Category Archives: writing

Anger– by a high school student

Anger

that shit will

fuck you up

hold you down

make you do

what it wants

you to do

Fuck!  

Are you fucking stupid?  

Fuck him up!

The soft voice

that is almost always

wiser

is drowned in the roar

of Anger

foaming at the mouth

like Hitler.

Storms pass

birds start singing

everyone gets back

to work or siesta

but while Anger

whips the crowd

like a livid Klansman

it can be easy to forget,

pitchfork or torch

in hand,

that this popping veined,

spitting motherfucker

is a Ku Klux Klansman,

is Anger.

Needs to be calmed down

not followed

screaming

into the dark night.

On second thought

My friend who asked me yesterday how I continue to write in the face of indifference emailed to clarify what he actually meant, a much worse question, to wit:

I meant, how do you maintain the focus and motivation to write, given the discouraging features of your life in general as you’ve described them to me over the last few months?

And my answer to this more pointed question remains basically the same as yesterday’s. 

The moment of grace, musical in a way, the tap of the keys clacking, a bit hypnotic, reminds me of the best of myself, no matter what discouragements lurk.  It is a relief to see my thoughts making themselves plain in black on this white screen.

His clarification does remind me of something though.  I had a dear old friend, very old, she died at almost 93 a year ago next week, who loved my project, the student-run animation workshop.  She had good reason to love it, she was the inspiration for it.  After the death of her youngest daughter on an icy road in Vermont she heeded the advice of good friends and opened the Elinor Beth Music and Art Workshop for local children.   I was one of the workers in this shop, though, as it was spring and we were kids, we spent more time in the backyard kicking a ball around among the budding trees and shrubs than we did at the easels painting.   

The inspirational thing about Florence was how much she loved to be on hand quietly encouraging us to be creative.  I’d ask her to show me things, she always told me she loved my way of doing them better than the ‘academic’ way she’d learned to do it.  She assured me there’d be time to learn whatever I wanted to about technique and the “correct” way to do things but that the most important thing now was to love what I was doing for its own sake.  And to keep doing it, in the way only a creative kid could.  I’d go back to the easel, slap another painting up there, hang it on clothes pins to dry, grab some cookies, suck down a little apple juice and dash back into the intoxicating back yard.

Florence and I remained lifelong friends.  At one point, two or three years ago, telling her about the great potential and probable impossibility of actually accomplishing what I’d devoted my life to– getting the animation workshop up and running–  she told me she didn’t know how I could sleep at night.  She said it was a great idea, but how I could face the discouraging obstacles I was facing was beyond her powers, seemed superhuman.  “I love what you’re doing and it’s a fantastic idea.  I just don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said with characteristic love and concern.  

I laughed, brushing her worry aside with bravado.  “I don’t know either, but I sleep fine.  Don’t worry about me,” I told her.

Not long after that I began to have trouble sleeping.

So if this blahg goes suddenly silent, you’ll understand what happened.

Would I?

I recently found a large painting in acrylic of a nude young woman reclining, succulent.   She is painted from feet to head, casting a dramatic shadow to her left.  The style is right on the border of realistic and cartoon and I was glad I’d found it.   I hung it on the wall in my cracked bedroom where I can glance at it from my pillow (which led me to notice and regret that the two nicely rendered feet are of glaringly different sizes).  It was done from a drawing I remember making of her, on a piece of brown corrugated paper highlighted with a white china marker and gouache, the drawing being much better than the painting.
 
The girl in the picture, rendered as three dimensionally as I was able, was twenty or so at the time. The painter was thirty.   The painter had been reassured by a mutual acquaintance, when hesitating momentarily to ask the girl out, that she was uncommonly mature and that he was uncommonly immature and so the age difference should not be that big a deal.
 
I did not regret anything about the affair, except that it ended somewhat badly a year later.  She went on to marry a guy, a young executive type, who sounded like a self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy.  They moved to a city one would never think of voluntarily moving to, the corporation had promoted him and assigned him there.  I did not hear from her for years after that, which came as no surprise.   In that city she gave birth to their daughter and, in fairly short order, he revealed himself, in a way that became increasingly impossible to endure, as an ever more self-important dick, a hugely ambitious baby, a narcissistic mama’s boy and, also, an impressively complete asshole.
 
During the painful divorce negotiations she called me regularly and I spoke to her calmly.   She greatly appreciated these conversations and I didn’t mind having them.  Truthfully, painful conversations are one of the few times you get the real person instead of the veneer.  I would rather speak with the real person than the veneer, so I’m not ruffled by the painful situation that brings the real person out.   That the pain is not directly my own is another plus and makes it easier for me to speak in a calming way.
 
One day she called during the day, usually she dialed me late at night, and came to her point rather directly “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?”   Even typing these words now, years later, makes my eyes open a little wider.  I stumbled for a few seconds looking for the right way to say there were few things I’d rather do but that I was in a monogamous relationship with a person I loved, that she was putting me in a tight spot with the question, that at any other time…. and as I spoke I jotted the question; “if I came to New York, would you fuck me?” on a post-it to consider at my leisure, perhaps to write about ten or fifteen years later.

And in the usual course of things, the post-it remained in my pants pocket where I’d put it until it somehow found its way into my beloved’s hand on laundry day.  She asked about it, naturally, with a certain irked urgency and I was once again thrust into that uneasy tap dance the original query had caused me to tap out.

After her divorce, when things settled down for her, I stopped hearing from the girl, now in her late forties.  She contacted me about a year ago to tell me how great my program is and that she would be supporting it with a cash donation, but to my knowledge no donation was ever made. That was the last peep I had from her.

I think there is probably no point to have that painting of her at twenty, presenting herself like a birthday cake, hanging on the wall next to my bed, even if there is little chance of my beloved ever seeing it as she can’t stand the decrepitude of this apartment of mine and avoids it like the proverbial plague.

Which is not an unreasonable position to take.

Why persist in writing?

“In today’s world of micromessages and fleeting attention spans, connecting with your audience is more important than ever.”   Denise Morrison, President and CEO, Campbell Soup.

 

We’ll leave that important question — how to connect with your desired audience so your brand can flourish — aside for the moment as I address today’s question from the steadiest of perhaps 3 or 4 regular readers of this blahg.  He writes:

what’s really hard to fathom is how you keep on producing this stuff despite the general lack of interest and encouragement

There is little mystery on my end.  I write as clearly and engagingly as I can, for the reader’s sake.  I practice the craft of writing every day, and feel better for putting my thoughts in order.   I enjoy combing through my words again and again until I am satisfied that what I’m saying could not be more clear.  The key is that I write for myself and my own feeling of clarity and accomplishment.  I am addicted to the satisfaction of those things.  

Writing is one of the few things I do all the time that I need little feedback or encouragement to continue doing.  It’s like playing the guitar for me, I require nobody to hear it or tell me I do it well; I play because I love to play.  I love the sounds of the playing and the time spent making and improving those sounds.  

A compliment is always lovely, and appreciation is like water to a flower, but we do the things we truly love because we love to spend time doing them.   We take pleasure in our mastery of things that were once hard to do.  In this ease we experience the lyrical grace that is otherwise so hard to come by in our high-stakes world.

Years ago I saved successive drafts of virtually everything I wrote.  I don’t save drafts any more because I’m sure now that every change I make is a change for the better.  The writing in each pass is clearer, more concentrated, less cluttered with distracting personal tics.  I set out each day to put at least one thought into focus.  My goal is to untangle sometimes vexing things in a coherent way that is easy to read.  Setting these things clearly into words engages my mind completely, reminds me of my best qualities and leaves me feeling better.

Every year or so I’ll get a note or call from someone telling me how moved they were by some particular thing I’ve written, or provoked, or struck by the collective weight of the many pages I’ve written.   Often this praise will transition into agonizing about not knowing anyone who can help me get my writing published, sympathizing with how frustrating it must be to write in today’s world of noise and “content” where thoughtful writing is often thought little of.   I find myself in the odd position, after I thank them for their compliments about the writing, of consoling them.

After my mother died a grief counselor recommended a helpful book called Death Benefits, my annotated copy of which seems to have been lost by the woman I loaned it to many months ago.  This is a shame, not only because she never read it but because I was planning to loan that personalized copy to a friend who can probably derive comfort from it as she mourns the recent death of her beloved, complicated father.  In that  book there is a reference, barely supported by the flimsiest of footnotes, to babies as young as a few months patting their mothers consolingly when the mother is in distress.   I love this image.

And I love to write.  It would be wonderful to have someone contact me and offer me a monetary advance to collect a hundred of these posts, along with a bunch of illustrations, and put them out in a groovy little tome.   I’d love to be asked to write something for the New Yorker, in much the same way I’d love to find a fat roll of hundred dollar bills abandoned on the sidewalk.  I would be very happy to earn a little money from writing and to have an attentive audience.  Appreciation of this thing I do mainly for myself is a bonus, and a great thing, but not necessary to sustain me in this particular pursuit of excellence.

My energies for struggle, such as they are these days, must remain focused on somehow putting one foot in front of the other and coming up with as yet undiscovered brilliant work-arounds to get my simple idea for changing the world in position to be seen.   That extreme challenge needs the feedback, encouragement, ingenuity and skills of the brightest of those who can see what I see in it.  So far, there is virtually nobody who is able to see what I see in it or offer useful insight for more than a beat or two.   It’s my cross to drag, heavy and sharp splintered, particularly when devil’s advocates are hanging from it in an effort to be helpful.  

That’s the thing that stings me, galls me, makes me want to holler: unless you succeed at making money from a thing you would call a business, unless you manage to sustain unbounded enthusiasm and confidence in the product you would sell, you are a perplexing failure.   It’s hard, to the point of making one doubt one’s basic sanity, to sustain optimism for an idea, regardless of its demonstrated worth, that generates neither money nor enthusiasm in others.  It may be simply a matter of not having connected with the proper audience for it, although using “simply” in that sentence is just whipping myself in the face, but that is a howl for another day.

Writing is in another category, it’s just something I need to do — and the most important conversation I have most days — whether you tell me you like it or not. 

Peace, y’all.

Idealism 101

Idealists
have never ruled the world,
grow up!
It’s hard enough
to get rich
without worrying about fucking ideals.
Be serious,
you know very well
what this world does
to people who try too hard
to be saints,
lacking the power to nail it.

Put it this way,
if Jesus had had
the Pope behind him
they’d have put every one
of those crucifiers
to the sword,
end of story.

The World is Just the World

“I’m going to finish that book I started,” he said resolutely.

“Not ‘Bird Wins’, I hope.  You’ve learned so much since the days you carried a piss bucket for pompous jerks too lazy to walk down the hall to the urinals,” he said hopefully.  “Besides, you realize now what it takes to sell a book idea, to get an advance.  You have to give them something positive, a fantasy they will enjoy, something uplifting and inspirational that can be made into a movie people will plunk down $20 to see.  Nobody wants a book where everybody dies, where the character we’re rooting for gets brutally screwed and there’s not even anybody to get revenge.  Tell me it’s not ‘Bird Wins’.  For the love of God, please tell me that’s not the book you’re talking about.”  He smiled at his old friend hopefully.  

“I hear what you’re saying.  The only trouble is, the fucking bird always wins,” he said.

“You realize it’s confusing to anybody reading this that you’re referring to us as ‘he’ and ‘he’,” she said, suddenly.  

“Oh?” he said, raising a single eyebrow, “you is a woman now?”  

“Not at all,” she said, “I’m a beautiful cat-faced female cat who can talk.”  

“You really are,” he said, taking her in with a nod and a smile.  

“Now that that’s settled,” she said “tell me you’re not talking about ‘Bird Wins’ again, or that soul-crushing book about the narrator’s doomed battle with the fascist Minnie Frego,” and as she looked at him it really was remarkable how cat-like her sweet face was.  

“Are you really a cat?” he asked.  She smiled and rubbed her face against his, her tail caressed his arm.

He petted her soft fur.  “The ceiling is still leaking.  Yesterday the super promised to come by.  I told him to come by today any time after 1:00.  He said he’d be working in the building all day and would stop by.  There is a bucket in the living room and one in the bedroom.  Both leaks are intermittent.  One begins to go ‘drip, drip’ while the other is silent.  Then they drip together for a while.  Then the second one goes ‘drip, drip’ while the first says nothing.”

“Hmmm,” she purred, “slightly troubling, but not very interesting.”  

“Right,” he said, “exactly!  That’s the deal with all of this shit, the accumulated drips and dribbles of a hundred leaking orifices, each one a nuisance but all together a demonic symphony that will not stop til the audience is howling.  It’s Bukowski’s swarm of trivialities that are always there and kill quicker than cancer.  One drip doesn’t get you, you can deal with one leak.  But as you turn your attention to that one, the other starts, and then another, a robot calls on the phone to tell you about some mysterious debt you owe, another week’s delay on something you were counting on, suddenly a jet of hot steam you don’t have a tool to stop, or if you did, you don’t have the heat resistant suit to avoid getting scalded, something flies into your eye, the eye is lost, down to one eye, you step backwards, the rake flips up with brutal self-caused force and opens a gash on your forehead with a mule-like kick.”  

“Did the super come by this afternoon and take a look at the new leak?” she asked, trying to rein in the torrent of his real and imagined troubles.  

“Of course not,” he said.  

“Well, I hope you called him,” she said, hoping gamely to get to some kind of resolution.  

“Yeah, I called him at 4:29.  He said ‘we knocked on your door at ten to one,'” he aimed a glob of spit and expertly dinged the spittoon, “I was sitting five feet from the door from noon onwards.  He never knocked on my door.  Then he promised to come by this evening, around nine.”

“He didn’t come by around nine,” she said, licking her paws and rubbing them over her face, cleaning herself.  

“No,” he said, “so I called him a bit after nine, and he was drunk.  Said he’d be by at ten, between ten and ten thirty, ten thirty the latest.  He’d call when he was on his way.”  

She continued grooming herself.  

“Have no fear, though, I am confident the early-rising lying sack of shit will be banging on my door at 7:30 a.m.,” he predicted bitterly.  “I’ve already told him I won’t be around tomorrow morning.  Of course, I’ll be in my bed cursing him, the useless prick.  And why shouldn’t he be a useless prick?   I’m sure they don’t pay him, yet he’s up at 6:30 every morning banging the garbage cans under my windows.” 

She curled up and rested her cat face on her soft paws.  She looked at him with a mysterious expression.   Her eyes said “you don’t really expect me to say anything, do you?”

When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

Wednesday 2-18, downtown A train

“Oh, happy fucking day,”

said a bitter old face

like mine

ceiling sprung a new leak

drip, drip

onto my last nerve

woman at Obamacare

didn’t know much about benefits

but read my 1099s to me,

including the one I received yesterday

“Do you still work at EVCS?” she asked

teeth and eyes not

needed for our health

not here

in the land where we no longer

tolerate

the lynching of former slaves

here

in the land of the free

and the home

of brave

corporate personhood  

“Whoa! calm down, man…”  

“Don’t you fucking

call me ‘man’, man,

don’t you fucking call me ‘man’!”  

There was a time

my hand would become a fist

where humans

forced to wear signs saying

“I am a man”

would have made me want to holler

arms hard,

ready to strike  

“Who is there to strike?”

a voice asks,

reasonable, kindly.  

“Those who benefit

from the murder

& enslavement of others,”

I say.

 “Ah, yes,” the voice says,

sadly,

“but one can never touch them.”  

ii

“When were you wont to be so full of songs, fool?”

the king asked me  

“Since every sweet lake, sire, receded to shoals of piss

a cool drink not sold by the bottle

living now only in fond nostalgia

while the priapic, tireless

thrusting, twisting, plunging

forms the rhythm section,

the recoiling cringe replacing dance.”

“There is more hope

for a dog returning to his vomit 

than for you, fool,” noted the king

“Yes,” I said,

“another song, sire?”

date forgotten

Had we not

bullet in the head  

been forced on top

of our neighbors’ corpses

in that festive

Ukrainian evening  

Had we not  

willing ourselves to forget

plunged

bottle deep

in spirits not our own  

Had rape

not been the law

but mercy instead  

Imagine

the songs we would have sung

the happy noise

scattered over bright chords

ecstatic leaps

and skiing madly

down the perfect slopes

of upturned breasts

under the thinness of silk

What We Are Doing Here

As a young man, tortured by much of what went on around me, I spent a lot of time alone, mulling things over.   I learned to play guitar, found my way around a piano keyboard, drew, wrote– all solitary, expressive things I did in any quiet spot I could find.  Outside of those hours, my life seemed to be, as Albert King sings in Born Under A Bad Sign, one big fight.  

I fought with my parents whose limitations as parents left them prone to frustration and anger rather than able to guide or advise me or my sister in any meaningful way.   I spent decades fighting with many of the inevitable assholes one encounters almost everywhere.  

There is no shortage of angry assholes to fight with, if that’s what you are trained to do.  In fact, you’ll never even need to seek them out.  Bullies and jackasses will be irresistibly drawn to you in a crowd, seeming to know you are set up to struggle against them.  Each one will passionately make the case that you are the asshole.  It would take me decades to get enough insight into the idiocy of fighting with raging fools to start becoming a consistently gentle person.

I recall that when I used to sit down to write in my younger years I was bursting to write everything down, impatient to tell it all each time, get to the bottom of our existence here all at once.  Not only is this an impossible wish, it is self-defeating.  

The ideal writing session results in setting out one thing as clearly as possible, providing exactly enough detail and nuance to make the reader feel and understand that thing. In deference to the reader one also prunes away digressions, no matter how interesting the particular darling might be, if they might distract or confuse the reader.  Setting out one thing clearly, to me, is a good day’s work.

I’m reminded of this after reading something a very talented young writer posted recently.   It takes four or five very compelling story lines, summarizing each one in abbreviated fashion, and jams them together into one piece to tell an ambitiously global tale.  Reminded me of my own long ago impulse to try to tell everything at once, get to the bottom of what our lives and the things we learn here mean, if anything.  

Reminded me a tiny bit of Clint Eastwood’s latest, American Sniper, which reduces the most compelling mysteries of the story to a short vignette and a single line title at the end, while spending the rest of the time showing the simple heroism of a likable, honorable, driven man valiantly fighting to save his brothers in an unquestioned, horrific, war.  We see him suddenly cured of PTSD, smiling and hugging wife and children goodbye, heading to his car.  In the next frame, on black, a title summarily informs us that he was killed by one of the vets he was helping.  What?  Now we’re at his funeral and the credits are rolling.  What? Really, Clint?

I was around when this brilliant girl began to show her prodigious talents.  If I was feeling a bit more outgoing at the moment I’d reach out and invite her for a plate of dumplings.  I’d offer to tell her the rest of the story, for whatever use she might make of my view.  I was there on the scene from before she was born, a more or less objective adult observer, over the years her remarkable life began telling itself as a story.  

I’d also advise her to wait and consider, before publishing the piece, if it wouldn’t be better written as four separate pieces, each one including all the information the reader needs to see each complex story as three dimensionally as possible.  And to discard interesting side stories that distract, even alarm, the reader, and remove focus from the larger story being told.

And I’d remind her to be sure to tell each story with the satisfying amount of shading and detail she always has in her best work.  I’d stress the importance of mercy to oneself when telling a story.  Being unfair to oneself does not always seem unfair, but it is.  Unfairness is as hard to see in writing as it is to experience in life.   I really ought to call her.

Bummer

Forty years ago it was not uncommon for teenagers, in the shifting winds then blowing, to believe the miraculous was about to happen.  You didn’t need a weatherman, as the song said, to know which way the wind was blowing.   The world was changing for the better, many, young and old, believed, the proof of it seemingly at hand.  

Few gave a thought to, or even knew about, the many Jews in the mid 1600s, certain that the Messiah was among them, who’d sold all of their possessions and waited excitedly to be delivered to the World to Come.   The Messiah, a charismatic mystic named Shabbtai Tzvi, faced with a sword, chose forced conversion to Islam over completing his proclaimed mission, and so, instead of the blissful End of Times, the Jews endured hundreds more of years of persecution.  (footnote in following post).  Nobody in those heady days before the dream collapsed was dwelling on the death of idealism that so often follows the intoxicating flush of inspiration.

The reader will forgive, perhaps, the depressing digression. Such digressions were commonly forgiven at the time I am writing about, the very early 1970s, the days of excess we think of now as the 60s.  If you were to take a time machine looking for the sixties, you’d probably want to go to around 1970 to find those colorful days in full flower.  Set the machine to 1962, say, and you’d find most white males still had crew cuts.  The songs played on the radio in 1963 would provide another shock.  In 1964, to give but one example, you could still be killed for advocating integration in parts of the country that insisted they had the right to treat their Negroes as they saw fit and to hell with the Supreme Court and the so-called Department of Justice.   

Now we smile or smirk at the quaint beliefs that animated the hippies, the rejection of materialism, the belief in peace and love, the embrace of brotherhood.   When we want to mock people we speak of them sitting down with people who hate them to sing “Kumbaya”.  Back then, large groups of people sat around a singer with a guitar, their voices rising in a chorus to sing the African song of friendship and brotherhood.  We no longer speak of “brotherhood”, except ironically.  It’s a word from a bygone era, quaint as a windmill.

The bummer I am thinking of was a bad LSD trip I witnessed in around 1972.  The house was empty of parents, the trip had been planned out, the drug secured.   The acid was dropped.  The potential of this drug to open the doors of consciousness, to expand the mind, was well known and in those days many pursued it avidly.  Robert Crumb is among many who attribute their radical shift in consciousness to LSD.  Crumb reports that he ate it regularly in the late 60s and he describes it as fueling his mad creativity.  Jimi Hendrix is another who credited LSD with unlocking his consciousness.   Purple Haze was a love song to the psychedelic named for a popular form of LSD.  

The drug reputedly unlocked creative centers of the brain, disinhibited the mind in a way that led to amazing discoveries, revelations, enlightenment.  Of course, it had a famous downside: the bad trip, or bummer, hours of intensely painful suffering instead of a transcendent opening of the doors of perception.  The CIA had used this feature of the drug to derange the thoughts of people it suspected of being spies and more than one of these deranged suspects leaped through plate glass windows not caring whether they could fly or not. There was a tent at Woodstock where empathetic people quietly talked down people suffering from bad trips.  Bummer, a word still in common use, and with good reason, is a relic of those days.  

As this bummer I am thinking of progressed, the young man in hell, a hell as real as any, desperately turned on the TV and began staring at an insipid program.   He sat close to the screen and watched the show intently.  The insipidness of the program, and the desperation of watching it, were more than I could bear at the moment and I went over to flick the TV off. 

“No, please…” the young man bumming out said, reaching forward to cling to the television set.  “Please,” he said with an abjectness difficult to describe, “I need it.”  Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise.  I don’t recall how long he sat there, literally hugging the TV.  It may have been only moments, but in the memory of a man with a proneness to metaphor, it is a deeply seared metaphor.

We live in a culture narcotized by TV where drugs are now routinely prescribed to treat every ailment known to man, woman and child.  Higher consciousness is no longer a subject of discussion, except winkingly, in air quotes.  Literally millions of children are given drugs like Ritalin to make them calm the fuck down after a quick diagnosis of “pain in the ass”.   It is for their sake, and the common good, that they are medicated.  Some of them no doubt benefit from it.  Others, well, there will always be others.  We are no longer sitting around singing Kumbaya, my friend.

A final note on the bummer, the nature of our minds and our minds on drugs, from an address given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician father of the famous jurist.  The quote has been rattling around my mind as I wrote this entry, and I provide it here for the wise to ponder, although, of course, one is equally free to enjoy a childlike laugh over it:

Here is an extended excerpt from the 1870 lecture of Holmes which was published in 1879 [OHMT]:

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

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