Life At Home

          1 February 2014 – 5:45 am

I’m listening to music that speaks to my soul,

drinking hot coffee,

and reading a good book.

I have three bottles of wine in the pantry,

two bottles of beer in the fridge,

some sleeping pills in a vial in my office,

four plums in a bowl and one in my belly,

and a bit of money in my pocket.

No point lamenting the likely loss of love

or the unlikeliness of ever experiencing it again.

         Afternoon Dilemma

Every afternoon,

after tucking away my daily meal,

I settle down in my favourite chair

with a mystery novel on my lap

and a bottle of plonk on the table,

not far from my right elbow,

and confront the dilemma

of which takes precedence.

The bottle will inevitably make the book

irrelevant,

but I do enjoy reading what is for me

the literary equivalent of comfort food.

I know I should limit my interaction

with the bottle – and its successor –

to occasional wee sips,

but I never do.

The book will be there the next day.

I’m never all that certain that I will.

     Mundane Everyday Soul

Traversing the familiar tracks

from bed to toilet to computer and back,

which I do daily, and often

– and likely do nightly in my sleep

without remembering –

is something ingrained in my being.

It’ll mean nothing

and be nonexistent

once I’m incapacitated or dead.

                     With the Sound on Mute:

watching daytime TV during August 2014 included seeing:

young Swiss and Scandinavian women

with expensively even dentition

competing at snowboard half-pipes somewhere in the Alps,

every dimension of the half-pipe meticulously set –

a young widow in Nepal wiping away tears –

ads featuring self-satisfied, confident, upward-mobile types

gloating about the dream houses

that they’d paid the contractors who put them on the telly

to build for them –

houses exploding from drone strikes –

a re-run of a documentary

about a Hungarian-speaking town in Romania

whose citizens are mad

about ice hockey –

a doco of reptile-eyed Brazilian military torturers from the 1980s –

adorable soft-nosed cattle munching on hay

somewhere in Australia,

followed by a shot of an adorable little girl

helping her mum put a roast in the oven –

archaeologists and tourists examining Angkor Wat –

men from around the world wearing camouflage fatigues

strutting while they flaunt assault rifles –

the sheer joy of dark-skinned cricketers playing their game –

country Kiwis growing turkeys for slaughter –

a flag-waving American redneck mob

shouting and snarling at wretched migrants at the border –

self-righteous, sadistically psychopathic Daesh shitheads

rolling over brown landscapes

killing for fun as they go

and making claims about establishing a global caliphate,

their flag flying over the White House –

lying neo-fascist politicians smirking.

          Obvious Strategy

It was mid-afternoon in mid-Spring.

The weather outside was pleasant

and my front door was open.

The first fly of the season zipped in,

but my pyrethrum spray convinced it to depart.

I was less than halfway through

my first bottle of wine for the day

when my loneliness overtook me,

making me shudder and sweat.

The obvious strategy for addressing this

involved concentration upon

drinking, not thinking.

               Habitat

A really large arachnid

crawled up onto my arm

as I was settling into my reading chair

with a bottle of whisky

and a Nero Wolfe mystery.

I flicked it off onto the coffee table,

then went and got a paper towel,

picked it up,

squooshed it,

and put it and the balled-up paper towel

into the bin.

The poor thing had just entered

the wrong habitat,

as I’d done so many decades ago,

only I haven’t had

the easy escape

of a fast and unexpected death.

           Preferring the Rut

I was waiting for someone,

so I stepped out onto my balcony

shortly after noon

on a midsummer’s day –

something I rarely do.

The songs from what seemed like

dozens of species of birds

filled the air around me,

and blessed clouds easing by

blocked the discomfort

of exposure to

direct, ozone-free sunlight.

It struck me that I should do this more often,

but I haven’t.

  

                            Beyond Me

It’s a block of five townhouse units

away from the street

at the end of a longish right-of-way.

The row of five letter boxes

stands facing the driveway

just inside the footpath.

I’m in unit three.

A young couple who moved into four

had a newspaper subscription,

but never collected their papers,

which became soggy and spilled out onto the ground.

I couldn’t figure this out.

Maybe they found a vista

that included rubbish on the ground

to be attractive,

or spiritually or morally uplifting,

or a mark of class,

as they passed it every time they came or went.

Maybe they thought that removing it was their mothers’ job.

I’m not their mother,

but since the sight of their rubbish on the ground

in front of my home

did nothing to please my aesthetic sensibilities

or to lift my morale,

I picked it up from the ground

if I was walking by

and stuffed it into the back of their letterbox

until recycling day,

when I’d have to set it out.

I would rather have stuffed it somewhere else,

but squabbling with neighbours never pays off,

and they moved away

shortly after I called noise control on them one midnight.

                       Indoors-Outdoors

I’m fondest of the colder months,

when I can close myself inside my house,

away from the unpleasantries teeming outside,

dress warmly, and seal my body snugly away

from the elements.

My heating bill during the colder months is, however, a worry.

As the days lengthen and warm,

the temptation grows to open the front door

when I’m downstairs

in order to let in the balmy breezes,

the view of my potted flowers and herbs,

and the smell of the jasmine

growing over my front patio wall.

It also lets in the pollen,

and means operating the pyrethrum anti-fly spritzers,

but that’s way cheaper than heating.

By February the jasmine’s finished and it’s fly season;

the fly-repellent devices can do only so much,

and leaving the doors and windows open

and running the fans

against the heat

is sometimes only marginally effective.

Autumn is always welcome.

I like closing the front door with the earlier sunsets.

I’m basically an indoorsman, anyway.

High-Brow Music Stuff

        Music

The rain returned,

so I turned off

my CD player

to listen to it.

I think Telemann

would’ve understood.

  

           Negative Aesthetic Preferences

I’d really rather enjoy music than have it irritate me –

indeed, I prefer enjoyment to irritation in all things –

but music goes deeply into my who-I-am,

and I can’t bring myself to enjoy musical syrup,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy bombast,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy superficial catchiness,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy smug self-importance,

and I can’t bring myself to enjoy

the florid glorification of the essentially trivial,

generally misleading, and frequently destructive

biochemical phenomena that are emotions.

  

              Too Bad For Some Of Us

Monk once said,

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”

The key word there is ‘subconsciously’,

because they may have never studied any maths in their lives,

but they were born with mathematics

imprinted in their brains,

and their minds work mathematically

whether they want them to or not.

Mine doesn’t.

Composer and Listener

One of the reasons

that I’m fond of the music

of Johann Sebastian Bach

is that it is,

as Martin complained to me,

overwhelmingly mathematical.

What makes this good for me

is that my mind

is not mathematical at all,

so I’m not suckered into

trying to understand it,

and can just experience it

as it washes over me.

  

    The Best of Bach

I saw an ad for a CD

called The Best of Bach.

Johann Sebastian Bach

composed more than eleven hundred

pieces of music,

all of them brilliant.

I think I’d probably

dislike personally

whoever it was

with the hugeness

of self-confidence

and teflon ego

needed to judge and assert

which two dozen or so

of these qualify

as Bach’s best.

           Minimal

During an afternoon walk

I was for some reason

blessedly able

to maintain in my head

the repetition of

a minimalist bar

of wordless notes

to distract me.

I say blessedly

because every undistracted moment

had come to be thoroughly filled

with sorrow, despair, and hurt,

and seemed overwhelmingly

likely to continue

to be so.

          Perceptions Of The Art Of Music

He told me he was a musician,

so I played him Frank Zappa’s ‘Gumbo Variations’,

one of his most musically challenging and rewarding

instrumental recordings at that time,

thinking that any real musician

would appreciate it.

Then he told me that what he’d meant

was that he’d played guitar

for youth-group singalongs at his church

(Catholic – but he had a Jewish-sounding surname)

and that what I’d just played for him

was about the most obnoxious thing

he’d ever heard.

Digital Capitalism

     Advances to the Rear

Digital technology

certainly improved

a few aspects of my life

during the first decade

of this century,

but since then

the trend has definitely been

the other way around.

It seems as if every new

amazing development,

whether in social media or operating systems,

has made trying to use these things

more frustrating and difficult

and less enjoyable and rewarding

to me –

although undoubtedly more profitable

and ego-fluffing

(‘Look at what WE can do!’)

for those producing them.

   Not Exactly A Fine Point

Always remember

that the very latest

in consumer digital technology,

no matter how oh-wow-gee-whizz

and fun to play with it is,

always serves the purposes

of those who produce and sell it

far more than those

of the consumers who buy it.

                        New Telephone

My clunky old phone and fax machine,

the fax capability of which I’d discontinued years ago,

was using up too much electricity

with its flashing LED display telling me 24 hours a day

either that it had no paper in the feed or that it was ready to print,

so I unplugged it and went to buy another phone.

I was pleasantly surprised –

for pessimists all surprises are pleasant –

to discover that it was indeed still possible to buy

a plain landline telephone

with no amazing electronic shit designed to astound the inner child.

It cost me $22.96.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered

that it didn’t work – anywhere in the house – when I was online.

The fax machine and my other phone did.

So I took it back.

The nice man patiently explained to me

that because all landline telephones are digital now

I had to plug it into an ADSL line filter

if I wanted to use it when I’m online.

One of those suckers cost me $17.98.

That’s called a technological advance.

A year or so later I got rid of my landline account altogether.

That new, digital phone makes a dandy garden ornament.

                Technological Advance

The oldest object of computer hardware that I’ve owned,

which I bought in 2001, was my scanner.

It’s also the only one

that worked the way it’s supposed to work

every time, with no glitches.

Unlike other programmes,

its software worked as it should every time, too.

Windows 8 was incompatible with it though,

making it intentionally obsolete.

Oh, the wonders of technological advance!

                 High Tech Toys

I’m tired of hearing about

things that people have designed

to make other people say gee-whizz,

wow, or anything like that,

as I have no desire

to pay money for technology

that does astounding things

for which I have no real use.

           Any Time Of Day

Walking early in the morning

to avoid the summer heat,

watching the dawn spread over the sky

whilst enjoying the singing of countless birds,

I saw a short, square-shouldered woman

of indeterminate age

who had a slouching face

walk by with wires leading to her ears,

her eyes on the ground

and some overpriced digital gizmo

in her hands.

       Sartre & Me & Windows 8

I remember that long ago,

when I was an undergraduate,

I read an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre

that, as I understood it then,

reasoned that whenever anybody makes a decision

(or maybe it was a certain type of decision)

that person is making that decision

for all of humanity.

I couldn’t buy into this then

and I can do so even less now.

I can’t stand the thought

of deciding anything for anybody,

let alone everything for everybody,

and it pisses me off whenever people

– and especially Microshit programmers –

take it upon themselves to decide things for me.

Unless, of course, if I don’t give a shit

one way or the other.

                  Functional

I wonder if it’s because I’m old

that the latest high-tech

gee-whiz oh-wow

always tends to make me

more irritated than enthusiastic.

I doubt it.

I’ve been this way –

only adopting and using

digital stuff

after it’s been around for a while,

if possible,

and only when I’ve had a real use for it –

since the 1970s.

               A Crime of the Future

Imagine a trim 47-year-old man

in a silver-and-green track warm-up get-up

and matching trainers,

pale-brown hair with a touch of silver at the temples

just starting to recede around a widow’s peak,

walking a grey French bulldog

along the footpath of a street lined with giant oak trees,

humming Annie Lennox’s ‘Something So Right’,

a song from his youth.

Walking the other way,

a lean, smooth-looking 31-year-old man

in matching pale-grey leather trilby and jacket,

sleekly taut high cheekbones,

laugh lines crinkling the corners of his twinkling eyes

sidesteps to stay in front of the older man,

blocking his way.

‘Hey man,’ he says smilingly

in a soft, smooth, reassuringly friendly voice,

‘got any money on yuh?’

Silver-temples chuckles indulgently.

‘Of course not. Nobody carries cash anymore.

All I have is plastic.’

He chuckles a bit more,

reaches into his silver-nylon bum bag, and shows him his cards.

‘You wouldn’t happen to have a mobile eftpos terminal on you,

would you?’

Cheekbones reaches into an inside jacket pocket

and pulls out a wireless terminal.

‘Now,’ he says, his eyes glinting and his voice hard with menace,

‘let’s have your card, mate.

You’re about to make a voluntary donation.’