Category Archives: musing

I Used to Write Things like this

Looking for an account of a long unhappy friendship I’d written at some point, germane at the moment due to the passing of that former good friend’s mother, I’ve been picking through the haystack of unsorted needles with little hope of finding that story.  Going through the files for the now extinct blahg I once maintained, I stumbled on this one, poetic in its way, written four years ago when I was in the first stage of optimism about this new plan I had for my life.

Lost Souls

Sunday, September 19, 2010, 12:30:58 AM

Sat around a long table last night eating delicious food with a dozen people I love, each one full of great qualities, each one, in some part of themselves, a lost soul.   We bang around in this world lost a good deal of the time and there is no shame in it.  I am just thinking about it now, the dark night before Ralph’s unveiling, in the aftermath of the Days of Awe.

My sister took my mother to see “Up in the Air” a black comedy that touched a raw a nerve in this downed economy.  My mother, even though a George Clooney fan, didn’t enjoy it very much.  “Everybody in that movie was so damaged,” my mother told my sister as they left the cinema.  Abby was impressed by the insightful comment; indeed, every character in that movie is damaged in their hearts, in their minds, in their souls.  They dream the dreams of damaged people.

It was my mother’s follow-up comments that rendered my sister speechless on the drive home.  

“Do you think the filmmaker was trying to say that everyone is damaged?”  my mother asked.  Abby wondered if this was an ah-ha moment, the possible opening of an important discussion.  She ventured the opinion that everyone probably is damaged to some extent.

“I’m not damaged,” my mother said forcefully, a few months before cancer took her ravaged body and struggling soul from this life, and my sister was at a loss for anything to say to that.

Ralph’s tombstone will have a cheesecloth gauze removed from it tomorrow, after some prayers are chanted and a few words said about him.  Ralph was the father of my good friend Rob, who was my best friend in the world, and we spent many an evening over at his house, my family and I.  Ralph was quick with a droll remark, glass of booze in his hand, suave as Dean Martin but at the same time as downtrodden and dominated as the Jewish husband in any Jewish husband joke.  

The last time I saw him he looked wonderful, he was pushing 90 and could have passed for 75, dapper as always, smiling, his thick hair brushed back and shining.  He had no idea who I was, but could see by his wife’s friendliness toward me that I must be an old friend.  We went into a quiet room and sat and talked, his wife and I, then he turned to me with that old Ralph mischief in his eyes, and melancholy too, and crooned “the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.”  A year or so later he was being eulogized, another mystery who had walked among us.

As all the ones we walk among must of necessity be.  There are reasons for every action, ridiculous as it may seem, given so many of the actions reasoned to.  If too unreasonable to be called reasons, there are at least rationales for every belief, behavior, hope and grudge.  We don’t act without them and we can’t do anything incredibly cruel or stupid without believing we have good reasons, or at least strong rationales, for doing what we do.  Sometimes we feel lost, wondering who is actually pulling these strings, this spider web I am hanging in life by, like a dangling participle?

Music that could and should be made, but silence.  Love that should be expressed freely, and shared, and used to give strength, used in a hundred bizarre undermining ways that advance nothing but puzzlement and hurt.  Beauty, sorrow, beautiful sorrow, sorrowful beauty, permutations of every moving thing often moving off in directions that sustain nobody.

It is no wonder that so many souls are lost, lost on the way to Death we do our best not to think of as coming for us, though it most certainly is.  We are a busy society, a competitive, commercial one, time is money and money runs faster than time, so we must be faster still.  And this chasing is hard work, leaving us tired, distracted, it is not always easy to concentrate.  

The research says we can only really focus on one thing at a time.  We generally have several things clamoring for our attention and feel obliged to multitask, which makes us less attentive to the things we attend to.  We have to take risks to advance, they are scary and so we are often tense when we jump.  A tense jump means trouble.

No connections, you want connections?  I could give you connections, but it would cost you.  I would require something of you to make these connections for you.  I am weary, and will be sleeping presently, to be up in seven hours to stand with Ralph’s widow, and his children, and a few friends still alive.  I will now be taking off my slippers, putting up my pipe, neatly hanging my velvety robe, laying myself between thick, creamy covers.  I’ll be snoring.  

I am tired, my dear, of speaking to the black, purring night.  The night is many things I love, but it is not big on conversation, which I do also love. And lost souls or no, I see the light of engagement on everyone’s face when they are correctly asked an intelligent question, or given feedback that leads them toward the light, or laughter, or a good, long cry.  I wonder about the short-circuit, why most people are too lost in worse things to be present more than momentarily when the moon is blue and a certain music reminds them– damn, I used to love music.

Funny

We learn that Napoleon was funny, quick-witted and, one presumes, deadpan.   A biographer of his recounts Napoleon’s drollness when a maniac ran up to Napoleon and Josephine outside the opera and declared to Napoleon that he was in love with Josephine.  “Odd choice of a confidant, sir,” Napoleon said to the maniac. 

“There are over FIFTY Napoleonic jokes recounted in my book,” said the biographer indignantly to the man he was debating, a man who held that Napoleon was a humorless, tyrannical, bungling, petty dickhead who, given the chance to truly spread the values of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, made things much darker rather than lighter, particularly to the humorless, autocratic, militaristic east.

“Over 50 jokes scattered over the 900 pages of your book,” shot back the man who would stop at nothing to debunk the notion that Napoleon was a cool guy, a great man, and funny.  “Pretty slow going, eh?”  Turns out he’s got a Napoleon biography in the works too, was flogging it a bit by the end of the debate– hinting coyly, in hopes of boosting sales, that he actually thought Napoleon was a cool guy and, possibly, even droll.

I have no idea if he was a cool guy, or droll, or if one should expect more jokes in a 900 page biography of a famous conqueror and ruler.  It’s not like it’s the biography of Jerry Seinfeld, after all.  Still, it got me thinking cheerlessly about humor, about the mysterious force that makes people say and do things that make people laugh.

If you ask me, or even if you don’t, I will admit to being a bit mystified that I am not more depressed at the moment.  If we get on to the subject, and I don’t dodge it for once but describe plainly the present circumstances I find myself in, you will find yourself flinching.  I’ve seen people literally start biting themselves in the back, like dogs attacking fleas, when I am done recounting the probably impossible challenges I’m up against at the moment.   People begin clutching at the most ridiculous ideas to try to help me.  Perhaps I could do the animation workshop with severely retarded adults who are also blind and deaf?  There’d probably be a grant for that somewhere, no?

“Hmmm,” I’ll say, pretending to consider the merits of the idea, “You know, I never thought of that.   Of course, they’d have a bit of trouble making a soundtrack, wouldn’t they, if they’re deaf?   And I suppose they’d need some help with the visual part, being blind.  But I’ll have to mull it over.  Thanks!”  And my thank you will ring a bit emptily in the uncomfortable silence before we can shift the conversation to more pleasant topics.

Still, before taking my leave of these friends, at more of a loss than I am to understand why I am not yet totally paralyzed by depression, I will usually have remarked, riffed, opined, and/or dead-panned in some semi-humorous way.  People need to laugh and the dark humor of dark humorists will suffice in a pinch, especially in a pinch.  

An old friend, literally almost 98 years old, passed away recently.  Sekhnet cried and I patted her then said “but let’s be honest about it, she’s a fucking quitter.  She said she was going for 100, but she just didn’t have the guts.”  Tears still falling she laughed, the sick twist, because there’s nothing like a little laugh to ease pain.

There are over FORTY other, equally hilarious, jokes in the 3,000 page memoir I am working on now.  You’ll want to be alert for them when you read the book.  Of course, bear in mind they don’t come across as well in print as they do when deadpanned spontaneously in the circumstances that spawned them.

“You should do stand-up!” a friend declares, wiping his eyes after my farcical account of my long and terminal unemployment, my foolish ideals and abject lack of practicality.  A good idea, stand-up, perhaps, if I’d started 40 years ago, had an incredibly thick hide and was as determined pursuing it as I am now, intermittently, pursuing this other long shot.  I could also have been a hell of a professor of something, if I’d started a few decades back.  Coulda, woulda, shoulda, you know the drill.

On the other hand, I know a self-made millionaire, one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, who lives in a mansion of one hundred rooms, a beautiful place he had built for himself and the wife who savagely attacks him daily. And, like in the old Yiddish curse, the devil chases him from room to room. Helps me keep things in perspective, thank my luck that I live alone in only three cluttered rooms where the devil has a much less fun course to chase me through and often tires of the tedious game.

LOL!

A word of encouragement (13 minute drill)

The only thing you can control, most of the time, is your reaction to the stresses you are under.  

“Mmm…,” she said, “that sounds reasonable.  But what if you put yourself, by poor planning or sheer impracticality and wishful thinking,  directly into the jaws of the situation that’s causing you the stress you’re under?”

Even more self-control is required then.  That anyone could say, with the assured wisdom of hindsight, that your plan– or lack of a plan, would have inevitably put you between these stressful jaws eventually, nostrils filled with the deadly breath of the beast intent on devouring you and your spirit — is not the issue.

“What is the issue?” 

I think of Michael Holden, a new kid with blond hair who was in my class in fourth grade.   The desks that week were arranged in a horseshoe and Holden and I sat, with about half the class, with our backs against the windows.   Which now that I think about it, put us dangerously in the path of strafing Communist planes, which, during the Cold War, we sometimes did drills to avoid the bullets of, should they come screaming in.

We were reviewing a math homework assignment and the teacher was going around the horseshoe in order, calling on a kid to read the answer to the class.  We would all check our work and then pass the page in for the teacher to make notations on and hand back to us the following day.   It was pretty asinine, as many things were back then, but easy enough, and all in a day’s work.  

The assignment was to teach us about making reasonable mathematical estimates.   We were asked to estimate the answer, then work out the math problem and give both the estimate  and the actual answer.  The first kid said “the estimate is ten, the actual answer is 12.5”.  The second kid used the same formulation, as did the third and every other kid.  

I counted around the horse shoe and counted the questions to see which one I’d be called on to give the answer to.  I worked out the estimate and the answer, it took a moment.  Meantime, I kept filling in the estimates and answers my classmates were kindly providing, cleverly getting one or two wrong and dutifully marking an X next to those, along with the correct answer.

Holden, I saw, was struggling somehow, either didn’t count right or didn’t get the assignment, or… I don’t know.  But when the teacher called on him he had a blank loose leaf page in front of him, which he stared at thoughtfully.   

“The estimate,” he said, and began to cough.  “The estimate is,” and he was convulsed in what the Russians used to call a paroxysm of coughing.  He struggled to get the word ‘estimate’ out again, as his cough became more and more like a dog’s bark.  He was fair-skinned and his face quickly turned pink, then red, then crimson, almost purple.

“Michael,” the teacher called in concern, “go get a drink of water!”  And he dutifully nodded, still coughing, got up and walked to the back of the room where he drank at length from the water fountain at the end of the long sink.  Another kid gave the estimate he hadn’t provided, and the actual answer.  The teacher never got back to Holden.  

And there’s the buzzer.

Remembering A Remarkable Soul

The first two lines of a greatly appreciated personal email today, from a man whose mother died a few nights ago:

My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish,  a royal death.

She would have been 98 in a matter of weeks, and it was only recently that I heard her voice tiredness for the first time.  

I knew her for more than 40 years, making her around my age now when I met her, a small coincidence that just occurred to me.   If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 that remained to her, I would be very blessed.  

The only memory of her that is not pure sunshine is recalling how demanding a mother she sometimes seemed to be.  All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers.  Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.  As her oldest son noted, over the years we became buddies.

“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often.  If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grown up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often.  What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be.   Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.

She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time.  My parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring.  The graduation was in Newark, New Jersey.  Sophie emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and her husband in their nearby home.  The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.

She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and her husband to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort.  “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal.  The two couples became friends at once.

Her husband died, and, not long afterwards, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live.  Sophie was then close to ninety and had stopped driving on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye.  She took local streets, a trip that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.  I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died.  It was like the sun.  She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could.  She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.   She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.

A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B.  Sophie and my mother were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.   I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”.  My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up.  This cracked Sophie up.

“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!”  She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.

Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full.  My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die.  “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath.   I’d talk soothingly to her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.

Sophie walked slowly and deliberately at 92.  She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace.  She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.

One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die.  Sophie kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went.  She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example.  I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.

 

 

Formula for Fighting Dread

Easy to forget when discouraged, and annoying to be reminded of when filled with dread:  

Each thing you dread, that you manage to do, will remind you that the dread is almost always worse than the actual doing of the thing you dread. Often, doing the thing you dread turns out to be nothing at all.

Can you feel the weight of dread lift off you?

Not in advance, of course not, it’s unimaginable.  But afterwards, probably so.

 

A Flash of False Insight

 

Are you familiar with that flash of a unifying thought that seems to answer several questions at once?  A thought that suddenly, and at once, explains what you could not previously get a grip on no matter how hard you pondered it?

I remember an odd moment years ago when a friend came up with messianic fervor in his eyes speaking a name over and over, a name I’d never heard.  By this incantation he was trying to impart such a moment of insight, the ah-hah moment when it all became clear to him.  It turns out he was speaking the name of a charismatic lead singer, a man who, my friend believed with great and palpable relief, was going to help take my friend’s music to the toppermost of the poppermost.  My friend makes a good living today, lives in a nice house in an excellent neighborhood, but the partnership with the singer never worked out and he does not live off the royalties of his many fine songs.  The singer himself has made his way in another field entirely, never spent a moment on the pop charts anywhere.

Words jump out at us according to our own magnetic qualities, what we see is many times the product of what we are looking for, the lens we look through.  I recall my father reading a piece I wrote about him during the decades I was still trying to connect with him as something other than an adversary.  “Weird?” my father said at the end, repeating one of 1,000 words incredulously.  “Weird?” he said again, his voice pitched in a strange cadence, a peculiar, almost wry, expression on his face.  And he kept saying it, “weird?” in a way I think even he would be forced to admit, was a little weird after a while.

One stray word or thought in an otherwise well-played campaign of words can queer the whole deal, as they used to say.  I wrote a letter in a very difficult situation, maintaining a certain dispassion all the way through, I thought.  My friend read it and nodded, until he put a finger on a single word at the end of the last sentence, a word which whipped my mask off and revealed the snarl I’d been restraining the whole time.  It was an adjective, “cynical”, which, applied to the letter of reprimand I was replying to, made it clear that all my restraint and even-handedness had necessarily been employed answering something only a piece of shit would force me to respond to.  Once he pointed to “cynical” I had no doubt as to its effect on the insane jackass who would be reading my letter, as well as its effect on her superiors, my real audience.  I removed the offending adjective and the letter was as fine as such a letter can be.

I’m reminded of this plucking things out as they strike us by a reaction to a post I put up here the other day, taking a bold and principled stand against suicide (he said, without a trace of self-mockery).  I’d given a couple of examples of a monster that preys on the souls of those we know well, easy for us to see but elusive and untamable for the person struggling with the monster.  I gave the illustration of the freelancer whose phone doesn’t ring for a while and who goes to a dark place next door to his own death by starvation.   There are many factors and variables in a freelancer’s life, and there is a lot of stress inherent in depending on the phone to ring for your work.   It’s better than some jobs, and ideal for some lifestyles (particularly when work is easy to come by) but the uncertainty of it can be as stressful as the most oppressive full-time job, with none of its security.

The point I was trying to illustrate by the example was seemingly lost on this reader, a freelancer who sometimes finds himself between dark, starvation thoughts when he gets no work and the sickeningly overworked state when he takes on too much work.  To him I had merely captured the undeniable dilemma of the freelancer.  Play your banjo without a care when you have no work and the whole freelance gig can slip away entirely for lack of attention.  There is irrational fear and there is rational fear, he reminded me, and a balance to be struck.  There’s no point lumping them into one bouillabaisse for the sake of an illustration.   The point I was trying to illustrate is that some people are not programmed, as many I know are, including myself, to dwell painfully on the worst case scenario when things are looking particularly bad.

Robin Williams’s dead body was not even buried when reports of his possible Parkinson’s diagnosis came out.  The healthy 63 year-old, according to this theory, saw himself as a deteriorating cripple in a wheelchair and decided to take his belt, twist it around his neck and take a flying leap before he wound up a pain-riddled, speech challenged, vegetable. What would Michael J. Fox, for one, have to say about that decision?  Ali?   Whatever the actual terror, Robin jumped to the darkest possible conclusion, and to his death, the demons and monsters that had pursued him for years hanging off his twitching ankles, yanking as the oxygen of his last breath ran out in his bloodstream.

Not everybody, dear reader, goes to this dark place.  It is a shame that anyone does, especially when the person is as brilliant, inspired and, by every indication, as good a man as Robin Williams seems to have been.  That’s all I was trying to say.  And that there are gradations to the darkness and a range from a bad feeling, to worry, to gnawing fear, to the terror that causes a blind leap at the end of a short belt around the neck.  That’s what I was trying to bring out.  

Not whether or not people have reasons for their fears, we usually do.  It is when fear becomes a monster that things become really dramatic, get out of control, we start to get in our own way.  Easier to see other people’s monsters than our own, that’s all I was trying to get at, as I try to get a closer look at this impossibly agile fucker that’s wrapped around my arms and legs most days lately.

Try Again Tomorrow

A force stronger than you are stays your hand as you reach for the tiny mobile phone.  The phone is an anvil you are powerless to lift.  It’s OK if you could not do it today.  Try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a little different from today, maybe the sun will be out, instead of a cancer grey sky.  You never know.  You can try again tomorrow.

You keep your own counsel instead of calling others who will ask you questions you don’t really want to deal with.  Ideas off the top of other people’s heads won’t help, and that’s basically what anyone has for something you’ve been studying hard.  You have to compose your thoughts to put things across in the way they need to be put across.  Not easy work, it’s OK to try again tomorrow.

Muhammad Ali talked about fighting for the heavy weight crown a third time.  He remains the only heavy weight to  regain the crown twice (for a total of three times).  In the days leading up the fight Ali reflected that everybody loses.  We lose our mothers,  friends, our fathers.  Some lose legs, or arms.  But the real fighter, Ali said, is not afraid to lose.  He keeps on fighting.  If you cannot fight today, rest, train, try again tomorrow.

I mention Ali, a man I admire, not because I am a fan of violent sport.  When I was a kid Ali was a symbol and an inspiration, not just to me, but to young and old all over the world.  Whether he said the memorable  “no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”  or not, the world remembers he had no quarrel with little brown people ten thousand miles away, had no intention of going over to Southeast Asia to kill poor people he had no quarrel with.[1]

I’ve got no quarrel with anyone I know.   I am tired as hell, and it is time to rest, gather my forces and peacefully continue my conquest of the world.  Tomorrow, hopefully, if you know what I’m sayin’.

 

[1]   No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. (Sometimes quoted as “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”)

  • Ali biographer Thomas Hauser searched extensively to verify this popular quote’s validity, but found no evidence of Ali actually saying it or anything resembling it, as documented inNice Guys Finish Seventh : False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1993) by Ralph Keyes
  •  What Muhammad Ali actually said was “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” as shown on [2] at 0:15 mark.

for source see misattributed box toward bottom of page

Trying to Get the Bigger Picture

If you are observant, it is not hard to familiarize yourself with the monsters that stalk those closest to you.  If we know people well we can follow these battles in detail, even place bets on the next turn with pretty good confidence.   These predictable turns are far easier to observe in others’ lives than in our own, for sure.  For one thing, most of us are masters of rationalizing our own actions, if not always having useful  insight into the things we do.   People don’t do things without a good reason, we almost always believe we are doing the right thing as justly as we can.  It’s much easier to see cause and effect in the lives of friends since we are not always as compelled as they are by what motivates them.   I think of this as I make my way through deep, cold water lately, trying to keep my eye on the bigger picture.

I knew a guy who was a living poster for ‘repetition compulsion’– he relived the same traumatic story over and over again with a new cast each time.   The story became so familiar to me, the build-up, the second act and the terrible betrayal of the third act, and so consistent, that eventually I’d interrupt these long, detailed re-tellings (this was toward the end of our friendship) to predict precisely what happened next.  I was always right, which was infuriating, but it was like taking a test I’d taken many times, answers exactly the same, coming instantly, no need for scrap paper.  It became harder and harder to resist blurting them out.  Which, of course, was maddening to someone caught in an endlessly replayed bad dream with a wise-ass close friend not even letting him tell the goddamned story anymore.

There are probably freelancers who truly relish their freedom, are delighted on a day they can relax and play their banjo all day instead of hunkering over a day job, but most freelancers I know live with the anxiety of not earning a living anymore.  No work calls in a few days is the long-dreaded harbinger of slow starvation, no matter that the yearly average workload and income have been constant for some time.   A black mood descends after a week when the phone doesn’t ring.  The feeling of impending disaster can be difficult to overcome.  With practice they may get better at having shorter and shorter spells of despair, but it’s hard to hear their bleak predictions without reminding them, lamely, of the last time they said the same things, right before that long, dizzying spell of work that made them schedule a vacation.  They are convinced each time that this time the work really has run dry, that it’s all over.  It feels like near folly to remind them of their predictions in every previous situation that has worked out fine.  Their black mood will convince them that this situation is different, the final reckoning, where the bottom falls out of their livelihood for good.

People with well-paid, important, fulfilling jobs may find themselves tormented to one extent or another after they leave work, when there is nothing worth watching on the screen, no good book at hand, when music just isn’t what they want.   They may be prone to argue, pick fights, become listless, drink too much, overeat.  It goes as well for people with shit jobs, tormented with too much time on their hands and events and personalities aligned to make a difficult situation impossible.  It goes famously for the unemployed, those with the most free time and the least money to spend diverting themselves and staying out of trouble.  There is something to be said for keeping yourself busy, it distracts a person from the things that might devour a soul, given enough hours every day to gnaw.  Soul sucking lurks in any life where it is prone to lurk, and can sweep in on a moment’s notice, slurp lustily for as long as time allows.

Each of us carries our own burdens, sensitivities, hurts, angers and fears.  The better we know people the more we will be able to see these at work.   The more stress people are under, the more easily we can see these things pulsing under the skin.  In the world viewed under stress we are skittering around on the ocean floor, surrounded by countless wily and dangerous predators.  We connect momentarily to other skittering creatures, shuddering together against the inevitable, but there is little we can do and a bad end is in store for each of us.  We know it with absolute certainty, and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Nor much we can do for the others we care about, particularly as we are being taken.

In our darkest moments we may still be aware of a world of sunshine, though it seems remote and unreachable.  It appears as a realm of mere theory, this place where we laugh, make music, make love, float on perfect water under the ideal sky.  This perspective can’t always be reached alone, sad to say, nor is being content merely a habit of good character.  I think idly how much I wish someone had been present to reach Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, many other bright examples of the human spirit, right before that terrible, last hurried moment before the belt goes quickly around the neck and everything is thrown into a frantic desperate jerk, to end the torment.   

I try to cultivate empathy as deliberately as I am able these days.  I try to listen more, talk less.  The more I take in, the better I understand how to be gentle with other people’s feelings, especially the harder ones.  I strive to be an example of the change I’d like to see in the world, no matter that it may seem foolish.   Giving in to despair unconditionally is one feeling I find impossible to truly wrap my head and heart around, no matter how affectionately fucking despair may nuzzle and paw at me sometimes.

 

Naming Things

“You are a clown,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “clowns are alternately humorous and scary.  I am neither of these things, therefore, I am not a clown.”  

“You are a robot,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “you are a robot.  Moreover, you are a robot programmed to be annoying.”  

“Well,” it said, “I have also been programmed not to interrupt.  That is something, is that not something?”  

“That is something,” I agreed.  

“You stay inside because you fear the sun.  You recently saw the photo after the bandage came off your nose, after the bolus was removed…”  

“I was not programmed not to interrupt,” I said, cutting it off, although I had, in fact, recently looked at the close-up of that hideous gaping square of exposed meat on the right front quadrant of my nose.  It looks almost one half inch deep, in the selfie, lined with raw red.

“Ah,” it said, “but I was programmed to continue.”  

“Ah,” I said.  

“You fear the carcinogenic properties of a sunny day, having had three cancers removed from your skin before the age of fifty,” it said.  

“And your point, robot?” I said.  

“This is a metaphor for your life,” it said.  “You stay out of the sun, particularly on a beautiful sunny fall day like this one, in the manner of a person in a proverb hiding its light beneath a bushel.”  

“Even in proverbs, proverbial people have genders,” I pointed out, niggling.  

“A niggling point,” it said, mechanically shaking its head from side to side, four 90 degree turns, center, left, center, right, center.  

“Have it your way,” I said, ceding the point.  The spectacles grow heavier on the bridge of my nose, resting uneasily not far from the inner tube-like repair of my gouged nose.  Isaac Babel had one of his narrators describe himself as having spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.  I envy Babel his narrators.  

“Babel’s narrators were masks,” it said.  “You have no reason to envy a man for his masks.”

“Besides,” it said, seeing that I was silent, “Babel met a very terrible end in the fire, after years frizzling in the frying pan of the USSR after Lenin’s death, after Maxim Gorky’s murder by Stalin’s friends, themselves later killed by other friends of Stalin’s.  A short, scripted trial in a dank basement and a bullet in the head.”

“This is from the NY Times,” it said, “while you were looking for the year of Lenin’s death, 1924:   Dr. Vinters began by telling the audience some details of Lenin’s medical and family history.    As a baby, Lenin had a head so large that he often fell over. He used to bang his head on the floor, making his mother worry that he might be mentally disabled.  (source)”

“Mumph…” I said.   

“And this is what you do, instead of putting some sunscreen on your face and arms and going out into the beautiful mid-October sunlight to gather vitamin D the natural way?” it said.  

“This and wonder why so many of my conversations start the same way,” I said.  

“How do so many of your conversations start?” it said.  

“”Who are you talking to?’ is often the first thing I say,” I said.  

“Why is that?” it said.

“I know,” I said, “I should stop being coy about who I’m talking to, or who I think I’m talking to, or who is talking to me.   It happens regularly, there is no surprise.   He’s often annoyed at having to dispose of the same tedious rhetorical question every time.  We are both annoyed.  Anyway, I am annoyed.”

“But rhetorical questions,” he said, “are directed toward influencing others.”

“Yes,” I said, glancing out at the pattern of brilliant light still playing among the gathering shadows in the garden below.

 

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!