Take Your Ugly and Run

Lauren Hutton represents!

It's been too long since I checked in with Les Blank. Not that he's missed me - we've never met - but I've missed him. Blank is a documentary filmmaker, probably best known by those who know him at all for Burden of Dreams, his record of the making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. (That sounds so dull and innocuous, but it's a journey to the ragged edge of madness, as you can see from the clip below.)

There was a stretch of years in my twenties when I leaned hard on Blank's example. What seems at first glance ironic about his choice of Herzog as a subject is that, while Herzog's aesthetic and philosophical bent is decidedly bleak, Blank's is unabashedly celebratory. His two favorite subjects are music and food  - titles include Yum, Yum, Yum! and Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers. His first filmic record of Herzog was not The Burden of Dreams, but Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, the comic consequence of an imprudent bet Herzog had made with another documentarian, Errol Morris. (Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse fame, kindly braised the shoe in a garlicky stock for five hours before Herzog dug in. He declined to eat the sole, noting that he would not be expected to eat the bones of a chicken.)

However ill-matched these two directors may superficially appear, they share an invincible curiosity. Both men relish life: Blank for its unquenchable joys, Herzog for its excruciating absurdities. They are wide-lens visionaries, illuminating what is peripheral, neglected, obscure. Their films continually generate small shocks of surprise and recognition, also of gratitude: the world through their eyes is richer than I knew it and stranger than I had the courage to admit.

If for no other film, Les Blank has a permanent home in my heart because he made Gap-Toothed Women, a cinematic ode to my lisping sorority, from the Wife of Bath to Lauren Hutton. I spent four years in braces - even had the muscle between my front teeth surgically snipped when I was seventeen! My gap got smaller but never surrendered, and Blank taught me to be glad of it. He interviewed a couple dozen women for his film, most of them anonymous, all of them vivid. But if memory serves, it was the underground comic artist and sculptor Dori Seda who revealed the magic of the gap and let me see my adolescent struggles by the light of her own. She said she'd once hated & been violently embarrassed by the stubborn, suggestive space between her teeth. She thought it made her ugly, feared she'd never get a boyfriend (not a "nice" one, anyway), envied the pretty girls to whom everything seemed to come easy. But if she had been pretty, she now figured, she would never have been forced to grow interesting (and strange and strong). She would never have become an artist, would never have found true love. Her gap was her public flaw and her secret power.

An exaggeration, yes, a fable with a temporary happy ending. (Seda died much too young of too much smoking and inhaling of ceramic dust.) But there's truth in it - much the same truth as in Tom Waits' immortal line "If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too."

What's the devil and the flaw and the power in you?

Forza!
Gretchen

Joy to the world

Snow doesn't fall often in Portland, but whatever does fall tends to fall in the west hills where we live. We woke one morning late last week to about an inch and a half of the lovely white stuff, just enough to frost the trees and bring out the bunk in our golden hussy, Barley, who bounced like an ecstatic rabbit around our neighborhood park.

Here's wishing you and yours a thousand reasons to celebrate this season of renewal. If you need an extra excuse to raise a glass, I've unwrapped a few to share:

1. Ghetto hikes

14 February 2012
HEY! MR. CODY SAY NO MORE JELLY BELLYS IF YOU BE USIN SWEAR WORDS. HOLY SHIT! YOLANDA GOT A PINA COLADA BEAN!

7 February 2012
ROCKS, STICKS, RIVERS. NEEDA COME OUT HERE WITH MY FUCKIN ART SUPPLIES, PAINT ALLLLLLL THIS BEAUTIFUL SHIT.

2. Fuck yeah Xabi gifs!

3. Why We Rescue & Maddie the Coonhound

4. Tracey Thorn's Joy

Stay warm and be merry.

Forza!
Gretchen

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

Rainer Maria Rilke's wrote that beautiful line in his Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29 (as translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rilke reminds us to speak even when we've lost faith that we'll be heard. He reminds us that we all possess the poet's alchemical power to transform bitterness and suffering into song. That power, however, is hard won, and by its nature entirely personal. It cannot be coerced from without.

Among the many things to be thankful for in this (all-too-brief) hiatus between election seasons, we can count a temporary respite from Republican "rape gaffes." Whatever Todd Akin may continue to believe (and to whisper in Paul Ryan's ear) about the superpowers of the female anatomy, we won't have to hear it repeated for a while.

In a strange way, though, I'm thankful for the gaffes themselves. Not only because they helped turn at least a couple of senatorial races (and quite possibly the presidential race) in the direction I favored but also because they dimly illumined some real, stubborn differences that go beyond the specific issue of abortion to our perceptions of moral agency itself, of what it means to choose.

I confess that I wasn't especially shocked by Richard Mourdock's reflection that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen."

I deplore the thought, but I'm glad Mourdock spoke it aloud, and I think he spoke in better faith than do some of the people who held him at arm's length until Election Day. For those of any religion who truly believe that "it's all part of God's plan," there are no codicils or exceptions to that belief. It needs must include rape, murder, and torture. (Dostoevsky dissected this spiritual difficulty brilliantly and heartbreakingly through his creation Ivan Karamazov and his story of the Grand Inquisitor.)

We may choose to leave the work of meaning up to God (or His elected representatives), in which case we cannot complain. Even in the absence of belief, we may decide (as Buddhists do) that our core spiritual work is about acceptance, about drinking down what is bitter and turning ourselves to wine. But who should presume to force that draught down our throats and call it anything but violence?

One of my heroes of spiritual alchemy is the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi. He was just beginning his (first) career as a chemist when the Nazis invaded Poland, and he later became - very briefly and by his own confession ineptly - a fighter for the Italian resistance before being captured, imprisoned, and eventually deported to Auschwitz. His account of his time there - Se Questo È Un Uomo (If This Is a Man) - remains the most indelible tale of endurance I have ever read, heroic (as many have observed) for its antiheroism. The worst of the crimes that Levi lays at the Nazis' feet is the deliberate, systematic destruction of their captives' dignity and decency; he can only communicate the horror of that crime by describing his own degradation into a creature of mere appetite. The strength he needed to write of such evil in a plain, clear voice is unfathomable to me - and I send up an empty prayer that it will remain so.

But in order to appreciate the magnitude of Levi's alchemical gifts (and in order to understand how difficult it has been for many to admit the possibility that he did not fall but leapt down a stairwell to his death in 1987), you need to read The Periodic Table. What you will find there is radiance. Wit. Love. Celebration. The song of a man who turned darkness to a bell tower and allowed what battered him to become his strength. He took on that great spiritual work, and his possible suicide does not to my mind diminish the humble miracle he performed in realizing it.

Irreverence itself supplies the steadiest source of light and calalytic heat in Levi's writing, as it did in his work as a chemist. Here he comments on the scientifically elegant solution he found to the problem of making lipstick more lasting: "The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies' lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn't trouble me for a moment. The trade of a chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever."

God absconded from Levi's world, but he kept his faith in carbon and nitrogen, the stuff of life. For a very long while, it was enough.

Quiet II: Just You Wait

Sometimes we find ourselves at the whipping edge of the storm, sometimes at the still but radiant eye. If we're enamored of our own strength, we may come to love resistance for its own sake: we push out when we're being pulled in, or shrink stubbornly into ourselves against the outflung winds. But when we fight the weather of the moment, we risk wasting its power.

Posted over my desk is a quotation from the Tao Te Ching that I return to in turbulent times:

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

The answer is often no, but the questions still and steady me.

Forza!
Gretchen

Quiet

Kicking ass doesn't always mean getting loud, getting big, preaching the Greater Glory of Me. Sometimes the best we can contribute to the world is a little bit of nothing. Silence can be an offering, an invitation, and a blessing.

When I was a senior in high school and the yearbook polls went out, I got voted "Talks Least, Says Most," which felt like a great vindication at the time. I was totally tickled to learn that the same people who had intermittently mocked me for my braininess, social idiocy, and failures of fashion sense had been impressed all along by this ineluctable quality of my character, this all-too-rare combination of substance and modesty!

Ha. Turns out it was only my insecurity (not) talking. In college, where I was suddenly surrounded by people who found thinking as fun and sexy as I did, all the gabbing that I'd previously confined to classrooms (where I could at least count on the encouragement of my bemused teachers - is this the moment to confess that I also got voted Faculty Flirt?) spilled into the cafeteria and dormitories and open lawns and futons that were almost synonymous with "life" for a short, intoxicating while. Whatever imbalance there had been on my conversational scales between "talking" and "saying" suddenly disappeared, though I don't think it got reversed until I became a teacher. (What closet extrovert can resist a captive audience?)

As must be clear, my habit of speaking my unruly thoughts aloud is now well rooted, enough so that I'm more likely these days to talk too much than too little when I'm nervous. Language sometimes functions like a briar hedge in my life: I prune it into enchanting shapes and forget to notice that it's closing me in.

When I remember, I try to make an opening.

I shut up.

Listen.

Then write all about it.

Forza!
Gretchen

p.s. I'm not sure whether it's ironic or apt that I'm writing this just as I've been struggling with an antibiotic-induced bout (she says optimistically, hoping there will be an end to it, and soon) of tinnitus. An innocent word for a nasty problem. The quieter things are right now, the louder the high-pitched static and whine in my right ear. So my love for silence is more than usually intense, and - alas! - totally unrequited.

Men in Tight Pants Who Positively Kick Ass: Quentin Jammer, Brendan Ayanbadejo & Chris Kluwe

The man.​

We're about halfway into the football season, and my mind is therefore (un)naturally occupied by the San Diego Chargers, who have all but perfected the art of breaking their fans' hearts. Case in point: they recently made history by becoming the first NFL team ever to lead a game by 24 points at the half then lose it by double digits. They took a chance to own the AFC West and strangled the breath out of it over 30 excruciating minutes of playing time. "Implosion" could be the Chargers' middle name.

As if this weren't bummer enough, it completely eclipsed a magical moment that had been more than ten years in the making: Quentin Jammer scoring the first touchdown of his career on an interception of Peyton Manning. A blown play sent the ball sailing right into Jammer's arms, and even though his face was obscured by his helmet, you couldn't mistake his giddiness as he skipped neatly around a tackler and kept on going until he was gone. I could swear he paused at the fifteen-yard line, as if to say, "Really?" or maybe just to savor the moment. I could almost swear the last Bronco paused with him: "You go, man. You've earned it." But I'm sentimental on the subject of Quentin Jammer.

Jammer got drafted by the Chargers as the fifth overall pick back in 2002. He's now in his eleventh year in the league, playing a highly physical version of a highly physical position, cornerback. I first admired him for his stoicism and his quietly fierce commitment to doing his job right by his own lights. These qualities were thrown into high relief when Antonio Cromartie joined the Bolts in 2006 and soon came to personify everything Jammer wasn't: acrobatic flash & self-loving swagger. In his years with the Chargers, Cromartie made about as many spectacular interceptions as he fathered children (soon to be twelve by nine mothers). Jammer just kept making tackles and breaking plays while raising three boys with his wife, Alicia. He mentored Cro and later defended him when teammates grew impatient with the younger man's lust for the hero's cape. (Now with the Jets, Cromartie is finally stealing an occasional taste of life as a wide receiver.)

Last season, Q wasn't so steady. He drifted out of coverage, becoming an easier target for opposing quarterbacks than he'd been in years. His timing was off and his hands were sloppy. Refs noticed. Every broken pass seemed to draw a yellow flag. Jammer looked overamped one minute and lost the next, suddenly not a man you could count on.

Maybe not in the short run. But a few months ago Jammer sat down with Kevin Acee, a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and laid it out just the way he's been doing forever: the no-apologies, hard-tackling truth. He told Acee where the fog had rolled in from. His marriage had come apart, and so had he. He'd spent months dazed by sadness, convinced that his failures as a husband and father made him a failure as a man and human being. But he learned otherwise. As Acee tells it,

"He first tried to hide his depression from his mother and younger brother, to whom Jammer has been a father of sorts. He did have a close friend, Ian Kennedy, who would not let Jammer push him away. And when Jammer informed his family of his troubles, they responded only with support.

'The thing I’ll take away from that is you don’t go through that alone,' Jammer said. 'Talk to somebody. Somebody may snap you out of it ... I learned people really care about me and love me for me.'

He said there was no magical moment that got him up from the floor.

'Just time,' Jammer said. 'You go out and you heal. You heal the best way you know how. You see all the people that support you and love you. You find out they all care about you. It gradually happened. I just got a little bit more happy, a little bit more happy. It just got a little better every day.'"

It's hard enough from the sidelines of our Ram Tough culture to speak plainly and without bitterness of pain, of need. It's a lot harder when you're on the field, playing out our communal fantasies of strength. Q spoke to Acee just weeks after a stadium full of people had celebrated the sadly abbreviated life of Junior Seau, who committed suicide in May - he'd seen how a man can get crushed by the mythologies he shoulders.

We women are hardly immune, especially when we get to thinking that the world will grind to a slow halt without our cheerful encouragement. ("I'm good." "It's all good." "Hangin' in.") In my own periodic struggles with depression, I've found it very hard to reach out, and vanity has been part of the reason: I want to think of myself as someone other people turn to for comfort and support.

That said, the public display of vulnerability doesn't usually entail an existential crisis for women the way it so often does for men. "Manly" is a brand of sprung steel trap, and you can hear the jaws snap shut a hundred times a day.

Sometimes you can step past; sometimes you need a sledgehammer to bust your way to safe ground. Brendan Ayanbadejo, a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, has been speaking out against homophobia for years, and he recently added his strong, clear voice to the campaign to preserve a newborn Maryland law that enshrines the right of gays and lesbians to marry. This exercise of a free mind and a compassionate heart (Ayanbadejo "happens" to be straight) inspired a state delegate, Emmett C. Burns Jr., to write to the owner of the Ravens, "requesting that you take the necessary actions... to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions."

Enter Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe - with sledgehammer - in a letter to Burns published on Deadspin:

"[W]hy do you hate freedom? Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something different than you, or act different than you? How does gay marriage, in any way shape or form, affect your life? If gay marriage becomes legal, are you worried that all of a sudden you'll start thinking about penis? "Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!" Will all of your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely, since gay people enjoy watching football too.)"

A week later, Burns relented:

"Upon reflection, [Ayanbadejo] has his First Amendment rights. And I have my First Amendment rights. … Each of us has the right to speak our opinions. The football player and I have a right to speak our minds."

Very generous of you, Mr. Burns.

Love & Truth 1, "Manly" trap 0.

Forza!
Gretchen

Update: Bless their mighty hearts, voters in Maryland, Maine, and maybe Washington (still counting, but looking good!) have come out in support of marriage equality. Score!

Cromartie makes good. Photo by Adam Bouska.​

Disappoint someone today

What the heck?​

If you can disappoint someone you love and/or admire hugely, all the better. Here's the thing: unless they're narcissistic jerks, the people whose opinions matter most to us don't actually want the burden of that responsibility. They don't want us to treat their every utterance as gospel or their every desire as divine fiat. They don't want to be our bad cops or good angels. They've got better, more interesting things to do, and our insecurity only drags them down.

Truly, the people in our lives who are most worthy of our love and admiration are the people we'll have the hardest time disappointing, but we'll never believe that unless we try. The people who love us depend on us to try, because the myth of perfect harmony is a cold killer. It will remorselessly strangle the life and joy from our love if we give it an opening.

I'm not suggesting that you go kick your grandmother in the teeth, or stand up a friend, or bare your breasts to Richard Thompson at his next concert. (What? That hadn't occurred to you? It has occurred to me, because I am a disappointingly low-minded gal despite my high-minded taste for British sarcasm, lyrical brilliance, and berets. I don't care if the man is twenty years my senior - he's incredibly damn hot.) You see, we don't have to make a big effort to be disappointing. We all come by it naturally. If you find yourself tempted by the grand "fuck you" gesture, you've probably spent a long time hiding your naturally disappointing self away, stuffing her into a very small, spring-loaded box. She will get out one day - SURPRISE!

That's why I'm in favor of making disappointment part of our daily routine. It's as easy as saying "no." As easy as saying "that doesn't work for me." As hard as saying "I want." Or "I think," or "I feel." And not apologizing. 

There it is, my fool-proof, dissatisfaction-guaranteed recipe for disappointing others. Baking times may vary - check your oven temperature.

Forza!
Gretchen

How's That Mirror Treating You?

​Photo by Cea.

One of my favorite pieces ​of advice in the "are you fucking kidding me?" category came from a history teacher I had in high school, someone who knew me just well enough to be dangerous.

"Beware your self-consciousness, Gretchen. It is all that separates you from true happiness."​

Um, right. Thanks for that!

In a generous reading, this polished little turd of wisdom could be embraced as a "character koan," like Pema Chödrön's warning that the impulse toward self- improvement is a subtle form of aggression. To the ready mind, it could offer a twisted path to enlightenment. But for a sixteen-year-old girl already half-paralyzed by anxiety​ about how she appeared to others (awkward, boyish, freckled & unkempt), it was the functional equivalent of "RELAX!" or "STOP THINKING ABOUT THE ELEPHANT!" Supremely unhelpful.

I can't say that I've totally dropped the habit of looking over my own shoulder, and I'd be a fool to suppose that I ever will, but self-consciousness doesn't grip me so cruelly these days. It was never my enemy, just another histrionic friend with boundary issues: "Oh my God, did you really just say Albanian when you meant Armenian? Of course I know you're not an idiot, but honey, you do realize that you will never be taken seriously by any of these people ever again, don't you? Such a shame." Okay, maybe sometimes my enemy, but much less so now than in the past.

There are many things that have conspired to loosen the corset whose laces I used to tighten every hour. Only a few have arrived in the form of epiphany, and I want to share one with you now. Maybe it'll help you as it has helped me. I hope in any event that it won't put a nasty new twist in your knickers if they're already knotted. Here you go:

No one will ever know just how good you are. Or how bad.​ Or how smart, how beautiful, how worthy of love.

​This includes your mother. It definitely includes your father. It includes your kids, your best friend, your lover, your mentor, your doctor, your pastor, the clerk at the grocery store, and the alluring stranger on the bus. Most importantly, this includes you.

I'll admit, there's a downside to living with this truth. For many of us, I think, the concept of heaven is attractive not only for the obvious reasons (comprehensive health coverage, cotton candy clouds, long picnics and touch football games with all our virtuous friends and family, etc.) but also, strangely, for the promise of ultimate judgment itself. As much as we dread our moment with St. Peter (or whomever we've installed in the judge's seat), we long for it, too. We want to know: will the gates swing wide when our names are called out from the register, or will the trapdoor open beneath our feet?​

Unfortunately, the desire to know how we ultimately stack up leaves us dangerously vulnerable. There are plenty of people all too ready to tell us, people who will use our hunger for an answer to assuage their own desperate insecurity. Many of history’s most vicious tyrants have amassed their power from the common human reluctance to live in a state of ambiguity and doubt.​

At the same time, we are woefully ill-equipped to judge ourselves. Even literal mirrors teach us this: we part our hair and practice our smiles for the favor of a backward image, then wonder why we look so odd in photos. Catherine and John Walter have speculated that a "feminine" right hair part spelled electoral doom for Al Gore in 2000, and they've created a True Mirror to allow people to see themselves as others see them. The experience is almost always unsettling, just as it is to overhear someone talking about you without knowing you're there. Whose truth can you trust? Who has the real skinny?

No one. The Book of You will be open long after you're gone, and every competing draft will be written in pencil. You cannot know how even the smallest of your acts - your offhand kindnesses, your petty cruelties - may ripple out, or whether your mightiest accomplishment will become your greatest shame. You cannot know whether that element of your appearance that you find most repellent may snag the curiosity of someone who comes to love you.

Can you live with that? Can you navigate by your own dim lights and keep moving forward absent the comforts of false certainty? Try it, and feel your rib cage expand.

Forza!
Gretchen​

First and Last, Kick Your Own Ass

​You might need help with this one. Photo by lulemon athletica.

Yes, kicking our own asses is awkward, but it's also necessary - something akin to Jesus's advice regarding motes, logs, and first stones, only not so stringently peaceable or self-effacing. It doesn't mean that we have to be paragons of virtue before we start mixing it up - we only need a couple of well-worn, homegrown examples like Abraham Lincoln and MLK, Jr. to remind us that history's most eloquent (and compassionate) ass kickers have all dwelt somewhere lower than they dreamed of ascending. Hypocrisy is sometimes unavoidable on the middle path between perfectionism and paralysis - if we wait to speak up until we're breathing the cold, thin air of righteousness, our voices may die in our throats.

Words imbued with struggle and hope are words in motion; they surge with the power of desire. Words of attainment - been there, done that - have never moved me much. One of my all-time favorite cartoons depicts a small band of men standing on a snow-covered peak, next to a flag that reads "BECAUSE WE'RE JERKS." I encountered it many years ago on the refrigerator of the man who became my husband... the same man who later climbed Kilimanjaro with my father and brother, puking his guts out at 18,000 feet and slogging through the garbage left by thousands of other jerks.

These are the internal contradictions that I don't care to live without, in myself or those I revere. There are people who toss babies out with their bathwater every morning, but I tend to avoid their company. Heroes, like family, ought to embarrass us now and then.

When I was a kid, I worshipped Pete Rose, and I have never regretted it. I didn't guess at the depth and breadth of his assholery when I was eight, but it was there all the time, and it was part of what made him great - that pure current of self-interest that sent him barreling around the bases whenever he knocked out another hit. Pete lent me strength and a dose of "fuck you" attitude that helped me survive a typically rocky adolescence. Maybe every eight-year-old girl needs an asshole to admire, preferably (much preferably) from a distance. Close up, they're not so great.

The Pete-Rose-sized hole in the Hall of Fame is a travesty, a monument to misdirected sanctimony erected by men who confuse baseball with religion.

And that brings me back to my original subject: the weird yogic practice of kicking our own backsides. I was in college when Pete Rose finally got busted for gambling, and then for repeatedly lying about it. I didn't feel betrayed; I didn't feel like everything he'd given to me had been stolen away. I still felt grateful. But damn, did I wish him just a smidgen of self-awareness. He'd worked so hard once upon a time to make himself an "athlete" - it was always going to be in quotation marks! - and now that he was permanently benched, I longed to see him devote some fraction of that focused effort to the remaking of his character. Like a lot of other admirers, I would have been happy even to hear him acknowledge that the floorboards were rotting.

But that's the challenge, isn't it? We know better than anyone where we want to go, but we can't see our own butts to kick them. We can rely on trusted friends to guide us, we can try to expand our peripheral vision (meditation as vitamin A), but we finally just need to get into the daily habit of pretzeling ourselves and letting fly: "You're really not all that, Gretch. And you know you need to call your grandmother."

So I want to say at the outset that most of what I post here will be written in the "royal you." ​I'm not saying "go kick some butt" because I've already reached sublime heights of strength and wisdom. I'm telling you what I need to hear, as I gather my courage to head out and make a new mess of mistakes.

Forza!
Gretchen​

Two Positively Kick Ass Spiritual Guides: Pema Chödrön & Louis CK

​Go buy a concert ticket. Go buy a video. Give this man your money - it's for a good cause.

I think these two might have been separated at birth. Granted, the physical resemblance isn't all that striking, beyond the strong noses and sparse reddish hair. You're probably right to be skeptical about their spiritual affinity, too, given that Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun and Louis CK a magnificently crass comedian. But Pema and Louis have been getting on amazingly well at the little party in my mind. They've also been giving me some of the same invaluable advice... in very different words.

​Photo by Robin Holland. Click through to the book at the top of my Pema stack.

​​Pema Chödrön = spiritual guide. Not a big stretch. James Atlas recently had a great op-ed in the NY Times about the exploding popularity of Buddhism among Americans who've become disenchanted with formal religion (or never got enchanted in the first place). He has a word for people like us, "people with a stack of Pema Chödrön books beside their beds": he calls us Newddhists, and goes on to confess that he's one himself. You can tease when you're family.

So why are so many of us turning to Pema for support both at ordinary moments and at times of great need? If she's become an emblem, if she's risen to the double-edged status of cliché, it's not because she's feeding people pablum. Look back into those eyes. Can you hold that gaze? Remember, you're only dealing with a photo here. If you dare to ask this woman what she thinks about how you're conducting your life, you'd best be prepared to do more than rearrange your deck chairs.

"There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what's meant by compassion or patience. That's what is meant by control."

- Pema Chödrön

How does Pema kick my ass?

• By telling me things that I don't want to hear, at the moment when I need to hear them.​
• ​By telling me things that I'm starved to hear, before I know I need to hear them.
  
• By laughing at me, you, herself, all of us.​
• By relishing what's difficult.​
• By encouraging me to make a mess, and to embrace the mess I'm already in.​
• By leading the way to humility. Again and again and again.
• Did I mention the laughter thing? It's important.​

Chödrön's resemblance to Louis CK came clearly into focus for me when I read her observation that the impulse toward self-improvement is "a subtle aggression against who we really are." I love that. It's impossible. Pema has got to know that I would never read her books if I didn't want to improve myself somehow, if I weren't seeking to be a little less stupid and destructive, a little more patient and generous. But now she tells me to cut it out. What do I do with that? How am I supposed to be fully accepting and hopeful of change?

Louis lives the paradox.​ In his concert at the New Beacon, he repeatedly says, "I want to be a better person." And I believe him. But every time he says it, he goes on to demonstrate how feeble this desire is, how it gets continually swamped by fiercer hungers (for sex, ice cream, revenge, etc.).

How does Louis kick my ass?​

• ​By reveling in the comedy of limitation. He insists on telling us in excruciating detail all the ways that he fails to be a good guy, a sexy guy, a smart guy, a loving guy.
• By "leaning into" his discomfort and shame and thereby redeeming them.​
• By transforming arrows into flowers. For $5 a download.​
• By staying tender.​
• By smiling - adorably - when he's just said the very worst thing in the history of human speech.​
• By being a big-bellied bodhisattva, a saggy sideline warrior - except that he now somehow finds himself an honest-to-god hero to all of us who dream of taking creative and economic possession of our work. That's transformation for you.
  

I follow these two because they'd really rather I didn't, because they'd both be happiest seeing me find my own way. (Well, my imaginary friends who look and sound like them would be very happy indeed.)

Forza!​
Gretchen

Just a human being...​

Ass Kicking vs. Shit Kicking

These two sometimes get confused, but if you want to land your kick, you've got to aim high. I'm assuming (optimistically) that you don't want to waste your time, also that you don't want to add to the sum of gratuitous misery in the world. There are already plenty of people out there stirring the contents of the communal honey bucket without our joining in. For the sake of clarity, here are a few of the forms that shit kicking can take:

​Photo by steenslag.

• Pretending that disagreement is a sure sign of stupidity (on our opponent's part, natch).
• Pretending that disagreement is a sure sign of moral depravity (ditto).
• Bitching and moaning about things we can't possibly change.
• Bitching and moaning about things we could change, theoretically, if we didn't have more pressing things to do.
• Taking the view that most or all of our sins are sins of omission, while other people are willfully obnoxious and/or out to get us.
• Hairsplitting, nitpicking, all kinds of uninvited grooming.
• Temper tantrums.​

These are all pretty well guaranteed to take us nowhere fun or even interesting. Ass kicking, in healthy contrast to shit kicking, is ideally a skilled and deliberate action, even a joyful one, designed to promote forward progress.

I want to be clear: I'm talking human butt here, figurative butt. No other animal has a figurative butt to kick - kindly leave their real butts alone.

There's no magic formula to ensure that our efforts are well-spent. Ass kicking is a trial-and-error endeavor, in which only results will tell. But there are a few things we can do to tip the long-term balance in a positive direction:

• Name names. Ours and the other guy's/gal's. There are significant exceptions, but by and large anonymity promotes cowardice and impedes learning.
• Focus on substance over trivia.
• Try to remember that whatever nutty thing the other gal thinks/does/believes, it's working for her somehow. No one is an idiot when it comes to her own immediate interests (though most of us are idiots regarding our long-term interests).
  
• Answer the question: who gets helped here? If "I do" is the only obvious answer, the real answer may be "no one."
• Start from common ground. If we can't find it, we need to create it. Here's the weird part: the other party doesn't need to believe it's there, but we do. Failing that . . .
• Walk away when the quicksand has only reached our ankles.
• Be ready - be hungry - to learn. Embrace the real possibility that our own butts will be smarting when we're done.

Contrary to popular belief, ass kicking takes discipline and trained intelligence. It's a mighty calling, not to be undertaken lightly.

Forza!​
Gretchen