The Shoelace

My mother always preferred rhymed poetry that jumped to a meter like her and her little friends on Eastburn Avenue singing in cadence as they hopped Double Dutch.   I sent her a prose poem called The Shoelace by Charles Bukowski, which went nicely with the words she copied in all caps on an index card and years later found a huge hot pink button with the same words:  S-T-R-E-S-S:  that confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it.

My mother loved The Shoelace, which neither rhymed nor skipped like girls over a rope.  In that classic poem Bukowski correctly states that it’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse, but a shoelace that snaps with no time left.  He refers to, and then riffs on, that swarm of trivialities that kills quicker than cancer, the death of a thousand unjust and arbitrary cuts, the accumulated little bumps, scrapes, itches, insults and bruises that can finally tip a man over into madness when his shoelace snaps, with no time left.  You can hear his inimitable reading of the poem my mother loved here.

I think of that poem now as my printer runs out of ink (cyan, which I am not using to print black and white, but smart business majors found a way to force you to buy cyan anyway) as I try to assemble tax documents, a favor done for me in haste results in a frustrating forty minutes of futile work trying to fix a mistake, I’m looking for tax papers in a haystack of papers only an insane person would have saved to begin with, trying to assemble two short films I need for Monday, find out my assistant will not be available after all on my day off and I’ll have to fill in for her, for a fraction of what I’m paying her colleague who will be there.  

It’s not these little things that send a man like myself to the madhouse, nor the even need to feign great optimism and remain an upbeat salesman of a product that suddenly looks fatally defective to me.  It’s the fact that although I am wearing no shirt, and only boxer shorts, my apartment is so hot that sweat is creating a slime on my brow, in my underarms.  I can feel bands of heat radiating off my naked back.

“Hah, that’s a good one, a NYC tenant complaining about getting too much heat!”

It is a good one, the place is a sauna, and I have windows open.  It must be at least 90 degrees in here, I feel like I’m about to faint.   The ‘super’ is a cheerful, manic, chattering rat in human form, I mean no disrespect to him, just describing him for you.  You can hear him outside at random times banging garbage cans and yelling in a variety of languages, sometimes repeating the same phrase over and over, like a demented parrot.  He shrugs about the heat, you know, the landlord has it programmed, nothing he can do.  He shrugs about the faucets he broke while fixing a leak– they trumpet like enraged elephants, particularly late at night when I brush my teeth or try to run cold water over my sweltering face.  “You gotta have the sink replaced, my man,” he tells me philosophically.  Until he fixed the leak a short time ago there was no problem with the sink. “You got to call the office, tell ’em you need a new sink.”  

So many things one has gotta do, endlessly remind oneself, for example, that nobody can help anybody on the deepest level.  Hard work is hard, sometimes, because it is amorphous, hard to prioritize, hard to even conceptualize sometimes.  It requires stumbles that can be embarrassing and worse.  A readiness to take a smiling step forward, slip, fall and break your nose and the arm that tried to break the fall.  Next time, hopefully, you will remember to let go of the kid’s drawing you were holding carefully aloft as you pitched forward, the better to catch yourself.

“You lost control because you were frightened of failing,” consoles a friend, “you will do better next time.  I’m pretty sure you won’t break your nose again protecting a drawing!”  There’s always a bright side, you dig.   Always an enlightening bright side, if you do not suffocate at your desk from the oven-like conditions in your apartment before enlightenment can strike.

 

 

 

 

Reminder: there’s rarely a good reason to twitch

Yeah, yeah, the twitch reflex, I know, as primitive and deep as reflexes go.   Something surprises you from the periphery: flinch!  True, and a good practice, to err on the side of caution, good for survival.

But I am thinking about the times I feel hurried, and twitchy, and, moving quickly, sometimes stumble, when what I need to do is take a moment to pause, breathe, gather poise, realize that five or ten seconds are better spent doing this than starting to sprint with a shoelace untied.  

An important thing I was reminded of yesterday, as I delivered well-thought out remarks in a rushed and not well-thought out way.   A lot was going on, I had many things on my mind, the stakes in some ways were high– all the more reason to remember:  take a moment to take it all in, smile, pause.  Being gracious enough can often be lost when rushing, as it was yesterday.  Be gracious, then breathe again.    

Then, be gracious.  Take a moment, smile, look around, breathe.  Then, after a human pause, be gracious.  

 

Give it a shot here

I had a theory I hoped was true: that kids, in spite of the explosion of technology and media, with the attendant fracturing of their already fleeting attention spans, still loved making things by hand, playing, using their imaginations to come up with new and often ridiculous ideas.  I was looking for these ridiculous ideas, counting on them.

Let me back up.  I did not have this theory because I am an educational theorist or anyone paid to have such theories.  I was inventing the career I had always wanted, being in a room full of children and giving them permission to set their imaginations free, as my imagination and complete concentration were also engaged.  My idea was to give them the setting to be creative, listen to them and help them invent, experiment and express what they wanted to say.   The motivation would come from the intrinsic excitement of being freed to create by someone who would encourage even their most absurd ideas.

I was delighted to find my theory was true, kids, in an even modestly supportive setting, will run under their imaginations like tiny maniacs flying ridiculous and ungainly kites.  That these ridiculous and ungainly kites often actually fly gives me no end of happiness.

I designed a workshop that kids could run themselves.  The technology was simple, and came last, used merely to assemble the final product.  Ideas and things made by hand were worked out, choreographed, tried and shot.  But here came the devilish part of my plan: kids had to focus to make their ideas look good, once they figured out how they wanted to make their ideas come to life.  

They had to light things properly, frame them well, focus the camera, shoot the frames with a steady hand, not shake the sensitive rig the camera is suspended by.  If any of these things was not done with care, if a kid even jostled the animation stand during shooting, the final product would be unacceptable, unsatisfying.  If the editor wasn’t paying attention, very cool animation would never be seen.  The skill of the editor is as important in this kind of quick form animation as the skill of any other artist in the room.

Free play and focused attention to detail, in almost equal parts, equals cool animation.  In the short amount of time we had each session to perform this experiment it was crucial that the kids worked in teams.  Two kids set up the lights and camera stands while another set up the computer.  Other kids set about arranging the materials.  Within minutes children were drawing, cutting, sculpting, writing, shooting, editing.  The classroom was turned into a beehive of activity, most of it in the service of stop-motion animation.

Some of these early sessions would be so productive and exciting the kids would be drunk by the end.  Slap happy, giddy and out of control, laughing and rolling on the floor.  I didn’t take pains to stop the drunken hilarity, except when it got really wild, because I understood exactly why they felt intoxicated.  I was reminded, too late, that drunken hilarity is never a good thing.  For one thing, it causes terror in anyone passing by, to see kids laughing, wrestling, rolling on the floor, in a pile, singing like drunks, no matter how justified those kids might be in acting that way.  

In my excitement at how quickly the children took over all aspects of production, literally by week two, I neglected to implement the crucial thing I’d learned at great cost over twenty years earlier:  the adult must ultimately be able to ask the children to be quiet when needed, and the children must be quiet.  If this is not instilled at the first meeting, reinforced at the second, the consequence for a kid acting like a prick swiftly and unemotionally enforced whenever necessary, the well-meaning adult will find himself in a room full of young cannibals it will be impossible to influence or direct, beyond a certain point.   I can’t fault myself for this, I was attending to a hundred other details at any given time and I forgive myself for forgetting to attend to this crucial detail,  one I won’t neglect again, but it meant the initial group was often a real pain in the ass to work with, for all their childish delight and invention.

A year ago, when I sent out an animated example of the children’s wild creativity, I got this email from someone I rarely hear from:

This stuff is amazing! You have unleashed in them pure unspoiled creative energy. You must be very excited.

I probably should have been very excited, and I was, excited and encouraged, but for the fact that I was making $90 a week.  I also had no idea how to find other schools, and though determined to work in public schools, I also intimately know the kinds of creatures most school administrators are.  They are the kind who pass rooms where kids are laughing, singing and lying on the floor and tell somebody to do something about this.

Why am I writing this here?  Because I have to prepare a focused presentation of the program, with 15 minutes or so of animation, for the day after tomorrow.  The presentation is a shot in the dark, to be fired from my blunderbuss in a basement room where one mother of a young animator is an elementary school principal.  I see this as a good chance to practice presenting the program to someone who might possibly want to hire it for her school.

The program was not picked up for a fourth semester by the school where the kids were giddy so often, I didn’t even get to say goodbye to those kids, many of whom I’d worked with weekly for a year and a half.   So much success reduced to a squeamish concern over occasional giddiness, by people who’d never seen the animation the kids created or been present in the student-run workshop where kids autonomously produced all aspects of the animation.  It is by no means atypical, this aversion to things not tightly controlled, a sense of order is much more comfortable than the appearance of chaos. 

The things sacrificed for a sense of order is why I launched the program to begin with: to prove what kids that society tightly controls and soon throws away have in their hearts and minds, and how creatively they can express those things when given the chance.

We live in a time and place where children, particularly in the besieged public schools, are not given a chance to do much but be tested, failed and slotted for a graduate program of misery and a truncated life expectancy.  Like “collateral damage” to describe innocent civilians killed in wars usually launched to benefit the wealthy of the attacking country, these children are labeled “at risk”.  At one time there was a lot of money earmarked for programs geared to improving attendance, literacy, decreasing the drop out rate among “at risk” kids.  It was to this tit I’d intended to fasten my parched lips as I got the program rolling in some of the worst public schools in the city.  

To this phantom tit, boys and girls.

“The tit is still out there,” the reasonable will insist, and you are probably right.  I am not a boy with a bloated stomach and flies crawling on his eyes, I can wait for my turn.  It’s not a question of patience or impatience, it’s more a need for some measurable success after several years of hard, and unpaid, work.  Our market society is based on profit and loss, and metrics.  Metrics, every philanthropist knows, are the difference between investing in something with real measurable potential and being swayed, unprofitably, by someone’s emotional dream.  Might be a beautiful dream, but metrics make the world go around, at least the world people get paid to play in.

So I have six sessions left between the two schools and then no prospects on the horizon.  One session will be Wednesday’s ‘animation festival’, then one more with this great group of kids who work together, have great fun, are amenable to suggestions, and who are never wild.  The woman who hired us for a summer camp last summer, and for three ten week sessions at two schools this year, including this one, was seemingly a fan of the program.   Three weeks ago, to the shock of her employees, this beautiful 34 year-old mother and educator died of a cancer none of them knew she had.  

The ‘festival’ was already in the works.  A chance for parents to come in, see a bunch of animation done by their kids, in a very short weekly session, hear a spirited and entertaining rap by the well-spoken, sometimes humorous, facilitator of the workshop, also the founder and creator of the program.

“And after that the kids will show the parents how to animate,” said the well-spoken, sometimes humorous, facilitator of the workshop.  And the late CEO’s protegee smiled her radiant smile, and nodded, and said it would be a cool idea.  I’ve done it before, it went well the last time.

The whole program will be one hour long.  I will speak for two minutes, set up the first one, dim the lights, show a 2:00 animation.   The parents will cluck and the kids will be happy.  I’ll give the kids the chance to say whatever they want to about it.  In my pocket a digital recorder will capture all their comments for later use in promotional clips.  I have signed permissions from each of the parents in a folder.  

I’ll introduce the next clip, then dim the lights and show it.  Another short round of kibbitzing and smiles, I’ll have someone pass out the Dunkin’ Munchkins.  Four or five more clips, most of them already in the can, each highlighting a different aspect of what we’ve been doing so far, four or five more breaks for short comments, and then we’ll have the kids wash their sticky hands (remember to pick up a bottle of Purell and a wad of paper towels) and throw the workshop open to the young animators, who show their parents how it’s done, let them try their hand at the process.  Their children will show them the frames coming to life in the camera’s viewer.

“I will have this edited and on youTube by the weekend,” I’ll tell them as they leave, getting their email addresses so I can send them the URL, shaking their hands. 

Something I can do in my sleep, talk about the program.  But I can’t write out my outline, choose the films.  I am thinking of the precariousness of the whole enterprise much more than its great potential, much of it already demonstrated.   I am thinking that I am paying two kids the entire fee I’m collecting to run the second one-hour workshop, even though I am still doing most of the work in running it.  The kid who’s getting my $90 fee is putting in about ninety distracted minutes a week for that money, I used to put in about five hours.  The assistant is getting $30, the same thing I paid the assistant for the two hour session.  I am getting virtually nothing, but the proof, with luck, that the workshop is scalable, can be run by people I train.

What must they know?   What it feels like to be creative, and how to encourage creativity.  And children don’t need much encouragement in that area, truly.  The adult must know that her first duty is to listen to and help the children, the teaching aspect is truly minimal.  They teach mostly by their example, the way they are present, and friendly, and the way they listen and help.  They model the behavior we hope to encourage in the children.

So I try to fool myself here, as I cannot attack this important task head on.  I write this, and hope I’ll come up with something like this:

“Hello and welcome to the student-run animation workshop.  This program is designed to allow the children to describe their ideas to adults who will help them, if they need help.  Most of the time the only help the kids need is a tiny bit of encouragement when they are not sure their idea is good.   Trying new ideas is a good thing and we encourage it.  There are very few ideas that kids come up with that we wind up having to discourage, usually involving violence — and there is usually a way to save the good part of even a very troubling idea.

I’m going to let the children’s animation speak for itself.  We have a larger screen that I was planning to bring today, but I am going to a wake right after this and the logistics were impossible, so you will have to get a little closer to the screen and use your imagination as you watch on this laptop.  Picture yourself in a little theatre, watching this on a big screen with a great sound system.  Forget for a moment that all of what you are about to see was made in a very, very short time by children, meeting once a week, who had never done animation before.  Picture what they could do if we had time to talk about stories they want to tell, and make characters, and scenery, and revisit some of these great ideas they come up with week after week.

Or, better than that, forget everything I’ve just said and enjoy watching your children’s imaginations come to life.   We enjoy it greatly every week.  They’re a great and creative group of kids and it’s a pleasure to work with them.   In fact, they are going to teach you how to animate in a few minutes.  Lights please, Tim.”

Encouraged vs. Discouraged

When you are discouraged, as I am at the moment, simple things look impossible.  Taking action seems as difficult as walking up a greasy wall in flip flops.  In biblical times discouraged people, then called sluggards, were heard to say “there is a lion in the way, yea, a lion!”  Of course there’s a lion in the way, there is always a lion.

When we are encouraged, by events, people, luck, the world looks entirely different.   It is no longer a problem that stops you in your tracks that there is a lion in the way.   Here you go, lion.

Courage, it has been said many times, is not the absence of fear but the presence of mind to carry on in spite of fear.  Easy to think of it as a matter of character, the brave die but once and so forth, but there are also tides, and winds that blow, amines in the brain, events, people, luck that will either aid your courage or sap it.

It is important to remind yourself, in times of low tide, that tides turn, that the moon and other forces are arranging it even as hope seems far over the barnacle and slime encrusted rocks.  If all goes well, everything will be fine.  If not, there will probably be time to cry about it.  

“Eh, you’re just trying to make yourself feel better, loser,” says a voice less charitable than one might wish to hear when you are feeling discouraged.

“You’re probably right,” you think to say, but wisely say nothing instead.

Walking Uphill

When you are tired and heading up a steep incline, and have an unknown distance to the place where you can rest, sometimes the wind will start blowing hard.   It feels like an immense, heavy hand in your chest, like a continuous slow motion punch removing all the air from your struggling lungs.   Your companions on this uphill walk share frightened looks, they are already depressed about the difficulty of the seemingly endless climb.  

It will not do to give them a bracing whiff of your own desperation at this time.  So you cheerfully have everyone to stop for a moment, turn their backs to the wind, drink some water, rest their legs.  They will appreciate this kindness and so will you.

If things get much worse, and finally the expedition is actually doomed, there will be plenty of time to give everyone a bracing whiff of your own desperation.  Until that time, remain cheerful, no matter how bracing the whiff of your own desperation may be to you.

Cheer Up

It’s hard to watch somebody suffering.  People don’t know what to do.  What do you say to an emaciated ninety year-old woman, lying on her back, hands curled on her chest in a pose of death, face impassive, eyes staring, composing a prayer: “please help me die”?   You bend over and kiss her dry, cool cheek.   She cannot speak.  What do you say after that?

“You’re looking well….”

“How are you?”

“I see you’re not feeling well and that you can’t speak, is there any way you can tell me what you want?   Shall I go?  Shall I keep talking?”

“I have my ukulele here, would you like a little music?”  And if she doesn’t, how is she going to let you know?

Her daughter is at a loss.  Maybe not the easiest relationship, going back to when the woman was a child and this now cadaverous looking old lady in the bed was up and around and raising her.  This disabling disease has surely not made things easier betwen them.  She complains about her mother’s depression, that she just will not look on the bright side.

If the old woman could talk she’d say “there is no bright side for me, bedridden, unable to even communicate, in constant pain from a disease that, with maniacal slowness, continues to get worse and worse, more disabling and more painful.  In a merciful world I’d be allowed to die.  I have a fucking DNR on the door, why can’t I just have a goddamned stroke already like everyone else?”

But the old woman cannot talk, though she’s expressed her wish to die to her daughter whenever she’s been able to.  I play the ukulele, her daughter and Sekhnet, both wearing surgical masks against the daughter’s bronchitis, sing.   At a certain point she manages to raise one finger which her daughter translates “one more?”  The old woman gives a kind of nod.

We play Goodnight, by the Beatles, the one sung so fetchingly by Ringo at the end of the White Album.  We do not perform it anywhere near as fetchingly as Ringo and the boys did, but, under the circumstance, even if Ringo and the boys were there, John and George alive again and at the peak of their powers, with a string section, it wouldn’t have mattered that much.

I think of how much worse many people have it than I do at the moment.  It is only a dream of mine that is on a respirator, after all, not me myself or any loved one.  I try to cheer up, much like the old woman being urged to make the best of her disabling Parkinson’s Disease.

Doing the Impossible

The only essential ingredient for doing the impossible, outside of talent, work, dedication, perseverance, luck and strategic support, is faith that you can do it.  

Lose that spark of sometimes unreasonable hope for success and the world is right– what you are trying to do is impossible, a million reasons it was doomed from the start.  Tongues will cluck, sad looks pass behind your back.  Life will go on, just not for your dream.

Depression, it emerges, is like riding a bike.  Don’t do it for 25 years, find yourself in the right situation and, bingo:  no training wheels needed. 

Sleep Resister

One more from the last visit with Florence (and a perfect one it was).
 “Ever since I was a young girl I’ve been a sleep resister,” she told me toward the end of my visit, around 1 a.m.  I knew exactly what she was talking about and no words were necessary, she knew I knew.  The phrase is a perfect description of my variety of insomnia most of the time.  The mind resists shutting down.  It’s not worry, per se, or anxiety, as much as just a stream of thoughts and ideas that does not want to be shut off.  A clinging to consciousness.
 
“When I went off to Syracuse my father gave me a little bottle of blackberry brandy to have a few sips of before I went to bed, to help me get to sleep,” she recalled fondly, and then smiled as she reported that it didn’t really help– she remained a sleep resister right up to the end.
 
She was found dead in her computer chair, with the NY Times open in front of her, her glasses on and a bowl of M & Ms nearby, probably resisting sleep at 4 or 5 a.m. when her ticker, pronounced sound earlier that very day by some Brooklyn quack, finally gave out.

Cancer Journals

Alone, in the middle of the night, cancer victims I have known wrote long emails, sent to everyone they hoped might care.  I recall cc’s I got from two of them, one many years ago (she has survived, I saw her dancing at a wedding not long ago) and one, more recently, who was a wasted shell at my father’s funeral — held up on her son’s arm, who died not long afterwards.

 

The emails were excruciatingly detailed descriptions of cancer treatment, hopes, drug interactions, side effects, verbatim reports of talks with oncologists, nurses, spiritual advisers, descriptions of articles from medical journals.  One might call these email journals obsessively detailed.  The writers did not seem to pause for a breath, in their desire to tell the entire story, in every detail, how the drug trial, a long-shot, was nonetheless a hopeful thing, citing the literature, comparing side effects, describing how the previous chemo had made them feel, reciting many cancer terms of art with facile familiarity. They had been educated in a deadly grad school and they wrote long, scholarly emails.

 

These arrived in the night in one continuous paragraph, many screens long, or so my memory makes them appear.  I recall responding early on, and wishing them well and thereafter being at a loss, though they each thanked me profusely for writing a couple of sentences to them.  

 

One lived far away, the other I saw frequently as she grew thinner, lost her hair, grew it back, became drawn and skeletal, her beautiful smile more and more fleeting until it was just a memory.  Both wrote in the same way, writing to think out loud, writing to call out to other souls to answer them, writing not to feel so alone, awake and rattling the keys as they clung to their precariously teetering lives in otherwise silent houses.

 

I bring these up because I had an eerie feeling earlier today, thinking about some obsessively detailed emails I’d sent lately, in real time, about very specific aggravations I was going through.   The frustrations of buying mandated health insurance on the New York marketplace, by tomorrow’s deadline, for example, and having to pay $1,750 out of pocket, in addition to premium payments, before any insurance benefits kick in.  Or being dicked around by a corporation that helps nonprofits, and others, raise money on-line and does not make full payment more than a month after the campaign ends, its Customer Happiness bots cheerfully cranking out generic emails with update links that cannot be opened.  I realize the level of aggravated detail in my screeches of pain was probably similar to the emails from these two cancer patients.  Some suffer silently, others at great, sometimes unbearably detailed, length.  

 

I also had the troubling thought that diagnosed with cancer myself, I would probably find myself writing similar journals.  The odds are pretty strong both ways.  All four of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, along with a young first cousin and a second cousin once removed, also quite young.  I’ve had a few small skin cancers already myself, and a few polyps snipped.  And I write by day and in the silence of night, sometimes in great detail.

 

I will now be as brief as I can as I explain to myself why I was so worked up by today.

 

On Monday a week ago I called my almost 93 year-old friend Florence, a great artist and a great soul.  She sounded befuddled on the phone, as she sometimes did.  I told her I’d call back.  When I spoke to her later she was completely clear and glad I’d be visiting her the following day.  I did.  The visit was wonderful and she looked great.  Three nights later she died.

 

I walked around the day after she died, last Sunday, feeling mostly grateful.  It was only when I told Sekhnet that Florence was gone that I found myself getting tearful.  Sekhnet is adept that way.

The following day my very promising young animation assistant was put into a terrifying position as the young man I am paying over-generously to arrive early and run the workshop showed up late and unprepared.  When I arrived the kids were one step from cannibalism, a bullied girl ran from the room.  This new group, and this promising and diligent assistant, may now be lost, the kids horses out of the barn and too late to lock the barn door. The young woman, seeing the carnage, may have been scared skittish.  I’d placed a lot of hopes on this new workshop and my new assistant.

 

Had dinner afterwards with Sekhnet, got choked up talking about a variety of things.  The next day and night I prepared a forced and muddled demo for the Wednesday workshop.  One girl correctly called the soundtrack creepy and I watched helplessly as my plans were cut to ribbons with little safety scissors.  I saw my dreams of this animation workshop flourishing and expanding littered across a classroom floor with the shredded materials that had been wasted.

 

Afterwards, after a long walk with Sekhnet, carrying heavy bags in the rain and expressing my hopelessness, she hit on an idea to help me.  Finding the 800 number for the company giving me the cold shoulder about the $450 they owed me from the fundraiser she urged me to call and straighten it out.   It was a sincere attempt to be helpful that resulted in me, on the fourth or fifth call, leaving a snarling message referring to the California attorney general’s office as Sekhnet called out the name of my nonprofit several times in the background as I tried to talk.  Wiping the foam off my lips I eventually accepted the tranquilizer she offered and found myself falling asleep twisted into a grotesque position memorialized by Sekhnet’s Blackberry.

 

A visit the following evening to an old woman dying slowly of Parkinsons, who seems to have lost the ability to communicate, didn’t feel like it brought anyone much joy.

 

Hours on hold trying to buy health insurance today, and so on.  I can add these things up and say “rough fucking week, man,” but I could not add them up in real time or distance myself in any single instance from the totality of them.  

Neither could I really get anyone to understand how unbearably painful any of it was to me, except for the sudden death of my oldest living friend.  Everyone can probably understand how much that one would hurt.