to the English language,

to which I have devoted a large portion of my life.

Old means old, as in having stayed alive for a long time.

It disgusts me when they treat it as if it were a dirty word.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

A really ugly line is, ‘You’re only as old as you think you are,’

as if lying to myself were a virtue,

and personal honesty and integrity a loathsome deformity.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

Another bullshit insult is, ‘But you have such a young mind!’

My mind right now is enormously superior to what it was 50 years ago.

As if my lifetime of curiosity and experience, and reflection on both,

hasn’t meant a constantly improving mind! Fuck that.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

Being old also means having arthritis and cataracts

and other physical niggles. Okay. That’s part of it.

It’d be a real drag to have them if I were still young,

but I’m not.

                    Notes On The Slipperiness Of Days

The days slide by like turds along the endless cosmic sewer pipe,

never pausing, never looking behind, never looking ahead.

Wednesday? Friday? I don’t know and I don’t care.

My mind has continuously engulfed the experience

that the shit all around me has provided,

my growth in understanding and wisdom

as imperceptibly gradual as my body’s deterioration.

My emotional life, however, has remained stunted;

having the emotional development of a nine-year-old

has made being old doesn’t seem unreal to me;

I view myself with child eyes,

which helps to make my reality seem distantly unreal,

as the days slide by.

I walk my old dog daily,

elevated by the caress of opioids or opiates, plus cannabis,

and usually no more than a wee bit of pain;

the doppler-effect rumble and hraahoomsh of traffic lends its music

to the dancing molecules in my brain and nervous system,

connecting me with my own kind

better than most face-to-face encounters,

as the days slide by.

Even middle age, and all that entails

is a fading memory that won’t slip away,

although the septic emotional wounds of that time

remain encrusted on top of all the day-turds

from childhood and onward,

as the days slide by.

I bought my new coat about a half a year before composing this,

or maybe it was about a year, or more, or something like that.

The days do slide by.

                               Progress

As soon as I become accustomed

to the aches and pains and points of fatigue

that come with being how old I am,

I grow older still and have new ones to contend with.

                             That Old

I may have been whinging

about one or more of the ways

my body’s deterioration over time

has inconvenienced me or worse –

but anyway she accused me,

as many others have done

(why they have to make it sound like an accusation I can only guess),

‘Oh, you’re not that old!’

and I began to wonder, as I do,

being the type of person who wonders about shit,

how old is that old, anyhow?

By what units do we measure it?

By months and years?

By tastes and attitudes?

By technological competence?

By knowledge of pop culture, both now and then?

By speed going up and down stairs?

By body odour?

By the number of grandchildren?

By how long we’ve been telling the same old jokes?

By the amount of wisdom accumulated?

… and where and how do we set the line for any of these

between what is just not as young as we used to be

and being that old?

Old enough to know better, I suppose.

                    National Super

It doesn’t seem real.

After struggling for years to survive

both financially and psychologically at the same time

(the word simultaneously wouldn’t have worked there),

just as I was close to having to sell my house

in order to do so I

simultaneously

reached my sixty-fifth birthday,

and as much money as I’d been paid some months,

and more than I’d been paid in some months lately,

before taxes,

doing the demanding and difficult work that I do –

excellently, permit me to add –

began to appear, after tax, like magic,

in my bank account every other Tuesday,

and although I still had burdensome debts to pay off,

I began to have to suffer less from privation.

It seems extraordinary to someone, such as myself,

who has a generally low opinion of my species,

that anyone, let alone a country,

actually takes care of tired old people, such as myself,

without asking questions, stuffing up, or saying,

‘Nyah! Nyah! Just teasing! We’re taking it back!’

I still expect them to do these things,

being largely incapable

of real interpersonal trust.

                   Rice Isn’t A Daily Thing Here

I don’t panic over work pressure anymore.

If I can’t do my work at a leisurely pace

that’s other people’s problem –

it doesn’t matter to me.

My superannuation pension has provided me

with what the Maoists would’ve probably called

my iron wine bottle.

                                 Seventy

Floating, or sinking, along a footpath – or both or neither,

a cool breeze ruffling my forearms’ hairs,

the high grey clouds diffusing what light was left

as the daytime shaded into the evening,

I focused on the outlines of the trees, still full of green leaves

despite the equinox having passed a couple of weeks before.

I felt connected to everything but humans –

humans who feel compelled to try to impose their egos

onto phenomena ridiculously larger than themselves,

onto phenomena absolutely indifferent to themselves,

such as by believing that by throwing a switch or something

at midnight on the first day of March

they have magically changed the season from summer to autumn,

here in the Southern Hemisphere,

although midnight and March are both random cultural inventions

that they’ve invented for their convenience,

and have nothing to do with the Earth itself,

the changing of the seasons obviously being

a gradual and multifaceted process.

Flip a switch. Say it’s official.

The seasons themselves couldn’t give less of a shit,

less even than the official-season crowd gives for the actual seasons.

The same for anniversaries and holy days – or holidays –

take your pick.

Time slides by seamlessly, incomprehensibly, indifferently.

The difference between my last day of being 69 and my seventieth birthday

being neither more nor less

than that between any other two consecutive days,

the universe throwing no switch

and caring not at all about my personal bullshit.

Despite my knowing better, though,

my awareness of this particular seamless transition

stirred up my personal bullshit within me,

and weighed heavily and stupidly on my human mind.