Now I Eat Meat

I worry sometimes about he gap between perception and reality. I don't really mean some kind of scenario out of The Matrix where the simulacra are indistinguishable from the actual and where the illusion of life is marked by being chased by Hugo Weaving through decreasingly interesting divisible thirds until, right at the end, you realize you just spent the whole thing watching Keanu Reeves play a video game.

No, I just mean the basic human instinct to systematize; to order the unorderable chaos of experience into arbitrarily arrived-at categories of same-ness in order to render sensory input small and individualized enough to be digested. I think you'll find that a great deal of what we think of as intolerance is an instinctive lashing-out at something that threatens the boundaries of these categories. There are men and there are women. Implicit in that is the biological imperative to procreate and perpetuate. If you crown the whole biological drill-down with the fripperous plumage of tradition and religion, you get not only homophobia, but self-justified anti-gay violence. RuPaul might be a dude in a dress, but he doesn't LOOK enough like a dude in a dress to be a dude in a dress. How much rage in this world comes from loudly-self-proclaimed hetero men who have felt a twitch in the ole gentleman's area when contemplating RuPaul? The confusion, I can assure you, hits some people right in that space between the solar plexus and the spleen, leaving less a bruise than the ultimately unscratchable type of itch that can only be caused by metaphysics. Or maybe a tapeworm. They're more similar than you'd think.

Those of us with critical thinking skills are able to reconcile the difference, leaving space for cross-dressers, gender-normative homos, women's rights, abortion right alongside the continued propagation of humans as a race. It's made all the easier by our in-the-know enjoyment of the bio-evolutionary benefits of non-straight people, including a social reservoir of a population not burdened by the biological necessities of childbirthing, a rich theater culture and bold-yet-tasteful window treatments.

Beyond the gayness question (which is here used more as an example and an excuse to talk about window treatments and tapeworms in the same thesis), I don't know that there's an answer for the anxiety when our preconceptions are disabused or revealed to be entirely illusory. All of economics leaps to mind. As does every aspect of living with in the certain knowledge of inescapable death.

But if you really want to freak yourself out, do what I did a few years ago and consider this self-delusion and question ye all ye ever knew.

The problem I have with it is that the press has finally settled on a spelling for the non-leader leader of Libya. It was always fun to see news outlets spar over Qaddafi, Khadafiy, Gaddafhi and every other variant, sometimes in the space of the same article.

The internets seemed to have settled on something close to "Gadhafi." Which is fine, except if you consider the scrambled-letter-reading thing, I almost always initially read as "Gandhi." I just do. The headlines come out somewhat awkwardly. "Gandhi orders airstrikes." "Gandhi vows to fight until the last drop of blood." "Gandhi orders soldiers to fire on unarmed civilians."

It fucks with me on two levels, with the weird I'm-never-really-reading-what-I-think-I'm-reading letter-scrambling thing and with the bloodthirsty Mahatma image, the flecky gore of martyrs staining his homespun Indian cotton dhoti.

I'm sorry, bapu, it's involuntary. If it helps, in the unbidden fantasy, you always win.