Category Archives: personal

Salient Point Left Out of Previous Post

I left an important detail out of the account I just posted.

The thing that left the whip marks on me was not recalling a difficult childhood and the sad details appurtenant to it.   Many have had it much worse than I did, than my sister did, or my parents, though each of us had it bad enough.  The siblings of three of my grandparents and their families, for example, thirteen years before I was born: I can’t think of a worse childhood than you and everyone you’ve ever known being massacred by organized gangs of drunken haters backed by a powerful occupying army whose commander is determined to wipe out every trace of your ancestors.

The whip marks I felt after yesterday’s session came a moment after I was asked if I had experienced any traumas.   At first I answered no, then I put my finger on an ongoing one, with roots in my earliest life, the moment that has always stopped me in my tracks:

when an angry bully, usually with an arbitrary hierarchic advantage of some kind, steps up and tells me to put my eyes to the ground.  

I recalled a few instances of this as an adult, how the rising feeling of unfairness, and powerless to do anything but fight, enflamed nerve endings seared repeatedly when I was a boy, how needy bullies have always had an easy time locating me in a crowded room.  I’m not hard to find, I’m the one who hasn’t learned to put my eyes to the ground at the key moment so someone else can take the blows.

“Your therapist can work with you on that,” the grad student told me sympathetically.

Getting to the Part That Hurts

During the first screening interview to get into the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research study most of the yes/no questions seemed designed to rule out people with serious psychological handicaps.  These people had larger problems than waking up exhausted every day and would be no more useful to the study than the study would be to them.  Changing how they think about their life would not likely help them very much, if at all.  Trying to reason their way to more productive pursuits would probably only take them so far.

“Do you sometimes hear celebrities on TV talking directly to you, acknowledging your secret connection?”  

“Do you feel that, as soon as you leave a room, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and begins unloading about what a complete jerk you are?”  

“Do the commands you get when wearing your tin foil hat seem more reasonable to you than the ones you get from the neighbor’s dog?”

“Do you believe that Dick Cheney would kill thousands of people to get what he wants?”  (a few were trick questions, I noticed)

This interview was at times a little tedious, but there was nothing unpleasant or challenging about it.  After the session I spent about 20 minutes filling out a written questionnaire with many of the same questions, or questions of their ilk.  

“Do you believe a health insurance industry insider and lobbyist was deliberately placed in charge of drafting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to ensure that no violence would be done to the fabulous profitability of that industry by those with ‘noble’ ideals about human dignity?”  

I was also given a longer form to take home and fill out with questions about people who had influenced me, family dynamics growing up, the death of loved ones, traumas I may have experienced, my happiest moments, most significant events at various times of my life, what my main goals in seeking treatment are.  

The second interview was free-ranging and surprisingly enjoyable.  It was like an interview on a talk show conducted by an open-minded host who was intent on showcasing what I could do.  There were a few laughs along the way and the time felt very much like the time I spend writing here– following my thoughts where they go, retracing my steps to make a connection, clarifying something, adding an aside, noting that the aside was not strictly relevant perhaps, a laugh line, pause for ironic irony, back to a serious point, etc.

At the end of that interview I was asked to tell ten stories, five minutes or less each, about ten specific incidents in my life.  In the end, probably because I had told so many little stories in the course of the previous hour, the interviewer was satisfied with five or so stories.  Since all of these sessions are videotaped, I called afterwards to find out if I could have a copy of the interconnected stories.  They seemed to put my life and moral progress in a certain nutshell.

The stories are being kindly transcribed for me now by an assistant who works at the research study.  I was told by Conan they’d make the narrative skeleton of a novella with excellent bone structure.   He told me so the other night, transmitting the thought directly to me from my neighbor’s TV.  

I emerged from that second interview feeling like a wholly integrated person whose life made a certain organic sense.  Having the good fortune to be able to dedicate myself to a worthwhile but unlikely plan that could potentially shine a little light into a dark and angry world, having designed it based on insights gained from the often painful events of my life, seemed like a great blessing, in spite of the difficulty of struggling alone to do the impossible.  I’d work on reframing my daily struggles, get some help moving forward and, y’allah.

I had a call to say I was good to go for the therapy, they’d be charging me the low end of the sliding scale ($20 less than my co-pay for limited treatment under Obamacare, plus no $1,750 out-of-pocket), that the therapist would contact me (she did) and that the third interview would take place at such and such a time (yesterday at 3).  This was all good news, since I’d been pursuing a study like this since early December and yesterday was March 4th.

Then, yesterday, the third interview.  “How are you?” the young graduate student asked with a smile.  I nodded and said “OK” with only the faintest note of cautiousness in my voice.  I noticed, even then, that I didn’t do the polite thing and ask the same of her.  What harm could the meaningless pleasantry have done?   Asking how she was would have been a decent bit of human reciprocity  requiring perhaps two seconds to do.  I thought about that afterward, not sure if there was deeper meaning to assign to my failure to do the social thing.  I decided it wasn’t worth thinking about too much, that I hadn’t been there for polite chat, after all.

Her pleasant greeting soon took on a different cast as she began to probe with the final set of questions.  “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she might have said as she paused with the oversized needle only partially hidden.  The questions seemed innocent enough, but they were boring down into the answers, each ten words or so filled in on small blanks (do not use extra paper), that I’d provided on the questionnaire I’d done at home after the first session.   She was working from what looked like a typed and annotated transcript of my answers.

This is the beginning of the hard part, I realized at some point during that hour.   These are not softball questions teed up to me while a buzzed studio audience laughs and enjoys the show.  They’d set the speed on the pitching machine to ‘high’ and these pitches were being thrown with purpose.  A few came in right under my chin.  “Provide five adjectives to describe your relationship to your mother.”  The fifth of these, I recall, was ‘complicated’.  My arms were too tired to take a better hack at that fifth one.  

Then I had to describe why I’d chosen each adjective.  Complicated, and the thing that connected all the moving parts was the pain behind each adjective.   My mother’s limitations, the sorrows she’d lived with, the humiliations she’d undergone, all overshadowing her talents, work ethic, great intelligence and sense of humor.  My childhood had been lived on a battlefield, surrounded by mine fields and beyond them barbed wire and dark, muddy trenches, and my only escape was into the world of my imagination.  That world held hope and terror in almost equal proportion.  I felt by the end of the session as though I’d made almost no progress from that imagined world of hope and nightmare that was my foundation in life.  It seemed to me I live there still, in that war zone.   The insights I’d gained?  Butterflies of the imagination losing color and substance as I tried to remember them.

We were done in exactly one hour, the shortest time the exercise could be done in.  I told the young woman that I’d take 41 more seconds to show her something, she was agreeable.  A moment before I left the room a shuddering nine year-old wondering why the world remained such an evil place I handed her the iPad and she watched this, which elicited a few chuckles from her as she watched.  She asked if I’d seen the Lego movie, I hadn’t.  I gave her a wehearyou.net Idea Book, which she accepted gracefully (she’d admired Sekhnet’s label at the end of the previous session when I’d made a note in my own worn Idea Book).  I put my coat on as I thanked her and said goodbye over my shoulder turning toward the lobby while she went into the office in the opposite direction.  I didn’t pause or turn to make final eye contact with her.  

What’s up with that running out of there like a whipped dog, I thought a moment later, feeling a bit like a whipped dog.  I continued feeling that way as I walked the streets near the original school where I’d gotten the program up and running.  I was aware of a strong desire not to run into anyone I knew from that school.  “How you doing?” they’d ask.  “Good!” I’d say, wincing out a smile and turning slightly to avoid showing the whip marks on my dog back.

The hard part is why few people succeed at doing things that are hard.   There are many things leading up to the hard part that most people can do well enough.   Then comes the hard part and, as George Dubya Bush said, with visible peevishness, about good people in his administration who had botched the rescue of poverty-stricken hurricane victims  (the wealthier ones did OK, thank God), the delivery of democracy to Iraq and anything else they touched, “it’s hard work!”  

“Which of your parents were you closer to?”  And, in spite of the complicatedness of the relationship, I had no hesitation choosing my mother.  “My father was a total asshole,” I said by way of summary, like a petulant eight year-old,  before clarifying, rephrasing, reminding us both that considering where he came from, the unimaginably painful abuse he’d suffered as a young kid, and all through his childhood, he deserved to have it clarified– yes, he was a verbally violent man, but, as I’ve described, it’s more complicated than that, and I don’t say asshole in a dismissively judgmental way.  

I thought afterwards of my friend quickly walking back his understandable frustration with the demanding mother who was driving him crazy during his annual visit to her.  He began talking about how manipulative she is, caught himself and began to talk about what a basically good person she is, how lonely she is, how much she loves him.

The hard work of that third interview left me feeling my wounds for the next couple of hours.  I realized, walking away, that there would be no more getting-to-know-you sessions in the green room, no more canned laughs.  If this therapy was going to help me move myself and this program forward, the hard work would be beginning toot sweet (comme un dit).

I thought of the Temptations, Cloud Nine – “The childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty, I was born and raised in the slums of the city.”  My identification with those born and raised in the slums of the city is something I can’t shake.   My disconnection from those who lead comfortable lives and accept the inevitability of slums, the viciousness of the cycles of inherited poverty and inherited wealth, the routinized murder of children the New York Times refers to as “collateral damage”, the ongoing evil of wars fought only to make the rich richer, a status quo that accepts as an externality of corporate wealth that the vast majority of the world, and the earth itself, will suffer whatever is necessary to maximize profits… all these things in the category of things I cannot change and that I ask an indifferent, or wholly absent, God to grant me the serenity to know I must simply bear…  

“You’re getting yourself worked up, calm yourself.  Why do you do this to yourself?” 

Who the fuck are you?  The hard part, in a word, is anger.  We have a damned good right to it sometimes, yes.  Now what are we going to do with it?

How It Made Me Feel Today

Hitting the “publish” button here completes the illusion of instant connection to everybody, and I can see from the world map on my wordpress stats page that someone in Taiwan read my latest post, two people in India clicked by, or one person there, twice.  I can see when my friend in Poland has had a chance to visit and I nod, anticipating  the intelligent comment my note will sometimes inspire.  When I saw I’d had a visitor from Yemen a few weeks ago I involuntarily pictured the face of that little Yemeni girl, confronted by the camera, after the rest of her family was blown apart by an American missile launched from a menacing American robot plane.   Hearts and minds, Brother O, way to go, sir.   But if we look at this phenomenon of maintaining a blahg for what it actually is, what causes the fingers to tap and one of them to press “publish” at the end, it’s hard to say what it actually is.  

Like everything in the world we have multiple explanations, theories, half-assed (or full-assed) opinions, proposed answers.   Each of these illuminates the matter from a slightly different angle, each contains some bit of truth, each convinces us a bit more or a little less according to our tastes.  In the case of why people post things to the internet, Occam’s Razor doesn’t quite cut it.

Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing: making oneself known to another, strikes me as a huge reason people post things they create on the internet.   The impulse to connect with others in our increasingly connected, increasingly isolated culture is no doubt part of the heart of any complete explanation.  Sharing information, trying to unite with others, giving a take on news that seems vital to understanding but does not seem to get reported, except by the brilliant author of a book that sells well, wins an award, ignites a small discussion that is quickly spun into oblivion as the news media churns the cycle.   Celebrity culture and 24/7 media blaring and flashing in infinite forms makes almost everyone who partakes of it just a little bit thirsty for  Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fabulousness.  In our narcissistic age, why not tell everybody how that makes us feel?   And we have the technology now, and talent or no talent is no longer such an important distinction, we say fuck the corporate gatekeepers.  Everyone is a star, no?  Or if not a star, everyone is someone with something to say. Or with nothing to say, but a cool place to say it and WTF, LOL, ROTFLMAO.  My new boobs are nice, admit it.

I try to write well, and I write about things that get to me one way or another.   That puts me in the same boat with millions of other bloggers.   Democracy at work, yo.  “What is it you want from people?” my sister once asked me pointedly during a calm period in an argument that would soon turn ugly.   I told her I want a conversation, a back and forth where people speak openly about things they care about.  Ideally it’s like a catch, throwing the thing gently back and forth.  They listen carefully to each other, interrupt only for clarification and respond intelligently to what the other person is trying to communicate.  

My sister and I grew up in a war zone and my answer wearied her considerably at the time.   She and I have good talks these days, but back then my answer really annoyed her.   It seemed so much to want, I think, like someone insisting on clean water to drink every time they are thirsty in a land where people are keeling over from dehydration all around.  We had little experience of respectful conversation as kids, though both of our parents were otherwise quite intelligent.  Being funny was something we were used to, and my sister has a quick wit, as did the rest of the war party around our dinner table.  

“A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling,” said a dime store philosopher named Nietzsche.  True dat, Fredrich, as was “without music, life would be a mistake”, which goes without saying, and really, except for its indisputable truth, has no place here.   

I am not one to be coy about my feelings or opinions here, or anywhere, really, but this post is going to be a bit more personal than usual because it’s about how something made me feel about my own life today.  I was surprised at how acutely I felt it, under my skin, in my blood and cells.  

Which, by way of semi-amusing digression, calls to mind this email I had blind cc’d to me recently from a guy I was friends with years back, a great improviser on trumpet who really listened, as all great improvisers must, a brilliant photographer, a man of many talents:

Probably one of the most “in-depth” interviews I ever have given to anyone.

Talking about my photography, my movie documentary work, but also about aspects of my personal life and experiences I never shared with anyone before, not even my close friends.
Possibly an interesting read, especially if you are, like me, here in NYC, stuck indoors due to bad weather !
He provided a link, and a recent photo of himself looking darkly pensive, and the charming rascal signed it Much Love, which gave me a dry little chuckle.   I sent this email on to a few others who had known this chap, likely with a cynical comment in the subject line I couldn’t quite resist.  Epitaph on the tombstone, you know.  None of us were going to click on that shit, though we all enjoyed the Much Love.
Having set the table a little too fastidiously, and with that last digression, my strength to continue with what I intended to write tonight drains away.  I will be back at it again soon, because this experience today, at the final of three pre-interviews before I begin what I like to think of as my ECT, was not like the first two, which I enjoyed, and it brought up some deeper things than I was expecting, beginning with the inexperienced nurse smiling and greeting me, a little too solicitously,  “how are you today?  Uhm, you’re not squeamish about the sight of your own viscera, right?”
I was surprised at how prudish my readiness to be nauseated actually turned out to be.

Would I?

I recently found a large painting in acrylic of a nude young woman reclining, succulent.   She is painted from feet to head, casting a dramatic shadow to her left.  The style is right on the border of realistic and cartoon and I was glad I’d found it.   I hung it on the wall in my cracked bedroom where I can glance at it from my pillow (which led me to notice and regret that the two nicely rendered feet are of glaringly different sizes).  It was done from a drawing I remember making of her, on a piece of brown corrugated paper highlighted with a white china marker and gouache, the drawing being much better than the painting.
 
The girl in the picture, rendered as three dimensionally as I was able, was twenty or so at the time. The painter was thirty.   The painter had been reassured by a mutual acquaintance, when hesitating momentarily to ask the girl out, that she was uncommonly mature and that he was uncommonly immature and so the age difference should not be that big a deal.
 
I did not regret anything about the affair, except that it ended somewhat badly a year later.  She went on to marry a guy, a young executive type, who sounded like a self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy.  They moved to a city one would never think of voluntarily moving to, the corporation had promoted him and assigned him there.  I did not hear from her for years after that, which came as no surprise.   In that city she gave birth to their daughter and, in fairly short order, he revealed himself, in a way that became increasingly impossible to endure, as an ever more self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy and, also, an impressively complete asshole.
 
During the painful divorce negotiations she called me regularly and I spoke to her calmly.   She greatly appreciated these conversations and I didn’t mind having them.  Truthfully, painful conversations are one of the few times you get the real person instead of the veneer.  I would rather speak with the real person than the veneer, so I’m not ruffled by the painful situation that brings the real person out.   That the pain is not directly my own is another plus and makes it easier for me to speak in a calming way.
 
One day she called during the day, usually she dialed me late at night, and came to her point rather directly “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?”   Even typing these words now, years later, makes my eyes open a little wider.  I stumbled for a few seconds looking for the right way to say there were few things I’d rather do but that I was in a monogamous relationship with a person I loved, that she was putting me in a tight spot with the question, that at any other time…. and as I spoke I jotted the question; “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?” on a post-it to consider at my leisure, perhaps to write about ten or fifteen years later.

And in the usual course of things, the post-it remained in my pants pocket where I’d put it until it somehow found its way into my beloved’s hand on laundry day.  She asked about it, naturally, with a certain irked urgency and I was once again thrust into that uneasy tap dance the original query had caused me to tap out.

After her divorce, when things settled down for her, I stopped hearing from the girl, now in her late forties.  She contacted me about a year ago to tell me how great my program is and that she would be supporting it with a cash donation, but to my knowledge no donation was ever made. That was the last peep I had from her.

I think there is probably no point to have that painting of her at twenty, presenting herself like a birthday cake, hanging on the wall next to my bed, even if there is little chance of my beloved ever seeing it as she can’t stand the decrepitude of this apartment of mine and avoids it like the proverbial plague.

Which is not an unreasonable position to take.

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.