Category Archives: muttering to myself

Not Angry? You’re not paying attention

We live in a world where the technology has finally caught up with the rapaciousness of those who would own everything–1,000,000 stock trades a second, baby.  Yes, phones in every pocket and social media helped organize the “Arab Spring.”   Yes, governments and their contractors are now mining every bit of data to prevent any kind of repeat of that.   Yes, bread and circuses, the old panen et circenses, is now 24/7, in your pocket, and everybody you know is preoccupied most of the time.

Q:  What are you doing Friday?

A;  I’m working til late Friday, then to the hospital for an all-nighter.

Q: What time do you want to hang out Friday?

Hello. hello?  

I’m sorry, what was I saying?  Grateful for the handle of that title above I say again– if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

Financial collapse caused, 100%, by the rapaciousness of those who would own everything.   Their appetite is limitless, as is their disdain for fairness or sustainability.  Their power to make and break laws is pretty impressive too.   So billions were made by a few, and millions by their assistants, as the poor got poorer.  Now we have a fiscal cliff we are being herded toward.   Instead of victimizing the rich, let’s all share the burden.   We raise the top tax rate on the wealthiest by almost 10%.   The rich pay most of the taxes already, plus they’re job creators.  Sacrifice must be shared.  So we raise the payroll tax on all workers, by 48%.  Student loan interest rates at 20 times what institutions pay to borrow money?  Fair is fair, you know what I’m saying?

Wars based on lies, creating thousands of traumatic brain injuries, amputations, suicides, refugees, dead children, kicked down doors, raped and beaten women– support our troops is the only answer for that.  Torture?   We call it doing the right thing now, the dark side is ugly, but that’s where we are.  Privacy?   If you’ve got nothing to hide, pull down your pants and your underwear and let us see.

If you’re not angry, baby, you are not paying attention.  If you are paying attention, and you’re not angry, you have stopped feeling in a big way.  Now the thing is, what is the productive way to use that anger?

Letter to Poland

So here’s the deal.  Over here a lot of bad stuff is going down, I think we are actually in the grips of a societal insanity that is rapidly approaching critical mass.  I know you try not to pay attention to the news from here, being an expatriate and all that, but I’ll give you a quick run-down of what’s been shaking since you’ve been gone.

In 2000 there was a presidential election, another of those farcical exercises in mass-marketed democracy we have every four years.  I heard the president described recently by the great Harry Shearer as the man (or woman) who has climbed to the top of greasiest pole in American society (listen to the first two brilliant minutes).  Word.   And, as you know, the higher the monkey climbs the more everybody can see the monkey’s behind, but forget that, if you can.

It was a close election in 2000.  Goon squads were actually sent to disrupt the recount of votes in Florida, the state whose electoral votes would decide the election.  A challenge was made by lawyers for the Republican candidate in the Supreme Court, claiming irreparable harm if the count was allowed to continue.  It was decided  on partisan lines for the Republican, in a one-off decision that oddly cast itself as setting no precedent.  You know that we were attacked on 9/11/2001 by 19 Saudi fanatics.  In the aftermath of that attack Congress voted special wartime powers for the president and we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.  These wars were very costly, and bloody, and corrupt, and rage to this day, though we are no longer officially fighting in Iraq.  

The war powers were abused, as war powers often are, and these abuses continue to this day in the name of The War on Terror.  Things that shocked the conscience of many Americans no longer seem to bother too many people.  The War on Terror is to our basic freedoms and general sense of decency what the War on Drugs has long been to people who like to smoke a joint once in a while– as well as to the many victims of violence by international drug cartels who sell pot and other drugs to Americans.  Get as drunk as you want sometimes, that’s your right as an American, you know.  Smoke marijuana and you’re a drug addict and probably a pervert.   Everybody knows that.  

Just like everyone now knows you have to rough up people you suspect of hating you.   In fact, a jury just acquitted a hopped up, gun toting asshole in Sanford, Florida for shooting a black kid to death.   This guy was patrolling his multiracial neighborhood one night when he saw a black teenager in a hoodie.   He called the police to report the suspicious Skittles wielding young black man.  The cops told the guy to stay in his car, that the cops would come.  The guy followed the kid, got out of his car and confronted him.  The subsequent fatal shooting of the young man was deemed self-defense by a jury of six white women.  People are outraged and don’t know what to do.  Officials are warning blacks not to think of rioting.  Other people are rejoicing, that we are still a country that believes in laws, even ignorant laws like the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person with a gun, who feels in danger, to kill the person he reasonably believes to be threatening him.

So, dude, if you come here, don’t hang out with your young black friends, at least not in Florida.  Some disturbed asshole with a police record can stalk you, confront you, grab you, and if you defend yourself, can argue that he felt in danger and then be legally justified in killing you with his handgun.

Hell of a day here in the USA.

On the other hand, I felt an unexpected surge of pure joy today watching the naming and honoring of a young baby girl, the new granddaughter of old friends of mine.  Impossible not to feel the love and good vibes in that room.

In other news, I got this mysterious email from an “edcsnowden@gmail.com”.  Makes me want to find the perpetrator (the sloppiness is revealing, methinks) and confront him, if you know what I’m saying.  I am, as you know, Ahimsa Man, but even I have my limits:

Ed Snowden <edcsnowden@gmail.com>
I saw  your site and was filled with wonder. Do you need an event planner and fundraiser? As I am both I also have experience with volunteers. I currently work with homeless families as well as homeless individuals suffering with the HIV virus.I would love to work with you as your are doing amazing things with small ones!
Sincerely, Ed Snowden

Creepy

There’s been a marked decline in laughter around here in recent months.  Funny things continue to happen all around, I’m sure, but they neep by unnoticed, don’t get to me in the same way.  It’s kind of creepy.  Virtually everyone I know seems in the grip of this grim new way of being.  

This is abstract, I realize, and calls for a colorful  illustration.   I can offer examples, but they only heighten the creepiness of this laff drought.  Why bother going down this road, if I’m not prepared to squeeze out at least one example?

OK, here’s one.  I have an old friend who is famous for being manipulative, sometimes in ways so overt they’re comical.  It is such a part of who he is that most of the time I don’t even notice the agenda he is always clutching just behind his back.  Things must always be arranged to maximize his advantage, somehow, even though how it actually benefits him is often hard to say and the price he pays for this is sometimes high.  There are many people like him, and I don’t point this out to be critical of the old fellow.

I have another old friend who is in the process of rebirthing himself.  Hard work!  I understand how hard this is and I applaud his devotion to emerging as a more mindful, compassionate, grounded person.   This chap and I have shared many a wheezy chuckle over the years over the constant inventiveness of our manipulative friend.

I got up early the other day, for me, resentful about the short sleep, in order to accommodate our host’s schedule (turns out he’d accidentally pushed everything three hours earlier without realizing it).   I move to offbeat circadian rhythms, true, and it’s rare I’m in bed before 4 a.m.   My mind gets into full power mode around 11 or 12 every night, always been that way.   So early for me is mid-morning for most other people, granted.

On short sleep I drank coffee, paid bills, answered emails, thought a little about business, showered, dressed and then it was time to go.  As my friend arrived to take us to the home of our  host I was opening a yogurt, which I bolted standing in the kitchen.  My friend smiled merrily as I complained that I had to choke down my breakfast so as not to be late to this, no doubt, artificially early play date.  Then he hurried me out to the car.

As we drove he mentioned a stream of messages he hadn’t listened to from our friend the host.   “I didn’t listen to them, I figure they were just his usual string of nervous proddings and I didn’t feel like hearing them,” he said breezily.  Then the friend called and said we wouldn’t be starting at 12:00 after all, that 2:00 was more realistic, since he was out shopping with his wife and wouldn’t be home much before 2:00.   I listened to this impassively, responded mildly and rang off.  I even let the statement that he was making things easier for me by doing it later roll off and land soundlessly on some imaginary pillow.

We headed back to Sekhnet’s where my friend made himself lunch while I went upstairs and took care of some business I hadn’t had time for, rushing to be in the car by noon.

But here’s the thing that creeps me out.  That my manipulative friend didn’t bother calling or dropping me an email the night before with the new time– to be expected.  That he said he’d moved things back to make it easier for me– well, a little problematic, in light of how much easier it actually made things, but not unexpected.  What creeps me out is that as we headed back over to our friend’s house my friend who was driving said, casually, “I heard his first message at 11:05, about not starting until 2,  but I was already in the middle of rushing through my errands to be here by noon.”

So when I was wolfing my yogurt, and complaining about being put under this kind of time crunch, he already knew there was no time crunch.   Still, he didn’t tell me to sit, relax , eat breakfast, that we had two hours, he pretended we were still running late.

“Why would you put something like this on the web, you querulous, carping prick?” asks a chorus of the two or three who will one day read this post.

Why, indeed.  I told you something creepy is in the air.

It Depends, doesn’t it?

edit 1:

Point of view determines what we see, obviously, how we interact with the world, and, to some extent, how the world interacts with us.  The glass half full, glass half empty, cost vs. benefit, things looking up, things hopeless — matters of opinion based on point of view.  In politics we have that wonderful term from economics, externalties, the hidden costs of a transaction.  What these externalities actually are is determined by where one stands to look at them.

For some of us to get the things we value, a lot of others might have to lose things they value.  Access to clean water, for example, or a safe home, or healthy traditional diets replaced with the Obesity/Diabetes Diet.  We have mass malnutrition in a land of plenty, and deforest the planet so that billions and billions of Happy Meals can be served worldwide.  (Point of view, somebody please give me the upside of any of these externalities.)

It’s human nature, after enough time passes many people stop harping on a few centuries of slavery, extermination of native peoples, destruction of the environment, externalities like that.  In order to create great wealth great sacrifices sometimes have to be made.  The people who make these sacrifices, with no say in the matter, are called losers.  We have literally billions of them living on the earth right now, they are all around us.

I apologize.  I’m cranky, carping on the nonstartling idea of atrocious injustice in the world.  Surely I’m not advocating a society where those with the least get a shot at a decent life, where those with the most are required to play fair with the rest.  That would violate the American Dream:   when I own Walmart I want to pay my workers the least the law will allow, let the government buy their health insurance.  Every cent I don’t pay my workers in wages or benefits goes directly into my pocket.

                                                                                             ii

It’s particularly airless in NYC the last few days.  There is some air, but it is thick, heated and hard to breathe.  You can breathe it, of course, but it doesn’t refresh you very much.  If you live in an airconditioned place you will only notice this thick stickiness of the air when you go outside.  The air the fans are pushing around is like warm sludge.  It hits the face like exhaust from an exhaust pipe.  I woke up after a few hours of sleep gasping like a fish on the floor of a rowboat, my head filled with dread.  The dread of everything at once.

Dread that this cyst, or fatty deposit, on the back of my left arm is a tumor.  The dread of being diagnosed with cancer at the same time I am losing the health insurance I’ve been buying for seven years.  The dread of faceless bureaucrats deciding the policy will terminate for individuals and sole proprietors on 12/31/13.  Now you can only buy this insurance if your employer is enrolled in it, God bless our independent entrepreneurs.   

Dread as I think:  if you’re 57 and have a deep family and personal history of cancer, get a job that offers health insurance and make sure you don’t lose it, loser.  They’ve tried to repeal “Obamacare” 37 times now in the land of the free/home of the brave.   Insurance premiums, meanwhile, have skyrocketed in those seven years.  They went up 20% for these last few months I’m eligible.  Tens of thousands of Americans still die preventable deaths of every year for lack of access to affordable health care.

Dread:  having created a radical and so far highly successful program for children, with virtually unlimited potential, and running out of money before it becomes self-sustaining.   As often, I am working for free, or virtually free, and those who receive the free benefit are most pleased with it.  

Dread:  having to find a business partner, somebody by nature and prejudice I think of as dry company, but someone essential for this program turning into a business that can pay my bills, create a few jobs with health insurance for myself and and my fellow workers.

Dread: of selfish, manipulative weasels of my long acquaintance, and the sickening aftertaste of remaining mild with them.

Dread:   new lump under left nipple, male breast cancer or soft tissue sarcoma.  Just what I need.

Dread:   this life-force draining heat and humidity, in this old house of Sekhnet’s, a jerry-rigged electrical system that causes her to fear fire if the air-conditioner is turned on.   So, if it’s 86 degrees and 90% humidity at 2 a.m., splay yourself naked in front of the fan and hope for the best.

The question is does dread depend on your point of view?  So let’s flip all this to another point of view and have a look.

I’ve made significant strides in my life and with my program.  I’m not making money, true, but rich personal history.   I’m taking careful notes, with soundtracks and animated shorts.  I remain modest, most of the time.  I use my talents for good instead of evil.   I strive to be collaborative, creative and mild.  I am trying my best to be the change I want to see in the world.  

Looked at through the long view of my life, the selfish, manipulative weasels with the bitter aftertaste are also friends of many years, chaps I usually have a good larf with.  

Alternate point of view: it is all good, all good, or to be taken care of, moving in the direction I want to move, remaining calm, in the face of the many compelling reasons not to remain calm.  

If you believe in the laws of karma you will know that the good I am doing will be paid back to me at some point.   The heat and unbearable humidity will pass and I’ll be shivering and putting on a polar-tech jacket soon enough.  I’ll make medical appointments and hopefully get good medical news rather than a diagnosis of the dreaded soft tissue sarcoma.  I’ll figure out the solution to the sudden loss of medical insurance, as I will be obliged to.  All will be resolved.  And in the end, after all, there is only death, and what we did during this blink of an eye here.

Eye Roll, please

I know how tedious stories of injustice are, and how depressing, especially here in America where we are by nature optimists.  You know, how many times can you hear about millions of indigent senior citizens being cut back from five Meals-on-wheels a week to four due to Sequestration, or the precocious little four year-old in Indiana whose mother can’t break it to him that he was lotteried out of Head Start next term, before you turn to the sports channel, or go shopping, or see what there is to snack on?

Or reading about some freshman  Congressman from Tennessee, let’s say, whose family owns a gigantic farm, and who gets a subsidy of $738 a day, (and, yes, some liberal prick actually took out a calculator and divided the average annual $269,000 farm subsidy this wealthy public servant gets into days…) while he advocates cutting the Food Stamp program that so many WalMart employees depend on?  (A more balanced, and almost incomprehensible, version of that story is here)

There’s a so-called debate in this country about values.  One side’s intellectuals cite the points made by a novelist who escaped from totalitarianism and had a lifelong hatred of “altruism” as though these strongly expressed opinions are slam dunk conclusions preempting any discussion of who deserves what.   The intellectuals of the other major party  dare not scream too loud at this, fundraising is a delicate art that must be constantly cultivated, and besides, most of the money in political campaigns is given by the top half of the 1%, and not all of them think that novelist Ayn Rand is an absurd source of moral, political and economic philosophy.

I may personally agree that it’s no sin for old people to cut back from five meals a week to four.  America has an obesity problem, you know?  I may agree that the brat in Indiana who wants to continue in Head Start when politicians have agreed to cut it across the board as part of their debate over who deserves what should stop whining, and so should his mother.  But if I do those things, I’m a bad person.  Really, think about it.  It’s only my opinion, but someone who justifies cutting food to the poor, on a philosophical theory about who deserves what, in a super-wealthy country where the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while everyone else does not– bad person.

Of course, there is no law against being a bad person.  Nor about a bad person being an elected public servant, leaving office and working for an average of 1000% more in the private sector as a lobbyist.   And I know it sounds terrible when you use a number like 1000%, it’s really only ten times as much.  If you take the actual numbers, it doesn’t really look so bad at all.  The public servant makes, say, $120,000 a year to serve, that servant can make much more in the private sector, but they make a sacrifice in pay in order to serve the rest of us.  So is it so unfair that the public servant leaves office with contacts, entree and expertise and makes $1,200,000 as a lobbyist?  If you look at it like that, it hardly seems unfair.  Look at it this way, it’s like the person only made $660,000 a year for those two years, only $480,000 a year if you divide by three with two years of public service, hardly a top earner in the USA.

I know, I know, prepare the eye roll.  Here we go, I’m done now — and may we have…. an eye roll. 

The Minor Leagues

I’ve been wrestling with applying to TED talks, I have a few more days to wrestle, the deadline for this round is Friday.  You can only apply once in twelve months.  I’m told that TED, like everyone else, looks at stats– how much of a following you have on-line, in the world, how many clicks, how many click-throughs.  By that criteria, I’m already disqualified, with well under a hundred watching each of the kids’ animations made by my visionary program.  

On this blahg I get a few readers on a good day, not that I’d mention gratootskyblahg to TED.  I have a small group of followers who seem to be about 50% business people looking for customers.  I am supposed to be a business person, if I’m to be attractive to TED.  My great idea worth spreading must already be out in the world, being discussed to some extent.  Being seen by more than the few hundred who’ve visited this great site.

In the real world I can’t get people to answer my calls, yet.  I think I may be in a better position in six months, when many more people are talking about my great idea worth spreading.  Maybe I should wait to apply to TED then, when I’ve raised my profile.  It’s a shot in the dark either way, who knows?

I stumbled on the farm system for TED yesterday, TEDx.  These appear to be the minor leagues for TED, small stages where people who may think their ideas are worth talking about get to audition, give a little taste of their stuff.  I watched some of these with a sinking heart yesterday.  Several Muslim comics, I watched one after another, addressing audiences in places like Doha, Qatar.  The titles were things like A Kuwaiti, a Saudi and an Egyptian walk into an Iranian Bar, Muslims are Funny, Too, and We All Laugh.  I hope we all laugh, it’s the best hope we have.  I haven’t had a laugh in a while, I was ready, overdue, really.  So I turned hopefully to my young Muslim brothers.

I watched one, an earnest young Saudi guy talking about how he helped bring Stand-Up comedy to the Arabian Peninsula.  As he talked very seriously about comedy, and getting laughs, the camera panned the faces of his audience.  There were a few smiles to be seen as I waited for laughs.  Where are the laughs?  I kept thinking.  None there.  Went to the next one, and the one after that, I smiled, but nothing got a laugh out of me.  A few of these guys had charm, but they were walking a very careful line.  Those who walk such lines are generally not hilarious.

Go to the major league TED talks and you will almost always have something to laugh about as you are provoked by super-bright performers to think new thoughts.  These people are at ease and inspired, they speak easily to the crowd of 1,500.   I was at ease and inspired at my mother’s funeral, even funny, true, but it was a crowd who knew me, and my mother, and appreciated the irreverence, which was a tribute to, and in part attributable to, her.   Forget that little show.  

Forget IBM, TED’s main secret sponsor, forget IBM’s stunning info-mercials at the end of each minor league TEDx Talk.  Forget, as you hear IBM’s genius public relations firm spin out the wondrous story of IBM changing the world with amazing ideas, that at one time IBM’s amazing ideas included keeping track of people an organized government headed by a psychopath murdered by the millions.  

I am in a dark mood lately, no lie.   No laughs here.  Maybe next time.  In fact, remind me to tell you the one about the visionary data company and the visionary purifier of blood.  It’ll kill yuh.

Cancer

My mother, always a large and heavy woman, was, for the last few years of her life, almost gaunt.  She’d been a fat baby, there’s an oblong portrait of her as an infant, she’d had it blown up and put into a gilt frame.  In the photo her eyes are black, she looks like an apple cheeked glittering-eyed Italian bambina.  She was overweight for most of her adult life, but for the last few years, gaunt.  Cancer and the Widow’s Diet, as she called it, did that for her.

Her mother had died of cancer, a terrible, painful, wasting death we all watched up close.  When it was finally time for my grandmother to die, she couldn’t go.  Her eyes turned huge, and black, and she screamed.  My grandmother was not in there any more, just the will to live.  It was dreadful to see.

My grandfather was gone over a year when she died.  He had survived lung cancer and the removal of a lung.  This all happened when I was a baby, he lived until my 24th year.  Although an ideal weight for his body his whole life, he was terrified of living alone without his mate and started cutting down on his calories.  He went on a low salt special diet with his cancer-stricken wife, although there was no medical reason to do it.  There was no practical reason either, they had always prepared and eaten different food every meal anyway.  My grandmother used to scream at him that he was an idiot, that he should eat what he always ate.   He was stubborn.  He lost a couple of pounds, carried too many bottles of seltzer back on a bus one 90 degree, 90% humidity Miami Beach afternoon, had trouble catching his breath when he came into the apartment.  Died not long afterwards of a heart attack.  Not to say that cancer wouldn’t have killed him too, it had already tried and almost succeeded once.

My father felt like crap the last two years of his life.  Looked terrible, had no energy, went to a cardiologist, endocrinologist and a hematologist regularly.  They tried a B-12 shot, which didn’t do much good.  One day he woke from a nap, paralyzed and yellow.  In the emergency room there was no doubt among the doctors and nurses there, he was clearly in the final stages of undetected liver cancer.  He didn’t keep his appointment with the hematologist the following day, he had only one pressing appointment to keep after that.  He was dead six days later.

His parents, my grandparents on my father’s side, both died young of cancer.  My first cousin, Ann, died of cancer before the age of 40.  Another cousin, Emily, same thing, dead of cancer around 40.  Emily’s father, my father’s cousin Gene, now 85, fought cancer as valiantly as my mother had, for more than twenty years.  He plays tennis and feels good.  He’s a tough bird.  

About five years ago I had skin cancer removed from my nose and my arm.  A year or two later more cancer removed from my nose, a few millimeters from the first site.  “It’s a hot spot,” explained the dermatologist, taking another biopsy.

I’m not bragging about all this cancer, please understand.

But it’s the background, explaining, in part, why this call to my old friend tonight has been tormenting me so much.  Soft tissue sarcoma is rare, the exact kind he has is a rare form of soft tissue sarcoma.  They’ve been cutting at him, assured him they got the whole tumor when they removed a buttock and part of his leg, but cancer is a cunning little fucker and it made liars of the doctors and their assurances.  Nerves were removed from his leg, most of the sciatic nerve on one side, recently the foot on that leg stopped working.  The doctors gave no guarantee about the surgery helping.  It was a good thing about the no guarantee, because the surgery didn’t help.   Chemo, the only game left for him, has been hit or miss, largely miss.  They are blind men throwing darts at a theoretical dart board in a room with no floor.  

I found myself talking like a nattering fool after getting his frank update tonight, blindly changing the subject at one point, the way I’ve heard others talk to people with end-stage cancer.  Tap-dancing, self-conscious, trying to be sympathetic, and helpful while feeling helpless against a horrific futility.  So, nattering on about everything else.   It made me sick to hear people do it to my grandmother, my mother.  It was more sickening still to hear me doing it.  My friend gently interrupted, it was time to change the dressing on his latest surgery, get some sleep before his doctor’s appointment tomorrow.  He was hoping to feel up to a visit soon, but no guarantees, he has been feeling pretty shitty.

I walked in the humidity trying to hold on to my new habit of cultivating happiness.  Might as well have tried to hold a fart in my hands in the merciless New York City night.

Marketing 101

Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing.  Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.

For example, which would you rather find on your plate?

a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or

b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow

Only a fool would try to market the product as (b).  Word to the wise, yo.