Category Archives: musing

Storytelling

“I am feeling more and more like a melancholy ghost,” he said to nobody.  The dust looked at him apathetically.   “Of course,” he thought, drawing in a deep, dusty breath.

We humans are moved by stories.  That’s why gossip is sometimes hard to resist.  He did what?  She thought… what the hell WAS she thinking?  Fucking humans… can you believe?   And if it is hard enough to believe, but still possible to understand as unmistakably true… or even mistakably true, damn, you got the kernel of a good story there, son.

A lawyer successfully making her case tells a story the jury believes is more true than the other story.   A huckster selling you a rock you can keep for a pet, triggers that childish belief in magic, begins the story in your head — what if a rock actually needs love and care as much as we do? Some ingenious fucker sold millions of rocks to Americans as pets by planting that story.   Hey, nobody said we’re a nation of geniuses, but we got good hearts. 

I have a story to tell, but not here.  My story must go into a slideshow I have to get back to work on.   It’s the story of young children that society is in the inexorable process of preparing for lives of tragic outcomes, getting a chance to flourish, create and shine.  It’s a funny story, and an unlikely one, and tricky as hell to tell with the right tone.  I need people to buy the idea, and give me money to fund it.

I note in passing, in outgassing, (and since I’ve already noted it and only have to cut and paste it)  the difference between the story I need to tell and the stories we are happy to slurp down during our leisure.

The difference between giving attention to a sales pitch and a TV series is that the TV series, if it’s good, hooks you on a story that pulls you in.  A good sales pitch must do the same, but I can’t remember the last time one did that for me.  
 
I recently saw 16 episodes of an engaging TV series called Rectify.  An innocent guy spends 20 years on death row for the murder of his high school girlfriend before his determined little sister gets him out on a DNA mismatch.   We see him in solitary, flashes of his nightmare life there, his one friend in life– the condemned guy in the cell next door, a repentant and sweet guy who shot into a car as a gang initiation and killed a 3 year-old girl….they become best friends talking through the grate, as the psychopath in the other cell tries to break the sensitive protagonist’s spirit.  As I set out the bones of it I’m already feeling it’s a compelling story. 
 
And it gets much more so when he gets out, and is a mess, and the small Georgia town is divided between those who embrace him as an innocent, blessedly exonerated man and those who don’t believe in the technicality of DNA and see him as a confessed and duly convicted rapist and murderer (we know he isn’t either of those, and so our horror at injustice is engaged) and, in any case, a weird and clearly disturbed guy they want to beat the crap out of, as several in masks finally do when he goes to visit the grave of his murdered girlfriend.  
 
After the brutal, possibly deadly beating in the cemetery, the brother of the murdered girl removes his mask and makes sure the protagonist sees his face through bloody eyes before he passes out.  Then the brother pisses on his broken body.  When the protagonist finally gets out of the coma, and the hospital, he declines to press charges when the corrupt but conscience stricken sheriff runs down and arrests the ringleader.  “It wasn’t him,” he says, looking stoically at a photo the sheriff, who knows it was, holds out to him.  The sheriff leaves in disgust.  Everyone in town is confused, and it is another proof that there’s something seriously wrong with the guy.  Some of us can’t help watching this kind of story.
 
A sales pitch, on the other hand, tells a calculated story that cheerfully invites the potential buyer to envision the wonderful things the product will deliver to them.  How will this product make my shit life feel marginally better?  Unlike with a story containing enough human complexity to hook us with its narrative mysteries, and we are ready and happy to be hooked, if the hook is there, we are on guard against a sales pitch, which must also disarm us.  
 
A totally different exercise in story-telling and the reason watching five hours of an enthralling drama, if you have the time, is never a chore, and watching a sales pitch of any duration is something you are programmed to mute and go take a mental piss during.  There is great art involved in crafting a winning sales pitch, as in telling an engaging story of any kind, and there are similarities in both kinds of storytelling, but differences too.   If you get paid to make commercial pitches, well, at least you get paid.  If you do them on spec, well, hopefully you enjoy a good challenge and love the work itself, eh pardner?

Heh.  I’m sorry, what were you saying, Dusty, old boy?

It’s Like Riding A Horse

Thinking of the famous difficulty of managing people, I recall an incident from when I was 19 or 20 that serves as an excellent illustration.

I was in California for the summer and hitchhiked to L.A. for a brief visit with my girlfriend at the time, a sturdy and elusive young woman I’d been attempting to have a love affair with from a very long distance.   We were staying at the beautiful home of friends of her family in a wooded area of L.A. on cliffs high above the Pacific.   They were gone for the weekend.  

They had a horse and she asked me if I’d like to ride it.   I said I would, though since a pony ride as a child I hadn’t been on horseback.

Having grown up out west, she expertly saddled the horse for me, then explained that she was allergic to horses and rushed inside to shower before the hives became unbearable.

I sat on this large animal’s back and was struck by how high off the ground I was.  I gave the giddy-up signal and the horse began to walk. Having been in the area less than a day I had no idea where to ride, so I let the horse go where he wanted.  It only took a minute or two, and we’d gone a very short distance, when the horse stopped.  I was confused.  The horse as much as said “well, then, fuck you, my friend,” did an about face and jogged back to his stall at a good clip while I held on for my life.

Horses, it turns out, need to know that the rider is in charge, confident and knows exactly what to do at all times.  Much like any humans you might find yourself managing, as much as they might also like to be treated with deference to their feelings, opinions and initiatives.

What Happens to Anger that is Swallowed?

Bad things happen when anger is swallowed but not digested.   Anger that is not acknowledged seeps out in ways that are famously bad for the health, the body, friendship, peace between individuals, groups and nations.  It is threatening and highly toxic, possibly the nastiest emotion humans have to deal with.   Anger that is swallowed fills us with a bitterness that banishes mercy and makes us capable of justifying any cruelty.  

Ask the guy who feels how viciously unfair I was to express how hurt I was by his failures to keep promises I depended on, and his subsequent inability to take responsibility.   And I didn’t even swallow my anger — I was like a cat determinedly hacking up an indigestible hair ball– and it took days, and it’s still not completely out of my craw.  Being treated unfairly is indigestible, and when done by a good friend who insists you are at fault for being over-sensitive, it can lead to an inner tumult that is hard to quiet.  

Hacking up the hair ball I did, in the form of words on this blahg setting out exactly why I’d felt so hurt, filled the meditator with rage, which he barked at me when I tried to leave the door open for a conversation between old friends.  His rage was justified, you see, because no matter what he may or may not have accidentally done to me, I had no right to be deliberately mean to him in return.  I had betrayed him by not being content with his repeated assurances of friendship and instead making an unfair public accounting of his disappointing shortcomings, things he already hates himself for.  Anger always justifies itself.

I open this hideous and uncomfortable subject not to give useless advice or even insight, just to point out one popular way unprocessed anger seeps into the world.  This provocative technique is done passively, “innocently”, and I will illustrate its mechanism as clearly as I can.  It is either this exercise or finding a way not to snarl “what the fuck?!” at the sender of a recent email that rankled me by unconsciously employing this very technique.

My father had a colleague who became very close to the family when I was a boy.   My sister and I found this brilliant woman funny, and caring, and she seemed to relate to us as a peer.  She was like a very cool big sister to us.  My mother was very fond of her too. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my father was done with her, for reasons he was too disgusted to detail for his disappointed kids.  We never saw her again.

Years later my father and I spoke about what had happened to their close friendship.   “She is pathologically competitive,” my father said, his face very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic mask of hatred when he is confronted by an on-screen enemy.  “She will fight to the death over everything and never gives an inch, especially when she’s wrong.   Her reflexive self-justification makes her impossible to deal with, even after years of therapy and supposed introspection, she still has no insight into how damaged and enraged she is.  She is always primed to fight and she fights even the smallest things to the death.  She’s one of the most maddening and provocative people I’ve ever met, and I finally just had enough, after a particular incident at a conference we did with Gladys Burleigh.”  That the same could be said for my father, minus the years of therapy, did not need to be spoken by me at the time.

My father had come to another breaking point with a good friend, part of the pattern of his life that troubled me greatly growing up.  It seemed to me he never gave these close friends a chance to make amends.  It took me decades to see that things sometimes advance beyond the point where amends are possible, much as it saddens me to see this.   When things become ugly enough between two people trust is torn and it can become almost impossible to make amends.  Anger puts each of them on the defensive, they become the worst versions of themselves and can justify their behavior down to the snarl.

Back to the point then, what happens to anger that is swallowed?  My father executed a sentence of death on this woman my sister, mother and I felt so close to.  He felt 100% justified.  Decades later I was talking to Sekhnet about how close I’d felt to this one time friend of my father’s and she urged me to look her up on the internet.   I found her easily.

We had a mutually delightful reunion by email which led to Sekhnet and me spending several days in her guest house in Santa Monica during a trip to California.  In her version of that conference my father had alluded to as the last straw, it was my father and Gladys who had set-up, sabotaged and betrayed her.  Unbelievable! she’d laughed, when I gave her my father’s version.

A great animal lover, she had a rescue dog, a lovely, skittish black lab, smaller than your average black lab– possibly still not full grown at the time.  She named the dog Boo!  Boo! was immediately very friendly with Sekhnet but seemed afraid of me.  Our host explained that Boo! had been abused by the man who owned her and that she was skittish around men.  By the end of our stay my cooing at Boo! to come over and not be afraid turned into “get off me, Boo!” as the affectionate dog would not leave me alone.

Had the story ended on this lovely note it would have been a wonderful tale of redemption.   My father had been wrong about many things, as he sadly admitted on his death bed, and his banishment of this wonderful woman was just another of them.  Except, the story did not end on this lovely note.   I have written about this at length elsewhere and it wearieth me too much at the moment to dig it all up, but I offer you the bones, which are hopefully illustrative enough to illuminate my point.

An unflinching advocate of social change when I knew her, a crusader for the underdog and righteous fighter for the oppressed, she had become, several decades later, a deeply conservative supporter of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Glen Beck and a host of other characters that would have made her earlier self recoil.  She asked if I’d be willing to have a dialogue about politics, which she’d had a revelation about after 9/11, as a favor to her, since we had such excellent communication and all of her other liberal former friends had cut her off (and she had new ones who were, like her, political independents of the far right).  To my eternal regret, I agreed.

The correspondence did not go well.  She and I found no common ground, and worse, for me, whether she had a coherent answer or not (and I eventually tried to reduce our Bush era correspondence to two questions:  why Iraq?  How do you justify torture?) she was vehement.  She insisted she was right, whether her answers made sense or not.  All of the experts she believed in told her that if we did not rain death and torture on those who hate our freedom they’d literally be upon is in our beds, literally cutting our throats.  Besides, we never tortured anyone, she insisted, and we only water-boarded three people (which she didn’t consider torture, in any case) and only because they desperately needed it and there was, presumably, a ticking time bomb and it was us or them.

A difference of opinion, we might say, and not something that should lead to the end of an otherwise wonderful friendship.  Our disagreements escalated.  My detailed emails were dismissed for their hopelessly misguided liberal bias, the larger points unanswered.   It soon became an exercise in masochism for me.  I eventually had enough.  We had a long falling out, I came to see her exactly as my father had described her– pathologically competitive, incapable of giving an inch of ground and irrationally spoiling for a fight.  

After years of silence I sent her a piece about Ahimsa that I’d written, she wrote back very moved, and grateful for the chance to renew a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.  She agreed 100% that we would no longer discuss politics, that it was a third rail we would not allow to electrocute our friendship again.

Except, even though she continually renewed her promise not to send political emails, darn it,  she could not resist once in a while (sometimes accidentally, she claimed) sending me something she really thought might change my mind.  She’d apologize most of the time when I reminded her I didn’t want provocative political emails and she promised each time not to do it again.   But she simply couldn’t help herself, darn it, sometimes a given piece was just too convincing for me not to be convinced by.

During all the turmoil over the deaths of unarmed black young men at the hands of police she sent me a piece that complained about how these same agitators who protest against the police conveniently ignore the hundreds of times more deaths black young men inflict on each other.  An opinionated and simplistic response I found not only irrelevant, but idiotic and inflammatory, and not even well-written.  A self-appointed American pundit compares killings by the police, sworn to serve and protect, with killings by violent criminal gangs, sworn to get rich or die trying?  This is your response to protests against police killings of unarmed civilians?  Really?

But, see, she couldn’t help it, you dig?  She was still earnestly trying to convince me she was right, get me to see the truth, get me on board with those who see the light, no matter how many times I’d expressed how these attempts make me feel.  I was so willing to have frank dialogue about so many things… why so closed minded about politics?

To me, there is only one explanation for this seeming irrationality that makes sense.  This is one thing that happens to anger that is swallowed whole:  it comes out as otherwise unexplainable tone deaf determination to be right that cannot consider the provocative effect it will have on the person it is directed to.  

The expression is very often directed at someone who had nothing to do with the original swallowed anger, which starts early in childhood, goes into a mass of general anger and creates the conditions for this kind of righteous moral tone-deafness.  And it’s “innocent”, you dig, and it conveniently becomes another proof that the person who gets upset over it is just an irrationally angry hot-head himself.  

The People rest.

Meditation on Discouragement

Courage is a rare and indispensable thing.  It is necessary for overcoming fear, which is all around us in a tumultuous world that ends, inevitably, in our certain death.   I don’t mean courage in the sense of being able to rush headlong into danger, although, in the moment sometimes it comes to that, but more the daily courage to act on what you know to be true in the face of an immense crowd chanting the opposite, loudly and constantly.  Or in the face of a small, silent crowd, for that matter.

Encouragement is a good and important thing to anyone facing any kind of challenge.  Note the way ‘courage’ is embedded in the word encouragement.  We can actually give courage by sincerely encouraging.  Presumably one encouraged consistently during the formative years will internalize enough fearlessness to continue without the need for external encouragement.   Blessed are these people, instilled with an incalculably valuable gift by the people who raised them.

Me, some days I find myself looking through the eyes of my grandmother’s beloved little brother who never made it out of Vishnivetz.   The youngest of seven Marchbein children, my grandmother spoke of him with love, and a glitter of joy in her eyes, the one time she mentioned him to me.   She was scratching my back, no doubt, as she often did when I was a boy, and told me about how much she loved her wonderful little brother, whose name was a Yiddish diminutive variation on Joe.  

No mention, of course, of what became of him, or the other six siblings, though I would find out years later exactly how things ended for them all.  Explaining, at least in part, why my grandmother resorted to so much vodka so often in her final years.

I am that beloved youngest sibling, standing on the lip of a ravine on the northern outskirts of Vishnevetz, in my underwear, amid the pounding of drums, the crashing of cymbals and the drunken ruckus of Ukrainian peasants who are trying on my clothes and scrambling over the ravine like demented monkeys.  It is evening, the sky is darkening.  I am waiting, and I can see what I’m waiting for.  The group before me has just had it — a bullet in the back of the head, one for each.  One more shot for the occasional twitcher and then a little dirt thrown over this layer.  “Next,” motions the Nazi in charge, like the maitre d’ at a horribly overpriced restaurant the critics can’t get enough of. 

I cannot get past this ancestral memory at the moment, though I try.  It is more than enough to stop me in my tracks, force me to the keyboard to try to tap it out of mind.   Some days the incomprehensible hatred, greed and stupidity of human beings lays on my heart like an anchor.   Why should such long ago events, no matter how terrible, stop me from doing what I need to do today?  Where is the courage to acknowledge it as just another terrible and distracting thought, one to think and let go of, and let myself get back to work?

What is work?   Today it is sitting at the kitchen table, where the new laptop is set up and ready to go, and clicking “play”, the timer on my cellphone running.  Watching the pitch that I need to refine, make sure it’s as close to ready as I believe it may well be, note what I still have to improve.   I have been working on to it now for over a month.   My immediate task is to make sure the automation is working correctly and timing the presentation, which aims to be about ten minutes long. 

Does not sound like particularly hard work, though I’ve been nervously unable to get to it so far.  Instead I am thinking of a ravine I never saw, on the outskirts of an old town cursed by God himself.

Of course, it’s the fearful difficulty of the entire enterprise that is upon me today.  The arbitrary slaughter of my family thirteen years before I was born is just a manifestation of my feelings of futility.   The fear is knowing that everything is riding on the pitch being a wonderful evocation of the thing I’ve been working on, unpaid, for the last few years.  

An excellent sales pitch is the difference between life and death, I understand that finally.   No shame in being a shameless shill for something that can help so many kids, give myself a better and more productive life in the process, I understand that now too.   I’m ready to do it, truly, and working on it.  Except for the feeling of discouragement I have to talk myself out of.

The pitch will explain why the program I’ve created, which has worked 100 out of 100 times, under very bad circumstances about half the time, and even been greatly appreciated by several amazed adults who’ve seen it in action, is something the NYC public school system, and every children’s hospital and juvenile cancer ward, should pay to have their kids participate in.  

The good work will then go on, the joyful laughter will be heard, the heartwarming feelings will be stirred.  The alternative?  Nothingness, the years theorizing, designing, field-testing, being delightfully confirmed in my theories, refining, trying to document, raise funds, publicize… gone with no meaningful trace.

I’ve refined the pitch now for a few weeks, showed draft 3 to two professionals last week who gave me excellent feedback.  I am using their notes to make draft 4 much better.  It is already much better, after several hours work on it yesterday.  I am sure of it.  

All that remains for me to do at the moment is to press “play”, start the timer, and watch the show.  Then I will know how close I am to having something I can present that will do the bulk of the selling for this wonderful program; that and being in and out of the sales meeting in 20 minutes or less and leaving the potential purchaser with a warm feeling of confidence in me and my product.  Nothing to it, baby.  

And so I have successfully talked myself into doing the obvious now, as soon as I’ve hit the “publish” button I’ll head right in there with my timer.  

Even though I am also, clearly and at the same time, still standing by that godforsaken ravine in Eastern Europe waiting for that coup de grâce as the supercilious maitre d’ distractedly fusses with the collar of his uniform in the hideously warm Ukrainian night.

The Blatch Settlement

The devil famously cavorts in the details, leaving a sloshy trail of offal for the squeamish to tread while picking among the good intentions of the compilers of pertinent details.

I’m thinking suddenly of the so-called Blatch Settlement, an agreement entered into between The Legal Aid Society (“Blatch” on behalf of a class of the disabled in public housing, one of whom was named Blatch) and New York City Housing Authority (“NYCHA”on behalf of the public authority’s right to evict the disabled).   It is as good an example as any of the imperfection of the law.  No surprise, as it’s created and agreed to by necessarily imperfect people.  The result is predictable:  those most affected by it have the least to say about it, the rules are imposed on them by those with the least at stake.   With all that, Blatch is a kind of masterpiece of its kind.  The tasteful marriage of modest, yielding reform and extroverted, stubborn status quo.

A little background:  NYCHA is subsidized housing in New York City. Tenants pay something like 30% of their monthly income to live in these tall, vertical low-income replacements for slum tenements.   The amenities are often not great, there is more crime in NYCHA projects than in the average apartment complex, there is more fear and hostility from the building staff than in your average apartment building.  NYCHA runs the NYC version of the projects.  

NYCHA has many, many buildings.  Hundreds of thousands of low income NYC tenants live in this “housing of last resort.”   When you are evicted from a NYCHA apartment that’s usually the last stop before homelessness or prison.  As they say in the movies: your choice, bitches.

A woman with severe mental problems who lived in a NYCHA apartment in Brooklyn was summoned to court for nonpayment of something like $100 in monthly rent.  She may have missed two months rent when they summoned her to court.  She had been refusing to pay because, among other things, Reagan’s people were leaving cans of human feces in her bathtub.  

The agoraphobic woman did not show up in court.  Since she didn’t appear, nor did anyone show up in her place, a default judgment was entered against her.  Several days later the marshal posted a 72 hour notice of eviction on her door.  

The marshal’s notice is literally the sign for the tenant to rush to court, as they are notified they have a right to on the notice, and have the judge sign an Order to Show Cause which gives them another chance to argue why they should not be evicted:  I have the money, I’m getting the money, I have rats playing cards at my dining room table. Tenants can sometimes get many Orders to Show Cause signed, dragging out evictions for months, or even years.   Landlords naturally hate this and NYCHA hates it too.  

In the case of Eleanor Bumpurs, a large, reclusive NYCHA tenant with a history of emotional disturbance, the marshal, police and armed NYCHA employees came to her door the day of the eviction, in October, 1984, ordering Ms. Bumpurs out.   Here is a great and terrible paragraph from the wikipedia entry on Eleanor Bumpurs describing the wisdom of the city bureaucrats prior to the eviction day:

Four days before the eviction attempt, the city sent a psychiatrist to visit Bumpurs. He concluded that Bumpurs was “psychotic” and “unable to manage her affairs properly” and should be hospitalized. A Social Services supervisor decided that the best way to help Bumpurs was to evict her first, then hospitalize her.[3]

It would be a fateful decision for the tenant.  Ms. Bumpurs did not cooperate. Floridly psychotic people are not known for being cooperative, as even a NYC Social Services supervisor might have known.  Things escalated until eventually the authorities broke down her door, as they had the legal right to, and forcibly tried to subdue the large, hysterical 66 year-old and remove her from the apartment they were seizing, a home no longer hers.  

The story I recall hearing at the time was that, fearing for her life, in a nightgown, she attacked them wielding a large kitchen knife.  She was, according to the men who killed her, threatening their lives at that moment as they tried to force her out of what had been, until recently, her home.  At least one of the men present fired two blasts from his shotgun, the first shattering her knife wielding hand, the second putting nine pellets into her chest, killing her.

e bumpurs 

The City eventually paid a $200,000 settlement to her family.  Meanwhile, the chief judge in NYC formed a commission to figure out how to prevent this kind of horror from happening again.  The solution was the creation of the deeply flawed Guardian Ad Litem (“protector for the suit”)  program.  The judge would appoint a “GAL” to stand in the shoes of a person not able to adequately defend themselves against an eviction attempt.   Initially most of the Housing Court GALs were lawyers, but I believe that presently no GALs are lawyers.  There is no requirement that a GAL be a lawyer, and as time went by, and GALs were treated by the court with less and less respect, and paid a modest flat fee for an often enormous amount of work, sometimes including multiple Orders to Show Cause and a dozen court appearances, it became untenable for lawyers to act as Housing Court GALs.

NYCHA has a zero tolerance policy for tenants.  If they are summoned to a hearing by management and don’t show up, or don’t shape up, the NYCHA administrative judge, two steps later, issues an order to evict them.  They may be hostile and defensive at these hearings, act like animals backed into a corner by indignant NYCHA staff and aggressive NYCHA attorneys (as a group the most reflexively prosecutorial I’ve met), whatever, they get their say, or not, and then a NYCHA judge finds them ineligible to stay in housing of last resort.  

The good news for tenants is that NYCHA has to bring the tenant to court before they can actually get the warrant to legally evict them.  The bad news is that the NYCHA hearing officer’s decision is binding on the NYC Housing Court judge and momentary delay of the eviction is the only play for the Housing judge who finds the tenant unable to defend herself.  

I was called to act as GAL by a very compassionate judge troubled by having to evict a gentle woman of obviously limited intellect who NYCHA found had illegally allowed banned felon children to visit her on three occasions over the course of several years.  Not preventing a visit from a family member with a felony conviction is grounds for eviction under NYCHA’s rules.  In that case I was able to use the NYCHA hearing officer’s comment that she appeared to be a “nice, gentle woman” (“who happened to raise three felons”– which I left off) as a lever to pry the administrative case back open.  I asked to be appointed as her GAL in the administrative hearing as well as the court proceeding.  

The NYCHA hearing officer later noted to me that it had been a mistake to write that the tenant seemed nice.  He pointed out that the second half of that sentence pointedly referred to her children, the felons, but admitted he’d been foolish to include a reference to what a sympathetic and harmless seeming old woman she was.  The law is the law, and eviction is the punishment for disobeying a clear NYCHA mandate.

In perhaps my finest moment as a lawyer (a moment extended over the course of over a year), I managed to get the charges against her dismissed by NYCHA and her case in Housing Court dismissed.  It was the result of more than a hundred hours of hard, and at times inspired, work, including forensic investigation and vigorous cross-examination of NYCHA personnel.  

The post-hearing pages I reserved the right to submit, wrote and sent to the hearing officer were, without a doubt, the most persuasively argued pages of my legal career.  I was paid the statutory $600 to help this helpless and likable woman avoid eviction.  That comes out to less than $6 an hour for my legal work, once you do the long division.

Her final NYCHA administrative hearing was not very long before my mother died, and as we stood outside the hearing room, feeling we had quite possibly won – or at least put up a hell of a good fight–  the tenant I eventually saved from eviction told me how sorry she was to hear that I was losing my mother.

“Your mother must be a great person to have raised a son like you,” she told me as I shook her hand the last time we saw each other.

This, clearly, was a rare and exceptional case.  More common was a hard kick in the ass from an overworked and frustrated judge with no dog handy to boot.

The Blatch Settlement was a hard-negotiated agreement that in a case where NYCHA knew the tenant was disabled, or unable to adequately defend herself, NYCHA had a duty to inform the NYCHA administrators and the Housing Court that the tenant required the services of a Guardian Ad Litem.  It required the appointment of a GAL in such cases.  So now the tenant who can’t speak for herself has someone at the table who can.  A great step forward, no?

Except that there is nothing in the Blatch settlement forcing NYCHA to do this, no real consequence for NYCHA’s failure to do it, except that it’s easier now for a non-attorney GAL in Housing Court, if he knows about Blatch, to have the case of a disabled tenant slated for eviction after a one-sided administrative ordeal without a GAL, sent back to NYCHA for a new hearing with a GAL.  Then back to Housing Court, and here we go loop de loo.  

If the tenant had a GAL at the administrative hearing, and NYCHA does not inform the judge in Housing Court of this fact, as unambiguously required by Blatch: no harm, no foul.  The judge merely delays the proceeding and appoints a GAL.

Of course, I know the real problem here.  It has more to do with my own contemptibly naive belief in some twisted version of justice, with what SHOULD be, than with any law.  I suppose I get this from my father, and it’s fitting, in a way, to wake up thinking about the Blatch Settlement on Father’s Day.  Do I really, in my heart of hearts, imagine that, as a group, the descendants of people who were once legally sold, raped, killed for disobedience, forced to work virtually unpaid and lynched in many states for a century after slavery was abolished, are going to be given anything like a fair shake by the legal system, even in this exceptional nation, the land of the free and the home of the brave?  

I can see my father’s knowing smirk.  

As my grandmother would say in answer to such a question:  “please….” turning her face away with a big, dismissive wave of her thick, expressive hand.

Creativity revisited

Why this obsession with creativity?  I do not sell mine, after all, why is creativity so important to me?

Never mind.  Not interesting right now.  I want to present John Cleese’s excellent observations about the necessary elements for creativity as concisely as possible.  I need it in a tiny nutshell, to add to a pitch to help me sell my program, which provides exactly those conditions to theoretical elementary school kids.

The great John Cleese describes five essential conditions for creativity:  place, start time, ending time, confidence and humor.   

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be, we’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet for a minute or two, be quiet.

Place for creativity: how about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames? With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Time:  ideally about two hours.   This allows for set-up and clean-up and leaves 90 minutes or so for time concerns to disappear.  The kids now have all the time in the world for leisurely play, letting things develop in their time, being comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  

Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time.”    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.  

What gives a person confidence?  Someone smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.  

What takes away confidence?  Critical comments, ridicule, skepticism, indifference to your best efforts. 

The last part, humor, happens naturally in a room where children are playing, relaxed, involved, having fun, trying out the craziest ideas they can think of, not worried about anyone bothering them.  

It’s not unusual to hear participants laughing at the end of a session.

Fear — and the optimism bias

Entrepreneurs, we learn, often have an optimism bias.  This bias tells them that, although there are dozens of practical reasons they will not succeed, and actual odds they can study anywhere that predict the overwhelming likelihood of failure, that there is a very real magical chance the thing will fly.   Without that optimism, why go to the track day after day betting on the same flea infested long-shot nag?  

Seriously, without the bias toward believing that the unique and excellent business plan will succeed, in spite of the probable impossibility of success, no entrepreneur would take the risky leap.  

It’s true, of course, that most entrepreneurs don’t gamble their own money, that would make the risk even more foolish.  If they can transmit their optimism about the idea, make their excitement infectious, people will give them money.  Entrepreneurs generally promise a nice monetary return on investment, the nicer the return, the better, and the more angels who will flutter in to ante up, but there are other returns a purpose driven enterprise can deliver.

The reason I am thinking about this is my own flickering optimism bias.  I heard the term ‘optimism bias’ just now for the first time, on a TED talk, and recognized it immediately as a feature of my current life.  I have to believe that, in spite of the darkness surrounding this worthwhile program of mine, from lack of partners, to general incomprehension and lack of interest, to my lack of knowledge of essential areas of creating a business, down the line, that there is a light switch on the wall somewhere.   When this switch is turned on the program, already worked out and smoothly operating, successful 100 out of 100 times so far, will be seen for what it is– the simple, fun educational playground I have created.

But like I say, my optimism bias flickers.  It becomes a “they’re right, I AM fucking insane” bias quite regularly.  I feel mad a certain amount of the time.  Here’s representative snapshot of this fight between biases.

I know now that I have to make this program tangible, package it smartly to turn it into a salable product.  I need to put it into palpable form that gives a taste and feel of the thing in action.  I have to create brochures, film clips, books, pitches, tangible things that quickly and colorfully conjure its excitement, lay out its potential, entice people to get involved.  Make principals realize how it will make them look like instant innovators,  putting original animation made by third graders on their schools’ website.  Make administrators want the program for the glory of their district, make social work students want to get involved in facilitating the workshop, for a decent fee, to write grad school papers on social dynamics among different aged children, lure a grant writer who is also a painter or musician.  Do a few of these things well and … the thing could be up and running in fairly short order, no matter the remaining challenges.

So I have put together a little photo book to show people, let them hold in their hands, flip the several thick pages of, get a quick sense of what the workshop is about, why it’s unique, why they should be a little bit excited about it.  I figure I’ll send this book as a thank you perk to the generous people who donated money in the December 2013 crowdfunding campaign. They have not heard from me or the program in a while and some may actually be excited by the colorful little book, glad to see their donations have gone to something positive.  

I’ll include a short personal thank you note to each one and invite them to check out the redesigned website.  A few will even click and see a moment of animation.  All to the good. .The books are a little expensive, but they’re nicely made, feel good in the hands, they’re cool objects filled with childish creation.  If you go for that kind of thing, you will like them a lot.   

Most of the dozen or so who’ve seen them so far have thought them cool, even beautiful, and agreed that they convey what the program does in a very short form.  These are  things I did not have before I struggled to create this book: a nice looking, concise evocation of the program.  The prototype is cool, even if most of the people who get the finished book will flip through it and be somewhat confused by what the heck it means, why I went to the expense and took the trouble to send such an oddly elaborate thank you note.  

Many people are not engaged with the creative impulse very much, if at all, and so the magic in the book will seem like nonsense to them.  The true biggest selling point of the animation workshop not the animation, which is actually a bi-product.  The real value of the workshop is that it provides a thick slice of time in a kid’s day when all that is asked of them is: have fun, create something cool, don’t bother anyone else.  They are surrounded by art supplies, lights and cameras, they create the action.  Machines are waiting to help them turn their wild actions into animation.  They learn many things at the same time, but that comes along with the free exercise of their imaginations and they hardly notice it.  The workshop is literally a model of John Cleese’s creativity lab in action.

His five guidelines come to mind:

place:  have a room where you go to be creative.  Leave the rest of the world outside.

time:  take some time to leave life’s distractions outside of the room.  Get into play mode.  Kids are better at this than adults, obviously.

time: a block of time, 90 minutes is ideal, to play, with no eye on the clock (adults are there to keep track of that) and no thought of anything besides having a good time.

good cheer: no voice of reason in the room telling you why your idea is stupid, won’t work, is amateurish, why you stink, suck, bite, why others do it better, why mine is better.   Without that asshole in the room, people having a good time making up wild stuff often find themselves laughing.  Laughing is a good and healthy thing, most would agree.

A time to end: play cannot go on forever.  There comes a time to wrap it up and leave the excitement where you can pick it up next time.

OK, so here’s that snapshot I mentioned before of my optimism bias in mid-flip.  

I show the book to several people who either praise it in some way or nod that it’s good. Some don’t want to hurt my feelings, of course, one or two may really not get it, but everyone generally conveys that it’s a good job, that the book itself is nicely done.  

I have one friend who doesn’t really understand why I am not concentrating on fundraising, who sees me cowering, hunkered down in a molasses-like marketing mode, writing pages like this instead of taking the actions needed to succeed.  I can only assume he’s thinking those things, based on things he’s said and confusion he’s expressed about my sudden interest in creating these books.  I show him the book.  He flips the pages, says it’s well done but expresses confusion about what I’m going to use the book for.  I tell him, but it seems to make as little sense to him as the previous time I mentioned it.

His comment stays with me.  I can explain it to him again, try to persuade him, but it’s raining, and time to say goodbye, and he’s looking for a cab.  Afterwards I’m thinking– sheez, he’s probably right.  What the hell am I thinking about with this fancy book?   

Here is where the optimism bias yields to pure, unreasoning fear.  I see myself, in light of that one confused comment, cowering, not concentrating on fundraising, hunkered down in a molasses-like marketing mode, writing pages like this instead of taking the actions needed to succeed.  

The snapshot is also another illustration, if one was needed, of the importance of hearing and really being heard.

The Limits of Pretending

We can always pretend.  Pretending is cool, it’s part of playing.    Make believe things we dream up can be sweeter than real ones.  Pretending is fun, unless it turns into a somersault try that falls flat and leaves the attempter in a body cast.  Then it becomes hard, and probably unhealthy, to pretend nothing harmful is at work.

Pretending, I should say, is not the same as believing that a dream, worked towards steadily and at times inspiredly, can be made real, in spite of the odds against it.  

Let us stipulate, for purposes of this post, that pretending is different than pursuing a dream, even if that dream is extremely unlikely ever to become a reality.  Pretending is knowing the thing can never be real, and acting as though it’s real anyway.  It can be tricky to tell the difference, sometimes, but pretend is make believe, based only on something better that we’d rather see than the thing in front of us.  

A wise man said the greatest miracle of human existence is that we all carry on like we’re never going to die.  This is a kind of pretending most of us do much of the time.   Not only is every one of us, merely by taking breath, getting ready to die, but every creature any one of us loves or will ever love — their death is a certainty.  We ignore this, or pretend it’s not so, because to have life’s evanescence before us at all times would make life too painfully sad to endure.   We live in spite of the certainty of death and our lives are given a certain urgency by the intermittent knowledge that we are hanging here by spider webs, taking part in this miraculous and fleeting world at the whim of fate.

We might often do better to pretend we don’t see certain things.  But there is a limit.

When a pattern emerges, becomes predictable, harmful, hard to ignore– pretending it is not so can become difficult.  It can also be unhealthy.

“Oh… here we go…” groans the wary polemicist.

I say again — we can pretend the first time that we did not hear the hurtful words, the ringing unsympathy, the lack of generosity.  It might help to ignore something ugly the first time.  It might have just been a bad moment, better to let it pass.  We can pretend a second time, too, twice could just be a coincidence.  But the limit eventually comes.

“It comes to you, oh, judgmental and punitive one,” says the reflexive arguer.

It comes to every one, my friend.  It comes when the limit of patience and ability to pretend is reached.  It comes when the sore nerve is probed again, seemingly for no reason but to get the reaction.   To pretend the sore nerve has not been probed again?  To what purpose?

Unbreakable

Sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the house where I grew up, my sister and I listened to a long-playing record we liked very much.    It was about Abraham Lincoln and was called something like Freedom Train.   

These big round monophonic discs were called LPs and were made of something stiffer and heavier than the vinyl that records would later be made of.   The record revolved on a turntable where a needle at the end of an arm drew sounds from its grooves.   The sounds magically came out of a little speaker in our record player, which folded up into a box when not in use.

We listened to this evocation of the Great Emancipator, flipped it over, heard the other side, also excellent, and were discussing whether to hear it again.  I must have just learned to read.   I puzzled out several unfamiliar words on the label of the LP.  One of them was “unbreakable”.  I was amazed to read this.  My sister, too young to show real surprise at such a fact, looked on with interest.

I took the LP, held it in the flat of my hand and turned my hand over. The LP fell the short distance from my child’s arm to the wooden floor and broke into five or six pieces.

I don’t remember my parents being particularly mad when they found out what happened, though they never replaced the LP.  My mother may have shook her head with a wistful expression.  The expression would have said “oy, welcome to the world, my son.”

The internet is a great resource

Whatever else it may be, the internet is a great resource.  I seldom write something about any fact without verifying what I can with a search on the internets, as our plain-spoken former president used to call the internet.

A moment ago I wrote a phrase that referred to “the mobius strip of our DNA”.  I was picturing the double helix and it looked in my mind like images of mobius strips I have known.   There seemed to be a disconnect, an element of physical impossibility in the blueprint of life being the mathematical abstraction of a twisted oval with only one side. I checked to see if DNA actually was a mobius strip.   I didn’t want to say it was, if it wasn’t.  A quick search turned up this wonderful answer:

Best Answer:  Although bacterial DNA is indeed circular and twisty, the main difference between it and a Moebius strip is that in order for the bacteria to reproduce, it has to be able to separate the two strands and give the two strands to its two “children”.

Consider a zipper as an analogy. Take a long zipper, remove the “pull”, and sew the ends together to make a circle. If you sewed it together without any twists (bacteria have an enzyme that de-twists the DNA during replication), when you pull the sections apart you will get two “half zippers”. This is what the bacteria does. After it gets two “half DNA’s” it has enzymes that use each of the halves as a template to synthesyze the other half. With your zippers, it would be like taking the half zipper and then fitting loose teeth into it – you would end up with two whole zippers where there was originally only one.

Now if you sewed your original zipper together with a half-twist, like in a Moebius strip, when you separated it apart you wouldn’t get two half-zippers – instead you would get a single half-zipper that was twice as long as the original zipper. This is no good to the bacteria. It wants to give each of its children a copy of its DNA. If its genetic material was like a Moebius strip, one of its children would get a double dose of DNA, and the other would get nothing, and die.

The similarities the article tries to draw between Moebius supercoiling and human consciousness are just plain loony. It’s an absolutely meaningless comparison. Anybody who uses the terms “isomorphism” and “limnocentrically” in the same sentence is not to be trusted.  [emphasis mine].

Dig it.