Author Archives: oinsketta

A Little Wisdom under the menu

There is a vegetarian Chinese restaurant that we love, on Main Street just north of the LIE.  A few years ago, during some very vexing days, when we sat down to eat there I was struck by an aphorism under the glass my menu had been covering:

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.

I copied it in Chinese with my brush pen and the waitress, like a beautiful deer trying to make herself understood in human language, smiled happily and praised my calligraphy.   I told her I write Chinese the way a parrot speaks, but she was undeterred, pointed to each character, trying to explain its deeper meaning.   I left the restaurant feeling I’d learned something important to remember.  I rewrote the phrase many times over the next few days.

Yesterday, in the midst of new vexations, which grow like weeds in most of our gardens, this was under the glass where I sat:

When doing something, instead of worrying or being vexed about it, we should just be mindful.

A reminder:  we cannot change what is happening in this troubling world while we work:  better than vexation is careful attention to doing the work as well as we can.

Chained to my old Rockin’ Chair

Beautiful song by Hoagy Carmichael, called Rockin’ Chair.   Louis Armstrong did several great versions of it over the years, with his friend Jack Teagarden and with Hoagy himself (Teagarden sang much better than Hoagland) among others.  Jerry Garcia did a plaintive version with David Grisman.  The point is, the old guy narrator sings about how he can’t get out of his cabin, how’s he’s grabbin’ at the flies round his old rockin’ chair, and chained to it and so forth.

I hit on this line because I’m chained today to my desk chair and this old typer.  Every time I get up to go outside, get a little air, a constitutional, run an errand or two, clear the head, it’s a few circles around the crowded apartment and plop, back into this ol’ swivel chair.   A few times I picked up my guitar (I feel like playing Rockin’ Chair now, all of a sudden, I dare not) but most times I did things I needed to do, checked off a few items on my checklist, moved things incrementally forward, with any luck.

Devised a trick to get my fevered self out of the cabin just now, well, almost six minutes ago.  Grabbed the timer off the refrigerator, set it to ten, told myself “go!” and off I went.

Forget Hoagy, Louis, Jerry, music, the soul, the rest of it.  Forget everything but the 4:40 left on the clock and a little tale to tease out.  Walking down Broadway last night with a friend of more than 40 years I mentioned something about a post here on this covert blahg.  “I don’t read the blog, I haven’t been able to find it lately, I’m sorry to say,” said the American I assumed was my other reader– most days there are the American and the Polish reader, two pinpricks on the map each 6 hours to one side or the other of NY time.

“Who the devil….?”  I began musing.  No idea  who that second sphinx on the grassy knoll is anymore.  The likeliest suspect is mildly apologetic, telling me how much he used to enjoy the old blagh, look forward to it each day, but somehow…. and his voice trails away.

“Who the devil…?” I ask the cluttered desk, the groaning shelves, the overburdened Lazy Boy.   Ninety seconds on the clock means I’m unlikely to solve this puzzle any time soon, but at least, with luck, I’ll be up out of this chair, like a NASA space craft being launched, straight up in a foamy jet of smoke and steam, into the atmosphere and into a shirt, down the two flights into the street and saying “damn, why the hell did I not do this five hours ago when I first proposed this excellent idea to myself?”

Time.

Sometimes it takes a long time to see the obvious

There are things we say, thinking they are everything we need to say.   A year or more later, sometimes, we realize there was something important we should have added, but left out.

I’m thinking about this, oddly, as I begin to keep a Gratitude Journal.   I’ve written down about, well, let’s see, 28 things I feel gratefulness about so far, collected last night during a long train ride home.  I hope to form the habit of noting my good fortune, and increasing my ability to see the small miracles that are quite common, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for them.  The love between that child and his mother on the train the other day, for example.  Or the fleeting smile on the face of the tough guy on the other side of the subway car when he saw the same thing I was smiling about, a second before he put his mask back on.

Out of the blue recently I thought of a missed chance to add a sentence or two when I should have, and it haunts me slightly that I didn’t add the important sentiment I realize now was missing from my answer.   Sometimes, in the effort to come to the point smartly, the larger point is missed.

An old friend was in town, a very talented musician and wonderful improviser, someone I love to play music with.   He was moving to the other side of the world, I don’t know if he was truly happy about it, but he was gamely moving to the other side of the world.   It would be a long time, if ever, until I saw him again.   

He and I had a mutual friend, a very good friend for many years, famously demanding and difficult.  This friend was increasingly unhappy as the years went by, and critical, and humorless. His demand for attention, inflexibility and inability to listen made him more and more difficult to be around.   He called at the worst times and always needed to have a long conversation, he always had a long, usually aggravating, story he needed to tell.  He was angry when he was not depressed, and expressed his disgust at a series of betrayals that began to look eerily identical.  He fought about being angry, claimed he was not at all angry.  Although he was extremely intelligent, quite talented and had other good qualities, those things became harder and harder to see.  The relationship became toxic to me and it finally came to a head in the weeks after my father died.  

I’d tried valiantly to have a better friendship with him, over literally several years, long letters, long conversations, but in the end I could not save the relationship.   We brought out the worst in each other and it was time to stop being  constantly reminded of what he considered my failures, hearing over and over about his endlessly repeating betrayals at the hands of virtually everyone he met.  His mother was very understanding of my position in the end and asked helplessly what, if anything, she could do to help him.

My friend the musician was in NY visiting an old friend who has always been an older brother to him.  He and his wife stayed with this old friend on the eve of their move to the other side of the world and while they were in town I was invited to join them for a quick lunch and then, a day or two later, to spend an afternoon walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with them.  

At the end of that nice walk, as we drove up the West Side Highway, my friend mentioned he was probably going to visit this former friend of mine.  They’d been out of touch a long time, he said, but he was planning to drop in.  I told him and his wife that the guy would be delighted to see them, lived in a beautiful place they should not miss while touring America, would surely show them a good time.  

The driver, my friend’s older brother, smiled at me from the rear view mirror and asked me pleasantly why it was I’d stopped being friends with him.  I smiled back and said “Truthfully, I came to realize we brought out the worst in each other.”  And that was that.  I never heard from any of them again.

I might have added that it pained me greatly to have things come to that sad end after decades of friendship, and that I’d tried mightily, and made every effort to improve things.  I might have spent five seconds to impress on them how seriously I take friendship, that I am not the categorical, black and white hanging judge who cuts off an old friend the way saying “we brought out the worst in each other” might have made me seem.   Probably would have changed nothing, but I regret not adding that bit of my humanity as my character was being weighed.

Truthfully, it was long in dawning on me that I was on a kind of trial in that moment.

Why We Don’t Talk about Poverty

Here’s the thing about poverty– it’s terrible, traumatic, scarring, bad for the health, reduces hopes for the future and life expectancy considerably.   Like the intractable and uncomfortable subjects of Death, Religion and Politics, it is one of those things we are advised not to discuss in polite society.

Poor people in the US have TVs, cellphones, air-conditioners.  Yes, some of them do. Most people who are not poor also have these things.  I’m not judging, just saying.

My mind is flipping around a bit today, I just sat through a webinar about how to retain donors to a nonprofit cause.   It takes, among other things, a constant flow of gratitude, which comes naturally enough when someone is moved enough to open their wallet that your idea might move forward into the world.   Did you know that 70% of first time donors do not donate a second time?   Or that a 10% increase in donor retention increases revenues by up to 50%?   Neither did I.  

It was suggested by one of the experts in the webinar that a nonprofit consider hiring a special consultant to coordinate the thanking and stroking of donors.   We will get on that right away, once we raise some funds to pay that professional.

Here is a free piece of advice:  if you want to help the children of the poor, do not be poor yourself.  Poor people, let’s put it this way, are not as credible as billionaires who can buy teams of marketing geniuses to make them mayor of any city they fancy.

Here’s another piece of disjointed opinion:  don’t get upset by what you hear in the media.   If you hear, say, an interview by a reporter you respect (Warren Olney) of an ideologue like Jim DeMint, current president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, in which DeMint repeatedly calls Obamacare the most destructive legislation in American history, and the journalist never asks for any clarification of the grounds for this rather incendiary assertion, don’t think too hard about it.

Perhaps it was one of the conditions for the President of the Heritage Foundation to come on the show:  absolutely no requests for clarification of any statements.  It is clear that right wing types are desperate that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) not be implemented, lest it succeed in saving consumers of health care a lot of money and become widely popular, like Social Security and Medicare.

Though not the plan many would have hoped for, it appears more and more clearly to have been the best Obama could do, as seen by the determination of the right to defeat its implementation by any means necessary.   It has personally saved me about $700 over two years, ACA-mandated rebates from the outfit that gave its CEO a 72 million dollar golden parachute when Obamacare was approved.

Perhaps, if you qualify for low-cost NY State Health insurance that costs a full 25% of the maximum allowable income to qualify, you should be happy and just shut the hell up.  You know why?  Because truly, and sincerely, and from the bottom of their hearts, anyone not effected by it does not care.

Live long, prosper, have a nice day.

These two made my day

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Blessings are where we find them.   The gift is in learning to recognize them.
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Yesterday as I headed toward another fairly disjointed and disappointing animation session with six boys (makes me realize how important a coed group is for a good workshop– the girls are more creative and take more chances and it spurs the boys on, and the energy is much better than in this weird little boy’s club– ten is also a far better number than six) I was feeling like crap, physically and emotionally.  
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An affable but irresponsible idiot from a local film school was coming in to shoot the session, against my better judgment, and I’d had to draft a legal paper for him to sign to protect myself if he tries to do anything more with his half-assed student project than submit it for his grade.  I was really feeling up against it, up against everything.
 
On the crosstown train, toward the end of my trip,  a woman sat next to me with her 3 year-old son.  What I saw filled my heart with wonder and joy, it changed my mood instantly and completely and the rest of the day I’d been dreading went fine.   I wrote this afterwards in my journal:
 
Climbed up on
his large brown mother
his small hands reaching
his small bright face tilted up
reaching
kissing the top of her large upper lip,
her nose, her cheek
balled in a beautiful smile
and she kissed his small
smiling face
and he held on as she 
brushed her lips over his profile
and began to sing
softly and kiss him back
as he kissed her
and stroked her face
 
I was reminded
hours later
after telling her
“you two are a blessing
to everyone on this train” 
and as she smiled
another beautiful smile
and told her dumbfounded 
young son to thank me,
as the doors closed and I walked on, 
after colossal patience
with idiot school boys
and listening long
to unhappy details
from an old friend, 
my friend reminded me
 
the lives of the children 
of the wealthy
ain’t no crystal stair neither
and I should keep in mind
the stress, neglect and childhood pain
I might soothe
in them too
 
neither should I scorn
their possibly unlikable parents’
money
which would help ease 
the unbearable worry of poor Sekhnet
who righteously agonizes
over my great gift
for not making a living.

On Other Days…

… the wick is turned way down, the flame barely burning.  In fact, if you don’t look very closely, you might not see any fire glowing there at all.  There are days like that, too, even for those who count their blessings several times a day.  No doubt about it.

On such days, if you can, it’s best to turn in early, sleep and restore yourself.   No question worth pondering is more important than that long draught of deep sleep.

G’night.

What We’re Doing Here

It’s a mystery, why we don’t greet each day as the unequivocal blessing that it is.  My mother, her internal organs riddled with a million tiny cancerous tumors, was given a few months to live back in 1992; she lived another 23 years.   It is unfair to single her out, but outside of loving opera, and laughing when something was funny, and seeing the dark humor in things sometimes, she did not greet every new day as a blessing.  Unfair indeed to single my poor, dead mother out, because she was by no means alone in this.  I am trying to think of someone who greets every day as a blessing, and I’m not coming up with anyone that I know.

But, look at it seriously.   Everyone has reasons to complain, feel bitter, cheated, to hold on to anger about many things that are truly aggravating.   All this is true, work often sucks, people are often thoughtless, or worse, the world is increasingly distracted, run by greedy, sometimes evil bastards, and it’s hard to get a thoughtful grunt most of the time out of most people, even those closest to us.  Everyone has their list of grievances.  But look at it seriously.  A hundred blessings every day.  Seriously.  

As a young man, delivering envelopes and packages on a bike so as not to take part in a corrupt and hateful materialistic society, I found myself in an elevator that wasn’t moving.  I was paid per delivery and this had been a day of endless delays.  I wasn’t paid for waiting, unless I waited more than twenty minutes.  I’d waited nineteen times for nineteen minutes that day and I was doing a slow burn in the dingy service elevator that sat, doors closed.  The corrugated metal cell smelled of sweat and urine.   I grumbled to an older woman that it wasn’t my day.   She was quick to correct me, “Don’t say it’s not your day.  If you’re alive, it’s your day!”  I nodded, gave her something between a grimace and a smile and eventually the elevator began its slow climb to the floor where I dropped off the important envelope and got a signature on my ticket so I could get paid.

The other night I was sitting outside the 24 hour laundromat as my clothes enjoyed the amusement park inside, spinning wildly in the dryers.  It was a cool night, a delightful night, really.  It had been muggy, but now there was a mild breeze that was the perfect temperature.  I sat in a chair enjoying it.  A woman walked up, somewhat painfully, put her bags down, sat heavily and looked over at me about to complain.  “I was going to start complaining that my feet hurt,” she said and I smiled.   I immediately thought of that old woman on the elevator thirty something years ago.   I told her she decided not to complain when she felt how good that breeze felt, and she smiled, and agreed.   I told her about what the woman in the elevator said to me, she nodded and looked relieved.

I told her the outline of the story of Wavy Gravy’s life, as told in Saint Misbehavin’.  He’d been a poet, extrovert and a trouble maker and had been beaten by cops at several civil rights rallies.  He had his back broken by cops twice.  The second time was really bad, he was laid up for months, the operation hadn’t seemed to have fixed his back, he was in a lot of pain, couldn’t get out of bed, became very depressed.  A friend convinced him to visit a nearby hospital for kids with cancer and to stop feeling sorry for himself, go help some kids with real problems.   He passed a costume shop and bought a clown nose.  He went to the cancer ward and began performing for the kids.  He said a light went on in the world for him interacting with those kids.  He went every day, rehabilitated his back, soon was walking without a cane.  Went on, with a doctor friend, to found an organization that has restored the sight to countless poor people in Asia, Africa, everywhere.   He learned that going to demonstrations dressed as a clown no cop would ever beat on him again.   What cop wants to be on TV beating the crap out of a clown?

“That’s right,” said the woman two chairs over, and asked me the name of the movie again.  I told her and mentioned how much it had inspired me, and then excused myself to see how my clothes were doing.  They were doing very well.

Political Orientation and Class Warfare

An old friend, a former leftist who had a political awakening on September 11th, 2001 and thereafter came to believe Bush and Cheney had the right approach, sometimes chides me for being uncharitable to the super rich. She considers herself an independent now.   She asked me recently if I knew how many really wonderful very rich people there are in the world.  I have no idea of the number, and was at a loss for a reply.  I admit I have a certain antipathy towards a class who, as a group, puts the acquisition of more than they can ever spend as their top priority.

She sent me an email today with a link to an article entitled  Americans in Poverty Have TVs VCRs Cellphones and Airconditioning (click on it, if you like).    The author, she wrote, backs up her thesis, American poverty is “a problem of fatherless homes, values, ennui, purposelessness, soul-work.”   She also lamented the lack of people, poor or otherwise, who believe in something greater than themselves.

I tried to be mild, since I value our friendship.  I’m not sure if I succeeded.   I wrote: 

If you will forgive me, I didn’t see anything very convincing in this little opinion piece which suggests America’s poor are doing just fine, thank you.  I know the right wing view of poverty which the title of this piece advertises quite prominently — moral failure of lazy non-workers, bloated, spoiled entitled parasites, godless hedonists.  People lacking the moral fiber and drive that folks like our former presidents Bush were both born with.
 
The other side of this view can be seen during a walk in any of the actual slums of the richest country on earth, slums that have been slums for generations, where the infant mortality rate is as bad in as the worst third world hell holes and the challenges of day to day survival are daunting.  Many do have tvs, and cellphones, and $200 sneakers.  Yes, I know, it seems unconscionable that people with such short life expectancies and so little to live for crave the luxuries that America advertises 24/7.  Particularly shameful when you consider that a hard-working HS graduate on minimum wage ($7.25 federal and NY state) makes under $300 for a 40 hour week, before taxes.  Seems an impossibly small amount of money to live on– only a greedy fool making that pittance would try to have a cell phone or TV.
 
The tax on the wealthiest goes back up, amid great gnashing of wealthy teeth, to pre-Bush tax cut levels by about 10% of the total rate while the payroll tax on everybody else goes up 48%.  Fair is fair.  Does one really have to be a Marxist to see that there is a class bias to our laws?  Is it unfair to criticize greed when it’s perfectly legal and enshrined in our laws?  Why should a CEO make only 40 times what his factory foreman makes (1970) when now he can make 400 times what that manager makes?  He’d be a fool to settle for 1/10th of what he can get, right?
 
So I’m not going to go further into this subject, though I may have gone too far already.  It’s something I guess we’ll never agree about.  Are there good rich people?  I’m certain there are many.  Are there good poor people?  I’m sure there are millions.  Are there greedy, vicious sociopaths both rich and poor?  Certainly, but in my book the poor, as a class, get the benefit of the doubt on that one.   At least they don’t amass more wealth than they can spend in 10,000 lifetimes, and fight for every penny of it as their right as successful Americans, and buy legislators and pass laws that favor their advantages, while children go to bed hungry across town for lack of food and others die needlessly for lack of access to routine medical care, while the aged poor eat scraps and wear extra sweaters to save on heating bills they can’t afford.
 
Perhaps the percentage of good and evil people is the same in both groups, good people and moral scum probably occur in roughly the same proportion in the rich and in the poor — but since there are thousands of times the poor people, I think the world has many more good poor people than good rich people.
 
Of course, most of the working poor are too busy holding down two or three low-paying jobs to write opinion pieces in prestigious publications, or on their websites. 
 
Love,
Groucho

Home Cure for Anxiety

Set the timer for twelve minutes.  Pretend the computer keyboard is a musical keyboard and blow.   The chords, as you know, are harmonies, instant, under your hands just like that.  Then there are the notes you can play against them and where you can put them.  

Oh, perhaps it is better, you think, to play an actual musical keyboard. There, you reason, you can put your fingers and hear the sounds you imagine, you try to describe.  Music, ineffable as that breeze suddenly blowing the sweat off your clammy face.

Well, there is a point to that, whereas here, where I tap like the fingers-afflicted victim of RLS, the bebopping leg shakes that can’t be controlled, as mine can’t be now, we are flying without a chart, without a map, without an audible clue, rhythmless and bluesless.  Such is the nature of this anxiety I am attempting the home cure for now. There is the best way to deal with it, and then there is the way we are capable of dealing with it in the given moment.

I have to say, it’s amazing the energy with which my right leg is pounding away.

That said, the rest is to be expected.  Sustaining a dream takes a remarkable, and/or, idiotic temperament, particularly when you can’t get others to really see the dream you dream.  That’s the hard work of the dreamer, to prove the dream is more than vapor in the mind of the person who dreams it.   How to show the focused excitement the living embodiment of that dream brings forth?   Hmmmmm.   How to control ze uncontrollable tapping of this right leg of mine?  It’s the damnedest thing.

I am waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting.  And because I’m in this holding pattern, waiting to hear, my leg has gone insane.  Lucky for the neighbor downstairs the foot is clad in a soft rubber croc, thus no tap tap tap on the ceiling.  Ah, now the RLS has miraculously stopped, and not a moment too soon.

A beautiful young woman, very talented, described her panic attacks the other day.   She begins hyperventilating and can’t stop herself.  The more fearful she gets, the worse it gets.   She sees a therapist, but so far, the attacks continue.

There is a merciless force at work in the universe, along with life-giving things like good music, kindness, love and hope.  Better to give hope, have it, share it, than to dwell on the merciless force always at work.  That force is busy whittling away at the life of an old friend who hopes to live to see his 58th birthday, this Friday the 13th.   It is busy eroding all of us, unless we tap into the forces that give life, and even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best.

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.