I had a young friend named Matthew John Davies to everyone but to me he was Matt Man.
We met at Tafe in two thousand and six, both doing the adult tertiary preparation course. It was almost time for computer class and he was sitting outside the computer lab on a brick horse shoe shaped bench reading a New Yorker magazine.
I approached and commented that that was what my father used to read and our friendship pulsed from there.
He was young and technically brilliant at what he put his mind to, he had many interests back then, musical theater , film noir, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouak , William S. Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Janes Addiction, Judy Garland and poetry among st a myriad other things .
He was, like I’d imagined my father as a young man, driven.
He then focused on poetry, to my two unit general English mind reading his poetry was like trying to read and understand a schematic, beyond my comprehension.
He ascended years ago now and I miss him, it was like having another like minded soul in the world, someone of immense value to me.
I always joked with him that I’d write an ode to grass for him as I spend so much of my days staring at a lawn across the road from the balcony of the flat.
I have never been physically violent with a woman although I have been emotionally manipulative, psychologically abusive and unfaithful in a previous relationship.
It is frightfully easy to do.
I tried to make amends after it was all over, my behavior was morally reprehensible and inexcusable at the time.
I guess being in a foreign land at the time away from my mother and relatives to keep me in check I was left to my own devices, although thinking about it I was probably too pig headed to be kept in check.
I write this because a young mother and three children died here in Brisbane in what is suspected to be a murder suicide a couple of days ago.
My mother was a feminist in a pretty hostile male dominated society, she was my mother and father at the same time when I was younger.
She was a dominant presence in my life and even though I would try to ignore what she was trying to teach me at the time it all makes sense now.
She was a staunch feminist but what can you do in a society where wanton use of force against women was a daily occurrence,ignorance expressed by violence.
As she aged she slowly became frail and her voice became a little more than a whisper when I went back to the village to say my goodbyes for we knew she was going.
Even as frail as she was then there was still that spark in her that would argue with anyone or man.
She taught me to always be respectful to women.
I remember an incident as a young man, whilst at a relatives place in Rabaul town, East New Britain Province,Papua New Guinea, waiting for a meal of fish to be cooked for me by a female relative of the same age.
Feeling guilty that I wasn’t helping her cook i talked her into letting me scrape the coconut for her to use in the meal.
Coconut scrapers are like a small bench that you sit on with one end having a round serrated metal scraper affixed where you would scrape the split coconut halves flesh into a bowl beneath.
After much cajoling, she begrudgingly let me,so positioned on the veranda overlooking the street below I endeavored to scrape the coconut.
Halfway though the first nut half a group of four to five youths appeared outside the fence I was overlooking and started to laugh at me.
You see they were so used to women scraping coconuts that it was funny that a ‘man’ was doing it, I remember feeling embarrassed and a little bit silly, a bit like a fool but i finished scraping.
I did that because my mother taught me to but just by that simple act I was seen as weak, an object of derision, an outcast.
I say now,real strength is respect of others regardless if you can belt the living day lights out of them or not, respect doesn’t involve force, abuse,sarcasm, threats and coercion.
My mother was not cowed in the end, she was Iron Man on the inside.
It’s a sad day for all you bibliophiles out there, your savior -Larry Tesler, the inventor of cut , copy, paste , find and replace during his tenure at Zerox PARC beginning in the early nineteen seventies has died aged seventy four.
After his pioneering work at Zerox PARC he subsequently was employed by Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, the genetics company 23andme and to top it all off became an independent consultant.
He achieved a lot in his working life.
Seventy four is still young in my book as one is able to do lots of interesting and fun stuff at that age.
Why if I’m still alive at that age I’ll take up illegal drugs.
As the morning wore on any illusions were dispelled by the humidity and occasional breakthroughs of fierce sunlight, it’s going to be a long day, as predictable as death and decay. A plane roars overhead, use your mindfulness skills you learnt in cognitive behavioral therapy a voice in your head extorts as you stare blankly at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of you. Staring at the screen is better than staring at the white wall behind it, you look around you, an umbrella to your left, a dresser with a flat screen television wired up to the set top box beneath to your right. Almost half a century of life and learning but nothing to show for it, except words and a deep disillusionment about life and the people in it. It seems like the truly crazed and psychotic are not the ones being treated but the ones out there in the wild running countries like fiefdoms.
Feeling as alive as a snake thats overdosed on a hot shot of heroin laced with fentanyl in the dead of a winters night.
Another wander around the landscape this morning in supreme discomfort, it was like the radiated heat from an open blast furnace.
Comfortable now, the newly installed split system air conditioner is set at an agreeable twenty four degrees, thank the spirit in the sky!
Call me Shirley and beat me with a limp piece of celery but the sun is now a health hazard, people shouldn’t work exposed to it.
Dog barks through the distant roar of the ocean coming out of the air conditioning and I’m day dreaming about being a lighthouse keeper in remote Tasmania.
With an affectionate jack Russell terrier, Nippy, and a snooty cat called Nijinski. I’d have a pipe and a beard which I would scratch whilst staring out at the seething cold and restless ocean.
Then I would take a hip flask of cheap whiskey from my coat, draw deeply from it and then gag, my eyes watering and throat burning.
Human beings are now commodities, you are born into a world of capitalism raised and indoctrinated to be servants of capitalism and then cast out into the world to be both exponents and consumers of capitalism for your working life.
You are then left to essentially fend for yourself abandoned in your twilight years juicedand played by a system of control that you gave your life for.
Now capitalism is marketing technology as an indispensable part of life.
It is an expensive fad, instead of bringing thoughts and ideas to life it instead is a marketing tool, news stories are based on you, your family, your community, your town, city and countries algorithms collected by countless cookies on the sites that you visit.
Information gathered from from whatever device you use to communicate via the internet even the ones you don’t know, we have become cows in an information feedlot.
We are not that advanced than the generations before us,the major issues have been the same in some form or another for thousands of years, the only thing that has changed is hype.
You can’t eat technology and technology in it’s current metamorphism’s is not sustainable to produce or maintain,coming at a great cost to our environments.
Sure you might be technologically superior but to produce and power all that tech for aburgeoning global population comes at a morbid blow to the environment so how is that technically superior?
You can’t grow it,you cant eat it,and you can’t drink it and you can’t make it without electricity and other machines and I seriously don’t think you are supposed to relate to it or use it as some kind of crutch.
technology is just a money making tool for the rich, technology manipulators, multinationals, government lap dogs and power producers.
As a wise native American once said, “you can’t eat money.”
While traipsing to the local post office, sweating profusely from the head to pick up some mail after a lengthy and tortured conversation on the phone en route,he arrived,turned to enter when something caught his eye.
He glanced over…’hang on’ he thought, ‘he looks familiar’, ‘isn’t that Jeff’,’ Jeff Horn.’
It was and he caught his eye as he,his wife and young child sat down around a table in front of the coffee shop next to the post office.
He continued on into the post office and when served by a rather surly young gentleman went through the usual ritual of handing over the tickets,showing identification and signing a makeshift digital screen for the parcels.
‘dickhead!’ he thought to himself as he left, he then looked to his right to see if Jeff was still there, he was, now seated, he caught his eye again and and said “I hope you win!”, “Thanks mate” Jeff replied.
He turned and continued walking home rather chuffed he had gotten to see and wishThe Hornet well for his upcoming fight against the son of former Australian boxing great Kostya Tszyu, Tim Tszyu.
Jeff Horn had a good back story, I think he was a former teacher who turned to boxing and had an early fight against the Philippines’s champion Manny Pacquiao a little while ago. He beat Manny in a rather brutal affair here in Brisbane, and the way that he fought the impression I got was that Jeff had a lot of heart, he was a fighter.
He took as much punishment as he meted out during that bout and he stubbornly refused to give up.
I was hoping he would do the same against the American boxer Terence Crawford when they fought in Las Vegas I think after the fight with Pacquiao, but he was outclassed at the time and lost.
However win lose or draw, it’s heartening that there are people out there when challenged fight with a lot of heart,
His senses returned and he gazed down the street between the houses that the sun was clinical in illuminating, he recalled the psalm -“and the foundations of the earth were laid bare at thy rebuke o lord, at thy blast of thy nostrils”.
It always came to mind when he looked or walked around the empty streets alone when everyone was at work for he never came upon anybody except perhaps a friendly dog through the fence. He was far from religious but he did like that psalm, psalm eighteen David’s song of victory.
The bible did have some good bits he decided.
“-he made darkness his covering about him,he flew on the wings of the wind-” he thought of that little red bible he left in the village, the language was noteworthy maybe from the nineteenth century,he wished he still had it just for that psalm and the language used.
He remembered his suffering at the time, the inability to find peace and bereft of hope, he used to read that psalm aloud over and over like a Buddhist mantra, not that it did any good or alleviated his anguish.
He didn’t know why he got so worked up but he was glad he did it,it may not be perfect but as Wayne Bennett (the coach of the Brisbane Broncos rugby league team) once said “Don’t die with the music in you.”
All one has is the present however temporary, you can die at any time and who would know what you were thinking if you didn’t do or say anything about it, somewhat mollified he sighed.
The Looking Glass 