Category Archives: writing

Interpersonal politics

I should have been a fucking diplomat (or maybe an advice to the lovelorn columnist).

Dear C:

In answer to your question [“whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness?”]: rachmunnis is mercy, empathy, decency, kindness.  Forgiveness is a close relative, in fact, rachmunnis is sometimes translated as forgiveness.   

This impulse to act with love, to move past hurt, to nurture someone else, after sitting with their uncomfortable feelings, is the heart of relations between humans who care about each other.  Rachmunnis is easier to recognize than to consistently practice.   

Humility and self-awareness are essential parts of being an empathetic person. You have to be willing (and able) to put yourself in someone else’s place in order to resolve problems, to forgive each other and show love instead of clinging to righteous anger that always escalates when conflicts are never resolved.  

When someone tells you that you’re hurting them, and you insist they’re being oversensitive, overthinking it, making unfair accusations, making you uncomfortable and so on, you are showing the opposite of rachmunnis.  If you do this once in a while it means you’re having a bad day, you weren’t yourself, and it’s not hard to overlook. 

If you reflexively get angry and intransigent when someone tells you that you’ve hurt them, you’re not capable of rachmunnis.  Forgiving a person who lacks rachmunnis is folly.   It’s not true forgiveness, for one thing; it’s an empty gracious gesture that guarantees ongoing future harm.  Forgiving without a real apology means you agree to swallow repeated spoonsful of shit every time the other person feels bad about anything.

What happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness in our case is that I’ve told you, over and over, and in writing several times — writing you tell me is clear, stylish and easy to understand — that it’s impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge fault.  You continue to act like you can’t understand this.

Your son is a very neurotic person, he’s also very angry.   He can only express his anger passively, and he has never conceded any kind of fault to me — or anyone else — as far as I know.   He’s too insecure to admit he’s ever been wrong about anything.  He’s too neurotic to express regret for anything he’s ever done, no matter what the cost to himself might be for not being able to do so.   

In the end, for reasons you know well, I stopped trying to fix things with people who can’t even acknowledge anything is broken.   For your part, you once seemed to understand this — telling me I had enough aggravations with my medical challenges without worrying about trying to be friends with R.  Now you’re intent on forcing me to forgive a very aggravating person, because it pains you that I am such a fine person and your son only wants to be friends with me.   

Can you forgive someone who accuses you of something his angry wife made up, angrily confronts you about it, eye twitching, telling you, before he even informs you what he’s accusing you of, that he’s not sure you can continue to be friends because of the viciousness of what you’ve supposedly done? Instead of showing anger, you answer him like a friend and try to help him with his problem, instead of walking away after the aggressive, ridiculous accusation. He never has to thank you for being a good friend or express the slightest regret about falsely accusing you or threatening you with the loss of an old friendship?  

To be put on the defensive by a person like that, after years of asking him to stop passive aggressively provoking me, is intolerable.  Yet, as even R will probably admit, I acted like a friend, treated him as a friend, did my best to help, seeing him in such a painful position.  To be told years later, many Yom Kippurs [the day when Jews are traditionally required to make amends with those they’ve wronged] come and gone, that, for a series of frankly senseless reasons, I have to forgive him, even if his rabbi/therapist can’t make him see the need to honestly try to make amends with someone he claims to love and admire, is intolerable. Him lying to you about having apologized to me “a dozen times” – the disgusting icing on an excrement cake.  

If you still can’t understand whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness, read the enclosed.  

(which is slightly less diplomatic, I add, diplomatically.)

The personal is political

In these bitterly divided times, the chasm intentionally created by far-right profiteers who blame the lunatic left, Antifa, unfair, ungrateful colored people, college students, lying, vote rigging, corrupt, crime supporting commies, “illegal aliens”, bloodthirsty baby murdering abortionists, city dwellers, godless feminists who want to castrate all white, Christian men while they’re innocently tanning their testicles, transexual pedophiles, etc. is widened and deepened 24/7 by the corporate media.

The Republican “Culture War” is a supremely cynical, lie-based, profit-driven corporate distraction, curated and promoted by the insanely greedy to divide people and turn us against each other, instead of the unthinkable — a united movement for fairness and government by consent of the governed. Such a movement would be … (shudder) … Class Warfare… so unfair to our best and wealthiest citizens! Many billions in tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies to the wealthiest individuals and our most important corporate “persons” would be lost if “inequality” was seriously addressed — talk about totally unfair!

The personal is political. You can either support injustice and inequality, based on a series of emotionally satisfying but rationally empty conceptions, or you believe in fairness, and do your best to act on that belief. That’s as personal as it gets. Nobody likes to be treated unfairly, although perhaps 250,000,000 of us routinely are in this pay-to-play democracy.

If you are OK with institutional injustice, the justification is generally either “well, I personally benefit from it” or, more commonly, for the masses, God wills it, Deus Vult! Who are we puny humans to question the unknowable will of almighty God and those vessels He fills with His spirit to carry out His divine impulses? That was the impetus for the Crusades, for every organized religious slaughter in history, faithfully serving an omniscient, all-loving, all-merciful god.

Speaking of God and his vessels, lately the president of the United States, an objectively crazy, criminally insane person, openly attacks the pope after launching a cynical, senseless, illegal war of aggression, a war that is already starting to cause great global suffering, to protect himself and his privileged “friends” from the evidence of their sexual predations being made public. How dare the pontiff contradict the will of the Leader?!!! Even the devout Catholics in the orbit of the Leader dare not speak up for the pope’s right to quote scripture to advance the cause of world peace and stability. They know the Leader will smite them, righteously, madly, humiliatingly.

I’m thinking about this fairness/unfairness business as my blood pressure has been surging lately with the aggravating news cycle (the Callais decision foremost among them– ruling, essentially, along “ideological” lines, that blacks are racists, not whites — and that equal protection of the law under the 14th amendment was meant to protect persecuted whites, not angry blacks and giving the persecuted majority emergency permission to immediately redraw all maps for maximum “partisan” advantage). My own health challenges walking, even standing, without pain, three years after an unsuccessful knee replacement, don’t make me any more cheerful or relaxed in the face of this KKK pleasing 6-3 fuck you to democracy. The former Confederacy has rushed to remove all “minority/majority” districts and end representation of Black voters. Makes me wanna holler.

Yesterday, by US Mail, I had a note from an ancient old friend of my long departed mother’s asking “whatever happened to rachmunnis (mercy, compassion) and forgiveness?”

This after I explained to her many times, on the phone and in writing, over the course of several years, why it is impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge they’ve hurt you and continues to do it. Her neurotic son, a childhood friend, is an aggravating person, as she herself conceded a couple of years ago when I was recovering from the knee surgery, undergoing treatment for kidney disease and in the throes of a prostate emergency induced by a psychopathic urologist. “With all the aggravations in your life, you don’t need to deal with him,” she told me, in what seemed a very loving gesture. Since then she’s been on a relentless campaign to force to me to forgive her passive aggressive asshole of a son, no matter what my high horse might have to say about it.

It’s a question of basic fairness — If I give you the benefit of the doubt, over and over, and you, feeling comfortable, are increasingly aggressive in making unreasonable demands of me, how is that fair? If you can’t acknowledge fault, as her son can’t (and he learned it from the mother he hates, who learned it from her unbearable mother — I’ve known four generations of this family), then there is never a reason to do anything differently, let alone apologize. The status quo in that kind of nonmutual relationship is irremediably sick, no conflict can ever be resolved fairly and must continue to fester and escalate. I’ve finally learned the only healthy response in this situation is a quiet sayonara. Here is the old woman’s “final” (I’ve had a few more calls and two note cards since) attempt to make amends:

This is my very last call to you, but since I received your letter yesterday I’m just going to say you know that you write very well. Throughout that letter, which I understood not all of it, there was never the word forgiveness. You don’t forgive anybody anything. So, at any rate, I just wanted to make that last statement.

I’m about to say my prayers, you’ll always be in my prayers, for your operation and for the two of you, you’re both good kids. And this is the last call you’ll hear from me. All right, I won’t bother you anymore and I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me for whatever it is I said, or did, or thought, or whatever the hell it was. At any rate, whatever it is, I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me. Have a good Passover and take care.

This message is beautiful in so many ways, in addition to how succinct and reductive it is. Talk about getting the last word. Since I can’t forgive her son, who has never acknowledged doing anything hurtful to anyone, and now her, for insisting I have to forgive him, no matter what I may feel about it, I never forgive anybody anything. Case closed. Pretty categorical. I’m a monster because I can’t forgive, maybe crazy too, certainly terminally enraged. Also, her apology is a beautiful example of blame shifting, her sorrow perfectly calibrated for the occasion: I’m sorry that you are such an unforgiving asshole.

I gave the old lady the last word, as I have learned to do with this type.

Then more calls from her that I didn’t answer and two antique note cards, weeks and months later, challenging me again to be a human being, to stop being ‘uncourageous’, a hypocrite, to get off my high horse, stop overthinking everything, being oversensitive, taking everything as a personal insult, being petty, unforgiving, merciless and so on.

In hopes of ending this relentless cycle, and because writing focuses and relaxes me, I replied to her note card by highlighting sections of the last note I sent her. That last note made the same basic, simple points I’ve made every other time. If someone hurts you, angrily insists they didn’t, and keeps doing it, there can be no apology and no reason to forgive. You have to just get away from this type.

I printed my previous final note to her, including the two paragraphs about forgiveness. I put them in red so she couldn’t miss them. Having the words highlighted in red makes it harder for her to pretend I hadn’t given the subject she claimed I never mentioned careful consideration. I added a few explanatory notes, with just a couple of ugly details to illustrate what I’d already written to her, since she’d told me she hadn’t understood some of my previous letter.

The eternal stickiness of this type is exhausting. Hopefully she’ll be wounded enough by the clinical precision of my explanatory notes to finally stop fucking badgering me. If not, I’ve already promised her silence after this, and, as she knows, my word is my bond. For good measure, by way of a final kick in her almost hundred year-old ass, I ended by telling her she’ll be in my prayers.

No More Impossible Letters

I have a category on my list to the right of this post called “Impossible Letters.” I wrote such letters for many years, each time making a case for kindness, consideration or decency, once all other appeals for these things failed.

I recognized, as I toiled over these pages, trying to get each phrase to ring just right, that the letters were impossible, that the most gently worded, generous, most persuasive, moving case I could present would change nothing. Nonetheless, I continued writing these impossible letters well into the start of old age. I almost never heard a peep in response to any of these letters, but of course, I was complaining, no matter how gently — and now in writing! — about not getting a human response, so the person I was writing to was too defensive to dignify my letter with an acknowledgement.

I’m done writing these letters. If you have to write a letter setting out why you require basic decency, you might as well stick a feather up your ass, dip the end in ink, and write your letter that way. It seems simple beyond needing an explanation, if a doctor, let’s say, treats you carelessly, dismisses your medical questions, claims to have answered them all already (even if you never discussed those concerns with him) NO LETTER IS GOING TO CHANGE THIS. In fact, the letter will make you an enemy to the vain doctor, and a threat, if the letter is written well. Plus, nobody is paying the doctor to read your whining prose.

Amazing that it took me so many years to understand this simple concept: if something is emotionally impossible for someone to give, it is emotionally impossible. That doesn’t mean you’re not raising entirely reasonable concerns, or expressing basic human things that virtually anyone would agree with. It means, if the person you’re writing the letter to has already demonstrated, over and over, that they will not cede any ground to make things better, the best letter anyone could compose will only make matters worse.

Here’s the big discovery. There is a certain personality type that cannot be wrong, must blame others when they are wrong, and will fight to the death if the person they blame refuses to take all responsibility for conflict. This type is immune to persuasion since they are compelled to do these things, by a terror of humiliation based in childhood trauma and shame. Not every traumatized child winds up this way. In some people, being abused actually fosters empathy later in life, but people who cannot be wrong or ever admit hurting others are this way because they were damaged as young children. They can’t help themselves. As long as you are always agreeable, avoid anything that makes them uncomfortable, make them laugh when things get tense, are conciliatory at all times, you need never see the implacable side of these relentless motherfuckers. Once they sense you have some kind of issue or problem with them, the game is on and you must either submit to an irrational narrative (like a conflict is caused solely by one party — you) or it is a fight to the death.

Is there any universe where it makes sense to write letters to someone like this? None that I know of. The only use for a letter to one of them is to make the break complete, if needed. A final word to show you understand the unwinnable game you are now in, increase their defensiveness, fear, anger and make sure their brittle vanity ensures they will never contact you again. I take pleasure in doing this as politely as possible, on the rare occasion that I need to write one last impossible letter.

There is a certain sweetness in crafting a cold ending like this one, to a very old woman, a onetime friend of my mother’s, the mother of a childhood friend I haven’t seen in years, who angrily insists I have to forgive people who claim to love and admire me, no matter what I think they’ve done to me:

When you raised your voice to me a few months back, in response to something you didn’t want to hear about your son, and told me to “be quiet and listen! You’re not going to get the last word!” that should have been the last time I talked to you.   Like your son, you mistake my good will and calm manner answering questions about my health for some kind of deep friendship.

Then I took a red crayon and drew a small heart, in the matter of an angry Christian, wishing somebody a facetious “have a blessed day”, under which I wrote my name one last time. Her daily stream of indignant phone messages should finally stop, once the mailman delivers this kiss goodbye.

Friendship, loss and Yom Kippur

A good friend is a precious thing. It is painful and difficult to live without friendship. Sadly, sometimes friendships die, like every one of us must in the end. There are various reasons why this happens, some are the fault of circumstances and have little to do with the friendship itself. We hope to keep our most important relationships to the end. This is not always possible.

Sometimes a friendship depends on pretending that things your friend does that hurt you are not really a big deal. We justify this forbearance because of the value of the friendship to us, because of our fond memories of the friend. Tolerating these things requires us to accept the unacceptable by pretending not to feel what we feel. This kind of pretend, with someone who takes no responsibility for inflicting pain on you, always ends badly.

You can either remain unhealthily bound to someone who mistreats you, or, if you stop pretending, you will be angrily blamed for heartlessly killing a beautiful friendship. There is no winning in a scenario where someone reserves the right to hurt you (outside of escaping it); everybody always loses in the end.

Tonight at sundown the holiest day of the Jewish Year, Yom Kippur, begins. This is the spiritual deadline every year for Jews to make peace with people they’ve hurt and to forgive those who come to them to make amends. In light of recent Yom Kippurs, and the eternal silence of friends I loved for decades without reservation, people who did objectively unfriendly things with no remorse, I’ve come to see this day the way Frederick Douglass regarded the celebration of July 4th, in his famous 1852 speech, a hollow sham that would disgrace a nation of savages:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival . . . [1]

I think of the ugliness of the recent endings of lifelong friendships with those who will insist to the death that they are actually my victims because I can’t forgive them for things they did that I claim hurt me, things they are incapable of admitting they did. I picture these moral paragons dressed in white, fasting and praying tomorrow, rising and being seated, having “productive” “meaningful” fasts and experiencing the glory of God’s forgiveness, even if they are not capable of asking for forgiveness from trusting friends they’ve treated badly. One of these old friends, a rabbi/fundraiser I’ve known since high school, told me two Yom Kippurs ago that God has the right to tell a person who lays his heart bare to his friend on Yom Kippur to go fuck himself. Why not?

May their foul fasting breath (they are too religious on Yom Kippur to brush their teeth before they head off to synagogue) continue throughout 5786, and may it be so inscribed in the Book of Life. Amen.

[1] Right now this speech can be accessed at Constitutioncenter.org. I suspect that will not be the case once Big Balls gets back to work.

How sensitive is over-sensitive?

My father, who had many wonderful qualities, was also locked in a lifelong war never to be wrong. He never escaped the prison of his terror of being humiliated, of feeling again like the helpless victim of vicious abuse he was as an infant, child, teenager. He said as much the night he died. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he rasped sadly, in that dying man’s voice that comes at the very end of a losing battle with cancer.

My father was very sensitive, in many cases he was super compassionate and caring. When it came to taking responsibility for his actions that hurt others, he would not. His anger was always righteous, his analysis of who was actually at fault was always flawless (to him), and he had a great ability to turn every conversation to his advantage, to deflect all responsibility by constantly reframing what you were actually talking about. This inability to admit that he was ever wrong caused him to distort reality whenever he felt trapped. He also quickly wrote off people who hurt him, one perceived strike was enough, and he never apologized to or forgave anyone that I can recall.

This distortion, blame and inability to forgive put great emotional obstacles in front of me and my little sister. “Life’s hard enough, Elie,” he said that last night of his life, “without your father placing obstacles in your way, like I did for you and your sister, and I am truly sorry for that.”

Good to hear, finally, and that first and last apology was gratifying, but, sadly, he was dead by the next evening.

I’ve finally come to understand, in the last chapter of my life, that if something hurts you, and you tell the person who’s hurting you that it hurts you, and they continue to do it, you have to get away from them. 

People who continually hurt others have a problem they will always blame you for.  Their problem only becomes yours if you tolerate being blamed for it. It turns out you can’t negotiate with someone who insists on their right to do what you have told them hurts you.  They will immediately become the victim of your unprovoked attack, you are persecuting them, they’ll cry, tears of betrayal in their eyes. This insistence that you are victimizing them is pure contempt for you and your feelings.

Once you have seen contempt on the face of someone close to you, you cannot unsee it.  When you learn a person will never change their insistence that you are solely to blame for every conflict, will never compromise or concede anything, ever, there is only one move: you need to get away from them.

I fondly believed all of my life — to my detriment in the end, when I was metaphorically lynched by a group of my oldest, closest friends during one of the most vulnerable times in my life — that every disagreement or hurtful pattern with people I cared about would yield to goodwill, humor, a gentle, reasonable presentation of facts, an exchange of views, an accommodation of everyone’s feelings.

Displays of genuine friendship can mend a painful situation with someone who cares deeply for your feelings. Someone who loves you yields to what you need. They don’t need to be persuaded that you’re hurt. They can acknowledge when they’ve hurt you, and try not to do it anymore.   

All of the goodwill, friendship and benefit of the doubt in the world will not move someone who, damaged enough early in life, can never, ever, admit they are wrong or ever did anything, even unintentionally, that could possibly hurt you.

You will hear from these types that you are one who has the problem.  Strictly speaking, this is true, the problem you have is that you are locked in a relationship and still trying to reason with someone like them.  They will tell you that you are over-sensitive, self-pitying, ruled by childhood trauma you never overcame, blaming them unfairly, that you frighten them, that your expectations of others are too high, that you can’t control your emotions, you’re too analytical, blind to how much they love and respect you, that you don’t realize how hurtful you’re being to them by unfairly accusing them of hurting you. 

To put it bluntly, these fucks will say absolutely anything to avoid conceding anything to you about the reasonable, foreseeable effects of their hurtful behavior.  When you see this behavior is a pattern, and it doesn’t stop, weed these folks out of your life, there is no other healthy option. There is really no middle course with someone who insists on their right to treat you as they see fit, even if you tell them many times that you can’t stand the way they treat you.

I don’t really mind being called over-sensitive anymore, not as much as I used to, anyway. I am sensitive, exactly as sensitive as I need to be. I would like to become ever more sensitive, because sensitivity is where all the beautiful things, as well as the painful ones, live.  I am sensitive because I am sentient.  I will not deliberately hurt somebody in my life, I try not to hurt strangers either most of the time.  If I find out I’ve hurt someone I know, I’m quick to make amends.  If I am over-sensitive, I greatly prefer it to being insensitive, under-sensitive, whatever the opposite of over-sensitive is.

Being sensitive, and knowing exactly what causes us the most pain, we need to learn to protect ourselves from repeating familiar harm.  I have found, over and over, that once I see contempt in a friend or family member, or anyone else, and contempt becomes their final answer, that I always feel immediate relief when I get away from that person.  Contempt as a final statement doesn’t heal, doesn’t change, is not amenable to negotiation. 

A show of contempt draws a life and death battle line, humiliating to the person who shows contempt, who can then never back down for fear of more humiliation. Their agitated implacability makes finding peace impossible.  Contempt is a relationship breaker, walk away from it and you will always feel tremendous relief. It is one horrible thing you no longer have to try to accommodate your sensitive feelings to.

There is enough of that horror in the world we can do nothing about, without having it inflicted by those close to us who insist, irrationally, counter-factually, that they love and admire us and that we have to love them no matter what because of that. Love is sensitivity to the feelings of the person you love.  It is nothing else.

Almost none of us are purely good or evil

It’s impossible to keep in mind during a time of traumatic upheaval like our present moment in history — very few people are strictly good or irredeemably evil. Few people are undeniably good almost all the time, we think of them as highly evolved, wise, enlightened, righteous, bodhisattvas, saints. Few people are relentlessly evil, we think of them as dangerous psychopaths. All the rest of us are between these extremes, on a spectrum we move along according to our emotions. All of us are quite good sometimes, even exemplary although, when we feel victimized and completely justified, cruel, ruthless and unforgiving.

If you’re cruel and ruthless at times, does that make you an evil person? It depends on a lot of things. There is a time to be ruthless in this rough world we live in, sad to say. But as a permanent attitude, a tiny minority of us are ruthless all the time just as very few can be at our best in every moment. We aspire to be the best we can be in every moment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” A very tall order for the average earthling, because forgiveness always depends on the specific circumstances, and a sincere apology landing just right, but it states a great aspiration — a readiness to listen and forgive, which is a beautiful thing. It requires not hardening your heart against people who have done you wrong, if they sincerely try to make amends.

Hatred and division have actually been monetized, you can buy stock in lucrative corporations (like Palantir) that specialize in mining and analyzing personal data for the use of those who seek to exploit existing prejudices and make people hate and fear each other. Personalized messages influence millions to see the “other” as inhuman and evil.  AI can also easily be harnessed to this task, dividing people by removing elements like nuance and context that make humans compassionate and replacing it with relentless algorithms that make AI conform to the creators of AI’s money-driven, bottom line, black and white, good/evil worldview.

We are divided by the calculated, constantly repeated, transactional lie that some people, people like us, are good, and other people, people like them (fill in hated group) are evil. This lie is the creation of evil people, which is then magnified by millions of sometimes fine and sometimes shitty people who are neither evil nor good all the time, repeating it widely to people who agree, often just to be agreeable. The lies that enflame our division are all promoted by algorithms that monetize engagement. Engagement is driven by fear, lust, agitation, need for confirmation, isolation, anger, outrage, etc. Now fear, hatred, outrage and the lies that drive them can be instantly spread to hundreds of millions, like a pandemic.

I think of the klansman, acting out of a reflex to protect a helpless toddler, diving into a river to save a drowning child. I imagine him in that moment acting out of human instinct, not stopping to think the kid might be black or a member of some other group he hates. Maybe it’s the Anne Frank good in me, seeking the good in someone otherwise hateful to me, but I think humans defaulting to their higher human impulses happens more often than we are aware. What unites us as vulnerable humans is far more powerful than what divides us, things that are mostly lies anyway.

The genius of homo sapiens, the self-named Wise Ape, is our ability to organize on a massive level based on abstract beliefs (granted often irrational, destructive ones). No other animal is able to build cultures of millions of its own and harness that organized mass to radically change the actual planet we live on. Humans are capable of the greatest things ever done, as well as the most atrocious. Almost none of us are Good and very few of us are Evil. There has to be some path to keeping this in the front of our consciousness as we move through these dangerous times.

Somaticizing your people’s trauma

A few words about real friendship

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.

Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog.  The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.

I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.

We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.

I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.

He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.

I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.

Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.

Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.

If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?

Intermittent Empathy

I described my mother as someone with intermittent empathy. She could be very empathetic but she could also be completely oblivious to what other people needed or wanted. How, the therapist asked, can someone be intermittently empathetic?

My mother was beaten down by her mother. An only child, raised by a talented, demanding, strong-willed mother whose entire family had been murdered in Ukraine when my mother was fifteen, she bore the brunt of her mother’s sorrows, terrors and frustrations. Her father was sympathetic, but also dominated by my grandmother, he could only do so much to protect his daughter. My mother clearly grew up with a lot of pain and anger she constantly had to push down. As a result she had a very low threshold for frustration and flew into anger very easily.

My father had it even worse than my mother. His mother, a tiny, religious maniac famous for her uncontrollable temper, literally whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. On his deathbed my father finally acknowledged the damage this had done to him. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he said in a raspy, dying man’s voice.

When my father flew into a rage my mother was always quick to join in. It is, I understand now, a primitive, childish reaction, the same one that animates any lynch mob. Another person’s righteous rage, forcefully expressed, gives you permission to vent your own righteous, often inchoate, anger. As a child I was regularly exposed to this tour de force tag team of parental immaturity. There was little I could do, during an onslaught, outside of telling them both to fuck off. This response, of course, made their anger all the more righteous and me all the more deserving of it.

Intermittent empathy works like this. Hours after the bloody conflict, when my mother was calm, and by herself, I’d sometimes be able to present my side of the most recent dinner table battle. I’d lay out what happened from my point of view. She would listen. Sometimes I’d be able to persuade her that I’d been treated unfairly. When I was able to get my mother’s understanding, I felt her empathy. I have to believe that this intermittent empathy probably saved me from my sister’s fate. My sister, never really having experienced either of our parents’ empathy, until late in life when our father became her chief ally and emotional and financial supporter, became exactly the dreaded parent that tormented and damaged her as a child.

I had a close friend, call him Flack. He often expressed his torment at how difficult it was to get empathy or support from his superficially charming wife, call her Gina. He told me many times, with a lot of emotion, how humiliating it was to have to beg for things from a life partner who should give him those things without being asked.

Empathy, of course, is at the top of the list of what each of us needs from our intimates. I’ve learned, since my execution at Gina’s orders, that Gina is an extreme case, probably a psychopath in her need to be right no matter what and her uncontrollable desire for maximum punishment of anyone who makes her feel wrong. Flack, it turns out, is the classic vulnerable narcissist, he will do anything for anybody at any time, even strangers, and he is heroic in these public efforts, but he is vigilant and quick to rage at anyone who might notice his rigid need to be seen as perfect.

No human has ever been perfect of course, but if you are damaged enough to believe you must be perfect, it’s probably impossible to recover from that. Empathy for the imperfections of others as a first reflex is ideal. I tell you I’m hurt, you ask me why. You listen, show you understand why I’m hurt. Then you can talk about the intricacies of the situation, propose solutions, etc. Empathy ideally comes first. It is the hallmark of our healthiest, most life-sustaining relationships. In my experience, with most people, empathy is often intermittent, as my mother’s was.

People are self-centered, defensive, distracted, react with solutions before they hear the problem, want to fix things before they know what’s broken. We are humans, puny earthlings. Still, empathy that has to be prompted by a clear, calm presentation, is infinitely better than what my old friend Flack has to contend with — token empathy conditioned on absolute obedience to the will of someone with very little empathy.

Given the choice, we’d all like empathy without having to ask for it. Also given the choice, real empathy we can elicit from someone else is infinitely preferable to the situation Flack finds himself in. With a mate incapable of empathy he is always required to peevishly beg for it, which he finds humiliating.

This eternal, reflexive humiliation leaves him angry much of the time, performing a lonely dance of brittle perfection. The only time he feels intimately connected to this woman he has bound himself to is when he is vindicating her honor by cutting off the head of an old friend she now insists is a deadly enemy. They are never closer than when he is manfully serving her need for revenge. For me, even the spottiest intermittent empathy beats that irresolvable fucking tragedy every day of the week.

Writing as pain relief

Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain.  Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first).   It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways. 

There are all kinds of pain.  Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions.   The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain.   In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either,  before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia.  I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out.  This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.  

I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain. 

My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up.  That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages.  I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient.   These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.

It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust.  Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust.  What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted?   Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin.  I felt much better after writing this.

Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through.  This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible.  We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?

I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph.  I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit.   What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do?  I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens).  Nazi fucks.

Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective.  The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself.  If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.

At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this  irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain.  There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.  

I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing.  Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief.  In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at.  Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful.   Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind.  If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.

To trust or not to trust?

Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option.  Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky.   I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting.  We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.  

When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you.  This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care.  Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head.   Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between.  Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience.   We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided.  The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?

We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns.   The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.

I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August.  We left the office very impressed with him.   He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”.  I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures.  The standard line is that most patients tolerate it.  You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable.  But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.

When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients.  She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed.  I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing.  I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.

The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation.  He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar.  In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room.  I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do   further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day. 

Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.”  It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did.  He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid.  Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to. 

My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust.  He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked.  (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board).  He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it.  He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect.  I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.

There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed.  I was unable to urinate at all.  After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate,  I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.  

I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries.  I left increasingly agitated messages.  Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.

I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself.  He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages.  He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery.  I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag.  I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery.  He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case.  ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital.  He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital.  I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.

So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is.  After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care.   You can read all about it on their fucking website.

Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.