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.