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Trigger-Unhappy.

December 31, 2018 by Exangel

by David D. Horowitz.

“You’re so judgmental,” the young woman vented into her cell phone to a male voice I barely heard, as she handed me my spinach fettuccini, neatly packed in a small recyclable plastic container. She took my credit card, processed the $6 payment, and handed the card back to me.

“Yes, you are,” she whined into the phone, and then the conversation apparently ended, for she snapped shut the phone’s halves and put it in her jacket pocket.

She was selling chilled, pre-packaged pasta at a table at one of Seattle’s large farmer’s markets, but she had to acknowledge her emotional wound. Looking pained, she asked me, “How do you not be judgmental?”

“Well,” I began, “I am not against all judgment. For me the question is: how can one make fair judgments? That entails patience, and patience emerges from recognizing two things: life is complex, and one can often be wrong. We can often misjudge, so delay judgment and be willing to revise and evolve.”

She looked like she appreciated the concern but was still lost in her hurt. Frowning, with forehead furrowed, she muttered, “Some people can be so judgmental.” Then, looking up at me: “Patience: how can you get that?”

“It’s not easy. Remember, life is complex, and it is easy to be wrong, and don’t be afraid to admit when you feel you have been wrong.” I had to buy tomatoes and cucumbers, and she had new customers approach her table, so our exchange ended with friendly nods.

Yes, I thought, beware of hasty judgment. Accrue evidence, continuously reevaluate, and cultivate long-term relationships that deepen understanding of others’ subtleties, fears, and hidden emotional spaces. Judgments—ethical, aesthetic, political—have their place, but always beware of hasty or one-sided judgments. And that includes towards oneself.

Indeed, fifteen Augusts earlier I recalled a friend who’d lost patience with her life, her career, and life itself. August, 2003: I visit my mother’s University District apartment for dinner. I had just stopped off at Bulldog News to buy a copy of that day’s Seattle Times. I chat with my mother, who prepares some soup, keeps it on “Low” on the old oven’s front burner, and then sits in her favorite chair.

I stand in the little uncarpeted, wood-floored living room and open the newspaper, inadvertently coming upon the obituary section. “Cynthia Doyon, radio host on KUOW” the headline read. What?! I read the article’s first few sentences. I am in shock. As if I had been pushed, I step backwards and sit down hard on my mother’s living room bed.

But I just saw Cindy a week ago in front of her apartment building! I was walking to a market to shop for food, and I saw her and stopped to chat. She told me everything was going great. She was all summertime evening grins and happiness. I had known Cindy for thirty-one years, as in 1972 we were both in Roger Merrick’s health class at Lincoln High School in Wallingford. She was 1973’s class co-valedictorian and went on to study at the University of Washington, which I also attended. We were never close, but I’d see her a few times every year on campus, and we’d exchange hellos and briefly chat about our respective doings. This once-or-twice-a-year conversation ritual continued well after we’d graduated. In latter years, she typically sat in front of one of the computer monitors on the ground floor of Suzzallo Library, researching some arcane detail about swing-era music. For Cindy had become a national radio celebrity of sorts: her show “The Swing Years” was syndicated nationally via NPR. Yes, she seemed purposeful and happy, and… now this.

“Ms. Doyon, who was 48, shot herself.” The article described the scene, near the UW’s Oceanography Building by the Lake Washington Ship Canal, running east-west through the middle of the city.

“Shot herself.” But, but I just saw her and…

The Times’s article described Cindy’s despondency over work and finances, and a year later The Seattle Weekly would feature an article more fully exploring Cindy’s career issues, debts, and cause for despair, but… who knew it was this bad? Pulling that trigger: the ultimate judgment.

But—life is complex, and one can easily be wrong. Bad days can deepen empathy, yield a great comedy routine or novel, precede a healthy break with a destructive habit or relationship or job. Bad days can help one, and others, enrich patience, empathy, humor, appreciation. Take the gun away from your head or heart, and put it down. Despair? Yes, it happens. But, joy, too, can come from a real place. I make no judgment about what Cindy did, and her end in no way diminishes her achievements. But I will continue to judge life worth the pain which is often a part of it—and I’ll always aim to keep from pulling judgment’s ultimate trigger.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Winter 2019: Triggers.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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