Category Archives: Reminiscence

The Wound

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Matt| 1 Comment

Sometime during the day, at odd and peculiar moments, I experience memories and reminiscences. I associate to the old blinds with “pulls.” As I pull down the blind one more day is gone. And in the morning I raise the blind as if I have another day given to me as I inexorably march off to my end.  At 71 I am saturated with all kinds of reflections of my childhood and all the concomitant cliches that come with that. I am drawn back in time like a receding tide and reminisce mostly of my dull relationship with my mother, a classic depressive. While I ponder about our interactons, I am drawn to a series of observations of myself as a child, unpleasant, unhappy ones. And then I extrapolate from who I was then and cast this pall over all the decades since and consider how the cards given me then have turned into the hands I’ve played. In short, for a large measure of my beginning years as a child, toddler and teenager I was incorporative as a human being. I had not acquired, nor was I shown, the tools of exchange, of embrace and engagement. I was not open to the world. Subterranean, I was all aquifer.

I will get to it quickly for after that it is mostly commentary. I feel I was not cared for by my mother nor did she engage me as  her son. I could say I was abandoned by her but caring holds a greater valence for me. You need not consider my father, who virtually did not exist, either for himself or for me. The real measure of my humanity would be tied up with my mother and it is here that she failed me miserably.  This is the wound.

I will cut deeper into the feeling. I experience myself then as devoid of emotional supplies, self-nutrients, the classic givens from which to thrive as a young human being. She never read to me, a childplacid and gentle in nature. I do so see myself as I look back. I was unobtrusive, a mother’s dream, especially for a depressive. I babysat myself. I had nothing to incorporate from my world with my mother, she was my moon, not my sun. I incorporated my environmental world as a child from friends and neighborhood, but I really cannot feel or sense that I received much in terms of parental affection, love or caring from my mother.

Only of late as I reconsider my life and the travail I have endured do I examine a little more deeply the lack of impact my mother had on me, and that very lack of impact has made all the diference in my life. After all, to age, by definition, is to recollect. Lucky is the mature human being who does this moment to moment, for he or she is express and in the world, an awakening of intelligence.

I will digress for a moment. The kind of wound I speak of here is the kind that defines us for the rest of our lives. [Have you asked that of yourself?]  A wound that by definition changes everything that follows in our life. It is beyond being indelible, for it becomes the matrix from which the fabrics of your life are woven. To understand the wound intelligibly, thoroughly and with intense empathy and feeling is to give you a measure of understanding that explains most of the calamitous misfortunes of your experience. The wound is forever; however, it does become much less inflamed and after a while, amenable to consideration and thought. Growing old can help somewhat. I cannot imagine a human being extant who has not been wounded in such a way. Unfortunately we often come to our end avoiding the wound and its circumstances. I choose not to do so. As Nietzsche said, “knowledge is death.” It also sets you psychologically free. And in a special way, it may give you a compassionate stoicism to get on with the rest of your days.

In fact, as I see how I have lived as a passive-aggressive in my life, not sustaining relationships with men and women, too self-contained, private and self-sufficient if you will, not reaching out to others in communicable and feeling ways I realize that I was protecting what little nutrients I had for myself. It was an enforced self-sufficiency and that has proven most fatiguing as a human being. And the psychological and emotional costs are significant. And that is why I write, and that is why I became a therapist and teacher (unconsciously so) – to know,  learn,  reap and garner so as too fill in the gaping holes, the empty aquifer. I dreaded engaging the other, for the responses were unknown to me. I dared not risk, for I had no inner resolve for that. My negative perceptions of my fellow man and of others close to me have been shaped and configured by my first impressions and experiences of how I was related to by my mother, a maternal indifference. I have self-crucified myself on a cross of distrust. Benign neglect is ultimately malignant.

I imagine that I am in a morgue, an apt metaphor, and the doctor has spread open my rib cage with retractors, delving into my organs for a look see. The clamps attached to bone, sinew and flesh expose a gaping wound. It is here that he takes, in my mind, a measuring cup and dips it into my abdominal cavity and ladles out what liquids he can access. I associate to these liquids as an immense splash across my existence as I paraded through the decades. Ain’t much there to spread about and not wholesome at all.

As I age all is pattern. I am not into blame at this point. It is a special sadness for what could have been and what was not done. I see all the lost opportunities between myself and my mother, of books, ideas, understandings between parent and child that were not openly said and not surmised or thought of, guesswork that is not good for the young person. A child needs to know through word and touch that he is seen, that a measure of who he is becomes important to mother and child; that an exchange of affection creates that irritant from which a pearl is formed. I lacked such an irritant, and what is grievous here is that I sought it out at some primitive level or need. And when I look back which is my task as a human being at 71, when I assess my pilgrimage to nowhere in particular, for I am not on a mission , I am intensely saddened. I am just merely engaging and experiencing as the blinds go up and down every day.

I believe my mother to have been vastly deprived as a child herself, for she could not engage me as her son, nor read to me, or play board games with me, or discuss my daily life with me. Although she never did go to work throughout my childhood and youth, I was home with her and played alone, as I recall. The more I reflect about it the more it exhausts and appalls me, the waste, the lack of attention to a child who would have touched the stars with the palms of his hands if he had been encouraged. I know now I was a gifted child left outdoors to rust. And I did rust well. I feel that I had so much more in me throughout my life that had gone  unexpressed. I had been stymied early and being stymied is an unusually agonizing, frustrating feeling — at least it is so for me. I remember years in adolescence afraid to initiate or touch young girls of my age as if I was a crystal that might shatter. All my rearing led to an immature adulthood. The larger part of my life has been in restoration, planting trees in the forest, grading the soil, weeding, breaking new paths, using quarried stones for walks.

A few unexplained and nagging doubts, perplexities, come to mind when I remember the years from birth to about 10 years old, 1950, to be exact, on Brighton Second Street, in Brooklyn, Brighton Beach Avenue and the cranky el at the end of the block. I could go back to that place tomorrow and trace out the courtyards, lanes and hidden places I frequented as a young boy. On the avenue was the Lakeland movie house, a run down and seedy theater we all called the “Dumps.” Often I was sent to the movies here, admission a mere $.18 cents. When I recollect the pictures I saw on the screen, really conscious dreams, if you think about it, I wonder why my mother so often  sent me to the movies. It was safe back then for a young boy to go to the movies alone. She didn’t have to work. I wonder today what she did with all her time. Was she having an affair? And that is a loaded supposition, is it not? That thought comes before the regret — the resentment of this moment – that she could have spent more time with me.

I recall seeing Citizen Kane and The Search, both films dealing with mothers essentially. In one the mother sells the son, in the other a GI helps a waif try to find his mother after the war has separated them. Of special note is a scene involving a park and swings. The camera comes behind the boy when he sees his mother but the swings, moved by the wind, befuddle him, he can’t get to her. The children swings moved sideways as the boy moved longitudinally, struggling to get at the mother who is awaiting him after all these weeks and months. A caring mother seeking her son, a despairing mother abandoning him for money, I had neither. In one a mother is invested in her child, and in the other the mother sees her son as an investment for  twisted capitalistic needs, unthought out actions on her part. Perhaps his middle name, “Foster,” was more than apt.

My wound is one of indifference, a failure of my mother to mirror back my very existence. We all need to be mirrored. A horror of a kind as I think of it, quite chilling if I allow myself, after all these decades, to feel it. I was shut down so early. And I still feel it all now.

Mothers. It is here within the uterine, incorporative recesses of the maternal “hold” that the child is formed. Blame, anger, rage, resentment, surly, and incendiary  feelings at 71 come  nowhere near to what I feel. Allow me a reversal to get at what I am dimly feeling but wish to see so vividly in the light, blinds pulled up. I lost a daughter at age 34 by her own hand. Doubtless, what she felt from me was an absence of caring. And she would have been correct. I didn’t have the werewithal to express that, to give it, understand what she needed at the time. I know that. And so she experienced loss as I experience her loss today, for a suicide really kills two. No, I don’t blame my mother for that! I am responsible for my own grave limitations. And so I am beyond giving blame. And I am not in the psychobabble game of coming to terms, reconciliation or redemption. What I need I cannot even say, but I feel. I struggle with that inexact feeling each and every day, whether tomorrow sees the blinds never pulled up or not. I go to my demise troubled, hurting and beyond sadness. That is enough for one life.

I find solace in Epicurus’s epitaph: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.”

 

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Dear Mr. Brooks

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.I answered his request in his column, “The Life Report.” I am quoting from his opening remarks.

“If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories — career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge –and give yourself a grade in each area.

” If you send these life reports to me at dabrooks@nytimes.com, I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

“I ask for this gift for two reasons.

“First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete pciture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

“More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relativelty little help in undersanding how a life devbelops, how careers and familes ev olve, what are are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.”

Dear Mr. Brooks:

I was a teacher for thirty-two years.It was the equivalent of having urine running down your leg. In this culture teaching, as presently constituted, is a significant agent of conditioning the young, making them dupes for the American dream, whatever that is. If you don’t know, it is marketing.

Since the Conant Report in 1957 about our secondary school system reported on its gross deficiencies, some decades later nothing really has significantly changed.

Was I a good teacher, which is sufficient in any case, or just a cranky discontent? I was one of the best. I lived a devastating split. It took the awakening of intelligence; Krishnamurti called it that, for me to realize that I was like Dathan on the way to Mt. Sinai, hectoring Moses to return to Egypt. No wonder it took forty years for that generation to die out so that metaphorically an unenslaved Jewish mentality could enter Canaan.

I trained to be a psychotherapist, so that I could come to my death knowing that I could be something other than an American teacher. It is not the occupation that is dreadful; it is the reality of it. So I wasted a third of my life a surly discontent in a mind-numbing occupation where to be excellent threatened the lives of others.I once told a group of parents that I was a writer who happened to be a teacher and because of that I could help their children in ways that an English teacher could not. On the morrow a guidance counselor tried to reprimand me for that “provocative” statement, for the tax-paying parents wanted me to be a teacher who happened to be a writer.

I have always been subversive, often surreptitiously. Call it passive-aggressive if the diagnosis helps you.And what a split that is. Allow me to brag: I see through crap, I see through large swaths of this rather decadent culture –just look at the array of pinheads running as Republicans. The fact that, except for one, they all believe in creationism attests to the failure of the school system in this country. Nothing wrong in being in decline, a natural historical process for empires. Just see it.

As a therapist I grew immeasurably so. I worked with clients to decondition themselves and finally to be free of me. I don’t brew disciples. Working with a school-phobic teenager, the school pressured the mother because they had not seen any results. They told her I was not a good therapist. Get this – school teachers commenting with their amazing erudition and expertise about another professional in an entirely different career. Aside: if more teachers went into treatment before becoming “educators,” we would see better teaching. Better still, if they went into treatment they might realize teaching is not the way to behave maturely

In short, I urged the mother to stand fast. I told her I was not an agent of the school system. It was not my task to make her son be good, nice, conform and all the delightful ways that schools want the herd to behave. Years later I met the now adult man who was my client. He was at college and all was well. He won. The school was defeated. Yippee!

All my life I have written. It kept me emotionally alive all during those dread years as a teacher. I have written three books, all favorably reviewed, not bad for someone in the last decades of his life. I will never play golf!

All this is career information, is it not? But there is more to every one of us. I have been reading and learning from that great spiritual genius, Krishnamurti, for more than three decades. Between him and Kazantzakis I almost have it down. The Freese motto is an epitaph from Kazantzakis’s: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” I am not dependent on either man. I just catch their rays for a good mental tan.

Teacher, shrink, writer, and all this does not assuage the griefs I have experienced in my life. A daughter who committed suicide because I was an inept and often not understanding father who lived far away. Closure is a moronic American cliché. It never closes. I don’t bathe in retrospective guilt. I just have regrets I did not see more deeply as a father into her pain. I lost a wife in a car accident and a daughter who was terribly mangled but survived, her boyfriend dying in the crash. I remember all this and I can do no more than to be a living sconce for each, for if I remember them they are “alive.”

This society considers me superannuated.In response, I just don’t consider this society. Krishnamurti said that all societies are essentially corrupt. I would tell anyone reading this essay that is all an aware human being needs to know. The rest is his or her struggle.

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Superannuated, My Ass

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

According to my dictionary, it is to be obsolete, old-fashioned or outdated. None of this applies to me and yet it does. Because this particular culture says so. This culture has an implicit statement to make about age and purpose. There are manifest and subtle latent cut-offs for people. In fact we have perfected retirement in its various manifestations. Careers are made for those creating pensions and benefits; retirement homes are an extraordinary business. You can fill in the rest. At a certain age you automatically become old or of “retirement age.” The whole construct of retirement is a product of a capitalistic system. We do not value the wise, the accrued smarts of those older than ourselves. Americans generally dwell in the new, the temporary, riding the crest of the wave; the association comes to mind of a surfer connecting to his Ipad while on his board. We adore the temporary, the facile, the evanescent. All this is the seemingly banal complaint or observation by the old of the young.

What do the superannuated do or feel when they realize they have reached the age of superfluousness. Many engage retirement all that more, digging deeper into their golf game or doing line dancing (argh!) at the local gym, or taking courses as hamburger helper for their minds as they speed toward death and dying. No superannuated person considers occupying Aetna’s offices, especially the benefits office. Admittedly, to face what this culture mandates in a thousand subtle ways, like licking the bronze shoe of a sculpture in Rome, the infinite licking producing a centuries old patina, is to realize that resistance is futile — the Borg have won. Awareness, personal self-awareness, is a rare commodity in all populations throughout the world. To be awake is not a good thing for one who is “over the hill.” It is not even a good thing for one who is young.  Imagine America as an immense human head with a Trump combover, silly, vain, unreal, narcissistic and completely out of touch with some commonly held verities throughout human history, oh, such as integrity.

The only movie that I can recall over all these decades that sent out a disturbing message about the conditioned and unconditioned was “The Matrix.” I read it for what it was. A metaphor for the aware and unaware, one world induced a living coma in life, while the other fought off the narcolepsy, the hypnotic trance the so-called “real” world was in. I argue that all the nonsense sent to us by satellites and cable are pollution, for they create and have created a kind of blade runner world. I wonder, at moments, if there are any  young adults who see through all this dangerous cant; and if they do, are they suicidal? If you have not learned who you are by your young adulthood, this world will indoctrinate you so well that you can watch a child being raped and not intervene. Oh, no, I don’t mean call the cops — that comes later. I mean actually intervene. In this case 911 is the second choice. May McQueary never find solace in his “God.”

A few months ago, coming home one night my wife and I watched a neighbor who we only had a few interactions with, a mother, in this case, approach her son who was seated on the lawn with his buddies. Then, she slapped him heartily about the head for some misdeed only known to her. Standing next to her was another neighbor who was “involved” with his cellphone and acted as if he had heard nothing, which he definitely did, because I shouted to the mother to stop what she was doing. I tore into her verbally. At first she thought I was kidding her. I told her if she continued I would call child protective services. With that she took her child and left. So I had an aberrant mother and an  uninvolved cop who heard nothing. Yes, a cop! Yes, he denied he heard anything although the event occurred on his lawn no more than four steps away from him. When the next cattle car chugs across the landscape to Auschwitz, he will hear nothing as well.

I feel very superannuated in this world, for my values are considered outre or retro. I feel they have been tested by my decades of living. I have lived from hearing Superman on radio to having a woman sell me a pound of coffee at a farmer’s market the other day and use her smartphone to connect to my bank, after I used the tip of my finger to sign my name on the glass screen as well as forward a receipt to my computer. I am the same man, the same continuing person all these decades. You can mix me up, scramble me like three eggs on a griddle, and I will still be me. You would think this might be appreciated. No. It is not. The scary thing is that we are all so enmeshed in anomie that the only validation we have is the validation we may give to ourselves (many are unaware of that personal attribute)– and that is a centuries old verity, believe me.

Superannuated as I am, I dwell in the somewhat smug and self-satisfied notion that I own something you don’t have and it is worth millions. However, i see that you have a somewhat smug and self-satisfied notion that my time is over and you are declared the winner. I had a good run. And as Harlan Ellison once ended one of his short stories, “Fuck you!”

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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Reminiscence

Much Delayed

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Matt| Leave a comment

Several weeks now since I heard I had vascular problems; several tests taken and finally the cardiologist reading the “will” to me. Apparently I can live, have lived with one artery closed with plaque, dental or otherwise, a series of mild issues with the heart, the dosage of two baby aspirins to keep my arteries clear, teetering or tottering toward diabetes unless I significantly lose weight and then there are no guarantees and the prediction that I will live a long life. I will remember these weeks, for they are the testing one experiences as one ages, the torero’s red cape before the charging bull. I did not submit or sink into a depressive state, quite reasonable if I had; rather, it was as if I was being stressed, pruned, whittled on by the grim reaper. How many “escapes” does one get in life? I observed myself all the while feeling and experiencing myself. I did not play games with myself; I, in fact, seemed to become stoical, for what else is one to do with one’s mortality at large, and one’s mortality when under sharp and acute attack? It was, I imagine, a kind of acceptance without capitulation. I have been put on notice and that has not been lost on me at all. Never was. And never will be.

Hitting70 made me reflect more, as I usually do, about what intention I wish to give my life; as to meaning, I’ve thrown that out. The question is always: how best to avail myself of the time left, for it all ends? I will struggle with that. Those who do not, who do not reflect on this at all, who slough it off are made of the bread of ignorance is bliss. They are the “lucky” ones. Part of me says that my writing in my later years gives me pleasure and so I will continue until the tips of my fingers grow callused. I want to travel, see Costa Rica, to wit, a fantasy I’ve just chosen of late for all kinds of disparate reasons; it is the fountain of youth of my aging, for it guarantees nothing. Costa Rica is just a place, ah, but a place I project onto, for I like to travel. It will have to be deferred for a while (the years are running out like sand in an hourglass) so I “rush” to weigh carpe diem with tempus fugit. This balancing act, which is a mental chimera of my own making, is the task I set myself.

So you can have an idea of what keeps me canoeing toward the cataract, fear spuming aft and stern, ice on the oars, the roar of the falls ahead is in this snippet sent to me by a book reviewer last week:

Review should be done within a week, again you have mesmerized me with your writing. I sit and read the essays and sometimes I find myself in a place of deep soul searching and discovery, other times I am simply entertained but never disappointed.

Well, now, reader, what moves you? Money, granite countertops and an open floor plan, the next pay raise, politics, Bachmann, Obama, the slurry from the open pits which is American culture at this time. I didn’t need these past weeks to wake me up or to jar my sensibilities; what they have served to do is to simply remove the sand “sleepers” we accrue after a while. I am just more fully awake now, catching my balance, seeing more clearly what I need to do. What greater joy than to hear a reader say that I moved him or her into a place of self-discovery. I’ll match that, as a good competitive American soaked in the conditional lye of America, with what you come up with. Remove the conditioning and one is really shaken by the possibility of being Donald Trump for an hour, the retching that would entail.

In retrospect I feel a mild smugness, for I did not appeal to a non-existent god; I regard that as a man-made folly, a concoction of the human mind that takes up too much space and bends our wills to utter nonsense. I just saw Malicks’ “Tree of Life,” which is his attempt to assay this experience we call life and the whole concept of creation and what god is or is not. At the end it became a soup of religiosity and the light at the end of the tunnel kind of stuff. The platitudes about love, grace and meaning infiltrate the film like basement flooding and I thought to myself and I said to Jane in the theater, “It doesn’t make me feel, it doesn’t make me think.” I face my end alone, having a few close loved ones at my side, but alone in any case. I seek not succor or redemption, heaven or hell, the human projections that nauseate me for they lack courage and hard-thinking about life itself. We come, we suffer, we live, if that, we depart. Why suffuse it with prayer, sin and a call to be saved from sickness? The atheist may be accused of being dogmatic about god’s non-existence but the atheist registers the randomness of it all and bravely goes forth existentially, a kind of Sisyphus. Yes, there are atheists in foxholes.

I have time left, like we all do, moment to moment, regardless of the age. I cannot appeal to anything external for redress — there is only personal redress and I am working on that. I am preparing, if you can for such things, by being aware as my bottom falls away and I experience angst and personal terror of being no more. Nothing can be readily done to assuage aging or illness; all that can be done is in one’s self and in the abiding relationship to another self, for in that is some medicine for the pain. As I slip into nothingness, take it easy with the morphine, and hold my hand ever so firmly. Let me feel or know you are there, as I have been there for you. What more can I ask?

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Cotton Candy

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Matt| Leave a comment

Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach, then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, a bus or the el above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set for “Nightmare Alley.” Steeplechase Park was here as well as the dizzying spire of the parachute ride which still stands like a frozen, rusted Transformer. I rode that aerial ride in my teens and it was frightening; in those days you “sat” on a skimpy  wooden plank with a chain across your lap for safety. I could see all the way to Manhattan Beach. Steeplechase was a memorable park, all kinds of rides and  with its very exciting and exquisite steeplechase ride about the park on vary colored and wild-maned horses, these wooden-carved stallions ending up in antique stores throughout the U.S  The park had two monstrous indoor slides that tested any youngster’s mettle and personal grit; all gone. The parachute ride, now inoperable, remains, like the Statue of Liberty in “The Planet of the Apes.” All this by the way of an introduction.

I recall corns as thick as one’s upper wrist slathered in butter, hawked on the boardwalk. It was not a favorite of mine but I liked to watch as a vendor using a paper cone wrapped up the silken threads of cotton candy until it grew like a beard about the cone itself. I dimly remember that the process had something of static electricity to it, as sugar fibers attached to the moving paper wand. It was much too sugary for my taste; however, Nathan’s franks and its great mustard and Hires root beer, always served in a paper disposable cup, were required food at Coney. The soft ice cream or custard was spectacular, vanilla my favorite. The breeze off the beach carried a tinge of salt to it, and the weathered boards were inlaid across the boardwalk like parquet. I mention all this as a kind of reverie,  for my associations to the past, especially the cotton candy, make me reflect. I reflect how much of time is about us as we trespass in life, wandering hither and thither like carousing sailors. It is as if I am a paper cone dipped into time and whirled about until I coalesce as a person in the passage of time. It is something done to me, and nothing that I can do to it. All and everything is done to me.

I think. I consider. It comes and goes but it is a common occurrence, for it is something I do, naturally now, it seems to me as I think about it. I send “kites” into the air, mental ribbons tied to their bottoms, gaily ballasts, I suppose. Each kite is a thought or a consideration. And what is it I consider or pose to myself as I spin like cotton candy to my end, the grim reaper, scythe in hand, sittting down, watching me patiently, until the spun cone is all wound up? I ask myself if, for example, I should draw up a list of books and read them, not as an attempt to get necessarily wiser, for books don’t make us wiser, but as an attempt to complete something in myself, perhaps a “should.” It is not a bucket list as the new slang has it. I don’t want attainments or achievements before I die. It is more thoughtful than that. Here I am, a miniscule human effort, given such and such amount of days and years, and what should I be doing at this time in my life when I have more time to reflect on the life I have led.

So, I ask myself what would be the purposeful thing to do given the limitations of my life, circumstance, health, family, wifely companion. What should any human being do at 70 — pick your age — so as to round out his days in a way that has some inner purpose? And what I come up with is not very satisfying, it all seems mundane. What I do observe is the grand amount of waste in my life — days unseen by the eyes, unfelt, unlived, thrown away at night without regard, reverence and the experience of them. I ask if it is at all possible to bite deeply into my life like one bites deeply into a pastrami on rye.

Recent medical issues, really threats to my way of living, recent diagnoses, unfavorable at that but sustainable, creating fears, of course make me more alert to issues I have wrestled with for years. The recent experience with the Rapture hints at latent issues, what if this were the last day of your life? What would you do? What are the rents in your relationships that need attending to? And so forth. For me rapture, as I interpret it, would be an epiphany of a kind, some kind of transcendent moment free of religiosity, but flinty spiritual stuff, if you will. To seek all this is a fool’s errand, I know. Many things in life come to us, wanted and unwanted, like the next spin around the cotton candy bowl. Even if we imagine the list of pleasures we might have before we die –Maui, the Parthenon at sundown, rapturous spiritual lovemaking with one’s significant other, a cruise to a Greek island unknown to tourists. . . I stop here  and observe that my hit list has nothing to do with material possessions but more to do with sharing with one’s significant others — how apparent, is it not? I spin off, away from the nagging “kite” at hand.

I get up in the mornings (mournings?) now, often resistant to doing anything, but I nag myself into trying to do something for my writing, or my life, or my shared existence with Jane. I try to make merry with or without money — and there are many rich things you can do without too much money. I struggle to sit down by my desk and to write this blog, to rewrite a story or to send out an article — I feel good because I sent an article out to Mensa journal, “To Ms. Foley, With Gratitude.” All this makes me feel good, writing this blog about my personal feelings feels good.  I try to Be. Well, I have always had a philosophical cast to my feelings, and self. Not good for an American.

I have not answered the question I posed — What is to be done? At moments I feel I am a ventriloquist’s dummy without his master. I suppose if I come into it, if I wade into this ineffable “it,” I will have a way, a tao, to bring my life to its final ends, not that I am in a rush. It is the old and ancient question broken down into the historic threes –Who am I? What am I do while I am  here? And where am I going? The last one is for the believer; the second one is a savage master. The first question is forever.

Upon awakening tomorrow, I will face once more what I want to do in the days remaining, what intent can I give some congruency — or peace – to that inner directed self that queries life, not so much in search of an answer, but of posing a better question. And while all this goes on some mighty wind may simply come by and tatter all the kites aloft. Knowing this only makes me at 70 feel more of the immediacy of my questions. And then I see you, any you, on the street and assume he may not even be awake to the questions he should be posing. But that’s a kite of a different color.

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Make Merry

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Matt| Leave a comment

I learned years ago from a gifted psychotherapist friend that one should make “merry.” I worked as a therapist in his counseling center in the early 90s. Occasionally I was informed that the staff would have a get together, the usually drinks, usual snacks and the usual suspects. When I asked what was the occasion, I was met with a shrug or what need is there to ask, just go with it, a remnant of the 60s. In fact, Ben did this for the entire staff for no reason other than to make merry, which I cherish till this day, a celebration of blood running through one’s system and that I haven’t croaked as yet.  As I grow older, I choose to make merry more often, given what psychological and monetary change is in my pocket.

In my last blog, “Acoustic Research, Pun Intended,” I more subtly applied the same insight to acquiring a vintage stereo system. As I waited for the amplifier, I bought some records off EBay; while that was going on I ordered a vintage Pioneer turntable and while all this was going on I bought new speakers from Amazon. It is the reaching out for, the taking in, the feeling of your being mercury spilled to the floor, merging into nook and cranny which self actualizes me — and you? Do you wait until life macerates you or do you venture out with spear from the primeval cave? Have hope — all these are learnable behaviors. Our culture makes us constipated with the hard suppository of bullshit of what and what not we can do. Think diarrhea and have a better existence. Nothing like an anal metaphor to get you to move, no pun intended.

Of late I have chosen to make merry by fantasizing a dream I may never obtain as part and parcel of my merriment: I want to move to Costa Rica. Oh, any reasonable Latin American country will do. I am finding out more about CR but CR doesn’t drive me so much as the merriment of trying to get a little retirement home in this country — it could be Belize, Panama, maybe Puerto Rico, Ecuador. et al. It smacks of the impossible dream but I am not into self-torture, unless you call Jewish anxiety such an experience. The impossible dream may very well become possible. I remember an anecdote I came up with as a therapist. It was for clients who had tunnel vison or were stuck or could not conceive of other choices or options in their lives; they were popsicles, frozen to their sticks. I would ask them to imagine standing on the shore and looking out upon the waves, very calming as it is. I’d then ask them to tell me what they made of the waves reaching the beach. Some of them were too literal, or self-blind. At last I would end the struggle and tell them that waves spit deep into the beach sands, others never arrive, some are middling and that if you looked across the span of the beach and waters coming in there was a vast variety of intakes here and there, of differing dimensions.

Sometimes I had to bring all this together. I’d tell them that this paralleled life’s choices. That no one wave comes across the shore at the same rate, the same dimension; to wit, when making breakfast one doesn’t wait until the coffee brews, one makes toast, one gets the cup out, one cracks the eggs for the omelet. The point of the anecdote is to help them act, to choose, to do other things until their ship comes in. It is very much like making merry. I’ll read about CR, google sites on CR, which I have done; contact real estate agents; Visa requirements; taxes for ex-pats if any, an endless array of things to do rather than waiting for CR to come into shore and dock itself. In the stirring up, in the arousing of feelings, we can truly make it happen. I did this more than 20 years ago when I came home to Rochelle and told her that I would go nuts if I didn’t have something else in my life as a teacher, some respite, some place away from the maddening crowd and the collective stupidities and inanities of schools. Withihn two years I owned property in upstate Canaan and build a little house — and the man who made that happen was Ben. It was all an act of serendipity — he came to me one night in my office and asked if I was serious about a country house. I said yes! He said that he owned land upstate and if I wanted come take a look. And so Ben’s merriment made my merriment come true.. Before that as a family we took small trips to New jersey, upstate New York to scout out possibilities, much like making that breakfast — no frozen moments for me. And so CR is on my mind. Sharing it with Jane has only led to a mutual dream, a mutual desire and mutual risk taking; I don’t have much gelt in the bank, but somehow I’ll make it happen. Of course, we have a small issue of mortality here. I don’t want to crack coconuts by backing up on them with my Mr. Mobility chair.

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Acoustic Research, Pun Intended

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Matt| Leave a comment

I wanted to write about this event in a movie I had seen as a preliminary commentary about the essay to follow, but it has slipped my mind and I am chattering now on screen in the weak hope it may re-emerge. The felt-sense of this reminiscence I can feel right now but cannot access and put into words goes along this line: I am trying to recreate something from the past, something nostalgic — and what nostalgia means is much more complex than a dictionary meaning contains. Nostalgia, I suppose for me, is a returning to the scene of the “crime,” much as we know that some criminals have to return to the the place they commited their criminal acts. It is no longer a curiosity but a fact and part of being human, I guess, as returning to the old neighborhood or being at a high school reunion for a class decades past in one’s youth. I will continue buzzing along here as that ineffable metaphor I was going to use for your benefit eludes me; as soon as I get it, I will stop and insert it into this blog.

As one ages, as I grow old, the old truth holds true, that we come closer to our childhood as we come closer to our death. (In America we “pass,” for me I “die.”) Like Kane, there are several snowglobes in my memory banks, holographically fading in and out, mnemonic human plasma seeking shape, substance and form. I think there is a feeling of recapture and reclaiming in all this, for I would dearly love to possess the phonograph, made in Switzerland, I was gifted with as a child and played all kinds of records on it. It was a mechanical marvel, so well lathed, blue in color, and all parts trued and  fit squeakingly well into a self contained case, for part of the joy was in removing the arm and the needle and returning all that once again after play was over. It was compact and well-machined, beautiful machinery, much as we look back at Smith Coronas, Olympias, and Hermes typewriters. In this culture we ride the wild mustang of change, and we are told this is in and new, this is out and passe and like lemmings we follow. I associate to the phonograph once again and I see it as a foreshadowing of what I did in my thirties, admire the stereo system more than play it.

I recall playing Al Jolson records on it, that gravelled voice, a cantor’s voice; Bozo the Clown and some 45s of classical music which I played over and over, some motifs, I imagine, sticking to my germ plasma as a child. It was a wind-up phonograph with a heavy metal device that held the needle, almost as thick as a tapered nail. It did its job well and everything else didn’t matter to my child’s mind. Cartridges and needles, anti-skating devices and all the rest of the gibberish would come later as I tried on some nether level to replay the childhood experience I had as a child before 1950. And now I am repeating all over again: I miss taking out a record from its sleeve, embracing its curved edges between both palms in order to read Side A and then flipping it to read Side B, a  forgotten gesture as ancient as holding one’s hands up for mother to wind wool into hanks of wool or being told to get off a man’s fender or playing stoop ball with a Spaldeen.

Of late one snowglobe in mind has been the stereo sytem I had in the 70s. This, as I am reading, was the Golden Age of such sonic components. I remember, on my small budget, reading stereo magazines to create the possible audiophile dream of a system. Finally, I remember buying an AR (Acoustic Research) turntable which is now considered  a classic; it was a manual, for I did not mind to get off my ass and change the record. And it was thought that automatic changers dropped records unnecessarily harshly onto the platter — what nonsense, I now think. In any case I paid about $78 for this masterful turntable. On EBay it goes for so much more as people are now returning to re-establish vintage systems. Additionally I read more and paid an exorbitant amount of money, for the 70s, for an Acoustic Research receiver which is now a rare classic.  Evidently I had good taste, like keeping a ’65 Mustang in the garage for decades — which I did not do! So I was building my dream system; I always had shit speakers, for bucks were always an issue. Years later I remember discarding the AR only to see it in a stereo store in upstate New York  — decades later –going for the same price I purchased it new. I had moved to CDs, like many of us, and that is regrettable.  Like Odysseus tied to the mast, I heard the sirens of change..

I went on a lark, for a lark for any old man, which I am, is to reestablish something indefinable, a denial of death, perhaps. All the equipment I  bought comes from the 70s and 80s when two channel stereo was at its peak. Going to EBay I purchased a Pioneer turntable for under $50 and an integrated Harman Kardon amplifer for about $65 and then bought a small collection of classical albums, near mint, as they say, for about $65 Ravel, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.  Scouring Craigslist and EBay, I am now seeking bookshelf speakers. All the old names are revisited — JBL, Bose, Kenwood, Acoustic Research, still around after allthese decades. I bought a wicker stand for the components and when all of them are at hand I will read the owner’s manuals and sort it all out; the perfectionism has abated and all I want to do Is play with records and hear some good music. Additionally I am moved to buy some of the dear albums I cherished in the late 60s and throughout the 70s — Revolver, Wildflowers, Mother Earth, Sgt.Pepper, Rubber Soul, Hair, Bridge Over Troubled Water, et al. Reminiscences of Richie Havens, Cream, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night waft through my brain. I gave all them away, you know, like train sets, baseball cards, the memorabilia of childhood. I missed the album cover drawings and the lyrics, in large print, inside. I missed my past, that which I can never regain but that which still abides and resides in me, for the past does not exist — the past is the present, ask Proust, ask Faulkner, ask a highly skilled shrink.

I self-observe myself returning to earlier times perhaps as an attempt to self-soothe who I am, for it is harmless, a hobby with ancient antecedents. I seek not to stave off the advance of change, for change is a consequence of human interactions without any coherent, overall design. Change is human woodpecking. I am into recovery, that recovery which makes one sensitive and overtly feeling and softened by memories which are often overpowering and dearly cherished as part of one’s esential exisential self. It is the essence that precedes existence. In this search for the recoverable past once more I attempt to define who I am.

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Gone

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

I recall working from a pad of white paper, perhaps 16 lb or so, often with silky carbon paper nearby. I owned a Smith Corona portable, blue bottom, beige sides, and so often abused by me over the years as I struggled typing my stories that I had to have the letter “e” resoldered on to the key more than once. I wish I had kept that apparatus, for I do miss the inserting of a snow white page and advancing the knob on the right side so that it grabbed and came out on the other side of the roller all ready and willing to be impressed upon my thought-fury. Old typewriters, the really old ones, have a curio-like appeal to me much like old Kodaks, Yashicas, Mirandas, Canons and Konicas. They are the detritus of advancing change; once apocalyptic advances themselves they are mere relics now. More mechanical than digital, they did allow for more trouble-shooting manually and not by software. In other words, I did not feel helpless around them. If a new car breaks down, you can’t adjust the carburetor for it no longer exists; the car needs to be towed off. Since I am here for some decades, I feel the loss more than if I lived for hundreds of years. Change is abrupt and that which I relished, savored and enjoyed has passed by except for the reminiscences.

Allow me to share a reverie about my stereo equipment which I owned more than30 years ago. I remember saving up for an AR turntable and paid $78 for it new. I wanted a manual turntable for I was not too tired to get off the couch and place the arm on to a new record. Even then this was viewed, except by stereophiles, as quaint if not archaic. I did not want my records to flop down upon one another if I used a changer. You see, I cherished the entire process of selecting an album, removing the record, taking off the sleeve, holding the vinyl carefully about its circumference so that I could “flip” it to choose the side to play; that is a lost nuance, is it not? And on the back were the lyrics of the songs therein, easy to read, to memorize, unlike todays CDs. The record was contained in its sleeve with a cellophane circle in its center revealing the musician, orchestra, and the side that was to be played ; I always found classic records to be handsome about this production.

With the manual turntable I invested deeply in an AR acoustic research receiver. Here I deviated, for if I had the money I would have purchased individual components — pre-amp, amp and speakers. It was a hobby of mine and one that I never completed, much like the train set that never ends. I recall reading the magazines of the day, savoring this and that component and the adversity and the challenge of not having the cash for these delectables did not defeat me but only made me more dogged in having a decent or good system one day, for I was in my 30s, married, with children and had much more time for waiting and hoping than I do now. In my closet now are n gauge trains I have purchased off EBay and track that in my fantasy will someday run in my office on a small table with, perhaps, a desert vista. What I am sharing with you is that the fantasy of completing the train set is as powerful as eventually having it; I suppose that is to say that the present wishes are, for me, as strong as the reality of attaining them. What shall I say, I persevere, the second tortoise behind the first. The turntable and a class A receiver were my gold but I had shit speakers (adversity) and for several years I struggled toward that end.

Eventually I bought a pre-amp and an amp by Dynaco, I think, and a CD player thus avoiding a turntable as I transistioned to the new changes about me. I sold or gave away, perhaps I even junked the treasured receiver, and went on. Many years later I saw my receiver which had a golden surface with all kinds of knobs that filled the hand in a second hand store upstate New York. The dealer was selling the receiver for about $400 then, about the price it was when new. And that made me rue what I had done; for change shufled aside what could have been a wiser choice, just to stow it away. I didn’t do that with my 1965 Mustang convertible, either. Who knew? East of this monitor is a Onkyo CD player with good speakers that I have on but rarely use. I think I may regress one day and seek out a turnatable, etc and start all over with records again. I choose to have a second childhood. I miss the process, the tactility of it, oh, the human touch of it all. I am that kind of person.

So, a 1965 gold Mustang convertible, a manual, AR equipment, the class turntable of that time, and an old Smith Corona typewriter are all gone. I am gone as well, all the years lived, unwisely spent, being unaware and not awake, leave me desolate in places for what could have been was not even imagined much less envisioned and there is no saying that I will be any wiser in the persent or in the future. Perhaps we should all have as our epitaph: “GONE.”

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Looking Back

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Matt| Leave a comment

What should I do? Look forward, I think not. Forward is the end. I think back and what that entails is recollection and reminiscence. memories and the sisters regret and ruefulness. The present is in disarray, for the dust has not settled, just the eye of the storm crossing self-geography. I associate to a dim memory in sixth grade in which I wrote down the year 2000, for it was 1952. I imagined for a moment what it would be like to be 60, just for a moment. I shot ahead, I shot back to ’52 and I went on. The memory trace stays and what it means is open to all kind of interpretations, choose what you like. I like the thought that I was imagining old age while all the time relishing and reveling  that I was 12 — and all those years in between – and could not be 60 if I tried to be. I was exploring the future, making tense work for me, given the allowance of so many years ahead to live and be alive, although by 12 I was pretty much dead to myself. And now I look back to 1952 — Truman, H-bombs, Mccarthy, Brando, the Brooklyn Dodgers and especially Jackie Robinson, with that steatypygous high stance of his, and cherry lime rickeys. It is always striking what we remember, what we force ourselves to remember, what floats in that computer which is our mind that does not often allow for deletions.  I think we become human dustballs, gatherers, collectors, aimless as we drift hither, thither, terrain scramblers, sagebrush. Human experience as accretion.

It is very bright in my office now. The Nevada day is starkly brilliant so that in some odd way I find it hard to focus or to write and my mind wanders, the above paragraph is such an association and so I will follow it as I laze and meander down by the riverbanks of who I am, where water touches soft mud and the reeds. As I look back I remember a program last night on Reagan. One of his biographers said that he had no friends and his son confirmed that, for whatever reasons, although the first decade of his life was difficult, an alcoholic father and  failed businessman and a religious evangelical for a mother. Reagan is not the issue here; what I identified with was that he had no friends, acquaintances, yes, but no childood “Chum,” as the therapists would term it. I can think of only two friends, long since gone out of my orbit, who I had a relationship with. So, I know I can do that, or have that, but I went off by myself and essentially became my own friend, for there was no one else there. I befriended me. I am a loner and it has its satisfactions and its costs. I can confide in me, I can confide in Jane, and sometimes, perhaps, I wonder if I need another for a well-rounded opinion or assessment, but I choose not to have that. I am “sociable,” not an isolate, but I am of two minds about having a close friend and not having one. I am much more interested, given my character, to examine why this has come about than to run out and become an American and load my Facebook page with “friends.” Oh well, the short answer is that I do not trust, for that would bespeak vulnerability and that has been latently scary for me all my life.

I believe we never reach that imaginary state in which we are “grown up,” for that never occurs — and how boring that would be! –even until the evening before we die. Assuredly, we are never in conrol of anything, even our bodily functions press us into action. Humorously, homo sapien acts and behaves as if values and systems and religious beliefs (Omigod!) give us “security” and purpose. So skewed and mistaken as a  mindset. We are all in a spin, in a twirl and tizzy and somehow manage to keep the species extant.  In short, all the psychoanalytic thinking, self-reflection, self-knowledge, guru-izing and musing will not satisfy me as to why I end up without a close friend. Whose life is it? I can say decidedly – someone has to do that in this blog – I had no hand in all this except the hand that rules all of us, the unconscious mind, that thing we run from and even if we met up with it could not handle its drives (pun intended).

Controlled by the invisible hands of evolution and gravitation, throw in the unconscious as the other known force that kicks the shit out of us. The unconscious rules. As I come down to it, as the pencil is whittled more and more, I reflect over the different selves I have lived, perhaps experienced and, of course, there are scant answers for the questions intrigue me much more. I am just taken with the idea that I will become vaporized, an exhalation of decades and then a snuffing out. This yardstick we are given in years genetically, the measure of thousands of experiences, the learnings accrued, the insights kept and savored amount to a hill of beans. Why be upset? Nothing can be done about it. But I sense, as you do, a kind of profligacy on the part of nature; however, how else will evolution mutate, eternally forever?

Allow me to struggle here about what I intend, behind or under the words, I present to you. After all this sound and fury which often signifies nothing, in moments of self-reflection, for that, to me, is our greatest gift as as species — the possibility of the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti said it, what is to be made of all this life and living, these relationships, the cacophony of the culture and global world about us?

I think I find respite, only that, no more, in acknowledging the present moment more and more as if I could drop dead at any time which is what I would whisper into the ear of any acute young person starting out on his earthly trek. No cliches here about the present as evinced in therapies and philosophies, the croakings of Dr, Phil, Chopra and Dyer, the three Stooges. At 70 I am looking at the now, at the moment, and I have a whole ball of wax which is my past, often given to me, often unlived, often unaware of until I reached this time. I associate to the old story about Alexander the Great when he came upon the Gordian knot. Told by the Indian mystics that India would belong to the conqueror who could unravel the knot, Alexander descended from his horse, Bucephalus, withdrew his sword and cleaved through the knot to the amazement of onlookers. Of course, this is, to my mind, the distinction between the western and eastern worlds, doers versus thinkers; both have their merits.

So I look at my Wellsesian snowglobe, turn it upside down, and as the snowflakes in solution float down I try to see what fixture is at the center of it all, no not a sled, but what characterological self is there that absorbs all the flakes, wondrous symbols of death. I am with myself, trying to discern at this time in my life; I find it a bit rewarding and sad but infinitely more challenging than a round of golf. In that globe is why I have no close friend, why I have made the mistakes of my life, why  I was or was not a good father — or husband, why I failed in my own eyes, for culture’s condemnation or not does not concern me at all. In that snowglobe is revealed for me for all time how essentially immaterial are the tantrums of Sarah Palin, who has no snowglobe except her own reflection in Todd’s harpoon tip.

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I Have One Day to Live

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Matt| Leave a comment

I will finish the week, the month and go on to 2011, but I pose this to myself, for one day I will have one day to live. Regardless of the sickness, be it cancer or a stroke, there is the day before that. And if I were to be in on the hoax that is life, that is death, what might I do with that day. It is a damn hard test to task one self. Let us agree that I will not run amok in the streets of Henderson, Nevada; I will most likely call my son, talk to Jane, but no more than that. And I avoid the question by bringing up these last good byes. The hardness of the question has been with me in one fashion or another for years and I have come up dry. How do I know this? For in large measure my life has not changed or differed much from what it is now. I have not granted myself a dream or a wish; I have not traveled inordinately so to Macchu Picchu or other places of the planet; I have not indulged in vices, for the question posed is riddling, perplexing and mindnumbing. Essentially I am challenging myself to find that which is in me that needs to be completed, honed, reawakened, resolved  or reinvigorated since I am a day away from my death.

What feelings might I experience if I just grasped one or two “things” to do before I evanesce. Knowing me (not really, for we don’t know ourselves except for the images of the images of the images of the images of appearances of selves we think we “see” or “know”), I probably be riddled by what to do — or what to think. Of course, I could think of a place to go to, or a book to read, or a conversation with an estranged one, or a reconciliation, but more often than not what I observe with the question I pose is that it is a doing, not a being. In On the Beach with Ava Gardner and Greg Peck, the question is asked of a group of individuals facing the end of the world by thermonuclear war. Some race their cars and then commit suicide in the car; a couple takes poison; a submarine captain takes his crew to the bottom of the ocean to die there; and one telling observation is made that even dogs go home to where they belong to await their death.  It was a dreary, chilling film with not an ounce of happiness in it except for those who chose to go on emotional binges; not much to do if you know it will be soon over. Yet, each one of us will face that. Metaphorically, I take it that the end ends with us, not out there.

I suppose I intellectually masturbate over that question because I don’t want to be “taken by surprise.” And that is a hilarious phrase. I think all my writing is an attempt to stave off death — for awhile. You may play golf to defer death and dying; I whittle my being with thoughts, trying to find not a way out, but a way in, in order to face the inevitable. One need not be morbid at all to consider these things. The young, as I did, wallow in time, splashing its moments and hours over the end of the tub; the middle age sense that there is too much water on the floor; and the aged are fearful of getting out of the tub and metaphorically slipping into death. In this stream of life I pose questions to myself, really, I think, I believe, I know, choose your verb for me, to make sense of the individual day and the time ahead; I record my thoughts, here before your eyes, in order to ascertain what to do and I have no answers except the riddling arcs of needle-sharp questions. I spend my time in belaboring my existence. At least I think about it, I say defensively.  I do not believe that one can live any life without examining the lint between his or her ears. It could well be that I just can’t think of what to do with my life in the years ahead.

I could move elsewhere, I could continue writing, that’s a given; I need no cars, no new clothing; no material things, for I am reasonably contented; I would like to travel for I am old enough to appreciate it more, I say; I could go out into the world as god had said to the Hebrews (no other deity had ever asked that of his followers). While pausing in this list I thought of how what suits me best is to explore internally within myself, but then I’ve always internalized the world. I need not transcend, fat chance that is; I seek no new creed, the Jewish ethos is more than enough for this Jew in this lifetime; perhaps the world of relationship needs much repair in my life which I acquiesce to; perhaps “I” and “Thou” as Buber wrote about it needs to be explored further. So in this bloated carcass that reeks of rot, this culture I rut in, I have no need for the pleasures of things, markets, or the human pus that Palin and others give out. Watch TV with binoculars from a thousand feet away and your mind and soul will wither from the “content” it reveals.

I was taken aback the other day reading in the paper that a DSM III disorder, the diagnostic statistical manual used by all psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists for arriving at diagnoses of their clients has deleted a major disorder. Indeed, homosexuality for decades was listed as a perversion, et al until removed a few years ago or so. In the 70s and 80s narcissism was a major topic of discussion in the psychological field. I recall Christopher Lasch wrote a book on cultural narcissism which I did not read but I mention it here because it became topical. In the field major psychoanalysts wrote about it. One thought stays in mind after all these decades. A narcissist in treatment or the one next door can be more than insufferable or unbearable; they are often so stewed in their own self worth and assessments of themselves that a world is created which no one can enter. Consequently in relationships they do not see the other person as extant and alive as well.

One telling observation an instructor gave our class has stayed with me. In short, although the person opposite you may be, in fact, sheer disgusting in how he relates to you, or how he berates you as a therapist, or puts you down, the key issue here for you as his therapist is to realize that he is essentially profoundly empty; for him to realize, come in touch with, or know that would be, on some levels, totally devastating to “who” he is. He lives in his own void. So, indeed, if one  were to help this pompous, annoying, arrogant, grandiose and narcissistic being, one has to take the tack that seems diametrically opposite to what he presents. He presents that he is an “omni” person, capable of doing and being all to all people at all times. Apparently, to help him realize his emptiness one must not assault or attack him but one must approach him with care and unremitting patience as he continues to throw thunderbolts, like Zeus, at your very competency.

I say all this because the narcissistic categorization has been dropped from the DSM III. The reason: it is no longer considered a disorder because most people in this county have normalized it; that is, it is no longer a disorder, for too many people reveal this as the usual behavior pattern(s) in this country.

That is a jaw-dropper! The consequences go far beyond the pale and the purpose of this essay. I am stillthinking about it all; it has been nagging me for two or three days. If narcissism is the mainstay of this nation, if it is, imagine the consequences for families, for children, for governance, for worldwide interactions. I must say this that Palin goes beyond vanity, ambition, but reveals an “omni” response to the world — that I can do this; that this is simple; I can do that, for it doesn’t take too much to do so; that I can be all to all situations because I need no intelligence, nor learning, great wit and savvy. In short, I am inordinately gifted with a narcissistic world wide grandiosity that allows me such competence. In short, beneath that rancor, lies a profound emptiness, and she is adored by the  conditioned slaves that line up outside bookstores for her latest skinny on world events because they are equally as empty and narcissistic.

If I have one day before I die, perhaps I should invest in an underground shelter; to keep out not radiation but the narcissistic zombies that slowly gimp and limp throughout this land. The day of the Borg is here, for resistance, apparently, is futile.

I will continue at some other time.

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Posted in Commentary, Philosophy, Reminiscence