Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Decade Not To Remember

The current edition of NEW YORK Magazine reflects on the decade.  Personally and professionally, I'm hoping to forget it.  Everything that I feared or wasn't sophisticated enough about life to fear happened. 

Pets who were more family than my own family died.  A sister who was family but not close for about 10 years died.  That wiped out those parts of my childhood that I had experienced with her.  There is no one else who had borne witness.  Also, I got it, and I was right, that much of my decisions and actions were self-destructive.  I stopped that.  But the shock lingers.

Professionally, my business tanked Download Geezerguts.  That proved to be a blessing but I don't wish that blessing on any one.  Just as I was again making big money, the Great Recession blew in.  I have given up the goal of returning to a high earning capacity.  Maybe that too will prove to be a blessing. 

I see no useful reason to review the past decade.  I am certain that some practiced public relations pros can bury it.  Meanwhile, I have started out the new decade with my first novel.  It's doing just fine on Barnes and Noble.  

2 Cultures: Yale and Marginal

It's just visually sitting there, ready for a Dorothea Lange: Yale and the Marginal.  But the sad-looking creatures who would be photographed would be the Yale folk, not the street ones who hang around The Green in New Haven, Connecticut. 

The students from Yale who walk by are so skinny and unsmiling that one would conclude they are living through some worst of times.  Their body language screams anxiety.  In the postal station marked "for Yale only" but isn't for Yale only any more they grouse about the time they're wasting on line.  The civil service clerks, as in Russian novels, seem to treat them with scorn.  For example, they are not allowed to jump the line to ask a question about if they need to be on line.

The marginal people who loiter around The Green are chubby, smiling, and have been seen to even break into dance.  People are kind to them.  The street crowd treat this little universe as theirs.  They pop into the nearby 12-step meetings in church basements.  There coffee and, now with the holidays, goodies free.  The New Haven Public Library has rest rooms, newspapers, the Internet, and chairs to doze in. 

Post-bubble crash, striving to obtain an Establishment credential doesn't seem one bit appealing. 

Here is my funny-dark book on capitalism as we knew it during the boom.

Their little lives: Not grief yet, just sadness

Two years ago Callie the calico died of cancer.  A year and a half before that Molly Mittens the Pomeranian died of congestive heart failure.  Two years before that Sarah the long-haired gray beauty died of cancer. 

Now, going into the holiday season I got the bad news on Saturday that Jason the black short-haired has congestive heart failure.  Given the way he sometimes struggled to catch his breathe, I anticipated a diagnosis of cancer. 

"That's good news.  Not cancer."  That was my idiot reply.  But actually it was good news.  Jason could just drop dead, boom.  Callie had to be put down.  So did Sarah.  Molly Mittens died when the vet and I turned from the table to do paperwork on tests to be taken.  Also, the vet indicated Jason could die over the weekend or last years.  He recommended more protein in the diet, to bring down his weight.  And, if he's still with us this summer, I will have to install a new air-conditioner.

Right now, it's sadness, not pet grief.  But when it comes to our four-footed companions sadness is really sad.  My worry is that Jason is very close with the Havana Brown short-haired Carlotta.  "I need Jason around as long as we can pull it off, for Carlotta." That's what I told the vet.  Pet lovers plan, the gods laugh.

Those Feuds - The Best Gifts for those we hate and who hate us

I grew up on family, neighborhood, and commercial feuds.  They get especially exciting during the holidays.  Major decisions have to be made if gifts should be exchanged.  The answer is usually yes.  Part of the psychology of feuds is keeping the enemy guessing.  That is most creatively accomplished through gifts.  Yeah, you got it, beware of greeks bearing gifts.

Here are the best bets:

• Something that appears to be expensive.  Usually that means picking it up as it falls off a truck.  To do that, hang around urban streets.  The recipient will be confused at our generosity.  They will spend months pondering this, discussing it with family members, and considering they might have misjudged us.  Since the item is likely counterfeit, it will break sooner than later.  The recipient will figure they were not careful enough and feel guilty.  It doesn't get better than that.

• A hand-made craft.  They will assume they have to display it and will cave.  Few like crafted anything.  This will visually haunt them.

• Food of any kind.  They will realize we didn't put any thought into the selection and will feel insulted.  Just as we wanted.

• A contribution in their name to some cause they could care less about.  Everyone needs money right now. 

• A children's book when they don't have kids.  This attempt at cute will just rip them. 

Upsetting our foes with exactly the wrong gift is one of the deep joys of the holidays, at least for those of us for whom feuds matter.

Dynasty, wealth aren't everything

Caroline Kennedy is aging badly.  Her mother would have been heartbroken to witness this.  But if her mother along with her father and brothers were around, the aging might not have gotten so out of hand. 

"Getting Tigered"

Surely sooner than later, a new phrase will enter pop culture.  It's: "Getting Tigered." 

That will be street code for being taken in by a squeaky clean persona.  That could be the persona or image of a person, organization, cause, product or service. 

Examples could be:

Yeah, she got tigered by that Mormon missionary she was dating.

Volunteering for the soup kitchen seemed so right.  But, I was completely tigered.

The client seemed so sincere about rewarding us for WoWs.  We were so tigered.

I guess the question is why we get tigered, including by the original Tiger?  Do we need illusion that much about the way of the world?

The Holidays

All the biggies like Thanksgiving used to put my back out when I was young.  I had to be with my family.  Now in old middle-age, they're just as tough.  There is no family left to be with. 

Why aren't they telling one another how they feel? - Daul Kim, 20, likely suicide

Is it the seeming invulnerability of the young that prevents them from telling each other how they really feel?  Maybe.  So soon after the suicide at the NYU library we have one in Paris.  Model Daul Kim apparently killed herself.  She was age 20.

When I was young and in college, we sometimes alluded to pain.  In those days we called it angst or alienation.  But suicide?  That was a taboo subject, particularly in the women's Roman Catholic College Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.  The party line was optimism.  In fact the college's motto was: Hazard Yet Forward.

As time passed and we former classmates got drunk and truthful, we recounted our frequent suicidal ideation. 

One woman, convinced she was pregnant, hatched a plan to jump from the Canevin Building. 

Another walked around a classmate who had taken too many pills.  Later in life, that woman did finish off the attempt. 

What we always bring up is that naive soul who confided to her date at the neighboring men's college Vincent's that she wanted to off herself.  He told everyone and everyone told the Dean of Women at Seton Hill.  The woman transferred.  When I ran into her in the late 1970s, she was still bitter there was lots of gossip about her despair but no concrete help. 

From her experience,  I learned to keep my lips buttoned.  At 58, I finally bottomed out, asked a cognitive behavioral therapist Amy Karnilowicz [family.therapist@comcast.net, 860-216-5116] for guidance.  Haven't had a suicidal day since.  Question: Why couldn't I have sorted that out with a good friend? 

Seton Hill, Greensburg, PA 1966-67: A Tale of Two Roommates

"You were there to get a degree.  I was there, needy and looking for everything, anything."

After a three-hour conversation last night with college roommate from senior year at Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a mystery got solved. 

She - let's call her Rose - went through that then woman's Roman Catholic College, went on to a job, marriage, immigrating to the left coast, opening and, after many years, losing a business with her husband, surviving comfortably the Great Recession, and migrating back to western Pennsylvania - smoothly, w/o a nervous breakdown or more, and sans drama.

I did nothing smoothly, had a whooper of a breakdown in 1970 and 2003, and created or attracted plenty of drama. 

The difference, we figured out, is that she wasn't looking for anything, ever.  Instead she saw what was there, took advantage of opportunity, and pushed back on mean people.  Me?  I assumed institutions filled with folks in their own transitions, grabbing at their own goals, and more often stuck could guide me, love me, make me love myself.  Didn't find that, of course.

"But how could it have been different, less a disaster, less painful to you at another college."

That's what call-her-Rose asked.  The answer was so obvious.  The players would have been a more interesting set at, say Rutgers in my home state of New Jersey or Harvard Law, where I got in the mid 1980s.  To me - and remember I am writer who sucks in others's experiences - the show would have been worth it. 

And that's exactly what has happened, post-2003 meltdown.  I struggled to need less from the world and find more through my observations and skills as a writer.  I tumbled into the world of hyper successful on the Gold Coast of Connecticut and Manhattan.  The result has been my first novel "The Fat Guy From Greenwich," to be published early winter.  Here are the first two chapters Download FGFGchapters1,2.  These characters were worth the agita.

I choose my poison better today.  That's made the pain a writer's gold mine.

Writers & Demon Alcohol

Have you've known an influential writer who hasn't battled Demon Alcohol [DA]?  Unlikely.  The two seem to go together like W.B. Yates's concept of the interrelation between the dancer and the dance.

That battle seemed to have been lost by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Ludwig van Beethoven as a composer [see Chapter 4 in "Manic Depression and Creativity" by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb. ]

It was won by Stephen King, Dominick Dunne, and, it seems, me.  Today is yet another anniversary for me as a Friend of Bill [FOB].

What have I learned that gives me an edge in outfoxing DA?  Plenty.

Most of the lessons came indirectly, from other FOBs, usually ones just starting out.  One canary-yellow chap when he came into the rooms returned to the pink of health within four months.  He remains in the pick of health.  Observing him and talking with him I came to adopt the Don't Care mindset.  I really don't care which prospects turn me down.  It's an opportunity to reverse-engineering my pitch and do better next time.  I don't care about what folks in the past are thinking and saying about me.  After all, if they're wasting time on a screwup like me, they're probably not growing as quickly as they need to in this complex world.  I don't care about money.  That started out when I took my vow of poverty on the same day that I entered the rooms.

Another lesson I learned is that I can unplug from that awful entity reality [which even T.S. Eliot admitted was pretty heavy stuff] w/o getting a load on.  There's renting a car and running away [usually to the ocean] for as long as it takes to reset.  There's getting an extension on a client deadline and working on my own stuff.  There's not moving from the couch and taking in all the crime TV shows, new and repeats.

Third, I learned the power of a good night's sleep.  Research shows that it really does reconfigure our mental state.  It might even help us solve creative problems.  Yeah, sleep on the decision to return to DA before you do the deed.

How am I celebrating my anniversary? Doing nothin'.  I smoothly reset a client deadline.  After doing nothin' I am heading to the movie theatre by Yale and watching films until the place shuts down.