Category Archives: Ahimsa

There is a type

I’m aware now, to an extent it was impossible to know before, for reasons I could explain at length, of a type that is truly incapable of emotional growth.   They are also unable to be honest, which is a big factor in their inability to grow, mature, to evolve into better, wiser people as they go through life.  They were brutally crushed at a young age and their entire personality is an exercise in never being hurt again.   They can be charming, generous, funny, gracious, hospitable, helpful, sympathetic — until they can’t be any of these things.

The crux of their situation is that they were humiliated, early and often, their noses rubbed in their powerless to do anything about it but suffer.  They grew up in frightening circumstances with no loving adult to look to for protection.  They remain hypervigilant against anything that can embarrass them, make them look bad.   If they are confronted with something hurtful they did, no matter how gently the point is raised, they react with fury.  They are always one twitch away from a disorientingly familiar, bloody war to the death that they are bound to lose badly.  They fight with childish desperation. 

I’ve known a variety of this type over the 68 years of my life.  They come in several variations.   A common trait is an inability to see things from someone else’s point of view.    They tend to be judgmental, too.  They often have a reflex to piss on other people’s parades.

The adult daughter of one of these tragically deformed souls wrote recently online of always being amazed, as a little girl who grew up in the suburbs, by the thought that every giant apartment building in New York City had a thousand windows, with a unique life and universe behind every one. She eventually, around six, managed to express this to the adult driving the car. She referred to this person as “the adult” and later used the person’s pronoun, “she”. The response of the adult, a woman I know very well, is a perfect illustration of this kind of crabbed, damaged, damaging personality.

She told her six year-old, marveling at the variation of human experience, “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”   Crushing the little girl in the back seat, as this type does in order to feel superior, and therefore not subject to the agony of their own emotional limitation.

I am not a man given to hatred or motivated by revenge.   Revenge is in my heart lately, directed toward a small intimate lynch mob of my once good friends.  I understand and forgive myself for the impulse, though revenge is not something I’m enthusiastic about in general.  I’ve never been a hater.  But, in a real sense, I hate this little girl’s soul crushing Nazi of a mother, eternally reserving her right to hurt anyone she feels like hurting, because she’s entitled to.   And because she’s terrified in her stunted soul, as all such empty human shells are.

Merry Christmas everybody

Thank the Lord we are all once again free to utter those beautiful words in the United States of America. There’s nothing woke, unwoke or deep asleep about uttering a traditional holiday greeting to our Christian neighbors. Feliz Navidad, y’all.

That said, Jesus, of course, is probably quite unhappy (and rightfully so) about what his most public megaphones are representing as his principles: fuck the poor, screw the meek, child poverty is God’s will, as is pediatric cancer, competition beats cooperation every time, obscene wealth and unslakable greed are the Divine’s way of rewarding the righteous, guns don’t kill people, burning toxic things doesn’t cause pollution, spit on and beat homosexuals, make raped girls give birth, as God intended, etc.

But let me not tar American Christians with the ugly sins of perhaps only a hundred million or so of them. One of the finest people I ever knew, smart, funny, irreverent, mischievous, died a few weeks ago at ninety. Rose was a religious Catholic and went to mass every Sunday, until she was unable to and began attending by video link. When I was overwhelmed, and she was out of ideas, she’d tell me to put my faith in God and let God take care of things that caused me anguish. I would gently remind her that prayer and faith had been ruined for me early on by the staggeringly idiotic hypocrisy of the Hebrew school/Jewish center I attended. She understood, but urged me to try it anyway. I’d deflect with a joke and she’d respond with one of her trademark wisecracks.

To be loved by someone who is religious can put the whole exercise of religion in a much more sympathetic light. Sure religion is an engine of control, enforced conformity and, sometimes, murderous intolerance of other faiths. Of course people who become very wealthy, influential and powerful promoting religion quickly become corrupt hypocrites, if they don’t start out that way. An old Jew I once knew used to say “the longer the beard, the bigger the thief”. No religion has a monopoly on evil in the name of God. It is good, in the face of such common ugliness in the name of religion, to remember the blessing of true belief in a moral system ruled by a just Creator.

It is encouraging for me to think of examples like Rose Cuccaro, people who lose nothing of their great and unique personalities while being imbued with faith in a divine spirit, and committed to loving and serving those around them. Religion, at its best, does that. It also brings great comfort to the dying.

At Rose’s wake, her daughter told us that her mother dreamed (two nights before she died) that she was at a great dinner party with her nephew Frankie (great guy, he died a few years back) and so many other cherished loved ones, and she named them.  “All dead,” said Adrienne.  The next day she told her “Frankie’s here to take me home” and she went with her favorite nephew (anybody else at the party would have been just as happy to escort her) for the joyous reunion with the rest of them.  

We all agreed that Frankie was the most likely guide to come down to bring her home. Whether they sent him because he was the most recent arrival (“you go for her, rookie, you’ll get a kick out of it”) or just out of Frank’s basic nature, which would’ve been “let me do this, it’s Aunt Rose, I got this one.”   Not a bad way to end this dream, if you ask me, if you can believe it.

And with that, a merry Christmas to all. May the blessings of this holiday season, centered around the shortest day of the year, and faith in the coming of Spring, be upon you.

Contempt is always the same

Contempt is the same thing every time anyone experiences it.  Talk to as many people as you like about what it feels like, it always feels the same.  Details leading up to it will vary, but contempt is unmistakable. 

The only people who will fight you to the death about your right to be hurt by having your feelings disregarded, and insist on blaming you for deserving to be treated as they see fit, are the contemptuous.  

As for those deeply damaged folks, seriously, fuck those putos.   Contempt is their problem, you can’t fix ’em, help ’em, save ’em, make them feel any different.  They are fucked, and rightfully so.

When you see contempt, remain calm, leave

Contempt is the ugliest thing you can see in another person. It is a childish expression of vicious, outer-directed egotism: I am ultra important, you are a piece of shit, I can treat you however I want to and there’s nothing you can do about it. Once someone shows you contempt, there is no saving things, talking things out, reasoning, making peace. Contempt is the last corrosive word these assholes have to protect themselves against their own disabling insecurity.

It is always infuriating to be treated with contempt (also hurtful, unfair, despicable, indecent, etc.), but the best thing you can do, especially if one of these folks has any kind of power over you, is regard them calmly and get away from them as quickly as you can.  Even a stranger showing contempt is worth not reacting to, there is never anything to be gained, even if you like fighting and enjoy bashing bullies in the face.  There’s really nothing in it for you better than getting away from them for good.

Here’s a recent personal tale of facing contempt that I am actually grateful for.  This asshole’s show of contempt kept me out of the hands of a lying, negligent maniac doctor who sent an entirely false report of tests he never performed to my other doctors.  He works for Optum, by the way, which is part of United Healthcare — go figure!   I guess the entirely fabricated report is one reason Optum never sent me a bill for the three hour session Medicare paid 80% for.

The doctor was friendly and reassuring the first time I met him. He scheduled tests and when I asked about anesthesia he assured me I’d be given conscious sedation before the tests, which was a great relief to me. Having things shoved into your penis, scopes, tubes, etc., while not as horrible as it sounds, is bad enough. I was glad I’d be conscious but sedated for the procedure, which involved putting a thin tube into my bladder by way of my urethra and then filling my bladder with water.

When I arrived for the test, the nurse who was going to put the tube in asked if I was ready.  I said I would be, as soon as the conscious sedation was on board.  She reacted with frustration toward the doctor “I don’t know why he tells patients they’re getting conscious sedation, we don’t give that for this test, we never give conscious sedation, we don’t even have it in the office.  You have to be alert and answering questions.  I guess he thinks it calms patients down when he says that, but I always tell him it doesn’t.”

I confirmed that it doesn’t.  If I’d known, I told her, I would have taken a tranquilizer before I came for the test.  She said that would have been her advice, if I’d been told to call her prior to the procedure and that she was sorry nobody had told me to call her.  She had nothing she could give me.   The catheter went into my penis and into the urethra before stopping at an obstacle somewhere on the way to my bladder.  She retracted it.   For the next ninety minutes this angelic woman held my penis, keeping it warm in the cold room, as various applications of lidocaine did their best to numb my urethra, and tried at least three more times to insert various catheters into my bladder.  Finally she said the doctor would have to try it himself.

The doctor came in, sweaty and harried looking, by now it was getting toward closing time.  He asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to the conscious sedation.  He lost his shit, raising his voice and snarling that it was impossible that he’d ever said that, essentially calling me, and his nurse, a couple of fucking liars.  In that moment I knew this guy was not going to be my doctor.  I managed him as one does an out of control five year-old flinging shit around the room.  I made only one call to his office afterwards, to his nurse.  She told me how to get the medical records for my new urologist.

Highlights of the report:  results of the cystoscopy (a camera at the end of a wand inserted into the opening of the penis) he never performed.  He found no tumors, normal this, slightly abnormal that, the report said.  No mention of the unsuccessful attempts to insert the catheter to test the bladder, the test went fine, the bladder was normal.  He discussed all this with the patient, also getting claimed legal waivers from the patient on about twenty different fronts, covering his ass front and back, and the ass of Optum, and insulated the $560B corporation from the aggressions of any plaintiff’s lawyer who might want to make a fuss about a fictional narrative detailing the results of tests the doctor and his nurse never did.

Think of this, though. If the guy hadn’t had a temper tantrum and started throwing his poop around the room, I’d have gone back to him. I’d have never read his scandalous report, never known he was a compulsive liar. I’d have been in the hands of a maniac working for psychopaths. So the fact that I no longer tolerate contempt saved me from a world of trouble.

4-2 quickly becomes 8-2 in a group of ten

When I was six or seven, and first learned about Switzerland’s neutrality in World War Two, I thought it was great that peaceful Switzerland didn’t get involved in the hideous carnage. It wasn’t long afterwards, once I learned a bit more about the Nazis, that I understood that Switzerland’s principled neutrality was actually an acceptance of the equal right of plundering Nazis and desperate, wealthy Jews, to safeguard their fortunes during this world catastrophe, to the great benefit of a banking nation who took no moral position on anything other than protecting, and enhancing their own, wealth. In other words, Swiss neutrality, when Nazis were going full ape shit in the world, was not a good thing but a rather evil thing.

Heather Cox Richardson, in a recent talk with Jon Stewart, made an excellent point about the feelings of most people. We want to get along, not have to fight, or be intimidated, or made to feel isolated or uncomfortable. In any group of ten, she pointed out, if two are intent on power and control, they will choose two, make them the source of all evil by vilifying them, often by lies, and turn the other six against them. You can see the short clip of her description here.

What I have come to realize is that it is only necessary for the two who want control of the group to recruit two others to their side.  If they can convince two, the next four are almost automatic.  The two they convince will be very credible advocates for the proposition that those two selected for exclusion are beyond redemption, sick, evil, disgusting, dirty, nasty, mean, ugly etc.  They will be the best ambassadors for the position of the two they follow.  It will be natural for the next two and then the last two to follow the group.  In a tight-knit group, consensus always makes sense if the group intends to remain intact. It is, after all, a loving group that very much cherishes its closeness.  Nothing brings people closer than shunning a common enemy.

Finding myself on the short end of this common equation, with a group of lifelong friends, I’ve had to ponder the dynamics of this in order to make some kind of peace with it. I’ve learned that those who can never be wrong, must be perfect, have no tools for resolving conflict, need to control others or they feel threatened themselves, live their lives on a war footing.

As you try to resolve a conflict with them they are already busy recruiting allies, spreading a stilted story to make you hateful, forming an iron coalition, first with two and then with everyone. It is impossible, then, after a good, righteous lynching, for a group to believe that they have done the wrong thing when they are unanimous in their moral position. In fact, the more wrong they are, the harder they will fight to make sure you’re good and dead and without any ability to make them feel like the credulous lynch mob they’ve become.

When you ask your old friends how they could believe such lies against you, they will insist that they are completely neutral, like Switzerland. Who are they to decide who is actually the Nazi in this scenario and who are those persecuted by Nazis? It’s a flawed metaphor. They are Switzerland, they will insist, taking no side, but, sadly, they will never see you or talk to you again.

Adversity has a million tricks

Say your sleep is robbed by the daily aching in your prosthetic knee after it hasn’t moved for a few hours. The surgery went perfectly, every surgeon who looks at the beautiful x-ray agrees. You are apparently one of the unlucky tiny percentage who suffer from Highly Successful Surgery Suboptimal Outcome Syndrome and chronic pain and limited ability to walk is something you will have to get used to, asshole. It’s not the surgeon’s problem if you’re unable to heal properly.

On waking you agitatedly consider the nonresponse to the concise, urgent letter you wrote to your urologist seeking clarification on an upcoming surgery that is different, on the presurgical consent form, than the one you discussed and agreed to in his office.  You hand delivered the short  letter to his office Monday.  It is now Thursday, 6 pm.  On Monday morning you must get up early and have a battery of presurgical tests, for a surgery you were never informed of, can’t weigh the risks of and certainly never consented to.  The internet is a Christmas tree of blinking red lights about the many risks of this changed procedure, one with an alarmingly low success rate that involves shaving the inside of your urethra, lifelong urinary incontinence being but one of its unwanted outcomes (that’s why they make adult diapers, pant load).

Your new urologist is, like most other doctors in America today, an employee of a medical corporation run by vulture capitalists to extract maximum profit from the lucrative sector of human medical anxiety. The name should have been a give away: Psychopath Urology, PLLC. They talk a good game, I do have to give them that. These fuckers are nothing if not adept marketers:

At Psychopath Urology, PLLC, we are dedicated to providing the highest level of urological care to our patients in a friendly, compassionate office environment. Our Practice utilizes state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment, computerized medical records, and office based minimally invasive surgery.
In addition, we are deeply committed to providing expertise in treating urological conditions that specifically affect women with the latest laser techniques that treats vaginal atrophy. We are part of Medical Psychopath Vulture Capital, LLC, the largest group in the nation dedicated to the treatment of urological problems.

A forwarded text I had from my beloved that I saw as soon as I looked at my phone made me immediately shift my focus.  A ninety year-old woman we both love and cherish is in bad shape, hooked up to machines fighting to save her from congestive heart failure.  This sharp, funny woman is apparently confused (yet still somehow feisty) and very close to death.  Her daughter wanted us to know, because we are close to her mom and left her a couple of unanswered messages the last few days.  Devastating news.  Sekhnet sent me an agonized proposed text to the daughter, I suggested adding this:

Your mother’s feistiness is one of her enduring qualities, along with her great sense of humor, her wisdom, compassion and her deep faith.  She does not fear death and has a humble confidence in where she’s going afterwards.  Of course we hope she recovers, so we can have more of the love and joy she brings to us.  If she does not recover she will soon be in heaven, a beautiful, blessed soul, reunited with those she loved and lost.   It’s heartbreaking to us, who love her, but we must take consolation that she knows where she is headed if this is her time to go, the place for all such wonderful souls.  

Note on gratefulness for Thanksgiving

There is always a lot to beware of in a world where psychopaths, more focused on power over others than most, hold a lot of power over the rest of us. Beware of those who repeatedly lie to win arguments, elections, discussions of who needs to be ostracized, rounded up, roughed up and why. Beware of smug certainty, inchoate anger, apathy, depression. Beware of anyone who shows you they’re incapable of ever being wrong, who blame you and always fight you to the death.

On the other hand, take care to appreciate the things in your life you are grateful for. If you have a talent that allows you to spend time in a special zone — be thankful as you enjoy it. If you gain an insight that helps free you from a painful cycle you’ve been trapped in, gratefulness is the proper feeling to have about it. If you have one person in your life who you can share your deepest feelings with, you are very lucky and Thanksgiving is the right day, as is every other day, to consciously feel appreciation for that great blessing.

I surprised myself a few weeks ago, during a discussion of my numerous, interlocking medical problems, any one of which can find me in an emergency room if not treated skillfully and soon, by expressing gratefulness. An overwhelming appreciation of good fortune, particularly amid hard luck and trouble, itself is something to be grateful for.

I’m grateful to find myself grateful.

It’s always worth a few moments to take a short inventory of the blessings in your life, no matter what horrors you are facing — particularly when you’re facing monsters, actually. The miraculous, precious, fleeting nature of life is worth considering from time to time, and being very grateful for.

Sartre: Hell is other people

YouTube algorithms occasionally send me a video with a title like the above. I recall Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play featuring a small group of bickering people in what turns out to be the waiting room for Hell. By the end they realize they’re already in Hell, their punishment is being trapped in this small room with each other for eternity. That’s Hell, suckers, relentless people all around you in a room with no exit.

The best moments in life, outside of whatever joy and solace we take from our own solitary pursuits, (this joy and solace is nothing to sneeze at, I am digging it right now as I write), involve our connections with others. There is nothing like sharing a good laugh, love, an aha! moment, mutuality, appreciation, a meeting of the minds or spirits, an improvisation that works, or participating in, or observing, a group event that inspires joy, hope, courage or just plain awe. We are, in spite of how often groups of us mass murder and enslave other groups of us, social creatures.

Where it gets sticky is when raw nerves, sensitivities, idiosyncrasies, vying strong needs, chafe against each other. The understandable impulse to impulsivity often arises in these situations, at a certain point we need to save ourselves. Someone makes one too many emotionally draining demands and it can take superhuman effort to remain kind and understanding.

In a short video with wise words about life the narrator says “given the choice between being right and being kind, choose being kind.” Beautiful, wise, merciful advice, the world would be better if we could all follow it. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult, as when facing relentless, desperate argumentativeness from someone you are trying to remain kind to.

Speaking to the son of a longtime, now former, friend, I came to my breaking point about twenty minutes in. At one point he described his father’s inability to separate his feelings and perceptions about things from what actually takes place in front of him. I remarked that this reminded me of the McNaughton Rule in law, the legal definition of insanity in many states. The person, at the time he committed the act, was unable to recognize the difference between his perceptions and reality, between right and wrong, and so is not guilty by reason of insanity.

His response was to become indignant that I’d called his difficult father insane. He told me sternly that he would not tolerate this. My impulse when he got testy was to get off the phone and I began to take my leave. There are many things in life we can’t fix, and one is a person who makes unfair, indignant demands.

It was a heavy, heavy lift to refrain, at that moment, from telling the kid to fuck off, that he was as aggravatingly nuts as his old man. I was able to calm myself enough not to, and the conversation, a somewhat heavy lift for me, as I told him, continued, in a more positive vein, for a long time after that.

In the remainder of that exchange there were reminders of why we persevere in the face of interpersonal difficulty. Sometimes, if we don’t yield to emotional impulses, we get to certain difficult truths, gain clarity and find agreement that might surprise us. These things are hard to come to, and require work, patience, an ability to calm oneself, to listen instead of immediately responding out of emotion. These kinds of talks are rare, valuable, and life-affirming, and we learn things in the course of these dialogues that are impossible to otherwise grasp. The regular rules of life still apply: nobody gets to shit on anybody in the course of these talks.

So, while I can agree, for the sake of discussion, that it is my subjective conclusion that people who can never be wrong, who blame others for all conflict and fight to the death over even a small disagreement are not suitable partners for friendship or marriage, I also know that to be true. Having experienced trying to make relationships with this kind of person work for decades, with a variety of people, I understand, 100%, from reaching the same impasse over and over, and the consistent relief when they are gone from my life, that these motherfuckers are not for me.

You can love them if you like, and figure out how to accommodate yourself to their need to dominate you, but that’s different than saying my side of the story is only my side of the story and that you can’t necessarily take my word about what is true or not without hearing from the lynch mob who tried to kill me a couple of years back. Would it make my position more plausible if you could speak to the lynch mob and get their side of the story of why they were justified to gather together to angrily string me up and then decide more objectively if I’m right about them? Go talk to them.

So, yeah, hell is other people, for sure. But also, with the right set of skills, patience, forbearance, emotional detachment when needed, a strong desire to connect with others, an ability to listen and hear other perspectives, and to sit with discomfort and pain, your own and the other person’s, there is nothing like real connections with other sentient human beings. Connections with others keep us from the hopeless sense of isolation and dread that is a huge deathward factor in our bodily and spiritual health.

Seeing the people we know as lab rats

A gigantic rat I was good friends with, about 6’4″ with hands like boulders (inexplicably, he was a skilled guitarist and pianist), once accused me of regarding everyone I knew as lab rats. I remember feeling defensive when he made that observation, though, forty years later, I can acknowledge it was somewhat insightful.

It’s not that I view myself as a superior and dispassionate scientist methodically conducting experiments, collecting data and forming data-based scientific judgments, exactly, but something like this is always in progress when we interact closely with others and learn from our experience.

I give my friends the benefit of the doubt. This is something I have always done and it is how I want to be treated by others. I understand now that not everyone is capable of this. I have that understanding only after years of testing the hypothesis that kindness, patience, seeing things from the other person’s perspective, defusing tension with humor, extending sympathy, etc. will always yield the desired result — peace, love and understanding. My informal lab studies have demonstrated, conclusively, that not all lab rats are capable of the mutuality I am always seeking with people I interact with.

What to do with this data? When you encounter a lab rat who is anxious, becomes defensive and aggressive at the first sign of any conflict, angrily blames the other rats, is always ready to fight to the death — that rat may not be the best subject for a study of the healing power of empathy. You can run the experiment with this kind of rat over and over, and after a while you will be able to predict the outcome with close to 100% accuracy.

Teach this rat to speak, express his point of view, let this rat interact with other rats, design a minor conflict. Take out your clipboard and get ready to record your observations.

This rat will find other rats to ally itself with, involve them in the conflict by enflaming their sense of right and wrong, exploiting their anger at being trapped as lab rat experiment subjects. The rat will then approach the rat it has a beef with, backed by these allies. If the surrounded rat stands his ground in any way, the affronted rat will go for the throat. There is a big vein or artery there that you can rip open and it’s curtains for the vicious, defiant fucker. End of story. Anybody else want to fuck with the expressive talking rat?

All the scientist can do is make notes and add it to the data. You can run this experiment as many times as needed, though in the end the conclusion about how this particular specimen will always act will be hard to empirically disprove.