Category Archives: Ahimsa

Reminder: Thou Shall Not Kill

I hurt my knee.  It hurts like hell in certain positions, like a scalpel being inserted point-first into the patella.   If I sit too long and try to stand, or even just straighten my leg, scalpel into patella time.   I am trying a knee brace, not bending the leg when I sit, but it’s not always possible to avoid the searing pain of trying to straighten my once sturdy leg. 

Finally went to the doctor, who sat on my foot and pushed and pulled my knee from different angles.  The only thing that hurt was the direct pressure on the patella when I tried to straighten the leg.  The doctor told me to go have an x-ray, which would then allow my insurance to pay for an MRI if the sports medicine practitioner needed to do an MRI.   

I called my current insurance company, Healthfirst.  I declined the robot’s kind offer to take their customer satisfaction survey for the “service you are about to receive” by pressing two.  It was only a few moments before Jackie was on the line, very pleasant, bright, sympathetic.    She tried to walk me through the website, which was buggy today on my end.  It displayed completely differently for her than it did for me.  The search function did not seem to be working correctly on my end.

She found me a nearby x-ray place, then a sports medicine doctor, both of whom took my specific Healthfirst insurance plan.   Then an opthamologist, so I can get a prescription for new glasses, then a gastroenterologist for my overdue colonoscopy.  We truly had a great chat while all this was going on.   At the end of ninety minutes of customer service I thanked her, we had a last laugh and parted as great friends. I began to make the calls.

The nearby x-ray place does not have an x-ray machine, it turns out.  They do several other forms of diagnostics, have a lot of sophisticated equipment, but no x-ray.   The receptionist there gave me the name of another nearby x-ray place, and the phone number.   It was a fax line, I learned when that eerie squawking began.  

I called the sports medicine doctor, figuring they might have an x-ray machine on site, save me a few steps.   The doctor, it turns out, does not accept my particular Healthfirst plan.  A first time visit would cost between $320 and $640, if insurance paid nothing.   I asked the receptionist what determined whether the visit was $320, $435, $508 or $639.99.   She had no idea.

You walk into a restaurant.  There are no prices on the menu.  When you ask the waiter how much the BLT is he tells you not to worry about it, the sandwich is delicious.  In three months you’ll get the bill in the mail.   The EOB from the third party that deals with the restaurant informs you that the BLT is billed at $640, but since you have insurance the negotiated price is only $120.  Your copay is $50.  You made out like a fucking bandit.  

We can’t tell you what it will cost until the provider sends us the bill and the billing codes.    That is the standard line and it is perfectly legal under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  You see, until the provider tells us the exact price, nobody can predict anything.   That’s clear, easy to understand.  How is anybody to possibly know that this hospital charges $44,000 for a bag of chemicals they will infuse into your body?   No possible way anybody could possibly know that, prior to the procedure, the submission of the billing codes, and the calculation of the EOB.  Jackie confirmed as much when I asked if the $44,000 bag of Rituxan that may be in my immediate future is covered under my current plan.  There is simply no way to know in advance.  

The first appointment with this sports medicine doctor who will charge between $320 and $640 is a month from now.    Your aching knee is nobody’s fucking problem but your own.  You should have made this appointment weeks ago, you’d be almost in line to see the doctor by now.

I struck out with the other doctors’ answering machines.  Call during business hours, the first one advised me, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.   I noted to myself, with familiar bitterness, that it was 4:30.  Same deal with the next doctor’s machine, only by then it was 4:35.   Well, it was 75 degrees out, Sekhnet reminded me.

Soon she was done trying to cheer me up.  As I laid the merciless details on she was finally struck dumb, began crying because this shit is so frustrating when it happens to somebody you love.   It is worth noting, of course, that if the law allows an insurance company to list a thousand doctors as participating, and only a handful actually are, there is no harm and no foul.  The piece of shit, er, customer, merely has to keep making calls to different offices further and further from their home.  Eventually they will find a doctor somewhere who accepts their insurance.  No fraud where the law says there’s no fraud.  Patient Protection Act and shit.  Hey Barack, Arbeit Macht Frei.

I asked Jackie about getting evidence from Healthfirst that my recent invoice had been returned to Healthfirst by my local post office as undeliverable.  I told her the story, another short chapter in the million chapter book they are constantly updating.  That book is called How We Fuck You To Death You Fucking Piece of Shit.  The main device is never allowing the true facts to interrupt the dominant narrative.  If you can’t produce irrefutable proof, and you are not incredibly dogged, we can fuck you with impunity, fuckface.

Jackie wished she could help, by giving me the evidence that the local post office is now returning rent checks to me and insurance invoices to my health insurance company.   That could only be done by Finance.  There was no way for her to directly contact Finance.  Nobody was allowed to know who Finance is or what they do, but she dutifully made a complaint to them, asked them to send me some proof that they had received the last bill sent to me back marked “undeliverable”.   She gave me the complaint number, said I can follow up in a few days if Finance doesn’t contact me.  Finance unfortunately has no direct extension, so I’d have to get lucky when I try to follow up.

“This is exactly how they kill us, Jackie, those powerfully legally created psychopaths who make all the rules to best serve themselves. You have to admire the seamless perfection of it.”  I then described my request to see a mental health professional, as I imagined it would go.   It did not go well.  Jackie found it hilarious. When I hung up the phone I noticed I was foaming at the mouth.

I was seated on my aching hind legs, head thrown back, howling as loud and plaintively as I can.  I am doing that right now, as I type.   Easier than you’d imagine, really. 

Loneliness (for fun and profit)

The loneliest woman in the world married the most gregarious man in the world.  She told me, during the last conversation we had face to face, that at the time they met and got married he was very lonely and isolated too.   The man was a good friend of mine, and over the years I got to be good friends with his wife as well.   He was a kind, generous person, full of good cheer, an excellent host who really enjoyed company.  The time we spent together over the years was always full of laughter and meaningful conversation.    Sekhnet only got to spend a few fleeting times with him, but she immediately felt like she’d known him always.

In a vindictive turn on the phrase my father used only to make my mother tearful, “don’t worry, Evvy, only the good die young”, my friend died young.   Suddenly, stopped at a red light just off the freeway in Berkeley.   When the light turned green his passenger said “Howie…” but Howie was already gone.  His life had winked out like a candle flame in a soft breeze.

There was a lot of crying over Howie’s sudden absence, which came about a month before my long-suffering mother breathed her last breath.  I spent many an hour on the phone with Howie’s widow.  She felt abandoned by their large circle of friends, things were getting worse at work, her old enemy had been steadily climbing the corporate ladder and was now sabotaging her at every turn.   I noted at one point that I’d never heard Howie speak badly about anyone, a remarkable thing, we agreed.   We both marveled for a moment about this saintly habit of the departed and then wondered what we’d talk about, if not for badmouthing people.  

Then her complaints would continue, the treachery of those who’d always pretended to be her friends, how everyone had turned their backs on her, while feigning great love and concern.  The details were endless, the proofs she advanced very damning.  I was as sympathetic as I could manage.    

I remembered well my own mother’s loneliness after my father died.  My mother was bright, interesting, a sociable person with a great sense of humor, but my father, it emerged as soon as he was gone, had been the social glue that bound people to my mother and father.  Funny, in a way, because he always professed to be a curmudgeon who’d rather spend his time reading and my mother was the social director who arranged all the dinners and visits.  Until my father died, and the calls and visits abruptly stopped.   So I was in touch with Howie’s widow regularly, recalling how painful the isolation had been for my mother after her mate was gone.

Howie’s widow could be demanding, as I learned, shopping for and preparing the buffet for Howie’s unveiling, for example.   She didn’t always show gratitude, I began to notice, while doing nice things for her.  Over time our friendship began to feel more and more like a one way street.   Her mother, someone who’d given her a lot of grief, died after a period of dementia.   I loaned her a great book on seeing the larger picture after the death of a parent, even a difficult parent.  I wrote her a letter to go with the book.  She took the book and letter without comment.   On three separate occasions in the years afterwards she told me she’d look for the book, which she hadn’t read, and send it back to me.  I never saw my original, annotated copy of Death Benefits again.

Here is the kicker, and I notice, as it is not the first time, that a missed call is later cited as the fatal proof I didn’t give a fuck about somebody.   The first time that happened was when a former good friend, a mentally ill guy with vexing emotional problems and an unbearable amount of self-hatred, broke a promise at a very trying time for me and then left me a missed call afterwards, instead of an explanation or any kind of apology.  He claimed he’d left me a “missed call”, at any rate, my phone had no record of the call.   I was hurt at the betrayal, and angry, and didn’t return the “missed call” I hadn’t known about for several days, something that was then thrown in my face by this pant-load while shabbily blaming the emotional standoff on me, you dig, for being too petty to return a “missed call”.  That my phone recorded no such missed call was but a trifle for someone determined to defend himself at all costs.    

Howie’s widow used a similar ploy in the end to make me the asshole who’d viciously rejected her.   I had a missed call from her.  She had been calling, I learned a few days later, to tell me she was coming to New York, but she left no message, sent no email or text.  Once in New York, a day or two before she was leaving, she called to chide me for not caring enough to call her back in time.   I arranged to be available the following day, but she never called back.  I left her a message and I assume she flew off to California pissed at my betrayal.

I heard how hurtful my betrayal had been to her months later, when mutual friends were in New York.  They’d been asked to find out why I had so coldly rejected our old friend.  I told them the story and have heard nothing since from, or about, our rejected friend.

Loneliness, my friends, is a curse and often its own reward.  This woman is very active on Facebook.  I am not, in fact, I hate that shit, for too many reasons to list here.    Another mutual friend called to give me shit a few months ago for missing his mother’s funeral.   I told him how sorry I was, that I hadn’t known his mother died.   He told me it had been on Facebook.   He then gave me some grief for not being a good friend to Howie’s widow, now almost ten years after Howie’s death.   I explained, but it was no use, he wasn’t buying it.   Most likely she’d announced on Facebook that she was coming to New York, but I was too much of a self-absorbed asshole to even check her Facebook page from time to time.   He told me he’d call me back the next day, and that was the last I heard of him.

Loneliness has been monetized, friends, if you want to verify how much, just look up Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.   I was recently at a free dinner Sekhnet had RSVP’d to attend, hosted by some financial company.   One of the speakers flashed a slide and mentioned the FANG stocks, very valuable positions in any respectable portfolio. I glanced over at Sekhnet who gave me a sly smile at the term FANG, which encompassed some of my most hated mega-corporations.    The slide showed the logos of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.  

Every FANG stock is part of the increasingly monetized loneliness of our digital world.   Don’t go to a store, or even talk to anyone on the phone, order shit from your computer, have a slave deliver it to your door for free.  Use a device that marks you as a cool person with money to burn — sure, you can buy cheaper versions of the products Apple sells, but you can’t be COOL if you do.  Don’t interact after work, go into a cocoon, chill and binge watch shows without commercials on Netflix.  Down the fucking list of FANGS.

One of the many reminders, this apt acronym, of the vicious power of loneliness to drive commerce and finance a comfortable retirement, if you are properly positioned with FANG to do so.  God bless these United Global States of corporate personhood.  

 

Nuance, Context and other quaint notions

There are knee jerks that are almost impossible to resist.   Those knee jerks, now amplified and encouraged by our own private on-line and mass media cheering sections,  rule our world today, certainly our politics.  Right is right and evil is evil and if you try to defend evil I will swat that shit away and wag my finger like Dikembe Motumbo under the basket, as your shot winds up in the third row.   Don’t try that shit in my house!

When I hear somebody say that  God told them to do something, and that thing is bombing a water filtration plant and hospital in a far away land (because the dictator of that land is a modern-day Hitler), causing children to die along with their elders, my knee jerks.  That kid in Florida, Trayvon Martin, when the vigilante with the gun stopped him, whatever the guy with the gun may have said to him, why didn’t the black kid just say “yes, sir.  I’m up from Miami, visiting my family, sir” and get to live another day?  Knee jerk.   When the president does what he’s on record as saying his predecessor was an idiot for considering…. boing, there goes the knee.

Flash the cards, there is no shortage of them.  Abortion: murder of a human soul or a hard choice in a situation where an unwanted child will otherwise come into the world to live a life nobody would wish on it     If you believe God said abortion is murder, that’s the end of the story, bub.  It’s murder if the fetus was put in a thirteen year old’s womb by a rapist, or by the coercion of a sleazy, criminal relative.  Murder if they held the girl down and took turns punching her and raping her.  Murder because, every soul was created by God and the soul comes into being at the moment of conception, because God loves every soul.  

True believers are hard to have a conversation with.  There are no facts you can put forth that will allow them to see things from another perspective.  I’m not singling out hypocritical Christians, doggedly defending the rights of fetuses while letting the little unwanted newborn fuckers fend for themselves.   I am just using rigid religiosity to illustrate this larger point about belief that is impervious to discussion, nuance or context.  We all believe what we believe and we justify those beliefs according to our ability to rationalize.    

I am floundering today, as I try to make this vague yet obvious point clear.  If we omit nuance and context in a discussion, we are just talking opinionated shit at each other. Nuance is the first casualty of absolute moral certainty, any sense of a larger context is killed at the same time.  Not to say there aren’t principles worth fighting for– personal integrity is one, it seems to me, but even there, choosing your battles is very important.  This black and white, red and blue, us and them world we live in is the divided, divisive hell it is for many reasons.  High on the list is a massive failure to acknowledge nuance and context, particularly on the other side of our own beliefs, when talking about particular issues. 

I was surprised to learn, as I was writing a long manuscript about my father’s life, trying to draw every lesson I could from his tragic example, that it is possible to identify with the feelings of a desperate, trapped woman who viciously takes it out on her baby.   The feelings, I say, not the actions.  It’s impossible to identify with the actions, I think.  The actions are despicable, whipping a baby in the face, there’s no defending that.   The feelings, odd to realize, are quite readily understandable.   That’s some fucking nuance right there, dear reader.  Let me try to make it as clear as I saw it that day.

A relative I never met, who was portrayed to me only as red-haired, tiny, very religious and with a terrible temper (also a great cook), turns out also to have whipped her infant son in the face, regularly.   It was part of her daily routine, breaking this toddler’s spirit.  I always assumed she was a psycho, which she most likely also was.  But one day it dawned on me, how tortured this woman was when she began taking it out on her first-born son.    It doesn’t excuse what she did in any way, but it sheds light.  Light is the only antidote to darkness.   It shows a path out of what she was trapped in, even if one didn’t exist for her in 1926 when she began her lifelong persecution of the boy she called “Sonny”.

The man she fell in love with was driven away by her brother and her sister-in-law.  It was nothing personal for them, nothing against the young man who loved her.  It was strictly practical.  Her marriage would have meant the loss of their indentured servant and they weren’t ready to give up their live in maid.   Years later she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who seemed to be brain damaged. He’d been knocked in the head many times by his own angry step-mother and nobody will ever know if this deadpan man who died young was brain damaged or not.   He couldn’t make a living.   They lived in a filthy, teeming slum, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1922.   Every day the woman woke up to this horror.   Somehow she got pregnant.  The baby girl died shortly after she was born.  

At some point the heartbroken woman got pregnant again.   This time the tiny woman gave birth to a gigantic son.   We can imagine the pain of this childbirth.   The baby looked exactly like the idiotic husband who had knocked her up.   He looked at her with that same dopey expression.   One day the woman snapped, whipped the baby in the face with the thick, heavy, burlap wrapped cord of her iron.   It apparently felt good.  Maybe the only thing in her life that did.

I’m not being a lawyer for this evil mother.   We’d like to think a mother like this today would be in the hands of an excellent psychiatrist.   That her child would be getting help recovering from his trauma.  But what I’m digging for here is Nuance.   Not that she’s in any way right to act in this vicious way, but in order to understand her pathology, on the way to hopefully making life better for all involved, we have to fully know the context of her actions.

I rattle on about this subject tediously often, I’m aware.   We live in a world where every message we get, every bit of news, is curated, structured to support one polarized point of view or another.   It is extremely rare to get the full story about anything, from anyone.  I am always looking for a way to make the point about nuance and context that is not partisan.  I do this animated by the Anne Frank-like faith that most humans, in their hearts, are not haters.   That we are all basically good.

I believe this even as I hate any U.S. president who rains death on people who have no power to do anything but agonize and die, or if they manage to survive, fear and hate.   Few problems have ever been solved by the application of massive deadly force, whether you call it “Freedom on the March” or by any other high-sounding name.  It is of course business as usual,blowing shit up is a driving force of capitalist profit making.  

I felt a surge of hatred when Bill Clinton sent missiles that blew up civilians, destroyed infrastructure they needed to survive.   That same hatred surged through me when George W. Bush ignored millions of us marching in the frigid streets and launched “Shock and Awe”, later declaring victory and lynching Saddam after shooting his two hideous sons in the street like dogs.   As for the massive civilian deaths?  Killing civilians is now blandly called “collateral damage” nothing to get excited about, certainly no war crime, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.   Barack Obama’s extrajudicial murder of the radicalized American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenaged son Abdulrahim a week later– same deal, along with all the other deaths our recent president inflicted on unknown brown people on his secret kill list.

Can we have some fucking nuance, a little context so we can discuss these things intelligently instead of just using force to kill things like Terror, Evil, Haters of our Freedom?  Our previous president told us we were looking forward, not backwards at the architects of  our recent crimes under international law, you know, because we are, uh, taking the high road.   To be totally honest, we tortured some folks, what are you going to do?   Good folks doing some bad shit, with the best of intentions.  

Make American Great Again.   Hope and Change.  Make America Great Again, again.  The slogans change, a few of the proponents of government violence change with each administration, but the song remains the same.  Fuck nuance, fuck context, it feels good when our leader bombs the shit out of some fuckers who might very well be evil.  If nothing else, they really do appear to hate our freedom.  Even pundits who usually seem to have a reasonable grasp of world affairs go momentarily gaga when the president blows some shit up with a huge show of force.   It doesn’t seem possible to me that we are a nation of such stupid motherfuckers.

The evidence is not strong that we are not, but I am always digging for it.

 

 

Fifty Years Ago Today

A hater with a gun, a sniper who shot from a hiding place, someone who could not possibly have been stopped by a hundred dead-eyed lovers with guns, slaughtered Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.   Decades later, after a sometimes ugly debate, King’s birthday would come to be celebrated as a national holiday.   MLK has been turned into a caricature, an unshakably non-violent man who led his people out of the darkness of a violent racist past and into the light of our present day of color-blind freedom and justice for all.

King was killed one year, to the day, after laying out his arguments about the evil of the war America was then waging in Vietnam.   The speech was called “Why I am Opposed to the War In Vietnam”, you can hear the entire address here.   He denounced the war as an “unjust, evil and futile war.”  He explained why he was no longer able to remain silent as the war raged.   He went on to describe the symbiotic relationship between racism, poverty and militarism.    He was unsparing in his analysis.  To my mind, there is no refuting what he had to say.  

The money to solve the problems of inequality in America was being wasted in a senseless, evil war waged against the poor people of Vietnam, purely for the profits of a few.   The same can be said for every American war since.  Trillions to kill poor people abroad, on dubious rationales, hardly a penny to prevent the eternal hopelessness of our own millions who are born into, and die in, poverty.   King pointed out that we spent $500,000 for each enemy soldier killed in Vietnam and $53 for each American living in poverty– much of the $53 going for the salaries of those not in poverty.

Immediately after giving the speech, which his advisors all urged him not to give, King went from beloved icon of Civil Rights to pariah.  He was immediately condemned in virtually every publication in America.  A few years earlier he would have been universally denounced as a Commie for his brutal analysis of the military-industrial-poverty-racism complex.  He was called a Commie and worse.   King met with the hostility those who style themselves patriotic always express toward those who dissent against any American military campaign.

After the speech, King was largely alone, increasingly focused on the larger problem: social justice for every American living in poverty.  There is no cure for racism until poverty is eradicated.  Neither goal is attainable until America stops spending billions on war.  Talk about speaking truth to power.   King laid out the exact swindle those behind our Great American War Machine are constantly pulling.      The war in Vietnam, King said, was the enemy of the poor, black and white poor together, burning the huts of poor villagers in Southeast Asia, while segregation and inequality persisted at home.  

I add: You’re poor?  Join the army, get some respect.  We will send you to kill other poor people, who will hate you — and not without reason.   Don’t expect, like black vets returning from World War Two did, the respect of your fellow citizens, or even the rights of your fellow citizens.  Know your place, wait your turn, give things a century or two.

I now believe, fifty years today after his assassination, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. must be the angriest angel in heaven.

Individuals part 2

It is good to remember that individuals, while generally better than members of an enraged mob stomping off to do something atrocious, are still individuals, subject to immense variation.  I was reminded of this two or three times after I wrote yesterday’s feel good piece.  

The sympathetic woman who took my initial call about a brusque postal supervisor who gave me a polite “tough, fucking shit, sir” when I complained my rent check had been inexplicably returned to me, and the equally nice woman, a Ms. Linton, I was later informed, who fielded my follow-up five business days later, were two very decent individuals.   The first, whose name I did not get, was not, as it turned out D. McNeil, the woman who was out to lunch when I spoke to the second kind individual at the Postal Inspector’s.

Ms. McNeil knew nothing of my complaint, her name had simply been on the automatically generated email that had been sent to me confirming that my complaint was being seriously investigated.  She confirmed that it was being investigated at the local level, by the person best suited to evaluate it, the brusque postal supervisor in question, who now had my confidential complaint in his hands, with my name and address.  

Ms. McNeil knew nothing of the case, put me on hold to read the case notes.  Five minutes later she was back, still not sure why I had wanted a return call from her.  The case had been ‘escalated’ to the individual post office level.  I asked her what the sense was to have my complaint in the hands of the man who had created the problem when, instead of being helpful, gave his tour de force of super-cool tough guy customer service.  She sort of agreed there was only a limited point to him investigating himself.

Unlike the others, Ms. McNeil didn’t bother to apologize on behalf of the Post Office for this Clint Eastwood-like customer relations specialist, though she did agree that it would have been better customer service to have told the customer holding the mistakenly, inexplicably returned rent check, “this should not have happened.  I will put it on the truck now and your landlord will have it in two or three days.”   She said it would have been better if he’d said something like that, instead of handing me a fake complaint number to call, instead of crossing out the barcode so the idiotic mistake would not be repeated.  She agreed that had he said that an apology of any kind would have been unnecessary.   She asked me wearily what I expected her to do at this point.

“For starters, I still want the Post Office to deliver the rent check they’ve returned to me twice,” I told her.  She explained again about the bar code, how it had to be crossed out and covered with a label.  Sadly, there was no guarantee it would be delivered this time either.   She then mentioned the original idea I’d had– have the post office put the thing in another envelope, readdress it and send it again.   Ms. McNeil liked this idea.  Eventually she told me she would ‘escalate’ the complaint, sending it to the area supervisor, the person to whom all branch supervisors answer. I asked for the email address to send my photos of the twice returned envelope.  She placed me on hold.   While holding I was treated to an endless stream of upbeat ads about the many unbeatable services offered by the Postal Service.   I listened, for as long as my patience lasted, which was about three minutes.  I hung up and dialed the number I had for D. McNeil.  

A pleasant recorded voice told me the person at this number had not set up their voicemail and then announced I would be transferred to a representative to assist me.  There was a beep, then another recording.  It said “your session cannot be continued at this time.  Goodbye.”

Twenty minutes later Ms. McNeil called me back with a fax number where I could fax all the photos I wanted.  I told Ms. McNeil I’d gotten rid of my fax machine years ago.  I asked again for an email address.  She sighed, having no idea why I was being so difficult about these simple things.  She was sure they probably had an email address, would I like to hold while she searched for it again?

I thanked her and walked over to the local post office.  The two Chinese American clerks there had always been very nice.  But all the one I spoke to told me is that she could cover the bar code, send it out for sorting again and hope for the best.  “But,” she told me in strongly accented English, “some Postal employees do not do what they’re supposed to.  You can never tell.”   As for putting it in another envelope, they had no such envelope, I had to go to the main post office for that service.   She agreed it wasn’t fair to make me pay more postage for another envelope, the only option available.  Then she looked at me with intensity and said “But if I give you envelope I have to pay, nobody pay me for the postage.  You think that’s fair?”    I didn’t.  They had no supervisor available at their little Utopia Branch (heavenly though the place otherwise is.)   The two Asian-American clerks regarded me seriously until I agreed it wasn’t fair that one of them should be forced to pay.

I had a sudden thought that none of this was fair.  Our fucking world is off the fucking rails, every business we encounter here in America, with rare, beautiful exceptions, is managed from the style book for psychopaths.  I bought the envelope, it cost me 63 cents.  I paid in cash.  I  addressed the blank envelope and re-mailed the twice returned rent check to my landlord.  I apologized to the wide eyed clerk, who had begun staring at me, seeming truly hurt by how I seemed to be making such unfair demands of her.  When I handed her back the envelope I said “thank you, ma’am.”   She smiled.  I walked back into the sunshine trying to get over the feeling that I had been successfully pissed on, for more than a week.

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“Greeked” for posting on this website.  The envelope was addressed as neatly as circumstances yesterday allowed. 

Peace be with you.

Short version

Wrote this as part of a futile letter I am working on, an exercise in trying to digest something that is indigestible, addressed to the chef and server of the unpalatable dish.  I don’t know if it has any interest, but it’s a much quicker telling of the encounter laid out in the previous post, and I will most likely delete it from the letter I wrote it in:

P.S.

I wrote this letter right after an encounter at my local post office. The encounter illustrates a personality type, all too common, that gives no quarter in defending why they are right and you, whatever the facts, are actually the asshole.

My rent check, in the landlord’s mailer, was returned to me, the stamp cancelled and no other explanation. Went to the post office to have it delivered.  The monkeylike clerk wordlessly studied it for a long time before telling me I needed to talk to the supervisor. The supervisor also studied the envelope for a moment.

“Must not have read the address,” he said, pointing to the address printed on the business envelope. “Machines, we use machines, sometimes they make mistakes.” I asked him to expedite delivery of the check, since it was now a week late. He told me he couldn’t expedite anything, only “overstamp” it and put it back into regular mail, unless I wanted to pay for overnight delivery.  He apparently thought I was being a dick, because he’d already admitted a machine had made a mistake, that it was nobody’s fault, and yet I was still demanding something from him. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?” he asked me.

At this point, the guy who should have simply said “this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle. I’ll hand cancel this, put it on the truck and make sure it gets delivered tomorrow, the address is only five miles from here” was staring at me like I’d just taken a piss at his window.  He slid a paper with a number he said was for complaints through the window, told me his name. He refused to give me a receipt or any proof I’d re-mailed my returned envelope to my landlord. Told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid for it.

The number on the form turned out not to have an option for “complaints” and the waiting time was 40 to 50 minutes to speak to a human. I have no idea if this dickhead gave me his actual name, whether he put my letter in the bin to be sorted and delivered or into the garbage bin. How would I know how much of a vicious psycho this guy potentially is, particularly after I finally told him to fuck himself after he told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid him? He’d certainly showed me a nice snappy catalogue of politely sociopathic traits.

With a stranger who is an asshole, this is standard behavior: never sympathize, or admit any wrongdoing, give a reason that sounds reasonable enough, deny any obligation to fix the mistake, put the complaining consumer on the spot by blaming him for being a hypocrite, and a complainer, tell him to fuck off, politely, give him a fake number to file his fake complaint and make up a name for yourself.

A loved one who does this is in a different category, no?  Do you want the lesson your kids get to take with them in life to be that trust is a delicate, transactional illusion, that to live you have to learn to tell yourself, and others, any lie that makes it possible to conceal shame and manipulation?

 

Anger Update

Be reluctant to declare victory in the war on difficult emotions, my friends.   It is important to remember that battling our powerful lowest impulses is a constant wrestling match.   I had a nice reminder of the hubris of claiming victory yesterday, and the letdown in vigilance such hubris often causes, when I momentarily lost my verbal shit in the post office yesterday.   This came a day after delivering learned comments about recognizing the signs that you are about to get angry, taking a breath and pulling yourself back from the explosion.

My rent check, in the printed mailer provided by my landlord, was returned to me several days after I mailed it.  It was postmarked and returned with no reason for its return anywhere on the envelope. I brought it to the Post Office today to have its delivery expedited.   The woman at the window studied it for a long time, turning it over and over in her hands, peeling back the stamp, turning it again, her lower lip hanging down pensively. After a few minutes of this, and before she could reach for a magnifying glass, I pointed out that she was not going to find any further information.  I told her it was a rent check, returned to me in error, and that I needed it delivered as soon as possible.   She asked what day I had mailed it, when it had been returned to me.  She looked blankly as I told her “I mailed it Tuesday,  it was returned Saturday” then consulted her phone, presumably for a calendar.   After a long pause she looked up at me without expression, slid the envelope back to me and sent me over to her supervisor.

The supervisor looked at the postmarked envelope, turned it in his hands, shrugged and told me maybe the printed address had not been read through the window.  I pointed out that it was quite legible, printed in caps, in fact, and in the place where every business correspondence is addressed.  He countered with “machines, these are read by machines, which sometimes make mistakes.”  

He told me he could not expedite delivery of this erroneously returned mailing, then, when I appeared dissatisfied with this answer, asked me if I had never made a mistake.  I told him, of course, we all do, but that in the case of this properly addressed, properly posted letter I hadn’t made a mistake, the Post Office and its sorting machines had.   I was asking him to correct this mistake.  He said all he could do was send it again, by regular mail, and that hopefully it would go through this time.  He told me he would draw arrows directing the machine’s attention to the place where the address is on the business envelope, that hopefully it would be properly routed by the machine this time.

“Arrows,” I said, “directing the machines to the ordinary place for an address.  Presumably these arrows will get a postal machine to remove its head from its mechanical ass and sort the envelope properly this time.”

“Those are your words,” he said, unnecessarily.

 When I  still appeared unsatisfied, realizing he was dealing with an angry, implacable dick, he slid a postal form, PS Form 3849, under the glass and told me if I had a complaint, to call the number on the form.  The move removed any doubt I had about being in a conversation with an immovable asshole, in this case one named Umar, but I managed, for a time, to maintain a grim cool.   

This was the time, as I urged my friend the other day, to notice the signs that this was going badly, not going to end well, the physical signs that fight or flight chemicals were flowing, the familiar, climbing feeling that generally happens when I find myself confronted by a robotic attitude, by some insistent jerk sitting behind bullet proof glass who won’t back down no matter what.  This was the time to walk away, there was clearly nothing to gain in this interaction.

All he could do, he told me again, was “overstamp” it and draw arrows on the envelope pointing the machine to the address, and hopefully it would get there, by regular mail, in a few days.  Unless I paid extra, there was no other option available to me, nor anything else the post office would do, or had any obligation to do.  “Feel free to make a complaint,” Umar told me, giving me his name.    I told him to overstamp it and send it again.  He did.  I thanked him for his time, through gritted teeth.

Walking out of the post office I was steamed.  After walking about a block I realized I should have gotten a receipt of some kind of the re-mailing, in case of future trouble with the landlord (and to avoid a $25 fee to stop the original check, in the event the letter didn’t make it the several miles to my landlord’s office).  

As I turned to go back to the Post Office I passed the ongoing standoff over a parking spot.  On my original trip to the Post Office, fifteen minutes earlier, I’d seen one car backing in to parallel park as another nipped in quickly from the other direction.   Neither car could get into the spot now, and neither driver was willing to concede an inch to the other.   The two drivers were locked in their positions, neither one backing down, while a traffic jam built up behind them, a bus trying to make a turn was now blocking all traffic on Broadway.   Horns were blaring.   “The human condition,” I thought, as I entered the Post Office again, to enact my part.

Umar would not come to the window, though he saw me standing at the window.  I called him and pounded on the bulletproof glass with my fist as he disappeared around the wall.  I continued calling his name in a loud belligerent voice.  When he returned, affecting the unflappability of the perfect asshole, he refused to give me any kind of receipt.  Impossible, he said, unless I paid for it.  I then exploded.

“This place is fucked up and you are the fucking supervisor of it!” I snarled idiotically, if also accurately, and stormed out, banging the door hard enough to break it.   A moment later it occurred to me that his next move would be to reach into the bin, retrieve my letter with the rent check, rip it neatly in half, ball it up and toss it into the garbage.

The “complaint” number he gave me had no option for complaints.  It was not a complaint number.  The wait to speak to a human was “40 to 50 minutes”.   I found myself flooded with fight or flight chemicals as I searched the web for how to make a complaint against customer-relations challenged civil servant Umar, to protect myself if he did the angry thing and destroyed my payment to the landlord.  He could also simply have left it on a shelf, to sit for a few weeks.

I called the federal agency that oversees the Post Office, spoke to a very sympathetic woman (whose name I foolishly did not take, though she gave me my case #) who assured me this will be investigated and an email would come back to me within 3 business days.  She told me it was a good move on my part to have photographed the returned envelope, and that I should hold on to the photo.

Odds are Umar didn’t rip it up, the landlord will have it the day after tomorrow, cash it by 3/20 and done and done.  In the odd event that he did ‘go postal’ on my check to the landlord, there is at least a record, a complaint with the federal office that investigates alleged improprieties by postal workers.  For whatever that might be worth.  

But if that impenetrable wall of glass hadn’t been between us, and Umar had stepped toward me, I can’t say for sure, in spite of not being a fighter, in spite of my conscious attempt to remain peaceful, that I would have been able to resist what nature would have been imploring me to do.  I’d had fair warning as things went from fartlike to actual shit, but it was no help in this instance.

This is one reason anger is such a dangerous thing.  It is waiting, always, particularly for those of us who were victimized by angry adults when we were children, and anger can almost always convince you that you are 100% correct in your reaction.  Umar had probably had a shitty day himself, didn’t feel like being reprimanded by some snotty, disgruntled customer for a simple mistake he had nothing to do with.   When the customer poured salt on his shit-sandwich of day by telling him “if you had said ‘this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle, we’ll get this over to your landlord ASAP,” Umar could only claim he had said that.  “I told you I was sorry,” he said sullenly, then slid the fake complaint number under the glass by way of saying “lick my unwashed, crusty asshole, sir.” 

There is no winner in this kind of transaction.  It is best to keep them short and to the point, though that is far more easily said than done.   Remain humble, do not proclaim that you have surmounted the ugly thing that will soon be ready to bite you in the ass again, hard, and with very sharp teeth.

Moral Dilemma

I have gone on at length here about the damage done by concealing crucial information, in public and private life both.   It is impossible to make sense of a situation when the underlying events are secretly redacted, classified, above your need-to-know pay grade.    This obfuscation of what actually happened, what used to be quaintly called “the facts”, can be found in virtually every situation where somebody is brutally, or even gently, fucking somebody else over.   Withholding key information is necessary for the proper functioning of every abusive situation,  every betrayal and scandal, personal, political, environmental, what have you.

Removal of transparency has been institutionalized by the powerful corporate players who sponsor candidates for the legislature, it is now also the rule in the government unlimited free speech money has largely purchased.   It would not do, for example, to have the facts known about the effects of the toxic waste being produced by a fabulous company employing thousands and making billions.   Public relations firms are employed to humanistically spin the work the friendly corporation does, to direct people’s fleeting attention away from the murderous externalities the corporation seeks to conceal. 

An energetic public relations firm has been at work for Koch Industries in recent years, showing actors playing women, black people, minorities of every kind, happily employed in important jobs by beneficent, forward looking Koch Industries– making a better tomorrow today and shit.   

There is obviously no hint in these feel good Koch pieces that the toxic sludge they are piping from the Alberta tar sands they own, across the entire width of the U.S., to refineries in Houston, is the most toxic form of fossil fuel left on earth.  Or that it’s flowing sluggishly (with at least one massive spill so far) across more than a thousand miles of the American watershed.   Forget, for a moment, the raped wasteland the ‘harvesting’ of this toxic prehistoric sludge leaves behind on the Canadian lands owned by the Kochs.  The Americans who are protesting the pipeline are beaten up by privately hired goons, set upon by dogs, by Trump, strip searched and imprisoned for carrying signs stating their case about protecting the water supply.  Nothing to see here.  Koch, making the future bright, for winners.  Whatever else you can say about piping this toxic sludge, the profits it will generate for the two Koch boys will double their already incalculable fortune.

Or as you will immediately learn by googling Keystone XL: 

The Keystone XL oil pipeline will be the safest and most advanced pipeline in North America, providing U.S. jobs, energy security and economic benefits.

Wealthy criminals who are actually prosecuted can avoid admissions of guilt by signing lawyerly agreements where they pay a sum of money without an admission of guilt.  Trump and his dad did that, thanks to the rabid genius of the unscrupulous Roy Cohn, who countersued the government for defamation when the government prosecuted the Trumps under The Fair Housing Act.   Trump Inc. who had been systematically violating the Fair Housing Act long before it became law, admitted no wrong-doing and agreed to have its rental policies and practices monitored to ensure no future violations, but the government blinked.  Trump never had to admit their policy and longtime practice of not renting to brown skinned low-life motherfuckers, no matter how respectable they appeared to be.  Nothing to see here, bitches.  You didn’t prove shit and we didn’t admit jack.  Fuck you!

Political and business obfuscation is ubiquitous, too common to even talk about.   Rule one: never admit shit.  Rule two: when accused of violence, punch the accusers as hard as you can in the face, repeatedly, while kicking them in the balls.   Rule three: no disclosure.  Make me.  I know you are, but what am I?

“Yeah, we violated all 371 treaties we made with Native Americans, so?  They were fucking Stone Age savages who thought the earth itself was a god.  Fucking losers, they didn’t even know how to smelt metal.  Plus, a handful of the survivors became very, very rich, filthy rich, with those tax free casinos.  What are they bitching about?   You can’t bring back the dead.  Fucking losers….”

The moral dilemma I referred to above is in the personal arena.  It is an almost daily torment to me.   Hitler did a nice job trimming my family tree back in 1942 and 1943.  Of what would have been dozens of relatives today, from a once large family, I am left with a tiny handful, most of whom I haven’t seen in years.   The work that Hitler wasn’t able to complete, well, there are other ways to do it, yo.

“There you go again with the hyperbole, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, popping up randomly, as he often does.  “You’re going to lose a lot of readers with this Hitler shit.  Hitler, yeah, not a nice man.  Mass murderer, twisted fuck, fine, most people know Hitler was no goddamned good.   You’re not shedding any light here by dragging his hideous face into this conversation.  My suggestion: leave fucking Hitler out of it.”

After a long pause, that included a shower, lunch and checking on the progress of Aaron Judge’s recovery from shoulder surgery, I agreed with my father’s skeleton that the best way to explore this moral dilemma was with a piece of fiction.  A lie, as Picasso put it, that reveals the truth.  And remember, total darkness is the best cover for abuse and shame.

The first time Jim met the man, the man said that Jim was a pussy, a man who lacked the balls to “confront” his girlfriend’s father.  “Confront the bastard!” he told Jim militantly as Jim’s girlfriend smiled and slightly cringed.  Jim felt no need to confront the girl’s father. He’d had dinner at his table, the man didn’t particularly like Jim, and as the father of a young woman who had middle class expectations, Jim thought the man was well within his rights to be wary of him.   Jim was idiosyncratic, disconnected from the general ambitions of the world, though smart.   Jim and his girlfriend’s father got along as well as they needed to, and the romance between his daughter and Jim was going along very amicably, in Jim’s opinion.  Jim told the man he always kept his word to the girl’s father, had her home by the hour he promised, and that preserved the peace and made everything much easier.

The guy who was lecturing Jim about having no balls was trying to convince Jim’s sister, who he’d met weeks earlier, to quit her excellent job, pack her things and run away with him to Arizona.   He was fleeing a failed marriage, it was complicated, he was deeply, deeply in love and he had no intention of meeting the parents of the pretty young woman he was trying to abscond with.

“Phew… that’s some ripe, eh, fiction,” said the skeleton.   

You can’t make this shit up, dad.   From that twisted exchange, an unneeded moral lecture to Jim about something he himself was incapable of doing, the rest followed in a straight line.   A long con game.  Soon he’d lost his job, asked Jim with a smile if he could borrow some money, just for a short time, a couple of months.  Jim was generous, Jim was foolish.   The man took advantage.  Jim became the subject of mounting anger on visits to his sister.  He was cursed as the “fucking Jew” who, years later, still came every month, driving a six hour round trip, just to collect the monthly payment they never mailed to Jim.  

The man was always more comfortable blaming others than taking responsibility for his frequent mistakes.  It is only human to make mistakes, it is inhuman not to forgive, preached the man who did many bad things without ever once apologizing to anyone.

The skeleton of my father nodded from his grave, very satisfied. 

“Nicely turned, Elie,” he said.  “I love that you didn’t even mention the many old friends he ‘borrowed’ money from who eventually abandoned the lying fuck, the several times, that we know of, that he embezzled from a boss who loved and trusted him, the year or more that he pretended to go to work every day while he was fraudulently drawing his ‘pay’ from his dead father’s credit cards.  The $10,000 he borrowed from mom and me towards the downpayment on a home he was pretending they were going to buy, two or three days before he declared bankruptcy.  Particularly heroic, on your part, not to mention the time he threatened to murder his children, his wife, me and mom, and then himself.  Like all desperate, murder and suicide threatening cowards, he could have saved everyone a lot of grief by just snuffing himself first.  So I salute you for not going there.”

Why would I go there, dad?  You know I always take the fucking high road. 

“Just one more reason you sometimes feel so fucking alone, Elie,” said the skeleton, wanly.  “I’m just sayin’… Try not to brood on lost nieces and nephews, eh?”

Anger Makes You Mad

Neuroscience has identified the part of the brain that lights up when we are angry — the insula, deep in the cerebral cortex.   When the insula is aglow fight or flight chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol are released and the mind is literally disabled from making fine, or even gross, distinctions.  

A truly angry parent may actually be physically incapable of seeing the harm in venting against a young kid who has provoked them to rage.  Incapable of seeing the damage done by slapping the kid, or locking the kid in a dark closet and turning the music up to drown her screams or raging wildly against the child’s sense of self. 

This shut off of the moral faculty when rage is upon us seems like an obvious point, but it really isn’t.  Angry and “mad” are synonyms, but even that is only a hint of the obvious.  

The other side of being angry is that we instantly justify our anger, even though these deeply-held justifications often don’t bear much scrutiny.  All available evidence, when we are mad, points to our being absolutely right to be angry.   The urgent reason we feel angry couldn’t be more obvious, to us.   It’s telling, and very human, that the only non-physical faculty that continues to work when we are enraged is our homo sapiens ability to justify ourselves.

This trait, rage making one resolute and incapable of seeing another person’s point of view, is what makes war possible.  It explains mob lynching and every other atrocity.   Rage makes people support deadly policies of all kinds.   We don’t see the victims of war, lynching or deadly policies as humans with souls as unique and precious as those of the people we love.   We see them as irredeemable fucking assholes who deserve what they fucking get.   If Donald Trump had a massive stroke during a nationally broadcast speech, many Americans would feel no empathy for him, some would even laugh.   Reminds me of a great line of Trump’s, from early in the presidential campaign when he was picking off his Republican opponents one after another.

 I think it was Ted Cruz, right before he was voted off the island, who introduced a woman, I think it was Carly Fiorino, as his running mate (turns out Carly introduced “our next president” Ted Cruz — ed.).   The woman turned on stage and seemed to fall into a manhole.   She stepped forward and just went down.  Trump showed the great clip to his crowd at a rally.  The crowd loved it.  He pointed out that nobody on stage had gone to help her.  “Even I would have helped her,” Trump said with a smile and a little shrug.  “Even I!”   Cracked me up.    

My grandmother, no stranger to anger, liked to calmly say, after she’d provoked me with some harsh comment about my work ethic, “I know, I know… the truth hurts, I know…”   I’d sputter on in defense of the thing she had just attacked and she’d smile, and nod, and sympathetically tell me that the truth hurts, that she knew, she knew.   I loved her, but that was some hard to come back from shit.  

There is this, though: the things that will make us most angry are things that attack us where we are most vulnerable.   A shameful secret, dangled sadistically.  Noting a particular weakness we know we have.   Bringing up something painful in a way that seems unfair.   Making an issue of our greatest fear.  

I’m no expert on anger, but I have studied it for many years, since it played a terrible role in my life going back to my earliest days.   It turns out there are ways to avoid an angry confrontation, methods to defuse anger rather than escalate it.  

The intellectual part is hard enough, recognizing the maddening principle at work, the exact, familiar thing that pisses you off, before the anger takes over, and then learning what you need to say and do next to avoid escalation.   That intellectual understanding is crucial for de-escalating the situation.  It’s hard, but over time we can get better at recognizing the signs that we are about to get mad and take the steps that have worked in the past to calm our reactions.

The emotional component of anger is the truly hard part to master.   The overwhelming feeling of injustice hits us hard out of nowhere.  Suddenly we are under attack, the stress chemicals flowing, the insula lit up, the justifications for our anger mounting aggravatingly.  That, my friends, is the fucking hard part.   Something to think about while you consider how you feel about the idea that anger, even rage, is inevitable in human affairs.   I would not concede that in my own relations.