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Note on Son of Letter to etc.

Interesting to notice how the unconscious mind grapples with a seemingly unsolvable problem.  When you are under ongoing stress from a difficult to bear psychological torment the brain struggles against it in the background, I suppose.  Objectively, your situation might scream for relief– anybody in your position would be ready to start shouting, particularly if there is no possibility of relief.  

The way things are set up here in the Free Market, you’d better have a lot of money to buy influence if you are burnt by something that desperately needs changing.  I have been banging my head against repeated drafts of a letter that has, at best, a small chance to influence even NY State’s publicity hungry AG to take action.  First a bit from the trenches:

My Obamacare navigator (the “in-person assister” who helps consumers find their way on the opaque New York State of Health website) was on the line with me Monday when I called to get my subsidy reinstated.  The quickest way to resolve this situation is to simply run my numbers again and calculate the subsidy the law entitles me to.  

This, I learned, will be impossible to do, according to the New York State of “Health”, without jeopardizing my current coverage– they can’t grant me a special extension to refile while they examine their clear error in denying me the subsidy the law entitles me to now.  I snarled a bit then preserved my right to appeal the removal of my subsidy.

My navigator heard that I am unable to refrain from snarling at the NYS rep Clint Eastwood-like but at length, whenever my low threshold for frustration is exceeded.  Now, no doubt, she understands that this Patient Protection Act shit has driven me a bit crazy.

The first time I exploded was when they rejected my appeal request because my scanned tax return with my signature did not have a handwritten date next to my signature, only a typed one by the paid preparer, a filing date verified by the official IRS tax transcript which was sent with it…

My navigator, a lawyer who works for a busy nonprofit assisting some of the thousands fucked by the Patient Protection Act, looked over a previous draft of my letter to the AG.  She emailed that I needed to focus on what I was really asking the AG to do– in the mode of “question asked”.  At law, you can’t complain without requesting specific relief within the power of the person you are petitioning to grant — well you can, but it won’t get you anything. 

It’s like that dilemma described in “Standing on a Phantom Leg” — part of my unconscious grapple with this very issue of being fucked without a remedy at law.  The complaint can be irresistibly well-drawn, but for legal purposes, it has to state a “cause of action” and request specific relief the court can provide.  The letter as written, and posted the other day as Son of Letter, in addition to being bloated and senselessly recursive, really doesn’t state exactly what I am asking the AG to do.

Reading a skillful litigator friend’s critique I realized the most recent draft of the letter was a long foul ball.   If I wrote it to the chief of the legislature, and my congress person, and everyone else in the New York State legislature, maybe a reasonable letter– since they are the ones to write the laws.  But all the AG can do is enforce existing laws.  I have to convince him that NYS insurance companies routinely commit widespread fraud against mandated low-income health insurance buyers utterly unprotected by New York State law, in spite of the fig leaf of administrative supervision by the Department of Financial Services.

Will it persuade the AG to rush off for a news conference (he’s a progressive and a publicity hound)?  That is the only question to be asked of the letter.  Written well but not hitting the mark?  Who cares? I have no time for that kind of writing.  I need this letter to be a clean base hit if I have any hope of it spurring the AG to action.

THIS JUST IN:

The New York State Attorney General has the power to, and does, propose legislation.   Yee fucking hah!  Back to the drafting table.

NOTE: Hanging with the skeleton of my father

I didn’t imagine, when I started to write the story of my father’s life, that his skeleton would start a conversation, or how quickly I’d be drawn into it.   It seemed only natural the first time he popped up to give me mild shit about something I’d written.  He often had a problem with things I wrote, even as he usually approved of the style.  I have to say, though, since his fairly sudden death, and our chat the last night of his life, he’s become milder than when he was alive and kicking.

The skeleton’s personality is the essence of Irv as he always was, and also, my father as he would have been, had we had more talks along the lines of that conversation the last night of his life.  The skeleton has the enhanced self-awareness that comes from thinking about his life in quiet contemplation for the eleven years since his death.  He has much more perspective than he did when he was alive.  This is only natural.

There is some irony in the changes to his personality since he became a skeleton,  He always argued that people cannot change themselves or their lives in any fundamental way.  He seemed quite changed to me that last night of his life, expressing regrets, admitting he’d been foolish, wrong, apologizing for the first time in his life.  I know I was changed, thankfully, and just in time to be mild, and patient– to hear his confession and help him make his exit from this world.

The skeleton of my father, who first popped up to  heckle me, became an equal partner in the telling of this story of his life.  He supplements, argues, clarifies, proposes alternate scenarios in ways that sometimes surprised me, even though I wrote his words for him.  He sometimes chafed at this arrangement, me writing all his lines, but he generally found it easier to just go along.  Another sign of how much he mellowed and matured since his death.  

What choice does he have, anyway, if he wants his story to be told?

Historical Revelations over shumai

Had dinner the other night with my father’s first cousin once removed, Gene, who grew up, from the age of five, in 1933, in the same Bronx apartment building on Eastburn Avenue where my mother lived with her parents.   Gene’s wife Sally grew up on the other side of the Concourse, just a few blocks away.   Sekhnet and I ate with them in a Chinese restaurant in Teaneck, where they have lived for many years.

I learned that Gene and Sally, like my parents, had little real information about their parents’ lives before they came to America, or about the families left behind. Gene’s father Morris had been one of eighteen children in a Polish town near the German border. Nine of the eighteen lived, including his father’s twin sister.  

Of these children only young Morris made it to America, having been sent for in 1909 or so by an uncle in New York.   He arrived after a two-week Atlantic crossing; was greeted by his uncle, who, three days later, died. Thirteen year-old Morris had to make his way alone in New York, learned the needle trade, became a union shop steward and a Communist.

“Stamper was a Communist,” my mother always said, without any judgment attached.  Although, it turned out, according to Gene, that after von Ribbentrop signed that pact with Stalin’s underling Molotov in 1939, the fatal non-agression deal between mass-murdering Josef Stalin and soon to be mass-murdering Adolf Hitler, Morris Stamper resigned from the party.

My grandmother Chava, Irv’s mother, had come across the Atlantic, with Gene’s mother (Morris’s future wife), on one of the last ships to leave the port at what was then probably called Danzig, now Gdansk, before the outbreak of World War I.     This was in the summer of 1914.

I was mostly listening, and filing details away, but I got the impression, from Gene’s description of his mother Dinsche as a brave, beautiful “leader” and Chava, two years younger, as a complaining, far less intrepid type, that it was due to the spirit of Dinsche that the two were able to cross the Atlantic in steerage during the summer of 1914.  

Dinsche had regarded the crossing as something of an adventure, charming the crew and getting special privileges for the two of them.  Chava, apparently, complained about the food, though the food they got was better than the food most people in steerage received, thanks to the socially adept Dinsche.   After their German-registered ship discharged its passengers in New York it was quarantined in the U.S. for the duration of The Great War.

As for the muddy hamlet the two of them came from, Truvovich, a place no longer found on any world map, it had been one of three such tiny Jewish hamlets located across the river from Pinsk, in a swampy area, as far as I can tell.  The other two doomed hamlets were Vuvich and Misitich.   Pinsk at the time was a town of about 70,000 people, about 30,000 of them Jews (of whom 37 are known to have survived the Nazi occupation).  

It was a short ferry ride from Truvovich across the Pina River (though Gene called it by a different name). It must have been after a ferry ride to that metropolis, in the earliest decade of the twentieth century, that Leah and Azriel were immortalized in a photo studio in the two large portraits Chava dragged with her to the New World in 1914.

The most amazing bit of history Gene imparted, along with descriptions of his childhood train trips up the Hudson River to visit Chava and her kids in Peekskill, was about my father’s uncle Aren’s Marco Polo-like voyage across Asia, the Pacific, the entire American continent just after the turn of the twentieth century.   If I’d heard this amazing and unlikely tale, I’d forgotten it.  

Aren had three children, Eli, by his first wife, who died of complications from Eli’s birth, and Nehama and Dave by his second wife. Aren sent for his little sister Chava in Truvovich after he remarried. Eli, I did the math just now, was about six when he went with his father to greet his beautiful, red-haired aunt in NYC and the two fell immediately into lifelong love.

Aren’s story I heard mostly from his son Eli. I spent many days, often until late at night, talking with Eli in the final years of his life.   Much of the talk was family history, the entanglements and devilish details of it.   Aren had arrived in New York City in around 1905, I had understood, where he learned to vulcanize rubber. Getting in on the ground floor of the brand new automobile industry, he would work with cars for the rest of his life.

I knew Aren had escaped from conscription in the Czar’s army around the time of the Russo-Japanese war, which history books tell us was in 1904-05. In those days a Jew drafted into the Russian army served for thirty years, absent early release via death or dismemberment in battle (partially untrue, actually, see note*).

Aren and two friends, Fischl Bobrow and Fleishman, decided not to be among the 40,000-70,000 dead Russian soldiers in that war.  They escaped the Imperial Russian Army together and arrived in the United States.  It’s possible Fleishman opted for Canada instead, which is where I think he settled.  I believe Fischl was the eventual connection to the Widems, Irv’s father’s family, from outside of Hartford, Connecticut.

According to Gene, their flight took them across Siberia, the Pacific (or perhaps the Bering Straits) and eventually to San Francisco.   San Francisco in 1904 or 1905, before the Great Fire of April 1906.  I picture Aren now, arriving in California, having crossed the massive Pacific Ocean somehow, a trip of about 6,000 miles.  Then he heads east, presumably on the transcontinental railroad, for another three thousand miles.  Next we hear from him, Aren’s in Manhattan learning to vulcanize rubber.     A few years later he sends for his little sister, who becomes my father’s mother, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

 

* Apparently Jews, who were not allowed to serve in the Russian army until 1827, had been drafted for a twenty-five year hitch prior to the reforms of Alexander II.  Therefore Aren and his friends were likely only in for a five year military stint at the time of the Russo-Japanese War.  They were not alone in disobeying the Czar’s military orders.   From the summer of 1905 to the fall of 1906 there were apparently 400 mutinies in the Imperial Russian Army.

Things were made worse for the Jews at this time by circulation of the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Russian 1903,  confirming the worst about The Chosen People, in the minds of many, and unleashing a renewed flood of pogroms.

One for nothin’

Went in to check on snoring Sekhnet, who, on about three and a half hours of sleep, set off for a job, under cover of darkness, and returned to creep up the stairs ten or eleven hours later, as I was writing.  

She was in a deep sleep when I went to check on her, make sure she had a sheet over her as she sprawled in front of the fan.

“Grandma picked a fig off the tree,” she murmured as I pulled a sheet over her shoulders.

“Your father’s fig tree?” I asked.

“Yeah, and she was picking a fig that wasn’t ripe and I said ‘grandma, that fig’s not ripe.’  And grandma said…” she mumbled, talking in her sleep.

“What did grandma say?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, you woke me up,” she said, and immediately began snoring again.

The Democracy Game Show

“You’ve lived long enough now to have observed a few things about democracy,” said the skeleton, squinting against the sunlight that was flooding his hilltop in Cortlandt, New York, brilliantly illuminating his tombstone.  “As Winston Churchill quipped, between stiff drinks, democracy is the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others.  Quite the wag, that Winnie.  On this sunny Sunday, why not discuss the nature of our exceptional American democracy a little?”

Sure thing.  As I learned from you, satire is often all we have.  

“Well, it’s a pretty poor substitute for power, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll take a nice pointy skewer from Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor over even the most eloquent speech by your brilliant orator friend Mr. Obama.  We’ll get back to your post-racial president later, I suspect, but first allow me a general observation about democracy.

“Your friend Thomas Jefferson, the refined renaissance man who never dignified the pernicious rumors of his thirty year miscegenation with a beautiful, light-skinned piece of his property, spoke of raking the educable few from the rubbish,” the skeleton gave a small chuckle.

“I was, it turned out, one of those educable few, so was my brother.  Look, they raked me out of the rubbish, via the GI bill, et, voila!   If I’d had more of an ability to smile as I was fed shit I might have become a college professor.  It’s the wrong way to see it, of course, smiling as I’m fed shit.  It would have been better to have just seen it as paying dues, but we only pay the dues we can afford to pay, as you yourself know very well.”  

No argument here, dad.  I’ve always lived on a very tight budget for dues paying.

“So you have an American genius like Jefferson, with his hundreds of inherited slaves and I believe thousands of acres of inherited land, surveyed by his father and his father-in-law, and later by him and registered as his property.  And you have masses of people in the colonies who don’t have jack shit, as they used to say.  There could never be enough seats in the newly created University of Virginia for all these folks, and most of them, frankly, wouldn’t know a book from a block.  Although, for the rabble they were, the masses of Americans were surprisingly literate back then.  

“So, really, there was a pretty sizable pile of educable material in that heap of rubbish that could have been raked, but what are you going to do with masses of highly educated poor people anyway?   Once you’ve read all the great works of literature, philosophy and history, acquired the habits of critical thinking,  you’re not going to be content working as a brute all day and drinking grog all night.   How do we preserve life, liberty and property (forget the ‘pursuit of happiness’, you know what I’m saying?) for those who have it while making sure the brutes don’t rise up and grab any of ours for themselves?  Give them beautiful platitudes and keep them as ignorant as possible.

“We create a nation everyone can take pride in, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.   We create a government of, by and for the People.  In civics you learn that the will of the People is carried out by elected representatives on the local and federal level.  And blah, blah, blah.  But of course, you remember when I convinced you to enroll as a Democrat, because the only meaningful vote you’ll ever get is in the party primary?  Well, that was the last of my idealism talking.  How many meaningful primaries have you voted in?  You got to vote for Bernie Sanders this time.  Did it feel great?  I hope so.

“Anyway, let’s cut to the chase– what does it take to have capable elected officials working intelligently to solve difficult problems, making meaningful compromises to advance social progress, protect the environment, ensure domestic tranquility?   Educated, critical thinking voters evaluating the candidates based on what they actually believe in and what they have proven they can do. How often does that happen, Elie?   We are given the choice at election time between two shrewdly marketed brands already in debt to the people who put up billions to brand and market them, or more succinctly, as Lewis Black put it so memorably, two bowls of shit.

“Even our best presidents have been custodians of the status quo, protectors of privilege, it’s built into our two party system.  Take FDR, a class traitor and great president by almost anyone’s assessment.  His New Deal, while radical and a great improvement over what existed before in our Darwinian democracy, was largely put into place to prevent a Communist uprising here.  People were sick, tired, depressed, angry, organizing, ready to smash something.  Super-rich speculators had sucked the country dry as they have been doing from the day they arrived here in the land of opportunity. Sure, some of them had jumped from sky scrapers when they lost fortunes, but those were only the weak ones.  The stronger ones figured out how to remain rich. The rest of us?

“You read Harold Lasswell’s description of how, from the beginning, mass media has been used to sell things to the American public by manipulation.  Newspaper guys like Hearst sold war, and then when the great progressive Woodrow Wilson found it advantageous to take America into the World War he turned things over to George Creel, the advertising genius.  And Creel’s Commission tirelessly turned the tide in a very short time– an isolationist nation was lining up to fight the fucking Hun who was chopping the arms off kids in Belgium.  

“None of it ever happened, of course, the atrocities that were widely reported, but the truth cannot be allowed to stand in the way of greater truth, which in that case was to get America into that great war before it ended.  We were about to fight a war to end war, a war to make the world safe for democracy, or safe from democracy, or whatever the hell you want it to be– it will be the greatest, most glorious, most exciting war ever!  

“Until you get over there, of course, and it’s a filthy slaughterhouse worse than the battlefields of our Civil War — a war like all American wars, including the Revolutionary War, that the wealthy could literally buy their way out of serving in.  The piles of excrement next to the stinking trenches were as tall as mountains.  A hundred years later nobody has a very good explanation for why there was a world war in the first place, except that the greediest in every civilized nation were intent on exploiting the uncivilized nations without interference from every other civilized nation.  That and the billions the U.S. had loaned to Britain and France, money that would have been lost if Germany won the war. 

“Your democratic voters, if they had the true picture, would never have sent their children to be butchered in such a meaningless war.  Advertising and propaganda to the rescue.  Hitler was on the losing side in the war to end war and he was no happier about being a loser than most losers are about it.  To his accursed credit, he learned a key lesson from unscrupulous Allied propaganda in the World War, which had succeeded gloriously where more truthful, honor-bound German propaganda had not.  You read that section of Mein Kampf, where he wipes the rabies slaver off his lips and writes about how gloriously effective the lies of the Allies were.  

“Photo of a pile of dead bodies outside a Brussels hospital?  They died of disease, sadly, but why not put those corpses to good use with a nice inflammatory caption?   Slaughtered by the Hun!  Poisoned because they were witnesses to the Kaiser’s blood thirsty men’s butchery of the Belgian children.  The lies were better, the Allies found, if there was a certain internal consistency to them.  What did Lasswell say?  ‘hacking and gouging were leitmotifs in the war to the East’?   Pure bullshit calculated to enflame rage, and Hitler admired it greatly, would put the lesson to great use.  Make people hate, and fear, and they’ll do whatever you tell them needs to be done.

“That was one reason there was so much skepticism here about the rumors of the death camps once Hitler got things back up to speed in Germany.  Americans had heard the brutal lies before, the human skin lampshade story had already been used in the World War chapter one.  Fool me twice, what did Dubya say about that?”  the skeleton paused to watch a car raise a cloud of dust coming down the dirt road into the cemetery.  

“Oh, my,” said the skeleton, “we have guests!”

I don’t recall you going on this way when you were alive, to be perfectly honest about it.  

“Well, shit, I would have, Elie, but, if you recall, we were kind of lifelong adversaries.  We agreed about most things, you understand, but the one thing I could not abide was the existential threat you always posed, or that I thought you always posed.”  

You do realize how insane that sounds, don’t you?  

“Yes, of course, as I was dying it became crystal clear to me how insane that was,” said the skeleton.  

It looks like those guests are coming to visit Benny Peritsky, dad, so you can continue your remarks on American democracy.

“Well, let me sum up then.  The most essential thing for an effective representative government is an informed, intelligent, critically thinking electorate.  Free public education is supposed to educate our future voters in how to think and evaluate.  You can judge for yourself how well that’s working out for you.  Freedom of the press is supposed to ensure that the voters are well-informed.  Of course, the press, in all its modern mass media forms, is mainly interested in the bottom line, profit.  People tune in to what scares and outrages them, and to what titillates them.  That’s it, you know, if it bleeds it leads.  The details about an innovative environmental idea that can save tens of thousands, or even millions, of lives in rural areas every year?   Show us the slow-motion sequence of that maniac mowing down gay dancers in that Orlando nightclub again.  Holy shit!  Did you see that?  He took a pledge to ISIS right before he started shooting.  Holy fuck!  They’re coming to kill us!”

Indeed they are, pop.  And that’s one reason I am so grateful to have a president who runs the most transparent administration in history and works closely with the press to make sure the American public always has the truth on every vital issue.  

“Except when he’s threatening whistleblowers with the death penalty under Wilson’s 1917 Espionage Act, of course, or keeping top secret the number of children in Yemen and everywhere else his drones are killing and maiming every time he signs off on his secret kill lists,” said the skeleton.

Jesus Christ, dad, do you still hate our freedom so much?

Basic Assumptions of Human Relations

from the report on creation of the Human Relations Unit (regarding the brainstorming sessions for NYC educators on three successive May weekends in 1967):

Finally, before they embarked on their project, the participants were given certain basic assumptions with respect to quality integrated education prepared by the Office of Integration and Human Relations.  These assumptions, which served both as a common frame of reference and as a “jumping off” point for the deliberations, follow:

1. Quality integrated education is the most desirable education for our democracy and the most realistic for our nation and world.

2. The development of good racial attitudes is important for every child, regardless of race, creed or national origin, and each school bears a major responsibility in such development, regardless of the pupil population of that school.

3. Quality integrated education is more easily achieved in a desegregated school, although with special effort many of the elements may be made to apply to segregated schools.

4. The development of academic skills must be a major goal of quality integrated education.

5. A successful program of quality integrated education requires belief in and commitment to its goals, as well as an understanding of the responsibility of the schools as one of the most important agents of our society in achieving these goals.

6. Adult fears, suspicions and disbeliefs concerning the values of quality integrated education must be met by a staff confident of these values, a program devoted to securing them, and an opportunity for adults of both races to participate in such a program.

7. Adults with an understanding of and belief in the values of quality integrated education must be reassured that the school system and staff have that same understanding and belief.

8. The search for additional avenues of desegregation must be never ending.

9. Similarly, the search for improvement in quality integrated education must be an ongoing process which is the responsibility of each and every member of the school system.

10. Our schools must exercise a major part in the leadership which inculcates in each pupil, each parent and each member of the community a sense of responsibility toward the achievement of quality integrated education.

source   pages viii-ix

An Epidemic of Mental Illness?

This excellent article, which I found very convincing, was given to me by a very intelligent man who considers himself insane.  He may well be right, although the piece he recommended is well worth reading if you are considering a psychopharmaceutical cure for what ails ye.  

Or if you are a psychiatrist who spends hours talking to patients, while wondering how to make more money in less time, with far fewer head aches.

The second part of the fascinating two part book review is here.

historical footnote

Footnote 7 from

A Short History of Blacks As The Special Favorites of the Law: (Revisiting the Failure of Reconstruction and America’s Persistent Race Problem)

7]   The legal foundations of the “Peculiar Institution” are buried in three discreet clauses in the Constitution. The words “slavery” and “African” are understood.

The first reference was in regard to the valuation of slave men as three-fifths of a man for purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress.    See U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3

The second authorized the unimpeded continuation of the slave trade until 1808– “migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”  

See  U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 1

The third provided the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Acts,

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”  

U.S. Const. art. IV, § 2, cl. 3.  

A Slightly Odd Thought

Thoughts are more susceptible than most things to being, at the same time, reasonable and helpful and bizarre and unhelpful, according to the angle they’re viewed from, how the light hits them. 

In discussing whether I might actually be mad, trying to do the quite possibly impossible thing I’m trying to do, the teenage therapist and I seem to agree that the jury is still out.   Clearly, the most sensible thing to do is find something to do that brings in money.  If it’s something that also brings personal satisfaction, helps others, is enjoyable and challenging — that’s great.  But given the choice between earning a living or being in a constant state of turmoil over a ridiculously challenging thing requiring a good deal of self-reinvention while not bringing in a groosh or a kopeck… most people, on every shade of the elusive sanity spectrum, would choose the former.

I am ambiguously blessed, at the moment, not to have to occupy myself with the vexing question of how to pay my bills.  Five years ago I inherited enough money to support the average person three to five years.   Not lavish years, mind you, but average years for the average person living a modestly middle class life.  I have always tried to keep my expenses low, my options open for working the fewest hours in a conventional job.  Five frugal years later I still have money, riding on the “free market” roulette wheel like the trillions scooped off the slanted table the last time the richest and cleverest gamed the system prior to the “collapse” (or wholesale fraud, if we want to be more accurate) in 2008.  For the moment I am not worrying about that, though, of course, I probably should be.   My not worrying is another tick on the side of the ledger the jury may lean toward when deliberating over my relative sanity.

But here was the slightly odd thought that snuck up on me the other day.   I’m working strictly on marketing now, as much as I can, focused on presenting the workshop in a light that will make it hard for public school innovators in the de Blasio administration to resist.  This marketing work is also necessary for interesting and recruiting the best possible people to work with me on the program.   I’ve spent many hours removing all self-deprecation, self-doubt and frustration when I describe the program.  I’ve eliminated all references to the likely impossibility of my task.   I focus, when I can, on how well the program I designed works for its intended purposes.  

I am making my language terse, yet natural.  In the first minute I now summarily answer the most obvious questions: who I am, what brings me to the room and why this program is so important and valuable.   I am isolating the talking points, keeping them simple and rotating them, repeating each one enough times for the message to hopefully sink in.  You want to involve children in their education, make them eager partners in their own learning?  Give them a stake, let them learn what fascinates them and let them teach each other.   You really want children to become creative problem solvers?  Put them in a room full of art supplies and technology, with an exciting end-product they can enjoy, and adults who set things up then take a back seat, and watch what they do.   Etc.    

The odd thought, yes, I’m coming to it presently.  I’d been stuck for a while trying to complete the pitch.  I need to be able to present a snappy and memorable show during the structured yet natural twenty minutes I will get to pitch it some day.   Improvisation in a sales pitch is foolishly risky business, as I’ve learned in a gently brutal manner.  Wrestling with the technology to make the AV (I reveal my age with this anachronistic reference to “Audio Visual”)  side of the presentation has been an added frustration.  Every added frustration makes the mountain I have to climb steeper.  The fucker is already almost vertical, any steeper and I’ll have to find or design special shoes to allow me to walk upside down.  Another of five dozen, sometimes ridiculous, workarounds so far.  

But this week I was finally able to negotiate the last technical hurdles with the program I’m using to create the pitch (a total of five hours winning over ever more supportive and expert tech support) and it gave me the ability, at last, to record version after version and watch them back.  Recording myself was a useful bit of advice I received a few weeks ago when the very idea of watching my sluggish progress set my teeth on edge.  Being able to finally see my work played back eliminated the rehearsal-to-myself motivation problem, and the equally vexing one of finding someone to do me the favor of watching each version and helping me assess my snail-like progress.    

“Wait,” you will say, “you supposedly have an organization, a non-profit founded in the Spring of 2012.  Why do you still need to find people to do you a favor?  Call a meeting and….”  Shut the fuck up, would you, fuckface?  

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, ignore this well-meaning yet provocative clown and my client’s outburst as well.  My client suffers from acute Founder’s Syndrome, a well-known condition that eventually afflicts the CEO of virtually every one-person organization.     

Anyway, now that I can work on the pitch and watch it in progress it’s much easier to see transitions that are bad, points that are not made clearly, glitches, clumsily worded talking points and so forth.  Clearly this is the work of a committee, a team, but since I have neither, it’s taken way, way longer to complete.  Now that it’s finally not so difficult to see and fix weak points I’ve made good progress the last week and it’s now virtually done.  I’ll be presenting it to a successful non-profit entrepreneur on Tuesday and once more have the benefit of his experienced feedback.  He has mastered a pitch that is successfully selling a once one-man program related to mine.   My pitch is ready now, 48 hours before the meeting, though I plan to polish it a bit more, if I can. 

Now the slightly odd thought, after one last bit of set up.   I ran the short new segment by Sekhnet the other day.  It contained my freshly written “who am I, why am I here, why should you care?” rap.  She was distracted from my short personal and professional message by the flash of oddly unrelated animation on the screen.   She was right to be distracted, I could see at once.   I set to work making the proverbial enormous changes at the last minute.  Had I presented that first version to the social entrepreneur I’d have lost him in twenty to sixty seconds and he’d be bracing for a wasted 20 minutes with a clearly mad person with a single good idea and a hundred bad ones. 

Several hours of concentrated work later I had a 49 second animated clip that I can actually link to this post (later) explaining who I am, why I am here and setting up why my program is something you should check out.   These simple questions had been impossibly ticklish ones for me to answer.  I knew the new version was pretty good.  Ran the less than minute by Sekhnet.  “I like it,” she said, after a little laugh at 0:20 where I’d inserted a little bark of levity, “it really shows how much work you did developing the program”.   Went back to work, tweaking a couple of things I noticed while showing it to her.  I fixed several other small weak links in the pitch.  

At the end of a very productive day I stood at the mirror shaving.   As I watched myself I noticed a small twinkle in my eye.  In that small moment of satisfaction I glimpsed an entire universe of truth and I had this odd thought:   it’s easy to have ideas and it’s morally satisfying to have ideals;  living them is the hard part.  I don’t personally know many people working as hard to live their ideals directly, to see their unique ideas mischievously afoot in the world.   It is hard, maybe impossible, work, but it’s the best work I could hope for, it occurred to me in that moment.  I am also blessed, by pure luck of circumstance, to be free and able to pursue it for as long as I have been.  

I pushed aside the thought of all of my more successful friends, figuring out how to live well doing things that are also important, or sometimes not;  pushed aside the often odious comparisons that come so naturally to all of us here in the Free Market.  

I am free, the twinkle in my eye reminded me, and lucky to be doing important work for which I am uniquely suited.   I’ve learned to savor the small but crucial moments of reward that are invisible to most people.  This could be a sign of madness, of course, seeing these tiny, isolated moments as a blessing, but I prefer (in the custom of all madmen) to think not.   It’s crucial to drink fully of every life-sustaining moment of reward we feel in order to persevere in any difficult undertaking.  I’ve learned to suck every drop of  juice from these rare and subtle moments of reward one must be vigilant to enjoy. 

If my life is harder, harder to explain and less materially sustainable than the lives of many people I know — these are all part of the price the world extracts from those who dream of a more merciful society and struggle to make these dreams real in the world.   There is a price to be paid for being different, clearly, and it’s not just a theoretical price.  Part of that price involves the occasional questioning of your sanity.  

It was an excellent moment in front of the shaving mirror, even if, at the same time, a slightly odd thought.