Category Archives: writing

Correspondence with a weasel

Looking for some papers just now to serve in connection with a rare payday as a lawyer, I came across this great correspondence from my early days at law.  The first letter was sent by a guy who ripped a friend of mine off, almost 20 years earlier, for $750.  It is priceless, as you will see when you read the detailed response.

When I got out of law school, my friend asked how long a judgment is good for (a judge had agreed the man, a lawyer, owed her the $750).   Turns out it’s enforceable in New York State for 20 years, at 9% interest.  The original $750 had grown to a considerable sum over the 18 or 19 years.  I grabbed that sum from his bank, legally freezing the amount owed in his bank account.  

When he found out he called in a rage, to tell me that I was a fucking low-life, scum of the earth, goddamned fucking piece of shit.  I allowed that all this might be true, but I was more interested to know if he would consent to the money being released to my client.  He was not at all mollified by this reasonable approach, cursed me louder and hung up on me.  

Later that day he decided to take the high road.  Here’s how it went:

November 2, 2000

via TeleFAX  

Dear Mr. W____,

I take strong exception to your heavy handed collection methods on behalf of your client.  This is an eighteen year old matter which has had no activity during the intervening years.  Simple inquiry would have revealed that I am a member in good standing with the New York Bar, and that I still own, reside and work at ___ Street., Brooklyn, the situs of the dispute between Z___ and myself.  A telephone call or letter would have sufficed.  Your behavior is typical of that which increasingly places the legal profession in disrepute in the eyes of the public.

Please send by return FAX any and all documentation regarding Z___’s claim, whether in your possession or Z____’s possession.  Additionally, please send me any and all correspondence between yourself and Republic National Bank/HSBC or any other institution which in any way relates to any attempt at collection in this matter.

If you do not intend to comply with this request please so inform me by return FAX.

You may rest assured of my best intentions.

Very Truly Yours,

To which I apparently replied:

Brother I____:

I regret that you found my collection methods heavy handed but I had little reason to expect you to pay this debt voluntarily, as you proved me right by not accepting my offer to lift the bank restraint if you paid it voluntarily now.  

I relied on the representations of my client that you would do everything in your power to avoid paying the money as you had demonstrated a pattern of unwillingness to pay this $750 debt in the past; first when you breached your contract with her, then when you refused to pay Judge Michael H. F____’s judgment after trial, when you made an appeal that you never perfected and later when you brought various counterclaims that removed Dr. Z______’s next Small Claims case from the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Part– brought because there was no acceleration clause in the contract you had with her and the court had instructed her to bring a separate action for the remainder– to the Civil Court that you then had adjourned at least twice and finally defaulted on.  Only the fact that M___ Z_____ was a pro se litigant saves you from having the marshal levy on twice the amount you still refuse to tender.

I had little reason to expect good will on your part and, in light of your attempts to weasel out even now, I’m glad I took the certain route to a tiny fraction of your wealth.   

Regarding your belated discovery request (discovery is only permitted in Small Claims actions with prior judicial approval, by the way) nothing requires me to provide you with copies of anything, you have the ordinary access to them through the channels you know so well as an experienced attorney.

Yours sincerely,

(and I might well have signed it)

“Juan Snyde-Bastid, Esq.”

A taste of blood to a shark

Sekhnet periodically goes on a strict diet, cutting out most of the foods one should avoid to maintain a healthy weight:  bread, pudding, pasta, desserts, fried food.   During these healthy times she refuses to take even a bite of any of these foods.   “It’s like giving blood to a shark,” she says, “if I have one bite I’ll have to eat the whole thing, and more besides.”

I’m thinking about that because, while I spend at least an hour a day tapping here at the keyboard, taking a sharp knife to my words and hitting “publish” at the end, it is only recently that somebody else took a dull knife to my words, published them and sent me a check.  

“Cah-ching!” I said, as I signed those babies and fed them into the ATM.

Got a taste of blood, after years of honing rows of teeth to a razor sharpness.  One may quibble with the things I write here, wonder about a man with so much time on his hands, so seemingly unable to do most other things that normal people do.  

The hour or two I spent tapping out a thoughtful piece on the word “motherfucker”, for example, is it really worth writing about, for f-word’s fucking sake?  (unsuccessfully searched this blahg for the piece I wrote about the fascinating etymology of the word and my father’s didactic role in bringing it to my attention.  Maybe it was on my previous blahg?)

Anyway, that’s it.  I got a taste for blood now.  I want a nice tall glass of it, and another one after.

 

You Want to Laugh, do you?

I rarely find myself reading something and laughing out loud, LOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever ROTFLMFAO, but on rare occasions something in print tickles the old funny bone and makes me roar in my chair.   This bit did zee trick, LOL!

The author, always funny, was a good friend in high school who I lost touch with (or, ‘with whom I lost touch’, if you prefer the stick up the ass).  I stayed friends with her ex-husband and, through an on-line magazine he writes for that pays a few bucks for 1,000 word pieces, I discovered more than a dozen written testaments to Helene’s wicked wit yesterday.  There are a few tragic ones among them, although even those are leavened with her distinctive irony, but scroll down the list, every one is worth reading, and none more than 1,000 words or so.  

The list of Helene’s stuff  which she just reported bears the editorial mark, here and there, of that lovable “scamp” who improves good work with a deft, sometimes daft, touch (hey, Larry, where are you when the reader needs you?) is here.   Czech ’em, but only if you want a larf.

Writing for Pay

Writing for pay, like doing anything for pay, is not a job for the squeamish.   Squeamish, we are informed by a wonderful dictionary I have somewhere, means “exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.”  Such prudish readiness is not a desirable quality for a person entering the marketplace.  You want to do business in the marketplace and never be nauseated?  Good luck, pal.  That’s why you write here on WordPress, after all.  Here on a blahg read by a small handful, nobody will ever randomly change your words in exchange for a check.  On the other hand, no check for $250, or even $5, will ever be mailed to your home to pay for  your single malt scotch.   So get over it.  

I mean, really, isn’t it churlish, childish and even a bit arbitrary to be upset when a sentence that you wrote:  

It was always hard for me to understand how a man with my father’s many great qualities could be such an intractable asshole.

is rendered:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

There is meaning, there are shades of meaning, and things that simply mean what they mean, if you know what I mean.  I can easily understand that many people love other people who are intractable assholes.  It may be another thing to recognize the lovable qualities myself, even as I also see the intractable asshole.  But that, I suppose, is simply nuance.  And nuance, as we all know…. fuck nuance.  You want nuance or a check?  Your choice, it’s a free country.

Cliches are another thing.  Just because I avoid them like the plague doesn’t mean some editor will be able to resist quickly swapping in the familiar rather than yielding to the more precise description I’ve put together.  

But I am a whiner by nature, as should be clear to anyone who has read even a couple of these posts.  In fact, instead of writing my next pay day, a generous fee for not a lot of work, something I sat down to do, I am whinging here about how hard it is to see even the most innocent and well-meaning violence done to my inviolable prose. 

Wee wee wee.  Or as the editor might style it:  oui, oui, oui.

 

Schmoke

“Schmoke,” says the Israeli firmly, with that delicious pronunciation of the Yiddish word schmuck, which comes originally from the German for jewel, but, by reducing the man to his ‘jewel’, his procreative parts, renders him ridiculous, a putz, somebody who should know better, much better, not an idiot exactly, because not stupid, but something worse than an idiot, a kind of schvantz.   Which is like calling a dog “a tail”.  

“Nu, very interesting, schmoke,” says the Israeli, not interested at all.  “People do not buy an idea, no matter how ingenious.  You have an ingenious idea, that’s wonderful, mazal tov.  We are happy for you, your idea is the idea of a genius.  There’s no question, genius idea, wonderful, we love it, honestly, we love the idea.  But to sell an idea….” he stretches the phrase out, drawing out “sell”, watching you lean forward.  He waits, taking his time, to emphasize his point and to emphasize that he’s a successful salesman talking to a schmoke.

“Fucking Israeli,” you say, but it’s worse than saying nothing, really, because you actually said nothing.

“You do not sell the idea.   Only a schmoke thinks you can sell an idea.  An idea, it’s like a flavor, a gas, a color, you can’t hold it in your hand, you can’t touch it.  An idea you can’t sell.  You can only sell the implementation of an idea, the system for delivering some version of the idea.  If you don’t realize that by now you have been trying to put together the wrong puzzle, I’m sorry to tell you.”  

“Fucking Israeli,” you think, but the guy makes an excellent point.  Worse, he knows he makes an excellent point.

“People don’t invest in you because you’ve got a brilliant idea, trust me.  They don’t really care about the idea at all until they read about how it’s been put into practice, until some other genius explains, in a prestigious journal, how you managed to take this genius concept and actually put it into practice.   Took this amazing thing you imagined and made it real in the world so every idiot could point to it and say– hey, look at that amazing thing!  I need that!  Think of that schmoke Steve Jobs, the fucking genius Jesus of Technology they are making all these movies about.  His idea, I put all your two thousand long-playing records on something so sleek you can fit between the cheeks of your ass, the sound is better than your fancy quadrophonic stereo, I’ll put ten thousand albums on it, I’ll put fifteen thousand albums, and movies too, and a hundred of your photo albums.   If he can’t deliver it and make you pay whatever he tells you you have to pay — you never heard of Steve Jobs, I guarantee.  I hate that schmoke, personally, but you have to recognize what he did.  It wasn’t the ideas themselves, though they were smart ideas, things nobody thought of before, but the way he delivered them.”

He leans forward and pours another round from the bottle on the low glass table.  Under the table polished tiles glow in the golden light of the small city holy to three major world religions.

“I don’t call you a schmoke to mock you, please understand.  I say it with love, or at least with rachmunis.  It’s hard to have integrity in a world like this, OK, almost impossible.   You want to live as a man with integrity, better be very rich.  If you are very rich, you can have as much integrity as you like.  If not, well, I’m very sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, and I know it will not go down smooth, like that scotch you brought over here– and I thank you, it was a wonderful thing to do and I hope you will do it every time you come see me– I’m sorry to break this fartlike news to you– you say ‘breaking wind’ right, it’s a fart?– but the working man has only the integrity of doing his work well.  Ideas can be terrific, but they are not the same as work.  Work is what you have to do to make your idea real.  If you can show me the thing that is in your head, or better yet, have somebody else show it to me, a very beautiful girl delivering perfectly the excellent script you wrote for her, then we can do business.”

“Otherwise,” he looks for a second at the caramel colored liquid catching the light in his glass, “please, don’t waste my time.”  He tilts back his glass in the Jerusalem sunset and savors his drink.  He closes his eyes, smiles, shakes his head as if he can’t believe it.   “Oh, Jesus Christ and Jesus of Technology, this is good whisky and you are a very nice guy, even if you are, also, and I mean this in the best possible way, a complete fucking schmoke.”  

What did you think you were going to hear, schmoke?

Stats Corner

One thing I love about baseball is the stats.  You can look at a sheet of numbers next to a bunch of names, arranged as a box score, and quickly learn virtually everything about the game these people played.  Few stats are as straightforward as the numbers in a box score, though, of course, a blooper that falls in and rolls is indistinguishable from a shot that caroms off the wall at 120 mph.  “That will look like a line drive in the boxscore,” says the announcer of the dribbler that stops halfway to the hot corner as the runner reaches first and gets a perfectly valid base hit.  Most stats can be manipulated any number of ways, like words, moods, standardized test scores, economic numbers, people who want to please, fearful souls, etc.

WordPress offers stats, along with your free blahg.  Stats let you know how much traffic your site is getting, how well your little on-line journal is doing as far as readership.  You can see, for example, how many visitors you have on any given day, week, month, year.   You can see the numbers of likes, comments, views.  I look at these from time to time and nod, observing what an obscure little corner of cyberspace the gratuitousblahg occupies.   Rearranging the stats like the entrails a sooth sayer in the time of Caesar studied for omens of the future, I see this smiling augury.

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.41.27 AM

Not a bad trend, I think, coyly trimming off the tell-tale column to the right that shows the actual numbers.  But look at the trend, if you will; it is the trend I am getting at here with this chart.  I have reason to feel slightly encouraged by the steady uptick in annual visitors, do I not?  In ten years time, at the present rate of increase, I will have as many visitors in a year as the average porn site gets in a few hours.  Progress, by any measure, I’m sure we all agree.

Stirring the entrails with my stick to divine further trends I notice an odd contradiction in the stats.  Although I’ve stopped complaining about it, as much as I am able to, long time readers of these posts will know I’ve often sung sad songs about the difficulty of getting any feedback on anything.  The echoes from my adversarial childhood make me more susceptible than some to the sting of silence by way of response, though I think anyone  who expresses herself does so with some hope of a response.   (Note the sensitivity of my gender choice there, gentle reader.  I was encouraged to do this in law school, of all places.  Funny, I know.)

The most dependable form of response in real-time, something that, sadly, cannot be heard in cyberspace, is a laugh.  A laugh is also gratifying because it’s usually honest, spontaneous and an instant of blessed relief for everyone involved.   Not so with a response to other kinds of expression– they require both thought and action, even if each might take only a few seconds.    

Much non-response is simply the result of most people being too busy to read, hear or watch something they thought was pretty good and then take even more time to type “nice”.  “Nice” seems insufficient, so after a moment of searching in vain for a better four letter word they sensibly move on to the next thing.  

On top of the fast pace of modern life, it also doesn’t even occur to most people that a person who spends time creating something would be gratified by the encouragement, even as they applaud even a mediocre live performance (writing isn’t a performance, read it publicly, then we’ll clap) and most people remember to compliment the chef at dinner when a new dish is served (hey, nobody asked you to serve me this crap, bub).   Social behaviors change when people are anonymous, which is whey they created the “like” button, although the chart for gratuitousblahg likes is too ambiguous a little mountain range to be of any use to us here.

There is pleasure and satisfaction to be had from doing a thing as well as you can.  These excellent things are not to be sneezed at.   Recognition that the thing is well-done, interesting, has provoked a thought or feeling, welcome as the validation might be, well… no one can hear you shake your head in cyberspace   Anyway,  have a look and quick ponder at the next telltale graph, comments on the blahg since its ‘launch’ in August of 2012.   And, please, no comments, this one’s on me.

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.40.52 AM

Storytelling

“I am feeling more and more like a melancholy ghost,” he said to nobody.  The dust looked at him apathetically.   “Of course,” he thought, drawing in a deep, dusty breath.

We humans are moved by stories.  That’s why gossip is sometimes hard to resist.  He did what?  She thought… what the hell WAS she thinking?  Fucking humans… can you believe?   And if it is hard enough to believe, but still possible to understand as unmistakably true… or even mistakably true, damn, you got the kernel of a good story there, son.

A lawyer successfully making her case tells a story the jury believes is more true than the other story.   A huckster selling you a rock you can keep for a pet, triggers that childish belief in magic, begins the story in your head — what if a rock actually needs love and care as much as we do? Some ingenious fucker sold millions of rocks to Americans as pets by planting that story.   Hey, nobody said we’re a nation of geniuses, but we got good hearts. 

I have a story to tell, but not here.  My story must go into a slideshow I have to get back to work on.   It’s the story of young children that society is in the inexorable process of preparing for lives of tragic outcomes, getting a chance to flourish, create and shine.  It’s a funny story, and an unlikely one, and tricky as hell to tell with the right tone.  I need people to buy the idea, and give me money to fund it.

I note in passing, in outgassing, (and since I’ve already noted it and only have to cut and paste it)  the difference between the story I need to tell and the stories we are happy to slurp down during our leisure.

The difference between giving attention to a sales pitch and a TV series is that the TV series, if it’s good, hooks you on a story that pulls you in.  A good sales pitch must do the same, but I can’t remember the last time one did that for me.  
 
I recently saw 16 episodes of an engaging TV series called Rectify.  An innocent guy spends 20 years on death row for the murder of his high school girlfriend before his determined little sister gets him out on a DNA mismatch.   We see him in solitary, flashes of his nightmare life there, his one friend in life– the condemned guy in the cell next door, a repentant and sweet guy who shot into a car as a gang initiation and killed a 3 year-old girl….they become best friends talking through the grate, as the psychopath in the other cell tries to break the sensitive protagonist’s spirit.  As I set out the bones of it I’m already feeling it’s a compelling story. 
 
And it gets much more so when he gets out, and is a mess, and the small Georgia town is divided between those who embrace him as an innocent, blessedly exonerated man and those who don’t believe in the technicality of DNA and see him as a confessed and duly convicted rapist and murderer (we know he isn’t either of those, and so our horror at injustice is engaged) and, in any case, a weird and clearly disturbed guy they want to beat the crap out of, as several in masks finally do when he goes to visit the grave of his murdered girlfriend.  
 
After the brutal, possibly deadly beating in the cemetery, the brother of the murdered girl removes his mask and makes sure the protagonist sees his face through bloody eyes before he passes out.  Then the brother pisses on his broken body.  When the protagonist finally gets out of the coma, and the hospital, he declines to press charges when the corrupt but conscience stricken sheriff runs down and arrests the ringleader.  “It wasn’t him,” he says, looking stoically at a photo the sheriff, who knows it was, holds out to him.  The sheriff leaves in disgust.  Everyone in town is confused, and it is another proof that there’s something seriously wrong with the guy.  Some of us can’t help watching this kind of story.
 
A sales pitch, on the other hand, tells a calculated story that cheerfully invites the potential buyer to envision the wonderful things the product will deliver to them.  How will this product make my shit life feel marginally better?  Unlike with a story containing enough human complexity to hook us with its narrative mysteries, and we are ready and happy to be hooked, if the hook is there, we are on guard against a sales pitch, which must also disarm us.  
 
A totally different exercise in story-telling and the reason watching five hours of an enthralling drama, if you have the time, is never a chore, and watching a sales pitch of any duration is something you are programmed to mute and go take a mental piss during.  There is great art involved in crafting a winning sales pitch, as in telling an engaging story of any kind, and there are similarities in both kinds of storytelling, but differences too.   If you get paid to make commercial pitches, well, at least you get paid.  If you do them on spec, well, hopefully you enjoy a good challenge and love the work itself, eh pardner?

Heh.  I’m sorry, what were you saying, Dusty, old boy?

500 foot foul ball

“Sometimes,” he said, squaring up in the batter’s box and not taking his eye off the old coach who was trying to show off his once major league fastball, “you just feel like hitting the fuck out the ball.”   He squinted and fluttered his fingers on the bat handle, the bat remaining steady.

The  pitch sailed in high and outside, he made no move to chase it.  The coach grunted from the mound.  “For Christsake, you coulda hit that.”

“Not 500 feet, Bush.  Give me something I can turn around, give the fans a show.”  said the batter.

The coach went through an ostentatious series of pitcher’s tics on the mound.  Made the motions of loading up the ball, the motions of sneaking these motions past the umps and the opposing team.   The batter didn’t smile at this, nor did he feel impatient.  He just waited, like a Zen archer getting ready.

The next pitch was reasonable, a strike, with just enough on it to make it a little bit of a challenge.  The batter uncoiled and sent it on a rising line toward the lights.    The pitcher turned to watch it go, his body language said “fuck!”

The ball landed in the upper deck, in one of the last rows.  It had traveled 500 feet.  It was foul by about 25 feet.  The batter nodded, the pitcher raised his eyebrows.  If there had been a fan in the stands he might have jumped up.