In Brisbane

Naughtyman is sitting on a plastic rider, pushing himself to and fro. The floor he is playing on is concrete. Big kids will knock him over and he'll be hurt, if I let him come here.

Zenita has disappeared. No one is watching out for her. I find her in a cubby house. She will fall down from the climbing frame and she'll be hurt, if I let her come here.

My children are too precious to leave in the care of people who do not care. A person who says "one to seven is what the regulations call for in mixed-age groups" just doesn't understand that "one to seven is what we feel is right for your child" is the right thing to say.

Do I think the other parents don't care for their kids, to dump them in such a place, some of them five days a week? I think they look the other way. I think they're scared to see what is right in front of them.

We do not value the raising of children, yet doing it is building our world.

***

Next week I am home alone. I do not go to the inlaws'. It's for the best, although I miss visiting Straddie. I take the opportunity to work longer hours instead. I don't really miss the children. A man who says he can't go a couple of days without his kids is probably lying in my view. We are not women and we don't need to feel we have to compete with them for motherliness. Kids need routine and we get sick of it.

But I do feel lonely when I am left alone because I do not have anything else to do but be a family man. It's a product of having twins and having to be supportive. and of course it's a product of just not knowing how to enrich my life. I know, it's pathetic, you don't have to tell me, but it's not that I can't find what would be fulfilling; I can't even think what would be. And family men can't just make friends. There's no avenue to do so in my life. I work from home; I don't go out except to the football.

I need life to reach in to me but it doesn't. Won't. I know it won't. It's just an excuse for sitting inside an ever-thickening shell.

***

I could join the bushwalking club. I'd enjoy it, but by god, there's a shitload of equipment and buggerising about involved. What I actually need is two or three people who'd like to go for a walk and maybe camp once in a while. And aren't complete fucking arseholes, preferably, but frankly, I'm not that fussy. I want to chuck the stuff in the boot and go, not sign up on a list, coordinate, be led, blah blah.

I could join the humanist society. Mrs Zen met the secretary or the president or someone. They want younger blood. That's not too promising.

Maybe animal rights. I don't want to stand on street corners though. Fuck that. I want to release rabbits. And I can't do anything illegal until I'm a citizen. Being deported would put a crimp in my family life.

Leftist politics is for arseholes. Sorry, it is. I don't fit in any of the pigeonholes anyway. I'm an anarchist in theory but anarchists are no fun, and let's face it, you have more chance of Jesus coming back and telling us all it was a pisstake and God really wants us to do each other up the arse while smoking crack than an anarchy spontaneously forming in Australia. Anarchy demands enormous goodwill of people, and while I have faith in their capability to be good, I worry that they're all Augustinians, planning on not being venal fuckheads later rather than sooner. Socialism is, I'm afraid, nonsense. I don't want the workers to run the place. They're mostly fucking idiots. I believe in empowerment of the people but not all of a sudden. That's not to say leftist solutions haven't made the world a better place, just that until the proletariat are better educated, more sensitive and less inclined to hate anything that doesn't come in pink skin, they're better off being governed than governing. Stop the War is out of the question. I'm against the war, shrilly so, and I don't like Israeli expansionism either, but there's no way I'm marching alongside the kind of tosser I'd punch in the face in another context. It's gone way beyond strange bedfellows, because more and more it seems the well-meaning leftists have adopted the slogans and hatred of those same cosleepers. And look, Muslims might be justified in hating the very existence of Israel, and ethnic states might be an ugly expression of racism, but it does exist and the upset at the oppression of the ummah doesn't actually apply to Western college boys who would quite likely be first against the wall if the caliphate came to their town, and no one complains about Japan, do they? so we have to work with what it is, not what it would ideally have been. On that note, Western commentators really didn't understand what Ahmedinazhad was trying to express. Forget the Holocaust denial bollocks. That's obviously demented anti-Semitic nonsense. But the stuff about why don't the Jews have a homeland in Germany really speaks to the ummah, and not realising that is a mistake. Because the problem with Israel is that from the Muslim point of view, a European colony was smacked down in the middle of their lands. Yes, there was a Jewish presence there, but for most of the Islamic period, and before that right back to the Romans, until Zionists started a movement to populate it, it was rather limited. To the Muslims, the Jewish claim on Israel seemed rather tenuous, perhaps analogous to Portugal's claim to India. They had come and they had mostly gone. I'm not expressing an opinion on the rights or wrongs of it, just noting that that is how they see it. Britain more or less imposed Israel on the Arabs. We did a lot of that kind of thing. We invented Iraq, which was a bad idea given its complete lack of actually being a nation, and empowered the Sauds and several other chosen Arab families. Should the Jewish homeland have been a piece of the United States, or Russia, or a province of Germany? Well, maybe, but it isn't. Should it be a multiethnic state (the "one-state" solution)? Well, maybe, but you can certainly understand why Jews are mostly not keen on it. There aren't a profusion of happy, multiethnic, Arab-majority, democratic states in the region. The problem is, of course, just as with anarchy, people talk in ideals but we have a world that refuses resolutely to be ideal.

Anyway, I like Jews, even if they did invent Gahd/Allah. I'm fucked if I'm going to march up and down saying I don't.

***

I'm interested in people. Profoundly interested in them. I like to know about them, what they do, what they know or think they know, what moves them. I could listen for hours to people talking about themselves. I am so not interesting myself though that I don't like talking about myself. Small talk involves almost nothing but talking about yourself and asking about others. If I could only make it clear that I don't want to talk about my job, my car, my house, my kids and actually, I don't want to know about theirs either. But people insist. They ask what I do for a living. I answer and then it's how's your kids, blah blah, and before you know it, I've spent another ten minutes of my life not knowing someone. Because all that stuff is what you wear as your coat, not who you are. Okay, maybe it's a bit much to expect people I've just met to share their secrets, but...

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:08 pm