Friedman once accused me of using my friends as lab rats, making them unwitting participants in my lifelong psychological experiments. All of us here are lab rats, to some extent, as we can see by looking around at the peculiar setup we find ourselves in. Most of us, as we live and learn, calibrate the […]
It feels like time to take a break from this project, which, in my mildly depressed state, in this disorienting time, I am starting to see as another proof that I’m right to feel depressed. Before I give this instructive tale of the doomed Friedman a little rest, I’ll ladle out that Zen koan of […]
Years later, as Al Friedman lay dying in a Florida hospital, the oddest Mark Friedman story of all would take place. I cannot really begin to explain it, even all these years later, though I will tell it in as much detail as I can. First I need to point out a subtle element of […]
Writing in detail about so resolutely unhappy and demanding a character as Friedman brings up an obvious question: why would anybody care? I’m not sure. In the case of an equally perplexing character, my father, I found it important to highlight his many virtues, his humor, intelligence, sensitivity, sense of fairness — qualities that made […]
Live and learn, I say. What did I re-live while reading the “most important letter” of Friedman’s life, what did I learn in the years since I wrote it? The same vital lesson I eventually had confirmed for me, as my father apologized right before he died, years too late you could say, for his […]
At the end of the movie, all becomes clear. As the credits roll you unconsciously start processing how the story was unfolded– what techniques were used to fairly or unfairly manipulate your expectations, stretch the old credulity — that willing suspension of disbelief needed to go where the story is taking you. If the story […]
When Friedman was a boy, (and his name was Mark, a name I should also use), his family spent some time, over the course of several summers, camping near Lake Sebago in bucolic Harriman State Park. Presumably they crossed the road by the family camping area and hiked up a trail to a beautiful manmade […]
Friedman, a man with a problematic singing voice, was, at one time, a prodigious writer of highly personal songs that were often hard to listen to, sung in that difficult voice of his. A central tragedy of the poor devil’s life — to write with sensitivity for an instrument so ill-suited to music. The singer-songwriter […]
My father died almost eighteen years ago. Not long after he died, I was finally able to disentangle myself from a long, unhappy friendship with a smart, tormented guy who’d stood in as a sparring partner for my difficult father since we were teenagers. You can get all the details about this interesting, perplexing fellow […]
I forgot this one important chapter from my short piece about the life and death of a supremely unhappy man, The Book of Friedman. It might be the most significant and illuminating snapshot of the whole sad story. A reminder of forgotten hope at a terrible time is a great gift to give somebody, just […]
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