Author Archives: oinsketta

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.

Phantom Run, ironic

As my fingers involuntarily clicked on the stats tab, I saw I had another email.  The stats said zero, the email said Chelsea had liked my post, Avoiding the Shutout, which went up a few hours ago.

I refreshed my stats.  Still zero.  Yet Chelsea had sent me a “liked it” email from wordpress.   Ironic that she found the one about barely avoiding being shut out awesome, while somehow not showing up in today’s stats to break up today’s shutout.

So am I on the scoreboard, as it would appear, or still being shut out, as the stats insist?

Avoiding the Shutout

In baseball a shutout occurs when the losing team scores exactly zero runs.   Excitement mounts in the stands, in TV Radio and Internet land, during the waning moments of a 1-0 game.  If the team being shut out scores even one run the game will be tied, the shutout lost.  No team wants to be shut out, it adds insult to injury, as the saying goes.  Better to lose 5-1 than being shut out 5-0.

I was thinking about this late yesterday as I glanced at my stats page.  On the stats page I see a running tally of the individuals who look at this blahg.   I don’t know why I glance at my stats page, it has become a tic.  That kind of tic is the reason I don’t keep a phone with the internet in my pocket.     I started writing on this blahg on August 2.  I don’t know why I do that either, except that I love to write, and good writing takes practice, and that I daydream, sometimes, about being on a public radio talk show discussing my breakthrough book with a perceptive host.   Maybe I’d also jump up and down on Oprah’s couch talking about this remarkable book that, like my fascinating organization for largely doomed poor children, resides entirely in my head.   

Anyway, every time I checked how many people had read my recent posts the answer was the same, none.   “I’m being shut out,” I thought, as other perplexing thoughts wheeled through my head, illuminating the truly puny magnitude of my concern for the stats of gratituousblahg.   An hour later the tally was still zero, as it was six hours later.  At around 11 I checked the stats, and I was still being shut out.

“I got shut out,” I said to myself, glumly, going about some other business shortly before midnight.  It would break a streak of at least one person reading these words since August 2.

Apparently, though, just as the day was about to end, some time right before the stroke of midnight, the shutout was broken up.  I had one reader yesterday.

“Yes!” I said out loud, for no reason I could grasp, except that the sports metaphor had really taken root.

Today, so far, I’m being shut out again, and so soon after setting high water marks for readers in a day and in a week.  Well, like Robbie Cano’s torrid and cool season shows, these things go in cycles.  Maybe I’ll be 5 for 5 tomorrow, eh, Coach?

Lack of Focus

The best way to do five things badly is to multitask.  With the TV on, other tabs on the computer screen updating as you write, another device displaying messages with a tone each time a new one arrives, music in the next room loud enough to hear, and a radio playing for good measure, you might find yourself mystified that you forgot what you came into the next room to do.

“I’m losing it,” you might think, not realizing that the “it” is focus, simply remembering to shut off four of the five devices.   Shut off five of them.  There is enough noise without any of them on.

Humans in complex societies are masses of twitching nerves set off by chafing or wistful memories, the many demands of the fleeting moment and often agitated thoughts of the many possible near and distant futures ahead.  Focus is elusive, it has to be practiced every day to have a fighting chance of taking root.  

But you don’t need my blinking, trite words to remind you of that.  Besides, four other things are demanding  our twitchy attention, yea, five other things.

What was I saying?  More importantly, what did I fail to hear this time.

The Puckish Nature of the World

I wrote here a while back about a friend I’d lost touch with who has the annoying habit of writing a witty email every few years, engagingly asking for feedback or a favor.  The feedback is given, the favor done, and then years pass without a peep from him.  It has earned him the enmity of more than one person I know and I’ve been fairly disgusted by it.

He was recently in town and I mulled over responding to his insistent, twice sent email seeking to get together when he was in town.  I replied, mentioned surgery around the time he’d be in NY, he replied, uncharacteristically, and said he’d write more soon.  A few weeks passed, then his itinerary arrived, which I treated with a healthy dose of silence.    

A few days later I had a voicemail from him, arrived in NY hours earlier,  posing as my surgeon, inquiring about my recovery, trusting it was smooth and pain-free, then pleasantly telling me that he and his wife were at my service and would come to me at any time and place convenient for me.   I took another oxycodone and drifted off without calling back.   Seven hours later his next message arrived.  I mulled over listening to it, decided against it, watched TV, wrote a few emails, took more drugs, drifted off again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t listen to the message yet,” a friend said the next day.  I really wasn’t that curious.  I knew over time the messages would be tinged deeper and deeper with the hurt tones of someone forced to keep drinking their own medicine.  I thought about it, when I did think about it, as the 8 year-olds in Harlem used to, when a bully met someone who hurt him and was crying.   “Good for you,” they’d call out to the crying kid, while hiding their identities.  

I eventually sobered up, decided that my sadistic inaction, pleasant though it was, and justified as it might have been, was not of a piece with the gentle stance I have been trying to maintain.  I called him back, informed him that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get together with him and we proceeded to have a pleasant chat.  It turned out the infinite flexibility would all occur on a certain day, the day before they left, and that was a complicated day for me.  If there was any question of exerting myself to get together with them, the limited time frame made it impossible.  

But all this tedious background is for this.  He told me at one point, as we discussed my animation program that has just crept its first fins on to land and is about to close up the gills and breathe air for the first time, that he’d been in a one-day animation workshop in a summer program in a San Francisco art museum as a boy and had never forgotten it. 

“I remember almost nothing from before I was about 14,” he said, “but I have vivid memories of how cool it was, at ten, to draw these crude things on cels and then see them played back as animation.  I remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the program and watching the animation I’d done on a big screen, and how amazing and exciting it was.  I remember it 45 years later, and almost nothing else from that time in my life.  So it made a huge impression and I’m sure the kids lucky enough to be in your workshop will have a similar experience.”

Wow, I thought.  What a great little sound byte to record and use to promote the program.  

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s been great talking to you.  We’ve missed you and are sad we won’t get to see you, but we understand, it’s a short trip and your operation and all.  But,” and his voice got very tender and sincere “let’s stay in touch.  You know, we should email and talk on the phone once in a while.”  He sounded, for all the world,  like a person who actually did these kinds of things and I managed to say “sure, that would be nice,” instead of laughing in his face and telling him how hilarious he was.

“Oh, listen, send me your latest animations, I love them.  And I’ll send you feedback and stay in touch,” he said, and again I managed not to spoil the mood by guffawing like a donkey.

The next day I sent him the latest animations with a short note about his great story of being a ten year-old animator for a day.  I told him the story would make a great promo and suggested we get a recording of him telling it.   I let him know how nice it was to hear from him.  

That was only two weeks ago.  It’s not that I expect to hear back from him, I just think it’s another great example of the puckish nature of the world, if you look at it the right way.

We go to war with the army we have

And so we embarked, on a boat, into an atmospherically perfect morning.  That I had slept less than two hours was not even on my mind as I let a comrade drink what would have been my second cup of coffee.

We go to war with the army we have, and the armaments too.  We went into battle armed with a guitar, two ukuleles, a small portable keyboard and a tiny external speaker.  And we put up a hell of a fight there on the beachhead.  Hell of a fight, boys.