Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
Tuesday AM
He felt a sense of sick unease in his bowels, the day was going to be long and uneventful.
A dog briefly barked in the distance, the morning wind rustling the leaves of the tree’s.
It was a public holiday Tuesday and he sat like he always did on the balcony by himself partially exposed to the elements.
He had been awake a couple of hours longing for a cheery good morning or some positive affirmation that it was worth being alive.
The wind picked up markedly in the overcast conditions as if forewarning of an impending storm.
It’s kind of hard not to be so self involved when you are alone he thought to himself and sighed.
Oh for some company, banter about nothing, the radio playing, cups and dishes clattering along with the cutlery, the television news on, the aromas of coffee, tea and milo.
The smell of toast..
The sounds of people….
Tabu.
Humankind was not put on this earth to make money, money dis-empowers citizens in the societies in which they live and monetises their everyday existence.
Perfectly valid traditional belief, self sufficiency and trading systems have been superimposed by the veneration of the money system and the people who make it.
The good majority of those ‘winners’ like Jack Ma, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates who are venerated by a good deal of society did not make their money ethically.
There are by products like damage to the environment and pollution not including the human cost.
That phone in your hand that you, hopefully, are reading this by comes at a great cost to the environment in which it was produced which most probably was China.
The Chinese regime choose to disregard the tremendous damage that producing these products causes to their people and environments all to their ultimate aim of becoming the next unilateral superpower by being the richest.
They are buying or already have bought power on an industrial scale.
A false god like Baal has been created and everything it produces are a glorification of the power of money. It is almost complete where power is directly equal to the amount of money that you have, not knowledge or wisdom but cold hard cash.
With the technological ‘advancement’ that money brings nowadays you have to think of the future, are we going to all become quasi computerised machines?
What is the ‘society’ that all this technological ‘advancement’ will create?
With all this money technology there is still no cure for cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, aids.
The betterment of all of societies should be the ultimate aim of the technology that the ethical use of money should bring not the dis-empowerment and subjugation of those who do not agree in the name of the all powerful money god.
Call me an outdated fossil but arguably the most powerful ‘man’ in history was not a money worshiper but an ex carpenter with pacifist tendencies who ultimately believed in peace.
An exercise in Perspective
He didn’t write, if you could call it that, for adulation, sympathy, acceptance or even to be liked.
It was just coming from a place of brutal honesty, a perspective tempered by all the experiences in his life that bore him to where he was now.
A friend said to him in a long and convoluted diatribe that there were other people in the world and even his own relatives who suffered infinitely more than he.
He knew this already, hell there was injustice everywhere, people going hungry or were starving to death or dying of C-19 and other afflictions on earth every minute of every day.
With this in mind he also knew that to alter or modify his point of view so that it would be agreeable to everyone would be next to impossible and end up being a form of self censorship, to what end?
To make himself like the rest that essentially ended up saying nothing for fear of insulting someone somewhere, sometime.
He knew that he probably came across as weak and a bit of a whinger but that was someone else’s perception of him not his, there’s a certain dignity and strength in vulnerability he often thought.
You see one person sees a river stone and thinks ‘oh a stone!’ Where as a Tolai would see the same river stone and think ‘what a good cooking stone!’ it’s all about perspective.
We all do after all walk different paths commensurate to our lived experiences that are unique to each individual.
So you may not agree with what I say or how I express myself but it comes from a lifetime of good and bad experience which I am still going through and will do so in future, God willing!
Denmark
It was now late afternoon after the false start of the morning, late Autumn sun shining beyond the balcony on the street ahead and below.
A helicopter passed overhead to a destination it knew and the wind rustled in the trees.
A familiar car parked in the street and a mother and child exited, heading to their unit behind him. It was a public holiday.
He looked down the sunlit street, a lawnmower coughed into life, he sighed.
It was ironic he thought to himself, he had a persona on Facebook completely divorced from his reality.
All he was qualified for was menial employment such as cleaning or labouring, jobs that killed his spirit when he was able to work.
He had no choices, people had no choices and then got taxed to pay for a government that told them how to live, odd.
You either conformed to a stereotype or got cast aside to play the role of the loser, a cautionary tale of warning to the rest of civil society not to follow suit.
I guess he was a loser, not that he really cared but what did irk him was the hypocrisy of the rulers.
How could you dictate how someone should live when you have not experienced or are even aware of what they go through.
It’s a top down and outdated patriarchal system of government that has not been steeped in the current experience,of I argue, the slim majority of the population.
Those that are not rabid capitalists who live in the past along with the dinosaurs, government does not change but rather grimly maintains the status quo of the previous decade.
A dog barked briefly and he could hear the sound of children, they would be governed by the rules of the present.
It was all so disheartening, the wind picked up and he decided to have a smoke.
Meaning
It wasn’t the sparkling, beautiful post Autumn morning that affected him so but the hollow feeling of abject meaninglessness.
He longed for a street vendor on the corner selling beetle nut, Spear and loose cigarettes he could frequent for some company and casual conversation.
He often thought to himself if PNG had Australia’s infrastructure and systems in place it would be close to heaven on earth.
However those are the breaks I guess, nothing is perfect and the best that you can do is make sure that the positives outweigh the negatives.
He sighed and looked up to the perfect blue sky and thought of his niece who oft admired the view from his balcony on Facebook.
I guess she was leading a meaningful life.
His small Australian flag fluttered in the slight breeze on the balcony railing, he was feeling better.
Friends imbue the world with meaning to an individual and I guess it doesn’t matter where you are it’s ultimately how you feel.
A petrol powered leaf blower started in the distance.
Medical professionals, friends and family had often said to him to essentially distract himself from ruminating by physical exercise, volunteering and employment.
Why? He thought to himself, at the end of the day he would end up where he was now and his associated feelings.
Anyhow he’d done all those things before and had now come to the conclusion that he would rather think his way out of his current dilemma
He could just hear a jet roaring beyond his horizon.
I guess he was on a quest for meaning, to find meaning and live a meaningful life.
Meaning mattered most of all.
Dead man waking
The minutes into hours into days into weeks, months, years , a decade and then two.
He sat defiant through the seasons, the probing looks and stares scattered at his feet like arrows blunted by metal.
The sun merciless in its heavenly domain, sapping the very strength from his bones till he could bear no more, retreating to the coolness of his shelter.
Just another fool on a hill of unrealized potential, the world full to overflowing of such.
That’s why she left, she couldn’t bear to see the once pulsing youth wither and die in middle age before her eyes.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, his slow death began in his late twenties the years incrementally siphoning the wonder of the world from his very soul.
His soul seemingly empty now within a very large and completely disillusioned body, dead weight!
Maybe he reminded her of death and dying whatever it was he didn’t blame her, how can you give if you have nothing left inside, someone trying to love you would feel like they were trying to resuscitate a corpse or hold on to the wind.
“Di voule ra tinata ta go ra tutana!” His mum once exasperated said to someone about him which loosely means “it’s a waste of time talking to this man!”
How can someone believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself.
He had nothing left to give.
He returned to the balcony, seconds turned into minutes turned into hours and it continued unabated, his waking death
The Pinnacle,
I started this blog and then subsequently joined major social media because after a whole life of limiting and abstaining from the utilization of such I thought to myself well I’m in my advanced forties so I might as well leave behind a kind of legacy, a trace of my existence.
I grew up listening to the radio, reading books, newspapers, magazines, comics and having conversations with a whole range of children, teenagers and adults. We had access to film and video before we had cable which was toward the end of my scholastic misadventures.
I was raised in two countries and traveled to a third for six months in my young adulthood and I cannot remember the amount of times I have traveled on all manner of aircraft starting with Fokker F27’s, F28’s and Boeing 707’s and progressing through Airbus A320’s to Boeing 767’s today.
I may not have traveled the world but I’ve been around and experienced and learned about life from rich and poor, sophisticated and unsophisticated, educated and uneducated, criminal, bordering on criminal through to policemen, devoutly religious through to fervently non religious, knowledgeable to ignorant and powerful to powerless.
During all that time I always looked out the window, experienced every experience to the best of my capabilities at the time, remembered every experience that I could good, bad, tragic or indifferent and tried to remember conversations that I have had throughout my life.
I’ve fucking lived!
So now it seems everywhere I go I no longer see anyone looking out the window at the scenery passing by on various modes of transport or people looking at other people or me when I go to the city, everybody it seems is looking down at their phones.
When I go to visit relatives at home or when we go out to maybe a restaurant to see other relatives passing through, the younger late twenty somethings are on their phones and leave the ‘adults’ to carry the conversation. That type of behavior was seen as the the worst social faux pas one could commit in days gone by but unfortunately seems like the norm in today’s ‘developed’ society.
For me in my advanced years it is as if ‘experiencing’ something on social media is taking the place of actually doing things, having great conversations actually seeing something with your own eyes instead of taking a photo to ‘share’.
As Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi explained in his Ted X talk on Youtube, a man says his whole life he wants to climb a mountain then the time comes for him to do so.
He then asks returning travelers which path is the best one to take then he speaks to so many about their experiences climbing the mountain that he comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t need to climb the mountain because he already knows what its like.
I interpret this as sometimes there is no substitute for actually doing, how will you know what the view from the top of the mountain is unless you go through the process of experiencing the climb and ultimately seeing it with your own eyes,
By the way you might be lucky enough to see Master Shi Heng Yi when you reach the pinnacle.
Bitches and Money!
My mother used to say on occasion that I thought too much and there is I think an Asian saying that a person who thinks before each step is destined to spend his life on one foot.
Welcome to my world!
I’ve been thinking about life a long time and the thing that keeps popping up is what we believe in.
The late eighties Rap group NWA once rapped about life in one of their songs off their breakout album Straight Outta Compton “- to some kid looking up to me, life ain’t nothing but bitches and money!”
I’ve given this line a lot of thought and basically that is what life these days distills down to for some these days, what about power? I hear you say, well money buys that you see, recently most noticeably the Presidency of the United States.
I see that mentality almost reinforced in mass media, amongst popular entertainment, on the internet and social media.
To an adherent of such a mindset,being socially responsible would probably be the least of their concerns as Ice T rapped in one of his songs called The Hunted Child “- what we teach to the youths on the streets today about the ends justifying the means mentality, ain’t happening!” and that is what we have to deal with as a society.
Popular musical figures such as the rapper 50 Cent even released a movie many moons ago titled ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and that it seems is what the whole world is trying to do, chase two powerful base motivations-sex and money power no matter what the cost.
Varmari.
His head felt like it would explode, not from anger but sheer frustration which had been slowly building up for some time.
Every morning the same hope evaporating like the morning dew underneath the fierceness of the merciless Australian sun, the frustration building with each cup of coffee or Pepsi Max until the pressure he feared would drive him out of his mind or beg for death.
It was so easy to feel this way it was as if it was the default setting for his brain just like his serious facial expression was for his face. I guess it was the lack of human interaction, the release following a conversation with someone, anyone to think something, anything but the tired old narratives of a previous existence.
He thought to himself if this was the result of his mental illnesses but it seemed to him that all of it seemed to dissipate when he had company, when he wasn’t alone.
This is the perfect way to break someones will he thought, isolate them from loved ones, family and society and let them slowly deteriorate until they just destroyed themselves by their own hand.
In his mothers tongue there was a word for love, varmari, he thought – kir ta varmari ati!, which meant there was no love here.
Everything revolved around the almighty dollar and it was getting that way where he came from, a whole world enslaved and without love for each other or the common man or woman.
The word varmari also incorporated or meant pity and pity seemed in no supply in his world, he was brought up Melanesian, a race of people that were by default very social and community orientated and to be alone was akin to death.
He’d been alone a very long time.
He stayed because he had everything he needed to survive, water, shelter, food, electricity, medical care, security, communication, stability, money but still he yearned quite painfully for love and a sense of meaningful community belonging.
His flatmate had potted plants out on the balcony where he spent the most of his days smoking, he watched them in the dispassionate way that the rest of the majority European neighborhood he imagined watched him.
Probably waiting for him to die for the cardinal sin of not working, not meaning anything in their ‘world’.
He couldn’t go back to where he came from, he had no skills, no means to support himself and his medical ailments yet he wondered how much of this anguish he could bear for he feared he would soon lose his mind,
but of course he never did.
It was like that line in Otis Redding’s song ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay’ which goes-” and this loneliness won’t leave me alone “.
Australia as a society or community seemed to him to have no varmari, he was sure it must exist somewhere in this enormous land but to his current experience it was lacking.
Kir ta varmari ati.
Day.
It had been a while since he had written anything, not that he was a particularly good writer it just was an ability to think.
The morning breeze was warming up and he could feel his forehead go damp.
The day like so many others before it, it was as if his existence was of no consequence.
Life carried on without him a rather joyless experience.
He wondered if this was living on one hand and on the other that at least he had the opportunity to contemplate life.
So many others didn’t have that luxury in their struggle for survival and he pondered whose was the more valid way of life, who was happier.
“Life goes well with friends” he used to say to a receptive ear, he guessed his life wouldn’t be so tedious if he had physical friends to break up the monotony.
The wind picked up and the palm trees fronds swayed too and fro.
What did all his friends, relatives and acquaintances do when they weren’t on Facebook he thought, probably too busy living or working, he sighed got up from where he was sitting on the balcony and went inside.
To an outside observer it would appear that he had everything why even to himself he would come to that realisation on occasion but still that ghoul of unrequited emotion that tormented his days and nights.
The wind howled briefly outside the shut bedroom window, the fan next to him continued whirring ,
Another day……..
The Looking Glass 