Winning
So it's small things that get you excited, small triumphs, little steps on the road to wherever.
So the other day I'm playing poker. I've just moved up to the 22s and as usual, when I move up, I run really bad. I had lost a couple of hundred bucks, which is not much, but when you have painstakingly won it a buck at a time, it feels like a lot. It's a feature of poker that losing seems a lot easier than winning.
So I'm losing, and the little whiny child in me is saying, let's give up poker. We're not good enough and now we're getting our comeuppance.
But there's a stronger me: an experienced, smart poker player, who has studied and learned. And that guy looked around the table and said, hang on, no one here, literally no one, has the first clue how to play an STT. And my edge, my ability to win, is strongly expressed in being able to say that, to know that I am the only player there with the ability to win money over the long term.
Today, I got a bunch of new work. The local paper's chief sub has offered me casual shifts and my people in Singapore have given me a new project. And I know, if I let myself know it, that if I don't give in to self pity, I can survive, and better than that, thrive.
The monkey can get fucked. Because I know that happiness is not illusory. I know that I am the guy who can write a wicked bassline, beat the 55s in time, edit anything, massage you into paradise, fuck you till you're sore, win. I can win. I knew it in an instant.
And I came second. (Sometimes that's like winning [insert winky].) It's enough. I am going home. I am soon going to be walking the streets of an English city, and everything will be okay. All that ails me will vanish, and I will have my pear tree.
Yes, fuck the monkey. I will have my pear tree. I am telling you now, you can count on it. Bear with me; where I have it in my power, you will have yours too. Can we not rise up? Can we not overcome our monkeys?
I know it won't last. I know I'm manic and the crash awaits. I don't care. You will never understand. You will never know that it is all worth it. It's like a cycle. At the top, I love you. I love you so much I am bursting with it. At the bottom, I hate everyone, myself the most. But I wouldn't trade it. I mean, I couldn't trade it.
I feel like laughing maniacally and I don't care. LOLOLOLOLOL. See? Tonight, Zenita was trying on her new hat, which Mrs Zen bought for her, because we will soon be in a place that is cold for months on end, not just the odd night (and I am sitting out on our back verandah on a midwinter night, in a light jumper). She was so perfect, a little hippie chick, beautiful and spirited, real and tangible. I do not know how to tell you how much I love her. You would have to feel it to know how it is.
How lucky we are! Us dads, how lucky we are to feel this overwhelming, wonderful love we have for our girls and our gentle, beautiful boys. How lucky we are sometimes to be winners, to rise above it and be, for a moment or two, better than the world we have been marooned in. Three cheers for us. Fuck the monkey. He does not cheer. He leers and hopes to see us fail. But if we live, and have hope, he cannot ever see us fail. If we live.
I will have my pear tree. Come with me. We will have it together. I have stopped being shit when I lose. I have learned that losing is just one more step on the way to winning. I am better than the world I am a stranger in. I will be home soon. Fuck the monkey. He is not coming with me. He is not coming. He is going to stay here. He belongs here, the miserable cunt. Come with me. Let's succeed. Let's be people we can fall in love with. Let's be manic forever. Let's win.
Let's win. We're good enough. Look around. No one at this table has a clue. We are not opposed to them. We are just who and what we are. We do not have monkeys to hold us back. We have a strong, deep understanding of love, and that is our salvation, nothing else, and nothing between us and winning, always, winning.
Fuck tha police
So the police do not believe I rammed the woman's car, but I got fined for not exchanging details. Apparently, it doesn't matter that she refused to take my number. I should have gone to every other car in the carpark asking whether anyone had a pen, and forced my details on her. Or something.
Basically, the woman went to the cops, claimed I rammed her twice and refused to give my details. Right. I was standing in the rain for my health, and apparently "just exchange fucking details, you cunt" doesn't count as giving your particulars under the act. I mean, why the fuck would I get a pen when she was sat there holding one? There's nothing I can do though. The law is written very broadly so that the police can just make it up as they go along. That this disgusting woman not only caused the accident but lied about it doesn't help me any. Oh well, soon I will be gone from this shithole and this will be just one more reason to hate Queensland, which I do, and to consider the police the enemy of the truth and morality, which I do.
Why did the police believe me and not her? Well, apart from that I was telling the truth, and police are used to distinguishing truth from lies, and use interview techniques to do it, they have photos of the damage. It quite clearly bears out my story. The car is dented at an angle: so it's obvious at a glance that she was moving when she was hit (the dent is not flat, as it would be if she was stationary, but angled, and the crumpling is greater at the front).
Unfortunately, the police will not put it in writing that they do not believe her. Officially, there are two sides to the story, and there is no evidence to proceed with. The constable said that they had decided very easily and quickly that there was no case to answer. Sigh. Now I have to hope that her insurance company investigates the claim and denies it. They have told me that if they find she has lied in her claim, that's what will happen.
I understand why she lied. She drove into the back of my car, and is well aware that morally, if not legally, she caused the accident. She probably wasn't sure how she stood under the law, so she made up a story that seemed more clearly to put her in the clear.
But see, I did nothing much wrong. You can certainly argue that it's unpleasant to abuse someone for not swapping their details and berating you instead, but the police should not be in the business of teaching me a moral lesson by fining me because they don't like that. I backed out of a parking space carefully and some stupid whore ran into my car. When I saw the notice in the newsletter I contacted the police straight away, and I have told nothing but the truth. I feel good about it, to be honest. Sometimes, shitty people do shitty things to you, and there's nothing you can do. You just brush yourself down and walk away. So that's it.
Cock and bull
I suppose I should not be surprised how disgusting people can be, but even at my age, I have the capacity to be surprised by it.
The woman I was involved in the car accident with has invented a story that is not just untrue; it is obviously untrue to anyone who knows me even a little, and equally obviously untrue just on the face of it.
The woman is saying that I reversed into her while she was stationary and that I had road rage and did it again.
With my kids in the back seat of my car, this woman is saying, I purposely ran into her
with my fucking kids in the back of my car.And then, weirdly, got out of my car and yelled at her, what the bloody hell did you do that for?
I mean, fucksake. Let's pretend that I'm the kind of person who gets aggressive towards others, which I am not. (I might mouth off at you but I have not hit anyone in 25 years plus, and then it was in self-defence.) I ram you and then shout at you for doing it? So I'm not just aggressive, I'm insane. No one who knows me would think that I delude myself about anything, let alone that it's someone else's fault that I ram them twice!
I know that the woman is taking advantage of the fact I was angry to invent this story. She knows she did the wrong thing but obviously you cannot tell your insurance that. You cannot tell them that you tried to cut someone off and they hit your car because your claim is turned down flat at that point.
But if that was all there was to it, I would get over it. But it's worse. She has a witness who has the same,
who is an offduty copper. I do not know how she got this person to say this but I know it is not true. If I had made a mistake, I would confess to it. It is not my style to blame others for what I've done.
But I did nothing wrong.
And where the hell did she get this copper from? No one approached her at the scene. No one has told the police anything. How does she know there is a witness? How did a witness even contact her insurance people? The insurance people now say that there is nothing in the notes about a statement. It's crazy.
How did the woman get this statement? The insurance company won't say. They say they don't have a statement. I can't speak to the woman who rang me about the case.
She even lied to her insurance about my not wanting to swap details. That's not true. I called her a cunt precisely because she would not write her number down and swap details. I did not have a pen in the car, so I couldn't do anything about it. I was standing in the rain listening to her mouth off at me while she fiddled with her pen.
I thought all I would have to do is go to the police station and make a statement. I would go to court if I had to, and tell the truth. I believe, foolishly, in the truth. I thought that, yeah, I might lose. Maybe the court would find that it was my fault, even though there was nothing I could do. Her story doesn't even make sense though. She claims to have been stationary in traffic and I rammed her. But how come if I rammed her I only hit the very front of her car? How come I didn't hit the car in front of her? Why didn't the driver of the car in front get out to see whether their car was damaged? (The answer, in case you're curious, is that they had moved off, which is why she had tried to get across the gap before I could pull out.) Is she seriously suggesting that the driver of the car that was parked in front of her was not even curious whether they had sustained damage?
And I want to know who this witness is. Who is their kid at the school? Obviously, no kid, no credibility. Can they prove they were in the carpark at the time? Where were they? They would have had to be particularly well placed to have seen it clearly enough to know what happened, not to mention that they would have to have been looking at the right time. It happened quickly. Why didn't this policeman arrest me for criminal damage? Why didn't he come and get my details? I didn't disappear. The woman blocked me from leaving the spot and sat phoning someone for several minutes. Why didn't the policeman approach me? Was he not worried that someone so enraged that he would ram another car might turn violent?
Why did a policeman with a good enough view of the accident to corroborate her story not come forward at the time?I don't even understand how I am supposed to have done it. In her version of the story, I waited for several minutes in my parking spot, then just said fuck it and reversed into her, where she was sitting stationary, and then became so enraged that she was there that I rammed her again. But why? I often sit in that carpark. I wasn't in any hurry. There's no point; it always takes forever to get out of the carpark.
I am actually really scared that this woman has got someone to ram her car after the fact, to create more damage and make it worse for me. Anyone insane enough to make up the story she has made up could do that. What a nightmare!
What upsets me most of all is that I know I didn't do the wrong thing, but she did. I waited for a space and pulled out when it was clear. I know that is true. I am a cautious driver on the whole, and I am aware of what a nightmare the school carpark is, particularly in heavy rain. I don't drive aggressively, and I don't play chicken with other cars. I am
always the chicken. I would never risk injury to my children and the suggestion that I would is truly offensive. I hate the woman more for that suggestion than for what she did in the first place or for any other lie she has told.
But this woman did do the wrong thing. She tried to cut me off when I was backing out. She and I both know that is true. (And it doesn't matter how many off-duty policemen say otherwise: the truth is the truth, and we both know it.) People do this kind of thing. They play chicken, throwing their cars across gaps to stop each other pulling out. I see it all the time. But I didn't see her do it and that's why we crashed. She even confessed it when I got out of the car and asked her why she'd done it. She didn't want to wait.
She didn't want to wait. She risked injuring my children because she didn't want to wait for one more car to get out of the carpark.
Well, I should not be surprised that someone that disgusting would lie and would have found a friend to lie for them, should I?
Good riddance, freak
On the one hand, Michael Jackson was an abused child who became an abuser (I suppose we must say an alleged abuser, because sadly he escaped conviction for what he did, and died unrepentant), a victim as much as a villain. I do not say that a man should be blamed for what he grows into when we are so strongly moulded by experience.
On the other, he was a man with the resources to get first-class help and instead used his money and power to increase his access to children. Some say that abuse is a cycle: children who are abused grow up broken and in turn abuse others, who become broken and so it goes.
This is a great human tragedy. I'm a softhearted type and a sucker for "does no one think about the children" appeals to sentimentality. But I am also a realist and believe that the foundation of a happy, secure childhood is essential for fully developed human beings.
So good riddance to Michael Jackson and may your life stand as an indictment on a world that will forgive anything of those who caper for it amusingly.
****
While I am on the subject, vale Farrah Fawcett. I was one of many teen boys who had a Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster on my wall (I think you all know which
one), and it's no exaggeration to say that my earliest masturbatory fantasies featured her exclusively.
The contrast between how these two stars brought sex into the lives of boys is quite striking. These days I'm more concerned about the commodification of women than I was then, but I don't overanalyse it. I simply rejoice in her beautiful smile and hair that many women, including Mrs Zen, would quite literally kill for. And the nips. We're going to miss the nips.
Vale Farrah Fawcett, forever summer in her red cossie.
Smashed
I've got to write this down because it's bugging me so much. It's super stressful.
So I am waiting in my car to pull out of a parking spot in the carpark at our kids' school. Every evening there's a long line of traffic waiting to get out onto the road that the school is on, and it backs up into the carpark. So you take your chance to back out of your spot when you can. So the guy next to me backs out, and the woman who left the space for him still hasn't moved, so I back out too. I look over my shoulder: all clear, and off I go.
Crunch! At first I'm like, how the fuck can there be a car there? So I get out and I realise that the woman has purposely driven her car into the way to cut me off so that I can't back out. I didn't see her move forward, obv., or I would have stopped. I am pretty sure she knew I was backing out. I had been waiting with my indicator on for a long time, cars are backing out wherever they can, and once the way was clear, of course I was going to go.
So I'm like, what the bloody hell did you do that for?
And she's like, it's such a long line and I've been waiting ages.
And I'm like, so you made me fucking crash?
Because I can't believe it. That's exactly what she has done. She has hooked it into the gap that I'm pulling out into because she won't wait for another car.
So she is getting her notebook out, and it's teeming with rain. She is yelling at me about how I ran into her. I am like, you have to be kidding, you put your car behind mine on purpose. She keeps yelling and is not doing anything with her pen.
So I'm like, just swap fucking numbers, you cunt.
She's like, you set a good example for your kids.
And I'm like, yeah and I suppose making someone crash their fucking car is setting a great example.
So she goes, I'm just going to take your licence plate for the insurance.
I'm like, fine, and get back into my car.
So there's a notice in the newsletter from the school: the police are searching for witnesses to a car accident. I'm freaking out. It's probably just that she has made a claim on her insurance and they have told her she has to get a police report.
I suppose it's going to be expensive for me. I drove into her and that's all that's going to matter. That she purposely put her car in my road doesn't matter.
Well, that's all I need. My boss has no work for me. My big project is delayed. I have 2K dollars in my England account and barely a K in my transaction account. I am supposed to prove that I have the funds to support Mrs Zen when we go to the UK or she can be refused a visa. I am underemployed and my outgoings will be greater in the UK. I mean, I hope to get a jerb but my CV is all over the place and I haven't even had a reply from the past half dozen places I've sent it to.
I am sick of it, you know. Sick of this useless life. Sick of stress, of boredom, of people who just fuck you up because they have no regard for anyone else, sick of a boss who hires someone else to do my job because she doesn't feel comfortable briefing by email, sick of women who cause a crash because they are not patient, of people who swerve in front of me in the road, missing by inches, and flick the finger when you sound your horn instead of feeling shame that they have endangered your life and theirs, sick of fear, of emptiness, sick of feeling sick.
Talk about the weather
One of the problems a writer has, even one with no readers, is what to write about. Which is why most interwebnet writing is pointless drivel. And I'm no different from most of you: a dull person living a dull life in a dull backwater.
So we could talk about the weather. The weather is flat and uninspiring. It has rained a fair bit recently, and we have laboured under heavy grey skies. Well, you're saying, isn't that what you expect in winter? Actually no. This is Australia. We're all upside down and shit. The winter here is mostly dry, with the skies predominantly blue and clear. Yeah, we do it differently here, and kangaroos march down the high
street.*Okay then, not the weather. Iran is exciting, right? What can I say about Iran? Well, I have my doubts.
What? The thing is, I'm not keen on Mousavi, who seems to be an opportunist: an Islamist when it suits, all for the unveiling of yuppies... sorry, the liberation of women everywhere when that is what is needed, and the same can be said of the faction he represents. Only in Iran could Ali Rafsanjani be considered a "reformist". On the other hand, one does want to support the populace, and it's hard to know how broad based the protests are. Hard to know because our media is pushing a particular agenda hard, and the blogosphere is aflame with the spirit of crusade.
But, you know, people talk about repression, but the regime in Iran is not deeply unpopular, and probably would not have survived if it was. It just isn't the case that the whole world shares our Western "values". And some places, such as Iran, insist that their millennia of history, indigenous culture that runs deeper than jazz and cheeseburgers and tradition of on the whole being a positive influence on the world around them entitle them to run their affairs as they choose.
So yeah, I suppose I'm all for the people, but not much in favour of posturing neocons who are pretending to be liberals (or are being painted that way by Westerners). It's tough for people of
goodwill** to know what to make of the whole thing. What I do know is that I will avoid what I see at
Lenin's Tomb, a blog I read and sometimes enjoy, where Richard Seymour trips over himself in trying to figure out how he can support what seems to be a popular uprising while not supporting the people behind it. Seymour's failing -- common on the left, and one he is particularly prone to -- is that he argues from what he wants to be true backwards. I'm sure there's a Latin phrase for that, but anyway, we all know it when we see it. Ideologues feel obliged to make the world fit their ideology, rather than their ideology fit the world. Seymour is a socialist of a particular type, which constrains him to see the world in a particular way. Sadly, I do not think there is a faction that the left can side with in Iran. Two rightist gangs are clashing over control of the economy of Iran, and the protests are mostly just fallout. I do not think a popular revolution will follow
.***Okay then, not Iran either. How about them Cubs? Erm no. How about football? Well, it's become a bit ludicrous. My own team -- the valiant, underachieving "sleeping giants" of Leeds -- are not involved in the hoopla, except that their young and talented squad is going to be raped by people with more money, but isn't that football in a nutshell? It's become silly now, particularly with Arab money involved. Or has it? I'm in two minds, because Arab money didn't spoil horse racing really. It just changed the colours that the jockeys wore. And football's slide into being just another tawdry form of celebrity worship (rather than the fine artform we know it is at heart) has not been caused by, or even particularly helped by, the Arabs.
On the subject of Arabs, I'd like to note that it is almost the world's problems in nutshell that a few families have become insanely rich and
believe it to be their right while many of their compatriots starve. I was reading about Bahrain, which is owned by the Al Khalifa family. And as I read that, I was thinking, wtf. Some greedy shites killed some other greedy shites a hundred years ago and now their descendants, who have never done a thing to earn a cent of it, are rolling in the clover?
Well, wtf. Should I even care? I have my own problems, right? Let's talk about how I am going to make a living next month, or next year, or about my prolapsed disc, which has been painful recently, or the holes in my teeth, or the woman whose car I ran into yesterday and as I stood in the rain listening to her shouting at me for not realising that she had purposely driven into a gap to block me from reversing I lost my temper and told her she was a cunt -- but in my defence, if you are going to act like a cunt you can hardly expect me to shake you by the hand and call you sister o' mine, or the frighteningly real dreams I have in which my children succumb to leukaemia, or the loneliness and alienation of 21st century suburbia, living out in the sprawl of a dull provincial city in a dull insular island in the middle of a sea full of sharks, so that even if you swim for your life, you will not live.
And isn't that what all my problems, and most of our problems, come down to? We cannot live. We are tied up in chatter, blather, endless empty words, lies and blandishments, 24/7, on every channel, in every place we look. Isn't that all it is and if we just stayed calm for a while, it would all blow over, we would live and all would be well?
And if not, why not?
* No, they don't really. I think what is most surprising about Australia is how utterly prosaic it is, what a cavern of dullness. You might imagine nothing could be duller than English suburbia, but you would be wrong. You couldn't even get stabbed around here.
Return** By which I mean, leftists. But I do not call myself a leftist too often, because for me, being on the left simply means being on the side of the people. It seems impossible to me to be rightwing if you like people. I mean, we all understand being selfish. We were all five-year-olds once. But we mostly learned that you can't get what you want like that. Unless you are privileged and basically already begin with what you want. It's just screamingly obvious that human greatness is a product of cooperation, not exploitation. Anyway, I would not be a socialist. I'd find it way too hard to be all doctrinaire and pofaced, and I don't want a dictatorship of the proletariat, until the proletariat have been freed and do not consist so markedly of people I would not leave to watch a fire, let alone run the country. Yes, I agree that an idealised proletariat would be fine for the job, and I realise that what we have now are products of a system designed to lessen, to blunt, to diminish. I have faith in us, but that is like saying I have faith that Naughtyman will learn how to swim. I'm sure he will, but I wouldn't throw him overboard from the family
yacht**** to prove it.
Return*** Don't get me wrong. Seymour is a lucid and intelligent commentator, and I do recommend him. I just cannot help feeling he would be greatly improved for becoming a humanist and abandoning
ideology*****.
Return**** No, we don't. Nor would I want one. I like sailing and I like yachts, but I don't want one. I am not one of these people who dreams of sailing the world on a motor cruiser. I don't in any case much like being out of sight of land. Like an ancient Greek, I prefer to hug the coast. I like to flatter myself that I could swim back home if the worst happened, although, let's face it, it's unlikely I could outswim the sharks.
Return***** I know what you're going to say though. You are going to say, but don't you have an ideology, Dr Zen? Aren't you some sort of commie yourself? Well no. If I had to be an anythingist, I'd be an anarchist. I think we are better on a smaller scale, and would have beautiful lives were we to abandon materialism and live within means that would have all comfortable and content. I could describe that world at great length and it's a fine ideal. But that's what it is. It is not our world and getting there is probably not possible. I mean, we could shoot everyone who refuses to share, but most of refusing to share is built on having the guns. In practice, I'm a bleeding heart liberal, largely a rejectionist, and I am content with that. I believe that making the world more
just****** is a good thing, and making it less just a bad thing.
Return******Yeah, I know, justice is a slippery concept. We sort of know it when we see it, but we don't always allow ourselves to see it. Largely, I think it boils down to saying that we should all have what we need, including the space to think through what we need. And yeah, I know you think you need a helicopter, but you're going to have to narrow your definition of need so that it is not too much broader than what is possible for all to enjoy. Come on! It's not that impossible. We are conditioned to be greedy. I don't believe it's what we are. If we are secure and comfortable, we are quite happy to become indolent. And I do not mind indolence. The lazy only kill by inaction; the energetic are the fuckers who cause the chaos.
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