Category Archives: muttering to myself

If You Have Nothing Good To Say About Someone

“say nothing,” my mother always said.   Actually, that’s not true.  She may have said it once.  At any rate, not as often as she said things about people when she had nothing good to say about them.    If you would look for a real conversation with people over the internets*, I’d suggest you find something else to do.   Banging your head against the wall, in my opinion, is probably a better use of your time.  

Think of it, in an actual conversation, much of the time the odds don’t favor a meaningful chat– each person will talk about what excites or concerns them, or just as often what annoys or perplexes them, and if there is a back and forth, beyond this mutual telling of stories, that’s a big plus and a conversation to remember.   In writing, unless you are writing to another writer– and even then, the odds are against you — you can often forget about hearing much connected to what you were discussing.  If you curse, insult or use CAPS to browbeat the person you will sometimes get an aggrieved and defensive direct response, but, all things considered, this is not a useful strategy for having a productive conversation with someone.    Better to do almost anything else, including posting random thoughts and opinions in cyberspace.

I remember my friends’ bright, precocious daughter, at about age six, annoyed by her younger cousins at a family gathering, bursting out with “I hate those fucking little bastards!” and stomping out of the room.  My friend took his little girl aside and with infinite tenderness told her he understood that her little cousins were probably frustrating to hang around with, but that they bothered her because they loved her and wanted to be with her.   She stuck to her position that she hated them, but left open the possibility that she might soften her position.  I recall being very impressed that my friend didn’t even mention the language, he went straight, and compassionately, to why the girl was angry.  

But I have to say, I’m with the girl here, particularly lately.


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* As former president George Dubya Bush styled it

Do You Find Your Own Thoughts Fascinating?

And if so, are they valuable enough to sustain your beliefs and provide the energy to power productive actions?

I am asked to give my thoughts on the Thought Inventory next week.  What did I think about how I thought about things I was thinking about in regard to what those thoughts led me to do?  If I did not think that thinking about how I was thinking provoked thoughts I did better to think than the ones I was previously thinking, please rate this thought on a scale from “somewhat” to “extremely”.

“I’m sorry, doctor, I am losing the thread of this conversation,” I said.  

“I’m not a doctor,” she said.  

I did not wish to think about that further.  The work, I thought thoughtfully, is mostly done by the patient anyway.   Most things here, in this world of pleasure and pain, are matters of opinion, after all.  I’ve already stated for the record that I value my own insights above almost every other– though I am open to helpful advice, I like to think.  And I need help from somewhere, that much is as clear to me as to anyone who has seen me in inaction these last two quarters.

“Well, one thing to become more aware of is how you are feeling about yourself,” said the therapist early on in the session.   The obvious question, if you have faith in your theories and your powers why aren’t you using them, in spite of whatever lack of encouragement, whatever objectively discouraging obstacles, you’ve had?  

“You will feel better about yourself if you use 11’s on your guitar,” a moderately accomplished guitarist told a better one.  I’ve never forgotten this, though it was spoken decades ago.  For one thing, I’ve always used 11’s.  I don’t recall ever feeling better or worse about myself based on the gauge of the guitar strings I use.  

“You live in the world of your head!” another told me, though it’s possible I was hearing things.  It’s not as though there are not very good reasons for living in my head.  Growing up, the world of my head was a much safer place than the world of everyone else’s heads.  Putting oneself in the heads of many other people is truly scary, as is much of the world of what we agree on as “objective reality”, the way things actually are.  Tens of millions of kids who will never see a toilet, though many of their siblings will see early deaths from diseases absent in places with basic sewage and sanitation infrastructure.   You know, the way things actually are.

For the record, then:  I created and implemented a largely autonomous team-based animation workshop that allows participants to create stop-motion animation in a fraction of the time it usually takes.  I did it alone.  I don’t know anyone who has dreamed up, designed and implemented anything as simple yet complex.  Still miles from being the self-sustaining business I am counting on it becoming, but as far as demonstrating that it works– I think the 90 plus workshops speak for themselves.  

For the opposition, those who do not live in my head, highly successful marketing genius Seth Godin:  if you send your best idea to ten people you trust and they don’t send it on to other people, your idea is not worth chasing.  Find another idea to sell.

Another angle: if you send your best idea to ten people, in a form that is not readily digestible, tasty and exciting, the way a marketing person would send it, how do you know your idea is not worth chasing?  After all, the people who actually experience the workshop are engaged at once.  Many of them love it.  People not inclined to work with others soon find themselves working with others because it’s simply the best way to work on any creative project with multiple moving parts.  The work they produce is, inarguably, sometimes quite cool.

Guy Kawasaki, I told the therapist, concealing my surprise that I’d immediately remembered the name of an internet savant I’d heard once, sent a query to his email list of 2,000,000 people.  He initially heard back from about 1%, or 20,000 and was very happy with that success rate.  If I send a query out to ten people and hear back from two, that’s, statistically, a hugely successful week, if we don’t factor in the emotional let-down of 80% of the people who claim to wish me every chance at success not bothering to tap “nice” and hit send.  

“Most people do not tap ‘nice’ when somebody sends something they created, they feel like they have to write something more in an email, give some real feedback.  If you need people to tell you ‘nice’ you are a needy fucking baby who needs to get a life, and a job, and not try to be the CEO of an imaginary nonprofit.  The rest of us work our asses off, and spend years paying our dues.  We’re sorry if we can’t jump every three months when you send us something for your feedback to tell you it’s ‘nice’.”  

“Well, shoot,” I say, extending my lower lip a bit, “you don’t have to get all pissy about it.  Don’t say ‘nice’, that’s fine with me.  Must be tough, having your life.   Sorry to bother you.  Hope you have a nice day.”  

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” says my former business partner to the mediator.  “He claims this is about the starving children in Harlem, kids with cancer, the women undergoing chemo, that it’s not about him.  But it’s about him.  It’s only about him.  And he gets to be pissed off at anyone who works for corporations because he thinks he’s Saint Fuckface.”  

“But, darling,” I protest, doing a passable Cary Grant, “I AM Saint Fuckface.”

Another glimpse at Perfection

If your point is that American politicians are hopelessly corrupt, and the voters a bunch of easily whipped up partisan dupes, and that since government is ineffective, at best, and  should be curtailed and kept small enough to drown in a bathtub, imagine if you could do this.

Contribute unlimited money, tax-deductibly, to organizations created under the odd provisions of a certain law’s section 501(c) (4) to run unlimited ads ensuring that politicians who oppose your agenda know they will be voted out of office if they don’t go along with your program.  If they’re conservatives, threaten ’em from the right.  If they’re liberals, shoot, it’s even easier to primary those bastards.  

The result?  A pliable bunch of hopelessly compromised and corrupt American politicians  committed only to staying in office, playing to easily whipped up partisan dupes who are already mad as hell and waiting to do something about it.  The resulting ineffective government will cause even those who believe in the importance of democracy to cry out to drown the bastards, every one of them, in a bathtub.

A kind of sickening perfection, you have to admit.

Creativity, you say?

“No,” she said, “that’s what you say.  Imagining all-consuming creative collaboration that is all in your head.”  

“That is what I say,” he said, “its own reward.   And all-consuming creative collaboration has not always been in my own head.”  

“That’s what you say,” she said.  

“You keep saying that,” he said.  

“As you say,” said she.  

“Listen, I’ve been in rooms many times, people get swept up into working together, given the chance to be part of a creative team.  I’ve taken part, I’ve seen it, experienced it many, many times.”  

“You are a dreamer.  Nobody but you gives a rat’s creatively shaved buttock about creativity for its own sake.  Creativity that leads to more tangible things, OK.  But even there, it’s more a buzzword or catchphrase — creativity– than something anyone cares about for its own sake.  Anyone but a person like you.”  

“A person like me….” he said.  

“Show me the money, I’ll do something creative for you right now,” she said, “pay to play.  I’ll collaborate with you all day, if you got the green to make it worth my while, I’ll riff with you til the cows stop farting up into the ozone.  You know what I’m saying?   If your idea is so valuable why is nobody paying you for it?”  

“I really don’t see the point…” he said.  

“My point exactly,” she said. “it’s nothing to talk about excitement, you have to make me excited about it.”  

“Oh,” he said, reluctant to take her deeper point, “you’re the one I have to make excited about the excitement of my exciting idea.”  

“I am,” she said, “and I am but one of hundreds you need to excite.”   She was right, goddamn it, he thought.   She’s just the first hurdle in this two thousand hurdle race.  

“You have no idea how many more hurdles than that it is,” she said, reading his thoughts with an ease that struck him as supernatural.  

“Supernatural my ass,” she thought, “all I had to do was read the words off the screen.  This guy doesn’t even realize all this is just writing on a screen.”

“I know that,” he said, his bottom lip coming up to cover the upper one.

Quick, Snide Note to My Fellow Americans

Americans are arguably (and we will argue, by God, and the dumber the argument the readier we are to fuck somebody up over it) the world’s most competitive,  unhealthiest, most easily manipulated, most vi0lent, most ill-informed, most opinionated, most likely to kill each other with a gun, most likely to defend the right to kill somebody with a gun, most prone to suicide with a gun, most materialistic, most optimistic, greediest, most distracted and self-involved population, probably of all time.  I’m leaving most fearful off the list, and angriest, because while those might also be true, they’re matters of opinion and hard to verify.  I’m also leaving off most kind-hearted, idealistic and trusting, for the same reason.

Of course, we Americans are free to fight about any one or all of these snidely unflattering characterizations.  We have that freedom here, unlike citizens of a lot of other places.  And God bless these United States.   I defend our right to be all of these things and more.  

Worldwide consumers of fast food and violent American films should not feel smug about America’s faults.   We come by them honestly:  our national religion is the acquisition of wealth and the refinement of the machine that assists in that acquisition.  Wealth, or lack of it, is the measure of everything here– as it is fast becoming everywhere.   America was the land where unlimited wealth was advertised, our streets paved with gold; the chance to have more money than anyone else remains a big part of the American Dream, the global dream.  The right to compete was guaranteed to all Americans, even if it is, arguably, not always enforced fairly.  

This dream was sold to Americans living here and used to lure needed workers here over the years.  It was sold deliberately, skillfully, to excellent advantage, from our earliest days.  America pioneered Public Relations and modern Advertising, the increasingly sophisticated use of the mass media to shape public perceptions, frame debate, package, brand and sell products, instill values and consumer loyalty.  We are the masters of it.  Nobody else, until very recently, was even in second place.  

As adults most of us can sing many catchy ad jingles we remember from childhood.  Few of us can quote a line of Shakespeare or anything from the Bible, but most of us who were around at the time can sing “The One and Only Cereal That Comes In The Shapes of Animals” and know exactly what we’re singing about.

So while it’s true we may be dumber than shit, and arguably in steep decline, as a nation and culture, we’re very, very rich and we can still fuck you up.  Yeah.  And we will too.  What are you gonna do about it?

Heh, I thought so…

Friday the Thirteenth Again

Rodney Dangerfield:

When the alarm rang I hit snooze, and the snooze bar came off.  I went into the bathroom,  the door knob came off in my hand.  I was afraid to pee.

It will sound petty and peevish, I know, but I haven’t been sleeping enough the last few weeks.  I’m down about 2 hours every night, it seems.   I was asked to sleep over in SoHo and take care of my sweetheart’s cat while she was away overnight.  I was to stay over and make sure the Baron had his accustomed dinner service, his midnight snack and his continental breakfast.

They are renovating the apartment above.  It worked out better than any alarm clock could, for the cat, because it was impossible to stay in bed directly under the hammer blows, drilling and other banging that commenced three hours before my alarm was set for.  The cat was happy, he had his late breakfast a few hours earlier than he otherwise would have had I not had such a persistent and energetic alarm clock pound me awake.

I’m not complaining, mind you.  I am complaining, let me face that sad fact.  Of course, as my father was wont to point out, I’d complain if I was hanged with a new rope.  All I need is a couple more cups of coffee and I’ll be fine.  Fine, I say.   Whoops, the drilling has moved to over my position here at the computador.  Excuse me, please, I’ve got to get out into the street for some peace and quiet.

 

Does the thought of anger make you mad?

Is the subject of anger so infuriating, threatening, hideous in itself that virtually any mention of it will, sooner or later, stop conversation?

Likewise, the subjects of apology, repentance, forgiveness.   Do these of necessity, except, among a small, select, wounded population, induce squeamishness and avoidance?

“May I play Devil’s Advocate?” she asks, and without waiting for so much as a nod says “Here’s another either/or.   Either your intensity, self-righteousness and over-sensitivity on any subject go beyond the boundaries most people consider decent, made worse by a relentless demand for response, stated or strongly implied, put people to silence, just to make it stop.  Or, if what you write is like… oh, never mind.”

What?

“You freak people out, and piss them off, when you… you know, when you act like yourself.”

Hmmmm.  Good to know.  I’ll try not to act like myself so much.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.

Corporations are people, with feelings too, sniff, sniff, you judgmental, insensitive bastard.   Is that what you mean?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.  “I mean that you might like to think you are not an angry person any more, that you have made great progress in that area, gained important insights you’ve had the courage and persistence to act on and are just currently frustrated, discouraged and trying not to wake up and smell the napalm, but that doesn’t mean….”

Hold it right there, girlfriend.  I was in the middle of a long discussion over the roles of genetic predisposition, nurture and  conscious effort to change innate personality traits one is unhappy with.  The correspondence reached a certain point and then abruptly stopped on the other end.  Silence as loud as the other person yelling “Silence! Enough!” [1]  

I stumbled on this line in my notes last night:  “the most insidious enemy of death benefits [taking positive lessons from the lives of even difficult departed loved ones–ed.] is the pervasive assumption that personality is fixed by midlife.” source

“Maybe your correspondent believes this pervasive assumption fervently, or hopelessly, as you might say, and has proven to his own satisfaction that struggling for any kind of positive personality change is futile and is just tired of your 2,000 word meditations, your opinionated self-regarding back and forth about the importance of doing things he feels are futile at best– particularly in light of your objectively depressing circumstances and lack of prospects for changing them any time soon.  Maybe he’s doing you the kindness of not telling you he finds these attempts to justify your life particularly distasteful.   Maybe he’s protecting you by not calling you on what bullshit virtually everything you say is.”

Dad?  Is that you, you rascal?

“You will find, son, when times get tough, that I am everywhere.  But let me assure you of this: you have made progress, and if I was still alive, still enlightened by the regrets I expressed on my death bed and my wishes to have lived differently, been, in fact, more like you, I’d be very proud of you.   Proud that you continue to believe in what you feel is right, in spite of the difficulty of it, despite the deliberate and inadvertent deafness of virtually everyone you encounter these days.”  

Must be easier for you these days, to say things like that, being a skeleton.  

“Oh, I can’t tell you how much easier it is, now that I’m just bones with dirt between my smiling jaws.”

[1]  Of course, another obvious reason for the gap in this particular case is the present lack of time required to thoughtfully reply in a life I know to be particularly emotionally complicated at this moment.   This goes as well for each of the other several cases where the subject of anger has been unveiled and then left to languish a bit.  –ed

Do You Get It?

Talking approvingly about the progress among the compromises made by the Obama administration to pass the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the context of America 2015: driven by profit, corporations as people with feelings too, money as speech, ad buys win campaigns, politicians vying at the corporate trough, etc. is like talking about the success of advocates against the spread of slavery in 1856.

“Half of the new territories won’t allow slaves as a result of our hard work here today,” the successful advocate would say proudly, “that’s progress.  Not ideal, I know, but given the facts on the ground:  slavery perfectly legal under the Constitution, constitutional amendment impossible in a nation divided 50/50 into partisan camps that hate each other, wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an armed war between these two gun toting factions protecting their interests… we were LUCKY to convince Congress not to allow slavery in half the new territories.  That’s success today, and we should celebrate instead of looking at the damn glass half empty.  Hell, we have enough problems trying to wipe out the buffalo herds so we can destroy the Indian culture on the prairies that we need for Manifest Destiny….”

“Do you fucking have fucking Tourette’s?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but doesn’t everybody?”

Mind Bending Irony

That the loudest cries for freedom, liberty and the right of every man to the pursuit of happiness came from men who held others as slaves… and that these slaveholders cursed the mother country for reducing them to the wretched condition of ‘slaves’ by forcing unfair taxes upon them… and that these men, all the time owning other men, created a republican democracy based on ideals almost unimaginable in their day…. that while they ensured by the construction of their republican democracy that the rabble would not get the final say– by ingenious devices like the Electoral College– 

“Do you have a kind of Tourrets, sir?”

Excuse me.  Who is asking that?

“Does it matter?  Wasn’t it you who not ten minutes ago wrote that the best thing to do when the mind was exhausted was shutting down the computer and clearing the mess on the desk all around the screen?”  

Isn’t that a rhetorical question?

“Are you answering a question with a question, rascal?”

Aren’t you?  

“I know you are, but what am I?   Why are you asking me?  Clear your desk.”

 

A Foolish Belief in Democracy?

The young Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he married the widow of Bathurst Skelton, three years before becoming the Author of Liberty, increased his wealth threefold.  He became the master of Bathurst’s 135 slaves [1]  (Jefferson had inherited only 50 from his parents) and added 11,000 acres of property formerly held by Bathurst [2] to the 5,000 he had previously inherited.   To say that young Thomas Jefferson was born booted and spurred to ride the backs of his saddled countrymen would not be entirely unfair.  His marriage to the wealthy young widow added luster to both boot and spur.

With all this inherited wealth, and in spite of an eloquently expressed life long hatred of tyranny,  which compelled him to risk being hanged as a revolutionary, and his deep moral opposition to slavery, the Author of Liberty should have had the luxury, more than fifty years later, of freeing his remaining 130 slaves in his will, as the Father of our Country had done.  Sadly, that luxury was denied to him.  John Adams, who comes down to us far less heroically than Washington and Jefferson, and not nearly the moral equal of either (in the simplistic popular imagination), never owned a slave.  But that is another rant for someone else to go on about some other time.

Fictional, aspirational president Josiah Bartlet, of  The West Wing TV series, is fond of learned quotes.   He quoted Jefferson some time toward the end of season six.   “A man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character,” he said.   And it struck me anew: motherfucker!  

The reason Jefferson could not free his slaves, as he heartbrokenly regretted he could not do toward the end of his life, is that in spite of his great inherited wealth, his management of his own purse was less than perfect.  His love of luxury far exceeded his  ability to pay for shipments of the most expensive French wine, the finest Italian furnishings, the clothes made for him by the greatest tailors in Europe, the magnificent horses he rode, the no expense spared constant remodeling of his gracious and beautiful home, Monticello.

He had racked up impressive debts over the years of his long, luxurious life as a philosopher king.  If he had freed his slaves, instead of bequeathing them as property to his daughters, he would have left his progeny penniless.  The shame of that outweighed any other qualms he might have had.  Even leaving aside the several slave children he fathered with the illegitimate half-sister of his late wife, his long-time slave mistress Sally, (unacknowledged during his life and indignantly denied on his legacy’s behalf for a century and a half after his death) let us say, in unison: motherfucker.   History is kinder to him, by far, than I am.  No doubt.

My meditation on the man who bravely declared the self-evident truth of human equality leads me to wonder about my ongoing belief in the idealistic democracy he played such a large role in shaping.  I continue to believe in the importance of our public institutions.  Most large steps forward as a People were the product of principled government initiative in response to overwhelming events and popular agitation. Think about the use of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the courage and determination of both activists and jurists in the federal courts to end centuries of racism at law.  (Much work remains to be done there, but that’s not the point.  The laws needed to be changed, the government acted to change and, in some cases, even enforce the laws.  A triumph of democracy.)

The importance of principled government action is confirmed for me over and over as I watch the ongoing failure of profit-driven business, our so-called Free Market, to solve any of the pressing problems of our society.  Exponentially increasing the wealth of a few makes the country’s wealth look good on paper, but human lives, like baseball games, are not played on paper. Wall Street’s health in most cases has little to do with healthy lives on Main Street.  

Without a pragmatic and honest government to unite and inspire us we have no hope of solving the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet.  I am probably even in the majority in this opinion, of those with the leisure to consider the question seriously, and who do not stand to lose wealth by taking this position.  Not that it makes much difference, if my belief in democracy is a silly as other fond beliefs of childhood.

Leave aside the damning fact that our highest court has decided that, Constitutionally speaking, and as intended by the Framers, money is speech in a land where 97% of all political campaigns are won by the side that spends the most money speaking.  Has there ever been anything like democracy for most of the history of this nation, the world’s first modern experiment in government of the People, by the People and for the People?   At isolated moments, perhaps, the best aspirations and highest motives of our citizens have become enshrined in our laws.  Sometimes these isolated moments are decades or centuries in the making.

Slavery and lynching, two practices long protected by American law, the former embedded, obscurely but robustly, in our Constitution, the latter winkingly left up to the states to, er … uh, regulate, are now universally reviled.  Today nobody but the hybrid of a moral cretin and a talking jackass would make an argument in favor of slavery or lynching, though both were the law of the land for generations.  Medicare, once unthinkably controversial, is now something even the Tea Baggers want the government to keep their hands off of.  Social Security too, at one time renounced as part of a Socialist plot, has become something most retired people rely on, at least in part, and value as part of a decent society’s social safety net. Not long ago homosexuals were hunted down and locked up, today they legally marry in many states. Millions are in jail today for preferring marijuana to alcohol as their drug of choice. [OK, I know, an exaggeration, please see note… 3]  Democracy does over time move forward, although more often than not only after excruciatingly long struggles against powerful, organized, determined, well-funded forces. 

In light of all this, can I really be angry at a president who campaigned by appealing to the highest ideals and hopes of many of our citizens and continues to talk the talk, though often obliged to speak less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while ruling in slavish obedience to the corporate bottom line?  Sure I can, but I don’t know how fair it is.  He is not the only “sell-out” to find life much more complicated as the indebted to campaign donors leader of the free world than he may have wished it to be.  Bill Clinton is often considered the greatest Republican president of the last fifty years, though he was relentlessly attacked as a liberal.  Heck of a liberal Bill was, really.

If Jefferson could have freed his slaves, you just know he would have done the right thing, even as the management of his purse showed most of what we need to know about the actual content of his character.

It bears repeating, as was done a few times on The West Wing:  we campaign in poetry but govern in prose.  Call me strict, but I believe  the Author of Liberty should be judged by his own formulation– ditto this well-spoken idealist we have in there now.  

When someone who talks like a psychopath, or a slave holder, acts like one, I know how to react.  I am mobilized, adrenaline flows.  I’m angry, maybe, but not hurt.   I certainly feel no surprise, no betrayal of principle or trust.  When someone talks like a true and compassionate friend, and acts exactly like the guy who talks like a psychopath, and people around me act like he’s still our true friend — it robs me of hope.  It crushes my soul just a little bit more.   Makes me feel something I strongly resist believing:  that my faith in democracy, in the power of the  People to see the truth and walk toward the light, may be entirely foolish.

I don’t believe that, deep down, but, damn, these complicatedly nuanced idealist motherfuckers who eloquently speak our fondest hopes make it hård.

 

 

[1] These 135 slaves were inherited from Martha’s father John Wayles, not Bathurst Skelton, and in 1773.  Among the slaves was Betty Hemings and her last daughter by John Wayles (she had six of his children), the baby Sally.

[2] He inherited the 11,000 acres from Wayles, too.  I just like writing Bathurst Skelton and didn’t have my copy of Fawn M. Brodie’s excellent, groundbreaking 1974 Thomas Jefferson; An Intimate Biography at hand when I wrote the post earlier today.  (see W.W. Norton softcover, pp. 80-87)

[3] Fine, not millions locked up for pot.  But read these shameful statistics.   Could a democracy spend the more than $51,000,000,000 annually that goes to the endless, senseless “War On Drugs” any more wisely?  How about 10% of it to make sure no old Americans are ever forced to be cold, or homeless, or eat cat food?