Author Archives: oinsketta

A taste of blood to a shark

Sekhnet periodically goes on a strict diet, cutting out most of the foods one should avoid to maintain a healthy weight:  bread, pudding, pasta, desserts, fried food.   During these healthy times she refuses to take even a bite of any of these foods.   “It’s like giving blood to a shark,” she says, “if I have one bite I’ll have to eat the whole thing, and more besides.”

I’m thinking about that because, while I spend at least an hour a day tapping here at the keyboard, taking a sharp knife to my words and hitting “publish” at the end, it is only recently that somebody else took a dull knife to my words, published them and sent me a check.  

“Cah-ching!” I said, as I signed those babies and fed them into the ATM.

Got a taste of blood, after years of honing rows of teeth to a razor sharpness.  One may quibble with the things I write here, wonder about a man with so much time on his hands, so seemingly unable to do most other things that normal people do.  

The hour or two I spent tapping out a thoughtful piece on the word “motherfucker”, for example, is it really worth writing about, for f-word’s fucking sake?  (unsuccessfully searched this blahg for the piece I wrote about the fascinating etymology of the word and my father’s didactic role in bringing it to my attention.  Maybe it was on my previous blahg?)

Anyway, that’s it.  I got a taste for blood now.  I want a nice tall glass of it, and another one after.

 

An Epidemic of Mental Illness?

This excellent article, which I found very convincing, was given to me by a very intelligent man who considers himself insane.  He may well be right, although the piece he recommended is well worth reading if you are considering a psychopharmaceutical cure for what ails ye.  

Or if you are a psychiatrist who spends hours talking to patients, while wondering how to make more money in less time, with far fewer head aches.

The second part of the fascinating two part book review is here.

Facebook Nation

I’ve got to face the muzak, I am a member of facebook nation, whether I ever click on facebook or not.

“Social media” connects us in the most superficial possible way.  Which is cool, it is the least we can do to keep up the pretense of connectedness, and for many, also the most we can do.  It takes a few seconds to see the update, and if we’re not interested we click the next tab, no need to be polite or interested in the privacy of cyber friendship.

What has long irked me in real-life irks me on-line: it is rare for people to simply answer a simple question.  We are distracted all the time, much more now with powerful personal computers in our shirt pockets.  I don’t remember the last meal I ate in a restaurant without somebody at the table consulting a tiny, irresistible glowing screen for real-time updates.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you say something?”

I had a friend of many years, somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, I would think, very active on social media.  We eventually had a terminal falling out, no doubt years in the making, after he promised to do a small favor in his area of expertise and then, after not doing it, was peevish about me not answering his missed call to let him explain why he didn’t do it.  I wrote a series of pieces here about the unraveling situation, and in that month my “readership” spiked dramatically.  In fact, it set a personal record for this largely unread blahg, a record that could stand as long as DiMaggio’s hitting streak.

The nice thing is that through writing about the situation as clearly as I could I emerged as the vicious bully and he, unrepentant but cruelly misunderstood, came out as the victim, at least in his mind.  In our last call he actually attempted to bully me, which surprised me, but the point was made, if it needed making again:  written words can wound.   Over and over again, apparently.

After my final post on the slow-motion falling out went up I had an email from a friend.  “Good thing he doesn’t have a gun,” wrote my friend about the piece.  I hadn’t thought of that, but it was a good thing.

That’s the thing about being a cyber-presence, you don’t actually have to look anyone in the eye when you shoot them in the face.   Look at the comments on-line sometime.   I am often impressed by the level of civility and intelligence I see in comment strings on some sites.  People actually support each other and try to exchange differing views in a mature and nuanced way.  Then someone jumps in swinging virtual fists, light sabers, burning paper bags full of dog shit.  There are some sites where fisticuffs is the norm.  Put two of these bellicose trolls in a room and it’s unlikely they would be so fierce in each other’s actual presence.

Whenever I told the story of the end of the friendship with this former friend of mine I always added a line I never said, then admitted I didn’t think of it at the time.  The line was “if you want to bully me, come on over, I’m home.  I’ll wait for you.”  This is the kind of line we would write for a laconic tough guy narrator, which I am not.  But I play one on-line, you see.  Not that I would have needed to be any such thing to get this particular fellow to stop talking shit.

Writing here is the easiest thing I can think of to do at the moment– it’s almost like scrolling down a friend’s facebook page.  The least I can do and also, at the moment, the most.  Once I send it into cyberspace I plan to get on to many things I have been thinking of doing for the last couple of weeks.  In fact, let me do that now.

But first, how are you doing, my friend?

The power of “nice”

Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes.  Most of us are not strictly nice or mean.   We swing both ways, according to circumstance.   One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.

I was grown in a hothouse of rage.  It took me decades to start to understand the obvious:  that it’s better not to engage with insane anger.  There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad.  But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.    

One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you.  This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option.   Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on.  That’s all I’m saying.

My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).  

“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her.  It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B.   Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.  

It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.

So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply.  “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.  

“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.”  I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.

In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond.  They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting.  They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.

And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it.  Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.

If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply.  “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it.  Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things.  But anything else?  Good luck, kid.  

Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it.  Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.

“Nice is nice,” I told her.  “Nice is excellent.  Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.  

Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment.  This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.  

The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’.  Investment of time and effort– almost none.

But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said.  That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it.  Can you dig that?

“Nice!”

 

 

You Want to Laugh, do you?

I rarely find myself reading something and laughing out loud, LOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever ROTFLMFAO, but on rare occasions something in print tickles the old funny bone and makes me roar in my chair.   This bit did zee trick, LOL!

The author, always funny, was a good friend in high school who I lost touch with (or, ‘with whom I lost touch’, if you prefer the stick up the ass).  I stayed friends with her ex-husband and, through an on-line magazine he writes for that pays a few bucks for 1,000 word pieces, I discovered more than a dozen written testaments to Helene’s wicked wit yesterday.  There are a few tragic ones among them, although even those are leavened with her distinctive irony, but scroll down the list, every one is worth reading, and none more than 1,000 words or so.  

The list of Helene’s stuff  which she just reported bears the editorial mark, here and there, of that lovable “scamp” who improves good work with a deft, sometimes daft, touch (hey, Larry, where are you when the reader needs you?) is here.   Czech ’em, but only if you want a larf.

historical footnote

Footnote 7 from

A Short History of Blacks As The Special Favorites of the Law: (Revisiting the Failure of Reconstruction and America’s Persistent Race Problem)

7]   The legal foundations of the “Peculiar Institution” are buried in three discreet clauses in the Constitution. The words “slavery” and “African” are understood.

The first reference was in regard to the valuation of slave men as three-fifths of a man for purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress.    See U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3

The second authorized the unimpeded continuation of the slave trade until 1808– “migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”  

See  U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 1

The third provided the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Acts,

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”  

U.S. Const. art. IV, § 2, cl. 3.  

Excellent short piece on one of three discreet mentions of the peculiar institution in the Constitution

Not being at home, where I have a short paper I once wrote about the three slimy and well-camouflaged Constitutional foundations for American slavery, the “Peculiar Institution”, I hit the internets to find the three discreet, coded, legally binding devil-in-the fucking-detail phrases. 

I found this one first, the timeless reference to “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”; lucked on to this excellent one page discussion of the slave trade clause, well worth a read:

http://abolition.nypl.org/essays/us_constitution/3/

Glad to see there are some excellent teaching materials on-line.  My niece teaches American History in High School and I’m glad to see high quality discussions like these are easily accessible, with teaching notes.  Here’s another excellent short discussion (citing all three clauses) of one of the three legal foundations for the Peculiar Institution (I’ll leave the fucking 3/5 compromise — which apportioned representatives to Congress based on total population, including 3/5 of each slave, slaves comprising 40% of the population in the South — out of this post):

Fugitive Slave Clause — Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3
Essay by Matthew Spalding (pp. 275–276)
A model of circumlocution, the Fugitive Slave Clause comes the closest of the so called Slave Clauses (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3; Article I, Section 9, Clause 1; and Article V) to recognizing slavery as a protected institution. The Fugitive Slave Clause was one of the most controversial clauses in the Constitution because it provided that escaped slaves would be returned to those who claimed ownership. 
 
The Framers carefully drafted the clause to ensure that the Constitution did not give moral sanction to slavery. The final revision emphasized that slaves were held according to the laws of individual states and that slavery was not based on natural or common law. The language also implies that a slave owner’s property did not extend to federal territories if Congress chose to prohibit slavery there. Indeed, according to the legal requirements of the clause, an escaped slave was no longer a slave upon entering a state that did not recognize slavery under its law.
Unlike other clauses in Article IV, which vest power either in Congress directly or in the United States, this clause is written in the passive voice…

Click to access lesson-19.pdf

Matthew Spalding, author of the above, does an excellent job breaking down this “carefully drafted” clause, showing in very few words the complexities of political compromise I generally leave out of my morally indignant posts.  I frequently take a less nuanced route:

A “model of circumlocution”, “written in the passive voice”– this is how the fucking devil speaks and writes.  Just goes to show, once again, if showing again were needed (not to say it’s not): one needn’t be Hitler’s legal counsel to do excellent work, as a result of which, many millions are humiliated, maimed and killed.

467

 

 

150 years since slavery was abolished

Slavery, at one time enshrined, in coded language, in our Constitution, was abolished by the 13th Amendment, apparently passed 150 years ago today.  The justice and mercy of Law, what can one say?   I am about to go on a bike ride before tackling other things, but thought I’d tackle this old chestnut briefly first.

l always love the racist complaint that when it comes to slavery American Blacks should “just get over it”.  It was 150 years ago! they will heatedly remind you today.  A brief survey of those 150 years may be in order.  American states seceded from the Union, took up arms to defend their rights, including the Constitutional right to hold humans as property, to do with such property as they saw fit.  Although today most people consider slavery inexcusably evil, it was Constitutionally protected, more vigorously protected than many rights enjoyed by American citizens.

Treatment of American citizens was, and remains, largely a States Rights matter.  Advocates of States Rights seem brazen about the fact that the states most loudly demanding their rights are the same ones who took up arms against the government they felt, with mixed justice, was interfering with their Constitutional rights.  Demanding unthinkable things like the end of our genteel way of life, sir!  Damn you, sir, I say, damn you!

After a monstrously bloody war slavery was abolished by a Constitutional Amendment, the thirteenth.  The defeated rebel states had to endorse this amendment or forfeit the right to Federal funds to rebuild their war torn infrastructure (most of the fighting was in the Confederacy).  “Reconstruction” was a short-lived project, it lasted about as long as Prohibition and, though it began with great promise, did about the same amount of lasting good before it was abandoned.  When federal troops were removed from the South, and the Supreme Court severely limited the scope of the other Amendments designed to insure rights to the freed slaves, it was time for States Rights again.

We had states ruled in many cases by outfits like the Ku Klux Klan.  Can’t be sheriff, son, nor mayor, nor governor, neither, unless you move up in the Klan.  Black Codes in these states made it a crime for a black man to be unemployed and walking the streets without a certain amount of money in his pocket  Wealthy white men with fields to plow could bail out imprisoned Negroes and have them work to pay off their bail money.  The repayment was structured to last a lifetime.  The arrangement lasted less than a century, but surely seemed longer to those freed slaves who, on paper, had the same rights as anyone else.

A war was waged steadily throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s finally restored much of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, passed a century earlier.  Then it was only a matter of 50 years or so after that until the question of widespread poverty among the descendants of American slaves, and hopelessness, violence, racial profiling, killing by police and so forth would be back in the news.  

Malcolm X questioned why such barbarous conditions were considered a matter of Civil Rights when, more properly, they should be regarded as violations of Human Rights.  Let the U.N. decide whether America is still denying basic Human Rights to millions of its citizens, he demanded.   The ballot or the bullet, you know.  They chose, as they so often do, the bullet.  February 21, 1965.  Another big anniversary, less than a year ago, sir.

 

Projects

There may be individuals, I suppose there must be, who can continue uphill, pushing a worthy long-shot project, undaunted by the continual climb, the lack of landmarks, fellow-travelers, encouragement, the barren landscape.   Could be part of the myth of the rugged individual, of course, the invigorating but pernicious idea that one person, alone, can create a community to play a small role in changing horror into hope.   There are the usual outliers, guys like Don Trump, who start with nothing and wind up– or who start with relatively little, a few million, say… and…. ah, fuck Trump and the Trump he rode in on.

There is, it is written, a time to reap and a time to sow.  There are other worthy projects I’ve been neglecting as I neglect the larger one, an ambitious undertaking that has already showed its potential to do what it purports to do.   Few alive today are aware of its great potential, true, but, anyway, it seems a good time to list and try to advance the other worthy projects I must also put my back into.  Progress in one thing helps in another.

Among the 901 posts I have put on this blagh since August of 2012 there are a dozen or more that can be raked into the approximate bones of the Book of Irv, the tragic and illuminating story of my difficult father.   There are posts on my mother, an equally compelling character, probably another dozen.   One of each of these story types was published, in abbreviated form, for a small but decent payday.  You can see them here and here.  Although each bears the mark of sometimes arbitrary editing, the small violence done to my prose, the random insertion of a cliche here and there– a very small price to pay for the nice cash money I received for them.

There are several posts about animals, my ongoing vigilance against doing harm, musings on friendship, etc.   Each should be raked into a little pile, organized, submitted somewhere for money.

Of course, when I write of raking into little piles and organizing, the chaos in here strikes an ironic pose, winks at me saucily.  “You want to rake some piles and do some organizing, my friend?  Really?  Heh.”   I should take these sprawling dunes of paper, drawing books, boxes, cords, rulers, cutting boards, sunscreen, dropper bottles, rubber stamps, dead electronic devices, hats, zipper bags, music books and many other odd items and tame them, one by one.  Would make everything else much easier, no question.  One small triumph inspires the next.

There is also the memory of the excellent advice an adjunct professor in law school gave us at the end of that last semester.  When you study for the bar exam, he said, treat it like you are in training for a grueling fight.  Set a daily schedule of study, keep to it, but also eat well, work out, get enough sleep every night.  You need to be in the best shape of your life, he told us, mentally and physically.  Sitting for hours studying means you’ll need to schedule daily time for exercise.  The exercise will also help you unwind from your studies and improve your sleep.  I took him at his word and rode the bike for an hour every night.  It helped a lot as I passed two bar exams in three days.

After long days at the computer, mostly distracting myself, I rode my bike, briefly, each of the last two nights.  It was good to be rolling again, if also a little sobering to be reminded– when you get back on the bike it takes a while to build up to where you want to be.  Those hills you conquered on nightly rides in the past will kick your ass until you build back up to being able to kick their asses.  I’ve been there before, needing to get back into shape, getting back into better shape.  It is a pleasure when you do, a struggle to get back there, a longer struggle the longer you neglect to begin.

Like so many other things in life, my friend.