These two made my day

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Blessings are where we find them.   The gift is in learning to recognize them.
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Yesterday as I headed toward another fairly disjointed and disappointing animation session with six boys (makes me realize how important a coed group is for a good workshop– the girls are more creative and take more chances and it spurs the boys on, and the energy is much better than in this weird little boy’s club– ten is also a far better number than six) I was feeling like crap, physically and emotionally.  
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An affable but irresponsible idiot from a local film school was coming in to shoot the session, against my better judgment, and I’d had to draft a legal paper for him to sign to protect myself if he tries to do anything more with his half-assed student project than submit it for his grade.  I was really feeling up against it, up against everything.
 
On the crosstown train, toward the end of my trip,  a woman sat next to me with her 3 year-old son.  What I saw filled my heart with wonder and joy, it changed my mood instantly and completely and the rest of the day I’d been dreading went fine.   I wrote this afterwards in my journal:
 
Climbed up on
his large brown mother
his small hands reaching
his small bright face tilted up
reaching
kissing the top of her large upper lip,
her nose, her cheek
balled in a beautiful smile
and she kissed his small
smiling face
and he held on as she 
brushed her lips over his profile
and began to sing
softly and kiss him back
as he kissed her
and stroked her face
 
I was reminded
hours later
after telling her
“you two are a blessing
to everyone on this train” 
and as she smiled
another beautiful smile
and told her dumbfounded 
young son to thank me,
as the doors closed and I walked on, 
after colossal patience
with idiot school boys
and listening long
to unhappy details
from an old friend, 
my friend reminded me
 
the lives of the children 
of the wealthy
ain’t no crystal stair neither
and I should keep in mind
the stress, neglect and childhood pain
I might soothe
in them too
 
neither should I scorn
their possibly unlikable parents’
money
which would help ease 
the unbearable worry of poor Sekhnet
who righteously agonizes
over my great gift
for not making a living.

On Other Days…

… the wick is turned way down, the flame barely burning.  In fact, if you don’t look very closely, you might not see any fire glowing there at all.  There are days like that, too, even for those who count their blessings several times a day.  No doubt about it.

On such days, if you can, it’s best to turn in early, sleep and restore yourself.   No question worth pondering is more important than that long draught of deep sleep.

G’night.

What We’re Doing Here

It’s a mystery, why we don’t greet each day as the unequivocal blessing that it is.  My mother, her internal organs riddled with a million tiny cancerous tumors, was given a few months to live back in 1992; she lived another 23 years.   It is unfair to single her out, but outside of loving opera, and laughing when something was funny, and seeing the dark humor in things sometimes, she did not greet every new day as a blessing.  Unfair indeed to single my poor, dead mother out, because she was by no means alone in this.  I am trying to think of someone who greets every day as a blessing, and I’m not coming up with anyone that I know.

But, look at it seriously.   Everyone has reasons to complain, feel bitter, cheated, to hold on to anger about many things that are truly aggravating.   All this is true, work often sucks, people are often thoughtless, or worse, the world is increasingly distracted, run by greedy, sometimes evil bastards, and it’s hard to get a thoughtful grunt most of the time out of most people, even those closest to us.  Everyone has their list of grievances.  But look at it seriously.  A hundred blessings every day.  Seriously.  

As a young man, delivering envelopes and packages on a bike so as not to take part in a corrupt and hateful materialistic society, I found myself in an elevator that wasn’t moving.  I was paid per delivery and this had been a day of endless delays.  I wasn’t paid for waiting, unless I waited more than twenty minutes.  I’d waited nineteen times for nineteen minutes that day and I was doing a slow burn in the dingy service elevator that sat, doors closed.  The corrugated metal cell smelled of sweat and urine.   I grumbled to an older woman that it wasn’t my day.   She was quick to correct me, “Don’t say it’s not your day.  If you’re alive, it’s your day!”  I nodded, gave her something between a grimace and a smile and eventually the elevator began its slow climb to the floor where I dropped off the important envelope and got a signature on my ticket so I could get paid.

The other night I was sitting outside the 24 hour laundromat as my clothes enjoyed the amusement park inside, spinning wildly in the dryers.  It was a cool night, a delightful night, really.  It had been muggy, but now there was a mild breeze that was the perfect temperature.  I sat in a chair enjoying it.  A woman walked up, somewhat painfully, put her bags down, sat heavily and looked over at me about to complain.  “I was going to start complaining that my feet hurt,” she said and I smiled.   I immediately thought of that old woman on the elevator thirty something years ago.   I told her she decided not to complain when she felt how good that breeze felt, and she smiled, and agreed.   I told her about what the woman in the elevator said to me, she nodded and looked relieved.

I told her the outline of the story of Wavy Gravy’s life, as told in Saint Misbehavin’.  He’d been a poet, extrovert and a trouble maker and had been beaten by cops at several civil rights rallies.  He had his back broken by cops twice.  The second time was really bad, he was laid up for months, the operation hadn’t seemed to have fixed his back, he was in a lot of pain, couldn’t get out of bed, became very depressed.  A friend convinced him to visit a nearby hospital for kids with cancer and to stop feeling sorry for himself, go help some kids with real problems.   He passed a costume shop and bought a clown nose.  He went to the cancer ward and began performing for the kids.  He said a light went on in the world for him interacting with those kids.  He went every day, rehabilitated his back, soon was walking without a cane.  Went on, with a doctor friend, to found an organization that has restored the sight to countless poor people in Asia, Africa, everywhere.   He learned that going to demonstrations dressed as a clown no cop would ever beat on him again.   What cop wants to be on TV beating the crap out of a clown?

“That’s right,” said the woman two chairs over, and asked me the name of the movie again.  I told her and mentioned how much it had inspired me, and then excused myself to see how my clothes were doing.  They were doing very well.

Political Orientation and Class Warfare

An old friend, a former leftist who had a political awakening on September 11th, 2001 and thereafter came to believe Bush and Cheney had the right approach, sometimes chides me for being uncharitable to the super rich. She considers herself an independent now.   She asked me recently if I knew how many really wonderful very rich people there are in the world.  I have no idea of the number, and was at a loss for a reply.  I admit I have a certain antipathy towards a class who, as a group, puts the acquisition of more than they can ever spend as their top priority.

She sent me an email today with a link to an article entitled  Americans in Poverty Have TVs VCRs Cellphones and Airconditioning (click on it, if you like).    The author, she wrote, backs up her thesis, American poverty is “a problem of fatherless homes, values, ennui, purposelessness, soul-work.”   She also lamented the lack of people, poor or otherwise, who believe in something greater than themselves.

I tried to be mild, since I value our friendship.  I’m not sure if I succeeded.   I wrote: 

If you will forgive me, I didn’t see anything very convincing in this little opinion piece which suggests America’s poor are doing just fine, thank you.  I know the right wing view of poverty which the title of this piece advertises quite prominently — moral failure of lazy non-workers, bloated, spoiled entitled parasites, godless hedonists.  People lacking the moral fiber and drive that folks like our former presidents Bush were both born with.
 
The other side of this view can be seen during a walk in any of the actual slums of the richest country on earth, slums that have been slums for generations, where the infant mortality rate is as bad in as the worst third world hell holes and the challenges of day to day survival are daunting.  Many do have tvs, and cellphones, and $200 sneakers.  Yes, I know, it seems unconscionable that people with such short life expectancies and so little to live for crave the luxuries that America advertises 24/7.  Particularly shameful when you consider that a hard-working HS graduate on minimum wage ($7.25 federal and NY state) makes under $300 for a 40 hour week, before taxes.  Seems an impossibly small amount of money to live on– only a greedy fool making that pittance would try to have a cell phone or TV.
 
The tax on the wealthiest goes back up, amid great gnashing of wealthy teeth, to pre-Bush tax cut levels by about 10% of the total rate while the payroll tax on everybody else goes up 48%.  Fair is fair.  Does one really have to be a Marxist to see that there is a class bias to our laws?  Is it unfair to criticize greed when it’s perfectly legal and enshrined in our laws?  Why should a CEO make only 40 times what his factory foreman makes (1970) when now he can make 400 times what that manager makes?  He’d be a fool to settle for 1/10th of what he can get, right?
 
So I’m not going to go further into this subject, though I may have gone too far already.  It’s something I guess we’ll never agree about.  Are there good rich people?  I’m certain there are many.  Are there good poor people?  I’m sure there are millions.  Are there greedy, vicious sociopaths both rich and poor?  Certainly, but in my book the poor, as a class, get the benefit of the doubt on that one.   At least they don’t amass more wealth than they can spend in 10,000 lifetimes, and fight for every penny of it as their right as successful Americans, and buy legislators and pass laws that favor their advantages, while children go to bed hungry across town for lack of food and others die needlessly for lack of access to routine medical care, while the aged poor eat scraps and wear extra sweaters to save on heating bills they can’t afford.
 
Perhaps the percentage of good and evil people is the same in both groups, good people and moral scum probably occur in roughly the same proportion in the rich and in the poor — but since there are thousands of times the poor people, I think the world has many more good poor people than good rich people.
 
Of course, most of the working poor are too busy holding down two or three low-paying jobs to write opinion pieces in prestigious publications, or on their websites. 
 
Love,
Groucho

Home Cure for Anxiety

Set the timer for twelve minutes.  Pretend the computer keyboard is a musical keyboard and blow.   The chords, as you know, are harmonies, instant, under your hands just like that.  Then there are the notes you can play against them and where you can put them.  

Oh, perhaps it is better, you think, to play an actual musical keyboard. There, you reason, you can put your fingers and hear the sounds you imagine, you try to describe.  Music, ineffable as that breeze suddenly blowing the sweat off your clammy face.

Well, there is a point to that, whereas here, where I tap like the fingers-afflicted victim of RLS, the bebopping leg shakes that can’t be controlled, as mine can’t be now, we are flying without a chart, without a map, without an audible clue, rhythmless and bluesless.  Such is the nature of this anxiety I am attempting the home cure for now. There is the best way to deal with it, and then there is the way we are capable of dealing with it in the given moment.

I have to say, it’s amazing the energy with which my right leg is pounding away.

That said, the rest is to be expected.  Sustaining a dream takes a remarkable, and/or, idiotic temperament, particularly when you can’t get others to really see the dream you dream.  That’s the hard work of the dreamer, to prove the dream is more than vapor in the mind of the person who dreams it.   How to show the focused excitement the living embodiment of that dream brings forth?   Hmmmmm.   How to control ze uncontrollable tapping of this right leg of mine?  It’s the damnedest thing.

I am waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting.  And because I’m in this holding pattern, waiting to hear, my leg has gone insane.  Lucky for the neighbor downstairs the foot is clad in a soft rubber croc, thus no tap tap tap on the ceiling.  Ah, now the RLS has miraculously stopped, and not a moment too soon.

A beautiful young woman, very talented, described her panic attacks the other day.   She begins hyperventilating and can’t stop herself.  The more fearful she gets, the worse it gets.   She sees a therapist, but so far, the attacks continue.

There is a merciless force at work in the universe, along with life-giving things like good music, kindness, love and hope.  Better to give hope, have it, share it, than to dwell on the merciless force always at work.  That force is busy whittling away at the life of an old friend who hopes to live to see his 58th birthday, this Friday the 13th.   It is busy eroding all of us, unless we tap into the forces that give life, and even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best.

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.

Get Walkin’

Sekhnet bought me a brilliant device that clips on a pocket, smaller than a pinkie.  It measures steps, calculates miles walked, has an altimeter that ticks off how many flights of steps, or their uphill equivalent, you walk.  It’s pretty motivational, I have to say.  We playfully compete against each other and can see each other’s stats on-line.   I cling to the slightest of leads over her in steps this week, and I see, to my chagrin, that pacing around the hovel today only netted me 1,747 steps, less than a mile.  I climbed no stairs.

Now the clock is counting down, it’s after midnight.  I’ve been nursing a bad cold all day, holding it to my breast, suckling it on hot soup when it was not gurgling out my nose, rattling in my chest.   Feeling a tiny bit better after all that and then I see my time to walk has passed.   And 29 steps on the device.   29 friggin’ steps.  0.01 miles.   So I have to go for a walk, just up the Avenue, around the hill at the corner, down to Broadway, back up the hill, down the Avenue.   3,000 steps, get me started for tomorrow.

“What are you prattling about, man, with 7:01 leering on the timer?”

Hmmmm.  Yes.   What, indeed.  I am trying to get this heavier than air aircraft to fly.  It’s said to be theoretically possible.  People tell me I’m insane.  Maybe they’re right.   Then I notice the clothes of one of their children, spattered with blood, a certain haste to kick them behind the chair.  A guilty look, picking the teeth, wiping the mouth then hiding the napkin, eyes flashing wildly from side to side, laughing too loud.  

“Cannibal,” I think to myself, swallowing hard, “and, yes, I’m insane.”

“You hang out with people who eat their children, man,” points out a shrewd one, as though it were obvious what kind of person that makes me.

Perhaps, yes, they eat their children.  But they certainly don’t mean to eat them.  For God’s sake, man, you’re not saying they eat them because they want to eat them?!

“Of course not,” man says soothingly, falsely, “nobody wants to eat their own children, surely not.  But it would seem they are irresistibly delicious, wouldn’t it?”

I hasten neither to agree nor disagree, the walls of the cabin are sweating feverishly and there is less than three minutes on the timer.   I don’t like the way this cat’s looking at me.

“What?” he asks, innocent and evil at once, “I’m not a vegetarian.  Not a vegetarian like you, Hilter of the sea.”

“I don’t feel so good about eating fish,” I tell him, but he’s already one step ahead, the fork and knife glinting in his hands, napkin tucked smartly under his chin, ready.

I’ve got to get the hell out of here, I say to myself, trying not to look the obvious in the face.  I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

41 seconds on the clock, I see, and it feels like a year.  A year in prison, I’m telling you.  20 seconds now, like a month.  And now, counting the last ten and…. ah, the buzzer.

I’m headed out to the Avenue.

A brief meditation on gratitude

I’ve been writing largely about aspects of angst here lately — when to know you’re being treated badly, fretting over war plans being made in my name, worry about life plans, (which men make as God tries not to laugh), worry over exactly what kind of idiot I might be.   In all this wrestling (no favor to you, dear reader)  I’ve neglected one of the most important things of all and one of the greatest indispensable arts:  gratitude.

It seems impossible to be impervious to gratitude for perfect sleep temperature, finally, no need for the fan last night.  I was relieved, but didn’t stop to savor how delightful it was and to feel grateful.   The many blessings we take for granted– gratefulness is a much more valuable response than a sullen yawn that things aren’t better.   Things are not perfect, true, but they are damned good.  I am thankful, grateful, appreciative.

Now to remember to carry this throughout the day, in my heart and on my face.   It is a beautiful world, many of its challenges included.  I take a moment, now, to breathe that sometimes subtle truth in. 

Visionary or Idiot?

I worry, sometimes, whether I am some kind of visionary or some kind of idiot.  Both see things not as they are but as they believe they are.

Then it struck me, with some kind of mixed relief:  it’s quite possible to be both a visionary and an idiot.

Grit and Pushing Through Fear

The most important single factor for success, we are told by those who sound like they know, is grit.   Grit is the ability to keep going in the face of discouragement.  It requires a long goal, an ability to persevere and unshakable faith in the value of the goal.

Fear is what stops us from accomplishing anything difficult.  It is much easier to do the easy thing than the hard thing.   Fear is a primitive emotion, easily accessed, and it overrides every other emotion when it is activated.   It comes from our survival mode and tells us to run like hell from danger, or curl up in a ball and pretend we’re dead.

Seth Godin makes this point about the amygdala, the part of the brain where fear lives, and how we must learn to overcome the impulse to shrink from a challenge.   He also points out that grit is essential.   He also says this, which is scary as hell:

Grit and faith in an idea is not enough.   The idea itself must be great.   A friend of his parents lived his life the slave of a single idea that he pursued with grit.  The trouble was, the idea itself wasn’t so great and it did not merit the grit and singleminded devotion this failed man gave it.

Picture Woody Allen’s father from Love and Death.  “My father was very attached to his small piece of land,” Allen’s character narrates and we see a crazed man in a cell, hugging a small square of sod.  “My father was an Idiot.”  Mmmm.