Religion-Type Stuff

             Carolling

Working in a home office

with work that comes to me online

and being paid by the job,

rather than by some unit of time

has its advantages and disadvantages.

Probably its greatest advantage

is that I more or less set my own hours

for when I work,

which enables me to express

several of my values

by working on xmas day.

That tickles me.

I’ve also never had to wear a silly hat

in December

in order to keep my job.

             The Inarajan Missionaries

Everybody knows that Mormon missionaries

consist of teams of two young males

who wear black suits and white shirts

and plastic name badges,

and who ride around on bicycles,

smiling at people and pestering them.

When I was living in the rural part

of the Micronesian island of Guam

the Mormon missionaries who were staying in an apartment

over a store in the village of Inarajan

developed a sexual relationship

with each other,

then fell out

over who-knows-what,

and one of them bashed the shit out of the other one.

The locals,

almost all of whom were devout Catholics

and ill-disposed to conversion anyway,

thought that this was hilarious.

I have no information about what their Mormon Elders thought,

of course,

but hilarity probably wasn’t involved.

             I Wasn’t On A Mission

I wonder if I should have been more polite

to those aggressive Mormon missionaries

who didn’t take my, “Go away – I’m not interested,”

as conclusive

when they intruded into my consciousness

as I was walking my dog along Piako Road,

and if it was okay for me to say,

“Fuck off, you superstitious bastards.”

                                  Difference

I never did understand this Jewish thing when I was growing up.

I knew that I was Jewish, sure enough,

but I couldn’t understand how that made me different,

or why I was supposed to socialise with the other Jewish kids

more than with the kids who weren’t Jewish,

even though I didn’t particularly get along

with most of those in either category.

There was that religion thing, of course,

but none of it made any sense to me – Jewish or Christian –

and how one was right and the other not so;

I only knew that mine was different,

which made me different,

even though I had no idea in hell why.

I loathed the sabbath services, by the way,

despite the imposing visuals and rituals,

remembering them most

for having to wear excruciatingly painful suits

– I’m allergic to wool –

resulting in my mother nudging and elbowing and kicking me

and hissing, ‘Stop fidgeting!’ non-stop,

while some operatic tenor in a robe vocalised interminably

in Hebrew, which I didn’t understand.

I’ve hated operatic tenors ever since.

I gave up on that religious shit for good when I was fourteen.

Over time, of course, I’ve settled into the realisation

that I’m not different to and disconnected from others because I’m Jewish.

Fuck that bullshit.

I’ve always felt different to and disconnected from other Jews, too.

No, I’m different and disconnected just because I’m me,

and that’s all.

                     Astronomy

A white dwarf star is zooming around a black hole,

so close to it that the astronomers say

it does two revolutions an hour.

And we feel a thrill of sci-fi horror-show fear

for that little star’s fate,

which is ridiculous of course,

because it’s so far away,

and so out of scale

with a cabbage or a plum or a basketball,

and unconnected to human life on Earth,

where we have our own problems,

not nearly so huge as having

a black hole nearby,

but huge in our lives,

which we refuse to admit

are inconsequentially tiny,

and huge for the future of our species,

which we refuse to admit

is pathetically insignificant

astronomically.

  Three Pointless Unanswerable Questions

Why can’t love just fucking win for a change?

Why do bullshit and pointless mental convolutions

have to send love packing every time?

Why must children lose out on love

for their own protection?

No coherent reasons at all, I suppose.

I guess that that’s why the Greeks developed

tragedy as a form of art.

      An Observation Of Orthodoxy

I remember once when I was ten or eleven

I had a Sunday School teacher

who was one of those hyper-religious Superjews;

she’d shaved her head

as a sign of her devoutness,

or so I was told,

by my mother, I think.

She wore a wig,

so I probably would have had trouble knowing

if nobody had told me.

I wondered why,

if shaving her head was a statement

of her devotion to God,

she’d gone and covered it over with a wig,

but I didn’t dare to ask my mother.

She wasn’t that kind of woman.

                            Amazing

   

Marketers have done a stellar job

of selling the world on how desirably amazing

their digital gadgets are,

but they’re really no more amazing, deep down,

than such other products of human ingenuity

as hammers, violins, and cookery.

The universe, which is more amazing than anything else,

is itself a cosmos chock-full of amazing stuff.

It amazes me that the universe even exists.

I’m amazed that I was actually born into it,

and I’m amazed that the lottery of birth

dealt me parents who were white, professional-class

beneficiaries of the twentieth-century Western world.

It also amazes me that my mother was a psychopath.

It’s amazing that I’m not dead yet.

My dog amazes me daily.

I wonder if anything amazes my dog.

Waking up in the morning amazes me.

Getting my arse out of bed amazes me more.

The glorious enjoyment of my hot shower amazes me.

It amazes me that I can still, at my age,

do what I have to do to get by,

think faster and deeper than I ever have before,

and manage to have an occasional erection.

I’m amazed that, compared to most old people in the world,

I’m living a life of relative plenty in a warm, dry house.

Human cruelty and stupidity amaze me,

as does human kindness and intelligence.

DNA is endlessly amazing stuff.

I’m amazed that so many human adults

are actually able to believe

religious and other superstitious codswallop,

but that I can’t.

My own insignificance doesn’t amaze me at all.

Isn’t that amazing?

           Effing the Ineffable

spiritual, adj. Descriptive of that part of you

and the universe in general

that isn’t anything else.

                   From Out of the Desert

The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph

announced that he and his boys

are – with God’s help – gonna destroy Western civilisation

and that their flag is gonna fly

over the domes of Washington and Rome.

I wonder what effect this would have

on the Finnish snowboarding scene?

Getting Through The Day

Another Day Begins

Oh shit.

I gave up

on lying in bed

awake.

Another day begins,

and I have nothing for it,

and it has nothing for me.

Since it’s still another

couple of hours

until the autumn dawn,

the wait until the time

when I can start

to pursue oblivion

seems interminable.

Oh shit.

                 Rough Morning

It wasn’t one of my better mornings.

My body temperature kept shifting

from too hot to too cold and back.

My skin temperature was all over the place, too,

and rarely in synch with that of my innards.

Sometimes my belly and my head felt too hot

at the same time that my back and feet felt too cold.

Pins and needles intermittently shot around my body.

My heart rate sped up and slowed down at random.

I had an upset stomach.

Concentrating was, of course, impossible.

My morale was nonexistent,

and for the first time in memory

I failed to take a morning walk

when it wasn’t pissing down rain.

Some days are better than others.

That morning was one of the others.

              Evenings

I don’t do evenings.

With the soft magic

that they often seem

to bring to the air,

and the abundant entertainments

and artistic moments

that they make available,

they’re times for closeness and conviviality,

neither of which are in my skill set.

That’s why, unless I’m performing,

I try to reach oblivion

before each evening arrives.

   Keeping Focus

My primary concern

is to be able to

survive until I die.

                 My Former Companion       

My fox terrier had been pissing me off.

Maybe it was because we were both getting old.

I knew it was only natural

that she was exercising less

and wanting to eat more,

and I did feed her more than I had before,

but she wanted still more, and I feared she’d get obese

if I gave her all she wanted,

so she nagged me whilst I worked

in a particularly annoying way,

by repeatedly sighing and groaning just short of loudly

and by blowing long, loud exhalations through her nose,

which irritated the hell out of me,

especially when I had high-stress rush jobs

that required extraordinary concentration.

Then she stole a treat I’d bought myself at the hot bread shop

from off my eating table when I went upstairs,

climbing onto a chair, pulling the shopping bag to the floor,

and extracting the treat from its paper bag inside it,

something she hadn’t done since she’d been a puppy.

Love keeps life at home from being easy.

She also took to getting underfoot all over the house,

but especially at the head of the stairs.

I became convinced that I would die

by tripping over her and going arse over elbow down the 15 steps.

I didn’t and outlived her,

although I did come a purler down the stairs all by myself

one lonely, whisky-soaked evening after she’d died,

but survived with just a few broken ribs.

        My Dog’s Life

It could be better,

but it’s not too bad.

It’s likely to get much worse, though,

when I lose it completely.

     From My Pocket Notebook

On my arse at the end of the day

feeling various aches and pains,

also feeling growing apathy,

cruising aimlessly toward death,

and not giving a shit.

                           My Sore Nose

Since the free-to-air sports channel went off the air,

my viewing choices have been limited

to Aljazeera English,

which rubs my nose

in how so many people are much worse off than I am,

a lifestyle channel called ‘Choice’,

which rubs my nose

in how so many people are much better off than I am,

and the mainstream channels,

which rub my nose

in how most people seem to be much dumber than I am.

Since I’m just a pensioner

and can’t afford pay TV,

and also have no actual real-life, face-to-face community,

I’m spending more time now just reading books

and fucking around on the internet.

                    Dreams Suck, Anyway

It struck me on a Saturday afternoon

that I’d neglected to buy a lottery ticket that week,

thereby forfeiting my right to dream

for at least a few days.

Daydreaming’s just a delusional obsession, anyway.

Values Stuff

      Types & Personalities

The one-size-fits-all tests

people put forward on facebook

and in school-counselling programmes

assert that they are capable of determining

an individual’s personality type,

and from there, well,

the sky must be the limit

to our understanding of ourselves,

finding our optimal life pathways,

and therefore, I suppose,

to transforming our situations

into ones in which we can be

happy.

Or something.

I myself am suspicious

of the whole fucking concept

of personality types –

as opposed to personalities –

as it seems to me that anything

more than a cursory, superficial consideration

of most people would reveal

that we have complex,

in some ways apparently contradictory,

multifaceted, multiple-type personalities.

Briggs Myers is rubbish,

like astrology and racism,

with its claim to be able to force

intricately carved pegs

into square, round, and other smooth-edged holes:

pigeonholing pigeonholing

typecasting typecasting

assigning assigning

regimenting regimenting …

        Biodiversity

I have a crisis of conscience,

agonising over the ethics involved,

on those rare occasions

when my cravings lead me

to buy one or two hundred grams

of supermarket beef.

The neighbourhood cats,

for whom I leave the fat and gristle scraps

by the end of the hedge,

have no such problem.

           The Common Touch

Do you know what it’s like

to be the different one?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to enjoy the weather

on cool, light-breeze days with high overcast cloud cover,

and to dislike it when it’s blue-dome, hot, and still –

to be a shade-worshipper?

to be someone who’s glad when summer ends

and it’s finally, truly autumn?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to feel oppressed by daylight-savings time

without being a farmer?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to enjoy popular songs and TV shows?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to follow cliché social conventions

and find it next to impossible to say, ‘Good, thanks’

when someone greets you with, ‘Howahyuh?’

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to assimilate – anywhere?

to be an outsider, even in the company of outsiders?

Do you know what it’s like

to apply rational analysis

and a sense of aesthetics

automatically to even mundane domestic tasks?

Do you know what it’s like

never to be able to see the emperor’s new clothes?

Do you know what it’s like

for the way you look to be completely unlike the way you are,

and to be utterly unable to change either?

I do.

Do you?

   Comparison Gives No Comfort

I have a warm, dry house,

and my pension provides me

with enough to eat

and enough wine to distract me

at the end of each day

from my grinding, life-long unhappiness,

but that unhappiness is real, and permanent,

and I can do nothing to make it leave me.

Knowing that billions of others in the world

suffer much more than I do

does nothing at all to reduce my own despair.

It only makes me sadder.

                 Peeping Tomism

When I was five or six I read a comic book

– I think it was maybe a Donald Duck opus –

that had a peeping tom in it.

I accepted this, the way that little kids do,

as a matter of course, one more part of my

ever-expanding world to learn.

There was the term; there were the comic pictures –

peeping toms were clearly a thing.

From my little-kid point of view

it was definitely funny

– after all, it was in a comic book –

and it looked as if it might also be fun,

as I’ve always enjoyed a keen sense of curiosity.

It also, or so it seemed, involved a whole lot of sneaking,

and I’ve never liked sneaking,

and a big dose of in-the-shit if I got caught,

and, as I do today, I had an aversion

to finding myself in the shit,

and I’ve always been certain

that whatever it was, I’d get caught.

So I decided to not give peeping-tomism a go.

The same has applied, over the years,

to kneecapping.

                           Competition

When I was a child my mother often directed me to play

with my sibling, who is a month and a half shy

of being two years older than I am.

Being boys, the games had to be competitive.

Our age differential meant that I always lost,

and my sibling was a shit winner.

Every time he beat me at anything

he’d gloat and sneer and jeer and verbally put me down,

so I turned to private occupations –

writing, drawing, imagining, walking along the creek –

and avoided him, and competition, at playtime.

You’re unlikely to meet anyone less competitive than I am.

Later, when old enough for team sports,

I played for the fun of it and didn’t worry about the score,

and once when we were in high school

I had the enormous pleasure

of breaking his collarbone during a game of football –

one of the high points of my life.

Due to an odd set of circumstances,

I was a basketball coach at various levels

for a dozen years in the 80s and 90s.

I learnt to be a better-than-average technical coach,

but was never adept at the rah-rah stuff or handling difficult players.

I told my teams that if they played as well as they could

they’d never lose,

but better teams might beat them.

Like Woody Allen,

I find artistic competition distasteful,

and haven’t watched the Oscars on TV

since I was in my mid-teens.

You obviously won’t see this verse in any poetry competition.

                  Overwhelming

It seems to be particularly difficult,

and therefore somewhat rare,

for people who find ourselves

in agony-inducing life situations

coupled with the stress that coping with these has

on our emotional and psychological resources,

to recognise it when others are trying to find some way

to survive similar shit,

and to empathise with each other.

Overwhelmed people seem to have no time

for other overwhelmed people.

We each have our own problems, thank you.

                   Fear and Awareness

I used to be homophobic when I was much younger;

in the true meaning of phobic –

I was afraid of homosexual men,

afraid of being penetrated,

afraid of being shamed.

After all, it seemed that everybody I knew

felt free to express their detestation of faggots

at the drop of a hat,

so I avoided associating with them.

In retrospect I suppose it was just one aspect

– a culturally reinforced one –

of my fear of other people in general.

It was only after my gradual growth of awareness

of my own differentness and social and cultural isolation,

and the similarly gradual growth

of the number of my gay workmates

and other acquaintanceships,

and awareness of human sexuality in general,

that my fear of this category of otherness,

both different to mine and strangely similar,

faded away.

I’m still afraid of other people in general, though.

               Manners & Exceptions

I don’t believe in much,

but I believe in good manners.

I try to be polite and respectful,

and to avoid being rude to people,

unless they provoke me outrageously,

with in-my-face rudeness of their own.

One of the rudest expressions of bad manners

is to ignore someone,

at least face-to-face.

With facebook and other social media, though,

it’s often the wisest course to follow

to avoid a pointless conflict.

This should trouble me but it doesn’t.

For me, good manners also apply

to people only and not to abstractions,

even face-to-face.

I ignore death, for instance,

even though we’re face-to-face all the time,

because it doesn’t give a shit

if I’m rude to it or not,

so there’s no point in paying attention to it

just to be polite.

            I’ll Never Know

If things’d turned out differently,

I wonder if I would’ve become

a wanker who drinks the correct wine

out of the correct crystal stemware

with flawlessly correct companions

in a correctly custom-built show-home

located on a desirable beachfront section

in a prestigious seaside subdivision,

of if I would’ve managed

to avoid these temptations

and the smugness that goes along with them.