Old Age

                             Okay, I’m Old

Okay, I’m old.

Although some people insist on insisting

that I don’t look as old as I am,

as far as I’m concerned that’s no

Big Fucking Deal.

Numbers may indeed be abstractions,

but numbers, meaning years of age, are scary,

and numbers, meaning years of age, are silly,

sometimes.

It all depends –

on how dependable

or dependent things are –

doesn’t it?

First, the scary:

I’m 71.

Scared the shit out of you didn’t I?

Oooh, I hope that filthy old fart doesn’t want any intimacy with me!

Next, the silly:

I mean – despite the numbers, I’ve always been who I am, y’know?

and part of me’s always been eight years old,

since I was eight,

and at moments still I’m that 10-year-old at camp,

or that suffering, clueless teenager,

and I don’t particularly like the part of me

who was at my idiot testosterone peak when I was 25,

and too much of me remains of the doormat I’d become 20 years later,

and have in some ways always been,

and of course part of me’s always 15 years old –

especially when I see long, well-toned female legs, and so forth.

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

Because that’s ridiculous

because I’m old,

and because I don’t think I deserve ridicule –

at least not for that,

but Big Fucking Deal, eh?

                                 Old

It gets right up my nose;

I mean, it really sticks in my craw

when, in the flow of conversation,

in regard to, say, riding on city buses,

I off-handedly refer to myself as being old,

and another party to the conversation,

usually with a patronising or condescending smile,

contradicts me and insists, ‘Oh, you’re not old!’,

or some crap like that,

and asserts the superiority of using some euphemism.

This always offends the shit out of me.

I know it shouldn’t, but not giving a shit

about what I should or shouldn’t feel

is one of the advantages of being old.

It offends me because it’s an affront to the English language,

to which I have devoted a large portion of my life.

Old means old, as in having stayed alive for a long time.

It disgusts me when they treat it as if it were a dirty word.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

A really ugly line is, ‘You’re only as old as you think you are,’

as if lying to myself were a virtue,

and personal honesty and integrity a loathsome deformity.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

Another bullshit insult is, ‘But you have such a young mind!’

My mind right now is enormously superior to what it was 50 years ago.

As if my lifetime of curiosity and experience, and reflection on both,

hasn’t meant a constantly improving mind! Fuck that.

Shit, being old is okay with me, really.

Being old also means having arthritis and cataracts

and other physical niggles. Okay. That’s part of it.

It’d be a real drag to have them if I were still young,

but I’m not.

                    Notes On The Slipperiness Of Days

The days slide by like turds along the endless cosmic sewer pipe,

never pausing, never looking behind, never looking ahead.

Wednesday? Friday? I don’t know and I don’t care.

My mind has continuously engulfed the experience

that the shit all around me has provided,

my growth in understanding and wisdom

as imperceptibly gradual as my body’s deterioration.

My emotional life, however, has remained stunted;

having the emotional development of a nine-year-old

has made being old doesn’t seem unreal to me;

I view myself with child eyes,

which helps to make my reality seem distantly unreal,

as the days slide by.

I walk my old dog daily,

elevated by the caress of opioids or opiates, plus cannabis,

and usually no more than a wee bit of pain;

the doppler-effect rumble and hraahoomsh of traffic lends its music

to the dancing molecules in my brain and nervous system,

connecting me with my own kind

better than most face-to-face encounters,

as the days slide by.

Even middle age, and all that entails

is a fading memory that won’t slip away,

although the septic emotional wounds of that time

remain encrusted on top of all the day-turds

from childhood and onward,

as the days slide by.

I bought my new coat about a half a year before composing this,

or maybe it was about a year, or more, or something like that.

The days do slide by.

                               Progress

As soon as I become accustomed

to the aches and pains and points of fatigue

that come with being how old I am,

I grow older still and have new ones to contend with.

                             That Old

I may have been whinging

about one or more of the ways

my body’s deterioration over time

has inconvenienced me or worse –

but anyway she accused me,

as many others have done

(why they have to make it sound like an accusation I can only guess),

‘Oh, you’re not that old!’

and I began to wonder, as I do,

being the type of person who wonders about shit,

how old is that old, anyhow?

By what units do we measure it?

By months and years?

By tastes and attitudes?

By technological competence?

By knowledge of pop culture, both now and then?

By speed going up and down stairs?

By body odour?

By the number of grandchildren?

By how long we’ve been telling the same old jokes?

By the amount of wisdom accumulated?

… and where and how do we set the line for any of these

between what is just not as young as we used to be

and being that old?

Old enough to know better, I suppose.

                    National Super

It doesn’t seem real.

After struggling for years to survive

both financially and psychologically at the same time

(the word simultaneously wouldn’t have worked there),

just as I was close to having to sell my house

in order to do so I

simultaneously

reached my sixty-fifth birthday,

and as much money as I’d been paid some months,

and more than I’d been paid in some months lately,

before taxes,

doing the demanding and difficult work that I do –

excellently, permit me to add –

began to appear, after tax, like magic,

in my bank account every other Tuesday,

and although I still had burdensome debts to pay off,

I began to have to suffer less from privation.

It seems extraordinary to someone, such as myself,

who has a generally low opinion of my species,

that anyone, let alone a country,

actually takes care of tired old people, such as myself,

without asking questions, stuffing up, or saying,

‘Nyah! Nyah! Just teasing! We’re taking it back!’

I still expect them to do these things,

being largely incapable

of real interpersonal trust.

                   Rice Isn’t A Daily Thing Here

I don’t panic over work pressure anymore.

If I can’t do my work at a leisurely pace

that’s other people’s problem –

it doesn’t matter to me.

My superannuation pension has provided me

with what the Maoists would’ve probably called

my iron wine bottle.

                                 Seventy

Floating, or sinking, along a footpath – or both or neither,

a cool breeze ruffling my forearms’ hairs,

the high grey clouds diffusing what light was left

as the daytime shaded into the evening,

I focused on the outlines of the trees, still full of green leaves

despite the equinox having passed a couple of weeks before.

I felt connected to everything but humans –

humans who feel compelled to try to impose their egos

onto phenomena ridiculously larger than themselves,

onto phenomena absolutely indifferent to themselves,

such as by believing that by throwing a switch or something

at midnight on the first day of March

they have magically changed the season from summer to autumn,

here in the Southern Hemisphere,

although midnight and March are both random cultural inventions

that they’ve invented for their convenience,

and have nothing to do with the Earth itself,

the changing of the seasons obviously being

a gradual and multifaceted process.

Flip a switch. Say it’s official.

The seasons themselves couldn’t give less of a shit,

less even than the official-season crowd gives for the actual seasons.

The same for anniversaries and holy days – or holidays –

take your pick.

Time slides by seamlessly, incomprehensibly, indifferently.

The difference between my last day of being 69 and my seventieth birthday

being neither more nor less

than that between any other two consecutive days,

the universe throwing no switch

and caring not at all about my personal bullshit.

Despite my knowing better, though,

my awareness of this particular seamless transition

stirred up my personal bullshit within me,

and weighed heavily and stupidly on my human mind.

Culture

            San Antonio, 12 January 1982:

                Boy Racers Foreshadowed

These people who drive around in black

Not quite sports cars — Pontiacs, Chevies, Datsuns —

That get shitty mileage and handle like tanks —

I know because I drove one for a couple of weeks once —

And they have the Rock station’s decal

In the middle of their rear window —

What about them, anyway? How do you explain that?

Is it God’s will?

Or just assholes without any idea of what’s going on,

Like me?

                Fashion and Style

Fashion is fleeting;

style lasts.

Fashion is dictated by others;

style comes from within.

Fashion is a group thing;

style is an individual thing.

Fashion is superficial;

style is integral.

Fashion comes from the mass media;

style is personal.

Fashion is a commercial phenomenon – it costs money;

style can’t be bought – it’s free.

People pick fashions from the available options;

Style is a matter of unlimited choice.

Fashion is a part of our culture;

style is a part of our souls.

                 Legs & Tits

The women of Yap in Micronesia

go about their days bare breasted

because it’s hot and babies need feeding.

They do, however, always wear

foot-length lava-lavas,

because women’s legs are scandalously

provocative sexually.

The Chamoru women of Guam,

another Micronesian island,

being overwhelmingly Catholic

of an Inquisition-era Spanish variety,

wouldn’t dream of going out in public

with their breasts uncovered.

Mother-of-God!

But, since it’s hot, they almost all wear shorts.

Yapese tend to think that Chamoru women

are a bunch of sluts for showing their legs.

Chamorus overwhelmingly consider Yapese women

to be a bunch of sluts for showing their tits.

                Testosterone & Culture

It would be interesting to read a study

of the various ways that adult men

in various cultures and subcultures

express the reality

of the testosterone in their bloodstreams.

In which cultures do they express it primarily with violence?

In which with sexual promiscuity?

In which with displays of physical strength?

In which with posturing?

In which with piety?

In which with insensitivity to others?

In which with the ability to endure pain?

In which with emotionlessness?

In which with vigorous defending of family honour?

In which with attention-demanding public behaviour?

In which with acquisitiveness?

In which with the ability to dominate others?

In which with conspicuous consumption and waste?

In which, if any, other than rural New Zealand,

is going about outdoors

in near-freezing weather

wearing only shorts, a singlet, gumboots,

and maybe a floppy cricket cap

the mark of being a Real Man?

            An Obvious Observation

I was watching the opening ceremonies

and highlights of the first few events

of the 2011 Pacifica Games in New Caledonia

via digital delay on Maori TV.

To provide the all-important

atmosphere and ambience,

the producers showed heaps of long shots

of Noumea and its environs.

It struck me as a pleasant place in which to live or winter

for those who have plenty of money –

but then, any place would be.

                Cultural-Stereotype Similarities

When I was a freelance writer in the early 1980s

I did a story about Southeast Asian refugees in San Antonio.

One educated Vietnamese man whom I interviewed

made the wry observation

that the city’s two main Southeast Asian refugee groups

resembled the two main groups

that flooded into New York and elsewhere

during the mass migrations

of the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The Vietnamese, he told me, were like the Eastern European Jews –

ambitious, shrewd, ready to delay gratification, and keen on education.

The Laotians, he went on, were like the people from southern Italy –

easily satisfied with just about any job

and keen on food and drinking

and generally enjoying life with their extended families and friends.

Remembering this and curious, I asked my mate Michael,

who’s lived in Southeast Asia

and whose thesis on Cambodian politics I edited,

who the Khmers’ stereotype would resemble

and he told me the Irish –

they have close-knit families, are wary of strangers, distrust authority, bear a grudge toward the Vietnamese as the Irish do the English,

and tend to behave jovially up to a point,

but can suddenly turn violent when drinking or provoked.

I wonder to what extent

these cultural stereotypes

are accurate.

More than a bit, I imagine,

but definitely far from entirely.

           A Status Hierarchy

Out behind the school

the extensive onion and carrot fields

stretched expansively

in every direction.

The migrant workers’ kids

showed up for school

during the picking seasons.

They had their own

special classroom

in a one-room relocatable building

right next to the one

in which I supervised In-School Suspension,

the school jail.

The other kids

(such as most of those

the school administration sent to me),

who were permanent residents

of the painfully downmarket barrio

spreading out from the school

in the three other directions

and as poor as piss,

looked down on the migrant pickers’ children

as inferior.

That’s how humans are.

             Population Density

The bus rolled slowly

past a line of mansions.

Inside, the gaggle of slum kids

on their way

to their first volleyball game

at the posh school’s gym

gaped at the three-storey residences,

as wide as they were high,

beneath enormous old shade trees.

One girl asked me

how many families lived in them.

When I answered, “One each,”

they didn’t know whether to believe me.

         What Explorers Say

They came from their cultures,

Armstrong and Hillary,

which is probably the source

of the difference between

“That’s one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind” and

“We knocked the bastard off.”

I know which of these cultures,

although flawed as all are,

sits better with me.