Postcards From My Childhood Part 17: A Bad Time in Tahiti

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"The child is the father of the man," they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


I always wondered about the word "hate". It was one of several terms I suspected I understood differently from other kids. So I decided it might clarify things to try to draw a line between hatred and milder aversions, finally devising this test:

If this person were shipped off to Tahiti, and you were guaranteed never to run into them, or hear about them, ever again, would you wish them a bad life in Tahiti?

I mentally ran through various candidates. Nasty kids and bullies. Sadistic teachers. Gristly historical figures. But in all cases, merely shipping them off and being done with them seemed to suffice. While I was easily capable of contempt and repugnance, I concluded that I didn't hate.

Oddly, I never once considered the inhabitants of Tahiti. A rare slip of my childhood self. But I certainly never wished them ill.

At age 61, I still haven't found anyone I'd wish a horrible time in Tahiti. Though I might need several massive container ships to handle the transport.

Yesterday, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts. I'm relieved that the system worked. I'm very relieved that, at least as a candidate, he won't receive secret security reports. And there has been no individual in my lifetime who I more desperately wished to vanish to Tahiti.

However I don't understand the celebration. This is not a good day. None of this is good. I can't find a framing that makes this good, except in some garish cartoon where The Bad Guys lost and we (of course, "we"!), The Good Guys, won.

We don't live in a cartoon, and I take no joy in seeing Trump punished or miserable, because I don't care about the guy. What I really want is to stop hearing about - stop thinking about - Donald Trump. I want him in Tahiti!

But everyone else seems to care persistently and deeply...one way or the other. Nearly every one of us, I'll bet, would eagerly follow his Tahitian exploits, for purposes of either adoration or abhorance. Everyone but me seems hellbent on paying him the infinite attention he so desperately seeks.

My baseline view of this guy stems from the acknowledgement that if someone had told me, in 1990 or 2000 or 2010, that I'd be compelled to speak his name daily for a decade, and constantly have that guy on my mind, that would be a seriously horrible outcome for my life.

So what I want is for it to stop. I do not enjoy paying attention to him. And hatred is attention. Strong attention. Rapt attention! I want two simple things: 1. preserve democracy, and 2. remove that guy from my screens.

I want him shipped off to Tahiti, and never heard from again. And I would not feel the slightest impulse to check in on him there. Because I have no strong attachments. No love, no hate, just a desperate desire to change the channel. So if, on that distant island, he passes his time jubilantly sucking down mocktails on the beach while feebly and briefly shtupping every porn star, fine! What the hell do I care?


The "Former Guy" trope, which superficially seemed to reflect that same mindset, was actually the very oppposite. Like "the N word", it was an example of power enhancement via euphemism. Both euphemisms glow with emotion and investment compared to the stupid, absurdly impotent terms they replace.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 16: Remember to Take Profit!

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"The child is the father of the man," they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


Of course, "Remember to take profit!" is not how I phrased it as a child. It was only much later that I learned that, until investors "take profit", by selling their investments, gains are strictly propositional. But my old-dude mind sometimes expresses things in boring, stodgy adult-speak. My inner eleven-year old tolerates this, so long as I haven't diluted his message.

I was fascinated, as a kid, by the psychology of saving. I still use the budgeting scheme I came up with at age seven. I wrestled with the question of exactly what we save for. Squirrels understand, at some level, that they’ll retrieve those acorns during winter. Their savings process is necessity, not luxury. But human saving is more abstract.

We spend on essentials - because they're essential - while saving comes out of the rest. It's deliberate deprivation, and it's a bit bizarre. We endure deprivation to asssure future enjoyment, which means either 1. your future self is a tyrant (who therefore doesn’t deserve it), or 2. you expect to know when to pull the trigger; i.e. when to stop saving and start spending. Neither seems quite rational.

I couldn't wrap my head around the issue, but I did send a postcard to my older self, reminding him/me to keep a keen eye so as not to miss the trigger-pulling point. When it’s time to spend, I need to actually do it!

I have, alas, failed momentously. I just gave away my beloved collection of aged Belgian ales and port wine, because I'd blindly awaited tyrannical future me to arrive, zestfully yanking corks and swigging grog. That guy never appeared. And if there was a clear moment for me to about-face and get drinking, I never noticed. So the bottles just sat there.

It's not just drinks. I've recently thrown away countless fruits of herculean effort, vast profit sadly unrealized because I never made a withdrawal. Nothing but deposits! I've ignored my childhood maxim. I failed to keep a keen eye.

But, after that recent experience, the issue was on my mind. And this week I found myself homeless, my house and car sold and my stuff in storage while I await a residence visa from Portugal - which should have arrived weeks ago but god knows when it's coming - leaving me with nearly just the shirt on my back and nowhere to go and nothing to do. With all my careful planning exploding on me, keenness finally arose.

My inital plan was to couch surf, book cheap AirBnBs, and generally crouch into a holding pattern, grimly awaiting the damned visa with a clenched jaw.

But no. I'll book nice hotels in cool places (none of them abroad, since Portugal has my damned passport). This won't be a grinding austerity. I''ll make it a blow-out. And I won't sweat the money one bit, because it's time to take profit.

I may even take a cruise. I'm not generally that guy, but in present circumstance, the easy infantilization of cruise ship life, padding around and catching some comedy or some solar radiation or a shrimp cocktail, maybe spending hours in my room reading, sounds good to me. Fewer decisions and less stress than driving around in a rental car, booking hotels and constantly loading and unloading suitcases in the dead of winter.

No one one could deny that my youthful deprivations were worth helping 60 year-old me avoid a hideous chapter, especially when this is the very thing youthful me urged me to do. I will take profit in a moment of genuine need, and not look back.

But I'll also execute a nuanced counterstep. A finishing touch; a coup de grace; described by Buddhists as "The Middle Path" and by mathematicians as "regressing to the mean." Any guesses? Take a moment to ponder!

As I loosen the buckle, allowing myself this profligacy, I'll also oh-so-gently feather back the other way. I'll stay at good hotels, but not exorbitant ones. And I'll find deals. I won't opt for the fanciest cruise in a high-status cabin. I'll find bang-for-the-buck last-minute offers. Just because you're blowing out doesn't mean you can't also pare down. Calories don't magically devalue in the presence of lots more calories.

I will not economize to the point where it no longer feels like a party. I'll be strategically profligate. To me, that's the sweet spot. There's a Zen art - or at least a level-headed maturity - to keeping firm-not-fraught attention on the opposite thing without spoiling the contour and spirit of what you're primarily trying to do.


My posting "Spending is Non-Linear" contains more specific guidelines, worked out later in life.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 15: The Declaration of Independence

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


As a child in 1969, I saw something on TV that deeply affected me. The Right at that time was fond of the sentiment "America: Love It or Leave It!" America is a free, just, moral country, so everyone needs to fall in line and shut up. You don't like the Vietnam War? You want to holler about minority or women's rights? Go start another country. This is how we do it here, and if you don't love it, again: leave it.

This was, on the face of it, patently un-American, of course. And not the only time half the country leaned authoritarian in their freedom-loving desire to uphold liberty and democracy. But the inherent contradiction was even less self-evident in those days.

A conservative rally was being held somewhere to celebrate our founding fathers and the glorious principles upon which the nation was based. Cannons firing and fifes and drums and lots of salutes to our boys over in 'Nam kickin' Asian commie butt. Meanwhile a reporter strolled around the crowd, asking participants for their opinions about snippets of writing, which he didn't identify as having been drawn from the Declaration of Independence. Not the parts we all know (i.e. the first two sentences). Lesser-known chunks. And every one of these respondents belligerently invited the reporter to take his Commie propaganda elsewhere.

This landed hard on me as a thoughtful seven year old. Wait. They love America's founding principles. But they spit in your face when you quote them? My little brain ground feverishly at the illogic. And I directed myself to watch for this phenomenon in other contexts. And, man, there's been plenty to see. It's just further evidence for my claim that most people are posing nearly all the time.


Just one example among multitudes (few intelligent observers lack for examples of this phenomenon): I don't talk about yoga with yoga people anymore. I know from experience that I tend to disturb and annoy them. Mr. Weirdo talking crazy talk. It's not that I hold heretical views, or am antagonistic or arrogantly condescending. I amiably chime in with observations more or less straight from the teachings, but all of them - including the teachers (especially the teachers) are into yoga in precisely the same way 1969 Republicans were into the Declaration of Independence.


If humans were a truth-oriented species, this would be a whole other world. Earthly existence would not be devoted to concocting and inhabiting fake dramatic trajectories, and we would not be endlessly and transparently posing as this or that. So the truth seldom attracts. In fact, it repels...at least mildly. This is a reasonably easy observation to accept, yet I find that I, at least, nonetheless get snared by it in day-to-day life. I have a visceral and seemingly irradicable assumption that most people love truth like I do (so apparently I don’t love truth so very much after all).

Postcards From My Childhood Part 14: The Fish

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


Visiting a big city aquarium, I raptly watched hundreds of fish swim around an enormous tank. As always, there was one dodgy fish. He was missing half a fin, and sported a few odd bite marks. He wasn't quite an entire fish, and I became obsessed with determining whether he knew.

Lazily paddling endless pointless circles in formation with his school, was he abashed? Or self-conscious? Was he grimacing? Did he feel like less than a fish? I studied his pursed fish lips, trying to catch him uttering a weary "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck."

After a half hour of riveted observation, I was certain I knew the answer: He didn't feel diminished in the least. Nor did he have his back up, shoving his messed-up fin in the other fishes' faces and challenging them to be okay with it. He was simply doing his thing. Just being a fish, cool as a sea cucumber.

The fish really knew how to live. I decided to imprint my memory of him as a hero and role model.


Many of the postcards I sent forward from my childhood became constant guiding principles, but this one had a time delay. As I grew older, and maladies and issues compiled, I adopted the normal framing, grunting an increasingly aggrieved "Doh!!" upon each fresh injury. But just as I began to spin it all up into a sense of cumulative burden and decline, I suddenly recalled the fish.

Since then, I've lost my hair and received a cardiac stent, a hearing aid, and a wealth of daily pills, along with more challenging maladies than I can count. I launched Chowhound as a youthful-seeming 34 and left it at 44 so haggard and traumatized that I looked twenty years older (if people asked, I'd tell them I was 73, just to hear them marvel at my spryness). Having taken to heart the Zen injunction to "burn yourself completely", I’ve wound up looking like someone who'd been sleeping in a pile of ashes.

But that's just the external. Internally, I've been blithely me the whole time. I've lived straight through it all, treating it like a ride, come what may. I’m fresh as a daisy (or whatever the non-fruity version of that expression might be). 

This involves no cinematic display of chin-trembling bravery. It was more like how glasses, for me, are neither half-empty not half-full (if there's water I drink with gusto, and, if not, I find more water....or simply move on, like the monks and the coffee). Every moment thrusts forward a challenging card hand to play, and I do so exuberantly, without a shred of stoic resignation or self-actualized "positive thinking".

I am bemusedly responsive. Here I am. That's all, and that's sufficient. I'm proud to have grown up to be the fish!

"Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." - Anthony de Mello

See "No Less a Fish", a short posting relating this insight to the aging process.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 13: The Invisible Man

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


I was in the early childhood stage of feeling anxious about people watching me going to the bathroom. Meanwhile, I was reading a comic book about The Invisible Man. So I worried, of course, about the possibility that in spite of my diligent effort to shut and lock the bathroom door, the Invisible Man might be present, watching me pee.

But then I realized, with relief, that The Invisible Man watches everyone pee. So it's no problem. No shame!

As with the rest of these postcards, a simple childhood insight was deliberately sent forward, to my great benefit. On a pragmatic level, I don't get uptight during my female doctor's prostate check. On a spiritual level, I've become less ashamed of past misdeeds. If anyone - real or imagined - were tallying them, I take comfort in knowing that my mound of wickedness and transgression pales in comparison to humanity's cumulative towering mountain. To anyone who might take stock, I'm an unexceptional parasite.

This helps, because I've had a problem with shame all my life. It's not from my parents. I'm to blame (ha!), by choosing to hold myself to a moral standard that I frequently miss. A terrible combination! But as my "Invisible Man" epiphany continues to expand - even now, five decades later - I no longer cringe at my remembered failings. And I only very rarely blurt out random stuff after flashing recollections of embarrassment. When wrongly accused, I chuckle and shrug, no weight added to my burden. And when I'm genuinely to blame, I apologize sincerely, and, if I'm lucky, enjoy absolution via refusal of my apology (thankfully, few people graciously accept apologies nowadays; it's a major saving grace of this world).

As a result, while "deserve" isn't a word I use much (it's one of those theatrical terms humans concoct to keep themselves miserable), at age 55 I'm starting to feel like I deserve to be here. That might sound odd, but most people subconsciously feel undeserving of existence (and largely blame it on whichever personal characteristic they spend their time obsessing about).


How do I know most people feel undeserving of existence? Because I sense their ruminations. But they needn't worry. The Invisible Man watches everyone pee.

A Seven Year Old's Approach to Spending

I use, literally, a seven year-old's approach to nonessential spending. I invented it at age 7, and, as with many of my childhood insights, I've stuck with it because it never stopped working. It's gotten me through times of feast and famine, and leveled out the swings. I think I might have nailed it!

When I was 7, I had a ton of pennies. I decided that I could spend them freely, with hardly a thought (I could not, however, go nuts, because then they'd run out. So I certainly wouldn't go looking for excuses to spend them, but didn't limit myself when there was genuine desire). Nickels required vigilance, and dimes were spent only on special occasions. Quarters? Practically never!

Bubblegum, costing a penny, could be enjoyed freely (though, in practice, rarely more than a few at a time). Baseball cards (a nickel) could be bought judiciously. I can't really remember what cost a dime, because such items were mostly out of my league. Comic books, which cost a quarter, might as well have been bicycles. They were acquired only as gifts.

At age 18, working a part time job in college, I could spend quarters freely (just in time for Asteroids!), though, in practice, rarely more than a few at a time. Dollars required some vigilance (my weekly bacon cheeseburger at the local diner). Fives were for special occasions, and tens, practically never.

In the early days of my music career, I could spend ones freely (this is when I started building my ethnic dining expertise), though, in practice, rarely more than a few at a time. Fives required vigilance (an occasional batido de guanabana along with that roast pork), and tens only on special occasions. Twenties practically never.

Now I can spend twenties freely (DVDs! Multiple craft beers! Parking garages! $15 entrées!), rarely, in practice, more than a few at a time. Fifties are spent judiciously (cheap travel), and hundreds when absolutely necessary. Thousands practically never. And, as was true at all previous levels, I feel content. I have never in my life hankered to level up (am I the only such American?). I can't imagine I'd have any more fun with free-flowing fifties or hundreds. Really, I was having an awfully good time with Asteroids and unadorned roast pork!

I believe my sensible approach to money stems from this lifelong system. I've never had to tightly budget myself, because expenses are always under control. I don't feel much pull toward compulsive spending. I'm neither stingy nor extravagant.

The essential part is that I've never gone nuts within the freely-spendable quantity. If I had, I'd have been forced me to reappraise that privilege (once you've worked through your trove of pennies, you'll need to cool it with the bubblegum...and I don't want to cool it with the bubblegum!).


It's simplistic and juvenile, sure, but there are realms where grown-up complications mostly just help us hide from the truth.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 12: The Maze

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


To solve a maze, you don't need to visit every corridor and hit every dead end. Once you have the solution, the maze loses its interest. To dawdle in a solved maze makes no sense at all.

I recognized that people do, in fact, dawdle in solved mazes. And to some extent, it makes sense. You may have discovered the best dish on a menu, but lesser items might be delicious, as well. But there comes a moment when you've mined the value from a thing. Life is an adventure, and every dedicated adventurer learns to recognize that moment and to swiftly move on.


Here's the problem, which I didn't foresee as a kid:

If you develop an instinct for detecting this moment and moving on, things can hyperaccelerate. You find yourself learning and experiencing in lots of different realms in lots of different ways, perpetually thirsting for value and diversity (imagine a dog with his nose sticking out of a car window, hyperstimulated by the myriad passing scents).

But the unexpected truth is that it exhausts. You don't need to learn and experience absolutely everything (just as a maze solver needn't plumb every maze passage) to see clearly through, and to grok the underlying patterns. And value depletes shockingly quickly if you opt not to stick around for every single repetitive level of every video game.

The world is optimized for dawdlers who endlessly wander the same corridors. The world does not stand up to the scrutiny of those who resist the cheap allure of the various Skinner boxes. God, it turns out, pads like a motherfucker.

More here

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Postcards From My Childhood Part 11: Heating the Entire Atlantic Ocean

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.

I was reading a kid's book about survival where the author described how, bobbing in his life vest in the north Atlantic, he'd managed to lose his waterproof body heater. It had, he wryly noted, gone on to try to heat the entire Atlantic Ocean.

"Try to heat the entire Atlantic Ocean." That image really connected for me. So I pushed forward this reminder to myself: don't ever try to heat the entire Atlantic Ocean.

This isn't the same as the mundane warning "don't take too much on." I like taking too much on! That's where all the fun (and productivity) is! I was warning myself, rather, not to aim for infinity. Alas, I disregarded this advice in running Chowhound, where I completely disregarded any breaking point, injuring myself in some ways that can't be healed. I think I'd seen it coming as a child.


There is one, and only one, way in which humans can heat the entire Atlantic Ocean without draining themselves - the only infinite outpouring requiring no replenishment: love. That's the sole inexhaustible resource, even though it's the most stingily apportioned. The entire Atlantic Ocean can be filled with love without depleting batteries - the single case where infinity represents a warm invitation rather than a fraught danger.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 10: Perils Are Not Infinite

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


As a small child, I had a terrible fear of being lost in crowds. It wasn't the fear of separation, per se; it was that I didn't understand the world well enough to gauge the actual downside - to know whether I risked permanent separation. What if I never, ever found my parents? Would I wind up in some orphanage, dressed in rags and being served gruel?

Eventually, I came to understand that even if I did get badly lost, I would - by hook or by crook - that night undoubtedly find myself back home safely in my bed. I might need to undergo some fraught drama and run down some dead ends, but, really, that ending was inevitable. Lost kids at shopping malls don't simply plunge into an abyss.

Other kids, smarter than me, instinctually understood all this. They seemed oblivious to peril, with their innate understanding that risk doesn't extend to infinity.

This realization has applied widely: to broken hearts, crushing disappointments, disastrous failures, bracing humiliations, and bad situations of every stripe. Whenever I feel on the nauseous brink of permanent smoldering extinguishment of life as I know it - permanent total pain, permanent total inability to ever get back to my life - I recall my lost toddler self. I remember, viscerally, his sense of clammy dread at the prospect of infinite peril. And I walk with him through the instant when he realized that even if he made wrong moves, and adults in charge made lots of stupid decisions (as they so often do), and dead-ends were hit and gulping drama was experienced...he'd ultimately find himself back home safely in his bed*.

One problem is that an over-abundance of limp cliches apply. "One day you'll laugh at all this", "Tomorrow's another day", "This too shall pass" and the rest all roll way too easily off the tongue and can't match the deeper emotional wisdom of my childhood flash of insight, which evoked a deep-seated understanding, beyond words, that I'll still be me, living my life, no matter what. Perils are not infinite.


* I actually save this for particularly upsetting situations. My first line of defense is the "Oh, Shit!" Antidote.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 9: Aging

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


As I wrote in my account of Chowhound's latter days:

I don't remember much, aside from day after day of waking, going to the computer, and, many hours later, getting back up and going off to sleep. I'd often forget to eat. Days would drift by where I didn't go outside or talk to anyone. Literally everything in my life was eventually let go of: my health, most of my friendships, my musical career (even my trombone technique), and any notion of romance.

When the smoke cleared, I found myself in a Rip Van Winkle situation, and my emergence from suspended animation has provided a unique perspective.

Having lost track of many friends for a decade or so, I've gradually reestablished contact over the past few years. Of course, most are not as I remember them. In 1998, we were young. Now, we're not. Fifteen years is a surprisingly long time. So there's grey hair galore, and, through my eyes, the transition has been jarringly sudden. Normally, friends age so gradually that the process is barely noticeable. But to me, it's instant-on. It's as if they'd been baked overnight in kilns.

And here's what I've noticed. Old friends divide into two camps: those who are exactly the same beneath what seems like stage makeup, and those who seem squarely (in all senses of the word) middle-aged.

Naturally, I gravitate to the former. I feel they've kept alive something that others have let die. But I'm not certain I'm right about this. Might it be more flowing, more grounded, more sane to fully inhabit one's age? After all, "Peter Pan" is never a flattering association when it appears in the titles of self-help books.

The other day, as I ran up a flight of steps, a stranger tightened his face and asked if maybe I wasn't "a bit too old" for such undignified behavior. The suggestion struck me dumb; I didn't know how to even process it. Am I really supposed to constantly rejigger myself to meet people's expectations of how someone of my nominal age ought to act? If so, geez, I'd need to rethink pretty much everything!

When I was seven, and just beginning to send messages ahead in time to my adult self, the most urgent one was this: grown-ups who sever all ties with their childhood selves lose something essential. The perqs of maturity should be fully embraced, but a certain essence must be retained. I observed that this essence rarely survived to adulthood, but my childhood self, precociously aware of being father to my adult self, was determined to see it through.

So I know his answer: he chooses perpetuation, and releases a jolt of righteous satisfaction when he sees himself in me and in others. Dad, in other words, approves.

But is he being a tyrant? Is the original protagonist in this story blocking the natural progression out of some narcissistic determination to remain central to the narrative? Or is it simply a matter of clarity and freshness and light declining to be crusted over by bitterness, psychic baggage, free radicals, and other empty sedimentation?


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 8: The Director

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


I saw a famous director (I wish I could remember who) on a late night talk show, complaining about how he can't find any great screenplays. The host smiled and replied, "You shouldn't have said that. Now everyone is going to try to get their scripts to you!" The director chuckled and said, "Good luck! I'm not very accessible, and scripts that come in just sit forever in a stack". The host, confused by the seeming contradiction, asked him how he expects to see the good scripts.

With a gleam in his eye, the director replied, "Anyone with the phenomenal talent, resourcefulness, and creativity to come up with a world class screenplay also has the talent, resourcefulness, and creativity to get it to me."

I understood immediately, and sent forward a postcard reminding myself to never, ever enter through front doors.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 7: Competition

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


When I was 17 years old, I auditioned for the Eastman School of Music. I was told that of a hundred trombonists auditioning, only three would be selected. Hearing that completely psyched me out. I did not play well.

I wound up attending the University of Rochester, with which Eastman is associated. And I took a bunch of classes, and played in ensembles, at Eastman, so I had a chance to hear those three kids. And I was absolutely shocked to find that they weren't all that good!

I pondered it, and decided that, of the 100 kids, something like 70 must have been cloddishly untalented, 25 were good-not-great, and 5 were very good, like me, but had been psyched out. So the three best of the "good-not-great" pack won (clunk!). My conclusion (and the postcard) was: just because there's heavy competition doesn't mean winning is necessarily difficult.

Eventually, I realized that all competition is a self-defeating illusion. Just 1. be the best, and 2. do your best...and let the chips fall. If you're not the best, you ought to be way less concerned with competing, and way more concerned with getting better!


See also this.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 6: Guileless Clunk

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


At age 12, I signed up for a ping pong competition. The best player, Ricky, was an arrogant, tanned, broad-shouldered 15 year old California adonis with a custom-made paddle. I, pallid and short for my age, was not deemed a hot prospect, so they matched me against Ricky in the first round. I was a pawn to be plowed through en route to Ricky's inevitable triumph.

Ricky sneered at me and launched his famous serve, tossing the ball very, very high into the air, then slicing it so fast the eye couldn't follow the motion. It tore by me. I never even moved. And it dawned on me that I could never beat Ricky on his own terms. I couldn't match his vicious slams, or counter his esoteric spins and slices. I'd miss a lot more of those shots than he would. So I decided to concentrate entirely on missing less than him.

When Ricky's shots, humming with topspin, sizzled toward my side of the table, I'd simply return them. Clunk. Right down the middle of the table. Nothing fancy. No english. No pace. Just a big, dumb, clunking return - volley after volley, point after point. And Ricky, sensing my strategy, began tightening up, returning my cloddish volleys with increasingly hostile smashes....some of which missed. Meanwhile, none of mine missed. Clunk. Right down the middle. Clunk. Clunk.

I won, of course. And, of course, he refused to shake my hand. Poor guy. I may, to this day, be the worst thing that ever happened to him; the sole blot on Ricky's otherwise immaculately golden life record. Here's to you, Ricky, and the botoxed pilates teacher with whom I visualize you sipping overly buttery Chardonnay in your Malibu hot tub. Remember me by my sound: "Clunk".

Sometimes a person works hard, learns all the moves, develops talent with arduous training, and some lazy, no-talent shmuck comes along and finds a way to undercut you. While it's important to develop one's talents with due discipline (as I've done in a number of realms, myself), it's also fun to sometimes be the undercutting shmuck. The guy who gets there via guileless clunks.

Consider my little video, "The Enigma of Von's Magical Cookies". It's dreadfully shot and edited, the sound's abysmal, and the whole thing seems pretty aimless. I'm incredibly bad at every necessary skill, and used lousy tools to record it (a smartphone camera and a Radio Shack microphone).

Yet it's got something. As time has passed, and I view it with a fresh eye, I see that it's actually good - in vibe and overall effect, if not on any actual merits. Guileless clunk won the game. Lots of people really like it (I got a beautiful note from Von's surviving daughter - Von, alas, passed away shortly after the video was shot), but a friend who's a legendary film director, and who otherwise likes my endeavors, detests it. In fact, it makes him apoplectic. He's certainly not jealous, any more than Ricky was jealous of my table tennis skills. After all, my video's not 1/1000th as good as the worst of his films. But all he can hear is the "Clunk", and it's pure anathema. He wouldn't hate it this much if he didn't recognize that it works. Failure doesn't provoke hatred.

Guileless clunk can be used even at higher skill levels. For instance, I've played piano since age six, but never really learned piano technique. My left hand is kind of gimpy, and where a serious pianist might have nine hundred different ways to do a certain thing, I have only four or five. But that's enough to get by. I'm no clod; I've put in my 10,000 hours of practice. But I'm not versatile or elegant or well-taught or "proper". I take liberties and cheat with quirky shortcuts. Never having taken the pains to become a "real" pianist; I opt for the easy route. If you heard me, you'd think I was professional. But when pro pianists hear me, all they hear is the "clunk". And they want to strangle me. Because it works.

My father, a wonderful sculptor, always wanted to try painting, but he knew he had no facility with color. Finally, he came up with a dazzlingly creative solution: he'd paint only with primary colors. Brilliant! And the results were distinctive and appealing, though not very painterly. But they antagonized his second wife, a well-trained serious painter. Noticing months later that he'd stopped painting, I asked him why, and all he'd say was that his marriage was more important.

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Postcards From My Childhood Part 5: The Strong Drunk

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget.


When I was 16, I took the train into Manhattan for my weekly trombone lessons in a claustrophobic little music studio near scary Times Square. This was 1978, the era of unending strikes, racial unrest, corruption, budget defaults, crumbling infrastructure and rampant muggings and car thefts. When it came out in 1981, the sci-fi film "Escape From New York" didn't seem like so huge a stretch.

So I picked up a book about "urban survival", which turned out to be pretty silly, though highly amusing. But it did contain one insight which I've retained. In the chapter about surviving bar fights, it explained that drunk people are sluggish and clumsy, so it's easy to outrun or outmaneuver them. But if they ever get their hands firmly on you, watch out, because drunks are stronger than sober people.

I've never been in a bar fight, but the image of the strong drunk has become a touchstone for me. Time and again I've found myself confronting people (or institutions) functioning as Strong Drunks, and who therefore needed to be finessed or adroitly outmaneuvered. The mantra is: don't ever let them get you in their clutches!

Cops, for example, are strong drunks. If a policeman decides, rightly or wrongly, that you're on the wrong team, and has you within his grasp, you will be out of options. There's ample maneuvering room in defusing that determination, but if it goes the wrong way, and you're within their range, you'll find yourself utterly powerless.

Cockroaches are the opposite. A roach can't hold or harm you...but they hide well and they run fast. If you manage to catch one, it can be effortlessly stamped out, but there are always more of them craftily evading you, and you can't do much about it. To a cockroach, you are the strong drunk.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 4: Backsplash

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


As a child, my technique for relaxing and falling asleep was to visualize a stressful moment I'd experienced during the day, and to imagine myself, in that moment, falling down into a cozy bed.

It worked well, but, after a while, I discovered to my horror that whenever anything stressful happened, I'd find myself growing sleepy and wanting to fall down into a cozy bed.

I felt it was important to remember this backlash effect...hence the postcard.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 3: The Iron

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


When I was shipped off to college, I was given a strange and foreign object: an iron. And since they don't come with instruction manuals, I had no choice but to teach myself to use it. It wasn't long before I discovered the first rule of ironing: you can't iron away a crease. You can reduce it some, but the fabric will always have an inclination to bend there, and there's no changing that, even with the brutest force.

This for some reason fascinated me. I spent time rolling it around my mind. And, eventually, I had an insight, realizing that there is, after all, one - and only one - way to eliminate a crease: flip the garment and then iron to create an opposite crease.

I realized I'd hit upon an essential truth, and have applied it all my life. For example, if you're plagued by nightmares full of scary monsters, the trick is to love the monsters (this was surely the original intent behind giving children teddy bears).

The cure for ennui: make life exciting for others. If you feel you're not getting your due, work to give others their's. If you feel helpless, help others. If no one understands you, show people you understand them. If you're lonely, ease others' loneliness. If you're sad, cheer people up.

Gandhi's entreaty to be the change you seek in the world, Kennedy's appeal to ask what you can do for your country, and Roosevelt's fear of fear all involve the same mental jujitsu.

I learned to never expect payback. That just creates a new crease. You've got to put all attention on the flip itself, keeping the fabric crisp and well-ironed.

One of the easiest, quickest examples: if you're scared, reassure someone. If there's no one around, an imaginary someone will do. (Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell. That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some reason, childish and loopy. Noticing this, by the way, entailed yet another flip.)

The biggest/greatest flip of all is well-illustrated by the story of the Russian cosmonaut, re: this movie clip I keep linking to:




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Postcards From My Childhood Part 2: The Piano

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"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.


I started taking piano lessons when I was a mere six years old, and it wasn't long before I did what every child is irresistibly compelled to do: I used my forearms to mush down all the keys. And I listened very keenly to the result, which I recognized as more than mere cacophony.

I found, to my delight, that within this jumble of notes was every song. I could, if I concentrated, pick out Row Row Row Your Boat...in any key! TV commercial jingles. Concertos. Every song ever written, and every song that ever might be written was there to be selectively tuned in to. Nothing was "played", yet everything could be "heard".

I had learned a new faculty; focusing attention to create the perception of change, as opposed to the more normal passive perception of change. The sound entering my ears was unvarying - "out there" was an unchanging jumble. But "in here" played exquisite symphonies. It wasn't imagination; the notes had actually been struck. It was just a matter of internally moving one's attention around static notes, rather than having notes externally moved around one's static attention.

On a gut level (I wouldn't have been able to articulate any of this at the time), I came to suspect that this was how it all works. We live surrounded by a static Everything, and apparent movement and change are created by movements of your attention. All notes are struck; we spend our lives arbitrarily tuning in to this or that.

For one thing, where's Heaven, assuming there is one? We've mapped much of the galaxy, but have yet to find an immense cloud populated with happy reclining people. Yet lots of wise people assure us heaven exists. Indeed, I've experienced it, for fleeting moments, and so have you, but we didn't transport up into the sky - nor have we descended for fleeting moments in Hell. Both were experienced (and are always available for re-experiencing) right here.

And what isn't experienced right here? Even when we travel, isn't it always with the same eery, unshakeable sense of right-hereness? Who can fail to suspect that this pervasive Presence isn't the bedrock of it all?

All notes are struck. That's the postcard.


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Postcards From My Childhood Part 1: The Tree

"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.

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Like many kids, I was into lots of stuff. I juggled, did magic tricks, collected baseball cards, read astronomy and science fiction books, played trombone, piano, and basketball, led jazz bands, acted in school plays, published an underground newspaper, shot super 8 movies, and practiced yoga, meditation, and self-hypnosis. I didn't particularly care if I was any good at these things, though. Like Max Fischer, the lead character in Rushmore, I ran on pure fascinated zeal.

One day, while meditating, I managed to accept and forgive the entire universe, and to earnestly offer my body's component molecules to the four winds. It was perfect surrender, accompanied by a profound shift of perspective. My heart contained everything. It contained the universe. I'd had everything backwards - the universe doesn't contain us, we contain it. I knew this with the sober certainty of someone waking from a dream. I understood that it's all perfect.

My reaction, as a twelve year old, was along the lines of "Whoa, that was cool!" I told my mom, who said it sounded very nice and suggested I go outside and play.

I couldn't talk about what I'd experienced, because it was impossible to describe (the above was just a cruddy metaphor), and also because I discovered, over time, that it wasn't something people could relate to. I ranked it on par with single-ear-wiggling as another cool little trick I could do which others can't. And, as I grew busy with other activities, I lost touch with it. I did, however, foresee that I'd later try to reclaim it, and that it wouldn't be easy to do so as a grown-up. So I sent myself this image:

You're sitting on a tree branch, facing the trunk. Use a saw to cut the branch in front of you, crazy though it seems. And have faith: you won't fall, you'll float!

One reason I'd been sanguine about letting this stuff go was was that I knew it didn't matter. The underlying truth is what it is, regardless. If I were to pass decades lost in foggy delusion, it wouldn't make any difference, because upon rediscovering the perfect, timeless truth, nothing would seem to have been lost - the very notion of lostness being part of the delusion. So I sent myself that message with a playful wink, because it absolutely didn't matter. But I knew I'd forget that it didn't matter. Hence the tip.

It's paradoxical, but while it made sense at the time, after several busy and untranscendent decades, I found myself, for the past eight years, determinedly steeping in hours of daily meditation...and endlessly revisiting the tree image. How encrusted I'd become! With all that practice, I passed through the various milestones, and enjoyed some interesting experiences, but my heart, while open, wouldn't expand. I was sawing away at branches, but the damned tree was just a tree!

During Hurricane Sandy, I spent a few days cooped up in the guest room of my mother's apartment. My mom's great but....well, you know how that can be. Plus, I was stressed about the storm damage and my refugee status. I wasn't getting much sleep, and had been surviving on Chinese food delivery and skipping meditation (and stopping meditating can be worse than never having started). In that lousy condition, I trudged out to find gas at the height of the shortage.

After waiting an hour in line for a gas station still a half mile away, my tank nearly empty, a driver cut the line just ahead of me. I jumped out of my car and went apeshit. Yelling and screaming...it wasn't pretty. This was completely unlike me, and I felt deeply shocked and ashamed at myself.

Only for a minute, though. I value moments when errant bits of rabid stakedness gurgle up from my depths. If I can quickly snap back to equanimity, the door remains open for a moment, and the source - the unconscious contraction - can be sussed out, dredged up to awareness and surrendered in meditation along with my better-lit parts. You can't, after all, surrender what you're unaware of.

So a few moments after my shameful display, I caught myself, calmed deeply and probed for the source. To my horror, it wasn't some foggy fearful bit of primal grasping. Rather, it had flowed from my center; my ground zero. The rage had stemmed from the very core of my being. It wasn't something that could be shaved off!

I saw that the years I'd spent meditating, hoping to shave off all the crud, were - enjoyable and salubrious though the practice is - the ultimate example of turd polishing. It's all crud, all the way down. I'd been "letting go" only in the sense of someone standing safely on a concrete ledge, dropping unwanted baggage into a pit. I had to actually jump in, myself! It all needed to be let go of. Anything here [I gesture toward my body] is, in the end, just a mass of congealed urges, fears, and drama. One can peel away at it forever, but that's all there is. To the very core.*

So I smiled and allowed myself to fall blindly backwards into oblivion - to throw away the thrower-awayer. A quick jolt of fear made me hesitate. But suddenly I remembered: Cut the branch in front of you, crazy though it seems. And have faith: you won't fall, you'll float.

Thanks, kid.


* - which isn't to say worthiness never emerges from the crud. It does. But, tellingly, the really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - "out of nowhere" and hard to claim credit for.


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