Author Archives: oinsketta

Playing together

If it’s music we’re talking about, the first thing is listening.  Don’t do anything at first, listen to the beat.   There are many places to put a note, a beat, an accent;  against the beat, on the beat, next to the beat, slightly off the beat.   The first thing though, is to feel the groove that is waiting to emerge from the beat.

The groove is not the beat, it’s all the stuff around it that makes the beat groove.  Check it out.  One note put in the exact place to make the head jerk forward slightly, or one of the hands to unconsciously, or consciously, flick an invisible, or visible, drumstick.   It sets the groove in motion, wait for it… AH! oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

I think this is a wonderful metaphor for a good life and playing nicely with the people you meet.  Before you can say something helpful you have to have heard what the person is really trying to say.   Thinking back, many times I could have been more helpful if I’d listened better, and paused to listen to my own thoughts, before launching into a particular solo.

Genetic Predispostion to Laughs

My mother, maybe two weeks before she died, was in her bedroom when a hospice nurse, social worker and someone from a physical therapy place arrived to speak with her.  The previous hospice had declined to give her physical therapy, not because they were mystified that she wasn’t dead already, not because it was pointless to give her the illusion that she was fighting to get stronger when death was days away, but on the grounds that she was too demented to remember the instructions of the physical therapist.

I was incensed, switched from incompetent, vicious Vitas (this conclusion about dementia was but one of their criminal bits of negligence)  back to the other hospice, who’s name escapes me, and a day or two later these three arrived to assess my mother for physical therapy.  I was in the kitchen when these three women went into the bedroom where my mother was resting on the bed.  Within a minute I heard one of the women laughing, soon they were all cracking up.  There were several peals of laughter.  I have no idea what my mother was saying, but the effect was pretty dramatic.

“One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said the nurse coming out of the room with a big smile still on her face.  They started physical therapy the next day, and she did pretty well that first session, but session two had to be postponed so she could be admitted to Hospice By The Sea to die a few days later.

I think about this because, while I’m not up against an imminent death sentence as my mother was, I am living a stressful enough existence these days, no income, escalating health insurance, a program that works amazingly but that I haven’t managed to monetize, recruit the people I need to turn it into a sustainable business, blah blah.  There are days when I’m feeling quite desperate about things.  I spend long stretches alone wondering what I was thinking.

Nonetheless, wake me from a sound sleep on one of these days, like my wasted, napping mother, and I will find my footing in the conversation pretty quickly.  There will often be a chuckle or two, even though a moment before I may have been dreaming of my unfair and gratuitous execution.  

Laughter is like medicine, it is medicine, there is nothing as good for you as a good laugh.  At least that’s the way it feels to me, the dramatic reminder that in the midst of horror there is still a moment to lose yourself and your troubles in a roar that makes your heart leap and clears out everything else.

Cain’t Leave It Alone

Thought experiment.   Imagine:

Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor.  Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control.   Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.

Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time.    Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that.   Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths.   It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age.  Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.

Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning.  Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance.   He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room.  He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.  

Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions.  The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain.  He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy. 

Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision.  The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War.   Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him.  “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it.  It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain.  It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it.  There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable.  The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”

Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott.  As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations.  But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.

Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here).  The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple.  In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man.  This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro.  From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic.  Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.

Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.

Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic;  a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions.   Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate.  Your father challenges you to justify your opinion.  As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion.  Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.  

In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps.   If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.  

Afterwards, you will take the high road.  You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument.   You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question.   Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question.  Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait.  You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.   I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later..

And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit.  And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.  

Note:  He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.

I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  

Elegant, the way the passive voice was used.  This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ.  “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice.  Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’.  Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife.  You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.

You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later.

This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”.  It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party:  try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply.  What do you want from me?  This is clearly your problem, not mine.  

The bit about  I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction.   “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word.  “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.  

But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’   An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection.  “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”

And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”

Wink!

Why Smiling Anger Can Be So Dangerous

When somebody rages, with eyebrows drawn low over the eyes, teeth bared, facial muscles torqued into a mask of aggression, you have a good indication that you should be careful.  People in this state can become violent, it’s called being “mad” for good reason.  They are out of control in their anger.  They may snap, they could have a heart attack.  It’s fairly easy to recognize, when somebody is in this kind of rage, that care must be taken to avoid things getting worse.

Take rage to its extremest expression and you have murder.   If an angry person kills you, it rarely makes everything right for them.   They just have to start justifying themselves and getting ready to do the same to anybody else who backs them into an infuriating corner.  And, of course, there are the police to worry about, and all the rest of the legal system.

There is another way of displaying anger, a bit more subtle and almost as common.   It expresses itself without snarling, but is just as determined to exact its price.  The real horror of anger?  There is no price it can exact that will really make things better for anybody, outside of a sincere apology and promise to do better next time.  And with this subtle kind of rage, it often has nothing to do with the person it is being visited on, so it cannot be placated.

When you see a genial person become intransigent, but continuing to smile, even as the intransigence escalates, realize what you are dealing with.  If nothing you can say is having any effect, beware.  It is not a situation worth staying in, if you have any way to leave.

Personal Manifesto — preview

From time to time, I’m told, it’s good to write a manifesto– a plan of action laying out the beliefs that animate it.  I’m going to do that, if you watch this space you will see it soon.  I hope you may even be inspired by it.  But today I have only a few minutes.  Somewhere I jotted a note the other day, I remember writing it down, and that it was a hook to a big part of the manifesto and my motivation.  Let me dig it up.

“I don’t want to see stubborn, opinionated, pandering televised idiots having false debates about reality and the most pressing questions of the future– help create smart citizens.”

I’m doing it, B.  I’ll get more into the details of this next time.  There is one other matter and then I have to jump into the shower, get ready to go.  

People, when they’re young, love to play.  Without play, what does a young person have?  Grim preparation for a life of unsatisfying drudgery.   Seems pretty clear, when put that way, that children should be encouraged to make discoveries during play time.  Got that one covered too.  And older people, we need to keep playing too.  You know what’s left if we don’t?  You know what’s left.

Last point.  You hear often from funny, successful people that feedback and support were key elements in their growth.  I hear it loud and clear, even as I am put to the test, over and over, to prove that even without much feedback or support — if you have enough belief in what you are doing and in your creative power to do it — amazing things can still be done.

Now go forth and play, my friends.

Eye Roll, please

I know how tedious stories of injustice are, and how depressing, especially here in America where we are by nature optimists.  You know, how many times can you hear about millions of indigent senior citizens being cut back from five Meals-on-wheels a week to four due to Sequestration, or the precocious little four year-old in Indiana whose mother can’t break it to him that he was lotteried out of Head Start next term, before you turn to the sports channel, or go shopping, or see what there is to snack on?

Or reading about some freshman  Congressman from Tennessee, let’s say, whose family owns a gigantic farm, and who gets a subsidy of $738 a day, (and, yes, some liberal prick actually took out a calculator and divided the average annual $269,000 farm subsidy this wealthy public servant gets into days…) while he advocates cutting the Food Stamp program that so many WalMart employees depend on?  (A more balanced, and almost incomprehensible, version of that story is here)

There’s a so-called debate in this country about values.  One side’s intellectuals cite the points made by a novelist who escaped from totalitarianism and had a lifelong hatred of “altruism” as though these strongly expressed opinions are slam dunk conclusions preempting any discussion of who deserves what.   The intellectuals of the other major party  dare not scream too loud at this, fundraising is a delicate art that must be constantly cultivated, and besides, most of the money in political campaigns is given by the top half of the 1%, and not all of them think that novelist Ayn Rand is an absurd source of moral, political and economic philosophy.

I may personally agree that it’s no sin for old people to cut back from five meals a week to four.  America has an obesity problem, you know?  I may agree that the brat in Indiana who wants to continue in Head Start when politicians have agreed to cut it across the board as part of their debate over who deserves what should stop whining, and so should his mother.  But if I do those things, I’m a bad person.  Really, think about it.  It’s only my opinion, but someone who justifies cutting food to the poor, on a philosophical theory about who deserves what, in a super-wealthy country where the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while everyone else does not– bad person.

Of course, there is no law against being a bad person.  Nor about a bad person being an elected public servant, leaving office and working for an average of 1000% more in the private sector as a lobbyist.   And I know it sounds terrible when you use a number like 1000%, it’s really only ten times as much.  If you take the actual numbers, it doesn’t really look so bad at all.  The public servant makes, say, $120,000 a year to serve, that servant can make much more in the private sector, but they make a sacrifice in pay in order to serve the rest of us.  So is it so unfair that the public servant leaves office with contacts, entree and expertise and makes $1,200,000 as a lobbyist?  If you look at it like that, it hardly seems unfair.  Look at it this way, it’s like the person only made $660,000 a year for those two years, only $480,000 a year if you divide by three with two years of public service, hardly a top earner in the USA.

I know, I know, prepare the eye roll.  Here we go, I’m done now — and may we have…. an eye roll. 

The Minor Leagues

I’ve been wrestling with applying to TED talks, I have a few more days to wrestle, the deadline for this round is Friday.  You can only apply once in twelve months.  I’m told that TED, like everyone else, looks at stats– how much of a following you have on-line, in the world, how many clicks, how many click-throughs.  By that criteria, I’m already disqualified, with well under a hundred watching each of the kids’ animations made by my visionary program.  

On this blahg I get a few readers on a good day, not that I’d mention gratootskyblahg to TED.  I have a small group of followers who seem to be about 50% business people looking for customers.  I am supposed to be a business person, if I’m to be attractive to TED.  My great idea worth spreading must already be out in the world, being discussed to some extent.  Being seen by more than the few hundred who’ve visited this great site.

In the real world I can’t get people to answer my calls, yet.  I think I may be in a better position in six months, when many more people are talking about my great idea worth spreading.  Maybe I should wait to apply to TED then, when I’ve raised my profile.  It’s a shot in the dark either way, who knows?

I stumbled on the farm system for TED yesterday, TEDx.  These appear to be the minor leagues for TED, small stages where people who may think their ideas are worth talking about get to audition, give a little taste of their stuff.  I watched some of these with a sinking heart yesterday.  Several Muslim comics, I watched one after another, addressing audiences in places like Doha, Qatar.  The titles were things like A Kuwaiti, a Saudi and an Egyptian walk into an Iranian Bar, Muslims are Funny, Too, and We All Laugh.  I hope we all laugh, it’s the best hope we have.  I haven’t had a laugh in a while, I was ready, overdue, really.  So I turned hopefully to my young Muslim brothers.

I watched one, an earnest young Saudi guy talking about how he helped bring Stand-Up comedy to the Arabian Peninsula.  As he talked very seriously about comedy, and getting laughs, the camera panned the faces of his audience.  There were a few smiles to be seen as I waited for laughs.  Where are the laughs?  I kept thinking.  None there.  Went to the next one, and the one after that, I smiled, but nothing got a laugh out of me.  A few of these guys had charm, but they were walking a very careful line.  Those who walk such lines are generally not hilarious.

Go to the major league TED talks and you will almost always have something to laugh about as you are provoked by super-bright performers to think new thoughts.  These people are at ease and inspired, they speak easily to the crowd of 1,500.   I was at ease and inspired at my mother’s funeral, even funny, true, but it was a crowd who knew me, and my mother, and appreciated the irreverence, which was a tribute to, and in part attributable to, her.   Forget that little show.  

Forget IBM, TED’s main secret sponsor, forget IBM’s stunning info-mercials at the end of each minor league TEDx Talk.  Forget, as you hear IBM’s genius public relations firm spin out the wondrous story of IBM changing the world with amazing ideas, that at one time IBM’s amazing ideas included keeping track of people an organized government headed by a psychopath murdered by the millions.  

I am in a dark mood lately, no lie.   No laughs here.  Maybe next time.  In fact, remind me to tell you the one about the visionary data company and the visionary purifier of blood.  It’ll kill yuh.

Insomnia

It is a loss for me, having nobody, restless, like a phantom limb.   The illusions of connection in a world of illusion, never mind.  I suppose one should feel satisfied with a random cluck now and then.  The sun pries its way through the blinds.   Now the birds are out there, with all their idiotic opinions in the airless morning.  

Cancer

My mother, always a large and heavy woman, was, for the last few years of her life, almost gaunt.  She’d been a fat baby, there’s an oblong portrait of her as an infant, she’d had it blown up and put into a gilt frame.  In the photo her eyes are black, she looks like an apple cheeked glittering-eyed Italian bambina.  She was overweight for most of her adult life, but for the last few years, gaunt.  Cancer and the Widow’s Diet, as she called it, did that for her.

Her mother had died of cancer, a terrible, painful, wasting death we all watched up close.  When it was finally time for my grandmother to die, she couldn’t go.  Her eyes turned huge, and black, and she screamed.  My grandmother was not in there any more, just the will to live.  It was dreadful to see.

My grandfather was gone over a year when she died.  He had survived lung cancer and the removal of a lung.  This all happened when I was a baby, he lived until my 24th year.  Although an ideal weight for his body his whole life, he was terrified of living alone without his mate and started cutting down on his calories.  He went on a low salt special diet with his cancer-stricken wife, although there was no medical reason to do it.  There was no practical reason either, they had always prepared and eaten different food every meal anyway.  My grandmother used to scream at him that he was an idiot, that he should eat what he always ate.   He was stubborn.  He lost a couple of pounds, carried too many bottles of seltzer back on a bus one 90 degree, 90% humidity Miami Beach afternoon, had trouble catching his breath when he came into the apartment.  Died not long afterwards of a heart attack.  Not to say that cancer wouldn’t have killed him too, it had already tried and almost succeeded once.

My father felt like crap the last two years of his life.  Looked terrible, had no energy, went to a cardiologist, endocrinologist and a hematologist regularly.  They tried a B-12 shot, which didn’t do much good.  One day he woke from a nap, paralyzed and yellow.  In the emergency room there was no doubt among the doctors and nurses there, he was clearly in the final stages of undetected liver cancer.  He didn’t keep his appointment with the hematologist the following day, he had only one pressing appointment to keep after that.  He was dead six days later.

His parents, my grandparents on my father’s side, both died young of cancer.  My first cousin, Ann, died of cancer before the age of 40.  Another cousin, Emily, same thing, dead of cancer around 40.  Emily’s father, my father’s cousin Gene, now 85, fought cancer as valiantly as my mother had, for more than twenty years.  He plays tennis and feels good.  He’s a tough bird.  

About five years ago I had skin cancer removed from my nose and my arm.  A year or two later more cancer removed from my nose, a few millimeters from the first site.  “It’s a hot spot,” explained the dermatologist, taking another biopsy.

I’m not bragging about all this cancer, please understand.

But it’s the background, explaining, in part, why this call to my old friend tonight has been tormenting me so much.  Soft tissue sarcoma is rare, the exact kind he has is a rare form of soft tissue sarcoma.  They’ve been cutting at him, assured him they got the whole tumor when they removed a buttock and part of his leg, but cancer is a cunning little fucker and it made liars of the doctors and their assurances.  Nerves were removed from his leg, most of the sciatic nerve on one side, recently the foot on that leg stopped working.  The doctors gave no guarantee about the surgery helping.  It was a good thing about the no guarantee, because the surgery didn’t help.   Chemo, the only game left for him, has been hit or miss, largely miss.  They are blind men throwing darts at a theoretical dart board in a room with no floor.  

I found myself talking like a nattering fool after getting his frank update tonight, blindly changing the subject at one point, the way I’ve heard others talk to people with end-stage cancer.  Tap-dancing, self-conscious, trying to be sympathetic, and helpful while feeling helpless against a horrific futility.  So, nattering on about everything else.   It made me sick to hear people do it to my grandmother, my mother.  It was more sickening still to hear me doing it.  My friend gently interrupted, it was time to change the dressing on his latest surgery, get some sleep before his doctor’s appointment tomorrow.  He was hoping to feel up to a visit soon, but no guarantees, he has been feeling pretty shitty.

I walked in the humidity trying to hold on to my new habit of cultivating happiness.  Might as well have tried to hold a fart in my hands in the merciless New York City night.

Clean Livin’

My father, known for a dark sense of humor, would smilingly chirp “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you” when asked how he had accomplished whatever someone was remarking on.   (Note harbinger of premeditated hereditary puckishness to follow.)

The accomplishment in this case is a successful pitch to take the animation workshop to a new group of kids, for a price much closer to sustainable for the program than what we’d been paid by the PTA of a NYC public school where I had the initial lab and the initial rats, the creative group of experimental young monkeys, the rolling auditions for the best grown-ups.  In fact, 2.5 times more sustainable, by my back of the envelope calculations.

So though I’ve endured a few days of excessive stomach acid and general dyspepsia, I feel I’ve earned the right to chirp, in a calm echo of the old master of darkness “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you!”