Author Archives: oinsketta

End of the line

I’ve had this kind of conversation before. Every time it is the saddest imaginable conversation, because at the end, in spite of great affection, both parties will be dead to each other. Alive and walking around in the world, and doing acts of kindness, and trying to be the best they can be, and dead to each other.

We don’t come to this kind of final conversation lightly. First of all, we have to care enough about the other person to extend them the final chance to avoid our mutual deaths. The average jerk who acts like a jerk and hurts us in a jerky fashion does not get this kind of final discussion. We just write them off, smile when we see them and avoid anything of consequence with them. But with people we deeply care about, who have deeply hurt us, it sometimes comes to this final conversation.

Personally, I tend to avoid starting these conversations once I’m fully aware of the hideous terrain we are both stuck in. Once the other party insists that nothing you have said changes anything, you are pretty much done. Words at that point have no ability to change the emotional reality that makes it impossible for us to continue as friends. In fact, if you express yourself clearly you are only making the wound deeper by seeming to blame the other person for being heartless, clueless, unforgiving, unyielding, rigid, needy, childish, etc.

The outline of this talk is always the same. The person calling will say they love you, that they have taken about all that they can take, that they have tried their best to be your friend and give you what you need but nothing they have done has been enough for you. They will place it on you, pronouncing the final death.

After all the aggravation, the soul searching, the health threatening stress of trying to find a mutual solution with somebody who is unable to overcome their righteous anger, their inability to forgive, words are of limited use. That said, it is good to remain honest until the end.

Trust me, you will get no acknowledgment of your honesty, and truly it means nothing in that moment. But you remain true to yourself by not pretending that all of your hard work has produced any tangible result. It is time to put down the cadaver of an old friendship you were carrying, alone, in hopes of a miracle.

I find that at the very end of these talks sometimes a last precisely calibrated insult can be very helpful in allowing your dear friend to permanently write you out of their life. At that moment, it is the least you can do by way of mercy.

MAGA justice

“We’re focused on how political our Justice Department has become — they’re making decisions on a political basis, we’re going to look at all that,” [Ohio rep Jim] Jordan said in a November news conference. “We’re concerned about anything that is being done in a political fashion at the Justice Department.” . . .

. . . Jordan’s counterpart on the House Oversight Committee, however, recently said in a CNN interview that following up an investigation into classified documents found at Trump’s private club and estate in Florida “will not be a priority.” Incoming chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has been conducting the minority party’s own investigation into the August search warrant executed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, but he has indicated he favors prioritizing investigations examining Twitter’s handling of reporting on Hunter Biden before the 2020 election and the origins of the coronavirus.

https://wapo.st/3HHK6H6

Then with the same level of seriousness and shrewd analysis of what is in the best interest of Justice, the article ends with this blurting from the disgraced former president, our recent 2 year-old in Chief.

“Under the Presidential Records Act and the very well established Clinton Socks Case, the raid of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, and the taking of documents and many other items, was ILLEGAL,” Trump said Friday on Truth Social. “Everything should be returned, at once!”

What it means to be unforgiving

Being unforgiving means you cannot let go of your hurt and anger, even after someone does their best to make amends. Even when someone expresses sincere regret for their harmful actions and humbly asks for your forgiveness, you can’t forgive.

This kind of angry person, who tends to live in a zero sum world of winners and losers, cannot forgive themselves, cannot calm themselves when they’re upset, have not learned to sit with strong, painful emotions and wait until they are calmer to try to resolve a conflict. Unregulated anger is destructive, it arises from pre-verbal fears and shame and it extends to an inability to forgive.

Holding on to anger is a maladaptive way to try to feel righteous and superior. This type, with its unhealthy bent toward indignation and rage, is clueless about how to resolve conflicts with others and within themselves.

When you think about it, it’s pretty clear that you have no obligation to forgive someone who hurts you and blames you entirely for making them hurt you. When no apology is offered, hurtful behavior is never acknowledged, your obligation to forgive disappears. That is not being unforgiving, it’s health, common sense and what’s best for yourself and other people that you love.

Those who can’t forgive, no matter what? Dangerous, wounded, supremely destructive motherfuckers. We might well feel very sorry for them, if we care about them, but not being able to forgive their eternal blaming anger does not make us unforgiving.

This type will force her mate to kill his best friends, and her mate will do it because he feels he has no choice but to become enraged at his best friends and kill them. Otherwise he will be derided forever as a contemptible weakling. The alligator he is wrestling with will point toward his more sympathetic friends and tell him that they are the vicious alligators and if he doesn’t fight them to the death he’s a pussy.

As long as he stays angry, he will never have to to be tormented by his own immature, self-harming actions, which is the greatest blessing to this eternally trapped poor bastard type.

Marjorie Taylor Buttplug

Marjorie Greene, the unapologetically passionate face of the balls to the wall MAGA party, gave some fiery remarks at a gala in New York City the other night as she accepted the annual Richard M. Nixon patriotic democracy-loving American politician award from New York City’s Young Republican Club. During her remarks she said that had she and Sloppy Steve Bannon organized the January 6th riot, well here she is (as reported by the fake News New York Times):

“And I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won,” she told the audience. “Not to mention, it would have been armed.”

WE WOULD HAVE WON. Not to mention, it would have been armed.

You know, it’s not like Steve Bannon was in the War Room at the Willard Hotel on January 6th or anything like that… but as important as that comment/admission was, she went on to talk about her intimate shopping habits at Target and CVS.

Addressing an audience on Saturday night after being given the Richard M. Nixon Award—assigned by the New York Young Republican Club to “a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism,” Greene told those gathered: “By the way, you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays. I don’t even know how we got here. This is the state that we’re living in right now.”

https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-sex-toy-comments-spark-avalanche-jokes-memes-1766285

USA! USA!!!

Good working definition of empathy

This definition comes from Dr Ramani, a psychologist and writer with a youTube channel dedicated to understanding narcissism and the harm it causes.

Empathy is about being present with a person, truly present with all of a person. And being able to respond to their emotions and attempt to understand them and their emotions… Empathy is a deep, reciprocal state.

Take away the reciprocal part and you don’t have empathy. You have a hierarchy where one person’s emotion is much more important than the other’s. Call that whatever you want, it’s not friendship. And there’s not even a whiff of empathy there.

If you’re trying to have a real conversation with somebody who lacks empathy, you might as well talk to a hungry grizzly bear.

A sad finale

An old friend broke his silence of a month, calling me on this rainy Friday afternoon. After a few moments of small talk about our upcoming biopsies and other medical procedures, the concomitants of living to the ripe old age we have reached, he came to the point of his call.

“I’m not going to be responsible for trying to fix this,” he said. “I’ve done everything I can. I want to be friends.”

So you’re not going to take responsibility for your own actions this last year and a half?

“Don’t put words in my mouth, that’s not what I said,” he said, saying it all. “We all did things to each other,” he began.

I haven’t lied to you once in all the years we’ve known each other. Every time you got upset in the last year and a half I behaved like your friend, heard you out and calmed you. You have never answered a single question that I’ve asked in the last 15 months.

“And I’m done with being questioned,” he said. “I guess I got my answer.”

I offered one last slightly acerbic rejoinder, which, under the circumstances, I thought was pretty good.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said, as I disconnected the call.

contempt

When you are treated with contempt, there is no mistaking the corrosive feeling it arouses. It is dismissal on steroids. It causes a unique and terrible injury.

Contempt means nothing you say needs to be considered, your opinions and ideas are bullshit, anything you think of as insight is a bunch of stinking crap. Contempt means never having to even consider saying you’re sorry because the person acting hurt has no gripe except against her contemptible self.

Contempt doesn’t mean I disagree with you, it means you and your thoughts and your feelings are so far beneath me I don’t have to even consider them.  If I have contempt for you, you are nothing to me, so far inferior that I have no need to consider anything in regard to you, except how contemptible you are.  

You need understanding?   It’s only because you are weak and needy.  Some intimate fear you need to share with me?  You are a coward.  Something bothering you that you need to talk to me about?   Forget it, maggot.  You show me vulnerability?  I show you the back of my fucking hand, asshole.

Contempt is the precursor to every act of individual and organized violence.  It is not enough to simply hate the people you are about to beat, torture and murder.  You have to feel contempt for them.  Once you have that deep conviction of their contemptibility, you feel justified in doing whatever you have to do to the smelly, weak, pusillanimous, poisonous little pukes.   Another gruesome page of human history, written in the blood of the contemptible.

Senseless enmity

My father’s mother, a diminutive red haired religious woman with a brutal temper, used to snarl whenever my father and his little brother fought.  “Seenas Cheenam!” she would say, Yiddish for “senseless enmity!”   They lived in poverty impressive even by the desperate standards of the Depression, their mother openly hated their father, the larger older brother was regularly whipped in the face by his mother, the sickly younger brother was always pampered by that same mother.   Add it up and you get “Seenas Cheenam!”   

My father spoke very little of his deeply scarring childhood, except to point out from time to time that he grew up in “grinding poverty.”  That was the phrase he always used when comparing his lot to my sister’s and mine.  We also heard the phrase “Seenas Cheenam” often enough growing up that it sticks in my head.  I later learned Hebrew and the word cheenam means “free,” or “gratuitous,” if you will,  seenas being the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew seenat, hatred.   

Psychological insight into human behavior is not necessarily a widespread human characteristic.  Certainty, of course, is.  We like to be sure before we whip somebody that we are doing the right thing.  And so it was with my grandmother, an uneducated woman from a family soon to be murdered en masse, prone to fits of righteous rage, a woman who died young, of cancer, a few years before I was born.  The irony of her dismissing any reason the boys might be at each other’s throats in that sadistic experiment they grew up in is not lost on me.  Blaming her boys for being at each other’s throats for no reason was her way of being certain that she was always doing what was best, exactly what God wanted her to do.  Certainty is the human genius.

Before my uncle died (in a rehab center) he told his son and me that he had framed photos of our great grandparents in the house his son was selling.   We looked everywhere, didn’t find them, and, on a last pass through, before locking up the house for the last time after it was sold, I walked into the sun room.   There behind the wicker couch my demented aunt had secreted the almost life-sized portrait heads of my grandmother’s parents, in beautiful oval frames.  I could barely stand looking at them.   These two had created a monster of their youngest child, my father’s violently unlucky mother.  

I can only imagine the household that raises their youngest to whip her infant son in the face over and over.  I look at the face of her mother, in a photo taken before 1914 when my grandmother arrived here in the US.  I shudder.   The father looks a bit more human, though as I look a moment longer I start to cringe.  People who were being photographed for the only time in their lives tend to look stiff, and rigid, and perhaps not at their most natural in the photographer’s studio, but there is something about these two that gives me the creeps.  

It is the knowledge that they raised a girl who grew up to viciously take out her misery on her first born son, a toddler who grew up to be my father.  My father, though he did much better than his mother, also was unable to resist taking out his misery and his unslakable anger on his children.  He was not one to hit, but his brutal words, as he eventually admitted, were as harmful as any regime of slaps, punches or kicks could have been.

We don’t want insight, we want to be right.  Keep it fucking simple, you merciless asshole!  I am right, as my gut is telling me, as my muscular tension tells me, as the surge of fight/flight/freeze chemicals urge me, as my every justification fucking tells me!

My sister and I had a terrible fight almost thirty years ago when my niece was a toddler.  Frustrations from years of conflict flared up and I lost my temper.  So did my sister who began screaming for me to get out of her fucking house.  My niece said, from her highchair, “mom, stop screaming at Uncle Elie!”   Sides clearly had to be drawn more decisively, as they were over the years, until my niece and nephew were convinced not to communicate with their crazy uncle any more.  Right is right when it comes to seenas cheenam, you understand.