Category Archives: writing

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.

A little vacation time for me

I needed to get away to my fortress of solitude, it’s been too long.  The 3D multidirectional stress I am under is exhausting, to me and to poor Seedj.  We both need some time apart once in a while, and we’ve been getting in each other’s way the last few days.

I’ve plunged into a new round of working on the manuscript, producing many pages, with an eye toward an important insight:  every member of the intimate lynch mob must be as sympathetic, fully human, even lovable, as I can make them.   Writing it this way is crucial to the story making sense and for the lessons I hope the story will succeed in conveying.   

It is a cautionary tale intended as a wakeup call to anyone who finds herself (or himself, you priggish pussy) in painful conflict with those who can never be wrong and will kill you to prove it. 

I have to make it clear to the reader that not one of these torch, pitchfork, gun and rope brandishing motherfuckers are at all abnormal, mean, crazy, violent, dumb or irrational.   It’s just that when people act like a clan, all questions stop.  The deepest comfort of being in a loving group is that everyone agrees about what needs to be done.  They all take the same moral stand, for better or worse.

I compare writing it this way to sitting in a comfortable recliner, with a cool drink, wrestling with a medium sized, hungry constrictor.  You certainly have to watch the head, and you need to untangle it when it grabs you a certain way.   It’s exhausting, but also motivating, although mainly fucking exhausting.  

Of course, then I have to read the fresh poop to poor Seedj, since she’s the only one there.   She’s about ready to break, and I don’t blame her a bit, how many times can she expect to be treated to every queasy detail of this horror story loop?   One or two new insights, no matter how they may momentarily excite me, does little to freshen any of this stinking material.  So I came here, to my longtime bachelor pad, to spend a few days by myself.

Still no phone or internet service here, 34 days and counting, in spite of my complaint to the FCC.  Whoops.   Talk about yer fortress of solitude.   Have to go down two flights of stairs and walk about fifty feet up the street to make a phone call or send a text or email.  A drag. I’ll have to go to my local library, or coffee shop, to post this.   It’s a bit creepy, and disorienting, to be in an electronic dead zone in your own home.

I’ve had $250 of non-service comped by the nice people who work for the lobbyist-rich tech psychopath that has stopped providing a network connection to my building and its immediate environs.   Nice.   Every time I need to be in contact, I simply limp down two flights and walk down the block.  When it’s 93 degrees, which it will be tomorrow, or raining, which it will be the next day.

So I finally get back to my brokedown palace, and  — just to give this story a nice kind of punchline — the ceiling over my bed has collapsed, a twenty-five pound slab of concrete and layers of plaster, and a mass of dusty shrapnel, on the floor.  Revealed in the ceiling above, the dirty wood lathe, nailed up there over 100 years ago.  It will be a job to fix it.   Thankfully, I’ve taken to moving my bed out of the way when I leave here, in consideration of the deeply cracked ceiling above it.

Luckily the slab didn’t land near the head of my bed, while I was in it.  That heavy chunk of ceiling would have killed me with a direct hit — and, now that I think of it, I couldn’t have called anyone if I’d managed to regain consciousness.   Not without crawling down two flights and about fifty feet up the block.  Hmmm, that would have been a long, slow death…  

(What kind of wrongful death case would Seedj have?   Not a very generous one, I’m afraid, calculated on the corpse’s projected life expectancy and earnings.   But she wouldn’t bring the case to start with, thankfully.   Remember those 9/11 widows of young financial executives, so pissed off at the paltry sums they felt they were being paid for their dead husbands lives?)

It’s actually hilarious, in a ten plagues kind of way, the only nearby benches where I can sit comfortably, check the internet and talk on the phone, without having to walk up to the park a few long blocks away, is in front of a lush fringe of vegetation fronting the old Dyckman House.  It’s a museum, the Dyckmans had some slaves, they were rich.  A main thoroughfare is named after them.  And the greenery in front of their onetime home is, I learned last night, a paradise for mosquitos.

These thirsty bitches drank from my forearm, I saw the welts, like track marks, and went home, managing not to scratch (as Seedj teaches) doused them with ammonia and avoided the worst of the itching.  I was not so lucky with the bite on my right tit, just above the nipple, which I didn’t discover until I was in bed trying to sleep.

In addition to the mosquitos there are the rats, largely unseen in the bushes above the benches.  The screams and squeaks of these agitated rats vying for something or other in the plants right over your head are annoying.  Rats are pretty determined to avoid humans, and they’re smart in that determination, so you don’t have to worry much about them.  It’s more the idea that rats are screeching right by your ears that is a little creepy.

Fucking hell, the levels of this fucking infinitely swampy world, rotting layers deep, like the corpse lasagne a clannish mob made of my mother’s family in the ravine northwest of Vishnevitz one airless August 1943 night.  The ability of groups of likeminded souls is sometimes atrocious.  

Then again, each member of that long ago mob of drunken Ukrainians, and their German overseers, has a personal story that makes him or her fully human, kind, unique, even lovable.  

That right there, boys and girls, is the murderous tragedy of human history.

from Chapter 39

Fifteen weeks later this dawned on me one day, the point of this chapter:


My actual terror is not of incoherence itself, but of implacably angry incoherence in the service of a tyrannical will. It is the forced imposition of a counter-factual reality represented by incoherence that terrifies me, because there is no discussion, persuasion or compromise possible with incoherence. The really fearsome thing is the angry will demanding unquestioning adherence to a narrative that makes no sense. The incoherence is the handmaiden of a willful tyrant’s eternally demanding will.

If the clear truth of something you need is inconvenient, like the indisputable fact that we all need to be listened to and heard by loved ones when we are in pain, simply say “NO! You will not be heard, whiner. Being heard is for closers, like coffee, you fucking fuck, like your smelly mother, who had much more pain than you ever will, and managed to whine much less. You’re a hostile, childish asshole, jackass, and wipe that sullen look off your face, you’re the one with a problem hearing the goddamned truth, pant-load.”


The point is, just say anything, it matters not what, to keep the mood going and your will dominating. Your inflamed will is not persuadable, your mind is clenched, you will say anything, contradict yourself over and over. It doesn’t matter at all what you actually say, the point is to just keep angrily denying and attacking, whether it makes sense or not. Keep the other person on the defensive, by any means necessary. Incoherence means never having to actually account for anything you do. That’s the key: do not concede accountability for anything, admit nothing.


My deepest terror, it turns out, is the insane, demanding will, and the readiness to do anything in its service, that made Adolf Hitler a household name. The incoherence is just the infernal music they play while bending others to that will. The genius of it is that you cannot argue against incoherence.


Set and match, bitches!

Two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures

(from Chapter 36 of The Intimate Lynch Mob)

There are two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures available to us, open or closed, predisposed toward healing or harming. We can behave with openness and vulnerability or protecting ourselves, projecting strength and a determination to never be hurt. We have a reflex toward healing, ourselves and those we care about, or protecting ourselves at all costs, even if it means harming others.

We can listen with patience, and react honestly, or close ourselves off, secretive, foreclosing dialogue and remaining protected, even if it means being dishonest and causing damage to others. To the latter type, the reflex to dishonesty is no vice because the stakes are your precious heart and soul, the essence of every sentient creature’s being.

To those oriented toward repelling threat, every bit of energy will be directed toward self-protection. Vulnerability is seen as weakness, contemptibly pathetic and even suicidal in an infinitely dangerous high stakes contest for dignity where only the strongest prevail.

To me, and pussies like me, the only prize truly worth having is someone you love feeling safe enough to make themselves vulnerable, because they know that the first instinct of your love will always be to protect them.

Then again, consider the source. This is coming from the insane bastard who sadistically tortured his best friend for over a year and refused to forgive him for some unspecified imaginary crime, so take it with a few grains of salt, eh?

Insecurity on steroids

The thing with someone who can never acknowledge they were wrong, or behaved hurtfully, is that it comes from a terrible insecurity. We all have insecurities, it is part of the human condition to wonder and compare yourself to an ideal you have of how you should be able to act in the world. People who can’t be wrong live in a different world than the rest of us fallible earthlings.

If you admit you’ve hurt somebody, it makes you a bad person, in their crabbed, black and white worldview. People who hurt others are bad, they need to be perfect, so it is impossible that they could have hurt someone without a very good reason. That reason is always the same: “that person who claims I hurt them, that liar, actually hurt me, really, really badly. I am the victim, not them! How dare that morbidly oversensitive defective attack my perfection, and expect me not to react!”

“I was only reacting, like any normal person would, reflexes got the best of me. You made me shoot you in the gut, because I was rightfully afraid you were going to attack me. You didn’t see that terrifying look on your face, I had to stand my ground. Everyone has a right to self-defense, that’s all I was doing when I shot you a few more times just to make sure you couldn’t get up and beat the living crap out of me, pistol whip me with my own gun. Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were thinking as you were lying there, fake bleeding!”

In my personal life I’ve recently experienced this insecurity on steroids, in my face so constantly I had to grapple with the underlying principle of how these emotionally driven motherfuckers truly believe they are acting righteously. Coming from a loved one, someone you’ve long trusted, it really fucks with your mind. A person who is sometimes wrong, who apologizes from time to time, cannot understand that for someone with crippling insecurity these simple human acts are impossible. The logic is not hard to understand, once you grasp the basic principle.

I am so insecure that any criticism or complaint against me is a deadly attack. I cannot be wrong, because everyone loves and respects me. I am an exemplary person. I will not be attacked by people with mental problems. You are insane if you don’t understand that you are wrong and I am right, no matter what.

You can’t reason with these good folks, they are beyond the reach of introspection, empathy or the ability to see nuance or take responsibility for the harm we all sometimes do to others. All they see is deadly threat, competition to the death and victory. Once you realize this about them, how paralyzed they are by insecurity and anger (which hardens immediately into implacable rage) during even the most minor conflict, the only thing you can do to preserve your integrity (and what’s left of your sanity) is follow the advice of the second best fortune cookie I ever opened:

The best throw of the dice is to throw them away.

The subtle details of long-term damage

I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.

The painful challenge of the adult child of a narcissist

When somebody who can’t be wrong feels challenged, defied, they fly into a rage. It is embarrassing to lose control like that, humiliating even, and this type will blame the person they raged against, every time. “You did this to me, I just reacted. I did nothing wrong, you did everything wrong. You owe me an apology.” If you are a child, and this person is your parent, you stand up for yourself at your psychological peril.

No allowance. You’re grounded. You’re in my doghouse. You don’t love, or deserve to be loved. You can’t forgive. You cling to your hurt like a baby. You’re crazy. You don’t have the slightest clue how the world works.

This last bit is true. These types literally run the world, because they are deadly determined to always be in control so as not to risk being humiliated. It was their early life humiliation, and that terrifying feeling of powerlessness, that created their zero-sum worldview and tyrannical personality. My way or the highway, asshole. I’ve cut people dead for less than what you did to me, you ungrateful piece of shit. They demonstrate their terrible power by making good on their threats to exact payment for disobedience. If you want to be dead to them, keep insisting they had no right to rage at you.

The adult son is locked in a psych ward after some dramatic display of desperation, two days after arriving back at his childhood home. You, my friend, would be desperate too, if, whenever you needed support, one parent always blamed you for their rage and the other one always quietly agreed with the abusive parent. “We have to present a united face, so as not to confuse the child, it’s just basic good parenting” the abuse enabling parent will explain to others.

To his son he will say “your mother needs to be right, and she is right. She is used to being the boss, she took charge of her devastated family at age twelve and has always been in charge. You need to accept that she can’t be wrong, because it’s true. You are dead wrong if you think either of us is ever going to tell you that she was ever wrong, let alone abusive.”

Not surprising that two days after the adult son moves back into his parents’ home the weight of it all comes crashing down on him. I don’t know how he got to the mental ward, but I know he stayed there until they could stabilize his mood well enough to send him back into the place where his soul was crushed from the time he let out his first unanswered cries for empathy.

It is the biggest part of my current torment, to have the keys to his cell in my pocket and no way of getting them to him.

The Great Dictator

Nowadays, for anyone who wants just to write, and forget about having millions of readers, someone who just needs to write everyday and make that writing accessible to others, this is a golden age.

Any schmuck with a smartphone and an app can sit in a recliner and make like the great dictator. I talk to this phone the way Adolf Hitler talked to loyal halfwit Rudolph Hess, who transcribed Hitler’s incoherent gibberish in a way that was also completely unreadable.

This phone allows me to go back and make any number of editorial improvements with the keyboard. The result is prose of the highest quality that I am capable of producing.

In this chair, pontificating, I am the great dictator, literally. I dictate these words into my telephone. I will then take the Rudolph Hess-like transcribed gibberish and render it back into the English that I spoke into the phone.

It’s a refinement that, sadly, Adolf Hitler could not avail himself of there in Landesdown prison when he produced his masterwork “My seven years of struggle against the lying, filthy Jews, Communists, homosexuals, and other inhuman, maggot enemies who stabbed the victorious German army in the back!!!!” [1]

That dramatic Hitlerian title was later prudently shortened to Mein Kampf (My struggle). Picture being the editor trying to argue with fucking Hitler.

Hitlerious, no?

[1] Wikipedia corrects my recollection:

Hitler originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).[8] Max Amann, head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler’s publisher, is said to have suggested[9] the much shorter “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).

Trauma and immature parents

I’ve got to keep writing the same idea until I get it into a gentle enough form that it might be heard and considered. My credulous former friends are just what they are, there is no reaching those who uncritically embrace hateful lies, angrily close their minds, or what’s left of their minds.

I’m trying to reach a young man who is living in hell, the identical hell I escaped decades ago only by the best of luck. He is living with parents who had no hesitation to fly into a rage at a hurt old friend, arguably their closest, and embark on a deliberate campaign of lies, to destroy my good name among our fellows, when I needed to talk through a conflict with them. This poor guy is their oldest son.

Trauma, observes Bessel van der Kolk, is when we are not seen or known. When a child is upset, and parents look away, wait for the bad mood to pass, will not yield in any way, there is your basic recipe for trauma.

No reason can explain why the kid is acting this way, no explanation or understanding is possible, the crying simply must stop. Parents act this way only if they suffered similar abandonment when they needed to be comforted as infants.

An inconsolably crying child presents a challenge to every kind of parent. Emotionally immature parents, who have been damaged by the same kind emotional distancing when they were crying children in need of comfort, feel embarrassed at their helplessness. It makes them look terrible in public, too, not being able to control their child. The upset child is now assaulting the immature parent’s image as a great parent. The situation instantly becomes about the parent’s feelings, not the child’s.

It can take you decades, if ever, to recognize a basic fact about your childhood. Your strong-willed parent, who can neither be wrong nor apologize, may turn out, when you add up years of evidence, to be a bully. Bullies are created by abuse that damages them to the point they lash out at others whenever they feel threatened.

A bully is, obviously, not a good parent, they are too hurt themselves to help anyone else in trouble. They will do terrible damage they can never acknowledge or take responsibility for.

The best you can hope for, if you do enough hard work and have enough help and luck to untangle complicated emotions, is a deathbed reconciliation with the bully, full of regrets as they are about to leave this world.

I had a deathbed reconciliation with my father, a raging, frightened bully. I felt it was a beautiful mutual gift at the time, a blessing, but his “I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago, but I was too fucked up” is about the most poignant line I can imagine a dying father saying to his son. That I can’t cry about it to this day is one of those mysteries of being a male in our toxic society, but the line is no less tragic.

If your parent is still angry at their own mother or father, in adulthood, chances are they will not be able to give you the kind of nurturing they never experienced. They will demand obedience in all circumstances and blame you as defiant and irrationally angry if you show any hesitation or resentment.

Parents who need to be right will not tolerate that kind of behavior for a minute, it will enrage them. The child learns early to avoid this rage any way they can. In the end, expressing true feelings becomes futile.

The damage is done, congratulations, the bullying parent insists they are fully justified, and now your challenge begins. You will be second-guessing your true emotions for the rest of your life, trying to avoid conflict. You may be subject to episodes of mania, rage or depression. Strictly speaking, it’s not your damaged parents’ fault, but that’s cold comfort, I assure you.