Monthly Archives: May 2014

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today, if my mother was alive, she’d be 86 and in her 27th year of endometrial cancer.   That’s just bookkeeping, mere facts, a logical and stupid way to begin.

One year we flew to Florida on May 20th, Sekhnet and I, and rented a car at the airport.   We drove to my parents’ gated retirement community and somehow gained entrance without having the gate call the residents to verify that we were not smiling predators posing as children and coming to kill and rob the condo owners.

We arrived and parked at the far end of their parking lot, out of sight of their windows.   I dialed my parents as we walked up to the apartment and Sekhnet and I wished a hearty happy birthday and expressed our regrets that we couldn’t be there to celebrate in person.  Then we rang the doorbell.

“Goddamn it,” my mother said, with her ready Bronx attitude of frustration at an interruption, “somebody’s at the door….”

When she opened it we were standing there, phone in hand.

Her mouth popped wide open in the most comical expression of surprise you can imagine.   Although her mouth was open wide enough to swallow a small dog, she had a wry Bill Maherish smile around the edges of it, and in her eyes.  She looked for a moment like one of those nutcrackers in the shape of a person with the impossibly open lower jaw.   I can see that expression now, so can Sekhnet.

My mother began to laugh “you rats!” she said, hugging and kissing us.    My father appeared behind her, making humorous, sardonic remarks.   Ginger, a small poodle shaped like a football, began clicking her claws on the hard wood floor by the door.

All of them now long gone;  my father nine years, Ginger the same, my mother will be gone four years tomorrow.

I pause today to think of how proud my parents would be, even if terribly concerned about my long-term survival, to see the progress of my program, and my determination.   They would not be any more excited about the actual animation than anyone else is, but I think they would understand that their son, long struggling against a world of darkness, brutality and ignorance, has found a way to bring the things he values most into the lives of children who get very little chance to ever experience these things.   I think my mother would be proud, and excited for the possibilities immediately before me, now that I have proved the success of this program with perhaps 100 kids in four or five different settings.  

Even if she didn’t have much faith in my prospects for the future, she would listen willing to be convinced that I have already done much of the hard work to produce something amazing.   “Elie, you’re not curing cancer, but this is pretty good,” she might agree, when I was done persuading her of the great value of what I am doing and how much satisfaction it brings me, in the midst of the fearfulness of this wholly invented, marvelous and scarily shaky vehicle I am dragging around with me.

Happy birthday, Mom.

The Kind of Dog Dog Kickers Kick

People who kick dogs are cowards, let’s face it.   Unless the dog is attacking you or a loved one, or a helpless person nearby, in which case you are within your rights to kick the dog.

It is the kind of dogs people usually kick that shows best what such people are made of.   Do you think Mastiffs are often kicked?   The only people who kick large, powerful dogs are those cowards so filled with rage and hatred that they have a powerful, large caliber gun in the other hand as they kick the dog.  The same “equalizer” the overseer always had at hand when whipping slaves on the rich guy’s plantation.

The typical dog kicker’s dog?  A small, sad-eyed dog who cannot fight back.  A little terrier, a Chihuahua, a toy poodle.

 

Golfito (1)

I’ve taken a vow of nonviolence.  It is a hard vow to keep in a violent world filled with enraged acting-out cowards.  That worm who kicked me on the train the other day– if he did it out of clumsiness, why not say “sorry”?   If too oblivious or enraged to have second thoughts after solidly kicking a sleeping man’s ankle, the best remedy for such behavior is a quick tug on the kicker’s head and a sudden jerk of the face to the subway door.  Bam!

This will possibly deter the man the next time, make him think twice before booting a man thirty years his senior (perhaps I reminded him of the father he always hated).   More likely it will only cause him to seek smaller dogs to kick, maybe even blind ones.

The cycle of rage and violence cannot be corrected by violence, of course, though it is the only language spoken by many in a violent society like ours.  True mildness, coupled with unfailing directness, is a better corrective– though very fucking hard to practice.

Dog Kickers

Seething silently behind reflective spectacles

One must exercise care

around these mild-seeming creatures

 

One, after a day spent,

undoubtedly doing distasteful things

for too little pay,

wants the seat next to yours on the uptown A

and not finding as much room as he requires

to spread his legs the way he likes

rises, huffy, roosterish

crosses to perch on another too narrow seat

eyes slits burning at his newspaper

 

Then, as deep sleep returns to you

this well dressed person leaps

to change to the seat across from you

Your ankle the dog he kicks hard

as he lurches toward  it.

 

Rudely awake you glare, ankle aggrieved  

he resists by staring at his newspaper

face like an unsanitary knife, stinking

 

Ahimsa boy is left watching him exit

a stop before he could rise,

cross the car,

stand briefly and heavily on the instep

and raise one side of his face impassively to say

“pardon me.”

It Will Not Do To Mope

While it’s always an option, moping doesn’t help much with what needs to be done.   Tempting though it is, many times, to mope, moping is its own reward.

 Be of good cheer, he says cheerfully to himself.   It won’t do to dwell on the realization I had the other day, in the process of forbearing from telling an old friend that he was acting like an old asshole.   On the way to meet him, many hours after several anxious wake up calls I had no way to ignore, I jotted:  the reward for mildness, another chance to remain mild.

 “Yes!” he said cheerfully when I said it to him.

 “It’s very fucked up,” I said, never more truthful.

 Multiple recordings from Verizon inform me that my internet service will be out at least two weeks.  I am not the only customer affected by this outage, apparently there are thousands of us, phantom limbs waving as we recall a time we could pop on-line for any or no reason.

Doctor left me a message, less than a week after my first call.  My blood looks good,  excellent, in fact.   He invited me to call him back for another round of phone tag.  Hopefully his secretary has printed and mailed me a copy of the actual numbers.  I’m very much into stats, being a lifelong baseball fan.

 In the penultimate session of the rather sad compromise of an animation workshop that is the last one currently standing I found myself making lemonade yesterday.  Four of the twelve kids brought in model releases and I’d photographed the only one of the four who was there the week before.  He changed expression a dozen times and I printed a sheet of his heads, cut them out and made stickers out of them with a wonderful repositionable glue stick.   He was remarkably unproprietary about the use of his head.   His is the manic head of “The Bad Murderer”, an ax wielding stick figure drawn on a blackboard who cuts up another stick figure with his worried face on it.  

 The lemonade came in the form of a series of photos of the other three who posed for their headshots, and one particular sequence.  Once I saw those frames flashing by, the stern, serious face, kind of closed and tough, bursting into animated antics, and back to the stern, closed face, I realized I had pure gold in my hand.  

 Now, in less than five seconds, you see the magic of animation in progress, including the effect it has on the child animator.  The little girl glows as she clowns for the camera, her inventive, mischievous soul shows itself in a devilish flash of fun, then back to an anonymous social mask.

 Not a bad day’s work, methinks, as I prepare to go down to Darling Coffee for a cup of expensive tea and an hour on the internet.  Better to think of that kid’s wonderful star turn, and the fantastic five second ad for the program, than of all the other reasons someone without an income, or an inkling of how to have one, would find to mope.

Whiner 5-8-14

The doctor, after taking pains to impress on me that he would have treated a long-time patient like me for free, that he had nothing to do with his group’s three month wait to participate in the Affordable Care Act, shook my hand and said we’d talk when the blood test came back in a few days.  

We did not talk, though I got a bill for $445 from his office for the twenty minute visit.  Mysterious, since I’d presented a valid insurance card and the wellness visit was supposed to be “free”.   Also mysterious, the $300 charge for a wellness visit and another $145 for a wellness consultation.

Whine no. 1:  no call back yesterday from the good doctor to talk about what my blood might have to say about the state of my health, though the bill, I was told, had been paid by insurance.

The internet is still not working here, increasing my feeling of isolation and dislocation.   Verizon is supposed to be here any minute to restore it.   Verizon’s DSL service, it must be said, is pretty crappy under the best of circumstances.   Rain seems to make it much worse, and it rained last night.   We’ll see if they show up and fix the line, three more hours left in their appointment window.  (He arrived, determined problem was in basement, door locked, super busy.  He’ll try again tomorrow, armed with super’s number.  Still no service)

Without the internet I can’t send follow-up emails to my unreturned calls from yesterday.   The businessman who sits on the board of the largest public after-school program in the country, among those calls.   I can’t have a look at that wealthy non-profit’s website to familiarize myself with its operation, to sound better informed than I am now.

Another call back that was promised but never came is from the controller of the outfit that is currently employing the animation workshop, unpaid, for months.  Second promise to immediately send the checks was made on April 17 when I sent the unpaid invoices again.  Left town, got back, no checks arrived in the intervening three weeks.

Whine no. 2:  people are weasels, and overbooked weasels at that.

Instead of attending to anything productive, like taming the skin-crawling chaos on and around my desk, I open at random a recently received proof of Philippe Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime.   On the page, now dog-eared, in a list called The jackals of negativity, I spot a familiar jackal, disguised as a fact:

Fact:  I can’t do it alone, I need help.

Petit, a man who repeatedly snuck into the new World Trade Center, casing it until he was able to solve all technical challenges, rig a tightrope between its twin towers, and stroll serenely across space, dismisses these jackals as mere excuses.   “Impossible, what is that?”  asks Petit.

Every problem can be solved over time, with enough attention and persistence.  Provided a person has the burning desire to walk the next step a thousand feet above the pavement to which most people fix their eyes.   A world of darkness, yes, but look also at all those beautiful colors.  Amazing, really, how colorful this hopeless world also is.

What gives the world its marvelous color?   Creativity.   Try living a day without it, you will find yourself fucked, wondering what the point of any of this exertion is.

I can do it alone.  I could use help, of course, but I can do it alone.  It will take much longer than it should, if I had the small team that would be so useful, but I am the man for the job.  If I can stop wasting time tapping my cane against the darkness.

Legs Zoff

Until around 1997 I had never used email.   I didn’t really know much about the internet before I started law school.  The computer was a word processor to me, and a wonderful one.  I spent hours typing and mechanically cutting and pasting, rearranging, effortlessly murdering my darlings.   It was fantastic.  Later I found pictures of pretty women on the internet and thought how cool that was, but I wasn’t connected on-line yet.

Fast forward 17 years or so, the lifespan of those who grew up with electronic devices connecting them to each other, and, on discovering I have no internet service today, I feel like I’ve had me legs chopped off.

Among my emails is a possibly very important phone number, the direct line to a board member on the largest, best-funded, public school after-school program in the country, based in NYC.  This fellow found the promo I sent him very cool and invited me to call him when I got back in town.  But his number is inaccessible now from my internetless apartment.

As are the limitless informational possibilities that the internet represents.   Dag.

Can’t even call my internet provider, Verizon, a chickenshit outfit, because their number is… on line.   Unless I can dig up a paper bill and find a tech support number there.

My plan is to bring the iPad to a local coffee shop, connect over there, with a notebook by my side to jot down numbers in.  Damn it.  They do have good coffee though.