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.

  

  

Stuff About Location & the U S of A

                                         Location

        Resort Beach Observation

It was in the mid-eighties.

I was, for reasons that don’t matter,

spending a week or so at a beach resort

near a small town on Jamaica’s northeastern coast.

The derelict shell of an old fishing boat

marked where the resort’s beach ended

and the public beach began.

Hustlers gathered about the old boat,

offering the resort’s paying guests

such cash-only delights

as ‘spliffs?’ ‘cocaine?’

‘my girlfriend braid your hair?’

‘hand-carved statues?’

‘river tour in my boat with barbecue?’

and so on.

They’d gradually edge their way

onto the resort’s beach

in order to make their pitches

more directly to the pale-skinned

guests from the North.

After a while the resort’s security guards

would shoo them good-naturedly back beyond the boat.

When the guards went back to the poolside bar

or wherever,

the hustlers would begin another commercial incursion.

This went on, back and forth, all day.

It struck me that in a town as small as Ocho Rios

both the hustlers and the security guards

had almost certainly known each other

all their lives,

and I wondered if they swapped roles with each other

every few weeks.

            Reduced Visibility

Taking my Sunday morning walk

through an autumn fog

covering Claudelands Park and nearby footpaths

I revelled in the novelistic moodiness

that the mist created,

enjoyed the sensation

of the chilly dampness

on my face and facial hair,

and wondered at the

maniacal, homicidal recklessness

of many of the drivers,

who zoomed about

with idiotic abandon

I think perhaps because

of the limited visibility

and slightly slick streets.

          Timely and Deep

While watching an in-depth interview

live on Aljazeera

I wondered what it’d be like

to be interviewed myself

on a global network.

This, of course,

is overwhelmingly unlikely to happen,

as I’m not at or even anywhere near the centre

of any weighty situation

of global interest,

which, I suppose,

is probably a good thing.

               No Indigene

I’m not indigenous anywhere.

Most of the people in the world

would consider me an intruder

if I tried to reside

in the land of my distant ancestors,

and they’d be right.

My grandparents had to flee

their country of birth

because those who could kill them

told them that they didn’t belong there.

I left the country of my birth when I was six weeks old.

I fled the country where I grew up

because both I and those controlling

its dominant culture

knew that I didn’t belong there.

They said, ‘Love it or leave it,’

so I left.

I embrace the nation that I chose to join,

and many here have welcomed me,

but I’m not indigenous to this land,

and although I’ve lived here

for more than a quarter of a century,

many locals still consider me a foreigner.

I guess the only place I really belong

is where I actually spend most of my time, anyway:

online, in the company, as much as possible,

of more or less educated people

who are more or less capable of clear, rational, critical thinking,

many of them more or less misfits,

as I am.

     One Good Thing

One good thing

about living where I do

is that I don’t have to see

fuckin American flags

all over the place.

+     +     +

                                                The U S of A

                     Hollywood Boulevard 1968

She was a bouncy old broad in her custom-made bra,

so I stopped to jot her down on that Hollywood corner.

A pickpocket hand hit my arm – missed my pants –

and I felt at my arse for hours –

Felt good! –

and I felt at my arse for hours.

                  American Heritage

My mate Phil Blaine,

an odd-looking chap,

explained:

“I’m part Scot, part Irish,

part Cherokee, part Chiricahua Apache,

part Ethiopian, and part Sudanese.”

“Oh,” said the person who’d asked,

“so you’re a nigger.”

“That’s right. I’m a nigger.”

              US Electoral Update

I just had this epiphany about Bernie Sanders:

I know him.

Sure, we’ve never met,

but we’re about the same age,

and he’s the sort of person I would’ve known

if I’d been in his vicinity

rather than my own.

Whether we would’ve got along with each other

is an open question.

I imagine we would now,

but we’ll never know.

    Totally Unrepentant

I saw an interview on TV

with Frank Zappa

shortly before he died.

He was sitting in an easy chair

wearing a dressing gown

and had let his beard grow out.

In response to a question

from the interviewer

about his life-long public scorn

for religious beliefs

in his then-current situation,

he replied, that deep voice still strong,

that he was “totally unrepentant.”

How American!

I doubted if an interviewer

in any other

English-speaking country

would have asked

Frank Zappa

such a question.

             Media Management

Keep your eyes on the monkey.

What a naughty, silly, dumb-arse it is!

Keep your eyes on the monkey

while the organ grinders clear out all you have.

Keep your eyes on the monkey.

Doo-Jee-Too

Keep your eyes on the monkey

as he drops his shorts and shows you his arse.

Keep your eyes on the monkey

while the organ grinders plunder your neighbourhoods.

Keep your eyes on the monkey.

Doo-Jee-Too

Keep your mind on the monkey

as he wanks himself right in your face.

Keep your mind on the monkey

as the organ grinders gang-rape you and those you love.

Keep your mind on the monkey.

Doo-Jee-Too

Keep your mind on the monkey.

as he flings his shit into the front-row seats

Keep your mind on the monkey

as the organ grinders call all your shots all day in life.

Keep your mind on the monkey.

Doo-Jee-Too

Keep your eyes on the monkey

as he conducts a mis-matched dog fight to the death

Keep your eyes on the monkey

as the organ grinders destroy everything they can’t steal.

Keep your mind on the monkey.

Doo-Jee-Too

                                 Stanli

She came into the shop that I was helping to run

and the hormonal chemistry immediately took hold.

She had some sort of job at a radio station

and I was taking some radio-TV production courses,

so we had something in common other than compatible genitals.

Her name was Sandy but she preferred the nickname Stanli,

as she was an obsessive Laurel-and-Hardy fan.

No prizes for guessing which of the two was her role model.

I made her a hand-crafted birthday present,

and we had some good times together,

cuddling and kissing in the movie theatre and such –

she was an excellent kisser –

but then she stood me up one Friday evening,

and the usual mutual distrust and recriminations ensued,

and that was that.

Some weeks later another ex-girlfriend, a stripper,

came into the shop and asked me about my thing with Stanli.

I told her that it was unfortunately past tense,

and she assured me that that was good,

and that it did my reputation no credit

to be seen kissing a nigger in public.

That had never occurred to me.