"No. Dr. Lector has no interest in hypothesis. He doesn't believe in syllogism, or synthesis, or any absolute."-Hannibal, Thomas Harris
"What does he believe in?"
"Chaos. And you don't even have to believe in it. It's self-evident."
I have expressed the opinion here that the path to contented living in the boondocks is to relax to the fact that shit happens. Today I'm thinking that was maybe easier advice to give than to live. There are different kinds of shit. The kind I find easy to relax to is the kind that maybe drives other people up various walls. The kind that other people actually welcome is the kind that makes me want to climb into a hole and pull it in after me. For me, true chaos is other people: People with their own existential needs, their own ideas about what constitutes chaos and order, people who don't give a shit what I think about it because what I think is self-evidently (to them) wrong. People who show up and (it seems to me at the time) start barking orders and making demands because the way I've been doing things all along are exactly as wrong as the way I think about them. And there's nothing at all I can really do about any of this, because let's face it, if I knew how to deal with people I probably wouldn't be out here in the first place.
I admit it freely: I don't do people well at all. I am a totally clueless male. That's why I moved to the boonies: It was part of my own personal 12-step program. I had admitted that I was powerless over Cluelessness and that my life had become unmanageable. I'm still working on steps two through twelve; I'll let you know.
Oh, all right, there were other political and philosophical reasons for moving here. But right now that seems like the big one, and down deep it may actually have been the real one. Let a wind storm turn the whole place upside-down: I can deal with that. Let the dogs take on a pack of coyotes with three paws tied behind their collective back: No problem, I'm there. But let people I barely know show up and start re-arranging things to suit their own needs, even (perhaps especially) when they have every right to do so, and I become helpless mush. I should stop carrying a 1911 and start wearing a Semtex vest. At least that way when I express myself my troubles will be over.
Yeah, but then I'd go out to the range and try to practice with the thing...
"Embrace the chaos," he says. Christ, what a hypocrite. What the hell do I know about dealing with chaos?
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