Began a second round of workshops today in school number three, a place where we worked in the fall.  It was bitterly cold out, and only a handful of kids showed up, but they were happy, and calm, and eager to animate.  Within moments they were “in the zone” as my assistant put it.  The energy in the room is very calm, yet alert, everyone is coming up with ideas, trying things, helping each other.  It’s a lovely thing to be part of when the kids are working that way, which they often are.

The director came in, watched the speeded up 10 hours of animation in three minute clip I’d put together and felt moved to give a little speech.   She told the kids how proud she was of the work they’ve been doing in animation.  She said that since they’d had such a good time, and done such cool work, they had asked Mr. Eliot back for the spring term and that she was looking forward to the great things they were going to do.  It was very touching and it came across without a whiff of falseness.   When I told Sekhnet what she’d said, Sekhnet told me I ought to write her a note and tell her how much I appreciated it.  I should, I shall.

But here’s the riddle for you.   I am not happy about the calm, productive session, the new kids jumping right in and animating, the experienced kids showing them how to use the camera, etc.   I have a sick feeling in my stomach from a voice mail I had as I reached the session today.   Thinking it might be from my assistant, who hadn’t shown up yet, I listened to it.  

Voice of the absentee director of the program at the other school, the first place I did the workshop, the place I am hoping to add a post-production workshop in a few weeks.  The voice of a caviling, quibbling person who has never been in the workshop to observe how it runs.   She went on with a list of things I need to do better: supervise the kids in the lunchroom before the session begins and make sure they don’t leave a mess, don’t let the children use the materials of the teacher who is obliged to give over her room to the workshop on Thursdays, she’s very tidy and has been complaining about this and that every week, even though I have an assistant it doesn’t mean that she is responsible for making sure the kids behave, that she knows I love the kids’ creativity but that the school has standards and that discipline must be maintained at all times, that she understands there was a fist fight in the workshop and that I must intevene when such things take place… the message went on for three minutes in this vein.

And I have a sick feeling in my lungs, a kind of fight or flight reflex.  Gone are all the good feelings of today, all that remains is the fussy bullshit of a clueless person making demands that are, in most cases, ridiculous.   There was no fist fight in the workshop, I saw a kid starting to jump ugly with another kid and immediately intervened to calm things.  I don’t let the children use the materials of the fussy teacher whose room we invade every Thursday at three.  I don’t leave a mess, and this woman’s administrator and my assistant can both attest to these things.

This sick feeling in my lungs is clearly an injury from childhood.  Being unfairly blamed for things that are none of my fault.   Sickens me, even as an adult on the edge of old age.   I think about the odds of such a person being in charge of whether or not my program moves ahead or not– the odds are pretty good.  Most adminstrators are like this woman, demanding, unreasonable, eager to fix blame wherever they can.  

In a sense it’s the reason I launched this program, to give a kid somewhere a fighting chance of spending a few hours not supervised by someone like this.   Allowing a few breaths of air into the lungs of a kid being pumped full of exhaust all day, fed Ritalin so he can sit still, punished for not being able to abide mind-numbing boredom and the heavy boot of factory-style conformity.   The heavy boot of factory-style conformity is the order of the day, to be sure, but it is a very fucked up order that leads to very little good and a great deal of bad.  

The riddle abides, why can I not shake this feeling of doom?

I’m fighting here, back to the wall, pen in hand, as always, and feeling a bit desperate as I am unable, day after day lately, to catch up on my sleep.  Eyes pop open after a couple of hours and nothing I do seems to get me close to a good night’s sleep.  I wonder idly why I am writing here, to what end do I post something like this to a website?   Maybe it’s because it forces me to focus and write as well as I am able.   Damnfino.

What do I have to write?  Nothing at the moment, eyes unfocused, legs restless.  But I am thinking of a tiny soul winging its way upwards against the immenseness of a million universes, a billion, and wondering about our lives down here.  The only answer might be music, and that tightens my throat, thinking about decades of music unplayed.

When my friend’s father was dying of cancer that ravaged his once strong body, my friend gave this supremely practical man a book called “Sing Your Song” or something like that.    The thesis of the book was that one needs to sing one’s song, and that not singing it leads to bitterness and cancer.   My friend agonized after giving his father the book, which he felt his father might interpret as blaming him for his cancer.  Then a call came from his father.

“Mike, I read that book you gave me,” he said, as my friend braced himself.  “He’s right.  I’m going to sing my song.”   A few days later they were on a fishing boat in Florida with their father’s old friend, his father sick as hell, and happy.

There are silver linings everywhere, for those with the life talent to extract them.   For the rest of us, shapeless misery that dogs us as we grieve.

Hard to imagine, in a fog of sorrow that sucks hope out of sight, that a day will come when everything will appear again in its place.    

A too fast turn at a tricky juncture on a slippery road led to a steering column through the chest and instant death to a man younger than I am now.  This was decades ago.  A poet named Tony Velona wrote to the widow:  everything is in its place.  The poem:

I went up on a wobbly chair just now to get a bottle off the top shelf in my paint bare cupboard over my cracked kitchen sink.  I have four bottles up there, single malt scotches all, three now, actually.  Each one delicious, each slightly different from all the others.  In those differences the beauty of single malt scotch, an acquired taste, certainly, but a polished little universe for the tasting and savoring of those smoky nuances.   

There is whisky, like in the black and white movies.  The guy goes into the bar, says to the bartender “give me a double,” and the double the bartender pours is the house whisky, usually a blend of various malts and grains, made with all sorts of other ingredients, sometimes tap water.  House whisky is the least expensive bottle of the hard stuff you can buy.   It gives a nasty hangover too, compared to the more refined Scotches I am talking about.  Whisky is not sipped with pauses for smiling appreciation, you toss that fire water back.  It doesn’t necessarily taste terrible, but you’re not drinking this stuff for the flavor but to get a worse taste out of your mouth.

“Give me another one, bartender,” says the drunk loudly.   

“What are you drinking to?” asks the bartender, hesitating to serve the obviously sloshed man.

“My first blow job,” says the drunk sloppily with a wistful smile.  The bartender pours him another.

“Here you go,” he says,  “this one’s on the house.  This is a special day for you.”  The drunk tosses back the shot, waits a few seconds, shakes his head.  

“That’s it,” he gets up unsteadily, “if six shots don’t get the taste out of my mouth the whole bottle ain’t gonna do it.”  

Guy gets on the A train with his four kids at 14th Street.   They’re wearing suits and dresses, like they’re going to church.  The kids immediately start screaming and throwing themselves all around the train.  They are slamming into other passengers and shrieking in people’s ears. climbing on the seats, swinging from the bars.  The father is just sitting there with his head in his hands pretending he doesn’t know the kids as the kids run riot.  

Finally I turn to the guy, after getting kicked again by one of his screaming kids and I say, “do you mind taking care of your out-of-control kids?” and the guy is still looking down.  

“I owe you an apology,” he says.  “I’m sorry and I feel very ashamed of myself.  I should not subject you and everyone else on this train to this, but I can’t control them.  We’re coming back from their mother’s funeral, she was hit by a car yesterday, and none of us know what to do with ourselves.”

So you got a crude guy walks into a bar joke or a vignette providing an illuminating change of perspective, the unnoticed miracle that happens in life once in a while.   Things that once you learn change the whole picture for you, improve your perspective, help resolve painful mysteries.  My father as an infant being whipped in the face by his mother.   The wild children wildly grieving their young mother’s atrocious death.  

That’s the difference between drinking whisky and enjoying fine single malt scotch, a quick, cheap laugh, or a nuanced laugh and something to ponder (even though the second anecdote above was lifted from a wonderful talk I heard a few years ago).

Scotch has to be grown– grain, malt, all other ingredients– distilled, aged and bottled in Scotland, apparently, whereas whisky is whatever you can ferment anywhere to make a brownish tan intoxicant of approximately 50% alcohol.  

I recall a great Scotch tasting not a decade ago, in London.  The occasion was the fiftieth birthday of a guy I’d known since we were seventeen.  I was not the only guest to arrive with a bottle of  fine Scotch, I think I brought Glenmorangie.  There was Laphroaig, Glenlivet, Johnny Walker Black, a few others.   We set them all out on a long table with enough small glasses for everyone.

“Johnny?” we all said, and nodded and tasted the Johnny Walker Black.  It was smooth, it was rich, it was tasty.  We all agreed it was delicious.   Then we tasted the rest in turn, savoring and evaluating each.  It was hard to pick the best, and that was hardly the point, even though I think there was some consensus at the time, which I don’t remember.   If you like a smoky, peat taste to your Scotch you’d probably prefer Laphroaig.  The Glenmorangie aged in the sherry casks was special, I recall, someone else had bought that one, which is the kind I look for once in a while.

But, thinking about it now, those friends, like the last of the 12 year old Macallans I just poured, are all gone.  When I recycle the empty bottle only the memory of drinking it on special occasions over the course of several years will remain, if that.  

Merry Christmas to all, don’t drink and drive.  Don’t drink alone.  Leave the single malts to the experts.  And peace on earth, boys and girls.