CSotD: Choosing perspective
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Incidental Comics is a feature I keep on my gocomics list for moments like this.
My prejudices have been stated several times, and my tastes lean heavily towards writing. Grant Snider's work seems to lean heavily towards art. Our moments, then, do not often coincide, but, boy, when they do, it's a lovely moment indeed.
This being one of them.
It's a matter of timing, both long- and short-term.
Long-term is that I find as I grow older that I become less concerned with who I ought to be and more comfortable with who I am. Or who I currently appear to myself to be, which, while not quite a distinction without a difference, is at least a distinction about the placement of whose anchor I am not terribly concerned.
I started some years ago by simply admitting that I don't like crowded, noisy places and so it was hardly surprising that I wasn't much for parties and barrooms. Yes, despite all the people who seem to enjoy that sort of thing. It was okay for them to like those things, and it was okay for me to not.
Sometime after that, I read Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I Fall" and realized that, not only can you can be idealistically optimistic about the world without having to feel bad about it when the world chooses not live up to it all, but that you can chuckle about it without being disloyal to your younger self or to beliefs that, if unrealistic, were genuine and noble nonetheless.
(Here I was going to quote something from the interview Terry Gross did with him, but I'd end up quoting the whole thing. It's a stunner for anyone who lived through those times, and I think (I hope) an eye-opener for those who think they know what happened. Click on the link and enjoy a very funny, thoughtful, literate exchange.)
Anyway, it wasn't so much that I chose to return to my youthful, idealistic past, as it was that I chose not to fret too much over its — my, our — place in history.
Part of that was Coyote's book and part of it was a growing awareness that history has a pretty slapdash way of categorizing things to begin with and that you can't expect it to suddenly place your own era into the right slot when it does such a crap job of filing all the others.
This leads you to a sort of anti-Yossarianism, where you accept that, since they really are shooting at everyone, you needn't take it personally.
And that — on a practical, responsible level — since Catch-22 only allows you a certain level of control, you should, like Orr, simply avoid the worry and the conflict and the stress yourself while making sure that, if your buddy absolutely refuses to fly with you, you at least make sure you leave him with a working stove for the tent you share.
So this whole introspective lifelong process adds up to this: It's not that you become surrealistic in your outlook, but that, if surrealistic things begin to happen, you might as well enjoy the sensation.
After all, you've already weathered a lot of stuff that was potentially harmful, and most of that was boring if not downright unpleasant.
And now we come, by a logical process, to the short-term explanation of why today's cartoon appealled to me so much, which is this article in the Atlantic about how a common parasite in cats — Toxoplasma gondii, the one that requires pregnant women to avoid litter boxes — may be having much more widespread success than anyone suspected in invading human brains and making a significant number of people act crazy.
The article came up this morning in a Facebook link from Dylan Horrocks, who is in New Zealand and can therefore be reading long, complex, very strange things while those of us in this hemisphere are sleeping, with the result that we get up in the morning and find that something has been laid on our breakfast plate that we would not have expected to encounter at such an hour.
I started to read it and then realized that I'd better read my comics instead, get the blog posted and finish the article later.
And I want to tell you that halfway through that article was one helluva place to meet up with today's installment of Incidental Comics.
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