Category Archives: muttering to myself

A Million Reasons for Fear

You can use infinitely elastic hypotheticals to keep yourself endlessly worried and afraid.  I’ve seen it done, and trying to argue against it is like arguing against the wind.

The things to be afraid of can be listed, the list might be long.  But the real fear is the thing to be afraid of that you didn’t put on the list, the insane thing that violates the known laws of the universe that could really put the hurt on you, did you ever stop to think of that?

No, of course you didn’t.  You think nothing can hurt you, which is the first principle of hubris.

As I told many a poor bastard I represented in Housing Court “The threat of losing your home is very scary and I know it’s hard not to worry about it.  But I’ve done this many times, your case is like many others I’ve worked on, and every one of those cases worked out well.  It’s aggravating that it’ll probably take months to resolve, but I’ll get all the time we need from the judge and, in the end, the chances are  99% in your favor that it will be fine, this will be over and you won’t have the threat of losing your home– which is what I’m here to prevent— hanging over you.  Try not to worry until I tell you there’s something to worry about, that the 1% chance of something to worry about might happen, and that day will probably never come.”

On the other hand, you could be hit by a car fifteen minutes from now and after hours lying on the street with your spinal fluid leaking out finally get picked up by an ambulance crew high on crystal meth, some insane rogue team of cannibals who sodomize you instead of taking you to the hospital and then, after urinating on you, leave you to die overnight in an abandoned industrial park where the rats will begin working on you before you’re even dead.  Did you ever think of that?  Of course not.

I rest my case.

Addiction to the Internet

A friend correctly pointed out that it’s actually an addiction to hope for a response.   In a world of sensory overload it is not easy, at times, to get even a one word text back from people who are juggling many things while balancing with one foot on a large rolling ball, with a cake balanced on their tall hat and a rake, clutched in their tail, struggling to hold the fish bowl aloft while the fish quakes in terror.

While it annoys me not to hear back from busy friends, I don’t judge or condemn them.  Fuck them, is my attitude.  Only they won’t slow down long enough.  Perpetual motion machines, sharks moving endlessly, if they ever stopped it would be bad for them.

So I tap here for two or three people who read these words and once in a while tap back a comment or flick the “like” button.  When the like button is flicked I get an automated email telling me so and so thought my post, say, Addiction to the Internet, was awesome and inviting me to their website.  Awe.  I don’t know that awe is always the feeling inspired when people click “like” but I prefer it to the silence.

One of the people who sometimes likes these posts is a witty woman who seemingly started her blahg around the same time this one went up.  She has, I think, 2,500 followers, maybe 25,000.  It could be 25,000,000 for purposes of declaring war on her.  Me and my 7 followers wouldn’t get very far attacking that horde.  Good thing we all come in peace here.

May peace be wit ch’all.

Blessed Are the Meek

And so much fun to slap the shit out of, too.

It may be because I heard the presidential debate on the radio last night, as much as I heard of it, anyway.   To me the president sounded calm, measured, had fairly intelligent answers to the vague generalities his opponent kept forcefully expressing.  It sounded to me like a mismatch, like the flailing challenger taking a slow-motion fall in a desperate attempt to be a contender.

Then I hear them talking, the pundents, and all these geniuses had watched with eagle eyes and seen what I could not imagine.  The calm, measured tones were coming from a man who apparently looked like he had no fight in him, a listless, eye contact avoiding stiff.  The stream of seemingly inane generalities coming from his opponent were delivered with a confidently thrust out chin, with an engaging half-smile that showed he, not the president, really wanted the job.  He showed he wanted it more!  And America relates to that, especially in these hard times.

Maybe that’s part of my sour mood today, the realization that Americans are more impressed with body language coaching, facial expression coaching and debate style point coaching (how to do it while the moderator dozes) than with the substance of the respective arguments.  You know what, I thought to nobody and everybody, you deserve the most wooden-headed store mannequin the cynical sales team have the termerity to foist on you and may you keep all the splinters too when he’s done having his way with you.  Of course, I deserve him too.  Let the least meek man win, I say.

Maybe it’s the iPod that seems to have been lost or, more likely, boosted, as I was working with a group of nine kids in a public school on the Lower East Side this afternoon.   On that old iPod were many tracks I recorded over  the years that exist nowhere else anymore, tracks I’d been meaning to download and copy for a long time.  Gone now, so it goes.

Maybe it’s not being careful enough what I wish for, combined with my dad’s lesson from beyond the grave.  Dad:  those feelings you had when you were two, when I used to mistreat you in that way that filled me with self-loathing as I was dying?  Those will never go away, no matter how much you come to admire Gandhi or change your outward behavior.  You see, the world’s not black and white, but it’s black enough and white enough, if you see what I’m saying.

Maybe it’s how much of our relentless and all-consuming culture I have placed myself up against in seeking to start a program where the model is community and group-work.  These kids have no model for that– none.  Here it’s competition or get your ass kicked, pussy, I’m not here to help your weak ass.  Yes, the meek shall inherit the earth, when the rest of us are through with it (as a wit once styled it to me, on a bad day when I felt even meeker than him).  Maybe the irony of trying to do this on my own, not as part of any community at all, even on-line, is finally becoming too much for me.  It certainly feels like it as I pound these keys.

And maybe it’s listening, in a moment of not thinking, to a friend urging me to upgrade the operating system on my brand-new iPad, which I’ve bought with funds desperately begged from supporters of my exciting and mostly imaginary non-profit.   I was able to download the first recording program I need, garageband, and everything seemed to be working fine.  Until there was a message to upgrade the brand new iPad to the latest version of the operating system.  

I was thinking it better to leave well enough alone, and truly there was no reason to do it, certainly not hours after I bought it and had finally got it working, but I yielded to a forceful argument and “upgraded”.  

The upgrade rendered the iPad largely inoperable, the tunes I recorded in garageband and sent to iTunes are invisible.  iTunes on the iPad, as it appears so far, is only a store to sell you things, there is no apparent way to use it as a library for music you record on the iPad and share with yourself in iTunes.  And the store will only sell you things if the user ID they force you to change for the new operating system matches up to the password you’ve reset and they can find your matching credit card information so you can use the machine.   The tech support I paid $100 for?  Only open until 9 pm, they don’t work cheap enough in Shanghai or Bangalore, I guess.  So as I struggled at 10 and 11 pm to use this obscenely expensive device I was on my own, as it should be, as it is written, as it has been ordained.  And in his grave the grim, driven, demanding, unreasonable genius of marketing Steve Jobs grins his gruesome grin, just like when he was alive.

“You’ll play in my sandbox, bitch, and don’t worry about the cat turds,” I can hear him laughing his hideous dry cackle as he sleeps the long sleep.

Good Punchline in Torture Debate

Not that I often need a diversion or digression to get me following a random string, but a friend sent me an article the other day about US government use of torture, prohibited by decree of Barack Obama in one of the first acts of his presidency.   The author opined that as president Mitt Romney was likely to rescind that decree.  There was a link to an article about SERE training (see first line of yesterday’s post for link) and the US government’s perverse relationship to the torture it rightly condemns when barbaric enemies employ it.

I sent the link to that article to my friend and we shared reactions to it.   He wrote that he was aware that as soon as the acetylene torch came out he’d tell them everything.   We seemed to agree on most points.   Then, after a long and stressful day, I got an email from him with that old chestnut, the ticking time bomb scenario.   He said use of torture was not such a clear moral issue when your loved ones were on the verge of death and the prisoner in the chair likely knew how to stop it– but wasn’t talking.  In that case, he said, there is an arguable duty to use any means necessary to save your loved ones, including the worst tortures you can think of.

I reacted with a good measure of horror, and arguments, and I slapped at the hypothetical that American advocates of torture had recently used over and over to justify the torture of many innocent men, people they called “detainees” and kept in secret “black sites” or on an American military base in Cuba that they lawyered up to claim was not, therefore, subject to U.S. and International laws.  

This torture in my name, although the torture was legally redefined in a secret internal memo and defended as merely “enhanced interrogation”, and marketed as necessary to protect us from terrorists who’d planted countless ticking time bombs, has been one of the most galling aspects of the rise of the “neo-Con” partisan in American politics.  That most of the people tortured, these “worst of the worst”, had later been released as innocent is another fact that makes me wanna holler.

My friend, a skilled lawyer, hit back on each of my points, then made this point, toward the end of his gamely fighting email:

Me: Your conclusion would seem to be that if there’s a time bomb ticking, or if you believe strongly enough that there is, everyone should probably be tortured, just in case one of them knows something you would come to regret not torturing them to find out.

Him: There you go again. Screw the fucking time bomb. Why not just torture everyone and get it the fuck over with. There, I said it. Somebody had to.

I’d thought he was at least half (if not 90%) joking, so I’d ended my previous with this:

But I think you may be pulling my shackled leg in a stress position while pouring ice water on me as my balls are given a mild shock from a car battery.

 Him:  Wait your turn.

When I wrote back, my will and spirit finally broken, I told him: You win, torture away.

Him:  I am, my friend, I am.

PTSD

I read this in an excellent article by a graduate of the SERE program, the Cold War-inspired torture institute set up to try to train American servicemen to resist inhumanly brutal interrogation and brainwashing techniques (SERE later formed the blueprint for the “enhanced interrogation” –tortures — Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington were so enthusiastic about):

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disease characterized by, among other things, an addiction to the reliving of powerful memories, memories that habitually traumatize and re-traumatize the mind until, in the worst cases, it becomes impossible to live without the chemical rush the memories provide.

This reminded me of the study a brilliant, and disturbed, classmate of mine in Law School told me about.  Scientists studied the brains of people who had been abused as children and found there were significant physical changes in the brains of these people, now adults.  Being traumatized and re-traumatized, living in a hostile environment where you are powerless, frequently punished for infractions of brutal, arbitrary, impossible to know rules, changes your brain, literally.

I’m not putting this all together for you correctly now, and I must toddle off to sleep, have to be up early to attend a workshop about getting blood from corporate stones.  I’ll reorganize it better tomorrow evening.  But for now, when I wonder about my own debilitating moods, the odd actions of people I’ve known for years, self-destructive or strangely gruff behavior, and grimness, this traumatizing and re-traumatizing gives me an insight, or the glimmer of one.

Stay tuned.

The Illusion of A World

What draws the helpless addict to the internet?  The illusion of a world, input, output, putt putt, the illusion of an interactive world community.  Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the world we perceive with our senses as Maya, the veil this hectic universe of noise, show and desire wears.  So the internet is a play within a play, carried out on the vast virtual stage of liquid cyberspace.   Every kid’s dreams can sail on that sea, take a step back, all the dreams together are less than the breath of a single ant.

“You are addicted to the internet,” says Sekhnet, not without some justification.   I look around at the available options and come running back here, where there is no demand on me but to focus my thoughts, if I like.   And to dial back my expectation of anyone actually giving a rat’s tutu.

In the real world you’d be well-advised to stay busy, bub.   That’s all I’m saying.  There’s a reason many people are workaholics, looking your own life in the face can be terrifying.   Could lead you to question things you’re better off not questioning, dwelling on things better left alone.  Such dwelling could lead to self-revelations that will cause major tremors in your life, could shake the whole structure of it to pieces.  Stay busy, my friends, that’s my advice.

“That’s not your advice,” a voice knowing better says.

My advice is don’t ask me for advice, is what I say.   My advice is to look at your fears and figure out something productive to do about them.  Which is very easy for me to say, wrestling with the lethargic anaconda of my own terrors.  If you’re getting your ass kicked, find a way to get out of the room, that’s all I’m saying.  Which is easy for me to say, no active monsters in my life at the moment, except for the fear of a difficult dream I’m trying to make real turning out to be another illusion, another dead end. 

I suppose anyone in a tough spot can rationalize their situation in a similar way: this difficult waking dream, OK,  this nightmare, can be turned around by a miracle.  Miracles happen every day.  The bad guy gets hit by lightning, the pure soul wins the lottery.  OK, if not by a miracle, by changing my view of it– making this alchemy part of my daily spiritual practice, let me say.  If I can change the way I view the battle I’m locked in I can turn it to my advantage, somehow, it becomes spiritual work, to accommodate myself to a merciless world of suffering and stop thinking about better and worse, stop heaping puny human value judgments on a situation that is not susceptible to such things.  And, anyway, is it not entirely possible that a bit of unexpected mercy will come my way, I’m not a bad person, there’s nothing bad about staying in a tough spot and …. what am I nattering about?

I can’t shake the damnable expectation that I am not the only one who gives a rat’s ass about any of this.

Bullying

In answer to the unasked question, I don’t know the answer.  If you consent to be bullied, participate in the cruel and grotesque dance of it, what advice can compel as much as the terrifying, all-consuming tango of that?

There are many situations where we are powerless, or virtually so.   In other situations, though the choice may appear very scary, there are life-affirming choices within our power to select.

Easier said than done, I suppose.

It’s me, I think

I woke up in a room piled high with clothes on one side, random unused items carpeting the floor, a cracked wall and peeling ceiling, a Sony Trinitron and VCR un-used for perhaps a decade.  The clothes I’d put in a black contractor bag after the fire in the apartment downstairs were still there, in front of the blankets piled haphazardly on the trunk of drawing books.  My beloved Oinsketta had been alive during the fire, I rushed her and her tiny lungs out into the street.  It was probably a year before September 11th became a day of infamy.

“That bag of toxic, smoky clothes has been there for more than ten years,” a voice said indignantly.  And it’s true.

I woke up realizing it’s probably me, not the other maniacs I know, who is closest to being a kind of crazy.  Everyone I know carries their collected wounds, scars and disabilities, but not everyone does it so stylishly.

Exploring My Disdain for Driving Ambition

I should be clearing off my desk, or at least picking some things off the floor here, but it’s my time to do a bit of musing and tapping and that’s important to me too.  I was propelled out of bed last night by a swarm of mostly faceless anxieties and wrote about the unluckiness of this propensity of mine to sometimes brood, to helplessly watch my mood flip from strong to weak.  It is the other side of my luck in knowing what drives me, the same forces have made me particularly vulnerable to certain fears, even as I’m less susceptible to other fears that seem to drive many people.

It reminds me of a friend, raised by a mother who was generous with slaps in the face but not with love and support, who had a moment of terror at work when something he was responsible for began to go wrong.  His colleague, who had not been slapped but told “don’t worry, you didn’t make the world. You’re a smart boy, let’s figure out how you get out of this” didn’t worry, realized he didn’t make the traffic jam that was delaying things, knew he was smart and confident.  He calmly picked up the phone and suggested a simple fix that saved the day.  My friend’s intestines took a while to unknot, but the lesson was palpable, unforgettable.  I’ve told the story many times over the years.  It’s the perfect illustration of how the way we are raised either gives us a foundation for problem-solving or leaves us at the mercy of a sometimes merciless world.  

So, the way my father never saw love in the home he grew up in, confessed at the end his complete inability to express affection, since he’d had no model for it, I never saw mature problem solving or calm, methodical analysis of how to fix anything demonstrated in the home I grew up in.  I saw frustration, helplessness, rage and fear disguised in various crude get-ups.   It’s a deficit I must deal with, invent ways to solve problems, overcome moods, the way my father had to invent ways to show affection, no matter how stunted they may have seemed.

Back to the ambitious business person and my disdain for the type.   I think the biggest piece that irks me is the prioritizing of monetary success over everything else, the mercantilizing of human relationships– who doth it profit me to cultivate and who doth it not?   And this dehumanizing calculation, reducing each human to a net profit or net loss, is performed with the abacus in one hand and keen business acumen in the other.  Is this person good for my business’s bottom line or a drag on it?  Such is the thought process of the truly ambitious businessman.  There are not enough hours in the day to be successful and to daydream or shilly shally.  

Time is money.  It is the mantra of a materialistic society, it is a drumbeat that never sleeps.  There are slaves to pound the drums constantly and the successful love the sound of this beat.  It reminds them that in the competition that is life they are winners, while the guys banging the drums, well, they are not quite such big winners, though at least they’re not outright losers.  OK, maybe they are.

I think of the richest of the rich, people who have reaped enormous wealth from their corporations, wealth they couldn’t spend in a dozen luxurious lifetimes, and how hard they fight to hold on to several more tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, in tax reductions every year.  It’s envy, punishment of success and class warfare to suggest that investment income be taxed like the wages of the slaves who bang the drums for free enterprise.  Never mind that we are fighting fantastically expensive decades-long wars and dealing with desperate poverty here.  Can you say Ayn Rand?

Our nation is founded on the idea that unlimited wealth is the right of every person who can fight for and obtain it.  That few ever will attain the American Dream, well, that’s another discussion.  Yes, slavery was wrong, but at the time it was necessary.   OK, corporations aren’t really people, but we treat them as people so we can make certain laws and have the kind of government we need to help the richest among us while not letting the poor starve to death.  Or, if they do starve to death, to absolve us of moral responsibility for people who do not strive and instead choose to feel sorry for themselves because they are losers instead of winners.

I realize I am conflating some things here, oversimplifying things too.  But this is at the root of my disdain for people who put their own monetary profit above all else. They have no time to discuss anything else, it’s a waste of time, which is also a waste of money.  End of conversation.  You only want to talk about it because you are a loser, they will say, if they feel like being polite about it.  If you were successful and had the right values, they could add, you wouldn’t be attacking my right to have a hundred times more than I need while children a mile away are eating paint chips and shooing away rats.

But my heart has always bled this way.  You know, it just seems to me — and to song writers and the creators of that “priceless” ad campaign — that the most important things in life can’t be bought.  They may even agree that 45,000 people dying preventable deaths every year in the richest country in the world, for lack of affordable health insurance, is obscene, and a price too high for unregulated free enterprise.  Or that having to file personal bankruptcy because a family member has had cancer or some other catastrophic illness is the creation of a perversely immoral culture.

If you have gold plated health insurance you might say: why don’t these “poor” people just reach into their trust funds and buy decent health insurance, Biffy?

I’m sure there are driven business people who are very concerned with the poor.  I know of more than one billionaire whose foundation helps millions of poor people the world over.  But, if you will excuse me, I have a business plan to write, and spreadsheets to spread out (once I clear off this desk), and I can’t waste any more time/money pontificating here.  Is that clear?