This is #53 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.
My neighbourhood: Lafarge Lake with its running track and sports fields far right-centre, with Pinecone Burke Provincial Park above it, and the Pacific Coast mountains behind that. Running diagonally lower left to centre is Hoy Creek and its ‘linear park’ trails, with Westwood Plateau above it.
When I wander around my neighbourhood, or hang out in the local cafés, I hear many snippets of conversations, and observe lots of bits and pieces of things happening, where I never get to hear, or see, their resolution or outcome, as I continue on my walkabout.
But there is something in the makeup of the human brain, it seems, that requires us to try to “make sense” of these fragments by imagining what might have come next and how it might have all ended.
So I’ve started collecting some of these fragments from my local community meanderings, as if they were ersatz writing workshop prompts, and writing little vignettes to fancifully consider, in each case, how each story fragment might have ended. Here’s a few of them. Each is “based on a true story” (as if there were such a thing), or at least the beginnings of one.
(1) In the café, at the table two over from mine, a middle-aged guy has just revealed to his friend that his wife has very recently left him. He claims to be astonished, and proclaims that she didn’t even leave a note, just packed up everything and moved out. He insists she didn’t leave him for another guy. (How does he know that?) Then he just gets quiet. Trying to make sense of it, I guess. What’s he feeling? He doesn’t seem angry or blameful. He doesn’t seem particularly shameful or guilty or sullen. Mostly he just looks confused. The friend offers no consolation or even comment, just shrugs and asks the guy if he’d like another coffee.
I can’t see a Hollywood ending here. I imagine that there will be follow-up conversations, and the guy will possibly try to talk her into coming back. He might make promises, but to do what, since he seems quite clueless?
I imagine a friend of the wife playing a pivotal role here. She’s seen this before. She’ll cite the statistics that once a couple has broken up, it’s very likely they won’t successfully or durably get back together, even if they really try once or twice. And she’ll see what no one else can see, perhaps even the women herself: That this woman has not been happy for a long time.
In the end, I imagine, her life will be, like most people’s, mixed, complicated, with moments of joy and misery. She will, I imagine, learn to be content living alone, perhaps, but might always wonder what might have happened if…
As for the guy in the café? He’s good-looking, and well-dressed. I imagine he’ll be in another relationship in no time. But somehow I doubt if he’ll ever clue in to what really happened.
How do you see this ending?
(2) Later that day. Same café. Two young women, late teens or early twenties, are talking about a writing assignment that one of them has been given. “We have to write about ‘things that don’t suck’,” she says. They both laugh. There’s some offhand glib remark about guys, and then the second woman suggests that’s an almost impossible assignment. “I’ll think of something”, the first woman says, before they change the topic of conversation.
My sense of this woman, charged with this gnarly assignment, is that she’s smart, active, and perceptive. That’s an unsupported judgement, more about her energy and apparent self-confidence than any real evidence.
So I imagine her identifying, and writing about, the following things that ‘don’t suck’, from her own personal experiences rather than any philosophical perspective: (a) small surprises, such as a note with some words of wisdom or admiration or reassurance from her mother, left in her school-bag; (b) outdoor adventures, something that reconnects her to the land and the world and disconnects her from the prosthetic civilization that entraps and oppresses us (though she won’t say it in those terms); (c) science — the young women I know are embracing STEM in increasing numbers; (d) friends, or some of them at least; (e) photography and art, because it helps us see, and imagine, and because it’s fun.
(3) The next day, I listen as a little girl on the local park playground laments that she has lost her stuffed bunny. She in inconsolable. “It was right here.” Parents are distressed, of course. Her misery reminds me of a viral story from a few years back about a girl who lost her teddy bear, apparently with a recording of her then-deceased father’s voice that played when the bear’s hand was pressed, and how it was returned by Disney staff, with photos taken by the staff showing the teddy having all kinds of adventures at the park. I was suspicious that it was too ‘feel-good’ to be completely true. But it seems it was authentic. Sadly, it has spawned a flood of copycat stories that are complete fictions. And we are such suckers for these stories! — like the many, many AI-produced, mass-produced, formulaic tear-jerker slop sites that are out there as traffic-funnels to monetize websites by abusing your attention and your compassion.
As research by debunkers has revealed, the odds of this girl getting her bunny back are not good. I imagine that, in time, she will forget about the lost bunny, but only after steadfastly refusing to accept her parents’ offer to buy her a replacement.
But come on! We can’t allow ourselves to imagine this being the ending. It’s too hard. Instead, how about this: It rained hard that night. I imagine a park staffer finding the sodden bunny the next day and taking it to the city’s lost and found. But only after the staffer and his colleagues blow-dry and clean up the bunny. Of course the girl has to be reunited with the bunny, and she has to laugh at the bunny’s comical blow-dried appearance.
No other ending to this story is allowed.
(4) Later that day, on the walking path around the lake, a little dog on leash is, not uncommonly, carried away with excitement at everything going on. First, it races off towards a group of ducks on the lakeshore. The woman on the other end of the leash, in frustration, pulls the dog back. Unperturbed, the dog now notices a big dog being walked toward it in the opposite direction, and tears off towards it. The woman now shortens the leash, scolds the dog (“bad dog!“), casts an apologetic look at the larger dog’s person, and hustles away off the path.
This one has a ton of possible endings. I think the saving grace here is that the woman’s behaviour is so baldly inexcusable that someone with a bit of common sense is likely to intervene soon.
The hardest part here is that the woman is so caught up in shame and blame and making this about her feelings rather than the dog’s perfectly natural behaviour, that it will take a lot of courage and humility to ‘walk back’ her judgements and admit she was the misbehaving one, not the dog.
When I saw this, my mind immediately returned to the first anecdote above. It’s so hard for us to ‘run away’ from a situation we’ve been conditioned to believe is ‘normal’!
So what I imagine is that somehow or other — a friend’s or family member’s intervention perhaps — the woman and the dog are separated, and the dog ends up with a family that understands and ‘works with’ its obvious puppy-like behaviour.
But what about the woman? What will become of her?
(5) Back in the café, I’m reading more about the Epstein Class syndrome, and specifically about how this patriciate class and its stupidity and misbehaviour are not symptoms of evil or conspiracy, but rather evidence of the power of homophily — our propensity to like, relate to, defend, and prefer, people who look, act, and think the way we do, to the point we excuse, forgive and reinforce their misbehaviour, and they reinforce ours. One of the articles on this class describes the relationship between shame and desire, and talks about what we cannot help wanting (due to our conditioning) even though we’re ashamed of that, and the gap between what we think we should do (or not do) and what we actually do (or don’t do), and how we rationalize that gap. I think about all the Epstein Class/Patriciate members I have known, and how close I came to becoming part of that class. And I wonder: How will those steeped in that culture of invincibility and superiority end up, particularly as economic collapse precipitates civilizational collapse and levels the playing field?
There is almost nothing worse, it seems to me, than being shunned and rejected by the group you felt you belonged to. It’s like being told (yep, back to anecdote (1) again) by someone you love that they don’t love you anymore. The implication is that YOU are not lovable anymore, and that the group was right to reject you.
I remember watching interviews in the short film Parked, by Bowen Island’s Sylvaine Zimmerman, of homeless men, often once-wealthy established professionals who, for various reasons not of their own making, had slowly or suddenly (or slowly and then suddenly) lost everything, and were struggling to survive in Vancouver’s rugged Stanley Park. There was a sense of shame, and then something beyond that, when the pretensions of control, of wealth and power and capacity, were set aside in favour of the simple clarity of living day-to-day.
How will they end up, these arrogant, stupid Epstein Class alumni, as civilization collapses? Much like these men, homeless in Stanley Park, I imagine. All the illusions, finally gone.
(6) Still ruminating on this in the café, I think of those I know who are caught up in this web of shame and desire. I think of those struggling with addictions — to overeating, to alcohol, to sexual obsessions, all the things that give us a mighty shot of dopamine every time we even anticipate feeding those desires, and the shame that inevitably follows, in a vicious cycle. The cycle of shame (“I’m bad”), guilt (“my action was bad”), and blame (“not my fault though”). And, of course, denial and compartmentalizing, and all the other forms of frantic rationalization.
What will become of us, caught in this web of shame and desire? Because we’re all addicted to something, if we’re willing to admit it. Dopamine and other bodily chemicals serve to addict us to things our bodies have evolved to think of as good for them, and for the larger whole of which they are apart. Even though for the most part these addictions no longer serve us well.
I imagine that these addictions will either continue until we die or succumb to them, or until our body, for its own unfathomable reasons, ceases to reward us for them. Whatever happens will be the result of our conditioning, biological and cultural, given the unpredictable circumstances of each moment. If we cease to be addicted — if our bodies and our culture change what they condition us to do so these addictions lose their hold on us — then, I imagine, we will probably not even notice their absence.
(7) I end up chatting to the barista about Hank Green’s recent video on why we resist doing things that others insist we ‘should’ do, for our own benefit, even when we know they’re right. Hank’s example is about his resistance to getting progressive lenses in his glasses instead of constantly putting them on and taking them off. We all have examples of these kinds of foolish resistance, I suspect. For my barista friend, there is a considerable list of sensible things he foolishly resists doing, despite the fact, and perhaps even because, his wife is relentlessly pointing them out. Why doesn’t he just do them? “Stubbornness. Habit”, he says. If it had been his original idea to do them instead of hers, would that have made a difference? “Probably not”, he says. “Some of them probably were my idea originally.” Some of these resisted ideas, such as not doing things in advance even when that would make sense, seem to come down to procrastination. So:
I imagine a ‘cure’ for procrastination. We do what we ‘must’ — that no-alternative stuff — then we do what’s easy and fun. No time or priority for what’s important, or even what makes sense. We are not logical creatures, as much as we’d like to believe we are. How do we ‘cure’ something that we cannot control? By getting others to condition us. How? Not by telling us what to do and not to do. But by having them model better behaviour for us, and show us that it works better.
Our atomized, alienated civilization cultures mitigate against the opportunity for effective modelling. Much of our modern incompetence, in the workplace and in everything we do, I think, is partly due to the lack of opportunity to see people do things well and to then, very humanly, copy that behaviour. Mastery only comes after apprenticeship, learning by watching and doing.
So I imagine my barista friend will be like the rest of us. His wife will gently demonstrate some things that are clearly more effective than what he is doing now. And then, in his own time, he will try them, and then he’ll be hooked, and do them too. As for the rest of his bad habits, I imagine he’ll continue them, knowing he ‘shouldn’t’, and probably pass them on to his children, if he has any.
(8) On the way home I take the river path. There’s one especially beautiful section near a footbridge, where a small group of older guys tends to gather to smoke and drink. They’re always friendly, nodding and greeting everyone who comes by. Today I hear a bit of their conversation. One guy says to a second guy: “You have to give it back, man.” A third guy pipes in: “Why should he, if he needs it more, and the owner hasn’t stepped forward to claim it?” I think back to my visit to the little village in Belize, where the whole concept of ‘private’ ownership of things was largely unacknowledged. Everything (and to some extent everyone) belonged to the community. But that’s in a place where that’s accepted. What’s going to happen here, where ‘private’ ownership is revered and unquestioned, and where ‘the community’ owns, and owes, nothing?
I try to imagine what the item in question might have been. Money? Booze or smokes or drugs? Something to wear to keep the wearer warm and dry? If someone has something they don’t need, that someone else needs, who ‘should’ have it, morally speaking — the person who owns it, or the person who needs it?
I imagine that the ‘property’ in question was money, and that it was deliberately taken. And, as is seemingly often the case, I imagine that neither the person who took it nor the person who it was taken from, is wealthy. And I imagine that none of the members of that little group will speak up about it to others. You don’t rat out your own, even if you don’t approve of their behaviour.
And I imagine that there was some shame. But sometimes, I guess, you just have to live with that. Maybe, like the homeless guys in Stanley Park, you even learn to get over it.
What I felt myself, after overhearing that brief conversation, was not my imagination: It was my own sense of shame in having more than they have, a sense of helplessness at not knowing what to do, a sense of guilt at listening to a conversation not meant for me to hear, and having judgements about it. If we lived in a real community, this might be ‘our’ business, and I would feel no moral ambivalence about listening to it. But we don’t live in a real community. We don’t even know, or remember, what a real community is.
(9) Outside my apartment building, as I’m fiddling in my pocket for my keys, a woman waiting to be buzzed into the building says to the guy she’s with: “That’s a stupid question. Why do you always ask such stupid questions? Why don’t you ask for some information first before you jump in with your opinion?” And I think: What is a ‘stupid question’, exactly? Much of the Socratic method is based on asking (non-stupid?) questions instead of proffering answers. Of course, both of the woman’s questions were rhetorical. But the second one was, I thought, interesting. Why are we (especially guys, I’d surmise) so quick to offer opinions and ‘solutions’ before we really have the knowledge needed to do so? I’d guess that it’s largely because (especially guys, I’d surmise) think they’re expected to have answers and to be knowledgeable, and asking questions therefore betrays ignorance, uncertainty and even lack of intellectual capacity. It’s all conditioning — what we’ve been rewarded or punished for doing or not doing. And in any case, the guy has clearly tuned out whatever the woman is asking or saying to him.
Flash back to my barista conversation: Does this frustrated woman model the information-seeking process she wants from the guy? Every accusation is a confession, as the cliché goes. And if she doesn’t show him, how does she expect him to learn to do what she wants him to do?
Perhaps I’m feeling charitable after my moral self-reproach on the river path, but I’m inclined to imagine a positive ending for this couple. I imagine the guy is curious enough, and cares about the woman enough, to see what asking for more information before jumping to an answer gets him. I imagine he’s curious enough to see what not offering an answer at all, and just listening to what she has to say, gets him.
And I imagine that that — just listening to what she has to say — is exactly what she is actually asking from him.
It probably says more about me than about the characters in these anecdotes, that I imagined these endings and not any of the alternatives. I do like happy endings. And I like stories that reveal some subtle, hidden truth or insight. “The job of the media”, as Bill Maher famously said before he went Epstein-Class mad, “is to make what’s important, interesting”. I keep trying to do that, in my writing, in different ways, including these month-end ramblings. Since it’s all a function of my conditioning and the ever-changing circumstances of the moment, I don’t know, even after 23 years, where my writing is going to end up taking me.
But I can imagine.
