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I study Japanese in a small Church in El Cerrito. We're in the advanced
section. This morning the teacher, in her weekly quiz, asked the class
to write (And here she spoke in Japanese:) "Richard comes from San Francisco."
It's a subtle translation; three distinct forms of Japanese writing are
required. And there's another problem. I'm actually from Berkeley.
The youngest kid in our class is ten, and I'm the oldest: I'm fifty-four.
I overheard one of the younger ones saying, "It takes very little to amuse
you, doesn't it?" to another kid beside him.
There was a little irritation there, expressed in one of those everyday
insults everyone has heard before. The trouble is, I haven't heard that
one in ten years, and I found myself wondering what to say back! I mean,
if I don't know, how's a ten-year-old kid to know?
Then tonight I was talking to my friend, David Van Ness, about the "problem
of insults," and he related how a particular woman had asked him, "What
are you doing for Thanksgiving?" just the
other day (November 2nd). It seems friendly enough, except the other person
never volunteers what they're doing for Thanksgiving: It's a one-way
form of communication leading from what they "ought to ask" to what we
"should say" that completely ignores how we really feel. Help! I don't
live in San Francisco; I live in Berkeley!
What I'm doing for Thanksgiving is giving back as much as I possibly
can to everyone who at one time or another has needed to be real.
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Imagine you are outside looking at the stars with a friend,
telling them how you feel about an oppressive or mean comment
you heard during the day. David Van Ness says, "When someone
attacks, it's like they shine a bright light in your eyes."
Send feedback to Richard@taxi1010.com
(in San Francisco, CA USA), or Amoret@taxi1010.com (in Wilmington,
NC USA), and we'll share some of your ideas underneath a
picture of the stars!
Don't forget to include your first name, age, home town,
and country!
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How
to Deconstruct an Attack
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First of all, you have to take yourself out of it.
Remember that scene in Lethal Weapon 4 when the villain played by Jet
Li actually "breaks down" the pistol in Mel Gibson's hand, before he even
has a chance to pull the trigger? Okay, it's just a movie, but it's an
extremely useful metaphor for certain aspects of emotional intelligence.
You "go for" the weapon, the elbow, or the knee. It's very specific. You
don't just say, "Defend yourself, using martial arts!" You rehearse for
defending yourself from everyday attacks by learning particular "moves"
and "gestures," which you can also think of as "impromptu scripts."
Many scripts are far from obvious, because of how we were socialized —
We were taught to "go along" with people who were pushing us around, or
to "get along" with everybody (indiscriminately). For instance, do you
know how an adult might disarm you (with a sense of humor) if you said,
"Go stand in the corner!"
"Short and sweet" ripostes are neutral; some are conciliatory;
some enforce boundaries; the "who or what" don't matter for certain ideas
to be effective. The actors can change; the situations can change; the
focus for deconstructing verbal violence stays the same ... on disarming
the attack itself, often unnoticeably. Once neutral, you can add a sense
of humor and a sense of forceful poetry: a person does not have to be
serious to learn something! Many, many verbal attacks take the form of
"murdering you with the mundane." So let us continue:
"Where are the dogs?" is a wonderful example
of the mundane. It's a question of where do we go from there? It's equivalent
to asking a nuclear physicist, "Where are the electrons?" When you pin
down an electron, the magic of quantum mechanics completely disappears.
So, what do they care about the geophysical coordinates of your little
dogs, or electrons, even if you knew? Some people say small talk is an
act of social grooming — simply an exchange of dithers and scratches.
But how do they know where you itch? What a waste!
You can have a lot of fun, and get to the root of their manifest concern,
(and veiled concerns,) by responding to the codeword, "where,"
with a simple, "—Not alone." It's fast,
easy, and poetic. You can follow it up with, "—Don't
let the cat out of the bag, whatever you do."
A smarmy, "Where are the boys?" [meaning,
your dogs], provides a "good-old-boy" variation, as if you're supposed
to "go along" with their "friendly" attack. The presuppositions are ideas
such as, "You're a fool," "You do it with dogs," and "You can't even exist
without your dogs." These veiled themes may or may not be present: they
are latent components, or potential aspects of the question.
Well, then. A sense of humor flips up a "friendly" defense, "—It's
genetic," followed by an equally foolish: "—I
fell in love with a banana and married it."
Here, the disarming act is to bring tacit themes into the light,
where they simply evaporate.
All of this is a lot of work! In Non-escalating
Verbal Self-Defense, you don't explain, don't complain, and don't
analyze! Wow! So, how do you not do all that?
You take yourself out of it.
This website is a dictionary for emotional intelligence: using a strategy
of "divide-and-conquer," it shuttles all human communication
into eighty-eight categories, half of which are based on the informal
fallacies of classical rhetoric. (Four examples — The Fallacy
of Complex Question, Tu Quoque, Argumentum ad Verecundiam, and Ignoratio
Elenchi — and forty others are defined in the Introduction)
Street-smart people, or people who traffic in emotional intelligence,
don't analyze that way; they don't grapple with syntax or semantics, either.
And they cut straight through sarcasm! All they have to hear are certain
"codewords," which let them respond
immediately, without thinking or feeling! They do not become emotionally
or intellectually "involved" in an attack, and with a practiced
sense of humor, they have a choice: to engage themselves fully with another
person, or to take themselves out of it!
1. [index of codewords]
2. [index of attacks or "tricks"]
3. [index of two-word
"wings"]
4. [index of follow-up "ideas"]
In order to navigate through this site, you have to explore it. You are
in the same plight as a visitor arriving at the Transbay Terminal in San
Francisco on a sunny day — without knowing the layout of the
City. You don't know the Golden Gate Bridge is burnt orange, and you only
have a vague idea of the Ocean. This website has over one hundred pages!
5.
[index of essays]
6. [index
of art]
7. [site
map]
8. [fallacies]
The eighty-eight categories at this website are arranged in a particular
order, corresponding to a poetic interpretation of the ancient Tarot,
representing stages of development in a child's life, ages one to twenty-two —
introducing A Bully, for example,
at a very young age, and A Turncoat,
for example, in later years. This is a convenient and totally arbitrary
way to arrange the eighty-eight categories, and it takes some getting
used to. So does a Japanese dictionary!
I like order, because I am by training a systems programmer from Dartmouth
College, IBM, a think
tank in Cambridge, and Atari, who started driving a taxicab in San
Francisco when my last employer canned everyone back in the 'eighties.
I thought, "Jeez, you know, wouldn't it be nice to make sense out
of everything?" So I wrote a book, printed it, and sold it out of
my cab. A year later I made a Second Edition, and sold it out, too. Then
I made a Third Edition. Also gone! So what we have here is the open source
code and database for a street-smart robot named Electra, which is updated
every day, and better off for it! Electra.
A teaching robot for kids.
9. [the writer]
10.
[the painter]
11. [coverage]
12. [press kit]
13. [publicity]
14. [milestones]
Notice how quickly things change: What if someone says, "Where are
the dogs, in the doghouse?" Now I can
respond to the codeword, "doghouse,"
and say, "—Sounds serious!" Not
wanting to get caught without a backup, we try to provide a unique follow
through, such as, "—That's a waste of time."
I don't make these things up! It's stuff I hear and write down. My friends
and I think of it as stealing from the rich to give to the richer! The
only people who really like taxi1010.com see it as an adjunct to their
communication skills for disarming the effects of people who mindlessly
"vent" or who unconsciously "propagate fear and intimidation"
downstream in the river of human "mooning." I like to see this
Sufic, or Gurdjieffian work as a gesture, aiming light and understanding
upstream, back to its source ... which mean people, and people who can't
stand calling mean people mean, can't stand. It's sort of miraculous.
15. [Introduction]
16. [Thumbnail
User's Guide]
17. [An Old-fashioned
Art, for kids!]
18. [Guide to Street-Smarts]
19. [Feedback]
20. [Links]
21. [Mirror]
22. [Navigation]
23. [Moxie's
Disease]
24. [Assignment taxi1010]
25. [¿Prumbing?
In Engrish!]
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A
Theory of Human Communication
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What if?
Underneath everything.
It's deeper.
Completely different.
Not alone.
Everyone has had something done to them, and many people are frozen in
a particular stage of development, and under those circumstances, are
doing the best they can. When people communicate, they use sentences,
and you can always trace trouble back to a particular sentence, where
you can nip verbal violence in the bud.
When communication goes wrong, you can see you have been tricked
into being a child. Bill Clinton, for example, is a person you can never
trick into being a child; whenever anyone attacks him, telling him he
behaves like a child, he responds the way a good father would.
It's very useful to be able to "dumb yourself down," to act no better
than anyone else, to act no smarter, no more important, and no more special
than other people. This ability is a tool for getting by in an often hostile
urban environment. It's closer to your libido, and to the part of you
that dreams at night, which contains all the magic.
If you breathe like a baby, from the belly, you can separate yourself
from the hysterical emotions of other people. You can stay in touch with
your true feelings, and be honest to yourself and to other people. Hold
your breath and sense your genitals and you will coast through trouble
like a Jedi knight. Get away from mean people and lay low.
When people talk to you, you can see each sentence they utter as a tray,
which may be "too hot to handle" or "loaded." If they are attacking
you, boring you to death at a party, complaining a little too much, murdering
you with the mundane, threatening to hijack your life, intimidating you,
or just making you feel uncomfortable, try to see some part of them
wants you to feel that way. If their tray (sentence) is filled with
nourishment, by all means take part. If their tray bears plastic fruit,
garbage, nonsense, or an insult trap, ignore the contents of the tray
completely and deconstruct the tray itself.
taxi1010.com has "impromptu scripts" for doing this, spread
over eighty-eight "stargates." It usually takes about three weeks to learn
a particular riposte in such a way that your emotions "get it" or catch
up. That's why actors do so well in the movies: they rehearse
until they understand what they're doing in a very deep way.
Communication is easy if you know when to partake, and when to hole up
and heal. I hope these pages offer you nourishment, and that you get a
chance to contribute in some way to the common experience of being alive,
of being a particular person in a particular place, and of seizing just
the moment to help other people along through their natural stages
of development.
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