An unreasonable belief in Reason?

“Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

At least one reader finds these musings I post here a window into a tortured soul. For me, there is no torture involved. When I write I experience a kind of peace as I sort things out, comb through things that may be hard for me to understand or digest. Taking enjoyment or some kind of sustenance from this kind of contemplation is, no doubt, an acquired taste. A friend recently told somebody he’d rather die than be forced to grapple with his innermost thoughts on a page. Me, I’d rather grapple with my innermost thoughts on a page than die. Just me, though.

My friend’s comment got me wondering. What am I actually trying to accomplish by writing things here? I don’t promote myself; I put my late beloved cat’s name as the author of these pieces. I don’t compile them and send them for publication somewhere that might pay me for this work. I am not connecting myself to a network of like-minded souls. What the hell am I doing here?

I realized the other day what might be at work, at least in part. An arguably unreasonable belief in the power of Reason to shine a light on an often irrational world. Seeing intolerable things, like a political party willing to de-fund the government and hold a nation hostage to an ideological demand while spending billions on a secret torture program, trillions invading countries that pose no threat to the U.S., murdering on a vast scale in the name of old saws like “freedom” and “democracy”, I feel I need to somehow put things in perspective, articulate my position. The powerlessness one feels can be overwhelming. So I put my best arguments for that puckish abstraction Reason here.

That the world is not run by the wise, or even the reasonable, is clear. In the realm of our personal choices, and in the face of the irrationality of human society, we strive to be smart, to learn from mistakes, to not repeat the unpondered lessons of our personal history. The most painful feeling is finding oneself in the same situation over and over, what a brilliant maniac friend tagged as the Repetition Compulsion. It is easier to see in others than in ourselves– doing the same thing over and over: trusting, helping, attacking, saying too much, too little — and finding oneself in the same regrettable place.

In my case, I was raised by fearful adversaries. Before I had any say in the matter, I was cast as a dangerous opponent. Puts one on ticklish footing, being cast this way as a child. After more than 40 years of battles to the death a dying father says “I deeply regret having been so impaired all my life and taking it out on you and your sister. You were right to try to reach out to me, as you valiantly did for many years; I was wrong to keep myself out of reach. I was afraid my whole life, seeing the world as black and white, and I see now how impoverished my life was by not fighting that fear.” You can’ t make this kind of shit up. The echoes of these painful disconnections reverberate through one’s life, influence our behavior, set our course in life.

So I use the time here to muse, to ponder, to make myself clear, to myself as much as to any reader. There is probably a line between “therapy” and “art”, I don’t know where it is. The tools I have are my willingness to muse and my practiced desire to express myself as clearly as possible. What these things are worth, I cannot say. They have always been with me and no doubt developed as I struggled to make sense of the senselessness I came up in, to become the capable parent I never had.

It has been shrewdly pointed out that work is the curse of the drinking class. If we do not work, and we do not drink, what is left, how do we spend our time here? If we work but receive no payment, what is our work worth? These are questions one does not often think to even ask, unless one neither works for pay, nor drinks. Work is the greatest and most universally embraced form of therapy there is– it takes up most of one’s time, sets a schedule, provides clear reasons for action and regular, tangible rewards. including a paycheck. Work allows one to prioritize things in an easily understandable way that makes perfect sense. Work first, play later. Work hard, play hard. If you work hard it is important to play hard, and one earns the right to do so.

Hard work gives meaning to life, a sense of accomplishment, a certain status. On a societal level, lack of meaningful, remunerative work is a main reason countries with massive unemployment, like L. Paul Bremmer’s Iraq, become powder kegs– men with guns and no jobs, no prospects for accomplishment except for raging against those who keep them from the dignity of a life of productive work.

Is it unreasonable to believe it’s possible to think one’s way out of a painful cul de sac? I don’t know. I only know it is worse to be in a bad situation without hope of an exit. We dream of a way out, we conceive of it, design it, take our best steps toward creating it — all better things than staring at a wall and seeing only our confinement.

Depressed Eagle

An old friend from High School I’ve seen only a couple of times in the decades since emailed to apologize for being out of touch. He referred to this blahg as a window into my tortured soul and then supposed he could unsubscribe. Fortunately for me, he was inspired by the endless scroll of arguably depressing musings here to create and send this, which cracked me up. May it have the same effect on y’all:

The Bitterest Use of Silence

In my experience, having been sensitized to it young, strategically deployed silence is one of the most effective and damaging expressions of rage out there. It has the great virtues of ease and simplicity– plus the razor sharp double edged bonus of deniability. Not all silence falls into this category, of course. Much of it does not. But those angry people who feel entitled to their rage can make excellent use of the simple device of saying nothing in return. The real beauty part, it can be used again as a clever bludgeon if the party put to silence ever whines about it. “Oh, Boo HOO! Silence…. oh, dear….”

Here’s how it operates: take an unbearable pain in your own life. Maybe it was a mother who, from your earliest memories, regarded you with hatred and whipped you across the face. Hard to recover from that one. One will do one’s best not to repeat that in one’s own life, but the cards are stacked against you. You will have to deal with some version of the following:

My son is brilliant, but he’s got a grievance against me, has been my accuser from the time he was born. Now he wants my approval. Let me do the math: not giving him the approval he wants versus being humiliated over and over by an insane and violent mother? He has a lot to complain about, this pampered, angry boy. I will say nothing, let him deal with a world as cruel as you like, but one ten times more merciful than the one I managed to survive.

One vice of heavy duty victims is comparing the pain of others to their own and always finding other people’s pain a pale and pathetic wannabe pain. I was the victim of incest by a beloved family member, you want my sympathy because your boss called you a cunt? Silence, I say, waiting with a slight smile for that delicious moment when you feebly accuse me of not caring just because I said nothing.

I never got a dime from my parents, nor even the respect of a thank you for the many services I did for both of them when they were dying. You didn’t inherit enough from yours to make you independently wealthy? Boo fucking hoo. Get a job, loser, instead of dreaming you’re special enough to be the change you want to see in the world.

I am the most talented person I know, yet you don’t hear me whining about my lack of recognition. I go to work, live in the world, do not whine about my creative efforts being unappreciated, myself being unlionized. And, dude, I am much, much more talented than you. So, yeah, sue me if I don’t have any comment on your wonderful hobby “art”. Oh, boo hoo hoo. Silence…. oh, my… pobrecito!

Etc.

It may seem a small thing to someone lost in a world of anger now, but I have seen my father’s regrets as he was dying. It was a terrible thing to see a man with all the tools to have been a great friend, a loving father, bereft because he had been unable to separate himself from his pain enough to do either of those things. Terrible for its own sake and in its timing, because all that was left for him was death, and he had become wise, and grasped the simplest and most beautiful of human truths, too late.

He may have been putting on a play for me, trying to do me a final favor after decades of putting walls and heavy stones in my way, but I prefer to think his regrets were real. He had defended himself against his pain as well as anyone could have, heroically, if tragically, since it came at the cost of true friendship and the warm, direct love of those closest to him. He had deprived himself of the most important things in life, in order to cower behind a brittle sense of invulnerability.

I don’t judge the man. It’s hard to imagine how anyone recovers from what he was subjected to in a childhood of unimaginable pain and humiliation. I’m not comparing the pain of being whipped in the face daily with the pain of a father turning his face away at important moments. I merely note that if you set out to hurt somebody who asks for your point of view, while maintaining that all important sense of superiority, silence is a beauty way to go.

A Few Thoughts on Madness

My only visit to a locked mental ward was to see a friend incarcerated in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. When I left I waited for the elevator in a dingy space between the ward for men and the ward for women. A woman was screaming, part of her face visible behind the medieval looking screen over the tiny window in the metal door. From the sounds of it she was being tortured while the guards read magazines, ostentatiously pretending not to notice. It took a long time for the elevator to arrive and the woman begged for my help the whole time.

I’d been visiting a friend who had been committed to this ward for refusing to be admitted voluntarily after a few weeks of increasingly bizarre behavior. This meant that police with guns came to the suburban house where he was holding court, arrested him as a possible danger to himself and others (it’s unlikely he actually was, though he was clearly crazy) and took him to a room where they held him for several hours as they processed his paperwork and decided what to do with him. We watched him for a rueful moment through the one-way mirror. I remember he just sat there, still, and we saw him in profile.

The locked ward in Elmhurst, where the State in its mechanistic wisdom brought him next, was a scary place. It was more a prison than a hospital, I thought during a short visit before he was transferred to a less restrictive section of the hospital a few days later. Our friend seemed to hold his own there, pacing, glowering, vibrating with an energy that was disconcerting to watch. It was an energy that most of the ambulatory men in that large, dingy day room seemed to have.

Before witnessing this breakdown I had a romantic notion about the fluid line between madness and sanity, seeing it more as a social construct involving conformity than a hard line. I learned that it is, at times, a hard line; there is little subtlety involved when someone is having a full-blown episode of being batshit crazy. There are plenty of eccentric, pain-filled, maladjusted, tormented, impractical, melancholic, aggressive, self-destructive, absurdly demanding people in the world who nobody would claim are completely mad. It may be said that most lives, examined for more than a moment, are tinged with irrationality, ruled by destructive beliefs, misperceptions, shifting angers, ill-shaped grievances, avoidance, bottomless sorrows. Or maybe this only describes the people I have met. There is always that possibility.

Anyway, this friend emerged OK, went back to work, continued courting his new girlfriend, soon to become his difficult wife. Things were fine until a few years later, when I had a series of shrill, early morning calls from the difficult wife demanding that I drive to Greenpoint and take care of my friend, who was barking mad again.

When I arrived at their door she pushed him out, without his keys or wallet, and locked the door behind us. This woman is vicious, full of self-important opinions, demeaning, demanding, narcissistic, reserving the right to rage. A thoroughly unlikable person. Though we got along for fleeting periods of time over the years, I think of her, for shorthand’s sake, as Hitler. She is certainly as implacable as the famous psychopath. Although, on that day, after a few minutes with my friend, I realized that she had been pushed to this desperate, if harsh, maneuver.

My friend was clearly manic; he was cheerful as hell, spoke quickly, his great intelligence swerving the conversation from one difficult to grasp idea to the next. His eyes glittered with a combination of merriness and malice. He had partially shaved his head, giving him an excellent look for his new attitude. He was very thin, clearly had not been feeling the need to eat for some time. I tried to get him to eat something at the nearby McDonald’s, but he wisely declined.

Fifteen or twenty hours later, at my wits’ end by now and realizing that the only help for my friend would come from skilled professionals, I made him a plate of pasta in my apartment. He agreed that he should eat something. Then as he sat down he turned to me and said something so provocative, so vicious and uncalled for, so perfectly aimed at my greatest vulnerability, that I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, lifted him from the chair and slung him toward the door of the apartment, intending to shove him into the hall. I am not proud of this moment, though neither am I unduly tormented by it. Every human has his or her limit, and that now forgotten cruel comment as I was trying to get my insane friend to eat something was mine.

He grabbed me by the throat. I grabbed him by the throat. It was a moment when raging insanity was about to prevail. In a moment of inspiration I lurched forward and kissed him, on the lips. He laughed. I relaxed my grip on his neck, he let my neck go. I patted him on the back, told him to go eat, and went into the shower to blow water out of my face and try to regain myself.

A few hours later, somehow, I had him at the mental hospital, this time without police. No locked ward this time. He was restrained on the gurney, however, and I recall seeing him in profile spit a Haldol pill into the doctor’s face. They wheeled him away. The next time I saw him he was in the hands of a psychiatrist who became convinced my friend had been misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. Treated as bipolar, on a long-time regimen of Lithium, he has had no recurrence of mania in the twenty or so years since.

Knowing that Lithium is eventually fatal, he weaned himself off the drug. He’s been maintaining himself with Zen meditation, achieving a certain clarity that included the realization that one can not live a happy life sharing a home with Hitler. He finds comfort in cult-like settings, he tells me, and has found a nice group of people he meditates with. He found a woman there he is very fond of and has a lot of sex with. His wife broke the window of his rented room in a jealous rage over this and he obtained a restraining order against her. She somehow got one against him. The divorce is not going to be smooth sailing, but then, how could it be?

We check in from time to time. The dispirited period I am going through makes it harder than usual for me to reach out, but we talk every month or so. He reports that he is mostly content. I nod, since regular and good sex with its steady flow of life-restoring endorphins will have that effect on a person’s outlook.

The last time we spoke he was keen to taste the single malt I keep on a high shclf and have been refraining from drinking, being depressed enough without imbibing depressants. He began singing its praises. He does not keep it at home, fearing to fall into the bottle himself, but loves to drink good stuff from time to time at the home of a friend. I told him I’d prefer not to drink, and explained why, but later gave him a snort, against my better judgment, which led to having a few myself. I felt like shit the next day and haven’t touched it since.

Had a call from him the other day, for the first time since. “B is such a good friend to you,” he said, “he helps you with your business, and brainstorming, and trying to get your apartment shaped up, he hauls boxes of things to Good Will, puts his back into it, really cares about your well-being. He seems like such a good guy and I feel bad that I’ve made such a bad impression on him. He probably sees me as a guy who is always sucking around looking for something from you. Dragging you back into well-worn bad habits you’d just as soon pick up. To him I must look like Lampwick from Pinocchio, my ears slightly donkeyish as I persuade you to uncork the bottle, pour us just a drop.”

I agreed that this was likely the case, refraining from saying there was a certain accuracy to the image.

“I’d appreciate it if you could let him know that I’m not really that way. If I ever meet him again, and I hope I do, I’d hate to think he has such a poor opinion of me. Would you set him straight?”

We talked for a while more, he described the likely end of his period of unlimited sex, how the younger woman was very practically looking for a mate her own age, to have a child with, and how he could probably not hold on to her much longer. He told me she was compassionately trying to set him up with another woman in the group, and that he had certain hopes for this new one. He observed in passing that I am depressive. I described some semi-comical recordings I’d made recently, and an aggravating piece by the often aggravating David Brooks that I had annotated.

“Send them to me!” he said emphatically. I had stopped sending creative things to him because of his penchant for remaining silent. We have been over this time and again in the past, my sensitivity to the easy slight of silence, when even “nice” or “ah hah” suffices to break the bitterness. My father had been severely abused as a child and his cruelty translated often into the strategic, viciously ungenerous withholding of attention or comment. This regular practice had sensitized me to the chillingly brutal power of complete silence in response to a query or creative effort. I have stopped sending things to people I rarely hear back from, particularly those who attempt no creative work themselves. His silence had become conspicuously dependable. “Send them to me,” he said again. I told him I would and later that day did.

“By the way,” he said, by way of providing an excellent punchline, “I was thinking… if it’s OK with you…. you know, heh…. that I could come by for a drop of that excellent single malt today. I have a few hours before I have to go see my girl.”

Neither of us laughed then, though it is very droll, if you think about it. As droll as the silence into which the things he asked me to send him dropped.

Freakshow

If you had a camera in here, recording my steps around this crowded apartment, you would see the steps circling endlessly back to this chair with the excellent view of this computer screen. To either side of the screen, and in front of the keyboard, drifting piles of beautifully colored ink drawings, like sand dunes seen through a prism.

“Why don’t you shut the computer off and just clear off the kitchen table?” a reasonable voice asks.

The camera would show me nodding, powering the machine down, stepping away from the computer, into the kitchen, looking at the table. An hour’s work, one would estimate. Put the blood pressure monitor somewhere, take away the power cord from the macBook, put away the cable for the iPod. Remove the two wire book stands, collapsed and interlocking, lying interspersed with various small items, most of which, although they’ve been there for years, should be discarded. Move away the cutting board, unplug the disconnected phone, put the unit in the electronics recycling bag.

Then just go through that raft of papers, most of which can be thrown away or shredded after a glance. There is even a prize at the bottom of that Crackerjacks box, in addition to a clear work space to prepare food, eat a meal not propped on your lap. Under those hillocks of papers, hopefully, is the card with the new return address of your old friend’s widow. You’d like to write back to her, wouldn’t you?

But first, the steps lead back to the computer, power it on again, just a little sit here, see what’s doing, just a moment. That snow storm, winter storm warning still in effect, what time is it now supposed to hit Queens and when do I need to leave here in order to shovel out from under it without being caught in it? Etc.

This is all undeniably a bit freakish, and worrisome. Just a moment’s pondering and I see it is just a fragment of a larger freak show all around. We leave aside things like $81,000,000 paid to two psychologists to reverse engineer a torture program nobody seems very upset about. Here there is a car going 75 mph on the interstate, accelerating onto a lane of hidden ice with the thought to go 80 in the HOV lane. Here is a man issuing periodic and alarming reports from hell, describing a relentless monster wife and an unbearable life, now suffered for over twenty years. There a man tells his longtime wife that their marriage has been over for a decade and shakes his head at her angry display of shock. Here a man calls an old friend and complains that he is often seen as using the man, dragging him back into the weeds of bad old habits. He urges his recovering alcoholic friend to intervene, for the sake of his reputation, tell them it isn’t so, that he is a good friend, and then… by the way, if you don’t mind…. if I could prevail on you … do you still have that bottle of excellent single malt? The examples are too numerous, the exceptions too few… it is all a gorgeous, swirling landscape of barely concealed madness.

There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to the thief. I will just tap here a few seconds more and now …. if you will excuse me… I must be…. on my way.

A Few Thoughts on Friendship

I foolishly tackle a huge subject, attempting to extract a kernel of something here, before plunging into my list of many times put off tasks.

People who share our most deeply held beliefs, or passion for something we love, unless otherwise repellent, are easy to become friends with. There are drinking friends, and sports friends, and so forth, people we become friends with because of shared interests and good times spent together.

I have heard there are also business friends, people we meet who can help us advance our fortunes, and these are also cultivated as friends by most intelligent people. There are other intelligent people who lack even the basics of practical knowledge of advancing oneself in the world, they may be idealistic, but are ultimately a sad and perplexing lot.

The true friend, whose faults we can always overlook because of the great comfort we derive from their company, is extremely rare. Humans are fucked up, take a look at history, an unending scroll of rage and violence stained with blood and shit and scattered with torture devices. It is a miracle that we can find true friends, given the terrain, but it is also our greatest blessing to find a kindred soul.

Some Greek, possibly Socrates, maybe Aristotle Onassis (it was Plato, actually), divided people according to the preponderant part of their natures: Appetitive, Glory Seeking, Truth Seeking. All three parts comprise each soul, but individuals are driven by the dominant part of their nature. Just societies, this opinionated Greek opined, are ruled by that minority who seek truth, fairness and goodness above all else.

Our society is dominated by the ravenous appetite, and a love of out-sized glory, and the easiest thing to do with the meek ones who seek slippery abstractions like the common good is to mock and piss on them. You know what I’m saying. Bring Jesus back and pious billionaire Christians would instantly crucify him again, secretly, and destroy all traces of his visit.

And here we have the beginning of the rub that has been rubbing me for some time. How difficult it is to strive towards our higher nature without judging those who hold themselves to a more general standard. Nothing is more insufferable than a person who takes their virtue seriously.

I think back to a few I’ve considered friends, who revealed themselves, over time, to be driven to dispute, wrestling with their demons, given to outbursts of anger followed by lack of remorse or apology, incapable of refraining from hurtful behavior, while feeling virtuous. Like everyone else who has ever acted, feeling completely justified in their actions.

The retired judge who speaks convincingly of an abiding plague of our times: honor anemia. People’s contributions are slighted by lack of recognition, which is demoralizing, he points out. The few who are honored are often the least deserving. The man speaks the name of his own syndrome, an abiding and deep seated lack of respect, like Rodney Dangerfield but without the laughs. And behind that honor anemia lurks the virtue he believes in himself to be unassailable, no matter what else the facts of his life may have to say about the exact nature of those virtues, and a rage to defend these self-perceived virtues to the death. One may continue to be friends, as long as one accepts the playing field– certain buttons will set off explosions and woe unto the person who presses these buttons.

The former leftist, now a politically independent defender of Sarah Palin, who cannot restrain herself from sending political diatribes blaming liberals for terrorism, murder of police and every other plague of our divided, bleeding society. A woman of otherwise considerable insight, she has promised time and again to refrain from provocations on politics. Blacks (and many others) are upset because young black men, unarmed, are regularly killed by the police, in numbers disproportionate to their numbers in society? Her reply is quick: what about all the black on black violence? How come, she asks, guilty white liberals show so little concern over that?

You are insane, friends tell me, to have a correspondence with this woman. How many times has she promised not to send you political emails? How many times has she failed to honor that promise? What do you call someone who promises one thing and does the opposite? Let’s not call names here. It is true, though, I am insane to believe this person is a friend, no matter what other good things I may share with her.

“I can’t help it. I know it’s wrong. You are so gentle, trying so hard not to get angry. You are admirably walking on the high road. I applaud what you are doing, the great progress you have made. But I can’t help it, once in a while, I just… I know it’s not right, but I have to give you a bloody nose. It’s not you, it’s me, I know, and I pray you will forgive me. I have tried to get insight into my rage, my isolation, my fear, my hatred. The best I can make out is that I value a meek friend like you I can bloody and dependably be forgiven by. You restore my faith in mankind, a pretty unredeemed bunch. You understand, don’t you? Please….”

Priapic Corporatism

The corporation, American jurisprudence holds, is a person. It is a sort of idealized rugged individual type person, having no need for anything but profit. It also has an insatiable, if impersonal, sexual appetite, with the legally constructed and indefatigable organs to sustain this voraciousness endlessly.

What makes me think of this today? A call from a female robot, threatening to cut off my health insurance if full payment is not made by January 30. This was especially aggravating since I’d made full payment on January 21 and had the email confirming payment. I snarled the command to connect me to a representative and then was put on the queue as if I’d called the 800 number.

If you are an Anthem customer or member of the Freelancer’s Guild, press one, if you are a health care provider, press two, oprime el tres si no entiendes ingles, then muzak interrupted by the standard, sincere, reminders about how important my business is and urging me to stay on the line.

My blood began to simmer as the ten second muzak loop continued to blare. Welcome to America, land of the bottom line– our only business is business. You powerless cocksuckers will wait on hold to be placed on hold while the corporation gives you the chance to find out why you were threatened with cancellation of a policy you have already paid the premium for.

In only ten minutes Mark is on the line, apparently having a hard time making out the spelling of my name. That D, he asks if it is a G. “D as in dog,” I say and he hears E. D as in David works. Then I go through a similar exercise with my first name, he reads back an Aleutian name instead of the one on my policy. In a moment he sees the same confirmation of payment I am looking at. He asks me to please hold for just a few minutes while he checks something.

“I’m not going to hold, I’m going to get a call back from a human being apologizing for this aggravating error by the corporation you work for,” I tell him and he agrees. “Do you have my callback number?” I ask him and he says he does, reads me back the number of the robot who called fifteen minutes earlier to inform me that my health insurance is about to be terminated for nonpayment of the January premium. I give him the correct number, he promises to call back in a minute, and I begin shoveling a cubic ton of snow, snarling as I do.

In a moment he calls back. Empire generated bills for two month cycles in 2015, this one was for January and February. Presumably for corporate convenience, saves money on billing, like using robots to call customers and nag them for payments, instead of wasting humans who have to be paid to make these calls. Since I’d only been required to pay January’s $471 and not the $942 that would have paid for my excellent Obamacare health insurance through March 1, I’d paid only half of the bill, the half I was legally required to pay. You get the math here? Pretty straightforward.

I thought of the ungodly mechanical sexual apparatus of the American corporation, and how it thrusts endlessly onward, upward, downward, sideways, relentless and insatiable. And I saw another American president, this one very articulate, witty and smooth, smiling next to it, admiring the vigor of the machine that makes him an obscenely wealthy and powerful man.

Apathetic Paralysis

“Don’t say ‘can’t’,” she said again. “It’s not that you can’t do things, you can. It’s that you don’t make yourself do them.”

“A distinction without a difference,” he said.

“No,” she said, “saying ‘I can’t’ means you’re incapable of doing them and it is far different from not making yourself do things you are clearly capable of.”

“Is it really?” he said. “If I don’t do something I am clearly capable of, something I want to do, something it frustrates me not to be doing, doesn’t it mean, for all practical purposes, that I can’t do it?”

“It means you won’t do it,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t”.

“The beggar says to the woman in the mink coat ‘please help me, I haven’ t eaten in three days’….” he said.

“And the woman says ‘force yourself”. Yes, you are very witty, Shlomo, but better to use your energy for seriousness at the moment,” she said.

“Energy?” he said.

The conversation was a circle, it moved like the hands on a clock that had long ago given up trying to keep time. It would move in a circle and stop, sit in the dark, and when the light went on again, it would continue to pointlessly circle.

Game for Suckers

Here is a snapshot of the rules of this game for suckers.

Put your savings in a bank, the way one was encouraged to do for generations by thrifty adults. Your savings will nowadays earn less than 1% interest and you will get a 1099 at the end of the year with this interest ‘income’ on it. This interest gets added to your taxable income and you will pay the same rate on it as you do on the rest of your income.

Keep your money in a diversified portfolio, as people who are more successful, or simply luckier economically, do, let a financial manager take care of the tricky details and earn an average, over time, of 7-10% annually. Leave the money grow, it will come in handy later on. The interest on this money will be taxed at a substantially lower rate than the rest of your income, if at all.

Game for suckers? That’s so harsh. As my father often reminded me, JFK famously said “life’s unfair.” Dig it.

Reason vs. Rationale 2

Human beings don’t do anything without a reason. Whether that reason is a prudent application of Reason arrived at after weighing various likely outcomes is another question. You can see the reasons behind the actions of every villain in Shakespeare, though you may find them repellent reasons. Nobody, even the worst people in the world, does anything for no reason. With the possible exception of me writing this at this particular moment.

I have many other things to do, things that are pressing. Yet I prefer to tap these keys, enjoying the clatter the keys make, a kind of kinetic music that is, at the same time, the opposite of kinetic. I am wondering about reasons, and how they differ from mere justifications, while finding no reason to act, outside of massaging this keyboard.

A reason that is reasonable is different from a rationale, which is often giddily free of Reason. “WTF?” texts somebody who has stumbled on unspeakable carnage. “Freedom on the March!” bellows the rationale.

“Have you considered that you may have turned the corner, are headed resolutely toward the deep end?”

“Your request is denied,” he snaps, by way of reply.

“‘By way of reply’?” she asks. “I am totally confused…”

“Confusion denied,” he snaps, confidently.