Category Archives: writing

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.

“Face twisted and contorted with hate”

This is how sick, damaged and destructive people who can never be wrong are. They will do anything to prove they can’t be wrong. For example:

Their eight year-old kid is upset and no matter how many times mom and dad assure the kid there is nothing to be upset about, the stubborn little bastard insists he’s upset. In fairness, this could be very upsetting to a certain type of parent, one who feels responsible for their child’s well-being but truly doesn’t know how to sit with upsetting feelings themselves, let alone help someone else with them. Imagine how upsetting it is to them to see their child upset! The natural thing for this type to do is escalate things until the upset person is way more upset than they are.

Now they are talking about the basic lack of courage in the child, his self-pity, his sadness, his completely irrational anger. These things are bad, each of them, and together constitute a pathetic excuse for a human personality. They are reflections of a lack of character. They are sad predictors of a miserable life of failure and blaming others for his problems. They remind the boy how angry he was as a newborn baby, furious and hostile, all the time, for no goddamned reason.

Eventually the kid starts glaring at his accusers. This reaction is what they were going for the whole time, though they couldn’t have put into words. Now that the kid is angry on top of being upset, he stares at his parents angrily. The moment is right to strike:

“Look at his face,” the father will sputter, “twisted and contorted with hate.”

My younger sister and I heard this phrase often enough that we both quoted it to each other and laughed about it, back in the years when we were still talking to each other.

To show a face twisted and contorted with hate (isn’t a contorted face always twisted, a twisted one always contorted? Isn’t the overkill of the one two punch a tell?) is different than protesting that your feelings are always dismissed, or calmly stating that as an eight year-old you need to be heard by your parents when you are upset. A face twisted and contorted with hate is the despicable face of a klansman at a lynching, a Nazi, some kind of hate-filled sick fuck who can’t be reasoned with. Certainly not the face of a child who deserves to be heard when he is upset, reassured with kindness.

My father apologized for his abusiveness the last night of his life, and it was good to hear, but the damage had long ago been done. I was close to fifty the first time my father apologized for being a monster as a father. The next evening he was gone.

We are left holding a heavy bag, full of the weighty things our parents were too overwhelmed to carry themselves. It is passed on, endlessly, until someone gets the insight to put the fucking thing down. In that moment she can finally untwist and un-contort her face and feel not a hint of hatred toward those who did their flawed human best to love her.

The Fundamental Terror/Beauty of Life

The most terrifying thing humans are up against is the erasure of our right to exist.   This is why my grandmother used the phrase “screamed bloody murder” so often, why she drank so heavily as she got older, why she got tearful when her vodka-fueled gestures of affection toward us made us uncomfortable.   She had good reason to feel this way, her entire family had no doubt screamed bloody murder, though their screams were drowned out by drums, out of tune brass and drunken catcalls, in the ravine where they all met a nightmare end.

Death is one thing.  We can be philosophical about it, since it is inevitable, but until we find ourself in unbearable, unrelievable pain it is not an option anyone finds palatable.  Life is the precious, irreplaceable thing, and feeling grateful for our place in this ongoing miracle, breathing and loving for the wink of an eye that we exist here.

The most painful thing, as far as I have experienced, is having your feelings erased, contested, fought to the death by people who claim to love you.   It is a pain I recall well from my childhood, it is a pain I revisit every time something I say is met with silence, dismissed, contested, fought to the death.  I don’t want to fight to the death, but many cannot restrain themselves, they must fight to the death, these clueless gladiator fucks.  The alternative is the humiliation of being wrong, admitting imperfection, which is unbearable to this type. 

I can fight as well as any clueless gladiator fuck who has ever come against me with a sword or ax.  I have had to fight, from my earliest memories.  My life has been a long, slow journey away from the need to fight these senseless, idiotic battles with people who profess to love me.  I spent decades learning to control my temper, with some success, although never enough sometimes.  For example, I still suffer from instant Tourettic outbursts whenever I am buggered by technology.

Having a supportive social network is one predictor of longterm health.  Sadly few people have these networks in our modern, corporate world.  There is an epidemic of loneliness in America, which expresses itself in deaths of despair.  If nobody gives a fuck about you, after a while you conclude “what the fuck?” and whatever you must do to answer that question seems legitimate, even if it kills you.

The only antidote to this life threatening isolation is talking to someone who cares.  It is a true horror that so few get this chance to be heard when they need it.

If you have a painful medical procedure and find yourself abandoned by your social network, amid recriminations and expressions of your unworthiness to be loved, your recovery will be slower than if you are visited, checked up on, wished well, sent jokes and funny videos.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed “in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, it is the silence of our friends.”  Dig it.

An anguished soul can be a heavy burden to carry from day to day, even for people who love you.  I have to be sensitive to Sekhnet’s frayed nerves and her endless worry for me.  I isolate myself today and tap here, speaking silently to the universe of anyone who may stumble on these words, instead of troubling her.  We all need a day off.

This is where imagination and creativity come in.  I noticed at a very young age that I was closing myself in my room with the intent to set my dismissed feelings out on a page.  My drawings were often disturbing.  My writing was grandiose and rambled, trying to cover every subject in the world at once.  Sixty years on my drawings are often oddly cool, my writing focused and somewhat compressed.

The beauty of writing is that you can go back as many times as you like, comb through ambiguity and weak expression to make your writing as clear and elegant as possible.  A piece of writing is as perfectable as our delicate, malleable human souls. 

The phrase neuroplasticity is used to describe the ability of a pain damaged brain to heal itself.  It doesn’t happen without hard work, but what better work is there, during the wink of an eye we get to participate in this ongoing, if often tragic, miracle?

Morality is not theoretical, it’s practical

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing a broken friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

Given the choice between redemption and condemnation always choose redemption when it is within reach.

Superficiality is its own reward

The demons that may descend on you in moments of weakness, the worries that rob you of sleep, the doubts you may harbor about your ability to overcome these things, to ever feel better — a terribly debilitating pack of torments. I’ve known many people who adopt a simple solution for this. It doesn’t work for me, but I try not to judge those who adopt it. It is hard not to judge them, I have to say, but here we go.

Here’s the quick fix: simplify, deny and stick scrupulously to whatever is on the surface of things, the things most easily controlled. All the risk and terrors involved in vulnerability to others and honesty with yourself, swept away at once with a magnificent, unwavering commitment to the superficial. In this world of appearances you can actually, clearly win. Here’s all you have to do:

Have a beautiful home that people will admire. Have a large circle of social friends you can point to as proof that you are well-loved. Have children who willingly do what you tell them to do. Have a well-paying, high-status, job. Dress well, exercise religiously, avoid gaining an excess pound. Allow your charitable work to be publicly honored by your peers. Accept all awards graciously and with modesty. Cut anyone from your life who does not adhere to these simple rules for a good life. Make sure everybody else in your life knows these sick fucks are good and fucking dead and that communication with them will be punished harshly.

The things that torment you at night, that wake you early, in dread? Hide them from everybody, hide them from yourself. Remember, above all else: I am perfect and nobody can see these silly things that torment me and everybody else. There, under the surface of things, be dragons, here, where all is above board, be peace, security and no threat from anyone. Here on top be victory.

People of the Lie

A friend sent me a book, People of the Lie, that had greatly impressed her. It was written by a psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck, who subtitled it The Hope for Healing Human Evil.

That human evil arises from unbearable pain and searing humiliation in the person who practices it is not hard to observe. Peck’s book was case study after case study of people who routinely hurt others brutally and convince their victims, themselves and everyone else of a lie that leaves the perpetrator completely blameless. He isolated human evil, describing these people of the lie, as well as I’ve ever seen it done. Evil is always based on inhuman, mercy-negating lies.

The story that stuck with me was of a suicidal young man who was brought to Peck by his concerned parents. The parents had a plausible story for the boy’s depression. Peck eventually spoke to the boy privately and learned the truth of the precipitating event — the parents had given the boy a gift, the gift rifle from them to his beloved older brother, who had recently used it to kill himself. The parents went into a rage when this story was revealed, as if it could have explained anything, and immediately terminated therapy for their depressed son. Such is the nature of the lies destructive people routinely tell to hide their rage and the shame that provokes it.

It is one thing to read about this foul trick in a book. It is much more powerful to experience it unexpectedly in your own life. It is viscerally unsettling to find yourself close to this kind of destructive desperation. It smells like death and conjures atavistic images of devils and eternal darkness. Get a good whiff of this evil and it will take a very long time to get the stench of it out of your nostrils. You are unlikely to completely recover without expert help, help I am still trying to secure.

Case study from my own life: old, beloved friend reacts with rage to what she perceives as her friend’s defiance. Leave aside the entire concept of defiance — a stubborn refusal to yield to the will of another. Just look at the display of rage — a focused, hostile glare of the kind described as ‘if looks could kill’ directed at you for long, silent minutes, as her husband tries to gently translate her glaring silence, explain why she is too upset to speak. It is not a transient moment of rage, it continues, through the end of the tense negotiation and ends with a snarled refusal to compromise in any way and a closed bedroom door.

Never go to bed angry at a loved one is very good advice. You eventually learn that these two do it all the time, the one who must never feel defied and the martyred appeaser, silently locked in an angry struggle when they go to bed and when they wake up the next day, and the day after that.

Now, granted, having an ugly side of your relationship seen this way by dear, long-time friends is objectively embarrassing. It should not be the end of friendship, or anything like that, but it is something to be talked about afterwards. If it is actually felt as humiliating, the impulse to lie, and blame the witness, becomes irresistible. The alternative is acknowledging that you have no idea how to resolve conflict, how to deal with anger, are locked in a hideous farce of a beautiful relationship that everyone must admire, an admission that you need help.

The one who must be right at all costs forces all the other family members into therapy, because she cannot be wrong, will not be challenged, will do whatever needs to be done to feel right, superior, beyond reproach or even criticism. She simply will not tolerate defiance, and she will NEVER go to therapy because she is perfect the way she is. All of her friends and colleagues tell her so.

If her son is depressed, to the extent that he must be hospitalized for it? Sadly, the young man inherited his father’s depressive DNA instead of her genetic predisposition for happiness and high achievement. She and her husband have been the ideal parents to this hypochondriacal, oversensitive, vacillating, embarrassingly unrealistic young idealist, as everyone who knows them knows. If their former closest friend, the aggressively, threateningly defiant one, is told by a mutual friend that the boy is in a mental ward, that is betrayal. It is none of his fucking business! He is DEAD to us, DEAD. What do you not understand about DEAD?

The funny thing about being dead is that if it happens to you while you’re still alive, well, you’re a dead man talking. You are right now reading the words of a dead man (which will be true enough, by and by, if you happen upon these words once I am truly gone), a dead man about to go to the kitchen and get a cold drink. Kind of funny, this kind of death, in an ironic kind of way, no?

The person who is not damaged to the point of destructiveness is always the last to understand, the game of people damaged enough to be evil is always to the death. There is no irony at play when the Nazi says “we are going to kill every last one of you, Jew.” Nazi irony is of a special kind, winking to its cohort and the world — “Work Liberates” on the gates of a slave labor/death camp, “Special Handling” stamped on the passports of those transported to such workers’ paradises and so on. Every evil must be accompanied by the lies that make it possible. With the wonderfully flawed human understanding that if you honestly believe that a lie is true — it is not a lie.

In a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch

A mensch is someone who strives to be honest, to keep their word, to do what they know is right, even if there is a price to be paid for right action. Real mensches are rare, we treasure them when we meet one, and, if we are decent, we try to live by the example they set. Jews are commanded “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch”. So this is me, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, striving to be one.

I refrain from telling two longtime dear friends, too damaged by their own childhood trauma to refrain from assassinating my good name, that they are teaching their children a vicious and wrong lesson about life. I manfully avoid writing them and their family a note to ask: are you really teaching the three children you love that your own inability to deal with your pain, humiliation and rage entitles you to decide who they may love?

I would not be wrong to write those words, but I have to first consider if they would have any practical effect, if they could possibly improve anything between me and people who have decided I am dead because I was hurt by them and refused to simply shut up and pretend everything was as it always was, or as it always seemed to be.

My words would have no effect except to make two people already too humiliated to act with decency feel even more humiliated. It would increase their rage. It would harden their resolve to make sure the lid of my coffin is hammered tight shut and I remain, for all concerned, dead and silenced forever.

So, I am reduced to thinking these dour thoughts and writing those words here, as we all fast and consider our good and bad acts of the previous year, and who we still need to make amends with. I strive to be a mensch, and they have long avoided reading anything I post here, so there is little chance of them ever reading this. Still, there’s a chance they might. If they do, call me pisher.

Happy Erev Yom Kippur, y’all

Tonight is considered the beginning of the holiest day of the Jewish year. New Years 5784 was nine days ago. Tomorrow dawns as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the tenth and final day to make amends with people we’ve hurt before the Big Guy upstairs closes the Book of Life, after reviewing our deeds and inscribing our fate for the year. He seals the book at the very last moment of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying, before everybody in temples everywhere rushes home to break the fast.

This Book of Life is a poetic conceit from hundreds of years ago when it was conceivable, in a preliterate age, that an actual Creator of the universe, with a long white beard, sat on a heavenly throne and personally looked over everyone’s deeds (in the manner of Santa, now that I think of it) paging through a gigantic accounting book with a page for every human. Depending on the humility, honesty and goodness of each, the Holy One wrote out the indelible karma of each person for the following year.

Down here in the world of free will and dirty human affairs, even the most disinterested Jew pays at least some attention to Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax, a completely secular Jew, famously sat out a World Series start that fell on Yom Kippur. After Koufax shut the Yankees down the following day, Mickey Mantle asked his teammates if there wasn’t maybe another “Yom Koufax” before the end of the Series.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the rituals of my religion but I take its moral values seriously. I take the main theme of Yom Kippur seriously — I try my best to make amends with those I’ve hurt, extend forgiveness to those who ask me for it. I always fast on Yom Kippur, along with millions of Jews, religious and secular, worldwide. My rationale for fasting is that with so many billions hungry every day, many starving to death, I should be ashamed if I can’t go without food for one twenty-four hour period every year.

There is an extra chill to solemn Yom Kippur for me this year. The group of old friends, who always gather to break the fast together, the place we’ve gone every year for thirty years, has made it clear, after we narrowly got a last minute invite last year, that I am fucking dead to all of them and to their children. DEAD. No conversation is possible with a stinking cadaver, which is what I am to them, their friends and their children. Nothing this accursed zombie has to say can be heard, according to the ancient, sacred doctrine of “I know you are, but what am I?”

One among them, a long time good friend of ours, was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer. My gestures of friendship are awkward, I was told, my tears are not welcome at his funeral, unless I heal the damage I’ve somehow done to two people too damaged to acknowledge their own destructiveness, and to the rest of the group, also unforgivably hurt on their behalf. Don’t I understand how excruciatingly painful it is to everyone for me to stubbornly refuse to pretend that none of the destructive behavior they reflexively engage in ever happened?!! Apparently not.

Hopefully the implacable, perfect First Couple’s first born is out of the psychiatric ward and doing much better now. Hopefully my old friend with the terrifying prognosis will get some blessed medical news. Hopefully the good thoughts of a dead man will be taken to heart by an imaginary all-powerful, all-merciful, infinitely just and loving Big Guy as He hunches over the gigantic Book of Life tonight and tomorrow, making His final notations, before He seals everyone’s fate for the year.

May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the year you deserve, y’all.

From Chapter 42

So I can only take the lesson from other people I have loved who, I find out in the end, can never be wrong. They all lash out the same way when they feel defensive, they will effectively kill you to prove that they can never be wrong. Once you’re dead you have to finally shut the hell up, they don’t have to listen to another mortifying word.

I don’t know what it is with this type. Actually, I do. It’s irreparable, traumatic damage done to them early and persistently, disabling them so badly that they cling to a fragile belief in their superiority and are compelled to destroy whenever their projected virtue feels threatened. This type also, of course, is very easily threatened.

They understand the world as black and white, win-lose, zero sum.  They resonate with other winners who are easily threatened, and they band together with them. They all intuitively grasp the basic rules and boundaries — when threatened, they form a herd and protect each other because they’re all the same kind of animal. They understand the extreme dangerousness of life, the finality of rage, the importance of social status, the limitations of love, trust and friendship in the same way, and they love, trust and befriend each other in the same conditional way.

I have known a bunch of this type, and it’s taken me sixty-seven years to recognize the infernal consistency of this tribe they are all perfect examples of. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of their predictable moral certainty, when the time inevitably comes, trust me. 

from Chapter 45

My Samsung phone has a quirky habit of intermittently making “stories” out of a succession of photographs. These little slide shows are accompanied by cheesy music, feature random fades, wipes and other effects and are punctuated by enthusiastic pastel graphics with cute expressions that might really delight an eight year-old Korean girl.  Sometimes these stories are wildly inappropriate.  A group of photographs of bloody toilet bowls and urinals, when I was tracking how often I peed blood, and how long each spell took to pass, comes to mind.  Set to a peppy little pop tune with a particularly inane melody, and mischievous winking emojis, it was a classic of its kind. I got a real kick out of the hematuria story.

There are a number of stories with photographs of three people, our heads close together, smiling, playfully holding each other‘s chins, poking each other in the cheek, putting devil horns behind each other’s heads and so on. The three smiles are very genuine, sometimes the heads are caught in the moment one or all are laughing.   They’re set against a number of backdrops.  A beautiful snowy forest, with the three dressed in full winter gear, with hats and scarves and pink cheeks and noses. A summerscape with glittering water in the background, me wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the other two in T-shirts. There are nighttime shots with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us, one with a slightly pissed off camel looking over our shoulders . . .

. . . I saw a few of these Samsung photo stories lately, after I switched to a new 5G phone in a vain effort to restore phone and internet service in my suddenly dead zone apartment. One after another, three happy faces, sometimes pushed against each other, best friends forever.

The idea that this easy, loving friendship could ever not be was unthinkable to all of us, never occurred to any of us, until our first outbreak of conflict and the incredibly painful aftermath.  Now the unthinkable has become the new normal.  Not only are we no longer friends, but I am, to everyone we knew in common, a walking cadaver, stinking, grotesque and scary.  I am approachable on pain of death, as they have made clear to everyone else.   The stories they’ve created and told about me would put the Samsung story bot to shame!

It strikes me now, trying to show our specific friendship, rather than sketch it generically, how difficult it is to describe something so natural, flowing and seemingly right.  It’s as hard as trying to capture my affable, intelligent, witty father’s monstrousness — there was no single snapshot that could illustrate it, no broken bones necessitating a trip to a midnight ER or anything like that.  So it is with my once dearest lifelong friends and their extended social and family circle.  

All I can provide is the Samsung story version of something that seemed so vital, precious and eternal, but which turned out to be as brittle as the thin crust of ice toward the middle of the frozen pond that laughing children are about to drown in.  The best I can do now, looking back with a bitter understanding I never wanted, is make my warning to the other children as clear and memorable as I can.