Category Archives: Ahimsa

The Opposite May Also Be True

Went back to buy the guitar today.  As I passed through the main room there was a quiet vibe in the electric guitar section.  A young woman played quietly with a phone propped on her thigh, maybe jotting down a song idea.   A guy, who looked, with tattoos and serious Scottie Pippen profile, like a possibly dangerous gang member, was playing some meditative lines that brought Jerry to mind.  A few other people played, thoughtfully, none of them too loudly.  I reproached myself mildly, perhaps I’d been too harsh the day before about those exhibitionist wankers I pictured driving themselves into dividers.

Into the acoustic guitar room where a guy was checking out a booming electric acoustic bass. I took the guitar into the other room, with the acoustic amps, and slid the glass door closed.  An introverted kid with dark hair dyed blonde on top sat facing the wall, a big acoustic/electric guitar plugged in.   The kid played some interesting open chords, paused as I got in tune.  I played for a moment and the kid started again, an open chord the young guitarist could not have spelled.  The raga bass note was D and it was not hard to find things to play that complimented the kid’s strange chord changes.

The notes you finger on the strings form harmonies, chords.  Some are basic ones every beginner learns, G, A, D, Dm, E, Am.   You can spell these chords by naming the notes you finger:  G-B-D-G-B-G forms a simple G major chord, spelled 1-3-5-1-3-5, the places of these notes on the G major scale.  You can make the harmonies fancier, and weirder, by changing a note or two of a familiar harmony.  You can also change the voicing, the order of the notes.  A G chord can be played with a B, its third (a strong harmonic partner) on the low string. Lower that B one fret to a Bb and you have a cool fingering of a G minor chord, with the minor third in the bass.   You can add notes to harmonies, subtract notes, play open strings that give unusual sounds — there are many possibilities.  Jazz guitarists can tell you that you have fingered an inversion of a C6-9 chord, called that because the notes added are the sixth and ninth degrees of the C major scale, but many guitarists, particularly young ones, just find cool sounding chords and mess around with them up and down the neck.

These odd chords and eccentric invented voicings are among the first amazing things creative young guitarists discover, and this young player was working with these ideas as I was checking out the guitar I was going to buy.   The young guitarist was not insistent, in fact was somewhat reticent, but from time to time some of those odd chords would flower into the air from the amp, a rhythm would be tapped out. I’d catch a chord and bend a bass note along to it, let it shimmer, then play a little run ending with the flavorful riff from Norwegian Wood.  It sounded good to me, this interplay, and it felt good, too.  There could not have been a greater contrast between this interactive guitar player and the showy jacked up masturbator of a few days earlier.    

I lingered, checking out the guitar, listening to this kid’s ideas, adding notes and ideas of my own.  The guitarist was making musical sense, there was logic to the choices and a sensibility, a poetry, that made it easy to follow.  Most importantly, he left generous patches of silence among what he was playing, inviting oxygen-rich spaces where music can breathe and grow.

It put me back in time to when I was first learning the guitar, the magic feeling when something accidentally turned musical.  I thought of my friend Paul, a young man who couldn’t spell even a simple chord to save his life (and once, when his life literally might have depended on it, he couldn’t be bothered to learn to spell) but who is probably the most intuitively brilliant and inventive guitarist I’ve ever met.  He’d stumble on a chord shape he loved the sound of and would soon fashion a song out of it, then another, then five variations on that.  I remember his beautiful solo arrangement of By The Time I Get To Phoenix, a song that caught his fancy, though he couldn’t have told you the key or the names of any of the chords he was playing.

This kid in the acoustic guitar room was no virtuoso, but he played with great taste.  The way he lovingly took a sound and played with it reminded me of Paul, of my own early experiments with guitars.   I could have played there until the store closed, the guitar was nice to play, the room was air-conditioned, the amp had a great reverb, our levels were perfectly adjusted so we could hear the nuances of what each of us was playing.  I suppose we played for about an hour.  

I got up, unplugged my new guitar and bought it.  As this was going on the kid left, head down, eyes avoiding everyone else’s.  I wanted to say “hey, you sounded good.  It was a pleasure playing with you.”  It would have meant a lot to the kid, I think.  My reflexes were too slow.  I said nothing to the kid, but I note here; things may be horrible sometimes, but without warning, the opposite may also be true.  Be alert for the small miracles that make the rest of this worthwhile.

Life’s Work

The pursuit of excellence for its own sake is regarded as idiocy in a society that values only the creation of value– that is, the creation of the dough re mi — money you can buy things with.  Things are given value according to how much they’re worth — in dollars and cents. Nothing could be more basic and immutable than this first law of the marketplace, no?   Why bother to write clearly, if not to hone your craft for money?   Why be meticulous about playing in tune, and in time, if nobody is paying — if, in fact, nobody is listening?   I am listening.    

I was checking out a guitar yesterday, a 3/4 size Martin that felt good in my hands, sounded good.   I’d been thinking about it, realizing I’d probably have to buy it, even though it’s not really made of wood. “How does it sound amplified?” I asked the kid with very long hair.   He handed me a cable and led me to a room with padded stools and amps.  

“It sounds good,” he said.  He was right.  Damn, it sounded very good. I began to play, now with a pick, now using fingertips to pluck the chords of One Note Samba; I strummed with my thumb, with the pick.  A nice rich, round tone.  The pleasure of playing this little guitar was considerable, my hands relaxed, playing things they’d played enough to play smoothly, improvising, checking out the harmonics.

Somebody came into the room after a few minutes and began to play another guitar.  At first I was annoyed at the intrusion, but when I realized the guy was playing a straightforward thing in E,  I played in E, some fills, a couple of chords.   It was OK, I could continue to check out the guitar.   My back was to the guy, he’d sat behind me.   He soon got very ornate, playing a fast, elaborate finger-picking piece that was tricky to follow.  He turned up his amp.  

It was quickly obvious that this was the common exhibitionist wanker in a guitar store, there are dozens of them, wailing away, fancying themselves gunslingers, striving for supremacy, the spotlight, the admiration of their flailing peers.   If you walk through the main room of any guitar store there are many of them, bashing away at guitars, in every key, in no key, with varying degrees of skill, playing over each other, all of them way too loud.   The cacophony is unbearable.   They get into cars, if they have them, tailgate, ride the horn, pass on the shoulder cursing as they go, spin out of control, ultimately wind up totaling their cars into a divider.  On a good day.

I never turned to look at him, unplugged the guitar and brought it back to the salesman.  I’ll buy it tomorrow, I decided, when I’ll be in the neighborhood next.

In the subway on the way home I am fleshing out an idea that struck me while walking across 18th Street.  I’d paused to write: reading is magic, think about it.  Marks on paper tell you what I’m thinking.

Picture that animated.   That’s what I was doing on the subway.  I drew a pen, took a brush and painted a shadow under it.  The train swayed, jerked, but I have always written and drawn on trains, am an experienced surfer that way.  It is a very rare stroke that goes wrong for me on a train.   I soon had a 3-D looking calligraphy pen drawn on the page.  I made a note to animate the drawing and then cut the pen out.  I’d take the cut out pen, dip it in a drawing of an ink bottle, the cruder the better, and write the words, in stop-motion, as though they were flowing from the moving pen:

Reading is magic, think about it.  Marks on paper tell me what you’re thinking.  

True.  A simple but powerful illustration of the amazing human invention of writing and reading — communicating anything you can think of to express using combinations of 26 symbols.  Also a powerful evocation of the potential of animation to get kids interested in literacy.   I drew in my book for about ten stops, was pleased and shut my eyes.  It felt wonderful to shut my eyes on that air-conditioned train.  

write ani

Inevitably I had the second thought, which caused my eyes to open and which I began to note on another page — in black and white.  

reading animation

We do not, as a society, give a fuck if you can read, have a rich mental life, consider ideas and solutions to problems you might not have imagined.  We do not, as a society, give a rat’s ass if you can write, beyond clicking a box assuming liability for any and all debts incurred in the course of your dealings with our corporation.  

Our society does not have work, or any productive use, for a good chunk of its people, tens of millions of them.  The young versions of these unneeded people are sent to schools to prepare them for a life where they are not needed.  The lesson many of them learn clearly is: fuck you, asshole, bend over and spread your cheeks.  Lift up the nutsack. Cough.  

Life’s work:  knowing this, all of it, and living calmly and productively, doing everything your talents allow to inspire, give hope, make a small ripple of change.  Death is waiting for you anyway, why be aggravated by the many aggravations this life dispenses so generously for free?

Etiquette as the Last Refuge of Scurrility

It’s wrong to abuse people gratuitously, or even trying to be funny.  There, I said it, fuck you.  Seriously, there is most often no humor in abuse, no matter how otherwise witty.  Abuse masquerades as humor to apply the talent for malice, seizing a jocular tone to wield the lash with the deniability of “only kidding… Jesus, stop being such a pussy.” A “roast” on TV can be occasionally funny, it’s all in good fun, blah, blah, but a roast in real life is rarely fun for the roastee.  It is uncomfortable for most people to be put on the spot.

If I put you on a spit and turned you slowly and lovingly over the flames, basting you with your own juices to keep your skin from burning, no matter how otherwise hilarious my patter was while doing this, I know for a fact you wouldn’t find it all that adorable.  We do this to each other from time to time, and it’s no joke, it’s a sign something sick is going on.  

Not to be all judgmental about it, but when someone who has just been kicked in a delicate place is crying, the most humane first reaction is sympathy, not a smirking admonition not to be a pussy.   “Everybody gets kicked there, whiner.  Stop fucking crying and finish listening to my problems, asshole.  I have problems too, you know.  I kneed you by accident, ACCIDENT– pussy.”

I am thinking about this because when being polite is the only reason for doing something, against many good reasons for not doing that thing, experience teaches that it is a mistake to do the thing out of politeness.  Being polite is a good thing, especially with strangers and potential assholes, and politeness has an important place in civility. Being polite as the only reason to do a thing?   A weak ass reason indeed, and almost weightless against any reason not to do the thing at all.    

Years ago, after an unhappy, brilliant, talented, witty and often abusive friend turned her abuse on me at a particularly bad time for me, I replied to her hurtful email with a long explanation of why I’d been so hurt by it.  She declined to respond to my wimpish complaint.  I never heard from her again.  It was the quiet whimper at the end of a long, troubled friendship between two damaged people.  

A year or two later, her husband’s mother died at 99 or 100.  The old woman had been severely demented for the last decade or two, and when she finally died, the husband’s sisters began screaming for him to do something.   He jumped up and applied mouth to mouth resuscitation to the dead woman, until, presumably, nurses intervened.

Sekhnet and I spoke to him shortly after learning, by email, that his mother had died.  He was very grateful to us for a long call that gave him some comfort.   I had nothing against him.  In fact, it had been a source of stress and pain to watch him severely verbally pummeled by his unhappy wife every time the four of us got together.  I always took his side, tried to pour some humor on the ugly situation, distract the wife from her assaults.   Sekhnet was also very troubled watching this brutality at every meeting.   When the woman turned that same whip on me one time too many, I was not having it.  That was the end of our long, troubled friendship.    Against my better instincts, I yielded to Sekhnet’s persuasion that I attend the wake in Chinatown.  It would mean so much to our lapsed friend’s husband who had just lost his mother, she convinced me.  Sentimentality and a misguided sense of duty and kindness triumphed over Reason and self-interest.

I have never had a reason not to regret going to that wake.  I rushed from something I needed to concentrate on to be there, and needing to rush off had distracted me from the important thing I’d needed to focus on.  I stood in line to have a meaningless hug from my former friend who made a smiling, breezy comment, only gently barbed, and it was the only exchange we had.   Her husband thanked me several times for coming, and even took a moment, at a family dinner after the wake that I should also have not been persuaded to take part in, to find out if I was still trying to do that ridiculous animation business with kids.  

I have never had a reason to think I did the right thing going to that wake.  I did the wrong thing, for myself, thinking it was the right thing.   Lesson learned, and now I move on slightly wiser.  

Politeness for its own sake?  Complete fucking lying bullshit.

If You Believe…

What is the harm in believing your adoring maternal grandmother and seeing yourself as a talented person uniquely qualified to leave something worthwhile for society when you go?  

I can see a few pitfalls in that sentence:  the blinded grandmother with her six dead siblings, dozens of nieces and nephews never seen, described in Yiddish letters that stopped coming in 1942 or ’43, buried with everyone else in that ravine to the north of town, has many reasons to be unreliable.  

My grandmother (my mother’s mother, not the one who whipped my infant father in the face, I never met that one, she died before I was born) was a talented woman, a dressmaker who could see a garment, remember it, buy the material (as she always called fabric) and put one like it together in a few hours, cutting with large scissors, working at her sewing machine and mannequin.  After she retired, between copious draughts of straight vodka, she could go with a wealthy neighbor to a fancy Miami Beach store and look at dresses.  They could pick out the general cut of one, the neckline of another, the detailing on a third, the material of a fourth.  She never made a sketch, kept it all in her head. Her customers always loved the dresses she made, but does that make her an authority on talents that uniquely equip one to tackle and carry out the impossible?   Hardly.

I believe that everyone possesses talents, many of which they are unaware of.  This loss to the world is largely the work of our capitalistic society — only major league talent that can beat the competition is talent worth paying for.  Everyone else with your unmonetized talents — you got a hobby you like, good for you.  I had a grandmother who wanted badly to believe that her only grandson was a genius destined for fame and wealth. She needed to believe it more than most grandmothers, with only her daughter, her granddaughter and me the last shot at keeping alive the genetic line.   I have not kept alive the genetic line, except in myself so far, though my sister has a daughter and a son.  

Back to my belief that many people have great talents they are unaware of, an example:

I was riding in the back seat of a car, behind the driver. There was music on the sound system, it sounded good, a woman singer or two harmonizing beautifully.  I knew this music, but was not aware of the version with the harmony singer on it.  I discovered it was the driver, singing live with wonderful pitch and a great voice, a woman who does not consider that she has any musical talent, a woman who’d be embarrassed if I told her how impressed I was.  Her husband, unaccountably and nonchalantly, also has a great voice, a remarkable memory for a tune he’s heard once — yet, also, no musician.   It mystifies me with these two: all of their children play instruments and are excellent singers.  Yet they…. well, I wouldn’t understand, as they tell me, since I’m a musician.

I consider talent a near universal thing, every individual possessing some particular gift, and it is sad to me that here in Free Market World so many of these talents are hidden, wasted, not contributing wonderful things in every area of life.   There are untapped and valuable talents beyond the easy artistic ones that come to mind.   Some have an innate talent for organizing information, a talent for talking soothingly to groups of people, a talent for seeing the larger structure and fixing problems others would take a long time to put their finger on, a talent for making people feel comfortable, for bringing out the best in them, a talent for peace, a talent for happiness, a talent for enjoying the best things in life.   These are all talents that, if cultivated and freely expressed, would make the world a much better, happier, more contented and peaceful place.

“Ah, there you go, typical… fucking dreaming again, as if utopian socialism ever had a chance in reality,” a reasonable voice will say.  “The world is the world, Darwin was essentially right, it is survival of the most cunning and ready to murder their rivals.  One look around shows the counterfactual nature of your absurd, idealistic, wish.   Evolution itself argues against it.”

Unless survival through increased insight and interconnectedness is true evolution– learning from mistakes instead of compounding them by revenge.    

“Oh, they will shoot you many times if you say that loudly enough, my friend, if you ever get enough attention for your wishful views, which, thankfully for you, is unlikely in any case,” says the voice of reason.  

“I’ve always held that seventeen bullets to the torso for speaking a powerful enough truth clearly is worth the price paid by those who smolder, volatile and ready to blow, living lives of desperate and unreasonable compromise under intolerable conditions.”

“Mmmmm…. a talent for the felicitous phrase, a talent for justification, a talent for recasting clear failure as something actually laudable…”

A talent for talking to myself.  A talent for ignoring certain hard realities as long as I can and then recoiling from them.  A talent for finding myself in a loop, shaking my head and going, “damn…..”

Back to my original question: is it mad, if you are uniquely situated to help, to carry on in spite of the seeming impossibility of success?   If you have an idea that can help people in need, develop it into a program that can contribute something constructive to the noisy and often misguided conversation being hollered all around, can give some joy, fun and sense of accomplishment to kids who are presently doomed to lives of tragedy that will seem longer than their twenty years…. do you not have a moral duty, if you have the means to carry out the program, to soldier on?

“You expect an awful lot of yourself,” says a device, weakly.

I have the tools.  I have the program, done successfully now one hundred times.  I have the written materials describing it, a curriculum, a website… I…. I….

I remember meeting my grandmother’s first cousin, George Segal.  George, creator of life-sized plaster casted people posed in evocative dioramas, is remembered today as a giant in American sculpture.   I met him twice as an adult, once in passing at a gallery on 57th Street, we walked west together toward Columbus Circle, and shortly thereafter as his guest at his farm in New Jersey.   He took me into the converted chicken coops, huge sprawling studios, rustic but comfortable even in winter.

“Your grandmother was very good for you, and very bad for you,” he observed sagely when we were sitting alone in one of his studios.

Somewhere in my many haystacks of papers I have the furious letter he wrote me after that visit.  You can practically feel the clench of his teeth at the monstrousness of someone who wanted to be an important artist but felt himself superior to the guardians of taste, the wealthy art collectors and the unctuous subculture that curates their collections.  They certainly did not deserve the bitter anger of someone who hated them but felt entitled to their money and respect.  These taste-makers were some of the greatest and most generous people in the world, he pointed out through clenched teeth, and worthy of respect and honor, not scorn.  

It had certainly worked out well for him.

 

Making Sense of Seeming Senselessness

My father, for lack of a closer example, and being dead, also, a perfectly cooperative one, never recovered from the traumas of his childhood, which were many.  

He appeared urbane, had a series of pretty good jobs, with some prestige, bought a nice home, had the respect of many people.  He had a great, dark sense of humor, he was witty, and very well-read.   He could converse intelligently on just about any subject.  He was affable and had an easy rapport with children.   He loved animals and took good care of any he came across.  The only tell of his early traumas was his need to fight and to win every fight.  

He was Fred Astaire in an argument, very light on his feet, smooth, quick, almost impossible to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you were not the object of his arguing it was hard to find fault in his smart, stylish ability to dispatch an opponent easily.  He never seemed to break a sweat or exert any effort at all.

His need to win every argument was the giveaway I noticed fairly early on.  I tried every way around it, since I hoped for more out of our relationship than an occasional laugh and the inevitable bludgeoning arguments, but until I was in my 40s, and had learned something about reining in my emotions, I had little chance of success.   I spent years piecing together the clues to what had made him this way; they did not yield themselves easily.   In the end, and aided by my discoveries, I was as good as the old man at making my points.  Law school put the finishing touches on it, because as much as anything else law students are relentlessly drilled in the smelly art of prevailing.   The prevailing party wins it all in court, the other party loses all.  Elegant in its simplicity even if grotesque in many of its implications.   

The old man needed to win, and if you were keeping score, he seemed to win virtually all of the time.   There was a cost attached, but he was glad to pay it.  A punchline of sorts will give you the point I am hoping to make here, if  I prepare everything for you correctly.  

My father’s first cousin Eli was American born (his mother died giving birth to him) and a rough and combative character who was incredibly warm and funny if he loved you.   If he didn’t love you he had no hesitation to thunder, turn purple, and possibly bash you in the face.   He did this even to people he loved, sometimes, though he and I got along well.  Our frequent disagreements sometimes turned his face purple, brought white spittle to the corners of his mouth and a ferocious panther-like expression to his face, but we never came to blows or stopped talking to each other.  “Eli and your mother fought all the way from Georgia to New York,” my father once cheerfully said of a car ride up from Florida.  Nobody loved each other more than Eli and my mother did, or fought each other more passionately.

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me some crucial background into the hitherto inexplicable behavior of his Aunt Chavah, my father’s mother, towards her oldest son, my father.  He did this to give me some insight into my father, and it worked.  Eli had gone with his father to the dock where a ship brought Chavah from Europe and they picked her up in his truck.   It was love at first sight.   Eli was a handsome young man and Chavah, the aunt he was meeting for the first time, was a red headed beauty who loved him immediately.    Her older brother, Eli’s father, was not as loving, even though he’d paid for her passage from Europe.  She was expected to work off the debt as a servant in his house.  

Her indenture went on for a few years, and would be continued after she had children and moved back to Peekskill (my father and his young brother dug their nails into the snake plants they were forced to dust, in an ongoing attempt to kill the succulents).   During her first years in service there she fell in love with the Jewish post man, also a red head.  He wanted to marry her, but Eli’s father broke that up.  “His bitch-on-wheels second wife would have lost her slave,” Eli pointed out.  

A few years later, when it was past time for her to marry, they arranged a marriage as mysterious as they come.  I have no idea who made the match or how the two sides even met each other.  The groom was a man from a primitive, dirt floored farm near Hartford, Connecticut who most considered dull.   Eli described the deadpan face of this man who died before I was born as “two eyes … a nose and a mouth”.   He then imitated a face that was just that.  

Eli insisted his uncle by marriage was very funny, and incredibly subtle, he’d simply had the life beaten out of him by a cruel and violent step-mother who hit him in the head with heavy boards and whatever else came to hand.  According to Eli, my grandfather had mentally checked out at a certain point to save himself.  The way Eli told it, he seemed to be the only one who could see this inner life in his new uncle.  My grandfather Eliyahu comes down to me as a tragic man who, having endured a very hard life, and great abuse from his step-mother and then his reluctant and furious wife, died young of liver disease though he never drank alcohol.   

Chavah, who had always had a temper, seemingly went into a permanent rage once ensconced in her horrific new life.  They were incredibly poor, even by the standards of the day in the crowded slums of the Lower East side.  After her illiterate husband lost his herring delivery job when the horse who knew the route died, and he returned at the end of his first day with the new horse with a wagon-load of undelivered herring barrels, Eli and his father drove down to NYC and picked up the hapless little family:  pregnant Chavah, Eliyahu and their little son Azrael, usually rendered Israel.

That one and a half year-old taken to his new home in Peekskill was my father, and terrible damage had already been done to him in the airless little slum apartment he was born in.  His mother had already given birth to a girl, a still born.  The baby may have lived a day or two, nobody alive now can verify this.   The newborn baby was dead and buried and then some time after that my father was born.  Chavah was tiny, my father was a huge baby.   Chavah hated her husband and seemingly carried a long building grudge against this large baby as well.  Whipped him from the moment he could stand, preferred method rough burlap wrapped power cord from her iron across his baby face.  Whap!   Stop looking at me, she might have screamed, in Yiddish.  Whap!

Eli, by then 18 or 19, and in their house all the time, had seen it himself many times.  My two year-old father cowering as his mother rattled the drawer by her seat at the kitchen table where she kept the heavy, stinging electrical cord.  “By then all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would….” and he imitated a terrified boy, standing at rigid attention, cringing as he waited for a few lashes in the face, averting his eyes.   I had a sudden, immediate insight into why my father was so relentless about never losing a fight.   And a flood of sympathy for the poor bastard that had been impossible to feel when he was bullying and hectoring and paying any price to win.  

I tried to hint at these things the next time we met.   “Eli’s full of shit!” snarled my father.   “Ask his kids what kind of father he was, he is so full of shit.  His kids hate him.  Sure, listen to his twisted version of history, he’s a great historian, he knows everything, he’s the expert on every subject, a man of great insight into everything.  A fucking bullshit artist — did he tell you about the many millions he made that he was screwed out of, always somebody else’s fault?  I’m sure he did.  His fantasy stories will answer all of your questions.  He’s a fountain of wisdom,”  and so forth.

And now the punchline, of sorts, that you have been so patiently awaiting.  After two years of inexplicable fatigue, my father found himself, the first night of Passover, waking from a nap unable to move and severely jaundiced.   My mother who had been heating up matzoh ball soup and getting ready to serve dinner,  called an ambulance.  The ER doctor knew immediately what the learned endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist that my father saw several times a month had been unable to figure out:  this patient is in the very end stages of terminal liver cancer.   He went into the hospital on the first day of Passover, a holiday of eight days, and was dead before the holiday commemorating the perilous journey from slavery to freedom ended. 

On what turned out to be the last night of his life I visited him in the hospital, stood by his deathbed where I found him waiting to talk.  After the pleasantries, and after he asked if I’d brought the digital recorder (we were both glad I’d left one there in the care of his wonderful nurse) the first thing he said was:  

Eli hit the nail on the head, everything he told you was true.  Only he probably didn’t paint it as dark and nightmarish as it really was…  

Then, the man who had insisted all his life that childhood was something an adult leaves behind in forging his own independent identity and life, said:  my life was over by the time I was two.  You don’t recover from that. 

I have been over and over this terrain many times, probably told versions of this very story a dozen times right here on this gratuitous blahg.  I’m thinking about it now because I had a reminder yesterday of the essential incomprehensibility of much of human behavior, particularly our own.  

An old friend expressed dismay that his loved ones sometimes don’t seem to realize that he has nothing but the best of intentions, no matter how else it may appear.  It saddens him that his old friend, and his wife, cannot easily see his good will and instead misconstrue things motivated by the best of intentions as antagonistic or hostile.   Those actions he intends to be supportive that are sometimes misread as provocative, a vexing human mystery.  

 As for my father, he expressed his very sincere regret that he hadn’t explored the many gradations of life instead of seeing everything as a black and white zero sum fight to the death.  He mused momentarily and sadly about how much richer his life, and the lives of those he loved, would have been had he seen the world in all its subtle variations.

He expressed this sorrowful insight perhaps seventeen hours before the sun went down and, in the orange and pink embers of a beautiful Florida sunset, the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital window, his last breath went out and no more came in.

Why I Brood, short version

Got to get this done in five minutes or less, finish the crucial work I can’t get to, be done with a series of invisible bones crosswise in my throat.

I spent my childhood often blamed for things I had no control over. Motives were ascribed that were not my motives.  I had to defend myself, at times, for things I hadn’t even done.   This was the work of my traumatized father, primarily, with the able assistance of my almost equally traumatized mother.  I am not complaining about this, merely stating how it was for my sister and me growing up.  My sister claims it was worse for me because I fought against it.  I don’t know if it was worse for me, I know it was bad enough for each of us.

Attempts to get the whole truth on the table: denied.   A child hasn’t all the tools to counter a determined and brilliant adult adversary in partnership with a loyal adult ally, also of great intelligence.  Over decades these tools can be acquired, along with a certain amount of insight, but it takes a lot of work and it can take a lifetime.

Fast forward 45 years or so.  Father on his deathbed says to his son, his lifelong adversary: you were right to feel betrayed and I was wrong to betray you.  I am so sorry I was such a brutal prick.  I am amazed that you seem able to forgive me.

The son says:  you did the best you could, I realize now that if you could have done better you would have.

The father (with a sigh):  I wish I’d been mature enough to have had this kind of talk with you fifteen years ago.  

Long pause.  

Now, if you will excuse me, son, I’d like you to help me die.  I have no idea how to do it.

“Nobody does, dad,” I told him.  

Ten minutes later I closed his dead eyes with two fingers of my right hand, then handed his oxygen tube back to the nurse who had silently come back into the room.

Instead of anything productive today…

In spite of myself, could not stop until I’d written it all down:

The service department at Tekserve has a sign telling customers how much they want us to leave happy.   I left yesterday after a series of long ordeals, promised work still undone,  feeling thoroughly urinated on.  I will never set foot in Tekserve again, unless I am in the neighborhood and need to use one of their handy, clean bathrooms. Tekserve touts its independence and superiority to the famously superior Apple Store, though it offers perhaps the worst service I have ever been subjected to.  Their bathrooms, though nice, are no nicer than the ones in the Apple store, where, for all their sometimes attitude, the service is also much better.  Their technicians and managers do not misinform customers, nor, in my experience, are they untruthful.

I recently bought a new macBook from Tekserve and dropped off the current one to have a larger hard drive installed.  The current one was working perfectly, I merely wished to expand the hard drive space.  I explained to the service tech that I wanted to be sure the drive that was being replaced was fully backed up, I’d brought an external drive.  I explained that I needed the thousands of frames on the new hard-drive and wanted an additional back up as well.  I held up the external drive.  He told me Tekserve couldn’t perform that service but assured me I’d get the old hard drive back.  I pointed out that there was no way to access data from the removed drive.  He told me they could box it, for $40, and I’d have in effect an external hard drive.  I paid for this service, which was $75 when the labor was added.  I asked about replacing a rubber foot on the bottom of the machine.  He didn’t think they had the foot, but would make a note for them to look for one and replace it if possible.

When I returned the following day to pick up my laptop I got my ticket and was told I was next.  Twenty minutes passed.  It was now 20 minutes to closing time.  I looked for a manager.  Eventually one arrived and explained that the end of the day is the wrong time to come in.  He brought out my computer and the boxed hard drive.  There was no data from the prior hard drive on the computer, none of the files I needed were on the new hard drive.

“But you have them on this external drive,” said the manager.  He explained it was only a matter of a few hours to migrate them all over to the new hard drive.  I’d been there almost 40 minutes at that point and was peeved to learn I had hours of work to do in order to use the computer for my children’s animation program.   The rubber foot, still missing, was an easy fix, he said, something they did as a courtesy, but as the adhesive takes two hours to dry I’d have to come back for the computer the following day and wait again to pick it up.   I expressed reluctance.  

He offered me an Uber car to take me home and a generous $25 to compensate me for any inconvenience.  I declined both, pointing out that I hadn’t been informed at any point that I’d have hours of work to restore the laptop to usable status.  In the end he gave me the job “for free”, meaning he waived the service charges, in light of the misunderstanding, the incompletely done job and the hours of work they had given me to fix it.

The hours of work included a couple of extra hours manually updating every now non-functioning app the kids use and keeping my fingers crossed that the new version would be compatible with the one they knew how to use.   One of the main apps they use, iTunes, could neither be opened nor updated.  

I called Tekserve the following day.  I was told the manager was in a meeting and would call me back when he got out.  He did, and only 24 hours later.

When I explained the situation to Gary MacDonald, another service supervisor,  he read the service notes and insisted I’d been fully informed about the problem with the old drive and that I’d already had a generous discount and that, in essence, I seemed to have a negative attitude.   I managed to remain patient.   Eventually he expressed regret, admitted it shouldn’t have happened the way it did, that he wanted me to be happy.  He told me to bring it in, everything would be fixed promptly, the rubber foot replaced, use his name, ask for a blue ticket, I’d been seen right away, no wait, everything would be taken care of, I’d be happy.  He gave me his extension (464) and invited me to call when I was coming in so he could expedite things, also gave me his email address.

That he didn’t return my call was understandable.  I was just informing him when I’d be arriving to have the work done.  I used his name and was given a blue ticket, told I was next and, sure enough, my wait was only 15 minutes.  The tech guy behind the counter corrected me,  I hadn’t been given a “blank” hard drive, if it was blank it wouldn’t have had the Operating System on it.  I stood corrected, told him none of my data had been transferred, the old hard drive had not been mirrored, cloned or migrated to the new hard drive, that I hadn’t been informed of this til I picked it up, that I’d had to migrate the files and update all the apps myself.  That iTunes was now non-functional.  

His opinion was that this made no sense.  He assured me that iTunes was native to the Operating System and that it was no doubt my unfortunate unsophistication that made me unable to find it in the apps folder.  I invited him to open iTunes.  He was unable to.  This seemed to stun him.  He began looking for fixes on the internet.  He was as unable as I’d been to find any for OS 10.6.8, which Apple no longer supports.  He told me he still uses 10.6.8 and loves it.  I told him I love it too.  I suggested he get Gary MacDonald, the supervisor who was familiar with the entire situation.  He disappeared into the back. Five minutes later he returned with Gary, who had me retell the entire story.  

After some negotiation they agreed to reinstall iTunes and replace the missing rubber foot, though they were reluctant to commit to re-install the iTunes library as it could take a bit of time.   I assured them I could install the library as long as iTunes was there and that waiting two hours or so was no problem, and that I’d be about 20 minutes away.  They verified my contact number, promised somebody would call as soon as the machine was ready.  I thanked them and shook both of their hands.  The whole process had taken less than 40 minutes, not exactly an instant drop-off, but, under the circumstances, I was glad the thing was finally being done.

When two hours passed I called for an update, as the email from the service department had invited me to do.  I left Gary a message at his extension asking for a quick update.  I called to speak to someone in the service department, heard four minutes of music and was told nobody was available and invited to leave a message.  I did.  An hour later, having heard nothing, I headed up to the store.  I was determined to pick up my computer, make sure it was fixed, and leave without uttering a syllable.  I made one last call.

This time, after the four minutes of music, and hearing once more that nobody was available, I said peevishly that my next call would be to the Better Business Bureau.  At that exact moment I had a call waiting beep and it was the service department, 40 minutes prior to closing time, informing me that the laptop was ready to be picked up.  (The email informing me of this was sent 18 minutes prior to closing time, when I had already been waiting in the store.  You can read their punchy email at the bottom of this post).

The blue ticket meant I was next, after anyone else waiting with a blue ticket.  I asked to speak to Gary.  The kid told me he’d find Gary, but he was busy greeting others, giving them blue tickets, explaining that they were next.  He called a couple of other blue tickets who were next before I was next and finally turned to see me sitting sullenly in the last seat available, leaving Gary a message.  He pointed to Gary, at the counter behind me, along with three other Tekserve employees, helping another customer.  “There’s Gary,” he said.

I walked over to Gary who would not make eye contact.   After a minute of this I rudely interrupted. “I’m here to pick up the computer your service techs disabled.  I don’t intend to come back into Tekserve unless I have to piss (I pointed to the bathrooms) as you people have been pissing on me since I dropped off the laptop for repair two weeks ago.”   Two security guys prepared themselves for more.  I returned to the last seat in the waiting room.

Gary came over to where I was sitting.  He informed me that I cannot speak to him that way in front of customers.  I informed him ​that was a matter of opinion.  It was now 20 minutes to closing time.  He hadn’t called me, he said, because I said I’d be coming back in 20 minutes.  I told him he should learn to listen, asked why I’d come back in 20 minutes for a job that wouldn’t be completed for at least two hours.  Instead of an answer he said it was unfortunate that he couldn’t give me the good news about my computer because of my attitude.  

He went back to finish with the other customer and a moment later called me to pick up the computer and sign some paperwork.  He made minimal eye contact as he struggled to complete the paperwork, the laptop he’d started on didn’t seem to be working.

 I opened the laptop, noticed the battery was almost completely drained, and did not find iTunes on the dock.  He told me it was in the apps folder.  I asked him to put it on the dock.  He did.  I opened it, it worked.   “What was the good news about my computer?” I asked.

“It’s fixed,” he said.

“It’s restored to the condition it was in before I brought it to Tekserve, you mean,” I said, then tried the other apps the kids use.  Only one would later need to be updated. again.  I turned the computer over.  The rubber foot had not been replaced.  Gary had apparently had enough of my bad attitude by then and said nothing when I pointed it out.  It was now closing time.  I left Gary to sign whatever name he liked to the paperwork he was working on and headed toward the door.

I asked the security guard at the door for the contact information for the owner of the store, as nobody else seemed to give a rat’s ass about a customer’s very unhappy experience.  He had no idea, of how I could contact the owner, but listened to the bones of my story and took me over to someone who could help me. 

This fellow listened attentively and when I described what I’d write on Yelp told me that one of the owners personally responds to every (presumably negative) Yelp.  I asked for the man’s contact information, but this was not something routinely divulged.  I told the guy I’d hear from him after my Yelp, I supposed.  I was then given both David Lerner’s name and his top secret email address david@tekserve.com.

The worker, at as much of a loss for how to make things right as I was at the moment, suggested he could possibly extract an apology from the service manager, which I declined.  He urged me to contact David directly rather than tell the ugly story on Yelp.  I asked if he thought I owed David this courtesy.  He maturely declined to insist that I did.

Their service email is below, and reading it I discover: hey, they never sent me their survey!

My takeaway:  these guys are pretty much all assholes.  The culture in the store is an asshole culture.  Good marketing, very, very poor service.  Stay away is my advice.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Tekserve Service Department <servicestatus@tekserve.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 7:42 PM
Subject: Your Tekserve Service is Complete (SRO #3-161-520)
To: fuckyoucustomer@asshole.com

SERVICE REPAIR ORDER: #3-161-520

The day has arrived! Your SRO is ready for pickup.

Please bring your receipt or a photo ID when you come for pickup.

We want to make your pickup as easy as possible. Let us know if:

  • you would like someone else to pick it up. Email us their name and we will add it to the record
  • you would like to have your computer or device messengered or shipped to you
  • you would like us to recycle a machine that cannot be repaired instead of picking it up

Contact a Service Manager directly at: servicestatus@tekserve.com and they will make the necessary arrangements.

Once you have picked up your order, we will send you a survey to find out how we did. We really do want to make sure we are the best place in town. Please respond to our survey with any feedback you’d like us to have.

Thank you for your trust in us.

Want to Make the Most of Picking up Your Computer?

  • Come to afree seminar or personalized training
  • Get a new case, printer, display, tablet, iPad, iPod, headphones or one of each
  • Ask us about Thunderbolt, Fusion Drives or any other new Apple-compatible technology. We love questions almost as much as we love answers
  • Tell us your problems. If a Mac can fix it, we’ll tell you how.

Store hours and directions

 

What Happens to Anger that is Swallowed?

Bad things happen when anger is swallowed but not digested.   Anger that is not acknowledged seeps out in ways that are famously bad for the health, the body, friendship, peace between individuals, groups and nations.  It is threatening and highly toxic, possibly the nastiest emotion humans have to deal with.   Anger that is swallowed fills us with a bitterness that banishes mercy and makes us capable of justifying any cruelty.  

Ask the guy who feels how viciously unfair I was to express how hurt I was by his failures to keep promises I depended on, and his subsequent inability to take responsibility.   And I didn’t even swallow my anger — I was like a cat determinedly hacking up an indigestible hair ball– and it took days, and it’s still not completely out of my craw.  Being treated unfairly is indigestible, and when done by a good friend who insists you are at fault for being over-sensitive, it can lead to an inner tumult that is hard to quiet.  

Hacking up the hair ball I did, in the form of words on this blahg setting out exactly why I’d felt so hurt, filled the meditator with rage, which he barked at me when I tried to leave the door open for a conversation between old friends.  His rage was justified, you see, because no matter what he may or may not have accidentally done to me, I had no right to be deliberately mean to him in return.  I had betrayed him by not being content with his repeated assurances of friendship and instead making an unfair public accounting of his disappointing shortcomings, things he already hates himself for.  Anger always justifies itself.

I open this hideous and uncomfortable subject not to give useless advice or even insight, just to point out one popular way unprocessed anger seeps into the world.  This provocative technique is done passively, “innocently”, and I will illustrate its mechanism as clearly as I can.  It is either this exercise or finding a way not to snarl “what the fuck?!” at the sender of a recent email that rankled me by unconsciously employing this very technique.

My father had a colleague who became very close to the family when I was a boy.   My sister and I found this brilliant woman funny, and caring, and she seemed to relate to us as a peer.  She was like a very cool big sister to us.  My mother was very fond of her too. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my father was done with her, for reasons he was too disgusted to detail for his disappointed kids.  We never saw her again.

Years later my father and I spoke about what had happened to their close friendship.   “She is pathologically competitive,” my father said, his face very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic mask of hatred when he is confronted by an on-screen enemy.  “She will fight to the death over everything and never gives an inch, especially when she’s wrong.   Her reflexive self-justification makes her impossible to deal with, even after years of therapy and supposed introspection, she still has no insight into how damaged and enraged she is.  She is always primed to fight and she fights even the smallest things to the death.  She’s one of the most maddening and provocative people I’ve ever met, and I finally just had enough, after a particular incident at a conference we did with Gladys Burleigh.”  That the same could be said for my father, minus the years of therapy, did not need to be spoken by me at the time.

My father had come to another breaking point with a good friend, part of the pattern of his life that troubled me greatly growing up.  It seemed to me he never gave these close friends a chance to make amends.  It took me decades to see that things sometimes advance beyond the point where amends are possible, much as it saddens me to see this.   When things become ugly enough between two people trust is torn and it can become almost impossible to make amends.  Anger puts each of them on the defensive, they become the worst versions of themselves and can justify their behavior down to the snarl.

Back to the point then, what happens to anger that is swallowed?  My father executed a sentence of death on this woman my sister, mother and I felt so close to.  He felt 100% justified.  Decades later I was talking to Sekhnet about how close I’d felt to this one time friend of my father’s and she urged me to look her up on the internet.   I found her easily.

We had a mutually delightful reunion by email which led to Sekhnet and me spending several days in her guest house in Santa Monica during a trip to California.  In her version of that conference my father had alluded to as the last straw, it was my father and Gladys who had set-up, sabotaged and betrayed her.  Unbelievable! she’d laughed, when I gave her my father’s version.

A great animal lover, she had a rescue dog, a lovely, skittish black lab, smaller than your average black lab– possibly still not full grown at the time.  She named the dog Boo!  Boo! was immediately very friendly with Sekhnet but seemed afraid of me.  Our host explained that Boo! had been abused by the man who owned her and that she was skittish around men.  By the end of our stay my cooing at Boo! to come over and not be afraid turned into “get off me, Boo!” as the affectionate dog would not leave me alone.

Had the story ended on this lovely note it would have been a wonderful tale of redemption.   My father had been wrong about many things, as he sadly admitted on his death bed, and his banishment of this wonderful woman was just another of them.  Except, the story did not end on this lovely note.   I have written about this at length elsewhere and it wearieth me too much at the moment to dig it all up, but I offer you the bones, which are hopefully illustrative enough to illuminate my point.

An unflinching advocate of social change when I knew her, a crusader for the underdog and righteous fighter for the oppressed, she had become, several decades later, a deeply conservative supporter of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Glen Beck and a host of other characters that would have made her earlier self recoil.  She asked if I’d be willing to have a dialogue about politics, which she’d had a revelation about after 9/11, as a favor to her, since we had such excellent communication and all of her other liberal former friends had cut her off (and she had new ones who were, like her, political independents of the far right).  To my eternal regret, I agreed.

The correspondence did not go well.  She and I found no common ground, and worse, for me, whether she had a coherent answer or not (and I eventually tried to reduce our Bush era correspondence to two questions:  why Iraq?  How do you justify torture?) she was vehement.  She insisted she was right, whether her answers made sense or not.  All of the experts she believed in told her that if we did not rain death and torture on those who hate our freedom they’d literally be upon is in our beds, literally cutting our throats.  Besides, we never tortured anyone, she insisted, and we only water-boarded three people (which she didn’t consider torture, in any case) and only because they desperately needed it and there was, presumably, a ticking time bomb and it was us or them.

A difference of opinion, we might say, and not something that should lead to the end of an otherwise wonderful friendship.  Our disagreements escalated.  My detailed emails were dismissed for their hopelessly misguided liberal bias, the larger points unanswered.   It soon became an exercise in masochism for me.  I eventually had enough.  We had a long falling out, I came to see her exactly as my father had described her– pathologically competitive, incapable of giving an inch of ground and irrationally spoiling for a fight.  

After years of silence I sent her a piece about Ahimsa that I’d written, she wrote back very moved, and grateful for the chance to renew a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.  She agreed 100% that we would no longer discuss politics, that it was a third rail we would not allow to electrocute our friendship again.

Except, even though she continually renewed her promise not to send political emails, darn it,  she could not resist once in a while (sometimes accidentally, she claimed) sending me something she really thought might change my mind.  She’d apologize most of the time when I reminded her I didn’t want provocative political emails and she promised each time not to do it again.   But she simply couldn’t help herself, darn it, sometimes a given piece was just too convincing for me not to be convinced by.

During all the turmoil over the deaths of unarmed black young men at the hands of police she sent me a piece that complained about how these same agitators who protest against the police conveniently ignore the hundreds of times more deaths black young men inflict on each other.  An opinionated and simplistic response I found not only irrelevant, but idiotic and inflammatory, and not even well-written.  A self-appointed American pundit compares killings by the police, sworn to serve and protect, with killings by violent criminal gangs, sworn to get rich or die trying?  This is your response to protests against police killings of unarmed civilians?  Really?

But, see, she couldn’t help it, you dig?  She was still earnestly trying to convince me she was right, get me to see the truth, get me on board with those who see the light, no matter how many times I’d expressed how these attempts make me feel.  I was so willing to have frank dialogue about so many things… why so closed minded about politics?

To me, there is only one explanation for this seeming irrationality that makes sense.  This is one thing that happens to anger that is swallowed whole:  it comes out as otherwise unexplainable tone deaf determination to be right that cannot consider the provocative effect it will have on the person it is directed to.  

The expression is very often directed at someone who had nothing to do with the original swallowed anger, which starts early in childhood, goes into a mass of general anger and creates the conditions for this kind of righteous moral tone-deafness.  And it’s “innocent”, you dig, and it conveniently becomes another proof that the person who gets upset over it is just an irrationally angry hot-head himself.  

The People rest.

Miscellaneous Maunderings

Finally got myself to call to find out what I actually owe to the hospital that has been so charitably taking care of small matters for me.  I was looking to make an appointment to bring my stack of contradictory bills to an Ombudsperson at the hospital.  The woman I reached could only deal with bills from “Columbia Doctors”, which was disappointing, since only a fraction come from them, though all services are, admittedly, performed by Columbia Doctors.

“Sir, you won’t let me help you,” said the exasperated woman at the number on the bottom of my medical invoice.  She was starting to lose her temper so I became more conciliatory, paused, spoke more softly.  She eventually admitted she too would find it frustrating to receive multiple incorrect bills from several related, but completely separate subdivisions of the corporate entity she works for.   She herself is a Patient’s Advocate, if only I’d let her help me.  
 
“Sure,” I said, “I’d like you to help me.  What can you do for me?”
 
She eventually came close, I could feel her leaning for a second, to admitting that $507 to see a physician’s assistant, even if she had been helpful (though in my case she wasn’t), did seem a little expensive for the Affordable Care Act, especially seeing as my insurance company had already paid $314 to them for the same services.  It turned out the $507 had been billed in error, it was actually currently only $437, as far as she could tell from her end, which didn’t include the $327 in lab fees.
 
As for an Ombudsperson who could look at all the invoices, she was not aware of the existence of such a person, she was in a billing office somewhere in NJ.  I’d need to organize the many duplicative and inconsistent bills from each department and call each separate department to determine the amount I actually owe on each invoice. 
 
“The $100 refund check was not from us, sir, as I already told you several times, except you seem intent on being pissed off instead of letting me help you, we are Columbia Doctors, that check came from New York Presbyterian (formerly Columbia Presbyterian) Hospital.  We have nothing to do with them, you have to call another number, as I’ve been trying to explain to you.  We are completely different departments.”   
 
Good news for me though: my visit with the clueless physician’s assistant is down from $180 to $110.  The $180 bill was an error, they sent it prematurely.
 
My new macBook, which I bought Monday to complete work for the nonprofit I hope to see thriving in the near future, while it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t seem to work, is under warranty and will be replaced if I drag it down to the store.  The one I had refurbished on Monday, and spent hours uploading its former contents to along with multiple updates and fixes last night, now has all but one crucial program working again.  
 
That one crucial program… a mystery, and it’s no longer available on-line.  It worked perfectly on Monday, it’s dead on Tuesday.  Bring the computer back in, we’ll have a look, says Attila, a nice guy and the first and only one to give me any help over the phone at Tekserve, the independent alternative to the Apple Store.
 
Wrote this down a few hours ago, while waiting for a promised call back from the manager of Tekserve, which, naturally enough, never came.  I should just call and read it into the Moth pitch line answering machine, no?
 
My father was a brilliant and funny man; he was also a ruthless prick.  My sister named him the D.U., the “Dreaded Unit”, and the name was pretty apt.  I spent more than 40 years trying to make peace with a father who regarded me as an adversary from the time I was a baby.  At around 40 I learned, from an older cousin, of the atrocious abuse my father had endured as a child.  It explained a lot, gave me insight and sympathy I hadn’t had before.  My story is about our conversation in his hospital room the last night of his life.
 
In other news, notice arrived today that my internet service is going up by around 30%, they’re sorry they forgot to mention that the $34.99 I’ve been paying was a PROMOTIONAL deal.  Starting today It’s only $10 more a month, for the next twelve months, another promotion for a loyal customer like me.  The provider’s got a monopoly in this area, the only slower speed option is only $14.99, but its too slow for wireless service.  Tiffany was good enough to give me a one-time $10 credit, like a kindly dollop of vaseline for an irritated bung hole.  God bless America and the citizen corporations it works for.
 
I will be heading down to see the motherfuckers at Tekserve again tomorrow, most likely.  I am so happy about it, a third trip there in four days, I could shit.  Perhaps I’ll wait til I get there.