Kiwi On The Loose

Well here I am trying to be funny on a gorgeous sunny fall day in Denver that still feels like summer . Its been great to be out and about, having my weekly cup of coffee x 3 with some really lovely people. I was reading last night about coffee inhibiting some kind of beta type brain waves BUT today life seemed better, the future manageable and the mountains a little less obstacle like. OF COURSE  this all could have been due to the fact that I had been wearing my orange biking sun glasses and thinking I was BONO walking thru K Mart with a beautiful women.

ORANGE could just do that to my brain waves and maybe my thinking it was coffee is not right @ all.

I have come to love copy opps! I mean coffee, BUt I don’t drink it daily, only on special occasions. TWAS funny though, last week Susan and I went to have coffee @ Starbucks, we ordered a couple of HazelNut lattes. Well part way thru sitting outside in the sun discussing sugar and the ills it has added to society WE realised we weren’t drinking HAZELNUT lattes @ all but iced lattes. Being a couple of onto it Da Vinci’s that kind of oblivious may seem hard to believe. After a brief discussion, me wussing out not to bother BUT Susan being the up front consumer she is , inside she went in to the guy and  pointed this out. We hadn’t ordered iced coffee. They laughed together as you do around Susan, (otherwise known as The ‘Q’. Q for qwerky, Qute (very), Qwackers and Qwarazy and very to all those too). Afer laughing the guy gave us 2 MORE coffees PLUS our old ones BACK for good PR saying they only cost the company 6 cents. I thought MATE !! you shouldn’t tell us that kind of info. This was before the 700 billion dollar package of course!. So now we are FOUR coffees (and 24 cents real cost) but wait there’s MORE.

See what ORANGE has done to me today. Here’s a photo to prove it.

AND NOW back to the story.

We are outside in the sun again, listening to Russian being spoken at a table next to us WHEN sipping away and still thinking about sugar and Susan says “HazelNut lattes are sweet enough anyway”. I think or taste and go hmmmmmmm……………we realise THESE R NOT hazelnut lattes either. WELL Susan can’t resist and off she goes again to take on daddy Starbucks.

Again she returns with two more real HazelNut lattes PLUS our old ones. SO now we are SIX. We have them in a nice tray holding 4 cups. So off we go. We had paid around 7 buks for the TWO coffees, we cost the company, 36cents and we walked away with SIX cups of coffee, two of which we had drunk of course.

Not bad, especially since we drunk them all that day and managed to sleep that night.

So that’s the coffee story.

MY THINKING I WAS FUNNY in my blog title today had nothing to do with coffee BUT was becoz I am using Adobe Contribute to update my blog now…..which while its a learning curve, I am finding it is quite a bit easier………

Hence Contributing School…………….ha ha hee hhe…..Does anyone else get my word plays or am I in a class of my own???? Not the top class either.  I am sure it is healthy to find yourself funny…..but some people when they find out you think you are funny suddenly become serious and you aren’t FUNNY@ALL. TODAY I am funny……I can laugh at myself………and may it continue. The DOWs falling, I am 7,000 miles from my family and home…..I am ON TOUR In AMERICA, which could be depressing if you listened to the news all day, BUT I can laugh today………..that’s gotta be good.

So I think this Contributing School is great. Makes updating my blog and schpeeling easier. I need to schpeel, there’s so much to think about here. THANKS Adobe, I am glad I am in your class.

Hey thanks for reading this. Please leave a comment or register. Feeling like you are talking to yourself may be practice for my solitary confinement one day but don’t be shy…………. why am I the only loudmouth in the world.

Was New Zealand @ the Olympics?

There I was watching the open ceremony, looking forward to and wondering how I would feel watching ENZED enter the beginning parade.

When we finally got to it………after lots of commentary and team USA promo patriotic adverts………………. team New Zealand entered the stadium…………ahhhhhhhhh. I started to feel things.

Was Sam Warriner there from my hometown? THEN after barely 5 seconds of seeing Black….’we are gona cut to a break now!’

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. No it wasn’t our politics or nuclear policy, pure and simple someone made a call that we didn’t matter, that some other nation of ONE entrant was more interesting.

In that one moment I had such a vivid illustration of worldview and NZ place on the world stage thru American eyes. Didn’t they know I was watching in Denver??? LOL.

Of course its normal and good and okay for USA to be there for the collection of news about themselves. If Naru had a broadcasting crew, they wouldm be there for Naru. Which makes me wonder, who does cover the little guys @ the Olympics for the fans at home. Eg,Samoa and Tuvalu had a representative this year….who does I wonder.

Maybe coverage isn’t that important, but being there is.

And there is worldview in a nutshell. America wants to see America, NZ wants to see NZ, Ukraine..Ukraine and so on down the line.

It all illustrates our preoccupation with ourselves, which to be honest some of which is good and healthy and needed BUT if we go deeper into it, PERHAPS the Olympics is just ritualised imperialism or one upmanship for some nations. And nothing is really gained from the spirit of competition that is mind broadening beyond a fascination and cutesy value of other competeing nations. Apart from the opening and closing ceremonies the media does nothing that will perhaps parallel relationally what is happening on the ground between the athletes in terms of life changing meetings.

IMAGINE if the media talked to competitors and people from other countries than there own, and there was passion and pride in a more global way. THEN I think the Olympics could be a defining time for all the nations.

IMAGINE being interested in the worldview of other atheletes from strange lands.

I didn’t mean to deep here but here I am again pondering serious stuff. IF I had been in NZ I know we would have got more than 5 seconds of USA entering the stadium. I know you gotta cut to the break somewhere in the studio BUT? I think NZ has a less self absorbed view of itself and others.

So I want to have a worldview that sees the adventure of getting to know what others think as a primary objective. It by no means giving up your own convictions, or worldview BUT it sets a platform for UNDERSTANDING and with understanding comes tolerance, and sometimes understanding comes with a big stick too. I don’t want a gushy accept all behaviour kinda world. Its just not good when the stick comes out from self absorption or the road to understanding hasn’t been walked first.

So I wont get to see NZ’s entry and performance at the games, and find out how I will feel about it.. I don’t have a clue from TV how many medals we’ve got or how Sam Warriner did.

BUT the USA team patriotic adverts are the same, just no silver fern or black. AND I am happy to feel pleasure and pride in USA’s achievements. Its a different worldview, thats all.

In some ways I should feel shame as a kiwi never having seen Mount Cook or in fact never having been to the South Island full stop, but I don’t.

You can’t do everything in your life and the years roll by awful fast when you get wonderfully tied up making a home, try’n to have a career, be a good husband, pay the bank back and be the best parent you can be despite the limitation of being who you are. It ain’t always easy folks, and then you look back and are ready to really do the job and 23 years have passed…..booof just like that!

Mountains offer a perspective all of their own. I was once fascinated by how many great people in history climbed mountains, or high hills. A mountain don’t have to have snow on it or mean you need breathing apparatus, its just something thats higher than you. Just like the obstacles in our lives………….but I digress.

When I first flew in a plane I was mesmerised by the fact that the sun was always above the clouds, and how above the clouds seemed like a whole new world. Thats where I wanted to live.

I wanted to live on the earth with an above the clouds perspective or mindset.

So here I sit, on top of Mount Evans, higher than the majority of kiwis at that moment in time………………(except those in Nepal or The Andes doing something crazy) and I wonder how high Mt Cook is compared to this.

I am approximately 2000ft higher than Mt Cook and 5 thousand feet higher than my previous Rocky Mountain exploits.

The new perspective it offered from that mountain top was on myself, and its always good to see yourself differently and feel like you are stretching your boundaries. (that’s not a term for putting on weight LOL), I realised the exhilaration of living differently, and in living differently experience wonderful things, like the clouds up here, the mountain wildflowers and pasture, the mountain sheep, breathing the thin mountain air, being surrounded by granite, looking out over the ranges distant, touching the green as grass on mountain meadow, knowing that the mountains are His.

Its good for your soul to get as high on the earth as you can sometimes and look out and feel the thrill of being there and grow in some small way, and go back down to the real world somehow different.

So Mt Cook /Aoraki is 12,316 ft high (3754m) and I have never been there and in all honesty wont ever stand on its top.

Mt Evans is 14, 258 ft high and there is a road to the top then a short walk/pilgrimage to the peak. I was there

Well as promised heres a little bit of pig hunting ‘kiwi’ styles. It so just occurred to me how if this boar had been hunted in England how different this picture could have been ‘old chap, eh wot and all that’. This is so New Zealand.

This is in fact my old dad in his younger years. Not only has it done me good to look @ this picture from a ‘let’s celebrate kiwiana who am I perspective’, but also from the fact that this is my dad . Inside myself I have this welling up of, WOW! and it makes me realise whose I am, and where I came from genetically and geographically. I walk away from this computer straighter, a fuller chest, emotionally richer, and a little less beaten by life. This image oozes testosterone and freaken Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, Arney or Harrison Ford and all the stars AIN’T got nothing on this nor all the AllBlack Gods. AND he’s my DAD!

This is the real deal.

SO I wonder… how many kiwi Dads are there out there who look at the bullshit (excuse the French but they deserve it) on television, the movies, the eye candy men, the heroes in womens minds and inside they think………………….?

Well I am sure they actually don’t think a lot because society and all its bullpucky (such a descriptive kiwi word) has demeaned and reduced their acts of manhood, courage, adventure and valor into nothingness. Unless you have abs like the 300, (assisted by makeup I might add) or have the ear of the media your exploits mean NOTHING. You are a legend in your own mind. You sit in your lazyboy and remember when……when ……….and you die slowly inside, walk more stooped, drink more, talk less……….there is no voice or even an ear for the stories compared to the strength on the medias NEW heroes. The billboard breed.

I am so guilty of not being interested BUT when I look at this picture I need to be. I so need to be.

The silence of living in obscurity in your own mind is deafening, when they could have made a movie on your life……….and you replay it in your head and come up with the sad untruth that you were nothing special.

If it wasn’t pig hunting it may have been any number of things…………I want to go home and hug my Dad, sit at his feet while I can.

He’s a heroe and I am his son.

As to the pig story. That better be another Kiwi VagaBond post.

Here’s the challenge!

Have you really seen your Dad lately?

Have you really seen your Mum?…..your grandparents if you are so lucky?

Have you really seen anyone lately?

There’s a heroe…..music please….(any of the heroe songs……………just please not ‘I did it myyyyyyyy way’………. it’s too close to the Hollywood bull___t, ole’ blue eyes was a ganster)

Kiwi on the loose was watching Kiwi Kitchen on TV just now and there they were in tonights programme looking at scones, picklets, corn beef and self saucing chocolate pudding. Very kiwi indeed! These NZ kiwiana iconz that most kiwis have grown up with and we will revisit sometime soon.. What all these recipes however had in common (excepting the corn beef ) was the good old EDMONDS COOK BOOK. We all grew up with it. Its just part of being a kiwi. When I bought my house a year ago I had a nostalgic period of purchasing NZ pottery and things that reminded me of my childhood like Lone Ranger, Bonanza and I Love Lucy dvds from the Warehouse. On Trademe I found a genuine old Edmonds Cookbook. I bought it and instantly placed it in the cupboard over the stove with a great feeling of coming home . Now it felt like home. I’d like to come back to this….its really Kiwi and in fact where ever I travel, I will take the Cookbook.

I didn’t know that I lived in paradise until January this year.Just before I turned 51.
The realisation happened while I was having a brief holiday staying with a photographer friend in America. Back in NZ from Denver, I had reflected lots on New Zealand in comparison to the USA, and what the strengths of each were and most importantly what made ‘kiwi’ kiwi.

I am no sleaze when it comes to collecting useless information, but in my brief stay in the USA I was disgusted at how little I knew about NZ. Like people would ask how long it was, or whats the highest mountain etc…durrrr! I dunno!

I found America to be totally HUGE, totally awe inspiring, and I saw beauty at every turn as I was taken in and out of The Rockies. Just traveling the freeways of Denver with the mountains in the distance as a backdrop was wonderful. It produced in me a sense of respect and wonder. Flying from LA to Denver and later on from Denver to Dallas, I can remember being the guy with his nose stuck to the window hypnotised by the view beneath me just sprawling out forever and ever and then some.  Land stretching out so far and wide……………where was the sea. Flying in New Zealand you can see both coasts on a fine day, or even a not so fine day.

I remembered lots of songs in America as I traveled. I felt like Woody Guthrie or who ever wrote ‘This land is your land….this land is my land.’ I felt the love and respect for the land, the hugeness of it. I loved even the roads, I was happy as a pig in mud taking photos thru the windscreen as we travelled. I could see why this nation was carved into to the hearts of its inhabitants. The sheer living with it commanded some kind of reverent, respect and awe as well as the resulting arrogance evident is some Americans, its politics and attitudes consequent to the exhilaration of having tamed the land and covered it with railway lines, freeways and things. The ‘I did it my way mentality’, that everything can be subdued in the end.

Still I found myself captivated by America, home of the free. I met some very lovely people and made some wonderful friends. It deeply effected my spirit. I had been a while coming to the realisation that all people are basically the same. You have to go outside and over the road to do that. 6500miles over the road. When I got home and processed it all and scrutinised the America portrayed on TV …I wasn’t so sure. Reality television doesn’t help America’s image, and the sad thing is Americans seem to feel the more right the more they are disliked on the world stage it seems.. Was it as wonderful as I thought? I wanted it to be and still do, but I am not so sure. I think the way to find out is to really spend a lot of time in several places in down home America, and I ‘d like to return to do that sometime. To be part of actually existing in a space and become part of it for a while.

So till next time.
cheers
I will get to paradise bit in the end.. Please feel free to comment. I so know these are my own opinions and I like a robust debate!

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