Author Archives: oinsketta

You Just Have to….

When you are pushing a rock larger than yourself up a steep hill, even if you have chosen the rock yourself, you’ll encounter moments when the heaviness of the rock, the steepness of the upward incline and the seeming futility of the task will overcome you.  At such moments you may find yourself calling out to those who care for the strength to go on.   At such moments, few people have anything of much use to say.  One of my favorites is “you just have to….” with the advice that follows.

“You just have to not look back,” since you’ve only gone 6% up the immense incline.

“You just have to be strong,” since you will die if the rock rolls back over you when your strength gives out, as all strength eventually succumbs to gravity.

“You just have to remain positive.”

“You just have to keep on pushing.”

“You chose the rock, you just have to embrace the challenge.”

All so true, they bring tears to the eyes and a quiver to the arms, hamstrings, calves and back.

My Father’s Heartfelt Story

My father, a critical man who criticized himself most of all, lamented that my sister and I never sought his advice.  I wonder what he’d make of how deeply one story he told me shaped my life.

It was the story of the starving wolf and the well-fed dog who met on the road.   The dog, after expressing his concern, told the wolf he had plenty of food at home and they trotted off.   The wolf noticed fur rubbed away at the back of the dog’s neck and asked “do you have a skin disease?” 

“Oh, no,” laughed the dog, “that must be from my collar.”  The wolf slowed down, asked what the collar was.  The dog explained, then told him it was used for the leash, which he also explained.  The wolf stopped, thanked the dog, and trotted off in the opposite direction, as I did.

Gratootisblahg

I’m trying to recall, in the cold light of day, the many things I thought about last night, at 3, 5, 6 and 7:00 a.m., that kept me from sleep.  Sure there was loud snoring, but I’ve slept through that many times, joined the hearty chorus myself, no doubt.  There was that idiot banging garbage cans outside starting at 6:14 a.m., but he didn’t wake me, I was up. There was a parade of thoughts, no doubt, books I’d like to write, see in print, read from and talk about to nodding, laughing audiences in book stores.   There are places to do this, even today, in our shrinking corporate culture.

One thing I didn’t think about last night, I’m fairly certain, was an idea I told the mother of a struggling musician recently.   She applauded the idea, even though it was an impossibility that would require a total remaking of American society and its so-called values.  She’d mentioned the difficulty her talented daughter had finding an audience for her music.  She probably also mentioned the many millions generous, socially conscious superstars like Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and noted philanthropist Britney Spears rake in.

“If Springsteen  and Britney and Beyonce each gave $2,000,000 a year, a fraction of their income, to a fund a music exchange trust fund, thousands of  talented but unknown musicians could be paid $30,000 a year to play five or six gigs a week at schools, Nursing Homes, Veteran’s hospitals, orphanages, hospices, hospitals, children’s aid societies, work houses, prisons, concentration camps, enhanced interrogation centers, etc.  That way you’d support generations of inspired songwriters and performers and allow them to live as working musicians with a large and appreciative audience they could entertain and inspire.”

“That’s a great idea,” said the young musician’s mother enthusiastically.  And it is.  But it wasn’t one of the things I was thinking about last night that kept me awake.

Is It Just Me?

In this age of information, it’s only a matter of typing a few words and hitting ‘enter’.

US Federal Deficit $1.09 trillion

Cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars  $1.4 trillion

Cost of Bush tax cuts over first twelve years  $1.28 trillion

Is nobody else doing the math as we argue about cutting social programs?  

I leave it to you to check the accuracy of these figures.   They explain, in part, why that speechifying wartime president has been scarce since leaving the White House, except when he nips out to earn $100,000 or more to speak English, after a fashion, to cheering corporate audiences.

 

The Darkness Reaches for You

Last night an old friend described his waking horror, a stream of sinister associations in the blackness of early morning that woke him and continued on their own, torturing him in a way he could hardly explain, and really didn’t need to.  Started his day off with an unpleasant bang at 4:30 a.m.

Describing it to another friend earlier in the day had left him with the great pantomime, his friend’s miming of the terror, coming up to grab you with both claws, with that intent look on its face.   His friend reported it had been a long time since, but the thing had come up on him that way recently as he was trying to get some rest.

Call it what you like, the hideous hands reaching up to pull you down into its deadly embrace, lucky is the person who has not felt it.

Memory

Standing with my portable animation studio in bags on my shoulder and at my feet, on the uptown platform at Spring Street, a woman drops something plastic that clatters on the concrete.

I watch in my memory as the dental retainer, plastic and wire, flips off the wet sink and high dives into the swirling toilet water, down and gone, forty odd years ago, up early in the still dark morning for an exam up in the Bronx, in the bathroom of the house my dead parents sold long ago.   Reflexes too slow to grab the dexterous little translucent plastic mouthpiece. My father cursed when I told him, as he often did, and no arrangement was made to pay the orthodontist, Valens, now probably wearing red or kelly green pants in Florida, or Arizona, if not a shroud, to make another retainer.  Thousands already down the drain to fix his children’s teeth, to hell with the ungrateful little fucks.  “Goddamn it!,” he said, and cursed some more.

Thus was lost the last chance to finish the work of having my crooked teeth uncrossed.  So, on the platform at Spring Street I’m feeling my teeth with my tongue, thinking that my father’s immature, yet understandable, reaction deprived me of the chance for a more even smile.  I remember very clearly the pain of trying to bite a hamburger at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike the day after the braces were tightened.  For nothing.

The lost retainer explains the uncorrected upper teeth, but what of my Frank Zappa-like lower teeth, a jumble of beige choppers?  Or my sister, also a patient of this Dr. Valens, who to this day speaks of him mockingly, sticking out her still prominent slightly bucked teeth.  Both of us still remember the smell of the orthodontist’s breath and his hairy hands.

A Mug’s Game

Running in the background, constantly and to everyone’s detriment.  I’ll try to describe it in summary.

Dreams are seldom realized, that’s the set-up, the hard truth, why dreams are mostly dreams.  A variety of myths about freedom, living the dream, exist, but they are mostly bullshit.  Our idea of freedom is like holding a cloud.  Becoming free, in any meaningful sense, is hard, scary work.   Too hard and scary for most of us.  We collect, instead of the thing we actually want, a series of consolation prizes.  Then we try to believe that these prizes are as good as what we once held out for.

There is nothing so terrible in this, except how it predisposes us to cast a critical eye on others while we try to console ourselves.   Nobody is singing our praises, why should we sing anybody else’s?  And the cycle, vicious as any, rides on downhill with the wind at its back.  It takes only gravity to keep it going.

Someone weaker than you, recognized for strength?  Maddening.  A mediocre singer praised for singing when what you love best is to croon soulfully?  Infuriating.  In the real world it’s who you know and who you blow and blah blah blah.  So you send me your best attempt at a poem, in a moment of hope, I’ll let it drop into the silence it came from.  

You’d do the same for me, I’m sure, most people do.  And, of course, we’re all very busy trying to be born before the lights go out forever, or trying to forget death, or trying to write our own symphony, or pop masterpiece, or the perfect haiku, or chasing the distraction to end distraction.

Maddened in the city of abandoned dreams we rush about chasing consolation prizes.  The dream we dreamed fading mostly.  They only torment us when we dream of them again and ponder the gulf that now separates us from them.   Watching somebody else rush towards some noble truth or another only reminds us how far we are from ours.  It sticks in our throats.

Best of all not to even mention it, nobody gives much of what we really need to us, anyway.  In fact, forget, if you can, that I even mentioned it.