Category Archives: personal

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.

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Remembering A Remarkable Soul

The first two lines of a greatly appreciated personal email today, from a man whose mother died a few nights ago:

My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish,  a royal death.

She would have been 98 in a matter of weeks, and it was only recently that I heard her voice tiredness for the first time.  

I knew her for more than 40 years, making her around my age now when I met her, a small coincidence that just occurred to me.   If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 that remained to her, I would be very blessed.  

The only memory of her that is not pure sunshine is recalling how demanding a mother she sometimes seemed to be.  All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers.  Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.  As her oldest son noted, over the years we became buddies.

“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often.  If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grown up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often.  What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be.   Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.

She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time.  My parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring.  The graduation was in Newark, New Jersey.  Sophie emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and her husband in their nearby home.  The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.

She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and her husband to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort.  “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal.  The two couples became friends at once.

Her husband died, and, not long afterwards, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live.  Sophie was then close to ninety and had stopped driving on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye.  She took local streets, a trip that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.  I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died.  It was like the sun.  She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could.  She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.   She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.

A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B.  Sophie and my mother were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.   I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”.  My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up.  This cracked Sophie up.

“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!”  She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.

Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full.  My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die.  “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath.   I’d talk soothingly to her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.

Sophie walked slowly and deliberately at 92.  She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace.  She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.

One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die.  Sophie kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went.  She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example.  I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.

 

 

CV (revised)

I was self-employed as an attorney, never part of the corporate world.  I taught in the public schools for five or six years (teaching mainly third grade) before attending law school.  I have an MA in Creative Writing, my BA was in history and philosophy. 
 
I found I lacked real enthusiasm for the law and had philosophical as well as financial reasons for deciding to leave that adversarial world.   I set out several years ago on a path to help in the ways I am best equipped to help, doing work I can wholeheartedly believe in.
 
I envisioned a non-hierarchic, creative program where children could work together to make their voices heard.  I imagined the children in the Harlem schools where I taught having a place where their ideas would be listened to and supported as they demonstrate the depth of their imagination and desire to learn.   Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of stop motion animation in a way elementary school-aged kids could teach each other to do.  I invented a portable animation stand that fits in a backpack and sets up in five minutes.  The next two years I facilitated approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.   It is very gratifying to see how it works immediately, exactly as designed, everywhere I set it up.  Within minutes the room is a buzzing beehive of purposeful activity.
 
What I need now is help pitching, publicizing and selling the program.   I’m looking forward to hearing your advice and ideas about the steps I need to take to find the people I need to help move this from great working idea to  sustainable program.

Metaphor for a life

A human life is a universe.  It is (re)written:  she who saves one life saves the world.  The death toll numbers you see on corporate TV are from Stalin’s calculus– a million ended lives are an abstraction.  For every American journalist with a name whose face we see on video before a psychopath cuts his head off, thousands of nameless, faceless children and old people are killed in the name of fighting beheading psychopaths.   These kids and their grandparents have names, faces, universes, of course, but it is much more comfortable to think of them as collateral damage, necessary deaths to, theoretically, prevent our own murder, you dig?  Better not to dwell on what the nation does in our names, you say?  OK.  

So lie back on the couch and tell me the metaphor that best describes your life at the moment.  

“Waiting for a cat to shit to determine whether I’ll be able to go home today or continue waiting here for the cat to shit, possibly take him back to the vet tomorrow.”  

What?  

“He had diarrhea for a few days, I took him to the vet Saturday.  He took a loose crap Saturday night and then– nothing.   He’s regular as an atomic clock with that short digestive tract and his habit of waiting til Sekhnet gets back before hunching to uncork his turds into the sand, kicking the sand a bit until Sekhnet diligently scoops the shit away.  She calls herself the Elephant Sweeper, the one who follows the elephants in the circus parade with a shovel and bucket.   She got home yesterday, nothing.  Overnight and so far today, and it’s going on dinner time 48 hours later, nada.”

So a cat doesn’t have his daily bowel movement and you are stuck in place?

“Afraid so.  The vet’s girl said to call tomorrow mid-day if the cat hasn’t gone by then.  Trouble is, nobody will be here until late tomorrow night.  The cat could have real problems by then.”

So you are acting out of concern for another living creature you are attached to rather than in your own, strict self-interest?  

“Afraid so. The phrase is really apt, I am afraid.  Afraid of this metaphor that so accurately captures what my life has reduced itself to, with the help of an unrealistic goal of being the director of my own destiny.  Today my destiny is to wait until a cat takes a crap.  Not the destiny I had in mind for myself when I went to bed last night.”  

Not entirely fair, this waiting for the cat to pass some turds, while on the surface not a bad metaphor for your slow-motion, extreme close-up life at the moment, is not expressed in the way most fair to you.  Be fair.  

“This act of kindness to an animal who cannot help himself, while seemingly sentimental to some, is also an act of kindness to Sekhnet, worried sick about the handsome little animal she affectionately serves.  There is nothing I can do at my place that I can’t do here, or little, anyway.  I like the waiting for a cat to shit metaphor, though, it fits so perfectly.”  

Fits your self-mocking foolery, maybe, but not the larger purpose of supporting your powerful but delicate dreams and putting them out into the world.  

“True, my powerful but delicate dreams do not appear in the flattering chiaroscuro light they deserve when the metaphor is expressed this way.  I am clearly more than a man waiting for a cat to shit, although I am also, clearly, a man waiting for a cat to shit.”

Just so. 

 

CV

“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface.   Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY.   JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark.   Member of NYS and Federal Bars.  Quit drinking 2005.  Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans.  Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele.  Writing continually, rarely fiction.  Drawing and painting since age three or so.   Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized.  Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.  

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear).  Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy felt the same about me.    Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator:  bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.    

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country.   Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves.  Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness.  Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.  

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn.  Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes.  Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.  

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up.  Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love.  The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely.  Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow.  I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

 

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.  Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’