The Self Love Phase of Dog Ownership: Doggie Narcisism

Ever noticed how people often look just like their dogs, or their dog's seem to represent how their owners want to be seen... I have been noticing this for a few years now, and all over the world, not just in narcissism prone places like the US and Europe, although it seems to be a middle and upper class phenomenon, but maybe I am not quite seeing the love a mestizo might have for a mutt, or the projection a junk yard owner might be making with a junk yard dog. But I see it all the time in people who intentionally buy dogs at a phase in life I am going to call the self love phase, and I have seen it so many times I am past speculating that it is a trend..

 Basically, people buy these dogs at the beginning of self doubt. They tend to be people who are deferring having children, or just got out of a failed relationship where they considered having children, so this dog gets a lot of their attention, a heck of a lot.. for some reason I see this a lot in the sportier places in the world, places where people ski or surf, jog or mountain climb, and they are nursing some childhood trauma while pretending to be indifferent to the normal pace of life, but at some point, they feel empty, maybe it's a rejection, or something they will never talk about, but all the sudden they have this dog that looks a heck of a lot like them. Think of the shaved head guy with a goatee who buys a bull dog,  and who swings his arms oddly as if to accentuate how big his chest is..   he might even be trying to show that like his bulldog, he is kind of cuddly underneath, or the tough Latino guy with the pit bull,or the effete man with the poodle that has his same inquisitive yet regal and detached personality.. he isn't sure if he is gay, the dog is a poodle but male.. the similarities, the longer you look, go past being kind of funny to striking... it's the narcissistic phase of dog ownership..
I'm not a psychologist, so I won't try to explain it fundamentally, but it's always these kind of confident, often attractive yet somewhat odd people that go for it.. they tend to have talents, but be a bit hard to get to know.. maybe they don't even know themselves, and they seem to search for what they might have missed or be missing developmentally by trying to give it to a dog.. or any number of pets, but nothing quite like a dog to show it off publicly.. look at me, I can be a care giver.. thing's not hungry and doesn't have fleas...
Well,... good for you!

Sociology and Sports: Rugby Cultures, Soccer Cultures, and Baseball Cultures, and American Football Cultures, and...

I have started to form a theory about the sports a culture plays and how it organizes it'self.. in other words, how the culture, mostly the men of the culture, arrange themselves to tackle (or not tackle) challenges or even just daily organization as they arise in a place.
I think my first inkling that there might be something there came about in my observing the differences between latin places where they played only soccer, and where they played baseball as well. I think I had just traveled through Central America and noticed a difference in Panama, where you can actually drink the water through most of the areas close to the canal, and started to make some assumptions from my first world brain about productivity. Although at first this theory was about a notion of effectiveness and competence (how Northern European, how Rugby/American Football!) it seemed to offer insight beyond being a judge-mental outlet for my grumpy frustration with the Soccer worlds of bottled water only!
What I noticed was that in Soccer Culture's (I will say Football only once.. you must have by now figured out I am a yank...) there is rarely a developed perception of hierarchy or specialization.. kids playing soccer together are separated by skill, but rarely dominated in way that is quantified or physical.. it's all kind of light and non accusatory... and involvement is almost incidental.. moments of being completely responsible for the action are fleeting and seen more as opportunities than obligations.. a laissez faire attitude prevails, as well as a thinly spread perception of responsibility that is easily shrugged or passed off.. much effort is displayed, but the tides of the game mean that effort can be expended or wasted likely with not much notice by others until you reach higher levels, which only seem to exist as profit centers for those who come from more stratified portions of a culture that, in keeping with an all encompassing theory, likely valued other sports more originally. So you see soccer is the sport of the careless poor and middle class, living unstructured yet not necessarily unfulfilled lives.. but somewhat in a vacuum of the pressures that create quantifiable improvements to quality of life.. it's the game of the Flavellah and the cement sea of dirt roaded anywhere third world, a what me worry world of hand to mouth existence that doesn't really want to have a game plan...but living with passion nonetheless..
Enter baseball.. a group effort but with times of defined and calculable individual leadership and performance.. key decisions are made constantly with immediately measurable outcomes.. people are sidelined and even shamed for lack of performance which can be undeniably proven.. the players are at the mercy not of perception but of the weight of prior performance.. their personalities tend to be tempered to reveal nothing but what they want, ecstasy and agony traded for calculations on what and what not to reveal...the player tempering himself to not reveal his perceptions which could be exploited, but to reveal what might be an asset in an endless calculation that exists in a confrontation with defined rules, concentration and performance becoming a virtue over spontaneity with results and the cool application of precise force the virtues of these societies.. they seem to burgeon a middle class with more distinction, like a crew of team captains assigned one to every 9 or 12.. there is less chaos and more improvement, but somehow unexpected magic...less daily despair but more grid of the long season, the working class wholly enfranchised to the valuation of themselves by numbers and the most recent results instead of by status or perception of authority perhaps won long ago... it's almost the downside of too much honesty...in a culture that for an outsider is supposed to be a paragon of carelessness as we stumble south for Pina Coladas and beach bungalows..
Enter the Rugby culture to add a determination to so much calculation.. and to return some of the spontaneity of a fluid game but add the personal responsibility in an instant that demands both awareness and toughness, teamwork and individual performance balanced to create a somehow perfect balance of humility and pride, individual satisfaction and community success. Leadership and cohesion are on par with individual performance, the many become the one, and the society tackles problems aggressively but simply, with less calculation for self aggrandizement than the simple selfless solution to a problem... charmless perhaps on the surface, these cultures have a tidiness and a subtle tendency towards mutual humanization despite a tough front that leads to an unexpected respect, added to by the fact that aggressiveness is sublimated through a contest long enough to not leave one the luxury of departing the field of play with unspent emotions, so that problems are solved in one go, with a fresh start and a calm way consistent through the population but with the sheep dog potential for self defense while aggression is shunned. It might come as no surprise that this this might be the best culture to have accomplishments in on a day to day, but the lack of mercurialness can leave one wanting for controversy handled loudly and unprofessionally.. these are cultures of understood whispers and not savage incrimination, humor shared but nary the relish of one sacrificed for the entertainment of all... might not here enter the cultures of individual sports, the realm of the solitary with various manifestations for all, from the complexity of emotions that vent from ultimate fighting, boxing, or any other pugilism, to the weird worlds of insecurity, individuality, and effectiveness that come from Asian Martial Arts, to sports of technological precision like shooting, archery and the weird mix of bowling horseshoes and bachi realms, places where life becomes about individual tests...skiing, and other sports of gliding emphasize a n odd combination of gliding through life as an individual, appearing effortless and solitary yet with great effort to give such an effortless appearance, with ll the manifestations of leisure that seem so symbolized by that glide...
Now we arrive at American Football, a fine place to start before I expound on every sport that comes to mind as somehow exemplary of the aspirations and mindset of every valley and subculture that plays it. Football seems to dominate somehow a corner of any theory as it is so specialized and intricate that it all but requires a complex and dominating culture to spin off in every far flung direction from it looking for the satisfaction of the challenges it creates... It's complex.. completely complex.. it is the Land Air Battle of sports, the multi phase rules bound protected yet gladiatorial manifestation of a culture as ambitious for self preservation as it is for mental stimulation and glory... it creates it's own values, removed from the true vicissitudes of unprotected battle, but then through spectacle and calculation vaults it's complex modes of cooperation into dominance.. people specialize, they armour, they see themselves as a team and as a sub team, can take credit as a group or as an individual or as a team or special team as easily as they can shirk it or asses blame on another, blamelessly from the sidelines as their responsibility is rarely more than half the game. It creates complex nuance and the temptation to calculate for personal or group glory, and for both or for neither.. moments of true responsibility are there but often fade in the context of the whole effort if convenient.. and simple virtues carry only so far as the true complexity of the game requires more calculation than earnestness for eventual prevalence, no matter what is expected of the various sub groups who learn to fit within the hierarchy. And then there are the rules, the calculations to compromise entertainment and commerce, to turn commerce into entertainment and entertainment into commerce with an endless fiddling and halting to always guarantee fair play and to leave the game in the hands of the intellectuals instead of the savages while simultaneously rewarding the bottom dogs for their savagery and the top dogs for their thoughtfulness, but never letting the savages run away with the show, all at the expense of sublimation, so that you remain pent up dreaming for another day of it as often as not, but never straying from the group mentality to a fighting or rugby way of thinking.. to protect one so that true humility might never come and ones true value might never be known so long as the group as a whole moves forward.. what a culture this must be, the savages led by the sages to mutual benefit, the sages in turn controlled by the high priests and on and on.. so contrived as to almost appear as if it could never satisfy anyone except that the group acquiescence to the value of the game makes it a juggernaut of sorts... the world's smartest organism, able to identify any weakness if you give it enough time, predisposed to aggression and opportunism all under the guise of fair play... unifying all who should appear strong.. all kind of makes me think of that guy in Mad Max with shoulder pads, but before I keep going on into Chess and Indy Car Racing I will assume you have gotten the point.. sports and values are teammates in an endless human game..

2 Americas

The two Americas.. one of animal ferocity, but somehow in touch with it's civility, the other of docile playfulness, but somehow disconnected from it's wildness until it erupts...
One has skinned a deer and the other thinks it is savage to consider doing such a thing, but will still eat meat at the table. I wonder how many cultures have ever gotten so far into such a separation between food production and consumption.. it is a superlative of our culture, and sadly might be on our epitaph, but what evidence of how complex we have become, but at the expense of making generations of people squeamish like children when it comes to the reality of where food comes from. Butchering my first animal was for some reason a huge treat for me, like an anthropology class of the greatest value, and if you react to this you definitely are telling me which America you belong to. the other America, that of the raw side of our equation, would just wonder why I would make a big deal of it.. We enshrine them in films, like No Country for Old Men and The Grey, but most don't really want to be them.. the norm functions in the conventional wisdom of actuarial safety, protected by an OSHA for the mind, no matter how many people get blown up in Schwartzie's Commando ( I think this 80's B movie held the record for the most killings in a feature length film.. it must have been surpassed by now. Not to sell it short, it was Elissa Milano's debut as well. What a gift this film!).
If you learn about some of the villains of our time, like Kliebold and Harris, you can almost see that part of what drove them was a curiosity about the forbidden, which isn't that forbidden in any of the less economically blessed places in the world.
This reminds me of something I once saw in a remote high floor corner of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West in New York (for those of you from the squeamish America, your reference would be that it is one of the two museums represented in A Night at the Museum, that Ben Stiller movie that never grosses you out like some do, and it does have a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front, riding a horse in all his proud glory...). It was a statement on an old display by a woman who had collected most of what was in that gallery. She had been working someplace in either Polynesia or South America with a famous anthropologist (which I believe she eventually became) who was training her, back in what must have been the 50's when National Geographic actually had differences in the World to write about, and he asked her if she had ever witnessed a death in her own country. She said she had not. He sent her home to witness one, then asked her to come back. He didn't want her perspective on death to come from a cultural vacuum.
So often ours in America does seem to come from a reflexive vacuum. I wonder how many Americans first experience with witnessing a real death was from Video on September 11th. It's a funny thing, what we have created.. so safe it's dangerous...

Central Tennessee

It's all of America's soul with none of it's brain, part ghetto, part gilded suburb, two streets of fun and two America's living side by side with mutual respect but not much interest in one another, like a couple married for 22 years that rarely talks but knows what the other is up to, one Oprah's past, the beaten down existence of a black man in a state that sets up just about everything in it's power to keep a man down, and the other Oprah's future, a shiny world of white smiles and and baptist values that deny there is a savage side until you step sideways and see a forked tongue sliver out of someones mouth... it's an amazing thing, the display of a Central Tennessean angry, so different from the caution of honkeys in Memphrica, kind of a wrath of God indignation that put's the S in Surly. And surly is the best way to describe so much of what goes on there.. mollycoddled southern women who are used to having things their way and live in a weird bubble, out of touch with just about anything extra-cultural (they got their own culture, see, ask Paula Dean!), and the surly men who are constantly out of patience tending to this world... saccharine sweet turns to surly lightening quick on those hot summer days, 93 with 100% humidity, when everyone is out pretending to be southern gentry or a country star, the basis of this fantasy usually being one trip in their life to the Rhyman, or an equivalent one days spent doing keg stands at The Steeplechase, as hollow a bar for status as a southern gentleman as can be imagined... Hey is that Faith Hill! I'm wearing the same boots as her! OMG
And on the peripheries the real Nashville.. Musicians with a nose full of blow and 20 bucks in their pocket but enough gigs on the schedule so as not to be bothered.. brothers doing their day job, eatin' garbage food down at the gas station and making sure the CMT offices downtown get mopped at midnight... maybe meat and three every once in a while, or the Bill Frists of the world, Nashville's outside of music hoity toity, motivated by some mean spirited fantasy of ego and greed, that they get theirs but they'll stop you from getting yours in a heartbeat, 10% sales tax for all and tell em it suits em, all with a disarming smile that says "what could possibly be wrong with me?", all chasing some absurd dream of this being better than the small town, while pretending it is a small town when it makes them feel important, or that the music makes it all worth while, or maybe chasin' nothing at all, just livin', like a rattlesnake wanting to be left alone. it don't have to tell you why it wants to be, just leave it be, cause this house is defended by Smith & Wesson...It ain't a place for progress...
Sure, Parnell was a good mayor, and every once in a while you are surprised by what people in Belmont or Green Hills or East Nasty come up with (pretty creative.. sigh.. for Nashville.), but outside of Pelatas, invented in Mexico, just smartly done here, the place is often a derivative pile of seething dung, delivered with a self entitled smile by some caddy pretentious idiot, and to talk to a cop in Nashville is often to be taken aback by how bad they actually are ( I once tried to report an assault there, by a guy who was very dangerous, dangerous on another scale from what people are used to in the US, and the two fat fucks who refused to get out of their vehicle said to me "they must deserve each other.." and drove off... I was stunned. We went to the courthouse to try to get a warrant for the guy, and the judge seemed more interested in berating the victim for wearing a hat as we talked to the judge through bullet proof glass like a cheap liquor store. It took a third cop and 24 hours to even approach what would be considered professional public service).
Sometimes the music delights, and you say 'goddamn, there's some talented people here', and you feel the soul on the dirty pavement of drifting players in an American drama, and you feel a bit of shame to want any more, because in it's most honest moments the 'Ville can be existential bliss, America baring it's melancholy soul, being honest for a change, being open and country strong, like your cranky dad telling you he loves you after all those years, until it hits you... the ass hole could have told me that 20 years ago and I wouldn't have ever had to harbor all this fucking anger that I am releasing now so bitter sweetly in the first place .. that's Nashville in a PBR pint cup! it's the USA challenging you to truly love it, unconditionally, as it blows by on three interstates in 6 directions with nary an explanation why.. your nose running from the smog, your brain wondering why you got such a taste for the unrequited love of such stunning narcissism.. but oh the moments of perfection... Ooh Nash-Vegas, it ain't no place for a poor boy like me..

Why I left New England..

It wasn't my original home, but somehow I developed a distaste for New England.. for people from where I was born and raised, New England was somehow a tasteful retreat, a place where you could bring something to the locals but you could respect them as well, somehow an amiable exchange from the perspective of the inflated self worth of an urban colonist. Elvis Presley once described Scientologists as being all head and no heart, and that thoughtful little piece of Mississippi insight would explain in some funny way what we liked about New Englanders after life in the Big City had subjected us to the worlds 40 flavors of passion, hatred, and insanity.. for as much as New York could be provincial in it's narcissistic insanity, New England offered somehow a cerebral distance from all that was a seething microcosm of the worlds problems. New Yorkers can't search for relief for too long, and you need look no further than that New Yorker Cartoon to know that we didn't expect to find our solutions within 2000 miles of the other side of the Hudson.. hell they came to us for what ails 'em...It also seemed to offer the solutions. All head, no heart.. the Californians would ride us, the only people who unnerve New Yorkers despite all their protestations otherwise, for our habits, somehow the solutions to the worlds problems seemed to be associated with imagery of a farm, and the closest farms we seemed to know existed where someone had once invited us to Christmas in New England.. they had a farm right down the road, imagine that, what a thing, a farm.. so.. elemental.. so Wow.. Cows.. the whole shooting match, and that farmer, he's so.. flinty.. so.. real! That's how the whole sad infatuation started, and after a bit you find yourself living the plot or a John O'Brien film, Fred Tuttle embarrasses you in all the ways you want to be embarrassed, you big city fool, while teaching you the way of hard work and self denial.. Gee Gosh Darn, who did I think I was.. life wraps up pretty well like a Green Acres Episode, I buy a house someplace quaint, raise left handed bees and name my kids Juniper and Sage...
It felt as if the place had been eaten over, that as much as it was recovering, reforesting, that it would never truly be wild again, at least in it's southern reaches, not without some highly processed three times public commented permission, some variant on the probate court orphans of the Yellowstone Wolves...
But after all this wore off, this fantasy of a tasteful providing of the worlds needs in a squeaky clean socially unassailable way that never really involved going down Conrad's dark river of savagery (well, you were expected to read about it, but doing it.. tisk tisk. so.. republican)..it felt like it had been eaten over, and once one realizes the true extent of the world's savagery, you realize New England's only remaining savagery was indifference, which is a particularly awkward form, cowardly as well...and it's virtues had been defined so long ago at some Congregationalist or even Puritan Pulpit that there was no room for redefinition.. sure it was kind of nice, keeps the hoi palloi at bay.. New England, the last bastion against the bougie fucks who are turning the rest of America into something from that Joni Mitchell Song (New Englanders love Joni Mitchell.. it doesn't mean you got all freaky and went off with the Dead to California.. it just means you make choices to keep things nice.. we like nice.. nice and cautious..), parking lots stopped by all that taciturn judgement, that thrifty farmer common sense.. but underneath that judgement it started to fester at me that that soundness, that judgement, was a combination of a control to keep things just the way the autistic old farmer likes it, where the world needs him, where the eldest brother gets to keep being in charge, but also it was based on a fear of true adventure, of riding down the river to the unknown (there's a dam on the river you wouldn't notice it unless you knew where to look, and by the way, the salmon haven't been past it in 100 years...).. it's the responsible one who won't ever realize he could go further, but if he could, why would he?.. it gets cold out there, we go places in the spring... and it's uncomfortable.. and the people out there, if I could slip past New York and out into the world.. they don't have the same self control.. what would they do to me.. what might I do to them.. what might I learn to like.. it's all too risky, and risk don't milk the cows.. so the New Englander stays up in his isolated little corner of organized paradise, in a willful ignorance of worldly pleasures that the biblical basis of America's oldest culture might abhor.., perhaps for the better for never having seen Tijuana's den's of sin and Nuku Hiva's soaring spires of jungled mystery, quietly contributing in the ways he feels fit, but what of you that never taken wild ride, George Bailey, will it irk you to the end, and who are you to raise the young with only second hand answers...is there not a pride in the mistakes you have made having been your own? As I write, all that pretentious clapboard sided order seems almost nice, crickets in the evening fog, moths buzzing about the front porch lamp. I wonder what I railed against, but do we seek our equals and stop the machinery of growth to avoid it's awkward stages, call it good and seal it up like old Sturbridge Village.. stay a precocious 12 for ever without tasting the forbidden fruit of 13, pine for a wood handled past instead of going through the ugly stages of the present for a perhaps broader future.. I guess they will never know as the fight the next windmill farm, and I might never either, for as much as I pine for it's domestic tranquility, I don't know what I would say in such environs, when I open my mouth about the wonders I have seen...

Vermont

Never have so many people worked so hard to preserve so many freedoms that they were so afraid to use...