A word, please

A Word, Please...

Is there such a thing as writing or using words with no apparent consequence?

I'm inclined to think not. 

It's true that writing may indeed be opaque, questionably crafted, not easily understood or just plain boring but even if it's telling a story or sketches a hypothesis with which you disagree, none of those characteristics render the piece inconsequential. 

Should someone elect to paint with words in a more abstract way, even to the point of random irrationality, that too must surely be seen as a creative work as the very thought or intention behind it was to "create" something to be shared. That it defies our regulatory parameters of diction, syntax, comprehension and predictability may rankle but that's usually simply because a thing has the potential to shoehorn us out of our comfort zone. We needn't let it. We have the choice to ignore or explore, the latter inevitably providing by far the more interesting pathway. 

Opinion doesn't negate something nor render it inconsequential - it merely pigeonholes it within a frame of reference subjectively for the observer, or in the case of many written pieces nowadays, the consumer. 

For isn't that what journalism, as a form of written expression, to a very large extent, has become - fodder for the masses to be consumed, as Frank Zappa would have euphemised, as cheese in its various guises, some bland, some rich and malodorously repugnant. 

Exploring the potential of these incantations - and many, if not most, don't carry any manifest form of magic - through an added dimension, brings us to the scriptural concept of "the word." 

Some posit that this idea of "the word" encompasses, not the written version of a language but rather  the audible presentation of the phonetic - or in another context, the less spiritual idea of inceptual creation through the Big Bang is no more nor less than the background echo that singular event created - ergo: a pronounceable sound.  The Buddhists call that sound the eternal Om - the symphony of what creation actually is therefore to repeat that base frequency with your voice over and over again inevitably as they do in meditative chant, must begin to bring one into a sympathetic resonant frequency and harmony (be at one) with the cosmos. The word. 

Then there's the sticks and stones argument, that tenet taught to children by their parents as a coping mechanism paradoxically within the framework of prayer and other mysterious word related enchantments, all of which seems suspiciously similar to the paradox of quantum physics where the written word and the sound of the word could be seen as the particle and the waveform respectively. 

Words can and do have power but it's arguable whether or not the creator or the recipient (perhaps both) imbue the words with their true potential in the same way the observer influences the particle reality or the healer may or may not be influencing an outcome in a placebo experiment. 

These phenomena are all real and powerful yet we still do not fully comprehend the whys and wherefores of the various hypotheses. 

All we do know is that they happen and somehow we have a part in the phenomena as do the words we elect to share with the world when we place intention behind them. 

I'd say use them wisely. 

We truly have no real idea of the manifest potential these magic spells might have and how very far reaching that magic could be. 

In the beginning there was the word. 

That's all there was. 

Perhaps that's all there will ever be. 

Abracadabra. 

THE KANYE RAMBLE

A year ago Kanye West was seen to be this newcomer, Paul McCartney's, mentor - he'll be a-okay if he hangs with with Kanye it seemed.
All the kids were saying so and what a mensch Kanye was to be giving an old unknown codger a break.
Who was this Sir Paul, that quiet old git who'd fucked around with some garage band back in the day?
Does anyone know what became of those guys?
They're not around any longer and someone told me the remaining members might be making a drum and bass album soon. Who knows?
They've sunk into obscurity so who really gives a fuck! Not the evolving swarm mindset of the contemporary teen, that's for sure. And why should they?
Well there are a host of good reasons but more on that later perhaps...
If they'd stuck with Kanye, the garage band, they might have made something of themselves.
Unarguably, they would have had to wait for 56 years anyway seeing as God's gift to hip-hop was only born in 1977 and only started actively putting himself about in 1996 whereas the unnamed garage band signed some obscure record contract in 1960. A record what? Yeah, exactly.
We exist in the days of entitlement now.
Why should anyone have to pay for some muso's songs? I mean you just go online and download them right...they're not artists - artists paint and sculpt and shit - these are just guys with guitars and microphones and drums. They're okay but we need to hear their shit before we pay to go and see them, right...
We'll get the folks to pay for a concert ticket but fuck paying for the download - anyhow, I know a guy who knows a guy...
Luckily though, Paul was spotted by Kanye in 2015 so maybe the old scouse git has a future in music after all...
Let's hope he can make it on the road in the concert scene seeing that nobody pays for albums these days. Albums? Who listens to an album? We just want that song. Fourteen songs by the same guys one after the other - are you on fucking drugs or something?
You are?
Can I have some?
Make mine a double.
Whatever happened to six degrees of separation? Hang on - that shit won't work with these kids - they need to know who the fuck Kevin Bacon is from the get-go.
Oh, and what six degrees of separation means too.
No, kids, it's not the angle of the gap between Nicki Minaj's butt-cheeks when she's squatting on stage in leopard print - what's much more important than that of course, is finding out if her butt-cheeks are filled with god-given adipocytes or some synthesised alternative that augments the twerking motion just that iota more than her nearest rival who is......who is her nearest rival?
Let me see - oh yeah....who gives a fuck!

I didn't start out to write about this - it was going to be about values and hypocrisy and things I've unavoidably been seeing lately where news coverage is reduced to obsession with some celebrity's ass and whether it's fake or real...like that.
This may, of course, just be the result of some cognitive bias, Baader Meinhof phenomenon or some such paradigm where my new awareness (sic) taunts me into seeing this bullshit manifesting around me like I've been trapped in some teenage mutant value system dreamworld.

Whether you believe in conspiracy or not - forget conspiracy theory - I'm talking about just conspiracy - it doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not - just look around you. The media is owned privately - globally - the news is sponsored by the corporations with the stock. Similarly, politicians, as Robin Williams so sagely suggested, should be walking around like Formula 1 racing drivers with their corporate sponsors' logos emblazoned all over their uniforms, in this case, a designer suit that costs more than their average voter's monthly pay check. They'd be invisible behind the corporate identities, which is probably just as well - who'd want to see someone else's hand going up Hillary's ass to move the arms legs and mouth around?
Not me.
Let's be honest - we all get enough of that at home.
And it doesn't matter which way you slice or dice it, there hasn't been a legitimate defensive war since the advent of World War II - they've all been strategic orchestrations designed to foment destabilisation in certain regions, promote agendas of global uncertainty, boost oil sales and prices, cleanse the planet of a few more undesirable elements who don't make the WASP cut and create revenue for a multitude of industries owned by the same guys who own the politicians and the media. There is no conspiracy there - just reality - the one Orwell and Huxley predicted way back in the 1940's and 50's.
It's not coming to a cinema near you soon (although dystopian futures are the order of Hollywood it seems) they're already here and it's just that you haven't noticed it because your friends might not be trending it on twitter or Facebook or whatever other portal one has into the current reality.

Yet paradoxically along with this myopic tunnel vision, they have managed to reach out and instil uncertainty and fear among the emerging youth - even identifying an enemy upon whom this fear can be focused. All you have to do is listen to random public radio interviews on the streets of Sydney to know that teenagers aren't just aware of the sweeping threat of Islamic fundamentalism, they're downright afraid of it without necessarily thinking to the end of the page. Yet when I speak to my own range of selective "youngsters" they're hep to the bullshit and aren't buying it.
Could it be that the news stations are editing in only the juicy fear-filled interviewees?
To what end? Tell me it isn't so...
In the UK just ask any freethinking citizen if they believe the BBC stands for unbiased journalism and I'll show you a magic trick that has you disappear up your own arse.
I've heard the hoary old Nazi chestnut being dragged out for comparison to the current threat to world peace (ha - ha - yes, I did just write that - how can you threaten something that doesn't exist?) but here's the twisted irony - it wasn't the religious (supposed) zealots (in this case, the Jews) who threatened the peace and stability of the region and the world, it was the regime in charge that identified a religious faction and convinced the rest of the country that these infidels were a threat to the Third Reich, the Fatherland and - Gott in Himmel - the world itself!
Isn't there something eerily familiar about that scenario right now?

Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of the Zionist extremism that has driven despots and powermongers home and abroad to have created the abomination that is Israel/Palestine right now - but it wasn't being Jewish that made that happen. In the same way it isn't being Muslim that makes you a maniacal suicidal fundamentalist with a desire for jihad and world domination. That thinking certainly exists but it doesn't define Islam in the same way the KKK doesn't define Christianity although just like ISIL (I refuse to call the cunts, ISIS as that is my cat's name, after the Egyptian goddess not some godforsaken bunch of puppets created by the US and manipulated by their foreign handlers), this extremist ideology has been promoted through our mainstream media as the driving force behind Islam and the boogeyman under your bed in Paris, Sydney or New York is no longer brandishing a hammer and sickle - he's now got an explosive vest on and he wants your city - no hang on, he wants a bunch of virgins in the great hereafter - or does he?
It's a pretty frail and desperate proposition no matter which way you dice it. And it doesn't hang together too well under any real scrutiny.

And it's the distractees, the hoards of consumers, the proles on parade with their free downloads and their rampant obliviousness who, through their voracious appetites for whatever cheese the media sees fit to serve, give it legs, fuel its power...

Maybe Kanye can fix it.
If he can give a nobody like Paul McCartney a career path, maybe he can fix just about anything.
They're always talking about Kim Kardashian's ass - well maybe he can do something worthwhile for a change.

Goo-goo-ga-joob!

DON'T GO

I lay no claim to any form of psychoanalytical expertise but I think it's fair to say (to paraphrase someone, whose name escapes me right now) that once upon a time we listened to politicians and laughed at comedians whereas nowadays  it certainly seems to be the reverse case. 

The polemical wit and observational comedy of people such as George Carlin and Robin Williams for example, was without equal and really cut to the point. Sadly, both of those fine gentlemen are no longer with us in the flesh but in another sense, their bodies remain - their bodies of work - as cuttingly apposite now as ever before, if not more so. 

It strikes me starkly however that with this insight and the revelatory absurdity that comes from observing life from a comedic perspective, the material that's delivered for our amusement is profoundly tragic. The pathos just oozes from every pore.  

The lore and spectre of the sad clown syndrome was never more startlingly apparent than with comedic giants such as Robin Williams and in a bygone era, Tony Hancock, a pioneer of British comedy. Or was it? It only became startlingly apparent posthumously and there wasn't a shred of humour in that revelation. 

I experienced the same sense of intense pathos while watching and listening to Steve Hughes last night down at the Adelaide Fringe. There was this astonishingly funny and quite brilliant observational comedian performing before us yet unlike Robin Williams, whose depressive plight slipped quietly past us - to our eternal shame and chagrin, Hughes was stating quite bluntly (and I believe, genuinely) that if there was some place where he could go to transition from this world, he'd do it in a heartbeat. He'd had enough. His show was dubbed appropriately Nervous Breakthrough and it parodies, in part, his recent nervous breakdown and the stark horror of that experience. It is so much more than that though and the layers, if we were to peel them back, reveal, I think, a much darker and desperate world. 

He talks openly about not having had the balls to commit suicide but he certainly explored that possibility. Hughes, to me, is wise and wonderful and paradoxically connected with higher aspects of life where he posits our only hope of any form of long term survival as a species comes in the guise of a consciousness evolution yet we are so distracted by banal inanity that we are, many of us, sinking inexorably into a state of irreversible unconscious existence. 

One of his quips - stop obsessing with the evil of the past and watching Hitler doccos when there's full colour evil happening before our eyes that we skirt over or simply feel helpless to resolve. 

There's no overpopulation and there's plenty of "stuff" to go round, he quips. To believe in a state of global overpopulation and a shortage of stuff is, in essence to deny that whatever transpired to place us here in the universe was a very badly worked out plan indeed. And whether one is religious or atheistic, there's something fatally flawed in that mode of thinking. And if we accede to this ideology, it inevitably leads to fascism and someone or some group of people deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. 

"When you ask someone if they think the world is overpopulated and they say yes, ask them why they think this?"

"They stare blankly at you and mutter - someone told me..." 

"So if people need to be removed - if there are too many of us - kill yourself. Do your bit."

"No, not me, they protest - them - them over there. Yeah, it's never you, is it. It's always someone else causing the problem. And that's the real problem." 

Much of the show was in similar vein. It was biting and excruciatingly funny yet I was deeply saddened that this insightful, talented man admitted he no longer wished to be part of this tribe - us. He'd had enough. He saw no hope for us in our present state - a conclusion obviously augmented by his own personal burnout and resultant breakdown. 

What the fuck does one do in a situation like this? 

Laugh it off?  

Why? 

Because he was joking, right. He is after all a comedian - a successful one. 

So were Tony Hancock and Robin Williams....

They too had had enough. The chronicling of life's bitter ironic absurdities for the amusement of others was no longer enough for them. And we were too busy laughing at their antics to sense the tragedy lurking beneath. 

If Steve Hughes elects to bow out too and my wife intimated that as horrible as that prospect was, she got the distinct impression he just might, then try as I may, no matter how he might have "joked" about it, I just don't find that funny. 

The mixture of amusement and tragedy roiling within me as we filed out of that theatre last night, was profound to say the least. 

Where to from here? 

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

It's incessant and it's mindless 

And it's everywhere I go

Streaming madness, like a river

In a neverending flow

The links are exponential 

Russian nesting doll abyss 

Have we swapped our love and romance 

For cheap pornographic bliss? 

E-facts aren't truth or wisdom

They're just data served to you   

We now process information  

Sponsored news that's owned by few 

Reams of jackass clips and moments

Punctuate dull emptiness

In this age of instant access 

Joy just fails to coalesce 

We're sold hermetic voyeurism

For our safety's what we hear 

Yet the guardians of freedom 

Are the architects of fear 

Each cyber business platform

Is more efficient than the last

So where does all the time go 

That we surely have amassed? 

No, it's sucked back via portals

Into cybernetic jail

So back online and browsing 

Making sure we do not fail 

Verbal vomit via Twitter 

Rabid rants for what they're worth  

Like some impotent opinions

May make a change to planet Earth 

The barrage overwhelms me 

Until it stirs my inner voice 

Then I hear my spirit saying 

I should make another choice. 

 

CANNABIS AND CANCER....

The efficacy of cannabis as a broad spectrum medication has been known for a very long time but in the same way that hemp (another strain of marijuana) was torpedoed decades back by corporate America as an alternative to cotton and a myriad other applications, the bottom line was simply that it posed too much of a threat to the established industries - paper, textiles, medicine, fertilisers and pesticides (hemp is a natural insect repellent) and it provides a much higher yield per acre than any other plant in any of those industries. Ergo: it couldn't be considered and thus was passed over to maintain the status quo while a bunch of crap propaganda was proffered about the dangers of industrial hemp being used to conceal the narcotic strain of cannabis by unscrupulous growers.

In the same way, the pharmaceutical industry simply cannot afford to have something natural that potentially cures cancer readily available to the public when their whole reason for existing is to maintain repeat business and manage sickness. They're not in the business of cures or managing health - that's not a sustainable business model. Harsh but true.

So their approach to cannabis as medicine is loaded with all the usual rhetoric - studies are still underway and inconclusive - the science isn't verifiable - the reports about cures through cannabis treatment are purely anecdotal etc.

All of which could be changed if the industry took the potential seriously and actually funded proper research in this area which they have had the means to do for decades yet they still haven't actively pursued this....

Why?

The answers are obvious.

The vilification of cannabis by the establishment as a schedule 2 narcotic (in the same category as heroin and cocaine!) is also a bogus attempt to keep the distribution and use of the substance suppressed.

It's been shown empirically (Portugal / Switzerland) that legalising drugs - ALL drugs leads to a dramatic drop in addiction rates and deaths associated with the clandestine underground drug business which is, due to the fact it's illegal, run by thugs and gangsters who wage war against rival operators and cut their products with all manner of dangerous additives to further their yield and no control whatsoever is maintained to protect their users. Who cares?

When the supply of drugs are regulated, governments gain control of the entire operation, profit at every level of the supply chain and the illegal operators have no viable opportunity to compete in the industry. Clinics are established for addicts and the stigma associated with addiction is dramatically reduced.

The casualty rates drop significantly. It's been done - the data's available.

It's a no brainer. But when the very governments and so called law enforcement agencies are inextricably involved in the illicit business as has demonstrably been shown time and again in the faux "war on drugs," there's no chance of any meaningful improvement.

The establishment wants to keep things just the way they are. It's up to us to change that and ironically, if you want to medicate with medicinal cannabis, nine times out of ten you have to do it illegally.

The world is a very screwed up place indeed.

LINK TO: Cannabis and cancer

THE HEART IN THE HOME

I measure houses.  I see the full spectrum from the good to the bad and the ugly. 

I see lavish, pristine showcases, derelict hovels and pretty much everything in between. 

But what strikes me more than anything else has to be the way the places feel. 

There's the meticulously styled nouveau-decor environment that feels as if you've been sucked into the photo shoot spread. It's beautifully rendered, it's painstakingly arranged yet it's spiritless and sterile. 

These are houses (not homes) that haven't yet soaked up any real family energy or assumed an aura of having interfaced with haphazardly emotional beings of all ages and persuasions. 

The ones that have been lived in feel entirely different regardless of the decor. Some emanate warmth and whisper silently of long, blissful summers past when visiting family and friends clattered through the halls and blasted the walls with their laughter. 

Others are unspeakably melancholy. I seek only to do my work in those and move on before I feel the sorrow reach out and touch me. 

That isn't to say every deceased estate is a maudlin, tragic mausoleum of fragile, broken memories, no. Many of them still harbour rows of family portraiture, chronicles of flourishing children, burgeoning into maturity, seeding new life, sharing joyous milestones. They emanate a nurturing tranquility these homes. 

Yet some are just too despairing for words. One recently - room upon room of multiple lifetimes hurriedly crammed into boxes and garbage bags, no consideration given to what such trinkets or memorabilia might once have meant. The flotsam may as well have perished with the owner...

Wherever there have been animals, I can feel the difference. There's usually some sympathetic resonance within the walls.  

And often people just want to share a moment of something with someone simply because they're there and will listen.  

We should never stop listening and we should take the time to hear. 

And what you imprint upon your walls shall speak softly to the world long after you depart this realm. 

We are never far from the people and places we've touched.

INCONSEQUENTIALITY

                                                               Huh?

A friend urged me to write stuff about my life on my blog - this blog. Small, stuff, trivia even, as she was captivated by our journey, my wife and my journey from Africa to the smallish enclave of Adelaide, South Australia.
I thought about it. I mean, I'm already writing a book about this, I mused, precipitated by our disastrous honeymoon in 2008, which, in hindsight kicked off the sequence of events that led us to settle in Australia.
I've always said (in the ethos of Desiderata) everyone has a story to tell, sometimes many.
Some people just don't see it.
My life is a story - every day I see and experience magic around me, not least of which originates from my wonderful wife and our seven cats.
Then I realised something that's become manifest recently, kind of risen up and carped my diem - the idea of remaining in the present and talking about that.
The book is the appropriate forum for our anecdotal legacy, the trials and tribulations that got us here but the blog, I decided, should be a chronicle for the here and now...
until tomorrow then it's legacy once more.  
I wrestle with the demons that haunt me over a decision to become fully vegan, for example, when outside the magpies, my new friends greet me each morning hoping for a morsel of the pet's meat I've been buying to feed them....I've even resorted to donning latex gloves (my wife's artistry sometimes requires hand protection) such is my revulsion at dipping into the bloody, flesh-filled bag to hand out chunks of meat. It makes me gag at times.
Even owning (nay, WAITING on) cats has that inbuilt dilemma - they're natural carnivores, domesticated for man's pleasure (and what a consummate pleasure it is) so must it follow that one be part of that horrific cycle of abuse that is the meat industry? How does one get round it? How does one reconcile with the awfulness that is rife within it and still provide the necessary nutrition to the cats who are oblivious to my wistful agonising? Scour the highways and byways for likely roadkill or take out a classified requesting any donors who might have access to birds and rodents that have died of natural causes...?
Hardly seems plausible or even mildly pragmatic now does it?
I've started some research on the topic of animal veganism and have been surprised at what I've uncovered, however, I'd never subject my babies to anything without embarking on that road myself - no, not eating vegan catfood - simply becoming vegan myself.
This post wasn't meant to be about veganism or the debate over whether cats and dogs can thrive healthily on such a diet - arguably they can - it just seems to have meandered here of its own volition.
The magpies on the other hand, have no such quandaries to overcome - should I elect some day to proffer them non-animal titbits of a morning, they're free to reject them and forage for themselves, carrion and prey animals notwithstanding.
I can already hear the rampant carnivores among you rising up in protest, howling at how cruel that would be - forcing cats to become vegans when their natural instincts and biological imperative is premised on carnivorism and hunting. 
But that's all bollocks too. We abdicated that argument when we commenced the domestication process. The fact that we have all evolved culturally since then - yes, even cats - puts forward the potential to thrive healthily without contributing to animal suffering. We have developed alternative products and natural foodstuffs that allow this.
Here in Australia they have a love-hate relationship with cats. They bang on about how domestic cats, allowed to roam uncontained, decimate the local wildlife so they should be banned or at least confined or at the very least, restricted in their numbers. I'm all for that - all of it - to a degree. I personally think it's more cruel to confine cats to being housebound when their natural instincts are to roam and explore and hunt. Yet this is, by nature of urbanisation, a very prevalent phenomenon where cats are confined to apartments and houses for their entire lives. Is it cruel? Many a doting cat owner will vehemently disagree. And, like I say, it's become a normal lifestyle for millions of cats worldwide. They still thrive. They're the ultimate adapters - not for nothing were they accorded nine lives and a penchant for aeons of snoozing, you know.
I've circumvented that particular issue, however, by building the cats an external enclosure which, although not as large as I'd like it to be, allows them the freedom to explore in the fresh air on grass and soil and up trees and to come and go as they please through the cat flap in the scullery door. No cruelty there then.
I've also built a very large litter box in the form of an elevated corrugated steel planter which is embedded in the garden and roofed off so the critturs can enjoy the freedom of outdoor natural soil-filled ablutions without getting rain-drenched or having to use nasty, overworked kitty litter. All good so far.
Most cats, by dint of their domesticated confinement in suburban environments, don't have the luxury of hunting as they might have done in the days of their ancestral wildness - our cats are similarly restricted unless some hapless creature ventures into the enclosure through the fencing - then it's everything for itself.
So we play with them and we amuse them, not to mention the fact that they amuse each other. All the time.
So I ask - if they have the freedom to come and go as they please, have all the stimulation we can possible muster (there are jungle-gym improvements I intend adding - watch this space,) and are loved and cared for beyond all imagining, why would it be at all cruel to have them try vegan food if it has all the necessary nutrition and protein any domesticated feline might require?
I can't see the cruelty there except to imagine that the carnivorous human horrified at the prospect of themselves having to forego meat and animal products, imagine that that deprivation is in and of itself a terrible thing ergo it must by necessity be cruel.
I simply don't agree.
The crux of the biscuit (to coin a Zappaism) will, of course, be getting any feline with a particular palate such as ours have developed, to eat a new type of food other than Hills Science Diet original formula... vegan or no.
We've tried switching their diets once already when we bought a different type of Hills - the furball management pellets - our menagerie was horrified, down to a cat. They hummed and hawed and strutted purposefully away from the dishes harbouring the offending product until we caved and drove many miles to reunite them with old familiar.
I dread the thought of this potential again - but face it I think I must....
I guess it's only fair to say - me first then the cats, then the magpies...
Watch this space...