Thoughts on POTUS for Black Friday

I know, POTUS probably hates that name, thinks it should be White Friday. Yeah, yeah, some animals are more equal than others, yeah, yeah.

I watched a clip of Sarah Silverman playing a demonically frank version of Sarah Huckabee Sanders holding a press conference. She plays the part with joy, calling on her favorite reporters by pet names like Dummy and Pencil-neck. It’s less than two minutes and worth a gander, you can click here to see the whole bit.

At one point she answers a question about the president’s character this way:

“He wasn’t shown love in his formative years and he was taught that his only value was money and, you know, he didn’t earn his money, he was constantly given it, that’s why he started gold-plating everything and wearing suits that matched his cars. He never really emotionally grew past eight years-old. His mother had this odd disdain for him and because of it he, you know, reenacted the trauma through copying her hair.”

This sent me to the internets where this is one of the first images my search retrieved:

Mary and Donald.jpg

And for my fellow armchair psychologists, I submit this family photo of the Trump siblings, the offspring of uber-weatlhy alpha male Fred Christ Trump (son of a sketchy German immigrant who made a lot of money here) and born poor Scottish immigrant Mary MacLeod Trump.

Notice the age and size difference between Fred Junior, the ill-fated heir apparent of the Trump real-estate empire, and the younger brother and future president, born forth in the five pup litter [1]. Donald looked up to his older brother (a wonderful and beloved man, according to the young Trump, though his candor and care for others actually killed him, a cautionary tale for the future president) and bullied his little brother. Mary, their mother, laughed about that bullying years later, when her second youngest was famous, saying Donald was always Donald. Nothing a military academy could fix, apparently.

Now, the most powerful man in the world, he gets to abuse everybody, in his endless quest to selflessly take all that is broken and make it whole again.

[1] Yes, I know litter mates cannot be born years apart, just go with it. This is a guy who, as president, publicly referred to football players respectfully protesting as “sons of bitches.” Good for the goose, good for the gander. USA! USA!!!!

Thanksgiving Cliche scene

We had a great Thanksgiving at the home of Sekhnet’s family, a very warm and interactive bunch. It actually made us all feel thankful, including the great feature of their home being only 18.3 miles away and therefore not our usual hours in traffic drive for family, vegetable side dishes and dessert on turkey day. Toward the end of the day I was sitting in an alcove with a couple around my age and noticed that the pillow behind the woman’s head had little black eyes and a black nose. The eyes blinked. It was the family dog. Her husband had been absentmindedly petting the same dog when we chatted earlier. She began singing the praises of this affectionate pipe cleaner of a dog. The dog was indeed a wonderful creature.

I told her Ricky Gervais’s great bit about dogs being better than people. Gervais is an atheist, but he says that when he dies, if he finds out he’s wrong, and there is a God, the first question he’s going to ask God is “why did you make chocolate deadly for dogs, you bastard?”

“Ricky Gervais is an atheist?” she said, and then we got into a conversation about Netflix, which is where I saw the routine. They don’t subscribe to Netflix. A friend had recently told her about a BBC documentary she had seen on Netflix about three generations of Trump and said it was great. It was. I began describing some highlights, in the most neutral possible way, as it became clearer and clearer that the woman was horrified by our fake reality TV president. The man sat on the couch across from us glaring silently.

This appeared to be shaping into an instance of the Thanksgiving day cliche in our tribal America: a few drinks, a big meal, a violent argument about politics that tears another family down the middle. I watched the man glare on the couch across from us while his wife got more and more animated in her denunciations of Trump. In the next room at least two of the family members there had actually voted for the vile lying psychopath. I was aware of being dangerously close to the high voltage third rail of American life in our third century. Finally the woman said “Gary did work for Trump, tell ‘im,” and the glaring husband spoke.

He’d been one of the contractors on Trump Tower and had been screwed by Trump, during the course of the job and at the end. “He’s a bully,” he began and then described the details of what a scumbag he was to work for. “We had a contract, laying out everything we had to do, the prices, every detail. Working for him was a nightmare, because he treated everybody like his slaves, then when the work was done he just goes ‘ah, I don’t like this work so much, I’m only going to give you…’ and he pays pennies on the dollar. You want to spend thousands taking him to court, be his guest, he loves nothing better than sending an army of lawyers after workers he screwed.”

I agreed that the man is no damned good and referred to the many businesses in Atlantic City that had literally gone under after Trump stiffed them as his imbecilically self-toppled casino empire came crashing down. They’d been delivering steaks, dry cleaning, maintenance, electrical work for years, extending mountains of credit to our deadbeat grifter-in-chief and then — poof!

He nodded, glaring. still angry decades after working for the man who is now, by a narrowly engineered Electoral College win, the president of these disgraced and divided United States. What can one really say, in the end, about an insatiable, broken, destructive person like this scary clown with the nuclear codes as his last card to play if all goes badly for him?

We concluded our chat and I excused myself to go into the next room and got a cup of coffee, which I drank sitting near a smiling woman who had voted for the man who promised to make America great again, and saved them a bundle on their taxes.

The Price of Shame

Monica Lewinsky, the onetime White House intern infatuated with Bill Clinton, has a great TED Talk called “The Price of Shame”. In it she discusses her public shaming when details of her sexual affair with the president came out, including his semen on her blue dress, his penis in her mouth and his unlit cigar inserted tenderly into her vagina. She was publicly humiliated and cyber-bullied as a result of these disclosures. Her talk is excellent.

A friend of mine, also moved by her talk, tried to book her to speak at his local temple. It turned out the temple did not have the budget to afford her speaking fee. One of the prices of shame, apparently, if your shame has high enough public titillation value, is $20,000 to $50,000 per appearance.

I shit you not.

Current Events

It just occurred to me that during elementary school we were regularly assigned something called Current Events as part of our homework. The assignment was to read a newspaper or magazine article, stand in front of the small class of mostly well-to-do children (my small, boutique public school was at the time the top rated elementary school in New York City, according to my mother) and give an oral report on “current events”.

My father always took an interest in these current events assignments, often clipping out candidates from the New York Times, which he read front to back every day. He taught me the importance of attaching the date to every artifact of “current events”. He impressed on me that newspaper reports are the first draft of history, among the first sources historians study to get the full story many years later. The date of an article is significant as more information becomes known and it’s sometimes fascinating to follow how a story changes over time.

For instance, a few days ago Trump’s pick for acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, was not commonly known as the former CEO, (and apparently sole employee) of the Koch-funded (the rest of the donor list is “dark money”) Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (“FACT”), earning about $1,000,000 [1] donated by secret conservative donors in the three years preceding his appointment as AG Jeff Session’s chief of staff. Whitaker just amended his financial disclosure form to include this income, according to recent reports. [2] So an article written two weeks ago about possible conflicts of interest would not have included this interesting bit of conflict of interest for America’s current top law enforcement officer.

As I tapped in “current events ” in my previous post about Trump and the Muslim Brotherhood (the president is a lifelong secret member, people are saying) I flashed on myself at eight and nine years old, standing in front of the class, a thin scroll of newspaper clipping hanging from my hand, as I reported on current events. My next thought was about the oral book reports we occasionally were called on to deliver.

I was infatuated with baseball starting in third grade, the baseball bug bit me hard. I studied the Hall of Fame, learned the history, memorized stats, followed the box scores in the paper every day, read many baseball biographies. One day, in third grade, I stood in front of my small class to deliver my report on a great biography of baseball immortal Jackie Robinson I had just read. I was saving a big laugh line for the end, as the format called for talking about one dramatic moment in the book. The moment I chose was when young Jackie Robinson was chased off an angry white guy’s lawn with words to the effect of “get off my property you little nigger.”

Never having heard the word, it struck me as hilarious, easily as funny as Commie, another word I’d never been exposed to, until a friend of my mother’s described in horror one of the hate letters she got (they were proponents of school integration) that had a big red COMMIE written on the envelope (yeah, people were jerks in 1964). For years afterwards my mother gave me shit for laughing uncontrollably every time my friend Rob or I called somebody a commie.

“Get off my property you little nigger” did not turn out to be the hilarious punchline I’d imagined it would be. Nobody laughed, though I thought I’d delivered the line pretty well. My teacher, Miss Mary Richert, regarded me with undisguised horror. The little school had just been integrated that year, we had four black kids in our class, Bryan, Felice, Rani and Gayle. Bryan was, in fact, my closest friend in third grade. I don’t recall their reactions, odd to say. Bryan certainly didn’t seem to hold it against me. A week or two later our permanent record cards were being angrily amended by Miss Richert, in view of the whole class, furious that we had stayed behind in the gym to continue playing after the rest of the class marched back upstairs for math.

The notations Miss Richert wrote on our permanent record cards, Miss Richert, a teacher who clearly loved both me and Bryan, have haunted us both to this day, casting a very dark shadow over both of our lives, and I know I speak for Bryan too when I say this.

[1] New York Times and Washington Post reported the earnings at $1.2 million, CNN put the figure at $900,000. Either way, a comfortable three year salary for a man charged with actively opposing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

[2] CNN reported, nine days ago:

During his tenure, Whitaker was one of only two people on the payroll, and he made a total of $717,000 from 2014 to 2016. Funding for that salary and all of FACT’s work has come from mostly untraceable donors. Over a three-year period, FACT received $2.45 million in contributions, and all but about $450 of that came from a fund called DonorsTrust, according to IRS filings. Contributors to DonorsTrust are mostly anonymous, except for well-known conservative financier Charles Koch.

“In other words,” wrote the Center for Responsive Politics, “an organization ‘dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency’ gets 100 percent of its funds from a group that exists mainly as a vehicle for donors to elude transparency.” source

yesterday’s update from CNN

The Muslim Brotherhood

The president used a throwaway line in his latest comment on the Saudi murder, in its consulate, of a Saudi journalist living in America and writing for a prestigious American newspaper, suggesting the murdered man had ties to terrorism. POTUS engaged in his usual double-speak, claiming once again that it’s possible we will never know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi or who ordered his murder and dismemberment, no matter what the CIA learns through it’s now more than month-long investigation. The CIA investigation indicates that Muhammad Bin Salman likely had something to do with this “tragedy”, and he very well might, OR, he might not!

POTUS mentioned, though he didn’t say this is why the journalist deserved to be murdered, that he’d heard the dead man, Khashoggi, had been considered by the Saudis an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s possible, you dig, that he was a terrorist who advocated the murder of millions, universal Sharia law and that he hated our freedom, I’m just saying. It’s also possible he left the consulate or started a fatal fistfight with the hit team sent to kill him and many other things are also possible and, shit, we’ll never know. (And, it goes without saying, once more, that whatever happened to Khashoggi has nothing to do with the brutal Saudi war on the civilians of Yemen and the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis, as the world’s lying press calls it.)

My understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood (the above wikipedia link aside) is that it’s a militant fundamentalist organization that came of age in the prisons of Egypt where secular dictators imprisoned and tortured members of the radical religious right. The Muslim Brotherhood, apparently founded in 1928, whose membership included the military officers who overthrew Egypt’s last king in 1952, produced at least one influential writer and philosopher, Sayyyid Kutb. I remember learning about Kutb after 9/11, though I see no mention of him in the wiki on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Kutb had apparently been horrified, when he was here as a college student after World War Two. at the materialistic, over-sexed consumer culture of America. Returning to Egypt, he devoted himself to religious interpretation and making a political philosophy out of fundamentalist Islam. His jihad was now to protect pious Muslims from this increasingly global corruption. His books were influential and he was a close adviser to Gamal Abdel Nasser after Nasser took power in a military coup. He wound up sentenced to death for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Egyptian dictator/president Nasser, whose repeated high government job offers he had refused. Nasser commuted Kutb’s sentence, leaving him in prison. Years later Kutb was released, soon after arrested again, tried and hanged, this time for alleged involvement in another plot to assassinate Nasser. The author of more than twenty influential books, Kutb wound up a martyr.

Among those influenced by Sayyid Kutb was the Egyptian political dissenter, Muslim Brotherhood member and physician Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Al-Zawahiri also spent time in Egyptian prisons, was also tortured, was also a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Later he would be second in command at Al Q’eada, sitting at the right hand of Osama Bin Laden. [1] He is assumed to be alive and currently commanding Al Q’eada, whose brand has taken a serious market-share hit since the killing of rock star terrorist OBL.

To my knowledge President schitt-breath is unaware of even this much history of the Islamist organization. For his purposes it is enough to know it sounds bad, Muslim Brotherhood. It sounds far worse than an inexperienced young medieval monarch rashly ordering the killing and dismembering of a political critic he hated — in his own consulate. In spite of a long history of financial support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia now hates the Muslim Brotherhood [2]. Put it like this “Muslim Brotherhood” versus $450,000,000,000 from the Saudis for munitions, plus over ten million well-paying American jobs with full pension and benefits, unlimited calorie-free full-fat ice cream and plenty of great sex on demand. USA! USA!!!!!

[1] Recall the confusion on the lips of every talking head in America when they reported that Obama had executed Osama bin Laden, almost every one of them bungling the tongue-twister, interchanging Osama Obama Osama, Oh, mama!

[2] wikipedia:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped the Brotherhood financially for “over half a century”,^[23]^[200] but the two became estranged during the Gulf War, and enemies after the election of Mohamed Morsi. Inside the kingdom, before the crushing of the Egyptian MB, the Brotherhood was called a group whose “many quiet supporters” made it “one of the few potential threats” to the royal family’s control.^[201]

Strategic Consideration

psoriasis

Three short summaries

For those who don’t like to wade through long posts, here are capsule distillations of three recent ones I struggled to get right (and edited numerous times for clarity before and after posting):

I was hurt for weeks over an inability to salvage my oldest friendship. I finally composed a question to put the final pieces to the troubling puzzle in my hands. I asked the guy what my final unforgivable act was. He told me: my wife told me you recorded our last conversation, she told me you said you were mad enough to punch me in the face, she told me you said I was a pussy and she won’t be married to anyone whose so-called friend regards him as an unmanly coward. link

I pondered the two most common approaches to anger: getting angry and repressing anger. I concluded that the advantage to feeling anger, and sitting with it long enough to understand why you were angry, is that it gives you the possibility of having less anger in your life. Repressing anger cannot lead to that place. I provided an illustration or two of each approach. link

An aggravating medical situation persisted for an additional week as I waited for test results that would determine whether I needed to worry about late stage bladder or prostate cancer. The cause for my aggravation turned out to be a failure of technology (Samsung phone will not display T-Mobile voicemail notifications) and poor office follow-up with the doctor. I learned, a week belatedly, that the doctor had promptly left me a compassionate voicemail with all the info I needed, but the message was not readily available on my phone. His staff took days to follow-up with him and I didn’t get his subsequent voicemails until days after that. Things escalated unnecessarily as I kept receiving bureaucratic stonewalling, instead of empathy and help and the doctor kept leaving me messages I didn’t get as messages from the insane patient grew increasingly hostile. Everything was finally resolved amicably during a short talk with the doctor. link

That post, which began with a sentence claiming “we were both right” now begins, more precisely:

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error. The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.

Sometimes things actually shake out that way. Both parties wind up angry, and both have good reason to feel angry, based on what they are each being told about the other. Cutting out the unreliable “middleman” is really the only way to resolve this kind of difficulty.

I’m Not A Baby– YOU ARE!

Screen shot 2018-11-19 at 1.48.53 PM.png

There is, of course, no law, rule, custom or practice requiring senate confirmation of special counsel investigating possible fraud, corruption and other high crimes and misdemeanors. The senate has nothing to do with it, schitt-head.

If there was such a law, lifelong Republican Robert Mueller would have obviously been voted down 51-49 as would any so called “independent” counsel who had not given a public oath of impartiality and personal loyalty to the man being investigated (as the original framers of the constitution clearly intended it).

The attacked representative parried the tweet neatly:

Screen shot 2018-11-19 at 2.07.07 PM.png

By the way, according to the president, the jury is still out on whether Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman ordered the execution of a journalist he hated. The CIA rushed to judgment, recently concluding, based on all available evidence, that the order came from him. After only six weeks! SAD! Presumption of evidence and schitt!!!!

Writing for real

I have to consider the possibility that all this writing I do is driven by a compulsion similar to what I regard as my graphomania, a sometimes uncontrollable urge to make marks on paper. I write that sentence not to castigate or judge myself, but to view myself for a minute as others, untroubled by a need to set their thoughts and feelings down clearly in words, must sometimes view me.

Put it this way, you can tell a complicated story to a friend who is quite interested in what you are talking about and they will always hear you out. That same story, set out in 1,500 words, might well be unbearable for them to read. Why is this insane bastard sending me this long section of his obsessive personal diary? This insane bastard sings like a bird, why doesn’t he perform in a coffee house instead of madly singing to me? We have coffee houses and clubs for singing birds, why is this bird sitting on my shoulder and singing directly into my ear? Ewwwww…

Years ago, when I drew a lot, everywhere, somebody sitting next to me on the subway would from time to time ask me if I could always draw. They sometimes seemed to be looking for a tip about how to draw. I used to tell them that I always loved to draw, though I wasn’t especially good at it when I started, though I always found it great fun. If you love something you will keep doing it and it’s natural that you’ll get better and better. The love of the thing will keep you delighted to do it. The delight will keep you at it and your mastery of the thing will improve.

I have often thought of this in regard to other things. When you strike a note on a guitar, if you love the sound of the guitar, you will notice there are different ways to sound the note. There is a great pleasure in this discovery. If you strike the note with the soft pad of your finger the note has one sound, kind of round. Think of the great bossa nova guitarists. If you strike the note hard with a pick, your finger immobile on the note, you get a certain sound, you can also “attack” softly with a pick. The kind of pick, hard or flexible, influences the sound of the note as does the gauge of the strings. In addition to picking the note, you can hammer the note on, you can pull off to get another note. If you fret the note below where it naturally sounds on the fretboard and bend the string up to it, you get another sound entirely, a singing sound. You can bend the note one whole step, as blues guitarists and rock stars generally do — one distinct sound, or you can bend the note up a half step, as Django used to, a much different, and playful, sound. There are also countless microtones you can stop on as you bend from one tone to another. Mr. Clapton is a master of this, as is, more notably perhaps, and more masterfully, Mr. Beck, Jeff Beck. There is vibrato, plucking, tapping, fast picking, sliding a la glissando, harmonics, all kinds of ways to play a note.

All to say, if you love a thing, it is not work to learn more about it, to study it, to be so compelled that the thing itself is of infinite value to you.

I appreciate, more deeply than I can say, that in a robustly commercial society where all real value is monetary (and an unmonetized space, like the ad-free hold time of a business phone call, is a sadly wasted space, to those who love monetization above all else) what I have said above makes absolutely no sense. A psychologist may agree that in terms of stress reduction, or increasing self-esteem, daily engagement in activities you do well and enjoy greatly are ‘mastery exercises’ that have mental health benefits to the individual. Don’t found your life on them, mind you, but they have a certain value.

Found your life on your love of them at your peril, friends. You may find yourself with excellent control of pencil, pen and brush, able to “kill an edge” with great precision in a way that will impress your friends if they are watching. There used to be an ad on matchbooks “learn to drive the big rigs, flash a big bill-fold and impress your friends!” If you’re doing it to impress your friends, I completely understand. Who am I to opine about what motivations are more noble or laudable than others? As a teenager I deliberately set out to master a little piano, which I taught myself from what I knew on guitar, to impress girls. It once actually worked! She sat on my lap as I played Beatles songs with my arms around her, and the rest, a veritable magical mystery tour.

I sometimes imagine the electronic book of my life. It would be lavishly illustrated, with some of the millions of images I continually make with no purpose except love of making the marks. My desk is continually overflowing with them. It is horrible in a way, this profusion of useless but largely beautiful debris. I would select a hundred compelling images and put them in the colorful book. I would take a hundred pages of my best writing, maybe two hundred, place them between the pictures. Since the technology is there, I’d add sound files, with some of the music I have come up with over the years. You’d be happy to buy it. You’d love it, if you were the right kind of person.

I try not to judge, though I am often unsuccessful in this. People have very different experiences and expectations of life. My own are eccentric in the eyes of many people, I realize that. It comes with dancing to your own idiosyncratic rhythm section.

I love reading well-written history books sometimes. I love Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a masterpiece. She writes, about the assumption, in the Jerusalem court that tried him for his enormous bureaucratic crimes, that Eichmann was a normal middle class German of his time:

They preferred to conclude from his occasional lies that he was a liar — and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape. (p.27)

As for the title of this post, real writing, at its best, makes you stop to wonder. It changes, even for only a moment, how you think and feel and makes you consider your own life and the world around you in a different way. It is wonderful shit.

The lesson of my father’s life

The painful regrets and too late apologies my father recited the night before he died dramatically illuminated mistakes to try to avoid in my own life. My father had a quick wit, was sensitive, well-read, thoughtful, well-spoken. He also saw the world as black and white, a zero-sum game that had only winners and losers.

“That’s not really how it is, Elie,” he told me in that weak dead man’s voice the last night of his life. “I wish I’d been able to see the many gradations and colors of the world, I think now how much richer my life would have been…”

As he was leaving the world he regretted his maniacal focus on being a “winner”, a silly abstraction in a game that everyone, in the end, must lose by giving up life, consciousness, all possessions. Being a winner to my father meant never tolerating disrespect, and, more precisely, never losing an argument. He was a strong, confident debater, even if he reflexively exerted this well-exercised power on his young children. He deeply regretted this lifelong mistake and the merciless burdens it placed on his children, expressing his sorrow in a weak voice about sixteen hours before he breathed his last breath.

He came by his obsession with winning honestly, early in his life, but I think the word ‘winning’ is more properly rendered ‘surviving’ or ‘maintaining integrity’. He’d been born in desperate poverty, raised by a cruel, violent, religious mother and a father of few words whose main concern was not getting beaten any more. My father told me that he and his little brother were earmarked as classic losers, the sons of a brain damaged man, from day one. Their future was decided by their uncle and his brilliant son and daughter — the Widem boys would go to trade school, learn to work sheet metal. They were fit for nothing higher, in the opinion of the people in charge of the family. Both made it to college, graduate school and the middle class, in spite of the odds against them.

The fear and the indignities of their childhood never left them. It didn’t help, of course, that all but a couple of their many aunts and uncles were slaughtered in a Belarusian hamlet that was wiped off the world map forever.

“Elie, not to be a prick or anything,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave in Cortlandt, New York, “but didn’t you recently write over a thousand pages about my life already? Presumably there were lessons in there too, I mean, in a sense, wasn’t that why you started the process in the first place?”

Yes, of course. My focus today is a little different, though.

“Not seeing the sad parallels between my essentially solitary life and your own? Locked in an endless battle to be conclusively right, in spite of your dedication to non-harm, or what did that little Indian guy who slept naked with his naked teenaged nieces to show he could overcome lust call it– ahimsa. You know, you can be absolutely right and at the same time blind to the effect your insistence on being right has on others.”

Jesus, dad, you’re reading my mind. What I’m thinking about glancing from the computer screen to the window out into the grey afternoon, are the choices we make, how we use our time. Not everyone is wired to think deeply on the things that vex them.

“Well, I had a large part in wiring your brain that way, providing endless vexations for a small boy with a curious, nimble mind to brood upon. Your imagination is a blessing and a curse. Imagine less, sometimes you’re better off. Look, clearly, you’re imagining these words of mine now, I am now but a long-time skeleton, a literary conceit, and maybe, at this point, also a tired one. A rubber crutch, if you will.”

Funny as a rubber crutch, the jokes that killed vaudeville…

“Yeah, listen, Elie, you write everyday but nobody is all that interested until a book or an article comes out of it. Nobody you know is capable of being interested in that ton of verbiage you produce, even if most of it is well-written, even if some of it is genuinely insightful. As that alcoholic dispatcher at Prometheus used to sympathetically tell you all the time, whenever you complained — ‘nobody cares, nobody cares.’

“A writer writes not for the handful of readers he or she knows, they write for people they don’t know, and they get paid to do it. You grasp this, and yet, you are constantly disappointed that nobody you know gives a shit. Nobody you know gives a shit, only you can care about this uncontrollably prolific output. Trust me on this. Get some of your writing in print and they will be very happy to be happy for you, even read it. Were they not all happy for you when you got a few words published and paid for?”

Yes, they were unanimously happy for me, every one of them. They read each of those hamfistedly edited thousand word pieces, loved ’em.

“I know what sent you to the keyboard to write this today. You’re wrestling with a need to be right that suddenly seems to you uncannily like my need to be right, a need you correctly condemn as primitive and conflict-producing. The need to be right is deeply human, it’s also at the root of most human conflict. Most people when they begin fighting with an old friend, have the same fight a few times, conclude the other person is not worth fighting with and walk away. The person who keeps fighting is an unreasonable jerk, not a friend. Done.

“You don’t do this, though, do you? You’re always looking for some kind of deeper principle about the way friends should treat each other, why this person is not a friend but a deluded, clueless antagonist. You write thousands of words about it, like you’re insane. You think you are working out some dark puzzle about human nature, but, seriously, Elie, what the fuck?”

That is what I am wrestling with, all of the above. If we are to live principled lives, isn’t it necessary to clearly understand the principles we live by?

“That depends on how many angels are dancing on the head of a particular metaphysical pin. Yes, you’ve come to the same conclusions about particular people that I did when I was alive. We disagreed about my need to condemn and walk away from them, and years later you came to the same conclusion I did. So what? Why should this concern you? The old lady who constantly lied, taught her daughter to lie, who in turn taught her son and insane daughter to lie— where is the mystery in any of that? The woman who did not know how to not fight kept irrationally fighting with you? Quelle surprise, monsieur! as we used to say in Peekskill. What is this sudden torment today?”

I want to nail the lids on the coffins of a trio of glowering vampires.

“God bless you, then, son, that’s what you do with vampire coffins. Why even agonize a second about taking a stake to the undead? Take a hammer, or a rock, and nail that shit closed, bang! done, next case! Lights, camera, action! Enough with the Hamlet routine– be done.”

The chill that is making the trees outside this window tremble creeps into this room. The fading light outside a premonition, touching me lightly with Isaac Babel’s cold, dead fingers. The imperative keeps goading me — to find a resting place for my thoughts.