Category Archives: musing

Making Sense of Seeming Senselessness

My father, for lack of a closer example, and being dead, also, a perfectly cooperative one, never recovered from the traumas of his childhood, which were many.  

He appeared urbane, had a series of pretty good jobs, with some prestige, bought a nice home, had the respect of many people.  He had a great, dark sense of humor, he was witty, and very well-read.   He could converse intelligently on just about any subject.  He was affable and had an easy rapport with children.   He loved animals and took good care of any he came across.  The only tell of his early traumas was his need to fight and to win every fight.  

He was Fred Astaire in an argument, very light on his feet, smooth, quick, almost impossible to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you were not the object of his arguing it was hard to find fault in his smart, stylish ability to dispatch an opponent easily.  He never seemed to break a sweat or exert any effort at all.

His need to win every argument was the giveaway I noticed fairly early on.  I tried every way around it, since I hoped for more out of our relationship than an occasional laugh and the inevitable bludgeoning arguments, but until I was in my 40s, and had learned something about reining in my emotions, I had little chance of success.   I spent years piecing together the clues to what had made him this way; they did not yield themselves easily.   In the end, and aided by my discoveries, I was as good as the old man at making my points.  Law school put the finishing touches on it, because as much as anything else law students are relentlessly drilled in the smelly art of prevailing.   The prevailing party wins it all in court, the other party loses all.  Elegant in its simplicity even if grotesque in many of its implications.   

The old man needed to win, and if you were keeping score, he seemed to win virtually all of the time.   There was a cost attached, but he was glad to pay it.  A punchline of sorts will give you the point I am hoping to make here, if  I prepare everything for you correctly.  

My father’s first cousin Eli was American born (his mother died giving birth to him) and a rough and combative character who was incredibly warm and funny if he loved you.   If he didn’t love you he had no hesitation to thunder, turn purple, and possibly bash you in the face.   He did this even to people he loved, sometimes, though he and I got along well.  Our frequent disagreements sometimes turned his face purple, brought white spittle to the corners of his mouth and a ferocious panther-like expression to his face, but we never came to blows or stopped talking to each other.  “Eli and your mother fought all the way from Georgia to New York,” my father once cheerfully said of a car ride up from Florida.  Nobody loved each other more than Eli and my mother did, or fought each other more passionately.

Toward the end of his life Eli gave me some crucial background into the hitherto inexplicable behavior of his Aunt Chavah, my father’s mother, towards her oldest son, my father.  He did this to give me some insight into my father, and it worked.  Eli had gone with his father to the dock where a ship brought Chavah from Europe and they picked her up in his truck.   It was love at first sight.   Eli was a handsome young man and Chavah, the aunt he was meeting for the first time, was a red headed beauty who loved him immediately.    Her older brother, Eli’s father, was not as loving, even though he’d paid for her passage from Europe.  She was expected to work off the debt as a servant in his house.  

Her indenture went on for a few years, and would be continued after she had children and moved back to Peekskill (my father and his young brother dug their nails into the snake plants they were forced to dust, in an ongoing attempt to kill the succulents).   During her first years in service there she fell in love with the Jewish post man, also a red head.  He wanted to marry her, but Eli’s father broke that up.  “His bitch-on-wheels second wife would have lost her slave,” Eli pointed out.  

A few years later, when it was past time for her to marry, they arranged a marriage as mysterious as they come.  I have no idea who made the match or how the two sides even met each other.  The groom was a man from a primitive, dirt floored farm near Hartford, Connecticut who most considered dull.   Eli described the deadpan face of this man who died before I was born as “two eyes … a nose and a mouth”.   He then imitated a face that was just that.  

Eli insisted his uncle by marriage was very funny, and incredibly subtle, he’d simply had the life beaten out of him by a cruel and violent step-mother who hit him in the head with heavy boards and whatever else came to hand.  According to Eli, my grandfather had mentally checked out at a certain point to save himself.  The way Eli told it, he seemed to be the only one who could see this inner life in his new uncle.  My grandfather Eliyahu comes down to me as a tragic man who, having endured a very hard life, and great abuse from his step-mother and then his reluctant and furious wife, died young of liver disease though he never drank alcohol.   

Chavah, who had always had a temper, seemingly went into a permanent rage once ensconced in her horrific new life.  They were incredibly poor, even by the standards of the day in the crowded slums of the Lower East side.  After her illiterate husband lost his herring delivery job when the horse who knew the route died, and he returned at the end of his first day with the new horse with a wagon-load of undelivered herring barrels, Eli and his father drove down to NYC and picked up the hapless little family:  pregnant Chavah, Eliyahu and their little son Azrael, usually rendered Israel.

That one and a half year-old taken to his new home in Peekskill was my father, and terrible damage had already been done to him in the airless little slum apartment he was born in.  His mother had already given birth to a girl, a still born.  The baby may have lived a day or two, nobody alive now can verify this.   The newborn baby was dead and buried and then some time after that my father was born.  Chavah was tiny, my father was a huge baby.   Chavah hated her husband and seemingly carried a long building grudge against this large baby as well.  Whipped him from the moment he could stand, preferred method rough burlap wrapped power cord from her iron across his baby face.  Whap!   Stop looking at me, she might have screamed, in Yiddish.  Whap!

Eli, by then 18 or 19, and in their house all the time, had seen it himself many times.  My two year-old father cowering as his mother rattled the drawer by her seat at the kitchen table where she kept the heavy, stinging electrical cord.  “By then all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would….” and he imitated a terrified boy, standing at rigid attention, cringing as he waited for a few lashes in the face, averting his eyes.   I had a sudden, immediate insight into why my father was so relentless about never losing a fight.   And a flood of sympathy for the poor bastard that had been impossible to feel when he was bullying and hectoring and paying any price to win.  

I tried to hint at these things the next time we met.   “Eli’s full of shit!” snarled my father.   “Ask his kids what kind of father he was, he is so full of shit.  His kids hate him.  Sure, listen to his twisted version of history, he’s a great historian, he knows everything, he’s the expert on every subject, a man of great insight into everything.  A fucking bullshit artist — did he tell you about the many millions he made that he was screwed out of, always somebody else’s fault?  I’m sure he did.  His fantasy stories will answer all of your questions.  He’s a fountain of wisdom,”  and so forth.

And now the punchline, of sorts, that you have been so patiently awaiting.  After two years of inexplicable fatigue, my father found himself, the first night of Passover, waking from a nap unable to move and severely jaundiced.   My mother who had been heating up matzoh ball soup and getting ready to serve dinner,  called an ambulance.  The ER doctor knew immediately what the learned endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist that my father saw several times a month had been unable to figure out:  this patient is in the very end stages of terminal liver cancer.   He went into the hospital on the first day of Passover, a holiday of eight days, and was dead before the holiday commemorating the perilous journey from slavery to freedom ended. 

On what turned out to be the last night of his life I visited him in the hospital, stood by his deathbed where I found him waiting to talk.  After the pleasantries, and after he asked if I’d brought the digital recorder (we were both glad I’d left one there in the care of his wonderful nurse) the first thing he said was:  

Eli hit the nail on the head, everything he told you was true.  Only he probably didn’t paint it as dark and nightmarish as it really was…  

Then, the man who had insisted all his life that childhood was something an adult leaves behind in forging his own independent identity and life, said:  my life was over by the time I was two.  You don’t recover from that. 

I have been over and over this terrain many times, probably told versions of this very story a dozen times right here on this gratuitous blahg.  I’m thinking about it now because I had a reminder yesterday of the essential incomprehensibility of much of human behavior, particularly our own.  

An old friend expressed dismay that his loved ones sometimes don’t seem to realize that he has nothing but the best of intentions, no matter how else it may appear.  It saddens him that his old friend, and his wife, cannot easily see his good will and instead misconstrue things motivated by the best of intentions as antagonistic or hostile.   Those actions he intends to be supportive that are sometimes misread as provocative, a vexing human mystery.  

 As for my father, he expressed his very sincere regret that he hadn’t explored the many gradations of life instead of seeing everything as a black and white zero sum fight to the death.  He mused momentarily and sadly about how much richer his life, and the lives of those he loved, would have been had he seen the world in all its subtle variations.

He expressed this sorrowful insight perhaps seventeen hours before the sun went down and, in the orange and pink embers of a beautiful Florida sunset, the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital window, his last breath went out and no more came in.

The Mick on the radio

I was nine or ten, listening to a Yankee game on the radio, when it started to rain and the game was delayed.  A year or two earlier, in 1964, the great Mickey Mantle had his last great year as the Yankees won the pennant right at the end of the season.  1964 was my first season as a Yankee fan and it would be the Yankees’ last pennant for the rest of my childhood.  

I remember watching the celebration on TV, black and white, the guys in their grey baseball undershirts dousing each other with champagne.  Joe Pepitone describing how earlier in the year, before he went on a tear and finally fulfilled his potential (for about the only time in his career) he had been ‘fustrated’.  Mantle poured champagne over him as he was being interviewed.  Everybody laughed.  Mantle later hit a couple of dramatic home runs, a total of three in the World Series to break Babe Ruth’s career record, and the Yankees lost in a dramatic game seven to Bob Gibson and the Cardinals.  David Halberstam wrote a great book about the 1964 season called October 1964, well worth a read if you’re interested in baseball, history and how the world changes.

Mantle was the hero of many boys in New York in those days and I would always take his side in the eternal argument against those who idolized Willie Mays and insisted Say Hey was a better ball player.   Sure Mays was a first ballot Hall of Famer, unquestionably one of the very best ever to play the game, a five tool guy who could do everything on a baseball field and make it look easy.   Mantle’s skills were the equal of Mays’, we’d argue, and he was doing it all on one leg.  Before Mantle got hurt he was faster than Mays, we’d say.  The argument for the Mantle guys was the mythic hero tragedy centering on Mantle’s limitless potential, his heroism in overcoming his disabilities  playing through pain, doing it all on one leg, on crutches, with the clock ticking, a career-ending injury always one play away.   It was a tragic position: imagine what Mantle could do if he had Mays’ health!  In the end their career stats, corrected for longevity, would be virtually identical with Mantle having a slight edge in a couple of categories (slightly better base stealing percentage, for example), Mays in a couple of others.   It was the kind of vehement, futile, idealistic argument kids love to have.

Unbeknownst to us, Mantle was getting drunk virtually every night during his playing days while Willie took care of himself.  The Mick would get shit-faced and fall down, get into fights, wind up in bed with a woman he didn’t recall meeting, was sneaked back into the Yankee hotel by teammates, the loyal press corps helping cover up most of his alcoholic episodes.   We didn’t learn until years after his star-crossed yet magnificent career that he had been his own worst enemy.  

Haunted by his father, Mutt Mantle’s, early death, and the early deaths of his uncles, he believed he was cursed to lead a short life, so why not have as much fun as he could getting shit-faced every night?  The irrefutable logic of the bottle, I suppose. Toward the end of his career, as his skills diminished by the day, he played on a series of very bad Yankee teams.  For one of the few times in their history the Yankees were a second division team, finishing last at least once during my childhood.

One day in 1965 or ’66, (could have been ’67 or ’68), there was a rain delay.   I listened to Rizzuto and Bill White (I think it was White– though it’s unlikely, now that I think about it– White was probably still playing, he played first base on that great 1964 Cardinals team.  Must have been Joe Garagiola) as they stalled, trying to keep fans tuned in during the delay.   Not long afterwards radio networks would cut away from the stadium during rain delays and return to regular programming, but in those days they killed time telling baseball stories and talking about how it looked like it might be clearing up, how the ground crew was about to take off the tarp, until it started raining harder again.  During this particular delay Mickey Mantle came into the broadcast booth and was greeted happily by the broadcasters.  

This was a rare treat, you rarely heard players on the radio, and never during a game.  But there was The Mick, loose and happy as could be, larger than life, talking with his Spavinaw, Oklahoma twang.   The subject of a recent fight on the field between two baseball teams came up.

“You ever been in a fight on the field, Mick?” asked one of the broadcasters.

“Well, I’m not really much of a fighter, you know,” Mick said in his aw shucks way. He was one of the strongest men in baseball, with muscles like few other players, and this disclaimer struck me as a great aw shucks statement.  “There was one time in Detroit that we got into it on the field, somebody got hit and people ran out of the dugouts.  When this happens I look for a friend on the other team, and so I found Norm Cash, me and Norm are buddies, and we kind of held each other and pretended to fight.  I kind of had Norm in a headlock and he says to me “hey, Mick, ever see a picture of your wife naked?” And I say “no.’  And he says “wanna buy some?””  

“We’re going to break for a commercial,” said one of the broadcasters (almost certainly not Rizzuto) quickly.  When they returned there was no sign of Mantle, nor even more than a passing mention of his visit to the broadcast booth.

Perfect Moment

Many years ago, on a sunny summer day, I was on a train heading south from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.  It was the only time I was ever on a train in California.  Outside of San Francisco the train went along the Pacific Ocean for a stretch, before heading slightly inland for the bulk of the trip.  A kid was alone on a basketball court, dribbling the ball against the gigantic blue sky.  I watched him, waiting for him to shoot.  He was about at the foul line, bouncing the basketball, taking his time like an Elmore Leonard character.  

Dribbling the ball, he backed further from the basket, he was now at the top of the key.  A tunnel was coming up and I badly wanted to see the kid take the shot.   As the train speeded toward the opening of the tunnel he sent the ball toward the basket in a high arch.  The ball swished through the net a split second before the darkness hit.   It was like a perfectly cut scene in a movie.  I remember that great feeling of satisfaction, as I smiled in that long tunnel, with the thought that I’d just experienced a perfect moment.

Addiction to Social Media

It’s understandable, friends.  There is a human longing to be connected to…. hang on a second,  I’ve got to send a quick email, excuse me.

What’s the deal with looking at the smart phone every couple of minutes, every few seconds, what’s the …

It is addictive, this feeling of being connected, of having the world at your fingertips. A moment of total control in an out of control world when you stop to make your phone do something cool, smart, informative, interactive.

In elementary school, for me decades ago, when any of this was the domain of the smartest science fiction writers, a teacher described a psychological experiment that has a lesson in it for all of us today…. wait, got a message coming in, hang on.

They hooked an electrode up to the pleasure center of a rat’s brain.  Many rats were hooked up this way.  They had a button to push to give them a jolt of pleasure, the equivalent of an orgasm.   It took the rats a very short time to make the connection between pressing this button and the immediate jolt of pleasure.  

The scientists were not all that shocked to find that every rat died with his or her paw on this button.   There was no reason for them not to keep pressing it and it was irresistible, after all.

I had something more to say, but my phone is now fully charged and I’m thinking of downloading the electrode to the pleasure center app.  I’m sure someone is developing it… hold on, there’s a notification.  

Shoot, just an email, I’d better answer that.

Listening and the Woman on the Train

Dave Isay, creator of StoryCorps, a hugely successful oral history project that lets people interview each other about things that are important in their lives, received a million dollar TED prize in 2015 to expand this work.   His 2007 book of transcriptions from StoryCorps interviews, Listening is An Act of Love, was a New York Times bestseller, as were his other books on the subject.   Listen to Isay speak– though he has always been deliberate in keeping his voice out of the recordings of people he gives the mic to– and you will be convinced: really listening to someone is an act of respect, and hearing what they have to say gives them a rare gift.   Isay reports that has seen powerless, invisible people literally straighten their spines, infused with confidence in the face of the rare gift of finally being really listened to.  They shine as they are given the chance to speak, be recorded, and then edit what they have to say into a form that can be heard by anyone in the world.  Their interviews, mundane and extraordinary, full of candor and flashes of off the cuff poetry, all worth hearing, are cataloged in the American Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress.

A preacher in a violent neighborhood in Boston, trying to bring street kids into church, has a revelation one night after a boy who was shot ran to the church. He died 150 yards from the church, struggling to reach it.  Even though the lights were out, said the preacher, and nobody was home.  The preacher realized that if a dying kid runs to the church, the church needed to come at least half way to meet them.  The preacher began to walk the dangerous streets with a group every Friday night from 10 pm until 2 a.m.   Eventually the kids on the corners began talking to him and he discovered what he had suspected from the start, these were not violent monsters, just kids trying to survive.  He said he spoke to some of the brightest, wisest, most creative people he’d ever met, these kids trying to make it on the streets.   His initiative of listening to kids has spread to many cities, changes lives and won him awards.

We do not listen.   We have many good reasons: we are very busy, life is very stressful, we pretty much know what people are going to say, we can’t pay attention to everything, we have to tune out a lot of complete bullshit vying loudly for our attention in a nonstop attempt to sell us things we don’t need, the world is brutal and unfair, nobody fucking listens to us.  Fair enough.

Riding on the A train last night a very thin, artistic looking, slightly grimy young woman let an equally attenuated and dirty looking young man sit in the one seat that was left.  He sat gratefully and she stood over him talking almost without cease.  When the two seats next to me became available the woman moved with alarming quickness to claim them and the man slid in next to her.  The young man was next to me, clutching a nylon bag in his lap, the sharp corner of which protruded dangerously.  “I’m sorry,” he said, when I was first poked by it, but he seemed unable to make the slight adjustment that would have prevented it happening again.  I quickly learned to avoid it.

“I don’t like everybody constantly judging me,” said the haggard looking woman with a good deal of feeling, “I’m so sick of people telling me what they think I should do, people who don’t know anything about me or my life.  I purposely don’t confide in people, and I haven’t told you half of what I am thinking, even though we are very close.  You are about the closest person to me, I would say, but I will never tell you certain things.  I just can’t stand the way people look at me,” she added crossly.   I didn’t look at her, but not because I cared if she could stand it or not.  

The man, speaking with a heavy French or Italian accent, did his best to find out what was bothering the woman, but she was not having it.  “You know, if you don’t tell people what is wrong, what can they do to try to make it better?” he asked.  She had a quick, angry answer to this useless question.

Listening to their conversation,  I was slightly annoyed to be hearing it but also slightly fascinated.  It was like reading a grim but engaging short story about two desperate characters, trying hopelessly to connect but clearly being sucked down a tragic alley ending in rat poison and a decomposing body that would not be found for days. 

Listening carefully is not always the answer to the world’s lack of respect, but it can be.

Don’t Take It Personally, Man

You may be correct to feel that not being told the price of a medical service until after you’ve bought it is like going into a store and not being told, until after you make the purchase, the nonrefundable price, which you are 100% responsible to pay.   Or, like a restaurant where the bill is secret until after you’ve eaten, a policemen waiting to take you in if you refuse to pay whatever the restaurant demands.  Seems unreasonable, un-American, but according to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the practice is neither of these when it comes to medical services. 

Critics will be critics, and some critics ignore the facts in their zeal to score points, but a few things about the flawed step forward that is Obamacare (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act– PPACA) are beyond dispute. Systemically, it is an improvement over what existed before.   The elimination of the grotesque loophole of “pre-existing condition” exclusion from coverage alone was worth the fight.  Giving the medical industry financial incentives to prevent disease rather than continuing to profit off billions in late in the game testing and end of life treatment is another long overdue step in the right direction.  It can’t be denied that millions more Americans have health insurance under the PPACA and access to preventive care, many for free.

 Those things said, huge problems remain with this compromise, authored by a health insurance industry insider,  that keeps the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries firmly in charge of seeing their profits undisturbed.    Millions are still uninsured under the PPACA and tens of thousands of Americans will continue to die preventable deaths every year from treatable diseases discovered only in their fatal stages at ERs across the country.  

 Individuals may find also find themselves among a few million in an income category a little too high for free service, and too low to qualify for and afford the premium service members of Congress receive.  Such persons will, unfortunately, be a bit screwed by the details of the PPACA.  

The high deductibles, outsize charges for routine services, billing irregularities and other unappealable indignities may cause these patients to feel unprotected and that the mandated health care they pay for each month is sometimes obscenely unaffordable.   These Americans must take solace from the fact that it is truly nothing personal.

 Yes, it’s your individual problem, true, since the bills will be enforced by lawyers sent to collect all charges, but take courage in knowing that you are not alone in being partially unprotected by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, an otherwise wonderful program.  It’s nothing truly personal, surely you can see this.  It affects millions, so stop your belly-aching!

 If you consult for twenty minutes with a physician’s assistant, for example, who has never heard of the symptom you report, repeats your google research while you sit there, and who orders a blood test to rule out certain things, you may have a little sticker shock when you get the bill for $507.   This sticker shock comes about because there is apparently no provision in the law that the patient be informed of cost prior to receiving a service.  Call your insurance company and they will tell you the doctor must first bill them for the service and then the price is determined, according to negotiated rates, and sent back to the doctor, who will in turn bill the patient the deductible amount.  

It’s all right there on the bill:  consult with physician’s assistant:  patient’s responsibility– $180.   Subsequently reduced, without explanation, on a follow-up bill thirty days later, to $110.   Blood test:  $641.  Patient’s responsibility:  $327.   Insurance, oddly, paid the corporation representing the doctor $314 for the blood test.   $437 for a visit to a physician’s assistant?   Call to ask about these charges and you will be told the charges are all correct, sir, all the proper codes were entered, these are the legal rates your insurance company agreed you would pay.   You can take it up with the attorneys who are handling the collection matter for the doctor’s office.  

 Have a nice day and, please, keep in mind that this is strictly legal, enforceable and absolutely NOTHING PERSONAL!   Only a baby would take it personally, though plenty of folks, apparently, are squawking like babies about their treatment under this inarguably great step forward. 

 To be fair, though, would you rather be treated unfairly with the right to be hospitalized (at no expense beyond your premiums and deductibles) when you finally have a stroke or without that right?  You’d have to be a fool not to see that this is a no brainer.   

 

Why I Brood, short version

Got to get this done in five minutes or less, finish the crucial work I can’t get to, be done with a series of invisible bones crosswise in my throat.

I spent my childhood often blamed for things I had no control over. Motives were ascribed that were not my motives.  I had to defend myself, at times, for things I hadn’t even done.   This was the work of my traumatized father, primarily, with the able assistance of my almost equally traumatized mother.  I am not complaining about this, merely stating how it was for my sister and me growing up.  My sister claims it was worse for me because I fought against it.  I don’t know if it was worse for me, I know it was bad enough for each of us.

Attempts to get the whole truth on the table: denied.   A child hasn’t all the tools to counter a determined and brilliant adult adversary in partnership with a loyal adult ally, also of great intelligence.  Over decades these tools can be acquired, along with a certain amount of insight, but it takes a lot of work and it can take a lifetime.

Fast forward 45 years or so.  Father on his deathbed says to his son, his lifelong adversary: you were right to feel betrayed and I was wrong to betray you.  I am so sorry I was such a brutal prick.  I am amazed that you seem able to forgive me.

The son says:  you did the best you could, I realize now that if you could have done better you would have.

The father (with a sigh):  I wish I’d been mature enough to have had this kind of talk with you fifteen years ago.  

Long pause.  

Now, if you will excuse me, son, I’d like you to help me die.  I have no idea how to do it.

“Nobody does, dad,” I told him.  

Ten minutes later I closed his dead eyes with two fingers of my right hand, then handed his oxygen tube back to the nurse who had silently come back into the room.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

Although many of us tend to believe that humans are primarily rational actors, an excellent case can be made against that proposition.  We have rationales for everything we do, true, but whether they are based on solid facts and represent the most logical and effective way to achieve what we want to do is a very different matter.  Insane things are done, and justified as rational, in the sincere belief that they are the right and logical things to do.  And of course, sometimes strict logic seems simply inhuman.

Advertisers and political consultants have long known that appeals to emotion are far more effective in inspiring action than even the most irrefutable appeals to reason.  Art appeals to the heart as much as to the mind, the best of it goes straight to our feelings.   Emotions can be good or bad, of course, and although fear, envy and hatred are the most effective for getting us to do things commercial and political advertisers want us to do, people are motivated by a host of higher emotions as well.   Good people who instantly jump into a raging river or run into a burning house to save a stranger’s baby or a crying pet, are moved by emotion, not logic.  They are rightfully hailed as selfless heroes.

It’s probably safe to say we filter given facts through our emotions and act out of some combination of reason and mood.    To take an example close to hand — Reason: you had a vexing problem, it was eventually fixed, even though the fixing was a great head ache prolonged beyond patience — bottom line: problem solved.  Move on to the next challenge, Reason says.   Emotion:  the vexing way the problem was handled demands some kind of justice and I cannot rest until I have figured out how to get it.  Justice may be unlikely, even impossible, but I am not done exhausting my search for it yet.

The emotional position, while understandable after being subjected to aggravating discourtesy, untruthful representations and sloppy work, is also unreasonable.  If there are several immediate challenges that need to be engaged and worked through, why struggle over something that, but for the emotional component, is already solved?

To put it another way:  imagine you have an hour of work to complete a book you’ve been working on for months and that, at the end of that hour, you will be able to order what is hopefully the final prototype.  If the prototype is acceptable, sufficient copies can be ordered and sent out to thank generous people who have helped you.  In a week’s time each will have an evocative and colorful representation of what their generous help has accomplished in the world so far.   A small but great thing you have struggled towards for a long time, needing but 60 minutes to complete.   What stops you?

Lack of wind in your sails and preoccupation with distractions.

The proper mood is required, a sense of optimism, of purpose.   A mood easily robbed by the thousand hassling robbers of good mood that surround each of us at any given moment.

Now, picture that this mood has settled into your DNA as a result of villains like hunger, fear, neglect, and violence, relentlessly and constantly at work during your infancy and childhood.  Not a mood disorder in the traditional sense, let’s say, but a fact of your physical body now.  Emotion or reason?  Both.  Millions of children are born into this trap every day.

Here you have the simple but inexorable mechanism by which this damage is done, explained by a brilliant pediatrician in her TED talk, cut and pasted from an earlier post:

How does it work? Well, imagine you’re walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal to your adrenal gland that says, “Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!” And so your heart starts to pound,Your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. (Laughter)But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging.

Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

Nadine Burke Harris, MD

source

Likewise musing itself, like these words I am tapping on to a screen now, can be adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging.   And having observed that, it would be ridiculous and unhealthy for me not to complete the preparations for the book, even though I have not heard back from the manager of the print shop who promised to look over the proof and get back to me.  There goes emotion again.   Reason says:  Fuck the manager, do the corrections, have one copy printed.  If the copy is not right, fix it and print the next. Done.  Next case.

Next case!

We Wuz Stars, yo

A couple of decades ago, when I still thought I’d make my living by writing a great book or something, I answered an ad in the New York Times and got a job as tutor to the stars.  It didn’t pay much, but it was a cool gig that took me to several nice hotels in different cities and for a while I had hopes of a song of mine being bought for an album by a number one recording group.  The lead singer, my student, dug the song a lot.  I’d daydream about hearing their version of it on the radio, cashing the fat royalty checks.  

It was also fun designing a custom curriculum for my student, as I’d just read Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (ghost writing a paper for my sister’s most oppressive grad school class) and was able to put its excellent principles directly into practice.  It was gratifying to see how well it worked, like water falling on a parched plant that suddenly begins to flower.

The reason the youngest member of the group needed a tutor is a law that apparently requires show biz kids under 17 (maybe 16) to have a tutor hired by the management company who is profiting off them.  It is an offshoot of the Child Labor Laws, I suppose.   My student and I, when in NYC, most often met in the conference room at Get Down Bitch Records, several floors above the lobby where Tupac was shot in the balls one dark night in a gun attack prior to the drive-by that killed him.

“Ordered by (insert name of mogul in charge of Get Down Bitch Records– not its real name) no doubt,” I said to my 16 year-old student one day.   He pointed in panic at the ceiling and mouthed words that led me to understand that the conference room was mic’ed, that the mogul could easily listen from his desk while smoking a blunt and having his knob polished by one of the fine looking women there who had no clear job description.   I caught on quick, “of course, everybody knows Mr (insert name) is a great man, a good friend of Tupac’s and had nothing to do with it, I know he’s looking for the shooters,” I added, quick and cowardly as a young Bob Hope.  My student smirked.  

“That ain’t gonna save you,” he said, laughing.  Then we continued discussing Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, from the book we were reading together.

“Would I have heard of him?” my sister asked as we walked on a street in a fancy section of Boston.  We were passing a record store and, as I ushered her inside, on cue, my student Jason, all in white, was dancing across a wall full of TV screens.  Twenty or thirty graceful, glossy Jasons exuded charisma as their hit song lip synched its way over the excellent sound system.  “Wow!” said my sister.

For a short time these four talented and obnoxious brothers, my student the youngest, were plucked from obscurity and little Jason was, for a moment in time, young Michael Jackson.  It was like walking down the street with Elvis, when we ventured from Get Down Bitch to nearby Manny’s to play the sequencers there together.  I pretended to be his body guard when fans crushed in, ushering him quickly to some imaginary appointment I reminded him we were late for.

We joked, the road manager and I, that they should have a reality TV show (this was before such shows existed) called “We Wuz Starz, Yo”— never were four bigger assholes given a luckier break they were so comically intent on blowing.   I harbor no bitterness, mind you, heh, but these pricks were Grade A and they fell back to obscurity as quickly as they had risen to fame, and as justly.  The record company likely never recouped its million dollar advance, even with the platinum record, and when their second album tanked the company was glad to get rid of the four prima donnas.

I am thinking about them at the moment for a reason I’ll get to presently.  They came by their brutality and dysfunction the time-honored way.  They were raised by an enraged and upright religious fanatic who whipped the boys with wire hangers he straightened into whips, handles made of masking tape, the better to have a good grip.  The youngest, my student, had been spared at the mother’s insistence, I was assured.  He was the only one to escape the father’s rage in physical form.  The oldest had the whip marks burned into his back, like in an old black and white photo of a slave’s hideously scarred back.  It accounted for their savagery as a group, though one at a time they were nice enough young men.  

My favorite, aside from my bright, wise ass, Special Ed for no reason other than attitude student, was the oldest brother, Chris.  If I remember correctly his nickname was Choc, because he was the darkest of these Trinidadian brothers.  

We flash forward, past the weekend in Beverly Hills, past a second California trip that included a great time in San Francisco, past the great strides the bright, semi-literate Jason was suddenly making when he was engaged with what he was learning, past Chris telling me how much his brother Jason admired me, never stopped talking about me, past the fateful plane trip to Toronto where, after they’d fired the experienced road manager and put the sister in charge (to save money), we were promptly detained for hours at the Canadian airport for lack of the required paperwork the sister and former road manager had argued about.   There was no transportation arranged, and being the only one over 25 with a credit card, I was forced, after a call to the concern I worked for, to rent a van to drive them around in.  It was not part of my job, I was not paid anything for it, but I became these assholes’ chauffeur.  

It’s possible that as things escalated I may have found it necessary to ad lib the arguably anti-Semitic sounding “you assholes ought to make like the Jews and blow the chauffeur,” when I grew sick of their hassling and attempts to bully me.  Their threats heated up, they were going to trash the car, torch it, rip it up– it was on my credit card and I’d have to fucking pay.  Ha ha.  As the abuse became more feverish I told the other brother traveling with us to tell the other hyena motherfuckers to shut up, yelling grew even louder, objects flung at the driver, things got out of control.  I got back to the hotel, packed my bag and booked a flight back to NY.  “You bitches are on your own,” I informed them, driving the rented van back to the airport.

Things certainly could have ended better, I realize in hindsight.  No blood was spilled.  Sticks and stones and shit.  I’d lasted weeks longer than the previous tutor.  Wrote a short story about the experience, centering on the good looking and arrogant sister, and her delightful flirtation on a night flight back from LA, ending with her touchingly sincere, if way too late, voicemail apology for how things had ended.  She’d actually begged me to come back, said she understood if I didn’t.  It was a shit story, in any case.   My tune was never recorded.  C’est la guerre.

Decades ago, piss down the drain.  Funnily enough, a few months later I got a call from someone I’d met at Get Down Bitch, he had a new act, was I still tutoring?  Negotiated a deal for twice my old rate, the girl was smart, cool and very down to earth.  “Be nice to the people you meet on the way up, because you’re going to meet them again on the way down,” she told me one day.  A beautiful, talented girl, a wonderful student and very quick study, mostly a pleasure to work with.  Her mother, on the other hand, almost the complete opposite, destroyed the girl’s promising career before it could take off.  I managed to get paid in full before it all went into the toilet, though the mother did her best to beat me out of those last two paychecks.  Just another sad story in the Naked City.

Anyway, I’m on the A train last night, after midnight, riding uptown.  On the bench diagonally across from me was a guy I am about 75% sure was Chris, the oldest brother, the one with the driest sense of humor, the most intelligent.   Thought of saying “Chris” and seeing if it was him.  Looked at him a long time, couldn’t decide.  Saw him looking over at me, an old white guy who looked a lot different than when he possibly knew me.  It had also been 20 years, after all, years that had been a bit kinder to him than to me.   Besides, one has to be cool on the subway, it’s not a Starbucks in the midwest.   Weighed the pros and cons, couldn’t find enough pros, I suppose.  Closed my eyes and rested for a few moments.

I looked over later and he was lying down on the subway bench, staring up at the ceiling of the A train car.   I heard him singing suddenly– didn’t sound like much, but maybe he wasn’t trying too hard.  He was the best singer of the four, my student always said so.  Got off the train, walked up to my apartment.  Never will know if it was the guy or not.  Does it make a difference?

We wuz stars, yo.

Memory and mammary

“What say you, ghost?” asked the breeze of the fan.

But I wasn’t falling for it.  It’s true I have a lot of time on my hands, which famously makes for certain challenges, but I wasn’t going to go for that one.   I’m not talking to the walls yet (though this blahg is a kind of wall, I suppose).  I heard an old friend, with more than enough in his portfolio to comfortably retire, tell another old friend he will never retire.  

“What would I do?” he asked.  She suggested travel.  

“And after I travel the world for five years, what then?” he asked.    Reasonable question, nodded another grey head at the table.    I can see their point, but I don’t feel it, the work I want to be doing still just out of my reach.  

“What has this to do with memory and mammary?” asks another disembodied voice, not unreasonably.  

When we lose our memory, do not recognize old friends any more, cannot recall the things that excited us, made us happy, choked up, got us up and dancing… how much of life is left?  I can’t recall exactly what thought sent me here to write it down.  There was a short, coherent thought that inspired the title, now gone.  Imagine being unable to recall anything at all.  It’s not hard to picture, but it’s horrifying.  

Or maybe not.  Maybe it’s just like a painless death, you lie back, look at the interesting pattern in that light fixture, the way the light changes color on the walls as the sun paints the room for nighttime.  Coat after coat:  white, yellow, orange, pink, the gradations are seamless, perfect.  Now the light is almost purple, more blue creeping in, the electric lights go on outside the windows– or not.  Soon it is dark and your eyes close.  That’s right, dreams merge into each other and then slowly, gently fade.

“And mammaries?” asks nobody.

I remember them, Horatio.  Pressed against me, too young and foolish to know exactly what to do, but I loved it, Horatio.   To hold her for a moment, one more time, like a sleek seal, face upturned.   

And then?   I don’t recall.