The choice

“Deep down, he’s really superficial.”

-- Dorothy Parker about
Ernest Hemingway

I don't follow leaders, and I watch the parking meters, as advised over 40 years ago by Bob Dylan himself, so you can be sure that I'll be the last cat to steer you in the direction of some television preacher, guru du jour, or a motivational speaker. I thought I saw the essence of motivational speaking a couple of decades ago on public television, in the person of a motivator whose selling spiel was a story of how for a long time he had been a lost man barely subsisting in some American city, before he saw the proverbial light and got motivated to become... guess what, a physicist, computer programmer, teacher, journalist, doctor, lawyer? No, folks, motivated to become a motivational speaker! That was the bloke's entire resume, presented to motivate ourselves to do something with our lives! I remember flipping the channels.

That said, there is one fellow I've come to admire, having at first dismissed him as another one of those. He's been around for 30 or so years, has written numerous books, conducts seminars all over the country, produces occasional programs for public television, that are shown usually during membership pledge times, like the concerts of the forgotten 1960s teenage heartthrobs, now aching and balding, when the local stations beg the viewers for money and more money every month from then on. (I flip the channels at those times, too!)

The reason I like this man is that, as I've seen over the years, he has gone deeper than the usual motivational speaker banalities and cliches, has reached to the ancient texts and to religious and literary sources of wisdom, and has become, for lack of a better term, a sort of popular philosopher. He's no Mortimer Adler, that's for sure (another author to look up), but he comes close enough.

His name is Dr. Wayne Dyer. Check him out. I don't buy everything he says, and I'm not qualified to write a summary of his teachings, as there is plenty information (as well as some controversy) about him on the Internet.

All of the above as an introduction to a thought I have been meditating over recently, that, I am told, originated from Dr. Dyer:

"When given the choice between being right or being kind, always choose kind."

Wow! It may not be deep, but it sure is provocative, and, I'd say, a bit discomforting (Feel free to disagree.)

Is this a white flag of surrender? Is this a real or artificial choice? A manifesto of a feminized American male? All these questions came up as I chewed on the sentence over the past month. A short time before hearing it, I did in a manner of speaking choose kindness over rightness to deal with a tough professional problem with personal ramifications, emerging from the experience not exactly unscathed, or much wiser, but alive and kicking, which was better than I or anyone had expected.

Lead us from here

I'm an ape man, I'm an ape ape man,
I'm an apeman
I'm a king kong man, I'm a voodoo man
I'm an apeman.
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore
And make like an apeman.

(Apeman, by Ray Davies)


I spoke to my Wednesday yoga teacher before class. I told him I had picked up a copy of Bhagavad Gita, as he had recommended, and started reading it. I said that as far as sagely advice went, the Gita or Sun Tzu, as I remembered them, had little or nothing to say about relationships between men and women. And I said, I thought that was because in those days, relationships were about cavemen dragging the cavewomen by the hair into the cave, as illustrated by modern cartoons, and, even if not entirely true, that was more or less, metaphorically, the essence of it. (Caveman, apeman, same thing.)

"Is that what you would like to do?" he asked.

"Well," I answered, hesitating for a second, "what's a fellow to do?"

(You thought I wouldn't hesitate, didn't you?!) I have sought his advice lately, and we have had several longer conversations about this and that, about relationships and so on. It never hurts to ask.

"It's advice about life in general," he said referring to the Gita, "But relationships are a big topic, aren't they."

I asked him if he had seen her, in his other classes outside. No, he hadn't, he said. I told him about a recent encounter, seeing her drive by.

"Did she try to run you over?" he asked.
"She looked angry, sad, and pained at seeing me. Why, after all this time?"

"Divorce is not easy," he answered, "Seeing her affected you too, didn't it. Now, go change."

It wasn't strictly speaking a divorce, but I didn't argue. It was getting close to class time.

"Isn't it great to be alive?" he asked cheerfully before I started out in the direction of the locker room. I recalled that line from the Rolling Stones' song Angie.

"No," I replied cheerfully, this time without hesitation.

As I walked to the locker room to change, I thought that all these books with advice about life in general are intended for and read by people who have achieved a certain level of bliss with plenty, perhaps too much leisure time, living surrounded by modern comforts, who feel just a little out of sorts, slightly neurotic, and not for people finding themselves in dire straits, sleeping under the bridge, or making a decision whether to jump from a bridge.

I changed, threw cold water on my face, as I usually do before heading back to that bright, warm, mirrored room with the smiling yoga teacher standing at the center.

"Angie, Angie,
When will those dark clouds disappear,
where will it lead us from here."

______________________________________________

DISCLAIMER: The above work of fiction, and any resemblance between
the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental

A man on a fuzzy tree

There is an idiomatic slang phrase I use occasionally, most recently during a conversation with my yoga teacher, relating to him an encounter with a certain Her we both know fairly well, when she had passed me in her car as I was walking down the street, and having noticed her facial expression of anger, sadness and pain, as a reaction, I thought, to the sight of me, I told the yoga teacher that the experience got me all shook up!

Uh, uh, uh, I'm all shook up! Yes, it's incorrect grammatically, but who'd ever say 'I'm all shaken up?'! During formal occasions, when I slip up and say the incorrect phrase, I have a bit of trouble backing out of it, and I'll correct myself saying something like, "uhm, I got a little shaken up.' The society ladies present raise their eyebrows, but in the end, they find it in their hearts to forgive. Except for one of them, but that's another story altogether.

The ungrammatical phrase originated most likely on the streets of New York, or among Southern blacks, but it gained wide usage after Elvis Presley recorded a song by Otis Blackwell titled, well, 'All Shook Up' and took it to the top of the charts in 1957, as a follow up to his hit composed by the same Otis Blackwell, and titled 'Don't Be Cruel'. Incidentally, according to reports, Presley mimicked on his recordings Otis Blackwell's own interpretations he heard on the acetate demos. The two never met.

How the great Otis Blackwell, who went to write numerous hits for Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and others, and remained and died in obscurity, came up with the song, is another story, which I'd like to relate here.

Actually, there are several version of this story and, in the spirit of John Ford who had a line in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that went 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend', I'll relate the version I heard first and consider my favourite.

Otis Blackwell, already enjoying the big success of Don't Be Cruel, visits his music publisher, Shalimar Music in New York, bragging that he can write a song about anything. One of the owners of the company walks in, shakes a bottle of Pepsi Cola he's holding in his hand, and says "Here, write about this!" (A historical note: while the circumstances of the event, as well the identity of the person who shook that bottle vary in the different versions of the story, one element remains constant throughout: it was a bottle of Pepsi and not Coke!) Otis came back the next day with the song, which in part went like this:

A well I bless my soul
What's wrong with me?
I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree
My friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug
I'm in love I'm all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

[...]

She touched my hand what a chill I got
Her lips are like a vulcano that's hot
I'm proud to say she's my buttercup
I'm in love, uh, I'm all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

The DISCLAIMER

Early morning Friday the 13th, after a night of dreams about electricity, guitars and bridges, I find myself munching on an almond cognac croissant and talking to a lawyer.

"You've got to protect yourself," he tells me.

Ho hum, doesn't everyone.

"You write about easily identifiable people in your blogs, embellishing them, adding descriptions and dialogue that never took place, right?"

"Right, just as I told you," I said.

"Well, some of them might not appreciate your embellishments, feel offended, complain, sue, g_d forbid shoot you, then what?"

"Well, I survived one small incident with a gym staffer, I'll survive the rest."

I told him about the fiction of W.G Sebald, which reads like a memoir, and that this style is what guided me too. The 'I' in Sebald was not really himself, and the 'I' in my blogs is not entirely myself either.

"I'm not writing a diary, man, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to get started - I had to think up the form and the content. You know, some of these characters are invented out of whole cloth. I might even invent you."

"Not funny," he said.

"Well, after all you're a lawyer, counselor," I replied. We know each other well enough to engage in a little teasing.

"You need to put a disclaimer in your blog posts," he said, his eyes signalling lawyerly seriousness.

"Like this?" I opened a book I was holding and showed him the following:

DISCLAIMER: The following is a work of fiction, and any resemblance between the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.

He studied it slowly, then said: "That's a particularly weak one, but yes, something like it."

We finished without agreeing on anything, and I headed to work meditating on Friday the 13th, and on the lucky penny I found yesterday while thinking about someone special, and if it would bring better luck than the pennies I kept finding in previous months.

What drawer?

What is "writing for the drawer", anyway? Google this phrase surrounding it with quotes, to learn more, in the meantime, I'll tell you where I picked it up.

I picked it up from a newspaper review of a collection of Susan Sontag's writings. It was a quote from something she had written. Where did she pick it up? Google suggests an answer. Susan Sontag was known for her interest in writers behind the Iron Curtain, writers who had to put up with strict government censorship, and often "wrote for the drawer", unable to publish their works. (She was also known for her relentless, extreme Leftism, which leaves us with a question about Sontag's state of mind and her reasoning for reconciling her support for oppressed artists with a belief in the ideology that spawned that oppression.)

You will see that Google hits refer to many such Eastern European writers, who for a time wrote for the drawer.

Needless to say, this blog misuses the phrase in a way, as blogger.com is a public, uncensored (?) forum. On the other hand though, I think that, unless one's an exhibitionist or a megalomaniac, vanity press projects are similar to writing for the drawer, since no editor or publisher is given a chance to scrutinize them and decide whether our rants and rages deserve to be seen by the public at large.

Censored and ostracized writers in totalitarian states who wrote for the drawer, wrote for that drawer, but also for a few trusted friends and acquaintances, and this is what we are doing here now.

Going...

"If you're going through Hell, keep going."

-- Winston Churchill

Isn't it strange how you can be going through hell, I mean psychic hell, uncertainties mounting, head hurting, dark tunnels without an end, and at the same time, be writing jokes, thinking up puns, writing them all out on Internet forums, exchanging quips with co-workers at the water cooler. Schizophrenia and "tears of a clown when there's no one around"?

The Age of Irony, someone called our times. We tend to respond to everything with irony. To relieve our ever present anxieties with verbal absurdities. At least on the outside. But then there is this story. A man deep in debt, his wife's private medical clinic failing, took her and the children for a ride in the hills a couple of weeks ago, stopped the car, pulled a gun and shot them before killing himself. His neighbours later said he was his usual cheerful self the day of the incident.

One benefit that comes from reading newspaper celebrity gossip columns, as I have been doing lately on the afternoon train back home, is the life affirming implicit assurance they carry that the rich and famous, with all their money, mansions and leisure time, are, at times, as miserable, heartbroken, and sad as the rest of us. The gossip, which is, I suspect, written with just that in mind, gives us hope to continue going through our private hells. Of course, while the regular, plain folks readers of such columns understand all this subconsciously, we the overundereducated must first interpret such phenomena theoretically before we can stoop down, go slumming and read such tabloid trash.

It has been a strange week for us here in America. With the Fourth of July Holiday falling on a Wednesday, we have had a work week consisting of two Mondays and two Fridays, one could say. In the meantime, I found this unattributed quote on the Internet this past week, quite a propos the Independence Day celebration:

"This country is not free by the pen but by the back, brains, and bullets, of a soldier."

Psycho

A couple at the pub this past weekend sat in a booth facing each other and text messaging back and forth between themselves. ('SMS', as it's called in civilized countries, that are not as fond of acronyms as we are here in America.) Once they became bored with the game, they sat in silence drinking their beers. I was sitting at the railing opposite the bar, glancing occasionally at the woman's low cut blouse, expecting for a nipple or two to make an appearance any time (they never did), and trying to figure out a way to connect some stories I was jotting notes about on an insert pulled out from a free newspaper, advertising something called Argosy University. Wanna quick doctorate in Business Administration? I didn't think so. I'd only lose my job if I got one! Anyway, SMS, a new way to communicate without wasting one's breath. Well, they say that most of our communication is non-verbal.


My dear friend asked me verbally earlier this year, out of the blue, if I thought her breasts had been augmented. ('augmented' was not the word she used, but I don't recall the exact term.) After some hesitation, I answered "Umma, umma, you know, I never thought about it (which was true), but knowing you as a person and without having a peek, I think not!" She said, "They aren't , but they are beginning to sag." I then said " Whatever, I love you just the same." Which was perfectly true.

There was recently a well publicized trial of a woman who had murdered her psychiatrist husband. She had been his patient as a teenager, he left his wife and married her, 25 years his junior. Three sons, weird beliefs shared between the two of them about satanic cults abusing children, and "recovered memory theories", popular once and long since discredited, divorce and then the murder. She fired several attorneys and defended herself, an intelligent but psychologically disturbed woman, she was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced, now two books appear about the case. In one of them, the author cites a friend of the victim, who says that the doctor so loved her that he let her kill him and "died from suicide by wife".

I related some of the comic details of my own near-tragic melodrama to a longtime friend, one of the very few I had confided in, and he sent me an e-mail in reply, suggesting I move to his country where femme fatales are not as common as they are here. He then issued his own diagnosis, saying that, oh, she (the other player) must be such and such astrological sign, what with the anger, the revenge, the plotting. And I answered, dude, she isn't, I am that astrological sign myself, and anger, revenge and plotting are the farthest things from my mind. In fact, it's everything opposite of that I'm thinking about. He replied that I'm a strange specimen of that sign, and advised me to return to writing about music.


The way our thought patterns work, you'd expect that a folksinger named 'Elvis Perkins' were some desperate show biz pretender nobody with a stage name cashing in on the familiarity of the names of two co-inventors of hillbilly rock and roll, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Wrong, thought patterns! The fellow turns out to be the son of Anthony Perkins himself, best remembered in the role of the psychologically disturbed motel owner Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's horror film Psycho.