Author Archives: oinsketta

De Minimis Non Curat Lex

There’s a book in this old judicial maxim “the law does not concern itself with trifles”.  An entire library of trifles with which the law does not concern itself.  One man’s trifle is another man’s indigestible, unvomitable hairball, after all.

Think of the things that may bother you most.   Trifles, virtually all of them.  The Law does not regard or concern itself with them.   Like a demented four year-old on first discovery of the equally chilling “I know you are, but what am I?” the justice system’s got one for you right here, pal.

“De minimis non curat lex“

 

Heat Wave in NYC

It’s humid as hell during a heat wave in NYC.   Sekhnet does not sleep enough, even under ideal circumstances.   This morning she had to be up at 6:00 a.m., to water her garden before heading off to Katonah for a work assignment.   At 1 a.m. she was still doing something.  I urged her to go to sleep and she eventually fell asleep on the couch.  It was around 80 degrees downstairs and moist.

When I went upstairs an hour later, where it was several degrees hotter, she’d crept up there somehow.   She was on the bed, splayed out like a star fish, with both tower fans pointed at her.   There was little point trying to squeeze on the small bed with her so I let her sleep and went into the other room to pound at the keys of this computer.  

By 4:00 I was ready for sleep, pointed one of the fans slightly northward and went horizontal on a northerly sliver of bed.  She stirred, made some ridiculous remarks, only half awake, and then fell back asleep.   It was too hot to sleep, but she flopped an arm affectionately over me.  A few minutes later I slipped out of bed for a cool drink.   Could not shut my mind off.  Read a bit.  At 4:45 or so I tried again.  Then it was light outside and birds began sending out their tweets.  Sekhnet’s friend “Pietro” was back, imitating a dozen other calls and then singing his manic, signature “Pietro, Pietro, Pietro!!!”

“My father always liked Pietro,” she told me once.  Her father named him Pietro.  I knew she’d be glad he was back.  She was.

Weird babble began, her odd comments, my amused answers, her soft, slightly mad chortles.  The bed was hot, and she was still mostly asleep.  Soon the radio alarm went off, it was probably about 5:30.  Sekhnet likes to hit snooze as many times as possible before she gets up, but this time she was too wiped out to reach for the snooze bar.  I was almost asleep when her other alarm, a weird, electronic chiming guaranteed to get a sleeping person’s attention, went off.  Then, seemingly, a third alarm began to bleat.

“Sekhnet’s house of horrors,” I said grimly, to a cackle from Sekhnet.   

“Wake me up in five minutes,” she said, amid the cacophony of alarms.

I told her I would, if I wasn’t lucky enough to be unconscious in five minutes.   I wasn’t lucky enough, but she was soon enough up and out of bed, heading to the garden.

Letter to Poland

So here’s the deal.  Over here a lot of bad stuff is going down, I think we are actually in the grips of a societal insanity that is rapidly approaching critical mass.  I know you try not to pay attention to the news from here, being an expatriate and all that, but I’ll give you a quick run-down of what’s been shaking since you’ve been gone.

In 2000 there was a presidential election, another of those farcical exercises in mass-marketed democracy we have every four years.  I heard the president described recently by the great Harry Shearer as the man (or woman) who has climbed to the top of greasiest pole in American society (listen to the first two brilliant minutes).  Word.   And, as you know, the higher the monkey climbs the more everybody can see the monkey’s behind, but forget that, if you can.

It was a close election in 2000.  Goon squads were actually sent to disrupt the recount of votes in Florida, the state whose electoral votes would decide the election.  A challenge was made by lawyers for the Republican candidate in the Supreme Court, claiming irreparable harm if the count was allowed to continue.  It was decided  on partisan lines for the Republican, in a one-off decision that oddly cast itself as setting no precedent.  You know that we were attacked on 9/11/2001 by 19 Saudi fanatics.  In the aftermath of that attack Congress voted special wartime powers for the president and we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.  These wars were very costly, and bloody, and corrupt, and rage to this day, though we are no longer officially fighting in Iraq.  

The war powers were abused, as war powers often are, and these abuses continue to this day in the name of The War on Terror.  Things that shocked the conscience of many Americans no longer seem to bother too many people.  The War on Terror is to our basic freedoms and general sense of decency what the War on Drugs has long been to people who like to smoke a joint once in a while– as well as to the many victims of violence by international drug cartels who sell pot and other drugs to Americans.  Get as drunk as you want sometimes, that’s your right as an American, you know.  Smoke marijuana and you’re a drug addict and probably a pervert.   Everybody knows that.  

Just like everyone now knows you have to rough up people you suspect of hating you.   In fact, a jury just acquitted a hopped up, gun toting asshole in Sanford, Florida for shooting a black kid to death.   This guy was patrolling his multiracial neighborhood one night when he saw a black teenager in a hoodie.   He called the police to report the suspicious Skittles wielding young black man.  The cops told the guy to stay in his car, that the cops would come.  The guy followed the kid, got out of his car and confronted him.  The subsequent fatal shooting of the young man was deemed self-defense by a jury of six white women.  People are outraged and don’t know what to do.  Officials are warning blacks not to think of rioting.  Other people are rejoicing, that we are still a country that believes in laws, even ignorant laws like the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person with a gun, who feels in danger, to kill the person he reasonably believes to be threatening him.

So, dude, if you come here, don’t hang out with your young black friends, at least not in Florida.  Some disturbed asshole with a police record can stalk you, confront you, grab you, and if you defend yourself, can argue that he felt in danger and then be legally justified in killing you with his handgun.

Hell of a day here in the USA.

On the other hand, I felt an unexpected surge of pure joy today watching the naming and honoring of a young baby girl, the new granddaughter of old friends of mine.  Impossible not to feel the love and good vibes in that room.

In other news, I got this mysterious email from an “edcsnowden@gmail.com”.  Makes me want to find the perpetrator (the sloppiness is revealing, methinks) and confront him, if you know what I’m saying.  I am, as you know, Ahimsa Man, but even I have my limits:

Ed Snowden <edcsnowden@gmail.com>
I saw  your site and was filled with wonder. Do you need an event planner and fundraiser? As I am both I also have experience with volunteers. I currently work with homeless families as well as homeless individuals suffering with the HIV virus.I would love to work with you as your are doing amazing things with small ones!
Sincerely, Ed Snowden

How Do you form a team?

I’ve been puzzling over how to take an idea, made real now in a NYC public school over the course of 36 weeks, and turn it into an idea worth discussing, an idea people would be happy to kick in some money to see flourish in the world.

The short version of the idea:  give primary school children the chance to play and work together, teach each other skills they’ve mastered, show the results of this in animations they produce and score.  The adults in the room keep track of time, support and admire the ideas and products, lend a hand with some technical detail the children may ask for help with.  Once in a while the adults also corral a kid who is going out of control, calm the hopped up little bugger down.  But for the most part, it’s a buzzing beehive run by the kids themselves.

I picture it functioning best in the worst schools in the city.  I’ve already seen great positive changes in several of the 14 kids who participated in the first sustained workshop.   A class clown who was disorganized, sloppy, had a dozen unfocused ideas a week evolved into a focused, ingenious animator.  She was very proud of herself, and I was too.   When I asked her the most important thing she’d learned in the workshop she said “work together.”  I gave a little yip of approval which she humorously imitated, making it even more ridiculous.   A boy who was quite egotistical and a bit of a bully became one of the most helpful and interactive kids in the group.   I imagine the transformations in “at risk” kids will be even more dramatic.

Children in most schools, particularly  in poor neighborhoods, are rarely given any autonomy outside of choosing a red or purple crayon to color in the crude outlines of some shoddily photocopied drawing, a turkey at Thanksgiving, a crudely drawn Martin Luther King Jr.’s suit during Black History Month.  The photocopy machines in slum schools always produce worn out, grey sheets, since teachers pump out work sheets by the thousands every day until the machines give out completely.  Toner is expensive and so rarely replaced until the images are almost invisible on the pages.   Creativity in those schools is considered a luxury these poor kids can’t afford.

If I would shame the well-to-do enough to fund this program I need to expand it to a number of schools.   I need a team.  How do you form a team?  Asking for volunteers has not been a sustainable strategy, when people do you a favor you must be grateful, no matter how small the favor is.   It seems to me that my assistants, the people I would groom to replace me in a room once the program is up and running, should be paid generously, at least twice minimum wage.  So I do.  But so far, I can’t help but notice a mercenary aspect to their participation.  The hours they’re paid for they work fine.  And that work, I point out, is mainly interacting with kids who are doing interesting, funny artistic projects.  Nice work if you can get it.   Unpaid hours?  I thought you said you were paying us.

If the organization had $25,000 in the bank right now, it would be less of a problem.  I will have to raise a sum like that, 1/3 cajoled out of well-to-do people I know, the rest raised from a public whose passion must be aroused by the excellent little documentary I have to make to promote the program.  I need contributions from people I know so that strangers will see the needle on the crowd-funding meter ticking constantly up in the beginning, so they will know this program has support, is gathering momentum, is an idea worth making a tax-deductible contribution to.

But how do you form a team?  Volunteers and interns must be idealists motivated by passion for the project.   Paid people must be paid, which takes money.  How do you form a goddamned team?  And if you don’t answer this question the potential of this innovative program is another bit of unmonetized good idea friends may talk about at my memorial service, lamenting briefly that for all my talent and good ideas, I never figured out how to make a living.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Many ideas are floating through the air at any given time.   People catch them and remark on them, causing someone else to comment, an article or book is written, a movie or TV segment made.  There are ideas whose time has come, it is simply the right moment for these things to step into the world, raise a little sand.  Ideas both beautiful and horrific enjoy their moment on the world stage, in the minds of the most curious and the most incurious.

Ideas can flutter like dust motes, cough out like particulate ash, make kids’ tongues pop out for a taste, like snowflakes.  Free floating ideas can become projectiles and plunge down causing actual damage.  There are a number of these ideas out there now, they are always there.

Other floating ideas take wing, as they say, and you can see them soaring.  Like an idea Sugata Mitra had about the education of young people and the salubrious effect of an older person showing interest, and affection, and a sense of wonder about what the young person is learning.

A sense of wonder, there’s an idea we don’t appreciate every day.

Creepy

There’s been a marked decline in laughter around here in recent months.  Funny things continue to happen all around, I’m sure, but they neep by unnoticed, don’t get to me in the same way.  It’s kind of creepy.  Virtually everyone I know seems in the grip of this grim new way of being.  

This is abstract, I realize, and calls for a colorful  illustration.   I can offer examples, but they only heighten the creepiness of this laff drought.  Why bother going down this road, if I’m not prepared to squeeze out at least one example?

OK, here’s one.  I have an old friend who is famous for being manipulative, sometimes in ways so overt they’re comical.  It is such a part of who he is that most of the time I don’t even notice the agenda he is always clutching just behind his back.  Things must always be arranged to maximize his advantage, somehow, even though how it actually benefits him is often hard to say and the price he pays for this is sometimes high.  There are many people like him, and I don’t point this out to be critical of the old fellow.

I have another old friend who is in the process of rebirthing himself.  Hard work!  I understand how hard this is and I applaud his devotion to emerging as a more mindful, compassionate, grounded person.   This chap and I have shared many a wheezy chuckle over the years over the constant inventiveness of our manipulative friend.

I got up early the other day, for me, resentful about the short sleep, in order to accommodate our host’s schedule (turns out he’d accidentally pushed everything three hours earlier without realizing it).   I move to offbeat circadian rhythms, true, and it’s rare I’m in bed before 4 a.m.   My mind gets into full power mode around 11 or 12 every night, always been that way.   So early for me is mid-morning for most other people, granted.

On short sleep I drank coffee, paid bills, answered emails, thought a little about business, showered, dressed and then it was time to go.  As my friend arrived to take us to the home of our  host I was opening a yogurt, which I bolted standing in the kitchen.  My friend smiled merrily as I complained that I had to choke down my breakfast so as not to be late to this, no doubt, artificially early play date.  Then he hurried me out to the car.

As we drove he mentioned a stream of messages he hadn’t listened to from our friend the host.   “I didn’t listen to them, I figure they were just his usual string of nervous proddings and I didn’t feel like hearing them,” he said breezily.  Then the friend called and said we wouldn’t be starting at 12:00 after all, that 2:00 was more realistic, since he was out shopping with his wife and wouldn’t be home much before 2:00.   I listened to this impassively, responded mildly and rang off.  I even let the statement that he was making things easier for me by doing it later roll off and land soundlessly on some imaginary pillow.

We headed back to Sekhnet’s where my friend made himself lunch while I went upstairs and took care of some business I hadn’t had time for, rushing to be in the car by noon.

But here’s the thing that creeps me out.  That my manipulative friend didn’t bother calling or dropping me an email the night before with the new time– to be expected.  That he said he’d moved things back to make it easier for me– well, a little problematic, in light of how much easier it actually made things, but not unexpected.  What creeps me out is that as we headed back over to our friend’s house my friend who was driving said, casually, “I heard his first message at 11:05, about not starting until 2,  but I was already in the middle of rushing through my errands to be here by noon.”

So when I was wolfing my yogurt, and complaining about being put under this kind of time crunch, he already knew there was no time crunch.   Still, he didn’t tell me to sit, relax , eat breakfast, that we had two hours, he pretended we were still running late.

“Why would you put something like this on the web, you querulous, carping prick?” asks a chorus of the two or three who will one day read this post.

Why, indeed.  I told you something creepy is in the air.

It Depends, doesn’t it?

edit 1:

Point of view determines what we see, obviously, how we interact with the world, and, to some extent, how the world interacts with us.  The glass half full, glass half empty, cost vs. benefit, things looking up, things hopeless — matters of opinion based on point of view.  In politics we have that wonderful term from economics, externalties, the hidden costs of a transaction.  What these externalities actually are is determined by where one stands to look at them.

For some of us to get the things we value, a lot of others might have to lose things they value.  Access to clean water, for example, or a safe home, or healthy traditional diets replaced with the Obesity/Diabetes Diet.  We have mass malnutrition in a land of plenty, and deforest the planet so that billions and billions of Happy Meals can be served worldwide.  (Point of view, somebody please give me the upside of any of these externalities.)

It’s human nature, after enough time passes many people stop harping on a few centuries of slavery, extermination of native peoples, destruction of the environment, externalities like that.  In order to create great wealth great sacrifices sometimes have to be made.  The people who make these sacrifices, with no say in the matter, are called losers.  We have literally billions of them living on the earth right now, they are all around us.

I apologize.  I’m cranky, carping on the nonstartling idea of atrocious injustice in the world.  Surely I’m not advocating a society where those with the least get a shot at a decent life, where those with the most are required to play fair with the rest.  That would violate the American Dream:   when I own Walmart I want to pay my workers the least the law will allow, let the government buy their health insurance.  Every cent I don’t pay my workers in wages or benefits goes directly into my pocket.

                                                                                             ii

It’s particularly airless in NYC the last few days.  There is some air, but it is thick, heated and hard to breathe.  You can breathe it, of course, but it doesn’t refresh you very much.  If you live in an airconditioned place you will only notice this thick stickiness of the air when you go outside.  The air the fans are pushing around is like warm sludge.  It hits the face like exhaust from an exhaust pipe.  I woke up after a few hours of sleep gasping like a fish on the floor of a rowboat, my head filled with dread.  The dread of everything at once.

Dread that this cyst, or fatty deposit, on the back of my left arm is a tumor.  The dread of being diagnosed with cancer at the same time I am losing the health insurance I’ve been buying for seven years.  The dread of faceless bureaucrats deciding the policy will terminate for individuals and sole proprietors on 12/31/13.  Now you can only buy this insurance if your employer is enrolled in it, God bless our independent entrepreneurs.   

Dread as I think:  if you’re 57 and have a deep family and personal history of cancer, get a job that offers health insurance and make sure you don’t lose it, loser.  They’ve tried to repeal “Obamacare” 37 times now in the land of the free/home of the brave.   Insurance premiums, meanwhile, have skyrocketed in those seven years.  They went up 20% for these last few months I’m eligible.  Tens of thousands of Americans still die preventable deaths of every year for lack of access to affordable health care.

Dread:  having created a radical and so far highly successful program for children, with virtually unlimited potential, and running out of money before it becomes self-sustaining.   As often, I am working for free, or virtually free, and those who receive the free benefit are most pleased with it.  

Dread:  having to find a business partner, somebody by nature and prejudice I think of as dry company, but someone essential for this program turning into a business that can pay my bills, create a few jobs with health insurance for myself and and my fellow workers.

Dread: of selfish, manipulative weasels of my long acquaintance, and the sickening aftertaste of remaining mild with them.

Dread:   new lump under left nipple, male breast cancer or soft tissue sarcoma.  Just what I need.

Dread:   this life-force draining heat and humidity, in this old house of Sekhnet’s, a jerry-rigged electrical system that causes her to fear fire if the air-conditioner is turned on.   So, if it’s 86 degrees and 90% humidity at 2 a.m., splay yourself naked in front of the fan and hope for the best.

The question is does dread depend on your point of view?  So let’s flip all this to another point of view and have a look.

I’ve made significant strides in my life and with my program.  I’m not making money, true, but rich personal history.   I’m taking careful notes, with soundtracks and animated shorts.  I remain modest, most of the time.  I use my talents for good instead of evil.   I strive to be collaborative, creative and mild.  I am trying my best to be the change I want to see in the world.  

Looked at through the long view of my life, the selfish, manipulative weasels with the bitter aftertaste are also friends of many years, chaps I usually have a good larf with.  

Alternate point of view: it is all good, all good, or to be taken care of, moving in the direction I want to move, remaining calm, in the face of the many compelling reasons not to remain calm.  

If you believe in the laws of karma you will know that the good I am doing will be paid back to me at some point.   The heat and unbearable humidity will pass and I’ll be shivering and putting on a polar-tech jacket soon enough.  I’ll make medical appointments and hopefully get good medical news rather than a diagnosis of the dreaded soft tissue sarcoma.  I’ll figure out the solution to the sudden loss of medical insurance, as I will be obliged to.  All will be resolved.  And in the end, after all, there is only death, and what we did during this blink of an eye here.

Humid July Night in NYC

The new pedometer told me I’d put in 21,146 steps shortly before midnight when I reached the top of the stairs down to the A train at West Fourth Street.   Many of those steps had been logged during a discussion of how to take a successful and unique program and make it a sustainable business, at least for the two of us who were discussing it.  My Hawaiian shirt had not been dry since 5:40, when I stepped off a downtown A with about 6,000 steps on the pedometer.

I was talking to a friend on my late mother’s state of the art Motorola Razr as I walked up Sixth Avenue.  When I headed toward the steps down to my cool A train home my way was blocked by four people arguing at the top of the stairs.   A hot humid night, two couples arguing, one man stressing, rather pointedly, that the other guy should get out of his fucking face, he wasn’t doing nothing, back the fuck off.

Only the guy he was talking to was a young cop, maybe 25, who had to be hot as hell in that uniform in the brutal humidity, and he was one step below the angry guy.  Next to the young cop was his partner, a blond female cop with her hair in a pony tail, a bit taller than the young male cop.   I didn’t like the way things were escalating, but I also couldn’t very well push past the four of them and head down the steps under the circumstances.  They were directly in my way, I had little choice but to watch and wait.

We live in a racist country, let us face that bitter-tasting truth like adults.  The word “nigger”, once a staple of race relations, is now perhaps the most taboo word in the language.  People get fired for saying the “n- word”.  To me calling it the “n-word” is fucking obscene, excuse me, f-ing obscene, and the squeamish neologism makes talking about our deep history of racism more difficult, not less.   But whatever you think about it, “nigger” is certainly not a word to calm the nerves on a hot and humid NYC night when things are escalating, particularly when two people are black and two people are white.  The cops in this case were both white.  Doesn’t that make things clearer, dear reader?

I’m not certain, but I think the man who was insisting on his right not to be harassed by the police finally crossed the line when he imprudently said “I told you to get out of my face, nigger.”  He said this to the young male cop, who sprang like a lion, shoved the man who’d used that terrible word of disrespect against the chain link fence by the basketball courts, kicked his legs apart, roughly frisked him then shoved him on to the ground and knelt on the man’s back.  He jerked, then twisted, the abruptly face down man’s arms behind his back, and applied the handcuffs.  The woman who was with the handcuffed man said “Oh, I didn’t want this…”  She may have wished misfortunes on her angry companion, but not this, face down on the filthy concrete with his hands shackled behind his back.

I narrated all this to my friend who was on the other end of the phone.  She voiced indignation and horror.  I turned to a guy standing next to me, a young black man, who was watching impassively.  “You got a camera on there?” I asked, pointing to his iPhone.

“That’s foul, what you’re doing is foul,” he said softly to the cops.  The cops were in no mood to hear softly whispered words of reproach.  In fact, they didn’t hear them. The arresting officer’s partner was hovering near the prone, handcuffed man, ready with her nightstick if he turned out to be a foul-mouthed Houdini and slipped the cuffs and the young police officer kneeling on his back.

I noticed one more thing, kind of poignant.  It will not show up in the arrest report or in court later on.  The cop kneeling on the guy’s back redistributed his weight slightly and patted the man’s shoulder reassuringly, as though to calm him.   His hand stroked the blue t-shirt the way you’d comfort an inconsolable child.  It was the damnedest thing.

Feedback

No less an authority on having his ass kissed than Pablo Picasso, on the subject of an artist working purely for love of creation, without any need for feedback or praise from anyone who might experience the work:  a false idea.  

But don’t take it from him.  Imagine hitting a baseball further than you ever have before, admiring the arc of the ball, trotting around the bases trying to suppress a smile.  The crowd is large, among them many people you know (your ‘cheering section’) but they are talking among themselves, when you scan the crowd they’re not even looking at the field, most staring at electronic devices, nobody has any reaction to your clout.  Does it diminish the hit?  Not at all.  Diminish the moment?  Completely, transformed from  a great high to a significant bummer.   “Let them show me their latest poem,” you think grimly as you step on home plate, “I’ll show them how it feels”.

But once in a while you not only connect solidly with the pitch, but you get a spontaneous shout of appreciation.  Here’s one, moments after sending a couple of demo tracks trying to convince an ailing musician friend to buy a small, cheap USB keyboard:

Haha love it-  amazon.com here I come!

Started new chemo yesterday, 3 days in a row has me sleeping in fits and starts… Back to sleep with those mimgus like bass lines swimming through my head, you made my day
(night) thnks for sending

meefs

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.