Category Archives: 100 words or less

Dignity

“If I could comport myself with half the dignity my father showed as he was dying, I’d be happy,” I told Sekhnet, meaning to note it here to include in the Book of Irv.

“When are you going to start?” she asked me innocently.  

“In the hours leading up to my death, I mean,” I told her, innocently.  

“And not a moment before,” she said gleefully, bursting into a cackle as I struggled to find something to rattle, to indicate that she was mean as a snake.  

She continued to laugh as I searched fruitlessly for a rattle.

On Being Direct

It’s best to be direct,
though it can be painful 
while, say, 
pretending to converse 
with someone uncannily channeling
a beaming Christian Bale as American Psycho.
It’s easier to watch a horror movie
than to find yourself inside one 
trying to remain sincere
while looking into a funhouse mirror,
fun hogtied and bleeding,
gasping for breath.  
It’s fun until somebody loses an eye. 

Why So Glum?

“Why so glum?” she asked.  It seemed to her that he had many reasons to be cheerful.   His work was moving steadily forward, even if he was no closer to getting paid for any of it.

“Because I live in a giant toilet bowl where the biggest pieces of shit make the biggest splash,” he said.  

“That’s pretty good,” she said, “did you make that up?”   

“I don’t fucking know,” he said, and she recoiled as if struck.

“Don’t forget to flush,” he added, to the empty room.

Brave male kitten returns from catch-and-release

He whimpered a bit, then was stoic for the rest of the ride, watching me as I drove.  When I opened the carrier in his ancestral garden he cried again.   His sister, the alpha kitten, hearing this, came towards his cage as he emerged.  He went into the bushes and straight to business: a long piss.  Then he hunched like Arnold Palmer, instead of a putt he dropped a long, slow turd.  He kicked some leaves over it, found the food bowl, had a bite to eat, and dashed off in the direction his sister had walked off in.

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Reading

Reading a well-written page is like having a delicious snack.  I noticed this as I read Jon Katz’s “Saving Simon” just now, as I do whenever I read a bit of Umberto Eco’s masterfully hateful “The Prague Cemetery”.   Reading a good sentence is just a pleasure.

Vibrato, dynamics, the attack of a string, playing in and out of time, laying in a succulent part, leaving space– incomprehensible abstractions to most people, unless they play guitar and have the sensitivity to notice such things.

A well-written sentence?  Even a cat will nod, when the words are set out just right.

Whipsawed

A law professor introduced this great phrase to us in contracts class.  It means being on the hook to perform two conflicting contractual obligations at the same time, the doing of one interfering with the doing of the other.

I’m whipsawed today: the 1974 NYC Human Rights Commission Report cries out for more description, what Irv did in Germany after the war also does.  

It’s a minor dilemma — there’s no contract here.  Write one and the other, separate them later.  

Thus you, gentle reader, will have no idea, but these paragraphs, that I was was ever whipsawed at all.

An Epidemic of Mental Illness?

This excellent article, which I found very convincing, was given to me by a very intelligent man who considers himself insane.  He may well be right, although the piece he recommended is well worth reading if you are considering a psychopharmaceutical cure for what ails ye.  

Or if you are a psychiatrist who spends hours talking to patients, while wondering how to make more money in less time, with far fewer head aches.

The second part of the fascinating two part book review is here.