Category Archives: muttering to myself

Helpless Against the Avalanche?

Say your papers are piled over everything, as mine are.  You could experience a moment of panic confronting it, as I have from time to time.  It’s like looking at an avalanche about to happen, frozen in time, a jumble of all the moments it might have not become an avalanche.  There are virtues greater than a clear desk or kitchen table, sure, but those things are nice too.

Nicer, anyway, than that wall of papers, suddenly beginning to pulsate, about to overcome you.  I get back to it now, like the Dutch boy about to stick a finger into that little hole in the dike, to mix metaphors like the tossed salad of papers on either side of the screen where these words magically appear.

Monday Morning

Monday morning dawns late around here, Tony Bennett is already chatting amiably with Leonard Lopate.   Lopate asks a joking question and Bennett answers with his great, gentle laugh.  Why am I listening to Tony Bennett?  Then again, listen to him.

Somehow people get themselves to do tasks, then play later, if they get a chance.  I have many tasks to do, but all I want to do… yes, yes, never mind.   The children of my good friends used to tell people that I was a child like them.  I was forty at that time.   These kids are all older than me now, out in the world, making deals.

OK, enough of this, time to put my shoulder to the wheel, get out in the world and start making deals.   Let’s make a deal.

Delcog III

Here on Delcog III we don’t mess around with pie in the sky, or touchy feeliness either.  Life here is as frightening as it wants to be, and nobody on the planet has any quaint illusions that it could be any different. 

“Oh, yeah, Delcog III, isn’t that a bit lame, sir?” a blunt reader might ask.

“A bit lame, earthling, sure, as lame as you like.  It could not be otherwise, no matter what color glasses you put on, no matter what olfactory filter you dial in.  The air here, for example, you cannot breathe it.  When your tank runs out you will die in four or five agonizing minutes,”  the Delcog looked off indifferently, then went back about its business.

And you wonder, who is the narrator here?  Who is Delcog?  Why am I suddenly part of this story?   Is it true about the atmosphere on “Delcog III”?  Am I living in a fool’s paradise of bottled air, will it run out and will I asphyxiate?

“You may scoff at Deleterious Cognition,” said the Delcog, “you may think it is the same as plain pessimism, or depression, mere expectation of the worst.  But it is more than a passive expectation of the worst, I assure you, my soon to be oxygen deprived friend,” the Delcog gave its version of a smile.  It was as bad as the confident prediction of an agonizing death.  

“Cognition,” continued the Delcog mercilessly, “is a thought process that involves perception, gathering information, digesting it and using it to make informed predictions while assessing various risk factors.  You label it Deleterious and we embrace that label, yes, cognition can be deleterious– to wishful illusion, for one thing.  Your dreams, my friend, they depend very much on your oxygen supply.  I note that you are wearing a four hour tank and that the gauge reads 5%.  Let us do the math together– 50% would be 2 hours of breathing time, or 120 minutes.  5% of four hours, therefore, is a tenth of 2 hours or 12 minutes.  I suppose we can round it down to eleven now.”

You know, I’m thinking I don’t have to take this kind of crap from some pedantic literary invention, yet I stand here, under the winking blackness.  I’m interested to hear what this sick bastard has to say.

“Of course you are,” said the Delcog agreeably, moving seamlessly into the past tense, “instead of making your way back to the ship to replenish your air supply you are listening to me rattle on with breath so bad that, I dare say, if you were not wearing the mask and breathing apparatus you would be unable to stand so close to me.  The ship, by the way, is at least seven minutes from us, so in three or four minutes the point will be as moot, as mute, as the song you imagine you are hearing.”  

The music I hadn’t been aware of swelled thrillingly, and along with it a sense of hope, soaring.  That is one amazing aspect of music I sometimes forget, it can fill you with feeling, sometimes impossible to express except through music.  

“Yes, that’s fantastic,” said the Delcog with a slight smirk, “talk about music, since it is more precious, apparently, than life itself.  It’s kind of funny: choosing music over life, since in the afterlife everybody is deaf.”

Now the Delcog had gone too far.  I was thinking about zapping him with my bop gun, raising some funk and a little sand too.  But what if he was right about the atmosphere being poison for me to breathe?  

“By way of example,” the Delcog said, “and forgetting about your insoluble breathing emergency a few minutes from now, you are writing this instead of working on a business plan, instead of figuring out how to recruit the crucial people that will allow your plan to move forward, instead of working on strategies to network and sell your idea.  Whatever you think about capitalism, baby, you’ve got to raise capital if you want your own business.  The widgets your business will make are no different than any other widgets, they’ve got to be branded, marketed, dressed in short skirts and marched out into the marketplace.  You think you are doing something special since you are ‘nonprofit’.   That’s very funny, if you think about it for a minute.  Oh, I forgot, you don’t really have a minute… that’s a little Delcog III joke… you actually have maybe nine minutes, or, actually, two– to decide to hightail it back to the ship and see if they can get the hatch open in time.” 

It was wearying talking to this guy, but I was already weary.  I got to thinking it was a long shot to make it back to the ship in time to save myself.  The music had stopped, I felt sick, sweaty and claustrophobic in my space suit.  I had to get out of it.  I pulled off the face mask, and, outside of the fartlike smell of the Delcog, who hadn’t been wrong about his breath, the air was very much like the air in a dank basement.  It didn’t smell very fresh, but it was fine to breathe.  I winked at the Delcog and went on my miserable way, shrugging into a long sideways leap in the low gravity of Delcog III.

Disorder

There is a book called the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I think they are using version IV now, working on five.  The book lists symptoms and describes  the gradated spectrum of each diverse, specific, and sometimes subtle, mental disorder.  

Among these are the perfect statistical descriptions of each of the several distinct types that make up the editorial board of the American Psychiatric Association– brilliant and nervous,  dour and paranoid, voluble and smiling but filled with unspeakable rage, intense, taciturn but almost completely quiescent.  Those who twitch and those who smile fiercely, with one eye twitching slightly from time to time.  The trained observer may catch the occasional micro-expression showing the primal will to violence, but, for the most part, the editorial board of the DSM looks like a high-level group of accomplished professionals.

And it is.   I drop this all casually, though, of course, it’s a cliche: the crazy psychiatrist.  But the authors of the DSM, the book that categorizes every insurable mental disorder, are a select breed of psychiatrist, true experts, standing at a rare vantage point, on the defining edge, that hair’s breadth between normalcy and disorder.  

Diagnostic:  their diagnostic checklists of symptoms will decide what mental disorder you suffer from, please answer the following questions.   Are you ever sad?  Do you ever have bad dreams?  Do you become sexually aroused at odd times?   Do you like to shake your leg rhythmically for long periods of time?    A code is issued for each customized disorder and the psychiatrist  prescribes, and a pharmacist dispenses, the suggested drugs, according to the scientific recommendations of pharmaceutical industry expert psychiatrists.   Because a code number has been submitted with this claim, everyone along the line will be paid well for the patented medication to make this poor bastard function better.

Except that sometimes the poor bastard functions well, medication or no, and at other times not so well.   These mood fluctuations are a symptom of our condition here, buffeted by the pressurized demands of the world around us.  I’m just saying– a person who is freaking out might do better resting in a quiet room with soft music than strapped to a gurney, people screaming, lights flashing, men with guns, as the sedation is administered.

On the other hand, I’m no psychiatrist.

DSM-IV DSM-IV.jpg

The Return of the Bad Karma Kid

Like bad breath that lingers in a closed room forever, bad karma, the lack of faith in other people’s goodness, stinking in a cloud around him.  

“I had to fire him,” he said defensively, talking to someone he considered a moralist,  or at least a person of high morals,  “his replacement was so much better than he was, it was a no-brainer.”

“I took him to court and I beat him.  I win every time I have to take someone to court– an unblemished winning percentage.”

“I made more money last year than you made in your entire life, and I’m making 40% more this year,” he put his cigar out in the kid’s hand.

The kid, I knew, didn’t need my help.   He made no sound when the cigar tip hit his hand, only a quick downward movement and the burning cigar was on the ground.  A half second later Mr. Bad Karma had a terrible expression on his face, and the next second he was on the ground, wincing.

“Violence is not the only answer,” I said to the kid, while at the same time, I couldn’t help but admire how quickly he’d resolved the karmic quandary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0YBXwXNIg

Some Random Pricks I Have Known

As part of my constant effort to do better, a short list, in no particular order, of vindictive pricks I have knowingly, or unknowingly, infuriated in the past.

A pleasant looking young woman, who had graduated a top law school and clerked for a federal judge, then gone on to a white shoe law firm as a young, overworked attorney.  After several years she opted for academia, and having impeccable academic and professional credentials, soon found herself running a clinic at a state law school fighting for the the rights of those unconstitutionally victimized by arms and agents of the federal government.  I worked with her on a case to free several illegal aliens from what, after 9/11, would not be seen as either cruel or unusual detention in a privately owned facility that had a contract with the federal bureaucracy then known as INS.  They were subjected to some pretty nasty conditions during their long detentions and the clinic was their only advocate.

This driven woman, who’d graduate high in her class, garnered a federal clerkship, and worked as an associate in a top corporate law firm, evidently felt she had the right to treat the law students who worked for her in a high-handed and sometimes harsh manner.  In a word, she was a bitch.  Unbeknownst to me, then still an outspoken fellow with a biting sense of humor (thankfully both things of the past now) the conference room the five or six law students who worked for her sat and vented in after long days and even weekends of demanding work (she was very demanding), was equipped with a concealed intercom that allowed this associate professor to listen to our daily critiques of her in real time.  How my quips, and the laughter of my peers, must have galled her!

Which explains the overnight Fed Ex threatening me with a failing grade if I did not comply with her unreasonable demands to complete a “substantive portion” of my commitment to the clinic weeks after the end of the term.   Of course, not long after that I shut down her clinic by spreading the word among every law student in the school, but not before a clearly retaliatory and irrevocable 6 credit C- was entered on my transcript and could not be covered with a Pass because, to the Civil Libertarian deans of my law school, Academic Freedom extended to the right to enter a grade the student was able to demonstrate had not been based on the student’s actual work.

Live and learn, I say.  

(to be continued)

Other Priorities

It was Monday and massive Hurricane Sandy was poised to make landfall at around 8 pm.  At 7:15 pm I received the following email:

subject:  Club Behavior and Discipline

Dear Afterschool Club Instructors:

Behavioral issues have come up in a few of the clubs, so I wanted to share with you what parents received regarding disruptive behavior at the onset of the program. Although we haven’t been removing disruptive kids from clubs, as you can see below, if a child is repeatedly disruptive in your club, you are to send them to me in the office where they are to spend the remainder of the club time and their parents will be notified. Please keep my cell phone number (below) handy and either call me or have your assistant call me.

We recommend that you set up behavior expectations, e.g. sitting and listening, no wrestling, no yelling, at the beginning of your club and explain what the consequences will be if a child fails to behave as they would in class. Clearly articulating your expectations and the consequences if they do not behave properly will help the children understand later when they are being reprimanded.

WHAT IF MY CHILD IS DISRUPTIVE DURING THE CLUB?
We will not tolerate children who are disruptive or disrespectful to teachers, assistants, and/or other
children. The first time a child is disrespectful or disruptive, they will be removed from their club
and must spend the remainder of the club time in the office with our Club Coordinator, and their
parents will be notified. A second occurrence will result in the child being prohibited from attending
their club for the remainder of the semester with NO refund of fees.

Children MUST respect ALL SCHOOL AND CLUB EQUIPMENT. Any willful destruction of 
property will result in a child being prohibited from continuing with a club with parents liable for the
cost of damages.

On a related note, we are a team in the meeting/dismissal room #205. Of course you are expected to keep order of your club members, but if you witness ANY children, even if they are not in your club, yelling, running around, jumping on furniture or anything of the like, please use your authority to step in. Thanks!

That someone was composing this note about reprimands and authority as a destructive storm was moving in would seem to speak for itself.   Oddly, this email was not sent to me by the glaring bald headed man who strode into the noisy room where the children wait for their parents at 5:00 after 8 hours in school.  This man was clearly unhappy that kids were blowing off steam by making such a racket.  The email was probably written at his request.

We knew each other at once, with the quickest of glances, the way any random mongoose and any equally random cobra instantly know each other.  He was the most important man in the building and I was a man playing music in the corner with another adult while children shrieked,  a man who did not break off his conversation to recognize the clear fact of this imperious man’s importance.  

In my defense, I’d never seen the man before.   In his defense, guys like me…. well, there’s really no defense necessary there.   This is a fellow who makes the rules, who demands excellence, not nuanced excuses.

America builds prisons, passes laws, makes threats and wars to insure that people who do not respect our institutions are punished accordingly.   We do not reward failure.  Many believe the best president for our troubled nation is a successful businessman, not some Harvard educated lawyer who sees the endless complexity of major problems and is clever at making speeches.  The bottom line is the bottom line and the successful businessman’s Harvard law degree has nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, if children are treated with respect, and the program is designed to insure that they are engaged, and content, the likelihood that we need to threaten, reprimand or punish them is greatly reduced.

On the other hand, look around, there are many examples.   If you randomly prohibit certain drugs and impose long jail sentences for infractions, there’s a lot of money to be made by certain people along with a lot of pain for the masses of imprisoned users of the randomly prohibited drugs, not to mention victims of organized crime’s drug trade-related violence.   Nothing wrong with money, my friends, even if the war against certain drugs is an arbitrary, ridiculous, expensive and increasingly deadly failure.  

The attitude, of course:  as for people who hate our freedom, I tell you what, there’s no reason to have any mercy on their freedom-hating souls.

Still, I can’t help thinking that smart people can work together to design and implement things better than this system we have.  I understand that most smart people have other priorities, but, call me a dreamer.  There has got to be at least one better way forward than this.

Bipedalism foo

I’m going to start walking on four legs.  Screw this bipedal bull dung, if you know what I’m saying.   Tired of the upright pretense of walking on two legs.   Too much work and not much pay off, I say.  My lower back hurts more than it used to and I’m pretty sure I know why.

I look at my master, the only time he’s up on two legs is to grab my wrist with sharp claws and sink his fangs into my hand.   The rest of the time he moves and relaxes horizontally.  Way to go, I say.  And I’ve never heard him complain about his back hurting him.

“Where are you going with this?” asks one of those upstanding prigs, the kind who scrutinize with a wrinkled nose.

“Follow me if you can,” I say, putting my palms on the floor, along with my toes, and moving smartly up the staircase.

Louis Armstrong was once asked by a square what the meaning of jazz was.  “If you got to ask, Daddy, you ain’t never gonna know,” said Armstrong.

So if I go on two legs, or on four, what I’m saying is the same– and so is the song I’m humming.  Only my hands will be a little more calloused when I gesticulate, you know, since I’ve been walking on four instead of two limbs.

It’s in the delivery

It’s in the Delivery

 

Back when I had a sense of humor, this was intuitive.   A slight pause, a turn of the head, the tone of voice, a small gesture of face or hands to set off the moment right before the laugh.   There’s probably no way it can be taught, people we know are either funny or say “I suck at telling jokes.”

I was reminded of this recently watching somebody coach somebody else on how to read a line so it would be funny.   The line was OK, I thought to myself, but if you have to coach somebody on how to deliver it to make it as funny as you wrote it, maybe the line should have been written better in the first place.  This is a touchy subject and I didn’t touch it, although I got my greasy fingerprints all over it just now.   Vhoops.

But delivery doesn’t just go for jokes.  Skillful delivery is crucial in getting any message across.  People, as a rule, don’t give a rat’s ass about anything that’s not already on their mind.   We are a self-involved species.  So how a thing is delivered to us will decide whether we hear it or not.  Also how the message will make you feel to receive it.  Compare:

I don’t mean to bring you down, and a lot of people, I know, have been doggin’ you and criticizing where they should either be quiet or praising you, but I couldn’t help thinking that your last post, even though it was pretty good, I mean, I thought it was good, well…. a lot of people could say it was kind of preachy and superior.  I’m just telling you this so you won’t think these people are right, I didn’t find it very preachy and superior, only a little bit, and it really didn’t bother me that much.

and

I like your recent post.  You’re surely aware that some could be put off by what they will consider preachiness or superiority, but for my money– preach away, my brother.  As for the more priggish in the congregation, let the dead bury themselves.  In fact, I’ve got shovels in the trunk.

Then again, what the hell am I doing here, preaching to the choir?

Viral youTube video

Yesterday a friend asked me what a viral video is.  He’s from a generation before mine and grasping such things is not intuitive, as it would be for an eight year-old raised in this digital world.   I described the phenomenon, telling him about a chilling video I’d seen a week ago, along with 2.000,000 others.  Today you can click here and join the more than 10,000,000 who’ve seen this truly devastating story told by a 15 year-old who killed herself a month after making this short film, two days before someone reposted it and the tragic, engrossing short went viral.  Make sure to read the full comment below the video, at the bottom is the suicide teen’s original message of hope in a world of cyber-bullies and schoolyard monsters.

Looking at the latest clip by the animation workshop I noticed a clip called “dontwalkuponme”.  The title comes from the blustering line spoken by a trash talker immediately before he got his ass kicked.  The woman shooting the scene is a supremely annoying provocateur, with a braying voice yelling way too close to the mic.  She did a decent job with the camera, though, I have to give her that.  I sent this clip to my friend who’d asked what a viral video is,  it had been posted only 12 hours before and already had 26,000 views.  An hour later, when I refreshed the screen, I saw it had been viewed another 14,000 times.  When I looked again 6 hours later it had reached 76,000– before being online 24 hours.  You can see how many more have seen it so far by clicking here— though, do yourself a favor and turn the sound down if you watch this stupid little fight.

I was pleased to see that my session 3 animation with the kids had gone from 17 to 26 views meantime.  Of course, that doesn’t include the kids or their parents, I haven’t sent it to them yet.