God, You Really Piss Me Off

It's times like this that you really piss me off, you know that?

Because it's such a small thing you could have done, but you didn't. And I could get upset at the larger things, and I do, but just because there are larger things doesn't negate the small thing you didn't do. It just adds to it.

The sparrow was there when I got to work, in the foyer. Trying to fly out to its mate that sat beyond it through an invisible pane of glass. The door to freedom was right below. It could have flown out if it just flew down a bit, felt the breeze coming in through the door, stopped bashing itself against the glass.

But sparrows don't know anything about glass. Although apparently you know about this sparrow. And hairs on heads. You know everything that is going on. You could have done something. You could always do something but you don't. So often you don't. And I know the theological arguments, and I am at peace within myself with certain philosophical conclusions I have reached about free will and about bad shit happening and about healing and love and growth and etc etc and that's all fine and dandy but it still doesn't stop me from being really angry at you. Because it's different when it comes to animals. They have an innocence and a dependence on us, and we make the world so difficult for them to live in with our insistence on vomiting carbon and on foyers and on glass and such things.

I went upstairs and I was sad for the little bird and I hoped that somehow when I next went out to the foyer it had flown its invisible creepy coop. And so then an hour went by and Mary came back upstairs after being downstairs, and was visibly upset. Me and Mary are the biggest animal lovers in the office. We look at each other's photos of our dogs and coo. We say cynical things like who needs men when you've got a dog. Mary was visibly upset because the bird was still downstairs beating itself against the window trying to get out.

And so we went down. And there were two other people there as well. And we armed ourselves with brooms and scared the poor little darling who didn't have any idea what was going on, only that these weird smelling humans were coming at it. And we tried to coax it out the door but all it kept doing was flying into the window and then sitting on the ledge and then flying over to sit on the overhead lights, and then back into the window. All it needed to do was to look down, change its trajectory. Stupid thing. Trying to do the same thing over and over again. But yet we do that too, don't we, with our massively larger brains. And anyway, it's not true what they say about birdbrains even though it's a cliche in our lexicon. We think that size determines ability but it's been proven that birds can think and reason, beyond what they rightfully should given their brain size. Magpies grieve when their mates die; cockatoos mate for life; chimps virtually cry when one of their own dies and visibly go into depression.

And so that's why it upset me because this poor little thing was trying to get outside to its mate, and it would have been distressed in some sort of fashion, it's heart would have been beating fast, it would have been in pain bashing itself against the window, and it would be no skin at all off your invisible nose and did you do anything? No, you didn't. And I come out to leave work at 6pm and this poor little thing has been tiring itself out, and now there is a man with a bike in the foyer standing holding the door open, and people have been holding the door open all fucking day for this bird. And I prayed earlier in the day that if you didn't do something directly to the bird, whisper to it in birdish to fly down and out, that you would do something in the people, that you would inspire someone who was standing in a particular spot to move one inch to the right so that it was in the perfect place to create the necessary angle for the animal to shoot out the door. Or that someone would come with a ladder and a towel or whatever. It's SO not a big deal, right? People are dying every day of debilitating illnesses and drug overdoses and heartbreak. Why can't you at least give a bit of an extra helping hand to a stuck bird?

It was SO not a big deal. But we both know it doesn't measure out like that, because what seems small is actually big and vice versa, and you are love and all that stuff I know that in my bones. And I know lots of people will say it's not a big deal worth even worrying about but when it comes to these creatures my heart is fully open and it is a big enough deal that I have cried tears and I know it's some sort of prayer. I always feel this way when I cry to you about the animals, and it is you crying through me to you about the animals because it grieves you.

Even though you've got it all covered even when we can't see that, and that you know when this particular bird will fall to the ground. But even knowing that and knowing you grieve and care and love makes it even worse because you could have done something and you just fucking well didn't.

And I'm really angry at you that you didn't. And that you don't.

+++++

Edit: next day. Mary took some bread and water to the bird this morning, after it's day and night of no food. And she led a trail out the door, and it flew out. Yay for a happy ending :)

A Woman Scorned

Well I'm drunk on self pity,
scorned all that's been given me
I would drink from a bottle labelled Sure Defeat

Over the Rhine - Poughkeepsie

I don't go in much for self pity. Out of all the bad emotional habits, there are others I much more prefer, like underhanded self sabotage. The unstinting victim focus required for self pity becomes dull to me after about 15 minutes.

I can go for months without having any sorts of menstrual problems and then whack, down flows the black cloud and suddenly it's like a different world where all the colour's leached out and all the hope's done taken some trip on some downbound train spouting Bon Jovi lyrics.

It's just descended on me over the past few days this little black cloud and I feel like all my get up and go has got up and buggered right off. So hard it all feels, so hard. Such a struggle just to stand still. And I have a bloody headache.

Once I would try and fight through this and now I embrace myself, I walk into my house on Friday night and sigh and feel the house enfold me. I look to the Cirque de Soleil DVD I have to watch. It is surely time to go searching for some David Attenborough to top it off, to watch the wonder of the natural world and be soothed by it, somehow, even when the animals of the natural world have this awful propensity to keep eating each other. Time to immerse myself in some clay, to batten down the hatches and look after myself.

This morning it was too hard to swim myself up out of the mood. I do admit, when I walked up the ramp into the train station to go to work I probably exuded a bit of "Get out of my bloody way you bastards" sort of an air even though it was somewhat closer in mood to "Ahh, what's the point of all this again? Tell me, I doth forget." It is an unfortunate occurrence of human facial features that depression and arrogance often look the same out of one face and the time you most need someone to smile at you is the time they will most likely glare.

The young man and I, for all I can see from my single perspective, were most likely just as much to blame as each other really. In hindsight my bag was pretty overladen with stuff and obviously I bumped into him more than I realised at the time. But he was carrying a backpack slung over one shoulder and he bumped into me too. Oh, the single eyed focus of the self-righteous, more one-eyed than any Collingwood supporter.

Now, I've heard it said that when we recount incidences containing ourselves more than a few times we begin starring ourselves in a rather shinier role, and I am mindful of that. Perhaps I did bump into him more than he did into me. Perhaps if we were able to instant replay it could be found that my bumping was 23% more than his happened to be, and yet it is not how it felt to me.

"How about saying sorry you rude fucking bitch."

I had walked past him and was on my way to the ticket machine. I stopped when I heard this and turned around.

"Yeah, you," he sneered. "How about saying sorry for banging into me. Pretty fucking rude."

"Likewise," I retorted. Quick tempered young man, I saw the steam begin pummelling itself out of his ears. There were many people around us and they began staring at both of us. Time slowed down as it does in such confrontations, when it feels like everything is heightened and at the same time everything is muffled and I do not know how much I remember correctly.

I do remember, however his next words. He spat them out of his mouth.

"You fat fucking bitch," he said.

"You ugly prick," I said. It was pretty deadpan. Timing is everything in comedy you know. He wasn't really. Ugly, that is. He was quite an average, pleasant looking young bloke but you know, you take what your mind dishes up for you at the time. He started spluttering.

Whereas I should play poker. I have had so many years of teenage arguments with my father that I can stay stone cold and deadpan on the outside while inside I am seething, boiling, white hot, red hot. Of course it has a time limit on it. All that anger ends up seeping itself out and if I play my hand too long I give myself away, my voice quavering with the white and the red, my fingers shaking involuntarily. But right now it was coming out as ice, which INFURIATES young men with anger management problems.

The whole thing probably took 10 seconds. I walked towards the ticket machine and put my ticket in. See, there they were beginning already, the slightly shaking hands. The deep deep shame. You fat bitch. Obviously a few hundred more yoga sessions are in order.

The young bloke continued saying things I do not now remember.

"Why don't you fuck off and go and sit on someone's face, you fucking bitch," he said. Which sounded slightly less stupid when he said it than it does here but nevertheless still didn't make me think he was off to a Mensa meeting. He elaborated a little more on his strangely phrased thoughts, which contained the word "fuck" quite a bit.

"Perhaps an extended vocabulary might come in handy," I commented as the machine vomited my ticket back out at me and I stalked off onto the platform. He stormed off down the ramp out to the street. I could hear him for much longer than I could understand his words.

My hands fluttered over my page as the train came. I read the same paragraph over and over, all the way to Flagstaff. 'Do not cry,' I ordered myself crossly, like a child.

Can't let them see you cry. Don't let them see you cry. It feels to you as if your whole world would collapse and your soul would dissolve if anyone was to see you cry, if anyone was to know that the words of a stranger - you fat bitch - hurt you enough on the inside to make you cry. You read the same paragraph over and over, and you make it to work, and you tell a workmate what happened, and then you manage to get a bit of work done but it's the kind pity in another workmate's eyes who has heard why you are upset, and that is what does it, and you escape to the ladies room.

The ladies toilets, two toilets for about 50 women, that are always, always full so that you can never get a quiet poo in in peace, and now they are mercifully empty and the tears escape down your cheeks before you can hold the toilet paper up to your eyes.

You wonder where you have learnt this rule, the rule that says that no one must see you cry. You know where you have learnt it. It is a tight, tight, tight steel wad of pride that is lodged somewhere up under your chest cavity and no one, no one, is going to dislodge it except for Love.

Turn the other cheek, someone once said, but you didn't. Not today. Really, would it have been so much skin off your own nose to have stopped and said to the linguically challenged young man, "Sorry"? Really, now, girl, would it have? If you had, then you wouldn't have had to box him up into something mean and negative, would ya?

Naw, I don't be thinking it would have taken any skin off at all.

Sigh.

Entitled Football Supporters

Some of the Hawthorn supporters I sat near tonight were such a dismal pack of entitled little bastards that the evening was 20 times more hellish than it needed to have been.

My team got comprehensively beaten by our arch rival. It was never going to be a pleasant experience. But these dudes added a lovely patina of barely contained fury to my already rather dismal viewing experience.

Seriously, there's some blokes out there with real bad anger management problems. I understand why such a thing could be prevalent in today's society. I think men oftentimes feel lost, not exactly sure of how they should be behaving in a post-feminist society where women have somewhat found their voices in some ways. Sometimes it seems that men have been left feeling a bit emasculated. Maybe a bit like women have found their voices and men have lost theirs. Or at least had them stifled under waves of political correctness and lack of social cues on what is acceptable and what isn't. Sitting at the football is one of the few places where you get to yell and scream and vent your spleen and it's fine.

To an extent, though, surely. Because surely in the end, losing a game, playing like poos, being outcoached and outmuscled by the team you hate the most really doesn't entitle you to behave like petulant brats, does it? Some sort of perspective has to come into play at some point. In the end, you know that ultimately it's just a game, no matter how you doth love it, and it's only one game within a season, as thoroughly disappointing as the episode was. Your team has many injuries. And if they are playing a shocker, at some level you know that the players are not losing just to make your weekend start off all wubbly and wascally.

Several amongst the bunch of males surrounding me this evening called our team c***s. The guy next to me screamed his guts out the entire game and abused basically every single player on the team whose colour he was wearing. Some other dweeb threw away his scarf in a fit of childish rage at the end of the game.

I understand the whole anger thing. I was angry myself. But maybe some men need to consider why their self-identities are so flimsy that they can feel entitled to behave like a big tantrum bubby simply because their team has had a bad night at the office.

Their team, and identifying with and being part of that team, gives them that lovely little winning feeling. We all love that feeling. But if you need it too much, then the players, the individual people who are talented enough to be playing professional Aussie Rules, are lauded and loved and exalted but then ripped down when they don't perform to scratch. As if they are just wind-up robots that give you a nice feeling, like rats pressing down on the lever for more drugs, rather than living, breathing people.

And a living, breathing entity. A sporting club to which many people belong, or at least identify with. Part of that adherence involves loyalty, doesn't it? A willingness to stick with your team through "thick or thin"? To be willing to go with the losses as well as the wins, rather than smacking away the drug dealer when they don't give you your fix.

Some Hawthorn supporters need to lift their game even more than the playing list. The playing list has interrupted preseasons and half their backline missing. Some supporters behave like they have interrupted psychologies.