Category Archives: writing

I Give Up Part 5

The buzzing from the chip was just wrong, as was the headache.   They had fine tuned the technology to the point that any annoyances were intended, and I resented it.

“You make a fair point,” said the supervisor, motioning to an unseen technician.  Abruptly the buzzing and headache stopped.  

“14,000,000 people ahead of me on the crucifixion priority list, you say?” I said.  

“Easily,” he said, “so many other things had a better chance of killing you before the state got around to rooting you out.”  

“I should have invested everything I had in lottery tickets,” I said.  

“Would a few million dollars have made things any different for you?” he asked.  

“I could have hired the people I needed to make this thing work,” I said.  A bird flew by, one of the last.  It cast a small, flickering shadow on the floor in front of me as it passed.  

“Tell me more about this thing,” he said.

“The wealth of our country was built by slave labor and the cheap labors of exploited people who were hungry and desperate in the countries they came from.  The people who collected the lion’s share of the wealth, the same ones in charge today, had as many qualms about taking what they wanted as a hungry lion has about eating a zebra.  The new theory of evolution was cited, ‘survival of the fittest’, much more flattering than ‘survival of the most ruthless’.  Sciences were conjured, measuring skulls and skeletons to demonstrate the innate inferiority of one race, why others were fit to subjugate them.  The science of race was invented, a laughably unfunny race to bolster racism by any means necessary.”  

“I did tell you to take your time, but I didn’t mean this,” the supervisor said, showing only a glint of impatience.

“If I had a million dollars I would hire a highly skilled business partner, after interviewing a dozen, or maybe fifty, to find one who can understand the idea and help me bring it into the world on a larger scale.  It’s a simple idea that proves hard to explain, market or justify: children in slums deserve to be listened to as much as the children of the well-to-do.  In an elite school you get an ear, in a slum school a barked command.  The child of the wealthy is nodded at with an indulgent smile, the child of the poor is told to get in line, fold their damned hands, shut the fuck up.”  

“And this is your problem why, exactly?” the supervisor asked, not without sympathy.  

My theoretical diagnosis in the DSM XIV draft suddenly appeared in my mind, like a hologram, turning itself to catch the light from different angles.  It actually looked beautiful, the light catching the grooves in the letters, playing across the serifs.  This is the world I will miss, I thought with a sudden pang, these ineffable little miracles of sensory experience.  The tiny rainbows shining through the prisms of light hushed me for a moment.  The supervisor watched this too, grateful for the break.  

“But all good things must come to an end,” I said to him.  I was thinking of Sim Kessel, a French Jewish middleweight who uttered this line to excellent effect in his wonderful, but now out of print, Hanged At Auschwitz.  The former French underground fighter had reached the point in Auschwitz where he became what they referred to, bizarrely, as a ‘Muslim’.  That was the point where the fight was finally gone, the will to live exhausted.  ‘Muslims’ stopped eating, lost weight, became glassy-eyed skeletons and died.  Kessel was many kilos below his fighting weight and had that glassy look, started giving away his moldy bread and weak, stinking soup.  

Somehow a friend with the power to help got him out of the mining brigade, where prisoners were marched many kilometers, in wooden shoes, to labor in mines so hot and airless that men drank their own urine to survive.  These Auschwitz prisoners were the ultimate workforce, they worked as though their lives depended on it and were completely disposable.  A capitalist’s dream, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Pick it up,” the supervisor said, making the old circular choo-choo train motion with his hand.

“Kessel got a job in the camp itself, cleaning the latrine ditches.  He was spared the long freezing marches he was too weak to survive, and spent the day scooping dysentery and other waste out of the ditches in buckets and carrying them to dump somewhere else.  Eventually he was….”

“I don’t really care about Sim Kessel,” said the supervisor.

“When he regained his strength they sent him back to the mines, and that’s when he said ‘all good things must come to an end.  And so I was sent back to the mines.'”

“Interesting,” said the supervisor without expression. “And now, please, the rest of the personal details.”

“You asked me why this brutally unfair arrangement is my problem.  I have no short answer.  I do not understand it myself, what drives me to try to help something far beyond my powers to help.  I imagined that if people saw the creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity of the children of poor people it might kindle some mercy in them.  I don’t know why I thought this.  The black eyed face of a little girl in Yemen, confronting a camera after her family was killed in a drone strike, tugs the heart the same way a boy surrendering to men with rifles in a ghetto does, is the look of a shocked Armenian girl in 1915 who has just seen her mother disemboweled by a Turk on a horse.”

“The point, Jesus Christ, the point!  Will you come to the goddamned point, man?” said the supervisor.

“Nobody can be expected to give a shit about anything that is not directly under their nose.  I was a blind idiot to think that anyone would be interested in and moved by the creativity of children being raised to become inmates of our privatized prisons.  People are preoccupied by a thousand other things, nobody can be expected to give a shit, unless, perhaps, it’s their own kid, doomed to early death or a long stretch in prison for the crime of being born in shit city.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Just fucking crucify me, then, if you’re in such a fucking hurry.”

“I apologize,” said the supervisor. “I should not have snapped like that.  Very unprofessional, as well as discourteous.  I know this must be stressful to you.”

“Not at all,” I said, displaying another hallmark of my disease. “I came here to give up.  Like Sim Kessel giving away his rotten bread, I don’t care anymore.  I can’t explain why I cared in the first place.  You’re right, my mother’s right, I didn’t make the world.  I am not responsible for anybody’s misery but my own.”  

“Oh, but you are.  You are responsible,” said Gandhi, suddenly popping up like a jack-in-the-box.  His smile was very sad and serious.  “You think you can give up, let yourself be executed and be done with it?  You cannot.  Think about it, man.  Speaking to the man who will turn you over to the technicians of death, the last human in the chain, you are still trying to explain your responsibility.  If you take it up, it is your responsibility.”  

“Fucking great…” I thought, and through hidden speakers all around came my thought.

“Fucking great…” the speakers said in my voice, with a nice natural reverb that reminded me of playing my guitar in the resonant stairwells of public schools in the battered city where I grew up.  The voice emerged in surround sound, really clear and with great suppleness.  It actually sounded beautiful, in a weird way.

 

I Give Up Part 4

The chip, which can, of course, be used by the implanted citizen as an internal alarm, can also be activated by the network which can assign it various functions.  So I found myself instantly, alertly awake– with a splitting head ache.

“Ah, good to see you awake,” said the supervisor cheerfully, as I struggled to sit upright, slightly nauseated and unable to rub my aching head with my hands still shackled.  

“No need for the soft cuffs, officer,” said the man mildly, and the plastic restraints were snipped off my wrists.   I pushed myself upright and rubbed my head, neither of which helped the throbbing in my skull.

The supervisor, a thoughtful looking man, scanned my history from the chip. “You are not a bad person,” he told me reassuringly.  “There is no violence or criminality in your past, outside of some ill-advised verbal outbursts and the incendiary images you have committed to writing over the years– you know, those ironically intended things you write in high emotion that can be interpreted as actually, say, advocating the murder of various government officials.  You and I, and any person who looks at it for more than a moment, know you never actually advocated the killing of anyone.  Even those, as you have pointed out precisely and with great fairness of mind, are deserving of death.”  

His kindness disarmed me, as it was intended to.  I found myself almost tearful as I sat before him.  I tried to keep my mind blank, focused on his words alone.

“Unfortunately, nobody looks at these things for more than a few seconds, as you know.  And you are not here for those writings anyway, it’s much more subtle than that.  You are, in fact, a kind person with the best of intentions.  Anyone can see that.   Why don’t you tell me, for the record and also, as one human being to another, why you felt it necessary to surrender for crucifixion?   It appears you could have easily avoided it, you are probably about number 14,000,000 on the priority list for this special handling.”

“Sonderbehandlung,” I thought, the German term stamped on Jewish passports in the extermination years.  It meant “special handling”, Nazi code for “expedited for extermination”, one of the several German terms of art from those years I was familiar with: vernichtungslager, wir scheissen auf die freiheit, lebensunwertes leben, entartete kunst, arbeit macht frei — all similar in spirit.  

“Ah, the Nazis, always with the Nazis,” the supervisor said nodding with a sad smile.  “They did an indelible number on you and your family, didn’t they?   Not only shooting a whole bunch of them in the back of the head, virtually all of your mother’s side, leaving their bodies in a ravine in the Ukraine, not only disappearing your father’s side, and their entire lice-ridden shtetl in Belarus across a small river from Pinsk, wiped off the map without a trace, but invading your mind so thoroughly that to you all government authorities are capable of becoming mass murdering monsters, all populations their witting and unwitting accomplices.”  

He had a pretty good point, I had to give him that.  A society that is OK with millions of people dying so that others can have low cost slave labor?   A society that imprisons more people per capita than the most ruthless totalitarian states on the earth now?  A society that goes shopping for luxuries they don’t need as….

“….as millions of children go to bed hungry in a country that throws away countless hundred dollar a plate dinners in fine restaurants in the very cities where these kids eat paint chips to fill their bellies…. yes, the doomed children.  Always the doomed children, isn’t that what it is?  Tell me your plan, why you deserve to be crucified.  There’s nothing I can do to change your fate, you understand, but I’d like you to be able to get it all off your chest, as best you can.  There is no rush, take your time.”

And I began composing my thoughts, to tell him exactly what it was about my idealistic plan that marked me as a man worthy of the cruelest public execution a private contractor could perform for a government entity.

I Give Up Part 3

“Your messianic thoughts led you inexorably to this day,” said an articulate mercenary binding my hands with plastic cuffs, a bit tight for my taste.  

“Things will always be too tight for your taste,” he said, displaying an alarming clairvoyance.  I shook my head as it dawned on me: there was nothing supernatural involved, the chip was transmitting directly to the network and all he had to do was smile and repeat my thoughts aloud.  A parrot correctly outfitted could do it, although, in fairness to the mercenary, not develop those massive biceps.

We dream when we are young of freedom to attain the things we dream about.  There are higher impulses that it just seems right will prevail.  

“Right,” said the centurion, bored, pushing me forward now, “righty-Oh.”

I suddenly found myself thinking of terrible things few caring people care about, in a stream: the doomed children of the poor my mother correctly scolded me are an obsession of mine, unjustifiable state violence, thousands killed by secret American death squads in Viet Nam under the Phoenix Program, on suspicion of being enemies of democracy, circumvention of American law after 9/11 to blur the lines between covert and clandestine operations, eliminate the requirement to disclose covert assassinations to Congressional committees  and allow for new American death squads to operate secretly in as many countries as unaccountable persons appointed by the president deem necessary to protect our freedom here at home.  

I suddenly had the image of that young man in Ferguson, Missouri who had been shot to death back in 2014.  His large body, lying in the street for hours while they dug up evidence of why he deserved to be killed, shot so many times even though unarmed.  The National Guard was called in, anti-riot squads, tear gas, tanks, “we will control the angry crowds and protect private property by any means necessary,” vowed the governor, echoing Malcolm X grotesquely.  

“The governor didn’t say ‘by any means necessary’, jerk-off,” smirked my captor, nudging me forward.

A video of the large young man committing a misdemeanor, stealing cigars, shoving a tiny clerk, not long before the policeman confronted and killed him, was soon released and shown repeatedly on every TV station.  Perhaps, it was theorized, the unidentified cop knew he was dealing with a dangerous criminal, confirmed when the kid possibly used the f-word to the policeman, or even the explosively provocative n-word to a plainly white man.  No white man should ever be expected to abide being dismissed as a ‘nigger’, especially by a black kid.   Who could blame the large cop for his rage, for pursuing the wounded kid fifty yards, already shot, and making sure he was dead?

Why this image came into my head, I cannot say, but I saw the photos as they’d been shown on the news:  the white officer with his close cropped hair, the black teenager with a motor board on his head, a high school graduate who would never need to buy books for college.  

When a grand jury declined to prosecute the police officer, let all the facts come out in a trial, they seemed to have decided the peace officer had already suffered enough.  The riot squads were called back in, instead of 1,000 mediators, peace makers, a commitment from the government to demilitarize civil police forces, do something about the disproportionate police killing of young black men and find solutions to long-standing racial problems it pretends no longer exist.  

“Yes, I know,” said the mercenary, helping me along now with the muzzle of his gun, “we are a society that uses deadly violence to answer every question.  Given the choice between protecting human dignity and protecting private property we always choose the latter.  It’s sacred.  Do you have any more questions, sir?”  The expression on his face was so sincerely quizzical that I almost asked him about L. Paul Bremer.

“Nobody cares about L. Paul Bremer,” the soldier told me. “Yes, he fucked everything up in Iraq after the perfectly executed Shock and Awe campaign freed Iraq from a modern day Hitler.  His first idiotic error was Order 1, the de-Baathifcation.  Sure, it was stupid, in hindsight, or even with average foresight, to fire thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants because they’d been forced, by Saddam, to be members of his political party as a condition of their employment.”  He looked at me thoughtfully, and I could see him further considering what I was thinking of asking.

“Order 2 was an even bigger disaster, I’ll grant you that.  Disband the Iraqi army making 450,000 trained soldiers suddenly unemployed and without pensions in a country where an occupying power was breaking down doors, taking people to be tortured in Saddam’s former torture prisons, where the power grid had been destroyed by American bombing, where hospitals for the masses of wounded and sick were understaffed as a result of Order 1 that fired the best doctors, nurses and administrators in Iraq?  Big fucking mistake, huge mistake, unless your aim was to create an insurgency.  I grant you all that, sir, now just keep moving.”  This time the muzzle of the gun pushed me a bit more emphatically.

“And was Bremer a complete asshole to issue this statement to the suffering people of the Iraq that he was busy anally violating in ways no less brutal than his predecessor, Saddam:  We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture, or if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country?  Granted, granted, granted: complete asshole.  But Bremer retired soon after to a lavish estate and hid what might have been, to a lesser man, his shameful failure at a variety of luxury properties he and his family owned.  I mean, hasn’t the man suffered enough?”

And, truly, why was I even thinking of these things as a cross was waiting for me across town?  To my left and right I could see others, already crucified, writhing as they tried to die.  Mercifully, their vocal cords had been severed to minimize their expressions of suffering.  If you lead a life that takes you, inexorably, to your execution, have the decency to at least…

The butt of a rifle, expertly deployed, made my chip fall silent.

I Give Up part 2

It was a liberating moment, I recall, when I realized I could just give up.   “I Give Up!” I would call, hands up, walking step by step, slowly, toward the ruthless authorities I was surrendering to.   The sickening feeling of what I would then have to undergo was not in my mind in that moment, the forcible end of a fond dream, of a thousand sleepless nights kept awake by my dreams, the end of dreamless sleep that sucked a little life from me every night, the relief of being done with the struggle filled me with a kind of peace.  

I was chattering inwardly again, I realized, and this was a sign of the disease, I knew.  A rare condition that might someday merit inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Pharmaceutical Prescription Codes (“DSM”).  The current DSM, DSM XIII,  has over 24,000,000 discrete diagnostic and statistical prescription codes.  Modern science!  

The characteristics of this disease would not be statistically noted in a person who could say “others look at what is and say ‘why?’, I dream of things that should be and say ‘why not?'” with millions of dollars in the bank.  A person born wealthy is immune to the disease, inoculated by good fortune even before birth.  A person not born to privilege does not have the privilege of privileging this kind of thinking, in him delusional, because to objectively lack the power and proceed as though one had it is the hallmark of madness.  

Gandhi, my assistant here in the afterlife, and as pleasant a companion as one could wish for, reminds me of his great worldly success, in terms of making a living and running a business, before his great otherworldly success, leading millions, to become the living symbol of the peaceful change he wanted to see in the world. “Of course, I never said that, you know ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, ” he reminds me, “but, in essence, it is what I did.  First, though, recall that I was ambitious and hardworking and created a very successful law practice there in South Africa.  I had several people working for me, busy all the time, they made money for me while I slept.  I made a good living, had a luxurious home.  I pushed my wife around.  I was an asshole, impatient to fight the evil that was all around me but unable to see the anger in myself for what it was, what it could become.”

“But, you, my friend, are in a very different boat, although on the same perilous ocean.  Unless you had this kind of success, had the tools to market your talents, inspire others, build a business, before setting out to build a movement, why would you expect, at your rather mature age, to be able to suddenly create it out of, as the coiners of cliche would phrase it, whole cloth?”  

I knew this whole conversation was my own creation, no Gandhi, nobody waiting for my reply.  Nonetheless I felt compelled, by the disease itself, to respond, if non-responsively.  “The children of the wealthy will most often be attended to by people well paid to take their needs seriously.  At their exclusive schools they will be treated according to the most enlightened theories of education, theories that treat them as competent and unique individuals worthy of devoted attention.”

“Their opinions will be elicited, their ideas will be smiled on, their writing will be thoughtfully read and returned to them with encouraging comments in the margins.  The smiles and thoughtfulness may be slightly forced, true, since these are paid caretakers and not necessarily the ideal, loving bestowers of these things, but children are pleased by these reactions anyway, particularly in contrast to outright neglect or hostility.”  

“The children of the doomed– what is mysterious about this phrase?— they are, and I hope I am not shocking you with the bluntness of this, doomed.  Doomed in more ways than time allows me to describe, as I soon have to raise my hands and march carefully toward the mercenaries who will take me into custody.”

“There are no mercenaries there, nobody is taking you into custody, even if you give up,” Gandhi reminds me.  

There is no Gandhi there, I remind Gandhi.  

“Who, then?” he asks.

The children of the doomed.  They are born into…

“The children of the doomed, the doomed children… you’re like a broken record, the doomed children… the doomed children… what is it with you and the doomed children?  Millions of children are doomed, OK.  You didn’t make the world.  The doomed children, the doomed children…” calls the voice of my mother helpfully from the pristine white paper box where her ashes reside.  

Those authorities I mentioned, here is what they have to say, in a top secret legal opinion from the desk of current Federal Judge for life Jay Bybee, hired by powerful vice president Dick Cheney’s wartime consigliere David Addington:

For an act to constitute torture as defined [in the federal torture statute], it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure.  Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death…. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture under [the federal torture statute] it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., months or even years.

You have had this unendurable psychological pain for months, you say?  Hard to believe, first of all, since you have been enduring it, haven’t you?  How difficult can it have been, this alleged pain– and note that harm, not pain, is the hallmark of a mental injury to rise to the level of torture– if you are able to walk in here and confront me about it, accuse me of torture, of all things?   Aren’t you being a bit subjective– I mean, how difficult to endure must it actually be, objectively?   Anyway, read my secret memo again, it says the duration must be for months, true, but it also says “or even years”.  What is unclear about this distinction, or the qualifier “or”?  Come back in five years, maybe ten.  My legal opinion is unclear, admittedly about how many years constitute significant duration.  Genius, no?  Have a nice day.

Now I am Jay Bybee.  Do you see how insidious this disease is?  My best play, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me, is to give up.  I am the author and defender of torture memos now?  

“You are the author of what you are paid to put out in the world, remember that,” says Gandhi.  “If you would have any effect in the world you must not give up, you must press on, you must have others publish your ideas, take on your fight alongside you.  You cannot do it alone, nobody in the world can.  Nor can you, if you will carefully read the description of your diagnosis in the draft of DSM XIV, give up.  You cannot give up.  You must not give up.  It may comfort you to think the discomfort will end if you do give up, but don’t worry about that, you will not give up.”  

He smiles the famous Gandhi smile, and I feel like asking him how a mature adult man can have a ‘wet dream’ sleeping naked with his lovely, naked teenaged nieces to “test himself in the firmness of his vow of celibacy”, but, really, what is the point?  That is the question I so often ask myself, in regard to so many struggles.

 

I Give Up

This may be the organizing breakthrough I’ve been waiting for, a book idea I should outline while it’s fresh.   A late Philip K. Dick type thing, since the hour’s getting late.   The main character, living in a hopeless dystopian shithole in the near future, or recent past, has finally arrived at the place where he figures he might as well just cash it in, even though his work is not done.  His gently estranged friends have no idea what he is still trying to do, if anything.  The authorities are closing in anyway, as they always are.  The powers that be, if they knew of his mission, would be certain to crucify him straight away.   Trial no longer strictly necessary, the long emergency and everything.   Death on the cross too good for him, really, considering he’s hardly performed any miracles, to speak of.  Potential to do good works, most who still know him will agree to that, but hasn’t done any really impressive miracles, in spite of a lot of talk.

Flashback to Roman times where there was a small group who worshipped a murdered rabbi they considered holy, a charismatic teacher.  They were catching hell, these early followers of Jesus.  Turning the other cheek, as they’d been taught by their other-worldly master, persecuted because they didn’t worship the gods of their worldly masters, they were fed to lions for the amusement of the idiot crowds in Rome.  

In fairness to these idiot crowds, their lives were hard and they didn’t have TV, so watching people unfathomably committed to peace even at the cost of their lives, being ripped apart by wild beasts, put to the sword in great spectacles, was the closest they had to an exciting evening out and they went in droves, according to the market research that comes to down to us.  They also were mostly poor and hungry and got free bread at these circuses, though the obscenely rich also attended.  

These spectacles, and the bread, helped keep the desperate off the streets, where they might organize and fight the people who were keeping their mercenary army’s well-sandaled feet on their necks.  Watching these Christ-loving wretches who didn’t fight back get hacked up was the best show the Roman rabble were going to get.  

This went on for a long time, as the Roman Empire continued its long decline, until there arose a public relations machine that changed the script, and the long-term fate of this small sect of mostly martyrs who eventually became, at the time, the world’s most populous religion.   The story of Jesus was rebranded, brilliantly, told compellingly, the teachings most critical of the rich toned way down, blame for his murder shifted from the Roman authorities to the local Jews, and eventually sold to the highest classes of society.  The headquarters of that church today, ensconced in its own sovereign country in Rome, is a place of fabulous wealth, its art collection as impressive and valuable as any to be found in the world’s greatest museums.  

Several off-shoots of this church became very powerful and came to rule most of the European nations over time. With the divine rights of kings it was necessary to have a state that was also pretty much a church, and these churches, built on the teachings of the Son of God, a passionate devotee of peace and fairness, often went to war and put members of each other’s sects to the sword.  

The main thing, though, is the improvement of Christians’ fortunes, once they become the dominant religion through brilliant marketing, having sold the franchise to the wealthiest and most powerful of society, an inspiring story, the greatest in the history of marketing and branding.

That flashback would be only the momentary musing of the character, background that pulses through his mind as he passes the crucified, nailed up on the main streets of the once great city where he used to play stickball as a kid.   His last couple of friends would express concern over these hallucinations of crucified martyrs he kept speaking of.  There would be some debate about whether these were visions of martyrs or of criminals, or some combination of the two.  There was nothing so clear about who these ghosts on the crosses were.  

These concerned friends would also debate the kind of medication he should be on.  The author would burst through the narrative to comment, metafictively, about the events playing out in the story, bring in the real-life materials that were being metaphorically paraded before an audience of jaded literary agents, bored slush pile readers, cagey editors, ambitious book marketers, slick book packagers.

The book, of course, would bypass all these types and find its way directly into ordinary people’s lives through the internet, for a minimal cost, perhaps a donation.  This would be necessary for the author, and the character himself would also insist on it, having this successful and influential book about devoted souls slightly advancing madly impossible missions, almost enough to bring them to life, before their dejected surrender and crucifixion, bring no monetary profit to anybody.

Would kind of defeat the spirit of the book, if the author took in any real money for it.  But that is a musing for another time.

Concentrated Thinking

A writer interviewed recently by Terry Gross quoted Don DeLillo as calling writing “concentrated thinking.”  An excellent description of what a person does when focusing to write clearly, come to the point smartly, patiently untangle and remove what stands in the way of those things.  

Bad writing, like bad thinking, can be like a hungry anaconda.  Not to disparage large constrictors, we all need to eat, but a coiled monster that crushes you in its hungry embrace is not what most readers seek when they make their reading selections.  Making the reader’s task as easy as possible is one of the writer’s primary jobs, like making yourself easily understood is important in conversation. 

Which would you rather have in your lap on a Sunday afternoon, a relaxed cat or dog, or a ravenous constrictor weighing a few hundred pounds?

I’m thinking of this because, mistakenly believing I’d done some kind of good deed by answering a convoluted email from the toxic adult son of a recently deceased old friend, I had delivered to me an enormous pile of steaming shit, in a huge coil, by way of reply.  The inevitable punishment my misguided attempt at a good deed — done for the sake of others, not the vampire I was actually writing to–  deserved, no doubt.  The steaming mountain of shit, to my great alarm, uncoiled itself into a large constrictor and, as I pulled back in horror, got a firm hold on first one arm, then my torso.

I struggled against this determined monster for literally hours.  It was only through concentrated thinking, and metaphors like “coughing up a toxic hair ball”, and the fevered writing of many words, that I was able to finally loosen its terrible bonds.   The bad writing, and even worse thinking, put me back into aggravations long forgotten and filled me with a surprising amount of anger and violence.  

Bad enough writing, the product of bad enough thinking about painful emotions,  feels like it can kill you, if you let it enter your mind.   Like bad thinking, bad writing complicates things that are already difficult enough without adding complications.  

Concentrated thinking, and editing, and paring the thoughts to their most elemental form,  yielded this image, finally, which I sent as the last of too many words to the brother of this toxic person:

Your brother is a lost soul, flailing desperately.  He’s quicksand, only he talks you to death as he kills.

Like his bad writing.

 

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.

Welcome to our virtual world

Some kind of spambots, which are now ubiquitous, diverse and ingeniously specialized, land on my website from time to time and leave me comments, designed to get me to click on links they send me.   Posing as appreciative comments about my writing, the kind of comment most people are tickled to receive, they’re sent to generate hits on the sites they are promoting.   Many of the rare “likes” I get for these posts lead me back to enterprising web entrepreneurs who describe how wonderful it is to write from Bali, Copenhagen, Goa, Prague, Florence as they make excellent money working when and where they want, writing for the internet.  

All you need to do is create a blahg, a squeeze page, I think they call it, with affiliate links, backlinks, sidewinder links, they write using a jargon alien to me, but apparently very simple to master.  They will teach you everything you need to know.  Master this surprisingly simple craft and you can sit on a beach, or hotel room or in a cafe, anywhere in the world, and spend a few hours a day writing and watching substantial amounts of money flow into your electronic bank account.  A few changes of underwear, your laptop and international chargers and power cords and you’re on your way.  You will also find yourself losing weight, flab turning to muscle, meeting cool people, having tons more sex, laughing more, eating better, sleeping better, waking refreshed to have breathtaking adventures every day. 

Funny or not, I get almost no direct comments on this blahg but several every week on the blahg for the upstart nonprofit I am trying to start up.  The spambots for some reason home in on that mission driven nonprofit site rather than this gratuitous one.  Many of their comments are in laughably machine-translated non-English advertising some very weird and specific products involving commercial concrete removal, aluminum, real-estate, diet pills.  But I’ve had variations on this one a few times now, usually in response to posts of pictures or videos that have virtually no written content on them:

Comment:

I read a lot of interesting content here.

(Actual interesting content on this one was:  

If he doesn’t start long jumping right away, click on him.   

This neat leap was animated on 3-10-14  by a ten year-old at the Ella Baker School in NYC, using the amazing reference photos of Eadweard Muybridge taken in the 1880s.)

Probably you  spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google  – k2seotips unlimited content

Think of the hours I could save!   I could use those hours to learn about and master affiliate marketing and try my program, untroubled by any funding concerns, two or three weeks at a time, in Africa, Asia, Iceland, spend the hours every day learning languages, mastering new musical instruments, collaborating with local musicians on every continent, working on my six pack abs.  While high quality google friendly content is generated for me to maximize my audience and lead to my almost instant success in anything I try.  What an increasingly wonderful world it is!

Perhaps my favorite recent comment is one I saw on the site of a business woman who occasionally has a spambot send me a message letting me know that she thought my thoughtful post was awesome and that I should check out what she’s up to.   Clue number one on her site is her description of how the free site had been taken down once because she had violated the terms of use by promoting her businesses on the site, and that she had figured out a beautiful workaround she was generously sharing for others who wish to use the free platform for free, and powerful, advertising.

A commenter on that post referred to her, perhaps not entirely unfairly, as a “cunt”.  The next commenter took that first one to task for saying something so harsh about someone who was trying to do something good.   The first commenter wrote back, not without a certain hard humor.  Other commenters joined, but after a while it was only the first guy, the one who’d called the scheming businesswoman a “cunt”, who was answering everybody.  

Since high quality google friendly content (the post you’re reading now, actually) was being generated for me by robots of my own, I had the leisure to read the entire string of comments, and eventually came to a wonderful exchange that made the entire exercise worth more than I can say.  I share it here:

A man who identified himself as a pastor wrote to the woman who’d thought his post was awesome and had invited him to visit her site.  The pastor thanked her humbly and profusely for her appreciation of his writing.  It was a wonderful thing, he said, to have one’s poetry and philosophy appreciated and she was clearly a bright and discerning woman and also, in his humble opinion, the creator and keeper of a very interesting and rewarding site that he would be visiting again soon.  And a fine writer herself, if he might say so.

The next comment was from the clever trollish commenter who was the only one answering anything directed to the site.  It is perhaps the best comment on this whole blogging business I’ve seen:

Look, “Pastor”. I’m the only one reading these comments and responding. There is no blogger here anymore. She set up an automated system that goes around and clicks LIKE on people’s wordpress posts. And, let me guess – that is how you found this blog. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no actual people read or like your posts.

 

 

 

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”