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.

  

  

Love Stuff

            From An Online Conversation

Hatred is not an emotion.

It’s a condition – a cold, hard thing.

I know because I am intimately familiar with it,

and it oppresses me.

Emotions, however,

are transient biochemical reactions

resulting from our evolutionary DNA

and sensory stimuli,

and tend to involve

vulnerability and heat.

Love is, of course, an impossible word

that means different things

to different people

and different things

to the same person

in different contexts.

It’s no big insight

that what I’ve called love

when with a woman who makes my hormones jump

is radically different to what I feel

towards my daughters, my dog,

my closest friends, whisky, steamed mussels,

Jean-Luc Ponty’s music, an enjoyable book,

grey autumn mornings with some bite in the air,

and other disparate entities.

I think that

those who say that love and hate

are just different sides

of the same coin

have never really hated.

If I hadn’t learnt

was hate really is,

I probably would’ve mistaken it

for that combination

of anger and outraged resentment and hostility and hurt

to which they seem to be referring,

and which is what I’ve felt towards the mother of my children,

who flaunted her indifference toward me for more than 15 years,

but whom I’ve never hated.

         Love Stanza

Before her,

my memories

of feeling unqualified love

directed toward me

by someone I loved

were limited to

a dog I once had,

my first wife

when she was all there,

and my daughters

when they were little;

the experience of shared feelings

with her, of course,

were fleeting at best.

               Skinny-Assed Shiksas

All but one of the women

with whom I’ve been involved

for any length of time

have been lean, small-breasted, and not Jewish.

This irritated my mother enormously.

Once she snarled at me,

her voice full of anger and loathing,

“Why do you always go for those

pasty-faced, skinny-assed shiksas?”

Shiksa is the Yiddish word

for a non-Jewish woman attracted to a Jewish man.

Or men.

My mother, of course, was a big, buxom unit.

I didn’t dare tell her, of course,

that anyone or anything that has ever reminded me of her

in any way

has always turned me completely off.

                        The Helena Shock

My ability to shake off romantic love,

or at least my misinterpretation of the biochemical reactions

that cause the illusion or delusion of it,

after the music has stopped and the dance has ended

has varied enormously with the women and the situations.

It hasn’t usually taken long, though.

Yet with one woman, with whom I suppose I am,

as with every other one, hopelessly incompatible,

those biochemical reactions just kept churning away,

and even in their absence

reservoirs of tenderness and concern towards her

have stubbornly held their positions

in whichever part of my brain neuroscience would tell us they’d be.

After our breakup, when I was negotiating with her stepfather

over the return of my dog

at the end of an extended, contentious day,

Helena appeared from inside the house, still some distance away,

and my entire being became consumed

with a craving to have sex with her.

When we got together years later

for a working holiday in Guadalajara,

all that desire returned when we first saw,

then embraced each other heatedly in the airport.

The holiday, of course, ended as disastrously as our marriage.

I was seriously worried about her

when that hurricane destroyed New Orleans in 2005,

but my having her new surname wrong

prevented me from finding her on the internet

until I did so by chance in 2012.

A month or two later her adult daughter, who’s an artist,

posted a photo of a collage that includes a drawing that she’d made

of her 62-year-old mother.

I felt as I had when we’d first met – when she’d been 23.

Wham! 

A SugarDaddy-BabyDoll Scenario

Lying naked with me,

far from the man she lived with,

she told me

that she’d found

a sugar daddy

who’d been hangin out

at the strip club

where she danced,

lookin for a dolly.

He wasn’t much,

but he’d pay the rent

at a nice apartment

and buy her nice things.

Even though he was kinda gross,

if she didn’t take him up

he’d get himself

some other dolly.

I tried to tell her

that she wasn’t just

some interchangeable dolly,

but she didn’t believe me.

       Free Fall

She told me

with her purring accent

that she was pregnant.

In my mid-fifties,

with teen-aged children,

I felt a strange

exhilaration

and reached out

to hug her.

She put up her arms

in front of her body

to stop me

and told me

that she was sure

that the foetus had died.

She was correct.

He was indeed dead,

as was,

I discovered,

what I’d mistaken

for our love.

            Giant and Petite

When we were apart,

and only interacting over distance,

her enormous intellect, talent,

ability to communicate,

capacity for empathy and love,

and magical charisma

filled my mind to overflowing

– hell, her personality, her psyche, her self

could fill stadiums.

But when we were together

this giant of a person

could still fit perfectly on my lap.

                    Life In Her Jewellery Box

After years of spending my waking hours

in terrified reclusive solitude,

it started out surprisingly intense and passionate,

with intimate and amusing nightly conversations via various media,

but that apparently stressed her out.

I was so dizzy with my emotional overreaction

to the attention and affection

that she’d piled on me at the start

– stimuli of a sort to which I was entirely unaccustomed –

that it took me some time to calm down enough to take in

her retreat.

Then we communicated tersely and infrequently,

and once again

I spent my waking hours in terrified reclusive solitude.

She showed up every month or so

with her luscious tits and ass and shapely legs

wanting me to provide her with a home-cooked meal

and an orgasm or two,

and offering me little in return

except an hour or so of intelligent conversation

and access to her luscious tits and ass and shapely legs.

She emphasised that she really enjoyed it when I groped her,

so this access was far from a concessional one-way street.

And then she was gone.

And it’s just the same,

except she’s not there

and once again

I spend my waking hours in terrified reclusive solitude.

       The Breaks

As much as I crave it

more than anything else,

I have to recognise the reality

that having been conditioned

from the time I was a toddler

to believe that I’m unworthy

of love,

I’ve unconsciously

made this belief

self-reinforcing

and self-fulfilling

throughout my adult life.