Author Archives: oinsketta

12 Minute Run

Wind sprints, baby, run with it.

20 years ago I was amazed to see a restless class of third graders enthralled by a tape of a 1950s radio show with guest star Bela Lugosi as murderous pyromaniac Nick Segeden.   In the end he solemnly reminds children, after cops shoot him, non-fatally, “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” which may also have been the name of the show.  He draws the words out like a melodramatic high camp vampire.  The kids loved the radio play, wanted to hear the whole thing again as soon as it ended.

Point is– you can make a great radio play with kids, add sound effects, a podcast.   You want a story?  Hard to animate, animation is for fun ideas, quick, lively, unexpected.  Maybe the podcast is the way to go, what chu think?

I do not think, 8:45 left on the timer.  Why so chipper?  An old friend is struggling with the anaconda of soft tissue sarcoma which has cost him large chunks of his body.   Cancer wants the whole thing, my friend is fighting.  I think of calling him three or four times a week, but I’m scared.   What a good friend I am.

Do not think, 7:15 left on the timer, panned left, my voice imitating Bela Lugosi, panned right, and on three separate tracks, I’m the cops trying to apprehend him.  

In the left ear, Lugosi” “not so fast, gentleman…. I have a bottle of gasoline… and a ra-a-a-a-a-g!”  Pop, a gunshot, wings Segeden, he drops the bottle before he can set the rag on fire.  He cries.

“Relax, Segeden, it’s only a flesh wound.  You’ll live to fry for what you’ve done,” I say as one of the cops in the right ear.

I want you guys to write a script for a radio play.  OK, fine, improvise a story.  We need characters, a setting, a problem, a complication and some kind of weird, funny solution.   Yee hah.  Damn, it’s going to be fun!

What are you looking at?

3:51 on the clock, keep running, son.  

OK, there’s this.  Whatever is implanted in your mind that can hurt you will find the best possible time to leap out and do its darnedest.  Take this:  sure, you’ve been doing this successfully for six months, sure every step has been forward, you’ve proved it can be done, and probably scaled up into a business.  But, wait for it, wait…. “YOU SUCK!”  

Whenever the voice talks to you like that, ruthless and unfair, smile and nod.  “I do indeed suck, at this straw immersed in my milkshake.  And, uh, none for you, my merciless old suckless friend.”

1:33 and that’s really the best example you can think of?  

It so would appear.  Self rah rah sessions become mandatory in a tone-deaf world of worried sphinxes.   These sphinxes have a hard enough time without your problems, without mine.  They can barely help themselves, so go easy on them, would you?  

0:18  I most certainly will.

Ahimsa in Practice

The cells in your body, flooded with persuasive chemicals, will tell you clearly  to kick somebody’s ass.   There are many who are adept at making these chemicals flow like a waterfall.  

Your soul will thank you if you unclench your fist, make your hand soft, and do something productive, instead of kicking the ass of someone who is begging for, and richly deserves, an ass-whuppin’.  

Best to avoid these types altogether, if you can.  If you can’t, practice effective action to neutralize them.  They can sometimes actually be made to disappear, depending on your level of skill.  

Practice.

Forward Momentum

It doesn’t roll uphill by itself, the heavy rock, I can tell you from personal experience.   Instead of working to move the boulder up that slippery slope at the moment, I find myself reading a book about the biological imperative that makes us hesitate when the going gets hard, apparently a fear center deep in the brain called the amygdala.  This primitive reptile structure enabled our survival by letting fight or flight overrule all other processes in a nano-second.  

I imagine that if you walk a familiar path straight to work every day, and get paid, and go home to leisure, you might have an easier time moving yourself forward than if you’re trying to invent a situation where you can be most productive and help the most people.  

But I’m only imagining that, so many people drag themselves to work, full of dread and loathing, no matter how much they get paid.

Touching a Nerve

A woman I know, now a very successful businesswoman with her own business, took me to lunch on April 10.  She made me two promises, kept neither.  On the third anniversary of my mother slipping into a coma,  (her mother died three days later and we were momentarily united in grief), I emailed her asking her about those two promises.  The book she refers to is one I loaned her called “Death Benefits” that I found very useful in processing the loss of my mother.  She was too busy to open it and promised to have her assistant send it back to me pronto.

It was a fourth email, mixed in with a call her assistant fielded.  I was direct.  So was she.  Here’s her reply, a classic of its kind, which arrived 21 minutes after I sent mine:

I am busy–I am running a very demanding business, travelling, and in addition have been engrossed in two opportunities to sell and merge my business over the past two months.  I also raised $100,000 for the nonprofit that honored me, so it has been an exceptionally busy time.  I can only deal with non-work stuff on weekends and last weekend was the first weekend we had electricity (and internet service) on Fire Island, where we have been every weekend since I saw you.  I am not sure yet what I am doing about M____.  I know her through A____ and he thought my idea that she could help you was totally off base.  When I have time and am seeing her in person, I will raise it with her.  However, if there is any risk whatsoever that you would send her an email like this one, I will not pursue it–so please promise me that.

I am so sorry I completely forgot about your book.  I forgot to send myself a reminder, which I have done now.  I do feel terrible that you won’t have it tomorrow on your mom’s anniversary and will take care of it ASAP.   My mom died on May 24th.

A____ is right.  The idea that she could help me in any way is totally off base.  On to more productive thoughts.

Love, Death and the Bottom Line

A one minute video of a kitten having a nightmare and being comforted by her cat mother gets 51,640,359 views because it’s cute (it is, check it out) and because it adorably shows us what we all want– someone to calm our fears in the middle of the night.  Love is the only thing that really matters, on the way to death, though we live in a world obsessed with the “bottom line”.   Love and the “bottom line” are often at odds.  Guess who usually wins?  The result is sometimes a heavily armed “gunman” acting out unbearable pain.

It will surprise nobody to learn that Antonin Scalia’s brilliant lawyer son, Eugene Scalia,  is the lead lawyer attacking Dodd-Frank’s weak-ass, loophole ridden attempt to regulate the super-lucrative government backed gambling house banks, too big to fail, that enriched themselves enormously while sucking almost every drop of blood out of the economy that sustains it.  Eugene Scalia skillfully drives a tank through the loopholes in the law that require a thorough “cost/benefit analysis” before the government may place any limitation on these monster profit machines.  After all, shouldn’t masters of the universe be able to pay themselves whatever they like?  And why is it their responsibility if people are stupid, sign contracts and lose their homes or their pensions?

You can be sure Justice Scalia is very proud of Eugene, probably hugs him warmly at family gatherings.  Is that not love?

Would it surprise you to learn that the lead attorney for Monsanto, a bland, mild-mannered but deadly mongoose, is Dick Cheney’s son-in-law?  I’m sure the two are very close, share drinks and jokes at family gatherings.  Probably shot a few quail together, I’d wager.  Neither man feels responsible for the enormous damage their actions create because they are following the noble creed that is woven into the American Dream:  prevail.

But this is not the kind of love I’m talking about.  This kind of selectively blind love is closer to death.   The love I’m talking about does not abide the suffering of others.   It is rare, and the key to a calm and productive life, and it spreads like your proverbial wildfire when it touches a person.  That’s the love I’m going for.

The Power of Calmness

Easily lost and essential, this is the power that makes difficult things possible– the calm, patient force that facilitates the organization of chaos, enables the overcoming of great obstacles.   Try doing a stunt requiring coordination, creativity and daring without the necessary calm and witness how easily the neck can be broken.

Simba Perkins, at eight or nine, seeing his third grade teacher, me, about to get into his car, calls out and waves, balanced on a railing four feet above the cement.   Without any hesitation, and to my horror as I see what he’s about to do and hold out my hand to stop him from forty feet away, he springs backwards into the air, flips neatly upside down and with his head pointed straight at the deadly concrete, whips his body, catlike as Bruce Lee and lands lightly on his feet.  I exhale, smile, get into my car and drive off, impressed as hell even now, twenty years later.

A friend has long been working on an idea that could become a very engaging and interesting TV series.   He comes up with a solution to a long-running impediment– how the characters all meet in the first place and come to interact.   The elusive organizational device that will set his idea into motion week after week.   He excitedly describes his breakthrough to his wife.  His wife tells him it’s a stupid idea.

I laugh when he tells me this.  “What the fuck does she know?” I ask him, telling him I think the idea is ingenious, which it is.  He laughs too, because, truly, his practical and brilliant wife doesn’t know shit about this particular thing– creating something wholly from one’s imagination.   He tells me her comment stopped him in his tracks and he was unable to move the idea forward for days after she told him it was a stupid idea.

Today, in Costco, a friend who worries about my lack of business savvy, of worldly success, of my proven history of dreaming, spinning out ideas and talking a great game without actually ever getting paid for any of it, does the same thing to me that this guy’s wife did to him.   He certainly had no intention of doing it, but here’s how it’s done.

I’m Simba Perkins, standing on a railing, about to do the Bruce Lee backflip.  This guy is me, but instead of helplessly gesturing hesitation from 40 feet away, manages to make a superhuman leap and grab an ankle as I take off, trying to prevent my idiot backflip and frantically talking sense to me as he lunges.  “You can’t do it on concrete!  You’ll get paralyzed for life!”  Only the lunge and ankle grab don’t manage to save me, and his worst fears for me come true.

“I’m the guy,” he says, putting himself in the place of the powerful executive he’s managed to get me a business meeting with “and I have no idea what you’re talking about, exactly.”

So I calm myself, in my sleeplessness in a strange house where I’m taking care of yet another lonely dog for someone who’s away.  Here’s what I’m talking about, exactly.  You set up a business meeting for me with a very powerful and accomplished producer, entrepreneur, billionaire.  You want to know how I will pitch it.  I’m walking in Costco when we speak and I tell you over the phone that I will keep it short and sweet, describe my program in sixty to ninety seconds, show him a clip or two and ask him for his ideas.

“That’s too general, you should ask him something specific, as we discussed,” you say.

“I will tell him at this point, as I expand and try to fund the program, that I am looking for people with the expertise to help me get it to the next stage of development.   I know there are experts who can tell me the best ways to do things now that will take me months or years to learn on my own.  I will learn to do these things, as I’ve learned everything that’s taken the program this far, but a couple of people who know business, outreach, recruitment, funding and so forth would be a huge help and speed things up greatly.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” he tells me, “and I’ve been there with you from the beginning on this project.”

What I hear is the opposite of soothing calmness.  I hear, “why do you think you can do this spontaneously with an important stranger when you can’t even do it with an old friend?”  “you’re not ready”  “your presentation is going to fall flat”  “you’re going to embarrass me and my painter friend who set this meeting up” “you really don’t know the first thing about business meetings with busy billionaires” “you’re being cavalier” “I don’t think you’ll make a coherent pitch without a carefully crafted speech, in writing and memorized”  “did you even think of what you might possibly want from him?  We talked about this a week ago? have you given it no thought?”  “why are you so determined to fail?”  “why do you imagine you’ll be quick on your feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man when you just failed at improvising it coherently with me as you walk through Costco?”  “Why won’t you let me help you?”

Here’s why I imagine I’ll be quick on my feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man.  I speak well and am quick on my feet, I know the program and its philosophy intimately, can present it quickly and show the man charming examples of what I’m talking about.  I can also give the man as much detail as he likes.  I don’t see this as the high pressure business situation that it also is.   I’m playing with house money, there is truly nothing lost if this chap doesn’t see the point of the program, there is a fantastic upside if he gets it.  If he’s excited by the program I don’t need more than that– he will find a way to help.  If he doesn’t like it, the best script in the world won’t sell it to him.    I can explain and evoke it.  He will get it or not.  What do you not understand about this?

“I don’t understand anything you just said,” you will say, and I will smile, imagining I am not in a strange apartment, sleepless and far from my toys, but where I always am when I dream– in exactly the right place for blessings to fall gently on me like soft rain on a flower in Sekhnet’s garden.  

Rather than, bien sur, writing this to nobody at 4:53 a.m. to calm myself enough to sleep, instead of being up to have breakfast with old friends a mile away who are up and at ’em at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday because they are up and at ’em, baby.

Figures a do-nothing dreamer would sleep til noon, doesn’t it?  Couldn’t he dream just as well from 11 to 7?  No doubt, no doubt about that.

Affect, Affectation and Affection

The man with no affect regards us like a cat, stone-faced, carved of a substance unlike our own.   We wonder, as the features do not change, what is going on inside this head with its sphinx face.

Affectation is putting on airs, pretending to be something more than you are.  It is an affectation to pretend you’re unconcerned with things that deeply concern you, tragic kind of idiocy, too.   Most affectation, it would seem, comes from want of affection.  “They will love me if I seem better than I am,” reasons the affected person as they effect affectation.

Affection is what every creature instinctively seeks.  When we find it we feel loved, less alone, connected, at home in something greater than ourselves.  This is something you can explain to the man without affect, but you will never be sure he got it.

What I sent her instead

Well, you know what they say about statistics, particularly when spun by partisans like this NRA speaker.  If you throw in every third world sink-hole, countries in poverty with violent gangs, repressive governments, a lot of guns and low value on human life, yes, the US looks relatively OK.

 
Compared to other wealthy nations, not so good, as a glance at the attached chart compiled by the UN will show you.
Image

American mass-killing gunman doesn’t even get Bronze

There are plenty of proofs that America has no real problem with gun violence compared to the rest of the world.   Here’s one:

The Top 5 Worst Gun Massacres by an Individual

Perpetrator Location Date Victims
1
 Anders Behring Breivik
(aged 32, captured)		 Utøya Island, Norway 22 Jul 2011 77 killed,
(151 wounded)
2
 Woo Bum-Kon
(aged 27, suicide at scene)		 Sang-Namdo, South Korea 26 Apr 1982 57 killed,
(35 wounded)
3
 Martin Bryant
(aged 29, captured)		 Port Arthur, Australia 28 Apr 1996 35 killed,
(21 wounded)
4
 Seung-Hui Cho
(aged 23, suicide at scene)		 Blacksburg, Virginia USA 16 Apr 2007 32 killed,
(25 wounded)
5
 Campo Elí­as Delgado
(aged 52, killed at scene)		 Bogota, Colombia 4 Dec 1986 30 killed,
(15 wounded

When she sent me another proof, a speech delivered the other day at an NRA convention in Texas, I wrote:

Thanks, but I thought we agreed not to argue about politics. 
And if you’re going to raise politics, can there be any good reason to send me a purely partisan email?   This speech was delivered by a true-believer to a partisan NRA crowd in Texas in defense of “our way of life”  (different than those weird “other” Progressive Elites in NYC and Hollywood).  Even before I read it I was backing away from this particular speaker.   His arguments notwithstanding, I remain  unconvinced that guns are as harmless as butter, even if  they are as American as apple pie.
Why do ABC and other corporate media (and virtually any other non-NRA source) state numbers about America leading the wealthy world in gun violence by a clear margin?   Do you think they might be fronts for people who want to take our American gun rights from us– people who hate our freedom?   
 
There are two sides to every argument and the truth is often a shade of grey neither side will agree to.   So, as the NRA speech says, if you subtract the 65% of American gun deaths that are suicides (and these 95% successful suicides were not even counted as gun deaths until very recently) and then subtract all the “urban” gun killings– you know, as you sent me recently, black inner-city gangsters killing each other at rates dis- proportionate to their numbers, liberal perverts killing each other — then America is actually the most peaceful country in the world.   I agree 100%.
That only 500 or so were slaughtered in free-lance American gun massacres in 30 years would seem to clinch it.  A gun is no more dangerous than a bar of soap.   Certainly less dangerous, statistically, than lightning (according to the speech anyway, I didn’t check it) or a lawyer’s crooked mouth.
In retrospect I’m sorry I opined that it’s criminal that a small well-funded group of gun rights activists can override the will of  90% of the population.   But you know, I guess if that small group of gun lovers ever got really mad, it would be worse for everyone.  So I agree 100%– no laws against any type of firearm!   Freedom for all, that’s my motto.
I went too far with the P.S. that follows, but I read a bit more of this decent, compassionate, non-racist, Christian NRA fellow’s flowing speech and eventually I’d swallowed enough of his gas.   I’ll delete the PS when I write back to her, if ever, on this subject.
gun homicide chart
 
P.S.  
And I wish educated speechwriters like this guy speaking to his NRA friends in Texas would stop reminding people that the KKK is a Democratic party apparatus (ignore the eerie irony that this party is now silent in the former Confederacy, now solidly Red, since traitorous double-talking Democrats passed the Civil Rights legislation of the late 60s) and that Liberals and Progressives hate blacks and freedom so much.  Most inconvenient truths!!!

 I think we can all agree, as the speechifying NRA member says:

 We will work together side by side, white, black, Hispanic or native-American.  It doesn’t matter because we don’t see those divisions.   WE will work together as Americans not only to preserve our rights, but the rights of our children to be safe, our wives and daughters to not be held at knife or gunpoint by a rapist and our most precious and vulnerable little ones to have the right to survive a simple walk down a city street or, God forbid, survive a day of public education.