Category Archives: musing

Have no negative feelings about anything

If you pack up several of your best recent drawings, address the envelope to a loved one, weigh it, put proper postage on it and walk two blocks,  haltingly with a cane, to mail it to the very house you walked from, have no feeling if it does not arrive twelve days later, or even if it never arrives.   You must not expect things like a government agency holding up its end of the contract it makes when it sells you postage stamps.  It is best always to have no expectation of anything so as not to be disappointed when the world appears to be an unredeemed series of utter shit shows.

Whatever you do, do not try to see your petty problem in any larger context.  There is only doom down the road that starts “I’ve mailed literally hundreds of letters in recent years, including to myself, and none ever took more than three or four days to arrive, what is different now?”  Where does this thought lead you?  To wonder why Biden has not yet removed the Trump megadonor UPS stock owning Postmaster who was appointed by Trump to destroy mail service in order to slow down receipt of mail-in ballots is a thought experiment you should not start.  It is a complicated issue, of course, since any one Nazi senator can block virtually any presidential appointment and Biden needs to appoint two members to the Postal board of governors before the manifestly corrupt Looey DeJoy can be removed from office and sent on his smirking, self-satisfied way.

Have no feelings about the idiotic sham of a solemn, long delayed Supreme Court proceeding to hear arguments establishing whether it is legally permissible for a sitting president, after losing an election, to lie to, whip up and unleash a violent armed mob to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of his electoral defeat. 

We hear a hypothetical about whether the sitting president may legally, and unaccountably, order the murder of the duly elected man who is about to replace him as president, and his running mate, and anyone next in line for the presidency, in order to stay in power after his legal term ends.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution.   Lets say, for example, that the president truly and honestly believes these people are evil vampires who drink the blood of innocent white Christian children.   After all, the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

If you can’t walk more than a block without pain, a year after your knee replacement surgery, and the surgeon has no idea how to fix it, that doesn’t give you the right to feel sorry for yourself. Self-pity never helped anyone.

If your primary Care doctor is hard to reach, unresponsive, inconsistent, arbitrary, find a new doctor.  If the new doctor immediately proves hard to reach, unresponsive, etc., do not jump to any conclusions you might come to regret.

And so on, down the fucking endless list of reasons to ever feel sadness, anger, disgust, anything negative.  Be happy all the time, no matter what.  Isn’t that the best fucking advice you ever heard?  Rejoice, there is never a good reason for negativity!  

How do people stay ahead of their demons?

Many people, to avoid thinking about painful or threatening things, keep themselves heroically, productively busy all day and go to bed exhausted.  They wake up early the next morning to work hard all day, every moment programmed down to the minute.  My father used to call this lifestyle “running a full flight pattern” and you can picture a harried, over-caffeinated air traffic controller doing the job of four, eyes darting constantly from the sky, to a computer screen, to the blinking dots on a wall map, to the sky, to the runways below, to his watch, to an open game of solitaire on another computer, to the coffee maker and so on.

Other people try to live in a more contemplative way, allowing time to think, feel, seek a little clarity in a world of chaos and senseless cruelty.  The usual example of a contemplative life is a monk in a monastery, though life in a monastery is highly programmed too.   I have always, from as far back as I can recall, preferred living an unharried life in this mercilessly harried world.  

I have to admit, I feel smugly superior to those running a full flight pattern, the coffee and cocaine achievers I’ve known, the exercise addicts, self-righteous compulsive workaholics of every stripe.  I am also compelled, of course, in this case in my disdain for the outer directed, those who march ahead according to the dictates of a brutal status quo keeping themselves constantly too busy to ever question the orders they are following or why they are running full tilt all the time.  

The most engaging part of a person is their inner life, what they are like when nobody is judging them.  To be allowed to see the vulnerable core of another person, to me, is the greatest gift a person can give you.  The trust and acceptance involved in this kind of sharing is, to me, the essence of love.

I am living in a fucking dream world, of course.  I spend an hour or two every day typing, putting my thoughts and feelings, and sometimes my dreams, in order, making them as clear as I can, to myself and to anyone who might stumble on them.  Even if you are well-paid to write, and I am not, man (or woman) does not live by writing alone.  It is a beautiful and indispensable thing, to be able to write clearly, but it is not something you can do all day.

Generally, when I am stressed I have always gone for a long walk, or a strenuous bike ride.  Or do some pushups, which always get my heart pounding and make me feel strong.  A brisk bit of exercise is a wonderful thing for calming the mind, getting some air flowing through the stuffy attic.  Currently I’m unable to walk more than a block or two, complications from knee replacement surgery almost a year ago.  Pushups lately are also off the menu, as the pain from my left synovium seems to have migrated up the entire left side of my body, into my left hand and left shoulder.  Physical exercise, an old standby, is not one of my stress relief options these days.

I always feel better when I spend an hour or two playing the guitar, or, in a pinch, the piano.  My left hand, while willing and able, is playing on borrowed time before the pain in the fingers make it impossible to continue.  The fingers get the unmistakable message in about five minutes.  Ordinarily, in my frustration, I’d throw myself on the ground and grunt out some push ups, but, currently, that would only lead to shoulder pain in addition to the hand and knee.

So what do we say about these constraints on a contemplative lifestyle?  I’m fucked, in a word.

Luckily for me, I have inner resources many do not.  Unluckily for me, you find the outer resources curtailed enough and your inner resources become overloaded. 

Then, in a word, you’re fucked.

The lessons of history require critical thinking

Take the case of John C. Calhoun, one of our nation’s most famous and influential advocates of the rights of slaveholders.

Read the short biography of Mr. Calhoun at the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. You can’t get much more official than the U.S. government’s Office of the Historian. Here’s the link.

Here is a quick hit on google. Compare the results, notice all the obvious things the official portrait has officially airbrushed out of the biography of Secretary of State John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina.

Then look at the tell-all fucking face of the official portrait of the one-year diplomat’s influence:

This is from Clemson University‘s website:

link

In 2024 this kind of meticulous research takes a few seconds at most, plus two minutes to skim over some of the entries and then one minute to think.

Think about these words from the last speech he wrote. In 1850, dying of consumption he had his colleague, Senator James Mason read this on the floor of the Senate.

The Union cannot … be saved by eulogies on the Union, however splendid or numerous. The Cry of ‘Union, Union, the glorious Union!’ can no more prevent disunion than the cry of ‘Health, health, glorious health!’ on the part of the physician, can save a patient lying dangerously ill. …

How can the Union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is, by a full and final settlement, on the principle of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. …

If you who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.[16]

Link

Trauma for beginners

Trauma is the unbearable feeling of being powerless against a malevolent, deadly force intent on destroying you. It is the searing terror felt in a nightmare, the panicked vulnerability of not only being defenseless against a deadly enemy, but also finding yourself unprotected by anyone you’d expect to defend you. Trauma is an actual wound, of a different order from the things that annoy, frighten, hurt and threaten us because it is deadly, relentless and will certainly kill us.

A quick internet search adds this: trauma is a person’s experience of emotional distress resulting from an event that overwhelms the capacity to emotionally digest it.

Being traumatized regularly changes our reactions to the world, our health and even our DNA.

When you need understanding and a loved one suddenly shows you a face like this:

You are fucked. If you have experienced trauma, and a pattern of betrayal during moments when you were most vulnerable, you can smirk and shake your head at an old friend glaring silently with the implacable mask of an indomitable psychopath. You can opine to someone else about what an immature, enraged asshole the glarer is. You can shrug it off like an adult and go about your business.

It is only later, when you try to close your eyes and go to sleep that you find yourself unable to keep your eyelids closed. You are suddenly hyper-vigilant, disoriented, in a world unaccountably turned vicious and supremely threatening. The essence of trauma is that terrifying feeling of defenselessness, of betrayal by those who claim to love you.

There is a class of traumatized people who become reflexively brutal dominators of others. They only feel safe when they’re certain that they can control everyone around them, that there is no possible threat to them in any given room. They exert this social dominance using charm, guile, a politician’s toolkit, all sorts of devices, until they feel threatened. Then their only possible response is to attack and eliminate the source of the threat, and they do this by any means necessary. They will literally kill you, if it comes to that.

There are other traumatized people who, able to feel the heavy weight of betrayal without being crushed by it, maintain their empathy toward others. This type seeks reconciliation after a conflict with a loved one rather than demanding capitulation on pain of eternal, blind revenge.

I don’t know what decides which traumatized person emerges from trauma as the sadist/masochist or the injured nurturer. It may be that the latter group found themselves saved by someone who showed them real compassion when it mattered most while the destructive ones never found any relief when they were in the most extreme pain.

What I do know now is how essential it is to stay away from the extremely damaged type that lives in a dark, zero sum world where there is no possibility of redemption once hurt occurs. Those fuckers will kill you, if it comes to a choice between you and them. If they become dictator they will build death camps to put disloyal, betraying fuckers like you in. Count on it, their type has no other choice.

Silence is evil’s handiest tool

What could be more fearful when you are in trouble and call out for help than the lack of sound that mimics the silence of the grave itself? Silence by way of response is a great technique for expressing things that you may find difficult to say — merely say nothing. You can always defend the innocence of silence.

However in specific silence you have the permission for every monstrous injustice ever done in the name of demented righteousness. Slavery, Nazism, misogyny, every instance of abuse, lynching, enabled by the silence of those who could have spoken up but didn’t. Silence also erases all hope of talking things through, clearing up bad feelings, making peace.

Silence, while sending a message very powerfully, takes no courage, no effort, nada. You just keep your lips sealed and let the silence of death have the perfectly defensible last word.

When you hear it offered as the last word, understand the moral cowardice at work and trouble yourself no longer with the imposer of silence.

Suffering is not a contest

You may have noticed that certain people treat suffering like a competitive sport.  There’s long been a senseless, passionate public debate, for example, about who had it worse:  

a) millions of people, over hundreds of years, kidnapped, sold, dragged in chains across the ocean, packed together like sardines, countless souls dying and thrown overboard to the sharks that always trailed such ships, the survivors sold into lives of unspeakable horror once they got to their new, eh, I suppose we call it “home”, or, 

b) millions of people, over a span of a few years, chosen by their religion, herded into disease-ridden slums for abuse and eventual collection to be taken by cattle car to camps where they could be killed en masse, the lucky survivors getting to work as slaves until they could work no more.

In a world that was not insane, you would have to be insane to argue about which atrocity was worse. Can any atrocity be worse than either one of those? And there are many other atrocities in history, and even in the present world, that are as bad as those two, particularly for the victims and survivors of those atrocities. 

But I’m not here today to write about politics. I’m thinking of something more personal, the suffering of people around us, the suffering of people in our lives.  if you are not a guitar player, or a violinist, or someone who uses one hand for a specific, skilled task, sharp pain and stiffness in your left hand, annoying and concerning as it may be, is not a reason for despair. If you play music every day, and it is one of your great comforts, and suddenly one of your hands is too stiff and painful to do that, fuck.

Humans look for comfort (all animals do, actually), we look for empathy, we look for help when we are in trouble. Not everyone is built that way of course, some take comfort only in feeling superior to others. In their citadel of desperate superiority there is little space for empathy and for helping anybody except for quid pro quo maintenance of the humble servants of their need to feel better than others.

When I come across one of these assholes, I have to remind myself of my vow to first do no harm.  To forget that is to become more like the thing I hate.

To learn or not to learn

Anything important that you learn leads to new things to learn, for those excited about learning.   We are constantly building on the lessons in our life, if we are inclined that way.  It is possible to be quite content with what one knows, rest on our present level of expertise and become incurious, but for me, life is about  getting better and better at life itself.

Things that hurt us, things we do that hurt others we care about, remind us of work we still need to do, things we need to learn.  If I am constantly wounded by the same thing, I can learn to move my head out of the way instead of leaning in to that particular punch in the face.  I can learn to be kinder, more patient with people, know when it is important to withdraw, give others space.   In my life I’ve come to understand that if we give others power over us and they misuse it more than once, there is an important lesson in that.

There are some challenging things that can be impossible to do without intelligent feedback from others.  We simply can’t see the bigger picture sometimes.  A guy in obvious turmoil, a stranger, asked if he could talk to me.  He told me the story of how his wife left him after he fell off the wagon, his life was so painful that he reached out to a stranger, as his AA sponsor had advised him to do, instead of getting drunk, as was his long habit in painful situations.  As a stranger hearing the story an obvious thing hit me as soon as he told me that his wife was also in Alcoholics Anonymous.   His alcohol binge was a direct threat to her sobriety so she packed a bag and moved out.

He was shocked at my brilliant insight.  I told him it was as obvious as the nose on his face, though we also both agreed that in a dark room, even with a mirror, you literally can’t see the nose on your face, even though you’re breathing through it, can touch it, etc.

We are all in a metaphorical dark room sometimes, unable to see what is instantly clear once a light is turned on.  How do we turn on the light?   Often the darkness is illuminated by someone else, someone who has lived through something similar, someone who just knows how to listen, someone merely stating the obvious.  Obvious as it may also be, sometimes someone simply saying it out loud to us is enough to turn on a light in the blackness, once we hear it.

Our lives are shaped by our perceptions.  Reality itself is only our perception of reality.  Our perception is formed by the stories we believe, stories give us the lens to see everything else through.  Some stories are helpful and can teach us important things we need to know to live richer lives.  Other stories are harmful, confirm our worst suspicions, fuel our fear and anger and teach us only to repeat our past mistakes over and over and justify them better and better to ourselves. 

I suppose wisdom comes from learning to embrace the true sounding stories that give us more health, more peace, more ability to understand others.  The other kind of stories, bad news, bad karma, and more of the same incomprehensibly fucked up shit.

You can’t argue with Nazis

A Nazi has a closed mind and a simple, even if irrational, explanation for everything. They will repeat their mantra over and over again in response to any point you try to raise. It is futile to argue with Nazis, but it is essential to persuade anybody who is not a Nazi that Nazis are fucking Nazis.

If you are anti-Nazi, you might as well ask a Nazi why they never investigated Hunter Biden for taking $2 billion from the murderous Saudi dictator while Hunter’s father was the president of the United States. Or why their partisan six-year investigation into Hunter and the new Benghazi Commission for grounds to impeach Joe, based on a reliable source (now indicted) who spouted Putin‘s hand fed propaganda, does not turn up the heat to the boiling point to finally lower the boom on the evil Hunter Biden, and the hundreds of viciously anti-Christian billionaire Jews (not to mention Chinese communists and Ukrainian fascists) who prop him up.

If somebody’s last word in every discussion is a variation on “I will never listen to you, asshole, no matter what, because I am right and you suck cocks in hell, along with your so-called facts” I would say it’s time to talk to somebody else. You cannot persuade somebody who is a Nazi that there is anything wrong with being a Nazi. Anybody who can’t see that there is something wrong with being a Nazi is a fucking Nazi.

My best advice, once you see a door is closed with a fanatical insistence on the door slammer’s righteousness, and the endlessly asserted claim that you are a completely delusional asshole, if not also a poisonous fucking Jew, see that closed door as a very good thing and keep on walking.