3/15/2024

 Saturday, March 15, 2025

D+128/55

44 BC Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome

1966 Riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California

1989 US Department of Veterans Affairs was officially established as a Cabinet position

In bed by 9:15, awake at 3:30, and up at 3:45, unable to sleep with thoughts of time on the Milwaukee Ballet board, Jean-Paul Comelin, Ara Cherchian, Jutta, resignation, and time at F&F and the struggle to rename to FF&SJ, resignation.  My phone tells me we received 0.15 inches of rain in the last 6 hours, sounding as if we avoided the major thunderstorms that had been feared.    

Prednisone,  day 328; 4 mg., day 11/21; Kevzara, day 11/14.  2 mg. of prednisone at 4 a.m. and 5:15  p.m.  Other meds at 5:15 p.m.   .     

Big fish, small ponds.  I was a member of the board of directors of the Milwaukee Ballet Foundation for a few years.  I was invited onto the board through the recommendation of my good friend 😢 Ara Cherchian.  Ara was a senior vice president of Sclhlitz Brewing, in charge of their several canning factories around the country, with P & L responsibility.  He served as president of the ballet board for a couple of years and asked me to serve as treasurer, to which I agreed.  The company was young then and finances were always a challenge.  I was practicing law at F&F at the time and the firm was also young, for a time only 4 lawyers, Bob, John, Tom, and me and for a time Jeff Hirshberg, my MULS classmate, officing on the 5th floor of the Empire Bulding, 710 North Plankinton Avenue above the Riverside Theater.   While I was treasurer, there were times when I was hounded at the law firm by unpaid creditors of the ballet company, demanding impatiently but justly to be paid for their goods or services.  When Ara stepped down as president of the ballet company, he asked me to succeed him, and I (and the concurrence of the rest of the board) agreed.  Jean-Paul Comelin, our French artistic director,  had booked a tour of performances in several cities in the South.  The tour was not a money-maker.  On the contrary, it would cost the company many thousands of dollars that we neither had nor had any reasonable expectation of raising.  Ara and I and the other members of the executive committee of the board recommended to the board that the tour be canceled.  My vice-president, Santo Saliture from Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, voted with the rest of the executive committee to cancel the tour.  Comelin was insistent that the tour was important and necessary.  He started a telephone campaign with the non-executive members of the board to keep the tour.  He was successful and when the entire board met, a majority of the board voted to keep the tour.  Santo Saliture switched his vote from the executive committee.  I was - is outraged too strong a word? - and felt I needed to resign as president since the board had opted to ignore the recommendation of Ara and me and the rest of the executive committee.  I also felt I could not honestly and ethically sign contracts that I didn't think we could honor financially,  And so I resigned as president, saying in words or substance to Saliture, you switched sides so you sign those contracts.  My resignation was a bit of a scandal in the Milwaukee arts community because it highlighted the precarious financial condition of the ballet company and I agreed to stay on the board to avoid further scandal.  Santo became president, the company went on its tour, and somehow, the money was raised to survive the year and move into its brighter future.  For me, it was the end of my days as a player in the UPAF arts community.  Sic transit gloria mundi, but it makes me wonder about my history of resigning and whether I'm just a quitter, much as my poor father was.  I resigned from the law faculty on three separate occasions.   I resigned from my law firm three times.  I resigned as a commissioner of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, removing myself from the community of political appointees of Mayor Henry Meier. ?  I opted not to run for reelection to the board of directors of the Milwaukee Bar Association.  I resigned from the boards of Messmer High School and New World Montessori School at the end of my terms. Most importantly, I left my first marriage after almost 20 years. I left my community at St. Francis and the larger Catholic community when I left the House of Peace.  Do most people's lives have much straighter trajectories (oxymoron? flatter?) than mine?  Am I in again/out again Finnegan? 

 Stafford's Rpbert Sapolski insists that our actions are all determined by our genes, our hormones, our neurochemistry, our environments, and all that has occurred in our lives.  He argues that free will is an illusion.  In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig wrote "The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions" about the life, work, and death of Daniel Kahneman.  Kahneman was a Princeton psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on human decision-making.  He wasn't quite the determinist that Sapolsky is, but he argued (and supported his argument with experiments and data) that we do not make most of our decisions rationally but rather emotionally and inconsistently and often unwisely.  He asserted that we are all easily fooled, most easily by ourselves, by self-delusion.  One of Kahneman's important principles was the importance of reconsidering.  "“Most people hate changing their minds,” he said, “but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something.”  In my old age, I am doing a lot of reconsidering and some serious regretting, mostly about my birth family and especially my mother.  Sapolsky would tell me to forget about regretting: everything I did and didn't do was determined, not the result of free choices of mine.  On the other hand, my regret is also determined, not the result of free will and conscience.  My writing about these thoughts is determined and what's the point of Kahneman's reconsdering?  Reconsidering may make sense before we act, ante facto, but not post facto.  What's done is done or, in the words of Bob Friebert's joke about the old Jews talking about sex, vat vas, vas.  Notwithstanding all of that, I do reconsider the path of my life and wonder about the choices I made, sometimes unwisely.  I think about letting my good friendships with Vicky Conte and Are Cherchian evanesce, probably because of emotional turmoil in my life.  I feel like Littlechap in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, concluding the play singing What Kind of Fool Am I.   Should I have, could I have stayed on this or that board, with all its relationships?  On the law school faculty?  At the law firm? At the House of Peace and in the community of St. Francis?  The hardest question, in my marriage to Anne?  I'm almost inclined to side with Sapolsky's theory of Determinism, to think that all these choices were (almost) determined, which is to say I did what I had to do.  I couldn't have acted otherwise and still be me.

Kahneman’s friend Annie Duke, a decision theorist and former professional poker player, published a book in 2022 titled “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.” In it, she wrote, “Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.”