I Never Wanted to Be Nice

Tags

life in the foothills, me me me

I mean I seriously thought about being nice, and I rejected it. It’s a lousy gig, one to be avoided unless you are a masochist or something like that. Being nice means not being authentic, unless you decide that it’s worth all that work. Cuz being nice is hard work. Not for the faint hearted. Not for the lazy.

I know a lot of nice people. Past and present. They are always smiling. It’s part of the persona. At least while in public.

It’s always saying the right thing, and worse yet, it’s actually believing it. It’s liking to be liked, and being liked by so many people that when you die, well, there really won’t be a dry eye in the house. Your funeral will be well attended.

Why is it so sad when a funeral is not well attended? It shouldn’t be. I figure it’s as good of evidence as one gets that one has lived a life of profligate self-interest. I figure Donald Trump’s funeral will be well-attended. But it’s not because he ain’t all about self-interest. It will be because people want to be seen there, nothing else. There won’t be many wet eyes at that one.

Nice means submerging one’s true feelings because it’s not polite to be cruel or dismissive of the normal but boring detris of other people’s lives. First on the scene with a box of cookies. First to offer babysitting services. First to offer to plan a wedding shower. Yech, I gots way better stuff to do than that.

But it’s not all disrespect and narcissism. I mean being un-nice is not being deliberately mean or something. It has nothing to do with being good or bad. You can be good and un-nice. Or you can be good in spite of being un-nice.

Good is striving at all times (well most of the time maybe) to do the right thing, insofar as it leads to correct factual determinations and ultimately the use of such criterion in making decisions that matter. Or something like that.

It means caring about shit deeply. And it means speaking truth to anyone who will listen and shouting at those that won’t because you are damned sure that you probably know more than most about whatever you choose to pontificate upon.

It’s self-centered but benign. Or maybe not so benign, but that’s a word that doesn’t get used nearly often enough. I try to encourage the use of more words.

Being nice requires a lot of time. And to a lazy person, that means it starts with so many negatives that it surely can’t be resurrected except for the most important of situations.  It requires a whole lot of time and effort. Too much.

You know the nice people. They are uniformly nice. And secretly you admire them sorta, but not really because you figure they are more patsy than role model. They are sorta soft people, who settled on the safe “being nice” as their claim on the universe.

Wasn’t she just nice? The nicest person I ever knew. She was so nice. Everyone liked her.

Now that is the kiss of death ain’t it? What wants to be liked by everybody? What sort of bland is required to reach that pinnacle of mediocrity?

Seriously, nice is the easy way out in life. It’s bending to everyone’s whim because it’s far easier than sorting through all the demons that whisper in the background for you to come out and have some real fun.

Being the teacher I shall always remember as my favorite is not a claim to fame. Better to make someone sit up in shocked attention, and make it their life long goal to prove you wrong. That’s an impact. That’s worthy for the reference books, or at least an entry in Bartlett’s.

I don’t mean to make light. But I do.

For I am defending me.

Because, not being nice, no one else will.

Well, maybe not nobody. But not a lot of some bodies.

Few.

One other.

I’m a good person. I don’t pull the wings off flies. I don’t taunt little children, not pinch dogs to make them squeal. I think of global things that matter to lives in deep corners of the world and I tell people to think about them too.

I don’t steal or lie or commit adultery. I don’t commit treason, nor do I harbor hateful beliefs about fellow humans without strong evidence. If I do have the evidence, I’m surely not too polite to tell you. I figure you should know. It’s important to know who’s who.

Good is different from nice. Way different. And if you don’t know the difference, well, I ain’t got the time to explain it. And you might just be too stupid to get it anyhow. I have few illusions.

Illusions?

Figments of facts, floating by. Snatch one or two and make a statement. Let them all float by and you are living in suburbia serving the Merikan dream and largely brain-dead.

Who speaks of all this stuff?

It’s so much easier to play in your own puddle  but so much more fun to comment on the dirty water in your neighbor’s.

I don’t smile at clerks in stores all the time. Nice people do that. How can nice people be defined properly if I don’t help to anchor the alternative? So I don’t smile. And if they say one of those stupid things, like “did you find everything?” I’m likely to respond with a “now that is some sort of stupid question isn’t it? Either I gave up looking for “everything” or I did find everything, or I’m too lazy to care.

I point out stupid well. It’s a gift.

It’s lonely here in the gut section of humanity. Being the speaker of the obvious truth rather than pointing out how lovely your crappy dress looks with those shoes when they look hideous. Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not nice enough to not bother telling you that that crappy dress looks hideous with those shoes, because  why is it my job to care how you look? I enjoy a joke too ya know.

Mostly not being nice allows me to enjoy all the stuff I want to, without bothering to note the inconsistency in my commonly held positions on just about anything. Oh I bother now and then, and strike the old cognitive dissonance bell a time or two. But being good means never having to say you’re sorry. (Surely I did not lift that from Love Story?)

I’m almost sure I said everything. It’s hard to know, when you’re fighting writer’s block and feeling all Hemingwayish. No I did not mean that I’m fondling a shotgun or anything. Death wishes bore the shit out of me, and I find such people tedious.

I’m almost through grieving for Robin Williams. Almost.

Can you almost hear the sarcasm?

Can you almost wish this were over? No, my ego says no.

Almost.

We participate, (with a certain shamefacedness) in SoCS.

 

 

I Likey, You More Better, Capisce?

Tags

Catholic Church, faith my style, Humor

When all else fails, I can always talk about myself. It’s my favorite subject after all. Okay, like three dozen people just ran off to call in this story to their editors. . . .hot off the presses, Sherry is gonna talk about herself. Cheeky? Arrogant? Full of self? Oh yeah, all that.

Who does she think she is?

I said it before. Like her, or not, there are few other alternatives. She ain’t tepid oolong or Earl Grey.

She is me, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that you probably got that.

I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Or not. Mostly not.

If I were an animal which one would I be?

Polar bear mama?

Ponder that with your swayt tea. Yeah, we get that down here in New Mexico. I frankly hate that stuff. Sugar in tea? Are you mad?

People make me wonder. I mean take Bobby Jiggles Jindal. That man has no more chance of winning the GOP nomination than I do of winning a best in show at Madison Square Garden. Yet he twattles on.

Twattle, is a word conceived in sexual confusion. A cross between cunt and flapping lips of the face. See? Now you get it.

It’s a hell of a thing when your spiritual guru is a gang banger.

Well, not really, but sorta.

Yesterday I was a sittin’ in the pew when I noticed a young man with the usual accoutrements of style. . .ear-ring, sleeves cut out of the t-shirt. jeans, sneakers. He was sittin’ a few pews to the front of me.

Which made it convenient to watch.

So instead of concentrating on my own sinful self, I was bemused by this young man’s spiritual methodology. A very long time on the kneeler. No singing of entrance hymns. No murmuring of the “profession of faith” which is such a convoluted rattling of various Council pronunciations as to be indecipherable to all but the most religiously stringent of the faithful.

When that Gloria came along, oh good grief. It’s so badly written as to leave a normal believer astounded that given the whole of the Roman Catholic Church, no better rendition can be rendered but this? A squawky, akin to the Star Spangled Banner inability to keep the tune, sort of music that is painful to the ears and the senses.

My gangbanger, stands stoicly.

Mostly he sits with his head down, as if he’s there to beg atonement for a laundry list of crimes too numerous to mention. “Sorry God, but I shot somebody in a drive-by, and then celebrated with some blow, while threatening the mama of my baby for not having my dinner ready.” In the next breath, more sinful conduct is extruded.

Is any of this real? Oh probably not at all. The dude is probably a pediatrician, just out in his hoodie regalia which helps him calm down from the high intensity life of savior of children.

I jest?

Mostly.

It provided a handy excuse for not paying attention as Father explained all about the Holy Spirit and how we neglect it in our prayers.

Is that true for you too?

Do you pray to Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit? All the same yet different as they say.

Is it reasonable that Christian theology must be so convoluted? I suspect it works for theologians who like to think of themselves as pretty smart folks. And they are for the most part. Least they sound that way.

So, I’m sittin’ in the pew, figurin’ this guy is really doin’ it right. Most people don’t if you noticed. They are rushin’ around front to back, always with the obligatory bow to acknowledge that Jesus is layin’ on the altar, while we are talkin’ to our neighbor in the pew about a meat sale at the Carniceria.

So, I’m not talkin’, just praying me some Rosary until the bells ring and they remind everyone to shut the phones off. And I’m watching my mentor. I watch him with his own style of reverence, again on that kneeler when most everybody else is standing, because  the whole consecration thing is something to be knelt about.

And I wonder what the hell am I doing here?

Trying to recapture what once I had, yet which has so thoroughly departed. The devotion, the intensity, the It fuckin’ matters syndrome, it seems ephemeral after all this. Yet, I turn attention back. Jesus, I am not worthy to have you “under my roof” which is another of those John Paul/Benedict changes that is just change for change’s sake.

And he goes up for communion, but he is ahead of me, and I don’t realize until I get back to my seat, conveniently marked by my purse (what do men do to find their seat again?), that he has gone.

Guru man, you are of that ilk, (which I have never been) of those who in the confusion of people traipsing from pew to communion and back again, against the backdrop of a couple of hundred faces, working out their salvation with a wafer and sip, chooses to keep walking to the back and out the doors. Done! Got what I came for. Jesus is digesting in my belly and I’m roaring off in my Mazda to new Saturday night adventures.

I’m a bit chagrined by this turn of events. I wanted him to remain pious to the last second. Maybe be one of those stalwart types who continues laboriously to sing the closing hymn while people jostle  to get by and into the aisle, seeking the fastest route of escape past the priest who is taking a stand outside hoping to catch every last hand as it passes.

Alas, he has escaped and I’m chagrined, yet I’ve spent exactly three minutes of the sixty actually contemplating my own salvation. I don’t account all that bunk for much actually. I am, as they say, more of a Matthew 25 person. Get on with feeding the hungry and tending to the sick.

My spiritual guru seems made of common clay after all.

I sigh.

Whatever I’m here for, I seem to find. Not sure what exactly that is. But I feel better about everything somehow.

I don’t find it makes me kinder to stupid drivers though. I still yell at them from the safety of my car seat, taking satisfaction in the fact that I’m not stellar driver, but I am damn well better than that!

And I put it all aside, as I do every Saturday evening. Done! Mass obligation met. No need to think about that until next Saturday.

Which reminds me of the old guy at the pool, who apologized so deeply and long for not being able to sign my petition to open the pool at 8 because as he said, he could never come early, since he’s at Mass every morning. Alex, who recites the Rosary while he walks the water channel, did sign. No morning mass for him.

Too much piety for me. Except when I was in formation to be a nun.

Oh that’s news to you?

Fancy that. I prolly should yak about that sometime.

But not today. I don’t like to brag, unless I have a captive audience. God I know, I’m such a bitch. Which makes you even madder doesn’t it?

Remember this: happiness is the best revenge.

We participate occasionally and poorly in SoCS.

 

 

It’s as Good A Time as Any

Tags

Bernie Sanders, Election 2016, Hillary Clinton, progressives

Well here we are again. I’m inclined to talk (ask my husband), so there is little point in trying to silence me. You have no doubt made your decision already about me.

I’m not one of those persons who people are casual about. You either like me or you hate me, seldom anything down the middle.

So I don’t give a rip’s roaring ass which one you adhere to frankly. I can come down on that both sides of that issue too, depending, so welcome if you are reading, screw you in absentia if you aren’t.

I don’t figure myself to be that much different than the rest of ya, a bit smarter than the average, a tad wiser given my age than a thirty-year-old. I know myself better than most people  bother to inspect their innards, and I’m comfortable with what I find. Not always happy with it, mind you, but comfortable.

I grew up privileged. Not in super rich mind you, but privileged nonetheless. Most average kids from working class families don’t believe that, but it’s true. It was a hell of a lot easier than growing up African-American or Hispanic. It would have been better to be male given the times. But I never went to bed hungry or didn’t have a pair of shoes. I had the opportunity of a pretty decent education back when it was still affordable for the working class kid.

It’s a small but constant wonder to me that I ended up being a bleeding-heart liberal. I shouldn’t have, at least as I measure it from examining the lives of those I went to high school with. Some of them are loons. Some of them are just immersed in their own lives of grandkids and whatever one is interested in if it ain’t the state of the world and all who inhabit it. A few are liberal, a few pointedly conservative, but I repeat myself–the loons.

But I pride myself most about being a rational thinking individual who manages to blend a sophisticated metaphysical belief system along with a logic based political view of the world at the same time. They conflict, my angelic side and my devil as you would expect, and when the conflict comes, I wrestle with it, I seek to escape from it, but I rarely can ignore it.

Back in 2008, I supported Hillary Clinton, until it was obvious she was losing to Obama. Then I switched allegiance, since John McCain and his Alaskan albatross proved  to be unacceptable as leaders of the free world.

So we are now 2015, and Hillary is running again. And I am supporting her again. And. . . .

I’m conflicted.

Bernie Sanders and I disagree on very little. I was frankly surprised that he gathered so much money so quickly.

I am sensitive to the notion that if all of us smart people read the tea leaves accurately and accord him no real chance, we in fact insure he will have no real chance. Yet Hillary is more than competent and it’s so time for a woman to take the leadership.

Yet Hillary and I don’t agree on a number of things, and I am more than aware that she is more conservative (by nature) and certainly by design than I am. She is more comfortable with Wall Street than I would prefer. She is more hawkish that I would prefer.

In some ways Bernie has made this easier. At least his has the good sense to run under the Democratic banner, which means he is no threat to siphon off votes in the election as a third party candidate.

So I’ve been quiet about Hillary for the most part, hoping to let Bernie’s run peter out as it is expected to, and let the conflict within my head die a quiet death. And yet, I’m mindful that if he has no chance, it can surely be in part because people like me, his natural allies, won’t switch.

I am more than aware of my conflict of interests, which devolve down to a moral choice or a loyalty choice. Both are important I suppose, but one is compelling.

I am, as I say, pretty much clear on what motivates me.

An example.

The other evening, my husband admitted, “I have no opinion on the President’s trade agreement. I simply haven’t read hardly anything about it, so I don’t know who has the better argument.”

“Same here,” I replied, “but my reasons are quite different. I have deliberately avoided reading about it. I know at the end, I’ll either have to diss Elizabeth Warren or the President, and he needs all the support he can get against the crazies, so I’ve avoided the cognitive dissonance becoming informed would cause.”

See? I can and do act to avoid issues I don’t want to deal with.

And as I scrolled through my Facebook feed, I basically stayed fairly quiet when the discussions turned to Hillary or Bernie.

Yet the nagging continued.

This is not a time to merely support the candidate who can win. At least not until we get to the crossroads. Until the primaries are completed and one has withdrawn, I figure I am required by my moral compass at least to support the candidate whose dedicated to doing the most for the average person.

So I find myself feeling all sorts of traitor in leaving Hillary’s side and offering my small donation to Bernie. I still figure he doesn’t have a chance, but if that happens, at least I can sleep well knowing I did the right thing. I followed my conscious and not my cynical political savvy self.

Nothing will change in this country before it is too late to matter unless we as citizens, victims of the government machine, stand up and stop this madness. I’ve truly had enough of those who promise a better future while continuing to “play the game”.  The game at this point is simply rigged, and so clogged with illegality and personal greed as to make even Satan blanche at the sheer chutzpah.

Perhaps it’s always been this way, with a small but vocal group warning of “the end” but with climate change and income inequality, I don’t see planet earth surviving much longer with humanoids being at the top of the ladder. Unless that is, we make drastic changes.

They say that the uber wealthy in the world now routinely have bunkers build beneath their luxury homes, guarding against what they know must surely come, the uprising of people who have nothing left to lose.

I fully expect Hillary Clinton will be the next president. I hope however that she is not. Not because she wouldn’t be okay as president’s go. But because following Bernie, would be a fine time for Elizabeth Warren. And at least with Bernie, we have an honest chance to turn the page to a new way of doing democracy.

But enough of fantasy politics.

Back to reality.

Where’s my checkbook?

Yeah, I Already Said That

I never meant this to happen. This writing thing. I was just, shall we say, verbose as a child and adult, and I wrote with some flow and well, I got praised a bit here and there, mostly for essays and very long boring tracts on the death penalty and Rachel’s fathers household gods, and stuff like that doesn’t play at all well with the public but thrills the bejesus out of professor or six who spend their professional lives hoping to ignite the same passion they suffer in their students.

When blogging came along, I gotta say, it was a perfect storm.

My favorite writing is just off the cuff sorta rambling and blogging seemed to meet that style and give it a big old kiss of acceptance. No longer editing but gettin’ on with it.

I’ve been through a lot of transitions and polishing since the beginning back in whatever it was, 2006 or something. I changed the name a few times, changed the pretty covering it comes it, changed the focus, changed the writing. Guess it changed me too. Made me a bit more fearless, a bit more in your face, a bit more eccentric too no doubt.

Yeah, you know what’s comin’.

I’m taking a break. Maybe a break forever, maybe for a while. Maybe I’m moving to different pastures or just being bored. Some combination is about.

This, (these) blogs have never been what I envisioned. I envisioned a wildly controversial give and take with a bunch of people arguing over points and theories. That never happened. I got plenty of feedback, but it never developed into the conversation I had expected. The numbers went up and they plateaued and they rose, and they fell, but the comments never took over.

I always sought to be the spark that ignited the chat. Instead I remained the focal point.

I’ve had amazingly faithful readers, some for years.

My haters are numerous but cowardly for the most part. They tend to “cut me” in some juvenile high schoolish drama instead of having the courage to actually try to drum up a defense to their silly notions. So my response has been to poke at them incessantly as one does a bear in a cage, provoking its rage. That doesn’t speak so well of me, but I never tried to claim I was a good person after all.

So ceasing my efforts comes with some regret that I can’t dangle the truth before them daily, though lord knows they surely don’t read it anyway.

This does not mean I’m going off to some mountain to meditate.

I just seem to have an increasingly busy life right now, and I’m enjoying it too much to worry about getting out a daily missal of angst written in my indomitable snarky style. Worse, I find myself repeating myself, too many times.

Since much of my activity is on Facebook, I’ll still be making my points, and offering up good reading material when I find it. Just not formalizing it with an essay.

Perhaps the time of the blog has past. They say it has. Who am I to disagree? All I know is that I made no “smashing success” and never became the “talk of the town”, though I’m not sure I wanted that. Undoubtedly I wanted the praise, but not the responsibility that comes with it.

Perhaps the ensuing presidential campaign will ignite me again, but I fear that I will repeat again and again the same arguments, pointing out the same stupidities. I’m boring myself at this point.

Anyway, I’ll be around to those of you who are Facebookers. I may start a page there just to focus the political and stupid off my wall and into it’s nice little cubby hole. Who knows. I don’t.

All I know is that I have a lot of living type things to do, and I want to do them more than I want to repeat myself daily. Frankly I’m tired of writing something I think is juicy and certain to piss off a few, and having it land like a dud. Read by many, commented upon by nobody. The echo hurts my ears.

Perhaps I don’t write at all well after all.

Perhaps I do.

Perhaps, and perhaps.

I’ll send out notices if I start a Facebook page, but a title eludes me so far. Somethin’ catchy?

Anyway, I’m copying this to the other blog too, so you all will know.

So adios for now friends, and thank you all, especially those of you who have been faithful supporters.

I’m off to shopping, and cooking, and beading and reading, and rubbing my dogs’ bellies. And scratching the old man’s libido when he smiles that smile, and my heart melts.

The Gangs of Baltimore

Tags

Baltimore, police, racism

Watching the events play out in Baltimore is an education to some, to others, it’s a why question. Why didn’t this happen sooner? The fact is whether you like it or not, life in the inner city is purely shit for the average African-American citizen.

Every deck is stacked against the individual trying to survive. Poor schools, no jobs are just the beginning. We see nothing less than a systematic attempt to herd “unwelcomes” into small enclaves and then devote all our money and energies to “other interests.”

We not only condone racism in this country but we grow it.

We demean people even when we give them the pittances we do, by making them take drug tests, and defining what food stamps can be used for, and attaching so many rules and regulation to any sort of assistance that you end up in the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.

And when people rise up out of anger and frustration and disgust at the injustices they endure, we blame it all back on them and their “fatherless” homes, where unfortunate black youths learn no morals or sense of obedience to authority. Above all that, they have no respect for their betters.

One young man fairly told Geraldo Rivera to take his white ass and get out of town. They recognize Fox for what it is, purveyors of hate upon their heads. Geraldo, the youth said, you are only interested in filming what you call “thugs” rioting. You and Fox haven’t been interested in coming here to report on the daily injustice that we face.

To those of us who have engaged in the criminal justice system in this country in large metropolitan cities, we know all too well of what the young man speaks. As Alan Dershowitz explained in his Rules of the Justice Game, “almost all police officers lie about whether they violated the constitution in order to convict guilty defendants”, (rule IV) and all prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys are aware of rule IV. Worse, they look the other way. Like it or not, it’s true.

The recent public exposure of these cases of police overreach, abuse and lying comes as no surprise to us. I recall a dear friend of mine, a street cop from Detroit, whom I had argued with good-naturedly about whether police could do their job and still tell the truth. He was called to testify on an arrest and to make his point to me, told the truth. The case was dismissed for lack of “probable cause”. He grinned at me, as he walked from the courtroom. “See what you get when you tell the truth?”

We understood it, and we accepted it as a the way life was. We knew that in most cases the officers were at least sure they had the right guy.

But there is a segment of police officers within each department who do not care. They figure one black body is as good as any other, and they have ambitions, and a host of emotionally based reasons for throwing their authority around and not caring who gets caught up in their game.

Therein lies the problem.

And a solution comes from an unlikely source:

The gangs of Baltimore.

The major gangs have declared a truce, and apparently are devoting their time and efforts to helping their community respond in a politically helpful way to the recurrent injustice visited upon them in general and in the Freddie Gray case in particular.

It boggles the mind. Young men hell-bent on killing each other, and unfortunately any innocents that get in the way, have come together and agreed that for now at least, they will stop the violence against each other, and help organize their community to stop police violence against them all.

This is no small thing. Thinking, educated, above middle-class men and women only a few miles away, encased in a glorious white facade of sandstone and marble, are unable to agree upon even the most basic of things because screwing the black guy in the White House seems paramount.

Yet these young men have agreed to set aside their differences and work together for the common good of their community.

And the gang has a good deal to offer should it choose to actually follow through. Long the center of loyalty, and business acumen (albeit illegal) it mirrors many good traits that the young can well adopt. Strong Black men, helping their community? What’s not to like here. They teach loyalty, respect, and how purpose can bring about change. Somehow in their matriarchal upbringing, they have managed to become quite savvy at things they aren’t supposed to understand at all.

They in a real sense complement their environment, reflecting an honest if not legal response to the tremendous burdens and disadvantages heaped upon them since birth. They have the ability to encourage the younger kids coming up at least in the character requirements of making their way in a racist world while still standing firm for dignity.

No one argues that gangs are stellar examples to our youth. They have not been since the days of the Irish gangs, the Puerto Rican ones or any of the others. But all ethnic groups plagued with the criminal element within have always managed to take those good attributes and bettered themselves and their communities. And the Black community is no different. It too learns the right lessons along with the less savory.

Larry Wilmore, on his show The Nightly Show, did a most important thing on Thursday. He sat down with gang bangers in a diner and just talked. And they were articulate, and politically aware, and sincere. And that matters and should matter, and should make us hang our heads in shame when we cannot expect better from our paid politicians, and we cannot seem to expect more of ourselves in insisting on our own justice from the tyranny of big money and big K Street influence.

Perhaps it will be the gangs of Baltimore that will lead the way in helping us to see that we are not without recourse in our own struggles to retake command of our government. We need merely to stop focusing on our differences and agree that we are not being heard. None of us, for anything. And it’s time to change that. And if it takes a gang to explain that to us, well, more power to them.

And that’s a compliment in case you didn’t realize it.

We participate in SoCS.