SelfAdoration.com

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…)

One way of comprehending Marxism: The global reification of patricide.

Karl Marx’ father was a primo provider, but – “Daddy! Daddy wasn’t there!” – he was scornful and demanding, simultaneously dismissive and reproving of his, to him, disappointing son.

Just that much is Oedipus Rex Meets Mister Stick-it-Out – emotionally-needy baby is rebuffed by emotionally-witholding adult-baby. How common is that yarn? Ask any second-born son of a still-married-to-mom dad.

But what makes that story familiar to us is Marx himself. He was the first poor-little-rich-kid screw-up, casting the mold for his every ensuing scruffy, shuffling clone.

But the screw-up for whom Marx is the prototype is also the best vector of the virus of Marxism: Every smarmy loser who throws the stink-eye at his father is indulging the Marxian patricidal fantasy. Every angry-young-man is angry with his father first and worst.

The most bookish of these wannabe patricides become academic and activist Marxists, deploying the advantages that accrued to them by virtue of their intact-if-not-joyous families to destroy the family for every child.

For it is in this way that Marxism is most patricidal: The Marxist solution to everything is simply to do the opposite of what any self-responsible father would do. Accordingly, self-responsible fathers are the first and best defense against Marxism (and every form of criminal domination and subjugation) in a family. Hence fatherhood must be destroyed.

Marxists reproduce by taking over whole families, all at once, by obviating or eliminating the father – patricide de jure that works as well, for recruiting life-long converts, as patricide de facto. Better, really, since nothing scares up new cadres of very-angry-young-men like being robbed of a father.

If you’re looking for a good reason to buy my book, I can name that tune in two words: Barack Obama.

Not good enough? Here are two more: Karl Marx.

If one tough-as-nails German had done a better job with his kid, tens of millions of murders of innocents could have been avoided and the suffering of (more…)

The male brain is ‘programmed’ to prefer sex over food? No.

‘Science’ is at war with humanity? Oh, yes.

Exposing the Dancing Bear Fallacy with a classic dirty joke:

I wrote the complete algorithm* of moral philosophy over the weekend. That’s the good news. I have lots of bad news, including the terminal futility of Marxism even among ants.

Here’s some bad news with a good moral lesson: By enslaving harmless protozoa, morally-bankrupt pretend-capitalists illuminate (!) the moral bankruptcy of the Objectivist/Marxist argument for abortion: If usurping the life of a single-celled organism is self-destructive, the morality of deliberately murdering one’s own child cannot be a colorable matter for debate.

That is to say: Even stipulating the vile misidentification of an intrauterine Homo sapiens as “a clump of cells,” infanticide by abortion is nevertheless always morally reprehensible.

This week’s Church of Splendor homily explicates that algorithm of moral philosophy, but before we get to that, we take up one item of devastatingly worse news:

What if spree killings are the to-be-expected outcome of feminism? What if robbing our sons of their fathers while depriving them of every opportunity to learn how to come to be fathers themselves turns some (many?) of them into ticking time bombs?

This would seem to be an excellent time to learn how to understand all of human morality in a glance…

I bring you a church like no one ever has before, a church for making you and everyone you love and ultimately the whole world better. You should be doing everything you can think of to spread the good word far and wide. Here’s a way to start: Contribute your money to help me grow this thing. I want your family fed first, so don’t send anything you can’t spare; contribute new recruits instead. But these are the magic beans, Bunkie. It’s wrong of you to hoard them to yourself.

Marxist ants, enslaved protozoa, dictators, wars and rumors of wars – and under-fathered, over-medicated, involuntarily-celibate, universally-rejected young men – all counter-balanced by an algorithm by which any human being can attain the most and the best of his own Splendor. There ain’t never been a church like this:

*C hacks (more…)