If you are optimistic by nature, the pessimists you know will wage a long, strategic campaign to prove that they are right to expect the worst and that you are pathetic to believe that the best could still happen.
They will kill you to prove that.
Proving them right, I suppose, but in a pretty perverse way.
The world doesn’t care very much about any one of us. In fact, it doesn’t care at all. We are fortunate if we have people who love us and treat us with kindness, but as for the world itself, it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any one of us. It has seen billions and billions of us come and go, often dying violently for no real reason, except that somebody else is angry and takes it out on us in a lethal fashion. The universe itself is clearly indifferent to any individual’s existence.
Hey, that’s a nice Merry Christmas Eve, fella!
That’s not the point, that’s the background. In a universe that is indifferent we have a need to connect ourselves to others who care. And so in this age of the internet, with the illusion of connection to everybody else alive and staring at their phones, we send out our beacon to find others who might have suffered the same things we have, who might care, who might benefit from our thoughts and feelings if we can set them out clearly.
At this moment in history when American deaths of despair have reached these terrible proportions, when millions of isolated people have literally given up on the idea of love, kindness, companionship, decency and fair treatment, voices of calm, voices of reassurance, are so important.
When I write, I feel a connection to people I have never met. It is in part an illusion, since few people ever read these words, but the connection is also real. These posts take on a kind of life, they can be read anytime, they can be found when you might need to find something like them and derive some sense of comfort from knowing that somebody else has gone through things very similar to what you have gone through.
It may comfort you to know that you are not the only person who spent childhood in a senseless war zone, trying to make peace with an insanely implacable foe, and although you are wounded and scarred by this kind of upbringing, it doesn’t have to destroy you.
It may comfort you to know that if you love doing something very much, writing for example, if you do it every day you will get better and better at it. I don’t know that I have much native musical talent, but after half a century of loving to play music I’m a very good self-taught instrumentalist.
Love really is all you need, it makes the world go round. Lack of love is responsible for every terrible mistake that humans make, certainly every act of violence. Loving what you do is a net good. Spend some time everyday doing what you love, you will not regret it.
This turns out to be really hard to put into practice when you’re hearing something new from an old friend. It seems they must be going through some terrible crisis, that they’re not themselves, when they say things like “no matter what you say, you will never change my mind.”
The first time they say this to you, you will say to yourself, perhaps also to them, what the fuck? The second time they say this you should realize they’re being deadly serious. Every time after that, it’s on you that you don’t understand that nothing you can say will make any difference to their immovable position.
And what exactly is their immovable position? Only this: no matter what you say, I don’t care, you’re still wrong and I’m still right.
If you ask what they are right about they will simply repeat “whatever you say, you will never change my mind.”
When you are locked in a tense conversation only about frayed emotions, will and a need to be right, the only way out, since words, thoughts, appeals to friendship and mercy are of no use, is to finally believe that what your one time friend is now insisting on is his absolute truth. Now you will simply have to accept it. Nothing you can say will change it, as has been said over and over.
You don’t have to like it, of course. The point is you won’t like it, nobody likes to be told, essentially, to shut the fuck up. In the end though, you have to believe what they’re telling you, there’s no point wasting your breath in a conversation where nothing you say can will make a difference in any way.
One last metaphorical kick in the nuts, and be on your way, my friend, there’s no longer anything here for you.
“You don’t have to say you remember things that might hurt our friend’s case. You can always just say ‘I don’t recall’, even if you do remember. That’s not perjury” advised a lawyer working for Trump’s Make America Fully Nazi PAC, allegedly.
This allegation was raised in the last January 6th committee hearing the other day. In response the lawyer involved, Trump’s former ethics advisor in the White House, still working for the big guy, was scrubbed from his law firm’s website. The guy’s a partner there and his law firm cut him loose immediately, based on this explosive allegation of professional misconduct and criminality, which, of course, does not become a fact until the jury finds that he did what he is accused of. Although, of course the words “Trump’s ethics lawyer” speak for themselves, loudly and with very bad breath.
Good luck with that ask Mr. Zelinsky, but excellent speech, man.
I’m sure that Trump and the party of Putin in America is not very happy about this little Jewish lawyer/ comedian/president’s speech in Congress. It’s amazing that the GOP seems to be taking the side of the aggressor in this war-crime ridden war for territory and domination of a sovereign neighbor. Or maybe not so amazing, considering everything else the party of violence stands for…
A longtime friend, Mark Friedman, was the most dramatic example I ever met of someone with a repetition compulsion. Psychologists tell us that the compulsion to repeat the same painful pattern over and over is an attempt to resolve some injurious conflict that tormented us in our childhood.
In Mark’s case, as near as I could figure it, it had to do with feeling that his father never respected him, and that his mother could not love him enough to compensate for this. The primal wound he suffered is somewhat subjective and I don’t want to sound judgmental, but that he was compelled to repeat the same three act play throughout his tormented life is something I saw up close for many years.
The shape of the story was always the same, the three act tragedy identical each time.
Act one was great admiration, enthusiasm and pure enjoyment of a person who was finally able to provide everything he’d been looking for. This person was cool, smart, funny, ingenious, talented, charismatic and a great friend, the very best person he’d ever met.
During Act two cracks would predictably appear in this exaggeratedly perfect facade, which would become increasingly worrying to Mark.
Act three was the final, unforgivable betrayal of Mark, which happened every time as regularly as the sun rises and sets each day.
I don’t know of another case of repetition compulsion as dramatic as Mark’s. It was so clear to see, and so frustrating to me that as otherwise smart as he was he simply couldn’t see it. He’d get furious, in fact, if you pointed out any similarity in his crashed relationships. That, as much as anything else, was the cause of our final estrangement. Which, of course, fit the pattern, betrayal by his trusty longtime best friend was dictated by the three act structure.
While Mark’s self-destructive pattern was easy for me to see, the compulsion is much harder to recognize in oneself. Why was it that I was always attracted to smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically — funny people throughout my life?
It was an attempt to work out with them what I could not work out with my own smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically — funny father. In the end each of these relationships ended in a bitter falling out that I tried, sometimes for years, to prevent.
The lesson that was so hard for me to learn was that these people I cared about so much were literally poison to me because they could never give me what I was looking for, what I tried so hard to give to them — the benefit of the doubt, empathy and friendship.
Without empathy or the benefit of the doubt we don’t really have friendship. If somebody is incapable of these crucial things, out of their own injuries, we often won’t notice it until conflict arises. They say conflict reveals character, and it’s true. Under pressure things you can’t see when everything is fine will squeeze you to death. While everyone is laughing together it’s easy to feel like great friends.
And it was this laughter, this often dark, cruel humor, that bonded my father and me in between our long sessions of brutal combat. These moments of shared laughter were a great release, a relief, as well as providing the giddy hope of finding any kind of understanding with my supremely difficult father.
So these sardonic characters who were my closest friends for many years shared this bond of black humor with me and made me feel I’d found indispensable friends and was not doomed to interminable, senseless mortal combat.
It has taken decades for me to finally learn this sadly simple lesson: just because somebody smiles wickedly and laughs at your sense of humor doesn’t mean that they are your soulmate. Funny as it may seem reading these dry, serious pages I post here, I am a very funny motherfucker and make many people smile wickedly and laugh. It has taken me half a century to untangle reactions to my sense of humor from the deadly limitations of some of my onetime closest friends. Droll, eh?
He will make “domestic censorship” illegal and make it a crime for any federal bureaucrat to label anything mis or disinformation. What could go wrong?
The man is constant, and as true today as he was back in June when he denounced the partisan thugs on the discredited January 6th committee. SAD!
Now I suppose these November Criminals are going to indict him.
I’ve had this kind of conversation before. Every time it is the saddest imaginable conversation, because at the end, in spite of great affection, both parties will be dead to each other. Alive and walking around in the world, and doing acts of kindness, and trying to be the best they can be, and dead to each other.
We don’t come to this kind of final conversation lightly. First of all, we have to care enough about the other person to extend them the final chance to avoid our mutual deaths. The average jerk who acts like a jerk and hurts us in a jerky fashion does not get this kind of final discussion. We just write them off, smile when we see them and avoid anything of consequence with them. But with people we deeply care about, who have deeply hurt us, it sometimes comes to this final conversation.
Personally, I tend to avoid starting these conversations once I’m fully aware of the hideous terrain we are both stuck in. Once the other party insists that nothing you have said changes anything, you are pretty much done. Words at that point have no ability to change the emotional reality that makes it impossible for us to continue as friends. In fact, if you express yourself clearly you are only making the wound deeper by seeming to blame the other person for being heartless, clueless, unforgiving, unyielding, rigid, needy, childish, etc.
The outline of this talk is always the same. The person calling will say they love you, that they have taken about all that they can take, that they have tried their best to be your friend and give you what you need but nothing they have done has been enough for you. They will place it on you, pronouncing the final death.
After all the aggravation, the soul searching, the health threatening stress of trying to find a mutual solution with somebody who is unable to overcome their righteous anger, their inability to forgive, words are of limited use. That said, it is good to remain honest until the end.
Trust me, you will get no acknowledgment of your honesty, and truly it means nothing in that moment. But you remain true to yourself by not pretending that all of your hard work has produced any tangible result. It is time to put down the cadaver of an old friendship you were carrying, alone, in hopes of a miracle.
I find that at the very end of these talks sometimes a last precisely calibrated insult can be very helpful in allowing your dear friend to permanently write you out of their life. At that moment, it is the least you can do by way of mercy.
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