Category Archives: musing

Disorientation

Disorientation is a terrible feeling.  When you lose the ability to get your bearings, to keep things in perspective, the world becomes maddeningly, dizzyingly unnavigable.  Landmarks you have always used to get around transform into weird objects without meaning.  The torture of sleep deprivation is disorientation, you can’t figure out which way is up and all you want is sleep, but enemies are forcefully preventing it.  The stuff of nightmares, that.  It is often said, and I believe it:  the toughest person in the world will be broken by the torture of sleep deprivation in the end.

I had surgery to replace a worn out left knee joint three days ago.  Before the surgery I saw on my pre-surgical medical report that I was a high AWOL risk.  There was no explanation of what that meant, of course, or even a spelling out of the acronym AWOL.  The internet provided the usual one: Absent Without Official Leave.  In anesthesiologist parlance AWOL apparently means delirium after anesthesia.   As it turned out, they were right to assess me a high AWOL risk, apparently I was kicking with the leg they had just reconstructed as they wheeled me out of the operating room.  I have no memory of this because they injected me with something that caused complete amnesia during the surgery.  I recall being wheeled down a long, cold, metal corridor, I remember arriving in the operating room.  The next thing I remember is waking up hours later, saying hello to Sekhnet, then I was in my hospital room in a deep sleep for two hours or so.

Then, no more sleep for Bonzo.  The hospital, it turns out, is not a place for those who want to sleep.  Every time I chanced to fall asleep someone was calling my name, asking if it was OK to wake me up, inquiring about what I wanted for dinner and breakfast the next day, if I was comfortable, if they could take a little blood, if I needed anything (besides sleep).   My roommate, it turned out, was unable to fall asleep without the sounds of commercial radio.  He did not use headphones. I heard him explaining to someone at some point that he didn’t like them. 

When I woke up from a brief sleep at 4 a.m. Billy Joel was playing, followed by a louder commercial.  Apparently the station was playing a Billy Joel marathon, I heard several of his greatest hits, interspersed with enthusiastic exhortations from loud voiced shills.  Finally, when I realized where the music was coming from, I got a nurse to go over and shut the fucker’s phone off, fell into a deep sleep and fifteen minutes later was visited by another concerned hospital staff member with an urgent question. I never saw the surgeon.

The amount of pain I had after the operation came as something of a shock to me.  One medical site I later visited said the pain after surgery is no worse than the worst pre-surgical knee pain.  This statement is not true.  The pills they gave me to kill the pain, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite narcotic, did not really control the pain, though they combined quite efficiently with the anesthesia to kill the functioning of my usually clockwork bowels, as predicted  By the second night at home I’d be as disoriented and snarling as Medal of Freedom winner Limbaugh himself.  The reality that I was sent home with pain pills that did not control the pain was a bit disorienting, as was the lack of a heads up about severe pain and any clue about how to find comfort, and after a second consecutive terrible night’s sleep (my Fitbit rated it 43 sleep quality, extremely poor, a new record low) I greeted the physical therapist, a very pleasant man who promised me he’d begin torturing me as soon as the paperwork was done.  He was as good as his word.

He had me do three sets of 20 of a painful knee flexing exercise.  He told me to rest 30 seconds and do 20 more.  Then 30 seconds rest and twenty more.  “Do these three times a day,” he instructed.  He showed me two other exercises with the same instructions.  The sheet he gave me advised the patient to do sets of ten, two sets, and to repeat this twice a day.   I did the math as my new knee was throbbing angrily.  He’d had me do 60 reps times three, 180 daily.   The instructions he gave me called for 20 total reps, times two, 40 a day.   What is wrong with this picture?

He then had me lie on my back and created a support with three pillows, one expertly folded under my ankle.  The underside of my knee was not touching the pillows.  The position was to reduce the swelling and allow the fluids to return to the rest of my body, aided by gravity.  “You must sleep in this position,” he instructed me, warning me that trying to sleep on my side, as I always have, would result in the leg being bent in the fetal position, which was the worst possible way I could sleep after knee reconstruction surgery.   Then he said goodbye for the weekend, arranging to see me again on Monday.

After the second set of 60 reps of the first exercise he showed me (120 for the day), my new knee was inconsolable.   I was in so much pain that my final oxycodone/Tylenol cocktail of the day could only make a shallow dent, I tried to relax in the position he told me to sleep in.  It was uncomfortable to hold the position, let alone try to sleep in it. 

I became disoriented, found that although the hillbilly heroin was not effective against the pain, it was disorienting the hell out of me.  I felt myself turning into fucking Rush Limbaugh, I was close to raging.  How was it that nobody at the hospital had impressed on me that the crucial thing was to get a good night’s sleep, no matter how I had to sleep, and that it would do no damage to my recovery to sleep with legs slightly bent.  

I angrily pawed through the surgery recovery guide the hospital had provided, searching for even a word about the pain that ALL patients experience after the surgery and the difficulty sleeping that makes an internet search for “sleeping positions” autofill “after knee reconstruction surgery”.  Nobody can sleep without some good advice and some luck, and nobody can begin to recover without sleep.  The hospital’s  guide book went directly from successful surgery to rehab, with a short stop to note that necessary pain medication will provide a smooth transition back to total health, assuming one follows the directions of the rehab folks and does the work.

As I vented, Sekhnet, my devoted caretaker, became more and more upset.   She played me a guided relaxation track which I listened to without comment, somehow restraining myself for her sake, at least as long as the track lasted.

In the end I limped into the other room and spent a while on the internet trying to determine whether I could safely sleep without harming my recovery, something that after a decent night’s sleep seems quite obvious.  I felt much better after 7 and a half hours of sleep and I have no recollection of the positions I slept in to achieve that excellent result.  But sleep was exactly what I needed.  My attitude and pain level today were both much, much better.  I am trying to avoid the hillbilly heroin, having taken only one dose today.  Fucking Rush fucking Limbaugh and the fucking Sackler family of unaccountable criminal billionaire drug pushing shithogs.

And while I am cursing despicable forces at work let me not forget fucking rapacious capitalism, concerned only with profit for the wealthiest among us and not honesty, generosity, help, kindness or anything else that cannot be monetized and transferred to those most deserving of our citizens.

Ten minute drill (pre- surgery)

Got to stick to the timer, which I will set now, because Sekhnet is very stressed about leaving on time to be more than three hours early for my knee replacement surgery today.   I woke up with the poor, stripped joint yowling top volume, the limp to the bathroom was harder than usual.  So, off to have the knee replaced.  

For some reason, I need a few moments to compose myself before showering with the special antibacterial soap they gave me and packing my overnight bag for the hospital.  This I should not be doing, with only 29 minutes remaining to the time I promised to leave (compromise– we’ll only arrive 20 minutes before they asked me to be at the hospital two and a half hours prior to surgery), but, God help me, I can’t help myself.

Years ago, before a trip to London, I agreed to leave whenever Sekhnet wanted.  I have a history of arriving at airports at the last minute and even once missed a flight because of it.   So, to avoid stress, we arrived four hours before the international flight.  When we got there she turned to me with a big smile and said “isn’t this nice?”.   I gave her a grim version of a smile and nodded, wondering if I’d manage not to kill myself in all that time in a terminal before a long flight.   I hate getting up early as much as I hate an unneccesarily long wait.  Sekhet put her head down on our luggage and feel into a deep, happy sleep.

On the airport PA, as I paced, they kept paging Mohammed Atta, asking him to call the desk.  “Mohammed Atta,” a woman’s voice said every two or three minutes, “please use a courtesy phone to call the main desk.”   A coincidence, I know, since the only Mohammed Atta I ever heard of blew himself up on one of the planes the maniacs crashed into the World Trade Center.  Sekhnet had been at the catastrophe as it unfolded, filming the horrors for the news station she worked for, and still suffers PTSD and other health troubles from being in the toxic cloud when the first tower fell.  I looked over at her and watched her happily sleeping.

“Good for you,” I thought.  She certainly didn’t need to hear them paging Mohammed Atta over and over.

Time.

The calm after the temper tantrum

Something familiar from childhood that I had forgotten, the soothing reassurances by my parents after a particularly savage parental attack.  Once you were upset by their angry reaction to your needs they could comfort you, prove to you how crazily wrong you were to feel unloved.  

I completely forgot about this practice, a disorienting mindfuck I’d experienced so many times as a child, until I heard the recorded soothing tones of two old friends determined to do everything possible, except listen or compromise, to resolve the raging conflict between us.  They sounded so sympathetic and loving, until I told them they still were not letting me say what I needed them to hear.

I had what became a fatal falling out with old friends, who after a few increasingly stressful days in a rented house, were very upset that I’d said the f-word in anger.   My apology had to be considered, after all, what I had done was so brutal, so upsetting, so much worse than the distance, coldness and passive aggression I’d seen between my old friends, who it turns out are experts at covert warfare. They let me know that I was on notice, after I’d hurled a curse at the love of my life, that I’d be on trial and would now have to pass an ongoing test to see if I still deserved the friendship we’d always shared.

After months of silence, when one of my friends smilingly made a cutting remark (“homo”) to her husband (who winced), I told them I had a few things I needed to put on the table.  Fair is fair, it seemed obvious enough to me.  They’d both immediately had the audiences with me they’d demanded when they needed to speak.  In the first case I had to hear an apology that was later explained to me, more than once, as no admission of wrongdoing, but said only to calm me because, although I’d completely provoked the justified reaction, I was clearly so upset.  The other meeting began with a direct threat — “I have walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”   

I recognize now that both of these things are characteristic of people who can’t be wrong and who can’t, therefore, honestly accept their role in, or help to resolve, a conflict.  It matters not how otherwise easily the conflict might be resolved, the point is: if there is a conflict, we cannot be in any part responsible for that.

They left hastily, as though in shock (“I was shocked,” my friend later explained), after I mentioned there were things I needed to talk about, after a few months of silence.  I followed up with an email, explaining my purpose, and had the response that they’d be happy to hear what I had to say, once there was less stress in their lives, once the Omicron variant of Covid was under control, once there were no more family emergencies to deal with.  

Three months later I wrote a short peacemaking letter I never heard back about.  After a holiday visit where my old friend avoided eye contact with me (I did get one last laugh out of her, eventually) I told my friend that I used to think of him as a person of integrity, but that I no longer did, and that I now understood that when I speak to him I’m not talking to the boss.

This worked as well as his wife stinging him with a tossed off “homo”.  Within a few days he had dragged his reluctant wife downtown and we were sitting down so that I could say what I needed to say, and they could listen, and we could all finally move on.  It did not go well.  

Whatever I had to say, no matter how mildly I tried to phrase it,  had an instantly inflaming effect.  My old friend did an uncanny impression of a furious, eye rolling, tooth sucking, arm crossing, hissing, head shaking, back turning, cell phone pounding teenager’s tantrum.  I somehow held myself back from responding in kind, though her fucking tantrum, not letting me finish a sentence, was very upsetting.

All this time my phone, with their acknowledgment, was recording, so that I could listen to it back and make sure I’d said everything I needed to say in the clearest possible way.  In hindsight I understand that needing to document the talk shows that I already no longer trusted them to be fair or honest when it came to any role they might have played in our difficult conflict.   

Eventually she told me to turn off the recorder, it was clearly making her feel very defensive.  I tapped it off, put it in my pocket and the conversation eventually took on a calmer, more mutual tone, though nothing I said could actually be acknowledged.  Hours later, when I went to use the phone, I saw that there was an eight hour recording in progress still going on.  The file was 500 MB.

When I realized this I tried to edit the sound file, get rid of the five hours of pocket noise at the end of our conversation.  It proved impossible to do, I’m not sure why.  The few seconds I did hear, my angry friend cutting me off, instantly raised my blood pressure.  The part I wanted to save was two things she said after she finally calmed down.  

Both friends had angrily denied over and over that there had been any pressure or tension in that vacation house until I, for no reason except my irrational orneriness, exploded in anger.   When she was calm after her tantrum my old friend said “there was a lot of tension” and she explained one factor, admitting that she’d been micromanaging everything in an effort to make things perfect for her husband, the sixty-five year-old birthday boy.

As for any tension between them that I might have found alarming, she said, I hadn’t seen anything to write home about.  She then described how when they are really angry at each other they sometimes go days without talking to each other.  I remember her mentioning five days, sometimes a week, though nobody else recalls that number.  I’d like to hear her statement again, just to clarify that I’d heard what I recall hearing.

All this is academic, however.  A friendship, once attacked a few times with an ax, cannot be resumed as though no deadly force had ever come into play.  I have written about this, at every stage of my long agonizing try to save the biting zombie of a once beautiful friendship that I was carrying on my back, in unbearable detail, and it is not my intention to delve any further into the decomposing rot of it all here.  

Trying to free up space on my stuffed, doddering phone the other day, I saw the large sound file and tried again to upload it to my computer so I could delete it from the phone.  This operation proved impossible to do and after several attempts I knew it was a job for Sekhnet, a technological problem solver with infinite patience.  At one point, trying blindly to find the two quotes I mentioned above, I tapped in at around the two hour mark.

“What is it that you think we’re not hearing?”  I heard my once close friend ask me with the soothing tone of a kindergarten teacher speaking to an upset child in the schoolyard.  “I think we know exactly why you were upset, what do you feel we are not hearing?”

My other friend, done with her temper tantrum, came in with the same slow, calm, sympathetic, perfectly reasonable cadence.

For a moment I found myself wondering how I’d missed this conciliatory, loving part of an otherwise frustrating talk.  Had I been so upset I couldn’t hear them?  Sekhnet, at the time, had said as much to me.

This thought lasted only as long as it took for me to reply on the recording, and for them to shut me down again.   The feeling I was left with was long forgotten, but as instantly, elementally familiar as the memory of that time, at eight, that I stepped on a board with a rusty nail sticking up out of it and it went deep into the sole of my foot.

Classic definition of insanity

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

It gets crazier still when you add in the repetition compulsion, a neurotic reflex to serially relive the identical emotional experience in hopes of getting a different outcome.

If you are a long time, trusted friend who suddenly begins snarling at me, I will try to make peace. I will restrain my impulse to say, after threats, after the second or third show of hostility, “what is your fucking problem, asshole?” I will remain patient, try to listen, try to make myself heard. None of these things are effective once someone has turned implacably hostile, nonetheless, strategies I developed as a child for surviving monster attacks will automatically come into play (he said, the passive voice employed) during such conflicts.

Until I finally learn to recognize what I am up against. Once you see it, and confirm it, and confirm it again, it is crazy to think that with enough kindness, understanding, benefit of the doubt, you can win back the friendship of someone who is determined to “win” a conflict. There is no winner in a conflict that results in the death, real or psychological, of one or both of the parties, but that doesn’t matter to someone who cannot bear to “lose”.

The conflict itself, we learn, can be over virtually nothing. The dispute can be elementally simple to resolve, but that’s not the point. All that someone who cannot be wrong and must prevail at all costs needs is something that can be converted into a war cry. Then, you will find yourself at total war with someone whose greatest terror is the thought of “losing”.

They rightly perceive that they are in a war to the death. You may naively believe that good faith can fix what’s broken, but what war ever ended in people of good faith resolving the issues that led to war and setting up a way to avoid future wars? Good luck with that peace plan, idealist schmuck!

While you are searching for peace, the warring party is searching for war allies, convincing people that you are a sick, belligerent, dishonest, sadistic monster. If you find yourself talking to one of the folks who have already taken the warring party’s side: watch out. They will urge you to do whatever you need to do to end the war that you stand accused of starting and stubbornly prolonging. You will hear the unfair charges repeated as truth, and if you protest, your defensiveness proves the truth of the charges.

You remain calm, you refute each point, but at the same time, you begin to wonder why you are bothering to remain calm, logically refuting each point. This isn’t a conversation, it’s a prosecution, at the hands of someone you never exchanged a cross word with. Why am I being prosecuted? Because someone has made me an enemy and recruited mutual friends against me. Why have I been made an enemy?

The common fact, in every case of death during life final falling out, is that by exressing hurt I have made someone feel bad about themselves, feel as if they might have been wrong, thoughtless, perhaps even irredeemably enraged.

The fear of being made to feel shame, even though your entire life is a hard won buttress against feeling worthless, is more than motivation enough to attack and keep attacking anyone who might hold you responsible for things that are intolerable to you, as a perfect person. Perfect people are very dangerous when the obvious is pointed out to them, that there is no such thing as a perfect person.

It can take decades to recognize something you don’t want to see – that few friendships last forever and that friendships with people who cannot be wrong are doomed to end in an ugly way.

Much better to learn than stay in the loop of senseless, repetitive war.

You have a right to your feelings

Our feelings, it should go without saying, are always what we really feel, and, while we are feeling them, they are beyond right or wrong. We have to be gentle with our feelings as we consider how to move forward. They send us important messages our monkey minds can’t always perceive through cleverness alone. What we feel is what we feel, and acknowledging that is much healthier than pushing emotions down and pretending we feel some other way.

When you tell someone, particularly a friend or family member, how you feel, you are hoping for understanding. We are sympathetic to people we care about who are aggravated, worried, afraid, in pain, otherwise in need of comfort.

Compare and contrast:

“I’m exhausted…”

That’s not hard to understand, you’ve been working your ass off, and working on short sleep, plus you’re worried, and that takes a toll on your energy too. Hopefully you’ll have a long, restful sleep in a few hours.

“I’m exhausted…”

How come?

“I’m exhausted…”

You shouldn’t be, it’s your own fault, why do you go to sleep so late and wake up so early? You don’t take care of yourself, I don’t know why you do this to yourself. A healthy person knows how important a good night’s sleep is. I always get at least eight hours of sleep, no matter what.

The first two replies are expressions of empathy. The third is not.

So what the fuck is that third response? An inability to empathize? A need to feel superior? A need to have the last, authoritative word? Obliviousness? Moral idiocy? Fuck if I know.

The only thing I can tell you is that when you get this response from somebody a few times, listen to what your roiled guts are telling you – this is fucked up. No matter how nice we pretend to be, it is not right to be treated this way. It is intolerable.

If you dispute somebody’s right to feel the way they feel, you dispute their right to be an autonomous person with as much right to express themselves as you claim for yourself. You can call it love or friendship, but those things both feel much different than whatever the fuck this is.

Dr. House’s Rule 12

My friend’s therapist, John House, has a great set of 18 rules of life that make a whole lot of sense.   Rule 12 is maybe my favorite, since we see it played out over and over and over and wonder why these nasty, painful cycles continue. 

Many people are impervious to the evidence that what they are doing is causing them identical problems over and over.  It is always easier to blame others than to search your own life for your own damage’s role in ongoing bad scenes. House’s lessons apply to anyone who is trying to learn to have less pain in their life by changing reflexive habits that cause them pain over and over.  

Rule 12:   A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

At my sixtieth birthday Sekhnet threw me a party at the home of old friends.  I held forth in front of a room full of loving friends, several of whom I’m no longer in contact with.  Most of the people there I’d known since I was a teenager.  Most of the people I met back then, and kept as lifelong friends, fulfilled a psychological need for me, to be close friends with people who had many of the traits of my perplexing father.  My father had all the tools to be a great friend, he was hampered by a black and white worldview that made it impossible for him to be wrong in any conflict.   As long as I avoided conflicts with these old friends who were often similar to the old man, everything was fine, for many years.   The pattern of fatal conflict emerged over many years and I could never see it coming or understand it once it arrived.

Tensions would develop, it could be over anything, often over something dear to me, or upsetting to me.  I’d be upset because my health insurance had been illegally cancelled (this happened to me three times, including during the first full month of the pandemic).  Suddenly a friend would tell me I was overreacting, that my anger was not proportional to merely losing health coverage.  According to my friend’s argument, it was an indication of something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was so irrationally upset.  Now we had an actual conflict:  your feelings are out of line, asshole, and what about my fucking feelings?

This was a mirror of the eternal conflict with my defensive, prosecutorial father — denial of my right to feel the way I did, reframing of my feelings to make them a magnifying glass for my problems and shifting the conversation to his moral superiority in not whining about his, much worse, problems.  I’d react to these friends with patience, with a hard-won ability not to explode in anger, extending the constant benefit of the doubt that strikes me as the heart of friendship.  

For some reason, I was unable to see, until this shitshow had been repeated several times over the decades, that In a conflict with a narcissist, none of these things will help in any way, except to prolong a maddeningly insoluble impasse.  If one person in a conflict is incapable of empathy or compromise, on pain of feeling utterly humiliated, that’s all she wrote, boys and girls.

I was sixty-five when I had my first conflict with my two oldest remaining friends.  The conflict itself was supremely easy to resolve, if both parties had been able to remain open, listening, granting the other person their imperfections.  I agonized for a solid year, waking every day with the pain of this impasse boiling in my head.   It caused tremendous agony to Sekhnet as well, that I was in such pain and couldn’t see my way out of it.   I kept thinking of House’s Rule 12, since this conflict had major echoes of several others over the years.  What am I not fucking seeing here?  I kept wondering.

One day, bingo!  When someone shows you they are implacable, will not listen, no matter what, will not grant you the benefit of the doubt that you are extending to them, take notice.  When they show you that face it may be a warning of worse to come.  The second and third time makes waiting for the tenth or eleventh time an exercise in masochism.  How many times can you reassure an angry friend of your good intentions before you realize they don’t have the capacity to care about your good intentions?  Three or four unrequited attempts to make peace should suffice.

Lesson 12, in my case, when someone shows you over and over that they must win the conflict, at any cost, including the murder of your friendship, the best roll of the dice is to throw them away.  No need to agonize for a year, and extend endless chances for compromise with people who would rather kill you, and murder your good name, than admit they had ever behaved badly.

Lesson 12, when someone shows you that they are a childish asshole, believe them.  House’s rule 13 will only be of marginal use at that point:

13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.

Some people are angrily oblivious to the lessons of their lives. And those who must win at any cost are the world’s greatest fucking losers.

The death of a 1000 cuts

The funny thing about the death of a thousand cuts is that sometimes you can be cut 980 times before you realize you’re being subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. In the end you’ll be cut to shreds, in fact, you already are, even as you’re deluded by protestations of love from the folks with the knives.

It’s like walking around with a wounded friendship, carrying it on your back with no idea that it’s already dead. And worse than dead, really, the corpse you’re hauling on your shoulders is actually a biting zombie intent on having a nice snack.

The prison of our minds

There’s a famous story I’m thinking of, as I can’t find my way out of the loop of my two closest friends suddenly and irrevocably withdrawing their friendship from me.   The final communication was now almost four months ago, and it was just my old friend confirming that he would not be honest in trying to resolve our senseless conflict.  I have no illusion about anything involving that long running shitshow, understanding fully now how deadly any conflict is with this inexorable personality type. 

Yet, almost every day, as similar things are played out constantly in mainstreamed extremist politics — projection, incoherence, lies, vilification — I am reminded of my painful struggle to prevent the fatal falling out with my two old friends. They shocked me by continually using every familiar MAGA technique to blame and silence me.

Two monks who haven’t seen each other in many years meet in the forest.  They greet each other and one asks the other “do you still think about those sadists who held us captive and tortured us?”

“No,” says the monk “how about you?”

“I think of them every day and I never think about them without wishing karma to descend on them so that they hurt the way we did when they tortured us” says the other monk.

“Then you are still their prisoner,” says the more enlightened monk.  

True enough.

The thought that consoles me, as I am still the prisoner of thoughts of the brutal unfairness of the mistreatment I experienced at the hands of people who claimed to love me, is that I have no ability, at the moment, to blow off much  steam, to get things out of my system physically.  Strenuous exercise is always good for relieving much of that kind of tension.  In recent years I’d go for long, fast paced walks to clear my head, now I can only walk a block at a time, painfully, before I have to sit and rest.  Try clearing your head with that kind of halting walk. 

So the pain in my ailing knees reminds me to go easy on myself for not being able to break fully out of the prison I can’t think my way out of at the moment.  Mercy is a great gift to give yourself. When I am back in shape, after my knee replacement and rehab, I intend to flush the rest of this ugliness out of my system, daily.

The uninterestings

The smartest woman in the room, a Harvard graduate with a successful literary agent practice who has read countless books, loved The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer.   It is the epic fifty year story of friends from summer camp, who met the summer after my closest friends and I met at summer camp, and stayed close thereafter, their lives intertwining over the decades, as, amazingly, ours had.  My two closest friends were so excited by the book that they bought me a hardcover copy, in large print, no less, a kindness to my old eyes I always appreciate.  

I began reading the book, which starts from the point of view of an insecure, working class teenager Julie, a girl who is flattered to be taken in by a group of the coolest kids at camp, who rename her Jules.  This little group, The Interestings, forms the dramatis personae for the rest of the book.  I confess, I had a hard time making progress with the book, it struck me, from the start, as profoundly uninteresting, though context may have played a large role, as I will describe.  I got the audio version from the library and listened to it, determined to hear the whole thing.

Toward the end of the book the depressive husband of Jules tells his wife that her lifelong fixation with these Interestings has always been a mystery to him.  Aside from sharing an intense bond as teenagers, what was actually so interesting about any of these interestings?  He certainly spoke for me, and I suspect, many readers.

The pretty rich girl who was the queen of this little group wound up rich and successful, and married to a billionaire.  Her brother, a charming kid much loved by the females, wound up an expatriate in France, when it became clear he might be indicted for rape.  The eccentric, creative kid who couldn’t stop drawing and making little animations, became a billionaire, which is what happens to real geniuses, I suppose.  The musician became an engineer, I.  forget what became of the rape victim, though I think she remained friends with the others.  Jules became a social worker, I think. 

We didn’t wind up talking about the book my friends of fifty years had loved so much they bought me a copy of it.  Now that I think about it, we’d rarely discussed any books we’d read in common, beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It was not terribly long after I read The Interestings before a fifty year friendship with my two closest friends was over.  That’s fairly interesting, I think.

My friend flew into a rage at me over a conflict that, were she not so angry, could have been easily resolved.  Her righteous husband forced her to apologize to me the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, traumatized that my closest female friend had glared at me with a contempt I’ve only seen from my long dead father.  This famously willful woman’s loss of control, the show of rage, and the forced apology, I now understand, were mortifying to both of my old friends. 

Although I immediately accepted her crabbed apology, which, while blaming me for the entire incident seemed nonetheless sincere and the best she could do, they couldn’t accept my apology the following day for using the fucking “f-word” in a moment of anger.  Her husband rallied to his wife’s side, telling me I had no right to expect him to understand my feelings, because he was too upset by what I’d done (the f-word!) to hear about them.  In the space of two days, it was grimly clear these lifelong friends were no longer my friends.  It took me over a year to stop agonizing and see the obvious because it all made no sense to me.

My old friend called after the hellish five days in a beautiful rented house that ended our friendship and began “wasn’t that a great vacation?”  It went quickly downhill from there.  Next stop, a month or so of silent treatment from a friend I always communicated with a couple of times a week.  Then a demand to meet, and at that meeting, his wife beside him, he began “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”  Instead of verbally punching him in the mouth, which, in hindsight would not have been unreasonable, I reassured him of my friendship and he accepted my assurance, handed me a great book they’d bought for me.

Reading this book, some part of me must have understood the superficial aspect of the whole thing, the intimate friendship beyond question, the need to tell the same cover story, stick to the dramatic script, swallow hurt because your hurt is humiliating to someone who claims they love you like family.  And, like family, you simply have to unconditionally accept the faults of your parents, your siblings, your flawed uncles and cousins. 

The rap goes like this: being family means that nobody ever has to hear or understand why what they’ve done hurt the other family member.  Family is a sacred bond that cannot be broken, except by vicious, unforgiving, treacherously angry people falsely claiming to be hurt and who can’t let go of their childish grievances.  You understand that if I hurt you, I love you more than you are hurt, so it’s a wash and stop trying to talk about whatever you claim I did to you.  It is your problem, not mine, not the family’s, dummy up, be quiet, swallow our version of what you think happened quiescently or you’re going to be fucking sorry.  You don’t threaten the family, you fucking filthy mouthed fuck!

Interesting, maybe.  On their influencer daughter’s Substack page recently there was a long post with advice about how to endure difficult people, presumably those who intrude with strong opinions and feel they can never be wrong.  These people, she suggests, must be placed on an UNSAFE list and only dealt with when you have all of your personal matters for the day taken care of.  Funny to find myself on that list, but, yo, that’s family for yuh!  You’d have to be a reckless idiot to risk a million dollar inheritance to indulge the need for someone your family deems unsafe to have a word in your ear.

Writing draft two of my father’s story

My father, a brilliant man with a quick wit and a dark sense of humor, did severe damage to my sister and me.  Our childhood was a minefield, a war zone, we grew up in a home of constantly shifting alliances where accusations and angry screaming accompanied dinner almost every night.   

Irv always presented a puzzle that was impossible for me to solve: a man with so many admirable qualities, capable of being such a great friend, so funny and enlightened about so many things, who was, at the same time, so maniacally determined to never be wrong that he waged total war against his own children.  He was hellbent on never losing an argument, no matter how shaky its foundation.  He insisted to the end of his life, for example, that I’d had it in for him since I came home from the hospital, a newborn with a clear rage against his father from day one.  I stared at him as a two day-old, in his account, with big, black, accusing eyes.

The last night of his life, April 28, 2005, he expressed many regrets, but until then, and I was close to fifty that night, he always fought like the devil.  His rapidly approaching death seemingly relieved him of the need to fight to the death.  He was able to be candid about the demons that pursued him, for the first time in his life.  Looming death helped him gain clarity, but there were other forces also in play, as I will describe in the pages to follow.

I sat down, daily, in 2015 and 2016, and spent a few hours writing down everything I could think of about my old man, from every angle I could imagine.  It was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with a hundred missing pieces, in a darkened room.   At the same time, the process of remembering and reconstructing his life was fascinating.  Most amazingly, writing it all out got me closer and closer to truly understanding his uncompromising point of view when it came to conflict.   I didn’t agree with him much of the time, and understood his deep regrets about having been that way, but by the end of writing that first draft, and thinking about it, I felt that I truly understood how and why he came to see things the way he did.

Early on in writing that first draft the skeleton of my father piped up one day, and figuring I could always go back and delete the adorable device, I let him speak up regularly.  Much of that first draft is a back and forth with my father’s skeleton.  Over the course of writing I had many sessions with the skeleton, a close version of my father, whose voice I could hear very clearly as the skeleton made his opinions known, only much more capable of honest self-reflection since his death.   

I found myself greatly looking forward to our almost daily conversations, which seemed to me only partly imaginary though I was transcribing both sides and had no illusions that my father’s bones were actually sitting up in his grave, as I described, speaking at length and sometimes commenting drily on the raptors flying over the Westchester graveyard where he’s buried.  In the end, 1,200 pages, and many sessions with my father’s bones later, I was able to see things through my dead father’s eyes.  It was an outcome I never imagined.

That sprawling first draft was nothing close to a book and there are many reasons for it.  For one, the conceit of an extended conversation with my father’s sardonic, philosophical skeleton struck me as a bit precious and contrived (though the skeleton would have a good argument against my hesitation.)  Two big reasons for its incompleteness I am just understanding now, and they are connected.

The first is that I only recently put together that the personality type who cannot be wrong no matter what, the kind, like my old man, who is hypersensitive to criticism, quick to insult and anger, harshly blames everyone else for all hurt and never yields in any way, is not only a tortured soul, but a narcissist.   How did I not understand, until very recently, that my dear father was a narcissist?  

A narcissist, whenever there is conflict, is the quintessential black and white thinker.   They see themselves as either superior to everyone, or as utterly, humiliatingly worthless and undeserving of love or respect.  There is no grey area, no ability to compromise between these two stark choices.  In case of conflict, no matter how minor, for the narcissist it is always an existential war that can end only in domination or unthinkably painful submission.  They must use every weapon to maintain the narcissistic identity of perfect mastery or face the horror of their crushing unworthiness to be loved.

It doesn’t mean my father wasn’t also funny, sentimental, sometimes affectionate, very smart, with good impulses toward the world and an admirable identification with the oppressed (his paranoid tyranny over wife and children aside).  It just means his desperate childhood had damaged him to the point that he could not tolerate being wrong.  His fear of the humiliation of being wrong in any way was too painful for him.  He could not forgive, he could not apologize, there was no making amends with him.  My sister named him the DU, the Dreaded Unit, and not for nothing, the name fit him like a skin.

His narcissistic solution to the terror of ever being humiliated was to create a persona that was smart, well-read, informed, authoritative, adroit in argument, disarmingly funny, moralistic, admirably idealistic and formidable.   He had a real talent for debate and was without peer in constantly and effortlessly turning the disagreement from whatever conflict his opponent needed to resolve to a moral high ground of his choosing where he was in complete control at all times. Control, recent experience has taught me, is the cardinal need of the narcissist.  If the narcissist is not in control — devils and darkness!

Seeing the whole of my father’s life in terms of narcissism helps me understand it a little better. The first draft was written in the dark, in terms of the general insights about narcissistic incapacities available to me now.  In light of his personality having been without a doubt narcissistic, there is now a small lamp in the corner, shedding more light on the whole portrait.   Even as I realize that my father may not have presented as the classic narcissist because he was very skilled in making his manipulation seem entirely reasonable, even altruistic. 

The second major reason that draft one was a missed attempt to tell my father’s tragic, triumphant story is a limitation I put on myself in writing it.   The relationship that was the greatest illustration of my father’s character, his style and his limitations, was off limits to me. It involved a family member in our immediate family of five and I decided at the outset to exclude any mention of that important supporting character, indispensable supporting character, really, in an attempt to keep the peace with my remaining  blood relatives.  Taking this imagined high road did not prevent my estrangement from that little cult anyway, so, understanding what I now do about the worldview of narcissists, I am no longer bound by that high-minded impulse to avoid a painful part of the truth. No story worth hearing omits necessary truth.

Truth was a huge thing with my father.  There was some truth he was incapable of grappling with, true, but he was a big believer in the power of honesty.   He always stressed how crucial honesty is to any relationship and I took his guidance in that matter to heart.  In battles with other narcissists you will often encounter desperate lying, the constant shuffling of a shifting set of convenient facts that can be changed on the fly.   My father, because of his skills, never needed to do that.  I am not aware of any lie ever told by my father. He didn’t need to bend the truth, he simply reframed anything he didn’t want to talk about right out of existence.  

And yet, as clear as truthfulness is, as clear as an outright lie is, there is, in our world of imperfect humans, a vast field of gradation there in the middle.  

Part of that gradation is the way we treat people who we don’t trust but still need something from.  My father gave me the example, toward the end of his life, of a compulsively lying person he despised (and he pronounced the word with almost spitting contempt) but was able to pleasantly shoot the shit with, in order to have unfettered access to other people he loved.  The guy knew my father hated him, and he’d lost every argument he’d ever had with him, been handled as easily as a foolish child, but they talked sports, and the weather, and a little politics sometimes (they had roughly similar views), and for his part the guy played along, smiling, making wisecracks.  Anyone passing the two of them chatting would have assumed they were on good terms.  Unless one was able to observe their micro-expressions, those tell tale little flashes of true feeling that constantly play across the human face.

So this guy has to be a character in the final draft of my father’s story, he’s indispensable.  I forbade myself from including perhaps the most important supporting character in the story.  Can’t tell the story without including this motherfucker and everyone in his circle.  Sorry, but finishing this long delayed book is more important to me than a little group, damaged just as I was, who no longer speak to me anyway.  Let’s give ’em something to read about, shall we?