Sitting with Difficult Emotions

The more difficult the emotion, the harder it is to sit with it. We don’t want to feel the things that hurt us, quite naturally, and we have sophisticated, if often not very subtle, means of not feeling them. One of the most striking is the method described by Dr. John Sarno [1], who died recently at an advanced age. Sarno cured crippling back pain in countless patients by having them understand that immobilizing spinal pain, which the mind causes by making the body clench, constricting blood/oxygen flow to crucial muscles and nerves, is more palatable to the psyche than feeling the threatening primal rage that causes it. Understanding that, and feeling a hint of the emotion behind the physical manifestation, appears to be a big step to feeling better. Spine surgeons hated Sarno, as did other medical experts. Bad for business was fucking John Sarno.

I’ve never tested Sarno’s theory, not having suffered from what the good doctor called TMS, Tension Myoneural Syndrome. But I have often sat with anger, which is a motherfucker to sit with. Much easier to do virtually anything else, I’d have to say. Blaming others for your anger is a great alternative, I think you will agree. No shortage of asshole provocateurs in this world. Hah! Done and done. Nothing a hearty “fuck you!” won’t cure, repeat as needed. If people weren’t often such merciless pricks, you wouldn’t have to get angry at all. Anodyne as all get out, no?

In a quiet moment you will realize that blaming and venting didn’t quite work, you’re still angry. There is a cure for that too! Endure no quiet moments! There is so much noise available, sought or not, that we can keep ourselves from moments that will… well, you get the idea. Stay busy, my friends, and you need never feel things that will cut you too deeply. Work hard, play hard, pass out, repeat. It works for many people, I don’t knock it, really (though I also do knock it, clearly).

Some consider pondering things like your own anger a form of masochism. That would be true if you used your anger against yourself, blamed and excoriated yourself for feeling something so ugly. I don’t advocate self-harm in any form, though you might not know it from my lifestyle, which involves, I suppose, a certain amount of it. To my mind, and my spine, there is a good benefit to sitting in a comfortable chair with difficult emotions, or taking them for a leisurely stroll. For one thing, these terrible emotions lose some of their power. When you sit next to a monster intimately tied to your life you will tend to feel more comfortable with, and less terrified by, the monster after a while.

Go down the list of the seven deadly sins [2] as an exercise. Take a fearless moral inventory, if you like. Note how the seven deadlies overlap. Do you regularly experience, say, jealousy? Deal with your feelings of envy by understanding where they come from. Your fucking older brother got all the credit while you got none, never, not once. Mom and dad beat the shit out of me, while my siblings got away with murder. My brother and sister literally murdered and dismembered people, in front of mom and dad, and my parents just laughed and gave them lavish gifts. If I set the table wrong, the salad fork on the wrong side of the entree fork, I’d catch a beating. A beating and not so much as a stick of gum, ever. You wonder why I’m fucking envious of the spoiled bastards all around me everywhere?

I’m not actually recommending anything. There is nothing to recommend. We all do what we need to do, constantly. Me, I need to draw, write, play music. Can’t help it, don’t sell any of it, even as all three things are done at an increasingly high level, a professional level, one might say. My problem, when phrased that way, is my stubborn lifelong refusal to even try to monetize any of several highly honed skills. On another note (accompanied by a lovely, old-timey minor 6th chord), I don’t give a fuck about this world of noise and strife when I am doing what I love.

Not to say that I love sitting with difficult emotions, but the obligation to sit with the stinking bastards comes with being sentient, as far as I can see. I’d have it no other way.

[1] I have written a bit about Sarno, you can read it here and follow the links for more information about Sarno’s radical, medically disparaged but true sounding, theories.

[2] Anger, jealousy, pride, lust, greed, gluttony, sloth.

Walking into a storm

It’s difficult to remember sometimes, but it is best to remain calm when you are walking into a storm.

Some people, I’ve come to understand, are riddled with anxiety under most circumstances. They will not remember what you talked about last time, because… oh my GOD!!! You cannot imagine what it’s like to live with constant anxiety, it has got to be the worst thing out there. I’m sure I can only begin to imagine it, only because I’m one of those people who take imagination seriously, seriously enough to practice it regularly. I’ve clung, you might say, to a childish refusal to lose the ability every kid has to wonder about mysterious or amazing things and picture the missing parts.

The walls in your house are constantly threatening you, they are not straight, they could fall, causing a terrible, agonizing death of broken bones and slow suffocation. There are a million things to do, crucial protective things that need to be done, and secrets also, terrible shameful ones that can crush you in an instant, but the real threat is that you can only remember to be aware of five or six of these key things at a time. But there are literally a million! So many more than can ever be controlled because they can’t even be named! And, of course, it’s the ones you forget that will bite you the hardest, bite you to death, with razor sharp teeth, row upon row of them.

“We had this conversation last time,” you might say, seeking to avoid going through the whole thing from the beginning, finding it hard to imagine all that talk was for nothing last time. Tbe anxious person will say you’re mistaken, eyes looking past you at an approaching catastrophe possibly just past your shoulder. You know, the whole thing can come tumbling down in a rage of fire and rocks, it happens all the time, but, actually, it’s very late and I have to go now, I should have gone an hour ago, I can’t believe I’m still here! The Bible may be bullshit, metaphor, whatever you want to call it, but the torments described in it are very real. Disbelieve at your peril. Put that pen back exactly where you got it from, it belongs next to the red one. The RED ONE! Next to the fucking RED ONE, do I have to explain every…. Oh, my God! Never mind! Just give it to me, give it to me, give me the pen, the pen, give me the goddamned pen!

Vocabulary word of the day: anodyne

I was, for many years, prone to writing any unfamiliar word I’d encounter on a bookmark (with the page number next to it) and immediately looking up its meaning in the dictionary. Then I’d read the sentence armed with this new knowledge and understand exactly what the writer meant by using the previously obscure word. This excellent habit was instilled in me by some wonderful teachers. I recall, in High School, taking the vocabulary sheets they distributed quite seriously. Little else they endeavored to teach me in High School meant very much to me, but expanding the number of words I could use to express myself clearly always made sense.

Now, with Jeevsie here, constantly by our side on the ubiquitous internet we carry around with us in our pockets, it is very easy to instantly have any unfamiliar word defined for us. So it was the other night, when, drawing some knives, relieved that my favorite pen was behaving properly after a few days of struggle with her, I suddenly, unaccountably, wrote the word ‘anodyne.’

After I wrote it (I recall now hearing it months ago from Noam Chomsky describing the ‘anodyne explanations’ we get for each of our most unjust practices) I immediately looked it up. Which took about 1.2 seconds with our modern data retrieval capabilities. What a handy little fucker of a word!

We prefer the anodyne to the difficult, without a doubt. An anodyne explanation usually smooths us down, a difficult conversation often churns us up. Take American slavery, for example. One can say, with great conviction and moral certainty, that it was a grave national sin that has not been practiced here for 150 years. Abolished forever a century and half ago, our Constitution amended to make it perpetually so. Done and done. Nice and anodyne, wouldn’t you say?

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like a little anodyne myself, once in a while. And you know how hard it is for me to lie.

Pharmaceuticals in America

I have no intention of researching and writing a piece about the folks who sell us legally prescribed drugs. For a small, bitter taste, you can read this short bit about the wealthy family who helped bring us the Opioid Crisis. Pharmaceuticals is a fantastically lucrative American industry up there with fossil fuels and munitions as far as the vastness of its profits. I have to make a few calls today to line up a new drug dealer for my irbestartan and atorvostatin, as well as the weekly megadose Vitamin D, $2.50 a pill, that I’ve been prescribed. The first two are generic versions of two famous patent drugs, Avapro and Lipitor. Of Lipitor my mother used to say “I luhhhhhv Lipitor!”. It seems to be lowering my cholesterol nicely, and not giving me any noticeable side effects, though I’m not sure I have the same passion for the little pill that my mother did.

Right after Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, became the law of the land I had a long chat with my local pharmacist, a sympathetic man named Bahdri. He was lamenting what he expected of the new law. He predicted that within five years all small pharmacies like his would be out of business. The turf was being handed over to huge pharmaceutical distribution companies that were set up to deliver prescription drugs to millions of Americans under the PPACA. It was the pharmaceutical version of Amazon. No need to walk into your local brick and mortar store to get the shit you needed, just order it and pick it out of your mailbox a couple of days later. Bahdri was gloomy about his prospects.

I liked my little local pharmacy. I’d been having one of the drugs delivered to my home by an outfit called CVS Caremark, it was done automatically when the new drug was prescribed. They’d send a ninety day supply of irbesartan. I’d save five or ten dollars over the copay at the pharmacy. I didn’t care about the few dollars, and arranged to have the prescription filled at Bahdri’s. I preferred helping to keep a small neighborhood store in business. As it turned out, I needn’t have been so solicitous.

Bahdri explained recently that the thirty day supply of one of the drugs cost the pharmacy $9 and my insurance reimbursed them a mere $1.37. This did not seem fair to me either. My new plan, a sort of pay as you go Medicaid, has no copay for drugs under a certain price (I paid a $10 or $15 drug copay on last year’s plan), and so Bahdri’s small store was getting screwed every time I walked in. Bahdri informed me that the large chain pharmacy across the street would also not fill my prescription, certainly not the ninety day version. He advised me to have the prescription sent back over to CVS Caremark. I told him I would, and I will.

Yesterday, being out of one of the drugs, I went to Bahdri’s to get four more 50,000 unit Vitamin D pills for the weeks going forward. I take these because, after numerous skin cancers have been removed from my nose (and one from my arm) I avoid the fucking sun as much as I can. The sun helps the body produce its own Vitamin D, or something like that. The sun is very good in many ways, no doubt, but I avoid it. This is no great sacrifice for me, as I stay up late, sleep late, spend my first few waking hours writing, wait for late afternoon most days to venture out. I take most of my exercise around sunset or after dark.

Anyway I ran into Bahdri’s yesterday early evening to get the Vitamin D and his assistant (Bahdri wasn’t there) told me they no longer accepted my insurance and that Bahdri had told me as much the last time I was in. I begged to differ, but my begging was not the kind of humble begging one usually associates with beggars. I told him exactly what Bahdri had said and stated, with a lawyerly flourish, that Bahdri had never told me “your business is not wanted here any more.” I suggested there was probably a law against a pharmacy denying a customer a prescription refill without some kind of prior notice giving the patient enough time to make other arrangements (I doubt there is, of course, Big Pharma was in on writing the law). I was beginning to get pissed off but reined myself in. The pharmacist did his best to counter each of these points, but he was overmatched.

I demanded to know the price of the Vitamin D. He hemmed and hawed. I told him a few more times to tell me the price. He consulted his computer. The four pills were $9.95. I tossed a ten dollar bill on the counter. He told me he could not take my money, it was against the law, since I have insurance. It was, he suggested humbly, sub silentio and without judgment, the kind of insurance only a homeless leper in his home country, an untouchable, might have. Leper was my word, actually. He was hurt that I had thrown the ten dollar bill at him. He couldn’t understand it, as he assured me it was nothing personal, they just do not sell drugs at a loss to contemptible paupers like me.

I appealed to basic fairness, made another idle threat about using a law that almost certainly doesn’t exist. He hemmed a bit, and then hawed some more. I told him to save his breath. He did. I was done strong arming him. One of the kids who worked there handed me the four pills, I signed for them, and left, holding up poor Bahdri and his store once again. Banned for life, like Pete Rose, from a store I have patronized for the last fifteen years or so.

So today, as on so many days, I have to make some long, trying calls, try to navigate the hideous compromise with decent health care for all (except for at least 27 million or so odd Americans [1]) that President Hope and Change was able to negotiate with the health care free marketeers who wrote the law, folks who graciously agreed not to string him up as long as he didn’t try to fuck with their bottom line.

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said “Fairness is what Justice basically is”. I’m not sure of the context of his remark, but I’m pretty sure they nailed that commie motherfucker to a cross and then burned the cross. You can’t say stupid shit like that here, not HERE, it’s just WRONG! SAD! Thankfully the guy we have now doesn’t need to be told any of this, or anything, really.

[1] This number went up somewhat dramatically in 2018 under President Highness’s rule, as he continues his tireless campaign to make America great again. As for the number of uninsured Americans cited above, it is based on the 2016 number, here is the source.

The War on Drugs

Like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs depends on breaking down doors in the middle of the night, dragging people off and putting all the bad guys out of commission. The war metaphor underscores the idiocy of this massive program which has locked up tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in American prisons. [1] War is a violent reaction to a thing that can most often better be addressed in other ways. Most war is waged, let us be frank here, for the profit of certain powerful parties who have others die for them in noble battle. When war is not profitable anymore, the lion will lie down and let the lamb snuggle against it. In the meantime, locking Americans up in privatized prisons is lucrative for the owners of those private prisons. We need to keep the beds full, or the entire industry could collapse.

Speaking of war as the answer to all problems, at one time we had a War on Poverty here too, until, as Ronald Reagan cracked, “poverty won.” It did indeed.

This is a somewhat random rant, as I have opined here several times about the moronic nature of this somewhat random War on selected criminalized drugs. As a society America is very fond of drugs, we are dependent on a host of medicines. If you have any medical condition whatsoever, we use drugs to cure it. Ads for various drugs are ubiquitous on television: Ask your doctor if Asseffex is right for you. If you are depressed: antidepressants. Anxious: anti-anxiety drugs. Can’t sleep: sleeping pills. Need to unwind after a stressful day: alcohol or a tranquilizer. Do you fart? take this. Does your leg sometimes shake? This drug cures RLS. The list is endless.

Let us be fair– which would you rather do, take a pill or delve into painful things and make hard choices about your life? Chronic sleeplessness cured by a pill or by doing the unpleasant work involved in understanding what is actually keeping you sleepless and making needed changes in your life? Go for the pill. I’m no-one to talk, I’ve been convinced to take a daily blood pressure lowering pill and a statin to control borderline high cholesterol. Would I need these if I lost the twenty pounds I need to lose? Hard to say, and something I may never know. A doctor friend convinced me to take these medications, she and her husband do. She made some convincing arguments and I was convinced. It’s very easy to take the two small pills every evening.

The War on Drugs is a war against certain mood-altering substances that the law chooses to criminalize. The prevailing attitude among national lawmakers about drugs that only serve to get a person high is that folks should talk to their doctors, or bartenders. Liquor stores are also a legal and readily available option. Meanwhile, countless poor bastards have been locked up for the crime of procuring or selling illegal drugs, including marijuana. The annual price tag for this lost War on Drugs was over $15 billion as of 2009. When you’re preventing evil, the sky’s the limit, I suppose.

Why do people become dependent on drugs? Despair, difficulty with feelings of hopelessness, anger, worthlessness. People take mood-altering drugs in an attempt to make themselves feel better. The moment when the effect of the drug is felt is a moment of relief for the drug user, the only time in their day when they momentarily feel OK. The moment when the effect wears off it’s back feeling shitty again for the user. It is not hard to identify these impulses. The hard thing is to be in the middle of a war on the thing that makes you feel a little better, in addition to all your other problems. Not to say people who get addicted to drugs don’t need help managing their pain, they certainly do, but being hunted and locked up does nothing to help nonviolent people who take something everyday because they feel shitty.

In the case of the futile, destructive, perpetual American War on Drugs, the efforts of our government to use criminal laws and punishment as the only cure for a deep psychological problem only reinforces what right wing extremists have been saying for years: shrink the government and drown it in a bath tub.

We have a fairly shitty medical system here in the U.S., almost nothing as far as our medical records is standardized. That’s because private enterprise is in charge. Our medical records are considered by these private corporations as proprietary information. The company that provided the service owns them, may charge you for copies of your own medical records in some cases. Here’s a hilarious, if also somewhat sour, note in our American medical records song and dance.

I went for a pre-colonoscopy visit to a gastroenterologist’s office. The first thing the person interviewing me asked was if I’m still taking oxycodone. That prescription popped up immediately on the screen when she put my name in.

I’d had the side of my nose sliced open in December, by a surgeon removing a basal cell so tiny it could not be detected by the dermatologist. I didn’t really understand why the eyebrow length incision was necessary, but I immediately understood, once the anesthetic wore off, that I was in considerable agony. The surgeon called in a prescription for tylenol with codeine. I took a pill and the pain quickly subsided. I took another one four or six hours later, whatever it said on the label, and a third before I went to sleep. I felt no appreciable high, but the pain was gone. I felt fine the next day and put aside the bottle with the remaining tablets in it.

“Are you still taking oxycodone?” the pretty receptionist asked.

No, I said, and explained about the intensely painful incision on the left side of my nose. The opioid prescription was the only medical information that popped up about me when she put my name into the medical database. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I am thinking of it now: good old Jared Kushner! The president had appointed him to cure the Opioid Crisis (which killed more Americans last year than military veteran suicides [2], homicide by firearm and many other common causes of American death) and, by God, Jared is on the case!

God bless these United States!

[1] Almost half of all federal prisoners are locked up for drug offenses.

“Among sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities on December 31, 2015, 15% (197,200 prisoners) had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious crime.”

[2] Check out the shockingly high number of suicides among female veterans, almost 600% the rate of female civilian suicides 2000-2010

link

Why so Pissed, El? (final)

There are many reasons to be angry, no doubt. Many reasons to be grateful for the miracle of life, also, though those reasons seem not to be as compelling, as demanding of action, as the reasons to be mad. I’m thinking about the myths we are fed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Not that every nationstate does not have its myths, every culture its signature values, but… fuck.

I think about the record disparity in income we have here now in the land of the American Dream. Men with $35,000 toilet bowls and others, homeless, arrested for shitting in an alley. What kind of disgusting person do you have to be to shit in an alley? Can you blame a cop for roughing up a despicable fucker like that?

America is ruled by advertising, has long been, but now the ads come directly to our pockets, targeted by algorithms that single us out by expressed preferences. We elect our public representives based strictly on advertising, branding and marketing. Everything we see or hear is “brought to you” by some corporation with the money to bring it. Sponsors pull out, the show is over. Ten million people used to watch that shit every week, then something that couldn’t be spun quickly enough is said by the host and, bye bye. Corporations taking principled stands. We will not support a celebrity who makes a stink when everybody else on TV supports the next war. Fuck that, we are Americans!

As individuals, we are powerless in the face of what is done in our names. The champions we are sometimes allowed to vote for, and I think of recent liberal icons who have been devoted, flexible servants of the status quo, Bill Clinton (the “best Republican president of the 20th century”, our “first black president”) and Barack Obama (“the first black president”), are also men who will make every necessary compromise without flinching. Every president has to pass the psychopath test before being put on the ballot of one of the major parties. Some are better than others, but each of them, in crunch time, will do what needs to be done. Usually that involves dropping some massive fucking bombs and selling billions in the latest killing technology to despots. Few of us get excited about it anymore. “It’s just the president being presidential,” spoken in the way disgusted but resigned Red Sox players and fans used to say “that’s just Manny being Manny”, referring to the mercurial superstar’s self-centered childishness.

So we cultivate honesty in our dealings with others. Sometimes that is more fruitful than at other times. Not everyone is comfortable with everything being on the table. Honesty, really, what is that shit actually? How fucking honest do we want to really be, anyway?

Many people I know have stopped watching the news. You have a famously rabid bullying (though obsequious to superiors, allegedly) war hawk from the Cheney-Bush administration, elevated to sit at the president’s right hand, foaming at the mouth about Libya-style regime change in Iran. Everyone recalls how well that went. The Koch brother’s personal former congressman, elevated to Secretary of State recently by the world’s greatest deal-making winner, vows the most severe sanctions in history if Iran does not stop pursuing nuclear deterrence against the U.S., does not stop meddling in the Middle East. He announces this with a straight face: Iran must get the fuck out of fucking Yemen or we will fucking fuck you up. Says this as we are giving massive military support to our close democratic friends in the House of Saud as they pour the explosions and famine on impoverished Yemen. So, to avoid massive aggravation, you tune out, turn off the news. Go on a nice vacation, come back, feel a bit better that life is still good.

Not a bad move, my friends. Take a nice trip, recharge your batteries. Look after your health. If there is nothing we can do about the kind of country we live in, the kind of world we leave to the future, at least grant us the serenity to accept that and try to live as well as we can. Our lives here are only the wink of an eye, after all, and each of us is suspended by a strand of a spider’s web during that wink. It behooves us to look within, find peace, be grateful for every beautiful thing in our lives, do a little good wherever we can. It does.

There is something perverse in me that cannot look away. I am driven to gather the available facts, try to understand, to put the jagged puzzle pieces together in this dark, stinking room. I am fucked up. I get that. But it is my life, and my world, and it burns me sometimes that, no matter how clear and convincing the truth is, that mere truth doesn’t mean shit against a nicely spun pile of steaming horse shit. Hell, in our new post-factual world, you don’t even need to spin that shit– just keep it constantly coming. Heh, you completely dizzy yet, motherfuckers?

A theory

I was thinking idly the other day, as I so often do, when an obvious theory presented itself to me as I walked. What makes a man a power-crazed, misogynistic, narcissist? How does a person become a rigid, sadistic asshole? As George Grosz famously said, to know this we have to study the humiliations the person underwent.

I had a friend who was the youngest of three boys. He never felt he got enough attention. His father seemed indifferent to him and his mother, a charming woman, apparently did not give him quite enough undivided attention when he was young. I’m not a psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but I could eventually see by the way he lived his life — intent on adoration, constantly disappointed and betrayed, rigid in any conflict, incapable of useful self-knowledge, needing to get the very best out of any and every deal– that he was a deeply damaged person. He could not avoid conflict, no matter how gently he tried to control the situation.

In the end these traits made him insufferable. It was his lack of insight into how extreme his personality was, as much as his quirks themselves, that finally tipped the balance. I later learned, from his oldest brother, that he has been unable to keep any friends. SAD!, yes, but not that big a surprise.

This poor devil had unrealizable expectations of life. He expected to be recognized for his musical genius (he was quite talented) and it burned him that even those closest to him did not give him the props he deserved. His father, for example, was unable to sit still for a long recital of recent piano works. Father and adult son sat together in a cousin’s apartment where the concert was played for an audience of one. As the composer played, his father, seated behind him, began flipping through the CDs on the rack next to him. He reported how his blood ran cold as the cases clacked, how his spine stiffened as he bitterly forced himself to play the remainder of the new opus for a father still totally unable to focus on his youngest son. I couldn’t help identifying a bit with the man forced to sit for as long as it took for him to finally recognize his son’s undeniable brilliance.

We, many of us, have unrealizable expectations of life. Others manage to realize these unrealizable things, which can serve to stoke our own unrealistic dreams. At times, it appears, these fabulous accomplishments lead one to sourly ponder the old “be careful what you wish for.” A terminally unhappy person, dreaming that climbing a certain mountain will make them happy, often finds empty bitterness at that peak as they stand there in what should be blissful triumph. Certain holes in the soul cannot be filled by accomplishments, no matter how lofty.

I was thinking of the most powerful man in the world. The first man in his job who is constantly attacking people from his phone. “The president attacked…” is a common daily lede for current news stories. He is an innovator, of a certain type. He has made himself part of history. From my point of view, my opinion only, he is not making himself a very inspiring part of history. He is, from all appearances, a bully unconstrained by anything but his own need to dominate others. How does a person get this way? Walking uptown last night I had a theory.

His father was known as something of a tyrant. He had inherited a small fortune, from a truly entrepreneurial father, and, from an early age (the father died when he was a young teenager) began single-mindedly building that small fortune into a huge fortune. His methods were sometimes unscrupulous, he cultivated political favors, took advantage of government programs for grants and tax breaks, but he built a huge fortune on his real estate empire. He had a beloved oldest son who had too much of a conscience, from what I can glean, to take the family fortune to the next level. They had a falling out, the heir apparent quit (and eventually drank himself to death) and the father had to go to his second choice, a younger son who was a discipline problem.

Much has been made of the relationship between the overbearing mentor father and his tiny million dollar loan and the boy sent to military academy to get some discipline, to become a man. The kid had crossed a line in his bullying when he bought a batch of switchblades, the better to rule his private school schoolyard, I suppose. After military academy the grooming of this young mogul-to-be began in earnest. I had a sudden thought last night– what role did the boy’s mother play in all this?

The man’s father was born to some wealth, and soon acquired fantastic wealth of his own. The mother had been born poor, was an immigrant. It is reported that she went personally to the laundromats they owned in her mink coat, driven by a chauffeur, to collect, and then count, the quarters from the washing machines. Nothing particularly unnatural about this, I think. I then thought of the effect on her children of this kind of grasping, coin-counting desperation to feel wealthy and important. The effect on the young son, seeing his dynamic mother trying to act like an aristocrat. What values could she have instilled in the boy? We can only judge these by the man’s behavior.

This very public man has made virtually no mention of his mother, outside of canned comments he repeated over the years about her being beautiful and brilliant. “An amazing woman,” he will say, using the same adjective he used to describe his Healthcare for All plan, the Wall to keep Mexican rapists out, the record size of the adoring campaign crowds who cheer him and every other product he offers for sale. I can only imagine, by his overt contempt for women (one only has to picture him lurking menacingly behind his hated rival Crooked Hillary during a debate) that his mother, in some fundamental way, gave him only conditional love and support. The kind of thing that plants lifelong bitterness deep in the heart. If love depends on being a certain way… well, what the fucking fuck? I’ll fucking be that way in fucking spades, bitch. I’ll show you that certain way! Goddamn it, you want a certain fucking way? Here you fucking go, you amazing woman.

(Amazing as my long inability to excavate this desk… find an agent, get to the top of that little mountain of dung I sometimes find myself daydreaming about.)

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use. We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship. We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive. Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar. Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone. Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare. Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend. More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media. It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment. Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El? This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid. If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house. When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money. If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest. This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel. Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino. Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl. It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be. In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make. Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual. I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in. This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme. You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable. Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars. For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple. You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying. Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better. Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand. As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water. Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product. You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand. It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term. You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible. Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense. Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc. Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El? This has always been the way of the world. You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism? Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist. He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office. I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire. Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society. He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency. The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today. OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad? Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours. It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy. Collateral Damage. Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason. Nothing to see here. Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved. It’s all good! We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say. The bottom line is the economy, stupid. The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard. You want humble people to be left alone? Where does that ever fucking happen? I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of? How does that happen if you want to be left alone? Asshole. Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes. Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck? More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant. I’m mad, yo. Get me to a laughing academy, eh?

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out. God bless.

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there. I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers. “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker. What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers. Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale. Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities). They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407. Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact: When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8. Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion. That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

One Day on Fifth Avenue

I must have been seven or eight, I think. I recalled this the other night and wanted to write it down but forgot about it until driving down Fifth Avenue in a friend’s car a few days later. Driving along the long stone wall along Central Park the forgotten incident flashed through my brain again.

I don’t remember much else about that day, except that, apparently, we had gone to the city by bus, from Queens. Maybe we drove in my father’s car and the Long Island teenagers my father took to the Jewish Museum had come by bus. I don’t recall if my sister and mother were there, but why wouldn’t they have been? This was more than fifty years ago.

After visiting the museum we were waiting on Fifth Avenue for the rented school bus to take us back to Long Island. This was decades before everybody had a phone in their pocket. My father, the director of the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea, a national Zionist youth movement (my father was fond, in those days, of imitating Arab leaders who referred to citizens of the Jewish State as “Is-rah-ale-eee Aggressors”) had a group of restless kids from the rural counties east of Queens lined up on Fifth Avenue. At some point he sent me up Fifth Avenue to see if the bus was coming. I walked off northwards on a mission.

About a block or so into my quest I was approached by three or four black kids about my age, maybe a year or two older. They moved in a group toward the wall and, being a suburban kid with no instincts about these kind of things, I veered in the wrong direction. I quickly found myself trapped between the kids and the wall. They demanded my money. I didn’t have any money, outside of a few coins that were in my pocket, mostly pennies. They took the change. It was less than a quarter’s worth. It may have been 8 or 9 cents, which, in those days, could buy you a candy bar and a few chunks of Bazooka gum.

They demanded to look through my pockets. I was wearing some kind of jacket and produced what was in the pockets. Outside of some tissues, which I always carry, there’s wasn’t much. There was some kind of small, flat box that slid open. Inside the box was a tiny pad and the ends of a few pencils, small enough to fit into the box. Even at that age I felt desperate if I didn’t have something to draw with on my person. The would-be muggers examined the box in disgust, pencils stubs falling to the cobblestones by the bench along the long stone wall. I recall one of them bent to pick up a pencil and hand it back to me. After the robbery they headed south, toward my father and the teenagers waiting for their ride.

From a short distance away I watched my father intercept them. “Get up on the goddamned bench!” he commanded, and they obediently hopped up on to the bench along the park wall. When I got closer he called out to me, as though I was a stranger, “hey, kid, did these boys take anything from you?” I shook my head, then noted the few trifles (they’d left me my box with the drawing stuff in it). My assailants coughed up some muddy coins, which my father handed to me when I reached him.

I remember him chuckling afterwards. “They probably thought I was an undercover cop,” he said. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was an adult man, over six feet tall, and they were a small band of children, prowling the wealthy strip by the park, looking for some coins to buy candy. I certainly don’t condone what the tiny predators were out there doing, but, I have to say, they were pretty decent about the whole thing, as far as that went. As far as I can recall, it was the only time I saw my father act the tough guy in public. It was more usual to see him acting this way, against the wall, back to the shelf with the toaster on it, firing live ammunition at me and my sister over the dinner table.

Why So Pissed, El?

I have a great memory, made of a moment that sucked in real time but which has become precious to me over the years. During one of our normal family fights at the dinner table I became furious. I must have been eight or nine, maybe younger.

My mother, who sat next to me, responded by grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. She shook me like a terrier shakes a rat, or a floppy rag doll version of a rat. In my memory I am limp, and being wagged in the rhythm of her words, almost syllable for syllable. Picture it: “what (shake) did (shake) any (shake) body (shake) ever (shake) do (shake) to (shake) you (shake) to make you so (shake) fucking (shake) angry?! (shake)”

I thought of my reply many years too late. It was one of those moments some clever grenouille dubbed l’esprit de l’escalier, the bon mot you think of after the fact, on the stairs, the perfect witty rejoinder realized moments too late to deliver. My missed line was an obvious one: I don’t know, mom, maybe being angrily shaken when I’m clearly pissed off and asked angrily why I’m so fucking angry?

I don’t offer this story as any kind of indictment of my mother, not at all. She never gave me reason to doubt her love. Those fights at the kitchen table were no holds barred, we were all in pure survival mode in the fog of war as we fired our rounds, lobbed grenades, ducked wherever we could. She and my father were as helpless as we kids were. I don’t hold it against either of them, at this point, it was just a tableau vivant (although not silent, but screaming) of the Human Condition.

I love the image of the mother angrily shaking her young kid and demanding to know why he’s so fucking angry.

I’m not writing this as part of my Mother’s Day or birthday card to my departed mother. Though I’d like to note here that an orthodox Jewish friend of her’s, Benjie, hearing that she was in a coma on her 82nd birthday, told me that it is considered a sign of a righteous life to die on your birthday.

My mother was miles away at the time, in a nice room at Hospice by the Sea, but she seemed to have heard this remark. She’d always fought with Benjie about what she considered the idiocy of a life ruled by religious ritualism. She hung on overnight and died a day after her birthday, that way winning one last argument with the religious friend she loved to fight with.

Why am I angry lately? On one level it’s the same reason my mother and father were so often angry. An imposed sense of powerlessness, frustration they had their faces rubbed in over and over. In reality I am no more powerless than anybody else, I just get more occasion to soak in it than most people I know, living on a small fixed income, as I do. And, of course, I have much more time to feel my feelings daily, being self-unemployed until I can start selling little slices of myself the way professionals all do. Few people can have any real understanding of the possible value of what you are putting together unless you sell it; once you are paid for it, all the work makes perfect sense.

We all live in the same viciously materialistic society, currently governed by a grasping, entitled madman who personifies its values to an alarming degree and is stinking up the common space with uncommon speed and effectiveness. The poor, the weak and the marginalized are vilified in our great democracy as greedy parasites, while the truly insatiable and powerful are celebrated. Yeah, yeah, I know, go write a letter to your Congressweasel… write an op ed, write your damned blahg, in fact, monetize it, win or go home, take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.

I had the same chance for a comfortable, successful middle class life as any of my hardworking friends, I know. It is unseemly of me to complain, really, having so flagrantly failed to cash in my winning ticket years ago. I could be running on a very fancy treadmill in really, really expensive running shoes. Instead of moralistically daydreaming about making any difference about anything, or even having a voice in the conversation.

So what is it specifically that is so maddening? We accommodate ourselves to the world we must live in. It is a place where only a microscopic fraction of humans have any say about what is done in our names. We learn as much as we can about the proper way to act and try to take as much solace as possible from doing what we believe is the right thing, from our sense of integrity. Having integrity of any kind is just one challenge of being a member of a dodgy species like our earth ruling, hubris-filled, existentially terrified homo sapiens. Homo sapiens, the self-named “wise man”, has figured it all out, everything except how to behave decently toward his fellow primate. Oh, and how not to destroy life on the planet while exploiting its bounty and striving to own and control everything.

Money, motherfucker, the only thing you lack, to give substance and reality to your fleeting, meaningless life, is a dump truck full of filthy lucre. Until you get paid, you ain’t shit. If you forget that for a minute, how about a long wait for a subway at night, a tight squeeze into the train with a thousand other powerless chumps too stupid to take a $45 cab ride home, remember now what you are? Next go visit a doctor here, wait a few hours for surly service, try to see a specialist — here, let us remind you again, bitch — you want to feel like you have integrity of some kind, with that laughably shit insurance? Hah! Yaw hilarious! Unless and until you get paid for what you can do better than someone else, friend, you ain’t a fart in the wind, let alone shit. Let that be a fucking lesson to you, ass-bite. Have a wonderful day!

(to be continued)