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 …
