Category Archives: writing

Impossible irony

For a period of time I persisted in writing impossible letters, longshot attempts to persuade people I cared about to communicate with me, even as I knew they were now well beyond reasonable discussion. These letters attempted to do something no letter can do, silently get through to someone on the other side of a locked, fortified door and change their heart. I have a number of them here on this blahg. That I kept writing these letters is proof that I had not yet grasped an essential feature of human life — there are deeply rooted emotional positions that can never be changed.

I wrote these letters to try to repair painful estrangements. Only one, a letter to an old friend, a rabbi, ever achieved its short-term goal of reestablishing dialogue. That letter was perfected over the course of weeks, calmly making every painful point I needed to make while removing anything that could make the rabbi, who had behaved with surprising hostility toward me, feel defensive. It appealed irresistibly to his desire to be a mensch, to be admired, forgiven, to have his vanity stroked. We had a single warm but pointless talk as a result of that excellent letter. I realize now that the most moving letter I can write will change nothing.

At one point, after much agonizing, I wrote one of these letters to my niece and nephew, after years of estrangement. My sister is humiliated about certain true things that I witnessed in her family. She lives in terror of my big fucking mouth. If her children had relationships with me, the odds, she fears are overwhelming that eventually I would impart some of these humiliating true things to her children and she would never be able to reclaim their admiration and love.

A smart young man, around my niece’s age, offered to read the drafts of the letter and give me his feedback. He soon found himself at a loss. I mentioned to his father what a hard job his son had signed on to, and that I felt a little bad to have put that weight on him. The father volunteered to read the letter-in-progress as well. In the end, father and son both told me that my final draft of the letter was warm, loving and an excellent attempt at reaching out. I sent it.

I never heard back from my niece or my nephew. I have not heard from my sister since the letter to her children arrived. That was around three years ago. Now for a bit of impossible irony.

My old friends’ son, who had read the letter, visited us in a rented vacation house. He was unusually hopped up. His father had shared my pain about the silence from my niece and nephew. There was inexplicable, rising tension in that house that eventually became unbearable. Within a year the son would move back in with his parents and, two days later, be locked in a mental ward. His father and mother, after months of silence punctuated by anger, would be spreading the dubious, but apparently emotionally convincing, claim that I am the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I am dead to all of them. At least I’ve finally grasped the ridiculousness of writing impossible letters.

We live and learn, those of us capable of profiting from our most painful mistakes. Many have learned everything essential that they will ever learn by the time they are two years old, clenching their fists and vowing never to be hurt again, no matter what kind of person they are obliged to become. Writing a letter hoping to successfully question this kind of rigid, brittle self-confidence is pointless. Success is impossible, and the mission is futile, if also a supreme artistic challenge. I have finally learned that it is hubris to expect to succeed in that particular challenge.

Energy Vampire

Years ago an old friend, let’s call her Gina, decided that her old friend was not her friend anymore, in fact, that they were never really friends, in spite of their closeness in former times. She told others that the woman, in whose apartment she lived for a year or two decades earlier, was an “energy vampire” and everyone simply accepted that, like any of us, she had an absolute right to choose her own friends.

The old friend she rejected, and smeared as an energy vampire, was understandably devastated by this sudden repudiation. In my experience she is not an energy vampire, but the charge was enough for people who barely knew her to assume that Gina had every right to cut ties to someone who was demanding and emotionally draining. I had zero insight, at the time, into the narcissistic psychopathy of dear Gina, the woman who decreed her former close friend a life-draining energy vampire.

Fast forward a decade or so. I now have 100% insight into the raging personality problems of this damaged, controlling, easily enraged, terminally insecure woman of great charm, and former beauty. I, in fact, was reckoned far more dangerous than an energy vampire and she and her sychophantic [1] husband (she holds a humiliating secret over his head and she’s not shy about playfully flaunting it) deliberately assassinated my good name among a group of old friends.

I had a call the other day from a friend in France. At one point he mentioned a satire of a reality TV show called What We Do In The Shadows. A film crew lives with a group of vampires. He was laughing that the most feared vampire in the house doesn’t drink blood, it is an Energy Vampire. He’d never heard the term, he loved it, and he described the creature beautifully.

The energy vampire finds an empathetic listener, plays to the person’s kindness and then proceeds to latch on and suck them dry by droning on with the most boring possible monologue for hours on end. The energy vampire preys on its victim’s empathy and is expert at eliciting sympathy as it moves in for its long, painful drink. Once it senses kindness it gets its hooks into the person and never lets go until it has drunk its fill of the nice person’s empathy.

If we are too nice we can fall victim to these creatures, sure enough. That’s why maintaining healthy boundaries is so important.

Thinking more about energy vampires, and that unfair charge my old friend Gina made against her old friend, I realized how ironic Gina’s smear is. For one thing, Gina is not the least bit empathetic, though she does a convincing performance of it socially. Feelings make her very uncomfortable and she is adept at making anyone who needs to talk about feelings feel weak and pathetic. Energy vampires are powerless against someone like her, they will die of thirst if she is their only target.

Additionally, in her need for admiration, Gina is far more of an energy vampire than the woman she smeared as one.  The moment you question Gina’s right to control everyone else, she rages.  In her inchoate, irrational anger she is capable of things far worse than sucking someone dry of energy.  She is capable of anything any tyrant ever thought of.  I’d rush into the arms of an energy vampire to get away from someone as damaged and soul-destructive as her.

[1] sycophantic

  • Of or pertaining to a sycophant; characteristic of a sycophant; meanly or obsequiously flattering; courting favor by mean adulation; parasitic.
    Similar: parasitic
  • Given to obsequious flattery.
  • Attempting to win favor by flattery.

The GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English •

The gift and curse of writing clearly

If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing.  Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking.  Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing.   It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability.  I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.

To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating.  It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.   

When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for  many reasons, some quite innocent.  Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”  

The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”.  It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt.  It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.

The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and other challenges.  Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically.   We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.

For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless.  I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.  

That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose.  If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.

Why I hate irrationality

When someone asserts their will without any reason other than “I am asserting my will no matter what, and you may not fucking question or defy me” understand that you cannot reason with this kind of person. No appeal to fairness, decency, reasonableness, empathy, friendship, kinship, mutuality, morality or anything else will make any difference. There is no negotiation with people who are irrational, particularly when these fuckers are in a rage. Their “arguments” are incoherent, there is no conflict that can be discussed, no possible compromise, no possibility of future understanding. Still, it can take decades to understand what you are up against when you suddenly face this implacable truculence in someone you care about, are connected to, have a long, fond history with.

I recently sent several chapters from the second draft of my manuscript to an old friend who asked to read them. I sent them after explaining that I needed her comments, no matter how brief, to let me know she’d read the pages. I told her how hard it is to get feedback from readers, and how necessary such feedback is to understand how certain writings land with a reader, what needs to be fixed or otherwise clarified. Hearing nothing in a week, I sent a follow up note. After another follow up several days later, with no response, I started to get pissed off. It was tempting to write something angry and dismissive. I note that all of this happened during a few weeks of escalating medical troubles and nights of poor sleep.

In the end, I was glad I’d held my disappointment and temper in check. I wrote this to her, after a phone conversation that helped me greatly from a medical perspective (she’s a retired doctor who did research as we spoke and came to a logical conclusion as to the source and cure of my present autoimmune situation), to help her understand why silence by way of response is so intolerable to me.

As you described, when you were upset as a kid you closed yourself in your room and did math.  You were good at it and immersing yourself in it took you away from your hurt feelings and helped you regain a sense of order and control, a very important thing for us puny earthlings, particularly when we feel under attack.   My escape was always writing, drawing and playing guitar in my room.  All of these were things I controlled, and got better and better at, all things that took me away from my unfairly battered feelings.  Writing has been so important since my banishment from the group of rabid lemmings who expressed great love for me over the last fifty years.

My father’s most effective weapon of abuse was silence.  I’d talk to him about something that bothered me, worried me, tormented me, and he’d reframe it, bat it away, blame me, etc.  When I wouldn’t let him hijack the conversation, he’d go silent.  No response at all.  It was, and still is, kryptonite to me.  

Gina, after assuring me she was “happy” to hear my concerns, gave me complete, total, unbroken silence for four months (followed by an enraged teenaged/two year-old’s temper tantrum when I forced a meeting by insulting Flack’s fragile manhood).   Her hapless puppet, the “homo”, made excuses, blamed me, got offended, had hissy fits, defended his wife’s right to be an enraged, abusive bitch, got mad, calmed down, insisted over and over on irrational points, made incoherent comebacks, etc. but his periods of silence would only last a few weeks at a time.   Letters, texts, WhatsApps, phone calls from me were all ignored by the two queens, the homophobe and her pathologically obliging mate, during this ugly transition from friendship to eternal hatred, hatred spread generously throughout a large group that comprised most of my close friends and their now adult children — all revealed to be as emotionally/morally malleable as any lynch mob anywhere.

That is why after I told you I need acknowledgement before I’d send you my chapters it was so hurtful not to hear back day after day, even after I sent a few follow-ups.   Every day when I checked my email it would be like another little silent kick in the nuts, so familiar from anyone in my life who had malice or passive aggressive anger to let me know about. The intent isn’t relevant really, the effect is the same, particularly with my stress level turned up due to ongoing and new health threats, 80% disability, medical negligence, etc..

Anyway, fucking read that short bit I sent you again today.  It will take you about 6 minutes.  Then write “nice”, or “oh”, or “I think this will interest a literary agent” or “I’d suggest changing this, adding this” or “well-done” or “you really have an inflated sense of your literary abilities, pal, dontcha?” or “Bitter much?” or “I think you could lose part 3” or “I think this is so-so, even though the writing itself is OK” or “I know nothing about these things, but good luck” or … you get the point.  Anything but nothing.  Without reader feedback I’m working in the dark much of the time in how this material might land and getting this feedback is generally about as easy as pulling out my own wisdom teeth.

And so, we were able to come to a better understanding of each other and preserve a relationship that could have easily been severed forever. She emailed that she found my chapter about the unreliable narrator, the one a perverse but perceptive friend urged me to write, portraying myself as a despicable villain well-deserving of my punishment, very funny. Several people have found this chapter about my unpardonable faults funny. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose. But I take this all as progress, boys and girls, and another living example of living and learning to do better, and using Reason and an appeal to empathy to work through tangled, inflamed emotions with someone capable of responding in kind.

To learn or not to learn

Anything important that you learn leads to new things to learn, for those excited about learning.   We are constantly building on the lessons in our life, if we are inclined that way.  It is possible to be quite content with what one knows, rest on our present level of expertise and become incurious, but for me, life is about  getting better and better at life itself.

Things that hurt us, things we do that hurt others we care about, remind us of work we still need to do, things we need to learn.  If I am constantly wounded by the same thing, I can learn to move my head out of the way instead of leaning in to that particular punch in the face.  I can learn to be kinder, more patient with people, know when it is important to withdraw, give others space.   In my life I’ve come to understand that if we give others power over us and they misuse it more than once, there is an important lesson in that.

There are some challenging things that can be impossible to do without intelligent feedback from others.  We simply can’t see the bigger picture sometimes.  A guy in obvious turmoil, a stranger, asked if he could talk to me.  He told me the story of how his wife left him after he fell off the wagon, his life was so painful that he reached out to a stranger, as his AA sponsor had advised him to do, instead of getting drunk, as was his long habit in painful situations.  As a stranger hearing the story an obvious thing hit me as soon as he told me that his wife was also in Alcoholics Anonymous.   His alcohol binge was a direct threat to her sobriety so she packed a bag and moved out.

He was shocked at my brilliant insight.  I told him it was as obvious as the nose on his face, though we also both agreed that in a dark room, even with a mirror, you literally can’t see the nose on your face, even though you’re breathing through it, can touch it, etc.

We are all in a metaphorical dark room sometimes, unable to see what is instantly clear once a light is turned on.  How do we turn on the light?   Often the darkness is illuminated by someone else, someone who has lived through something similar, someone who just knows how to listen, someone merely stating the obvious.  Obvious as it may also be, sometimes someone simply saying it out loud to us is enough to turn on a light in the blackness, once we hear it.

Our lives are shaped by our perceptions.  Reality itself is only our perception of reality.  Our perception is formed by the stories we believe, stories give us the lens to see everything else through.  Some stories are helpful and can teach us important things we need to know to live richer lives.  Other stories are harmful, confirm our worst suspicions, fuel our fear and anger and teach us only to repeat our past mistakes over and over and justify them better and better to ourselves. 

I suppose wisdom comes from learning to embrace the true sounding stories that give us more health, more peace, more ability to understand others.  The other kind of stories, bad news, bad karma, and more of the same incomprehensibly fucked up shit.

The need for validation vs. the need for good feedback

People with an insecure sense of self are outer-directed, they live their lives for the validation of the people around them. Since they felt belittled and neglected when they were too young to do anything but suffer, they take pains to look physically perfect, according to the fashion of the day, they seek praise, status, social position, awards from their peers. All these are part of a lifelong attempt to make themselves feel better, more valuable and worthier of love, than others. They live in a hierarchical world where some people are simply much more important than others, by virtue of working to earn their self-worth in an objectively quantifiable way.

They live in a win/lose competitive world where winners win and are admired by those around them for having the will and talent not to be losers. As far as I can see, that world is the destructive illusion of superficial idiots, but I have always been super-opinionated about things like the justness of rigid social hierarchies and those who conform to social systems without any real questions about their validity. I keep thinking of the billions of people this worldview consigns to inferior, permanent, inter-generational loser status simply as the way things are.

I have always felt a need for the useful feedback I almost never got as a child. What is different about my need for a response and the need for outer validation I’ve sketched above? In both cases we are looking for assurances about the good effect our words and actions have on others. Everyone likes a sincere compliment, it’s always gratifying to be spoken well of by others. In the case of validation-seeking, the thing sought is praise and admiration. That is different, to my mind, than seeking an intelligent critique of your work, sometimes your deeds.

A person writes to convey thoughts, ideas and feelings to others. Writing is an extension of the desire to have a good, mutual conversation, one of the great pleasures of being human, as far as I can see. There is really no better way to gauge how well a piece of writing achieves the goals you intend than by getting good notes from a reader. This feedback allows us to understand what is still unclear to others in our work, or objectionable, or feeble, or unconvincing, and to address ambiguity, sloppiness, or assuming the comprehensibility of complex things we have not sufficiently laid out the context for understanding. With those comments in mind we can fix those things and come closer to our aim. Comments we can mull over keep the conversation moving forward, which is integral to why we communicate in the first place. Silence by way of response is a real conversation stopper, to state the obvious.

Validation-seeking people tend to stay very busy, they are socially active, work hard, program their leisure time down to the minute, consult the clock for when it’s time to end the party and get eight hours of sleep to be up and at ’em full force the next morning. Their every waking effort goes toward earning the self-acceptance and self-admiration they can’t feel except as reflected back to them by others. Sitting quietly by themselves, unless they are exercising their abdominal muscles, burning calories or something useful like that, is unthinkably difficult for them. It is as if they literally can’t see themselves unless they are engaged with others who appreciate them.

Of course, I probably only feel this way because I’ve always spent most of my hours alone. One could make a decent argument that I like nothing better than the company of my own constantly rippling thoughts and ideas. I learned early to soothe myself this way when I felt ignored – learning to play music, drawing, writing, cooking. I am always happy to spend time with other people, or talk to them at length – and I need these contacts as much as anyone does, maybe more – but I also accept myself the way I am and have as much compassion for myself as I do toward anyone else I care about.

Am I a great guitar player or any kind of virtuoso? No, but I am the greatest guitar player I can be at the moment. It means a great deal to me to play every note as cleanly, purposefully and soulfully as I can, to learn new ways to play the same melody, new positions on the neck for chords and little tricks, to become a more fluent improviser. Most people don’t think of any of these things, like the many different ways to play the same note, which I think is a shame.

To those who focus almost entirely on what the outer world says about us, you are either a professional musician getting paid and recognized for your work or an amateur with a slightly obsessive hobby which is nice, but a bit vain, because what does it really say about a person if they waste hours a day playing Beatles tunes?

It would be marginally better to the validation-focused, perhaps, to play sophisticated, challenging jazz tunes, or the best of classical guitar, if they would even notice that difference in material. They’re often not even able to hear any of it very clearly because it is just – they don’t even know what the hell compels someone to do it. Beatles, jazz standards or classical — best, to me, is playing what you love best and can make sound the most beautiful, but, fuck, enough about me.

Catastrophizing

I wake up with my skin crawling. Can’t sleep anymore because, in addition to all my other troubles at the moment, I have these fucking microscopic devils running around under my skin. Oh, my god… the horror, the fucking horror! I am soon ripping at my own skin.

This hellish looking baby is called a scabie (Sarcoptes scabiei), a parasitic mite that lives, in the millions, under the skin and causes a contagious itch with… exudative crust…

I scratch my skin hopelessly because it itches everywhere, worst in the places I can’t hope to reach. 

Note: there is no evidence that I have scabies. In fact, I don’t have scabies.  A friend in France recently described this nightmare to me, and the wonderful news he had from a doctor — his case is called “clean scabies” which, like “friendly fire”, or “collateral damage”, really doesn’t change the awful outcome, but is supposed to make you feel better since, in your case, the plague that is tormenting you did not result from your own poor hygienic practices.  

I looked up scabies and found this nightmarish image of the tiny fucker who runs in hoards making the skin horripilate and forming crusts over the itchy places where exudation occurs. Naturally the image of this tiny, demonic monster popped into my head when I woke up today itching. Once it was there, I couldn’t get it out. 

Because my new knee is still often immobilizingly painful ten months after replacement surgery, because I can’t exercise, because, after an objectively hellish experience with old friends I am wrestling with a playful anaconda of a manuscript that, while smiling, challenging and fun much of the time, is still a twenty foot long deadly constrictor, because all my eggs are in one basket and that basket is shredding, because I am flesh and must go the way of all such things… because the city cut off the water this morning and I have buckets of water all over for cooking, washing and toilet flushing… because, because, because….

It doesn’t occur to me, or it does but I dismiss the thought, that I am itching because of dry skin, a common malady of winter in temperate zones that gets more demanding with age. Next to the bed I have a pump bottle of moisturizer, placed there for soothing dry, itching skin. Applying it is a much better option than clawing at my own skin and twitching at the thought of parasitic mites doing gleeful gymnastics under my skin, but it seems as hopeless as everything else at the moment, too much skin to moisturize, can’t reach the places it itches most, wah, wah! Catastrophe!

Catastrophizing happens when you are overwhelmed by the challenges you face and are at the end of your ability to objectively weigh your circumstances. You can no longer see them one by one as discrete things to deal with, they have united to destroy you once and for all.  All the afflictions described two paragraphs above are true. Taken one at a time they are all things that can be taken care of, though some take a long time and require a long term perspective. Taken as a whole, as the relentless, million-faced army of the same implacable enemy, they appear in the form of the undefeatable microscopic tormentor pictured above.

The thought of this whole subject makes my goddamned skin crawl.

Telltale sign of what you’re up against (from a work in progress)

Chapter 69  Telltale sign: simple questions lead to anger

When you are confronted by an indignant person who has shown over time that they can never be wrong, no matter what, even the simplest request for clarification or empathy will fuel their anger.  People who can’t be wrong, on pain of utter humiliation, have only one aim when they feel challenged — destruction of the enemy.

When you encounter someone who gets mad every time you need to talk about something hurtful that happened, you will find that kindness, patience, friendship, extending the benefit of doubt, love, humor, generosity are useless against this kind of anger. The reason for this anger is that being imperfect in the eyes of others is unbearably painful and humiliating to them. If you insist on being understanding, while needing to finish a badly needed conversation, you will incur only their rage and desire to silence you forever. Trust me on this one, I’ve lived it more than once. 

F__ doesn’t deny that he told me, after weeks of icy silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” G___ regarded me coolly as her husband drew his line in the sand. I reassured him of my friendship and he seemed momentarily soothed, although this mild, anticlimactic outcome, instead of the desired outrage on my part, meant that the planned hit was not carried out, much to determined G__’s momentary disappointment.

Here’s the thing I know now that I was blind to then. It is essential to understand that when you are in an incoherent conversation with people desperate never to be wrong, all problem-solving tools become useless.  I should have calmly asked F___ what it was that I did to him. This would not have led to any kind of good outcome, but F____’s resulting temper tantrum, with tactical provocation from righteously enraged G____, could have opened my eyes, saved me months of anguish trying to solve a puzzle that had only one solution, a solution I resisted with my entire soul: mutual death. There is no way to avoid it in a conflict with this type. A year and a few months later they were as irreversibly dead to me as they’ve made sure I am to them and anyone who knows them.

What reason to kill when it is a blessing to be merciful, particularly to a loved one? Only one – you are in the hands of someone so damaged that death for you is the only outcome where they feel they are saving face, somehow not being humiliated by having to acknowledge imperfection.  Better, they reason, to righteously kill you than to be seen as a cowardly murderer, or a liar, or someone consumed with unslakable, inchoate rage that is so easily provoked.

We encounter situations where there is a perplexing question that must remain unanswered. The reason for not even asking these questions is having experienced a ferocious reaction to a reasonable question over and over. It makes one hesitant to set off the same kind of savagery in a moment that appears to be emotionally fraught. Experience teaches us that a meaningful answer to a painful question is beyond the capability of someone damaged on a primal level.

Here’s a koan that has become quite familiar to me, I’ve heard it now in five or six restatements but the sentiment is always identical. F___’s version was: You have to understand that I am too upset to hear why you are upset. In other words: my actual pain is much more important than your claimed pain.

There is no question that can clarify this or make it appear to be the reasonable statement of a friend and partner in understanding. Months later I asked F____ about this and he conceded it was not something a friend says to his close friend when they are both shaken up. Notably, he did not express regret or apologize for it. The obvious follow up questions all become useless after you learn that any of them leads to fresh indignation and anger.

This is the wall we face when confronted by a conclusory statement meant to stop us in our tracks, put us on our back foot, silence us, disable us in a fight to the death. The fight to the death starts long before someone who is not destructively damaged is aware of it.  It is unthinkable, except to those compelled to kill, that this kindred soul I thought I knew and loved intimately is determined to beat me at any cost, spread lies to destroy my good name, kill other friendships and forbid their adult children to get back to me.

It is mind-fucking, even after you have seen it a few times in your life. I suppose it takes the trauma of experiencing it as an adult to force you awake, to make you aware that the signs of this intractable sickness are always identical, that motherfuckers who act this way are all interchangeable, they must be seen as perfect or they will make sure you’re good and fucking dead.

Not being allowed to speak bites (plus upside)

When I say that somebody is not letting me speak, it’s not that they’re really able to make me stop speaking, but they make it clear, over and over, that they’re not willing (or able) to hear what I have to say.  That’s what I mean by “not being allowed to speak”. More precisely, it is a refusal to hear anything they don’t want to hear.

A person intent on not letting me speak constantly reframes the conversation, accuses, becomes indignant if I persist, insists on things that are often ridiculous and refuses to discuss the absurdity of their untenable claims. So I can, of course, speak as much as I want, even after the other person physically walks out of the room, hangs up the phone or cuts off communication, but “not letting me speak” is a way of saying someone is making it plain that they will never tune in to what I need them to hear.

Finding yourself in this situation, and feeling the human need to express what you are feeling, you may take up a musical instrument, begin to paint,  become an interpretive dancer, master any one of a number of things including the art of writing clearly. This clear expression of the things you need to say that others in your life refuse to hear over time becomes a necessity, an important muscle that you exercise every single day.  

In exercising this muscle you feel a certain mastery of things that are otherwise impossible to hold steady before you, the crucial things others refuse to let you say by refusing to hear you.  I’d have to call this strong impulse to do something creative and soul-soothing to express what you need to put out there a major upside of being told to shut up by people who claim to love you.

Political pundits often suck ass

I sent this email to a friend just now, in response to a couple of political opinion pieces he’d sent me.

These are all good points that you raise. The US has the lowest rate of social mobility, people born in poverty becoming middle-class, of any wealthy country.  Privilege is perpetuated by law (as you say, they killed the Death Tax) and elite institutions, like Harvard, that are not available to any but the top recipients of an excellent education (and funds for public education are constantly being hijacked by Christians and others to pay for their private schools), or those whose families have a connection or are generous donors.  (Example, Jared Kushner, C yeshiva student, Harvard alum after felon dad Charles gives the school a few million shekels)

There are a lot of factors about why things are so fucked up and so demonically divided right now. Of course Fox is a huge and horrible one, for the reasons you describe.  It’s really grotesque how much influence one ninety year-old billionaire reptile can have on the media for the entire world.  Neither of these big picture articles about our current crisis (Mother Jones or Stephens) even so much as mentioned one of the scariest elephants in the partisan divided room:  the many-headed nightmare emanating from climate change, global warming, increasing deadly storms, sea level and ocean temperatures rising and ocean ecosystems desalinating as ice caps melt, drought, floods, wildfires and famine and eventually no food or living space for tens of millions, and then billions, displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable heat and turned into roving hordes of hungry on-the-move cannibals, and a final world war caused by scarcity of things like now monetized water.  Talk about a refugee crisis, they’ll probably decide to nuke these ravenous cannibal migrants. Talk about elites.

My problem with Bret Stephens is really the same problem I have with Mother Jones. They are pushing a thesis, motivated by an ideological position, so Stephens talks about these corrupt, cancelling, illiberal  radical left elites out of touch with the person who’s lost his job in middle America, completely disconnected from the millions of deaths of despair, and the murders, and the hopeless lives of millions of abused Americans, but he is also one of the same corrupt , out of touch elites, being a respected opinion writer for the New York Times.  Both he and the Mother Jones writer resort to simplified arguments that leave out nuance and tremendously important details to advance the particular case they are making.

The Mother Jones guy dismissed the idea of any kind of conspiracy at play in the crisis that our country has come to, pointing out, irrelevantly but at length, that belief in conspiracy theories is about the same as it’s always been, even if the wife of history’s most corrupt Supreme Court justice is a far right Christian political operative, on the board of the influential, secret nonprofit Council for National Policy, who brokered the deal between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders in 2016, was in and out of the West Wing regularly during 45’s administration (and heads would always roll when she left) and also was in a religious frenzy in the Jesus-invoking texts to the Chief of Staff as Trump’s January 6 coup was sputtering, in the hours and days after she attended the Big Guy’s rousing speech in the freezing cold earlier that day.    Then all White House phone logs, texts, secret service texts and calls, irretrievably deleted, all Homeland Security heads’ communications also gone, from the hours before, during and after the riot at the Capitol for which hundreds are being, eh, vengefully held hostage.  There are complex right wing conspiracies at work all around us (for example, the association of Republican state attorneys’ general that met to work out how to limit drop boxes and things like that prior to the 2020 election, are probably meeting right now, the fake electors, election deniers overseeing upcoming elections, continual destruction of evidence, lies about the existence of evidence never produced, etc). and it doesn’t take Oliver Stone to tell you that.

Stephens does something similar when he focuses on the corrupt idiot asshole privileged  heads of elite institutions (accurate enough)  and uses them to prove his larger points that misguided, hypocritical, often tyrannical liberals suck and only sober conservatives like him see the world as it actually is and are prepared to lead it (debatable, like all political positions).  

The worst one in this category, for my money, is fucking David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times.  I avoid his stuff the last few years, too aggravating to read that know-it-all’s confident conclusions about his opinions.   The insidious thing about Brooks is that he can make very reasonable points while he hides his ideological agenda most of the time but then sometimes it just pops out in a grotesque, tell-tale aside, like nonchalantly dropping in a gutter formulation of what’s wrong with poor people in terms of their moral character.

Anyway, it’s occasionally interesting to read some of this stuff, but I don’t put any more stock in the opinions of these folks that I do in my own reading, thinking and talking to people whose opinions I respect. Political commentators are in the business of simplifying things, convincing readers of their astuteness and expertise, and making difficult, complicated, scary things seem to make sense, but the version of reality they give you is always missing essential ingredients that you need to have a nuanced, really intelligent conversation about the subject. That’s just one reason I resent these fucking pantloads.