Author Archives: oinsketta

You Don’t Know How Good You Had It

I have lived in this increasingly dilapidated apartment for decades.  Over the years I’ve had many upstairs neighbors as the apartment has changed hands many times.  Some lived quietly and considerately, others were an ongoing source of aggravation.  It’s hard to appreciate how lovely the quiet ones are until some flouncing, stomping, inconsiderate dick (of either sex) moves in.

When I first moved into the place, an old woman named Mrs. Freudenstein lived upstairs.   She was a German who had, so I learned from another original neighbor, committed the racial crime of marrying a Jew during the days when Hitler was making Germany great again.   (Yes, I know, believe me, sometimes the inevitable comparisons are impossible to avoid, believe me, believe me). Mrs. Freudenstein had been a widow for a while by the time I met her in 1975, her husband possibly met a gruesome end, for all I know, as they escaped Germany together.

She was a quiet, friendly, unassuming woman who walked over my head with the grace of a cat, on little padded feet.  She early on padded down one flight and silently slipped a note under my door.  

The short, elegantly handwritten note begged me to be a good neighbor by keeping my kitchen sink clean.   “Please, I am very clean.  I never had roaches, but now I do.  Please, please, don’t leave anything in your kitchen sink at night!”   Words to that effect and words I continue to live by to this day.  I bought a can of Ajax and a scouring pad and never leave anything in my sink overnight.   She thanked me weeks later when we passed in the hall.  

I soon know if my new neighbors are unsanitary types when roaches return to my kitchen– which the clean sink helps insure is never a vast army of them.  The sink, I don’t need to point out, is the only part of this place, outside of sections of the bathroom, that could be called clean.  Every roach I crush on the edge of the stove or in the sink I mumble an apology to, it is truly nothing personal, as opposed to the new anonymous slob above or below me, who I curse in the most intimate terms, for letting the cockroach colony in the walls between our apartments thrive.

The building has changed hands several times over the years as speculators tried to make money off this hundred year old six story apartment building.  One group decided to replace the boiler in November.  There was no heat or hot water for literally two weeks, which I know now is highly illegal.  There are portable boilers that can be parked in front of buildings to supply heat and hot water, through long hoses, while the main boiler is being repaired or replaced.  

I wore sweaters and hats and cursed a lot during those frigid November nights, but didn’t think to call the City and complain about this unconscionable violation.  A landlord, I now know very well, is required to provide heat and hot water during cold weather (hot water in all seasons), and restore it immediately or pay fines that mount daily.  These profit-driven real estate speculators were playing fast and loose with a law few tenants were aware of in those days.  

While I cursed against the cold, and boiled water to shave with and wash with, Mrs. Freudenstein upstairs, who had survived far worse, contracted pneumonia, and was taken to the hospital finally, where she died.  I always blamed this group of rapacious snakes, who owned the building for a very short time, for her death.  I remember seeing her son for the first and only time, carrying the dead woman’s things down the stairs in boxes.  

The new short-term owners of the building were not punished for her death in any way.  They were rewarded, actually, by a generous increase in the rent they could charge for the dead woman’s apartment.  The tenants who moved into the apartment that had been Mrs. Freudenstein’s home for the past forty years paid a 20% vacancy increase and a monthly portion of any costs incurred by the landlord to renovate any or all parts of the place, things like putting in a new ice box or a modern bathroom sink. 

This process has continued each time the apartment upstairs turns over and as a result, the place I pay about $800 a month for costs the tenant upstairs two or three times that.    

I endured a period when a young hyperactive buffalo named Thunderhoof stampeded from one end of the apartment to the other and back for hours at a time.  It aggravated me daily, but at least the heavy little guy eventually tired himself out and went to sleep at a childishly early hour.  On the other hand, the one-boy stampede got up with the sun and was off on his tiny, thunderous hooves as soon as he did.   Fortunately, they did not live above me long.

But this is not a trip down memory lane.  It’s an illustration of the old cliche Joni sang about: you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.   We don’t appreciate our good health, until it turns bad.   We often don’t appreciate the best things in life, until they are no more.

A woman moved in upstairs recently, an early rising night owl with a very heavy, seemingly pouty step.   All of her footwear is iron soled.  She is energetic and flounces heavily above me when she arrives home at one or two a.m., just the hour I am finally fully relaxed, and in a state of contemplation.  She hurls herself across the floor, seems to be flinging heavy objects as she goes, there are unaccountable thuds and crashes in her wake.  

Eventually she goes to sleep, loudly dropping her hard shoes on my ceiling and falling heavily into her bed directly over my head. This is all annoying, but just part of living in a city where people who grew up in suburban or rural ranch houses are inhabiting their first apartment where people live directly below their heedlessly stomping feet.

“You should go upstairs and talk to her,” Sekhnet suggested, not unreasonably.

Then I thought of former upstairs neighbor Bitch Boy, who came home at 2 a.m., from a job that apparently infuriated him, and blasted Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” for an hour or more, presumably to calm his seething.  I went up to speak with him a couple of times, did not find him particularly reasonable.  He was a stomper too, my friend even bought a remnant of thick carpet, in a heavy roll,  and brought it up to him to lay under his heavy boot steps.  

I found Bitch Boy, late one night, pissing against my door.    I flung the door open and he made a dash up the stairs, leaving a trail of urine on the stairs as he went.   I splashed a pot of boiling water, and some disinfectant, over his piss and came back inside shaking my head.  I eventually did some research, got neighbors to petition the landlord, who was then forced to take Bitch Boy to court, and the successor to Bitch Boy’s apartment got to pay his former rent, plus 20%.

Anyway, the clumsy, seemingly angry stomping of this new young woman upstairs is not worth commenting about.   Pieces of plaster fall from the ceiling more frequently now, but this place is well overdue for some renovations in any case.  That my apartment is currently too jammed with mountains of papers and piled boxes of other things to allow the replastering is on me.  Here is the problem.

My new upstairs neighbor is a soprano.   That means she has a voice in the range of a high-strung violin.   The first time I heard her voice exercises, directly over my pillow, I thought my new neighbor played the Theremin.  The eerie gliding note sounded right out of a 1950s low budget horror movie.  This was not Brian Wilson’s Theremin player from Good Vibrations, it was Bela Lugosi’s.  It played a four or five note, nerve jangling trill over and over. I listened from my bed and wondered why anyone in the world would be practicing the Theremin so industriously, so unmusically, particularly first thing in the morning.

Alas, it was not a Theremin player but a soprano, doing endless voice exercises, not always 100% tunefully but always with the effect of a female cat in heat shrieking in an alley, a torture victim losing control of all dignity and bursting into his or her highest register, nails, impossibly loud, on a blackboard and continuing, literally, for hours at a time.

The first few times it went on, and continued, certain exasperated men would shout out “Hey, shut the fuck up, will you?!!”  We have since given up this practice, since it does not seem to deter her.  She apparently knows her rights.  

I used to defend tenants in New York City Housing Court and learned once, to my surprise, that a hyperactive kid has every right to play drums ten hours a day overhead and under foot in a NYC apartment, no matter how badly, as long as the hours of racket are reasonable ones, neither too early nor after, say, nine p.m.

So there’s really nothing I can do about this hard-practicing operatic hysteric upstairs.  She generally only struggles to stay on pitch, tuning her high, hideous voice, for a few hours every afternoon. It was eight hours yesterday, but who am I to complain, tapping here incessantly as I do all day.  To someone with a stethoscope to the wall, floor or ceiling, I am probably a worse menace than she is.

I will say that the recent ten minute bleating of a neighbor’s smoke alarm, which turned out to be irate over nothing more than cooking fumes, was far preferable to my neighbor’s vocal exercises.  I would easily take two more hours of the monotonous, attention-seeking robotic alarm over ten minutes of the human’s deliberate operatic exertions.

This morning I was up unaccountably early, 7:20. a.m.  I couldn’t fall back asleep for a while, though I had not slept very long by 7:20.  Some time after 8:00 I was drowsy and began to drift off.  Just then Boris Karloff’s just slightly off-pitch Theremin player began to do her repetitive, amusical thing directly over my bed.  It continued, with pauses only for breath, until 10:30.

“Will you shut up?!!!” an exasperated man’s voice finally burst forth from the air shaft.

“Keep tuning your voice!” shouted another man’s voice, in that distinct dialect that also announces sexual preference, “I support you!  Artists should support other artists!”

A noble sentiment, and one I truly endorse, seriously.  People who lack the generosity to encourage each other’s creativity are a stinking, stingy basket of deplorables in my book.  

That said, I hope both of these artistic cunts will take up painting.

The United States of Anxiety — Freedom Hater’s Edition

The public radio station in New York City, WNYC,  has launched a series about the upcoming presidential election called The United States of Anxiety.  It’s a great and accurate name.  I plan to check out the podcast, since I’m hardly anxious enough about the puncher’s chance a classically entitled sphincter-mouthed bully has of becoming the job-creating reality TV show president of these United States.  

I have deliberately avoided this distasteful and aggravating subject here, and am not going to the obvious rant, er, screed.  Stay with me a moment.  I’m about to tell you why Americans are right to be mad as hell, on every side.

People are angry.  Millions and millions of people are angry. They are not wrong to feel angry.   Across the globe, people are being screwed, en masse, by the billions.  To my American friends, just make a call to most customer service numbers, spend a few minutes trying to resolve a simple mistake on your bill, you will get a wee taste of this non-consensual, but mandatory, screwing.  

There are millions, if not billions, of people too weak to feel angry, because they are starving to death and their babies are dying from shit-borne diseases in areas with no sanitation and no clean water.   Or they are too terrified to give vent to anger, fleeing from bombs and savage rag tag armies.   Let’s leave these unfortunates aside for the moment.  I’m talking about angry people who have homes, incomes, cars, friends, all the trappings of what should be a good American life.  

What are they so angry about?   The American Dream that is constantly being advertised turned out to be bullshit for most of them.  Work hard, save your money, send your kids to a good college, enjoy a golden retirement.  The American Dream, if it ever existed on a widespread level (it seems to have for a couple of decades after the Second World War when many rose out of poverty into the middle class), is attainable by an ever smaller group today.  The odds of a person born in poverty in America today getting out of it are about the same as the odds of that person winning Powerball.

It remains a great country for the wealthy, and the stock market is humming along for the investor class, but it’s a challenging, difficult, anxious time of economic decline for everybody else.  The poor and disabled get by on small government subsidies,  rather niggardly subsidies, actually, if you look at the numbers.  The rich see their taxes lowered and in many cases pay little or none on vast fortunes (see example below).  The tens of millions in the middle, who have seen no improvement in their situation, are feeling squeezed and hopeless, betrayed by their corrupt, dysfunctional government.   Angry, and not unreasonably so.  They are being screwed.  

It is impossible to deny this basic screwing, though wealthy candidates and liberal celebrities tend to point at the healthy stock market, and the relatively low unemployment numbers, as proof that America’s doing great.   Another wealthy candidate assures his supporters that they are right to feel every drop of the hatred they do, that they are, without a doubt, being mercilessly screwed and that he’s got a noose for every person who is screwing them.  

You can no longer live by being frugal and keeping whatever you save in a bank here in America, as people did in past generations to put aside a small nest egg.  You lose money in a bank, year after year, might as well keep the bills in your mattress as at the 0.1% interest rate banks pay.   The bank will also charge you a monthly fee, in most cases, if you have less than a certain amount on deposit.  Usually that amount is far in excess of what a poor person has on hand.  When I was a boy you could start a bank account for $5, and there were no fees.  They sent you calendars and gave out pocket organizers and pens.  I got my first crock pot as a gift from a bank when I opened a checking account.

The only people who are making any money on their savings are investors.  Investors are doing very well in this climate, created and perpetuated by the gigantic and lucrative financial industry, breaking its own fabulous record for profits and bonuses, year after year.  

The smartest government regulators charged with stopping fraud in this wildly lucrative industry step through a one-way revolving door and go on to seven and eight digit compensation packets in the industry, if they play their cards right.   The beauty is, whatever fraud is committed, it is extremely complex, done in-house and nobody ever needs to admit actual wrong doing.  They play with house money, always.

Let’s look at money, earned income versus inherited wealth.  If you inherit $1,000,000 you pay no federal tax  (only estates starting at $10,900,000 per couple are taxed).  Many states have no inheritance tax either on an estate of this size.   Forget what you hear about the dreaded Death Tax, it doesn’t apply to the vast majority of estates.  

Your inherited million, if invested, as an inherited million generally will be, makes between 5 and 10 percent a year, some years more.   You can take $50,000 in the average mediocre year, most of it tax free, without touching the original principal.  

Let’s get the calculator.  The million dollar inherited portfolio, at a 5% annual rate of growth, will be worth $1,275,692 at the end of five years, if left alone (a small piece of this increase will be taxable as ‘capital gains’).  That means that in year five you can begin taking interest of $64,000 a year — and still have around $250,000 more than you had when you got the cool million (once you adjust for taxes on capital gains made by whatever moves the fund manager may have made,  which your advisor will advise you about).    

For purposes of this 5% illustration,  you will get a hypothetical 28% annual raise, $14,000 a year,  over the initial annual interest of $50,000, just by doing absolutely nothing with that cool million for five years.   Money makes money, yo.

A million, of course, is considered chump change by the real players. Except maybe to someone who wouldn’t mind living off the interest while they try to launch an educational non-profit, write a book, learn to play the cello, fuck off on top of a mountain.  Some make do on a fraction of that.

A billion is the new price of admission to the locker room, where you can grab women by whatever you want, if you are so disposed, since– whatever it costs, my accountants will write a fucking check, and my lawyers will slap a gag order on you if you take the dough, OK bitch face?

A billion is a number so large it’s almost impossible to imagine. Let’s take a more manageable ten million dollars, just eight digits, starting with a 1.  Can you live on $400,000 to $500,000 interest a year?  I know I  could.

Then there are the health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, cash-strapped hospitals and high tech diagnostics, what we now call the Health Care sector.   You can invest in this sector, it does very well, as they say.  

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), whose primary authors are all back working lucrative gigs for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, while it has extended medical coverage to many previously shit out of luck, has many bad bugs in it.  

In many cases the ACA  makes health care more affordable, but there is little by way of patient protection.  

Here’s a serious bug: nobody can tell you the price for any medical service until after you receive the service.  This may have always been the state of American health care insurance, but it is a very sad state not to have been addressed in a law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  

The name comes off as a little cynical if you consider that the American Health Care marketplace is the only store where you buy something nobody can tell you the price of until weeks after you bought the thing.  Refunds are not allowed, you owe whatever the bill says.

The insurance company informs you that, sadly, they can’t tell you the price for anything until they are billed by the provider.  The provider, unfortunately, can’t tell you a price until they find out how much the insurer will pay.  

There is no requirement in the law, as written, (and a determined opposition continues to call for its repeal instead of helping to fix its many faults), for the consumer to be informed of the price of any service prior to buying the service.  

You will get a bill for $1,324 dollars for a fully covered sonogram, and a second bill, if you don’t pay the first, and then a letter from a debt collector if you still refuse to pay.  It is the patient’s responsibility, you signed a paper to this effect before the procedure was done, it’s ironclad.   Either straighten it out with a series of calls, letters and faxes, or get lawyer’s letters demanding the payment of $1,324.  

I get those letters periodically from some law firm specialized in debt collection, for a non-negotiable $327 blood test an incompetent physician’s assistant once had me take, “just in case”, a couple of years back.

So, yes, Obama did a great thing by making insurance companies give up that “pre-existing condition” loophole, something right out of the Nazi accounting book.  In return, he delivered to those same hungry insurance companies millions of new, mandated, customers. The solvency and ongoing massive profitability of the whole plan depends on all eligible uninsured Americans buying insurance.  

The premiums of the young and healthy, who as a group don’t need much medical care, will subsidize the costly care millions of older Americans with diabetes, cancer, chronic heart disease, morbid obesity, require.  Most of these illnesses were, until Obamacare, considered pre-existing conditions traditionally banned from medical insurance coverage.  

Of course, nobody is allowed to talk about the $25,000,000 annual compensation of the C.E.O.s of these private insurance corporations and the culture of profit before product they represent.  

“Kind of hitting below the belt, isn’t it, old boy?  What are you, a damned Red?  Now be a good fellow and fetch me and my lady friends a round of Old Fashioneds, would you?   Off with you now, chop chop.”

Remember the Alamo, Elie

“You are more aware than most people of the power of bullshit and the irrational nature of most belief,” said the skeleton.  “Look, humans are famously prodigious rationalizers, although scratch most rationales and you will see it is only a thin, sprayed on veneer of complete bullshit.

“Tell someone that the unexamined life is not worth living and they will hold you down, if they have the power, and force the hemlock down your craw, as you know very well.”  

“The great movements of the world are borne along on winning phrases, repeated confidently, intoned, chanted, served up with what your high school social studies teacher called ‘glittering generalities’, you know, freedom, democracy, just, fair, more perfect, unalienable.  A good catch phrase can rouse an army of earthlings to march off and slaughter other earthlings. ‘Remember the Alamo!’ was a rallying cry we remember to this day.  

“That clear-eyed war cry gave our nation the indisputable moral right, and the national rage, to seize what would become the entire American West from Mexico.  This was accomplished after the Mexican-American War, after ambitious Americans illegally brought their slaves on to Mexican territory they wrestled from newly independent Mexico and, after some bloodshed, called the State of Texas.  They went after the rest of Mexico within our dreamed of national borders, all the way to the Rio Grande and the Pacific, after the heroic stand at the damned Alamo, where every last American defender was slaughtered by the Mexicans under General Santa Anna.

“It wasn’t all about slavery, of course, from our point of view, it was about America’s right to the entire continent, sea to shining sea, and becoming fantastically rich selling seized lands, and our cherished freedoms, as much as anything.  

“Slavery was a side issue, although we note that Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829.  Americans who had slaves, and received huge land grants from the government of Mexico on very generous terms, insisted on their God-given right to keep their slaves, even in Mexico, where slavery was illegal.  To the American slaveholders it was an unequivocal question of freedom.

“When American settlers started getting violent in defense of their disputed freedom, Santa Anna, the Mexican general, petitioned to have the armed insurgents classified as ‘pirates’ which allowed him to dispense with taking prisoners of war and to summarily execute any pirates who surrendered or were captured.  Which is what he did at the end of the one-sided massacre at the Alamo, executed the few survivors.  

Years earlier he had written to inform the warlike Andrew Jackson what he would do in the event of violence by the American settlers in Mexico.   Jackson prudently didn’t tell anyone about this pirate business since it would, in the near future, have hurt recruitment for the eventual war against Mexico.

“Calling these fighters ‘pirates’ was like the invented classification ‘enemy combatants’ that allowed Bush and Cheney to torture anyone captured anywhere, as long as they appeared to hate our freedom. It allowed them to warehouse the detainees in black sites and secretly do whatever other barbaric things they felt like doing to them.  It was the same bullshit that war is always based on— we’ll have yours, thank you, and fuck you very much.

“America around the time of the Alamo was in the midst of carrying out Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act– and what was that based on?  ‘Manifest Destiny’ — a particularly glittering generality invented by a newspaper man somewhere.  The phrase appeared in a newspaper article, and then, voila, the fire spread that God had promised continental America to us.    Why are you killing all the buffalo?  ‘Manifest Destiny!’  Why are you sending native children and their mothers on forced death marches?  ‘Manifest destiny!’ And with God on our side, you dig…  How are you going to argue with ‘Manifest Destiny!’?

“Hey, you want to invade a country who has not posed a threat to you?  Invent a legal-sounding doctrine, find a couple of syllables you can sell to patriots:  the Doctrine of Preemption.   We have a right to kill your people because we believe that doing this will prevent you from one day, quite possibly, killing us.  It’s clear you fuckers hate our freedom, so we have every right to blow up your homes and hunt down your children.

“Anyway, Elie, we look for rationality, but you won’t find a lot of it in human affairs, not in state affairs, business or interpersonal affairs.  Look, I was a smart guy, psychologically astute, a big reader.  You don’t think, reviewing things rationally, as I always insisted you and your sister should always do, that I could have figured out that the war against my children was a little bit insane?  

“Doesn’t it seem likely that someone with my ability to understand could have grasped that my cracked, bleeding skin had something to do with stress?   That the constant and total war with my children was making everything much worse for everybody?  Yet I was helpless against it all.  I clung to the idea that a person can’t change, which is ridiculous.  Or if not ridiculous, a very harmful idea for a tormented person to cling to.

“But, of course, all that is very easy for me to say, now that I’m dead.  While I was walking around with the rest of you angry fucks I was another crab, skittering sideways, claws ready to strike.”  The skeleton looked off into the darkening sky.  

You know, dad, I live for these bright, delicious moments of clarity.

“See’est thou that ass, Elie,” said the skeleton, pointing off toward a metaphorical jackass, “there is more hope for him than for thee.“

Anatomy of an If-pology

For those sickened, as I was, by the recent extended recitation of my personal hurt over perceived mistreatment by a long-time writer friend, as I slowly processed the complicated toxins, please be forewarned.   This is the final bit.   Unless you’re interested in a dissection of an if-pology, please click away to something more diverting.

Here is a cool one I recommend, by a talented and philosophical cartoonist.  This one is also neat. 

For the fully annotated if-pology, which I offer in the hope it might be useful if you ever find yourself discomfited by an oddly unsatisfying apology, please read on.

Below is a writer friend’s apology, followed by my notes. You will find my take clarifying or proof that I am indeed the thin-skinned, vicious prig I was recently taken for.  

The writer had been hurt by something I posted here, felt personally and deliberately attacked and betrayed.   He assumed the worst of me after his outraged ex-wife forwarded the link to a poem I’d sent her.   You can be the judge of how entitled to his rage he was, the offending post is here too.  His tart email ended “I think you will agree we’re done here”.  

My relatively mild reply apparently surprised him, he thereafter wrote this apology, after reminding me again that I’d done something terrible to him that was kind of hard to forgive. Sadly, I find it irresistible as an example of a  textbook if-pology:

so let’s go back to april.(1)

i recall after our getting together you sending me some material and, as i remember, i read and responded to at least some  of it.(2)

it’s possible that i didn’t read it all, or perhaps i did and simply failed to respond.(3)

i simply don’t remember.(4)

but either way, it’s on me, and i am truly sorry because to you this was much more than a casual oversight. (5)

but, shit, man, all you had to do was call or drop me a folo-up note in may or june. (6)

i did not know you were hurt until i read that screed yesterday. (7)

i had some idea you might be pissed at me when you didn’t respond to my invite to the giants game in sept, (but, again, it appears now that i mis-sent that email).(8)

seems we currently have three choices:

1) we could cease and desist from all further communication as of this afternoon;

2) we could keep on emailing each other, which would likely create even more misunderstanding;

3) or the two of us could get together and see if we can work this out and maybe remain friends going forward.

 #2 doesn’t work for me. i’m okay with #1 if that’s what you like, but i’d be amenable to #3 if you are.   let me know your preference.(9)

NOTES

1) in April we’d had a lovely four hour chat over dinner, the final hour or so about the manuscript I’m working on, which was then 300 pages, about my tragic, aggravating father’s life.   I’d mentioned I’d just posted some sections on a brand new website I was working on and he expressed great interest in reading it. 

2) I never heard a word back about any of it.  Our email string on the subject contains no reference by my friend to any of the pages I’d sent or any comment about the brand new Book of Irv website which I was regularly updating with new photos and pieces. The email string includes two or three subsequent links to other pieces I’d sent him.

 “as i remember, i read and responded to at least some of it” implies I that I could well be mistaken in my belief that he never replied.

The only other email I had from him in the days after was the mysterious:

from the late, great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, speaking of his novels and screenplays: “Although I have not exactly been published or produced, I have had some things professionally typed.”

3) This note, and notes 4-8, are from his P.O.V.

I acknowledge the possibility that you might be right and I might be mistaken.  I’ll allow it’s possible I might have never given you any response.

4) it goes without saying, in light of this remark, that whatever you wrote clearly didn’t make that much of an impression on me one way or the other.   Nor did your website contain anything that notable or memorable.

5) “Either way” whether you hyper-sensitively, nay hysterically, blocked out that I actually had replied, which I believe I probably did, or whether, as you say, I never replied, it’s on me.  

“To you” is the key qualifier to this otherwise 100% sincere if-pology since, to you, being ignored, as you imagine you were, was hurtful.  

Granted, of course, that not everyone would have reacted this way, but since you did, I am truly, truly sorry.  

The oversight was casual in any event, you oversensitive fucking irrationally angry twat.

6) This “but” points out how easily you could have prevented this hurt and hostility on your part. Shit, man, if I didn’t reply to three or four requests for my feedback, you should have just sent me five, six or seven like anyone else would have done.  Clearly, jerk-off, I didn’t do it on purpose, if I even did it at all, which I reserve the right to argue I never even did.  

7)  This highly offensive post, as I already told you now three or four times, was a screed (a lengthy rant) an aggressive and unprovoked attack, a clear and unambiguous personal public betrayal.   Open to debate how vicious or unfair the screed was, perhaps, but you cannot deny that I was very hurt by it, hurt enough to write you off as the intentionally vicious fuck you clearly are.  

8) It may be fair to ask, if a simple folo-up would have solved any misunderstanding after you didn’t hear back from me, why I assumed you were mad at me for not replying to my email you, I regrettably admit, probably never received, why I didn’t just call or resend the invite instead of assuming you’d  silently rejected the invitation I mis-sent and never followed up on.  

But surely, someone as sensitive as you apparently are to a casual and unintentional slight, can see why I felt you were acting pissily when I never heard back from you to the email invite I sent but I guess you never got.  

It may also be fair to concede that you never failed to reply to anything I ever sent you, at the address where we exchanged numerous emails over the years.  

But that is not the point here anyway, you are the vicious asshole here, not me.

9) Me speaking now:   I wrote back proposing choice 4– I would call him whenever he liked and we could talk.  A phone call was not fully acceptable to him, presumably it would be hard for me to adequately grovel unless we met in person.  

And then, sub silentio, as the old Latins used to say, he added:

and for the record, I will never tell you what I think of that book you are optimistically working on, needy butt cheek.

After chewing things over, and in consideration of his clearly offended manhood, I opted for option 5, which was basically an elegant, silent restatement of his option 1.

Keret and Steek

Two women whose literary opinions I esteem told me to get Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years.  I eventually did.  I now recommend it to you, delightful short essays, each two or three pages long, each one a gem.  I found myself laughing out loud.   It felt strange to recall I once had a sense of humor, was not always this ball of aggravated nerve endings who sits clenched before you today.

Upstairs, or across the air shaft, the Human Theremin just began practicing her shaky soprano trill.  That high strung register is my least favorite range of the human voice, and her repetitive exercise is, I’m pretty sure, the most hideous use for that shrill tone.   She sounds like a Victorian hysteric swooning, over and over and over.   But I digress.  

The other day I was on the phone with my cellphone provider, T-Mobile.   They had problems with their service, and with their customer service, and sent me texts nobody could explain, and then abruptly cut off my internet service and data.   I spent hours on the phone with their representatives who were busy helping other customers but apparently there was no help for my situation.  

In the car one evening, I was finally talking to someone intelligent and proactive over at T-Mobile.   She was very nice, very smart, had looked at the mishmash of my recent customer service calls, apologized for the series of apparent screw-ups and network failures and told me she’d solved all the problems, zeroed out the balance, restored the improperly disabled data and internet services, was very sorry for my agggg….

“Hello?” I said “Sharayah?”  

Seconds later I had a free T-Mobile Msg:  

We apologize, your call with Sharayah (23530) from T-Mobile just dropped.  You will receive a call back shortly. Thanks for your patience.    

I read it out loud to Sekhnet, who’d heard the end of my delightful call with Sharayah.  

“Assholes,” she said, and I pointed out that they were a German company and, therefore, most likely, Nazi assholes.  

She’d had similar problems with her provider, Verizon, and we concluded once more that the corporate personality leaves a lot to be desired whether that corporation is Nazi, American or transnational.

An hour or two later the patience that T-Mobile politeness bots had thanked me for was gone.  I texted back “Hello?”  

T-Mobile was once again lightning fast with a response:

Sorry, this service is temporarily unavailable.  Please try again later.  

This too I read aloud to Sekhnet, with predicable results.  I probably used the word “motherfuckers” in some connection to these automated Nazi dickheads.   Thinking back, a lot of what happened later was simply my fault– I’d wound her up.    

A couple of hours later I called T-Mobile again, again from the car.  This time Sekhnet was driving.  After a very short wait, no more than five minutes (recent hold times had been up to an hour, due to the super popular iPhone’s recent emergence on the T-Mobile Nazi network),  I had another lovely, very sympathetic T-Mobile representative on the line.  

She was the second coming of Sharayah and she was able to read me all of Sharayah’s notes.   I should not be experiencing this problem, she told me reassuringly, it was a stupid error… someone had simply not inputted the proper order.  She began to apologize as she typed more notes on my account.  Suddenly Sekhnet, hearing my silence, had had enough.  

“T-Mobile sucks!” she barked, almost as loud as that inconsolable Tourretic German Shepherd next door.  “Tell them their service is complete shit!  What a bunch of fucking useless assholes… their fucking network is a piece of shit!   Fuck them!  Fuck T-Mobile!”  

It was hard to hear the kind young woman on the line apologizing to me over this outpouring of righteous passion.  

I asked the girl at T-Mobile for a second.  I told Sekhnet, with carefully modulated snappishness, that I was on the phone with T-Mobile.  Then I added, in a stage whisper straight into the phone, that a very nice, intelligent woman at T-Mobile was straightening everything out for me, the long tech nightmare was, hopefully, almost over.  

Then suddenly it all got to me, the restraint I’d been showing in recent days when two long-time acquaintances had revealed themselves as rabid by tag teaming me with snarling emails about what a wimp I was to complain about some innocent and completely inadvertent repetitive ass-dicking.   “As if any of us had never been, figuratively, fucked up the ass!” their terse emails strongly implied.

Suddenly I wanted to be compensated for this long ordeal with fucking T-Mobile.   Reparations was all I could think about.  I told this woman I wanted money refunded to me.  I suggested a month’s fees would be about right, as a sign of good faith from T-Mobile.  

She wasn’t authorized to do it, but said I was right to feel that way, she’d feel the same way — and she thought T-Mobile did owe me some money.  I appreciated her saying that, they so rarely do.  She told me she’d have to get a supervisor, someone who could give me some money.  She promised she’d stay on the line until one picked up, but then forgot to put me on silent hold as she had thoughtfully done, at my request, when she’d put me on a brief hold moments earlier to find Sharayah’s notes.  

A few blaring bars composed by the humorless Josef Mengele, MD, played over and over.  Then Josh was on the line.  Josh was a supervisor, very grateful that I’d been a loyal T-Mobile customer for twelve years.  He was eager, he told me, to make me completely happy.  

I told him my story in some detail and then spoke the only language these Nazis understand: money.  I wanted monetary compensation for my recent run around, in light of my twelve years of, heretofore, thankless loyalty to T-Mobile.  He said he understood.  He then offered me ten dollars off my next bill.

“Josh, if we were friends, and I’d done something very aggravating to you that had cost you many hours of your life to fix, and I offered you ten dollars, would you consider that fair, or an adequate show of friendship?”  I asked the supervisor.  

“Yes, I would,” he said cheerfully.  

“Well, you’re a much nicer person that I am, Josh,” I said with ill-disguised bitterness, with malice actually. “To me ten dollars from a multi-national corporation feels like someone peeing on me.”  

Josh then affably pointed out that the internet and data services I received from T-Mobile, and had not been able to use for only the last few days, were provided free, as a courtesy by T-Mobile.  

I countered that the generous 500 MB of data per month were part of the plan I paid T-Mobile $50 a month for, therefore it was hard for me to see the service as free.  We discussed this pointlessly for a moment or two.  Then I cut him off.  

“OK, I understand you’re not authorized to offer a customer more than $10 on behalf of the corporation.  I’ll take it.  Talk to you later, Josh,” I said, and rung off.  

“You were very mean to him,” Sekhnet said.  You’d hardly know, from her reasonable, parental tone, that she’d been barking like Obi, the long-eared Tourretic next door, only moments earlier.  

“And you’re no Etgar Keret,” she will point out when I read this to her.  

“Steek,” I will say, suavely extending a paw,  “James Steek, Keret veh Steek.” 

Blog

I don’t know all the reasons a person sits down regularly and puts their thoughts, feelings, pictures, sounds out on to the internet.  Not everybody does this, though many millions do.  Here are a few of the small rewards that make me do it most days of the week.

By putting things up on the “internets” (one of President Dubya’s many great phrases) I exert myself, cheerfully, to make my writing fit for “publication”.  I have to polish it to a certain standard before I hit “publish”.  I don’t put it up for the perusal of friends and strangers until the writing is as clear and flowing as I can make it.  

I read it over many times as I write, combing out sloppy, confusing writing whenever I find myself ensnared in it.  When I read it again on-line, I often go back and make small changes to make every sentence as good as I can.  I am exacting about saying exactly what I mean to say.  My writing has improved since I’ve been putting it on-line regularly.

Before putting something on-line I have to decide if I stand behind every part of it.  I’m an opinionated bastard, no question.  I don’t like to argue these days, though I haven’t lost the ability — I’ll use my words if pushed against the wall– but I still need to express my point of view, what I’ve learned from six decades of ass-kickings.  So that aspect of not being a damn chicken-shit bastard and actually standing behind what I sell is another important part of this almost daily ritual.  

The previous sentence contains an inside reference.  I get to explain it here, since there’s nobody telling me to stick to the script, and I’m free to digress, another reason I love this particular forum.  I don’t like to leave the reader hanging any more than I like to be left hanging.  

If you think about it, nobody should be left hanging, though most of us quite often are, almost always when it comes to the services we purchase from the grasping artificial humans called corporations, those omnipresent psychopaths that rule the global and local economy.  Or by the actual workings of our idealistic and inspiring democracy, now that I think about it.

Chicken-shit bastard, then.  Years ago a friend in Tennessee sent me a tape of prank calls made by a hippie who lived in a fairly rural area near Knoxville in the 1970s or 1980s. The recordings circulated widely on cassette tapes and were very popular throughout that part of the country.  The creative caller is still remembered fondly by those of us who heard his witty provocations.  Sadly, he died young, of a terrible disease, I think.  Happily, he left us his calls to people like Ed at Ed’s Auto.

He put on a thick rural southern accent (since he knew Ed and had bought auto parts at his store) and told Ed a long, cock and bull story about how Ed needed to pay for massive repairs on his car under some far-fetched and insane theory.   “Bullshit,” said Ed.   “Maybe I’ll replace the damn rims, I’m not paying to rebuild your entire fucking car.”  Things escalated quickly between the skillful manipulator and his carefully chosen macho southern victims. Rages were whipped up effortlessly, followed by mutual threats of catastrophic ass-whuppings.   

In my favorite moment on the tape, and my father’s too — the old man had howled at the skill of this provocateur in whipping up the manful rage of his victims — the caller gently calms the irate store owner down after insanely provoking him.  It’s a beautiful, human moment.  

“Whell, shit…” he says soothingly “you don’t have to get all mad about it… shoot…”.  They both laugh.  There is almost a sigh as the store owner finally feels heard by this prick who was just mercilessly provoking him. He lets his guard down, it’s just two humans talking for a few seconds. The store owner’s relief that the insane unprovoked attack is over is palpable.   You clearly hear him relax on the recording.  

Then the caller starts back in, in a reasonable enough tone “well… it just seems to me like a damn chicken shit bastard ought to stand behind what he sells”.  Which sets the store owner’s rage instantly back on full boil, his voice goes up an octave, impolite invitations to exchange fisticuffs are hollered and the fight is immediately back on.

So, just to recap: I ain’t no damn chicken shit bastard, if you catch my damn drift.  I mean what I say and I say what I mean.  I’m not here to be a damn go-go dancer for you.

There is also the pleasure of putting thoughts and feelings together, telling a story coherently, making a sometimes complicated point plainly.   There is the technical satisfaction of using words to do this, and the emotional satisfaction of reading back the clear expression of something that took a lot of effort to render in words.

There is the thought, sometimes, of the words reaching the ideal reader, sitting at a computer somewhere in the world, perhaps in the middle of the night.  In Kurt Vonnegut’s case it was his sister, who he always had in mind as he wrote to his eventual audience of millions of strangers.  

I have no actual person in mind as I type, except maybe myself, the writing needs to be clear and interesting to me, the reader, but my mother’s face when she handed me back something I wrote and told me it was “wonderful” would not be a bad one to think of from time to time.   The idea of having my thoughts and feelings reach and touch someone I’ve never met, in the form of carefully arranged words: pretty cool.  

There is the fantasy aspect, one that probably motivates many bloggers, instagrammers, spammers, lunch photo sharers, facebookers, selfie snappers, snapchatters.  The fantasy is that I am already a great writer, with a big reserve of interesting and important things to say, and that I’m giving away brilliant products of my disciplined imagination for free.  I sometimes imagine, after posting a given piece, that certain readers are going to be moved.   And that, in the end, I will sell my work widely and talk nonchalantly to people like Terry Gross and Leonard Lopate about it.

It’s a fantasy of fame, I suppose, shared by billions with computers and cellphone cameras.  That this fantasy is shared by, literally, millions and millions who are not great writers, who have little, or nothing interesting to say, does nothing to dim this vision for the rest of us brilliant fantasists.  For all anyone knows, many of us are right.  Who’s to say in this vast, virtual marketplace of unsold ideas?    

There is also the human need to talk and be heard when our feelings are stirred up.  If we talk to friends, or even email them, about some of these unpleasantly stirred feelings, we can place unintended and sometimes terrible burdens on them.  I recently was surprised to be put through a familiar trauma by a person of my long acquaintance who I, naively, in hindsight, considered a friend.   I wrote about it endlessly here, in several iterations, before I was able to come to some rather obvious conclusions about the best course of action.  It took me literally a few days, and a few thousand words here, to calm down.

Had I restricted my processing to these pages, which can be read, scanned or skipped, I’d have done a great kindness to the couple of harried friends I vented to.  I’d put each of them in a tough spot– agree with the reasonableness of my hurt feelings or risk my already free-flowing anger flowing to you.   It comes to this: we expect our friends to extend the benefit of the doubt to us.  It’s kind of a minimum expectation of a friend, that they won’t rush forward with a sturdy rope when an angry mob gathers howling for our blood. 

Sometimes a long-time friend, hurt for whatever reason, will accuse you of doing just that to them.  Then it is a contest– who has really done the other wrong?   The friendliest thing to do is put yourself in the other person’s situation and realize: shit, I’d have felt the same way if someone had done that to me.   This realization should be followed by an apology and a promise to do better in the future.  

Taking ownership of causing a friend’s hurt requires honesty, maturity and a humility not everyone always has.  Sometimes it’s easier to just go: well, you complain about me, but after I didn’t keep my promise YOU NEVER RETURNED THE MISSED CALL FROM ME THAT I KNOW YOU FUCKING GOT!  

The details of this kind of situation, I promise you, are always ugly. Better to process them where they can be taken in quietly or ignored, once they are set out as objectively  as the writer can.  So writing here has a therapeutic and practical value, sometimes, and spares friends the worst of my hurt when I am stung.

Then there is the zone I am in while composing one of these posts.  The focus is on one thing, one thought.  It is also something I enjoy as I work and that I do as well as I can.  In this zone of concentration I do what everyone in the world does after they head off to do their chosen work.  All of the daily annoyances and distractions, the many small things that conspire and are sometimes merciless in combination, disappear.  The need to focus on doing good work quiets the clamor of the many tiny demons.  

Whatever else I may be thinking or feeling, I need to focus my full attention on this pair of shoes that needs to be re-soled for the long-time customer who is coming in to pick them up at five.  My reputation and livelihood rest on making an excellent repair and getting the comfortable old shoes back to the customer when I promised her she’d have them.  She’ll be passing my shop after a shit day and her perfectly repaired shoes, delivered when I told her they would be ready, will be one good thing that will happen to her today.  

Of course, here there is no shop, no customer, nothing but the things I have noted above.  Which makes it more beautiful in a way, and more pure.  I am fixing this invisible shoe because I love the work.

Lies and Truth

“Well, I understand your intent in writing this sympathetic account of my disturbing life, Elie.  And I truly appreciate it.  I was glad to hear you laughing with Eli’s oldest daughter yesterday.  I particularly loved her reaction when you said, after referring to his incomparable charm if he loved you ‘but if he didn’t like you– and he usually knew within a minute– he could be Adolf Hitler.’   You could practically hear her smiling when you said that, she gave that knowing little sigh,” said the skeleton with a dry chuckle.

 “Nothing like a bracing, unalloyed whiff of honesty, Elie.

“Now, unless your father curses you, vilifies you, persecutes you, starves you, whips you, shoves you into an oven– it would enrage you to hear someone say your father is Adolf Hitler.  Even if Hitler actually was your father, and he was thankfully nobody’s father, you’d hate to hear somebody say that your father was Hitler.  Yet Eli’s eldest raised no objection– because of the truth of it and how good it felt to hear someone who loved her father acknowledge that other awful side of him. We all have another side, of course. 

“Now, if the fucking rabbi at First Hebrew had opined to her that Eli could be like Hitler if he didn’t like you, she’d have been rightfully incensed.   I’d feel sorry for the rabbi, if he were ever stupid enough to vent that way to Eli’s daughter.   But anyway, I offer Eli as Hitler just as an example.  

“We both loved Eli and we both, at the same time, understand, 100%, that, if he disliked you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kick you down a flight of stairs if the occasion demanded.  You are trying to get at the larger truth here, rather than the comfort of lies, no matter how soothing, and I thought I’d spare you having to pontificate about it yourself,” he gave a little wink, or as close as a skeleton can come to a wink.    

“Take the infamous, or famous, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Published in Russian in 1904, it incited a wave of pogroms in god-forsaken hellholes like Truvovich.  Within a few years, when it had been translated into many languages, this account of the leaders of world Jewry secretly meeting to discuss exactly how they were controlling the world, poisoning it against itself, the Times of London exposed it as recycled fiction written by a popular anti-Semite in a novel years earlier.  Verbatim.  That was in 1911.  Was that the end of the matter?

“You know the answer to that, and I ask it for the benefit of your readers, if any.  If books are read a generation or two from now, I hope this will be among them.  You are writing like a man on fire, Elie, hurrying to set down everything you’ve learned so far before the clock runs out on you.  

“Perhaps you are a man on fire.  You may wind up like Martin Luther King, Jr., describing a beautiful, promised valley on the other side of a mountain you’ll never set foot in.   Who is to say?   But as for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion— you know what the Jew haters said about the Times of London and its definitive proof that the book was a plagiarized work of fiction?

“Of course– the expose in the Times was proof, as if any more was needed,  not that the Protocols were fake, but, on the contrary, that the Times of London was a vicious and persuasive propaganda machine controlled by international Jewry.  Another proof of the truth contained in the Protocols.  Instantly transformed, the purportedly rational, objective, conclusive denunciation of the Protocols was just the latest lie perpetrated on the world by the fucking Jews.  See how insidious and terrifyingly cunning the Jew is!  You dig the beauty of this, the demonic ingenuity of it?  

“Fifteen years later, Hitler, in Mein Kampf, could state emphatically that the world would be a far better place if everyone in it read and digested the Protocols.   The Czarist forgery is still being sold, in countless languages and editions, mind you, along with the newly annotated Mein Kampf.  According to Umberto Eco, who gives a learned source for it at the end of his wonderful, dense In the Prague Cemetery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has sold more copies than any book besides the Bible.  Check that shit out, Elie, ask Jeeves about that one.

“It’s the nature of this slippery, mostly irrational world we live in, to believe that which confirms our emotional biases and heartfelt beliefs and to reject that which purports to prove, no matter how clearly and irrefutably, that we’re somehow overlooking some contradiction, somehow mistaken.  

“Your former buddy, a bright, funny, sensitive guy, a very fine writer — also an oblivious, empathy-challenged person, threatened by what lies beneath his glib gloss on things, to the point of paranoia, as he works odd jobs and pretends at all costs that he’s not a multi-millionaire.  Both things are true and do not contradict or cancel each other in any way: he’s smart and insightful, he’s a moral retard in certain ways.  

“Multiple things are often true, no, always true, simultaneously.  Though there is also, sometimes, a decisive truth to be discerned in certain cases.  Global warming, poverty, the persistence of hatred, the appeal of demagogues, the hellishness of war, shit like that.  It seems to me that you’ve stumbled on some real truth here about the nature of the individual, not of course that’s it’s original with you.  But I am thankful for it, in any event.  

“Yes, I was a monster who caused a lot of pain and destruction, guilty as charged.   Yes, I was a sensitive, funny, brilliant, tragic man who always had the best of intentions.  

“It’s a horror story, if you focus mainly on the swath of hurt monster Irv carved through the world he walked through.    

“It’s a tragedy if you take into account what it was well within my powers to have been, instead of a monster.  

“A friend of yours called this Book of Irv a labor of love.  That makes it, if you can write it completely and truly, a tragedy nobody should be able to get to the bottom of.”

Forgiving and Not Forgiving

I am reading an excellent, thought-provoking book by that title right now.   Written by a psychiatrist,  Jeanne Safer, who specializes in delving into and writing clearly about uncomfortable subjects others don’t often think or write about.    

“She wrote Death Benefits, didn’t she?” said the skeleton of my father.  The man always had a memory like a steel trap.  

Another excellent book, one I’ve often recommended to friends in grief after a parent’s death. In that book, most likely, the kernel for this Book of Irv.  She convinced me, with Death Benefits, that we get valuable gifts from even a miserable parent, and that we should take a grateful inventory.   More than that, she suggested that the relationship with a difficult parent continues after their death, and that it can be a much more nuanced, mutual relationship than the difficult parent was capable of while alive.  

“The People rest,” said the skeleton, making a lawyerly gesture of finality with his bony arms.  

“I know I said this while I was dying, but I am so sorry we didn’t have these kinds of back and forths when I was alive.  But, again, I was too fucking angry all the time, and the demons on my back kept digging their sharp spurs into me.”  

Whatever, dad.  Everybody has their shit.  The thing she brings up in Forgiving and Not Forgiving is that it is perfectly OK to not forgive, counter to the unanimous urging from virtually every quarter, that only unconditional forgiveness is healthy.  

There are many situations, things we commonly call abuse, that do not call for forgiveness.  If the abuser is not contrite, continues to snarl at the victim… well, fuck ’em.  Seriously, the only thing to do is to get the hell out of their reach.   It does nobody any good to pretend to forgive someone who will just do the same thing again, and be falsely forgiven again, and do it again. 

One of Safer’s patients tells her “I didn’t forgive what she did to me, but I’m not angry about it anymore.”  She is speaking of her cruel, unloving mother, now gone to her reward.  

“Well, unfortunately, I never got there with my mother, who was cruel to me when I was a boy, and unloving, and who all I could say about after she died was ‘אָלעוו-האַשאָלעם’  ‘may she rest in peace.’   I think now, now that I am dead and wise, that I should have worked to get a handle on my rage at that furious little tyrant, Ah-lahv ha-ah-shaa-lam.”  

Looks like Arabic when you spell it out that way, doesn’t it?  

“Another story of senseless hatred between brothers, the Hebrews and the Arabs.  Although, if you read the Bible you will see the ancient roots, the frankly stolen birth right, the Biblical origin of the story of Jew as the eternal scoundrel.  With the connivance of his scheming Jewish mother… what a goddamned world, Elie.  In a way I’m glad to be watching it from my bed on the hillside.  The greatest show on earth, the struggles of you puny, clueless earthlings.”  

Kind of creepy, dad, for a skeleton to express such superiority, just because you’re dead.  

“Let he who is dead cast the ultimate stone,” said the skeleton.

“Besides, let’s be honest here, Elie, and state the obvious once again.  I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy for you.   At one time I thought it was ridiculous when you first propped my bony form on your knee and began moving my stiff jaws, mimicking my style.  But I soon loosened up about the arrangement, and I have to say, it’s been quite rewarding having this long overdue conversation.”

Clearly, I feel the same way.  I’ll tell you, though, and I know we’ve discussed this, but no matter how well I set out some of the dilemmas of your life, and the tragedy of it, the humor of it (you continue to be a funny bastard, dad), its historical scope and the way your experience illuminates the more than eight decades you struggled to bend the moral arch of history toward justice, it means nothing unless I can sell it.  

“Don’t sell yourself short, Elie,” said the skeleton sympathetically, “it is the same achievement whether you sell it or not.”  

No.   Unsold it’s just a tree falling in the woods with nobody to hear it.  Elegantly and mightily struck, perhaps, but ending with a silence I could not bear at this point in my life.

“Elie, nobody knows at what point in their life they are at,” said the skeleton.   “This could be the beginning of the happiest period of your life.  Or that foamy piss you observe every day, the protein you’re spilling, possible serious kidney trouble, could be the writing on the wall — the writing could say: OH SHIT, I AM GOING TO THE E.R. AND I’LL BE DEAD THIS TIME NEXT WEEK.”   

As was the last thing written on your wall.

“Florida doctors, Elie, the greatest in the world…” said the skeleton.  “On the other hand, I always told you the chickens of my unhealthy lifestyle would come home to roost.  Overweight my entire adult life, eating steak every night, almost no vegetables, no exercise, overwork, not dealing with my lifelong anger problems, not finding loving ways to relax and interact with my children, who I loved very much but nonetheless couldn’t help but torture…. you know, that’s not a life for a person who doesn’t expect sudden death.  When I got the news, six days before I died, it made sense, it was really not a shock.  My only question was ‘what took so long?’  The skeleton looked around, seemed to sniff the autumnal breeze.

“Well, listen Elie, I know your hands are sore, and you had strange spasms last night in both of them that shook you up, and you’ve been typing in furious overtime the last week or so, so let’s leave off here.  In the end, do you forgive me?” said the skeleton.  

I don’t forgive you, and I know this will sound hard, but I don’t forgive you for not forgiving yourself.  If you’d been able to do that, everything else would have gone more easily.  That’s the thing I don’t forgive you for, can’t forgive.  

Everything else, of course I forgive you, dad.

Yum Kipper

In Hebrew, the words are pronounced Yom Kippur, Yome Kee-Poor, but where I grew up, the Yiddish speaking Jews of my family always called The Day of Atonement “Yum Kipper.”   No atonement was ever actually attempted, or only very, very rarely, and with the usual conditions and caveats, but the holiest day of the Jewish year was a day my father mortified himself by fasting and praying every year.  

Even most secular Jews retain some feelings about Yom Kippur.   Sandy Koufax famously wouldn’t pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur, when his start fell on The Day of Atonement one year, though I have no doubt he ate bacon cheeseburgers with Don Drysdale from time to time.  My mother always had a coffee in the morning, and maybe a piece of toast.  She didn’t quite fast, though she ate lightly.

Where I grew up there would be a long service in the morning at Hillcrest Jewish Center where the thousands in membership dues the family paid each year, to give their children a rude Jewish education, also gave them the right to buy seats in the synagogue for the High Holy Days.  

I don’t know how much the package was to have a seat for the biggest show of the year in the temple, but my father, as I recall, opted to sit in one of the hundreds of folding chairs they set up in the gym.  One year, I remember, he had a seat in the Ferkauf Chapel, in an alcove under the main sanctuary but a floor above the gym.  It was slightly more upscale, with carpeting and without the faint chlorine smell from the pool down the hall you sometimes got in the gym.  My mother never went to shul, my sister and I were forced to Junior Congregation for a few years, and never went again, so my father only bought one of the costly high holiday seats.  Fittingly, I suppose, he prayed alone at Hillcrest every year.

The seats in the main chapel were for local millionaires and my father wasn’t going to be gouged for the right to pray in the first class cabin.  I’m sure even those seats in the gym weren’t cheap. I remember seeing Caroline and Ralph there once, in that overflow crowd, fasting and praying in the gym while rising and please being seated in a wave with hundreds of others.  They, like my father, like the immense crowd of local Jews in their best clothes, jammed into every room of the Jewish Center, went every year, religiously.    

One year, my father reported that a woman fainted in the gym during her Yom Kippur fast.  She’d been asked to rise one too many times, I guess.   The faces of the Jews at Hillcrest were indeed solemn, as if acutely aware of exactly what was going on in the heavens above them as Yom Kippur came to an emotional climax.  

In Jewish folklore The Almighty sits over an unimaginably immense ledger, like an all-powerful accountant, reviewing, during the Ten Days of Repentance, the good deeds, bad deeds and borderline deeds of each Jew.   Based on their repentance, their generosity in forgiving those who seek it from them, their devotion to good works, their pious obedience to their Creator, or their failings in these departments, they’d get marked down in The Book of Life for a good year or a bad year in the one about to start.  

Jews have ten days to straighten out their accounts, the ten days from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, also known as The Days of Awe, to make amends,  to repay debts, to seek forgiveness, to forgive those who seek it.  In my experience, among the Jews I’ve known, this is rarely done in a terribly soul searching way.   It is very hard to have the humility to do all of these things, to be aware of every hurtful thing you may have done and humbly seek forgiveness for them, and it is not often done, except among people who really love each other, and even then, it is not the norm to go into detail.   We assume, by our love and continuing friendship, that we forgive each other, I suppose.  

But even many of the most casual Jews fast on Yom Kippur.  Even those, like me, who find the rituals of worship empty and many of the ancient commands lacking in soul.  As for fasting, I don’t speak for the others, but I have always done it, am doing it now.   I also made a practice of walking down to Hillcrest toward the end of the evening service every year to meet my father and walk him back to break the fast.  

The shul goers would get a break during their day of fasting and praying, a few hours of downtime after the grueling morning session.   My father generally took a nap, I’m sure many others did too.  Fasting and praying is hard work.  

I suspect that final afternoon into evening stretch of praying while fasting, and knowing that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, was fixing to make the final notations on your page in the Book of Life, and then actually seal your fate for the coming year with a giant seal, had to be very emotional.   It all leads up to a tremendous, long, sobbing blast on a ram’s horn, at that exact moment God seals the Book of Life, everyone’s fate sealed for the coming year.  

Fasting is enough for me, and walking down to meet my father and walk him home after his second long bout of praying was the only other Yom Kippur ritual I observed.

There would be a swarm of Jews outside the synagogue, as though a concert had just ended in a giant hall.  In the last of the dying sunlight I’d recognize a few, sometimes say a brief hello, but everyone on the sidewalk in front of Hillcrest was distracted, slightly drained, hungry, thinking about getting home, darting this way and that, as soon as the sun had completely set and there were three stars in the sky– bagels, lox, soup, fruit, thick slice of tomato, water, coffee, fresh orange juice, schnapps.   Food rarely tastes as good as those first bites after twenty-four hours of fasting.  Anybody I ran into while searching for my father was understandably not in a mood to schmooze, which was fine with me too.

I would find my father in this swarm of dazed, hungry Jews fanning out from Hillcrest in every direction, and we’d walk home along Union Turnpike. It was not a long walk, five or six blocks.

Only one year did we have a meaningful talk I still remember.  I initiated it and it was a very important talk for me, for my relationship with my difficult father and his with his difficult son.  We sat in the living room, my mother in the kitchen, the food all ready to eat, everything smelled delicious.  All the stars were in the sky, it was past time to eat, and we continued to talk instead of breaking the fast, and he continued to pretend not to understand what I was talking about, he went into all his tricks.  

It took quite a long time, maybe an hour or more, and my mother never appeared in the living room after she’d greeted us and saw us locked in this conversation, but eventually, after displaying a forbearance that surprised us both and untangling all of his tactical diversions, I got my point across, he agreed to do what I had asked, and we went in and broke the fast.  

I have written at length about this conversation, and I will do so again, but a hungry Sekhnet is on her way, and I have to be ready when she gets here.   We have a vast fruit salad to assemble before our friends arrive home from shul to break the fast a few hours from now.  I have to say, I can already taste that first swallow of pulpy orange juice.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

There has been research recently on the changes in brain chemistry, the physical structure of the brain itself, and even the DNA, of children who experience abuse, neglect, hunger, adverse childhood experiences that scar them for life.   There is a great, short video presentation by a brilliant pediatrician, Nadine Burke Harris, who clearly sets out the lifelong health consequences of terrible childhood experiences. Fifteen minutes well spent, the link is here.   

An old friend was telling me about a recent experiment where they abused baby rats until their brains’ plasticity was gone.  This is apparently one effect of child abuse, we can think of it as a hardening of certain areas of the brain that need to be flexible. Which makes the reaction of someone with this injured brain more extreme and painful than the reaction of someone with a pliable brain that can, literally, stretch and roll with the seemingly, to the un-abused person, minor punches.

This friend and I, both unfortunate subjects of an amoral behavioral experiment, identify with this kind of traumatized rat.  The senseless experiments we’ve undergone have left us sometimes struggling to behave as though we had normally elastic brains.   The main thing you need when hurt, particularly if you’re a survivor of adverse childhood experiences, is empathy, so you don’t feel crazy to be suffering what you are — and so you can learn to empathize and also continue to look for empathy, even if through a fog of pain.

My friend told me the experimenters, when they were done torturing these baby rats to sufficiently fuck up their brains, administered some drug and watched the effect on the little rats’ personalities.  The drug apparently restored their brain plasticity, or elasticity, or whatever it was.  The twitching rats became calm and cuddly.

We laughed that there might be hope for us yet.  There might be, there might not be.  But the laugh certainly didn’t hurt in any case.