Thoughts On Life

Every time I see a photo of a certain Republican candidate with orange hair and an increasingly tanned-from-a-booth visage I think of the scene in The Wedding Planner where, the day before her wedding, a panicky bride presents with a blotchy, orange face from too long under the tanner. JLo says ‘quarter cup of lemon juice and half a cup of salt and scrub scrub scrub’.

You live most of your life with your eyes screwed shut and you don’t even know it. Then one day you open them and realize that your real is godawful. You close them again; don’t want to look at that picture. Sometimes when you open them again you realize your real is freaking brilliant.

Does that make you schizo, or manic depressive or just very alive and aware? Or all three? Life is mercurial for some and that’s a fact.

The law of increasing complexity: the less aware you are the fewer choices you make consciously and the simpler life seems at some level. At a consequence level though, it’s chaotic because the unconscious choices you make control your behaviour and your world as if you were a puppet.

The great thing is that if you want to you can say it’s not my fault. The world is doing this to me. And it is.

But the big cahuna question is why the hell do I let it? The more you figure it out the more you realize how many unconscious choices you’ve been making to let people over-ride you. You have to make more conscious choices and face the fear that made you avoid them in the first place. And there’s no turning back, more’s the pity. It’s much easier to just be a victim and let life and people crucify you.

Well, not really.

Some people can see all the repressed emotions that are flying around in a group, all the passive aggressive behaviour. It can be pretty damn lonely because they can’t talk to  anybody, hey, did you see that?!! If they have somebody to share it with, that’s great. If they don’t, they either drive themselves dilly with the debate is it me, is it them, am I mad, are they crazy.

Or they write a screenplay or a play.

Much as everybody says being lonely is the worst thing in the world, it isn’t. Being mostly numb, half dead, passive aggressive, controlling, blind and deaf, that’s the worst. Because some part of you knows it and screams at you all the time. You have to work real hard to keep it out of your awareness so there’s nothing left for you to focus on joy. It exhausts you at a level you can’t access but it takes a toll on your body. One day, boom!

We’re all over-adaptive in some way or another. If you’re aware of it you’ll feel like a ghost in your own town until you find your voice. And when you do you might also find that you don’t like that town at all. You might grab the only horse there is and head on out. Some of the people left behind will be sad to see you go but thrilled for you. Others will blacken your name. If it happens, just keep on riding, don’t look back.

Or you might find that you are the horse. You're just a kid horse and you have to head on out alone. Don't worry, you'll find others soon enough.

I don’t like missionaries who target the poor or the needy, give them nice stuff like food and shelter and then indoctrinate them because at some level, even if they’re adults, there’s a vulnerable child within. The missionaries exploit the same principle that makes a child loyal to a man or woman who takes them hostage and then rapes them for years. Stockholm Syndrome, it’s called. It has many variations and there’s more than one way to take a child hostage and rape it.

Missionaries don’t respect your right to think for yourself. They respect their right to overpower your mind, though. And they sure believe that God talks to them more than he/she does to you.

To date James Patterson has written 130 books in 38 years and sold 305 million copies in all. He’s been the world’s best-selling author since 2001; way ahead of JK Rowling. He writes unashamedly to a formula and has an army of ghost writers working for him now, as well as a PR department in his publisher Little, Brown which he rules with an iron fist. He’s having a ball with it all.

His first book, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected 31 times before somebody at Little, Brown said ‘yeah, this is a winner’.

Harry Bernstein, Modern Day Hero

The photo is of Harry and Ruby Bernstein, married for 67 years. Bernstein, a man who never gave up as a writer, has a mind-bending story. He wrote 40 books and destroyed most of the manuscripts as they were rejected, as all of them were. When he was 93 Ruby died and the pain was so intense that he wrote a memoir to help him cope with his grief.

He took three years to finish the book which he called The Invisible Wall. It’s about his bleak early childhood years, growing up in the Cheshire/Lancashire mill town of Stockport in the early 1900s.

Harry’s parents had fled persecution in the Pale of Settlement (created in Russia by Catherine the Great in 1791), seeking a refuge in England. They settled in the dead-end East Street in a very poor part of town, Daw Bank, where Jews lived on one side and Christians on the other. Harry was born in 1910. He had six siblings, an alcoholic, abusive brute of a father and a long-suffering mother who took the abuse and tried to take care of her children. She would grovel under fruit stands looking for food. Harry remembers often being hungry and tortured by delicious smells of food being baked.

He also often had to run from kids who wanted to beat him up. Neighbours stood on their verandahs and yelled abuse at the Jews, ranting about them killing Christ. But the bigotry was mutual. Harry’s parents would spit when they passed the Catholic church. That mutual bigotry, the stench and humiliation of poverty formed the world Harry grew up in.

The 1914 war forged something of a bond between Christians and Jews but after the armistice the bigotry took hold again.

The Invisible Wall is also about a classic Romeo and Juliet love story. When his older sister fell in love with a Christian boy Harry’s mother sat shiva  for her, declaring her dead. And neither the poverty nor the abuse crushed Harry’s spirit. When he was 11 years old he started a newspaper The Gossip. There was one copy and it circulated among the community.

Harry’s memoire is raw, gritty, passionate and poetic. He submitted it to  a whole lot of New York publishing houses who all rejected it. But this time he didn’t destroy the manuscript. He persevered, sending it to the London branch of Random House. Even then it sat on the shelves along with other unsolicited manuscripts for a year until editor Kate Elton read it and couldn’t put it down. She later remarked on how well it was written and that it hardly needed any editing. It was published in 2007.

Harry wasn’t done. He wrote three more books about other aspects of his life, The Dream, The Golden Willow, and What Happened to Rose. The last was published posthumously; Harry died in 2011 at the age of 101. While he was writing he said that these years were the most productive of his life. Is there a Nobel prize for perseverance and gutzpah? 

Faith, courage and persistence. People who hold onto their own ideas about their life and keep on working at what moves them until the day they die are our everyday heroes. Harry Bernstein, thank you. Standing ovation stuff.