Category Archives: musing

Why persist in writing?

“In today’s world of micromessages and fleeting attention spans, connecting with your audience is more important than ever.”   Denise Morrison, President and CEO, Campbell Soup.

 

We’ll leave that important question — how to connect with your desired audience so your brand can flourish — aside for the moment as I address today’s question from the steadiest of perhaps 3 or 4 regular readers of this blahg.  He writes:

what’s really hard to fathom is how you keep on producing this stuff despite the general lack of interest and encouragement

There is little mystery on my end.  I write as clearly and engagingly as I can, for the reader’s sake.  I practice the craft of writing every day, and feel better for putting my thoughts in order.   I enjoy combing through my words again and again until I am satisfied that what I’m saying could not be more clear.  The key is that I write for myself and my own feeling of clarity and accomplishment.  I am addicted to the satisfaction of those things.  

Writing is one of the few things I do all the time that I need little feedback or encouragement to continue doing.  It’s like playing the guitar for me, I require nobody to hear it or tell me I do it well; I play because I love to play.  I love the sounds of the playing and the time spent making and improving those sounds.  

A compliment is always lovely, and appreciation is like water to a flower, but we do the things we truly love because we love to spend time doing them.   We take pleasure in our mastery of things that were once hard to do.  In this ease we experience the lyrical grace that is otherwise so hard to come by in our high-stakes world.

Years ago I saved successive drafts of virtually everything I wrote.  I don’t save drafts any more because I’m sure now that every change I make is a change for the better.  The writing in each pass is clearer, more concentrated, less cluttered with distracting personal tics.  I set out each day to put at least one thought into focus.  My goal is to untangle sometimes vexing things in a coherent way that is easy to read.  Setting these things clearly into words engages my mind completely, reminds me of my best qualities and leaves me feeling better.

Every year or so I’ll get a note or call from someone telling me how moved they were by some particular thing I’ve written, or provoked, or struck by the collective weight of the many pages I’ve written.   Often this praise will transition into agonizing about not knowing anyone who can help me get my writing published, sympathizing with how frustrating it must be to write in today’s world of noise and “content” where thoughtful writing is often thought little of.   I find myself in the odd position, after I thank them for their compliments about the writing, of consoling them.

After my mother died a grief counselor recommended a helpful book called Death Benefits, my annotated copy of which seems to have been lost by the woman I loaned it to many months ago.  This is a shame, not only because she never read it but because I was planning to loan that personalized copy to a friend who can probably derive comfort from it as she mourns the recent death of her beloved, complicated father.  In that  book there is a reference, barely supported by the flimsiest of footnotes, to babies as young as a few months patting their mothers consolingly when the mother is in distress.   I love this image.

And I love to write.  It would be wonderful to have someone contact me and offer me a monetary advance to collect a hundred of these posts, along with a bunch of illustrations, and put them out in a groovy little tome.   I’d love to be asked to write something for the New Yorker, in much the same way I’d love to find a fat roll of hundred dollar bills abandoned on the sidewalk.  I would be very happy to earn a little money from writing and to have an attentive audience.  Appreciation of this thing I do mainly for myself is a bonus, and a great thing, but not necessary to sustain me in this particular pursuit of excellence.

My energies for struggle, such as they are these days, must remain focused on somehow putting one foot in front of the other and coming up with as yet undiscovered brilliant work-arounds to get my simple idea for changing the world in position to be seen.   That extreme challenge needs the feedback, encouragement, ingenuity and skills of the brightest of those who can see what I see in it.  So far, there is virtually nobody who is able to see what I see in it or offer useful insight for more than a beat or two.   It’s my cross to drag, heavy and sharp splintered, particularly when devil’s advocates are hanging from it in an effort to be helpful.  

That’s the thing that stings me, galls me, makes me want to holler: unless you succeed at making money from a thing you would call a business, unless you manage to sustain unbounded enthusiasm and confidence in the product you would sell, you are a perplexing failure.   It’s hard, to the point of making one doubt one’s basic sanity, to sustain optimism for an idea, regardless of its demonstrated worth, that generates neither money nor enthusiasm in others.  It may be simply a matter of not having connected with the proper audience for it, although using “simply” in that sentence is just whipping myself in the face, but that is a howl for another day.

Writing is in another category, it’s just something I need to do — and the most important conversation I have most days — whether you tell me you like it or not. 

Peace, y’all.

At least two possibilities

One is that you truly have a great idea that can help many people, have carried it hundreds of miles on your back, over a thousand obstacles.   The only trouble is that you haven’t been able to sell it yet.

Another is that you’re already dead, your idea as dead as you are, your failure to convincingly sell the idea to anyone a clear indication of those deaths.   Everybody knows of your death but you, that’s the reason for the forced smiles when you make a joke.

There are other possibilities, of course, many of them, but those are two.

 

Is there anyone whose insight you value more than your own?

The title above was one of the questions asked during a screening interview to evaluate my eligibility to participate in a research study about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  The theory of CBT, as far as I can tell, is that once you become aware of thought patterns that keep you locked in undesirable situations you can begin to change the way you think about those situations and find solutions that seem impossible as long as you continue to think of things from that unhelpful cognitive point of view.

So the graduate student reads that question:  “is there anyone whose insight you value more than your own?”   These are posed as yes or no questions, so I answer with an unequivocal no.   I think of everyone I’ve ever met, what they understand of life, how they live, what their deepest values are and why they sometimes must put certain of those values aside in the onrushing exigencies of life, and my answer remains an unequivocal no.  

Thinking further, I imagine everyone I’ve ever met would likely answer the same way, given the yes or no format.  Unless one has a wise counselor in their life, a sage parent, a mentor who sees the big picture and restores perspective, a religious person connecting them to a meaningful philosophical viewpoint when they become perplexed.   I wonder if the question were posed “do you believe you know anyone smarter and more moral than you are?” if the answer would remain the same.

I muse in this fairly pointless way as the snow continues to fall outside and I wait until it’s done falling to shovel it up.  It’s either clear the sidewalk and driveway or cause tremendous additional stress to someone I love, who would be forced drive through hell to get where I already am and do it if I don’t.  It is the least I can do, and as I love doing the least I can do, it is a blessing to wait for the snow to finish falling so I can do that eventually.

The World is Just the World

“I’m going to finish that book I started,” he said resolutely.

“Not ‘Bird Wins’, I hope.  You’ve learned so much since the days you carried a piss bucket for pompous jerks too lazy to walk down the hall to the urinals,” he said hopefully.  “Besides, you realize now what it takes to sell a book idea, to get an advance.  You have to give them something positive, a fantasy they will enjoy, something uplifting and inspirational that can be made into a movie people will plunk down $20 to see.  Nobody wants a book where everybody dies, where the character we’re rooting for gets brutally screwed and there’s not even anybody to get revenge.  Tell me it’s not ‘Bird Wins’.  For the love of God, please tell me that’s not the book you’re talking about.”  He smiled at his old friend hopefully.  

“I hear what you’re saying.  The only trouble is, the fucking bird always wins,” he said.

“You realize it’s confusing to anybody reading this that you’re referring to us as ‘he’ and ‘he’,” she said, suddenly.  

“Oh?” he said, raising a single eyebrow, “you is a woman now?”  

“Not at all,” she said, “I’m a beautiful cat-faced female cat who can talk.”  

“You really are,” he said, taking her in with a nod and a smile.  

“Now that that’s settled,” she said “tell me you’re not talking about ‘Bird Wins’ again, or that soul-crushing book about the narrator’s doomed battle with the fascist Minnie Frego,” and as she looked at him it really was remarkable how cat-like her sweet face was.  

“Are you really a cat?” he asked.  She smiled and rubbed her face against his, her tail caressed his arm.

He petted her soft fur.  “The ceiling is still leaking.  Yesterday the super promised to come by.  I told him to come by today any time after 1:00.  He said he’d be working in the building all day and would stop by.  There is a bucket in the living room and one in the bedroom.  Both leaks are intermittent.  One begins to go ‘drip, drip’ while the other is silent.  Then they drip together for a while.  Then the second one goes ‘drip, drip’ while the first says nothing.”

“Hmmm,” she purred, “slightly troubling, but not very interesting.”  

“Right,” he said, “exactly!  That’s the deal with all of this shit, the accumulated drips and dribbles of a hundred leaking orifices, each one a nuisance but all together a demonic symphony that will not stop til the audience is howling.  It’s Bukowski’s swarm of trivialities that are always there and kill quicker than cancer.  One drip doesn’t get you, you can deal with one leak.  But as you turn your attention to that one, the other starts, and then another, a robot calls on the phone to tell you about some mysterious debt you owe, another week’s delay on something you were counting on, suddenly a jet of hot steam you don’t have a tool to stop, or if you did, you don’t have the heat resistant suit to avoid getting scalded, something flies into your eye, the eye is lost, down to one eye, you step backwards, the rake flips up with brutal self-caused force and opens a gash on your forehead with a mule-like kick.”  

“Did the super come by this afternoon and take a look at the new leak?” she asked, trying to rein in the torrent of his real and imagined troubles.  

“Of course not,” he said.  

“Well, I hope you called him,” she said, hoping gamely to get to some kind of resolution.  

“Yeah, I called him at 4:29.  He said ‘we knocked on your door at ten to one,'” he aimed a glob of spit and expertly dinged the spittoon, “I was sitting five feet from the door from noon onwards.  He never knocked on my door.  Then he promised to come by this evening, around nine.”

“He didn’t come by around nine,” she said, licking her paws and rubbing them over her face, cleaning herself.  

“No,” he said, “so I called him a bit after nine, and he was drunk.  Said he’d be by at ten, between ten and ten thirty, ten thirty the latest.  He’d call when he was on his way.”  

She continued grooming herself.  

“Have no fear, though, I am confident the early-rising lying sack of shit will be banging on my door at 7:30 a.m.,” he predicted bitterly.  “I’ve already told him I won’t be around tomorrow morning.  Of course, I’ll be in my bed cursing him, the useless prick.  And why shouldn’t he be a useless prick?   I’m sure they don’t pay him, yet he’s up at 6:30 every morning banging the garbage cans under my windows.” 

She curled up and rested her cat face on her soft paws.  She looked at him with a mysterious expression.   Her eyes said “you don’t really expect me to say anything, do you?”

date forgotten

Had we not

bullet in the head  

been forced on top

of our neighbors’ corpses

in that festive

Ukrainian evening  

Had we not  

willing ourselves to forget

plunged

bottle deep

in spirits not our own  

Had rape

not been the law

but mercy instead  

Imagine

the songs we would have sung

the happy noise

scattered over bright chords

ecstatic leaps

and skiing madly

down the perfect slopes

of upturned breasts

under the thinness of silk

Fatigue and the difficulty of recharging the batteries

Long have they urged us, originally in hoary Latin, not to let the bastards grind us down.  The bastards constantly and tirelessly grind.   Grinding us down is their only goal.  They do a hell of a job and it takes a fresh, happy energy not to be ground down sometimes.

Of course, it is supremely fatiguing, this death by a thousand abrasions.  It’s impossible to energetically engage every one of the many outrages that are paraded by us every day.  We have outrage fatigue, in this world where they are hatching one outrage after another, using devilishly sophisticated machines to crank them out faster and faster.  

Some days it is not possible to energetically engage even the smallest of these outrages.   The question I ask myself today, as my wheels spin so far in the sluggish air: how do I recharge my spirits?

I have been musing on the scam that is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the seeming impossibility of getting out of paying hundreds of dollars I do not owe, in addition to hundreds in monthly premiums I do, feeling myself frozen in place, stymied, angry.  No outlet.  Go fight City Hall, asshole.  Has nobody granted me the serenity to accept the things that get to fuck me with no remedy and know the difference between the things I am right to actively engage?

Global warming, the organized, vociferous denial of fact, a government whose corruption is surpassed only by the insatiable, murderous greed of those who corrupt and control it, poverty, war, lack of civility, humility, gentleness, creativity in our public discourse.  The war of each against all that is thrust upon us every day.   We are living in a mined out coal mine where the air has turned noxious and it doesn’t take a coughing canary to tell us which way the toxic wind is blowing.

How do I recharge my batteries today?  Yesterday I played the guitar for a few hours, an excellent thing to do.  But, while it did me a world of good at the time, did nothing to recharge my batteries.  

Going to work is the most widely practiced universal therapy out there.  That I do not go to work is a big factor, too much time to muse, since I am not hitting snooze, having coffee and dashing off to work.   If everything in one’s day is optional, a kind of haze can set it.   There is a good reason that many people fear leisure, dread retirement, the feeling of being unproductive, useless, if not working in some capacity.   I am on the other end of the scale with that one– if I could play productively every day I’d be a very happy boy.

A very happy old boy.

Being Invisible Hurts

Making one’s life’s work a project to make the children of the invisible feel visible for a few hours a week:  sheer idiocy.  I realize this, and how developing this project flows naturally from my own childhood experiences.   I was not born invisible, did not slip off until I disappeared during high school and kept out of sight, and the workforce, for a few decades.  I had great potential and was reminded of it often by many as I slipped silently into the night.  

We live in a corporate society, just accept it.  Virtually everyone I know is employed by a corporation, paid by a corporation.   The success or failure of everyone in our society is measured by their prosperity or lack of prosperity.  To dream of an unpaid program that has no measurable path toward prosperity?   Sheer idiocy.  

I do not castigate myself, or seek to belittle what I have managed to achieve so far, even as I mock myself in the voice of the larger society.  A program that allows young public school children, working together, to make all esthetic and technical decisions as they produce group animation?   Priceless, truly.  They master a host of skills and reap huge, unquantifiable benefits from this communal play with its ingenious balance of free imagining and technical demand.   Even just the isolated element of adults witnessing and applauding kids’ creativity and achievement for its own sake is invaluable.  That I lack metrics to prove this?  A fatal flaw in the design of the program, from a corporate funder’s point of view.  

I have felt in my body the pain of being invisible.  It doesn’t come from a lack of fame, or envy of celebrity, or the want of some validation.   It comes from that fundamental human need not to be seen as a fungible widget in a school uniform, a tiny data point, but as an individual containing an entire universe of imagining and potential.  The corporation does not place any value on this fundamental human need– it has no such need itself, being a legally constructed monster, a single-minded, all-consuming predator given all the natural rights of a human being.   “I’ll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one of them to death,” said Bill Moyers, national treasure.  Me too.  

A thought experiment:  consider your feelings on a subject you care about greatly. Express them as cogently as you can to a close friend.   Hear your close friend express almost zero understanding of why you feel so deeply about the subject.   Experience the existential moment where you weigh all the other good qualities of your close friend against their inability to understand your deep engagement with this subject.  This part is a conversation, largely with yourself.  

Now, experiment part 2:  express the same thing, in written form, and send it to the friend.  Hear nothing in return.   Is a neurotic person the only type who might find this silence troubling?  

The world is just the world and there is a certain wisdom, I suppose, in lowering one’s expectations about what can be done.   The myth of the individual who, by force of intellect, will, talent and determination, changes the way people think about the world?  It is seen now and again, usually in the context of people who achieve great wealth and celebrity along with their influence.  Luck is also a factor, the accident of birth first among these fortunes.  

Then we have someone like Malcolm X, pointing to another path, following one’s beliefs without thought of personal gain like recent world-changers who spring to mind, amoral corporate geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Of course, Malcolm’s fame arose while speaking for a large, ignorant movement– he stood for years before a loud megaphone where his genius could be honed and displayed regularly.  He underwent moral transformations during his life, was willing to revisit his deepest beliefs, refine his moral stance.  And he was willing, although not anxious, to die for those beliefs.  The shots that ripped him apart in the Audubon Ballroom that February day fifty years ago this week were earned by telling threatening truths many had an interest in not hearing expressed.   Several parties who hated each other were united in their desire for his death, played essential parts in his murder.   Not exactly a role model for action, perhaps, unless one feels he has no choice.  I suppose I feel that way.

 

That’s All You Get

The famous definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.   Many do an unwitting variation on this thought experiment over the course of their lives, never quite understanding why the outcome is so consistent every time.

We are often not really to blame, owing to the enormous variation in types we encounter in the world, and how hidden deeper similarities sometimes are.  The interpersonal variables may be so subtle that it’s hard to see that we are engaged in the same thing we always did.  As Moms Mabley pointed out: if you always do what you always did,  you’ll always get what you always got.    (Though the internet attributes the insight to industrialist/anti-Semite Henry Ford and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, I prefer to picture Moms Mabley saying it).  You may be doing what you always did, but the reaction of the new person may lead you to expect other than what you always got.  Then, when you get what you always got you will shake your head in disbelief at the familiar unwanted outcome.

The subtle nature of the world is responsible for much of this repeating of the same pattern over and over, with the same lamentable result.  Then there is also just plain madness, no small factor in human relations.   How could I have known, for example, that an old friend from High School actually saw me as his father and was furious that, like the smiling, passive-aggressive old man, I just kept making glib jokes and ignoring his need to be acknowledged as an educated man and excellent teacher.   I mean… how could I have known this?  How could I have suspected it?  Even if I had known, what the hell could I have been expected to do about it?

Yet to this fellow, the parallels couldn’t have been more unmistakable:  I had exactly the same  likable and despicable traits of his father, and the final proof, to him, was that, like his father, I withheld my appreciation of the things he needed validated the most.  There was no question to him that I was his father, and that I, so fucking typically, refused to see this must have infuriated him even more.  That I only found out at the end just proved how much like his willfully blind old man I was.

I’ve thought of this several times over the years, being put in a thankless psychic role I had no way to suspect I was cast in.  I only pieced it together after things had become intolerable enough that I had to disentangle the fellow’s clutching hands from my neck and, using my foot for leverage, force the door closed on this madness.   I had a letter from him afterwards informing me that, much as I might want to, I could not unilaterally end our friendship.  “Sorry, pal,” he wrote, “but it’s not in your power.”  I have the quote on my kitchen wall to this day.  It stands as a monument of some kind.  A monument to the barking madness of the world.   This man is a well-respected educator, a father, someone I haven’t been in touch with for decades.  In fact, ten years after his “sorry, pal, but it’s not in your power” letter I had an email from him, a single line:  “isn’t ten years a long time not to say hello?”

“Not in your case,” was but the first of a dozen rejoinders that sprung to mind at the time.  I had fun thinking up replies for a day or two, but left it realizing there was nothing to be gained by firing off some glib line that would only remind him of his infuriating dad.  The only thing that was still in my power was not pissing my pal off, though I knew that hearing nothing back from me would also piss him off.  What is a father to do?

I suppose what I am driving at here is that people can only give each other what they are capable of giving.  Sometimes the demand is unreasonable, even a little insane, as in the case of someone wanting you to do a better job of being their parent than their parent did. Sometimes the demand may be within reason, but the other person is only capable of giving very little.  It is foolish to expect more of them and inevitably leads to disappointment.  An agreement that they will not piss on your leg anymore while insisting it’s raining may be the best you can get out of them.  If this is the case, it behooves you to be satisfied to be at the end of the long, disgusting pissing/raining game and take solace in the dryness of your pant leg.  On the other hand, it also behooves you to realize that, most likely, this is pretty much all you are going to get from this particular person.

It is liberating, sometimes, and lets everybody mercifully off the hook, to realize that’s all you can get.

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

Irrational to end friendships?

As a child I was dismayed each time one of my father’s closest friends, bright, colorful people my sister and I enjoyed very much, was permanently banished from our lives.   “The fall from grace,” my mother would say, “is swift and absolute.”  People we were very fond of one day just disappeared, and it always aggrieved me.  My father always had his compelling reason why the last straw had been placed on the friendship, exactly how the despicable true face of the formerly beloved friend finally revealed itself.

I argued with him about the importance of forgiveness.  It was not lost on me that this forgiveness would also apply to me.  In my father’s view I had always fought him, even as an infant, when I stared from my crib with dark, accusing eyes even before I could speak.  He made a far less insane case for each of these people he once loved being unworthy of his affections, for the betrayal each had committed.  In only one case did I ever get to hear the other side of the story, and her case seemed at least as plausible and reasonable as my father’s did.  I have since come to write this woman off for much the same reason my father had decades earlier.

The point is, live long enough and you may see things from a previously incomprehensible perspective.   As a child it was unthinkable to me that a person could toss away a good friend and never look back.   As an adult I have done this many times, always in the spirit of not tolerating what I come to perceive as ill treatment or abuse.  It does not please me to say this.   I hold forgiveness high in my esteem, though it’s super-humanly hard to forgive someone who insists they did nothing wrong.  I would rather have all of the friends I once held dear.  In each case, though, I came to the impasse my father had come to during my childhood, the impasse I found impossible to understand then.    

It is the moment when one sees a destructive pattern in the relationship, feels a lack of empathy that quickly becomes mutual.   The other person believes that you are the asshole, you just as fervently believe that they are the asshole.  That you may both be assholes no longer gives consolation to either party.   The air in the closed room begins to stink.  All that remains is a senseless fight in a stinking room or a move toward the door.  Outside the stinking room, walking away, there is little reason for nostalgia or even curiosity about whether the place still stinks.  It’s just time to move forward into the fresh air.