What Could be Wrong With Me Part Thrice: White Knightin'

I debated whether to include this in this series at all. Largely because it overwhelmingly just effects my love life, not professional relationships, career choices, living arrangements, animal husbandry etc.

The other aspect, is that I've been well aware of this construct, how it applies to me, and how to manage it for over a decade now. I'm sure back there somewhere there's a post about it.

But, recently I've been pondering a question that means I could get something out of writing this up, then I think that already in this personal journey, the value of considering, as it were, interaction effects between the possible things wrong with me, can certainly help make salient how complicated shit is and that answers and solutions are not easily come by.

Think back to the disclaimers I wrote out (or alternatively, go back to) about how lay person or 'popular' psychology appears to be in this space right now where the modal person has two hammers and too much confidence, one being ADHD and the other being ASD. 

I've chosen to word these posts 'Could be' for twofold reasons, with the obvious being the subjects of each part may not prove to be something wrong with me at all, but there's also a bunch of things that are wrong with me but I don't have under consideration. For all I know ADHD and/or ASD could be in my personal mix somewhere, the reason I find them annoying is because what they may explain explains nothing I care about to the extent I don't even find them interesting, and I have entertained these run-of-the-mill suggestions not only in the past, but whenever they come up. eg. "Could autism explain why I get irritated by people who chew with their mouth open?" Fucking maybe, but in terms of shit that debilitates me it's just not even on the radar.

Reading your Unauthorized Biography

This construct is not any kind of official DSM-IV type pathology, it preexisted as a colloquialism much like a 'Peter Pan' complex for people who err towards pathological attempts to affect a youthful experience. Though to my knowledge, there's no well known literary 'White Knight' the trope or meme referred to. I know in old US TV shows like the Lone Ranger, due to shitty reception and resolution and black and white pictures, storytelling was visually aided by having the good cowboys wear white hats and bad cowboys wear black hats so the action could be followed in the wide shots.

And it's been a long time since I read any version of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot, maybe somewhere in there a particularly chivalrous and heroic knight wears all white at some point and bests Lancelot in a tourney. 

Regardless, I already understood "White Knight" to be widely understood to mean a rescuer. Typically boys who wound up in relationships with emotionally unstable girls and tried to rescue them, via a relationship.

By the time I was entertaining, in response to a pattern that had been emerging, whether I might have a compulsion to date hot-messes (more on this terminology later) I just plugged it into google hoping for a wikipedia entry and finding instead a book: The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others by Mary C. Lamia & Marilyn J. Krieger.

Books written by clinical psychologists typically feature case studies that are 'constructs' taken from several patient histories and given a pseudonym to keep it all confidential.

When I picked up a hardcopy of this 2009 book in a store and opened it to a random page, I found a case study in the chapter "White Knight's in Training" about a construct named 'Ron' who's mother had confided in him her fears and anxieties as a child, seeking an empathic listener to self sooth her own stress. 

This happened to me throughout my adolesence, my mum kept me up to date on the challenges my dad faced at work, the bullying she was experiencing from her vice principle and all the outcomes she was stressed and worried about. 

We have to presume, that this activity made her feel better, saying it aloud maybe arrested her rumination for a while and allowed her to get on with her day. Her behaviour was as instinctive as mine.

I, for example, assumed my mum was telling me all this shit for some reason, she needed my help, wanted to pick my brain, was looking to me for solutions, I was likely, simply a captive audience. 

Below the level of my conscious awareness, coming to someone with problems they can do nothing about creates a profound sense of impotency and frustration. Not erectile dysfunction impotency, but the impotency of the sports fan watching their team lose in the clutch on TV. You care and yet can do nothing.

I sell myself short. I have an innate talent at not getting bullied, though not a violent person, or a particularly powerful person, not of intimidating physical stature and so forth, I have no memories to draw on of when anyone who tried to fuck with me. I have only ever been fucked around by people, and probably even as a youth, I would have been full of good advice, and even been in a position to correct bad advice as regards being bullied.

Anyway, similar to how I had a meta-analysis of research into adult children that go no contact, like most adult children I am more than willing to forgive behaviour for the past. It wasn't malice, it was incompetence driven by someone's own story. 

Furthermore, even though the behaviour persists, I am a) an adult not a child now, and b) capable of setting boundaries. 

So let's talk about the book and how it helped me: Though my story resembles strongly the construct of the "overly empathic" White Knight, reading and rereading the book, the White Knight Subtypes: Overly Empathic, Tarnished, Terrorized/Terrified and Balanced Rescuer.

I mean I'm kind of already bored. The subtypes map kind-of onto attachment styles, anxious-preoccupied (lay term "needy"), dismissive-avoidant, anxious-avoidant, and secure.

I don't think the book from memory quite spells it out for you, but with attachment styles, generally it's arranged in a 2x2 grid with postive-negative thoughts about self-other. So for example, if you have positive thoughts about your partner and negative thoughts about yourself you get anxious-preoccupied, I'm going to guess negative-negative produces anxious avoidant, and positive-positive gives you secure attachment.

Secure attachment translates to "Balanced rescuer" subtype, where you can support your partner through difficult times without losing yourself nor becoming overly identified with this White Knight role, such that when it's time to take off the armour, it's no big deal.

The other thing to note, is that while "balanced rescuer" sounds temporary, it's more that you play heroics if and only when it is called for, but there's also just a temporary or transitional white knight experience, and that is where your environment has you play one of these dysfunctional rescuer roles, but change the environment and it is not an issue.

That was my main takeaway from the book and processing my unconscious behaviour with it to understand my own history. Generally I have positive self-regard, and positive regard for my partners, I lack the fear of being alone to actually be with anyone I don't regard positively. (Indeed, I have only recently been contemplating whether the times in my life I have told someone that I would rather be alone than with them, either directly or indirectly [eg. rejecting/breaking up without excusing myself via an attraction to someone else or being observed happily single] was something damaging given societal norms where men are often asked to accept this kind of rejection, but women aren't.)

But I can transition through these negative subtypes, particularly the overempathic/tarnished. There was little about the terrified/terrorizing subtype that I could relate to, and frankly it is what I would be afraid of.

The main difficulty, is that I don't easily recognize what I am attracted to in a person. It is where I seek the familiar on the basis of emotions motivating me, not conscious thought.

I came to think of it in terms of two Tarot Major Arcana - Strength, representing one of the four Christian virtues, and The Moon, that speaks to me about undiluted anxiety, but Tarot's arcana are very very Christian in theme, and not even mystical, but like book of revelations shit.

Basically, I very often mistake behaviours that are adaptive for anxious women, as strength.

It's pretty much the same logic as Homer's "A man with lots of ivory is less likely to harm Stampy than a man whose ivory supply is relatively low."

One of the most charismatic women I ever met, took me a very very long time to come to appreciate the charisma was riding atop a lot of anxiety. Anxiety I can offer little to remedy, and didn't.

The second time I came across this correlation, I had a panic attack, and cut off all contact and sought advice. In that situation, I had much to remedy my own anxiety.

The third time, well, I set boundaries. I remained calm. Had a very turbulent relationship, and with some irony, whereas my efforts to "rescue" in the past, based on a delusion of the curative properties of my love, produced resentment; in one of those bitter twists of irony, my refusal to play the role of white knight, particularly a dysfunctional subtype, induced resentment.

So I was already providing support so others could rescue themselves. 

That's the clear distinction, and to one set of purposes, where this post could end, as, if it is something wrong with me, I've had a handle on it for quite some time, it doesn't damage me anymore, nor others. 

But where rescuing others with magical love is a delusion, support is a skill that can be acquired through practice, I can't provide my own testimony as to whether I provided sufficient or insufficient support, competent or incompetent. It is likely I haven't yet attained journeyman status in that skillset.

I consider any white knight syndrome in myself, resolved. While this is a personal triumph, I have actually experienced devestation on the faces of some people when I've explained when and how I overcame this. As though self-rescue, as a concept, is threatening and/or alienating.

Vestigia

The last part in this series I speculated on the highly speculative construct of plutophobia, an irrational bigotry against riches. A section of that meandering post rationalized the bigotry as debilitating on account of the disproportionate destruction of poor heritage, compared to the rich. Namely poor people's stuff rarely gets heritage listed, and is often first to be demolished and replaced. 

That sent me to google maps satellite view, to check how much of the public schools I attended remained.

In a pleasant surprise the loooooooooong rows of portable classrooms where I did year 7 remained, but a few had been removed and replaced with new buildings. Specifically the old home-economics classrooms where I recall making tea cakes and fruit salad in year 7 that seems to be gone and it kind of makes sense that it would be replaced with a proper culinary instruction facility. 

Betwixt the chaplains office and the old home-ec rooms, was a little courtyard, a bbq area and that seems to be gone. Here I have memories that for a while, our recess thing to do, was play "perfect match" an activity if not conceived by my friend Bryce, certainly lead by and maintained by him for what could have been a week, a fortnight, three months worth of recesses. 

I mean other weird shit happened too, and I can't really recall how I spent all my recesses, I feel at some point we just had a bbq worshipping ritual. The memories have decayed, at least in my ability to retrieve them as I hadn't thought about Year 7 recesses since maybe my first months in year 8 at a new school.

Anyway, back to "perfect match" I remember very little detail. I remember I was in 7K our homeroom was down that bbq end of the corridor, and 7J was across the hall, and with 11 classes of 30+ students in year 7, we were all kind of ghettoised into clusters of two or three classrooms that functionally where our year level, like we had nothing to do with 7A or even 7F. 

The game would have been more akin to an improv-theatre sports style game, where we were pretending to be characters rather than ourselves on a dating show, but I kept matching with this girl pretty much every time we played. I remember Bryce was there of course, and I'm fairly confident Shannon was in that group, Heff was in that group but we never matched, the girl I matched with, I don't know where she came from, where she went, she definitely made an impression and having unwittingly scratched at this geographically cached memory, it is now itching like a motherfuck.

Let's call her Husqvarna, because she had a husky voice. She was vivacious, confident, extroverted. She had a nice beak, natural blush, hammed it up acting wise like what a Los Angelino would consider a very natural personality. And when we were paired it felt very natural. Yet, I never crushed on her as evidenced by the fact that I don't know her name. I recall being made nervous in an exciting way by her physical proximity, dare I say contact, when we were matched. For fucks sake I am only now just experiencing limerence with respect to her, from the shelved perspective of my 12 year old self.

Likely somebody did crush on her and she disappeared into a relationship. Now, I know I crushed on our editor for The Arch Magazine, the school paper, a year 12 girl and I can't remember her name either. I was a frustrated young man for my first years of high school, and it's unremarkable that little boys who barely have pubes but have begun that magical journey are attracted to girls and women much older than them - physically. But also are attracted to girls their own age, who enjoy the advantage, such that it is contingent on wanting male attention from boys their own age, of being around, sharing classes.

My asynncronious cognitive development though, probably means I struggled to relate to girls my own age, I had a natural affinity for the company of adults. I could converse fairly competently with adults, especially since I had no qualms about saying piss, shit, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker et. al. So I suspect I just struggled to be attracted to girls my own age and in my vicinity, who ironically in their relentless pursuit to pass as more mature than they were, struck me as very immature.

But this is the vestigia of my White Knight Syndrome, Husqvarna is actually relatively rare. The simplest explanation as to why I didn't crush on her, ask her out, make a move etc. was that I didn't know how, I had no experience. Me and my fellow loser friend Q, for which that's shorthand, his name is Quentin, spend many many many hours during our teens discussing 'signs' that maybe the girl we liked, liked us back and maybe we should ask them out. 

This may clash with gender stereotypes, that you know, it's girls and their girlfriends that see questions like 'okay but how did he say it?' as valid and useful, but my other friend Paul once turned to me and was like 'Yes! she borrowed my pencil! It's a sign.' and in my experience rejection anxiety was pretty common, it's a post mobile devices thing that guys started just sending pictures of their dicks to girls and getting done for distributing child pornography.

Bleh, so in hindsight, it seems clear to me that we were matching in a game where we were pretending to be dating game show contestants largely so Bryce could live out his fantasies of being a gameshow host, because incidentally we were likely attracted to each other. I was, in other words, in. And it was likely a clearer sign than other bullshit I'd agonize over with Q and certainly the bullshit he agonized over with me.

What is rare about Husqvarna, is that she is a figure from my past that I recall liking but didn't approach, didn't even think to approach. That's really rare.

For example, in my senior high school years, I experienced strong limerence that kept me up all night for this girl in my year that had become single right when I had become entangled with a very hot-mess. In a rarity for me, I was already dating a troubled girl but was then frustrated by feeling circumstance had cheated me of a relationship with a troubled girl I had much more in common with. 

After a few weeks, my relationship was over and I was clean and free to ask out this girl. I just choked up any time I saw her, I wanted to approach her but couldn't. Husqvarna by contrast seems potentially to be "here's this great person, she'd be a great girlfriend for some lucky somebody." Without out it occurring to me that I could be some lucky somebody.

When I was unpacking and processing this white knight shit, with a psychologist, which I needed to do to get out of a bad place I was in, a problem I came across again and again, was that I could easily identify better prospects for partners than the ones I became enmeshed with at that time, and this vestigia is hard to put into words - something like 'appeal without attraction' 

I would put it to my shrink like thus, "it's like I'm rich, I have heaps of money, and like the girls that promise a nice stable relationship to be with seem like they are rich too, and that seems pointless - like giving a million dollars to a millionaire. what seems logical and sensible to me, is that I should share my wealth with someone poor."

And you know, there was a lot going on there, including the painful realities of life that love at best, can support and comfort someone, but can't cure or fix anything. And that often an opposite is alien, frightening, disturbing and that keeps us all apart. As Alain de Botton, who was not my shrink says in a bunch of his talks - what we mean by true love is not someone who can fix us, who can make us happy, but what we are actually looking for something familiar, someone who can make us suffer in a way we recognize so we know the love is real.

My dysfunctional white knight tendencies have been, by my own estimation, sufficiently bounded for so long that they at least, do not make me suffer anymore. Those boundary fixes were quite easy to implement, a simple recognition that people's issues they bring with them, are theirs to resolve, and to usurp that responsibility is unloving and disrespectful. 

Acceptance is not a passive act, I also positively accept, that due to my own attraction to a type I will describe, as convenience, as "hot messes" that there's always a high risk that the relationship will fail, and I will be powerless to stop it, all I can do is my best to do right by the relationship, by doing right by myself. 

What was hard and first discovered with the panic attack incident, was coming to terms with the fact, that I was always going to be attracted to hot messes, and even with my experiments to go out, run in the opposite direction, and find women who weren't hot messes, in getting to know them, the most promising prospects of life beyond my type, we would achieve a level of intimacy, of familiarity where they felt comfortable, to be vulnerable, to reveal to me, that they in fact were, also hot messes.

This phenomena that I had to come to accept, with difficulty, I refer to as "The Lesbian Bar of My Life Has No Fire Escape."

So let's try and see if I can't shake something loose from the vestigia that does interest me:

Hot Messes vs. Trainwrecks

Have you heard? tohm's a White Knight, you know, one of those guys who has a chronic need to rescue his lovers. [breaks into run] Hey tohm, tohm! Hey, hi. So...um, funny story actually...I don't know if you've heard this, I told some people and you know, maybe it's getting around but yeah like so yeah um like anyway, funny funny story btw. Yeah, I've been seeing a psychologist aaaaaand...yeah well it turns out I have anxiety...[pause]...[searches eyes for human response]...yeah, I'm kind of a hot-mess.

The above is a type, a type I will refer to as a "train wreck". My type is the "hot mess" and not my type is the "train wreck." 

The thing is, I can't put it into words, some women when I discover the damage they live with, it becomes compelling. I experience limerence, it draws me in. When Ale and I went on our first date, the way she complained about how life had screwed her over was on the verge of causing nervous ticks, and it just made me want to kiss her, which I did, and then a rejection and a month of precious time we could have had wasted, we were a couple. The secret was getting rejected.

Then and obviously I'm not going to name any train-wrecks or even drop breadcrumbs on the bent tracks that point to the wreckage, there are women whose damage brings out the Jerry Seinfeld in me, that almost sociopathically wishes them "good luck with that." or a simpler "yikes."

What is, however, the difference? 

The simplest one is likely just a matter of attraction, as in physical attraction. In this regard, I am similar to what I understand a 'nice guy of okcupid' to be, often simply shortened to 'nice guy' which crowds out 'guys who are nice', for those unfamiliar, and too lazy to start googling just as I am too lazy to go find links for you, the 'nice' is sarcastic, 'nice guys' need their scare quotes because they are not nice at all. They view sex as transactional, and the currency as some form of chivalry, they do not see women as people, and as such do not understand that women are entitled to have friends. They get upset because they view behaviours that are banal in the context of friendship as courtship, that is taken.

Basically every woman they are attracted to, is running the Tinder scam of going on dates to get guys to pay for stuff. 

The all important regard though, is that I have heaps of female friends, and generally more experience of 'nice girls', than being a 'nice guy' myself. My test for "nice"-guyness is fairly simple - how do you treat people you don't want to have sex with? 

But under the White Knight delusion, the false conceit that love can cure all ills, that's where my double standard certainly kicks in. I am not a free-lovin' dirty hippie, there are only certain people I am willing to love.

Bringing me back to Husqvarna, again sticking to simple explanations I know so little about that girl from another home room whom for some innumerate iterations of a pretend dating gameshow I matched up with most frequently if not every time, that I have no idea what damage she may or may not have, whether she was on type or off it. 

Simplest explanation was that nothing happened due to inexperience. A real "what was that?" after something flashed before your eyes and after the fact someone explains "that tohm, was a romantic interest. It's gone but there'll be others, many others."

But why did it flash by? Because I can remember my first experience of limerence, of crushing on someone, and that went back to primary school. I'm not talking about playing mummies and daddies on the playground where it's just blind imitation, but the psychological experience of getting someone in your head like a song can. That first happened to me in grade 3, so about age 8, a romantic attraction without the sexual. A desire to simply be in someone's presence.

Flashforward to post Husqvarna, I became aware of the distinctions in my own heterosexuality. Firstly that there were numerous girls and women who are sexual non-entities to me, I understand them to be women, but to suggest that I could just decide to find them attractive is frankly ridiculous. Then there are a large number of women I find attractive, but among other things, I don't want to spend time with them, don't want to talk to them etc. post my sexual awakening in adolescence, it was far more frequent to encounter women I'm physically attracted to but not romantically attracted to or interested in. 

Apologies, I'm doing too much unpacking of my sexuality. But yes, let us not lose sight of the simple explanation that for me the difference between a hot-mess and a train wreck is the presence or absence of romantic attraction.

Where I feel this differential is inadequate, is that if I add men into this Venn-diagram I'm going to get men I behaviourally do a lot of emotional labour for, and gladly, that I have no romantic attraction to. There are other men that while I'd never go so far as to stick a hose down their throat while they are drowning and turn it on a la Ray Crock "The Founder" of McDonald's corporation, there are men whom Seinfeld like, I can only wish "good luck with that."

And here, there could be a sexual component, in terms of, does my care factor diminish if I esteem them as a sexual rival? I can only say no, for twofold reasons - some of my best friends have been sexual rivals. Just yesterday I was chatting to Rolphy, we have an ex in common, Bryce, gameshow host that kept matching me with Husqvarna, we have an ex in common, Brenton one of my closest confidants in high-school had many a crush in common, Stacey cut my lunch once, but it wasn't really a rivalry because I didn't have a chance...I could keep going, and Intrasexual competition tends to settle down in adulthood. 

The other fold, btw, is that I at least, experience pronounced sex differences between heterosexual men and heteronormative women, and am often mistaken as to who I should have regarded as a sexual rival. My late 20s early 30s in particular was eye opening, as many women often opted for men they could have a parent-child relationship with, and whose emotional immaturity rendered them quite dangerous, more so than the bad-boy archetype, I had nothing on the anxiety-boy archetype.

Now, I feel like there is a qualitative reason I perceive and experience a difference between what I'm calling Train-wrecks and what I'm calling Hot-messes. But yes, you can't spell Hot-mess, without "Hot" there's probably something telling in that.

What I'm not going to do, beyond my opening paragraph which is a psychology book style construct of amalgamated conversations I've actually had, is write up any case studies of "train-wrecks" under my general policy of not saying behind someone's back, what I am not willing to say to their faces. Now often people hear me talking about people behind their back, and assume I am a hypocrite who does not live up to their own standards, in which case they are usually underestimating what I am willing to say to someone's face, but in the case of Train-wrecks, that's beyond my courage, particularly since intrinsic to my usage, is my unwillingness to get entangled in their problems.

So why do I even use train-wreck? It feels kinder than dumpster-fire, but still implies a kind of public spectacle. And there's something there...yeah, feels right. Oversharing, definitely which can take too forms, firstly being indiscriminate in the audience you share your vulnerability with, that is not intimate but public. Secondly, overly impatiently sharing when we have not built up that kind of relationship, in fact, I hardly know you.

Like I definitely understand theory of mind; such that, while I know I'm trustworthy, I know that you can't know that, and I judge your judgement in oversharing with me. It is more so that, than thrill of the chase, but maybe that as well, given that it's a reasonable inference that a good place to start with any personal issues we have, is to take stock of our own judgement.

It could also be something to do with me, with affiliation, that's the real demarcation for me as train-wrecks have not cropped up randomly in my life. The people we know are seldom an accident. Just doing a short mental inventory, a single connection has introduced me to two-thirds of the train-wrecks I've encountered in my life. At least. But a third is significant, like I don't think it's the stink of affiliation.

Coming back to the labels I've chosen to use, I'm thinking "hot-mess" is also a kind of oxymoron, especially if we are treating 'hot' as a synonym for appealing, whereas "train-wreck" is not an oxymoron, it's possibly a subject and a preposition, and as such a valid sentence in English, I'm not a grammarian. But it's obvious. A train-wreck is a big obvious spectacle. It is obviously a bad idea to get involved, whereas a hot-mess is a paradox, it's intriguing, a seeming gamble.

Yes, this feels promising, like I've put my finger on an intuitive filter I have. Train-wrecks are the people that when you get trapped in an abandoned carnival at night, and all the rides suddenly and mysteriously turn on, and just as you are in the middle of remarking that this situation is "like the beginning of every horror movie ever" they interrupt with "I think we should split up."

There is also a synthetic vs. organic component, chance vs. non-chance. Here it is likely that we are all by default hot-messes, born into confusing circumstances and guided largely by inexperienced and/or unqualified fellow travellers in a vastly chaotic closed system. A Hot-mess reminds me more of headphone wires that will become tangled through the stochastic motions of being in a pocket while we walk, though in people that tangle can become a veritable Gordian knot, particularly if a White Knight attempts to untangle it with love instead of fingers. A train-wreck is engineering error, or driver error, the wreckage is characterised in my experience, usually by a brash overconfidence - someone has typically bought into a narrative uncritically and literally full steamed it until they are sitting among the wreckage of their life in a state of confusion, or worse, when observers can plainly see the engineer is going to derail, but the engineer is too self-unaware to see it. Sorry, I should have been clearer that many I unconsciously class as "train-wrecks" are really "pre-wrecks."

My life however, doesn't provide me with any real control. For example, and this is a safe example in terms of anonymity, I don't think I've ever met any women who lives with the horrible affliction of OCD, certainly in terms of a White Knight Syndrome, OCD is not going to be cured by a lover's love, so a control condition would be if I had met two women with OCD and come to regard one as a hot-mess I was drawn to romantically, wanting to help them, and another I regarded as a train-wreck firmly in the friend zone.

Let's get this train moving along though, because I think I've gone as far as my thoughts can take me on this question, I'll have to dredge up more into my active memory from long term storage.

The Ironic Safety of Train-Wrecks

I just want to make clear, the only sense in which I am repelled by train wrecks is romantically. And I am attracted to few enough people for it really to be a major source of feelings of rejection, besides if you are a train-wreck, you have bigger problems to concern yourself with than what I think of you, except in the sole instance where you aren't aware you are a train-wreck, and that happens in this era of normalized conspiratorial thinking.

I am happy to be friends with train-wrecks and can even be concerned for their wellbeing. This is motivated by my belief in a more universal human dignity, but in that concern it has historically been no issue at all to just accept my own impotency as a person of no particular qualification to help get a life back on track. 

But my white knight issues then, are, and have always been, no issue for the train-wreck. The subtitle of the book is "Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others" I feel no need, and to be clear it is the felt 'need' of the White Knight that is the problem, not that you keep rescuing people. Most often people in relationships can't and don't rescue their partners. 

I would almost bet, that while many clinical psychologists may recommend to a patient that they need to 'get out there' close to none would ever prescribe that someone 'just needs a boyfriend or a girlfriend' Relationships can be something that enriches our lives such that we highly value them, but good relationships are more likely a symptom than a cure.

As Dr. Gordon Livingston prescribes: First Earn, then Expect.

Mama Mia!

We are going to have to get over something, and it may come up when I say this next thing: I likely didn't know what to do with Husqvarna, my recurrent "perfect match" because she in no way reminded me of my mother.

Believe me, I have been fucking freaked out by some resemblances between my friends' partners and one of their parents. It's nothing we like contemplating, how common it is for someone to want to fuck their own mother or father, but it is also banal.

Take me for example, you've just met me, and drawing on a real example this time, you hit me with the small talk 'what are you going to do this weekend?' and I respond 'Killing prostitutes' how do you respond? I would guess the most likely response would be to call me out for my problematic views that must certainly propagate male violence against women, and marginalised women at that, but that's not the way to my heart.

We're talking about attachment theory here, and my response to your question is an implicit punishment for attempting to initiate an obvious conversation aka small talk. If you want us to grow closer, you need to pick up on that and 'yes-and' me. Something like "I've read about that, did you shave off your moustache because of the police sketch?" to which I might say "the repressed homosexuality comments really got to me, I abducted that journalist and showed him a slide show before setting him on fire in a wheel chair." 

Now we are bonding over our contempt for the social safety of banal conversations about weekend plans. 

None of this, has anything to do with my mother. I raise it though, as an example that if you hadn't guessed the thing to do, we are quite unlikely to wind up in a relationship. Equally, there's going to be a bunch of potential romantic partners permanently out of my reach, because I don't really know how to have small talk. 

And if you and your dad just love puns, this is how you wind up with a partner like your dad, because eventually at the watercooler you are going to be fucking in with the guy who loves puns, whereas I would throw my glass of water in your face.

Ironically, even though I only recall Husqvarna from a context where we were both entirely performative, pretending to be game show contestants, my feeling is that she was quite authentic, a WYSIWYG person aka the best kinds of persons, which was true of the other female contestants Heff and Shannon that I can recall too, when I come to think of it, all very unlike my mother.

Where my White Knight Syndrome was at its most literally overempathic, and therefore dysfunctional, when it was doing the most damage to my mental health and fostering the most resentment, where it was, in other words - least safe, least bounded and at breaking (me) point - a friend of mine pointed out that the catalyst for the expression of my dysfunction was "quite performative" in their persona. 

Something that had never occurred to me, but once pointed out, obvious. My own version of mistaking danger (performance) for safety (authenticity) and safety (the "Strength" tarot card) for danger (the "Moon" tarot card)...that half I'm less sure about.

Because the authors of The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others, in an interview I found with them, told an anecdote of telling a colleague about their idea for the book they were working on and the colleague said "so you mean...women" which is to say, this behaviour is so widespread among women that it is almost a universal, at least a fairly safe, generalisation.

And here I arrive at the vestigia best characterised as "the law of large numbers" to which I made an aforementioned allusion that we are all hot-messes, but not all of us are train-wrecks. Another book helpful, but more recently consumed by me on this front, is "The drama of the gifted child" which is not about the lay understanding of giftedness, not the 2% of the population who could in theory excel at schoolwork, but the gift every child has for surviving childhood emotionally no matter who their parents are, by subduing themselves in whatever way necessary to become the child their parents want them to be.

If it helps, think of dogs, dog's intellectual capabilities sort of max out at somewhere near the cognitive capacity of 5 year old children, where they excel at is in attuning themselves to the owners they depend on in order to survive. For many dogs this works out fine, their needs are met in a stable, predictable routine throughout their lives. Other dogs get all kinds of mental and emotional issues, sometimes translating into physical ailments like hives.

Author of "The Drama of The Gifted Child" does not mention dogs or dog ownership, that's my own analogy, but what it suggests is that pretty much everyone once you get to know them, is a survivor of their own childhood. So even if I were to successfully navigate around the hot-messes with their tattoos and piercings, their interest in crystals, their disorganised chaotic lives and go on a date with a successful career woman, overeducated and over travelled, member of a mixed netball league and paying off a mortgage on a townhouse, by the third or fourth date as they became more relaxed and more vulnerable I'd likely be beginning to learn the hollowing out of their personhood they feel is a result of chasing a perception by their parents that is acceptable.

It basically means, that my ability to throw a stone with my eyes closed, and hit someone with long intractable issues is not as impressive a magic trick as it seems. It's kind of like a mentalist guessing that someone in the audience today likes pizza.

That I have tended to romantically gather the low-hanging fruit of woman with an interest and side hustle in Wicca, is a product of my plutophobia, my asynchronous cognitive development "avoiding the middle" wasteland of mediocrity.

When I became conscious of my unconscious tendency to mistake "The Moon" for "Strength" I started actively trying to break my own patterns, to date the unfamiliar. It was a formula somewhat like (physical attraction + friendship = ask them out on a date) and I had some success at going on dates, but no relationships came from it.

The last time I experienced an adverse affect to my white knight predisposition however, was a panic attack I suffered when I came to recognize patterns between someone new and the person who had forced me to learn about my white knight tendencies.

Instead of donning the armour and riding out to the rescue, I panicked, fled and sought rescue myself. 

Q answered the call giving me a book on the hippocampus that explained mindfulness techniques I could use to get a hold of myself. Rod answered the call by welcoming me to the human race, pointed out that in my panic I'd just gone and done the thing I was afraid of happening, and had a good chat to me about how anxiety is not in fact a condition or affliction but a normal human emotion felt in the presence of uncertainty, that what I needed to do was not flee anyone and everyone that might tempt me into white knight mode, but come to accept that we all have head candy and that that's pretty good. A more nuanced view of not optimising our lives, but accepting a standard we can be happy in the presence of.

After that I understood, and even though life hasn't constantly come up tohm since, I don't think about it too much, it doesn't need much managing. Except...

The Worst Managerial Arrangement

My university, RMITU, most often referred to as what it likely really is RMIT, sells itself on "Work Integrated Learning". At about the midpoint of my first business degree, growing extremely frustrated with my inability to select electives and even more frustrated with how often a subject had 30~40% of its assessment be a dreaded "group assignment" I realised with horror, that RMIT was trying to sneak by us that group assignments were a direct manifestation of "work integrated learning" presumably because in real workplaces people contribute as teams like departments. 

I still find this assertion so annoying that I am tempted to waste words here, as to why group assignments are a false analogy to office work. Fuck it, two obvious ones is that office teams don't change every class - four times a day, and the work is often routine and in a linear flow, not simultaneous, and workplaces also generally have layers of management, not flat organisations like every fucking group in "group assignment." This lack of management is a kind of decent segue though and why I brought up the group assignment obsessed RMIT business courses.

The most common solution to the myriad problems of group assignments - namely the coordination costs and trust issues, was that one person volunteers to do the assignment and everyone else shares in the grade. Logically, the person with the most to lose, is the best student, the one most capable of achieving a high grade if the work isn't diluted by lesser contributors. They can effectively bribe their group members with a higher grade than would be achieved if they contributed.

But I noticed this didn't happen, as often I was the student in the group with the best grasp of what was needed and how to go about it, but I was the least motivated to do the actual work. I resented, and resent, to this day, the implication that I don't have anything better to do with my time than get high grades.

What most often happened, was that the group let the most anxious manage, they got a sense of control that relieved their anxieties, and we got to slack off.

The thing being, that highly anxious students can also be C, D and even F students. There was more than one occassion where I got emailed the assignment a day or two before the due date, was horrified, and had to redo it in an all nighter.

What of relationships? Given the romantic nature of modern relationships, my experience is that many resent or find insulting any parallel between a romantic relationship and a working relationship.

But relationships require management, and as Gordon Neufeild pointed out, two people can't drive a car, both he and his wife can't both be on top while having sex. He points out/asserts, that healthy relationships involve switching of Alpha roles. Taking turns. 

My Aunt Nancy says the way of our family is "if someone's more eager we get out of the way" and I have to trust she's observed enough of a thruline. I feel it is certainly true that both my father and I in relationships defer to the most anxious to manage the relationship.

I certainly, almost never seize control, deferring in relationship decisions, but this is not all.

I also shoulder the responsibility of making the marriage work, so in other words the worst managerial arrangement of all.

Last year, I was literally in this managerial arrangement, I had a boss that made shit sandwiches and I was expected to eat them. Without any romance though, I quit instead, albeit responsibly rather than dramatically.

In relationships however, this has not been the case, I've been fired. I experience relationships largely as an accumulation of pressure until it breaks. Even with my newfangled boundaries that have me supporting my partners to step into their own agency rather than appeal to me to rescue them.

I am always at my unhappiest though, when made to feel not a romantic partner, but a wish fulfilling genie. 

Envidiosa

My stories I'm watching at the moment, is an Argentinian comedy series on Netflix "Envidiosa" or "Envious" in english. I recognize, but cannot relate to the protagonist of the series Vicky. 

The premise is a 39 year old woman who is recently seperated from her fiance of 10 years David. Though she broke it off because David wouldn't marry her, David went on a trip and married a Brazillian dance instructor he met on that holiday. 

Vicky has a circle of female friends, and her envy expands beyond David and his new wife he married quickly after delaying for 10 years with her, to her friends who are getting married and having children. 

She has two love interests, Nick her boss who is wealthy but unreliable, and then the obvious right guy for her Mattias, a 40 year old guy who works in the Chinese restaurant next to her apartment building who keeps helping her pick up the pieces after disastrous melt downs.

All the while, episodes are often framed with Vicky sitting with a mysterious rash across her face, or a torn dress and gum in her hair, arguing with her psychotherapist that she isn't motivated almost entirely by envy and comparison.

By around the 4th or 5th episode of season 1, it's super obvious that Mattias is who Vicky needs to be with, and the plot starts to feel contrived that she keeps going back to  Nick and blowing off Mattias or friendzoning him.

Where the viewing experience is therapuetic for me, is understanding via Vicky's experience of dominance of the narrative, that she foregoes love with Mattias because Vicky's envy and comparison rule him out via an inability to meet her material needs. Whereas Nick has the distinct possibility of being an instrumental partner that can validate Vicky's esteem she needs from her friends, from David and so on.

But there's 4 seasons, I'm sure unless they kill Mattias in season 2, that the show will lose my interest because Vicky has no uncontrived reason not to learn the lesson she needs to learn by the end of season 2. For now though, I'll keep watching and might update this post.

I don't know, if I identify more with Mattias or David, certainly I have the experience of being either transitionally or more enduringly made to feel that I as a partner am a means rather than an end, and I suspect in many ways the vestigia of White Knighthood has been making my bed to lay in for all of my adult life.

When you companion yourself to someone who is muchly defined by their attempt to outrun the darkness they feel is chasing them, this is a romantic risk you will always face.

What's curious is, the question of whether I can ever consciously identify a Husqvarna in time to act, and whether I can bring the energy, the enthusiasm, necessary for someone healthy to accept a relationship, convinced, that I want to be there, and not pondering the inner workings of a hot-mess as I hold her hair while she pukes up another bad decision.

Conclusion

We must imagine Husqvarna happy.

Tax Reform vs Clown College

 To my best ability to discern a fact, without watching any news, the Australian government released the 2026-2027 Budget with some tax reforms that will kick into effect July 1st, 2027 so the financial year after next.

In my opinion the reforms are good, some tax relief for the productive economic activity known as work, and grandfathering out of a capital gainst tax discount on the unproductive economic activity of speculating on the asset prices of housing stock, as well as grandfathering out negative gearing.

I've been side eyeing some op-ed headlines trying to beat the war drums of furore against any touching of the obscene tax incentives to "invest" in property. Without reading the words that were said, these people are clowns and I thought I'd commit a few words to this proposition.

How Are Houses Capital?

Yes, capital gains tax is levied against the proceeds that arise from the change in price when someone sells the house and land package if it's positive. So if you bought it for $100,000 and sold it for $1,000,000 you would have to pay CGT on $900,000 margin, which if that was your primary residence (I believe for 6 months) in Australia you pay nothing and by the way, this post shouldn't be in any way construed as advice based on the Australian Tax Code I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse and the discounts out of memories of a subject I've had very little interest in historically.

But, okay, "shares" are capital because they are a means by which a company can raise funds for productive investment (in theory) and in return the investor gets a stake, or a share, of any future profits paid out as a dividend, or this capital, this stake in the company can be sold on an exchange and the price theoretically, is some reflection of the net present value of the expected future earnings of the company. (This doesn't necessarily work in practice.)

Less abstractly, a tractor is capital because while technically you could buy one for fun to get you from A to B in your private diversions, mostly tractors are bought by farmers to massively increase the productivity of their farm labour, allowing them to move hay bails for the heard in a matter of minutes instead of hours when they had a horse drawn cart (also capital) the can tow a plough and get a field ploughed in an hour instead of a day or week. 

An espresso machine is capital because it enables a cafe worker to make coffees for a dozen customers in 10 minutes with all their tediously specific orders. A pizza oven is capital because it cooks pizzas. A deep fryer is capital because it fries chips. Suction cups are capital because they enable glaziers to fit glass into its frame. A crane is capital because it can lift construction materials up to the top stories. A ship is capital because it transports goods across the ocean.

Now how is a house capital?

There are legitimate answers to this question, but in reality the more accurate answer is that houses are not capital. In some pedantic manner, they may help people do work by providing them a space in which they can keep office attire in a condition that allows them to keep their jobs, it prevents them from getting diseases and viruses that would impact their productivity if they were homeless, it gives them a fighting chance of keeping mental ill-health in check to the point they can function at work etc.

Also as of very recent times it can be asserted that there's like a 30% chance now that a house will have the dual function of residence and office with the post covid work-from-home revolution of video conferencing and internet connection.

But tax deductions for a home office are I believe, already provided for, and yes, entreprenuers have operated businesses out of the house for centuries, but relatively few people become work from home shoe cobblers in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's really at the 20% elapsed point of the 21st century that work-from-home approaches normal, and for most workers while they will need a whole room for privacy, their home work stations are gonna be like 2m^2. 

Housing is traditionally unproductive in economic terms. It's the least productive piece of acreage on a farm in the frontier days of Australia, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina etc. and in your Russian and British period novels involving some young chap struggling to make it in the city and having to contend with a widower landlord and her charming daughter, we can infer that home ownership rates are incredibly low, with a few rich families owning pretty much everything and everyone else renting.

And as I like to point out whenever I can, the clue is in the term of art "landlord" this is a feudal occupation and the landlords no longer saddle up and ride out against the pillaging would be landlord from the next fief over to protect their peasants. We just have this cultural artefact where through "home ownership" a "landlord" effectively buys the right to levy a private income tax.

Right. The way a "house" is an investment is functionally that it can ostensibly be used as housing by a worker. That worker who does productive work can pay this private income tax in a number of different ways, and Gary of Gary's Economics has a great video explaining that the differences don't really matter. A worker can pay the private income tax in exchange for housing either as rent, profit or interest. 

I am assuming that how paying rent to a landlord functions as a private income tax, but anticipate, rightly or wrongly, that the average aussie bogan might not see how borrowing money to buy the house is also a private income tax.

So I'll introduce another question: How much would you sell a goose that lays golden eggs for? The naive answer would be that you wouldn't. You'd be a fool to give up $53k per egg for the rest of that goose's life. Wrong, let's say the goose averages an egg a day, I don't know shit about geese productivity, that's $19M a year. You would calculate the Net Present Value by basically dividing the expected earnings by 1 plus the going interest rate on typically treasury bills or something and compounded for a time period, in this case the life of the goose. That will come up with some astronomical figure yes, but from the perspective of the goose holder they are getting paid out something close to the lifetime earnings of golden goose eggs right now, they don't have to wait for the eggs to be lain. 

This is what a landlord does when they sell you a house, at least in theory, Australian's I believe are objectively insane, but not irrational in what they pay for housing. When aspiring first home owners buy a house off the landlord, what is often lost is the process taking place where the landlord is saying "I could rent this to you or someone like you for 10 years and collect 60% of your wages for those ten years, I'm only going to sell it to you if you pay me, now 11x your annual salary." 

So Australian first home buyers are functionally tennents who pay a lump sum premium private income tax to avoid the ongoing private income tax paid in monthly instalments. In exchange they get some not insignificant perks, but they also borrow money to pay this private income tax for those perks and the interest repayments are also yet another private income tax, and the hope that thus far has been fulfilled in Australia, is that you can persuade the next person to borrow even more to pay you back, to bail you out effectively.

Now bringing it back, housing isn't really capital. It's not like a tractor or an espresso maker or an e-bike. It just houses people, some of whom are workers and many of whom are children. We also know through real estate maxims like "Location, Location, Location" that very little of the worth of a property comes from the housing structure itself, it is a positional good meaning that most of the wealth comes from the amenities around the land like infrastructure, parks, hospitals, schools, even the other houses such that an ugly house lowers the price of the beautiful heritage cottage across the street that's view it spoils and the beautiful house raises the price of the ugly house that has a great view of it.

There are cases like mining barracks where a company houses its workforce and that housing can be considered capital. And yeah commercial property can be considered capital because you aren't supposed to live in it.

It shouldn't have been called capital gains tax in the first place though, because land is a positional good, a different factor of production to capital, and this has been present from Adam Smith's start and then obscured to keep the landed gentry in the money for centuries.

Orthodox economists are clowns too often treated seriously particularly by the news media. 

Negative Gearing

Negative gearing is overdetermined to be awful. Nobody should be apologizing for it, at best they should express be expressing trepedation at the cost of removing it, but that it inevitably must be removed or Australia will continue backwards as an economy.

I don't want to do my full spiel, but a lot of young people don't understand what negative gearing is in principle, they just think it's a tax discount they would be smart to take advantage of or something.

Basically, imagine you are rich, you pay a lot of income tax. Then you go out and you make a bad investment that loses money. Negative gearing is the means by which the government says "well done, we'll go broke, not you." and let's you the rich person, deduct the losses incurred from your bad investment from your income tax.

So it encourages, let's be blunt, dentists, to bid up properties to inflated prices instead of paying income tax that would finance law & order, education, national defence, the national disability insurance scheme, healthcare etc.

Like our government literally pays the richest people to make housing less affordable.

They are fucking clowns too often treated seriously particularly by the news media..

Dropping in on Peter Boghossian

I merely felt like I hadn't checked out any of the content Peter produces in a year or so, and had been doing so on a diminishing basis for quite some time. 

I am but a weak squishy human and lest you think I can't resist the temptation of watching Peter opine on something, I'm actually referring to my powerlessness in the face of Youtube's algorithmic curation. So I have this rule, which is, that if Youtube shows me enough thumbnails for it to become cognizant for me, that I don't want to watch something, I have a strong emotional reaction against watching it that is, I force myself to watch it. Otherwise I am purely engaging with a confirmation bias machine.

Probably because I watched a Glenn Loury show episode recently, the algorithm did a "people who like these guys tend to like this guy" thing.

Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool...I...have to go.

Some selection of these thumbnails had been bugging me for some time. I think it would be a fairly objective way to put it, that you may be able to makeout Peter's production team's 'attempts at humour' by using LLMs to variously present him as an Iranian Ayatollah, a uniformed Nazi of some kind, a pregnant man who has started showing, and Peter presenting as female. And like, of course I don't want to watch these videos, subjectively, these attempts at humour fall flat, and they communicate a target audience that would find this humorous

4 of those thumbnails are going to be a type of video Peter produces called "spectrum street epistemology" where street = vox populi, epistemology = do we know what we think we know conversations, and spectrum refers to a 5 point scale between "Strongly agree" and "Strongly disagree" and if you can make out the view counts, with all the power of the internet, they aren't particularly popular videos

A Diversion to Sam Harris

Former podcast guest of Sam Harris, Bari Weiss if you click on the link went from marginal voice to head of a major news division on CBS. The simplest inference was that she was selected for being Trump admin. friendly, in the same way that Steven Colbert was cancelled for being Trump admin unfriendly, with seemingly, the exact opposite results.

I don't listen to Harris' podcast interviews much anymore, again largely because of a lack of interest in what he now covers much of the time, shit like silicon valley and stuff. Also naturally, much as I stopped watching Seth Myer's "A Closer Look" segments when Biden was in office, the Anti-woke stuff got a whole lot less interesting in 2024 when as stated in a recent post and here I repeat myself, I think it's 10 year window closed suggesting it was ever going to take off and go mainstream. 

Like I'm currently retraining and my course has stuff that would certainly fit under the "woke" umbrella, like every session presentation begins with an "Acknowledgement of Country" that may predate the whole "woke" phenomena locally, but certainly in terms of becoming a standard practice in many institutions in Australia is for me, a largely inert vestigial mass I can certainly live with.

Anyhoo, yes for those unfamiliar, Sam Harris was cast by Bari Weiss in an article she wrote titled "meet the intellectual dark web" that featured Harris in it. Harris at the front of many of his podcasts has a section called "housekeeping" where he has in the past responded to conflict and controversies arising from being affiliated with conspiracy hacks like the Weinsteins, conspiracy megaphones like Joe Rogan and possibly others.

With Bari Weis being I think by most standards, grossly unqualified to run a serious news organisation (it would be like putting Mr Beast in charge of a real life Squid Game, can you imagine?) I was curious to see if Sam had distanced himself from Weis' more obvious dumpster fires, not only her appointment to CBS, but also the University of Austin she founded.

A search produced reddit articles, and it seems like Sam hasn't said anything about Weis since he interviewed her some years ago (pre-Oct 7th attacks on Israel) about antisemitism.

Boghossian is listed on said University of Austin's website as at writing as "Founding Faculty Advisor" and he published his resignation letter from Portland University on Bari Weiss' sub stack and so on, so he's arguably more affiliated with a Bari Weiss project, than Harris as being a subject of an article, having her as a guest on his podcast, and writing an article about mindfulness or the self-as-an-illusion for her sub-stack.

For me, there's an unambiguous test to observe, which is, the Trump administration is unambiguously an enemy of free speech, the 4th estate, heterodoxy etc. So if you are affiliated with Weis, and do not approve of what Weis is capitulating to, then we have this stooge/not-stooge test front-and-centre.

But...have I actually conducted that test? Like Harris, I just can't find anything where he responds or condemns Bari Weis for her career developments, nor specific actions taken in her current role like pulling the 60 minutes story that was embarassing to the Trump Admin that we've all seen because it ran in Canada and the world has the internet now.

It may exist somewhere, I don't know and can't be bothered checking, but as you'll see from when I eventually relented and dropped in to confirm/disconfirm if Peter was producing content I was so reluctant to watch, his inability to prioritise is a recurring theme.

The Video

The video has an anti-clickbait category of "Peter Reacts" and a title of "Why can't they answer the question?" with a crappy AI thumbnail which, you might at this point expect Peter in blackface but it's just him standing in front of a row of African looking gentlemen in front of an early-learning center of some kind.

If ever I was tempted to title something "I watched blah so you don't have to..." it might be for this, and the reality is, no viewing is obligatory and you are welcome to make your own choice. 

The thrust of the video is, Peter yells out to some guy to play and pause videos of governmental inquiries of some kind. 

The two queries that justifies a plural "they" and that Peter reacts to are:

1. Some guy grilling someone from Minnesota about how many Somali immigrants are on welfare vs. "native" Minnesotans.

2. Some guy responding to a claim that there has been some quantifiable increase in racial hatred (in the UK) and asking someone "where does the racial hatred come from?"

First Quality Test

For all the people out there, who cannot answer direct questions with direct answers, to pick from why such obscure examples over non-issues?

Peter characterises the clips he is reacting to as 'viral' the Somali-line-of-questioning one has 345k views as at writing and was posted may 2nd, US time so...it's about 5 days old and only getting older, and the "Racism where from?" viral clip has about 175k views and was published May 1st.

So firstly, we can rule out from the principle of charity, that Peter is responding to these clips from a looooooooong backlog and that is why he isn't responding to one of the numerous viral clips of some Trump admin official being unable to clarify whether the US is at war with Iran, if the "whatever" is over or ongoing, what the "whatever" was supposed to accomplish etc. etc. You know, the thing Trump broke that threatens to destroy everything dependent on fossil fuels in the world.

Spoiler, Peter appears to, without any adherence to a Socratic-method, sound epistemology and seemingly with just a full lean-in to rhetoric, arrive at the conclusion that the inability of the two subjects of the 'viral' clips to answer direct questions that Peter just asserts are reasonable and valid, that they have to be captured by an ideology:

If you cannot name one statistic supporting your position, you do not have a position. You have a feeling you are too afraid to examine. [...] Ideology does not just distort thinking. It replaces it.

But picking these clips about relative nothingburger issues is it's own kind of statistic that supports Peter's position, as it applies to himself. 

Now, my characterisation that welfare dependent Somali immigrants in Minnesota, and that recent high profile attacks on Jewish targets in the UK (A shooting at a synagogue and an attempted stabbing that resulted in an arrest) as nothingburger issues, comes from a subjective actuarial viewpoint. 

For example, the price of gasoline in the United States approaches $5 for whatever a gallon is. By PBS news reports, this is up 50% from prior to the start of the Iran "Euphemism" of choice. That's a 50% increase in a major expense for likely hundreds of millions of US citizens, just the US citizens a nation where the most common occupation is driver. Do you think, a single member of the Trump administration, could answer a simple direct question about a war that needs funding, and has depleted the stockpile of warheads and munitions, could answer a simple direct question about whether US military actions resulting in Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, made the US stronger or weaker?

I don't think they could. And I think it would be too generous to even state the administration as having something as complex and flavourful as an idealogy. I think it's just stone cold cowardice job preservation.

By contrast to the indirect tax of shutting down a quarter of the world's oil supply, and the direct taxes of financing the misadventure and the fact that Iran is thus far, owning the US Military from a strategic standpoint, Somali immigration in Minnesota, concerning 6,000 people (80% of 8,000) in a state of 5.7 million (or 0.14% of the Minnesotan population).

This isn't even piss on shoes, when due to a completely dysfunctional political institution in the US executive branch, rules based global order is being stressed toward breaking point. 

First Question

The first question is less interesting, one of the most interesting things about it, is the preamble commentary given by the X user Peter linked to as a 'viral' clip:

Dinesh D’Souza didn’t just “let his daughter marry” anybody.

He let her marry Brandon Gill.

If you are unfamiliar with Dinesh D'Souza, to call Dinesh D'Souza a fucking clown is an insult to clowns who practice an artform with skill, often at McDonald's for minimum wage. Dinesh D'Souza is a serious and legitimate argument that institutions like Dartmouth be able to revoke "dishonarary" degrees if someone demonstrates through their practice, a complete absence of understanding of what they were taught.

I don't know anything about Brandon Gill except for this clip here, where he appears to simply be wasting every bodies time. But I am familiar with Dinesh D'Souza, who employs the crappiest rhetoric to routinely embarass himselves in public spectacles going back to when Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens were doing New Atheist book tours, and more recently just embarassing, shit running down the leg performances when put under the question by Destiny and Alex O'Conner. 

D'Souza is the definition of a party hack.

Brandon Gill asks a question Peter Boghossian characterises as 'fair' or 'reasonable' or 'valid' or something to that effect, but rhetorically it would be called a 'false' or 'bogus' dilemma, does the (not even number, but proportion) of Somali immigrants on some kind of welfare make the state stronger or weaker?

So I have a question for you: Does the proportion of US Corporations, receiving some kind of welfare from the state, make the US stronger or weaker?

And furthermore, whoever the guy is answering the first question in the clip, answers it. So it's not even a "They can't answer the question" the guy clearly answers "certainly, stronger."

Then this hard on Brandon Gill tries to reframe the question because he doesn't get the answer he likes in this reductive view that something like 80% of Somali immigrants receive some kind of welfare, and that only drops to 74% after 10 years of living in the US and only 50% can speak English well.

But what if, none of those stats are worth giving a fuck about? 

I couldn't find the clip, but I'm reasonably confident that on "Jubilee" the 1 vs 20 debate format that Jordan Peterson famously imploded on, but when Destiny appeared on it against a bunch of MAGA whatevers, there was a participant that thought they had this slam dunk argument to confront Destiny with, which was a list of homicide victims of illegal immigrants, and when Destiny revealed that he didn't give a fuck about a list of names of people killed by illegal immigrants, the person just couldn't fathom it.

They also got voted out in under a minute by their peers, because I think most MAGA people couldn't understand how someone could think that a 'gotcha' because the context is so obvious - now read the list of all the people who are killed by US citizens, White US citizens, killed by drunk drivers, killed by breaches of workplace health & safety, killed by someone who swore to love and protect them in a religious marriage ceremony.

"These people receive welfare <sarcasm> so obviously that makes us weaker </sarcasm>" is stupefyingly reductive. Firstly, this is the US being talked about, so just because large proportions receive welfare does not immediately apply that they aren't fulfilling essential job roles, employers like Walmart and Amazon can pay their essential workers so little that it doesn't amount to a living wage, but the employer's profit margins are effectively subsidized by state welfare in food stamp programs etc.

Then I literally won't get started on corporate welfare, I will end it here - Brandon Gill - given that some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, reside in the US and sit on some of the largest cash reserves in the world - does the government giving them tax credits, and tax cuts and lending them money at negative effective interest rates not so they can develop innovative technology, but so they can buy back their own shares make the country STRONGER or WEAKER?

Peter for me, first started straying way out of his lane when he decided to champion national debt as the number one issue nobody was talking about. Reagan's famously fictional Welfare-Queen and the real phenomena of poor marginalised people propped up by the social safety net, have always been, a fucking rounding error. Peter needs to react to this clip if he wants to start having honest conversations. This is as nothing compared to the proposed half-billion dollars Lindsay Graham wants earmarked for the ballroom, that I increasingly suspect needs to have complicated security features built into it, just because obviously the next democratic administration would tear down any ballroom and restore the heritage East Wing.

On top of this, and this is what a lot of people miss, Somalia produces so much emigration because it is an unsafe country. Many of these immigrants I will bet, are going to be refugees. Minnesota is taking them, and with it's below replacement birth rate, immigration will most likely make Minnesota stronger. I mean does an ageing population make Minnesota stronger or weaker Brandon Gill? Obviously, the answer is weaker. Have a peruse of my governments official travel advisory website for Somalia and this is the fucking problem that we get with refugee migration - it's not illegal, and it isn't economical, it's humane. 

That context needs to be factored in to say of course you are going to get people who don't speak English good and have low employment prospects for a couple of generations. But I'm sure New York saw plenty of Greeks and Italians, Mexicans and Jews who helped contribute $$$ to the cultural draw that is New York, and who lived and died without ever learning English, spoke Yiddish, Spanish, Italian, Greek etc. etc. from the day they arrived to the day they died.

Every wealthy, relatively stable democracy in the world, is going to get people fleeing war, drought, famine and pestilence. These people have a legal right to claim refuge, and then often for countries like Australia it is actually illegal for us to subject refugees to mandatory detention, temporary protection visas, and especially remand children into mandatory detention. On top of that, from the Australian experience, it is pointlessly inhumane to manage the sensibilities of an uninformed and xenophobic electorate, by trying to act like Australia will ever be so 'tough' as to be less attractive than the origin points refugees are fleeing from. We've just pointlessly built these detention centres, and offshore processing and it has all been a shit show, and refugees are still a rounding error on Australian immigration.

Peter's reaction renders him, close to, objectively a moron. The guy answers the question straight away "certainly stronger" and then Brandon Gill is like "that's not the answer I want, waaah waah waah" and tries to set the only criteria for consideration to be some decontextualised welfare statistics - the trap is obvious, I don't know why Peter can't see it, probably because there's a feeling he has become afraid of facing, or ideology has displaced his intelligence under his friend James Lindsay's "ironclad law of projection" 

I thought Peter had experience with the socratic method, with debate, with dialogue and rhetoric. The presumable democrat he tries to get Brandon to clarify what he means by "Somali" versus "Native" given that the overwhelming majority of Somali Minnesotans are born in Minnesota, it genuinelly makes the statistics Brandon is citing confusing. Are you talking about the 108,000 that have Somali descent, or just the 8,000 that have immigrated from Somalia in the past 10 years?

Are you suggesting that cutting off welfare will make these people less prone to crime? Why are we even talking about this? This is not an existential threat to the great state of Minnesota. The San Antonio Spurs are, can we talk about blocking Victor Wembenyama's entry to the state for games 3 and 4 of the conference semifinals?

The Second Question

The second question Peter reacts to, is more interesting but I hopefully have less to say on it. 

Again, contrary to Peter's video title, an answer is given, but Peter, betraying Socratic dialogue and opting instead for the rhetoric of an appeal to personal incredulity, won't accept the answer.

Anyway, let's frame it, because it's in that category of "I don't get, what you don't get" kind of impasses, let's look at the commentary offered by the X user that posted this 'viral' clip:

Boy oh boy oh boy…

This just about sums it ALL up…

Man asks clear question.

I'm cutting him off there, because the question isn't clear. This is a mischaracterisation of the exchange. Now to lean into my own whiteness, paleness if you will, it may actually be hard for Peter to react to these videos with insight, because I personally can't exclude the possibility that Peter is autistic, and perhaps he can't "read the mind in the eyes" to the sort of basic level that people are good intuitive readers of expressions, tones, body language.

The clip comes from BBC Question Time, Australia has it's own version of the show called Q&A and these shows are generally painful and actually bad for democracy because often editorial policy of broadcasters like the BBC skew towards equality of outcome, rather than equal opportunity. Nevertheless, it's not really a bad thing that a meathead can ask a question of a boffin or professional politician.

This guy asks "the lady from the green party, you've said you've seen a rise in racial hatred in this country, could you just specify where that hatred is coming from?" 

We see the lady he asks' facial journey reaction and here the moderator, which the X poster characterised as 'panicking.' 

What the ladies face states, is confusion, and in the moderator's voice we don't hear panic, but confusion the moderator, whom the green pm looks to, says "errm I'm not sure what you mean..." 

What we are seeing here, and I'm going to emphasize this is somebody stupid asking a question that stupefies somebody knowledgeable.

I had a guy ask me "what's wrong with making money?" this is stupefying because it strips out all context. The man's 'clear' question, is hard to parse grammatically.

Let me pose Peter an equivalent question:

"You've said, you've noticed an increase in rainfall. Could you please specify, where that rain comes from?"

And this seems to be how the greens MP parses the question, it's not a sidestep, but she tries to clarify that her statement was a statement about an observed phenomena, it is a statistical reality, a matter of data. 

So, another equivalent question would be:

"The lady said there's been an increase in smoking in the last 5 years among 16-24 year olds, could you specify where the smoke is coming from?"

I would look to the moderator - "is he asking if the smoke comes from their mouths?"

The question by Peter's analysis, is presumptive without being leading, allowing Peter to simply assert that a clear and strong inference was 'dodged' by appealing to "everybody knows" and I forget Peter's words, something like Islamic extremists, or fanatics or idealogues. 

There is an inference, that Peter assumes that 'honest' conversations cannot be had about immigration because people are afraid of sounding racist, and because he is connecting these two clips, that the two clips are about the same thing, a fear of discussing immigration in terms of nationalism or creed or race or whatever.

But so long as your mind isn't primed to make the inferences Peter seems to believe are not only there but generalisable if not universal, her answer is perfectly coherent - the rise in racial hatred is a biproduct of the deteriorating economic circumstances.

If you are talking about the broad rise in racial tensions, hatred whatever, then a specific causal explanation is that growing income inequality, shrinking social mobility, shrinking middle-class, growing precariat will result in a destabilised society and one of the ways in which a society becomes less stable - is by turning on itself along racial lines.

Now, if slightly more context were added to the clip, to ground the man's question as specific to an observable spike in racial hatred toward the Jews, then maybe a cogent answer would be as Peter suggests "Islamic extremists" but I'm not sure how influential they are. 

A much better specific origin for the growing plight of the Jewish diaspora would be "Benjamin Netanyahu's prosecution of the IDF's response to the Oct 7th attacks." The damage Netanyahu has done to Israel's standing in the world, is incalculable. In many ways, his response has been a total Hamas victory.

But this is all kind of a red herring. The question wasn't clear, it was stupid, it was fucking stupid. Where does Jew hatred come from? You're asking about a phenomena that has persisted for thousands of years. Mostly it comes from sectarian violence, if we consider all Abrahamic religions Jewish sects. Are we only going back as far as the crusades, or do you want to get really specific and talk Babylonian exile? Or do we trot out some Old-testament scholars and archealogists that can tell us about proto-Judaesm? Because there's a case to be made that it comes from the Persian empire and Zoroastrianism, or maybe the Egyptian Pharaoh who earned such ire from his people because he tried to install himself as the first monotheistic god? 

The thing that is bad about racial hatred toward Jews, is that Bernie Sanders and Benjamin Netanyahu become the same thing, when in reality they are opposites.

I suspect Peter Boghossian plays the transactional analysis game "now I've got you you son of a bitch" where Hamas' Oct 7th attacks are license for infinite retribution, when clearly, most people lost their stomach for Israel's response within just a few days, fun fact, you can find a Coleman Hughes interview with Rory Stewart from maybe a week or two after the attack, where Rory corrects Coleman by stating that Israel had already exceeded a proportional response by firing thousands of rockets into Gaza.

Mariah Careylusion

"Why are you so obsessed with me?" Peter Boghossian is an interesting conundrum, if he were to have an afternoon filming subway takes, his garbage takes would start with 100% disagree and end with 100% disagree. I don't know where he gets his confidence from, BJJ I guess.

And again, possibly autism plays a big role here, I mean watch him interview the critical drinker and he's like "I like star trek, I watch star trek, I've only watched star trek, do you like star trek?" and maybe "have you ever done BJJ? You should do BJJ."

The other thing, is that Peter likely has had a very traumatic time with his whole Portland University experience, and it seems plausible that he has received death threats, experienced ostracism, has security concerns for questioning trans-activism, identity politics in general. 

But the conundrum is that Peter kind of founded street epistemology, but is in many ways its worst ambassador, his garbage takes just make me believe that maybe Socrates was as dumb as he claimed he was, and it didn't make him wise, it made him dumb, like Peter Boghossian.

Thank U

I haven't delivered a eulogy in 8+ years. Relative to that, my facebook profile picture is pretty fresh and recent:

"It would be nice if an emergency meeting of the UN security council declared me insufferable, but less so when I am absorbed by little dogs and granted me a stipend and visa to just hang out with dogs again." March 31st, 2024.

It's Usma, star of my post 'microcosm of helplessness' and I haven't tried it in a while, but yes, I can close my eyes and still picture the moment she looked back at me and then ran across the avenue to get hit by a car. A memory seared in by my hippocampus that fills me with cold shame and guilt, I remember the decision - the ultimate one in a series of decisions that lead to that moment and it still rattles me, shakes me up, recenters me in that microcosm of helplessness.

I'm sad to say that Usma is now deceased after recovering from that hip fractured in three places and posing for the above profile picture. She died about a fortnight ago as at writing and of course, her death has effected me. 

I've been processing, and it's probably a great opportunity to slow things down a bit by acknowledging that 'processing' is one of those psychology speak terms that have been adopted by the general public to use at their convenience. What needs process is that the death of something is a catalyst that causes a chain reaction of changes to your mental schema with which you navigate life, that we simply do not have the bandwidth to update everywhere, all at once. That schema is made up of many relational thoughts and feelings, and again, I feel lay people have heard through popular culture and social media of the 5 stages of grief or whatever - shock, anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance or whatever. 

This is not a good model of grief, it is based on terminally ill patients experience of coming to terms with their own death, they are grieving some kind of future they imagined for themselves, and its a process that doesn't ulitimately terminate in acceptance, but terminates in death. 

'Bargaining' always caught me out, I suspected it was where you begged your girlfriend to get back with you on the promise that things would be different. But certainly, shock tends to happen, and it makes sense that it does because you know all our ancestors would have seen things like their children die while trying to paddle a canoe out past the breakers, so going into shock can zombiefy you into functioning while not registering distressing events as and when you hear about them.

But a better model, at least one I am persuaded of, is the resilience model of grief which I think better explains the vast disparities in human responses to bereavement. There are people who can more-or-less function as normal, and people for whom a death can effectively disable them. I suspect the variation can in some part be explained by variations in people's ability to regulate their emotions.

So that's what I'm up to, have been doing recently, when I get the chance, and what I call 'processing' and in part this death of a beloved canine companion is cumulative, an opportunity to come to terms with mortality as a whole. 

Cumulative but also specific, I'm mourning the loss of Usma and she offers me specific mysteries that mean I can never quite be sure when the grieving process has done its thing.

James, for whom I delivered my last eulogy, humbled me in my inability to perceive how much his death fucked me up, and how unwise I remained. So I'm now cautious when it comes to Usma.

A Caution on Privacy

Usma is my dog, in the sense that we accompanied each other, as humans and dogs do. But not in the property sense. She belonged to, and the person most important in the world in her opinion was, Ale, my former partner. She was already an extention of Ale's inner world when I met her and although we bonded quickly she remained forever and always, Ale's biggest fan.

As such, you know there's reflections I have on her death that would likely be of some value for anybody to hear, whether for inspiration or validation, but I won't because it's a private matter, pertaining not just to my private life, but Ale's too. 

There's a greed too, a simple desire to keep cherished memories to myself, as, as with all grief, the pain I feel at loss is a function of wealth, the pain you don't feel at my dog's passing is a function of your relative poverty. 

The people at a funeral that care more about you than the deceased, do so because they never had what you lost in the deceased. That's the deal, and you know I don't feel particularly compelled to share memories that belong to myself alone, or more frequently between Ale and I.

And I've also been callous in the past writing about James. I've never been raked over the coals for my solipsism, more a dawning self-awareness that just because I felt alone in my prolonged grief and incompetence at coming to terms with his death, didn't mean I was alone, just more likely, I had the biggest mouth.

But I'll share as much as I feel both good about, and is useful so as not to deliberately waste your time. 

Reason as Impediment

My friend John has a construct that I believe he calls 'Rational Man' very similar to Behavioural Economics founder Richard Thaler's 'Homo Economicus' in that it describes a mass of people who likely do not exist. People who do what is reasonable and rational all the time.

Generally people who put stock in 'Rational Man' particularly in their design principles, design an engine of their own frustration with the world. Notionally they do this because they discount irrationality, a part of which - the relevant part to this post - is not treating emotions as data, and building them into your model.

This is my main takeaway from Alain De Botton's pop-interpretation of Stoicism in his 'Consolations of Philosophy' BBC miniseries, where he rode shotgun with a London Van driver who experienced road rage daily at London's variagated drivers. De Botton aserted, that from the perspective of Stoic philosophers, if you carried the expectation that today was the day that everyone in London (and/or the world) became proper, competent, considerate drivers in the face of all the data to the contrary, then it is you, not the shitty drivers that frustrate you when they merge without indicating or do a 3-point turn rather than detour a single block, or park outside the lines, or talk on their phones while driving, steer with their knees, check their socials at traffic lights, exceed the speed limit, fail to exceed the speed limit, drive under the speed limit, drive in a hat etc. etc. It is in fact you who are irrational, for not observing empirically what your fellow humans are.

Rational analysis can be a defense mechanism against painful emotions. Instead of simply feeling the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the despair etc. you instead try to understand it. The moment it crops up you internally say 'that's interesting, lets try and analyse where that came from and how to fix it.'

Given who I am, I'm almost certainly prone to this, and mindfulness techniques are a boon to put me in touch with my emotions, experiencing them in the body, observing them as I feel them rather than understanding them. Otherwise, I'm not a huge fan of mindfulness.

But to a degree, I am helpless in the face of analytics, I try to adopt a policy of 'feelings have to be felt' and I have a luxury of minimal contact hours where I might have to function in a manner that doesn't center my emotions such that I hijack the social program. I can grieve largely and sufficiently in private.

So I want to assure you that's what I've been doing, even prior to Usma's death. A general approach, and since Usma's death this manifests in listening to the songs that come into my head motivated by the emotions I feel. I do not look away, and I don't try to shove those feelings down. I try to get the fuck out of their way so they can come out.

There's still a bunch of wishing though, feeling and expressing emotion I have found means that they don't repeat on me. I have done much grieving for Usma, but no ruminating. What I do wish for however, is that I could just get them all out, like if one feeling just cascaded into the next, instead I just have episodes here and there, they come up and kind of break off and I know a part remains that will have to be felt later.

In that breaking moment, that's where analysis tends to begin on my part, as I contemplate what the feelings mean, how I am changed having felt them. Again, this can leave me wishing for more, like that I could just complete the grief metamorphosis.

Where I think I feel I'm at

Today it occurred to me, that the nature of my grief in this case feels something like this:

All there is to say is "thankyou" but the thankee is gone now, so I can't.

What I need to feel, is her absence and come to terms with it, complicated by being separated by half a planet for 3 years.

I also know what Usma represented to me symbolically, well it's multiple things, but the one I miss that is particularly resonant with her death, was coming back to life, as in liveliness, vivacity. I met Usma while grieving, a big cumulative ball of grief that included the loss of two of my dearest friends under very different circumstances (suicide and ostracism) and the death of the family dog of 15 years, the last 6 or so of which I was her main companion. 

I just hadn't bridged that experience I was conscious of, which was getting attached to another dog. I'd been through it before, but in my head was the fact that dog's only live so long, and I'd had Bess for almost half my life by the time she died. I'd let maths get into my head, realising that every dog onward would be in my life for smaller and smaller fractions.

I needed a girl to shove me across that stalling though, and Ale brought with her Usma and we quickly fell in love. Much quicker than Ale who took like a half dozen walks compared to Usma's two.

It was all very delightful very quickly. 

For the moment though, appreciation comes with pain.

A Vision of Running

So today I was walking past the vet clinic where Bess my longest serving companion, spent most of her last week of life. Her kidneys suddenly and catastrophically failed, but in a manner somewhat ideal she was able to be kept alive on IV until the whole family could assemble, bring her home and we could all be there to euthanise the beloved family dog.

Such a walk I would have done over a hundred times since Bess died, but it resonates once again as a bitter-sweet memory because of Usma's recent death. I looked at the curve where the heel of my hand meets the wrist and where I have a particularly pronounced scar from where Usma buried her tooth in my flesh when I picked her up after she was hit by a car.

I would already have recounted in that microcosm of helplessness post, that when she bit me all I thought at the time was 'good' because it meant she was most certainly alive. Because Mexico has a rabies protocol that bite turned out to be super debilitating in the form of applying yellow goop to it every day for a fortnight while it healed up without any bandages or anything.

Anyway, I'd never made the connection before, but...look to this day I remain somewhat of a fantasist. I have a strong visual sketchpad, music often evokes powerful imagery in my minds eye and from time immemorial I have always found it easy to superimpose what I see in my minds eye over my actual vision.  

In my teens and early twenties though, I was often daydreaming fantasies of a megalomaniacal nature no doubt a response to coming of age during the War On Terror and instead of the fantasist response of assuming comforting conspiracy theories to explain away the confronting incompetence of world leaders and subsequent all-of-society, I used to imagine just basically being powerful and in charge.

I was also almost certainly, heavily effected by Frank Herbert's Dune series. All nerdy stuff, and nothing that came close to preventing me from inhabiting a mundane existence. But as say, a rooftop amateur sniper doesn't appreciate, you can't just exercise power and not think all of societies institutions won't come crashing down on you. 

This is why people can't easily stand up to say, organised crime, even if you aren't afraid they go after your family. 

Without contextualising the whole post-hoc rationale of the vision, running around as a youth (training for cross country) I had recurring visions of running through streets carrying a severely injured lover. Alternately, and even more fantastic and self-aggrandizing visions of carrying a lover in my arms after I had been shot or otherwise injured. 

And today I was just remembering running with Usma in my arms, freaked out, Usma in shock, arm bleeding, Ale talking to me but not registering what she was saying, the driver stopping to ask if the dog was okay and trying to reassure them without wasting any time on them, and just making our way half a block to the vets.

I don't believe in 'manifesting' I think in most cases that's more a case of confirmation bias and predicting the obvious, like if you are an attractive young woman people will give you free shit because they either want to have sex with you, or because they are hoping you will tell them a way to have people give them free shit because they want to have sex with you.

This was more, exactly what processing grief means in terms of updating your schema. I didn't recognise that I was living a recurring fantasy because a) Usma was a cute little dog and not a woman like Ale and b) it wasn't a fantasy it was a nightmare (particularly given that Usma's injury was my fault), and c) Usma being dead likely relieved my anxieties that she will die enough to look at that moment of personal history where I was extremely worried that she was going to die.

I started to cry, mourning finally the lost sense of clarity and purpose that I had in that desperate moment, that was chronologically buried by the immediate guilt and self-loathing I felt once Usma was in the vets hands, but that partitioning the sequence of events, from the moment I scooped up our squealing piglet from the road, supporting her neck and spine and getting bitten almost to the bone for it and that desperate rush to the vets to get painkillers into her, I'd passed a test I'd long been desperate to pass, and didn't even notice it happening.

Don't Mistake the Banal for the Profound

In the last eulogy I delivered, going by memory, though I have roughly what I said written down somewhere, it wasn't a jazz-eulogy; I'm pretty sure I said something like 'just as a part of me has died with James, a part of James lives with me' which I feel is in danger of being construed as profound, whereas if you reflect on it as much as I have, it's simply acknowledging something quite banal.

This is how relationships work, they are built on resonance, commonalities resonate more so in the presence of one another. When someone dies, the resonance stops, but what resonated for you, still exists. This is as mystical as the cables on a suspension bridge, or if you will, a guitar string. They can resonate by having a wind blow, or being left on top of a speaker. If some external force doesn't act upon them, then if you want to make the noise you have to exert the energy yourself.

Smash the body of a guitar or snap a suspension bridge cable, it won't resonate at all, which is death in this metaphor. Specifically the brain death, hence you can lose your resonance with living loved ones due to conditions like dementia, while still feeling great sentimental attachment to their living remains.

So, it's banally true also of Usma, that a piece of me died with her, and a piece of her lives with me.

It becomes more true in this case, because of an inside joke between Ale and I, that was our characterisation of Usma. Near as I can recollect, it began with Usma following Ale's lunch to her work desk. Ale told Usma "It's not for puppies/peritas" and I, as would come to be the notation of Usma's voice remarked "sOy gEntE" ["I'm people"] which became the beginning of Usma's long running scams to get fed people food, most typically involving variations of "[Insert fOOd] InspEctOr..." but also got laughs when the illusion was broken by having Usma ask Ale "cOmO sE dIcE..." ["hOw dO yOU sAy..."] which would prompt Ale to scold Usma "Usma you speak Spanish you don't ask how to say things in Spanish!"

Anyway, I'll spare you more elaboration, because, well, greed, but also an appreciation that without loving attachment to this particular dog, I'm sure the gag gets tedious quickly.

But Ale paid me the huge compliment of, upon returning from a day trip to the nearby lake-side resort town that she went on with Usma while I stayed home, that she had thought 'Usma is really quiet today' and not referring to her penchant for barking at dog-drama bullshit, but the conspicuous absence of the illusion of Usma's personality, before remembering that it's an illusion.

And that persona, was me, and Ale very quickly (instantly) learned the persona herself, the only difference being the differences between Ale's voice and mine. But it's not like you can project any personality onto any dog and effect the same willing suspension of disbelief. It needs to comply with our sense of animism, it needs to be congruent with the dog's stable personality traits, her behaviour, it requires a cognitive empathy with that particular dog's-eye-view of the world. It's not arbitrary.

Just so, Ale created Doki's voice on a whim, but not arbitrarily. It was my birthday, and at that point Doki wasn't allowed on the bed, he came in in the mornings after our housemate left for work and typically napped on either my backback, any dirty laundry I'd left on the floor, or the couch until I got up. Ale picked up Doki and said 'happybirthdaytohm' (as the nomenclature for Doki's written voice became) and it was perfect straight up.

If you could hear, and can't synesthetically imagine from the nomenclature what the dog voices sound like, you wouldn't find them particularly original. They no doubt share a pedigree with all cartoon dog voices ever, but they were distinct enough to describe the distinct personalities of the dogs.

Now, with Usma dead, she can talk from beyond the grave so long as I am alive. Just in my voice for Usma, not her own, which was a dog's voice, expressed as barks, growls, whines, shrieks and whimpers. 

Just days before learning of her death, I'd been feeling sadness and longing, reflecting on the dramatic reactions Usma produced when either of her people returned home after she'd been left there. There are few people whose day I earnestly want to hear about. This is largely based on the modal ability at storytelling. Let me take it further, there are few people whose wedding or trip of a lifetime I want to hear about, generally because most people in my experience, assume something rare to be intrinsically interesting, and don't realise that it is possible to make describing a cabbage as interesting as coming under mortar fire, and coming under mortar fire as interesting as describing a cabbage.

Part of my motivation to partner up with Ale and make a go of it, was because Ale is interesting to me even when she talks about something I profoundly disagree with. 

Ale aside though, I was recently reflecting that Usma was someone, that earnestly I always wanted to hear all about her day, even though what she was saying, not in our persona's voice for her, but her own voice "you were gone and now you're back and I didn't know if you would be back but you're back but you were gone."

Of course, there's a general conversational principle of "avoid the middle" that Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts as, for example, that if you are on a University Campus and you can't talk to the world's leading expert in a field, the next person you want to talk to is the janitor, not an undergrad.

Dog's of pretty much any stripe, are always for me, going to trump any human who lacks conversational skill. 

The above is a photo I took of Bess, and a friend, and I took it at the time because it was salient that my two favourite conversation partners were together and perfectly illustrated this principle. Within six months of taking this photo I lost both, so I'm really glad I have it, and though Ale and I still communicate, and obviously have been communicating with the death of Usma, we don't really converse and furthermore, Usma was a point of connection between us that is now gone, which is why grief isn't really discreet.

Again, the loss of beloved interlocutors echoes, rhymes in this present moment. Usma is the first dog I loved after Bess. I mean I loved Millie, my brother's dog whom I'd regularly dogsit, but she was alive before Bess died, and also it's one of those rare instances where English lacks sufficient vocabulary, with Millie it was Storge, familial love, Bess and Usma was Ludus, playful-joyous love.

But I owe a debt of appreciation to Millie as well right now, a kind of reverse-bringing-other-shit-up that any particular bereavement could do. When I left last time to go to Mexico, I had no idea I was saying goodbye to Millie forever. She got sick and died, not knowing what had happened to me, a member of her extended family and caregiver.

That was a new and unpleasant experience for me, an experience that beds-shit-down in the emotional wake of Usma's demise. 

"But you know I don't care. What I care about is to see you again. And to dance that song

From the record that we love so much, so much, so much..." ~ Tijuana Makes Me Happy, Nortec Collective.

A motivation in life was to somehow make my way back to Usma again, to validate her faith in humanity. But upon my departure from Mexico, I knew it was a distinct appreciable possibility, that I wouldn't get that chance. There was a world of possibilities, estrangement from Ale, dog attack, car accident, dognapping, all the myriad health issues that shorten dog's lifespans, getting deported and banned from re-entry, my own death.

I know in part my muted response, the resilience of my composure, to news of Usma's death and confirmation of this undesired reality, is in part because I had to grieve Usma several times. Ale knows and she's the only one who really gets to know. From my first return to Australia, to our first relationship crisis, to our separation, to the uncertainty of my departure date, to my departure, to our estrangement. 

Every time was heartbreaking, and every time I got to see her again was appreciated wholeheartedly.

Devastation

'If I die while I have a pet, let my animal see my dead body, please. They understand death and seeing me dead will allow them to mourn, but if I just never show up one day they’ll think I abandoned them. I know what it feels like to be abandoned and I never want anyone to feel that way, especially my dog.' ~ attributed to Sir David Attenborough, I can't source it.

It was upsetting to read this, but no-less true. What a privilege it is to be present when your dog dies, so they die with your living scent on their brain. Though sick dogs having no real stance or appreciation for euthanasia do seem to seek out some dog-privacy, liking their own death like they like their bones, solo. 

I feel crushing guilt that I abandoned Usma. Those friends I have that I was able to talk to, in the messy mucassy hours of fresh grief console me that my guilt isn't warranted, sharing my understanding that I didn't deliberately or maliciously abandon Usma (and Doki, and Millie) it was the collateral cost of a failed relationship, compounded by immigration status.

I just don't view "Abandonment" as a legal term like like Murder, distinct from Manslaughter by having the qualities of mens rea and malice aforethought and whatever else. It certainly makes no difference to a dog.

There psychology is evolved to excel at being a pack animal from the plains, with a unique interspecies capacity among mammals to induce oxytocin based bonding through eye-gazing with a human. We are their pack, and I know Usma, she never understood why we would ever split up the pack.

There is a greater meditation there about responsibility that I simply haven't done yet. I take responsibility, given the facts, there was nothing else I could do, certainly was willing to do, to exchange for staying in her life. Equally, Usma was not taking any bargain where she kept me and was abandoned by Ale. 

That was the breakup, that none of our pack got what we wanted and hoped for, was both the cause and the outcome.

Usma would have got new adventures, new joys, new people, new pack members as well. I'm sure also, there is a confused, uninformed form of mourning an abandoned dog goes through too. 

When I started living seperately, and just visited Usma, dogsat her, it wasn't the same as when I went to the shops without her or the gym, even when she came to visit me. She started greeting me like Ale. An experience I both loved and hated. 

The qualitative difference, indicated that Usma felt my absences, and felt them more when they grew longer. It was plain to the naked eye, that my moving out distressed her, that she didn't understand. 

After I last saw her, staring through a doorway as my Uber pulled away, she went through something. 

Whatever that something was for her, it is its own particular experience of devestation for me.

But I would not wish it away at the cost of not ever being her beloved person. 

I think it's under circumstances like this, which is to say, unideal deaths which everyone who gets a sufficient shot at life, is going to experience be it first-hand, second-hand or third hand; that the resilience model of grief truly shines, and the 'stages of grief' model fails. 

It happens that people die alone and terrified, deprived of a chance to say the things and hear the things that really matter to them. What those who survive are left with, is just a fact they can contemplate, and yeah accept rather than deny. 

But accepting need not translate into any kind of peace, I feel you simply have to function in light of that accepted fact.

Though I have no children of my own, and I'll acknowledge that tedium to a greater extent later, I am convinced by Dr. Gordon Livingston, that the primary responsibility of a parent to a child, is to model for them that it is possible to be happy in an imperfect world. And I am anxious to clarify, even if Dr Livingston doesn't, that to demonstrate the possibility of happiness does not mean it's necessary to achieve a state of static happiness, but to be happy when one can, with the knowledge that we do not live in the best of all conceivable worlds. 

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times*, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”

― Voltaire, Candide 

*My ability to discuss suicide candidly myself, including suicidal ideation, has inspired some to express their concerns for me, and attempt a kind of intervention. As such, I am in turn anxious to convey to people that I have never seriously contemplated suicide, much as while I have speculated on whether I would suck a man's dick sooner than fight him in prison, I have never seriously considered blowing a guy.  

Stuck in the Middle With You

With some bitter irony, I became closest to Usma during her recovery from the broken hip. We didn't like leaving her alone, and I having less friends, less clubs, less commitments was the natural choice as dog sitter.

I don't think dog bones heal any faster than human bones, around 6 weeks or something, but unlike a human with a broken hip, dogs figure out ways to compensate and walk around with broken hips sometimes immediately after a car hits them. 

Our landlord and neighbour Gina gave us some spare pet blankets, and by around the 3 week mark, Usma could be experienced walking hurriedly from one dog bed setup to the next dog bed setup around our apartment so she could keep an eye on whoever was there. It was cute, endearing and ridiculous.

We grew close then and never really separated emotionally. 

When I got Covid in Mexico, I had only one day of feeling under the weather, after that, the only symptom I ever experienced was not respiratory but the loss of smell which lasted 12 days. I have a spreadsheet somewhere where I tracked it. Each morning I would test for the return of my smell by picking up Usma and sniffing her.

The foolish thing I did at that time was never get a test for Covid, which later as Mexico changed its Covid mandates and opened night spots up to people who could either prove they'd gotten a vaccine or had Covid, Ale and I were paperless.

Similarly, in the years I was in Mexico, in hindsight I suspect I had symptoms of depression. Likely sub-clinical depression, but definitely something that impeded me from functioning and that was very likely environmental as upon returning to Australia I very quickly got back into the workforce, finding motivation easily to get shit done.

I feel I am too far removed from the experience I was having, to pursue a legitimate post-hoc diagnosis. I missed my opportunity to obtain an opinion I could have any confidence in.

In Mexico I was overwhelmed, and what eventually happened by the end of Ale and my relationship and cohabitation, was that my self-soothing routines that staved off these undiagnosed and hence speculative symptoms, expanded to take up my whole day. 

Again, occasionally I'd get work, commissions and contracts here and there, but very minimal and I'd function fine doing good work.

And here's what is difficult to describe. It was a really difficult time, stagnating like that while my relationship slowly suffocated. It was also, the best time of my life on a consistent basis. The two were occurring simultaneously, coincident, and Usma was there for it all.

I ruminated on the perplexing way that from my mid-20s to my mid-30s I suddenly found it impossible to get a relationship going, but my work (as opposed to wealth strategy) was ideal, doing my art and financing it with a call centre job, while my parents heavily subsidized this lifestyle by letting me live in their house while they were off overseas.

Then I found the relationship at long last, and between a global pandemic and a lack of citizenship, now I didn't have the income by which to plan out a future, though I had substantial savings, when you live off them you have to keep saving them.

I also ruminated on the potentially debilitating effect appreciation was having on my life. I have the language now, but even the stuff I could articulate, I struggled to talk to Ale about. 

The world we live in is driven by anxiety, the average person functions through a lack of perspective in order to motivate participation in the economy. Most people feel a sense of urgency, a sense of deprivation etc. via this anxiety near as I can guess.

I was trying to describe to a friend, the general nature of the "real talk" parents give their children to initiate them into adulthood. For example, recently watching a review by Mark Kermode of the screen adaptation of Camus' "The Outsider" Kermode characterised existentialism as adolescent, books like "The Outsider" something teens get into, but you have to grow up some time.

The Onion has an article baring the headling "Free-Spirited Man told to grow up and stop being happy."

I was describing it to my friend, as being a talk that takes the archetypal form of "look son/cupcake, we know for all your life we've been showing you stories and teaching you the importance of standing up to bullies, but the truth is, we don't. Life is all about appeasing bullies in order to survive, they are much much stronger and much much more important than we'd have children believe."

But, while you may disagree with my characterisation of the diversion referred to in lay terminology as "life in the real world" and more technically/specifically the modern economic project, it's not very controversial to point out that what the vast majority of people do with the vast majority of their lives, is not sustainable. Most of what we produce is waste, waste that will be recycled by ecology in a time frame that doesn't sync with the continuation of human society. 

The "real talk" that basically consists of telling people to get in the habit of doing what everyone else is doing, is fake, the real real talk is that we can't keep doing what most people have been doing for very recent history, and actually, most everybody will have to make quite drastic changes, the longer we drag our feet in changing.

But on the microscale, having the perspective of the real-real talk is debilitating. People who produce less waste, are given less food clothing and shelter, less resources, less opportunities.

Most people only snap out of the sensitivity (doing what everyone else is doing) driven habits (doing what you've always done) when berieved. Distant relatives, functional strangers, articulate inanely that death "really puts things in perspective" but in my experience, for most people this perspective is fleeting, they experience life as a series of discreet incidents not incidents that form a greater context.

The silt settles for a while and the waters become clear when the shock of a death disrupts them, but in two to six weeks they can get back to spiking their own cortisol over shit that literally doesn't matter, like traffic congestion.

I've observed that, but it is not my own experience. The cortisol never came back, particularly after James' death, to behave in a way that didn't get me called on in class when I hadn't done my homework. In the bigger picture, it is an adherence to the principle that "things not worth doing are not worth doing well." An antithetical notion to cultures like Japan and maybe South Korea, cultures that are slowly going extinct while simultaneously being fetishized by outsiders.

When my mother called to check in on me, during those years of stagnation, she would ask me a question repeatedly from a place of worry, that I found hard to comprehend "are you getting your needs met?" I think in the manner intended, there was much to my mum's question, in the manner unintended though, a large part of the paradox of having the best years of my life in a bad situation, was because the answer was 'yes' and a big part of that, was the heroic companionship of Usma (and Doki).

I would consciously marvel, and still do, that to some degree, a dog is just a bag of organs on legs, and yet they can evoke such meaning, love and happiness. The perspective made salient by James' death, and exemplified by dogs, is seeing intrinsic worth. I suspect in part James' struggle, though complex and not understood by me, had a contribution of unjust expectations. When he died it hit home hard, my own luxurious position of not needing James to be anything or do anything, just to be. 

As Gabor Mate pointed out, before he became known to US markets and the podcast circuit, human value is not discovered or created but intrinsic. Dogs' achievements are hard to quantify or weigh, those that are not strays or wild, are overwhelmingly employed as companions, the health benefits can be measured, their union is relatively week. Dogs I suspect, routinely extend the lifespan and expand the quality of life for their people, at the cost of their own, particularly in a 21st century, largely post-growth economy, where people are routinely both asset poor, cash poor and time poor and members of the precariat.

As such, for everything that was bad about the situation, I woke up to a beautiful woman, in Mexico, with pups and cats and it was all quite wonderful. The major stress, was not knowing how to keep it going, but I had it and perhaps nobody else appreciated it as much as I, bar Usma. Usma had it too.

She was fully attuned to Ale, but she was also apart from Ale. Usma and me, we were in sync. what I went through in those years, we went through together. I lost my fellow traveller.

Ring Theory, A Response

"Ring theory" regards manners, it is a heuristic. When I first came across it, it appealed to an intuitive sense, I have even shared it or explained it to others, and almost certainly written about it on this blog. 

I no longer agree with it, I think it a flawed model though it could still be a nice idea. For example, from the linked article:

"Susan Silk gives the perfect example in the article:" ~ anonymous author of content on speakinggrief.org

This may be one of the more bizarre things I've ever quoted, being the framing sentence that leads in to a quoted example. The flaw is that ring theory's creators do give a perfect example:

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.” “It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”

Now, the original article is behind a pay wall, even though it is not news anymore. I recall it, but can't rely upon, having another perfect example where the concentric circles of ring theory were drawn up such that there was terminally ill patient, patient's husband and work colleague, where the work colleague had an emotional breakdown over the impending death of the patient in front of the husband who supported and comforted her.

This is a perfect contravension of the "support in, dump out" heuristic that makes up ring theory, based on the heirarchical value of closeness.

When James died, it was only about a fortnight prior to the murder of Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon. I first heard the news, from one of Eurydice's friends and fellow comedians. Somebody who had actually seen her act, knew her personally, knew her boyfriend (whom I'd met at my friend's gigs, but never since). As such, I had both direct experience of a very private constellation of grief, and indirect experience of a massive, public collective meltdown sparked by a high profile death with a tangential single point of contact that amounted to DM thread where my friend and I compared some notes, once.

That note was the spanner in Ring Theory for me at least. It was an observation that people's reactions, particularly devastation in the face of grief was not a function of emotional closeness and investment in the person at the centre, but a function of how much it resonates with their own unresolved shit.

Again, the resilience model of grief, a mere observation that grief impacts people's ability to function differently, proves itself to me, as superior to both the 5 stages of grief model, and ring theory.

Consider these imperfect examples where ring theory falls apart:

A military veteran's son dies in a drink driving accident the son was responsible for. For the veteran this personal tragedy is but the latest brush with death he must process, for his son's school peers, it is their first real confrontation with their own mortality, at the public memorial several of the son's peers are frankly, losing their minds and badly in need of support due to their inexperience with grief. The bereft father is actually perfectly positioned to offer such support, the egocentrism of youth is by no means going to be the worst thing that happens to him, given the tragic loss of his son itself. His grief cannot be made worse by the incompetence and inexperience and myopia of youth. It can be made better, by his doing something incredibly valuable for his son's friends, even though he will think of his son every day for the rest of his life, and these young people won't until their next brush with mortality, where remembering the loss of their friend they haven't thought about in years might help them, and help them help others. 

Or:

A divorced dad's new partner dies of a sudden brain aneurism. His children had only met her a handful of times as she generally mostly stayed over when the kids were with his mother. The dad's support network rallies, as the person they know closest to the assumed "center" of the ring in ring theory. The thing is he is aware that he can luxuriously indulge his grief by offloading his parental responsibilities for a couple of months, but the benefit to him is outweighed by the cost to his own children.

Or:

Larry and Susie are both close friends of Marty, whose mother has recently died. They see each other for the first time since hearing the news about Mrs Funkhouser. Susie waits for Larry to offer her his condolences while Larry waits for Susie to offer him her condolences. A petty argument ensues.

 Ring Theory I suspect, is precisely wrong moreso than it is approximately right. The fact is that many funerals are attended by dozens, up to hundreds of people. Eurydice's example is one where the media might put a photo of candles and flowers left in the park where she was violently murdered by a man, and splash a headline like "Nation grieves/mourns" and there may be an argument to say the generalisation is fair and that the resemblance to grief or mourning or bereavement is near enough, but I would specifically describe what most people were processing was a story they heard.

What happened to so many people, was that they heard something and had an emotional response. They didn't 'lose' Eurydice because far more people were effected by the story than had ever known she existed. Who they imagined Eurydice to be, reminded them of either themselves or someone they cared about. It reminded them of personal experiences they had banked that were on some level unresolved. It may have even been a story, that brought up other stories that had effected them.

An obvious example being women, just women in general were massively effected by the story of Eurydice's death and I personally witnessed a variety of responses from women in my life that ranged from a mix of stoic realism coupled with frustration and alienation from fellow women, to very public meltdowns that played directly into the negative stereotype of hysteria, behaviour that amounted to women taking to social media and attacking every man they knew.

And so, even if, as a public event surrounding a private grief, we can apply ring theory by saying in terms of identification and relatability, women are closer to the centre of the circle than men, you are then going to get the clunkiness of group identities that not only belie the heterogeneity of women, but are not easily comparible - like older vs younger women, who is on a closer ring? Younger women that suffer from the fear of male violence as they enter sexual maturity, or older women who have suffered and survived male violence reexperiencing it psychology in the wake of this event?

Then the collision of public and private - who is on the more inner ring? The boyfriend of Eurydice or a young woman who is hesitant to pursue their passion for stand up comedy because they feel unsafe?

I would not throw out the ring theory of grief, but I would give it a postmodern treatment, deconstructing the assumptions by examining what power structures they preserve. 

As conceptualised in the original article and repeated by the various websites and blogs that distributed the meme - the structure of the concentric rings is predicated on familial values, privileging direct family members over extended family members, friends over colleagues, colleagues over strangers.

Charitably noticing that no version of the ring theory I've seen, explicitly maps out such a heirarchy, rather implying it should be intuitive, unfortunately I don't think intuitions are up to the task. It is all too often taboo and impolite to mention that someone is actually estranged from their partner or spouse, and it is all too easy to overlook that the partner of a friend attending a funeral, based on their personal history and not the closeness of their relationship to the deceased, may need far more support than the person who knew the deceased.

I would propose that the rings should be arranged fragile in, resilient out. An elderly woman may be the most impacted by the death of her husband, but in many cases it is plausible that the couples children will need more support from their mother, than the mother will need from her children. (Especially with the recent transfers of wealth from young to old, meaning a widower who vacates the master bedroom for her precariate children to stay there while she moves to the guest room may be providing both emotional and practical support to adult children who badly need it).

What does all this have to do with Usma? It's almost certainly the case that Ale is more adversely affected by Usma's death than I am. They were much closer to the point of sharing one heart. But it's also the recognition that I am largely resilient, and while there is much to process, the support I have needed and need going forward in order to feel the feels and function, is not in proportion to how much I love Usma and how much I regret her loss. 

I can lean on the benefits, the luxuries I've had to grieve heavily the loss of grandparents, friends, prior dogs, relationships etc. such that there were many feelings familiar to me, that didn't require processing or understanding, that I saw coming and as such have not been thrown into disarray by. 

I have been able, for example to attend my classes and support my student peers through their anxieties and stresses of having to deliver a training session, when they unlike me, have not lost a precious little dog. I am not doing a disservice to myself, by not disclosing my private grief and (as I feel would be the case) hijacking the emotional resources of our student community. Rather enjoying the dividends of being able to function in such circumstances and feeling I have done no injustice to myself or to Usma.

Focus

When everything I'm feeling makes it hard to understand

That what, what I need to miss

It's what I need to miss... is you ~ The Eels, Going to Your Funeral Part 1.

I've recently become aware that not everyone experiences life as a continuum. They appear to consciously experience life as a series of discrete events, apparently disconnected. These people likely get tremendous value out of sitting down with a therapist and being coached to connect the dots and see patterns.

People tell me, and I experience, a struggle with abandoning context, to just "get to the point" instead of providing the context, contextualising the context and contextualing my contextualising of the context and then giving a few dozen examples to assure you and myself that the point is robust, founded, coherent.

Usma's death is part of a continuum of mortality, it's something else I loved and lost. Her death brings up not just the loss of Usma, but the loss of Doki who is still alive, but in a different town, with a different family and no clear path back to reunion and only at most one or two years younger than Usma. The loss of what was my home, much autonomy, dignity, a relationship...

This cascades in turn, into bringing up other dogs lost, friends lost, family lost. Life lost, time lost.

These I think are the breakdowns we can see. The real breakdowns in ability to function, the people who lose themselves to grief. When it cascades. A reliable predictor, is when what people lose in death, is not just the person of the deceased, but the opportunity to resolve some tension, the opportunity to hear sorry or say sorry.

I have been told by someone, that the death of their elderly, very sickly mother, was the greatest tragedy of their lives. The very antithesis of the Zen story, where a family asks a monk to write them a scroll to hang in their shrine, and the monk writes "The Father dies, the son dies, the grandson dies" and the family are all like "what the fuck is this?" and the monk reassures them "this is a very auspicious wish, for it is the right order of things, any family that faces death in this order is very blessed." or something.

The way an ill, elderly person dying can be a tragedy, is if there was that much opportunity while they were alive to have an honest conversation about what was done and what was said, and everyone just put it off because it was too uncomfortable to stop pretending, and then one managed to run out the clock.

In some ways, Usma's death is tragic. For one I wanted to see her again, dogs in my experience generally adhere to "what have you done for me lately" so while I think she'd remember the smell of me, she'd be less excited to see me again after these years than Ale who just went to the shops. She also feels a little young, though we can't know her exact age she was adopted off the streets.

But that cascading effect her death brings, of bringing up all the other deaths, the losses, the self-reflection. Even though it doesn't result in breakdown, I've simply had too many breakdowns over James and B. and I mourned Bess when Bess died, and Lil when Lil died and Millie when Millie died. 

I still relate to the Eels' lyric above. My emotional regulation and tendencies to intellectualise, despite all the progress in emotional competence I've made, mean that I can forget that what I miss, what I need to miss, is Usma.

That there's an acceptable, but fundamental injustice to the nature of this world, that I could never express what I feel for Usma, because you know, she's a little dog. There are many like her, but she was mine.  

Acknowledging Tedious People

If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe as much as half the population are just not dog people. Those people are to be readily expected to exist and aren't going to get someone being upset by the death of a dog like people who don't get sports don't understand that people can feel emotions over the outcome of a game.

I feel a dog person is far more likely to be anti-cat than the reverse, and frankly I haven't come across any chauvinistic cat owners that might say 'good, that's one less of them' whereas the reverse phenomena of chauvinistic dog preferers have oft stated an abject hatred of cats to the point of dancing on their graves.

The truly tedious people are the ones who do not understand the algebra and subsequently will remark, almost with a sense of pride or superiority 'it's just a dog...' making a comparison to typically, some person they lost, some person your grief inconveniences or the anxieties they feel about their own children.

In many ways they have answered their own puzzlement astutely. People grieve dogs hard because they are 'just a dog' which is to say remarkably uncomplicated compared to the people in our lives and it is rare, if not pathological to feel ambivalent about a dog.

Let me say for the benefit of the anxieties of these tedious people who help none in these situations with their skewed perspectives: yes, your kids are objectively more important than my dog. They are your kids though, and I don't like them as much as my dog. In the rock-paper-scissors of it, as a believer in the basic decency of humanity, I would sacrifice my own life to save your children. What I wouldn't sacrifice however, is my dog for your children. Frankly if you can't control your children in the presence of dogs, or keep them on a leash and they get bit, I think it is your kids who should be put down, I don't know what the answer is to 21st century parenting's shortfalls, but it feels like a good place to start.

A Thought Experiment

You've struggled with God all your life, or maybe you've looked up at the stars and wondered if we are truly alone in this universe, maybe you just seek answers to deep existential questions like 'if life is absurd why do I persist in living?' or 'what does the end of Inception mean?' 

Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer and Apu go to the first Kwik-E-Mart and it is at the end of a long journey on top of a mountain presumably somewhere in the Himilayas?

Well picture yourself as Moses climbing mount Sinai, or Musashi fighting his way through Japanese swordmasters, or a Space explorer flying to a habitable exoplanet in a distant solar system in search of Alien intelligence, or Misty Copeland having a transcendent moment dancing solo and interfacing with reality itself, or just on your deathbed having visions of a tunnel of light as all your neurons fire off before going dark and...

Tell me if you can think of something better to meet at the end of these journeys than this:

sourced here.

I don't know if you'll agree with me, like you'd be slapping your own head thinking 'duh!' right now, but I do think you'll struggle to imagine a better outcome. I also think (unless you are one of those, not so much cat-person as carpet-person or couch-person, in which case you might think it obvious that who someone would want to meet is Martha Stewart for whom I'd hope you find it super easy to imagine how increadibly disappointing and disheartening that would be for a plurality of your fellow humans) you'll find it easy to make your own sense of discovering that Yoda is a warm dog.

I'm not anti-SETI and I appreciate those who need a more intelligible wisdom tradition to get through the long dark night of the soul, but I'd emphasize that our best friend has a pretty special and unique place in human history for a reason. 

Now, I probably need to specify, this dog you meet, isn't a talking dog, nor a magic dog. It's just a friendly dog that likes pats and play. It's vocation is the same as the majority of working dogs - companionship. It is there to adopt you and be adopted by you. It's survival is dependent on clicking, on meshing, on 'getting' you and its pretty damn good at it. 

It has no wisdom to confer beyond its lived example, its intelligence caps out at somewhere near a human 5 year old, it has to win you over despite its breath, its somewhat vapid interests, its taste in food, its penchant for rolling in stinky shit, the craps it lays and its habit of licking its own genitals and your face.

Yet the covenant that homo sapiens has with canis familiaris is I think one of the most wonderful things about the universe, and we have it, what better thing could we hope to find - plausibly some kind of interlocuter, some perspective other than the human condition. But I think it will be a struggle for life to ever experience itself in a better way than that of man and domesticated dog.

And it's so much better if, while you have it, you do not take it for granted:

from the wikipedia page "human-canine bond" Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

Gracias Usma. Descansar mi amor.