Accidental Historian

Because I Can't Leave Well Enough Alone...

If I’m going to stop doing this, at the very least I don’t want to leave on a note of, “Here’s a shitty post and because I wrote this shitty post I’ve decided to stop writing posts altogether.”  That’s just friggin’ sad, really.  And it kinda reeks of sour grapes or giving up or something, so there’s that.

Anyway, there’s this shitty post.  Now, the post is, in and of itself, fairly poorly written.  Also, too, it’s not intended to just say, “Hey, look at me, I’m an asshole,” but it’s exactly the post I would have written if I were trying to do that.  So at least I’ve learned that all-important lesson.  The idea behind the post, however, isn’t something I have a problem with.  As such, I have no intention of walking it back, but I do feel the need to contextualize the point and, in contextualizing, hopefully make the point I wanted to make but without writing yet another shitty post.  Because, y’know, craftsmanship.

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One of the questions I stop and ask myself from time to time is, “Why?”  I find I tend to do things on autopilot a lot, so if I’m just doing something for the sake of doing it I occasionally re-evaluate.  This is especially important to do when I hate what I’m doing.

When I started my Online Dating series I started asking the, “Why?” question, since it’s pretty freaking obvious that I hate online dating.  This is a corollary to the larger issue that I hate dating.  So in asking, “Why the hell am I doing this online dating thing,” and getting the answer, “Because it’s the easiest way to engage in the act of dating,” the next question is, “And why am I trying to engage in the act of dating?”

That question is far more interesting, since the answer is, “Fuck if I know.”  The follow-up, then, is, “So why are you doing it?”  My standard answer is, “Because I want to stay in practice in case I ever decide to take this seriously.”

And here we have a problem.

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I like being by myself.  I’ve basically built my life around being isolated, but adjacent to humanity so that I can wander out of my isolation from time to time and say hello to the world.  One of the reasons for this is that I don’t really much like Public Me, which is a problem that has stymied me for quite some time.

Public Me is loud, obnoxious, self-serving, and tries way too fucking hard.  He’s a throwback to my old days as the Fat Kid who was trying desperately to be accepted and approved of by the rest of the world.  I don’t like him very much, but I’ve never really been able to get rid of him.  I have toned him down quite a bit, which is nice, but, again, I want him to go away.

The awkward, baffling thing here, though, is the other people seem to like Public Me.  He’s apparently funny and personable these days, and memorable in what seems to be a good way.  I can’t really go too deeply in to this as, again, I despise Public Me, so I have no idea what people see in Public Me.  I think of him as someone who tries way too hard to force jokes that don’t work and dominates conversations just because he doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.  I regard (possibly as a bit of wishful thinking) myself as someone who is easily forgotten, but I’m apparently the only one who does so.  I suspect there’s a reason for that.

Public Me spends his time at war with Private Me.

I like Private Me.  Private Me is quiet and contemplative.  Private Me can go weeks without talking to anyone outside of required interactions.  Private Me really would be forgotten in a crowd, since he’d probably show up, talk to no one, then leave having made no impression on anyone.

There are a few people in this world who have met Private Me.  He basically only comes out in one-on-one interaction with people I know well and manifests as a guy who can sit in the corner and talk about basically anything for hours on end over coffee or beers.  For the most part, though, he hangs out and watches the world.  This is the nature of being private, after all.

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Public Me and Private Me share interests and experiences.  I can’t imagine how they wouldn’t, really, since this isn’t an issue of multiple personalities or any such thing.  One of those interests, it should surprise no one, is Trickster.  The difference is that Private Me wants to study Trickster while Public Me wants to be Trickster.

Trickster, when it gets right down to it, is kind of a dick.  He is selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.  All he cares about when interacting with the world is the question, “What can I get out of this?”  If it helps someone then that’s great.  If it hurts someone that’s great, too.  What matters to Trickster is that he gets what he went out to get.

This is why I was fascinated with N.K. Jemisin’s treatment of Trickster as a young boy.  Ultimately, Trickster is immature, interacting with the world on a circumscribed level where all that matters is how everything stacks up in the win-loss column.  He’ll play fair, but change the rules.  Imagine Trickster as playing an endless game of Calvinball with the world.  Calvin is, for all intents and purposes, Trickster anyway.  Hobbes is the adult world, gaining the occasional upper hand but never actually winning because he’s always trying to win the last game or even the last minute of this game.

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I never took the whole online dating thing seriously.  It was all just a way to actually avoid dating entirely.  Basically, I was playing a game and the rules were, “Meet crazy women, use them to justify not making any sort of commitment. “  Unfortunately, from time to time I managed to run across women who didn’t understand that was the game I was playing and were actually decent human beings.

How does someone who is operating from a disingenuous position deal with someone who isn’t without causing a great deal of destruction?  The answer to that, I do believe, is, “That’s not possible.”  While I recognized that this was both a possibility and a problem, I continued to play my little game of Calvinball with complete strangers.  The only explanation for this behavior that makes a lick of sense is, “I am selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.”

I do not like thinking of myself as a person who has such qualities.  The only way to stop being an asshole is to stop being an asshole, I suppose.  So the only way I can stop that in this specific case is to stop all dating-related activity completely.  All I’m doing is using the women I meet as story fodder, after all.

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That might seem extreme, absurd, even.  But when the question, “Why?” leads to unexpected places the follow-up inevitably must be, “What do you want, instead?”  I answer that question overwhelmingly with, “To be left alone.”

It’s a mug’s game, then, if you’re the sort of woman who makes the mistake of deciding you want to date me.  Chances are good that you’ll meet Public Me.  If you, for reasons that completely escape me, decide you like Public Me, it won’t end well, since you’ll be attracted to the me that I can’t stand.  The more time you spend with Public Me the more I’ll see how far I can push before you push back or leave.  This probably seems remarkably immature.  There’s a reason for that: it’s the whole Trickster/child thing.  On one level I’ll want to push your buttons to amuse myself.  On another level I won’t know how to break it off and I’ll basically try to make sure you leave because that’s a win according to my bizarre little game of dating Calvinball.

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There’s another follow-up question that must be asked: why don’t I just get rid of/redirect Public Me?

Believe me, I’d like to.  Private Me, it shouldn’t be surprising, doesn’t do well in public.  Public Me simply manifests when the need arises and I have very little recourse in dealing with that other than saying, “I’m never going out in public again.”  When it gets right down to it, Public Me is a big ol’ defense mechanism fueled by insecurity.

Fighting that by never going outside again seems like a lousy option.  By the same token, it doesn’t seem like a lousy option, since I don’t mind being alone.  Thus I live in tension.  At the moment I simply do not know how to resolve that tension.

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A friend of mine who knows me well enough pointed towards an alternate and/or complementary explanation for my conundrum.  It basically boils down to the notion that I have a pretty long history of running afoul of manipulative and controlling women.  He also pointed out that I’ve been mostly seeking stability for the last few years and women are not at all a source of stability for me.

I find the latter part of that fascinating.  I instinctively want to avoid the former, though, since it basically sounds like an Argumentum ad Bitches Be Trippin’, and the Argument from Bitches Be Trippin’ is usually the first (and last) resort of the misogynist scoundrel.  It has a certain amount of explanatory power, however, especially when combined with the Public Me/Private Me dichotomy.

I don’t have a good history with women who don’t treat me as a child or like shit, basically.  The ones who haven’t have historically also not really wanted much of anything to do with me.  As such, this has left me with a fairly binary categorization of women as either interested in me and not worth it or uninterested in me and possibly/probably worth it.  The interested and not worth it category then breaks down to cynical and manipulative or crazy and desperate.

Thinking on it, I’m not surprised in the least that my two somewhat long-term relationships, Ashley and Amy, were with the cynical and manipulative type, while my abortive dating attempts since 2008 have mostly been with the crazy and desperate types.  Ashley was the first one who seemed to give a shit, but she was also a cheater who flagrantly manipulated me and even after I broke it off with her and said some astonishingly horrible things in the process still tried to reconnect with me on a schedule I could almost set my clocks to every year for the next nine years.[1]  Amy…meh, I’ve talked about her enough.

After that there’s a collection of oddball characters I’ve enjoyed telling stories about from the safe remove of time and space.  Tossed in there, though, are a few genuinely good women who didn’t seem to care much for me or who were unavailable for one reason or another.  On some level it’s bad luck or bad timing.  On some level, though, it’s also self-fulfilling prophecy.

In this theory, then, Private Me becomes the only real person I can genuinely trust when the chips are down.  So Public Me’s games of relational Calvinball are just there to protect me and keep me solitary while I attempt to figure out how to make it through life.  This creates a whole new set of problems.

Basically, I’ve been running around and creating chaos in the lives of others.  Either I can decide to stop being a giant dick and actually try to meet someone with best intentions or I can throw my hands up, say, “Fuck that noise,” and go with a life of solitude.  The latter is actually rather attractive, but it’s really something that requires a certain level of commitment.  Otherwise I’m just playing games and it’s other people getting hurt by them.

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[1]The final (I hope) round of that came with her trying to start the dialogue by telling me that no one knew me better than she did and no one cared about my like she did.  NINE FUCKING YEARS OF ALMOST MINIMAL CONTACT AFTER I TOLD HER TO FUCK OFF AND DIE.  Let that one sink in for a minute.

Being Trickster

I am selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.

There are few things that are pleasant in self-admission like that.  But there are many things that are honest in such self-assessment.  I suppose, in the end, that there is something pleasant about honesty, even of the least pleasant variety.

It occurred to me while I was reading N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy.  They’re fantastic books and if Jemisin ever offers a master class on worldbuilding I want to be there for it.  Her most inspired decision of all, though, was her decision to incorporate Trickster as a primary character and have her Trickster choose to be a child.

I will admit that as a student of Coyote and Raven I hated that choice at first.  But the longer I was with her character the more I appreciated the choice.  The more I appreciated the choice the more I realized she was revealing something about Trickster that I’d never before considered.  The more I considered this new notion of Trickster the more I realized that part of my reason for identifying so strongly with Coyote is that underlying assumed nature of Coyote: he is selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.

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“I’ll tell you a story if you want,” she said, “Later, in private.  So you won’t be embarrassed.”

I’d never met her before, so the idea that any story she could tell embarrassing me was almost entirely outside the realm of possibility.  It helps, too, that I am almost entirely shameless anymore.  There are things I’d rather people not know because I don’t want to talk about them, but that’s not the same as something I’d rather people not know because I’d be embarrassed.  I realized something not long before I started the Online Dating series right here on this blog: only I have the power to embarrass me.  If I don’t care there isn’t a damn thing you can do to make my face red.

This goes double for strangers.  “How would it embarrass me?” I asked.  “You don’t even know me.”

“You’ll find out why soon enough,” she said.

I suppose you want some staging.  It was a party.  I’d wandered away from the knot of guys I knew reasonably well and was sitting between a guy named Stave and a cute woman who I’d decided I liked just fine but who I’d also decided I didn’t even begin to want to consider dating.  She was sitting next to the would-be storyteller, who was next to another woman I didn’t know and a guy I’d met once or twice before.  Oh, and there was another guy.  So…basically this wasn’t a group of my closest friends.  I’m dangerous in groups like that, since I simply do not give a fuck.

“Whatever,” I said.

“I saw your profile on Match.com and sent you an email and you never wrote back.”

Have I mentioned the bit where I’m selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel?  Because, um, that third part kind of comes in to play here.  I couldn’t fathom why that mattered.  I’d be surprised to learn I had a better than 10% rate of response to emails on online dating sites.  Part of the reason I stopped doing it was because I hate wasting my time.  Most of the reason I feel I was wasting my time is because I’d send emails and never get a response.

In short, my best response to this was, “Welcome to my world.”  I don’t think that was what I said, though.  Honestly, I don’t remember what my immediate response was.

Cute girl on my left decided she was going to try to make fertilizer out of this particular load of bullshit.  “You turned this down?” she asked, gesturing at the spinner of the so-called embarrassing story.  She was, admittedly, not particularly unattractive.

Here’s the thing, though: if I didn’t respond there’s a 99% chance there was a good reason I didn’t (well, maybe not 99%, since there’s always a chance that, “I just plain forgot,” is an option.  Seriously, try an experiment.  Send me an email.  See if I respond.  Chances are 50-50 at best that I will.  Even if it’s a fantastic email and I want to respond there’s a decent chance that I’ll read it, think, “I should respond to that,” and then never get around to it.  Why?  Repeat after me: selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.  The first two matter in this context).  In fact, I’m pretty sure I know who she was and I know when she emailed me and I can hazard a guess that, yes, there’s a good reason I didn’t reply.  Right now there are two possibilities in my mind and it might be both.  They don’t matter, though.  Not really.

“Maybe this can be a make-up,” said cute woman.  “A do-over.”

“No.”  I said.  There’s that cruelty.  It’s not intentional.  I think, on some level, the cruelty comes from a place of kindness.  Honesty, in my book, is the best policy.  I’m not about to change my mind, so there’s no point in playing games or pretending in anything.  And if she thinks I’m an asshole she can decide she ended up better in the deal, anyway.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for my particular brand of cruelty, though.  I think it’s partially a Midwestern thing, as those of us who are from around these parts are conditioned to not be honest when it might hurt someone’s tender sensibilities.  Basically, if you’re from the Midwest and you’re dating someone your family and friends hate, you’ll know your family and friends hate that person, at least as long as you’re, y’know, reasonably aware.  They just won’t say it.  The moment you break up with that person, though, you’ll get a flood of, “She was such a bitch, but I didn’t want to say anything,” or, “He was totally bad for you, but I knew you had to figure that out on your own.”  It’s a bullshit cop-out your friends and family are engaging in.  I hate to tell you that, but it’s true.

I, of course, have pulled that routine in the past.  I’m a Midwesterner, after all.

Now, though, I am cruel.  I am honest and without tact and honesty without tact is not kind.

Or something.  I doubt that anything would have happened even if I hadn’t said, “No.”  My intended audience wasn’t my jilted wannabe internet dating companion, after all, it was the one in the middle advocating for some sort of Happily Ever After that wouldn’t be happening any time soon.

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Every once in a while I wonder if I’m not engaging in some sort of elaborate revenge fantasy.  All the pretty girls ignored me in high school.  Now every once in a while I get the attention of some woman or other and shut her down.  I have to admit that on some level it amuses me.

If I had a nickel for every woman who ignored me I wouldn’t have to go to work.

Okay, that’s not true.  But as far as hyperbole goes, it ain’t bad.  I’ve been shot down and rejected a shitload of times, after all.  I don’t think a lot of women know what that’s like.

In the sixth grade there was Gwen.  In the seventh it was Erin.  Sophomore and senior year in high school it was Katie.  Junior year it was Heidi.  In my post-high school years there was Amy and Abbie and Angie and Amy and Erin and Emily and Anne and Amy and Jamie and Michelle.  And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.  There are dozens more out there somewhere.  None of them were from my abortive attempts at internet dating, either.  None of them even matter, really, except for the three or four women I’m actually friends with on some level after meeting them through internet dating sites.

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There is one aspect of my decision to stop dating that I try not to think about and that my little story here illustrates.

Basically, I’ve realized that there might be, somewhere in this world, decent women who actually do care about things and who run afoul of my selfishly self-absorbed cruelty and get hurt by it.  In the end I can’t really help it if that happens, especially since my general default view of the world doesn’t actually include that as a possibility.[1]  The fact that I can’t help it doesn’t mean that I should actively seek the opportunity to make it happen, though.

When it gets right down to it, I apparently see myself as diseased.  I’ve quarantined myself off from the world to avoid infecting anyone else.  In a more reasonable person that would probably be sad.

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[1]My general attitude is that everyone forgets about me if I’m not in the room.  As such, being hurt by something I’ve done is completely impossible, as I don’t matter enough to anyone to actually do anything they’ll care about long-term.  I’m intellectually aware of the fact that the world doesn’t actually work this way, but by the same token the world of internet dating really fucking should work this way and I’m somewhat surprised to learn that it apparently doesn’t.  The internet has a memory that only lasts until the next meme, after all.

You know you want in on This...

I'm heading back up to Chicago in July.  I've got a few things I plan to do while I'm up there.  There's a U2 concert.  There's a White Sox game.  There'll probably be some time hanging out with family and/or old friends and/or co-workers.  I'm going to be working at least one day in a vain attempt to pretend I'm on top of things.  Y'know, the usual.

But there is one super unusual thing I'm doing: Storytelling in the Snug.

That's right, kids.  I'm going back to the place where it all began, but this time I won't be in the audience, I'll be the teller.  I'm putting out a new collection of tales that I want to refer to as, "Never before heard outside of the state of Texas," but that seems like a bit of a lie, since for the first time ever I'm not working with my own original material.

It's a new set I like to call "Creation, Deception, and Death: Trickster and the Jealousy of the Gods."

So be there.  Assuming you're a reasonable distance from the lovely and picturesque Evanston, IL.

The Celtic Knot Public House
626 Church Street, Evanston
Sunday, July 10th at 8 PM

But get there early enough to get dinner.  It's delicious.  And there's a cupcake of the month.  What is it?  I don't know, since it's not yet July.

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Also, Dallas people, fear not.  I'm hopefully going to have a big announcement for stuff going on down here by the beginning of July.

It's gonna be legen-wait for it-dary.

Shit, Part 4

I’ve brought up weight-related issues a time or twenty on this blog.  It seems like the thing to do again, as I don’t quite feel like I’ve handled the idea of shit-shoveling to the level I wanted to.  I dunno, it’s just one of those nagging thoughts…

Anyway, as has always come up when I talk about this, I grew up as “the fat kid.”  It was, quite simply, a part of my identity.  On some level I’m beginning to think it will always be a part of my identity.

I was ashamed of being the fat kid.  Now, this is one of those difficult discussion points, as we’ve got a nascent fat pride movement in this country so this is probably the sort of thing that will get me in trouble because I wasn’t supposed to be ashamed of such things and its apparently everyone else’s fault for judging me.  But I was ashamed of who I was.  Period, full stop, end of story.  I assumed, basically, that no one would ever find me attractive and, basically, that I’d never, ever get laid.  But that’s a different part of this story.

I knew I was fat.  I mean, it’s not rocket science.  I regularly wished to not be fat and I regularly had people tell me that I should lose weight.  But that didn’t mean that it happened.

There were actually points when I would pray before going to bed that I would wake up in the morning as a skinny kid.  It did not so much work.  Okay, fine, it didn’t work at all.

In 2004 when I finally said, “Fuck it, I’ma get in shape,” I threw myself in to it.  Over the course of nine months I dropped from 340 pounds to 230.  That’s an average of about 2.75 pounds/week.  Which is really damn fast.  I was all, “Woohoo!  Look at all the weight I’m losing!”  And it felt damn good.

The only problem was that it was a completely unsustainable way of living.  I counted calories obsessively, worked out constantly, and basically freaked if a week passed where I only lost a pound.  On top of that, I was denying myself things I really wanted, like, y’know, pizza and snacks and whatnot.  This obsessiveness combined with self-denial had me looking at my calendar and saying, basically, “You know what?  I could be done with all of this on [insert date here, since I have no fucking clue].  Awesome.”

What actually happened was I hit a point where I decided I was happy enough and wanted to be done, so I quit at 227 pounds, which was, like, thirty pounds (and, at the rate I was going, only another two months) away from my goal.[1]

September of 2009 I was back up to 320 pounds.  The bounce back was slow, but it was noticeable.  The main problem is that what I had done was impressive but not sustainable.  This was furthered by the fact that it was such an extreme that the idea of fixing things during the interim periods seemed like an awful lot of work.

But what does this have to do with Tricksters?

The role that the Trickster plays is the role of appetite.  It’s an easy point to miss if you only focus on the plot of the story or only focus on one story at a time.  But what the Trickster is always trying to do is get more.  The Trickster himself is also generally depicted as an individual that is not really an active participant in society, but a go-between.  He neither harvests nor hunts and, as such, lives off of the work of others or attempts to take on the aspect of others in order to feed his appetite.

One story that illustrates my point is a story of Coyote.  It seems that Coyote was originally blue and pretty full of himself about it.  He was also utterly convinced of his own awesomeness in every way.  So one day as Coyote is wandering about[2] he finds some crows.  He insists that they teach him to sing.  They do, he sings horribly but thinks he’s awesome.  Then he insists that they teach him to dance, which he also does terribly.  Finally he insists that they teach him how to fly.  So they attach feathers to him and he jumps off a cliff.  This fails, predictably and spectacularly.  Coyote falls so fast his tail catches fire and hits the ground so hard the desert dust grinds in to his fur.[3]

In the end, this becomes a just-so story.  But up until that point it is an archetypical Trickster story.  Basically, the only thing that it’s missing is the eating aspect, but it totally highlights the aspect of Trickster not being of while trying to make use of the aspects of other animals.  There is also the aspect of Coyote’s lack of awareness of his own failings and a concurrent lack of shame.  He cannot sing, but that doesn’t stop him.  He cannot dance, but that doesn’t stop him.  He cannot fly, and although that does stop him and it fundamentally changes him he just heads off for his next adventure.  It’s how Coyote rolls.

Compare this to the crows.  In my synopsis of the story they come off as bystanders just letting Coyote do his thing.  But in the story itself their reaction to each request is to say, “No, that is only for us.”  Then when they relent to Coyote’s request it is primarily for the purpose of mocking him.  Imagine the crows gluing feathers to Coyote’s legs while exchanging knowing glances and snickering at each other and you basically get the picture.

This is the interplay between Coyote and civilization, the crossroads and the city.

This is also the interplay between religion and non-religion.  It’s an opposition between the in group and the out group.  The in group holds that thing that the outsider wants and can, therefore, deny it to anyone who doesn’t fit their definition.  If outright denial doesn’t work the next weapon is derision and creating shame.

Only Coyote lacks shame.  He can insist on participating without any real drawbacks.  He also, notably, has the advantage of being able to survive his own single-minded stupidity.  This is a somewhat important consideration.

Think of this in terms of my own weight loss.  I spent years paralyzed by my own shame.  When I eventually decided to do something about it I tried to become something different overnight.  It just plain didn’t work out and I eventually ended up basically back where I’d started.  But I was even less happy than I’d been before.  See, the first time I lost weight I thought I’d like myself better if I was just thin.  I got to a point where I was like, “Yeah, that’s decent,” and found out that I still didn’t like myself that much.  Then I had the added burden of being terrified of going back to the previous weight.

Christianity works like that.  Your church tells you, “You should [be like this].”  It’s an inherently exclusionary practice.  If you’re a coyote among crows you’ll be treated as an outcast and laughed at if you try to participate.  This is the case both if you’re regarded as a sinner and if you’re not the “right kind” of Christian.  Pregnant teenage girls in church get roughly the same treatment as charismatics in Baptist churches.

I was the right kind of Christian for the churches I was in.  I was also regarded as being, if not sinless and perfect, certainly the sort of person who was doing his best to live a godly life.  And yet my every failing, real or perceived, filled me with shame.[4]

The problem is that I had no outlet.  My options were to be what everyone else thought I was supposed to be or be regarded as having failed.  Seriously.  When I left church I had people ask me if I had thought about how it would affect their walks or the walks of the people I’d worked with.  I had one person tell me that if I couldn’t do it then he feared there was no hope for him.

This is a severe burden to live with.  While I was still trying to do the Christianity thing it felt about the same way it feels to walk past a delicious piece of cheesecake and say, “Nope.  I cannot eat that,” knowing full well that you want to.

Eventually that Coyote realizes he’s not a crow, however.  So the guy who had just lost 110 pounds in nine months says, “Fuck it, I’m done with this,” and starts eating pizza and cheesecake without sustaining any of the good habits he’d developed.  The kids that grew up in church have a tendency to come down with a bad case of rebellion, which leads to a lot of tut-tutting and gossip in the narthex.

I never really rebelled.  I didn’t really have the opportunity or desire to become rebellious.  What I simply did was stop trying to hold the doubts at bay and stop trying to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to believe what I had learned in church at the same time that I was aware of what I had learned in history, science, and religious studies classes.

Thing is, Coyote is always there.  Christianity tries to say that he’s not.  It’s just that eternal conflict between good and evil, where anything circumstantial can be explained as part of inscrutable “plan” and anything of unrestrained appetite can be described as the failings of the flesh.

Tricksters are not removed from the picture so easily, however.

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There’s another aspect of this, too.  I mentioned above that I assumed I’d never get laid.

First off, mission accomplished.  Although I believe it’s due to sheer bloody-mindedness these days.  However, I’ve lost the most convenient cover to explain such things away.  See, it used to be the sort of thing I could cover with pious Jesus-speak.  In the four or so years since I’ve discarded said pious speech, though, I’ve realized how convenient of a dodge that one was.

See, if you’re not having sex as an unmarried Christian that means you’re doin’ it right.  So if you say, “Hey, I’m a 29 year-old virgin,” people applaud or talk about how impressive it is that you managed to do that.  If you say that you’re a 29 year-old virgin who isn’t in a real hurry to get married you can then explain that you’re waiting for god’s will or you’re trying to use your “gift of singleness” for a while longer and, again, applause.  Also, I get the impression that chicks dig that.[5]

Either way, the various structures of evangelical Christian life basically create a situation where I could pile as much pious-sounding bullshit as I wanted on top of my insecurities and do my level-headed best to ignore them.

Weirdly, for a belief system that’s supposed to be about finding purity, Christianity creates perverse incentives to lie you yourself and everyone around you.

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[1]This requires a discussion of one of my favorite rant topics: the BMI charts.  According to the BMI charts I should weigh between 180 and 195 pounds.  My original goal was to hit 195, which I chose based entirely on the BMI charts because I don’t think I’d weighed less than 200 since eighth grade, so I had no fucking clue what that looked like.

Anyway, this is a picture of me from the tail-end of the year 2004 when I was down in the 230 neighborhood.  Although I happen to know that I still had weight to lose at that point, the idea of dropping another 35 pounds is fairly laughable.




This is me over Labor Day Weekend this year.  At the time of this shot, according to standard BMI charts for my height, I was borderline obese.




Although, again, I still have weight to lose, and even though I understand that “obese” is a medical term and not an appearance term, the idea that the guy in that picture is “obese” is somewhat hard to believe.

[2]This, over course, is another aspect of not being of anything.  The Trickster is the god of the crossroad: the god of random happenstance that occurs when two things collide.  Think of a road as being of civilization and between civilization, but not civilization itself.

[3]One of the tellers at the Fox Valley Folk & Storytelling Festival told this one, but I forget who.  It was cool the way it fit in with my own thoughts on the subject of Tricksters, though.

[4]I was also, from what I can gather, an insufferable jackass for Jesus.  This, oddly, wasn’t regarded as a sin.

[5]Awkward statistics for a godless heathen in the land of the megachurch (really, Dallas has 8 of the 100 biggest churches in America and Texas has 17 of them.  And the stats I saw didn’t include TD Jakes’ house of giant bigness.  It also didn’t include Catholic churches, but seeing as how the Catholic churches game their stats I don’t know we could trust them about such things, anyway).  As it turns out, there are more women than men to a very statistically significant extent in churches.  And church folk are apparently basically the same as non-church folk in terms of frequency of sexual congress.

Also, the internet has told me that iPhone owners and tall people tend to have more sex.  As a 6’3” owner of a 3GS I can tell you I’m not.

Basically, what this all adds up to is that I’ve made some strange life choices.  And I’m totally okay with that.  As it turns out, I like people, I just don’t like being around them for more than about four hours at a time.  Although I suppose that I could just take a Viagra and have a made-to-order out at my limits of human interaction.

Shit, Part 3

It’s really hard to imagine a point in life that’s worse than the one where you stop and realize, “You know what?  My life has become a Greek tragedy.”

I hit that point while doing what Lewis Hyde calls “dirt work” and I refer to as “shit shoveling.”  If you’re doing the work earnestly and honestly I think you’ll always discover something interesting about yourself.  But I wasn’t quite expecting Greek tragedy.

To explain I suppose I’ll have to explain what I mean by “Greek tragedy.”  See, there are two primary players in any Greek tragedy: Fate and hubris.  Fate is that inexorable force of the universe that pulls the hero to a pre-determined destiny.  Hubris is the pride that leads the hero to say that he can avoid his fate because he’s the goddamn hero, that’s why.  Of course the full definition of hubris is “the pride that comes before the fall.”  The specific fall is that point when the hero realizes that everything he’s done to avoid his prophesied Fate has actually led him directly to that Fate.

Consider the opening of Oedipus Rex.  The King of Thebes is told that his son would rise up to kill him and marry his wife (from whence Sigmund Freud came up with the Oedipus Complex, thereby missing the point in the most epic possible way).  So the king sends his infant son away.  He’s raised by peasants and has no knowledge of his identity.  It is this very ignorance of his origins that leads to the chain of events where Oedipus kills the king and marries the widowed queen.

We look at this and say, “Well, duh.”  But that’s because we have the gift of hindsight.  Things are rarely so clear at the outset.  It’s inherently logical to assume that the son of a king will kill his father in a palace power play, so the next logical step is to get rid of the son.  The bit about porking mommy is a little harder to fit in to that scheme, but…yeah…

Either way, Greek tragedy.  Fate.  Hubris.  I’ve got to get from Point A to Point B.

I started of “Shit, Part 3: Shit Gets Personal” in a completely different way.  It was…detached.  I attempted to start from the beginning and, in so doing, sanitize the shit that needed shoveled and justify the choices I’ve made.  This, oddly enough, is just about the worst possible way to go about the process of shoveling shit.  It’s shit.  It cannot, by definition, be sanitized and made more pleasant.

So if you’re not willing to actually confront the ugliness, don’t bother.  You won’t learn a goddamn thing and you’ll end up wasting your time and everyone else’s in the process.

That said, Greek tragedy.

One of the big questions I’ve asked myself a time or twelve in the last couple of years was, “Why did I spend so much time obstinately not getting over her?”[1]  There are, oddly, three specific answers to that question.  Each answer depends, largely, on how you define “getting over” and, well, “her.”

Answer 1: “I actually did.  I was working on something else.”

Answer 2: “I don’t actually miss her, I miss the idea of her.”

Answer 3: “I miss her as a friend.”

Let’s walk it back, starting with Answer 3.

This is the ironic one.  See, everyone knows that point in a relationship where one person decides they want to be in the friends zone and the other person decides that they want to be in the more-than-friends zone.  We also know, thanks to the timeless wisdom of When Harry Met Sally, that this cannot possibly work.  I, of course, wanted it to be outside the friends zone.  But the excruciatingly awkward thing about that was, well, I knew it wouldn’t work.  I mean, seriously.  Talk about trying to fight against the inevitability of Fate.

Now, this is basically the most logical explanation.[2]  I’d also hazard a guess that it’s a pretty damn good explanation.  But it’s not terribly interesting and it doesn’t really help me explain my point.  And, I mean, really, “So I did all of this soul searching and shit and came to the conclusion that I really missed sitting around and discussing literature and whatnot with her,” isn’t nearly convoluted enough for me.

Answer 2 is along these same lines.  I had this idea of who she was and who she would be in my life that was rather hard to give up.  Fantasy tends to work like that, after all.  Also, this is the sort of thing that completely nullifies the ontological argument for, well, anything.  Not only did a reality exist that wasn’t better than the one I imagined, there was a reality that wasn’t a thing like my imagination and which was noticeably worse.  Depending on how you define “worse,” of course…

So let’s move on to Answer 1.  It is here that we can actually go back to the foundational myth of those two years of self-delusion.  I helpfully provided additional context for the scenario a few days ago.[3]  I was at my initial point of truly, genuinely questioning Christianity.  My somewhat transitory crisis of faith was over, but it had left in its wake serious questions about how I could possibly maintain a belief in a system that created a situation where faith was required to trump reason even when reason was clearly the right thing to follow.

This is the threshold moment.  In the hero’s journey the hero is confronted with a quest and given the option to go forward or opt out.  I, in effect, crossed the threshold, then said, “Oooh, cute girl,” and attempted to immediately go back inside.  This worked.  For a time.  And for a definition of “work” which means, “Wasn’t at all a good idea and only served to delay the inevitable whilst undoubtedly wasting a lot of time for two people who, let’s face it, weren’t going to be doing much of anything different, anyway.”[4]

Interestingly, there are threshold moments in both hero tales and Trickster tales.  If you look at the early Loki tales, he often traveled with Thor while Thor went out and did his Brock Samson thing.  Prometheus, Hermes, Eshu, and Raven all have threshold moments, too.[5]  In this we can see similarities between the hero and the Trickster.  What it basically boils down to is this: the Trickster is an agent of change in exactly the same way the hero is an agent of stability.  The hero goes out at a time of crisis and makes things right.  The Trickster goes out in a time of stability and makes things change.

The ambivalent good/evil dichotomy of the Trickster, then, requires you to ask one question: what’s my opinion of change?  But that’s an idea for another day, really…

Either way, I was on the threshold.  The question of whether I was hero or Trickster is kind of up in the air for that one, but it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is the mythology that arose once that particular woman came in to the picture.  For it began with a challenge, a moment of theft, and an unintentional image quite befitting any good Coyote story.

For what happened was an exchange I came to call The Question Game.  I think.  That sounds vaguely right.[6]  There I was, barely hanging on to my self image, but attempting to impress this amazing-seeming woman.  And I wasn’t good at impressing women in even the best of circumstances.

I may not remember what I called it, but I remember how I described the aftermath.  She walked out of the room with my testicles in her back pocket.  This is where the story veers from hero to Trickster territory.  The rest of the story is one of an attempt to recover my balls.[7]  The problem is that I got them back the next week from her perspective.  I, apparently, missed that memo.  But that’s neither here nor there.

I had begun the Trickster’s journey and I attempted to cut it short almost immediately by crossing the threshold back in to the civilized area of the stable relationship.  Now that I think about it, praise Coyote that it didn’t work out at all.[8]  All this did was delay the inevitable.  An inevitable that she probably wouldn’t have been game for in any situation…

In this, too, even after the kinda-relationship with her devolved in to a non-relationship relationship I stuck around in an attempt to stay within the threshold.  Even when I was far along on that irreversible journey I tried to hold on.  But that’s part of the story, too.

As it turns out, there are four possible ways for a Trickster tale to go.

1.  The story begins and ends with the Trickster wandering aimlessly.  This is basically Coyote.

2.  The story begins with Trickster wandering and ends with Trickster bringing about a positive change.  This is basically the Prometheus or Hermes story.  And part of the Raven story.

3.  The story ends with the other gods locking Trickster up.  Think about Loki.

4.  The story ends with the other gods attempting to kill Trickster.  It generally ends up being pretty damn destructive.  Like, world-endingly destructive.  Consider Loki after he breaks free.

Consider these four possibilities in the context of what Trickster means.  At its most elemental level the Trickster tale is one of change and of chaos.  Sometimes the chaos continues for a long time.  Sometimes it brings about a permanent change that may be good or bad.

The thing about change, though, is that the first reaction of the powers that be is to attempt to lock it down, to squelch it.  But if you attempt to squelch change all you do is defer its power.  It will eventually get out and when it does it will be much worse than what you imagined it would do in the first place.

I attempted to lock Loki away and return to the life I once knew.  So when the change was finally released I didn’t just have to live with the consequences of choosing a new way of life, but I also had to live with the consequences of losing someone who had once meant a lot to me.  This is what happens.

Since then I have, largely, been wandering.  Since I am not a mythological figure, however, the idea of being Coyote walking around randomly and looking for excitement is not a tenable long term plan.  Think of it this way: I have a car that I could get in to right now and drive anywhere I want.  But I also need to make payments on that car, keep myself insured, and put gas in the tank.

So the question becomes one of how to settle some of the chaos down while still allowing Trickster to work his magic.  And that, well, that is a difficult question…

--------------------------

It also occurs to me that I haven’t actually gotten around to dealing with the thought that created this miniseries.  The addition of a Trickster figure adds a tremendous amount of flexibility that is simply absent from Christianity.

In the Christianity I grew up with there are three forces: an all powerful good, an already defeated but still inexplicably powerful evil, and the individual.  That all powerful good has a plan and is totally in control.  So that means that there are really only two ways you can choose to be: the way the all powerful good says you should be or wrong.  And that all powerful good is supposed to be a static force.  So everyone is striving to hit a singular ideal and then stay there.

This is both impossible to achieve and impossible to conceive of given the reality we face in this world.

So when I had my own crisis of faith there were only two possible responses: lose my mind or lose my religion.  There was not a third option.

In a system with an inbuilt dynamic chaos, however, you can completely sidestep this problem.  The Trickster as an amoral agent of change allows both the individual and the society to flex with the times.  If something doesn’t work the way it was supposed to, well, Coyote does crazy shit sometimes, man…

Also, I think if I’d just started with that I could have avoided writing three whole posts…

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[1]I have, at times, played with the “Her” and “her” dichotomy.  To switch from the simple pronoun to the proper noun is a much bigger issue than simply hitting shift.  It is the difference between god and God.  One of the problems, however, with going back to the pronoun is that “her” is an extremely non-specific way of referencing someone, so I have to make sure it’s specific that I’m referring to her when I say “her.”  Ergo, maintaining the convention of “Her” made it easier for me to talk about her in a way that could be understood even after I’d made the mental transition back to her from Her.

Also, have I mentioned recently how much I love the English language?  To wit, my favorite sentence of all time: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo.”  It’s completely grammatically correct, as is “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo.”  “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is also grammatically correct, but really too much, when you get right down to it.  Taking it up to six is, though, well nigh impossible.

By the way, in addition to being a city in upstate New York and a shaggy prairie cow, “buffalo” can also be a transitive verb meaning “to baffle or bewilder.”  So if someone buffaloes you, they’re probably about to bamboozle you, too.  Also, I may or may not have used this tiny fact to get an exceedingly long conversation about the word buffalo started at work today.  I get the distinct impression that being my co-worker is a bit of a trip…

[2]At this juncture I’m sure you’re saying, “No, the most logical explanation is that you thought you wanted to spend the rest of your life with this person but that didn’t happen and holy shit you are a massively pathetic pile of idiocy.  You’re in a major city that probably has a shitload of single women.  Go meet a few.  They can’t all be religious fanatics who have three children because they still haven’t figured out that Jesus is a far less successful prophylactic than a goddamn condom.”

To which I say, “My, that’s quite foul of you.  Do you type emails to your mother with those fingers?”

[3]Bet you didn’t think that had a point…

[4]Seriously.  Over the course of this period we both finished college and had jobs and friendships and whatnot, but if we weren’t in each other’s lives I don’t think either one of us would have been doing much of anything that was really all that different.  And, speaking for myself, I haven’t done a whole hell of a lot since then, either.  There is an odd question that I occasionally ask but am incapable of answering: How do we define wasting time?  I mean, I could say that I wasted two years of my life on her and her on me, but I don’t actually know that it’s a defensible position.  If anything, we were both seemed to be using each other as a convenient excuse to not have to do anything else.  Then there’s the fact that I’ve managed to spend a disturbingly high percentage of the last two and a half years using her as an excuse for further procrastination, also.  Too…

[5]Oddly, Coyote doesn’t seem to have one.  All of his stories that I’m aware of start with him wandering about.

[6]It was four and a half years ago.  Leave me alone.

[7]For all the good they were doing me.  Also, for the record, Tricksters spend a lot of time morphing and losing various body parts.  Heroes, not so much…

[8]I’m 75% of the way towards converting to a Trickster god-based religion.  There is no downside.  And I’d instantly have more street cred than the followers of that upstart Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Shit, Part 2

So I was sitting at work the other day and a song popped in to my head for reasons that I cannot currently recall.  I’m sure there was some reason for the earworm in question, though.  It was an old Jars of Clay song that I once loved called, if I recall, “Faith like a Child.”[1]

The song begins with an invocation to god to “surround me when I speak.”  And this is the part that popped in to my head.  I remember making those invocations.  The central message is, “I’m not good enough, but you are, god.  So let me get out of the way so you can do your thing.”  It’s a strange memory and, I suppose, a not particularly pleasant one.  But it’s not unpleasant.  It’s also deeply important while I try to figure out how to do the necessary work of digging out the shit and shame.

When I step out on to a stage as a storyteller I speak for no one but myself.  When I write I represent no one but myself.  If I am going to connect with my audience I will have to do it in reliance on myself, the material I’m working with, and the hope that my audience actually cares enough to engage.  This is both immensely terrifying and immensely freeing.  I can let the message take the audience wherever they want to take it.[2]  But it also means I’m operating without a safety net, so to speak.  If I suck it’s on me.

This, really, is a good thing.  See, if I do well it’s because I’ve been doing the work necessary to do well.  If I do poorly it’s because I haven’t.  In both cases the necessary follow-up actions are ones I can take on my own: stay the course and keep working or find a new way and keep working.

Contrast that with the idea that with the prayer to god to actually do the speaking.  If it goes well it’s because god got involved.  If it goes poorly it’s because god didn’t or something got in god’s way.  In both cases the only viable response is to keep asking an external agent to do the necessary work.

The first time I got on stage at the Fox Valley Folk and Storytelling Festival I was terrible.  This actually kind of surprised me, as I have spent quite a bit of time doing stuff on stage.  But that time I was nervous as hell and just plain didn’t do a very good job of telling me story.  Other tellers then offered me advice and encouragement, much of which I took to heart.  The next day I got back on the stage and I was better.  I was still a long way from being “good,” but I was better.

Since then I’ve taken every opportunity to get on stage and tried to make sure that I’m properly prepared.  I’m getting better.  I still have a long way to go, but that’s what putting in the work is for.  Specifically, it’s what putting in the work without a safety net is for.  If I do poorly I cannot say, “Well, god didn’t speak through me today.”  I have to say, “Well, I screwed up.”  By saying, “I screwed up,” I am then free to ask, “How, specifically, did I screw up?”  And that is the true key to improvement.[3]

What, though, does this have to do with shit?

It’s simple, really.  In the churches I grew up in if you were going through something the correct, and only, response was to “give everything to Jesus.”  As a teenager struggling with, say, thoughts of sex,[4] the appropriate response was to pray about it.  So say you’re lying there in your bed at night thinking about that one really hot girl in youth group (yeah…that happened…a lot…).  The appropriate response is to tell Jesus all about your lustful thoughts.  Then Jesus will take those thoughts away.  This is an idea that’s founded on two specific bits of the Bible, one of which says something to the effect that you can overcome all things through Christ and the other that says that you will not be burdened by anything bigger than you can handle.

Now this is a problem.  Eventually those thoughts will come back.  Sometimes they’ll stay away for as many as five minutes, but they’ll be back.  So that means that when they do, inevitably, come back it’s because you do not have enough faith.

Jesus cannot fail.  Only you can fail Jesus.

This is not at all a useful way to go through life, especially since Jesus seems to only care about the shit that the surrounding moralizers find important.

Let’s say that I just got done with my first ever story and was given four pieces of advice:

1. “That’s pretty good, but you need to be more expressive.”
2. “You should really name your main character Joe.”
3. “You need to work a bit harder to memorize your stories.”
4. “You should really lose weight.”

One of those bits of advice is completely useless and based on the personal preference of the audience member.  One of those bits of advice has fuck-all to do with my storytelling.[5]  Two of those things, however, are useful pieces of advice that offer something to do to improve.  And it’s the useful, concrete suggestion that allows someone to figure out how to improve.

“You need to pray better,” is not a useful suggestion.  It’s really not a suggestion at all.

But if we’re going to do what Lewis Hyde calls “dirt-work” and I call “shit shoveling,” we need to realize that not all improvements to who we are come in the form of a moment on stage.  In fact, most improvements come in places that aren’t seen at all.  The biggest challenge for most people is to become comfortable with who they are.

In a Christian system where there are only three actors: God, Satan, and Self, this sort of self improvement is almost impossible.  See, excessively morality focused Christianity attempts to be a closed system.  But there is no such thing as a closed system where humans are concerned.  This is the “shit” that needs to be shoveled.  We take in more than we can hold and some must be discarded as useless.

Christianity attempts to tell us that one of those items that must be discarded is sexuality.  The followers of Christianity are supposed to magically ignore or avoid sexuality until marriage, when it’s suddenly, equally magically, okay and wonderful.  There is no way that this is a mentally tenable position.

The weird thing is that the nattering moralizers seem to actually know this is the case.  That’s why there’s basically a new reminder to be pure every week or so.  That’s why they work so hard to get people to avoid producing art that incorporates sexual elements.  It’s why they encourage such wonderful bullshit as “accountability partners,” who are supposed to admit their sexual thoughts to each other and keep each other from falling in to such things.[6]

Then there are the random strategies to avoid such things.  Mercifully, I’ve forgotten most of them.  However, I was recalling one of them the other day.  Well, it wasn’t really a strategy.  It was more of an idea about how a couple should operate.

The idea basically went like this: the guy will always be pushing to go farther, physically, so it’s the girl’s job to set the boundaries and make sure they don’t get crossed.

Let’s just think about that for a moment.  Really roll it around inside your mind.  Consider the implications.

Now, you’ve got your standard “boys will be boys” and “girls just don’t like sex.”  We’ve come to expect that.  But it’s so much more insidious than that.  Really, it’s the pu-pu platter of shitty, patronizing ideas about human sexuality.

See, that attitude right there is ready-made for slut shaming and rape apologia.  If a couple has sex it must be because the girl didn’t set the proper boundaries or just let the guy go too far.  Ergo, slut.  If she didn’t want him to go that far she just didn’t set the boundaries forcefully enough or clearly enough.  Ergo, she was asking for it.

More, it allows for the standard definition of gay guys as being only about their sexuality.  If there are two dudes neither one will be able to properly set boundaries and they’re just gonna hump all day due to the lack of the control offered by a frigid bitch with a taser.

It’s unassailable logic, really.  I mean, as long as you don’t burden yourself with real knowledge.

The truly important thing, though, is that it pushes everything away from self-reflection.  Everything you do is, by the nature of the system, set up as you measuring yourself against an external agent.  It’s not a question of, “How do I want to enjoy sex?” but, “Am I properly Christian in my attitudes towards sex?”  Spending time with your partner isn’t about finding out how comfortable you are with that person, but worrying about whether you’re crossing lines that shan’t be crossed.  And they’re not lines that either person is actually laying down.

Because, see, we all have our own levels of sex, shit, and shame that we have to deal with.  But they’re personal, not universal.  And as long as we’re focused on bright-line distinctions written by outside forces, we’ll never learn to become comfortable with ourselves.

That’s why you need Coyote, the Trickster.  But I’ll get to that in the next (and hopefully final) installment.

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[1]One of the weirdest things that’s been happening lately is that I’m coming in to contact with old CCM songs I once loved.  I blame Pandora (which is awesome for that.  I mean, Semisonic’s “Closing Time?”  Hells, yeah, that just made my afternoon better!).  When I stopped doing the church thing I got rid of all such music, as I didn’t want to be reminded of it.  Now it’s taking on the same effect as listening to old-school Hammer or something.  I’m all, “Dude, it’s [this song]!  I used to love this song!”  It’s really quite strange.

[2]This is actually one of the weirdest things about the whole deal.  I run in to it time and time again on the blog, where I write a long post and expect people to take one thing from it, but all the comments are about completely different things.  This can be, in turn, awesome and aggravating.  The place where it’s most likely to be aggravating is where I write a personal story and attempt to tie it in to a larger topic and then receive advice on how to deal with the particulars of the story itself.  I rarely actually write personal stuff looking for personal advice, as I’m usually abstracting whatever the story is about to a large degree.

But, of course, no one knows that unless I point it out.  It’s a weird inside-out problem, I suppose.  I don’t do personal stories in storytelling at the moment.  But whenever I tell a story in front of my parents they try to figure out people or places in my life that created a certain character or location.  There usually isn’t one, or if there is it’s in a third- or fourth-degree of separation.  I start with something that happened to me.  My first thought is to turn it in to a story.  My second thought is to turn it in to a story about that thing.  My third thought is to turn it in to a story about that thing that happened to me as an abstract or archetype.  Finally I work my way around to the story itself.  And by that time I’m working with archetypical characters and locations.  But the power of using archetype is such that people who know me hear of a certain character type and say, “Aha!  He must be talking about this person.”  If you walk it back far enough then it’s possible to find that person in the original germ of the story.  But I compose the stories themselves in such an abstract way that I’m usually unaware of that connection.

And, of course, sometimes you just need a stock person or location.  So there may be people and places who appear who have nothing to do with anything.  They just needed to be in that story for the plot.

[3]One of the really interesting bits of advice I got during that first festival: “You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.  Smile more.”  That’s a damn useful piece of advice.  I always wanted to approach storytelling with the solemnity of sermonizing.  But the story and the sermon are completely different creatures.

For one thing, the audience follows the cues of the storyteller.  If you’re telling a funny story with a stone serious face, they don’t know what to do.  More importantly, though, if you’re attempting to make a transition from one thing to another, your attitude has to make the transition.  A moment of levity in a scary story just before the big hit makes the hit all the more shocking and, therefore, scary.

[4]Teenagers thinking about sex?  Never!

[5]To be fair, it would have been good advice.  I did not look good in the fall of 2008.  Or the fall of 2009.  In fact, everyone was more than a little shocked to see me in the fall of 2010 after a nine-month separation.  My freaking dog didn’t recognize me at first.

[6]I’m still exceedingly good friends with one of my former “accountability partners.”  We thought it was pretty much bullshit at the time, but now we still occasionally have accountability meetings.  They basically consist of one of us saying, “So, had any sexual thoughts lately?”  The response is always some variation of, “Hell, yeah,” to which the questioner responds with some variation of, “Good job.  Keep it up.”

Oddly, it seems to accomplish just about as much…

Shit, Part 1

Let’s talk about shit for a moment.

No, really.  I mean it.  We all know about shit.  We’re all full of it, some of us in ways both figurative and literal.  But it’s not something we generally talk about.  Which is weird, since we’re aware of the fact that we don’t talk about it.  It’s in the lingo.

Ever heard someone described as, “Walking around like their shit don’t stink?”  Ever heard of people going out of their way to suppress natural biological functions at the outset of a romantic relationship?  We joke about that sort of thing.  And if you haven’t heard that kind of joke, you’re moving in the wrong circles.  Or the right circles, I suppose, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t want to acknowledge such things.  If you fit under that category, feel free to ignore this post and look at kittens, instead (marginally NSFW...).

Back to the main point, though, shit is a universal thing.  As a wise book says, everybody poops.  Shit is also generally regarded as being a bad thing.  This dichotomy is not a hard thing to understand.  It’s waste, after all.  Because it’s waste, it fits in to that odd taboo category of things we all know but don’t talk about.

Strangely, since we don’t talk about such things, they have power.  Scatological humor can be massively hilarious specifically for its disturbing nature.  Consider Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo.  I laughed at him even while cringing at the little shit stains he left everywhere he hopped.  “Isn’t someone going to clean that up?” I thought.  “C’mon, that’s gross.”  Still, someone mentions Mr. Hanky and I’m probably going to laugh.  Hell, I’m making myself laugh right now just saying, “Hi-dee ho!” in a high-pitched voice.

So why don’t we talk about it?

On one level there’s the simple fact that it’s just not appropriate.  I mean, there’s absolutely no reason why anyone would ever need to walk in to a meeting at work and say, “Wow, you guys would not believe the dump I just took!”  Well, perhaps if the meeting in question was at a toilet manufacturing concern and they’re trying to decide on the efficacy of the new model.  But even that’s a stretch.

The bigger reason we don’t talk about such things is shame.  But to properly discuss this I need to move away from shit to that other big s-word: sex.

See, I came from a shame culture where sex was concerned.[2]  This is the joy of growing up in the Evangelical church (and, really, any number of other churches, mosques, synagogues, and probably other places, too).  It’s a known fact that somewhere around the end of junior high or the beginning of high school kids start getting horny.

It’s also right around that time that a certain segment of the population starts telling those kids that they shouldn’t touch themselves.  Or anyone else, either.  Because those things they’re feeling are shameful and disgusting.  Until they get married, at which point they’re wonderful things that will make all those years of self-denial totally worthwhile.  Yeah…

This has an interesting secondary effect that I like to call “the shame spiral.”[3]  Basically, a person has thoughts that they’re not supposed to have.  Like, y’know, some fifteen year-old guy sees a cute girl and certain biological functions take over.  This results in an agonized realization that some sin has occurred, which leads to some sort of prayer to expunge the shit that has now been created and a promise to never do that again.

Of course it does happen again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  And…well, you get the point.

From the standpoint of a simple, human understanding of biology there’s nothing wrong with this.  It’s natural.  Not only is it unavoidable, it’s not something that should be avoided.[4]

But this is not the end of our story of shit and sex and shame.  At the very least, it is not the purpose of our story.  For, you see, shame has no power unless shame is allowed to be given power.  Shit has no dirtiness without purity.  It needs to be internalized by the person engaging in so-called shameful activity.

This, ultimately, is why Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity are extremely hypocritical in their treatment of issues such as homosexuality.  They call open displays of homosexuality an attack on their civil rights and whatnot.  What they basically try to say is that giving other people rights is a violation of their rights to be bigoted jackasses.  Which, I believe, is not actually a right granted by the Constitution.

But, see, this is why Civil Rights and Pride movements are so damn powerful.  There was a time when it was expected that people of color were supposed to be second-class citizens.  Or even non-human property.  There was a time when it was expected that women would stay home and tend to the children and not vote.  There was a second-class status given to them, an implied shame that came with belonging to that particular segment of society.

Our great grandparents fought the Civil War.  Our grandparents marched for women’s suffrage.  Our parents marched for Civil Rights.  Our mothers went and got jobs that weren’t just nurse/teacher/secretary.  This is the only way to stand up to bigotry.

Bigotry says, “You’re shit.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  You should stay in your place.”  But bigotry only has power if the bigots are given the power to marginalize.

This, ultimately, is why the religious folk freak out at things like Gay Pride.  They only have power if gay people are in the closet, marginalized, and afraid for their livelihoods, lives even, if they’re exposed.  They only have power if exposure of someone as gay results in a knee-jerk response of horror.

If a moralizer points at something and says, “Look at that shit!” and everyone else shrugs and says, “Whatever, dude,” the moralizer has no power.

The thing is, though, we all have some idea of shit that we don’t talk about.  Every single person has probably allowed some unspoken bit of shit and shame to hold power over them.  It may not be so profound as defying conventional sexual mores in a culture of tut-tutting moralizers, but that doesn’t actually matter.

See, here’s the problem of shit and shame: it gets internalized.  Even if only one person is held back by that particular bit of shame it needs to be broken, as there is no obstacle harder to overcome than the one we put in our own path.

It’s something to consider, at the very least.  And I haven’t really explained it yet, but this whole thought process is directly related to my fascination with the Trickster gods in ancient myth.  So I’m turning this in to a sort of mini series.

And, yes, I’m still working on Byzantine Logic…

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[1]The internet, of course, offers ample proof that some people don’t regard it as a bad thing.  Further proof that the internet is a terrible, terrible thing sometimes.  And in as much as I want to link to 2 Girls, 1 Cup here, I have standards, dammit.  So, instead, Keanu Reeves is here to brighten your day!

I love the internet.

[2]Also many other things.  Including shit.  Not, y’know, shit itself (well, that too), but the word.  This is because the Bible says you’re not allowed to swear.  Even though it…doesn’t.

See, there are Biblical admonitions against taking the Lord’s name in vain.  There are Biblical admonitions against swearing oaths in inappropriate ways.  But cussing?  Not so much.  This is one of those issues that brings out the plasticity of words.

Consider, for a moment, the difference between the “profane” and a “profanity.”  The profane is something that exists in contrast to the sacred.  It is, in some way, debased.  “Profanity,” which is intimately related to that idea, is used as a short hand for vulgar language.  In its root form this makes sense.  The sacred is pure and set apart, while the profane is base and vulgar.  But this is a ceremonial distinction, not a linguistic one.

However, consider for a moment the words that are considered profanity: shit, fuck, damn, ass, and their myriad permutations.  Shit, fuck, and ass are all related to things that are considered shameful, while to damn something is to remove it from sacred spaces.  Ergo, you could make the argument that profanity itself is profane language.  But the point is that the Bible’s injunction is against careless and improperly irreverent speech, not the word “shit.”

[3]Full disclosure, I actually invented the term for something completely different.  I know a guy who needs to put on weight, but isn’t very good at it.  He seems to forget to eat on a regular basis, and when he does eat it’s usually pretty damn healthy.  And he’s not a binge drinker.

As something of an expert at putting on a shocking amount of weight way too fast, I offered my advice.  Get depressed about something, then eat a lot as a defense mechanism.  Eventually he’ll look in the mirror and say, “Oh, god, I’m a fatass.”  At this point if overeating as a defense mechanism is properly ingrained, he’ll then proceed to eat even more.

It’s a fool-proof system, really.  Also, I have never in my life had a good idea.

[4]Within limits, obviously.  Consent is deeply important.

And, really, I think a discussion of the emotional and physical issues that come along with sex and sexuality is probably important.  Also, probably way more useful than, “Jesus doesn’t want you to touch yourself.”

Although what do I know?  I came out of my comprehensive sex ed classes with one all-important understanding: sex = herpes.  I’m 99% certain that wasn’t the point, but it’s what I got.  Seriously, I’m afraid of two things: giant spiders (thanks, JRR Tolkien) and herpes.  Also commitment.  And mortgages.  I’m afraid of four things.  Also, having to live in Texas for more than a few years.  So I’m afraid of five things.

At the rate I’m going, though, I’m going to run in to giant spiders long before I get the opportunity to contract herpes.  Although Texas’s population of giant fucking wasps is causing me to spend more time looking over my shoulder for arachnids the size of my car…

Rethinking the Trickster

Shortly before I left Chicago my friends, who you all may know as Fiat Lex and The Everlasting Dave, got me a book, specifically Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World.  It’s a book on Trickster myths written, basically, in the style of Joseph Campbell.  The book languished on my shelf.  I kept meaning to pick it up, but kept finding reasons not to.

It seems that Coyote does not like being disturbed until you’re ready to understand Coyote.  Either that or you have to be prepared for mischief to properly appreciate it.

I’ve had a standing theory of Trickster gods for a while, specifically as they relate to Christianity.  It seems that my theory isn’t all that controversial.  Basically, it goes that the Satan character we meet in Job is really a not-entirely-edited-out Semitic Trickster deity of some sort.  We see him as the Adversary, who is, nonetheless, welcome in to the Heavenly courts and creates mischief for the sake of creating mischief.

I’ve developed a further theory, however.  One which seems to be confirmed in a rather roundabout way by Lewis Hyde.  So that’s nice.

See, my exposure to Trickster tales has been gradually expanding ever since I’ve taken up the storytelling thing.  Coyote, Anansi, Jack, and Raven appear time and again in storytelling concerts.  One of the things I noticed is that the Tricksters all had a tendency to hew to a certain logic.  Well, two sets of logic.

The first type of Trickster tale basically works like this: Trickster is hungry.  Trickster then creates an elaborate scheme to steal food.  Trickster’s elaborate scheme backfires on him in some way.  Trickster then goes off to plan for another day.  Generally, though, if you follow the cycle Trickster does learn from those failures, while Trickster’s targets learn from Trickster.

The second type of Trickster tale basically works like this: Trickster sees a different creature doing something that he wants to do.  So Trickster asks the creature to show him.  Hijinks quickly ensue, wherein Trickster is shown to be massively incapable of doing what the other creature wants to do.

We can divide the two types of Trickster tale in to broad categories.  The first is a predator/prey learning experiential tale.  The second is a just-so story that tells us about type and role.

In each type, Coyote is a source of expansion and education.  His elaborate schemes to get food are instructive.  They teach the listener about setting traps and watching out for those who wish to trap them.  His attempts to become something that he isn’t are also instructive.  They teach the listener about the dangers of foolishly overreaching their own capabilities.

These are, for lack of a better term, basic Trickster tales.  They can really pop up in any sort of culture that has a concept of mischievous spirits.  I more developed mythologies, however, Trickster takes on some other, far more interesting aspects.

One of those, as we see in the Job tale, is upsetting the natural order of things.  Time and again this has to do with the relations between mortals and the gods.  Raven stole the sun from Heaven in one Native American myth and placed it in the sky.  Prometheus brought fire to humans.  Legba convinced Mawu to leave the Earth behind.  The serpent, of course, got everything all fucked up in the Garden of Eden.

In this, too, Trickster had an effect on the way the gods understood each other and their world.  Prometheus tricked Zeus in to accepting a lesser sacrifice.  Hermes stole Apollo’s sacred cows and, in doing so, managed to get himself a position among the gods.  Loki allowed the Giants to steal the apples of immortality (but then got them back).  Loki also played a key role in the building of Valhalla and gave birth (yeah, you read that right) to Sleipnir, the eight-legged war horse (yeah, you read that right, too) that Odin would ride in to battle.

Throughout the tales the overwhelming sense you get from the Tricksters is that they’re not necessarily good, but they also aren’t evil.  They are simply chaotic, uncategorical, and willing to do things for their own nefarious purposes.  Or just because they can.  Even so, Tricksters are largely accepted by the larger pantheon and even if they aren’t full members they’re deemed to be quite useful.  Loki and Thor would hang out and go on adventures together.  Hermes and Apollo ended up as buds.  Eshu was the one who created the system of divination that allowed mortals to understand the will of the gods.  It goes on.

In many ways it was Christian missionaries and priests that messed up the concept of the Trickster.  This should not be surprising, as they screwed up a lot of stuff while playing the cultural imperialism game.  Basically, what they did was look at the Trickster character in the local pantheon and say, “Hey, this guy looks like Satan.  Let’s call him that.”  This indicated a somewhat unsurprisingly lack of critical thought amongst the Christian missionary set.

My theory is that it was Loki who suffered the most from this particular attitude.  Basically, we know very little of the pre-Christian Norse mythology.  Most of the preserved Norse myth comes from the odious Snorri Sturleson, who wrote the Prose Edda specifically to turn it in to a proto-Christian tale.  I’ve been aware of this particular issue, but I owe Lewis Hyde for a further insight.

See, the Norse mythological cycle hinges on two stories: the death of Baldur and Ragnarok, or the end of the world.  Baldur was the Norse sun god.  He began to have premonitions that bad things would happen to him, so Frigg went out across the world and made everything swear an oath that it would not harm Baldur.  Everything, that is, except for mistletoe.  So Loki commenced to use his trickery to get Baldur killed by that most unlikely plant.  The gods retaliated, chaining Loki down in Hel, where a serpent dripped venom on his face.  The story goes that Loki will eventually be loosed and will bring about Ragnarok, after which the world will end, but Baldur will come back to life and re-make the world.

Sound like anything?  Perhaps, oh, I don’t know…the book of Revelation?

Anyway, Hyde argues that this was not the original intent of the Baldur story.  He sees it as a winter tale, along the lines of the story of the Rape of Persephone or any number of corn god myths that we see all over in world mythology.  Mistletoe, you see, is also a symbol of rebirth.  It’s an evergreen, and one of the few hardy plants that can grow up in climates where the sun literally disappears from the sky for days, weeks, or months at a time.  There is a reason why we have that strange winter tradition of kissing under the mistletoe, after all.

This, then, gets to an interesting idea.  The Trickster of the just-so story creates the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth, of failure and opportunity.  But there’s even more to it than that.

Hyde offered up two different tales of Coyote in the land of the dead in his book.  The one Hyde found to be more interesting tells of Coyote going to get his wife.  He’s told to follow death through an elaborate path and do what death tells him to do, even though Coyote cannot see anything.  Coyote and his wife then have to cross five mountains and Coyote is told he cannot touch his wife until they’ve passed the fifth.  Coyote, of course, cannot follow this simple command and his wife is sent back to the land of the dead.  Death then tells Coyote that he’s a fool, as he would have created a way for people to come back from the land of the dead.

The story that fascinated me, though, was one that Hyde just tossed out on his way to the longer story.  It concerns Coyote going to get his wife.  He’s then told that he cannot look back to see if she’s following until he has left the land of the dead.  Coyote, of course, does and his wife disappears.  I was shocked because I’d heard that story before.

Orpheus, you see, was a great musician in the Greek mythologies.  His wife, Eurydice, died and went to Hades.  Orpheus traveled to the underworld and played his lyre, charming Hades enough that the god of the underworld agreed to release her on the condition that Orpheus didn’t look back.  As he reached the end of the passage back from the underworld, though, Orpheus turned to look and Eurydice disappeared.

Meanwhile, the lyre that Orpheus played was invented by Hermes, who gave it to Apollo as payment for the sacred cows he’d stolen and slaughtered.  Hermes was also the one that Zeus sent to Hades to force the release of Persephone in the Greek myth that explains winter.  There is a developing theme here.

What we’re looking at in multiple cases is the creation of death and rebirth myths that center around the Trickster characters.[1]

That requires a re-thinking of this whole Trickster = Satan idea.  I could argue that it’s just as accurate to say that Jesus is a Trickster character.  Now that’s a fun idea.

Of course it’s still not even that simple.  The Trickster is a character that’s far too complicated for the simplistic white/black and good/evil distinctions inherent in a monotheistic religion.  As such, I’m thinking of adding some thoughts about Tricksters in to this stuff from time to time.

Coyote is a fascinating character, after all.

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[1]By the way, at this juncture it occurs to me to mention that most people might not be aware of the fact that Hermes was the Trickster of the primary Greek pantheon, as he’s mostly remembered as the messenger of the gods, his crazy winged sandals, and his propensity to deliver FTD bouquets.  However, bear in mind that in the Roman pantheon Hermes became Mercury.    His name was then given to that element also known as quicksilver, that stuff that seems to be liquid metal at room temperature and is synonymous with things that cannot be easily caught or categorized.