Edit (exercise in using the fewest words)

Among the boys I grew up with, their oversized heads on necks like flower stalks, I was considered an athlete. In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or act tough, though it was within me.

In my early twenties I spent a couple of seasons in the Bay Area where I had a peripheral acquaintance named Joey. Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate. The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two. It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and Joey and I ran full speed for hours going out for passes or trying to intercept passes meant for each other. The cool afternoon turned to dusk and then into a chilly evening. When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day. As we walked to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind. I did not take hitting the ground hard very well.

Joe Oui seemed shocked at how quickly he was on his back, an angry maniac on top of him, forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood. The maniac’s eyes were merciless as Joey’s face changed color and panic began to show in his eyes. In time, the maniac stood wearily and let him breathe again. He clutched his throat and muttered something about a complete overreaction.

I practice ahimsa now, but nothing about that story makes me feel sad.

I Recalled this While Walking Tonight

I grew up among boys who had oversized heads on necks like flower stalks. I was considered an athlete among these boys, though I was no athlete compared to many of the boys in the tougher classes, kids who were not absurdly labeled “Intellectually Gifted Children” and assigned to the IGC class. These boys in my class from grades one to six all grew up to be wealthy men, I’m certain of it. In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or to be very tough, but that side was dormant, I suppose.

There was a guy in California named Joey, I knew him peripherally when I spent a few months out there in the mid-seventies, while all the flower stalk necked boys were working towards advanced degrees and promising careers. I found myself making drawings in spiral bound drawing books, looking out the windows of the bus as it made its way from New York to the Bay area. Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate. The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two. It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and we all ran for hours on a cool afternoon that turned into dusk and then a chilly evening. When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day. As we were walking to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind. I did not take it well.

I think Joe Oui was shocked at how quickly he found himself on his back, with me on top of him, leaning on my forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood. I continued to apply pressure until his face changed color and real panic began to show in his eyes. Then I stood wearily and let him get up. He clutched his throat and muttered something about what he considered my overreaction, I said nothing.

A stone killer.

TDD (Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria)

At a luncheon recently I mentioned, intending to share my skepticism about the evolving DSM and its 5,000 new categories eligible for lucrative psycho-pharmaceutical medications, Angry Baby Syndrome. I smirked as I brought up the newly minted diagnosis: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria, a proposed addition to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among other things the guide for what insurance will pay for by way of pharmaceuticals.

One of the strangers at the table, a woman with some professional familiarity with these matters, immediately nodded knowingly. “Yes, it’s a real condition, there are some babies who just start off angry,” she informed us and the conversation drifted quickly from where I was trying to steer it. In truth, though I am opinionated, I had no real interest in steering this particular conversation, I was merely stroking one of my pet peeves– the madness and brutality of runaway capitalism. I worked on my vegan lunch plate, smiling neutrally as I chewed, and let my mind drift in and out of the talk around me.

I’d read a great article, given to me by my friend the now retired judge, about the meteoric rise of mental illness diagnoses. The article was a review of several books on the boom in psychopharmacology, I’ll find it for you. A long review, but fascinating, well-written and worth a read. Marcia Angell begins:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

(click here to read the article)

I can’t help thinking of TDD, Angry Baby Syndrome, in the context of a story my parents told, and believed, until the end of their lives, a myth I always took pains to demythologize. At ten weeks old I became red and rigid, my little fists clenched, with a look of rage on my face that no amount of concerned staring or direct questioning from my frightened parents could wipe away. With great anxiety, they rushed me to the pediatrician. The good doctor took one look at me, began to laugh and said: “this child is having a temper tantrum! I’ve never seen it in a baby so young, but this is definitely one angry baby!” I recall thinking “fuck you, doc. I’ll live to laugh at your fucking anger some day, you articulate, quack prick. Just wait until I can talk, assbite.” By ten months old, according to my proud mother, I was talking, though neither at ten months nor at any time after that did I bother to track the cavalier pediatrician down.

The point of this story to me was always that rather than figure out why their child was so unhappy as to be having a temper tantrum, the two young parents took comfort from the quack’s diagnosis that the kid was just irrationally enraged. The expert confirmed my parents’ fear that their baby was just one of those born pricks– adversarial, angry, vindictive, challenging, defiant, hating all authority. Who knew a ten week old could have the worldview to make all these judgments? I have to believe it helped set the course of my adversarial childhood, this expert’s glib diagnosis that did not extend past a relieved chuckle. He concluded, essentially, that this baby suffered from nothing more than being an enraged little asshole. Kind of funny, in a way, no?

I always thought a good doctor might have felt the kid’s little fists– said to the parents, “I’ll be damned, even though it’s August, feel how cold this little guy’s hands are… maybe he’s pissed off because nobody has made sure he’s warm enough.” Indeed, my mother reported that I always immediately calmed down whenever she gave me a warm bath, but of course, it was impossible to carry around the baby bathtub full of warm water to bathe me whenever I started becoming irrationally enraged.

But my point in writing this is not to wonder whether TDD with Dysphoria is not a perfectly good diagnosis (why not give a pill to a young child who is just an irrationally angry bastard all the time?) or to muse about whether or not that pediatrician 57 years ago did anyone any favors, or to belatedly defend my, admittedly, infantile behavior.

I replaced a roll of toilet paper backwards just now. I noticed it and calmly removed the roll, reversed it, snapped it back into place. This struck me as a great moment. The calm fixing of a minor problem was unaccompanied by any sort of snarl, curse word, smirk, clucking of the tongue. I still fly into a Tourretic rage when I’m leaving the house in a hurry and my ear buds are violently yanked out of my ears as the cord whips around a doorknob, or the long horn bicycle handlebars. Part of my rage is at the randomness, seeming cruelty and absolute regularity with which these little delaying things always seem to happen, as though the universe is giving me the finger when I most need its silent cooperation. But with today’s toilet paper tragedy, I was happy to notice myself fixing a minor problem as calmly as the Buddha.

I took a breath and thought about the progress I’ve made from that vicious little ten week old I once was, the raging TDD poster baby. It made me think of my father’s terrible temper, and his insistence, until right before the end, when he smartly reversed himself, that people are what they are programmed to be, by genetics and upbringing. He always dismissed as delusional the idea that one can consciously change this programming. My dad’s reflex, when a mistake was made by himself or anyone else, was to become instantly enraged. I spent decades being mad at myself when I did something careless, or stupid, things that earthlings do all the time.

Follow if you can: you are snipping the ends off string beans, nipping the stem off and a bit of the tip on the other end. In one bowl the prepped beans that will be steamed or sauteed, in another the ends you will be discarding. One after another, bing, bing, bing, the stems into the little metal bowl, string beans into the strainer. Then, bip! stem into the string beans, whole string bean into the bowl of ends. One would expect, at most, a little smile and head shake, a plucking out of the stem, an extraction of the string bean, and quickly restoring them to their desired places. It would be hard for many people to understand the reflex to a paroxysm of rage when the stem gets flipped into the wrong bowl, but it is there for some.

Did my father have his face whipped all through his early childhood, and the angry course of his life irremediably stamped on his little soul, because he had undiagnosed TDD? Did his mother, an insane little bitch, as far as I can make out, suffer from untreated TDD? Is the reflex to be enraged carried in the DNA? If this reflex is then reinforced by infallible repetition, can the programming to react this way be undone by mere mindfulness and a desire to not react with rage to every frustration, no matter how minor?

Let us not underestimate the practice of mindfulness, working in tandem with a strong enough desire to change a painful reflex. I’ve been trying to apply this principle to my dealings with others, with some success. I have remained fairly mild in situations that would have provoked me to major unmildness before. Imagine my delight to find myself the recipient of this forgiving gentleness in the moment of realizing how maddeningly idiotic my placement of that roll of toilet paper had been. Noticing these small, valuable steps is a great gift we can give ourselves.

Or, an old reflex suggests, the wishful thinking of a fucking idiot. Though I think not, whatever my father or a respected doctor might have once said to the contrary.

Hanging By A Spider Web

True, the string a spider shoots out is plenty strong, still, it’s a little bracing to be suspended in this life by something as thin and almost invisible as that. Cornell West, a man with a penchant for cadence and rhyme, called his recent book Hope on A Tightrope. Similar image– we are, for an hour or a hundred years, by grace, moving forward, or backwards, or quivering in place, or asleep– but in a precarious situation where a single false step might be our last.

Unlike others I know, I never wake up sweating, my heart pounding in my throat, thinking of ending it all before the pounding can kill me. I don’t recall the last time I felt so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed. That said, going forward cheerfully and confidently in every moment is not always possible.

I saw an interview by Bill Moyers yesterday with the author of a book describing the real-life zombie apocalypse we are living through now in our thoroughly marketized culture, a world where obscene wealth is seen as victory and everything else the work of fungible parasitic takers. If obscene wealth is the only crown of victory in a competitive market society, and everyone else is a loser, and if losers are despicable in their craving for ‘entitlements’ when the only people actually entitled to entitlements are the super wealthy, and if the media hammers this destructive narrative home around the clock– you have one option, if you buy all that (and virtually everyone must on some level, since it is the dominant story shouted over and over): walk the streets with your arms out going “nyahhhh– nghhhh— nnnnnnnn…..” and looking for a live human to bite into.

I have to get to work now, but I hesitate, semi-paralyzed, questioning my judgment. Yes, I have dreamed, planned, designed and am carrying out a program that works largely as I designed it. But a series of larger and more formidable yeses stands in my way: yes, I have no marketing plan, yes, I have not branded or packaged the program, yes, I have not created a winning ad to sell it, yes, I have not made of it an easily scalable commodity that can be sold over and over, yes, I have not funded it, yes, I have not recruited a single brilliant person to help in any meaningful way, etc.

Fortunately for me, since I don’t live in an actual democracy but in a cynical marketplace filled with false idols, since I am surrounded mainly by stressed out, distracted, treadmill thumping zombies, I can sojourn in my own head where my beliefs, as they must, sustain me while I hang from this almost invisible thread, thinner than a spider’s. Now, to let out a yell like Tarzan and swing into action!

Only Human

We mess up, our plans go awry, comments meant to be light and funny sometimes fall badly, shattering into sharp pieces in the awkwardness they produce. Our best plans, our smartest theories, turn out to be less brilliant than we thought.

When angry at someone it is easy to reduce them to the sum of their aggravating faults, forget that they are frail humans to whom a certain degree of self-blindness and hypocrisy is as natural as walking on two legs. If they hurt us once, shame on them. If they hurt us again and again, in extreme cases we are driven to become the leader of our nation and unleash a vast coordinated killing campaign. Bombs, missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, burning chemicals dropped from the sky, torture and endless detention, relentless pursuit of enemy and friend of enemy alike, collateral damage be damned. A slightly less insane approach is to accumulate billions of dollars and build beautiful houses for ourselves every place that we like, and to scream that we are victims of a holocaust if anyone speaks of taxing us fairly. And there are less and less insane ways to deal with hurt all the way down to the saintly one of quickly forgiving all who mistreat us. If someone hurts you and apologizes, it is a good practice to accept the apology and move on. If someone hurts you and steadfastly refuses to allow that they’ve behaved badly, that’s a trickier situation.

Outside, in raging winter winds bringing single digit wind-chill, if the radio is to be believed, overly loud speakers somewhere nearby, perhaps on the campus of the college a few hundred feet from here, blared an auto-tuned hip hop number that was mildly annoying. As I tried to gather my thoughts with the recorded drum pounding, “I Love Music” by the O’Jays made a cameo and I thought of the irony, the random, unintended ingenuity, of using one of a person’s favorite songs as a bludgeon upside the head. Now it is just a kick drum, bap! BAP! bap! bap!, and a small voice wailing like a baby who’s been punched by an insane parent or guardian. Somebody’s idea of a groovy time over there, no doubt.

Where the line is between overlooking a friend’s occasional bad mood and swallowing abusive behavior is sometimes hard to say in the individual case. The case can always be made that the other person is only human, and sometimes humans slip up, do hurtful things. Hell, humans organize lynch mobs, scream with veins popping on their necks and faces and are not satisfied until someone is mutilated. Humans, it must be said, also rush into burning buildings to rescue small frightened animals.

One of the great personal dilemmas is to stay in a posture of forgiveness toward friends and family, while not tolerating abusive patterns that are sometimes subtle and dangerous. They are dangerous precisely because they are subtle, easily denied and made to appear as figments of your oversensitive imagination rather than concrete hurtful actions done in a thoughtless or cruel way. The subtle hurtful behaviors are easily justified, satisfyingly employed as small, sharp whips, to lash sensitive places on the face while telling the injured party that they are insane. The beauty part? Insane people often do believe innocent behaviors to be subtle, dangerous, hurtful, used as small, sharp whips to lash sensitive places on the face while the whipper puts on the most innocent of faces and tells them they are insane to feel that way.

Accepting Criticism

An emotionally intelligent person, concerned with effectively communicating with others, is interested in people’s reactions and takes them into consideration.

What is clear to the person speaking, or writing, or pitching, or drawing, or singing, may not be clear to the people she is directing it to. A person who would communicate well must be attuned to intelligent comments, as well as cluelessness, and the opinions of people who may be saying what they are out of an undigested mixture of helpfulness, envy, anger, confusion, ambivalence, distraction and so forth. Many of these comments will be useful in helping to refine communication.

Even those who blurt out, ten seconds into a thirty second rough sketch, why the thing fails as a whole, may have a good point. The only thing, it is sometimes hard, even for the person who graciously accepts suggestions and easily revises accordingly, not to snarl when this helpful approach is the only approach encountered.

The Bossy Type

There is a personality type whose fondest wish is to be in charge and able to punish and fire people who oppose their will. The thrill they extract from being the decider is somewhat alien to me, but there are literally millions of this type walking around the earth. They are bosses, leaders, experts of every stripe, many of them more or less complete assholes. I have never had much sympathy for the “my way or the highway” type, but recent events give me, if not sympathy, a bit of understanding.

I have a little program I’m running. I don’t say “little” to disparage it or minimize its potential importance. It is a great program that should have about six to eight people working on it by now– it could really be a bright, hot new pilot light on this rusty but essential stove outgassing here in the stinking global kitchen. It is little because I am the only person working on it, trying to do the jobs of a half-dozen dedicated people by myself. The program is currently exactly as big as I am, which is big enough, especially if you factor in imagination, talent and persistence, but for purposes of a program, quite little.

I recently spent great effort planning and attempting to hold a productive meeting to raise funds so I can hire some bright experts help to move the program forward. I’m told the meeting went well. After all, I managed to hold my tongue for the most part when the carping began, when I was called a hypocrite for calling the organization wehearyou.net yet not being willing to listen to an avalanche of criticism from well-intentioned people doing me a favor, supporters whose help comes largely in the form of opinionated criticism, frank and unvarnished, and, thoughtful or not, strictly for my own good.

The results of the meeting I spent hours working on could have been revealed to me in an email from the people who deigned to attend: your website sucks and has to be redone before you can think of mounting a crowd funding campaign. Of course, I had virtually no replies to any of the emails I sent any of the attendees, before or after the meeting, so I guess it was worth the $100 I spent to buy everyone dinner to get that great insight.

I pay a couple of people to help and they spend as much time looking at their smart phones and drawing their own pictures as helping do what I pay them to do, namely working with the children. I thank them as I hand them their checks, smiling, and thinking as I do “you stupid, fucking useless bastard.” This thought applies as much to myself as employer as to them, since I have not figured out how to extract what the program and I need from the mercenaries I’ve managed to recruit. Or how to recruit people who are willing to work as devotedly as I do.

And so I get the first inkling into why someone would be a prick boss as I ponder this:

The young man misspells the name I sign to every email and writes:

I’m applying for another social media position and they are asking for people who can vouch for my social media skills. Would it be alright if I listed you?

Thanks,

I decide, for the time being, to apply the tonic that has done so much for me: silence. No need to rush to reply to this guy. I’ve paid him about $500 for what appears to have been a total of about six hours of work. His rate was $15 an hour, and I suppose he figured, since I didn’t press him to do any of the things I asked of him that he didn’t do, since I’d be in the lurch if he walked and I had to conduct the Monday workshop by myself, since I seemed easy going, that it was better to get $90/hr. than $15 and made adjustments accordingly. The first week he was on the job there was a huge spike in social media, 500% increase as his friends checked out the various sites. The next four weeks the spike was less impressive, 0%. After paying him for weeks I told him truthfully that the corporate coffers were almost empty and I could no longer pay him for “social media”.

Yesterday I paid him to help at the original workshop so I could interview kids one on one for a promo I need to make very soon. Yesterday was actually my last chance to do this in time for the timeline I’m desperately aiming for. He was 5% better than useless and I was unable to interview anyone, since I was the only one of three adults in the room actively helping the kids throughout the workshop, then cleaning up alone at the end. No sound bites for the promo. I suppose I could write:

Think carefully about what I could say about your social media skills and work ethic. After an impressive increase the first week, the arrow went straight down to zero every week after that. Tasks I asked you to do were never done, or were done sloppily and uselessly. Your checks from me were always on time, and you were quick to ask the one time I delayed by a day to pay you, yet you don’t take a moment to spell my name right when asking me for a favor. A favor, moreover, revealing the almost imponderably large size of your testicles.

So I say this both as a fellow human being and a prick boss: think carefully about how my honest appraisal of your work might help your chances of finding more employment.

How To Crush An Idealist

There are many ways, but this one is elegant in its simplicity. It may be more fun to find one niggling detail, (detail unimportant, in fact, the pettier the better), grip it tightly in bulldog jaws and keep pulling at the idealist, but I think this one is better. Less is more.

Do nothing, say nothing. No matter what the idealist says or accomplishes, remain quiet.

This way the idealist is left to wonder if anybody is home, and the sneaking feeling that nobody’s home will crush that sucker faster than a steamroller flattening the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

There’s no place like home

I’ve got to be quick, because there is not enough air in here and I’m told it’s beautiful outside and I need to stretch the legs and breathe. I am just thinking about the games we learn as kids and how much deliberate and focused attention and hard work it takes to unlearn the bad ones.

It’s a tiring story, but my father was a tormented soul. Great, dark sense of humor, but essentially a well-defended fortress against all potential invaders. Everyone was included in this category. If I had a problem being raised by someone like this, it was not something he was obliged to concern himself with. That was his position for our long, difficult relationship, his answer to every attempt on my part to have him lower the bridge so I could cross the moat: I was the one with the problem, not him. A position he apologized for quite sincerely hours before he died.

He gave me the gift of belatedly acknowledging that my painful childhood was largely the fault of an adult incapable of being a better parent. He acknowledged that I was right to be hurt and saluted, for the first time, my many attempts over the years to improve the relationship.

While he was alive and on his feet, however, he’d fight to the death any suggestion that on his deathbed he’d have the regrets that could be so easily seen by anyone who wasn’t him.

They Had A Vision

I dragged myself to the workshop in a state of exhaustion this afternoon, half blind with fatigue for reasons too tedious to detail. I arrived first, five minutes before the session was supposed to start. Tim got there a few minutes later. Luckily, the kids didn’t arrive until five minutes after they were scheduled to arrive. It was an odd day, slight underwater feeling, everybody sort of floating around jellyfish-like. I don’t think more than 20 frames were shot all session, the usual number is two or three hundred frames.

I called two kids over, gave them headphones and the three of us began making a soundtrack. I couldn’t get the wonderful new Audiobus interface to work, but I gave them a taste of the cool sounds and after a few minutes of futility, apologized for not having had time to learn it well enough before the session. I shut it down and switched to garageband, which I know well, and which neither of these kids had used.

Within moments Lily was moving her hands purposefully on the touch-screen. They recorded an adorable track of childish bickering, but neither of them liked it much. I deleted it as they watched and they did it again, less contentious and still adorable. They still didn’t like it. I told them to leave it, we could mute it. Lily dragged a drum loop they chose into the track. I told them to listen to the beat and play along. I urged them to play only a bit, since they could always add more on the next track, and it was impossible to subtract if they otherwise liked the track. They pulled up another mic and began pounding the table in time with the drums. They played a piano together. I took my headphones off and walked over to see what the animators were up to, after muting the piano at their request.

When I got back I saw they’d deleted their adorable vocal track, along with the piano. I was dismayed, and told them so. They were too busy to pay much attention to my dismay, another girl was with them now, drumming on the table. I put a pair of headphones on her and walked away to start cleaning up, as Lily’s twin brother laughed, headphones on, pounding the table.

As we were leaving I said to Tim, “that’s what happens when you let the inmates have complete control of the asylum, you get no input into the output.” Tim commented that kids always find their own voices weird and distasteful when they first hear them played back, and that’s probably why they’d wiped out the adorable tracks.

I walked a good way with the heavy pack on my back, and a duffel bag hanging at the end of my arm. I was actually too tired to stop walking, and as the temperature began to drop I paused to pull my hood over my head. I sat on a bench. I ate a slice of pizza and took Excedrin. I eventually got on the subway and listened to Bill Moyers when I was not nodding out, and when I was.

Made it up to my apartment, took my clothes off and got under the covers. Charging the iPad I decided to listen to the track, see what they’d wound up with. I’ll be damned, they had a vision. They weren’t going for adorable, it was the percussion they were after. Two tracks of poly-rhythmic table banging, along with the drum track. They had an idea they were going for. I was impressed. They hadn’t opted for any of the fancy gimmicks they’d tried in garageband, they were going for the real thing. Playing the only instrument they had, the table, they jammed, creating a convincing jungle of percussion.