Stroke My Spaniel And I'll Bite You, Cameron

David Cameron scares me. Somehow he has managed to convince half the British electorate that he isn't Margaret Thatcher in a Tony Blair skinsuit, when he very obviously is. How did he pull off such a confidence trick?

The hopelessness of Gordon Brown's Government helps. Imagine, waiting for a job for ten years (or however many it was since Blair and Brown did their famous Mephistophelian[is that the spelling?] Deal) and then finding out you are utterly useless at it. Brown is a prime minister for a different age, one that passed many, many moons ago. He's just not superficial enough to pull it off in this age of media manipulation initiated by his former boss Mr Blair and his demonic sidekick Alastair Campbell. It's not the message that matters anymore, Gordy. It's how your hair looks when you deliver it.

Cameron's talk of believing in the individual and not the State has even, somehow, convinced cynical political observers that he's saying something new. But Thatcher and Reagan were saying the same thing in the 1980s. They just said it more aggressively. Cameron strokes your metaphorical cocker spaniel while he's saying it so you think, "What a nice bloke," and don't notice the subtext.

Think of the recent stuff about people taking responsibility for their weight. "The State didn't make you fat"--that was the implication. So you must take more responsibility for managing the problem. But whichever Tory speechwriter came up with the wording for that one put it so cleverly, they managed to make it sound as if Gordon Brown personally is somehow insulting you with all your qualities of personal strength and resilience by offering help for grossly overweight people on the NHS; while at the same time the speech played beautifully to the prejudice of all the perfect thin people who think being fat is somehow a sign of moral weakness, and lays the ground (nobody seemed to notice) for cuts in services that might well be desperately needed.

And that will happen. All of Cameron's cutesy, people-friendly policies and his anti-State perorations are sweetly-worded groundwork for a society that serves big business and satisfies the mean streak in the national character.

Of course, if you're a selfish materialist who dislikes everybody who doesn't resemble you, that isn't going to be a problem. Figuring out that plenty of voters in Britain these days fit both of those preconditions (though thankfully not everyone) and then reselling his perception with industrial helpings of Asda own-brand sweetener was probably what won David Cameron the election two years before it was held.

Earls Barton Gangster

comb stuck in hair,
jeans down around
his butt cheeks,
boxer shorts
on backwards.

talks black london
on his mobile phone.

"yeahyeahyeah
yeah cool man
cool."

big gangster waiting
for the bus to town.

asks for half fare
when he boards,
and gets it.

Palin

We woke up this morning to the news that John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, the Governor of somewhere or other, and--as the news reports are taking great delight in telling us--an ex-beauty queen, for his running mate in the American presidential elections. The fact that she was a beauty queen, of course, means nothing, and the British media is actually being rather sexist in reporting it so rabidly.
There's a suggestion that one of the reasons McCain chose Palin was to try to poach disillusioned Hillary Clinton supporters from the Democrats. I don't know if that's true, not being a Facebook friend of John McCain's, but I can believe it might be. What I struggle to believe is that anybody's alliegance to a political cause could be so flexible that they'd abandon it just because a candidate with the same genitalia was selected for the other team. But then, I am known for my dogmatism when it comes to politics. A friend of mine recently said, "Bruce, for such an intelligent and nuanced man you see things in very black-and-white terms." (of course, he would say that. Capitalist swine that he is.)

Changes To The Page

The keen-eyed among you will notice I've made a few changes to the look of the page.Let me know what you think. It looks cleaner and clearer now, to me, and it sports the colours of Ipswich Town, my football club, who, if the first few games of the season are anything to go by, are likely to need all the moral support they can get.
I'm also going to reintroduce labelling of posts from today so people can read the things they're interested in and skip over the stuff that bores them silly. I know some people don't share my interest in politics and only want to read about literary matters, for example. So labels should be of some help.
Excelsior! (as Stan Lee used to say.) Bruce.

The Station Pub

in Wellingborough is gone! I passed it yesterday. It was a fabulous old place, small, soaking in the character of another age when the profit margin and corporate unformity weren't immediate considerations for every new building or business. I'd guess it had been there down by Wellingborough Rail Station slaking the thirsts of travellers and rail workers for a hundred years at least.Lee and I went in there a few times, it being near his house. I've drunk in there alone and with other people too. Now it's just a big (small) pile of rubble behind a wire fence, the space waiting to be developed, no doubt into something that looks exactly like everything else, something no one needs. Overgrown with budleia, the large pointy purple heads blowing in the august wind. The only thing that's left of the original structure of the pub is the doorstep. I stepped over it, went in, sat down on one of the plucked and threadbare seats and had a pint in memory of times and people gone.

Leicester

I've been to Leicester today. Wanted to go somewhere I hadn't been for a while to calm my mind down again after all the tension I picked up yesterday at work. Seems to have been successful as well, since I don't presently want to shoot anybody.
I thought, since it was also pay day, it would be nice to be in a bigger place where more of the things I wanted to buy were available. But I was forgetting myself. I don't really want anything! Just the odd book by Philip Whalen or Gary Snyder or Han Shan or Li Po that you can't get in any English bookshops anyway (that's why Buddha willed the internet into existence, right?) So I haven't returned from Leicester with anything except a clearer mind than I had when I went out this morning. But that's got to be more important than anything else, I think. Without a clear mind there's no escape even in sleep.
Lunch in the park in Leicester town centre, a few feet away from this waterfall, across from the town hall where a black man and a white woman were celebrating just having married in the registry office, was the thing that clinched my return to some measure of sanity.As you can see from the picture it was a beautiful morning. I wish I'd also got a photo of the pigeons cooing around my feet hoping I'd drop a scrap of my Mexican bean wrap.

The Day After Work

Morning on the mountain. Cars circling like swarms of flies down in the world of dust below.

Mind really sour today. Don't even have any ear for rhythm. Snappy like an angry crocodile rotating yellow eyes in the undergrowth waiting for a chance to bite.
That's just the world,
the world,
the messy,
angry,
dewdrop
world.

(from my journal)

Me, Women And How It Is Now

Since I broke up with **** I have had a strange existence. I spent most of last year in the company of a woman friend who I never slept with, but who had become like a kind of Siamese twin. That relationship was too intense. I became too intense. Almost had another breakdown because of it. She had me believing (almost) my melancholic nature was due to hell demons attacking me. I can't remember why I'd made them cross, in her crazed demonology. Recommended I cry out the name of Jesus to come and defend me when the blues (and therefore the demons) got really rough. I didn't do that, but I did take to keeping a copy of the Bible in the house, and hanging a crucifix from a nail in my ceiling, just in case.Pretty peculiar for a Buddhist. When I look back on it now I wonder what the hell was wrong with both of us. (Maybe I was missing the nutty relative I'd lived with before, or the psychic dramas I endured in that situation for so long.)

Finally I couldn't take any more of my friend and stopped answering her calls. I feel guilty about that, but hell, I am alive; and I wonder if I would have been, had our friendship continued.

Since then things have been a little quiet. I had a couple of dates with a beautiful Namibian woman, but when I fell down the stairs in the pub on the second date I knew that was a bad omen. When I look back, from my present viewpoint, at all the female company and entertainment I had only a couple of years ago I wonder what's gone wrong. But nothing has gone wrong. People move, and change. Everybody I know now is so much younger than I am. And everybody I meet is so unlike me. I get tired of feeling like the eccentric uncle of every woman I sit across a pub table from. And it frustrates me having nothing to talk about with most of them. Did I see the X-Factor on Saturday night? Well, no, funnily enough. But I did a great thirty-minute meditation. (Eyes glazing.)

I have decided just to commit to being the person I feel like being, quit chasing worlds I passed through and matured out of twenty years ago so I can get a bit of company that would pretty soon bore the pants off me anyway. I'm happy getting up before dawn to sit on the meditation cushion.I'm happy hiking through the parks or along country lanes talking to the cows. Writing poetry and arguing in my own head or on the internet about politics. I'm happy living frugally because accumulating useless objects is a soul suck I just don't need. These things might make me an alien being that hardly anybody left (at least in this county) knows how to relate to. But I can live with that. Trying to do things the other way for the last forty years has left me a screwed-up and deeply unsatisfied man.

Drugs and Yours Untruly

I heard something on the radio this morning about mandatory drug and alcohol testing in the workplace. Now, I'm opposed to any impingement on civil liberties, especially when they're imposed by bosses to protect the profit margin, but when I heard about this one I thought, Hmmm, finally, a way of finding out whose life outside of work is real and who makes theirs up.

Because drinking and getting stoned are the only life now. It's everybody's measure of whether you've had a good or a bad weekend. If somebody had spent Saturday and Sunday writing a symphony, they'd probably still go into work on Monday morning and tell people they were massively hungover from a two-day drinking binge with a lot of unnamed (and probably made up) friends.

Mind you, I'm sometimes guilty of ridiculous (and essentially immature) image-making myself. I wrote an email to an old girlfriend some time ago in which I gently castigated her for trying to give up cocaine. "I hang onto all my vices jealously," I wrote (or words to that effect).

What vices? Tosser. I have smoked a little weed from time to time, and I like to drink. But I've never touched anything stronger. Not out of some moral objection, but just because drugs, and the people you got them from, seemed too dangerous (this woman's druggy friends were like desperate animals in my snobbish estimation: not a trace of civility or sophistication about them)(and they laughed and made fun of the helpless crumbling old drunk in the corner of the Racehorse). Oh, and I didn't want to have to spend the large amount of money you had to spend to get the drugs. Do the purer among you have any idea how much even a little marijuana sets you back?

So whatever vices I was inferring I might have to my old girlfriend--who took offence at the email and didn't talk to me again--I actually have never had.

Why did I pretend I did? I don't even know the answer to that.I have spent so long living on the borderline between fact and fantasy--as a compulsive storyteller in poetry and prose and in conversation--I probably almost believed what I was writing as I wrote it. There's an element of alienation, and mistrust of other people, in there too. But it's ridiculous anyway. My major vices are snobbery on the one hand, and self-pity on the other. Though I'm trying to deal with both through Buddhist practice.

I have a significant and lifelong addiction to peanut butter, if that helps me look any cooler to my readers.

Three Poems

i.

like hokusai's wave--
that cloud above
the council houses.

ii.

who's bowing down?
who isn't?--
morning meditation

iii.

as far as i know, i've never been
to san francisco--
inspired by the black cat bar
i remember other places.

Meditation

I got in a good twenty minute meditation in the bedroom at work before I went in for my shift this morning. I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it, with everything that goes on there distracting my mind. Ironically, though, one of my old Buddhas resurfaced at work the other day--I'd left it there ages ago and forgot about it, and someone had set it up as an ornament or something in the room--so I was able to use that as the focus for a kind of makeshift altar on the floor.

People are instinctively repelled by the idea of things like altars, bowing and prayer in this time--though it's okay to worship money and have a widescreen telly as the altar-like centrepiece and attention-focus of your living room--but I don't worry about them anymore. The ceremony of morning meditation is a nice way of centering my mind. And the elegance of it is certainly better for your head than the drivel it gets filled with by morning telly. I only bow before the Buddha from time to time, but anything that helps you break down your own ego has got to be a good thing. Who am I that I shouldn't have to bow down before something? or somebody? What's so special about me?

Mind you, these things probably would seem sensible and right to me. I talk to cows.

Work

Back to the money job today after 13 quiet, beautiful, instructive days off. Now I have to try to hold onto the peace of mind and the renewed focus I've found with all of the pressures and distractions of the job tugging me away from them. Well, if I really want to stay on the path I will, right? All I've got to do is sit squarely on the ox of my mind and make him go where I want him to. Which is easier said than done, but that really is all it boils down to.

As for the job itself--I can't really resent having to do it, much as that tempts you after two weeks of blissful silence and serene meditation. The job is what buys you the space to find the peace inside, after all.

NOW

There is only now, Zen says
The moment you are in
Sitting in the benjo
with your trousers down
writing "there is only now"
as someone coughs once
in the cubicle next door.