Author Archives: oinsketta

I’m lucky in this

 In stories we identify with characters whose motives make sense to us.  Odd to say, then, that the forces driving many of the heroes and heroines we meet are unknown to the characters themselves.   Their heroism itself is also often invisible to them.  

Our lives are not novels or movies, as far as we know, but they might as well be since we’re each the main character of our own life, as well as the narrator.  

I’m lucky in this:  the driving force in my life is clear to me.   In a nutshell, my parents were both raised by parents who broke their spirits.  My father was a prick (and sincerely regretful about this on his deathbed), my mother was a poet who never wrote, both were singers who never sang.   When I needed to be heard as a child I often got a deaf ear and eventually a lecture about attention-seeking and whining.  They were unable to give what they never got.

So my back story can be told very simply, and I understand it clearly.  And I’m lucky in this.   Parents who were hurt, doing better than their own parents did, but still not getting it right, raising two children with a lot to overcome.  The driving force of my life is doing better than they did, overcoming more than they overcame, giving what they were largely unable to give.  Becoming, in the overused phrase, the change I want to see in the world.  What is hurtful to you do not do to somebody else.

In the darkness here, where so many stumble cursing, I am blessed to see by the light of this dim candle, and I am lucky in this.   I have finally chosen a path that makes sense to me, using my skills to create a workshop where children are carefully listened to, allowed to imagine what they will and bring it into the light.  This path is straight up a steep and rocky hill, to be sure, but it makes sense and is motivated straight out of my life story.

I’m lucky in this.

The obligation to do right

I heard national treasure Bill Moyers interview a brilliant and courageous woman named Vandana Shiva.   You can hear their discussion here.   At one point Moyers asks her how she can continue to fight huge, immensely wealthy and aggressive agricultural multinationals with such little hope of success.  She tells him of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita that explains it is not whether you can succeed or not that determines whether you should do a thing, but whether you have an obligation to do it.   It resonated deeply for me.

The following week Bill Moyers interviewed Chris Hedges, former seminary student, who came to his calling– speaking truth to power– from a Christian perspective.  After discussing Hedges’s work witnessing slaughter, systemic poverty and oppression the world over, and writing and speaking about it in eloquent detail, Moyers asks him the same question.  How can you, a good person driven to despair, continue to resist in the face of such odds?  Hedges gives the same answer Vandana Shiva gave the week before.  We are obliged to do what is right, no matter if we can succeed in changing things or not.  

This rang that bell of mindfulness inside me again.  Death waits for each of us, more patiently or less patiently.  What would you do now if you knew for certain that you had six weeks to live?   What would you do if you had six years?  Or twenty-six? The question seems to call for the same answer.  Do what you are called to do, what makes you feel most useful, what makes the richest demands of your talents without diminishing you.  

One thing not to do is spend a second more than is necessary with people who prove toxic to your unique and infinitely precious self.

Fool Me Once

A very dynamic, creative and driven fellow I know asked me to do some animated titles for a political video he’s making that he’s sure will go viral.   I like the message, cute script, figured I’d do my part to try to keep the country out of the hands of nihilists (insert your favorite nihilist here).  After a round of auditions he picked a very expressive young actor to play the idiotic straw man, a sort of Joe the Plumber type.  I met and liked the kid immediately, talented and funny.   We were at the studio  to shoot some reference photos that I was going to work from.  

Only problem was, the planned one hour session stretched to about three hours, with only about 25 minutes of distracted work getting done amid many interruptions.  Oops, somebody showed up for an audition, just take a few minutes, oops, got to take that call, sorry, oops… knock on the door, guy with a walker, needs just two minutes…”Jesus, man, don’t you call to make an appointment?  I’ll be right back…”  oops, second voiceover audition, oops, I’ve got to find the adapter for the voice recorder, oops…. etc.  

At one point, as he was about to shoot something we hadn’t talked about, something I couldn’t have used if I’d wanted to, he became momentarily confused.  “Focus!” he barked at me when I pointed out what was about to happen.   I answered him as patiently as his own grandfather and we set up to shoot the frames I actually needed, the ones we’d discussed.   By the time I left, with 346 frames on my flash drive instead of the 24 I’d come for, my head was spinning.

“I need a massage,” grimaced my talented buddy rubbing his neck as his wife and secretary reminded him they had another round of auditions starting in fifteen minutes.  “I’ll leave you in peace,” I said, staggering from the studio, my eyes goggling from strings.  The work we’d agreed to do together only 25% done, and poorly done at that.

I spent hours on my own going through the 346 frames to get something like what I had planned to leave the studio with.  I stole a couple of hours each day around family celebrations and long drives to and from New Jersey to work on the animation under a tight, though never specified, deadline.  Met him yesterday to drop off the animated footage he was going to composite some photographed heads on to.  I’d told him it was a rough draft and that I’d get him a smoother version the following day.  He had me watch an audition tape on a second project and talked excitedly about possible financing from Dubai for a third project he was pitching. When I got home late last night from accompanying Sekhnet on a long good deed I had this email from my friend.

Sorry, can’t use it.  I tried hard, but it doesn’t work out!  

Fool me once, baby, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Better This Than That

I know people who meditate daily.  They recommend it even as they acknowledge it doesn’t seem to help much with the thousand tiny horrors that gnaw at them on the average day.  Others, to my surprise, use religious rituals the same way.  Same results.  There are no two ways about it– this world is a challenge.

I sit here tapping out a few words, the fewer the better.  The effect is about the same as meditation or a religious ritual, I would think.  I focus on writing clearly.  The world is work enough without writers flexing, flourishing their pens and making the point a little harder to grasp.

So, to be clear– these few moments of clarity are often the better part of my day, like meditation for others.  I sit and the keys clatter.  I watch the words on the screen, change a few, go back, read it from the beginning, make a change here to make it more clear, there to make it less clunky.

Unfortunately, I can’t do this all day.  It’s time to get back to the biting tics.

I Don’t Know the Rules

I don’t know the rules of the blogosphere, or of business, or of how not to be upset by the occasional sociopathic reaction.  I’m certain there are rules for all these things, as well as exceptions, but I’m taking a time out to say — I do not understand the rules here.  Or at least, I have not internalized them very well.

I’ll tell you the rules for working with impoverished kids, as they were taught to me when I was a teacher in Harlem.   Do not set high expectations for your students.  Keep the lesson plan simple, the goal clear, the step-by-step execution predictable and the outcome easy to quantify.  Always provide a worksheet with blanks for the kids to fill in.   The lesson plans were reviewed by people who had done their best to get out of the classroom and into supervisory positions where they could tell teachers how to teach, instead of working with children.  

It was unthinkable, in the difficult schools where I worked, that the students could actually generate ideas that could enhance their own educations.   I am currently attempting to prove that this model of motivating learning by letting creatively engaged students direct it works at least as well as the other.

The rule for success with attracting more readers to your blahg is, apparently, to immediately visit and like back anyone who sends you an email saying they like your blahg.  It seems like fair play, good form, a decent thing to do and all that.  Writing a few words praising another blog  in your blahg, or linking to it, apparently does not have the same meaning in the blogosphere.  OK, live and learn, what difference does it make anyway whether I set a personal record for most views on a given day or week or for least views?   It would appear to be mainly vanity that has most of us rattling here, to be thought thoughtful, clever, modest, deadly in the clutch, poetic.

Some turn their blahgs into lucrative businesses.  I saw one the other day, a woman who liked a couple of my posts, who appears to have done that, with 25,000 devoted followers and a host of corporations and other businesses who have signed on to be part of it.  An inspirational American success story, by the looks of it, and I wish the woman who writes and lives it every success.  She certainly deserves it, she’s an inspiration.

The more difficult thing for me is reacting well to the occasional sucker punch from a sociopath.  Anyone flipping the channels of the TV might laugh to hear me say this.   Not an hour goes by where we do not see a dramatization of this, hear a news report of it, or listen to a pious, boastful or motivational speech by one kind of highly successful sociopath or another.  These folks are often highly motivated, driven, hard-working, smart, cunning and, when necessary, ruthless.  These qualities are seen in almost every boardroom and in governments of every level.  They are leadership qualities.  Not all leaders are sociopaths, not all sociopaths are leaders, but there are enough sociopaths who are highly successful business leaders and public servants to prove the rule.

“Call me a sociopath, then,” the old sociopath might say, affecting a mocking yet convincingly hurt-looking expression, “I’ll go cry in my villa, then in my Lear Jet, I’ll sob all the way over to my pied a terre in Paris, and cry there, then I’ll sniffle through dinner, the opera and try my best to be consoled by my twenty-five year old mistress, the current silver medalist in Kama Sutra who is also Ms. Tahiti.   It sure sucks being a sociopath, though I wouldn’t be you, loser.”

I get it.  It doesn’t suck being a sociopath.  It sucks being victimized by a sociopath.  The sociopath doesn’t feel your pain, doesn’t feel his own very much, except as a goad to keep him focused.  Like a shark that needs to keep moving and eating, this type plunges endlessly forward.

It wearies me greatly to think about it anymore at the moment, except to exclaim “darn it!  Sociopaths, sheesh!”

Leap into Action

Being the samurai on the wide screen seems like an amazing life, but it takes a lifetime of devotion and practice to get to that ninety minutes that builds to the dramatically structured fight scene on that majestic hill.   The movie culminates in your death by sword, a death you don’t fear, a death you face with honor.  Then the credits roll and they ship your organs to recipients within a helicopter ride of that hilltop in ancient Japan.

For guys like me, though, the closest I come to being that samurai is trying to remain stoic after a blade has slashed my abdomen.

“Oh please!” says Sekhnet, flashing her eyes, then rolling them.

Easy for her to say.  She’s never felt that stitch across the abdomen where there never was one, three weeks after the surgery to correct what was once a minor annoyance.

“Please,” she says, “I’ve had more surgeries than anyone you know.”  And she’s right, I don’t know Dick Cheney, and my mother, who probably had as many, passed away in 2010.

But if you will excuse me, I have to get back to practicing.  And remaining stoic.

meditation

There are small kindnesses, everywhere, that are very easy to do and yet are beyond us.  We may even see them laid out for us, ready to be picked up and given like the precious gifts they are, but not do them.  After all, our day may have sucked with sharp teeth and nobody did any small kindnesses for us.  We may even be dealing with monsters all day long.

The person you love the best may say “yeah, you’re real gentle,” letting the sarcasm ring without a hint of poetry.  The thought that she says this because she thinks you should have been kinder to her, no matter how else you’ve tried to be gentle, may make you feel like snarling.  You don’t snarl, but that look on your face, as you stare at the road ahead, will do nicely.

“See?” she will think to herself, and feel absolutely just to think this.  She will even be right to feel that way, though it will burn you in that moment.

Any of a dozen small kindnesses you could have done earlier could have softened it, even a second or third if the first wasn’t appreciated.   Gentleness must be endless, or it is not really gentleness.

Fucking hard, though.  I know.

Snake Eyes

I don’t know why it should bother me, but, in spite of at least four reads by people I’ve never met, who took a second to tell me they liked what they read, my WordPress stats say  I got shut out here back to back days, after eking out a single view just before the game ended for the day two days ago.   Worse than snake eyes, two ones, this was two zeros.  The best throw of the dice, a fortune cookie once reminded me, is to throw them away.

We saw a young coyote today on Schoolhouse Road near Metler Road in a town near New Brunswick, NJ.  I did a slow U-turn so we could see the cool looking young animal, and just as we spotted him again he spotted a lizard or maybe a snake, dead in the gutter by the side of the road.   He picked it up, walked a few steps and began to eat it.  He watched Sekhnet roll down the window and take a few photos.  He took his lunch back a few steps, into the shade of a bush, and continued eating.   I thought he was a coyote from the first glance, but he was an immature one and we weren’t sure what he was until we looked for coyote images on the web.  Then there was no doubt.  I’ll try to get one of Sekhnet’s blurry Blackberry photos and put it up here.

“What was he doing all by himself?”  Sekhnet asked with concern.  For those of us who love animals, such questions will always be a concern.

I had a visit here today from a Canadian photographer and outdoorsman named Patrick, he was by the other day, liked another post.  I saw his wonderful photos of a recent hike he took through breathtaking costal landscape.  I thought to myself “damn, look at that eagle,” and “whoa, look at the attitude in that crab that wants to fight his friend!”  You can see his pictures here.   I remembered hikes I’d taken years ago, the newly sealed tent holding in the pouring rain in by Beaver Pond, NH en route to the Laurentides, sleeping tentless by Benson Pond in Yosemite waiting to meet a friend there who never showed up.  I remembered I didn’t mind at all not meeting him.

But I’m wondering, doesn’t Patrick’s visit count against my second straight shutout?  Or oneanna65, or Chelsea Brown 19?  And what about Matt George, who liked a short piece I just wrote and posted, and has a very cool photography website showcasing other people’s work.   I mean, WTF, WordPress, with these glaring snake eyes?

What Should Be and What Is

I would sometimes tell a judge, if I thought she had a sense of humor, or of irony, “‘Should’ is a word one should not use when speaking of Adult Protective Services.”  I was sometimes mistaken in my assessment of senses of humor and irony, but the point remains, and even the grimmest, dullest, most literal and judgmental judges got it.  

There is what should be — the state of affairs that logic, efficiency, mercy, justice, honesty, fairness and other convincing factors suggest is the way things ought to go– and the way it actually is:  just the world, how it will sometimes kick you or a loved one in the face, or the ribs, or the groin, how sometimes it does it by accident, sometimes on purpose, with passion or dispassion, personally or impersonally, and sometimes just because.

The healthy runner who dies of a massive heart attack, the good man struck down by a quick, sharp, relentless cancer, the person who least deserves advancement, getting all of it, plus untold wealth, while her more deserving colleagues scramble for the last bed at the homeless shelter, go mad and stinking without access to mental health care or a shower. 

The examples are too many, and too treacherous, to detail in a short post.  They are too tedious and draining to set out in a long post.  Everybody has their own list: things that should have been one way but instead were another way.  A friend I should have been more of a friend to, now dead.  A family member reduced to the sum of his faults and neglected.  Music that should have been played, but only silence instead.  A hand that should have reached out turned into a fist.  A conversation with a dear friend on the edge that should have been gentle and helpful, turned into a zero sum game.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, my friend.  You should fix your own life before you try to fix mine.”  

“I’m not trying to fix your life, I care about you and I’m expressing my concern.  I want to make sure you’re OK.”  

“That’s what you say.”  

“Who else am I to speak for?”  

“Clever, as always, Mr. Rhett Oracle Question.”  

“I’m sorry.”  

“Yes, you sure as hell are.”  

“I’m serious.  I’m worried about you.  Are you OK?  Is something going on with you?  Talk to me.”  

“I’m fine, worry about yourself, better.”  

“Are we stuck in a loop?”  

“Speak for yourself, Glue Man, I’m the Rubber.”  etc.

I find it particularly sad that I am giving any thought at all to the statistical book-keeping of the website that allows me to post these words.  Two people, one who liked and the other who began to follow this blagh today, two people I’ve never met, are not being included in my stats.  I was shut out today when, really, I should have had at least those two scratches on my tally.  One more person liked the previous post about the shutout while I was tapping out this post.  Where are those three tallies?   

Some believe that starting tonight God is reviewing a giant ledger where all of our deeds, and the actions we should have taken but didn’t, are recorded.  According to this tradition He is considering who shall be rewarded and who shall be punished, who will wax rich and who will be poor.  We have little more than a week to make right whatever debts we have failed to acknowledge, thank whoever we have failed to be grateful to, apologize to and soothe anyone our hasty words, deeds or failures to act may have hurt.  At the end of the Ten Days of Repentance God will finalize His notes about the course each of our next twelve months of life, or death, will take.  He will inscribe His will in the Book of Life, our permanent record, and, at the end of the day of fasting when even the great Sandy Koufax did not pitch, will seal the book, and the fate of all inside.

Of course, many also believe that God is dead, or a concept by which we measure our pain, or a figment of human fear, ignorance and superstition, or many other things besides a divine being who created the universe and takes a keen interest in human morality.  

I remember at eighteen thinking that God does indeed exist, and that He looked down upon the way the humans He created treat each other, His heart broke and He went mad in His grief.  And gave us the host of ongoing plagues, in His sorrow and superhuman madness, that are visited upon us each time things are the way they are, instead of the way we know they should be.