Stuff from April 2018; #120 in this series

                             Fanfare 

My Lotto slip matched up three numbers and the bonus,

putting me in division zed or something,

which meant that instead of losing outright, as usual,

I had $23 coming to me,

off a seven dollar output,

so my margin was actually plus $16.

Still, better than a kick up the bum.

Impersonal things can be like that.

When the lady scanned my ticket

the Lotto machine played

a brass fanfare,

or more precisely the recording of one,

and I wondered.

I wondered who composed that fanfare –

was it someone specially commissioned to compose it,

or some semi-famous composer

who wrote it long enough ago

for it to be in the public domain and therefore free?

I wondered who it was that decided on it,

and indeed on a brass fanfare at all –

was it somebody in Marketing,

or some tech geek who put together the software?

Is it supposed to make me feel special and important,

celebratory and giddy with excitement,

and therefore likely to buy more Lotto tickets?

Do they – whoever they are – think people are that stupid?

Are people that stupid, at least some of us?

The world is full of these mini-mysteries.

I wonder if discovering their answers

would ruin everything.

                  Grumpus

I don’t know if it’s just me,

but the grizzled old stereotype

of people becoming more conservative

as our years pile up

into grumpy-old-fart territory

clearly misses the boat.

The older I get the more that what passes

in the current lexicon as conservative

disgusts and repels me,

and the more that radical change

in global social and economic

concepts and attitudes and systems and values

seems attractive and plausible to me.

I also have become less conservative

in my day-to-day efforts

to cope with the general crap

of the world of humans

and my situation in it.

I don’t feel the craving to cling to things,

or to depend on individual people,

as much as I may feel the compulsion to do so;

my desperation’s lost all its urgency –

urgency ignores the cosmos –

death’s not all that far away any more,

and stamping my foot and having a hissy fit

won’t change that, or anything, really.

I take solace from my cosmic insignificance,

old age having released me

from the distracting illusion of love,

and freed me to feel almost nothing

without feeling guilty about it.

                Dehumanisation 

I can’t pinpoint

even the approximate age

at which I first became aware of it,

but since early childhood

my perception has increasingly been

that the more that a person knows me

the more likely that person will

behave toward me as if I were a thing

rather than a fellow human being.

As my self-awareness

increased and improved over time,

I became convinced that it was me,

that one or more of my unconstructive

concepts and default behaviours,

which I developed whilst my mind was forming

in a dangerously toxic family environment,

radiates subtle signals

to others that I am, indeed,

no better than a thing,

and deserve no better treatment,

but then it struck me

how triumphant capitalism

commodifies everything and everybody,

and that this objectification and dehumanisation

were probably widespread realities

throughout the system.

Still, deep down in the core of my personhood,

I can’t escape the stubborn conviction that,

Nah, it’s me.

    Taste Arbiters & My Sociability  

If a piece of music –

or of writing or painting

or sculpture or comedy

or anything else

someone has created –

does something for me – or to me –

somewhere deep inside my nervous system,

or if it definitely turns me off,

or fails to do anything in particular

and just leaves me cold,

that’s what happens,

and it doesn’t matter who tells me

that I should or shouldn’t think that it’s art,

or that it’s great, or just okay,

or that it’s crap,

no matter how knowledgeable and respected

or numerous

such taste arbiters may be.

Sometimes, I suppose,

it would be socially advantageous

for me to fake my response –

oh, definitely! –

but I can’t.

                         72  

When I was just a wee thing,

maybe four years old,

it somehow got into my mind,

I don’t know how,

that my ‘lucky number’ is 72.

It soon expanded

in my child’s consciousness

to being a magic number,

and I’ve never been able to shake that,

even though I’ve been basically anti-superstition

since about puberty,

and thoroughly so since the mid-1960s.

So, every time I’ve had to come up

with a random number for anything

I’ve always put down 72 –

or seven or two if it had to be one digit –

and of course that’s made fuckall difference to anything.

But maybe, I used to think,

it was a stroke of prescience or something,

if such things are possible,

which they almost certainly aren’t,

and something major –

from my perspective –

is going to happen when I’m 72 years old.

Maybe it’ll be my age when I die,

or get rich,

or find happiness and fulfilment at last.

Well, my seventy-second birthday

is now well in the past,

and I haven’t experienced anything remarkable

or life-changing or life-ending yet.

I don’t notice much change from being 71, actually.

                          Luck  

Only occasionally, but far too often,

I’ve heard people say,

almost inevitably with smugly assertive pride,

‘I don’t believe in luck.’

Now, I’ve learnt from all-too-tedious experience

that people who say that they don’t believe in luck

are egotists who probably mean either one of two things:

There’s the ‘it’s all part of a plan’ crowd

(God’s plan, Nature’s plan – it doesn’t matter.)

So what?

It’s just my luck that God’s plan

has screwed me over so badly.

It’s just blind luck that Nature’s done the planning,

and not some ancient aliens’ digital device.

Then we have the ‘We make our own luck’

and ‘It’s all choice, not chance’ evangelists.

Right.

That toddler chose to have abusive parents.

Those 12-year-old girls chose to have thugs in military gear

invade their villages and rape them.

That middle-aged nurse chose to win Lotto,

and two million others chose to lose.

‘I don’t believe in luck.’

So pick another word for effects

resulting from innumerable causative factors

beyond anybody’s control,

like why that one sperm out of hundreds of millions in that spurt

fertilised that egg to create you.

As if belief has anything to do with it.

It’s like saying,

‘I don’t believe in the direction “down”.’

 

         Wake Up Sheeple! 

I awakened from my siesta

with this sentence ringing in my head:

‘In less than two weeks you’ll be at my door,

chasing your witch-wives away

with their own mules.’

I have no idea what it means

and can’t remember the dream that spawned it.

I wonder if reading this

has enriched your life?

Not much, I expect.

Oh, well …

Some More Human Stuff

                    Nice & Nasty

It’s nice to be nice

because when you’re nice

everything is so much nicer

than when you’re not nice.

Isn’t that nice?

Of course, you have the option to be nasty.

Being nasty, though, can make you a nasty person,

although even nice people can be nasty sometimes,

and sometimes even nasty people can be, well, nice,

and sometimes it’s nice to be nasty,

or nasty to be too bloody nice.

Depends on what meanings you load onto the words, eh?

Some people put on a big front about how nice they are,

when they’re really nasty right down to their core,

and some people put up a big front about being nasty

because they’re afraid of what’d happen

if people were to find out that they’re actually nice.

It’s bad form to be nasty to someone who’s being nice,

but are people who act nice in response to nastiness saps,

or just cunningly passive-aggressive,

expressing nastiness in a nice way?

When people are being nice to me I usually wonder

if they’re Just Being Nice and don’t really mean it.

Pain is nasty.

Nice music can either intrigue me or make me yawn,

but I tend to rock out when the music’s nasty.

Nice food is enjoyable.

Nasty food’s better not eaten.

Dogs are nice companions and playmates,

but can sometimes smell nasty.

That first swallow of cold beer is nice.

Complex, dogmatic ideologies are nasty.

Hugs are nice.

Sex is definitely nicer when it’s nasty.

            If I Ran The Marathon

I can picture myself slogging away smoothly,

keeping up the pace for more than two hours,

finally pulling away from the last of the others,

running as if on air into the final straight

almost a minute in the lead,

and with about fifty metres to the tape

tripping over some surface irregularity

and landing forehead-first on the paving,

knocking myself out cold.

                        Dodging Dickheads

One of the reasons that I make an effort

to stay clear of people in general

is that I strongly prefer to avoid

having confrontations with dickheads.

Not for me the joy that some whom I know express

in, for example, inviting Mormon missionaries inside

in order to have a bit of a piss-take,

wind them up, and generally give them a hard time.

Not for me the crossing of swords

with pompous anti-intellectual sophists,

hypocritical cryptofascist bullies,

or fundamentalist simpletons,

whether in Garden Place, on facebook, in the blogosphere,

or on the footpath in front of my house.

It’s bad enough to have to endure

the behaviour of tailgaters and the egotism of taggers

when I’ve no choice but to venture out of my home.

    Inconvenient Elements

I know that many people

admire, metaphorically,

those who do so,

but when my wash is on the line

and rain starts to bucket down,

I don’t rush outside

and shake my fist at the clouds.

I’m not defiant

when it comes to nature

causing petty inconveniences

in regard to my petty objectives.

A soft water rinse

does my laundry just fine,

thank you.

This wouldn’t be the basis

for an inspirational,

defiance-toward-adversity

so-called meme

on facebook, though.

would it?

           A Misnomer

It seems to me

that the term ‘clean-shaven’

is ideological

rather than descriptive.

If shaving’s so bloody clean,

why do people have to put

antiseptic on the skin

where they’ve just done it?

                       Barbering

Okay, it’s a long time between events,

but I never really know

how to respond

when,

any time for several weeks after the event,

people I know inform me,

“You got a haircut!”

It confuses me.

Are they trying to impress me

with their grasp of the superficially obvious?

Or do they think

that I’ve been trying to keep it a secret

and need to be exposed?

Or do they think

that I’ve been too dim to notice it myself,

and they therefore need to update my status for me?

Or do they think at all?

Sometimes I used to feign surprise: “Oh! Really?”

or claim that what I’d actually done

was to mousse it up really stiff

and then drive it back into my head with a hammer,

or some such similar nonsense.

With this last haircut, though,

I’ve been going for straight denial.

                  Some Kind Of Place

Some people are so kind and caring

and devoted to helping

those less favoured than themselves

in meaningful ways

that the consensus of those who know them

or who are aware of who they are and what they do

is that the world of human society

will be a much poorer place after they’re dead.

Some people are so horrid, destructive,

egocentric, cruel, and nasty,

feeling either nothing or smug pleasure

when harming other people and the world in general

that the consensus of those who know them

or who know more than enough about them

is that the world of human society

will be a much better place after they’re dead.

I don’t think that my death

will have much of an effect

on what kind of place the world of human society

will be one way or another

at all.

        Heroism & Money

Nicholas Winton saved the lives

of 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia

by whisking them away

from the Nazis in 1939

and bringing them to Britain.

I’d love to do something like that,

but I don’t have his social position,

my body is too tired,

and I certainly don’t have the money

to charter a non-trafficking

passenger service for refugees

or to pay lawyers

to do the paperwork.

             Taking It

Instead of ‘Goodbye’,

or ‘See yuh later’,

he said, ‘Take it easy.’

I replied,

‘I’ll take it any way I can get it.’

This is no time

for me to pick and choose

about how I take it,

but rather just to take 

whatever comes along

as best I can.

For me at least,

one of the most pernicious

two-word phrases now is,

‘I hope’.

      You Can Play, Too

Look before you leap,

but he who hesitates is lost.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder,
but out of sight, out of mind.

Home is where the heart is,

but familiarity breeds contempt.

Two heads are better than one,

but too many cooks spoil the broth.

Better safe than sorry,

but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Cream rises to the top,

but shit floats.

This Sporting Life

            CG 2010

Watching a road cycling race

on TV with the sound on mute

and Weather Report being funky on the box,

I wondered what goes on

in the minds of the cyclists

at the back of the peloton,

without a hope of moving up.

It was beyond me.

                        Basketball Coaches

Basketball coaches

have dreams about exes and ohs

running offensive moves and defensive traps.

Basketball coaches

are like choreographers,

in a competitive contact ballet.

Basketball coaches

have to take heaps of shit when their teams are losing.

Basketball coaches

know that the fundamentals have to be right

for the rest to fall into place –

attack the break; don’t sag off it,

play defence with your feet, not your hands,

block out, give and go, pick and roll,

feet at 60 degrees for foul shots,

defend the passing lanes off the ball,

follow your shots, cover the point,

and so on.

Basketball coaches

know that speed is important, but there’s no substitute for size.

Basketball coaches

know the difference between getting beaten and just losing –

a team gets beaten when the other team

has to do all it can to defeat it;

when a team loses it beats itself.

The most profound thing

that basketball coaches learn

after doing it for enough years

is that it’s better to be lucky than to be good.

             The Excitement of Sport

Watching the Asia Cup cricket final on TV,

I enormously enjoyed

the shots of the spectators,

especially the young Pakistani women,

with and without hijab scarves,

and the young Sri Lankan women –

all belonging to healthy elites who can afford travel

and who wear expensive clothing –

all of them excitedly shouting

and flashing straight, white, smiling teeth

and jumping up and down

in response to the exploits

of the healthy young male athletes

disporting themselves down on the greensward.

I could almost smell

the oestrogen and vaginal fluids

through the television.

Turned me on, it did.

                     Lucky Blokes

Watching amateur club rugby league on Maori TV,

it became evident that much of it is ritual,

as the players on every team

from every one of Auckland’s

ethnocultural backgrounds represented

behave with almost identical

celebrations or commiserations

whenever one of their teammates

either scores a try

or stuffs up.

I envy them

their standard-issue,

done-by-rote,

reflexively automatic

blokey mateship.

      The Gold-Medal Women’s Curling Match

Most of the winter Olympics

is tedious on TV,

but I found myself

with nothing else to do after work

than watch the gold-medal

women’s curling match.

In general I’d be inclined

to back Sweden over Canada,

other things being equal,

but that Canadian woman

who shoved the stone instead of sweeping in front of it

had stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes,

chestnut hair, and a charismatic smile

that really did it for me.

The teams’ tactics were beyond me,

but that didn’t matter.

Sweden won.

Oh, well …

that’s sport.

Stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes

don’t matter.

                      Aggro Ridiculoso

One crashed into the other awkwardly –

who knows why?

Clumsiness? Bad judgement? Recklessness?

Callous disregard? Malice? Fatigue?

Just one of those things that happen?

– anyway, the testosterone and adrenaline and

who-knows-what-other hormone levels

zoomed up to levels requiring action,

but they couldn’t afford to take action

with real consequences,

as they both wanted to stay in the game,

so they went into a peacock display of chest bumping

and aggressive, glaring-eyed forehead leaning,

the garishly bright and unnatural colours

and the silly patterns

of their football shorts and jerseys

making them look hilariously ridiculous.

A case could, of course, be made that, deep down,

we’re all ridiculous –

the suffering involved in most people’s lives, however,

puts something of a damper on real-life hilarity

in regard to those who don’t deserve ridicule,

although human pain

does make certain psychopaths giggle and snigger.

                      Netball

When we were reading stuff about New Zealand

in 1988 whilst preparing to shift here from Guam,

I read that the country’s major sports

are rugby, cricket, and netball.

Now I’d seen people playing rugby in the park,

and cricket scenes in movies,

but I’d never even heard of netball,

and wondered whether

it was what Kiwis called volleyball,

volleyball being a major sport on the island.

The first time I saw it on TV I couldn’t believe it.

It resembled a sport that girls played when I was a kid

called girls’ basketball – since discarded for being sexist,

but I couldn’t figure out why the defenders had to stand back

and let the attackers shoot unbothered.

Nearly a quarter of a century later,

after shepherding two daughters

through the Saturday netball circus –

it seems as if it was usually in the rain but it probably wasn’t –

I still think it’s weird as shit.

I’m not keen on watching sports

in which the officials blow their whistles

every few seconds

for infractions that I don’t see.

                    Ryne Duren

When I was a kid in the fifties

I became fascinated by

a baseball pitcher named Ryne Duren.

His genius at gamesmanship and showmanship

eclipsed his skill at pitching,

but that’s what makes memories.

Sure, he could throw a baseball faster

than just about anybody ever could,

at somewhere about 175 kph.

Think of that.

He was also almost legally blind

and wore glasses that were, as everyone said,

as thick as Coke bottles.

His problem, of course, was control.

A relief pitcher, he would come on in the middle of an inning

and while warming up was always sure

to fire some of his high-velocity offerings

several rows up into the grandstand

and some others somewhere near

where the next batter’s head would be likely to be.

At least once that I recall, perhaps imprecisely,

he took off his glasses to polish them,

dropped them on the ground,

and then got down on his hands and knees

to feel around blindly for them

until he found them, put them back on,

and blazed one more warm-up cannonball, high,

before nodding that he was ready.

Batter up!

                Russian Tennis Fans

Watching the St Petersburg Open tennis tournament,

with the sound off, of course,

it seemed as if the clearly affluent spectators

were almost entirely either

women who looked like trophies,

or maybe porn actresses,

or men who looked like thugs –

or like cruel, expensively dressed gangsters

who employed thugs.

              Pace and Reproduction

One thing that struck me

when I watched the Beijing Olympics

was how Usain Bolt stood out from the field

with his sense of humour and personality

as well as the pace at which he motored down the track.

I also noticed the looks on the faces

of the young Chinese women in the crowd

and on the stadium staff

whenever he appeared.

I wonder how many half-Jamaican babies

who may end up being able to run fast

were born in Beijing in 2009?

                  Wimbledon Celebrities

One of the best parts of watching tennis on TV,

of course,

especially a grand-slam tournament such as Wimbledon,

was the editor’s selection of shots

from cameras focusing on celebrities in the crowd.

It amused me that I was unable to recognise most of them.

I assumed that those who were of A Certain Age

but wearing well

were either former tennis greats or minor royalty.

The glittery young women with perfect teeth

who’d look comfortably at home

on the covers of fashion magazines

were likely the players’ wives and girlfriends,

and the fashionably clothed and barbered young men,

also with excellent teeth,

their husbands and boyfriends.

Particularly fascinating were the apparently professional celebrities

taking time out from shoots for the covers

of supermarket check-out aisle magazines

to glom some world-class, global exposure

before sinking into the ranks of the uncelebrated

by the time next year’s Wimbledon rolled around.

I had no idea who any of them were.