Category Archives: personal

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?

Insecurity on steroids

The thing with someone who can never acknowledge they were wrong, or behaved hurtfully, is that it comes from a terrible insecurity. We all have insecurities, it is part of the human condition to wonder and compare yourself to an ideal you have of how you should be able to act in the world. People who can’t be wrong live in a different world than the rest of us fallible earthlings.

If you admit you’ve hurt somebody, it makes you a bad person, in their crabbed, black and white worldview. People who hurt others are bad, they need to be perfect, so it is impossible that they could have hurt someone without a very good reason. That reason is always the same: “that person who claims I hurt them, that liar, actually hurt me, really, really badly. I am the victim, not them! How dare that morbidly oversensitive defective attack my perfection, and expect me not to react!”

“I was only reacting, like any normal person would, reflexes got the best of me. You made me shoot you in the gut, because I was rightfully afraid you were going to attack me. You didn’t see that terrifying look on your face, I had to stand my ground. Everyone has a right to self-defense, that’s all I was doing when I shot you a few more times just to make sure you couldn’t get up and beat the living crap out of me, pistol whip me with my own gun. Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were thinking as you were lying there, fake bleeding!”

In my personal life I’ve recently experienced this insecurity on steroids, in my face so constantly I had to grapple with the underlying principle of how these emotionally driven motherfuckers truly believe they are acting righteously. Coming from a loved one, someone you’ve long trusted, it really fucks with your mind. A person who is sometimes wrong, who apologizes from time to time, cannot understand that for someone with crippling insecurity these simple human acts are impossible. The logic is not hard to understand, once you grasp the basic principle.

I am so insecure that any criticism or complaint against me is a deadly attack. I cannot be wrong, because everyone loves and respects me. I am an exemplary person. I will not be attacked by people with mental problems. You are insane if you don’t understand that you are wrong and I am right, no matter what.

You can’t reason with these good folks, they are beyond the reach of introspection, empathy or the ability to see nuance or take responsibility for the harm we all sometimes do to others. All they see is deadly threat, competition to the death and victory. Once you realize this about them, how paralyzed they are by insecurity and anger (which hardens immediately into implacable rage) during even the most minor conflict, the only thing you can do to preserve your integrity (and what’s left of your sanity) is follow the advice of the second best fortune cookie I ever opened:

The best throw of the dice is to throw them away.

The subtle details of long-term damage

I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.

Priceless memories of old friends

When, after a painful conflict with two lifelong friends, you behave with patience, kindness and maturity and an entire group of old friends unanimously condemns you for childishness and cruelty —

Priceless!

On the downside, when one of these hanging jurors is suddenly diagnosed with end stage cancer, and another is battling a serious degenerative disease, and neither one will speak with you unless you confess your unforgivable, unforgiving childish rage and acknowledge the unspeakable harm you’ve done to everybody, well, there’s a price to that, for everyone involved.

I used to make these two ailing friends laugh often. We spent many a wonderful weekend with them and all I ever felt from them was love and warmth. They now need all the love and support they can get, as we all would in their situation.

Except that I am suddenly their enemy to the death because two mutual friends who can never be wrong, terrified about their humiliating imperfect/damaged/dark sides ever being revealed, struck first and struck hard. With only a few sincerely imparted poisonous lies they convinced an entire righteous group of old mutual friends that I am a destructive monster who can neither love nor forgive.

Evil, we learn, often presents itself as righteousness. The most aggressive attackers always present themselves as the most unfairly persecuted victims. Which, itself, is also:

fucking priceless!

My father was a sometimes charming monster

He was not alone in this category of monster. Some of the most destructive monsters of all time were good looking, funny, smart and engaging. While you were admiring them they were not monstrous at all. They were wonderful, lovely, cool, special, easy to be around, fun.

Once they show you their monstrous side they are obliged to kill you. It is humiliating for them, the possibility they could be revealed as monsters. Better to take no chances, kill all the witnesses, kill them, kill anybody who tries to help a witness!