More Personal Stuff

                   The Situation

People, of course,

have always terrified me,

one-on-one and face-to-face,

but for more than 60 years

I tried to pretend to myself

that this fear didn’t exist

or struggled against it

when it was all too obvious to ignore.

Neither of those strategies worked.

For more than a year now

I’ve given myself over to the truth,

and just avoided those

face-to-face situations

as much as I can,

especially if they’re purely social,

and have used my reliable old

perform-instead-of-interact technique,

which has served me poorly since childhood,

only now with no hope

or expectation from it,

except to escape

as soon as I politely can –

or impolitely if that’s what it takes.

                  Adolescence and Me

Probably the main reason that I never made a career

out my certification as a secondary-school teacher

is that I just plain dislike most adolescents

and don’t get along with them.

It was like that when I was one, too.

           Blowing Off and Shining On

Back in the mid-seventies in San Antonio,

when I was in my late twenties and early thirties,

the people I knew – dopers mostly,

and a few theatre folk and musicians –

used a couple of phrases that I’ve recently realised

refer to behaviours that I’ve only embraced

as functional for my approach to life

in my mid-sixties.

The jargon in that far-off time and place

involved blowing things and other people off,

which refers to dismissing them

from our minds and lives,

and shining on,

which refers to finding serenity by gliding above the storm.

That’s what I do now.

I’ve discovered that I can do without

almost anyone or anything

by avoiding the news, being reclusive,

and limiting my social activity

overwhelmingly to the internet and emails.

It’s marvellously easy just to remove people

who like to piss me off, disrespect me,

provoke petty conflicts with me,

or any combination of these behaviours

from my facebook so-called friends list.

Click-click, Poof!

I’m only in danger of not shining on

when I have to leave the house

to exercise the dog or go to the shops –

the world is full of dickheads –

but I can go numb again and shine on

when I get home.

                 Tachycardia

There it goes – speeding up:

I can feel it going

thump-thump-thump

hard and fast

in my chest

and in my arms and in my belly,

accompanied by light-headed dizziness

and a thin film of sweat on my forehead;

the insides of my elbows also start to sweat,

and my stomach begins churning,

making me belch,

my intestines also shift into high gear,

as my lower abdomen expands.

Streams of sweat roll down my sides.

My knees start to feel cold.

A nagging soreness creeps over one of my biceps.

Pins and needles dance here are there on my back.

Sometimes it awakens me in the middle of the night

and doesn’t let be fall back asleep

until it slows to normal

again,

as it always has

so far.

                 Performing

As a full-time performer

rather than a person

with adequate psychosocial development,

I’m aware of several different types

of performances.

Performing in real life

face-to-face with someone,

performing these verses I compose,

performing in front of a theatrical audience,

and performing in front of a camera or two

are profoundly different to each other.

The only one of these types of performance

that produces any stage fright at all in me, however –

other than auditions, of course –

is performing in real life

when I’m face-to-face with a real person.

                Politeness and Concern

‘HowAHyuh?’

People look at me funny

when I’m unable to manage

the expected polite-but-dishonest, ‘Good, thanks,’

and make snappy evasions instead:

‘Same as yesterday but older.’

‘About as well as could be expected.’

And so forth.

Okay, most of them don’t give a shit

one way or another about how I’m feeling;

they’re just being polite,

which is fine and natural.

The real danger is with people I know,

the ones who actually look at me

and ask, ‘Are you all right?’

and then feel obliged to hit me,

if I open myself to them and don’t lie,

with salesmanship-seminar-level inspirational advice

that belongs superimposed over the photo of a landscape,

as if in all my many years

I’d never before heard

their glibly superficial

and inherently judgemental and hideous

you-just-gottas or similar simple solutions.

I’m best off if I answer these people

with something like,

‘About as well as could be expected

under the circumstances,

the circumstances being what they are.’

They might look at me annoyed,

but at least I won’t be making myself vulnerable

to their shit by opening up.

    A Robustly-Based Forecast

Nothing good

is ever going to happen

to me

for the rest of my life.

I may be wrong,

but it would surprise me greatly if I am.

             Brilliance & Inadequacy

Slogging my way through The Picture of Dorian Gray

fifty years too late,

Oscar’s brilliance stunned me of course,

as well as bogged me down.

My ex-lover, meanwhile, posted a vignette

on her ill-subscribed ‘community page’

that also stunned me with its brilliance – her brilliance.

I felt completely inadequate as a writer

in addition to feeling inadequate as a person,

which is how they had conditioned me to feel

so long ago,

and as life has rolled on.

      Emotional Disability

On a stormy Thursday,

with intermittent hailstorms

keeping me from taking my walk,

the realities involved

with being a lonely old man

in constant physical pain,

and with nothing in the bank,

a crumbling house,

a past mostly best not remembered,

an emotionally detached dog,

and no family anywhere close

put me on the edge of tears

about three times during the morning.

It would, I think, have been helpful

if I’d been able to shed some of them,

but I couldn’t.

The next day was clear and cold.

The Comfort of Autoapathy

   Not caring about anything

   having anything to do

   only with me

   is a beneficial state

   in which to be.

  The Storm and the War Were Inside

A big, howling storm was stirring things up

outside,

but I was inside my warm, dry house,

my belly full of nutritious food,

no murderous agglomerations

of self-righteous sadists waving assault rifles

or launching air strikes

anywhere even halfway near

my part of the world.

What right did I have

to be unhappy?

The Return of Dog Stuff

     At the Park on a Rainy Morning

My dog may have enjoyed a few things more

than drinking fresh puddle water,

but after the drought in 2010

it became more of a rare pleasure for her

than chasing sticks in the shade,

sleeping in the sun,

or chewing on bones, I think.

                 Practical Intelligence

My bedroom has a glass-wall ranch slider

leading onto a narrow balcony

facing east.

My fox terrier likes to lie there

in the glass-amplified sun

on winter mornings.

As I’m composing this

on a winter morning,

she’s sleeping by the heater

in my west-facing home office.

I think she knows

that the sky to the east

must look like a fast-moving,

grey watercolour video

with no direct sunlight

because of the occasional sound

of rain on the roof.

    Another Transition

My dog,

at age twelve,

no longer wanted

to be on my lap,

preferring to take her ease

on the floor.

I supposed the floor

didn’t keep recrossing

its legs.

About six months later

she fell sick and died.

                          The End of Stick

On the last day of 2009,

when I was taking Rhonda, my fox terrier,

on her afternoon walk around the neighbourhood on her lead

we were cruising along Sale Street in Fairfield

when three other fox terriers

zoomed off a house’s front porch barking wildly

and attacked her, one with its teeth.

In less than a minute the father of the dogs’ owner

came running out and forced them to retreat.

The owner of the dogs did the right thing

and reimbursed me for the emergency New-Year’s-Eve treatment,

but Rhonda was forbidden to run

for the next six weeks,

until they took the stitches out.

Before that incident,

I’d been throwing sticks for her to chase and return

for a half an hour every morning at the park.

After it, and the long hiatus,

she started giving up after only short games of stick,

rarely being up to it for as long as ten minutes,

and within a year rarely as long as five.

Then three minutes became a long game.

By the second anniversary of the attack

it had become more a matter of just two or three throws.

One morning in mid-January she chased the first throw

but didn’t bring the stick back.

Then, after a two-day layoff I tried again,

but she didn’t even chase the first stick.

Playing stick or ball had been a joyful part of my daily life

for about twelve years,

generally the only one.

The end of stick was a sad day indeed for me.

My newly adopted dog doesn’t chase sticks at all.

               Death and the Dog

Other than some sensory pleasures,

my entire life has been crap –

hardly worth the time it’s taken up,

for me at least.

Every day now when I wake up

I wish that I hadn’t,

and start counting the hours

until I can drink myself to sleep.

Every day when I finish work

I suffer from an inner conflict

between my body and my mind –

my body craving survival and food,

and my tortured mind craving

ascetic self-destruction

through self-induced anorexia.

It’s nip and tuck.

My dog knew nothing of this,

only that she depended on me completely

for all facets of her life.

I worried about

what would become of her

if my mind triumphed.

After she died

and I had no responsibility

for a helpless other

justifying ongoing, daily

psychological, emotional, and spiritual suffering,

I wondered why I spent time

thinking about boiling pasta.

Adopting a senior dog three years later

did little to change this.

                       Dogs In Bondage

They’re not up there with taggers and tailgaters,

but people who bring their dogs to the dog exercise park

and keep them on a lead

get right up my nose.

Okay, maybe they have valid reasons

for keeping those poor pooches in bondage,

but they should do it somewhere else.

It’s just plain cruel

to restrain their movements

when they can see heaps of other dogs

running and playing and swimming

and chasing balls and sticks and birds and each other

and engaging in natural canine social interactions,

all of which their masters deny them,

and cruelty to animals – especially to people’s own companions –

is simply wrong.

          Tandem Observations

One conclusion that’s become inescapable

after a lifetime of observing both

is that dogs are better at dog stuff

than people are at people stuff.

     The Desirable and The Desired

The cruelty that factory farming inflicts

on sensitive, intelligent individuals

tramples on my deeply held values

about the ugliness of indifference to terror

and therefore about what behaviours are desirable

for those engaged in food production.

When I saw that ham bone

in the meat-scraps fridge at the supermarket, though,

I bought it for my dog

without remorse.

I wanted it.

I craved the flavour and texture

of the bigger chunks of ham

still attached to it,

and I craved the vicarious pleasure

of watching my dog enjoy the hell out of it for weeks.

The Devil made me buy it, I suppose,

if that’s what the Devil is.

           Guapito

He’s such a prettyboy.

People notice

and comment

every day

about his looks.

Oh, he’s more than just cute –

he’s a real, catch-your-eye

prettyboy.

But when I look into his eyes

I can see a hint

of the depths through which

he experiences his world,

as himself,

distinct from being a schnauzer,

even distinct from his enormous talent

for just being a dog.

I mean, he’s an expert

who’s mastered most of the skills

involved in dog stuff.

I don’t think he knows

that he’s a prettyboy, though,

just that random strangers walking by

often stop to make nice to him

and coo.

He likes that.

I can tell.

                   Seasoning For The Season

Winter is what it is,

and the morning was wintry;

a nasty cold and wet southerly breeze

accompanied my adopted old dog and me

as we made our way around the park

for the first time that day.

It made me feel chuffed about myself –

I felt righteous;

I felt noble;

I felt heroic;

I felt, uncharacteristically,

almost worthwhile even –

for taking the Little Fella into my home, at his age,

and walking him twice a day,

whatever the weather,

even when none of the park’s other dog-walkers

were braving the inhospitably windy iciness.

I comforted myself with thoughts of hot soup

and maybe some slightly warmed wine

for when we returned home

but when, after completing the circuit,

I had divested myself of my top two layers,

doled out a packaged dog treat,

and gone snuffling around in the kitchen,

I decided instead on a summery cold seafood salad

and a fridge-cool tropical rum punch.

The inside of my house is, after all, warm and dry

without the atmospherics of a wood fire.

It was a good call.

                     Reality And The World

The world is what our nervous systems tell us it is.

Reality, unlike the world, is reality,

no matter what we sense and feel.

My dog and I occupy the same reality,

but we live in radically different worlds.

I’m unable to imagine what it would be like

to have a sense of smell a thousand times more sensitive

than the one I have now

– and I have a fearsome imagination –

and conceptualising a world dominated by odours,

in which I’d identify and remember people and places

more by their distinctive, individual scents

than by the configuration of their faces and landmarks,

is well beyond my mental capabilities.

Eagles, earthworms, dolphins, bats, bees, trout …

so many discrete, finite worlds we ourselves can’t know

in the reality of just this infinitesimal but ordinary

corner of the cosmos –

it’s all so incomprehensible that it’s no wonder

that people invent so much intricate codswallop

to convince themselves

that they understand what’s going on

and have actually made sense

of it all.

Uh-huh.

Memories of Childhood

                         Change of Venue

I was warm and cosy; it was comfy and familiar.

Then the terror started;

constriction replaced cosiness;

the whole of everything gripped me tightly all over;

I felt the need to breathe but couldn’t

as forces I didn’t understand

squeezed me, frightened, powerless,

in an unknown direction,

roaring in my ears,

until, until … suddenly

All the lights came on,

light, light – light as I’d never known it,

illuminating innumerable unfamiliar, blurry shapes,

accompanied by a strange cacophony of undifferentiated noises

that surrounded me as I sucked in sweet, moist air;

then I began to distinguish human voices

speaking language I didn’t understand,

seeming to say things around me rather than to me.

Then came hunger.

               Loez’m Su Ruhe

When I was little,

from the dawn of memory

until my daddy died

when I was nine-and-a-half,

my parents spoke Yiddish

when they didn’t want

me to understand

what they were saying.

I picked up a few words, of course,

as children do,

and the most beautiful Yiddish phrase of all,

which only my daddy said,

is what he said

when he heard my mother

verbally abusing me.

I don’t know if this is accurate,

but I remember it as,

“Loez’m su ruhe” –

which translates roughly as,

“Let him have peace.”

         Childhood Heaven

When I was small I had a definite idea

of what heaven is like.

It’s lying face-down

on eternally cool pillows

whilst eating an eternal black olive

and cutting an eternal fart.

      Mushrooms & Street Running

Kennett Square,

a country town with about five or six thousand inhabitants,

is the centre of an industry

that each week grows and processes

about a half a million kilos

of mushrooms.

My daddy used to love to take us

to a Kennett Square restaurant

called the Kennett Kandy Kitchen

which was less than an hour’s drive from home,

because he loved their mushroom soup.

Once, when I was – I don’t know –

somewhere between maybe five and seven,

when we were leaving the restaurant,

I dashed, as little kids do,

across State Street,

Kennett’s main drag,

toward my daddy’s Studebaker.

I tripped and remember seeing

a car’s headlights bearing down on me.

Obviously, it stopped in time.

My daddy picked me up and comforted me,

as I was a bit shaken.

My mother made it clear

that running across the street

made me a bad boy,

and that I’d done it just to scare her,

and I was never to do it again.

Now, more than sixty years later,

I hardly ever run at all,

but when I do it’s across streets.

                        Measurements

I remember when I was in late childhood

and early adolescence,

awaiting my late-arriving puberty,

reading, and hearing, and seeing stuff on TV

about women’s ‘measurements’,

always expressed in three numbers,

which I soon learnt were the circumference

– in inches –

of a woman’s bust, waist, and hips,

respectively.

These represented what I learnt was called her ‘figure’.

I learnt that the first measurement was best

when the number was in the upper-mid-thirties,

thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight

being the most worthy of admiration.

With the second measurement I learnt that smaller was better,

the optimal number being in the low-to-mid-twenties,

although people raved about some movie actress

who had an almost-magical eighteen-inch waist.

I also learnt that the closer the third measurement

was to the first one the better.

Measurements of thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six

seemed to represent a particularly praiseworthy figure.

I took all this in unquestioningly,

as it came to me as a matter of course.

I didn’t even wonder at the time

why I never heard anything

about men’s measurements.

             Dama de España

When I was eight or nine or ten

or something like that,

somebody taught me a naughty parody

of the ever-popular accordionists’ favourite

that went:

      ‘ Lady of Spain I adore you

       Pull down your pants I’ll explore you’

followed by a paroxysm or three of giggling.

I wonder if that helped to prepare me for adulthood.

Well, at least it was able to prompt

my horrid mother into displaying disapproval.

Giggle.

                                The Facts

I, similarly to most males

in the developed world,

I imagine,

did not learn about sex and reproduction

from my parents

or from classroom lessons in Health, or whatever they call it now.

I learnt it from

that omnipresent consortium

of social arbiters known as the guys –

also known as the blokes, the chaps, los chicos, los muchachos,

les gars, i tipi, die Jungs, otoko, rebyata, killarana, de fyre, and so on.

Or, otherwise, what polite folk call,

‘out on the street,’

where things are so,

well, seamy.

Only in my case

it wasn’t a street but a driveway.

I was trying to shoot baskets

into the hoop over our garage door,

with my eight-year-old mate Davy Lowrey,

and in regard to a dirty joke that I really didn’t understand,

I asked him if people really did, y’know – giggle,

y’know, actually-really, y’know, fuck?

He told me, sure,

that’s how people have babies,

and it all clicked together in my mind.

When I’d asked my mother about babies’ origins

she’d told me that the father plants a seed.

I’d asked her if he got that kind of seed

at Richardson’s Variety Store,

down the street,

and she’d told me to go outside and play.

                 Lawn Mowing

I started mowing the family lawn when I was eight

with an old muscle-powered reel mower.

My daddy would give me something like

fifty cents or a dollar every time I did it.

After he died the job remained mine,

but my mother didn’t pay me.

It was just one of the chores

that I had to do, and that was that.

When I was thirteen I bought a rotary power mower

with the money I’d received at my bar mitzvah.

It made the chore almost enjoyable –

I tried to keep the pattern of mowed and unmowed lawn

aesthetically pleasing to me as I went.

Mowing the lawn remained my job,

and my ongoing aesthetic challenge,

throughout all my domestic situations;

I don’t think either of my daughters has ever mowed one,

and none of my partners ever did

when they were with me.

When the old second-hand mower

that I’d bought in 1989 in Otorohanga

from Duncan Trott, the radio comedian’s dad,

finally died in 2005,

I started paying an old bloke

fifteen bucks to mow the tiny lawn

of the house I’d moved to in Frankton

whenever it needed it.

The place I live in as I compose this

has no lawn at all – just patios front and back.

I like that.

              I Wanted to be a Beatnik When I Grew Up

The first time a verse I’d written

outraged somebody

was in 1959, when I was 12 or 13.

It was a free-verse, rationalist, semi-existentialist, nihilist opus –

I think I entitled it ‘Nothing’ or something like that –

about how there’s no intrinsic reason for anything to exist.

My English teacher,

Miss Knodel,

who had a funny, not-quite-Scandinavian accent

and who’d probably wanted a sonnet,

or something like that,

thought it horrible that a child my age

could write such hope-less stuff,

and wrote all over the margins

a whole load of rubbish

about how God gives meaning to everything.

I felt smug,

a feeling I’ve rarely had since,

and never respected her again.

At least one thing became established:

when I became a beatnik

I wasn’t going to be the one playing the bongos,

which was a good thing,

because I had a pair of ’em

and although I’d had no tuition,

had become convinced that

I was shit at it.