Important questions

Who will come into power next, the democrats or the apricots?

_______________________________________

Why's it called a blow job when it's all about sucking?

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Can a heart of a Goy be transplanted next to the lungs of a Jew? Can a shiite liver coexist with a sunni kidney? These, my friends, are some of the questions that arise when considering the issue of transplants from an halachic perspective.
_______________________________________________

eich lishaeyr ben adam bechol habalagan haze?

________________________________________

The big issue, the grinding suck the life out of your bones issue, at middle age, as an impractical dreamer who sold his soul to the devil mirage of creativity, is how to earn a living? And how to go on earning a living? And how to find a way of earning a living that does not opress and depress and crush with its internal contradictions and the impediments it seems to throw up to articulating a working self that is somehow connected to our deepest aspirations, our most permanent/burning/ themes?

And if such a thing, if a life enhancing way of earning a living does not exist, and those who have not dared or were not lucky or did not have the persistence or simply haven't been able to create money doing things that connect their inner and outer selves, where the available energy is not used to censor and crush the hidden and reveal the fabricated and constructed...if they have not done so by middle age, where children and mortgages and never ending bills play a muted tune of anxiety that runs under almost everything we do, then how to make one's piece with the stunted, arrested-process work situations we find ourselves in, how to trudge off day by day into situations of terminal compromise, anonymity and mediocrity??* Situations that seem to be so draining that what few sparks are left are soon submerged in the grey waters of numbing and senseless routine, of living from appearances, living from the outside in, living inauthentically...the sparks are submerged and the fear is that they will go out. Permanently. And that there is only death with no chance of birth or rebirth.

* [ Can this bleak portrait be reframed more honestly? more meaningfully? Less 'hopelessly'? ]

________________________________________

The secret lives of teachers. Major X was having an affair with a woman who he wanted to impregnate. Mr Y had an entirely secret existence of junk food and recreational drugs. Public lives. Private addictions.

The upside of depressions

I'm not an economist and I've never studied or read much about economic theory, but as someone who perhaps romanticises simplicity and a comfortable measure of ascetism, I can see many positives in a recession/depression. Less advertising, less eating of cancer causing junk food prepared without love and eaten without community or consciousness, less buying of unnecessary gadgets and over sized cars, more time spent with friends and family talking, making music together, more strolls along the beach, more home cooked meals, more of the "simple" (and healthy) pleasures.

(Of course addictions are also set to rise as people, trying to cope with job losses and how to pay the bills and general verwhelm and under resourcedness take refuge in alcohol or cigarettes or pornography or hunting or whatever the escape is)

Not that I'm saying that people should hoard, although it does make sense not to live beyond our means, as we have been doing and have relentlessly encouraging each other to do for the last thirty years (at least!)

Spending money - and I half heard somewhere that economists like Keynes say spending money is the way to make economies grow and presumably to make people prosperous - has lots of positives to it as well: its a letting go, and a living for the present which is admirable. Hoarding savings for some future which may never come, when it could be used to alleviate suffering or increase the opposite of suffering - is that joy? - right here and now, is not a useful value in of itself. So the question is, what could money be well spent on, right here and right now?Either way I hope we don't rush out of this depression too soon, before what we needed to learn has been learnt.

_____________________________
ps. Captain's log supplimental. On Friday 3rd April 2009 / 5769, in the merry month of Nisan, I took an anti-depressant for the first time in my life, half a tablet of Zoloft just before shabat. It certainly had an effect....exhausted I went to bed at 9:30 but work up at 11:30, full of anxiety, and with a funny mushy, slightly slurred blurred feeling in my head. I watched TV til 3:30 in the morning, then went back to sleep til 6:30, when my cell phone alarm - normally set for the week day - went off and woke me up. Again it took me more than an hour to get back to sleep, and I watched a preacher on tv before hiugging the wall back to bed. These symptoms are all in line with those my doctor and wife had told me there would be, so not unexpected but certainly it was yet another long night of the soul. I took another half tab this morning and the slightly post stoned, head and eyes not quite on the end of my neck (slightly higher? slightly lower?) effect has persisted - and persists as I write now. Quite enjoyable overall, and in no way sharp or invasive - very present but much to diffuse, blunt and broad ( a cloud comes to mind) to be painful or threatening.

Here in Australia almost everyone I know who has emigrated in the last two or three or four years seems to be on anti-depressants - perhaps it is something in the air, or the way the life force here is carefully modulated and socialised with a combination of 'tall poppy get back down here' disaproval, over regulation, and ?????? (other factors still to be understood. discovered or articulated)...the dizzyness is getting worse, I feel slightly nauseous and the room and laptop are tilting up slightly...will sign off here

What people are looking for

What people are looking for is how to create a sense of occasion, of something special. Sometimes all they have is a cigarette and a bottle of beer, or some smudged lipstick, perhaps a candlelit dinner. Sometimes their faith gives them an open page of gemara in the beis hamidrash, and the schinah all around, or chanting the names of G-d in community...the richness or poverty of a culture is the channels it offers, and how stunted or evolved those channels are...

Debate in talmud about when to begin shabat

Nine works waiting to be written

See also comic-material-short-skits

Middle...a play about the quiet desperation of middle age, of a spreading middle, of striving to say unseen in the midle and simultaneously wanting to be seen, about the deflation of illusion and desire and hope
____________________________

A science fiction story where genetic engineering goes horribly wrong, with grave ecological consequences, a paranoid scientist,
_________________________________

Theme: the notion of agency


Mr X was walking home from the video shop, lonely and confused and bored, when he saw a group of drunken youths laying ito a homeless man. He was wondering what to do when someone smashed into him and almost knocked hom over, and a large man burst into the fray and tried to protect the homeless man. The youths set about the stranger, one of them hitting him witha beer bottle, and soon the stranger lay nexyt to the homeless man, bleeding and concussed. Mr X waited til the youths seemed to have gone, and then called an ambulance. When he heard the ambulance siren he scuttled off, not wanting to have to go to the police station and answer questions or have to fill in endless paper work, because he had to get home and feed his cat and do some work, or perhaps have a break from work and do his course

At the moment Mr X worked as a subeditor, but the work was boring. Before being a sub-editor Mr X had worked as a tele-marketer selling "cheap holidays" where the hotels recouped their cut price room rates at meal time, and before that selling diet mik shakes..
He had got the job as a sub editor - quite by chance. Before that he had worked at a nursery but had ben fired for negligence. Mr X was not sure what he wanted to do in the long term. he had also been seeing a women, a 33 year old divorcee, but was not sure how he felt about her. Mr X wanted to feel certain about something - that was one of his biggest wants. His mother wanted him to get a profession and so he had taken her advice and registered for a course in network enginering His divorcee friend said she thought he was good at fixing thoings, so

Mr X joined in the crowd, terrified they might turn oo him. Death to Apartheid Israel he chanted, along with the crowd, death to the Jews. Hit ler was right shouted the man next to him. Hitler was right, repeated Mr X mechanically, and hoped he was saying it with enough venom.

THE PROBLEM OF THE ACTIVE PROTAGONIST. Make up your mind snapped the man, I haven't got time too stand here all day. A bad decision is much better than no decision he said, and stepped off the pier. I'l l have the vanilla he said. It turned out to have human excrement in it.

Mr X wasn't sure if he should take the bus or the train into work. Mr X wasn't sure if he should leave his girlfriend or stay with her. he liked the sex but he disliked her long rambling conversatoions about her friends and troubles at work. Mr X wasn't sure if he should discus this with her or not. Sometimes he tried to but the tears that gathered in her eyes made him retreat. Why don't you see a psychologist, said his GP, when he went to get some creme for his hemharoids, so he did. The psycholist listened politely, and then proceeded to describe a near death experience he'd once had. Mr X wasn't sure to say he didn't want to hear that or not. he wasn't sure if he should go back or not. One week he went back, one week he didn't. He missed the bus but accepted it philosophically. the chief sub berated him when he got to work.

Suddenly Mr X noiced he had a itchy chest. he couldn't locate the exact moment, it migt have been while he was looking for a clean shirt to wear to work and stopped to scratch his chest and notcied an angry weal there. Over the next few days the itch got worse and worse.

He could not stop thinking about the car. he stopped whenever he walked past oine parked in the street. he decided he had to have one. he had never been interested in cars before, but suddenly he became very interested.

WHY DOES A CHARACTER bECOME INTERESTED IN WHAT THEY ARE INTERESTED IN. WHY DO THY WANT WHAT WTHEY WANT. SURE WE TRACE THEIR FIGHT TO GET IT, THE RYTHM OF RTHEIR OBSTACLES AND SUCCESS, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE VERY WANTS themselves? How did they arise? ids the mechanism mysterious or unremarkable??


_____________________________________________________________
A group of young people with rods and nets and bottles of beer, off to lynch a few fish. After hanging the fish, they took turns photograph its once beautiful silvery but now dead body in their arms, then took turns mutilating the body, gutting it and...
______________________________________________________
A visit to the inefficiency institute, where most South African waiters are trained. This important institute, establishd in 1962, has survived and even thrived in the post- Apartheid dispensation
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A stranger comes to Sydney and must negotiate the roads and the parking. he gets to an intersection and indicates left, but his passenger points out there is a sign saying no left turn. He cancels the indicator but notices a big no entry sign on the other side of the intersection. Desperately (cars are piling up behind him) he indicates right tun, but there is a big sign saying no right turn either. Where the f%^$k am i supposed to turn? he yelps, as the cars behind honk and curse. he crosses into the street, nearly gets hit by a V6 with P plates, and then takes a small diagonal street which ends, predicatble, in a dead end, facing the sea....he turns off the engine gets out, looks at the waves

_______________________

A one act play called Bemikreh, about a teacher, a troublesome student (to whom he is secretly attracted), a quarellsome neighbour, and a psychologist (the latter three all being related) - a dark comedy about the web that is woven to lay us bare
__________________________

A poetry collection called Pitzaei Bagrut (literally "wounds of adolescence", denotes pimples, metaphorically the wounds of growth, almost birth pains, the pain in the resistance to coming-of-age)

____________________________

'Typical' Ozzie bloke - working class, blue collar, delivery man, is sitting in the bar, sipping on his beer and telling his mates about this Jew school to which he had to deliver something to...his descriptions are intercut with visuals of what he is describing, his voice continues as VO
"they were all wearing big hats"
visuals of small children running around & screaming on the playground, some are playing cricket, all of them wear soft wide brimmed sun hats, ominous music plays on the soundtrack to underscore the sinister nature of these playground activities. Then he glimpses through a classroom some children saying prayers / making chanukiyot???? and his interpretation is again at striking variance with what we see on screen.
His mates ask him questions, which eggs him on to further invention and embroidery of the tale...


When I seek to change others or myself, I inhibit the change that is already happening effortlessly, by itself

Vegetarianism

I still think vegetarianism can make our world a better, nicer place to pass through....less blood, less disease, less methane, more celebration

Many Australian products have bovine gelatine in them...you have to carefully read the labels, on yoghurt, for example, before you find a brand that dosn't use gelatine, such as Farmer's Union Greek Style Yoghurt

When I was young I could pass a pet shop
with small animals in small cages
and supermarkets
where people exited with loded trully fulls
in plastic packaging
without a troubling thought
about what these things mean
about the world we share

I hide from kabalat shabat duty at school like I used to hide from the rasar (sergeant-major) in the army at tzayilim (in the Negev desert), in someone' elses tent so that he wouldn't call my weary body of to kitchen duty, but it was no use, he found me anyway.

Everyone is "acting", either consciously or unconsciously, and there are great truths in acting, i.e in consciously making yourself other to what you imagine yourself to be most of the time (in a universe in which everything is moving and changing all the time, what is the ground upon which the personality stands...only memory creates the illusion of a fixed self with knowable characteristics.)


Fear keeps me in my place - tarti mashma

Poems written or captured in 2009

See also vidui and other poems

My dad's lift at teleoptic
pty (ltd) 257 main street
with the expanding iron gate
that had to slam shut once the door had closed
I haven't thought about it in years
______________________

Not everyone
wants the rough and tumble of reactivity
the distracting chatter of the morning breakfast show
can a jolly good chin wag save us from the grave?
___________________________

I go from the school family
now disbanded for the holidays
to my family family
alone and bereaved
having neglected the one in favour of the other
and yet the school family being far more illusory than my own
though neither will last
but one will last months
and the other decades

----------------------------
There's no 1 way 2b a teacher
There's no 1 way 2b anything
There's no 1 way to run a class
There's no 1 way to run away from a class
___________________

Teacher thoughts
Leader thoughts
Service Thoughts
______

My heart is wide open like the evening sky
Libi patzua vedomem
defeated by my own contradictions

::::::::::::::


Don't worry
you will not forget
and if you forget
it will not matter
and if it matters
life will remind you
____________

I can never get enough
sea and sand
light and shade
penis and vagina
hand and mouth
alone and together
speaking and silence
________________________

May an earthquake strike
the hearts of Iranians
and turn them into
lovers of Zion
______________________

I have tried to knit me
a shield of armour
with words
___________

There is that desperate hunger in me
for some kind of acknowledgment
perhaps an acknowledgment I have
never given myself
slow down in that relentless search
hear the little voice that whispers
"you're OK...nothing more needs to be done"
___________________

Those who know the pain
of another load of washing
and the gaping dishwasher
waiting for the overflowing sink
at the end of a long day
the kids refusing the food:
"that's disgusting"
keeping your temper in check
and suddenly at bedtime they're
tearing round the house
not doing what they were told to
and then the following morning
getting them up for school
red eyed, exhausted
complaining and whining
trying to remember
what's needed for work
should know you deserve a medal
and applause
for your daily acts of heroism
________________

A couple rode into the woods
into the woods they rode
the day was hot, she rode on ahead
 
he watched as she rode in the woods

a couple rode deep in the woods
they stopped to rest in a glade
the silence was heavy
the bush was alive
the breath was short in his breast

she held his helmet
he took off his shirt
she loosened her hair
it fell all around 

deep in the woods they rode
________________________

My son is walking with me
and I am walking with my father
who is walking with his father
who is walking with his father
and it is always thus
___________________

Because I could not keep my parents
I kept some of their possesions
for a little while longer
____________________

Habayit reyk
hamekarerr mefamzem lo
d'maot shel shalva
zolgot al lechyai

The house is empty
the fridge is whirring
tears of peace
pour down my face

_____________________

In the small silence
I glimpse the great silence
that Solomon spoke of:
“ki azah kamavet haahavah
mayim rabim lo yuchlu lechabotah
uneharot lo yishtefuhah...
for love is strong
as death a flame
blazing vast floods
cannot extinguish
nor rivers down.”
I take off my body
and stay at home
_____________________

See "Shir HaShirim" - the Song of Songs
See these poems transcribed in Hebrew in BaMisaadah
______________________________________Listening to Noah
singing "nanuah"
liquid love
smiles from the tears
pure ghee rubbed
on a babies' back
feels just like this, a
1000 years
of lonely fear
hidden in the fortress
of the heart dissolves
just like that. If we are not
haMakom, haAyn Sof
az maayin noveya
hayofi hazeh
__________________

haMakom - Hebrew name for G?d = the place, the space
haAyn Sof - Name for G? d from the Kabblistic (Jewish mystical) tradition - 'the Endless'az maayin noveya - so from whence flows
hayofi hazeh - this beauty?
______________________

School a week before vacation
staff and students
thoroughly sick of one another
can already smell it in the air
they sniff at it greedily
with engorged nostrils
and continue to pretend
to teach and learn
_________________

Once the son
of Schickelgruber
saw a Jew family.

The Jew papa
patted his little boy's head
approvingly
tenderly
and a pain shot through the son
of Schickelgruber's chest.
He could not look
that love in the eyes
the sweetness hurt too much

to rid himself of it
he ordered the Jews
sons and fathers,
mothers and daughters
starved
beaten
tatooed
clothed in fleas
and dysentery
bayoneted
mutilated
gassed
burnt
drowned in misery...

it didn't help

the Jew love lives on

____________________

On the bus
being transported to work
a loud yawn -moan escapes me
a by product of anti-depressants
and despair
and I apologise
to no-one in particular
for forgetting to be opaque

_________________________________

On the bus
coming back from the psychologist
I am sitting on more
than just the seat
_______________________

When you're feeling sad and blue
but the timetable says teach 8.3 or 8.2
who gibber and jab and jibe at you
tell me friends what do I do?

wear your heart upon your sleeve
or wear a mask, while inside you grieve?
there is no right way, nor a wrong
but sometimes a class can feel very long

salvation sometimes comes as a bell
tolling for thee, come forth from hell
______________________________

I lie in bed
my crocodile eyes half open
waiting to see if my wife
will come down to the river
______________________________

Sometimes I want to explode on a bus
not like a suicide bomber
but from love
even the coughing spluttering man
pushing his trolley and cursing the passers by
is caught up in the blast and blown
to kingdom come
_______________________
This...


I have always fallen in love
with women whose faces
seem to be laughing and crying
at the same time
even when they're
just staring blankly

became this:

Often I've fallen in love with women
whose faces seem to be laughing and crying
at the same time
even when
they're just doing
the dishes
_________________

uncertainty is my friend
self doubt my brother
longing is my sister
acceptance is my mother

___________________

Rust how wonderful you are
rust and decay
as you slowly oxidise
our vanities away

___________________________

What is boredom?
stopping halfway
what is boredom?
Not looking at what is under the rock
What is boredom?

Taking a stand 

At 45
I feel lonely and frightened
like a little child
and I'm sure many other dads and husbands
and ageing batchelors do too
but by and large
unless we're extraordinary
we keep it to ourselves
we've had our time for that, now we're supposed
to be self sufficient, independent
"the father", the "man"
the "I can"
not the "I'm desperate, I'm trapped, I'm drowning...
I neeed help...."
well I say to that: bullshit
I can't do it on my own
I won't do it on my own
and if I need help I'll ask for it
___________________________________

Imagine the scene:
Austin Powers on one side of the desk, on the other a comely supplicant
Austin: (in measured cautious tones) I think in this situation the right thing...er, the natural thing..., the decent thing would be to ....
(vaulting across desk)
f%$k you!

_______________________

Lord please help me
move through the fear of boredom
and drudgery
so that I can support my family
in integrity

armed with his laptop and umbrella
the hero goes of to his job once more
to face the lions of his skull once more

______________________

There is a delicate dance
between teacher and class
a subtle and wonderous thing

______________________

Smoke and mirrors At the bookshop looking at a colourful book on video games I feel that familiar twinge of regret that instead of becoming something creative like a filmaker or gamemaker I'm now only a teacher, knowing full well that if I was a filmaker I'd be paging through a book, being full of regret that I hadn't become something real like a teacher

sometimes I wish i could earn a living helping people escape their lives for an hour or two and sometimes I wish I could earn a living helping people face their lives for an hour or two

When i tried to be a writer i wrote some things and when i saw them on the page i said to myself and sometimes to others thats me thats mine Im here I matter I'm someone, that's me, that's my poem that's mine when I tried to direct i directed some things and when I saw them on the screen i said to myself and sometimes to others thats me, thats mine, I'm here I matter I'm someone, that's me, that's my film, that's mine when I tried to be a teacher i went to a concert where my students performed and when I saw them on the stage I said to myself and to the others thats me, thats mine, I'm here I matter I taught her, I teach him that's my child that's mine

Israelis have soft bodies
like the rest of us
but try to make them hard
to armour themselves against the emnity
which seems to gather around them
because they have survived and even thrived
but the missiles, bombers and kidnappings
regularly prove
their soft humanity


I became a rabbi
watching a woman
ride a killer whale
I became a rabbi
when I argued with dad
to let the gardener
swim in our pool
I became a rabbi
in brothels and yeshivas
I became a rabbi
reading Tolstoy all night
I became a rabbi
hearing howling Al Ginsberg
singing Shalom Achshav
at Kikar Hamalka
I became a rabbi
when I rescued a cat
I became a rabbi
in an ashram in Lucknow
I became a rabbi
when I pushed out a fart
while being pushed out a plane
above palmachim
I became a rabbi
when I did not join in in Gibalia
as my unit clubbed a man to jelly
I became a rabbi
between her legs
each pubic hair
black fire on white
I became a rabbi
in run-down Tzefat
where I ran down the hill
like the Ariza"l
I became a rabbi
on the rocks of eyn gedi
where I leaped like a goat
in my tzanchanim boots
I became a rabbi
fighting back the tears
at the end of films
I became a rabbi
translating Amichai
I became a rabbi
with charitable acts
with each love song I wrote
when I held my new borns
and blessed them with peace
__________________________

yeshivas - fundamentalist theological seminaries

Al Ginsberg - Alan Ginsberg, the famous beat poet
Shalom Achshav - Peace Now, an Israeli extra-parliamentary movement which has fought for Israel to make territorial compromises in exchange for a cessation of hostilities against Israelis
Gibalia - shanty town in the Gaza Strip
Kikar haMalka - a large square in Tel Aviv where many political rallies have been held. It was in this square that Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated, and the square has since been renamed Kikar Rabin. At the time I heard Alan Ginsberg reading there at a Shalom Achshav ralley, it was still called Kikar HaMalka.
Palmachim - a beach on Israel's central coast where people often parachute
Ein Gedi (Hebrew: עֵין גֶּדִי‎, lit. Kid Spring (as in young goat) - is an oasis in Israel, located west of the Dead Sea, close to Masada and the caves of Kumran.
tzanchanim - paratrooper
Amichai- Yehuda Amichai, Israel's national poet

Strange fire

Sometimes when our sons
come home from friends
they bring with them sticky energies
from other households
that seem to us alien
or brash
and then we spend time
brushing them off
or waiting for the wind
to blow them away
'til they settle again
and enter the threshold
as the boys
we know and
love

__________________________

On the bus I pretend
the nubile passengers
are all my wives
and because my stop
is at the end of the line
one by one
my harem diminishes
until I alight
to go home to
my wife


Thoughts while attending a community college Yoga classSometimes I pity the charedi yidden
with their tsholent bellies
and their fish bowl eyes
who never know a moments rest
except on shabosand even then
they still have to
keep and
remember
________________________
keep - Deuteronomy 5:12 and remember - Exodus 20:8 - the shabat (Sabbath)

My cell phone is a goy
its predicative texting
doesn't recognise words
like shabbos or
oyvey

____________________


In the gathering evening
the boys and I
played pidgin tennis
with a bouncy yellow ball
and the score card read
love fifteen
love thirty
fifteen thirty
fifteen forty
game
set
match
love
love


the sterile streets of Sydney
from which rats and dogs and cats and cockroaches
have been vanished and poisoned
this is a landscape made for humans
and sometimes not even for them
its subterranean bars and casinos
with patterned carpets and dim lighting
the portals to a tattered hell


Something
call it acceptance if you want
is making all my suffering turn into sweet wine
no that's not it
its making the illusion of suffering disapear
no that's not it
there never was any suffering




When I was 19 or so
I sat in a yeshiva in Yerushalayim
at the time of the third meal
when the day was darkening
together with another 200 young men
and together we sang:
mizmor ledavid Adon-i Roh'ee
"The lord is my shepard, I shall not want"
and yedid beloved nefesh of my soul
200 voices in a darkening room
becoming the song as we sang it over
and over and over again
'til each note, each bend
hung before us in the air

and now the threads that held us together
no longer bind me
I have shed them like an outgrown skin
and the time and the place are gone
and I have ripened into something else
but the song remains the same
pure
untouched
and eternal