marginalia

The flight home last night from the Auckland was awash with aging suits who’d been at the employment summit. I talked to one of the suits – one of the 200 grey knights invited in to come up with ideas that will rescue our nation from doom and gloom. I was gauche enough to ask if he’d been at the unemployment conference. ‘No, we prefer to concentrate on employment – it was the employment salad.’

Eh? My ears, still dealing with post-flight clickiness, heard ‘employment salad’ and that got everything off to a terrific start. I’m just *naturally* impressive. I did my best to not engage as he launched into this amazing swirl of spin – if you’d believed this guy we’ll be at 110% employment by tomorrow. Or, somewhere over the rainbow. In the big rock candy mountain.

Which is kind of useful, because one of the big, big breakthroughs at the summit was a recycled idea about building a mountain bike trail from North Cape to Bluff. I think this is a great idea, it’ll make good use of the redundant rail tracks that currently infest the country. With much of our manufacturing industry now off shore the rail system is just a drain on the economy. We can sell the steel rails for scrap to the Chinese to convert into bicycles (yay the mighty wu tang) that they can sell back to us via the Warehouse and the profusion of $2 shops scattered across the country. The sleepers we can tear out and sell them to do landscaping in Remuera. And the carefully graded track lines will make mountain biking a really pleasant, but not too challenging, experience. An *added bonus* – minimal Resource Management Act requirements. Very good idea. And perhaps people will be able to make a pilgrimage by cycle, from the unemployment ghettos in the deep south up to Cape Reinga and cast themselves into the sea to launch their migration to Australia, our previously preferred (and time-honoured) method of solving unemployment.

I mentioned the migration method to my suit, and to my complete amazement, he thought I was younger than I am. He said, ‘When someone goes from here to there it doubles the average IQ on both sides the Tasman.’ I was stunned at the idea that he would voice that as being his own idea, and felt moved to mention that, ‘Yes, that’s what Muldoon said, and see where that got us.’

Apparently the suit (an ex-aussie himself) was of the opinion that in almost no time at all swarms ex-pats and their whanau will be back here to the land of the long flat white and honey. Mossies no more, we’ll be re-united, brothers in arms, red men … oh good grief, just no. I could see on the faces of the people around listening to the conversation that they were convinced they were in some sort of Tui ad, and that any minute now they were going the collectively shout, ‘YEAH, RIGHT!’

You know, thing I can never understand is how kids who are perfectly normal, fun, goofy, bumbling in a good way, vibrant and generally worthy people (i.e. real) at high school grow into conniving, word spinning, inhumane and at times, just downright stupid (i.e. unreal) in their adulthood. Does work – having a job do that to you?

I try to not buy into the illuminarti/new world order/masonic conspiracy but I cannot see what the payoff is. I’m unconvinced. Perhaps it’s greed. Perhaps it’s peer pressure. A desire for status. Craving credibility with the in-crowd. A media construct. Subliminal messages in the media. If enough people buy in to the Emperor’s new clothes group think takes over.

Pulling at an errant thread then, as much as I like the idea of being able to bike the length of the country – I am quite tempted by that idea I have to say – without the fear of being hammered by road traffic going through the bottleneck that is Auckland, and the other big cities – that I don’t really see New Zealand’s unemployment woes on the horizon being solved in this way. It’d be great, but let’s not pretend this’ll really do much provide widespread employment. Unlike if every Government business unit simply went to full staffing. Many business units are short staffed, and have been so for years. I don’t understand how a country can go from bleating about a shortage of skilled staff to increasingly strident bleats that companies are over-staffed in just a few months. I don’t understand why the Government doesn’t stop using foreign-owned banks instead of KiwiBank. Despite the seeming paucity of ideas (200 people, one day, 21 points – hey I wasn’t there perhaps it was fantastic and the points are incredible), the NZ Herald patriotically report: Mr Key said everybody who attended the summit had taken a risk, “but you put the interests of your country ahead of yourself or your organisation”.

Yeah, right.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on what to tell your grandkids. I don’t have any grandkids, but I was thinking about all those ‘What did you do in the war, Dad?’ kinds of questions that I didn’t ask my Dad. Could’ve, perhaps should’ve, but didn’t. Wasn’t that interested, to tell you the truth. At least not about the war. Dad did tell me/us a little about his early life and I think my memories of his memories are more about a brutish life than anything resembling fun, or even funny. You get that when your childhood gets stolen by someone else’s alcohol, a depressing environment, and relentless hard work. Dad did survive and, by any account, thrive – perhaps not financially rich, but a king’s ransom worth of knowledge and the love that his childhood didn’t have.

So back to the things to tell your grandkids – if a picture tells a 1,000 words then a video of a 1,000 pictures must tell thousands of thousands more. Here’s a great video, quaintly shot in the style of the Victorian photographs, doing Victorian things. This is what your grandmother was like when she was a girl…

Charles Darwin turns 200 today. My hero. After all these years he’s as provocative as ever. Definitely who I would invite if I could invite six people from anywhere (or any when) in history to have dinner with. Not sure what I’d make for dinner, but very clear about the invites.

Christina’s World Art Print
Wyeth, Andrew
36 in. x 28.75 in.
Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted

The first writing of the new brings no comfort at all. I was saddened to read of the passing of Andrew Wyeth noted by James Gurney, and then in the NYTimes. It’s always interesting to me how little things can change lives – and it was seeing the work, Christina’s World (above) that set me on a more creative path than I perhaps would’ve walked otherwise. I saw Wyeth’s work – reproductions rather than originals – in the 1970s and I was struck by the strange (yet familiar) isolation the images conveyed. It’s difficult for me to express how these sparse images are so evocative – I can all but hear the susurration of grasses, the soft ‘flumph’ of curtains pulled over the window frame to flap in the breeze, the ringing of silence. ‘Atmospheric’ doesn’t capture the almost surrealistic detail – and yet, when you look, no details, just scratchy brush marks. Wonderful.

My favorite work is ‘Wind from the Sea‘. Strangely haunting, I’ve only ever seen the painting by way of reproductions, most no larger than the link. I frequently think of this image, and before today the memory of it has somehow enticed me buy property near the sea – pursuing the empty promises of imagined realities. Who knows what are the sources of motivation?

Tonight I cruised into the supermarket to grab some fixin’s for dinner. Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. I noticed the trolley wrangler was wearing a green Santa’s helper hat. I remembered how my friend George had commented about the horrors of having to wear crap hats to hold down a job. Demeaning, he called it. I tried to drag myself nearer the festive part of the festive season. Three weeks to the day one of my colleagues announced today, in tones of joy that I didn’t know and chastisement that I didn’t know, blended with a subtle nuance of terror because she did know, and she knew what it meant. She also knew there was only one pay day between now and then. Almost like knowing there was only one more breath of air left in the car you drove off the wharf … sinking …

The supermarket. Instead of the usual blitz of frenzied looking faces grabbing calories to get through the night, no, tonight there was a bit of a crowd around the door, trays of slightly used looking snacks, and was that a barbecue? And someone in a penguin suit? No, not a tux; a suit what is a penguin. Handing out gee-gaws to sticky children prodded to the fore by grateful mothers. ‘Thank God that’s solved today’s demand.’ Is this how we want to live our lives? One of my other colleagues asked me today, ‘How do you approach xmas?’ Before I had a chance to answer he finished, ‘With trepidation?’

‘No’, I reassured him, ‘With fear and loathing.’ He laughed. We both laughed, in the way that those deep cellular memories laugh, the way our ancestral hunters laughed, around the camp fire, knowing full well that in the darkness just beyond the glow the sabre-toothed lion awaited. Patiently.

Xmas seems a bit like this for me this year. Been a long, long year – lots of laughs, but in the shadows, who knows. I grabbed me nuts (Brazils, keep it seemly) and me buttermilk, and headed for the checkout. Gotta get out of supermarket city … standing in queue. I turn, look at the next checkout queue. Checkout Chuck is wearing felt antlers. One proudly erect, one flaccid, spent, hanging over his be-pimpled face. And I think to myself, no, not what a beautiful world; rather, have I been somehow slurped into a Bosch painting?

Back, paying attention to my checkout. Wait, no, I’m distracted by a person (?) in a suit that looks a yellow coin with legs and arms. My mind evacuates itself. I am completely unable to … the switch goes to autopilot. I stare at the coin outfit. It makes no sense. I look for help to the checkout chick. She follows my glance and shrugs. At least I’m not hallucinating, she sees it too. ‘You must’ve been good’, I said. ‘Why?’ ‘You didn’t have to wear the yellow suit.’ ‘No’, she agreed.

We looked at the yellow suit, and back at each other. She seemed a trustworthy girl. ‘I want to make a deal with you, ‘ I said. ‘Sure, ok.’ ‘If I ever lose my job and become desperate for work, and I have to wear the yellow suit, I want you to kill me. Do NOT let me wear the yellow suit.’ ‘Sure, ok.’ ‘Deal?’ ‘Deal.’

I trust her.

I pay. I leave. I find out as I get closer (trying to be more invisible than my ancestral hunter confronting the sabre-tooth) it’s not a coin, it’s a crumpet. A crumpet. Someone came to work today and got paid to dress up as a starch-based food product. I walk back to the car. That was close. Too close. Oh, I know all about fear and loathing. I remember the year, that xmas, I came to work the crowds dressed up as Coogee Bear. You know, Rolf Harris. Coogee Bear. C’mon, you know you do.

Dressed up. For free. Where was that checkout chick when I needed her?

Hey, our Mira finally got her portfolio online. Yay!

Once there was a well known philosopher and scholar who devoted himself to the study of Zen for many years. On the day that he finally attained enlightenment, he took all of his books out into the yard, and burned them all.

From John Suler’s Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbour.

I wrote earlier about how it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. The message is, although we’ve been stuck inside and generally weather bound, connections to people and places and ideas and concepts and dreams have been exploding all over the place. I’ve always been really interested in loose affiliations and vague connections – the stuff of inspiration – mystery and imagination. Somewhere in the fusion of the six degrees of separation and how you don’t know how you have changed a person’s life is how our lives seem to have been working this year.

At times it’s felt more than a little overpowering, and at other times it’s been a complete blast. I haven’t been able to put it clearly in words, but, in a way typical of how the year has unfolded, I found a video that very accurately shows the year’s expression of our ideas and interactions – with each other, with you, and subsequently the rest of the population.

The best way to experience the full impact is to open the vid to full screen (click the second button in from the bottom right) and crank the audio volume up to melt-down-imminent-you-need-a-note-from-your-mother-to-do-this. May I present, our year of ideas and interactions with others in 3 minutes and 44 seconds… thanks, everyone, couldn’t do it without you.

One of the nervous moments people experience is the thought of their parents – you know – doing it. Not doing it, doing IT. Somehow the thought of our grandparents doing it isn’t so bad, and great grandparents – well, no one thinks about it. The ‘it’ I’m writing about is keeping a blog – a journal – a diary. What if we found our parents had kept a diary – oh horrors – what would it contain? And meanwhile we write like creatures possessed and think this online stuff is all new and exciting. We are the first generation to share our intimate (sometimes TOO intimate) thoughts with the rest of the globe. You know who you are.

My life, it seems, lately, has involved no writing here. I’ve been writing elsewhere, and now, slutty reader that I am, reading elsewhere too. Honestly, no shame, I’ll read anything. It’s not as though I’m addicted, I could give up at any time. I’ve found this new haibun/haiku writer – can you guess who is the author?

Drizzly.
  Dense mist in evening.
Yellow moon.

Hey, good for you – I would never have guessed George Orwell. Yes, that George Orwell. George has started to publish his diaries online. And the haibun/haiku is from August 10, 1938. Makes me think George would’ve been a first class writer using Twitter.

There’s something addictive to reading George’s writing – he’s as attracted to (or at least documents) the banal and mundane as the rest of us – he would’ve been a blogger or tweeter or whatever as much as anyone else these days, except, of course, it’s 70 years ago. Startling. Addictive. And when he’s got his writing going on, baby, it’s going on.

Well, long and cold, and while I have known lonely winters, this hasn’t been one of them. I haven’t written here for what seems like forever, but I have been writing like a mad thing over at the two new sites we’ve put together…

Business Savvy – For years I’ve taught people how to set up their own businesses. I have a special interest in micro business, patchwork economics, and rural community economic development. I decided that I would a) declutter the basement office, and b) make the material I’ve gathered over 20 years available online so that perhaps other people might be able to go on and change their lives and those of their family’s for a positive future.

A good reason why it hasn’t been a lonely winter… I’m a loaner. I changed jobs earlier this year – instead of a farewell gift of something fabbo like a plate with a picture of kitten to hang on the wall I asked for contributions to my investment fund for Kiva, and for my colleagues to pick out an investment for me. They did, and together we invested in an entrepreneur in Togo. Loaves and fishes. Having invested in fish, the next step has been to invest in loaves…

Cecilia Nyameke (from Tarkwa, Ghana) is a divorced mother with six children. Currently four of her children are in school. She has been baking for six years and her business serves as the main source of income for the family.

She wants to use her loan to buy bags of flour, sugar, and baking powder to expand her operation and also to avoid price hikes. Cecilia is a member of the group called Abandenden Jesus (meaning “Jesus, our Strong Tower”). Members agree to guarantee for each other to repay the loan.

I look at this photo and I just want to buy and try some the bread, still warm from the oven, with lashings of butter and clover honey. I can’t recommend the stories highly enough.

Another reason why the winter hasn’t been lonely – Get Going Online. After teaching html and web at night school for a couple of years, and to celebrate 10 years of writing web pages and developing web sites, I decided to offer people a great way of getting going online. There are huge numbers of small businesses with ugly and out-of-date web sites. Why? If you’re not geeky and/or if you’re busy running your business, how do you update your web site? The options are you either don’t – and that’s a bit of a disaster – or you pay someone else to do it for you – and that is a potential disaster too. I decided to offer businesses a happy compromise with a content management system and some limited customisation – at small business scaled prices. It’s a good deal, especially as seeing the end result is anything but under-powered. Get Going Online is offering well over 400 designs (more arriving every day), and the preview isn’t just a screen snap or two, the preview IS the full site – this is what your site will look like. I’m very, very pleased with the way it’s shaping up and the positive responses.

And another reason why it hasn’t been a lonely winter…