Category Archives: personal

At least two possibilities

One is that you truly have a great idea that can help many people, have carried it hundreds of miles on your back, over a thousand obstacles.   The only trouble is that you haven’t been able to sell it yet.

Another is that you’re already dead, your idea as dead as you are, your failure to convincingly sell the idea to anyone a clear indication of those deaths.   Everybody knows of your death but you, that’s the reason for the forced smiles when you make a joke.

There are other possibilities, of course, many of them, but those are two.

 

When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

Wednesday 2-18, downtown A train

“Oh, happy fucking day,”

said a bitter old face

like mine

ceiling sprung a new leak

drip, drip

onto my last nerve

woman at Obamacare

didn’t know much about benefits

but read my 1099s to me,

including the one I received yesterday

“Do you still work at EVCS?” she asked

teeth and eyes not

needed for our health

not here

in the land where we no longer

tolerate

the lynching of former slaves

here

in the land of the free

and the home

of brave

corporate personhood  

“Whoa! calm down, man…”  

“Don’t you fucking

call me ‘man’, man,

don’t you fucking call me ‘man’!”  

There was a time

my hand would become a fist

where humans

forced to wear signs saying

“I am a man”

would have made me want to holler

arms hard,

ready to strike  

“Who is there to strike?”

a voice asks,

reasonable, kindly.  

“Those who benefit

from the murder

& enslavement of others,”

I say.

 “Ah, yes,” the voice says,

sadly,

“but one can never touch them.”  

ii

“When were you wont to be so full of songs, fool?”

the king asked me  

“Since every sweet lake, sire, receded to shoals of piss

a cool drink not sold by the bottle

living now only in fond nostalgia

while the priapic, tireless

thrusting, twisting, plunging

forms the rhythm section,

the recoiling cringe replacing dance.”

“There is more hope

for a dog returning to his vomit 

than for you, fool,” noted the king

“Yes,” I said,

“another song, sire?”

date forgotten

Had we not

bullet in the head  

been forced on top

of our neighbors’ corpses

in that festive

Ukrainian evening  

Had we not  

willing ourselves to forget

plunged

bottle deep

in spirits not our own  

Had rape

not been the law

but mercy instead  

Imagine

the songs we would have sung

the happy noise

scattered over bright chords

ecstatic leaps

and skiing madly

down the perfect slopes

of upturned breasts

under the thinness of silk

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

Survival Kit

One essential item in this kit is a sense of purpose, the hearty hope that we are not struggling in vain in a senseless universe.  A compelling reason for our existence.

Reason, that most ticklish, sticky and fickle of things.  How many insane fanatics have brandished indisputable Reason as they committed unspeakable acts?    

“Most insane fanatics brandish Authority, which is different than Reason,” she says, reasonably. 

Not a bad point, actually.  Authority is most often cited based on faith, not rationality.  

“Wait a second,” she says.  “Are YOU completely insane?  Why are you sitting there tapping like a blind man across cobblestones when there is so much for you to do today?”

“Faith,” I say, without apparent conviction.

“Faith in what, pray tell?” she says.

“Faith in the sudden eruption of poetry, a moment of music, faith in the essential spark that animates every moment of elation, faith in imagination,” I say.

“Faith that you are, somehow and in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, not a fool,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, and nod my head to the tapping of these keys.

Irrational to end friendships?

As a child I was dismayed each time one of my father’s closest friends, bright, colorful people my sister and I enjoyed very much, was permanently banished from our lives.   “The fall from grace,” my mother would say, “is swift and absolute.”  People we were very fond of one day just disappeared, and it always aggrieved me.  My father always had his compelling reason why the last straw had been placed on the friendship, exactly how the despicable true face of the formerly beloved friend finally revealed itself.

I argued with him about the importance of forgiveness.  It was not lost on me that this forgiveness would also apply to me.  In my father’s view I had always fought him, even as an infant, when I stared from my crib with dark, accusing eyes even before I could speak.  He made a far less insane case for each of these people he once loved being unworthy of his affections, for the betrayal each had committed.  In only one case did I ever get to hear the other side of the story, and her case seemed at least as plausible and reasonable as my father’s did.  I have since come to write this woman off for much the same reason my father had decades earlier.

The point is, live long enough and you may see things from a previously incomprehensible perspective.   As a child it was unthinkable to me that a person could toss away a good friend and never look back.   As an adult I have done this many times, always in the spirit of not tolerating what I come to perceive as ill treatment or abuse.  It does not please me to say this.   I hold forgiveness high in my esteem, though it’s super-humanly hard to forgive someone who insists they did nothing wrong.  I would rather have all of the friends I once held dear.  In each case, though, I came to the impasse my father had come to during my childhood, the impasse I found impossible to understand then.    

It is the moment when one sees a destructive pattern in the relationship, feels a lack of empathy that quickly becomes mutual.   The other person believes that you are the asshole, you just as fervently believe that they are the asshole.  That you may both be assholes no longer gives consolation to either party.   The air in the closed room begins to stink.  All that remains is a senseless fight in a stinking room or a move toward the door.  Outside the stinking room, walking away, there is little reason for nostalgia or even curiosity about whether the place still stinks.  It’s just time to move forward into the fresh air.

A Few Thoughts on Madness

My only visit to a locked mental ward was to see a friend incarcerated in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.   When I left I waited for the elevator in a dingy space between the ward for men and the ward for women.  A woman was screaming, part of her face visible behind the medieval looking screen over the tiny window in the metal door.   From the sounds of it she was being tortured while the guards read magazines, ostentatiously pretending not to notice.  It took a long time for the elevator to arrive and the woman begged for my help the whole time.

I’d been visiting a friend who had been committed to this ward for refusing to be admitted voluntarily after a few weeks of increasingly bizarre behavior.  This meant that police with guns came to the suburban house where he was holding court, arrested him as a possible danger to himself and others (it’s unlikely he actually was, though he was clearly crazy) and took him to a room where they held him for several hours as they processed his paperwork and decided what to do with him.   We watched him for a rueful moment through the one-way mirror.   I remember he just sat there, still, and we saw him in profile.

The locked ward in Elmhurst, where the State in its mechanistic wisdom brought him next, was a scary place.  It was more a prison than a hospital, I thought during a short visit before he was transferred to a less restrictive section of the hospital a few days later.  Our friend seemed to hold his own there, pacing, glowering, vibrating with an energy that was disconcerting to watch.  It was an energy that most of the ambulatory men in that large, dingy day room seemed to have.

Before witnessing this breakdown I had a romantic notion about the fluid line between madness and sanity, seeing it more as a social construct involving conformity than a hard line.  I learned that it is, at times, a hard line; there is little subtlety involved when someone is having a full-blown episode of being batshit crazy.  There are plenty of eccentric, pain-filled, maladjusted, tormented, impractical, melancholic, aggressive, self-destructive, absurdly demanding people in the world who nobody would claim are completely mad.   It may be said that most lives, examined for more than a moment, are tinged with irrationality, ruled by destructive beliefs, misperceptions, shifting angers, ill-shaped grievances, avoidance, bottomless sorrows.  Or maybe this only describes the people I have met.  There is always that possibility.  

Anyway, this friend emerged OK, went back to work, continued courting his new girlfriend, soon to become his difficult wife.  Things were fine until a few years later, when I had a series of shrill, early morning calls from the difficult wife demanding that I drive to Greenpoint and take care of my friend, who was barking mad again.

When I arrived at their door she pushed him out, without his keys or wallet, and locked the door behind us.  This woman is vicious, full of self-important opinions, demeaning, demanding, narcissistic, reserving the right to rage.   A thoroughly unlikable person.  Though we got along for fleeting periods of time over the years, I think of her, for shorthand’s sake, as Hitler.  She is certainly as implacable as the famous psychopath.   Although, on that day, after a few minutes with my friend, I realized that she had been pushed to this desperate, if harsh, maneuver.  

My friend was clearly manic; he was cheerful as hell, spoke quickly, his great intelligence swerving the conversation from one difficult to grasp idea to the next. His eyes glittered with a combination of merriness and malice.  He had partially shaved his head, giving him an excellent look for his new attitude.  He was very thin, clearly had not been feeling the need to eat for some time.  I tried to get him to eat something at the nearby McDonald’s, but he wisely declined.

Fifteen or twenty hours later, at my wits’ end by now and realizing that the only help for my friend would come from skilled professionals, I made him a plate of pasta in my apartment.  He agreed that he should eat something.  Then as he sat down he turned to me and said something so provocative, so vicious and uncalled for, so perfectly aimed at my greatest vulnerability, that I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, lifted him from the chair and slung him toward the door of the apartment, intending to shove him into the hall.  I am not proud of this moment, though neither am I unduly tormented by it.  Every human has his or her limit, and that now forgotten cruel comment as I was trying to get my insane friend to eat something was mine.

He grabbed me by the throat.  I grabbed him by the throat.  It was a moment when raging insanity was about to prevail.  In a moment of inspiration I lurched forward and kissed him, on the lips.   He laughed.  I relaxed my grip on his neck, he let my neck go.  I patted him on the back, told him to go eat, and went into the shower to blow water out of my face and try to regain myself.

A few hours later, somehow, I had him at the mental hospital, this time without police.  No locked ward this time.  He was restrained on the gurney, however, and I recall seeing him in profile spit a Haldol pill into the doctor’s face.  They wheeled him away.  The next time I saw him he was in the hands of a psychiatrist who became convinced my friend had been misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic.   Treated as bipolar, on a long-time regimen of Lithium, he has had no recurrence of mania in the twenty or so years since.

Knowing that Lithium is eventually fatal, he weaned himself off the drug.   He’s been maintaining himself with Zen meditation, achieving a certain clarity that included the realization that one can not live a happy life sharing a home with Hitler.   He finds comfort in cult-like settings, he tells me, and has found a nice group of people he meditates with.  He found a woman there he is very fond of and has a lot of sex with.   His wife broke the window of his rented room in a jealous rage over this and he obtained a restraining order against her.  She somehow got one against him.  The divorce is not going to be smooth sailing, but then, how could it be?

We check in from time to time.   The dispirited period I am going through makes it harder than usual for me to reach out, but we talk every month or so.  He reports that he is mostly content.  I nod, since regular and good sex with its steady flow of life-restoring endorphins will have that effect on a person’s outlook.  

The last time we spoke he was keen to taste the single malt I keep on a high shclf and have been refraining from drinking, being depressed enough without imbibing depressants.  He began singing its praises.  He does not keep it at home, fearing to fall into the bottle himself, but loves to drink good stuff from time to time at the home of a friend. I told him I’d prefer not to drink, and explained why, but later gave him a snort, against my better judgment, which led to having a few myself.  I felt like shit the next day and haven’t touched it since.

Had a call from him the other day, for the first time since.  “B is such a good friend to you,” he said, “he helps you with your business, and brainstorming, and trying to get your apartment shaped up, he hauls boxes of things to Good Will, puts his back into it, really cares about your well-being.  He seems like such a good guy and I feel bad that I’ve made such a bad impression on him.  He probably sees me as a guy who is always sucking around looking for something from you.   Dragging you back into well-worn bad habits you’d just as soon pick up.  To him I must look like Lampwick from Pinocchio, my ears slightly donkeyish as I persuade you to uncork the bottle, pour us just a drop.”

I agreed that this was likely the case, refraining from saying there was a certain accuracy to the image.

“I’d appreciate it if you could let him know that I’m not really that way.  If I ever meet him again, and I hope I do, I’d hate to think he has such a poor opinion of me.  Would you set him straight?”

We talked for a while more, he described the likely end of his period of unlimited sex, how the younger woman was very practically looking for a mate her own age, to have a child with, and how he could probably not hold on to her much longer.  He told me she was compassionately trying to set him up with another woman in the group, and that he had certain hopes for this new one.   He observed in passing that I am depressive.   I described some semi-comical recordings I’d made recently, and an aggravating piece by the often aggravating David Brooks that I had annotated.

“Send them to me!” he said emphatically.  I had stopped sending creative things to him because of his penchant for remaining silent.  We have been over this time and again in the past, my sensitivity to the easy slight of silence, when even “nice” or “ah hah” suffices to break the bitterness.   My father had been severely abused as a child and his cruelty translated often into the strategic, viciously ungenerous withholding of attention or comment.  This regular practice had sensitized me to the chillingly brutal power of complete silence in response to a query or creative effort.  I have stopped sending things to people I rarely hear back from, particularly those who attempt no creative work themselves.   His silence had become conspicuously dependable. “Send them to me,” he said again.  I told him I would and later that day did.

“By the way,” he said, by way of providing an excellent punchline, “I was thinking… if it’s OK with you…. you know, heh…. that I could come by for a drop of that excellent single malt today.  I have a few hours before I have to go see my girl.”

Neither of us laughed then, though it is very droll, if you think about it.  As droll as the silence into which the things he asked me to send him dropped.

The Fairness Doctrine

There used to be a rule for broadcasters, all of whom use public airways built and maintained by the government, We The People, that required them to present a certain amount of controversial public interest content and give both sides equal opportunity to influence public opinion in any debate involving that public interest.  If you gave ten minutes to the spokesman for everyone having as many guns as they want and being free to take them everywhere they go and use them freely if they feel threatened, or even just a bit paranoid, well, a spokesman for people who are not insane had to be given a chance to rebut that opinion.  It was called The Fairness Doctrine, a quaint idea today.  The FCC apparently abandoned the doctrine during the Reagan Administration.

I suspect the Fairness Doctrine was devoured by ravenous Big Media when they got consolidated enough to openly advocate for the forcible drowning of the government in a bathtub and the government decided maybe it wasn’t wise to piss off the three or so major corporations who now control all of the broadcast news.  However it vanished, it simply is not the rule any more, except, seemingly, after presidential performances.  After the State of the Union the opposition gets a few moments to convince their base that the president has just unloaded a dump truck full of shit onto their kitchen tables.  

Of course, we isolated cranks who tap our thoughts onto the internet have never been bound by any kind of fairness doctrine.  Protected by the First Amendment, we rule our micro-kingdoms with absolute authority and a divine right to be as unreasonable and unfair as we like.   Still, many people have a tic that acts up when unfairness rears up on its hind legs and sprays urine in all directions while braying like a donkey.

A reader pointed out, quite fairly, that I’d been unfair recently, to myself.  He pointed out that I presented my old friends’ lack of care for me and her unkept promises to me much more gently (in the post I removed, hypothetically to protect her feelings, though there was virtually no chance she’d ever read the post) than I presented the counter position in yesterday’s post, the “compelling” reasons why she probably felt justified to act like a self-righteous, selfish, demanding, angry, materialistic jerk.  

Her theoretically compelling reasons, painted bravura style in the merciless strokes of the internal victimizer, an artist who can harshly improvise like nobody’s business, presented an unquestionably idealistic man (me) in the most damning possible light.  “He sleeps late!  He gets depressed!  He doesn’t make that fifth and sixth phone call when he gets no answer the first few times.  He’s not an undaunted salesman nor a master of marketing, graphic design OR branding!  He doesn’t burn to sell his great ideas, the loser!  He’s not out healing the lame and kissing lepers, though he claims he’d love nothing better.”  

I should go back and add a line about the stinking lack of fairness of that unfair characterization.  After all, I don’t want to give the impression that I learned nothing from battles with my unhappy, ruthless father, a man filled with terrible regrets in the last few nights of his life.  Here is what I learned:  it is easy to see imperfection, be put off by it and reduce the imperfect thing to the sum of its imperfections.  It is easy to be disappointed and hurt, life can be a parade of reasons for discouragement and anger.  

In your unhappiness it is very easy to give way to a kind of righteous disappointment, reduce the complex, multidimensional thing that all creatures are to one flat surface.  That flat surface will be covered with the disgusting stuff of disappointment.  Studying the aggravating flattened details will take away your appetite, make you angry, make you want to tick that person off the list of people in your life.  

“That fucking fuck,” you will think to yourself, possibly say out loud.  Possibly even say it out loud to the actual fucking fuck while slapping its face back and forth a few times, getting in a kick too, metaphorically if not here in the physical world.

“That’s not life, Elie,” my father, so well-practiced in that procedure, would say now, as he wheezed on the last night of his life.  We are not the sum of our failings, we are complex, iridescent beings, sometimes luminous, sometimes murky, like our motives.   Humans and animals are the best games in town, nothing against plants, soil, the sky, all the rest of God’s green earth.  

Of course, we humans are, at the same time, also the worst game in town.  The best villains in drama have good reasons for why they act so badly, compelling ones the audience can relate to.  Same for the heroes, not all good, my friends.  Same for all of us, born good and bad, like a phrase under Isaac Babel’s pen, ready to be turned brilliantly toward the light or cast confusedly into unreadable gloom.  

So my apologies to myself for being so harsh on myself yesterday, and I will add a line to the post and forgive myself for yesterday’s treachery, for being kinder to a sometimes jerk I love than to myself, another occasional jerk, who I also love.

Short Bark

Explaining the perplexing standstill my life and work have seemingly come to, I described in great detail the workings and potential of the student-run animation workshop.  My friend grasped it in unfolding steps as I laid it out to him and said “wow, the kids must love it.”  

“They do,” I said.  

“Well, then you need to take your strength and inspiration from them now, until you figure out the next move,” he said.  

“True, but I haven’t had a workshop with kids since May,” I said.  

“Oh…” he said, the syllable expressing perfectly the enormity of what I’m up against at the moment.

Cause for Concern?

At dinner last night with old friends I told a story about a manipulative parrot at another friend’s house.  It was an amusing story, and I told it without frills or fanfare, in about a minute.

“They were there,” Sekhnet said when I’d concluded the short anecdote. My friends nodded.  

I wondered to myself how I could not have remembered that.  It was a little embarrassing.  That my friend, a moment before my story, had retold a parrot story he’d told us before didn’t occur to me until just now.  

I wonder now if I can avoid mentioning the worrisome incident to Sekhnet, who is prone to worry.   It could only serve as another reminder that I might be finally sliding off the deep end.  It certainly feels like the case today.