SelfAdoration.com

It’s Veterans Day as I write this, a holiday so important to the Ruling Class that they didn’t turn it into a three-day weekend. Fear you nothing, though: This will not prevent the federal government and the banks (but I repeat myself) from taking the day off anyway.

It’s vitally important to celebrate the sacrifices of the brave men who served our country, which celebration will entail having nothing to do with any of them. It’s vitally important to have a cargo-cult holiday once a month or so, and those nettlesome vets ought to be glad they haven’t been entirely eclipsed by Thanksgiving.

And thank goodness Columbus Day is there to soak up all the excess autumnal outrage, or else someone might notice that military veterans – especially the ones who died in battle – are overwhelmingly male. We can celebrate the upside of war – begrudgingly, with department store sales and family get-togethers – but we cannot openly rejoice in the fruits of masculine virtue.

That would be just, of course, but justice toward men is… Old-fashioned? Uncultured? How about sinful…?

For it is a sin in our culture to notice and praise the virtues of ordinary men. We have plenty of attention for the extreme outliers, for the best and the worst at everything. But for the just-plain-regular stand-up guy who gets up every day and goes off to do a shitty job for minor ducats, often risking life and limb in the process, we can’t even spare a yawn.

And yet that man is the backbone of Western Civilization, the get-it-done guy who actually gets things done. He produces five-times his own living costs in income, passing all of that along to his wife and kids and grandkids – assuming he is not robbed of his family. He takes all of the risks imposed upon us by perilous reality, incurring all of the resultant injuries. He defends us in wartime, and for this he is scorned and neglected in peacetime. And unless he is lucky enough to (more…)

Why does Sisyphus keep pushing that rock up the hill? Because he’s doomed – or he believes he is – that’s why.

What happens when he realizes he can quit whenever he wants?

As it turns out, he eats a bullet.

This was big news last week, for about a minute-and-a-half, but in fact it is news to no one. If you haven’t noticed that you’re losing too many white middle-aged male friends and relatives to suicide, it could be you’re clueless enough to be an academic.

Consider this, from the linked article:

For Vancouver psychologist Dan Bilsker, what’s striking is how little we really understand about why the numbers peak when men are in their 50s. “It doesn’t fit previous models of things driving suicidal behaviour.”

In those models, by their 50s, men should “be feeling more in control of their lives, have worked out a lot of issues, be coping pretty well,” he says. After all, most of them are working, they’ve had jobs, relationships, children, life experiences. So the high suicide rate “raises a more disturbing model.”

Say what?!

Do you want to hear something interesting about poor dead Sisyphus, lying there in a puddle of his own brains? He left us because, from his point of view, he had nothing left to live for. Pretending that he was the dad in Father Knows Best in order to pretend not to understand his despair is simply to visit still further cruelties on the dead.

Why would Sisyphus quit, once he realizes he can? Duh…

Work hard, settle down, get married, build a home and a family – then have it all ripped away, all at once, with everything you’ve worked for destroyed and with what should have been lifelong storgic relationships torn asunder, never to be fully repaired.

Trade that treasured home for a cramped rental as you try to get by on what’s left of your income, after (more…)

I’m a happy man. Everything I’ve been grailing for in narrative art for the past two years is coming together for me now:

Launching Sunday: The scientific art of getting lost, for dogs, a benevolently funny shaggy-dog story – written by a shaggy dog – for four-year-olds.

The theme? The ontology and teleology of leadership, loyalty and storgic love within the family.

Oh, yes! The world is my oyster. I can take a gruesome homework assignment like that and make you and your kids laugh at it over and over again.

You wanted an art to change the culture. I can show you how to make it.

Like this:

And now you know what matters most to Big-O. He’s a giant of a dog, a full-blood Bloodhound, russet red with a tiny patch of white on his breast. I’m a mutt, so I’m the runt in our pack, barely 60 pounds. The two Coon Hounds come in at around 80. But Odysseus is big even for a male Blood. He’s easily 110 pounds – before dinnertime. He’s big and game and goofy and naturally dominant, the uncontested leader of our little family – when our people aren’t around.

He went through the long, slow process of getting to his feet, engaging each muscle and bone separately. Don’t kid yourself; he can be up in a shot when he needs to be – like when someone drops a slice of ham in the kitchen. But normally he likes to express his regal indomitability by taking his time when there is time to be taken. Rank has its privileges.

He sauntered over to us, the question of the hour still burning in his big, droopy brown eyes: “Dinnertime?”

You’d think he wouldn’t have to ask, but Desi always knows to the minute when it’s time for us to be fed. Don’t ask me how; the girl matches patterns incessantly. But you don’t have to know time to the minute to know that the sun was too high in the sky (more…)

My dog Shyly, writing in The scientific art of getting lost, for dogs:

I didn’t know what the boy was getting out of our discussion. His arms were wrapped around me by now, and he was absorbing my boundless warmth. I’m not bragging. Our people call me Shyly D. Lightful, and I’m sure that’s because I capture almost all the light that hits me, reflecting almost none of it back. That’s why I’m so hard to see in pictures – but it’s also why I’m so easy to hug in person.

I’m not actually trying to sell stuffed animals. That just came for free, as a way of understanding Shylygirl. Ophelia will make Sociable hearts melt…

I have a kid’s book coming – maybe a few kid’s books. The comic premise: Self-help by dogs for dogs. The book I’m working on now will be called “The scientific art of getting lost, for dogs,” and it features four of the dogs I’ve loved best in my life, including Odysseus, whose enormous snout you see here.

It’s written to be a bedtime book, a chapter book that parents read to older kids – say four years old and up. It will be a workable chapter book for ambitious independent readers, too, but there is a second track of jokes for adults readers – who, after all, could get stuck reading it thirty-eleven times.

I need beta testers, as it were, adults to read a chunk of the book to kids to see how it’s working. You’re welcome to just read it yourself, and I’m interested in hearing about that experience, too. But I’m trying to make a strong connection with kids, so I’m eager to hear if I’m getting the job done.

I would love to hear from an illustrator, too, and if anyone knows anybody at Pixar…

Sneak a peek and let me know what you think.

I’ve been playing visibility games for a solid year now. A visibility game, for me, is an intense empathy game where I probe you deeply enough to unearth the image of you that you wish you could see being reflected back to you by the people you meet. Then I go ahead and reflect that image back to you. This is often delightful to people, but it is always surprising to them. Loki smiles either way.

It’s a game in the Game Theory sense, not so much in the “Hey! That was fun! Let’s do that again!” sense. I don’t do it with bad people, and I focus only on virtue even in good people. After all, what it is it I’m trying to cultivate? But it is a brutal kind of intimacy, even so, not alone because it’s so rare – for each one of us – actually to be seen by other people.

Just that much is funny to me: Everyone wants to be seen, seen, seen, but no one even dares to take the briefest peek at anyone else. I’m the opposite, both ways: I don’t care who can or can’t see me, as long as I can. And I never tire of trying to figure out everything.

Want proof? I’ve been playing visibility games with four dogs we love. All four are dead, except in our memories, but soon they’ll live on in your memories, too. I’m taking the philosophy we talk about here and recasting it as a children’s bed-time story – ostensibly as a chronicle written by, about and for dogs. For now, at least, the book is called The scientific art of getting lost, for dogs, and the authoress is one Shyly D. Lightful, seen barely-visibly in the photo above.

Here’s an extract, the Act I curtain as it were:

Odysseus walks slowly – for him. That’s good, because I still have to hustle to keep up with him. “You’re the leader,” I agreed. “But to what?”

To this he answered nothing. He’s not rude, just distractible. I am, too, for (more…)