Brobdignagian - a wonderful word from Gulliver's travels. When Gulliver woke up to find that scores of tiny little people smaller than his fingers had tied him up by using tiny pegs in the ground with a weblike maze of ropes thrown over his chest and torso and midsection and even his legs and arms, the difference in size between him and those tiny people became known henceforth as Brobdignagian. It's not so much to indicate largeness in size and as much as the profoundness (profoundity) of DIFFERENCE in size, 
How could you think for eat first fraction of a second that any of it applies to you futuristically?
You're the one. Far beyond any other, YOU'VE ALREADY DONE THESE THINGS!!

To open up so freely is no big deal to any number of people. It is not common for any number of other people to do so.
Speaking from the heart is also something that is either achieved or pursued by some folks, where others wouldn't consider it. Politics or religion or finances, some people can go to a community or tete-a-tete gathering and express what they feel all the way about any of these or other subjects. Some people just keep it to themselves, and, of course, a variety of stages in between.

What is being referred to here is the opening of the heart regarding SELF and how one truly feels deep down. A person can turn on any TV in perhaps any country and see small or great people on an Oprah or a Jerry Springer show just hanging out the laundry. Another person can pull a bird's eye view of a hundred thousand psychiatric or psychological health facilities and see people who will not so much as express their view on the weather.
However useless or useful it is to any human on the planet, opening up to you and with you with no restriction on where we go with conversations is, to the view of at least one person, one living and breathing and feeling human being, an occurence of profound rarity. We call it "clicking," don't we?.  as in "Oh, those two clicked in a heartbeat; instant sympatico when they met."

To tell another human being your most hurtful childhood thoughts and beliefs, hurtful not to others, we're talking about the internal kind; the self-directed thoughts that every human experiences. In transactional analysis (obnoxiously big word for a tiny concept that even fifth-graders can understand), we're reminded that every thought and feeling and word and action that comes forth from each individual is an expression of either the parent or the adult or the child within each of us. When the child inside expresses any of the core feelings that end up guiding us through our lives, it can be reasonably interpreted as a gesture of the single highest trust that we might have outside of trusting someone to physically save our lives. Do you follow this thread as it's expressed? WHY it's such a vulnerability within us is a conjecture appropriate to sociology. Whatever the reason, however, it is for sure a sore point or a delicate point of extreme vulnerability. Applying it to yourself might help illuminate the core point of what it means to get to the point, for people engaged in any kind of relationship to get to the point of being able to let the kid pop out and just let loose with a trusim - as that child defines the trusim. Don't you yourself still have a little girl inside of you? Do you not carry both happy and not-so-happy nuggets in your heart that have been carried forth from childhood?

When you expressed your thoughts about wearing clothes to school, and the baggage that came with it, did it not create a lifelong dedication to making it your business not to leave your house unless you, your husband, and your children left the house with an appearance that matched what you wish to tell the world about each person as they walk out the door?

Those feelings, the ones that come all the way from the tiny, neclear pieces of our childhood, are successfully exchanged, as a rule, only with those we trust. When we find it, Lordie, Lordie, how good it feels, how relieving and how loved we feel, even when it's an unhappy core piece we're kicking up, because it represents a gate that has been dropped to grant access to the sanctum sanctorum of our individual happiness. It's like a great master key that allows us to instantly pass dozens and dozens of other self-defense mechanisms that are supposedly required for any of us to function in society and in business and in organizations with regard to how we interact. Just as we wouldn't go to a PTA meeting and pee on the floor, although it's perfectly natural and healthy to do so, we don't go to the office, at least we HOPEFULLY don't go to the office and wait for the general staff meeting to express one's concerns about one's twelve-year-old's nose-picking habits or spouse's non-stop after-dinner flatulence. With hundreds or possibly thousands of internal gates to construct as we go, letting anyone in past all those obstacles is quite a feat. It's like getting through a combination obstacle course AND highly-complicated mazes such as those constructed from shrubbery wehere we see from overhead, England perhaps? ... where people can actually get lost in the bushes of an estate's backyeard.

If my deepest feelings of hurt, that not one person had either the decency or the intelligence to see what they had with me and make it their business to see that I was given some fair shot at life, if such feelings offend you, then I would gladly retract them only insofar as they offended you. You're far too good of a human for anyone with even half a heart to wish to offend you. That doesn't mean I would take those words back.  You know, Howard Stern's on-air comic, Artie Lange (pronounced Lang), who's there to try and season the show the way you season food, with the salt and pepper of wry or comic observations, hits the nail on the head pretty well when people complain and he does his wailing, "Waaah, wahh! Poor me. My mother sold me to the circus when I was four and now I have issuees. Waaah! Waaahh!" Since it's his job to do so, he often goes overboard. Say, for example, someone calls in to the show and, in the course of conversation, not even complaining, just as an appropriate aside, mentions that their father has only months to live, so Artie will do his "Waah! Waaahh!" routine, which, in somewhat the same vein as Lenny Bruce, one of the most brilliant comics of the past couple of centuries, with a social overtone, a message that one hopes does have a salutory and inspiring effect on people to act more like humans.

Like others, I have alternately laughed or scorned criminals or attorneys who cry of tough childhoods and the like.
I do so not because they're inherently full of baloney - which they sometimes are and sometimes are not.
The laugh or scorn comes from the visceral response of, "Oh, really? Let ME tell YOU what abuse is, pal....."

Even with concerns and aggravations, petty annoyances and petty behavior (in ourselves more so than in others), you have obviously noticed by now that my life has not been overtly ruled by the negatives with respect to daily attitudes. My goodness, do you know anyone as positive as myself of the potential of every one of us? Do I not proactively pursue gratitudes to feel and express? Try to remember, Sweetie of Sweeties, quite a few of the funniest comedians of the past century have tended to be seriously unhappy people. Don't be surprised to learn that many of the most motivated people were once paradigms of laziness or inertia; don't be shocked that such a large majority of us present to the world the precise opposite of whence we came, because so many of humankind's best (and, sorry to say, worst) achievements are the direct result of moving not merely differently, rather, quite opposite to the direction that we had been headed for. Whether you want to call this a consquence of defense mechanism-building or any other psychobabblistic phrase, doesn't really matter in terms of understanding that it IS a common function of life. Isn't that Newton's third law of physics, that every action has an equal and opposite direction? Don't the Japanese teach us that, whatever you say, the opposite is also true?  It makes no sense to the child within me that something can wrong with the body and can't be fixed, because age does have consquences. It makes no sense that someone as delightful and obedient as Frimit, who followed all the rules and did everything her Mommy and Tatti told her, should be exposed to such gargantuan greed and the perfect selfishness of those who are willing to experiment on her poor, delicate consitution which has already been trampled on by "nature," and still have to suffer so grievously. That the travails of the disease itself are so repeatedly, so profanely, so repeatedly and largely multiplied by the nausea, and the hair loss, and the sadness, and so so so much more, maybe you can justify it and have it make sense; my brain is not that developed, not that far advanced from the brains of monkeys or parakeets to bring it to a state of what we call being fair. It's not fair. Life sucks in plenty of ways, and it tears the mind and heart in several directions simultaneously. OF COURSE one's heart has to go out to any parents who have to go through this; it's horrible and it's heart-rending. Is there any chance that you can take a look from an objective viewpoint, one that is not involved on a personal level because it's too involved on the results level, a larger-scale humanity level, wherein there is only abiding rage that any human beings could or would and in fact continue to subject a child to poison just because a doctor told them to? Doctors who are absolutely (and that is one very strong qualifying word, my dearest of all), absolutely and without restriction interested in themselves and not in the life of a child?

Doesn't matter how much you or I or anyone else WISHES to believe the truth is otherwise. Facts are facts are facts. When you tell me that your brother firmly believes that chemo and radiation have a higher success rate than natural approaches, I want to punch him in the stomach just hard enough to knock the breath out of him so that he will have no physical choice but to listen to the facts that prove nothing could be further from the truth.

So, knowing that life is just not fair, that something impossible actually is possible, and happening all the time, and even more than understanding genuinely accepting that we humans have a large and consistent tendency to grow away from wherever we may have been headed as children, you're asked to reconsider your initial responses to the sharing of that information with you.

My fault, and only my fault, that neither one of us took into consideration your own childhood thoughts and memories and foundations and formations in processing that... what should I call it? ... fear?   resentment? of mine that no one thought me worth building or saving, and that the only person I would ever go out and conquer mountains for financially in this life, the only person who could even GET ME to set aside a portion of this large humanitarian and food-based set of efforts for the purpose of providing them with wealth... is the person who believes in me.
Sweetie, and I ask you to multiply the word "sweetie" at least four or five times because it applies better to you than any other delicious girl it's ever been my pleasure to know or desire, you are so far past the test that it is still creating these waves of skin distress. How could it have gone past you? How could I be so uncharacteristically ineffective in a verbal communication? My most delicious of all correspondents in all of my life, do you remember that day that you had to park the car blocks and blocks from home, not really even caring if the car got towed or not, because you had to get home in time? Even with the concern evoked in me that you should get home on time, I was already keenly aware that you had begun the afternoon's enterprise in direct contravention of common sense because you were that determined to spend time together that day. there were no "maybe's" going on; you knew all along that you were balancing one need against another; or if you wish to dilute it, one desire against another. You sunk a good and happy hook into my heart that evening, because as I sat in the office awhile later thinking about, it was clear that you were making a statement, however unintended it might consciously have been. That you have done just precisely that again and again could easily be construed by a superficial examiner to be just a flirting with the exciting or the almost-dangerous. Since our house together, so to speak, does not have superficial looks at much of anything, it's just as easy to see past that oversimplification. I offer that because you've clearly shown that you do NOT like to, for example, cut things clsoe, that you'd rather be on time for everything, it's just that you have so many things you want to do, and you want to live your life fully, and so you're NOT always on time or early, if you'll permit a resoundly enormous understatement.

So, when it comes to money, money's not even in the game because you have, 
again and again,
 demonstrated where your heart is. Considering the ridiculous weight that people put on money, not just basic living money, but the never-ending excesses of consumerism gone beserk, it's hard to find any statement of faith, or trust, from any human to another, when they actively and then repeatedly demonstrate a willingness to give up more than just money, because money is replaceable, while other things are not. If ever I had a greater champion, perhaps it was Monsignor Kellogg, may he forever rest in peace at the very right hand of the Almighty Himself, who risked his name and his reputation to some degree, and even his entire pension, because his belief in me was so complete. If, in that one and only respect, you have to take hind teat - as defined in a recent conversation - behind Monsignor Kellogg,  well, Sweetie, you're in pretty fantastic company. I would hardly have dedicated my entire existence, and surrendered pretty much every chance of ever rejoining the human race, for anyone less than a full saint. Even my admiration for the Lubavitcher Rebbe's work is dissolved to a single grain of salt in the face of Bernie's achievements. Remember, the Rebbe was out to feed people's souls. Monsignor Kellogg had a far more noble, useful, productive, and globally beneficial goal: to empower me to empower others. In the process, I came to understand, without either he or I ever saying a word about it directly, that this includes the true nobility of the entire process: filling empty stomachs with something a thousandfold more important than filling one's soul: FOOD!!

It pains me to see so many people focused on the merely spiritual, because they are missing a link in the truest sense of the phrase. They themselves do not suffer physical hunger pangs, so they invest their lives with the ultimate selfishness, and end up cursing the rest of us within their family to eternal ridicule, abuse, pogroms, even a series of holocausts over the century, and denial of ultimate sanctification by the Architect of the Univese, which Orthodox Jews believe will come with the redemption of Moshiach, all because we refuse to use our skills and talents, passions and goal mechanisms, to benefit people in the single most important thing that any human can ever do. Without food in the stomach, my best friend, there is no soul, there is no spirit, there is no life, because without food, no life can be sustained. Only after the staff of life has been provided can the soul and the spirit be nurtured. That's one of the things that, who was it? ... Karl Marx? ...  meant when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. That phrase is right on the money, because it has successfully been used by those in power to keep the madding crowd from overthrowing the hyper-greedy.

Honey, there's nothing wrong with having a couple of extra steaks in the freezer, ESPECIALLY when one has children or elderly in the house. It is when people collect thousands of steaks and refuse to give any up beyond the most minimal of guilt payments, that's where we get to the sticky point.

To secure your loyal love and friendship and support and tickling for the possibility of a lifetime, of course I'd go out and hustle you a nice piece of money. How could you confuse that with "getting a job?" It's far preferable to set up a website or write a book or syndicate a column or ghost-write other people's speeches or develop a network radio or tv show or knock out something for Follywood, generate a million or two, turn it over to you and then politely ask you not to bother me with money concerns for at least five or ten years. Sweetie, I just don't give a crap about money. Give any human a couple of thousand dollars in this country, provide them with sufficient reason, and they'll work around the clock for as long as it takes to hit their high points. Unlike most others, I neither recognize nor acknowledge that "each of us has our limits and we should work within those limits." I know with perfect certainty that poor, elderly, ignorant black ladies in Harlem can write best-sellers or purvey three hundred million chocolate chip cookies in a five- or ten-year period. There are no limits beyond the limits that we INDIVIDUALLY set or have set for us. Sadly, eight of ten people are perfectly and provably willing to accept the limits that others set upon them. The other two in every ten people choose not to. Some of them give up after a few tries, others go through with ten, twenty, or five hundred efforts if that's what it takes. Please remember that Harlan Sanders actually wrote down and saved the names and phone number of more than one thousand people who turned him down for backing before he FINALLY, just before his seventieth birthday, opened his first Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In each and every single case of humans who prove, whether it's career-wise or health-related or financially or in other ways, that the only limits we have are self-imposed, that human had a sufficient reason.to do so. When it comes to money, my prefernce for generating money externally rather than for self-accumulation is based in considerable part on that one repeatedable fact: insufficent reason. Since I obviously enjoy the skills of how to generate money, and yes, there is ego-gratification in the process, and since I do not value my own self enough to maintain interest in generating income that is just for self-accumulation, doesn't it make sense for me to use those skills to benefit others? I get the thrill of knowing that only Paul Newman has fed more hungry people than my audience has done through my work, and all those hungry people get at least one more day in which to stand up and use their own great and not-so-great minds to help themselves and their children and their siblings and their neighbors.

I'd thought that my approach was both satisfactorily compromising, and reasonable, while maintaining the commitment to make a difference. Darling, in order to succeed at the task of changing the world for the better, and in large, measurable or at least observable ways, every person who is committed to such a life has to compensate for a hundred or more others who are simply selfish, small-minded people. So sorry to sound judgmental, but let's face it, eighty percent of the population is barely worthy of life itself, since they spend their WHOLE of it promoting themselves or their interests, to the identifiable detriment of those around them. Do you think Doc has spent so much as two or three seconds considering his impact on that little girl's parents, or what their other children may have to do without to feed his evil habits? Not a chance. Those who are wearing white hats have to compensate for entirely too many black hats, and it's a large order to fill for anyone, whatever their latent skills or talents may be.

Ultimately, you and I don't appear to be likely to get the opportunity to prove out how effective my multi-tasking approach can be in the domain of the "just you and I" scenario. The thought has occurred more than once that the best possible way I can prove how thoroughly much and devotedly I love you is to send you packing. Should the future, The Almighty Himself show a better way, a safe passage to the time and place where we can join fairly and squarely, each for the other as well as helping those in need, then we'll have a firm platform to stand on. As things stand now, I'm getting magnificent benefits from our relationship, especially those that help my work to grow and be disseminated globally, while you're not. Beyond the comforts of our friendship, and what I hope is your knowledge of how much I love you, how much I'm IN love with you - oh, such wonderful and physically pleasing words to present to you - how much I am in love with you, what do you really get out of our relationship? The hope of a future together? Sunny as my disposition is, Cutie-pie, how can a reasonable person think that such a future is in our cards? 

As we've discussed before, although not in some time, a case can be made, a powerful and compelling one, that if I just go off to the mountains and get this all in the past, then we can literally multiply the likelihood of having a happily ever after. The challenge here is actually twofold. One, whether or not there is a fair likelihood of physically surviving the whole enchilada. The second, and for me the much larger one, is the one that induces that horrible pounding of fear in the heart and a bottomless pit feeling in the stomach: "Imagine me actually going through all that, and at the end, she's not even vaguely interested?"

Granted, there are people who would say, "So? You move on, and do hundreds of thousands of good deeds beyond that time."
There is no small doubt, a gaping huge hole of doubt, actually, that I can pull that kind of magnanimity out of my soul one more time. Darling, I'm tired.             So freaking tired.       

In the past eight years I've learned that the one group of people I've most admired and wanted to be like are more hollow than a cardboard paper towel holder. Like you, I agree that there are MANY great Jews, including some in the Orthodox community. That's not where we disagree at all. Our disagreement may be in two place, certainly it exists in one. First, the question of what people are really made of. My observation of fact, and experience, as well as study, indicates clearly that no less than eighty percent of those who say they're Orthodox Jews are neither. And, yet, still that's not our point of contention.  Even if you can agree that only two out of ten are great people, we do not agree on the composition of the rest. You believe that they're just regular people, doing the best they can even if they're a bit short of nobility. I believe, contrarily, that because they don the mantle and reponsibility and facade of spiritualism, their typical American consumerism, WITHOUT the gratitude, WITHOUT the caring for others beyond "their own," their draconian departure from the tenets of Torah render them far worse than merely average people getting along; for me they represent some of the most egregiously evil personas on the planet, no less responsible for the world's pain as Catholic priests who sodomize their own parishioners and the ninety-plus percent of politicians who suck the lifeblood of their own constituents because they want dollars or power or pussy or recognition. 

I'm tired, sweetie. Now that I understand at a deep level how undeserving the Jewish people are of a Moshiach's redemption, I have lost most ever desire of life. I can only think of three things that keep me alive at all, and they're presented as they've chronologically occurred in these past fifteen years: Monsignor Kellogg's nurturance (isn't it great coining words that follow all the rules of Latin and English?) of the best in me; my desire to fight back for those who haven't the strength to fight for themselves when they're being victimized... and, in several ways that exceed all of my prior experiences, your unbounding and giving love to me.  My word, how many times just in the past few years have I been given cause to throw up my hands and give in? You're the first person I've ever met who can create massive physical reactions, each of them sustaining and excellent and rejuvenating, WITHOUT physical contact!!!!!!

It is staggering to think back to all those nights on one dance floor or another, seeing dozens or scores of pairs of eager, moist, female eyes, all focused in the direction of one person - moi - with desire and promise, knowing that when the performance was over little but a smile and a gesture proving to be enough to assure a host of good things to come - literally as well as figuratively - and that, gie offer right now, which some of us may think is no great difficulty engender - to have that again, perhaps on a considerably wider scale - or to trade it in for a guarantee of YOU being there with open arms -- okay, yes, with moist eyes, too, if you catch my drift - there is no great consideration or cogitation or Ben Frankin-style "upside versus downside" closing methods required. The choice is instantaneous precisely BECAUSE the subject has already been considered at length. Greatest of the great, and Knadle Champion of the Planet, you win. You are the choice first time and every time. If only all of life's important choices could enjoy such brobdignagian illumination of difference; then all of life's important choices would be correctly and empoweringly made without recriminations of "oh, but what if?" or "Damn! Do you realize I could have had __________?" or "I coulda should woulda ________________."

Just as my father lucked out HUGELY with his choice of who he chose to spend the second half of his life with, this particular chucklehead hit the nail on the head with you. You ARE a flower of love that still manages to take my breath away YEARS later. It is only today and tonight that I finally understand how the King of England could give up his throne for a woman who, by appearance alone, would hardly get most men to give up anything for. They obviously hit the love connection just so.

All of the pleasure that ripples through the past few paragraphs, sadly, are pretty one-sided. From MY point of view, this love thing is far better than sliced bread or pre-folded towelletes. And again, from your point of view it's hard to see more than danger or heartbreak. How can we reconcile these disparate positions?  Whoops. Sounds as if life just issued a reminder that LIFE IS NOT FAIR.

Given a choice of seeing you shed a tear or two for the loss of what we could be, can be......... or, G-d forbid, having to see you experience any backlash for having the temerity to even acknowledge me, let alone be involved in my life, it's almost tempting to pick the latter, just to prevent you having to shed even a single tear.    Like too many other of my choices over the decades, that is NOT the most clear-minded answer, not least because that would leave me with the continuing benefits of being loved by you,  perhaps married, tickled, fed, groomed, maybe even being emotionally pampered, and laundry thrown in at no extra charge (beyond the million or two you'd need to feel comfortable about being provided for), and someone to write to and otherwise keep me strong and focused through the travail of being in the mountains......    while you get a big bag of aggravation.
I guess you also forgot that I"m happy to try and generate that million or two for you anyway. When you said, "That conversation concerned me... oh, I have to get going, I don't want to get into THAT," I was surprised, because it tells us that you either forgot, or don't even believe, that those efforts already in play now which are designed to bring you a bit more long-term financial security, will come to fruit.        Ouch, I suppose, but if you of all people actually think that my writing one or ten best-sellers or movie scripts or PowerChats or radio or tv shows or online stores or whatever is such a big deal, or even more than a 12-month effort, then indeed there is no one left on earth who matters to me who does in fact believe that I am one record-breaking son-of-a-bitch, speaking accurately.

If it just didn't enter your mind as a computation of your feelings or if in fact it did, no biggie, it's become a habit. You broke the habit, one that lasted decades, and you've done so decisively. I don't know if there is a higher homage or gratitude to show you than to say you have completed my circle. Poor Frimit, not even getting a chance to do so. My sister did not hurt or offend other humans, and even when she argued with someone it was pleasantly. She didn't steal, or lie in any important ways, and she gave a great deal, and she pretty much did as she was told, and wasn't even gie basic tools to survive despite the putative affluence of her upbringing. A six-year old kid, diagnosed with cancer. Ok, so you're crazy enough with love for your kid to believe that exposing them to the most toxic material on earth will cure them. For thyroid patients, it does, most of the time, actually. It kills everyone else who do it repeatedly. For another few percent, yes, it kick-starts the body. Where, in NIH reports, Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, do we see a higher number than that? Why, oh why, oh why in heaven would someone keep at it, dozens of times? Did you know that pathologists who merely report actual findings do in fact report that the treatment killed the patient and not the disease? I've had more tools than most, and from a dispassionate point of view it's been pretty funny to observe