Category Archives: writing

Positions for the mediator

Party one:

I got my back up after he was very threatening and aggressive to me. He claimed that I hurt him very badly, traumatized him, in fact, the way his father used to, so we were suddenly talking about his traumatic childhood, and not anything that actually happened but after I got my back up, I apologized to him. I told him I was sorry that he made me feel threatened, and that I had acted incorrectly by getting my back up when his defiance reminded me of terrible battles with my daughter, which was very upsetting to me. 

Even after I apologized, and months later, even a year later, he couldn’t let it go, he kept obsessively insisting on talking about what he claimed I did to him. He wouldn’t let it go. He kept trying to make it my problem that he had a bad childhood and he tortured my husband for supporting me. He wouldn’t forgive us, no matter how many times we apologized, even though he kept saying he did forgive us, that he would “always” forgive me. He can’t forgive anybody.

Party Two:

After she flew into a rage during a minor disagreement, she glared at me steadily and did not respond to anything that I said. She literally just stared at me, tight-lipped and beaming hostility, as if I was a defiant child and she was my overwhelmed mother, trying her best to hold it together in the face of such disobedience.  I later accepted her apology, pathetic and blame shifting as it was.  I told her I had more to say about this but that I didn’t want to speak while I was still upset (after having not slept a minute the previous night) because I didn’t want to say anything that might damage our long friendship. 

Although she told me she’d be happy to hear what I had to say, she never let me say what I needed to say, the two times I tried she had temper tantrums.  My calls, texts and letters were ignored.   They began accusing me of being mean to them. Her silence, and her husband’s, went on for weeks and months at a time, complete with angry threats and false accusations against me, libels they’d later spread to our mutual friends and their children, their indignant claim that I was an enraged child irrationally trying to blame them for my obvious problems.

Mediation was the only possibility for fixing things, they finally said, after refusing to talk to me without a mediator present, but would not agree about anything — the conflict that sparked the end of our 50 year friendship, the tensions that mounted during that troubling holiday, the extreme coldness by the end, the angry fallout afterwards — claiming that the mediator would know what to do, without any input from the parties.  When they insisted that no agreement was needed, or possible, I understood that mediation was a ruse, a facially generous offer I would have to turn down, once they heaped impossible conditions on it. The beauty was that I could then be plausibly blamed for blowing up their desperate, endearing peace talks.  The one thing my friends can never forgive is someone who can never forgive.

Surviving betrayal

I was lynched recently by a small group of my oldest friends. It was not the traditional necktie party of places like Texas and Louisiana where a worked up crowd grabs you, puts a rope around your neck, tortures you a bit and lets you hang, sometimes burning you afterwards, sometimes before. My lynching was conducted in slow motion, over the course of months, with many a twist and turn as the rope was tightened, and loosened, and I managed to forget about it for days at a time, hoping for the best. Fortunately for me, when these righteously aroused fucks finally pulled the rope tight I survived.

It may seem offensive to describe my sudden and unanimous ostracism by friends of five decades as a lynching. Lynching is offensive, one of the most disgusting things humans do to each other. Perhaps we might better think of it as a pogrom, a worked up crowd comes to your neighborhood, breaking windows, plundering, setting things on fire, beating, killing and showing perfect contempt all around. There is no anodyne image to conjure being put to silence forever by a group of your closest friends.  

You may not speak about it with any of them, which feels like a great betrayal. since these are people you used to have heart to heart talks with. They will not listen, do not care about your feelings, since they’ve already blamed you, convicted you, excommunicated you and felt perfectly righteous doing so. A secret trial is all a despicable criminal deserves when the crime is so hideous, inhuman, unforgivable. 

You will undoubtedly feel a strong urge to defend yourself, set the record straight, correct outright and obvious lies told about you, but let me assure you, as I would have assured myself had I known sooner, nothing you can say will change an outcome that has already been agreed to. You can’t unsee the face of contempt and the firm intent to make you shut up forever if you have a problem being treated the way you are lyingly complaining about being treated.

Human society functions by believing stories, sometimes absurd ones, that explain the world in a way that makes emotional sense. Love is the highest value, and kindness to others, and forgiveness. Makes a lovely story to believe in., to live by. Someone who does not love, is cruel to others and can’t forgive is clearly beyond redemption. Tell that story about someone with enough passion, get a length of sturdy rope, let the guilty party talk his head into the noose and the rest follows naturally.

Live and learn, to me, is a much better formula for a good life than live and be enraged and never take a single lesson from anything painful. Many people are average, many below average, many are emotionally incapable of anything beyond the superficial performance of friendship. As long as everyone is smiling, joking, hugging and laughing, everything is fine in a group of old amigos. As soon as conflict arises and one accuses another (usually behind their back) of being a vicious, sadistic, unloving, unforgiving Nazi the real fun begins, masks come off and you see what your friends are actually made of.

We have a strong need to belong to a group, to be attached to people who love us, think like us, understand and forgive us. This attachment need explains the enthusiasm of sports fans, fans of angry politicians, cults, militias and so on. We are also born with a strong need to be authentic, to be listened to and heard, to be allowed to express things that trouble us, talk about things that need to be fixed going forward.

As I have learned, in my seventh decade of life, there are people who grow up with no tools to resolve conflict, no way to compromise. When you get into any kind of conflict with one of these super-competitive, hierarchy-embracing folks good will, extending the benefit of the doubt, demonstrations of friendship, patience, kindness etc. are of no use. If you have done all these things and are treated like a monster, it is not you, trust me. It is right to extend loving indulgence to friends, until they demand that you shut the fuck up about what you claim is your hurt and accept that they have every right to do the same whenever they want and to shut you up any time you make them feel bad about themselves. Fuck those putos.

And a very happy, productive 2024 to all!

 

Psychopaths and Narcissists often seem to “win”

Who is more determined to win than someone who sees “losing” as the utter destruction of their sense of themselves? The competitive ruthlessness of this sort is off the charts. If the price of not “winning” is a humiliating death during life, your motivation to dominate, or to kill your opponent, cannot be higher. It’s impossible to understand that someone you care about is like this, until you encounter that fatal conflict, which will often be the first and last. 

Of course, these words you are reading are being written by a quintessential loser, so take that into consideration. I have no power, political, economic or social. In such conflicts I have only my mind, my integrity and my sense of right and wrong, puny tools, it must be said, against the will of someone who will not be defeated, no matter what. Day to day there is also my sense of humor, which will not be evident in these pages, but that too can be turned into another reason to string me up by people given to that sort of thing. Trying to be funny, and making people laugh as though I am, when I am actually the most despicably camoflagued Nazi on the scene!!! Think of how quickly any funny man’s humor can turn to acid when you learn the guy is, say, a rapist who drugs his victims.

To a narcissist bent on victory, no matter what the facts may say about a given contest, there is always spin – your version of the facts that makes you, in fact, the winner, completely in the right. All you need to do is shut down the so-called facts of any so-called witnesses. Nobody is brave once the brave guy next to them is tortured to death, disemboweled and had their head placed on a pike. If there is evidence that can be used against you, bring pressure to bear to make that evidence go away. If the evidence is needed in a timely manner, say to avoid the statute of limitations, or to get past the ‘stop being an asshole and get over it’ deadline, keep the matter of its admissibility tied up in court until you run out the clock. All one needs is the will to do these things, and the power, and nobody can defeat you.

Oh, you can marshal the supposed facts into a so-called logical, arguably persuasive version of what you say happened? You can speak dispassionately and make your case appealing, intellectually and emotionally, to common sense, fairness and basic goodness? Good for you! I will utterly destroy you, funny man. Those “qualities” of yours can easily be turned against you, vicious hypocrite. I can cry, I can wheedle, I can rage, threaten, appeal to loyalty, to love, mercy, forgiveness, to the head on the fucking pike, to God, family, tribe, country, I can refute your “truth” with very compelling lies that will turn you into the irredeemable liar I say you are. Watch how fast most people will fall in line with this kind of thing, clown.

Watching this horror show play out on the national news every day, with one of our political parties, it is particularly unnerving to see it reenacted by a group of my oldest, closest friends. One day none are my friends, because I’ve had a conflict with another friend in the group who felt I defied her. Defying the will of a friend, boys and girls, a crime only a monster would commit, think about it. Then I made her feel terrible after her husband humiliated her by forcing her to apologize to me for flying into a sustained rage. She was not going to take this defiance from her spineless sadomasochistic husband too, and so he told me, after weeks of aggrieved, tooth-sucking silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” His wife regarded me coolly as her husband made this announcement.

His threat reminds me of a ridiculous ultimatum issued by another old friend, a guy I knew since fourth grade. A very nervous man, uncomfortable in his own skin to an alarming extent, he texted me that we could not talk on the phone, that it had to be in person. He drove to meet me so we could have the conversation his marriage counselor had urged him to have with his closest friend. He arrived with his eye ticking and face atwitch. After a few moment of small talk, in response to my question, he told me why he’d insisted on meeting in person. He had to confront me because I had, either intentionally or thoughtlessly, tried to deliberately destroy his marriage. His marriage, one should note, was a long hellscape featuring all the ravages of war. I was puzzled, but instead of telling him to fuck himself and his nightmare fucking marriage, and the fucking marriage counselor who had told him “your wife cannot respect you if you’re too much of a pussy to confront your closest friend after what your wife claims he did to you”, I talked things through with him, tried to help any way I could. Needless to say, I couldn’t help.

His divorce a few years later did nothing to improve our chances of being friends again, in spite of my efforts to do so. After all, he had been completely innocent and a good person during the years of our long friendship, while I… he didn’t even have the words to describe me. I was simply wrong, about him, his motivations, everything.

This is often the case, we learn, when you reach any sort of impasse with this kind of person. It is the reason Trump’s lawyers argue he must have an immediate adjudication of his complete immunity from all lawsuits and prosecution in one case against him and, at the same time, that he must be given maximum time to have the issue of his complete immunity decided in another case. He can argue an urgent rush to avoid irreparable harm in case one, and an equal urgency to have the court to take as much time as possible to decide the identical question in another case where delay is his only hope of “victory”.

These motherfuckers are never constrained by a need to be consistent, logical or fair. They have only one aim: victory at any cost, because winning is worth any price – since losing is a fate worse than a tortured death itself.

Sadists view pain differently (notes for the ongoing work)

They say isolation is the best thing for pain, physical, and emotional. By they, I mean, of course, the sadists.  

A sadist will always insist that whatever hurts you the most is the best thing for you. After all, that’s their fucking credo, getting a superior thrill out of the pain they cause another.

“Don’t worry,” they will say “your suffering is really for the best. Truly, it’s the best thing for you and it will improve your character and your outlook both. You just can’t understand it because you’re too weak and by weak I mean fit to be dominated, to your breaking point, by the unsmiling likes of me.”

I never understood, until my fatal falling out with two old friends and their extended family, (actually, it was about a year before the fatal falling out became irrevocable,) that both partners in a couple can be both the sadist and the masochist.  They take turns in these roles and their grim struggle over who will give the merciless pain, and who will receive it at any given moment, is a highly addictive feature of their sacred bond with each other.

Mind you, these two were my very best friends, friends I never thought to doubt.   Thinking about it now, though it made me very sad to watch day after day of that vacation from hell, I have no problem with their painful arrangement, truly.   It is how they express their love for each other and it’s much different from my best idea of how to do that, but seeing them mercilessly at work on each other was not the deal breaker in our long friendship.  It was their shame and anger afterwards at being seen that way, and their need to blame and kill the witnesses, after destroying my good name among a large group of our friends.  Like enraged, morally rigid three year-olds in a brutal war to the death with a hated enemy with infectious cooties.  More grotesque by far at the age, nearing seventy, when the last chapter of our lives is unfolding, culminating, winding down, amid all the usual tragedies. 

They will blame their inability to reconcile conflict completely on you, and you will be the cause for all the terrible hurt, the rage and all the unforgiveness.  The worst thing of all, they will piously inform you and everyone else, is not to forgive someone who loves you.  And because you’re unforgiving, they will demand that nobody they influence or control forgives you either. Being united in punishing your inhumanly unforgiving nature is a rare instance of justice in an unjust world.  A group can really bond around a righteous cause like that.

The Aftermath (another thought)

The reflex to react with pain, to lash out, to righteously mete out punishment according to its due, is a feature among humans, and very common. The thing that matters most about this impulse to lash out is what happens next.  If you calm down, listen and speak softly, like mensches, like friends, this kind of human exchange usually pacifies everyone. If it doesn’t, if the conflict must last to the death and everybody must choose between good or evil, black and white, on pain of their own death, you may have to reevaluate the other parties in the conflict.

A word from our old friend physical pain

Emotional pain hurts like hell, unless you can isolate the cause and find some kind of peace.   Physical pain works the same way, but the immediate and inescapable physicality of it demands our full attention sometimes.

Emotional suffering can find a moment of relief in distraction and a good laugh makes your heart work and pumps out endorphins.  Pain in your body is a different animal, insistent and hard to distract yourself from for long. I am reminded of this every few minutes recently as I await tests to determine the source of bleeding (and inflammation, stiffness and pain) in my prosthetic knee joint, installed eight months ago, and see what the medical industry has in store for me next.

You might be a writer

It could be that the reason you write every day, the reason you need to write and edit what you write every single day, is because you are actually a writer. This is a quirk of personality in some people, they need to clearly set things out in front of themselves, set them in front of other people once in a while.  Not everyone feels this need, you know.  You might really be a writer if you can’t stop, if you have to write every goddamned day.

On the other hand, you might just be a narcissistic jackass who thinks the same kind of things that everybody sometimes wrestles with in their lives, thinking these common thoughts are particularly interesting in your own case. Something that strikes you as an insight makes you feel a sudden need to put into words and share because doing this makes you feel focused and important for a moment, this fleeting thrill of self-revelation.

There are plenty of other hands, too. You might’ve really stumbled on something truly interesting. You might actually be an introspective, receptive person who thinks interesting thoughts, expresses them in a personal way that other people might actually be interested in, but who the fuck knows?  Unless, of course, you get paid for your words, in which case, there is no doubt.

If I were writing a book, and that’s not to say that I’m not, I would be steadily assembling all these pieces of a perplexing puzzle, a puzzle that vexes me, anyway, and struggling to tell the story in a way that might shed some light on somebody else’s similar struggle. How many asshole parents have left their adult children with partial puzzles, most of the pieces missing, set them into a dark, cold room and said, often from the grave “I always told you you were a clueless piece of shit.” 

Personally, I have no idea how many people need to write every day, there are no doubt statistics that can be pulled out of the collective anus, but that is a story for another day, and one that wearieth me too much at the moment to wrestle with and render in feeble, tottering words.

Until tomorrow, my friend, I salute you.

Truth and Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a beautiful thing. After a bitter struggle, if the two sides can regain trust in each other, reconcile and live in peace, it is the greatest example of redemption imaginable.

What makes reconciliation so difficult is the necessity for truth, the requirement that what causes the pain between the parties is addressed, so that there can be real resolution of the bitter conflict.  Without truth, reconciliation is one side agreeing that anything bad that caused the strife is better forgotten than actually addressed and rectified.

Certain things can’t be rectified without tremendous willingness to forgive on the side of the person wronged. No matter how great the willingness, truth is always an essential ingredient of real reconciliation.  Without an honest back and forth there can be no real meeting of the minds, no chance for true redemption.

If I lynched your brother, no matter how badly I felt about it afterwards, I still lynched your brother.   If we want to have reconciliation and I insist that at the time I lynched your brother I was completely right to do it, that story will never be reconciled with what you need after I lynch your brother.  

If I tell you to get over that unfortunate thing that happened to your brother, (distancing myself from my actions with the passive voice, as first year law students are taught to do when they have to admit an inconvenient fact), we have nothing: no truth, no reconciliation.

We can’t heal from an injury inflicted by someone else unless that injury is addressed, unless we have some assurance going forward that the same actions that caused the injury won’t be repeated. Humans usually get very defensive after they lose control and do something atrocious, they would rather not look squarely at something terrible they may have done when they lost control. 

Much easier to forget, justify, split hairs about it, tell you to get over it, blame you for being unforgiving if you don’t get over their little mistake or their long pattern of consistently similar little mistakes.

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa worked, former apartheid torturers cried in guilt for what they publicly acknowledged they’d done to their victims. Sometimes the victims would be so moved by the showing of remorse that there would be tears all around and actual reconciliation in the face of deep, deep regret, after honesty that had to be painful as hell, but no real peace comes without truth. 

The harder that truth is to admit, the more essential it is that it be sincerely acknowledged aloud for peace to follow.  Without truth, reconciliation is as empty as any political slogan you can think of.

Two sides, at least, to any conflict

If you find yourself in a conflict with someone who says, over and over “nothing you can say will ever get me to change my mind or take your side” believe them. These are the words of someone unwilling/unable to resolve conflict, except on terms they will dictate to you. Accept the terms, or you are dead to them. They tell you this up front and every time they fly into a nasty mood and blame you for causing all of the problems between you.

This kind of person will be familiar to anyone raised by a bullying parent. The insecure, prone to rage parent cannot be wrong, so no matter what they do, no matter how neglectfully, hurtfully or abusively they may act, they will always blame the child. They bring this personality quirk into every relationship. They can be charming, generous friends unless a conflict arises, in which case the problem was created by the other side. If the guilty party does not back down, the conflict is inevitably fatal.

Living with integrity is much harder than going along to get along. You ignore your own pain at your peril. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk demonstrated in his book of that title. Your sleep suffers when you feel abused, your blood pressure and resting heart rate rise, your digestion gets fouled up. If your suffering continues, beyond bodily manifestations of your psychic pain, and you continue to push the causes for that pain down, you eventually find your health compromised all the way down to your immune system.

Integrity is the best gift you can give yourself, challenging as it also is. When someone tells you they will kill you if you don’t comply with their demands and pretend their abuse is completely justified, you are dealing with what the literature calls a piece of shit. You cannot reason with them. Get away from them and save yourself. Being true to yourself means listening to your body while it is painfully telling you the score. The alternative is betraying what you know is right for the sake of an imaginary peace.

There may be two sides, or ten, to any conflict. But one of those sides is more true to what actually happened, makes much more sense, than the other stories. Learning to base your actions on reality is much healthier than basing them on the fond hope that those who treat you with contempt will come around to love you one day, if only you can find a way to their hearts. There is no way to the heart of someone so damaged they will silence others to prove they cannot be wrong.

Not all stories are of equal validity. Your body will tell you when you are being force fed a load of shit that will eventually kill you. Ignore this truth at your peril.

Y’mach shemo

There is an expression in Hebrew, y’mach shemo, which means “may his name be blotted out”. This expression is reserved for particularly heinous enemies of the people, murderous villains like Hitler, Himmler, Haman. People sometimes accompany this expression with a spitting gesture, or an actual huck toward the spittoon, to suggest the casting out of the hateful poison these inhuman types inject into the world.

I’m here to say, you have not truly lived until a group of your closest longtime friends agrees that your name needs to be blotted out, henceforth and until the death.

What crimes have I committed to make me deserving of inclusion in the worst people in history? Don’t ask. I made two people feel bad about themselves, forced them to lie just to defend themselves, was so relentless in my demand for “honesty” that a story equating me with Hitler was the group’s only alternative. After all, just because the oldest son of the couple I so mortally attacked was committed to a locked mental ward two days after he returned to live with his parents is no reason to make any judgments about their ability to be honest, loving, nurturing, supportive or vulnerable. How dare I bring such a viciously unfair idea into the world!

Sure, blame the parents. It’s always the parents’ fault when the adult child suffers from depression, is susceptible to self-doubt, self-sabotage, cannot form lasting friendships, according to the most childish among us. I am among the most childish, according to the hideous story of my irredeemable evil that justifies the blotting out of my name forever.

Every gathering of people who have written me off as deserving of permanent enmity, you know, for being such an unforgiving, smart, formidable fucking enemy, is like another funeral for me. The accursed name of the justly hated corpse will never be spoken aloud in mixed company. No question about me will ever be asked again, nothing I have ever said or done by way of empathy, humor, sensitivity, kindness or generosity will be recalled.

Only the danger I pose to the community of those who must accept the well-established, if slightly twisted, version of my threatening aggressiveness must be kept in mind. After all, if they could blot my name from history, what can they do to yours, fuckface?

Chapter 54 Self-soothing behavior

Many of us, particularly if we suffered as children, develop behaviors to soothe ourselves when we feel up against it. Some methods of dealing with stress are more productive than others. While I have bad habits that make me feel a bit better than not doing them, I have one that feels productive. I always take comfort from expressing myself clearly. It is a great relief to feel heard and understood.

I enjoy conversing with someone, or writing clearly to someone, who grasps what I have to say, adds their personal observations, allows me to reflect and refine my thoughts and feelings. This essential human give and take is a beautiful thing, and at the root of much learning. Expressing myself as clearly as I can, while listening as closely as I can, facilitates this exchange. The next best thing to this human back and forth is writing and its mirror twin reading.

I was sensitized to not being heard early in life. My parents alternated listening to me anxiously with studiously ignoring what I had to say. This strategic, selective silence was more the practice of my father than my mother. With my mother, who could flail and fight with the worst of them, I always knew that in a calm moment afterwards I could approach her and, most of the time, be heard. I was even able to persuade her from time to time, which is no small thing for a child to receive from his mother. Understanding after angry disagreement is one of the great balms of love.

This balm is something neither of my parents experienced much growing up. My mother clearly got it a bit more than my father, but my father got pretty much zero understanding from his angry, religious fundamentalist mother or from his father, a damaged cipher unable to protect his son, himself, or anyone else. The little brother he bullied throughout their lives clung to him as the big brother was dying, but prior to that time there seemed little love or understanding between them. My father found understanding, appreciation and love in his wife, my mother, and that was the greatest blessing of his embattled life.

The damage inflicted on my father throughout his childhood rendered him largely helpless against frustration and rage. I understood, shortly before he died, that he’d truly done the best he could, based on the monumentally shit hand he’d been dealt in life. I think of the rage I was regularly faced with at the dinner table. My father’s vehemence and abuse was a shadow of the horror my he’d gone through, but bad enough for me.

Unconsciously I knew that to respond with rage, which I sometimes did, would be final, terminal, irrevocable and the harm of it could never be revisited or undone. Over time I resisted going to that rage zone when my parents were furious. I eventually became pretty good at masking my rising emotions and reining in my anger. I have noticed over the years that for a type prone to humiliation it is humiliating, when in a rage, to be confronted with superficial calmness. They are out of control, and calling out their enemy for a good Western saloon-style fistfight, and their would-be opponent remains mild, unruffled, expressing honest confusion about the disproportionate rage blazing around them. Talk about humiliation.

What could be more provocative, for someone ready to deliver a righteous punch to the face, the gut, followed by kicks in the stomach, than a mild reply? They are enraged and you remain enragingly, humiliatingly composed as they circle for the attack. I realize now, given the set-up, that I couldn’t help becoming that way. I had no choice but to learn that survival skill when my father made me his adversary from before I even had words.

It is no surprise, given that background, that using words to present my view as clearly as possible would become supremely soothing to me. A good talk reminds me of the basic goodness of the world. The most painful type I still have to face sometimes is the righteous, angry person who will not let me speak. They insist on the right to silence me in spite of the many years I’ve listened to them as a good friend, brother, colleague, in spite of many excellent talks we’ve had over the years. What gives someone the right to tell another person they may not speak is another, hideous question.

We meet people like this sometimes in life, we may become close friends, having no reason to suspect how badly they will act in a moment of pressure. We don’t discover, til a moment of supreme tension, that a friend or other loved one may be so damaged in their souls that they truly cannot listen to someone else’s pain. In fact, another person expressing hurt and expecting sympathy is infuriating to them, given the right circumstances. Nothing is more hurtful for this type, at a vulnerable moment, than to be reminded of the fragile emptiness of the shell they created to make themselves feel better and more important, than others.

This is a certain type of asshole, the snarling, angry one standing on their right to anger. You can easily picture them in a lynch mob. Nothing you can say will make the slightest impression on their anger because they will never acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind without blaming you, somebody else, everybody else. They also always insist on one condition for any conversation once there is a conflict: you shut the fuck up about your goddamned feelings. The one condition I can’t agree to.

There is a deathly pain associated with being silenced. When you are prevented from speaking by someone else, it is a direct negation of your humanity. It presupposes the right of one person to make the other person shut up. Enforcing silence requires force, or the credible, frightening threat of force. Once you have shown your mercilessness to the others, say be ostracizing one critic, there is no reason to demonstrate your power again, unless strictly necessary. Your reputation as an indomitable competitor not above a quick kick to the shorts precedes you in your social milieu. Brutalize one and the rest tend to fall in line.

So on a bleak day, thinking about the silence of longtime, now former, friends, their unshakable, righteous enmity, to the death, I console myself by presenting my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I can.

I set the basic idea down quickly, once it’s in my head. I read it again, trying my best to make like an innocent reader seeing it for the first time. I clarify things that could be confusing. I elaborate on things I didn’t develop, condense whatever seems tedious. This work is a pleasure, considering my words and their effect, as I refine them into successively better reflections of myself and my views. When everything is combed through and smoothed down into its simplest form, I put it up in an online journal, another example of my soul doing its best to make my notion of a good life tangible on a given, otherwise shit, day.