Stomping on the Hand of God!

Yesterday, I made a stab at getting Jay and Reuben together, thinking that, since they both want to head out in the same direction, that they'd be great partners on an interesting and idiosyncratic journey. But then, last night, I remembered I've been promising myself for years to STOP DOING THAT because it so often ends up with screaming, and, worse, with Well-Meaning Denise being The Bad Guy!

However, that's only because other people are so endlessly, abjectly and infinitely STUPID!

The magnificent and incomparable Carl Jung once said "It is in co-incidence and synchronicity that one sees the hand of god.",  and I seem to have spent most of my life in god's hands because co-incidence and synchronicity appear as constant visitors in my life.  And when they turn up, I always go along because most of my life's great journeys have started with the hair rising on the back of my neck! 

However let me tell you only a few of the stories of what's transpired when I've introduced other people to these Old Friends during their visits:

*  Like the time at a friend's wedding, when the young man sitting next to me started telling me about the clothing design degree he'd just got and ended with the line "But my real dream is to design costumes for the opera!"

Oh wow!  The hair rose on the back of my neck because only ten minutes earlier I'd been chatting with another guest, a director on the board of one of the world's great opera companies, who'd been telling me that they had just got funding for a trainee costume designer and were about to start looking for a suitable candidate.  And here's this little boy telling me ...?

Hand of God, yes?

Anyway, I immediately grab his hand and race him across the room saying "Here's someone you really MUST meet!"  I introduce them and while I'm telling her about the young man ... he steals the cocaine stash from her open purse and races off to the bathroom.

Very fraught half an hour with much screaming and abuse and me being The Bad Guy, and after it's sorted, I take the boy out onto the balcony for a ciggie and a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on.  And that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says the enormously stupid young man!

Yup, I'm The Bad Guy!

*  And then there's the time I'm sitting in a cafe with a casting agent who's talking about the trouble she's having casting a certain kiddy role in a film ... when, right at that moment, one of my students passes by.  The hair rises on the back of my neck because he was the cleverest little actor who'd often told me how much he wanted to work in films and, best of all, he had exactly the right look she was after.  So I call out to him, get him over and introduce them. "Oh my!" says the casting agent.  "I see distinct possibilities here.  And you say he can act too?"

"He's a great actor." I promise her.

"I'd like to get something on film." she says to him.  "Can you come along this afternoon to audition?"

And the boy replies - and I still can't get over this! - with a hair toss, his nose in the air and a voice heavy with the utmost arrogance "I'm a star.  Stars don't audition.  If you want me for the role, just give it to me."

And this from a simple high school boy who'd never been in a film before!

Casting agent instantly cold shoulders him and me as well and I realise I've just lost a useful friend.

And back at school, several days later, I take the boy aside for a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on.  And, yup, that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain!  I had no idea. This is all your fault." says another enormously stupid young man!

And again, yup, I'm The Bad Guy!

*  And then there's the time Marilyn asked me to proofread her PhD thesis on different types of learning remediation from around the world. I'm near the end and reading about how, in Russia, she learned an amazing "unscrambling the synapses" technique for a very rare learning disorder wherein the brain scrambles words into numbers, except she can't put it to the test because it's so rare - 1 in 6 million - and thus she's never found someone to practice it on.

The hair rose on the back of my neck because I had one. Yup, 1 in 6 million and in my classroom at that exact point in time I actually had one.  The dearest sweetest little boy and so very clever ... except he had this profound problem with the written word I had never seen before.  And here's Marilyn exactly describing it, and then talking about a technique not previously known outside Russia to realign the synapses to sort it out forever. And she can do it in only 6 one hour sessions.

Hand of God?

Instantly I'm on the phone to her and she's so excited "My thesis is due in a month.  I just have time to do it." she says. Beautiful, right?  Yes, it's so all hand-of-godish and amazing ... until I actually try to organise getting the two of them together.  

"No!" says the principal.  "We already have remediation in place."

"But regular remediation doesn't work with these kids.  It's a problem in their synapses. This is the only chance this boy has to sort it out." I plead with him.

"I think you'll find that isn't the case." says the principal before turning his back on me. "This remediation team is very good."

The opportunity is too good to pass up so I ignore him and go straight to the remediation people.

"No." say the remediation people. "This is an insult to us. He's ours. You stay away from him."

So I ignore them and go straight to his parents. "No." say his parents.  "You're not practicing some weird Russian brain technique on our son!"

I tell Marilyn what's happening and she says "Look, I'm not going to do it if it's this much trouble. I don't really have time to do it anyway.  It's better we just leave it."

And so the years pass and, no, regular remediation never sorted out his problem, and so this darling little boy just got fatter and fatter and constantly more angry and confused, until, today, he's a no-hoper dropout who smokes a lot of dope and hates everyone.   And Marilyn is a professor at an important university and well out of our reach, and to this day, I'm still so angry about all those filthy egos and abject stupidity, I too hate everyone on his behalf.


*  There are so many different levels of illegal in this next story, I'll change all the names etc so you can't identify anyone.

Old friend, Penny, had a husband - let's call him Tom - who went barking mad and was dangerously violent too, so she divorced him.  Then, right in the middle of the custody battle, he kidnapped their son Mac and vanished into thin air.

Then, about eight months later, Keith and I are traveling somewhere at the farthest ends of the earth when who should we see but ... Tom and Mac.

Hand of God?

Immediately, we're on the phone to Penny telling her and she's immediately on her way with the plan to kidnap him back again.

Keith-the-Straitlaced wants nothing to do with any of this, so I'm on my own, killing time while waiting for Penny to arrive by doing a bit of undercover work; information gathering etc. 

With very little effort, I find out where Tom and Mac are living and am doing a lot of sinister lurking in a shop across the road, spying out through the window, trying to see what I can find out that will be useful for Penny when she arrives.

Then, as I'm lurking, I see a young woman come out of the flat below Tom and Mac's place and she heads straight for the shop; straight towards me.  OK, she's not the most salubrious-looking soul since she's all butch, tattoos, piercings, shaved head, but when she gets close I notice that, as well as being tall, large and overweight, beneath the fat are great big muscles and, most importantly, she's got very kindly and intelligent eyes ... and so, when she's at the counter buying her cigarettes, I take a big chance and start casually chatting with her.

It's unbelievably wonderful.  We have an instant rapport and she's all open and honest with me and starts telling me, with very little prompting, how she hates the guy upstairs because she thinks he's dangerously insane - see, I said she was clever! - and that she's very worried about the young boy he has with him and has tried to talk to him many times to find out his story, but he's forbidden to talk to anyone and too frightened of his father to disobey.

And because we have this trust between us, I tell her about Penny being on her way and the proposed kidnapping attempt ... and this lovely lady says "Count me in!  I'm in the perfect place to be your inside man! Whatever you need!  Whatever way, shape or form you think I can be useful, I'm in with you 100%."

Penny eventually arrives and I arrange for our new friend - who I actually explained to Penny as "our very own heaven-sent inside man" -  to drop by to meet her.  "I'd like to introduce you to our new best friend."  I say to Penny ...

... Penny takes one look and her face fills with contempt and disgust, rakes her gaze up and down the length of the lovely lady's body and she says "Yuck!  Why would we want to be friends with THAT!"

No, I'm not kidding.  That's exactly what Penny said.  Accompanied it with a lot of shuddering too.

And that's when our inside man, with great dignity, gets up and says "It was nice meeting you, Denise.  But please never call me again!" and she stalks out!

Fury!  Never have I ever felt such abject fury!  In white hot rage, I tell Penny in no uncertain terms what she's done - the real heaven-sent gift she's so callously stomped on ... "But you didn't explain!  I had no idea. This is all your fault." she whines at me.

I won't tell you any more about this proposed kidnapping attempt mainly since I don't know a lot since I too walked out, too incandescent with rage to want any part of it, but I do know it went horribly awry and it was Penny who ended up in a foreign mental institution!

Yup, again I'm The Bad Guy!

There are more stories, a great many more stories, along these lines.  So many, many stories about the times in my richly blessed life, when I've tried to spread around the largess, everything goes horribly askew and always it's due to the achingly abstruse obtuse stupidity of other people. 

Stomping on the hand of god!

Yup, I really have to stop doing this!