Author Archives: oinsketta

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!

Jump Start

Sekhnet brought me a cup of coffee, calling to wake me as she came, at approximately the seven hour mark of my sleep.  It was already day time.  Sleeping too much is a sign of depression and she worries, not unreasonably, based on my reports.   She was cheerful as a bird as I grimaced against the light, motioned for her to put the coffee on the bedside table.  I told her my alarm was set for fifteen minutes later and she withdrew.   A few minutes after that she came in with the phone to her ear, eyes wide with excitement.  “I’m going to put you on speaker phone, here he is.”

A neighbor of her’s, a bright, friendly woman of 89, with a resemblance to Allison Janney, was on the phone, talking in her excited voice.  Margaret, often mistaken for “dotty”, lived a creative, nonconformist life in Greenwich Village, photographing, carrying a sketch book and taking care of several rescued cats before her hip shattering fall a few months back on her way up the five flights to her cluttered walk-up.   She’s had her ups and downs being neglected in rehab and is grateful to Sekhnet for her regular calls and visits.  She’s a sharp woman when not overcome by despair.  She’s recently been feeling much better as a result of weekly visits from an acupuncturist.  She’s walking again recently, after months in a wheelchair after some initial progress towards walking.

“Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote about the importance of meetings, exchanges with like-minded people, to advance his ideas,” Margaret began, excitedly.  “Mensa is an organization where like-minded people meet, share enthusiasm and help each other solve problems.  Sekhnet tells me how thwarted you’ve been feeling and I think you should look into Mensa, they’ll send you an IQ test, which is a snap, and then you’re in.”

“That sounds like something worth investigating,” I grunted, keeping my eyes closed against the light.

“I thought of it in a dream last night, I’ve been having REM sleep and dreaming again, it’s wonderful.  After Sekhnet told me about your situation yesterday I dreamed about Mensa and I think it could be perfect.”

“Mmmmm,” I grunted.

“They send you an IQ test, which is just a gimmick, it’s easy, and you send it back…”

“A gimmick?” I asked.  She didn’t explain.

“Benjamin Franklin wrote about the importance of meetings in his autobiography.  He found it crucial to surround himself with like-minded people…”

I agreed and told her I’d been thwarted at the meetings I’d held so far, at the way any creativity in the room was funneled entirely toward criticism, profuse, imaginative critique, without a hint of construction anywhere in it. Easy to see the faults in an imperfect thing, like the crazy leap to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to your dead ninety-nine year old mother.  Harder, by many country miles, to see the glint of obscured perfection struggling to make itself seen.

I grunted my thanks to her and heard Sekhnet continue to thank her as she and her voice trailed away into another room.  I went on-line, looked over Mensa’s website a bit and took the Mensa mental workout, a timed test you can find here. 

An interesting exercise I algernonned by forgetting the one crucial rule of timed test taking– skip the hard ones and come back to them at the end, if time allows.  Several answers were apparent immediately, those questions took seconds to answer and the answer was a certainty as I filled it in.  Others, given some leisure, could be solved without great difficulty.  The difficulty was the one minute given for each of the 30 questions.  I didn’t get to the last ten or so.  Missed a couple of those I did answer, after pondering a couple for perhaps five minutes each.  My 53% made me wonder if my mother, a woman prone to poetic exaggeration, had been lying about my long ago IQ score on a test I hadn’t known I’d even taken.

My Regimen

Depressed because you don’t know any other creative types?   That’s a lot to expect in our mercantile workaday world, my friend, creative types.   If you go through life being depressed at the scarcity of creative types you will have a very sad, lonely life.   Creative souls can be found everywhere, the trouble is, these souls are also carrying immense burdens. 
 
Consider one, an alcoholic with a schizophrenic brother, both beaten by their father from the old country.  In the old country a severe beating was a hallmark of good parenting.  In the new country, the ghosts of the old country howled when his long-demented mother finally died at 99 years-old.   “DO SOMETHING!!” screamed his mad sisters and so he leaped up and began mouth to mouth resuscitation of his mother’s dead body.  
 
He’s a very creative guy, good sense of humor, inventive and a bit zany.  He’s an alcoholic from an insane family who gave his dead 99 year-old mother mouth to mouth resuscitation at the rabid urgings of his mad sisters.  We are neither this nor that, though it may seem to us otherwise.
 
The alarm is set, everybody has a time they have to hop out of bed and get busy.  Many people start their kizatskis with sunrise, some even before.  Up at 2:30 for a live shot, out the door like an arrow at 3:00, on location 4:15, set up and ready before the talent arrives for the shot at 5:00.   The show must go on, office opened at 8:00 for the first patients, I am there drinking coffee at 7:45 every single day of the week.  To do that I have to wake up at 5:40, my morning routine is almost an hour and my commute to work usually about 40 minutes.   I need fifteen minutes to sit in the silence with my coffee before I turn the lock and bring the office to life.  I open the office door and start my jumping jacks, 200 of them, then I put my palms on the floor and do 400 squat thrusts.  Some kizatskis and then 150 leg presses.  All the time I am speaking to clients over a speakerphone, so it is imperative I not grunt. 
I have made myself able to perform these exertions without ever sounding winded, but it takes training.
 
If, on a given day, I miss the 200 jumping jacks, 400 squat thrusts and 150 leg presses, (plus kitzatskis)  I do double the number of each on the following day, in two equal sets.  It is crucial to do them double-time on the make-up day, because they have to all be done before my first appointment at 8:30 and I’m going to need a quick shower and change into a crisp suit before that meeting.  I shave at home, so that’s already taken care of.  After my morning appointments I play racquetball against an energetic bot at the gym for one hour, a good workout.  After a sauna and a rinse I have lunch for 20 minutes, green leafy vegetables lightly steamed and seasoned with fresh herbs.
 
Then, in the afternoon, I spend an hour in the woodshed, and then I go to the well.

Ten Minute Drill

Everything, pretty much, is possible.  We can see this from the seemingly impossible things people do– on musical instruments, with their bodies, the things they create.  As my father’s blasé uncle said when his nephews took him to the zoo and excitedly showed him a giraffe:  “who needs it?”

Everything in life is pretty much impossible.   Look how hard it is to do the simplest things for so many people.  You will die unless you lose 50 pounds, live a life of pharmaceutical limbo until you do.   “So?” you say, “I’m going to die anyway.”  True dat.  As much reason not to do the thing as to do it, particularly if it’s a difficult thing.

This, for example.

Hard to tell, in many things, whether we are entering the fifth inning of a scoreless game, or the bottom of the ninth, down by three runs, with two outs and two strikes, the umpire crooked as the local politician.  The driver of that bus, we assume he is not insane, will not come up on the sidewalk amid screams and mow us all down.  Once in a while the bus driver is insane, plows into a crowd somewhere because he just can’t take it any more, for reasons others will be left guessing at once he blows his brains out after the massacre.

Today ten minutes seems like an eternity, forcing words out the way boys in the Boy Scout Handbook sometimes did not let nature take its course, causing them to worry and turn to scout-masters or priests who would ease their concerns about this worrisome behavior.   Sometimes this easing of concerns would scar them for life, but that’s just another example of the sardonic turn of mind instilled in me young by my father, who had it instilled in him with a whip across the face.

Let’s imagine he was only actually whipped once or twice a day.  Does that explain the whole story?   Can the whole story be explained, even summarily, in the 1:30 left on the game clock?  I think not, typing faster and faster, look, suddenly toward the end it all speeds up, goddamn it, if only there was time to reset the clock, get a few of those minutes back, gather my thoughts, rewrite a few lines, start again.  The stories we could tell each other, he thought wanly as the clock, relentless as this hourglass of a life here, ticks down 13…10… and before I can say time…. time!

Business Consultation

I had a friend whose father, a salesman and ad copy writer, alternately chipper and dour, died about ten years ago at the age of ninety.  His name was Al and for the last few years of his life he was pretty much dour.  File that away.

I went to a three pm meeting with a business consultant named David at the New York City Small Business Administration.  This was the first step, according to the website, in setting up a relationship with NYC Small Business Solutions.  The purpose of my visit, as I wrote in my on-line appointment confirmation, was to get help prioritizing the many tasks ahead of me: marketing, recruiting, fundraising, negotiating city government contracts, among other things, and to find out exactly what services were offered.  The website said there was help available, expert advice in all these areas, a pool of pre-screened recruits, meeting rooms there in which we could interview candidates.   A host of classes and business solutions to every challenge faced by every kind of small business and start-up were touted by the website.

At 3:20 David came out, greeted me, we shook hands and I followed him back to his desk at the other end of a large office in the financial district.  He had me fill out the form nobody had handed me during my 25 minute wait, was sheepish after I did, told me he had no idea if anybody even read these.  I didn’t stop to think that this form was close to what I had already filled out on-line.  I noticed his computer screen was blank, with a box in the middle for him to log-in.  

He read all the information I’d written on the form, confirmed that he was reading everything correctly.  He’d read it back fine.   If I’d left then, I would have been slightly ahead of the game.  But determination turned out to be my undoing.  He liked the idea of my program, though he had no inclination to watch the 30 second pitch I had cued up for him on my iPad.

“You have to have a pitch,” he agreed, as I noticed the palsy in both of his hands, the way his lip also twitched.  “You need to be able to give your pitch and be ready to give it over and over again,” he said.  “Very rarely will anyone respond the first time.  When you run an ad in the paper, usually you’ll get no responses until about the sixth time it appears,” he said, speaking from experience.   He’d been in sales, he told me.  

I told him that sales was a talent, and he agreed.   I admitted that sales was my weak suit, a talent I unfortunately did not possess, and he nodded sadly and knowingly. I told him a bit more about the program, talked up how it worked exactly as designed, and delivered all kinds of good things to students, but that I needed an excellent sales person.  Eventually he suggested I needed to hire a salesman, an excellent one, but I’d have to pay him well, or perhaps offer a 10% commission on each sale.  A commission was a good way to get a salesman off his ass, he said, make sure he was out there working, and it also allows you to pay him a bit less, since he’ll make it up in commissions, which don’t really come out of your pocket, since you wouldn’t have the sale without his work anyway.

He logged on to his computer walked me through the website, showed me the listing of classes I could sign up for, for free.   Building my own website, there was a course for that, I should probably sign up for that, every business should have a website these days.  He was impressed that I already had a website.  I told him the problem was getting eyeballs to look at the website, and he nodded solemnly, agreed there is an art and a whole world of specialized skills involved in a successful social media campaign.  I told him about the money I’d thrown away on a kid who claimed to be a social media expert, but was not.   He nodded sadly and knowingly.   I restated my dilemma for him and asked him about the pool of pre-screened recruits, and he called across the office “Gina, we help people get employees, don’t we?”  Gina told him they did, and my hunch, based on what the website had stated, was confirmed.

He then expressed his confusion as to why I’d chosen to form a non-profit. His manner indicated that I’d more than likely made a fatal mistake.  I explained that I’d formed an educational business for a public good and believed the tax deductible status would make it easier to raise money from donors and get grants from outfits devoted to the nonprofit sector.  I suggested, as I looked at his sad, knowing expression, that the jury was still out as to how good a decision I’d made.

Soon after that it dawned on me what had happened.  They had somehow reanimated Al, my friend’s mostly dour former salesman dad, who had died a decade or more ago.  They reanimated him, cleaned him up, put him in a shirt and tie and called him David.   “David” sat across from me, smiling uncomfortably, as anyone would smile having been dead for more than ten years and suddenly shoved behind a help desk at a city agency.  I thanked him warmly for his time, shook his hand heartily and headed out into the cold, grey drizzle.  

For a moment, realizing how close I was to the East River, I thought of dashing over there and throwing myself and the company iPad in.  I decided against it, got something to eat, came home, wrote this, and now I’m going to put my elegant cadaver rebozo back on and see who I can get to chat with me at this shindig coming up in a couple of days.

 

 

King of the Grotesque

Guy walks into a party, his life’s dream made real on his back.   He’s been carrying this dream made real so long, unable to give it the food it needs, that the dream is looking greenish, giving off a foul odor, wreathed in flies.  He’s carrying a decomposing cadaver on his back, its face frozen in the agony of its slow death.

“Why are these freaks looking at me like that?” the guy wonders as friends and acquaintances give sickened smiles and skitter away like well-dressed crabs.   He’s used to the weight, and the smell, which has been slowly gathering over several years, is something he doesn’t really notice, assumes is just the smell of this sometimes putrid world itself.

Poor bastard.

As for me, I have an appointment with a business consultant today that I have to prepare for, if you will excuse me.

The Unknowable Unknowns

To start with the grotesque, as is my custom:

Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the failed war in Iraq, a man who, if such losses were tallied against America, would have been on the docket at the Hague, along with his fellow merry reinterpreters of international law, to defend his killing and dispossessing of tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of anonymous brown people who never posed a threat to America. He famously quipped, stepping away from the standing desk he worked at, and cited as an example of the harmlessness of so-called ‘stress positions’ during the enhanced interrogations that unpatriotic, hyperbolic Americans insisted on calling ‘torture’: 

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.[1]

And gruesome (and gratuitous) as it is to start with that gleeful executioner Rummy, there are, in any endeavor, the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknowns, which I have been pondering today, as most days.  To wit:  I have either already failed and stubbornly cling to the irrational belief that I can move this moribund program along or I have achieved much, against great odds, and am only one or two contacts away from making it the success it deserves to be.    

Only time will tell, I suppose, what kind of unknowns these are as I wait to hear back from my latest round of writing to convince other unknown people to help me with marketing, fundraising, etc.

CV (revised)

I was self-employed as an attorney, never part of the corporate world.  I taught in the public schools for five or six years (teaching mainly third grade) before attending law school.  I have an MA in Creative Writing, my BA was in history and philosophy. 
 
I found I lacked real enthusiasm for the law and had philosophical as well as financial reasons for deciding to leave that adversarial world.   I set out several years ago on a path to help in the ways I am best equipped to help, doing work I can wholeheartedly believe in.
 
I envisioned a non-hierarchic, creative program where children could work together to make their voices heard.  I imagined the children in the Harlem schools where I taught having a place where their ideas would be listened to and supported as they demonstrate the depth of their imagination and desire to learn.   Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of stop motion animation in a way elementary school-aged kids could teach each other to do.  I invented a portable animation stand that fits in a backpack and sets up in five minutes.  The next two years I facilitated approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.   It is very gratifying to see how it works immediately, exactly as designed, everywhere I set it up.  Within minutes the room is a buzzing beehive of purposeful activity.
 
What I need now is help pitching, publicizing and selling the program.   I’m looking forward to hearing your advice and ideas about the steps I need to take to find the people I need to help move this from great working idea to  sustainable program.

A Sign

Like a soothsayer in the time of Caesar spreading the entrails to find a portent pleasing to his master, I sifted the dark brown walnut shell sands of the litter box and learned that my vigil over the cat’s digestive troubles is at an end.  I am free to move about as I like.  Hallelujah.

Metaphor for a life

A human life is a universe.  It is (re)written:  she who saves one life saves the world.  The death toll numbers you see on corporate TV are from Stalin’s calculus– a million ended lives are an abstraction.  For every American journalist with a name whose face we see on video before a psychopath cuts his head off, thousands of nameless, faceless children and old people are killed in the name of fighting beheading psychopaths.   These kids and their grandparents have names, faces, universes, of course, but it is much more comfortable to think of them as collateral damage, necessary deaths to, theoretically, prevent our own murder, you dig?  Better not to dwell on what the nation does in our names, you say?  OK.  

So lie back on the couch and tell me the metaphor that best describes your life at the moment.  

“Waiting for a cat to shit to determine whether I’ll be able to go home today or continue waiting here for the cat to shit, possibly take him back to the vet tomorrow.”  

What?  

“He had diarrhea for a few days, I took him to the vet Saturday.  He took a loose crap Saturday night and then– nothing.   He’s regular as an atomic clock with that short digestive tract and his habit of waiting til Sekhnet gets back before hunching to uncork his turds into the sand, kicking the sand a bit until Sekhnet diligently scoops the shit away.  She calls herself the Elephant Sweeper, the one who follows the elephants in the circus parade with a shovel and bucket.   She got home yesterday, nothing.  Overnight and so far today, and it’s going on dinner time 48 hours later, nada.”

So a cat doesn’t have his daily bowel movement and you are stuck in place?

“Afraid so.  The vet’s girl said to call tomorrow mid-day if the cat hasn’t gone by then.  Trouble is, nobody will be here until late tomorrow night.  The cat could have real problems by then.”

So you are acting out of concern for another living creature you are attached to rather than in your own, strict self-interest?  

“Afraid so. The phrase is really apt, I am afraid.  Afraid of this metaphor that so accurately captures what my life has reduced itself to, with the help of an unrealistic goal of being the director of my own destiny.  Today my destiny is to wait until a cat takes a crap.  Not the destiny I had in mind for myself when I went to bed last night.”  

Not entirely fair, this waiting for the cat to pass some turds, while on the surface not a bad metaphor for your slow-motion, extreme close-up life at the moment, is not expressed in the way most fair to you.  Be fair.  

“This act of kindness to an animal who cannot help himself, while seemingly sentimental to some, is also an act of kindness to Sekhnet, worried sick about the handsome little animal she affectionately serves.  There is nothing I can do at my place that I can’t do here, or little, anyway.  I like the waiting for a cat to shit metaphor, though, it fits so perfectly.”  

Fits your self-mocking foolery, maybe, but not the larger purpose of supporting your powerful but delicate dreams and putting them out into the world.  

“True, my powerful but delicate dreams do not appear in the flattering chiaroscuro light they deserve when the metaphor is expressed this way.  I am clearly more than a man waiting for a cat to shit, although I am also, clearly, a man waiting for a cat to shit.”

Just so.