Category Archives: personal

from Chapter 45

My Samsung phone has a quirky habit of intermittently making “stories” out of a succession of photographs. These little slide shows are accompanied by cheesy music, feature random fades, wipes and other effects and are punctuated by enthusiastic pastel graphics with cute expressions that might really delight an eight year-old Korean girl.  Sometimes these stories are wildly inappropriate.  A group of photographs of bloody toilet bowls and urinals, when I was tracking how often I peed blood, and how long each spell took to pass, comes to mind.  Set to a peppy little pop tune with a particularly inane melody, and mischievous winking emojis, it was a classic of its kind. I got a real kick out of the hematuria story.

There are a number of stories with photographs of three people, our heads close together, smiling, playfully holding each other‘s chins, poking each other in the cheek, putting devil horns behind each other’s heads and so on. The three smiles are very genuine, sometimes the heads are caught in the moment one or all are laughing.   They’re set against a number of backdrops.  A beautiful snowy forest, with the three dressed in full winter gear, with hats and scarves and pink cheeks and noses. A summerscape with glittering water in the background, me wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the other two in T-shirts. There are nighttime shots with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us, one with a slightly pissed off camel looking over our shoulders . . .

. . . I saw a few of these Samsung photo stories lately, after I switched to a new 5G phone in a vain effort to restore phone and internet service in my suddenly dead zone apartment. One after another, three happy faces, sometimes pushed against each other, best friends forever.

The idea that this easy, loving friendship could ever not be was unthinkable to all of us, never occurred to any of us, until our first outbreak of conflict and the incredibly painful aftermath.  Now the unthinkable has become the new normal.  Not only are we no longer friends, but I am, to everyone we knew in common, a walking cadaver, stinking, grotesque and scary.  I am approachable on pain of death, as they have made clear to everyone else.   The stories they’ve created and told about me would put the Samsung story bot to shame!

It strikes me now, trying to show our specific friendship, rather than sketch it generically, how difficult it is to describe something so natural, flowing and seemingly right.  It’s as hard as trying to capture my affable, intelligent, witty father’s monstrousness — there was no single snapshot that could illustrate it, no broken bones necessitating a trip to a midnight ER or anything like that.  So it is with my once dearest lifelong friends and their extended social and family circle.  

All I can provide is the Samsung story version of something that seemed so vital, precious and eternal, but which turned out to be as brittle as the thin crust of ice toward the middle of the frozen pond that laughing children are about to drown in.  The best I can do now, looking back with a bitter understanding I never wanted, is make my warning to the other children as clear and memorable as I can.

Birthday shout out to a coward

Today is the sixty-seventh birthday of my longtime close friend, many considered us best friends, which was fair enough.   After his wife flew into a rage at me during a tense vacation, he dragged her in to apologize to me.  This humiliated her, even though I accepted her crabbed apology, gave her the hug she asked for and kissed her.  She doubled down on her right to be inconsiderate with a well-placed bit of thoughtlessness the next day, and I reacted with a few seconds of anger I quickly apologized to everyone for.  

The aftermath was a long, torturous year-long impasse, a deliberation over whether I could ever be forgiven for the brutal way I’d used the “f-word”, long stretches of silence from them, a few breaks for angry meetings.  Attempts to repair our long friendship finally ended with his wife convincing all of our mutual friends, and their own children, that I was unloving and unforgiving, and no doubt worse things.  

To my shock, every one of them seemed to unquestioningly accept her creative account of our estrangement and her assassination of my character, or at least keep their distance.  As for their children, I’m sure the practical matter of their parents’ demand for loyalty, their mother’s unrestricted emotional prerogatives and their inheritance also play a role in their silence.

I knew nothing about this campaign of distortion, sensed nothing amiss with any of my other old friends, until a warm, dear friend of fifty years called, upset with me. She angrily lectured me about being unloving and unforgiving, deliberately torturing dear lifelong friends who only wanted my love and forgiveness.

I called my friend, the birthday boy, told him he had to correct these lies.  He had studied, and taken very seriously, treatises by a Jewish scholar on the harm of “the evil tongue” false gossip that destroys somebody’s good name.  He immediately promised to make things right.  

He called me an hour later to tell me he’d talked to everyone I’d asked him to call (there were two couples I’d mentioned) and taken care of my concerns.  He may have talked to them, but he corrected none of his wife’s defamatory claims.  His truthfulness was no longer something I could count on.

Months later I’d wind up ostracized by a large group of our mutual friends, all claiming to take no side, all professing equal love for everyone, all making it very clear that it was impossible to forgive somebody who can’t forgive.  Forgive for what?  I asked, but this feigned ignorance just proved what a liar I am, for I clearly knew good and goddamned well what I was childishly refusing to forgive.

This is my happy birthday to that sorry fucking worm. An enraged two year-old, still, at the ripe old age of 67. Many more, old boy.

Don’t get me wrong

Please don’t misunderstand.   I try my best to live by my understanding of Ahimsa, non-harm.    I wish more people did this.   I do my best to remain mild and to pause, and think, before I react.   I try to listen and help when I can.  When I can’t help, I try not to hurt.

But I come from, and live in, a toxicly competitive society.  My father was, in his own humble way, a monster.  He conformed to a monstrous system trying to gain the respect and dignity it was impossible for someone with his tragic history of trauma to find on his own.  I had my share of hard knocks, as most of us do.  I dropped as far out of this sickening competition for everything as I dared to.   So, the rage is definitely baked in there, baby, though I live my life mindful of keeping my temper under control and directing it where it actually belongs.  (Computers, phones, robots and any other AI-type corporate technology that fucks me notwithstanding).

Meaning, I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but I am capable of the same violence everyone else is.

Those who love me, people I’ve known for years, get a bit more of my benefit of the doubt than strangers.   But, if you keep doing the same hurtful thing, and when I ask for mercy you try to make it my problem, eventually, I will, figuratively, break your fucking face for you.   

A few kicks in the balls over the course of many years can be an accident, unless an inviolable pattern emerges.  Instead of an apology, every time I double over you express disgust that I keep making such an issue of your completely unintentional mistake?  

Nah, now I have to make your big nose bleed and you can go cry a river to someone who cares.

Then, back to Ahimsa for me.  

A little vacation time for me

I needed to get away to my fortress of solitude, it’s been too long.  The 3D multidirectional stress I am under is exhausting, to me and to poor Seedj.  We both need some time apart once in a while, and we’ve been getting in each other’s way the last few days.

I’ve plunged into a new round of working on the manuscript, producing many pages, with an eye toward an important insight:  every member of the intimate lynch mob must be as sympathetic, fully human, even lovable, as I can make them.   Writing it this way is crucial to the story making sense and for the lessons I hope the story will succeed in conveying.   

It is a cautionary tale intended as a wakeup call to anyone who finds herself (or himself, you priggish pussy) in painful conflict with those who can never be wrong and will kill you to prove it. 

I have to make it clear to the reader that not one of these torch, pitchfork, gun and rope brandishing motherfuckers are at all abnormal, mean, crazy, violent, dumb or irrational.   It’s just that when people act like a clan, all questions stop.  The deepest comfort of being in a loving group is that everyone agrees about what needs to be done.  They all take the same moral stand, for better or worse.

I compare writing it this way to sitting in a comfortable recliner, with a cool drink, wrestling with a medium sized, hungry constrictor.  You certainly have to watch the head, and you need to untangle it when it grabs you a certain way.   It’s exhausting, but also motivating, although mainly fucking exhausting.  

Of course, then I have to read the fresh poop to poor Seedj, since she’s the only one there.   She’s about ready to break, and I don’t blame her a bit, how many times can she expect to be treated to every queasy detail of this horror story loop?   One or two new insights, no matter how they may momentarily excite me, does little to freshen any of this stinking material.  So I came here, to my longtime bachelor pad, to spend a few days by myself.

Still no phone or internet service here, 34 days and counting, in spite of my complaint to the FCC.  Whoops.   Talk about yer fortress of solitude.   Have to go down two flights of stairs and walk about fifty feet up the street to make a phone call or send a text or email.  A drag. I’ll have to go to my local library, or coffee shop, to post this.   It’s a bit creepy, and disorienting, to be in an electronic dead zone in your own home.

I’ve had $250 of non-service comped by the nice people who work for the lobbyist-rich tech psychopath that has stopped providing a network connection to my building and its immediate environs.   Nice.   Every time I need to be in contact, I simply limp down two flights and walk down the block.  When it’s 93 degrees, which it will be tomorrow, or raining, which it will be the next day.

So I finally get back to my brokedown palace, and  — just to give this story a nice kind of punchline — the ceiling over my bed has collapsed, a twenty-five pound slab of concrete and layers of plaster, and a mass of dusty shrapnel, on the floor.  Revealed in the ceiling above, the dirty wood lathe, nailed up there over 100 years ago.  It will be a job to fix it.   Thankfully, I’ve taken to moving my bed out of the way when I leave here, in consideration of the deeply cracked ceiling above it.

Luckily the slab didn’t land near the head of my bed, while I was in it.  That heavy chunk of ceiling would have killed me with a direct hit — and, now that I think of it, I couldn’t have called anyone if I’d managed to regain consciousness.   Not without crawling down two flights and about fifty feet up the block.  Hmmm, that would have been a long, slow death…  

(What kind of wrongful death case would Seedj have?   Not a very generous one, I’m afraid, calculated on the corpse’s projected life expectancy and earnings.   But she wouldn’t bring the case to start with, thankfully.   Remember those 9/11 widows of young financial executives, so pissed off at the paltry sums they felt they were being paid for their dead husbands lives?)

It’s actually hilarious, in a ten plagues kind of way, the only nearby benches where I can sit comfortably, check the internet and talk on the phone, without having to walk up to the park a few long blocks away, is in front of a lush fringe of vegetation fronting the old Dyckman House.  It’s a museum, the Dyckmans had some slaves, they were rich.  A main thoroughfare is named after them.  And the greenery in front of their onetime home is, I learned last night, a paradise for mosquitos.

These thirsty bitches drank from my forearm, I saw the welts, like track marks, and went home, managing not to scratch (as Seedj teaches) doused them with ammonia and avoided the worst of the itching.  I was not so lucky with the bite on my right tit, just above the nipple, which I didn’t discover until I was in bed trying to sleep.

In addition to the mosquitos there are the rats, largely unseen in the bushes above the benches.  The screams and squeaks of these agitated rats vying for something or other in the plants right over your head are annoying.  Rats are pretty determined to avoid humans, and they’re smart in that determination, so you don’t have to worry much about them.  It’s more the idea that rats are screeching right by your ears that is a little creepy.

Fucking hell, the levels of this fucking infinitely swampy world, rotting layers deep, like the corpse lasagne a clannish mob made of my mother’s family in the ravine northwest of Vishnevitz one airless August 1943 night.  The ability of groups of likeminded souls is sometimes atrocious.  

Then again, each member of that long ago mob of drunken Ukrainians, and their German overseers, has a personal story that makes him or her fully human, kind, unique, even lovable.  

That right there, boys and girls, is the murderous tragedy of human history.

from Chapter 39

Fifteen weeks later this dawned on me one day, the point of this chapter:


My actual terror is not of incoherence itself, but of implacably angry incoherence in the service of a tyrannical will. It is the forced imposition of a counter-factual reality represented by incoherence that terrifies me, because there is no discussion, persuasion or compromise possible with incoherence. The really fearsome thing is the angry will demanding unquestioning adherence to a narrative that makes no sense. The incoherence is the handmaiden of a willful tyrant’s eternally demanding will.

If the clear truth of something you need is inconvenient, like the indisputable fact that we all need to be listened to and heard by loved ones when we are in pain, simply say “NO! You will not be heard, whiner. Being heard is for closers, like coffee, you fucking fuck, like your smelly mother, who had much more pain than you ever will, and managed to whine much less. You’re a hostile, childish asshole, jackass, and wipe that sullen look off your face, you’re the one with a problem hearing the goddamned truth, pant-load.”


The point is, just say anything, it matters not what, to keep the mood going and your will dominating. Your inflamed will is not persuadable, your mind is clenched, you will say anything, contradict yourself over and over. It doesn’t matter at all what you actually say, the point is to just keep angrily denying and attacking, whether it makes sense or not. Keep the other person on the defensive, by any means necessary. Incoherence means never having to actually account for anything you do. That’s the key: do not concede accountability for anything, admit nothing.


My deepest terror, it turns out, is the insane, demanding will, and the readiness to do anything in its service, that made Adolf Hitler a household name. The incoherence is just the infernal music they play while bending others to that will. The genius of it is that you cannot argue against incoherence.


Set and match, bitches!

Turning a therapeutic corner

Comedy, it has been said, is tragedy plus time, giving rise to Gilbert Gottfried’s immortal “too soon?” as he embarked on a tasteless, but hilarious joke, shortly after the 9/11 atrocity. I don’t necessarily see the profundity of that observation about comedy (is it inevitably a riff on tragedy?), but there is something undeniably helpful about the passage of time to aid in the old perspective. Without some temporal distance from something that gives you pain, it feels impossible, while smarting, that you will ever begin to heal from the wound.

Then, as I have noticed as weeks passed, whenever things were the worst for me, with enough time passed you start to emerge from the wreckage. You can see things better once the smoke, and dust, and poisonous gas have settled, it has rained a few times, clearing the air a bit, once you’ve thought about and talked through things with smart people you trust. The pain begins to diminish, to fade into the past. It seems to me that gaining clarity about the cause of your pain, and having a good sounding board or two, are immensely helpful in this healing process, but I think it happens naturally, to some extent, with the simple passing of enough time. This is particularly true in the case of loss.

It is unthinkable, while the wound is fresh, that you will ever not be in agony, ever find the emotional distance you need to calmly understand what you need to do to heal. Once healing starts, baby, you’re on your way to greater understanding of life in general. You learn that there are some hellish things you just can’t fix. Life goes on. You will be fine.

Two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures

(from Chapter 36 of The Intimate Lynch Mob)

There are two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures available to us, open or closed, predisposed toward healing or harming. We can behave with openness and vulnerability or protecting ourselves, projecting strength and a determination to never be hurt. We have a reflex toward healing, ourselves and those we care about, or protecting ourselves at all costs, even if it means harming others.

We can listen with patience, and react honestly, or close ourselves off, secretive, foreclosing dialogue and remaining protected, even if it means being dishonest and causing damage to others. To the latter type, the reflex to dishonesty is no vice because the stakes are your precious heart and soul, the essence of every sentient creature’s being.

To those oriented toward repelling threat, every bit of energy will be directed toward self-protection. Vulnerability is seen as weakness, contemptibly pathetic and even suicidal in an infinitely dangerous high stakes contest for dignity where only the strongest prevail.

To me, and pussies like me, the only prize truly worth having is someone you love feeling safe enough to make themselves vulnerable, because they know that the first instinct of your love will always be to protect them.

Then again, consider the source. This is coming from the insane bastard who sadistically tortured his best friend for over a year and refused to forgive him for some unspecified imaginary crime, so take it with a few grains of salt, eh?