Category Archives: musing

To trust or not to trust?

Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option.  Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky.   I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting.  We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.  

When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you.  This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care.  Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head.   Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between.  Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience.   We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided.  The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?

We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns.   The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.

I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August.  We left the office very impressed with him.   He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”.  I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures.  The standard line is that most patients tolerate it.  You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable.  But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.

When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients.  She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed.  I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing.  I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.

The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation.  He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar.  In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room.  I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do   further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day. 

Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.”  It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did.  He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid.  Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to. 

My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust.  He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked.  (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board).  He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it.  He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect.  I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.

There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed.  I was unable to urinate at all.  After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate,  I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.  

I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries.  I left increasingly agitated messages.  Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.

I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself.  He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages.  He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery.  I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag.  I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery.  He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case.  ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital.  He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital.  I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.

So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is.  After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care.   You can read all about it on their fucking website.

Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.

Our Age of Bullying Narcissism

We are, sadly, living in a renaissance of openly proud public psychopathy. This appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, with influential American culture presently at the epicenter of this plague on humanity. Bullying is an expression of deep inferiority that is easily seen, on a superficial level, as a kind of strength. It is the kind of strength that only destroys. Bullying inhibits and stunts the best intentions, and higher natures, of everyone around the bully.

My personal take on people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk’s elected second in command, and their stinking ilk is that they are driven by self-loathing that makes them cruel and punitive. They are primally wounded, to be what others see as childish, egotistical freaks; their grandiose mission in life is gaining power to punish the world for their humiliation. If they have the power to control and destroy others, they imagine they are important and safe from the self-hatred that animates their need for attention. If I humiliate you, who’s the humiliated one now, asshole?

I have come to this understanding through painful personal experience, being ostracized by a group of my oldest friends, based on lies told by two of them. My two closest friends, during a tense holiday the four of us spent in a rented house, were quietly at each others’ throats. The pressure mounted as the wife tried, and largely failed, to please her dour, quietly angry husband by micromanaging every moment of our vacation. Trying to help ease the escalating tension between my two old friends was a fool’s errand, and I paid a dear price for trying.

A laser beam of silent rage was fixed on me by the dear friend I considered the sister I’d never had, over a senseless, minor, easily fixable conflict. I wound up blamed for the entire disastrous vacation, I’d ruined a beautiful time on the second to last day by venting frustration in an inexcusable way. I’d uttered the forbidden f-word in front of these two silently vying prigs. It was that expression of visceral vulgarity that became the focus in the days, weeks and months afterwards. My uncontrollable temper, abusiveness and purported inability to forgive became the grounds for my righteous assassination by an extended group of friends of fifty years, the proof was in my own violent words.

My friend called a few days after our tense goodbye at the vacation house, saying “wasn’t that a great vacation?” When I reminded him of the rising tension, the anger, the coldness at our parting, he denied there was any tension at all until my explosion of anger made things suddenly uncomfortable for everybody. He told me he and his wife were very concerned about my abusive behavior, discussed it the whole ride home, were not sure they could ever forgive me. A few weeks of silence later my friend told me “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me”. He did not elaborate. More outbursts of indignation followed, and months of silence from my other friend, his wife.

This should have told me everything I needed to know about my former friends. I should have recognized they were now determined, adamant adversaries. Today there’s no way I’d keep trying to save a dead friendship once confronted by this united show of implacable anger and contempt. Now that I can see it clearly, a curt exit is the only sensible thing to do. In my defense, at the time it was unthinkable to me, as it was for Seedj, that our two closest, oldest friends were beyond the reach of friendship. They were, but it was impossible to conceptualize.

It took a full year, plus a month or so, before I finally saw their desperation never to be wrong as the monstrous, relationship destroying force it actually is.  Rage does not yield to peacemaking if the inflexibly angry party will not hear anything that might make them feel imperfect, or in any way bad about themselves.  The party’s over.

We were going to celebrate the retirement of another dear friend. The whole group would be there, paying a few hundred dollars a seat into his favorite charities as he was honored. The four of us had not seen each other since an ugly ending to an evening we’d spent together, five months earlier, when the woman who sternly told me that she and her husband had a contract never to call each other names, called her husband a name that stung him like an electric current. Then she smiled at me mischievously. When I made an oblique reference to it, they immediately got up from the dinner table and walked away. We hadn’t seen our close friends for five months, though I continued to try to get through to my friend, the husband, who I saw from time to time.

It would be impossible for me to pretend that all was well, and joyously celebrate our friend’s retirement, without being able to talk through our ugly impasse first. I challenged my friend and he dragged his wife down to hear what I had to say, a few days before the joyous retirement party. She had a prolonged temper tantrum. I’d put my phone on the table and recorded the session, to be sure I’d said what I needed to say. One part of me understood I might need the verbatim notes for later use. One problem I’d had in trying to make peace was that the story my friends told continually changed. There had been absolutely no tension in that house until I’d violated everyone with the fucking f-word. My friend had never flown into a prolonged silent rage at me, my aggressive hostility made her “get her back up”, understandably. I was the one with the anger problem, not them.

I found myself listening to part of the recording yesterday, while trying to master some editing software. My friend denied my challenge had forced him to bring his implacable wife to the table (though clearly it had). I was not the one restraining my temper, it was him, and his patient wife, he told me testily. I heard myself make every good argument, and listened to reactions that made no sense, except to deflect any responsibility from themselves. Yes, they conceded, for the first time, eight months after the fact, it had been tense in that vacation home, because the wife had been compelled to scramble, and micromanage, after a planned dream European vacation was preempted by Covid restrictions. I was mistaken about the anger between them, I apparently hadn’t seen anything.  My friend told me they often go a week at a time, living in the same house, angry, silent, avoiding eye contact.

It would be a few more months until things came to their, inevitable in hindsight, ugly climax. In the days following painful knee replacement surgery my other close friends in the group made it clear they could never forgive someone like me, a person who can’t forgive. What I had done to their dear friends could never be forgiven.

It is said that the victors write history.  They write it in the blood of their victims. My understanding of this dynamic, terminally wounded people who can never be wrong uniting others in their cause, using their power over others to feel better about the immense pain of their condition, runs deep. It could not have been illustrated more clearly than in the accusation, from someone who wasn’t there, that I’d “deliberately tortured my closest friend for over a year to bend him to my will.” My patient peacemaking efforts were doomed from the start, and I was then defamed, because I didn’t recognize the severe emotional disabilities of the people I was trying to make peace with.

So it is with the leaders and mythology of MAGA. They had every right to riot at the Capitol because they truly believed the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from their persecuted candidate. It was a Day of Love. Legitimate Political Discourse. Those who assaulted and grievously injured police that day — persecuted martyrs, victims of a weaponized DOJ. Virtually everything MAGA stands for is a lie. Putin wants peace, the dictator Zelensky is the aggressor. Medicaid is bankrupting a country of over 800 billionaires. This is always the pattern with these terminally insecure motherfuckers.  Zelensky, in countering one or two of the aggressive lies snarled at him during a photo op/pressure session, was trying to “litigate” in public, according to mascara wearing man’s man JD Vance.

We are all living in an age where these severely damaged, destructive motherfuckers are ascendant, even admired by millions. In a better world, we’d treat them as  damaged people who deserve our compassion.  Here in reality TV-land, it’s hard to do.  They reject compassion, having never experienced its healing power.  They seek only power and obedience to their will.  They continually demonstrate their contempt for the weak, the powerless, the gullible and appeal to violence. Hard to have compassion for people, no matter what their tragic personal history, who want to rule like Hilter did, but with more loyal generals who don’t sometimes get out of line and try to kill them.

It is important to recognize that lying is essential to the whole Nazi enterprise.  A bully has no right to treat others with contempt, except in the bully’s subjective view that he is the righteous victim and everyone else the cause of his torment. Every word these creatures utter, almost without exception, is a lie calculated to stoke violent loyalty. Lying is necessary to advance a narrative that makes no sense in light of the truth, of actual cause and effect. USAID saves thousands of lives a year, and feeds and clothes millions of starving children, protects children from polio, in poor countries that gain goodwill toward the USA. There is less waste, fraud and corruption in USAID than in the illegal “agency” of young hotshot hackers pulled directly out of Project 2025’s ass, adorably dubbed DOGE (branding is everything).

The truth is getting roughed up in this current one-sided fight, but it is crucial to see what we are up against and counter the lies at every turn. Democrats, a cautious corporate party, have been very disappointing in this regard. It is up to we the citizens of this besieged democracy. Here’s MAGA enemy Anthony Fauci, from before his security team was publicly removed from him by agents of Elon Musk and his pet orange man/boy.   

(Pardon the glitch, couldn’t embed the video, which appeared with a command, from a Google bot, to prove you weren’t a bot, then didn’t let you.   Click the link, the pitch is important, brief and well-said.)

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/u7VZlBfay84?si=kHPVItgi1nnhZW1I

What is up with fucking homophobes?

It’s 2025 and there are still millions of insecure, angry men, and a large number of similar women, who hate homosexuals. Hate them. What threat does anyone in the LGBTQ+ world pose to anybody? You’d have to be a homophobe to dribble out an incoherent, hate-filled rationale.

I’d imagine anyone with basic common sense and common decency would understand that people who are not like them, speakers of other languages, people from other cultures, people with different ancestry, religion, do not pose any threat just because of these differences. You don’t like people who speak French? Don’t talk to them, mon ami. Homophobia is irrational hatred just like racism against Blacks, Asians, violent hatred against Muslims, Jews, Central Americans, war orphans. Why did this news from Heather Cox Richardson come as no surprise in the Age of Musk/Trump?

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

Famous closeted gay superstar mob lawyer Roy Cohn, a highly sexed and very promiscuous man, smiles at his peeps from the hot place. He’s still a bit hissy that his protegé, the handsome young Donald J. Trump, dropped him like a bad habit when Cohn was dying of AIDS. I can picture him bitching to Satan about this betrayal by the ungrateful son of a wealthy man he did so much for every chance he got.

I’m the bad guy

I keep forgetting this essential fact in a corporate society — the person with the complaint is always the problem. 

Who would you rather be, a wealthy, philanthropic, problem-solving job creator or a sniveling, powerless loser trying to lodge some niggling complaint?   Not much to choose there, really, in our either/or, winner/loser, black/white, powerful/helpless culture.   Then, among us puny earthlings, there is the personal sphere, the only thing we can sometimes control — how we act in response to stress.

If it weren’t for whiners like me who need to make a “complaint” any time they feel slighted, cheated, over-billed, underserved, physically or emotionally injured and all the other annoying signs of personal self-pity, corporations would never be troubled by the odd customer with a gripe of some kind.   Life is unfair, everybody, even the most powerful among us, has gripes.  De minimis non curat lex.  “The law does not concern itself with your trifle, asshole.”  Sounds more majestic in Latin.

Somehow, I take the fact that I am now a cripple personally.  When I use that ugly term to refer to myself (we prefer to be known as ‘person with a disability’ or something more respectful than ‘cripple’ or ‘gimp'[1]) I am describing a person who cannot walk a few steps without pain.  It is not uncommon for a medical limitation such as not being able to walk, after a knee replacement, with no available medical cure, to eventually make a person bitter.   I am now officially fucking bitter.

I obliged the wife yesterday by sending my dermatologist photos of two new skin growths.  I went on the MyChart of the corporation my doctor works for and sent a message.  My question was if either of these look suspicious enough to merit expediting my appointment, currently set for April.

After a night of interrupted, low quality sleep (ongoing pain, swelling and stiffness in my impeccably installed prosthetic left knee) that left me without REM, deep sleep, or any real rest, I woke today, Friday, to a text from the dermatologist’s office with a Monday morning appointment (90 minutes from here at that hour).

I hadn’t heard from my doctor. It generally takes a few days, and she always gets back to me. There was a notation on the portal, when I logged in, that my doctor had not yet seen my note. Somehow, somebody (a fucking bot driven by AI is my best guess) scanned my note, saw the words “expedited appointment” and put me on the calendar for Monday morning.

Annoying, but easily remedied by calling to cancel the appointment.  In hindsight I should have just texted “N” to “not confirm” and been done with it.  I was already cranky from another shit night’s sleep, the inability of the medical profession to fix the new problem they had caused for me, and everything related to the pain, physical and emotional, of being unable to walk.  I made the mistake of not texting “N”, instead calling to find out if there was some reason for this sudden emergency appointment.

As is the case whenever trying to talk to anyone in a corporate medical office, it was a gauntlet of ads, unsolicited advice about their convenient website and hold music.  I hung up angrily after a few minutes of a five second loop of hold muzak played over and over and over.  The wife, seeing me upset, moved in to help me out.  At one point, when she had someone on the line, she began to cry in frustration and overflowing sympathy for my aggravation.  I took the phone, explained the situation, canceled the appointment, handed the phone back to the wife.  Ten minutes later she was still making nice with the very nice clerk at the appointment desk.  The doctor was seeing other patients, but would personally call me at her earliest opportunity, she let me know.

I didn’t need a call from the doctor.  I’d make an earlier appointment if needed to after I got her response on the portal.  There was no need to trouble the doctor, there was no need to trouble myself, and yet, the call went on and on until I finally lost my shit and began screaming, as I do in the shower sometimes when I’m alone in the house and my knee is screaming along with me. 

The wife is now hurt, and I am a brutal fucking bitter asshole, in addition to an ungrateful one who snarls and yells at someone who is only trying to help me. 

Have a blessed day, y’all.  May this cautionary tale remind you to be the best person you can be, and remember to make nice after you lose control of your frustrations.

[1] Across the board, people with disabilities generally agree that words implying the person is a victim of their disability should be avoided. For example, it is recommended that people choose phrases like “they had a stroke” instead of “they are a stroke victim” or “they suffered a stroke.” These negative phrases can imply that the person is passive to their condition.         

source

Personal Archaeology

Not everyone is wired this way, but for me, I need to unearth clues that help me understand the tangled progress of my life.  I learn many things way too late, and I wonder about these things, once the truth of them hits me like a wall.   Some may find this process painful and do everything to avoid it. 

I am not one of these people, I have left myself countless clues over the decades.  The challenge is to assemble them to  understand what they’re telling me about the progression of my experience.

There is a type

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas everybody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contempt is always the same

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

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

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

When you see contempt, remain calm, leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certain stories have only one reasonable response

We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.

There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”

The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.

We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true.  You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible.  During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries. 

Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record

MAGA judge appointed by Trump, nothing political here
One person’s complaint was based on lies, the other’s was based on facts on the ground right now

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation.   A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure.   The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading.  I was relieved. 

A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have.  There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy.  As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up.  Here’s what the device looks like:

I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans.   The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low.  I needed to talk to my doctor.  The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor.  My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give  informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.

This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response.  Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon.  It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question.  It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.

It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk.   There aren’t multiple sides to this story.  If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story.  You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is.  It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.

Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.

You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.

Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.