13.0
Time’s refuted with a good imagination. My that mighty laugh of hers rang out when he appeared before her. It was as though our heroine had manifested him, as though the things she’d fobbed off unconcluded had reeled him out to where she was so she could gut and clean him. The shape that he’d be left in was as yet unknown. Our hero could not conceive that it could mean their whole relationship. She could conceive that this one’s dysfunction had its bobber in her prior bad relationship. If only she’d flaunted flagrant cheating, he’d not be in some college sports state like Nebraska trying to get off the hook himself. He was certain that she loved him, so she had to be confused. To her, he had killed their love by rejecting her proposal, that night she said she wanted to marry him, and he said, I am not getting married. She got upset. Vulnerability leaps quick to retribution. When he sensed this, he blurted, We’re too young! To him that was the end of that. He was right and now they had to move forward. He saw them wedded someday, after college, but not now. To her the person she was closest to had bashed her dream in, flopping, gasping. And done so callously. And it meant so little to him that he was impatient and bewildered why she was still upset. He could not conceive that the moment of trust he felt, when he was open enough to be honest with her, was the rod that pulled her from him, kept her unresponsive since. Not right away but within days she saw him differently. The more precise she weighed him, the more she saw the number wasn’t what her dream life had in mind.
She knew but did not understand first-hand that one cannot change another person. Groups, even institutions, yes. Individuals, good luck. But something in their love had made her disinclined to try. She couldn’t admit to herself that her friends’ successes, their big weddings and their new careers, had given her a pang. I’m the peacemaker, is the identity she’d adopted, and she had been, among her friends, which put her in charge of their alliances and breaks. She was good with people. But her gallery shows and selling pieces in the thousand$ was not the status-line impresser. Art was something in a textbook, and school was now behind them. A few friends who married or earned salaries that required long hours drifted from the clique, but the core four friends made a pact of fealty for life. They did a pretty good job of maintaining it as each started her own family.
Going forward our heroine would have no need to drive to see a man. She would, she would just not have a need to. The end of their entwined and soupy lives was her great entrance into the sorts of things that experiential pulchritude gets up to. With sufficient tries they figure out what others want from them — then they can rotate mendacity til it becomes incredible excitement. They go traipsing through the market, squeezing all the loaves, leaving future shoppers with squished bread. Of course it won’t concern them, these testers of the viability of produce. People’s eyes will move to what is flashing with bright color. Turning corners shows an aisle that wasn’t there before they gave themselves permission to be single for a day. Curiosity is natural. It seemed that very few had shopped this aisle before, with the shelves filled out to overflowing. Sliding down a chute are telegrams, all landing at their feet. They need only lift their arms to catch a stack of envelopes, each one addressed to them. In words and pictures they receive the choicest entertainment, as well as genuine connection with the lengths-goers of love. The letters smell like gourmet food. They are nutritious, have a complex divine taste. They the beauteous receivers can have a snack or stuff themselves. Relationships they’re in do not factor into messages and meals. This is one food that they need not defecate.
Others, the majority, the masses, the lumpen workers and their misfit cousins piloting their lives to self-destruct, lamented their birth after the Age of Exploration and before the Exploration of the Other Planets. They’d been born into the stasis times of what’s been done before. Their transportation overheated them; they could not make the ones in charge get rid of everything but bikes and rafts. Their instinct for pattern recognition made things bleak. They were all set to expire before the science-minded figured out how to merge into the fifth dimension so they could have sex with their past and future partners all at once.
Trouble is available to all, but there’s more of it available to an affluent some. There’s the trouble that lines up with wealth and those they wish to share it with, and believe it they’re not gonna share with everyone. They’re very sensitive about their kind (of trouble). It’s another way to feel exclusive, to be special, when they weren’t popped out book-smart or talented, only wealthy and in charge. We must help them as best we can to build their self-esteem. Only when they’re as special as can be can we make a more effective mess of everything we wish this mess to be. Operations will settle from chaotic to at times agreeable. This will define the sphere of acceptable behavior.
13.1
In prior times his monotony amused her when it was making her see double, in the throes of what had clasped them to each other, at least twice per day. He had not just a one-track mind, he had the template from which all other tracks were made. The single-mindedness of men takes on a proto-form — anyone can recognize it. Those fellas not absorbed by theirs are nevertheless able to switch their brains off and let their little brains take over. Everything is a pursuit. Reproduction gives them purpose. They themselves derived from competition. They are the ones who made it to the egg. They’re acting out a program. The other men they meet are spermatozoon. They are heaving to out-run them.
Markets are derivatives of drives. The engine of economics is not the choice of the consumer, the engine is the expression of their deepest drives. If this system did not express pursuit and purpose, another system that did so would be in its place. A system set up for the book-smart and talented would leave the the masses without purpose. They would then act on their drives individually, from their common limitations, to generate a purpose en masse. The system they generate by the weight of commonality would then change to favor such. All forms of policing — local badge holders, military chant steppers, Stasi-type divide and conquerors, religious code enforcers, yes of course, but also marketers of one widget not another, language lobbyists, and common gossip fencers — all enact their drives of pursuit and purpose. They slot right into one or more police forms that the system of common limitations made available to them. Everyone can see it’s rotten, but the system as it is gets preserved all the same. The system gets the preservation that the biosphere does not! Clean air, clean food, and water, and justice for the ones who ask for it, is the sensible necessity of all. But making sure the masses have this removes pursuit and purpose from the ones in charge. Their drives will not allow this. It isn’t greed or ego. Greed and ego are byproducts of the swimmer’s race, all racing for the egg.
People are susceptible to tides, and will be pulled within the sphere from one side to the next. Intrepid entropy will take a hacksaw to our bonds. It leads the way through jungles, marching way on up ahead. It delimits our path. On either side it’s thick and tangled. Machetes are issued only to the ones who become police forms. But they are not allowed to use them on the thicket, only on the other folks to keep them on the path marked clear by entropy.
All of this is with the goal of celebrating life. If someone has no choice but to live within police forms, then one must find a way to reproduce within repression, and to nurture the self.
Cooperation is a drive that got us here, but communism proved to be an evil. Now corporate totalitarians adopt its tactics for another aim, exclusive access to the wealth of nations. Universal basic income with Smithian regulated capital could work, could add the needed preservation to the habitat.
With this argument in mind, the people try again and fail better this time at making their society more optimal for all. It will be beyond remorseful if the generation of mai de soixante-huit cannot stop global warming, allows banking crimes and war crimes to go unpunishèd. Indeed all adults alive today will be judged and regarded with contempt for not laying down our lives for clean energy, for making the only planet that we have almost impossible to live on.
The good we have comes from the folks who agitate the system. In the US, just in this writer’s lifetime, tobacco isn’t common anymore. Acid rain has lessened. Healthcare is a little better, though it’s still worse than every other Western democracy’s. Cannabis is now accepted as the catnip that it is. Violent crime has decreased from the 1970s. Gays who cannot help how they were born have now more acceptance and can marry. Social justice, as religious and communistic as it can be, at least tries to make life more equal for all, in terms of agency.
13.2
Passion will inflame us. People are susceptible to inflections and cadence. The first homo erectus who didn’t haul ass from someone threatening was bludgeoned with a chipped-off hand axe. He did not reproduce. Now look around at the successes of the ancient past, on full view and making for a trying ride.
Developing a new way of restating that which inhibits the stakeholders is a way to turn their glands to our advantage. We prop o’gate through our intelligence but also by cooperation. Anything that encourages us to do so is harmonic resonance. Anything that sets us to compete draws on our lower instincts. But we must have both continue grappling to move the people toward their own preservation. This is not a set of circumstance that fosters wombiness. It can exacerbate the insecure and serve up aperitifs of disappointment. No wonder what can be held onto will spring easily to hoarding.
All that’s there is not seen yet. Factors will inhabit us for years. Some will incubate them their whole lives. Our pity’s for the sort who never know uncertainty. There is much experience that they will never have. Their lives cannot be said to be whole when there are books they have not read, shamanistic plants and fungi they’ve not taken. They adhere in captivity so as not to know the pain of too much decision. Today’s tongues must wait for the entreaties that tell them it’s okay to begin probing. Words that find a bullseye inadvertently receive push-back, as though someone using her mind must endlessly request permission.
There are paid police forms and then there is the policing of our feelings, which parents have to do, which everyone performs. In this way we inflict our inner state on others. The over-riding message of every country’s culture — Don’t. In much of the US, people are blatantly surprised if someone’s friendly out of doors (the friendly person’s probably from someplace else). The South can be most welcoming, but only on its terms. Implicit in their little kindnesses is the assumption the receiver will acquiesce to the smiling Southerner’s intent. A cup of coffee and a donut on a hungry morning comes with a demand to visit with the preferred group where they will be improved, as though they need improving. These givers have a way of seeing people as babies who need swaddling. Their mythology is leaking from their blinkered eyes. The stories that they dwell upon create their navigation through the world. It’s helpful on the surface and it’s disconcerting underneath. They are for the preservation of a culture, theirs. They activate their lower drives only in their clique. One is rule enforcement on each other. Members in good standing follow just the rules. They must be adept at memorizing as well as turning strictures into action, while staying clear of what’s taboo. They are rewarded when they bring in new members and when they ferret out a member who can’t keep the dogma straight. A foundation of these groups is the childish tattletale. The members learn to fear and mimic him.
The quickest way to side-step Southerners who help because they want something is to claim confusion. This also will antagonize them, but the intelligent must be above such pettiness. Variations of I don’t get it puts them on a reel that never reaches water. They are excited at the start — it seems they have a chance to demonstrate their knowledge. They expect the pattern they were taught to hold. They’re sure that their questions and assertions will generate replies that will put the listener within their grasp. But they will get frustrated at the challenging of their basic notions — what’s a god and why are things we can’t control a sin. But there’s little satisfaction in the checkmate of a noob. That would be one’s lower drives in operation.
Religious dialogues effect a strange transition. They can sense when one is self-debasing. This gives the interlocutors the feeling that they cherish above all, superiority. It can be another way to make them bugger off — let one desire within them reach fruition. They have frankly so few desires that ever do. Their use is far from effortless. But all the same they’re stale. They’ve come without a method that can keep pace with this time of exponential learning. They cannot even reconcile the woman!
Past competitors are cordial with each other. They had a diminished meeting of the minds.
13.3
Our heroine thought one way and our hero thought another. For a time they overlapped, what they were thinking. The hardest lesson is that everything is only for a time. The immediate response to this need not be nihilism. We can draw upon the good. It has a shadow that does not extend as far as nihilism. There are more steps in between before the shadow can stretch out all that way. While great conviction makes it rigid, it truth not much is as malleable as perception. We can aim it anywhere and it will generate a road. Then it’s easy to return to place. When people seem to change in a relationship, they are really just moving down a road that already was inside them, just their partner hadn’t seen it yet. They level, grade, and install roads together as they share in thought-discoveries. The places they arrive can repel them later, as such places are reminders of an absence they perhaps never wanted. Such roads may be futurely ignored but will never fall into total disrepair — unless all of memory does. Lots of folks break down on those roads on which they once had a companion. They get stuck there. Most people, thousands or more, will not stop and help (the ones who do are likely migrants). Those who stop will get a curt refusal to their aid. There can be no gay times when one’s broken down on roads. There can be some distractions. The point is reached for them that a distraction is the best that they can hope for. They have no direct hope to ever get it fixed. They collect the roadside scrap and make a shelter. There they live on cracked asphalt where almost no one goes. Whoever does approach on their own business will be judged. A flash of hope skitters through the vagabundo‘s mind — it could be their old partner’s coming down the road again. As the distant figure becomes clearer, they realize it’s not the one. But for one delicious moment it definitely was. They can dine on that upsurge of feeling for many weeks to come. Where once they were subservient, now they live by a blood oath to never serve again. This source of strength and power spreads to other facets of their lonely lives. They find it will not heed to limitation. Now it is their base response in every new encounter. Someone asks them about themselves — they see this as the flowering of gossip and a thieving of their time. They quickly move away, leaving subpar feeling in their wake. They’re asked for charity at certain times a year. An unattractive woman wants something they can’t give; an attractive one wants something they refuse to.
To match her new relationship status, our heroine had a single chuckle for dessert. She was full from consuming just one shelf of that special aisle that day. She had some sadness to let out. She sobbed a little in her mom’s embrace, having excused themselves upstairs, leaving her dad feeling left out. This was part of the bond between a mother and her distaff kid, and what the male could offer had no role in this. Her dad understood it had to be this way even as he didn’t get the bond itself. He thought it had to do with all the water they must carry in this world. There is a commandment that they give themselves that says they have to bear it all, hold everything together.
Those who are unable to cope, perhaps lacking parental care, become high-strung, effecting a strategy that ensures they won’t be asked to (cope). This is unreliability as self-preservation, chaos as a prophylactic. The cringiest expression of gross emotion is a rational choice! That does not mean that it can be reasoned with. Indeed it cannot. But it wouldn’t be there had not circumstance demanded its invoking.