Thank You

The rigidly taciturn manager-cashier at the one good Chinese grocery in town, who tersely speaks in minimal Portuguese, and who doesn't know a word of English....

One of the first signs of a newbie traveler is the expectation that Chinese people speak some English, like the oldsters in Chinatown back home.

...rigidly declines to show any indication that he recognizes me, though I know that I am a VIP customer, being the only one asking for holy Thai basil or fermented tofu or obscure Chinese versions of senbei.

It's the sign of a merely accomplished foodie to be surprised that Chinese know about Japanese senbei at all, when they've earned a firm and enduring spot on the Chinese snack pyramid.

But this time, he rang up my stuff, handed me the bag, and there was an almost imperceptible sotto voce "thank-you."

It was so quiet and bashful and slippery that I may have imagined it. And like with the Voice used, hypnotically, by the Bene Gesserit in "Dune," I felt restrained from remarking or reacting in any way. I could only walk out the door, making a loopy, asymmetrical face of utter disorientation.

Has he been working on it? Knowing a thing or two about taciturn Chinese cashiers, I know it is entirely possible he's been practicing for months.

Steal This Bait!

Back in the golden era of Chowhound, when it was cranking with great tips, and thousands of experts stood ready to generously answer any question, I would occasionally take a moment to feel satisfaction. This monster was the ultimate answer machine, more useful than any food info trove previously imagined.

But those moments were short-lived, because I had friends who knew how good Chowhound was, and how much work it took, and how little juice I had left over, who'd email me to ask "Hey, Jim, I'm going to Prague. Where's good?"

It drove me nuts. I'd spent 10,000 hours, all my savings, and the majority of my hairline building a machine to answer such questions far better than I could. But they figured, being friends of mine, they could do even better by scoring a tip from the man himself. You know: the good stuff!

I might have never been to Prague. And if I had, it was likely years ago. And I certainly don't have comprehensive knowledge of the place. Plus, I'm exhausted! Exhausted from building a divination engine standing ready to answer your question nearly as well as it could possibly be answered, all for free! But it's like none of that ever happened. The machine was hand-waved into irrelevance.

"Fun web site, buddy. Now tell me where to find pizza. I'm a VIP."

I'd go round and round with them, but their response was always the same: "Sure, sure, I get it, Jim, but just give me one tip. One fabulous tip! Like only you can do!"

I'd explain how it didn't really work that way; that one inherently limited dude couldn't possibly compete with the aggregated knowledge of a million insanely devoted chowhounds. But they’d hear only dismissal. Mr. Food Celeb has no time for you.

The truth, of course, was that it felt like too much damned work to consult the divination engine. It had removed the need to buy and read guidebooks, or to shlep around endlessly. But checking a web site was still too much effort. Baby chicks agitatedly await mama bird's sweet, sweet vomit.

Remember the scene in the Jetsons where Jane pushes a button, launching a fleet of vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning robots, and then mops her brow in exhaustion from all the housework? Props to Hanna-Barbera.

---

Nowadays I get messages from acquaintances who've caught a Slog posting or two, or teasers on social media, and imagine I might have some insight re: sanely surviving the whole human-life-on-earth thing. They want to get together and "talk." I know what will follow: "Explain framing!" "Tell me useful stories!" You know, exactly what I've been knocking myself out to do here all this time.

I tell them that I've spent a lifetime pondering and eighteen years struggling to articulate my observations as clearly — and as entertainingly! — as possible. But they imagine that I merely dash this stuff off ("Fun blog, buddy!"), which is insane. No, I write dozens or hundreds of drafts each time until the writing is as clear and sharp as possible.

Just as Chowhound was a passionate kiss for food lovers, this is the very best I can do at making accessible the very best I can do. If you can't parse the effort, it's because I've applied still greater effort to make it effortless. Because that's how proper kisses work.

I've labored to develop whatever I have to offer into a form that's eons better than my raw output as some hapless blabbing dude. And, as with Chowhound, the thing I built must be worth something, or they wouldn't be approaching me!

But approach me they do, unhappy with my demurral.

C'mon, Jim. Just shortcut me to the good stuff.

Again, reading takes effort. But if they dove in, for even an hour or two, they'd likely catch the drift and be on their way to surpassing my own insight. In fact, that's the point! I'm not here to show off what I figured out. Like with Chowhound, my hope is for people to steal the bait, leaving me irrelevant! But the raw, simple sincerity of that proposition seems to make people chase a hidden greater win.

The Rip-Off

I'd planned to spend my first months in Portugal renting a room from two of my dearest, oldest friends, but they turned out to be late-stage alcoholics who flipped between two modes:

1. "We hate that you're here and hope you drop dead", and 2. "Why are you so skittish around us? What's wrong with you? We're your friends and we love you!"

I found every excuse to get away: travel, chowhounding (familiarizing myself with every restaurant south of Lisbon and north of Alentejo), park visits and cafe hangs, but I discovered (this is actually useful information!) that you cannot fill up all 168 hours of a week like that. So I spent 6-8 hours a day sitting in my car. There was a tree I liked, so I parked in front of it. Good times!

I had to accelerate efforts to find my own place, so I auditioned a series of realtors, each worse than the last. As ditzy as they may be in USA, here it's worse. They're like used car salesmen. There's no code of conduct local realtors even pretend to uphold. I settled on a French guy, a moody chainsmoker who, once I'd signed on, didn't conceal his contempt. His cracked phone screen showed how desperately he needed his commission. At every gross place he showed me, he'd stare at me, willing me via psi-powers. Please buy. Please. You want this.

My living situation had become unlivable, so Frenchie found me a rental which turned out to be adjacent to a marble cutter, who started at 7am, the whole house shaking and fine stone dust pluming, triggering asthma that hadn't recurred in decades. This is how you force a client to buy ASAP. Clever Frenchie!

In my haggard state, I managed to mess up my ankle and could barely walk. And just around then began a series of food-borne illnesses (I'd developed an inability to fight off campylobacter) which eventually stripped 45 pounds off of me, leaving me dehydrated to the point where my kidneys filled with tiny stones.

Half-dead — and inclined to use my remaining energy to drown the realtor — we walked quite unexpectedly into a soulful, super-nice, perfect apartment. But it was 70,000€ too expensive, and the owner shrewdly noticed that I was geared up about it and refused to budge. For weeks. I actually begged at one point, but no dice. My realtor was so galled that he actually counseled me—against his own interest!— to keep looking. Everyone in my life begged me to tell the owner to go to Hell. There are other apartments, after all!

Nope. I bought it.

The owner couldn't stop grinning at the closing as I limped around coughing and making bathroom detours. But I bought, moved in, and swiftly began recovering, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I now live in a soulful, utterly comfortable apartment which, after three years, has appreciated above its sale price. A win by any standard. Asthma's better, stomach is mostly sorted, and Señora Vanessa is making great progress on my ankles.

I don't know many people who'd have bought. They'd keep viewing properties with the contemptuous Frenchman, limping, coughing, and faint from a diet of white rice and toast. The price was WAY too high, the owner was WAY too much of a prick, and this was a scene you'd have been delighted to walk away from...even though it was a really great apartment.

But that last part was the only part that mattered for me.

I can't say it involved any high-mindedness. I didn't forgive anyone, or keep a "positive attitude". I merely followed my self-interest — like everyone does all the time! — in the presence of considerable gall. The ultimate example of not cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Now, having discovered the massive rewards of losing face (it's like a superpower!), I'm a changed person. In such scenarios, I deny myself nothing on principle. I'm not normally selfish, but this is my sole exception. I garland myself with the luxury of doing what's best for me even when the situation calls for haughty self-denial.

The best revenge is living well, though it may take forbearance to get through the initial degradation. It absolutely made sense to shower money at a seller who wouldn't stop grinning because he'd made a killing by killing me...because it was my best shot at living. He won, but I won more!


Here's a follow-up

Recircumcision

A strange form of behavior is becoming more and more common. I've coined the term "recircumcision," which hopefully evokes a baby peering up from his crib in horror asking "Really? You're seriously going to cut me again?

The recircumcision phenomenon is best seen by examples:

Outdoing Your Self-Deprecation
You say something self-deprecating, and the other person one-ups you.

You: "I'm a screwup"

Them: "You're the biggest screwup who ever lived".

Your self-deprecation in no way immunizes you from my deprecation.

Congratulations on your recircumcision!

Apologies, My Ass
In one of the Slog's most popular postings, "Angel on a Bike", I tried to make hay out of the widespread reluctance to accept apologies:

I absentmindedly walked into a bike lane in Manhattan, forcing a biker to swerve around me. I recoiled in horrified shame, yelling "I'm so sorry! I'm an idiot! Are you okay?"

Over his shoulder, he roared, "You fucking asshole, why don't you look where you're going?"

I quickly realized that this person was an angel, perhaps even a sort of messiah. If he'd gamely nodded at me in weary resignation, I'd have felt awful all day. But his reaction absolved me of all guilt. I felt light as a feather.

The unwillingness to accept sincere apology is a hallmark of lousy character, but it also affords the highest possible absolution. The biker had taken me utterly off the hook, leaving me completely unburdened.

Measure once, cut twice. Recircumcision!

Forgiving You For Their Mistake
In the posting "Correcting the Record?", I noted that you go on probation whenever someone realizes they've judged you wrongly.

If someone has a wrong idea about you—about something you said, did, or thought—you might, with effort, convince them otherwise. Maybe!

But here's the problem: we exalt our assumptions and opinions, even when they're whimsical. They outweigh provable truth (if this seems odd, imagine how different this world would be if it weren't so). So after all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time!

So the next time you offend, confuse, or simply trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.

Recircumcised again and again, 'til it's whittled down to a stub!

Sue and the Speed Bump
Here's where I finally saw the heart of it. The kernel. The unseen flowing channels of ghastly glowing green ectoplasm beneath quiet city streets spurring all this ghoulish recircumcision.

I'm driving zippily through back roads with a passenger, Sue, a bitter elderly alcoholic who excels at the unique alcoholic skill of judging everyone and everything from atop a dizzyingly high perch and won't you please pass the wine BELLLLLCH thanks very much.

I hit a speed bump at speed. Jarring. I apologize profusely — at first, sincerely, but lapsing into more lavish and pathetic self-immolation as I try to delay and dispel the inevitable blast from Sue's loaded shotgun of verbal excoriation. However, my tongue lashing is not the least bit reduced by my profuse mea maxima culpa blame-taking. The doctor has slated you for recircumcision, so recircumcised you shall be.

But just before she emits her harangue, I notice something. Her jaw sets. She has perceived an obstacle. An impediment. And she's revving her engines to clear it.

I realize, with a sickening start, what happened. My apology had infuriated her, because it was taking away her big moment. Sue's big moment where she'd enjoy free reign to savage another human being without compunction.

There are precious few opportunities to really let loose and harangue, harass, attack, insult, deride, and generally consume fellow human beings while remaining more or less within the bounds of proper behavior. Such moments are golden. Golden moments! And my extended apology had been like stealing a toddler's sundae cherry. Which, naturally, only peaked her pique.


The horrifying truth is that the knives are never far from out, anything you do might precipitate the snip-snip-snip of greedy scissors, and they actually like it this way.

Inside and Outside the Station Wagon

As a child, I once mistakenly pressed the "B" button in the elevator in my grandparent's Miami Beach apartment building, and found myself intruding on the custodial staff at lunch time. There was an absolutely revolting smell I couldn't identify. It felt like a violent attack (if you told me it was mustard gas, I'd have believed you). I mashed the "door close" button, desperately trying to escape.

It was garlic.

As a child, my parents would drive around the Lower East Side looking for parking so we could eat lunch at Ratner's. We passed malevolent-looking people lazily hanging around on the sidewalk. So these were "the mean streets!" How fortunate I was to live where things were NICE!

I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life on such streets while suburban douchebags gawked from air-conditioned station wagons.

As a child, Ricky Ricardo's band always sounded alien and a little corny. "Not our kind, dear."

I just hit a link and got a live audio page blasting intense salsa music. I'm not on this particular recording, but my friends are, and I didn't just enjoy it. From here in Portugal, far from that vibrancy, it was like a booster shot of essential missing vitamins. It reconnected me with my deepest heritage.

I'm not describing changes of taste, or even of mind. These were something more than that: reframings. And frames are strangely uncanny things. They can't be reconciled, because, obviously, they're differently framed! A framing is a distinct universe.

I chose, early on, to dive in to the full gamut with unashamed promiscuity. Not just emulating The Other, but becoming wholly part of it. I.e. reframing. There's plenty of upside. I can't imagine life without garlic or salsa, and my writing and musical careers both hinged on this. But the downside is that, at age 63, parts of me don't match up with other parts. I've been people with no connection whatsoever to other people I've been.

My Miracle Shower

I have a miracle shower. It's blocked in by thick glass panels, and there needs to be a door swinging open, which means there must be cracks, and you can't seal them because then, obviously, the door wouldn't swing open. You can actually see air through the cracks to the left and to the right and under the door. What's more, the shower head faces those cracks, spraying them relentlessly. This should not work. It's non-viable. It's impossible. And yet—and yet!—my floor stays dry. Luxuriously dry.

I don't understand how it works. Water spraying relentlessly on cracks should create leaks. That's basic science. Yet it does not leak. Hence "miracle shower".

What's more, I enjoy a truly great bath mat. Whatever you're imagining, it's better than that. As I exit my miracle shower, my feet are welcomed by a generous rectangle of fresh fluffy clouds. There is music. There is a sense of a life lived to its fullest.

Delight is fragile. So I was not surprised when, one morning, I stepped out of the shower and discovered that my mat was drenched with water. As my foot touched down, it made a "sploosh" sound.

Three problems at once:

1. My impossible shower had finally fulfilled its Wile-E-Coyote-suspended-in-mid-air-past-the-cliff-edge destiny, and was leaking the way it was always meant to,

2. The primacy of my bath mat was made a mockery of,

3. It being the cold/moist season in Portugal, nothing dries till springtime. We are in the Age of Mold. So I can hang this mat on a line until the (fluffy) sheep come home, but it will...not...dry.

When the problem continued, I consulted with contractors and chatbots, gathering enormous knowledge of sweeps and dams—silicone strips and such to glue to the door's underside to minimize the crack. And I ordered them from China, where—good news!—vendors stood ready to rush me this stuff in absolutely no more than five weeks, max!

Awaiting my silicone workarounds, and having swapped in a fast-drying piece-of-crap bath mat (oh, how the mighty have fallen), my shower began to leak worse and worse. I kicked the mat four feet from the shower, and still it drenched in pooling run-off. Finally, I tried something, purely by whim: I tilted the shower head a random one millimeter to the left.

Complete dryness ever since. Nary a drop of water, anywhere.

In the aftermath, I'm left rubbing my eyes and pondering What Happened Here. What can be learned. I'm not normally one for auguries, but this is so "on the nose" that I can't avoid the feeling of being force-taught something life-critical.

First of all, it reminds me of the time when I was a kid and a New York Mets pitcher (Ron Darling?) was in the midst of a horrendous slump, with no end in sight. Tom Seaver traveled to Shea Stadium to offer him the following advice (I'm paraphrasing): "You feel like you're a million miles away. But you're actually not. You're off just the tiniest little bit." That image stuck with me, and I refer to it whenever strike zones start to seem unhittable.

But while this circumstance echoes that, this was less about resilience than about premature conclusions about fragility. Just because you know what's wrong doesn't mean you Know What's Wrong. It's another "Cousin Manny Thing", where "knowing" is a map, while "experiencing" is ownership.

And this makes for a particularly bright example, because the entire shower situation is shrouded in mystery. None of it is truly sealed, nor could it be, so every dry shower has been a bona fide miracle. And whatever shower head movement had produced a unicorn trajectory to break everything was another miracle, as was my random adjustment returning it all to impossibile functionality. It's been raining miracles. Showering them, if you will.

This all presents a rich field to harvest for insight and revelation, but, really, I'm drowning in that, already. Especially the confusion and catastrophe which give rise to it. I don't regret what I've gone through to learn what I've learned, but, going forward, I'm out of the market for life lessons. Adolescent me would have eaten such lesson-teaching for breakfast, but, at age 62, I understand more than I want to about the world, so the catastrophes feel needlessly obtrusive and exasperating. Really, I'd just like to take a shower, please, thanks.

If you find yourself unwittingly embarked on a long, grueling adventure with no clue and no user manual, and finally return, battered and scarred, to find some glib wizard eager to finally dump all the secrets, it won't feel like reward. "Too little too late," Gandalf!

That said, I must confess that I'm far more delighted now, stepping out of the shower to a bone dry floor and my unimaginably fluffy bath mat, than even before. This brings to mind, yet once again, the very first joke I learned as a child (from "The Bozo the Clown Show"):

Q: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?
A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

Bozo really knew what's up.

Over the last two years, I've endured twelve trips to the emergency room, seven campylobacter infections (leaving me with risk of antibiotic resistance and a permanent ban on street food and third world travel), six severe orthopedic conditions requiring immediate surgery (which I'm managing via yoga), and way more. I withstood it all smartly, and am able to walk and eat more or less normally, which feels awesome. And having achieved this respite, last month I made a brief prayer.

I normally avoid prayer, because 1. I don't want stuff (I'm the sort of guy who's impossible to buy presents for), and 2. I fear unintended consequences, and 3. other people need way more help than I do, so I hate to occupy attention. But after ceaseless catastrophes (health and otherwise), I amiably requested "no more tough-love lessons." Also: if The Powers That Be get entertainment value from watching Jim narrowly evade peril, maybe they can maybe wind that down just a smidge.

I'm not someone who hears voices, but the gist I picked up by way of response was something like "Oh, sure, ok; I thought you liked it like that."

But now this.

Yes, it's just a leaky shower. And the lessons were rich. And the outcome was pure delight. So...I guess I do "like it"!

Choose a lesson! They're everywhere! Like with serendipity, it's all a question of which you choose to tune in to—which you choose to frame. I'll start with this unassailable observation:

A dry bath mat is no small thing.

Reciprocity

Way back in 1992, I hooked up saxophonist Ralph Lalama for a week long gig in Spain, where we both performed at the Seville Expo with a Catalan big band. We got along well, and a couple of weeks after we returned to New York, I bumped into him at a jam session he was running in the East Village. "Hey, Ralph!" I chirped. He glanced at me cooly, nodding imperceptibly before turning away.

One of Ralph's buddies explained things to me. "Ralph, you see, fancies himself an elder statesman in the jazz scene, so he figures that who he greets and how he greets them confers a certain anointment and validation. He wasn't sure you'd earned a full level of public respect from him."

"But," I replied, "I wasn't looking to be anointed. I was just saying hi." Ralph's friend shrugged helplessly. This is how it parses to Ralph. It had nothing to do with what I was looking for. I was hardly in this movie. This is the Ralph movie.

A week later, I bumped into Ralph in a Chinese restaurant. "Hey, Jim!" he chirped. I glanced at him cooly, nodding imperceptibly before turning away. I didn't run into him again for thirty years, whereupon he was still furious about the slight. He wouldn't look at me or talk to me, the ogre who'd dissed him. I never expected him to make the connection of his behavior in his sphere of influence to my behavior in mine, but I certainly never expected any of this to rock his world.

After a long period of unilateralism, I've started leaning into this behavior. I remain non-reactive, and always try to help where I can. I don't act spitefully or hold vendettas, and don't sneer or raise my voice. But I’ve begun to follow the playbook I'm handed. As with Ralph, I mirror. Not with venom or malice. Certainly no extra "oomph" to prove the point. I let people set the rules of engagement, and I amiably follow along. I reciprocate.


Since COVID quarantine, people feel less obligated to reply to one other. They don't answer messages if they're busy, or distracted, or didn't fully understand or approve of what was said. They'll let it go if they don't detect an immediate deliverable. And sometimes they don't reply just because.

I was eager to try this out for myself. It seemed like it might be liberating! So I did an experiment with a couple of longtime friends who'd grown less and less engaging, and declined to reply to each of them just once.

I never heard from either of them ever again.


I stoically followed the Golden Rule for my long unilateral period. But I eventually realized that it doesn't work if there's only one person doing it. As I wrote in The “Golden Rule” is Loftily Unattainable (I'd suggest reading the whole thing; it's short):

When the Bible suggested doing to others as you would have them do to you, it turns out this wasn't a helpful reminder. I always figured it was like "Sit up straight" or "Eat more vegetables"—a sappy homily people sometimes need reinforced, despite its blatant obviousness.

No. I see now that it was flabbergasting existential judo—a Copernican flip of perspective. And it was received as a lofty principle which, like other forms of godliness, could only be aspired to, and never put into actual practice.

Pivot from Portuguese Purgatory

My waitress was slow bringing the migas and potatoes to accompany my fish. It happens. But the restaurant's wizened, cranky Portuguese owner went berserk, screaming at the kitchen while pointing at The Customer (me), who'd been forced into a low-carb lunch here in the land of starch.

At meal's end she handed me—like a smuggler proffering diamonds—a glistening handful of freshly roasted chestnuts and—as if my shocked gratitude needed another kick in the gut—a moist/crispy slab of cinnamon toast (rabanadas). It was her apology. I didn't realize the word was even in her vocabulary.

We have a history, she and I. Even stout-hearted Portuguese tremble at her notoriously brusque command, and I've never seen another foreigner in the place, which is (like every tyrannical perfectionist operation) perpetually mobbed thanks to sky-high quality. On my third visit, I pointed at a photo on the wall of a terrifying-looking day-glo orange fish, and asked if it was good. "Ah," she sighed, briefly waxing slightly less ball-busting, "Rascasso! Delicioso!"

This was where I messed up. I asked if she'd have any tomorrow, and she nodded affirmatively. Then a series of oblique signals and punishments, fanning out over the subsequent 24 months, made it clear that:

1. She'd reserved one for me, which had required breaking character and
2. I'd failed to show (I was still fresh from New York, and hadn't realized that, here, an idle few words to a restaurateur can ensnare you in a Whole Thing).

This was not a person to piss off, but I somehow endured my lengthy sentence of purgatory. And today I was granted clemency when she needed to wash her hands in the sink near the front door next to the fish tank after hawking a vat of dead sea creatures out to to the charcoal grill manned by her husband just outside the restaurant in the street. Waiting to be seated, I was blocking her way, though attempting to reduce my 6 foot bulk to an inconspicuous singularity to avoid making trouble. But before she could ask, I executed a pivot more elegant that one would ever imagine possible from someone of my age, height, and timidness. She freely waltzed to the sink, washed her hands, and began screaming at the wait staff to set a place for me. Normally she makes me wait 20 or 30 minutes even amid a glut of empty seats, but the Baryshnikovian pivot had redeemed me. I was back in good graces. And this is why she'd been particularly galled that my carbs were delayed.

Groaning painfully after ingesting an entire charcoal-roasted sea bream, a large platter of migas (sautéed bread crumb stuffing), boiled potatoes, boiled sweet potatoes, salad, and wine (16€), she demanded I consume the chestnuts and the cinnamon toast, together, and stood over me gloweringly awaiting my reaction. When I convulsed in pleasure, she nodded authoritatively and strode away. Shortly after, I paid the bill and told her, in my unreliable Portuguese, “Estou matado de alegre.” (hopefully "I've been killed with pleasure"). Apparently I nailed the Portuguese, though the syntax was just off-kilter enough to provoke a semi-grin. I think.

Her tray of rabanadas, which only emerged once nearly all customers had left. Like the chestnuts, it was staff-only. I've won at Portugal.

Doctors and the DMV

Fun! I just met with a new doctor, who spent a full hour going over my myriad medical issues. The six severe orthopedic conditions requiring immediate surgery which I'm managing via yoga. The severe ulcer from aspirin therapy + a series of profound gut infections; the osteoarthritis; the torn plantar plates which can prevent me from walking, the benign paroxysmal positional vertigo that keeps me dizzy, the exposed dental nerves I feebly manage with OTC pain cream. The pericardial effusion (like the one that killed my mom) which has left me hoarse and coughing, the 50% hearing loss, the vitreous detachment, the stent. The periarthritic calcified shoulders which, when bad (they're never great), send me into seizure from the pain. We discuss each in detail. Then she looks up from her monitor and asks "So how do you feel?"

"Pardon?"

"How do you feel, just going through your day? Any pain?"

I stare darts at her. She peers back, composed and crisp.

I begin to repeat my symptoms, and she interrupts to repeat: "But how do you feel?" I did not commit medicide. I got through it, somehow. But I went home and asked chatGPT to explain why the world seems insane (this time).

It replied, essentially, that she has a field to fill out in her report which requires choosing smiley-face patient, normal-face patient, or frowny-face patient. So, like a clerk at the DMV, she just needs me to give an answer so she can finish filling it out.

I'm beginning to understand the appeal of quacks and pseudoscience.

Eddie Palmieri

The great Eddie Palmieri, one of my musical heroes and a formative superstar of Latin Jazz/Salsa/Whatever You Want to Call it, died yesterday.

I'll offer two stories:

Fumigation
I'm at the bar of Blue Note nightclub in Manhattan, circa 1987. I'm an insider there because I play almost nightly at the late after show with trumpeter Ted Curson. Michel Camillo, the latest big-publicity jazz star, is in residence, and he's busily and smilingly outgassing the smoothest and show-off-iest latin-ish jazz imaginable. A friend of mine refers to this style of playing as "Show You My White Teeth Music". The tourists are eating it up, but we musicians at the bar, seeking any possible relief, begin drinking with determination.

The set ends, thunderous ovation, and we eagerly await the second half of the show, featuring Eddie Palmieri's Orchestra. It's a bit like Sandra Bernhardt following Jennifer Lopez. Eddie was not dentally impressive, and his music did not drip with showy glissandi. No smug rich guy suntanned sambas. Eddie was the apotheosis of soulful grit. Eddie was antimatter to Camillo.

The mangy musicians from Eddie's group finally took the stage, tuned, and sat placidly waiting for the drugs to wax or wane, per individual preference. Then Eddie came out, and, as he often did, launched into an extended solo piano intro. Eddie can get quite "out", making Thelonious Monk seem songful by comparison. He always had the soul of an avante gardist, though, unlike just about every avante gardist I know (and I knew many), he could also swing his ass off. But on this night, he played 20 minutes of impenetrable, maddening solo stuff, giving the tourists nothing to hang their ears on. Nada. On and on it went, featuring repeated piddly hammerings on the highest piano key, making the dressing room cat mew loudly in consternation. A number of audience members walked out, though no one in the band could give less of a crap. They just sat there mopily with misaligned pupils, waiting.

Finally—FINALLY—Eddie stands up (adding maybe four inches to his seated height) and screams "ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!!!" fast, and the band just roars into a montuno from a dead standing start that's so instantly swinging and wailing and exasperated (by Camillo) that the entire room forgets to breathe for a solid minute. Whatever it is that metal heads get from having their ears blown out by garish rednecks and their overclocked guitar amps, this was the platonic form of that. This was the mythical Wall of Sound.

The interminable solo had been fumigation. And then the heavy roller machine had gone into overdrive, laying down fresh, inexorable pavement. I actually teared up a little from the emotional release. If only orgasms offered such catharsis!

Dominican Humiliation
My one gig with Eddie was a catastrophe (more for him than for me). We were playing in a brand new Dominican nightclub in Washington Heights, and while you might imagine The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico as geographic and cultural twins, their musics are like oil and water.

Dominicans dance to merengue, an easy 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 like polka. It's fast and furious and sexy and exciting, but not the least bit sophisticated. Puerto Rican salsa (which derives from Cuba, and, before that, Africa) can be furious, sexy and exciting at times, but it abounds with sophistication and subtlety.

Those not born into it (or made it their lifelong study, as I did) wouldn't be able to even clap their hands to it. Imagine that! Popular music—dance music!—you can't clap your hands to! It's not 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Instead, it's two short claps and three long. Or three long and two short. And even knowing which is which is a move for insiders only. The difference with Dominican merengue was yet another matter/anti-matter contrast.

So I'm gigging with the greatest salsa band in the world, hideously misplaced in a Dominican nightclub (hey, a gig's a gig, you know? It's not like Eddie's manager would ever say "no"!) and no one is dancing, or applauding, because this crazy Puerto Rican stuff is happening which none of the Dominicans can parse. It's like trying to play a Windows game on a Mac. One of the greatest moments of my life is an abject humiliation for all concerned.

There had, however, been a high point the week before. The rehearsal for this gig marked the first appearance of the young conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, who'd arrived with a reputation as a genius. As he and I both warmed up across the room from each other, separated by over a dozen other honking horn players, his complicated hand slaps suddenly and improbably began to encompass my warm-up. Not that he was tuning in to me, specifically, getting all up in my stuff. it's just that he was a Big Ears Guy, never not listening to—and never not encompassing—Everything. I was the same (most players wouldn't have noticed they were being encompassed). When I engaged back, it was like Fred Astaire cocking an elbow at Ginger Rogers. He complied instantaneously and sumptuously. Beautifully. The back/forth continued for a couple minutes until Eddie hollered to start the rehearsal. Giovanni went on to become a major star, and we'll leave it at that because his story became too sad to contemplate. Best damn warm-up I ever had, though.

Back to the Dominican club, it's intermission and I'm standing in a stairwell, playing long tones to keep myself in optimal condition, when Eddie walks by and offers me a hit off his joint. I refuse with a smile, saying I need to keep my head straight on my first gig. Eddie shrugs amiably and walks away. God, I'm an idiot.

Rest in Peace, Eddie.


Are you noticing a pattern?

Perverse Corroboration

Dave Liebman
As a 21 year old jazz trombonist, I enjoyed the support of a few jazz heavy-hitters. I was clearly no boy genius—nothing like that—but they assured me I was on the right track and expected good things, which is the most warmly effective sort of appraisal. Rather than inflate my ego, it made me redouble efforts to do my very best.

This was the age where one stops being a student and starts calling oneself a professional, but I attended one last polishing program for talented kids my age. Several went on to stardom. And a number of them really liked my playing.

I knew what I was doing, at least. I was coherent, assured, and could get from A to B in interesting ways. I'd done the work of acquiring fluency and control. Though, as with my writing, it wasn't quite like anything else. But I'd always figured that was the goal. A personal, original approach was exactly what my mentors had encouraged.

Saxophone star David Liebman started the first day's class by asking me to improvise. I played with swing, feeling, and lyricism. I told a story. And, when I was done, Liebman didn't look at me. He faced the class, like a surgeon standing beside an excised tumor, and asked, with unconcealed disgust, "Does anyone know what the fuck that was?!?" Even the students who liked my playing shrugged. Geez, Dave, no. We have no idea!

I was confident enough, thank heaven, not to be destroyed (I knew—though Liebman did not—that one of his own idols strongly supported my playing). But, man, was I angry. And I remain angry to this day, though it's not something I revisit often. How could a bona fide jazz veteran be so horrible to a kid?

Les Blank
Thirty years later, I had a chance to interview a guy in Connecticut who was renowned for his cookies. He wasn't a professional, just some guy, and said he'd show me his technique and I could film it with my iphone camera.

So I showed up, and he revealed that he's just using the plain old recipe from the Quaker Oats box, so it's really nothing special, yet he conceded that no one else ever comes close to matching his results. He showed me how carelessly he cooked, and how pedestrian his ingredients were. And when I tasted a cookie, I nearly lost consciousness.

I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.

One of my best friends at the time was the great film director Les Blank. I sent him a copy, and it made him so angry—just spitting mad—that he refused to discuss it.

I instantly realized that if it were legitimately bad, there'd be no anger. Professional filmmakers don't lose their tempers over crappy films. They just wince and move on. Les' rage showed that I'd accomplished something.

Why the rage? Who knows. Some byproduct of Les' tangled inner being (perhaps having spent his life refining skills to create magic, seeing even a bit of magic emanating from guileless incompetence felt infuriating). I didn't need to parse it. It was sufficient to recognize it for what it was: corroboration.

Linkage

But while by that point I'd acquired the insight to parse Les' reaction appropriately, I still carried anger over my Liebman encounter from years earlier, before I knew how to frame it correctly.

In fact it was only today that I put the two together. If my playing merely sucked, Liebman would have been more teacherly. He'd have dressed the wound, given me basics to work on, and sent me on my way with an exasperated eye roll. A jazz superstar only howls "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?" at an eager skinny 21 year old trombonist in summer camp shorts and tank top if that kid actually has something.

What's the thing? I can't venture a guess. So what set him off? Same. But, at this late date, I see I should have accepted it as corroboration. Not in the sense of twisted, trollish delight at getting under someone's skin and eliciting a reaction, any reaction. Just the level-headed realization that 1. I had something, and 2. It's neither necessary nor possible for everyone to dig every something.


Laboriously Updating Assumptions
But this posting is not about under-appreciation. Nor about celebrity insecurity, nor the chilling subterranean streams of human interaction. Rather, it's about my failure to tie this all together until an hour or so ago.

I try hard to sharpen my thinking and strip away kludge and bullshit. I work to apply lessons forward to future experiences and backward to recollected ones. I generate my share of insights, but must constantly relearn them...endlessly. As I noted while explaining Why My Cooking Isn't Great, it's devilishly hard to distribute insights evenly into all aspects of one's life.

You can't update assumptions and memories in light of freshly-acquired insight en masse. So I remain endlessly mystified by puzzles previously well-solved, and doomed to ceaselessly re-solve it all.

On the other hand, if you're ever bored in old age—no one invites you to dance parties anymore, and your crustily truculent friends can't be pryed out of their easy chairs to come see a movie or whatever, this might be the answer. Spend your time processing mental fodder with ever more lithe framing. Be like an earthworm, improving the soil by passing it through your corpus. I guess that's what old age was always supposed to be for. Perhaps this explains the elder "wisdom" people used to talk about way back when.


For extra credit, watch that movie, and consider how the discussion of quality - what it is and how it gets in - pervades this entire discussion. Creating quality is a sticky wicket, but appreciation is no less tortuous.


Followup: The Waif and the Limo

Well-Meaning Guys Under Siege

Chowhound was racking up $300/month in data transference surcharges, and I didn't have it. Our massive popularity was straining the rented server, and we were forced to pay for it.

I needed to devise some profit streams, and fast, so I supervised design and execution of a line of t-shirts and tchotchkes such as the Chowhound Passport—sliding cards reading "Give me the real stuff, not the tourist stuff" in eight languages to show one's waiter. Plus a bundle of newsletters which I'd edit and distribute in my spare time.

A thousand passports arrived, to my surprise, unassembled. They needed to be laboriously folded and glued. I threw a party for some friends to help assemble them. In an ideal world, I'd have plied them with great food and drink, but all I could swing was beer and chips. Anyway, we assembled just 100. Not nearly enough.

One attendee sighed and volunteered to tackle the rest as a Zen exercise in gracious patience. A week later, she handed me back 900 passports, ready to go. And of course I thanked her, but not, like, a LOT. And I didn't subsequently include her in my life—because even my best friends weren't included in my life, which was crammed full of seven full time unpaid jobs (while desperately trying to make rent on the side). It was clearly non-viable, but I didn't want to disappoint a million nice people by shutting down that monstrous albatross of a website.

I sold the operation a few years later, and, a year after that, the corporate machinery spat me out like a lead slug, and then there was recuperation and then various ingenious and heartfelt ventures which all drew vacant stares. Decades were passing. I'd tried reconnecting with old friends, but they'd all moved on. A few were jealous, most just indifferent. And I never reapproached this person. So much time had gone by.

Relatable, right? If so, it's only because I've convincingly shared the framing of a well-meaning guy under siege. But imagine the perspective of that other person.

I've written all this to share one single nugget of insight you might want to bear in mind: Well-meaning guys under siege can look like assholes.


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Sushi with Royalty

So I had dinner with a woman in London at a fancy sushi place. We ordered a service of chef-selected special nigiri, very artfully put together, very expensive. She snarfed it up like takeout from her corner sushi shop, downing eight of the nine pieces in 2 minutes flat.

Smiling, with gentle encouragement, I urged her to maybe slow down, because we presumably wanted dinner to stretch longer than five minutes. She gave me a look that signaled that she was in no way done with dinner, so while I'd expected the exorbitant nigiri to be sufficient, I realized, startled, that she needed more.

I lunged for the menu, which I held out before her. As the, I supposed, gender-compelled host of this meal, I felt nervous flop sweat eyeing her final piece of nigiri which signaled a 15 second countdown to some kind of breakpoint.

She peered at the menu blankly. "I don't want cooked food," she pouted, "I thought we were having sushi." I asked whether we should repeat the platter, and she was quite agreeable, so we requested another round of special lacquered nigiri, as the waiter tried to conceal his "geez-never-saw-that-before" face.

The bill came, I paid a spine-tingling $300, and we said goodbye. And the next day she sent me an excoriating note, saying I'd made her feel like a pig for eating too fast.

I rolled the proposition around my mind a few times, as I do. She was obviously averse to being thought of as someone who eats like a pig. Fair enough, but this leaves me surprised that she'd eat like a pig. If this is a sore point, then the issue is on her end, no?

If I'd hate to be thought of as someone with dirty hair, I'd shampoo daily. If I considered "stubbly" a disgusting epithet, I'd shave constantly. This is how we shape our existences, no? We take pains not to do the things that would make us doers of those things. We sidestep horribleness in order to--well, to sidestep horribleness.

I tried to compose that last sentence to make some sense, but there are realms of nonsense so baffling as to resist even the most artful rhetorical surmise.

Eating like a pig, if one doesn't mind being seen as a piggish eater, is a fully respectable choice. But the notion of maintaining an elegant feeling while eating disgustingly by taking prickly umbrage at any hint of an implication that one might take longer than three minutes to consume one's supper, that boggles my mind.

I often note that citizens of the first world currently are bona fide aristocrats, but this isn't aristocracy, it's royalty. The king and queen are only to be viewed in the most flattering light, despite disgusting, slovenly, or dodgy behavior. Beheading is too good for commoners who fail to maintain game faces as seamlessly composed as high-end nigiri.

I guess it's nice work if you can get it--where you eat like a pig without ever feeling like a piggish eater because everyone pretends you're a vision of stylish grace while diligently keeping your trough full. The only blemish in this scenario would be the person across the table with no harsh words, but who might be so impertinent as to urge a more deliberate pacing for a more enjoyable experience lasting double-digit minutes. The problem--the only problem--was me.

From this perspective, I see her point. As the sole blight on her vaunted, stylish, elegant landscape, I deserved to be scornfully shamed for unintentionally making her feel ashamed for her shamelessness. I get the logic.


It took me a few weeks, but I finally cracked the code on what was going on. See "The Desperate Preservation of Effortless Grace: Explaining Royal Privilege"

The Underpants

One floor below me lives my neighbor José and his unnamed wife ("never mind her name"). They are not a fun couple. This apartment of mine, which cost like a rat-infested fourth-floor walk-up in a bad nabe of Queens, is top-drawer for here, which means I live among the local aristocracy. And I always need to be reminded that aristocrats rarely brim with good humor and joie de vivre.

Horror of horrors. Recently, a pair of underpants fell from my line, splatting directly atop Nameless Wife's undergarments. I slid this note under their door (here's an English translation):

Good evening, José and family!

I hope you enjoyed my generous gift on your laundry line! I assure you, it’s perfectly clean!

I was planning to buy new underwear next week anyway, so it’s fine to throw it away if you don’t want it!

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful weather!

The next morning, I opened my door to find my underpants in a shopping bag. A thick one, carefully chosen to steer clear of full snideness yet clearly alluding to the potentially noxious condition of said underpants, though they were, as I pledged, 100% copacetic. No note. The bag had been hung from my door knob. Silently. Neutrally. "Here's your underpants."

I imagined the up-to-the-elbows rubber cleaning gloves she'd used to deposit them into the thick-but-not-too-thick bag. And the many additional wash cycles she'd given not only her adjacent undergarments, but every last item hanging on her line.

Flash forward two days.

I leave my apartment and find yet another thick bag dangling from my doorknob. It contains a pillow case I hadn't even known had dropped. I went directly to the supermarket, bought a spool of shopping bags, and left them dangling from José's doorknob. The unspoken point, of course, was "Expect more drops!"

I imagined José's pinched grin, wryly amused by the gesture, while she-who-must-not-be-named ran through nasty scenarios. "Does he think we can't afford shopping bags?" "Is he giving us gifts in order to obligate us in some way?". If José won, there would be no response, and no returned bags, and the arc would be smooth. If Wife won, I'd find the bags back on my doorknob. And I get the vibe she normally prevails.

One thing was for sure: she'd find it unthinkable that her neighbor was expressing irony as a whimsical gesture to stoke joy. Because life ≠ joy. The notion of burning a single calorie for shits and giggles would be mind-boggling and paradigm-shaking. I had to be up to something malevolent or taunting or ugly and the bags would be sent back. Note-lessly. In an even thicker bag.

A player of long games, I plotted my next step: If the bags came back, I'd heighten the absurdity by buying a fishing pole, attaching an oversized gleaming metal hook, and lowering the line with underpants hanging from the hook right to her eye level.

The escalation proved unnecessary. The bags were not returned. My joke appears to have landed. I have bullied—with wit and consummate politeness—the encounter onto my terms, even in their building in their country, and even being the shmuck who keeps dropping underpants and whatnot into their midst like space debris.

But it just occurred to me that I'd never have left them a bunch of bags if this were Brooklyn or Chicago. I opted for it here because it's keyed in to Portuguese sense of humor. Among my puny superpowers is the ability to play to the humor sensibilities of different people and cultures (it's a framing thing), and I realize that's exactly what I did here, unconsciously. It was a joke custom-designed for Portugal.

The Value of Rapport

There's a guy I met online years ago who is a brilliant programmer and a joy to work with. The harder the problem, the more he likes it. If he wasn't so busy with his day job, I'd make up projects just to prod him into action and watch him overcome adversity.

Over the years, he's quietly helped me with a number of endeavors, always refusing compensation. Most recently, he worked on my smart phone app, "Eat Everywhere", and, per usual, he saved the day with some clever, elegant tech that did the equivalent of building a stable bridge between a mountain peak in Peru and one on Alpha Centauri. He handled the sprawling, deal-killing technical nightmare like folding a napkin.

I told him I had a cool apartment in a great town in Portugal, and invited him and his family to take over the place for a week or two, since I hardly need an excuse to travel (I moved here in part for €50 round trip flights to Milan, Budapest, Berlin, etc.). I left him, naturally, copious food tips, and overlapped for a couple days to show him my haunts and secret treasures. I also left him my bank card, because foreign credit cards often don't work here. I told him he could Paypal me when the bill comes in.

To my surprise, he was flabbergasted by my "generosity", since we'd never actually met. And I've been struggling to make sense of this. Was I missing something here?

If someone clearly demonstrates kindness, brilliance, and solid dependability, is that mere trivia compared to the vivid in-person evidence of personal style and presentation? If he'd had a pimple on his nose, would that have lowered his stock?

I get that rapport matters. But when competent, kind people recognize each other, that's a deeper rapport. Working eagerly and selflessly to build cool stuff without ego or acrimony. How does that compare with the shallow rapport of being fun to hang out with? I don't hand my apartment and ATM card over to lively conversationalists. It's a fine trait, but it doesn't stoke trust.

Social rapport—as every con man knows—can easily be faked. Tell someone they're awesome, and they'll open their hearts and their lives. This planet is a psychopath's delight; fakery gets bought, hook, line, and sinker.

Someone who contributes meaningfully to your life, is never unkind, and asks nothing in return? That's the good guy! Such qualities are not fakeable (at least not over the long run), so that's who you trust, no?

Well, it makes sense to me. While I enjoy a lively hang—and admire dermatological savoir faire—such factors strike me as a very poor basis for establishing trust or extending generosity. But I'm apparently in an extreme minority. And as I mull it over, lots of mysterious weirdness here on planet Earth suddenly makes sense.

Shrunken World Scenario

I was in the hospital for scary heart stuff. It would be easily fixed with a stent, and I'd be cleared for exertions galore, though I didn't know it at the time. But I was cheerful. I'm a wave-rider. Tell me my limits, and I'll contrive a way to solve problems—and have fun!—within those limits.

There are always limits!

I will never be a point guard for the NY Knicks. I could be compelled to frown about that suspended dream if I were to focus on it. And I could descend into bitter basketball drama if I held it close day after day while making toast and tying shoelaces. In fact, that's what most people do. They obsess over limitations, suspended dreams, and suboptimalities.

People live in a world of What Isn't, and I, too, indulged in that self-torture until one night I caught myself flipping between the wonderful time I was actually having and a contrived notion of what could have been happening and should have been happening. It stunned me to watch myself struggling to determine the appropriate framing. As if there were a real quandary.

After that revelation, I found it surprisingly easy to opt out of What Isn't. And when the only game in town is to play the cards you're dealt, life improves tremendously. But that's not what this posting is about.

Back in the hospital, I waited to learn which hand I'd been dealt. Chipper in the cardiac ward, there was only a single fly in my ointment: The God Damned Charging Cord.

In that moment, my life revolved around my iPad, because it was literally all I had. Aside from one friendly nurse, there was little for me to curiously probe or engage with—certainly no eateries to explore—outside my bed, where I was firmly stuck. And in that twin-sized world were precisely two things:

1. My iPad (for entertainment, information, communication, cardiac tutorials, and fun games).

2. A body with an alien monster grumbling in its chesty regions.

Re: #2, I wasn't about to meditate, or mess with my breathing, or anything like that, because I was essentially covered with police tape. This body of mine was not cleared for tampering.

So my universe was the iPad, and The God Damned Charging Cord would not reach the outlet. So I needed to periodically charge it while it was poised on a ledge, and this required leaning over hard with an IV drip pulling at my opposite arm as it delivered the nitroglycerin keeping me (not to be melodramatic) alive. Plus, I needed to acrobatically bend over and around, as an unfamiliar internal voice, with the hesitance of an entity unaccustomed to speaking up, cleared its throat and politely questioned my life choices:

"Hey, uh, are you sure this is a good idea, bud?"

It took a few paragraphs, but hopefully I've persuaded you that, deep in the cardiac ward, I was plagued by one single legit problem. It was a "mere" charging cord, but its significance, both for peril and for deliverance, was gigantic.

Aside from that, I was ready for test results, and for a plastic squib to be pushed through my circulatory system to lodge open a critical artery. In fact, I was so amiably game that the head nurse (not the nice one) sent a social worker to attempt to ease the oblivious slob into accepting the gravity of his situation. If she had been aware of how The God Damned Charging Cord was oppressing me, she'd have had me sent straight to the psych ward.

---

A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm immensely adaptable about big things yet oddly petty about small things. Pondering this, I've decided it's about life scale. If your life is big—you're busy, or dreamy, or have lots of pots on the stove and irons in the fire—you live in a vastly different universe than if your life is more lifesized. A sufficiently small life can revolve entirely around The God Damned Charging Cord, however odd that might seem to a harried cardiac nurse, or to a reader unprepared by paragraphs of psychological self-explanation.

Since I don't occupy myself with what's not happening, or make myself miserable over contingencies, my life gets extremely small. Drama is for larger livers. Most of us swell with vexations, resentments, fears, and thirsts. These "big canvas" tools stretch life fabric to distant horizons, framing out expansive MacMansions of Hell, well-stocked with construction materials for more additions.

In the hospital, I stuck out among hordes of teary, petrified patients beset by emotional turbulence, but this represented the opposite of superiority. They were the ones with great big lives, undergoing monumental events, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, while I was left in the dust, plotting my ratty little tactics re: The God Damned Charging Cord which—in the absence of heroic derring-do and epic tragedy—represented my entire pathetic little universe.

Everlasting gratitude for my friend Dave who brought a longer cord on day two. After that, all was well. The stent's been fine, too. Heart stuff is not what you think it is.

Let's call it the Shrunken World Scenario. For one thing, it explains why small children get hysterical over lost balloons. Kids have fabulous imaginations, but they don't use them to contrive grand grown-up predicaments. In their small worlds, a balloon looms large. So they are not wrong to mourn it.

The Shrunken World Scenario also explains the elderly propensity for staring placidly into space. It's not always a matter of frailty or dementia. They've seen through fake drama, ceased obsessing over "what's missing," and begun wave-riding. Those internal processes reduce external engagement and shrink lives. We don't send a social worker when grandpa keeps his powder dry amid adversity, because it's normal behavior at that age. Yet despite the overarching equanimity, old people can be notoriously petty. I’ve explained why. Within small lives, a tablecloth stain or leaky faucet looms awfully large.

---

When I moved to Portugal, I discovered that the old friends I'd arranged to temporarily stay with were vicious late-stage alcoholics. I endured this (and other chaos) while living out of a small suitcase as my possessions slowly drifted toward me via the world's slowest container ship. For some mysterious reason, I'd brought along, as my sole discretionary object, my favorite baseball card of my favorite player (Tom Seaver, 1970), and as I spent countless hours sitting in my parked car seeking refuge from the madness, Seaver's confident countenance stared encouragingly from the dashboard. Within the minuscule universe of that car cabin, the petty token had real power.

---

From 1997 to 2005, I endured a very different sort of trouble. Big Life trouble, running an enormous web community without revenue or seed money or tech help or really anything aside from my wits and adrenal glands. Eventually, moderators volunteered, thank God, but by then I was working eight full-time jobs, unpaid, for the endeavor, with more pots on the stove and irons in the fire than any human being should endure.

In that predicament, no dumb charging cord could bother me, and no lousy baseball card could help.

The Fish

The fish arrives at your table. It's beautifully, perfectly broiled. You beam brightly and tell the chef (who's missing a couple of teeth and whose eyes don't focus real good) that he's a genius. And because his customers view perfect fish as their entitlement, he's never been complimented in his life, so the acknowledgement means something.

But you take a bite, and it's a tiny bit dry. Just the tiniest bit, but it can't be denied: he over-did it. Slightly. Still delicious! Still within parameters! But he's no...no...

Your thought stream stalls. The sentence won't complete.

Are you averse to admitting your error? Would it scrape your ego to retract the mental assessment?

Or are you loathe to puncture your glowy sensation of virtue? Too self-satisfied from the dramatic vignette?

None of those things. The fish is dry, and he is a genius, and he'll nail it next time.

You go back another day, and he nails it.


Was I right the first time? Or did I make it happen with my beaming encouragement? Or did the flow work itself out while I simply waited? Or did I frame truth by my choice of start and end points?

Crazy Adaptable and Crazy Petty

I'm the most adaptable guy in the world. Several of my best friends voted Trump, and I feel perfectly at home in Ecuadorian or Cambodian restaurants, and I've palled around with addicts and murderers. I used to play blues in a white tuxedo in a ghetto crackhouse (there was gunfire twice), and after-hours Dominican meringue gigs at 3am in the South Bronx (back when the South Bronx was the South Bronx). In tenth grade I took the train into Manhattan for my weekly trombone lesson in 1977-era muggalicious Times Square. And I swaggeringly add stuff like watercress and farofa to my pasta without so much as blinking.

So how am I also the pettiest guy in the world? Just one example:

Here, Kleenex tissues are half the weight, which feels like torture to my expectations every damned time. And they come in flimsy cardboard boxes which hold like 40 tissues, total. When I pull one out of its box to gratify my runny schnoz, the box hoists along with it before reluctantly falling back to its surface with a dissatisfying "FUUUULFF". It drives me absolutely crazy. I haven't yet paid to ship kleenex boxes from America, but I'm more than halfway through the DOBEE dish cleaning pads, the Ivory Liquid detergent, the Theratears lubricating eyedrops, and the SimpleHuman quality trash bags I shipped over with my furniture to preserve my sanity.

And when I finally run out of Bandaids, and must use the hellishly expensive, 1965-ish ones sold in Europe which stick only to the wound and not at all to the skin around it, and are neither waterproof nor flexible, I will face a grave existential crisis.

Still Expecting Damaged People to Self-Repair to Accommodate Me

I was friends with two married couples back in the day. Two of them, some years back, chose to break up with their respective partners so they could be with each other. This was intensely painful for the rejected spouses, of course.

It happens. It's not nice, but it happens. Commitment to relationships is a thing, but so is love. It's a tricky wicket. I have no pat answers.

However, the happy couple, both of whom are celebrities here, had the chutzpah to produce a TV special detailing the storybook nature of their beautiful love story, retracing their circuitous paths to a middle-aged discovery of a level of towering, billowing love neither previously imagined possible. This shlock played on television in front of their exes, who'd done nothing but love them sincerely (one of them had moved across the world and put aside career ambitions for the relationship).

Holy Jesus on a shingle.

Obviously, I took the side of the jilted, and aimed to steer clear of the storybook lovers. But circumstance landed me in their midst, and, having no personal beef with either, I was cordial, and we kept up some contact for a while. But at some point they were shamelessly and callously inconsiderate of my feelings. And this actually shocked and perturbed me.

Proving, yet again, that the human psyche can't process the fact that damaged people cannot be expected to self-repair to accommodate you.

Consider the narcissistic absurdity of my thought process: These are people who not only cheated on their partners, and devastated innocent lives, but then went so far as to gloat about it on national TV. And when they were less than agreeable with me, well, I took UMBRAGE! How dare they! And it took me months - months! - to frame it correctly.


So that time I met Don Rickles, he was so - what's the word? - insulting!

The Kids Are All Right

I aim to be helpful. It hasn't gone well.

The punishment of good deeds can play out as a mild Reader Digest quip or a harrowing Twilight Zone episode. At worst, it can be quite a lot.

I frequently recall a rare instance of utter ease and perfection. My 80 year old childhood trombone teacher called to say:

"Pipes burst. Carpenter needs $2000. I don't have it. If you loan me, I'll pay back out of social security every month."

I burned 5 calories writing and mailing a check, and my bank statement reported monthly deposits until I was repaid. It was so luxuriously easy. A tangible fix to a dire circumstance at no real cost to anyone. The episode had glided on greasy smooth tracks, as close to "nothing" as any something can feel. And I often make this my basis of comparison. Especially regarding that weird night at Lou's house.

My friend Lou held a reading of the book he'd just published post-mortem, written by his miserable dead wife. She'd experienced horrors in childhood and never recovered. Her book recounted the horrors from which she'd never recovered.

She was born and raised in a big wonderful mansion in Austria with loving parents and siblings, boisterous dogs, and crackling fireplaces. As the eldest daughter, she'd inherit the house and raise a family of her own there one day. But her father died and they lost the house and moved into an apartment. The end.

In the living room of Lou's house (much nicer than anywhere I'd lived, and where his miserable dead wife had spent decades), several attendees wept openly, while the rest dabbed their eyes with tissues. So, so sad.

Me, I was incredulous. Really? That's it? She went from a house to an apartment (and then to Lou's pretty damned nice split-level colonial), and this compelled her to make herself — and everyone around her — thoroughly miserable forever and ever? I know people who don't even have apartments, and none of them paint grand tragedies.

The difference, I mused, was the difference. A small apartment — like where I lived — was a come-down from a mansion. Ok, sure. But when she'd hooked up with Lou, her mood might have elevated as she made up some lost ground! But no, her suffering was a one-way ratchet. And this made no sense.

So I diagramed her trajectory, stripping away particulars to consider the broad contour:

"I thought 'A' would happen, but 'B' happened."

Not being wealthy, this was unfamiliar algebra. I never had reason to assume that my expectations would be met. I figured I'd continue bobbing and floating amid the waves of an indifferent ocean for my duration. And the notion of haughty entitlement to expected results struck me as, well, hilarious. I tried not to guffaw as Lou read the very sad manuscript, his cheeks streaming with tears.

If I contrast my trombone teacher's problem with Lou's miserable dead wife's problem, the difference is clear: The former was a problem. The latter was not a problem.

In fact, stripped of particulars, scarcely any problems are problems. Most often, they boil down to "I thought 'A' would happen, but 'B' happened." And that's not a problem — unless you're immensely privileged and extraordinarily confused.

This explains why my problem-solving impulse creates problems for me. If you try to solve a problem that's not a problem for someone who imagines they have a problem, you will mostly just get entangled in their fervid problem creation. For my elderly trombone teacher that one time, I provided a solution. For nearly everyone else, I'm grist for their mill.

Really, Sir Lancelot, the kids are all right.