This post should be read in conjunction with Puzzle for You, also in the Personal category.

I have a second voicemail from the fellow I described in the previous post.  The first one came at noon today, this one arrived seven hours later.

In his first message he suavely introduced himself as my doctor, calling to make sure the operation had left me without any discomfort.  Then smoothly he became himself, assured me that he and his wife were at my disposal and then, in the evening, he reached out again.  I haven’t listened to his second message yet, but I assume the tone will be slightly less playful.

Why don’t I listen to his second message now?  I don’t really want to hear it, at the moment, the same way I didn’t feel like improvising a duet with him when he called for a second time today.  And, as it happens, T-Mobile, my cellphone provider, sometimes doesn’t deliver messages until several days after they’re left.  I am surprised, sometimes, when missing a call from my sister, that she’s left no message.  It’s not like her not to leave a message.  Then, three days after I speak to her the message from earlier that week is delivered to me.  It’s the damnedest thing.

So I have deniability, as well as a bit of sadistic tit-for-tat pleasure in ignoring the second call.  All I have to say is that stinking T-Mobile often waits three days to deliver voicemails and I’m off the hook.  What can I say?  I didn’t tell him that I didn’t hear his messages, only that T-Mobile is so often bad at delivering messages.  It’s like a politician’s perfect lie:  the truth of it is undeniable, yet it is completely untrue and has no application to the actual facts at hand.

Another thing I understand is that he and I are playing psychic roles for each other, the dimension and scope of which are hard to define.  It may be that I am very much like his father, who was droll, quick and emotionally elusive.  It may be he stands in for the good friends who don’t answer emails and takes the lumps for all of them.  These people, in turn, are standing in for my parents who always insisted that since I was a genius and know-it-all I really didn’t need their feedback and should stop whining about the strategic silence.  

If things hold true to form, in this hideously choreographed ballet, his tone will get less and less playful, take on more and more of an edge, for every call he makes that is not returned.  He’ll be hurt, the wronged party, complaining, unjustly treated badly, increasingly, with every additional message he has to leave.  For my part, I already feel justified in not getting back to him right away.  I act this way because I’m far from being a saint, though further along than I was when I was still doing battle with my parents.  As for him?  I have no idea, really.

“It’s your perspective,” she told me, not for the first time, when I reported another unenergetic start to the grey day stretching before me.  

“You’re stating the obvious again,” I reminded her.

There’s also the unsightly, slightly uncomfortable technicolor excavation of what was once my navel.  Purple, brown, yellow, maroon, greenish, a concave rotting peach in the center of my belly.  It prevents me from springing up and down on my hands a few times to get the blood flowing, to shake up my mood.  Doesn’t let me take an aerobic bike ride, either.

It is a matter of perspective, of course, and I was glad that for once she didn’t compare my outlook to my mother’s perspective.  My mother was given to these low grade depressions, seeing the proverbial glass as half empty instead of half full.  Either way, I say, it’s half a glass of juice where there once was a full glass (assuming it was ever full).  On the other hand, if we think of it as a glass of, say, piss, that one has to drink, instead of juice, in that case it’s better to see it as half empty than half full.  

I tend to think my mother should have taken those extra years of life as more of a blessing than she did, but it’s hard to judge her emotions in the years she lived without a husband, who died and left suddenly, six days from ER to funeral home, with no sphincter to clench when she had to go to the bathroom, with an endlessly creative cancer bearing down on her from several directions, alone, with the wars with those she was closest to flaring constantly.

“You should try to be more positive,” Sekhnet pointed out, this time blessedly (Bless you, Sekhnet) not making the connection with my mother, or my father, for that matter.

He styled himself a curmudgeon as the years went on, fumed regularly about the demeaning idiocies of the world.  His basic stance became misanthropic, his view was that people were basically self-serving, shallow, manipulative pricks. There was an element of defensiveness in this, of course, since he had to be on guard from the time he was first able to stand.

I’m no Anne Frank, not any more.  I don’t believe people are basically good or basically bad.  I think everyone is under a lot of pressure.  Some comes from within, some is thrust upon us and much of it comes from a relentless mass media selling the ideas that will keep the pressure on.  The advantage to keeping the pressure on is that a populace that is not under pressure, not distracted at all times, will eventually get together to demand the changes that they need.  Changes that will certainly tend to disadvantage the most advantaged and advantage the most disadvantaged.  And, as God himself knows, we cannot have that.

For example, the bad smell humans have when under pressure was part of a survival mechanism, the result of evolution or brilliantly intelligent design, as you prefer.  The stink of terror sweat could be a deterrent to predators.  The swooping animal would hesitate–“damn, that bastard stinks!” and in that moment the human could scamper out of harm’s way, live to reproduce its DNA with another stinking hominid.

The bad smell, over millenia, became a boon to a trillion dollar industry, as a procession of ever more ingenious chemicals was discovered to mask the bad smell.  Then the industry specialized, there are bad foot smells, breath smells, armpit smells, special feminine bad smells.  Of course, the industry would be nothing without marketing, making everyone aware of the need for the product, the humiliation of not having the product.   Marketing, of course, would be nothing without the visionary ingenuity of great artists and social psychologists.

But there I am again, riding in circles on one of my favorite pet peeves, instead of doing something productive today.  Oh, dear…

This puzzle should be read in light of the previous post, about wishing everyone a calming of the reflex to strike back, about being mild and not angry.

A lapsed friend from freshman year in college sends an email every few years, opening conversations he does not pursue.   One told me all about his life and asked me in detail what I’d been up to in the fifteen or more years since we’d last seen each other, what I believed in.  It seemed to call for a manifesto about my values, which I took a couple of hours to write.  One expressed admiration for a guitar track I played on a short animation I put on youTube not long ago.  I thanked him, asked if he still played.  One asked a legal favor for his daughter in NYC.  I responded with a long email explaining the pertinent NY Law, that I no longer practice law, but that his daughter was welcome to call me to discuss the situation.   To my annoyance I never heard back to any of my replies.  

I mentioned this to a friend recently, since I’d had an email that this fellow, a few weeks before he and his wife were coming to NY, telling me that they hoped to see me during their short visit.   “When I didn’t answer him right away, he sent me the same email again, just forwarded me his previous email twelve hours later.  Struck me as kind of a dick move, especially for someone famous for not replying to emails,” I told a friend who also knew him.  

My friend’s reply was uncharacteristically harsh.   He reminded me of great favors he’d done recently for this person, also with no acknowledgement, and apparently not for the first time.  His solution, he told me, was to leave the messages unread, in a kind of spam folder he’d had set up for just this guy’s emails.  “When he leaves town send him a friendly email telling him how nice it was to see him when he was here.”

I admit, the simplicity, justice and understated viciousness of the plan tickled me.  

I admit, also, that this guy’s particular tic, not responding (while being demanding of a response when he wants one) is like kryptonite to me.  Silence by way of response is a kind of death sentence to me.  It can come from many places– being too busy, being preoccupied, not knowing what to say– or from worse places– obliviousness, insincerity, selfishness, anger.  

Silence is the clearest, easiest way to disapprove of something, it implies, with no effort at all, that the thing in question never even existed.   Although I’ve made strides over the years, I struggle with silence by way of response.  It is hateful to me, especially since, in the age of email, tapping a few keys is so easy.  If I live by one credo it would be “what is hateful to you, do not do to others”. 

A few hours ago I had a voicemail from this guy, arrived in NY, looking forward to our visit.  Informing me genially that he would bend his schedule in any way necessary, he and his wife would come to me, wherever was most convenient, so that we could hang out.

I don’t want to visit with him at this point, though when I first wrote back I indicated it would be good to see him  and his wife.  I had a few words back from him, and a promise he’d be in touch in a day or two.  Two weeks later I had an email with details of the redeye flight and their general itinerary.  Then his call today.

So that is your puzzle, Dear Abby.  I don’t want to do what is hateful to me, that is, respond by way of easy silence, as I had thought to do.  I could take the polite, semi-honest, route and tell him that my operation was more debilitating than I expected (actually, it was) and that I am busy catching up with things I couldn’t get done last week, that time got away from me and unfortunately there will not be a moment to get together.  

I could send him an email, three or four sentences about the combination of actual factors, not least of them his habit of starting conversations that die out because he doesn’t seem interested in continuing them, suggesting a lack of authenticity that makes the prospect of a visit unappealing.  I am not up to the particular kind of acting that social situations sometimes demand.

I could simply send him a link to this post.  

I could be more direct still, calling him and laying out the facts, including the most pertinent one, that we are not really friends and that it probably wouldn’t really be very interesting to get together, at least not for me.

All of these options require some degree of effort on my part.  Silence takes no effort, but I well recognize the ugliness in it.  We must resist becoming what we hate, especially when justified to act that way, if we are sincere about becoming better, not worse, people.  

I’m leaning toward the quick email and the truth, in a day or two, since forwarding this link (a more elegant solution) would compromise the privacy of the friend who devised his own solution for dealing with this person’s demanding, nonreciprocating nature.  His, what my grandmother and mother would call “chutzpah“.  The first syllable of this handy Yiddish word begins with a rattling clearing of the throat, by the way, and not the way you sometimes hear it on TV, as though the ‘ch’ at the beginning were the first letters of a word like “church”.

My sister, who does not have an easy life, was roughed up by our parents during the long battle that was our childhood.

“You had it much worse,” she told me once, “because you stood up to them, you always fought back.”

Whether I had it much worse, I’m not sure, but it was bad enough.  And it’s true I fought with them, all through my childhood and beyond.  My sister and I grew up in a war and it was everyone for themselves.  Violence and anger begat more of the same, as well as distrust, intense dislikes and other toxic biproducts.  

Eternal vigilance against bullies and exploiters was a theme in personal and professional life, and a detriment in both.   I never learned how to be direct and get what I need, the overarching moral component always cast a menacing cloud over those practical considerations, confrontation with the inevitable enraged, petty assholes life places everywhere was unavoidable to me.

Now I am committed to nonviolence, in word and deed.  It is  a hard, bumpy road in a rugged winners vs. losers society where sucker-punches are considered good sport.  You will notice quickly, if you announce your commitment to nonviolence, that people you meet, including those closest to you, will challenge you continually.  As soon as you slip, they’ll be ready to point and smirk.  You will not, like Gandhi, have a community of like-minded fellows to support and applaud your resolve, but an army of hooters, ready to restrain themselves or bust loose when your fist clenches in spite of itself.

I recently found a video of my parents as a young couple.  There was one amazing sequence where my father, an angry, quick-witted, supremely defended individual who believed, not without evidence, that the world is full of betrayal, turned in the sunshine and smiled at the camera as he walked.  Not a bad looking man in photographs, the man in the movie radiated optimism, intelligence, humor, warmth, and that nonchalant sense of his own power that the world calls ‘charisma’.  I watched it again, ran it back, watched the handsome, poised young man turn again to smile directly into the camera’s eye.  I described the sequence to my sister over the phone.

“What happened to them?” she asked, half laughing, half full of horror.

I didn’t know, but I described again how this good-looking young man radiated confidence and seemed ready to take a big bite out of a delicious looking world.  My sister and I never met this man, or even his reflection or shadow.

“I think it was us,” my sister said, “I think our being born did it to them, changed them for the worse.”

I didn’t think so, don’t think so.  But I recognized it was the scars in my sister’s brain that let her come so easily to that conclusion.  Our parents had seemed happy, were both good-looking, life was ahead of them, glittering.  Then, by the time we knew them they were both pretty unhappy campers.  She puts the evidence together, in the light most damning to herself, et, voila, a conclusion that can only lead to more pain.

My father’s soul was broken early, and I know some of the  terrible details of how it was done.  My mother, likewise, a child entering a lifetime of uneven combat with a cunning adult caregiver swinging a club.  It was waiting for them from the beginning, the fear, denial, anger, over-eating, lashing out in blame, the neuroses that came later. 

“I think it was us,” says my sister again.  It’s Occam’s Razor to her, the shortest explanation, everything else being equal, tending to be the right one.  They were happy, we were born, they were miserable.  Therefore, it must have been us.

I told her I didn’t think so, that it was waiting there all the time, the inevitable defeat they were set up for from the start.  But she remained convinced that it was our parents having my sister and me that destroyed their chances for happiness.

And I think of the scars that were inflicted during all those battles around the dinner table.  A parent who was not scarred that way would never think of inflicting it on their child, no matter how much of a trial or disappointment the kid was.  It takes a lifetime of conscious work to get some actual healing done, sometimes more.  And while you’re doing it, it’s best to deal mildly with the hecklers.

The same force that used to drive me away from digging myself out is now slowly coming together to help me dig myself out.  Supervising the reversal of this force is slow, patient work.

It is either remove some of this heavy dirt that is closing in or be buried in it before I’m dead, it seems to me now.   And the force that kept me from digging had the easy appeal of fun.   It offered the stark choice: “would you rather tackle this hopelessly complex mountain of stuff, or invent some nice things against the tasty vamp behind the curtain?”   It wasn’t much of a choice, actually, the tasty vamp won every time, even as the mountain became higher, deeper, more difficult to think about taking apart.

But I take my courage where I find it now, shredding all but the courtliest examples of my former craft when I take the folders apart.  The hundreds of pages not in folders usually make me wonder why they weren’t tossed a year earlier, in some cases five years earlier.  I don’t wonder long, on a mission, now, first to clear the table and desktops.  If the mission lasted twenty minutes today, well, that’s twenty minutes to the good.

It took many years for the mountain to get this dark and dense, it will not be scaled and resized  in the blink of an eye.  It will take many, many, many blinks of an eye.  And then some.