Well. It was only a matter of time before I joined the pop blog culture; Life has been interesting, and I wanted to share broadly…

For those of you who haven’t yet seen these, here are the posts in question:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sea-change/

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/calm-sunday-and-good-enough-friday/

The following mini-rant is not about regaining our sense of privacy in a self-absorbed digital age. It is not about the ravages of social media on our actual confidence and our notion of what matters. It is not even about a too-soft generation taking back responsibility, disappointment, and control. Well, it’s also about all of those things. But it is mainly about reinstating our own core instincts, intelligences, and centers of vitality, and redrawing the interpersonal boundaries required to separate true creative power and personal agency from a slow nuclear leak.

It is about being more ourselves by being less invested in projecting who we are. It is communications advice for individuals (brands are another, also complicated story) which I am certain will upset people — and which I stand by anyway.

Here it is: What you’ve done is not communication, or even art, if your need to express yourself outweighs the benefit to other/s of consuming said expression.

Let me restate this in the cruelest terms: If the only thing you’ve changed by posting or writing or speaking or making something is delivering your own psychic payload, you have not engaged in creation or communication, but have bombed the listener / reader with auto-therapy. (Consuming this form of expression is the legitimate domain of actual therapists or best friends, and, if you are lucky, siblings and parents. We will get to significant others in a moment.)

In the real world, listeners or readers or viewers need to walk away inspired to act, better informed on something they care about, or in some way enlightened, relieved, entertained, or changed. You can assume your receiver is intelligent, but you ought not assume they speak the language inside your head, or want to hear you all the time. No one owes you that. Not for free.

Even if the subject is personal, it is actually not about you – it is about the one you are giving your ideas to. Once these thoughts or feelings are out of your brain, they must be able to do something to or for the intended audience – of one or one million – or they should never have left that cozy grey room.

Your ideas are the components of energy. You have broken your core to let them out: How could they be anything but? Why would you not want to keep them to better run *you* until you were sure their release was strategic, or at least somewhat necessary, rather than wasteful or even toxic?

Think about the most charismatic people you know. Their communication finds the specific listener, like a smart-bomb.

Very few people care simply about your need to express yourself or to create internal order, and as a consequence, those who want to read or hear or see anything filled primarily with angst, anger, self-praise, unwarranted apology, a crazy level of detail or repetition, or over-sharing, will have their own side of the bargain they expect from you. What this is might blindside you when the relationship becomes suddenly bilateral. Such is the nature of proliferation.

No-no’s includes not only excessive complaining but also gushing, excessive praise, which I’ve discovered actually minimizes the receiver instead of building him / her up. Because toxic leaks are not only about angry or crazy or whiny: admiration, too, can feel like work to read or hear when it is offered mainly as a release of need.

This is all especially true for communicating with your boss and colleagues, where sanctions are often subtle but swift. But it is even true for most friends, and also for lovers / partners, if you want the relationship to maintain its fullest power.

Consider the price of another human being holding the sealed barrel with your energy leak. You rely on them to catch your sometimes toxic secondary output, while your fullest creative product, your best behavior, is given elsewhere, to those who won’t hold your worst. Exchanging need is actually not a bad reciprocal arrangement and is often the happiest and most enduring kind of union, but we should call it what it is, which is mutually assured destruction: containment. It’s not a bad deal, often necessary, but it costs you the heat generated by being at your best.

You might be shaking your head and saying – that’s so not fair, and it’s so sad that she thinks that, this damaged woman just set my therapy / marriage back ten years, what a bitch.

That last thing might be true. But it is not especially sad, if you consider all the time potentially saved by people becoming their own centrifuge, and what the human race could accomplish with this savings. We are talking sustainable energy.

What greatness could emerge from more external silence and better tolerated and carefully monitored internal noise?

Maybe people would exercise more from all the frustration, and discover they prefer ripped abs to writing long emails or producing unintelligible art or going straight to Facebook with every observation or complaining for hours to their wife.

Maybe we would work more and work better to avoid making excuses or apologizing or making more and more lists. Maybe our communication would be more significant if we updated fewer statuses and re-learned the power of making people miss us.

Or we’d take a few more risks in life or in love once we’ve thought and planned but perhaps before we’ve spoken or written. And maybe end bad things sooner, instead of burying them in verbiage. Enough saved up energy is excellent at very clean destruction when this is what is called for, with far less bloody carnage than the gradual relationship or job phase-out.

Maybe we’d produce better art as a society, and would not have to choose so often between accessibility and quality.

Maybe we would learn to sit longer with our thoughts and the complexity of our feelings, get comfortable with contradictions and discomfort, and discover we are so much tougher than we thought. So much readier to challenge and be challenged.

Meditation would not be about clearing your mind and being nothingness. It would be about being *everythingness* and containing that, sparing the world our truth until the best and most useful explosion was fully spun.

What greatness could emerge from more external silence and better tolerated and carefully monitored internal noise? I think it could be game changing, and could proliferate quickly.

You can take it or drop it. I’ve spoken enough.

It is almost the Jewish New Year, and I almost care.

As the year begins, I can almost decide how I feel about work / family balance, about excellence and ambition vs. the heart of the work, about money and security, about close suburban community life, about a religious structure, and about what it all has to do with a God I almost feel.

I am almost looking forward to stepping into a synagogue tomorrow for the first time in about a year, which almost sounds impossible to my own ears.

As does the fact that this is the first thing I’ve written outside of work in many months, which definitely, not almost, makes me feel worse.

The actor Jason Biggs, last seen (apropos Rosh Hashana foods) being intimate with an apple pie, has come back to our screens as the fiancé of an upper middle-class convict in Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black. His character, a writer, becomes obsessed by the practice of “edging”. In terms I can discuss in public, edging is the transcendent space of the almost. But you can read more here if you are over 18 and not related to me by blood.

I, less literally than Biggs, think almost is underrated, because wholeness, certainty, and serenity bore me to tears. I feel almost like this is a lazy approach, and almost like it is brave.I feel like there is a lot of energy in almost, and also a lot to mourn.

The world, too, is rife with the almost, for better and worse.
We are almost at war with Syria, which is almost finally seen by the world as a truly very, very bad regime.

We are almost committed to peace at any outrageous cost (and the world Jewish community almost cares, while the world community at large almost certainly does not.) We almost definitely have no idea what peace means since we have never known it, and yet we really do believe it can be almost achieved.

I almost love, unreasonably, the Jewish People and the Jewish state, and I am almost always surprised by how this does and does not conflict with my professed humanism, which is almost sincere. I can almost believe that Israel’s rabbinic woes – the conversion crisis and the status of women most notable among them – are solvable in my lifetime, and that the rifts in our society can almost, one day, heal.

Local politics in a sleepy backwater can be almost interesting, and friends can be almost enemies and then almost friends again in just under three weeks’ time. We are almost afraid of polio because some of the population almost has plumbing – and others almost respect first world medical conventions.

I can almost identify, in the daily, not annual, soul search, (also – almost sincere) which hardened pieces of myself ought to be expunged, and which are positive markers of “leaning in” and growing up. Which I am almost ready to do. I have almost come to terms with being responsible for another human life, and then several, for half of my time on earth. I am actually OK with my oldest child almost going into the IDF as a combat soldier, and when he does go, I will be almost OK, since sleeping and eating are overrated too.

We are obsessed as a culture with very public almost-sex and almost-death, which are most certainly, and not almost, related. We are almost horrified by this. We almost believe ourselves when we talk about the inside of a person being the most important thing, and I am almost a feminist, except I love Robin Thicke, who most certainly won’t mind if I objectify him, and I don’t mind when bus drivers honk.

Our entertainment is almost real, and our relationships are as well. We almost believe what is reported and experienced as reality, and it interests us almost as much as the entertainment. We are almost horrified by this, too. We are almost convinced by self-posted digital pictures.

I almost resigned myself to spending the day in the kitchen to prove it can all be done last minute despite what they said, a plan which was almost derailed by the oven shorting out just after noon. I almost forgot that the thing I learned this year is that there is no strength like icy calm and tactical precision, at exactly the moments when you are almost completely sure you will lose it.

But I didn’t forget. And I am almost proud of myself.

Happy New Year, from the existential edge.

Rome and Paris are deeply embarrassing cities for artists and writers who have abandoned their craft. Before I became the manager of creative processes in the service of selling a secure future to the Jewish People, I was elbow deep in the creation itself, often simply in the service of the process.

In places where beauty and truth intersect purely for their own sake – places like the Sistine Chapel or the Villa Borghese or even a Parisian train station (!!) – one who writes or paints or sculpts but has not done it freely or deeply in a while feels like a dancer-turned-nun in Las Vegas. Bless me, Bernini, for I have sinned.

Now my blog of essays lies in an induced coma and the occasional poem or book outline finds its way to the notes section of my iPhone, but essentially I am these days more a father than a mother of new ideas: I seed them energetically, support them loyally, see them through rough patches and advocate for them… but they are gestated and tended to by others.

In Paris on business following Rome, I was working on crappy WiFi, searching for an old document. Sitting in the undying evening under an impossible kind of sky, I accidentally came across the below poem, which I wrote when I gave up on my 2001 novel manuscript ever being published. This poem told me that it is the motherhood of creation that scares me sans-merde (who can bear the pain, the work, the loss it entails?) and to which I must somehow return.

Can one be both father and mother? There is a room in the Villa Borghese that says yes.

Anyway – here’s the poem:

Bleeding

- SKE, Jan 2008

–
A balcony apart
From my heart
(Where a small, quiet temple with fewer rules renews one member
Every September)
–

Because this is not
a House of God:
What kind of holy gathering place
Has nothing growing? In which I cannot count ten.

What we have here
is a House of Men.

- SKE, March 2013

Here’s what I said at my grandmother’s funeral, earlier tonight:

After hearing such touching words on two continents from my father and uncles, the sons, and just now my mom, I speak today on behalf of all of the grandchildren – Eitan, Gadi, Alex, Elie, Yoni, Yael, Ari, Yaffa, Yonina, Ora, Simi – and their respective spouses. I have the unique privilege of having turned Esther and Al Klein from Mommy and Daddy into Grandma and Grandpa; I hope to represent my generation honorably.

My grandmother died after doing what she said she would do, which is to attend my cousin Eitan’s wedding, last Sunday night, to his lovely bride, Pam.

My brother Elie took Grandma down the aisle. She danced with her children, all but one of her grandchildren (me), and about half of her great grandchildren. She danced with the children and grandchildren of her surviving brothers, Joe and Shalom.

Early Wednesday morning, she began slipping into the next world. This was with the full knowledge that all three of her sons were still in the country, and could be around her in the final hours. She liked to tell of how *her* grandmother, who died of the rarest of all things in her generation – natural causes – slipped away after lighting candles Friday night. After two days asleep, struggling quietly with death, it seemed that my grandma could not let go. So the sons and daughters-in-law had the idea to make Kabbalat Shabbat around her bed a little early, on Friday morning. This is when she agreed to go.

Esther Klein did things on her terms. She accepted God’s will. But to the greatest possible extent, it would be God’s… and Esther’s.

If funerals were given to creative staging, I would invite you to my kitchen for a fitting tribute to this great lady. I would seat you in the corner on a rickety step stool, play some swing music, and let you peel some potatoes for my soup, or very slowly add the ground nuts into the egg whites for the highest rising Pesach cake in Bayswater, if not all of Queens. If you were male, I would also probably get you to schlep something up from where it was stored somewhere terrifying en route to the basement. When you offered to wash dishes, I would joke to you that I had an amazing dishwasher. He was 75 years old and still worked great.

While you were on that step stool, I would tell you stories about my childhood and my sisters and my parents, all gone. I would never cry. I would tell you in a way that never scared you or depressed you, but instead compelled you to bring the story forward, to your own kitchens, later. I would sing along with the music and laugh at your jokes, whether or not they were funny, and I would tell you my distinct opinion on family life, world politics, fashion, economics, literature, or social etiquette, all the while agreeing with whatever you just said. “Yeh,” I would say. There was something in what you just said I could agree with.

Later, we would play Rumikub and I would scratch your back until you fell asleep. I would tell you stories about your father, when he was little, and how he reminded me in this way of my own father, and in that way, of you. Without too much effort, I would tie you generations back, and tie myself generations forward, completely by the way, as you were dozing off. You would never guess that my own wonderful childhood ended at the train tracks, until I would tell you that part, too. There was a perfect sense that nightmarish evil was absolutely real, and also that, most decisively… Ve Von.

We won because, when you are not sitting on that step stool, I am using it, well into my 80’s, to climb to reach things from the top cabinet, teaching you that it’s all about balance.

I tell you about my very religious father who learned at the Shabbat table with my mother. How they used to argue about various Rashis in the parasha, back when most European women were learning the Tzena Re’enna. I would tell you about my very learned and religious father who sent his sons to yeshiva and expected them to work, like he did. I would tell you how my mother prepared blueberry jam for stomach ailments, b/c she was known as something of a medicine woman around town, and, like my father’s dry-goods store, her kitchen was a regular stop for the local poor.

I would create a seamless flow from Nechama Hershkowitz’s charitable kitchen in Seredna to my short but horrific stay in Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck, where I was sustained by my nieces, Ibby and Helen, teenagers of whom my sisters put me in charge… and then right back to the kitchen where we now sit, making potato soup.

Which, if I were my grandmother, would bring me back to my mother, who told me on our first day in Auschwitz, when we were being processed into our potato sacks, to ignore the SS, just as I had ignored the goats and the cows back home. My mother had reminded me, in those two weeks we were together before she disappeared in a cloud over Poland, who was the human being in this situation, and what that demanded of me. I remembered, and reminded, every day since.

What it meant to be human was to have balance. Empathy and a sense of justice. Respect for the dead and a total dedication to the living. To living. A sense of reverence and a sense of humor. Balance. Living modestly but mindful of aesthetics. A dedication and deep gratitude to America, and a complete devotion to and support of Israel. Work outside the home well into her 70’s, and family always first. Being equal parts emotional, intellectual, and physical. Shiurim, survivor’s meetings, family events, the gym. Shul and the Beach, both healing.

Being realistic and optimistic – living on that delicate edge of facing down yesterday and expecting a reversal tomorrow, while completely in the present, today. My Grandma was Zen before anyone knew what that was, except maybe my Uncle Normie.

My grandmother’s life, you would soon see, was a “Dayenu” story. Thankful and disbelieving of every victory, and also always pushing the envelope toward the next one, the one that her father demanded that she pursue.

I could go on forever, making very appropriate comparisons to Queen Esther and to Sara Imeinu from the Parasha – matriarchs who themselves represent dynasties and disasters, Jewish advocacy, relentless optimism alongside realism, and gentle, iron strength in the face of the patriarchy and other nuisances….but it is late. So I will suffice with the story that many of you have heard, but some of you have not, and it bears repeating, mostly because it taught me a lot about what is running through my veins, and that of my cousins, and now all our kids.

It was the endless winter that began 1945. My grandmother and her nieces had just been marched through the snow from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck. The Nazis felt that the end was near, and the final solution hadn’t been totally… solved. To accelerate matters, they put the women in an outdoor tent in sub freezing weather. The calculations were correct. Half died the first night there. The survivors, my grandmother told me, slept very little, and when they did, it was standing or sitting, huddled in groups. They also didn’t let go of their tin cups, b/c that way, they could drink hot soup, when it was available.

Being and asthmatic since age 13, my grandmother got sick. Very sick. She did the forbidden and fell asleep. She thought she would not wake up. But then something crazy happened. She had a dream. In that dream, her father, whom she had not seen since getting off the train on Shavuot of 1944, was standing near a window in a long white robe. She said it looked like a kittel.

He asked her to come look out the window. He pointed actively, like the angels in last week’s Parasha, to a tree with white blossoms, and told her: When the trees start to blossom white, you and Ibby and Helen will be free. Please wait.

So she woke up. She stood up. And she waited. And encouraged others to do the same.

As her father promised, they were liberated in spring. The Swedish Red Cross took my grandmother and her nieces back to Sweden. When they disembarked this more benevolent train, they found that they had arrived in an orchard in full bloom. On every tree, white flowers.

This story, which every grandchild has heard more than once, was Grandma’s way of saying that you need an inner guide, one that is firmly planted in your own authentic roots, but that you make yours, and tell it your way. You need to hang on and believe in God, but you need to do your part to make it so. She believed in Divine miracles made real only via human effort, which is the message of the first Esther, too. She believed in bearing witness to the past, and she believed in writing your own story going forward.

Grandma, we will miss you terribly. A world without you is a strange place. But you have taught us how to balance on a rickety step stool while singing and reaching higher. What more could we have asked to know?

This post is about 90% recycled from 2009. But it’s still true, so I figured, what the heck:

–

Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, especially on thick, soupy nights like this one, I’m hit with it in the head, like the skillet of an angry housewife: the urge to play Alan Jackson loud with the windows of my station wagon rolled down, hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son – Redneck Fever.

I’m guessing I can’t be the only (sub)urban sophisticate, the lone overly-serious Jewish girl, with an occasional thing for white trashiness. Growing up in Baltimore / Silver Spring in the 80′s, I was buffered by a strong, warm, and nosey Orthodox community, but just beyond the breach in the bubble stretched vast redneck territory, and boy: the country radio was sweet, and so was the drive out to the pool where I guarded up in Reisterstown, and the trip out to Spa Lady in Timonium. And going Down-the-Ocean, or to school down in Montgomery County via US route 29 from B-more, you best believe we crossed paths with plenty of Earls and Randys.

I’ll tell you what: The thing I miss most about America, truth be told, is not the jumbo sized Mountain Dew, the tiny purse-sized cosmetics flavored like candy, or even Bed, Bath and Beyond. It’s the people. The space they give you, the space in them. Things are simple, basic, and on an as-need basis. Ain’t no right or wrong way to breathe, hon.

Take the relaxed way the locals speak, south of the Mason-Dixon, the reassuring gait out back to the truck to get another part, the walk of a man who ain’t quite sure (and don’t quite care) what the final result was of the Civil War. (Yes, I am aware – this has its downsides…) He’s got time, and he keeps his thoughts to himself.

They are probably straightforward thoughts and not historically complicated, mired in guilt, or otherwise needing of footnotes and subscripts and ardent, multi-nuanced opinions. (Perhaps for this reason, the Iroquois and Cherokee nations have not made too much of a fuss about their Nakba of 1776. What good would it do? Again – I am aware: This has significant downsides.)

But it gets me thinkin’. Where’s the Israeli ability to sit quietly with one’s thoughts? Or to separate sin from guilt, wrong from outright lost? We could use some self-forgiveness around here, some private 12oz. absolution. Calm contrition. Contemplative work. “Hell, was I wrong, but tomorrow is for fixin’. Now back to what needs doin’.” Can you hear that coming from a Levantine mouth? Can you imagine anyone letting it?

And excuse the non-sequitur, but what about baseball? Remember night games in August rained out in the 5th, beer and nachos floating down the aisles, sunburned women in yellow ponchos running to the car and thinking they’d be protecting their hair with the drenched paper program they were holding up over their heads?

Shoot, ain’t nostalgia a bitch.

And if you still had any doubt that Rednecks rock, I refer you to Brad Pitt’s long-ago but still oh-so-relevant debut in Thelma and Louise . Oh, Brad: Why the arthouse pieces that don’t make any sense? Please go back to shirtless in Oklahoma. Much obliged.

Ya’ll listen up: 10 months a year I LOVE that my argumentative, close-talkin’, fast-walkin’, dark, intense, complex, spiritual and spiritual-phobic, text-obsessed, content-driven, apology-addicted, sarcastic and bombastic, cell-phone shoutin’, hi-tech worshippin’, God-ambivalent family of Jews is who I live among, but LORD – if I don’t wish every summer for a wide open I-64 and a beat- up old Ford, some Virginia dreamin’, and a bottle of Mountain Dew so big I can hear my kidneys screamin’.

Amen.

1. I don’t care who you are, if you are white and 85 years old, you really oughtn’t wear yellow.
2. Even a five-year-old boy knows when a kiss is a *kiss*, or just…eh…a kiss.
3. What I am wearing to my son’s Bar Mitzvah: Copycat Pippa dress. The most inspirational thing about the event, really.
4. The best hats on the planet really are in shuls on Long Island. Sorry, Mrs. Beckham.
5. Thank the good Lord (all 3 or 1 of Him, whichevs) that the Archbishop of Canterbury, he of the best hat of all and the extremely somniferous voice, is not my rabbi.
6. ….Although, if I invited him to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, do you think he could wrangle some more of that Divine *silence*?
7. William got a great deal (I think K8 is Gr8) but he’d better watch out for that very chic and scary mother-in-law. (…Who could have walked right out of a shul on Long Island.)
8. The book of Romans can be hot.
9. After learning that the only way to be a king is to be born into it, one of my kids is considering beginning his own monarchy. Blue and White blood.
10. There is no way I am old enough for Prince Charles to look as old as that.

Abnormal Psych. was a super course. It was Spring Semester of my Junior year. The professor was old and eccentric. He told lots and lots of stories. He liked to teach outside.

So we discussed Personality Disorders under a huge Willow, an expansive shelter that kept us firmly in the shade. On Borderline Personality Disorder day, it rained, just long enough to thoroughly soak the grass. We stayed inside that day.

I mention this because it was in this particular course, on that peculiar rainy Tuesday, that I became friendly with a guy named Spencer Ollopa. Spencer, like me, was not a Psychology major. He was taking Psych. as a minor. His double major was Marketing and CompuSci.

After graduation, I took my English major and used it for many weeks as a very effective place mat. When the stains started to bug me, I took a trip to Williams Sonoma. And when my lack of a graduate degree started to bug me, I did a painless Master’s in English Lit. in medical school years.

Spencer, on the other hand, went on to get his MBA and then a Masters in Computer Science. His MBA thesis was called: “Putting Your Ear to the Ground: The Future is Here.” (Maybe you’ve read it in paperback.)

It’s a story you already know: Many geeks and an IPO later, by the early Spring of 1998, Spencer Ollopa, Founder and CEO of SearchMe.com, was richer than almost anyone else on the planet.

*****************

“There’s something off about the whole thing, something vaporous and intoxicating,” he said once, intoxicated. “It’s all…too invisible for my taste. I’m waiting for the big bad wolf to blow it down.”

This was back in the magic months beginning 1999. I was out at Spencer’s house, visiting an old pal. He’s the kind of old pal you make sure to keep in touch with.

I had followed Ollopa outside to his veranda, a drink in each hand. He has an overwhelming view of the San Francisco Bay. I could have stayed up there forever, just watching the lights, watching the moon in the water. Then I turned around and looked at his sprawling home. It was all glass. From a few hundred feet away, one could almost not see it at all.

*****************

I called him a few months ago to see how he was doing since the Internet turned rabid. I wasn’t really asking about Ollopa.com, just Spencer.man. Although both were kind of piquing my interest, if the truth be told. The company was being remarkably secretive. He invited me out to the house to talk about it. I tried not to say “Oh, so you still have the house! Thank God!”

I asked if I could do a piece on him while I was there. He said, a bit puzzled-like, “Of course…That’s what I thought you meant. Come anytime after New Year’s.”

*****************

The fabulous glass house is still standing when I arrive, although the wolves Spencer spoke of have been circling for a while. His sister opens the door, greets me warmly. I’ve met her before, a few times, briefly, and as I recall, she’s Spencer’s twin. They look nothing alike, if that’s your next question. She’s a knockout, all lips and legs and great skin. (No offense to pale, sparsely featured Spencer, of course, but the gods were certainly patriarchal in their aesthetic triage here.)

Selena says she’s in the process of moving and Spence is letting her crash. I see her as more of a human filter for unwanted contact.

Spencer strolls down the stairs in a pair of Teva clogs that he brings in from Israel. He could not move any slower unless he were moving backwards. His shorts and shirt are breezy off-white linen, billowing from his body, which is now considerably more sinewy than I remember. He’s lost weight. A lot of weight. He hasn’t shaved in two days, maybe more.

I ask him if he is dating Calvin Klein.

Spencer laughs. “You’ll never let it go, will you? I’m straight for God’s sake. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s just not me. Good to see you, Mak, by the way. Hi, Hello. Welcome.” He laughs again. He looks strange.

It hits me: He’s happy.

*****************

I confront him on it later, over a drink. He had obviously been waiting for me to ask. He’s ready with an answer, dives right into the thing. “I am happy. I am here, you see? I am HERE. The whole damn world fell all around me at the end of last summer, and kept falling. People were – are – going insane. And I’m just not into it somehow…” He sounds almost apologetic, that he can’t muster any more grief or apprehension. It is, after all, his universe we’re talking about, but he seems more than a little detached.

It seems that Spencer had anticipated this plunge into hell, more or less. He had been stabilizing, quietly, slowly, for quite some time before the bottom of the Earth fell out from under Silicon Valley.

“So once,” he begins, out of nowhere, “My CFO is pouring Maalox into this big mug and sipping it like Chardonnay, and I am looking around, doing some quick math in my head, and I figure that whatever happens, everyone in that room would still have somewhere to live and something to drive, and there will still be a company of some size. And then about one minute later, I’m thinking how even that is beside the point, although the point, I can’t quite say what it is. I’m just sitting, in my suddenly huge chair, staring at everyone, they’re all sweating and on the verge of massive coronaries, and I’m wondering: Is this normal, you know, for people to do this? To be this? It was this quick, funny thought – like – I was watching them in the zoo…”

I regard Ollopa with new interest, stare at him a bit, which he doesn’t seem to mind, although I’m trying not to be obvious about it. This man is not nose-to-the-ground Spencer from Abnormal Psych. This man is all eyes. This man looks older but better, handsomer.

He also looks a bit… religious? I ask him about this, but he closes his eyes. God, or Whomever, is off limits.

I spend the rest of the day with Selena.

*****************

Now he’s in a talkative mood again, and he starts right where he left off yesterday, with no introduction whatsoever. “There was something about that day that just totally blew all the bullshit out on a breeze. It disappeared. You know? It’s like, when I tuned back into the conversation my execs were having in there, it was like a foreign language. Like they were on one Earth, with one set of rules, and I was on another, with very different ones, and I didn’t mind so much, being on mine, just I felt bad that they hadn’t jumped over with me.”

Ollopa has come up with a name for that moment: He calls it his founding. That has a nice corporate feel, I tell him, hoping he’ll elaborate. He doesn’t. But he does tell me that he’ll always be Spencer, whether he’s “colonizing the Internet or settling his soul.” I ask him who he’s been to see and where, but I’m up against the fog again.

This kinder, gentler Spencer says nothing else all afternoon. He’s reading a book, John Updike’s The Afterlife and Other Stories. He closes his eyes every now and then, leans back into his lounge chair on the roof. He’s built a solarium up there; As long as the sun’s out, it’s the warmest, most soothing – down to your every muscle and bone – spot on the planet. (If I had one of these, I wouldn’t need the rest of my house. Or food.)

Once again, I talk to Selena about her work (she’s a record producer between projects) while she makes us margaritas in the middle of the afternoon. I could get used to this.

Spencer hasn’t spoken for hours, but his presence is deafening. He seems to be enjoying himself here doing nothing. Did I mention he was unemployed?

*****************

The rest of the story went something like this: Spencer looked at the room full of “dying shell-people”, and started to laugh. Still laughing, he got up to hug every executive in the room. This, he mentions, did nothing good for the rumors about his sexual orientation, or his sanity, but then, he really doesn’t care what people say. That much has always been true about him.

(We settle for sanity, he told me once, back in college, but we don’t have to – settle, or settle. I’m still not sure I get it, but it comes back to me now, as I write this…)

He told them all to go home. To watch TV and to rest and to be with their families. He’d have something to tell them by morning. Please be downstairs in the gym at ten. He sent an e-mail out to sixty other key employees, telling them the same. He called the gym, asked the manager to clear out the equipment. To put it in storage. He wanted a big empty room with carpets and mirrors by morning.

*****************

Ollopa’s top people were sitting on the floor cross-legged in seven rows of ten, a strange tribunal of elders convening under the not-yet burning temple. It didn’t matter that all the facts were not yet in, he said, or that much of the world still thought the ‘net was spread evenly under them. He pretty much knew how the story would end, and sooner than anyone thought.

Here’s what he said, more or less:

The good news: Every one of you still has a job, although there will be some re-sorting and re-shaping of what those jobs are. Be prepared to do stuff you haven’t done since school. This is not true for everyone in the company, so please treat this as good news.
The bad news: Most of you are no longer millionaires and probably will never be.
And more good news: We will survive better than almost any other Internet company, if you people can exit the bubble before it bursts completely.

Spencer launched his re-organization crusade with this:

It’s not over, but it will never be the same.

*****************

So it was written, and so it has been done: SearchMe held on to most (not all, but most) of its upper-mid to high level employees, kept on consolidating its resources, and ultimately carved out a niche for itself on the unraveling web. (See “SearchMe’s Second Page”, page 235.) In a slimmer, more streamlined, less generous cyber-world, portal, product, and premium were taken very seriously, very early by Ollopa. It saved many asses, although, the way he arranged it, not his own.

After putting his house in order these last few months, Ollopa met with that same tribunal of elders on what he says was a freezing day during the recent holiday Season (isn’t California supposed to be warm? Who told me that?), and handed over the reigns to Deb Wolf, Rick Hill, and Ted Marcus, his “tried and true triumvirate of corporate sanity and humanity.” (He told me to quote him on this.)

And then he took himself off the payroll.

He’s just there for moral support, he says, to lend his brain, to occasionally adjust the jib when he can feel the wind changing. He says that he doesn’t want to drain the company of any more money to pay himself; he also feels that his best contribution has already been made, and that he does not want his “old ego-ambition” to kill the company now that it is weaker.

Part of his late summer restructuring last year involved reallocating his old salary to the R&D department, a move he feels might ultimately be the thing that keeps the company, if one can pronounce this sentence without crying, “if not profitable, at least alive.”

*****************

Ollopa must be the world’s most famous intern, other, of course, than Monica Lewinsky. He still goes to work a few times a week, in his Teva clogs, and he “does what needs to be done, meets who needs to be met”, even attends executive meetings, helping “as they want me.”

He’s moved from Luke to Obi Wan to Yoda in the blink of an eye.

“Yoda, huh? Funny you are, Michael, in things which do you say…ha ha … I guess so. That’s what I feel, a bit, now, is old. In this very weird way, because I’ve never felt more free, more like a little kid. I have no where else to conquer, to fix, to do, except in here, in my own space. For example – I’d like to travel, to see things, but I don’t feel like I have to read five books on Italian Renaissance Art before I visit Florence. I don’t feel like I need to be head of the committee to save Venice to go to Venice. What for, you know? I feel like I can just go and visit Italy. Do you know what I mean?”

I am starting to get it, I tell him. That you can feel old – ridiculously old – at just turned thirty. But he, at least, has the advantage of also sounding wise.

*****************

Later, I ask him the inevitable, about the money, the stuff. He tells me that he still, of course, has the house and its contents (which are sparse and lovely and plenty expensive) and two SUV’s, but he’s sold much of everything else, including a plane, a loft on Central Park, and a time share in South Beach. He kept the yacht and the helicopter.

He’s a rich guy, but he might not make any headlines ever again. Ask him if he cares.

I have one more question for Spencer. We’re still up on the roof. It’s getting dark, and now it’s kind of cold in here, and San Francisco is flickering – literally – around us. I forget I am cold. I have no desire to ever leave.

It suddenly occurs to me that Selena might be here now because she was using one or both of those apartments Spencer just sold. She nods, smiling. It’s cool, though, she says – she has her own house in Seattle.

She looks at Spencer and neither of them elaborates further. He just seems genuinely glad to have her here with him. These two and their looks are making me wish for a twin. They literally don’t need to speak.

By the time I get to my question, at the end of the looks, I feel like a bit of an outsider, like my time here is, actually, done.

Damn.

But I ask it anyway: Is he lonely, now that the madness is over? Is enlightenment enough?

“You mean, why is my sister here, and not a woman? No offense, Le-Le. You mean, if I’m not gay, and not busy running the world, why am I not part of a couple, a family?”

That’s what I mean. Selena looks at me quickly.

“I don’t know, Kohl.” Ollopa looks around, looks up for a long time, looks at his feet, looks at Selena: Telling her it’s OK I asked. That I got.

Before I can congratulate myself on this breach of their psychic placenta, I hear him mumbling, “I’m glad there’s something I don’t know.”

**********

From: Michael A. Kohl [maksomething@juno.com]
Date: Wednesday, January 19, 2001 3:30 PM
To: Ken Bogan [kenbo@empiremag.com]
Subject: RE: Ollopa Profile – Attached

Ken –

Here it is, attached. It was a great trip…Thanks. Spencer has changed so much since college…I’m not sure you’d recognize him on the street. He still has that voice, though…Remember? That Nicholson voice. It’s fantastic. But now it doesn’t go with his personality like it once did.

He’ll be in the city next month and wants to get together with you. Said he’d call you. I’d believe him now.

BTW, Yes, I’d love to come up and interview Sandra Dylan for Empire’s August issue …Gee, Thanks Ken! Maybe God likes me after all? Or is it just that you do?

Why do I feel fifteen when I think about calling her manager? Do you remember discovering your manhood in front of Ivy Leaguers? I saw it 25 times. Ahhh, Sandra. I can’t believe she’s turning 40! Yikes!

Anyway, thanks.

Best,

M

**************

From: Webmaster [webmaster@braintoys.com]
Date: Wednesday, January 19, 2001 8:17 PM
To: Hands_Solo [hs2000@hotmail.com]
Subject: RE: Your e-mail of last week

Michael:

Hi. Well that certainly was an interesting e-mail from your drunken depths. lol. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you…Things have been busy at home.

Glad you felt you could trust me. I’m really sorry that happened to you. I don’t know what else to say…It was a shitty thing your ex did.

I’m sorry if that thing I brought up about choosing our circumstances has got you going a bit nuts…I really didn’t mean to excavate anything…lol…Or maybe I did? Maybe fate has thrown us together to excavate everything? Maybe we chose to speak with each other for a reason? Now I understand why the mental institutions are so full. Once you start thinking like this, where does reality begin?

Anyway – what I wanted to tell you was – Don’t let your ex off that easy…she created this mess, also, you know???

You know, I woke up this morning with a lot of energy – now what to do with it all???

- Maya (The non-artist formerly known as NB)

Burqa Babes from SarKE on Vimeo.

Muslims, Chill: This Isn’t About You

Since this story has once again reared its ugly unknowable, covered head, I thought a re-release of our 2008 video was in order. Especially just before Oscar season.

Some background, in bullets:

- The Jewish burqa cult was discovered in an arrondissement of my hometown (Bet Shemesh… as in Samson….Extreme soil??) about 3-4 years ago.

- The main premise of said cult is that tzniut, modesty, is THE paramount virtue in a Jewish woman, and this requires covering EVERYTHING.

- Note that the above has very little to do with actual Jewish Law, which seeks to keep women modest, but not invisible or dysfunctional (well….mostly not); In fact, most rabbis at the time, and most of the husbands of these women, came out strongly against the practice, and especially their oddball leader (see below).

- As such, in an ironic twist, covering themselves became an act of feminist revolt. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (Add somethin’ strong and it may even make sense.)

- This has a similar tenor (to my ear at least) to the debates raging across Europe over the Islamic burqa / hijab practice – is it an abrogation of religious and personal freedom to ban it? Or an abrogation of women’s basic rights not to step in and prevent Muslim women from being forced to wear it by the patriarchy? It is a conundrum that has liberal thinkers like me (I didn’t say practitioners, B.R.) in knots. But back to our own scandal.

- Said leader eventually arrested for….wait for it….child molestation

- So…We didn’t hear about them for a while and assumed they had…errr….disappeared.

- Surprise! Here they are again!; Keep in mind that we are talking about only a handful of people…just they are very…um….visible.

- Back in 2008, at the height of the first sheetstorm, some friends and I could not remain silent, and made this video for Purim (Jewish festival of food, disguise, and jocularity-slash-mockery…)

- (Many thanks again to Jaely K for the concept, Deb W for the authentic Ramle burqas, and Talli R for the talented video-editing progeny. Thanks also to The Kraz for being The Eternal Keeper and Purveyor of All Things Digital.)

- We had about 12,000+ hits on YouTube, but some Muslims took it the wrong way (Yes, they went thinking it was about them. Go figure.)

- Someone told on us re: the soundtrack not being authorized bla bla bla

- This got the sound disabled. (Now YouTube has the technology to do that automatically and no longer has to wait for snitches.)

- Let’s see how long this one stays up. Vimeo, come thru for us, will ya’?

Final thought: Back in 1989, as an Orthodox teen in Silver Spring, MD., some friends and I, in our floor-dragging jeans skirts in June, were asked by a passing redneck if “y’all wuz Menn-on-ites.”

Well, sir! See how our people have evolved?