Author Archives: oinsketta

RIP Tawny

My sister loved her dog, a pit bull named Tawny.  My memory of Tawny is as an ageless lioness, limber, strong and perfectly formed.  Sekhnet recalls her as a giant lioness.   She was not small.  She had boundless nervous energy, if you threw her saliva soaked white sock for her once you’d be obliged to do it a hundred more times.  

The wet sock would be on your lap, at your feet, or next to you on the couch, Tawny, head cocked, staring longingly at you, at the sock, at you, making sure you saw her, knew the sock was there.  Whatever else might have been going on, she had one concern, her paw up on you now, to focus your attention to the matter:  throw, run after that sock and bring it back, drop it for throwing,  repeat.  

She was beautiful.  She was gentle, too.  She wouldn’t bite a hamburger, as the phrase goes.  She was not cuddly, had too much energy for that, and her coat was not smooth and silky for petting, she wanted to move, to bring back the sock, a ball, whatever.    

You could picture her on the savanna, with no fear of any creature, sitting under a tree gnawing a bone.  My sister said that is how she died today, at the ripe old pit bull age of more than 13, deaf, unable to use her hind legs any more.  Chewing on a bone, peaceful, as her loved ones sat around her and the vet administered the stuff to knock her out.  Very gentle and very sad.  My sister and her family are all crying tonight.  

To those who have never loved a dog or a cat or other animal, I have to say, I am a little bit sorry for you.   There is no love greater than that shared with a familiar, loyal animal whose life and warmth connect with yours.  We are lucky who have experienced that kind of love with another human.  

This love between humans and animals is not a new thing, either.  The bonds between human and animal go back to earliest prehistory.  The first friendly wolves who ran with humanoids, becoming the first dogs, defending the group, being rewarded with food and affection, a warm place to sleep by the fire.   The pack was as familiar to dogs as to humans.  Cats and other animals long ago joined into this most excellent arrangement.  

 

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Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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The Lifespan of Friendship

Having time, that most precious of resources, I sometimes brood, that most useless of uses for time.  I don’t brood at random, mind you.  I brood about specific vexing details of this life here, the life we try to celebrate, and wring every bit of joy, gratefulness and amazement from.   We try to appreciate the good things in our lives to the cadence of a constantly banging drum, and not only one drum, a million drums.  

The beat is constant, purposeful, and often drowns out everything else.  It is amplified and throbs over the wall to wall speakers of mass media.  Recently it was Paris, the murderous motherfuckers who slaughtered some innocent people there.  That was the only story.  Everywhere.  Oh, yes, and the accompanying footnote story of a similar slaughter in Beirut where less people were killed that same day in a part of the world where many are killed daily.  Then the only story was about some insane American motherfucker with a gun killing people he believed were killers because they worked in a clinic that sometimes performed abortions.  Trump.  The idiocy or atrocity of the day.  The kid who was killed by an enraged policeman in Chicago, the city paid the family $5,000,000 for the kid’s “wrongful death”.  The eventual release of the videotape, after a year of government stone-walling, showing there was probable cause to believe the policeman murdered the kid in the first degree.  Friday was Black Friday, run to stand on line for amazing deals.  Today is Cyber Monday, big savings on line, go go go!

But I am not thinking of any of these things today.  I am thinking about the death of friendship, how it happens, why.  As a kid I watched my father toss old friends over the side, not even look back as they disappeared without a trace in the wake of his mighty ship.  I thought this was horrible.  Over time I’d learn it is even more horrible to have vengeful people scowling and skulking on deck, spewing hatred, jealousy, anger, poison, insisting they are your best friends and that you don’t deserve any fucking better, asshole.  If you ask them nicely and they don’t play nice, don’t play with them.  If they won’t leave, it is kind of a moral duty to throw them over the side.

It is a matter of luck and sensitivity, and valuing the rare thing that true friendship is, to find and keep good friends.  A certain amount of work is involved in keeping a friendship alive and healthy.  I believe there are many people who do not have the luck and sensitivity to others to find and keep good friends.  It is much more important to them to be right, and feel superior, and justified in their anger, and not take any shit from anyone, ever.   I have been there, prepared to take no shit from anyone, ever.  But taking a little shit once in a rare while, from someone who sometimes needs to give it, as all of us do, well, OK, the price to be a good a friend, to have a good friend.  A little shit can be overlooked, within reason.

But then there is the line drawn in the sand:  all shit all the time!  I didn’t sign on for this, you will think to yourself, protest to the friend who declares this drastic new policy.  Doesn’t matter, your friend will say, you’re the only one I can throw this on, need to get it out of my large intestine, can’t leave it on the floor.  The color goes nicely with your eyes.  Makes kind of a warm hat and scarf for you, my friend.  At first, anyway.

This is really disgusting.  Is this really the best I can do at the moment?

I like to think not.  I like to think I can do better.  It is not always possible.  Time is money.  Tick tick tick.  

If you want your friend to listen to you, not cut you off, consider the things you say: listen to your friend, do not cut them off, consider the things they say.  The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Jesus, was Love your neighbor as yourself.  This may be possible for the son of God, or a saint, but does not seem possible for the average human.  The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Hillel:  What is hateful to you do not unto another.  This gives us a handle on a better way to act, seems more practical.  Everyone knows what they hate.  If you hate it, don’t do it to someone else. What are you, a sadist?    

Many are sadists, sad to say, and sadism, it seems to me, comes from being victimized by another sadist.  What is hateful to you do to anyone who is weaker than you– the credo of the sadist.    Some victims are made more sensitive by what they have been forced to undergo, become protectors of others.  Many, sadly, become fucking sadists.  Is it possible to be friends with a sadist?  If you are a masochist, I suppose.   The old one:  the masochist says ‘hurt me, hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘no…’

This is most muddled, my friend.  Is there some lesson to be drawn from this?  I do not see it.  Are you saying your friends will treat you no better than you treat them?   Are you once more taking a bold stand for the obvious, that it is better to be a mensch than an asshole?  Those things are kind of subjective, no?  Don’t most of us consider ourselves justified in our actions, on the high road, compromisers taken advantage of when things go south?

I think of the line between mensch and asshole like that Supreme Court justice wrote of obscenity: we know it when we see it.  In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man, as it is written in the Book of Proverbs.   Or maybe it was in Pirkey Avot.  I’m sure every religion and culture has some variation on this.  Our’s in the west is: go someplace where there is something of material value, claim it, stand tall and use your quick drawn gun to kill anyone who contests your claim to it.

Madness creeps down like a curtain, like the darkening sky at dusk, like a thumb on to an ant.   I don’t know what to make of this.  Hopefully the next page will be a little more edifying and entertaining.

 

 

 

NY Times on Federal Judge Jay Bybee

Not that I am a huge fan of the Grey Skank, but I did have to applaud this editorial bit on the Torture Memos and their author, life-tenured Judge Jay Bybee (the article I read it in, linked below, is also worth a read):

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

source

Writing for Pay

Writing for pay, like doing anything for pay, is not a job for the squeamish.   Squeamish, we are informed by a wonderful dictionary I have somewhere, means “exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.”  Such prudish readiness is not a desirable quality for a person entering the marketplace.  You want to do business in the marketplace and never be nauseated?  Good luck, pal.  That’s why you write here on WordPress, after all.  Here on a blahg read by a small handful, nobody will ever randomly change your words in exchange for a check.  On the other hand, no check for $250, or even $5, will ever be mailed to your home to pay for  your single malt scotch.   So get over it.  

I mean, really, isn’t it churlish, childish and even a bit arbitrary to be upset when a sentence that you wrote:  

It was always hard for me to understand how a man with my father’s many great qualities could be such an intractable asshole.

is rendered:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

There is meaning, there are shades of meaning, and things that simply mean what they mean, if you know what I mean.  I can easily understand that many people love other people who are intractable assholes.  It may be another thing to recognize the lovable qualities myself, even as I also see the intractable asshole.  But that, I suppose, is simply nuance.  And nuance, as we all know…. fuck nuance.  You want nuance or a check?  Your choice, it’s a free country.

Cliches are another thing.  Just because I avoid them like the plague doesn’t mean some editor will be able to resist quickly swapping in the familiar rather than yielding to the more precise description I’ve put together.  

But I am a whiner by nature, as should be clear to anyone who has read even a couple of these posts.  In fact, instead of writing my next pay day, a generous fee for not a lot of work, something I sat down to do, I am whinging here about how hard it is to see even the most innocent and well-meaning violence done to my inviolable prose. 

Wee wee wee.  Or as the editor might style it:  oui, oui, oui.

 

Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey.   They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years.   I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects)  and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat.  Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds.  The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse.  Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm.  Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.  

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for?   They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime?  Then it hit me.  They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat.  Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind.  There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged:  when cooked skillfully we are delicious.   We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid.  Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners.  No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed.   They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over.  No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side.   Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.  

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, Mr. President.  Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour.  On the other hand, sir, what the fuck?  I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it.  I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness.   I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.  

He looked at me like “this surprises you?   That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way?   You look surprised.  Pathetic.  How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”  

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives.   Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man.  I got two words for you:  Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know.  The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life.  A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed.  Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with.  Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple.  Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject.  What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat?  Less sentient than the ones who live on land?  Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere.  God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

Ten Minute Drill

On your mark, get set….

wait a second.  I forgot my timer.

OK, here we go.

Wait, wait.  OK.  Ah, it’s no use.  The mind is like a molasses pond.  Hands like spoons.  Nothing good will come of this.

“There you go, again,” comes an uncanny Reagan in my ear.  

“Some boys are not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally,” says the Boy Scout manual, in the years before one spoke openly of masturbation.  “While this may cause no real harm, any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be shared with a scout master or priest.”

“Father, I don’t know what it is, but I am not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally to me,” says the boy.  

“Oh boy,” says the reader, eyes rolled heavenwards, tired of this frog march already.  

“Have no fear, gentle reader, less than five minutes left,” writes the blahgger reassuringly.  

“We are not reassured….” says Meryl Streep, in her uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt voice.   It was her, the credits revealed, who read Eleanor’s part so perfectly in the brilliant Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts.  

“THIS is what you are doing today?” asks a disembodied voice incredulously.

We could use a class traitor like FDR in the White House today.  Is nobody inspired by his example any more?

“That’s it,” says the guitar in the stand, “you will pick me up and play some standard in C.  How about the intro to Stardust?  There, that’s a good boy.  Leave everyone alone now.”  

When she’s right she’s right, I think wearily, either that or a short nap, or both.

Still 50 seconds left.  Are you concerned about that?  I am not, just waiting for the beep.  Turns out I don’t have pneumonia, something much more vague.

BEEP!

 

 

De gustibus

The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction.  He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing.   He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.

Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music.  Any music.”  

She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”  

A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment.  In another wink, the old man was gone.

Collateral Damage, yawn

This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut.  There is never a good time to bring things like this up.  Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up?  It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes?   Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals?    The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.   Candidates lie.  Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts.  Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney.   If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it.  If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?  

An excellent question, sir.  You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it.   Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here.  End of story.  

Any other questions, jerk-off?

 

 

 

 

 

Walking Pneumonia

I got up with the sun several days in a row, the reverse of my usual practice of retreating to a darkened room as the sun begins prying open the blinds here.  I walked many miles every day, seeing cool things, noticing and photographing great signs, calligraphy, sights. Walking with others, I did not stop when tired, although I often wanted to.  

I did notice the extraordinary heaviness in my lungs while climbing a steep hill.   I thought I might have suddenly aged forty years.    What the fuck?   I stood there gasping like a fish on the floor of the rowboat.  It took me a startlingly long moment to regain my breath.   My lungs were full of phlegm, green at first, lighter as time went on.   Was this the result of ten hours in the lung ward on the back of an international flight?  Sitting next to a robustly hacking man who also used my right side as a kind of body pillow?

I was sleepless on the plane coming back, looked with envy at the blissfully snoring Sekhnet across the aisle.   Afterwards she told me she’d felt my hand on her arm, periodically trying to get her attention so I could express my misery.   Wise of her, not a facial muscle twitched as I prodded her.

On arriving home I immediately crawled under the covers for a nap.  I slept five hours without turning over.  Glanced at the clock, it was already afternoon.  Next time I saw the clock it was the evening.

“Why am I so tired?” I asked Sekhnet, stumbling downstairs after a ten hour nap.

“Maybe you have walking pneumonia,” she said, helpfully.

The next few days passed in a kind of fog.  Shoot.  Maybe I do have walking pneumonia.  Glad my free Obamacare physical is coming up in a few days.  The last trip to that office, to see a clueless physician’s assistant, cost me almost $500.