Commerce Stuff

                               Jeans West

I bought a pair of cargo pants on sale from Jeans West.

The second time I wore them they split up the back

into a twenty-centimetre tear over my left bumcheek,

not even along the seam,

when I bent over to feed the dog.

When I took them back the young woman in the store

was enthusiastically apologetic and fetched me another pair

that I discovered were nineteen centimetres too small when I got home.

The odd number being because

Jeans West is an outpost of American cultural imperialism

and insists on using that benighted country’s anachronistic inches,

and she’d mistaken ‘30’ inches for ‘38’.

Being a 95 in world measurements makes me a 37 over there.

When I returned those she was even more

enthusiastically, energetically apologetic, self-critical, and mortified,

and let me buy a cheaper pair of trousers,

refunding me the difference.

Those trousers lasted about a month

before splitting in a similar fashion

whilst I was sitting in a chair pulling on my shoes.

I bought my next pair elsewhere.

                     Siggi Networking

She walked up to me

in that faceless suburban pub

as if we were old friends –

instead of people who’d met each other once

at some Green Party hoo-raw –

and asked me what I was doing there.

Looking at her as if she were from another planet,

I gestured toward my glass and the big screen,

and replied sequentially,

‘Drinkin’ beer. Watchin’ footie.’

With her German accent

and her husband at their table, she pressed her case,

which eventually turned out to be Amway.

Drinking beer and watching footie

– or ethical environmental politics, for that matter –

weren’t on her agenda,

in regard to me that week, at least.

             More Than Two Sides

Debates that I’ve read

about various matters involving health

tend to be between people

who desperately, aggressively

want their fantasies to be true,

no matter how fallacious,

and those who insist on carefully acquired evidence

and rigorous reasoning,

when it comes to matters of biology and medicine.

Those who disparage science and scientists,

do so almost always without sane, rational cause,

and conjure up imaginary conspiracies

between those engaged in medical science

and large multinational corporations

that care about nothing but maximising profits –

which is indeed an accurate assessment of those institutions.

Those on the side of science-based

medicine and health care

relentlessly refute and debunk

the pseudoscientific claims of the conspiracy theorists,

but also often seem to tend to dismiss the potential

for serious damage

in the ways that the corporations exploit

science and scientists

with no regard for ethics, basic human decency,

humanity’s overall well-being,

or environmental consequences.

I hope I’m not the only person

who respects science

but also has a deep distrust of,

and antipathy toward,

predatory multinational corporations.

             Socks

After a year or so,

some of the sturdy

Australian-made socks

that I’d bought from a kiosk in Centreplace

started to develop holes.

I’d noticed that the kiosk

had disappeared the previous December

and it was still gone

when I went to buy more in March,

so I went and bought

some Chinese-made ones

from the Warehouse.

The first holes started to appear

within a few weeks.

             On Daddy’s Money  

A little extravagance is good, she thought,

like her white soft-leather couch

and the art deco table lamp,

but she’d never blow a wad on designer clothes,

for instance,

and she felt scorn toward her friend Annie’s

designer fingernails.

Still, she thought nothing at all

of flying to Honolulu on Daddy’s money

for a long weekend with her new crush.

At least it wasn’t someplace vulgar,

like the Gold Coast –

which was Annie’s pet short-term destination –

swarming with the lesser sons

of Chinese sweatshop operators.

It was hardly even Daddy’s money, anyhow,

as he kept his family comfortably secure

by manipulating other people’s money –

well, assets –

some of which he undoubtedly invested

in Chinese sweatshop operations

all over Southeast Asia.

           Boy Scout Knives & iPhones

When I was eleven I got a Boy Scout Swiss Army knife

with umpteen gazillion (well, ten) different blades

and tools and other implements,

some of which I had no idea what they were for

and most of which I never used.

As of my seventy-first birthday

I’ve never had an iPhone

or any other brand of pocket computer

with attached phone and camera

and umpteen gazillion different

programmes and apps and other functions,

most of which I’d probably never use.

           Weapon of Choice

Nobody with a snarl on his face

and a gun or knife or club in his hand

has ever robbed me.

Smiling people

manipulating documents or digital signals

have done so often.

     They Are What They Wear

Don liked being known, being defined,

by his preference for footwear,

and never left home without

Doc Martens on his feet.

He was just that kinda guy.

Maybe you’ve known people like him.

Harry liked being known, being defined,

by his preference for footwear,

and never left home without

bone-coloured winklepickers on his feet.

He was just that kinda guy.

Maybe you’ve known people like him.

Ross liked being known, being defined,

by his preference for footwear,

and never left home without

hand-tooled Lucchese cowboy boots on his feet.

He was just that kind of guy.

Maybe you’ve known people like him.

Scott liked being known, being defined,

by his preference for footwear,

and never left home without

oxford wingtip brogues on his feet.

He was just that kind of guy.

Maybe you’ve known people like him.

Jack liked being known, being defined,

by his preference for going barefoot,

and never left home with anything on his feet,

even in the freezing rain.

He was just that kind of guy.

Maybe you’ve known people like him.

                    Credit

I’ve never really received credit

for some of the noblest,

most worthwhile things I’ve done.

This may or may not have been

to my personal psychological benefit –

it’s probably been a mixed bag

and not a point I’d care to debate or determine.

I’ve done whatever worthwhile stuff I’ve done

because it has seemed like the right thing to do at the time,

credit and recognition being incidental,

and asking for credit or praise would seem to me

to deny me the right to receive it.

People who go on at length about their good works

and who recount their noble deeds often and in detail

are not the sort of people I’d choose to emulate, anyway.

I don’t know why; it just wouldn’t feel right.

The bank says I have $5,000 worth of credit,

if I want to use it,

but I don’t,

so what the hell.

Family Stuff

                PTSD

I’ve never had a clinical diagnosis,

and it’s only been since my mid-sixties

that compulsive reflection and self-analysis,

combined with serendipitous and targeted reading,

have led me to the conclusion

that the relentless abuse

I received more or less daily

from my maternal and fraternal units

as a child and an adolescent

and during subsequent encounters with them

until I was well into my forties

resulted in my being subject to

post-traumatic stress disorder.

It explains heaps.

Actually, if I didn’t have PTSD

it’d be a fucking miracle,

and I don’t believe in miracles.

            Dudi, the Numbers, & Lotto

One of my favourite people ever

was my maternal grandfather,

whom we grandchildren called Dudi.

A refugee from the Russian Empire,

he’d been born in a small village

near what’s now the Polish-Belarusian border,

and although he’d fled when he’d been 14,

he still had a heavy accent.

He always smelled strongly of tobacco,

as since he’d been ten

he’d smoked about two packs

of unfiltered cigarettes a day,

and did so until he died of a sudden aneurism

when he was 89 or 90 –

refugees without papers can be vague about birthdays.

He was a tough old unit, sure enough,

who loved and believed in hard work.

Once, when he was about 80,

the vehicle in which he was a passenger hit a stone wall.

With several cracked ribs,

he got out and walked a half an hour or more

in to his newsstand, where he worked all day

before getting medical help.

He told me naughty jokes,

much to my mother’s disapproval,

which endeared him to me more.

He taught me card games that I’ve taught my children.

He loved Groucho Marx and Jimmy Durante.

He also liked to play the Numbers,

which is what he called

the gangster-run lotteries that slurped up people’s money

before the state took the racket over.

Of course he never won.

I’d just won $25 before writing this – Lotto Division 6.

I hope Dudi would have been proud.

              Interesting Point

One of the many forms of abuse

to which my mother gleefully subjected me

was the use of enemas as punishment,

when I was still small enough

for her to get away with it,

from the dawn of my memory

through the preschool years,

and then until I guess I was about maybe seven.

The obvious psychological-emotional abuse, of course,

was in the threat itself,

the severity and grim inevitability in her manner,

and the way she prepared methodically

to carry it through, filling me with terror.

The actual pain and humiliation of the punishment

was definitely physical abuse.

I wonder, though,

whether it was actually sexual abuse,

or both.

To answer this, I’m afraid,

would mean going into that woman’s mind –

which is not a place I’d choose to go, thank you.

                      General Practice

I remember that when I was little

my daddy, the only GP in a small town,

used to make house calls regularly;

I remember how the black bag

that he took with him on these

absences from home

and its contents fascinated me.

I remember that one morning at breakfast

he was telling my mother,

with me sitting there with ears wide open,

about how the night before

the patient who had called him to see her at home

had been an old woman

with no acute medical problem

other than being too weak and fragile and broke to get out much,

lying there facing the human condition all by herself,

while still being afraid of dying.

He said that he’d sat by her bed,

just wordlessly holding her hand,

for a long time.

I don’t remember my mother’s reaction to this.

It seems unlikely that family doctors

can do things like that any more.

Maybe it’s the growing stresses

on the patients-to-resources ratio.

Maybe it’s the changes in our systems and culture.

Or maybe my daddy was a one-off even back then.

In a world characterised by horror and pain,

I suppose that comforting one lonely and frightened old woman

who isn’t even family

makes bloody little difference, anyway.

           A Nasty Personal Secret

I remember once when I was five or six

that my mother caught me

poking holes in my dry lips

with a pin.

She immediately launched into

the sort of violently and angrily

abusive, domineering,

control-at-any cost harangue

to which my self-harm

was a common psychological response.

I tried to explain that it was safe

because I’d sterilised the pinpoint with a match.

Searching for a knockout blow

in order to sort me out on the behaviour

once and for all,

she blustered, ‘You’re … you’re … you’re … you’re a masochist!’

as if that meant anything

to a child that small

other than being another reason

why I was bad, with no chance of ever pleasing her.

I never was a masochist, of course,

and have what I suppose

is a normal distaste for pain inflicted by others,

but I continued with self harm

when she wasn’t looking,

enjoying the sense of relief and empowerment that it provides,

and I suppose the mild endorphin burst, too.

I continue to do so from time to time into old age

– I’ve lately enjoyed using my fingernail

to scratch the inside of my ear until it bleeds

and to dig craters into my scalp –

and I aint dead yet.

                              Rugged

My stepfather, Howard,

owned his own civil engineering firm,

had served as a major in the occupation of Austria,

and was a life-long Republican.

When he heard in 1968 that I’d been drafted

he told me that he’d set me up in business in Canada, explaining,

“Goddamned army was the worst goddamned waste of time in my life!

I had to take a bunch of shit from people who were idiots,

and I didn’t make a goddamned cent!”

Yes, the military is indeed incompatible with rugged individualism,

with people, like Howard, who feel that life isn’t worth living

if they can’t tell anybody they think deserves it to go to Hell

whenever they want to.

I took a shitload of benzedrine tablets

and flunked my draft physical due to high blood pressure,

but I felt grateful to Howard for the offer – and the lesson,

anyway.

           Absence of Nostalgia

I knew my mother

for a few decades or so,

but I have no fond memories of her,

and almost no pleasant ones.

The only semi-pleasant one that I can recall,

comes from early childhood –

after I’d taken my first bath all by myself,

and she was interrogating me

about how thoroughly I’d washed myself.

When she got to the point

of asking me if I’d washed my ass,

her face took on a devilish,

almost-human, almost-pleased expression,

with raised eyebrows and a naughty smile,

and I almost felt a bond with her

and then it was gone

forever,

and her onslaught of heartlessness resumed

unabated.

                  Dickhead Perfection

               (A Real Person I Know)

Man, what a dickhead!

A perfect dickhead.

He can be dickheaded about anything, and is.

And not just dickheaded,

but as undeviatingly, purely dickheaded

as it’s humanly possible to be,

and humans being a species

with an overall tendency toward dickheadedness,

this is saying something.

On any given matter,

whether it be politics or social problems or ethnicity

or food choices or clothing styles or sport

or occupations or education or real estate or headphones

or any other of the hundreds of thousands

of big and small stuff in our lives,

he unerringly takes the most extremely dickheaded

position and point of view possible

and sticks with it loudly and aggressively

until and unless he can think of a more dickheaded one.

He makes prodigious effort

to seem effortlessly dickheaded

to his family and his colleagues,

and anyone else who comes along

— if he thinks he can get away with it.

He’s a type A dickhead

with a lust for dickhead perfection,

and, despite his age and social status,

he frequently giggles about it.

Birds + Music Stuff

                                            Birds

        Non-Battery

I picked up a beautiful,

cerulean-blue bird’s egg

from the ground

in some bush by the river.

I considered eating it,

but someone warned me

that it had probably been fertilised.

Sure enough,

when some cheese slid into it

in the fridge door

and broke it

it was mostly blood.

Poor sad mama bird.

         Stale Bread

Toward the end of spring

I took to leaving

little pieces

of stale bread

out on the fencetop

for the neighbourhood birds.

Watching them

carefully approach

the bread

and peck at it,

I marvelled

at their acute consciousness

of everything

around them

and wondered about

their supposedly short lives,

although I’ve seen

remarkably few

bird carcasses

lying about.

There Had To Be A Catch Somewhere

A bird – some kind of finch, I think,

but I could be wrong –

alighted on my patio wall

above the bird feeder.

She stood there, alert,

moving her head into various poses,

checking things out,

then flew to the stalk

of an agapanthus flower

right in front of the feeder

and cased the situation again.

She repeated her reconnaissance

on the board behind the feeder

and on one of the feeder’s perches

before poking her face

into the feeder itself.

Then, without eating any

of the cornucopia of birdseed before her,

she flew away.

I can only conclude

that she decided that the whole set-up

was indeed a set-up

and far too good to be true.

       Wasteful Avian Pickiness

When they ate at my bird feeder

the members of the local winged set

spilt about as much onto the ground

as they got into their bellies.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

I thought.

It amazed me that

even when the feeder was about empty

or they were fighting over access to it

I’d never seen any of them flying groundward

to retrieve what must have been a considerable feast,

so I gathered up a couple of kilos of it,

put it in a plastic bag,

and when the time came

filled the feeder with it.

They wouldn’t touch it.

It hadn’t been sloppiness at all.

Picky, picky, picky.

                                      Җ                Җ                Җ

                                              Music Stuff

                      Swing

Although I listen to music

almost constantly during my waking hours,

and consider much of it

to be pure artistic communion

with the world of the spirit

(as I composed this I had a CD

of Francesco Geminiani’s concerti grossi on the box –

Oh, yeah!),

I’m sad to report

that I’m unable to stand the sound

of such musical genres

as opera, heavy metal –

both of which seem about the same to me –

rap-hiphop, romantic-era symphonies,

mainstream pop, marches,

and swing-era big-band dance music.

In regard to the last of these, of course,

my aversion is connected with

my maternal unit’s fondness for it,

as I have an aversion to anything

that my mind associates with her,

but I also once had a job as a waiter

in a theme restaurant

that played a tape loop

of Glenn Miller swing favourites

non-stop throughout the dinner shift.

Over and over.

Gaaah!

            Music Absorption

Tramadol, the super-duper analgesic

that I was taking for the pain

complementing my broken ribs,

had the side effect

of being a perfect enabler

for music absorption,

or absorbing myself into the music,

rather than the other way around,

which is what I had been more accustomed to doing.

This made listening to music

that I’d already heard often

a strangely new experience.

Within a few days

my system adjusted to the drug,

and that strange new experience

had become a thing of the past.

               King Curtis

I was listening to a King Curtis CD,

which was magic in itself,

and couldn’t keep my mind from wandering

to his death at the knife of a junkie

who’d chosen his front steps

as a likely place to shoot up.

This is the world in which we live.

                          Lemmy

Judging by the huge and extended outpouring

of lamentations and elegies

from my friends and contacts

upon his demise,

I learnt that the bloke was the benchmark

against whom it is appropriate

to measure all others’ ways of life

in the rock-and-roll-and-heavy-metal universe:

a cultural icon;

the apotheosis of black t-shirtedness.

I’d never heard of him at all when he was alive.

Oh, my.

Where have I been?

         Hip-Hop With The Sound Off

I was watching Maori TV with the sound off,

and between the basketball and the league

they filled in some time

with what appeared to be a music video.

So I watched –

with the sound off –

a group of hip-hop performers

going through formulaic motions –

hand gestures, facial expressions, body language –

identical to each other,

and identical to what I’d seen

from such performers

for about a quarter of a century,

conforming to the protocols,

whilst pretending to be rebels,

as if imitators led rebellions;

pretending to be artists,

as if imitators create art.

                                 Homeboy

I grew up on the outskirts of George Thorogood’s home town,

but the first time I saw him perform was about 2750 km away

in San Antonio, Texas

in a venue usually dedicated to the art of professional wrestling

that smelled like it.

As I walked there along dark residential working-class streets,

the closer I came to the place

I encountered with increasing frequency

voices from the shadows chanting the mantra,

“Speed? Acid? Lids?”

The opening act, Omar and the Howlers, never showed up,

but George and the Destroyers

came on early to placate the restless crowd

with straightforward, no-nonsense, blues bar-band rock

and did a damn fine job of it;

I thought that it was cool when George

invited a female journalist in the front row

to meet him after the show

for him to give her something to write about.

A quarter-century or so later,

I went to see George and the Destroyers

at the Mount Smart Super Top in Auckland,

and they rocked as well as ever.

I was especially moved at the time,

having neither a haircut or a real job.

This time, though, they were the opening act,

and in the post-concert jam

I’m afraid to say that George got blown off the stage,

guitar-improvisation-wise,

by the headline act, Carlos Santana,

whose home town had been Tijuana.