Silent Listener

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 3

"The Lord is watching everywhere and keeps His eye on both the evil and the good."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Our house used to be owned by a Catholic family.  They were hardcore, at least in the sense that there were crucifixes (cheap, chintzy ones, mind) everywhere, and they buried a mini statuette of Saint Whatever under the dirt in the flower bed to help their house sell quicker.  When we came to see the house for the first time, we noticed a plaque hung over the dining room doorway that read, "Jesus is the silent listener at every conversation".  And I thought,

"Pervert."

As funny as it is, at least, in my mind, to imagine a holographic Jesus silently castigating a faithful family of seven as they slander and defame their way through a Thursday night dinner, this is, of course, why man created religion in the first place, right?  Look, you can believe it was the other way around if you want, and I respect that, but this is my blog and, as we know, my wisdom is chipped, so: deal.  I believe we created religion because we got a little scared of each other, and of ourselves-- we got scared of our impulses and our predilections and our predatory instincts and our propensities and our obscenities and we said, "Whoa.  We've got to find some way to put the brakes on this.  We need to find something to motivate us to behave."

Stick.  Carrot.  Whatever.

So, we created the silent listener at every conversation.  Because we know ourselves, we know our truest, darkest nature, and we knew we had to do something about it.

Because we're bad.

Because I'm bad.

And, if I'm bad-- you're probably bad, too.

But let's be bad together.  I love being bad with you.

I love being bad.  

I was bad at the inservice I went to today.  I was bad mostly in thought, but I was bad in word-- in malicious, nasty side conversations with my seat mate.  I was bad with my eyes, hungrily taking in the pleasant physical attributes of some of the younger female attendees' bodies, seated vulnerably in the row in front of me.  There were other sinners among us, I won't pretend I was the only one-- the rampant texters, the narcissists who just HAD to assault us with their profound revelations constantly, those who nodded off periodically.  The ones who were late coming back from lunch, and the ones who pretended to give a damn.  So we were a roomful of louts and ne'er-do-well's, fakers and phonies, this's and that's, so on's and so forth's, but I want to be the worst one.  

Because I love being bad.  Mean.  Cruel.  Spiteful.  Cutting.  

Some people don't know this about me.  They just don't know.  They think I'm a nice boy, smart, clean and gentle.  But I am precisely the kind of person for whom God was invented: someone who needs a little help walking the straight and narrow, because straying is just too delicious.  To see the terrible glint in the eye of someone I've just made laugh with some awful remark is intoxicating.  I see it in my mother's eyes-- she was my first addiction, my friends, my coworkers.  I need a policeman.  I need a lawyer.  I need a P.R. rep.  I need Jesus, sitting right behind me, breathing softly down my neck.  I need to be accountable.

Because, generally speaking, I'm not.  

I get away with things, and part of this blog is to let you know all the things that I get away with.  To shake you.  To make you understand.  So that you'll confront me.  Call me out on it.  Expose me.  Accuse me.  Turn on me.

Maybe that's what I want.  

I don't know that I could recover from it, though, if you did.

I was listening on the radio today to some sound bytes of people talking about the Defense of Marriage Act and how marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman and how "I'm against gay marriage because I'm against gay couples" and all of this vile, ugly, nasty prejudice and hate is, of course, heavily cloaked in this self-righteous, base religious dogma and I was thinking to myself, "Wow-- is Jesus the silent listener at this dumb fuck's conversation, too?"  And, if he is, I wish to hell he'd speak up and slap these people in the head.  I just can't fathom how these people don't see their bigotry for what it is: just plain old bad behavior.  They're behaving badly.  It's wrong to oppress people.  It's bad.

And, I guess they like being bad.    

It's funny-- I don't believe in God or Jesus or hocus pocus anymore than I believe that the sun'll come out tomorrow, but I do believe in scaring yourself into behaving.  I believe there is value in that.  I think that, whatever you have to do to make that happen, whether it's force yourself to believe in the improbability of God or the hereafter, or recognize the importance of social conformity and behavioral norms, or whether it's to get laid or get a little bit up the ladder or to get a seat next to the red head on the train-- whatever: do it.  Scare yourself.  Because when we lose that, when we go through life believing that there is no silent listener at the table, I shake to think what we would say and do.  

And by "we" I, of course, mean "me".  

You I trust.  

It's not you, honey.  It's me.  

Very Un-Nehru

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 1

"A soft answer turns away wrath, but harsh words cause quarrels."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

We've been together, you and I, for a while now.  You know me.  Or, you think you do, and maybe that's enough.  You know what makes me tick, and tock, you know how I write.  The cadence, the over and the under, you know about the swearing and the glaring.  You know that I can be mean and sweet and funny and melancholy, wandering, ranting and roving.  

You know.

You know that I am overworked, underpaid Anatevka, that I cling desperately to some of the same things you do, because I am like you, I am of you, I am you.  That's why you come here, I suppose, because you see someone with whom you can identify, and someone who is struggling hard to identify with you, and that's nice.  We can take comfort in each other's neuroses, we can wear them like a mink stole or a HAZMAT suit or a starched white dickey at a fancy dinner.  A bullet-proof vest.  Chain mail.  A nun's habit.  

Did I ever tell you that I can make a homespun nun's habit (that looks halfway decent, actually), out of three black t-shirts and one white one?  I taught myself how to do that when I was fourteen, and maybe that's a digression better left to another post.  See?  Just when you think you know a blogger...

And maybe you do know me, but you don't know my anger.  Perhaps you're sitting there saying to yourself, "Of course I know his anger-- every post of his is positively dripping with it!" but that's not so.  That's not anger, that's acrimony or cruelty, it's insecurity cloaked in a self-righteous homespun nun's habit.  It's bullshit.  It's silly.  

Well, I don't really know what it is, but it isn't anger.

I won't let you see my anger.  I'm too careful, too repressed, too petrified of what you'll think, what you'll say, who you'll call, how you'll look at me next time.  

How will you look at me next time?  I can't bear it.  Don't look at me.

If I let you see my anger, it's because I've known you long enough and loved you hard enough to not care anymore.  Lucky you.  You've hit the jackpot.  Mazel.

Anger is so ugly-- my anger is, anyway.  I know, I know, how can it be that different from yours?  No anger is especially beautiful (although I've seen a redhead or two get so angry it was kind of hot-- then again, they weren't angry at me) and am I putting myself on a pedestal by saying that my anger is especially vulgar and vile and vitriolic that the greater populous should be shielded from it?

I guess so.  I guess I am saying that.

My father does not get shielded.  Not anymore.  Never did.  

I let him have it yesterday.  I can't explain why.  It's too long and stupid to go into, all the precipitating events, the antecedents, the clauses and the pauses-- it doesn't matter why.  But, once I realized what he was saying, or, rather, what he wasn't saying about me, about my wife, about my children and my dog and my house and my lifestyle and my everything, well, something just-- un-clicked.  You know how people say they realized something when something "just clicks"?  Well, with me, with anger, with that peculiar feeling and emotion, something decidedly un-clicks.  It's very un-Nehru.  Nehru got angry, I'm sure, but I can't imagine he ever told his father to go fuck himself.

Maybe he did-- I don't know.

I un-clicked and found myself standing in the living room screaming my throat dry, seeing spots on the ceiling that probably weren't actually there just roaring.  My wife was standing by the china cabinet staring at me.  The children were be-bopping around, hopefully oblivious to the appalling wreck I was becoming in front of them.  The basset hound was contemplating the energy required to tongue her privates.  And, instantly, I was sixteen again, putting on a one-man show in the living room, screaming at my parents to decry the injustices of the searing, embarrassing, painful world until my mother would give up and pretend she had laundry to do.

Tonight, my daughter flipped out because there were no noodles to eat.  And I had noodles, but they were mixed with shrimp and pork and my wife doesn't want them eating food that has come into contact with pork and shrimp and so the screaming continued and I gave up eating and it's Jewish and I don't care but she cares so I care and there was more screaming and finally I lost it and became a big ugly man bastard and it all stays in there for so long and I talk a good game about it hoo boy do I ever but sometimes punctuation just gets in the way and I still capitalize I because of my good breeding but that's about all I can muster because it's almost eight oclock and theres still so much to do and I'm too tired to scream anymore

Expressing anger in a healthy way doesn't feel good, you know?  It just doesn't feel good.  Not that expressing it by exploding feels good, but it's at least cathartic.  When you use "I" statements, there's no catharsis.  There's nothing.  Just political correctness and ditto sheets from a psych hospital.  And we've been together for a while now, you and I, and you know I can't stand ditto sheets.  

Not the Vomit to Which I am Accustomed

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 10

"Only the person involved can know his own bitterness or joy - no one else can really share it."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

There's that part in To Kill a Mockingbird where Scout is snuggling up to Atticus, her Macomb sun-dappled face scrunched up in her sincere efforts to understand her world and herself and he tells her that you can never really understand a man until you get into his skin and walk around in it.  To me, that we can't do that, is the biggest human tragedy.  We are doomed to misinterpret, misunderstand, to, well, miss.  We miss each other.  It happens all the time.  We try to connect, make a meaningful moment or a friendship or alliance, try to make a point or see something from someone else's point of view-- and what happens?  We fumble.  We offend.  We say the wrong thing.  For years, after going to my mother and father's house for dinner, on the ride home, I would have to work arduously to assuage my wife's fears that she had said "the wrong thing". 

 

It was exhausting.  And I'm sure that saying that is the wrong thing.  Oh well.

 

If I had to tell you where I thought great art comes from (okay, okay-- I'll tell you already!) I think it's from that curse bestowed on us human beings to never be able to fully understand another of our species, that the desire to connect and the earnest nature with which we make that effort to extend our hand and heart and brain is what makes us beautiful and foolish and worthy of glory and pity all at the same time. 

 

Friends, I suspected when I started writing this post that I would not be able fully to communicate my joy to you, that I would be misunderstood or misinterpreted or, well, missed.  That you'd miss me.  And that's a risk you take, of course, when you write.  You gather a bunch of words up and you corral them like sheep in a pen and you send them out there and whatever happens happens.  And I know that I can't stand over your shoulder while you read and take furtive glances at your face as you read my words, and make subtle comments from the sidelines like a middle school soccer coach, to guide your experience.  This part, with the clickety-clackety, is up to me.  The rest is up to you.  And, if we miss each other, well, there's always Monday's post. 

 

Joy comes in many forms, and stems from experience.  I cannot describe what joy feels like or looks like.  I don't know if it commonly has a smell.  Today, though, mine did.  My joy had a smell.  And a taste. 

 

There's an old saying (I think it's a Proverb, actually) about a dog returning to its own vomit and so on and so forth and how that's probably a bad idea because vomit's gross and all.  Well, I'm a dog who frequently returns to his own vomit.  I repeat mistakes again and again and again, just to really make sure, you know.  You want to be thorough in this life, just in case there isn't another, where you come back as a light switch or Peter Ustinov.  I run away when I'm presented with an opportunity to better my lot in life, because I'm scared of failure and success, I cut people out of my life for what might seem like tiny infractions of unwritten codes.  I stumble, and fall and, when the time comes to step over again, it seems like the lights are out and down I go again. 

 

Ashes, ashes.

 

So, too, do I repeat my mistake many mornings at a tiny shop with a pink and orange logo.  When I don't feel like making coffee at home, I'll go to Dunkin' Donuts.  I find the coffee inferior, still, I swill.  If I'm ravenous, I'll get a bacon egg and cheese sandwich on an onion bagel. 

 

"Morning, Doctor!" the predictably Indian franchisee gleefully shouts from behind the counter as I amble in. 

 

Big nose.  Jew.  Glasses.  Collar shirt, tucked in.  I.D. badge from a hospital.  Showing up at 5am.

 

He scanned me one day and decided.  He decided I was a doctor.  I never bothered to correct him.  I don't blame him for profiling.  You have to do that when you work at Dunkin' Donuts.  Who's going to order the dozen.  Who's going to pull a 9mm?  Who likes iced coffee and who likes it hot?

 

I get it.  It's okay.  I scan him, too, and decided at once that he was Indian.

 

So, Morning Doctor gets a large decaf with cream and sugar and, sometimes, a bacon egg and cheese on an onion bagel.  I don't know if you get breakfast sandwiches from Dunkin' Donuts, but, if you do, you know that they are inferior to virtually every other early morning chain-store breakfast sandwich option anywhere.  The bagels are thick and ooey, utterly flavorless-- it almost doesn't matter what savory choice you make, they all taste plain.  The foam faux-egg patty is an embarrssment and the bacon is wobbly and miserable, probably made of salted tomato slices. 

 

And it's like that every time.  Still, I don't learn.  I'm not into learning.  It's for the weak.

 

Eating a Dunkin' Dounts breakfast sandwich is an utterly joyless experience.  It's the couple from "American Gothic" doing it.  It's drag racing in a CR-V.  It's bobbing for prunes.  But you slog through it and the reward is feeling like you have a old men's dress shoe inside your stomach which, I guess, beats hunger.  But not by much.

 

This morning, though, I opened the sandwich wrapper while steering with my knees (don't drive near me) and, even in the dark of the early, early morning, I could see something was very different.  The faux-egg was still phony, but it looked like it was making a more honest effort.  The bacon was-- crisp?  And the bagel was thinner and had more bite, more integrity.  At a red light, (I swear), I stared at this thing quizically. 

 

I don't know you, I thought.  You are not the vomit to which I am accustomed to returning. 

 

I took a bite.

 

Yeah.  It was Beethoven blaring and Neruda whispering and Picasso and I have a dream and to be or not to be and psychadelic colors and sweet breasts and big rock candy mountains and my pupils dilated and blood surged to places unknown and I wish I was getting compensated for this endorsement but I'm not and that's how it goes as far as that goes because I'm too dumb to know how to monetize and it's okay because I had a nice breakfast.

 

And I could look at that last passage and say, yeah, that adequately communicated the joy I experienced this morning in my car with my breakfast sandwich, but I know it didn't.  I know I failed.  And that's okay, because it means that I'm human, and I love being human, because it means that I never, ever have to worry about getting it right.

 

'Night, Doctor.

Everything's Alright

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 13

"Laughter cannot mask a heavy heart.  When the laughter ends, the grief remains."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

I admit that I picked this proverb to start tonight with some trepidation.  After all, much has been said about humor as a coping skill, and how so much comedy and so called "light entertainment" comes from a place of darkness and pain.  You don't have to look very far for comedians and performers who light up a stage, command an audience and enthrall even the most hardened cynic, only to return to a dank motel room or cold home to brood and mutter despondently into a highball.  I decided that I didn't want to write about comedians or actors that I know of and respect and admire. 

 

Instead, I decided to write about my mother. 

 

Since my brother-in-law died of cancer last year, my mother has lived in the shadows.  Well, existed.  To say that she has lived wouldn't quite be so accurate.  She has been seen at work, and at birthdays and dinners and such.  She has been seen.  Seen.  Not heard.  This has been sort of the story of her life.  My mother, before she lived in the shadows since my brother-in-law's death, has lived in the shadow of my father for just about thirty-nine years.  His shadow is enormous.  He is larger than life, Israeli, effusive, profane, impulsive, uprorarious, gregarious and hairy.  My mother is none of those things.  Maybe she was once, (not hairy) but I doubt it.  She's said as much.

 

"I used to pretend that my name was 'Cynthia' and I told my teacher on the first day of elementary school that that was my name, and she'd call on me and I'd never answer." 

 

When old friends from school see me and we catch up, the question I'm invariably asked is, "How's your dad?" as if my mother had died when I was a child, or perhaps she never existed anyway.  And I get it-- he's memorable.  He makes sure you remember him.  He doesn't exactly slide beneath the radar.  She's the stealth bomber.

 

Back in college, I wrote a short play about me and my parents, and, at the urging of the chair of the theatre department, it became a trilogy.  After reading the first play, his big complaint was, "You know there's a lot of your father in this play-- and he's a great character-- but I think the real gem here is your mom.  There's a real quiet intensity to her, and a dry wit, that I'd like to hear more from."  So the last play was just me and her, talking in the kitchen.  And it was good.  I might not think that anymore if I went back and read it, but I remember it being good, and that's the way I like to remember it.

 

Those nights in the kitchen, waiting for my father to get home, "at 6:37", were good, too.

 

I've never known my mother not grieving.  She lost her mom to lymphoma when she was maybe nineteen or twenty. You're never not grieving after that.  My mother's humor is as dry and wry as the coarse desert my father comes from, and her jokes are tinged with the smell of death.  She's always told me, during my anxious, crisis moments, that everything will be alright "in the end" and she gives a smile, because she knows that I know that she knows she's talking about when we die, and that she's really saying that nothing will be alright, because how can it be?  How can things be alright?  I love how, when my son falls and bonks his head, I scoop him up and tuck him close to me and say, "It's alright-- everything's alright," and if that poor schlep could talk in sentences he'd say, "What are you, fucking dumb?  Of course everything isn't alright, my fucking head is pounding and it happened because you're a negligent asshole."

 

One day last month, I was taking the babies out in the stroller, and this spindly old bat stopped me on the sidewalk and engaged in some polite banter, which I hate. 

 

I know your mother from the libary, she says. 

 

Wonderful, I say.

 

Your babies are thus and so, she says.

 

Yes, thank you, I say, they are.

 

Your mother's starting to come back, she says.

 

Who the fuck are you to say something like that to me, you don't even know me, or her, I want to say.

 

Is she, I say.

 

She is, she says, she's really very funny, your mother.

 

She is, I say.

 

She says, did you know that about your mother?

 

I want to rip out all of your veins and make a spider web out of them, I want to say.

 

Yes, I say, I do.  I know that.

 

I can only make my mother laugh when I'm being bad.  That's the kind of humor I learned from her.  Pushing the envelope, being slightly uncomfortable, surprising, desperate and true.  I don't know what she finds funny in movies and television, but that's what she laughs at in person.  When I make my mother laugh, and it's never very hard for for very long, I feel powerful.  Like the playwright I thought I could be in college.  Like the man I pretend to be when I fix some dumb thing in our falling down around our ankles house.  Like the father of twins who changes diapers and feeds and calms and plays.  Like the man who's going to be alright in the end. 

Yo, Teach! I Gotta Piss.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

 

Proverbs 15, Verse 2

 

"A wise teacher makes learning a joy; a rebellious teacher spouts foolishness."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

In the high and far off times, O best beloved, the idiot had no graduate degree.  He had only a tiny little Bachelor of Arts degree, in Theatre, no less, that he kept tucked under his arm-- no, on his back.  He wore it on his back, like a backpack.  Like a backpack filled with monkeys, monkeys on his back.  Millstones around his neck.  Bricks tied to his ballhairs. 

 

You see where this is going.

 

In 2006, I decided to go to graduate school.  Now, the phrasing of that last, short sentence is actually very important.  It identifies the year in which the decision was made, and it indicates that some decision was decided, and the sentence very clearly states, without ambiguity or room for interpretation of any kind, who made that decision.

 

Me.

 

Over here.

 

In the corner.

 

In the red Chuck Taylors.

 

I did it.

 

I.. Aye.  Eye. 

 

Eh?

 

If you happen to talk to my wife about this particular chapter in our lives together, she will probably express a certain amount of guilt/remorse/bitterness/embarrassment about my going to graduate school, and she will probably tell you that she feels responsible for my undertaking that (ad)venture.  Now it is true, O best beloved, that she encouraged me.  Yes, she did.  "Go ye into that vast chasm of resplendent academia and attain for yourself a degree of advanced studies that shall confer upon you all the rights, duties, privileges and heartaches afforded to those who seek to answer the highest calling of a teacher, leader, an expander of minds."

 

That is the way bi-colored python rock-snakes, and wives, for that matter, always talk. 

 

Of course, one can encourage a person to chew broken glass while shoving a pencil up their own ass so far that they can play tic-tac-toe on their pancreas.  In the end, whatever encouragement you may receive, the choice to act is yours and yours alone. 

 

So I enrolled.  I stuck my own smear nose into the crocodile's mouth because I wanted to find out what it had for dinner.  Two years later, my nose had stretched out to the ungainly size it is today and I became a M.A.Ed. 

 

It's rather shocking to think that it's been five years since I received that degree and I spent a grand total of one month in an actual, honest-to-God classroom.  I've been paying $436.40 every month for five years, and I'll continue to do it for 327 more years until it's all paid off.  I don't remember exactly what the hell I did in graduate school.  It didn't feel very different from college, in fact at times it felt decidedly less challenging.  I know there was some reading, and some writing, and some playing at being a teacher, but mostly I remember the professors.  A rum lot they were, my dear.

 

One of them was on the verge of retirement.  He spoke about himself often, but not in an annoying, self-involved way.  He was just self-referential, and he was so in the 3rd person, which was amusing.  He wore a wristwatch that was approximately the size of a satellite dish and the most meaningful conversation we ever had was after class one night when I asked him about it and he said it was a Sturling and it was the last watch he was ever going to buy, so he knew he wanted to spend a lot of money on it.  That year, I bought one for my wife-- it was a skeleton watch, the kind that you can see all the gears moving around inside, and it had an orange band, which she loved.  She loved it till the second hand fell off and got stuck in the gears and killed it.

 

I had another teacher who I think was reasonably convinced that she was Jacqueline Kennedy.  SHe taught a course called "Human Exceptionalities" which, for those not in the politically correct inside circle, means "Special Ed".  She one night arrived at class wearing white kid gloves and a mink.  Her hair was primped and sprayed to perfection, and I never saw someone who believed in sequins as if it were a religion. On some level, I really respected a woman who thought it was important to get that dolled up to teach a bunch of apathetic losers about Kleinfelter's Syndrome.

 

Then there was a man whom I'll refer to as Fat Bastard (not his real name).  Fat Bastard taught some bizarre class that I don't even remember the name-- it had something to do with slogans and reification.  What that has to do with teaching, I'm not really sure.  But anyway, Fat Bastard was universally despised by everyone in the room, even the students who were too stupid to know why they despised him.  He didn't have much going for him in the looks department-- morbidly obsese, glasses from 1984, greasy AND flakey hair (don't know how he managed that, O best beloved), and loved to talk about his glory days as an unabashedly racist teacher in the Philly public school system in the turbulent '60s.  His rambling opening monologue to us on our first night of his class included a gem about how he was writing some sort of equation up on the blackboard and all of a sudden a student called out and said,

"YO, TEACH!  I GOTTA PISS!"

 

Apparently, Fat Bastard said the student couldn't go to the bathroom at that particular time, so the student walked over to the trashcan, unzipped his fly, and let loose.

 

"And the worst part was," Fat Bastard reminisced to, well, at us, "the trashcan was made of mesh-- wire mesh, so all this kid's piss went out all over the place onto the floor."

 

Yeah.

 

I don't remember what the point of that story was, and I'm sure he didn't either.  But, even five years later, every time I see a wire mesh trash can, I think of him. 

 

I miss my teachers.  Every now and then I want to pick up the phone and call one of them, to check in, to shoot the shit, to joke around, to pay attention or homage, to wrestle with a mind-fuck, to share a hurt or a happy.  Teachers hold this very strange place in our lives, the ones you remember, the ones you don't-- the ones who remember you, the ones who hurt you or the ones who tried.  I had a teacher in high school who said he stalked J. D. Salinger once, didn't speak for a year, and who told us that, if his wife was dangling off the edge of a cliff and a bag of popcorn was similarly dangling next to her, he'd go for the popcorn first.  My seventh grade English teacher put so much Vaseline on her face her cheeks and forehead glistened in the fluorescent lights like the sunlit snow.  My high school anthropology teacher used to clack his hockey ring on the desk when he was making a point, or thought he was anyway. 

 

I don't know if I'm ever going to be at the helm of a classroom again like I was for that one little month in 2008.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I know one thing for certain, O best beloved, my students, if I have them, will read Kipling and Twain and Gilbert and they'll stick close to their desks and never go to sea, and if they want to know what the crocodile has for dinner, they'll have to go and ask him themselves. 



Pass and Review

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 21

"Those who love to talk will suffer the consequences.  Men have died for saying the wrong thing!"

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

An annual performance review is a terrifying thing, created by Human Resource departments which are, by and large, staffed with and by terrifying people.  People like to joke about how sadistic high heels are ("and, of course, they were invented by MEN!") and, of course, the annual performance review was created specificially to torture the desk-tethered working class chimpanzpolyees of the world, and, what's more to the point, the annual performance review was most likely created by people who probably never had to have one.

 

For most people, I guess, the annual performance review is kind of a big deal because it lets you know how much money you're going to make, or not, in the coming year.  When, however, your life's occupational efforts for the last 365 days come down to forty or fifty cents, the annual performance review comes down to something a lot more meaningful:

 

Somebody's going to sit down across from you and tell you what they think of you.  They're going to talk about your strengths.

 

AND YOUR FAULTS!

 

They'll call them "weaknesses", because that's "nice".  Maybe they'll call them "targeted areas of performance improvement".  They might say that "we just need to make a few tweaks".  

 

Make.

 

A few.

 

Tweaks.

 

TWEAK!

 

T

 

    w

 

             e

 

                         a

 

                                       

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That's a funny word.  It's a drug thing.  Drugs are funny!!!!

 

No supervisor I've ever had has told me that they're gonna tweak me up or whatever, in fact, most of my annual performance reviews have been quite nice.  Effortless.  Pain-free.  The very quintesscence of tweak-less. 

 

There was one, however.... 

 

Back when I was young and stupid(er) I got this job working in a non-profit.  They rented an ass-donkey expensive office out in some officeburb and I had my own office.  Four walls and a closed door.  WITH MY TWEAKIN' NAME ON IT.  The door closed, and it didn't have glass or frosted glass-- I could have been attaching car batteries to my nipples while watching a poodle do tricks on my desk during my lunch hour in there and nobody would have known.  Unless the poodle narced on me.  Not that he'd dare cross me, what with that car battery right there.

 

So, little skinny Jewish Donald Trump had his desk and his office and his phone with lots of buttons and lights, just like he'd dreamed of.  He wore a dress shirt and tie and "church pants" to work every day, he nodded to the ice-queen rent-a-ceptionist as he walked past her and secretly thought about what she looked like naked every morning and he went to work and pretended like he knew what he was doing.

 

After around four months, he found he actually did know what he was doing.  Those first few months don't actually count, dummy-- that's why it's called a probationary period.

 

Anyway, it was a very small organization-- just the executive director, a program head, and this glasses-wearing asshole in the tie with the car battery, tweakin'.  A year went by, and all of a sudden it was ANNUAL REVIEW TIME! 

 

His notes were impeccable.

 

The summaries of applications to the board were succinct and yet full of detail.

 

His files were orderly.

 

He communicated with applicants in a courteous, efficient, capable way.

 

He was never late.

 

EVER.

 

All work was completed in a timely fashion. 

 

He had learned to ask for help when he needed it.

 

He worked well independently and as part of a team.

 

---

 

But.

 

---

 

"You know, I really feel," said the Executive Director, "that you don't make enough small-talk.  You know my birthday was two months ago, and you didn't even say anything."

 

I stared at her, blankly.  Numb.  Tweakin'.

 

Are you serious?

 

I didn't say that, but that's evidently what my face said, because she, without missing a beat, said,

 

"I'm serious-- you know office culture really thrives on people feeling AT HOME with one another, comfortable.  Like family.  And you just don't engage in that office chit-chat."

 

..........

 

"But... I'm working.  I'm here to work," was my reply.  I was amazed that, at twenty-three, I could summon the balls to say that to a narcissistic fifty-six-year-old.

 

(Oops.  Fifty-seven.  Sorry.)

 

"Yes," she said, "but, you know-- work's not all work!"

 

---

 

And I get it now.  I get it.  But it's not easy for me.  Small-talk.  Chit-chat.  Chatterboxin'.  Water coolering (I also, apparently, wasn't very good about calling the water cooler company when we were running out of bottles) and chin-waggin'.  There has to be a certain amount of that.  But I find my way with the spoken word so inept, so fumbling, so fussy, so fraught with petrifying consequences that I avoid it.  I throw myself into meaningless paperwork or keyboard clattering so I won't have to say boo to anyone, because, let's face it, "boo" is scary.  And I don't want to scare you.  What you read on here is probably scary enough.  But at least you know I'm thinking it over before I press "Publish" (well, I'm thinking a little bit) but my mouth is frightening, and sometimes it moves faster than my brain does.  Ironically, it's my writing that's gotten me in the most trouble in my life, professionally and personally, but I still feel that it's my safe place.  So don't be offended if I can't look you in the eye and talk joyfully about my kids, or yours, or the weather, or politics, or the Weathermen, or which way the wind's blowing.  I'll just be over here, with my face buried in a binder, or a computer screen, or behind this here door. 

 

Nevermind the barking. 

Be My Brother

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 19

"Some people are friends in name only.  Others are closer than brothers."

 

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

The films that I love most have strong male bonds.  "Funny Bones" is a 1995 film that nobody saw and, while the father/son dynamic was painful and faltering, a bond between two brothers, and a brother and his half-brother is the glue that holds the film together. 

 

1998 saw the release of "The Impostors" where Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt (who also starred in "Funny Bones") play better-than-best-friends-- life partners (and, no, not in that way) who prepare tea and bread for each other, sleep in tiny wrought-iron beds next to each other and are each other's muse and rock and worst mistake. 

 

"Rushmore" also found its way into indie/emo hearts in 1998, and the lovely, flawed, and love-threatened relationship between eccentric young Max Fisher and monochromatic shirt-and-tie combo wearing tycoon Herman Blume was as achingly sweet and true as it was improbable and incongruous.

 

 

Max: That’s the Perfect Attendance Award and the Punctuality Award. I got those at Rushmore. I thought you could choose which one you like more, and you could wear that one and I could wear the other.

 

Blume: I'll take Punctuality. 

 

And a bond was forged, we'd like to hope, forever.

 

Friendship for me has always been a complicated duck.  I suppose that's because I was never particularly interested in having a friend, I was more interested in having a brother, which I never did.  The friendships I forged throughout my life were quirky, easy to mock, and just as easy to understand and affirm.  Close, protective, exclusive.  The standards I set were rigid-- I expected nothing, except total loyalty and acceptance of my complicated personality, my sometimes need to eat breakfast for dinner, to sit in a car and drive around aimlessly for hours and talk about aboslutely nothing, to require a sounding board for neuroses and failings, to mitigate and sift through hopes, dreams and desires. 

 

That's all I required. 

 

There's more difficult challenges in the world, to be sure, than to be my friend, my wannabrother, but I'll tell you this: I wouldn't want to be my friend.  Because I might not hear from me for six months.  Or a year-and-a-half.  Because one day I might get a lenghty email out of the blue laden with emotion and straw-grasping and belly-aching and what am I supposed to do with that? 

 

I wouldn't know how to be my friend. 

 

As I get older, I'm learning more about how I am.  Not liking, just learning.  About the manipulation, the control, the demands and the resentments.  The need for validation.  Please, make me feel better about myself-- the choices I've made, and those I couldn't.  Am I wrong?  Am I bad?  Should I stay in therapy or should I go?  Was this the wrong thing to say?  Was it right? 

 

Am I right?

 

Should I take Perfect Attendance or Punctuality? 

 

My father had a best friend back in Israel, when he was young.  And one day his friend drowned in the ocean while he and my father and another friend were fucking around together on the beach.  You can talk to my father about the army-- about the redheaded soldier who was so ostracized that he tried to shoot himself in the head and wound up blowing off his jaw, you can ask him about the fear he had in adopting my half-sister and moving to this country with nothing.  But I haven't found the courage to ask him about losing his best friend.  I've lost friends, too, but they were not eaten by Poseidon.  They were taken away from me for this reason or that-- it doesn't really matter why anymore, it's so long ago now.

 

And I get it.  That's supposed to happen.  It's like shedding dead skin, only losing skin cells doesn't hurt.  You don't feel it happening.  A painless procedure.  You'll just feel a little pinch.  A little punch.  A staggering blow.  Out cold. 

 

But, no matter what happens in my life, I'll always have Hollywood-- and its quizzical male pairings, grasping at and clinging to each other for God knows what reason, wearing each other's pins, performing careworn comedy rountines, lighting each other's cigarettes, being there for each other. 

 

Being there.        

A Very Precocious Youngster

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 12

"If you have good eyesight and good hearing, thank God who gave them to you."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I got my first pair of prescription eyeglasses in fifth grade, but I think I actually started needing them two years earlier.  I even took the socially frowned upon step of taking a pair of cheap plastic red Mickey Mouse sunglasses, poking the dark lenses out, and wearing them to school.  They had little Mickey Mouse emblems on the temples, but otherwise I thought they looked sharp.  You know, like something Elton John could have gotten away with.  Mrs. Henderson, on recess duty one day, told me to take them off before I got hit by a fifth grader.  

But I didn't just want glasses, I really couldn't see.  I complained to my mother that I couldn't see the blackboard (we had blackboards back in 1987, but they were green) and that the picture on the TV looked fuzzy and that it was hard for me to see my face in the barber's mirror while he was cutting my hair.

"There's nothing wrong with you," she said to me, "you're just a little theatrical."

The test done by the school nurse in fifth grade at the health fair proved otherwise.  Maybe "health fair" isn't the right word.  I don't know what the hell it was, really, but I remember they herded us all into the room where they did the book fair, (maybe that's why I call it the "health fair") and they gave us each a rectangular punch card divided up into sections.  One was for vision, one was for hearing and there were other sections, too, for-- I don't know what-- penmanship?  White blood cell counts.  I don't remember.  But there were four or five stations that we each had to visit.  They had the machine with the headphones that made beeps and you were supposed to raise your hand when you heard a beep in your left ear and all that other business.  I liked the hearing test a lot, and I thought about how sneaky the test was-- like, were they really trying to fake us out?  Would they make a beep start in your left ear and then do a Doppler kind of thing where, just as you're raising your left hand, they move the sound to your right ear?  

I aced the hearing test despite my burgeoning paranoia, but the vision test didn't go so well.  I triumphantly brought home the note from the nurse recommending an ophthalmic examination and placed it smugly in front of my mother on the kitchen counter.  She thinned her lips.

"Don't look so disappointed," she said.

A week later, we were in the car going to the eye doctor.  At last, I had gotten proper validation.  There was actually something wrong with me-- it was exhilarating.  I almost peed on the Oldsmobile's seat cushion on the way to the optometrist.  Once we arrived and I met this guy, the excitement waned markedly.  He was as big as a condominium and he smelled like the inside of a pawn shop trombone.  His breath, which he made sure to provide you with a ample dose of, was rancid and tobacco-hued and his teeth were the color of old newspaper.  His gut was shaped like the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle.  

Okay, okay, you get the idea.  

One last thing, though-- his paunch completely covered whatever genitalia that might have at one point existed down there, but he was constantly adjusting the longitudinal aspect of the crotch of his pants during my examination which, of course, was conducted with the lights off.  I made the mistake of complimenting him on his three piece suit, which he probably purchased at William McKinley's garage sale.  

"You're a very precocious youngster.  Do you know what 'precocious' means?" he asked as he leaned in towards me with some ophthalmic instrument or other.  

"Yes," I replied, pretty sure I was about to be molested.  For some reason, my mother had seen fit to stay in the waiting area, probably because all three of us couldn't fit in the exam room.  Regardless, it left me alone in there with this malodorous walrus.  

"If I can just get through this," I told myself, "I'll get to have glasses."

And I got through it.  I'm pretty sure the sweaty, heavy-breathing optometrist didn't rape me, or if he did I've successfully repressed it, and anyway, a couple hours later, I had my first pair of eyeglasses: gold-colored double-bar specs that would have looked half-way decent on your average octogenarian.  I was in heaven.  

I've gone through maybe forty pair of glasses since then.  I suppose it didn't help that, for three years, I worked at an optical shop and have remained solid friends with the manager, who still gives me frames and lenses at-or-near cost.  I've had designer, knock-off, vintage, antique, plastic, metal, and everything in between.  The latest frames are plastic Tart Arnels from the 1960s, brown up top, clear plastic on the bottoms.  I love them.  For how long?  Hopefully a very long time-- they were expensive, even for me.  I am extremely fickle with three things: watches, cars, and glasses.  Why?  I don't know.  My wife often jokes, "I'm glad you're more consistent with how you feel about me than about your watches, cars, and glasses," and I am too.  I talked to my therapist about the everchanging items on my wrist and my face and the car seat beneath my ass.  He was kind of flip about it.

"You get bored," he said.  

Wow!  Only $50 for that?  What a steal!

I can remember trying to convince my mother early on, around late elementary school and early middle school, that I needed to see a therapist.  That something was wrong with me.  I got the familiar refrain of "There's nothing wrong with you," and "you're just a little dramatic" and got sent on my way.  It seemed odd to me then as now that, in the face of some pretty obviously aberrant behavior, my mother was content to stick her head in the sand until some clinical or authoritarian voice told her otherwise.  I wonder how I'll be as a father, when my children come to me claiming to be sick in the head or the heart or the eyes.  I guess I'll have to struggle hard against the impulse to ignore or reject, because looking up and looking in is scary.  And they're only seventeen-and-a-half months old, and I'm scared already.