Bad moves 101

I was raised by an angry, narcissistic father and an angry, but non-narcissistic mother.  While my father could never admit being wrong or doing anything that hurt you, my mother could eventually see things from the victim’s point of view, at least in my case.  

Her love is what saved my life, I realize now, in that constant war zone where my father fought my sister and me every night over our steak, salad and rice-a-roni.  My sureness in her love is what sustained me in an endless, senseless war with my father that I didn’t start and that lasted until the last three days of my father’s life.  

In the end, he saw he’d been mistaken and we finally came to a tragically too-late, but blessed, understanding, the last night of his life.  Before that time, like all narcissists, the idea of being imperfect was humiliating to him.  He could not bear to “lose” and would do any number of ruthless things to ensure his ongoing “victory”.

Twenty years earlier, as I was turning thirty, I began to realize that my dream of becoming a famous artist was actually my ambitious grandmother’s dream for me.  I had talent, but not the “vision” and drive that marks the great immortal artists whose work graces the world’s museums and the walls of those who can afford $20,000,000 for a picture to hang in their home.  

It turns out I was always more of a philosopher than an “artist,” another rarefied calling with a very secure career path.  I was always more interested in discovering deeper truths about this perplexing shitstorm we live in than creating work that the wealthy tastemakers, those who decided who were real artists and who were just regular people with a passionate hobby, traded in. The difference between an artist and someone who simply loved to create, I was beginning to realize, was that very rich people bought and sold artist’s work to decorate their lavish homes, while the hobbyist was just a poor bastard with delusions of grandeur. 

I was too critical and angry at the injustice of vast wealth and vast poverty to be an interior decorator for those entitled fucks but I had a hard time abandoning the dream of living like Picasso.  I became depressed.

I had a minor accident while making deliveries on my bike.  Cutting diagonally across West 57th Street  in a reckless, illegal move, ironically right in front of some prestigious art galleries I used to haunt, the handlebars of my bike were sideswiped by a young driver.  Many months later I was awarded about $7,000 when some shysters won a lawsuit suing the driver.  The accident had actually been my fault, but what the fuck, the kid’s father’s insurance paid.  I took the money.  

With that money I was going to finance my fourth film and then travel to Israel and then east, up to Nepal.  For whatever reason, both of those ideas became too daunting for me.  I’d already put the movie idea on hold and promised to sublet my apartment to a friend but found myself increasingly unable to make decisions.  Soon no decision was too small to cause me agony, in a short time I was paralyzed.  

I remember spending hours in a shoe store, trying on shoes, and in the end leaving with none.  The salesman was furious.  I felt like shit.

The day for the sublet was rapidly approaching, and my father, disgusted by what was happening to me, made the decision for me.  “You made a promise to Brendan,” he said, “you can’t screw up his life because you are having trouble making decisions.  You can move in here until you go to Israel.” 

I took the worst advice I’ve ever followed and moved back into my childhood home.  It was like a miracle, I woke up in my old room crushed with depression.  Things got worse and worse.

One aspect, looking back, is that it seemed my father had won.  It turned out I was a weak, self-pitying, egotistical, grandiose, lazy, unrealistically dreaming young man filled with idiotically self-serving ideas about some imagined glorious life that had led me directly, and deservedly, into the dark abyss I found myself in.  There was no escape.  

I don’t remember my mother’s love in those days, though she was clearly heartbroken.  What I remember is my father’s scorn and that, although he was ashamed of what I’d become, he also had an odd sense of vindication.  My sudden inability to do anything, in spite of my talents, proved to my father that he’d been right about me all along, and look how wrong I’d been about it all.

One day he asked me to type a letter for him.  I was not a particularly good typist (it was only years later, getting a degree in creative writing, and typing hours a day, that I really began to type well — later, in law school I discovered, to my great surprise that I could touch type with no need to look at the keys) but my hunting and pecking was much faster than my father’s.   We had no correction tape or white out in the house, no way to fix a typo.  

My father stood beside me and dictated the short business letter.  I sat at the kitchen table typing carefully.  Amazingly, I typed the whole thing without a mistake.  Until the world “sincerely” which somehow contained a typo.  My father exploded in frustration, which was his way of dealing with things not being the way he needed them to be.

A friend called to check in on me and was alarmed by how despondent I sounded.  I told him the story of typing the letter.  He told me “you have to get out of there.  Today.  I have a spare bedroom in the apartment, you can stay there.  Whatever you do, get out of there.  You will die if you stay there.”

A few days later I was living in his spare bedroom, playing the guitar and recording melancholy songs I was coming up with on his four track reel to reel tape recorder.  I still dreaded every day light hour and was seeing a therapist twice a week.  It was a long, dark road back, but one day, shortly after moving back into my own apartment, I met and began having sex with a very cute young woman, and shortly thereafter a second one.  After a few weeks of this I chose the one I liked better, said goodbye to the other one, and took with me the lessons I’d learned during that long season of depression.   

Lesson number one, do not kick, whip or beat yourself, for any reason, and get the destructive voice of the internalized victimizer (in my case my father) out of your head.  It was a long project, over many years, but I no longer kick myself, and my father’s voice has changed to the humanistic one he displayed the last night of his life.  It has since evolved into the clever, insightful, merciful one that I’ve been in dialogue with ever since.  

Now you know the rest of the obvious story…

Rather than fanning the vague and hateful lie that there is widespread voting fraud, on all sides, and here’s another example of it, reports should always mention that voter fraud in the US is fleetingly, statistically insignificantly rare, except for the Stop the Steal crowd. 

Here’s what is missing from the report on the previous post, and, no, it is not members of both parties who are warned by judges not to intimidate witnesses at their trials, that’s a MAGA/Mafia/Nazi thing.  Buried toward the end of the article published in the Times Union, dateline Troy, NY:

Crist is a former news reporter and longtime GOP political operative in Rensselaer County who has wielded enormous influence in local politics and for many years has been McLaughlin’s political confidant. Wallace is a former Republican legislative aide in the state Assembly and Senate who also has a private political consulting business. Gordon is a former Troy mayoral candidate and a member of the North Greenbush Town Board.

The charges include allegations that the trio conspired to use their official positions to violate the constitutional rights of subordinate county employees to intimidate them into requesting and filing absentee ballots, according to federal prosecutors.

source

What a fucking shock.

Unregulatable Second Amendment freedom

The sacred Second amendment reads:

 “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” 

Or to those looking up the text of the sacred Second amendment on the internet, the first thing you will read is the interpretation of the “Originalist” Supreme Court who decided 5 to 4 what it actually means in the original intent of the holy, infallible framers

Unconnected to service in a militia, obviously, because if they’d meant the government shall not restrict the ownership of guns for members of a well regulated militia, they would have so stated, obviously, duh!

And it’s worth remembering, Antonin Scalia was a genius.

The age of disorientation

I’ve been bothered by the increasing angry incoherence at the core of our culture. It has really gotten out of hand in recent years but it has always been headed this way. I understand that in a culture that values only money and the things it can buy, a certain amount of incoherence will be necessary to sell poisonous substances for vast profit, to sustain an unjust, exploitative, extractive economic/cultural system that is destroying the earth itself for the benefit of a tiny, hereditary minority. Without the incoherence nobody would go along with this.

A recent example to stand in for all the rest of it, little white children are butchered in a Christian school by a maniac with an assault rifle. The obvious solution is to make it harder for maniacs, and everybody else, to get rifles designed to spray bullets to kill as many as quickly as possible. The obvious question is why anybody needs an assault rifle except for mass murder, but we’ll leave that aside. So the vast majority of us call for restrictions on access to these kinds of mass killing machines. What is the argument on the other side?

Make sure every little white child in a Christian school from the age of four always has an equally powerful assault rifle with them at all times to defend themselves against such maniacs, because freedom means that everybody is allowed to have any kind of deadly weapon they want anywhere. Look, the Second Amendment guarantees it! Forget those inconvenient opening words about a well regulated militia. A brilliant and fanatical right wing judge wrote those words right out of the amendment, as his doctrine of Originalism required. So you see there are two sides to this so-called debate.

Everyday there are a thousand more examples of this kind of desperately insane crap from people with an agenda to dominate in spite of the deadly consequences to the world of their domination. We are subject to a constant firehose of incoherent, maddening, divisive, profit-driven complete horseshit, misinformation, propaganda, lies, calculated provocative idiocy, whatever you want to call it. So the incoherence has long rankled me, of course, as someone who tries to resolve vexations by pursuing agreement on the things 99% of us can agree to, and we can build on that to compromise about other things. Obviously, though, if problems could be solved that way one person would not be thought a hero and a genius because they owned more then 10 million people including millions of children who go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country on earth, and those many thousands who die needless, preventable deaths for lack of healthcare and all the other externalities of a culture of billionaires.

What I realized after my recent disorienting brush with turning into Rush Limbaugh as my frustrations with post-surgical pain my painkillers did nothing to dampen, an idiotic post surgical lack of care and concern, enhanced by oxycodone, which while it didn’t cure my pain, certainly stirred my anger, my indignation, my strong sense that all of my feelings were extremely righteous, is that the raging machine that drives this culture is disorientation.

If we can’t agree whether it’s day or night, whether we are traveling east or west, whether medical precautions are wise or a form of tyranny akin to what the Nazis did to certain German homosexuals, we find ourselves demoralized and disoriented. When people are disoriented they will cling to literally anything to give their life some kind of coherence. The irony, of course, is that, because they are disoriented, they will cling to the most incoherent possible things in their need for coherence

We want to protect freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Common sense and common decency both tell us that if a little girl is raped she must be treated with the tenderest possible care, every consideration given to her health and recovery. 16th century Catholic theology, however, winds up trumping all of that, we must honor the sacredness of the rapist’s seed which has created sacred life in the tiny womb of that young rape victim. And so instead of balancing what Jesus Christ himself would have done against the right of a rapist to see his child born, six unappealable lifetime appointees, selected by a powerful psychopath from a list of people who believe they speak for Jesus Christ himself, rule that, if she lives in a certain political jurisdiction, the girl must carry the sacred fertilized egg to pregnancy and go through the agonies of childbirth even at the age of 10 or 11, for the sake of their beliefs. Their beliefs, mind you, not the girl’s, not the girl’s family, not other people who love the girl, not the greater good of society not the beliefs of anyone but the six who have the power to impose their will on everybody else in the name of the greater good, in the name of the actual son of God, according to the “one true religion” as written in the immutable, multiply amended sacred text that founded our great democracy.

If that shit is not disorienting to you , you’re much stronger than me, and I salute you, I guess. But the frame I’m seeing things in lately is that disorientation is the technique that is used to keep people from opening their eyes, becoming “woke” if you like, connecting history with the present and the future as a kind of cause and effect one might draw important lessons from in a world under growing threat from a dozen angles. What happened when people were allowed to forcibly grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences 70 years ago, 200 years ago, 1000 years ago is a pretty good indication of what will happen if we allow people to grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences today. It may be common sense to say this, but in the age of disorientation it is equally valid to say “why don’t you go fucking hang yourself, you woke, transexual libtard cuck? We burn books here, asshat.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Age of Disorientation.

One tiny encouraging thought, incoherent rage may be a successful argument in the so called Court of Public Opinion for a solid 30% of the population. But in an actual court of law, where there are only a small number of cases they can be unappealably decided by unprincipled partisan judges ignoring the law and the facts of the case (see for example our Supreme Court), angrily arguing that the woman testifying under oath that you raped her is a publicity seeking, gold digging liar hired by George Soros and other evil global monsters (wink wink, see Q) who you wouldn’t fuck with Mike Pence’s dick, will more often than not come back to bite you in Mike Pence’s dick, as a matter of law, justice and common sense.

Imagine what a curse this is

Imagine you are on stage at your junior high school, playing the piano. Your parents are in the audience, along with several of their closest friends.  As you play, your father turns to his best friend, a guy who was always like your funniest uncle who is also a guitar player.   Your father says quietly to this guy “it’s a shame she doesn’t have the discipline to ever become a great concert pianist.  We started her too late, that other girl is so much better than her.”

You will of course never hear about this, unless decades later this beloved uncle figure is suddenly rejected by your parents as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.  The transformation became necessary after he witnessed embarrassingly human behavior and your parents both felt humiliated by his moral stance.  Uncle Hitler might write something like this, like this thing you’re reading right now:

You were a musical prodigy, my dear, the independence of hands that you had at the age of 6 was as amazing as your ability to play full classical pieces by ear.  Your musical talent was mind blowing, off the charts, phenomenal. But your parents, who, as I only recently learned, are both narcissists and see the world as strict hierarchy, black and white, win or lose, glory or shame, didn’t understand that somebody with your degree of musical talent should be guided by love of music to wherever that talent takes her. 

In their ignorance/arrogance your parents decided they could harness your love of music to instill discipline in you by forcing classical piano lessons on you.  I always gave them the benefit of the doubt on this, neither one realized that the greatest musicians we know often can’t read music.  You know the long list of these Paul Simons, John, Paul and Georges as well as I do.  You hated these lessons, and the straightjacket of classical piano training, although you easily mastered everything they required.  You fought a succession of these overmatched teachers, who were surrogates for your implacable fucking parents who wound up needing to convince you, decades later, that, among other things, your beloved uncle was actually Uncle Hitler. 

I am so sorry to be the bearer of this unbearable, but hopefully helpful news, that your feelings about the unsafeness of the world are based in real experience, and you are not to blame for the hurt you feel. I’m there with you now, in solidarity.

My door is always open to you for any insight a guitar playing mass murderer who has known you since you were born can share. 

Have a nice day, and if you will excuse me now, I have to get back to my unslakable, inchoate rage and ongoing mass murder project.  I’m on a timetable here, dear, and the clock is ticking.

Love always, 

Your Uncle Adolf