The Future Of Money

                                               Who should we put on the hundred?

This is a song that I wrote called "Song For A Baby".  It is the last song on my CD, OUT OF THIS WORLD.
https://lafango.com/media/67098-song-for-a-baby#.U-MNCPldV8E

Don't Give Up

            You can't fall apart when things go wrong.  And when I say "go wrong" I mean badly wrong, way wrong.  The loss of a job, the death of a loved one, a diagnosed illness: that kind of wrong.  You can't fall apart.

            It's difficult not to fall apart.  We don't control our emotions.  Grief, despair, depression, are creatures with wills of their own and they seem to take over the daily habits that normally sustain us.  How do I NOT fall apart?  How do I fight back and regain my dignity after chucking it into the trash, after curling into a fetal position and going "waaaah?!"

            The answer is "ANY WAY YOU CAN!"  I thought to do some writing, and I ended up writing this.  Which will take about five minutes.  I wanted to work on my novel in progress and I sat staring at the page feeling waves of anxiety streaking through my innards.  It's difficult to write through waves of anxiety.  I'll make it.

I'll get there.

            Last year a man died suddenly.  He was the man who provided me with three quarters of my contracting work.  Three quarters of my income vanished overnight. Then I had a health scare.  Things began going to pieces, one little piece at a time.  It works that way, sometimes.  It isn't one big thing; more like a lot of little things until it seems that nothing will ever go right again.

            That's the voice of depression speaking, saying "It's done, you're finished, nothing good is going to happen to you."  As a grizzled veteran of the fight against depression I understand the feeling that a low emotional state is permanent.  It isn't.  But you can't fall apart.  You have to fight back.

            If you've got any energy, go clean something.  That often works well to lighten the mood.  Or, better, go help someone who is in trouble.  Service is one of the great anti-depressants in our tool box.  The effort of getting up may seem like fighting through the eye-wall of a hurricane, but once beyond that obstacle there's a world of hurt out there. It puts our personal pain into perspective.

            Just don't give up.  You may fall apart for a while; but you can get back up to renew the effort to heal yourself.  You can.  Just do it.

Me And My Belly

I estimate that each of my legs weighs sixty pounds.  That leaves a hundred pounds for the rest of my body.  My head probably weights twenty, which leaves eighty for the arms and torso.  My belly, that piece of me that surprised me totally when it arrived in the years between forty and forty five, my belly must take up sixty pounds of that remaining eighty.  It's a classic middle-aged man's belly.  It is true, I eat too much and most of that eating is in bed.  Every night of my entire life I have munched or crunched something as I read myself to sleep.

            My theory is that I am seeking a substitute for breast milk.  My early days on this planet were not a paradise of blissful bonding between my mother and child.  My father tells me that I had night terrors.  I tell him that if I was terrified of anything, it was my mother. 

            During my futile attempts to rid myself of this belly I’ve done ten kinds of abdominal exercises, hundreds of reps daily, for months and months on end.  My belly didn’t get smaller.  It got bigger. 

   Why was I exercising my six-pack this way?  What myth did I buy into?  If I wanted to get rid of my belly, I should have done absolutely nothing.  I should have, with the wisdom of hindsight,  accepted the fact that this belly is here to stay, it's a natural by product of aging.  It just IS, and why is that so horrible?  Why is everyone buying gizmos, electronic abdominal muscle stimulators? Why do they buy gimmicks with names like Abbacizers, Sixpackalongs, Abhancers? Why do people hang from bars and pull themselves up and back, up and back, or lay tilted on long boards, going up and back, up and back?  There’s more than a little insanity in this vain pursuit.  The obsession with the six pack is about vanity and its monster shadow, insecurity.  Our culture pumps its toxic load of media venom into our collective psychic bloodstream so that we feel inadequate if our bodies don’t adhere to some contemporary ideal of beauty.  For the moment, that ideal has become horrifically thin; it forms the ironic counterpoint to the visible reality that Americans have gotten chronically fat.

            We’re a culture with a lot of food.  I mean, a lot lot lot of food.  There’s never been a civilization in the history of the world with more food.  It’s hardly surprising that everyone eats a lot, gets fat and the ideal of beauty is to have arms and legs so thin that you have to walk around storm drains lest you slip through the bars and get washed out to sea.

            I wish we could weigh thoughts just as we weigh butter, or scrap metal. How much would my daily output of body-shame weigh?  How many pounds, kilos, ounces, grams would every thought weigh, those thoughts that go, “Oh I wish this belly would flatten out, it makes me feel so unattractive, so grotesque?”

            Beneath the veneer of our society a drumbeat of subliminal command roars like an underground subway train.  It’s saying, rhythmically, “hate your body hate your body hate your body hate your body.”  Chugga chugga chugga chugga.

            People who are at war with their bodies spend money on ridiculous products. Teeth whiteners!  When did this obsession come along?  Who cares about teeth whiteners?  People who use them look ridiculous.  There’s a blinding beam of Cheshire Cat grin every time they open their mouths, a light so blatantly artificial that it obscures the rest of the face with its message:  “I am insecure and hopelessly vain.  I use teeth whiteners.”

            Recently I heard a radio spiel about a product that reduces shadows under the eyes.  Oh my god, here we go again!  The script describes the grotesque anatomical process behind eye shadows: a horrific network of bloated capillaries spreads beneath your eyes until they burst forth to spill a dark disgusting goo of congealing blood, thus producing bruised tissue, thus producing embarrassing and unsightly morning-after shadows, hanging and spreading and sagging until they’re the size of wrinkled leather saddle bags beneath your optical sockets.

            Eeeeeeww!  How humiliating!  Burst blood vessels, bruises, discoloration? Wrinkled leather saddle bags beneath my eyes? I can’t have that! 

            This is how to create a market for a useless product.  People will start fixating on their fatigue-shadows, examining the mirror for any hint of darkening skin.  The stuff will sell like crazy, as another reason to hate one’s body darkens the horizon of the national psyche.  This insanity is all about money.  People who hate themselves spend more money, spend compulsively, to cover their unhappiness.  It serves the interests of marketers to create a social condition in which self hatred becomes the paradigm.

            I have to ask myself the question, “Which is worse, being overweight, or being guilty, stressed and ashamed of being overweight?”  Which damages my health more?  I think it’s the latter.  I think that stressing and hating my body is more toxic than glugging down three milkshakes a day.

            How many ridiculous weight-loss products bloat the bandwidth of the media empires?  How many bogus concoctions feed on the fervent wish that one can lose pounds and become shapely without any effort?

            I have invented my own product to add to this glut for gluttons: “Thindreme”ä!  Here’s the commercial, presented by a blandly attractive blonde woman in front of a red- white- blue studio set enhanced by computer graphics showing fat bodies and thin bodies arranged for before/after comparison.

            “Do you dream of going to sleep fat and waking up thin? Now your dreams can come true!  Two tablets of clinically proven Thindreme before bed will melt the pounds away as you sleep!  The more you sleep the thinner you will get.  This new miracle compound acts upon the metabolism of your slumbering body and converts fat cells using the principle of DCE, or Dynamic Caloric Extrapolation.  It is a proven fact that Rapid Eye Movement sleep is an untapped source of caloric output.  In other words, REM sleep is exercise!  Thindreme has come along to utilize this remarkable opportunity.  The more you dream, the more weight you lose!  Within four to six weeks you can emerge a brand new person, thin, sexy, appealing, without any effort on your part! Forget about diet, exercise, lifestyle.  You don’t need will power.  Thindreme does it for you!  Now you can be the man or woman of your dreams! If you order in the next ten minutes, Thindreme will double your order, and at no extra cost, will give you this free nose hair trimmer. And there’s more!  We will also add to your order this stylish miniature folding piano! So pick up the phone, and order now! And remember, Thindreme is Clinically Proven.” *

            Now, the disclaimer is read quietly and quickly:

*Thindreme (wackazone hydrochloride) can produce side effects in a significant minority of users, including blurred vision, stuttered speech, nausea, excess ear wax, demonic visions, spastic extremities, impotence, frigidity, memory loss, extreme body odor, blurted expletives, colorful flatulence, Fixed Eye Syndrome, increased hair growth on the lower back, muscle cramp, constipation, diarrhea, logorrhea, Recalcitrant Plebny, and black facial warts.  If dreaming does not occur, possible weight gain is indicated.

            A Product of ExCon Industries”

            I’ve given up trying to rid myself of this belly.  I know that a group of cannibals would find me delicious.  My bicycle thighs would be a Kentucky Fried delight, the most giant Crispy ever to appear in a cannibal’s bucket. 

            When I compare my life to the living hell in which I see that most people exist, I feel grateful for the good life that I have.  My relationship with my partner has its sick elements, to be sure, its ‘enablings’ and ‘codependencies’ (how I love this modern language of the heart’s twisted pathways).  We don’t fight.  If something starts to fester between us, it will come out in a talk, a gentle but firm confrontation where our fears are expressed and laid to rest.

            This was supposed to be about my belly, but I can’t write about that part of my personal real estate without including all kinds of other things in my life.  My belly doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it isn’t just floating around in space, a belly, without connection to the rest of the universe. My belly may be causing storms on Neptune, for as we have recently discovered, everything has a connection to everything else.  It’s the Butterfly Effect.  Or in this case, The Belly Effect.

            My belly is a dominating presence in my life.  I, who spent my youth being thin and sinewy, looking like a Hindu holy man from the hippie trail in Nepal, am now somewhat imprisoned by this entity who sits astride the center of my body.  It goes everywhere with me.  My vanity is not the main actor in this dismay.  My vanity went out about the same time as my hair.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I am concerned with how I appear to other people.  The problem is, I know that the one person least qualified to judge how I appear to other people is myself.  And that is a universal law.  You, who think you look thus and thus to the outside world, are completely deluded.  When you look in the mirror, the information you receive is so utterly tainted by your needs and dreams that you might as well be looking at a stranger.  I wish people would understand this.

            YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE.  YOU NEVER WILL.

            There are so many ingredients that go into an appearance that are invisible to the owner of a human body, that said owner should just give up. Photographs lie for many reasons.  Photos capture one two hundredth of a second, and in that two hundredth of a second, an expression may be crossing your face that is otherwise invisible, so quickly do the facial muscles change with the passing of emotion.  That’s why we often look odd in pictures.  Videotape is in some ways even worse.  I don’t know a single soul who doesn’t cringe when viewing his or herself on video.  Its distortions are insidious but nonetheless real.

            I say this to my fellow humans:  do your best to be hygienic, wear clothes that are comfortable and that please you, and let your nature emerge, because that’s what happens anyway.  Your appearance is determined by your nature.  The way you look is about energy, not physical features.

How To Make Money Writing About Writing..or..my buck is faster than yours

           I get these emails: "How To Format Your Manuscript".  "How To Write The Perfect Query Letter."  "How To Make Six Figures Writing Copy".

          "How To" books are always a bonanza.  They work mostly on illusion.  Writer's buy WRITERS MARKET or WRITERS GUIDE TO SCREAMING SUCCESS and believe they will sell so many books about writing that they'll make a nice comfy living.

            I cannot disprove this assertion without hours of boring research, sending out questionnaires to writers who have bitten this hook and come up empty.  I wish I could return to the past, pursue that college degree in psychology, acquire a profession to backstop my creative work and structure my life according to common sense rather than unconscious rage and a relentless conviction that my talent is special. 

            I've been a fool.  BUT.  Being a fool is what life is about.  If you're not a fool for, oh, sixty or seventy percent of your life, you won't know anything about the human condition and your literary insights will be pallid. 

            These emails won't stop coming!  From Writer's Digest: GET PAID TO WRITE. THE 12 STEPS OF QUERYERS ANONYMOUS. (Querying is that essential skill at writing letters to agents and editors). WD ANNUAL WRITER'S COMPETITION ($30 entrance fee, maximum three entries permitted.  Ooohh $$$$$$).

            I am not accusing these writing entrepreneurs of bad faith.  On the contrary, I'm envying them their astute timing.  The instructional writing field is always the most lucrative when a demographic stampede is in progress, and there is right now just such a stampede in the community of writers, be they good, bad or brilliant.

            I've been a lousy internetrepreneur.  Sound it out.  I just made it up.

            Pain is any experience you would rather not be having.  I would rather not be having this experience of poverty.  It's time to go back to what I know: story telling.  I've got some beautiful stories and I hope you will download a copy and become a fan of my work.  I'm almost ready.  Be patient.

           

David Foster Wallace: A review of D.T.Max's biography, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY

David Foster Wallace was a writer who wrote for other writers.  In this way his fiction is analogous to jazz.  It's been said by the musicians themselves that jazz is a concert-level music played by virtuosi for other virtuosi.  It isn't, however, necessary to be a jazz musician to appreciate jazz.  Nor is it necessary to be a writer to appreciate David Foster Wallace.

            But it helps.  Critical writing about Wallace's work is laced with academic terms like Post-Modernism and Post-Post Modernism.  Professors of literature struggle to place  Wallace in a "school" of writing, as if that will make them more comfortable with a literature that breaks every rule of writing yet succeeds in communicating with anyone willing to put a little effort into reading his work.

            I suspect that some writers read Wallace without enjoying the experience.  They read him just to have read him.  To enjoy Wallace is pure delight. Wallace observed human and societal behavior with the skill of a world-class brain surgeon.  He was then able to translate his observations into a prose that was fiendishly complex but thoroughly entertaining.  The fact that his vocabulary was gargantuan, that his ideas were informed by deep studies in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics and semiotics does not make his prose incomprehensible.  It just makes it challenging, and ultimately rewarding. 

            In my opinion, biographer D.T. Max got it right.  He gave us a view of DFW as a human being.  He didn't psychoanalyze, he didn't build up the suicide to promote a spurious climax.  David Foster Wallace's suicide came at the end, that's all.  He was a haunted man and there is no story of childhood abuse upon which to build the scaffolding of his pathology.  He had a normal, stable and reasonably happy childhood.  He had an illness.  It emerged in adolescence and it caused him untold suffering.  It eventually proved fatal.

            Biographer D.T. Max gives us the impression that if Wallace was haunted by one thing more than anything else it was the failure of a novel to emerge after the hit of INFINITE JEST.  Wallace put a lot of pressure on himself; he felt he was expected to produce another masterpiece.  He was writing a lot of non-fiction, taking plum assignments from The New Yorker, Esquire and Rolling Stone.  His novel in progress, THE PALE KING, accumulated in boxes of manuscript paper and on floppies and computer drives.  Hundreds of sheets of paper piled up but never gelled into the novel with which Wallace struggled.  It was finally published posthumously, and generally well received.

            It is so sad.  His suicide seems a matter of bad timing.  His psychiatrist  had taken him off the medication Nardil and was preparing to prescribe a more 'modern' anti-depressant.  This procedure, the flushing of the old medicine from the body, the incremental build-up of the new medication, can take several months.  During that time, a patient suffering clinical depression can face a period of intense vulnerability.  It seems that David Foster Wallace got caught 

in a pharmacological bear trap.  He couldn't find a better way out.  People who suffer serious depression know this aspect of its manifestation: while it's happening it seems as though it is permanent.  And, while it's happening, they will do anything to avoid another five minutes of feeling the way they feel.

            The suicide notes are everywhere in Wallace's fiction.  One of INFINITE JEST's protagonists, Hal Incandenza, said it best (and here I paraphrase, being without a copy of the book): "If I knew I had to feel this bad some time in the future for even a week, I would kill myself right now."

            He was describing a plummet down the slippery walls of a deep dark well, a mood of total despair and emptiness. 

            D.T. Max  wrote a beautiful biography.  He enjoyed access to Wallace's family, friends, papers and letters.   He was not worshipful.  He describes Wallace's life as one in which not much happened outside the events of his literary world.  He taught MFA classes in a handful of universities.  He got the McArthur Grant, won other  lucrative prizes and did not have to worry about money.  He was too shy and reclusive to enjoy fame or publicity.  He didn't like parties and dreaded interviews and television appearances.  He was a private man who was very careful about establishing deep bonds of friendship and devotion.  His best friends, it seems, were his dogs.  At the time of his death he was recently married.  He was only forty six years old.  He was just beginning what may have been the best time of his life.

             I repeat...it is so sad.   

12 Years A Slave: A Review

Twelve Years A Slave: A Review

          The making of this film, TWELVE YEARS  A SLAVE, must have been more like a mission than like a job. It brings us a new perception of pre-Civil War slavery and gives us a look into the psychology of both slaves and slave owners.  The tragic face and  huge eyes of Chiwetel Ejiofor dominate the screen as Solomon Northup. His characerization rings true and brings us to believe in his dignity and his suffering. 

          The human mind is capable of rationalizing absolutely anything.     If an activity or institution is profitable, people will accept grotesque intellectual distortions in order to make that activity seem moral and desirable.  People believed ardently in Adolph Hitler.  Pol Pot's gunmen cleaned up Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the name of Year Zero ideology.  Slavery, genocide, mass rape have repeatedly been rationalized into sweetly benign activities, ostensibly for the benefit of society.      American racism is a rationalization.  Slavery was a product of that rationalization.  The fuel for this rationalization was the staggering profitability of purchasing human beings and working them without mercy for the rest of their lives. Slaves were the wealth of the South.  The Civil War was fought to protect that wealth.  This film examines the brutality of slavery but it also reveals important aspects of slavery's impact not just on slaves but on those who did the enslaving.

          The film TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE intends to shock the audience but carefully weighs the degree of shock to keep the audience from recoiling.  It's brutal but tolerable within the story's context.

          Solomon Northup was an upper middle class freedman in Saratoga, New York.  When he accepted an offer of a lucrative short term job away from home he made a fateful error in judgment.  He put himself in the hands of white men that he didn't know.  After dinner and drinks at a restaurant, Solomon awoke in chains, stripped of papers, identity, rights, stripped of his humanity.  He was shipped south into 1840s plantation slavery.  It took him twelve years to find an opportunity to get a message to his friends and family.  Twelve years of the most brutal slavery passed before a brave  man risked his life to carry Solomon's message.

          The ability to read and write was illegal in Solomon's slave world.  Any tendency towards intelligence was viewed as insolence.  A slave who was too smart risked severe punishment: whipping, torture, even lynching.  In order to survive, Solomon had to conceal himself.  He was forced to play the dumb "nigger". 

          The film touches upon the corrosive effect that slavery brought to the owners of slaves.  Plantation owner Edwin Eppes and his wife lived in a twilight world of marital loathing.  Actor Michael Fassbender plays Eppes with a convincing edge.  He's a dangerous man not just because he's the Master but because he's haunted by temptation, guilt and the shadowy confusions of his own  hypocrisy.

          "Massa" Eppes was obsessed with the slave girl Patsey (played with incredible passion by Lupita N'yongo).  He raped her again and again, yet Patsey would rise from her shame and pick twice as much cotton as any of the other slaves. During a clandestine meeting  Patsey offers Solomon her life savings if Solomon will take her to the bayou and drown her.  Shocked, Solomon refuses.  After this exchange Patsey begins to take more risks until she's caught in a minor transgression and is tied to the whipping post.  Massa Eppes forces Solomon to whip her savagely, then takes the whip himself and nearly kills the woman.  He stops before he beats her to death, saying "Don't push me any further because I like what I'm feeling right now."

          This film deftly illuminates the corrosive effects of owning other human beings.  In the American South of the 19th century it was a common belief that slavery was good for both white and black, that slave owning was sanctioned by the Bible and was in harmony with the natural order of the world.  No one believes that any more but the emotional legacy of such a mindset lingers in the musty attics of our national consciousness. 

          TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE is more than a good film.  It's a necessary film.  It won't change anything.  Slavery still exists in many parts of the world. The film vividly demonstrates how atrocity can only exist when one group of human beings decides that another group is less than human. 

          I didn't know what to expect from this film but I was surprised (and relieved) by its pragmatism.  Director Steve McQueen admirably got out of his own way and let the story tell itself.  Sometimes the transitions were abrupt but I didn't care.  The story was told.  The performances were beautiful.  Lupita N'yongo as Patsey deserved her Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.  She was gut-wrenching. When Patsey begged Solomon to commit an act of euthanasia upon herself the film stopped time and delivered its consummate message: a life of slavery is not worth living.  I will never forget the crushing disappointment in Patsey's face when she accepted that Solomon would not put her out of her misery like an injured dog.