Getting Through

                     Happiness & Love Skills

I see people who are apparently happy,

I guess, or some of them say that they are;

they’re in the shops and on the footpaths

and all over the internet,

and it seems to me

that the main reason why

they’re happy

is that they know how to be,

and that they probably know how to be

because they learnt the skill

when they were children,

through plenty of practice as grown-ups,

or both.

The same goes with love.

People whose lives are filled with love,

it seems to me,

had plenty of experience with it as children

in the warm bosoms of their families,

reinforced by plenty of practice as grown-ups,

or both.

Lovability,

this ability to be loved,

is also a skill,

like the ability to be happy.

I never learnt either one of them

worth a shit.

Advice to Self

Don’t reflect on it.

Don’t analyse it.

Don’t dream it.

Just be it.

               Empty Days

Days like this one,

as I key this onto the screen,

when I have no jobs in my inbox,

are definitely hazardous to my wellbeing,

as if that makes any difference to anything

except me, and I don’t matter.

Although frequently maddening,

my work also has the advantages

of being distracting and fatiguing.

Days like this one

I write verses that I’ll never get to perform

because I’ve written too many,

having had too many

days like this one.

Days like this one

I read at whatever book I have

fitfully on and off,

play countless games of computer solitaire and hangman,

and check my inbox every few minutes,

even when I know my chief editor in Australia

must still be asleep.

Days like this one

I have to do my best

to concentrate on not thinking about myself

and my emptiness and sorrow.

Days like this one,

after ten or so hours of tedium,

I sometimes get offers of seven-hour rush jobs

just as I’m signing off

with visions of wine and whisky

dominating my mind.

  Coffee, Gluten, and Solitude

Whilst watching some bullshit

world cup football match

to the droning of vuvuzelas

at seven o’clock or so

in the morning,

I found myself crying

because no one was in the kitchen

making me coffee and scones,

or was sitting beside me

waiting for me

to make her coffee

and tortillas.

                          Fixing the Fan

My early conditioning

to lack self-confidence in general,

combined with no one ever teaching me

how to do bloke stuff,

has resulted in my default setting

when it comes to simple home repairs

being to forego even attempting them.

The pedestal fan in my home office

had been in serious decline for a few years,

needing to be jumpstarted first up in the morning

by spinning its blade like the prop of a Sopwith Camel.

I’d asked my son-in-law, who knows about such things,

what it would take to fix it.

He’d just laughed and said that it wasn’t worth fixing –

that I could get a crappy new fan at Bunnings for $30.

Capitulating like that to global corporate capitalism’s

efforts to manipulate consumers

into cooperation with its waste-increases-profit agenda,

would have gone against my grain, of course.

It finally got to the point

at which I had to spin the bloody thing

for ten minutes each morning to get it to work,

and then when it was on high it was still fairly slow.

I noticed that the price of fans at Bunnings had dropped to $20,

but I decided first to take the bull by the tail

and face the situation.

I removed the blades and the collar behind them

and injected a few squirts of all-purpose household lubricating oil.

It worked a treat.

An Unproductive Pastime

It really makes no sense

to sit in a comfortable chair

by myself,

swilling cheap red wine,

while memories of

a series of women

with whom I fucked up

thirty-five or so years before

dominate my brain.

No, not at all –

wallowing in

mistakes from which

whatever I’ve learnt

doesn’t help at all

really makes no sense.

                     Clean Sheets

One Wednesday I washed my bedclothes –

that’s my sheets and pillowslips –

for the first time in six or seven months.

As an aside,

even though the forecast was for clear weather –

I refuse to call clear weather ‘fine’ –

I removed them from the line

shortly before an unexpected lunchtime downpour.

Thursday morning I was surprised to notice

how radically better they felt,

having turned sour only gradually.

                    Downtown Lunchtime

Being without an editing job

for the third of the past five days –

and the two jobs I did have having been piddling –

at about a quarter to one I got tired

of checking my inbox every few minutes

and walked downtown

to go to the library,

to see if anything on Victoria Street

that might take on an old codger

had a Help Wanted sign up –

none did –

and to buy a lottery ticket.

It seemed as if every pebble on the footpath

found the holes in the soles of my shoes,

and the aroma from every lunchtime eatery

found its way to my nose,

reminding me of how little I had to eat.

                    Deferential Till It Matters

As long as it’s a whatever (with adolescent shrug) situation,

I’m perfectly willing to defer just about anything

to just about anybody,

as what there is of my ego

doesn’t demand that I be in control or otherwise be top dog,

and the older I get the better I get

at not sweating the small stuff.

Funny what people,

including me, of course,

consider to be

small stuff,

and what falls into

other categories.

The tricky part, of course,

is when we poke about

in areas that don’t qualify as small stuff

to me

at all.

I’ve noticed, upon rare occasion,

that some people have trouble

analysing the fresh data

coming forth from my behaviour

when they step over

the whatever line into serious shit

or I perceive that they’re

pushing me around

just because they think they can,

and I stop being eagerly deferential

and dig in my fucking heels.

Even if that means me going off the rails,

… and I don’t like being angry.

            The Final Fatigue

I’m tired of having to do everything for myself

and even more tired of everything I do,

with all-too-rare exceptions,

being only for myself.

Humans didn’t evolve to live this way.

          Your Aunt and Your Uncle

Whilst throwing sticks

for my dog

in the park

one morning,

the old nursery song,

‘Where have you been,

Billy Boy,

Billy boy?’

earwormed into my head

and wouldn’t leave.

I wish it hadn’t done that.

Not Getting Any Younger

                          Success

So there I was,

more than nine months into my sixty-sixth year,

sitting by myself at my table after a workday

during which I’d done one job worth ten dollars Australian,

piddled away at a few verses,

and played heaps of computer solitaire,

clumsily sewing a button back onto the frayed cuff

of an at least twenty-year-old shirt,

a no-longer-completely-full bottle of cheap plonk

on the table beside it.

      Fingernails, Ageing, & Hedges

When I was younger I only had to

clip my fingernails

once every month or two.

Now that I’m old

it seems to me as if

I have to clip them

every few hours.

Okay, I hyperbolise.

Still, it calls to mind those plants,

like jasmine and photinia and box hedge,

that thrive on pruning,

and grow back thicker and more insistently

when people give them a good trimming.

             Watching

Being old is just being old,

just another series of moments,

doing less participating and more watching –

watching hideous havoc on Aljazeera,

with the sound off, of course,

and watching my residence,

with which I’m saddled

because it’s also my property,

quietly deteriorate and crumble.

Being old is just being old.

Although neither better nor worse,

it’s still not like being young.

                           The Processor

Man, it feels like it’s all over, but it’s not.

My future is almost certainly entirely behind me.

My metabolic thermoregulation

– great-sounding term, that –

has been becoming increasingly crappy for years,

making it take an hour or more for me to recover

even from just walking to the grocery store,

and of course I have to walk

because the size of my pension

makes having a car uneconomical,

and the size of my cataracts makes driving irresponsible.

Walking, however, now irritates

my spinal arthritis,

making what used to be a pleasure painful.

The nervous rashes on my forearms –

neurodermatitis, for any readers who also liked

metabolic thermoregulation –

itch and burn almost constantly

and bleed, sometimes heavily, from time to time.

The erectile dysfunction goes without saying,

which is generally irrelevant,

considering my ineptitude with other people

and the faintness of my pheromones.

Being asleep is far preferable to being awake,

that’s for sure.

I’m more than ready to die,

but it aint happening.

I just keep processing edible matter

into shit.

     The Dogless Elderly & Weeding

I have no idea how many of us exist –

lonely old people on pensions

who drink too much

because grog provides

the illusion of companionship and acceptance

when little or none exists in the visible world.

The lucky ones have dogs

or have the skills, the physical flexibility,

the will,

and the outside taps

needed for maintaining gardens.

When I adopted a nine-year-old dog

I considered myself lucky.

       Sea Change On Land

I’ve been noticing

that by becoming most definitely

a fragile, pain-riddled, nap-taking

old person,

and therefore no longer just

a person in general,

I’m experiencing the process of changing,

both perceptibly and perceptually,

from one of Us into one of Them,

and that accustoming myself to the reality

that my being one of Them

means that I’ve acquired

a different Us.

       Changes Over Time

The older I’ve become,

it seems, to me at least,

that my mind’s become increasingly sharper,

my insights have become deeper and clearer,

my analytic skills have continually improved,

and my urge to create has continued unabated.

It’s with this mind, which is as me as ever,

that I observe my body falling apart,

and since I also basically survive

on a small pension,

I can do little more than watch

as my house falls apart, too.

Outside The Terminal

Standing and waiting.

Standing and waiting.

Watching for the car

as meaningless time slipped by.

When I’d been younger

I would become incensed

when made to wait,

but I remained floatingly calm,

knowing that the wait

would soon be over,

as would everything else,

glorying in how little time

I have left, anyway.

             The Evils of Marijuana

I used to smoke weed every day

that it was available

and that I felt safe from the tentacles of authority,

and for 44 years it made every one of those days better;

but then when I was 63 years old I gave it away

because I didn’t want my days to be better.

I just wanted them to as similar

and as flat

as possible.

I took it up again when I was 69.

It’s mixed well with the opioids and opiates

that I take for arthritis.

It’s also helped me

to keep functioning

psychologically and otherwise.

               Paranoia & Common Sense

When I told her that, after seven years on the sidelines,

I’d started smoking cannabis regularly again,

she replied that it just made her too paranoid,

and I said, look:

I’m seventy fucking years old,

I’m white, for shit’s sake,

and for the first time since I stopped shaving

more than a half a century ago,

having a beard doesn’t make a man look suspicious.

The cops just don’t look to fuck with me any more.

So far, so good.

           The Voluntary Sector

My last lover may have done me wrong,

but at least she fooled me into feeling

as if she loved me from time to time.

This doesn’t matter, though,

because I’m old and stuff and who gives a shit.

It took me a while, being socially thick,

but after a few months

I could tell that my neighbour was playing me.

What the game or the tune is

she’s never said, and I haven’t asked,

and it seems to change from time to time,

but it sure has increased my feeling of objectification.

This doesn’t matter, though,

because I’m old and stuff and who gives a shit.

Another woman, I know, aint all right in the head,

but she did a passable impression of friendship for a while,

then began sending me messages

telling me that she was going to drop by

for a drink and some conversation,

but she never did.

This doesn’t matter, though,

because I’m old and stuff and who gives a shit.

Maybe I should contact some visit-the-elderly agency

to send a volunteer by on some regular basis

just to visit the old fart,

and maybe play a game of dominos.

They wouldn’t be allowed to drink whisky with me, though.

Kind of impersonal, maybe,

but also maybe more honest and straightforward.

For hugs and cuddles

I suppose there’s the brothels,

but I can’t afford that.

This doesn’t matter, though,

because I’m old and stuff and who gives a shit.

The Return of the Son of More Dog Stuff

                        Naomi and Rhonda

From the time that I was 21 until I was 37 or 38

I was attached to a shaggy little dirtball

of a hybrid-vigour dog,

whom I’d named Naomi,

just because it’d seemed to me to be a pretty name for a pretty puppy.

Unlike me, she charmed everyone she met

with her sweet, engaging personality.

It seemed to me that she loved me as a daddy,

and enjoyed lying by my side with her head on my shoulder.

Sometimes we danced.

When I went to see her in the veterinary hospital

where she’d gone after suffering a fall from a balcony

she put one small paw through the mesh of her kennel

and just rested it on my hand.

She died in her sleep

curled up on her favourite blanket in front of the gas heater

a few weeks later.

When I was 53 I took on the responsibility

for a fox terrier,

whom I named Rhonda

in the mistaken hope that she’d help me.

It seemed to me twelve years later

that she considered me primarily to be a provider

of things that she needed and enjoyed –

and little else.

I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm,

she was just hard-headed and self-centred and it wasn’t her fault –

it was just part of her fox-terrierness.

Anyway, we both knew that she depended on me

totally

for everything important,

which was serious stuff,

and then she got sick and died before her time.

            Definitely Asymmetrical

I’m sorry, but I just don’t allow

my dog to watch me when I’m in the loo,

even though she looks up at me,

expecting me to watch her

and use the word ‘good’

whenever she relieves herself on our walks.

           Rhonda the Challenger

For twelve and a half years

I had a fox terrier whom I’d named Rhonda,

and who was definitely one hard case.

Not only did she have her breed’s

peculiarly challenging characteristics

of mischievousness, marked stubbornness,

and an inclination to use her cleverness

to get away with any shit that she could,

she was also abnormally big for a foxy

and had been by far the largest in her litter,

which had taught her from her earliest days

that it was natural for her to be the top dog.

She challenged me almost daily.

I often had to snarl or shout

to make her obey – sorta –

and sometimes she even didn’t come to me

when I called her name at the park.

I also had to demand

that she come to me

every time I was ready

to put on her harness to go for a walk.

During those walks near home

I often had to jerk her 15-to-16 kilos up by the lead

and drag her across streets

or pull her back from dicey situations.

Even though having to prevail

in such petty daily struggles

was truly a drag,

I could never let her win.

I was the human, she was the dog, and it’s a hard world.

If I wasn’t the leader of our two-unit pack

we would’ve both gone down the gurgler.

            Differentiation

For me what is,

is pointless bullshit stupidity and agony.

For my dog what is,

is what is.

                    Afternoon Walkies

Since with advancing years both my dog and I

discovered that things go best when each day’s pattern

closely resembles that of the day before,

the circadian pattern in the winter of 2011

had for some time been awakening pre-dawn,

doing desk things until after morning drive time,

with a small breakfast for her only at about six,

then an hour or so in the dog exercise park,

rain or shine, healthy or sick,

including a short game of stick – weather permitting with this –

her major meal of the day when we returned home,

then desk things, errands, or both until mid-afternoon,

when she got some supper and I had my only meal of the day,

washed down with a bottle of cheap plonk,

and after I finished the wine along with a book

we took an afternoon turn around the footpaths

of our leafy inner-city suburb of Claudelands

and then around Claudelands Park.

Sometimes, when the editing work had been

particularly strenuous mentally that day,

I prefaced my meal with a small glass of whisky,

and was in no mood later to go out for the walk –

although I almost always did,

telling myself it’d just be a short one.

Then, as we reached the farthest corner

of the park’s circumferential footpath,

I told her that she’d been lucky once again that I’m so indulgent,

although as my nerves calmed down and my digestion picked up

I tended to wonder who was doing a favour for whom.

After she died my late-afternoon strolls

became increasingly infrequent,

which did nothing to improve my physical condition.

  Doomed One-Way Abstract Discussion

I tried to explain

to my dog

that as much as things in general

seem to bewilder her,

I’m more bewildered still.

                  Dog-Proofing

Being a smooth-haired fox terrier,

Rhonda shed copiously in all seasons

and at all times of the day and night.

Since she had, at various phases of her life,

enjoyed her daytime snoozes on my giant waterbed,

and since a coating of bristly dog hair on my bedclothes

would fail to enhance my sleep environment,

I had from the start covered it with bedspreads

during the day for dog-proofing.

At the start of the autumn of 2012

she hadn’t been up on the bed

since some time the previous spring,

I supposed either because the bed is heated

and the afternoons had still been warm

or because she’d decided that the considerable leaps

involved in getting both on and off –

the mattress and frame sit atop a twelve-drawer pedestal –

were no longer appropriate

for a dog of her increasing age and weight.

I still went through the ritual of covering it

with two bedspreads every morning

and folding them up

on a corner of the foot of the bed every afternoon

before going downstairs for food and wine.

It seemed likely to me that the first day I didn’t do that

she’d be back up there,

so I kept the routine till she died.

          Relative Consistency

I think that my dog appreciated

my being consistent with her

except when she preferred that I’d be consistent

in some other way.

              Kennelside Manner

She was bristling with

generalised, non-specific hostility

that was alert for anything

that she – or it –

could possibly consider provocation.

I certainly tried not to provoke her,

but of course that was impossible,

so I received some really nasty, unfair innuendos

about how I was caring for my newly adopted dog.

I refused to let her ruffle me, though,

or call her names even in my mind.

I reckoned that it wasn’t personal,

although it seemed that way,

and that she couldn’t be like that all the time

and still function as a veterinarian.

Must be love problems, I thought,

or maybe her eggs had been cold that morning,

or something.

Two visits to the vet later,

there she was again,

as nice as a person can be,

and showing empathy for the tribulations

of a person who adopts an older dog.

               What Keeps Dogs Sane

My fox terrier was always totally into the moment,

with no consideration of the past or the future –

but only of now.

          Comparative Social Skills

My little old Schnauzer’s primary objective in life

is to make as many friends as he can.

It fascinates me when

he goes up to say hi-let’s-be-friends

to other dogs on the footpath or in the park

(as he invariably does),

and the other dogs’ people

try to tell them how to react to this:

‘Now, be nice, Buster (or whoever)’

or ‘Don’t bark’ or ‘Go slow’ or ‘Don’t be rough’

or whatever,

as if they know more about dogs’ protocols

than the dogs do themselves.

Of course they don’t.

If those people paid attention,

and could actually see their dogs

through the haze of their own pathetic egos,

they’d know that, left to themselves,

dogs are much better at being dogs

than humans are at being human.