Category Archives: muttering to myself

It Doesn’t Pay to Flip A Dumb Redneck the Bird

Or anybody, really, for that matter.

I was in Florida, about a year ago, staying at the apartment of my dead parents, trying to get the place cleaned up, the smell of dog urine out of the porous concrete.   My mother had told me it was going to be a nightmare going through all those drawers and closets when she was gone.  It wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but it wasn’t that much fun.

On the way to the 2004 Cadillac that would eventually become an excellent buy for some pushy bastards who called my sister around the clock, I slowed as I passed the small circle of benches where a group of old people hung out when the shadow of the building fell there, as the afternoon faded into the relative cool of evening.  One of the regulars, a fat woman with white hair, a virulent racist and an imbecile, according to my mother, had been out there when my mother was taken past her on a gurney to the hospice where she died.  “Oh, look, they’re taking another one to die,” she’d said loudly as my mother and I passed on the way to the hospice’s vehicle.  I thought she was an idiot for that, and for the racism, and the next time I was in Florida I learned that she was dead too.

Eddie was on the bench with his girlfriend Jean, a woman who raised my mother’s blood pressure.  Eddie was a lot like Foghorn Leghorn, he loved to tell stories about himself– he’d brought a man back from death, for example, true story, and long story.  Oh, he had done all kinds of things.  Jean, probably never the brightest bulb in the chandelier to begin with, was in the grips of a dementia that made her mostly pleasant, but very repetitive.  She could also be stubborn, which drove my mother as crazy as Jean’s habit of asking the same question over and over.  Eddie had his hands full caring for her, but they always seemed affectionate with each other.  They held hands when they sat on the bench.  

I said a quick hello to Eddie and the beaming Jean as I passed, careful not to break my stride.  Eddie was talking to a white haired security officer leaning out the window of his patrol car, he introduced me to this southern man.  We said hello to each other, I told him it was nice to meet him, smiled, wished everybody a good night and kept walking to the car.

The following day I was riding my bicycle around the circle.  It was 2.4 miles and I’d go around several times, to keep the heart and lungs tuned up.  I’d generally do this at night, but on this particular day it was before dark, I was on my way to dinner at my sister’s nearby.   A security car pulled next to me and the uniformed man inside yelled for me to pull over.  It was the white haired security guard, driving too fast, red in the face.  I ignored him and kept riding.   I heard him scream at me again and, most likely, casually waved a finger over my shoulder.

Wrong thing to do.  It caused him to accelerate to well above the 25 mph internal speed limit, he was in a rage.  Not only was the damned country slipping away from his kind, it had never belonged to him in the first place.  He cut me off, blocking my path with a diagonal veer.  If I hadn’t spent years riding in the traffic of NYC he might have caused me serious bodily injury.  I was indignant and adrenalized as our chat began.

“You need to show me some ID,” the asshole demanded, getting out of his car in an angry hurry, his body language reaching for the gun he wished he was wearing.

I not only didn’t show him some ID, I showed him my smart mouth, and how stupid he was, and proved to him that he already knew who I was.  He angrily denied this so I reminded him we’d been introduced by Eddie in back of 1601 not 24 hours earlier.   He muttered that I needed to get a pass from the gatehouse before I could ride a bicycle in the circle.  My blood pressure was elevated as I left the senseless confrontation with an idiot.  It shouldn’t have been, but it is difficult sometimes to be a master of the fight or flight reflex in the heat of the moment.

I complained to my sister, her husband sort of chuckled, he knew the guy I was talking about.  The whole thing was senseless.

A week or two later, on my second to last night in the apartment, which no longer smelled of dog urine and which had been tidied up quite a bit, I took my nightly bike ride, the twelfth in the last twelve days.  I passed the security car circling the road, it was the only car out there at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.  I made a few circles, had my aerobics, and then got a goodnight call from Sekhnet as I got ready to carry my bike the two flights up to the apartment.   We talked for a while, I may have still been chatting with her as I came up the stairs with the bike.  I said goodnight to her as I went inside the air-conditioned apartment, took my shoes, shirt and pants off and took a shower.   I read, or watched a little TV, then went to sleep.  Seven hours later I got up looking forward to going to Redlands to play guitar with an old friend’s husband, a great blues and rock guitar player.

They lived in a big tiled house with high ceilings and great natural reverb.  The guy had two strat type guitars, made by a local guitar maker, nice axes.  Tube amps.  It was a pleasure playing with the guy, I’d done it only twice over the years, but each time was a lot of fun.

Only, picking up the pants I’d worn the night before, I discovered to my alarm that I had no driver’s license.  There was no wallet in the back pocket of the treacherous baggy cargo pants, still in a heap in on the floor in front of the bathroom.  I tossed the cushion on the chair in front of the TV, rummaged in a panic and then dashed out the door to retrace my steps from the night before.

It was now broad daylight and I’d had the wallet in the back pocket on the road side of the pants.  If it had fallen out while I was riding, which it surely had, it had fallen into the road.  It was fat, black and the size of a small turtle.  No passing car would have failed to see it.  The only car out there at that hour was the security car, I’d passed it at least once, possibly twice.

I went around the circle twice, one way and then the other, searching also in the grass, though I knew it was unlikely that it was there.  I went to the security booth and told them to be on the look out for the missing wallet, that I’d pay a reward for its return.  I made sure they had my cell phone number.  

I’d just been to the ATM, so there was $100 in cash in there.  After the attack on 9/11 Sekhnet had urged me to carry $400 in a zippered compartment in the wallet, in case of a future emergency, so that was there too, a hundred dollar bill, a fifty, some twenties and tens and fives.   It would be foolish, Sekhnet had pointed out, to pay $20 for bottled water in case of an apocalypse when I could offer $5.  There were 60 Euros in there, waiting for another trip to Spain.  There was an uncashed 2004 check for $600 signed by a friend I’d done a favor for, a guy who has done me countless favors.  There were all the credit cards, license and my attorney ID from the NY court system.  This attorney ID had a recent picture of me on it.

I went through all the horrors one might expect after losing a wallet, made all the calls.   Kept checking with security.   Finally, on my last day there, I went to the security office where I talked to the head of security, a grim-faced important  man who’d kept me waiting while he concluded a long phone call.  This guy looked a little like Chris Christie, a big, blustering tough guy.  He was in much better shape than Christie and wearing a white uniform.  I thought of Redman Tobacco chewing sheriffs in small southern towns as I sat across the desk from him, uncomfortably making small talk about a picture of Mickey Mantle he unaccountably had on the wall behind his desk.  I told him about a great, highly nuanced biography of Mantle I’d recently read, by Jane Leavey, recommended it to him.  

For his part, he was adamant that nobody on his security team would have pocketed the wallet, repeating the line I’d heard from other security personnel that one of the (black) home attendants leaving at 3 a.m. had probably found it.  Why a night nurse would leave at 3 a.m. was not a fit question so I asked him to look up who was on duty that night so I could at least speak to him.  He would not do that.  National security, you know, and executive privilege, and the ancient doctrine of “I know you are but what am I?”.  He eventually went over to a file cabinet and pulled open a drawer, glanced at a folder, put it back and closed the drawer.

“Nope, he would definitely have returned it, if he’d found it.  Honest as they come,” he said.  “He’s been working for us for twenty-two years, he’s returned lost jewelry.  If he’d seen it, you’d have it.”  I nodded, recommended the Mantle biography again and went out feeling like a sap.

The realization was slow to dawn on me.  Twenty-two years a Florida security guard, suggesting white hair and a red neck, a stupid bastard driving too fast and yelling at people to pull over and assume the position.   I wondered bitterly about that moment when he saw my photo on the ID, my mother’s photo ID with the apartment address on it, the baby pictures of Sekhnet.  It was possible he whooped with glee, if he recognized me, as I would surely recognize him.  There’s no doubt he did whatever a dumb bastard does the day after he finds $500 in cash at 3 a.m. on a deserted circle in a retirement village. 

“Who’s the goddamned smartass now, you rich goddamned NY lawyer bitch?”  I can hear him ask, rhetorically.

Sphinxes and Monosyllabs

The speed of modern electronic communication somehow makes the silence of Sphinxes and the e-grunts of Monosyllabs harder to bear.  You may get a dozen emails from somebody you’re waiting to hear back from with no reference at all to the question you may have sent them.   Clearly, Sphinxes and Monosyllabs must be suffered gladly, but, damn…

As I get down off my soundproofed soapbox, I offer this little bit of amusement for the childish side of y’all:

animation workshop, second season

Dig it.

You Just Have to….

When you are pushing a rock larger than yourself up a steep hill, even if you have chosen the rock yourself, you’ll encounter moments when the heaviness of the rock, the steepness of the upward incline and the seeming futility of the task will overcome you.  At such moments you may find yourself calling out to those who care for the strength to go on.   At such moments, few people have anything of much use to say.  One of my favorites is “you just have to….” with the advice that follows.

“You just have to not look back,” since you’ve only gone 6% up the immense incline.

“You just have to be strong,” since you will die if the rock rolls back over you when your strength gives out, as all strength eventually succumbs to gravity.

“You just have to remain positive.”

“You just have to keep on pushing.”

“You chose the rock, you just have to embrace the challenge.”

All so true, they bring tears to the eyes and a quiver to the arms, hamstrings, calves and back.

Gratootisblahg

I’m trying to recall, in the cold light of day, the many things I thought about last night, at 3, 5, 6 and 7:00 a.m., that kept me from sleep.  Sure there was loud snoring, but I’ve slept through that many times, joined the hearty chorus myself, no doubt.  There was that idiot banging garbage cans outside starting at 6:14 a.m., but he didn’t wake me, I was up. There was a parade of thoughts, no doubt, books I’d like to write, see in print, read from and talk about to nodding, laughing audiences in book stores.   There are places to do this, even today, in our shrinking corporate culture.

One thing I didn’t think about last night, I’m fairly certain, was an idea I told the mother of a struggling musician recently.   She applauded the idea, even though it was an impossibility that would require a total remaking of American society and its so-called values.  She’d mentioned the difficulty her talented daughter had finding an audience for her music.  She probably also mentioned the many millions generous, socially conscious superstars like Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and noted philanthropist Britney Spears rake in.

“If Springsteen  and Britney and Beyonce each gave $2,000,000 a year, a fraction of their income, to a fund a music exchange trust fund, thousands of  talented but unknown musicians could be paid $30,000 a year to play five or six gigs a week at schools, Nursing Homes, Veteran’s hospitals, orphanages, hospices, hospitals, children’s aid societies, work houses, prisons, concentration camps, enhanced interrogation centers, etc.  That way you’d support generations of inspired songwriters and performers and allow them to live as working musicians with a large and appreciative audience they could entertain and inspire.”

“That’s a great idea,” said the young musician’s mother enthusiastically.  And it is.  But it wasn’t one of the things I was thinking about last night that kept me awake.

A Mug’s Game

Running in the background, constantly and to everyone’s detriment.  I’ll try to describe it in summary.

Dreams are seldom realized, that’s the set-up, the hard truth, why dreams are mostly dreams.  A variety of myths about freedom, living the dream, exist, but they are mostly bullshit.  Our idea of freedom is like holding a cloud.  Becoming free, in any meaningful sense, is hard, scary work.   Too hard and scary for most of us.  We collect, instead of the thing we actually want, a series of consolation prizes.  Then we try to believe that these prizes are as good as what we once held out for.

There is nothing so terrible in this, except how it predisposes us to cast a critical eye on others while we try to console ourselves.   Nobody is singing our praises, why should we sing anybody else’s?  And the cycle, vicious as any, rides on downhill with the wind at its back.  It takes only gravity to keep it going.

Someone weaker than you, recognized for strength?  Maddening.  A mediocre singer praised for singing when what you love best is to croon soulfully?  Infuriating.  In the real world it’s who you know and who you blow and blah blah blah.  So you send me your best attempt at a poem, in a moment of hope, I’ll let it drop into the silence it came from.  

You’d do the same for me, I’m sure, most people do.  And, of course, we’re all very busy trying to be born before the lights go out forever, or trying to forget death, or trying to write our own symphony, or pop masterpiece, or the perfect haiku, or chasing the distraction to end distraction.

Maddened in the city of abandoned dreams we rush about chasing consolation prizes.  The dream we dreamed fading mostly.  They only torment us when we dream of them again and ponder the gulf that now separates us from them.   Watching somebody else rush towards some noble truth or another only reminds us how far we are from ours.  It sticks in our throats.

Best of all not to even mention it, nobody gives much of what we really need to us, anyway.  In fact, forget, if you can, that I even mentioned it.

Lebensunswertes Leben

I’m listening to a disabled woman whine on National Public Radio that she can barely live on the $1,200 a month SSD disability payment she gets now.  She complains that her parents, in their eighties and in poor health, with many medical expenses of their own, have very little to kick in from their monthly Social Security check for her upkeep.  

And the President is negotiating to lower future payments to the old and infirm for Social Security and SSD.  I’m sick to hear it, that he’s left the New Deal Social Safety net on the negotiating table in the artificial emergency hostage situation Republican phrase masters, at no small expense, have named The Fiscal Cliff.  I say they forget Fiscal Cliff– call it by what it is, when you ask the weakest to make the sacrifice for other people’s comfort, Lebensunswertes Leben (see FN below).  

This disabled caller is worried, calling Tom Ashbrook on On Point to speak for others like her, people already feeling desperately squeezed, living under the poverty line, a line that is drawn artificially low to begin with.  Do the math, $1,200 a month is less than $15,00 a year, excluding the bounty she gets in the form of the Food Stamps and Medicaid.

It seems, according to her, that the price of the transportation for the disabled where this physically and cognitively disabled woman lives  has tripled in recent years.  It now costs her ten dollars to leave her house to go shopping.   Logic would dictate she go out less often, but somehow, she seems very unhappy with the idea of how much this semblance of independence eats into her meager budget.  It’s not as if this lady is rich, strictly speaking she lives on $14,400 a year.  She doesn’t have a cleaning lady and a driver, if that’s what you’re thinking, Eric Cantor. 

She is calling Tom Ashbrook in the context of a conversation about President Obama’ s willingness to hack at the Social Saftey Net in the name, presumably, of bipartisanship — showing more of his famous willingness to concede on major principles before the horse trading actually begins– and preserving the oligarchic status quo.

“Oligarchic,” a political adversary will say, raising eyebrows and hackles both.  I say, that is the proper name for the United States in 2012, there is no question of it being otherwise as the rich get richer and the poor and gullible are constantly called on to make more and more dire sacrifices.  

It’s not as if I don’t see the arguments against the position  I’m taking.  After all, why should a person making only $400,00 a year be forced to take the hit and go back to the old tax rate before the Bush Tax Cuts?  That’s why they built the Fiscal Cliff (you can be sure that well-paid right wing genius of phraseology, the coiner of  Death Tax, Collateral Damage, Friendly Fire and so forth, was well-paid to coin this hard image of looming, desperate catastrophe)  to capitalize on Bush’s deferred 2004 mandate to privatize Social Security.

How cool would that have been?   Everyone free to freely invest their retirement money on twenty thousand lottery tickets,  or getting mortgages to buy houses to flip, or on the spin of a roulette wheel that could make them fantastically rich — if they had enough to bet with.   2008 would have been a big “whoops…” for millions who would have lost all retirement income, in addition to the millions who did lose everything, (like the employees of Enron once upon a time) after the last unnatural Fiscal Disaster– the huge fraud that led to the massive losses of 2008. 

That organized effort by fantastically wealthy institutions to defraud people with limited means was perpetrated by very, very, very wealthy people, people it wouldn’t be right to prosecute, or imprison, or force to give back billions obtained by fraud and deception.  They are too big to prosecute, and besides, they are not considered a threat in the same way that an angry young black man is a threat, but, if you look at the full picture, these are some very dangerous motherfuckers.  But anyway, back to lives not worth living, those expendable millions at the bottom of the food chain.

The sickening spectacle unfolds, there goes our supposedly liberal President Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, agreeing to pony up the Social Safety Net in favor of letting the wealthy pay as little as possible in taxes, the old rate before Bush gave them his temporary one-time tax cut gift a decade ago.  

The President seems to have agreed in principle to tie future Social Security payments to a new cost index that would gradually decrease the amount our nation’s oldest and poorest, our most helpless, receive every month.  They’ll eat cheaper meat if the market dictates it, they’ll eat less meat, they’ll live like Gandhi.  We didn’t make them losers.  If they’d made better choices in life they could have also been winners.   We didn’t make the jungle.

Still, I have to ask:  why is the New Deal being renegotiated at this particularly difficult moment for most people?  Whence this radical right wing drive to shred the Social Safety Net?   Are we still fighting the damned Civil War?   Did Germany win World War Two and nobody told me?   Why is the onus for settling an artificially engineered showdown to cut social spending placed squarely on the backs of our most vulnerable?  Why is it being  presided over by Nobel Peace Prize Winning President Change We Can Believe In?  

There must be a hundred more likely places to start to cut the deficit before we talk about cuts to a program that is solvent for at least the next twenty years without any changes.  

There are those who insist we live in the freest nation on earth.  The vast majority of children who grow up in poverty die in poverty in America.  They live shorter, more dangerous lives, their infant mortality rates are like those of Third World mothers.  American children in poverty, in the patriotic view of those who proudly call our nation the greatest nation in the history of the world, have the freedom to choose between obedience, discipline and participation or anger, rebellion and prison.  

A rational actor, the theory goes, would choose to pay close attention as the cards are dealt and gamely play the crap hand he’s being dealt every round.   He is not playing at a high stakes table anyway.  For example, if he or anyone he knew were to die and a corporation had liability for that death, their family would get a tiny wrongful death settlement.  Think World Trade Center bus boy wrongful death number ($20,000) vs. World Trade Hedge Fund guy’s (multiple millions, widows complaining about the meager pay-outs).

“Let’s see,” the lawyer for the corporation negotiating the settlement for the guy’s death from some kind of toxic product or procedure, would say, consulting charts and punching a calculator “a life expectancy of 31 years times an annual salary, interest, benefits and dividends, of…. let’s see…. zero— prisoners in the State prison system do not make very much money, would be…. we’ll give you $10,000.”

The family would take it, in sorrow and in rage.  But really, that’s the game, the way its set up, how the board is rigged, where the finger rests heavily on the scale, how the field tilts, who the refs are, how corrupt and greedy they are, and billions and billions in wealth to be taken, the wealth of the world is inexhaustible, more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes, but who cares?  God bless unfettered Capitalism, nobody can put a limit on an American’s right to luxury a million times over, as if he had a million lives to spend it.  

It’s Winners versus Losers, punk.  It’s a clear choice, really.  You can choose the side that wins every time– even if you personally keep losing big time you can still root for the Winners, bask in their glow.  Or, you can side with the Losers, those who will always lose, always be screwed by those who can.  Some are born with advantages, others with disadvantages.  It’s up to you— pick a side.

So this disabled woman talking to Tom Asbrook complains that if the monthly check is decreased, if she’s told to buy a cheaper cut of meat, lose some weight, don’t use so much heat in the house, wear two sweaters inside, and a scarf and a hat,  live like Gandhi, then she will suffer.  The rest of us need it all, so let’s just say, to her and the millions like her:  be quiet and have a blessed day.

FN:  Lebensunswertes Leben (from Wikipedia)

The phrase “life unworthy of life” (in German:“Lebensunwertes Leben”) was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be “euthanized“. The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of the Third Reich. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of  Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1]  The euthanasia program was known as Action T4.

I Live in a Submarine

I was thinking this as I made my way back to the sleeping hatch before.  “This is like a submarine,” I said to myself, with the stirrings of some other possibly clever lines following suit in that funny way they have, tumbling like monkeys.   I was not in the mood to so much as jot down any clever lines, so tired I was, “shoot,” I told myself, and my monkey mind, “I’ll jot that semi-clever jive down tomorrow.”  Then I turned to the compromised Lazy Boy, a sly smile creeping, “maybe….” I said, then went down the narrow hallway starboard toward the sleeping area.

Except, once I got starboard, goddamn, there was very little air in the hatch.  Fresh air, that is.  I’ll be lightheaded e’er long, I thought to myself absently, glad I wasn’t actually there, my heavy head pressing heavily against the many pillows on the pallet.  There was also a hiss, suggesting either that we were taking on water (very unlikely, I reasoned) or that steam heat was sissing up through the tenement pipes (odder still, it seemed to me).

OK, how is like a submarine?  Well, it’s fairly long, front to back, and it’s become narrow, with my dusty possessions piled aft and the length of it made narrow by things also on the other side.  The fore deck and the poop deck, well, let’s not even talk about such disgusting things at this hour,  I can easily move from the front of the U-boat to the back, and  dive and surface, blindly but with little trouble.  It’s mainly the narrowness of it and the damnable lack of a periscope– or gyroscope, for that matter, that make it so submarinelike.

“You do realize how that sounds,” says the sour-mouthed bowsin, indignant that I don’t even bother to google the proper spelling of boatswain. 

“Like the periscope in this Class D- frigate following sub, you, sir, do not even exist.  Forget about spelling your imaginary title correctly.  ‘Woof, woof,’ as a matter of fact.”

“Sure,” says the boatswain, more sourly still, “why don’t we just boat forget the whole thing.”

They Might Really Be Insane

I sometimes wonder about it, where the exact line is.  It’s hard to say sometimes.   A person can be fully justified, and still insane.  Oversensitive, obsessive- compulsive, “crazed”, psychotic — where the precise line is?  Fuzzy.

You can leaf through the DSM and find every one of your friends, relatives, colleagues.  We’re each the product of long-programmed reactions, prejudices, actual knowledge, fears, suspicions, notions of success and failure, collected tics.  

The actual line is not so bright, that’s all I’m saying.

 

koan

 

The Noble Toble was given the tit,

Griff fought the breast;

it was not offered to the baby.

Rubber Crutch

They’re making them so realistic looking these days, it’s often impossible to tell what a crutch is made of until it’s time to depend on it.   Damnedest thing.   I could have sworn this was metal and wood.

“Tell that to your broken ass,” a casual observer suggests.

Two minute drill

I’m on the timer now, counting down two minutes.  Unless I’m busy selling myself these days, and my program, I’m busy falling through the cracks into the past, a past of flashy, articulate non-worldly non-accomplishment.   A history of articulate failure, in  the cozy confines of my own mind, we might say.   Of course, in more than two minutes, this could be polished, shined up, presented better– but that would defeat the point of this exercise.   This is a test, at the end a buzzer will go off telling me “pencils down.”  Then the test will be scored.

“Not too shabby for two minutes,” a reader might say, but that is another story.  Here’s the buzzer.