Category Archives: musing

Truth and Reconciliation

Got a supremely annoying phone call from a former old friend.  I don’t know what the point of the call was, except to do the hideous dance one last time.  

In the course of an aggravating conversation he continually justified his unreliability, made oblique references to my over-sensitivity, laughed at one point when I was sputtering slightly to finish a point he’d interrupted a couple of times for shows of peevishness.  He was angry that I wouldn’t grant him it had been nervous laughter and not the passive aggressive enjoyment of a weak and angry person who had succeeded in making his antagonist mad.  How dare I presume he was being passive aggressive, how dare I not let him tell me why he was laughing while I was trying to control my anger!  

He told me I’d been vicious, in writing of his unreliability, characterizing it and him so uncharitably, no matter how hurt or angry I might have been.    “Sometimes writing can be much more vicious than speech,” he pointed out, “and the attempts to sublimate and refine the pain and anger are more damaging than just having out with it.  How hurtful do you suppose those things on the blahg were to me?”

I grant him the truth of that, as I grant him most things.  One thing I don’t grant is being shouted down when I am making a point.

“The first precondition of a meaningful apology is the recognition that the person apologizing has hurt the person he is apologizing to.  It is an acknowledgment of why the other person was hurt, a demonstration of empathy, followed by an admission that the behavior was wrong and some assurance of not repeating the hurtful behavior.   It’s like the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa…”  suddenly I’m cut off by a loud voice.

“That was about murder and a system of brutality!  Nobody was killed or brutalized here!  You have this overblown tendency to make everything like that, everything is Hitler to you,” he thundered pre-emptively dismissing any point I may have been about to make.

I managed to finish my point anyway, though my lungs hurt by the time I was through, and not because I’d been shouting for more than a few seconds to break back in to finish my point.  

It is a funny thing about experiences that smell similar to the childhood abuse I experienced– I feel a certain burning in my lungs whenever I’m near it.

“If you won’t acknowledge how hurtful what you did was, intentionally or not, how important the thing you promised to help me with was to me, how many hours, literally days, elapsed before you even got back to me….”

“I called you seven and a half hours later, how is it my fault you never got that missed call?  Why didn’t you keep calling me when you didn’t hear back?  I had bronchitis!  You wrote vicious things about me on the blahg.  You…”

An imaginary friend winks, tilts his long necked beer bottle to me.

“You would have been much better off forgetting the Ahimsa shit for a minute and just calling this clown and saying what you had to say originally, when he started calling you a couple of days too late, and leaving wheedling voice mails, and calling your girl friend when he couldn’t get an immediate call back from you … it’s kind of funny that he kept referring to your ‘nine days of enraged silence’ toward him, that master of enraged silence.  I like when you counted off that it had actually been more like four or five days.  But you should have just said what you had to say, Dude, in as few words as originally would have sufficed.”

“We’re done.  You’re a cunt.  Been nice.”  

“Clean,” he said, and took a drink.

It’s true, that’s what this call amounted to anyway, with a residing pain in the lungs to show for my sad attempt to stay on the high road, give a stubborn former friend a chance to state his insufficient case for the hundredth time.

“You hanging up on me?  You’re going to fucking hang up on me now?  Hello?  hello?”  I can still hear the peevish fellow justifying himself, clucking about how vicious and unfair I am.  “After all, you’re not the only one with problems, I’m not the only one who doesn’t help you, your constant references to Hitler, no matter the context, are inapt, and what about…’bon voyage’?  ‘bon voyage’?  oh, nice…. hello, hello?”

Fooling Myself?

The young therapist told me today to add some daily “mastery and pleasure activities” to my daily schedule.  These are fun interludes that remind us of what we love and what we have accomplished.  Apart from not really keeping a daily schedule, I told her as far as a satisfying mastery activity I have this daily writing session that ends with a press of the publish button.  

I am always satisfied and feeling somewhat better when I press the button.  Not that every post is a gem, or even worth more than a cursory glance, some may go to disturbing places, but the exercise of getting the post ready for the “public” is something I’ve mastered.  By the time I hit “post” the writing is as clear and easy to read as I can make it.  At its best this blahg is my higher self giving good counsel to my regular day to day self, reminding me of who I am trying to be, how far I have come, how far I still have to go.

A few weeks ago an old friend wondered why I spend so much time tapping these posts (it’s really less than an hour a day, I would think) and suggested it is far healthier to interact socially than to live in my mind as much as I do these days.  He’s right about the social interaction– this online social universe is actually a nightmare world of mostly disconnection and narcissism.  I explained to him that the illusion of a social life is not why I write here.    A week or two later he read a couple of posts that he admired, that touched him.  He wrote to single them out.  

I gave him the back story of one, Listening, and described the inspiration, a fellow very active on social media who anxiously reads the blahg whenever we have some kind of trouble (this latest round goes back months, including several long, patient, useless discussions about the issues, as with F before the end, and there are several posts related to it).  He was also struck by the one about madness from a few months back, which was also inspired by my faltering friendship with this same chap.  

The night after the second seder, as I waited for sleep to come, I had  a choice: spend an hour figuring out how to send the fellow the precise kiss-off he earned and deserved (a waste of time and energy), or trying to get to the deeper question involved — understand and digest the harm done to me and process my feelings about it.  It is an important exercise, understanding my feelings and getting past the hurt to react as nonviolently as I am able.

Writing made me think about it more deeply, make connections, allowed me to take something positive out of the otherwise distasteful experience.  Looking beyond the personal to the larger principle involved was helpful to me, as was the exercise of making it clear to a reader, and in the process, more clear to myself.  I think the piece could be helpful to others as well in laying out the human issues involved– the damage of not being listened to, the fruitlessness of one-sided relationships for the person on the wrong side.

 
I understand that this fellow was rarely, if ever, listened to, except by me at times.  I appreciate that things are not black and white, that he has fine qualities, a sense of humor, decency and so forth.  Still, individual acts and failures to act, particularly when they come one after another, form a pattern that speaks much louder than promises and conditional apologies.  Hitler had it rough, but if I had a time machine I’d go back and break every bone in his body if I could.   Maybe go back earlier and make sure his dear mother had an abortion.

My friend and I, I hardly needed to remind him, had it rough growing up, but we help when we can and try not to hurt when we can’t help.  We don’t build a fanatical political party and death camps and all that other fucked up shit.  We don’t leave people we care about hanging. To those who can’t help being hurtful, good riddance.

 
Our first duty is to preserve ourselves, an extra challenge for those of us who were forced to learn on our own to become our own protectors.  Sometimes quietly subtracting an unwitting underminer is the most positive thing we can do for ourselves on a given day.  

Black and White Thinking

My father, a lifelong black and white thinker, lamented on his death bed that he had not seen and appreciated all the colors and gradations of human experience.  “I think how much richer my life would have been,” he mused in a voice that was near the end.

I did not at that moment have any feeling besides sympathy for him as he went.  It was one of those times when everything aligned correctly and we were able to finally have the conversation he had never been capable of.  It’s not clear how much of a long-term blessing it was for me, though it felt enormous at the time.  I’m sure it was a blessing to him, to be able to unburden himself to a life-long adversary he’d created, a suddenly former adversary who was now gently helping him go.  

I think of my father first whenever I hear the term Black and White Thinking.  Those words are on a sheet the CBT therapist gave me during the last session.  Ten ways people suffer and ten ways each form of, what is essentially deleterious cognition, can be changed for the better by properly reframing them.  I don’t know how much faith I have in this whole system, though the value of going to this session every week, working myself out of my torpor, seems beyond question.   I face many obstacles in a possibly impossible undertaking I have staked everything on, but I am facing them one at a time again.  Waiting for the mapped redesigned website to load at wehearyou.net so I can return to my marketing and networking efforts.

My father’s black and white thinking arose from the facts of the world he was born into.  His mother hated his father.  She had done her duty with him and eight or nine months later their first child was stillborn.   She lay with him again.   The second child, my father, was a huge baby.  She was a tiny, furious woman.  She cursed him before she even saw him.   Once he could stand she began whipping him in the face for what felt to her like a baby’s defiance.  

I have to get in the shower and down to my session in a moment, but I leave you with this excellent TED talk I heard last night.  It was about the long-term changes in a human mind and body produced by childhood trauma.  The chemicals that are available to us in a moment of danger, things that give you a surge of strength and concentration to fight or flee, constantly flood the child who must be on guard against, say, a whip in the face from mom.   This does damage that is hardwired into the human body.   Listen to this pediatrician.  The talk is fifteen minutes long and well worth your time.

Listening

You have never really been listened to, granted.

I grant you everything.  I grant you the pain of never really ever having been listened to.  It is a primal pain, to feel that when you first spoke, until now, that you have rarely, if ever, been attentively listened to.   Dig it.  Many people, sadly, experience this in life.  It is a trauma that puts a heavy burden on the soul.

I knew a woman who said she loved me, acted very much like she did.   She did very loving things for me, was generous with her love.  I could tell she hurt when I hurt.  She gave me advice sometimes about my life, what she thought I should do to be in less pain.  She told me she was giving me the same advice she had found useful in her life.   When she was dispensing advice she told me she always talked to me the same way she spoke to herself.

I did not doubt this, even as I often resisted some of her advice.  One day, when she tried to insist, I said to her “but sometimes you have talked to yourself and convinced yourself the best thing to do was to put your head in the oven.”  She was quiet.  She had told me of these moments of weakness, the things she had done in desperate moments.  I wasn’t telling her this to make her feel bad, I was reminding her of the difference between us, and how we treat ourselves, to put her advice in perspective.  

“I remind you of this to illustrate as vividly as I can, so you will have no doubt — if someone tried to put my head in an oven I would fight them to the death.   I would never put my own head in an oven.”   Just saying.  She still offered advice from time to time, but I think this perspective stayed with her.

People who care about you will sometimes give you advice, with the best of intentions.  They tell you things meaning very much to help.   They may never have been really listened to themselves.  Many people were not.  They learned as best they could, filled their lives as best they could with the things they needed and never got in life.   They took whatever wisdom they were able to find and they try to share it with you out of concern.   Not all of these people can help you.  In fact, few can actually help you.  

Turns out the thing that probably helps the most is someone listening to you with enough care to hear what you are actually saying.  This kind of listening does not  assume it knows what you are about to say and does not respond to what it thinks you may have said, based on the past.  

Empathy turns out to be the best thing one person can give to another, the best thing we can give ourselves.  It is a question of attention– of asking questions when things are unclear, until you understand.  It is a question of time, being generous with your time to hear what the other person is really concerned about.  In my experience it is almost impossible for  a person who is niggardly with their time or attention to be a valuable friend or even a good person to talk to.

A sufficiently mature person can tolerate being ignored, forgotten, slighted, thought of last, if at all, and can make philosophical accommodations to all these things.  But when a person who claims to care for your well-being does these things, you must not tolerate it.  Care does not include these things.  

So, best to be direct.  I have told you as clearly as I can what hurts me in your actions.  I have told you again.  I have explained it on a third and fourth occasion.  I have given you every fair chance to do better.  You have not done better, you have done worse.  If you have not done worse on purpose, you did it because you were not capable of doing better.  You did not care enough.  I understand your limitations in friendship better than I did before.

You were not taught to care enough, nobody showed you how it should be done.  That is true for many people, no doubt.  It is the rare and blessed person who is shown the way to care for others.  Most of us have to learn it as we go, the best we can.

I am trying hard to be a man of peace, and I succeed more often now than before in my life.   I understand that self-hatred and confusion drive some people to act destructively, to themselves and others.  But understanding the reason for it does not give permission to anyone to act destructively.  Hitler had a horrible childhood, clearly.  But fuck Hitler.

We come in the end to the point where the only question remains:  hand open or hand closed when it bids you peace and go in good health?

Good Friday

When they originally named this day, ‘good’ must have had a different meaning.

Hard to think of the day otherwise as ‘good’ if it commemorates the brutal torture and slow, excruciating execution of a gentle teacher of empathy and peace.

The faithful believe that this atrocious Friday was followed by a Sunday when this good soul rose from the grave, alive again, to show everybody the Way.   So in the sense that a miracle was revealed on Sunday the terrible events of Good Friday could be seen as a necessary precursor.  

Still, ‘good’ as in Good Friday must have originally meant something other than what we usually think of as good.

“Good. This is what you’re doing now, instead of getting ready?” I can hear a voice getting ready to say.

So, peace everybody, and a very Good Friday to those who celebrate it.

How Does One Work This Hard Without Pay?

Truthfully, many days I have no idea.

If you don’t get paid in money, appreciation will sometimes sustain you.   If you work for children, their engagement in what you’ve created must sustain you, because kids don’t often express appreciation except directly, by involving themselves in the thing you offer them.   Their parents won’t usually express appreciation either.  You are, as far as they can tell, in that harried moment when they pick up their kid and you are almost done putting things away, a retired guy who provides an hour of day camp their kid seems to like.  No artwork to clutter up the refrigerator, that’s a plus, I suppose.  Disable the counter on youTube, if you can, no point to see that not everyone clicks on the animation links you send.  The workaround of uploading the clips to google drive will eliminate the counter, so that’s a plus too.

If you can manage to sustain your enthusiasm for an idea that might well be excellent, and highly useful, but that has not brought you any variation on a livelihood, then you are remarkable– possibly remarkable as an idiot.  Possibly something more admirable, but the jury is out, and while they are out– and, in fact, not planning to return unless subpoenaed, say by an article in the New York Times about this little one man organization that managed to talk its way into the conversation about public education– well…

So after a long day of incrementally useful futility you go to dinner with a friend and wind up having an extended three way chat with a lovely young waitress from Bangkok.   She lingers a long time at the table as the restaurant begins to empty.  She is pretty, and animated, and bright– her smile actually casts a delightfully warming light on to your face.  She laughs an easy laugh and answers questions with great seriousness, then laughs again.  The restaurant is empty and they are starting to put the chairs up.  You eventually take the hint and hit the street, she waves goodbye as you go.  

“Shall we see if Jackie’s at one of his haunts?” asks your friend and, although you’ve heard his sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes aggravating tales of Jackie Mason’s coffee klatch, the odd, shifting collection of night crawling characters the monologist assembles around him as his impromptu court, you’re hesitant.  

“Where are these haunts?” you ask, and it turns out one is less than a block away, so you agree to go to the closest one.  As you walk you’re hoping he’s not there.  The place looks fairly empty and he doesn’t seem to be there.

“There he is,” says your friend, spotting him with a few others at a large table in the back.  “You want to go in and meet him?”  I really don’t, I tell him to go on in and say hello.  He promises not to stay long.  

I walk in behind him, intending by my presence right there to hasten him along.  I am standing back from the table as he greets each of the odd-looking people around Jackie.  Naturally they invite him to sit, and I am in turn invited to sit and I figure, what the hell, might as well sit as stand waiting for the politeness to end.   It is fairly boring chitchat among strangers and then, after I mention a nearby kosher Italian restaurant that serves food during Passover, Jackie asks me “are you Jewish?”

I nod, shrug,  “vhud den? Are you?”   He nods, acknowledging with a deadpan expression that this is possibly a clever reply or at least a convincingly Jewish reply.   The disjointed conversations continue, then heads turn to him as he begins an extended monologue about performing for the Queen of England, he’ll be performing for her a record seventh time in May.  

“Nobody has performed for the Queen seven times,” he says and then adds “Danny Kaye has the record, he was there six times.”  He then describes what sounds like a horrible scene:  no pay, you can’t look at the Queen directly, you have to wait for her to address you before you can speak to her, the long line the performers have to wait on line to shake her hand after you’re done performing.

 “The second time I’m standing there for a half hour and I start thinking — what the hell am I doing here?  They’re not paying me, she’s saying the same thing to everyone, I’m waiting to shake her hand and hear the identical speech she’s giving to everyone.  Exactly the same speech.  ‘Oh, you are the most marvelous performer I’ve ever seen.  Thank you so much for coming.  I’ve never enjoyed anything more.  You are a unique and gifted genius.’  And each one of these unique and gifted geniuses are floating on air, quoting her, ‘the Queen said I’m a unique and gifted genius!’.  They’re too stupid to realize she’s saying exactly the same thing to everyone whose waiting on line to hear the same exact line she’s been saying for the last fifty years.  It’s like she’s memorized a script, it’s the same exact line down to the syllable.”

“Maybe it’s a robot Queen they programmed to shake hands and deliver the speech,” I suggest.

“The same exact speech,” says Jackie.  “So the third year I decide to hell with this, and as soon as I get off the stage I tell the driver, they give you a limo and a driver, no pay, but your own limousine.  So I tell the driver ‘I have an emergency’ and I know he’s not going to ask me what the emergency is: I have a stomach problem, I have two seconds to live, I have no blood sugar, an internal hemorrhage, an aneurysm, projectile diarrhea — an emergency, let’s go.  And he takes off immediately, back to the hotel.  So I don’t have to stand on line for a half hour to be told, along with all the other unique and gifted geniuses, what a unique and gifted genius I am.”

“Sounds like the only reason you’re going back is to break Danny Kaye’s record,” I suggest.

“Do you like Danny Kaye?” he asks me, with his most serious face.  

“Yeah, I used to watch his movies with my grandmother, she loved him.  He was a very talented guy,”  I say and then conversation flits briefly over several of Danny Kaye’s movies, Jackie tells everyone what a huge star Kaye was, which leads him to nostalgia over the many great comedians of the old days, guys like Sid Cesar, a real genius, truly one of a kind, the kinds of comics the world will never see the likes of again.

Toward the end, as this restaurant is starting to close, after they’ve heard that I am not in show business, Jackie asks me if I was ever married.  I tell him I wasn’t.  “Are you a homosexual?” he asks.  I tell him no, not as far as I know.  It doesn’t occur to me until a minute later, as we’re all shaking hands on the sidewalk by the waiting cab, that I could have said “why? you asking me for a date?”  

My friend laughs when I tell him this missed rejoinder, and wishes I had said it.  “That would have been great,” he says as we head up Ninth Avenue.  We talk about that odd group around the table for a block or two.  Then I show him the new website I am still not done figuring out how to get to show up when one types in wehearyou.net.  He expresses appreciation of the great improvement.  It really does show at a glance what my program is all about, he admits.  He congratulates me, tells me it’s great.  

That will be my pay for the month, more than likely– that and getting the website to display when you click on the link.  

So, if my coffee breaks go on for longer than most people’s, you will have to understand– or not– it isn’t only that I’m lazy and prefer play to work.  I have a really, really hard job and I am obliged, at the moment and for the foreseeable future, to do it for free.

Unreliable Narrator

I am that.  You can rely on that. 

I have a list here of ten forms of twisted thinking, given to me by a young woman who is learning the art of untwisting twisted thinking.  Let’s review them, just for the sake of discussion– or not.   I say “or not” because, when the choice is given it is often logical to choose ‘or not’.    

“Punch in the face, sir?”  

“I think I would prefer ‘or not’, if it’s all the same to you, sir.”  

Here then, the ten forms of twisted thinking:

All-or-Nothing Thinking  

Over-generalization

Mental Filter  

Discounting the Positives

Jumping to Conclusions

Magnification (“binocular effect”)  

Emotional Reasoning  

“Should Statements”  

Labeling (an extreme form of All-or-Nothing Thinking)  

Personalization and Blame    

Now, without my characteristic, ceremonial discounting of the positives of such a list, or jumping to conclusions about its utility or lack of same, or labeling the list in any way, I wonder, as I ponder it for a moment between the objective complications of things that should be simple enough (ach…. a “Should Statement”)…

would you like to see a little movie?

Or not.  

What can be relied on, even with an unreliable narrator, is a narration.  Might make no sense to you, the complications of someone else’s life, the necessity to narrate, the compulsion even.   Wherefore this compulsion to narrate, sirrah?  Have you seen too many movies, knave, in which a protagonist’s inner battles are engagingly portrayed, making you churlish when people don’t listen when you speak of yours?   Do you enjoy the inner battles of others?  Hmmmm?  Well, maybe you do, maybe you’re that rare eccentric who finds that shit fascinating, but, more to the point: why not go to work like everyone else and do that most essential of things: shut the fuck up?  

Look, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of (insert number here) little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.  Dig it.  That was a classic moment in a great movie.  In your own life?   Pfffffft….

Redesigned the website so that it can be a calling card.  I did a massive amount of work, learning, tinkering and, I’ll be damned, it works now as a pretty cool calling card I can send out to people I am trying to network with.  The old site, frankly, sucked, and I can no longer update it, the webhosting company cannot figure out how to fix it, says it’s a WordPress issue.  I can’t get the upgraded site on-line under the domain name I purchased.  Very tricky, so tricky nobody so far can figure out how to do it.

Frustrating?  Oh, it certainly is.  

Did you know that WordPress, the free site where I tap these ruminations and post the delightful fare I serve up to a discerning trio of readers, is actually two entities, one a non-profit and the other a for-profit?   Or that when one signs up to get help at the forum at WordPress.org, (the non-profit) which I logged on to for help, it apparently automatically migrates your hosted website, in my case the amateurishly designed wehearyou.net, to the WordPress.org side?   Once on the .org side you can no longer choose to have WordPress.com host the damn thing, as far as I can tell so far.

But why believe me?   Perhaps this whole misadventure is an extended exercise in twisted thinking.  If you have funding you can make things happen, hire everyone you need to get things done.  If you lack funding you can, with persistence and a little luck, learn everything you need to know and do as much as you can by yourself. Including, apparently, heading off from time to time to a romantic spot to fuck yourself.

 note from google search:

https://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/

Me and babies

I enjoy working and playing with kids, though I’ve never really been a big fan of infants.   Babies, before they can do anything, cute though they sometimes might be (and uncute as they just as often are) are kind of creepy in their helplessness.   That the infant’s ability to communicate is far more limited than Sekhnet’s cat also interferes with my complete enjoyment of very young babies.   Nonetheless, I recognize that you have to participate in other people’s joy in their babies.  It seems inhuman not to at least smile, and coo and make some melodic remark about the baby’s cuteness.

Sekhnet’s cousin, a new single mother, asked Sekhnet and me if we wanted to hold the baby the other day.   It was the first time either of us had seen mother and child since the birth. The baby was born the weight of an average dinner lobster, many weeks prematurely, and now, three months later, has ballooned to eight pounds.   The mother offered the baby and, as Sekhnet hesitated, I took the tiny child, smaller than a miniature doberman.
 
I gently picked her up, held her in front of me and smiled at her.   She burst out crying.  Her mother was amazed, laughed and kept saying she’d never seen that reaction.  She must have said it ten times.  
 
Afterwards, and in spite of all my graciously accepted apologies to the mother, who kept repeating that the little girl had never reacted that way, ever, to anything, I felt pretty good knowing I still haven’t lost my touch with babies.

Finding a new web host

Apparently there are many, many web hosting services.  GoDaddy was recommended to me years back and hosted my first sites.  I bought the domain name wehearyou.net from them and they are currently hosting a site I created on WordPress for the student-run animation workshop.

I have several free WordPress sites.  On each of them I can put up galleries like the one above, which I have just perfected.  I planned to have a gallery like this on the redesigned static home page I would send people to view at wehearyou.net.  

This new page would do what every Marketing 101 student learns the first day:  make things clear at a glance to anyone with an attention span of at least five seconds.   The page would say:

photo (1)

and have some more animated stuff to look at and links to galleries of animations by the kids:

It would also have a brief explanation, like:

Children, with adults on hand to listen and assist, perform every facet of animation production:  equipment set up, ideas, art work, choreography, photography, computer editing and multitrack sound recording.  A classroom quickly becomes a beehive of purposeful collaboration, combining equal parts free imagination and exacting precision to make good looking animation.   

I can make these galleries on each of my free websites, as I have made this page just now.  The one hosted by GoDaddy does not allow me to create animated galleries or even to import working animated gifs, these little looping animations you see here.

Two hours of tech support with GoDaddy resulted in this:  “I wouldn’t blame you if you cancel your service contract with us, even though it wasn’t our fault and the functionality works on our end, and even though I understand your logic.”

The logic the supervisor understood was that if a customer has four virtually identical sites, three free and one hosted by GoDaddy, and only the one hosted by GoDaddy presents a problem, then the problem, absent a better explanation, is related to GoDaddy.  

Two hours exercising patience for no earthly reason.  Except to have what functionality there was left on the wehearyou.net site before the call disabled now after the update that was not the responsibility of GoDaddy since WordPress is an open source third party.

Need to find a new web hosting outfit toot sweet.  That’s the name of that annoying tune.

State of Perpetual Decrepitude

In October, 1781, American and French forces routed the British and their mercenaries at Yorktown, a decisive turning point of the Revolutionary War.  Joyous Americans gathered to celebrate amid bonfires, speeches, and general revelry amounting to the ceremonial sticking of a fork into King George the Third.   Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Father of Our Country, George Washington, to congratulate him and to beg off on attending the festivities.  His reason survives:  he would have come, he wrote, except for “the state of perpetual decrepitude to which I am unfortunately reduced.”  The Author of Liberty at that point was 38 years old and temporarily retired from politics.*

In a state of perpetual decrepitude myself, the line spoke to me.  Looking for a thread to unite the hundreds of pages I have posted here, it may be that state of perpetual decrepitude.  The phrase has some poetry in it, I think, and the urge to type “perpetual decrepitude” is hard to resist.  Resist I must, though.  Onward!

what that decrepitude sounds like today

de·crep·i·tude

(dĭ-krĕp′ĭ-to͞od′, -tyo͞od′)

n.

The quality or condition of being weakened, worn out, impaired, or broken down by oldage, illness, or hard use.  
Noun 1. decrepitude – a state of deterioration due to old age or long use

dilapidation
deterioration, impairment – a symptom of reduced quality or strength
noun
1. decay, deterioration, degeneration, dilapidation The buildings had been allowed to fall into decrepitude.
2. weakness, old age, incapacity, wasting, invalidity, senility, infirmity, dotage,debility, feebleness, eld (archaic) the boundary between healthy middle age and total decrepitude

decrepitude

noun

The condition of being infirm or physically weak:

debility, delicacy, delicateness, feebleness, flimsiness, fragileness,fragility, frailness, frailty, infirmity, insubstantiality, puniness, unsoundness,unsubstantiality, weakliness, weakness.

* Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate Biography,  Norton paperback p. 149