Category Archives: personal

Getting enough sleep

Sleep deprivation, as every dark site practitioner of “enhanced interrogation” knows, is the ultimate torture. Deprive the most well-trained partisan torture resister in the world of sleep for long enough and you will eventually break them in half, even as you render them insane. Being unable to sleep night after night, for whatever reason, will rob you of optimism and eventually destroy you.

On the other hand, a good night’s sleep is the best medicine. When you wake up after enough sleep your day starts off better, your mood is lighter. Get enough sleep day after day and your faith in the goodness of life and a large range of possibilities returns.

Of course, all bets are off when it comes to psychopaths. They may be insomniacs or machines that sleep exactly eight hours a night. What’s the difference?

How long it can take to learn simple things

I am an old man, made older by an implanted prosthetic left knee that developed an intractable inflammation and limits my walking to the range of an 85 year-old. I am grateful to have finally learned this simple but elusive life lesson, after experiencing it many times since childhood: those who act abusively toward you are incapable of doing anything else.

You can employ every trick you know to get along with someone who occasionally treats you with contempt, in the end, your best efforts will earn you more contempt and anger. When you see rage, get away from it. It took me 67 years to learn this seemingly simple thing, and I am grateful to know it now, but damn.

How can something so simple be so hard to see? Our need for love and connection is powerful. We are instructed, by virtually everyone, in the importance of forgiveness. If someone we have a deep connection with acts like a psychopath once in a blue moon, the proper thing seems to be to see it in the context of a long, loving relationship and forget about it. It makes us feel good to act with this kind of philosophical maturity. It also marks us as the perfect victim of an enraged loved one who needs to take their anger out on others from time to time.

Not so easy to look dispassionately at someone who swears they love us, someone we have shared many a wonderful time with, and grasp the brokenness in them, the terrible damage that makes them lash out unfairly, always blame others, insist on their indignant right to rage whenever they need to, at whomever they choose to direct it. Someone who acts this way is not a good partner for anything important. They are not someone you can work with or trust with your vulnerability. They lack all problem solving tools and any ability to compromise. Whenever the slightest conflict arises they always lash out in boundless, childish frustration.

Love them or not, believe their protestations that they love you or not, these damaged souls cannot be fixed. Not by you, not by a team of the world’s greatest experts. There is only one productive way to deal with them. It is not by trusting them to act less abusively next time. It is by completely removing yourself from their reach.

The greatest gift you can give yourself is learning this hard lesson and walking away from these unredeemable creatures whenever you encounter them. There is nothing you can do for them, and equally hopeless, nothing they can do for you — except rage at you, when the time is right.

Impossible irony

For a period of time I persisted in writing impossible letters, longshot attempts to persuade people I cared about to communicate with me, even as I knew they were now well beyond reasonable discussion. These letters attempted to do something no letter can do, silently get through to someone on the other side of a locked, fortified door and change their heart. I have a number of them here on this blahg. That I kept writing these letters is proof that I had not yet grasped an essential feature of human life — there are deeply rooted emotional positions that can never be changed.

I wrote these letters to try to repair painful estrangements. Only one, a letter to an old friend, a rabbi, ever achieved its short-term goal of reestablishing dialogue. That letter was perfected over the course of weeks, calmly making every painful point I needed to make while removing anything that could make the rabbi, who had behaved with surprising hostility toward me, feel defensive. It appealed irresistibly to his desire to be a mensch, to be admired, forgiven, to have his vanity stroked. We had a single warm but pointless talk as a result of that excellent letter. I realize now that the most moving letter I can write will change nothing.

At one point, after much agonizing, I wrote one of these letters to my niece and nephew, after years of estrangement. My sister is humiliated about certain true things that I witnessed in her family. She lives in terror of my big fucking mouth. If her children had relationships with me, the odds, she fears are overwhelming that eventually I would impart some of these humiliating true things to her children and she would never be able to reclaim their admiration and love.

A smart young man, around my niece’s age, offered to read the drafts of the letter and give me his feedback. He soon found himself at a loss. I mentioned to his father what a hard job his son had signed on to, and that I felt a little bad to have put that weight on him. The father volunteered to read the letter-in-progress as well. In the end, father and son both told me that my final draft of the letter was warm, loving and an excellent attempt at reaching out. I sent it.

I never heard back from my niece or my nephew. I have not heard from my sister since the letter to her children arrived. That was around three years ago. Now for a bit of impossible irony.

My old friends’ son, who had read the letter, visited us in a rented vacation house. He was unusually hopped up. His father had shared my pain about the silence from my niece and nephew. There was inexplicable, rising tension in that house that eventually became unbearable. Within a year the son would move back in with his parents and, two days later, be locked in a mental ward. His father and mother, after months of silence punctuated by anger, would be spreading the dubious, but apparently emotionally convincing, claim that I am the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I am dead to all of them. At least I’ve finally grasped the ridiculousness of writing impossible letters.

We live and learn, those of us capable of profiting from our most painful mistakes. Many have learned everything essential that they will ever learn by the time they are two years old, clenching their fists and vowing never to be hurt again, no matter what kind of person they are obliged to become. Writing a letter hoping to successfully question this kind of rigid, brittle self-confidence is pointless. Success is impossible, and the mission is futile, if also a supreme artistic challenge. I have finally learned that it is hubris to expect to succeed in that particular challenge.

Energy Vampire

Years ago an old friend, let’s call her Gina, decided that her old friend was not her friend anymore, in fact, that they were never really friends, in spite of their closeness in former times. She told others that the woman, in whose apartment she lived for a year or two decades earlier, was an “energy vampire” and everyone simply accepted that, like any of us, she had an absolute right to choose her own friends.

The old friend she rejected, and smeared as an energy vampire, was understandably devastated by this sudden repudiation. In my experience she is not an energy vampire, but the charge was enough for people who barely knew her to assume that Gina had every right to cut ties to someone who was demanding and emotionally draining. I had zero insight, at the time, into the narcissistic psychopathy of dear Gina, the woman who decreed her former close friend a life-draining energy vampire.

Fast forward a decade or so. I now have 100% insight into the raging personality problems of this damaged, controlling, easily enraged, terminally insecure woman of great charm, and former beauty. I, in fact, was reckoned far more dangerous than an energy vampire and she and her sychophantic [1] husband (she holds a humiliating secret over his head and she’s not shy about playfully flaunting it) deliberately assassinated my good name among a group of old friends.

I had a call the other day from a friend in France. At one point he mentioned a satire of a reality TV show called What We Do In The Shadows. A film crew lives with a group of vampires. He was laughing that the most feared vampire in the house doesn’t drink blood, it is an Energy Vampire. He’d never heard the term, he loved it, and he described the creature beautifully.

The energy vampire finds an empathetic listener, plays to the person’s kindness and then proceeds to latch on and suck them dry by droning on with the most boring possible monologue for hours on end. The energy vampire preys on its victim’s empathy and is expert at eliciting sympathy as it moves in for its long, painful drink. Once it senses kindness it gets its hooks into the person and never lets go until it has drunk its fill of the nice person’s empathy.

If we are too nice we can fall victim to these creatures, sure enough. That’s why maintaining healthy boundaries is so important.

Thinking more about energy vampires, and that unfair charge my old friend Gina made against her old friend, I realized how ironic Gina’s smear is. For one thing, Gina is not the least bit empathetic, though she does a convincing performance of it socially. Feelings make her very uncomfortable and she is adept at making anyone who needs to talk about feelings feel weak and pathetic. Energy vampires are powerless against someone like her, they will die of thirst if she is their only target.

Additionally, in her need for admiration, Gina is far more of an energy vampire than the woman she smeared as one.  The moment you question Gina’s right to control everyone else, she rages.  In her inchoate, irrational anger she is capable of things far worse than sucking someone dry of energy.  She is capable of anything any tyrant ever thought of.  I’d rush into the arms of an energy vampire to get away from someone as damaged and soul-destructive as her.

[1] sycophantic

  • Of or pertaining to a sycophant; characteristic of a sycophant; meanly or obsequiously flattering; courting favor by mean adulation; parasitic.
    Similar: parasitic
  • Given to obsequious flattery.
  • Attempting to win favor by flattery.

The GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English •

Deleterious Cognition finally defined

I had a concept in mind, since taking my first philosophy course at City College: deleterious cognition. I knew what it meant, knowledge that can only hurt you with no possibility of helping. I like deleterious cognition as a phrase, but I always had a devilishly hard time defining it (just like ‘catastrophizing pain’, a potentially revolutionary modality for pain management, but for the lack of an agreed on definition). The chairman of the philosophy department, KD Irani, after listening with a furrowed brow to my struggle to define my term, suggested that I might be referring to cognitive dissonance. I wasn’t, but, at nineteen, I couldn’t explain exactly why.

The other day, after an alarmed, alarming call from a kidney specialist about things that showed up on a recent CT scan, I had a moment of insight.

Deleterious cognition is a rumination on actual known facts with no hope of coming to anything but more fear, anxiety and other psychic harm.

In other words, had I taken up any of the numerous email invitations to see the full results of these worrisome scans, I would only open the door to deleterious cognition. I’d be looking at cold scientific facts, context free, with no option but to worry more. Hence, any cognition based on a scary report I have no intelligent way to interpret would be deleterious. Better to wait for a medical consult with someone who can put the scary facts into perspective and offer the best options.

A stickler would quibble about ‘cognition’ in that phrase, since the word means “mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. Can a terrified worst case scenario reading of scary medical information, without context, be called ‘cognition’? Who the fuck knows?

All I can say is that pondering the worst facts presented to you, fully considering each terrible piece of information and all of the inevitable extensions, reasonable or not, without the proper training and experience, can only lead to deleterious cognition.

Terror of humiliation leads to violence

Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

Your medical files speak the truth

Dr. D. talked me out of the biopsy my urologist had sent me to have. He’d looked over my medical records and told me he was confused about why I’d been sent for a biopsy. He said if he was me, and I just had a clean MRI, and my PSA had been steady for years, that he would put off having a biopsy of his prostate unless there was clear indication that one might be diagnostically helpful.

Since there was no indication that a biopsy was immediately necessary, the doctor told me, and since at my age any prostate cancer is going to be slow growing, there is no reason not to put it off until there is a clear indication of the need to do a biopsy.

Then he described the pain of the procedure and week of discomfort that is the normal after a needle biopsy takes twelve slices of your prostate, through your anus.   He convinced me there was no medical urgency to the biopsy, I thanked him and left without having the needles delicately inserted up my ass. 

The next time I saw my long-time urologist he immediately asked me why I didn’t have the biopsy. I told him the doctor he sent me to had talked me out of it.  I described our conversation. He pointed at his computer screen and read from my medical notes: “patient refused.”

Of course that’s what my medical record at the corporate hospital said. Phrasing it that way was the prudent, liability-avoiding way to notate our conversation. It was not false that I’d declined, or refused, the biopsy, though misleading. The medical record, after all, never lies. Put it on the witness stand, if it comes to it, and it will always say exactly the same thing.

The bit of self-protecting wording is also a nice snapshot of the essence of corporate narcissism.   The corporate bottom line, and only line, so ruled by the Supreme Court while creating this “person” out of legal fiction and political calculation, is profit and avoiding accountability/loss, after all.

What kind of person is a corporation, if not a single-minded, predatory psychopath?

Still, nice of Dr. D. to spare me the unnecessary hassle of that prostate biopsy. I sure hope he was right and I didn’t make a mistake refusing the treatment he was offering and ready to provide.

Faith can blind us

Toward the end of my slow recovery from a frustrating and fatal conflict with my two closest friends, with nonnegotiable sides drawn by a unanimous group of our oldest friends, now mutually dead to me, I heard a political scientist say this:

People get so invested in their belief system that they don’t care what’s true.

The simple truth of this hit me hard, explains so much about our tribal species. The dear old friend of fifty years who accused me of sadistically torturing her poor husband, my closest friend, “to bend him to my will”, is known to everyone as someone with a very strong will. People tend to do what she wants, it’s always easier than locking horns with her. If anyone was bending anyone to their will, it was far less likely to be me than her.

Then there are the facts, a year of cause and effect, my continued attempts at healing a conflict, her silent, steely ignoring of each try, punctuated by fits of rage, her determination to silence me, to be right no matter what. 

The alternative to my death and banishment from our group was unthinkable to her, the humiliation of being exposed as an angry, deeply damaged person incapable of vulnerability, or acknowledging fault when conflict arises.

Of course, when you are part of a cherished group and filled with attachment and belief, as in unquestioning love for a charming, charismatic friend who endearingly needs your admiration, you do not care what the “truth” is.  Her hurt is all that matters.

Faith is the strongest force in human affairs, it is rarely subject to the back and forth of discussion, persuasion and compromise.  Things that should be easy to resolve, in light of clear cause and effect, and empathy for the weakness each of us has, become impossible to ever fix. 

If there is unquestioning emotional faith on one side, and a strong need never to be wrong, no matter what, faith erases any “truth” that might call its rightness into question.  

There in a nutshell is the tragedy of human history.

The gift and curse of writing clearly

If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing.  Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking.  Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing.   It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability.  I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.

To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating.  It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.   

When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for  many reasons, some quite innocent.  Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”  

The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”.  It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt.  It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.

The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and other challenges.  Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically.   We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.

For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless.  I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.  

That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose.  If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.