Miscellaneous Personal Stuff

          Not Quite Heroism

My stress levels

had been beyond my ability to tolerate them

for weeks.

The day started out

remarkably painfully

even in the context of that month,

but I actually made an effort

and got two things done

before giving up.

            Tempus Fuckit

It occurred to me

that it was only two months

until a certain non-event,

and that the time

would slip by rapidly,

as I slowly and progressively

deteriorated

physically, psychologically, and financially.

                       Scale

I read science blogs,

and prefer the ones

about archaeology, biology, linguistics, and psychology

to those about physics,

since what interests physicists now

seems to be either astrophysics

or quantum mechanics and particle physics,

and I prefer to have science tweak my imagination

about things in sizes I can envision.

                  Sundays

Not having had

a five-days-a-week

job for decades,

I’ve embraced this deviance

from the supposed norm

and emphasised it in my life

by making my passage

through each day

pretty much the same.

Monday? Friday?

I don’t give a fuck.

Except now,

when I’m truly retired,

Sundays stand out.

As I settle in on Sunday morning

I experience the weekly bummer

of comparing my ticket

to the previous evening’s winning numbers

on the lottery’s website

and learning that I’ve lost

once again.

Sunday TV also usually has

more sport that I’d watch

than other days,

which means that I can start drinking noonish

or earlier,

which means I get little or no writing or reading done,

and stumble off to bed early,

throwing me off on Mondays,

when I wake up too early

and spend the day

not wanting to do

jack shit.

   Questionable Pertinence

I know that I’m irrelevant,

devoid of meaning,

and I can’t imagine anybody having

any reason or incentive

to give a flying fuck

about me or my feelings,

so I’m not surprised

when people don’t.

               Oral Objectives

Brushing frequently and carefully

and flossing every couple of days or so

with the objective of retaining my remaining teeth,

having lost two in 2006,

I have become intimately familiar

with the idiosyncratic configuration

of the inside of my mouth.

This, however,

has never been one

of my personal objectives.

      Self-Examination Or Egotism?

I really do try not to think about myself,

since nobody else apparently does,

but it’s bloody hard,

seeing as how I’m always right here, y’know?

where I am and all,

and my neurochemical make-up

being the tricky bunch of molecules it is.

Thinking about myself, after all,

tends to lead to thinking about my pain

rather than my privileges,

and my personal inadequacies

rather than any positive personality features

that I may have.

     Sense and Nonsense

When it comes to my own life,

nothing at all makes any sense,

except the sinking void,

which makes no sense at all.

                                  Sad Logic

If anybody thought that I was sufficiently worthwhile

for them to take the time to care for me, they would.

Stuff About the News, Public Affairs, & the Future

            News Avoidance

I’d chosen to have similar holidays

from the news before,

but since whenever it was

that New Zealand’s crypto-fascist

prime minister announced

that he was dishonouring

a campaign promise

by playing Robin Hood in reverse

and giving rich people huge tax cuts

whilst raising the tax take

from poor people like me

I haven’t listened to the radio news

or watched the news on TV –

not even the animated isobar map,

which I do so enjoy – at all,

and my life is more liveable for it.

I’m too old to appreciate

feeling outraged and futile.

I’m still exposed, though,

to far too much news

on facebook, anyway.

The News And One Of My Shortcomings

I try to avoid the news

as much as I possibly can.

The amount of smug, stupid, self-righteous,

incomprehensible, and pointless

cruelty

that exists in the world

– New Zealand, too, especially the government –

is more than I can bear

finding myself exposed to.

I suppose that I should front up

and go down in flames

fighting the good fight,

but I don’t have it in me any more,

pessimistic old wuss that I am.

          All the News That …

When I sold newspaper advertising

to various local retailers

my eyes automatically scanned

the bottom of each page

to see who was buying

what size ad,

and the so-called news at the top –

what we advertising jerks and creeps

called “editorial” –

was just a blur.

I don’t read newspapers anymore –

haven’t for years –

but I reckon that

I still know more

about serious shit that goes down

than most of the people

who do read them.

Horoscope, anyone?

How about some celebrity gossip?

Letters to the editor from the rationally deprived?

             No Consolation

I don’t know why I ever watch Aljazeera,

even with the TV on Mute and music playing.

After all, I see no need

to have my nose rubbed into

how unimaginably cruel

insecure egotists with power can be.

I could find consolation

in knowing that what they do

will in the not all that distant future

bring a shitstorm down on our species –

if I didn’t have daughters.

              What Works

Although I don’t watch

the TV news anymore,

because I dislike being pissed off,

whilst watching a harmless rugby match

on Prime one Saturday arvo

I saw a promo for Prime News

delivered by a gorgeous newsreader

with blond hair and pale eyes

and a kinda flirty way

of saying what seemed

to be serious stuff,

although I had, of course,

touched the ‘Mute’ key

as soon as I saw that it was the news.

I wondered if she’d got her job

due to her

journalistic and communication skills

both being superior to those

of all the other applicants.

    Almost Lapidary Geology

The image

was of some

young Middle-Eastern fellow

in camouflage drag

crouching behind some drab,

greyish-brown desert rocks

(or were they brownish-grey?)

aiming an assault rifle

across a drab, brownish-grey desert landscape

(or was it greyish-brown?),

and my eyes focused

on the configuration and faceting

of one of the rocks,

which struck me as interesting.

  Systemic Globalised Acne

I wonder at how

the history of my species

has during my lifetime

careened so far out of control

that the whole shebang has become

like a giant whitehead zit

just about to pop.

              Perspective

It’s so obvious,

and yet so inevitable –

the bad guys are gonna keep winning,

just as they’ve always done,

until the whole global system collapses

with horrifying destruction and casualties.

Yet another civilisation will end –

this time ours.

New bad guys, of course,

will take over,

because those embodying the cuvée

of ego and ambition and aggression

and psychopathy and testosterone

always triumph.

And the flowers bloom,

and the birds sing,

and the insects go about their business

outside my open door.

          Progeny and the Long Term

I wonder whether it’s all gonna turn into hellshit

during my daughters’ lifetimes,

and I comfort myself that my not having grandchildren

means that my progeny may avoid the worst,

because the worst, from a human perspective,

seems likely to arrive in the not-all-that-distant future.

                   The Future

It says something

that the three-day forecast

and the first three days

of the six-day forecast

on the NZ Met Service’s website

are usually different.

Food Stuff

                       Not Cheddar

He drove from his small town in the King Country

up to Hamilton in the late eighties

– or maybe it was 1990 –

to buy fancy food for some celebratory event.

Acting on a tip from a local he knew

who did stuff at the varsity,

he went into the Gouda Cheese Shop on Cambridge Road,

and later expressed amazement upon discovering

cheeses that weren’t cheddar.

Things – and he – have changed dramatically since then.

                      June Solstice 2013

I don’t know why I bought all that food.

At least I put the sandwich back in the chiller

before going to the checkout.

Food sustains life.

My existence hardly qualifies.

I don’t know why I bought all that food.

At least I put the sandwich back in the chiller.

I’m even starting to question buying the grog.

It does make my lifeless afternoons bearable,

but big fucking deal – it also gives me an appetite.

I wonder if the harm it does to my body

balances out the nutrition it tricks me into consuming.

I don’t know why I bought all that food.

At least I put the sandwich back in the chiller.

The fantasies that sustain my miserable existence

are even more pathetic than my everyday reality,

and my being pathetic disgusts me.

I should starve my pathetic self to death.

I don’t know why I bought all that food.

At least I put the sandwich back in the chiller.

                   Deciding Factor

As the spring warmed up,

despite the knowledge that doing so

would compromise my metabolism, ethics, and budget,

I felt the desire building within me

to go to BK

and load up on insane amounts of grease.

The budget factor, however,

was fortunately too compelling to ignore.

                      It Seemed Odd

It was a one-day paid gig

wrangling the passing public

whilst the crew of a feature movie –

I don’t feel comfortable calling them films anymore,

especially since they stopped manufacturing film –

were shooting on location

in Hamilton Gardens’

Japanese Garden of Contemplation,

one of my favourite spots in the city.

The movie was set in postwar Tokyo,

or so they told me.

I saw several Japanese actors,

one of whom looked like a young Emperor Hirohito,

and other actors, putatively American,

dressed in 1940s US military-officer uniforms.

One of the best things about movie work

is location catering.

Out of deference to the Japanese members of the cast,

the lunch buffet offered

rice, of course,

tofu slices topped with roasted pumpkin,

dumplings stuffed with I know not what meat,

those spicy marinated cucumber spears,

and other Japanese-y delights,

but it struck me as odd,

as I tucked into a crumbed boneless chicken breast,

that the buffet table had held no fish,

since the Japanese build most of their meals, as far as I know,

around fish and rice,

Japan has the highest per capita fish consumption in all of East Asia,

and it imports more fish

than any other country in the world.

    Unworthy Of Forgiveness?

I know that dairying

is a cruel and dirty industry,

and the bobby calves’ eyes haunt me,

but I can’t help loving

the taste and texture

of uncompromisingly

strong, crumbly cheese

in my mouth

from time to time.

I wish I were a better person,

but I’m not.

                   Ethnic Relishes

He lived his life for the sensuality of savouring

splendidly rich ethnic relishes

Sweet, tart, savoury, spicy, subtle, hot –

they all infused meaning

into his otherwise flat, meaningless life.

A well-rounded sort,

he also dabbled in luscious condiments and pickles.

He wallowed in them orally every day:

with medleys of sandwiches, sliced cold meats,

eggs, spuds, sausages, roasted asparagus,

ready-cooked chooks, and cheese and crackers;

he always pantried about two dozen jars,

each gleaming glass vessel containing a different relish,

and as soon as one went empty

he’d replace it with one accommodating some condiment

radically different to the one just exhausted.

He was on first-name basis

with every relish-vending retailer

he could find – except for the supermarkets,

which mostly carried just traditional English ones, anyway;

he was a member of three online relish-of-the-month clubs,

and spent his leisure hours

giving life to googled recipes

from exotic, far-away places and eras.

Following a relish recipe translated from

a six-thousand-year-old archaeological find

was for him a transcendent experience.

He never felt anxiety or significant sadness;

he was indeed a man,

if you’ll forgive the idiom,

who truly relished life.

                Sliced Mustard

She eased me silently from her life,

or at least that tiny part of it

she’d deigned to share with me,

I guess because I just didn’t cut the mustard.

But then, mustard is tricky stuff to cut.

Mustard plants might be easy enough,

but they’re not really ‘the mustard’

until people process them.

Cutting those tiny mustard seeds, though,

would require keen hand-eye coordination

and an exceedingly sharp knife.

I have neither.

I could maybe separate powdered mustard

into little piles, but that’s not really cutting it,

and too much of it would stick to the knife.

Now, prepared mustard,

whether hot English or mild American or Dijon

or Chinese or Bavarian or what-have-you,

how the fuck was I to cut that?

It keeps glooping back to where it had been

before I addressed it with my knife or scissors.

Of course, I could have spread the mustard

on a slice of toast and cut that,

or simply just cut the mustard from my diet,

but I didn’t.

Probably one other reason why

I just didn’t cut the mustard with her

is because I habitually think like that.

                               Milk In Your Coffee?

Pasteurised milk? It’s an outrage!

Yadda yadda yadda unnatural blah blah blah kills off vitamins

yadda blah blah ruins the taste yadda blah yadda hard to digest

Yadda blah huff and puff

Raw milk? You should never!

Yadda yadda yadda diseases blah blah blah hipster bullshit

yadda blah blah health risks yadda blah yadda hard to get

Yadda blah huff and puff

Cow’s milk? How could you!

Yadda yadda yadda cruelty blah blah blah dirty dairying

yadda blah blah cholesterol yadda blah yadda factory farming

Yadda blah huff and puff

Soy milk? You’re not one of them!

Yadda yadda yadda chemicals blah blah blah not real milk

yadda blah blah hormones yadda blah yadda monocropping

Yadda blah huff and puff

Coconut milk? Give me a break!

Yadda yadda yadda processing poisons blah blah blah guar gum

yadda blah blah too damn la-di-da yadda blah yadda FODMAP

Yadda blah huff and puff

Almond milk? Forget it!

Yadda yadda yadda additives blah blah blah the environment

yadda blah blah costs too much yadda blah yadda health risks

Yadda blah huff and puff

Cremora? You gotta be kidding!

Yadda yadda yadda chemicals blah blah blah made by evil corporation

yadda blah blah saturated fats yadda yadda blah encourages obesity

Yadda blah huff and puff

Baileys Irish Cream? Well, yeah.

                          Ambience

Attached to a featureless motel

across the four-lane from the city’s oldest mall,

the diner was called something like, ‘Waffle House’,

although probably not that exactly.

Its décor was all vinyl and formica,

in pastel hues of pink and baby blue.

Its cuisine was noteworthy for its Country Boy Special,

a breakfast featuring the best biscuits and gravy

I could remember ever having eaten.

I took Bess, an older woman whom I was dating,

there once to enjoy the house specialty.

Bess’s ex-husband had been a lawyer,

one of the top criminal defense attorneys in all of Texas,

and she’d often helped him entertain clients,

so she knew what she was talking about

when she surveyed the restaurant’s clientele and loudly said,

“Everybody in this place looks like they just got out of prison

or are about to go in.”