The normalising of weird, the weirding of normal.

I came across a video this morning of a bunch of women in an old barn all dressed up in raw homespun and they were singing and chanting and it was beautiful. It rose up through me and I felt that kinship that is within as all and that's all well and good, and it is, but at the same time I wanted it to be in a shopping mall where they all came together without ceremony, threw aside the christmas shopping, kicked off the high heels and just let the mascara run and the sweat drip as they found and fell into the communal praise that was in them all already.

And that's kinda like why I haven't ever really been interested in leaving the city. Oh yes, I've had many kind offers to go out and grab a bit of the big untrammeled nature and be my altogether weird self within her bosom of fecundity except that has never felt right... almost too simple. Not that I don't discourage anyone else that right but it's just not for me.

Maybe it is that I was born within spitting distance of a steelmill and that the sounds of life I hearken to will always have that beat going on. I really don't know and somehow it doesn't matter either... it just is what it is and I love machines and steel and oil as much as I love weeds and trees and rivers.

But I've always been weird, different drummer and all that, which was never really something I thought about except over the years the feedback from others has been such that okay, I'll accept I'm different but at the same time 'so what'.

To the point though, 'cause it's writing and supposedly it has to have one, and even before I started this I did kinda have one... but now I've started and out it pours I'm even wondering how to get to it.

'Cause, me, myself, as an illustrative quality, I'm all over the fucking place. Bit of this, bit of that, almost as if I've got the whole human experience to draw on and make use of yet at the same time, while I'm quite comfortable with that, it does tend to be a bit too piratey and cowboyish... as if I can't quite be trusted, yet that somehow too is the point.

So I suppose that the thing. That the video... and I better try and stick it in here, has the old barn and the homespun clothing and it has a beauty and it has goodwill but at the same time it almost discourages and sets such things aside because there is a specific uniform going on, that the culture isn't ours, the space and connection isn't ours... we weren't born to it so we can't have it, and all that is just a bit fucking bollocks. Except it's not wrong either.

Okay, I went back to Canada in '95. One month and sponsored by Grandma, bless her heart, and the land was sick. It was where I was born and it was hurting and I felt that. Maybe it was that I left at 7 and came with my family to New Zealand and whatever tendencies I did have felt at home in this land, that it was somehow wild enough still, and engendered a kind of wildness in me, that when I went back to the land that birthed me I felt a kinship trodden and hurting. I don't know. And it may have been too an uncle dying who kind of picked up, in that accepted reality, a sense that I had a sense going on and we sort of cajoled and coaxed each other towards whatever it might welcome within us. So he felt something and I felt something so we got the women to take us out to the reservation... to see the Indians.

And so we did that, a coupla times actually, but just went wandering without being able to somehow form the questions and also without being able to get answers... it became almost a vision quest, as it were, and eventually, through the mouths of babes, the acknowledgement came.

Typically too I wrote it all down but I've lost the paper I wrote it on. So what happened was I felt this need to explore why I felt what I did, 'cause it was as real as I am, and went off in search of what I felt might resonate with that and was merely perplexed and more confused. So I had to accept that and settle into it.

Anyway, I was given a paid job to do a mural at my cousins and paint up their room, these two young, very young, boys who had rudimentary speech, which interestingly there was a little worry around. So I did this painting and I kinda discussed in that painting what my questions might be about and then afterwards we had a big family barbecue and during this, with all in attendance, the youngest of these lads walked up to me, and loud and clear, spoke words way beyond his vocabulary and said " We acknowledge your presence, we hear your plea, and we feel your commitment." Or something very similar anyway, 'cause like i said, I've lost the proof... and don't need it anyway.

Back to New Zealand and again go back to lot's of fun and games just being almost tragically unsuccessful but at the same time always managing to make good and go off on all kinds of tangents and along the way the past lives kinda start accumulating and they all fit in quite neato, quite specifically there for quite specific reasons but suffice to say, 'cause that in and of itself is a whole other completely tangled up ( but only in how it might be explained cohesively as a linear thing... 'cause it just ain't) set of weird, but essentially it became part of my vocabulary, as it were, and I met a woman where basically there was stuff in the air that wanted grabbing and it tended towards native American so that's what I focused on.

Now specifics aren't required except I made a connection, and the Aborigines of Aussie call it the dreamtime... I don't call it anything, it's just what I do, but I had the audacity, that once I'd kinda gotten the info to see this woman in the light that wanted seen, to ask what my Indian name was. I don't why I asked that, it wasn't a concern, but it popped out and it was answered "Sleeping Wolf"

The thing is then that yes, I could go on building the pomp and ceremony and even badge myself up with this whatever it is except while it's kind of deep and meaningful to me it's also somewhat silly too.

Because I went in and read up on the founding documents of the Iroquois and low and behold, it's right there written down, the adoption agency, as it were, the invite to come sit under the witness tree and it makes total sense that this is what's been going on.

And what is silly, and the hard bit too, is that it's kinda got to be silly but almost really bloody serious too. The connectedness we find that connects us all, our ability to singularly, and en masse connect, cannot be lifted out of the connectedness for self importance... therein lies the fiasco.

So what if I'm havin' conversations on earth frequencies or picking up messages across stellar distances, so what? It's just my normal and it's gets fed back into the wider bigger normal which is all of us.

It's like the Saviour thing has gotten us to where we are now and it has been good, I've no doubts about that at all, but this tendency to put all our eggs in one basket, the looking for wisdom from on high as it were, these permissions and allowances granted with the pomp and ceremony of versions of corporate dignity emblazoned with the glories of "The answer"... it's reached a use by date.

Now we gotta look into ourselves and find our own permissions, our own willingness in the uniquely but perishable existence of our possibility, the tiny and precious similarities for a whole new mix'n'match, where we all get little bit's of whatever cloth strikes us and make our very own dreamcoats... or something like that.

And see... I can't just repost the video here. It's just beyond me so all I can do is link to their facebook page and you can find stuff which might be relevant... as in find your own and own it your way and share it your way 'cause that, I reckon, is the brand new, fresh off the shelves, shake, rattle and roll "All of Us!"

https://www.facebook.com/laboratoriumpiesni/

What is Luck?

Typically I haven't thought about this at all but something happened yesterday that I feel needs some discussion. It may never be read, it may fall on deaf ears even if it is, but does that even matter beside me at least taking the time and effort to expand the idea?

It was a decision to, at almost four o'clock, hop in Mum's car and take the head of my cars engine across to Panmure to have a helicoil inserted into the spark plug hole I'd so deftly chewed the threads out of, which, in and of itself, was a rather ridiculous thing to do that late in the day, so close to rush hour, yet that is what I did.

And I did it, not because I can afford it now, but because I can afford it next week and that also gives the man about 4 working days to get it done. In the meantime I then had enough money left from my dole payment for my two required packets of tobacco. But then I arrive, at like four o'clock and he's immediately smiling and says 'You want just the helicoil done?', 'Yes' I reply, 'Okay, I'll do it now. Have you got cash?' and I haven't really but I tell him I haven't quite got 80 bucks, which was the quote he'd given me the day before, and I'd been somewhere else in the interim and been told it was a very good price. So he says 'Tell you what, you go down and get 70 bucks out and that'll leave you enough for dinner as well.'

Now I could go on and on about all these split second decisions that are made with absolutely no backup, well hardly any anyway, that keep throwing me into almost ever increasing faith that no matter what my resources are I just have to keep trusting that it'll work out as almost everyone one I meet seems totally inclined to help me out in some way... often even when lines are in evidence where people obviously are well backed up, and yet I keep getting to the heads of the lines... what's that all about?

And quite often people end up confiding in me and just as often they seem quite perplexed that they are. Me I'm just having fun at my own expense so maybe it's got something to do with that as if by that me just enjoying my life means I've obviously got time to hear others out and possibly offer clues as to what they might admit to can somehow be transformed simply by me hearing it.

But this fellow yesterday, he was good, he went a little further than most and was actually willing to listen. It was as if he actually sensed consciously that I had something about me he could learn from. That's actually quite rare as most just want me to listen and I don't even think they know that.

So yeah, this fellow confided in me that he'd had years of bad luck and somehow wanted me to let him know what good luck is and to a certain extent I know what it is but I'm not really allowed to say... well, I am but it's pointless.

The thing is that good luck is from the heart and just going with that and these people who are just in their heads, well, nothing to be done there, but those who are somewhat caught between the heart and the head... that's the interesting place but working from the head to encourage more heart, it just doesn't work.

Oh God, if it did we'd all be sweet as. We could let our heads build our worlds into what we need and at the end of that be able to jump into this heart led life with absolute trust that it would all work out fine... except that's exactly the bloody opposite of how it actually works, or as far as I can see that it works, and I don't particularly like this myself but it's how it is.

I mean I'd like a little more success, a wider pool of security, as, in a sense, people might trust this more and listen better somehow, but it ain't gonna happen, at least not in that way anyways. Because I almost have to be on the brink of failure all the time, at least in a conservative sense, because what people might trust, from the head, can't be there... it can't and it's as simple as that, so on the brink of failure it's like people have no choice but to look deeper at this luck I might have and feel it as a strong and willing thing away from a sense of security as we all like security to be.

The thing is I don't really ever make decisions of going this way or that way. Theres no time for that. Ways to go become so obvious there just isn't time to choose, you just do it. The other side of the coin though, and this might even be harder, is that if nothing is obviously in need of doing... then do nothing.

And, of course, this isn't the whole story at all but that's the point... you only ever get enough story to get started then even that gets thrown out, that is tossed as useful only in hearing the starter gun, after that you make your own story... 'cause in the end that's it too, no ones else's story will ever work, will ever be copied... well, they can be, but why be a facsimile?

To be continued...

We are all Fathers; fathering, fatherless of orphaned rascals.

Man, women and children all, the subjects of ourselves to be led and coaxed.

I am a father to my own stubborn griefs sitting complacent atop my hearts cage,

Where the soldier's spear gave ease to the crucified, where Adam gave that bone to be Eve... We are the hobo father.  

Even as Neptune, fluid as grace ever was, we batter the mother for wet dust.

That it all be pulverised to build the scars and the scabs, the palaces of the longing made of obsidian cuts, sew with the echoes of howling wolves, that we can know ourselves by our disease.

Rock that baby, jive the still blind infant, be with the joy amidst crashing tragedy.

Be the father, be the tears of a toughed heart... On all day's we are the father.



Excuse that above, or don't, it's from a ways back, not too far back and I think I might have already published it on facebook though I kind of went searching for it and couldn't find it in my recent past... so who knows?

But for some reason, right now, it does makes certain sense to carry on underneath this draft from whenever because I think it somehow captures the sense of what I might be coming to terms with.

About 5 years ago someone put me onto the 'Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle and about the same time I was fairly ensconced and starting to make some headway in a dealer gallery. So I was working like a bastard and meditating like a bastard too. Mr Tolle said I didn't really need to do the meditation thing but I always have so I used that to work my way through his book.

Long story short I left the gallery, under the guise of being kicked out, but I'd made up my mind previous to that and from a particular instance whereby I decided that that particular procedural system of art making and art selling wasn't actually of much use to me as I'd figured, and made use of, the ways offered by Mr Tolle to the extent that the making of the art, how it comes to exist and find it's way into the world, was of far greater importance, somehow, than the art itself.

So I went ambitionless and it wasn't hard at all as all those ambitions I'd had were pretty much attained and achieved... okay, things could get bigger, that might have been the new ambition except the essence of achieving had been well and truly sorted so it was quite easy to drop such things and just meander about.

And this I did. For about 4 years I just meditated whenever I could and just did as little work as was possible to keep the base sense of what was needed chugging along. To this extent I was what might be called lucky as I'd already managed to put together a framework, for existence, which didn't need much feeding and that was simply because I knew if such needs were small, paltry even, then I could put all my efforts into the art I'd decided it was worth having a go at.

Anyway, as time went on I began to feel that Mr Tolle, and subsequent study of other 'Guru's', seemed to be missing something, something important,and it's been somehow nagging me to figure out what it actually is.

Because the interesting thing was that whilst I stopped wanting things the things themselves didn't stop wanting me and as time went on this became somehow understood in the sense that with my head out of the equation, because I've ended up pretty good at not thinking, a deeper sense of want seemed to be a part of me. We could quite easily put this down to the subconscious becoming conscious and it's a pretty good way to see it but it also seemed deeper than that somehow too, wider even, and it might sit better possibly as a mixing of the collective consciousness, as posited by Jung, with an evolving earth consciousness.

Then at the same time I found myself apt to talk and make jokes, and generally have fun, at and within any opportunity that presented itself and this seemed somehow to go back to the Tolle thing, the now, and be a very simple and genial sociality. And I like that, and I still do like it. A lot seems to be the willingness to play the fool, to be unencumbered by ego and just serve within any group of people to steer, even if ones self needs immolating (set afire), towards easiness and the abandonment of harsh, serious and all that other stuff.

This then sets up a dichotomy of sorts whereby we , or I and can drop the supposedly royal we, have the totally now resonating sociality where all boundaries of power and status disappear and the animal of human congeniality raises it's head to purr in simple gestures of fun and comradeship and on the other hand we have what might be a world starting to shape itself which would be entirely conducive to this simplified and easy sociality... but it isn't yet.

And this seems the missing bit. The guru's can't help but 'be there' and then in communication advise us how to 'get there' too, and while being in their direct area might actually communicate this more readily than the words do without the presence, this then seems to be the area where work needs to be done... the transition, as it were. That while our heads and our hearts hearken to this state, and may often be in it, the physical world has such a burden of inertia about it that we can't help but be adverse to it yet at the same time it may be the biggest and most vital thing we could be 'adapting' ourselves to.

If it isn't yet what shall I call it?

I was out driving yesterday, a few things spread across our metropolis wanted finding by me, and maybe it's somehow about that. That ideas about what might be are just sitting out there waiting to be found, not formed even, and it, that state of possibility that is, is about being possible too. Bugger, that doesn't make sense, and somehow I don't think it can... until it's ready to.

And I think quite a few others have found that driving, sitting in a car and watching, can be advantageous in the sense of being inspirative. Maybe it's the betweeness, between theres and heres as in this was this and that'll be that.

Lots of people tend to find nature inspiring and maybe theres something to that but possibly more than that is that they are allowing themselves to just wander, and yes nature can be restful, but as well an expectation that nature is inspirative might make the whole gesture a waste of time as this supposed communication comes from nature when it could very well be that not expecting it, inspiration, it what makes it available and it's far less about the circumstances that might bring it forth.

Me, I was on the motorway first but that just bogged up real quick and I got off at the very first exit, Otahuhu, and kinda meandered... I always take the path of least resistance, whether it be physical or mental. Yesterday it was physical in the sense that as soon as those cars bogged up, made their lines of impatience I just went another way, and given I always have time on my hands I'm not really adverse to wasting it, and I ended up at a place where I used to go years ago, Rosenfeld Kidson which is an exotic timber supplier. I made up an excuse for myself that I'd see if I could find a bit of Maple as it's in the back of my mind somewhere that I'll eventually get back into making guitars, so excuse found I went in and followed my nose.

The sum of that visit was, and I had no idea of this as I wandered about within this cathedral of potential, was as I left after getting a price for one particular piece, which ended up being Cherry, that wood that always tends to remind me of Chekov and Russian springs, I remembered my own great piles of stashed timbers and realised how profoundly rich I am. And that's partly that I recognised, remembered my own great stash of timbers, but also that adding the odd new bit, like adding a notion of a $100.00 bit of Cherry when theres a spare hundie floating about, it all adds up to this richness of having time and space available to actually be my own sense of what rich is.

Ah, even with this meandering writing I do I have an objective except I have no idea how I'm going to get there and yet this wandering has given me a hint as I remember back to yesterday, which already seems so far away, and in that timber place something of my being bouncing off others seems to have made sense. It's as if me just carrying my time about lazily and the possibles I might be accruing even looser it seems to spark off in others a wondering in themselves of what might concern them to hold stuff that way. There was a point I was talking to a chap, not at but around somehow, the appreciation of timber and I mentioned finding my own as packing crates and sawmills being unwilling to go near them for the possibility of old nails left in it and so having to build my own sawmill in the driveway and I, now in hindsight, felt this fellows wondering himself about fixing his old boat to go fishing more.

How is this? I didn't see it yesterday... I'm sure of that, but I know I felt something, an opening, a gap as it were, in the defined wandering towards the yet to be defined... interesting.

Now should I open that up a bit more or go straight to the objective?

The objective I think and it was about the how of realising ones own projecting, the mirroring we all do where the world is us, but in somehow being able to see that but also see beyond that to the reflective reflections... and it's the interference patterns, which are what light does... when it's a wave.

This was actually a couple of weeks ago and for some reason I'd gone back to the experiment with light through slits and where before the slits it was particulate and after the slits it became wave like... it made no sense then and I didn't really need it to but it must have found it's way into what I call the back of my head because yesterday as I passed those mansions of Remuera Rd and wondered why I like them so much it occured to me the question of being reflective and understanding oneself in those reflections was also about seeing beyond the reflections and feeling, seeing, whatever, the reflection reflecting of others and quite suddenly this experiment in light came to me.

And it's an insight but it's an insight still sketchy... but that's it's business and not mine, let it go then and if it wants to come back it might even find me willing, or busy chasing others... and it reminds me too of Pacific navigators, which incidentally makes a certain unquantifiable sense too because the other day I was looking for the Latin of boat and it was navi, but also vessel and ship etc, and, anyways, how the navigators watched the waters for interference patterns. That for most the waves might be doing what waves do and all moving one way except on the edges of those waves are the waves which move underneath and there are layers of these waves going all the way down... that they can see the reflections of the Islands they are wanting to get to.

And, of course, having gotten this far theres something sitting on the edges right now beckoning and playful, some remembered idea or thing which will bring it all together, tantilising... but, it'll come in it's own sweet time, or it won't.

Patience indeed might very well be a virtue.

Prejudice and discrimination.

Straight off the bat you might think I'm going to go off and add to the demonisation of these words... which might in itself, that start, show off my own prejudice within my own expectation of how I might decide you are coming to this post.

I suppose then, in the above instance, I could be illustrating why prejudice and discrimination are problematic and it's therefore easier to just bannerise these poor words without giving them the time and the space they might actually require.

I love prejudice and discrimination! (How's that for an opening? Throw your half empty coffee cup at the screen right now... and leave disgusted!)

prejudice

ˈprɛdʒʊdɪs/

noun

noun: prejudice; plural noun: prejudices

1.

preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.

discrimination

dɪˌskrɪmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

noun: discrimination; plural noun: discriminations

1.

the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.

2.

recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.

What has brought this up for me is one or two friends I've been talking to over the past few days who shared what for us, in hindsight, was growing up as a minority... except then it might have been a racial minority but now we don't really say such things as that and what we say is cultural minority though that doesn't work either because way back then, living and going to school in South Auckland, we were all part of that culture so even then cultural minority didn't apply unless one really went big and used the appellation in regard to the whole of New Zealand and the comparisons became economic stratifications...

So what it was is that we were white kids within a culture of predominantly darker skinned kids, see how difficult this is? What actual descriptive terms am I allowed to use?

The thing is that, and this comes through with quite a few, but by no means all, these people of Euro descent I now come across from the old days, is that it wasn't at all about measured differences at all and just surviving in what ever way seemed to be the best way to just keep surviving... and having fun.

And while I was talking to one of these old friends I even told a story where I went to Art School and the first month or so I felt uncomfortable and I couldn't figure out why until I eventually realised I hadn't actually spent so much time, day after day, just in the company of white people.

The thing was, I think, that we learned, without thinking about it, that prejudice was required to a certain degree (while at the same time we didn't even know prejudice was even a word) except it had to be held fairly lightly and one had to discriminate very quickly. What that means is that situations and circumstances could change all the time and you had to be fluid, you had to weigh up situations quickly and then live by those decisions... until things changed.

To that extent survival, if things got hot, depended somewhat on not being extreme in ones prejudices whereby one was overly positive or overly negative... that would get you into trouble. And with all that said the colour of ones skin was never more than a surface treatment. Far more important things came up first as instinctive and intuitive decisions had to be made.

Like one day you might be down in Mangere Bridge and at a house where the family were Maori but the father had been in some government job for decades and they lived in a much better house than you did and they introduced you to cheese spread out of a jar bought at the supermarket but then the next day you'd be on the other side of the mountain where the shade cooled out the house for most of the day, and be with another new friend you'd met at cubs, and their house would be run down and full of just washed clothes with a bunch of semi-pulled apart cars littering the section and learning how to shoplift down the local dairy and this boy would have blonder hair than you did.

It was just this big huge melting pot of difference, and yes, there were fairly obvious differences though they simply weren't differences that counted, and you just couldn't be prejudiced but then at the same time you needed to have some prejudice available in case it could be thrown up as a point of difference, a uniqueness to make things interesting. Yes, you did see prejudice, as we now like to call it, except you didn't 'look' at that. You 'looked' for anger and problems and the colour of ones skin had nothing to do with that... though of course it actually did.

Discrimination then became a life line. You needed absolutely to discriminate, to be discriminating. Again it had nothing to do with the colour of ones skin... it was the edges that counted, What was underneath and around the edges? What was the emotional underpinning, what seethed and boiled if anything? Was a smile at a joke hung on difference loaded or authentic?

Because what you did learn fairly quickly was that when situations might get tense it was often that this minority which you were supposedly a part of made you the representative of the majority you weren't actually a part of at all except, by default, simply because of the colour of your skin you became.

So yeah, I've had these few chats with white people who shared the same basic upbringing that I had and we're prejudiced as fuck, certified card carrying members of not even giving the bastards any chance to be anything other than what they obviously are... that surface details don't matter but they give you clues as in what kind of shit might be hidden and under what cloaks... or not.

Do I resent ever being part of what ever supposed minority I might or might not have been a part of given whatever circumstances were in progress that used such definitions to define what might be prejudicial? Fuck no, that'd be stupid and take away some of the fun. 'Cause in the end once you've figured out the possible use of prejudice and discrimination it, they, are a useful set of tools to get one more orientated, aligned as it were, to having fun and being interesting, and that, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to with colour, gender, money or anything fucking stupid like that... while at the same time somehow being all about it. It's then nothing to do with what it is but what you might do with it that counts... in my book anyway.

Progress is hypocrisy in action.

I had something happen last week, I think it was last week, where somewhat out of the blue I was invited back to an old haunt. I had said to someone that this would eventually happen, to which they had doubts, but it was one of those things that just felt inevitable though in this case somewhat akin to unfinished business.

And that made sense simply in how the invite was couched. As in like come back and start at the bottom, which I didn't answer except I did say I would surely come back in for a chat at the least. Because, for me, there are things I'd quite like to do and in this regard theres a possibility of investment in that so I'm more than willing to offer my side of what might be a round of bargaining.

In the meantime I tied up again some old strings left dangling and with that reviewed a little of what said old haunt was up to and made a seemingly innocuous comment... boom! Door closed. Oops, but then again, not really oops as I'd tweaked an emotional edge got a reaction and realised nothing hew had happened so the whole thing would have been a waste of time anyways.

Then, just the other day, someone gets all upset about an attack on something cherished and new and goes mad, as in angry this and that and then this and then that, and again I'm like bloody emotions, they can be a pain in the ass.

Now I've nothing against emotions per se except when the owners of said emotions are victimising themselves with their own emotional outbursts and basically using such to blame the world for all their own unresolved problems.

And this leads to one of the things I say quite often now which is that when people are irrational then no amount of rationality is going to make any difference especially, it seems, and this is something I've encountered recently, these people who have these emotional outbursts seem to enshroud their denial in being all for critical thinking... weird.

But then again I don't really care that much and instead of trying to push my own ideas of what might be going on I turn things around and wonder why I might feel a need to offer what I think are either answers or a better set of questions to address whatever any emotional outburst is actually sitting on top of. To that end it's like feeling the magnetism within any outer shows of emotions which seem to be irrational and then feeling whether these outbursts are setting off little echoes in me so I can dig down deeper into myself and uncover any little pots of my own gold.

I still like intellect though and maybe that's about all the years I've spent meditating and being able to quiet my mind not to the extent that it's an enemy worth vanquishing but that being able to isolate the intellect and then feel around it's edges for attachments to emotionality has somehow honed the abilities with intellect I might have. It's not that it's suddenly so much better so much that it's possibly a little more refined.

Trouble is though that even this seems problematic in the sense that so many people seem to ride the unbroken horses of their emotionality that even being rationally unencumbered, not completely of course, seems to be a threat a lot of people can smell from ages away and start fighting even before the lines of the cage are even drawn.

What I do find though is that hypocrisy seems to be the defining gesture. An unrecognised hypocrisy which seems entirely obvious to me yet seems to be entirely oblivious to the people who brandish it alike their own form of nationalism and patriotic fervour... weird.

Me, I love my hypocrisies, and often go in search of deeper and more vital inconsistencies... they are the emulsifiers of my existence, hypocrisy is that ingredient which allows the disparity of oil and water to mix and have the best of each doing their work together.

But out there in the world there seems to be nothing worse, nothing more demeaning of post modernist development and progress, than hypocrisy. Yet, if theres anything the whole world swims in it is hypocrisy except it's always outside... never can it be inside.

That seems then the catch 22, if I even remember what a catch 22 is (so I better google it) but before I do that I'll speculate... it is the point at which disparity must be faced. "a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions."

So it is then pretty much what I thought it was except I see it as something to be embraced whereas the accepted meaning is it is something to be avoided at all costs. 

Now I come to my own catch 22 and there was a quote a few years ago I read but alike I usually do I just read it, took it on board but forgot about the details of who said it and what was specifically said. The gist of it was though that some enlightened dude said that once you are enlightened you know completely and utterly that such cannot be explained but that the whole and inexplicable reason for having attained enlightenment is to try and do so.

Even then, at the supposed heights of human achievement, what do we find? Hypocrisy.

At this point I think I'll go right back to the beginning, not of my life, but this post. Why? 'Cause I like intellect.

So we have an attack or a defense of something and let's say it's an intellectual stance yet the attack/defense is powerfully emotional. This power, then, which underlines the intellect is drawn from the emotion. This then is the obvious clue. Power.

Therefore, I'm bored now and I want to rap this up, any display of power is hypocrisy in action and what may define it as useful or otherwise is the order to which it is recognised or not.

Train spotting for Grizzlies.

In recent years I've found that the novels I've read and really like are hard work at the beginning and I've learnt that, hopefully, quite quickly though who knows how many really good books I gave up on simply because they were hard work to begin with.

But I'm supposing that if you are taught to write, to make it a way of having a living, then it'd be all about hooking the reader, baiting them right off the bat so they become willing participant in their own catch. So right there is that fishing analogy... with a little side order of clubbing the prey into submission too.

Pop songs too are about hooks and being catchy. Seems just about all our efforts in one way or another allude back to those good ol' days of hunting and gathering. And how long ago was that?

Fifty thousand years ago? Twenty thousand? Sure enough though it was a very, very long time ago and was it such a huge game changer, a complete and utter paradigm shift, that we have so imprinted it upon ourselves that we really have no choice but to look at things that way?

So going back to these books that were really good it was usually a combination of getting my head around the writers set of perspectives whilst often also about setting up a complicated set of circumstances in which the story could unfold. And if that was a form of fishing it would be maybe something like Ice fishing where the set up to even do it in a modicum of comfort required quite a bit of advance planning and setting up and even once all that's done then it wasn't really about catching anything, though I suppose that might be a bonus, so much as a meditative and quiet time to slow things down and percolate in ones own intellectual juices.

Whereas the other extreme end of this fishing thing, this hooking of legless reptiles who still retain their primordial guise, is something like a river when the fish are spawning and some old grizzly bear is just leaning on a rock and swatting the poor tired and half depleted buggers onto a grassy shore.

Now that's done, my own hooks set and cast into the oceans of your relevance I can introduce what I really want to talk about and that's this new programme on channel three “The Housewives of Auckland” and in comparison to Marcus Lush's train spotting epic 'Off the Rails”.

It's not then particulary difficult to define which is ice fishing and which is merely swatting tired spawning fish out of rapids. There is the meditative individual who has worked to secure a place of maybe even a form of worship whilst the other is a big old bear seeing a very easy way to stock up on fat reserves before a big long winter and a vast and easy slumber under the snow.

So yes our brains might be hard wired still in the primordial hunter gatherer vein of how to harvest the natural world and be content and full but surely this technological age we find ourselves in has somewhat abetted the need to store fat reserves for long and hard winters by reaping easily some tired and struggling resource almost at the edges of it's ability to renew it's species?

And thats what 'The Housewives of Auckland” seems to be for me. Big old lazy bears getting fat so they can sleep soundly through the long cold. Moribund network executives unwilling to even try coming up with something interesting and simply importing an idea which is already depleted. And the Salmon, well, they would be those trophy wives and trust fund princesses struggling up the rapids of their own declining physical assets... wooh! Did I say that?

At the very least, within nature, it is spectacle. It is a profound truth of existence in the wilds so when a learned man, say like Attenborough, gives us a commentary... we are moved, we are interested and we are reminded of the stringencies of life to keep struggling on.

But what kind of spectacle is it when the rich and the proud are paraded before us as early evening entertainment? I actually think it's really sad that those big, and very soon to be fat, network executives seem willing to swat struggling salmon onto the grass so we can see them gasping for air as their guts are sprawling alongside them from having their guts ripped open.

The thing is I'd like to see myself as a bit of a renaissance man, that having had vacines and schools and all kinds of technological breakthroughs given to me as convenience, that all this has been quite enlightening and as such I have a willingness to raise the game, as it were, of humanity.

So before I go on with the ripped carcasses of trophy wives and trust fund princesses, which yes, we all still do enjoy a kind of tragic carnage, it's that hunter gatherer brain enjoying the splendours of spring and fall, isn't it somewhat behoove of us to get a little more introspective within our entertainments, to embrace a little more, actually a whole lot more, the character of our species aligning ourselves with the possibilities we do have as we fall, supposedly, into this new age of information?

Could we please acknowledge that train spotting of the technological soul might be better entertainments?

Artists colony?

What was I thinking?

I worked with a woman a while back who lived in her own house all by herself and she had an idea that once her mother died and she had real access to money that she would buy up a big bit of land with as many old buildings on it as could be utilised reasonably easily and start an artists colony.

And my working for her, as in she would define what she wanted and then I would do what I figured out, as I went along, what was best and this created all sorts of problems because she would have to confront her need to control what I did... in the sense that I would basically ignore her and do what I thought was the most appropriate.

It seemed somehow to make sense that my attitudes towards art needed somehow to be incorporated as a reality within her idea of what art making was especially in regard to her having control of this ideal made concrete, eventually, as an art colony. I suppose it was that I was one extreme, as in just intuitive and no figuring out, and she was over the other side in intellectual and planning and whilst I mostly came to terms with the way I saw it, my being there, it was also good for me to encounter her ways of being especially now that I've actually decided my place is going to be an artists colony.

The thing was that as soon as this woman did get her hands on the money then everything changed. World trips and doing up her house using pro's became the thing and I was somewhat shuffled off to the edges as a struggling artist in need of care... which was weird and then wasn't so weird once I cottoned on and began to question, albeit humbly, the choices she was now making... and soon enough I was cast out.

Here I am then this morning going in to tidy up one of my own messes and in doing so the ideal of my own ramshackle assortment of ramshackle shacks ever becoming useful as regards something to hand on to other people, in parts, for their own uses has come into question. Not because it isn't a good idea I'm well inclined to favour so much that I have so much collected odds and ends which fill almost to brimming over in all my spaces that emptying them all out so others can use them just seems an inordinately difficult task.

In this regard then I am apt to see that while I thought I was training this particular woman what was actually happening was that I was training myself. Or more honestly what I thought she needed to learn was much more specifically what I needed to learn.

This brings to mind then the sense of visionary and whilst I don't think I'd call myself visionary I would tend to the idea that what such ideas encapsulate describes quite nicely how I actually work. What that means is that whilst I wander about in life and see things and meet people I often get a sense that I know what needs to be done. And not only what wants done but that I'm the fellow to do it.

It used to actually be visions as in fully rendered ideas would pop into my head and it was merely about shifting things about, clearing a space as it were, and then just making whatever it was that was supplied as what to actually go toward. Now though it seems deeper, a kind of knowing without knowing, and that makes sense with what might be my understanding of how these things work as regards energy content and transference into transformation.

It's like the God's speaking and trumpets blaring as Angels sing is just too big a show. Needed maybe if we're not paying attention... to get our attention but that once we attend to how possibilities actually work then that energy which before went so much into just getting our attention is lessened to a degree which allows it somehow to be spread further.

Anyway, that all said, I even wonder why I'm here writing about it and the simple answer to that is that the mess I've to get through just gets slightly overwhelming so I take breaks and this is one of those.

The other fairly cognisant point about this whole visionary thing is that while the idea of an artist's colony is somewhat my driving force it also doesn't mean that that's actually what I'm doing. It's like the vision or whatever is the motivation to get started on anything, it needs to be held loosely, because often once you actually get started on something the doing opens up new directions and so it pays then to be able to let go of that which was only the inclination to start.

My Dad.

I went to see my Father the other day. I haven't seen him for ages and I have no idea why. He's out in Howick, in place overlooking the sea, and when I do go see him I prefer that lounge with those views than sitting in his bedroom with him as that space just looks out onto a wall.

The first thing, after pleasantries, Dad remarked on was a bruise on my cheek. It's seems now that I'm older the skin where I find pimples that are worth the effort doesn't like me doing so and bruises easily. He thought it was just dirt, which is more likely I suppose with the me he knows, and I'd forgotten it was there so it was either me painting or working on cars or machines and then just going out into the world not thinking of approvals. This then might have been why he asked me how old I am now, 54, and this surprised him. "Well, Dad, if you're 82 then it stands to reason I'll be 28 years younger as that's how old you were when Mum had me."

And Dad is the oldest man now of the family that issued from Mum's side and even those on Dad's side of whom we didn't have much to do with. I went back to Canada in '95 as the Matriarch wanted to see me and she payed for it except I wasn't so interested in her and hung out with the old men dying. My uncle Ralph had Parkinson's and though he shuffled about he wanted me to meet Indians and take store of that lands needs as if this coming closer to his God, and I smoked my pot out at his altar in the Garage where he smoked his cigars and ruminated before his Pope, gave him access to deeper streams he knew I swan in.

Uncle Ralph had a model A pickup that he couldn't drive anymore so Uncle Davey, who was dying too, came 'round and took me for a drive and while we rattled and chugged he too spoke of his dying as if he too, being close, somehow understood my way with ghosts.

And it is, this town by the lake in Southern Ontario, a steel mill town and Uncle Ralph spoke of a dumping of Cobalt out on the edges and how it seemed to be taking all the Men and maybe that is why my own father has age because we left that place and went way across the earth... I don't know.

And now my Dad is walking again which is rather amazing though he has a toughness even the doctors find somewhat miraculous especially after their cousins, the psychiatrists, fed him willingly quite the huge doses of anti-depressants over many years. So Dad getting walking again isn't really surprising and it seems this toughness he has way down has just gotten bored with being a victim of the after-effects of these tranquilizers and no Doctors being able to do anything about it... so he will.

Dad was the youngest son of his fathers wifes second man and that family was the poorest of the poor in a shipyards attachment of tenement housing in Glasgow and though they were Irish Protestants, the blackest of the black, they finally had accrued some money and so he was sent to a Catholic school and there my tough but thoroughly sensitive father was scared out of his wits, or into his wits, as the case might actually be.

And maybe it worked because as luck would have it he was given an apprenticeship in plumbing after leaving the Nuns and the Priests though, my father, still at a tender age didn't see his life as shovelling shit and maybe that, somehow, was too alike the racial slurs those Scottish neighbours seemed far too willing to heap upon him and his as if five to a bed and a shared outhouse weren't enough.

To the high seas then my father went and still young he signed on as a cabin boy in those rusty old hulks that crossed the Atlantic to Islands in the Caribbean where just two dollars bought more than enough alcohol to forget and lithe young dark skinned woman for the whole of a night even if they were only forgotten and sweating warmth alongside.

Then at the opposite end of these rolling and huge swaying through the Atlantics high seas were the ports of Europe where the same occurred except more silver was needed and the grasses of mattresses more refined but still it was the same heathen crawl.

By this time too I think his own father had died, of a cancer in the stomach, and a step brother too morose from a war spent in bombers killing wholesale the innocent and the guilty, so it was only then my father and his slightly older brothers in a whole family of older women who altogether made flight to Canada to leave this bitter place.

Within all that which was so hard and crushing my father remembers high summers spent fleetingly at Lochs and a small and intensely loyal terrier which had a penchant for attacking and trying to kill old mens long beards so even in the Northerly place not quite North enough in it's mass to be really cold there seemed just enough sunlight, just enough warmth, to keep him knowing that smiles and laughter were precious.

And he knew tenderness too. Somehow as still a youth and on those rolling seas he saw the life almost completely beaten out of a man whos love was the kind not spoken of, that love which is furtive and secret but still just wants to be love. He saw this and he knew somehow it was more honourable than the rage that would kill it, stamp it out and leave it bending upon which ever surface it fell.

So I'm glad my father is walking again for the truth is he was boring me. It was just, when we sat in that small room, stories of his time in the Army. Stories of more drunken days and the stealing of trucks to go on binges where he was always freed of time in lockup because he wore his uniform well, his body filled it out and stood straight, so he was pulled early and shined up and stuck out the front to grace the high born.

And it was as if this trolling back was an invite to dementia alike his two sisters who have completely forgotten. That it was the years crying down to his green eyed soul and the flamed head was left shining that the recourse to a doctors easily prescribed advice had made the flames of his red locks engulf his legs and make them burn as if he stood waiting in some inner clarity aligned to his toughness that whilst others walked quickly upon flaming coals that my father stood still and waited for permissions none, it seemed, were willing to give.

So even Dresden and it's bombed out glories could hold him for long and bring him to forgetting. And me, it's taken me years and years and years to piece together all these fragments, not even necessarily because they were offered but because I too have chosen my own narrative. That somehow it was less about the grist of the stories, the chewy bone ends of the telling, and more about the changing perspectives somehow, despite worthy traumas and any significance that made the choreography a set of juxtapositions, that it was about choosing our own camera angles, directing our own scripts to even see beyond them.

In then comes the Canada days and me the first squalling infant who as soon as I found my legs whacked a head throbbing father across it's cranium with a bottle emptied the night before that ended all his drinking days. That my father who drenched his history had now to wake up and set things out for my own methods of undoing. For by this time my father had become a socialist, a man of union hopes, and that dull surge of righteousness called McCarthyism was instilling a pernicious and loathing  pride in it's adherents in the Maple leaf lands and men aligning with the carmine of Rus were disappearing in molten vats and under the crushing wheels of trains though mostly it seems that that matriarch who called me years later back to that land was a bitter rival for the now owned daughter, his sway in those circles about not having freedom in men so we found a plane willing to carry us far away.

I was seven and already far too old, already bitter somehow as I have found photos of this time and my eyes are much too distant and calculating. New Zealand became straight away an adventure and a forgetting place with my first freedom being finding myself alone, making sure I was, and climbing a very noble tree and jumping onto a high roof then scrambling up it's steep and dangerous to get atop the ridge of Parnell and having the whole magnificent harbour before me and knowing this was a place just for me, that calculating could end and the boredoms of the slow cast aside for real adventure.

Now I've lost the thread. It could be that the New Zealand story is so completely a new thing it cannot be joined to this. That all this clumping of the old world is such a different set of colours it demands it's own canvas... or I've simply had enough for one morning and the hot is here. I felt it on the cat, Tutti, as I rubbed across his silken back, him back in wondering if food has appeared. These are the things I trust... that cats become silky with heat, especially the new sun's grace, and so being lazy and soaking is a worthwhile thing.

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.