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.