Wednesday, June 23, 2010

If you meet an anti-buddha on the road, who should kill whom?


If you meet Buddha on the road you must kill him. Excellent, but what if you meet an anti-buddha? And what if he's a pissweak fool of an anti-buddha who only wants to spend the rest of his life eating chocolates and cakes and watching Fox Sport on the TV? Can you kill him? Or is that too harsh? Me, I piked out. Instead I've spent the last four years aiding and abetting this anti-buddha (er... that would be my father) by keeping the fridge full of chocolates and cakes, and perpetually resetting the TV back to Fox Sports when he gets in a tizz and moronically sits there watching the steak knife channel. Ain't life swell.

Be warned, I hereby give the game away. Forget all that stuff about me as self-declared Buddhist railing at the death cult etc. Truth be known I'm a fellow with a heart full of hate who wishes his father was dead. If he carked it tomorrow I'd sing hallelujah. God, that's dreadful. Who the hell says such things? Perhaps I'm a small time death cult member? Or just a mamby-pamby bullshit wannabe? Perhaps I'm the death cult's Walter Mitty? Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa went his slippers as he shambled off to the toilet again and put paid to me wondering if he's dead yet. I tell you what, this dying caper would be so much quicker and easier if one didn't have to keep getting up and going to the toilet all the time. But then, thirty cups of tea a day will do that to you. Here, tea drinking, like going to the toilet, like every goddamn thing, qualifies as pathological.

What does it mean that my answer to the perennial question, 'How is your father?' has become, 'Don't ask me because I don't care. He's still alive it seems, but he's been that way for quite a while now. And shall continue, I expect, until we've all run melancholy mad. Or at least until I have...' Actually, that's the clever me. The real world me says, 'Don't ask me. I wish he was dead.' I apologise for saying it of course - I mean you have to what with the shocked look on the face of whoever's asking me. But really I'm past it now - I've ceased caring. Every second in this place has become perfectly and utterly hateful. I haven't hated a thing this much since my first year in China.


It's the mind games that got to me in the end. It's his idiot pretence that he's doing it all for other people, which is to say me since there's no one else here. Nearly four years of this shit and he's still asking me if I mind if he changes the channel. Which sounds normal until you realise that I've declared in no uncertain terms that I detest Fox Sports, that if it was up to me I'd throw the TV out the goddamn window, and that he should never ask me about changing the channel again. Ever. He's just being polite he says.

There isn't a single question I can ask him about what he'd like to do that isn't answered with, 'Well, what were you having?' I ask him if he wants any more salt and pepper and he says 'Well, what were you having?' Seriously, I'm not making that up. Now I no longer unravel the idiocy of such an answer and instead just shout at him - 'For chrissake, it's a simple question. Did you want more salt and pepper or not?' 'Er, no thank you.' Goddamn! It's like pulling fucking teeth! Every fucking time! Sign me up for the fucking death cult! Jesus!

The perversity is that I'm the author of my own misery. The only reason he's alive is because I keep calling the bloody ambulance. He'd have been dead at least four times over except for me. Trips to the emergency room aside, in between his truly insane consumption of processed sugar and grease, I pointlessly feed him healthy food. He eats half, throws out the rest and then has a piece of cheesecake. His thirty cups of tea a day is made with water I distil for him. Actually, I distil it for me but he drinks it all, about four litres a day. And that's the game we play. His role is to speed his demise and my role is to prolong it. The irony runs rampant what with him not quite wishing to die and me not quite wishing him to live. But as if anything ever made any sense here.


And then there's the retroactive aspect to it all. The nth degree perversity of my life here has cast in stark relief the fact that it was always this way. The only thing that was missing was that last little wafer thin mint to take us to the obvious conclusion. It's clear to me now that he was always a self-obsessed, self-pitying fool. I doubt that there was a man more cuckolded than my father, nor one who deserved it more. With every aspect of my childhood now viewed through this glass darkly, the family snapshots have turned into a series of Ralph Steadman illustrations.

For the last couple of years I've been wondering what I'd say at his funeral and just lately I've decided that I'm not even going to go. Fuck it. The only people who'll be there are my brothers and I've long since ceased caring what they think. Besides which, God spare me having to listen to their mawkish efforts.

Like I said - the world's crummiest Buddhist, me - a man who talks about selflessness all the time, and who goes through the motions, yet all the while his veins run with a fetid black ichor. Compassion? Compassion... I don't even know what it means anymore. Is it compassion to assist an anti-buddha in his delusional self-obsessed spiral into zombiedom? To feed him another spoonful of ashes and him with his mouth already full? The TV sport, the sweety bonbons, the silly mind games, all of it fodder for a hungry ghost who eats and eats, tasting nothing, and never to be sated. What's the point? It's all so purposeless.


Perhaps the right answer is to be possessed of limitless patience and to devote myself to his happiness. But what if the only way to make him happy was to sit and watch Fox Sport with him, be his chocolate buddy, and play the designated role in each of the various mind-game charades he perpetually comes up with? Or to put it another way, join him in his anti-buddhadom? While I'm at it, I'll buy the latest fashions, get a haircut, sign up to facebook, learn how to twitter, and join the Liberal (conservative) Party. God, I'd make his day.

He's everything I want to leave behind and yet here I am shackled to the fucker. Buddha left his wife and kids you know. Easy for him - if I left the old man would be dead in a week. If I stay he could live for years. Hoo-bloody-ray. Would anyone be surprised if I said my hair is falling out and my face is covered in a stress induced eczema? No really, I look like hell.

Oh shit, he's up now. There goes the morning. Ah, Fox Sports news. Fantastic. A fifteen minute bulletin that gets repeated over and over. And within that bulletin is a riff that gets repeated 50? 100 times? Who knows. I'd do the math except I can't think straight. How marvellously loud it is. Sing along - ♫ Dundun dader daderda dundun ♫ Dundun dader daderda dundun ♫ Dundun dader daderda dundun ♫ ad nauseam...


Run Away! Run Away! Down at the library it's time to tie things up - cue the soaring conclusion, the rolling rhythmic build up, and the step-off-the-precipice ending! Or maybe not. Nothing is a lock in and patchiness is the best you can hope for. I gotta tell you, I can barely think straight and it just gets harder and harder. So! Lest anyone wonder what's going on round at nobody's place, it could well be insanity because I've just about fucking had it.

---

But then again, the nature of monkey is irrepressible. No doubt I'll be back in a couple of days with a new peice and no one will ever know that I've secretly been going bonzo zonko. Whew! And let's hope they never find out!

Monday, June 21, 2010

a mundane path to the great whatever


I am not spiritual. The thoughts that flow through my head would more accurately be described as mundane. It's an interesting word that, mundane. It's meaning of dull or tedious is actually brand-spanking new, dating from the 19th century. Prior to that it was a precise antonym for spiritual. Sure enough, it derives from the Latin mundus meaning world. Put it all together and I think it describes me nicely: I am worldly, without spirituality, and dull. Don't argue - you should see my dreams when I have them. They are tedious beyond all imagining.

The thought of spirituality appeals of course - I recall watching a Buddhist nun on the television describing her life of complete ascetic isolation and thinking, bravo that sounds fantastic, but mundane fellow that I am, I couldn't get past the question: how did she do it? Where did her food come from? If I wanted to do the same thing, how would I go about it? She provided no answers but I expect it's actually quite simple. She was part of an order and probably lived a couple hundred metres up the mountain at the back of the temple. Or something like that. I expect there was a person tasked with taking food to her a couple of times a day.


Anyway, whatever we call that journey, I'm doing it, albeit in a mundane fashion. For me there is no magic, there is no feel-good. I simply do without things and see if I crash and burn. So far, so good. I now drink nothing but water (and fresh fruit juice occasionally). I've pretty much ditched processed food and anything with sugar in it. And just lately I've made a rather large step and done away with bread. My stomach has been a disaster since forever and rather than try and figure out if I had coeliac disease, or irritable bowel syndrome, or wheat allergy (or any of those grab-bags of symptoms in search of a name) I just thought fuck it, I'll take the lot. Thus I no longer eat wheat or bread or gluten or yeast or any of that stuff. It's do-able and I've done it and it's fine. I haven't wigged out and nor do I sit around pining for anything. By the same token, there is no pay-off. I do it and that's all there is to it.

Is that selflessness? Perhaps we could call it training for selflessness? All I know is I can wander past shops and cafes and feel no desire. And there's no magic to this. I did it just by doing it. It's my mundane best at attempting to emulate the Buddha. Or it's just a diet, ha ha - The man who mistook his diet for spirituality.

Food is one thing, and everything else is another (Phwooar! I kick the arse of truth!). And in amongst all that, I've dispensed with an entire field of human endeavour - nightlife. Or is that social life? For many it's the same thing. Whatever it's called, I no longer have the clothes for it. Speaking of which - whilst I'd prefer not to look like shit, I've utterly ceased attempting to impress. Fashion is a thousand years ago. Now I just wear thongs (which Americans call flip-flops, and yes, I understand that this is hysterically funny but... only for you), where was I? Oh yes, thongs, Thai fisherman's pants, and whatever logo-less t-shirts I find at the charity shop (easier said than done in this bullshit corporate world). And my hair is long, not because I like long hair - I don't - but because anything else would necessitate me choosing a style and maintaining it every month.


Sure enough, in this bullshit tourist town with its beach esplanade that distinguishes itself from every other beach esplanade in no way at all, I am the fellow that isn't meant to be there. The spruikers don't even bother with me now. As I walk back from the supermarket with my granny trolley full of groceries, somehow they just know that I'm not going to come into their restaurant, or buy a time-share unit, or contribute to the fat-cat surf life saving club. I am the wrong guy and obvious with it.

It's all about sex, you know. Looks, that is. Charles Darwin, the serene and impassive avatar of life and death (as I imagine him) was right - for any entity that self-perpetuates, everything is subservient to the sex drive. He doesn't declare that to be bad - it just is. And it's this understanding that has driven a great deal of what I write here, particularly in regards to the death cult. But back to today's topic - for anyone wishing to shed desire, sex is the biggie to end all biggies. This topic too I approach in a mundane fashion.


For an unattractive fellow it's surprising how many women dig me (or dug me, at any rate). With almost no effort on my part women who fancied me seemed to keep turning up. It was never A Hard Day's Night (in spite of what I said in that Arundhati Roy thing), but it was okay. Yet sadly whatever appeal I might possess deserts me the moment the tables are turned and I attempt to pursue someone. It's a special knack I have. Thus the world of nobody's romantic entanglements divides into two groups: those who fancy me; and those I fancy - and never the twain shall meet.

Besides which, without any intent of cruelty I've broken too many hearts. It doesn't take much - honesty is all you need. They ask me if I love them and I answer no. Keeping in mind that for any number of women (and don't tell them this but...) I only went to bed with them out of politeness, ie. I didn't wish to make them unhappy by saying no. But whatever the intent, one way or another unhappiness would be the end result. And if there's one thing that kills me dead it's a woman weeping and all on account of me. As for the other way around, I don't mind getting dumped. It's nothing special.


Honestly, how many decades do you have to be crap at something before you give it up as a dead loss? Weirdly enough, in spite of my head being filled with the standard general-issue lust, I don't really miss it. I just file it in the same box as x-ray specs. Remember them? As a kid I'd see the ads for x-ray specs in the Spider-Man comics and be mesmerised - Gosh! Imagine being able to see ladies' bosoms! - but they were from some place far far away and never to be mine and that was fine. It really wasn't worth expending time or energy on, so I'd just 'file it'. In terms of dealing with desire, perhaps this is cheating? But does it matter?

Hmm... it just occurred to me that all this is the polar opposite to The Secret™. Remember that? It was huge on Oprah apparently. In the wee clip I saw, the boy who wanted a bicycle was instructed to obsess over it - cut out the ad, draw pictures of it, plaster your room in pix of the bike, and obsess, obsess, obsess. And magically you'll get the bike! God spare us - a primer for anti-buddhas. The corporations give three cheers. Was The Secret™ a psy-op? Sure, why not?

Never mind all that. For a mundane fellow, I'm doing pretty well. No spirituality, but the check-list of desires crossed off is really getting somewhere. Does it matter that the means by which I do so are so dull, so antithetical to everything in every ad ever? As the Buddha said, everything is here and now. And me paraphrasing: there's no heaven or hell. Nor gods, nor devils. The Buddha is dead and Maitreya ever in the future.


Others say otherwise of course, but people say lots of things. I'd love it if all that stuff were true, but who wouldn't? It occurs to me that a desire for magic says more about desire than it does about magic. Who am I calling? What do I want with them? What would they want with me? Besides, if one was seeking selflessness, how would that be granted? Ting! You are now selfless! Me - Yay, that's great! Just what I always wanted! Never mind the contradiction - somehow I don't think so. Somehow I think that a sheer dull slog is all that there is.

And you know what, perhaps there's not any spirituality to be arrived at, and me, I'll never find it - doomed to spend the rest of my life as a mundane toiler striving for some kind of DIY whatever. But whatever! If there's nothing in it for me and none are harmed, what's the problem?* (*Oprah Winfrey, the owners of the little ™ that comes at the end of The Secret™, along with other assorted corporate motherfuckers and death cult members are excused from answering.)

And so I continue. One foot goes in front of the other and all as unmagical as can be.

Monday, June 14, 2010

In which I make an obsequious apology

Well, no one ever said I wasn't rash. It seems that the last piece was written in a tone of certainty rather than one of probability. Thus it's time for yours truly to do the mea culpa macarena and admit the following: As far as Israelis faking attacks on themselves to appear victims and thus justify their own talmud approved brutality, I will happily declare that in this single instance of the Mavi Marmara attack I got it wrong. What with their tactic of using helicopters to shoot people on the deck of the boat and thus provoke those on board to retaliate, the variety of fakery suggested by those photos was in all likelihood unnecessary and most probably did not occur.


What was I thinking of? Did I really think that the Israelis would go to all that expense and shell out the shekels to hire the sister ship and effectively double the production costs of military personnel, boats, choppers, camera crews, and post-production, when on the actual day they could just stand off and shoot some Goyim and thus provoke them into doing the same job for free?! I'll admit that there's the cost of a box of ammunition, but gee whiz, that's money well spent for the opportunity to kill some Goyim. Honestly, put an Israeli in a gunship and pretty much the whole world qualifies as a free-fire zone amusement park. "Get some! Get some! You should do a story about me because I'm so fucking good!"


Forgetting Full Metal Jacket for a minute, where I came a cropper in this case was in thinking of all those other examples of Jews attacking themselves to appear victims without realising the other obvious commonalities. Um, we're all familiar with this aren't we? I actually have a collection of fake attack stories on my hard drive. Holy shit! I just checked and there's over twenty of them, and I only ever spent a blink of an eye looking for them.


My fave is that French woman who claimed six North Africans on the Metro mistook her for being Jewish and beat her up and threw her baby out of the humidicrib, sorry, pram. Ha ha ha ha, 'mistook her for being Jewish' - bloody marvellous, I love it. And special Jewish Brownie points to her Jewish boyfriend for getting an idiot shiksa to do all the work. "A Jew may do to a non-Jewess what he can do. He may treat her as he treats a piece of meat," and quite right too. Otherwise it was very poor of the French police to drag the Jewish boy into it. How was he meant to know they'd check the cctv cameras and be able to see that nothing happened at all? Besides which, every thing he did was sanctioned by the talmud. Hell, he could have shot every one of those ill-mannered cops right there in the interview room and it would have been blessed by God. Don't they know they're not even human?


But never mind that one single case, there's been many, many, many: gravestones smashed; synagogues burnt; swastikas daubed on everything from cars, buildings, Morton Downey Jr, and pretty much everything in between, and all done by Jews to paint themselves as victims. And God forbid anyone should ask the question: if anti-semitism is so rife, why are so many Jewish people running around faking it all the time? It would be ungracious of me to ask it, so I shan't. The important thing is, I missed the main point - in all of these cases of Jews as false victims, the money spent was nickel and dime.


So yes, my instinct to assume that uppermost in the Israeli mind would be how to make themselves appear to be victims whilst callously murdering people in cold blood was correct. But. Where I went wrong was in imagining that they'd go about it in a profligate fashion. Even in elaborately prepared cases like 911, where significant sums were outlaid, it was only because the payout was assured and everyone was going to make out like bandits. Just ask Larry Silverstein and Australia's very own Frank Lowy, now in South Africa copping blowjobs in his role as head of Australian soccer. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi Oi Oi Vey!


Oh dear, have I strayed again? Back to the mea culpa. Yes, I was wrong. I was foolish, I was stupid, I was naive. I prostrate myself in front of those self-righteous, drenched-in-blood, Israel-uber-alles defenders of the indefensible and say, please forgive me for imagining you'd spend a penny more than was necessary. More fool I.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Mavi Marmara - Internet sleuths 1, Mossad bullshit-artists 0

God I love this picture. Hats off to the legends who put it together. And thanks also to AP at Twelfth Bough for pointing me at it. (Post Scriptum: The original pic is an animated gif. Best I can tell animated gifs don't play on blogger. Or maybe it's just here, who knows. Regardless I've broken it into four jpegs. You can still see the original at the first link there).





For those confused, the ticket here is to keep your eyes on the disappearing ship's name. Which is to say, the colour plate is the MV Mavi Marmara and the overlays of B&W Israeli footage is of another vessel, in all likelihood the MS TDI Karadeniz, the Mavi Marmara's sister vessel. Fingers crossed somebody tracks that down to see where it's been and who's been using it.

Otherwise I have nothing much to add apart from the fact that all the Israelis had in their defence against charges of murder was that grainy B&W footage. And even that's fake. Hmm, thinks... not only has whatever excuse they had evaporated, but their 'excuse' now spins 180° and turns their 'botched' effort into an obvious, elaborate, premeditated bloodbath.

God I love this. I feel like Col. Kilgore on the beach. "I love the smell of Israelis shitting their pants in red-faced embarassment. It smells like humiliation...
One day this shitty little country is going to end..."





PPS. Ah yes, such wishful thinking... please see the next piece in which I rethink the likelihood of all this and come to a slightly different conclusion. Yoroshiku, n.