Business Consultation

I had a friend whose father, a salesman and ad copy writer, alternately chipper and dour, died about ten years ago at the age of ninety. His name was Al and for the last few years of his life he was pretty much dour. File that away.

I went to a three pm meeting with a business consultant named David at the New York City Small Business Administration. This was the first step, according to the website, in setting up a relationship with NYC Small Business Solutions. The purpose of my visit, as I wrote in my on-line appointment confirmation, was to get help prioritizing the many tasks ahead of me: marketing, recruiting, fundraising, negotiating city government contracts, among other things, and to find out exactly what services were offered. The website said there was help available, expert advice in all these areas, a pool of pre-screened recruits, meeting rooms there in which we could interview candidates. A host of classes and business solutions to every challenge faced by every kind of small business and start-up were touted by the website.

At 3:20 David came out, greeted me, we shook hands and I followed him back to his desk at the other end of a large office in the financial district. He had me fill out the form nobody had handed me during my 25 minute wait, was sheepish after I did, told me he had no idea if anybody even read these. I didn’t stop to think that this form was close to what I had already filled out on-line. I noticed his computer screen was blank, with a box in the middle for him to log-in.

He read all the information I’d written on the form, confirmed that he was reading everything correctly. He’d read it back fine. If I’d left then, I would have been slightly ahead of the game. But determination turned out to be my undoing. He liked the idea of my program, though he had no inclination to watch the 30 second pitch I had cued up for him on my iPad.

“You have to have a pitch,” he agreed, as I noticed the palsy in both of his hands, the way his lip also twitched. “You need to be able to give your pitch and be ready to give it over and over again,” he said. “Very rarely will anyone respond the first time. When you run an ad in the paper, usually you’ll get no responses until about the sixth time it appears,” he said, speaking from experience. He’d been in sales, he told me.

I told him that sales was a talent, and he agreed. I admitted that sales was my weak suit, a talent I unfortunately did not possess, and he nodded sadly and knowingly. I told him a bit more about the program, talked up how it worked exactly as designed, and delivered all kinds of good things to students, but that I needed an excellent sales person. Eventually he suggested I needed to hire a salesman, an excellent one, but I’d have to pay him well, or perhaps offer a 10% commission on each sale. A commission was a good way to get a salesman off his ass, he said, make sure he was out there working, and it also allows you to pay him a bit less, since he’ll make it up in commissions, which don’t really come out of your pocket, since you wouldn’t have the sale without his work anyway.

He logged on to his computer walked me through the website, showed me the listing of classes I could sign up for, for free. Building my own website, there was a course for that, I should probably sign up for that, every business should have a website these days. He was impressed that I already had a website. I told him the problem was getting eyeballs to look at the website, and he nodded solemnly, agreed there is an art and a whole world of specialized skills involved in a successful social media campaign. I told him about the money I’d thrown away on a kid who claimed to be a social media expert, but was not. He nodded sadly and knowingly. I restated my dilemma for him and asked him about the pool of pre-screened recruits, and he called across the office “Gina, we help people get employees, don’t we?” Gina told him they did, and my hunch, based on what the website had stated, was confirmed.

He then expressed his confusion as to why I’d chosen to form a non-profit. His manner indicated that I’d more than likely made a fatal mistake. I explained that I’d formed an educational business for a public good and believed the tax deductible status would make it easier to raise money from donors and get grants from outfits devoted to the nonprofit sector. I suggested, as I looked at his sad, knowing expression, that the jury was still out as to how good a decision I’d made.

Soon after that it dawned on me what had happened. They had somehow reanimated Al, my friend’s mostly dour former salesman dad, who had died a decade or more ago. They reanimated him, cleaned him up, put him in a shirt and tie and called him David. “David” sat across from me, smiling uncomfortably, as anyone would smile having been dead for more than ten years and suddenly shoved behind a help desk at a city agency. I thanked him warmly for his time, shook his hand heartily and headed out into the cold, grey drizzle.

For a moment, realizing how close I was to the East River, I thought of dashing over there and throwing myself and the company iPad in. I decided against it, got something to eat, came home, wrote this, and now I’m going to put my elegant cadaver rebozo back on and see who I can get to chat with me at this shindig coming up in a couple of days.

King of the Grotesque

Guy walks into a party, his life’s dream made real on his back. He’s been carrying this dream made real so long, unable to give it the food it needs, that the dream is looking greenish, giving off a foul odor, wreathed in flies. He’s carrying a decomposing cadaver on his back, its face frozen in the agony of its slow death.

“Why are these freaks looking at me like that?” the guy wonders as friends and acquaintances give sickened smiles and skitter away like well-dressed crabs. He’s used to the weight, and the smell, which has been slowly gathering over several years, is something he doesn’t really notice, assumes is just the smell of this sometimes putrid world itself.

Poor bastard.

As for me, I have an appointment with a business consultant today that I have to prepare for, if you will excuse me.

The Unknowable Unknowns

To start with the grotesque, as is my custom:

Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the failed war in Iraq, a man who, if such losses were tallied against America, would have been on the docket at the Hague, along with his fellow merry reinterpreters of international law, to defend his killing and dispossessing of tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of anonymous brown people who never posed a threat to America. He famously quipped, stepping away from the standing desk he worked at, and cited as an example of the harmlessness of so-called ‘stress positions’ during the enhanced interrogations that unpatriotic, hyperbolic Americans insisted on calling ‘torture’:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.^[1]

And gruesome (and gratuitous) as it is to start with that gleeful executioner Rummy, there are, in any endeavor, the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknowns, which I have been pondering today, as most days. To wit: I have either already failed and stubbornly cling to the irrational belief that I can move this moribund program along or I have achieved much, against great odds, and am only one or two contacts away from making it the success it deserves to be.

Only time will tell, I suppose, what kind of unknowns these are as I wait to hear back from my latest round of writing to convince other unknown people to help me with marketing, fundraising, etc.

CV (revised)

I was self-employed as an attorney, never part of the corporate world. I taught in the public schools for five or six years (teaching mainly third grade) before attending law school. I have an MA in Creative Writing, my BA was in history and philosophy.

I found I lacked real enthusiasm for the law and had philosophical as well as financial reasons for deciding to leave that adversarial world. I set out several years ago on a path to help in the ways I am best equipped to help, doing work I can wholeheartedly believe in.

I envisioned a non-hierarchic, creative program where children could work together to make their voices heard. I imagined the children in the Harlem schools where I taught having a place where their ideas would be listened to and supported as they demonstrate the depth of their imagination and desire to learn. Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of stop motion animation in a way elementary school-aged kids could teach each other to do. I invented a portable animation stand that fits in a backpack and sets up in five minutes. The next two years I facilitated approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools. It is very gratifying to see how it works immediately, exactly as designed, everywhere I set it up. Within minutes the room is a buzzing beehive of purposeful activity.

What I need now is help pitching, publicizing and selling the program. I’m looking forward to hearing your advice and ideas about the steps I need to take to find the people I need to help move this from great working idea to sustainable program.

A Sign

Like a soothsayer in the time of Caesar spreading the entrails to find a portent pleasing to his master, I sifted the dark brown walnut shell sands of the litter box and learned that my vigil over the cat’s digestive troubles is at an end. I am free to move about as I like. Hallelujah.

Metaphor for a life

A human life is a universe. It is (re)written: she who saves one life saves the world. The death toll numbers you see on corporate TV are from Stalin’s calculus– a million ended lives are an abstraction. For every American journalist with a name whose face we see on video before a psychopath cuts his head off, thousands of nameless, faceless children and old people are killed in the name of fighting beheading psychopaths. These kids and their grandparents have names, faces, universes, of course, but it is much more comfortable to think of them as collateral damage, necessary deaths to, theoretically, prevent our own murder, you dig? Better not to dwell on what the nation does in our names, you say? OK.

So lie back on the couch and tell me the metaphor that best describes your life at the moment.

“Waiting for a cat to shit to determine whether I’ll be able to go home today or continue waiting here for the cat to shit, possibly take him back to the vet tomorrow.”

What?

“He had diarrhea for a few days, I took him to the vet Saturday. He took a loose crap Saturday night and then– nothing. He’s regular as an atomic clock with that short digestive tract and his habit of waiting til Sekhnet gets back before hunching to uncork his turds into the sand, kicking the sand a bit until Sekhnet diligently scoops the shit away. She calls herself the Elephant Sweeper, the one who follows the elephants in the circus parade with a shovel and bucket. She got home yesterday, nothing. Overnight and so far today, and it’s going on dinner time 48 hours later, nada.”

So a cat doesn’t have his daily bowel movement and you are stuck in place?

“Afraid so. The vet’s girl said to call tomorrow mid-day if the cat hasn’t gone by then. Trouble is, nobody will be here until late tomorrow night. The cat could have real problems by then.”

So you are acting out of concern for another living creature you are attached to rather than in your own, strict self-interest?

“Afraid so. The phrase is really apt, I am afraid. Afraid of this metaphor that so accurately captures what my life has reduced itself to, with the help of an unrealistic goal of being the director of my own destiny. Today my destiny is to wait until a cat takes a crap. Not the destiny I had in mind for myself when I went to bed last night.”

Not entirely fair, this waiting for the cat to pass some turds, while on the surface not a bad metaphor for your slow-motion, extreme close-up life at the moment, is not expressed in the way most fair to you. Be fair.

“This act of kindness to an animal who cannot help himself, while seemingly sentimental to some, is also an act of kindness to Sekhnet, worried sick about the handsome little animal she affectionately serves. There is nothing I can do at my place that I can’t do here, or little, anyway. I like the waiting for a cat to shit metaphor, though, it fits so perfectly.”

Fits your self-mocking foolery, maybe, but not the larger purpose of supporting your powerful but delicate dreams and putting them out into the world.

“True, my powerful but delicate dreams do not appear in the flattering chiaroscuro light they deserve when the metaphor is expressed this way. I am clearly more than a man waiting for a cat to shit, although I am also, clearly, a man waiting for a cat to shit.”

Just so.

CV

“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface. Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY. JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark. Member of NYS and Federal Bars. Quit drinking 2005. Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans. Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele. Writing continually, rarely fiction. Drawing and painting since age three or so. Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized. Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear). Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy felt the same about me. Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator: bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country. Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves. Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness. Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn. Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes. Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up. Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love. The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely. Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow. I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts. Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive. Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you. The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man. I can’t stand that whining. Man up, for fuck’s sake.” There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted. A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet. “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine. “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad.

Humans are not primarily rational actors. We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational. Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations. Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness. Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane. The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane. The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice. Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that. When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360. It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds. Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with. She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us. She asked me not to talk about it any more.

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice. This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it. Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!” I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving. The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story. I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray! God bless Murray!” I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years. This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane. After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first. My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence. Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones. It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice. Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters. But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone. “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place. Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to. Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons. It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.

It Makes Perfect Sense

On the day after marchers clogged downtown NYC to protest America’s lack of a real response to catastrophic man made climate change I take a moment to set down, in my aggravatingly simplistic Devil’s advocate way, why the status quo makes perfect sense. In the process you will no doubt see the folly of protesters who lack the economic clout trying to get serious attention from a government run by the private dollars, speaking loudly and freely, of those who do.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of the industry that produces and sells the amazingly lucrative products that result in the pumping of carbon into the atmosphere. It may be true that carbon emitted by millions of cars, trucks, trains and airplanes increases the greenhouse gases that are warming the earth and already creating great climate disturbance. May well be true, though those great climate disturbances may also just be part of a natural cycle or the wrath of a vengeful God. It may also be true that an industry based on extracting an ever decreasing natural resource from deep inside the earth is a bad long-term business model. Let’s also admit that could probably be the case, eventually, though you must also admit you don’t have a viable alternative plan at the moment.

Now look at it from an economic point of view in the here and now, from the perspective of the Oil and Gas Industry and those whose vast fortunes are based on its ongoing prosperity. The internal combustion engine, powered by fossil fuel, made most of human progress in the last hundred years, a time of unprecedented human progress, possible. We transport things from coast to coast, around the globe, fly airplanes everywhere, commute long distances to jobs, travel in gas powered vehicles to beautiful places for holidays. Our economy depends on this wonderful engine, which is powered by the transformed and processed remains of dinosaurs. Industries related to automobile and other gasoline powered transportation employ literally tens of millions.

Let’s take a quick look at the bottom line and we’ll evaluate who is the foolish party in this debate over whether man is really destroying his home by allowing carbon to flow freely from smokestacks and exhaust pipes. From the dawn of the automobile the oil business has been a gold mine. Billions and billions in profit are made every year from the production and sale of this liquid gold. As the supply gets smaller and smaller, and demand rises, the price only goes up. The immutable law of economics. Talk about a business model! If you were an executive in an oil company, or an investor, rich beyond your millionaire father’s wildest dreams, with a product whose supply is ever diminishing and whose price has tripled in the last decade, would it not behoove you to spend however many millions it took to convince people that those who march in protest of the unfettered use of this miraculous product are misguided idiots, at best?

They hate our freedom, you will say, and it will certainly be true that they hate yours. They gullibly and blindly believe the vast majority of scientists who have studied the climate and are constantly issuing alarming findings about ice caps melting, sea levels rising, droughts, floods, murderous super storms, raging wild fires. What do you call someone who is alarmed by supposedly alarming news? That’s right, an Alarmist. These are Climate Alarmists, freedom haters. If you had to use one word it might be Communists. You see, if they had their way, free enterprise would be ended and we’d all be back to using horse drawn carts. It is far wiser to be skeptical when so much is at stake. After all, we have scientists too who will tell you this is all ideologically driven liberal alarmism. They will say, with no equivocation, that carbon produced by human activity has nothing to do with the natural cycles of climate or the wrath of God. And the wrath of God will surely be upon those who hate freedom.

If a kid has a genius idea for a website he sells for a billion dollars, the pressing question on the minds of the business community is– how will he make even more money for his invention? How will he keep it relevant, monetize it more efficiently, keep it moving forward, dynamic, maximize its profitability? A billion dollars may look good on a balance sheet, or in a headline, but what is this bright 27 year-old’s next move? The pressure is on the young man now, you see. The engine of our economy does not rest on making a fortune and living a life of good works, doing what you love, living on your fortune. The engine of our economy does not rest– it drives ever forward, onward, upward. And the engine it drives is powered by gasoline– and never being satisfied to have merely enough.

Flowers for Algernon

There is a novel with that title by Daniel Keyes, later made into a movie, first published as a short story in 1959. It is the story, told in diary form, of an experimental surgery to increase a retarded man’s intelligence. The experiment works wonderfully, as it did on lab mouse Algernon, and Charlie Gordon, the first human subject, a barely literate simpleton in the first entry of his diary, quickly develops into a genius.

I can give you all this detail not because I have a fantastic memory, except for the bare bones of the Flowers for Algernon story, which I read 50 years ago, but because we now have the impeccable digital memory of the internet that allows me to refresh my recollections of the details, quickly learn details I hadn’t known before, and link you to the actual text.

I am thinking of the story, also known as Charly (the title of the Academy Award winning movie), because of its tragic dramatic arc. Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68, undergoes an experimental surgical procedure to increase his intelligence. He goes from semi-literate janitor to an eloquent genius with an IQ triple his original one. His brilliance complicates his life, but he is grateful for it, until he sees Algernon lose all his post-surgical intelligence and wind up in worse shape than he began.

Charlie Gordon’s fate is tragically clear as Algernon, now his pet, quickly regresses and dies, to Charlie’s, and the readers’, great sorrow. The flaw in the experimental surgery that his own research discovered is confirmed. He feels it all slipping away and we watch, his journal entries deteriorate and his new found powers slip away. In the end he is as he was before, even a bit worse, and the last thing he asks for is for someone to put flowers on Algernon’s grave.

What starts with all the promise in the world, ends with Charlie as he was before, even a bit worse off.

I am thinking of this Algernon phenomenon in relation to my great experiment. Against the odds I singlehandedly created and conducted a program that worked exactly as I imagined it could. I was in one school, where it went well, as it did in the three other schools where I launched it, at a reform school and even at the sessions for chronically ill adults.

At its peak the workshop was active in three schools. Then two. Then one. Then none. It’s hard not to see that as backwards progress, lose the optimism that kept me chasing the miraculous aspect of what I felt I was beginning to accomplish.

I don’t remember if Charlie Gordon was beset with self-pity as he felt it all slipping away, though it’s hard to imagine that feeling could have been absent from his journal. In my own case, it is entirely possible, one hopes, that after conducting 100 successful workshops, making several short promos of students at work featuring their original animation, writing increasingly concise and descriptive materials about the program, that I will get the business and funding help I’ve needed from the beginning.

It is not impossible, after all, that the New York City Agency that helps small businesses recruit, train, fund, negotiate government contracts and so forth, will provide exactly the help I need to make the program a success, in spite of the daunting odds. Not impossible that one of the mentors I wrote to on the new NYS business mentoring site will one day get back to me, offer valuable guidance. Not impossible, no. There’s every chance I will complete the short on-line application for NYC Business Solution’s help as soon as I finish posting this.

But I still can’t help thinking of Charlie Gordon and that mouse Algernon today.