Psychological Stuff

                 Tired

Solitude born of reclusiveness

born of terror born of abuse

is exhausting in many ways –

mentally, physically, emotionally, and

for want of a better word,

spiritually.

It leaves me without the inner strength

to take care of myself

or of some of the things I use,

and nobody else has any reason

or motivation

to take care of me or my stuff, anyhow,

so things just don’t get done,

and it doesn’t matter.

I survive without.

This condition inhibits me from accomplishing

things that have always brought me pleasure.

The answers to the nagging voice in my head

that repeatedly asks, why bother?

are obvious, and yet I can’t use them.

Sometimes coffee helps, though.

Not A Contradiction

People who know me,

don’t.

That’s not me.

I’m the one

who’s by himself.

     One Problem

The number of

failed relationships

and the amount

of consequent solitude

that has characterised

my adult life

has been,

I suppose,

inevitable

because I’m not

what –

let’s stress that that’s what,

not whom –

what women,

or at least all those I’ve known,

want.

            A Scene At Arthur’s Creek 1956

I was ten the first time I went to overnight camp,

where I was miserable, of course.

Okay, I would’ve been miserable anywhere.

It was about a half a year after my daddy had died,

and although I was glad to be away

from my mother and my brother,

I couldn’t help but carry them inside my mind

as an ominous omnipresent non-specific sense of threat.

The other kids at the camp all seemed like threats to me, too.

I wasn’t making any lifelong friends.

So I feigned illness,

and was chuffed to discover that I did have a slight fever,

so they sent me to the infirmary at the camp next door.

I walked there by myself,

and stopped by a little brooklet beside the path.

I sat on a rock and stared

at the glittering, smooth-flowing water,

the rocks of various sizes and shapes,

the gravel with its uneven pebbles,

the tree saplings along the edge of the woods

framing my scene.

I stared and stared.

I stared at it fixedly for about ten or fifteen minutes.

My ten-year-old self telling my ten-year-old brain

that I was fixing that exact scene in my memory

exactly,

and would always remember it

exactly,

and more than sixty years later,

I do.

Exactly.

         Not Suited For It

I read mostly crime fiction,

I suppose because

the arrogant, egocentric,

psychopathic, sociopathic,

overconfident mentality

of the characters of the serious criminals

and some of the detectives

that such books portray

is so fascinatingly strange, exotic, and alien

to my timid, deferential, low-personal-risk mind.

                       Security

The trillions and trillions of dollars

that people, businesses, and governments

spend every year on security

is truly boggling,

since security is, ultimately, an illusion.

It’s always seemed that way to me, anyway.

When I was 18 I shifted from my local uni to another

about 350 kays from where my family lived

in a jurisdiction where

the legal age for buying beer was 18.

I drank heaps, but only after finishing studying,

so I got good grades whilst my drinking buddies flunked out.

Once, when visiting me,

my mother asked me why I was drinking so much.

I replied reflexively,

involuntarily regressing into a small child’s voice,

that it was because I was insecure.

She came back at me sneering,

her voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt,

“What do you have to be insecure about?”

I recovered and, putting on my young-scholar character,

said that the world is a particularly insecure place,

numbly unaware at the time

that her question answered itself.

        Progressive Acquaintanceship

The better I get to know a person,

the stranger that person usually seems to become to me,

as the categories wash and fade away

in the rising tide of always inadequate

and usually contradictory particulars.

     My Locus of Control

I fuck up often, y’know.

This is, I realise, a subjective evaluation,

but since I have what psychologists call

a strong internal locus of control,

that’s an evaluation I frequently make.

Maybe things just happen,

and that’s just the way things are.

Maybe some people take the time and trouble

to fuck me over just for the hell of it,

and cleverly cover their tracks.

Maybe I’m a repeatedly pathetic victim

of systems beyond my control.

Maybe I actually do things better than I think,

or at least as well as a reasonable person would expect,

and I’m just too fucking hard on myself.

But I don’t believe that’s so.

I fuck up often, y’know,

and I’m hard on myself when I do.

       The Hot Line

Maybe the main thing

that prevents me

from being overtly suicidal

is that I really don’t give a shit

whether I live or die.

                    Insomnia

I don’t wanna talk

about why I had insomnia, or how,

because that’s several different long stories,

and I like to keep these verses short.

Dealing with it, however,

has been a different story,

and a problem that grew steadily

until my GP scripted me Zopiclone.

Sometimes I was able

to concentrate on my breathing,

as my old yoga-meditation guru,

a German named Erhard, or Hardie,

taught me,

but not all that often

and never for long

before the demons took over.

The demons are what

shrink-talk calls ideations

involving the relentless personal abuse I received

from family members for most of my life.

These demons usually express themselves

into impotently reliving episodes of physical abuse

by my older male sibling,

the word ‘brother’ having connotations that don’t apply.

Zopiclone somehow prevents this.

The other kind of demon

consists of earworms

involving passages of pop songs

that I could never stand

repeating themselves for hours

inside my head,

despite all efforts to focus my mind elsewhere.

Zopiclone doesn’t protect me

from that particular torture.

                 What A Day

I’m tired of daydreaming.

It makes me feel such a pathetic git

that daydreams are about all

that make my reality seem bearable,

but that’s the way it is.

I’m tired of daydreaming,

all right,

but I fear what it’d be like

to stop.

             No Way Of Knowing

I wondered, as the dog settled in on my lap,

if I was just a comfy surface upon which to snooze,

or if something personal within her nervous system

was involved.

The Return of Personal Stuff

    The Illusion That Is Me

I know that I’m still handsome,

for an old bloke –

what a fucking joke –

and have wide shoulders,

a powerful voice,

and a strong presence,

but all this only gives

the people I meet

and even those I’ve known somewhat

for years

the wrong

impression.

I’m really

an insecure

nine-year-old boy

with no self-confidence,

low self esteem,

and no self-belief

who’s afraid of everybody,

and have been since 1955.

                      Vertigo

I don’t know if it’s all in my mind

or just in my middle ear,

but vertigo’s been a part of my life

for as long as I can remember.

It’s not that I’m afraid of heights –

I can enjoy the view

out of a twentieth-floor window or from an airplane –

but whenever I’m unsure of my underpinnings,

whether I’m walking across

the outside lane of a windy bridge

or changing a light bulb three steps up a ladder,

an icy sensation shoots back and forth

between my ankles and my knees,

I become dizzy, disoriented, or both,

my sense of balance seems to desert me,

and I have to fight to prevent myself

from lurching into a disastrous fall.

          I Am A Thing

Although some may find

things that I do

to be competently useful

or mildly entertaining,

I find it hard to believe

that anybody gives a shit

about what goes on in my mind

when I’m alone –

which is most of the time –

or about my feelings

or my pain.

My experience has been

that other people –

and even my dog –

behave toward me

as if I were a thing,

rather than a human being,

and I long ago came to accept their judgement.

                   Motivations Obscure To Me

I’ve observed these people –

on TV and when I’m out and about –

who have full beards and shaved heads,

and it’s beyond my capacity for empathy

to understand in any meaningful way

why they do.

It’s the same with elaborately trimmed-and-shaped beards

that require high maintenance,

and trendy hairstyles

that require frequent barbering

and expensive product.

Words come to mind –

fashion, machismo, vanity, narcissism,

obsessive affectation –

and I know what all those words mean,

but I’m incapable of knowing

what those things feel like.

Although I did experiment once,

extremely briefly,

with a goatee when in my early twenties,

I stopped shaving,

or allowing barbers to shave,

any part of me when I was nineteen

because I didn’t like to do it,

didn’t like the way it felt,

either during or after the process,

and could find no compelling, rational reason

for doing it at all,

and that’s it.

               A Brief Assessment

I’m just a psychosocially deficient old man

who occasionally churns out amusing words.

                        I Don’t Feel Ethnic

I don’t feel ethnic

even though I was born into a definite ethnic group.

Ashkenazic.

Eastern European Jewish.

Two grandparents from what is now Poland

and two from what’s now the Ukraine.

Still, I love most of the ethnic food I grew up with –

chopped liver and sour green tomatoes and kasha knishes

and sable, which is smoked black cod, and,

although I haven’t had any in many years,

gefilte fish with hot horseradish – comfort food, all,

but I also derive comfort from stuff from the hot bread shops,

and just about every other kind of ethnic food,

and when I cook it’s more likely to be

some form of Mexican or Italian or Indian or something

I’ve improvised

than Ashkenazic.

I don’t deny my heritage,

but the religion part,

and most of the in-group cultural stuff of it never stuck.

I guess the thing is that although

I’m a member of the tribe for sure,

I just don’t dance with the rest of them

around some metaphoric campfire.

I don’t dig klezmer,

and I didn’t dig it when another member of the tribe

came up to me at a recent function

and told me an ethnocentric, ethnic-stereotype joke,

having lost my ability to appreciate

humour based on ethnic stereotypes – except Australians –

many decades ago.

I didn’t feel simpático with that landsmann,

to mix my Spanish with my Yiddish.

What I felt was alienated from my roots,

just as I do from the wider culture.

   My Own Confirmation Bias

When I don’t feel confident

about being able

to do something competently,

but have no choice but to do it anyway,

and it comes out okay,

this result has no effect

on my underlying lack of confidence

at all.

            I Come Last

One of the many things

that I internalised as child,

having learnt it within

the dynamic of my family,

that my life in general reinforced,

and that became solidified during the years

when I was primarily a spouse and parent

is that when I am involved or engaged

with one or more other people,

my interests, my preferences,

my feelings, my desires,

my needs, my time – my life,

definitely have less importance

than those of the others.

I accept this as natural and inevitable,

but I don’t like it.

         Early in the Morning

For a long time now,

the worst part of almost every day for me

has been that early-morning moment

when I grudgingly have to acknowledge

that I’ve awakened and am unable

to get back to sleep.

From time to time, however,

things become worse,

such as when I’m at my desk before dawn

and am unable to distract myself sufficiently

to maintain mental numbness.

       Without When Within

It got to the point

at which even whisky gave no comfort

from my rattlings about in my own absurdity;

I had no children, or old men like myself,

around to connect me

with card games or dominoes

and laughter about nothing.

I no longer had even pathetic congress

with the plants in my pots.

No new facebook notifications.

No new emails.

No phone calls or text messages,

as usual.

No hugs and cuddles.

No cosy time-passing.

No sharing of secrets.

No enthusiasm or expectations

that the courage required to hit the world

would result in reward.

Of all the music in the world,

much of it at my fingertips,

I didn’t know what to play –

something that would reach me

but not really touch me

would have been most appropriate for the situation,

but the situation seemed incurable, anyhow,

even with jazz fusion.

           Within When Without

Fear afflicts me

most of the time.

It afflicts me the worst

when I’m away from my hole.

All sorts of fears afflict all sorts of people,

but – except for vertigo –

most of the common ones,

such as the fear of death,

bother me little or not at all.

What terrorises me, of course,

is people.

Okay, most of the people who take my money

in the shops and so forth

are like balm.

But when I venture into

the world of people

who may give a shit

or should give a shit

or pretend to give a shit

or who I want to give a shit,

I’ve learnt to keep my defences up,

and let the performer hide the child,

being highly suspicious of what is actually there.

My form may be within your range of vision, y’see,

but I’m not there.

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.