On how it is

We only have so many credits in the eyes of other people, and each time we complain about something we lose a few. It’s best to save our arguments for things that really matter to us, because then people say: “Oh, he/she never complains, so if he’s complaining now something must really be fucked up.” Otherwise it’s: “Oh, he/she always complains” and argument instantly dismissed, no matter how insightful it may be. Some things just make us angry – sometimes it’s legitimate anger over an issue, or sometimes it is latent anger that comes from an indirect association. Some things have to be fought for. And some things we think we have to fight for but then we realise afterwards: no it didn’t, I should have saved that credit and preserved that relationship a bit better.

There are so many problems and so many people out there who have opinions, yet are neither in a position to solve them or lack the innate ability to perform correctly when they have the moment. All the rest of us have are words, cheap words that will change tomorrow. Some say it’s all about keeping up the fight. But the fight against what? The cluelessness of the human race? The hatred of those who keep the old in place? And then you wonder so many things, about collective inability to let go of hurt, about collective hatred, about collective inability. Should we keep caring if nothing seems to change? Should we fight, and argue, clog up the atmosphere with yet more negative vibes, or should we simply try to create something new, put new beauty out there where there was none, and hope that it helps someone? Do we help someone if there are no signs of it? And even, do opinions really matter? Is it worth thinking someone is a fool simply because he wanted Barcelona to win the Champions League Final and I wanted Arsenal? Or that he’s a fool for some other irrelevant matter of belief, like the opinion of a particular politician, or of a particular practice? No, of course it’s not worth it, and yet it happens, it’s instinctive. They want to help, those others want to help in a different way, and yet both sets end up hating each other.

What’s going on, man?

 

MEDIA What’s going on? We went to war in Iraq against the wishes of the entire nation and the media doesn’t say a word about it? And why do I have to hear about Lara goddamn Bingle every day of my life? The media ditched the truth a long time ago in favour of cheap shit, yet does that mean that everyone likes cheap shit, titillation, vacuousness, celebrity? It must, it must. The Herald Sun goes from strength to strength while all the other newspapers go under, what’s going on? The stars of some TV show get twenty minutes’ coverage while a ship that goes down off the coast of Senegal taking 900 lives with it gets one line? What the fuck are our priorities, as a society? What even is the point of the media anymore?

POLITICS We voted Rudd in to change to better energy and he didn’t do it. And what’s the alternative? The old crew made executive decisions based on the fact that the opinions of one hundred are more important than the opinions of twenty million. And why can 51% tell 49% exactly what to do? Don’t hold your breath for someone to shake it up, we thought Rudd would be that guy, remember? Barack Obamas come along once every two hundred years.

AUSTRALIA Thanks for the money, Australia, I appreciate your funding of my studies and unemployed moments, but what are we doing? Have we lost an identity, did we ever have an identity, or is it just about who’s got what, who’s got that job, who’s got that street cred? Has the excessive money and distance from everyone else blinded us? Do we give a shit about anyone except our families? We make announcements talking about what great blokes we are for giving a shit about our kids. Guess what? So does every other father on Earth, it’s instinct. Is there a country of people who do more than simply big-note themselves and their mates?

SPORT We celebrate the fact that one team has all the ability and therefore always wins, and we call them ‘great’. Oh me oh my. Speculation and reputation becomes more important than actual results, in the sporting sphere and in business, and in daily life. When the little guy wins it gets forgotten, when the big guy loses it gets forgotten pretty quickly too in favour of the next uneven ritual slaughter. Remember Jean Paul Duminy? Which one was he again? Real Madrid is in crisis unless it wins every game. Of course they have to win every game, they own three-quarters of Spain. Where’s the perspective?

Unless we make tomorrow matter as much as today we’re gone. What else, Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl so for once I’m on the winning side, if you don’t count me being born as a white male and all that jazz. And I saw Wodonga for the first time and went swimming for $3. Coooooooool!

Paraguay, Hijo de hombre

Paraguay River

I long for Paraguay as much as I long to breathe. The existence of that country is one more thing that is there in my mind, perhaps an ambition, perhaps a place, perhaps the representation of a dream or a representation of the concept itself of simply wanting, perhaps simply the sound of a word.

It exists for me in a few different ways, some of which are more pleasant than others, and some of which ironically don’t exist for the locals themselves. It is the tropical flatlands with colourful flowers and paths of red earth that spread out into windswept plains that go far off into nowhere. Paraguay is heat, stifling summer heat. It is the rivers, the forest, the thousand of species of animals with Guaraní names, the lack of coastline. Paraguay is the nation that was once complete jungle. Paraguay is the people drinking local tea outside the front of their houses on a Sunday afternoon, born in a forgotten corner of the world who exist purely for themselves, forgetting the wider world that forgot them.

It is the name. No one is even completely sure where the word Paraguay came from. It is probably from the indigenous Guaraní language and probably means “The water that flows to the sea,” the country named after the massive Paraguay River that does what I’ve just suggested. Or it could be named after local birds, or a tribe of local pirates.

Paraguay is many things, my mind separating the promise of magic from the land of incessant difficulties. Paraguay is a people born in an economic prison without exit signs. It is without money from the legal sector yet a country that is one long black market whose profits are siphoned off by crooks. It is a tranquil country that snoozes yet has terrible problems with petty crime. The night I got there I was told not to go into town until the next morning. “That’s Paraguay,” the reservedly personable landlord shrugged.

The Chaco Desert, scene of the War of Thirst

Paraguay is quintessentially South American. It does not have Argentina’s tourists, or Colombia’s salsa dancing, or Bolivia’s Andes Mountains, or Peru’s connection to the Incas. It is sneered at by Brazilians in their hauteur who go there for cheap shopping. But it is authentic. Visitors describe the reserve of the locals, the quiet confederacy of purpose, the vague sadness and quietness that drifts, the straightforwardness of the locals who apparently have not yet discovered sarcasm and despite the arrival of 21st Century amenities, the internet, abundant mobile phones, have not quite discovered the modern world in its entirety.

The country was almost crushed by Brazil and Argentina in the 1870s. It was not wiped off the map but ceased to exist as a viable, self-sufficient nation, and the mood never really recovered. Then they shot themselves in the foot a few more times.

I was there for one day, on July 15, 2006, one week after the soccer World Cup had finished, when Zinedine Zidane had planted his head and the Italian team had put in all of its penalty kicks. My friend and I knew no one there and found the place impenetrable, too much of a mystery to crack in a few hours without someone holding my hand, which I didn’t have. I bought a famous Paraguayan book there called Hijo de hombre for 25,000 Guaraníes, which I simply paid for with a $us5 note. It’s next to me right now, one of my rarest possessions. Inside the story the country unfolds…

In the small town of Sapucai in the flowery countryside where people speak Guaraní to each other instead of Spanish, people without land or power struggle to rise up and are always defeated by the Paraguayan army. Memories of the town go back to a few years after Halley’s Comet flew past Paraguay, to 1912, when hope was denied and their best men were killed. Those without anything try again, and again lose. Army conscripts ask themselves: we’re one of them, it kills me to be ordered to fire on these peasants, I’ve become just like the guy who killed my Dad. Then a four-year war against one of Paraguay’s neighbouring countries unites the nation: The political prisoners are all freed and the focus shifts outward, to the Chaco Desert (this happened in the 1930s), the theatre of war where more soldiers die gruesomely of thirst than by the bullet. The war ‘won’, the soldiers, some who have had arms and legs amputated and some who will not get over the trauma of war return home to their farms. The old shouts and the graffiti of the disenfranchised begging for land, bread and freedom will once again start up. The narrator says: something has to change. A people can’t continue to be oppressed indefinitely. Man is like a river, who is born and dies in other rivers. A bad river is one that dies in an estuary, because stagnant water is contaminated, poisonous. It engenders miasmas of a malign fever, of a furious madness. Then, to cure the sick man or to pacify him, he has to be killed. And the ground of this country is already busy enough under the earth. The book is filled with an edgy, uncertain mood that ends like this:

“There must be some way out in this monstrous countersense of man crucified by man. Because if it’s the opposite it would be the case to think that the human race is cursed forever, that this is hell and that we cannot hope for salvation.

There must be a way out, because if it’s the opposite…”

I love Bolivia tenderly. But I’m in love with Paraguay.

Stream of consciousness

The months fly by, and every time I check it is a different one, but I’ve lost my dread that they pass, that time goes by. It simply happens. I chose emotional over political a while ago and held fast to it, but every so often I reacted badly to people who choose the opposite. I think about hurt, but don’t wonder if anyone else feels it too because it’s outside my ability to see things through other people’s eyes. I wonder if it’s more important to be kind to people or to get shit done, because in reality there are very few people who do either thing, so they are probably as important as each other and no more. I would like to be the former and sometimes to often I am.

I believe that I am being consumed by negativity. I no longer think about what things mean but simply react to them with anger. I drop angry comments without stopping to ask myself the consequences and occasionally I am too fragile to verify the result of them. I have a weird relationship with the human race, in which I often feel oddly tender moments of love for the individual that I’m speaking to but when I think of people in an abstract sense I feel afraid of them and disgusted by them. I question whether I’ll have a close relationship with anyone now that I’m no longer early-twenties stock, because we stop meeting people and getting to know them for the sake of it after a certain age: once we are above twenty-whatever we need to know them for a reason. Once I get married it will no longer be legit to have female companions, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I might get married in the next two years; I know a girl with whom I would like to shut out the world and just be with her, lately I’ve become more convinced, and for the moment I trust that she would like me around. She says so.

The phone just rang right now and I reacted with irritation, like I do with every minor and unexpected interruption. When did I become this way? When did it reach the stage where anger and irritation is my automatic reaction? And was I afraid? I don’t know, did everything relate to that, that thing from the past? I drive my car, and her. I eat my lunch, and there she is, always there in my mind. But new things should be entering my head, I should let them if they don’t, because once a person stops being open to newness he is finished, absolutely. And yet three point something years later, there she still was. I never really got over the sadness of that sudden about-face rejection from her, the anger that it later developed into. And after her there were not many pieces left to pick up so that I could try again, because I had given away my most passionate love and I couldn’t find much more to give to anyone else. But there were different kinds of love, and some: while not as self-consuming, weren’t lesser but simply different.

The tennis is here, the tennis will go. Today’s ephemeral time-killers will become tomorrow’s why-did-I-care-about-that-little-piece-of-unimportant-trivia. I started work at a restaurant two and a half months ago, and it keeps me level but I achieve nothing with my days, for the moment and perhaps forever. I want money but I don’t want to own anything, but even more confusingly I don’t want to suffer from the same afflictions that the others who own nothing suffer. Sometimes it is wilful simplicity and sometimes it is genuine simplicity, and sometimes it is wilful ignorance and sometimes it is just lazy ignorance. I might be broken but I suspect that everyone is broken in some way; if you do not fulfil certain dreams it hurts, and too much. I have time but not so much; perhaps that’s the best way to be. People say that we need a sense of urgency to achieve something today. I don’t care if what they have to say is new as long as how they say it is new. I feel pity and contempt at the same time, and at the same time love and fear and is that hatred, all at once? Or is hatred too strong a word for something so capricious?

Going…

It’s been a disaster, there’s no sugarcoating that fact. But in a way, the Bush years were more a failure of the system than of the man himself. A person of his intellect should never have been able to climb that high and attain the presidency in the first place. If you strap a monkey behind a steering wheel and the car crashes, it’s not exactly the monkey’s fault. It’s the fault of the person who straps the monkey in. It’s the fault of the 151 million Americans who wanted him in (149 million of 300 in 2000, lol).

Joking aside, he probably did win the 2000 election. But why Florida couldn’t have been counted twenty times, a hundred times until we were certain of its numbers, goes beyond logic. Stopping the recount via the now ultra-political supreme court (need I remind anyone that the whole point of having a supreme court is for it to be above the partisan bullshit) was a shifty way to get in and set the tone for his entire presidency. In addition, the famous faulty ballot paper caused many Florida Gore-ites to accidentally vote for a fascist asshole named Pat Buchanan, depriving Gore of the handful of votes that would have given him victory. (Still, Gore was a loser, it should never have been that close in the first place.)

When Bush came in, however doubtful the 2000 election was, he had a shitload of money bequeathed from the Clinton years and he blew it all on Iraq and tax cuts for the rich, buying himself a second term in power at the expense of America’s financial future. Now there’s a gaping canyon where America’s money used to be, which will consequently slowly erode their power. That is probably what makes him a bad president in cold-blooded terms, and not Iraq per se. Controlling a nation should always be about strategy and not emotion, and Bush made it about emotion. This presidency based recklessness, on hunches and gut-feeling and lack of reflection took the whole country down the gurgler. In this day and age it’s astonishing that a government – Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Co., take a bow – could still think in such closed-minded terms. That way of thinking doesn’t work, and yet things will never change, they will always have their supporters despite all evidence to the contrary, however much of a disaster this decade has been under them.

September 11 probably killed any chance Bush had of setting his own agenda. The Taliban had sheltered Osama, Osama had pulled the strings on September 11, therefore the Taliban had to be taken out. That shit just had to be done; one of the two wars was inevitable. (It’s like how right before Ukraine ditched capital punishment they did in a serial killer who roamed the countryside terrorising the villages, and their explanation was: “Someone like him just has to go.” I’m against capital punishment but perversely I agreed with their assessment. What can I say, I’m a ball of contradictions.)

Iraq killed him and killed everything. I believe the whole Iraq thing was not even to do with oil but simply Bush acting on a grudge against Saddam and answering the old critics who said his father had not finished the job. From a strategic point of view Saddam was a counterbalance in the Middle East against hardline Islamism and now there is no counterweight; Iraq will be hardline and an ally of Iran within ten years (assuming a U.S. pullout). The whole thing was just stupid even before mentioning lives lost and all the humanitarian concerns, and the money spent.

Katrina was bad. Morally bad, not just a relative mistake like most governmental errors of judgement. Katrina showed that America has an underclass that not even the government gives a shit about.

I don’t think the financial crisis was strictly his fault like Iraq was. It was the product of decades of Republican policy of pandering to the rich. A house of cards had to fall sometime. When a badly-hung Christmas tree ornament falls by itself, it’s natural to blame the person standing the closest to the tree. Don’t get me wrong, Bush and his deregulation and pandering to the moneyed classes and companies contributed to all this; he was a part of it, but not nearly all of it.

The vox pop verdict is basically unanimous. Lizeth the left-wing Bolivian called Bush the anti-Christ, although much South American analysis of the world can be discounted as it is ignorant of what the wider world consists of and is viewed purely through the bitter window of anti-Americanism. My right(ish)-wing accountant mate here says his stock-markety Dad called Bush a disaster and blames him for everything. I asked my mate: isn’t the cabinet supposed to mitigate against Bush’s idiocy? He answered, “No, he actually does make all the decisions. He’s a lower IQ.” Their actions are those of a government with a lower IQ.

I do not think he is the anti-Christ. I think he was misguided rather than a bad person. On a personal level I find something very likeable about Bush. He’s someone I could have a beer with. Even Barack Obama mentioned in his book that Bush has a straightforward manner that helped him win two elections, the kind of guy who would make for good company so long as the conversation revolved around sports and the kids (that last bit is a direct quote). But he just didn’t know what he was doing as prez, and evidently the puppeteer Cheney didn’t know what he was doing either. And, as one guy said in the lead-up to election 2008: “If I want to have a beer with someone, that’s what my friends are for. I don’t want to have a beer with my president.” The implication being that the prez should be an egghead, however little he has in common with the rest of us.

At least Bush gave a lot of aid to Africa and put a lot of dough into countering AIDS and malaria and all those diseases that we no longer even sneeze at in the first-world (pun perhaps intended). That’s what he did better than the other prezes.

And, at least countries with money and power have the ability to fix themselves (although I don’t think America will ever be as all-encompassing as it was in the 90s again). And no country has more money and power than America. The empire will stagger on.

Santa Claus’ Tribulation, part 3 of 3

The end was approaching. The self-sufficient community that had been set up in times past was decimated. The only ones left were the old workers, the ‘elves’. Even they had begun the meticulous process of dying off. Morale at the workshop being what it was, Santa could only be grateful that – contrary to popular opinion – magic did not need the continuing belief of its beneficiaries to impose itself. The continued flight of the aged, worn-out reindeer was witness to this indisputable fact.

December 24th had arrived. Mrs Claus was bedridden, and in fact had not been seen on her own two feet for several months. Certainly she was very old, with a complexion that indicated that blood no longer pulsed through her cheeks as readily as it once had. Santa didn’t dare ask himself if she was on the verge of death. Would he be on his way soon too? The answer would have surely overwhelmed him and affected the arrival of yet another Merry Christmas™. Deliveries were being made with threads of will that could not be snapped, because if they were broken even once, then at his age Santa knew that the mission would be finished.

Santa commanded the reindeer off with a jerk of his wrists but without a word. He could hear the faint creaking of the worn, nostalgic sleigh as it glided far above white, moonlit hills. Had he ever felt this tired? That night he didn’t respond to the occasional dazzling bursts of joy that children gave him upon recognition.

He was struggling back up a chimney when he noticed an absence up above him. At first he was worried that the reindeer had run away and left him adrift. The stamping, braying and jingling sounds that reached his ears eased his anxiety and yet at the same time restored his puzzlement. He could not understand what it was by looking around him. It was only further along the track – several countries having been passed along the way – that he focused on this absence and saw it for what it was. His wife’s birth star, the one that he had always seen with his heart and mind if not with his eyes, had vanished. Santa struggled to comprehend this as he sat in the sleigh that was comfortably perched on the roof of a two-storey house. Amid the impatience of the reindeer, who Santa was ready to release from their harnesses and shoo away for the state he was in… amid the reindeer, he put his head down against the wooden frame of his sleigh, closed his eyes and began to tremble.

When he woke from his somnolent, solemn pose, it was already morning. The ensemble of sleigh, bells, harnesses, reindeer and fat man in red was still up there on the snow-covered rooftop. Santa was about to tell his reindeer in short order to head back to the North Pole for what might have been their last ever trip. Was the fate of the ailing Mrs Claus symmetrical to that of the fallen birth star? Before he found out, however, a glance at his still bulging sack caused him to pause. What would these undelivered toys do but clutter up the workshop and cause him to trip over them throughout his remaining days? They had to be delivered, if only to satisfy Santa’s desire for  “a place for everything and everything in its place.”

The questions flowed as he continued with the undertaking. Once again he began to feel sentimental and nostalgic about the gratitude accorded to him. For the first time he was witnessing this gratitude first-hand, because this time he could talk to those recipients of his gifts who had risen with the sunlight that streamed through their windows. The thank-yous he received that day erased, with the help of the benign selection of memory, the bitterness of the previous years. When the noses of the reindeer were pointing towards the North Pole once more, Santa was overwhelmed by the certainty that he could not yet bring the mission to an end.

And so people would often tell each other about the occasion that they saw Santa Claus make his deliveries not in shadows but by the mid-morning light of the sun.

 The End

Santa Claus’ Tribulation, part 2 of 3

The years were passing, and yet they still found Santa delivering toys long after many of the eight year-olds had stopped believing in him. The invisible leg irons that age had coupled to his ankles were also witness to his beard turning white and the steady increase of his weight. His wife, who looked at him from time to time with affection though not with desire for many years, asked him why he kept that beard when it always scratched her face when she gave him a kiss.

“You don’t understand,” he replied. “My image means something to people.”

“What about your image with me?” she asked. “What about my image with people? Sometimes images are allowed to be false.”

But despite her absolute commitment to her husband’s never-ending but increasingly irrelevant mission, neither she nor anyone else could successfully mend the fraying at the edges of this tapestry. The older generation of workers had lived lives whose loyalty to Santa had never come into question. Their children, however, who had married each other and who wondered if there were alternatives to pasty skin, to the necessity of wrapping headscarves around one’s mouth, to the insularity of the North Pole – had begun the long and drawn-out but steady stream of desertion. The Japanese technicians, who had always made the workshop a more varied place every November and December – if not quite any livelier – suddenly stopped appearing, for the companies with which these toilers had built themselves up professionally would no longer consent to giving their workers away for two months for what they saw as a dying enterprise.

The toy production continued. The non-techno genius workers had stayed with the man who had rescued them from the listlessness of their former homes. They were there beyond the point where their hair had turned white and the rare visitors to the famous workshop wondered if these workers really were ageless, for the peers they had left behind many years ago were surely dead by then. Their ears had not only reddened in response to the icy pin-pricks of northern living but had become pointed as a way of fighting back against nature.

By this time, Santa was longing for a year’s break – a holiday from the holiday period, so to speak. It did little for him to hear that he had a dream vocation, that few other people were compelled to only work for one night per year. Santa gave the finger to such suggestions. Each year he had had a myriad of problems to solve, which he had always preferred to deal with personally and thus carried with him weight that was heavier than either his paunch or his peddler’s sack o’ toys.

For a moment he drifted back in reverie of days gone by and, in searching for someone he could talk to who might understand his feelings of a lost yesteryear, he found himself in the reindeer’s stable. They had been willing servants of his original dream for long decades, and he looked at them with affection. Dasher was more circumspect with his leg speed now; Dancer had lost her rhythm; Prancer no longer had a spring in his step; Vixen had lost her allure; Comet was no longer a bright flash across the night sky; Cupid’s love affair with the mission had gone wrong; Blitzen no longer had the strength and will to rival an army as he had once had. Meanwhile, Donner had pulled up lame so Santa had put him out to pasture on the steppes of central Asia.

Knowing what such an event would do to the morale of the children of the world, Santa did not take his long dreamed of year off. But the sight in the night sky of Santa’s magical sleigh (as it occasionally appeared to four- and five-year olds) was an increasingly ragged one. The silhouette no longer had sharp edges if it appeared in its classic pose pulling out into the foreground of a low rising full moon; and the image no longer glowed bright white if flying low in front of the shadows of a city skyline. He found that passers-by could no longer distinguish him from the assorted Santas in the department stores. Or perhaps there was something that did mark him apart: the absence of jolly ho ho hos. One day he heard an older child behind him mention to his friend that Santa was there on the corner, and the other responded that if Santa really did exist then he surely wouldn’t have the shadows in his heart that this fellow did. Santa turned to look at them with tired, sad eyes.

“Merry Christmas,” he sighed.

Santa Claus’ Tribulation, part 1 of 3

(The real story of Santa Claus. Santa has feelings too, he goes through angst just like the rest of us…)

 

Santa Claus had been delivering toys from what seemed like time immemorial. He had first had the impression that there was something vaguely special about Christmas when he was a younger man who didn’t yet need to shave every day. At the time, he was in the process of going to university on a part-time basis studying commerce, looking at the girls’ legs when the short skirts came out in the summertime and meanwhile confirming his suspicions that there truly was nothing more to life than work, sex, ice-cream, family and death. But he was struck by the fact that at the end of each calendar year strangers would feed each other lines of goodwill as they crossed each other in the streets and that, even more incredibly, some of those people were actually being sincere.

This spirit of the December 20-somethings affected Santa, whose German grandmother had emigrated to America in a fit of spite after having divorced her husband of twenty-seven months. From this severed union had been left a son who would later experience a night of pure love, from which the long-lasting side effect was the birth of the child Santa Claus eight months later. Santa knew, more than the others, that as individuals the best that each person could do was to treat each other sort of well in order to make each person’s life just a little bit better and to make the world a slightly easier place in which to live. But there was precious little of this phenomenon to be witnessed, until the time of year when pine trees were cut down and brought into the unfamiliar environment of living-rooms with imitation fire-places. These trees would have a last hurrah in festive atmosphere until the day they died in darkened solitude. Around this time of year, people would make an effort to contact their relatives and think of others, which left Santa with a feeling of star-struck astoundedness.

Santa ditched his studies, his theories on economic activity withering like so many fir trees in disturbing Hans Christian Andersen ‘fairy-tales’. The season caused him to experience such uncharacteristic warmth in the heart region that he felt a compulsion to give another layer to his and others’ depth of feeling. He relocated himself to Europe for ease of movement, purchased a restored factory with his inheritance and began to make toys to give to children. Santa felt that, despite their innocent yet despairing occasional cruelty towards those who did not fit in, it was they who were the purest exponents of spontaneous friendliness and were thus the ones who best captured a Christmas spirit of sorts.

Santa was not prepared for what was to come next. The world-at-large, whose land mass was almost exclusively in the wayward providence of the governments of nation states, began to feel threatened by these acts of unregulated generosity. His own Germany, under pressure, expelled him and none other would accept his pleas of a new home. The only options left for this newly imposed wanderer were the tiniest of Pacific atolls, which were too small to fit his factory, or a life of devotion at either the north or south extremes of the Earth.

Choosing the north because of reasons of proximity, Santa continued to work in the same manner as he had before. He let his beard grow to protect against the cold as his legend began to grow. Others who had been shut off from the nation states asked for his help to start their lives again, which he gave, but like all disenfranchised throughout time one could only find the thankless tasks for them to do. So they did, but at least they were given a fruit mince pie to eat as a bonus on Christmas Eve – and a thank-you.

Santa married the daughter of one of these workers on her 22nd birthday. She was of Vietnamese origin and had lived various moments of her life in Indonesia and Australia, eventually having to leave that country after her father narrowly lost a bet with the Australian Prime Minister (“If you win, you become the new PM, but if I win you have to leave the country.”). Despite being considered ageless in later years, Santa was in fact not much older than his bride when the union occurred. As there were frequent sightings of Santa Claus in later years but none at all of the elusive Mrs. Claus, illustrators of children’s books would draw Mrs. Claus as a female equivalent of Santa: a homely old white woman with curly white hair. But though the reality was much different, Mrs. Claus was only slightly annoyed by the by the misrepresentation.

She was already accustomed to the ways of northern living, a culture that resembled that of the Scandinavian nations, only without any ports or markets as Santa’s generosity took care of many of his employees’ needs. They had money but no one knew what to do with any of it. Later, as the workers’ children grew older, arrangements were made for the building of a movie theatre and a place to dance when spirits were up in the eternal daylight of summer.

Santa’s calling was easier in the beginning. Children with no expectations of presents were ecstatic with what they were given, and in the early days a toy per child sufficed. Gifts for the most part were of the wooden or cloth variety. The augmenting of the children’s greed happened later, when Santa would have to try to find a way to fit racecar sets into his sack and counteract the fragility of Sega systems and computer screens. When these gift requests began to become the norm rather than the exception, Santa saw no recourse but to import a selection of the finest Japanese electricians to the North Pole every November/December period, turning his workshop into a madhouse. The on the whole short sizes of these Japanese techno-geniuses complemented the stout builds of some of Santa’s existing workers, many of whom were of Mestizo or Amerindian lineage who had left jobless, penniless and disenfranchised from wretched villages in the mountains of Bolivia. The natural heights and measurements of these workers would cause Western commentators, somewhat unfairly, to refer to them as ‘elves’.

Santa’s departure from his more idyllic and idealistic days of the beginning caused him to pursue a relentless self-examination, long before his critics were doing something similar. Had his successes been beginner’s luck? Suddenly disillusioned, he gave his attention to the fact that had often been at the edge of his consternation: he was giving more toys to children of richer families. He thought of the day – December 24th? – that the seed of this pattern of discernment had taken root. Rudolf, the reindeer of nervous disposition but whose godsend gift of a fluorescent nose was more than useful to someone who worked exclusively at night, was leading the way as he always had since his emergence three or four years beforehand. Rudolf was a reluctant hero, perhaps the inevitable consequence of the cruel (and jealous) insults his magical deformity always brought his way. That night he was not given a premonition. While Santa was delivering to one of the poorer, more dangerous areas, a bullet was fired from out of the darkness and Rudolf succumbed. He died, but not before waiting patiently for Santa so that he could give him a final despairing look from his large, sorrowful eyes.

That Santa had compelled Rudolf to participate in the annual escapades hardly assuaged his guilt. After that he took no chances. He would barely be inside each house for more than thirty seconds if he felt that the eight waiting specimens of reindeer were kicking their heels and jangling impatient bells in unsafe places. In addition, Santa could not quite dispel the nagging feeling that he was more generous to the wealthier recipients because of the richness of the food they always left out for him and the cosy façades of their plush living rooms.

Across the Maribyrnong

I went to meet my mate a few days ago to kick back in the house he was housesitting in Hawthorn and to witness the last hurrah of the decomposing Australian cricket team.

I get a peculiar feeling when I cross from the western suburbs of Melbourne to the eastern. The eastern side is more leafy. It has more trees, and a feel that my side does not have. It maybe only exists in my head, but I look at their streets and because I imagine a more relaxed vibe I therefore feel it as I’m there. The only thing that exists is what our heads give form to, so to speak. I imagine (and therefore feel) a tranquil existence which paradoxically needs more money to fund it, since that is the money side of the city. I imagine a side of the city purely populated by Anglo-Saxons and Asians, free of the politics and bitterness that the Wogs brought over from Macedonia, Malta, Serbia, Italy and Co. and drenched the western suburbs in. I erroneously imagine an old-fashioned feel of people who still give a damn about each other despite being strangers on the surface, another quality that I associate with the idea of monoculturalism, although I’m not sure if that idea is intellectual or because of my own slight, latent racism. I see milk bars on the street corners that have an old-Australia feel. I see houses that are no bigger than ours but probably cost more.

And I feel… different. I used to make jokes about the divide when I was in high school in South Yarra (yeah, don’t start) and all my mates came from the other side. But now that I’m here, and school broke out for summer nine years ago now, and all the jobs that don’t involve being a tradie (I’m just not suited for that stuff) are in the east because that’s where all of the businesses are: I’ve just realised how envious I feel of them, how less tense I imagine my existence would be if I had been one of them. I don’t mean in a violence sense because virtually nothing violent has ever happened to or around me; but I mean that I’m sick of dealing with the politics of day-to-day racism (including my own), the feeling that I’m an outsider in my own country.

What if my parents had been posted over there when they came in the seventies? I’d be supporting a footy team that had won more than zero premierships in the last fifty years. I’d be frolicking in trees and all that crap. I’d probably be making a shitload of money, although that one is my fault, I should have gotten on my feet at an earlier age. I’d have probably met more people who had brains throughout my time, and not felt on the defensive so much.

Money is not about having more things, I suddenly wonder. It’s about avoiding unpleasantness, unpleasant people, unpleasant jobs, unpleasant schools. Sure some of them over there are spoilt and sue their kids’ schools for not delivering an automatic 99.50 ENTER even if their kid is a moron; they have no idea that life is a battle and not a procession, but I’d choose that over the alternative. I wasn’t sure where this post was going, I thought it would be some glib shit about fate, but in a way this is about what I would want in a fantasy world and so is not so dissimilar to my Christmas list.

Langu

Langu was a black woman my age from South Africa who I worked and lived with for three months on a campsite in the U.S., then we separately went back home and I didn’t see her again.

I’ve had people in my life who I’ve liked, and people I’ve felt comfortable around, but very few people with whom I’ve felt welcomed on every level and understood on every level, that there was no judgement floating below the surface and never would be. I ended up feeling love for these people, and afterwards never felt the strange bitterness when they got ‘lost’ from my life that I residually felt with everyone else whose bad memories overtook the good ones once they went missing.

There was Langu from Johannesburg in 2003, and there was Clint from Cape Town in 2004 who both (but separately) worked with me at St Mary’s children’s summer camp in Wisconsin. The two greatest people I ever met, but they would probably not figure on a list of influential people in my life because I just didn’t know them long enough – three intense months each one. Throw in Lizeth the Bolivian goddess for the perfect understanding we had although my association with her did not give me any peace – there, I said her name, strike me down – and a Swede named Elin who I knew in Bolivia and those are the four people I’ve felt a perfect connection with. Langu and Clint were the ones I felt the most joy around, the people I would most give a shit about losing, yet the only ones who I felt no animosity towards when I did lose them, as I said.

After a few years apart, they stopped answering letters and emails, disappeared into the heart of South Africa and became untraceable. It’s a strange thought in the google/facebook age that people can still vanish into the ether, but neither of them has a facebook or answer the few hopeless emails sent so that’s the end. (My facebook is now deactivated too, as an aside.)

Langu was one of the very few women with whom there was never any sexual tension in my mind. I just cruised with her, laughed all the time, discussed things, intellectually thought she looked kind of decent but instinctively knew that it was about something else with her, and simply lived it. I lived it once more in Bolivia in 2005-6, with a very cute Swedish/Iranian girl named Talajeh. We lived in the same house in Bolivia and she became my sister. I watched both of them hook up with other guys with amusement and warmth. But they were the only women my age with whom I felt this way; all the others could g.f.themselves cause they didn’t want to sleep with me, etc, you know, the macho shit lives inside me too. I wonder if a massive difference was needed to allow me to feel that way with the two of them, a huge racial difference that just instinctively put the sexual side out of the question.

I have all of these great memories of Langu, a catalogue. She referred to a song we sang together onstage as “A Langu and Marty moment” and I suppressed my laughter to cooly reply, “One of many.” She used to wander around, aware of everything but at the same time in her world, never lost but never succumbing to the day-to-day bullshit that everyone else did, or at least never showing it with me. She told me about her life, her extended family, her schooling. She never begrudged me my slightly upper-middle class background, my naïveté.

I was with her for a week in New York and was just overjoyed by my company, that I had those two people all to myself (it was her and another fantastic dude from Jo’burg named Jono. I’ve met so many great South African people that if I could turn back the clock I would give them the 1999 World Cup semi-final as gratitude, to ease their pain). She was running low on money so we did simple things. We stayed in Spanish Harlem and decided that New York was not exactly overrated but neither was it the glamorous Sex and the City world that everyone writes about and is shown on TV. New York City was Third World in its gritty struggle to survive, its utter lack of forgiveness. Its ragged squalor and sometimes filthy surroundings, its hustle- and urgency-based economy pointed not to the richness of Wall Street and the rest of North America but back to the poverty of Africa, from where huge numbers of African immigrants had rolled the dice and come to try their luck in NYC. Langu and I ended up with mixed feelings about the place. We said goodbye to each other on a NY street corner and when I was there for a few days the next year I thought of her constantly.

The last time I heard from her was September 2006, when I had just returned from the Bolivian year and was an emotional wreck, although an emotionally drowning man cannot see himself drowning until he has safely emerged afterwards. Then I lost her, she stopped writing to my letters and emails (I sent actual, physical letters to her: she was special), but that’s how it goes, I don’t feel any “You’re too good to write to me anymore?” nonsense. She might have lost interest, she might be married, she might be ashes for all I know. Oh well, you can’t hold a rainbow, but I wish I was still in touch with her.

Langutelani Rikhotso, Langu Rikhotso, if you ever google your name, maybe you’ll come across this site and know that I still think of you, and maybe you can get in touch if you’re still a living, breathing person at this point. I say this, even if it’s a terrible emotional cliché: Langu, I love you, or at least did when I knew you, and the memory of you warms my heart still. I felt perfect contentment whenever I spent any time with you, and that is an exceedingly rare feeling. While I’m at it: Clint Hendricks from Cape Town who worked in Wisconsin in 2004: google yourself and find my site if you still exist, as I’m sure you do. You are the most insightful, kindest, funkiest person I ever met. I love you as well, you are the only guy I could probably say that to, and I never forgot about you.

I keep on falling in and out of love with you

“Show some love for the talented, the beautiful Alicia Keys!” I was told last night, along with 13,000 others, the majority female. I would show love in my own time but objected being told to do it by some flunky. The ‘beautiful’ part shouldn’t have had a damn thing to do with anything, because in a smart world we wouldn’t be giving and receiving compliments for something we have no control over, but of course Alicia Keys’ smile and face and hips have a lot to do with it. Who was I fooling, I loved seeing her face and moods blown up on the big screen last night at her concert. We went to hear beauty but to see it too.

We don’t simply live in a world in which appearance/packaging/marketing is the most important thing. We live in a world in which the packaging is the only thing. What is inside, what the substance of the product or person is, quite simply does not matter. I hate it, I despise that that’s how it is, but that’s how it works out there.

Alicia Keys intrigues me because she is one of the very few stars that has gotten what she has because of her substance and not due to her façade. If anything the lady who plays the piano is a bit of an old-fashioned image, not that cool, or at least wasn’t until she made it cool. She must have something, that “it”, the indefinable magic that speaks to people deep inside themselves, because a lot of people have responded to her this decade and as I’ve just said, it couldn’t have been just for her look.

She wrote the song Butterflyz when she was thirteen, the song that would remain my favourite for years to come (or perhaps one of two favourites). As I half-jokingly remarked about Alicia Keys a year ago, her second album hadn’t been quite as good as her first, so my thinking is that when your greatest song is written at age thirteen, there’s nowhere to go but slightly down. But then she released her third album and gently responded to me, “Shhh!”

She’s graduated from being the piano lady to a more deliberate RnBer, while paradoxically letting her hair loose and ditching the braids. She’s occasionally gotten into some basic dancing over the last few years. On an instinctive level I hated that she had become so popular, that she belonged to everyone else and not just to me, but as long as she stays relevant then I too stay relevant and up-to-date.

She let her band jam it last night, instrumentalising up a few of her songs that had gotten stale over the passage of time, and I loved her for letting it all roll as I swayed. I loved the instruments and her frail brown backing singers. You could tell by the way she talked to the audience that she was used to playing crowds, had done it all before, but she is still a human being who smiled when she felt it and didn’t smile when she didn’t: at one point I think I saw her in a moment when she thought, this arrangement is not working that well. Her voice booms without sacrificing beauty, she has hips and a nice smile, and she wore white while her band members wore black. She has it.

On her second album she killed the song that could have been the kick-ass tune of her career, You don’t know my name, with an uninspired minute talking through the middle of it, and ruined it again last night by eliminating the piano from it and playing it as a croony shoop-shoop song. No matter. Her false finale was Fallin’, the theme song she will never get away from as long as she lives, and she should have ended the concert there. The build-up to the song was huge, they gassed the stage and she trilled for a minute before she started. I will never stop loving Fallin’, and evidently no one will, it was the only true song when it came out onto the plastic music scene in 2001 and established her as the only true songstress.

She came out for two more staged encores, but didn’t sing Butterflyz, which is a song that stays with me after everyone else has forgotten it and which I once sang in front of a bunch of people at camp four years ago. (But if it was her first song she must always remember it too, I’m thinking?) But the idea of the slow, simplistically-emotional Butterflyz at one of her hip concerts of funky songs is like going on a date with Miranda Kerr just to see her nose, like seeing the Brazilian soccer team – Kaká, Ronaldo et al – for its goalkeeper, like going to a seafood restaurant for its salads: irrelevant.

She has it, she has it, and I hope she keeps it, and shows it, and never loses it.