Category Archives: musing

Jump Start

Sekhnet brought me a cup of coffee, calling to wake me as she came, at approximately the seven hour mark of my sleep.  It was already day time.  Sleeping too much is a sign of depression and she worries, not unreasonably, based on my reports.   She was cheerful as a bird as I grimaced against the light, motioned for her to put the coffee on the bedside table.  I told her my alarm was set for fifteen minutes later and she withdrew.   A few minutes after that she came in with the phone to her ear, eyes wide with excitement.  “I’m going to put you on speaker phone, here he is.”

A neighbor of her’s, a bright, friendly woman of 89, with a resemblance to Allison Janney, was on the phone, talking in her excited voice.  Margaret, often mistaken for “dotty”, lived a creative, nonconformist life in Greenwich Village, photographing, carrying a sketch book and taking care of several rescued cats before her hip shattering fall a few months back on her way up the five flights to her cluttered walk-up.   She’s had her ups and downs being neglected in rehab and is grateful to Sekhnet for her regular calls and visits.  She’s a sharp woman when not overcome by despair.  She’s recently been feeling much better as a result of weekly visits from an acupuncturist.  She’s walking again recently, after months in a wheelchair after some initial progress towards walking.

“Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote about the importance of meetings, exchanges with like-minded people, to advance his ideas,” Margaret began, excitedly.  “Mensa is an organization where like-minded people meet, share enthusiasm and help each other solve problems.  Sekhnet tells me how thwarted you’ve been feeling and I think you should look into Mensa, they’ll send you an IQ test, which is a snap, and then you’re in.”

“That sounds like something worth investigating,” I grunted, keeping my eyes closed against the light.

“I thought of it in a dream last night, I’ve been having REM sleep and dreaming again, it’s wonderful.  After Sekhnet told me about your situation yesterday I dreamed about Mensa and I think it could be perfect.”

“Mmmmm,” I grunted.

“They send you an IQ test, which is just a gimmick, it’s easy, and you send it back…”

“A gimmick?” I asked.  She didn’t explain.

“Benjamin Franklin wrote about the importance of meetings in his autobiography.  He found it crucial to surround himself with like-minded people…”

I agreed and told her I’d been thwarted at the meetings I’d held so far, at the way any creativity in the room was funneled entirely toward criticism, profuse, imaginative critique, without a hint of construction anywhere in it. Easy to see the faults in an imperfect thing, like the crazy leap to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to your dead ninety-nine year old mother.  Harder, by many country miles, to see the glint of obscured perfection struggling to make itself seen.

I grunted my thanks to her and heard Sekhnet continue to thank her as she and her voice trailed away into another room.  I went on-line, looked over Mensa’s website a bit and took the Mensa mental workout, a timed test you can find here. 

An interesting exercise I algernonned by forgetting the one crucial rule of timed test taking– skip the hard ones and come back to them at the end, if time allows.  Several answers were apparent immediately, those questions took seconds to answer and the answer was a certainty as I filled it in.  Others, given some leisure, could be solved without great difficulty.  The difficulty was the one minute given for each of the 30 questions.  I didn’t get to the last ten or so.  Missed a couple of those I did answer, after pondering a couple for perhaps five minutes each.  My 53% made me wonder if my mother, a woman prone to poetic exaggeration, had been lying about my long ago IQ score on a test I hadn’t known I’d even taken.

Ten Minute Drill

Everything, pretty much, is possible.  We can see this from the seemingly impossible things people do– on musical instruments, with their bodies, the things they create.  As my father’s blasé uncle said when his nephews took him to the zoo and excitedly showed him a giraffe:  “who needs it?”

Everything in life is pretty much impossible.   Look how hard it is to do the simplest things for so many people.  You will die unless you lose 50 pounds, live a life of pharmaceutical limbo until you do.   “So?” you say, “I’m going to die anyway.”  True dat.  As much reason not to do the thing as to do it, particularly if it’s a difficult thing.

This, for example.

Hard to tell, in many things, whether we are entering the fifth inning of a scoreless game, or the bottom of the ninth, down by three runs, with two outs and two strikes, the umpire crooked as the local politician.  The driver of that bus, we assume he is not insane, will not come up on the sidewalk amid screams and mow us all down.  Once in a while the bus driver is insane, plows into a crowd somewhere because he just can’t take it any more, for reasons others will be left guessing at once he blows his brains out after the massacre.

Today ten minutes seems like an eternity, forcing words out the way boys in the Boy Scout Handbook sometimes did not let nature take its course, causing them to worry and turn to scout-masters or priests who would ease their concerns about this worrisome behavior.   Sometimes this easing of concerns would scar them for life, but that’s just another example of the sardonic turn of mind instilled in me young by my father, who had it instilled in him with a whip across the face.

Let’s imagine he was only actually whipped once or twice a day.  Does that explain the whole story?   Can the whole story be explained, even summarily, in the 1:30 left on the game clock?  I think not, typing faster and faster, look, suddenly toward the end it all speeds up, goddamn it, if only there was time to reset the clock, get a few of those minutes back, gather my thoughts, rewrite a few lines, start again.  The stories we could tell each other, he thought wanly as the clock, relentless as this hourglass of a life here, ticks down 13…10… and before I can say time…. time!

King of the Grotesque

Guy walks into a party, his life’s dream made real on his back.   He’s been carrying this dream made real so long, unable to give it the food it needs, that the dream is looking greenish, giving off a foul odor, wreathed in flies.  He’s carrying a decomposing cadaver on his back, its face frozen in the agony of its slow death.

“Why are these freaks looking at me like that?” the guy wonders as friends and acquaintances give sickened smiles and skitter away like well-dressed crabs.   He’s used to the weight, and the smell, which has been slowly gathering over several years, is something he doesn’t really notice, assumes is just the smell of this sometimes putrid world itself.

Poor bastard.

As for me, I have an appointment with a business consultant today that I have to prepare for, if you will excuse me.

The Unknowable Unknowns

To start with the grotesque, as is my custom:

Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the failed war in Iraq, a man who, if such losses were tallied against America, would have been on the docket at the Hague, along with his fellow merry reinterpreters of international law, to defend his killing and dispossessing of tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of anonymous brown people who never posed a threat to America. He famously quipped, stepping away from the standing desk he worked at, and cited as an example of the harmlessness of so-called ‘stress positions’ during the enhanced interrogations that unpatriotic, hyperbolic Americans insisted on calling ‘torture’: 

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.[1]

And gruesome (and gratuitous) as it is to start with that gleeful executioner Rummy, there are, in any endeavor, the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknowns, which I have been pondering today, as most days.  To wit:  I have either already failed and stubbornly cling to the irrational belief that I can move this moribund program along or I have achieved much, against great odds, and am only one or two contacts away from making it the success it deserves to be.    

Only time will tell, I suppose, what kind of unknowns these are as I wait to hear back from my latest round of writing to convince other unknown people to help me with marketing, fundraising, etc.

CV (revised)

I was self-employed as an attorney, never part of the corporate world.  I taught in the public schools for five or six years (teaching mainly third grade) before attending law school.  I have an MA in Creative Writing, my BA was in history and philosophy. 
 
I found I lacked real enthusiasm for the law and had philosophical as well as financial reasons for deciding to leave that adversarial world.   I set out several years ago on a path to help in the ways I am best equipped to help, doing work I can wholeheartedly believe in.
 
I envisioned a non-hierarchic, creative program where children could work together to make their voices heard.  I imagined the children in the Harlem schools where I taught having a place where their ideas would be listened to and supported as they demonstrate the depth of their imagination and desire to learn.   Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of stop motion animation in a way elementary school-aged kids could teach each other to do.  I invented a portable animation stand that fits in a backpack and sets up in five minutes.  The next two years I facilitated approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.   It is very gratifying to see how it works immediately, exactly as designed, everywhere I set it up.  Within minutes the room is a buzzing beehive of purposeful activity.
 
What I need now is help pitching, publicizing and selling the program.   I’m looking forward to hearing your advice and ideas about the steps I need to take to find the people I need to help move this from great working idea to  sustainable program.

CV

“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface.   Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY.   JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark.   Member of NYS and Federal Bars.  Quit drinking 2005.  Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans.  Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele.  Writing continually, rarely fiction.  Drawing and painting since age three or so.   Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized.  Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.  

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear).  Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy felt the same about me.    Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator:  bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.    

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country.   Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves.  Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness.  Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.  

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn.  Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes.  Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.  

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up.  Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love.  The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely.  Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow.  I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

 

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.  Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive.  Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you.  The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man.  I can’t stand that whining.  Man up, for fuck’s sake.”   There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted.  A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.  

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet.  “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine.  “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad. 

Humans are not primarily rational actors.  We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational.   Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations.  Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness.  Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane.  The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane.  The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice.   Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that.  When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360.  It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.  

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds.  Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with.  She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us.  She asked me not to talk about it any more.  

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice.  This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it.  Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!”  I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving.   The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story.  I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray!  God bless Murray!”  I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying  job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years.  This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane.  After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first.  My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.  

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence.   Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.  

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones.  It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice.  Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters.  But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone.  “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.  

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.  

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place.  Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to.   Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons.  It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.

 

 

 

 

Flowers for Algernon

There is a novel with that title by Daniel Keyes, later made into a movie, first published as a short story in 1959.  It is the story, told in diary form, of an experimental surgery to increase a retarded man’s intelligence.  The experiment works wonderfully, as it did on lab mouse Algernon, and Charlie Gordon, the first human subject, a barely literate simpleton in the first entry of his diary, quickly develops into a genius.

I can give you all this detail not because I have a fantastic memory, except for the bare bones of the Flowers for Algernon story, which I read 50 years ago, but because we now have the impeccable digital memory of the internet that allows me to refresh my recollections of the details, quickly learn details I hadn’t known before, and link you to the actual text.

I am thinking of the story, also known as Charly (the title of the Academy Award winning movie), because of its tragic dramatic arc.   Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68, undergoes an experimental surgical procedure to increase his intelligence.  He goes from semi-literate janitor to an eloquent genius with an IQ triple his original one.   His brilliance complicates his life, but he is grateful for it, until he sees Algernon lose all his post-surgical intelligence and wind up in worse shape than he began.  

Charlie Gordon’s fate is tragically clear as Algernon, now his pet, quickly regresses and dies, to Charlie’s, and the readers’, great sorrow.  The flaw in the experimental surgery that his own research discovered is confirmed.  He feels it all slipping away and we watch, his journal entries deteriorate and his new found powers slip away.  In the end he is as he was before, even a bit worse, and the last thing he asks for is for someone to put flowers on Algernon’s grave.  

What starts with all the promise in the world, ends with Charlie as he was before, even a bit worse off.

I am thinking of this Algernon phenomenon in relation to my great experiment. Against the odds I singlehandedly created and conducted a program that worked exactly as I imagined it could.  I was in one school, where it went well, as it did in the three other schools where I launched it, at a reform school and even at the sessions for chronically ill adults.  

At its peak the workshop was active in three schools.  Then two.  Then one.  Then none.  It’s hard not to see that as backwards progress, lose the optimism that kept me chasing the miraculous aspect of what I felt I was beginning to accomplish.

I don’t remember if Charlie Gordon was beset with self-pity as he felt it all slipping away, though it’s hard to imagine that feeling could have been absent from his journal.  In my own case, it is entirely possible, one hopes, that after conducting 100 successful workshops, making several short promos of students at work featuring their original animation, writing increasingly concise and descriptive materials about the program, that I will get the business and funding help I’ve needed from the beginning.  

It is not impossible, after all, that the New York City Agency that helps small businesses recruit, train, fund, negotiate government contracts and so forth, will provide exactly the help I need to make the program a success, in spite of the daunting odds.   Not impossible that one of the mentors I wrote to on the new NYS business mentoring site will one day get back to me, offer valuable guidance.  Not impossible, no.  There’s every chance I will complete the short on-line application for NYC Business Solution’s help as soon as I finish posting this.

But I still can’t help thinking of Charlie Gordon and that mouse Algernon today.

Infinite and Finite

In our finite world scarcity and competition for limited resources are facts of nature, taken for granted.   We are hard-pressed to see the world we live in except in terms of winning and losing.   Most drama in our world centers on the burning question of who will take the lion’s share and be safe in their home and property and who will starve or die young of preventable diseases or violence.    Most live anxiously in between, taking distraction and pleasure where they can, and there are people who will kill you for the money in your pocket.

Other things in this world are infinite and as precious as clean water.   Empathy is infinite, if allowed to flourish, and it saves lives.   The gift of being listened to, heard and understood, having someone take the time to understand — a sadly rare gift that costs nothing to give and is potentially infinite.  Imagine the pain and violence that could be spared, if a person on the edge of rage had only had someone to hear how much they were suffering and ready to give even a small comfort.

I heard a great radio interview a few weeks ago with a woman who worked in an office in a school.  A distraught maniac came into the school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo, ready to kill and then, as the maddening saying goes, “turn the gun on himself” or commit “suicide by police”.  She was the first person he encountered there, and she was in the midst of a day of great personal trouble already when he walked in.   She saw his agony and spoke to him kindly, told him he was loved, called him sweetie, assured him that his life was going to be better than it felt in this terrible moment.  She wound up calming him enough that he didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t turn the gun on himself.  

Many gun-toting maniacs who barge into schools are far past the point of hearing anything, the kindest words in the world will be cut off by their gun shots.  But her actions that day saved many lives, including her own.  They don’t make a movie about her, but she’s a greater hero than most that movies are written about. Antoinette Tuff is this hero’s name.  In looking her up just now I read that a few days ago they sentenced the 21 year-old with the AK-47, who shot at police before Tuff talked him down.   Looking at the photo of the beautiful Ms. Tuff, and reading about her hard life before her heroic moment, they might very well make a movie about her.   She has a book out now and is doing the interview circuit.

Also infinite, the violence rage produces.  It is as inevitable as the “fuck you” many in a hurry, or dealing with their own troubles with no time left, might feel reading something like this on some fool’s blahg.  Abstract bullshit with rose colored shades on, where is the actual content?  Oh, wait:  it’s better to be amazingly kind than to be a common fucking bastard, eh?  Deep.

Our minds create the world we live in, it is said.  The organ of mass media plays upon our senses, all the time, selling without rest, pulsating in our pockets, on a billion screens, it’s echoed by the crickets chirping in the darkness.  All of human genius is focused on perfecting this ever more incredibly sophisticated sales machine.  We cannot see our world without seeing the inevitable — war, competition, violence, hatred, revenge, infuriating piety.  Infuriating piety is as bad as the rest of the plagues, it’s maddening to listen to someone piously announce the difficult truth, presented with a pious idiot’s simple mindedness, leaving no room for discussion.  The certainty of pious people can be maddening, that’s understood.

Picture two kids and their prospects for a happy life and I’ll duck back behind the curtain.  One child, when she wakes afraid in the dark, has an adult who comes, puts a soft hand out, speaks quietly, listens and reassures. The other child wakes afraid in the dark and is met by an angry adult who waits for the child’s wailing to get out of control and then barges in snarling “you’d better shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about!”  

That this goes as well for adults as for children is too self-evident to even try to show.  It is even more important for children, clearly, and for the future of life here.

Isolation Chamber 

 

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.  

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity.   Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks.   It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

 “Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I.   And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention.  Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media.  It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators.  How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down?   140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me.   Into the breach, follow me!!   Hello? Can I get a tweet back?  Retweet?  Ping?  Hello?

 “Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

 “’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship.  After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

 “To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now.  Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in.   He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

 I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”.  To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine.  Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am.  I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base.  Before I left each friend they were laughing.  I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way.   That’s neat, I remember thinking.

 “But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

 “You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

 Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?”   I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?”  The line was dead.  Silent.   The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

 “There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

 Isolation does things to a person who lives alone.   I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line.   Silence.

 Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous.   Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it.  All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.”   End of that particular story.   I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.