Category Archives: personal

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.

What Should Be and What Is

I would sometimes tell a judge, if I thought she had a sense of humor, or of irony, “‘Should’ is a word one should not use when speaking of Adult Protective Services.”  I was sometimes mistaken in my assessment of senses of humor and irony, but the point remains, and even the grimmest, dullest, most literal and judgmental judges got it.  

There is what should be — the state of affairs that logic, efficiency, mercy, justice, honesty, fairness and other convincing factors suggest is the way things ought to go– and the way it actually is:  just the world, how it will sometimes kick you or a loved one in the face, or the ribs, or the groin, how sometimes it does it by accident, sometimes on purpose, with passion or dispassion, personally or impersonally, and sometimes just because.

The healthy runner who dies of a massive heart attack, the good man struck down by a quick, sharp, relentless cancer, the person who least deserves advancement, getting all of it, plus untold wealth, while her more deserving colleagues scramble for the last bed at the homeless shelter, go mad and stinking without access to mental health care or a shower. 

The examples are too many, and too treacherous, to detail in a short post.  They are too tedious and draining to set out in a long post.  Everybody has their own list: things that should have been one way but instead were another way.  A friend I should have been more of a friend to, now dead.  A family member reduced to the sum of his faults and neglected.  Music that should have been played, but only silence instead.  A hand that should have reached out turned into a fist.  A conversation with a dear friend on the edge that should have been gentle and helpful, turned into a zero sum game.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, my friend.  You should fix your own life before you try to fix mine.”  

“I’m not trying to fix your life, I care about you and I’m expressing my concern.  I want to make sure you’re OK.”  

“That’s what you say.”  

“Who else am I to speak for?”  

“Clever, as always, Mr. Rhett Oracle Question.”  

“I’m sorry.”  

“Yes, you sure as hell are.”  

“I’m serious.  I’m worried about you.  Are you OK?  Is something going on with you?  Talk to me.”  

“I’m fine, worry about yourself, better.”  

“Are we stuck in a loop?”  

“Speak for yourself, Glue Man, I’m the Rubber.”  etc.

I find it particularly sad that I am giving any thought at all to the statistical book-keeping of the website that allows me to post these words.  Two people, one who liked and the other who began to follow this blagh today, two people I’ve never met, are not being included in my stats.  I was shut out today when, really, I should have had at least those two scratches on my tally.  One more person liked the previous post about the shutout while I was tapping out this post.  Where are those three tallies?   

Some believe that starting tonight God is reviewing a giant ledger where all of our deeds, and the actions we should have taken but didn’t, are recorded.  According to this tradition He is considering who shall be rewarded and who shall be punished, who will wax rich and who will be poor.  We have little more than a week to make right whatever debts we have failed to acknowledge, thank whoever we have failed to be grateful to, apologize to and soothe anyone our hasty words, deeds or failures to act may have hurt.  At the end of the Ten Days of Repentance God will finalize His notes about the course each of our next twelve months of life, or death, will take.  He will inscribe His will in the Book of Life, our permanent record, and, at the end of the day of fasting when even the great Sandy Koufax did not pitch, will seal the book, and the fate of all inside.

Of course, many also believe that God is dead, or a concept by which we measure our pain, or a figment of human fear, ignorance and superstition, or many other things besides a divine being who created the universe and takes a keen interest in human morality.  

I remember at eighteen thinking that God does indeed exist, and that He looked down upon the way the humans He created treat each other, His heart broke and He went mad in His grief.  And gave us the host of ongoing plagues, in His sorrow and superhuman madness, that are visited upon us each time things are the way they are, instead of the way we know they should be.

The Puckish Nature of the World

I wrote here a while back about a friend I’d lost touch with who has the annoying habit of writing a witty email every few years, engagingly asking for feedback or a favor.  The feedback is given, the favor done, and then years pass without a peep from him.  It has earned him the enmity of more than one person I know and I’ve been fairly disgusted by it.

He was recently in town and I mulled over responding to his insistent, twice sent email seeking to get together when he was in town.  I replied, mentioned surgery around the time he’d be in NY, he replied, uncharacteristically, and said he’d write more soon.  A few weeks passed, then his itinerary arrived, which I treated with a healthy dose of silence.    

A few days later I had a voicemail from him, arrived in NY hours earlier,  posing as my surgeon, inquiring about my recovery, trusting it was smooth and pain-free, then pleasantly telling me that he and his wife were at my service and would come to me at any time and place convenient for me.   I took another oxycodone and drifted off without calling back.   Seven hours later his next message arrived.  I mulled over listening to it, decided against it, watched TV, wrote a few emails, took more drugs, drifted off again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t listen to the message yet,” a friend said the next day.  I really wasn’t that curious.  I knew over time the messages would be tinged deeper and deeper with the hurt tones of someone forced to keep drinking their own medicine.  I thought about it, when I did think about it, as the 8 year-olds in Harlem used to, when a bully met someone who hurt him and was crying.   “Good for you,” they’d call out to the crying kid, while hiding their identities.  

I eventually sobered up, decided that my sadistic inaction, pleasant though it was, and justified as it might have been, was not of a piece with the gentle stance I have been trying to maintain.  I called him back, informed him that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get together with him and we proceeded to have a pleasant chat.  It turned out the infinite flexibility would all occur on a certain day, the day before they left, and that was a complicated day for me.  If there was any question of exerting myself to get together with them, the limited time frame made it impossible.  

But all this tedious background is for this.  He told me at one point, as we discussed my animation program that has just crept its first fins on to land and is about to close up the gills and breathe air for the first time, that he’d been in a one-day animation workshop in a summer program in a San Francisco art museum as a boy and had never forgotten it. 

“I remember almost nothing from before I was about 14,” he said, “but I have vivid memories of how cool it was, at ten, to draw these crude things on cels and then see them played back as animation.  I remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the program and watching the animation I’d done on a big screen, and how amazing and exciting it was.  I remember it 45 years later, and almost nothing else from that time in my life.  So it made a huge impression and I’m sure the kids lucky enough to be in your workshop will have a similar experience.”

Wow, I thought.  What a great little sound byte to record and use to promote the program.  

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s been great talking to you.  We’ve missed you and are sad we won’t get to see you, but we understand, it’s a short trip and your operation and all.  But,” and his voice got very tender and sincere “let’s stay in touch.  You know, we should email and talk on the phone once in a while.”  He sounded, for all the world,  like a person who actually did these kinds of things and I managed to say “sure, that would be nice,” instead of laughing in his face and telling him how hilarious he was.

“Oh, listen, send me your latest animations, I love them.  And I’ll send you feedback and stay in touch,” he said, and again I managed not to spoil the mood by guffawing like a donkey.

The next day I sent him the latest animations with a short note about his great story of being a ten year-old animator for a day.  I told him the story would make a great promo and suggested we get a recording of him telling it.   I let him know how nice it was to hear from him.  

That was only two weeks ago.  It’s not that I expect to hear back from him, I just think it’s another great example of the puckish nature of the world, if you look at it the right way.

Inspired to do the milder thing

Had a call just now from a friend who has her ups and downs.  She was up today, yesterday had apparently been a great day.   When she began telling the story I thought we were heading towards the delicious coldly-served revenge scenario she’d been sketching out for a while in regard to this particular person.

Instead she’d had a revelation, the person who’d hurt her was a damaged, suffering soul who was sorry for the behavior.  They’d spent a surprisingly lovely day together, spoke of and laughed about the various revenge scenarios that would have been richly deserved.  “I tell you, I feel light as a feather today, letting all that anger go,” she reported happily.

Inspired by our conversation I decided to call back the person who is the subject of A Puzzle for You and Psychic Role-play.   The puzzle was solved– be mild, direct, no need to bring up the guy’s worst, most annoying side, even when he says, with apparent conviction, that we should stay in touch.   I have nothing against staying in touch.  We had a few laughs and talked for a good while.  It was a most pleasant conversation.

Better to be mild than punitive, when the offense, in the larger scheme of life, harms only your perception of the other person.  It’s easy to reduce someone to the sum of their annoying faults, but there’s also a baby, probably worth saving, in that stinking bathwater.  

I shouldn’t really use that metaphor, though, I don’t have much use for babies.

Psychic role-play

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.

Perspective

“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…

A puzzle for you

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”.