Still Ranting

                      Dog Years

She asked me pleasantly how old my dog is,

and I answered pleasantly that she’s eleven.

Then she asked me how much that is in dog years,

and I answered that it takes the Earth

the same amount of time to go around the sun

for every species on the planet.

The whole notion of dog years

is pathetically fraudulent

and shows a deep ignorance

about dogs.

Dogs don’t follow the

same developmental curve

as humans.

They mature quickly,

remain physically active for a long time –

if their people let ’em –

and then decline rapidly.

Their life expectancy,

furthermore,

varies enormously

with their breed and size,

with small dogs and mixed breeds

tending to live longer

than large ones and pure-breds.

Some pop-offs

have asserted dogmatically

when I point this out

that a dog year is six human years,

sometimes seven,

and that’s that.

If that were the case,

then every dog I’ve ever had

has been sexually mature at the equivalent

of about five or six years old,

and still sprinting at full speed

when they’ve been older than 70.

                       Charmism

Every civilised, intelligent, decent person

knows that it’s totally uncool

– and in most places illegal –

to discriminate against people

based on ethnicity,

ancestry

(I refuse to use that horrid word ‘race’),

sex,

disability,

religion,

health,

sexual orientation,

gender identity,

political opinion,

or cultural beliefs.

Nearly everybody, however,

discriminates against people

with deficient social skills

and unsettling or irritating

personal behaviour characteristics.

I call this Charmism, and it stinks.

Show your dedication

to a truly inclusive society

by every once in a while

inviting somebody with a shitty personality

to your home for dinner.

Well, maybe that’d be pushing it.

Take ’em to the pub for a burger and a beer

– if you can afford it, that is.

                                Truth

Some people seem to take great delight

in presenting themselves

as more profound thinkers than they really are

when someone is trying

to tell them some truth

by asking as portentously as they can,

‘What is Truth?’

I think the best way to describe

what telling the truth is

is by saying what it isn’t.

If it involves:

lies

evasion

trickery

deception

dishonesty

face-saving

arse-covering

perjury

unfairness

pretence

posturing

insincerity

spin

disingenuousness

fraudulence

dissimulation

subreption

or

prevarication,

or any combination of these

… it just ain’t the truth.

     PS: The emperor, by the way, is buck naked.

                Oxymoron or Not?

It’s án astounding phenomenon,

yet I observe it all the time.

An apparent contradiction

at least in terms, but there it is.

I’ve seen them when I’m walking

my dog across the road,

and often when I’m driving

my car on city streets,

also in the checkout line

at the Pak n Save.

One ranted on the footpath

before the veggie stand.

I encountered one when trying

to buy a roasting pan.

One egregious specimen

was at a parent-teacher night.

My mother, oh, have mercy,

was one all her life.

It seems absurd,

but there they are –

destroying gender stereotypes –

with determination every day:

dick-headed women,

what the hell just makes them

turn out to be that way?

        Fashionably

It’s something about which

I’ve had solid cognitive knowledge

for at least a half a century,

but on a visceral level

I’ve never been able

to become accustomed

to eight o’clock

really meaning eight forty-five.

The rationale for this

is completely beyond

my ability to understand.

                 The Atrocity Menu

We live in a time of atrocities.

Maybe every time has been

a time of atrocities,

but the availability of almost-instant information

about whatever atrocity or atrocities du jour

any particular individual or group

finds particularly appalling

makes them seem to be never-ending.

So many of them erupt, or drag on,

across the global computer screens

that people world-wide

can pick and choose

from the current menu of outrages

which one or ones they deem to be

most deserving of their disgust

due to their perceptions

of the victims’ similarity to themselves

or some other capricious criteria

before being distracted

by tomorrow’s reports

of some other explosions of inhumanity.

                     Litterbug Picnics

They come to city parks,

whether by the river or by the lake or elsewhere,

and enjoy the serenity

of sitting or reclining

on well-tended lawns

under leafy trees

as they consume their junk food,

leaving their McDonald’s packaging,

KFC buckets,

fish-and-chips newspapers,

chippie bags, chocolate wrappers,

empty fizzy-drink bottles,

energy-drink cans, and RTD containers

lying on lawns that suddenly need more tending

for anybody else to enjoy serenity on them.

One late afternoon in early 2012,

when I was doing a one-off job at Hamilton Gardens,

I saw two young couples in hip-hop drag

walk in carrying plastic supermarket bags

filled with bags of chippies

and bottles of fizzy drinks

in vivid colours unknown to nature.

I couldn’t bring myself to smile at them

or even to think,

“Now, isn’t that nice.”

                               Whores

I dislike it when I hear people use the word ‘whore’

in a disparaging, derogatory, or belittling way

in regard to sex workers,

whether female, male, or otherwise –

in reference to scientists employed by Monsanto

and right-wing academic economists, yes,

but I have great respect for sex workers.

I respect their courage,

their senses of humour and irony,

and their honesty about money.

They harm no one,

and provide a needed service,

selling self-esteem

and the soothing warmth

of intimate physical contact

to socially inadequate,

fearful,

emotionally confused,

psychologically crippled,

clueless,

and otherwise lonely

members of the public –

not to mention obnoxious assholes

whom nobody else, not even their wives,

would touch with a barge pole,

and rightly so.

Perhaps most of all, then,

I respect sex workers for their strong stomachs.

At least they don’t sell their souls

or future generations

down the river.

               Rank Favourites

The bloke who took my money

at Kiwi Liquor in the Fairfield shops

asked me what my favourite whisky is,

as I always buy the cheapest,

whichever that is at the time.

I told him that it was impossible

for me to have a favourite,

as each has its own flavour and its own charm.

They’re just different to me –

neither better nor worse,

although I do tend to prefer blends to single malts.

He apparently found this hard to swallow,

as it were,

as every time I’ve gone in there since

he’s interrogated me on the point.

So many people’s apparent need to rank things –

to have a favourite

food, piece of music, city, friend,

brand of anything,

celebrity of the opposite sex –

to decide which ones are better and which are worse,

and their seeming inability, and even refusal,

to acknowledge that they’re just different,

seems an odd and ugly and foreign

way to think about life,

to me, at least.

                    Pseudo-Inspirational Crap

The word that comes immediately to mind is smug,

although the term arrogant ignorance would also fit.

Although now that I’m more reclusive than ever,

I don’t have to listen to it as much as before,

I run into it too damn often on facebook –

these little homilies superimposed

over inspirational artwork

saying that we can do whatever we want to do

and that we are whoever we choose to be

and that every aspect of our personalities

is the result of our own choices

and that if we don’t like it we can choose to change it

and all that sort of rubbish.

It’s the “I’m all right, Jack, and if you’re not it’s all your fault” crap

that probably seems correct to people

who’ve never been severely traumatised,

either by violence or torture as adults

or daily by family-member abuse as children.

      Win That Prize

She asserted confidently

that artistic competitions

like TV’s The X Factor

are necessary for innovation,

and that without competition

creativity would stagnate.

I wonder in what

winner-take-all contest

Van Gogh was competing

when he painted Starry Night,

or Jane Austen

when she wrote Pride and Prejudice,

or Miles Davis

when he recorded Bitches Brew?

This Sporting Life

            CG 2010

Watching a road cycling race

on TV with the sound on mute

and Weather Report being funky on the box,

I wondered what goes on

in the minds of the cyclists

at the back of the peloton,

without a hope of moving up.

It was beyond me.

                        Basketball Coaches

Basketball coaches

have dreams about exes and ohs

running offensive moves and defensive traps.

Basketball coaches

are like choreographers,

in a competitive contact ballet.

Basketball coaches

have to take heaps of shit when their teams are losing.

Basketball coaches

know that the fundamentals have to be right

for the rest to fall into place –

attack the break; don’t sag off it,

play defence with your feet, not your hands,

block out, give and go, pick and roll,

feet at 60 degrees for foul shots,

defend the passing lanes off the ball,

follow your shots, cover the point,

and so on.

Basketball coaches

know that speed is important, but there’s no substitute for size.

Basketball coaches

know the difference between getting beaten and just losing –

a team gets beaten when the other team

has to do all it can to defeat it;

when a team loses it beats itself.

The most profound thing

that basketball coaches learn

after doing it for enough years

is that it’s better to be lucky than to be good.

             The Excitement of Sport

Watching the Asia Cup cricket final on TV,

I enormously enjoyed

the shots of the spectators,

especially the young Pakistani women,

with and without hijab scarves,

and the young Sri Lankan women –

all belonging to healthy elites who can afford travel

and who wear expensive clothing –

all of them excitedly shouting

and flashing straight, white, smiling teeth

and jumping up and down

in response to the exploits

of the healthy young male athletes

disporting themselves down on the greensward.

I could almost smell

the oestrogen and vaginal fluids

through the television.

Turned me on, it did.

                     Lucky Blokes

Watching amateur club rugby league on Maori TV,

it became evident that much of it is ritual,

as the players on every team

from every one of Auckland’s

ethnocultural backgrounds represented

behave with almost identical

celebrations or commiserations

whenever one of their teammates

either scores a try

or stuffs up.

I envy them

their standard-issue,

done-by-rote,

reflexively automatic

blokey mateship.

      The Gold-Medal Women’s Curling Match

Most of the winter Olympics

is tedious on TV,

but I found myself

with nothing else to do after work

than watch the gold-medal

women’s curling match.

In general I’d be inclined

to back Sweden over Canada,

other things being equal,

but that Canadian woman

who shoved the stone instead of sweeping in front of it

had stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes,

chestnut hair, and a charismatic smile

that really did it for me.

The teams’ tactics were beyond me,

but that didn’t matter.

Sweden won.

Oh, well …

that’s sport.

Stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes

don’t matter.

                      Aggro Ridiculoso

One crashed into the other awkwardly –

who knows why?

Clumsiness? Bad judgement? Recklessness?

Callous disregard? Malice? Fatigue?

Just one of those things that happen?

– anyway, the testosterone and adrenaline and

who-knows-what-other hormone levels

zoomed up to levels requiring action,

but they couldn’t afford to take action

with real consequences,

as they both wanted to stay in the game,

so they went into a peacock display of chest bumping

and aggressive, glaring-eyed forehead leaning,

the garishly bright and unnatural colours

and the silly patterns

of their football shorts and jerseys

making them look hilariously ridiculous.

A case could, of course, be made that, deep down,

we’re all ridiculous –

the suffering involved in most people’s lives, however,

puts something of a damper on real-life hilarity

in regard to those who don’t deserve ridicule,

although human pain

does make certain psychopaths giggle and snigger.

                      Netball

When we were reading stuff about New Zealand

in 1988 whilst preparing to shift here from Guam,

I read that the country’s major sports

are rugby, cricket, and netball.

Now I’d seen people playing rugby in the park,

and cricket scenes in movies,

but I’d never even heard of netball,

and wondered whether

it was what Kiwis called volleyball,

volleyball being a major sport on the island.

The first time I saw it on TV I couldn’t believe it.

It resembled a sport that girls played when I was a kid

called girls’ basketball – since discarded for being sexist,

but I couldn’t figure out why the defenders had to stand back

and let the attackers shoot unbothered.

Nearly a quarter of a century later,

after shepherding two daughters

through the Saturday netball circus –

it seems as if it was usually in the rain but it probably wasn’t –

I still think it’s weird as shit.

I’m not keen on watching sports

in which the officials blow their whistles

every few seconds

for infractions that I don’t see.

                    Ryne Duren

When I was a kid in the fifties

I became fascinated by

a baseball pitcher named Ryne Duren.

His genius at gamesmanship and showmanship

eclipsed his skill at pitching,

but that’s what makes memories.

Sure, he could throw a baseball faster

than just about anybody ever could,

at somewhere about 175 kph.

Think of that.

He was also almost legally blind

and wore glasses that were, as everyone said,

as thick as Coke bottles.

His problem, of course, was control.

A relief pitcher, he would come on in the middle of an inning

and while warming up was always sure

to fire some of his high-velocity offerings

several rows up into the grandstand

and some others somewhere near

where the next batter’s head would be likely to be.

At least once that I recall, perhaps imprecisely,

he took off his glasses to polish them,

dropped them on the ground,

and then got down on his hands and knees

to feel around blindly for them

until he found them, put them back on,

and blazed one more warm-up cannonball, high,

before nodding that he was ready.

Batter up!

                Russian Tennis Fans

Watching the St Petersburg Open tennis tournament,

with the sound off, of course,

it seemed as if the clearly affluent spectators

were almost entirely either

women who looked like trophies,

or maybe porn actresses,

or men who looked like thugs –

or like cruel, expensively dressed gangsters

who employed thugs.

              Pace and Reproduction

One thing that struck me

when I watched the Beijing Olympics

was how Usain Bolt stood out from the field

with his sense of humour and personality

as well as the pace at which he motored down the track.

I also noticed the looks on the faces

of the young Chinese women in the crowd

and on the stadium staff

whenever he appeared.

I wonder how many half-Jamaican babies

who may end up being able to run fast

were born in Beijing in 2009?

                  Wimbledon Celebrities

One of the best parts of watching tennis on TV,

of course,

especially a grand-slam tournament such as Wimbledon,

was the editor’s selection of shots

from cameras focusing on celebrities in the crowd.

It amused me that I was unable to recognise most of them.

I assumed that those who were of A Certain Age

but wearing well

were either former tennis greats or minor royalty.

The glittery young women with perfect teeth

who’d look comfortably at home

on the covers of fashion magazines

were likely the players’ wives and girlfriends,

and the fashionably clothed and barbered young men,

also with excellent teeth,

their husbands and boyfriends.

Particularly fascinating were the apparently professional celebrities

taking time out from shoots for the covers

of supermarket check-out aisle magazines

to glom some world-class, global exposure

before sinking into the ranks of the uncelebrated

by the time next year’s Wimbledon rolled around.

I had no idea who any of them were.