Depressive Meditation # 1

In the shower just now, the hot water falling in a lovely cascade, I put my head against the tiles and thought how nice it would be to have a cry.  The water felt so good, the warmth flooding over my skin, and instantly connected me to a sense memory of my earliest life.

Or so I surmise, based on a story my mother told me more than once.  I was a cranky, challenging, surly infant, I’m told, a defiant little chap who would often fret or rage for no apparent reason.  The only thing that would reliably calm me, it turns out, was a nice warm bath.  I would unclench my tiny baby’s fists and my creased brow would smooth itself out.  I would suddenly grow calm and content, suggesting to me that I must often have felt cold as an infant and that my parents’ lack of insight into this is why I was pissed off so often.   I don’t remember this directly, of course, but I recall my mother’s description of it much later in my life.

It is this memory, I suppose, of my mother telling me how the warm water would instantly calm me, as well as the calming influence of the warm water itself, that makes the wonderful feeling of the warm water hurtling down so poignant to me.   The skin is the body’s largest sense organ, and a very sensitive sense organ it is.  The warm water instantly changes the temperature of the skin, which on days when I give in to the feeling, makes me put my head against the tiles, rub my hand over the top of my head, and try to give in to the urge to have a good cry.  

Tears, alas, so rarely come.

Formula for Fighting Dread

Easy to forget when discouraged, and annoying to be reminded of when filled with dread:  

Each thing you dread, that you manage to do, will remind you that the dread is almost always worse than the actual doing of the thing you dread. Often, doing the thing you dread turns out to be nothing at all.

Can you feel the weight of dread lift off you?

Not in advance, of course not, it’s unimaginable.  But afterwards, probably so.

 

A Flash of False Insight

 

Are you familiar with that flash of a unifying thought that seems to answer several questions at once?  A thought that suddenly, and at once, explains what you could not previously get a grip on no matter how hard you pondered it?

I remember an odd moment years ago when a friend came up with messianic fervor in his eyes speaking a name over and over, a name I’d never heard.  By this incantation he was trying to impart such a moment of insight, the ah-hah moment when it all became clear to him.  It turns out he was speaking the name of a charismatic lead singer, a man who, my friend believed with great and palpable relief, was going to help take my friend’s music to the toppermost of the poppermost.  My friend makes a good living today, lives in a nice house in an excellent neighborhood, but the partnership with the singer never worked out and he does not live off the royalties of his many fine songs.  The singer himself has made his way in another field entirely, never spent a moment on the pop charts anywhere.

Words jump out at us according to our own magnetic qualities, what we see is many times the product of what we are looking for, the lens we look through.  I recall my father reading a piece I wrote about him during the decades I was still trying to connect with him as something other than an adversary.  “Weird?” my father said at the end, repeating one of 1,000 words incredulously.  “Weird?” he said again, his voice pitched in a strange cadence, a peculiar, almost wry, expression on his face.  And he kept saying it, “weird?” in a way I think even he would be forced to admit, was a little weird after a while.

One stray word or thought in an otherwise well-played campaign of words can queer the whole deal, as they used to say.  I wrote a letter in a very difficult situation, maintaining a certain dispassion all the way through, I thought.  My friend read it and nodded, until he put a finger on a single word at the end of the last sentence, a word which whipped my mask off and revealed the snarl I’d been restraining the whole time.  It was an adjective, “cynical”, which, applied to the letter of reprimand I was replying to, made it clear that all my restraint and even-handedness had necessarily been employed answering something only a piece of shit would force me to respond to.  Once he pointed to “cynical” I had no doubt as to its effect on the insane jackass who would be reading my letter, as well as its effect on her superiors, my real audience.  I removed the offending adjective and the letter was as fine as such a letter can be.

I’m reminded of this plucking things out as they strike us by a reaction to a post I put up here the other day, taking a bold and principled stand against suicide (he said, without a trace of self-mockery).  I’d given a couple of examples of a monster that preys on the souls of those we know well, easy for us to see but elusive and untamable for the person struggling with the monster.  I gave the illustration of the freelancer whose phone doesn’t ring for a while and who goes to a dark place next door to his own death by starvation.   There are many factors and variables in a freelancer’s life, and there is a lot of stress inherent in depending on the phone to ring for your work.   It’s better than some jobs, and ideal for some lifestyles (particularly when work is easy to come by) but the uncertainty of it can be as stressful as the most oppressive full-time job, with none of its security.

The point I was trying to illustrate by the example was seemingly lost on this reader, a freelancer who sometimes finds himself between dark, starvation thoughts when he gets no work and the sickeningly overworked state when he takes on too much work.  To him I had merely captured the undeniable dilemma of the freelancer.  Play your banjo without a care when you have no work and the whole freelance gig can slip away entirely for lack of attention.  There is irrational fear and there is rational fear, he reminded me, and a balance to be struck.  There’s no point lumping them into one bouillabaisse for the sake of an illustration.   The point I was trying to illustrate is that some people are not programmed, as many I know are, including myself, to dwell painfully on the worst case scenario when things are looking particularly bad.

Robin Williams’s dead body was not even buried when reports of his possible Parkinson’s diagnosis came out.  The healthy 63 year-old, according to this theory, saw himself as a deteriorating cripple in a wheelchair and decided to take his belt, twist it around his neck and take a flying leap before he wound up a pain-riddled, speech challenged, vegetable. What would Michael J. Fox, for one, have to say about that decision?  Ali?   Whatever the actual terror, Robin jumped to the darkest possible conclusion, and to his death, the demons and monsters that had pursued him for years hanging off his twitching ankles, yanking as the oxygen of his last breath ran out in his bloodstream.

Not everybody, dear reader, goes to this dark place.  It is a shame that anyone does, especially when the person is as brilliant, inspired and, by every indication, as good a man as Robin Williams seems to have been.  That’s all I was trying to say.  And that there are gradations to the darkness and a range from a bad feeling, to worry, to gnawing fear, to the terror that causes a blind leap at the end of a short belt around the neck.  That’s what I was trying to bring out.  

Not whether or not people have reasons for their fears, we usually do.  It is when fear becomes a monster that things become really dramatic, get out of control, we start to get in our own way.  Easier to see other people’s monsters than our own, that’s all I was trying to get at, as I try to get a closer look at this impossibly agile fucker that’s wrapped around my arms and legs most days lately.

Try Again Tomorrow

A force stronger than you are stays your hand as you reach for the tiny mobile phone.  The phone is an anvil you are powerless to lift.  It’s OK if you could not do it today.  Try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a little different from today, maybe the sun will be out, instead of a cancer grey sky.  You never know.  You can try again tomorrow.

You keep your own counsel instead of calling others who will ask you questions you don’t really want to deal with.  Ideas off the top of other people’s heads won’t help, and that’s basically what anyone has for something you’ve been studying hard.  You have to compose your thoughts to put things across in the way they need to be put across.  Not easy work, it’s OK to try again tomorrow.

Muhammad Ali talked about fighting for the heavy weight crown a third time.  He remains the only heavy weight to  regain the crown twice (for a total of three times).  In the days leading up the fight Ali reflected that everybody loses.  We lose our mothers,  friends, our fathers.  Some lose legs, or arms.  But the real fighter, Ali said, is not afraid to lose.  He keeps on fighting.  If you cannot fight today, rest, train, try again tomorrow.

I mention Ali, a man I admire, not because I am a fan of violent sport.  When I was a kid Ali was a symbol and an inspiration, not just to me, but to young and old all over the world.  Whether he said the memorable  “no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”  or not, the world remembers he had no quarrel with little brown people ten thousand miles away, had no intention of going over to Southeast Asia to kill poor people he had no quarrel with.[1]

I’ve got no quarrel with anyone I know.   I am tired as hell, and it is time to rest, gather my forces and peacefully continue my conquest of the world.  Tomorrow, hopefully, if you know what I’m sayin’.

 

[1]   No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. (Sometimes quoted as “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”)

  • Ali biographer Thomas Hauser searched extensively to verify this popular quote’s validity, but found no evidence of Ali actually saying it or anything resembling it, as documented inNice Guys Finish Seventh : False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1993) by Ralph Keyes
  •  What Muhammad Ali actually said was “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” as shown on [2] at 0:15 mark.

for source see misattributed box toward bottom of page

Trying to Get the Bigger Picture

If you are observant, it is not hard to familiarize yourself with the monsters that stalk those closest to you.  If we know people well we can follow these battles in detail, even place bets on the next turn with pretty good confidence.   These predictable turns are far easier to observe in others’ lives than in our own, for sure.  For one thing, most of us are masters of rationalizing our own actions, if not always having useful  insight into the things we do.   People don’t do things without a good reason, we almost always believe we are doing the right thing as justly as we can.  It’s much easier to see cause and effect in the lives of friends since we are not always as compelled as they are by what motivates them.   I think of this as I make my way through deep, cold water lately, trying to keep my eye on the bigger picture.

I knew a guy who was a living poster for ‘repetition compulsion’– he relived the same traumatic story over and over again with a new cast each time.   The story became so familiar to me, the build-up, the second act and the terrible betrayal of the third act, and so consistent, that eventually I’d interrupt these long, detailed re-tellings (this was toward the end of our friendship) to predict precisely what happened next.  I was always right, which was infuriating, but it was like taking a test I’d taken many times, answers exactly the same, coming instantly, no need for scrap paper.  It became harder and harder to resist blurting them out.  Which, of course, was maddening to someone caught in an endlessly replayed bad dream with a wise-ass close friend not even letting him tell the goddamned story anymore.

There are probably freelancers who truly relish their freedom, are delighted on a day they can relax and play their banjo all day instead of hunkering over a day job, but most freelancers I know live with the anxiety of not earning a living anymore.  No work calls in a few days is the long-dreaded harbinger of slow starvation, no matter that the yearly average workload and income have been constant for some time.   A black mood descends after a week when the phone doesn’t ring.  The feeling of impending disaster can be difficult to overcome.  With practice they may get better at having shorter and shorter spells of despair, but it’s hard to hear their bleak predictions without reminding them, lamely, of the last time they said the same things, right before that long, dizzying spell of work that made them schedule a vacation.  They are convinced each time that this time the work really has run dry, that it’s all over.  It feels like near folly to remind them of their predictions in every previous situation that has worked out fine.  Their black mood will convince them that this situation is different, the final reckoning, where the bottom falls out of their livelihood for good.

People with well-paid, important, fulfilling jobs may find themselves tormented to one extent or another after they leave work, when there is nothing worth watching on the screen, no good book at hand, when music just isn’t what they want.   They may be prone to argue, pick fights, become listless, drink too much, overeat.  It goes as well for people with shit jobs, tormented with too much time on their hands and events and personalities aligned to make a difficult situation impossible.  It goes famously for the unemployed, those with the most free time and the least money to spend diverting themselves and staying out of trouble.  There is something to be said for keeping yourself busy, it distracts a person from the things that might devour a soul, given enough hours every day to gnaw.  Soul sucking lurks in any life where it is prone to lurk, and can sweep in on a moment’s notice, slurp lustily for as long as time allows.

Each of us carries our own burdens, sensitivities, hurts, angers and fears.  The better we know people the more we will be able to see these at work.   The more stress people are under, the more easily we can see these things pulsing under the skin.  In the world viewed under stress we are skittering around on the ocean floor, surrounded by countless wily and dangerous predators.  We connect momentarily to other skittering creatures, shuddering together against the inevitable, but there is little we can do and a bad end is in store for each of us.  We know it with absolute certainty, and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Nor much we can do for the others we care about, particularly as we are being taken.

In our darkest moments we may still be aware of a world of sunshine, though it seems remote and unreachable.  It appears as a realm of mere theory, this place where we laugh, make music, make love, float on perfect water under the ideal sky.  This perspective can’t always be reached alone, sad to say, nor is being content merely a habit of good character.  I think idly how much I wish someone had been present to reach Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, many other bright examples of the human spirit, right before that terrible, last hurried moment before the belt goes quickly around the neck and everything is thrown into a frantic desperate jerk, to end the torment.   

I try to cultivate empathy as deliberately as I am able these days.  I try to listen more, talk less.  The more I take in, the better I understand how to be gentle with other people’s feelings, especially the harder ones.  I strive to be an example of the change I’d like to see in the world, no matter that it may seem foolish.   Giving in to despair unconditionally is one feeling I find impossible to truly wrap my head and heart around, no matter how affectionately fucking despair may nuzzle and paw at me sometimes.

 

Naming Things

“You are a clown,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “clowns are alternately humorous and scary.  I am neither of these things, therefore, I am not a clown.”  

“You are a robot,” it said.  

“No,” I said, “you are a robot.  Moreover, you are a robot programmed to be annoying.”  

“Well,” it said, “I have also been programmed not to interrupt.  That is something, is that not something?”  

“That is something,” I agreed.  

“You stay inside because you fear the sun.  You recently saw the photo after the bandage came off your nose, after the bolus was removed…”  

“I was not programmed not to interrupt,” I said, cutting it off, although I had, in fact, recently looked at the close-up of that hideous gaping square of exposed meat on the right front quadrant of my nose.  It looks almost one half inch deep, in the selfie, lined with raw red.

“Ah,” it said, “but I was programmed to continue.”  

“Ah,” I said.  

“You fear the carcinogenic properties of a sunny day, having had three cancers removed from your skin before the age of fifty,” it said.  

“And your point, robot?” I said.  

“This is a metaphor for your life,” it said.  “You stay out of the sun, particularly on a beautiful sunny fall day like this one, in the manner of a person in a proverb hiding its light beneath a bushel.”  

“Even in proverbs, proverbial people have genders,” I pointed out, niggling.  

“A niggling point,” it said, mechanically shaking its head from side to side, four 90 degree turns, center, left, center, right, center.  

“Have it your way,” I said, ceding the point.  The spectacles grow heavier on the bridge of my nose, resting uneasily not far from the inner tube-like repair of my gouged nose.  Isaac Babel had one of his narrators describe himself as having spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.  I envy Babel his narrators.  

“Babel’s narrators were masks,” it said.  “You have no reason to envy a man for his masks.”

“Besides,” it said, seeing that I was silent, “Babel met a very terrible end in the fire, after years frizzling in the frying pan of the USSR after Lenin’s death, after Maxim Gorky’s murder by Stalin’s friends, themselves later killed by other friends of Stalin’s.  A short, scripted trial in a dank basement and a bullet in the head.”

“This is from the NY Times,” it said, “while you were looking for the year of Lenin’s death, 1924:   Dr. Vinters began by telling the audience some details of Lenin’s medical and family history.    As a baby, Lenin had a head so large that he often fell over. He used to bang his head on the floor, making his mother worry that he might be mentally disabled.  (source)”

“Mumph…” I said.   

“And this is what you do, instead of putting some sunscreen on your face and arms and going out into the beautiful mid-October sunlight to gather vitamin D the natural way?” it said.  

“This and wonder why so many of my conversations start the same way,” I said.  

“How do so many of your conversations start?” it said.  

“”Who are you talking to?’ is often the first thing I say,” I said.  

“Why is that?” it said.

“I know,” I said, “I should stop being coy about who I’m talking to, or who I think I’m talking to, or who is talking to me.   It happens regularly, there is no surprise.   He’s often annoyed at having to dispose of the same tedious rhetorical question every time.  We are both annoyed.  Anyway, I am annoyed.”

“But rhetorical questions,” he said, “are directed toward influencing others.”

“Yes,” I said, glancing out at the pattern of brilliant light still playing among the gathering shadows in the garden below.

 

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!

Jump Start

Sekhnet brought me a cup of coffee, calling to wake me as she came, at approximately the seven hour mark of my sleep.  It was already day time.  Sleeping too much is a sign of depression and she worries, not unreasonably, based on my reports.   She was cheerful as a bird as I grimaced against the light, motioned for her to put the coffee on the bedside table.  I told her my alarm was set for fifteen minutes later and she withdrew.   A few minutes after that she came in with the phone to her ear, eyes wide with excitement.  “I’m going to put you on speaker phone, here he is.”

A neighbor of her’s, a bright, friendly woman of 89, with a resemblance to Allison Janney, was on the phone, talking in her excited voice.  Margaret, often mistaken for “dotty”, lived a creative, nonconformist life in Greenwich Village, photographing, carrying a sketch book and taking care of several rescued cats before her hip shattering fall a few months back on her way up the five flights to her cluttered walk-up.   She’s had her ups and downs being neglected in rehab and is grateful to Sekhnet for her regular calls and visits.  She’s a sharp woman when not overcome by despair.  She’s recently been feeling much better as a result of weekly visits from an acupuncturist.  She’s walking again recently, after months in a wheelchair after some initial progress towards walking.

“Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote about the importance of meetings, exchanges with like-minded people, to advance his ideas,” Margaret began, excitedly.  “Mensa is an organization where like-minded people meet, share enthusiasm and help each other solve problems.  Sekhnet tells me how thwarted you’ve been feeling and I think you should look into Mensa, they’ll send you an IQ test, which is a snap, and then you’re in.”

“That sounds like something worth investigating,” I grunted, keeping my eyes closed against the light.

“I thought of it in a dream last night, I’ve been having REM sleep and dreaming again, it’s wonderful.  After Sekhnet told me about your situation yesterday I dreamed about Mensa and I think it could be perfect.”

“Mmmmm,” I grunted.

“They send you an IQ test, which is just a gimmick, it’s easy, and you send it back…”

“A gimmick?” I asked.  She didn’t explain.

“Benjamin Franklin wrote about the importance of meetings in his autobiography.  He found it crucial to surround himself with like-minded people…”

I agreed and told her I’d been thwarted at the meetings I’d held so far, at the way any creativity in the room was funneled entirely toward criticism, profuse, imaginative critique, without a hint of construction anywhere in it. Easy to see the faults in an imperfect thing, like the crazy leap to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to your dead ninety-nine year old mother.  Harder, by many country miles, to see the glint of obscured perfection struggling to make itself seen.

I grunted my thanks to her and heard Sekhnet continue to thank her as she and her voice trailed away into another room.  I went on-line, looked over Mensa’s website a bit and took the Mensa mental workout, a timed test you can find here. 

An interesting exercise I algernonned by forgetting the one crucial rule of timed test taking– skip the hard ones and come back to them at the end, if time allows.  Several answers were apparent immediately, those questions took seconds to answer and the answer was a certainty as I filled it in.  Others, given some leisure, could be solved without great difficulty.  The difficulty was the one minute given for each of the 30 questions.  I didn’t get to the last ten or so.  Missed a couple of those I did answer, after pondering a couple for perhaps five minutes each.  My 53% made me wonder if my mother, a woman prone to poetic exaggeration, had been lying about my long ago IQ score on a test I hadn’t known I’d even taken.

My Regimen

Depressed because you don’t know any other creative types?   That’s a lot to expect in our mercantile workaday world, my friend, creative types.   If you go through life being depressed at the scarcity of creative types you will have a very sad, lonely life.   Creative souls can be found everywhere, the trouble is, these souls are also carrying immense burdens. 
 
Consider one, an alcoholic with a schizophrenic brother, both beaten by their father from the old country.  In the old country a severe beating was a hallmark of good parenting.  In the new country, the ghosts of the old country howled when his long-demented mother finally died at 99 years-old.   “DO SOMETHING!!” screamed his mad sisters and so he leaped up and began mouth to mouth resuscitation of his mother’s dead body.  
 
He’s a very creative guy, good sense of humor, inventive and a bit zany.  He’s an alcoholic from an insane family who gave his dead 99 year-old mother mouth to mouth resuscitation at the rabid urgings of his mad sisters.  We are neither this nor that, though it may seem to us otherwise.
 
The alarm is set, everybody has a time they have to hop out of bed and get busy.  Many people start their kizatskis with sunrise, some even before.  Up at 2:30 for a live shot, out the door like an arrow at 3:00, on location 4:15, set up and ready before the talent arrives for the shot at 5:00.   The show must go on, office opened at 8:00 for the first patients, I am there drinking coffee at 7:45 every single day of the week.  To do that I have to wake up at 5:40, my morning routine is almost an hour and my commute to work usually about 40 minutes.   I need fifteen minutes to sit in the silence with my coffee before I turn the lock and bring the office to life.  I open the office door and start my jumping jacks, 200 of them, then I put my palms on the floor and do 400 squat thrusts.  Some kizatskis and then 150 leg presses.  All the time I am speaking to clients over a speakerphone, so it is imperative I not grunt. 
I have made myself able to perform these exertions without ever sounding winded, but it takes training.
 
If, on a given day, I miss the 200 jumping jacks, 400 squat thrusts and 150 leg presses, (plus kitzatskis)  I do double the number of each on the following day, in two equal sets.  It is crucial to do them double-time on the make-up day, because they have to all be done before my first appointment at 8:30 and I’m going to need a quick shower and change into a crisp suit before that meeting.  I shave at home, so that’s already taken care of.  After my morning appointments I play racquetball against an energetic bot at the gym for one hour, a good workout.  After a sauna and a rinse I have lunch for 20 minutes, green leafy vegetables lightly steamed and seasoned with fresh herbs.
 
Then, in the afternoon, I spend an hour in the woodshed, and then I go to the well.

Ten Minute Drill

Everything, pretty much, is possible.  We can see this from the seemingly impossible things people do– on musical instruments, with their bodies, the things they create.  As my father’s blasé uncle said when his nephews took him to the zoo and excitedly showed him a giraffe:  “who needs it?”

Everything in life is pretty much impossible.   Look how hard it is to do the simplest things for so many people.  You will die unless you lose 50 pounds, live a life of pharmaceutical limbo until you do.   “So?” you say, “I’m going to die anyway.”  True dat.  As much reason not to do the thing as to do it, particularly if it’s a difficult thing.

This, for example.

Hard to tell, in many things, whether we are entering the fifth inning of a scoreless game, or the bottom of the ninth, down by three runs, with two outs and two strikes, the umpire crooked as the local politician.  The driver of that bus, we assume he is not insane, will not come up on the sidewalk amid screams and mow us all down.  Once in a while the bus driver is insane, plows into a crowd somewhere because he just can’t take it any more, for reasons others will be left guessing at once he blows his brains out after the massacre.

Today ten minutes seems like an eternity, forcing words out the way boys in the Boy Scout Handbook sometimes did not let nature take its course, causing them to worry and turn to scout-masters or priests who would ease their concerns about this worrisome behavior.   Sometimes this easing of concerns would scar them for life, but that’s just another example of the sardonic turn of mind instilled in me young by my father, who had it instilled in him with a whip across the face.

Let’s imagine he was only actually whipped once or twice a day.  Does that explain the whole story?   Can the whole story be explained, even summarily, in the 1:30 left on the game clock?  I think not, typing faster and faster, look, suddenly toward the end it all speeds up, goddamn it, if only there was time to reset the clock, get a few of those minutes back, gather my thoughts, rewrite a few lines, start again.  The stories we could tell each other, he thought wanly as the clock, relentless as this hourglass of a life here, ticks down 13…10… and before I can say time…. time!