Keeping a Journal

Hot from FEEL FREE TO LAUGH this morning:

Keeping a Journal

You are supposed to do it
every day.
According to Tolstoy
happy people
are not as interesting
as unhappy people;
(somewhat crude translation
from the Russian
translation.

I’m having trouble
dissimulating
my own situation
here.

Really,
I would like to crow
about my success;
never having made more
than 24G’s per annum
in my dirty, bloody,
working life—
I still managed
to accumulate
a million bucks,
(more actually)
of real estate
that provides me
a capitalist’s income
from just supplying
other people
with a survival commodity.

I have a wife,
with a good job
and her own fortune;
like one of those men
in a Jane Austen book
who are not quite good enough
for the upper crust girlies,
and who’d want them;
or I could be a capitalist pig parasite
sucking the blood
out of the proles;
or a feudal lord fleecing my flock
of peasants.

I don’t really have to give a damn
about anything;
not the SSO,
not Gerry Schwarz; hell,
I never could tell the difference
between a good performance
or a bad performance.
Classical music all sounds
the same to me anyway.
I don’t even know what
a conductor does, really;
or an “artistic director”.
I don’t give a damn
about “human resource directors”.
I don’t give a damn
about certain person’s traumatic pasts,
even when they surface
to destroy something
I was trying to take seriously.
I don’t need to care
whether my “music”
is worth a damn
to anyone,
or whether I have
“talent”.
I’m alright, Jack!

I’ve done my best
to fulfill my obligations
to society,
and if “society” don’t
like me,
then society can
buss my fundament;
K231 as Mozart once put it.

Not that I am totally without
sympathy
for all the little people
I float above.
It’s more of a practical thing.

Why should I go
to any trouble
for a drowning person
when all I’ll get for it
is punched out,
or maybe sued
for some legal nonsense?

Why should I care
about child abuse
when its main symptom
is a belief
that it is alright
to abuse me
in turn?

Why should I care about
your laws when
the main effect
is to keep the price
of recreational drugs
high enough
to aid and abet
the criminals who profit
from this very
illegality?
Or,
your idiot factory schools,
your psychopathic religions?

Why should I try
to commit
“random acts
of kindness”, or
“senseless acts
of beauty”?

No, I do not trust
your society,
and I don’t need to;
but I’m not one
to brag.

Hey, I did what I could
for you little monkeys
and you bit me
on the ass.
It heals
and I can still walk—
didn’t cost me a thing,
and you lose.
I wear my scars proudly.

Sometimes
I imagine my tombstone
reading,
“You lost more
than I did here.”

I still remember the kid
who tripped me in the bathroom
of my first grade school
and broke a big chunk
out of one of my front teeth.
Hope he got killed
in Viet Nam.

In conclusion,
live or die,
fish or cut bait,
shit or go blind,
who cares?

Doug Palmer 2008