Month: January 2019

I watched a play about how single black mothers struggle to keep their sons safe, and it occurred to me there are really two perils in single motherhood.  The first, of course, is being so emotionally overwhelmed that they are emotionally absent, or at least inconsistent, which might actually be worse.

The second, more subtle, is that they become OVERLY involved in their childrens lives, such that the child feels little space to develop as a person.  There is a breed of narcissism latent in the mothers overidentification with the child, with her conflating her emotional needs with his emotional needs.

And it occurs to me that white “liberals”, seen socially, cross this rough line as well.  We read in recent days that, according to actual study, white “liberals” dumb down their language when talking with blacks (whereas conservatives do not, presumably because we are not trying to be “hip”, and see individual blacks as individual blacks).  Obama was notorious for this.  He would always drop his “g’s” when talkin’ and relatin’ wit black folk.  Nome sayin’?

I think even putting black people on a pedestal, as white “liberals” like to do, is a disservice.  It is the opposite of integration, and hard to process emotionally.  Attention, even excess attention, always feels good up to a point, but there comes a time when it becomes creepy and uncomfortable, and at that point–at least in my own iteration of this experience–it becomes easier to disengage and/or shut down emotionally.

If the  Democrats has set it as a matter of conscious policy to leave urban poverty substantially untouched over the last 50 or so years, from 1968 until now, what would they have done DIFFERENTLY than what they in fact did? 

What would be the sine qua non?  Making sure blacks don’t fix their own problems themselves.  This would be absolutely essential.  How do you do that?  You take  two pronged approach: 1) you say their situation is not their fault; and 2) you say you will fix it for them.

With respect to number one, this is simple: if a problem is not your fault, then the solution is not in your power.  If you can’t create a situation, then you can’t solve it.  You are helpless.

You frame all black poverty and underachievement as the result of racism.  Racism, being universal and insuperable by the sole efforts of individual blacks, makes progress impossible.

Secondly, you promise that THIS TIME, this election, you will fix everything.  You do this every two years or so for fifty years, some 25 times at minimum.  You also make sure that everyone understands that the Republicans are massive villains, out to stop this whole process of the rescue of blacks.

And of course you understand that smart blacks will see through this scam, so what do you also do?  You make damn sure that no effective school reform ideas are introduced, and that black communities are rendered really, really ignorant, because even though schooling is offered to them, the teaching is poor, and the expectations low.  It would not hurt, either, to teach them to value ignorance, by conflating it with “being real”.  Because, you know, brilliant, accomplished people are not real, and people standing on the corner selling drugs ARE real.  Obviously.

It is a source of amazement to me, in all honesty, that ordinary, rank and file Democrats were so fucking stupid that by and large they failed to complain when the Party as a whole opposed charter schools, which are the ONLY innovation in education shown to improve outcomes among poor blacks.

So I would ask: what would the Democrats do differently?  They established low expectations, promised money from the sky, validated every excuse they ever heard, opposed every effort to make the schools better, and in a great many cases the streets safer, and overall did their best to play the role of codependent Sugar Daddies.

I don’t think they would have done ANYTHING differently.  With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I would argue that the Democrats replaced the KKK somewhere between 1970 and 1975 as the single worst enemy ordinary blacks face.

To the extent I personally am racist, it is in response to this blindness.  It is unfathomable to me.

I had a vision in a meditation this morning of Xi yelling at Hillary for failing to keep her end of a bargain.  I have decided that the force behind the demonization of Russia is almost certainly the Chinese and their sundry willing and accidental agents in the United States.  This includes large segments of our intelligence apparatus which, far from protecting us, seems to be selling us out.

Did they want to see Russia expelled from the Middle East?  A war between the US and Russia?  Perhaps either/or.

And I will say that calling China to account for its restrictive trade practices MAY be one of the most important things Trump has done in his first term.

People call this a trade war.  If so, it amounts to a counter-offensive.  The markets were not open, so the opening assaults originated in China long ago.

China WANTED to keep dumping goods on America, having an elite and the government pocket most of the money, and use that money to continue their quest to become a superpower. I don’t think this is working very well now. 

And I have said for years that Bill Clinton’s real crime was most likely facilitating both the leaks of highly classified military information, and the sale of dual use technology to the Chinese, most likely in exchange for compensation in multiple forms.  Kenneth Starr may have been actually intended to cover up the real crimes, just as Hillary used Russia to distract from her Chinese connections.

China is not a superpower yet, and it remains a wildly unpopular government.  They do not have “The Way”.  They are an old school fascistic government, of the sort China has unfortunately seen off and on for several millenia.  It is ruled by and for the elites, who try and use propaganda, some carrots, and some well hidden whips, to keep the populace in line enough to do the work they can use, as the “rentiers” and Capitalists they are, to profit their own families and further their ambitions for power.  China has kings and it has a tyrant.  Nothing is new, except, perhaps, the rationalization.  But even there, “Historical Necessity” probably still plays the role of The Will of Heaven.

Nothing has changed.  Nothing, except that the death tolls were much higher than they have ever been.

Reading all these memoirs–I just read Ken Kesey’s fictionalized but likely true-ish account of how he heard of Neal Cassady’s death (btw, at least one commentator said Neal was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy)–and what I am struck by is the profound instability of everything in the lives of these people. 

Nobody stays put.  Nobody feels strong loyalty to anything but an abstract “cause” which consists in the main of telling everyone not like themselves to go fuck themselves.  This was the great virtue of the Vietnam War, and roughly the role played today by Global Warming, which is that it gives nihilists, unable and unwilling to commit to moving forward and growing what has been, a reason to push back against all that is, together, and to be unified in this effort, at least for some period of time.

But everyone is fucking nuts.  They are flying around like shattered debris in a tornado.

Psychologically, the stability that matters is not rigidity.  Rigidity is in fact defined as unhealthy, and flexibility as healthy.

What needs to be stable for any sort of social or individual flourishing to happen is the sense of self and sense of purpose. 

You need to be able to say “I am this sort of person, this is what I value, these are the people and causes to which I feel loyalty, and this is my place.”

I am not saying as a conservative, much less the reactionary some unhinged souls (unhinged, a door no longer tied to a doorway) might want to claim me to be.  I am saying this because it is TRUE.  It is true even if it is inconvenient.  It is true even if it fails to serve some specific political agendas.

You can rebel against the rules of life, but in the end, you accomplish nothing but your own destruction.

William R. Burroughs son only made it to 33, before more or less literally committing suicide by alcoholism.  He had a new liver, but he fucked that one up too.

He writes of his father not being a father at all, and of the time he went to Tangiers when he was 14 and was sexually propositioned by several of the male lovers his father had at the house, and also of nearly continual drug use the whole time he was there.  His father did absolutely nothing to protect him.  He hardly talked to him.  He spent all his time getting high and writing.

Where does such a child turn?  Where is the sanity?  Where the love?

To live, he would have had to turn his back on all this, to reject the value of literature concocted from such a place, from such degraded souls.  He would have needed to find Jesus, or a Buddhist Temple, or a faithful yoga practice, or something along those lines, far from the fuckups, and far from the rationalizations for the fuckups.

As I have said before, the hippies were not the burgeoning of love, but a more or less generalized cry FOR it, which they could no longer find in a world without drugs.  They were a weak counter-shadow to the Machine, but completely unable to counter it in any meaningful way.  A large number of them BECAME the Machine in Silicon Valley.  Steve Jobs certainly did. There is nothing magical or mystical about digital technology.  And they know this.  The same people created Burning Man, not as an alternative, but as a break.

Talk with any Deadhead.  They will have positive memories from when they were stoned with their friends.  They will also tell you all the times they got dicked over by de facto amoral psychopaths and thieves who are very thick in that population.

The generation before him, artistically, was the Lost Generation.  His generation was the defeated generation, the beat generation.

I was reading an account of the moment he realized “On the Road” was going to be a hit, and that his life was going to change.  His then girlfriend or wife wrote this:

“Jack kept shaking his head.  He didn’t look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was.”

Then the next day his publisher comes by with a case of champagne, he gets drunk, and he’s excited, the way he ought to have been the night before. 

Would it be so hard to infer from that that he was destined to die of alcoholism? 

Myself, I would ponder where or not what was going through his head was something like “how in the world did we get to a world where the underdog is the hero, not for surmounting the odds, but for BEING the underdog.  I live in this world, but I don’t understand it.”

I take that quote from the “Portable Beat Reader”.  Another set of quotes concerns his daughter he did not want to claim, and around whom he behaved very sketchy, as they say.

I am going to quote this at length, because this is the story of many abandoned children.  I don’t think people who come and leave women and their babies realize the extent of the psychic damage they wreak, the hopes and fears and private terrors they engender.

Toward late fall my mother was going to court all the time to try and get child support from our fathers.  She must have gotten fed up with waitressing.  The day was nearing when I was to meet my father for the first time.  I remember a certain gullible part of my young mind thinking that nine and a half must be the age when one is grown up enough to meet one’s father for the first time. It meant I was maturing–a big girl now.  Feeling more independent than usual, I went to the pizza parlor all the way up on Fourteenth Street.  I had had my hair curled for the occasion, and as I watched the guy twirl the dough, I kept looking in the mirror at my new hair, not at all sure I liked it and worrying what my father would think of me. 

In Brooklyn the next day, after a long subway ride, my mother and I met Jack and his lawyer at the appointed place and went strolling down the street together.  I couldn’t take my eyes off my father, he looked so much like me.  I loved the way he shuffled along with his lower lip stuck out. 

The lawyer nervously suggested we go somewhere for lunch and was about to walk into a restaurant when Jack saw a place he liked better, and steered us to a bar across the street, in spite of the lawyer’s feeble protests.  I thought it was a great idea, wanting, as I did, to be in accord with this naughty bummish fellow.  We sat down in a booth, my mother and I facing the two of them, and a hamburger was ordered for me.  It was the day the first astronaut went up in space, and the TV up in the corner by the ceiling was showing him up in his capsule all bundled up in glaring black and white.
My mother and father seemed to be getting along just fine, and were talking about old times. 

“Yeah,” he was saying into his beer, “you always used to burn the bacon,” jokingly accusing her.  I could see why she had been attracted to him.  He was so handsome with his deep blue eyes and dark hair hanging in a few fine wisps on his forehead.  I like hearing them talk about the things they used to do. It made me feel whole, confirmed the suspicions I’d had all along that I was an official bona fide human being with TWO parents. [emphasis mine]

After that, we had to go get the blood tests.  Jack and I, to determine if he really was my father.  I felt like we were special somehow, as if our blood was some precious substance the laboratory needed, and we were the only two people in the world that had it..  Then we went back to my neighborhood, bringing Jack with us.
As soon as we got to the apartment, he wanted to know where the nearest liquor store was, so I took him by the hand to the one on Tenth Street., proudly walking him past kids I knew as if to say, “See–I have one too” [emphasis mine] 

In the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry.  That name is indelibly etched in my memory.  As we walked back, he talked to me but seemed shy, like a boy on his first date.  I was nervous too, afraid I’d say something stupid.
Upstairs, he sat down at the kitchen table and peeled off the black plastic around the top of the bottle, as my sisters gathered around him curiously.  He pointed at each little black peel and furrowing his brow, said, “Shee im? Shs’ Russian–shhhs’ no good”!  He kept doing this, to their delight, and telling my mother, “This one has laughing eyes and this one has melting eyes”. 

I was a little jealous that he was paying them so much attention, but I figured he didn’t want to be serious, and me being older, maybe he was afraid we’d have to talk about something he didn’t want to think about.  So I watched the antics and smiled whenever he looked at me. 

To my sisters, he was just another funny guy that came over to visit and entertain them, like Ray Gordon or Pete Rivera.  But to me he was something special, he was my very OWN funny man out of all the others–like their father, Don Olly, was to them.

Kerouc drinks his booze, then heads out the door.  He says he will be back in January, and the next and only time she sees him again is 6 years later.

There, he is “upending a fifth of whiskey”–which she later calls a “baby bottle”–and watching the Beverly Hillbillies.  He has moved in with his mother, and married a third time.  Jan percipiently remarks: “Now that his mother could no longer take care of him [she had had a stroke], Jack had married another mother to take care of them both.”

Thus was the last scene she had of him.  He died two years later, shortly after Neal Cassady reached the end of what he had always known was a one way ride, that would end far too soon.

This is how the great Jack Kerouac lived and died, from the perspective of someone whose heart he broke.

Three guesses how Jan fared later in life, although one should suffice.  Her book details long term drug abuse, loveless liasons with heartless men, pregnancy at 15, and overall a whole lot of fuckup and hurt.

Can you not see this coming from these pathetic, sad lines?  She was dead at 44.  Her dad at 47.

Core lesson: as a society, we cannot side with the fuckups.  We can feel them, we can help them, we can include them, but we CANNOT make them the heroes.  They are not the heroes.  Aim up, not down.  Aim for better, not worse.  You can be a visionary without being an amoral, drug addled thrill junkie and opportunist.

Even now, to take an apparently pedestrian example, who are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer siding with in this Wall non-debate?  The “Not-Us’s”.  The Outside as against the Inside.  The people who do not belong here, the people whose lives are not working where they are from.  The people plagued by poverty, ignorance, crime and no small measure of laziness, who want to bring all these traits into our country by ignoring our process for legal immigration, and who in so doing want to jump in from of line relative to all the people we DO want, who are willing to do the work to do the thing correctly.

Remembering the millennia, and embracing each day.

I don’t understand forgiveness.  I think it is an emotion related to social inclusion and exclusion, and I have never felt fully connected to an extended social system.  My family, my primary social system, only taught me fear and shame, and their counterparts, fake courage, and vanity.

I think I am slowly learning real courage, so I won’t take that away, though.

But it feels to me like forgiveness is healing the wounds that person caused you.  It is about removing the trigger which causes you pain every time you reference that wound.  This is the primary process.

You can choose to include that person again, or not, but you can use the word “forgive” either way.

I suppose in other contexts it might also mean “I understand why you did that, why you said that, why you felt that way, and having performed that act of understanding I am no longer angry”.  It is perhaps that too.

And I think sometimes what goes under this word is acts of mercy for people who really don’t deserve it, people who hurt you and never apologized, but who you, as a mostly psychologically normal person, do not get pleasure from hurting or wounding in return.

Stabbing the people who stabbed you might feel good in imagination, but I think every time anyone performs a willful act of cruelty, they hurt themselves again.

Life is not fair.  Living in such a way that you feel resentment every time some idiot does what idiots do, is to cast your fate to the winds and tides.  This is not intelligent.

Letting things go is about releasing yourself from them, so that you can live in freedom.  Moralism, a strong need to judge others, is a cage.  Now, sometimes the innocent need to be protected, sometimes standards are needed, but this should be a dispassionate evaluation, not something stemming from a need to control, a need to confine and subordinate.

I touched feelings of shame last night.  I think this is what holds many of us back. 

Shame is this feeling of wanting to lie down on the floor, die and disappear, because that would hurt less than enduring people looking at you, as the sort of person who did what you did.

In my particular case, I look at my past, and there is nothing I actually did which causes me more than momentary pain.  I look at some situations where I behaved clumsily–and there are many of them–but there are no large crimes which cause me pain, no large betrayals, no being a son of a bitch, at least over the long term (I have been rude to many people, when feeling particularly bad).

This shame really has no root.  It is existential, or what I might suggest as a synonym, Developmental.  I think when people talk about “life”, they are talking about their early childhoods.

Be that as it may, this is the root of self sabotage, the most basic of which is feeling unworthy of happiness, of feeling unworthy of full participation in the human community.  You are a pariah, a leper.   You may not look like that on the outside.  You may in fact have learned how to pretend to feel like you belong.  You may even convince yourself you have convinced yourself, but I think this is rare.

If I might reference again Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain, they must have had this sense that they had been fooling people all these years, but they were just tired.  I remember Chris Cornell saying something about how he didn’t know how to connect with people.  Bourdain’s show, of course, was primarily about connecting with people over food.  If he had known how to truly do it, and feel like he deserved it, he would have had the ideal life, which is what he tried to project.  If I might surmise, he didn’t want anyone to know how he felt, how utterly undeserving, outcast, and alienated he felt.  There was no reason to feel this way.  But it never went away, and it killed him.  He didn’t kill himself: his shame did.  He had the perfect life, and he nonetheless felt like shit.  This, itself, probably caused him to feel even more shame.

Anger and fear, relative to shame, are obvious emotions.  Shame does qualitatively touch fear, though.  It has some similarities.  And it is also a sort of self anger.  I can feel how they would cluster, be related at the level of neurophysiology.

In my dream, I committed a crime, an accidental crime, one I didn’t mean to do, but panicked about and covered up at the time, hoping I would never get caught.  Of course, in the end I did, and I had to admit to everything.  It was a double murder, or so I thought, but they had lived all this time, constrained, thin, barely alive, which made me feel even worse.  They were there to testify against me.

This does feel like an opening, though.  I murdered feelings at one time I did not know how to process, how to integrate.  Their discovery and de facto resurrection is likely a good sign.  I have to endure the pain of feeling these primal feelings, but I do think they are a gateway to something better.

I will add that my people, the people I want to work with, are the fuckups.  They are the people I meet and know and talk with in bars.  They are the people who had a knife shoved all the way into their solar plexus at some point in their lives, and they said “fuck that hurt”, then they immediately started pretending it didn’t hurt, that it wasn’t there, that all life needs is a little more effort, you know, and some self help books maybe, and the this or the that that makes the pain go away.

You can meliorate such pains over time, and for those capable of genuine love, perhaps they can in the end heal them.  But most people carry some fragment of that wound to their graves.

We can do better.

It seems to me we are all given a ticket to ride on a riverboat, down a river, whose length we can’t know, when we are born.

A full life is taking that ride to the end, to staying receptive to the new and unknown until the end.  What most people do, though, is reach a certain point, get off the boat, and say “this is as far as I go”.

We all want roots, and boats do not provide them.  But everything changes.  Everything that is erected falls down.  Everything which is built comes to naught eventually.  Perhaps I might say that in Buddhist terms our home is the river.  Our home is our boat, our experience.

I have had some odd insights and experiences in recent days, and will most likely post on them.  Some things I need to smoke a little on, some things I need several long cigars. 

I am not, by the way, speaking metaphorically as far as the cigars.  I smoke cheap cigars, but they make me focused and often happy.