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Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since the human is to realize it can’t be understood.
“The Book Of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa
Within the past month, a couple of unrelated announcements, which, though, somehow, are chillingly related. Or is it uneasily related?
Glenn Beck, possibly losing his eyesight.
Christopher Hitchens stricken with a grave form of cancer.
Fodder for the cold-hearted on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Not a time for public pronouncements on the part of idealogues seeking to capitalize on the misfortune that has befallen their antithetical brethren.
It brings to mind, to my mind, the concept of fate, justice and “karma.” Loosely speaking.
Though undeclared and quietly guarded, I guarantee there are many more people than we’d comfortably admit who harbor a private spark of elation at the bad fortune that has afflicted either of these two men. In fact, it’s often the religious and virulently devout who shamelessly rejoice in the ill fortune of the sinner or blasphemer who has fallen on their bad side. Invariably preached in the spirit of “God’s will” and other pernicious rationalizations.
There is justice to be witnessed at play in all instances of ill fortune. It is intrinsically evil to herald bad news, even that which befalls your enemies. Hitchens and Beck both have their share of evil detractors and the recent announcements by both these men was surely greeted with some dark celebrations in the minds of lurking onlookers.
Which brings to mind the question of justice.
Justice varies so widely and can be viewed as “just” by almost anyone in almost any situation. How is justice to be meted out fairly when there is such a disjunction in its presentation vs. its perception?
Can we be certain that Hitchens’ cancer is not justice? That Beck deserves to go blind? Naturally the majority would agree that there is little a man could wreak on mankind which would righteously expose himself to such debilitating fates. But there would also be those who, inspired by the harshest sense of punitive punishment, would find it acceptable and even logical that these 2 men are paying the price for living wayward existences.
And there is punishment most would agree on.
Punishment for acts which seem so indelibly cruel and monstrous that very few would find a sense of clemency in their hearts. For instance, I recently read a news report about a man by the name of Jonathan Richardson from North Carolina who was accused of beating, torturing and raping his girlfriend’s 4-year old daughter. This is a most heinous category of crime which most would agree should be punishable by blindness or cancer or other agonizing and life-altering affliction if in fact mankind were able to harness such power.
Punishment ultimately must be doled out by humans when there is doubt that it may occur without their judicial intervention. Punishment and justice are the slipperiest gifts man can bestow upon his fellow man. Civilized man seeks to reduce justice’s arbitrary nature by standardizing its retributive nature and by laddering the vehemence of its expression in corresponding degrees to the severity of the transgression which initiated it.
Man’s subjective and moralistic expectations decide other’s fates and dictates levels of punishment based on the measure of the crime’s severity in congruence to the ratio of normal members of society who would find the crime distasteful or abhorrent (as expressed by the level of distaste it arouses in our civilized senses). Thus justice, punishment, are but mere indicators of a deed’s unpopularity.
Always, there is the presumption that “justice” must counteract the human vision of “bad” or “wrong.” Justice is not blind for it is wagged by our unnatural perspective of humanly morals.
Where does the line of justice get drawn?
If the celebration of Glenn Beck’s blindness fills the hearts in even the smallest fraction of civilized people, why is it assumed his fate is less valid or just than Jonathan Richardson’s? Why is it considered callous to laud the fact that Christopher Hitchens has been stricken with a deadly cancer as just punishment when the same cancer striking Richardson would be applauded?
The cancer is the same.
The fate is the same.
Circumstances are oddly blind.
However, fate is a coldly human contrivance.
Punishment is written and produced by man.
It is served with the presumed endorsement of a lifeless God. Man recognizes, has long recognized, that punishment in the absence of cosmic authority is merely a display of humanly chivalry as it pertains to the treatment of insolent human behavior.
Man would find equally futile the attempt to harness lightning than to attempt to manipulate the laws of fate.
Man punishes man; man asserts pain indirectly in consequential retort to the wrongdoings of man. Unsure of the immediate pleasure or vindication to be derived from the pain’s acute punishment, he can never be convinced that justice is served. Justice cannot be real; not when its allocation is subject to such subjective manners of trust and hope.
The long gray road, spanning all visitations of misery, the journey of punishment and retribution which we sporadically join in order to play the transient role of punisher before we exit the road again. The ideal of punishment is opaque. The range it spans, from this end where it vanishes into irrelevant nothingness, to that other end where the monstrousness of the human heart dwells, the point where man dares to set foot and assume the role of punisher.
Sometimes, questioning the concept of god, questioning fate and purgatory, we must question punishment. If punishment serves no metaphysical purpose, it follows that virtue also serves no function other than the sensory enlightenment of the human desire to achieve an unachievable equilibrium.
Prisons, jails, courthouses…lofty palaces concocted where mankind can park his eternally troublesome instinct to match fate with uncaptured reality in a cascading slope of confused motives. The justice system plays a vestigial role in our quest to impose civilization and order to a crumbling sense of wanton moral aimlessness. Man’s incapacity to capture and furnish justice speaks to its faulty and fallacious nature. Justice is the promiscuous inkling of surrealistic reality masquerading as fact which man can attach himself to while still pretending to maintain saintly neutrality.
Justice is false, and as carved by man, cannot truly exist, for he is an impostor to suppose that he can appropriate natural fate. Justice only lives up to its name when it transcends man’s ability to intercede. Justice is mightiest without his complicit help or noble intentions.
I read once of a teenager who was goofing around (as teenagers do) with some friends at the Kodak Center here in Hollywood, and while daredevilling along the rail of an escalator, fell 2 or 3 stories to his death.
That is a fury of remorseless and incautious justice that man can only dream of unleashing. The only justice is that which is sentenced behind the back of our moralistic fiddling and patronizing sense of grandiosity (divided by our ballooning sense of powerlessness).
I don’t know if I do satirical well.
Or, when I try to be modestly satirical, I have even worse doubts.
For instance, the other day, my Plain Jane post was a rough approximation of satire, and in the spirit of satire, I did my best to indict a general attitude that seems prevalent in the Roissysphere and all the blogospheric satellites it has spawned.
I might not have thought twice of the post if I hadn’t come across a couple of items which reinvigorated my caustic sensibilities when examining what I perceive as a herd mentality and judgmental cultishness on the part of many of these guys who appear intent on solidifying their viewpoint as the standard operating model by which all men should abide (if they want to lead glamorous and pussy-filled lives, of course). It would seem a dereliction on my part if I don’t now revisit the Plain Jane post in the spirit of regurgitating these 2 items that share a synchronous sense of existence to my post.
The first item is a feature story from “msn relationships” called Dating Down, a femicentric diatribe presented as vaguely scientific proof that women who marry men who are less physically attractive than they, are usually happier and more “emotionally satisfied” than women whose husbands are of equal or greater physical attractiveness.
The article rehashes much of the evopsych wisdom that gets bandied about regularly, which in this story, is disguised behind the female perspective with its unacknowledged motive of making marriage and relationships more amenable to the female interests. The article surmises:
A recent study published in the Journal of Family Psychology suggests that for women, dating a less attractive man may result in a happier, more emotionally satisfying relationship.
The story spouts some common sense and popular wisdom which is nothing new in these parts. I believe having such a perspective and pre-knowledge helped me read between the lines. Reading Citizen Renegade and the like has given me an awareness and knowledge that has given me a glimpse into the evolutionary world the article alludes to and grants me the ability to dissect the proposed findings of the author, Elise Nersesian-Solé.
Nersesian-Solé really is just drawing out the simple idea of the economics of marriage and relationships that dictate both parties are involved in an ongoing cost/benefit analysis in which they appraise the other through the self-interested lens of utility and worth (to themselves). She cites a university study in which couples are filmed and their interactions detailed as well as measurements made of their relative “attraction” levels.
After analyzing the tapes, researchers discovered that in couples where the man was more attractive than the woman, he said often things such as, “This is your problem, you deal with it” whereas the unattractive hubbies were more apt to say things like, “I’m here for you — what do you want me to do? How can I help you?’”
In other words, couples in which the man assumes the symbolically subservient role by virtue of of inferior physical attractiveness (in relation to his girlfriend or wife) are those that experience “success” and “health”…that is, from the self-interested vantage point of the female. Hell with the man. Women are defining a relationship as “ideal” one in which they possess superior strength and options over a weak puppy dog husband who is obediently grateful that his wife has inconvenienced herself by choosing his raggedy ass. A physically inferior male mate, lacking a strategic sense of masculinity and the power that ensues, will commit himself to the consumptive chore of selflessly sacrificing his manhood in order to comply to his wife’s desires in the desperate pursuit of maintaining his unlikely hold of her. All the attendant traits of a self-perceived weak man are at play here…fear, insecurity, excessive gratefulness. Which comes first…the unattractive or the Beta? The dynamic is alive and well in the world of television sitcoms, ever notice that?
In a tremendous understatement, she continues
It’s possible that a man who is less attractive than his partner feels so grateful to be with her that he works harder to maintain the relationship, amping up the amount of emotional support and kindness he provides,” says Benjamin R. Karney, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at UCLA. “Yet a man who is better looking than his partner knows he has lots of other options besides his mate, so he’s less committed to providing the emotional support long term relationships need to thrive.”
And we need social scientists to tell us this?
The most striking portion of the article is the degree to which the author twists (ie, manipulates) the logic of evolutionary psychology to justify the mentality of the self-absorbed female whose desire to be placed on a throne trumps all other healthy facets of a complementary male/female relationship. This reminds me of the elephant and the blind men. Everyone sees something different, and in this case the woman defines a helpless, weak mate as emotionally giving and cooperative for he obediently feeds the feminized claptrap of what a marriage “should” be. Whereas a man perceives his beautiful mate as a glorious and miraculous gift from heaven and immediately the relationship embarks on a radically asymmetrical power-sharing dynamic. His dignity is willingly sacrificed as he tenaciously digs his hole deeper and deeper while he basks in her self-righteous and entitled spotlight.
And later I discovered a post titled Why Game Is Worth More Than A Billion Dollars over on Citizen Renegade.
It involved a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire founder of Facebook, taken as he walked to an unnamed event or location with several people, including his girlfriend.
The comments which followed degenerated into an all too familiar, predictable shitfest in which just about every guy who participated joined in a communal trouncing of Zuckerberg who appears to shamelessly persist in dating this girl who apparently pre-dated his billion-dollar fortune (I’m relaying what I learned in reading the comments, I don’t usually keep abreast of this chick fodder, unlike a lot of guys who have the time), a girl who incidentally looks to easily land in the “Plain Jane” category I spoke of.
The wrath and ridicule that was leveled at Zuckerberg was stupefying. There was the predictable chortling and accompanying “if I were that rich, I wouldn’t be dating that hog” sentiments. I suppose this is all in good “fun” and is generally harmless. However I can’t discount this piranha-like bloodlust I witness as guys circle the object of their pseudo-Alpha derision who really has done nothing wrong. Yes, it’s only a bunch of anonymous commentators feasting on the purported Betaness of a public figure, but it is representative of an underlying modern male attitude that rejoices in petty judgments infused with short-sighted gratification and soulless torpor. Lost amidst the sea of male cynicism was the possibility that maybe Zuckerberg really likes this chick. What a concept.
I’m not romantic idealist (hardly) but how can such a wide swath of men instinctively condemn a man who has chosen to remain with his girlfriend through the temptations of wealth?
I’m not praising Zuckerberg, but neither am I ridiculing him. I don’t know the guy, I have no idea what goes on in his life or his girlfriend’s. I refuse to invest much of my analytical thought in deconstructing the guy’s motives. To do so is misguided squandering of the intellect and personal energy. The commentators symbolize much of what I decried in my post when it comes to men and the Woman they elicit in this society: men living enormously outside themselves, enmeshed in private social circles they know nothing about and involved in all this bullshit that serves no purpose or reason. To denigrate this dude because his girlfriend doesn’t match his income level? And besides, where exactly the fuck is the reference manual which spells out just how “hot” your girlfriend should be based on your annual income (I’d like to know where I fall on that continuum, and let me tell you, it won’t be pretty)? This rampant cynicism demonstrates a lagging helplessness and disabling ennui on the part of modern man who has bought into feminized culture’s reliance on the art of prattling on like a bunch of high school girls talking shit about people behind their backs in the absence of constructive self-enhancement tempered with a good dose of humility.
So yeah, undoubtedly, while Zuckerberg is raking in astronomical amounts of income and dating his Plain Jane, some abrasive PUA with only a copy of The Mystery Method to his name will be hooking up with an illiterate Barbie Doll. Tonight, or maybe as I type away here, the shameless keyboard jockey that I am.
Whose shoes would you rather be in?
Poor Mexicans man, doesn’t anyone like us?
(Just so you know, at this point I was going to punctuate this rant with some Spanish, real ethnic, italicized and all, but I couldn’t do the phoniness. I haven’t spoken Spanish for years and I understand it when it’s spoken slowly with common words. I am of Mexican descent, I’ve alluded to it many times, however I’m not thoroughly immersed in my culture. To keep in mind during the remainder of this post. Read: Pocho)
It seems we are so reviled as an ethnic group (at least in the U.S.) that the only people who can tolerate Mexicans are other Mexicans (and even that is disputable).
Black people get a lot of shit also, yes, but at the risk of sounding like a racial Pollyanna, they have had a much longer history in this country, and consequently have become rather adept at infiltrating and becoming an integral part of Americana. Black culture has grown within the blueprint of American history. In essence, black culture has defined much of American culture as well. Inseparable but slightly equal approximately defines the state of black social advancement in this country, whereas for Mexicans it seems to be defined by “separate and forgotten.” Mexican culture tends to be insular and enamored of the Spanish language and the old country (which is too destructively close to the United States for there to be any semblance of Mexican assimilation into American culture.)
Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican President at the turn of the 20th Century, said it best in his observation, “Poor Mexico – so far from God and so close to the United States.” Rather than construing the sentiment as “anti-American,” I believe it is merely stating a simple, unequivocal truth that Mexico, possessed of whatever failed government or culture it did have, still never had the ability to succeed or fail in a manner which it completely owned. All Mexican triumphs and tragedies were realized through the fuzzy distortion from the immediate presence of the magnificent gravitational pull of it’s northern neighbor’s affluent mass. I believe Diaz was pointing out that geographical and historical happenstance are partially to blame for Mexico’s less than sublime historical record (at least from a First World status-oriented perspective). Would Mexico’s fortunes have smiled otherwise? I don’t know, but in such a situation Mexico’s fates would have been its own to build or destroy.
And thus Mexico’s birth into an existence in the shadows of the most powerful and wealthy country in the world thus struck its soul down.
Unable to assert tremendous strength or weakness; only proliferating an unwavering sense of insignificant notoriety in its people and its culture, Mexico has two choices in concurrence with Diaz’ quote. Embrace the United States and its ambitiously responsible culture, or eschew its principles of capitalism and cheesy hedonism. Having chosen the latter, Mexico was left to fend for itself to find a way to create a viable and independent nation while resisting the imposing gravitational wake issuing from the north.
Mexicans, we are a half-hearted American minority. We own our culture outright and being Mexican seems to be a state of geography and language above all. Our culture belongs to us, and exporting it to other nations, even in Latin America, has proven to be troublesome at best. Our culture is encapsulated by our language and brushed in broad, esoteric strokes which have not proven transmittable to strangers. The other segment of Diaz’ quote offers a curious dichotomy for the Mexican people.
So far from God.
My opinion, which was assuredly not Diaz’ in the year 1900, is that another ingredient in Mexico’s travails in its march to independent and healthy self-governance was the presence of the overbearing and dictatorial Catholic church. “So far from God” in the sense that the Catholic church, consumed and bloated with power and its centralized, earth-bound dogma, never allowed Mexico the opportunity to know any sense of God, for Mexico was inserted so deeply into Rome’s anal orifice that the poverty-ridden country was, for all intents and purposes, an unthinking and blindly devoted satellite puppet of the Vatican. Yet one more meek nail in the coffin for a country seeking to establish an identity and a culture.
Hence, on one hand, Mexico heeded the call of a small but powerful religious state halfway around the world whose global hegemony insisted on Mexico’s dependence, suffering and intellectual submission. And on the other hand, Mexico was asked to choose between joining the mighty ranks of the swelling cultural pulse of American wealth and dominion…or not. Instead, my ancestor’s timorous embrace of the American dream and journey to the foreign land (a concept which loses its potency considering the foreign land was a short walk away) failed to be magnificent in glory or in doom.
Where is…Mexico?
This is a post I was on the verge of beginning with
Guys, you don’t know what you want
but after some thought, it dawned on me this is not quite right.
I decided
Guys, you know what you want, but the problem is your wants are incompatible with many of the heroic feminine traits you praise in concept.
I’ve lurked in this blogosector long enough to learn what these gloriously putative womanly traits consist of just as I’ve also learned many of the signature faults which make up the laundry list of anti-heroic feminine traits. I sit here wading through both lists consisting of openly proclaimed and subtly hinted feminine characteristics that men and the misogynists among them cite as the holy grail of the female package and also, the epitome of femininity gone wrong. I concur with the majority of the items on both lists. I easily identify with what men say they seek and what they avoid like the plague. The problem is that in spite of all their lip service, men don’t normally avoid anything when the promise of pussy is indisputably at hand. Quite amazing the ease with which male principles are quietly stuffed when such situations arise!
I’d like to summarize the model female I suspect most men would agree is the ideal companion/mate.
She is generally accepting of her primal role within the male/female dynamic. She not only accepts the role, she welcomes it as an intrinsic natural instinct which is best expressed fully and not to be fought or wrestled with. She may find strength and a sense of instinctual purity within the confines of such genetically ordained gender roles. She is committed to her man’s welfare and best interests. She does not seek to undermine or subvert his influence in such a complementary relationship by allowing her flippant female proclivities to run unrestrained on a path of interpersonal destruction. She has a firm grasp of her ego. She is steady and intelligent and stoically masters her duties to uphold the relationship and its cohesiveness. To enumerate using modern examples, she knows her way around the kitchen, she does not avoid cleaning (ie, she is not averse to scrubbing down the bathroom, cleaning the fridge, vacuuming the carpet). She smartly and practically prioritizes the material and monetary needs of the household. Though she is a woman and innately admires glittery adornments, she refrains from surrendering her good sense to peer-pressured fashion and cosmetic whims. She takes pride in her appearance but does not allow this pride to degenerate into a consuming fixation which impinges on her ability to attend to practical concerns. She has common sense about her and will not play anyone’s fool. She possesses that unique female strength expressed in hardiness of spirit and emotions, and allows it to augment the man’s masculine stability in order to create an overall sense of strength in the union of these two people.
This iconic description of the “dream woman” is wonderfully nod-inducing. There’s a problem, however. Men accept it devoutly and even foolishly internalize the characterization as a righteous demand, an expected privilege that reeks of moral laziness because I believe many men, especially the younger ones, are not sincerely committed or willing to sacrifice their ego embellishments which make the attainment of such a woman unlikely.
For what I’ve described, this glaringly unrealistic image of womanly perfection, leaves out a crucial element. I’ve neglected the physical. Undoubtedly, most men are likely to insert a physical element into this mixture and in doing so, minimize the likelihood of such a confluence of female traits. Can they be blamed? I was their age once, I was a man who maneuvered the minefields of raging testosterone and an excessively idealized self-image which was reflected back on the rest of the human race. I knew what I wanted and needed while failing to heed the reality…that my lofty desire was nowhere close to meeting its adjunct partner in any of the offerings reality might offer.
We men are fond of sanctifying the the gilded image of feminine perfection while failing to live out our own sense of perfection. I see way too many men in this community who are ragingly superficial while acting the part of mindless clowns, which is fine because this gig will work and it will get some guys laid. The problem as I see it is that their own personal offerings do not invoke the quality of female perfection they act entitled to. The woman they desire and not-so-discreetly reward is the flashy temptress who willingly immerses herself in the same social outlets the men do and which affords both the ability to meet on mutually artificial terms. Men seek the brainless, whored out image they have learned from television and the rest of pop culture. Men, playing the feminine role of pretentious attention whore only serve to encourage and proliferate the same behavior in women who are their natural mating demographic.
The dating scene amongst the majority of 20-somethings (extending into their early 30s, as well) seems one that is etched with subdued superficiality and half-hearted standards when in fact the overriding impulse is one of purely physical and visceral pleasure. My memory reminds me that the woman I intellectually knew was an ideal candidate for emotional perfection/maturity in my 20′s was usually not the woman I would be willing to relinquish my youthful vigor for. Cynically stated, the idealized woman I described usually won’t meet the stringent entertainment and physical requirements that a frolicking man seeks at that time in his life. A woman with a good mind and a good heart is hard to unearth amongst the swarms of hair-teased, stiletto-heeled quasi tramps shaking their ass out on the dance floor.
Man, when he is ready to grow up and leave the superficial enticements of the modern whore behind, must embrace the Plain Jane.
The Plain Jane is certainly not the glamorous female prototype we’ve been culturally indoctrinated to adore, is she? The Plain Jane is certainly not what you gel up your hair or don expensive jeans for, is she? You don’t order $12 martini’s in order to share precious dance floor space with Plain Janes (actually, no Plain Jane would be caught dead in a dance club) and you don’t work on that perfect douchie tan or pump iron for the Plain Jane, do you?
You know why I say this, guys…because everything you do is with the intention of securing feminine interest and rapt horniness. Thus committed, you reap what you sow. You play the plastic whore exquisitely; and that is what you will get in return. You are being as morally lazy and intellectually vapid as the flashy slut you want to Game right into the sack. Not until you are able to find satisfaction in self-improvement solely for the sake of self-improvement and thus derive personal benefits apart from the ego-driven consuming appetite to surround yourself with the flashiest female artifice, will you finally accept the measure of feminine qualities you romanticize.
You must embrace the Plain Jane and realize that she alone can provide qualities you prize. The Plain Jane lacks the ostentatious displays of vulgarity and self-obsessed fixations which requires doting on the part of equally self-obsessed men. The Plain Jane is content with her supporting role in the mating dance. The Plain Jane does not ask for more than she is capable of and she is at peace with the natural simplicity of life’s astute demands.
The Plain Jane’s offerings are widely hidden and disguised behind the flashy vagaries of modern society which dominate cultural discourse.
Which is a problem, for the young vibrant man is of an equally sensory nature and has been similarly inculcated with the indifference and lack of desire for that which does not assault his senses. Such a man is easily bored and spiritually unmotivated. He is flabbergasted by the self-conscious glitter of female materialism and, in turn, he nurtures the sick dynamic with his own dose of pretension and boisterously overwrought displays of so-called masculinity.
The Plain Jane is not ugly nor is she boring.
The Plain Jane is simple and unadorned.
The Plain Jane does not feel the urge to assault sensibilities for she is confident in her ability to secure her engaging personality traits only for the people closest to her. The world is not the Plain Jane’s stage.
In this culture of flash and circumstance, the Plain Jane is routinely invisible.
The artifice men and women display within the similarly artificial environment they construct with their behaviors and demands creates a cosmetic facade which eschews selflessness and concentration; which saps sincere humanity of honor and creates a bubble of superficiality, a grand stage on which the plastic pawns of humanity act out their one-dimensional roles. The Plain Jane is desecrated. She must lurk behind the curtains offstage for no one has written a role for her in this production.
Most likely, the Plain Jane will never be summoned to the stage until man matures and realizes artificiality is boring and unsustainable. Unfortunately the majority of men do not mature and remain trapped within the needy strictures of the plastic culture; he is imprisoned the moment he buys his way into the female-induced materialistic paradigm through the cultural gifts of personal and financial debt. All must maintain the public facade of community consumerism in order to play the game.
A man’s blind allegiance to our plastic culture, while dictating his taste in material items, also dictates his tastes in women. In such a state of single-minded avarice, a woman’s value equals, at best, that of an inanimate object, and all its attendant falsity. In a woman he seeks no more than he seeks in a car; physical appearance and peer appeasement and technical performance (or potential performance). Reliability and the utility of the automobile are not the primary concerns to him; instead he surrenders practicality and realism to the human desire to add another brick to the temple of artifice. Seeking and valuing such inanimate qualities in a woman will merely result in providing her further impetus to fulfill such requirements for the nature of woman is pliability and conformity to the male archetype.
The Plain Jane remains unseen, unknown, and thus lacking the means to invest in a man’s sense of egotistical worth, will remain so.
Man must choose that which pleases his soul, not his ego.
His recognition of the difference between the two requires intensive self-directed honesty and tranquility of spirit which he appears destined to overlook in this distracting world. The Plain Jane offers the renowned pleasures of mystery and surprise. A beckoning answer waiting to spring from the unknown. The Plain Jane signifies that which we cannot know and which must be excavated from the soul we buried long ago in the graveyard of human trivialities.
The Plain Jane is the antithesis to our know-it-all mentality.
Hi, so how do you write?
Overheard at last year’s Blogger Convention. Blogicon.
Well that was a joke.
Completely ridiculous.
As far as I know, such a gruesome convention does not exist, and furthermore, I can’t imagine anyone brazenly tasteless enough to enact such an ill-fated pick-up line.
Well, almost anyone.
I’m very intrigued by individual writing practices. We (bloggers) live in an environment of authorial free-for-all; the blogosphere is an unregulated and anarchical textual wasteland. I’d love to know how these people, these bloggers, integrate their blog’s ultimate expression (and its practical fulfillment) into their life and the nitty gritty process disguised behind the words they eventually transpose to the digital billboard.
I suppose if I was more social I might have asked, by now, howthey approach this. How do they embark upon the journey that results in a post? I only know the journey that is my own. But I think it’s important for the typical blogger to be cognizant of his working style, of its strengths and shortcomings. Judging by how many fly-by-night blogs I see flaring into brilliant supernova deaths, I suspect many people mistake the urge to write for the simultaneous drive to populate a blog with their ramblings. Maintaining a blog requires an entirely different skill set than that which enables one to just write. It requires a nominally glamorous, artistic and creative ethic that supplies the hard work and sweat that enables one’s words to find life in a blog’s regular fruition. I think this is why many bloggers fail or surrender. They are unaware of the limitations of their own writing habits which ultimately are but a mere portion of a diligent personality’s ability to marry the creative and the practical into a cohesive whole.
The creative nature of writing can falter when it’s confronted with the dreary, rigorous chore of writing and refining the final product. For instance, my writing on AUM is unrehearsed and completely absent of formal outline or structure. I generally set out to write a post with an idea in mind. Sometimes the idea is more detailed than others, but I always have, at the very least, a vague notion of what I will write about. If the idea strikes me in the morning, it brews in my skull all day while I’m pushing the paper at work. During which time my mind is also free to generate new, peripheral ideas or concepts which slowly accumulate throughout the day like bad breath. Often, by the time I get home, the post is generally pretty spelled out in my mind by the time I start tapping the keys. In such cases, it’s a matter of giving life to the ideas and reforming them in blocks of prose. I know the subject of what I’m writing and the only unknown is how it’s expression will be verbally formulated.
And there are times the idea rattling in my head is distantly vague. It’s not until I begin typing that the idea assumes the form of the words I type; in fact, the act of setting down words acts as a perpetuating device which gives rise to new ideas, many of them offshoots of the original one. Essentially, the act of writing acts to induce creativity.
As you can see, the common denominator in both cases is my sense of disorganization and spontaneity. I don’t rely on structure, I don’t outline my thoughts, I don’t strategize posts. For me, the act of writing takes place when my fingers furiously tap out keystrokes. Once again, it returns to my style and subject matter, which is invariably a subjective stream of observations lacking semblance of structure or forethought. Very few of my posts abide by any sort of attributional structure. It’s not often I cite facts or case studies because most of my posts are merely observational or personal interpretations. In this respect, my writing is less methodical than a person whose blog is centered around figures, statistics, or peer-related factoids.
My point is that I’ve allowed my writing style and writing habits to create a unification of expression in my posts; I’ve stumbled upon an accidental synchronicity. If I were to suddenly embark on a series of factual posts which rely on gritty scientific and objectively based interpretations, with references to match, I could not continue to practice the same writing habits I do now. The disjunction would spell certain failure.
A blogger must be aware of the limits of his writing style. This is why I believe “how do you write?” is a very important consideration which fledgling bloggers must be prepared to confront. And if your style does not match the mechanics you choose for your creative expression, you need to adjust one or the other.
Well, it’s Friday night and I decided to stay home.
Of course, this is no different.
No different than the other, what, 50 or so Fridays each year. I’m always home on Friday night.
Therein lies my trickery of human expression and suggestibility. Curious, isn’t it?
For I made a simple and neutral statement: “It’s Friday, I decided to stay home.”
The sentence has no overt intention other than to declare an indisputable fact. I decided to stay home this fine Friday evening.
Ah, keeping in mind the sentient party-animals that we are thus born and raised, we likewise tend to atribute and endow observations and statements with surreptitious symbolisms and inferred meanings. We fill in the blanks.
My statement, “it’s Friday, I decided to stay home” is suddenly inflated and hoisted above our metaphysical shoulders and the assumption is that I chose to stay home tonight as opposed to going out; I chose to stay here. The inference is plainly obvious, for it’s a common perception (and even a desire) that a single man, will not, under normal circumstances, choose to stay home on a Friday night. It’s the penultimate expression of “life” or whatever the hell is in keeping with the sacrament of single-living Friday night splendor. And my statement, while superficially innocuous, is subtly distorted into a mirrored counter-assumption that by choosing to stay in, I am in fact departing from a routine (which is left unsaid) in which I go out on Fridays. Even though that is not the case!
“It’s Friday, I decided to stay home.”
The missing piece of the puzzle, the mysterious piece that you don’t consider until it’s spelled out for you because you are so enshrouded in the all-consuming mentality that Friday night obligates one, within the context of normal human social drives, to exit the house in search of booze and women, or barring that degree of wildness, at least a movie and popcorn, maybe dinner….the missing piece that I left out is:
“As I always choose to do on Friday nights.”
Ya see!?
This broadens the concept and lets sneak in the unanticipated revelation that I have no life.
My simple statement, worded so ambiguously that it captivated and deluded normal perception and interpretation, really was just the tip of the iceberg that is my stunted social life. The iceberg which lurks coldly beneath the water’s calm surface.
So I decided to stay in tonight after going out to eat dinner, that is. I went to a popular area Mexican restaurant (of course, there is not much else in my neck of the woods). In this part of L.A., you either got Mexican or you got Chinese. There is a smattering of other foods, but your choice essentially will be sandwiched between the wildly divergent selections of eggrolls or taquitos.
So I ate my dinner alone at a small table in the bar of a crowded Mexican restaurant. If you choose to eat alone, especially on a Friday night, you better have a courageous ego or you risk awkward self-consciousness. I know a couple of people who refuse to do anything alone. They will not eat out alone, will not see a movie alone. I can’t relate. Not when I choose to do as much as possible while alone. I can’t comprehend this urge to surround oneself with people at all times (or rather, I can’t understand the abhorrence certain people have of the state of aloneness). So I sat at the table and observed, because that is what I am…The Observer. I study human nature and I feel most placid when I am able to witness the madness of human interaction from a displaced distance, close enough to engage the aura but far enough to avoid its capture. While sitting in a restaurant with the after-work coed bustle of dinner happenings buzzing along, you note one thing: people talk a lot. Talk and talk and talk and talk. Talk with no end. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to listen, much less participate. Many times after I leave work, my lips and jaws are drained from the day’s verbal demands and I literally can’t bring myself to open my lips to utter more than a few lazy utterances in the evening. Picking up the phone can be excruciating.
The option is to get rid of it.
Hmmm, that’s an enticing thought.
Actually, the idea of throwing my cell phone down the sewer drain is both exciting and frightening. The possibility is invigorating but intimidating. We’ve become attached to our cellphones, even if we don’t use them. We have become attached to them in the way we are attached to an appendage, a body part that is retained merely for the sake of false biological impetus, like an appendix. I’m speaking for myself, of course. I realize there are many whose lives revolve around the phone…mine doesn’t. I might find it pleasing to live a phoneless life. I’ve forgotten my phone at home a few times and there is something ascetically appealing in the empty-pocketed sensation of phonelessness and the promise of day long silence, and the knowledge that there is no possibility this quiet flow will be interrupted by the persistent invocation of my cell phone. Not to mention, that’s an extra 40 or 50 dollars each month I’d be saving. It’s tempting but there is always the “emergency” unknown. This world we live in…the promise of life or death, skirting the edge of disaster, gravitates around us all day long. Our phones have become a lifeline. I find it peculiar that our mentality has shifted thus far toward the acceptance of cell phones as savior, as rescuer and security blanket. Much of my life overlapped those recent eras in which we happily existed in the absence of the cell phone teat…if you needed to make a call or thought there was a chance you might, you carried extra change because pay phones were plentiful, however disgustingly sticky and slimy they may have been. Without the cell phone, life is less sure, less controlled, more vast. Unexpected nooks and crannies await in the unseen darkness of existence.
It’s tempting.
Much of my life has been an ongoing, tumultuous battle in which I’ve sought to exorcise my inner nerd.
Battling valiantly to prove and boldly display my un-nerdiness, to flaunt my amazing coolness in the hopes its mammoth nature would overshadow the slightest iota or trace of nerdiness in my soul.
I did all I could.
I raped, I pillaged, I fought, I conquered, I smoked, I drank, I scratched my balls in front of strangers. All with the ostensible aim to convince the global anti-nerd community that I, in fact, was anything but a nerd.
But sometimes, as they say, it is what the hell it is.
You are a nerd. Deal.
It is not the worst fate.
And if you can accept a life of mutually shared disgust with the cool crowd you once thought you were a part of, if you can accept a life of mentally imprisoned isolation as you whittle away the hours indulging in whatever little pathetic mind or dexterity exercise you happen to be fond of, then you are home free.
I fought it. I somehow deluded myself into believing that I was cool and hip. When I actually cared about being hip and being cool.
Well. I don’t care now. I can’t begin to convey the sense of liberation I experienced as I slowly shed the “cool” affectation and finally accepted that which I was, and in fact, learned to embrace it while discovering a sense of strength and power in this new essence. Power and pride, that’s right.
Nerd Pride. Nerd Power.
Whatever, I’m a big fucking nerd, always have been.
I’m a brown nerd. I’m a big time Mexi-nerd, ese vato.
That’s right you bastards, nerds come in brown too and sometimes they have crappy looking facial whiskers and broad-ass mestizo features.
Aztlan Nerd.
Ha, what a tremendously messed up blog name that would be. But oh so perfunctorily cool in its own self-loathing way.
So my nerdiness…it has suffused my very soul since I was a young child.
I was plagued by that typical nerdy aloofness, that nerdy sense of intellectual impropriety. That Goddamn brainy brawn which cannot be contained, the kind of cranial overload that will eventually trip your mental wires and escape out your mouth in a wave of awkward and clueless blathering which no one in the world (of normal or lesser intelligence) can possibly identify with.
Nerdiness is bandied about and there are so many on-the-fly definitions, I don’t know what the hell a nerd is anymore. Seems there are distinctions to be made. You have the nerd, the geek, the dork, the dweeb. But the nerd is the prototypical classification and standard model, in my mind, of the socially inept miscreant who is nevertheless endowed with a tremendous intellect which alienates him from most people. The nerd’s predicament is the grand circular chicken or egg quandary.
Is the nerd’s intellect the basis of his social dysfunction?
Or is the social dysfunction a precursor to his keen mind which he was forced to sharpen in the absence of a redeeming social life?
You know something. Does it matter?
A nerd is a stain upon mankind and sadly I’ve come to realize I am part of that stain, that big brown shit-colored stain.
I’m the 7-year-old kid who, sitting in a room with a bunch of cool teenagers, suddenly piped in, when the conversation steered me onto this imbecilic course, that “bees and wasps are frequently attracted to bright yellow colors” and sat smugly as the room fell silent for wont of anything befitting a response, cool or not. The teenaged conversation continued as if this minor transgression on the little kid’s part was nothing but a disturbing gnat on the surface of the big ass of coolness they were molding. That’s me, the nerd, sticking my foot in it at ever opportunity. Always piping in my awful 2 cents, wanting to be heard; which for the most part is pretty anonymously harmless, that is, until the age of bloggery. Now my nerdiness has the opportunity to be displayed in all its blubbering and conspicuous glory to the global audience. Well, you know, theoretically.
But what I wanted to talk about, briefly, was the concept of nerd humor.
This is what drove the point home. Nerd humor is why I know I’m a nerd. It seems I share the same jolly, humorously disengaged frivolity that other nerds amuse at when an object of mutually approved comic nature arises.
There is a nerdish sense of humor I’ve learned that only nerds can appreciate. You’ll frequently spot a group of 2 or more nerds laughing self-consciously and too loudly at a joke they just traded which tickles only their fancy. Not yours, not anyone else’s. Nerds have those really atrocious laughs, as well; it sounds like a breathless but vocally bloated unsocialized yelp which cuts like a goat’s bleat.
Nerd humor is…special.
It is a different brand of humor and I frequently find myself laughing alone with the only other nerd in the room.
Nerd humor is quite unlike the emotionally and socially elevated humor most find entertaining. Common humor is born of cultural dissonances which permeate society. This common sort of humor derives its comic quality from the commonly perceived interactions which the majority of people can relate to and experience first hand and which speak directly to inner flashes of recognition on the part of the listener. For that is humor…recognition. The discovery that the joke speaks of a historical exchange within the social history which has taken place within the murky pool of one’s mind. This humor may be linear and reside at a relatively superficial layer in the stratification of comprehension required to “get” it. Most popular comedians indulge in this obvious humor, and in some cases, the extreme superficiality only signifies that the comic’s jokes are but lazy trite jabs at that which the audience can recognize in the sleepy and dusky mental fogginess of its pop culture indoctrination. .
Nerd humor is twisted; not in the common sense of the word, but “twisted” as in unemotionally stringent manner which is only lightened by a self-contained sense of flippancy. Nerd humor is frequently centered around material objects and mechanical concepts which elude humanistic nuance. Nerd humor presupposes a grand sense of holistic understanding of the joke’s esoteric context before the punch line is delivered, a context which only a nerdish-minded person can find the least bit amusing. Or worthy of note. See, this is where nerd humor crumbles for most people…the presupposition which fuels the joke requires intensive innate awareness and ingenuity which will bore most people who will view it as pointless or stupid. Thus unequipped, they lack the desire to build the foundation upon which the joke must rest. So if you have difficulty arousing even amusement from the pre-punch line situational hypothesis, the nerd joke will fall flat.
When George Lopez jokes about the popularized ostensible traits of a Mexican family, it is rather easy for the listener to manufacture the commonly perceived racial reality they have acquired through the medium of pop culture in order to make the joke work. Little mental effort is expended as the jokes have minimal layers of obtuseness between the presupposition and the punch line.
When Mitch Hedberg, one of my favorite “nerd-oriented” comics, talks about Bigfoot being blurry (really being blurry) as the reason for all the blurrry photos, the presupposition requires extra mental gymnastics many aren’t prepared to engage in. Nerd humor essentially assumes that you have already absorbed the underlying sense of irony ingrained in our existence and that the jokes will require little work on your part in order to arrive at the presupposed irony.
If it was possible to split-frame a specific portion of my life, of my day, I think the most curious contrast would be the one of days like today in which you intertwine my morning saunter as I head to work next to the conjoined scene of my departure from work later the same day. The morning frames portray my robust enthusiasm as I spring to work, an offensive virility bristling in my stride. Each movement issuing from my morning essence would be optimistic and freshly enthusiastic. In the adjoining scene, the evening frame would show me trudging up the evening stairs to my parked car. Slow, devoid of spark, tapered, neutered, a fizzling ember. Is this the same person?
Such was today.
I had an excellent Day 3 work out in the morning, and on the heels of a good night’s sleep I was set to defy natural physical laws and levitate to work. Which might have been preferable to the drive but the FAA bureaucracy denied me. I literally bounded out the apartment and drove to work ablaze with a demented fiery optimism. When I arrive at work in such a mood, I’m possessed of an incessant loop of witticisms and obnoxious spontaneity (in fact, I’m positive I’m pretty damned intolerable at such times) and there is no corporate prison factory in existence that can subdue me in that state abandon.
The day passes. Life passes. Happens and passes.
People pass through my daily stage. Events fly by, pained expressions, shitty timing, off-putting behaviors…
The day marches by lazily and leaves a putrid bloody trail in its wake.
You trudge up the concrete stairs and the despondent weight of the fleeting evening sits heavy on your shoulders. Burdens the soul. You scale the last flight, walk to your car, realize it hasn’t been cleaned in months. And you know what? You don’t care. You start the car and drive away, another day. You mind is awash in secluded thoughts and pensive ironies and you wonder how.
How can it be?
How can this morning’s raging fire have been extinguished so abruptly and thoroughly that now you are but a cold ashen figment of obligatory reality, winding serpentine-like through the cogs of the daily clock and how you wonder.
Along the way, on the tireless urban road, a mind thinks and it ponders. It cultivates inner deliberation.
Words, phrases hammer in the silence of the mute car.
Dispirited
A most depressing word and pseudonym for the demon of spiritual death.
To be dispirited is to lose the Self. To lose the vibrancy of a yearning heart after it is trampled to death by the errant chores and vicissitudes of a normal day.
Aspirations and confidence rendered barren and obsolete.
You can be dispirited over a period of life, week, day. An hour. In youth we are optimistic and hopeful; in old age, cynical and crushed by the bleak condemnations of a life discarded.
In the car, I thought.
I am. Dispirited.
I feel as if I’ve left the scintillating and golden cast of my former self in the furnace of my faltering sense of glory. This morning, yesterday, 20 years ago, persistently the sense of lost glory. The sour taste of spiritual abandonment and seclusion.
Dispirited. Which gripped me this evening. I lost something. Something was taken from me. The most personally endearing item, a prized possession: trust. For one’s dispirit can only be wrought at the hands of other people, of events, of groups, of social structures, of common attitudes. Tragic is the fate of the hopeful enthusiast. Dispiriting is the nature of man who must contend with hordes of his fellow man. The natural human inclination is to dispirit and sap the outstanding and noteworthy optimism from the hopeful like a leech. Cherish your dreams for they will not be long if you must do battle with the dreamless. Hopelessness is like a heavy magnet which draws ethereal hope into the deep abyss; there can be no hope if you insist on a smile. Like a sunbathed mountain peak, a smile is a challenge to be conquered.
The day will dispirit; life will dispirit and damper the rigors of your fiery enthusiasm.
In the car, dispirited.
Not quite as I was in the morning.
Spirit relinquished the stage to bland inconsequential purgatory.
Oppressive cloud of humanity
It’s every way. Here, there, every which damn way. Driving in silence, thinking of a dispirited being, driving the crowded and thick streets oozing of people and flesh and hair and draping clothes. Streets, littered with carcasses. People cross, back and forth. In front of your car. They’re the same people, aren’t they? These people who cross in one direction, don’t they cross in front of your car again, a mile up, in the other direction? Do you ever really shake off these people. Do they not go away?
Where do they come from, why do they cross the streets so slowly and cloaked in mismatched patterns and materials; their peculiar off-key faces and deranged features; even the most innocent of them are consumed with oddities and the fire of secret carnal desires.
A jungle, a zoo, people overfill. Clothes, so many clothes and outfits and hairstyles and body types and it’s an affront to your sight for we were not intended to see this many people. Nature did not see to it thus…
We did not conquer the planet by wielding the tools of our intelligence and technology to rule over this quagmire of disrupted humanity and its rampant common disfigurement. Did we? The human animal is disfigured! This is only apparent to those eyes which witness the infinite repetitious legions of humanity float across its sight. The hideousness, the commonness, the awkward and deranged and repulsive, the street is awash. Man, woman and child, an offensive primal offshoot from evolutionary remains, skin deeply mired in murky human fleshy and brilliant oils, asymmetrical and bulbous faces, clothes equally harmful to behold.
Homeward bound!
The dispirited soul will not take.
The oppressive mass will not leave.
To yearn for the self, pure, complete, apart, devoid; rescued and cleansed from the spiritual agony of this world’s perfidious (and melodious) demands.
The mass of humanity squeezes inwards, presses upon your spirit.
You try to push your way out.
But it continues to squeeze, suffocating, sapping your life of spirit, of light; you push but it pushes back tenfold. The harder you push to escape, the more furious it pushes in return. You soon realize that only by not pushing can “relief” be realized. You don’t push. And suddenly silent, like the soundlessness of a power outage, the mass stops counteracting, mimicking your non-resistance. Now you’ve reached an uncomfortable equilibrium in which your range of movement is the width of your skin.
You don’t push.
And you must be happy.
The damned telephone.
It’s handed me nothing but misery, tragedy and inopportune bits of devastation throughout my life.
In ancient eras the phone was but a cacophonous bell-ringing head-rattling monstrosity motored by the purringness of the clickety-click-click of the rotary dial. You couldn’t dial a phone number any quicker than the stupid round dialer was capable of spinning. Purrclickety-purrclick-purrclick…
See, there were limits then. Unlike now…phones are unbridled high-tech masturbatory mega-toys and they’ll happily dial even to your voice’s commands now. Hands free, phone numbers directed with the flow of silent digital airborne instructions.
As I was stating, the telephone is bad news.
It started in 1973 one afternoon when our kitchen telephone rang. The phone was a permanent immutable household fixture affixed to the wall and tethered by the curly-wurly plastic spiral cord. The telephone’s “ring” was really a ring. It was a loud, fire-station decibel RING, damnit. That shit could knock the crust out of your ears. Phones knew how to ring and there was nowhere in the house you could flee its invasive audible cries. Nowhere. That tolling bell, it was either waking the dead or busting down the door, exposing your prone figure while you cowered in the corner seeking to escape its wrath. But there was no escaping that brassy alarm!
In 1973, the kitchen phone rang.
Loudly.
Which makes it even more disquieting…
My mother answered and since I was very young, my memory is hazy. After holding the phone to her ear for a few seconds, she burst into uncontrollable sobs of grief. Very bad news, the worst news. Two of my young cousins, 9 and 10, right around my age, were sleeping in the cab of a big rig my uncle was driving back east during the summer, and along a road in Indiana the axle broke and the truck jackknifed on a bridge and caught fire. The fire quickly engulfed the big rig and my cousins burned to death, trapped in the cab. My uncle was disfigured for life by the flames.
That was the call; that was what the bellicose ringing needed to tell us.
The tone was set for all time.
Evil phones. If it wasn’t the loud bells and agonizing rotary bullshit, it was the subdued peaceful ringing of later models and the soothing (and swifter) push-button replacement of the rotary dial. The buttons gridded on a keypad in which each button, or number, was accompanied, when pressed, by a musical note that tonally chirped back in your ear. The “1″ sounded completely different from the “3″ which in turn, sounded different than the “8.” The musically adept (to be very generous and kind) had the capability to string together a series of button-pushes in order to create a simple melody; actually, a really awful sounding MIDI-quality concert. Nevertheless, bad news still flourished at the hands of the new generation of phones. Death. Destruction. Illness. Pain. The phone excelled at shrieking misery in our ears.
In time, the telephone’s ringing began to elicit a Pavlovian response from me. Whenever it rang at odd hours or unexpectedly, my first instinct was to reach for a tissue box or dash to the closet in order to dig out a clean black suit. The phone’s ringing was our official Grim Reaper anthem.
Cell phones and their technological serenity and indifference didn’t change the landscape.
Still, the misery visited, courtesy of radio waves.
Still, the death and the despair.
The gift of misery. Carried on the wings of electromagnetic transmissions and alerted within the customizable and individualistic (but really not) chime of an electronically generated custom ring.
I wasn’t a kid anymore. Now the telephone was the scene of arguments, disagreements, bad tidings. I broke up via the telephone a few times. I even had a DMV hearing via cell phone wizardry in which I pleaded to keep my driver’s license and still, to no avail, the phone failed me. And of course, the phone, still the standard bearer of death and misery. Some things never changed.
Bad fucking news.
The telephone is an artery of grievous horrors.
The telephone has always stood waiting, patiently, ready to bellow its harsh sentence at me. Sadistically, it savors the ability to rouse me from the slumber of complacent and happy existence; to smash my hopes with a sledgehammered dose of bad news.
And still, anxiously awaiting its clarion call.
Why, a solution to what, you ask?
Why just peer back in time, like about 24 hours, and read about the sociological dilemma of our times as I see it.
Done, good.
So, the problem I’ve fashioned….
Let me start further back.
There is no problem, really. Hence, the solution is not really a solution for can there be a solution in the absence of a problem?
I think not. Sounds a bit like the old “if a tree falls in the forest” quandary,
The scenario I postulated yesterday is merely that…a scenario.
It’s only a problem for those who stand to lose the most: men. Even though most of them don’t know it. I say it’s not a problem because frankly the world will continue to function and evolve wonderfully as it has for the previous few thousand years. The only difference being the interjection of new, strange values which contradict and besmirch the traditional values of male-dominated generations of yore. Who knows, maybe in a hundred years the dominance of feminine values in our world will be complete and “primitive” masculine values will be relegated to the dustbin of historical shame.
We are not looking to save the world by foreshadowing this possibility. We are looking to save the masculine legacy of our species. The problem is that we cannot count on all males to care when they are too concerned about booking little Johnny’s appointment at Little Kuts or panicking about the slow descent of his home’s value toward the icky world of Upsidedownland. Yeah right, the normal guy in such a situation is really going to care a lot about society’s renunciation of his gender’s farcical primitive role.
So in this respect, I don’t feel I’m proposing a solution nor anything resembling such.
I witness, on a daily basis, the emergence of an insidious womanization which has begun infiltrating the inner mechanism of society. I watch as men are ridiculed and shamed and exposed as dumb asses. I can’t blame Hollywood or Wall Street. I find it very, very difficult to believe that the dollar creates anything. The dollar merely follows. The dollar emulates the pulse of society and reflects it right back at us in a crazed, self-replicating mirror.
First of all, men must stop blaming. They must stop haranguing the women and gays and liberals. It’s time to right the ship and adapt.
Women have adapted excellently to the world man created.
Women took what they were handed and created a fluid, slippery culture that is modeled on their nuanced perceptions and the maze of wiring that drives them. They have usurped the communication and the mode and morphed the world into something that resembles their mind.
Men?
We have relinquished control of the car. We’ve jumped into the passenger seat and made a fuss about it while the windows were closed.
Man will never be “man” again. Man will never conquer his environment through physical prowess or muscular might. Man’s stoicism and linear expressiveness will no longer grease the loins of culture, now modern and dense. The new landscape is no longer covered and disrupted with canyons, ravines, lions or fatal gorges; the new landscape is no longer riddled with the microscopic obstacle course of microbes or the unsanitary food-handling which allowed them to proliferate. The new cultural landscape requires different tools and bringing the old “John Wayne” mentality to the modern world is akin to bringing a gun to the knife fight (albeit, to complete the accurate comparison, bringing a gun with no bullets).
The new landscape is self-contained in the circuitry of our technological age, in the disguised and subtle gradations of human behavior and manipulation. The new landscape is not inherently female or male, however, by virtue of its design, it is most efficiently and forcefully steered by the hands which display female social and perceptive skills; a world view which derives strength from social cues and meta-awareness; from finely-tuned perception and the recognition of subtle power plays and social maneuvering. Whereas we once needed a man’s hands to open a swath of space through which we could navigate the dense forest and its deadly fauna, we now require the socially intelligent skills required to manipulate the social jungle and its complex and entangling fauna. Perception and intuition are the auspicious skills of the day.
Once upon a time, brute physical force sustained control of our environment. Now, brute cognitive force performs the function. By “cognitive” I refer to those elements issuing from our mind: emotional, intellectual, social. A combination of these items mixed together in a powerful stew ready to face combat in society’s new battlefield.
The solution is not a solution.
The solution is a way, it is an alignment. A refocus.
It is possible for man to reassert his finer traits in this realm. It is possible for John Wayne to rise within the new paradigm and inject his hard-edged reality. Man is capable but first he must question that which is notoriously assumed to be his weakness. That which it is assumed he lacks. For instance, intuition. It is vitally important for a man to recognize and utilize this hidden ability. Intuition is not the sole provenance of the female, despite our archaic understanding of the concept. Intuition is the absorption of one’s environmental perceptions and fashioning a cohesive understanding from their mixture. Intuition is the ability to integrate these perceptions into a unified whole which can help predict how various elements will evolve and interact in the future. Man, using his primal instincts, his evolutionary hunting background, is equipped with the skills of patient and perceptive observance. Now it’s time for him to recognize these and put them to use.
Man must throw off his chains of helplessness. He must steady his psyche and fine tune his perceptions and ignore the peripheral cultural distractions clouding his brain.
To begin anew.
With himself, and most importantly, with his sons.
Man needs to be serious again. He must eschew the petty contrivances of feminine culture. It’s time for him to reclaim his soul from the voracious jaws of the plastic world that has captured his gaze. He must become a hunter again.
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