Category Archives: Ahimsa

Scoring Political Points

A friend who sits far to the right of me on the political spectrum (as so many of our fellow Americans seem to) sent me an adorable short animation yesterday she thought I’d enjoy, even though it blames the poor for being lazy and greedy and shows how the hard-working wealthy are persecuted and exploited by the progressive tax system.  You can watch that delightful proof of the case here.

Although I have many things I need to get myself do today, every day, and am languishing at the moment, on many levels barely functioning, even though Sekhnet correctly growled when I mentioned it, I had to send this response to my friend.  Part of my effort to preserve our friendship and  to ward off future emails like the one she thought I’d like, the oversimplified and therefore irrefutable cartoon about the unfairness of a progressive tax system (or a progressive anything else, I suppose) in a magical world where everyone is born with the identical chance to prosper, if only they’ll stop being born in toxic slums and get a decent home to grow up in so they can embrace hard work and smart investment.

I wrote to my friend:

The problem with this kind of hypothetical is that it sets up an artificial, conveniently over-simplified example that can rarely be seen in real life to “prove” a proposition about the complicated real world.   If the set-up in this cartoon was the case in even one out of 100 cases it would be a lot.   
 
It sets up a straw man (the demanding lazy brother happy not to work, spending every penny and feeling righteously entitled to his rich brother’s forced charity) on an absolutely even playing field, excluding all inconvenient, complicating facts, to stand in for all the parasites, you know the ones– they are out screaming every time a policeman enforces the law and one of their illegitimate kids die, and those with guilty consciences who don’t believe the police always act with justification, even when the person they kill isn’t shown to have posed a lethal threat — and the wealthy, every one of whom, as we all know, got their money from their hard work and smart investing.  The wealthy who are persecuted and exploited by parasites and hated and envied for their every hard-earned advantage.
 
It always surprises me when, because you agree with the conclusion of some political piece, you send it thinking I will find it convincing.   I try to remain mild, and Sekhnet curses me for spending any time at all responding to these things whenever I mention it to her, but I really do find it amazing that you can’t see these things for the preaching to the choir they are.  And that they are also provocative (the kid in Missouri bashed the cop/racing car driver’s face in before the cop shot him to death, Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, etc.) especially when they turn out to not be true.
 
And, not to belabor the point, but you agreed not to send me these political things.  
 
Love,
[name withheld by request]

Formula for Fighting Dread

Easy to forget when discouraged, and annoying to be reminded of when filled with dread:  

Each thing you dread, that you manage to do, will remind you that the dread is almost always worse than the actual doing of the thing you dread. Often, doing the thing you dread turns out to be nothing at all.

Can you feel the weight of dread lift off you?

Not in advance, of course not, it’s unimaginable.  But afterwards, probably so.

 

Try Again Tomorrow

A force stronger than you are stays your hand as you reach for the tiny mobile phone.  The phone is an anvil you are powerless to lift.  It’s OK if you could not do it today.  Try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a little different from today, maybe the sun will be out, instead of a cancer grey sky.  You never know.  You can try again tomorrow.

You keep your own counsel instead of calling others who will ask you questions you don’t really want to deal with.  Ideas off the top of other people’s heads won’t help, and that’s basically what anyone has for something you’ve been studying hard.  You have to compose your thoughts to put things across in the way they need to be put across.  Not easy work, it’s OK to try again tomorrow.

Muhammad Ali talked about fighting for the heavy weight crown a third time.  He remains the only heavy weight to  regain the crown twice (for a total of three times).  In the days leading up the fight Ali reflected that everybody loses.  We lose our mothers,  friends, our fathers.  Some lose legs, or arms.  But the real fighter, Ali said, is not afraid to lose.  He keeps on fighting.  If you cannot fight today, rest, train, try again tomorrow.

I mention Ali, a man I admire, not because I am a fan of violent sport.  When I was a kid Ali was a symbol and an inspiration, not just to me, but to young and old all over the world.  Whether he said the memorable  “no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”  or not, the world remembers he had no quarrel with little brown people ten thousand miles away, had no intention of going over to Southeast Asia to kill poor people he had no quarrel with.[1]

I’ve got no quarrel with anyone I know.   I am tired as hell, and it is time to rest, gather my forces and peacefully continue my conquest of the world.  Tomorrow, hopefully, if you know what I’m sayin’.

 

[1]   No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. (Sometimes quoted as “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”)

  • Ali biographer Thomas Hauser searched extensively to verify this popular quote’s validity, but found no evidence of Ali actually saying it or anything resembling it, as documented inNice Guys Finish Seventh : False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1993) by Ralph Keyes
  •  What Muhammad Ali actually said was “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” as shown on [2] at 0:15 mark.

for source see misattributed box toward bottom of page

Trying to Get the Bigger Picture

If you are observant, it is not hard to familiarize yourself with the monsters that stalk those closest to you.  If we know people well we can follow these battles in detail, even place bets on the next turn with pretty good confidence.   These predictable turns are far easier to observe in others’ lives than in our own, for sure.  For one thing, most of us are masters of rationalizing our own actions, if not always having useful  insight into the things we do.   People don’t do things without a good reason, we almost always believe we are doing the right thing as justly as we can.  It’s much easier to see cause and effect in the lives of friends since we are not always as compelled as they are by what motivates them.   I think of this as I make my way through deep, cold water lately, trying to keep my eye on the bigger picture.

I knew a guy who was a living poster for ‘repetition compulsion’– he relived the same traumatic story over and over again with a new cast each time.   The story became so familiar to me, the build-up, the second act and the terrible betrayal of the third act, and so consistent, that eventually I’d interrupt these long, detailed re-tellings (this was toward the end of our friendship) to predict precisely what happened next.  I was always right, which was infuriating, but it was like taking a test I’d taken many times, answers exactly the same, coming instantly, no need for scrap paper.  It became harder and harder to resist blurting them out.  Which, of course, was maddening to someone caught in an endlessly replayed bad dream with a wise-ass close friend not even letting him tell the goddamned story anymore.

There are probably freelancers who truly relish their freedom, are delighted on a day they can relax and play their banjo all day instead of hunkering over a day job, but most freelancers I know live with the anxiety of not earning a living anymore.  No work calls in a few days is the long-dreaded harbinger of slow starvation, no matter that the yearly average workload and income have been constant for some time.   A black mood descends after a week when the phone doesn’t ring.  The feeling of impending disaster can be difficult to overcome.  With practice they may get better at having shorter and shorter spells of despair, but it’s hard to hear their bleak predictions without reminding them, lamely, of the last time they said the same things, right before that long, dizzying spell of work that made them schedule a vacation.  They are convinced each time that this time the work really has run dry, that it’s all over.  It feels like near folly to remind them of their predictions in every previous situation that has worked out fine.  Their black mood will convince them that this situation is different, the final reckoning, where the bottom falls out of their livelihood for good.

People with well-paid, important, fulfilling jobs may find themselves tormented to one extent or another after they leave work, when there is nothing worth watching on the screen, no good book at hand, when music just isn’t what they want.   They may be prone to argue, pick fights, become listless, drink too much, overeat.  It goes as well for people with shit jobs, tormented with too much time on their hands and events and personalities aligned to make a difficult situation impossible.  It goes famously for the unemployed, those with the most free time and the least money to spend diverting themselves and staying out of trouble.  There is something to be said for keeping yourself busy, it distracts a person from the things that might devour a soul, given enough hours every day to gnaw.  Soul sucking lurks in any life where it is prone to lurk, and can sweep in on a moment’s notice, slurp lustily for as long as time allows.

Each of us carries our own burdens, sensitivities, hurts, angers and fears.  The better we know people the more we will be able to see these at work.   The more stress people are under, the more easily we can see these things pulsing under the skin.  In the world viewed under stress we are skittering around on the ocean floor, surrounded by countless wily and dangerous predators.  We connect momentarily to other skittering creatures, shuddering together against the inevitable, but there is little we can do and a bad end is in store for each of us.  We know it with absolute certainty, and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Nor much we can do for the others we care about, particularly as we are being taken.

In our darkest moments we may still be aware of a world of sunshine, though it seems remote and unreachable.  It appears as a realm of mere theory, this place where we laugh, make music, make love, float on perfect water under the ideal sky.  This perspective can’t always be reached alone, sad to say, nor is being content merely a habit of good character.  I think idly how much I wish someone had been present to reach Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, many other bright examples of the human spirit, right before that terrible, last hurried moment before the belt goes quickly around the neck and everything is thrown into a frantic desperate jerk, to end the torment.   

I try to cultivate empathy as deliberately as I am able these days.  I try to listen more, talk less.  The more I take in, the better I understand how to be gentle with other people’s feelings, especially the harder ones.  I strive to be an example of the change I’d like to see in the world, no matter that it may seem foolish.   Giving in to despair unconditionally is one feeling I find impossible to truly wrap my head and heart around, no matter how affectionately fucking despair may nuzzle and paw at me sometimes.

 

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive.  Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you.  The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man.  I can’t stand that whining.  Man up, for fuck’s sake.”   There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted.  A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.  

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet.  “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine.  “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad. 

Humans are not primarily rational actors.  We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational.   Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations.  Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness.  Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane.  The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane.  The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice.   Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that.  When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360.  It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.  

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds.  Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with.  She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us.  She asked me not to talk about it any more.  

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice.  This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it.  Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!”  I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving.   The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story.  I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray!  God bless Murray!”  I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying  job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years.  This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane.  After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first.  My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.  

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence.   Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.  

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones.  It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice.  Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters.  But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone.  “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.  

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.  

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place.  Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to.   Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons.  It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.

 

 

 

 

Infinite and Finite

In our finite world scarcity and competition for limited resources are facts of nature, taken for granted.   We are hard-pressed to see the world we live in except in terms of winning and losing.   Most drama in our world centers on the burning question of who will take the lion’s share and be safe in their home and property and who will starve or die young of preventable diseases or violence.    Most live anxiously in between, taking distraction and pleasure where they can, and there are people who will kill you for the money in your pocket.

Other things in this world are infinite and as precious as clean water.   Empathy is infinite, if allowed to flourish, and it saves lives.   The gift of being listened to, heard and understood, having someone take the time to understand — a sadly rare gift that costs nothing to give and is potentially infinite.  Imagine the pain and violence that could be spared, if a person on the edge of rage had only had someone to hear how much they were suffering and ready to give even a small comfort.

I heard a great radio interview a few weeks ago with a woman who worked in an office in a school.  A distraught maniac came into the school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo, ready to kill and then, as the maddening saying goes, “turn the gun on himself” or commit “suicide by police”.  She was the first person he encountered there, and she was in the midst of a day of great personal trouble already when he walked in.   She saw his agony and spoke to him kindly, told him he was loved, called him sweetie, assured him that his life was going to be better than it felt in this terrible moment.  She wound up calming him enough that he didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t turn the gun on himself.  

Many gun-toting maniacs who barge into schools are far past the point of hearing anything, the kindest words in the world will be cut off by their gun shots.  But her actions that day saved many lives, including her own.  They don’t make a movie about her, but she’s a greater hero than most that movies are written about. Antoinette Tuff is this hero’s name.  In looking her up just now I read that a few days ago they sentenced the 21 year-old with the AK-47, who shot at police before Tuff talked him down.   Looking at the photo of the beautiful Ms. Tuff, and reading about her hard life before her heroic moment, they might very well make a movie about her.   She has a book out now and is doing the interview circuit.

Also infinite, the violence rage produces.  It is as inevitable as the “fuck you” many in a hurry, or dealing with their own troubles with no time left, might feel reading something like this on some fool’s blahg.  Abstract bullshit with rose colored shades on, where is the actual content?  Oh, wait:  it’s better to be amazingly kind than to be a common fucking bastard, eh?  Deep.

Our minds create the world we live in, it is said.  The organ of mass media plays upon our senses, all the time, selling without rest, pulsating in our pockets, on a billion screens, it’s echoed by the crickets chirping in the darkness.  All of human genius is focused on perfecting this ever more incredibly sophisticated sales machine.  We cannot see our world without seeing the inevitable — war, competition, violence, hatred, revenge, infuriating piety.  Infuriating piety is as bad as the rest of the plagues, it’s maddening to listen to someone piously announce the difficult truth, presented with a pious idiot’s simple mindedness, leaving no room for discussion.  The certainty of pious people can be maddening, that’s understood.

Picture two kids and their prospects for a happy life and I’ll duck back behind the curtain.  One child, when she wakes afraid in the dark, has an adult who comes, puts a soft hand out, speaks quietly, listens and reassures. The other child wakes afraid in the dark and is met by an angry adult who waits for the child’s wailing to get out of control and then barges in snarling “you’d better shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about!”  

That this goes as well for adults as for children is too self-evident to even try to show.  It is even more important for children, clearly, and for the future of life here.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Vacation

I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest.  Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal.  And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces.   We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad.   “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.  

I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes.  I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts.  Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback.   I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now.  Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.

I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission.  It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part.  The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur.   The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated.  During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often.  I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily.  One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out.  Woken from  a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.

The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal.  We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged.  Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often.  It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.

The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all.   She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free.  I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood.  It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess.   I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as  I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.

The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children.  Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup.  She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too.  My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going.  She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity.  I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities.  Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything. 

I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting.  I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal.  This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake.  I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one.  The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.

Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman.  I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.

Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo.  And not a moment too soon.

Seven Miles from home, New York City Style

We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here.  The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.

Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night?   This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.

We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us.  As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent.  “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him.  At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll.  The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.

By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile.  Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile.  A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour.  We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively.  But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure).  We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30.  It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.  

Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.