Category Archives: personal

Childhood Memory (flashback to 1963 or 1964)

My mother, seeking to protect her sensitive, fearful oldest child, urged me not to see the movie scheduled for the hotel ballroom that evening, “Let My People Go”.   I knew nothing about the film, except that all the teenagers at the convention would be seeing it.  I was seven or eight, and curious, and I wanted to see the movie, which was the only thing to do that evening anyway.

“You’re too young to see these things,” my mother told me tensely, “when you had nightmares about Tarzan I could show you pictures of the actors, assure you it wasn’t real.”   Which was true, she’d gone to the library and found books that proved her case.  After her photographic proof that the actors who played the savage cannibals wore regular clothes, drove cars, laughed, played with their own kids, spoke English, the nightmares in which my mother, like Jane, was struck down by a cannibal’s hurled spear, stopped.  

That strategy had also worked a few years earlier when terror of another flood like in the time of Noah, vividly depicted by a children’s book illustrator with an Italian name my mother always recited in connection with this story — ah!  Tony Palazzo!– kept me awake at night.   She drove me past rows of houses on the beach and my fear succumbed to Reason.  

“But these things in the movie really happened, and not that long ago, and they were horrible, and I don’t think you’re ready to see them.”   And she was right, but having been told many times by my childish, blustering father that I was not too young to start acting like a man, goddamn it, I was determined to see the move come hell, high-water or spear throwing cannibals.

The movie started innocuously enough, woodcuts and old paintings, mosaics, pictures of ruins, a narrator detailing the ‘lachrymose history’, as I’d later come to know it, of the tireless persecution of the Jews.  There were the pyramids, built by Hebrew slaves, a familiar story to me, nothing shocking there.  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, not a trauma to me, I thought smugly to myself.  The subsequent exile, I was young to grasp how traumatic this might have been.  The Romans destroyed the rebuilt temple, OK, that’s a shame, but I didn’t like going to temple anyway.  

The movie was clearly building to something, I was not too young to miss the terrible foreshadowing as the persecution and exile of ancient times became a steadily heavier drumbeat.  Now some crude depictions of Jews put to the sword during the rise of warlike Islam, pretty bad, but just drawings.  In Christian Europe, meanwhile, the Dark Ages had descended, harsh, brutal lives lived under the pall of monkish ignorance and superstition, and the Jews to blame.  By the Middle Ages the Jews were entrenched in collective Christian consciousness as the crucifiers of Jesus Christ, the son of God and the Christian Messiah.   That we were blamed for killing the Messiah came as a shock to me, I’d always thought the Messiah hadn’t come to earth yet, that once the Messiah arrived the hearts of children would be returned to their parents, forgiveness would be universal and there would be no further violence or cruelty, no death.

The torturers and hooded Klansmen of the Spanish Inquisition stood out to me, the auto de fe, trial by being burned to death, was truly horrible.  Things quickly escalated from there, pogroms, the music got more tense, and soon there were some black and white photographs.  In Russia, blood libels against Jews, claims that Jewish monsters killed Christian children to make matzoh on Passover.  This made no sense to me, even an idiot knew that matzoh was basically flour and water, where did the dead Christian child come into it?  A photograph of a grim French military man, falsely accused of treason against France and executed, though everyone in France, and everywhere else, knew he’d been set up because he was Jewish.  Theodore Herzl’s photograph, with that beard practically begging to be carved in marble, the dream of a Jewish State and now the filmmakers kicked into high gear.  This is what they’d been building up to.

Centuries of persecution of a small, decent people, driven from their homeland, vilified and hated everywhere they settled, expelled from Spain and every place else, murdered with impunity– there was only one solution: a return to our homeland.  This would not be without struggle, in part because those on the land that would be our homeland considered it their homeland, not ours.  Deals were made, land bought, proposals made, unmade, snags hit, navigated, more snags.  Nobody, it was clear by now, was in any hurry to help the Jews.  

Meanwhile, more killing of Jews in Europe, persecutions in the Arab lands.   Suddenly, oh boy, there’s a familiar Jew hater– Adolf Hitler.  I had a feeling he’d show up in this shit show.  There he is, dancing a mad jig after the fall of Poland.  Turns out this ‘jig’ was the creation of Allied propagandists using a technique I myself would use decades later, repeating a sequence of frames over and over and speeding them up to achieve a desired effect.  These propagandists took a one second sequence of Hitler laughing and stamping his jackbooted foot and repeated it enough times to create a convincingly mad, cackling dance.  I knew nothing about this trickery, an insignificant detail in context, as I watched in rising horror.  

The violins on the soundtrack began weeping more emphatically.  Then, as I looked around me at crying teen-aged faces in heavy cigarette smoke, there was the footage, shot by the Nazis themselves, of exactly what my mother had cried to try to stop me from seeing.  A terrified boy my age with his hands up, savage beatings, Jewish corpses lying on the sidewalk.  This was terrifying imagery.  Then there was the guy with the wheelbarrow, on grainy black and white film, moving resolutely forward.  The giant wheelbarrow was filled with jiggly, rubber looking skeletons.  He was wearing a cap and smoking a cigarette.  He came to the edge of a huge pit, upended the wheel barrow and dropped the corpses down a chute.  They wriggled down the ramp, landed on top of hundreds more naked dead skeletons.  

I ran up the aisle through the crying audience, got to the elevator, to the room, saw my little sister’s shocked face as I burst into the room and, a second later, projectile vomited.  My mother hugged me, crying, and said “I told you….”

Get Away from the Screen

Excellent advice, read after my timer went off, 48 minutes of cleaning picked at, when I popped back on to the screen.  

Do you see any significant clearing in the tangled undergrowth of your desk, your kitchen table, your chair?   That tangle on the floor next to and behind the chair?  The precarious pile of boxes, paper, musical instruments and effects balanced next to the chair?    

Another 48 minutes for the timer, your back into it this time, instead of looking hopefully at the screen for something that will distract the mind.  There is a rich universe of things here for distracting the mind, although rich is probably the wrong word for the kaleidoscope up here on the screen.

Very well, 48 more, let’s go.

Tenterhooks

I don’t know what they are, exactly, but goddamn them.  Time running out, whipsawed between waiting for a promised immediate definitive call back from a well-meaning woman at the credit card company with slightly insufficient attention to detail and a long trip by subway, bus and foot to allay, to the extent I can, the stress of someone I’ve stressed out by my own slightly insufficient attention to detail lately.

Seeking to reduce her stress, I am on tenterhooks, real or imagined, since I need to leave and was just promised that if I stay I’ll get an immediate call back with a definitive answer I don’t absolutely need until around 9 Central Time (it’s 4:14 Central Time now).  

Time to use my imagination to cast the tie-breaker against reality, whatever that may be.  Here we go:  I can imagine myself on the subway, standing now, since it’s rush hour, listening to a podcast, not minding a bit.  I can imagine finding a vexingly lost item where I hope it is when I get back to the farm, having time to make a surprise dinner for my stressed out, exhausted partner who will be particularly happy to see me if my vexing stories turn out to have happy endings.  

And if not, misery, as they say, loves company.   Y’allah, let’s get the show on the road! 

We complement each other

Sekhnet’s one-time friend, a likable quack she came to refer to as a ‘caboose’ because of the drag he exerted on the rest of the train, once did astrological charts for her.  He did not live by the stars, but had a lifelong interest in them and a fond belief that they held deep secrets for the mortals rushing about below.  He did two charts for her; one for her and one for me, her, then, new love.

Each chart was arranged in a circle, like a clock face, or a pie.   Sekhnet’s  pie was almost completely eaten on one side, solid pie on the other.  My chart was the mirror image, wherever she had pie, my tin was empty, where mine was empty, her’s was full.  

“These charts show two complementary souls,”  he reported happily, “look at how you complete each other!  This is the strongest bond you can have with another person.”  She was happy to believe this and I smiled to see her so happy.  Our bond is, indeed, very strong.

We are, in some fundamental way, like complementary angles, you dig, or properly aligned magnets, or any number of analogues from the world of science.   Adding our strengths and weaknesses together forms one very strong, complete composite person, though that person may be a slightly mad one.   I have noticed many things that seem to prove this complementary thesis.

Deadlines, for example, which famously trouble people, in part because of their sweaty similarity to death.  Sekhnet and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on these.   Though we both complete absolute necessities by the deadline, our approaches are completely different.  

I give myself an arbitrary deadline, say 3:00, which, as I  glance at the clock now, I see is rapidly coming up.  OK, I have thirty minutes and then I must make those calls I’ve been putting off for two, or three, or six weeks.  At 2:55 I realize it will be impossible to make those calls by 3:00 and I will generously extend the deadline to a more comfortable 3:30.  I feel merciful having done this, and continue whatever else I was doing until… oh, crap, 3:29.  

Would 4:00 work better for you?  I ask myself.  Oh, yes, I answer, relieved, and then we both smile and: 4:00 it is!  In the end I put it on the list for tomorrow, with only the smallest pang of regret.   This is not the recipe for ambition, I understand, but it is how I tend to do it– unless there is some pressing external reason I must have the thing ready by a certain date and time.

Sekhnet is exactly the opposite.  She is tormented every day to know she will meet only a tiny fraction of the hundred deadlines she sets herself every day.  She may accomplish several big tasks in a given day, things that have been bothering her, but that is almost never a reason for self-congratulation or relief.  When I try to pat her on the back she is not having it.  She is quick to point out that she did not accomplish many more tasks, which must now be added to the long list for the following day.  When I try to comfort her she will not take comfort, not from someone who hasn’t made any of those two minute calls he wanted to make two months ago.

Reminds me of other stressful situations where I try to reassure her when she becomes anxious.  I’ve taken to adding a semi-humorous caveat to my reassurances, it sometimes works very slightly.  “Don’t worry,” I urge her, “… said Nearly Headless Nick….”  And I put my arm around her, my head lolling slightly to one side, where the neck has been hacked.

Oh, crap!  It’s 2:53.  I’m late! 

Disconnect

The young therapist-in-training seemed at a loss when I asked why her supervisor seemingly gave her no advice about a patient who reported no progress week after week on two of the three goals he came into therapy seeking help with.    

“But you speak so well, and seem to know exactly what you need to do, and talk very precisely about it, I…..” and her voice trailed off as I looked on, alert, eyebrows sympathetically raised, listening actively with body language showing her I was not shutting her out.  

“Ah,” I said, philosophical as always, “that’s the devilish subtlety of it.  I can always see another side and even as I feel bad that I cannot, for example, motivate myself to do an amazing thing that perhaps only one in a million people would even dream of doing, I can also reassure myself that it’s cruel to chide myself for not being able to do what perhaps one in a million would attempt to do, on their own.”

I watched the wheels turning in the young therapist’s mind.  She was forced to agree.  

“You’re a tough nut,” a friend concluded with a tiny chuckle when I told him about the unhelpful dance I do with this psychology student for about 40 minutes every week.  His long-ago CBT therapist had eventually found a way to get him to have a good cry.  That cry made him feel pain he was then able to release himself from, in an important way.  I don’t want to feel that kind of pain, of course.  

“Part of what makes you such a tough nut,” said my friend, clapping me on the shoulder and moving our glasses to the sink.

“Makes her the perfect therapist for me, I suppose, she’s not going to make me cry.  Something to be said for that.”  

“Yep,” said my friend, running some foamy water into our glasses.

Head in Hands (labored re-creation)

This afternoon, at a loss for anything better to do, and having written that piece referencing Cheney that activated Sekhnet’s PTSD and made her cry one sentence in (where I stopped), I found myself sitting in the universal pose of resigned inaction, head in hands.  My few chores done and a futile attempt at a restorative nap aborted, I sat wearily at my desk near the window overlooking Sekhnet’s farm and my head sank into my hands.  I sat that way for a long moment.  The symbolism of this posture dawning on me, I lifted my head, opened this computer and resolutely tapped out a few hundred words that disentangled some tendrils, put it about as well as I can.  

It was a different kind of post than most of these and it felt like a good day’s work.  Writing it put my thoughts and feelings in order, explained some things I was hard pressed to understand or express and salvaged an otherwise fairly bleak and low-energy day for me.

Sekhnet and I went shopping and after the long trip I opened the blahg to read it to her.  There was no sign of the new piece anywhere, not in drafts, not in the trash.  “Head in Hands” does not exist, I was informed.  I was sure I’d hit publish, I’d definitely selected the categories, which appear below this post now, which I have already saved now three times.  It was hard to believe I had never even once saved the draft.  I hadn’t shut off the computer or logged out of WordPress, yet, no trace of the ninety minutes of writing.  

Seeing it wiped away at the moment I was going to read it to Sekhnet I felt panic and then rage, at once it became the most profound thing I’d ever managed to write, of course, being now irretrievably lost.  In despair I realized how impossible it would be to recreate the integrity of the piece, whatever music it had contained.  It took all I had not to scream or smash something.  Sekhnet was sympathetic, immediately reminded me I should always save my work, no matter what, we’ve both learned the hard way, blah blah blah, helpful advice I couldn’t listen to.  850 something posts on this blahg with no hitch that I can recall, maybe one.   Fitting reward at the end of a day I dragged myself through, to have some of my best work wiped away without a fucking trace and for no explainable reason.  I went outside and stalked for a mile.   

I’d started off wondering if dysthymia had me by the neck lately and posted a link to a wiki describing the condition.   I compared the inevitable hopeless feeling to music, the depressed theme striking a familiar chord, persistent fatigue providing the bass, empty stretches of senseless inaction like a sad string section, the dulled, receding emotions forming amusical harmonies to a background music as pervasive and hideous as the sickeningly effective ad jingle that plays involuntarily in your head.  

I mused about the genetic component of dysthymia and described my mother setting out for work every day, carrying dysphoria on her shoulders, working all day, coming home on the train, cooking us dinner, watching TV, reading, looking forward to the emotional release of the opera Live from the Met that throbbed from the stereo every Sunday (it may have been every Saturday).  She became tearful easily, was often angry, over-ate, reported feeling blue when she was alone, though she was always convivial and had a good sense of humor in company.

I spent hours alone in the basement, listening to blues records, the same sides over and over, playing along on an acoustic guitar, learning the ropes.  Friends came and went, I never questioned their qualifications or motives.  I enjoyed interacting with them, cherish a few of them still, but probably spent much more time by myself than in their company.  When alone I worked in one expressive medium or another, it always seemed important to me to express myself well.  I follow the same practice now.  

This tendency to isolation is quite possibly a symptom of dysthymia, a diagnosis I dismissed, a hazy condition easily waved off because it lacks the sharp drama of a scary depression, or a rising anxious terror, or the wild mania that will land one in the Emergency Room.  The proclivity to oversensitivity and introspection could also be called part of an artistic temperament, I suppose, but that temperament famously comes at a steep price.

I was considering, in far less words than this, that I should probably go off to work every day, or at least several times a week.  Any work, meaningful or not is not important, the main thing is to keep oneself busy.  This is universal therapy practiced by most people in the world and much mischief and violence are the result of enforced idleness, too much time on one’s hands.  Working people have routines and stay busy, the validation they get from doing their jobs well is part of what makes their lives make sense to them, makes them feel productive.  At the end of the day they have a good reason to be tired, to relax and unwind, and they have to be ready to get up for work early the next day so too much emotional heavy lifting is out of the question.  

Unlimited time to ponder and imagine is not a good thing in the long run.  It is difficult, maybe impossible, to sustain vital creativity in isolation anyway.  Creativity is intended to be shared, it’s collaborative by its nature.   You may sometimes create fine work, hone it to a great smoothness and clarity, provoke thoughts and feelings in a unique way, but such work, done primarily for yourself, has an element of madness to it, is not complete as expression until it is received by another.  It is necessary to find a partner or two, it seems to me, if the work is going to have real meaning and resilience.  Things I write here for a small handful of readers, sometimes true things, at times elusive but obvious when pinned down, a good in and of itself.  But in another sense: what the fuck?

I noted that with no warning, today, I find myself again in that hot August night outside Vishnevitz, the tortured little town where we’d been forced to fence ourselves into a crowded quarter six months earlier, using barbed wire, splintered boards, chicken wire, plaster.  They’d forced us to pay for it too, with money we needed for food and medicine, and now had finally marched those of us who survived to the side of the ravine, my tiny nephews and nieces walking at the unnatural pace of the feeble, hobbling elders I’d assisted up the road.  

This forced march was supervised by our neighbors, people who cursed their difficult lives and had for centuries looked with superstitious ignorance for someone to take it out on, to make pay.   These captive fellow citizens of Vishnevitz had been ordered to murder by conscripted German men brainwashed by a madman in a society conditioned by generations of militarism, conformity and war.   The Ukranians collaborated gladly, having the chance to freely pour out the hatred and humiliation that had been boiling in them for generations.  

They made the night stink with their drunken anti-Semitic songs and their infernal banging to cover the groans and cries.  I tried not to look at them, what was the point?  There was nothing to say.  Why give them the satisfaction?  Humans, these were not exactly that.  The deadly play was written in blood and shit by people who hated themselves, murderers.

“Goddamn it Vasily, I hate this fucking life, I curse my goddamned mother for bringing me into this fucking life, Vasily.  Give me the goddamned vodka, Vashke, and we’ll do what we have to do.  Fooh!  It tastes like your stinking spit, Vasily.  That’s OK.  It’s good.  Let us do what we came here to do to these fucking kykes, OK.”

There was no point to run, nowhere to go and the old people and the children couldn’t run anyway, there was nothing to be done, no expression to even have on your face.  Running would only provide a moment of challenge and excitement for these reptiles, and they have excellent depth perception and three dimensional vision, reptiles.  I said nothing, my face two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  I flattened myself into two dimensions, both eyes on one side of my profile, fuck you, reptile.

Why invent the time machine for this particular trip, I cannot say.  Pessimism is wrong, nothing good can come from it.  It is not always right to be optimistic, of course, but hope is a better mistake than hopelessness.  In a world of miracles and atrocities there comes a time to simply sit with your head in your hands sometimes.  It just is what it is, as they say and, as I did not make the world, I just live in it, for whatever time I am given.

The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario

One of the great bullshit hypotheticals, used to justify medieval barbarity that is both immoral and useless: the ticking time bomb scenario.   In this fantasy you have captured the insane fanatic who’s planted a powerful bomb somewhere where it will imminently kill thousands.  Make it a dirty bomb, or a suitcase nuke, even better, poised to take out two million innocent citizens in a major city.  You have the undeniably guilty guy, handcuffed to a chair, smirking, the bomb ticking away somewhere: what do you do?  You spend five seconds consulting your lawyers, who nod grimly and turn away, and then you do whatever it takes to get the insane fanatic to tell you where the bomb is hidden.

Of course, if it’s planted in Grand Central Station he’ll tell you St. Patrick’s Cathedral, send you up to the Bronx where the President, the Pope and dignitaries of all nations are visiting Poe Cottage.  It’s such a bullshit scenario it’s not even worth thinking about– if the guy is ready to die for what he believes is his cause, and knows the bomb is set to go off in twenty minutes, what’s his motivation to tell you the truth just because you’ve attached electrodes to his testicles?  The real terror of torture is that it will be endless.  Most fanatics can take twenty minutes of the worst you can dish out standing on their heads, naked in an icy room full of hissing snakes.

The real ticking time bomb is us, our lives.  Not that we’re going to explode, necessarily, the end, in the words of an immortal anti-Semitic poet, is as likely a whimper as a bang, but our personal extinction is certain.  That suspicious mole on my left leg just above the knee?  Too bad you didn’t have it looked at six months ago, the dermatologist will say, we could have saved the leg, your life.  Melanoma is treatable when it first appears– now you’d better start going through that mass of papers in your apartment, there may be time for a cruise with Sekhnet, if you schedule it today and make it a short one.  

A week stealthily turns into three weeks, to a month of Sundays, to the limit of human endurance.   Your great idea, the unwritten novel, the memoir…. pffffft.  For some the certainty of an unknowable end drives them to make the most of every moment.  For others, the vague dread causes them to steer as far from the heart of it as they can.  If I do not think about my death, well, maybe… oh, you know, I’d better stay busy!

I listened to another interview with a famous writer yesterday.  They very matter of factly discussed the prolific author’s bouts of depression, uncertainty, paralysis.  The lot of every creative, introspective person, it would appear– a certain amount of torment and self-doubt.  Most creative people are troubled, it seems, the greatest comedians are often tortured souls.  Are you surprised when a great poet puts her head in the oven?  The only surprise is the lack of a farewell note.  Not to bring up a sore subject, but, Bill Cosby, at the height of his fame, when he was a handsome rock star with a killer wit who could have any woman in the world, and in the years that followed, preferred his women unconscious.  I mean… what?  

The trick, I suppose, when trying to ride this impossibly high horse– the view from which often makes old friends invisible, they can’t be expected to understand the things that drive someone to practice arts they do not even try to sell– is to maintain a kindness toward oneself, toward the world.  Remain interested in others, be mild, do not complain, do not raise the lash over your own back for failures to move an impossibly heavy boulder endlessly up an endless hill.  

The clock is ticking, true, but it ticks in any case.   Set reasonable goals, take human bites.  The clock may well run out on you, as it does on us all, but succumbing to the pressure of the relentless ticking… as good an option as futilely torturing that sick fuck in the chair who smiles as you slice at him.  He ain’t telling you where the goddamn bomb is, Dick, no matter what your lawyers tell you about the tortured legality of the unspeakable things you are doing to him. 

Generativity vs. Stagnation, again

There is no shortage of irony here.  

I am striving to bring interactive creativity and fun into places where these things are spoken of highly but rarely practiced; myself, creative, yes, but not having much fun.  

The program I’ve already implemented is capable of injecting some encouraging news into the depressing discussion of American education, the non-discussion of real participatory democracy; I am a marginal participant not actively discussing the issue with anyone who cares.  

The program is therapeutic, I saw haggard women with chronic disease transformed into laughing girls at the end of our sessions; it gratified me, but, burdened with logistics, I was not laughing with them.  

I’ve solved dozens of logistical and psychological problems so far, though some very large, possibly insoluble, ones remain.  With the best of intentions, as I try to maintain my focus on promoting this inclusive, participatory program, I have somehow become a kind of hanging judge.  

Nuance has become harder for me to discern; holding multiple truths in mind, and choosing the one that casts the best light– not always possible.  I listen to the prosecutor making his relentless case, nod my unsmiling head.  Fine, I think, give the guy the chair, let the Court of Appeals worry about it, there are many worse tragedies happening everywhere.  Bang the gavel, next case.  

I’m not always able to refrain from doing what was so hateful to me watching my father do it:  reducing a person to the sum of his faults.  We are flawed, all of us, and gracefully accepting the flaws of others is an important part of being a decent person.  Whipping a fucking goat?   Really?  I take pride in not being the sort of person who inflicts harm, particularly on those with limitations.  Lately I couldn’t rest until I’d given a particular animal a hard kick in the ribs.  The thing was perhaps less than perfectly thoughtful, or even characteristically oblivious, but in either case, why the need to kick it? 

The seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is called Generativity vs. Stagnation.  Being productive, successful and involved in the world during the middle and later stages of adulthood versus being isolated and removed from the world, dogged by feelings of failure and hopelessness.  The eighth and final stage, Integrity vs. Despair, takes place at the end of life, looking back, when one feels satisfied at a life well and authentically lived or is bitter and full of regrets.  

I embarked on a project of encouraging expression, using free play as an educational strategy.   I undertook this ambitious project knowing nothing about how to plan and build a business, how to run an HR department, how to secure funding to hire professionals needed for several live or die jobs.   I have no connections or friends who can fill these gaps.

The program is a success, as far as implementing it in five minutes anywhere, as far as how easily it does what it purports to do.   The student-run workshop vindicated my best hopes for how it would work.  The creativity and competencies of young kids, and ailing adult women, for that matter, exceeded my expectations.   Yet, not having a network of people in a position to participate productively… so far enforced stagnation.  

Those who don’t understand what I am striving for, or who take no interest in it, who now quite sensibly avoid the subject, I can’t help thinking of as partial jerks, even as I know I have only a passing interest in all the details of their working lives.   I was surprised and touched when a hard-working friend took a few moments to enquire about the progress of my program a couple of months ago.  I told him the program itself, curriculum and all, works smoothly and wonderfully wherever we’ve done it, and that now I am focused on packaging, promoting and selling it.  

I described my initial hope– that kids would work together to produce original animation in a workshop setup where adults would set things in motion and step back as children learn and teach each other.   This big taste of autonomy fosters students’ confidence, brings out peer-mentoring and leadership skills.  It has happened quickly every place we’ve done the workshop, about a hundred times so far.  

Now that the program itself works smoothly, I told my friend, I am wrestling with the crucial tasks of packaging and promoting it.  I told him I’m optimistic that someone in di Blasio’s administration would be quite interested in the presentation that I have recently put together, that is just about ready to roll.

He told me he now understands the important goals I set for the program, the workshop’s many great applications.  He said he was impressed by how well thought out it was, acknowledged the tremendous amount of work I’d done and the ingeniously simple design of the program.  He wished me success, strength to my arm and told me he agreed that di Blasio’s people would be very interested in a program capable of producing a cadre of peer-teachers entering Middle School.  

This reaction was as wonderful as it was rare.  We have but one measure of success in our society and until friends read about the program in a NY Times piece, or hear a well-crafted moment about it on NPR, it is a dream I am dreaming alone as I sleep my fitful sleep.

One more note in the polyphony of my imperfect sleep: my attempts to avoid bitterness in old age seem ironic to me much of the time these days.  These attempts are hampered by the difficulty of living by words I have written on pages many times with various calligraphy pens, words I must inscribe in my heart as I find ways to become more actively and productively involved in the world:  cultivate mindful empathy.  Everybody we encounter is fighting a hard battle against killer odds.  Just because somebody almost never keeps their word, for example, is no reason to write off the rest of their virtues.  

Now, if you will excuse me, there are some kittens in the garden I have to go be sarcastic to.

kittens

Etiquette as the Last Refuge of Scurrility

It’s wrong to abuse people gratuitously, or even trying to be funny.  There, I said it, fuck you.  Seriously, there is most often no humor in abuse, no matter how otherwise witty.  Abuse masquerades as humor to apply the talent for malice, seizing a jocular tone to wield the lash with the deniability of “only kidding… Jesus, stop being such a pussy.” A “roast” on TV can be occasionally funny, it’s all in good fun, blah, blah, but a roast in real life is rarely fun for the roastee.  It is uncomfortable for most people to be put on the spot.

If I put you on a spit and turned you slowly and lovingly over the flames, basting you with your own juices to keep your skin from burning, no matter how otherwise hilarious my patter was while doing this, I know for a fact you wouldn’t find it all that adorable.  We do this to each other from time to time, and it’s no joke, it’s a sign something sick is going on.  

Not to be all judgmental about it, but when someone who has just been kicked in a delicate place is crying, the most humane first reaction is sympathy, not a smirking admonition not to be a pussy.   “Everybody gets kicked there, whiner.  Stop fucking crying and finish listening to my problems, asshole.  I have problems too, you know.  I kneed you by accident, ACCIDENT– pussy.”

I am thinking about this because when being polite is the only reason for doing something, against many good reasons for not doing that thing, experience teaches that it is a mistake to do the thing out of politeness.  Being polite is a good thing, especially with strangers and potential assholes, and politeness has an important place in civility. Being polite as the only reason to do a thing?   A weak ass reason indeed, and almost weightless against any reason not to do the thing at all.    

Years ago, after an unhappy, brilliant, talented, witty and often abusive friend turned her abuse on me at a particularly bad time for me, I replied to her hurtful email with a long explanation of why I’d been so hurt by it.  She declined to respond to my wimpish complaint.  I never heard from her again.  It was the quiet whimper at the end of a long, troubled friendship between two damaged people.  

A year or two later, her husband’s mother died at 99 or 100.  The old woman had been severely demented for the last decade or two, and when she finally died, the husband’s sisters began screaming for him to do something.   He jumped up and applied mouth to mouth resuscitation to the dead woman, until, presumably, nurses intervened.

Sekhnet and I spoke to him shortly after learning, by email, that his mother had died.  He was very grateful to us for a long call that gave him some comfort.   I had nothing against him.  In fact, it had been a source of stress and pain to watch him severely verbally pummeled by his unhappy wife every time the four of us got together.  I always took his side, tried to pour some humor on the ugly situation, distract the wife from her assaults.   Sekhnet was also very troubled watching this brutality at every meeting.   When the woman turned that same whip on me one time too many, I was not having it.  That was the end of our long, troubled friendship.    Against my better instincts, I yielded to Sekhnet’s persuasion that I attend the wake in Chinatown.  It would mean so much to our lapsed friend’s husband who had just lost his mother, she convinced me.  Sentimentality and a misguided sense of duty and kindness triumphed over Reason and self-interest.

I have never had a reason not to regret going to that wake.  I rushed from something I needed to concentrate on to be there, and needing to rush off had distracted me from the important thing I’d needed to focus on.  I stood in line to have a meaningless hug from my former friend who made a smiling, breezy comment, only gently barbed, and it was the only exchange we had.   Her husband thanked me several times for coming, and even took a moment, at a family dinner after the wake that I should also have not been persuaded to take part in, to find out if I was still trying to do that ridiculous animation business with kids.  

I have never had a reason to think I did the right thing going to that wake.  I did the wrong thing, for myself, thinking it was the right thing.   Lesson learned, and now I move on slightly wiser.  

Politeness for its own sake?  Complete fucking lying bullshit.

Liver

Although I ate chicken, steak and hamburgers often during my childhood, and particularly loved fried chicken, flank steak, deliciously marinated, and burgers char-grilled over coals, I have been a vegetarian now for seven or eight years.  As they say, just because you’re a vegetarian doesn’t mean bacon stops smelling delicious.  The smell of burgers on a charcoal grill still gets to me, though I haven’t eaten one in years.  Same for pastrami (a childhood delicacy) and barbecued brisket (which I discovered very late in my meat eating life), damn that stuff smells delicious.  As for my vegetarianism, a friend corrects me, I am a pescatarian, since I eat fish a couple of times a week.  

I zestfully ate the lean muscle of many animals over the years, what we call meat, but was always squeamish about eating internal organs, feet and necks.  My mother loved to gnaw on a neck, or chicken feet, working her way around the tiny bones and sucking out the marrow with a smile of pleasure; I’d watch in horror.  Squeamish is defined as a “prudish readiness to be nauseated” and no Victorian lady was ever more ready to recoil prudishly than I was from the smell of a calf’s liver frying with onions.   The odor would literally sicken me and drive me from the house.

Why did I stop eating meat?  I heard Michael Pollan on the radio, a long interview on WNYC, I think he was speaking to the gourmand Leonard Lopate, a man who will seemingly try any food.  Pollan described something I’d witnessed as a teenager and was able to ignore at the time: animals we eat are raised in death camps not much different in spirit than places like Auschwitz.  

Yes, this was an uncomfortable fact, and I’d seen the brutal treatment of tiny chickens and turkeys on kibbutz in Israel, but then Pollan described the intelligence and suffering of these meat animals and I looked over at my cat, a handsome carnivore, and he seemed to nod.  Pigs become very depressed, they are much smarter than dogs, smarter than cats.   They have to be restrained and drugged to stop them from freaking out in the weeks and months before their painful slaughter.  

Delicious, yes, but also way smarter than this cat I like very much. The cat has a personality, preferences, moods, a certain brutal sense of humor.  I will cry when he dies, hopefully many years from now.  Sekhnet will be inconsolable, she cries at the thought of how inconsolable she’ll be.  I suddenly could not eat pork, delicious as it is.  Or cows for that matter, large gentle animals who, raised by the millions for meat, are big players in global warming with their ruminant farting.  Human love of burgers has incented (as the capitalists now say) the destruction of the Amazon jungle, the earth’s lungs, for grazing land for cows.  They say a vegetarian who drives a Humvee has a smaller carbon footprint than a bicyclist who regularly eats cow.  That is another matter, also important, but it was the idea of the terrible lives these sentient animals raised in industrial death camps lead that instantly made me unable to eat meat.  

I recalled the way we chased down baby turkeys, sometimes they were kicked, take four or five in each hand, upside down by the feet, pass them to someone with a pair of clippers who’d snip off their beaks.  A spurt of blood and they’d be passed to someone with a syringe who’d shoot them full of antibiotics, hormones and who knows what else.  Then they were thrown into another section of the enclosure with their squawking, blood spattered colleagues.  I have a vivid memory of these birds, all with blue eyes, suddenly turning into a friend of mine, a beautiful girl with blues eyes.  I excused myself and went into the bathroom to write this up in my journal.  I was eventually rudely called back to work in the turkey coop.   There were thousands more turkeys to get ready for meat and I was a needed volunteer.  Eventually, decades later, after hearing Pollan’s description, I had to stop eating birds too.

This does not make me highly moral, of course.  Hitler was a vegetarian for the last fourteen years of his hideous life.  He gave up meat in penance for his part in the death of the young niece he was obsessed with.  The only woman he ever truly loved, he said later in his life.  At twenty-three Geli Raubal finally shot herself in the lung in 1931, with Hitler’s gun, during the last leg of Hitler’s marathon to power.  Who could blame her?  Hitler was obsessed with her, jealously kept her virtual prisoner in his apartment, and though we may like to think of him looking at her through a bathroom keyhole and jerking off, her nauseated face as he rubbed against her sometimes, it is probably just because Uncle Hitler was fucking Hitler that she chose death over life in the end.   In any case, when he snapped out of his depression and got back to his life’s work, he gave up meat.

So, although I can’t eat meat these days (fish, a hypocritical compromise) I’m not on a moral high horse about it.  I’m on a moral high horse about many other things, of course.  I also wish people would stop eating so much increasingly poisonous and earth-damaging meat, but enough on that.  

Toward the end of my mother’s long death from endometrial cancer she lost a lot of weight.  She had always been very heavy, but after my father’s death, nibbled at by cancer, she lost most of her excess weight.  “The widow’s diet,” she called it, a lost interest in cooking and eating, for the most part.  She was almost gaunt by the end.  

A few years before she died we were driving in her Cadillac in sunny south Florida and she suddenly said “I feel like Golden Corral all of a sudden.  Do you want to go?”   I was hungry, and she expressed so little interest in food, that I immediately I swung the car toward Golden Corral and we got our trays and giant plastic cups.  

Golden Corral is a large scale buffet with many stations.  It’s possible to eat semi-healthily there, if one sticks to three or four foods, but that’s not why people go there.  My mother was thinking of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, a bunch of other things I wouldn’t necessarily put on my plate.  I had not yet heard Michael Pollan’s description of the suffering of animals raised and slaughtered in Auschwitz and I took some fried chicken along with some side dishes.

I’d had a tasty steak there a few weeks earlier, and I took a thin well-done steak as well.  I did not notice the tell-tale onions.   My mother ate the chicken happily for a moment, and then pretty much lost her appetite, the cancer was all over her and probably had something to do with it.  She watched me eat and asked me how I liked this, wasn’t the macaroni and cheese good, and so forth.

I sliced into the thin steak, took a morsel on my fork, put it in my mouth and chewed it.  It tasted funny, it tasted bad.  This was not the tasty steak they’d served for dinner a few weeks earlier, this was some kind of horrible lunch time meat.  

“It’s liver,” I said right after swallowing it, with a nauseated face that made my mother laugh.

“It’s not liver,” she said dismissively.  For some reason I’d swallowed the foul tasting dark meat and I was feeling sicker by the moment.   A waitress passed by.  I asked her if it was liver.  

“Yes,” she said with a big smile, “isn’t it delicious?”   I gave her the expression of Woody Allen about to go into the MRI.   My mother laughed again and told me to grow up, that it wouldn’t kill me.   I wasn’t so sure.  

Not long afterwards I heard Pollan describe the torment of literally tens of millions of animals raised in factories to be killed so we might cook and eat them and I could finally stop worrying about eating liver.