Press 1 to answer a short survey

A couple have just finished making steamy passionate sex. She rolls off him. Both of them recover their breath, and then she picks up her tablet from the bedside table and turns to him.
"Would you mind if I asked you a few short questions?

"Sure"

"How easy was it for you to get hold of us today?"

"Well it took a while, but it was certainly worth it" he gazes at her admiringly "and there sure was a lot to get hold of"

"Thinking about your experience now, on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being very poor and 10 being excellent, how would you rate it?

"Oh a 10 babe. Ten for sure. Comere and lemme give you a kiss."

"Hold on. There's a few more. How likely are you to recommend this service to other people?"

"You must be joking"

"No. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being extremely unlikely and 10 being very likely."

etc. etc.

_______________

This is how I amuse myself on those long spring nights:

Option 1:

A man is standing at the gap, a favourite suicide spot in Sydney, staring over the cliff edge to the sea far far below. Hands shaking he dials a number on the mobile in his hand. We listen in to the call.

"Hello you have reached the suicide call back service. your call is important to us but at the moment we are experiencing unusually high call volumes, please wait and a counsellor will be with you as soon as possible. Did you know you can also chat online with one of our counsellors by visiting our websiste"

Music comes on.

It is Monty Python's 'Always look on the Bright Side of Life."

The man carefully places the phone down on a nearby rock, and bends over, his back to us, fiddling with something on the ground. We pan back from the man to the phone, which is still playing the same song repetitively. We remain on the phone,, while off screen, after a while, we hear what may be a distant splash.

A short while later a bright and cheery voice takes over from the music. 'Hello, can I start with your name please?"

We pan back away from the phone. The man is nowhere to be seen but we stop for a moment to linger on a pair of empty shoes neatly placed just near the edge of the cliff.

Option 2

We rewind back to the man dialling a number on his phone. This time he is answered immediately by a human, the same bright voice we heard previously.

'Hello, can I start with your name please?"

"It doesn't matter what my name is. I've just gambled the family home away and I'm at the gap. Give me one reason why I shouldn't jump.... one fuc#4ng reason!"

"Certainly, we can talk about that, but first I must tell you this call is being recorded for quality control and training purposes. Are you ok with that?"

"No I'm fuc#4ing not ok..."

"Allright so you'd prefer me to turn the recording off...?"

"I don't care what the f#4k you do, I don't see any way out."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Would you mind if I put you on hold just for a minute. I'm a bit new here, and I just want to check something about our privacy policy with my supervisor. I'll be back with you in a minute. Please don't go anywhere. OK?"

Before he can answer there is a click and the music comes back on: 'Always look at the bright side of life.'

He waits, quietly sobbing to the music. Then he turns, his back to us, and begins to fiddle with something on the ground.

There is a click, and a different voice comes on.

"Hello, can I please start with your name?"

"Are you people going to help me, or what? Where's the other girl?"

"I'm a trained counsellor sir, would you like to tell me what's going on...."

"I'll tell you what's going on you fuc#4ng dickhead. I'm at the gap, I'm about to jump, I've lost everything, and you people are fuc#4ng useless."

"Ah, so you haven't actually tried to commit suicide yet?"

"No, but I'm about to."

"Oh I'm so sorry. I see. You've reached our POSTvention service, for people who have tried and didn't manage to quite pull it off. I think what you are after is our PREvention service. I can give you their number. Do you have a pen or something you can write with?

"I'm about to jump, I swear"

"Don't.......don't. Please don't. I'll text you the number ok? Give them a call. They will support you. I'm texting you right now... did you get it?"

There is a ping on the man's phone.

"I'll hang up sir, so you can call them. Promise me you'll call them, ok?"

"Can't you just put me through?"

"I can try, but if something goes wrong please promise me you'll call them?"

The man grunts.

"Ok I'm putting you through now. Take care."

There is a click. The phone rings and rings and rings. We wait expectantly, hopefully, for someone to answer. there is a click.

""Hello you have reached the suicide call back service. your call is important to us but at the moment we are experiencing unusually high call volumes, please wait and a counsellor will be with you as soon as possible. Did you know you can also chat online with one of our counsellors by visiting our websiste"

There is a click.

Then silence. Nothing. Gonisht min gonisht.

In despair the man hurls the phone into the void. We see its small lit screen falling down down to the sea.

We track it down in slow motion. As it falls. There is a click.

'Always look on the bright side of life'.

There is a splash. The phone bobs for a moment, then sinks beneath the waves.

 

 

VEGANOMIX

A man is interviewing candidates to sublet a room in a shared house, and is explaining to them that the kitchen is an animal free one. Some consider it, some ask how negotiable, some leave (this could also be a series of phone calls - we cut from phone call to phone call - or a series of typed online conversations - or a mixture of both.)

Eventually he finds a housemate who is is ardent as he.

He comes home from a hop and unpacks all his delicious vegan goods, humming as puts them away in fridge and freezer and pantry.

She cooks something and offers him to taste. They discuss ingredients , mushrooms, nuutritional yeast, pea protein etc etc and swop recipes.

She ys she is off to the square of truth.

he is out shoppng. he goes past a fast food outlet. moves out of frame. but then we are surprised to see him coming bck into frame and lingering there.

(he places a sticker there and then runs off...?)

he goes somewhere out of area, makes sure no one he know is around, furtively darts in,orders a chicken burger. Cut to him wolfing it down. this happens a few times.

cut back to home interacting with his house mate.

one day he is out nd about when he sees her doing the same thing ! (choice point....tell all, maintain the pretence, accuse her of hypocrisy....which is more interesting? which is more generative???

 

PERSPECTIVE

Two emaciated concentration camp inmates are sitting shivering in the corner of their bleak prison hut, having a quiet conversation while other skeletons nearby on bare bunk shelves try to find a few hours escape from the cold and starvation in sleep.

The one inmate pulls out from under his striped pyjamas a tiny piece of stale rock hard bread.

"Take it, take it, my friend, I picked it up in the kitchen today when no one was looking...take it. You must. You must live!"

The other looks at the morsel longingly, but then reluctantly holds up a bony hand in a gesture of refusal.

"I can't. I can't take it."

"Why? Why not? If you're concerned about me I am fine...I am strong...and I will get more tomorrow. Don't worry about me."

"No, its not that. I'm gluten intolerant."

"You're what...?"

"Gluten intolerant. So bread makes me sick."

"Well forgive me for saying this but....you're dying anyway. So how much sicker can it make you?"

"No, I mustn't, else I will feel terrible in a few hours time."

"If you're still alive in a few hours time..."

"Yes...." Long sigh.

"Wait" says the other, "we bribed Shpitzkopf. With a French postcard Berelowitz somehow kept hidden. And you won't believe what we got...."

With trembling hands he shifts one of the floorboards slightly and takes out a child sized chipped enamel mug.

"Milk...MILK! Careful, don't spill it now....."

He extends the precious liquid to his friend, who licks his dry cracked lips, and, with tears in his eyes, slowly shakes his head.

"I can't....I can't" he moans."I'm lactose intolerant."

"What rubbish are you talking"

"No really, I am, milk gives me terrible stomach pains"

"Stomach pains mummik pains....you prefer hunger pains?"

"No, but what can I do?"

"What can you do? You can eat something....even if it is just a tiny teaspoon....here, this will get you through the selection tomorrow."

He feels around inside his pant leg, and triumphantly produces what is indeed a tiny tin teaspoon which has a tiny amount of something unrecognisable on it. He thrusts it at his friends tightly pursed lips, but his friend recoils to a safe distance before asking

"what is it?"

"this...this my friend, is peanut butter!"

____________

COMIC SKETCH - FAMILIES

A 74 year old man is busy dying in a palliative care home.

We begin on the dying man, whose eyes are shut. He looks peaceful enough. He camera tracks down to his chest and lower abdomen, where no movement at all is detectable. It lingers there, and after a while there is a slight almost imperceptible movement. We linger there long enough to establish that there is slow regular breathing. The camera moves back up his chest and then, in extreme CU, runs down an arm, past a canulla, down to his hand which is being held by another hand, that of Sally, his daughter. She is seated next to him, her eyes also closed, just being with him. We stay with them for a while, this special father daughter tableaux of closeness and connection.

There is a click of the room door opening. We move off Sally to find Lily, her older sister, entering the room. Their body language indicates there is a lot of tension between them. Lily seems to be disappointed that her father is not alone. They greet each other somewhat coolly.

A Heavy Dream

In the early hours of this morning I dreamt I was in some sort of backyard, perhaps not unlike the one that I had grown up in. There were three burly, hard faced Russian men, in white overalls, who had caught a large terrified rat, and were holding it tightly as they prepared to kill it. The rat was about the size of a large cat, but tiny compared to the three large men. Although they were the ones hurting it and preparing to kill it, they had made up that the rat was bad and the agressor. They were standing next to an opaque small bathroom window, and had some methodology they always employed, which involved driving a sharp metal skewer through the rat's ear and then through its brain and out the other ear, and somehow this was necessary, and then to allow the rat to bleed out. They discussed the process, all the time one of them squeezing the rat tightly, so I could only see its face and small brown eyes.

I watched horrified, but certain there was nothing I could say or do that would stop or change what was happening. I felt unbearably sad for the poor rat and oppressed by their violence and projection of their own murderousness onto the animal, which, even if it had done some rat-like thing like chew through cables or eat from a grain store, was just going about its business as G-d had created it. (And perhaps those who come to murder are also just going about their business as G-d has created them. I don't know.) But I was certain I would not be heard or listened too if I spoke up, perhaps would be jeered at or even attacked myself. And so in fear and helplessness I hovered. And then either they drove the spike through the trembling rat's ear, or were just about to, and I woke up.

A great sense of heaviness and weariness and oppression filled me, about my helplessness, my crime of commission and omission as a bystander, and about the evil that men (yes men) do under the sun.

Hebrew Article on Joe Slovo Circa 1996

 Click on picture to enlarge

Book review 2005 "How Israel Lost: The Four Questions"

 Click on image to enlarge

Gus Ferguson 1940-2020

 

I learnt via FB this morning that a high school friend of mine, aged 58, has dropped her body. Cancer. An excellent wake up call for me to take nothing for granted and to stop sweating the small stuff.

And then this evening I learnt that poet, publisher, illustrator, pharmacist and all round good guy and mensch Gus Ferguson has also departed these shores. I first encountered his poetry aged about 16, in 1980, when I bought his collection Snail Morning at the Market Theatre book shop. It was probably the first collection of poems I had ever purchased, and I bought it because

 

a) I'd read an article about him and

b) Some kids who knew his kids and him had moved to our school - (Fran Seftel you know who you are).

 

I loved the gentle whimsical poems ostensibly about snails, and the Quentin Blake-like illustrations Gus did himself. After a long hiatus, when I returned to South Africa around 1991, Gus regularly published my poems in the various poetry journals he brought out - Slugnews and Carapace being the two I remember. That he managed to keep Carapace running for as long as he did, on a shoestring budget, is testament to his creativity, determination, persistence and vision. He gave hundreds of wannabe and established poets a platform where the barriers to entry were somehow more permeable that those of New Coin and New Contrast and the other poetry journals that mostly folded after a couple of editions.

Gus also has (had?) a poetry imprint, Snailpress, which probably published more South African poets in the last thirty years than any other publisher. There is no money in poetry, and that he kept its doors open for as long as he did is again testament to his great love for poetry, and for nurturing and facilitating the creativity of others. Snailpress co-published both of my collections (Hidden and Revealed 2007, Ripening 2020) together with Marcia Leveson's Quartz Press. For this I remain deeply grateful to Gus.

 

His own poems were full of humour and kindness, self-deprecating wit and a profound reverence for the G-d of little things. He was a great lover of the small and humble, and wrote with a twinkle in his heart that ignited the same gentle wonder in the hearts of others. The last collection of his I have - his seventh - is titled "Dubious Delights - of ageing and other follies" and I share six of the delightful poems in it, by way of tribute to Gus Ferguson.

 

The first poem was prescient:

 

ALZHEIMER'S FREIGHT

 

Those things that you wish

to remember are not lost

 

or forgotten; but

packed up and sent on ahead

___________________________

 

PARADOX GAINED

 

I read all the classics. I studied the news.

I stared at my navel. I still had the blues.

 

I trudged in the mountains. I walked by the sea.

I carried a burden. The burden was me.

 

I put myself down and, with consumate ease,

I floated away in the afternoon breeze.

 

But who is this self that is free from all woe?

And what is the burden abandoned below?

 

These are the thoughts, and many such more

that trouble me now as I weightlessly soar

______________________

 

WHILE HIS WIFE IS AWAY

 

The house is quiet

because, perhaps

he isn't talking

 

Peelable fruits

are eaten first:

avocado, banana, pawpaw.

 

At room temperature

the stove is at its most

economical.

 

The grannies

in detergent ads

are suddenly sexy.

 

Its probably

projection but the goldfish

appear depressed.

 

He watches TV

the cats watch the dog

the dog watches him.

 

They eat together-

they crunch pellets

he crunches granola.

 

Preparing to cook

he absent-mindedly

eats the ingredients.

 

The phone rings.

He lurches -

it's only a poet.

 

In mute soliloquy

he prowls the house -

a bit like Hamlet.

_______________

And how could a Gus Ferguson sampler not have a poem or two about snails?

 

CHANSON

 

Along the Rue d'Escargot

we always travel very slow

When nights are long and lights are low

 

the sky's a lovely silver glow.

Along the Rue d'Escargot

we heave our heavy portmanteaux

 

that hold dark secrets none should know

and that is why we go so slow

along the Rue d'Escargot

____________

 

SNAIL

 

In your wake

the starlight glistens

listen how

the cosmos listens

_________________

 

And last, but not least Gus's simple acknowledgement of how we are all on the great wheel....what he refers to as Sam sara sara in another poem elsewhere in the same collection.

 

BLEAK MOMENT

 

They are all

dead or dying,

the parents of our friends.

 

And we,

inadequately trained

are bustled to the front

I don't need my body to be well in order to be happy

Deconstructing the thought (or belief) that my happiness depends upon having a well body.

Here are some associated beliefs that it is worth taking some time to question:

I have a body - True/ False/Don't Know?

The body is "mine" - True/ False/ Don't Know? (and if I am the owner of the body, then what am I?)

I know what constitutes wellness - True/ False/Don't Know?

(Hint: wellness means my body can do what I think it "should" be doing. As Byron Katie says "who needs G-d when we have your opinion") 

I know what I need to get done in this world, in this lifetime - True/ False/Don't Know?

I am the doer - True/ False/Don't Know? (or does doing just happen and I find out about it post facto? Check your experience)

Down With Catipalism

When I was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990, I had this idea for a little comic. I think I had Sting's line from his song "Englishman in New York" floating around in my head. I asked my friend Porat, who was studying fine art at Betzalel, Israel's premier art school, if he knew anyone who could draw cartoon-like illustrations and he suggested an American woman, Liz Fainberg, who was also studying at Betzalel at the time. I think she did a good job.

(Click on each panel to see whole image)