What I learned in 1993

First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd December, 1993. I must have had a bit of a year in 1993: this should have come across as witty, but it verges on the vitriolic.

I learned what a homie is (though I am still not sure if I’ve got the spelling right, or if, in fact, anyone knows). Homies like to wear super-baggy jeans, slung so low round the hips they threaten to slide down to their ankles. They hide their torsos in tent-like tops.

They often have undercuts – another word added to my vocab this year. This means they cut their hair stubble short (often at ‘number one’ on the blades), underneath longer hair. This may be kept hidden – in which case it is only the fact that you have done it that’s important – or the longer hair may be tied up, making the scalp look as though the barber had a sudden seizure.

I learned that homies invade families indiscriminately, rather like stray cats or scabies.

I learned, yet again, that statistics are extremely flexible. It all depends on who is using them. Thus one group can claim that men are almost entirely to blame for violence in the home, while another says statistics show women to be the major offenders – 53% in fact. And that women caused death in nearly 56% of the cases.

That’s an interesting statistic for Suffrage Year.

I learned you can utterly forget that you have been sexually abused as a child, but that certain therapies can help you remember.

I learned also that some therapists can help you remember things that never actually happened, and if you are clever, you can make a lot of money out of remembering – you will need to, to pay your even cleverer therapist.

I learned that other people deny this.

I learned that women in power are no different to men in power, and that there is barely any difference between politicians and poets – both have to be somewhat crazy.

I have also learned that politics is about ambition: it has little to do with integrity, wisdom or servanthood. It has a lot to do with back-stabbing, sudden demotions, and revenge. And that’s New Zealand politics I’m talking about, not Italian.

I learned that I was wise to wear a beard for 22 years: it conveniently hid the ageing of my face. For one beardless week I felt like either Jekyll or Hyde – I’m not sure which.

I learned also that there is a very strong cultural bias against beards: sadly many of the male population have succumbed to the lie that men are better-looking without their beards. (Well, we’ll all have beards in heaven!)

I learned to smile at the frazzled parents of little children when the latter were wrecking things, or carting their baby sisters down the stairs. I now know that being a parent in those years is a delight by comparison with being a parent of a teenager – let alone of four. Teenagers are no different to preschoolers – they’re just bigger.

I have yet to learn whether there is any truth in the theory that children in their twenties are almost human.

I learned that people are just as interested in what I don’t want to write about, as in what I do. In fact, I debated detailing today all the subjects I would not write about in 1994, but I wasn’t sure if I could hold to such a resolution.

I’ve learned that in spite of all the commercialism of Christmas, in spite of the people in our community who would have us wipe Christmas off the calendar – and its message off the map – in spite of Santa Claus proliferating like the flowers that bloom in the Spring (tra la), in spite of the pressures of holidays and presents and even the violence that surfaces so readily at this stressful time of the year, Christ and Christmas do not go away.

Their truth remains, focused in the birth of a child who changed not only the course of history, but is still capable of changing the hears of men and women.

I’ve learned that when nearly everything else around is changing, a few things do not.

Three young men dressed in their homie best

I noticed when retyping this some thirty years later that a subeditor appears to have changed all my contractions to fully written out words, something I was unlikely to be doing after three years of writing the Column. It’s nice to be able to put all the contractions back in again.

I’m not sure why I claim poets are necessarily crazy. Certainly there have been crazy poets – you may even know one or two – but by contrast with politicians they are people of great sanity. Although Rimbaud and Verlaine notoriously had knife ‘fights’ and Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist with a pistol once. Apparently Ben Jonson fatally stabbed an actor in a duel – I’m not sure if this counts…