Category Archives: musing

Therapist in Training

“You went to dental college to have a bridge made?”

“Yes,” he said, voice muffled by the swelling on the left side of his face.  

“You seem surprised that there were complications.”

 “One hopes for the best,” he replied miserably.

“Reminds me of a young therapist I had once.  It cost me a fraction of what an experienced professional would have, and I reasoned that she was being supervised and that I was the one who’d have to do the hard work in any case.  How much could her inexperience have hurt me? I remember telling myself that.”  

His friend inclined his head quizzically, his face too inflamed to make unnecessary utterances.  

“Early on I brought her a drawing book of mine which she flipped through.  I explained to her that this is how I saw the world, flashing vignettes of creative inspiration and how important drawing and other creative expression was to me.  She nodded and asked why I don’t try to sell them.  I explained my feelings about creativity in service of commerce, my misgivings about doing creative work for clients, particularly the wealthy and tasteful.  When I was done explaining she pointed out that Hitler had been a frustrated artist.  It didn’t occur to me to ask if she was suggesting a career in politics for me.”  

His friend grimaced, grunted meaningfully.  

“Yeah, I know.  Anyway, she came up with a great restatement of my essential problem, which I’ve never forgotten.  I told her how difficult it was for me to get anyone to appreciate the beauty and potential of the simple, radical educational model I’d come up with.   Friends would nod sympathetically while thinking of gentle ways to convince me it was long past time to do something else.  She said to me ‘so, it’s upsetting to you that your friends are not able to be affectionate to the imaginary dog you love.’  I thought of siccing my imaginary dog on her young ass, but stared past her at the wall, thinking of ways to say nothing.”  

“And you question my wisdom in getting a bridge from a…. ouch…” and he closed his eyes, faced screwed up in pain.  

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “we are often much more droll than we realize, aren’t we?”

excerpt from the transcript

“If you’re not insane why are you in this laughing academy?” she asked with a challenging smile.  

“I’m not in a laughing academy,” I said.  

“Ha!” she said.  This cracked her up.

“Nothing like a girl who appreciates her own wit,” I said.  “I’m glad you find this funny.”  My profession of gladness snapped her right out of it, the frown returned to her face.  

“This should cheer you up,” I said.  “A fragment of the transcript of my intake interview.  Listen to how it reads so naturally like someone speaking.”

She read:

And it was an object lesson to me about the power of apology. It was like, the feeling of hurt was dissipated instantly. And I felt much better friends with him because he empathized completely  with how hurtful what he did was and he, as quickly as possible, made it go away. 
 
I said earlier I believe in the power of apology and forgiveness and all that, and it was a sad trait in my family: my sister, my father,  my father’s first cousin, my grandmother, they had a very hard time forgiving.  And that’s kind of unforgivable to me.  I’ve seen 30, 40, 50 year grudges in my family and so that incident with my friend was really like a light going on in a room.
 
“Kind of unforgivable to you,” she said handing the paper back with the most deadpan of expressions.
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Jheadfoureyes

Elizabeth Warren

“powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque”

Elizabeth Warren was deemed too controversial to head the new federal U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she’d called for.   This agency would investigate complaints by ripped off consumers,  give them a way to get compensated when their powerful fellow-citizens, corporations, take advantage of them in a predatory way.    President Obama decided the confirmation debate on the floor of a Congress intent on thwarting his every idea, even ideas they agreed with, would be futile and politically costly.  He nominated a less controversial person to head the agency, appointed him during a recess and that was the last anyone heard of this bold new agency.  Nobody’s fault, a defender of Mr. Obama could say, just the sad reality of the highly polarized wedge issue politics of the day.

Elizabeth Warren ran a successful campaign for the senate in 2012 and took office in January 2013. I get emails from Senator Warren from time to time.   I like what she has to say very much, and what she consistently seems to fight for.  Here is a great quote from her I heard last night, apparently made over a year ago:  

“I’ve been in the senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families.  We could talk about a lot of ways the system is rigged: lobbyists, campaign finance, the court system, but I want to raise a specific issue that we need to spotlight:  how much powerful interests benefit from a system that is complicated and opaque.”  

A system that is complicated and opaque.  Well said.  Other adjectives come to mind as well, but she cuts through to the essence, resisting the urge to use words like convoluted, deliberately confusing, obfuscatory, immoral.  Ask a financial genius to describe the industry-wide scam that torpedoed the economy in 2008, the bundling, tranching and reselling of toxic “derivatives” that were somehow swapped for the tremendous profits of few, and the bankruptcies of many, after being rated triple A investments by rating agencies that were essentially paid to give these false and misleading ratings to poison.    The genius would have a hard time describing it in a way anyone not trained in the industry could understand.

Although, the simple fact, after the fact, is that a massive fraud was perpetrated, industry-wide, arguably under cover of complicated and opaque law, and nobody was ever forced to return a dollar of the billions and billions transferred from retirement accounts and life savings to the personal wealth of already very rich executives and investors.  The opaque, complicated and loophole strewn laws these wealthy interests agreed to so that a future tsunami of financial highjinx does not roll over us lack the simplicity and effectiveness of the FDR-era law* they had repealed in order to perpetrate this massive transfer of wealth.  

Glass-Steagall, the repealed law, prevented a major financial crisis for more than 50 years (they’d previously happened every 15 years, culminating in the stock market crash of 1929), until loopholes began appearing under Reagan in the 1980s.  Shortly thereafter we had the Savings and Loan Scandal.  Once the law was repealed (under Bill Clinton’s watchful and practical eye) we had the first world-wide financial disaster since 1929.  An amazing coincidence, no?   

The devil is in the details and if the details are complicated, confusing, opaque, impossible to parse– voila, the devil is free to cavort as much as he likes.  Here’s one that struck me from Elizabeth Warren’s recent email about regulation to curb the interest rates of student loans:

“Since last year, nearly a million more borrowers have fallen behind on their payments. Altogether, students are now struggling with $100 billion MORE debt than they were a year ago.

Student loan debt was an economic emergency last year – and now that emergency is getting worse. That’s why I’m reintroducing the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act. Join me in telling the Senate Republicans: Student loan refinancing can’t wait another year.

” … I don’t kid myself: Refinancing loans won’t fix everything that’s wrong in our higher education system. We need to cut the price of college, to reinvest in public universities, to shore up federal financial aid, to crack down on for-profit colleges, and to provide better protections on student loans.

But let’s start with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. Let’s start by cutting back on the interest payments that are sinking young people and holding back this economy. Tell the GOP: Let’s start with Bank on Students.“

The bold proposal that Republicans filibustered last year would limit the interest rate in this trillion dollar government sponsored industry to 3.9%, four times what savings banks pay to depositers, three or four times the interest rates banks are paying for two year CDs.   A quick check of mortgage and other loan rates shows rates below 3.9% for people buying houses or cars, or refinancing homes.   I don’t know what rate investment banks and corporations are paying to borrow money these days (as close as I can tell this is the federal funds rate, lowered to 0.0-0.25% in December of 2008) but I believe the 3.9% interest rate is more than 10 times higher than that, if not infinitely higher.  

Ah, go fight City Hall, it’s complicated and opaque, you know what I’m saying?  But let us end with Elizabeth Warren’s succinct 2011 refutation of the Libertarian worldview and her answer to the charge that in advocating for higher tax rates on the wealthy she is engaging in “class warfare”:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

source

NOTES

*  [in 1987] Thomas Theobald, then vice chairman of Citicorp, argues that three “outside checks” on corporate misbehavior had emerged since 1933: “a very effective” SEC; knowledgeable investors, and “very sophisticated” rating agencies. Volcker is unconvinced, and expresses his fear that lenders will recklessly lower loan standards in pursuit of lucrative securities offerings and market bad loans to the public. For many critics, it boiled down to the issue of two different cultures – a culture of risk which was the securities business, and a culture of protection of deposits which was the culture of banking.  

(and from the end of the PBS piece)

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal [October, 1999], Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told [noted corporate cocksucker] Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government?”

source 

If You Have Nothing Good To Say About Someone

“say nothing,” my mother always said.   Actually, that’s not true.  She may have said it once.  At any rate, not as often as she said things about people when she had nothing good to say about them.    If you would look for a real conversation with people over the internets*, I’d suggest you find something else to do.   Banging your head against the wall, in my opinion, is probably a better use of your time.  

Think of it, in an actual conversation, much of the time the odds don’t favor a meaningful chat– each person will talk about what excites or concerns them, or just as often what annoys or perplexes them, and if there is a back and forth, beyond this mutual telling of stories, that’s a big plus and a conversation to remember.   In writing, unless you are writing to another writer– and even then, the odds are against you — you can often forget about hearing much connected to what you were discussing.  If you curse, insult or use CAPS to browbeat the person you will sometimes get an aggrieved and defensive direct response, but, all things considered, this is not a useful strategy for having a productive conversation with someone.    Better to do almost anything else, including posting random thoughts and opinions in cyberspace.

I remember my friends’ bright, precocious daughter, at about age six, annoyed by her younger cousins at a family gathering, bursting out with “I hate those fucking little bastards!” and stomping out of the room.  My friend took his little girl aside and with infinite tenderness told her he understood that her little cousins were probably frustrating to hang around with, but that they bothered her because they loved her and wanted to be with her.   She stuck to her position that she hated them, but left open the possibility that she might soften her position.  I recall being very impressed that my friend didn’t even mention the language, he went straight, and compassionately, to why the girl was angry.  

But I have to say, I’m with the girl here, particularly lately.


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* As former president George Dubya Bush styled it

Good Advice From A Friend

At dinner with old friends last night I described the progress of my adaptable and energizing simplified animation workshop.  My friend smiled as he spoke of the many good uses for it, the almost infinite applications, how many different people and settings who would love to pay for something so wonderful.  He was happy about how far my original idea had come, even as he was struck by the difficulty of my struggle to figure out how to make it a viable business.

I told him about Reggio Emilia (described in previous post) and the schools in NYC that follow its model.   A good fit, he agreed, and saw as stubborn folly, a clinging to misguided beliefs and political prejudice, that I’d even hesitate to work with them just because the parents paid $39,000 for their kids’ kindergarten tuition.

“I treat patients on welfare, and I can afford to, because I also treat patients with gold plated insurance.  You can’t work for the poor unless you sustain yourself somehow.  Take rich people’s money!  They’re the ones who have the money!  If they’ll pay you five times what the public school can afford, work at one rich school to be able to serve more poor schools.”   I heard his point and granted it, told him I’d think about it, but he could see I was not sold.  He was pained that I’d need to think about such a no-brainer.

“People become addicted to what they are used to, old patterns are very hard to change.  You have always struggled, you’re used to it, it’s a habit and you don’t want to go out of your comfort zone.  You need to look at the bigger picture, if your idea that you’ve worked on for years to bring to this point is to flourish you have to get out of that struggling mentality.”  Again I raised my eyebrows, nodded, though we both knew in some way he was talking to the pens in my shirt pocket.    

I raised something Sekhnet had mentioned the other day: people with connections and good business sense seeing the great potential of my workshop and promoting and selling it as their own invention.  Who, I thought, is likelier to steal my invention:  the art teachers at a posh school with unlimited resources and successful artist and business parents on the board or the overworked teachers’ aids at some of the slum schools I’ve struggled in, the schools I am targeting for this program?  The innovative private school would then get to take credit for the thing I’d created to showcase the heartbreaking creativity of children of the poor marked for failure, prison and early death.  Bird wins, one more time ladies and gentlemen.

“Justifying your habitual struggle, that’s all,” said my old friend.  He may have been entirely correct, although I think he also understood how much work I still have to do with marketing, packaging, promoting, fundraising, recruiting, social media and so on before I can claim to have created a business or program, rather than just having carried out an promising idea.

I don’t want to do this program for the children of the rich.  Call me a damn redneck, what can I say?

Hypothetically Speaking

“Hypothetically, in theory, I can, or, say, one can, ward off encroaching insanity by the application of reason, by carefully thinking and clearly writing one’s way out of dark corners,” he said.

“Stipulated, hypothetically and in theory, for purposes only of this conversation,” said his friend.

“But say that a necessary part of this warding off process is the acknowledgement, by at least one other person he respects, that these efforts could indeed ward off encroaching neurasthenia,” he said.  

“Sounds like the poor devil may have already gone round the bend, if this is his condition for trying to heal himself, a compassionate partner, so to speak, in warding off the inevitable,” said his friend.  

“Well, that may be so.  But what if the person has gathered around himself a small group of people so niggardly in this attribute of empathy, so challenged by their own lives, so easily wearied by the eternal demands of this struggling devil, that his efforts, by the very design of his own little support network, are doomed?” he said.  

“Well, it would appear, then, that he’s doomed,” said his friend.  

“Oh, dear,” he said.  

“Yes,” said his friend.

A Dream that Shook Me

The dream featured one of the kids in the second series of animation workshops I did, a survivor of childhood cancer, a bright, lovely and creative kid who was sometimes out of control.  His parents loved him to death, his survival had been a miracle, every day was a different struggle and the boy, much indulged, was volatile.   One day he demanded I help him, said he needed me to get him a gun so he could kill himself.  He appeared to be quite serious about suicide, unconcerned with the pain it would cause many people who loved and cared about him.  His mother told me she’d speak to his therapist about it.   On many other days he was the most cheerful and entertaining kid you could ever imagine. Once in a while he was completely out of control, crawling on the floor, responding only with animal sounds.

In the dream he is driving his father’s brand new Mini Cooper east on 73rd Avenue, a two lane street near where I grew up.  I caught a clear look at him as he drove past, alone in the car.  The ten or eleven year-old veered across the line a few times, narrowly missing oncoming cars, coming dangerously close to the parked cars on both sides.  I caught up with him, he was on foot by then, and told him that driving was a complicated business and that he shouldn’t be behind the wheel until he’d had some instruction.  And besides, he was only ten or eleven and it was far too soon to start learning to drive.  

He dismissed these concerns, told me he’d parked the car with no problem and pointed down the street.  I walked over to see that he had parked it, on the sidewalk, perfectly lined up with the white lines of the crosswalk.  I didn’t know where to start: illegal to park in a crosswalk, illegal to park a car on the sidewalk, the tickets his father would get, the towing and impound fees, that he could have easily killed somebody, himself.  

I ran into his father at some kind of party and took him aside to tell him quietly what his young son had been up to.  The man was concerned, but fell silent as the boy approached, eyeing us suspiciously.   “I have to pee,” the kid said.  I pointed out where the bathroom was and the boy went there.  The father thanked me for letting him know and told me he’d deal with the situation.

I woke up in a particularly bleak mood.  The dream, it seemed to me, was an unmistakable proof of the folly of tying to be a one man team in the business of getting a student-run workshop up and running.   Was not the dream that young children can run a workshop as absurd as the kid childishly driving a death mobile?  

I reached for a pen and wrote:  just because he doesn’t actually crash doesn’t make driving a good idea.   Then I added:  but– students run, adults facilitate.

There is always, I’ve noticed, an argument to be made for the other side of almost anything.

A Key Distinction

 
The Devil, it is often correctly noted, is in the details.  We all have our particular weaknesses and very particular reasons we are weak exactly where and under what circumstances our weakness becomes excruciating.  I’ve been chafing for years, for reasons I’ve gone into many times, when someone simply leaves their end of a conversation to silence.  I’ve done conscious work on my reactions to this, which is about all one can do, but it’s a challenge for me even now, whenever it happens.  And we all know, it happens all the time, especially with email.  
 
I was gratified to see in the famous NY Times, in a review of books on how to deal with difficult people, that one respected author sets aside Silent and Non-responsive as one of seven supremely maddening types.   For whatever reason, that type has learned:  all I’ve got to do, motherfucker, is nothing.   Hmmmmm?  Is my humming bothering you?  Hmmmmmmmm?
 
If a friend expresses annoyance that I didn’t reply to his description of an outburst of rage he described in an email he sent, I will read the email again and reply.  Stepping neatly into the trap.  Because then, heh…. what?   I didn’t say anything.  You’re fucking crazy.  I did nothing and look how fucking mad you get!!!!  Oh my God, and you think I was enraged because I said I was enraged when I totaled my car… what a complete fucking asshole you are, Mr. Ahimsa-Boy!
 
A few distinctions occur to me and are in order.
 
In defense of people with bad tempers who don’t want to think too deeply about why they fly off the handle from time to time, or suffer, like an expatriate friend, from all sorts of painful anger-repression related physical ailments, or live joyless lives seeing no reason to do anything but continue trudging out of a sense of duty, if you don’t lose your job over your temper, is it really that big a problem?  True friends and loving family will often forgive you for an outburst of anger, bosses– not as much.
 
Also, the difference, I realize, between the rage that was directed at me (and my sister) by my abused father, at my friend by his enraged, quick to snarl and slap mother, and whatever bad treatment was meted out by other inept parents of adults we know, is that being raged at is a trauma that causes a different category of harm in the child than just being disrespected or treated thoughtlessly.   Being the object of a parent’s rage from your earliest memories?   Priceless.
 
Just ask my dad about that, though you’d need special powers to make out what his smiling skull would tell you up there in that little boneyard outside of Peekskill. If you had those special powers, the man could tell you a hell of a lot. 

Do You Find Your Own Thoughts Fascinating?

And if so, are they valuable enough to sustain your beliefs and provide the energy to power productive actions?

I am asked to give my thoughts on the Thought Inventory next week.  What did I think about how I thought about things I was thinking about in regard to what those thoughts led me to do?  If I did not think that thinking about how I was thinking provoked thoughts I did better to think than the ones I was previously thinking, please rate this thought on a scale from “somewhat” to “extremely”.

“I’m sorry, doctor, I am losing the thread of this conversation,” I said.  

“I’m not a doctor,” she said.  

I did not wish to think about that further.  The work, I thought thoughtfully, is mostly done by the patient anyway.   Most things here, in this world of pleasure and pain, are matters of opinion, after all.  I’ve already stated for the record that I value my own insights above almost every other– though I am open to helpful advice, I like to think.  And I need help from somewhere, that much is as clear to me as to anyone who has seen me in inaction these last two quarters.

“Well, one thing to become more aware of is how you are feeling about yourself,” said the therapist early on in the session.   The obvious question, if you have faith in your theories and your powers why aren’t you using them, in spite of whatever lack of encouragement, whatever objectively discouraging obstacles, you’ve had?  

“You will feel better about yourself if you use 11’s on your guitar,” a moderately accomplished guitarist told a better one.  I’ve never forgotten this, though it was spoken decades ago.  For one thing, I’ve always used 11’s.  I don’t recall ever feeling better or worse about myself based on the gauge of the guitar strings I use.  

“You live in the world of your head!” another told me, though it’s possible I was hearing things.  It’s not as though there are not very good reasons for living in my head.  Growing up, the world of my head was a much safer place than the world of everyone else’s heads.  Putting oneself in the heads of many other people is truly scary, as is much of the world of what we agree on as “objective reality”, the way things actually are.  Tens of millions of kids who will never see a toilet, though many of their siblings will see early deaths from diseases absent in places with basic sewage and sanitation infrastructure.   You know, the way things actually are.

For the record, then:  I created and implemented a largely autonomous team-based animation workshop that allows participants to create stop-motion animation in a fraction of the time it usually takes.  I did it alone.  I don’t know anyone who has dreamed up, designed and implemented anything as simple yet complex.  Still miles from being the self-sustaining business I am counting on it becoming, but as far as demonstrating that it works– I think the 90 plus workshops speak for themselves.  

For the opposition, those who do not live in my head, highly successful marketing genius Seth Godin:  if you send your best idea to ten people you trust and they don’t send it on to other people, your idea is not worth chasing.  Find another idea to sell.

Another angle: if you send your best idea to ten people, in a form that is not readily digestible, tasty and exciting, the way a marketing person would send it, how do you know your idea is not worth chasing?  After all, the people who actually experience the workshop are engaged at once.  Many of them love it.  People not inclined to work with others soon find themselves working with others because it’s simply the best way to work on any creative project with multiple moving parts.  The work they produce is, inarguably, sometimes quite cool.

Guy Kawasaki, I told the therapist, concealing my surprise that I’d immediately remembered the name of an internet savant I’d heard once, sent a query to his email list of 2,000,000 people.  He initially heard back from about 1%, or 20,000 and was very happy with that success rate.  If I send a query out to ten people and hear back from two, that’s, statistically, a hugely successful week, if we don’t factor in the emotional let-down of 80% of the people who claim to wish me every chance at success not bothering to tap “nice” and hit send.  

“Most people do not tap ‘nice’ when somebody sends something they created, they feel like they have to write something more in an email, give some real feedback.  If you need people to tell you ‘nice’ you are a needy fucking baby who needs to get a life, and a job, and not try to be the CEO of an imaginary nonprofit.  The rest of us work our asses off, and spend years paying our dues.  We’re sorry if we can’t jump every three months when you send us something for your feedback to tell you it’s ‘nice’.”  

“Well, shoot,” I say, extending my lower lip a bit, “you don’t have to get all pissy about it.  Don’t say ‘nice’, that’s fine with me.  Must be tough, having your life.   Sorry to bother you.  Hope you have a nice day.”  

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” says my former business partner to the mediator.  “He claims this is about the starving children in Harlem, kids with cancer, the women undergoing chemo, that it’s not about him.  But it’s about him.  It’s only about him.  And he gets to be pissed off at anyone who works for corporations because he thinks he’s Saint Fuckface.”  

“But, darling,” I protest, doing a passable Cary Grant, “I AM Saint Fuckface.”

Don’t Think About it Too Hard

“The most universally practiced form of therapy, and the most dependable device to free oneself from the torments of excessive introspection, is to stay busy.  Work is good, and proper, and necessary.  It is always good to work, it keeps you occupied, gives a feeling of accomplishment, plus you get paid, which allows you to live.  And everyone knows you have to work, so working long and hard is also rarely seen as a vice,” A said.

B was quick.  “Yet you, I notice, endorse indolence and excessive introspection for yourself. Which would be fine if you were wealthy or successful, you’d be entitled to your opinions, not needing any further pay for them.  But you are neither wealthy nor successful and clearly are in need of pay, even if it comes only in the form of recognition or appreciation.”  

“What I endorse for myself I would not recommend for everyone.  In fact, I say ‘go to work’ whatever that work may be.  Better you were working now than busting my balls, for example.”  

“Yet you feel superior because you spend your days ruminating, seeking connections, puzzling, trying to clarify.  You actually feel superior because you do not work, because you believe you are somehow doing hard and important work by tapping away in your little journals even though nobody pays you for it,” said B.

“That may be so, but I don’t fault anyone for not taking the time to try to think things through too deeply.  It can hurt, that much is clear– and whether it can help is an open question.  And look, I understand, perhaps more than most, that people need recognition and appreciation, in many forms.  Dale Carnegie, years ago, set out in his principles of how to make friends and influence people, that first among our needs is the need to be acknowledged.  No sweeter sound than hearing one’s own name spoken kindly and so forth.   We live in a world where this is simply not done very often. In its place we have getting and spending, deriving self-worth from our work and our possessions, striving, trying to thrive as comfortably as possible.  Why explore the roots of an anger you’ve spent a lifetime repressing if you can work long and hard day after day and then go on a fabulous vacation instead?  Or, in rare cases, just be happy because you have the genetic set-up for it?”    

“Why, indeed?” said B.  

“No, I grant you that.  100%.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  If you fit in, and you are able to be happy competing, rising early, striving all day to do your job well, going to bed tired with a feeling of accomplishment, God bless you,” A said.   “I’ve never had that talent.”

“That’s why people think ‘A’ stands for ‘asshole’, my friend.   You sit around all day brooding and judging, and think you are…. ah, never mind,” B said.  

“Look, I grant you that I am annoying.  What is my life but a perplexing mystery and the story of incomprehensible failure?   I may have mastered a few things over the years but what have I done with any of them beside make fine hobbies of them?  I recognize that even someone like George Steinbrenner, who I had nothing but contempt for when he was alive and little feeling for at all now that he has a monument bigger than Babe Ruth’s in Yankee Stadium, could be a hell of a piano player.  I knew a cocaine addict, a pretty decent bass player, who grew up near Steinbrenner’s and somehow became connected to the old tyrant.  He told me George could play the hell out of a piano.”  

“Fascinating,” said B.

“Point taken.  It’s just that I’m struck over and over by how many people’s lives of quiet desperation unfold with just one or two moments of seeming broader understanding popping up.   Is insight worth so little that…” A was at a loss.  

“‘For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,’ Ecclesiastes 1:18,” said B.  

“You quote scripture at me, Devil?  Those books contain every kind of justification you could ever want: God has no problem with slavery and genocide, God hates slavery and genocide.  Isn’t Ecclesiastes The Book of Depression?”

“Yes, I think so.  The Book of Depression, yes.  That’s what most biblical scholars have taken to calling it,” said B.  

“Or maybe it’s the book of what just is: a time to be born, a time to die, vanity is just vanity, do not spend too much time chasing the reasons you are miserable, don’t worry, be happy,” said A.  

“Oh, are you a biblical scholar now too?” said B.  

“No, I read about it on Wikipedia.  Anyway, I got a note recently from a supremely busy friend, perhaps the most harried person I have ever known, a little piece he’d dashed off while in flight to a business conference of some kind.   He wrote that he had gained some insight into his troubled marriage and had reason for hope of improvement, based on small signs of tenderness from his often angry wife.  Within that note was a report that in a fit he later recognized as rage, he had totaled his car.  I wrote back to tell him I was glad his marriage was looking up,” said A.  

“This is exactly the reason some people who hate you hate you,” said B.  “Everyone you know is just a lab rat to you, a living chart to be pulled down and vivisected to make your pretentious points about human life here in this unexamined world.”

“Heh,” said A, “that reminds me, years ago F called to tell me he was sick of being one of my lab rats and that he was resigning the post.  I laughed and told him I was making note of this excellent reaction in my lab book, that his ‘resignation’ would be presented in my next scholarly paper.  And I told him I’d make sure he was given two extra pellets for that fine work, that I was proud of him but that, of course, letting him out of the cage could not be considered.”  

“You’re a sick bastard,” said B.  “now, if you will finish your point about the busy friend with the glimmer of hope about his difficult marriage, I have to get back to work.”

 “OK.  So I get an email back from him saying I’d missed the point.  The point was that he’d been enraged, and, driving in this state, totaled his car.  His anger, damn it, that was the point, was I not paying attention?” said A.  

“Were you not paying attention?” said B.  

“I’m sorry…” said A, “what were you saying?”  

“OK, I really have to get back to work, what is your point, if any?”  

“As long as my friend stays busy, busy, busy he will never have to think again about the anger that drives him, dogs him, bedevils him, anger that I’d been so fucking oblivious about,” said A.  

“Without a doubt,” said B, “now, unlike you, I have to get to work.”  

“Go forth and be productive,” said A, sliding off his chair back on to the carpet.  

“And you, have a nice nap,” said B.  

“Look,” said A, “some people respond to their anxieties by running, others by stopping in their tracks.”

“Profound,” said B, “I suggest you sleep on that one.”  

“Excellent idea,” said A, curling up to think on it more.