Category Archives: musing

Albatross

I know a woman who married a tall, charming, athletic man a few decades back.  He was a salesman, and something of a bullshit artist.   He exuded self-confidence and threw money around to impress his guests, but occasionally he would stutter.  His stutter did not stop him from being very opinionated, very assertive, arguing forcefully for opinions gleaned from his wide reading.  His stutter did nothing to curb his road rage.

 I once saw him strike out in a softball game and throw his bat down in frustration.  He was a giant and almost shattered the bat on the hard dirt near home plate.  Next time up he popped up, put his head down and groaned in frustration.  His groan could be heard on the other side of the park.   The third time up he hit a monstrous drive that kept rising as it went, and it went further than any ball I’ve ever seen hit in a softball game.  He went into his homerun trot smiling.

The woman fought with him, and dominated him in many ways, but they clearly loved each other.  He loved her so much he kept buying her cowboy boots, at one time she had a dozen pairs.  Their daughter would later have two dozen Barbie dolls.  He was a high roller.  He left 40% tips if he liked the service.  Then things started going badly for him.  Over time his stories of bad luck stopped making sense.

For example, he had a very lucrative sales job, working on a small crew of salesmen who sold a product that flew off the shelves.  He was friends with the many store owners on his route, they often gave him hardcover books, current best sellers.  There was no reason to think this friendly salesman was putting the books in his case when the store owner was distracted writing him a check for the goods he delivered.  He was loved at work, one of their top earners and a bright guy with a great sense of humor who could make fun of himself.  Everyone believed him when he reported that his sample case had been stolen from his car.  Why would anyone sell his samples for a few hundred bucks when he was taking home so much money?

Once he came home with his clothes cut to ribbons by razors, his wallet and house keys stolen.  He’d pulled off the FDR to avoid a massive traffic jam and two crackheads had tried to carjack him on an East Harlem side street.  He reported they were each as big as him and had eyes like sharks.  He’d managed to fight them off, being hit by a 2 X 4 in the process and amazingly not going down, they got his wallet and house keys, but he managed to hold on to the car keys and drive home.  He was black and blue, his clothes sliced to ribbons, but otherwise OK.  Nobody will ever know what actually happened to him that day, though one suspects a gambling debt was involved.

He eventually was fired from the lucrative sales job when his second sample case was stolen from his trunk, and samples began showing up on the shelves of stores on his route.  He managed to talk his way back into the job, but was reassigned to a very slow territory and his sales, and income, plummeted.  The woman found out they had zero left in the bank, and very little coming in, and with a new baby in the picture she was very stressed out.

He eventually lost that job, had others, progressively less lucrative, lost them too, usually following the discovery of some petty embezzlement scheme he cooked up.   Each scheme had two characteristics in common: they netted a few hundred dollars at a time and they were designed in a way that guaranteed he would get caught.   My personal favorite is one I will relate in a moment.

The woman eventually realized that he was a person who was handy with an untruth if it suited the situation better than candor.  It took years, but eventually she came to see him as a liar.  The final proof came as they were house hunting, a couple of years after the birth of their second child, a son.  When she was pregnant with the boy she reported that her husband wanted another child “as much as he wants testicular cancer”.   Once the boy was born it was love all around for everyone.  They were going to put a down payment down on a house the woman loved, they were done negotiating and were ready to buy it.  He borrowed ten thousand dollars from his wife’s parents on a Monday, part of the money they were going to put down to buy the house.  Later that week he informed everyone that he’d declared bankruptcy on Wednesday.

The woman went into a rage, and a panic, and stopped sleeping and lost a lot of weight, she could not keep food down.  For a variety of reasons she didn’t leave him, though she slept with her young son for several years and actively hated her husband.

Fast forward several years and we are at my personal favorite story about this guy.  He was coaching his son’s basketball team with another guy, and they got to talking about the shit work the guy was obliged to take these days to pay his bills.  The other coach had a commercial extermination business and offered his new friend a sales job.  The pay was better than what he was making, he would be working for a friend, and the friend’s company was flourishing.

A big source of income was commissions for landing new accounts.  The first few months he opened a few accounts a week and he was taking home good money.  Then it became harder and harder to find new businesses that needed exterminator services.  He could not let his wife and children down, so he hit on another brilliant scheme.  

Trusted by his friend, he would often lock up the office at the end of the day, he had his own key.   Ignorant about the workings of computers, he managed to pull up accounts and change the details, making up new clients he’d pretend he’d signed up.  He would print out the new client information sheet, turn it in the next day, and his friend would slap him on the back and pay him a commission.

The only problem was, in order to create a new fake account to get a commission for, he was inadvertently deleting actual accounts.  He’d overwrite company A’s file on the computer, renaming it company X.  He didn’t know how to copy a file and retain the original, so an actual client was deleted each time he overwrote the file to create a new commission.   The scheme worked perfectly, for several weeks, until the deleted companies started calling in to complain.

“Hey, Dave, what the hell’s going on?  I’ve got waterbugs marching out into the waiting room, carrying away small dogs,” reported a disgruntled veterinarian, “I haven’t seen you guys in a month.  What the fuck, Dave?”

Dave was sincerely perplexed, checked his computer, did not find the vet’s account.  Once this happened a few times Dave figured out what happened and angrily fired his unethical buddy.

The man went home to his wife that Friday and sadly reported that Dave’s business was having a slump, and that Dave had to let three sales people go, and since he was the last one hired, he was the first one on the chopping block.  His wife was all sympathy, took him to dinner, then a movie, reassured him that everything would turn out OK.  She took him to the beach the next day, the family had a wonderful weekend.  She had finally completely recovered from her rage against him.

Until Monday when Dave had calmed himself down enough to call the wife.  He reported the crime, and how much he was hurt by the betrayal, and told her he was going to press criminal charges unless the $3,600 was paid back immediately.   They made a payment plan and the woman began paying her husband’s debt weekly out of her meager salary.

I urged her to finally tell her children the truth about their father’s treachery, otherwise she would appear once more irrationally angry at him and the kids would be rightly confused.  Honesty was the only light to be shined on this hideous situation, and she agreed.  Declining my help (I’d known them all for years and have had training as a mediator) she assured me that he himself had promised to tell the kids what he’d done.  I was skeptical.

When the big day came he put on a sad face and sincerely told the children: “you know, sometimes people make mistakes.  And, as you know, your mother has a hard time forgiving people, particularly me….”  At this the woman screamed, ran out of the house and began driving 90 mph on the highway.  To this day, I’m pretty sure, her children have no idea why she is often enraged at their father.  The father, after all, is an affectionate, playful, easy-going guy who takes things in stride.  Their mother, by contrast, is a demanding and stressed out nervous wreck who is often cranky and who treats their loving father very badly much of the time.

Now, we fast forward to the present.  The kids are both young adults, the daughter just graduated from college, the son on his way to college.  Lovely kids, and both quite brilliant, good looking and well-liked.

The man is now crippled with multiple disc and joint problems.  He can no longer stand or walk without pain.  He had to give up his off-the-books job delivering pizza, he can no longer drive or carry the bags and boxes to and from his van.  Pain killers do not seem to help, and he moans in pain as, after a long day at work, the woman waits on him, does the laundry, empties the dishwasher, brings him water, the TV remote, his book, his reading glasses.  He groans throughout the night.  This once muscular 240 pound athlete is now a shattered 300 pound albatross who has not left the house in a month.  He hangs heavily from his wife’s neck, and it is up to their son to tell the man not to groan all night, that he must not keep his wife awake and endanger the hardworking breadwinner’s livelihood.

I tell the story because, having heard it, and felt the weight of it on the woman, and the almost mythic proportions of it, it becomes impossible not to tell it to somebody.  

Smile as umbrella

Saw Sekhnet’s cousins last night.  Alan, a friendly man who describes himself as a pussycat, was beaming.   He had good news, finally being laid off from a lucrative and easy job he was trying to leave for years, with a nice severance package.  He’s 70, has plenty of money and investments and doesn’t need to work anyway.  He grinned from ear to ear as he laid out the details of his new freedom.  After a nice dinner Alan dropped us off at the nearby ferry.  As soon as we were in the car he laid on us the heavy medical news he’d just received.

Thinking of his beaming face at dinner in light of the scary news he related afterwards reminded me of a series of photos of me taken the mid 1980s.  Those photos are on two facing pages of an album my mother put together, now in my sister’s house.  In each photo I am beaming, looking happier than I ever remember being.  When I first came across these photos a few years back I was at a loss for why I looked so deliriously happy in each photo, posed with my arm around somebody, or putting my widely grinning face close to their’s for the photo.  

I did some figuring and realized with shock when they had been taken.  During a winter I was incapacitated by what felt like a deep depression.  The experts I saw diagnosed it as something called Dysthymia, which, years later when l read about it on the internet, told me they were at a loss to diagnose this sudden several month long bout of darkness and paralysis.  It disappeared as suddenly as it arrived, after six months or so, never to reappear in anywhere near that intensity or for very long.  

Dysthymia, for diagnostic purposes, is supposed to persist for  at least two years, with only minor interruptions in the generally depressed state of this chronic illness.  Dysthymia, we are told, lasts a lifetime and can only be mitigated, it would seem, by a lifelong regimen of various pharmaceuticals that inhibit the, dig it, reuptake of serotonin.

Our minds, moods and personalities are still in most ways mysteries.   I think of that beaming smile, which fools most of the people most of the time, and what a flimsy umbrella it actually is.

Reminder to Be More Careful

“HEEEEEET-Lah-ree-yoos!” howled the monkey with glee, a little too enthusiastic about my minor visual joke.

I’ve got to be more careful about what I say in front of him, I thought.  I’m his fucking role model.  I haven’t really been able impress on him that ‘hitlerious’ is only appropriate and/or semi-clever in certain very specific situations.   He’d latched on to it as an all purpose howl and I was getting a little sick of it.

I’ve spoken once really well, outside of a few isolated moments of deadpan eloquence in seedy courtrooms.  I wish the monkey had been there to see me at my best.  It was at my mother’s memorial service.  I killed, as the comedians say.

“YOO keeled at your mother’s memorial!  HEEE-TLAH-ree-yoos!” yapped the monkey.

I’ve got to figure this out, how to get him off that stinking throw away.  It reminded me of when I taught a friend guitar years ago and got to hear every one of my worst musical tics played over and over and over.  At least then it forced me to learn some new musical tics, but it was painful.

“Better musical tics!  Adolflutely Hitlerious!” barked the monkey, embellishing now, I noticed– not without chagrin.

“Listen, lice picker,” I said to my pet, “if you live a good life, and are a loving person, or monkey, or whatever, then perhaps when you die someone will memorialize you the way I memorialized my mother in that nice chapel in Peekskill.  A guy in a suit will stand up there and talk from the heart, and one last time people will see you in your best light, and laugh, and be somber, and recall that you were a unique character, endearing and tough, and that you lived and left a range of colors and flavors that people can consider after you’re gone.”

“Colors and flavors!” howled my monkey, by now completely out of control, “oh, stop it, please, you’re Goering to kill me!”  Pleased with his joke, the tiny fascist scrunched up his face again and shrieked “Heeet-lah-lah-LAH-ree-yoos!”

Clearly, I will have to do something about this.

Cultivate Mindful Empathy

I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

 

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source

 

The Arch-Enemy of Creativity

There are several forces that can choke creativity to death, but probably its most ruthless foe is a ticking clock set for a very short time frame.

“Ready, set…. create! You have twenty minutes to be creative, then we’re back on the clock: go, go, go!!!!”

In a situation like this the most musical sound you are likely to hear is the loud, rhythmic ticking of the clock counting down the minutes until creative time is over and you are back to the workaday drill. Young children can probably salvage something in this short burst of time, they are not bound by practical cultural imperatives as adults are, not yet daunted by seeming logical impossibility. A disciplined adult might write a tight paragraph or two in fifteen or twenty minutes, or play something nice on a piano or think up something new. But for most others, that tiny window to do something creative won’t be one they can leap through very productively. Just as they enter the creative zone, that free play place where most creative people report that time disappears, time will be called and it’s back to reality.

For one thing, as the clock goes from 20 to 19 to 15 minutes to 9, pressure is building. Pressure is the enemy of imagination. Time is required for the mind to unwind and the imagination to uncurl and stretch itself. Imagination takes its time, cannot be summoned instantly like a genie from a bottle. A short period of unwinding must be allowed for.

The rest of the world must be allowed to recede before the mind unwinds to dream up things that don’t already exist. This takes time. It can take 20 minutes or more for the distractions to dissipate enough for the relaxation necessary for inventive play to set in, and then at least an hour is needed for that play to be of good use. Only an undistracted, relaxed person can think and act creativity. In this world of a million constant distractions, it takes time for the rippling pond of the mind to calm itself.

It’s true that many creative thoughts happen in an instant, when we are doing other things– the aha moment stepping into the shower, the missing puzzle piece appearing out of nowhere as we chop firewood. The brain is ingenious this way, because creativity and problem solving are native to us, but I am talking about setting a period to do creative work. You must not be stingy when you do this.

Thought experiment: you live a pressured life with a hundred nagging responsibilities every day. When you are not actually ticking off tasks you are worrying about tomorrow’s list, which is bad, but not as bad as the list for the following day, or next Tuesday’s. You make room on your calendar for a twenty minute session of playing your neglected musical instrument. To do this in good conscience you must first squeeze in three additional tasks, saving the remaining ten for after your little play session. Imagine the music you might improvise under those conditions.

We live in a highly pressurized, competitive society where most of us are judged on how hard we work and how much money we make. If you are born, like Thomas Jefferson, booted and spurred, etc., you can be judged on the quality of the luck you worked hard to create, but few are born having worked hard enough in the womb to emerge attended by 300 slaves. Even so, Jefferson was undeniably a prolifically creative man. If you are not born super-rich, your life is usually spent in the practical pursuit of usefulness and making money.

Creativity, unless it brings an income, is reserved for day dreamers and idlers. That I can easily be seen as both of these at the moment leaves me in a distressed state of mind sometimes. I find myself tormented by the simple fact: unless you monetize your creation very few will understand what you have been wasting your time doing. Unmonetized creativity, no matter how otherwise cool that creation may be, is– say it with me: failure and a source of shame.

I picture an immensely talented little girl who two decades ago sat at her grandmother’s upright piano and began playing two handed classical music by ear. I can see her little left hand, it was like those water bucket carrying brooms from the Sorcercer’s Apprentice scene in Fantasia. The left hand was animated, relentless, moving in perfect time, of its own accord, and continued to keep perfect time as the little girl looked at me over her shoulder and beamed. “And look, you can play this one too!” and she played another classical melody as the left hand kept playing its part perfectly. Then she played a third classical tune over the still uninterrupted bass line.

Fast forward– or better yet, don’t. Let’s keep the focus right there. The six year-old was not imagining herself on stage at Carnegie Hall, or cashing the check for playing at Carnegie Hall. She was not picturing her face on the poster, on the album cover. She was certainly not thinking of the clock, or what she might have to do next. She was in awe, splashing happily in a joyous torrent, connecting herself without any self-consciousness to a deep human longing, magically coaxing life, melody, beat and danceable music from an inanimate object.

“Yes, but the six year-old did not understand that she was not actually coaxing magical life out of that piano, she was merely discovering the musical/mathematical discoveries already made by other very talented people, Mozart, Beethoven and so forth. Remarkable, perhaps, that she could do this without knowing how to read music, OK, I’ll give you that. Good for her that her left hand could play so independently and so steadily– a real talent, OK, we’ll give you that too. But I hardly think, you know, this is just so typical of the way you try to build your ‘case’. I say, I say, blah blah blah,” says the predictable voice of the world.

There is no market for what I’m selling so far, or, more precisely, I haven’t found a way to market it yet. Our free market (as those who profit most from the system have romantically named it) is run according to the bottom line. What you can sell has value, clearly. What you dream about, unless monetized, is only a dream. We all like to dream, yes, of course, but better to dream of creating something of tangible value than of building play castles in the clouds. It may seem a shame that our culture is the way it is, to someone who likes to waste their time dreaming of things as they wish they were instead of logically fitting their creativity to what is marketable… I say, I say: blah blah blah.

Forget for a moment the arguable shame of a culture that puts a price on everything and discards whatever can’t be sold for a profit. Forget you are reading the words of a man who swims, ranting on the strenuous out breaths, against the current of the mercantile world we live in. Forget that most people simply don’t have the luxury of 20 minutes to unwind before spending an hour being creative, or any real desire to abstractly create in the first place.

Remember this — there is nothing to lament if you’re unable to think creatively if you don’t give yourself time to let life’s pressures fall away for ninety minutes or so once in a while. Creativity may be an abstraction that means little to you, it seems to mean little to most people. That’s perfectly fine. But if you mean to be creative, remember to give yourself enough time to unwind and let the world of other demands turn hazy and fade away, before you fault yourself for a lack of creativity.

You’ve Got the Power

We hear all the time about positive thinking, visualizing the things we want, pushing through to our goals.  These are all good ideas, even if each one is often positioned on a greased, tilted incline. 

You work for someone who doesn’t pay you.  They tap dance when confronted.   If you become angry they will never pay you.  If you remain mild, they will never pay you.  If they intend never to pay you, they will never pay you.   You can visualize the amicable resolution of this vexing situation:  a check that doesn’t bounce and a post-it note apologizing for the delay and thanking you for your patience.  Outside of visualizing that, have a nice day.

Today a Canadian, apparently, read my first post on this blahg which contained this paragraph:

I don’t mean to sound peevish, living in this moment in time when literally any idiot can wax philosophical over them internets, but I probably am peeved.   I have hard work to do, and I need a bit of luck.   Thomas Jefferson noted that his luck was multiplied many times over by his constant hard work.   I wonder, listlessly, if he really worked harder than most of his 300 slaves on the inherited plantation where the master worked so hard improving his luck, and the cause of human freedom.  It is beyond doubt that his luck was much better than their’s.

If you inherit a vast estate, and hundreds of slaves, it is much easier to become the Author of Liberty than if you are born a slave on a plantation by the Chesapeake Bay, as the brilliant and courageous Frederick Douglass was.  Though it can go either way, clearly, having no need to worry about survival, or beatings, or laws against your basic human rights, makes it easier to think positively, visualize (and buy) the things you want, push towards your goals.  Money, social prestige and power go a long way to making a lot of those hard work leads to luck type deals turn out luckier than no money, no social standing and only the power of one’s beliefs do.

That said: you’ve got the power.  It may be harder to launch a successful business with no money, no financial backers to speak of, no experience in business, but it is not impossible.  If you want it enough, believe in it enough, work hard enough, undaunted by the extreme difficulty of success, by setbacks, by the staunch disinterest of virtually everyone you know, you may succeed.  It cannot be denied that you are the only person who has the power.

We Americans learn early, and are reminded often, those of us not born booted and spurred to ride the backs of everybody else, that we are fungible drones, born to serve in fear of losing our health insurance, our pensions, our lives.  We are taught that we can only achieve the American Dream (being fantastically wealthy) by working harder, for more hours than the next fungible drone.  This next drone is not a colleague or comrade but a competitor.  There are only a few seats at the table, and most are already taken.  Ready, gladiators?  

Ah, but I am just being peevish.  I have no fear of losing my health insurance, pension or life.  I am blessed to live in comfortable circumstances.  I could have been born, like a billion or more others, without basic sanitation, without drinking water, in a toxic slum where the odds of even living to adulthood are ten million times worse than mine.  

The fact remains, difficult and problematic though it may also be, you’ve got the power.   The trick is figuring out how to harness that power and use it consistently and positively.  A tricky trick, no doubt, but we are ingenious bastards, those of us who would be the Authors of Liberty but are not born as Philosopher Princes.

Be Of Good Cheer

Coming up with the odd one liner is no substitute for being of good cheer.   The odd one-liner may cause a good guffaw, but that laugh passes quickly and, in the larger scheme of things, does not make up for an abiding lack of cheerfulness.

Remarking that someone’s redeeming qualities are becoming more and more elusive may be a clever way of understating the obvious, but it’s no substitute for a day’s work.

That’s why they call it work.  

Be of good cheer.

Letting Go of the Dying

Four years ago today my mother died.   She had been in a deep sleep at the Hospice by the Sea (miles from the sea, but a nice place nonetheless) for almost 24 hours, sleeping through her 82nd birthday.  She eventually breathed her last and was gone.

Last night I spoke to an old friend whose mother, at 90, has been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for many years.  She long ago lost the ability to move without pain and has been bed-ridden for the last few years.  In recent months she has virtually lost the ability to speak.  When she could still speak she would frequently tell her daughter that she wanted to die.   Of course, dying is not as easy as merely wanting to die.

“She makes her wishes pretty clear though,” my friend complained, after confirming that her mother is silent most of the time, except when crying out in pain.  It bothers her, the way her mother clenches her teeth against food and water, for example.

My friend’s sister is a doctor, she arranged for intravenous hydration and nutrition for the dying woman, as well as blood thinners and other medications to prolong the dying woman’s life.   The bags of nutrition cost $100 a day.   There has been trouble getting people to keep the port clean, very hard to find skilled nursing people who will also stay for a 12 hour shift, and overnight.  Unless one has unlimited funds, of course, which my friend and her family don’t.  So the two sisters perform most of the medical procedures.

I spent some time listening to my friend’s intense frustration with Hospice, which was reluctantly invited into the picture last week.   The social worker and nurses, as described, sound like a bunch of insensitive bureaucrat assholes.  On the other hand, they are dealing with two adults who will not honor their mother’s expressed wishes and are doing everything possible to keep her alive as long as possible.

“My nephew’s graduation is June 4,” my friend tells me wearily, and that’s one reason they want their mother to live a few weeks longer.  Not that she will be at the graduation, but it would be very inconvenient for everybody to have a funeral in the short time between now and the graduation.

On the other hand, two weeks is a lifetime of misery for a woman in chronic pain whose daughters are spending thousands of dollars to make sure she lives until at least June 5th.

“She’s so angry,” observed my friend.

I told her the story Mickey Rourke told to James Lipton.  He’d been very protective of his little brother for the kids’ entire life.  The younger brother had some deadly disease and clung to life for a long time after he should have been dead.   Rourke sat by his bed every day.  The hospice nurse called him into the kitchen.

“And I knew what she was gonna say.  She told me my brother had lived months longer than anyone she’d ever cared for with his disease and told me he was clinging to life because I wouldn’t let him go.  She said I had to tell him it was OK to go.”

“Jesus,” said Lipton, “she said that to you?”

“Yeah, so I went in and said ‘it’s OK, I love you and you can go.’”

“How long did it take him to die after that?” Lipton asked.

“About 20 seconds,” said Rourke.

She was impressed by this story.  It is an impressive story.   But she is not ready to let her mother go.

I told her the story from the beginning of Sherwin Nuland’s excellent How We Die.  I admitted to her that I’d never read much of the highly lauded book, but told her about the unforgettable opening chapter.   

Nuland, a resident, emerges from a hospital room drenched in sweat and close to hyperventilating.   An older doctor calms him and asks what happened.  Nuland described a terminally ill patient, in his nineties, who went into cardiac arrest while Nuland was making his rounds.  He’d spent twenty minutes frantically performing every heroic measure possible to bring the man back from death, but had been unsuccessful.

The older doctor reminded him that the patient was in his nineties, waiting to die from a wasting disease.   He asked Nuland what kind of favor he would have done the old man by reviving him to live a few more hours or days when his wait to die was now over.

My friend was impressed by this story too.   But she is still not ready to let her mother go.

I told her other stories, about my father’s death, and my mother’s.  About how hard it is to let someone you love go.   I told her that as they approach their deaths their final autonomy is all they have left, that it must be about their wishes, and not our wishes for them.  And how approaching death from a terminal disease often follows a pattern.  The person begins withdrawing from the world and eventually loses the desire to eat or drink and just wants to be done.

“If you expressed a wish not to eat and drink, which is one of the final signs that a person is ready to die, and you were hydrated and given nutrition against you will, you wouldn’t like it,” I pointed out.

“No,” my friend said, “I wouldn’t.”

We spoke a little longer and in the end, before wishing her strength and urging her again to get rid of the Hospice if they didn’t quickly shape up, I stated the obvious.  “You and your sister are not ready to let your mother go.”  She agreed.  I wished her a good night’s sleep and told her we’d talk soon.   She sounded grateful for the conversation in an otherwise terrifying void.

But I’m sure another box of nutrition and hydration supplies is being ordered today, as I reflect on the relentless sorrows of this world.

What You Will Be Asked to Do 

If you are patient, they will ask you to be even more patient.  Generous?  They will always demand more generosity, they can never have enough of that in this greedy world.  If you have a sense of humor, make us laugh.  You’re a clever guy, why won’t you make us laugh?  

Nine year-old today came into the last animation workshop toward the end, crying.  I asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t say.  I gave her a sheet of photos of herself, face exploding into mischievousness.  “This will cheer you up,” I told her, going through the box of supplies I was trying to divide between two heavy duffel bags to take out of the classroom and carry back to my crowded apartment.

“I know what I want to say,” she said a moment later.   She meant she wanted me to shoot a little video of her.  I was happy to oblige.

“What I like best about….” she said, then searched for the word, flustered.

“Take two,” I said, and she tried it again.  Same thing.

“Take three,” I said and she said “what I like best about…” there was another long pause then she said “stop motion” and I nodded and said “animation.”  

“Animation,” she said.

“Take four,” I said.  And she recorded her bit.  I shook her hand and thanked her, told her it was a pleasure working with her.

And it was, even under the worst circumstances so far for the endangered animation workshop.  A good group of kids, a poorly run after-school program.   The kids are given the choice of doing their homework, or animation.  Right after animation they can go outside into the springtime to run around, if they are done with their homework.  Today three kids animated while the other seven did their homework.

I’ve been paying an assistant to run the workshop.  I pay him the full fee I was paid at the last place.  He is a nice guy who has little experience teaching.  He runs a watered down version of the workshop, he edits fairly good versions of the kids’ animations, though he doesn’t take the time I often did to massage a few frames into an interesting animation nobody watches.  I realize now that there is a training component needed, and trainee rates while candidates get up to speed, but a deal’s a deal, and so I grossly overpaid this guy while I attended every session and actually ran the workshop, for no pay.

My invoice for the ten sessions was never paid.  I got a kind of apology when I first raised this with the controller back in March.  He told me the invoice had never been forwarded to him.  He asked me to send him the invoice and assured me he’d pay it by the end of the month.  He did not.  On my follow up call in April he apologized, described a hectic move to a new office and asked me to re-send the invoice and said he’d pay it on receipt.  Again, no check.  On my third follow up, after he didn’t return my call, he took out the cane and the hat and did the old soft shoe.

“You know how it is, Eliot,” he told me, beginning to dance like a young Buddy Ebsen. 

“Niggers get paid last, sir, if at all,” was one thing I might have said to him, though we don’t use that kind of language anymore.  My point would have been, if you are meek and lack the power to make anyone listen to you, shut the fuck up and take what you get, if anything.

There is every indication that this small after-school program that hired us for the ten sessions is going out of business after the death, at 34, of the woman who created and ran it.  When this happens my program will be stiffed for the fee for services we provided under the worst of circumstances so far.

Today I get back on the horse and pretend the program is flourishing, though the taste in my mouth is not of something delicious.  I will try to persuade myself and a woman at a large after-school nonprofit, recipient of a $20,000,000 federal grant (if and when she returns my call), that wehearyou.net is a vibrant and innovative program her outfit would do well to partner with.  She would be able to put the program in a dozen public schools in very short order, if we come to terms.  

I’ve got to hope the almost eight hours of sleep I got last night will be the tonic I need.  Maybe there is no tonic powerful enough to pull of the confident sales job I will need to do, feeling as deflated as I do at the moment.

Be of good cheer, though.  However hard you may think you have it, literally everybody else has it harder.  Be assured, whenever your leg gets cut off, the paper cuts of those around you will be held up as reminders that your crying is of no use.

Crying is of no use.  Think of Mel Brooks’ definition of tragedy and comedy.  Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.  Funny, isn’t it?

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today, if my mother was alive, she’d be 86 and in her 27th year of endometrial cancer.   That’s just bookkeeping, mere facts, a logical and stupid way to begin.

One year we flew to Florida on May 20th, Sekhnet and I, and rented a car at the airport.   We drove to my parents’ gated retirement community and somehow gained entrance without having the gate call the residents to verify that we were not smiling predators posing as children and coming to kill and rob the condo owners.

We arrived and parked at the far end of their parking lot, out of sight of their windows.   I dialed my parents as we walked up to the apartment and Sekhnet and I wished a hearty happy birthday and expressed our regrets that we couldn’t be there to celebrate in person.  Then we rang the doorbell.

“Goddamn it,” my mother said, with her ready Bronx attitude of frustration at an interruption, “somebody’s at the door….”

When she opened it we were standing there, phone in hand.

Her mouth popped wide open in the most comical expression of surprise you can imagine.   Although her mouth was open wide enough to swallow a small dog, she had a wry Bill Maherish smile around the edges of it, and in her eyes.  She looked for a moment like one of those nutcrackers in the shape of a person with the impossibly open lower jaw.   I can see that expression now, so can Sekhnet.

My mother began to laugh “you rats!” she said, hugging and kissing us.    My father appeared behind her, making humorous, sardonic remarks.   Ginger, a small poodle shaped like a football, began clicking her claws on the hard wood floor by the door.

All of them now long gone;  my father nine years, Ginger the same, my mother will be gone four years tomorrow.

I pause today to think of how proud my parents would be, even if terribly concerned about my long-term survival, to see the progress of my program, and my determination.   They would not be any more excited about the actual animation than anyone else is, but I think they would understand that their son, long struggling against a world of darkness, brutality and ignorance, has found a way to bring the things he values most into the lives of children who get very little chance to ever experience these things.   I think my mother would be proud, and excited for the possibilities immediately before me, now that I have proved the success of this program with perhaps 100 kids in four or five different settings.  

Even if she didn’t have much faith in my prospects for the future, she would listen willing to be convinced that I have already done much of the hard work to produce something amazing.   “Elie, you’re not curing cancer, but this is pretty good,” she might agree, when I was done persuading her of the great value of what I am doing and how much satisfaction it brings me, in the midst of the fearfulness of this wholly invented, marvelous and scarily shaky vehicle I am dragging around with me.

Happy birthday, Mom.