Author Archives: oinsketta

Tenterhooks

I don’t know what they are, exactly, but goddamn them.  Time running out, whipsawed between waiting for a promised immediate definitive call back from a well-meaning woman at the credit card company with slightly insufficient attention to detail and a long trip by subway, bus and foot to allay, to the extent I can, the stress of someone I’ve stressed out by my own slightly insufficient attention to detail lately.

Seeking to reduce her stress, I am on tenterhooks, real or imagined, since I need to leave and was just promised that if I stay I’ll get an immediate call back with a definitive answer I don’t absolutely need until around 9 Central Time (it’s 4:14 Central Time now).  

Time to use my imagination to cast the tie-breaker against reality, whatever that may be.  Here we go:  I can imagine myself on the subway, standing now, since it’s rush hour, listening to a podcast, not minding a bit.  I can imagine finding a vexingly lost item where I hope it is when I get back to the farm, having time to make a surprise dinner for my stressed out, exhausted partner who will be particularly happy to see me if my vexing stories turn out to have happy endings.  

And if not, misery, as they say, loves company.   Y’allah, let’s get the show on the road! 

The Search for Love

“You search for love, that never stops as long as you live, it’s the human condition.  If the love you had when you were little was a little crazy, or very crazy, well, that’s going to explain a lot about the rest of your search,” said the Israeli.  “You think it’s easy to trust crazy people?  But you can’t live without love and you can’t truly love without trust, I can tell you that from my own life.”

“What’s all of a sudden with the fucking Israelis?” asked a second Israeli, no less impatient than the first to be on to his favorite subject.

“I’m trying to explain to him not to feel like a schmoke, him and his beautiful friend over there, I also don’t want her to feel like a schmoke, ” said the first Israeli, “he and his beloved both had very scary starts in the world.  She will deny it, turn it into something that made her strong, he will admit it with way too much not always hilarious detail, but basically similar stories.  You look for comfort in a hostile world and the person who is giving it to you is a victim twitching with terror, eyes darting nervously, cortisol is being released every two minutes.  Children from war zones have this kind of elevated cortisol and adrenalin, programmed with fear as they develop only the most primitive childish theories on how to live without terror.”

“You want to talk about terror?” asked the second Israeli, “I can tell you plenty of stories about terror.  In fact…”

The first Israeli cut him off, “I don’t want to talk about terror, we’re talking about love.  I mentioned the extreme form of fear only to illustrate a point.  Fearful people can act brave, and its an inspiration to the brave among us sometimes, but at the core of their operating system there is fear.  Terror is terrifying, everyone knows about that.”

“I’ll tell you about terror,” says the second Israeli, “I have some interesting theories for you about terror.”

“Terror we’ll talk about another time, love is the subject today,” said the first Israeli, undaunted.  “Love is the highest feeling there is, connection to another, to others.  Love is what every song is about, finding it, losing it, lamenting its loss, getting a second chance, hoping for new love, the redemption of loving and being loved.  ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved, in return’ as the strange enchanted boy sings to Nat King Cole.”  

“Yes, we can talk about love songs, it’s a nice topic, but they are on their way to Yad Vashem, these two, looking for the lost hamlet where the river split into three branches to the southeast of Pinsk.  The place where the angry side of his family was stomped like so many cockroaches.  You think they are thinking of love songs, Shmulik?”   

“Why do you have to say my name, Doody?   We are abstractions, literary devices and you have to pull off the masks like it’s nothing?  I don’t understand you, man.  Yad Vashem is Yad Vashem, love is love, mixing things is mixing things.  You like to mix things, don’t you?”

The second Israeli waved his hand dismissively, “you like to keep things simple.  I get it.  OK, love is love, we search for love, if we were raised in a fearful house where we were not heard, felt in danger all the time, developed massive defenses, it will be harder for us to move past fear and trust people and give and take love in the comforting way everyone hopes to.  Is that a pure enough telling of what you were talking about, Literary Devicesky?”

“You dance so divinely, Doody.  Why is it that you have had so many wives?” said the first Israeli.  

“Look, Mr. Don’t Mix Things In, now we are suddenly talking about my three wives, only three.  Not so many, really.  And why are you… eh, never mind.  Have you noticed that neither of us has let either of these two get a word in?  Not a single word.  That’s kind of funny, I think, since they are your guests.  I think it’s funny.”

“I don’t know if it’s funny,” said the first Israeli.

Schmoke

“Schmoke,” says the Israeli firmly, with that delicious pronunciation of the Yiddish word schmuck, which comes originally from the German for jewel, but, by reducing the man to his ‘jewel’, his procreative parts, renders him ridiculous, a putz, somebody who should know better, much better, not an idiot exactly, because not stupid, but something worse than an idiot, a kind of schvantz.   Which is like calling a dog “a tail”.  

“Nu, very interesting, schmoke,” says the Israeli, not interested at all.  “People do not buy an idea, no matter how ingenious.  You have an ingenious idea, that’s wonderful, mazal tov.  We are happy for you, your idea is the idea of a genius.  There’s no question, genius idea, wonderful, we love it, honestly, we love the idea.  But to sell an idea….” he stretches the phrase out, drawing out “sell”, watching you lean forward.  He waits, taking his time, to emphasize his point and to emphasize that he’s a successful salesman talking to a schmoke.

“Fucking Israeli,” you say, but it’s worse than saying nothing, really, because you actually said nothing.

“You do not sell the idea.   Only a schmoke thinks you can sell an idea.  An idea, it’s like a flavor, a gas, a color, you can’t hold it in your hand, you can’t touch it.  An idea you can’t sell.  You can only sell the implementation of an idea, the system for delivering some version of the idea.  If you don’t realize that by now you have been trying to put together the wrong puzzle, I’m sorry to tell you.”  

“Fucking Israeli,” you think, but the guy makes an excellent point.  Worse, he knows he makes an excellent point.

“People don’t invest in you because you’ve got a brilliant idea, trust me.  They don’t really care about the idea at all until they read about how it’s been put into practice, until some other genius explains, in a prestigious journal, how you managed to take this genius concept and actually put it into practice.   Took this amazing thing you imagined and made it real in the world so every idiot could point to it and say– hey, look at that amazing thing!  I need that!  Think of that schmoke Steve Jobs, the fucking genius Jesus of Technology they are making all these movies about.  His idea, I put all your two thousand long-playing records on something so sleek you can fit between the cheeks of your ass, the sound is better than your fancy quadrophonic stereo, I’ll put ten thousand albums on it, I’ll put fifteen thousand albums, and movies too, and a hundred of your photo albums.   If he can’t deliver it and make you pay whatever he tells you you have to pay — you never heard of Steve Jobs, I guarantee.  I hate that schmoke, personally, but you have to recognize what he did.  It wasn’t the ideas themselves, though they were smart ideas, things nobody thought of before, but the way he delivered them.”

He leans forward and pours another round from the bottle on the low glass table.  Under the table polished tiles glow in the golden light of the small city holy to three major world religions.

“I don’t call you a schmoke to mock you, please understand.  I say it with love, or at least with rachmunis.  It’s hard to have integrity in a world like this, OK, almost impossible.   You want to live as a man with integrity, better be very rich.  If you are very rich, you can have as much integrity as you like.  If not, well, I’m very sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, and I know it will not go down smooth, like that scotch you brought over here– and I thank you, it was a wonderful thing to do and I hope you will do it every time you come see me– I’m sorry to break this fartlike news to you– you say ‘breaking wind’ right, it’s a fart?– but the working man has only the integrity of doing his work well.  Ideas can be terrific, but they are not the same as work.  Work is what you have to do to make your idea real.  If you can show me the thing that is in your head, or better yet, have somebody else show it to me, a very beautiful girl delivering perfectly the excellent script you wrote for her, then we can do business.”

“Otherwise,” he looks for a second at the caramel colored liquid catching the light in his glass, “please, don’t waste my time.”  He tilts back his glass in the Jerusalem sunset and savors his drink.  He closes his eyes, smiles, shakes his head as if he can’t believe it.   “Oh, Jesus Christ and Jesus of Technology, this is good whisky and you are a very nice guy, even if you are, also, and I mean this in the best possible way, a complete fucking schmoke.”  

What did you think you were going to hear, schmoke?

Stats Corner

One thing I love about baseball is the stats.  You can look at a sheet of numbers next to a bunch of names, arranged as a box score, and quickly learn virtually everything about the game these people played.  Few stats are as straightforward as the numbers in a box score, though, of course, a blooper that falls in and rolls is indistinguishable from a shot that caroms off the wall at 120 mph.  “That will look like a line drive in the boxscore,” says the announcer of the dribbler that stops halfway to the hot corner as the runner reaches first and gets a perfectly valid base hit.  Most stats can be manipulated any number of ways, like words, moods, standardized test scores, economic numbers, people who want to please, fearful souls, etc.

WordPress offers stats, along with your free blahg.  Stats let you know how much traffic your site is getting, how well your little on-line journal is doing as far as readership.  You can see, for example, how many visitors you have on any given day, week, month, year.   You can see the numbers of likes, comments, views.  I look at these from time to time and nod, observing what an obscure little corner of cyberspace the gratuitousblahg occupies.   Rearranging the stats like the entrails a sooth sayer in the time of Caesar studied for omens of the future, I see this smiling augury.

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.41.27 AM

Not a bad trend, I think, coyly trimming off the tell-tale column to the right that shows the actual numbers.  But look at the trend, if you will; it is the trend I am getting at here with this chart.  I have reason to feel slightly encouraged by the steady uptick in annual visitors, do I not?  In ten years time, at the present rate of increase, I will have as many visitors in a year as the average porn site gets in a few hours.  Progress, by any measure, I’m sure we all agree.

Stirring the entrails with my stick to divine further trends I notice an odd contradiction in the stats.  Although I’ve stopped complaining about it, as much as I am able to, long time readers of these posts will know I’ve often sung sad songs about the difficulty of getting any feedback on anything.  The echoes from my adversarial childhood make me more susceptible than some to the sting of silence by way of response, though I think anyone  who expresses herself does so with some hope of a response.   (Note the sensitivity of my gender choice there, gentle reader.  I was encouraged to do this in law school, of all places.  Funny, I know.)

The most dependable form of response in real-time, something that, sadly, cannot be heard in cyberspace, is a laugh.  A laugh is also gratifying because it’s usually honest, spontaneous and an instant of blessed relief for everyone involved.   Not so with a response to other kinds of expression– they require both thought and action, even if each might take only a few seconds.    

Much non-response is simply the result of most people being too busy to read, hear or watch something they thought was pretty good and then take even more time to type “nice”.  “Nice” seems insufficient, so after a moment of searching in vain for a better four letter word they sensibly move on to the next thing.  

On top of the fast pace of modern life, it also doesn’t even occur to most people that a person who spends time creating something would be gratified by the encouragement, even as they applaud even a mediocre live performance (writing isn’t a performance, read it publicly, then we’ll clap) and most people remember to compliment the chef at dinner when a new dish is served (hey, nobody asked you to serve me this crap, bub).   Social behaviors change when people are anonymous, which is whey they created the “like” button, although the chart for gratuitousblahg likes is too ambiguous a little mountain range to be of any use to us here.

There is pleasure and satisfaction to be had from doing a thing as well as you can.  These excellent things are not to be sneezed at.   Recognition that the thing is well-done, interesting, has provoked a thought or feeling, welcome as the validation might be, well… no one can hear you shake your head in cyberspace   Anyway,  have a look and quick ponder at the next telltale graph, comments on the blahg since its ‘launch’ in August of 2012.   And, please, no comments, this one’s on me.

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.40.52 AM

The Unfairness of justice-biasing profit vectors

Corporations are people, you know, our highest court has affirmed this truth, as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   Corporations are just like you and me, endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights, although skeptical Bill Moyers says he’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.  

I heard an excellent talk by a man named Yuval Noah Harari describing the ascent of one hominid species, homo sapiens, to dominate the planet.  Homo sapiens were not the top predators, far from it.  There were many animals who could easily kill and eat homo sapiens, there still are a few.  Homo sapiens were bound together by common terrors, and driven by fear and a large brain, came to dominate all the other species on earth, and wipe out many of them on our way to planetary domination.  

He compared us to sheep with a nuclear bomb.  A truly terrifying and profound comparison.  He pointed out that you don’t fear a lion with a nuclear bomb, not that he would ever try to create one, because a lion is not afraid, knows its power, can defend itself without a bomb, but a sheep with a bomb?   The top animal in a group of sheep will press the button in a heartbeat when a lion comes too close, the second he runs out of weaker sheep to shove into that lion’s jaws.   

Harari also pointed out how homo sapiens are driven by our abstract world view, march forward as societies united by belief in a common myth.   He underscored the fluidity of the self-created myths that humans live by.  We can turn on a dime, when it comes to the beliefs that drive us. Torture, for example, (although I don’t think he mentioned it), a practice universally reviled as barbaric, quickly becomes acceptable to many once it’s rebranded as something that moral freedom-lovers necessarily use against evil fredom-hating monsters.   Harari gave the humorous and horrible example of members of a divinely inspired religion based on peace and brotherhood who obey God by setting on fire those who deny the divinity of the awesome god who has commanded them to be merciful, to love their enemies.   We eventually get to an idea like the “Free Market”, another good one.

An empathetic person can see things from another person’s point of view.  So let me not be so judgmental about a freedom loving and prosperous people who consider the inadvertent downstream poisoning of impoverished babies in some faraway hellhole, or the wholesale destruction of life-sustaining jungles, “externalities”, the unfortunate but acceptable price of doing business in a “Free Market”. That millions were displaced by a war we started, hundreds of thousands maimed, killed and orphaned on orders from our leaders, who may have honestly believed they were doing the right thing?   Regrettable, of course.  

Jesus was very judgmental about the injustices of the status quo of his time, and the status quo wasn’t having it,  nailed him to a cross, made an example out of him.  Few are willing to be made such examples of.  I am certainly not hoping to be made such an example of, as I preach quietly to my distracted flock of three or four.  Let me, therefore, try to be more empathetic toward the powerful.

Seeing things from a corporate point of view, as our lawmakers are obliged to, things are not so black and white, Mr. Moyers.  Really the only thing corporations want is unlimited immunity from the justice-biasing of their profit vectors.  If fairness were the only yardstick by which we measured our actions in the world, few great things would ever be done.  How many great fortunes were made by people who passionately believed in across the board fairness?   Grow up, would you.  Life is unfair, get used to it, stop bellyaching about it, move on.

Allowing a justice-bias into the conversation about the Free Market just gums up the works, kills job creation, makes us all less wealthy.  Think about it.  You can’t spend time (which we all know is money, and therefore, also, free speech) considering every abstraction, after all.  And bias of any kind is wrong, as we are reminded constantly.  If a very profitable process for extracting a valuable commodity from the earth causes earthquakes, well, a lot of bad shit happens every day.  You cannot blame people for wanting a good life.   It’s certainly not smart to blame those people too shrilly if they have their finger on the trigger of a nuclear bomb.  

Corporations, like people, can be oversensitive too.   We all have a limit to what we can take.  For the sake of us all, and our prosperity and our freedom, and for the love of God, take a stand against the unfairness of those who would call for the justice-biasing of our profit vectors.  The Free Market cannot tolerate such meddling!

Lost My Pants

I have to get back to work, I am long, long overdue to get back on my house-cleaning schedule, and determined to get on it immediately, but I thought this was interesting enough to take a quick break to tap out.

I have been losing things lately, something that is not like me.  In spite of the chaos in my apartment, it has been rare, until recently, that I actually lose anything of any importance to me.  Hard to believe, if you look at the shifting stacks of papers, books, small items, shirts, musical instruments balanced everywhere in haphazard piles.  Take my word for it, though, keys, pens, glasses, chargers, important papers, almost never mislaid.

But lately a long-time favorite pen, expensive and hand-tooled, a cherished gift I always clipped on to my right front pants pocket– gone.   Like a kick in the stomach.   A couple of other less important things, too.  Troubling indications that I have to right the psychic ship.

The other night I went to the laundromat, washed, dried and folded a new pair of pants.  Took all my clothes home, put them away, went to Sekhnet’s the next day.  Came back a few days later, took a shower, went to put on a clean pair of pants.    No pants.

Slipped on a barrel with suspenders, like a cartoon character, dashed desperately over to the laundromat.   A glance at the lost and found pile, a few ratty towels and orphan socks, told me someone had taken the new pair of laundered, neatly folded pants I’d left on the counter above the rest of the laundry.  Why wouldn’t they?  No pants, crap…

This was a problem easily solved, and I did so directly.  Website of the store I’d got the pants in, ordered three pairs (they are not expensive pants), tapped in a bunch of numbers from the old tarjeta del credito and waited.  Following the progress of the shipment on-line, it was a matter of only four days before the USPS was scheduled to deliver my new pants.  Today was the day.   

Waited around for the buzzer from the postal worker telling me the box of pants had arrived.  Four o’clock, no buzzer, what the hell?  Went down to the lobby to check for a notice.  Opened the mailbox and there inside was a bag of pants.  How did they get three pairs of pants into a bag and inside a narrow mail box, I wondered.

“They must be pants like the Cockroach’s” theorized Sekhnet.  She was referring to the special lap-dancing pants a one-time friend had described to me years ago.  This connoisseur wore the thinnest pants available, they had the added advantage of being easily paper-toweled dry in the men’s room and made ready for the next dance.

She called him the Cockroach because of my description of her body language the first time they met.  He considered himself very charming, irresistible to women, and comported himself accordingly.  As I walked toward them in the hallway Sekhnet was leaning steeply backwards, away from him, as though recoiling from a human sized cockroach.   She looked in danger of falling backwards on her head, or jumping out of her skin.  He was pumping her hand, smiling from ear to ear, telling her how pleased he was to meet her.  She seemed to be wondering where she’d find a can of Raid big enough to spray this sucker.  

“Yeah,” I said, “they must be the like Cockroach’s.”  I opened the bag, three pairs, thin as you please, just in time for winter in NYC.  Now I just have to figure out how to make some space to put them away. 

We complement each other

Sekhnet’s one-time friend, a likable quack she came to refer to as a ‘caboose’ because of the drag he exerted on the rest of the train, once did astrological charts for her.  He did not live by the stars, but had a lifelong interest in them and a fond belief that they held deep secrets for the mortals rushing about below.  He did two charts for her; one for her and one for me, her, then, new love.

Each chart was arranged in a circle, like a clock face, or a pie.   Sekhnet’s  pie was almost completely eaten on one side, solid pie on the other.  My chart was the mirror image, wherever she had pie, my tin was empty, where mine was empty, her’s was full.  

“These charts show two complementary souls,”  he reported happily, “look at how you complete each other!  This is the strongest bond you can have with another person.”  She was happy to believe this and I smiled to see her so happy.  Our bond is, indeed, very strong.

We are, in some fundamental way, like complementary angles, you dig, or properly aligned magnets, or any number of analogues from the world of science.   Adding our strengths and weaknesses together forms one very strong, complete composite person, though that person may be a slightly mad one.   I have noticed many things that seem to prove this complementary thesis.

Deadlines, for example, which famously trouble people, in part because of their sweaty similarity to death.  Sekhnet and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on these.   Though we both complete absolute necessities by the deadline, our approaches are completely different.  

I give myself an arbitrary deadline, say 3:00, which, as I  glance at the clock now, I see is rapidly coming up.  OK, I have thirty minutes and then I must make those calls I’ve been putting off for two, or three, or six weeks.  At 2:55 I realize it will be impossible to make those calls by 3:00 and I will generously extend the deadline to a more comfortable 3:30.  I feel merciful having done this, and continue whatever else I was doing until… oh, crap, 3:29.  

Would 4:00 work better for you?  I ask myself.  Oh, yes, I answer, relieved, and then we both smile and: 4:00 it is!  In the end I put it on the list for tomorrow, with only the smallest pang of regret.   This is not the recipe for ambition, I understand, but it is how I tend to do it– unless there is some pressing external reason I must have the thing ready by a certain date and time.

Sekhnet is exactly the opposite.  She is tormented every day to know she will meet only a tiny fraction of the hundred deadlines she sets herself every day.  She may accomplish several big tasks in a given day, things that have been bothering her, but that is almost never a reason for self-congratulation or relief.  When I try to pat her on the back she is not having it.  She is quick to point out that she did not accomplish many more tasks, which must now be added to the long list for the following day.  When I try to comfort her she will not take comfort, not from someone who hasn’t made any of those two minute calls he wanted to make two months ago.

Reminds me of other stressful situations where I try to reassure her when she becomes anxious.  I’ve taken to adding a semi-humorous caveat to my reassurances, it sometimes works very slightly.  “Don’t worry,” I urge her, “… said Nearly Headless Nick….”  And I put my arm around her, my head lolling slightly to one side, where the neck has been hacked.

Oh, crap!  It’s 2:53.  I’m late! 

Fucking Moods

The mood is a slippery mother.  Wrote in my “therapy notebook” the other day:
 
Wrestling with demonically limber moods,
you cannot count on their sportsmanship, 
they grapple by their own rules, 
if any, 
as the frequent knees and elbows to the groin 
will keep reminding you.
 
Hah!

A protest out the window

My rented apartment is in the back, away from the noise of the cars on the avenue that comes into the sunny front apartments.  On the window side there is a narrow alley between this old building and the one next door.  Out the back windows there is a larger expanse, a back alley city-scape where a rumble for a low budget version of West Side Story could be filmed.  The apartment is usually quiet and good for sleeping.

Years ago there was a man with Tourrets living across the alley.  In moments of my own frustration I would pause to listen to his outbursts, unintelligible growlings of rage, and think “the man makes a lot of sense.”  Then one day I didn’t hear him anymore.  I read a piece in a newspaper about a guy screaming vehemently at another guy in a nearby bodega and being beaten to death with a baseball bat.  I think it may well have been him.   Now I am the man with Tourrets, though my outbursts tend to be one or two screamed obscenities when the internet goes out suddenly or my computer has some robotic fun with me.

Recently someone moved into the building, seemingly a theremin player.   The theremin was featured on the soundtracks of many black and white horror movies, its quavering, wailing tone sliding eerily from low to high and back.  Used properly, it makes the hair on the spine tingle.  I was lying in bed one day listening to someone methodically going up and down the fluid scale of a theremin.  

After a good while, when the theremin began singing in regular intervals and more typical scales, I recognized these were a soprano’s voice exercises.  “Oh, God,” I thought to myself wearily, “shut the fuck up….”  I turned my head on the pillow so that my mostly clogged ear was facing outward.   The high pitched vocal exercises continued, but were slightly muffled.

After another few minutes a man with windows on the alley could stand it no longer.  “Will you please shut the fuck up?” he called gruffly and politely out his window.   I smiled as the singing stopped.  My smile turned to a smirk as the startled soprano resumed her exercises.  I realized it was time to get out of bed, and distracted myself in the other room as the singer continued to chase her dreams directly above my bed.