Author Archives: oinsketta

Dream

I had taken my mother to see some kind of play in the Bronx.  It was after the play and we were in a large old fashioned looking, and down at the heels, pizza parlor.  It seemed to be about 2 a.m.  We’d been there for what seemed like hours when I suggested we get the D train to a place where we could get a cab.  My mother, dead now going on three years, nonchalantly dismissed the idiotic idea and told me to call a car service, that she could afford it.

Later, Mayor Bloomberg, not a person I admire in any way, was holding a news conference to announce that a rat that had been at large in City Hall, black and very cute, with foxlike ears, had been found.  The rat was wandering calmly on the table between Bloomberg’s hands, and Bloomberg petted it as he spoke.  “It all depends on how you handle a rat,” he told the camera.  “If you’re gentle with them they are very nice, this little fellow is very silky.”   I reached my hand into the frame and petted first the black fox-like rat and then the more common grey rat with the scary tail.  Both were indeed silky and practically purred under my touch.

What We Take For Granted

Quite a few things, it turns out.  A president who is clearly intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and seemingly caring must be granted certain allowances for what might be called moral or political failures.  For example, if a cleric in Yemen speaks out against Al Queda, risking his own life, and then meets with his adversaries to debate, and is accidentally killed along with the terrorists by a US drone, the cleric is collateral damage, you know?  The president’s spokesman today called the targeted killing by drone program “legal, ethical and wise.”  

If we like the president we can say “bad shit happens in war.”    Or we can all agree that collateral damage is terrible.   The last thing we’d do is call for the return of the Nobel Peace Prize he received for not being a torture-endorsing, pre-emptive war waging faith-based cowboy.  On the other hand, if we dislike the president we can say just about anything, there are a hundred things that spring to mind.

I know, I know.  The world is complex so let’s just agree that it’s OK to disagree and that we also must hunt down and kill our enemies wherever we find them, by any means necessary.  And while killing them other people will be killed and that killing also produces consequences.  OK, OK.  

How, for example, does it benefit anyone if I once more observe that Thomas Jefferson, the Author of Liberty and one of our most revered idealist presidents, a man who inherited a fortune and died deep in debt because of his love for imported luxury, was tormented as he neared death that his debts prevented him from freeing hundreds of human beings he owned?   After all, it was Mr. Jefferson who so famously stated the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.  Why carp over the fate of a few hundred he held as property in perpetuity, or their descendants, some of whom, it turned out, were his own flesh and blood?   I carp, I carp, I carp.  Carpe diem, better that than this fish mouthed carping of mine.  

Why this envious need to attack true greatness?   Sure, Jefferson had many slaves.  Sure, he went bankrupt because virtually everything on his inherited estate was imported from Europe and he had expensive tastes.   Sure, it must be admitted, almost two hundred years after his death, he did own a beautiful slave named Sally, the half-sister of his beloved wife who died young, and he had at least three children with her over a period of many years.   Why this envious need to attack true greatness?  

I don’t know, I take it for granted.  Like the fact that the rich will get richer.  Thus it has always been and thus it will ever be.  Why this foam on my lips when I read that Bank of America paid nothing to the U.S. treasury in 2010 and received an almost two billion dollar “tax rebate” that year?  What can I do about this?  Why do I take the word of an avowed Socialist on this issue when everyone knows Socialism is a short step away from Communism, a proven evil?  These people hate our freedom.  Do I hate our freedom?  

What we take for granted, I suppose, is that this is a rational world where things are done for thoughtful and sincerely debated reasons, reasons that lead to the greater common good.   If a drone is sent to kill someone thousands of miles away, or down the block, for that matter, there is a good reason for it, most likely.  It’s better than putting the lives of our young men and women at risk by placing them in war zones, right?  If Bank of America, or General Electric, pays no tax on billions in profit it is because they are creating jobs, or some equally compelling good reason.  What next, disputing the right of their executives to be paid millions of dollars a year? Just because Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual affair with a woman he owned, and treated their children kindly as preferred house slaves, that doesn’t mean he believed any the less the self-evident truth that is a beacon to the world and a keystone of human liberty and democracy.

For my part, clearly, I spend part of almost every day tormented about things I am helpless to influence.  The things I can influence for the good often remain uninfluenced as I fret about other things, as I am fretting now.  I tap the keys, glance at the screen, correct typos and other mistakes.  I reshape the sentences until they become clear and strong enough to stand on their own spindly legs.   If I march the proper sentences into a good paragraph it feels like a job well-done.   This too is an illusion.  No matter how well I put them together, make them flow one into the next, create a stream of thought and feeling a reader can paddle in, there is no job done without pay, only a hobby horse giddyapped on by a willfully blind man letting opportunity in the real world fly past him.  

I wonder if the young Thomas Jefferson, who most biographers note made a daily practice of whipping his riding horses bloody, the only outward show in his life that this thoughtful, soft-spoken patrician was not the complete master of his passions, whipped his hobby horse as a lad.  Practice makes perfect, one notes, as I rattle on here.  I suspect he may have.  Not that I judge him, mind you.  I probably would have done the same, if I’d been him.

The only alternative to this life of sour contemplation is a life of action.  After all, am I not the fellow who showed a nine year-old how to operate garageband and left her, with no further instruction, with a seven year-old to spontaneously create a music track?  And did they not, with only slight post-production help from this same adult, come up with a very neat little exuberantly improvised soundtrack within a few minutes?  

Yes, yes, I know it’s like writing that is truly nothing until monetized, but still, it should not be taken for granted.  After all, not everyone is trying to be the change they’d like to see in the world.  What we take for granted is the right to take a bow.  It is not time for any bows yet, nor is there any stage nor anyone to curtsy modestly before as the cheers descend.

What I Often Forget

Each of us hangs here in this world by a spider’s thread, a strong enough wind will put an end to any of us.   It’s a miracle, if you think about it, that an entire mad world has been put together by people in this precarious position.   Immense structures of heavy metal fly through the air, filled with people, all hanging by a string as thin as a spider’s web.

It may last a day, a month, a few years or a century, but the most important thing, I think, is not to leave damage on the souls of the people we encounter.  As the kindly drug pusher told me on that long ago Greyhound coming back from Boston, when I declined his offer of a laundry list of drugs and he then handed me a free percoset, as I was on crutches with a newly sliced tendon on the bottom of my foot, “if I can’t help, I don’t hurt.”

It Doesn’t Pay to Flip A Dumb Redneck the Bird

Or anybody, really, for that matter.

I was in Florida, about a year ago, staying at the apartment of my dead parents, trying to get the place cleaned up, the smell of dog urine out of the porous concrete.   My mother had told me it was going to be a nightmare going through all those drawers and closets when she was gone.  It wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but it wasn’t that much fun.

On the way to the 2004 Cadillac that would eventually become an excellent buy for some pushy bastards who called my sister around the clock, I slowed as I passed the small circle of benches where a group of old people hung out when the shadow of the building fell there, as the afternoon faded into the relative cool of evening.  One of the regulars, a fat woman with white hair, a virulent racist and an imbecile, according to my mother, had been out there when my mother was taken past her on a gurney to the hospice where she died.  “Oh, look, they’re taking another one to die,” she’d said loudly as my mother and I passed on the way to the hospice’s vehicle.  I thought she was an idiot for that, and for the racism, and the next time I was in Florida I learned that she was dead too.

Eddie was on the bench with his girlfriend Jean, a woman who raised my mother’s blood pressure.  Eddie was a lot like Foghorn Leghorn, he loved to tell stories about himself– he’d brought a man back from death, for example, true story, and long story.  Oh, he had done all kinds of things.  Jean, probably never the brightest bulb in the chandelier to begin with, was in the grips of a dementia that made her mostly pleasant, but very repetitive.  She could also be stubborn, which drove my mother as crazy as Jean’s habit of asking the same question over and over.  Eddie had his hands full caring for her, but they always seemed affectionate with each other.  They held hands when they sat on the bench.  

I said a quick hello to Eddie and the beaming Jean as I passed, careful not to break my stride.  Eddie was talking to a white haired security officer leaning out the window of his patrol car, he introduced me to this southern man.  We said hello to each other, I told him it was nice to meet him, smiled, wished everybody a good night and kept walking to the car.

The following day I was riding my bicycle around the circle.  It was 2.4 miles and I’d go around several times, to keep the heart and lungs tuned up.  I’d generally do this at night, but on this particular day it was before dark, I was on my way to dinner at my sister’s nearby.   A security car pulled next to me and the uniformed man inside yelled for me to pull over.  It was the white haired security guard, driving too fast, red in the face.  I ignored him and kept riding.   I heard him scream at me again and, most likely, casually waved a finger over my shoulder.

Wrong thing to do.  It caused him to accelerate to well above the 25 mph internal speed limit, he was in a rage.  Not only was the damned country slipping away from his kind, it had never belonged to him in the first place.  He cut me off, blocking my path with a diagonal veer.  If I hadn’t spent years riding in the traffic of NYC he might have caused me serious bodily injury.  I was indignant and adrenalized as our chat began.

“You need to show me some ID,” the asshole demanded, getting out of his car in an angry hurry, his body language reaching for the gun he wished he was wearing.

I not only didn’t show him some ID, I showed him my smart mouth, and how stupid he was, and proved to him that he already knew who I was.  He angrily denied this so I reminded him we’d been introduced by Eddie in back of 1601 not 24 hours earlier.   He muttered that I needed to get a pass from the gatehouse before I could ride a bicycle in the circle.  My blood pressure was elevated as I left the senseless confrontation with an idiot.  It shouldn’t have been, but it is difficult sometimes to be a master of the fight or flight reflex in the heat of the moment.

I complained to my sister, her husband sort of chuckled, he knew the guy I was talking about.  The whole thing was senseless.

A week or two later, on my second to last night in the apartment, which no longer smelled of dog urine and which had been tidied up quite a bit, I took my nightly bike ride, the twelfth in the last twelve days.  I passed the security car circling the road, it was the only car out there at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.  I made a few circles, had my aerobics, and then got a goodnight call from Sekhnet as I got ready to carry my bike the two flights up to the apartment.   We talked for a while, I may have still been chatting with her as I came up the stairs with the bike.  I said goodnight to her as I went inside the air-conditioned apartment, took my shoes, shirt and pants off and took a shower.   I read, or watched a little TV, then went to sleep.  Seven hours later I got up looking forward to going to Redlands to play guitar with an old friend’s husband, a great blues and rock guitar player.

They lived in a big tiled house with high ceilings and great natural reverb.  The guy had two strat type guitars, made by a local guitar maker, nice axes.  Tube amps.  It was a pleasure playing with the guy, I’d done it only twice over the years, but each time was a lot of fun.

Only, picking up the pants I’d worn the night before, I discovered to my alarm that I had no driver’s license.  There was no wallet in the back pocket of the treacherous baggy cargo pants, still in a heap in on the floor in front of the bathroom.  I tossed the cushion on the chair in front of the TV, rummaged in a panic and then dashed out the door to retrace my steps from the night before.

It was now broad daylight and I’d had the wallet in the back pocket on the road side of the pants.  If it had fallen out while I was riding, which it surely had, it had fallen into the road.  It was fat, black and the size of a small turtle.  No passing car would have failed to see it.  The only car out there at that hour was the security car, I’d passed it at least once, possibly twice.

I went around the circle twice, one way and then the other, searching also in the grass, though I knew it was unlikely that it was there.  I went to the security booth and told them to be on the look out for the missing wallet, that I’d pay a reward for its return.  I made sure they had my cell phone number.  

I’d just been to the ATM, so there was $100 in cash in there.  After the attack on 9/11 Sekhnet had urged me to carry $400 in a zippered compartment in the wallet, in case of a future emergency, so that was there too, a hundred dollar bill, a fifty, some twenties and tens and fives.   It would be foolish, Sekhnet had pointed out, to pay $20 for bottled water in case of an apocalypse when I could offer $5.  There were 60 Euros in there, waiting for another trip to Spain.  There was an uncashed 2004 check for $600 signed by a friend I’d done a favor for, a guy who has done me countless favors.  There were all the credit cards, license and my attorney ID from the NY court system.  This attorney ID had a recent picture of me on it.

I went through all the horrors one might expect after losing a wallet, made all the calls.   Kept checking with security.   Finally, on my last day there, I went to the security office where I talked to the head of security, a grim-faced important  man who’d kept me waiting while he concluded a long phone call.  This guy looked a little like Chris Christie, a big, blustering tough guy.  He was in much better shape than Christie and wearing a white uniform.  I thought of Redman Tobacco chewing sheriffs in small southern towns as I sat across the desk from him, uncomfortably making small talk about a picture of Mickey Mantle he unaccountably had on the wall behind his desk.  I told him about a great, highly nuanced biography of Mantle I’d recently read, by Jane Leavey, recommended it to him.  

For his part, he was adamant that nobody on his security team would have pocketed the wallet, repeating the line I’d heard from other security personnel that one of the (black) home attendants leaving at 3 a.m. had probably found it.  Why a night nurse would leave at 3 a.m. was not a fit question so I asked him to look up who was on duty that night so I could at least speak to him.  He would not do that.  National security, you know, and executive privilege, and the ancient doctrine of “I know you are but what am I?”.  He eventually went over to a file cabinet and pulled open a drawer, glanced at a folder, put it back and closed the drawer.

“Nope, he would definitely have returned it, if he’d found it.  Honest as they come,” he said.  “He’s been working for us for twenty-two years, he’s returned lost jewelry.  If he’d seen it, you’d have it.”  I nodded, recommended the Mantle biography again and went out feeling like a sap.

The realization was slow to dawn on me.  Twenty-two years a Florida security guard, suggesting white hair and a red neck, a stupid bastard driving too fast and yelling at people to pull over and assume the position.   I wondered bitterly about that moment when he saw my photo on the ID, my mother’s photo ID with the apartment address on it, the baby pictures of Sekhnet.  It was possible he whooped with glee, if he recognized me, as I would surely recognize him.  There’s no doubt he did whatever a dumb bastard does the day after he finds $500 in cash at 3 a.m. on a deserted circle in a retirement village. 

“Who’s the goddamned smartass now, you rich goddamned NY lawyer bitch?”  I can hear him ask, rhetorically.

My Father Would Have Loved This

My uncle, who was buried yesterday in a small cemetery outside of Peekskill, would not have gotten anywhere near the kick out of this that his brother, my father would.  My father had a truly dark sense of humor, and few things made him laugh more than things that were tinged with horror.  I felt a pang, when my cousin told me the story, that I couldn’t call my father and tell him about it.   He would have chuckled.

The rabbi had thoughtlessly mentioned my uncle’s unpaid membership dues for 2012 while discussing the burial.  He told my cousin about the congregation’s strict policy about not burying any member who was in arrears.   I had a more violent reaction to this bad behavior on the rabbi’s part than my cousin did.  My cousin was merely annoyed.  For me, it woke a lot of pissed off ghosts who were sleeping in that graveyard.

When the time came, I was mild with the rabbi, even as Sekhnet glared at him.  After the funeral, as my cousin took his wrung out mother down the hill toward the cars, I found myself speaking directly and without rancor.

“Rabbi, I need to raise something that’s a little difficult.  We were all upset that you brought up membership dues with Jon when he called to arrange his father’s funeral the other day.”

“But Jon didn’t say anything,” the rabbi said, looking slightly aghast.

“Jon’s pretty stoic, and his father had just died,” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” said the rabbi sincerely.

“I found an invoice in my uncle’s files dated December 2011, seven months after his stroke.  He was billed $2,640 and his letter was attached, along with his payment for $350 and yet another special waiver.  There is a pile of letters, year after year, from my father and my uncle, about their out-of-town membership rate.  They’d each paid dues for more than 60 years.”

“I… I apologize, I shouldn’t have brought that up at that time,” said the rabbi, looking pale in the cold.

“OK, you should tell Jon,” I said, pointing down the hill towards Jon and his tiny, huddled mother.

The rabbi apologized to Jon, we said goodbye to Jon and my aunt as they prepared to make the long drive back to Maryland.  I had Sekhnet go get her Where The Wild Things Are fake fur hat with the pointy animal ears on top, and she got a smile out of my aunt with the adorable hat.  They drove off.

I spoke to Jon last night and he gave me the details that would have brought laughs from my father’s wry skeleton.   About 150 miles south of Peekskill Jon’s cell phone rang.  The caller introduced himself as one of the directors of the Jewish Center, the son of the kosher butcher who was the best friend of our cousin Eli, the guy with the famous temper who told the rabbi to put a dog in his grave, that he wasn’t paying any more in dues.  The man offered his condolences, apologized again for the rabbi’s thoughtless imitation of a rabbi from an anti-Semite’s joke.  He went on for some time, my cousin reported, although Jon had no idea what the purpose of the call really was.  Clearly the rabbi had given him the cell phone number.

There was another apology from the rabbi, this time in email form.  But here’s the punchline, dear reader, and Dad.  They sent Jon an electronic invoice for the membership dues in the amount, not of the $350 he’d billed to his credit card right before the hearse left for the cemetery, but $325.

“$325,” I laughed, “what percent discount is that?  Less than 10%, hmmmmm, that’s good.”  The laugh I laughed was bitter and not very satisfying.  My father would have been able to get more out of it. 

The Purpose Driven Life

As I start thinking about what I will say on a frigid Monday morning near a man-sized pit outside the benighted little town where my father and his brother, my recently deceased Uncle Paul, grew up, and where my father’s skeleton sleeps the long sleep in the frozen ground, I am distracted by a book I just looked at.  It is about the deep inner purpose, outside of the naked profit motive, that drives every successful business, according to the upbeat marketing creep who wrote the book, a consultant for McDonald’s and Proctor and Gamble, two exemplars of this purpose driven business culture.  I’m going to go downstairs and fetch it for a few quotes, but first, a few distracted words about my uncle, my aunt, my cousin and the fucking rabbi.

After my father’s death I found among his papers a cc of a letter he sent to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.   It was a remarkable piece of work and I have it somewhere.  In it was reflected my father’s great intelligence, his ability to tell a story and craft a very persuasive letter.   It was an appeal to be allowed to continue paying a discounted $350 annual out of state membership dues rate instead of the proposed rate of several thousand dollars.  

My father and my uncle, who had not lived in the town since graduating from Peekskill High in 1941 and ’43, respectively, continued to pay dues to the synagogue they had attended as children.  After all, my father pointed out in his letter, they felt loyalty to the place they helped their father mop and care for.  

He no doubt wanted to mention it was the place where they did menial jobs as children, assisting their father, who was paid a pauper’s wage as caretaker.  And that it was the place their religious mother donated money that probably should have been spent on clothes and food.  The family was poor.  Their father was so poorly paid as caretaker for the synagogue that the family received Relief, the shameful precursor to Welfare.  The boys helped him work there sometimes.  When they were young men they paid a few hundred dollars annually in dues for more than fifty years each.  My father’s letter was asking for an exception to the new rule that every member, whether in state or not, had to pay the full dues.

“I realize the impact on the congregation’s finances and ability to carry on its work if its many out of state members did not contribute the full dues.  I spoke to Lisa, who informs me that my brother and I are the only two such members.  In light of this, I respectfully submit that the harm to the congregation would be minimal and request that we be granted a waiver, and be allowed to continue paying the $350 annually.  It should also be noted that we have faithfully paid annual dues since the mid-1940s.”  

My father’s first cousin, Eli, long gone now, was less diplomatic, more inclined to turn purple and react with his fists.  A few years before my father’s letter he’d reacted to the news his dues were being raised by picking up the phone and barking.   “You can put a fucking dog in my hole,” he roared at the woman at the synagogue, “I’ve been paying dues for 60 years, out of respect, for a place I haven’t set foot in in decades.  I’m not paying one fucking dollar more, and you can tell the rabbi to go fuck himself too!”

Eli received a letter of apology and an assurance that the 85 year old’s dues would not be raised.   Two years later he died and was buried in the plot he’d probably paid tens of thousands of dollars to reserve for himself, next to his beloved wife Helen who left us early.

In my mother’s papers I found letters from my uncle, after my father’s death, assuring her that the Peekskill dues had been frozen at $350, in spite of new dunning letters.  My mother paid every bill she ever got on time, and must have called or emailed my uncle when she got the bill every year.  For her part, she always indicated a desire to be cremated, the stone was already over the double grave where her husband’s mortal remains were already eternally resting, she didn’t like religion, had no connection to the shul, or need for it, yet paid anyway, $1,750 for the last five years of her life.   In the end they forbade us to inter her ashes in the grave she’d paid and paid for.  She truly doesn’t care, I’m sure.

After my uncle’s stroke my cousin and I found correspondence in a file folder regarding the promise that the dues to the congregation would be kept at a preferential $350, in spite of the fact that members actually using the facilities paid many times that.  My uncle wrote a patient letter annually and was granted the exemption each time.  

When I called to tell the rabbi that my uncle had had a stroke, the rabbi sounded genuinely concerned.  He seemed like a compassionate guy in those couple of conversations.  He called my uncle once, which I found touching and which my uncle appreciated.

My uncle died early Thursday morning after a two week hospital stay that could not save him.  Later that day my cousin called the compassionate rabbi to arrange the funeral.  The rabbi asked my cousin if he’d mind if they made the hole a bit deeper and buried some old prayer books?  Jewish law apparently requires this odd practice, and my cousin said it would be fine.  They spoke about my uncle and his wishes for the funeral arrangements.  Then the rabbi mentioned that the congregation had a strict policy about burial arrangements and that members who were not up to date on their dues could not be buried.  There was the matter of the $350 unpaid on the most recent invoice.

“Please tell me you’re shitting me,” I said to my cousin.  He assured me that he wasn’t.  “Please tell me you barked ‘you can put a fucking dog in my father’s hole’!”  He hadn’t.  He, like me, seeks to avoid confrontation, and though he was disgusted, as most people would be, he did not make an issue or argue, he just made arrangements to pay the $350.

I am walking the difficult path of trying to remain mild and gentle in all circumstances.  You’d be surprised how many loved ones throw this kind of vow in your face, if you ever raise your voice, if you express exasperation, or anger, or, say, the desire to give this religious quack a quick short shove into the open grave.  Their mockery makes it no easier to become truly nonviolent, but ahimsa is difficult in any circumstance, living in a violent, angry often irrational world.

In my mind, as I think of the quick remarks I’ll say for my uncle  mainly to comfort my aunt at the grave, in that freezing cemetery where most of the rest of our family is already interred, I’m searching for the perfectly turned phrase to deliver, looking directly and mildly at the hypocrite rabbi as I do, to bring sudden color to his face and an abrupt, involuntary absence of breath, like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Soul on Fire

I had the odd thought, and true, that my soul is on fire. Feeding the blaze all the skills I’ve loved, and nurtured, burning in a deep, bright flame.  Though it takes all my strength, sometimes, not to call things by their name, I am also amazed, sometimes, at this incandescence.

Sphinxes and Monosyllabs

The speed of modern electronic communication somehow makes the silence of Sphinxes and the e-grunts of Monosyllabs harder to bear.  You may get a dozen emails from somebody you’re waiting to hear back from with no reference at all to the question you may have sent them.   Clearly, Sphinxes and Monosyllabs must be suffered gladly, but, damn…

As I get down off my soundproofed soapbox, I offer this little bit of amusement for the childish side of y’all:

animation workshop, second season

Dig it.

Tragedy and Comedy

Mel Brooks, of all people, gives the best definition of these terms.  It is concise and full of great insight, a frank and brutal snapshot of our lives here.  Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.

I haven’t been sleeping well, it will no doubt sadden you to learn.  It isn’t that my sleep is fitful, or that I have insomnia, I just don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour and set my alarm, lately, five hours from when I finally get to bed.  To do otherwise risks switching night and day, sleeping all day and fussing at night until the dark rooms here are flooded with a sickening light and I retreat to my dark sleeping coffin.  I’d rather not go that far, though I am, without question a night person.

After several days of this short sleep I hit the wall yesterday.  By 11:00 pm I felt like I was moving underwater.  At midnight I took a dose of a new sleep product called Zzzquil, just to be sure I didn’t start getting energetic and alert at 1:00, as often happens no matter how tired I am all day.  By 1:00 I was in bed, groggy, drowsy, sleepy, sleeping.  Alarm set for 10:30 to have a nice catch up on sleep session before conducting the animation workshop with a new group this afternoon.

At 1:47 there was a sudden commotion near my head, my cellphone rattling and cackling.  It was my cousin Jon, my only living first cousin.  I knew at once that his father had just passed away.  My broken fingernail, being woken from a sound sleep at an hour I’d normally be awake, ironic and all that.  But there was nothing very comical about my poor uncle falling slowly into a manhole and dying, after two weeks unresponsive in the hospital.  Nor was my cousin laughing.

Ahimsa– the e-book

I write this to remind myself to create an e-book, illustrated by myself and children I’ve yet to meet, stressing the importance of Ahimsa, a practice of peace and gentleness I am trying to perfect without great knowledge or any religious framework.  This book will help me stay focused on Ahimsa– non-harm.

Do not cause suffering, if you have any say in the matter.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.  If you hate something, don’t do it to anyone else.  Be calm, focused and peaceful when you oppose something.

Suffering is a contagious symptom that feeds on and devours itself along with hope and mercy.  The doctor who would treat it must remain calm, focused and peaceful, because it spreads easily and requires quiet skill to properly diagnose and treat.  

If I can’t help, I don’t hurt.  Practice that for two hours on Thursdays as you and your little colleagues draw, cut, photograph, edit, title, strategize, choreograph, clap, stomp and sing.

Don’t say “you suck,” although it takes almost no breath to say it.  Use your breath to laugh or sing, much better uses for it.  Only, don’t laugh or sing at someone else’s misery, no matter how funny or well-deserved that misery may seem to you at the time.  You would hate it if someone did it to you.