Category Archives: personal

Even Dreams are Telling Me The Same Thing

It is horrible to find yourself judging your friends.  The world is cold enough without doubting those nearest and dearest to you.   America believes in the myth of the Rugged Individualist, the one who creates an empire out of a single apple and who doesn’t need anything but guts and relentless hard work.  It just never occurred to me that I might someday have to become that mythical figure (one that never truly existed, by the way) to succeed in the alternate form of success I am pursuing.

The painful truth is that I may have reached the crossroads in my life where the friends I have truly cannot understand what I am trying to do, can relate to it only intellectually, if at all.  If I was pursuing monetary success it would make much more sense to them than this odd mission I seem to be on, a man too lazy to acquire any kind of material wealth or comfort, a little scornful to boot, smugly superior in his quixotic charitable pursuit.   I find myself alone in the ways that matter most and it may be that I’ll have to find my new way with a new group of companions, people I’ve yet to meet.  The odd phrase from the New Testament rings in my head “let the dead bury themselves”.  My dreams are telling me the same thing.

In the dream last night I was literally left stranded by the highway, far from home in the darkness of a rural night.  Three cars filled with several of my oldest friends had taken off without me.  I’d been left because, without explanation, I’d stolen two or three minutes to pop into the rental car of a friend from out of state who, in real life, I have started consulting with about the nonprofit.  His car was last in a line of three or four cars that all did u-turns to take off up the nearby highway ramp without me, a moment before my friend said goodnight and drove off to his hotel in the rent-a-car.  

In the dream I called one friend driving off who cooly told me his coordinates on the map and his merciless wake up hour for work the next day, by way of answering my “where are you?”.  In the dream I exploded in a way I have not in waking life in many years “dick move, asshole!” I yelled into the phone before hanging up and trying to figure out how to get home from this distant town in the middle of the night, or at least find shelter until morning. 

This kind of hilarious practical joke by close friends reminded me of the day several of us biked the Five Borough Bike Tour with tens of thousands of others and the two friends I was separated from didn’t stop at any one of the four or five obvious places to wait for me.  I rode about ten miles in the throng of pedaling strangers and eventually found them at the next rest stop.   They had all rested and were ready to move on by the time I caught up.  I was trying to get sunscreen that stung like mace out of my eyes with bottled water.  Another guy from the group and I wound up racing on the Belt Parkway to try to catch up to the other three an hour or two later.  This was the first year a macho friend rode with us, and evidently she was intent on competing in this leisurely ride.

Twenty miles later, after riding hard most of the day to catch up to friends who seemingly didn’t take a moment to think of me behind them, struggling to catch up, I finally decided to call it quits.   I took a nap under a shady tree in a park by the Verrazano Bridge, rolled over in the cool grass and crushed the screen of my new Motorola Razr.  I biked to the nearest subway and went home.  The next day I flew to Florida again.  Two weeks later my mother was dead.

A Novel I’d like to write

The protagonist would be a man who, though gentle, truly did not give a rat’s ass.  One of the many annoyances that did not trouble him at all would be the silence of those who knew of his sensitivity to silence.  

This would be most vividly seen in the memorable vignette where he blissfully goes about his gentle business while, all around, those closest to him, intractably attracted to their own mothers, are busily having enthusiastic sex with them.

The Right to Rage

You have the right to rage, but there is a price you must be willing to pay.  You might think the rage itself is price enough, but you would be fucking wrong.

A mother, say, may rage at her child.   In the moment nobody is fast enough or strong enough to prevent the attack, certainly not the kid.   The enraged woman might have a right to her rage, a lawyer could argue, but if she takes a bottle and skulls her kid she has a right to be taken to the police station and sent over to the Laughing Academy for observation.

My father had been treated to this kind of tough love as a very young boy.  This kind of tough love may be more properly called hatred.  It leaves only betrayal and rage behind in the child who, instead of being protected by his mother, was beaten by her.  “A face only a mother could love,” has a bitter ring to someone who was brutalized by his own mother.

My father, to his credit, rarely lashed out with his hands to hit my sister and me.  It was the tongue, sharp as a bullwhip, that he lashed out with.  I won’t describe the torrent of hate speech that often foamed out of his mouth.  I understand it now, but, shit…

It is not unusual for children, watching one parent rage and the other cower, to make the obvious mistake:  the raging one is strong, the cowering one weak.  It is not weakness to cower and not strength to scream and threaten, or lash out.   I’ve seen many situations where a kid winds up emulating the style of the parent they identify as strong.   These situations are always sickening.

My father was very smart, and a gifted arguer.  He taught me the Socratic Method years before I heard of it.  A series of logical questions, with answers beyond dispute, leading to a conclusion, also beyond dispute.  I did some ju-jitsu on him one day on line at a wedding buffet in a bistro on Metropolitan Avenue.

“You’ve said many times that physical violence and verbal violence are exactly the same in the harm they do to the victim,” I said, piling some shrimp on my plate.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing, dignified, ready to rumble.  He already knew where we were going.

“So all the verbal violence around the kitchen table directed at A___ and me was the same as if you’d been beating on us?”  I asked, pulling a celery heart out of ice.

“That’s right,” he said, not avoiding it now.

“So would you say A___ and I were victims of child abuse?” I asked him, moving the Queen behind the Rook, and the celery heart behind the shrimp.

“Yes,” he said, “I would have to say that you were.”

The thing I remember most about this exchange, which took place more than twenty years ago, is the angry look my sister shot me over the old man’s shoulder.  She was mad on his behalf, her identification with the strong parent was greater than her realization of the damage he’d done to her.

You have the right to rage, everyone does.  But for the love of God, don’t do it.

Hopped Up, Exhausted, Immobile

Yes, I’ve been hopped up lately.  Thinking of my mother’s life and death a lot as the apartment where I spent time with her the last twenty years was sold yesterday.  Excited about the workshop with the nine kids grades 2-5 that will begin a week from yesterday.  Hopped up about the state of this apartment, which has been this way for a long time and needs to be fixed up.   Hopped up that I am drawing the same picture over and over, reading, emailing, reading, listlessly surfing the internet, drawing the same picture.  All around, the chaos I would tame, looking on mockingly.

Exhausted, truly.  Eyes tired all the time, reading a novel in too fine print, staring at this screen for hours at a time.   I can’t look away, even to make a long overdue appointment with the eye doctor.  Too many details to take care of lately, too many things on my mind.  Tired, yet unable to sleep for ten hours or however long it would take to not be so tired.  The picture I keep drawing finally tells me to stop it.

Image

Immobile, drawing the same picture over and over, staring at the computer screen.  Thinking.  “Stop thinking so much,” says Sekhnet, echoing the voice from Ecclesiastes “For in much wisdom, there is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” Ecclesiastes 1:18.  But I can’t help it, Ecclesiastes, old boy, not to say there is much wisdom in my vexation, nor agreeing that increasing knowledge necessarily increaseth sorrow, you know, I’m just sayin’.

Saw a Ted Talk by a man named Sugata Mitra, whose research shows the power of groups of poorly educated children to learn and teach each other what they are motivated to learn (watch it here, I recommend it). He concludes that “values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed.”  This is a very deep conclusion, if you ask me, comes close to the core of what’s wrong with the world we live in.  

He also concludes, as I do, that “learning is a self-organising system” (he spells ‘organizing’ like a former subject of the British Empire).  In other words, individuals and non-hierarchical groups can learn what they need to learn in an organic kind of way that reveals itself as it goes.  I’m in the process of trying to prove these very things, even as I can’t clear off my kitchen table or desk.

So the mind doesn’t stop thinking and the body doesn’t start doing, except to dance here on the keyboard, eight fingered, with the right thumb playing bass on the space bar.  I’d be better off sitting at a piano keyboard, or playing a guitar with eight fingers.  But even that wearieth me, man.

Why am I not going to sleep?  Most people in my time zone are having some serious REM sleep about now, dreaming.

It’s me, I think

I woke up in a room piled high with clothes on one side, random unused items carpeting the floor, a cracked wall and peeling ceiling, a Sony Trinitron and VCR un-used for perhaps a decade.  The clothes I’d put in a black contractor bag after the fire in the apartment downstairs were still there, in front of the blankets piled haphazardly on the trunk of drawing books.  My beloved Oinsketta had been alive during the fire, I rushed her and her tiny lungs out into the street.  It was probably a year before September 11th became a day of infamy.

“That bag of toxic, smoky clothes has been there for more than ten years,” a voice said indignantly.  And it’s true.

I woke up realizing it’s probably me, not the other maniacs I know, who is closest to being a kind of crazy.  Everyone I know carries their collected wounds, scars and disabilities, but not everyone does it so stylishly.

Awe

The blackness of the night, stretching over the world.  For each candle, a gust of wind.  Childish, this fear of the darkness, but it waits there at the end.  A terror as big as God.

“I’m wondering what’s gonna be,” says the old woman, her body already 90% devoured.  A few days later her eyes are only blacks, glittering like fire.  Then I am at her funeral.

A soul burns in the night, feverish, shivering like a young animal first smelling the end.

Exploring My Disdain for Driving Ambition

I should be clearing off my desk, or at least picking some things off the floor here, but it’s my time to do a bit of musing and tapping and that’s important to me too.  I was propelled out of bed last night by a swarm of mostly faceless anxieties and wrote about the unluckiness of this propensity of mine to sometimes brood, to helplessly watch my mood flip from strong to weak.  It is the other side of my luck in knowing what drives me, the same forces have made me particularly vulnerable to certain fears, even as I’m less susceptible to other fears that seem to drive many people.

It reminds me of a friend, raised by a mother who was generous with slaps in the face but not with love and support, who had a moment of terror at work when something he was responsible for began to go wrong.  His colleague, who had not been slapped but told “don’t worry, you didn’t make the world. You’re a smart boy, let’s figure out how you get out of this” didn’t worry, realized he didn’t make the traffic jam that was delaying things, knew he was smart and confident.  He calmly picked up the phone and suggested a simple fix that saved the day.  My friend’s intestines took a while to unknot, but the lesson was palpable, unforgettable.  I’ve told the story many times over the years.  It’s the perfect illustration of how the way we are raised either gives us a foundation for problem-solving or leaves us at the mercy of a sometimes merciless world.  

So, the way my father never saw love in the home he grew up in, confessed at the end his complete inability to express affection, since he’d had no model for it, I never saw mature problem solving or calm, methodical analysis of how to fix anything demonstrated in the home I grew up in.  I saw frustration, helplessness, rage and fear disguised in various crude get-ups.   It’s a deficit I must deal with, invent ways to solve problems, overcome moods, the way my father had to invent ways to show affection, no matter how stunted they may have seemed.

Back to the ambitious business person and my disdain for the type.   I think the biggest piece that irks me is the prioritizing of monetary success over everything else, the mercantilizing of human relationships– who doth it profit me to cultivate and who doth it not?   And this dehumanizing calculation, reducing each human to a net profit or net loss, is performed with the abacus in one hand and keen business acumen in the other.  Is this person good for my business’s bottom line or a drag on it?  Such is the thought process of the truly ambitious businessman.  There are not enough hours in the day to be successful and to daydream or shilly shally.  

Time is money.  It is the mantra of a materialistic society, it is a drumbeat that never sleeps.  There are slaves to pound the drums constantly and the successful love the sound of this beat.  It reminds them that in the competition that is life they are winners, while the guys banging the drums, well, they are not quite such big winners, though at least they’re not outright losers.  OK, maybe they are.

I think of the richest of the rich, people who have reaped enormous wealth from their corporations, wealth they couldn’t spend in a dozen luxurious lifetimes, and how hard they fight to hold on to several more tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, in tax reductions every year.  It’s envy, punishment of success and class warfare to suggest that investment income be taxed like the wages of the slaves who bang the drums for free enterprise.  Never mind that we are fighting fantastically expensive decades-long wars and dealing with desperate poverty here.  Can you say Ayn Rand?

Our nation is founded on the idea that unlimited wealth is the right of every person who can fight for and obtain it.  That few ever will attain the American Dream, well, that’s another discussion.  Yes, slavery was wrong, but at the time it was necessary.   OK, corporations aren’t really people, but we treat them as people so we can make certain laws and have the kind of government we need to help the richest among us while not letting the poor starve to death.  Or, if they do starve to death, to absolve us of moral responsibility for people who do not strive and instead choose to feel sorry for themselves because they are losers instead of winners.

I realize I am conflating some things here, oversimplifying things too.  But this is at the root of my disdain for people who put their own monetary profit above all else. They have no time to discuss anything else, it’s a waste of time, which is also a waste of money.  End of conversation.  You only want to talk about it because you are a loser, they will say, if they feel like being polite about it.  If you were successful and had the right values, they could add, you wouldn’t be attacking my right to have a hundred times more than I need while children a mile away are eating paint chips and shooing away rats.

But my heart has always bled this way.  You know, it just seems to me — and to song writers and the creators of that “priceless” ad campaign — that the most important things in life can’t be bought.  They may even agree that 45,000 people dying preventable deaths every year in the richest country in the world, for lack of affordable health insurance, is obscene, and a price too high for unregulated free enterprise.  Or that having to file personal bankruptcy because a family member has had cancer or some other catastrophic illness is the creation of a perversely immoral culture.

If you have gold plated health insurance you might say: why don’t these “poor” people just reach into their trust funds and buy decent health insurance, Biffy?

I’m sure there are driven business people who are very concerned with the poor.  I know of more than one billionaire whose foundation helps millions of poor people the world over.  But, if you will excuse me, I have a business plan to write, and spreadsheets to spread out (once I clear off this desk), and I can’t waste any more time/money pontificating here.  Is that clear?

I’m Unlucky in This

I have not learned certain things that most people learn.  I’m not making excuses, or blaming anyone, but I have somehow avoided learning a few key lessons, and these occasionally come back to bite me, like now, late at night when they propel me from my bed in horror that robs me of my rest.

My housekeeping, for example, is pretty bad.  I don’t know where this comes from, but it’s not good.  Chaos creeps across the desk, every table, up along the walls, on the floor, and among the chaos, a lot of dust.  It occasionally overwhelms me.   A normal person, coming into my apartment, must immediately feel something is very wrong, even though the place doesn’t stink or have vermin, since I keep the kitchen and bathroom relatively sanitary.  

I tell myself that I’m a creative person, that the disorder in here is no worse than in many a working artist’s studio, that it reflects a bohemian unconcern for conventionality, but I know as I tell myself this that I am full of it.  For some reason I never learned good housekeeping.

My disdain for business, and the kind of people who do business, who possess the competitive entrepreneurial drive that keeps them at work late into the night, wakes them early in the morning to get back to their consuming ambitions.  These kind of people give me the creeps.  I don’t know exactly why that is.  I think this disdain is a bad thing, just because somebody seems to think of little but money, fame and power, chases it all day and in their dreams, does not mean they are a bad person.  I have not learned to get over this feeling, which I realize is at least partially irrational and certainly is the kind of prejudice I try to avoid.

I am unlucky in this too: I find my spirit flipped in a moment sometimes, from a rational optimism and faith that things will work out to a deep and implacable pessimism that assures me everything will go badly.  I’m not sure what it was today, though it seems to have been when I sat down and recorded a one take acoustic version of  “Brokedown Palace” that I liked very much.  I sang it while playing the guitar, overdubbed another voice and another guitar and then put a simple bass line to it, panned left.  It had the kind of space and spontaneity I am always going for, and it was take one.  I was about to mix it down and go prepare dinner for Sekhnet.

Garageband crashed, “quit unexpectedly” is how the machine put it, and when it came up again there was nothing there.  Wiped away like it never existed.  Suddenly the metaphor for death was unmistakable, the futility and vanity of human endeavor stopped me in a way it never stops the driven businessman.  A pall was cast over the day and the miraculous fact that technology let me  be a one man band and record a nice song in five minutes was lost on me completely.  And even though my subsequent recreations of the track came pretty close to the original, the idea that I’d had that inspired track stolen by a stinking machine burned me, continues to burn me.  It reminded me of the delicate pencil drawings, unlike my usual work, that a friend borrowed years ago, promising to take good care of them and get them back to me.  He lost them, has no idea what happened to them.  It burns me like that, though there is no reason for either thing to burn me.

So I am unlucky in this even as I am lucky in other things.

meditation

There are small kindnesses, everywhere, that are very easy to do and yet are beyond us.  We may even see them laid out for us, ready to be picked up and given like the precious gifts they are, but not do them.  After all, our day may have sucked with sharp teeth and nobody did any small kindnesses for us.  We may even be dealing with monsters all day long.

The person you love the best may say “yeah, you’re real gentle,” letting the sarcasm ring without a hint of poetry.  The thought that she says this because she thinks you should have been kinder to her, no matter how else you’ve tried to be gentle, may make you feel like snarling.  You don’t snarl, but that look on your face, as you stare at the road ahead, will do nicely.

“See?” she will think to herself, and feel absolutely just to think this.  She will even be right to feel that way, though it will burn you in that moment.

Any of a dozen small kindnesses you could have done earlier could have softened it, even a second or third if the first wasn’t appreciated.   Gentleness must be endless, or it is not really gentleness.

Fucking hard, though.  I know.