As promised, but different than what I imagined I’d write.

I believe in the importance of  fun.   Hardworking people sometimes think this is frivolous on my part, a desire not to work, an immature love of play.   I do quite a bit of work, but I do very much love to play.  Playing together is one of the most important things in life.

Laughter cannot be overrated as a release valve, restorer, tonic, heart medicine, fun. People do not laugh enough when they are under stress, facing terrible odds.  More humor is called for.  Under my regime, you laugh or you die.

Creativity is crucial to a happy life, connected or not to any monetary calculus.   Our society quantifies talent and puts a monetary value on creation, killing a great deal of creativity.   Makes no difference to me, start playing,  I’ll jump in.  The animal is the same whenever it appears.

You don’t hear a tree fall in the forest?  I won’t let it upset me.

Canaries who sing in coal mines often sing in minor keys.  Picture a gypsy guitarist accompanying a canary, two souls longing around a campfire, only the canary is in a cage and going back down into the coal mine tomorrow.  The caravan will be forced to move on the day after that.  Sorrow and beauty often go hand in hand.

Mildness is better than anger.   Remain mild even when you have the right to be angry — that is the right path.    Violence is common, terrible, rarely the solution.  Nobody should consider violence before considering everything else many times.   Countries murder wholesale and call it war, ruled by a body of laws called The Laws of War, but that does not make it right, except, perhaps, for those who profit by the sale of this large scale killing.

Do not forget to show gratitude.   Gratitude and sincere appreciation are like water and sunlight to seedlings.   “Thank you,” is so easy to say, as is something like “this was really delicious” or “you are very kind.”  Cost you nothing, but they are so valued by the people you give them to.

Today I give myself a generous ten minutes to work out the kinks in my brain.  There are several, and unkinking them is a bit of shallange, chall we say, but no matter.  Our’s is not to wonder why, our’s is to get on the stick.

Get on the stick?  What a horrible image.  What are we, Indonesian shadow puppets?

I could use a good roti canai, now that I think of it.  But there’s the timer, now down below 8:00 and why am I dicking around with images of getting on the stick?  I’m on the stick now, on the clock.  Ten year-old comedienne in neighborhood restaurant the other day:

“what’s brown and sticky?”

Like the thirty times before it we asked what.

“A stick”

Indeed.  The answer is so simple and obvious, once you have it.   Today I am aiming to edit sessions 12 and 13 of the workshop into a more or less flowing 1:30 clip and also to get the Surfing Competition into some kind of shape, see where it’s at, so it can be finished during the next session, to the extent that the kids can refine it at this late date, during the last session, when they will want to do everything but.

Went in there on four hours of sleep last time, might as well have gone in wearing a bee keeper’s outfit with 100 bees inside the mask.  “Eliot, you got bees in your bonnet.”

The child comedienne who stood by our table asked “What kind of bees give milk?”  We were stumped again, and it showed on our faces.

“Boobees!” the kid piped, her mother laughing at the other table.  All so damned obvious, once you know things like where the general keeps his army (up his sleevey) or why 6 was scared of 7 (cause 7 8 9).

Two minute warning, I’m warning you.  Moods will be flipping, I’m just sayin’.  Great reasons to be optimistic as I plan and try to put myself and the organization in position to have some good luck.  A little bit of luck would be very welcome around now, as 1:00 comes and goes on the timer, but even without luck, one must tickle the rock up the steep incline, the slippery slope, the sheer mountain face, the shiny mirror, the … void.

dawn of a new age of animation

Odious as marketing and branding jargon is, with its hideous bluntness and odd verbing, they do cut it to the quick for you.  The bottom line:  there is a trillion dollar a year art to Making the Ask.   If you are a beggar it is essential to master this art.  Truly, it is the difference between survival and the grim alternative.  90% of new ventures fail, regardless of how bold, interesting, useful or passionately held their animating idea may be.  90% of all new businesses of all kinds go under, for failure to skillfully monetize a dream by attracting enough customers.  In the case of nonprofits, early and immediate death is a direct result of failing to master the art of Making The Ask.

I have to confess, I am among the last to know how to Make the Ask.  Up here on the high road we don’t really make the ask, we hold fast to our ideals and, well, we might as well pray as believe we can make the ask.  Prayer requires a faith not all of us up here possess.  Without faith, is anything more ridiculous than prayer?

“Everything is an exchange of value,” says a well-dressed marketing/branding type who cornered Sekhnet at a party before he was skillfully spatulaed off her and on to me by the adroit, self-preserving Sekhnet.  “It’s not necessarily an exchange of money, but you have to give value to people and they will give it back to you.”  Soon he was rolling, the current verb of choice, “leverage”, was appearing in virtually every clause; you have to leverage the value of the idea you already have to create more leverage for leveraging exchanged value to the people you would have leverage your levers for you.

“It’s a fantastic idea,” he said again brightly, “I think you could really leverage it.” The brainstorming continued, all around us the glittering marketing generalities, platitudes and talking points swirled.  In the background, in huge, ominous letters shimmered one phrase.   

Making The Ask.  An organization needs an idea person, the one who develops the program, and an outside person, the fundraising face of the organization, a business savvy bottom-liner, turning the organization’s profile this way, and then that way, according to the needs of the particular Ask. Confusingly, that second person, the one who drums up business and funding, is called the Director of Development.  The one who has the idea and actually develops the program, the creative person, is called the creative person.  That position, and all hypothetical positions, are eliminated, along with the entire wonderful and needed idea, unless the Director of Development is able to get financial legs under the idea and march it forward, monetized and ready to do business in the real world.

The real world is famously strict.  A person may have half a notion that your idea might be good, and they are writing charitable donation checks anyway this time of year.  If they are a betting person they might feel like wagering a few bucks on your tax-deductible project, but where is the Donate Now button on your website?  Now you are asking them not only to copy down an address but to find an envelope and a stamp, write a check– oh, for fuck’s sake— back to the pile of solicitations with their check boxes and their mailers.  They’ve already sent the “perk”– a page of return address stickers, reproductions of the work of doomed kids, the promise of a mug, a bag, a hand-cranked emergency radio flashlight.

“You should have a Donate Now button on your website!” a chorus will immediately agree.  I agree.  So I make the first call.  Network for Good provides this service for thousands of nonprofits.  I talk to Lisa, she’s bright as the young woman I used to know who made her way into the middle class and beyond selling ad space.  I do the math in my head as she talks, for $600 a year I can have a Donate Now button, provided by this nonprofit who will also process the donations and deposit them into my organization’s account, for an additional 3% administrative fee.  Her follow-up email has additional incentives: she will, to close the deal, waive the $199 set-up fee and front me three months, which I will then pay, along with the fourth month, once my coffers are overflowing.

All the Donate Now buttons in the world are useless without a) a good flow of traffic to your donation page and b) a compellingly made Ask.  Crisp, concise, compelling.

I have lunch with my most active Director.  He describes another nonprofit, in the Bronx, on whose board he sits, an outfit with a budget of $16,000,000– mostly government grants. He balks at the price tag for the donate button, as I did.  He’s going to look into Pay Pal and some other ones that are probably free.  Then he tells me the Bronx nonprofit  just hired a guy, an eccentric old koot with a good track record of raising money for nonprofits.  He knows everyone and he gets face to face meetings with people who can drop large checks into the coffers, or get others to do so.  He also recruits Directors of Development and works closely with those directors.   This is the kind of guy I’m looking for, we both agree.

“How much does he charge?” I ask.

My friend laughs.  “He gets $10,000 a month.”  I laugh too, but it is very much like the laugh he apologizes for later.   

“I wasn’t laughing that your friend is losing a battle with cancer, it’s horrible,” he says, “it was that uncomfortable laugh when you don’t know what to say.”  I understood that, but I also appreciated that he’d said so, it made him even more of a mensch in my eyes.  

“Call him today,” he said, “don’t put it off.”  And he was right again.

Meantime I came to the computer just now to start wrestling again with the Ask I am trying to make crisp, clear, compelling, and as much as any of those, concise.  Everyone I know, virtually, has the money to drop a few hundred bucks for dinner from time to time, and they all do.  It is their delight to savor delicious new foods paired with the perfect wine.  Me, if I never ate in another fancy restaurant again it wouldn’t bother me.  Them, it would bother very much.

“This is what you’re doing now, instead of Making the Ask?” demands one too busy gathering and storing nuts for the winter to focus on anything, in relation to my program, but what I should be doing, instead of what I am.  That said, she’s also right.

I’m going to post the Ask in progress, maybe it will spur me to work on the cute little tart in time to send it around for solicitations during this crucial week for fundraising.

You can also, of course, both of you, go here to donate. 

we were able to produce this, during session 9 of the animation workshop

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=fo9gJvz1Km0

(I need to harvest the last few months of these, back them up on a hard drive)

Thank you, I feel like a billion bucks.

no, really.  Literally $1,000,000,000.00.

“Lets not go there,” is the other side of “all options are on the table.”   One says, “even hypothetically, I do not want to entertain any idea like this.”   The other says, “hypothetically, we will forget about law, morality and everything else and reserve the right to do the worst things you can imagine.”  Both are terrible reactions to stress, whatever Realpolitik value they may have.

I learned, in the last five years of my mother’s life, to be much more patient with her.  She was dying a long, slow-motion death from endometrial cancer.  There were periods of remission and times when the disease would rage back.   I had a lot of compassion for my mother, which my sister told me was easy for me because our mother clearly loved me so much.   That may have been part of it, but there were other factors.  One thing I learned was not to press an issue once my mother resisted it strongly enough.   

I would from time to time get a call from my mother, in a fury, after spending a few hours with my sister.  She would recount the episode that had infuriated her.  She’d close with the warning not to tell my sister any of this.  I’d hang up and soon I’d have a call from my sister, giving her account of the same horrific few hours.  She too would close with a stern request that I not mention our conversation to our mother.

Having heard both sides I was in a unique position to see how relatively simple a partial solution to this unsolvable personality clash could be.   A skilled mediator, I knew, could frame the issues in such a way that with relatively few adjustments in behavior tensions could have been dialed back.  The issue involved ingratitude and harsh criticism, if each had been aware how much their behavior infuriated the other, it would have been possible to mitigate the main source of recurrent anger between them.  I pitched the idea to them several times over a period of months, separately and together.  They were united in their resistance to trying it, though both acknowledged it could have some value, if the other party were not such an intractable, self-righteous and infuriating force.

“Don’t go there,” warned my sister.   “Besides,” she predicted, “she would never go for it.”   My mother said something similar.  I soon dropped it.  Over time they did a pretty good job pretending this mutual rage was not lurking between them.  As my mother got weaker and weaker she protested less and less, my sister became more and more of a caretaker, almost a parent, and they came to rely on each other much more.  The issues that drove them to call me and vent receded in those final couple of years.

But to this day, when my sister describes certain traits of our mother’s, she does so with the same anger and vehemence she might have had when the wars between them were raging full force.

When I hear “let’s not go there” this impasse between two people I love always leaps to mind.  It tells me again that most people would rather complain about a bad situation than do the hard work that would be necessary to change it.

As a recently declassified CIA report, written around the time of the 1976 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, stated in regard to torture and mind-control techniques:  “If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”  I guess that’s right.