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.

Holiness

                   Cats and Believers

Discussing matters of belief –

it doesn’t matter whether

it’s Christianity or astrology or free-market economics –

with people who actually

believe in them

is a less useful way

to spend time

than waiting for a cat

to make up its mind.

            Hah-oh-ah-lee-uh

When I was little

and had to go to the Jewish temple

whenever my mother made me,

what really impressed me

during the service and sermon

was how the rabbi

was able to drag out the word ‘holy’

into five syllables,

each lasting a full second or more.

I wondered if they had special classes

in rabbi school –

I didn’t know the word yeshiva then –

where they learnt how to do that.

                    Sanctity

When I referred to the oak tree

in our house’s back yard

as sacred,

one of my then-adolescent daughters

asked me what makes something sacred.

Although I’d never thought about it,

I answered immediately

that if somebody just says

that something’s sacred

and others believe that person,

then to those people it’s sacred.

To others it isn’t.

This seemed to make sense to her and she nodded.

                  Bullshit Studies

The more complicated, intricate, detailed,

and demanding of exhaustive study

such superstitions as

the Abrahamic and Hindu religions

and the homeopathy, astrology, acupuncture,

and free-market economics pseudosciences are,

the more absolutely ludicrous

any honest, open, and clear-minded consideration of them

reveals them to be.

They do provide their devotees

with something to use up their time, however,

and also a sense of fellowship

that creates a support system

to help them maintain

their precious delusions.

              Symbolic Headgear

When the Pope was in the Middle East

I saw TV images, on Mute of course,

of a papally attended interfaith service

in Jerusalem or somewhere near there,

I’d guess,

and it struck me that no matter which

monotheistic religion or denomination they represented

– Catholic, Islam, Judaism, Orthodoxy, and so on –

all the clergy present were men

wearing funny-looking hats

of one sort or another.

Outlandish, non-functional headgears

clearly have significant mana

in traditionally organised monotheism,

although I fail to divine

their spiritual significance, myself –

except, of course,

the Pastafarian colander.

          Hallelujah!

Church hymns, xmas carols,

and other religious songs

are not about the soul or the spirit.

They’re about power –

people controlling others –

with some cultural solidarity

thrown in as seasoning.

                             Blessed

My paternal grandparents were hard-core Stalinist atheists.

Since my mother hated them more than she hated anyone else –

and she was a prolific and vehement hater –

she made me go to a middle-of-the-road –

neither orthodox nor reformed – Jewish temple.

Since my daddy had done a generation-gap thing

and become half-assedly semi-religious

he let her, although I don’t remember him going himself.

He, by the way, enjoyed dissing Christianity,

something for which my mother always scolded him,

and made it clear to me that following that example

was not to be on my agenda.

My memories of going to the temple

centre on listening to the cantor,

a small man with a large-nostril nose

that he employed for singing stuff in a language I didn’t understand

in an operatic tenor,

whilst I sat with the backs of my thighs burning from my wool suit –

my being painfully allergic to wool making no difference

to my mother’s clothing selections for me –

with my mother beside me violently hissing at me to stop fidgeting,

and elbowing my ribs and kicking my shins with the side of her shoe

when I failed to do so.

I went through with the bar mitzvah bullshit

because I had no choice

and also because I wanted to rake in the pressies.

Besides, I’ve always enjoyed performing.

After that I rapidly lost interest,

and when I ate on a fast day

and nothing negative happened,

I thought the whole thing through

and concluded that it really was all bullshit.

                   Blasphemy!

It was when that weedy-looking little bloke

came up to me after a performance

and told me that he found it to be offensive

because he was a Chris-ti-an

(that’s three syllables: Kriss-Tee-Anne –

people like that tend to be prissy

as well as egocentrically superstitious)

that I realised how fortunate I was

to live in a country

where blasphemy is not a crime.

A Catholic colleague of mine

when I worked as a high-school teacher,

and who was, incidentally,

as prissy as they come –

a celibate queer in denial

who was crushed to learn that Liberace

had died from Aids,

refusing to accept that his hero

had enjoyed sexual love with another man –

had been horrified when I told the old joke:

‘What’s invisible and tells lies?’

(pause)

‘God.’

He informed me with much sadness

(because he really was fond of me – really)

that I was doomed to Hell no matter what,

because no matter how much good I did in my life,

the only Sin that God would never forgive

is blasphemy.

My only response was,

Well, that’s that, then.

         Monotheism and Taxonomy

Although I acknowledge that

people must have the right

to believe

 – without empirical evidence –

in some ancient

Middle-Eastern-culture’s

semi-anthropomorphic,

masculine,

simultaneously monotheistic and triumphalist

sky-god,

and to pray to

him as if

the whole seething universe exists for them,

and as if he gives a shit

about their stupefyingly picayune, personal peccadilloes,

and also to obey unquestioningly,

and violently –

if that’s what it takes –

those who say that they know

what he wants,

their doing these things

makes me feel

disgust and dismay

and ashamed to be

in the same species they are.