Category Archives: musing

Dog Days

The dog days of summer, dear diary, are heavily upon us here in New York City.   The radio warns of a fourth straight day of heat alert, real-feel temperatures again well above 100 with humidity to melt you.  Keep your pets inside, air-conditioner on high, the expert on the radio advises.   Check on the old people next door, make sure they have not parboiled.   The city opens “cooling centers” where sweat-soaked, stinking citizens can come and recover in super-cooled public rooms scattered around the more working class neighborhoods.

I am a complainer by nature, so it will surprise no-one to hear me bitch about lifting my head from a wet pillow, unpeeling myself from the wet sheets and picking up the thermometer I’d dragged up to the bedroom late last night.  I smirked as I read “95”.    I nodded grimly, this all figures, I said to myself, possibly out loud, as I began to mutter and staggered downstairs to get something to drink to restore some of the lost hydration I’d left soaking the bed.

A pair of bare feet at the bottom of the stairs startled me, I caught the next mumbled syllable in my throat.  It was Sekhnet, waiting for a call-back from work, stretched out near the cat, both of them vaguely in the warm wind of a tower fan, the only thing standing between any of us and certain death from heat stroke.   There is a tower fan next to me now as I write, bringing semi-cool air to my left armpit and side, wicking away the freely flowing sweat. I dare not write much longer, for fear of burning out this laptop in the 95 degree heat up here.  

Sekhnet was somber there on the living room floor.  We’d trapped three feral kittens the last few days, had them neutered by a vet a friend recommended, with certificates from a nonprofit making each wild animal’s care come in at not much more than a hundred and thirty dollars.  The two I picked up at the vet’s yesterday, after their hysterectomies, cried all the way home.  It was pitiful.  I was glad Sekhnet wasn’t there, her sobs would have drowned out the wails of the miserable little cats.

These feral cats have brutal, short lives in Sekhnet’s garden, though she cares for them like they were her own pets.  An old one lives to be two or three.  We have seen many generations now, and each generation has ended badly, dead kittens found here and there virtually every season, the older ones simply disappearing.  A dead kitten was found today, one of the almost full-grown males from Mama Kitten’s previous litter.  The grey, tiger striped corpse was found under the Chan’s apricot tree.  Sekhnet had Joe open the contractor bag so she could identify the dead cat.

“Scratchy,” she told me, and urged me not to mention it to the younger brother of the neighbor next door if I see him across the garden fence, to let his older brother tell him when he gets home from work.   The younger brother is a sad, limited man.  He has some kind of mental problems that erupt in screams sometimes, once in a while the cops are called in.   Not much danger of me running into the brother, or anyone else, as I won’t be spending more than a moment out there today, and certainly not a second at the garden fence.

“Mama Kitten had her litter, as I told you she was,” said Sekhnet, “she came by today and she’s not pregnant any more.”  Mama Kitten had her first litter at the age of six or seven months.  Three kittens, two of whom survived, one of whom survives today (the third is the corpse in Joe Chan’s contractor bag).  The runt of that litter, cute, spunky Dobbie (named for his long ears which made him look like J.K. Rowling’s house elf) made a nice meal for a red-tailed hawk, as far as we can tell.

We watched the two surviving kittens of that first litter eventually drive Mama Kitten out of the garden and take the turf for themselves.  Talk about ungrateful fucking offspring.  Talk about the cruelty of nature.  (Talk about a metal laptop heating almost to frying pan temperature…).  She’d come around to visit, always affectionate– rare in a feral cat.  She’d come to trust Sekhnet and me, would rub her face on our legs, let us pet her one stroke as she’d walk the length of her body under our hand.  

One day, as all the feral mother cats around here have always done, she came to the garden to introduce her new kittens to their benefactor, Sekhnet.  She marched four of them past, three with white faces like Dobbie’s, one who looked like her tiny twin.  Of those four, three survived (one disappeared a week or two ago, probably lunch for a red-tail).  All three have now been neutered (though it seems the runt may not be up for the challenge of survival– not having taken a bite since returning from the vet’s yesterday, staying out of sight) and…

“Mama Cat came by, skinny again,” reported Sekhnet somberly.  In a nest somewhere nearby she has her next litter, four or more adorable little doomed kittens born on a very muggy day in hell.   Mama Kitten was the one we were trying to trap, to have her spayed and the embryonic kittens aborted, but she was too wary, too close to giving birth by the time we arranged with our friends to come by with the traps and expertise in how to catch the ferals so they could be released back into the wild in a way that would not increase their already too large numbers.  

“She loved the turkey, which is what we should bait the trap with, once she reappears with her new batch of kids, once they’re weaned,” said Sekhnet.  “She hated the sardines though, she gave me a very dirty look and jumped back when I offered them.   Mini-Me ate the sardines, though Mama Kitten hissed at me for offering them to her.”  

The mother kitten began hissing at her kids when she became pregnant again, making sure they were on their own before she brought the next batch into the world.  So far this beautiful little cat, now little more than a year old, maybe a year and a half at most, has given birth to seven kittens that we’ve seen and several more newborns, tiny and suckling somewhere behind a garage, waiting to become Sekhnet’s adorable little charges.

Meanwhile, it is about a hundred degrees and only two of her last batch of four kittens is accounted for, the one who looks like her and the one still at the vet’s.  Hearty, brave and recently spayed, the little alpha kitten who looks like her has been up and around, eating with her usual gusto.   Her sister, skinny and withdrawn, traumatized by her trip to the vet, did not eat yesterday and has not been seen today.  The blue-eyed Dobbie-looking sibling, who turns out to be a boy, I will pick up at the vet’s tomorrow.  He will probably cry the whole way home, like his sisters cried yesterday.  Luckily, Sekhnet will be at work and not in the car, crying along with the cat.

Well, diary dear, I’d better shut this machine down, before it fries itself.  I ought to hop into the shower and drink another liter of seltzer, if I know what’s good for me.  Stay cool!

 

Taking A Break from Cleaning

The paper formations in here  arose through decades of accretion, in the manner of sedimentary hills in the desert.  When you begin picking at them there will be rubble everywhere.  There is rubble everywhere.  It is exhausting, and looks even worse now than when I began deconstructing, but I am determined.

Taking a break now I’m thinking of a recent chat with a narcissistic chap I once knew.  I don’t say that in a judgmental way, this fellow is warm, and intelligent, he smiles and has a sense of humor.  He just has a tremendous need to be heard.  I get all this, I really do– the human condition and all that.  It just became hard to spend time listening to his stories.  One dinner too many in an excellent restaurant to the  soundtrack of one too many finely detailed stories about the complete lack of respect he was shown at a five star resort he went to in Arizona.  It was exhausting, Sekhnet felt the same way.  Nothing against the guy, but not much in it for someone who likes a good conversation with a little back and forth to it.

Had a call from him out of the blue about a week ago.  He asked with genuine concern how I’d been, how Sekhnet was doing, what was going on with my program.   I said we were fine and told him the program itself is good to go, 100 workshops, worked smoothly everywhere we did it, curriculum written, many lessons learned, untapped potential, all ready to go.  Told him how I need to pitch it to DiBlasio’s After-School Czar, get it in a few schools as a pilot program.  Hire and train a few people, once I get some funding.   Got to complete the pitch I would ideally be creating with a team of like minded people. But doing it alone, it takes a long time, I told him.  I need to recruit a few people in Social Work graduate programs to work with me.  That and a business person since and I have no experience selling, pitching, closing.  It’s a little frustrating, I admitted, taking care to maintain the cheerful tone I’ve learned to have when I speak of it.

He took a beat.  I knew he was dying to tell me about his plans for his next fabulous vacation.  But he paused to find the right words.  Then he compassionately said “it’s a good thing you’re not a drug addict…”  

“So, in February I’m going to Buenos Aires, for a week or so,” he continued cheerfully, “then on to Cape Horn and Antarctica.”

I decided pretty soon after that call that it’s probably time to tackle the desk, kitchen table, these boxes piled along the walls.  Once I make some progress in that seemingly impossible task I will be readier to tackle the next one.

 

 

 

The Actual Book

“The Book” itself, I realize now,  turns out to be something completely different than any of those three hypothetical discrete, daunting book projects I laid out the other day.  

For one thing, it has to draw all three themes together, for lack of time and because of the maddening specificity of the case it must lay out. Hatred, love, slaughter, mercy and play must be interwoven, weighed out chapter by chapter.  In the end you will have to care about it, see the work I am trying to move forward as animated by something very real and pressing, or the book is nothing.

The Book, this The Book of Irv (Book of My Father), pieces together a tricky puzzle, tells each strand of the history to lay out the unifying theory.  It is an attempt to explain the unexplainable, make clear things that are hazy at best.  

You cannot understand hate until you experience it directly, cannot love until you’ve been loved. Simple idea, though complicated to explain well.

Everything we believe has been sold to us. Everything.  

Our world is increasingly based on selling, from everything you can see with your eyes to the deepest beliefs you hold.  If I can’t package and sell I’m basically through, and the thing I must sell is, above all, a compelling story of the theory that moves me.   It’s got to move you, too.

The Book of Irv is equal parts beauty and horror; the fun and invention of play — the first and deepest mammalian bonding and learning– (and Irv was always playful with children and small animals) and the unspeakable horrors of hatred, the despicable civilities committed in the name of our American law.  The devil is, as always, in the details.  These historical strands need to be patiently, clearly set out, in order to give the reader the full context for consideration.

Irv as a unifying figure is ideally situated at the center of this explanation.   His life began in dire poverty, a Jew born in a New York City tenement who moved with his family to a shit hole in Peekskill.   He was an outsider consumed by outrageous injustice.  He fought racism in America after returning from a stint in our occupying army in post-war Germany after that modern nation showed how muscularly racism could be flexed, if insanity actually ruled.  

My father, for all his frailties, fought a fitful fight for social justice across decades, as he fought his kids, dominated his wife, quipped, raged at the inhumanity of the world.  He imparted to his children deep and important values that would influence the course of our lives, to our great detriment.   All this should be explained, the strength of this irresistible force that compels us both to work with the children of the fucked.  

The principle is straightforward:  poverty breeds despair, violence and fear.   Poverty stinks worldwide, kills millions and shortens every life it touches.   You want to heal the world?  Start by working on eliminating poverty.  Start with the kids.

In our modern world of unlimited wealth, poverty is a problem that can finally be ameliorated.  It won’t be, but that’s another story.  I suppose the thing that finally drove Irv to despair was his feeling of hopelessness.  Justice does not prevail, except sometimes incrementally, for moments in certain lifetimes, and without a community of comrades it is impossible to continue the good fight.  

Irv understood that the moral center of a society that can enslave millions solely to amass great wealth is indistinguishable from a culture that sends its believers scrabbling to cut their neighbors’ throats.    The names of the atrocities change over the centuries: impaling, shooting, lynching, drowning, whipping, but the song remains the same.

The Book of Irv must walk the line on this side of rant, unreliable narrator or no. Play must be at the center of it, because play is the only dependable relief from the oppression all around.  A tall order, friend, but while I am taking orders, why not?

“So you’re going to talk about this fascinating, all-explaining, theory unifying book you’re supposedly going to write, Dr. Bronner?  Or are you going to knuckle down and start writing it?”

I’m going to knuckle down and continue to talk about starting to write it, at the moment.  But first to get back to my long-stalled project to make some space in here.

Write the Book

So what is this book?  

It is more than one book, actually.

The subject of each has been dictated by the world, each book is needed to demonstrate my point.  These are entwined but distinct points that need to be separated out.  Let me try to disentangle and prioritize them, make them less abstract, seem less the ravings of a madman.

Book One —  to convince the reader of the obvious: how important careful listening, participating and empathetic feedback are in learning.   Make the case for why I care about these things so deeply, why others should too.

This is a fraught book, perhaps more than the others.  It is a do or die attempt to sell, more than my name or skills, a big idea I’ve already invented the machine to demonstrate and have put into  practice dozens of times in classrooms in New York City. 

The world has largely moved away from these quaint values of care and appreciation, at least on a mass level.  If I’d make a business out of helping kids learn these old-time, hand-made type skills, I have to tell the story in a way that will engage and excite.  I need to find the way to inspire a creative and caring sector of a world that values, far above everything else it also espouses, competition and the metrics of who is wining and who sucks.  

Until I find the way to tell this story compellingly enough to get it funded, or finally give it up as a bad job and find something else to do, I continue to lose the only competition everyone readily understands.   Quicksand, my friends, in which I swim in extreme slow motion.

Book one, the detailed and compelling case for wehearyou.net, (or whatever you want to call it) an interactive workshop where public school kids’ imaginations run the show as they work together to master the interlocking skills needed to produce original stop-motion animation.  This is clearly the hardest of the three books to write.

There are two easier ones that come to mind– the easiest would lay out the devilish details, fleshed out by memory and imagination where the world has wiped away all trace, of the destruction of the roots and trunk of my family tree by centuries-deep hatred that finally had the technology to carry out its ultimate goal– killing every last one of the fuckers, everyone like me.  

This had happened before, has happened many times since, has tangled roots and a million implications.  It has haunted me since I learned of it as a boy, applies over and over as we read the news today.   Who gives a shit about this story? Probably a few middle class people here and there.  It is a story that will mostly have to wait, it would appear, or show up as a long article in some journal somewhere, along with my research into the unfathomably sad, sick history of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The third book is the tip of the iceberg, really, the iceberg itself being the preceding book.  Or, picture, instead of the iceberg,  the fruit of the destroyed tree, if you prefer another cliché.  To understand how somebody of great intelligence, humor and charm can act like a cornered rat, lash out viciously at loved ones, you need to picture the exact circumstances that put the rat into his dreaded corner.   This would be the most interesting of the three, perhaps, and require the least by way of imagination.

But let me tell you a little story that might be the best way to set the stage for the first book, the story of my most tangible real-world quest.

In a region of Italy ravaged by World War Two, in a village called Reggio Emilia, the first thing the parents built, when peace finally returned, was a school.  This school was built in a charred landscape, for children who had known only war.  The parents wanted a better world for their children and their first priority was imbuing these poor devils with a love of life, a deep appreciation of the wonder of creativity and every hope for a beautiful future.

To that end they made the school beautiful, had the children plant and tend a garden to make the blackened earth blossom.  When the plants in the garden were cared for, green leaves magically sprouted and their fruits ripened in the sun. These delicious ingredients were harvested and lovingly cooked.  Kids and their teachers prepared and ate the things the earth produced, the things they had brought forth from the earth. 

Colors, flavors, scents, everything that could excite the senses of young kids was brought into play.  The childrens’ excitement  guided the things they studied.  Adults carefully listening to the children nurtured their creativity, childish intellectual curiosity and everything else that makes students into life long learners.

I was told of this program by a friend who’d encountered it in San Francisco.  It reminded her, she said, of my program, since it placed adults listening to children’s ideas and discoveries in the forefront of education.   She believed it was now a worldwide movement, that there was probably a Reggio Emilia school or two in New York City.  

I was delighted to find a couple in New York City. You will not be surprised to learn who the children in these Reggio Emilia schools are– they are children whose parents can afford the $35,000 a year tuition for their kindergartner.

Below is what Reggio Emilia says about itself (see ruptured appendix 1).   Here is what a writer for a major magazine has observed– a fairly obvious point about which children need this humanistic approach to education the most.

Which completely ignores the question of how these creatively engaged kids do on the life or death standardized tests designed by testing corporations to measure learning and guides us back into the crippling cul de sac that I must somehow leap out of if I am to proceed, if my long-stalled program is to go forward.  In a world of limited resources, whose children will get the rare, difficult, precious thing and whose children will get the predictable, easier, more crippling one?

If you will excuse me now, I have to go bash fucking City Hall in the face and get back to practicing so I can find my way to Carnegie Hall.

More tomorrow, when I must somehow avoid writing anything in this vein, or this vein.

 

ruptured appendix 1

At the heart of this system is the powerful image of the child. Reggio educators do not see children as empty vessels that require filling with facts. Rather they see children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories.

Children have the right to be … active participants in the organization of their identities, abilities, and autonomy.. .  “better citizens of the world”… (this system) also credits children, and each individual child, with an extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities and potential, strength and creativity.  Irreversible suffering and impoverishment of the child is caused when this fact is not acknowledged [my emphasis– ed].

Each day and every moment, we, the teachers, follow the directions of the children and adapt ourselves, always observing, documenting, listening and interpreting their goals, theories and strategies so we can gain insight into their thinking, always ready to make changes and support the children in their discoveries.

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”  Chinese Proverb

source

 

 

 

 

“They Can’t Do That!”

(note: this is a reimagining of a hideous courtroom encounter with an enraged young jurist who senselessly flogged a tired guardian with the unreasoning letter of the law.  No similarity to the actions of the angry hearing officer, if such a person even existed, is intended, nor should any be inferred.  Elpidio Ortega and Dave Levin, although arguably based on real persons, are also arguably not).

You don’t really understand how relentless the law is until you stand next to it for a long enough time.  Years ag0, as my dying mother was impatiently waiting for me to finish in court and get her for lunch, I had a conversation with a judge, on the record, that went like this:

Judge:  So, counselor, you’re telling you have  never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no intelligent action plan for the octogenarian, Mr. Ortega, a non-English speaking client of Adult Protective Services.

Me: (pause) … that’s basically what it boils down to, Judge.

The Judge asks a series of probing questions, my nods, head shakes and other body language and gestures are captured only as silence on the record, as is my detailed explanation.   Then the judge says.

So, basically, counselor, again, what you’re saying is you have never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no real plan of how to protect your ward, an 80 year-old man who is facing eviction.

Me:  … outside of what I have already said, Judge, that is what I’m saying.  There is only one plan now possible for Mr. Ortega.

Listen to the voice recording again, “outside of what I have already said” is a non sequitar when all I’ve said is that it boils down to me having no idea how to proceed in this guardianship matter.  

My adversary in the Housing Court that morning, Dave Levin, remembers well what I’d said, the steps I was taking, that he had already agreed to my excellent terms.  None of that is on the record.  The cunning and ambitious young judge made sure to make a clean record.

“A clean record comes in very handy when anyone questions your ethics.  If you can produce a transcript where everything that can be used against you has disappeared, you’re golden,” said his mentor Sheldon Silver.  This young judge was one of Shelly’s golden boys, had skipped over several more qualified candidates to become a Housing Court judge.  He dexterously rode the switch to edit our colloquy on the fly, delete the rest of what I’d said in the six unrecorded minutes.

But they have a clock in the courtroom, right on the bench, you will protest, surely when the judge and you speak on the record the transcript has a running time stamp that would show deletions.   

Oh, of course, absolutely — in theory.  But theory, we find, gets the snot whipped out of it by practice, almost every time.

In case a judge needs a break to make a phone call or look up a point of law on the computer, or use the bathroom, there is a switch that turns a tiny red light off and on and signals when the device is recording, when the transcript is being made.  The judge turns the recorder off between cases too, otherwise the log would be one running mess of courtroom sounds.  

Like so many things where the law is involved, keeping the system honest is on you.  If you speak without making sure that light is on, you learn to your horror too late, your remarks will leave no judicially cognizable trace.  

Once you know about the red light you can check it, point to it any time it is shut off, make a record of the light being off, correction to the record.  But, if you don’t know about the little red light, and the ease with which a concealed button can be pressed and unpressed, you are fresh meat for thirsty blood drinkers.  

“Off the record, please, your Honor,” means the tiny red light blinks off, the clock moves along, and all conversation is off the record, unless the judge decides something needs to be put on the record.  

“When we were off the record counselor for the respondent informed the Court that his client has not been seen in three weeks, cannot presently be located.   He reminds us that his client has evaded three psychiatric evaluations and a Heavy Duty Cleaning and that the last time he was in Court he spoke of having booked a reservation for a coach seat on an interstellar airline.  Respondent confirmed his flight arrangements by consulting a large, hardcover note book, and reading a long confirmation code from a blank page, aloud to the Court.” 

Outside of that kind of information germane to the case, there is almost never a reason to put something said off the record on to the record.  Everybody knows the drill.  On the other hand, an argumentative, angry judge, might prefer not to have an argument that makes him look like a cranky crybaby asshole preserved for all time. 

“Well, your Honor, I’ve already been waiting over an hour for you to look at and sign the three line stip [a stip is an agreement, stipulated to by two parties – ed.] Mr. Levin and I submitted to your Clerk.  You agree that the terms are reasonable and I have every reason to hope another Order to Show Cause will not be necessary.  In the event that the agency unaccountably does not do what it has already promised to expedite, I have almost a month before I have to make a motion.   Mr. Levin and I are in agreement about its terms and he has been generous in this negotiation.”  

Judge: this is not a bad stip, I agree, but I have a question for you, counselor, as the Guardian ad Litem.   As you know I am required to allocute this stipulation, even though your client is not in court, even though you and Mr. Levin are both attorneys.  But I have a few questions for you, and as you can see, I have not been sitting idly by as you waited for me to sign your stip, which I could not have done anyway, until I’d allocuted it.  

Me:  You will recall, Judge, that I’ve appeared before you many times as a Guardian ad Litem.  We have seen more difficult cases than this one, but the system doesn’t really have a good fix for this.  Tenant owes over $9,000 and has zero income so there is no way to get him any kind of grant.  He has to move.  He has adult children, also living with him, also with no income.  They will all have to find places to live.  The City does not have such places, outside of homeless shelters.  The best I can do is have APS get an Article 81 guardian appointed, that will stay this proceeding for up to a year, during which time they will find housing for him, hopefully.  At least then he will have a proper guardian for the person, as opposed to a Housing Court GAL.  Not many arrows in my quiver, judge.

Judge:  Did you meet with your client?  Is this what he wishes?  

Me:  Judge, the man is eighty, with no income and $9,000 behind in his rent, growing by $800 a month.  He doesn’t speak English and my Spanish is weak.   But Judge, even if he expressed to me, through a translator, his firm wish to retire to Kuai,  I could not do anything more than I am doing for him now, everything within my legal means to get him an additional six to twelve months in a rented home he can’t pay for.  It’s an imperfect system, I grant you, and we both know just how imperfect it is– and Mr. Levin’s client will be out close to $20,000 before this is over–  but I don’t see at this point what Mr. Ortega’s wishes have to do with it, I have to protect him in his place as long as I can.  

Judge:  Why would you take this case if you could not speak Spanish?  You’re telling me you never even made an attempt to contact him?  

Me:  I was in regular contact with his case manager at APS and her supervisor, Ms. White.  They both confirmed that he does not pick up the phone or come to the door.  Spanish was not an issue to your law secretary when she called to ask me to take this case.  Is there some insight I’m missing here, Judge?  

Judge (voice recorder on): So, basically, counselor, again, what you’re saying is you have never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no real plan of how to protect your ward, an 80 year-old man who is facing eviction.

Me:  … outside of what I have already said, Judge, that is what I’m saying.  There is only one plan now possible to protect Mr. Ortega’s interest in not being evicted into homelessness.

“They can’t do that,” you will say at this point.

I know, and dogs and cats can’t lick their genitals either. 

“You poor fucking innocent chump,” I will say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Correspondence with a weasel

Looking for some papers just now to serve in connection with a rare payday as a lawyer, I came across this great correspondence from my early days at law.  The first letter was sent by a guy who ripped a friend of mine off, almost 20 years earlier, for $750.  It is priceless, as you will see when you read the detailed response.

When I got out of law school, my friend asked how long a judgment is good for (a judge had agreed the man, a lawyer, owed her the $750).   Turns out it’s enforceable in New York State for 20 years, at 9% interest.  The original $750 had grown to a considerable sum over the 18 or 19 years.  I grabbed that sum from his bank, legally freezing the amount owed in his bank account.  

When he found out he called in a rage, to tell me that I was a fucking low-life, scum of the earth, goddamned fucking piece of shit.  I allowed that all this might be true, but I was more interested to know if he would consent to the money being released to my client.  He was not at all mollified by this reasonable approach, cursed me louder and hung up on me.  

Later that day he decided to take the high road.  Here’s how it went:

November 2, 2000

via TeleFAX  

Dear Mr. W____,

I take strong exception to your heavy handed collection methods on behalf of your client.  This is an eighteen year old matter which has had no activity during the intervening years.  Simple inquiry would have revealed that I am a member in good standing with the New York Bar, and that I still own, reside and work at ___ Street., Brooklyn, the situs of the dispute between Z___ and myself.  A telephone call or letter would have sufficed.  Your behavior is typical of that which increasingly places the legal profession in disrepute in the eyes of the public.

Please send by return FAX any and all documentation regarding Z___’s claim, whether in your possession or Z____’s possession.  Additionally, please send me any and all correspondence between yourself and Republic National Bank/HSBC or any other institution which in any way relates to any attempt at collection in this matter.

If you do not intend to comply with this request please so inform me by return FAX.

You may rest assured of my best intentions.

Very Truly Yours,

To which I apparently replied:

Brother I____:

I regret that you found my collection methods heavy handed but I had little reason to expect you to pay this debt voluntarily, as you proved me right by not accepting my offer to lift the bank restraint if you paid it voluntarily now.  

I relied on the representations of my client that you would do everything in your power to avoid paying the money as you had demonstrated a pattern of unwillingness to pay this $750 debt in the past; first when you breached your contract with her, then when you refused to pay Judge Michael H. F____’s judgment after trial, when you made an appeal that you never perfected and later when you brought various counterclaims that removed Dr. Z______’s next Small Claims case from the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Part– brought because there was no acceleration clause in the contract you had with her and the court had instructed her to bring a separate action for the remainder– to the Civil Court that you then had adjourned at least twice and finally defaulted on.  Only the fact that M___ Z_____ was a pro se litigant saves you from having the marshal levy on twice the amount you still refuse to tender.

I had little reason to expect good will on your part and, in light of your attempts to weasel out even now, I’m glad I took the certain route to a tiny fraction of your wealth.   

Regarding your belated discovery request (discovery is only permitted in Small Claims actions with prior judicial approval, by the way) nothing requires me to provide you with copies of anything, you have the ordinary access to them through the channels you know so well as an experienced attorney.

Yours sincerely,

(and I might well have signed it)

“Juan Snyde-Bastid, Esq.”

A taste of blood to a shark

Sekhnet periodically goes on a strict diet, cutting out most of the foods one should avoid to maintain a healthy weight:  bread, pudding, pasta, desserts, fried food.   During these healthy times she refuses to take even a bite of any of these foods.   “It’s like giving blood to a shark,” she says, “if I have one bite I’ll have to eat the whole thing, and more besides.”

I’m thinking about that because, while I spend at least an hour a day tapping here at the keyboard, taking a sharp knife to my words and hitting “publish” at the end, it is only recently that somebody else took a dull knife to my words, published them and sent me a check.  

“Cah-ching!” I said, as I signed those babies and fed them into the ATM.

Got a taste of blood, after years of honing rows of teeth to a razor sharpness.  One may quibble with the things I write here, wonder about a man with so much time on his hands, so seemingly unable to do most other things that normal people do.  

The hour or two I spent tapping out a thoughtful piece on the word “motherfucker”, for example, is it really worth writing about, for f-word’s fucking sake?  (unsuccessfully searched this blahg for the piece I wrote about the fascinating etymology of the word and my father’s didactic role in bringing it to my attention.  Maybe it was on my previous blahg?)

Anyway, that’s it.  I got a taste for blood now.  I want a nice tall glass of it, and another one after.

 

An Epidemic of Mental Illness?

This excellent article, which I found very convincing, was given to me by a very intelligent man who considers himself insane.  He may well be right, although the piece he recommended is well worth reading if you are considering a psychopharmaceutical cure for what ails ye.  

Or if you are a psychiatrist who spends hours talking to patients, while wondering how to make more money in less time, with far fewer head aches.

The second part of the fascinating two part book review is here.

Facebook Nation

I’ve got to face the muzak, I am a member of facebook nation, whether I ever click on facebook or not.

“Social media” connects us in the most superficial possible way.  Which is cool, it is the least we can do to keep up the pretense of connectedness, and for many, also the most we can do.  It takes a few seconds to see the update, and if we’re not interested we click the next tab, no need to be polite or interested in the privacy of cyber friendship.

What has long irked me in real-life irks me on-line: it is rare for people to simply answer a simple question.  We are distracted all the time, much more now with powerful personal computers in our shirt pockets.  I don’t remember the last meal I ate in a restaurant without somebody at the table consulting a tiny, irresistible glowing screen for real-time updates.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you say something?”

I had a friend of many years, somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, I would think, very active on social media.  We eventually had a terminal falling out, no doubt years in the making, after he promised to do a small favor in his area of expertise and then, after not doing it, was peevish about me not answering his missed call to let him explain why he didn’t do it.  I wrote a series of pieces here about the unraveling situation, and in that month my “readership” spiked dramatically.  In fact, it set a personal record for this largely unread blahg, a record that could stand as long as DiMaggio’s hitting streak.

The nice thing is that through writing about the situation as clearly as I could I emerged as the vicious bully and he, unrepentant but cruelly misunderstood, came out as the victim, at least in his mind.  In our last call he actually attempted to bully me, which surprised me, but the point was made, if it needed making again:  written words can wound.   Over and over again, apparently.

After my final post on the slow-motion falling out went up I had an email from a friend.  “Good thing he doesn’t have a gun,” wrote my friend about the piece.  I hadn’t thought of that, but it was a good thing.

That’s the thing about being a cyber-presence, you don’t actually have to look anyone in the eye when you shoot them in the face.   Look at the comments on-line sometime.   I am often impressed by the level of civility and intelligence I see in comment strings on some sites.  People actually support each other and try to exchange differing views in a mature and nuanced way.  Then someone jumps in swinging virtual fists, light sabers, burning paper bags full of dog shit.  There are some sites where fisticuffs is the norm.  Put two of these bellicose trolls in a room and it’s unlikely they would be so fierce in each other’s actual presence.

Whenever I told the story of the end of the friendship with this former friend of mine I always added a line I never said, then admitted I didn’t think of it at the time.  The line was “if you want to bully me, come on over, I’m home.  I’ll wait for you.”  This is the kind of line we would write for a laconic tough guy narrator, which I am not.  But I play one on-line, you see.  Not that I would have needed to be any such thing to get this particular fellow to stop talking shit.

Writing here is the easiest thing I can think of to do at the moment– it’s almost like scrolling down a friend’s facebook page.  The least I can do and also, at the moment, the most.  Once I send it into cyberspace I plan to get on to many things I have been thinking of doing for the last couple of weeks.  In fact, let me do that now.

But first, how are you doing, my friend?

The power of “nice”

Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes.  Most of us are not strictly nice or mean.   We swing both ways, according to circumstance.   One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.

I was grown in a hothouse of rage.  It took me decades to start to understand the obvious:  that it’s better not to engage with insane anger.  There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad.  But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.    

One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you.  This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option.   Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on.  That’s all I’m saying.

My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).  

“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her.  It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B.   Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.  

It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.

So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply.  “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.  

“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.”  I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.

In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond.  They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting.  They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.

And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it.  Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.

If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply.  “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it.  Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things.  But anything else?  Good luck, kid.  

Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it.  Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.

“Nice is nice,” I told her.  “Nice is excellent.  Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.  

Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment.  This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.  

The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’.  Investment of time and effort– almost none.

But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said.  That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it.  Can you dig that?

“Nice!”