Years back I went to a past school friends party, and chatted with his mother in law. She was recounting one of the students back in the day that had got ‘all huffed up’, ie way too self important and above station. I became more intrigued when I sussed she was talking about me. The years had passed.

Indeed I’d danced the sugar plum fairy in the schools Nutcracker suite, wavy blonde hair and tights. That and a few other baubles had gone to my head. It was time to sport some off-uniform swag, get a detention, pull wheelies on the 125, price mags for the Cortina.

New Zealand wide, garish displays of outwardness were not encouraged, one was to stay buttoned down to a simmer at best. She was right, my chum’s mother in law. I’d started off under the radar but had taken to dancing like a showpony.

My dad would say that when you score a try, no hero moves, it’s not about you. 30 odd others on that field, coaches, ref, ambo’s on standby … jog back to the halfway like nothing happened. Go minimalist on the chuffed bit.

Being raised to not show off, when I go ‘look at me’, like this blog, there’s a voice saying ‘Baz, maybe not’. My dad used to call people in media and advertising ‘Fly-boys’, cos they’d flit around and stick to anything that smells rich in the moment, gone in an instant the minute something more tasty appears over the way. He considered such types to be a bit light on character. It’s conflicting … right in there, holding back, what to do.

Some of us, moi included, have our fingerprints all over the web like the neighbourhood Tom. Posting on social like we’re feeding pokie machines. What’s that about ?

Media geezer from the 60’s Marshall McLuhan claimed a change in info parameters when he observed ‘the medium is the message’. TV was getting its game on, before we carried the medium in our pockets. You bet pop will eat itself, and it most surely is. We’ve now fallen under the spell of the pocket. The Greeks gave us Narcissus, and seems we are no less than he, in love with our own reflections.

All the more given our Pocketeer’s seek we become info-enmeshed, from mush to intellect and back, so many strangers so little time. The expectation of constant availability, offerings of pleasure and fear, and that gravity defying trickle-up of money, info and soul. Seems the idea is to over-run human capacity then pass the epi pen’s around a surrendered populous. Overstimulated on hi-vibe in a digital lockdown. Uppers and downers, clever pocketeer’s running a dollar each way.

Buy me a coffee

The age of anxiety is certainly earning its keep, and my job description these days ? Sifter. Imagine thousands of midget info assistants running round our heads prioritising and binning the oceans of info. Busy 2026 heads have we.

The medium is absolutely the message or massage, cabal’s of AI gatekeepers with tabs on words published, voices heard, films viewed, data accessed, rabbit holes ventured, realities altered. We’ve new-skool access where everyone’s an influencer, youtube star, follow me, click and share, where the pocketeers can pull or spin any algorithm anytime. You’re someone ? You’re no one.

Going through the gears feeding our online selves is a lot of work. We square off our boasting and humility in a kind of cage fight for one, values in the ring and a few bruises later, some compromise and integrity we can work with. It can be a beat up.

Being on-line fit as a content maker means showing up and showing off regularly. And as consumers we need stamina to stay abreast of our domains. Surveying multiple domains requires the staying power of an ultra marathon runner, mental agility of a chess master. Venn diagrams everywhere, crack out the crayons and sheets of A2.

For me it’s about connecting. Whether that’s with a handful of chums and followers or just myself, it’s important. It might be about vanity and self interest, and it might be more than that. I worry about aloneness, mine as much as others. My life has lotsa peep’s in it, it’s not that. I feel adrift as a privileged westerner swimming in individualism, our neoliberal creed. The great misfire of economic growth.

Adrift from real connection with mother nature and her mycelium nervous system, the insects, animals, birds and tree’s, adrift from big picture collective, community both human and existential. Sure I can swim and sail and bush walk, do some sundown omm’ing on a coastal walking track, cuddle the grandkids. But I’m aching for the wider collective beauty that we have, the love that we miss. Yearning for more shift in fellow consciousness to help us Come Together in the face of our challenges.

For years I had one very close friend that I never met. Not Jesus. Michael Leunig, an Aussie cartoonist, for years ‘of no fixed abode’. His offerings informed me for decades that I wasn’t mad or alone. Double phew. I had another close friend who this weekend a year ago took his own life. He lived in a house but had become ‘of no fixed abode’, a terrible aloneness in his heart that was difficult to reach. Not so much loneliness, but a fortressed aloneness. Kiwi’s can be big on this, it’s not a resilience I admire.

Yes, aloneness. I wish everyone in the world could stay at my place, I’ll go hard on the cheese toasties, there’ll be a sofa somewhere to crash on. I’m even building a tree house out the back, could pop some short chums in there.

I guess when I smash out a bunch of song vids, blogs, interviews, I am doing my best to bridge both a personal and systemic aloneness. I’m ranting my view of the world into space in the hope that it resonates with a handful of people, and is of some value. The process helps me think sideways, broach areas of concern with decent enough intent and sometimes humour. There’s always some self indulgent toss, a few passing showers of self-doubt, but on a good day I feel the fear and do it anyway. When I feel connection, every day is a good day.

In posting stuff I’m asking people for their most valuable thing - time. I have no expectation that anyone will click on the links. I hope that whoever reads or watches stuff I put out, will in turn be excited to share their thoughts too. We all have observations and reflections. One of my biggest buzzes is to turn people onto sharing their stories with others. To be a bit vulnerable. Trust and be trusted. I can’t remember who I should attribute this quote to, but it’s a keeper:

The world has everything we need for a thriving human civilisation, except a communications system that shows us how to build it.

So let’s both suggest and build it while we can, cos in the future we’ll be facing power and internet outages, and online will become even more of a fickle friend, like not show up. Imagine the end of swiping, we’ll be checking our thumbs into rehab. A few km radius of analog reality could become our lives. #1 tip for this blog ? Like most of them, double down on goodwill with actual people, ones you can hold hands with, drape your arm round, hold, cuddle, help dig a garden with - our physical neighbours, they won’t evaporate as easily as our online ones.

I wonder if what I feel, a desire to connect, to receive love and have love received, is playing out in all of us. I am happy to be all huffed up and show pony if that’s what it takes to invite others in. So sorry Dad, sorry my school chum’s mother-in-law, if I’m a bit too rant & spectacle. It’s an attempt at connection in an anxious world.

The rants may or may not resonate. Please, rant back, comments box is there, a soapbox in the online square.

Arohanui all, and I’m leaving you with a selfie with my dear chum Royce, fellow teacher, flatmate, techno bunny motorbike riding beautiful clever and conflicted decent geezer, gone a year ago. I found a pic of us in London, off to a Ken & Barbie party. Barbie’s even wearing her 1987 stockmarket crash Amex card earring. Must’ve been quite some occasion.

Till next time :)

photo: Wendy Ford

Blessings brethren.

I love staying as raw as I can to the ‘mood of the globe/nation’, local hood, vibe of a sports tournament, a reality TV show, whether the budgie’s on edge. Chatting to randoms features big, and I’m full of gratitude for the chance to play music in pubs, connecting with people through tone lyric and beat. Often the choice or execution of the songs is neither here nor there, the music’s just a tool to reach out and include.

It was with this in mind that I ran a gig as the Very irReverend Bazza Caitcheon. All about breaking the shackles of enslavement. Thursday nights I would take the pulpit in Parnell Auckland, and sing about love, deception and redemption. Handed out the hymn books I’m a believer styles, and drank a lot of Guinness.

The Irish music scene still had some steam, pubs were fit outs of churches. There was hands on healing for the sinners, confessions between songs, a pop-up shop of blessings and salvation. The reverend could also do some merciless Highway to Hell, damnation only a pint away. Punters knew to watch for when the reverend turned.

All went south when I did a gig out west on a sunday afternoon - Bar full of bogans, bikers and V8 boys. Went a bit far on the theatrics gaffa taping sinners hands to the bar, and they did Not take well to the reverends hands-on healing. Ungrateful heathens.

Had to put him on gardening leave after that shocker. Jesus back in the wardrobe. I asked him the other night if he fancied a return to the vestry - was a second coming out of the question. It’s a big job, to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Told me he’s visioning a shopping mall celebrity tour with Krishna, Buddha, Mohammed, a couple of norse gods, Justin Bieber impersonator and Bob Geldof. Told him it was a bit bloke heavy, and couldn’t he include at least a hologram of Olivia Newton John. Said he’d talk to his people, no promises.

Support the good Reverend

Most soul influencers sing from the same songbook, elevator pitch being ‘do your best not to be an arsehole’. For those that need the fine print, this can need breaking down into specifics, so we get some general rules. The Inca’s for example had 3 - Don’t steal, be honest and don’t be lazy. No slouching when there’s an irrigation ditch to be dug, potato beds to prepare. Gotta be a hardy jesus, the Andean version.

God knows in our world at the mo, we could do with a flock of saviours.

So where would he/she/they start, this Jesus … The financial sector would cop a right kicking, break some toes on the money-lenders tables, private equity managers on the Rack, some smiting of the political ponzi’s and those greedy lobby lads, hands on for those in the military machine, and maybe if time allows, smoke some weed with the meek, they’ll at least know where to get good ganja.

Would today’s Jesus be all over social ? Maybe she’s already a tiktok star with a burrito stand in Mexico City, or peddling soft drugs on the canal banks in Amsterdam. Maybe he’s retired and volunteering in a Hanoi hospice, ground control to major Tom, or offering fruit at a shinto shrine, a buddhist temple. Doing time in an american prison, or a bouncer at the Taumaranui Cossie Club getting plenty of hands-on.

If you were Jesus what would you do ? Me, I’ve got a ten pointer good to go.

1. coffee first

2. learn the accordion

3. get some superpowers

4. second coffee

5. work the house, talk to strangers

6. dance on the sunny side of the street (make time for this one)

7. use superpowers to smelt military gear into spades

8. create viral tiktok vids, Dances with Spades

9. bugger off to play accordion and smoke more weed with the meek, while the world goes crazy working their SpadeDance™ moves in the brassica’s.

   Job done, capitalism and wars back in the box, a crucifixion free global redemption. Oh yeah and,

10. give the superpowers back.

Imagine that, a world where our military mission is to grow and share food, not reign hell from the skies. Surely every make, model and flavour of saviour would want that. To regenerate soil and celebrate local resilience. Honour the insects, the flora, fauna, critters both land and sea. Imagine giving them voice for checks and balances on commercial interest. That’s what my Jesus would do.

And dudes, we’re all Jesus - those trippers back in the day, Galilee, the Haight-Ashbury of it’s time, populous bonced on mushrooms, and then the power plays of preferred interpretations coming in cold - second, third, fourth hand, I mean really. Do we absolve our responsibilities to some higher friend or foe ? What if We were that friend/foe, the higher power ? I think we are, we all have our third eye, our dream state, that subconscious cardigan missing a button but still a dependable friend.

We’re mostly not wearing white robes and sleeping under bushes, and true, seems there’s sweet fck all we can control given the big stuff. However when we make a move in the right direction however small, the instinct button goes Yes, right move. As it does No, on a wrong move. Anthropologist Margaret Mead stated "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." You’re onto something there Mags.

When we got the covid lockdowns, my Pacific rim Jesus (I’ve got a few), pricked up her ears. A chink in the armour of the machine. Where’s this heading she thought. Change needs a window, are we looking at a peep hole here, or a ranchslider ? We were hardly blinded by the light, but for a short while it did get the rosaries moving, the joss sticks burning.

My jesus has come up with a new phrase, BounceBack. It’s what happens when we venture into new territory, a voluntary move or taken by force, only to scurry back to square one, first chance. Square one might not be fully functional, but it’s familiar. I have to get on my adventure jesus to avoid BounceBack. There should be an adventure jesus Barbie, crampons, ice axe, climbing to the heavens. Adventure is never comfortable or it wouldn’t be called adventure, and jesus Barbie could take the hits, make Mordor by dusk no probs.

It’s so much easier to take the bounce, and sometimes I do. I’ve some quotes sprinkled round the wall of my office shed, my escape pod. Such as ‘courage is not a lack of fear, courage is fear walking’. Am going to conscript some of these whakatauki into a 2027 manual for self.

The manual, working title Book of Bazzarus, is already full of helpful lists like the one earlier in this blog. Kind of like a selection of observations and take-outs for the curious wanderer. All straight up, free tickets to heaven.

The pulpit’s always waiting, tea and scones for afters, apples aplenty in the garden of Eden. Blessing be upon us brethren, we are each of us mind benders, heart givers and truth tellers. Here’s to keeping our kumara dry and a sharp eye out for BounceBack.

Keep the faith brothers and sister 🫶🏼🫶🏼🙏🏽.

Till next time :)

Excuse me Mister, but I’m a Mr too, and you’re giving Mr’s a bad name, Misters like you’, sings Ben Harper. I’m with him. There’s a type of bloke that lowers the tone.

The historical lean towards PowerBloke leadership is understandable. As more of us feel like pawns pushed off the board, we look for a fix, so we’re easily drawn to the entertainer. PowerBlokes always have a court jester. Such an item leads a merry dance and says he’ll fix it. Of course he will. When things don’t pan out and the Blokes sense a pawn swarm, tone on the turn, it’s bunker down/double down. Powerblokes fear pirates and peasants with pitchforks, lanterns in the night. I would too.

Buy me a coffee

They mostly like to accrue stuff and status, despite such a fleeting lease on property and wealth. Gotta be fun to dance your worth around the globalised financial mkts and back before breakfast.

Control is hands down the Bloke’s first move on the board. Nail the narrative and the rest falls into place, sorted. But for that pesky online world, which keeps busting out alternative truths. Serious PB’s know this and buy up the portals, mainstream, fringe, whatever, to champion particular lines of reason, negate others. They’ll clean you out if they have to, actions once taken in the night but now daytime’s all good too.

We’re definitely best-by on capitalism’s over-reach, a knowledge both arresting and motivating. I see it more as human under-reach, ie we tried the World as a Market, splendid for a while here in first world land, but now we’re running out of World. Damn.

We under-reacher’s are excited about the work we can do to help Mother World back to some form of natural rhythm. It’s hardly selfless, there’s no end of self interest when it comes to saving our arses. Good news is there are peep’s doing this, stuff that is within our control. Lets not forget our got-it-right PowerBlokes, there’s some goody’s, using their heft to build community, collab on good stuff. Big up’s you lot.

‘Bloke’ is used loosely here, not gender specific, and it’s a jovial dufferish label mostly one of ageing endearment, a younger version of a geezer maybe. Some of the PB’s we witness in action definitely deserve a terser nametag. Like evil narcissistic fckrs. Or woefully underinformed. The two conditions often pair up. But in keeping the tone of this blog light and forgiving, Bloke it is.

Onto it PowerBlokes know all about the importance of containment. My intermediate school principal was one. I recall the school getup - matching overcast grey shirt, shorts, socks in sandals. Principal mirrored us in his grey suit, sweet of him to notice. Told us to line up, shut up and put-up. No need to shout I thought at the time. In hindsight, poor teachers, battle-weary for sure. Serious seeds of dissent took root that year. My chum and I snuck into the staffroom through the backdoor one night at badminton, nicked their krispies and pissed in their tea urn. Heartless. I can’t believe I just admitted that. Six of the best. By form two I had the school record. Playground respect doesn’t come better than that, sticking it to the man. PowerBloke Jnr right there.

Now that I’m 36, I’m a lot more seasoned with PowerBloke interchanges. I can smell the bait, read the assault and prepare for rear guard action before Blokemoves catch hold. Doesn’t mean I always escape. Those pincer movements get you from the side, just look at the banking and finance industries. How many arms does your krishna have ?

Powerbloke likes the suit when it suits, but undercover casual chic runs pretty hot these days. In fact the suit is more often the tat now of the lowly paid security or hospo worker. Such a clever flip of class struggle in the costuming dept. Ace move. And poor chaps the blokes, they carry a lot, power comes with responsibility whether you’re ready for it or not. It’s not easy being up there, there’s generally a try-hard or two looking to usurp. So the PowerBloke becomes a night watchman. Sleep can require medication when Lady Macbeth’s giving you the side eye.

I’m in there too. I might mock the type, the PowerBloke, but I can be one, where’s my medication. When I put a guitar on and play a gig, I’m the local incarnation of yesterdays rock god, a would have been if I could have been has-been. There’s stars in someone’s eyes I guess, the soul screamer, the vegan folksinger, guitar hero, hurt before but willing to try again country music lonely heart. I am the holder of the torch for those few hours, I am PowerBloke_music, rebooting dreams and memories for the punters. Can’t touch this.

When the kids were younger, me I’m dad in the house, alpha male, issuing commands to the kids, PowerBloke right there. In my defence I did try and be PowerBloke_light, suggestions and rewards rather than commands and threats. Authority can wear slippers and find a sounder outcome.

I spotted a good number of PowerBlokes rallying deals at the recent NZ Rural Fieldays. Sizeable payouts in the dairy industry means a lotta guys talking turkey on big machinery. Most of it diesel dependent but we’re not mentioning that today. Blokes in gumboots and swandri’s upwind of the silage pile.

What if I was one, a moneyed, status’d PowerBloke? Would I rail against my own ilk ? Or be ‘sweeeeet, not gettin off this ride with its baubles of wealth and choice’. I like to think that ship sailed, the baubles of wealth at least. I recall deliberately sabotaging some opportunities cos I wasn’t up for the snakes and ladders of its aspirations. Dunno why, self aggrandisment, whether stuff or status, just hasn’t been my jam. Sure I’ve been selfish, possessive at times, spank me. I’ve also been railing against Reagan/Thatcher’s twist in the tale ever since my freshly minted economics degree. But you know, it’s hard reasoning with people who live alternative truths, when their livelihood and how they feed their families, is dependent on belief, I‘M no different… It’s just not going to land. Working on that.

Goodwill is the big payer. I’ve made some real powerplays in attempted goodwill. I say attempted cos yeah, some bellyflops. It’s when you put the welfare of others/mother nature at least up there with yours, if not before. When you work hard for community, not your own stash pile. My own experience is that rather than lessen yourself in service to others and nature, the inverse happens. There is born a new kind of wealth. A big warm inside capital gain. Given our limited tenure on this planet and our need for collective, that’s really the only power we have to gain - or lose. Goodwill.

Gotta be medication time. Music and dance cross lines. I’m thinking I might offer monday evening music jams to PowerBlokes - the proud/closet/recovering/aspirational, likely a community notice on facebook - I’m visioning a mens circle with harmonicas, some dance moves and we can all suck and blow to our hearts content. Great therapy especially if we lost the footy in the weekend(see below). We’ll work with Wheels on the Bus first and then I’ll break out the accordions, you can chose your colour, who’s in ?

Till next time :)

Screengrab here of Blokes losing the footy, the Chiefs going down to the Hurricanes 60-5 in the Super rugby finals - Hamilton took it hard. I could go to work with the harmonica’s right there.

Not entirely. Depending on the fcks, I can give a few. But the age thing ? Wotever.

Currently I’d pick my actual age at round 36, tho my birth certificate suggests 67. Someone’s wrong. I’m a decade or two deep, counting back the yrs. From memory it was my 50th birthday party when I let the kids run the bar - a beautiful irresponsible chaos. Yep. was about then the serious unmaturing began.

There’ve been a few turnkey moments … early days Zumba and I’m watching this very zen person dancing and smiling, while I’m grimacing away down the back, both my feet in the blender. Observing my vibe-smiling dance sister happy in her work got me thinking … ‘wouldn’t that be cool, I’d love to do that too’ … the smiling bit at least, the footwork came later, and within no time my disposition shifted. Sometimes it just takes one person. Now I prance like a happy gazelle, catch me if U can. True my short-term’s a bit shot on remembering the patterns, could be some 67 in there, but I’m now relishing the gay abandon of dance and togetherness. I love all my homies in the dance hall. It’s a high.

Then there was 4 yrs ago I put in a couple of summers working on a landscaping team, boss was 25, I loved that. An honour to chisel steps into some rich geezer’s air bnb hillside with a bunch of 20 somethings. Hard work shared, always a bond in that. And the chats we had. Lucky-as Baz.

I never set out to un-mature. 6 formative years in Hamilton are a decent headwind to contend with. Had I paced out another 6, kept my head down, I’d have been in the running for Mayor, or even Nat party member for TronWest holding the line on compliance, conservatism, complacency, Classic Hits and comfort. But no, punk rock and Uni took care of that.

So no fcks given bout the passing years, the whole scene just gets rowdier with the passing of time. Can’t wait till I unmature back to Yr 10 or 11 at school, where my whole world was mischief. A bro and I burnt Mr Widgery’s hedgerow eyebrows when on cue we blew down the gas taps in science causing Widgee’s burner to go monster, that old chestnut … spilt his condy’s crystal’s all over the show as he sprinted for the door, brows still smoking. Locking us down in rooms all day, fancy grown ups thinking they could get away with that. I hear it still goes on, the school thing.

My body sometimes calls me into check as I unpack my newfound youth, but it’s also in there with me, ‘yeah Baz, we’re good, bend me shake me use me.’ Been some system malfunctions but mostly we’re a happy pair, body and I. He/she/they continues to give me consent, and that is a much valued permission.

It’s the heart, mind and soul that I feel really get the spoils as I count back the years.

Full disclosure, I’m high as a fckn kite at the mo. Not on weed or anything, tho it seems half the peep’s I know have a prescription now, I’m just permanently delighted.

Could be I’m still glowing from my tour round some of NZ’s Envirohubs and sustainability centres . I’ve got a bunch of endorsements saying ‘Baz is a gibbon on acid, spectrum 4 sure, but yeah we recommend you do his workshop.’ It’s a bit like collecting a few certificates at prizegiving, must be doing something right.

No it’s not the ego on this occasion, it’s the numerous groups of righteous citizens I’ve come across doing amazing stuff in the community space - many with an environmental/food resilience take. I love it when people do stuff that serves others first, not pursuit of personal coin or property. The truly wealthy.

In each of these communities there are one or two other unmaturing gibbons on acid making cool stuff happen, and loads of others on team, varying less gibbon, still some acid. These peeps are beautiful troublemakers.

A few blogs back I mentioned a book that really rang true… Rutger Bergman’s ‘Humankind’. He’s now begun a substack and this is his first post , angling it at people redirecting their talents into something that he terms a moral seriousness. Maybe mayor of Hamilton could’ve been worth a shot after all. Depends what kind of moral seriousness we’re talking bout.

I think when we’re energised by something bigger than us and we know it to be right in our hearts, we rise beyond the mercantile world of money and pomp. Of institution and title. Moves that involve risk and courage, like leaving a career, making a stand as an unpopular minority, a fringe dweller. Do this when we’re not ‘sorted’ as many in these communities aren’t, and we risk homelessness and poverty. It can be brave work.

The good news I have to report is that there are growing communities around NZ doing very cool stuff with all moral seriousness, mostly unfunded. A sizeably larger demographic than the original peace sign wearing lentil loving greenies. God bless ‘em.

Yes, the tribes are growing, not before time, and this more than anything else is what keeps me so excited about my advancing youth. Community is on a roll. Not that our mainstream media would have you know that. Still a menu of anxiety and bad news on the bleeds/leads front. Hence my mission to help create local community storytellers to celebrate initiatives, bottlenecks and work-arounds.

I have never been more excited about the future, it happens with getting younger. I’m stimulated by the changes approaching, cos fck me this construct we have as humans, how we co-exist with each other and Mother Nature - or not, so needs a rebuild. Lots of our brothers n’ sisters in less privileged parts of the world have been under the hammer for generations. NZ is not all innocence either.

It might take its pretty little time to fully unpack in our picture perfect Hampton’s of the South Pacific, but shared duress is on its way. Half the worlds currently awake at night on scroll feeding the anger bots punching in cortisol codes. Glory be.

So again a call for all hands on deck. Bury ourselves in endless Netflix series if we must but a more sage approach would suggest we do more than just circle the wagons round the bruises. Time to get our hands in the soil, metaphorically and literally. Interesting blog here, nutshell quote being “While the wealthy cling to logistics and illusion, the real defence strategy is soil and local growers who refuse to let their communities starve.”

Here’s the 60 second challenge for my maturing peers. Start getting younger on it. Whatever we have - our time, positive vibes, experience, money, property, compost, stuff, use it to give traction to those who are inheriting this dance, get morally serious on it, get un-old. Join me in becoming less responsive to expectations of decorum and obedience, more aware of the greater us, get scared, try things that seem impossible but we know to be right. Six impossible things before breakfast.

Devise ways to hang with younger generations if they are not naturally part of the domestic furniture and be prepared to change our thoughts on what’s right and wrong, again and again. Refresh the browser. Rock our own boats. Be part of the new visions that are forming for how we conduct ourselves going fwd.

I look at my kids and their kids, all of them free tickets to a younger take on stuff. I’m both passing the baton and jumping into the mosh pit with them. Cannot recommend that last bit enough. Watch out for BoomerDrop though, that’s what happens when you launch yourself off stage and your vibe is all wrong. Rather than catch U, Gen Z will part like Moses doing a runner and you’ll splat on the floor like a full nappy. Still, some points for trying. Tip - padded rompers for the mosh pit.

It’s said that when you hit 60 you’ve done five full zodiac cycles @ 12 yrs apiece and your life begins anew, which would make me 7 yrs old. No chance, I’m well into my 30’s … I hope I make it to 7.

Till next time :)

It’s looking like we might have to ease up a bit … slim chance of going anywhere if the pumps run dry. Penny’s dropping like flies as our kiwi dependence on offshore refined oil for virtually everything is laid bare.

“You’re the second person that’s said that to me this morning” Evan replied when I told him he was now likely to be everyone’s new best friend. Ev is a bike mechanic, an expert, and he was tweaking up my 3 seater. Seems the common bicycle is set to become more a valuable item with each passing day. Even more than my spare accordion I’ve lent him. Thinking we’re gonna need lots of accordions to mop up the tears.

Duplicitous bastard I always am, I’m currently driving around Aotearoa in my petrol burning HiAce, running smartphone video workshops for people involved in Environment Hubs and sustainability centres. Folks primarily into community and local food resilience. I should be biking, instead I’m foot on the gas blasting Classic Hits. Some would say I’ve let myself go.

I’m workshopping folks with dirt under their nails, helping them shoot, edit and publish short video stories on their phones, so they can make noise on social bout what they’re growing/doing and how, bottlenecks and workarounds. I’m lucky to be meeting some pretty cool cats.

Talk about timing, geopolitics and all that. Our culture has always been heading toward a forced localism it’s just When that’s been raffled. How far we can walk, paddle, cycle and sail may well define our worlds. Food, shelter and conflict resolution, the big picture KPI’s now touching down home and personal.

Supermarkets, iterated as they are around diesel supply chains, may be powerless to keep up. Composting, bottling, preserving, pickling, fermenting et al gonna be bigger than the All Blacks. Forget MasterChef, we’re looking at MasterVeg, down in the dirt with wormcam. Batman’s gone, it’s now Bugman. Better still BugGrl - patriarchy in the back seat for while, cool off boys.

I’m on the third leg of my journey, begun in February. Now into March I’m off round the Sth Island. I pitch the sessions as a yr of film school in half a day. The full shebang is 4-5 hrs long, and some just one or two hour quickies. The workshops are free/koha, so yeah another passion project that costs rather than earns, freedom camping my way round in the van, dipping in the surf and streams, bludging a shower here n’ there. Doing it cos I love turning people onto storytelling, and I’m super nosey. I want to see what peep’s are doing for themselves in growing and sharing food. So it’s more research I guess, and that great buzz, talking to strangers.

In Thames, a Coromandel of community gardeners, recycling centre and kiwi care peep’s, wetland planters and activists looking to frustrate the fresh attempts of the mining companies, currently going gangbusters cos ‘there’s money in them there hills’ … gold silver, minerals.

Carterton, New Plymouth, Wellington’s Sustainability Business Network, the Te Aroha marae at Kai Iwi, Nina’s living room in Picton. All memorable sessions, happening because of one or two motivated individuals in each locality are gathering up citizen storytellers and newbies keen to be, and making it happen. Bless these people, community driven gold each one.

Working it out together. In absence of any real global leadership, we need to step up. No one is coming to plant our kumara’s. Angela, kuia at the marae session chuckled “we’ve been doing that all our lives, the māra(vegetable garden) is a big part of the marae, feeding people is # 1 and sure there’s Pak n’ Save, but we’ve got lots going on just out the back here”.

We could do well to elevate indigenous ways, foods and herbal remedies(rongoa), community sharing of task and reward - in step with navigating our imminent local and repair focussed economy.

It means a realtime gear change, re-imagining how we spend our time. The diminishing of institution - education, career, portfolio. We’re all going to be growers of food, enablers of water, clothing, warmth, builders of shelter and keepers of peace and equity. Unemployment unknown, all hands on deck.

Don’t freak. Mother nature needs this, and we’ll work it out if we keep our cool. For me it’s bout finding a personal zen, making peace with how we got in this situation, what lies underneath our feet now, and navigating what will likely present ahead. Google maps won’t help, it’ll be our skillsets, grit, stamina, connection and compassion. Fun times.

A fave whakatauki here: Courage is not a lack of fear, courage is fear walking.

Before I left home on this leg, I took some photo’s of my own māra. We couldn’t live off it, but our wee ¼ acre has supplemented the eftpos food sources we use. Our home on Waiheke has crap soil, all clay and stone, so it’s been several yrs of composting seaweed, horse poo, coffee grinds and other waste foods from fruit n’ vegetable outlets and cafes. I’m a food waste scavenger, a wierdo, happy around the smell of decomposition. This summer at our place there’s been lots for the bees, and a reasonable amount for us in the way of veggies, fruit and herbs. Not expansive volumes, but it’s a start, we’re learning what works and what doesn’t, bottlenecks and workarounds.

These pics remind me of the magic of growing food. Chickens/eggs could also be a go when I get home. Ecuadorians love to spit roast their Hamsters, so maybe some hamsters. Gotta have protein. And can never have enough broad beans and other legumes.

I’m an average gardener - I plant a whole lot of stuff in only half prep’d soil, then get busy on other stuff neglecting to clock the daily needs of small seedlings. Like water, which is a scarce commodity on Waiheke island. It comes off the roof or not all. Does make one highly respectful of weather patterns, living rain cloud to rain cloud.

Parked up above the Patea River mouth a few nights back, I chat to some Filipino builders out on the breakwater, set to fish into the night before heading back to Hawera for work. ‘We are so lucky to be able to do this’ said one with good English, all of them beaming and chirping filipino. With Patea Maori Club’s famous hit ‘Poi ē’ the soundtrack of the day, it’s a joy to hear this different language, this different music, mixing it up with Te Reo. That’s us going fwd I think, this melting pot of cool peep’s. Choice also to see there’s still some bounty in the ocean, fab.

Right now we’re past the halfway mark March 2026, gas prices creeping up. The real issues are soon to be bigger than pricing. They are supply and availability, of lots of stuff. Even if the various seaways like Straits of H open tomorrow and it’s business as usual, it’s still coming, opening act already here.

For generations our financialised industrial growthwashing narrative flew from the top of the pole, unquestionably. ‘There is no other way’ said Thatcher.

One of NZ’s big retailers moving globalised consumer goods, once proudly broadcast they were ‘making the desirable affordable’ … the desirable is set to be barely affordable or available. Let alone desirable, a lot of it’s consumer tat.

For we that haven’t been paying attention, it’s unnerving. Collapse of commodity mkts, financial mkts, mass redundancies, a global depression significantly worse than the 2008 GFC, something more akin to the great depression of the 1930’s only with climate patterns spazzing out and a fck lot more people on the planet competing to be fed.

“You can’t come out and say that, people would panic”, were the words of a friend of mine who works in national security, when I suggested the government of the day missed the opportunity to kick start serious local food resilience around the country. The issue at hand was the first covid lockdown, and we didn’t know whether we were facing the black plague or a simple flu virus, or as some were inclined to think, a load of conspiratorial bollocks.

I wanted to hear the Prime Minister come out and say something like ‘we don’t know where this is heading, what supply chain breaks we’re facing, so we’re encouraging all of us to start a veggie garden, and we’ll incentivise it, here look, I’m already rocking a silver beet in a bucket. Let’s go Y’all’.

Imagine if the corporate welfare then given to businesses, was in part given in incentives to dig, emergency containers of spades shipped in, garden supplies, assistance and tuition. Sometimes shit’s just gotta get real. I’ll own it, I’m a composting hard arse, medium rare on the outside, cooked in the middle.

A few years back our local community board had a sterling initiative - two free fruit tree’s to every suburban resident with a berm. Renting or owning, didn’t matter. Council dumped truckloads of compost and mulch on street corners and it was up to us to dig the holes and keep them mulched and watered through the first summer. I have a fig and guava, both on the berm, public fruit for anyone to help themselves. Next door there’s citrus out front. Awesome initiative.

Meanwhile some collective anxiety - back above the equator, one or more psycho manboys playing with matches could well unleash a nuclear popper.

It’s watch this space. Are we gonna see more military tech people pummelling Gaza styles, or maybe even the crown jewel of our age of anxiety, a stakes high nuclear popper.

They’ve been marketing some shocking new armaments in the Ukraine and Palestine. As it’s always been through history. Thermodynamic, thermonuclear, white phosphorous, dudes lining up to buy these batshit cruel advanced armaments. “Small, contained, strategic” they’ll say … whatever that means. Should that escalate, it’ll be a challenge to habit significant swathes of the northern hemisphere. Challenges for the Sth too.

Lord of the Rings and Jacinda Ardern have helped put New Zealand on the global stage, so billions know where we live. A paradise of relative peace, an escape from military madness, a chance to survive maybe even thrive. We’re not the best economic performers re GDP growth, but these indices will likely lose gravitas. Possibly a good thing. We have soil, water and for now, sunshine, all the ingredients needed to generate food in our local hoods.

I’m thinking we could find hordes of people globally, seeking passage on whatever seagoing vessel they can and heading our way. Container ships, trawlers, anything with diesel that can possibly take on the Pacific and Tasman seas. It will have nothing to do with airports, passports, visa’s, retina scans or customs officers. Follow the money, there’ll likely be multiple refugee runs for some vessels, others likely to just beach themselves, mission complete. Our immigration stance and enforcement abilities at that point won’t be able to keep up.

Similarly for military powers. If warships from the US or China or wherever want to rock into our waters, they just will. What are we gonna do? Fly a peace sign and flick them with a wet T- towel ? Whichever flavour of saviour men-of-war seize the anchorages will be a moot point. Any of these vessels of menace in our harbours make us a target to other manboys who wear a different strip.

Sounds Hunger Games but I don’t see it that way. Said manboys should know we’re entering the age of aquarius, that the old schtick is up. And yes, they’ve missed the memo, n’ bets on they’ll throw their toys every which way on the way out, already are. There’s such good revenue for stakeholders in warfare, and we’re conditioned to coo over a good revenue model. Such a conflicted species aren’t we ? And very late to the party.

Bottom line is this: mother nature needs this modern world, this oil world, to stop. She birthed us, and she’s playing her hand in the great humbling.

So let’s get with the play. Walk, paddle, cycle, sail, and get to know the spade like our lives depend on it. Cos they will.

I’d stowed the laptop for months, lost in looking after grandchildren, wheezing away on the piano accordion (yes, I know), biking, sailing, zumba, gigs, chums yada.

Just the ticket.

The grandchildren thing I didn’t see coming. One minute I’m doing a jig cos I’ve got my kids through school, next thing they’re procreating. My eldest two are first out of the blocks, a couple apiece. Four grandsons ranging from two to five. I’ve pimped up my mountain bike with a seat on the back and a shotgun job up front. No shortage of passenger requests or fitness opportunities for grandad.

Classiest act last few months was moving in 24/7 while daughter and husband gapped for Europe leaving me their 3 and 5 yr old for a few weeks. Awesome exhausting experience. I got some help and we handed them back alive, even got a certificate, reckon I deserved it n’ all.

Small peoples worlds are magical places. The unhinged excitement optimised in a flash, the flow states, the big feelings, the volume of action … master jugglers of the analog our kids.

It’s said the creative adult is the child that survived, could be something in that. At Uni I popped my head up in the adult world and thought fck that. I’m pretty sure I got into high school teaching to keep the teenage me alive. Would’ve been in my 30’s when I finally left school.

The luxury to be able to go analog, step back from Google docs, has been enabled by becoming a geezer, and its financial baubles the gold card and pension. It’s the bumper boomer bonus pack of free public transport and a few hundy for doing nought. Oh yes and a mortgage-free cottage to reside. Not sure that’s fair on our young ones grinding it out but my snout’s in the trough. I am a VeryLuckyBaz.

I’ve been flirting with organic me for a while now. Back around covid, I took a dive downhill in front of the screen, working on an umpteenth draft for a client. It was my mirror mirror on the wall moment, I was done, my soul a puddle of mud. Cancelled my adobe subscription at sunrise, vowing to never edit another video again.

Yes, well, here I am in the ones and zero’s again, your average citizen tapping this blog on a phone, luddite light. AI would prefer I went full cookies and cream on it, triple chocolate on sundays, and some days I do. But booting the thing down, like completely off, is also I’ve discovered, a joyous freedom, if a little selfish in the spirit of progress. AI wants to know me better, I’m hesitant to suggest it’s the new friend I need.

Lately I’ve been more consumer than producer, call it research. Substack and ilk have exploded. So many thinkers, so little time.

Another act of rebellion, handwriting and doodling, paper lists, shortlists for lists, and pleased to say I’m rocking a print diary - not sharing calendar info with the cloud. Who knows who’s really flying that magic carpet. Musk? Metaman with his move fast and break things spiel? If I lose the thing (diary that is) then I form another plan, a bit like being on the run, making it up, reinventing.

My gratitude for technology is running a bit skint at the mo, I do need to work on my attitude. For all the brilliance of app-land, the pace of booking travel, accom, transferring money - assuming you have any, google maps, tai chi tutorials (watched but seldom attempted), there’s the opportunity cost of in-person human relationships. Digital both connects and quarterises.

As a kiwi in the provincial pre-digital era, hands up we were often compliant holders of nutritionally limiting truths. When the dial-up modem hit town, it offered investigation into wider threads. But in the same way that rock n’ roll’s rebel pelvis became swiftly commercialised, freedom of the web has doubled back on itself in a rainbow of algorithms, virtual pots of gold, water water everywhere but not a drop to drink. The mirage of intelligent precursive convenience, with a shadow side of subjugation and serfdom. Of course awesome times for those of us that have leveraged technology to our advantage… but for a limited time only, watch this space.

I think we yearn for our analog. Other day I was gigging at a local bar, one minute before I’m due to start, the house system’s playing Hotel California, of course it was … the ‘you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave’, a fitting metaphor for our digital world. EntertainerBaz has barely said hi on the mic before a punter yells out a request … Hotel California. I reached for the meds. Maybe it was they needed a real person to play their anthem. Like playing chicken with a jukebox to assure we comfortably numb Peep’s that there is still a human representative reminding them of their organic selves, a smiling singing meat puppet. They call it live music, as opposed to dead I guess.

Disengagement #42 has seen me hoovering some actual books, ones with paper pages. Two recent winners worthy of mention, ‘Humankind - A Hopeful History’ by Dutch author Rutger Bregman, and ‘The Lot’, words by Melbourne cartoonist Michael Leunig.

Historian Bregman reveals that the human species is hard wired to collaborate, not compete, and that our hunter gather ancestors were in no way adversarial dog eat dog. Quite the contrary. He posits our problems began when the first quantity surveyor decided to mark out a choice spot and call it private property. Says he, sharing, kindness and working together have always been the core of our DNA. Vying for dominion over resource was always an unnatural construct, engineered by civilisations early self anointed puff daddy’s, evolving into the competitive ladder pulling sociopathic shitshow we today call society. Steady Baz, there’s been some good stuff too. But taking the long view and the meth fuelled acceleration of the last 50 yrs WinnerTakeAll, nah, we’ve fooled ourselves.

Leunig, whose cartoons graced the Melbourne Age for decades, suggests that our only chance to make the shitshow tenable is to take every opportunity to talk to strangers, that our connection with the unfamiliar is mostly revelatory. The ultimate analog.

Two authors, same conclusions. One a researched and referenced academic, the other a gifted creative musing on personal observation. Throw in american author Mark Twain’s claim that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”, and it seems we’ve got some roaming to do. Hunting and gathering for new relationships.

I’m no author of repute like these geezers, but my own research globetrotting a couple of years back came up with the same. I don’t think I met a single arsehole. People are awesome, more often open and generous. Extend a smile, a hand of friendship, speak in their language (or attempt to), and souls meet. The deeper the immersion, the trust, the greater the connection. And if people rip you off, spare a thought for the children they have to feed, the elderly they need to care for. Put yourself in their shoes, maybe value connection over possession. Ooh that’s such a difficult western concept, and I acknowledge my white privilege here where billions globally struggle for food and shelter. Message here is trust yourself off the tourist trail if you go wandering … adventure is not comfortable, or it wouldn’t be called adventure.

Technology has given the developing world a leg up in a globalised economy, also given them a kick in the crutch, presenting the developed world the chance to fck over developing countries with even greater efficiency. Cue the world bank, IMF, a grab bag of other predators with their fingers deep in the resource buckets of the global south. There’s decades worth of The Economist magazine and their FreeMarketFreddies in the witness box there.

Getting out in nature is the ultimate analog. If it doesn’t work for you, you haven’t found your magic place yet. Keep the faith, you’ll find it. If you’re familiar with mother nature - she’s hard to miss, then you likely have a bunch of magic places. That’s called falling in love. It’s not just Shrek that makes it to home base on that one, it’s there for all of us. ‘Mother’ nature is the ultimate corporate hermaphrodite, chair of the board, CEO and the entire labour force. Not sure where middle management fit in here, or anywhere for that matter.

For my part, 2026 is looking like Go Time. The Hopes, fears n’ good ideas project is keeping me excited in a perfect marriage of analog and digital. There’s going to be more grandad time for sure, maybe some more blogs and pisstake songlets like I did back in covid days … and spreading the gospel with smartphone storytelling workshops

And if all that fails there’s always the piano accordion. One of the four instruments of the apocalypse, in there with the banjo, bagpipes and a hippy on a djembe drum.

I’ll leave you with a thought from the considered western hippy of eastern philosophy Alan Watt’s, who scribed these thoughts back in the 1960’s:

“The problem is that we are now wielding the incredible surgical instrument of technology with trembling hands, and what concerned Huxley was that such power cannot be handled constructively by anxious and alienated men with as fundamentally hostile attitude to nature”.

Till next time :)

Obedience is the enemy. I had plans to cover the sails of my little keelboat with this message a few years back.

The occasion was a maritime defence exercise hosted out of Auckland’s Devonport naval base combining allied warships, and I planned to spend a couple of days sailing to and fro in front of them. I started prepping the banners then got hit with a nasty flu - it never happened.

War is futile, we could probably all agree on that, but still our leaders find reasons. My advice for anyone dependent on the military - national or mercenary - for their families food and shelter, is find another way to pay the bills. In this gig economy we now inhabit, most of us have to keep re-inventing. Now’s as good time a time as any to move on from the uniform.

If we hand on heart believe we’re doing the right thing, ridding the world of terrorists, defending our patch, whatever, then best we keep peeling the onion.

There’s some good stuff of course, our navy involve themselves with cyclone relief in the Pacific, fisheries patrol in coastal waters, praise all round. But if we’re called upon to service the twisted narratives of an allies’ geopolitical interests, the old Us and Them thing, sit that one out, obedience is the enemy.

The silent bloodshed lies in the shell games of the financial world. Military interest pivots around leverage of resource and money, a marriage made in hell - shop soiled bedpals those two, grubby to the touch.

Without giving you the full 101 macroeconomics tirade, tossing aside the gold standard and the Glass-Steagle act were two of the sketchiest moves american presidents ever made. Despite their electioneering rhetoric, these ‘leaders’ then as now, toe the line, or, as JFK found out, you’re gone by lunchtime. And now with BRICS and the global awareness that the USA has gone rogue, time’s shortly to be up for the hollywood of hegemony and their economic dominance. Some say it already is, and not before time. The global financial system, hundreds of yrs in the making, the last 50 on meth, is pure and simple ponzi. Gambling, where the house always wins. The house in our case is Mother Nature, and he/she/they cares not for quarterly financials, the sugary donut on the boardroom table. Contrary to popular belief, economic growth is a dark horizon to be setting sail for. Don’t fall for the growthwashing.

I’ve taken a keen interest over the last few decades in the United States, haven’t we all. They have reprehensible foreign policy, Team America World Police. Shady at the best of times, it’s that old chestnut of insecurity and greed, and the inevitable grab for power and control.

Sadly their domestic policy is little better. Which is unfortunate because the folk that inhabit the States, like anywhere in the world, are awesome humans that just want the best for their children, elders and communities. The States have given rise to some formidable intellect, the best of creative minds.

But the twisted narratives that generations have built around the american dream ? Smoke and mirrors. And here we sit in NZ, the USA as allies, the Five Eyes intelligence sharing complicity we suck up. Dubious.

Longtime analysts like Noam Chomsky have always followed the money as they say, to peel back the layers of oval office and pentagon endeavour. And the real power, financial gravy trains and fat controllers that sit behind them. Many great observers - Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Orwell, Huxley, Margaret Atwood, William Burroughs, George Carlin, musicians like Frank Zappa … have for some time been calling bullshit on the backline of self-interest and greed.

Currently I find sounder narrative coming out of Chinese leaders mouths, more considered thought, a country playing the long game. State controlled capitalism seems to be the current flavour of their saviour. And biding their time. They don’t tend to drop munitions on countries willy nilly like some we know. They could, but they don’t.

The USA is new, a youngster, still emotionally finding it’s way, hormonally erratic. Their current leadership is a fine reflection of this … spoilt manboys in their playground bully years.

White Empire (an affectionate term for the States, coined by the global south), carry recent enough shame in genociding american indians, profiting from the slave trade, and now propping up any regime (eg NATO/Zionism/Taliban/al-Qaeda/Iran/Iraq the list is endless) that will divide and conquer; buy/sell arms, spin a buck, and steal resource that’s not theirs, under the guise of protecting their interests. I’d suggest that the US’s interests lie within their own borders, and they have no business bullying other nations, whether Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine/Middle East, Latin America, Africa, just about every corner of the globe - a stakeout of multiple military bases, standover tactics every which way. No business at all.

American foreign policy is global terrorism incarnate. They’ve invested multiple billions in PR via every channel imaginable to convince us in the West that they are here for us, the flagbearers of freedom and enterprise. Rubbish, always has been and now the emperor has no clothes. Here’s looking at you USA, you have lost your way. China stretches back thousands of years. I would not want to live in China with a dissident spirit, I’d likely get disappeared if I challenged their narrative, same now in the States, ICE etc. But I can see why kiwi Rewi Alley took a shine to China. The all for one and one for all attitude, a collaborative rather than competitive culture, well it makes sense to me. The mountains of consumerist junk that they spew and we eagerly lap up, not so much. But I get their gameplan, with most of the world now playing Chinese checkers, the host holding the board.

No, I don’t think Xi, Modi or Putin are the answer to our current challenges as a species, but it’s clear to see that american leadership and the course they’re setting is delusional and ultimately defeatist.

Stateside the Dem’s, Republicans, red/blue, tweedledum/tweedledee, whatever, are a bunch of owned Wall St bitches, complicit the lot of them. The system is a rort and even the misinformed mainstream media consumer can sense the rat under the floorboards. As a consequence we’re turning our backs on the buy-in, aware that a lot of our past truths have been sifted and shuffled, served up as brainfog.

Money, power and war… the shit going down in Palestine, that’s been decades of US backed land theft, displacement and extermination. I visited Israel in the 90’s, it resembled California, an american outpost all modern with glass and steel high rise, a desert land pimped up with wealth, paved roads, modern infrastructure, the USA’s 51st State for sure. And so it has recently become glaringly obvious. Zionism is not Judaism, and it’s now getting a lot of airplay on the world stage as a crushing ideology of othering, of cruelty and genocide. They’re not alone in dirty deeds, but that doesn’t make it alright to pass trauma down the line. 2 years ago in Peru, just before the Hamas uprising, I spent a week in a hostel dorm with some young Israeli’s fresh out of their compulsory training with the IDF. Got talking, and I couldn’t find one of them keen to go into Gaza. One said to me ‘Baz we’ve been asked to inherit the vengeances of our elders’ … how cool, after all the trauma’d othering they’d grown up with, they didn’t see Us and Them. Ran into a few of them in Bolivia post-Oct 7th and they were sad, not angry, cos they knew what was about to come. With recent reports that the IDF have a lot of young reservists like these refusing to turn up for duty, I’m thinking they’re working it out, that obedience is the enemy.

Men in suits and military fatigues. Has there ever been a weaker more cowardly strain of reptilian human than those prepared to use aviation to drop munitions on populations. Dresden, London’s Blitz, Hiroshima, Kissinger’s Cambodian B52 lolly scramble, Gaza. Ad infinitum. We have a long way to go, obedience is the enemy.

Back here on the home front, New Zealand’s ‘leaders’, men in suits, women with shoulder pads … in all my voting years, and I’m a grandad now, I’ve never seen such a vague bunch more out of their depth than our current finger pointing government. Bless them but they are ideological beginners with little economic or emotional literacy. Even my second cousin (yes we’re related) ShowPony Winnie™ could do with a moral compass re-swinging. For Winston, magnetic north has always been a television camera. Sorry bro, hurts to say that. But not much.

So what to do.

Hitherto handles like capitalism/socialism, left/right are no longer fit for purpose. I am a believer in hard work, but simply for self-aggrandisement ? That wont get you an invite to my barbie. Ownership is an illusion, mother nature owns the lot, and ‘profit’ whatever that means to you, needs to be returned to the communities from whence it’s generated. Including ecological communities - the ladybirds need a voice. Call me yesterday’s leftie and you’d be wrong. I question everything. I’m looking for a new structure within which we can conduct ourselves, and it likely won’t take hold with any real intent till our current one has a few more 2008 GFC seizures.

Wealth for me is having people around me that give a shit, feeling like I belong somewhere, that I’m not an island. And valued, of some purpose to a greater good than just me.

And yes I need some form of food, shelter and clothing. Tho this doesn’t need to be opulent, I already am. Mere fact I’m a white boomer with a NZ passport and right to reside makes me priviliged beyond the wildest dreams of those struggling in developing nations. I have the luxury of time to tap this out on laptop, the luxury of a laptop, access to electricity and wifi. I am the 1%.

In todays economic climes, globally and here at home, our kids struggle to find jobs, cos the concept of having one especially white collar, is on the wane. High schools have not so much lost their way as never found it. Putting teenagers in rooms behind desks for much of the day … what the actual fck is that about. Most media we consume is mindless distraction. I was a schill in both those service industries. What they could be, and what they largely are … don’t get me started.

Our kids will likely never own their own shelter, they can barely afford to rent it, unless they are lucky enough to have a mum and dad with a trust account like NZ’s current “I’m sorted’ Prime Minister. Boy is that ladder puller in the wrong job.

Our petrol and diesel comes from far away. We currently need it to prop up our material oil dependent lives, at the least to get food to supermarkets given our relationship with food has largely become an eftpos card. Mother Nature doesn’t need it, he/she/they would prefer we left the fossil fuels in the ground, scientists mostly concur.

So again, what to do ?

I was recently priviliged to interview a bunch of locals in my community about their hopes, fears n’ good ideas. Not a paid job, a passion project. I did this because I think that we’ve become insular, scared, a bit alone, and we’ve no reason to be. My thoughts are that as humans, what unites us is bigger than what divides us. I hosted these on this blog, shared on community social media, now up to about 25,000 views over 50 interviews. That’s big for a small community. Seems like we’re interested in what our neighbours think. Who knows, such sharing could grow connection and empathy.

As the new realities bite, I’m thinking our worlds are going to indeed become local. As far as we can walk/run cycle paddle sail. Now that will be very interesting. No skiving off to the Gold Coast on a JetStar members deal for the weekend. Getting to Hamilton from Auckland might take a few days, a sleepover at Huntly on the way. Could be the leg up Huntly needs. Akld - Dunedin would be like a month or so on the Te Araroa trail. A sailboat across the Cook Strait, fancy that.

One blog recently suggested we won’t be teaching our kids to code (AI has that down), but to compost. Growing food within walking distance will be the new black, everyone gainfully employed in food, shelter and conflict resolution. Or go hungry with the real possibility of becoming food/compost ourselves.

Of all the people in my life at the moment, two of my favourites are women in their mid 80’s. There’s Betty, fit as a fiddle, knits, grows veggies and pickles/bottles and preserves like there’s no tomorrow. Always at the saturday market on Waiheke Island, each week she makes several hundred dollars for one of a number of charities. Then there’s Pauline, a piano accordion teacher. Plenty of core strength this one, her 10kg+ of breathing chest furniture swinging off her shoulders. She teaches and regularly gigs the thing, on the bill at a bar I played not long ago.

These women are inspirational, they are my leaders. They’re not only physically and intellectually together, but emotionally fit for purpose. Way more so than the calculating duplicitous FartSuits we see at the helm of the likes of the USA, UK and NZ.

One could argue that women have a higher emotional intelligence than men, a stereotype far from watertight, but there might be some truth in there. My thoughts are robust leadership first and foremost requires the individual or entity to have their emotional shit together. When I witness world ‘leaders’ coming together for this or that summit, it’s invariably men in suits. There’s sometimes a sprinkling of oestrogen but largely it’s an ageing boys brigade. The suit is intended to convey a just-add-water respectability. I find the more suits on stage, the handshakes for the camera, the less credible the oratory when their mouths move.

These people are not my leaders, these men in suits.

We are slaves to a globalised neoliberal structure that no longer serves most of us, we serve it, stressed and anxious hunger games proles. Minimum wage slaves tethered by subscription serfdom, held to ransom by guns and butter. Before too long, overheated financial markets will bomb and take our developed privilige with it. We’re not going to like it.

It’s really down to what the likely triggers will be - there’s a few contenders, and when, and how the downstream impacts will present. This is bad news but also good news. The current game is simply not sustainable. Indigenous cultures may have seemed primitive to my thieving european colonising ancestors, but we badly need those indigenous smarts in order to live within nature’s parameters, or what’s left of them, in order to survive as a species.

So yeah, obedience is the enemy. Try practicing selective disobedience, we all have a moral compass, let’s use it.

Arohanui all xx

And that’s a worry.

Our fascination with the sheer volume of upsized story and it’s modern electronic transport means we have to fight to process or retain anything that isn’t shortform, most of us too exhausted and flooded to be fucked. Thousands of fleeting impressions every day. If we’re paying attention, we’re under siege from a million maybe’s.

Even the sun rising in the east and setting in the west is up for debate — if Fox News says so.

Narratives have truly gone feral with town criers everywhere waving brochures promoting the flavours of their saviours. There’s plenty on the menu, food that sits well with my tribe, and I’ll have a double helping thanks.

Truth is malleable and sticky, flung at the wall and spilt across 100 lanes of highway,

Ed Bernays, the acknowledged father of C20th public relations and propaganda, seized on the opportunities to sway public perception, using a grab-bag of effective emotional triggers. Using the early tech tools of last century, he refined and ramped up the spin.

Nothing new there over the sands of time.

We think of unhinged twisters like Hitler and Trump as the more recent posterboys of Bernays deceit, but they’re everywhere … the velvet voiced and sandpaper-rough fictioned-up fact dispensers, dervishes of tribal truths.

We’re all dropping like flies, genuflecting to naked emperors flashing screengrabs of quick fixes.

Can any of us agree on what reality is anymore ? Maybe … find out what to think, after the break.

It’s a great work in progress, the human journey, and not without it’s moments.

Mother Nature’s pretty out front about it all, while the financial sector plays the old hide and seek ‘coming ready or not’, and in amongst it all, we recalibrate how we live, or might live, in the future.

Me I believe some implosion is unavoidable in order to move forward. This is both exciting and scary. Likely we’ll live less grand and more humble existences.

Depends on your reality. Confusion is the hardener, the catalyst that sets the resin. Once that goes off then there’s likely little softening of stance possible until the whole thing cracks from stress and we’re left to play phoenix from the ashes. Uber eats likely won’t be on speed dial at that point.

My reality (today at least) can be quite a lonely place, though less so as I find more fellow humans emotionally confident enough to discuss our confluence of existential crisis. Namely the fast food 3-pack of financial sector collapse, ecological stress and societal meltdown. Each joined at the hip with the other. Add a medicated mental health environment dealing to anxieties fuelled by the trickle down of end-stages capitalism, and brethren we are righteously fucked. Your truths might come up with a completely different scenario.

My parents reality was different — they were born a handful of years after WW1, into a land licking its wounds from a significant loss of young men that never came back after ‘winning the battle’ for the British empire. By the time they were 8 yrs old they were into New Zealand’s version of Steinbecks’ Grapes of Wrath — the great depression, where nobody had a job and you either turned the land around you (a front yard/paddock) into food or you starved. Everyone bottled preserved and pickled food for later, at every opportunity.

By the time they were 20 they were hands on in WW2. My dad and his brother went off to Europe with rifles, again to be antipodean fodder for the empire. Dad made it back, his brother didn’t.

In the years following, many of the ones that made it back worked tirelessly on building public infrastructure for the good of all. I’m proud of my mum and dad for that public service. There was nothing lazy or indolent in their tribes collective efforts to build utilities and community for the common good. Quite the opposite.

Guess my politics; it’s definitely not everyone for themselves.

By the time I was 20, a new war was gathering steam, my war.

Western leaders like Thatcher and Reagan were rolling up their sleeves Bernays’ styles and selling up the planet for profit. Egged on by small country ‘neo-liberal early adopters’ like New Zealand and Sri Lanka (who got their neoliberal sell-out on first in 1979 and have now, as you’d expect, imploded). These ‘leaders’ and their corporate enablers led the way to ‘privatisation’… ie selling off stuff that wasn’t theirs to sell. Essentially buying and selling the planet with all it’s riches including its’ people, enriching private entities mostly focussed on their own aggrandisement. Business 101, the shareholders must have a return.

As if the planet was ever for sale. How narrow/dumbass/self-serving are we to think we can best mother nature. Truly a high5 Homer Simpson ‘Duh’.

These last 50 yrs, most of my life, are just the steep part of the exponential curve of delusion, that’s had 400 yrs of direct theft-by-empire, and before that, millennia of power and control wrestling over dominion.

My reality now is realising we’re fully dependent on our eftpos card — assuming we have any credit on it, to feed, transport and shelter ourselves. That the skills of my parents and grandparents to grow and preserve food are now only held by a small number of peep’s. That shipping supply chains of petrol/diesel may or may not make it down to NZ going fwd, and our ageing electricity grid — when it falters, will leave us barren.

The brochure promised much more, so there’s some shock and awe in these realisations. That we have little or no agency, have allowed ourselves to become dependent on things we have no control over. Let alone knowingly (or not) raping our planetary home to pad our comfortable western cells. Unbelievable, but we’ve gone there, boots and all.

My reality is realising we could do well to network the peep’s that live in our local hood, ie as far as we can walk/paddle/cycle/sail, stocktaking fruit tree’s, gardens and edible wild foods. And composting everything in sight like there’s no tomorrow. And building supportive relationships with immediate physical community. Cos once breakdown (no gas at the pump or food in the supermarket) gets a head of steam on, it could move more quickly than we can comfortably respond and we will be left with just our neighbours and what we have collectively to eat. One hopes it won’t be each other.

My reality is observing small numbers of people not just getting these ‘truths’, but acting on them to reduce dependence on the uncontrollables, and work on regenerating the guts of Gaia.

It’s also observing much larger numbers of people frozen in the glare of the headlights, doubling down on getting what we can out of this crumbling system, because our rent/mortgage/rates and feeding of kids depends on us harvesting whats left of the machine RIGHT NOW — albeit while fully cogniscent and impacted by it’s stresses and residue of decline.

My reality is living in this duality, keeping the bank balance a layer or two away from the red, while fire-walling off some hope and possibility for my children and grandchildren. It’s spending time in front of the mirror along with the fingerpointing. It’s attempting to grow and learn more about growing and preserving food.

My reality is realising all the unravelling of system that needs to happen, what we call ‘work’ or employment, education and schooling, our relationship to food and each other, our entitlement dropping a few pegs. It’s realising that very little of this is going to happen voluntarily, it’ll likely simply happen to us, and our choices will only be in how we respond.

And this shitstorm is difficult to act on with any real intent now, w/out getting demonised, doomslayed or locked up.

All our realities, truths and biases have been a lifetime of experiences, influences and impressions, the making of our longform narrative of what is and isn’t. Having to find a place round the table for new realisations and truths is hard work. I’m not 21 anymore, but I feel like I’m just getting a run-up. Exciting and scary all in one.

So how are you doing ? What’s your reality, where do your truths live ?

Localism

Been Ages since I’ve blogged, so hi again. Where am I at, what am I on …

Google tells me I’m on an island off the coast of Auckland city, New Zealand.

One of 10,000, where some live the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine. A New York Times travel feature recently called us the Hamptons of the South.

“Hands up anyone want this assignment” … Well, fly me round the world with my rose tints, and I would wax lyrical about anything too. Cheers NYT.

On my island there are the well-to-do, then lots of us that service them. I’m mostly in the latter bunch but on a sly day can be found hanging on the shirt tails of the former. Privileged.

For now we have food and shelter, my children, and their children.

In that respect we are fully paid up first world lucky.

Lucky to enjoy this seaside largesse by virtue of birth, a cottage purchase a decade ago and a great network of community chums.

Shit’s going down overseas — as always, and there’s a few potholes on the roads closer to home. Unsavoury truths are circling and descending.

Some, like Russian paratroopers, already landed. Mother nature’s started wheel clamping us before we’ve even stopped the car. I know as do lots of my peep’s that we’ve overshot the mark in our quest for the modern world.

The whole thing showed so much promise. Plenty of narratives always on offer and tellingly we went for the aspirational one, the acquisition one, the ‘profit/growth’ one. Lots in the catalogue, so much choice …

All that time we thought it was all about us. For a while it was.

Following the fissures of the 1970’s, we popped the cork on the 80’s winner takes all.

Dancing on the tables to the free market’s runaway hit ‘I’ll Have That Thanks’.

Especially when it came to exploiting and extracting our planets resource for economic growth — a good thing apparently, depending on the economic flavour of your saviour. Me, I’ve always been a JK Galbraith economist, comb-over to the left.

And now we have to chill it the fuck out, crawl into the chai tent and dribble for a while to recalibrate. Will we? Well, the modern human engine is a hungry beast.

Pulling the brake is just not going to happen. Cop26, Greta Thunberg ? bless.

So it’s going to happen To Us, already is.

Pick your geopolitical hotspot, load your drones.

Pick your expanding desert belt wasteline of depleted soils and failed crops.

Pick your oceanic plastic small things riding on the currents.

Pick your production and supply chain maybe’s

Pick your billions on the see-saws of obedience.

These are most twisted times we inhabit.

If you’re after an angle on the Russian sit’n, the first part of this guys blog has resonated with me the most. Not the latter part. I’m a dove not a hawk.

He could be right, but I can’t go there.

I have never been more alarmed and excited in the same breath.

My wife said to me when our first covid lockdown happened here in New Zealand — 2 yrs ago now, ‘There’s no need to look so gleeful .. “

True, I was riffing on it bigtime. Even though it stopped my small business dead in it’s tracks. I’d spotted a chink in the armour, the latest rug-pull sitting on the bench of our fast times. Not so much the virus itself, more the kickers that come from the cutoff’s in business as usual. New and exciting territory for sure — terrifying but essential. Ask the Lorax.

Reflecting personally, it’s been and still is, a fascinating trajectory. 42 yrs ago I was a freshly minted macro-economics grad. I liked the rebel energy of the free market boys n’ girls rolling seamlessly into boosty promise-projections. But I found the focus lacking in dimension, the patter a bit skint.

Integrity, empathy, take-a-man-at-his-word, trust, all a bit pawned in the wake of heady times. The now infamous rollcall — Thatcher, Reagan, American foreign policy, Rogernomics here in NZ; none of it smelt or felt right to the touch. Blogged bout this before

Now in 2022, the leveraged boom-bust bubble gyro’s are spinning on max, GFC 2008 just the curtain raiser.

The Lorax might be loving the supply chain peak production neolib meltdowns, but We’re not going to like it, not one bit.

And trying to get a handle on it … smoke and mirrors, choose your tribe, commentators mewing predictable schtick.

Who to believe? Where is there robust leadership ?

So much clutter, so much to defrag …

We’re open house on information, so we think we know a lot. But really we’re Generation Sifter — big mouth whales dragging for plankton, endless spume firing out the top, least I hope there is.

We’re not only very tolerant of being misled, I think we quite like it.

You know, tell me something I want to hear, give me hope, lie to me if you must, have a happy day. Media oldboy Marshall McLuhan would be handing out the tabasco suppositry’s by now if he were still with us. Fahrenheit 451.

These coming times seem like a new dystopia — and they will prove to be.

The last five decades ‘normal’ have expediated our arrival to this place.

From here on it’s looking more and more like localism — networking community, growing food and the purpose and connection that come from these challenges.

Will we ‘go without’, be hungry ? Quite likely.

As we’re impacted personally by contemporary change and pennies drop, there’s confusion and anxiety. We already know lockdowns and their ricochet’s have rendered having a job, or viable business, as all a bit elastic.

Though we now know a fair bit, we are largely atrophied to any meaningful shapeshifting. Cos we can’t — as first world fossilfuel feeders our relationship to product and service is electronic and hydrocarbon rich.

Now figure a future with few if any cars/trucks/flights/shipping/big box stores yada, & keep biggering the figuring as peak supply, supply chain fails and markets nursing downwards wounds, penetrate our ability to keep up our level of comfort, convenience, consumption and civilisation.

No food in the supermarket could change a lot of things. Diesel for the trucks and where I live, ferries that transport them ? One would hope, or would one ….

We cashed up a lot of booty in a few short centuries, mostly a few short decades. Easing up is the new black. Key to our survival is now getting the carbon back into the soil. Not into the sky.

My elevator pitch these days is localism, growing food sources within our physical communities, rural and urban. Compost is the new rock n’ roll.

We’re all going to become gardeners and educators. Food, shelter, community and with it, conflict resolution.

Shifting gear on personal narrative is hard work, harder than growing food. We’ll all need a counsellor.

My wife’s one of those, lucky me. She works for a budgeting foodbank service, helping peep’s down at heel keep an even keel, or get back on one or maybe just even find one. Food and shelter stuff — the cheap seats at Maslow’s show.

Various of her stable are homeless, or about to be. These guys have got a head start on us. Some live in cars, others live nowhere, others still are in unsavoury domestic situations, and none have much chance of getting a rental — not that they could afford one, thanks AirBnB. All here in the Hamptons of the South.

Break it down brethren … how far can we walk/run, paddle or sail ? I reckon we start scoping out space, water sunshine and soil in our hood’s. If you live in a town, spare no berm.

Can be done though we’ve lost a lot of valuable knowledge. Indigenous peoples had sustainable relationships with our planet for millennia.

When Cuba lost their diesel/petrol amongst other commodities just 30 yrs ago, they fended off starvation doing just this, growing food in their local communities, urban and rural. Water/sunshine and soil that’s alive with micro -organisms will become even more critical.

My chum Richard thinks the greater Auckland area, pop’n closing on 2 mill, needs 1,000 urban gardens. I’m with him, front lawns into food forests same with areas in public parks. Go full guerrilla and dig up the roads, a row of parsnips down the centreline, fuck cars. Traffic lights could make great hanging planters.

Despite a handful of people working on it in my local hood, at our local marae, not forgetting various residents going hard on their veggies and fruit tree’s at home, we are not food resilient by a long shot. We beach hippie boomer semi-retired’s and our offspring, we’ll be bleating like hungry lambs.

In my community we’re a little more anxious now, less certain that the ground we stand on will hold. That’s some nervous energy we carry. Time to sequester that energy into the soil.

I’ve been waiting for this, a significant break in transmission. Humans living within mother natures confines — who’d have thought ?

Drop the bass DJ, I can already hear the sub’s rumble, the scaffolding tremble, and there’s not a disco biscuit in sight.

There’s people overseas desperately fleeing as their lives are mashed by war — I’m lucky to have the space and safety to even muse this stuff.

If only our soldiers would put down their weapons and pick up spades. If I was Gandalf ….

The real war is our collective survival and for this we need mother nature, always Chair of the Board and CEO, to be honoured and that means an end to our modern behaviour. Localism brothers and sisters. Forget cars, trucks and all their hydrocarbon-hungry cousins.

It’ll happen to us, be ready and welcome it, it’s time :)

I finally got to Europe in 1994 — a rather belated OE. My soon-to-be wife and I returned home to begin 1995, pregnant with elder son. We settled, staying put in NZ.

Save some brief trips to the USA, Sth Pacific islands and Aussie for family or work, I’ve been fully kiwi’d in matter and kind for 25 yrs. So a 2 mth break last year was an absolute treat, a trip to Lisbon via Qatar and Ireland, homeward bound via a chum in France and friends in London. Go on, flight shame me.

Qatar — 2.5 million or so people on a small spot of land where the desert meets the Persian Gulf. 300,000 Qatari’s in residence, an arab kingdom where monarchy calls the shots and the 2 million or so interloping Africans, Sri Lankans, and Indians, muscle on down in the hot sun doing the menial stuff, no doubt grateful for the opportunity to upgrade their thirdworldness, & make some $ on the back of the local gentry’s exploitation of mother natures geological bounty.

Ireland, and an easy chat with strangers at every turn. Stories, conversations, folk singers on the streets and in the bars.

Awash also with east coast americans in tour buses looking for their history, chasing a cheeseburger and obligatory Guinness. $15 a pint for the black stuff downtown Dublin. Ireland, the country that hit the skids hardball post GFC, due to greedypig shortcuts in big bubble finance and low tax schemes for foreign money. Out of intensive care for now, no small thanks to tourism.

Portugal, another one nailed to the mast post-GFC, holding on by a few loose nuts, a washer or two ahead of Greece, low wage economy, but still at least an economy. Grilling sardines as fast as it can for the visitors emptying out of its airports and cruise ship’s tag-teaming up the Targus.

Love that McDonalds and other global fast-food monsters have only managed a slender foothold — there’s just too many small ma n’ pa custard tart cafes — in all probability, it’s likely what makes Porto, Lisbon et all so popular on the tourist trail. That and the easy bang for buck on the euro.

Portugal, a still-proud country that for centuries led it’s european neighbours around the world, exploring and righteously pillaging, sticking their flag in foreign soil, a nod from jesus every step. Seagoing men-O-war in their day, now paddling to keep up.

France — a few days in the rural south visiting a friend hardly makes for a grounded impression, but with an elastic political climate it’s anyone’s guess where they are likely to position in the changing EU. Home to an economist I follow, Thomas Picketty — a man calling time on the colonization of our times — global finance.

London.

I didn’t much like my take on it a couple of decades back. Thatcher had done her work and the faces on the street seemed beaten, beggared and broken. Even the well-to-do looked anxious, worried the cockney rebels — the jnr Corbinista’s, were getting a run-up, set to kick over the monopoly board — hotels, utilities, Eton rifles, the lot.

Good old Blighty. Every ethnicity of human in London. Much has changed, much hasn’t, but my take on it has. Only a few days to speed date our love you longtime friends that made the call to move to London, better opportunities, never coming back. I’m older now with kids behind me, a less-desperate hand to mouth lens on the place.

On being a tourist …

The virgin drive of discovery peeking out the window from the airport — the faces, behavior, how people hold themselves, the smells, the do’s and dont’s.

So grateful those of us with the means can explore distant shores and spheres. Like a lollyshop olympic games, still with notes of competition but w/out the workout. Unless you’re on the hell bumsore cycle trail.

In Lisbon I spent time with an outdoor guide, a guy who delights in connecting his charges with trail walking, sea kayaking and cycling along coastlines and through forests. Folks he reports, that ‘largely spend their working lives in front of computers and in meetings.’ He said to me “what could be cooler than making that outdoors connection for them?” Connecting with nature, bringing cultures together, assisting revenue stream, all in the brochure.

Something fantastic about experiencing other cultures, whether fully immersed or just breezing through. Global connection, reaching out, exchanging values and views.

Seems all my former truths are bought into question when on the move — just when you think you’ve got it down, the converse appears. And so long as we survive, a little friction can be a rewarding thing.

Back in ’94 on that trip to London I was arrested for busking in Tokyo. A senior police officer raged at me about my mother being a whore — via his younger interpreter. Neither having never met her — she was more into knitting cardy’s than putting it about. Truly, live theatre money couldn’t buy.

The more I laughed, the more he lost it. Shameless Gaijin !

Cultural Connection is the best. Here in NZ I love our immigrant families. That we share our underpopulated country with others from around the globe — for better or worse, is a fine thing.

In the market for a 7 seater a few yrs ago, $5k to spend, I got to meet Ishmael, Achmed and Pradeep. All living in the Mt Roskill/Mangere belt of immigrant families/muslim communities. What a treat. Invited in, drinking spiced tea on the prayer mat with people I would otherwise never meet. Achmed’s 1998 Toyota Ipsum is still getting WOf’s and carting my crew around.

Migration and tourism. We’re on the move brethren, part the seas.

She’s a pretty expensive sea to part where I live. On Waiheke Island, the lucky tourist can expect to get shorn like a merino. Here where commerce has a capital T, our kids turn a $ espressing the tourist with coffee, wine, food and a smile. Money that pays for their food/shelter/study and travel.

Thank you dear tourists, for your help in feeding my kids.

The pro’s and cons of Tourism. Me, I prefer mine in small caps.

Capital T in the worlds fave spots can be a bit frightening, with hordes of us, adequately heeled global go-getters marching up and down the waterfront, armies of lager louts and Sharon’s doing shots n’ sangria, que’s of babbling busloads ticking off the attractions. We have a hedonistic hunger for experiences. Mostly I’m keener on a quieter time observing difference.

And back with an economic lens, tourism is fickle as a flyboy.

Throw a single spoke and the roulette wheel can spin off the table taking the house down with it. One vanload of explosives by some disaffected individual on the tourist trail must do’s, and the entire industry tightens like an asshole, people’s livelihoods truncated.

Or a change in mood by mother nature — hurricane/earthquake/tsunami, volcanic blow. A nutjob political populist … pick your fave action mag drama.

In the bigger scheme of things, tourism is a bit of a pop-up shop. A little bit is ok, like when the circus or the Easter show comes to town — but it’s contrary. The caravans move on, unlike our need for consistent food, shelter and community. I raise an eyebrow when tourism is a country’s life support. Our communities — local, national, global, virtual, could do better than rely on a game less than robust.

Imagine declining air travel, or shipping.

There’s a bunch of reasons why and how this might happen, likely by degree’s.

Strait of Hormuz anyone ? We’ll no doubt be privy to a mixed bag of transport postponements and terminations in the coming yrs.

The IMF and World Bank have been increasingly introspective — not a bad thing. They’re concerned about hot variables, the ones with too many wildcard tendrils. Can you write an algorithm for pass the parcel? Musical chairs ? Working round the clock on that one, least I hope they are. I hope we are.

My repeating theme — if and when economic infrastructure goes hallucinogenic, have we the resources, networks and conflict/resolution skills to survive.

Can’t eat an eftpos card. Food and shelter in peacetime. Can it be done ?

Irish folksinger Christy Moore sings about our contemporary nomadism, and he’s not talking cruise ships and tourists. The irish know all about dispossession of self and land. If you’re thinking the potato famine injustices of the 19thcentury, you’re way late. Our lyrical ancestors have been Mother England’s bob-a-job, if they got paid at all, since time immemorial — and dynamic times looming for Ireland now with brexit border issues, that sleeping giant The Troubles waking from it’s slumber.

Back in the Med we’re all up on a desperate form of movement where the hungry and war-torn of north Africa and the east try to get a foothold on European soil. Can’t blame them chasing a better life for themselves, their children.

One of my chums works on a superyacht on those seas, owned by an American megastore fiefdom. He informs me that when they come across these particular types of travellers out there on the briney, they turn off their gps/comm’s and hang a U-turn. Maritime law requires them to render assistance, but it just doesn’t go with the gold fittings, jet ski’s and onboard celebrities.

When the comm’s have an electrical outage there’s not a lot one can do.

In 1973, british economist EF Schumacher wrote a collection of essays ‘Small is Beautiful’. He banged on about the only way we get through this ie C20/C21st life/survival of the human species, is to share our skills in small communities, locally grown food, locally harvested skillbases. With a focus on sharing resource. Anyone heard of the Transition Towns movement?

What was attractive about the small pockets of rural Europe I visited were the close walkable/cyclable proximities of small villages. Villages that produced life sustaining stuff, like bread, cheese, olive oil — soils that sustained local fruit and vegetables. Cottages constructed of stone, some permanence and provenance in the shelter. Small waterways, waterbores.

Seems idyllic, of course, never is. Under pressure ? No doubt. Growing populations, pollution, modern chemicals/commerce etc, help and hinder process.

And cycling round Tokyo 25 yrs ago, i realised the city was a collection of small communities, prefectures where teeny plots of soil everywhere were intensely manicured for food and aesthetic.

Small communities needn’t be rural.

I wonder how much longer will we be able to roam — whether adventure or survival, or trade, across increasingly crowded and polluted skies and seas ?

Maybe the Portugese and other coastal mariners with their centuries of sailing legacy will rise again, sailing actual sailing ships, like ones with sails, across the oceans with a different quest, rigs that can ride out the new school of storms. Maybe this time they’ll leave their flags, muskets and jesus at home.

Sure, take your flag if you must, just don’t stick it anywhere.

Back on th blog, first one in couple of yrs.

Lots has happened — Trumps normalized fear, Britains in divorce, David Attenborough’s stagediving like a walrus cos mother nature’s squeaking …

The age of despair ?

Not for me, quite the reverse.

I spent my downbuzz allowance 2–3 decades back when we hit the gas on global development, and shoved, shouted and celebrated as allaboutme.com repeatedly took first prize.

Aspirational units everywhere, men fingering fliphones, currency traders, wall to wall shoulderpads, shiny suits — you know the story.

Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton trailing their bridal parties, cashed up the agreements on financial controls and boom we were off untethered.

Despite, ‘Hey you with the sad face, come up to my place and live it up’,

it was just sad, I couldn’t shake the Lorax off my back.

So why so chirpy now ?

People talking bout ecology, growing their own food, equity, ownership, tiny houses, employment, migration, agency for the meek, AI, tech sector accountability, redefining land use, footprints, lack of certainty, yada.

These are the good days, when we’re taking action, talking about more than sports scores, or our dealings or lack of, on the property market. Good days and bad days.

First though, acknowledging my privilege — I’m a middle-aged middle-class homeowner with the bank as minority shareholder, living in a developed country with the world’s biggest moat — so for now I’m kinda comfy, have the luxury and room for these musings.

The planetary squeeze we’re identifying has been on the march for my lifetime. So with the wrecking balls swinging closer to home, we’re on the squeak too. Not a bad thing — when disease works it’s way to the surface it can be identified and lanced.

Yes my faith is being restored.

I love that at our core level, one-on-one, most of us are decent people.

Deviant, deluded, deranged even, but deep down we possess some goodwill, and seek the best for our families, friends and communities.

As a collective tribal species maybe not so much, but slip past the competitive sparring and we’re born-naked die-naked vulnerably decent.

This confidence in who we can be, actually who we really are deep down, is the clincher.

I love that we’re willing to at least sit down with our conflicting narrative.

We must have growth — must have it or global economy falls over. Ponzi 101. But we must nip growth in the bud — world resources are finite or the lot falls over. So it’s out with the gps — how do we navigate ?

I love that mother nature is now big picture visual, in the saddle. She is the ultimate CEO and the Board, a business case hermaphrodite.

I love that it’s no longer allaboutus.com , even when we want it to be, that the struggles of other species and ours are connected.

I love that as global leadership(that’s mostly not really) reveals it’s ongoing matrix, it’s spiraling darkness, unusual resonances surface — cue the 16 yr old eco-warrior from Sweden and a global movement of more where that came from.

Sorry kids we’ve been cheating on you. OPEC calling her the most serious threat to the fossil fuel industry, a supercharged influencer.

Take a bow Margaret Mead, Dr Seuss.

Ditto in the USA where Sanders and AOC’s squad are calling shop on inequity, team america world police, positing a new green deal, and globally, the egg timer Extinction Rebellion teams.

I love that significant numbers are speaking truth to power, withholding inappropriate obedience, and that we’re doing group process — building our confidence and narrative to call it.

Tales from the mirror, show me where it hurts.

I love that we’re finally putting ourselves in the dock as we seek how to recalibrate our moral compass — acknowledging the issues, exploring the bottlenecks and how we tackle them.

I love that growing pockets of our young are questioning whether ownership/self-accrual are viable let alone desirable goals.

I love that people on low wage shit jobs, and those struggling for even that status, are reaching critical mass — it sucks, but as a necessary flashpoint it’s where the rubber hits the road and change manifests.

I love that American foreign policy, the most consistent agency of global terror over the last 70 yrs is increasingly being undressed as we seek answers.

Ditto for the real powerhouses backstage. Governments don’t rule the world, goldman sachs rule the world.

I love that (for me), it’s not just melbourne cartoonist Leunig for company anymore. That there is now robust community searching beyond the distraction of weak media-made faux leadership.

There’s a lot of us, big families of young ones coming thru in th developing world, and all of us would like something to eat, a roof over head, to get along and to get it on. Can we ?

Not sure, but I get excited when people put out, mobilise and pop-up narratives that challenge status quo.

I have a chum who makes it his mission to get on with arseholes. Instead of reacting or walking away, he delights in finding the crack in the armour where he can make a connection with said bumshit. And build something decent out of it. This is one of his greatest delights, a new vocation maybe, an arsehole paramedic. Could be a new sport, tv gameshow — “ It’s all go on ‘Extracting Empathy From Pricks’, find out after the break ”…

So yeah, never been more enthused.

Can I muster even a bit of despair ? Not at the moment. Should I ?

And if I do I’m going on Bumble — ‘hurt before but willing to try again’.

Bound to work, can’t not ☺

Here in New Zealand the outgoing government were looking for love but they took us for sex workers. Plenty of Kiwi’s assumed the position but for me I just couldn’t get it up.

It’s all great ongoing theatre, ideology on the roulette wheel, our held beliefs on high rotate. I did my bit and voted. I hummed n’ haaa’d.

I really love immigrants, our new Kiwi’s — sharing New Zealand with the world, and I thought CatMan was onto it with his wealth tax and other levellers.

I loved the young red smarts emerging on the starboard bow.

In the end I rooted for Green, they needed all the help they could get.

And now the King has anointed 3 shiny new biro’s for the pocket protector. Black, red and green.

We’re going to be taking notes so line up, single file.

No chit chat, and leave plenty of space in the margin cos there’ll be a test at the end.

On cue the media are going tits-up.

With the circus readying the stage, they all want a ringside seat.

Some of them comfortably turncoating, others, puff daddy’s fronting their own flavor of panicked conjecture.

Where would we be in this age of anxiety without the town cryers howling doom.

Guys I gave at the office, try again next week.

There’s some dumb-as star bellied Howlers out there. You know the ones, they pretend to tell it like it is, whatever that means.

They take what they’re fed by their tribal source, repackage and further spin the feed with aggregated bad juju.

I pick them as under-informed, smug, imprinted, dull or too lazy to dig deeper. They’re not seeing the long game. Or they’re pathologically mean.

Benefit of the doubt, I’ll give them the former.

Homework tonight: read some Chomsky. You don’t do academics ? Try serious funnyman Russell Brand.

If you are a person that buys what mainstream media have dished out for the last 30–40 odd years, then you might be confused right now. You should be. More’s the worry if you’re not. Just give it time cos you soon will be.

Those of us that worked for TVNZ affectionately called our workplace the DeathStar. Vending our truth to your living room like Meth dealers. TV, the heartbeat of the Boomers, calibrating our minds, rights and wrongs, and setting our value/s … but that’s another blog.

Back to our new governments 2IC, and more to the point his ‘don’t blame me’ portent. Like it or not, King Biscuit is right, and it won’t matter who’s on the helm.

Latest indices, even The Economist, are suggesting world financial markets are priming to do another πrsquared pole dance of a ‘correction’ … love that clinical phrase — so get ready for GFC2.

US stock markets are again overheated, only this time bigger stakes and no wiggle room left. No hiding behind the pews brethren.

I love the hedged duplicity of The Economist. It pays a dollar both ways, playing the rocksteady scribe, tipping it’s hat to the worst of the world’s financial terrorists, positioning itself as saviour of the developing world and well, everyone. It tries to be honest in a Steven Joyce kind of way.

That none of their articles are ever credited by the authors, makes The Economist a perfectly faceless entity. So in keeping with the upper echelons of the financial world.

I guess if you put your name to some of that stuff you’d be boiling your smalls in the motel jug by sundown. Run baby run.

They will do what they can, our new leaders, with what is maneuverable.

You can’t undo 30 plus years of on the make with a few ideological shifts.

But it’d be ill advised to not make a start.

Positing a revised narrative is healthy, and I’m hearing some of the soundest words we’ve had at the helm for some time.

You know NZ has had socialism for decades ?

National’s Muldoon the biggest of them all, and putting a human face to capitalism is pretty sensible stuff. Even Morrinsville has socialism.

Love those farming subsidies.

Any of us thinking this through will likely get it. If not, book in more thinking time. Gently does it mind, keep the Xanax close.

Anyway, little old price-taker NZ … b4 too long we’ll all be taking one for the team, pop goes the weasel on the housing market — and then maybe we can have a lie down.

Of course growing numbers of us already are, in a bus shelter.

Government issue rescue remedy and a copy of Steinbeck for all combatants.

Just so there’s no surprises, picture a day when Countdown no longer puts out. How are your kumara beds coming on, have you planted out your front lawn and berms as well as the back yard ? Plenty of community garden working bee’s in your diary?

My diary screams at me Must Do Better.

Like lots of us, my relationship with food is largely an eftpos card. I can pick my teeth with it but I can’t eat it. Such helpless dependence.

I see growing numbers of us hunting and gathering for ways to provide food and shelter, once known as having a job. It won’t be comfortable, it’ll just be what it is. We’ll see a ‘correction’ re what we do with our time. For some, that’s already present tense.

The next generation will view ownership as 50 shades of grey.

For those currently struggling to feed their little ones and elderly, let alone themselves, it becomes bottom line black n’ white.

When the Berlin wall came down, one of the knock-on effects was Cuba’s food security. Having been dependent on The Soviet Union for supplies — food, diesel, petrol etc, the nation began to starve. In the mid 1990’s they mostly hand dug all tillable land and planted crops. All hands to the pump when needs must. It worked and the populace began putting back on the bodyweight they’d lost.

Lets hope we don’t starve as a people anytime soon, but keep an eye on it folks, sharpen your garden tools and keep fit.

Back to our new political leadership.

Santa doesn’t have a magic sack. Take the brown acid and you might wish for miracles … loaves and fishes, but I’m thinking probably not.

Expecting our leaders, old and new to make it all better is a copout.

We’re the leaders.

It’s up to us, our community — however we define that, to see us through the long game. Not this or that elected official.

Now — are we capable? — given decades of everyman for himself.

If we compete with each other tooth n claw then we’ll perish.

If we work as a small but growing collective in the South Pacific, as my parents and their peers did coming out of WW2, we could be in with a chance.

And this is the real value in our change of leadership … the change of narrative, as the human face of economics gets a spin on the dance floor.

Not just your or my human face, but everybodys, including mother natures.

60’s Civil rights writer James Baldwin noted “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

For those of you taking notes, here’s the test I promised.

What leadership role, irrespective of size, do you intend taking?

That’s it I’m done. All four children through school.

Eldest daughter says “grandkids next dad”. Arse. I thought I was clear.

Earlier this week, fourth in line for the family throne gave his yr 13 cohort a group cuddle, his favourite teachers a nod, and legged it with some stage booty.

Well done son, 13 yrs in school.

That morning they’d walked up the school driveway with balloons, cheered by the rest of the school. So cool.

Thank you to the amazing teachers that added value to him and to all my kids.

I’m hoping they returned the favours.

I slammed a few tequila’s before this prizegiving. Not my usual habit, but this one being the last … it lived up to expectations, a good old Waiheke ‘being sort of formal’ event.

Think Harry Potter meets the Adams Family doing ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’, all live from the prison lunchroom.

Funny costumes, obedient children standing to attention when beckoned.

School stand school sit — no talking from the bleachers.

There’ll be a detention in the mail for sure.

I’ve often been one to think on the counter-currents in high school. The great stuff, and the equal and opposite forces of obedience and irrelevance.

I happily own some of my struggles with high schooling.

I have what I consider collateral damage from my time at the chalkface. A bipolar type affliction with a side of category B tourettes.

Wife says I need to tone it down. Fat chance.

For three out of four of my kids, things went rather concrete pill when an old-schooler took the helm at our local high school, kicking to touch our playcentre parents progressive thoughts about learning. No … no no no no.

Went to anger management, helped a bit.

Since then slightly more whacky leadership has changed the game at our local lately, so I guess that’s a start.

But there’s still hundreds of children all wearing the same clothes.

They are popped in rooms, stratified by age and sometimes supposed smarts, often spend much time sitting at desks, and do this four to 5 times a day in unrelated modules, each time with mostly just one adult in the room. And there might be 30 of them at a time. I ask you.

Time Out, gotta change, here’s why -

As a species we are lining up for a good rogering and we need more than anything our young to break the mould we have lovingly made for them. Or we will assume the accepted position and take what’s coming.

That means setting them free to make their own choices early in the piece. With us alongside, they need real world stuff. Be excited and frightened, fall over, fuck up. Lets not leave it till they’re 18 — extended adolescence in unproductive yrs.

We grownups have shaped subservience for our kids, just as was administered us. Lets not anymore.

They’re the ones navigating the human condition from here on, we don’t need them bridled, tethered, ordered or surveiled.

Same for teachers.

The best teachers are the free ones. It’s hard work getting free, you gotta fight some rearguard while still keeping your registration.

Here’s to the back end of national standards — whatever that doublespeak was supposed to have meant, and hopefully some space for teachers to fully engage, allow interactions to grow organically/creatively, not be pre-determined outcomes. Set teachers free to do it their way, integrate community during school time. Been here b4 in a previous blog on schooling.

Auckland University of Technology professor Welby Ings has a lot to say about this in his recent book ‘Disobedient Teaching’, as does NZ’s Dr Robin Youngson in his book on changing the health system ‘Time to Care’.

Different sectors but same biz, Youngson suggesting that our health system is predicated on the british public school model, and until we actively deconstruct these top down factories, moving other sectors along in a dynamic world, will continue to be abrasive.

Maybe still a place for it in China for now, big on industrial and manufacturing.

I’m the boss, do what you’re told still rolls. It’ll pass.

But not NZ. We’re little.

We don’t have any choice but to be sideways innovators.

My older son’s prizegiving was a contrasting affair. Different school, bit more progressive.

The senior students ran the event, the stage was theirs not the teachers, and they invited various teachers, parents and guest speakers up to the stage to speak and present.

His parent/teacher evenings were similar. He would run the show preparing his own report, presenting to a small gathering of a few of his teachers and his parents, followed by a 3 way korero.

Impressive process, he had to study for these evenings, produce powerpoint/media/data, host the event, go through his subjects with contingencies for the stuff he’d missed. Not easy for a teen, there’s nowhere to hide for students with process like this. More guide on the side than sage on the stage, teachers are mentoring all the way. We got contacted as parents lots too. Teachers, parents and students working together, my kind of co-teaching.

Years ago I was hired as a teacher in a small progressive Auckland high school.

The interview panel of 4 comprised the principal, a Board of Trustees member and two students. Each had a vote. A couple of clients on the interview panel, well who would’ve thought ?

We parents are every colour of the rainbow when it comes to what we want schools to be, and some love the old fashioned top-down stuff. We all do what we feel is best.

Is obedience and consistency a 24hr essential ?

It was strictly so at a school I directed some promo videos for a while back.

On top of the hill by the motorway and taking no nonsense, one of Aucklands’ esteemed boys schools. It was like going behind enemy lines.

A couple of choices on the menu for the boys there.

Toe the line or don’t. Don’t and you’re gone. No correspondence, just winners and losers. Which you gonna choose? Do what you’re told, and a bunch of opportunities open up.

The video we made was a sales tool to recruit students from asia.

Many families like old school. They can be more interested in outcomes than process. And maybe process is important but you like the old school type.

Kids are graded like chickens, nice and tidy, you know where you stand.

I know parents who are happy with their children’s journey through this school. And I have friends in their 40’s still in counseling, each pointing a finger at same school.

Me I’m a turmeric tea lefty, into student agency and reversing the roles. For a lot of it, rip it up and start again. What is teaching, learning, education ? What could it be ?

I’ve always been amazed at what teens are capable of when honoured, backed and trusted. Top down directive on our teens, making decisions for them, is to me the very picture of having low expectations of them. Interesting that old fashioned schools whose modus operandi can lean to the militant, will often spiel ‘high expectations’ in the prospectus etc. Oh the irony.

My advice to my children has always gone something like this:

It’s not what we can’t do that scares us, it’s what we’re aware we can do.

So, park the scare.

Find something you’re good at and love doing, and be sure that it makes your soul feel good, ie it adds up to something bigger than you.

Then spend however many years it takes working out how to provide food and shelter from it. The roads that lead there are rarely evident, full of likely twists and turns. And don’t neglect the ‘soul feelgood’ variable.

Don’t expect to be employed. With the concept of ‘being employed’ highly dynamic, there’s no guarantee having a job will be a keeper.

Technology is an exponential disruptor in every game.

Be scanning constantly for small opportunities to start your own business, maybe collaborate with others and realize it will need tweaking and reinventing constantly.

No one is a complete arsehole, so build your skill at working positively with difficult people.

So my son who’s just finishing now, what’s he going to do next year?

They call it a gap yr but really it’s a gap-it year, the one where you run from institutionalized education then look back from the city limits for some overview and context.

He’s so excited. So am I, I think it’s marvelous.

His older brother did something similar, worked and travelled.

My two girls did the straight to Uni thing, works for them, but the boys just wanna rock out.

However our kids burn the toast, it’s weird for them to have to get a note from teacher one day, then take charge of making major calls the next.

Plenty of my chums continue to advocate decisions for their kids when they reach this stage … I get it, it seems safer, more focused. Maybe.

Back to the local prizegiving. They ran it over two nights and I missed the first one. Sounded like the best.

Jnr came home animated re what the guest speaker had to say. He was a local guy that took years to find where he fitted. He now creates film scores as a sound designer for global clients. Unusual but well valid work.

My son was all ears — both our boys are passionate musicians … you mean you can make a decent bob out of this ?

What said speaker did suggest to the students, is that chaos and disruption are good and decisions that don’t work are essential — gotta have ’em, and one here for the school’s deans — disobedience is an important component — a craft to develop in order to navigate successfully.

I can hear the tinfoil trays pop as the schools law enforcers, DP’s deans and what have you, heave back the tramadol.

My wife and I are considering offering some form of scholarship for the local high school. It would be for the standout student who has challenged the school system. Not sure they’d want our award, might still make the suggestion.

For all the strutting and fretting I’ve done about my kids high schooling, they’ll prob be fine and I’m not far behind. They have a mum and a dad, a home, lots of good chums and aunties in the wings.

Their mum and I give them a bit of wiggle room re deciding their food/shelter paths, the door is always open, always space to doss down, lick their wounds, regroup and have another go.

Again thank you to their teachers, some of whom have been outstanding miracle workers despite the odds. I hope you make significant wins in the pay rounds.

I hope you embrace the changes coming in how you work, fearlessly and with open arms. You have communities of families/businesses and other resource at your physical and online door.

Use us, come on out, welcome modern learning and student agency.

Lead or be left behind.

Hamilton has come on.

It still gets the occasional poke in the ribs, but its no longer in the recovery position. Poor old Huntly gets that one now.

Following the South African rugby tour in 1981, the infamous invasion of the pitch and the calling off of the game, political cartoonist Tom Scott wrote “there’s a lot of nice people come from Hamilton, it’s the ones that stay there that spoil it.”

That was both genius and less than generous. I’d just moved on from the Tron and it was like both a pat on the back and a kick in the pills.

Our family moved to Hamilton in the 1970’s when the pop’n was 100,000 and I was 15. These day’s it’s double and I’m nearly four times that.

Dad spared us Huntly, commuting there each day for work.

Life was rugby in the winter, rowing in the summer and holiday jobs on the land. Picking up hay or cutting animals up for export at the freezing works.

Cafe culture was kona coffee or percolated in the urn with a custard square at the counter. If you wanted coffee in Dinsdale on th road to Raglan, It was Greggs instant at the Shell station. Full cream from the bottle.

Friday nights I’d ride my shiny Honda SL125 round the city block and park up outside Meltzers surf shop, find out where the parties were and we’d be off. Led Zep 3, Slade, Elton’s Yellow Brick rd.

I had my arse pinched for the first time in Hamilton — the wonderful Operatic Society.

Man we could prance, and being straight it was fun making up the numbers.

With the Hamilton rowing club, we sneaked in a girls crew. Took it to the committee and they said no, girls bring the pikelets on regatta day and besides, there’s no toilet facilities. So we did it anyway when the boys weren’t training, coaching the clubs first female crew.

I fell in love for the first time in the Tron — not quite Paris, but when the stars wink over Hamilton lake on a clear night parked up in the Cortina, it could be.

My dad always said “if you find a nice girl, leave her that way”.

He didn’t often say much my dad, and when I asked him some advice about gardening he said, “just one piece son, don’t get caught.” Ahahahah

As Uni students we had some great financial perks.

No fee’s in the late 70’s, we got paid a small student allowance and best of all, our holiday jobs pulled top dollar. All bow to the freezing works.

It was bow to the east actually, mother England having brushed us off so we sold to Iraq/Iran etc.

Affco, Horotiu. A mere blip on the map between Hamilton and Ngaruawahia.

Soon as you came within half a kilometer you could smell it.

Once you were in, you were in. Season after season.

It meant we could go flatting, run a car, drink up large — the money was primo.

I worked 4 or 5 seasons at Affco, on the gut trays separating innards, the beef chain chopping out eye fillets, the cooling floor corralling the stiffs, and in the stockyards, guardian to the bobby calves and pigs.

At 19 I was earning more than my mother who was a charge nurse at Waikato hospital with 20 + years experience.

A gravy train while it lasted.

We’d be working away and suddenly union bosses would call an ‘All Up’ and hundreds of workers would assemble in the carpark where some geezer would bark that working conditions on the mutton board were untenable — steam coming out of the pipes or something, and it was Strike!

A rugby league fixture that arvo in neighbouring Ngaruawahia was pure coincidence.

Farmers were earning close to nothing for some of their stock and we weren’t helping.

Different story these days.

Thanks to the slaughterhouse, I owned two MkII Cortina’s at the same time. One column shift/bench seat, the other bucket seats, stick shift and a bit more grunt. I was going places, could’ve been Mayor if I’d stuck around and played my cards right.

Young Hamilton came with it’s own university, just out of trainer wheels but holding ground. Doing hometown Uni is a bit weird.

Your old chums watch you get bent as opposed to you gapping it to Otago where you can get buggary bent w/out being observed. We got tidily surveiled as we kicked up middle class styles with Johhny Rotten sneaking into the suburbs.

There were a lot of firsts in Hamilton.

That first love ? Pulling into her folks driveway for the second time to see a Yamaha TY250, low slung, twice the cc, chrome nuts glistening on the crankcase, fresh tread on the tyres. I Remember that u-turn like yesterday.

In Hamilton I discovered hard work, rock n roll, motorbikes, weed, getting drunk, girls, and a critical suspicion of authority.

Home for 6 years, good old landlocked Hamilton.

Once I’d done, things moved quickly.

Goodbye to the seasons at Affco, the regatta’s at Karapiro.

A tank of gas, a bag of weed and I was gone.

35 years later and I’ve been making my peace with the Waikato.

There’s a greater mix of elves and hobbits now. Still a few Orks.

This year my old high school 1st XV got owned by Hamilton Boys High School’s 4th XV, 40 something nil — hammered. Hamilton can be a tale of two cities.

I made lifetime friends in Hamilton.

One of my teachers from that school remains a great mate, sold me his band gear when he hung up his gigging axe. And I have a special Tron friend who never left. He was the first person I ever asked on a date. He never pinched my arse and his family and I have become 4eva chums. He’s just set me up with an avocado tree.

A little while back he and I dug up the high school time capsule, a few of us catching up at significant b/day.

Both sides of the river still home sizeable tracts of comfortably conservative brethren.

Fair to say mainstream narrative wins the day, and I sometimes prescribe BYO meds on hometown visits.

New Hamilton is going places. They’re working on the ringroad and there’s grass, diggers and development everywhere. But you wouldn’t diss dairying too loud.

They’d have you in Garden Place in stocks and pelt you with sour cream before you could say soy latte.

Mooo.

Here’s to the Shire.

I was 8 yrs old when TV arrived in our house.

It immediately became God, displacing the radiogram — the Archers, dads Tijuana Brass and Mantovani records.

We gave the box in the corner our full attention. I fell for it, mesmerized.

After a few years a colour one arrived, viewing intensified and it was dinner on a tray in the lounge. We talked less as a family.

There were new more important spokespeople in the room and they sported british and american accents.

God and I were getting it on.

At high school I taught teenagers how to make TV, all the clever ways to frame the story.

Then one day I actually got to be with God, I got on telly. A bit of comic selfie-cam stuff led to a few slots in TV ads. In the money.

I realized I’d made it when I was recognized in Lynmall.

Then a bunch of us had a crack at playing God.

Pre-internet and my chums and I spent our savings on a TV transmitter, broadcasting video clips from the hills over Auckland.

We were mobile, and it worked.

Student radio station bfm told their listeners, various tuned in and the authorities started tracking us. They got our transmitter but not us.

Our pirate TV exercise made the case — it didn’t need to be costly to make or transmit video. Lots could take part in storytelling. But no. NZ television offered 3 channels. No newbies allowed, case closed.

Then Youtube showed up and it became a moot point — Elvis was everywhere.

And right on cue, reality TV emerged. Like fresh putty for the windows when the glass is cracked, the genre gave the platform just a little more rope.

“Will Wayne repo the car, has Sherie finally had it with Pete, and is she really pregnant to Graham …” , find out after the break.

Armchair voyeurism full of winners and losers. Watch those humans come unstuck. Glad it’s not me. Pure schadenfreude.

Souls got stolen down at NZonAir, the funding rolled in and production companies geared up to produce conflict and jeopardy, baselines for the new frame.

We all hopped to, crafting lab rat TV, making sport from the vulnerable and vain. Our truth-stretching voice overs fabricating story and tension.

Imported fare like Trump’s ‘Apprentice’ was rating through the roof. Apprentice my arse. If you doubt the power of reality TV to soil the human fabric, well, there you go.

One of NZ’s early tabloid doyens of this genre was recently knighted.

Responsible for some king-hits, if she’d been voted off early in the piece, I daresay we’d all be the better for it.

But you know, when in Rome … obedience is a comfortable cloak to wear when you’re on the gravy train. The soul might not have fared so well, but working on that schlock helped feed the kids.

And now, The Kardashians etc.

Honorable mention must go to cooking shows like MasterChef — fucksake you’d think it’s Lord of the Rings. What’s with the Jaws music?

If we’re ramping up the drama then lets shoot the series outside the Sallies foodbank. Surely be a righteous place to prime for a shark attack.

Foodie culture is great, but what’s really going on here ?

Those three indolent arbiters of taste, the big one with the cravat and his two mates — Hunger Games trippers deciding who’s is the best scone, decreeing half-baked power of attorney at whim.

That power to dictate the narrative, it’s tone, it’s yay or nay.

You win. You lose. Now, cry on camera. Wow. Really ?

But catch that twist of lemon and nutmeg in the jus … inspired.

Primetime’s exhibit A must surely be the news. No it’s not.

It’s entertainment. Try saying it with a jocks voice — ‘The News’.

Who makes those editorial calls ? … “Hey ! look over here, no over here … no over here now.” At least the weather is an honest attempt.

The goggle box has until the advent of broadband, shaped my generation’s stories. We’ve hoovered it up.

It’s kept us of particular thought, preened us for obedience, encouraged us to consume, told us where to look and who to believe.

The reality genre ripped up the panorama a bit more, spreading division and fear.

Now the word ‘television’ is dated, going the way of ‘wireless radio’.

It’s morphed like a Fukushima octopus — a 100 odd tentacles, screens everywhere.

On the ‘casting front, the big TV machines are shifting their tools around the Cluedo Board in a competitive whodunit. Bye bye Sky, hello Netflix etc.

George, out you come one more time … it’s an Orwellian fire sale.

My kids take in the animations, some of the best social commentary and essential sedition to be found. Southpark, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, American Dad, Duckman, Ren & Stimpy. There’s heaps now, great indicators.

One of my sons said to me, about the time the modem became the # 1 household appliance, ‘Dad what use is a TV ? I can turn it on, off, change the channel, mute it, that’s about all.’

At the time he was deep into TopGear episodes online, blogging with fellow enthusiasts, adding to the narrative.

Good stuff exists on old-school telly if you keep an eye out.

Anyone seen Westside, a kiwi production sequeling as a prequel to Outrageous Fortune ? — great kiwi storytelling. A few taxpayers $ to make but worth it.

On the budget side there’s great footsoldiers like kiwi doco maker Bryan Bruce.

Bryan builds honest kiwi stories, great tales from NZ’s mirror, stories depicting reality for many kiwis whose own MasterChef is down to what’s at the back of the cupboards, on special at Pak n’ Save or whatever they can beg/borrow/steal from family.

I rate Bryans stories hardbuzz for content, rivetting for revelation, and inspirational for possibility. Resistance and persistence — brave formula.

There’s people still holding the line. Thank You.

Me I’m just a reality TV director in recovery.

Please, shoes off, move slowly and be gentle.

My wife the counsellor. Bags not her job.

I think if we split I’d be straight on Tinder with a no counsellors need apply.

No she does fantastic work, and it’s needed.

She’s tending to that growing pack, The Unstuck. Families and individuals going through rough times.

I’m not so Stuck myself, depending on the day.

We grownups spinout, the kids soak it all up and she’s in there with first aid.

A lot of the relationship wreckage she sees stems from people going under physically — food, shelter, employment.

Lose the ability to provide for ourselves, our family, and the cortisol tears through the nervous system like a reverse enema. It attacks any certainty like a cancer, and it’s fallout is costly — for self, circle of affected’s, the taxpayer, society.

It’s my ultimate close to home fear.

And no matter where we sit in the wealth stakes, no one is exempt.

All of us are just a ticket away from a derailing. We lose a family member, we go down with the big C. Lose our job, our home.

From Christchurch to Mexico and everywhere in between the earth can shake and suddenly we are the dispossessed.

I’d love to see the weatherman on the telly, instead of giving us the day’s wind and rain, give us a fear and hope report …

“ A 25% increase in apparent fear in the Hutt today due to staff layoffs at one of the Valleys largest employers, while over the hill in Wainuiomata, we’re seeing a 30 degree shift in hope with the community’s Village Veggie project — Meanwhile in Wellington central there’s a gathering belt of anxiety, expected to subside once this trough of concentrated hot air and deceit moves away.

Hopecasters are expecting some change by early next week.”

Fear is the nightporter peeking out of the half light.

Standing in the shadows baby.

When work’s coming in I can be cock of the walk.

When it falls off, I’m playing Twister on a waterbed — suddenly I’m down, flailing till more fish bite.

Stop, drop n’ roll, circle the wagons around the bruises, dust off and re-invent.

Unless we’re in fields like teaching, nursing or the police, job security has become all a bit maybe really.

And with so many global, let alone local variables in the pot — ecologically, economically, tectonically, politically, militarily yada, I figure there’s little chance of physically controlling much anymore.

So for what it’s worth, a few starters here from my ‘things I can control’ in the giving and receiving response kit.

(1) Eye contact, mentioned in an earlier blog, it’s a good starter. I challenge you — make it, smile at strangers — get down on it and put out.

(2) Connection.

When despair creeps in, there’s healing in empathy and touch -

physical and emotional. As well as a cuddle and a cup of tea, the Down need to feel that what they have to give is received.

Down visits many of us from time to time.

(3) Gratitude. Especially low paid workers, the cleaners and care workers in my elderly mum’s home. And hospo staff when they make my coffee, deliver my food, take the dirty dishes away. I’m in there with the eye’s on the thank you’s.

(4) Story rebuild. I try and park the ego and baseline indicators sometimes and realize that my pre-conceived right and wrongs, may in fact be arse about face. Damn. This one is messy, the deconstruction of my story, and it takes on-going recalibration and reboot.

Mandela and the good Bishop Des Tutu brought the term ‘Ubuntu’ to the western world. Simply put, ‘it’s our sharing that connects humanity.’

We can share money, capital, and we can also share goodwill and gesture, the intangibles.

Etched in my memory is 10 minutes of a Sunday afternoon years back when I was working at the St Heliers BP station. In comes a local guy, gold Amex, to top up his Bentley. His eyes and body language saying “I’m lonely, I’m sad, a little defeated”. I’d clocked his Down on a previous visit.

2 mins later a rusty Toyota hi-ace pulls in and a dozen pacific islanders en route to East Tamaki spill out to a pop-up party on the forecourt.

Eyes sparkling, tongues chattering, it was going on.

They both had what the other needed.

Sharing can have some great win-wins.

Melbourne cartoonist Michael Leunig, one of my favourite fear and hope commentators, suggests people can handle austerity if there is a fairness and collective involved.

My mum and dad had similar sentiments to Leunig when referencing the second world war effort.

We can be a bit ‘fuck off that’s mine’ when it comes to sharing our wealth, no surprises given several lifetimes worth of narrative to materially accrue for oneself. The emotional development needed to bring that one round will be work in progress for years to come.

In fact anyone comes round my place and tries to Castro all my stuff and leave me asset-less; ok I get the ideology, but the actuality …. ?

We are frogs in the broth of certain uncertainty.

The disruption is exciting, but havoc on the nerves.

So calling all front line responders …

Intangibles (1) — (3) are an easy kickoff, right now.

And keep up the work on (4).

I reckon I’ve got obedience tourettes — it started early and I blame Dr Seuss.

The cat rides in on one wheel, says come on kids lets play up.

Everything’s bent, no straight lines, and no sooner is he off — scott free it appears, than the Lorax steps out, taking on the man about his biggering.

Then we get the aspirational Star Bellied Sneetches and power tripping Yertle the Turtle. That stuff gets in.

Seuss got his sedition over the line with great verse and rhymes, fabulous cartoon pictures and the seuss suckerpunch — the story. The Dr is in.

These days I run my own small business, I’m the boss it’s only me, and I often don’t do what the boss wants.

This can present difficulties, and luckily I’ve a nice counselor to have a cup of tea and a liedown with.

Yep the seeds were sown early, and it’s been a game of two halves since.

There’s me the pleaser, and then there’s me out riding the range, looking for opportunities to upturn the applecart, happy to take one for the team and shoot out my own tyres if that’s what it takes.

I honed my two faced craft in my 5 yrs as a high school student.

Such a masterclass in obedience, no shortage of material to work with there. Uniforms, straight lines, yelled at, gamed n’ groomed to the adults tune.

It never stacked up, nor did the doublespeak of ‘standards and high expectations’. Not today Josephine.

I can’t recall a penny-drop moment.

It was all just chasing the why, instinct and intellect putting two ticks in the margin, double entry bookkeeping.

In order to avoid the wreckers at an early age, I was covert, duplicitous and fleet footed. Making trouble is not all unicycles and larking about.

It can be lonely stressful work.

Occasionally there’s the odd other heretic for company, but sods law they come bruised and half broken. Pick your units and you’ll find the companionable spirit and sparring is worth the maintenance.

When I slipped into high school teaching at a young age, I immediately set to work.

“Kids, we’re being groomed to be obedient wage slaves — must do better, lets carve our own road — we all like a challenge; it can be done”

The can opener, worms everywhere, being glared at over the tea urn at interval.

Students could (a)discard my words and play the game, (b)play the game knowingly, effectively ‘game the game’, or ©toss the lot and bail.

Cool, multichoice.

If you believe as I do that our young folk, their energy and challenge, are our best pitch for salvation, then it may make sense why I’m intent on being the fly in the ointment. The Principal wants to see me in his office again ?

Ah well it was a sequel anyway, Goneburger 2.

I’m still learning to sincerely feign sincerity, in order to roll with the days play.

Gaining one’s trust, only to then reveal your true colours, is a bit like being a trojan virus. It’s a shitty trick.

But when you drill down to reveal the theft of our human story, it’s civic duty.

As welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers bluntly put it, “if you tolerate this, your children will be next”.

With the onset of kids (sounds like a disease but it’s not), I’ve had to chill a bit, suck it up and put their food and shelter first.

Poor little bastards have had me in their ear for years now and carry their own obedience issues — so proud of them. “Clean your room ! …. Ahhhahaha“

Now they’re getting older and both less and more vulnerable, I’ve the space to pick up with Dr Seuss again.

And for me, a bit more wear on the tread, it’s perfectly clear.

The last thing we currently need as humans is to salute the flag.

I’ll willfully break the law if it doesn’t pass muster.

Breathe.

I now no longer see myself as in any way a heretic, or even heretic-lite.

I’ve decided I’m a calvinist conservative — must change my facebook profile.

Took me a while to get this one.

The unchecked pirates that have raped and pillaged our social/economic/environmental construct, they’re the subversives, not me.

Though I accept I’m complicit.

Thieving bastards Europe set sail circa 16th century to landgrab the world, using galleons and cannons. ‘Do You have a Flag?’ as comedian Eddie Izzard jested.

It was going on for centuries b4 that, and it’s been all pies, fizzy drinks and diabetes at the tuck shop ever since.

There were more tricks to pull when I worked in establishment media.

I disappeared footage of cannon fodder humans coming unstuck, before it was used for national entertainment. Call it victim support.

And a colleague of mine disappeared hard drives full of that schlock working in TV. He was gone by lunchtime. Was thinking of nominating him for New Zealander of the Year.

For those of us good boys and girls who know all is not right but aren’t sure how to commence making trouble, a pointer.

Spot the crack, the tender or vulnerable spot — there’ll be one.

Nip in with a wedge and you’ll be flipping the monopoly board over in no time.

Be strong. You’ll take a few knocks but likely live to fight another day.

It can take energy working on the ones holding the line.

Their narrative substantiates what they believe and once they’re onto you undermining them, expect no mercy.

I’m not proud of my own behavior at times — swing the compass on some days and apparent and magnetic north are way off.

Before I met my cup-of-tea-and-a-lie-down counselor, I took LSD and sat in front of the mirror to discuss some of these calibration issues.

Ended in me taking a long shower and emptying a full bottle of flex balsam shampoo over my head while singing Thoroughgood’s ‘Bad to the Bone’.

Never been much hair on my head so there must have been some righteous cleansing to do that day.

Still, I’m certain I’m not a total shitball.

I work to build and celebrate goodwill, humility, humanity and some treading lightly. I like hope, it’s a keeper.

Current bedside reading ?

John Raulston-Sauls ‘Voltaires Bastards’, Joseph Stiglitz’s ‘The Price of Inequality’, Welby Ings ‘Disobedient Teaching’, The Economist.

Historians, economists, educators in recovery, conservatives, thinkers and shakers … Great dreams reading this stuff before lights out let me tell you.

If only I’d ease up and check out Brittany Spears cover feature in the Australian Womans Weekly. Did you know she’s doing ok now Brittany ? Fired her manager dad, been through rehab, found Mr Right. Such a relief.

If I had one wish it’s that I was braver in my quest.

Conservative power and control must not have its way.

So no slouching, there’s work to do.

Anyone from Napier will know the large words etched in the concrete deco arch entrance to the soundshell, the ones the city’s fathers chose –

‘Courage is the thing: — all goes if courage goes’

My fellow trouble makers, that’s an ongoing call to civic duty.

When the kids were little we played a game called ‘chasing the why’.

They would ask me a question, any question and I would give them an answer and they would say ‘and why’s that ?’

I would respond and they would keep drilling down with ‘why ?’

The only rule was that I couldn’t answer with ‘because I said so’.

It was fun coming unstuck bending my head chasing the why.

They’d use it on me with motive.

‘Dad why can’t we have an ice cream ?’

Because mum and I are saving money

Why ?

So we can fix the Falcon

Why?

So we don’t have to walk everywhere

Why?

Because we live in the country and its 20 miles to anywhere

Why ?

Because your mother and I decided to try the country life and grow veggies.

Why ?

Because my city job finished

Why’s that dad ?

The bosses wouldn’t back our project

Why ?

I think they were scared it might fail

Why ?

Because if it failed they might lose their jobs

Why ?

Cos they have bosses too that can take their jobs away. No job means no money and we get nervous when we don’t have money

Why ?

Cos the way we live as humans means we need money

Why ?

Because money buy’s stuff like food and toys

Why ?

Because you can’t just have them for free, you have to pay using money

Why ?

Jesus ! — cos we’re in a system where money rules; if you’ve got it you’re sweet, if you haven’t, you’re not. You can stop now.

Why ?

Because you’re NOT getting an ice cream

‘… but how much is an icecream ?’ says the middle one.

And then off we’d go down another file tree of why’s — loads of fun, sport with the kids, both of us tweaking the line of enquiry at will.

Bout that time my stepdad, a retired south island farmer said to me, “Why don’t you move to Oamaru ?”

Why ?

“Because you’ve got to get ahead”

Why ?

“because you’ve got a wife and 4 kids and you have nothing.”

Actually we had heaps, a great family unit living rurally boiling up tough old yardbirds — that the kids refused to eat, and living the good life.

How moving to Oamaru was going to help me ‘get ahead’ was beyond me.

He suggested I get a nice teaching job at Waitaki Boys High, where house prices meant home ownership was doable.

He did have a point. I’d just turned forty, with little material wealth save the Falcon and a couple of guitars.

My world of job gigging — literally, playing Elvis in the Waiuku and Pukekohe Cossie clubs — wigless, was barely covering costs.

Providing food and shelter was akin to surfing the cortisol.

And I was in Oamaru just a few mths back, it’s all a bit hip with it’s weirdo steampunk act — I even got stuck in a small traffic jam. Looks like it’s getting ahead.

But the rural packing shed we rented north of Waiuku was cool.

It had been made something into a cottage, running water and electricity, pot belly, some partitioning for two small bedrooms and a bathroom. When it rained heavily it flooded but it was home for a few yrs, rented to us by a chum.

Y2K came and went, I stored pails of rice in the adjoining barn just in case, and that shitty old Falcon all mags and spoiler, died an eventual death when we moved to Waiheke.

That car man — what a pig.

Never tracked properly, wandered all over the show, and it chose open road blind corners to conk out. Lpg cylinder in the boot, bunch of kids in the back.

Cap’n Cortisol rides again.

Oamaru never happened, but I started hanging out with the Auckland motorway cops and busting people on camera — God I hated that job, but the money was way better than playing Elvis in bars. I was getting ahead.

Various of my cop mates were trying to get out. One had applied to the Queensland police so he could wear a gun, another bailed to sell real estate, yet another landed a desk job at Central preparing papers for the prosecutors.

It’s lone wolf stuff out there where the rubber hits the road.

You can feel a bit Nigel-no-mates as a motorway cop.

Back at the packing shed, the kids were at it again.

‘Why are you going out tonight dad ?

To video people breaking the law

Why ?

Because it’s my job at the moment

Why ?

Cos it pays better than playing music

Why ?

Because people like seeing video of other people coming unstuck more than they like music

Why ?

Because it probably makes them feel better about their own lives

(I’m grabbing my keys off the table)

Why ?

Because lots of humans aren’t well, and seek hope in strange places

(I’m walking out the door)

Why Dad ?

Because …. I dunno, ask your mother.

Currently in NZ it’s like we’re heading into a rugby world cup. There’s a couple of odds-on fav’s, the blue and the red jerseys, then a bunch of smaller aspirational teams eager at the sideline for a go at the big league. Competition is king.

The closer we get to the voting booth, the faster we dance around the maypole as the media lead us down the microscope to see who’s blood we’ve got between the glass slides today.

Fun times ! — our own reality show. Walk the plank bitches.

Now swim, and good luck with the sharks.

But we already intuitively know how we’ll vote, who we’d like as our national leader, the group and the package that they bring with them.

It’s built into our nature and nurture, been a lifetime in the making.

I’m justified, and as a paid up member of the What’s in it For Me party, I think we’re done here.

These leaders debates, little mini-sessions of life in the parliamentary house, shouting at each other, making shit up on the fly, construing half-truths to wrestle power and control … Look away brethren.

I’ve been conducting my own research poll. I can’t do it over the phone, or via media. It’s got to be in the flesh and it’ll still be running after the election.

I think of it as ‘the eyes have it’.

When I’m out n’ about I enjoy making eye contact with randoms.

Could be walking down the street, on the bus, a corporate workplace.

I’ve got a toolkit of gazes.

There’s the glimpser, just a sneak and you’re off, hopefully moved off their eyeline b4 their glimpser catches yours. If it does then at that moment of capture you’re gone. Never happened, didn’t clock you, promise. Nothing to see here.

There’s the gleamer, a longer smile into the face of a stranger, still in passing but with a deliberateness. Like I see you and I am giving you the good vibe as hail fellow well met. But no words.

This ones like fishing, my reward sometimes being a return gleamer — from a stranger … bonus !

On a good day when I’m feeling energized and upbeat, I can catch my quota pretty quick, and spurred on by success I can become quite a greedy smiler.

And then there’s the goner, a full combo deal.

It can begin with introduction of some sort, and you hold the eyes for a fraction longer than is etiquette and Bam ! — they’re stuck. Instantly you’re in love.

I fall in love everytime this happens. Guy/girl young old, we’ve got it going on.

Happened to me yesterday, the goner.

A woman that hired me for some work a few mths back — pass in the foyer, how’s it going ? She’s talking to me and she’s doing it to me, the goner.

Bitch. Held my eyes in a deep set for at least 10 secs, looked into me, through me, out the other side. Talking all the time, never skipped a beat.

I felt beautifully violated.

No I’m not after a shag, and it’s not really flirting.

I’m on a different take, building my personal catchbag of human connection, happy to wear the less cordial responses … why is he looking at me ?

Every possible interplay I can wring out of a day, each momentary glimpse and gleam with strangers, builds my data base. Are you at peace? Are you king of the mountain, on a roll ? — cool, let me piggyback on that for a second.

Are you scared, anxious ? Are you feeling alone and vulnerable ? Ok, let me offer you a warm glimpse in return, feel free to piggyback on that for a second.

One of my hero’s is a guy in his 20’s blind since birth. Fate has deprived him of glimpsing and gleaming. Jono is a glass half-full beer drinking miracle with the voice of a bellbird.

As a street singer, his ears collect the data.

He said to me “Baz I see everything you do, I just don’t use my eyes.”

Different tools, same process.

For me, the eyes have it. My own evidence based data collection provides barometric readings on vibe. Vibe is everything. Vibe is fragile. Vibe can turn. Good to keep an eye on the indicators.

OK so long as we individually have a revenue stream, for now we can go it alone materially, supermarket food, gas at the pump, rent/mortgage sorted, keypad on the gate.

But don’t count on that as an ongoing scenario, this disco is heating up and the bearings on the mirror ball are squeaking.

Come up from the media microscope for a minute. We’re looking at tree’s when it’s the forest we could be seeing.

Smell the actual, recognize the echo chamber — trust and challenge intuition.

Us and them is bullshit.

I look to the day when adversarial process, like we’re seeing in our runup to the election, is done. We’re all in this together and we could do well to collaborate rather than compete.

Competition is yesterdays C word. But that’s another blog.

Arse. It seems high school teachers are getting harder to come by — especially in Auckland.

Current stats in New Zealand indicate 50% of newbie high school teachers bail within their first four years. Hefty attrition.

I’m a bailer.

I taught high school for over a decade.

In my first year or two I wasn’t much older than my senior students.

I brought an opshop radiogram and kids thrashed my LP ‘s during lunchtimes.

It was a fun thing.

Years later we played vhs tapes of early Southpark.

80 kids packed into one classroom over lunchtime .

Sir’s in charge, cup of tea/round wine biscuit.

Had to fend the Principal off over that one. Came running with one hand on the bible, the other my teacher registration. I had some behavior management issues.

I bailed because the system was vacuum sealed in yesterday.

Before I go further I say this -

High school teachers are my heros’, underpaid, undervalued, sometimes sandwiched and stitched up. I feel for them, the miracle workers, the talented, the tireless, the average — even the wretched, the ones the kids give a wide berth.

Some operators are absolute wizards, keepers. Born to it.

Others struggle, a half baked bipolar escape plan blue tacked somewhere.

Anyone that thinks teachers have it sweet, give it a go.

Teenage kids are combustible packages of energy, challenge and change.

Most days, most periods, surfs up.

Waxed, leg rope on, waiting for that seventh wave of the set that’s gonna make the ride all worthwhile, or smudge you out with a bruising dumper.

Then the bell goes, n’ you’re paddling out ready for the next set.

Few years back I went to the farewell of one of my best high school teachers.

This guy did 42 yrs in the classroom. When promotion knocked, he looked the other way, stayed with the kids.

I always had the feeling there was nowhere else in the world that he wanted to be than hanging in a prefab with us.

He was the real deal, twinkle in his eye, excited — loved his job.

He could have been teaching macramé and we’d have aced it. We rolled with him.

For him it was the best job in the world.

So why have we got difficulties retaining high school teachers ?

They’re everyone’s bitch; the kids, parents, Principals and the Ministry’s.

Depending who you talk to it’s obsession with assessment, paperwork,

lousy pay, weak leadership, exhausting expectations.

And teachers want that national standards monkey off their back.

Fair enough. It’s more like a gibbon on acid.

Boxes to tick and little time, it’s a tightrope to also be creative and take a lesson somewhere. Ringmaster by day, paperwork by night.

And the dramatic energy — friendly mentor one minute, raging gorilla cop the next.

“School stand …sit, you’re too noisy… stand ….. QUIET ! … Right, you boys talking in the fourth row, etc …” The assembly ritual, DP n’ Deans pulling out the talkers and uniform irregularities. Socks up.

I sometimes wondered if I hadn’t joined the Dept of Corrections.

Lately, in parent mode I went to my schools ERO (Education Review Office)

‘meet the community’ session.

I said what if the school invite parents and other members of the community to bring their passions/adventures/skillsets into the class and work with teachers to help mentor groups of kids, build portfolio, achieve goals etc

I can hear my teacher mates saying, “Baz there’s no space to build another expectation into the day”, and some parents wouldn’t be keen or find the time. No prob.

But it can work.

My eldest son went to a high school that did that.

When he enrolled they chatted me up.

“So what do you do Baz”, and then “would you like to come in to help ?”

Soon got round to “how’s your diary looking, police check all good?”

On chosen day in I’d go, wear a name badge so I wasn’t a wandering random.

My job was helping media studies kids with their imovie projects. It was fun.

Teachers with parents on speed dial. Solid idea.

Push the boat out some more and imagine a learning landscape different again.

Environments where people collaborate at different times of the day/eve/weekends. Mixed ages, streams, subject collusions, different spaces, processes, outcomes … rethinking teaching and learning.

Teachers might further flourish in their craft, give value and feel valued.

Though there’s the risk of sexing it up too much.

A stampede of freshly baked high school teachers clamouring for work in high schools, could be very, very, scary.