≈ Comments Off on The Death of the Manly Man in America
The Death of the Manly Man in America
Recently, I was at my favorite soup and sandwich place, enjoying lunch outside with the warm sunshine and light breezes. The patio area is popular with patrons and many people sit there. As I was downing my tomato basil and bread, perusing my I-Phone, I could not help but overhear the conversation of the white-haired couple one table over. It looked like a man and his wife; however, it could have been sister and brother. Since she did all the talking, it was difficult to tell.
The conversation had started before I sat and went on for some time as I was there. The subject seems to have been a young man (son?) and the rendition of a very long laundry list of items concerning his job. The items were the distance, the cost of gas, the repairs on his car, situations with co-workers, etc. etc. (her voice dropped). However, the list continued and continued. There was a final wrap up where she concluded that ‘he quit the job and now is working part time here and there and that gives him more freedom to ….’ I lost the last bit. The man during this monologue said not so much as two words. They finally concluded lunch and left. I sat in thought for a few minutes thinking about what I had just heard. This was probably a son or grandson she had been talking about. In retrospect, it was the biggest pile of BS concerning why someone didn’t want a full-time job I had heard in sometime. The sad part is that the woman appeared to accept these long-winded explanations completely and the man didn’t bother to disagree with her. (Does he?)
One week earlier, I had been at a favorite coffee spot having an early coffee. I was again checking messages on my phone while sipping. Another couple was off to the side. A young man, early 30’s with a older male companion. The conversation between the two of them went on and on; with, mind you, the younger man doing most of the talking. Again, proximity made it difficult to not hear. The young man is apparently involved in developing computer game designs. The dialogue about his efforts to be ‘successful’ and get ‘established’ went on for three-quarters of an hour. The game design was peppered with many stories of moving from place to place. Sleeping on his sister’s sofa; moving back down here, etc. etc. I was getting tired of hearing him ramble and the older man finally interjected a few encouraging words, which, like jet fuel, set the young man off again. It was still going on when I had to run out and go take care of some of my work business.
There appears to be a kind of unspoken consensus among people my age, that young people (a lot younger than us!) need to have a lot of ‘space’ in order to be ‘creative.’ The idea of having a plain regular job doesn’t seem to appeal. Somehow, ‘regular’ work kills all creative flame. God forbid you consider getting married and having children. Yikes! Those thoughts in mind, I would like to touch lightly upon the careers of some of my favorite guys and how they handled things in their day. Let’s see if ordinary ‘conventions’ killed the spark.
Charles John Huffam Dickens, 1812-1878 (58)
Married to Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and had 9 surviving children.
Married in his twenties to the mother of his children, Dickens had his problems with the marriage.
“This comes from the correspondence with Forster in 1854–55, which contains the first admissions of his marital unhappiness; by 1856 he was writing, “I find the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one”; by 1857–58, as Forster remarked, an “unsettled feeling” had become almost habitual with him, “and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find…”
Regardless of this, Dickens was one of the most prolificate, creative and influential writers of our age. He wrote for newspapers, journals; did essays, novels, short stories and poetry. He was in life and of life for the whole of his career. He was popular with the public and had good earnings.
He was one of the most creative and respected writers of his and our time. All the while, as indicated, being married, having a large family and supporting them (and some relatives.)
Of course, in those days, large families were common. Today, couples and individuals have many more options. A blessing or a curse?
Doyle went to school at Edinburgh University and graduated with a degree in medicine and became a practicing physician. In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins and they had two children. After her death, he remarried Jean Lecke and they had three children.
Doyle started off as a doctor but started to write his famous detective stories for The Strand and became famous in a short period of time. He continued to be a prolific writer for the rest of his life. He wrote short stories, novels, and essays on political subjects. He was knighted for service in South Africa during the Boer War.
Twain was married to Olivia Langdon in 1870; they had four children. Twain was famous during his own lifetime for short stories (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.) His novels, Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for some. He was a celebrated essayist and speaker. He was invited to do world tours and was famous for his wit and political satire.
……………………
It would appear that these extremely famous and prolific writers/speakers were able to be married, have children, work at their craft and support their families. So, what has happened to change all that? Is it just our ‘modern’ attitudes? We have clearly had a revolution with modern birth control methods that drastically alter the choices couples have about having children or not. Is this real freedom or the freedom to remain children forever and never grow up?
≈ Comments Off on No, do not let your Two-Year use your cell phone!
More and more when I am in restaurants and other places, I am seeing young mothers, with very small children, allowing the child to ‘use’ the cell phone or else, buying them electronic devices of their own to use. Seems great, right? The kid is entertained, you are free to a) eat b) talk to your friends c) be on your cell phone. Great? Not great. Remember the days when every restaurant had coloring placemats and crayons? Your kids would spend a lot of time coloring the cows and cowboys all kinda wierd colors. Remember how proud they were of that. You worked hard to smile and said “Beautiful, darling!”
FYI parents; the purple cows and pink cowboys will eventually become pink and purple butterflys, with brown houses in greeen lawns. Those with become cats, dogs and horses and those will become…..wait for it…people. This process, and it is a process, is called creativity and yes, surprise, surprise, it does have to be ‘developed.’ When your kid is watching a cartoon, playing a computer game, watching movies and TV shows, they are watching something created by someone else. Not them. This is a very passive activity that doesn’t do much for them except fill time.
Social skills: as a teacher, I see in the classroom a growing lack of basic social skills between students. A lot of this was extremely aggravated by Covid, but the constant presence of cell-phones and their addiction is not helping.
The never-ending, unreal world of not only TV but Facebook: In case you have not seen the movie Barbie, I would recommend it. Barbie starts off very happy in a very fantasy world. It’s not real and neither is she. Facebook pages are filled to the brim with wonderfully happy people living wonderfully happy lives in a kind of never, never, land. As an adult, with pretty good self-esteem and judgment, I can get jealous and envious of others and start feeling bad about myself. Kids and teens don’t stand a chance as they have little life experience to compare to these perfect vignettes to. So, no, don’t let small children use cell phones and other electronic devices. Also, pay close attention to how much ‘total time’ your older children are spending on the same devices.
Yes, your smartphone habit is affecting your kid—here’s how
We’ve all spent countless hours lost in emails or Instagram, but experts are worried that when we’re connecting online, we’re connecting less with our kids.
“Well, when can we go?” My three kids, ages six, nine and 12, stood before me with frustrated faces, as though they’d been waiting a long time for an answer.
“Go where?” I asked. My eyes fought to look up from my tiny phone screen and then struggled to refocus on their faces.
“To the pool! Mom, you were looking for the pool hours.”
I’m not sure how long it had been since I picked up my phone for the search. My various apps and notifications had led me deep down digital rabbit holes. Dozens of times a day, as I walk, eat and parent, my phone distracts me and, embarrassingly, the kids are starting to notice.
Child psychologists are also noticing, and they’re concerned—not for me, but for my kids.
Our tech tools have become essential for our work, play and comfort. My phone is my research assistant, as well as my yoga teacher. It gets me to meetings on time, reminds me to call the dentist, deposits cheques, encourages me to take deep breaths—it even tracks my hormone cycles so that I only have to experience them, not be attuned to them.
But these devices aren’t as benign as we all thought when we opened their stiff boxes and gloried in the shiny glass screens in which we could check our lipstick. They have been designed to capture our attention and keep us coming back to monitor the popularity of our status, read our most recent notifications and find out the latest trending stories. We pick up our phones as many as 150 times per day, creating short interruptions in our real-world relationships. This has experts wondering: Are smartphones impeding the critical human connections that for millennia have been the primary way parents have transferred rules, skills and social norms to the next generation?
Devices are interfering with development
Humans learn best through person-to-person, in-the-flesh interactions. Jeanne Williams, a child psychologist and play therapist based in Edmonton, explains that this interaction-based learning begins long before a child is verbal. At birth, a baby’s brain has a hundred billion neurons, most of which are not connected. The neurons begin to form connections with one another when the child engages with their parents and others around them—for instance, when a baby smiles and their parent smiles back, or a baby cries and a parent responds with a hug.
These types of reciprocal exchanges are known as “serve and return” interactions, because they work like a game in which a ball is volleyed back and forth. The child sends a signal, and the parent responds. Serve and return helps connect neurons in the brain to support language and communication skills, and as a child grows, these interactions help them learn emotional control, as well as important non-verbal emotional cues (for instance, what anger and happiness look like). The more responsive we are to their elemental attempts at communication, Williams says, “the more they learn the world is a pretty safe place.”
But for all of this learning to happen, the “served” communication must be promptly “returned.” While I’m no sports fan, even I know there is no game if one team stops bumping back. And that’s exactly what happens when our devices interrupt our interactions with our kids. Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine observed that when parents were distracted by a device at dinner, they had 20 percent less conversation with their kid and 39 percent fewer non-verbal interactions.
The tech interruptions start early on in our relationships with our kids, disrupting even little things like eye contact. And the consequences are real. University of Cambridge researchers have found that when mom and baby lock eyes, their brainwave patterns sync up so that scans of their brain activity look very similar. Researchers concluded that gaze powerfully signals to the baby that mom is available and interested in communicating, and the baby in turn will make more vocalizations and greater attempts to interact.
So when breastfeeding moms use devices to pass the time, lactation consultants are worried they’re missing those critical bonding opportunities that come from looking their babies in the eye. It’s true that texting or social scrolling can connect us to friends and family at a time when we’re isolated and feeding on the couch, but by getting lost in notifications and never-ending pictures of other people’s super cute babies, we miss out on the connection our babies may be trying to have with us.
Missed opportunities continue as our children begin to process emotion through conversation. “Often, the effect of looking down at a screen can eliminate the opportunity and space kids need to say what’s on their mind,” warns Williams. That’s why, when I drive the kids to school and activities, and have no distractions, they become exponentially more open to sharing stories about their day.
As kids grow, being available and responsive also helps them learn emotional regulation. “When a kid is distressed and you completely ignore them, their distress is going to grow,” Williams says. “They won’t build neural pathways that teach them how to soothe themselves.”
The inconsistent and unpredictable responses that often evolve from tech distraction (sometimes I ignore you; sometimes I don’t) can be especially harmful to kids. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, professor of psychology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, decided to measure the effect. She had parents self-report their normal technology use and their child’s temperament. The children whose parents used their phones more had a harder time reconnecting with their parents and displayed fewer signs of happiness and curiosity overall. What this means for kids’ emotional health later in life is of concern to Dennis-Tiwary: “If we disrupt our one-on-one time by disappearing into our smartphones, then they will learn to disconnect in similar ways.” She fears that parents’ cellphone use is teaching kids that technological distraction is the way to handle boredom and negative feelings. “If our children learn to navigate these challenging moments with devices, they may have fewer and less flexible strategies at their disposal to cope with day-to-day social ups and downs.”
And if this weren’t enough to jolt me from my scrolling-induced reverie, there are also the physical consequences of distracted parenting. One study matched hospital data against the slow rollout of 3G cell networks in the US. When cell service became available, local hospitals reported a 10 percent spike in emergency room visits for kids under six. The study’s author argued that it wasn’t because kids were involved in riskier activities; it was because parents were distracted.
Competing for attention
It’s not like distracted parenting is new. From constantly watching for predators in our early cave-dwelling days to dealing with gruelling work weeks during the Industrial Revolution, parents have always had activities that pulled their focus from their kids. Tech-induced distraction is also not new—parents of previous generations had car radios and sports on TV. However, today’s technology is designed to draw us in and follow us wherever we go. Vast amounts of money and science go into playing on our vulnerabilities in order to attract and keep our attention. Unfortunately, it seems to have a detrimental effect on our ability to focus on anything else. In fact, according to one study, my goldfish now has a longer attention span than I do.
With such a well-funded and successful campaign to capture our attention, how can our kids compete? They try. Brandon McDaniel, assistant professor in Human Development and Family Science at Illinois State University, has studied “technoference,” as he has dubbed it, since 2012. In a recent study published in Pediatric Research, he observed that the more parents were distracted by tech, the more kids acted out. But it didn’t stop there; it became a cycle. As kids acted out, parents became stressed, and when parents were stressed, they turned to technology, which, of course, only led to more acting out. He empathizes with parents who are just responding to pressure in our hyper-connected world, but he feels it is important to sound the alarm: “We are allowing tech to interfere with our relationships, and that feeds back into how our children are doing.” Don’t I know it: My kids get louder, get closer, grab my chin and suddenly, I pay attention—but usually it is only to ask them to settle down.
Scaling back screen time
While I can’t give up my phone, I want to manage my distraction. McDaniel suggests I start with analyzing my phone use. By downloading a few apps (I tried Moment, Mute and RealizD, but Apple’s iOS 12 also has a Screen Time feature), I’ve been able to track my usageand the number of times I pick it up. The analytics tell a story about my emotional, social and professional reliance on my phone. I’m most vulnerable to being distracted by my phone after I post on social media or in the late afternoon when I’m tired from the day (and, unfortunately, just when my kids return from school).
McDaniel says we have to take the time to create strategies to better manage our tech use. I decided to set a tech-free zone at the dinner table and in my bedroom, but McDaniel discourages a one-size-fits-all approach to managing the distractions: “Tech-free zones work differently for every family.” He encourages families to consider when and where tech-free times would work best for them.
Most phone-use tracking apps come with goal-setting tools, and when I ask Williams about what goals she recommends, she says, “Try to have some regular time that you are 100 percent focused on your kid.” Start with scheduling one or two playtimes every week. That might mean 20 minutes of playing catch in the front yard or swimming at the pool, but whatever it is, commit to no distractions. By being really present, she says, “you’re primed to hear if your kids have something to talk about, or see a scowl and have the availability to ask, ‘What’s up?’”
Williams also urges me to limit my unnecessary screen time, like surfing social media after the kids get home from school. “It’s OK to use our phones to chill out, but try to keep it to when kids are in school or in bed. Ask yourself, Do I really need to be on here?”
But what about all those times when looking up an address, turning on music or finding a recipe is necessary? Although I need to do these things, to my kids, it all appears like distraction. Without the visual and audio cues I had as a child—when I could see my parents looking at a map or going to the post office—my kids are often left in the dark as to what I’m doing or planning.
To combat this, I say out loud what I’m up to so they know I’m arranging their summer camp registration or finding the perfect birthday cake recipe. This way, they know when they can interrupt. When appropriate, I’ll mirror my screen on the TV, so we can meditate together on Headspace or edit pictures collaboratively. Williams says kids love being included when we’re trying to solve problems and often have ideas of their own. “Talking with your kids about the struggle you are having to achieve balance with your technology is a huge opportunity to learn together with your kids what balance looks like for your family.”
McDaniel’s final piece of advice is simple: Look up. “If your child walks in to get your attention, look in their eyes instead of looking at your device.” Adults understand that a person focused on their phone is distracted or attending to another task, but McDaniel says young children can’t comprehend that their parent still values them over technology. By looking your child in the eye, he says, “You’ve shown them that you are listening, and they are learning that the device doesn’t have more value than them.”
The other day, McDaniel’s advice came to mind when I found selfies of my 11-year-old daughter on my phone. They were blurry photos in very close range of her eye. It was as if she were saying, “Look at me.”
I took it as a reminder to look up. There’s no app for that.
This article was originally published online in December 2018.
≈ Comments Off on Wellness exams or Disqualifying exams?
As a medical insured with United Health, I have been very happy with my coverage for the last year. Basically, I have had no problems with them and I love the coverage with multiple gyms for workouts.
After about one year, I have received repeat phone calls from the company requesting time for a ‘wellness exam.” At first I told them I already had a regular doctor and got this exam from her each year. Not to be deterred, the phone calls kept coming and coming. Finally, I agreed to have a nurse come to my place for a wellness exam.
The date of the exam, I made sure to be there on time and have cold water in the fridge in case someone needed some. The nurse showed up with a sidekick, another nurse in training. The exam took an hour and included my weight, bloodpressure and heart. In addition, was a cognitive test for my memory. All of these items were stock in trade and usual for all exams I get at the clinic. The disturbing part came with the long, long list of deep and probing questions about my entire health history to include information about mother, father, brothers and sisters. I answered the questions. The question went on about drugs and alcohol for myself and all family members. I had to answer questions about all surgeries and injuries that I had had in the last year. I discussed two recent surgeries that were for arthritis. The nurse got practically excited when I admitted to smoking cigarettes 30 years ago. She wanted me to tell her how many cigarettes I smoked per day. I laughed at this point and said I couldn’t remember that far back but it was only ‘occasional, social smoking.’ More questions followed, I had my temperature taken and got measured for height and my BMI was calculated. I had to have a pressure test to the bottoms of my feet to check for nerve damage. The digging kept on about depression, mental illness, treatment for psychological problems. The nurse was very nervous when she showed up.
After giving her negative answers to most of these questions and we found that my BMI was low enought, blood pressure low enough and heart ok, the nurse seemed to relax. By the time the pair left I realized that I had been subjected not to a wellness exam, it was a disqualifing exam. This was an intensive investigation to see if the company had a basis for cancelling my coverage. I was shocked when it all sank in. I await the results of my exam. Hopefully I passed. However, next year, my response will be that they can get copies of my records from my GP. What an invasive and demeaning experience. And, how many people have to go through this.? God forbid I had anything serious wrong with me, short of age, of course. Wow! I can’t talk to family members about this as they are all military and have life long coverage. Review the next.
U.S. Federal Court Finds UnitedHealthcare Affiliate Illegally Denied Mental Health and Substance Use Coverage in Nationwide Class Action
BY INC., PSYCH-APPEALPublished 10:47 AM MST, March 5, 2019Share
— Landmark Case Challenges the Nation’s Largest Mental Health Insurance Company for Unlawful, Systematic Claims Denials – and Wins — Groundbreaking Ruling Affects Certified Classes of Tens of Thousands of Patients, Including Thousands of Children and Teenagers — Judge Rules, “At every level of care that is at issue in this case, there is an excessive emphasis on addressing acute symptoms and stabilizing crises while ignoring the effective treatment of members’ underlying conditions.”
LOS ANGELES, March 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — In a landmark mental health ruling, a federal court held today that health insurance giant United Behavioral Health (UBH), which serves over 60 million members and is owned by UnitedHealth Group, used flawed internal guidelines to unlawfully deny mental health and substance use treatment for its insureds across the United States. The historic class action was filed by Psych-Appeal, Inc. and Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, and litigated in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The federal court found that, to promote its own bottom line, UBH denied claims based on internally developed medical necessity criteria that were far more restrictive than generally accepted standards for behavioral health care. Specifically, the court found that UBH’s criteria were skewed to cover “acute” treatment, which is short-term or crisis-focused, and disregarded chronic or complex mental health conditions that often require ongoing care.
The court was particularly troubled by UBH’s lack of coverage criteria for children and adolescents, estimated to number in the thousands in the certified classes.
“For far too long, patients and their families have been stretched to the breaking point, both financially and emotionally, as they battle with insurers for the mental health coverage promised by their health plans,” said Meiram Bendat of Psych-Appeal, Inc. and co-counsel for the plaintiffs who uncovered the guideline flaws. “Now a court has ruled that denying coverage based on defective medical necessity criteria is illegal.”
In its decision, the court also held that UBH misled regulators about its guidelines being consistent with the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) criteria, which insurers must use in Connecticut, Illinois and Rhode Island. Additionally, the court found that UBH failed to apply Texas-mandated substance use criteria for at least a portion of the class period.
While the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 requires parity for mental health and substance use benefits, insurers are permitted to evaluate claims for medical necessity. However, by using flawed medical necessity criteria, insurers can circumvent parity in favor of financial considerations and prevent patients from receiving the type and amount of care they actually require.
In his decision, Chief Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero concluded that “the record is replete with evidence that UBH’s Guidelines were viewed as an important tool for meeting utilization management targets, ‘mitigating’ the impact of the 2008 Parity Act, and keeping ‘benex’ [benefit expense] down.”
Psych-Appeal, Inc. and Zuckerman Spaeder LLP were appointed class counsel by the federal court and represent plaintiffs in several class actions against other insurers.
How men can save relationships by learning to be vulnerable
Perspective by Andrew Reiner
August 2, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
(Isabel Espanol/Illustration for The Washington Post)
When Nick Firchau and his wife were dating, he trekked from his Brooklyn apartment into Manhattan to buy fresh scallops to make her dinner. This was a big deal for Firchau, now 43, who rarely cooked and wanted to impress his girlfriend. According to him, she grew vocally upset because he neglected to cook a vegetable, too. “I couldn’t believe she didn’t appreciate all the effort I went to,” he told me.
He never said anything to her, though. Instead, he fumed for days — a dynamic that continued for years into their marriage. When conflict arose, and he felt hurt, Firchau let those feelings “marinate,” which led to pent-up “anger and resentment, because the air hadn’t been cleared the first time.”
Neglecting to examine and tend to emotional needs is common to many men, it turns out. For a number of reasons — many rooted in socialized norms about masculinity — men are often taught very young to diminish, or even ignore, their emotions in relationships. They do this, however, at the expense of their relationships’ health and their own well-being. When men learn to better understand their emotional needs, the payoff can be profound.
The common myth about men and emotions goes something like this: Men are wired differently than women, and, as a result, they don’t have the same emotional needs. But Israeli researchers who pored over scans of more than 1,400 brains discovered that human brain structures and features are a “mosaic,” resistant to easy binary expectations about gender or sex. Another study published last year in Nature reported that men’s and women’s emotions are, as one of the researchers put it, “clearly, consistently and unmistakably more similar than they are different.”
Instead, psychologists say these perceived differences often arise from social constructs, which starts early. “We don’t train boys to have vocabulary around their emotions beyond anger,” said Fredric Rabinowitz, chair of the psychology department at the University of Redlands in California, whose research and private practice focus on men’s mental health. This occurs, Rabinowitz said, because many boys are raised to believe that deeper emotions are separate to their being, which morphs into “unprocessed trauma.” And when men lack emotional language, they cannot explain what they are feeling.
Firchau can identify with this. Until 2018, the podcast producer and host of the “Paternal” podcast “didn’t think about my emotions in general,” he said. (I have appeared as a guest on his show.) That year, he lost his job, the stress became overwhelming, and he felt as if his identity was under siege.
“I always believed guys are supposed to have everything figured out, for ourselves and our families,” Firchau said. He worried that he couldn’t handle everything with “stoicism, confidence and emotional toughness,” which scared him, because he feared that betraying vulnerability “would make me unattractive to my wife. I was afraid I would lose her if I shared what was unraveling me.”
Like so many men who feel beleaguered, he could not express these negative emotions and, he said, became overwhelmed with stress.
Another self-inflicted barrier that prevents men from meeting their own emotional needs occurs when they check out of relational conflicts, or “stonewall.” This occurs when someone feels overwhelmed by their emotions during interpersonal conflict and then physically or emotionally disconnects, such as by walking away, changing the subject or reaching for other diversionary behaviors. Many people who practice stonewalling consider it a peacekeeping tactic, but it merely buries problems that need resolving.
Men aren’t the only ones who contribute to masculine stereotypes about vulnerability. Psychologist Paulette Kouffman Sherman said in an email that, despite the well-documented request for male partners to be more emotionally available, some women “don’t find it attractive.” They perceive a man’s vulnerability as “weakness, neediness,” as less masculine, a threat to traits they value in fathers who were the family “rock”: “strong, silent, fixer” types, she said.
Bill Johnson, a psychologist in suburban Chicago, said that his mostly Black clientele, a third of whom are part of the LGBTQ community, experience similar pushback from their partners. “Many men don’t feel they have an audience to talk about deeper pain and hurt in their romantic relationships. It’s difficult to have people in their lives who will do that for them. This is true for both straight and gay men.”
But there’s no question about vulnerability’s role in successful relationships. Therapists know that opening up to partners and spouses, and to potential rejection, builds and deepens trust, empathy and intimacy.
Since Firchau took the step of working with a therapist, walls have come down in his relationship. “My therapist helped me develop the language to talk about my deeper feelings and helped me validate them. And he helped me realize that they weren’t anything to feel ashamed of, that they were normal.”
Emboldened, Firchau approached his wife with his newfound literacy and confessed the truth: He had been afraid that she would regard his true feelings as weakness. He was wrong. “She told me, ‘What’s unattractive is that you were unwilling to face the problem at all.’ ”
This language, Firchau said, has broken down unproductive barriers — and created healthy ones.
“Whenever my wife and I have a heated conversation about kids or money, I know now that rather than engage in a heated argument, I need time to step away and think for myself on how to articulate what I’m feeling.” He now creates some needed space for himself and, a day or so later, shares with his wife why he felt hurt or upset. “But we hold each other accountable. And after that day has passed, we have that follow-up conversation.”
Andrew Reiner teaches at Towson University and is the author of “Better Boys, Better Men: The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency.”
The reason why men push away the love of women they love is that they didn’t think the process all the way through. Most men think about now and that’s it. When you can feel in your gut that a man is pushing you away, you are usually right. It’s your woman’s intuition. It makes women wonder why doesn’t he want me?
Reasons men push women away
1. He believes it’s too good to be true. He just can’t believe he can be happy with the woman of his dreams. He doesn’t believe it could happen to him.
2. She is being too clingy to him. She never leaves him alone. He’s not used to that much communication with a lover.
3. He is realizing how much he misses being single. He doesn’t want to commit. He has a “commitment phobia”. This is a man who likes to do whatever he wants to do.
4. He is too selfish. He realizes it will cost him time and money to continue on with her. It’s all about him in his life and that’s how he likes it.
5. He doesn’t see a future with her. He can’t see himself being with her forever but he didn’t know that immediately. He only started feeling this way lately.
6. He felt pressured into the relationship. It’s not necessarily that she gave give an ultimatum to be in a relationship. It could be that he is not ready but he feels that he owes her that. Women want men to do things when they want them to. That’s just not the way men work.
7. He has too much on his plate. Living a busy lifestyle has him feeling like he won’t be able to devote as much time into the relationship that’s needed to keep a healthy relationship.
8. He has been hurt in the past by someone else. He thinks every female is out to hurt him. He guards his heart like its a newborn baby.
9. He feels like he is in competition with her. She may be more “accomplished in life” which plays with his manhood. Men are generally the providers or at least the breadwinner.
When he meets a woman with more than he has to offer, he gets intimidated by the situation. He feels almost like he is not good enough for her.
10. He has a fear of love. He is genuinely terrified of his own feelings. He has never felt like this about someone before. He doesn’t know how to handle the feelings he has inside for her. These feelings are almost overwhelming to him.
11. He doesn’t fully love himself. It’s hard for someone to fully love someone else when they don’t love the man in the mirror. He is insecure and has to fix this by himself. He feels inadequate in showing and expressing his love for her. He is unable to connect with her emotionally.
12. He is not as into her as she is into him. He just doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. He is slowly contacting and responding to her contacting him less and less in hopes of just easing out of the situation. He doesn’t want to be a man and say what’s on his mind and heart. He just hopes she gets the hint by showing less or no more interest.
13. He can smell a challenge. Some men will pull away when they think another man may be involved in the equation. They don’t like to compete. Men are very territorial.
14. She is such a good woman that he is scared he will mess things up. He doesn’t want to hurt her. He knows he has never been in a serious relationship that lasted very long.
What to do when a man pulls back
1. Work on yourself. Remember who you are as well as your worth.
2. Have a conversation with him. Ask him what his issues are. Let him know that you are there for him. Do not pressure him in any way. You need to know what’s going on. You have a right to some answers.
3. Give him what you think is a reasonable amount of time. People go through things. Be a little patient. However, you are not a toy to play with.
You still need to put a time frame on the situation. Do not allow him to come in and out of your life if he is confused or still pushing you away. No one should be allowed to reserve you emotionally and not act on it.
4. Keep yourself busy and your mind off him. What do you like to do? Enjoy your hobbies. Spend more time with your family and friends.
5. Pull back too. Give him time and space to figure things out. Stop contacting him. Just act nonchalantly about the situation. Make him miss you again.
He needs to reappreciate your presence to make him remember and realize what he will potentially be missing out on. When he “snaps out of it”, he will come around.
6. Leave him alone and move on with your life. This may be easier said than done but you deserve to be happy. No need to keep lingering around someone who is confused about what he wants to do with you. You should never put your life on hold for someone unsure.
Life is too short. Don’t keep pressing him about this issue. You will make him feel like you are desperate.
7. A man pulling away is like a scared animal. He might be emotionally immature. You must be positive, calm, constant, and reassuring you can help him change those feelings.
You will see that he slowly will trust what you are saying and doing. Make a safe environment for him to perceive forward. He will slowly move forward if he is the right man for you.
As you can see there are many reasons why men push away women they love. Watch his actions around you. In dating and even in relationships, A guy would rather pretend that he doesn’t like you while silently suffering inside because he does like or even loves you very much. Sending you mixed signals is not fair in the love game.
The worst thing you can do is blame yourself. This has everything to do with him, not you. You can control a man that has unstable emotions. You didn’t do anything wrong and there is nothing wrong with you. His ego could be in the way of his heart right now.
Valuing yourself and scarcity is very important. He knows that you are a great woman, he knows someone will love you if he doesn’t. Hopefully, you know and understand this too.
You’ve probably seen someone standing on a corner at one of Alexandria’s busiest intersections, probably holding a sign detailing the desperate circumstances they’re in and asking for help.
Maybe, motivated by a charitable instinct, you handed them a couple of dollars or some change through your car window.
You think you’re doing good, but you may actually be contributing to deeper problems, says the head of the Central Louisiana Homeless Coalition.
“Please, please, please — do not give to panhandlers,” said CLHC Executive Director Joseph Buzzetta. “Our community does want to help out individuals who are homeless. I understand the public’s desire to help. Homelessness speaks to something in our souls. But giving money to these individuals is not the way to deal with homelessness.”
“Honestly, a lot of these people flying signs are not homeless,” Buzzetta said.
Tiffany Crooks, housing program director with Volunteers of America, said she’s known some individuals who have made as much as $500 in one day of panhandling.
“We always tell people, don’t ever give money,” Crooks said. “Because you’re reinforcing the panhandling behavior. If you feel like you need to give something, give tangible items — a granola bar, a bottle of water, I’ve even seen people give gift cards to McDonald’s. If they’re not willing to take that from you, nine times out of 10 they don’t really need help. They’re just out there trying to make a quick buck.”
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Your money may be putting them at risk
Many people on the streets are there, at least in part, because of serious substance abuse issues. And one of the worst things you can do to someone who has a drug problem is make it easier for them to get drugs.
“I have seen people give money to people who are active substance abusers,” Buzzetta said. “Not just using baseline street drugs, they’re using hard, hard drugs. Especially with all the fentanyl out there, all the opioids out there. They’re trying to survive so they do self-medicate, they do seek out these substances that make life easier for them, and it is just so, so dangerous.”
Buzzetta said “panhandling is one of the most dangerous activities a homeless person can engage in,” and not just because the money might go to feeding their drug habit.
Information passes a lot more effectively among the homeless community than people think, he said. When someone is known to have made a decent amount of money panhandling, that could make them a target for attackers looking to rob them.
Homeless people are particularly vulnerable to such attacks because they spend nights in out-of-the-way areas with no walls or doors to protect them, and are less likely to report crimes against them to law enforcement.
Panhandling could keep them from seeking needed treatment
“The challenge we’re seeing is some of our clients who we engage with on a regular basis will stop coming to us for our services and instead go panhandle, because it is good money,” Buzzetta said. “A lot of homeless people are in survival mode. For them, it’s a calculation. Do I come and meet with case manager get signed up for disability, try to get signed up on these waiting lists, or do I go make a cool $60 or $70 or $80? Whenever that’s the calculus that the community is encouraging, I understand why our clients are going for that.”
If they can make it panhandling, it keeps them on the streets, and keeps them from seeking help.
“The longer these individuals stay on the streets, the worse their mental health conditions get, the worse their physical health conditions get, the worse their substance abuse issues get,” Buzzetta said.
Eventually, the danger is they don’t receive treatment for so long that their problems, which may have been addressable, become too severe.
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It may keep them out of stable housing
In addition to using it for drugs or other destructive behavior, Crooks said, she’s seen homeless people using money they got panhandling to buy themselves a night in a hotel room.
While that buys them shelter for a night,” the next day they’re right back in the same situation,” she said.
“Until these issues are addressed, these people are not going to make it into housing stability,” Buzzetta said. “And that’s what we’re here for. We want these people stably housed and thriving in this community. When that happens, our entire city benefits.”
Many homeless people have experienced significant trauma, Buzzetta said. Dealing with that trauma for an extended period fosters a mindset that they can only value what gets them through another day.
“Panhandling encourages that mindset, encourages that behavior and stops them from coming to us so we can work on moving them from that present-day orientation to more of a future-based orientation so they can move forward in their mental and physical health goals,” he said.
The average cost per day, per client is about $30 for CLHC, Buzzetta said. For that, the agency has about an 80 percent retention rate.
That means eight out of 10 times, once a client sees what a better life looks like, they’re willing to accept the challenge of staying off the streets.
But to get that glimpse of a better life, they have to engage in services that move them on the path toward stable housing. And as long as they’re making money panhandling, they’re less likely to do that.
“The bitter irony is every dollar you give individuals on the street could go to a housing agency and we could use that to develop more housing and get these people off the streets,” Buzzetta said.
≈ Comments Off on Raymond Chandler – On Writers and Living in Los Angeles
A drunk, a womanizer, a perfectionist and irrepressible demander of himself and everyone around him, Raymond Chandler was the darling of studios and the silver screen for twenty years. Now touted as one of America’s greatest writers, alongside Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway, his most famous works include: Philip Marlowe, private detective, The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Lady in the Lake and others.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression due to drinking, absenteeism and bad boy behavior.
Chandler was born on July 23, 1888, in Chicago, Illinois. He died on March 26, 1959, in his longtime home of La Jolla, California. He was proceeded in death by his wife of 30 years, Cissy Pascal (m. 1924–1954).
Hollywood was built on the work of underappreciated writers. Just ask Chandler, Faulkner and Fitzgerald
In 1945, barely two years into Raymond Chandler’s career asascreenwriter, the man whose hard-boiled fiction did much to make film noir into an art form had already wearied of the town and its treatment of writers.
“Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made,” he wrote in an acerbic essay published in the Atlantic.
In barbed zinger after zinger, the man who gave us private investigator Philip Marlowe described Hollywood as a cauldron of “egos,” “credit stealing” and “self-promotion” where scribes were ruthlessly neglected, marginalized and stripped of respect; toiling at the mercy of producers, some of whom, he wrote, had “the artistic integrity of slot machines and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.” (The Los Angeles Times.)
The Great Wrong Place – Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles at 70 – Black Mask 9/8/17 – Mike Valerio.
They seemed to fit together right from the very beginning. The right town and the right words.
“The lights of the city were an endlessly glittering sheet. Neon signs glowed and flashed. The languid ray of a searchlight prodded about among high faint clouds…. The car went past the oil well that stands in the middle of La Cienega Boulevard, then turned off onto a quiet street fringed with palm trees….” —from “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”
It was the very first piece of detective fiction written by one of the greatest of all mystery writers, Raymond Chandler. “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” published in 1933, appeared in the rough-edged pulp pages of Black Mask magazine.
In the 70 years since he penned that first tale of crime and corruption, Chandler has come to occupy a singular place in the cultural history of his adopted town. Called by S.J. Perleman “the major social historian of Los Angeles,” Chandler used his tough, bourbon-soaked poetry to re-create the city as a character, as real and intense as Chandler’s private eye hero, Philip Marlowe.
With his distinct descriptions of all that was unique about L.A. (“The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn’t move.”), Chandler introduced our beautiful and brutal city to more readers than any other author, despite once declaring Los Angeles had “the personality of a paper cup.”
In post-World War II America, Los Angeles was a frontier town, ruled by a crime syndicate that was under the control of a cabal of shady politicians, lawyers and police officials. Chandler turned the greed, cruelty and despair of his crime-infested metropolis into the stuff of fiction. For millions of people around the world, he defined not only a city, but the genre of the hard-boiled detective story and even the style of movie-making that came to be known as film noir. His influence on mystery novelists from Ross Macdonald to Robert B. Parker, and on movies and television shows from Chinatown to The Rockford Files to L.A. Confidential have been well-documented by scholars and critics. Chandler’s path in creating that legacy is in evidence at the Special Collections Division of the UCLA Research Library, which contains the most extensive collection of Chandler’s work in the world.
Manhunt for an Identity
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888. His alcoholic father frequently abandoned his family for extended periods, a habit that ultimately caused the divorce of Chandler’s parents. Eventually, young Raymond’s father vanished for good.
Chandler’s mother filed for divorce. She saved enough money for a move to England, where she and Raymond lived with relatives. Beginning at age 7, he received a proper British education at a school in London. He won awards for mathematics and was an avid reader of the classics. At 17, he attended London’s Dulwich College and later studied in France and Germany.
After a time, Chandler returned to London and became a naturalized British subject in order to take a civil service exam. He passed and soon acquired a government clerking position. But Chandler grew bored working as a civil servant and left the British government to work as a journalist and essayist for London’s Daily Express and Bristol’s Western Gazette, for whom he wrote articles on European affairs, along with poetry, reviews and literary essays.
Chandler found his way back to the United States in 1912. Searching for his niche, he worked on an apricot ranch, made tennis rackets in a sporting goods firm and, after studying bookkeeping, became a junior accountant. Chandler’s restlessness during this period was at least in part due to a problem with alcohol. It was a problem that would plague him for the rest of his life. “I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year,” he once said, “just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.”
In 1917, Chandler began a year of service with the Gordon Highlanders of the Canadian Army, just after the start of World War I. As a member of the Royal Air Force he saw action in France. Chandler’s first real brushes with violence and death changed him. As a 30-year-old sergeant, he was ordered into trench warfare, leading his platoon into direct machine-gun fire. After that, he said later, “Nothing is ever the same again.” He was discharged in 1918 after sustaining a concussion in combat.
After the war, Chandler returned to America, this time to California (“The department store state,” he would later write. “The most of everything and the best of nothing.”) He worked as a banker in San Francisco and a reporter for Los Angeles’ Daily Express (he was fired after six weeks for being “lousy”) before finally joining L.A.’s Dabney-Johnson Oil Corporation as a bookkeeper.
By 1924, Chandler married Pearl “Cissy” Pascal and was promoted to auditor for the oil company. Soon, he rose to the rank of vice-president, but over the next several years, his battle with alcohol took its toll. After several self-destructive displays of excessive drinking and erratic behavior, he was fired in 1932 for absenteeism, womanizing and drunkenness.
Raymond Chandler was 44 years old.
The Pulp Jungle
The firing was a wake-up call for Chandler. The Great Depression was on and work was scarce. Chandler stopped his excessive drinking (temporarily), picked up a copy of Black Mask and vowed to dedicate his life to writing. The man who would soon turn Los Angeles into a film noir landscape never looked back.
For a novice writer during the Depression, there was no better place to start than the pulps, those thick, cheaply produced magazines filled with dark and bloody tales of mystery, murder and action, all written in the most purple of prose.
A fan of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, Chandler registered himself as a writer in the Los Angeles City Directory and began his apprenticeship in detective fiction.
Chandler decided to tackle the mystery pulps because he believed that some of them, in spite of their preoccupation with cheap-thrills melodrama, actually possessed an honesty and moral code that appealed to him. Also, he believed that the literary bar was low enough in the pulp fiction trade that he might actually have a good shot of earning even as he learned.
For a full year after his ignoble exit from Dabney Oil, Chandler worked daily at learning the craft of writing detective fiction. At first, he leaned heavily on the styles of Hammett, Gardner and even Ernest Hemingway as models for plot, character, pace and style. It didn’t come easy. That first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” running just under 18,000 words, took him five long months to finish. He submitted the story to tough-minded Joseph Shaw, the editor of Black Mask, the leading hard-boiled detective pulp of the day.
Shaw accepted the story and published it in the December 1933 issue. Chandler’s career as a mystery writer had officially begun. For his months of labor, the author received $180, at the standard pulp rate of a penny a word.
For the next six years, Chandler continued his apprenticeship in the pulp magazines, perfecting his craft and building, story by story, the character of his many-named private detective hero (known in various stories as Mallory, Dalmas, Carmady, Gage and Delaguerra, among others).
Though the detective story was a popular form, it did not pay very well. Never a prolific writer, Chandler struggled to earn even a modest living from his short-story sales. In 1938, his three published novelettes earned him a total of $1,275. Often short of cash, Chandler and his wife moved from furnished apartment to furnished apartment throughout Southern California—sometimes two or three times a year. He later recalled: “I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once.”
Marlowe, P.I.
As the Depression wore on, Chandler continued his education in the pulps. Over the next six years, he sold 10 stories to Black Mask, seven stories to Dime Detective, and one to Detective Fiction Weekly. Chandler learned much from toiling in the pulp jungle, but by 1938 he was ready to move on. In the spring of that year he began writing The Big Sleep, his first novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the romantic and chivalrous private eye with the thoughtful, introspective approach to investigation that would mesmerize audiences in a total of eight novels, all set in steamy and seamy Southern California.
When The Big Sleep was published by Alfred A. Knopf in February 1939, the novel sold 10,000 copies in the United States and paid Chandler $2,000 in royalties. Those figures didn’t make him a best-selling author, but they were remarkably high for a mystery story, particularly for one by a first-time novelist.
Chandler wrote for the pulp magazine market for only a few more years, publishing three stories in 1939, none at all in 1940 and a final one in 1941. For the rest of the decade, Chandler devoted himself to the novel, often cannibalizing plot points, action set-pieces and whole characters from his own short stories. The years during which Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942) and The Lady in the Lake (1943) were published also saw the slow death of the pulp and the rapid rise of the paperback. These small, cheap reprints of hardcover novels were not only in bookstores but in drugstores, newsstands and even railroad stations.
For Chandler, the paperback revolution and the reprinting of his novels resulted in more income and something new: fame. By the beginning of 1945, 750,000 copies of The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely had been sold. Just four years later, a Newsweek report on the crime-fiction business noted that there were more than 3 million copies of Chandler’s mysteries in the hands of readers.
As a writer who saw himself following the path of Dumas, Dickens and Conrad, Chandler devoted his life to the principle that genre writing is writing first and generic second. “My theory,” he once wrote, “was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.”
Chandler’s L.A.
Those descriptions included colorful portraits of Los Angeles landmarks and landscapes, like that of downtown’s Angel’s Flight cable car in The High Window: “I parked at the end of the street, where the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street, and walked along Court Street to the Florence Apartments.”
The Santa Monica Pier, the San Bernardino Freeway, The Dancer’s Nightclub at La Cienega and Sunset, Beverly Hills (“the best-policed four square miles in California”), The Bradbury Building (renamed The Belfont Building by Chandler and later used as the site of Marlowe’s office in the 1969 James Garner film, Marlowe) all fell under the eyes of Chandler and his private detective. Marlowe’s Hollywood office, Chandler told us, was on the sixth floor (number 615) of “The Cahuenga Building” (in reality, The Security Trust and Savings Bank at the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga). Once the tallest building on the Boulevard, the six-story structure erected by John and Donald Parkinson, designers of Bullock’s Wilshire and Santa Monica City Hall, became a high-profile home for Hollywood’s best-known private detective.
“If, as is often said, every city has at least one writer it can claim for a muse,” author and critic David L. Ulin once noted, “Raymond Chandler must be Los Angeles’.” Chandler’s background as both a journalist and a poet made him, said Ulin, “the one Los Angeles writer whose books have as a consistent center—the idea of the city as a living, breathing character–capturing the sights, the smells, the bleak glare of the sunlight, the deceptive smoothness of the surface beneath which nothing is as it seems.”
Ross Macdonald may have put it even better: “Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”
Yet Chandler’s Los Angeles is no City of Angels. It’s an urban swamp filled with darkened back alleys, endless expressways and oppressive architecture. It’s a city of decay and corruption, right down to the foliage. When Chandler, as he does in Farewell, My Lovely, describes “a tough looking palm tree,” it is a tree that could only grow in Los Angeles. When, in the same book, an afternoon breeze makes “the unpruned shoots of last year’s poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall,” lovers of Los Angeles—even those who have never lived here–recognize it as home. And when private eye Philip Marlowe makes his lonely drive from The Hobart Arms on Franklin Avenue to Arthur Gwynn Geiger’s House on Laurel Canyon Drive, as he does in The Big Sleep, we travel with him on atmospheric “mean streets” of a town without pity.
Making a Case for Mystery
Despite the income all those paperbacks generated, their lurid covers advertised Chandler’s stories as nothing more than collections of sex and violence. This kind of image angered and depressed Chandler, who considered the mystery story a valid form of literature. He dove deeper than ever into his drinking, coming up only often enough to produce some of the English language’s greatest crime fiction. In a letter to Lucky Luciano in preparation for an interview (at the suggestion of James Bond creator Ian Fleming), Chandler told the gangster: “I suppose we are both sinners in the sight of the Lord.”
In defiance of the sensational images screaming from the paperback racks that did little to promote Chandler as an important or even talented writer, a small number of Chandler supporters were beginning to argue for his literary value, as was Chandler himself. Writing to his overseas literary agent, Helga Green, Chandler said, “To accept a mediocre form and make literature out of it is something of an accomplishment… We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves.”
Chandler was lucky enough to start writing novels at a time when Hollywood, based on the success of John Huston’s adaptation of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, was turning to the hard-boiled detective genre for stories. In 1941, RKO Pictures bought the rights to Farewell, My Lovely for $2,000, using the novel as source material for The Falcon Takes Over. A year later Twentieth Century Fox paid Chandler $3,500 for The High Window. Chandler wasn’t seduced by the attention, however, claiming, “If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come.”
Like many novelists during Hollywood’s Golden Age, Chandler turned to screenwriting to earn the money his books could not. In 1943, he signed on with Paramount Pictures to collaborate with Billy Wilder on a film version of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. He was paid $10,500, more than his entire earnings to date for any single novel. Chandler continued working for the studios for the next four years, earning increasingly higher salaries.
Seldom had a novelist’s work been so successfully or so frequently translated to the big screen. Chandler’s career as a screenwriter peaked in 1946 and 1947 with the release of director Howard Hawks’ film version of The Big Sleep (“The Violence—The Screen’s All-Time Rocker-Shocker!!” screamed the studio advertising), adaptations of The High Window (as The Brasher Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake, plus Chandler’s Academy Award nomination for The Blue Dahlia (the screenplay for which Chandler crafted under an agreement with Paramount that he be allowed to write at home while drunk). In 1947, he was signed by Universal to create an original screenplay called Playback, but the film was never produced. Chandler tried screenwriting one final time in 1950, adapting the Patricia Highsmith mystery Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock (“He threw out nearly everything I wrote and brought in another writer.”).
Farewell to Filmland
After that film (the 16th written by or adapted from him), Chandler quit what he called the “Roman Circus” of Hollywood screenwriting to devote his energies to his remaining novels, The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953) and Playback (1958). Hollywood returned his ambivalence. Aside from a truncated television version of The Long Goodbye for the CBS series Climax in 1954, it was nearly 20 years before audiences saw another adaptation of one of Chandler’s books on screen.
Chandler saw no reason to cry: “The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large.”
If Hollywood had grown indifferent to Chandler’s work, the same could not be said for his growing legion of readers. As the genre of detective fiction increased in popularity, Chandler was hailed as its most accomplished practitioner. The growth of his reputation in literary circles was based primarily on his first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely and on his sixth, The Long Goodbye, but the demand of mystery fans, hungry for the work of a man who had not produced much of it, kept all of his fiction continuously in print.
Chandler once said, “The actual writing is what you live for.” And, indeed, his tight, clean prose, with its rapid rhythm, flawless precision and inspired similes (“He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”) seemed the perfect conveyance for the detective story that he, more than anyone else, had elevated from its pulpy roots. The power of Chandler’s language and the emotion of his characters resulted in stories driven by mood and soaked in atmosphere, revealing and perhaps even explaining the darker side of human nature. Said poet W.H. Auden: “Mr. Chandler is interested in writing not detective stories but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful, but extremely depressing books should be read and judged not as escape literature, but as works of art.”
The end of Chandler’s own story reveals a personal life filled with difficulties, disappointments and disasters. His epic bouts of heavy drinking cost him his health, his lifestyle, his professional and personal relationships—and even his talent. Eventually, he wrote virtually nothing but letters.
Chandler suffered from depression, once saying that he could no longer look out at the Pacific Ocean because it had too much water and too many men had drowned in it. And he was a victim of self-loathing. Although he agreed to become the president of the Mystery Writers of America, he threw his ballot out because he could not face the prospect of voting for himself.
When his wife Cissy died of fibrosis of the lungs in December 1954, Chandler’s sense of loss turned from devastation to desperation. One boozy night, he loaded a .38 revolver, walked into his bathroom and fired twice. He missed both times. When the police arrived, they found him on the shower floor in the midst of a third attempt. He was taken to a sanitarium. When the news of his botched suicide made headlines, letters of support poured in from all over the country. Chandler dismissed the sentiments as silly.
Finally, in 1959, Chandler was hospitalized for pneumonia, his system weakened by years of alcohol abuse. He died alone at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla on March 26, just three days before the premiere of Philip Marlowe, a new ABC television series based on his most famous character.
Chandler’s funeral was attended by only 17 people. They included local acquaintances who hadn’t known him well enough to be called friends, representatives of the local Mystery Writers chapter and a devoted collector of first-edition mysteries.
Chandlertown
Yet 70 years after penning his first Los Angeles crime tale, Raymond Chandler lives on. His seven novels and 25 short stories are still in print and readily available, as are the movies and television shows made from those works. And Chandler lives as well at the very place where Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe once hung his hat, coat and gun.
On August 5, 1994, in honor of the first writer to chronicle Los Angeles and all its vivid eccentricities, the city of Los Angeles designated a familiar Hollywood street corner as a Historic Cultural Monument. Raymond Chandler Square now occupies the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards, the site of Marlowe’s office. Journalist Jess Bravin, who first approached the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission with the idea of the tribute, said then: “Of all the artists of the 20th century, perhaps no one shaped the image of Los Angeles more than did Raymond Chandler. His novels, which featured private detective Philip Marlowe, portrayed this city and its people with a depth and texture that both inspires and chills each generation of readers. His style, terse and metaphoric, gritty yet romantic, bridged the worlds of rich and poor, of losers and dreamers, of ‘popular novels’ and literary art.”
ittle before she got dressed and met her date. No point in looking droopy. After 45 minutes she got up, reapplied her makeup careful to hide the bruises from the Botox, brushed and sprayed her hair. The dress was on, the stockings up, the shoes matched everything and the jewelry too. She was ready to go.
She met Rudolf by the subway and her first impression was that he was shorter than she thought he would be. “He has got to be the shortest 6’ man I have met in awhile.” Regardless, they were soon chatting together like old buddies.
They tried to find a restaurant, but most weren’t open yet, so they ended up at Starbucks. Rudolf ordered them coffee; Connie got a sandwich. They both talked about themselves, and he seemed to like talking about himself. She had to admit, he had the deepest blue eyes she had seen in quite some time. She could fall right into those…
“And I have been to 27 different of the United States” he told her. “And I bet you have never been to Lynchburg, Tennessee where they make Jack Daniels whiskey.” She had to admit she never had, and he told her all about it and how the place was just like the commercials. Rudolf proceeded to tell her about all the cities in California he had visited too and then started in on the Asian countries he had been to and all the weird food. Are we in some kind of race? She thought to herself.
After about two hours of the ‘where have you been, what have you done,’ marathon, Connie had to interrupt.
“Rudolf, I’m going to have to go. I’m meeting some other people here in town,” she smiled. “How about lunch tomorrow?”
Rudolf seemed a little surprised by the request. “Oh, ya, sure.” Awkwardly he stood up. “Tomorrow then,” nodding they shook hands. Too soon for any clumsy kisses.
Connie knew she could be in trouble with this one and was happy to meet her friends for dinner and stop thinking about him for a while. Later, in bed back at the hotel, she knew she would have to confront Rudolf about his situation with his wife. She realized reluctantly that there could be all kinds of reasons for it. Maybe none of them to having anything to do with the wife at all. Perhaps the company offered him a bunch of money to come here, or he was bored and restless, having a mid-life crisis, he wanted to fool around, so on.
Connie got up bright and early the next day, looking forward to lunch. An hour later she got a text from Rudolf that he could not make it because of illness and that he was going to have to cancel all his plans for the day. She texted him back, “Thanks, Rudolf. Talk soon?”
Later that week, she got off the bus with Mr. James.
“So, what are you doing for next holiday weekend?” he demanded, black eyebrows pulled together.
Connie was ready. “Oh, that!” she informed him breezily. “Well, I’m off to the City with the boyfriend and it will be fun!” She smiled brilliantly.
Mr. James got very quiet. “Hmm, well, I will be spending time with my three daughters. And” he coughed, “my wife.” He smiled tightly.
“Now, wasn’t that hard,” Connie thought.
After three days, Connie didn’t think she was going to hear from Rudolf again.
“It’s okay,” she said to Bubbles as they sat watching television, “I gave up all that trying to impress people kind of stuff in high school. I guess that guy is still back there. Weird. I just might not be nearly exciting enough for him. Hmm. Maybe I should send him the phone number of that Pink Escort Service I saw advertised. Now I bet those girls are exciting!”
Bubbles yawned, clearly unimpressed by all this drama. He laid his head on her lap and she gave him a pet. “Sherlock, Bubbles?” He didn’t disagree so she changed the channel.
She positioned herself with the hand weights and started to do the back lifts like the gym instructor had told her. She pulled on the weights and repeated 15-20 times. She did front side and back for several minutes and put the weights down and glancing around to see if anyone was watching. Lifting her arms up, she giggled the arm flab in front of the full length mirror. “Actually,” she thought to herself, “it wasn’t looking so bad,” It did look like that ugly upper arm flab was receding. She thought about lipo-suction. “Nah,” she thought, “If I am going to spend $4,500, I’ll spend it on my face.”
She saw the guy coming her way, who at age 55, dressed like he was a 30 year-old mountain hiker. He was always trying to get her attention. “I might be interested,” she thought to herself, “if he wouldn’t spend so much time looking at himself in the mirror.” True to form, the guy came over to pick up some of the heavier weights. Stopping in front of a floor length mirror, he adjusted his baseball cap to a jaunty level above his eyes, and gave his cotton neckerchief a little yank. Is that a sporting look, thought Connie, or to hide the wrinkles? She moved away, no point in letting him think she was looking at him. She was looking at him, she reminded herself, but she wasn’t looking at him.
She moved over to the exercycles and got on one. There was a housewife type next to her who gave her a cheery hello! She seems to be having a great time! Connie thought grudgingly as she pulled out her book to read. She checked the clock, should make this twenty minutes for the correct amount of cardio and all that baloney. She adjusted the dial down to the lowest point and started cycling. Exercise could be a pain.
Later on in the locker, she was amazed as always, at the number of women who sported what one of her friends called ‘the apron.’ The apron was belly fat so large it stuck out. Eventually, it sagged down in a large fold over the bottom of the abdomen, sometime hanging as low as the pubic area. Connie always tried to not stare at women with this. “I am sure they feel just as bad about it,” she thought to herself. “Wow!” as one woman walked by. “Plastic surgery? Something, yikes!”
Connie was contentious about the gym, but certainly did not feel like she was compulsive about it. She was fairly sure one of her ‘gym-mates’ was there every day and possibly twice a day. “Too much!” she thought as she saw the women yet again, “nobody needs that much exercise. Jeese!”
Back at home that evening; she had to get on her online dating site. “I do not have to check my mail, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t…”
‘Looking for Love’, she read, ‘Really Nice Guy.’ “Hum, nice picture,” she told Bubbles the cat who seemed only mildly interested. She read on, “widowed, two boys….they are my life….and my dogs, good doggies…” Connie jerked at this one but continued to read paragraph after paragraph about their lives. He seemed like a good father at least; the paragraph went on and she then came to “but I might get violent if I found you watching a chick flick…” What! She read it again and then once again to be sure if she read it right. Was he trying to be funny? “God, no wonder his wife died!” Connie told an uninterested Bubbles who was licking his fur. She decided to give ‘Looking’ a pass and did send a message to Kiwi from Australia; too young of course, but cute on that bicycle.
Connie had to stop all this frivolity to get ready for bed; tomorrow was definitely another day and this was finals week and she needed her energy.
Mr. James was waiting in line for the bus as usual and she moved behind him and attempted to pull out her book to start reading quickly. No luck, he had to talk to her. Mr. James was an employee at her school who had started there about six months before. He immediately fastened on to her and kept giving her invitations to lunch, dinner, coffee, hiking, etc, etc, etc. Connie countered with being busy, having no business cards, forgetting her phone number, not calling him, having a friend call him after he just insisted on going with her hiking group. Connie had told her friend Lilly “If this guy is not married, my name is Mickey Mouse! And, he won’t back off.”
Today the subject was movies and they managed to squeeze out 5-10 minutes of conversation on the latest movies before the bus mercifully showed up and she could get on. She dashed to a seat next to a girl student quickly before he could figure out where she was and sat down. “Boy, do I need to shake this guy,” Connie mused to herself, shaking her head.
Connie got through the day of sweaty, semi-hysterical students with their final exams, and fortunately, almost to her surprise, most of the students did really well. “Guess that open-book idea worked,” she told Bob her co-worker.
“Ah, you’re going too easy on them,” was his response.
“Maybe so, “she told him. “But, it is either that or a bunch of them flunk the test and then I am called on the carpet to explain why students ‘can’t’ pass the class.” Bob shrugged his shoulders with a ‘what-do-you-do’ kind of attitude.
Connie told him about the ‘chick-flick’ guy. Bob laughed “Oh no, caught red-handed watching Sleepless in Seattle the second time and it is my favorite movie!” They both laughed.
Back home that evening, Connie decided to skip the gym, she was too tired. She told Bubbles she wasn’t going and Bubbles blinked at her in a kind of blank fashion. “I know, I know,” she said. “First it’s one day, then the next, and the next, and the next.” Bubbles lost interest at this point and started to lick his fur. “Yeah, yeah,” she said to him.
Back on-line, “Hello, how are you?” came the polite question. Rudolf was 45 years old, blue eyes, 6’ tall and educated. He was here in this country to do some engineering work. He wanted to know if she would like to send him an email. “Hum,” Connie though, “so polite.” She scanned his profile. “Married” was blank. That didn’t look so good. She did send him an email “Nice to meet you Rudolf, you look very interesting, Are you married?”
The answer came the next day and Rudolf indicated that he was ‘separated.’ Experience told Connie that could mean a really lot of things. She began fantasizing about why he was separated. His wife has had an affair with a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, she drinks too much, she takes pills, she works too much, she won’t work at all, she sits on the sofa all day, she goes to the gym all day long. Between these fantasies they were emailing each other back and forth and finally decided to meet.
Rudolf lived in the Big City which was two hours away by train. She was ok with that; allowed her to collect herself before meeting him. Connie had to grind over and over again about going back to Dr. Lee to have Botox on her forehead. $400 she groaned to herself. Jesus that is a lot of money!
But, she had to admit, every time she went past a mirror, especially in bright light, the deep furrows between her eyes were doing nothing for her looks. She finally decided to bite the bullet and go in and do it. Two hours later and lighter in the pocketbook, she emerged with only a little ice pack on her forehead.
“You’re an artist Dr. Lee,” she told him. She wasn’t kidding. He had just gone after her face hammer and thongs with two laser guns for heavy sun spots and done a beautiful job. The spots above her mouth were fading away nicely.
Dr. Lee looked very pleased with himself. “He should,” she thought, “making that kind of money. “
Connie got her hair colored and bought a new pair of wooly stockings to go with her latest English dress that was very ‘trendy.’ The dress covered the remaining stomach and butt bulges without clinging. The hairdresser curled her hair with the curling iron, something she could never do herself, and she brushed it out the next day and was ready to get on the train.
By the time she got there and got checked in; she was starting to feel tired. Connie decided to lie down a little before she got dressed and met her date. No point in looking droopy. After 45 minutes she got up; reapplied her makeup careful to hide the bruises from the Botox, brushed and sprayed her hair. The dress was on, the stockings up; the shoes matched everything and the jewelry too. She was ready to go.
She met Rudolf by the subway and her first impression was that he was shorter than she thought he would be. “He has got to be the shortest 6’ man I have met in awhile.” Regardless, they were soon chatting together like old buddies.
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