A draft is caused by ill fitting doors.

One set of ideas I tend to have fun with occasionally is that even my own art will last beyond my death and be found interesting to the extent it could even be defined as great and therein become a set of resources, for not only other artists, but that great clinging and often swamping phalanx of opinion making, the academic.

And so I wonder how I could disguise the scents I might leave in my work and throw them off what could actually be a trail so, and this is where it's fun, it sends them off into the real bush where they might forget such trivialities and learn survival with their own brilliance.

Except all of that means I have to own a foreknowledge that I might actually be good at this stuff called art. Thats, of course, the tricky part, but it's good at the same time, because whilst one is playing with these ideas of possible genius, really, is one quite the shining light or is it just a tendency to get lost in our own mirage making? And this is good because it seems somehow to skirt edges of madness, you can actually feel the stupidity, and scariness, of such over intellectualised indulgence... so you just go back to doing art, plain and simple.

But that world of critical judgements, somewhat cast aside as ridiculous, is still there, it is still alive even while art is being made and right through to the sermons of it's mightiness and glory well past the use by date of it's authors corpse becoming food for all manner of things crawling and tunneling under graveyards.

I can't help then, having touched on the insanity of measuring myself as worthy or not, look out into the world and see how this constant measuring of that which is not only dead and gone but also that which is seemingly alive and well is a vast and engulfing industry which baffles me.

I am right here writing therefore it seems safe to assume I am a writer and yet when I look at the world of writing it seems a whole other monster. Something I might stand on the edges of and wonder where the admittance gates are and how it might allow me ejecting myself into it, or even dejecting myself into it, because it seems to have all these rules and regulations wherein the defining of takes precedence over the doing of.

Because I am in a world and it's full of people, people I come across everyday doing all kinds of mundane people doing things, and yes, I have chosen that art thing to do which at it's very basic doing is simply being a decorator for all these people I share my life with.

The simple question for me then is if I enter this world of writing does it mean that all these wonderful normal people must start carrying dictionaries so when I use the word uxorious, because friends and fellows I have entered the world of writing and seek to be a 'writer' therefore my... what the fuck is that word, even now I've... ah, my vocabulary is a wide, wide sword and sharpened, oops, made poignant to keep the thrill alive of other members of my golden gild (guild), that all these unwashed whom I share my days with rise up with me willingly because they now, almost without blinking or even having the brain stuff even close to non-comprehension, that uxorious means ' having or showing a great or excessive fondness for ones wife.'

That then is the question. Specialised knowledge. Do we go off into these new worlds and feel fitting into these worlds is fitting of us? That they are big enough and with enough adherents to these specialisations that we might have enough memory retention, having amassed this new currency of defining, that we can survive in them and that they will survive alongside us?

Or do we willingly embrace possibly being uncouth, unknowing and ignorant, and just swim in the pool without regard to it's depth and how long we might hold our breath as we dive deep into for the medals such feats might bring?

And so two worlds exist. At least for me they do. One world is simply the one I have always inhabited and within that world I have founds words both reading them and writing them an interesting and fun thing I can play in, and this other world, this new one I might enter because this playing of words might seek to be beyond amateurish and become professing and currency worthy, is a whole other thing and it's seems to have forgotten it's use, by my simplified reckoning, to be much greater than merely decorative.

Creativity; skill, sensitivity and trauma?

Someone gave me a nice big slice of unpublished writing the other day.

It was great in so many ways I think it's going to take rather a while to wade through all the possibilities it's set off.

What's been brewing for me for rather a long time is writing a book, which would possibly be more like a collection of essays, sort of tentatively called 'Creativity for Dummies' except that most probably, as a title, wouldn't strike the audience I might be after to even pick it up.

And one of the chapters, or essays, would have been about how this piece of writing lent to me, in confidence, started out except I can't, of course, use an excerpt from it but I did come across a similar portrayal of the ideas behind it while watching one of my favourite shows QI.

It was the story of a composer when young who'd had synaesthesia but didn't know it. His parents had taken him to concerts and he'd taken for granted that the lights being darkened before the music played was because everyone else had what he had which was the music creating all kinds of colour displays for him to enjoy.

So this young man possibly without the synaesthasia might not have been so engulfed in music to go on to be a composer as well he might not have been 'placed' in an environment whereby the music he had access to created the same chance to inhabit it so personally to set him on a course of it being his life's work.

To me then this question of how we perceive, and even possibly much depth there is behind the perception, is of just as much importance, if not more, than what is being perceived.

My own family story, and I remember nothing of this yet my whole life has been about adjusting and adapting to it, is that at about a year and a half old I wasn't interested in life, I was lethargic and un-animated somehow so my parents took me to a doctor and this man said my eyes weren't very good and they needed to be stimulated and he suggested that my father take me for walks and encourage me to look at things. So he did but then Dad added his own two cents worth and gave me paper and crayons to draw what might have interested me.

We could say then that this is how we learn to draw but what also sits underneath that is I learned to be in the world by watching and walking, journeys of looking which were then followed by attempts to record those journeys.

This though came with a side effect and that was that I drew so much most of it was thrown out, it was waste paper, and good riddance too as I doubt much of it was good but this too has effected my art practise quite significantly... I'm really not very interested in the art I make after it's finished. I mean sucking up the odd bit of admiration never killed anyone so I've never been entirely adverse to that part of the process, the results of doing, but it always was the doing that has done it for me though, as I'm getting older, the significance of the watching is becoming something just as, if not even more, important than the doing.

Then when I was 5, at the end of my first year at school, there was another story which too seems to have significant bearing and that was my father telling me that all the drawings we'd done during the year and took home on that last day shouldn't be thrown out, cast aside on the walk home as all the other art I did, and he made me promise.

It was a steelmill town and so the fathers of first years were given the afternoon off for this special occasion, maybe part of a folklore lazily abided to as some illusion within industry to the care of children, I have no idea what it was but, in this family story, it was quite an event.

As the story goes all the other children dutifully arrived bearing their gifts and in driveways down our street the glories of life were revitalised except where was I? Time passed and still there was no me but then eventually I did arrive though I didn't have any drawings... Dad was angry and I told lies "They kept them, I wasn't allowed them'. My Dad, as far as knew never hit me but I'm pretty sure I would have gotten a good telling off and I would surely felt scared, fearful and also, within that, disturbed at not being believed.

Turns out I wasn't lying as after summer holidays and going back as a first grader I came home with a note that my drawings were so advanced they'd been sent to the local university... end of story.

Here I sit now just about fifty years later and I want to somehow unravel what seems, in shorthand, to be creativity as skill, sensitivity and trauma. That the three together somehow make up a trinity of sorts whereby it isn't about gifts at all, there is no instilled ability, or at least not so much as a possibly quite slight inclination towards certain mind-body skills being a little easier to get started in, but that its far more about somehow setting the scene in which the three can come together and be what will eventually result in some talent.

Now I'm suddenly reminded of a quote.

A man who works with his hands is a labourer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.    Louis Niser.

Quite interestingly I could easily then ascribe hands to skill, brain to sensitivity and heart to trauma without too much of a jump. Oops maybe its brain to trauma and heart to sensitivity... hmm?

Except why trauma? Trauma comes from the Greek wound and this is interesting.

I'm kind of sensing now that I'm on the right track... theres something here worth unraveling.

Trauma then is quite loaded in a psychological way... as in it's not a good thing and best avoided but if we take it back to it's original sense and that of wound it's almost a different story altogether, it's not a bad thing at all and maybe even a necessity. It's then, not quite the 'that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger thing, the idea that to get talent, ability and skills that theres an abrasive thing going on, sandpaper on wood even, to polish and make bright.

The kid who loves running and gets faster and slips and falls, abrades skin and bleeds, teaches themselves to be more aware, not so lost in the talent but aware that it can cost, that slipping away from vigilance means hurt...

Then there is the idea of where a line might be and where things become dangerous.Is this then where sensitivity comes in?

Now I'm lost. I'll have to come back to this.

Shifting couches.

These days, in terms of my internet addiction, I have two favourite hangouts.

That opening sentence already offers a problem worth pulling apart, I started with an idea, jumped in and straight away found a quite reverberate dissonance between addiction and favourite... how I get anything done alludes me, but, and this is me and how I work, let it go, leave it for some other future unraveling.

Though what is interesting is that I could be more proficient in my use of words, know them better, but I don't so I grabbed quickly what was to hand, that which easily sufficed, and therein by doing that but at the same time wondering why those words might do the job I have uncovered another sense of myself in the world worth investigating, and in my usual laconic style, let go now whatever time that might be need , choose it's own gap of relevance later, find itself as opposed to me pushing the issue. Therein to if I was more proficient this lack might not have arrived, too confident to question... keep it away!


So these two places (favourites) that interest me are facebook and spiritualforums and what interests me is that they are almost worlds apart. Each though has a kind of stated, though possibly more unstated, sense of itself and what it is, and these two against each other are almost poles apart. One a place for lazy relaxing and the other for concerted seriousness, one a wide but shallow pool, or even puddle, and the other a deep shaft filled with water though it might better regard itself as a lake.

Me, then, I've picked two almost opposing ways of being, both as a projection of self and as a sponge to define self, and so can I act in SF (spiritual forms) as if I'm on FB (facebook) and vice versa, or even more pertinently, can I just be me honestly exactly the way I am in both places without regard to the set, but unstated, natural foliage of each environment?

And this too raises other questions alike what is the real me? Is there even such a thing as a solid centre under the chocolate coating which meets the world, or is that too actually an opposite whereby often the hard candy surface is the outside and the inner thing, the deeper us, isn't solid but soft and malleable alike chocolate?

I don't know? But I love that not knowing... I am the idiot boy floundering about having learned all these jerky non-syncopated movements are actually my own naive dance in life... That's a recent realisation too, that there are no answers, there are no solutions, and it's absolutely all about questions, that perception, as in how we look and see, isn't a fixed thing at all, that our perception is our playground.

And thats it really. Giving ourselves room to move. Find spaces and move in them. Not too wide though, have edges... edges are feedback.

Okay, back to square one, SF and FB.

FB seems this place where we go to relax, and either take ourselves out of the world we've engulfed ourselves within to throw amusing anecdotes about as if we were fairies throwing the fairy dust of happiness about, or it is this very serious place where the tools we might wield if we were Helen Clark or Donald Trump, those weapons of shift that make worlds move, we can put the worlds to right by telling everyone how it should be. This I find interesting. That its both a place of rest and a place of action... but each in negative somehow.

Whereas SF is an entirely different creature, yet it is somehow the same too. SF, as so many places where learning is the stated commitment, seems to revolve around a caste system, that it's where the experts are and if you want to learn this particular learnedness then be a learner and know your place. In that regard too then there seems far more jostling for position than there is a set of principles about what passing on knowledge is all about.

Now for some reason I got handed a memory. And this serves quite nicely to explain somewhat how I work. I focus in on something, this writing, and I just follow it as if it's a prey I need to catch, circling around it getting closer, but then I break away, as if I completely forget what is uppermost and concentrated and just shoot off empty headed... I did that. I think it's years of meditation and being able to quiet the mind, let go all relevance and just empty my head... and how that, over time, builds up a sense of trust, a kind of vitalised calm almost, that no matter how determined one might be to own something, to have crafted it into use in the world... you can just let it go, it doesn't matter.

And it's total irony because having let something go it sort of does it's own work, becomes almost individualised and finds it's way home having lived life, even as a succession of empty moments, as a competent being... words fail me so much. (Excuse me, as in words fail me so much, it's my sense of how and what I am are mostly intuitive and this writing thing is a squidgy bloggy mass I'm not fighting with but wondering at as I troll this space between new tool, writing, and old task, being.)

Anyway, this memory is from my mid twenties and myself and my group of friends had turned up at an absolutely huge bonfire on the foreshore of Mangere bridge for an evening of amusements. It was massive, or at least it had been as it was now dying down but the massiveness was still there as it was about 10 metres, at least, from side to side.

At this time, way back then, we were all fans of drinking beer and smoking dope, and I don't know how many others did this but our thing was to drink about 3-5 bottles of beer, be warmed up as it were, and then smoke a few joints together.

In this way, a bit of drinking first, we still had quite good control of our bodies but they were looser, more apt to sway easily, and then when we added the dope, a jolt almost the other way, our brains kinda joined in with this really neat fun weirdness appreciation... So here we are facing this huge burning mass, having just reached that enjoyable and subservient call to play, and me and this one other rascal suddenly decided to go fire running... whatever that is.

I think I went first, but I do know that me and other rascal boy had made this completely stupid pact of idiocy. so completely out of the blue, as there was quite a crowd gathered and this in and of itself was somehow an important factor, and without out any reconnaissance to even see if it was doable, I went running through this fire, jumping from cold spot to cold spot closely followed by my friend... And we made it... we didn't fucking die.

The thing was, and I can almost know this now, except even now it scares me a little, is that we knew somewhere in ourselves that luck was a real thing, that if you swayed your perceptions just so that on the edges of that your senses could pick up possibilities of enactment which were existent, in a real and tangible way, if you didn't think and just did. It was intuitiveness taken to the levels of dangerous and thrilling... and it was a very heady mixture,

But then again, what we also did a lot of, and never did alcohol during, was ride motorcycles as quickly as possible as much as possible under the influence of dope, not a lot, but just enough to focus and somehow get into a zone where time and space slowed down and one could weave through what now became ponderous.

Me and this fellow did our run, our brains somehow detected at a pace our thinking mind couldn't keep up with that this wasn't a difficult thing at all but just balance and a jump from rock to rock, as if these rocks were within ponds of water, and that within that that it was fire made it seem spectacular... it would be impressive and we would be admired!

But then, and it was admired, because others had a go at it. Oh no, oh fuck! reality came biting and gnawing as others far less fleet of foot and further along in drunkeness suddenly saw a way to be counted as brave too.

Suddenly and without remorse our actions were setting a very dangerous precedent as idiots who should know better sought to follow in our foot steps.

Luckily no one fell. It was quite simple but even as it was simple it was also very dangerous and as I look back at it now it was as if a group think took over. Me and my friend had decided somehow to push this group think by being irresponsible and that twanging of a deeper sense brought forth a responsibility in the group to dampen that irresponsibility... but in  the jarring of reality, the willingness to stretch boundaries, even in my semi inebriated state I got a real sense of what responsibility might really be.

And that was no matter how capable I might be that it was far less about proving that and far more about realising others capabilities in a relationship with my own... that's to me what being responsible is... at least in regard to capability and talent.

Ah, and now I know why that memory bubbled up from the silts of my life.

It is that I could conform, reasonably accommodate what I think I am, to preset definitions of being on both FB and SF, except I question my conformities between these chosen poles, and that this then leads quite nicely into one of my favourite quotes.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw: Man and Superman (1903) 'Maxims for Revolutionists'

Basically then the reasonable embrace becoming heroes and set the stage whereby their capabilities are shown for applause... except that's easy, that's what everyone does. I am impressive therefore I am.

Whereas me I look at FB and wonder why it seems so readily to conform to a way of being, a way of use that is merely a perception shared around and agreed on. Who is it says it should be a certain way? And SF too seems to somehow skirt the issue of pupils becoming teachers and most often be about teachers defining what great teachers they are simply by hanging out with the highest knowledge... stupid.

Well, maybe not stupid, but certainly boring because I really don't see progress as a thing driven by exclusivity in the sense that great athletes being hero's is to me more about being allowed to sit on a couch and watch from the sidelines whereas inclusivity, which spellcheck tells me isn't a word yet, is far more about how a great athlete might be ignored and shifting couches about become an exercise regime.

Grumbly bastards.

It's a real pity but some stuff you gotta be real secret agent like with codes, mis-information and double bluff stuff. So this day had just been cloaked in dagger stuff with right at the end me admitting my thing, and it just occurred at that moment, is that I kinda con the con-men, nothing nefarious mind, gently as she goes and all that... but still.

But let this cliche start at the beginning, let's wind it all back, and push the start button just after dawn, well a fair bit after dawn as it was still dark when I got up, but suffice to say the chill was still on many.

Another anonymous government department meeting to decide the countries future even whilst that percentage is well behind the decimal point, it's still a percentage and the percentage is me.

Even outside waiting I've decided to spread the chat about and it's old Holden's and what a lovely scarf that is and if I ever did get to Fiji it'd be up in the mountains with the dusky hillbillies... I'm contagious today.

And inside and it's a nod and a wink, bygone days of growin' weed, the motorcycles almost given away 'cause luck shouldn't be tempted too much even if it grows wings. Man, rest in peace, I have got your back.

So outta there and still a free man I went chasin' after the Nuiean but he weren't there so I passed on the good luck that I might be able to swing a buyer for his trike to the wife and theres a man in the office, all above the boards, and he's on our side. She'd said no money comin' in, no pay cheques at all, and he could sell some 'merican iron but he does love that trike, and yes, learn to let his love go and she's smiling.

But she did tell me where he's at. Top of the road, a rented space, and there I am and again I'm offering connections just found to the Hindu man and his son who told me he can do the moon walk, except in my haste I managed to lock the key in the car. I found some of that strapping plastic but it wasn't wide enough and the door jambs are too deep anyways for that old trick. 'Got insurance? Just smash the window" said a few, but back into the dairy asking for wider tape to at least try that way the old man behind the counter hands me a wire coat hanger. That's even older school than my old school but by then a Tongon chap turns up with a window wiper tensioning rod... they also make good thumb piano blades. Long story short the Nuiean turned up too and we levered the top of the door with a screw driver, and as all the attempts to move handles and pull knobs didn't work, it was simply a matter of grabbin' the key sittin' on the seat in plain site, duh, and fishin' it out through the forced gap. Sorted and bows all round.

The days still well early so I head off to see the Californian. He's almost as old as my Mum and I found him way back in the late eighties to teach me some skills. But he was way expensive and it turned out this land was too mad and intricate for a man used to a Long Beach telephone directory so we did swaps where I'd find stuff he needed and he'd give me info and choice bit's of exotic timber to play with.

'Cause he'd called me, got hold of me, and it might even be work so off I go and this guy is a legend. Brought up on a military base where naughty was the kids takin' tanks for joy rides then got a technical education and was there in Nasa for Rockwell doing Apollo shit, dropped out which was the done thing and supplied exotic weed to the Grateful Dead and other such luminaries of the time before easing back into repairin' and moddin' the gizmo's for sound weirdness.

So yup, we go back a ways, though I don't see him much and it's another wife answering another back door and the Californian ain't doin' too good but she did go and ask which kinda makes me a credit card with preferred status. Hope he's not dyin' though...

Then I remember power station girl lives up the road, the new rented abode got for a song,  and just remember the address. Yup, 'nother long story but she's missed her bus so a chat as we drive her to a festival movie... nice.

Nagging though isn't the word, kinda of an itch, as i drive away so the meeting spot it is. That infamous road where all you gotta do is find a place, which I've got, and all sorts of weird and wonderful gets refound, linked in and connected up, for whatever dastardly plot might need dastarding.

And there he is, even he knows it right away. Turns out he's got screen man's old place and a dead man's collection of super high end thermionic play stuff, hand wound this and NOS glass bottle that from a Maestro I should have known... and it seems I was in his will, which was never written of course, but praise be, it's all for me. Quite possibly a done deal when I mentioned that this summer's playlist will feature lifting a roof to do a new room designed at base camp to be the electronics and yoga studio.

Maybe the industry of music is calling out again to jump right in 'cause then it occurs grumbly bastard, last time I visited, with his heaped up collections of tarnish and well handled, might be worth a visit. His initial though is abrupt, like I said grumbly bastard, but I'm just here to browse but then he clicks and it's a marathon of inconsequential connections from Italian brassworks to garden store and poolshop chemistry... good, we're friends again, not that I ever ain't with nobody, but peoples funny that way. Get a glitch and ride the self importance scolding all and sundry... grumbly bastards.

All the stuff's fair heapin' up like the World's well over my holiday and wants me back... maybe that's how it works though? Some ultra fine line between completely uninterested and fuckin' passionate as, maybe not even a line and the only two for one deal worth not reading the fine print... ever.

Now I'm home, the cats are fed, Cookies sleeping and Tutties out patrolling the boundaries... time for a fire!

Dole boy 2

About nine years ago I decided to go off the dole. 

It was the morning after the long incumbent but dulling Red government of Helen Clark lost out to Mr Key's shiny new Blue version willing to have a go at our behest. Apart then from the previous evenings gameshow of 'Democracy has Talent' it wasn't unlike most mornings of late where first orders were getting down to the Winz office  to play with computers and look like I was searching for work.

 But this morning the resident Bigman, the sergeant major type, called us all outside for a talk and proceeded to blame us lowest of the low, us lepers of the consumerist ethos, that it was all our fault: that, emphatically and with the gusto, this soapbox mini tyrant (and all bottom up purveyors of the bureaucratic kingdoms know each office always has at least one staff member with a seething subconscious anger utilised to play with fear as a motivational tool) had the audacity to vent his frustrations saying that because we basically didn't have the will and or the skill to enter the workforce that the Great hope of New Zealand had been vanquished.

What utter rot! And I just could not see myself remaining as cannon fodder on which this type of man could feed his almost berserkerish self contempt. I would not play a part in enabling this type of behaviour. And why? It's because even whilst I've always enjoyed my self determined rascalism flitting through the system able to keep it fun, this episode was too disturbing, too scarily real somehow, and I just couldn't dig deep enough to balance off my easy non-chalance with a system that really has to work for others, that survival wasn't a mere game, so I ran, I escaped.

Nine years later and here I am trying to get back in, what a puzzle it is. What an absolute maze of interconnections between governments departments, banks and other newly branded mills of number crunching post modernism's which can only be made by deft use of both a cellphone and a computer to the extent you almost need a benefit just to get on the benefit. 

Okay, I've made it a little harder on myself after five years ago getting thrown out of a dealer gallery in Parnell, as I'd followed up the art thing again after leaving the benefit world and by luck and not a little scheming, plus a finally embraced conviction to stop playing to the audience and dumbing myself down for cash, I'd ended up cohorting with a slightly swarthy chap in charge of a space who'd been born and bred, alike me, close by the fuming stacks but had had a brilliant father who went from garage invention to full blown industrial competence and so lifted the family unit out of the doldrums of the working class, and given these freedoms he played at art and let me try out for his stable, be a fledgling colt.

History has a way of repeating itself, especially when you kinda don't want it to, so a year or two goes by and it's fun having money again, becoming a practiced racer, coupla falls, a few injuries, but nothing major and I've actually just had my first big race and I won! But this ain't horse racing and the one big difference is it's more like stock trading. I create the stock and the trader trades it. In my case though the trader says it's worth trading but I can't be bothered. Seems my trainer, back to the horsey metaphors, decided my old injuries should come back to haunt me, I was over them but it seems he wasn't so it was lesson time. Bastard! That, taking time to learn proper where you are and what's at stake, is a provision I hadn't seen. I'm still on the wrong side of the tracks and I'd burned all the candles on this one, the pastures, on home farm, were bare and I'd promised prime fertilizer! Oh well, play with the big boys, take the big boy whacks.

Humble pie, hmm, nice.

The storm settles and I'm at the gallery one sunny day, having accepted my fate that a house up on the hill is still somewhat a ways off but a doable thing in the long run when out of the blue, my boss man and benefactor sees one of his own benefactors come ambling onto our chosen field of play, and I, being quickly sidelined, watch him scoot across the pasture and play out a loathsome display of bowing and scrapping... what? Flashback to that cool Otara winter morning but it's a sunny Parnell day and here's my own tyrant  becoming a genuflecting pauper... and the same dread was on me, the same hyper reality that was fight of flee, something that needed acknowledgement but I just couldn't see beyond feeling scared... boogie man under the bed stuff. A wound from the way backs opening up and bleeding fear.

Somehow though I'd learned something along the way, some wisdom had found me better prepared, some course in battleground medicine, 'cause I conned the conman, I got my deposit back and I was outta there. More on this later maybe, still a bit of a state secret.

Decided I'd  become ambitionless, meditate heaps and heaps and see if enlightenment were possible. Oops, that's right I did go back to school for a year and play with Mud, clay technology I think it was called, which was fun until they, all these upper middle class housewives playing at craft, kinda cottoned onto me being a proper artist and the games of both belittling and applauding that skill set began. Those potters have a real problem being labeled crafts people… and who even cares!

That outta the way, and honestly, and in hindsight, it was more about student allowance than it ever was about getting a skill, then it was three years chopping firewood and collecting water. The bare minimum of life action to sustain as much as possible a non-action life.

Now, which is incidentally much bigger and wider these days, here I am attempting to sign on and all I have left is a license. And this, my only verifying document, I'd lost a year ago and as I tried to get another, and needed some full size piece of paper (a long form birth certificate) from a government building in Canada, which at the time was engulfed in blizzards not seen in decades, it became a story about relatives and justice of the peace's battling arctic conditions, as I myself battled across phone lines just so box ticking could be done on this side of the world. This would have enlightened a more cognisant soul that bureaucracies had changed somewhat since my explorations began in being desireless.

I am, for my sins, quite the life long on and off again member of the fraternity known as unemployed, so getting into the office, Winz, and being recognised, was easy. In out no problems but the next morning turning up for the lecture and being told this load of about twenty pages had to be got through in twenty days, or we start over, and that if successful at completing all this then a meeting would be scheduled and if everything was above board and proper… then we'd finally be signed to get payments, I knew it wasn't going to be simple.

Now I'll go back even further in my own life, to set the scene, as a on off dole bludger with all kinds of intermittent attempts and often failures at self employment, feast or famine my lot as it were, and so one can imagine that kind of life doesn't really give one a very reliable set of reference markers as to whether one is actually quite clever, this given some of my business ideas worked rather well, or stupid… as failures seemed to follow on quite naturally after successes. 

I felt I needed a baseline because the normal rules of what success was just didn't seem to apply. By then I'd already been on TV, nightline, a few times for my exploits in Art but I'd read this thing somewhere that as an artist newpaper bits were good, magazines were better but if you got to TV you'd be rolling in it... yet I wasn't at all.

And one thing I figured that might at least give me a touchstone was a measure of intellect so I went off in search of IQ tests, as this seemed a fairly obvious way to measure such things, but a first reconnaissance of the yellow pages, this was like back in ‘94, revealed doing such to be very expensive things that only happened in surgeon drive in Remuera so I dug deeper and found out about Mensa, their test was only ten bucks and if you passed you were a genius, top one percent for your age and all that. 

And I passed, Good golly, not merely clever but possibly a potential genius,and it was almost scary... bugger! All those books I'd read in my earlier years about the great and the glorious, those vanguards of progress I'd hoped to emulate in some small way, little ol' me might actually be standing on some well lofty shoulders. But then again, the whole hand to mouth thing was still ever present and I'd spoken on the phone to one or two members of the club and that brought me back to earth quite nicely. It seemed genius level IQ is far less about saving the world than it is about living in the world and saving yourself... and if theres one thing I've always intuitively understood, I understood that.

Here I am then, writing all this down and I'm not a writer. Except I am because I'm writing... That's kinda how I've always done it, not pretending I am what I'm not but deciding something is worth investigating, some skill it might be worth having, so I do it. Get prepared as much as I think I might need to then jump in and see what happens. That's, then, where the genius thing tends to get complicated. I get into these weird and wonderful explorations of whatever, get a few skills under my belt and then the fun really gets going and, often, before I know it I've used up all my resources and I'm penniless... But thank God we have this welfare state, this beautiful, beautiful caring and sharing enshrined in our sense of being a Nation, because people like me, despite our best efforts to try and be useful in some way, we make mistakes, we end up needing help.  

So as our Prime Minister recently advocated during a TV bit standing out the front of Winz "Just go to Winz, go in those doors, all help is offered". So that's what I did but arriving on that second day and sitting through a lecture and going away with an almost incomprehensible maze of connections to be fabricated in digital airs that even myself, who many years ago found the Mensa test fun, it's like it's already wanting to be thrown in the too hard bin.


And what scares me is that they know this (and even more that they don't!), that these planners and scammers, spin doctors and witch proctors, at logistical levels have created within this systemic overburdening of an individual's need to be defined as a card carrying member, when they are least able to carry out these required duties, a maze of box ticking complexities that they know full well how many fall off to the waysides.

 That all these departments of the public service, at some level of defining themselves as leak proof so that not a single tarnished penny gets away from them and ends up where it isn’t supposed to go, have created such a perplexity of connected digital relevances to be ticked off as appropriate to their needs to define a reliable and efficient machine they can trust, that even trying to enter it and make use of it’s supposedly offered possibilities seems almost impossibly difficult.

Article for the Herald No1.

There was this little video thing on Facebook this morning, one of those suggested post thingies that comes and goes and are usually little more than fillers and you don't really want to click as you know facebook, in it's infinite and insatiable wisdom in knowing what's right for you, is going to log that and chase you like it now knows who you are and 'exactly' what you're into.

This one though, this little innocuous film, seemed to touch me somehow as worth further investigation, the chosen still and that particular grouping of words spoke somehow, even if it was 'seems irrelevant, but what's seeing itself as relevant now?'

The thing is that if I was a proper writer, with an education and such like, I suppose I would have at least made notes, grabbed book marks, tagged, bagged and snagged this particular nugget of potential wisdom creation, but I didn't. Somewhat 'cause I'm not a proper writer but mostly because I prefer seeing whether something relevant sticks, letting stuff go, but then wondering why it comes back... long after the ability to even be bothered trying to find it comes back and kicks me in the foot I shoot myself mistakenly by even noticing whatever.

The thing was this video was so modern, so up to date but lacking too, that's what got me. A youtube channel in the making, how to be savvy with cash, and some ridiculous mixing of appellative possibilities supposed to feign real understanding... and even her head and body were moving heaps, alike TV people do as if the puppets hand up inside them is covered in biting ants, but then, and this is the crux, there was just nothing there. Dare I say it? No soul.

Maybe it was because it was nothing more than common sense, the cut and thrust of it's subject, and yet there just wasn't a sense of what might be that which common sense sits in – wisdom - it felt there was absolutely no wisdom there... it was just empty expression, the brand new middle class playground.

Okay, what was it about? Basically living within ones means. That the more you make, moneywise, the more you want and this hedonism, and that's where I think they felt it was quite clever somehow, that by mentioning hedonism everything would suddenly be understood and we'd see ourselves in the light of this offered wisdom, subscribe to this youtube channel, and everything will be alright simply because we shifted a little and got a cheaper house and had holidays we could actually afford.

Me then, at the moment, I'm going through the maze of signing up to get the dole, which is a complete story in itself how stupid it's become... Oops, how inhuman it feels to be subjected to the lowest line of defense in the huge bulwark of governmental caring and sharing, and so way, way, way down the bottom of a ladder that's even ceased to be a ladder with rungs and seems merely to be a frayed set of strands even unable to carry my weight... never mind someone who really needs it as a lifeline.

This video then seems contemptuously lazy, a kind of ludicrous caring carefully gift wrapped in its own intellectual blandness whereby the attainment of at least some comfort and security, whereby those muchly required tools of self aggrandisement, those puzzlemakers of belonging, the cell phone with 4G capability and a PC, at the least, with a video program for editing, basically somehow means you can turn those long moments of free time into advice worth hearing for the rest of the world to listen. As if we've reached that summit of well being and a subscribed youtube channel is going to tick that box... but really, and I'm sorry that it's so middle class, it's really just more nothing stacked on top of even more nothing.

Me, again then, I've had a weird life choosing art, and a life within that, almost as a last option when coming from the working class and not fitting how I was supposed to but trying anyway, have ended up quite well set up to the point where I don't actually need the dole except it'll help me out for a week or two, maybe more, so I can get up and running a thing on boosted to build little shacks in the driveway and sell a few on trade me and use that to both make more shacks to give away to people who need them... and pay myself a wage to get an actual art project off the ground.

Problem is that I got myself so well set up I nearly disappeared from the system so getting back in has been interesting.

As a reference, way back in the 90's when I was having fun running around town building shops for people mainly using rubbish from bins and skips to do so, I couldn't figure out whether I was clever or stupid and figured getting an IQ test might result in me knowing either way. I did a little research and found out that getting a test done, ten bucks, to get into Mensa, yah or nah, was the cheapest option... and I passed.

So here I am now, almost completely penniless, running about from one government department to the next then shuffling it through and amongst my brand new fifty dollar cellphone and the PC made from bit's found on the side of the road and the simple truth is that the Mensa test was way simpler than getting through the maze of connected savvy that getting on the dole seems to have become in the 8 years I haven't been on it.

Possibly relevant too is that when I went off, when that decision was made, it was the morning after Helen Clark's Labour thing came to an end. The very first day of National's new reign and even before we got onto the computers down at 'find a job' HQ we were all herded outside, at the offices for such on Lovegrove crescent way out here in Otara, and were told by this angry bureaucratic Nazi that it was all our fault... what? That us there at the very bottom of the heap, us merely requiring a little help just to survive and find the very first slippery rung, had created, in our ignorance, in our laziness and in our rudimentary, at best, wisdom of the system, had failed it and brought to pass this apocalypse of political fortitude demolished.

I mean going in each and every weekday, for an hour, to look for jobs that didn't exist was one thing but being part of the system that enabled this morally superior collector of the government stipend to stand on a soapbox and elucidate such repugnant crapola... that was just too much.

And all of this, I'm thinking, goes back a week of two, maybe more - like I said, research, taking notes, not me – to when I saw our Prime Minister, him who shall not be named, standing at the doors of Winz and saying “Just come visit here, all help given” or somesuch non-chalant similarity, and so I did.

So what happens now? What is my clarion call? Maybe it is, if I even have one, is that answers don't work anymore, we think they do... they look as if they do, my God, the whole brunt of media seems to be that the right questions are being asked and the right answers are being sought. What I would say to that is the middle class has become a hot air machine receptor, an empty balloon of not even biodegradable materials... I wonder if anyone is holding the rope?