Author Archives: oinsketta

Integrity — exercise in imagination

“You mean to tell me this American citizen has been locked up, without charges, in solitary confinement, for almost a year over there?” asks the president sharply.

“Yes, sir,” says a high ranking advisor, “at our request, sir.  He’s articulate, and pissed off and self-righteous.  He preaches in perfcct English and in native Arabic.  He has a worldwide following of young jihadi types.  He could be lethal winning hearts and minds for al Que’da.”

“Can’t we charge him with anything?  He’s an American citizen, are we now detaining American citizens without charges, without habeas corpus, without any sort of judicial process? Has the Constitution been suspended for citizens who are too critical of our policies and I’m just the last to find out?”

“We really don’t have grounds to charge him with anything, sir, other than abusing the First Amendment.  We need to hold him, though.  He’s dangerous, charismatic, his internet sermons are inspiring fanatical youth around the world.”

“Can’t we shut down his website?”

“We did.  The sermons circulate on DVD.  It’s best to keep him locked up, sir.”

“Under the secret detention black site policies Dick Cheney and David Addington put into place when this country went to the dark side?”

Sometimes no answer is the best answer, the advisors hold their peace.  

“Charge this guy and have him extradited or tell Yemen to cut him loose,” orders the president, turning to the next name on the list.  

A year or so later, still not charged with any crime, the American cleric was released from prison.  

A couple of years later his name appears on a kill list given to the president.  The president is known for his  eidetic memory.

“Isn’t this the guy who Yemen had in solitary without charges, the American citizen we finally told them to cut loose?”

“Yes, Mr. President.  He’s still giving sermons, and his rhetoric is on fire.  We need to silence him.”

“I ask you again, general, can we charge this motherfucker with a crime before we kill him?  Any crime?  At one time extra-judicial executions were frowned upon.  We Americans always frowned upon them, publicly at least.  Are we now killing even American citizens without feeling the need to even charge them with a crime?   Doesn’t his father have a lawsuit in our courts to keep him off the kill list?”

“The law suit will be moot, sir, if we shoot.”

Moment of decision, where one would like to imagine a man of integrity drawing a principled line he will not cross.  An American citizen cannot be killed without judicial review.   Even if he is charged and tried in absentia, there is some legal process, some requirement to prove guilt of a crime serious enough to punish with execution, before we sentence one of our citizens to death.  It’s just wrong, putting a name on a secret list and designating him for death, especially one of our own citizens and it sets a very dangerous precedent.

“Mr. President, he’s been eluding us for many months, for over a year.  He’s becoming a hero in that wild tribal area in Yemen and a symbol of defiance.  We know where he is tonight, we have a small window to act.  We need to kill him now, sir.”  

A long pause.  “Fine,” the signature scrawled left-handed next to the American’s name, marked for death.  “Just don’t come to me in a couple of weeks and tell me you also killed his teenaged son with the dreadlocks, or the kid’s friends listening to hiphop somewhere.”

“Will do, Mr. President, absolutely.  Thank you, sir.”

 

 

Salient Point Left Out of Previous Post

I left an important detail out of the account I just posted.

The thing that left the whip marks on me was not recalling a difficult childhood and the sad details appurtenant to it.   Many have had it much worse than I did, than my sister did, or my parents, though each of us had it bad enough.  The siblings of three of my grandparents and their families, for example, thirteen years before I was born: I can’t think of a worse childhood than you and everyone you’ve ever known being massacred by organized gangs of drunken haters backed by a powerful occupying army whose commander is determined to wipe out every trace of your ancestors.

The whip marks I felt after yesterday’s session came a moment after I was asked if I had experienced any traumas.   At first I answered no, then I put my finger on an ongoing one, with roots in my earliest life, the moment that has always stopped me in my tracks:

when an angry bully, usually with an arbitrary hierarchic advantage of some kind, steps up and tells me to put my eyes to the ground.  

I recalled a few instances of this as an adult, how the rising feeling of unfairness, and powerless to do anything but fight, enflamed nerve endings seared repeatedly when I was a boy, how needy bullies have always had an easy time locating me in a crowded room.  I’m not hard to find, I’m the one who hasn’t learned to put my eyes to the ground at the key moment so someone else can take the blows.

“Your therapist can work with you on that,” the grad student told me sympathetically.

Getting to the Part That Hurts

During the first screening interview to get into the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research study most of the yes/no questions seemed designed to rule out people with serious psychological handicaps.  These people had larger problems than waking up exhausted every day and would be no more useful to the study than the study would be to them.  Changing how they think about their life would not likely help them very much, if at all.  Trying to reason their way to more productive pursuits would probably only take them so far.

“Do you sometimes hear celebrities on TV talking directly to you, acknowledging your secret connection?”  

“Do you feel that, as soon as you leave a room, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and begins unloading about what a complete jerk you are?”  

“Do the commands you get when wearing your tin foil hat seem more reasonable to you than the ones you get from the neighbor’s dog?”

“Do you believe that Dick Cheney would kill thousands of people to get what he wants?”  (a few were trick questions, I noticed)

This interview was at times a little tedious, but there was nothing unpleasant or challenging about it.  After the session I spent about 20 minutes filling out a written questionnaire with many of the same questions, or questions of their ilk.  

“Do you believe a health insurance industry insider and lobbyist was deliberately placed in charge of drafting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to ensure that no violence would be done to the fabulous profitability of that industry by those with ‘noble’ ideals about human dignity?”  

I was also given a longer form to take home and fill out with questions about people who had influenced me, family dynamics growing up, the death of loved ones, traumas I may have experienced, my happiest moments, most significant events at various times of my life, what my main goals in seeking treatment are.  

The second interview was free-ranging and surprisingly enjoyable.  It was like an interview on a talk show conducted by an open-minded host who was intent on showcasing what I could do.  There were a few laughs along the way and the time felt very much like the time I spend writing here– following my thoughts where they go, retracing my steps to make a connection, clarifying something, adding an aside, noting that the aside was not strictly relevant perhaps, a laugh line, pause for ironic irony, back to a serious point, etc.

At the end of that interview I was asked to tell ten stories, five minutes or less each, about ten specific incidents in my life.  In the end, probably because I had told so many little stories in the course of the previous hour, the interviewer was satisfied with five or so stories.  Since all of these sessions are videotaped, I called afterwards to find out if I could have a copy of the interconnected stories.  They seemed to put my life and moral progress in a certain nutshell.

The stories are being kindly transcribed for me now by an assistant who works at the research study.  I was told by Conan they’d make the narrative skeleton of a novella with excellent bone structure.   He told me so the other night, transmitting the thought directly to me from my neighbor’s TV.  

I emerged from that second interview feeling like a wholly integrated person whose life made a certain organic sense.  Having the good fortune to be able to dedicate myself to a worthwhile but unlikely plan that could potentially shine a little light into a dark and angry world, having designed it based on insights gained from the often painful events of my life, seemed like a great blessing, in spite of the difficulty of struggling alone to do the impossible.  I’d work on reframing my daily struggles, get some help moving forward and, y’allah.

I had a call to say I was good to go for the therapy, they’d be charging me the low end of the sliding scale ($20 less than my co-pay for limited treatment under Obamacare, plus no $1,750 out-of-pocket), that the therapist would contact me (she did) and that the third interview would take place at such and such a time (yesterday at 3).  This was all good news, since I’d been pursuing a study like this since early December and yesterday was March 4th.

Then, yesterday, the third interview.  “How are you?” the young graduate student asked with a smile.  I nodded and said “OK” with only the faintest note of cautiousness in my voice.  I noticed, even then, that I didn’t do the polite thing and ask the same of her.  What harm could the meaningless pleasantry have done?   Asking how she was would have been a decent bit of human reciprocity  requiring perhaps two seconds to do.  I thought about that afterward, not sure if there was deeper meaning to assign to my failure to do the social thing.  I decided it wasn’t worth thinking about too much, that I hadn’t been there for polite chat, after all.

Her pleasant greeting soon took on a different cast as she began to probe with the final set of questions.  “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she might have said as she paused with the oversized needle only partially hidden.  The questions seemed innocent enough, but they were boring down into the answers, each ten words or so filled in on small blanks (do not use extra paper), that I’d provided on the questionnaire I’d done at home after the first session.   She was working from what looked like a typed and annotated transcript of my answers.

This is the beginning of the hard part, I realized at some point during that hour.   These are not softball questions teed up to me while a buzzed studio audience laughs and enjoys the show.  They’d set the speed on the pitching machine to ‘high’ and these pitches were being thrown with purpose.  A few came in right under my chin.  “Provide five adjectives to describe your relationship to your mother.”  The fifth of these, I recall, was ‘complicated’.  My arms were too tired to take a better hack at that fifth one.  

Then I had to describe why I’d chosen each adjective.  Complicated, and the thing that connected all the moving parts was the pain behind each adjective.   My mother’s limitations, the sorrows she’d lived with, the humiliations she’d undergone, all overshadowing her talents, work ethic, great intelligence and sense of humor.  My childhood had been lived on a battlefield, surrounded by mine fields and beyond them barbed wire and dark, muddy trenches, and my only escape was into the world of my imagination.  That world held hope and terror in almost equal proportion.  I felt by the end of the session as though I’d made almost no progress from that imagined world of hope and nightmare that was my foundation in life.  It seemed to me I live there still, in that war zone.   The insights I’d gained?  Butterflies of the imagination losing color and substance as I tried to remember them.

We were done in exactly one hour, the shortest time the exercise could be done in.  I told the young woman that I’d take 41 more seconds to show her something, she was agreeable.  A moment before I left the room a shuddering nine year-old wondering why the world remained such an evil place I handed her the iPad and she watched this, which elicited a few chuckles from her as she watched.  She asked if I’d seen the Lego movie, I hadn’t.  I gave her a wehearyou.net Idea Book, which she accepted gracefully (she’d admired Sekhnet’s label at the end of the previous session when I’d made a note in my own worn Idea Book).  I put my coat on as I thanked her and said goodbye over my shoulder turning toward the lobby while she went into the office in the opposite direction.  I didn’t pause or turn to make final eye contact with her.  

What’s up with that running out of there like a whipped dog, I thought a moment later, feeling a bit like a whipped dog.  I continued feeling that way as I walked the streets near the original school where I’d gotten the program up and running.  I was aware of a strong desire not to run into anyone I knew from that school.  “How you doing?” they’d ask.  “Good!” I’d say, wincing out a smile and turning slightly to avoid showing the whip marks on my dog back.

The hard part is why few people succeed at doing things that are hard.   There are many things leading up to the hard part that most people can do well enough.   Then comes the hard part and, as George Dubya Bush said, with visible peevishness, about good people in his administration who had botched the rescue of poverty-stricken hurricane victims  (the wealthier ones did OK, thank God), the delivery of democracy to Iraq and anything else they touched, “it’s hard work!”  

“Which of your parents were you closer to?”  And, in spite of the complicatedness of the relationship, I had no hesitation choosing my mother.  “My father was a total asshole,” I said by way of summary, like a petulant eight year-old,  before clarifying, rephrasing, reminding us both that considering where he came from, the unimaginably painful abuse he’d suffered as a young kid, and all through his childhood, he deserved to have it clarified– yes, he was a verbally violent man, but, as I’ve described, it’s more complicated than that, and I don’t say asshole in a dismissively judgmental way.  

I thought afterwards of my friend quickly walking back his understandable frustration with the demanding mother who was driving him crazy during his annual visit to her.  He began talking about how manipulative she is, caught himself and began to talk about what a basically good person she is, how lonely she is, how much she loves him.

The hard work of that third interview left me feeling my wounds for the next couple of hours.  I realized, walking away, that there would be no more getting-to-know-you sessions in the green room, no more canned laughs.  If this therapy was going to help me move myself and this program forward, the hard work would be beginning toot sweet (comme un dit).

I thought of the Temptations, Cloud Nine – “The childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty, I was born and raised in the slums of the city.”  My identification with those born and raised in the slums of the city is something I can’t shake.   My disconnection from those who lead comfortable lives and accept the inevitability of slums, the viciousness of the cycles of inherited poverty and inherited wealth, the routinized murder of children the New York Times refers to as “collateral damage”, the ongoing evil of wars fought only to make the rich richer, a status quo that accepts as an externality of corporate wealth that the vast majority of the world, and the earth itself, will suffer whatever is necessary to maximize profits… all these things in the category of things I cannot change and that I ask an indifferent, or wholly absent, God to grant me the serenity to know I must simply bear…  

“You’re getting yourself worked up, calm yourself.  Why do you do this to yourself?” 

Who the fuck are you?  The hard part, in a word, is anger.  We have a damned good right to it sometimes, yes.  Now what are we going to do with it?

How It Made Me Feel Today

Hitting the “publish” button here completes the illusion of instant connection to everybody, and I can see from the world map on my wordpress stats page that someone in Taiwan read my latest post, two people in India clicked by, or one person there, twice.  I can see when my friend in Poland has had a chance to visit and I nod, anticipating  the intelligent comment my note will sometimes inspire.  When I saw I’d had a visitor from Yemen a few weeks ago I involuntarily pictured the face of that little Yemeni girl, confronted by the camera, after the rest of her family was blown apart by an American missile launched from a menacing American robot plane.   Hearts and minds, Brother O, way to go, sir.   But if we look at this phenomenon of maintaining a blahg for what it actually is, what causes the fingers to tap and one of them to press “publish” at the end, it’s hard to say what it actually is.  

Like everything in the world we have multiple explanations, theories, half-assed (or full-assed) opinions, proposed answers.   Each of these illuminates the matter from a slightly different angle, each contains some bit of truth, each convinces us a bit more or a little less according to our tastes.  In the case of why people post things to the internet, Occam’s Razor doesn’t quite cut it.

Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing: making oneself known to another, strikes me as a huge reason people post things they create on the internet.   The impulse to connect with others in our increasingly connected, increasingly isolated culture is no doubt part of the heart of any complete explanation.  Sharing information, trying to unite with others, giving a take on news that seems vital to understanding but does not seem to get reported, except by the brilliant author of a book that sells well, wins an award, ignites a small discussion that is quickly spun into oblivion as the news media churns the cycle.   Celebrity culture and 24/7 media blaring and flashing in infinite forms makes almost everyone who partakes of it just a little bit thirsty for  Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fabulousness.  In our narcissistic age, why not tell everybody how that makes us feel?   And we have the technology now, and talent or no talent is no longer such an important distinction, we say fuck the corporate gatekeepers.  Everyone is a star, no?  Or if not a star, everyone is someone with something to say. Or with nothing to say, but a cool place to say it and WTF, LOL, ROTFLMAO.  My new boobs are nice, admit it.

I try to write well, and I write about things that get to me one way or another.   That puts me in the same boat with millions of other bloggers.   Democracy at work, yo.  “What is it you want from people?” my sister once asked me pointedly during a calm period in an argument that would soon turn ugly.   I told her I want a conversation, a back and forth where people speak openly about things they care about.  Ideally it’s like a catch, throwing the thing gently back and forth.  They listen carefully to each other, interrupt only for clarification and respond intelligently to what the other person is trying to communicate.  

My sister and I grew up in a war zone and my answer wearied her considerably at the time.   She and I have good talks these days, but back then my answer really annoyed her.   It seemed so much to want, I think, like someone insisting on clean water to drink every time they are thirsty in a land where people are keeling over from dehydration all around.  We had little experience of respectful conversation as kids, though both of our parents were otherwise quite intelligent.  Being funny was something we were used to, and my sister has a quick wit, as did the rest of the war party around our dinner table.  

“A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling,” said a dime store philosopher named Nietzsche.  True dat, Fredrich, as was “without music, life would be a mistake”, which goes without saying, and really, except for its indisputable truth, has no place here.   

I am not one to be coy about my feelings or opinions here, or anywhere, really, but this post is going to be a bit more personal than usual because it’s about how something made me feel about my own life today.  I was surprised at how acutely I felt it, under my skin, in my blood and cells.  

Which, by way of semi-amusing digression, calls to mind this email I had blind cc’d to me recently from a guy I was friends with years back, a great improviser on trumpet who really listened, as all great improvisers must, a brilliant photographer, a man of many talents:

Probably one of the most “in-depth” interviews I ever have given to anyone.

Talking about my photography, my movie documentary work, but also about aspects of my personal life and experiences I never shared with anyone before, not even my close friends.
Possibly an interesting read, especially if you are, like me, here in NYC, stuck indoors due to bad weather !
He provided a link, and a recent photo of himself looking darkly pensive, and the charming rascal signed it Much Love, which gave me a dry little chuckle.   I sent this email on to a few others who had known this chap, likely with a cynical comment in the subject line I couldn’t quite resist.  Epitaph on the tombstone, you know.  None of us were going to click on that shit, though we all enjoyed the Much Love.
Having set the table a little too fastidiously, and with that last digression, my strength to continue with what I intended to write tonight drains away.  I will be back at it again soon, because this experience today, at the final of three pre-interviews before I begin what I like to think of as my ECT, was not like the first two, which I enjoyed, and it brought up some deeper things than I was expecting, beginning with the inexperienced nurse smiling and greeting me, a little too solicitously,  “how are you today?  Uhm, you’re not squeamish about the sight of your own viscera, right?”
I was surprised at how prudish my readiness to be nauseated actually turned out to be.

On second thought

My friend who asked me yesterday how I continue to write in the face of indifference emailed to clarify what he actually meant, a much worse question, to wit:

I meant, how do you maintain the focus and motivation to write, given the discouraging features of your life in general as you’ve described them to me over the last few months?

And my answer to this more pointed question remains basically the same as yesterday’s. 

The moment of grace, musical in a way, the tap of the keys clacking, a bit hypnotic, reminds me of the best of myself, no matter what discouragements lurk.  It is a relief to see my thoughts making themselves plain in black on this white screen.

His clarification does remind me of something though.  I had a dear old friend, very old, she died at almost 93 a year ago next week, who loved my project, the student-run animation workshop.  She had good reason to love it, she was the inspiration for it.  After the death of her youngest daughter on an icy road in Vermont she heeded the advice of good friends and opened the Elinor Beth Music and Art Workshop for local children.   I was one of the workers in this shop, though, as it was spring and we were kids, we spent more time in the backyard kicking a ball around among the budding trees and shrubs than we did at the easels painting.   

The inspirational thing about Florence was how much she loved to be on hand quietly encouraging us to be creative.  I’d ask her to show me things, she always told me she loved my way of doing them better than the ‘academic’ way she’d learned to do it.  She assured me there’d be time to learn whatever I wanted to about technique and the “correct” way to do things but that the most important thing now was to love what I was doing for its own sake.  And to keep doing it, in the way only a creative kid could.  I’d go back to the easel, slap another painting up there, hang it on clothes pins to dry, grab some cookies, suck down a little apple juice and dash back into the intoxicating back yard.

Florence and I remained lifelong friends.  At one point, two or three years ago, telling her about the great potential and probable impossibility of actually accomplishing what I’d devoted my life to– getting the animation workshop up and running–  she told me she didn’t know how I could sleep at night.  She said it was a great idea, but how I could face the discouraging obstacles I was facing was beyond her powers, seemed superhuman.  “I love what you’re doing and it’s a fantastic idea.  I just don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said with characteristic love and concern.  

I laughed, brushing her worry aside with bravado.  “I don’t know either, but I sleep fine.  Don’t worry about me,” I told her.

Not long after that I began to have trouble sleeping.

So if this blahg goes suddenly silent, you’ll understand what happened.

Would I?

I recently found a large painting in acrylic of a nude young woman reclining, succulent.   She is painted from feet to head, casting a dramatic shadow to her left.  The style is right on the border of realistic and cartoon and I was glad I’d found it.   I hung it on the wall in my cracked bedroom where I can glance at it from my pillow (which led me to notice and regret that the two nicely rendered feet are of glaringly different sizes).  It was done from a drawing I remember making of her, on a piece of brown corrugated paper highlighted with a white china marker and gouache, the drawing being much better than the painting.
 
The girl in the picture, rendered as three dimensionally as I was able, was twenty or so at the time. The painter was thirty.   The painter had been reassured by a mutual acquaintance, when hesitating momentarily to ask the girl out, that she was uncommonly mature and that he was uncommonly immature and so the age difference should not be that big a deal.
 
I did not regret anything about the affair, except that it ended somewhat badly a year later.  She went on to marry a guy, a young executive type, who sounded like a self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy.  They moved to a city one would never think of voluntarily moving to, the corporation had promoted him and assigned him there.  I did not hear from her for years after that, which came as no surprise.   In that city she gave birth to their daughter and, in fairly short order, he revealed himself, in a way that became increasingly impossible to endure, as an ever more self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy and, also, an impressively complete asshole.
 
During the painful divorce negotiations she called me regularly and I spoke to her calmly.   She greatly appreciated these conversations and I didn’t mind having them.  Truthfully, painful conversations are one of the few times you get the real person instead of the veneer.  I would rather speak with the real person than the veneer, so I’m not ruffled by the painful situation that brings the real person out.   That the pain is not directly my own is another plus and makes it easier for me to speak in a calming way.
 
One day she called during the day, usually she dialed me late at night, and came to her point rather directly “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?”   Even typing these words now, years later, makes my eyes open a little wider.  I stumbled for a few seconds looking for the right way to say there were few things I’d rather do but that I was in a monogamous relationship with a person I loved, that she was putting me in a tight spot with the question, that at any other time…. and as I spoke I jotted the question; “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?” on a post-it to consider at my leisure, perhaps to write about ten or fifteen years later.

And in the usual course of things, the post-it remained in my pants pocket where I’d put it until it somehow found its way into my beloved’s hand on laundry day.  She asked about it, naturally, with a certain irked urgency and I was once again thrust into that uneasy tap dance the original query had caused me to tap out.

After her divorce, when things settled down for her, I stopped hearing from the girl, now in her late forties.  She contacted me about a year ago to tell me how great my program is and that she would be supporting it with a cash donation, but to my knowledge no donation was ever made. That was the last peep I had from her.

I think there is probably no point to have that painting of her at twenty, presenting herself like a birthday cake, hanging on the wall next to my bed, even if there is little chance of my beloved ever seeing it as she can’t stand the decrepitude of this apartment of mine and avoids it like the proverbial plague.

Which is not an unreasonable position to take.

Why persist in writing?

“In today’s world of micromessages and fleeting attention spans, connecting with your audience is more important than ever.”   Denise Morrison, President and CEO, Campbell Soup.

 

We’ll leave that important question — how to connect with your desired audience so your brand can flourish — aside for the moment as I address today’s question from the steadiest of perhaps 3 or 4 regular readers of this blahg.  He writes:

what’s really hard to fathom is how you keep on producing this stuff despite the general lack of interest and encouragement

There is little mystery on my end.  I write as clearly and engagingly as I can, for the reader’s sake.  I practice the craft of writing every day, and feel better for putting my thoughts in order.   I enjoy combing through my words again and again until I am satisfied that what I’m saying could not be more clear.  The key is that I write for myself and my own feeling of clarity and accomplishment.  I am addicted to the satisfaction of those things.  

Writing is one of the few things I do all the time that I need little feedback or encouragement to continue doing.  It’s like playing the guitar for me, I require nobody to hear it or tell me I do it well; I play because I love to play.  I love the sounds of the playing and the time spent making and improving those sounds.  

A compliment is always lovely, and appreciation is like water to a flower, but we do the things we truly love because we love to spend time doing them.   We take pleasure in our mastery of things that were once hard to do.  In this ease we experience the lyrical grace that is otherwise so hard to come by in our high-stakes world.

Years ago I saved successive drafts of virtually everything I wrote.  I don’t save drafts any more because I’m sure now that every change I make is a change for the better.  The writing in each pass is clearer, more concentrated, less cluttered with distracting personal tics.  I set out each day to put at least one thought into focus.  My goal is to untangle sometimes vexing things in a coherent way that is easy to read.  Setting these things clearly into words engages my mind completely, reminds me of my best qualities and leaves me feeling better.

Every year or so I’ll get a note or call from someone telling me how moved they were by some particular thing I’ve written, or provoked, or struck by the collective weight of the many pages I’ve written.   Often this praise will transition into agonizing about not knowing anyone who can help me get my writing published, sympathizing with how frustrating it must be to write in today’s world of noise and “content” where thoughtful writing is often thought little of.   I find myself in the odd position, after I thank them for their compliments about the writing, of consoling them.

After my mother died a grief counselor recommended a helpful book called Death Benefits, my annotated copy of which seems to have been lost by the woman I loaned it to many months ago.  This is a shame, not only because she never read it but because I was planning to loan that personalized copy to a friend who can probably derive comfort from it as she mourns the recent death of her beloved, complicated father.  In that  book there is a reference, barely supported by the flimsiest of footnotes, to babies as young as a few months patting their mothers consolingly when the mother is in distress.   I love this image.

And I love to write.  It would be wonderful to have someone contact me and offer me a monetary advance to collect a hundred of these posts, along with a bunch of illustrations, and put them out in a groovy little tome.   I’d love to be asked to write something for the New Yorker, in much the same way I’d love to find a fat roll of hundred dollar bills abandoned on the sidewalk.  I would be very happy to earn a little money from writing and to have an attentive audience.  Appreciation of this thing I do mainly for myself is a bonus, and a great thing, but not necessary to sustain me in this particular pursuit of excellence.

My energies for struggle, such as they are these days, must remain focused on somehow putting one foot in front of the other and coming up with as yet undiscovered brilliant work-arounds to get my simple idea for changing the world in position to be seen.   That extreme challenge needs the feedback, encouragement, ingenuity and skills of the brightest of those who can see what I see in it.  So far, there is virtually nobody who is able to see what I see in it or offer useful insight for more than a beat or two.   It’s my cross to drag, heavy and sharp splintered, particularly when devil’s advocates are hanging from it in an effort to be helpful.  

That’s the thing that stings me, galls me, makes me want to holler: unless you succeed at making money from a thing you would call a business, unless you manage to sustain unbounded enthusiasm and confidence in the product you would sell, you are a perplexing failure.   It’s hard, to the point of making one doubt one’s basic sanity, to sustain optimism for an idea, regardless of its demonstrated worth, that generates neither money nor enthusiasm in others.  It may be simply a matter of not having connected with the proper audience for it, although using “simply” in that sentence is just whipping myself in the face, but that is a howl for another day.

Writing is in another category, it’s just something I need to do — and the most important conversation I have most days — whether you tell me you like it or not. 

Peace, y’all.

At least two possibilities

One is that you truly have a great idea that can help many people, have carried it hundreds of miles on your back, over a thousand obstacles.   The only trouble is that you haven’t been able to sell it yet.

Another is that you’re already dead, your idea as dead as you are, your failure to convincingly sell the idea to anyone a clear indication of those deaths.   Everybody knows of your death but you, that’s the reason for the forced smiles when you make a joke.

There are other possibilities, of course, many of them, but those are two.

 

Is there anyone whose insight you value more than your own?

The title above was one of the questions asked during a screening interview to evaluate my eligibility to participate in a research study about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  The theory of CBT, as far as I can tell, is that once you become aware of thought patterns that keep you locked in undesirable situations you can begin to change the way you think about those situations and find solutions that seem impossible as long as you continue to think of things from that unhelpful cognitive point of view.

So the graduate student reads that question:  “is there anyone whose insight you value more than your own?”   These are posed as yes or no questions, so I answer with an unequivocal no.   I think of everyone I’ve ever met, what they understand of life, how they live, what their deepest values are and why they sometimes must put certain of those values aside in the onrushing exigencies of life, and my answer remains an unequivocal no.  

Thinking further, I imagine everyone I’ve ever met would likely answer the same way, given the yes or no format.  Unless one has a wise counselor in their life, a sage parent, a mentor who sees the big picture and restores perspective, a religious person connecting them to a meaningful philosophical viewpoint when they become perplexed.   I wonder if the question were posed “do you believe you know anyone smarter and more moral than you are?” if the answer would remain the same.

I muse in this fairly pointless way as the snow continues to fall outside and I wait until it’s done falling to shovel it up.  It’s either clear the sidewalk and driveway or cause tremendous additional stress to someone I love, who would be forced drive through hell to get where I already am and do it if I don’t.  It is the least I can do, and as I love doing the least I can do, it is a blessing to wait for the snow to finish falling so I can do that eventually.

Idealism 101

Idealists
have never ruled the world,
grow up!
It’s hard enough
to get rich
without worrying about fucking ideals.
Be serious,
you know very well
what this world does
to people who try too hard
to be saints,
lacking the power to nail it.

Put it this way,
if Jesus had had
the Pope behind him
they’d have put every one
of those crucifiers
to the sword,
end of story.