Author Archives: oinsketta

Open the book

I’m talking to myself.  The book is the notebook I made a list in on Thursday, on the way home from session 16 and a long dinner with my two assistants.  It was a very pleasant dinner, I thought.   The heavy bags I’d struggled with rushing to the session in a downpour (my pancho and ziplocks were indispensable)  were much lighter walking from the restaurant.  When I put on my backpack with the laptop, cameras and stands and picked up my duffle bagI thought I must have forgotten to pack something when I left the classroom.   My bags were much heavier when I set out, they were lighter when I hefted them to leave after the session and a nice dinner with these two intelligent women I hope to expand the workshop with.

On the train Thursday evening I made notes of calls I need to make, emails I must not forget to write, follow-ups, most of them, things to push the program forward when the school year ends in three weeks at our current site.  I was leaving for a long weekend, everyone was and I’d take care of all business on Tuesday when the business week resumed.    Only Tuesday found me staring at the cracked walls, the buckling ceiling and the missing tiles on the unwashed floor.  I remember thinking “what the fuck?”   I thought it many times, but I did not open the book to look over the checklist of my tasks.   At 1 a.m. I took a bike ride.

Today was Wednesday for me.  Some will call it Thursday, since it is 2 a.m. and technically they are correct.  It is 2:11 a.m. Thursday.  But for me it is still Wednesday, the day I woke up to 14 or 15 hours ago.  I could not open the book.  Did not open it.   Poetry may have spilled out of it like a delicious drink on the sandpaper tongue of a parched man, face and facade about to crack, but nothing could tempt me to open it.  I would not, did not.   I wrote a pleasant email to a lovely polymath, the inventor of many things scientific who has in recent decades turned his great mind to the problem of educating primary school children.   You may have heard of Sugata Mitra, I hope you have.  If you’ve been paying attention you have heard me go on about him.  Wonderful man, I wrote him a pleasant email today.  It took a very short time.  My small committee, two excellent writers who read these kind of letters for me and fire back their comments, both wrote back quickly to say it was just about ready to go.  I made one quick pass, trimmed a few sentences, sent it off to Mitra in Newcastle, found his personal email address, shot a copy across the pond to him over there too.

But I did not open the book with my list of important reminders in it.  It was as though I didn’t want to be reminded of the steep uphill climb.   I walked to Target in the Bronx, bought t-shirts and a pot to cook in (I have one to piss in).   I found cauliflower for $2.50 and bought a head, took it home, reduced it to a bowl of florets, chopped garlic, ginger, jalapeno peppers, made suki gobi out of it in the suddenly humid NYC summer.  Listened to the Yankees get stomped by the hapless Mets and then took another bike ride, working the heart and lungs.

But I did not open the book.  No force in the world could get me to reach on to the chair, extract it from the open blue bag and pull back that heavy cover.   The cover of that book weighs I do not know how many metric tons. 

Social Welfare Nonprofits 501(c)(4)

A friend and I started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a little over a year ago.  True to our charter, no profits whatsoever have been made.  Any money we do one day raise, over $25,000, I think, requires us to file what I’ve heard is literally sixty pages of paperwork with the IRS to show that we have complied with the complex laws that govern charities.

Part of the application for nonprofit status with the IRS was promising that we would undertake no political advocacy of any kind in connection with our educational activities.  Fair enough, I thought, I don’t support any of these political candidates anyway.   Obama’s voice has become as foul and disturbing to me as Dubya’s, as Rumsfeld’s.  My only political aim is a much broader one— let children think, voice their opinions, teach themselves how to learn what they need to know.  Don’t be sheep jerking your knee in a Rockettes like chorus line of high stepping party line robots.

That’s what 501(c)(4), the Social Welfare Nonprofit, is for– political activity disguised as charity.  Why they put it into law is probably the same reason a dog licks its privates.  Check it out.  You can raise millions for political “education”, even spend tens of millions on direct political advertising (as was done in the last election), as long as you are coy and couch your activities as educational.  For example, Karl Rove raised and spent tens of millions on political TV commercials with his 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS or whatever the non-profit 501(c)(4) analogue to his for-profit political money machine is.  Those commercials were for educational and social welfare purposes first, influencing the outcome of elections second.  And that urine running down your leg is really rain, pure mountain rain.

Was it wrong for the IRS to target right-wing sounding 501(c)(4) groups for extra scrutiny?  Yes, it was wrong.  Heads rolled, apologies were made.  Calls for prison time for the authors of the nasty questionnaires the IRS sent out were made by the man with the strange orange suntan.   It’s not time to compare the crimes of the two criminal conspiracies, Democratic and Republican, that vie for control of our great nation.   One reason is that I don’t have ten hours to spend listing the most recent ones.  Another is that it’s like arguing about who is worse, Mao or Stalin.

But here’s my question– why are the targeted 501(c)(4) groups so outraged that the IRS sought lists of donors?   Transparency is desired by everyone but the criminals opacity protects.   If you give money to a nonprofit, why is that a secret protected activity in an arena where money supposedly equals speech?  I have no idea.  But I do have another idea.

Get rid of 501(c)(4), it’s complete bullshit.   If you want to teach your children that God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh and that all this was 5,000 years ago, go right ahead, God bless you.  If you want to teach your children that homosexuals should be put to death in a hail of fist sized rocks, it’s your right as a free citizen.  Just don’t demand the right to raise millions in tax-exempt money from secret donors to influence the outcome of elections and call it Social Welfare.   

Two minute drill

If no consequence is attached to evil practices such practices will continue.  If you don’t raise an eyebrow when your predecessor redefines torture to allow it to be practiced at will, nobody should be surprised when you do the same.  If you find remote control killings of enemies and innocent alike preferable to boots on the ground, you’ll do it.   If you’re cool with a government that prosecutes whistle blowers and tries them in secret, well, you’re cool with it.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, necessarily, to wink at evil, but don’t put your arm around me, brother.

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.