Since You Asked: Uncommon Advice from Cary Tennis

It's been almost two years since I did a podcast here at the Since You Asked podcast station, and geez I've been paying Buzzsprout every month all this time, anyway, here in this rather casual talky-type podast there's a song, and I talk a little about my passion for music and songwriting and how it goes here in Castiglion Fiorentino. Not really a Since You Asked column, this is not that, it's more just a warmup. But once I get some Holiday Angst-type letters I'll do podcasts of my columns from those letters. That request for letters just went out this morning so we'll see how that goes. 
Feels good to be back in the podcaster's saddle!
ciao
ct
a dopo ...  

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May 12 to 22, this year, 2022, I will be hosting another of our fabulous writing workshops here in beautiful Castiglion Fiorentino at lovely Le Santucce. The Amherst Writers and Artists method we use in the workshops has been a godsend to thousands around the world who want to have a richer, fuller experience writing. Whether you write to sharpen and enlarge your experience of life or you do it for a living, this is a great way to boost your strength as a writer, to go deeper, to feel greater confidence, to build motivation and have a good time in Italy while you're doing it. 

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The moment  has come to tell our unvaccinated friends and relatives the truth: Their refusal to be vaccinated is killing people. It is morally wrong. The moment has come to get in their faces, to reveal ourselves passionately, how deeply we care about this, to plead, to beg, to negotiate, to use whatever strength we have left to do our part to help mankind stop this pandemic. 
Like it or not, each of us has a moral responsibility to speak out, to engage passionately with others, to try to turn the tide, to try to stop this awful pestilence, one person at a time, one conversation at a time, one vaccination at a time. 
So I made this podcast. 

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Today I respond to the below comment from someone who identifies himself as "Ugly hunchback," posted on last week's column, as though it were a question.  It expresses suffering for which I propose an antidote. The author of the comment was apparently alerted to this column by my 2006 Salon.com column on suicide which after 15 years still attracts fresh readers and comments as recent as April 2021.
I don't quote the whole comment here, only mainly the part that concerned me. The commenter says,
"I ask mankind — at least all who believe in Christ — to kneel down and ask Him what the point of this horrible world and existence is. We only exist because of a rather disgusting, wicked drive, a drive that has no place in Heaven or even a Platonic ideal sphere, as Andy Nowicki rightly noted in “Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker”.

A pipe dream, I know, God won’t answer. I rather see sex as a result and curse of the Fall. There is no better explanation. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Weininger et al all understood that sex poses a deep existential problem. It is indeed “forbidden knowledge”, changing one’s outlook on existence forever and to 180 degrees.

* https://www.salon.com/2006/03/06/suicide_23/

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Hi Cary,

I have huge trust issues and it’s affecting my relationship with my partner of 3 years. My trust issues have stemmed from my childhood for many different reasons and to top it off, last year I found out my step dad had been abusing me.

My partner has never given me a reason to not trust him. He says he has his morals and knows deep down he has never done anything wrong. His dad cheated on his mum and he has a suspicion his ex cheated on him.

But there is something lingering over me and I am struggling to know whether to believe my partner or not. I have had suspicions about him and a girl from work. ... 

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In 2004 I was finishing up an article for Salon.com about George W. Bush and the upcoming presidential election, when I thought I was having a heart attack. I hit “send” and then I dialed 911. I called my wife from the ambulance. I spent the night in the hospital.
Tests showed I was not having a heart attack. I was having a panic attack. That whole episode got me thinking: Maybe I was a little too stressed out.
I needed to find a more humane approach to creativity, that would stress community. So I read Pat Schneider’s book Writing Alone and With Others.
By 2007 I was leading Amherst Writers and Artists style workshops, using the method describe in her book. And that kind of saved me. But I was still driven to write for publication and that meant finishing big projects, and putting pressure on myself.  So I came up with a workshop style that was a twist on the AWA method, and also borrowed from something I’d had experience with called Artists Anonymous, which was a 12 step knockoff. This workshop I created kept a humane foundation but it focused not on creating work in the present but focused on finishing writing projects and for that matter finishing all kinds of projects. 
I called it Finishing School. And it got results.  

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Hi everybody this is Cary Tennis, it’s Thursday, April 22, 2021 and I’m exhausted.

I gotta tell ya. What a week. What a few weeks. Living in Italy but I’m watching CNN and the news constantly and I gotta tell ya, I’m full of hope for the possibilities of police reform in the United States and I’m also just emotionally exhausted.  And I have to tell you it’s not just the political situation in the US, it’s also some sad news I received on Sunday when I was incidentally celebrating 32 years of continuous sobriety, abstinence from alcohol and drugs which were pretty much killing me when I quit. Yeah, and after surviving 5 weeks in the hospital here in Italy, and I’m feeling great, and I get the news on Sunday morning from my friend Nick Tedford, he texts me and says, “In case you haven’t heard, Alfeo died last night.”

Alfeo Tanganelli was a huge presence in our lives here and also in the town of Castiglion Fiorentino. He was also an incredibly handsome, dashing man. He and Miranda Raffaelli, whom he married and raised three kids with, they’re like movie-star beautiful, generous and kind, and a big part of life here in Castiglion Fiorentino. And they were so helpful, Alfeo and Miranda, when I was in the hospital for five weeks, from November to December 15, they took care of my wife Norma all the time. They were so giving and caring. And then I came home and I survived and then Alfeo got sick and died just like that. And it’s tragic and so we’re all very sad.

So I thought this week I would offer my friends out there just some amusing things, if I could find some amusing things on the Net.

I did hear some useful comments from people on Facebook about last week’s post about leaving San Francisco. It’s an excerpt from the book (I’m writing) called The Stones of le Santucce, which is all about Le Santucce, the (former medieval) convent that was bombed in World War II by American flyers and was rebuilt by Alfeo Tanganelli. It’s just another of the things that he did that made him such a remarkable and beloved figure here in town.

OK, so that’s it for now. Let me see, maybe … I think I’ll suggest that you just look at the newsletter, which will contain all these, you know, humorous links … and if you’re not getting the newsletter, you can go to the site www.carytennis.com and you’ll probably get a little popup window and it’ll ask you to subscribe and then you’ll the newsletter and hopefully it’ll be amusing and full of what we like to call “news”.

So ciao for now. I’m sticking to the Thursday schedule but every now and then it’ll be like this.

OK? So, glad you’re out there.

Good to be in touch.

Ciao.

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Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said this Friday about the fight for voting rights:

"Hope is a little different from optimism. Hope is the recognition that, yeah, we are in a serious fight for what is good, what is true, what is righteous, and evil is well financed and determined. I understand that. But you know, as bad as this bill is, and it's terrible, it would be worse if it were not for the fact that people stood up, and made noise about it. So I don't want people to underestimate the power of their own voice."

And this: "A change that we don't think is possible, when it happens it almost feels like all of a sudden, but it wasn't all of a sudden at all. Dr. King used to say that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. It's our job to keep bending the arc."

And this: "I believe in democracy. I believe that democracy is, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the political enactment of a spiritual idea, this noble and amazing idea that all of us have within us a spark of the divine, the imago Dei, some sense of the image of God, and that therefore we ought to have a voice in the direction of the country and our destiny within it."

And here are a few things I said:

"While misfortune is random, so is the occasional gift; so is the occasional turnaround. And we're not in control of either one."

I also say this: "Hope and optimism fuel action. Despair fuels depression and giving up. ... It's incumbent upon us to feel hope, because hope springs from the observed world. It is a component of the world."

And then, around the 29:20 minute mark, I start playing the blues on my Takamine parlor-style guitar and I don't stop for nine minutes. So if you get bored of me talking you can skip right to the blues or, if like my friend Larry Rubin, you don't care one iota about the blues, you can skip the musical interlude entirely the minute I stop talking. Ciao!

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Dear Cary,

I hate my family of origin.  I recently discovered that I grew up in a mostly narcissistic family, with a narc mother who subtly but persistently projected her own guilt and shame and anger about her situation onto us, her six children.  ...
As children, we knew we were poor, were ashamed about it, and felt something was terribly messed up about this situation.  As a result, we - especially the youngest three kids (ages 8, 14 and 16 at that time) felt such a degree of responsibility to help that whatever money we made at our little jobs would go straight to our mother, from our hearts, without a single second thought.  The financial help continues to this day.
Fast forward 20 years later and our mother has become a massive pain in our side. She never moved on from our father and all the other “betrayals” of her past, and now subtly accuses us of abandoning her. 
Trying to Avoid Being Bitter in California

Dear Trying to Avoid Being Bitter,

She’s never going to give you what you want.

That’s a hard thing to take. But that’s the way it is. She’s never going to give you what you want and she’s never going to change. Accepting that fact is hard.

What you need, my friend, is distance. Not physical distance but psychological distance, emotional distance, the ability to not respond emotionally, which means not asking for the thing that you’re never going to get. I t doesn’t mean not having any emotions. It just means not responding with those emotions, not making demands on those emotions, not looking to her as someone who can make things better because she’s not going to make things better, she’s only going to make things worse. And if you put yourself in her hands as you have many times over your life because she’s your mother, you’re just going to get hurt again. ...

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David Talbot, founder and former editor in chief of Salon.com, has a  new site called TheDavidTalbotShow.com,  and he asked me to write for him a piece about my stay in the hospital in Arezzo and my crazy adventures recovering from Covid-19. You can read that piece on his site, where you can find the full, unexpurgated tale of my incredibly strange delusions and hallucinations, the result of the drugs I was taking, the isolation, etc. 
This podcast started out to be about that, and is a sort of homage to David, who I unabashedly name as my hero, but it ended up being not so much about David as about my own journey as a writer, how I ended up at Salon doing the best work of my life, and how David and I ended up being friends and brothers in spirit. So enjoy!

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