The true enemy revealed

I have many enemies.  Pants.  Shoes.  Ninjas dressed in yellow.  But one of my greatest foes is doors.

There are a few acceptable reasons to have a door.  My fridge door, for example, keeps my food cold.  My oven door keeps me from roasting to death.  My balcony door keeps me from freezing in winter.  These are annoying doors, but their utility outweighs their intrinsic evil.

But my home is *full* of doors with no redeeming value.  Recently I struck a blow against the tyranny of doors and took off the two cupboard doors that have most annoyed me in the past.  Now my kitchen is far superior.

It is glorious.  Beautiful, functional, clean, neat.  Now when someone is using the counter and I want a glass, I don't have to caution them about danger, wait for them to move back, open the door, reach around it, and fumble to get the right glass.  Instead I just reach in and get it, smooth as anything.

You know how often I bash my head on no door at all?  NEVER.  You know how often I bash my head on the old cupboard doors?  SOMETIMES.  Never >  sometimes, when it comes to head/door bashery.

I can just look in and see everything.  No opening one door, realizing the thing I want is behind the other door, and then opening that.  Instead of a piece of furniture whose primary function was to impede my vision and movement, I have empty space, nothing at all, and both my vision and movement run wild and free.

People will no doubt claim that you need bathroom doors.  FAUGH I say.  Bathroom doors just cause mirrors to get foggy and block access to the towels that are hanging on the wall behind the door.  People have bodies under their clothes.  They poop on a regular basis.  We don't need a door to pretend that we aren't naked under it all, or to perpetuate the fiction that we go to the bathroom just to play Candy Crush on our phones.

But when a door is taken off, the resulting free door, loosed from its bondage, must be dealt with.  The solution I have come up with is to store doors behind my curtains in my bedroom, up against the floor to ceiling window.  If you are across the street from my condo you would clearly see a door up against the window, and you might wonder why.  The answer is that it doesn't bother me there.  Those curtails are always closed, it does not block my sight.  I don't want to go through the window and fall to my death, so my movement is free.  Also, I am extremely unlikely to bash my head on it.

While I would rather simply smash the doors, rend them to pieces, watch tiny shards fly past my head as I deliver the deathblow with an axe, this is not to be.  If I end up selling this place someday the new buyers will insist on their being doors.  They will be convinced that plates must be kept hidden, washing machines must be disguised, and food needs to be sequestered away.  We can't have visitors thinking that we clean our clothes, or eat!  What a social disaster that would be!

So the doors will stay until such time as I must reattach them to coddle the foolishness of others.  I despise doors, but not enough to lose money over them.  I am not *that* far gone.

Burnout

The Fyre Festival is an example of legendary incompetence turning into spectacular failure.  It was a festival pitched as a luxury music experience in a remote, tropical location that was superbly marketed, but which completely failed in execution.  People who were promised villas on the beach got leaky tents, chefs serving sushi were replaced with cheese sandwiches, and all the bands pulled out and the festival collapsed after everyone had already arrived.

I just watched a documentary on Netflix called Fyre about the festival, cataloging its initial meteoric rise and subsequent implosion.  It was clear that this wasn't a series of unfortunate accidents, but rather calculated fraud layered on top of idiotic optimism and mismanagement.  I liked the show a lot, and I recommend it if you want to watch evil fools fail.

The thing about the documentary that I found most fascinating though is the way they marketed the festival.  They got social media influencers to post about it and make it a meme, and sold out all of their heinously expensive tickets in no time at all.  I know that social media influencers are a thing... but the idea of following them, much less buying shit they are shilling, boggles my mind.

Why would I care what any of those people say?  Aren't they just mostly spending their days composing photos to make you think their lives are better than yours, and then trying to sell you shit that in theory will give you the life they are pretending to have?

I think I have a weird relationship to my phone compared to most people.  Health professionals insist that you need to leave your phone away from your bed so your notifications don't keep you awake all night.  I can't fathom this.  Why the fuck would you have your phone near your bed?  If anything gives me notifications I uninstall it!  Stop bothering me!

I can look at an instagram model and appreciate the curves, or marvel at the gigantic biceps.  But following them to get more pictures?  Nonsensical, is what that is.  It isn't that I am claiming some perfect rationalism that makes me immune to sales pitches (though I am about as resistant as people get), rather I honestly can't fathom what it is that goes on in people's brains when they follow social media personalities so fervently.

Following celebrities?  I am barely interested in following people I actually know, and I curate my facebook feed to maximize 'people who link thoughtful and clever articles'.

But apparently just knowing how to get followers on instagram is a career option, so apparently it is me who is the freak.  Nobody is paying me gazillions of dollars or offering free stuff just for a mention on my blog, so by the logic of capitalism I am doing this *wrong*.

I guess I should start posting pictures of my fancy life, spending time oiling my arms and learning to use filters to put up muscle shots, and telling people they can have it all.

Or not.  Because the prospect of doing that regularly makes my skin crawl.

Want what you want

I just read a Savage Love post that got me thinking about what people think is okay to demand in a relationship.  In the post the letter writer complained that twenty years ago his wife said that she would never kiss him or give him oral sex again, and he was looking for permission to divorce her.  (Kinda late, though, wouldn't you say?)

Dan basically told him he could divorce his wife if he wanted.  Because obviously if you are unhappy you are allowed to get a divorce!

The comments afterwards though were interesting.  Some people thought that withdrawing oral sex in such a way was unacceptable, some thought that it was fine but withdrawing kissing was unacceptable.  There was a lively debate about exactly how much physical intimacy should be required in a relationship.

I think so many people, nearly all the commenters included, miss the boat on this one.  The key is this:  There is NO universal standard.  There is no thing that your partner has to do such that not doing it is righteous and proper justification for breaking up.  You can break up righteously any time you want, for any reason or no reason.  You do not owe anyone a relationship.

There are the basic decencies we owe everyone, of course.  But a partner can demand kissing.  Or they can demand no kissing.  They can demand flowers every day, sexy Santa/Elf roleplay, living in different cities, or eighteen children by age 40.  And you can demand your own things, and if each person's demands are not met, they can leave.

I would say that we do owe each other honesty about our demands.  Trotting them out only after a partner has made a critical commitment is shitty.  On the other hand, people do change, and we don't have to be the same person for our entire lives.

In so many relationships, in advice columns and in real life, I see people asking the question "Is this thing my partner did so bad that I am allowed to break up with them now?"  They don't phrase it like that of course but this is truly what they are asking.  We have ingrained this idea that relationships must be forever and it is so destructive.  We idolize the idea that a relationship that ends has failed, even though there is no sense in that - a relationship should be judged on what it brings, not whether or not someone died.

You can end a relationship any time you want.  You don't need permission, and you don't need an ironclad reason aside from 'I am not happy with this relationship'. 

I wish more people thought this way.

Bag of bags

The Liberal government here in Canada just announced that they are going to be banning single use plastic by 2021.  Naturally this isn't going to be a *full* ban.  They will cave to all kinds business pressure in the name of 'being competitive' but hopefully a substantial amount of single use plastic will stop. 

The phrase competitive is constantly brought up in these sorts of debates as though it is some kind of magic bullet, when it so often is meaningless or silly.  Who cares if businesses are inconvenienced, if they are selling in the Canadian market against other businesses here who are equally inconvenienced?  If your unique business model requires generating loads of trash and plastic waste and your competitors do not, you *should* go out of business because you are depending on hurting society and government largesse in cleanup to maintain your bottom line, and the rest of us shouldn't put up with that.  If everyone in competition is doing it, then you all change your practices and prices together, no big deal.

Naturally the Conservatives are against this, because of the effects it might have on business.  This is something I always find hilarious, as though the important thing in the world is business.  Don't worry about humans - corporations are the crucial thing, goes their thinking.  Corporations should exist to serve humans, not the other way around.  If a decision is good for people and bad for corporations... then it is good for people!  Easy!

I personally try to work on not using single use plastic, but it is rough.  When you are a tiny slice of the market it isn't in most companies best interests to provide you with options, so we really need the government to bring the big club down and force it.  I prefer soft enforcement, like a $1 tax on every disposable plastic bag, for example, to hard enforcement, but I will take what I can get.

If only we could actually elect someone willing to put environmental issues like this as high on the agenda as their impact on people actually warrants... but for the moment that is a bit of a pipe dream.

One track mind

A couple days ago I went to a sex club.  I won't actually be talking about the sex though, because the non sex stuff was actually more interesting.  It revealed some things about my brain, and made me wonder if other people are like me in this way.  I don't actually know!

Part of the evening was an icebreaker event to get people comfortable and mixing it up.  This is a great feature for me because while the idea of sexing up a bunch of hot randoms at a club sounds fun, I know a lot of women get approached way too much in these situations and I don't want to be *that guy* who makes things shitty for them.  Having a structured way to get familiar with people is ideal for me.

The first icebreaker was sock wrestling.  Two people get a sock each, put on that sock, and then wrestle.  The winner is the one who gets the other person's sock off first.  Of course being a sex club the crowd ranged from people wearing something to people wearing nothing, so the potential for sexyness was high.  I, of course, was naked, because fuck clothes.

The organizer started it up, and she challenged us, asking who would wrestle her.  A woman about the same size stepped in and they fought.  The organizer won convincingly, through a combination of raw athleticism, aggressiveness, and practice.  Then she asked for more people to wrestle, and naturally I waved my hand about.  Pick me, pick me!  Ooh, ooh, pick me!

She picked me.

I was the tallest and strongest one there by a fair margin, so I wanted to be the first into the ring.  If someone was going to fight me, I wanted them to know what they were getting into.  A woman immediately stepped forward to fight me.  She was pretty average in size, but she gave me a 'IMMA CRUSH YOU FOOL' look that made me optimistic that this would be a good fight.  Also she was super hot, both because she was conventionally attractive, but additionally because her aesthetic was exactly my style.

But her attractiveness and nudity had no effect on me.  Normally in this sort of situation I would be wound right up, incredibly sensitive to any touch.  I would be acutely aware of exactly how we touched, and every nerve would be trembling, waiting to fire.  Not this time.  The only thing in my brain was the desire to compete, to fight, to strive for victory.  The organizer said go, and we rushed each other without hesitation.

It became instantly clear that my opponent was fast, strong, and flexible.  Also she wasn't holding back in the slightest, and neither was I.  Normally if you ask me 'hey, did you touch a boob in that situation?' I can tell you *exactly* how much I touched a boob.  The fucking memory is seared into my brain.  In this case I have no idea.  We were wrestling for a little while so I probably touched lots of things, but I couldn't tell you what they were at all - my brain was entirely occupied with winning.  That what we were doing might be sexy didn't exist; it was eclipsed by the struggle.

She was faster and more agile than me, but I had a large reach, mass, and strength advantage, and I ripped her sock off without allowing her to get to mine.  She kipped up easily, demonstrating that agility, and I shook her hand and said "Good fight."  Afterwards we talked about it, and she seemed really happy that she had a real challenge, as that was why she immediately volunteered to fight me.  We were both pleased that it was tough and close - losing wouldn't have bothered me, but I wanted a challenge, and I wanted an opponent who was able to take my best efforts, and I got that.

*Then* I got horny, and unbridled desire set in.  Other people wrestled, but only had limited attention to pay.  Hot is great and all, but combine that with physical competence and a "I will fight you, no matter how big you are!" attitude?  Ker Pow.

But there was more icebreaking to come.

Twister is a thing children do at parties.  Also a really solid icebreaker for mostly naked adults.  During round 1 I got bumped out fairly quickly, as you tend to when there are 10 people on a twister board.  On the final round though I managed to hang in there until it was just me and the organizer left, and she made it her mission to get me out.  You can do this in twister by just hanging out on your end of the board and trying to win via physical supremacy... or you can get in right on top of the other person and make it interesting.  Also sexy.

I am not particularly good at twister.  My flexibility is suspect, though my reach does help.  But I am bloody determined, and I managed to stay in despite the fire in my muscles ramping higher and higher.  My opponent decided to make things more difficult for me by distracting me, so she ground herself against my leg and rubbed her breasts on me.

I noted the grinding and touching, and thought that she was doing a good job, getting the crowd into it, and making sure the people were entertained.  But it had no effect on me.  I was going to WIN.  I even thought "Well, I will remember this fondly later, once the match is over."  My legs were twitching with strain and I could feel that I was not going to be able to continue - it was becoming too much. 

Finally things came to an end.  She was underneath me, both of us all tied up like pretzels, when she just lifted her body up, hoisting me off the ground a little, and my hands lost contact.  Game over dude!  Whether or not she was cheating by the official rules of Twister I don't know, but I was happy to accept the end of the game either way.  I told her I was glad to lose because I was about to die and stumbled off.  I spent the next hour struggling to walk because my leg muscles were too beat, so I am glad it didn't go longer.

Now in retrospect that was hot as fuck.  But at the time?  Ice cold.  No reaction.  I think for some people that would be expected but I am the horniest man alive - that old silly stereotype of men thinking about sex every 5 minutes makes me go "Hah, amateurs."  But when competition is in the offing, that totally shuts down and the only thing I think about is striving for victory.

It isn't the winning that I aim for though.  It is attempting to win.  Pushing myself as hard as I can go.  Running to the edge of my capabilities.  Win or lose, the key is to play with all you have.  That is where the greatest joy is found.

Winning is nice and all, don't get me wrong.  It just isn't the key to capturing my brain like intense competition is.

I suspect most people are happy being partly in each world.  Sexy games can be fun because you are both playing a game and flirting, doing each in part.  But I don't do halfways like that.  If I am competing, that is the only thing I am doing.  If I am having sex, that is the only thing I am doing.  Straddling the line between those worlds is not a thing I do.

This has a lot to do with my divided mind.  Director can multitask to some extent - usually trying to accomplish something while worrying about other things.  Passion though?  He does only one thing.  Nothing else even exists.  While I was wrestling and twisting I was totally Passion.  Doing exactly one thing with all my focus.

Maybe if I ever go back to work I will skip sales and go straight to organizing sexy events.  Getting paid to play naked twister seems like a pretty sweet gig to me.

Just a little plastic bag

The other day I was in the grocery store buying a bunch of things including a single hamburger bun.  I didn't put the single bun in a plastic bag because that seemed silly and wasteful - I don't want to use up extra plastic for no reason, and I don't want to create extra plastic trash.

The cashier was not amused.  She put the bun on the scanner to ring it in, and then went to get a plastic bag for it.  I asked her not to, and she got angry at me, telling me I had to take the bun off the scanner myself because she could not.  Her hands had touched money, and she wasn't willing to touch the bun again for fear of passing along germs.  I kinda figure that once you have touched an item once you aren't going to hurt anything by touching it again, but she wasn't having any of it.

This sort of thing happens all the time.  I constantly have to fight to get cashiers to stop putting extra plastic bags on stuff that I buy.  I purchase mushrooms, they try to put extra bags on them.  I refuse the bags and toss the mushrooms loose into my grocery bag, and they look at me like I am a demon sacrificing a baby on an altar made of blood and bones.

Behaviour of this sort is far beyond any reasonable set of precautions against illness and is straight up purity signalling.  You don't need all that plastic to separate everything from everything else - all those foods are going to end up being dissolved by acid in my stomach, after all - but we use packaging as a way to suggest purity and cleanliness even when there is no actual need for it.  When I say that I don't need a plastic bag it goes past logistics and straight into being unclean.

Plastic bags swirling around the world as trash in a dump, litter near a highway, or garbage in the ocean simply aren't the cashier's problem.  They can't be blamed for the Pacific Garbage Patch, but they *can* be blamed for not offering a bag when somebody wanted one, so all the bags get used, even when there is no reason to.  Negative externalities kick us all in the collective junk, as people fail to worry about the consequences of their actions when those consequences are borne jointly rather than individually.

I see this as a failure of regulation.  In my mind garbage should have a price, and it should be borne by the consumer.  Every extra layer of packaging should have a cost.  Every object that has to be recycled should require a fee be paid by the manufacturer, and everything that must be thrown out should have a much larger fee.  The government and society is going to have to pay to deal with that shit once it is done being used, so the company producing it should have to pay for that.  If we actually charged people for the cost of cleaning up the messes they create we would have far fewer messes, no doubt about that.

Want a flimsy clear plastic bag to put your mushrooms in?  Fork over a dollar, because that is what is costs to clean it up.  Want plastic bags to carry your groceries?  No problem, just $1.50 each.  It wouldn't prevent all waste, of course, but it would reduce it a great deal, and would finally break past that sanctity argument people constantly use to justify their polluting ways.

Monetary incentives won't solve all these problems, naturally.  But they can help, not least of which by getting people to see that while a thing might cost a penny to make, the real cost to all of us is much, much more.

A dragon or three

This post has all the spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8.

In the closing episodes of season 8, Daenerys murdered thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.  Not because they were a threat, but just because she was pissed off.  There are all kinds of blog posts and articles and petitions that are angry about this because people wanted Dany to be good and pure!  She could be the saviour of Westeros!

Dany was never good or pure.  She was just white, as white as white can be.  The story of Dany as the great saviour is a pile of racism as far as I am concerned.  Dany is very much the embodiment of privilege, a person who wants the feeling of having helped people, the belief in herself as a benevolent person, but who has no interest whatsoever in considering what sort of help other people actually want.  She wants to *feel* good, not *do* good.

Throughout Game of Thrones Dany has been merciless, cruel, and hopelessly self centered.  She refuses to see anyone else's suffering as relevant, and regularly makes it clear that while she lays claim to titles like "The Breaker of Chains" she actually isn't interested in offering freedom.  She wants to be seen as a liberator, but she demands perfect subservience from everyone around her and total personal loyalty.  People should be free, she thinks, but what freedom means is simply "Have no other master other than Daenerys."

Dany 'saves' people occasionally, no doubt.  But she saves them without any idea of the consequences of her actions, and her expectation afterwards is perfect obedience and adulation.  Simply put, Dany sees herself as the natural and righteous ruler of the world.  When any power structure is destroyed she is happy because it means that more of the world is falling under her sway, and she is closer to the absolute power she thinks she deserves.  When she saves someone she thinks she is doing them a favour - the favour of being ruled by Dany instead of someone else.  Most people think of being saved as being given more freedom, more security, or a otherwise better life.  Dany doesn't think that, because they only thing that makes the world better, in her mind, is her controlling more of it.

Just look at how the whole thing with her rescuing Mirri Maz Duur from a rape goes down: Dany assumes that because she rescued Mirri Maz Duur that she is owed eternal loyalty and love.  Mirri Maz Duur, of course, remembers that the army that Dany showed up with raped and murdered her entire family, destroyed their homes, and enslaved them.  And then she was 'rescued' by being taken forcefully by her oppressors as a servant.  No wonder she strikes back when given the chance!

Daenerys is a delusional, murderous, megalomaniacal tyrant.  The fact that Varys and Tyrion, among others, could not see this is mostly a function of their own racism, and the fact that they really didn't see the suffering in foreign nations as important compared to the suffering of people in Westeros.  They saw her being a force for destruction and evil but hoped that she would suddenly stop when she arrived amongst white people... and she did not.  I wasn't surprised in the slightest, and they shouldn't have been either.

It was honestly funny to me that people complained about this turn of events as though it was impossible to predict.  Dany has been written and acted in such a way as to foreshadow this throughout the show.  Just watch how often Tyrion tries to convince her that she shouldn't use her dragons to burn King's Landing, and how she consistently ignores that line of reasoning.  She doesn't say "Of course burning a city with dragons is a heinous crime!  I would never do such a thing!"  She stares icily, and makes it clear that she would *love* to burn the city with her dragons, but just maybe if people beg and grovel enough she might forgo that pleasure.

Because she is the rightful ruler, and if she wants to burn a city, well, that is her perogative.  People only live because she allows it.

While Daenerys had a terrible time of it in many respects, she has always been a villain.  Many people were hoping that she was the one truly good person in a world of moral ambiguity, (again, way too strongly influenced by her whiteness) but that has never been borne out by her words or actions. 

Face it.  Daenerys is one of the great villains of Game of Thrones.  Just because she occasionally struck back at men for their sexist behaviour or ruthlessly murdered evil people doesn't change that.  Just because she is pretty and white doesn't make her pure.  Her suffering, appearance, and gender do not qualify her for Team Good status.

When Dany burned King's Landing I nodded to myself and thought "Yep, that sure was always going to happen."  You don't have to like it, but this was coming right from the beginning.