New Year

 

All through this past year I used to imagine what would happen to me emotionally if I found that she’d moved on and found somebody else. They were thoughts and feelings that I really had to work hard to keep down because even just dwelling on them for a second felt like the worst pain ever, like having the last bit of hope drained from me. I finally have to face that now and fuck it hurts so much. I do not know how I will contain it.

 

I got talked into going to a party last night. I really did not want to but I was convinced that I could just hang around the fringes and not draw attention to myself. But as we arrived I had this massive psychotic panic attack. There was a little group of people around a fire and as they all turned to greet me this weird thing happened where they all looked like the one person I really do not want to run into. It was the most surreal experience I have ever had straight, this was not caused by drugs but by anxiety and panic and fear. I spun straight around and marched off the property. My mates tried to talk me into coming back, one of them grabbed my arm as I walked past and I sort of shrugged him off. It was not fun.

So I went home and watched the sky tower fireworks on tele and got a relatively early night for New Years, for me…

I am going to need to take care of myself for the next little while because my mind is going places it hasn’t been for a long time and I just don’t feel strong enough.

Happy New Year, kind reader.

2020

m

 

New Years Ears and Orphenadrine

I just submitted a tenancy application. I am not real hopeful. It’s with another guy that I trust and we are pretty similar. Both have anxiety and depression issues but are basically good people at heart. Just a little broken. He also makes music but he plays at a higher level than me, it’s like we are both athletes but I’m a jogger and he’s an olympic diver or marathon runner or something. I admire him for it and I understand why folks hold him in such regard. We both have had brushes with dipsomania and can both attest to a life of struggle and spent haunted by the ghosts of things we’ve done or had done to us.

It’s all academic because we both are on benefits and we both do not have any real credit histories or backgrounds that people in this society deem worthy of trust. It sucks. In my country at the moment housing is a privilege, not a right and many many of us are now drifting through the cracks into homelessness or as close an analogue for homelessness as to be indistinguishable. As I mentioned a while back, I live in a society where welfare consider the owning of a vehicle as having a roof over your head and therefore not really “homeless”… People are living in garages and sheds and folks are ending up living in third world conditions, multiple families sharing one or two bedroom flats that are dirty, dangerous and smelly. Theres a few big blocks of places like these down the road from where I “live” now. It’s scary even walking past them and I shudder to think what the lives of the children that live there are like.

People survive poverty though and I guess there are many many worse places to be poor and unwell. I once heard of a nomadic tribe of NZ homeless people who migrate from the far north in the winter down to the east coast beaches in the summer. Chasing the warmth and the holiday crowds. They used to tend towards Tauranga but I heard that the council there have implemented some pretty brutal by-laws concerning street people. For a city of only 141,000 people (give or take), it’s not really a big place. I always assumed that it was less violent and scary than being homeless in central Auckland and far less chilly than Wellington or ChCh.

So, I guess I will end up doing tenancy applications until I get something. I can’t really carry on like this. The situation is hard and I just want to have a bedroom that I can be alone in and make music or just wear undies if I want. It is not a lot to ask for is it? It doesn’t seem like it. I’ve been a bad tenant before but should that mean I do not deserve to have a place to live? People make mistakes. Hell, the biggest blot on my name was when the landlord did a meth test and it came up positive. Now that I know how the government went back and apologised to folks they threw out over stupid meth tests I feel like I was wronged. Unfortunately that was a private rental and I am not afforded the same rights as government housing clients or beneficiaries. It was the first meth test on that particular property and meth had been a popular drug here for about 30 years by the time they decided to saw the walls.

I am not saying I am innocent, I am saying that if anyone smoked meth in there over that 30 or 40 year period before I got there… well… It wasn’t fair and yet its going to come up when they do my application.

Sigh.

I’m not coping very well. I am running out of steam to be honest. I thought this morning that the world seems to be forcing me into a position where I end up going back to prison for something stupid done out of despair or desperation. I know it’s a bit dramatic and it was only a fleeting thought that spun its web as I waddled up to the shop but that’s where my head is at. Oh YEAH! So, yesterday  I went to help an old friend. He is getting on in years and I do what I can to make his life easier. We went in to one of the big box hardware stores and he was looking for something and he says to me “Why don’t you just waddle around until I blah blah blah”. Waddle! Fuck, gentle reader, I am FUCKING FAT! How am I ever going to get laid ever again if I stay like this. I am losing weight but nowhere near fast enough for my liking. Perhaps I could swing by the old house and lick the wall paper 3 or 4 times a day. After all, diet pills ain’t nothing but pharmaceutical grade speed anyway, right? Right.

I am due at the hospital a week or two after New Years. I hope they take me seriously. I went to the chemist yesterday to pick up my repeat prescription but the Dr had only written up  20 days worth. So he gave me three months worth of everything else but 20 days of pain relief. So I had to get in touch with the Dr and plead with him to help me. I have begged each Dr I have seen for over a year now to please help me. My kidney is not right, it shouldn’t be debilitating every time I walk to the corner. I googled “Partial Neurectomy” and read 2 or 3 studies done on patients post op. NONE of them reported being in chronic pain 12 months out from the operation. When I presented this to a Dr. (all of 28 years old, burned out at Community Alcohol and drug/mental health, C.U.N.T) he laughed at me as if to say “I trained for 12 years for this job and you spent half an hour on google, so fuck you pal, fuck you up your druggy ass, I ain’t falling for it”. It’s a drag.

Eventually the Dr gave me another script but it used up all the money I had to spare this week so now I am back where I started again. Times is tough.

I reconnected with a dear friend the other day. I sort of blocked everyone on email and I closed my Facebook acc down and so it was with some trepidation that I finally emailed her. She’d been asking a mate to get in touch with me and it could have gone either way. She was lovely and she knows my heart and it was really nice because my experiences lately have made me retreat even further from people and, well, I am lucky I guess. Sometimes good things happen. Honestly, things can only get better. Right? Hey man, Netflix has some really good documentary content. If you like music history check out the “Remastered – Who shot the sheriff” concerning the attempt to assassinate Bob Marley. Otherwise, happy New Years kind reader, I hope yours is happy and filled with folks you love.

I love you, that’s a start.

xxxm

Pro Re Nata

Hello.

 

Not real sure how I feel today, gentle reader. I am pretty adept at self medication, I’ve spent a lot of my life medicating the things inside of me. I am restricting it to only stuff I am prescribed, just to be safe. I can just see it now, “Oh yeah Mark is on his blog going on about how much drugs he takes…”. So, I watch my step. I asked this guy once “if a snitch snitches in the woods and no-one is there to hear it, is it still snitching?” The answer is  “yes, yes it is”. Unless you have been there, you cannot really comprehend the feeling of being locked in a cell and left to your own devices 23 hours of the day.  I am prepared to go to great lengths to ensure I never see the inside of a cell again…. in this life anyway. Statistically I am kind of already fucked. Maori, Drug user, lengthy police record and having already served two custodial sentences, I fit right into the shitty end of any given statistic about crime and punishment in New Zealand.

The police cells are the worst, they have in them a toilet (stainless steel, no lid) a concrete bench to sit or lie down on. If you are lucky you might get a book, a blanket or nicotine lozenges to keep you calm. They are either too hot or too cold. I remember trying to use my sweatshirt as a sleeping bag. “Shivered the whole night through”.  If you are lucky the guy across the hall has real smokes or a joint. “How can that help, if you are both locked up?” I hear you say. Well, it’s called “fishing”. Meals come in plastic takeaway trays. (that’s where the similarity to real food ends though, it’s usually something nasty and inedibly and aggressively microwaved to death.). Farm animals get better food than police station food.

 

Ok so, fishing. You tear up a sheet, a blanket or a garment that you can live without. You carefully tear it so that it makes a long strip, like a rope,  length of string or a fishing line, if you have the imagination for it. You find a way to pierce the tray and tie one end of the line to it and then you place whatever you want to share with the other guy or guys and you slide the tray out under the door or gently through the food slot. If you are going to use the food slot you will want to cover the tray so the stuff doesn’t fall out when you peer pulls it up and in through his hole. (he he he “his hole”) (sorry, juvenile). If you don’t have a tray you can easily just tie it up in a bundle. The other person has made a similar length of line except his just has something with a bit of weight to it, I guess like a sinker at the end of a real fishing line. The trick is to toss the heavy end across the line attached to the tray. (Exactly the way you do not cross lines if you are fishing, kite flying or working with electricity)  Once it’s tangled with the other line you simply have to pull the package inside and hope like hell that there are no cops coming down. Meanwhile the person who sent the tray over gently pulls the tray back; ready to do it again or send it to another person. I was in Tokoroa police station for a week back in 2008 and we had a whole system going which involved sending smokes, lighters, pills and pipes along the wing; between 5 or 6 men.

I digress, again… The first time they lock the door is perhaps the worst feeling you can have without being in love or having someone close die. Society has put you somewhere dark and hard and they do not want you to be part of, well, a part of anything. It can snap peoples minds and at night you hear the screaming and banging on cell doors. I know of a few stories of men stripping off, taking a big dump and smearing it all over the cell and themselves. I’ve never felt so inclined, my style is to try and stay calm and just keep my eyes on a future that isn’t in a cage. Anyone who knows me knows that if I haven’t got my nose in a book I can’t sleep,  those are long nights begging the universe for sleep. Every time I nod off the cops will bring some screaming lunatic down to the next cell or even just opening and closing doors really loudly. My personal situation was exacerbated by the fact that the police refused me medication for 4 days. I met other men who said that the police had made sure they got their meds, it seems like they decided that they were going to further punish me. I can imagine the cops going to the  Desk Sergeant with my request for medication and him (or her) saying, “No, fuck him, we aren’t gonna lift a finger”. Withdrawal from all of my medication meant that I was a crazy, messy ball of mental and they kept me in that state for another 3 days .  It is probably grounds for a complaint but, well, you don’t complain about the Cops or Screws because they have long memories and friends everywhere.

I know that it’s not supposed to be fun though; please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to minimise my experience or cheapen the reasons I was there.  I am not trying to portray myself as some kind of hard man, prison expert either because I am not. But I do feel compelled to write about it. The tenacity, resourcefulness and cunning that people are capable of in trying situations is a testament to our species. Take “Hogans Heroes” for instance, those guys had a bunk bed that opened into a tunnel…  Dave Chappelle talks about the paradox of people being offended or hurt by his comedy and yet they were the ones who bought the tickets, you dig me, kind and mindful reader? Not that this is supposed to be comedy but the analogy fits. So, before you get all grumpy about things, potentially grumpy reader, please remember that you clicked on this.

I hope neither of us ever has to face that soul crushing despair, self doubt and fear again.

Several times a day my mind trips over itself and places me back inside that place and those feelings. I’d like to say it gets less stressful or panic inducing but I would be lying and we are trying to avoid that. The worst times are dreams.

I am struggling. I guess that’s no big surprise but it’s still a drag. I still have so much of my “to do” list to achieve but it’s not coming easily.  Some of the things are on hold for lack of funds. Welfare still refuse to help me and I am mindful to not be a burden on others so I just have to be patient. Finding a home, engaging with my family, getting my licence,  eye tests and glasses to go with them, getting my kidney issue sorted out and losing all this blubber are the things that keep me up at night (figuratively).  It all feels so huge and impossible. I clam up. The worse my anxiety, panic and ptsd get, the less I feel capable of action. Like a rabbit in headlights .

I expect the worst from people and I get to the point where I just hide from everything. Its fucked right? Heres an example: I asked my GP to refer me to a mental health provider. He did. They came around on Friday to speak to me and I have an appt with them. But it’s a “Kaupapa Maori” organisation and I do not feel very safe opening up, my experience with other Maori has been traumatic and cruel and I feel a bit pissy that my GP seems to have referred me according to my ethnicity. I just do not trust those kinds of organisations because I’ve worked in one and I know what they are like. I do not fit in and, after 25 or 30 years of it, I decided I wasn’t going to subject myself to it again. So, anxiety, panic and fear are such that they keep me from getting help with, well, anxiety, panic and fear. You see?

I do not want to be this living breathing pile of confusing and unhelpful paradoxes.

I’m still not sure if I should be posting about this stuff but I really do not have anything left to lose. Some days I can be busy and forget, in that moment I feel like myself but those moments pass rapidly and I have to face just how fucked I am. I cannot see any way out, forward, under or over and it’s a stark and cold feeling. I have, lately, been waking and not knowing who or where I am. It lasts for 10 maybe 15 seconds. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter but the feeling is the same. I hear a dialogue in my mind. “Hey where am I?” , “who am I?” and having no answer for myself. It all gradually comes back into focus but it’s quite a strange sensation… a bit like how I imagine astronauts feel.

Thats all. I am pretending that my heart isn’t broke. It’s not always easy.

I love you, you know that.

oxM

 

p.s – I stumbled upon some photographs today that made me feel happy. I thought, dearest reader, that I’d share them with you.

here goes…

OSHO again…

Here are some of the words of OSHO that really got me through some of the really dark and tough times last year. OSHO,  D.T. Suzuki, The Dalai Lama, Nietzsche and The Beatles were my guides out of that deep loneliness and suicidal despair, into the light, into the promise of love and enlightenment. They offered not solutions, explanations or reasons for where I was and what I felt was happening to me but gave me a way to put it all into a wider context couched in care and understanding the futility of raging against the suffering of the human experience.

Some of OSHOs zingers…

“Whether you do Gagatri Mantra or read the newspaper does not matter, both are OUTSIDE. I am telling you to sit silently…”

“Meditation is NOT something…”

“The moment you get out of the bondage of “religion”, of all that seems to be stupid and nonsense… you have found your truth”

“we have always condemned the rebellious spirit, while the rebellious spirit is the only spirit in the world which helps evolution. If we are lagging behind everybody in the world it is because of our respect for obedience.”

“I am telling them to be silent but they are asking me to fill their silence with something. It is pitiable, I feel sad for them.”

“Love knows no judgement, it simply loves, as you are”

“When anything comes from inside and blossoms, it has tremendous beauty.”

“Zen places the utmost emphasis upon this foundation experience and it is around this that Zen constructs all the verbal and conceptual scaffolds… Zen is. Zen is not.”

“The moment you are nothing, you become a door. A door to the divine, a door to yourself, a door that leads to your home, a door that connects you back to your intrinsic nature and mans intrinsic nature is blissful.”

And, My personal favourite…

“It is absolutely easy, simple. The most simple thing in existence is to be oneself. It needs no effort, you are already it.”

 

There is an adage that “The master appears when the student is ready”. I have certainly noticed this in art and music time and time again. Both as a student and as a master (well, you know, if you will pardon the expression?). Sometimes it is a synchronise meeting of minds, sometimes it is an opportunity, a location or a resource happened upon but it seems to me that when a person is ripe for something new, a person, place or thing will occur to facilitate it. I feel fortunate that I am sometimes mindful enough to capture moments like this and, conversely, I feel disappointment for the times I have let moments like this slip by.

As you can see in the quotes I have selected, there is nothing really earth shattering about OSHOs observations, they are very simple truths and yet they are not simple enough that they occur to me readily and I am grateful for having them pointed out. Particularly for their timely arrival in the mail, addressed to hell on earth.

I have now almost watched the entire “Wild Wild West” docuseries. I heard about it a few years ago and I am glad I got to know OSHO before I watched it. There is corruption everywhere. That an Indian holy man may have been somewhat of a rogue is no huge revelation. Priests, Popes, Pastors and Rabbis, Mullahs, lamas and Imams are all certainly capable of roguery… it is less a statement about their faiths and more a consequence of human nature.

Here is something to think about though. A small observation from a very complex history. In the documentary they discuss a man named “Bowerman” who made it a personal crusade to discredit and destroy the commune and its people. He was famous for being the man who invented Nike running shoes and made his fortune in footwear. Now, all of his bigotry, racism and fear based motives aside, let’s examine how much suffering the Rajneeshi people caused in the world and how much misery the Nike Corporation has caused in the world. It’s no secret that they have used child labour in Asia and the counterfeit market spawned from their cult-like success have almost certainly dabbled in child labor and slavery conditions. So, you know? Nothing is ever as clear as it appears.

I feel lost. every day is a drag and I feel like a rabbit in headlights, too stunned to move. I continue to hope though. I am not hopeless. 

 

 

Osho and Awkward Whanau

 

My friend is a Sannyasin, a follower of OSHO and was there, at the time, when The Rajneeshi left Poona and went to North America. He was with Osho (Metaphorically and literally) in the time after that and is, to this day, a Swami. He is as close as I have to a “Holy Man” and he is the person I defer to in matters of deeper import. Here is a picture of him.

If you have lived in Hamilton for any length of time you have probably seen him on his fancy old times bike without a helmet. (For which he has a permit to ride without).

I am watching the “Wild Wild West” docuseries on Netflicks and am finding challenging insofar as it strikes me already, only a couple of episodes in, that the people of Antelope, Oregon hated the Sannyasins on sight. They hated them because they were different and that point of difference caused them to be feared. I know the basic outline and how the story ended but I can already see that the white folks of Antelope hated those hippies long before the hippies were forced into extremes of behaviour to try and secure what was, in essence a beautiful dream of humanity. A whole self sufficient ranch that could serve hundreds of thousands of people who just wanted out of the capitalist fuck weasel world. People who wanted to create art and make love and grow food and meditate. What the fuck could be wrong with that? I feel angry about it already.

A screw, as I may have already told you, once berated me for reading one of Osho books…

I have little contact with some of the people I love. As you can probably imagine, I have been trying my best to do things correctly, with respect for others. But I have also had to protect myself. Protect myself from other peoples ideas about me, preconceptions, gossip, rumours and lies. Some days I win and some days I lose that little war. I wish I was a man who could detach himself from what others might think of him but I am sometimes not.

I had a hard childhood. I do not want to get too far into it but it was spent in fear. The times I felt safe were few enough that they stand out. The main things I was told about myself were that I was broken, useless, ugly and defective. Not white enough for my community, not brown enough for my whanau. This also, inevitably, came along with tags like nuisance, naughty and lazy.

I don’t know if I can aptly convey to you how fucked my body is. Everything I do is a measure series of painful experiences. I cannot just do things the way I used to. The problem with this is that I do not have a “Home”, somewhere I can say “Hey come and hang out with me?”. I am hoping to remedy this in the coming few weeks. I am not holding out much hope though. I seem to be coming to the end of hope. I felt the old tug of oblivion and true despair the other morning and I feel it creeping up on me like a million predators just about to pounce on me from behind and rip me to shreds.

I’ve done bad things in my life. I’ve caused suffering and I’ve cheated people out of what was theirs. I haven’t ever set out to harm anyone else. Not often anyway, but there have been times when either my heart and mind were so far from consciousness that something deeper and more primal and reptilian has taken over or I else I have felt that I had no choice but to cut whatever corner I felt was necessary at the time.

I miss the person I was when I was doing really well. A couple of years back I saw a little gap in the fabric of reality and thought that I could slip through it and make a break from myself. I had prospects and I had love and I had children who could rely on me and who enjoyed my company. I didn’t cope well with all that stuff falling apart. I’ve always been quite resilient but this was the first time in my life that I’ve been knocked down and didn’t really manage to get back up again.

I am a photocopy of a photocopy of a faded polaroid of a shadow of that guy.

xxxm

Yule Tide

this…

and this….

 

Rip It Up

So I have been teaching myself how to edit video. I have the possibility of work and if I can do a decent job of it there may be more to come. My first effort is the screw jack xmas clip. For some reason I cannot paste a link in here but I think I can do this… and hopefully that will suffice.

Christmas is a drag. Fortunately it’s happening to other people and I am going to just remain inside my bubble. In fact the summer solstice is today and the people I tend to kick around with prefer today as their focal point for summer celebrations rather than the pageantry of “Christmas”. Hey, speaking of things I do not believe in… Last night I found this cool documentary clip about “Goth”, if you are a fan of punk or new wave or Goth, glam, shock or plain old death metal, you might enjoy it. There are a lot of connections that the clip makes that I sort of intrinsically intuited but never managed to formalise into coherent thoughts. It made a lot of sense to me. Unfortunately they make quite a big deal about Nico as an influence and I sort of do not really dig Nico. I will revisit her solo stuff today I think and have a look. Heres the clip, knock yourself out…

I tend to be more into male songwriters and performers. When I was in prison I made elaborate lists of musical icons that ended up culminating in a piece about the size of an AO sized poster which included somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 bands and solo artists, movements, genre and record companies that I felt had been an influence on me. I posted out some of the earlier lists and was challenged by a woman friend (Who is also a formidable music maker in her own right) concerning the disparity in my lists and the absence of some real heavy duty women whom I had simply ignored. Nina, Billie Holiday to name but a few. So it prompted me to re-examine my stance.

I think that as a Man I am, of course, going to be able to relate to male songwriters easier than I am to a woman. But what about someone like Bjork, who transcends sex and creates confronting avant- grade music with pan-sexual themes and who can easily touch me in the same ways I feel connected to male artists?  Annie Lennox was a huge influence on me as a teen ager along with Cindi Lauper, Madonna, Roxette, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Sade and…. well, you see? Once I got started I found that I actually do have many female artists that I hold in high esteem, I just needed to be prompted.

I think that, because I have behaved badly in the past as a lover and partner, I find some women songwriters confronting because, say for example “These Boots are made for walking”, I am capable of being the kind of guy that gets told to pack his shit and get out. Metaphorically at least. So female artists that dwell on the darker side of relationships tend to get a bit close to the bone maybe. Hey what about Amy Winehouse or Pattis Smith or Courtney Love? Women who approach the music business from a place of power and with as much moxie as any man has? Hmmm? So, yeah I am suitably chastised and will probably end up revisiting Nico today. Right now even.

Brb.

So, it’s solstice. My friends generally tend to have a party today. Life has changed so much. I cannot go, too many people feel too passionately about me and my situation and I just can’t face it. I do not feel angry or anything bad towards them, I just wish they knew me better than that. I think also that drinking would be a very bad idea.

My health is really bad. I went out to visit folks yesterday and its got so bad that just walking around the corner is quite a massive undertaking. I have a route that contains the maximum number of places to sit down. Until you lose your mobility I think you take for granted how simple it is to just walk somewhere. It’s not until the simple act of walking becomes too painful that you realise, apart from park benches and bus stops, there are not that many places to just stop and sit down in the world. For the first time yesterday I imagined myself having to use a cane or even one of those walking frames. I pleaded with the Doctor to help me. He offered me sarcastic paracetamol and basically said that its Urologies problem, with whom I have an appt on the 9th of Jan. I can’t get anyone to believe me. It’s not until I do something physical that it hurts, so, sitting in a Drs chair it looks like there is nothing wrong with me. Even I tend to forget about it. If I sit and do not do much, then it doesn’t hurt. But then when I have to go out and do stuff I end up nearly in tears with pain and frustration. If I got stuck, somewhere far from home and was faced with a long walk I think it would be a disaster. Fuck. So, I am hoping that in January I will get some help.

My dear friend gave me her spare netflicks login yesterday so I am going to spend solstice watching “El Chapo”. I find him a compelling gangster character but it’s hard not to dwell on how fucking evil he has been. Even so I really hoped that he would have some daring prison escape or something like that. I guess it’s my curse to always back the underdog, my team never wins… I sampled tuis singing last night and I am chopping it all up into useful samples. They have such a beautiful song. New Zealand is a beautiful place.

Well, gentle reader, I am going to do some more work now and try to be productive. I love you, you know that, right? If I do not see you, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice and let the new year be a better one than the last, perpetually.

xxx Mark Edward Tupuhi

p.s – This Nico record is unlistenable shite… you can’t win em all huh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Screw Jack For Xmas

Heres a video clip I made yesterday, its pretty basic but I am getting better at it…

 

 

 

 

Christmas and Matriculation.

Christmas is an idea fraught with anxiety and depression for me. The deadline for getting myself in a financially malleable position is upon us and I honestly can’t afford to use the $2 dryer at the laundromat let alone express my love for my people with gifts and well wishes. Now I fucken know that its not about all that but I also know how wonderful it feels to be able to show love through the giving of gifts. I am pretty good at it too. I have been guilty, in the past, of procuring gifts for people that more reflect what I want rather than what I think the other person would desire. But, for the most part, I think I am pretty mindful of what I am doing when I select gifts. In fact I usually know what I want well in advance of stepping out into the street and participating in commerce. So I feel sadness at being unable to do it the way I want to.

I think that my upbringing put quite a lot of emphasis on Christmas. It was always the culmination of everything and seemed to me that was the whole point of life, school, work etc, that everything in life built up to Christmas. School finishes and food gets fancy, gifts are exchanged and there are trips to the beach or holidays in the North Island and people are happy. Christmas seemed to be the focal point for our entire society so I always felt a weird anti-climax thing after Christmas and New Years when the whole grind began again.  It took me many years to shake off this rather childish world view.

I think about some of the Christmases past that stand out. I remember the first Christmas I spent alone. I think I must have been 19 or there abouts. I think my folks were in India, my brother was in her majesties bung-hole and my daughter was with her mothers family. I set up a charcoal BBQ on the deck and sat in the sun all day reading and drinking Bacardi. It felt, to me at that age, a terribly mature and grownup way to spend the day. The drinks were in the right glasses with the right garnishes and the bottle was in a bucket of ice. The steaks were expensive cuts and I had fresh salmon with a caper/sour cream  sauce. It was lonely though, I remember waking up and realising it was the first time in my life I’d been alone on Christmas Day.

The year after that I was travelling with my girlfriend in central Otago. We’d spent the summer working on an orchard and driving around exploring. We picked a car up in Picton and drove it everywhere we could. She’d never seen the South so it was really cool. Anyway, My folks and brother and my daughter were spending Christmas in Dunedin so we ended up hooking up with them for a few days and it was really nice.

My family make a big deal of Christmas for the kids. My earliest memories are of waking up to find a pile, no, a MOUNTAIN of presents underneath our tree. We always had real trees too. The place smelled like Christmas. I believed in Santa Claus. I do not know when I stopped believing but it was pretty sweet while it lasted. Actually one year my Grandma forgot to pack all the presents and bring them with us and I overheard the grownups talking about how “Santa is going to have to get presents from the service station up the road”. Back then everything shut on Christmas Day except for the petrol stations so, yeah, I pieced it all together. I think I made a point of not bumming my little brother out with this new intel I had on “Santa”.

After my Mum died we have sort of stopped having big family christmases. I know that the commercialism and selfishness aspects of it are pretty rank but I love that experience of overwhelming kids with a whole big pile of things they have wanted or things that surprise them. I’m a sucker for overdoing things like that. When my eldest child was about 4 my brother worked at a chocolate factory and at Easter she woke up, literally covered in Chocolate. Her whole bed was covered in Eggs and bunnies and giant blocks of chocolate. It was an amazing experience watching her face register what had happened.

As I said before, I mostly have left that childish expectation that Christmas be this huge climax but I do still feel a bit glum that I won’t really be a part of anyones Christmas this year.

I have been at the Dr today. I am trying to get some help but the things I am struggling with seem almost insurmountable and I sense that the Drs feel that way too, that I am in the “Too Hard” basket and so they just pass the buck. I have a Urology Appt in January so hopefully that will be addressed. Being more mobile would make a huge difference. after that if I can get a handle on my mental health then I think I can build a little life for myself. My babies are at my Dads house today but I can’t go and see them. To hold them and to tell them how much I have missed them and how much I love them. Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

m

Breathe in, Breathe out…

Breathe

Animals Growl

I wrote this piece of music back in happier times. Living back in Hamilton after returning from Auckland was a really cool time. We were making lots of music and filming stuff and I was really functioning as an artist. Probably the most productive time in my life so far. It seemed that every day brought with it a new opportunity to create or to enable someone else to create. I was seeing my kids heaps and we were doing cool stuff together and sometimes I wonder how times like that slip back into struggle? I can pin point certain events that helped things along but mostly it is just the way it is.  I guess the point is that nothing ever stays the same, all things shall pass, the good, the bad and the indifferent

I’ve been struggling with anxiety and panic. My future is really unclear and I still haven’t managed an income or a stable home. Sometimes when I dwell on it too much it threatens to overwhelm me. The worst times are at night because, as you probably know, it’s very hard to affect change or action from bed. Worrying about shit whilst in bed is fucking torture because all you are doing is poking at a situation that is definitely not going to change in the next few hours and so is complete madness to indulge it. And still…

Hey, they are tearing down the house at Memorial Drive. I lived there for a while and I have had a stake in that place since I first rolled up there in the summer of 1993 to drop poems in to Malcolm for the “Whakarongo Ki Te Awarenesses”, a local poetry compilation…. I’ll find a link for you… Nope can’t find one, oh well… they say that if you remember the 90s, you weren’t really there. heh. I intend to go and say goodbye to the old place once its empty. I am hoping we can get some film and stills to remember. So much of Hamiltons freak history happened under that roof and it’s a sad day to say the least. There were people who vowed to burn it to the ground if it was ever slated for demolition… there’s still time.

Have a great day in Maysfield and keep on trucking.

Mark Edward (Te Haupa) Tupuhi esq.

p.s – it strikes me that saying the bit about the fire may not be the wisest thing to do considering the type of folk who have lived there over the years and the likelihood of one of them actually doing it. To be clear, I do not intend to burn anything, well anything that isn’t tobacco. xxxm

 

The Treehouse Of Horror

Ok so here’s a little story that I think you will find a bit creepy.

So I was in a lot of prisons this year. Springhill, Rangipo, Rimutaka, Otago Corrections Facility (The Milton Hilton), Christchurch Mens and Rolleston. “Double Bunking” is something you may have heard of in the news. It’s the practice of converting a single cell to a double simply by adding a bunk. I found out at the end of my lag that you can, legally, refuse to be double bunked but the screws are very insistent and resisting can land you in an even worse situation than the one you are in. The other way to go is to get a psychiatrist to say that it’s too risky to double bunk you, either for your safety or your cellmates. There are also some kinds of folks that it’s just not fair to lump someone else with. These tend to be folks with bad hygiene, excessive gas, turbo snoring or boundary / violence issues. I was double bunked for most of the year except for when I was at Rolleston, where they haven’t got around to putting bunks in. However, on that note, they were almost finished building a new 120 man unit there which was rumoured to be all doubles.

I got two really good cellmates over this period and five not so good ones. As I may have alluded to before, one of them terrorised me over night and as soon as they opened the door in the morning I said that I was not going back in there with him. I needed to be put in the “ARU” (at risk unit) for a week after that. I’m afraid I didn’t cope very well with it. It is probably the worst 12-16 hours of my adult life. Enough said about that I think. Another of the gems was an older Maori guy who was at the end of a 12 year stint and was struggling with the idea of release. I’ll tell you about him as well…

So, every morning I was escorted, with a handful of others, to the medical unit to take my medication. For controlled drugs like Methadone, Suboxone, Valium, Morphiene and Ritalin the procedure is to have inmates come to the health unit and take their meds under heavy observation. People still managed to “Divert” their meds though and I was constantly in quiet awe of how good some of these guys were at it. I gained some notoriety for managing to get methadone liquid out of the medical unit for a couple of weeks until some snitch ratted me out. Please remember that it was prison and I had to survive the best I could. I had to get inventive managing stress and anxiety and fear. I did stuff I wouldn’t normally do, ok? ok.

The guy I was celled up with was getting more and more angry at the guy in the cell next to us. The reason was because at night, when the unit is all locked down, the nurses come around and stop at several cells to dispense night time meds. From the window in your cell you can see most of the unit except 4 or 5 cells on either side. The unit is elliptical in shape. kinda like this (). There was a snitch in one of the cells across from us and, every night, as the nurses and screws opened the door for him to come and take his meds the whole fucking unit would scream abuse at the guy. He caused a lot of trouble and was always getting away with stuff anyone else would have gotten charged for. It got so bad that he eventually refused his meds just so they wouldn’t come to his cell in the evening any more.  I can still hear them in my mind, 70 or 80 men all shouting and banging on their doors at once. The first time it happened was spectacular, the screws and the nurses just stood there wondering what the fuck was going on. The problem was that the main instigator was my mate in the next cell along (Who would later become my cellmate) and the target of the abuse was a friend of my cellmate.

Each night my cellmate would rant at me about how he is gonna smash the guy next door and how he’s sick of me talking to him about stuff. I used to get to move about the prison a lot due to my meds so I would often come back with stories from my morning. Particularly he hated it because the guy next door was also a regular feature at the medical unit. I was just trying to be friendly, you know “Man, you should’ve seen what so and so did this morning!” Stuff like that. It all came to a head one morning when my cellmate was due for a check up or something so he had to come with us to the medical unit.

Each unit has a thing called a “Sterile Zone” or sometimes they call it a “Sally Port”. A space like an airlock on a space ship. So you leave the unit by first going through a gate into a space that had another gate out into the prison. So they would get us all in there and we’d wait for the vans to take us to wherever we were going. It means that staff can do other stuff instead of waiting along with us. The gates are controlled electronically from the guard house. It is also a way for visitors (Repairmen/women, teachers, church people etc) to get into the unit without having to interact with inmates.

On this particular morning there were about 6 of us in there including my Cellmate and the guy he had been threatening to “Smash” for a week now. My instinct told me that he was feeling shit because he’d been making all these threats and posturing himself as the baddest mother fucker in the place but now his opportunity had arisen and he must’ve felt like he had lost face. So what he ends up doing is attacking me. It was all my fault because I come home every day and tell him about what’s happening in the unit and he just wants to “Do his own lag” and, apparently, I was to blame for whatever head fuck he was going through. I can remember his eyes and the way he was trying to puff himself up. He had his fists clenched and hanging down by his sides and was sort of rocking from side to side. He goes “Do you think I take all these antipsychotics for nothing?” Passive aggressive bullshit. So that was the end of that. They actually put us back in together after that but I was adamant that I wanted out of that cell as quickly as possible. He’d basically told me he doesn’t want me to talk to him. He even apologised twice but even that was fucken bizarre, he sort of wrung his hands and batted his fucking eye lashes and said “I’m Sowwy” like a kid would say it. I didn’t give a fuck after that. Mostly I was worried that if he tried to get physical again I might actually hurt him, his back is fucked and it wouldn’t take much to do something I would regret.

I moved in next door with the other guy. When the screws finally came one day and said “Ok, once we unlock you, move all your shit next door” and he looked at me and goes “Oh, so you’re happy now are ya?” I just said “yeah man, I am”. The week or two between the scuffle in the Sterile Zone and changing cells were so bad. Imagine living in such close conditions and not speaking to each other. Fuck it was grim. I ended up trading for pills so I could just sleep as much as possible. When we were in the yard he would just sit and stare at me. If I stayed in the cell to get some space from him I would sometimes look up from what I was doing and he’d be staring in at me. It was pretty bad. However, after I moved I worked really hard to be kind to him and we came to a place where we were much better as friends than cell mates. After that he was fine and we are, I believe, friends. We were released on the same day and now he’s starting a new life in Auckland.

Can you imagine returning to society after 12 years? Everything has changed. He didn’t want to leave prison. His plan was to stab a screw in his last week. I could understand that. On the outside he is an old man with serious mental health and physical health issues. No money and no mates. On the inside he has free rent and board, his art brings in a regular “Income” and he has a little mana because of that. Life inside, for him, is better.  It was his mum that finally made him come around. She talked him into leaving, to coming home. He hadn’t heard from her in 6 years or so as he’d refused contact with his family. . He is a fantastic artist too, when I got back from my trip down south he had made me a painting of Jimi Hendrix, 2m x 1m ish. It is a beautiful piece and I left it with my last cellmate so that he could sell it and help make ends meet.

I’ve seen a few guys on their last days and a lot of them take all their possessions home with them. I left with my correspondence, colouring pencils and my copies of “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Exile on main st.”, Otherwise I distributed my stuff amongst the people who had supported me, especially in the weeks after the night from hell. I gave my CD player to my cellmate and I’d been stocking up on toiletries on the sly so that I could leave him a big stash of things you can trade. I felt that leaving prison with stuff that I could easily acquire was a mean thing to do, they need that stuff more than me.

My last Cell Mate was a guy I grew up with in Invercargill. I was having trouble when I got back because no one wanted to cell up with me because of my snoring. It was getting pretty desperate because I was running out of options and there were some real fuckwits in there. I was just walking around the unit doing my daily exercise and I walked past this guy just sitting on a chair, in the sun, staring into space. He looked up and goes “Mark” and it was really cool, we go way back. I told him about the situation and he instantly goes, “bro come in with me”. He is one of the fortunate who are allowed a cell to himself but, because I wasn’t going to be staying long (I had 3 weeks to go) he didn’t mind. My heart breaks for him in there, every day when they let him out he just sits on his chair staring, just biding his time until he gets released, again. He’s been in and out of jail since he was a youth. Theres fucking nothing for him in society and eventually he just takes what he wants and the cycle repeats. He’s one of those awful statistics. Abused in state care, broken family, substance abuse from super early age, Maori, P.T.S.D and all that goes along with it. According to the 2018 “Family First” report on Prisons:

“The strongest predictor for imprisonment is growing up in state care.”

Maori represent 51% of the current prison muster yet represent only 15% of the general New Zealand population.

“Prisoners who had been in care as a child were more likely to be reconvicted following release from their current sentence than those who had not (61% compared to 49%)”

So, yeah.

Now the reason I have been droning on about this is that a few days ago someone I love received mail from a guy I was briefly celled up with on my way back from Christchurch. There wasn’t anything bad about the contents of the letter, it was rambling bullshit but just sending mail to my people out of the blue is fucking creepy. Then, yesterday, another letter came to someone else I love. I think he must have copied the addresses from my mail. I wrote a lot of letters and I made the envelopes really beautiful with colouring pencils and biro, they came out great. The thing is, there is no privacy in a double bunked cell. Everything you do, you do within 2 meters of another human being for 22hours of every day. Even if I did manage to hide something personal, say under my mattress or whatever, every morning I go to the medical unit and that can take anything between 20 minutes and 4 hours. Theres no privacy, that’s what Im saying. And that 2meters thing is very real, if you are taking a shit you are still in the same room as someone else, you see?

So, I do not feel that this has happened due to any failure on my part. Writing to my friends and family is what kept me sane in there. So I do not feel responsible for causing this but I do feel responsible to put a stop to it. Ive written a firm but respectful letter to the guy and I have contacted Corrections to ask for help. It’s pretty icky and I hate it that my situation is still making things bad for the people I care about.

You cannot trust anyone in there. Thats the thing. No matter how close you feel to someone or how much you bond over books or music or chess or cards or exercise, the fact of the matter is that A: That person probably didn’t get there by being trustworthy and B: You only just met this person and there’s no way to find out if they are genuine or not. This isn’t universal, there are heaps of exceptions to this rule but”Trust Slowly” is a safe practice.

I didn’t mean to write this quite as candidly as it is but, I guess, it’s not like its a secret.

I am trying to figure out how to approach folks for xmas. There are still a few people I haven’t reconnected with who I need to. Gossip is a terrible thing because it gets in the way of me reaching out… “Oh yeah so and so said…blah blah blah” and suddenly I’m terrified of it and freeze up. I want to do things right. I want to approach people with respect and tact, you know? I’m afraid, gentle reader, I feel it creep up on me and before I know it I’m panicked and can’t function. Not just about friends and family either. The idea that they could come for me any time they want and throw me back into hell is a constant fear. Largely irrational but anxiety doesn’t really do rational. A friend of mine has been trying to contact me. She left messages with Matt for me but I’m mortified at what she might say to me. I try to remember that, in life, the things we worry about hardly ever come to fruition. Just like the situations we fear to approach never actually being as bad as it was in our minds eye.

I am doing ok. Things are really hard but I just keep doing what’s in front of me and somedays well… to quote The Big Lebowski…

-“Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.”

Thanks for reading, if you are still here. I hope the prison stuff didn’t upset you or conjure negative emotions. I think, even more so now, that out current system does not work, particularly for Maori, drug users, mental health sufferers and victims of historic abuse. Things are changing though. maybe one day we will find a way to address crime and keep the world safe. Punish people for shitty behaviour but also try to address the reasons for that shitty behaviour and try to reintegrate people with less likelihood to reoffend into the world without further damaging people (the way that our current system damages them). I realise that “compassion” is not really on the top of the list when someone robs your house or drains you bank account or shoots your Mum or sells drugs to high school kids or forces sex on someone without consent.

I was in a Mongrel Mob unit up in High Security for a week or so. This was after I’d been convicted but before they had a place for me in low security. All of the guys in that unit were gangsters. People who just do not give one single fuck about the law, people for whom jail is just a place to train and to get strong so that when they get out they are leaner and meaner than before. They have cell phones, shanks, cigarettes, drugs and booze. Some of those units even have (or so Im told) Transgender ladies who get used like a prostitute. I’m not real sure how you would deal with them coz change is not on their agenda. Methamphetamine can bring in tens of thousands of dollars, enough that it’s worth spending half your life in jail because the other half is spent rolling large.

They call it “con college” because you can learn new tricks you didn’t know before. I witnessed two prison yard “class rooms” (for want of a better phrase). One was when a guy was teaching 4 or 5 other mobsters how to cook meth. They were taking notes and everything. The other one was a sort of brainstorming session for fleecing Acc money by faking being a victim of sexual abuse in a religious setting. What they would do was get a few guys who actually had been abused by a priest or a pastor or who-ever. Then they teach you the things to put in your claim. Places, People, distinctive behaviour types and distinctive appearance details, years, months and days in which they occurred etc. After that, presumably, you would go to Acc and say “Father Brownsword molested me in Christchurch in 1983, he had a long scar on his thigh and …” You get it right? Pretty shitty.

Right Im off for a walk, I’ll catch you guys tomorrow.

xxxm

 

Ticking Things Up

I played with the band last night. I haven’t played music in earnest for over a year now. (Actually, thats not strictly true, I jammed with a local ukulele band a week or two ago.) It took a lot of effort and number 8 wire shit to get the gear going again, its all just been gathering dust, busted and unloved. I guess we have that in common huh? It was, at first, very challenging, I noticed all my mistakes and timing problems but after a while it all clicked into place and, dude, you won’t find a better band in our genre for many many miles, maybe the whole Island even. Hmmm? It was lovely and I am so grateful and fortunate to have friends that feel compassion and understanding towards me. It has been a hell of a ride.

The thing that is different is that in 2017 I was drunk as often and as much as I could be. The world was a hateful scary place and I had a death wish coupled with thoughts, feelings and ideas that needed to be soaked in booze. At it’s peak I was spending $200 a week, 24 cans of 8% beer, the big 500ml ones and two 40oz bottles of tequila or vodka. I woke up and started drinking as soon as I could. This turned band practice and things like that into a drunken blur and I bet it was quite obvious to my friends that I was insane and barely keeping my head above the water.

The plans I had to end my life were time consuming. It took me 2 months to save up 1600ml of methadone but it carried me through simply knowing that the end was in sight. When that didn’t work I spent another few months saving up 2200ml. All the time, in the back of my mind I knew that all I had to do was hold on for a few more weeks or whatever and it would be ok. When the first one didn’t work I was exhausted, I didn’t have anymore in me. I guess I am supposed to be here because those big doses would kill most people, easily. To put it in context, one of my daily doses would kill anyone without a tolerance…. times that by 10 or 20…. fuck.

I am waiting for my laundry to wash and then I am going to go do some housework. I have some food to cook but in order to do that I have to wade through a couple of hours of intense cleaning. Its worth it though, oh yes.

Anyway, I am doing ok today. I am broke and I have much stress, particularly about xmas, I want to show my babies that I am thinking of them and that I love them but I can barely afford a postage stamp. I am getting better though and I am still surprising myself with acts, behaviours and thoughts of a much wiser man than I gave myself credit for. I saw a picture of myself today, about 4 years ago, sitting outside Grey Gardens. I looked great! How come we never know how young, thin and beautiful we are until that youth, vigorous and beauty has long since faded and run to fat…

Bah, humbug.

Love from the land of volcanoes….

xxxm

Philosophy

 

I wrote this song when I was living with Zara on Snell Drive. It was such a lonely year. I pretty much went to bed for 12 months or so. After rehab I really lost my way. I ended up moving back to Auckland  though (eventually) and, despite a rocky initial period, I was at my most stable and productive for quite a long time. It was a time of strength and confidence and, although it took some chemical assistance, relative sobriety. I drank once in that entire period and it was a planned night out with lots of safety measures put in place. I stopped taking the anti-abuse for two weeks to let it flush out then I went and saw Kora and Katchafire at the Powerstation with my friend Hayden. I got drunk and stoned and I danced and danced and it was wonderful. On the following Monday I resumed taking the anti-abuse pills and I reckon it was pretty cool, it felt like  scratching an itch that otherwise could have grown out of all proportion and become a relapse rather than a holiday. It made me feel like I wasn’t really missing out… that I still had an edge.

I made a couple of friends up there, people who I thought would be life long friends but they have gone now and I don’t hear from anyone now, well, ‘cept for Jason but I knew him way before either of us even got pimples so…. you know.. don’t really count. He has been in the news lately and my heart goes out to his family. Immigration are trying to say their marriage visa was faked and its simply not true. I watched their wedding on Facebook, it was in Kenya and looked idyllic. His Mum is probably as close to me still having a Mum who is alive. Her and my Mum were good friends and she reminds me of Trishee. She is a psychiatric nurse. I remember once being woken by her at the mental ward after a suicide attempt. She gently woke me up and I remember it clear as day, she goes “Does your Mum know you are here?” To which I burst into tears. So She gave me a cuddle and said “Would you like me to call her?” It was nice.

That place remains a nightmare. I was there for 2 weeks the year before last after a couple of overdoses and… people don’t really get helped, its an evil little ineffective ambulance at the bottom of a fucking huge cliff. I saw a man at the London St clinic the other day trying to ask for help. He was clearly, genuinely, suicidal and I recognised the desperation in him. His neck was all fucked up from, presumably, a rope and he was pretty unsteady on his feet. He said that he’d tried to hang himself in garden place and the police had cut him down. They had also, inexplicably, done nothing else. It sounds like they questioned him and told him to go to the hospital for help. So, you know, some things don’t change. I can remember pleading with them on the phone to help me when things turned to shit in Raglan that time. They do not take suicide threats very seriously.

I’m way off topic now but that’s the kinds of imagery this particular track reminds me of.

 

Heres another one from that period. I was working with the kind of set up I have now, MacBook, mic and some guitars and a keyboard. Just noodling away by myself in a room. If I wasn’t making music I was drinking or smoking weed or doing pills and if I wasn’t doing that then I was bingewatching tv shows like “Community” or “Dr Who”. Not a real productive year.

 

What I came here today to talk about is my drivers licence. So, today I sat and passed the Learner Driver test. Next week when I have some spare dosh I can do an eyesight test and then I can sit my Full Drivers Licence test and be legal again for the first time in years and years. I was studying towards it down in Rolleston and I have spent the last week or so making sure I knew all the stuff. Give Way rules, Speed limits, How heavy a trailer can be, what speeds to drive through puddles and splash people at bus stops etc.

There was a list of things to do when I got back to the world. I have ticked a few off. I still can’t seem to get any health care people to take my kidney pain seriously. Frankly I am a bit scared to find out. I don’t feel strong enough to face another bunch of procedures. As I have said before, I used to like stuff like that, general anaesthetic is pretty nice, from a junky perspective but now I am not so keen. I am afraid. Other stuff on my list still has to be done. The opportunity to have a room in a flat is not as sure as it was last week, they’ve raised the bar a bit but I’ll face that in time. Today I’ll just do what’s in front of me. I kinda want to prove to my kids that I am a better man today than I was before but it’s not going to happen just like that (Snaps fingers)

So here’s one more track, this time from “Screw-Jack”. I hope your day is going well, gentle reader. It was a struggle to get up and motivated today. I assumed I was going to fail the test and get in trouble for wasting an opportunity. I was shaking like a leaf when I sat down to do the test. I struggle with this anxiety thing way more than I used to. Life is hard some times and living with these problems seems to make life feel impossible sometimes. But, everyday I am getting better at it. I love you, gentle kind reader. Thanks for being there, where-ever you is….

xxxm

 

 

Procrastination

I can procrastinate like it’s an art form. I usually kept decent grades at school but  the times I actually prepared in advance of more than one day are very few and therefore stand out in my memory as aberrations.  Part of my procrastination stems from anxiety. The fear of other people or of being caught out or embarrassed seem to be the main motivators. I am sitting my drivers licence this week for the first time in almost 10 years, maybe more.  I have the booklet and all the test questions and I am brushing up in advance. I was studying towards this goal before I came home and so I feel like I have a good chance but everything seems really hard and overwhelming at the moment and I worry that I will just let the opportunity slide. I dunno why I am like this, I just am.

I was invited to go for a jam with other musicians last night but I procrastinated about it until it was too late and then called in my apologies. Why would I avoid that? Its one of my favourite things to do but, for some reason, I panicked and missed out. I have probably missed out on about 5 million really great opportunities through this behaviour. At least at the moment I have good reason to be fearful, anxious and hyper vigilant. I do push myself sometimes and so I can maybe switch it around and say that I grab hold of more opportunities than I miss.

My dreams are weird and scary lately.  I remember them in the moments after they wake me but they fly away in a few moments and, like a handful of ashes, or feathers, or polystyrene, they fly away from me in the breeze. I’m aware of it being like this so I try to hold on to that moment for as long as possible. I remember the parts of the dream out of sequence as I scramble to take note of everything I can but, before I know it, it has evaporated. People keep dream diaries. I have tried to a few times but it’s hard work. Lately I sleep with a little help from a tablet or two as well so there’s an extra layer of resistance against remembering or articulating my minds night time visions.

Do you dream? Do you ever remember them? I find them fascinating but I loathe hearing about someone else’s dreams. I had a few “Flat Mates” (sic.) this past year who sometimes felt it necessary to bombard me with their long, drawn out dream narratives. Don’t do that people, unless you have a really good handle on story telling, don’t do that to others…

I was locked up with a guy whose idea of a conversation is as follows… Take whatever comment, life experience, belief or narrative that the other person has said and then concoct a great big lie that makes your experience bigger, better and more. It gets tiring living with that day in day out. I learned not to tell them anything after a while. Even my failings or bad memories came in as fodder for this guy. If I’ve broken my ankle once in a car crash then he shattered his skull and broke his back and the car was a Lamborghini and he hit a family of 4 but he dragged all the people out of the burning wreck and then the mayor gave him a medal… or if I once won a jackpot playing the pokies, he won lotto, twice and bought a house in New Plymouth and his mum and dad live there and he has the rest of the money buried in the back yard. Dude… I got to the point where I was just saying the most mundane and ordinary things, just to see what would happen, and sure enough he followed me right down to the wire. “I like Brushing my teeth” to which he would claim to have never brushed his teeth ever and he has the best teeth in the world, a dentist had told him that he has the best teeth in New Zealand and Australia, he won an award for it. Shit like that.

Ok, back to the road code.

xm

 

It’s tricky, to rock a rhyme…

Hi. I’ve been uploading my old music to Bandcamp. I will post some links below. I haven’t the space to start producing new stuff but until then I can keep busy, I guess. I am struggling to keep positive, gentle reader, things are really hard and I know that if I let the sadness, discouragement and fear get out of control… well… it won’t be very good, will it? So I am trying to not worry about things beyond my control and putting one foot, you know, in front of the other.

Sometimes I feel it welling up like a tsunami inside me and I have to do a lot of breathing and other distraction techniques because there is just no room for error now, you know? I wanted to blog today about some of the things that happened in the lead up to this year. There were some truly desperate moments and some terrifying moments too. The feeling that you are all alone and that, if you’ve calculated correctly, you will never see another person, never hug my kids, never make another note of music. Those fucking moments are laced with pure horror.

Anyway, I trashed that blog post. It’s too revealing and too sad and scary and it hurts thinking about it. So I am working instead of going insane. What is happening to me at the moment seems really unfair. I can’t get on a benefit but I can’t work either. My stomach is really sore and, as I have described, it hurts to do anything for longer than a few minutes. Sometimes it hurts when I am just sitting. I have been asking for help but its like a scene from a Beatles movie where everyone is running around on fast forward but not really doing much. Radiology said to go to my G.P for scan results, the G.P said to go to Urology for Scan results, Urology say they don’t know what scan results I am talking about and meanwhile I am in agony.

Here’s the thing about anxiety and panic and PTSD… People look calm and capable on the surface but it’s all an act to get through. All the things that people take for granted as being easy seem insurmountable to me sometimes… “Just get a new Doctor” someone said to me. Just like that? Or regarding my accomodation situation people say “Just go on trade me or go to a rental agency. Buy guys, I can barely face going to the corner shop without a bit of a run up to it. I am struggling. I guess that’s what I am saying.

So today I am going to try and study for my licence, try and find some money for rent and stuff and I am hoping to find an advocate to help me with the welfare people. I suppose people might think I am weak or lazy or stupid but man, I have had a couple of years from hell. I’ve paid for all of my various sins, shortcomings and vices, a million fold. Prison was a nightmare. I am not the same man I was two years ago. I feel like at any given moment someone can come and take my freedom away again and put me in situations of pure panic and terror. I think about that every time I leave the house, that it could happen just like that.

Sorry, I meant for today to be a bit more positive but I am in pain and it kinda taints everything with frustration and exhaustion.

I love you though, kind reader, you and me are tight.

xxxm

Some Catch, That Catch 22

I was contacted by someone yesterday asking for me to put my first solo record on Bandcamp. It feels really good that, lately, people are finding my music seemingly by accident and liking it. The Down Beat Dub stuff I was making in 2017/2018 is a huge body of work and, due to the nature of Dub, quite tedious after a while. I always imagined it either as a sound bed for video/film, background music in one of the “Cannabis Cafes”  that my government are suggesting we might be able to have sometime soon. I also think it would work live too at a festival in a chill out zone.

However to have someone enjoying my older, more melodic music. I don’t know when it happened but at some point I lost my confidence to sing. I am not a bad singer but once I found Dub music I sort of lost the desire to express myself in words. Preferring to let my musical skills come to the fore. It’s never going to do the things that I thought I wanted when I started making music in Barnes… Record deals, mansions, studios in L.A and another studio on my Island retreat in the Hauraki Gulf. All of those things seemed to be what you strived for, long before my confidence got all fucked up. But I sort of now have come to realise that the actual goal was simply to live a life making music and so I ended up finding something far better than that bullshit, Grammy Award pipe dream.

As I type this my friend is playing piano next to me and I guess I learned to just be happy with what I have and count my blessings.

In other news, I shall be sitting my drivers licence next week and, all going well, I could have my full licence by Christmas if I get lucky. I also may have found a place to live. Its not in claudelands, where I wanted to end up but, you know, it’s a room to myself and a place to set up the studio and do some street art projects. The government have declined my income. Apparently I no longer qualify. The problem is that I’ve qualified for the past 4 or 5 years and nothing has changed so why are they cutting me off now? I feel like it’s because of my little holiday that they are messing with me. I do not understand it. I can survive on the $180 bucks a week but Its not going to be very pleasant in the food, doctors bills and prescription departments. I’ve lived hand to mouth like this before but, man, its a fucking drag and things get stressful. It’s crazy because after prison I am probably even more depressed, anxious and unhappy than I was before. I get scared very easily and I still do not like people being to close to me.

So, yeah, a pretty discouraging week but I am not letting it get to me. I felt the panic rising yesterday and was afraid it was going to swallow me up. I don’t know how much elasticity my mental health has anymore. I go from 0 to 100 very easily and I work very hard to be patient and hopeful. I think I am going to need an advocate or something because I am not getting any help from my Dr, Welfare or Mental Health and it’s getting on top of me. The stupid fucker gave me 3 months of pills the other day. I was ok with it at first but I’m going to take them into the chemist tomorrow and ask them to just give me a weeks worth at a time. Particularly at the moment because I am struggling to keep my head above the water and we all know how well I don’t do when things seem impossible to overcome. Hey that’s not a death threat or anything but I think its a case of being realistic about my situation.

I can’t wait to have a licence again. I used to love just getting in the car and driving to wellington or Auckland and I haven’t been able to do that for many years now. It represents freedom. Plus my car is a big station wagon/people mover and I can pull all the seats out, chuck a mattress in the back and go wandering. My friend owns a large property in the far north and he has always said I could rock up there and camp out. Theres work to be done up there too as he has been putting in infrastructure  and getting the gardens ready for his first hemp crop. He has a licence to grow it and I reckon that’s like a huge foot in the door if we get legalisation or decriminalisation or what ever it is.

I feel sick today. I got prescribed a new pain killer and it makes me feel very ill. Plus it didn’t actually work, I am still in pain. I don’t know how I can be more direct with my Dr. he didn’t seem to really give a shit. If I walk to the shop, maybe 400 meters, I have to stop at the buster in the middle and sit for 5 minutes before I can go on. There and back, shit, surely there’s something wrong. Even little missions like doing dishes or cooking is punctuated with little rest stops. If I were to be stranded across town without a ride or bus fare I don’t think I could make it. Or, at the very least, it would involve a lot of pit stops.

So, yeah that’s how my week is going, ups and downs but always forward. I hope to have my studio running in a few weeks and that ticks off two of the real big things on my list of goals. A room to myself and the studio.  There are still other bridges I need to cross but at least Ive made a start.

I’m still binge watching the two new “Wu Tang” series on TVNZ on demand. I am mesmerised by it and I find it inspiring. There are some really deep, philosophical and spiritual themes in the Wu Tang back catalog and you have to admire their rags to riches moxy. Anyway, I’ll catch you guys on the flip flop.

peace.

m

 

Walking and Painlessness

I went for a short bush walk yesterday. I’ve also been going for walks early in the morning sometimes. I am trying to feel better and lose some weight. I have this giant belly that, dude, I do not recognise myself with. I’ve never been really obese before and I struggle with the extra girth, self esteem and the health issues I imagine are lurking behind it… and, believe me, there’s shit loads of lurking room behind it….

So I snapped some pics coz I like the idea that there are people reading this from all over the planet and I dig it that, perhaps, they might enjoy seeing a little slice of Middle Earth. Some of my kids are auditioning for the new “Middle Earth” films that are going into production soon. I can remember a few of us went and auditioned for the first Lord Of The Rings Movies. That must have been 1996/1997. It was a great experience.

I am struggling to find somewhere to live. My probation Officer doesn’t like where I am camping at the moment and yet between them, welfare and mental health, they just can’t seem to help me find an independent living situation. Private rental is an option but… well… look man, my history has some shitty credit and bailing on properties with rent, power and phone bills unpaid, not heaps but some. I also left a place in crisis and, I am not real proud of this, I left all my possessions there. I packed what I could into a pack, grabbed two guitars with cases and walked out. It is not one of my best moments but I think that that is kinda what this blog is for, being real, so…. That was a long time ago and the only time I did that. I had been pleading with mental health, my family and my case worker for months to help me. The Ambulance had collected me twice already that week and I just wasn’t doing real good.

Usually when I’ve left with rent owing I had already arranged for the landlord to keep my bond so its not quite as bad as it sounds. I have been a great Tennant more, far more than I have been a bad one and I have matured much in the last two years. I do not think I’d be a bad bet as a Tennant now. I value my independence and the idea of having my own, safe, space to live, create and get well far far more than I feel at risk of self destructing. Every day I surprise myself with small thoughts and behaviours that display growth and maturity and give me hope that I’m gonna be ok now. Way too late for my love, my heart and my babies but, well, you have to take any wins you get in my line of business.

Having somewhere safe is the main thing. You would not believe the fear one feels locked up in a confined space for 24 hours a day with someone who not only means you harm but can easily overpower and hurt you without any rhyme or reason. The very worst part was that when the situation was finally resolved and I was removed from what was basically a hostage situation the screw in charge of that unit says to me “Yeah, we knew that was going to happen”, with a smirk.

There just isn’t any way to describe what life is like in there. I see the images, ideas and words on the TV and hear them on the radio and people just aren’t painted a truthful picture of what its like. On paper it all looks like quite a good idea but inside it, far from reporters or politicians and pundits…. well… I was in handcuffs, a jumpsuit and also handcuffed to a screw and was being led through Christchurch hospital once on one of my many trips to the hospital down there. This was only a few months after the chch mosque shootings and there were still cops with machine guns around and people were just a little more tense. The Lift door opens and I’m standing at the back of the lift with my chaperone and. the swarm of people that were intending to jump in stalls and they all decide they want to get another lift after all. One guy at the back pushes his way through and goes “I’m not afraid of you!” and he gets in the lift. He’s wearing black doc Martens and a “The Clean” t-shirt so I’m thinking “Cool, one of us”. Nope. He gets into a rant about how modern prisons are fucking holiday camps and how we should all be gassed like the good old days and my heart just sank. They are not holiday camps, gentle reader, they are violent, degrading, terrifying, hostile, evil places that throw the rule book out as soon as they have you in their grip. They are designed, in my opinion, to create men and women who, once in the system, will keep returning to the system. There is no “Rehabilitation”, its all about degradation and making sure that you end up so fucked that you have no option but to keep coming back. Because, the more you do that, the less society has to live next to you.

That is how it seems to me. I am lucky, I had a little hope and art and people to write to. I even had visits and now and then people put money into my prison account. I was alone though, I never met anyone else like me in there. Mostly people are gang affiliated and dead set on returning to a life of crime as quickly as possible.

Sorry, todays post kinda got away from me. I have been worrying that I am sharing too much to people who probably mean me ill-will. But, well, there seem to be more people who just like reading than lurkers so… fuck em. Fuck em all, aye? Gentle Reader? We are stronger than them coz we have love and hope and music and art. Things are slowly getting better. Really slowly but I am hanging in there. Hey if anyone ever wants to use my car, it’s just sitting there mostly doing nothing. Chur.

xxxm