actually existing capitalism

life under actually existing capitalism continues;

a unique combination of boring and stressful.

face it, i’m never going to be a hot porridge-man

i think trusts are somehow fundamentally immoral

for tax wheezes and to sneeze-on late diseases

build car washes and slag heaps on the green belt!

speed eden’s fall to it’s infernal conclusion

i don’t want to be too political, but i don’t like the world that much. i don’t claim to know how to fix it. but it’s just not that fun. work i mean. we spend years in training, like 13 years of school, then maybe college as well, you’d think we’d be like smart enough to make the world work without everyone spending most of their waking life just trying to keep on top of their emails.

an odd feature of actually existing capitalism, is that the essentials of life, you know, shelter, food, raising a family, entertainment… are priced as luxuries. lots of jobs just don’t pay enough to support such things. i don’t claim to understand economics. but that seems to me like an abject failure.

culinary weekend

gloriosa, parliament sauce,

crises on the high seas

a paddling pavarotti leaves

in degrees of blue cheese

graduates to a sextet roundtable gaff christening

make the dog wait late to get out in the rain

halved iced raw lobster twitching

piled up plates in the kitchen

was there a thing about the three tenors and high c’s? sometimes i read this poem back and i haven’t much of a clue what was going through my mind. i think this was about my girlfriend’s flat warming but honestly. it was a tough time. maybe we just leave it at that. need to get better about oversharing…

in my second novel, tentatively titled ‘sleaze in san estaben’, there is a character called pavolvia who is loosely based on pavorotti. except it turns out he isn’t really italian and has a gruff new york accent. and he’s a bit of a sex pest. man i need to spend more time working on my novels.

baby-boomin’ woomin’

all my life, baby-boomer woman

have told me i’m good looking

and from hereon in such women

shall be by heroines

growing up, women of my parents’ generation were always telling me i was handsome. women of this generation remain the most likely to smile at me unprompted in the street, even when i’m not walking a dog.

but mainly, i am prone to echolalia, and the day i wrote this i just had the couplet stuck in my head all day and i felt like i was going insane. now, a year later, i’m quite comfortable making a conclusive diagnosis of insanity.

the pb

race day nerves, alert,

waiting for the call to stool

and then a heady wait for armistice

two centuries less a decade,

my heart rate for eighty-six minutes

wobbly, aching legs, perplexing personality test

pleasant materteral assessors suggest i am for def. autistic

i ran a pb in the half marathon this time last year. this time this year i ran a pb in the 10k. 38 mins. it was a windy day. my legs are still aching from it now. as they were from the half last year.

then i went for my autism assessment, which was actually very stressful. like custom designed to really stress an autistic person out. which is the sort of person i am.

save for what?

my good friend steev had a job when teenaged

saved up, quit, bought a guitar with his wages

said to me once: what are you saving up for?

lately i think about that a more and more

and the other recurring dream

loading the trolley with all the treats

and waking up before i eat them

i have mentioned my friend steev before. i went climbing with him early in the morning before work for a year or so, until he moved away last winter. we were both going through transitions of one sort or another.

we were in a band together when we were much younger, and it must have been around that time that we had the conversation about saving up.

when does one find contentedness? i was thinking about that a lot. and the autism diagnosis was forcing me to look at my life in a different way.

i decided to work less. spend more time on art. poetry, music, this blog. and i am working on redrafting some long form prose for publication. i wish i could work more on this stuff and less on employment still though.

chorus number nine

brazen child, pray share your toblerone with me

i know you pinched it but i’m no a grass

i have a theory that the criminal law system propagates violence in place of justice

different but the same

it’s funny that i find myself writing this blog on the day i was a victim of attempted violence (see tues 2 – i postulate a remedy). should i report the crime, and myself propagate violence (the criminal justice system) on my assailant?

the punishment is often worse that the crime. i need to think this through. i believe we shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they ever did. but i also realise that if crime is unpunished, criminals become our rulers.

the tempo of doms

to the sweetie shop why stop there’s no consequence

i run and i come as close as i’ve came since whence,

rage rover through the stroll pastoral

cape town to mugdock bog,

wide spectrum gossip, conspiratorial

prone to panic about other’s perceptions

a tendency revealed through a habit of projection

concept album? i am living a concept life

into the tempo of doms i go, abandon strife

the internal rhyme rolls the rhythm, through indecision to precision

yes i am getting organised, on a mission

to rise up contra to mindless repetition

yet once again i combine olive oil, chilli and paprika in the kitchen

back in the mid life crisis phase, one thing that happened that partially led to my initial interactions with the medical industrial complex, was that i unexpectedly lost a load of weight for no particular reason. i’ve been fit and active for most of my life, but i’d never had visible abs. then suddenly, i couldn’t maintain my weight. it was a bit scary at first but by this stage i was more thinking well i may as well just eat sweeties whenever i want.

i do try and eat healthily but i’m still lazy and i require daily treats. and i think i have gained a bit of the weight back now. i stopped weighing myself and the problem became less stressful. it doesn’t make any sense, but i can’t waste my life looking for the answers to absolutely everything can i?

the crops blaze

a sunny eve with keith, watch the crops blaze

dump, no whiff of a gap, sewer works (the job pays)

i dispel return to indefinite limbo

doing surveys shirtless on the deckchair, a himbo

you know i cried every day for a year after i left

and 17 months on my life’s still a mess

weirdly, this same pun was in private eye the other week, but done much better. they had ‘water treatment works’ – with the punchline ‘well why aren’t they doing it?’

mortal again

in how many people’s memories do i still live?

what degree of blur, how precise an image?

there is nothing mere about mortality

there will be humdrum finalities like the last cup of tea

the last step in the sea. the last shag

the last time taking out taking out the bin bags

so i say memento mori at least every day

and when things get hard, i’ll try to be there

i genuinely do try and say memento mori every day. there are so many sad things about life. but life, as far we know, is the whole show. so you’ve got to try and make the most of it really. try not to spend all day reading the news. remain in denial about creeping authoritarianism and the collapse of the world order. who knows, maybe things will get better eventually.

i think i’m going to start watching star trek from the beginning. i think i’m ready.

smash and ooze

you smash the avocado, bring the force within you down

your zeitgeist, your energy and spirit

oozes, you infuse us in it

but our guests left us with an odd moment

mutually dysregulated, endlessly in torment

good souls do forgive all souls, but is every corpus soulful?

i was randomly flicking through my old emails from university and noted quite a few where i had emailed tutors chasing for essays. i hate uncertainty, hate waiting for the answer. i remembered logging into to websurf, the university’s online student platform, to check my exam results. just mindlessly refreshing the page. then eventually, my degree certification was there. it came through first, before the rest of my exams were uploaded, and i felt such relief. joy, general excitement, but essentially relief. a non-shameful result.

i had dropped out of uni after first year. had a difficult time after leaving school, suffering from autistic burnout. after a few years i was ready to try again. i didn’t really have any expectations, the best grade i had got in first year was a c i think. i just wanted to stop myself from drifting into a life of unrewarding cycle of repetitive work, burn out and unemployment. which felt like not just a real possibility, but probably the most likely outcome for me at 19 years old.

anyway, that relief and joy was tempered almost immediately when i realised i didn’t have a job, wasn’t especially suited to one, to be honest struggled with all the entry level positions i’d ever had, and was useless in job interviews.

i’m proud anyway.