Grow up

I've started reading an amazing book: Getting the Love You Want. I’m up to chapter 5. It's all about how early childhood experiences, especially with your caregivers, influence your choice of mates later in life, and, more profoundly, why and how you experience love.

I hate ebooks! Every time I use them, I have to relearn how to navigate. But there's no going back, I can't keep accumulating physical books, and have no time left to wait for their delivery. Libraries and book stores... what the heck are those?!

Learning and relearning: how to love, earn a living, survive, enjoy such a rapidly changing world.

Today’s assignment is to write the limo scene without dialog.

I asked my LA advisor why he liked my bike race scene so much better than everything else I showed him to date. He said, now that I know you can write, I can tell you what I really thought about the dialog you sent earlier: rank amateur wretched puke!

Someone else I sent it too basically said the same thing: “The dialogue sounds too stiff and contrived. It doesn't sound like a conversation.”  She apologized afterwards when I said ouch!

I think (I hope) she was the only other person I sent it to. I was SO EXCITED when I wrote that dialog that my instinct was probably to send it to everyone I know! It was the first dialog I wrote after structuring and restructuring the script for six months or so in response to contradictory feedback from three opposing camps (positive, negative, and silent).

No matter how bad it was, what I needed more than anything at that moment was encouragement! And despite all evidence to the contrary, I still somehow felt like a natural-born screenwriter! What the…?

I now appreciate even more deeply how good a teacher is my LA advisor. After my first dialog submission, he bit his tongue and wrote back “hey Ben, I think it's a great start,” and sent a bunch of suggestions about movies I should watch and things I should do differently.

I was chomping at the bit to do more, but he delayed responding, sometimes for weeks. He even asked me for advice about a project he was developing. I was so thrilled and flattered to oblige, no matter how great or little use any of my suggestions actually were to him.

I am learning an entirely new craft, and am repeatedly shocked at how tone-deaf I am regarding my mistakes. It seems so unusual to return to a beginner’s stage at my age. I’ve even been called adolescent for doing so.

What is it about achieving expertise that repulses me so much? I love the respect it brings, but loathe the predictability of knowing the answers. I really hate know-it-all close-mindedness, which is so hard to avoid with expertise.

Virgin territory is my sandbox; vocational risk, my drug of choice.

I guess what I really want is to play again. I can’t wait to keep writing my screenplay!



The Uncanny Valley

The problem with stereotypes is the uncanny valley. Being almost-human isn’t just creepy, it robs people of their humanity in the profoundest way, far more than a caricature that doesn’t pretend.

The phrase was coined by a robotics professor and is most commonly used in the context of CGI (computer-generated imagery) and its eerie similarity to the mediation of real actors. I wonder if moving images felt the same way when they were invented. Maybe not, since the public gravitated toward the new industry rather than recoiling from it.

Any representation, in fiction, nonfiction, visual art, even music, that feels close-but-no-cigar fake yields the same repulsion. It's worse than something that's far off. Way wrong can be funny, but slightly wrong—especially if trying to be right—is just yuk.

Sunday night at a fundraiser, I heard a fellow named Bernie Glassman, who cofounded zenpeacemakers.com and coauthored the soon-to-come The Dude and the Zen Master with Jeff Bridges, say “wars aren’t fought over opinions, only over what’s right and wrong.”

I’ve learned this past year that Buddhism was popularized in America largely by Jews, mostly since the 60s, but also in the 19th Century. They call them “JuBus”! Zen Master Bernie said he’d read my screenplay when it's ready for feedback. I love his “mantra”: “just my opinion, man!”

The near-miss is unnerving, the what-if so troubling. But wars are fought over entrenched polarities, when opinions become opposites in a world of disturbing nuance. The miracle of meditation, if enlightenment is possible, is promising to teach peace in the uncanny valley, equanimity in the face of stereotypes.

Vive la Différance

“Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” ― Winston Churchill

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.” ― Steve Jobs

“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” ― Emma Goldman

“Categorization is rudimentary theory.” ― Wassily Leontief

I grew up with ideology. So did the world at that time. You were right or left, or, if American, in the self-described middle. My mother called me a “Brooks-Brothers Marxist,” because of my young penchants for suits and leftist world views.

My political education took place in London before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as a result, America seemed like a foreign place, its bland, muddy middle of isms: liberal, conservative, individual, and exceptional. Historical materialism, in contrast, unlocked the secret workings of human society for me, though its very language was taboo outside of academia and in many places inside too. I’ll never forget my conversation (too polite a term) with a Polish woman in a pub about how the communist societies of Eastern Europe did not represent the kind of social systems for which Marx advocated. She would hear none of it, nor would most of the Western world. Mostly what’s left, it seems, is my handedness, one strange expression of which, I just noticed, is a drawer full of left-hand gloves, their partners lost to the daily toll of biological bias.

It all seems like such ancient history. Left doesn’t even warrant its own color any more. A mere news commentator could redefine red as a Republican State at the dawn of the 21st Century. The hierarchy used to be so clear: one’s relationship to the means of production was the primary determinant of human welfare: suffering, happiness, opportunity, freedom. The multitude of cultural, demographic, and even environmental concerns are just superficial manifestations of the fundamental material relationships between us. Marx called them “superstructures”. Take race, class, and gender: your class, no doubt, has greater impact on your life experience than race or gender according to the Left. Women and people of color are generally more oppressed, because they have historically weaker positions relative to the means of production; a wealthy Black woman, for example, would generally have a better life than a poor white working man. OMG, did those arguments seem so insightful back in the day, and now so radically simplistic. Just ask Oprah!

Generalizations and stereotypes are dangerous, but we need them to make sense of the world, or at least we think we do. Without prejudice, or categorical thinking, we would be overwhelmed by difference: lost within infinite diversity. Discrimination, like discernment, can be a value-neutral, even elegant, affair; its judgmental—even hateful—attire is worn when our most craven defensive instincts attempt to bar unlike guests. Even life and death, the ultimate bifurcation, would become just a spectrum of possibilities without our abilities to discriminate. As with variations in aversion to risk, each of us has a uniquely personal relationship to typological rigidity, what kinds and how much we need to navigate comfortably through the day. As days pass, this relationship often changes. My need for ideological distinctions has dissipated over time, but I am well aware that a common definition of aging is the opposite tendency. Old dogs are blindest to their own attitudinal biases. The theories of one generation can make perfect sense to its members, but not jive at all with the experience of the next. And so it went: identity flipped the hierarchy, just as Marx “stood Hegel on his head” (which may be as famous a Leftist misquote as Emma Goldman’s dancing revolution).

Mine seems motley. Maybe that’s because in all apparent respects, I am a member of the most privileged one—hello, well-heeled white American men! Identity politics were created for my opposites, who demanded their just deserts. But I’m also a Jew, and hence not white at all (which would take another essay entirely to explain the antebellum origins of this now-ubiquitous racial category), and one raised by a family dominated by strong, independent Southern women in a largely African-American Northeastern city. At one time, a Black Baptist judge married a Hindu man to a Muslim woman in our Jewish home bustling with a Christmas tree and three kids attending Quaker school. Assimilation was the mantra of my upbringing. We tried to fit in and succeed to the best of our abilities; identity was a private matter: straight, gay, or goy. Much of my subsequent professional life focused on downtrodden populations, because I identified with their struggles, not their identity. I did my mother’s bidding as much as my father’s, still searching for my own. Motley is confusing, because the borders are indiscriminate, yet as a Jew, I am not motley at all, defined by a pure-blooded matriarchal lineage going back to BC.

I once went to a feminist organizing meeting in the 1970s and was asked ultimately to leave, because the women at that time, more than anything, needed a time and place to define their own agenda, a room of their own. I believe in equal rights, but I don’t believe men and women are equal at all. On the contrary, they are quite different, and unlike race, in ways that are as profoundly biological as sociological. Would the world be a better place if women were historically the dominant gender in terms of money and power? Maybe not, but it would definitely be different. We may well be moving in that general direction with women becoming more educated than men, more health conscious, and, I suspect, often more naturally endowed with emotional intelligence, the key power trait in an ever-more service-oriented economy. Do I think a gas-station calendar of pin-up models inevitably demeans young women or deleteriously shapes their self-image? I doubt it. My girls already know they can lead the boys by more than their gazes, though by their gazes too.

What the world needs now is a men’s movement that teaches emotional maturity to the hordes of stunted adult males hell-bent on war and terror and domination and greed whenever they’re given a room of their own. It probably won’t be women who teach them, even if they are in charge, and already among the world’s greatest leaders, artists and thinkers. When a man’s instinct is to let the baby cry herself to sleep, a woman may think that cruel, but the exhausted mother can’t otherwise go on, and the baby can’t otherwise separate “I” from “Thou”. What a foolish stereotype, you say?! Many other stories are just as true. Age has taught me to be slow to judge. I don’t have all the answers, but nor do the isms. Jacques Derrida once mesmerized me at the New School, but I can only vaguely remember his labyrinthine riffs on discrimination and difference. I learn today that he coined the word differance, a French play on differ and defer, and their fundamental roles in language and thought.

The baby waits, the mother cries, the man tries to discern, the world keeps changing as red becomes blue. We reach across a divide. Some notes fall flat, others sound new, maybe echo too. This is about me and you.

Flying with Sandy

With the day-after gusts and drizzle, no power for TV, and an Executive Order outlawing Halloween for New Jersey kids in the wake of the “Frankenstorm”, I was able to convince my younger daughter to take a walk with Duke (the dog) and me to see if the playground had reopened.

It hadn’t, but a bunch of kids were on the corner, and Breena asked please, please, please can she hang out with them. I said yes, as long as she didn’t leave the corner for any reason other than to walk home.

This is a story about time, which, it seems, is what my blog is about. More specifically, it’s about time interrupted: its tricks and treats. Disaster, like a sabbatical on steroids, refocuses our relationship with time by disturbing the normal course of events. Things like elementary schools and lights stop all together, others like buying gas or getting to work take forever, and the priorities of our days are reshuffled like a deck or toppled like a house of cards.

The screenplay I’ve been trying to write for the past six months is about a disaster involving the national power grid, but one caused by a terrorist cyber worm rather than natural causes like winds and floods. I haven’t gotten past the outline stage, because my readers keep getting confused by the 40-year time sequence. I finally got it right, I think, after following the advice of my screenwriting buddy in LA, by creating a temporal “anchor” in the year 2037. That's when there is an assassination attempt on the life of U.S. President Jason Martinez. I emailed my rewrite a month after his comments, which was Monday morning, the day Sandy came to town.

The next day, I drove around looking unsuccessfully for gas—actually, really just so Emma could charge her iPhone—and returned to find the kids from the corner in my driveway without Breena. They said she had gone to another kid’s house, in direct violation of my only rule. Then, like water finally breaching the sandbags, they really spilled the beans: Breena had been stealing my money to buy weed at the playground, as well as pizza and other stuff, most of which she gave away to her new-found friends.

Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the world’s leading experts on ADHD, says the disorder is not so much about inattentiveness, but rather a kind of “time blindness” or “nearsighted[ness] when it comes to time.” People with ADHD don’t have a normal “sense of self across time.” Maybe you could say the same things about all teenagers, but as a parent of a kid with ADHD, it’s clearly different, though also not clear at all what it is or what to do about it.

There are only three parts to time: past, present, and future. All the spiritual stuff I’ve been exposed to on my sabbatical tells me to reorient my attention to the present. Just breathe. Almost like intentional ADHD. Oblivious to consequences, Breena lives in the present, like a bird with eyes darting from one worm to the next. When Emma gets caught, she will deny her involvement for days; Breena, in contrast, fesses up immediately. She even feels sorry, but cannot articulate why. So there is little need for denial.

During this Presidential campaign, there has been no mention so far of climate change, even though the predictions of increasing frequency of extreme weather events have already painfully come true. Would greater political “presence” mean less denial or more inattentiveness to consequence?

I think I am now going to bicycle to Hoboken to volunteer my time. Unless I get distracted with some other flight of fancy.

The Rut is a Path

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

It took a week to get the thethreesss urls (.com and .org) to point here. Technology is amazing, but what a time suck. I live to be in flow, but one thing I've learned on sabbatical is that we can learn as much if not more from being stuck, what George Leonard in Mastery calls "loving the plateau."

One of the great ideas I've had on sabbatical is called "The Visible Universe Project." It's kind of a Google Maps for time. I pitched the idea to a Google manager, who said he liked it and suggested that I develop it with a bunch of grad students, prove it has traction, and come back to him. That not what I wanted to hear. After putting everything I had into launching United Visual Arts, raising start-up capital while simultaneously quadrupling the revenue of the nonprofit I was also running (City Without Walls), and proving the concept behind my patent-pending defEYE® frame, including validation by the Museum of Modern Art no less, I felt like I already had way too much skin in the game. One of the many aspects of my stuckiness is needing to close UVA by year's end, despite having created something beautiful that has yet to see its day in the sun—other than a brief stint in MoMA's holiday catalog featuring a Marilyn by Warhol.

If you look closely at the image of the "Visible Universe" above, there's a pink curve that shoots off the top of the page in the center in a way that's different from all of the other data structures I plotted since the beginning of time. This is Moore's Law, or what Ray Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns," predicting a singularity like the Big Bang that started it all billions of years ago or the Big Freeze that may end it billions of years hence (all also visible above). But this technological singularity could happen within a mere generation: a single, affordable, handheld device with computational powers many times greater than all the human brainpower on earth. This has been called a kind of "event horizon," beyond which predictions are impossible. Now THAT is a deep rut!

A friend of mine asked me to review chapters of a book he's writing about fundraising. From my years in the non-profit world, nothing seems more deadly than the work of development staff; they feel all the pressure and none of the rewards. My friend and his book, however, have allowed me to see otherwise: effective fundraising is the secret sauce behind all great social enterprise. With enough cash, you can accomplish almost anything; without it, mostly wishful thinking. One of his insights is that effective fundraising depends first and foremost on effective leadership. Now THAT helps me see beyond the rut.

My main feedback is that he needs to transform himself from a social-media curmudgeon into an apostle. Whatever the limitations of using these new media for fundraising today, it's all about relationships, and no matter how small or significant, every relationship in the future will be so mediated. As Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale (via Web 2.0 herald Tim O'Reilly) says, you've got to get in front of that parade. The most important "ask" in today's rapidly changing marketplace, as I learned today from Michael Schrage, is "who do you want your customers to become?" These changes will arise through storytelling, about which, even McKinsey & Co. recognizes, nonprofits (and screenwriters) can teach us a thing or two, and social media will be the primary vehicle for their transmission throughout society.

Hmmm. So let's put this all together: leadership, fundraising, and social media, with storytelling as the glue. A path appears from being present in the rut.

Columbus Day

An old friend who is a professor of political science read my last post and asked, why "no women" among the famous people I mentioned? He reminded me that in addition to Barry Commoner's death at 95, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm also died at 95 last week, though reported on page B19 instead of A1 of the same issue of the New York Times.

The two greatest lessons of history are "to the victor belong the spoils," and anicca, the Sanskrit word for "impermanence". How appropriate that the former was first uttered by a Nineteenth Century American in the early days of this country's long march to becoming the unrivaled superpower that it is today (New York Senator William Learned Marcy in 1832). The latter is one of the three marks of existence according to Buddhism, among the world's oldest teachings for how to overcome suffering; every victor is inevitably vanquished, though it can take years, generations or even millenia.

A friend sent me a press release last week, announcing his efforts to promote Italian-American culture. I was introduced to him by another friend who promotes Italian culture for a living—and with a much thicker Italian accent. She also introduced me to my first billionaire (yet another Italian American, but that's another story), and asked me once why I was surrounded by so many Italians rather than Jews like myself. Click on the map to my left to see the answer in terms of sheer statistical probability: Italians are the largest population by ancestry in the entire New York metro area.

In an article for London Review of Books on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery", Hobsbawm argues 1492 marked the first time in a thousand years that Europeans were engaged in conquering other lands rather than being conquered by Asians and Africans, a reversal that also included the expulsion from Spain of Jews and Muslim rulers. The Europeans expected to reshape the New World in their image, not the other way around. But the creative destruction that has transpired since then has been America's quintissential and hegemonic impact on the world.

Native populations have been vanquished throughout most of the Americas, now comprising less than 1% of the population in the U.S. and much of South America, but the map to the left shows they also still comprise major proportions of the population in some countries, as well as majorities in many subregions such as northern Canada. Click on the map below to see how despite this mass extermination over centuries, the echoes of these First Nations continue to reverberate in almost every American neighborhood today.

I am an assimilated American Jew, for example, living in a place called Weehawken, a word evolved from Lenape, meaning "rocks that look like trees" or maybe "at the end" (both probably refering to the mighty Palisades), having grown up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover, and surrounded by a motley intergenerational mix of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Cuba, Columbia, Dominican Republic, etc. The local, one-party (so-called "nonpartisan") spoils system is so complete and corrupt here that even the many local escapees from Communist states don't notice. Our political bosses are such masters of patronage that despite the occasional jail term, they would make "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" Plunkitt of Tammany Hall proud, a direct lineage not only of 1492 but of the entire evolution of our species—one of the single greatest insights of a European in the New World.

My political science friend, who knew Hobsbawm personally, says he "despised the notion of identity in all its guises and took a lot of abuse and was marginalized in public discourse, mainly due to the liberal intellectuals who run the show in academia." It may seem anachronistic not to have named a famous woman (or, he might have added, person of color) in my last post. Feminists launched identity politics in its now multiple forms so many years ago, but it is easy to forget that it is all so recent in the grand scheme of things. With the same kind of statistical probability of my being surrounded by Italians, I could not possibly remember seeing a famous woman on a plane or person of color on the Upper East Side with the same ease that I can recall sitting across from Spalding Gray while we sipped hot chocolate on the top of a ski slope, because the forces of history had simply not allowed enough of them to reach such fame or fortune until just about now.

I could write ten more posts on the subject of identity politics in American history, and maybe I will. I think one I will call "Octoroon."

Dreaming of Eigenvectors

I’ve been asleep for 2 days with the flu gratis my teenager who stayed out too late Saturday night.

My special screenplay “advisor” told me my dream sequences are unrealistic: no one dreams about history and math. My new Canadian “friend” told me she’d teach me how to dream.

Now, after the acupuncturist and podiatrist both took their best stabs at fixing my foot (literally), I can’t go back to sleep (I promise to write soon about my right foot).

I’ve decided that I won’t find the right job until I can bring humor and romance back into my life.  

My life seems like such a dream, unrealistic in almost every way. My mother just emailed me asking if I took her to hear Ornette Coleman at the Palace Theatre in London when I studied there in 1980. She stuffed kleenex in her ears; I can still feel the percussion in my bones. I just love that she remembers that, and hope it’s a memory of “Type 2” fun (i.e., in retrospect, rather than real-time), and not torture. I remember the seats were blue, but maybe it was just the music.

That whole year was like a dream. I visited Eastern Europe before the Wall fell, as well as Morocco and much of England and Western Europe, using a student Eurail pass to sleep on trains and wake in a different country and city eight hours away. Sometimes, I ended up sleeping in a train station or behind bushes in a park, curled up in the revolving door of a commercial high-rise or on the dirt-floor of a home in a slum outside of Casa Blanca. (Don’t tell Mom!) I wore a bright green blazer with gold buttons and carried a backpack full of books I never read. I’ll never forget the supernatural feeling of leaping around the fells in the Lake District barefoot and covered in mud. All like a dream. 

After a cold-water flat or two, I lived with the Secretary to the President of the Polish Government in Exile, and visited the Gdansk shipyards just as Solidarnosc began to change the course of history. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a comparative biography of Lech Walensa and Mikhail P. Tomsky. After graduating, I moved to NYC and for several years shared a sixth-floor walkup with a Polish peasant in the East Village. He spoke no English and wore long johns to bathe in the tub in our kitchen. His feet smelled so much like the raw garlic he would eat to ward off whatever ailed him that I had to time my meals long before or after he took a bath. We communicated via shots of vodka on Friday nights. Despite rubbing Epson Salts on his sore muscles every day, I heard Danek died as soon as he returned to the old country. I just looked up his Polish name; it's origin is Hebrew, Daniel, about whom I wrote last week, and means "God is my Judge."

A few years later, while the Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik stayed with me, we watched (he filmed) from my window as thieves stripped his cousin's parked car like ants leaving only the apple’s core, after it had been hit in a drive by. The front-page photo of the military tank during the East Village squatter riots took place on the same spot, right in front of my building. I learned from Tompkins Park that a “revolution” can occur without anyone hearing just blocks away, and remembered from a college professor that poverty is the best preserver of history. The squatters are long gone and that block is now full of high-end cafés and tourists; I've made and lost my first million, and we continue to forget and to dream.

The most heroic act of the protagonist in my screenplay is to sell solar power to the nuclear industry to stave off disaster in 2027. I’m going to apply for a job to direct the solar strategy of the biggest nuclear power company in New Jersey. I’d be great at that job, but will never get it. Barry Commoner’s obituary was on the front page of New York Times this week, just before I fell asleep. He was one of the founders of the environmental movement in the U.S., ran for president and was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970. The day before he died, while visiting studios in DUMBO, a friend of mine and I talked about our work with him years ago on a Brooklyn advisory panel. In the early 90s, Commoner asked me to be his successor, but withdrew the offer when I asked him when he planned to retire.

I am the most amazing job interviewer. More on that too in future blogs.

I received a letter from Al Gore praising one of my books that was reviewed side-by-side his in USA Today. I lost the letter. At least I got the VP to sign his book for me. And, somewhere, he has a signed copy of mine! Did I tell you about when Andy Warhol tried to pick me up on Second Avenue, and I brushed him off, mop head and all? Or when Allen Ginsburg corrected my English when I told him I lived on the top of the Palisade, just months before he died and while he was signing every scrap of paper in sight, like printing currency for his family?

There was a programmer who worked with me in the early 80s, who I joked once, “couldn’t figure out which disk drive to stick it in.” He finally found a girlfriend, and then was murdered on a NY subway before Bernie Goetz took revenge. A friend-of-a-friend became front-page news when he disappeared after leaving the late-night party on Canal Street where I had been hanging with him. Or how about the time that my grandmother insulted Tony Randall for smoking while we were eating at Sardi’s, or when Joe Moakley told me he worked for Congress after he asked me what I was did for a living. I watched Mike Wallace rip out newspaper articles while barking at an assistant, and John Kenneth Galbraith buried thick in a book as if he were on the plane all alone.

I got a full scholarship to study with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief even though I could never understand what an eigenvalue is. I still wake up thinking my degrees are just a dream, and that I only really know what I learned today.

And just like a dream, that ain't the half of it....

Calculating the Flip Side of Love

The most important calculation I ever made was simple subtraction: 

People of Color = Total Population – Non-Hispanic Whites 

I am the first person to define statistically what is a “person of color.” This of course may sound like an outrageous claim. But I know for certain that Public Data Access, Inc., a company I co-founded, was the first to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the 1980 ZIP-code Census, and to analyze these datasets for social science research in the early 80s after the phrase "colored people" had become taboo and was retired for the now-ubiquitous term "people of color."

That calculation, which came to me in my sleep in 1986, was used in a landmark study I coauthored that led to a Presidential executive order (No. 12898), public policy at all levels of government in the United States, and a new field of academic study called “environmental justice.” No one had bothered to aggregate all of these different population groups before; even our own study still used the term "minority percentage of the population." Some people knew I did this at the time, and it led to my being able to say on my resume that I was “an advisor to the Clinton Administration,” with several federal appointments and contracts to my name, as well as a string of influential publications. But mostly, it barely even registers as an historical footnote.

As a polymath provocateur, once I move onto my next challenge, others move in to stake claim for whatever ground I’ve laid. Most recently, for example, even before I left town, others tried to grab credit for initiating the City Murals program that I created from whole cloth, which can now boast more than two-dozen permanent, large-scale public murals throughout the City of Newark, created by contemporary artists working with inner-city kids, all of whom face incredible hardships and some even severe physical disabilities. When the program won New Jersey's top award for cultural access, because of a mural created with children in wheelchairs, I wasn't even invited to the ceremony.

Like Seth Godin’s professional lynchpins, when I “affirm that I am most fulfilled by championing others,” I must learn to separate passion from attachment. That’s an even more difficult challenge than loving without possessiveness.

It is Thich Nhat Hanh’s three-breath hug: 

1. I am going to die.

2. You are going to die.

3. We have just these precious moments together.

So profoundly ephemeral, so temporary, it may be life’s hardest lesson:

Loss is the flip side of love.

Not since the 80s

Just learned that according to www.urbandictionary.com, sss also means “shit, shower and shave,” as well as “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” and a women’s underwear fabric called “second skin satin.”

Here’s my promised guide to middle-aged online dating....

Lesson #1: if it looks too good to be true, then oh yes it is. Why do some faces just make your eyes pop—what is that?! The shot may not be glamorous or even sexy, maybe just girl-next-door sweet. But the scammers somehow got our number. This happened to me when I first tried match.com, and hit me again just last week, despite my now having seen this kind of thing before. Most recently, on Zoosk, I got several flirts in one day from a variety of pretty women, all of whom had interesting profiles, until I looked past the different hairdos, makeup, fashions, camera angles, ages, bios and locations and realized it was all the same person! I’m pretty visually attuned, and have already learned the tell-tale signs of the glamour gal who likes to fish and hunt, but I had responded to two or three of these realistic profiles before I caught on!

Lesson #2: the real potion is to love thyself. Despite being as much a bedrock of Eastern and Western religions (e.g., Mark 12:31 and Buddhist metta) as “know thyself,” it sounds so narcissistic and is so easy to tune out that it can take a lifetime to learn how true it is. The first time I was scammed was several months ago on jdate, when, after a bunch of messages back and forth, I felt a passion like I hadn’t felt in decades! What’s really strange is that even after her story about her upbringing in Birmingham UK and her French mother, and her not wanting to talk anymore about her parents (may they rest in peace), and not caring about politics while she was emailing me from a delayed beauty pageant in Cairo on the eve of Egypt’s first national election, all started to NOT add up, and I realized she was a total fiction—who knows, probably even a scruffy old toothless Arab guy—I STILL felt this incredible, almost life-changing sense of love. What a revelation: the “other” is not an essential ingredient! It was like my first glimpse or taste of enlightenment, and of all people, I can thank a scam artist for that!

Lesson #3: check references. After a long and wonderful telephone conversation with a thoughtful and attractive lady, and a time and place set for my first date since the 1980s (yeah, I’ve been married too damn long), I decided to reverse search her phone and do a little Google research, and found her conviction for passport fraud and time in federal prison where her brother tried to get her medical treatment for being abused by the guards. That might not have stopped me, because even ex-cons need love, and there might be a plausible explanation for why she absconded to Israel with her daughter and was declared an unfit mother, but then I saw the Village Voice article calling her a “serial evictee” and one of NYC’s “10 worst tenants,” and the quote of a former roommate saying she made the woman in Single White Female look like Snow White in comparison. So I called her to say that unless she had some kind of explanation, I think I’d have to cancel our date.

Lesson #4: a “no” is the next best thing to a “yes”. Shortly after the near miss with the immigration felon, my first actual date was with an immigration judge! She wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, or quite as pretty, but I wasn’t in the mood to close doors, so I texted her afterwards saying “really lovely meeting you,” “thank you for making my first date in 25 years such fun,” and “hope to see you again.” The next day she sent me an email essentially saying good luck but no thanks. What I didn’t realize at the time was how rare it is nowadays to get a “no”—that it takes the decisiveness of a judge to deliver one! I’ve decided since then to basically stop paying for dinner, because the new norm apparently is to not even respond. I mean really, how hard is it to write back: “nice to meet you, thanks for dinner, not interested”?!

Lesson #5: the three sss eliminate 90% of the ladies. So should I just lie? I asked one who said not interested after seeing “sabbatical”: how do you know I’m not able to take time off because I’m independently wealthy and own an oil well and waterfront property? No answer. I offered to take a ferry and bicycle to another on Martha’s Vineyard, but she declined after she reread my profile and saw I was separated. Hey, even my separation agreement says I can date! You’re that afraid of heartbreak that you won’t have coffee with a fellow willing to cross the ocean to see you? Mentioning screenwriting just seals the deal. The quick translation, I suppose, is: deadbeat dad.

And then there was the perfectly nice and attractive woman who had dinner with me at the perfectly nice and attractive suburban restaurant who said she liked to watch The Newsroom on Sunday nights, and I swear I tried to like it, but I get cold sweats just thinking about a show that tries to make old news sound exciting. Lesson #6: it shouldn’t feel like work.

Citizen Kane

Just watched it, and as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen it before. What a depressing movie!

 

What I learned about screenplays:

First, in trying to figure out why this is considered such a great film—if not the greatest—I found that when asked how he got the confidence as a first-time director to create such a radically different film from other movies of that time, Welles responded, "[From] ignorance...sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful."

Second, it seems like a lot of Welles’ innovations are rather technical in nature, and now primarily historical footnotes for film buffs, including camera focus and angle, special effects, makeup (especially showing Kane age), soundtrack, and, which I'm sure is why I was told to watch it, the storytelling techniques of unreliable, multiple narrators using overlapping flashbacks that cover an entire lifetime, as well as montages that collapse long periods of time into a single scene, the best of which is the breakfast scene(s) that condense the breakdown of a marriage over 16 years into 2 minutes—masterful (and such an eerie echo of my own)!

Third, its only Academy of Award, for best writing, targets the movie’s greatest strength. OMG, are there dozens and dozens of such classic, profound, and stark sound bites—what brilliant linguistic density!

Opening (and final) Image: No Trespassing (at Xanadu).

Primal Conflict: “more newsworthy than his own news,” “he had no conviction but himself,” “all he wanted out of life was love,” but in the end “my reasons satisfy me, Susan.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely….

Catalyst/Call to Adventure: At just around the appointed 12 minutes (a "beat" that Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat" says every movie makes), they start the search for Rosebud. So I guess that’s a metaphor for what prompted Kane to put power over all else: a childhood scar that set up a life-long struggle to stop rich people from manipulating his life.

Break into two: [warning, spoiler alert!] Young Kane hits Thatcher with Rosebud.

Wow, is this deconstructing exercise laborious and time consuming! I get why it’s useful for aspiring screenwriters, but I also have always followed Welles’ advice above, sticking as closely to a need-to-know-only approach to technical expertise. That approach has served me well in multiple fields. In fact, once I master something, I often lose interest and move onto the next thing. Anyway, I definitely haven’t come close to mastering this art yet. Maybe the hardest part: it feels so strange watching movies during work hours, even if this IS work for a screenwriter!

Final thought: When I read the synopsis of CK on IMDb, I can’t imagine anyone buying—or following—it either!

Atone

My “Enneathought” for today says: “The inevitable consequence of deteriorating down the Levels into being dominating and confrontational with others undermines your Basic Desire to be truly strong and ironically brings on your Basic Fear of being destroyed or violated by others.”

Today is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. My wife stopped by to take the kids to synagogue. They weren’t ready. As I was telling my youngest to put her socks in the hamper, my wife started mumbling about my giving them chores when it was time to leave. So I asked her if she could please wait outside while they finished. She went to pick up a nearby friend, and when she returned, the kids left without telling me.

I stopped myself from texting her: YOU TAUGHT THEM TO BE LATE AND TO THINK IT’S OK TO LEAVE WITHOUT EVEN GIVING THEIR FATHER A KISS GOODBYE.

As I was writing this email, the doorbell rang and Christian proselytizers were there asking if I thought something was about to happen to change the world. Normally I just say no thanks and shut the door, but today, I took a breath. I told them it was Yom Kippur and that’s a day for thinking about just that kind of thing. Their eyes brightened and they pulled out the Bible and said since “you have the Koran,” I should be able to relate to a passage in the Book of Daniel (maybe they thought Yom Kippur was a Muslim holiday?).

I said Jews wrote that Daniel stuff (and that, by the way, we all “have” the Koran). As they explained there would be a time when the heavenly kingdom would rule instead of the government of man, which they complained about along with the suffering in Italy and the Middle East and all around us today, they also made it pretty clear that they have no faith in their fellow man, only in God. I told them I was an atheist and had faith that every one of us can try to make the world a better place one day at a time. After I declined to take their literature, we wished each other a good day.

The fasting is causing me to lose my train of thought. In the shower after I woke, I decided I’d start this blog, and thought my first entry would be funny stories about internet dating as a middle-aged man. You'll have to wait for the one about the lady who turned out to be a convicted felon and listed in the Village Voice as one of NYC’s ten worst tenants....

I accepted a sweet invitation to a break-fast this evening that I received from the wife of one of my wife’s employees. I warned her I might not stay long; socializing with my wife under the circumstances is awkward to say the least.

Wish me luck!

Prompt Night

[Instructions: go round the room and each participant free-associates a word, then, with only 10-minutes to write, the prompter says, "name a song" and start writing without ever stopping your pen from moving, even if it means you just write nonsense words. Here were the group's starting words: baby girl sweet sleep thunder tired money disease spent laugh lonely raisins sun lullaby teeth bit wallaby kangaroo. And here's what I wrote....]

"Row, row, row your boat," sang the little girl after her ssssss sister fell asleep on the dock. Their parents were arguing heatedly about god knows what, so Jill jumped in. Wherever there was water, Jill got wet. Usually just her sneaks, a slip off the stones, but this time, in her raincoat, she sunk. And the birds flew off as her parents accused each other of this and that, threatening to drive off and leave the other as the silence of the pond crept up on them, and they saw Jessie sleeping so peacefully, but Jill nowhere to be found.

 

Meditate Mowing 

To be present today, I spent several hours mowing half of a four-acre field. I realize that’s how I’ve meditated since I was a boy; although, not on the same John Deere I used as a child. That burned down along with the barn and the rental car, which is another story entirely (the moral of which is don’t try to jumpstart a tractor with a rental car, unless you know what you’re doing and have multiple insurance policies; another: it’s easy to entertain people without trying, as long as you don’t mind being the butt of the joke.)

The mower I used today looks like it’s designed for golf courses, yellow with zero radius. But don’t be fooled: mowing a field is violent work. Thousands of species killed within seconds. Ragweed and Queen Anne’s Lace (the lace is long gone this time of year), Buttercups and Black-Eyed Susans, brier patches trying to establish a foothold (I hit them twice), and plants that look like dead men’s lollipops, which I especially love.

My parents would have known names for dozens of them, and to think that when their parents were kids, more than 90% of Americans lived in the rural countryside. I don’t know the names for most of what I slaughtered, and can barely get city and suburban friends even to come out here anymore, for fear of ticks and poison ivy, leaches and bears, cobwebs, peepers, bugs and bats, dirt and pollen. For good measure, Duke the dog tried to catch and kill anything that jumped from the weeds just for the fun of it: rabbits and moles, praying mantises and butterflies. I think the wasps knew how guilty I felt, they didn’t even bother chasing me after the mower trampled their nest. 

The twirling blades are my mantra, keeping me in tune with everything as I slice and grind. It’s amazing all of the emotions the mower feels. Trepidation as the thick grasses rise above my head; any second now, I could hit a rock or crash in a ground hog hole; the nostalgia of my baby girl, her sleeping warmth in my lap on a cold autumn day. She can drive it herself now, but barely appreciates the utility of following a straight line—the Zamboni mandala is a magical thing, it bestows wisdom and requires it too. I left the other half for her. 

I cleared the field early this year, so there was much more life to destroy. Usually I wait till October when the green has mostly gone, but I saw the farmer next door had already finished his, and now that my wife left and I only have half of a family half of the time, I filled the day by myself, preventing nature from taking control. Bouncing and bumping along while the monkey mind thinks of this and that, until the field is cleared and all that is left is empty spaciousness, so peaceful now, until everything grows back next year. 

After hours of rumble, when the engine is cut, it’s like the bell rings. I open my eyes, and today’s meditation is done.