Category Archives: musing

The Excitable Optimism of Sekhnet

From time to time Sekhnet, who meets countless people during the course of her work gathering news for a national network, reports a fascinating conversation she had that relates to my life and plans.  She brings me a business card, or contact info written on a scrap of paper and urges me to call them.   Often things come to grief, since I am not always quick to make these potential contacts.   That most have so far been in vain is no excuse for my glass-half-empty pessimism.    

She heard a bright and funny man give a fantastic talk on becoming pitch perfect at sales meetings, during interviews of any and all kinds.  He pointed out that people have one chance to make a good first impression and clinch the deal, and that there are a hundred ways to blow it.  Read his book, aptly titled “Pitch Perfect” and you can weed out many of these ways, have a crisp phrase ready, delivered in the same winning style you see before you today, saying exactly enough to make your point crisply, and not one phrase more.  

Being pitch perfect is the difference between getting a major donation, or any kind of big yes, and getting that gassy baby smile and limp handshake at the end of a meeting too long by crucial moments.  The man’s talk and style were both excellent, she enjoyed it and found it valuable.  She bought his book, which I read cover to cover.  It was excellent.  

I took the next step and contacted his office to make an appointment for the four hour personalized master class.   It was, not surprisingly, $4,000.  I explained that I represented a small, money-strapped non-profit and was cheerfully told the tiny non-profit rate was $3,600.   My silence was met by an offer to do the half course, more than 60% as good as the full one, for only $2,000, certainly our budget could manage that.  

Well, I thought, the $2,00o, a quarter of our operating fund, could go for that or for two new animation set-ups.  I thanked her, even as a bit of bile was coming up in the back of my throat.

Sometimes helpful people, hearing my idea for the child-run interactive animation workshop, have suggested I pitch the idea on Shark Tank to get funding.   Shark Tank is a show where business owners try to strike deals to get funding from a group of wealthy sharks who evaluate the ideas looking for monster profits.

Experience has taught me the difference between what I was trying to sell and something an angel investor in the Shark Tank would salivate over. In Shark Tank the family that invented the fantastically lucrative Squatty Potty was looking for millions to take their product, a short plastic foot stool that made passing stools as easy and pleasant as operating a soft serve machine, to the next level, international super sales.   The investors were looking for a credible sign that every million they put in would have a good chance of turning into ten million for them.  It is straightforward.    

If the idea is to transform a boring public school classroom into a fun ninety minute imagination-fueled, problem-solving, peer-teaching playground where kids have the final say on every aspect of the product they are producing, a short bit of stop-motion animation, a process that leaves them collaborative, energized and engaged in learning and teaching, no angel investor worth his dorsal fin will so much as stop circling to sniff that particular patch of water for blood.  

“Sounds like a great idea, you got funding?  What’s your marketing budget?”   These are the first two questions anyone bright and practical asks when I finish my brief answer to “so, what have you been up to since last year?”  

“You have to find fellow idealists,” Sekhnet has always told me.  

I was referred to a non-profit called idealist.org, signed up.  Was invited to a mixer at a bar.   Went and met the people who worked for idealist.org.  They explained all the benefits of being a member.  I joined.  I haven’t had an email from them, or anyone else on the site, in years.  

I had an email from two guys who founded a nice outfit to introduce non-conformists with big society-improving ideas, a mutual help organization for idealistic types.  They would match people up according to their skills, interests and needs.  The first rule, when you met, was to listen to the other person’s idea and needs first and think about how you could help.  In the end, their emails stopped coming too.  It was a great idea, but I guess they didn’t have funding or an adequate marketing budget or business plan.

Having lunch with the sister of an old friend the subject of the nonprofit came up.  She thought it was a great project and then told me about a woman she’d recently met, a dynamic older woman, who was on the inside of Mayor Di Blasio’s Department of Education.  She was a great lady, and good friends with this woman’s good friend.  She shepherded many great new programs through the Education Department’s doors, knew how to get them funded and contracted as pilot programs, that was her speciality.  She was, literally the perfect person for me to meet.  In fact, we’d meet for Dim Sum, with the mutual friend, and I could run the idea by her at an informal meeting, that would be best.  

That offer turned into the old can-do idealist’s phone number being texted to me, followed by a series of supportive follow-up texts asking if I’d contacted her yet.  Presumably I was supposed to set up the informal Dim Sum meeting where the no pressure chat could unfold.  I called her a couple of times, introduced myself in short, hopefully well-pitched voice mails, I texted her this and then  this.   We never met for Dim Sum, nor did I ever hear back from her.  

It reminded me of the introduction I’d had a year earlier to the director of a large arts non-profit, with a twenty million dollar annual budget.  I was told this woman, a good friend of a close friend of mine, would love my idea and her well-funded organization could definitely help.  If our mutual friend had been present at the meeting, things might have gone better, the well-funded nonprofit could definitely have helped.  As it turned out, I was chided for my defeatist attitude before the meeting, felt dread on the way to the meeting, and the results afterwards were the opposite of helpful.    

Sekhnet remains undaunted.  Her mechanic’s daughter, it turns out, by pure whimsical chance, works at a nonprofit that features creative programs for public school children in Queens.  This friendly young woman was very excited about the student-run animation workshop, gave Sekhnet her card.  Sekhnet has learned about such things, knows that I’m currently concentrating on a book about the life and times of a man nobody’s ever heard of, and told the young idealist that it might be a while, but that I would get in touch with her.  

The same goes for the twenty-one year old idealist she spoke to in the computer department at Costco the other day.   He works at Costco and is completing a business degree at Baruch.  He and his brother love stop-motion, are idealists, think a student-run animation workshop for young kids sounds amazing and want to help.  Plus, he’s getting the business education to help with funding and marketing.  Win-win-win.  He was cautioned that it may take a while to hear from me.  

Thanksgiving I hear Sekhnet piping at me from across the room, calling me by my Christian name, if I was a Christian.  I never know what the deal is when I hear her urgently piping “Eliot!”   She’s talking with a smiling, friendly woman who it turns out works for Simon and Schuster.   She works in HR, hiring and firing like a demon, but she has found her home in publishing, after years in electronic media, and loves being around book people. She reads like a fiend since she’s been working there.  Sekhnet informs her I’ve written a book, I get a big smile.  

“It’s a manuscript, a first draft, around 700 pages.  It’s like wrestling with an anaconda at the moment, but I’m really enjoying it,” I say to the big smile.  

“I love book people,” she tells me, with that beautiful smile.  

I describe the idea that gets me out of bed every day, excited to write: a three-dimensional portrait of a great idealist who was also a monster, and how he rose from dire poverty to live the American Dream, a historian passionately involved in the historical events of his lifetime.  A dreamer and a destroyer of dreams.

I tell her that one day, as I was writing about his painful childhood, the skeleton of my father sat up in his grave to bitterly dispute something I’d just written.  I’d dismissed it at the time, went with it, had the chat, figured I could cut it later.  Then found him popping up again and again and now much of the ms. is an ongoing dialogue with the opinionated skeleton, a talk I look forward to every day.  

The smile continued as she told me it sounded cool, and that this kind of soul-searching memoir is currently a very hot genre and that if I find the right agent things could go well with this idea.  She then told us of a website where you can do a detailed search, by genre , of agents, and that no publisher will accept anything unless submitted by an agent.  Sekhnet jotted down the name of the website where I could find the highly specialized agent I will need to find.

I then told her everything I knew and felt about Jim Dale’s deightful audiobook performance of the marvelous Harry Potter books.  I promised her that she would love it, based on everything she’d told us about the books she liked best, then smiled, curtsied to Sekhnet, and went to have another muffin.  

Clarifying Why I Prefer Transparency

I wrote Note on How Far You Should Go in telling a story mainly to reiterate my belief that the reader should be given all the info necessary to put everything together to get the full impact of the story.  The writer should include every useful specific detail so the reader can understand and digest exactly what they are reading.

I feel the same way about conversation, particularly with the people we’re closest to.  Would you rather have the pertinent background to a story, if told concisely, or be left wondering how you might feel about details left out or glossed over?  

Information, it seems to me, is the key to grappling with anything tricky.  Can you fully trust an information source that is guarded in deciding what information you will need for your understanding of the complex thing on the table between you? 

That is the essence of my beef with writing that provides a simple happy ending to an emotionally complicated situation.   I think of one I read, by an otherwise excellent writer, where he reports being deeply, desperately depressed for the first time in his life, after the end of his long marriage.  I’m interested immediately.

Then, instead of describing his particular depression, which might have been fascinating to have his unique take on, he sketched out a generic depression in a few lines to stand in for how unbearably painful it was.  Then he quickly and sure-footedly moved on to the abrupt end of his depression, thankfully a merciful 48 hours later (though if felt like a year), when he met the new love of his life and the world was bright and fresh again.  

My thought was “give me a fucking break” when it could have as easily been “beautifully rendered”, because this writer was capable of rendering it beautifully, if he hadn’t been writing a light piece to be sold for a Reader’s Digest-type publication.

I have the same beef with parents who keep essential truths from their children, perhaps thinking they’re sparing them the worst while leaving them with no clue into the seething rage around them at the dinner table.  Daddy won’t admit it, but he was caught fucking the former baby sitter, mommy saw it on the nanny cam; dad sticks to his imbecilic story that it was simply malicious trick photography by a hacker intent on sowing discord. 

Mom is enraged, the kids have no clue that she has good reason to be mad– as much about the childishly implausible denial as the infidelity with young woman a few years older than their daughter. Everyone keeps awkwardly mum as mom smolders and seethes, pounding the pots on the stove, slamming the oven door shut.  

To me, the teenaged kids don’t deserve to be kept in the dark as to why mom is not unreasonable to be hurt and angry.  Mom doesn’t deserve to be seen as irrationally enraged, neither does dad deserve to shrug at the kids and smile ironically whenever mom turns away like he’s the victim too, but it’s a sadly typical case.

Barack Obama leaves a bad taste for a similar reason.  He is a smooth obfuscater who speaks eloquently of the necessity, in a democracy, of free and open information for citizens, while he withholds information the People have a right to know, denies more Freedom of Information requests than even Cheney, threatens journalists and other citizens who report things he doesn’t want public.  For maximum chilling effect, he brandishes the rarely-used 1917 Espionage Act which was designed, in a mania of patriotic wartime fervor, to imprison and even execute wartime traitors during the War to End All Wars.  

I watch the president do a great comedic turn at his final National Press Club’s White House Correspondents’ dinner and then turn serious to thank his partners in transparency, the millionaire stars of the mass media, the ones who help him keep all Americans exquisitely informed with all the details we citizens of a democracy need to make intelligent choices.  

I get that candidate Obama had a great selling point in his election fight against the non-transparent heirs to Cheney’s unprecedented reign of secrecy.  I get that politics is complicated and that all candidates lie.  I don’t get why he keeps counter-factually insisting that he’s run a transparent administration.  The facts say he has not.  

As he goes on congratulating his partners in the corporate media and speaking of this era of unprecedented government transparency they are partners in, I immediately picture the New-Speak talking Martians in Mars Attacks, saying “we come in peace” and reducing the person they’ve greeted to a charred skeleton.  My smile turns to a sneer and I say to the screen “OK, man, you need to just shut the fuck up now.”

I believe that a writer in a free society should be as true to his or her thoughts and feelings, and what she/he knows, as possible.  It may not be the best way to sell a book, necessarily, but, for me, it makes for the most interesting and rewarding reading.

I suppose that conviction comes from a childhood where the whole story was never told, where you had almost no chance to put together the larger puzzle from the few perplexing pieces given.

That childhood, and my experience as an adult in our simplified blue hat/red hat advertising-driven democracy, have given me a lifelong distaste for half-truth, untruth, self-justifying rationale, saying what you think you should say, or what you think needs to be said, lies of omission, withholding of needed facts, the disconnect between feeling and expression, between knowledge and responsibility. 

That was my main point in that piece on what a writer should write and how far they should go to properly tell a story, though I don’t know that I expressed it very clearly or succinctly in that previous post.  

Minimalist

If I was a successful minimalist how different would my life be?   When Etgar Keret mentions the ‘inherent laziness that has plagued me for so many years’ it’s delightful to picture.  If I say it, of myself, it’s not that delightful.  Everything is a bit more delightful when you’re getting paid, and recognized for what you can do, but that’s only part of it.

Phone call from Albi, France interrupted my train of thought.  My dear, lost friend, taking care of his mostly paralyzed mother, apologizes that he was too depressed for the last six years to be in touch.    Which made me feel a bit better, I’d only been depressed and avoiding people for a year and a half.  

He reports that his hair is now white, he feels eighty and he has a chronic back ache from carrying his mother everywhere for the last seventeen years.

“Seventeen years!” I exclaim.  “What a punchline to an inspirational story!” (start at paragraph five)   

His manic-depressive mother had made tremendous progress during the first ten years of his care.  She had regained the use of her body to an extent that baffled doctors.   Doctors kept predicting she would die soon, that this procedure would be her last.  He wheels her to the funerals of one dead doctor after another, a cigarette propped jauntily in her mouth.

Then, during a split-second of distraction, she slipped from his arms, landed hard, needed an operation.  The anesthesia put the 87 year-old back to square one.  She’s now almost ninety-four, and although sometimes quite cantankerous, can’t talk.  He has to conduct both sides of their arguments, which is exhausting.  He loves her and has no regrets about his choice to care for her, but feels a certain wistfulness to realize he’s been her selfless and unpaid caretaker for the last seventeen years.

We had a few good laughs, between talking about the many reasons for being too depressed to pick up the phone.   Then it was time for him to make sure his mother wasn’t choking in the next room and for me to get back to thinking about the important work I need to be doing.

Keret and Steek

Two women whose literary opinions I esteem told me to get Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years.  I eventually did.  I now recommend it to you, delightful short essays, each two or three pages long, each one a gem.  I found myself laughing out loud.   It felt strange to recall I once had a sense of humor, was not always this ball of aggravated nerve endings who sits clenched before you today.

Upstairs, or across the air shaft, the Human Theremin just began practicing her shaky soprano trill.  That high strung register is my least favorite range of the human voice, and her repetitive exercise is, I’m pretty sure, the most hideous use for that shrill tone.   She sounds like a Victorian hysteric swooning, over and over and over.   But I digress.  

The other day I was on the phone with my cellphone provider, T-Mobile.   They had problems with their service, and with their customer service, and sent me texts nobody could explain, and then abruptly cut off my internet service and data.   I spent hours on the phone with their representatives who were busy helping other customers but apparently there was no help for my situation.  

In the car one evening, I was finally talking to someone intelligent and proactive over at T-Mobile.   She was very nice, very smart, had looked at the mishmash of my recent customer service calls, apologized for the series of apparent screw-ups and network failures and told me she’d solved all the problems, zeroed out the balance, restored the improperly disabled data and internet services, was very sorry for my agggg….

“Hello?” I said “Sharayah?”  

Seconds later I had a free T-Mobile Msg:  

We apologize, your call with Sharayah (23530) from T-Mobile just dropped.  You will receive a call back shortly. Thanks for your patience.    

I read it out loud to Sekhnet, who’d heard the end of my delightful call with Sharayah.  

“Assholes,” she said, and I pointed out that they were a German company and, therefore, most likely, Nazi assholes.  

She’d had similar problems with her provider, Verizon, and we concluded once more that the corporate personality leaves a lot to be desired whether that corporation is Nazi, American or transnational.

An hour or two later the patience that T-Mobile politeness bots had thanked me for was gone.  I texted back “Hello?”  

T-Mobile was once again lightning fast with a response:

Sorry, this service is temporarily unavailable.  Please try again later.  

This too I read aloud to Sekhnet, with predicable results.  I probably used the word “motherfuckers” in some connection to these automated Nazi dickheads.   Thinking back, a lot of what happened later was simply my fault– I’d wound her up.    

A couple of hours later I called T-Mobile again, again from the car.  This time Sekhnet was driving.  After a very short wait, no more than five minutes (recent hold times had been up to an hour, due to the super popular iPhone’s recent emergence on the T-Mobile Nazi network),  I had another lovely, very sympathetic T-Mobile representative on the line.  

She was the second coming of Sharayah and she was able to read me all of Sharayah’s notes.   I should not be experiencing this problem, she told me reassuringly, it was a stupid error… someone had simply not inputted the proper order.  She began to apologize as she typed more notes on my account.  Suddenly Sekhnet, hearing my silence, had had enough.  

“T-Mobile sucks!” she barked, almost as loud as that inconsolable Tourretic German Shepherd next door.  “Tell them their service is complete shit!  What a bunch of fucking useless assholes… their fucking network is a piece of shit!   Fuck them!  Fuck T-Mobile!”  

It was hard to hear the kind young woman on the line apologizing to me over this outpouring of righteous passion.  

I asked the girl at T-Mobile for a second.  I told Sekhnet, with carefully modulated snappishness, that I was on the phone with T-Mobile.  Then I added, in a stage whisper straight into the phone, that a very nice, intelligent woman at T-Mobile was straightening everything out for me, the long tech nightmare was, hopefully, almost over.  

Then suddenly it all got to me, the restraint I’d been showing in recent days when two long-time acquaintances had revealed themselves as rabid by tag teaming me with snarling emails about what a wimp I was to complain about some innocent and completely inadvertent repetitive ass-dicking.   “As if any of us had never been, figuratively, fucked up the ass!” their terse emails strongly implied.

Suddenly I wanted to be compensated for this long ordeal with fucking T-Mobile.   Reparations was all I could think about.  I told this woman I wanted money refunded to me.  I suggested a month’s fees would be about right, as a sign of good faith from T-Mobile.  

She wasn’t authorized to do it, but said I was right to feel that way, she’d feel the same way — and she thought T-Mobile did owe me some money.  I appreciated her saying that, they so rarely do.  She told me she’d have to get a supervisor, someone who could give me some money.  She promised she’d stay on the line until one picked up, but then forgot to put me on silent hold as she had thoughtfully done, at my request, when she’d put me on a brief hold moments earlier to find Sharayah’s notes.  

A few blaring bars composed by the humorless Josef Mengele, MD, played over and over.  Then Josh was on the line.  Josh was a supervisor, very grateful that I’d been a loyal T-Mobile customer for twelve years.  He was eager, he told me, to make me completely happy.  

I told him my story in some detail and then spoke the only language these Nazis understand: money.  I wanted monetary compensation for my recent run around, in light of my twelve years of, heretofore, thankless loyalty to T-Mobile.  He said he understood.  He then offered me ten dollars off my next bill.

“Josh, if we were friends, and I’d done something very aggravating to you that had cost you many hours of your life to fix, and I offered you ten dollars, would you consider that fair, or an adequate show of friendship?”  I asked the supervisor.  

“Yes, I would,” he said cheerfully.  

“Well, you’re a much nicer person that I am, Josh,” I said with ill-disguised bitterness, with malice actually. “To me ten dollars from a multi-national corporation feels like someone peeing on me.”  

Josh then affably pointed out that the internet and data services I received from T-Mobile, and had not been able to use for only the last few days, were provided free, as a courtesy by T-Mobile.  

I countered that the generous 500 MB of data per month were part of the plan I paid T-Mobile $50 a month for, therefore it was hard for me to see the service as free.  We discussed this pointlessly for a moment or two.  Then I cut him off.  

“OK, I understand you’re not authorized to offer a customer more than $10 on behalf of the corporation.  I’ll take it.  Talk to you later, Josh,” I said, and rung off.  

“You were very mean to him,” Sekhnet said.  You’d hardly know, from her reasonable, parental tone, that she’d been barking like Obi, the long-eared Tourretic next door, only moments earlier.  

“And you’re no Etgar Keret,” she will point out when I read this to her.  

“Steek,” I will say, suavely extending a paw,  “James Steek, Keret veh Steek.” 

Blog

I don’t know all the reasons a person sits down regularly and puts their thoughts, feelings, pictures, sounds out on to the internet.  Not everybody does this, though many millions do.  Here are a few of the small rewards that make me do it most days of the week.

By putting things up on the “internets” (one of President Dubya’s many great phrases) I exert myself, cheerfully, to make my writing fit for “publication”.  I have to polish it to a certain standard before I hit “publish”.  I don’t put it up for the perusal of friends and strangers until the writing is as clear and flowing as I can make it.  

I read it over many times as I write, combing out sloppy, confusing writing whenever I find myself ensnared in it.  When I read it again on-line, I often go back and make small changes to make every sentence as good as I can.  I am exacting about saying exactly what I mean to say.  My writing has improved since I’ve been putting it on-line regularly.

Before putting something on-line I have to decide if I stand behind every part of it.  I’m an opinionated bastard, no question.  I don’t like to argue these days, though I haven’t lost the ability — I’ll use my words if pushed against the wall– but I still need to express my point of view, what I’ve learned from six decades of ass-kickings.  So that aspect of not being a damn chicken-shit bastard and actually standing behind what I sell is another important part of this almost daily ritual.  

The previous sentence contains an inside reference.  I get to explain it here, since there’s nobody telling me to stick to the script, and I’m free to digress, another reason I love this particular forum.  I don’t like to leave the reader hanging any more than I like to be left hanging.  

If you think about it, nobody should be left hanging, though most of us quite often are, almost always when it comes to the services we purchase from the grasping artificial humans called corporations, those omnipresent psychopaths that rule the global and local economy.  Or by the actual workings of our idealistic and inspiring democracy, now that I think about it.

Chicken-shit bastard, then.  Years ago a friend in Tennessee sent me a tape of prank calls made by a hippie who lived in a fairly rural area near Knoxville in the 1970s or 1980s. The recordings circulated widely on cassette tapes and were very popular throughout that part of the country.  The creative caller is still remembered fondly by those of us who heard his witty provocations.  Sadly, he died young, of a terrible disease, I think.  Happily, he left us his calls to people like Ed at Ed’s Auto.

He put on a thick rural southern accent (since he knew Ed and had bought auto parts at his store) and told Ed a long, cock and bull story about how Ed needed to pay for massive repairs on his car under some far-fetched and insane theory.   “Bullshit,” said Ed.   “Maybe I’ll replace the damn rims, I’m not paying to rebuild your entire fucking car.”  Things escalated quickly between the skillful manipulator and his carefully chosen macho southern victims. Rages were whipped up effortlessly, followed by mutual threats of catastrophic ass-whuppings.   

In my favorite moment on the tape, and my father’s too — the old man had howled at the skill of this provocateur in whipping up the manful rage of his victims — the caller gently calms the irate store owner down after insanely provoking him.  It’s a beautiful, human moment.  

“Whell, shit…” he says soothingly “you don’t have to get all mad about it… shoot…”.  They both laugh.  There is almost a sigh as the store owner finally feels heard by this prick who was just mercilessly provoking him. He lets his guard down, it’s just two humans talking for a few seconds. The store owner’s relief that the insane unprovoked attack is over is palpable.   You clearly hear him relax on the recording.  

Then the caller starts back in, in a reasonable enough tone “well… it just seems to me like a damn chicken shit bastard ought to stand behind what he sells”.  Which sets the store owner’s rage instantly back on full boil, his voice goes up an octave, impolite invitations to exchange fisticuffs are hollered and the fight is immediately back on.

So, just to recap: I ain’t no damn chicken shit bastard, if you catch my damn drift.  I mean what I say and I say what I mean.  I’m not here to be a damn go-go dancer for you.

There is also the pleasure of putting thoughts and feelings together, telling a story coherently, making a sometimes complicated point plainly.   There is the technical satisfaction of using words to do this, and the emotional satisfaction of reading back the clear expression of something that took a lot of effort to render in words.

There is the thought, sometimes, of the words reaching the ideal reader, sitting at a computer somewhere in the world, perhaps in the middle of the night.  In Kurt Vonnegut’s case it was his sister, who he always had in mind as he wrote to his eventual audience of millions of strangers.  

I have no actual person in mind as I type, except maybe myself, the writing needs to be clear and interesting to me, the reader, but my mother’s face when she handed me back something I wrote and told me it was “wonderful” would not be a bad one to think of from time to time.   The idea of having my thoughts and feelings reach and touch someone I’ve never met, in the form of carefully arranged words: pretty cool.  

There is the fantasy aspect, one that probably motivates many bloggers, instagrammers, spammers, lunch photo sharers, facebookers, selfie snappers, snapchatters.  The fantasy is that I am already a great writer, with a big reserve of interesting and important things to say, and that I’m giving away brilliant products of my disciplined imagination for free.  I sometimes imagine, after posting a given piece, that certain readers are going to be moved.   And that, in the end, I will sell my work widely and talk nonchalantly to people like Terry Gross and Leonard Lopate about it.

It’s a fantasy of fame, I suppose, shared by billions with computers and cellphone cameras.  That this fantasy is shared by, literally, millions and millions who are not great writers, who have little, or nothing interesting to say, does nothing to dim this vision for the rest of us brilliant fantasists.  For all anyone knows, many of us are right.  Who’s to say in this vast, virtual marketplace of unsold ideas?    

There is also the human need to talk and be heard when our feelings are stirred up.  If we talk to friends, or even email them, about some of these unpleasantly stirred feelings, we can place unintended and sometimes terrible burdens on them.  I recently was surprised to be put through a familiar trauma by a person of my long acquaintance who I, naively, in hindsight, considered a friend.   I wrote about it endlessly here, in several iterations, before I was able to come to some rather obvious conclusions about the best course of action.  It took me literally a few days, and a few thousand words here, to calm down.

Had I restricted my processing to these pages, which can be read, scanned or skipped, I’d have done a great kindness to the couple of harried friends I vented to.  I’d put each of them in a tough spot– agree with the reasonableness of my hurt feelings or risk my already free-flowing anger flowing to you.   It comes to this: we expect our friends to extend the benefit of the doubt to us.  It’s kind of a minimum expectation of a friend, that they won’t rush forward with a sturdy rope when an angry mob gathers howling for our blood. 

Sometimes a long-time friend, hurt for whatever reason, will accuse you of doing just that to them.  Then it is a contest– who has really done the other wrong?   The friendliest thing to do is put yourself in the other person’s situation and realize: shit, I’d have felt the same way if someone had done that to me.   This realization should be followed by an apology and a promise to do better in the future.  

Taking ownership of causing a friend’s hurt requires honesty, maturity and a humility not everyone always has.  Sometimes it’s easier to just go: well, you complain about me, but after I didn’t keep my promise YOU NEVER RETURNED THE MISSED CALL FROM ME THAT I KNOW YOU FUCKING GOT!  

The details of this kind of situation, I promise you, are always ugly. Better to process them where they can be taken in quietly or ignored, once they are set out as objectively  as the writer can.  So writing here has a therapeutic and practical value, sometimes, and spares friends the worst of my hurt when I am stung.

Then there is the zone I am in while composing one of these posts.  The focus is on one thing, one thought.  It is also something I enjoy as I work and that I do as well as I can.  In this zone of concentration I do what everyone in the world does after they head off to do their chosen work.  All of the daily annoyances and distractions, the many small things that conspire and are sometimes merciless in combination, disappear.  The need to focus on doing good work quiets the clamor of the many tiny demons.  

Whatever else I may be thinking or feeling, I need to focus my full attention on this pair of shoes that needs to be re-soled for the long-time customer who is coming in to pick them up at five.  My reputation and livelihood rest on making an excellent repair and getting the comfortable old shoes back to the customer when I promised her she’d have them.  She’ll be passing my shop after a shit day and her perfectly repaired shoes, delivered when I told her they would be ready, will be one good thing that will happen to her today.  

Of course, here there is no shop, no customer, nothing but the things I have noted above.  Which makes it more beautiful in a way, and more pure.  I am fixing this invisible shoe because I love the work.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

There has been research recently on the changes in brain chemistry, the physical structure of the brain itself, and even the DNA, of children who experience abuse, neglect, hunger, adverse childhood experiences that scar them for life.   There is a great, short video presentation by a brilliant pediatrician, Nadine Burke Harris, who clearly sets out the lifelong health consequences of terrible childhood experiences. Fifteen minutes well spent, the link is here.   

An old friend was telling me about a recent experiment where they abused baby rats until their brains’ plasticity was gone.  This is apparently one effect of child abuse, we can think of it as a hardening of certain areas of the brain that need to be flexible. Which makes the reaction of someone with this injured brain more extreme and painful than the reaction of someone with a pliable brain that can, literally, stretch and roll with the seemingly, to the un-abused person, minor punches.

This friend and I, both unfortunate subjects of an amoral behavioral experiment, identify with this kind of traumatized rat.  The senseless experiments we’ve undergone have left us sometimes struggling to behave as though we had normally elastic brains.   The main thing you need when hurt, particularly if you’re a survivor of adverse childhood experiences, is empathy, so you don’t feel crazy to be suffering what you are — and so you can learn to empathize and also continue to look for empathy, even if through a fog of pain.

My friend told me the experimenters, when they were done torturing these baby rats to sufficiently fuck up their brains, administered some drug and watched the effect on the little rats’ personalities.  The drug apparently restored their brain plasticity, or elasticity, or whatever it was.  The twitching rats became calm and cuddly.

We laughed that there might be hope for us yet.  There might be, there might not be.  But the laugh certainly didn’t hurt in any case.

Anger and “The Insula”

Last word.

I will keep this simple.  I’ve heard (granted from a historian Bill Moyers interviewed) that there’s a specific part of the human brain, located in the primitive, survival-oriented region that’s sometimes referred to as the lizard or reptile brain, where anger is experienced.  Let’s call it the insula (or insular cortex), and assume, for our purposes here, that feeling anger is one of its primary functions.  

When the insula is engaged for anger, all bodily engines are mobilized for fight or flight.   Cortisol and adrenaline, already coursing through the system, are ready to be released in a flood, as soon as the insula gives the command.  The ability to see nuance and make distinctions disappears, along with the ability to compromise.  All the person with the glowing insula can see is rage and the enemy in the upcoming battle.  There is a clear evolutionary survival advantage to this hyper-focus.

It explains why it seems impossible for an angry person to acknowledge certain things that may seem easily seen.  An angry person, told that his ignoring three requests for a comment was hurtful, cannot process that information.   You would think anybody who had been ignored several consecutive times would feel hurt, at least slighted.  You’d think it would be an easy matter to put yourself in the other person’s place and feel and express regret for not doing the decent, human thing for a friend.  If your insula is glowing, and you never learned how to calm it, it is actually biologically impossible to do any of those things.

First of all, you will say, I don’t remember ever having ignored you, so I couldn’t have done it on purpose and you’re the aggressor for blaming me.  Second, you say I ignored you but it’s quite possible I responded to you, I think I did, and you just, for whatever reason, maybe to feel justified in your irrational rage, blocked it out.  Third, I don’t even remember if I even read the thing you asked me to comment on, it made no lasting impression in any case, so what’s the fuss about?  Fourth, you’re a fucking hypocrite, I sent you something you never responded to, even though I realize now I must have somehow sent it to an address where it never reached you.  Fifth, I will need your unconditional surrender before any peace negotiations can begin. Blah blah blah.

The effective thing to say, if you meant to have a sincere and lasting peace, and friendship, with the other, would be more like:  

Of course I’d be hurt if you did that to me, anyone would.  A friend should not have to beg another friend for feedback on a project they had a long, animated conversation about.  This is especially true between two writers who have discussed one of their projects. Three separate requests should have been enough.  It’s not necessary to send me the email string to prove I never uttered a peep in response.  It was wrong of me to question your veracity on that, I was angry and feeling desperate.   I was an asshole not to get back to you, a jerk to insist you should have contacted me for feedback a fourth time, and a fifth if necessary, and I apologize.   It’s not as though I’m working two full-time jobs and am overwhelmed by work, I’m semi-retired.  I understand it was hurtful, I didn’t mean to do it and I hope you will forgive me. Would it help if I read it now and gave you some notes you might be able to work with?  

The insula, glowing, knows only how to continue the do-or-die fight for survival.  God bless the reptile brain, when fight is needed.  Hard to be friends with an angry reptile, though.  I speak from long experience.

 

NOTE:

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

The NY Times printed this, on June 2, 2007.  (source)

 

Knots

When I was a sprout, in the late sixties or early seventies, a brief period of creativity when there seemed to be wonderful possibilities for the human and natural world, there was a book called Knots.  It was written by a Scottish psychiatrist named R. D. Laing, about whom Wikipedia offers this great line:  Many former colleagues regarded him as a brilliant mind gone wrong but there were some who thought Laing was somewhat psychotic.

As I recall the short book was a series of poetic vignettes about things like Complementary Schismogenesis (“creating of division”), somewhat gnarly psychological concepts involved in relationships, laid out, with some wit, in simple, down to earth scenarios, or dialogues.  As I dimly remember the book, they were more elegant versions of things like:

Guy is very sensitive to being ignored, interprets silence as anger.   He writes a play about the pain of being ignored, asks his friend the playwright if he’ll have a look.  Playwright cheerfully agrees, takes the manuscript and never writes back about Guy’s play.  Guy asks the playwright three times for his feedback.   Each time he gets a short, witty reply unrelated to his play.

Months pass.  Guy gets another unrelated note from the playwright, complaining that Guy is now ignoring him.  Guy writes an arguably nasty poem about the playwright, or at least one the playwright might find insulting.   Playwright’s attention is called to the poem, which is tacked to a small door around the back, by a troll.  The poem infuriates him, he seethes about the unprovoked attack, attacks Guy as an oversensitive jerk for not simply asking a fourth time when he didn’t hear back the first three times. 

“Plus,” says the playwright, “I said I’d look at his fucking play, I didn’t promise I’d say anything about it, Jesus.”

Complimentary Schismogenesis, I am told, is when two opposites are locked in some kind of conflict, neither getting what they need out of the arrangement, the attempts of each to resolve it, coming from opposite orientations, only make the problem more intractable, tighten the knot.   The schism continues to deepen as the two struggle cluelessly in opposite directions to heal the underlying fissure.

If we assume everyone is somewhat fucked up, damaged by life, laboring under certain sometimes vexing disabilities, friends are those whose asshole side we are able to overlook.  The friend has other lovable qualities we value that counterbalance the bad tendencies we all have.  We extend the benefit of the doubt to friends, a benefit we do not readily confer on random people we encounter.  

I told a friend recently that whatever other problems we may have had with each other over the years, we both are confident that neither of us would, seeing the other strapped in the electric chair, throw the switch before insisting that every single witness had a chance to speak.  He agreed.

I got a short, infuriated email today, keeping it simple, telling me I must agree that I’m dead to the writer of the email.  I read it to an old friend who immediately suggested I call the guy and see if I could placate him.  I told him I’ve already written back, trying to be gentle, comparing the guy’s hasty, angry email to an arrow let fly in a spasm of anger, an arrow that can’t be called back.  I told him I’d replied as mildly as I could and wasn’t sure there was anything to be achieved by calling this angry fellow who had already done the prosecutor, witness, judge and jury bit in very short order.

During the call to my friend I had an email back from the infuriated man.  I was reluctant to read it so soon after his “you’re dead to me” note.  Curiosity finally got the best of me.  He placed conditions on our possibly remaining friends, reminding me again that, in his opinion, I had attacked him viciously.  As for what I claimed he had done, he certainly hadn’t meant to do it, if he even did do it, which he was not prepared to admit.  Plus, if I was hurt by his behavior, it was my own fault for not telling him he was being an insensitive jerk since obviously he hadn’t been aware of it.

It got me thinking about the nature of friendship, whether friends ever get the right to have a temper tantrum, ignore your needs and rant angrily at you until they are satisfied.  I suppose there are certain friends who have earned the right to do that one time, maybe twice, for good cause, and get a pass.  Then, since they are good friends, they calm down and apologize for their outpouring of anger, and are able to see the situation from your point of view and promise to try to do better in the future.

I have to think about this proposed detente more, since my general policy is once somebody shows me raw rage, that savage inability to empathize that is characteristic of righteous fury, there is really no coming back from that.

Or, rather, without an honest and mutually vulnerable exchange, there is only the possibility of returning to a false and fragile peace, ready to be set ablaze the next time a spark comes near the short, highly flammable  fuse. Another chance to prove to yourself, and intimates, that you have mastered the urge to strike back in kind, a fairly paltry reward for a very strenuous bit of forbearance.

Getting to the Heart of Things

We live in a largely superficial society, sadly enough.  Authentic emotion is often suppressed in favor of putting on the smiling face of the winner.  The only emotions everyone in America is free to express are happiness and rage, which is a fucking shame. We are warned not to advertise that you feel sad, unless the provocation is extreme and obvious.  In the case of a death, or mass murder, nobody could blame you for feeling sadness.  In fact, you’d be a monster not to be sad in the aftermath of a tragedy.  

But sadness for no real cause?  They have medications for that.  Only a loser is sad for no reason.    That all this is clearly bullshit designed to foster the inauthentic, unexaminable life of the acquisitive consumer has nothing to do with it.   Drive a winner car and you’ll feel better about yourself.  Pretending you’re not a loser is half the battle, the constant commercial assures us.  

I have a friend who’s an excellent writer.  He was a professional writer for many years, a deep thinker and a man of deep feelings.  It seems to be part of his professional credo that the deepest feelings do not belong in writing one does for pay.    He advised me to keep it light when I was sending things to his friend, the gatekeeper for an online publisher, for $250 a pop.   He writes a 1,000 word anecdote in an hour, eats lunch, gives the piece a final polish and by dinnertime he gets the thumbs up and a check for $250.  Of the fifty or so he’s sent in, only one has ever been rejected and none has ever needed to be revised in any way.

I scored on the first two I sent in, and it was great, even if my pieces were a bit darker than most of the others posted on the on-line magazine. Even as a few of my thoughts were muddled by a clumsy editor trying to earn his keep.  Then the hoop I had to jump through for my $250 was made smaller and smaller.  

The third piece I sent was accepted for publication, and I smiled as I tallied another $250 score in my notebook.  Weeks went by and I didn’t see it on-line, nor was there any check.  I inquired.  “Oh, I could have sworn I emailed you that I reconsidered, we’re not using it. Beautifully written and powerful, but, oddly, too personal for a personal anecdote.”

My writer friend told me over dinner to shrug it off, keep ’em light.  He keeps ’em light, but I wonder how easily he’d shrug off having the $250 snatched back after the piece was accepted.   He doesn’t need the money, so there’s that, but, still, it didn’t sit right with me that he’d feel nothing about having $250 plucked out of his pocket.

Later the two of us had dinner and I described the Book of Irv to him.  He’d had family traumas aplenty, but his father was apparently a good and gentle soul who always treated him well.  He told me it was a fascinating project, trying to conjure the complicated wonderful, monstrous Dreaded Unit father I had described to him over the years.  

As we said goodbye he told me he was looking forward to reading some of the manuscript.  I told him I’d send him the link to several selections, which I did when I got home.  I sent the earliest incarnation of the Book of Irv site (link) and told him how much I looked forward to his take on it.  I thought this piece (link) in particular, about my father asking me hopelessly for Detroit Tiger scores all through my childhood, would resonate with him.  He is a huge sports fan, currently writing a book on college basketball.

The next email I had from him read: 

from the late, great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, speaking of his novels and screenplays:”Although I have not exactly been published or produced, I have had some things professionally typed.”

Outside of that zen koan, I never heard a word back about the pages I’d sent him.

In fairness to him, he is famous for being an affable space cadet. Once, in a restaurant, his wife’s chair fell backwards, she almost fell with it, and he didn’t seem to notice, absorbed as he was finishing his anecdote.  Good natured obliviousness is one of his known characteristics.  I figured he was just being himself and I later sent him a few other Irv pieces, asking what he thought.  I  never heard a peep.  

Our email conversation petered out after he wrote, of my comparing my frustration trying to get a reply from a promising business contact who was not responding to root canal:

“Have to disagree — based on 30 yrs of extreme periodontistry, molars and their double roots are worse.”

We’d had a good laugh over dinner last April recalling Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy.  “Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.”

I was truly at a loss to account for his silence about my work.  Since we rarely talk more than once or twice a year, I put it out of my head and kept writing.

Yesterday I wrote a piece about sports and sent it to him, hoping the note found him well and telling him the piece made me think of him, a one time competitive tennis player and a seasoned teller of tales I have always enjoyed swapping yarns with.

To my surprise, he wrote back instantly, telling me he assumed I was angry with him since I’d never written back to his several emails.  I checked and the last emails I had from him were things he forwarded, months ago.  I wrote telling him this and he replied that he must have sent the personal emails I’d ignored to the wrong address.

I don’t often write poems, but sometimes they seem the most direct way to process and express a specific thing.  On the subway an hour later I found myself writing:

Funny as my broken fingernail,
your fatal manhole, 
me mad at you
because silent?
Huh?
The silence started here, 
when I last wrote you in April,
not to be thin-skinned
about it.
I just figured
you were by far
the tougher guy.

Besides, I’m in deep
conversation
with the dead
while you,
disinclined for the dark stuff,
pursue real-world business,
things that can be put cleanly on a ledger.

ii  
I am drawn
as by the earth’s powerful magnet
to the darker core
of the thing itself.  
Pretentious, perhaps, to say
to those who enjoy light,
simplicity,
a bracing lack of confusion.  

Odd, how unlike the
nightmare some seem to fear,
this probing in the darkness
feels to me,
when it is going well.  

Others, I am assured,
resist this
sort of thing
with all their strength.  

Me, I yield
to a greater curiosity
pulling my thoughts like gravity,
pushing inside of the thing,
the thing that struggles, wild,
never to reveal
its entire mystery.

Life As Metaphor

Thought I was on my way yesterday to meet a guy I haven’t seen in about thirty years.   A scamp texted that this likable fellow, who had been spotted recently, would be joining us for lunch.  As my life does not have the recognizable shape of most people’s I know, measured in a real-world career one can speak of, I thought of what I would say when he asked what I was up to.  I mused about this as I made the long trek by public transportation to a $40 snack with old friends.  

“I am living my life as metaphor,” I was planning to tell him.  He’d give me his patented puzzled look and I’d explain.

“For example, I founded a highly successful child-run public relations firm for the children of the doomed.”  

“Hell of a name for a P.R. firm,” he’d say.

“A metaphor,” I’d say.  

“From this you make a living, from the children of the damned?  Someone pays you for this?”

“Metaphorically,” I’d say.  “Of course, here in the literal world, everybody would know the first thing you need to have before even thinking about undertaking such a project is a funder — in addition to a name making no mention of the horrible fact that millions of American children, and billions worldwide, are in fact doomed, the children of the damned.  Some generous corporation or rich individual to pay people to do the work you have dreamed up for making the world a marginally more hopeful, playful place.”  

“From this you do not make a living,” he would say.  

“Again, metaphorically.  I’m alive, I’m making, I’m living.  Who’s to say my life dreaming in metaphors is any less rich than that of the billionaire who wakes early each day to go into combat for even more, and who once or twice a month sits on a board that decides whose big ideas will live and whose will die.  Which fledgling organization will wax rich and which will fall like the dry grass.”  

“Metaphorically speaking,” he would say.

“You were always a man who could grasp a metaphor,” I’d tell him.

“Metaphorically,” he’d say, with Talmudic precision.  “You got any more?”  

“One has a choice in life, I’ve discovered, between bitterness and happiness.  I choose to be happy, extremely and unremittingly fucking happy.  You got that, man?”  

“You are singing to the choir director, mein friend,” he would say, and I’d watch the famous Cheshire Cat smile spread across his gigantic, cherubic face like a metaphor for the Moshiach and the World to Come.