Stuff from June 2017

                 Young Earth People, part 1

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

It seems to most people, understandably,

that things are the way they are – now,

and it follows that most people,

which are those who have little or no imagination

inadequate education, and a truncated ability to wonder,

think that with a few small wrinkles,

such as what telephones and pop music and fads are like,

things now are more or less the way things’ve always been.

The Treaty of Waitangi

started what we call New Zealand, more or less,

about 175 years ago,

and who knows anything much

about their great-great-great-great-great grandparents,

who lived back then, anyhow?

And then 30 or so generations

of Maori lived and died in Aotearoa

before the colonisers got things here under control,

more or less.

Sumerian civilisation lasted for about 2,500 years,

which was more than 100 generations,

much, much longer than the English language has been around,

but it ended about 4,000 years ago 

(imagine how many ‘greats’ to put before ‘grandparents’ there),

about the time that Chinese written history began.

Without imagination it could seem like the 80s,

or an egalitarian New Zealand culture.

All ancient history.

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

                  Young Earth People, part 2

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

It’s obvious why young-earth creationists think that way.

Who can imagine all the births and deaths

that went by before we could live?

We’re about 50,000 generations from being hominids,

compared to the young-earthers’ unchanging 250 or so.

Being simpletons, they simply cannot imagine

that much time and change,

or a universe that isn’t centred on them.

And if that’s too much, imagine how impossible it is

for them to imagine, for example,

that a species of egg-laying mammals

lived in Victoria, Australia for about 8½ million years,

but died out about 112½ million years ago,

far, far longer than people have been around in any form,

or than young-earthers claim that the whole universe has existed.

Minds that boggle at a thousand generations

must shut off entirely when the numbers reach the millions.

The light from the trillion suns of the Andromeda Galaxy,

(Imagination Failure! Imagination Failure! Ha-Oooga!),

the most distant of the twinkling lights

that people can see in the night sky,

took about 2,250,000 years to get here,

(Imagination Failure! Imagination Failure! Ha-Oooga!),

but when the End of Days brings the Rapture,

all the stars will fall from the sky, and why not?

Stars, after all, look like little things

that you could almost reach out and touch.

Some might even land in your back garden.

If you pray hard enough, though,

they just might land in your neighbours’ gardens

and leave yours alone.

        The Freedom Of The Ruling Class

They gleefully hoard more than they can ever need,

the rulers of the Earth,

but stay edgy,

all of them slaves to the bottom line at the end of the day.

They revel in their smug sense of superiority,

the rulers of the Earth,

souls being problematic,

desperate slaves to their inhuman business model’s needs.

They giggle like children as they befoul their playgrounds,

the rulers of the Earth;

consequences being for lesser people,

they themselves being simpering slaves to maximisation.

They’re chortling in their newly-grown beards,

the rulers of the Earth,

who can afford anything,

but are hopeless slaves to fashion.

           There’s A Word For This?

Walking into town along gracious George Street

the memory of a job I once had

whistled into my brain and filled it for a while –

the job was supervising the In-School Suspension program

at an extremely downmarket school in the 80s,

with an assortment of adolescents

coping with poverty and culture conflict and hormones

in an entertaining variety of ways –

especially the charming rogues,

and it struck me that it had been like living

in a Dickensian novel, only an Hispanic one,

but all this cranial tapestry was really just for me,

and this filled me with wonder.

It’s not quite an emotion, I don’t think,

but I was experiencing one of those feelings

that we don’t have a word for in English.

Maybe the Japanese have one

of their zinger words for it,

or the Germans one of their words

that take up an entire line of type,

or one that the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego

has encapsulated with pithy insight – I don’t know,

but the feeling was one of being simultaneously

keenly conscious of what an unlikely, magnificently amazing,

and beautiful phenomenon my brain is

and of how utterly insignificant all my neural activity

is to anything outside of my body, anyway.

  

      The Limits To Veracity

All my life, since I was a little kid,

one of the bedrocks of my self-respect

has been that I don’t lie.

Sometimes I may have had

to be a bit evasive, perhaps,

but when pinned down

I’ve always tried to tell the truth.

That’s one of the basic reasons

that brazenly lying people of power

disgust me as much as they do.

Oh judgemental me!

I do, however,

recognise an exception

to my no-porkies rule,

and that, of course,

is that it’s okay to lie to cops

in certain situations.

Maybe that’s why

corrupt politicians lie all the time –

they consider everybody –

you and me and reporters, let’s say,

to be something like cops.

Nah, Key and Turnbull and Putin and Trump

and their ilk have probably just been

psychopathic liars since they were little kids

and have some kind of a block in their brains

that prevents the truth from reaching their mouths.

                   Focused Passions

Robin scrubs each grape with a toothbrush

before popping it fastidiously into his mouth.

‘Hygiene is very important,’ he says.

Erana scatters the clothes pegs about on the ground

every time she removes her wash from the line.

‘I have a random-romantic personality,’ she says.

Ogden polishes his espresso machine daily

and won’t permit anyone to even say ‘plunger’ in his house.

‘Coffee is something to take seriously,’ he says.

Leonid painted all of his dog’s toenails

in high-viz reflective metallic orange.

‘Her safety and stylishness mean everything to me,’ he says.

Sam learnt glassblowing just so she could contrive

a water pipe that captures the smoke out of the bowl

and re-routes it back to the mouthpiece.

‘It’s a sin to waste marijuana smoke,’ she says.

                   Not A Cliché

She was wizard

with warm, comfortable relationships,

and a repeated victim

with passionate ones,

but passion is what she craved

despite the torment it brought her,

her being a suffering, talented, sensitive genius.

It’s difficult being that different

in that way,

and to be thoroughly aware of it, too.

                      Force-Fed Buzzwords

It came up on my screen as my device rebooted,

superimposed on some lame landscape photo I can’t get rid of:

“Get the apps you need for an absolutely awesome summer.”

and I thought:

‘Do people really need apps?

Like they need food and music and love?

Must people who don’t buy the correct toys

suffer through summers

that are less than absolutely awesome?

How have the lucky ones managed to tolerate

every summer until now without them?’

And what the fuck does ‘absolutely awesome’ mean, anyhow?

They could have just used the term ‘marketing-buzzword’ summer instead.

Same thing.

After all, how different is an absolutely awesome summer

to an absolutely fabulous one, Sweetie?

Before I was born they would’ve been pitching a top-drawer summer.

In the 70s and 80s it would’ve been an ultimate one.

Anyone up for having a world-class summer next year?

Or a fantastically inspirational one, or a quality one?

What if I wanted my summer to be woke?

Or maybe a just can’t-complain, not-that-bad one?

I mulled this over as the summer faded into autumn

without me buying any apps,

despite my screen nagging me multiple times daily.

I don’t think the summer I did have was absolutely awesome,

or even awesome without being absolutely so.

Hell, I’m in awe that I just fucking survived it,

but I rather think that no,

blowing my grog-and-weed money on apps

wouldn’t have helped it all that much

in the way of absolute awesomeness.

              Family Pride

If one of my daughters were pregnant,

which neither of them is,

and asked for my input

in regard to naming the sprog,

which neither of them would do,

I’d point out my preference

for honouring ancestors

by naming their descendents after them.

Now, my much-loved Uncle Joe

was a helluva guy,

much warmer toward me

than was his sister, my mother.

A former barnstorming semipro baseballer

and a World War Two hero,

he settled down as an interior decorator.

My father’s father was also Joe,

but I don’t remember him;

the stories I’ve heard about him, though,

portray him as something of a hard case.

He was a devout Communist,

and even an admirer of Stalin.

I believe he worked as a salesman.

In his photos he’s invariably dapper

and smoking a long, thick cigar.

Therefore, a grandson of mine could be Joseph,

or maybe Josef or Josephus or Jozip

or even Yossi or Yusef or Giuseppe or José.

A granddaughter could of course be Josephine,

or maybe Josine or Josey or Joelle or Joey or

Jolene, Jolene! JOLENE! JO-LEE-EE-EEN!

or maybe just plain Jo.

It’d be cruel to name anyone JoMama, though.

Stuff From May 2017

     The Butterfly Effect

I’ve seen the maths,

even if I didn’t understand it,

but mathematics is mathematics,

there’s no arguing with that.

So a small change in one state

of a deterministic nonlinear system

(How’s that for mathspeak?)

can eventually bring about huge changes

in a distant place and time.

SciFi authors love it.

But if the flapping of one butterfly’s wings

in the Amazon jungle

can cause wild weather in Northern Japan,

what about the flapping wings

of the other billions of butterflies

in Brazil and everywhere else.

Seagulls and hummingbirds, of course,

flap their wings all over the place, too,

each having its own effect,

I suppose.

It’s obviously too complicated to comprehend,

and I like it like that.

                       Tunkela

My first wife was a strikingly beautiful woman,

and judging by her facebook photos

she still is one in her late sixties,

the product of a magnificent mixture

of ancestral DNA:

Mayan, Mestizo, and Lombard.

In Louisiana, of course,

some people considered her to be a nigger,

maybe because of her curly reddish Italian hair

and hard-to-pin-down facial features,

despite her creamy complexion,

which is much lighter than my skin tone.

After our divorce, which tore me up painfully,

one of my older relatives told me,

“Okay Richard, now no more tunkelas,”

‘tunkela’ being the Yiddish word for ‘darkie’.

How deeply racism sends its roots!

How bullshit those roots are!

‘White’ is clearly an ogre of the imagination

and not a description of skin colour.

Only albinos are actually sorta white,

but in racist minds albino Africans or Asians

or Native Americans aren’t white at all.

Shit, lots of bigots don’t think that Jews are White,

so where does that leave the anti-tunkela crowd?

After we sketched out our ancestries,

the nice clerk in the New Orleans courthouse

wrote ‘White’ for me and ‘Indian’ for my love

on the part of our marriage licence

that demanded our races.

For statistical purposes only.

          Not Gonna Guess

Intermittent light showers;

brolly up and down;

the distant sky in slapdash

watercolour-wash greys;

the close and distant treelines

also awash with faded autumn tones;

sauntering with my dog

through a hazy, sometimes-light,

sometimes-medium mist

that emphasised a sense

of blurred, indefinite other-worldliness

– okay, enhanced by my cataracts

and analgesic medication –

resulting in a powerful illusion of spirituality

that was probably really something else.

There’s no way of knowing.

                         Emotion

I distrust emotions; I think they’re archaic

and evolutionarily anachronistic,

counterproductively vestigial

hormonal reactions that we’re stuck with, like it or not,

but which people seem to like to flaunt and glorify,

as if they’re noble and filled with some higher fineness,

with hyper-emotional music and song,

stage and movie dramas,

and drama-queen displays in everyday life,

all of which turn my stomach and frost my arse,

but are unfortunately natural and universal

amongst us humans.

My own emotions have almost all

eventually ended up causing me trouble,

and often internal agony,

when I’ve been unable to control or manage them,

which of course I’ve often failed to do,

despite my awareness of the grinding internal conflict

with my knowing better,

when I’ve been fooled into the illusion of romantic love,

or when my daughters were little

and reached out for me to pick them up,

or when my dog’s gone missing,

or when I recall certain aspects

of the trauma of my childhood.

I know what hate feels like,

and it doesn’t feel at all good.

             Passive Aggression

All my personal relationships,

as it were,

are so fucked up

that in most cases my available

relational options

for communicating directly with those I know

are to:

   a) be untruthful, or at least dishonest,

   b) express thoughts that can only result in

conflict,

   c) acknowledge the validity of their

documentable indifference to me as a feeling person

due to my multiple personality flaws,

behaviour most people incorrectly

deem to be passive-aggressive, or

   d) just shut the fuck up.

Since I can’t bring myself to follow options a) or b),

and since people treat c) like some sort of

unforgiveable sin subject to accusational judgementalism,

I’m stuck with d), hiding out at home by myself,

communicating only indirectly

and judiciously

by keyboard

like this.

      Don’t They Award Ribbons Or Something?

Considering all the medications I need to keep going,

I feel as if my survival and ability to function okay

are largely a matter of my GP doing

something like a project for a high-school science fair.

bullshit

claptrap

malarkey

baloney

bilgewater

hogwash

tommyrot

horsefeathers

nonsense

nonsense on stilts

flapdoodle

balderdash

poppycock

bunkum

humbug

rot

bosh

bunk

Irish bull

drivel

rubbish

taradiddle

garbage

tosh

cobbers

hokum

twaddle

tripe

kak [S.Africa]

guff

hooey

crap

bollocks

heiferdust

barmpottery

bollocks

               Shark Cage

Do you trust people?

I don’t.

Oh, I trust some of them

to do the most dickheaded thing possible

in any situation,

but that’s not the same thing.

So I’ve come to live my life

in an invisible shark cage,

satisfying my hyperactive curiosity

by looking out,

and reading,

because even when the ocean seems clear,

whenever I’ve let any part of me,

with puppylike trust,

stray outside of my cage,

the sharks,

disguised as unique human beings,

some wearing friendship masques,

have ripped that exposed part off of me

painfully,

and made it disappear.

It’s definitely safer inside my cage,

and I intend to stay here,

but of course as a fool I never learn,

no matter how much I know.

Do you trust people?

I don’t.

But there they are.

All over the place,

    No Longer A Beardo Weirdo

For half a century my beard

made nice people look at me askance

wondering why I just didn’t shave,

prospective employers balk at hiring me,

as if I’d scare their customers,

and cops think that I looked suspicious,

probably up to something unlawful;

what was worse was

that I, perhaps consequentially,

found myself feeling

an involuntary bonding

with other bearded men,

even though they were probably

as likely to be shitnozzles

as anybody else.

Now beards have come into fashion,

and although my facial hair no longer marks me

as an enemy of polite society,

and the cops no longer give a shit,

heaps of them being bearded now too,

I shamefully miss

being so obviously out of fashion.

At least it takes more than just not shaving

to keep my head’s exterior up-to-date,

and I don’t sport that swept-up hairdo

that fashionable men all copy each other wearing.