Prisoners of Technology

Young people today may be the true heirs of the information age. They were born with the sum total of the world’s accumulated information and opinion in their pockets, instantly accessible on phones so smart they can anticipate what we want to know. Those born with this amazing power feel they are the best informed generation in history. Maybe they are.

The great educational innovator Sugata Mitra claims that students no longer need to memorize long lists of dates, famous names, salient facts etc. since everything of that sort can be found instantly on-line. I’m no longer so convinced on this particular point by the extremely convincing Mr. Mitra, though I am a big fan of his theories of how we learn, how we are born wanting to learn.

As others have pointed out, what happens to the holder of the sum total of the world’s acquired information when your phone is out of battery life, if the power grid or internet goes down, in the event of a large scale emergency where smart phones no longer operate? We are dependent on technology to an extent never before seen in the ravaging reign of homo sapiens, the earth’s apex predator and determined destroyers of our own habitat, if there is enough money to be made doing so (and, to be honest, even if not).

I’m just bitchy because my expensive new phone is messed up. A month ago it was near an open window during a rain storm. It didn’t get wet, but was exposed to 100% humidity. It would not charge after that, giving me a shrill warning to immediately disconnect it– “moisture has been detected!”. Fortunately, it could be charged on a wireless dock. Another popup message a few days later informed me that it could take some time for the detected moisture to disappear. Now it is a month.

Last Saturday a technician at Best Buy, a nice fellow named Curtis, fixed the phone, it was able to take a charging cable. He reset something, told me there was a problem with the sensor in this model of Samsung phone I have. I was able to charge it with a cable. Once. Now it again warns me that I will do permanent damage to the phone, void the warranty, cancel my insurance policy, etc. if I leave it connected to a charging cable.

Customer service is no longer something we can expect just because we are customers. The world is now way too smart for that. That’s where our smartphone comes in, it helps us figure out how to get customer service. Who knew the Samsung guy at Best Buy was my best bet?

I discovered, after Curtis didn’t fix it, that there is a Samsung store at 837 Washington Street, not hard for me to get to. I can use my smartphone to make an appointment to see a brilliant technician there. They can tell me how foolish I was not to back up the 3,000 photos randomly and without warning deleted from my phone a few weeks ago. They can point me to the Android to Mac program I need to download on to my laptop so I can save data from an Android to an Apple computer. Hopefully they can also fix the phone and allow me to charge it with a cable so I don’t have to keep my friend waiting another hour for lunch while the phone gets a trickle of a charge on the wireless dock. Last I checked it was up to 61%. Could be 70% by now…

Hopefully the insurance I pay every month will cover this repair of a very expensive phone and the $175 “deductible” won’t kick in. Hopefully.

Look around and think about that “hopefully”.

Historic photo from Sekhnet

which arrived above this caption:

April 5th 2017 group… Including the beautiful sole survivor.

The beautiful sole survivor is the now banished Paintjob, eating turkey off the paper near her mother (now her feared enemy) and her three doomed little siblings.

Paintjob continues to survive somehow, she was photographed eating yesterday by Sekhnet who sent the photo with the caption “Yay!”

Made in America

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Another kitten

Mama Kitten, who was pregnant again by the time her kittens were two or three months old, showed up a couple of weeks ago skinny again. Sekhnet and I concluded she must have had a miscarriage. Then this breaking news photo came across the Sekhnet news wire. Mama nursing a single mouse she had carried by the scruff of the neck to the area of the garden where Sekhnet was working.

Shades of Anger and Avoiding Rage

Anger comes in varying shades. Not every shade is dangerous, but unchecked anger always has the potential to explode into rage, which is the main thing to avoid. Anger is a threatening emotion, difficult to sit with, and anger that is denied, pushed down, diverted toward people who don’t deserve it, is as corrosive as sulphuric acid.

Anger often starts as annoyance, escalates to feeling provoked. Sufficient provocation gives rise to a righteous and difficult to control desire to strike back. Depending on the situation, anger can easily turn to rage. Recognizing the initial signs that you are becoming angry, and taking as many breaths as needed to avoid the easy cycle of anger, is crucial to not flying into a rage. Not flying into a rage may be the best we pitiful earthlings can do when we are provoked to anger. Important work, friends, learning to not fly into a rage, even when sorely provoked.

I have been in this cycle of provocation and escalation countless times. Over my childhood angry confrontations were a regular occurrence in the little house I grew up in. I was a kid, and did the best I could in an insane situation where everyone was screaming at each other. Much of the anger came straight out of my parents’ frustrations with their own lives. Neither of them ever learned to control their anger very much, certainly not when it came to the two ungrateful children who presented such challenges to them. In terms of dealing with their anger, both of my parents were essentially children.

I had a friendship for a while with a New York City criminal court judge. He was a brilliant man, if also deeply troubled. Sekhnet, who has a talent for hitting such nails on the head, said of him “Bill’s a child. A brilliant child, but a child.” The same could be said for my father, and to a great extent, my mother. Both were highly intelligent, both had been raised by domineering mothers who frequently made irrevocable vetoes of their child’s deepest wishes.

Each overbearing mother had broken up the most exciting romance of each of their childrens’ lives. My mother’s mother chased off her daughter’s first fiance, simply would not stand for this dashing young con-man becoming her son-in-law. In my father’s case, it was a longterm relationship with a Christian woman, a young widow a couple of years older than my father. There are photos of them together before World War Two in Connecticut and after the war in Syracuse. My father never looked happier than in those couple of black and white photos. It appears to have been some kind of love story. In the end, the overbearing mother won, the lover was extirpated forever from my father’s life.

There is the kind of anger that makes people lose their minds. When angry, they feel they are simply fighting to stay alive. Anything is fair to somebody in this hopped up state. This is very common with anger– it convinces you of the rightness of whatever you do in that state. Defend the homeland!!! Death to the infidels!!! Death before dishonor!!! Take it out of their skulls!!!

I am thinking about anger today because yesterday, once again, I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with someone who called to tell me, essentially, that I had no right to my feelings. No matter how much I may have been hurt and provoked, the caller told me, or how many times I may have been hurt in the exact same way, they love me, I am like family and the thought of me not in their lives is too painful for them to deal with. All this was happening, I was told, because I was not looking at myself deeply enough, not finding a way to forgive a series of escalating provocations that were very aggravating, true, but completely, or at least largely, unintended.

It was an aggravating conversation with a person I like very much. It was aggravating largely because the person had no idea, outside of endless, limitless forgiveness on my part, for what I should do going forward with a friend seemingly incapable of not provoking me in every encounter. Aggravating because I’ve thought deeply about all these things, studied the situation over the course of the last few months, consulted friends whose opinions I respect.

In the end, I had nothing, and nobody else could see any way forward, outside of the miracle of an old friend suddenly discovering how to be a mensch, something completely out of my hands. I gave this old friend every opportunity not to keep attacking, but he was unable to refrain from being on defense and offense instead of seeking a way out of the toxic cycle that was killing our friendship.

A few times during the conversation yesterday I got angry. Each time the person I was talking to squawked, hurt and mad that I was expressing anger at not being heard. Each time I took a deep breath and quietly expressed the thing that couldn’t be heard when I expressed it with anger. In the end little that I said seemed to have had much effect, but the exercise of not exploding in anger was a good workout. A sad, mutually unsatisfying conversation ended calmly enough, with neither of us telling the other to fuck off.

No matter what else can be said about the difficulty, sometimes, of not exploding in rage, it is always a good idea. It is hard work, Jack, very goddamned hard work. Especially if I keep denying your right to feel hurt by something I did to you, no matter how unfair I admit that thing was. Keep bringing it up, I will keep shifting the blame back to you — you are unforgiving, you are heartless, rigid, you don’t see yourself, you exaggerate, you betray. If you look deeply enough into yourself, I will say, you will see that you are wrong — it is possible, isn’t it, that you are wrong also? Love conquers all. I will lay down the love card, the final card, the card only someone without love could deny. I could not have really hurt you that badly because I LOVE YOU.

You respond that love is not words, no matter how beautiful, but actions, how we treat the person we love. If I treat you harshly you have every right to expect a sincere apology from me, if I care about your feelings. If I can’t give you an assurance that I understand the harm I’m doing, will do my best not to inflict more of it, there is no way forward.

I will insist, if I am that type of person, that you are no saint either. You betrayed my confidence by writing on a blahg that you know a person who has a faulty memory. I would never do that to you! You have no idea how hurtful that public betrayal was to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wore a wire on me when we talked the other day. Are you wearing a fucking wire on me now, you fucking fuck!? I’ll bet you are.

And away we go!

Heartbroken

My sister recently recommended Home, a book she loves, by Marllynne Robinson. The book is apparently part of a trilogy, all deep and beautifully written, according to my sister, but Home is her favorite and it stands alone as a story. I placed a hold on a copy at my local library and a few days later began reading it.

The protagonist arrives at the ancestral home to stay with her old, ailing father in his last days. On page two the narrator writes:

Why would such a staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken?

Framing the question this way made me suddenly see the book through my sister’s eyes, our father’s eyes. Our father, like that staunch and upright house, was heartbroken. He was abandoned and heartbroken. It struck me that in the 1,200 page manuscript I’ve written about the man I don’t recall using the essential word heartbroken even once.

The human world is impossible to understand without grasping the mortal suffering a broken heart inflicts. Heartbroken people try many things to not feel like their hearts are broken, almost all of it in vain. Heartbreak does not heal, fade with time or go away of it’s own accord. We are resilient creatures, our damaged nerve endings display impressive plasticity, an ability to regenerate and recover from many kinds of harm. A broken heart is in a category by itself. Difficult hard work, empathy, fortitude, persistence and a few strokes of luck can begin to heal a broken heart, if it is the right kind of luck.

Irv, my father, had his heart broken very early in life. He didn’t have a single stroke of righteous luck, really. Being an infant and child in extreme poverty inflicts one kind of permanent damage, life-impairing damage already very close to heart break. Having nobody in your life to love and protect you in that harrowing situation breaks your heart, would break any little heart. Add to this poverty and non-love your mother whipping you in the face from the time you can stand, your father cowering, powerless, without the ability to stop your pain. Your child’s heart will shatter into a million pieces.

Hours before your death, eighty years later, you will tell your son “my life was essentially over by the time I was two.” You will insist, after a life as a well-read, quick-witted and brilliant conversationalist, that you were the dumbest Jewish kid in the depressed little river town you grew up in. Your son will express disbelief. You will emphatically respond “hmmpf! by far!”

Did little Irv really have nobody in his life to love and protect him? His first cousin Eli, maybe, though he feared the tough, sandpaper voiced man his entire life. Outside of Eli, who by his own admission more than once witnessed the whipping of baby Irv without stopping his beloved aunt, Irv’s mother, who? Nobody. Abandoned and heartbroken. His entire life, a desperate exercise in not appearing to be mortally wounded.

And yet, I would not reduce his life to this terrible misfortune, this cruel tragedy. To do so ignores the admirable traits he also displayed, his principled morality, the struggles he wrestled with (even if not very successfully) not to inflict on his children the harms done to him, the many valuable life lessons he was able to impart to his children about mercy, kindness to animals, fairness, protecting the weak. It would be a terrible tale without a moral, the tragedy of someone crushed before he was two spending his entire life desperately fighting the horror of feeling how he was crushed.

Many years ago I sent a description, and a few sample pages, of my Master’s thesis/novel (the degree was in Creative Writing) Me Ne Frego (“I Don’t Give A Damn”) to a contact I’d been given at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I have the concise rejection letter somewhere in my unorganized library of fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand pages of drawings and other papers. The kind and thoughtful rejection letter was from a young woman named Straus, no doubt with literary credentials from one of our top Ivy League schools, who praised the writing but found the material, unfortunately, not suitable for their prestigious house to publish. The kernel of wisdom she imparted was that every great narrative is the story of a dramatic change in the protagonist. She had seen no such change in the narrator in the few pages I’d sent. She wished me the best of luck, which I proceeded not to have.

Part of my father’s abiding tragedy was that he fought the idea that people can change themselves in any fundamental way. I might think I could get a handle on my temper, believe I might make myself less easily provoked, become more gentle, but he was there to assure me at every step that my struggle was doomed, that we are what we are born and wired to be and that was that. Better, he always said, to simply suck it up and act like a man. And no, he countered, eight years-old was not too young to start taking responsibility for your own life and acting like a man.

He had nobody to teach him any differently. Nor did I. I didn’t have a magical stroke of luck in my life that left me believing, and able to somehow confirm, that we can change fundamental things if they cause us enough pain. I have seen it in two old, very dear friends, fundamental changes in character. Further proof, for me, is my greatly improved ability to forebear, a stubborn challenge I’ve worked on for decades now. I can now, for the most part, endure direct, prolonged provocation without completely losing my shit, that is to say without doing anything violent or insane. [1]

In a way Ms. Straus’s idea about a compelling narrative necessarily involving a dramatic transformation of the protagonist (now that I think of it, she probably wrote her under-graduate thesis on that proposition) was reflected in my father’s last words about his life. He lamented that he had been too fucked up to realize how much richer his life would have been had he embraced its many gradations instead of blindly fighting for black or white.

Broken-hearted, that’s what the man was. He had deep regrets as he was dying, and long overdue apologies that came very late in the game, hours before he died, that was as close to change as he could come,. But, in a way, Ms. Straus, aren’t those both proofs of how much he was actually able to transform in the end? Does that count toward your compelling narrative thesis?

[1] Sekhnet, in her infinite love for me, always likes to tweak me when she hears me make this claim, but it is a tic of her’s I do my best to ignore. Screaming horrible things at a computer in frustration, or venting angrily about the thousand indignities we are forced to suffer for the privilege of living in an inhumanly capitalist world, is not the same as taking a hammer and smashing the computer, or hurting another person. Even if the computer is made by slaves somewhere so that the global corporation that sells it can triple its own value on the stock market.

I have improved my ability to endure all this, though, it goes without saying (especially by a man who regularly waxes Tourretic) that I have not perfected my absolute equanimity. That is not the point of the exercise. The point is to avoid the worst of what you’re inclined to do when you feel angry. That you rein yourself in and learn to take a breath when you need to. That you are not distracted from the conversational point by anger. Those things are all good, and each one of them is quite valuable.

Grandson of the Awful Ease of Incoherence

The ease of incoherence is awful
because it is so easy.
The idiot ease of it: effortless
no effort needed.

Incoherence makes no demands,
anything you can
pull out of your ass
will do, really,
there is no problem with anything
you might pull out,
the less likely the better,
actually, for purposes of
incoherence.

Meanwhile these affectionate ferals
born with two strikes against them
and five personal fouls,
eight of their nine lives wasted,
spend a few minutes in the sun,
chasing a delicious smell
then gone forever
like the Polar Ice Caps,

like everyone
you’ll ever love.

Son of the Awful Ease of Incoherence

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The Awful Ease of Incoherence

I’ve been getting a bit of the incoherent narrative full-stink in my personal life lately, and, of course, we are all subjected it to it daily in the news. Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between a coherent story and an incoherent one, so we’re all on the same page.

Coherent: Humans and animals are in escalating danger of habitat loss and extinction, in large part due to massive, destructive, human activities. We don’t need science to tell us the earth herself is regularly screaming in alarm. The largest California wildfire in recorded history is raging at the moment, along with several other wildfires in the state. Climate disruption has increased the number of these catastrophic events every year: record hurricanes, monsoons, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes in regions that never had earthquakes, tornados in regions that have never had tornados, plus a new horror, never seen before: fire tornadoes. We regularly endure record heat waves, record cold streaks, new records for heat set year after year, “hundred year storms” coming along to devastate us every year or two.

The science only confirms the disastrous state of nature we are able to observe taking lives all over in the globe on a regular basis. Citizens of the entire world are aware of this perilous situation, only in America is there any controversy attached to this, and only because billionaire fossil fuel titans have invested countless millions to create armies of zombie-like deniers called, elegantly, “climate change skeptics”.

Incoherent version: Human liberty itself is under attack. Our government has become a tyranny. Scientists with an anti-freedom agenda have conspired to make it look like there’s a correlation, a cause and effect, if you will, between the millions of barrels of fossil fuel, and the tons of clean coal, burned every day, the lucrative, clean extraction of natural gas from deep inside the earth, and the supposed warming of the earth. The earth warms and cools in natural cycles. Humans have nothing to do with it. Government is the enemy, not humble servants of the people like us who want to make sure everyone has enough gas for their cars. Without gasoline the trucks can’t deliver food to the cities. Our very culture, our survival and our liberty, is under attack and those vicious partisans are weaponizing disputed science as the tip of the spear. The science is disputed, there is no consensus among the mere 98% of climate scientists, including at NASA, who say this is so.

We are treated to the weaponized tweets of an infantile, irrationally angry winner-in-chief every time we turn on the news. These tweets make no sense except in one way: they constantly shift the focus back to incoherence. If there is a focused discussion of some important issue being maintained in the media, there will be a nasty presidential tweet suddenly calling out son-of-a-bitch Lebron James, attempting to denigrate the NBA great with a strongly implied “nigger” thrown in there for good measure, because the people who love real winners don’t shrink from non-politically correct speech. Lebron James is overrated– not as good as MIKE! Lebron should shut his fucking mouth and stop being a loser. I could beat Lebron in a game of one on one, Lebron sucks. Etc.

Soon, that’s today’s story. “The President today attacked the NBA’s greatest player, LeBron James.” The president will double down by tweeting the name of another player, who played his last game fifteen years ago, who supposedly (incoherently) makes Lebron look like a pile of poop. Lebron will be interviewed about this, will respond with his characteristic aplomb, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

It is not a problem. The world we live in now is largely ruled by incoherence. Do not be fooled into thinking the facts matter, that the identical stories of fifty eye witnesses who are complete strangers to each other make any difference, same with recordings of actual conversations, videotapes of the hideous thing happening right in front of the camera phone, the world itself as you perceive it does not actually exist! WINNING exists, and LOSING. If you’re not winning, you’re losing. You’re all fucking losers, tweets the world’s greatest winner, only I WIN and you all can’t stand it, losers. Jealous, pathetic losers. SAD!

The fish rots from the head, they say. The only trickle down I’ve ever seen in my sixty-two years living in America is the trickle down of incivility, in-your-face hostility, hereditary entitlement, the corporate killer mentality coming home to roost in every argument everywhere. Never admit fault, that concedes liability. For the same reason, never apologize, unless with massive qualifications before, during and after the calculated apology. If confronted, hit back harder. If confronted with something you cannot counter, become indignant, completely change the conversation. If necessary, invent some inflammatory provocation to put the enemy on the back foot. If necessary, gather allies and threaten violence. Most people are cowards, outgunned ten to one they will usually give up like the pussies they are. People talk big, but a loaded gun talks much, much louder than any bigmouth, no matter how smart he thinks he is.

This is the only thing that trickles down, this psychopathic impulse to dominate at any cost. It’s the only game in town, yo. I note that most of us do not play this game, or that we try our best not to play it. Anyone who has whiffed this foul game full-stink will make every effort to not to replicate it. Still, it is pervasive. The values of our society come from what we see reflected in the public behavior of our elected officials, ambassadors, celebrities. The party of “I’ve got mine and fuck you, you fucking whining loser” has been prevailing the last few decades. It is America’s one truly bipartisan coalition.

I console myself by reading histories of fascism. There are always good people– on one side, on one side — who stand against the encroaching totalitarian incoherence. On the other side there are millions who go along with authoritarians out of a genuine desire to put their boots on the necks of the enemies of the people. There are also even more millions who have learned from birth to simply conform. You do what you are told, don’t make waves, and you will generally be OK. This is the tragic swing group, since they are the ones who, by doing nothing but obey, allow incoherent authoritarians to call all of the shots. The millions who hate your average Hitler type, an ill-tempered, oversensitive type who won’t hesitate to use as much violence as his enemies demand, have to tread very carefully until they can figure out the small acts they can do to put a finger on the other side of the scale. A scale that eventually, and always, tips against these ruthless authoritarians who must always rule by coercion and terror.

Yesterday I went to see the great Jose James play outdoors at Lincoln Center. I’ve had the pleasure to talk with Jose a few times at the home of my close friends. We made arrangements to get on the guest list for reserved seating on a day when the real feel temperature in NYC was 99 degrees. This was due to the high humidity which made a mere 90 degrees feel much hotter. I stayed hydrated and went to the show.

To sit in the reserved seats you had to have an orange wrist band. These were given out on the opposite side of the large venue from where the reserved seats were. It was hot, I was dripping, but walked over there on my painful knees to get my pass. The young woman who gave out the passes was there at her small table alone. There was an opening in the moveable barricade about six feet from her. I went to the opening.

A guard stepped into my path, pointed to an empty labyrinth of barricades and told me I had to go the long way around. I gestured toward the empty table, to the girl with the iPad and a bunch of wristbands, the completely empty labyrinth of barricades. I asked him to please let me pass, my knees were killing me, I’d walked a long way already, and that, please, since nobody else was waiting, might I just get my pass and go join my friends who were already seated?

The guard, a dark-skinned African man in a crisp, white uniform, told me that I had to go all the way around. That was the rule. He had no discretion to violate the rule or make exceptions no matter what, was apparently not even supposed to be discussing anything with anybody. I soon learned why, he was being watched intently by two of his bosses, who immediately made their sharklike way toward me to find out why I was giving their hired hand such a hard time.

The large man, who had a huge pallid head like an overinflated albino melon about to burst, advanced one step too far into my space and told me with a glare: “first of all, relax”. I told him to relax. One step behind him was a woman, a dead-ringer for Betsy DeVos (but with dark hair), probably from the same social class (we stood in the shadow of the David H. Koch wing of Lincoln Center, after all), and about to prove herself as brilliant as DeVos in the arts of persuasion and argumentation.

Pumpkinhead told me the rules are the rules, they’re there for crowd control and I had to walk. I told him my knees were killing me, my friends were waiting and I’d appreciate the small courtesy, which was only common decency, especially since nobody else was being inconvenienced and I was an easily controlled crowd of one person. His turd-like smile told me exactly how far this line of moral reasoning was going to take me.

At this moment DeVos’s cousin stepped forward with that famous well-bred idiot smile and said reasonably: “imagine if fifty people were here and they all asked us to just let them break that little rule, to give each of them special treatment?” You see, her smile said, just common sense, just like your’s! It’s a draw, so the rule wins!

I started asking her if this was really the kind of country she wanted to live in, where the Nuremberg Defense was the final word in any conversation, where unreasoning adherence to rules no matter what the circumstances trumped every other consideration? Neither of them, I saw, had any problem with the downside of anything I was saying. I was unwittingly describing exactly the country they want to live in, a place where people who don’t like the rules are kept strictly in line.

Before I could point out that while it might be a problem if there were fifty people simultaneously demanding preferential treatment, I was the only one in this actual, real-life non-hypothetical, and the favor I was asking could be considered a request for special treatment only by a rigid, rules-bound, unreasoningly authoritarian type, the girl with the iPad and the wrist bands came over from her table, where she had been waiting patiently for the next customer.

I thanked her and gave her my name, as Pumpkinhead said something I don’t recall. My name didn’t come up, to another eructation from the pallid Pumpkin. I gave Sekhnet’s name and that seemed to work, Pumpkinhead said something else I don’t recall. I told the girl “please, just give me the fucking wristband so I can get away from this asshole.”

This one two punch (“fucking” plus “asshole” equals “resisting arrest”) gave them all the moral ammunition they needed to leap into indignant defense of all that is decent. I’d said FUCKING, a Bozo-no no!! How dare I rape the ears of this innocent young black woman after assaulting the black hired guard with my offensive, nakedly racist insistence on my white privilege.

“That’s it!” said Pumpkinhead triumphantly, “don’t give him the wrist band. You’re not getting it!” I had one bit of restraint left, and I used it.

“Ah, not only an asshole but a vindictive asshole, nicely played.”

Just as I turned to storm off, muttering incoherently about letting him take me to court for slander where truth is an absolute defense to the charge, Sekhnet came up. Turned out DeVos and Pumpkinhead had given her some crap earlier, a variation on the same issue (she’d gone a few steps into the empty labyrinth and took a shortcut, hopping the barricades). They gave her quite a stern talking to about that, you can be sure. I walked a hundred yards, sat on a plastic chair in the sun, stewing a bit, letting the anger dissipate.

Someone I knew came up and said hi, when I gave him a 20 second capsule description of my recent confrontation his eyes turned into two ping-pong balls, lolled out of the sockets on to his cheeks. He waved a wan goodbye and I fluttered a few fingers.

Ten minutes later Sekhnet had my wrist band, texted me her location, and we sat in the “V.I.P” section to watch the show. Jose put on a great show, singing the songs of Bill Withers, songs he was born to sing. On Grandma’s Hands, a song about the love of a grandmother who always protected and comforted him when the world was kicking his ass, he did an inspired improvised section that blew me away.

It was brilliant, using the musician’s many arts to drive home the obscene incoherence of a violently angry caregiver. Grandma’s “Matty don’t you whip that boy” turned into a long, staccato, rhythmically complex, inventive reinvention of the morphing syllable that began with “whip”. Jose’s improvisation evoked the twitch of a grandmother’s pain to see her grandson mistreated, the violent idiocy of the mistreatment itself– well beyond words. [1] His singing and wild invention took me to another, far better world, and after the show I had hardly a thought of those two incoherent fascist disease carriers who’d tried to ruin my day.

[1] I described it in an email to a friend this way:

There’s a point in the song when Grandma is stopping the father from whipping the boy. Jose did a long improvisation here, where the words “what you want to whip him for?” turn into scratchy nonsense syllables, percussion, wordless hiphop, rhythmic, robotic, spastic, absurd, endless, obscenely ridiculous, the single syllable of “whip” turning into a million senseless acts of incoherent brutality. Man! Needless to say, I loved that shit, it was truly inspired and done with superb musicality. Turned to Sekhnet with a big smile and said “brilliant” and M turned, smiled and nodded. Then she looked at me one extra beat. Tears were falling out of my eyes.

The Essential Point of the Death of Turtleback

This photo was taken an hour before the one of Turtleback lying in his box, the last photo taken of him. This is his three siblings having dinner. Turtleback was off exploring and didn’t return in time to join them. Here are the three of them, Whitefoot and his sisters.

Not many people read this blahg and I am not on social media, so the reach of this post will be virtually non-existent. If I could somehow get it out to enough people, one or more of these kittens could be saved, live a full life, give and receive a lot of affection.

My request: Send this out to your thousands of “friends” on facebook and your legions of followers on twitter. If you find anybody in New York City or Nassau who wants to adopt one, or all, of these beautiful, tame little cats, please contact me via the comments and I’ll make the arrangements.

Sekhnet informs me that they were born on March 31. Any one of them would make an excellent pet. Whitefoot already solicits petting and is very playful. The girls are a bit more shy, but also very interested in humans.

I also happened to find, among the few photos that remain on my willful fucking “smart” phone, this picture of Whitefoot, his first official portrait by me. It looks like an extreme zoom and cropped screen shot, a bit more like a pastel than a photograph:

Oh, wait, I see by the non-white foot (check out that nice little claw, already deployed) that this is Whitefoot’s equally good-looking sister. She deserves a life.