Category Archives: Gratitude

A Man Without A Smiling Face Should Not Open A Shop

Famous, and wise, Chinese proverb: a man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  It is very true, few people will continue to come into the shop of someone who is depressed or hostile.  Having nothing much to do with anything, I once had a less well-known piece of advice in a fortune cookie, perhaps no less profound:  laff alla time people think you crazy.

The mystery to me is how one keeps the smile on the face when the proverbial wolf is at the door, his cheeks full, ready to huff and puff and blow the whole thing to little pieces in the stink of wolf’s breath.

“My father had a great sense of humor, but he was such an unhappy man,” is something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. feared his children might say about him at the end.   Happiness is a talent like any other, I suppose, some people are good at it, some people not so good.  It is something worth cultivating– being grateful, and full of wonder, and optimistic.  Enjoying and appreciating the things and people you love.  There is a predisposition to melancholy, or pessimism, but happiness is probably like a muscle you can develop by constant use.   Let’s assume that happiness can be cultivated, for the moment. 

There are innate talents, sure, but the most exciting demonstrations of talent are given by those who love what they do and spend hours and hours doing it until they do it well.  Their love for the thing is expressed in the way they do it, and it’s an inspiring thing to see.  Many people have more innate drawing talent than I had as a boy, than I have now.  Few people, I think, love to draw as much as I always have.  Doing anything endlessly will make you better at it.  Not to say that some ability is not also involved, but the perpetual doing of a thing you love will make you better at it than someone who is able but doesn’t care.

“Oh, no,” you will say, “that’s not true.  There are geniuses who can do with little practice what a less talented person could not do in a lifetime.”    Well, let me entertain that dispiriting cavil for a second, before I get back to practicing my fucking shopkeeper’s smile in the mirror.

I met one person in my life who is, without any doubt or qualification, a genius.  We went to high school together, this very bright and original kid and I, and his musical talent was off the charts.  So much so that his destiny seemed clear at 15.  I could tell you a couple of great stories about this kid’s talent, and what he grew to compose, arrange, improvise, perform, the many instruments he plays virtuosically, but there could be no question, comparing him even to other great musicians, that his talent is of another level.  Frank Burrows is the guy’s name, you can look him up on youTube.

We had another friend, a prodigiously talented musician who, like Frank, played for hours a day and lived to play music.   These guys played together in bands, prodded each other’s musical growth and invention.  Both have their eccentricities, to be sure, and both endured traumatic childhoods.  As brilliant as David was, Frank was in an otherworldly category in terms of the grace with which he assimilated musical ideas that inspired him.  I have the feeling it always embarrassed Frank when I singled him out as a genius.  No offense intended, my man.

David taught me most of what I know of music theory and chord voicings on guitar.  He was an often brutal master, hard on himself and just as hard on me, though I had a small fraction of his talent.  There are some who consider me a decent musician now, but I am nowhere near being able, after playing for more than 40 years, to do what either of these guys was able to do in high school.  Anyway, David’s main pedagogic tools were derision, scorn, sarcasm and a certain ruthless pursuit of perfection that’s hard to describe.   I took abuse from him while I was learning, eventually learned that it is never a good idea to take abuse from anyone, no matter what else might come along with it.

I recall, years later, trying to fake some jazz with David who responded in his inimitable withering way that I would never be more than a journeyman.   I’d heard an echo of this comment from a keyboard player friend of mine who disparagingly told me “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a keyboard player.”  There are people I could fool in that regard, but apparently this chap is not among them.  I’m no virtuoso, but I can play a little piano when I need to.

Anyway, we fast forward a few decades.  I record a catchy little piano and acoustic guitar vamp, leaving lots of space.  I send it to Frank and to another fantastically talented musician friend and ask each of them to overdub some parts on it for a friend who is dying.   (I have another track to make for a friend who is currently dying of a rare and relentless disease, but that time the dying friend was a composite of people I’d lost, was losing and part of myself).  My friend Paul played a haunting and beautiful fretless guitar improvisation over the top, I can hear it in my head now as I type.  

Frank, to my great surprise and delight, spent probably forty hours producing a symphonic masterpiece out of the track.  He added a dozen or more parts, harmonized it in ten different ways, on twenty instruments, wrote a brilliant intro and an unforgettable outtro.  I told you above, the man is a genius, was born that way, but he’s also spent well beyond the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell prescribed for becoming a master.  To this day, I still can’t get over what Frank was able to create out of that simple two chord vamp.

I sent it to David, who was impressed with the composition.  And this brilliant composer and harsh teacher– and this is why I have rolled out this long, tedious story– emailed me to say he was unable to tell which of us, the genius or the journeyman, had played which of the several guitar or keyboard parts.  A moment of great, long-delayed satisfaction was had.

So the point is, even a hack, with enough love of something and enough dedication to practicing it, may eventually play a few notes that will be indistinguishable from notes struck by a genius.  

Similarly, this strained, cracking smile I am practicing now can be molded, with enough true desire to do so, into a sincere and radiant grin that will attract customers to my cobwebbed shop.   I am betting the shop on it, my friends.

The times that try men’s souls

These are them.  But I’ll take just one small immediate snap shot, since I don’t have much time, trying though what little time I have at the moment may be.

If you find yourself waking up as a slave, having slept poorly, dreading the wake-up hours too early, stomach filled with acid, do not despair.  You will be tempted, as I am, having slept poorly, needing a few hours more sleep, alternating coffee to wake up and Tums for the acid, to cry out.   No need for that.  It won’t help you anyway.  This is a day you have to remember that your soul is no slave, and your dream of freedom will keep you moving forward, that an isolated trying day does not a trying lot make.  Even a string of such days does not mean the end of your dreams.

Sure as this drenching thunderstorm that is hovering over the area for the next 48 hours, sure as the wildly unreasonable  demands you will be asked to meet as soon as you arrive soaked and shivering, doubled over, trying to catch your breath.  Take it to the bank that today’s beating will end, you will recover, things will be fine and your food will taste good again and the sloshing of acid in your nervous stomach will be a distant memory, if that. 

Do not worry about any of this.  Do you see me worrying?

Moment of Contentment

Many things are beyond human control.  My friend who surgeons have been cutting at and other oncologists have been pumping full of poisons in an attempt to prolong his life comes to mind.  Woke up one day with a mysterious lump on his backside.  Did you ever hear of soft tissue sarcoma?  I hadn’t.  It’s apparently rare.  The form he has is a rare form of a rare cancer.  They throw darts at a dart board to treat it.   After his first round of chemo the doctor was very serious.

“The tumor has doubled in size,” said the oncologist.  “I think we should try another chemo regime.”

“I think so too, doc” said my friend, sitting uncomfortably on what was left under him to sit on.  They’d told him they’d removed all the cancer when they cut out several pounds of his flesh.  They underestimated cancer’s craftiness.

Why do I type Moment of Contentment and launch right into this horrible story?   Partly my nature and partly to point out what it is.  In the midst of this death by a thousand cuts my friend can still laugh sometimes.  Needs to laugh, more than most.  He has always had a great and infectious laugh too, with a taste for slapstick, the bizarre and the not too drastic misfortunes of others.

When I had the headphones on last night, adding tracks to a mix with a tiny portable USB keyboard, and I’m playing drums, bass, electric piano, more percussion by hitting the small keys of a flat little keyboard that weighs a few ounces (and cost $50– the Korg nanokey 2, if you’re interested) I had a thought of my friend, a great musician who nimbly tickled the ivory with Fred Flintstone fingers and how this little keyboard might be the best present he could receive (assuming, of course, that the neurological damage produced by the chemo still allows him to play) .  

I’m talking about the moment of contentment where we are doing exactly what feels best to us.  The moment we wouldn’t change anything, or, like when writing here when we can change exactly and only what we don’t like and leave only what we do like.  

Not every moment of contentment produces something to share, there are things like letting a cool breeze blow across your face on a hot day, closing your eyes, with relief caressing your face.  There are all the little things we do that produce nothing but a moment of contentment.   These moments are nothing to sneeze at, especially given the world we live in today.

Now back to our regularly scheduled headaches…

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.

Living In My Own Head

An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are. 

All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.

What is your current primary activity? *

 

I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net.  Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation.   And they do.  The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack.   There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly.  Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor.  Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.    

In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper.   I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks.   (1,068 characters)

 

What are you best known for? *

Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid.  I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood.   I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many.  I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer.  I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share.  Also for a sometimes uncanny memory. 

In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above.  As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful.   As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort.  I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed.  Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.

As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words.   I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person.   A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation.  I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with.  I place a high value on real conversation.

 

What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *

As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms.   My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net.  My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.  

I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short.  I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about.   I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation.   I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.

My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently.  It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted.  While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.

 

Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *

I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is.   I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others.   I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas.  I also enjoy accompanying singers.

I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life.  Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase.   I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much.  The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse.  My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice,  “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread,  crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups.  To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.

I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy.  I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.   

I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons. 

I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.

 

Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) * 

Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking.   Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end.  The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted.   When children are allowed to choose their projects, &  control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge.  Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation.   I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.

The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with.   Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help.   Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.

In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education.  Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.

8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle.  I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do.  Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance.  Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer.  Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum.   A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat.  The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat.  How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.

Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball.   I ask if she’ll do this with clay.  She nods.  A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described.  (2732)

 

What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *

(I’ll get back to them on this one) 

Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times.   I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand.  Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.

My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change.   He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set.  I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes.  He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.

At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital.  His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.”  He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant.  This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town.  He told me I was right about change.  He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself.  “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”  

As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs.  (1476)

How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?

I don’t recall exactly.  I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since.  I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC.   Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks.  I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.

 

Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc) 

Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks.  The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.

Ahimsa in Practice

The cells in your body, flooded with persuasive chemicals, will tell you clearly  to kick somebody’s ass.   There are many who are adept at making these chemicals flow like a waterfall.  

Your soul will thank you if you unclench your fist, make your hand soft, and do something productive, instead of kicking the ass of someone who is begging for, and richly deserves, an ass-whuppin’.  

Best to avoid these types altogether, if you can.  If you can’t, practice effective action to neutralize them.  They can sometimes actually be made to disappear, depending on your level of skill.  

Practice.

Love, Death and the Bottom Line

A one minute video of a kitten having a nightmare and being comforted by her cat mother gets 51,640,359 views because it’s cute (it is, check it out) and because it adorably shows us what we all want– someone to calm our fears in the middle of the night.  Love is the only thing that really matters, on the way to death, though we live in a world obsessed with the “bottom line”.   Love and the “bottom line” are often at odds.  Guess who usually wins?  The result is sometimes a heavily armed “gunman” acting out unbearable pain.

It will surprise nobody to learn that Antonin Scalia’s brilliant lawyer son, Eugene Scalia,  is the lead lawyer attacking Dodd-Frank’s weak-ass, loophole ridden attempt to regulate the super-lucrative government backed gambling house banks, too big to fail, that enriched themselves enormously while sucking almost every drop of blood out of the economy that sustains it.  Eugene Scalia skillfully drives a tank through the loopholes in the law that require a thorough “cost/benefit analysis” before the government may place any limitation on these monster profit machines.  After all, shouldn’t masters of the universe be able to pay themselves whatever they like?  And why is it their responsibility if people are stupid, sign contracts and lose their homes or their pensions?

You can be sure Justice Scalia is very proud of Eugene, probably hugs him warmly at family gatherings.  Is that not love?

Would it surprise you to learn that the lead attorney for Monsanto, a bland, mild-mannered but deadly mongoose, is Dick Cheney’s son-in-law?  I’m sure the two are very close, share drinks and jokes at family gatherings.  Probably shot a few quail together, I’d wager.  Neither man feels responsible for the enormous damage their actions create because they are following the noble creed that is woven into the American Dream:  prevail.

But this is not the kind of love I’m talking about.  This kind of selectively blind love is closer to death.   The love I’m talking about does not abide the suffering of others.   It is rare, and the key to a calm and productive life, and it spreads like your proverbial wildfire when it touches a person.  That’s the love I’m going for.

The Power of Calmness

Easily lost and essential, this is the power that makes difficult things possible– the calm, patient force that facilitates the organization of chaos, enables the overcoming of great obstacles.   Try doing a stunt requiring coordination, creativity and daring without the necessary calm and witness how easily the neck can be broken.

Simba Perkins, at eight or nine, seeing his third grade teacher, me, about to get into his car, calls out and waves, balanced on a railing four feet above the cement.   Without any hesitation, and to my horror as I see what he’s about to do and hold out my hand to stop him from forty feet away, he springs backwards into the air, flips neatly upside down and with his head pointed straight at the deadly concrete, whips his body, catlike as Bruce Lee and lands lightly on his feet.  I exhale, smile, get into my car and drive off, impressed as hell even now, twenty years later.

A friend has long been working on an idea that could become a very engaging and interesting TV series.   He comes up with a solution to a long-running impediment– how the characters all meet in the first place and come to interact.   The elusive organizational device that will set his idea into motion week after week.   He excitedly describes his breakthrough to his wife.  His wife tells him it’s a stupid idea.

I laugh when he tells me this.  “What the fuck does she know?” I ask him, telling him I think the idea is ingenious, which it is.  He laughs too, because, truly, his practical and brilliant wife doesn’t know shit about this particular thing– creating something wholly from one’s imagination.   He tells me her comment stopped him in his tracks and he was unable to move the idea forward for days after she told him it was a stupid idea.

Today, in Costco, a friend who worries about my lack of business savvy, of worldly success, of my proven history of dreaming, spinning out ideas and talking a great game without actually ever getting paid for any of it, does the same thing to me that this guy’s wife did to him.   He certainly had no intention of doing it, but here’s how it’s done.

I’m Simba Perkins, standing on a railing, about to do the Bruce Lee backflip.  This guy is me, but instead of helplessly gesturing hesitation from 40 feet away, manages to make a superhuman leap and grab an ankle as I take off, trying to prevent my idiot backflip and frantically talking sense to me as he lunges.  “You can’t do it on concrete!  You’ll get paralyzed for life!”  Only the lunge and ankle grab don’t manage to save me, and his worst fears for me come true.

“I’m the guy,” he says, putting himself in the place of the powerful executive he’s managed to get me a business meeting with “and I have no idea what you’re talking about, exactly.”

So I calm myself, in my sleeplessness in a strange house where I’m taking care of yet another lonely dog for someone who’s away.  Here’s what I’m talking about, exactly.  You set up a business meeting for me with a very powerful and accomplished producer, entrepreneur, billionaire.  You want to know how I will pitch it.  I’m walking in Costco when we speak and I tell you over the phone that I will keep it short and sweet, describe my program in sixty to ninety seconds, show him a clip or two and ask him for his ideas.

“That’s too general, you should ask him something specific, as we discussed,” you say.

“I will tell him at this point, as I expand and try to fund the program, that I am looking for people with the expertise to help me get it to the next stage of development.   I know there are experts who can tell me the best ways to do things now that will take me months or years to learn on my own.  I will learn to do these things, as I’ve learned everything that’s taken the program this far, but a couple of people who know business, outreach, recruitment, funding and so forth would be a huge help and speed things up greatly.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” he tells me, “and I’ve been there with you from the beginning on this project.”

What I hear is the opposite of soothing calmness.  I hear, “why do you think you can do this spontaneously with an important stranger when you can’t even do it with an old friend?”  “you’re not ready”  “your presentation is going to fall flat”  “you’re going to embarrass me and my painter friend who set this meeting up” “you really don’t know the first thing about business meetings with busy billionaires” “you’re being cavalier” “I don’t think you’ll make a coherent pitch without a carefully crafted speech, in writing and memorized”  “did you even think of what you might possibly want from him?  We talked about this a week ago? have you given it no thought?”  “why are you so determined to fail?”  “why do you imagine you’ll be quick on your feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man when you just failed at improvising it coherently with me as you walk through Costco?”  “Why won’t you let me help you?”

Here’s why I imagine I’ll be quick on my feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man.  I speak well and am quick on my feet, I know the program and its philosophy intimately, can present it quickly and show the man charming examples of what I’m talking about.  I can also give the man as much detail as he likes.  I don’t see this as the high pressure business situation that it also is.   I’m playing with house money, there is truly nothing lost if this chap doesn’t see the point of the program, there is a fantastic upside if he gets it.  If he’s excited by the program I don’t need more than that– he will find a way to help.  If he doesn’t like it, the best script in the world won’t sell it to him.    I can explain and evoke it.  He will get it or not.  What do you not understand about this?

“I don’t understand anything you just said,” you will say, and I will smile, imagining I am not in a strange apartment, sleepless and far from my toys, but where I always am when I dream– in exactly the right place for blessings to fall gently on me like soft rain on a flower in Sekhnet’s garden.  

Rather than, bien sur, writing this to nobody at 4:53 a.m. to calm myself enough to sleep, instead of being up to have breakfast with old friends a mile away who are up and at ’em at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday because they are up and at ’em, baby.

Figures a do-nothing dreamer would sleep til noon, doesn’t it?  Couldn’t he dream just as well from 11 to 7?  No doubt, no doubt about that.

What I sent her instead

Well, you know what they say about statistics, particularly when spun by partisans like this NRA speaker.  If you throw in every third world sink-hole, countries in poverty with violent gangs, repressive governments, a lot of guns and low value on human life, yes, the US looks relatively OK.

 
Compared to other wealthy nations, not so good, as a glance at the attached chart compiled by the UN will show you.
Image