Values Stuff

      Types & Personalities

The one-size-fits-all tests

people put forward on facebook

and in school-counselling programmes

assert that they are capable of determining

an individual’s personality type,

and from there, well,

the sky must be the limit

to our understanding of ourselves,

finding our optimal life pathways,

and therefore, I suppose,

to transforming our situations

into ones in which we can be

happy.

Or something.

I myself am suspicious

of the whole fucking concept

of personality types –

as opposed to personalities –

as it seems to me that anything

more than a cursory, superficial consideration

of most people would reveal

that we have complex,

in some ways apparently contradictory,

multifaceted, multiple-type personalities.

Briggs Myers is rubbish,

like astrology and racism,

with its claim to be able to force

intricately carved pegs

into square, round, and other smooth-edged holes:

pigeonholing pigeonholing

typecasting typecasting

assigning assigning

regimenting regimenting …

        Biodiversity

I have a crisis of conscience,

agonising over the ethics involved,

on those rare occasions

when my cravings lead me

to buy one or two hundred grams

of supermarket beef.

The neighbourhood cats,

for whom I leave the fat and gristle scraps

by the end of the hedge,

have no such problem.

           The Common Touch

Do you know what it’s like

to be the different one?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to enjoy the weather

on cool, light-breeze days with high overcast cloud cover,

and to dislike it when it’s blue-dome, hot, and still –

to be a shade-worshipper?

to be someone who’s glad when summer ends

and it’s finally, truly autumn?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to feel oppressed by daylight-savings time

without being a farmer?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to enjoy popular songs and TV shows?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to follow cliché social conventions

and find it next to impossible to say, ‘Good, thanks’

when someone greets you with, ‘Howahyuh?’

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to assimilate – anywhere?

to be an outsider, even in the company of outsiders?

Do you know what it’s like

to apply rational analysis

and a sense of aesthetics

automatically to even mundane domestic tasks?

Do you know what it’s like

never to be able to see the emperor’s new clothes?

Do you know what it’s like

for the way you look to be completely unlike the way you are,

and to be utterly unable to change either?

I do.

Do you?

   Comparison Gives No Comfort

I have a warm, dry house,

and my pension provides me

with enough to eat

and enough wine to distract me

at the end of each day

from my grinding, life-long unhappiness,

but that unhappiness is real, and permanent,

and I can do nothing to make it leave me.

Knowing that billions of others in the world

suffer much more than I do

does nothing at all to reduce my own despair.

It only makes me sadder.

                 Peeping Tomism

When I was five or six I read a comic book

– I think it was maybe a Donald Duck opus –

that had a peeping tom in it.

I accepted this, the way that little kids do,

as a matter of course, one more part of my

ever-expanding world to learn.

There was the term; there were the comic pictures –

peeping toms were clearly a thing.

From my little-kid point of view

it was definitely funny

– after all, it was in a comic book –

and it looked as if it might also be fun,

as I’ve always enjoyed a keen sense of curiosity.

It also, or so it seemed, involved a whole lot of sneaking,

and I’ve never liked sneaking,

and a big dose of in-the-shit if I got caught,

and, as I do today, I had an aversion

to finding myself in the shit,

and I’ve always been certain

that whatever it was, I’d get caught.

So I decided to not give peeping-tomism a go.

The same has applied, over the years,

to kneecapping.

                           Competition

When I was a child my mother often directed me to play

with my sibling, who is a month and a half shy

of being two years older than I am.

Being boys, the games had to be competitive.

Our age differential meant that I always lost,

and my sibling was a shit winner.

Every time he beat me at anything

he’d gloat and sneer and jeer and verbally put me down,

so I turned to private occupations –

writing, drawing, imagining, walking along the creek –

and avoided him, and competition, at playtime.

You’re unlikely to meet anyone less competitive than I am.

Later, when old enough for team sports,

I played for the fun of it and didn’t worry about the score,

and once when we were in high school

I had the enormous pleasure

of breaking his collarbone during a game of football –

one of the high points of my life.

Due to an odd set of circumstances,

I was a basketball coach at various levels

for a dozen years in the 80s and 90s.

I learnt to be a better-than-average technical coach,

but was never adept at the rah-rah stuff or handling difficult players.

I told my teams that if they played as well as they could

they’d never lose,

but better teams might beat them.

Like Woody Allen,

I find artistic competition distasteful,

and haven’t watched the Oscars on TV

since I was in my mid-teens.

You obviously won’t see this verse in any poetry competition.

                  Overwhelming

It seems to be particularly difficult,

and therefore somewhat rare,

for people who find ourselves

in agony-inducing life situations

coupled with the stress that coping with these has

on our emotional and psychological resources,

to recognise it when others are trying to find some way

to survive similar shit,

and to empathise with each other.

Overwhelmed people seem to have no time

for other overwhelmed people.

We each have our own problems, thank you.

                   Fear and Awareness

I used to be homophobic when I was much younger;

in the true meaning of phobic –

I was afraid of homosexual men,

afraid of being penetrated,

afraid of being shamed.

After all, it seemed that everybody I knew

felt free to express their detestation of faggots

at the drop of a hat,

so I avoided associating with them.

In retrospect I suppose it was just one aspect

– a culturally reinforced one –

of my fear of other people in general.

It was only after my gradual growth of awareness

of my own differentness and social and cultural isolation,

and the similarly gradual growth

of the number of my gay workmates

and other acquaintanceships,

and awareness of human sexuality in general,

that my fear of this category of otherness,

both different to mine and strangely similar,

faded away.

I’m still afraid of other people in general, though.

               Manners & Exceptions

I don’t believe in much,

but I believe in good manners.

I try to be polite and respectful,

and to avoid being rude to people,

unless they provoke me outrageously,

with in-my-face rudeness of their own.

One of the rudest expressions of bad manners

is to ignore someone,

at least face-to-face.

With facebook and other social media, though,

it’s often the wisest course to follow

to avoid a pointless conflict.

This should trouble me but it doesn’t.

For me, good manners also apply

to people only and not to abstractions,

even face-to-face.

I ignore death, for instance,

even though we’re face-to-face all the time,

because it doesn’t give a shit

if I’m rude to it or not,

so there’s no point in paying attention to it

just to be polite.

            I’ll Never Know

If things’d turned out differently,

I wonder if I would’ve become

a wanker who drinks the correct wine

out of the correct crystal stemware

with flawlessly correct companions

in a correctly custom-built show-home

located on a desirable beachfront section

in a prestigious seaside subdivision,

of if I would’ve managed

to avoid these temptations

and the smugness that goes along with them.

Brotherhood I

Trigger warning: dirty laundry

     A Note To My Sibling

You’ve never conceived of me

on an interactive level

as anything other than

a thing

for you to have a jolly time

tormenting.

It doesn’t matter to me

that you can justify it to yourself

as just brotherly

kidding around,

because it wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter to me

that it’s the result

of conditioning

that you acquired

by following the cues

that our inhuman horror of a mother

gave you as a birthright.

Our radically different upbringings

in the same house mean

that I see the way we were

and are

in a manner

that your self-centred,

malicious mind

can’t imagine.

                      Throwing

As soon as I was big enough,

I guess when I was three,

my mother began to shunt me

outside to the back yard

to play with my brother Paul,

who’s two years older.

Being boys, what she instructed us to play

was ball.

Being little, my coordination

was incompletely developed,

and I threw the ball clumsily

in a shot-put sort of way.

Instead of mentoring me

and teaching me to throw properly,

he immediately started taunting me,

in that sing-song chant cruel children use,

“Riki throws like a girr-ul! Riki throws like a girr-ul!”

He did this every time she forced me to play catch with him,

for years and years and years.

Sometimes he did it in the house

when we weren’t playing ball at all.

I cringed every time, which made him smile.

Even when we became adults

he’d bring it up sometimes,

with a little smirk on his face,

as if it were some reminder of warm fraternal bonding.

Of course, I never did learn to throw properly.

It kept me from being adequate at sports that require it.

Even in my sixties I couldn’t help but feel inhibited

when throwing a tennis ball for my dog,

and preferred the cricket bowling action.

I flung sticks for her sidearm across my body.

Thanks, Paul.

Just one of the thousands of destructive impacts

that you’ve had on my life.

    Cold Water in the Shower

When we were in high school,

from time to time my older sibling

would sneak into the bathroom

when I was taking a shower

and pour a pitcher

of cold water on me

from over the shower curtain,

and then exit giggling.

When I reminded him of it

a half-century later

he seemed to think it was still funny

and told me I was “spewing”

when I called that response

sick and evil.

He then claimed that he wanted

reconciliation.

                          Shvoogies?

When I tried to explain to my sibling Paul

about my activities as a basketball coach,

He dismissed the sport of basketball as,

and I quote,

“a bunch of Shvoogies running around in their underwear.”

I supposed that by ‘Shvoogies’ he was referring to human beings

with ancestors who’d been victims

of the African slave trade.

I also supposed that he thought he was being funny,

especially since he giggled after he said it,

but I thought he was far from funny,

and certainly didn’t giggle with him.

                At the Start of Nightmare Week

The last time I had the misfortune

of having to endure my sibling’s physical presence,

was a nightmarish week in 1990.

Early on in the adventure,

whilst I was still jetlagged,

and after he’d warmed up by putting me down

and trying to wind me up

by frustrating my efforts

to have a meaningful conversation

with the stratagem of responding to my every sentence

with dickheadedly inaccurate non-sequitur put-downs of New Zealand,

he commented on New Zealand’s then-recent

decriminalisation of homosexuality

by aggressively asserting that

all homosexuals should be lined up against walls

and shot – illustrating this by miming

the firing of an automatic weapon with his fingers

and making the corresponding noise.

Then he indulged himself in the

aren’t-I-a-naughty-boy-not-really-I’m-so-pleased-with-myself

half-giggle and half-snort

that it has always disgusted me to have to hear.

Not wanting to get into a pissing contest with him,

under the circumstances,

I didn’t remind him of the time, thirty-two years earlier,

when he was fourteen and I was twelve,

that he tried to rape me,

but I’ll never forget the pressure of his hand on the back of my neck,

or the foul stench coming up from his genitals,

or his mocking laughter after I’d struggled free and was fleeing.

          Sick and Evil

Y’know, it struck me recently

that my elder sibling

probably still thinks

after more than a quarter-century

of estrangement

that just because

he had such a jolly good time

relentlessly bullying, vexing,

belittling, tormenting,

and otherwise abusing me

as we grew up,

and at every opportunity

thereafter,

that I’d enjoyed it, too.

I’ve read about

that twisted shit going on

in his ilk’s minds

whilst they’re doing it,

but clinging to that

contradictory, disingenuous

self-delusion

into old age

is sick and evil.

    One Problem, Though

All too frequently

I find myself

filled with fantasies

about directing vituperation

into the smug, smirking, sneering face

of the morally inferior subhuman

who is my parents’ older son.

But then I remind myself

that in order to do this

I’d need to confront him,

and the sight of that face

and the sound of his voice

have made me feel

physically sick

upon encountering them

for decades.

(Hair colour in cartoon is wrong)