I don't count the number of claims
that my government is incompetent,
I accept that such claims are part of the price
of being a grown up and being able to vote,
that I will be advised by a diversity of opinion.
I have to trust that whatever the opinion is,
something like it has been said before
and it was no more accurate then than now.
But I will read and listen, in spite of the uniformity
of mediocrity that I find often surrounds me.
I remain hopeful of something fresher on the horizon.
I was not 'born political', like some are.
The house I was born into avoided politics.
The adult take on politics was expressed as a code,
where all cynicism was hidden from the children,
lest the child openly by cynical toward their parents.
I was one such child. What Politics meant
was also obscured by the tabloid press
that my parents subscribed to, there
any political narrative in the news
had to be rewritten as an illiterate joke
with a banal punchline, for the adverts
that made the paper's profits to seem half truthful.
Nowadays YouTube brings me my world news,
which is to say I watch how America's sees itself,
and I know that it takes a lot of money to make the events
it portrays seem like a soap opera set mostly in a casino,
whilst presenting what appears to be a truthy explanation.
My mother might have been less cynical,
and more engaged with the television news,
had she seen how reports and Party Politics
could be remade as a kind of soap opera for export.
I don't mind being raised in the cheap,
Mother scrimping and saving every penny
she could find, to cut the corners to the future with.
Somebody has to live that cheap for others to set up
the waste-for-profit schemes that are modern Capitalism.
Where cheap living gets difficult for me
is the isolation and lack of skills that comes
from me living within my means.
When grown up friendships cost money,
and a social capital that I was raised to live without,
then a cheaper past means a cheaper future,
where the most I am to aspire to
is that my cheapness 'is sustainable'.....
The older I get the less I can find to say,
and the more I find myself caught up
in the minutia of grammar, and punctuation!
It is a recent trend in the media
for adverts for popular products
to talk about 'making memories',
as if families did not do this before,
whether with or without the assistance
of the technologies of their day.
How much is the spread this phrase
a reaction against the new awareness of dementia?
It seems that way to me, much more than
it is about the unity of family, when previously
memory was a given, regardless of how generous,
how mean, or merely banal, the events were,
that created the memory of family.
Back then a memory of an unhappy family
was better then having no recollection
of family at all, and whoever in the family
got away with the most wrong doing,
buried that in how family was misremembered
and made the greatest social capital they could
out of what would otherwise have been,
as an adult, memories of a misery laden childhood.
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| 'The Bridge', a 1990s painting Australian painter Rick Amor (born 1948) a scene he revisited in several published sketches. |
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| 'Evening on the Ti-Tree Shore', a 2018 landscape painted by Rick Amor (born 1948). I accept that these paintings will seem much more impressive when they take up the width of a gallery wall. |
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| 'Terraced House by The Garden' a 2022 painting painted by Rick Amor, an artist drawn to atmospheric landscapes, of which Australia has many. |
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| 'The Shore' as painted by Rick Armour (born 1948) here is the artists website. |
