Author Archives: oinsketta

Missing Kitten

We’ve named him Underfoot, this affectionate feral kitten who appears a few times a day in the backyard for a feed.  Poignantly, more than a feed, the young cat wants contact and affection.   He rubs against Sekhnet’s pant legs as she shoos him off, lest Skaynes get a whiff of the young male cat marking Skaynes’ woman.  As she works in the garden he tangles himself under her feet.  He lets people pick him up, he’s happy to be hugged and carried around.

“He’s dying to be somebody’s pet,” Sekhnet commented.  And it’s true.  He’d be a great pet.

Haven’t seen him the last few days.  Could mean a little boy or girl picked him up and said “daddy, can we keep him?  Can we?  Daddy, can we keep him?  I want to keep him.  Look, daddy….” and daddy seeing the adorable, cuddly pair smiles and nods, reaching for his camera phone, and the kid screams in delight and waves the kitten in the air.

Could mean what has happened to several generations of feral cats we’ve known, fed, played with and watched grow up — a tiny body lying somewhere. These cats in the wild don’t seem to live more than a year or two, many of them don’t make it that long.  Hard life out there on the street.

(two hours later)

I saw the little scamp hop over the fence, from the top of the compost bin.  I went out and called him and he came bounding over, leaped another fence.   Did his dance around my feet until I picked him up.  He purred as I rubbed his face.  Then I opened a can of food and put it out in the chilly late afternoon, he ate a few bites and then was rubbing against my pant legs again.  Picked him up for another few pets, then left him to eat.  

Looking out the window just now I saw his food bowl almost untouched, then I saw him, by the garage next door, chowing down studiously on something the neighbor had put out for him.  Had the thought– only in America, where millions of children go to bed hungry every night,  do neighbors compete to feed doomed stray cats their favorite flavor of cat food.

Impossible versus Improbable

Impossible stops you in your tracks.  It is impossible, the end.   Cannot be done for a very good reason: it is impossible. Then someone perseveres, perseveres and does the impossible and we say: “OK, for them, it wasn’t impossible, then.”  And when other people do the same thing we are forced to agree– “it wasn’t really impossible, it was just very improbable.”   Until, of course, the first person proved that improbable is a huge improvement, in terms of facing a difficult challenge, over impossible.  

I raised the ire of several zombies not long ago by holding up two signs.  The first one read: there are a thousand reasons the thing won’t work.   The second:  All we need is the one reason it will.  From their reactions, I could just as well have held up first the severed ear of one of their children, then the other ear, still attached to the screaming head.

These images, of course, are disturbing, disgusting, gratuitous.  They do nothing to advance the point I’m trying to make except to underscore how easily disgusting, sick images pop into my mind.  Don’t worry, I’ve already had to apologize to these offended critics for the insult of telling them to try to keep their comments creative and helpful rather than reflexively critical of efforts already underway, moreover, efforts, in not even the tiniest part, their own.

Is it impossible that I will create a compelling ad for the program I need to pitch, with the smoothness of Ron Popeil selling a thousand Veg-O-Matics?  Not at all.   I can write copy with the most depraved of them, look:

In little over a year the innovative child-run animation workshop has taken root with children in five different settings. It has succeeded in turning room after room into a beehive of creativity resulting in dozens of short student-produced animations on youTube.  Kids as young as five, entering the room where seven and eight year-olds were creating animation, hopped right into the pond like excited ducklings.  The secret is a hands-on workshop where simplified technology is employed, by the children themselves, to quickly make their hand-made ideas come to life.  And the beautiful thing– when roasted on the Showtime rotisserie for a very short time at the proper heat, these ducklings are incredibly delicious.

Not only delicious, but amazingly nutritious.  And for a limited time you can take advantage of this internet special to receive a succulent portion of this health-restoring meat shipped directly to your dining room or Lazy-Boy.

And, if you marketize this program now, we will throw in the human head of your choice, severed, on the neck or including the bound and gagged person.   You won’t want to miss this special offer.   Did we say one head?  Ha, you know, since Christmas is coming, and Hanukkah is already here, we’ll throw in as many heads as you can carry (sorry, severed heads only).  

Is this a great country, or what?!!!

Cancer getting the upper hand

My friend seems to have come to that cliff at the end of cancer, when things accelerate and it becomes more and more an exercise in keeping the agony of approaching cancer death at bay.  It’s hard to know what I will say when I call him the day after tomorrow, the day after he gets back from radiation to hopefully shrink the tumors now growing in his lungs.

His wife has been heroic, loving, hiding her terror expertly as she changes the dressing on his grievous wounds sometimes twice a day.  The doctors have been cutting away at him for some time now.  The futility of their efforts reminds us of the relentlessness of what humans are up against when it comes to the killing powers of the universe.

My friend’s wife doesn’t talk about selling the house where he is dying, after he’s gone.  He knows it’s the only equity they have.  Their daughters are coming by for a last belated Thanksgiving-type meal tomorrow, the day after that it’s off to the hospital to have his lungs irradiated.  The day after that I’ll call him in the afternoon, which seems to be the best time for him to talk.   It would seem easy enough to call him and check in from time to time, but it isn’t, even as I know how little it is for me to do, that it is all I can do (he lives 200 miles north and doesn’t want visitors), and that it may make him feel marginally better for a moment or two to get the calls.

Does my friend’s situation give perspective on my own challenges?  Surprisingly little.  All of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, as well as two close cousins younger than me.  The odds are high that I will die of cancer too.  Does it remind me that we are all candles in the wind and urge me to get on with the important business of living well? Not so much.

It sets me to rattling the keys in the middle of the dark night, and wondering about things really too terrible to think of.  It should make me grateful for my strength, Sekhnet, the things I love to do, the people I enjoy.  It really should.

Edit (exercise in using the fewest words)

Among the boys I grew up with, their oversized heads on necks like flower stalks, I was considered an athlete.  In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or act tough, though it was within me. 

In my early twenties I spent a couple of seasons in the Bay Area where I had a peripheral acquaintance named Joey.  Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate.  The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two.  It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and Joey and I ran full speed for hours going out for passes or trying to intercept passes meant for each other.  The cool afternoon turned to dusk and then into a chilly evening.  When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day.   As we walked to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind.  I did not take hitting the ground hard very well.

Joe Oui seemed shocked at how quickly he was on his back, an angry maniac on top of him, forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood.   The maniac’s eyes were merciless as Joey’s face changed color and panic began to show in his eyes.  In time, the maniac stood wearily and let him breathe again.   He clutched his throat and muttered something about a complete overreaction. 

I practice ahimsa now, but nothing about that story makes me feel sad.

I Recalled this While Walking Tonight

I grew up among boys who had oversized heads on necks like flower stalks.  I was considered an athlete among these boys, though I was no athlete compared to many of the boys in the tougher classes, kids who were not absurdly labeled “Intellectually Gifted Children” and assigned to the IGC class.   These boys in my class from grades one to six all grew up to be wealthy men, I’m certain of it.  In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or to be very tough, but that side was dormant, I suppose.

There was a guy in California named Joey, I knew him peripherally when I spent a few months out there in the mid-seventies, while all the flower stalk necked boys were working towards advanced degrees and promising careers.  I found myself making drawings in spiral bound drawing books, looking out the windows of the bus as it made its way from New York to the Bay area.  Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate.  The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two.  It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and we all ran for hours on a cool afternoon that turned into dusk and then a chilly evening.  When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day.   As we were walking to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind.  I did not take it well.

I think Joe Oui was shocked at how quickly he found himself on his back, with me on top of him, leaning on my forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood.  I continued to apply pressure until his face changed color and real panic began to show in his eyes.  Then I stood wearily and let him get up.   He clutched his throat and muttered something about what he considered my overreaction, I said nothing.

A stone killer.

TDD (Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria)

At a luncheon recently I mentioned, intending to share my skepticism about the evolving DSM and its 5,000 new categories eligible for lucrative psycho-pharmaceutical medications, Angry Baby Syndrome.  I smirked as I brought up the newly minted diagnosis: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria, a proposed addition to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among other things the guide for what insurance will pay for by way of pharmaceuticals.  

One of the strangers at the table, a woman with some professional familiarity with these matters, immediately nodded knowingly.  “Yes, it’s a real condition, there are some babies who just start off angry,” she informed us and the conversation drifted quickly from where I was trying to steer it.  In truth, though I am opinionated, I had no real interest in steering this particular conversation, I was merely stroking one of my pet peeves– the madness and brutality of runaway capitalism.  I worked on my vegan lunch plate, smiling neutrally as I chewed, and let my mind drift in and out of the talk around me.

I’d read a great article, given to me by my friend the now retired judge, about the meteoric rise of mental illness diagnoses.  The article was a review of several books on the boom in psychopharmacology, I’ll find it for you.  A long review, but fascinating, well-written and worth a read.  Marcia Angell begins:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.  Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.  

(click here to read the article)

I can’t help thinking of TDD, Angry Baby Syndrome, in the context of a story my parents told, and believed, until the end of their lives, a myth I always took pains to demythologize.  At ten weeks old I became red and rigid, my little fists clenched, with a look of rage on my face that no amount of concerned staring or direct questioning from my frightened parents could wipe away.  With great anxiety, they rushed me to the pediatrician.  The good doctor took one look at me, began to laugh and said: “this child is having a temper tantrum!  I’ve never seen it in a baby so young, but this is definitely one angry baby!”  I recall thinking “fuck you, doc.  I’ll live to laugh at your fucking anger some day, you articulate, quack prick.  Just wait until I can talk, assbite.”  By ten months old, according to my proud mother, I was talking, though neither at ten months nor at any time after that did I bother to track the cavalier pediatrician down.

The point of this story to me was always that rather than figure out why their child was so unhappy as to be having a temper tantrum, the two young parents took comfort from the quack’s diagnosis that the kid was just irrationally enraged.  The expert confirmed my parents’ fear that their baby was just one of those born pricks– adversarial, angry, vindictive, challenging, defiant, hating all authority.  Who knew a ten week old could have the worldview to make all these judgments?   I have to believe it helped set the course of my adversarial childhood, this expert’s glib diagnosis that did not extend past a relieved chuckle.  He concluded, essentially, that this baby suffered from nothing more than being an enraged little asshole.  Kind of funny, in a way, no?

I always thought a good doctor might have felt the kid’s little fists– said to the parents, “I’ll be damned, even though it’s August, feel how cold this little guy’s hands are… maybe he’s pissed off because nobody has made sure he’s warm enough.”  Indeed, my mother reported that I always immediately calmed down whenever she gave me a warm bath, but of course, it was impossible to carry around the baby bathtub full of warm water to bathe me whenever I started becoming irrationally enraged.  

But my point in writing this is not to wonder whether TDD with Dysphoria is not a perfectly good diagnosis (why not give a pill to a young child who is just an irrationally angry bastard all the time?) or to muse about whether or not that pediatrician 57 years ago did anyone any favors, or to belatedly defend my, admittedly, infantile behavior.   

I replaced a roll of toilet paper backwards just now.  I noticed it and calmly removed the roll, reversed it, snapped it back into place.  This struck me as a great moment.  The calm fixing of a minor problem was unaccompanied by any sort of snarl, curse word, smirk, clucking of the tongue.  I still fly into a Tourretic rage when I’m leaving the house in a hurry and my ear buds are violently yanked out of my ears as the cord whips around a doorknob, or the long horn bicycle handlebars.  Part of my rage is at the randomness, seeming cruelty and absolute regularity with which these little delaying things always seem to happen, as though the universe is giving me the finger when I most need its silent cooperation.  But with today’s toilet paper tragedy, I was happy to notice myself fixing a minor problem as calmly as the Buddha.  

I took a breath and thought about the progress I’ve made from that vicious little ten week old I once was, the raging TDD poster baby.  It made me think of my father’s terrible temper, and his insistence, until right before the end, when he smartly reversed himself, that people are what they are programmed to be, by genetics and upbringing.  He always dismissed as delusional the idea that one can consciously change this programming.  My dad’s reflex, when a mistake was made by himself or anyone else, was to become instantly enraged.  I spent decades being mad at myself when I did something careless, or stupid, things that earthlings do all the time.

Follow if you can: you are snipping the ends off string beans, nipping the stem off and a bit of the tip on the other end. In one bowl the prepped beans that will be steamed or sauteed, in another the ends you will be discarding.  One after another, bing, bing, bing, the stems into the little metal bowl, string beans into the strainer.  Then, bip! stem into the string beans, whole string bean into the bowl of ends.  One would expect, at most, a little smile and head shake, a plucking out of the stem, an extraction of the string bean, and quickly restoring them to their desired places.   It would be hard for many people to understand the reflex to a paroxysm of rage when the stem gets flipped into the wrong bowl, but it is there for some.

Did my father have his face whipped all through his early childhood, and the angry course of his life irremediably stamped on his little soul, because he had undiagnosed TDD?  Did his mother, an insane little bitch, as far as I can make out, suffer from untreated TDD?  Is the reflex to be enraged carried in the DNA?  If this reflex is then reinforced by infallible repetition, can the programming to react this way be undone by mere mindfulness and a desire to not react with rage to every frustration, no matter how minor?  

Let us not underestimate the practice of mindfulness, working in tandem with a strong enough desire to change a painful reflex.   I’ve been trying to apply this principle to my dealings with others, with some success.  I have remained fairly mild in situations that would have provoked me to major unmildness before.  Imagine my delight to find myself the recipient of this forgiving gentleness in the moment of realizing how maddeningly idiotic my placement of that roll of toilet paper had been.  Noticing these small, valuable steps is a great gift we can give ourselves.

Or, an old reflex suggests, the wishful thinking of a fucking idiot.  Though I think not, whatever my father or a respected doctor might have once said to the contrary.

Hanging By A Spider Web

True, the string a spider shoots out is plenty strong, still, it’s a little bracing to be suspended in this life by something as thin and almost invisible as that.   Cornell West, a man with a penchant for cadence and rhyme, called his recent book Hope on A Tightrope.   Similar image– we are, for an hour or a hundred years, by grace, moving forward, or backwards, or quivering in place, or asleep– but in a precarious situation where a single false step might be our last.

Unlike others I know, I never wake up sweating, my heart pounding in my throat, thinking of ending it all before the pounding can kill me.   I don’t recall the last time I felt so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed.   That said, going forward cheerfully and confidently in every moment is not always possible.

I saw an interview by Bill Moyers yesterday with the author of a book describing the real-life zombie apocalypse we are living through now in our thoroughly marketized culture, a world where obscene wealth is seen as victory and everything else the work of fungible parasitic takers.  If obscene wealth is the only crown of victory in a competitive market society, and everyone else is a loser, and if losers are despicable in their craving for ‘entitlements’ when the only people actually entitled to entitlements are the super wealthy, and if the media hammers this destructive narrative home around the clock– you have one option, if you buy all that (and virtually everyone must on some level, since it is the dominant story shouted over and over): walk the streets with your arms out going “nyahhhh– nghhhh— nnnnnnnn…..” and looking for a live human to bite into.

I have to get to work now, but I hesitate, semi-paralyzed, questioning my judgment.  Yes, I have dreamed, planned, designed and am carrying out a program that works largely as I designed it.   But a series of larger and more formidable yeses stands in my way:   yes, I have no marketing plan, yes, I have not branded or packaged the program, yes, I have not created a winning ad to sell it, yes, I have not made of it an easily scalable commodity that can be sold over and over, yes, I have not funded it, yes, I have not recruited a single brilliant person to help in any meaningful way, etc.

Fortunately for me, since I don’t live in an actual democracy but in a cynical marketplace filled with false idols, since I am surrounded mainly by stressed out, distracted, treadmill thumping zombies, I can sojourn in my own head where my beliefs, as they must, sustain me while I hang from this almost invisible thread, thinner than a spider’s.  Now, to let out a yell like Tarzan and swing into action!

Only Human

We mess up, our plans go awry, comments meant to be light and funny sometimes fall badly, shattering into sharp pieces in the awkwardness they produce.  Our best plans, our smartest theories, turn out to be less brilliant than we thought.

When angry at someone it is easy to reduce them to the sum of their aggravating faults, forget that they are frail humans to whom a certain degree of self-blindness and hypocrisy is as natural as walking on two legs.   If they hurt us once, shame on them.   If they hurt us again and again, in extreme cases we are driven to become the leader of our nation and unleash a vast coordinated killing campaign.  Bombs, missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, burning chemicals dropped from the sky, torture and endless detention, relentless pursuit of enemy and friend of enemy alike, collateral damage be damned.  A slightly less insane approach is to accumulate billions of dollars and build beautiful houses for ourselves every place that we like, and to scream that we are victims of a holocaust if anyone speaks of taxing us fairly.  And there are less and less insane ways to deal with hurt all the way down to the saintly one of quickly forgiving all who mistreat us.  If someone hurts you and apologizes, it is a good practice to accept the apology and move on.  If someone hurts you and steadfastly refuses to allow that they’ve behaved badly, that’s a trickier situation.

Outside, in raging winter winds bringing single digit wind-chill, if the radio is to be believed, overly loud speakers somewhere nearby, perhaps on the campus of the college a few hundred feet from here, blared an auto-tuned hip hop number that was mildly annoying.  As I tried to gather my thoughts with the recorded drum pounding, “I Love Music” by the O’Jays made a cameo and I thought of the irony, the random, unintended ingenuity, of using one of a person’s favorite songs as a bludgeon upside the head.  Now it is just a kick drum, bap! BAP! bap! bap!, and a small voice wailing like a baby who’s been punched by an insane parent or guardian.  Somebody’s idea of a groovy time over there, no doubt.

Where the line is between overlooking a friend’s occasional bad mood and swallowing abusive behavior is sometimes hard to say in the individual case.   The case can always be made that the other person is only human, and sometimes humans slip up, do hurtful things.  Hell, humans organize lynch mobs, scream with veins popping on their necks and faces and are not satisfied until someone is mutilated.  Humans, it must be said, also rush into burning buildings to rescue small frightened animals.

One of the great personal dilemmas is to stay in a posture of forgiveness toward friends and family, while not tolerating abusive patterns that are sometimes subtle and dangerous.  They are dangerous precisely because they are subtle, easily denied and made to appear as figments of your oversensitive imagination rather than concrete hurtful actions done in a thoughtless or cruel way.  The subtle hurtful behaviors are easily justified, satisfyingly employed as small, sharp whips, to lash sensitive places on the face while telling the injured party that they are insane.   The beauty part?  Insane people often do believe innocent behaviors to be subtle, dangerous, hurtful, used as small, sharp whips to lash sensitive places on the face while the whipper puts on the most innocent of faces and tells them they are insane to feel that way.

Accepting Criticism

An emotionally intelligent person, concerned with effectively communicating with others, is interested in people’s reactions and takes them into consideration.  

What is clear to the person speaking, or writing, or pitching, or drawing, or singing, may not be clear to the people she is directing it to.  A person who would communicate well must be attuned to intelligent comments, as well as cluelessness, and the opinions of people who may be saying what they are out of an undigested mixture of helpfulness, envy, anger, confusion, ambivalence, distraction and so forth.  Many of these comments will be useful in helping to refine communication.

Even those who blurt out, ten seconds into a thirty second rough sketch, why the thing fails as a whole, may have a good point.  The only thing, it is sometimes hard, even for the person who graciously accepts suggestions and easily revises accordingly, not to snarl when this helpful approach is the only approach encountered.