Stratagem 27 Anger indicates a weak point

“I WILL NOT CALM DOWN!”

 - Abe Simpson

“Should your opponent surprise you by becoming particularly angry at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal; not only because it is a good thing to make him angry, but because it may be presumed that you have here put your finger on the weak side of his case, and that just here he is more open to attack than even for the moment you perceive.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Kunst,Recht zu behalten - The Art Of Controversy

Somebody said something I don’t want to mention more specifically because it is literally sickening and I don't want to spread the contagion by making this post googlable by using specific labels. The disgusting thing was said by somebody who is too awful to mention by name and it was widely reported on the media. 

I respectfully disagree with Arthur (may I call you Artie?) Schopenhauer. Making your opponent angry isn’t a nice way to win an argument. Poor Grandpa Simpson always falls for this.

Apparently, Artie didn’t have a strategy for applying passive aggression to win arguments, or even to beat his opponent figuratively senseless with words. Or maybe before we invented the term passive-aggressive, it was simply known as poking your opponent in the eye with a sharp metaphorical stick.

You don’t need an assault rifle of anger when you use your words. You can apply your rapier wit to leave your opponent’s arguments in tatters like a piñata at the end of a 10-year-old’s birthday party. You can deploy the RPG of your sarcasm to obliterate your opponent like a tornado in a china shop. You can drop leaden irony to crush opponents like a balloon of lard thrown on a hot sidewalk from a third floor balcony.

But be careful how you deploy anger even in words. In these Dies Irae anger management is a survival skill that should only be employed defensively, because anger and rage can escalate and kill. Anger should never be a strategy of first resort in any discussion with someone obstinate and already angry. Especially when decorum has been beaten bloody and kicked to the curb. And when the broadcast, cable and social media talking heads insist on keeping the "conversation" going. 

I think anger betrays stupid more than weak. It should go without saying that stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Hopefully (sic) answers the stupid person doesn’t get. Also, use your word powers for good. A good mission statement would be “Hulk only crush Stupid”. So my response to the statements referenced below may go a bit over the head of its intended target.

I am not angry at what that man who is so stupid they should create a new Nobel Prize in Stupidity for him said. I do believe however, that he is a sick fuck. 

Then again, maybe Artie is on to something about anger exposing weakness. the weakness apparent in Bad Comb-Over’s unconfined anger at women. He wears it proudly like a badge of rapey honor by a privileged fraternity boy; or like Bill Cosby with roofies and Viagra. He is overcompensating for his impotence and feelings of mental and moral inferiority to women by joking about incest, marital rape and menstruation; and by fat shaming and throwing women away shortly after menarche. He is apparently distracted by shiny things. I expect soon he will put FGM on the table and then say we wouldn’t even be talking about it if he hadn’t raised the important subject. His anger at women highlights his feelings of inadequacy and weakness, poor baby.

But I’m not inclined respond to his anger with anger. Why poke with a stick when I can ignore with disdain? Life's too short to engage with such toxic stupidity. I’m not sure what Schopenhauer’s strategy was numbered, but I will respond with words instead of letting Narcissism Impersonated’s anger provoke me to sinking to his level.

My father’s explanation of the rhetorical device I employ below was that if you’re in a shit throwing contest, always remember the winner isn’t the person who throws the most shit, it’s the person who has the least shit sticking to him when the fight is over. I distinctly remember learning this dinner-table wisdom at the XXL picnic table Dad made and covered with orange Formica that had that boomerang pattern.

Accordingly, if I was bothered to continue a conversation as rewarding as spitting into the wind, I'd say this. Sir, I’d say, I’m rubber you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you. 

Although I would never literally ever touch a gun, I would figuratively give the rich narcissist with the bad comb-over a few extra holes to bleed out of as his sharp sticks aimed for my eyes boomeranged on him.

I call it the Karma Ricochet Strategy. The bad man shot first and it’s started to come back to him. Please don’t be mad sir, because the weaker sex isn’t staying around to watch you bleed out. Figuratively speaking. We’ve already literally forgotten you, little man.

SEE ME

“The point is: what happens in heaven?'

'Unknowable wonderfulness?'

'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.'

'If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.’”

― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“… there is such a thing as the smallest possible unit of time. And it must exist, mustn’t it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn’t have the length then the present couldn’t exist at all. There would be no time for it to be the present in.”

-       Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time

I have been reading the Discworld series since my husband died last December. I’ve been taking them slowly and reading other things in between, and savoring them. I’m convinced the Discworld series is a perfect way to work through grief, beginning from that improbable inconceivable irrefutable proof of death. The books remind me of the old saying about how a society so relatively primitive compared to ours would see our advanced technology as magic.

So, why not the other way around? We’re so magically primitive that a fantasy about a magical place seems like magic to us. Discworld exists “only just this side of total improbability”. Get it? Like death. The above is from a book in the mid 20s of a series of about 40. I’m pacing myself so I should finish the series about one year after my husband died.

Anyway, both these quotes are about how there is a theoretical single smallest sub-particle of time that is the present. No. one is more about what happens to time after we die. The present is always now everywhere, but we can’t stay there. Which makes me think that’s why I’m finding these books some sort of magical consolation. They help me understand how a death that happened in the past is always here in the now.

But that’s not the point of the title of this post. At one point in Thief of Time a schoolteacher receives an unsigned note on her desk saying SEE ME. And that’s what this post is about. And happy birthday to Martha. And our parents made us crazy.

Suddenly, I had this blinding flashback to receiving such notes from a species of nun that no longer walks the earth and all these repressed memories flooded back. The chipped metal desks and chairs painted some institutional eye-save green, the smell of the green mulch-like stuff the janitor used to push around the linoleum tile halls until the red and yellow speckles shinned like glitter against the brown background. And acid-washed papers and books beginning their long slow slide down entropy’s slope of decay to atomize into the very air we breathed.  (Note to self: consider class action suit for people who breathed that air K-12. Catholicschoolestosis? I have the classical symptoms of paranoia, rage, good timing, lying, selective hearing and listening loss. I have Terminal Bad Attitude. I have the intelligence. I just don’t fucking apply myself.)

(Seriously, I think that’s where my irregular heartbeat problems began, so I arguably have actual damages to support tort claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Why was fear their weapon of first resort? Were they so young, so alone, so unequipped that the power drove them mad? Did they grow up disappointed and bitter old atheists regretting our life choices? Coincidence?)

Then I remembered how the time I totally cheated and didn’t get caught was on a Religion test of all things. It was one the priest taught. They only brought in the big guns to talk about serious shit like sex. But we had to know the books of the Old Testament which was - in some twisted alternative probability - as important as sex ed. Hence the priest instead of the nun. There’s like a million books in the OT, seriously. Not the like the NT, you know? And some of them seemed to be mostly genealogy lists that did jack for saving my soul so who cares? So, I wrote them down in very light pencil on a piece of ruled paper. Then I put a clean sheet of ruled paper over that when it was time to take the test. The wooden desks were so scratched and gouged it was SOP to use a sheet underneath just to make your paper smooth enough to write on. When I pressed down to write I could see the letters beneath, but I was pretty sure you couldn’t see them otherwise.

I remember the priest walking down the long aisle on my right, behind the end of the row and back up the aisle on my left. He was looking at what we were writing so menacingly I felt his glare on the back of my neck as he approached from behind. I was sure I’d been busted because I paused writing and lifted my hand from the paper as he first approached, appearing to be too deep in through around book 1,844. This was the smallest unit of time I have ever experienced and there was a lot of fear concentrated there. I had plenty of time to consider and discard the crying strategy and instead I determined to adopt the brave attitude later re-discovered by Norma Rae. Then he kept on walking up the aisle past my desk and life resumed.

So what is the point of this post? That when a book includes a scene where someone in a classroom gets a paper with the words SEE ME scrawled in red pencil, it should have some sort of trigger alert. 

A Pathetic Fallacy

"Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits."

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

The other day, my scale inexplicably got stuck weighing me in kilos instead of American. Today, I went to fill up my gas tank. When I top off the tank, I re-set the trip odometer because my gas gauge got stuck on half this one time and I am just the teensiest bit OCD. So my redundancy gas gauge is my trip odo.

Funny story. The button next to my gas gauge it turns out - I didn't know this about my ten-year-old car - changes the speedometer from miles per hour to millimeters or something unAmerican.

Pulling out from the gas station I waited for the light to turn green. I fumbled to reset the trip odo. I noticed I was behind a police car at the light.

The light turns green. I see the 40 mph sign between me and the cop. I glance at my speedometer. I'm going 58!! I doesn't seem like it, but no way am I going to pass the cop.

Me:  Universe? Seriously?

WISIMH:  Why are the gods conspiring to mess with me by doing this? I've been out all morning. I got my new hearing aids, I picked up my new glasses, I stopped for a real latte and a bagel, I went to the grocery store. I even earned some good karma by being kind to a stranger. Gas station was my last stop and I want to get the hell home and take a nap. And this is the reward I get?

Me:  Thank you for turning into that parking lot, Mr. Policeman. Now, let me slide by here to the right of Nana who is doing a brisk walking pace in the left lane with her right blinker on.

While waiting behind the cop at the light, I noticed on the back of his slick SUV was a little chrome badge that said "Police Interceptor" which is apparently a model of the fleet package that includes the grill between the back seat and the front seat and presumably the speed to catch me. I want that badge for my 2005 Prius that hasn't been washed since the drought began.

 WISIMH:  I wonder if your fancy Police Interceptor could catch me now Pig. I'm going over 100!! And there's a dinosaur on my dashboard!

And I hope I don't drift into the next lane as I wildly flail at the trip odo buttons and glance over. WTFF? There's another button marked mph/kl.  Why is the metric system fucking with me? I'm already an anorexically thin 79 kilos, and now I'm a mad speed demon. Angela Merkel is out to kill us all.

I remember watching Bishop Sheen on black and white TV when I was a kid. Blissfully, what I don't remember was a single word he said. But the google says he also said hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn. So, he had that going for him.

Cider for Lunch

When life gives you lemons your lemonade is gonna suck unless life also gives you sugar and water.
 - Nobody here

I have a talking scale. It belonged to DOB and just because she moved out a few years ago, I wasn't going to toss it out. Since it's the closest thing to an in-law living under my roof, you could say it's my step-scale.  Step on it, and a pleasant lady's voice says:

Talking Scale:  Your weight is... 170.5 pounds. (If I'm lucky)

Me:  Bitch.

Then, she started talking to herself. I would come into the bathroom and she'd be saying

TS: Your weight is... 1.4 pounds.

Then the digital display would say "low" which I suppose was a some kind of cry for help.

So, I replaced the 9 volt battery.

Then...

TS: (Crickets)

Silent Digital Display: Err

Which I assumed was the scale clearing her throat to say I am so heavy that she'd prefer not to say out loud what my actual weight is. I may have mentioned I prefer to say I have gravitas rather than that I'm morbidly obese.

So, I changed the battery. Again.

TS: Your weight is 79 kilos
       Your weight is 80 kilos
       Your weight is 76.5 kilos.

I felt all anorexic and shit until I found a switch on the bottom that said Kl on one side and Lb on the other. But it doesn't matter which side I move the switch to. All she'll give me is kilos. And inconsistently. It sucks to be me.

Time for more cider. Hard, of course. 10.5% ABV to be specific. About twice as strong as I usually have. Stupid scale.

The Iliad Goes Gymming

“…for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men…. Once the experience of war makes vivible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moent, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.”

-       Simone Weil,  Essay “The Iliad – or the poem of force” in War and the Iliad, by Simone Vwil and Rachel Bespaloff.

Lady on the treadmill next to me: I see you’re reading the Iliad. Achilles is such a superhero isn’t he?

Me: You mean, like he won the war, or that he was half god?

Woman: He killed the Trojans, right? Greece won?

Me: Wow, spoiler alert! Achilles won?

WISIMH: There apparently isn’t anything you don’t know about the Iliad. Your argument is sound. You know, because it made a sound when you said it. I agree with you in a very broad way. I couldn’t agree more broadly. 

Achilles isn’t the hero of the Iliad, you shallow pretentious obviously retired sixth grade teacher with dementia. Achilles is a beautiful mindless personification of ‘roid rage; a tool of vengeful capricious gods entertained by bloody wars. Hector is the hero. First of all, he was all man, not a watered-down god. He had a loving wife and son, a bunch of deadbeat brothers, a father to defend, a city to save from invaders. Achilles' problems included a dead boyfriend, a briefly misplaced whore, a helicopter mother and suit of shiny armor. While they both knew they were fated to die, they both faced it and they both died. Achilles mad with the lust of power, Hector reduced to a doomed lamb about to be slaughtered by a berserker. Hector died with honor. Achilled killed with disrespect.

Demented Retired Teacher on Adjacent Treadmill: Then again, the victors write the history books, right? Homer was Greek.

Me:  Heh. Nailed it.

WISIMH: Like a dustapan of hair to the wall without the dustpan. The Iliad – more myth than history - is universally recognized by scholars to be the most even-handed war story ever told. Both enemies are treated the same – neither glorified nor vilified - either by the writer or by each other. That’s one of about a million reasons you should read this book once a year. No to mention Christopher Logue’s War Music and All Day Permanent Red profound transliterations of the battle scenes that every REMF should read every year.

WISIMH:  Holy crap! I have hyperlinks inside my head? Does that make me a cyborg?

DRTAT: What’s your favorite part?

Me: The last sentence: "And thus they buried Hector, tamer of horses." It wipes out the heroics and erases the majesty of force in one gentle stroke of humanity, and describes the hero on the scale of his contribution to the world of man.  

WISIMH:  I suppose your favorite part is the horse. Which is not in the Iliad. Also, the Iliad ends just before Troy falls, so it doesn’t say Greece won. However, Achilles dies too, in the actual Iliad and thus before Greece wins. Loser.

Is That You?

Downtown searching for 'er, looking all around

Saw her getting in a yellow cab heading up town

I caught a loaded taxi, paid up everybody's tab

Flipped a twenty dollar bill, told him 'catch that yellow cab.

Nadine, honey is that you?

Oh, Nadine

Honey, is that you?

Seems like every time I catch up with you

You are up to something new/

 - Chuck Berry, Nadine

Among my many stubborn sisters is one who not only refuses to embrace social media, she is such a Luddite she sees absolutely no socially redeeming value in the magic of the internets. I tried to get her to join Pinterest and you’d have thought I was trying to get her to a Scientology audit.

She contends – can this possibly be right? - that real life differs in some important way from virtual life. I know, right? She’s even worse than another stubborn sister who thinks I should get out more. Like she is trying to get me to drink and drive, right?

Then, there’s my sister who I dreamed called to ask me to remind her what was the name of the playing card between six and eight. You have to think about that for a minute: it was very vivid. But was it Go Fish? When I told her, she said it was a portent of how we are losing our minds. Such a worrier. She thinks a zombie looking for brains would pass right by us. For somebody like me lately so preoccupied with the coming zombie apocalypse this is such glass half empty thinking of her.

I could go on. But I was on a mission.

I had determined I’d spend my afternoon at the keyboard, drinking nothing but water and mediating on a topic that I can sink my mental teeth into. I mean metaphorical teeth. The idea is to tackle something, anything, existentially important as an example of how consulting the internets is better than consulting a Tibetan monk in Lhasa while suffering the effects of hypoxia. Better wisdom-O2 ratio at my keyboard. It’s not a complete waste of time and I wanted to prove that the internets can often be used to enrich one’s life when its power is used for good.

So, I was listening to Chuck Berry while thinking of a suitable topic, and obviously realized Nadine would be a perfect subject. I’m trying to show my sister how wise and all-knowing the internets can be, and plus entertaining.

If you google image Nadine, you get pictures of dark long brunettes looking over their shoulders in chiropractically questionable positions and equally uncomfortable/minimal clothing. And all young and thin and come-hithering and shit. Probably the kind of woman Chuck was trying to catch up with.

This afternoon I have been meditating/internetting whether Nadine is a high class whore name. Or whether it’s just me and google image that thinks that. Maybe some of the women pictured are famous. They have this Eastwick blank sameness (the equivalent of the Victorian Interchangeable Emma). A sort of 21^st century Raquel Welch wannabe but less edgy than Raquel. Less authentic than even Madonna who tried too hard to make it look easy. Then again, the Nadine images could be of the same two or three women.

To be sure, some of the edginess to Nadine is that there’s something more sexy about brunettes. It could be they’re just malnourished Russians or broke Eurotrash, but I think it may be that hint of brains. Not enough to be scary for sure, but maybe would get your jokes, you know? 

But not the one about how Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings. They don’t know shit about Wings, and that too may be a good thing. Because sadly blonds too often still do. The blonds, for consideration on some future day, will be mono-named but with invented sharp sounding names. Kyriaka, Zulynn, Mijanou. And Bunny.

Yahooo Answers wouldn’t even entertain the question about whether Nadine is a slut name. Using a different browser (Firefox is a fucking prude) I found out why. One word. Porn.

Now, part of spending the afternoon on the internet is learning how to follow forks in the information superhighway. Since Yahoo crashed Messenger rather than address the issue of Nadine’s sluttishness, I wondered if it was Yahoo in general, or just Nadine. A scientific test was in order.

Turns out, Yahoo is more responsive when you ask: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Oddly, many replies include white refrigerators. This will remain a mystery meme. Wait, let me ask google for images of this. Technical difficulties and distractions ensure.

I began a google search with “please don’t take…”  I think even my most stubborn sister knows how google loves to play the Let Me Guess What You’re Asking game. The third suggested answer is “…the baby to the liquor store”. Drops mike. Walks away.

Then I got more water and came back. Having come to no conclusion and tabled the Nadine/slut name issue for a future session, I determined to get me some serious internet wisdom. I read the latest issue of International Socialism which let’s just say really harshed my Nadine-instigated mellow. So I had to visit Kate Heidel at  Wear Your Cape to cheer the fuck back up.      

So, while it’s not all fun and games on the internet, there’s some stuff out there that keeps me interested in life. Too bad when I try to listen to Spotify and practice zen googling my computer keeps crashing.

Which got me thinking. Life is counter intuitive. Glitter has a surprisingly heavy carbon footprint. It takes more water to make a tiny packet of glitter than it takes to make a bottle of bottled water.

When I was Your Age

“Now do you believe dead rats float, Lisa?”

 - Homer Simpson

We had to do homework over the summer. We had to read a bunch of books. We had to show up in September at Catholic school, probably circa 6^th grade, circa 1959, with a book report on, among other forgotten gems, Kon Tiki. It was a story by an anthropologist who wanted to test his theory about how people might have migrated from the old world to the new world. It was mind-numbingly uninteresting to someone who had the intellectual imagination to theorize about how a snail felt when you put salt on it to watch it dissolve.

Notwithstanding that I hated the pathetic young under-educated nuns whose “calling” was more important than their teaching abilities, the book was rubbish. Homework over summer vacation has been outlawed by Article XXIV of the Human Rights Convention. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the number of the last book of the Iliad. Or is it??

I remember my report said that floating across an ocean on a homemade raft was probably slightly more exciting than reading a book about floating across an ocean on a homemade raft because at least the raft had a mast tall enough to hang myself and probably enough rope to get the job done. All I had that summer was a salt shaker to punish snails who squished between my bare toes when we played hide and seek after dinner. When I was your age, snails didn’t even have shells. (I think I mean slugs, don’t I?)

In my book report deliberately misspelled the author’s name multiple times, which I will boldly spell here without the help of the google because we didn’t have spell check or google back in those homework-laden summers of yesteryear and because I want to make a point about how stupid this book was. I think it was Thor Hyerdhal. Or Tor Hayrideall. Or Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Sister Alice Maureen didn’t have spellcheck or even, apparently, a copy of the book. She certainly never read the book reports. I think the idea was to just count the number of reports turned in and then laugh over communal supper at the suckers who actually bothered. It’s a wonder I’m not bitter.

Anyway, in my report, I said the part I enjoyed the most was when the sailor/author befriended a stowaway rat with whom (late at night over brandy and cigars) he discussed whether to include a chapter - or at least a paragraph - about masturbating to the soft porn magazines the author had brought along “just in case”. That didn’t happen, at least in the book. At least as I recall. Spoiler alert: in my (as yet unpublished) book report, the rat was lost at sea.

Perhaps it’s worth another read now that I’m a grown up. Although my intellectual development has advanced beyond questioning the inner lives of snails, I did once shoot a man just to watch him die. It was Whore Higherdoll, just after he announced he was writing a sequel about his return trip across the ocean in the cargo hold of an overbooked Jet Blue flight.

Picture credit: http://rosamirabooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/rat-ahoy.html