Author Archives: oinsketta

One Problem with the internet

If your goal is to be mindful, to taste the food you are putting into your body, to understand the effect your words will have before you speak, to be aware of others and their problems, to be calm and present in the moment, you will have already put limits on your use of the internet.

If your goal is to be distracted and/or entertained, to have your views confirmed, to preach to an imaginary choir, the internet is your place.

Know this, though, there is nothing easier to ignore than something on the internet.   Of all forms of communication, e-mail is probably the easiest to ignore.  Like falling off a log, baby.  Yeah, print out that email you sent me, I still never saw it, or if I did, so what?  You never answered that one I forwarded about serotonin levels in decorticated cats.

Sabbath

In ten minutes I will either have explained it or not.   The idea that a beast must work around the clock, with no rest and no time to restore itself, is a brutal notion from a hard-scrabble age.  Among enlightened people the importance of relaxation, a pleasurable holiday from the cares of the world, is understood.  

Don’t worry about me, I have one eye on the clock and almost seven and a half minutes to go.

On the sixth day God made Adam, looked at His creation, light and dark, order out of chaos, the living world, the oceans, all the creatures of the oceans, and the sky, and the sky itself, and all the land dwelling animals, reptiles, insects, mammals, the endless ingenious variation and variety.  God looked at His work and smiled and said “Good!” and took the seventh day off.

God rested.  Modeling the proper respect for yourself as a god, taking your rest after a job well-done.  You have worked hard and deserve the day of rest.   Use the day leisurely, to rest, repair yourself, dream, relax your worries.  So few of us actually take a day every week to do this, or even a few hours, except to see a movie, perhaps.

Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.  One of the Ten Commandments, up there with Honor thy father and thy mother, and Thou shall not kill.

In two minutes I’m going to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.  I’m going to tune up all the ukuleles and make a chorus of them.  They will play a vamp in the night.  This vamp will be very simple, and will thrum at the pulse of a relaxed heartbeat.   The vamp will have a two part riff that will go over it.  The boys sing the call, the girls sing the response.  Then they switch, then a few one and two note solos.  By then the strings will be well in tune, the beat calm and the notes to sing very clear and obvious.  

Time.

The Law is A Blunt Instrument (10 minute drill)

That’s the nicest way I can put it, by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think it was.  Again, two seconds on Google is too long for me, as I’ve set the timer for ten minutes and am determined to get on with it.

We’ll go with the Q & A format today:

Do you regret the three years in law school, forty plus thousand in debt and the ten years practicing that miserable (for the subsistence lawyer) profession?

I don’t regret it.  School has always come easily to me, I like books, at least 30% of what I studied was interesting.   The discipline and structure of law, so foreign to my way of thinking and so much the lingua franca of our world, was worth subjecting myself to, I think.   Standing in front of certain judges was a sickening exercise, and I saw up close the corruption of the system.   Shoot, I saw that already in the NYC school system.  Regrettable as the whole adventure was, I don’t really regret it, no.

Are you a hopeless romantic, then?

Hopeless, probably.  Romantic, well, you’d get an argument there from some people.  One person’s romance is the other person’s self-indulgent narcissistic daydream, I suppose.  But we were talking about the law, were we not?

Who are you asking?

Funny!  I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor.  Right, then.  Yes, the law.   What is it about the law that is so disgusting?

Are you asking the questions now, as well as answering zem?

It so would appear, yes, and with less than five minutes left on the clock, it would behoove us to keep things moving.  What is so disgusting about a blunt instrument is to see it used on things it cannot possibly help.  Some wit said if the only tool you have is a hammer the answer to every question will be a hammer.

A hammer?

Yes.  Now, as I was saying, the blunt instrument of Western Law, and probably every kind of law that industrial societies are based on, was designed to protect the property of the wealthy.   If you take a fine-toothed comb over the US Constitution, famed around the world as the blueprint for democratic government, and the first such charter, you will eventually discover three discreet phrases, inserted by lawyers who owned slaves, that make it perfectly legal to import and own ‘such persons as the states shall see fit to admit’ and that, if you own enough of them, your representation in Congress would be enhanced by 60% of the voting power of such creatures, if God had seen fit to give them the vote instead of chains and an angry, poor, sunburned white man to whip them. 

“Pish tosh!”, you say, “ancient history!” as I see 39 seconds left on the clock.  Let me just say this then:  read the Constitution, read The Slaugtherhouse Cases and Cruikshank, observe the almost century-long-sleep of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and have a very nice day, there’s the beeper.

Challenge

It was Mussolini, I believe, who said “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”   I could check this in two seconds on Google, but the point is, they hung the guy and his girlfriend upside down from meathooks in a public thoroughfare, this strong man.   Benito Mussolini, in his arrogance, did some bad things, I understand, in addition to making the trains run on time.  I don’t say he didn’t deserve the meathook, probably he did.  Other people deserve it too, probably.  I can think of several off hand, but none of the ones I’m thinking of will get it.  I can say that with the oracular assurance of a modern day Nostradamus.

What I am driving at is the challenge of making something good out of all this talking to myself.  If someone writes you a check at the end of the week, no matter how lousy the pay, you still get a check, money you can spend to sustain yourself, a bit of validation, no matter how unsatisfactory the amount of money or the actual work may feel to you.  If nobody writes you a check for your work, you may ask yourself questions, things like “what the fuck?” and “who in their right mind would work this hard for no pay?”  or  you might find yourself writing over and over “all work and no pay makes Jack a very exploited and bitter little bastard”.    

“No, no,” you will tell yourself, the very Voice of Reason.  “Nobody will pay unless you make them pay.  It’s the American way, baby.  You just make them pay.  Rugged individual, man.  Nobody wants to pay, they want everything for free.  You just say ‘pay me’ and you look at them very tough, without blinking, stone-faced, and then they swallow, and there’s a stare down, and then, if you’re really good, they pay you.  That’s all, man.  No need to get all philosophical about it.”

“Or,” another voice of reason will chime in, (though not mine), “you can do what most people do– figure out a good or service you can sell for money and sell it.  Use your credentials and work experience, your network of business contacts, for godsakes.  You can make a living most easily by working for an outfit that worries about raising the money to pay you.  Then it’s only a matter of abiding the politics of that particular workplace and you will get paid.”

“It’s called maturity.  You do something you might not necessarily love and you get paid.  That’s why they call it work. It’s what 99% of the world does.”  

I cannot tell you how many times this reasonable Alice Kramden-like lecture has been presented to me patiently by people close to me who have had it up to here with my dreaming and my judgmental complaining.   Look, we torture people and kill children with drones and in other ways, and, yes, we also maintain an apartheid school system virtually unchanged (except for the addition of guns) since Brown v. Board of Education almost sixty years ago, nobody said we were perfect, shut up about it already, we’re trying to enjoy our meal in this nice restaurant.  Go find a leper to kiss and let us eat and drink in peace.

Better, perhaps, if they just spit on me and spare me the lecture.  Then we could duke it out, they’d be surprised, I think, at how tough Ahimsa Man really is.  It hasn’t killed me, after all, it must have made me strong as a meathook.  I tell you what, I wouldn’t want to try me.

But let’s not, as they say, go there.  I was feeling overwhelmed last night and said to myself the exact words my father said to me right before he died.  “I don’t know how to do this…” I said to myself, echoing precisely what my dying father said to me as he tried to figure out how to stop breathing.  Then he did it like a champ, like Rembrandt painting one of those transcendent final self-portraits, like Martin Luther King Jr. giving that speech the last night of his life.  Just goes to show you.  

It’s sad, and it’s funny, that when I woke up seven hours after posting the piece about my father’s death I had a number of emails from WordPress.  When somebody “likes” a blog post an automated email is generated to the blogger telling her or him that somebody “thought your post was awesome”.  The email then suggests you might like to visit the blog of the person who thought your’s was awesome.  And these blogs I visit, every one of them is usually pretty awesome.  

But the funny thing I noticed today was the amazing coincidence that four of the people who thought my piece about the death of my father was awesome have the same great idea for me– become an affiliate marketer in your spare time to generate enough cash to be a globe trotting bon vivant living off your laptop and the constant stream of commissions that will come your way.  It’s awesome, man, seriously.  

I can still write whatever I want, dream whatever I want, be as judgmental and complaining as always, I just have to set up squeeze pages and so forth and drive imaginary traffic to affiliate sites where the affiliates will sell things and send me my commissions.  So easy, I hear, that virtually anyone can do it, and with even a 2% conversion rate you can do this from the beach in Bali or from a sweaty hovel anywhere you choose.    

Although, who am I kidding?  More to the point, who the hell am I writing this to?  And would you get a load of this rogue’s gallery under the Google search for Nostradamus (and who knew he had a brother named Jean?)– what the hell is Psy doing between Hitler and Bonaparte?  “People also search for”?  What?   Really?  People also search for their ass with both hands and wind up scratching  a hole in the ground.

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My Father’s Death

When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”   Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.

“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around.  He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.

We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end.  I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better.  He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes.  Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk.  Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.

I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said.   We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of.  I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill.  Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.

“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self.  “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time.  Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.”  My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset.  I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.  

Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.”  She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.  

“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse.  I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew.  The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time.  She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.

They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room.  My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…”   I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK.  I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last.  His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano.  It was eerie how natural the movement was.  The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils.  “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them.   I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.

I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were.  I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was.  A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.

“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.”   Same phrase.  It struck me.  Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”

Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness.  I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to.  The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Just as I was feeling I may have been a little harsh on the State of Texas, I was listening to a podcast from KCRW in Santa Monica, Warren Olney’s news show To The Point.  The show, entitled Are High-Stakes Tests Corrupting Public Education? was broadcast on April 5, 2013.  The theme of the show is stated next to the podcast:

After charges of systematic cheating on standardized testing by administrators and teachers a backlash is growing against standardized testing.

Since there is a growing trend to tie teacher pay to the scores of their students on standardized tests, it is not surprising that some teachers and administrators have been caught cheating.  All it takes, after all, is the eraser on your number two pencil and a pile of student exams.

My sister teaches first grade in Florida, one of the poster states for No Child Left Behind, now called Race to the Top, both of which are based on the Texas assessment model where President George W. Bush’s people got the idea.   Florida is also a “right to work” state, which means, actually “the right to work without a contract or union interference”.  You can get a contract in a “right to work” state, but don’t expect too much about keeping your job to be guaranteed in it.  

My sister, who teaches students from poor and largely illiterate families, many of whom don’t speak English, is graded on the same scale as those who teach the children of the affluent.  There is no curve.  You can imagine her torment, thinking of her pay being tied not to how much she actually teaches her students, which is considerable, but to how well they do on standardized tests, when compared across the nation to every other kid.  Her class, by the way, always has the top scores, by far, in her school.  But she and her students are judged against the scores of students in wealthy neighborhoods in far away states that fare much better in educational outcomes.

Anyway, it will surprise few, I suppose, to hear it stated on Olney’s show, at around 8:10, that Texas leads the nation in money spent on standardized testing and also on the sheer number of tests given.  

It has a wonderful side effect, what one of Olney’s guests called “drill and kill”, this relentless teaching to the test, preparing kids to guess the right answers and learn strategies for gaming these often shabbily designed tests (I speak from experience, having prepared classes for and proctored a number of these), it serves to demoralize the staff and children of schools in poor neighborhoods.  These schools can then be shown to have failed, and closed, and public money can be given to the private sector to operate competitive schools that can succeed.  In the end, to a certain type, privatizing everything is the way to go, since the “free market” (think “right to work”) is the best arbiter of good and bad.

After all, look how well the free market has taken care of controlling health care costs in the USA (leading the world in expense, pretty far down the list in health outcomes), making sure banks and investment houses (which are largely the same thing now) play fairly, guaranteeing a baseline quality of life in the richest country in the world so that no old person ever has to eat dog food (cat food is also a possibility).  

Ach, there I go again, hating our freedom… I really am a one trick pony.  Good night.

Unable to find data

Much as I dislike statements of “fact” that are not backed up with a citation to a credible source, I included one yesterday about Texas leading the USA, and by extension the world, in felony assault on children.   I’d heard the stat cited on Public Radio in NYC some time ago, and it stuck.   The actual show, and time and date of broadcast, is probably noted in the drawing book I was carrying at the time, but there are too many of them to flip through.

I did some on-line research and was unable to find the supporting documentation, or anything resembling it.  Not to say that it’s not true, but a source has been hard to find.

You can read a report on Felony Assault on Children here, but Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice has thoughtfully redacted pages 17-67.  It does not appear that there is a state by state breakdown in the report, though under the section on state law there is a defendant demographics table on page 45.   I suppose a Freedom of Information request could be addressed to the DOJ.

Guns

They have only one purpose, to project bullets at speeds that can penetrate.  Like a rattle snake, guns are not inherently good or inherently bad.   They are probably fun for shooting at targets, but there are many not content to use them on things that are not alive.  And, like a sleeping rattlesnake woken by a careless foot on its back, the trigger of a gun is faster and more deadly than lightning.

I know several hunters, and while I don’t agree that killing animals is fine, these men are responsible, decent people.   They care greatly about the environment, use their guns safely (except for the animals they kill)  and eat the animals they kill.   Whatever my feelings about the anonymous deer and wild boar they may kill, I don’t begrudge people like them the right to responsibly keep and shoot their guns.  None of their children will ever stumble across a loaded gun and accidentally kill another child.

It’s the idea that if small, bookish Jews in Eastern Europe and Germany had only had enough high powered guns they could have prevented the Holocaust that makes me crazy.  Or that the cure for homicidal maniacs armed to the teeth and intent on murdering as many children as possible before turning the gun on themselves could be stopped, if only every kindergarten teacher in the country was armed with firepower equal to the assault weapon wielded by the insane intruder.  

America is a violent place, and we lead the world in murder by gun, by a long shot, as it were.  The land was taken by violence, at gunpoint.  Slavery was outlawed in Mexico in 1829.  Americans who moved into Mexican territories wanted to have their slaves with them, Mexico gave them guff about this after 1830.  Remember the Alamo!  Our guns finally made the Mexicans change their minds, realize we were right.  “Keep your slaves, keep ‘Texas’, have a nice day,” said the ghosts of dead Mexicans.

Texas, formerly Mexico, has the world’s highest rate of felony assaults on children.  These are assaults where bones are broken, organs crushed, real physical damage is inflicted on top of the trauma of the assault itself.  Granted most of these assaults are not committed with guns, but what the hell?  Is this really the best we can do?   

Is it any consolation that Texas also leads the country (and probably the world) in executions year after year?    

Spring Cleaning

I paid $92 a couple of months ago for the privilege of riding my bicycle 38 miles through the five boroughs of New York City.   Thousands do this ride every May, I’ve done it several times.  Sections of highways are closed as motorists seethe, and it is very cool to be biking on the FDR, the Belt Parkway, across the 59th Street and Verrazano bridges.  The trouble is, I hadn’t been on a bike in months.   Last night I took my 7th ride in 11 days, getting my legs and lungs ready for that long ride.

But that’s not the point, nor should anybody be particularly interested.  In fact, there is little reason for anybody to be interested in what comes next– and I can say that with confidence, even as what comes next, at the moment, is an expanse of white below the words I’m typing now.    

I like to draw and I have become addicted to certain drawing implements lately.  If I don’t have a black ink filled brush (calli free-flowing waterproof black) , a yellow ink (Winsor Newtown’s beautiful Winsor Yellow) filled brush, black and red calligraphy pens in two widths, a .9 mm mechanical pencil and a few other odd devices, I am desperate.  I look over at the metal mug filled with them and I feel happy.  Leave one of them at home, I am bereft.  I have extras, empty and ready, in a drawer against the possibility I might lose one of these marvelous drawing implements.  I say again, I love to draw.  I cannot help it.

But I am not organized about it, do not sell the drawings, or send them anywhere to be published.  I rarely even think to give them as gifts.  I’m sure the ones I do give most often get lost, or tossed.   So I draw something and put it to the side.  Another drawing goes on top, but not in a neat pile, there are other things under the drawings.  A bunch of cables for electronic devices, a coil of wire, some one-hand folding knives, a bank statement, metal rulers, a roll of gaffer’s tape, phone charger, digital recorder, wire bound and other notebooks, music– I can see the corner of the lead sheet for Body and Soul winking out at me as I tap here.  The desk, as large as a door, is basically two precariously piled haystacks of drawings and other items, with a little space in the middle, under the computer screen.

The leak in my ancient bathroom sink (it has two spigots, one for hot, the other for cold) had become a waterfall in recent weeks.  I ran into the super and he told me he could come by any time to fix it, I just had to call him.  Weeks went by as I glanced at the floor, which had become an extension of the desk, the kitchen table, papers spilled in an avalanche, papers I daintily stepped over.   I could not expect the super to do this dainty dance.  I realized, to my horror, I’d have to make a wide, clear path from the front door to the bathroom.

This may sound like common sense, something every five year-old learns “pick your damned stuff off the floor!”.   Well, common sense, as Sekhnet’s mother used to say, is not so common.  But marshaling my will, at last, I made a clear path to the bathroom, the super came up, and after a titanic struggle that involved taking the immense, heavy top off the antique pedestal sink, he was able to install two shiny new faucets.  For the first time in months the sound of running water is not coming from the bathroom.  It’s almost eerie how quiet it is here, with just the computer and refrigerator purring at me.  

“Was there some point to this?” a poor soul, tried beyond silence, will ask.

Uh, only that I spent over an hour yesterday making some small progress in tidying this place.  And that if I could put in another hour today, and one more on Wednesday, and so forth, I might again have an apartment where people could feel comfortable sitting, where Sekhnet could spend time without leaping out of her skin, hopping on to the back of her skeleton and skittering out the door screaming.

Our Infinitely Puckish World

Go on youTube and put in Vandana Shiva, you’ll find a number of videos of her speaking.  Every one of them is worth listening to.   I’ve been thinking Vandana Shiva is a genius, the way she cuts through infinite complexity with brilliant simplicity.   She has a doctorate, in physics, I think, and is one of the great speakers alive today.  She may be the most important voice out there, a voice that few have heard. a wonderful voice.  

There are a bunch of great speakers operating today.  You  can find many of them on TED talks, a great source for fascinating ideas to think about.  But unlike most of them, Vandana Shiva is not selling anything.  She lives past, present and future at once, her passion is sustainable life.   There is no subject more vital, literally, than sustainability.

Vandana Shiva will explain this to you, like you are sitting together after a delicious meal of fresh local vegetables seasoned with fragrant seeds.   You will not stop her conversation lightly, she draws you in with great compassionate logic and the light touch of humor.  Her humor is irony, that refreshing irony people need when they must use their bare hands to handle things made by monsters.  

Is she accurate when she says 270,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last decade, as the crop seeds in India went from 80% owned by farmers to 95% of farmers now paying Monsanto for a license to grow crops?  I have no reason to doubt her.  

And I know quite well, I assure you, that few give a rat’s ass about an Indian farmer.  Isn’t it true that millions are slaughtered every year in senseless war?   That child soldiers are raped and forced to murder?  Isn’t it true that gorillas and chimpanzees plead for mercy when they are being slaughtered? And aren’t children torn apart every day by explosives sent by men who never set foot on their continent?  Who has tears for the Indian farmer who can’t bear the shame of bankruptcy after countless generations living well off the land?

Vandana Shiva spends only a moment on the suicides of the farmers.  She knows it is not the point.  The point, she says, is that if we do not take back control of our food supply from predatory corporations, those companies will profit from the death of the world, until the world is dead.  Then there will be no more human life and no need to fear man’s unsustainable ways, but that will not necessarily be a good day to wake up.

On the other hand, as they teach a lawyer to argue, Dr. Shiva herself admits that Indian seed companies only made two rupees per bag of seed under the old regime.  Now Monsanto charges thousands of rupees for a bag of the patented seed, a seed very similar to the original seed in most ways, but patented and licensed by one of the wealthiest mega-corporations on earth.   The Indian seed company now makes several hundred times more profit, since they are middlemen in the licensing deal between Monsanto and the Indian farmers.  So you do the math, two rupees or fifteen hundred rupees, your choice. 

In our infinitely puckish world, the logic of the earth’s greediest and most morally debased, backed by irrefutable economic fact — and the death of a human who is  not a wealthy, white American truly is an unfortunate externality, after all — carries the day every time.  Never mind that many more will starve, preventable disease (caused by a diet of poison) will continue to proliferate, , the earth itself will whither and die.  And until that time, the earth’s most greedy and unredeemed will continue to amass more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

You might wonder, did I ever stop to examine why I hate your freedom so much?