Category Archives: writing

The Smartest Man in the Room

My old friend Andy was a very clever fellow.   Only he, Antonin Scalia and James Woods, for example, ever scored perfect 1600s on their Scholastic Aptitude Test.   He clearly had a facility for math and abstraction, demonstrated by his perfect 800 in Math, but his verbal skills were, clearly, equally well-developed.  He spoke well, wrote well, was a highly critical reader.  This was partly because much of what he read he could probably have written better. 

We used to joke about his red ginsu, the razor sharp one he used to parse, slice and vivisect paragraphs.  I don’t know that all of his corrections were for the best, although I know he felt unshakably certain about every one of them.  His occasional howls at the way a line was written were a giveaway, I always thought.   From time to time they’d lock him up in a ward somewhere until he calmed down, so there is also that.

The smartest man in the room, someone who takes the sketchy title seriously, is rarely impressed by other people’s cleverness, it seems to me.   If he is impressed, he keeps it to himself.   It’s as if he’s sure the clever remark is something he could have easily delivered better, he was simply thinking of more important things at the time.  I find myself mulling this over this on a frigid day, this cold trait of some very smart people I have known.    

I once knew a very bright professional writer, a former journalist.  He was a good storyteller and a true literary craftsman,  He also turned out to be loathe to compliment, or even comment on, writing that was not currently for sale.  He had a pragmatic orientation, for one thing.  Writing for oneself was just that, and no further commentary was necessary.  Writing for pay was a job, a craft, work, every sentence open to debate and revision by the buyer.  It was two different worlds to him, I surmise, presenting an idea for publication versus masturbating at length (or even succinctly) in the privacy of one’s own notebook. 

To increase the odds of having a piece published the writer must proceed pragmatically.   What subject will the publication want written about?  What kind of prose does the publication usually publish, what is their editorial point of view, what style do they prefer?  How much of the personal is acceptable in a personal piece and how much of the private is expected to be suggested with discretion?  What tone do they buy?   How many words? 

You take these factors into consideration, and the taste of the person who buys the pieces, if you are able to find out, and craft your piece accordingly.  All of this is sensible to keep in mind while writing for pay.   Follow these steps while writing as well as you can and you increase your chances of selling the piece.

Here’s a harder part.   Suppose someone sends you chapters of an ambitious manuscript of a book he’s trying to write, a personal biographical project you have discussed with him at length.   It is unlike most straightforward memoirs you’ve read.   It would be hard to put it into a marketing slot, or imagine what shelf to put it on in a bookstore, if it did become a book.   It’s a kind of creative nonfiction, a reimagining of a difficult life, a sometimes poignant wrestling match between anger and acceptance, set against huge historical backdrops.  Some of it is, admittedly, moving, and it takes an occasional nice leap from apparent reality to pure conjecture, but in the end, what the fuck is it?   Best to say nothing.

The writer’s ex-wife will later angrily defend the writer’s continued silence on the several chapters of the ms. he was sent.   According to her, he was unable, or unwilling, to write that way, with the creative leaps and the wildly reimagined confrontations, the deeply personal stuff.  He simply wasn’t built that way, not in his writing, not in his personal life.   It was unfair, she said, to judge him harshly because he was not able to write that way.  Unfair to bring up that he’d expressed interest and offered feedback on the pages and then never sent any feedback.   “What do you fucking expect him to fucking say about something he himself couldn’t do, you fucking self-absorbed fuck?” she added, a bit gratuitously, I thought.   

Eventually, when the subject was gingerly raised and discussed between the writer and the would-be writer, the published author told the unpublished one that he had been raised, by a supremely successful grandfather, to always compete.   This was as close to a plausible explanation as the unpublished writer would ever get from the pro.   

I get to wondering about this, a man who no longer keeps a journal, outside of the words that find themselves here.  Maybe I delude myself, judgmental bastard that I also am, that I always try to nurture the creative efforts of people I encounter.   Somebody sends me a beautiful photo, I send back “beautiful”.   It takes a few seconds and it feels right.   Perhaps it means nothing to the other person, is like a single “like” on fucking Facebook. 

Maybe I’m largely the same way as these paragons I describe above, oblivious about the many times I don’t even send “well-done” when a virtual tear runs down my virtual cheek after reading something that moves me.  I mean, unless the writer is a needy, vain, weak person, why do they need me to tell them that what they wrote made an impression on me, right?

When I write now I scrutinize every sentence and the whole before I hit “publish”.   I’ve polished my style by this exercise of preparing these pages to be read by a stranger in Malaysia, or Saudi Arabia or, today, Slovakia.  I picture anyone in the world reading my words, and picturing this reader, I strive to make what I am saying as clear as possible.   

I read this top to bottom, numerous times, as I write, flashing my own ginsu over any word that casts a shadow over the clarity of its neighbors.   Writing clearly is a kind favor to the reader, and to ourselves.   We write to be understood, to express thoughts coherently, to make our feelings felt by others, to connect.   We strive to write without a thought for who is the smartest baboon in the room.  At least I think we do, though, it also must be noted, I am clearly not the smartest baboon in the room.

Joe Frank on the advantage, to a writer, of not avoiding pain

The late, great Joe Frank [1], who died recently at 79, was memorialized by radio superstar Terry Gross.   She played an interview she did with him in 1989.  You can hear the whole interview, illustrated with tasty slices of his radio shows, as well as read the transcript from which the following was clipped, here.  The entire twenty minutes you will spend to hear the whole episode is time well spent.  (IMHO, LOL!  ROTFLMAO!)

At one point Terry asks him a question that yields what struck me as profound answer.   The answer resonated with my experience, I guess is what I’m trying to say.   Those of us who work on writing thoughtfully about our condition here should have a look at Joe Frank’s answer about personal fears and insecurities. 

GROSS: You know, a lot of your more personal shows deal with fears and insecurities – ones that, you know, we can all relate to. But I wonder if when you take your own insecurities and put them in a kind of persona and make them into an hour radio program, if they’re easier to deal with than they are, say, when you’re lying awake alone in the middle of the night.

FRANK: Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, by using those experiences for radio programs, you transcend them. You almost look for bad experiences or painful experiences. Whatever tragedies might befall you, you can always, right away, think, well, that would make a great story for radio. And so that whatever happens, even if it has a great negative content, even if it’s painful – because you can then tell it on the radio and share it with many listeners and move people or entertain people, it then takes on a positive value.

And I remember distinctly that – coming to that revelation a number of years ago when I realized that I no longer wanted to avoid pain – that I could use it in a way that was very productive so that it was easier to experience whatever suffering came my way.

 

[1]  

 

The Pleasure of Reading

Last night we visited Sekhnet’s aunt, the widow of Sekhnet’s father’s brother, on the occasion of the energetic aunt’s 98th birthday.   Aunt Lillian has always been a big reader and had several paperbacks on her coffee table. “You want this?” she asked me, holding up a book by Nelson DeMille.

I’d read a couple of DeMille’s books, given to me years ago by Sekhnet’s favorite cousin on her mother’ side.  He used to buy them in airports, read them on planes. He loved DeMille’s wiseass, macho narrator, a private eye with a dozen wisecracks ready for the bad guys who were about to torture him.   DeMille has a million or more fans, and has written many bestsellers. He is no slouch, a kind of heir to Elmore Leonard, even if sometimes without Leonard’s unfailing gift for understatement.

The book hadn’t been Aunt Lillian’s cup of tea, the wiseass, macho narrator no doubt had put her off, but she told me, in selling the book “he’s a good writer.”   He is.  He writes to engage the reader, to entertain and to sell books.  He is very good at all of these things.  Reading his book last night and today reminded me of why we love to read a good tale.   DeMille has gotten better with age, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how quickly each of his other books sucked me in.  I’ve snipped out a few examples, which I’ll share and then be on my way.

Of his narrator’s backstory, he says:  

FYI, I spent five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer and got blown up in Afghanistan.  That’s the short story of how I wound up here. The long story is a long story, and no one in Key West wants to hear long stories.

As a reader, I wanted to hug the guy when I read that.  Instead of wasting a paragraph, or several, on made up details, he gives us a punchline that reveals a lot about the narrator and heads right back to setting up his story.

About his father, the narrator says:

…my father was a man of few words.   If I’d gotten killed overseas and he had to put my obit in the Portland Press Herald at twenty dollars a word he’d be Yankee frugal and Maine taciturn, and just say:  Daniel MacCormick died.  If it had to be a six-word minimum he’d show his practical side and add: Car for Sale.  

Well, maybe I’m being hard on the old man.  He was proud of me when I joined the Army, and before my second deployment to Afghanistan he advised, “Come back.”  Well, I did, and he seemed pleased about that, but a bit concerned about my physical injuries, though not so much about the post-traumatic stress, which he doesn’t believe in.   He liked to say he came back from Vietnam the same as when he left, which, according to my mother, is unfortunately true.

Great shit, fun to read.  Even if the joke about the obit might be an elderly one, it is recycled deftly by the talented Mr. DeMille and serves the telling of the tale.

One last one before I make myself lunch and eat it while reading a few more short, tasty chapters of The Cuban Affair:  

(The narrator is a charter boat captain in Key West.  His first mate Jack is an ornery seventy year-old Viet Nam vet.  They are about to meet mysterious clients who have offered him millions for a dangerous mission.)

Jack always wore jeans and sneakers, never shorts or flip-flops, and today he’d chosen his favorite “I Kill People” T-shirt.  

I suggested, “The Maine T-shirt I gave you would be good tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”  

He doesn’t mean “yes,” and he doesn’t mean “sir.”  He means “Fuck you.” Sometimes he calls me “Captain,” and I never know if he’s using my former Army rank or my present title as licensed sea captain.  In either case he means “Asshole.”

 

 

 

An untenable life

I persist here almost every day, frequently encouraged by the previously adversarial voice of my dead father’s skeleton.  I write these pieces in spite of many sensible reasons not to spend so much of my time this way.   I’m often cheered by my appetite to set the words down, get my thoughts out clearly, express sometimes difficult feelings, in spite of the almost universal silence that greets this unpaid work.  Still, it is an untenable life.

I console myself: I write because I’m compelled to write, because it helps me, and may help someone else.   I assure myself that I’ll eventually sell some of this writing to support myself, however slightly, going forward.   I am better about not being pissed sitting in the middle of the almost universal silence that hisses around even my best efforts here, I remind myself.  Some days, like today, for example, it feels like an untenable life I am living.  A random page ripped senselessly out of Ecclesiastes.

My idiopathic life-threatening disease is as vague and slow-unfolding as my life itself.  Norton Juster had a character in The Phantom Tollbooth who reminds me of myself in regard to my writing life.   “Worlds tallest midget” said the sign, and a man of average height opened the door.  Around the corner was the “World’s smallest giant”, same guy.   If I wrote half as well as I do, but had twice the ambition, twice the marketing and branding skills, I’d probably be able to make a living.   If I wrote a third as well, and had ten times the marketing and branding smarts, and the unquenchable drive, I’d be a wealthy man by now.   But who am I fucking kidding?  My life is untenable.  

Look, all of our lives are untenable in the end.   Fuck– look at this guy, his lungs just went kaput.   She could have lived to be a hundred, if not for that drunk driver.    Nobody knows how this one died, put “WTF?” for cause of death.   In those last moments, given the chance to take stock of one’s life, how many take consolation in the many good business deals they made?  I have no idea, having almost never made a good business deal.

It seems to me that, except in the case of monsters, those last moments are probably spent thinking about love, shining forth from the world we are about to lose.  The thought of being loved could be a comfort, or it could be unbearable, smothering, I suppose.   That was one reason my father sent his family away right before he died.  How do you die with a small audience of people desperate not to lose you looking on?   The nurses told me afterwards that many men do this, send wives and children away before they breathe their last.  

It’s not the thought of my eventual death that bothers me now, it’s thoughts of my untenable life, a life I must continue to live today.   You can be a moral person, strive to be kind, and mild, to listen, to be responsive, use a gentle phrase to turn aside wrath.   With that orientation to the world, if you have a metrocard with a ride left on it, you can get on a bus, and probably you will be one of the nicest kids on the bus.

Years ago, as I was caring for my dying mother long distance with long daily phone calls, a literary agent was blown away by a long, convoluted story that spilled out when I arrived, soaked and dehydrated, at a party.  “If you can write that down just the way you told it, I can sell it!” she assured me with great confidence.  It was an exciting assurance.  At the time I had no clue how to write it down just the way I’d told it.  I sent her what I thought was my best effort and she responded that I was a very nice guy and that she’d like to take me to lunch at the Harvard Club, where she took her professional clients.   I never called her to arrange that lunch, nice fucking guy that I am.    

These days, having the time, patience and solitude to concentrate, I have a pretty good idea how to go about writing it all down.  Little idea how to organize it, or even review, say, the 1,200 pages of a first draft, but a much better sense that I am hitting the target pretty consistently when I sit down to write.  Nonetheless, the life I am currently waking up to is untenable. Today it is about 2,000 pounds of untenable.  

Wrestling with my themes every day, I’ve developed muscles that most people I know, people much more muscled and capable than I am in most other ways, are not aware they even have.   Today this rippling musculature mocks me, feels like an even shittier consolation prize than it does most other days.   I turn the goddamn thing I am looking at five different ways before setting it in final form.   There are subtle details that must be lit just so.  Impossible to show these things, unless you take pains to set them at the right angle, against the right backdrop, light them correctly.  Leave out a step and you might as well piss in the ocean from a high cliff.

“Schmuck,” I can hear the voice, “instead of writing about what a good writer you are, why don’t you write a great letter to a top literary agent and see what you can get them to do for you and your untenable life?  Nobody gives a rat’s toned and sculpted cuisse for your self-regarding opinions about your fucking untenable life.   Live a tenable life or die — your choice, bitch.”

Leonardo, looking for a patron, once wrote a remarkable letter to some rich guy, maybe the King of France (see letter to the Duke of Milan).  He boldly set out a highly improbable list of many things, in a dozen disparate fields, he could do for this rich guy.  The rich guy was impressed, gave the prototypical Renaissance man a lifetime stipend to live in a villa and conduct his life of contemplation, exploration and the pursuit of knowledge and excellence.   It may have been some other rich guy who eventually gave him the lifetime stipend, his letter may have had no greater effect than being a wonderful example of self-confidence and seeming hyperbole that is actually, possibly, understatement. 

“Yes, that’s what you do, write that understated, hyperbolic letter and send it to everyone you can find who might be an advocate in getting you some rich people’s money.  The people you know can’t help you, and, more to the point, cannot stand to hear about your untenable, if also highly fortunate, life.  You want silence?  You’ve got it now.”  

I’m all ears.

On Writing

My nephew, a young man of few words, is an excellent writer.  In speaking he doesn’t waste words, neither does he waste them when he writes.   It is a rare gift, saying exactly what needs to be said and not saying everything else.

I tend to talk too much.  I speak in long, implausibly complicated sentences.  When I write I’m able to compose and compress my thoughts, refine my feelings, comb through and untangle my sometimes challenging syntax.  It is like anything else one loves to do.  You practice it every day, and after thousands of hours, doing a thing you love, it becomes more graceful.   It also never feels like work to work at improving your skills, it is a pleasure to do because we love the thing itself.

Not that we can master everything we love to do, but the regular doing is essential in any case.   Like calligraphy, which I attempt intermittently but without enough commitment to do gracefully.  I love the flow of ink on paper, and the look of beautiful writing, but my attempts at calligraphy are clumsy, endearingly, idiosyncratically clumsy, if you like, but lacking the flowing grace of masterful calligraphy.  In lettering beautifully the practiced hand must dance lightly, in perfect harmony with the ink and the paper.  My hand is heavy, jerky, my loops quirky, but so be it, I don’t practice the fundamental strokes of calligraphy every day, with enough devotion.

I’ll say only this about writing.   If you do it carefully, and seriously, without taking yourself too seriously (as I am right now, taking myself too seriously) you’ll find it easier and easier to write well.   Hah! Look at me.  Took a perfectly beautiful piece of paper and made an unartful blotch at the bottom, while giving a pert little lecture on the ineffable harmony between ink and page.  I don’t crumble it up, though it would be easy enough here to select this offending paragraph and hit “delete”.

Whatever else you can say about writing, and it is a beautiful and rare thing to be able to go back over and over and fix your mistakes until the words fit together as clearly as you can assemble them, it is far, far better to be able to write, and set things out coherently, than most of the alternatives available when you are faced with a thing that could otherwise choke you to death.

When I turned sixty I assembled those near and dear to me and told Sekhnet I wanted to celebrate by “holding forth”.  She was filled with dread at the prospect.  Her fears were in vain.  In the end, between the two sessions of my improvised stories (they demanded a fucking intermission) I’d only insulted a small handful of old friends.  I’d told a few endearing tales about people in the room, trying to keep them concise, but you know how these things go.

I recall thinking, at one point, that some of my friends must have been thinking (or maybe all of them were, at one point or another during my long holding forth) “who the fuck does he fucking think he is, holding forth this way, like his life is… why, I oughta…..”  I quickly put the thought out of mind, it was distracting.   

Better to hear poems about me recited by friends?  I thought not.  And, anyway, my bumpy life makes little sense to any would-be poet trying to put a few stanzas together to commemorate my life achievements.   Thought it better to attempt it myself, by saluting those I’d chosen as my lifelong friends, than leave that pressure on befuddled loved ones.   I don’t know if it’s related to my long birthday lecture or not, but I’ve seen relatively few of the assembled nearest and dearest since that day a year and a half ago.

Sixty years from now, I will hold forth again, if time permits.  In the meantime, I refine the best of myself here, in carefully selected words, in the manner of my nephew.  I have to say, I love this shit very much, writing.  It comes with an added bonus.   If I do my work properly I will get a “like” from none other than Tetiana Aleksina herself.  She has a knack for picking the ones I would pick myself.   Hello, my dear, you have excellent taste.

Crank

What do you call a person who sits at a computer for hours at a time opining into the invisible wind?   A crank.   If their main purpose is not to wrestle with difficult issues, making rational arguments and citing sources for any facts they refer to, but to rile up those they hate, you can call this peevish type a troll. 

The crank may call itself a citizen journalist, if he bellyaches about current events, or by some other high-minded title, depending on the object of her crankiness.  The fact remains, unless they are employed by reputable journals, and paid well for their opinions, they are, as a general rule, merely cranks.   Trolls, on the other hand, need no introduction.  Their only purpose is to wind people up.

You can find some beautiful music on youtube, whatever your taste.  Listen to some that moves you and then read the comments below.  There will almost always be trolls.   They will tell you why the beautiful thing you just enjoyed was a fraud, a hack job, theft, ham-fisted, dick-fingered.  Count on a troll to tell you the many ways you suck, your taste sucks, people who like the things you like suck.   They have troll farms, I understand.  Dark forces have unleashed mechanized armies of these energetic attack creatures, troll bots, robots programmed to troll.   When the cyber-world is a popularity contest where value is determined by likes and shares, trolls play an outsized role.

But I came here not to speak of trolls.  I am speaking of cranks.  A well-spoken crank, well, so much the worse for him.   The world is complicated, threatening, it comes at you fast, can fuck you up from multiple angles.  The forces of greed and repression are on the rise in the world today, as the tide of hopelessness rises proportionately.  Hard fought century-long battles for things like clean air, clean water, safe working conditions, the right to fair pay, and reasonable work hours, and to a pension, and a social safety net are being undone here in the US by the wealthy appointees of a spoiled billionaire of limited concern for anything but his own misguided quest for glory.

Our dysfunctional political system has produced enough despair to drive masses of people to a feeling of hopelessness.  Our economic system serves only the very wealthy, everyone else is on a treadmill of insecurity.   At any moment those who are not very wealthy can lose most of their life savings on a few bad turns of the roulette wheel everyone must keep their money on these days, since banks no longer pay interest on savings.   What would you rather do, sit around pondering these fearful things or dash off to work to make sure you can pay for your hospitalization after your stroke?   

Most people don’t have the luxury to sit around being full-time cranks.  Even if they did, most people would still rather do many other things.  I myself, in many ways the prototype crank these days, would rather be writing of the wonders of this miraculous world than the slops that get dashed in our faces every day.  Or at least finishing the first draft of the memoir of my father’s life, a massive work of creative non-fiction.

The essence of the crank is isolation, I think.   This is also the essence of the writer’s life, I suppose.   A writer needs large tracts of time accountable only to the ideas they are trying to set down.    Setting out ideas as clearly and vividly as possible takes as much time as we can give it.   

We know the world through stories and framing these stories can be thirsty work.  People are doing it brilliantly every day.  We live in a golden age of television drama, for example.  There are so many well written serials these days it’s like the art itself underwent a renaissance recently.   Not everybody has stories they want to tell, just like not everyone dreams of painting, or singing, or dancing like Fred Astaire.

I’d love to ask somebody like Charles or David Koch what they really love to do, what they dream of doing.   I imagine it would be something like seeing the greatest living cellist play a command performance, surrounded by precious art treasures, and then, going into another room and counting all the money in the world.  Rolling naked in all the money in the world, I suppose.  These two are eighty years old and they have more money than the Catholic church, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia combined.  What is it they really love?  Nobody is calling them cranks, but then again, they have very important work to do every day and they are very, very successful at it.

Taking notes from a friend

One of my oldest friends, an indispensable one, took a moment to tell me he liked the improvised intro I wrote yesterday for the anaconda of a ms. I am wrestling with.   It was good, he wrote:

until you began to spit at the ones who will …what did you call it… “pony up”…..cooperating while not being disgusted is not an impossible goal. especially now that you have the wind at your back.

I took his notes to heart and took the lever to a few descriptions in the objectionable paragraph.  You can be the judge of whether, with the revisions, I’ve succeeded in not spitting at the corporate fucks whose smug faces I originally took careless aim at (oops, sorry about your Jerry Garcia tie, man). The revised version is immediately below.   The original graf my friend commented on is below that, for comparison.

new:

Beyond that, of course, the challenge is to turn the story into a winning book proposal, something to convince a corporate type to give an unknown sixty-one year old author an advance to finish writing the book.  I know, I know, with that attitude what self-respecting corporate shill is going to pony up anything for my book?  I know.   My biggest challenge, outside of learning how to charm this indispensable type, will be to write the blurb, a 30 word masterpiece of copywriting that will sell the ambitious book I have been wrestling with for a year and a half now.  Or at least get me into the decider’s office.

original (and extra crispy) version:

Beyond that, of course, the challenge is to turn the story into a winning book proposal, something to convince a corporate fuck I wouldn’t so much as shit on to give an unknown sixty-one year old author an advance to finish writing the book.  I know, I know, with that attitude what self-respecting corporate cocksucker is going to pony up anything for my book?  I know.   My biggest challenge, outside of learning how to charm this (I forget how I originally referred to the despicable sell-out), will be to write the blurb, a 30 word masterpiece of copywriting that will sell the ambitious book I have been wrestling with for a year and a half now.  Or at least get me into the piece of shit’s office.

NOTE:  Of course, neither version of the paragraph would go in the actual intro to a published book.  The challenge it mentions would have already been surmounted and only a petty and self-destructive baby would seek to make mention of it in the actual published book the reader is holding in her hands.  In its place I’d have a nod of thanks to the corporate cocksuckers who showed confidence in the marketability of my work, gave me the generous payment and put the thing out for public consumption.  I would, of course, call them neither corporate nor cocksuckers in that grateful nod.

That said, I don’t think the paragraph suffers at all from the revisions.  Then again, I’m not a supremely over-sensitive fucking corporate shill… Reading them over now side by side, I don’t know.  The rewrite seems to lack a bit of integrity, somehow.  What do YOO think?

Why the fuck am I keeping this on-line journal?

Good question, even as I have to jet out of here in a moment.  I write here, as often as I can, mainly for the feeling of being in control of things we humans have little or no control over.  It makes me feel good to write.   I write here to make sense of things as they happen, to the extent I can.  I find it helpful and hope that what I write is sometimes also helpful to someone reading it.    

I also like to keep the old writing pencil sharp, because I love the craft of writing.  It is very satisfying to see words lined up to bring something into focus.  I also hope, one day soon, to sell these little darlings like the adorable hookers they’re supposed to be, in the Free Market.  After all, any craft unsold is just a fucking hobby (he added, with gratuitous bitterness).

Today I made an appointment for screening of my skin for more possible cancer, long overdue in part because I’ve had to find three new sets of doctors in the last three years thanks to my man Obama’s beautiful compromise with the perfect, which disabled my ability to see the dermatologist I’d been seeing for years, a doctor I liked.  The earliest appointment for a new patient I could get today is for August 31, at 2:30 pm.  I took it.  I’m also on the waiting list for any earlier appointment that might pop up.  If I’d done this three months ago, instead of being discouraged when nobody I called accepted my new Silver level insurance, I’d have an appointment for next week.  Of course, I’m free to call as many other dermatologists as are on my insurance company’s list, in the meantime. This is America, after all.  In the meantime, I fucking write.

I’m being pressured to begin immunosuppressive therapy for my kidney disease.   This therapy includes three months of steroid treatment, in alternating months (chemotherapy type agents are administered every other month) each month beginning with three days of IV infusion of steroids.   I am trying to educate myself about the disease before committing to this pharmaceutical blunderbuss approach.   I read this just now, from the Mayo Clinic:

Membranous nephropathy (MEM-bruh-nus nuh-FROP-uh-thee) occurs when the small blood vessels in the kidney (glomeruli), which filter wastes from the blood, become inflamed and thickened. As a result, proteins leak from the damaged blood vessels into the urine (proteinuria). For many, loss of these proteins eventually causes signs and symptoms known as nephrotic syndrome.

In mild cases, membranous nephropathy may get better on its own, without any treatment. As protein leakage increases, so does the risk of long-term kidney damage. In many, the disease ultimately leads to kidney failure. There’s no absolute cure for membranous nephropathy, but successful treatment can lead to remission of proteinuria and a good long-term outlook.

You have to admire the candor of “in many, the disease ultimately leads to kidney failure.”   Regardless, I have my life to live, and a nice box of chocolates to buy for a 95 year-old birthday girl, who I have to dash off to see after a shave and a shower.    

I feel so much better having taken this little break to practice my word arrangement.  Thank you, Diary Dear.

On a Lighter Note

Our thirteen year-old cat, Skaynes, recently diagnosed with a fatal and irreversible disease, chronic renal failure, just hopped up on to his feeding post and looked at me expectantly.   His appetite has been spotty lately, but he still shakes us down for treats, even if he doesn’t always eat them.  I took a break from thoroughly cleaning his litter boxes to find out what he wanted as a snack.

I took down the box of his various treats, and, as I offered the first to him, he sunk his grey fangs into my wrist.  I pointed out to him that he was literally biting the hand that was trying to feed him, but he was unimpressed.  He bit my wrist again, by way of reply.  He bit it every time I tried to place his treat in front of him.  We often refer to him as The Baron.  This was certainly baronial behavior, it seems to me.  

Thinking of fucking barons, those born booted and spurred to ride and rape the rest of us, reminded me of this lighter note, such as it is.

Farmers used to love Thomas Jefferson, they saw him as a fellow farmer.  I heard a quote of old TJ’s yesterday, a wonderful quote by the old agrarian.  

“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” [1]

I know it’s wrong, and I couldn’t help myself, but I started thinking of the rest of the quote, lost to posterity:  “and I should know, bitch, I own more than three hundred of them!”  

Just then his beautiful half-sister-in-law (his wife and her had the same white father) and long-time mistress Sally, a piece of his personal property, in both senses of the word, walked by.  

“Got to go now, bitches,” said the Author of Liberty with a wink, a man way, way ahead of his time.

 

[1]   It goes without saying (he said) that Jefferson held this truth to be as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.

Tempus Vug It (Part Two)

“But wait a second,” said the college kid, a bright young man with an inquisitive mind, “if you already got this old man the deal that anyone would have wanted you to get for him, why is this judge busting your balls?  Is a judge allowed to just do that?”    

I was impressed by how simply he stated this question of fundamental fairness.  

“Well, actually, strictly, legally, no, not really, a judge can’t just randomly dance on a lawyer’s balls, beyond a certain point.  It would be an abuse of discretion for the judge to give the lawyer more than a little bit of shit, even worse in  the case where the lawyer had provided his client with the highest degree of professional service.  So, the plain answer to whether a judge is allowed to just do that?’ is ‘no, not allowed.'”

The young man looked up at me quizzically, his expression confused, open-minded and ready to laugh.  

“I understand,” I said, “I know that sounds confusing, because I am a lawyer, I’d done my job diligently, and I was getting random shit from some snippy young cloaca of a judge, something the judge is not allowed to give to an attorney for no real reason like that.   Here’s the thing: as a Guardian ad Litem, even though I am a lawyer, I am in court in that instance not as a lawyer but as a friend of the Court, someone to advocate on behalf of the respondent who cannot adequately advocate for himself.  Strictly speaking, I appeared in those cases as the tenant, not the lawyer for the tenant.”  

“OK,” said mother and son in unison, neither of them grasping the fine, somewhat mad, legal distinction I was talking about.  

“I have to give you a bit of history.  Does the name Eleanor Bumpurs mean anything to you?”  It didn’t, the young man hadn’t been born when the tragic New York City story had been in all the papers, his mother had been living in California at the time.

I told them the terrible 1984 story about the agoraphobic Brooklyn woman with severe mental problems shot to death in the front hall of her NYCHA apartment by the law enforcement officers who were trying to evict her.  She’d been summoned to court for nonpayment of something like $100 in monthly rent.  She may have missed two or three months rent by the time they summoned her to court.  She never appeared in court, so she lost automatically and they sent her the paperwork telling her she had to leave or be evicted.   She’d been refusing to pay because, among other things, Reagan’s people were leaving cans of human feces in her bathtub.  

After Ms. Bumpurs was killed, and the settlement paid to her family, the city brass put their heads together.    There is no legal allowance for a right to free court-appointed counsel in eviction cases.  This is based on a peculiar, legally attenuated, definition of the word ‘jeopardy’.   Jeopardy, for purposes of a constitutional right to counsel, is when you face the possibility of imprisonment for a year or more.  Homelessness is considered a bad roll of the dice, constitutionally, not ‘jeopardy’ for purposes of triggering the right to court-appointed counsel.

“That’s very fucked up,” said the young man.

Yes, but they found a work-around, in the wake of the Eleanor Bumpurs shooting.   The Chief Administrative Judge summoned the wisest minds of the new New York City Housing Court, bastard step-child of the New York City Civil Court.   They came up with an excellent work-around for the usual right to counsel business that would protect tenants like Ms. Bumpurs from her arbitrary and capricious state killing under cover of law, or at least from homelessness that could be prevented.  It was an excellent decision.    

They created the deeply flawed Guardian Ad Litem (“protector for the suit”)  program,  a good program that had a series of distracted, part-time, ineffective administrators.  The judge would appoint a “GAL” to stand in the shoes of a person not able to adequately defend themselves against an eviction attempt.   In the early years, lawyers did most of the Guardian ad Litem work and it saved Housing Court judges from a great deal of grief, dealing with lawyers instead of mad tenants.   The program also had the effect of providing capable court-appointed lawyers for indigent, vulnerable tenants facing eviction.  

Initially most of the Housing Court GALs were lawyers, but I believe that presently no GALs are lawyers.  There is no requirement that a GAL be a lawyer, and as time went by, and GALs were treated by the court with less and less respect, and paid a modest flat fee for an often enormous amount of work, sometimes including multiple Orders to Show Cause and a dozen court appearances, it became untenable for lawyers to act as Housing Court GALs.  A list of modestly trained free-lance citizen GALs took over for the lawyers, and problems with the program began multiplying.

“Yes, OK., but, in court, aren’t you still a lawyer?” said the college boy with a smile.

I tell the boy that I am, indeed, but that de minimis non curat lex, as they say — the law shits on your little troubles.  I then recount the story my mother told me of a man she had some business with.  She’d asked my legal advice, and I’d given it to her firmly and simply as I could.  I told her exactly what she needed to tell him.  She somehow told him exactly the opposite of what I’d coached her to say.   She protested that her son the lawyer had told her to say exactly what she had said.   “Your son must be the dumbest lawyer in New York,” said the man, not unreasonably.   Now, in the context of that story it’s up for debate, in the context of my life story, he has a pretty strong case.

I described how virtually all of my work was standing in the shoes of tenants deemed unable to adequately defend themselves against eviction.  I am in court not as their lawyer, but as them.  They have already appeared in court and the judge has decided, or an inept agency called Adult Protective Services has moved the court that the tenant cannot effectively advocate for themself.   It may be because of some mental problem, or a strong personality quirk, or physical infirmity, advanced age– it just has to be an articulable suspicion that the person needs someone else to play the part of them for the legal proceeding that could render them homeless.

So, at any given time, I am standing in the broken backed, smelly, perforated shoes of twenty or thirty such poor devils.  I’d say 75% truly need the help, and appreciate it, 15% are too crazy or otherwise debilitated to connect with and the other 10% are professional grifters who get thousands in back rent paid on their behalf every few years so they can spend all their money on booze, or prostitutes, or whatever it is that makes their lives worth living.  

One crazy old guy, who loved cocaine, lived with a crack addicted hooker and the two of them, for whatever reason, moved their bowels into plastic bags that were left all over the vermin-infested apartment.  In court, the part of this insane bastard, who was not required to show up in court at all, was played by me, over the course of many months.   My pay for this court-appointed role play was a flat $600, whether I appeared once or a dozen times.  Most often I had to show up at least four or five times.   

As a result of this quirky system that required me to do an ongoing tap dance in front of judges while the overwhelmed agency dithered, and the interminable delays in Adult Protective Services providing services, which caused me to appear month after month after month on most of these sad cases, some judges regarded me with a certain distaste.  Articulate, capable and despicable.  In the way that certain bitter people come home after a bitter day and kick their cringing dog, lawyers that were in my line of court-appointed work were available for booting, whenever the pressure mounted on certain of these judges, those least endowed with what we think of as judicial temperament.  

 

“So you’re telling me that you are unwilling, are refusing, to go see the tenant, to meet and consult with your ward?” demanded the judge, at 12:42, as the clock was running out on my poor mother’s plans for lunch.  

This was right after he asked me why I took the case if the tenant only spoke Spanish and I spoke almost no Spanish.  He didn’t it like him when I told him his court attorney had assured me the language issue was not a problem.  At any rate, I had to speak to his worker at Adult Protective Service to work on his case plan anyway.   Whatever I did for him in court was based on what APS would be able to eventually do on his behalf.   There were only so many ways these cases turned out: pay the money, cure the nuisance, get an Article 81 guardian.

He didn’t like any of that at all, that I kept having all the damned answers to everything he threw at me.   He could not afford to look bad in front of those two law students, I suppose.  He told me he would not sign the stipulation and that he was adjourning the case to allow me to go visit with the tenant and then report back to the Court, which is how he referred to himself, with legal precision if not humility.  This is the way a judge did it, he demonstrated to the law students.    Josh put a hand on my sleeve, regarded me sympathetically, urged me quietly to remain calm as snarls began forming on my lips.  He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked out of the courtroom at 12:45.  

It was at best 50/50 that I’d make it down to the NYCHA Part in time to find who I needed to adjourn that last case.  By 12:40 people started heading off for an early lunch, though the courtroom was technically open until 1:00.  I had visions of not getting out of court until 3:00 or later, because this immature weasel of a judge had made me wait ninety minutes to force me to do something unnecessary, something that could not help my client in any way.  It would, of course, show that he covered his ass with the letter of the law, which is no small thing I suppose, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway.  

The top of my head blew off just as I reached the door of the courtroom.  Shoving the door to the hall open I snarled to Josh, not using my inside voice at all, “why is he being such a fucking dick?!!!”  Josh, a man built like a bull, quickly pushed me into the hall and pulled the door closed behind us.

(to be continued, as tempus fugit)