Zoos confound me.

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I love animals. I am one of those people who love nature specials, cat videos on YouTube, calenders with puppies in hats on them… and zoos. As a kid, I grew up in a house full of cats, and loved them all. I delighted in befriending the various dogs along my paper route, each of whom had their own vibrant and unique personality, and some of whom had never been friends with any stranger that regularly violated their territory before. I collected little cards with pictures of various animals and facts about that animal on them. I loved National Geographic in exact proportion to them amount of animals in each issue.

So you would think that, given all that, I would love zoos. The opportunity to see all those animals I have learned about from books? The chance to see lions and zebras and fennecs and wolves and elk and things with my very own eyes and watch them do their thing, living and breathing and moving and such right in front of me, just a few yards away? What could be better?

But I’m also the sensitive and thoughtful type, and I can’t help but think about the animals and how happy they are, living all cooped in in pens and cages and not able to roam free and live the lives their instincts lea them to crave? Is it really fair for us to capture and cage living beings which are capable of happiness, pain, emotions, and longing for freedom just because our human social instincts are so broad that we like to look at them and watch them?

Perhaps that’s just projecting out human desire for autonomy and freedom on to them. After all, the argument goes, they might be perfectly happy in captivity. Just because we human beings would be miserable living such a restricted life, and long for freedom all day, does not mean that a creature such as a leopard of an elephant couldn’t be quite content living the life of a zoo animal.

But I don’t buy it. I think freedom is an instinct, and if you need proof, just ask yourself what, exactly, it is that drives an animal to immediately try to escape if someone is foolish enough to leave the cage door open? After all, if the creature is perfectly happy, why need a cage at all? Happy creatures would stay where they are. They would know a good thing when they happened upon it and cages would be completely superfluous. Certainly, leaving the cage door open would not be a big deal.

But we all know that any animal brighter and faster than a snail will try to get out of its cage the moment it realizes that it CAN get out of the cage. Why? Because they want freedom. They want a bigger world, they want to explore, they crave novelty and stimulation and adventure. Just like us, they grow bored with a limited life with only the same stimulations day after day.

They are not really happy in there. They might be zoo-born and therefore have no idea that their lives could be any different than they are. But that just means they don’t know why they’re not happy. (How many of us are in the same situation?).

But I can’t con myself into thinking that locking up these marvelous creatures in cages and pens does not come at a cost for the creatures involved. I can’t convince myself it is perfectly okay. I know better.

So, that makes it simple, right? Zoos are bad. They lock up cute animals and make them sad! Animals should always be free and anything else is just plain mean. I might want to see the animals, but that doesn’t excuse abusing the animals just for my pleasure. Zoos are just plain bad!

But the thing is, it’s not nearly that simple. I have seen those nature documentaries. I know what it’s like to be an animal living free in the wild.

And the truth is, nature is a cruel and nasty bitch.

The life of creatures in the wild is brutal, stressful, dangerous, unkind, unjust, and just plain bad. Even predators have a life of constant toil and strife, danger and stress, terror and tiredness. And all creature know what it is like to be the hunted, to be vulnerable and helpless against great forces that wish to destroy and devour you, because even the mightiest hunters are prey when they are young.

So are the okapi in my local zoo really that bad off? They might long for more freedom, and wonder what is on the other side of the fence, but they have one another’s company, a completely reliable food and water supply, medical care when they need it, and no danger of being eaten by a predator or dying from the hardships of migration.

so it’s not as simple as all that. Modern democratic free society’s default position is always that freedom is the most important thing of all, but that is only true from the point of view of someone who already has material security in a safe, modern, orderly society. Once you have all that, it is freedom you want the most. But without that, freedom doesn’t mean a god damned thing. You don’t give a crap about freedom until you have security. You need freedom from the worries of survival before freedom of choice matters.

“Freedom from” trumps “freedom to”, every single time.

So even though the critters in the zoo might long for freedom and get very bored, the argument can certainly be made that they are, in many ways, far better off than their compatriots in the wild, and it is better to be bored and stifled than dead and digested.

So what’s more important, freedom and danger, or captivity and security? Are the animals in the zoo better off than the ones in the wild, or is that just foisting human values on nonhuman animals?

Zoos confound me.

One of the longest lived struggles in philosophy is the one between objective versus subjective reality. Is there such a thing as true objective reality that exists entirely outside our minds, or could we all be just brains in vats, experiencing nothing real?

As with a lot of these ancient dualities, the answer lies somewhere in between, and is invisible to those who are mired in an excessively either/or a/b binary mindset.

We are all, truly, brains in vats, experiencing nothing like pure objective reality. It’s just that those vats are our skulls, and through said skulls, connect to the rest of our bodies and hence to the world.

Objective reality, or at the very least a highly reliable and remarkably durable and convincing illusion thereof, does indeed exist. But there is no way to experience it “directly”. The question itself is meaningless, What would experiencing it directly mean? No matter whether your mental inputs come from the usual five senses, mental telepathy, or the whispers of angels directly into your neocortex, they are being mitigated by your senses. That’s what senses are. They sense things. So all the rationalist folderol about “pure reason” outside the senses is just so much nonsense. There is but solipsism, or senses.

In fact, despite the rationalists’ pooh-poohing of them, the senses themselves cannot be in error. They are mindless, mere machines, and can no more make an error than a bedspread. Only the mind, the realm of “pure reason”, can make a mistake, because it is only in interpretation of the input from the senses that error can occur. A machine like the senses might be broken. But it cannot be ‘wrong’.

But it is clear to any even casually active observer of the human condition that we human beings have a lot more going on than just sensing objective reality. We have rich and complex inner lives filled with all the thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories, and other vital and inevitable functions of the sentient mind hard at work dealing with its own complex subroutines, and in between this inner world and the outer objective world there is often a great deal of tension, a tension that sometimes leads to error when we get confused as to what exactly belongs to each world.

This is the human dilemma, and the result is what I call human reality. Neither entirely objective or entirely subjective, neither wholly white nor completely black, we instead live in the thin, taut layer of existence that is formed by the tension between outer and inner worlds.

We call the resultant state “consciousness”.

Because neither force is ever entirely dominant except in the cases of the catatonically insane or the very intellectual impaired, the human lot is a complex and manifold one. The difference between what we think about something and the thing unto itself can be subtle indeed, and because we ourselves shape the very tools we use to parse the input from our senses and our inner lives, we are quite capable of developing a mental apparatus that is completely incapable of perceiving those things we desire the most.

The truth, then, of the objective versus subjective debate is both more complex and in many ways more tragic than the binary alternatives would suggest. Regardless of any objective or universal truth, no matter how solid and durable the reality of reality might be, we will always be suspended between it and out own complex inner lives.

It is the price of sentience. A subsentient animal might live entirely in the world of its immediate senses and instincts, with no inner conflicts to plague it or doubts to make it hesitate. But it will never know it.

And even if we were nothing but consciousness in the void, we would still be constrained by the limits of the very structure of our minds. The very formation of consciousness itself involves certain choices which are both unavoidable and limiting. The unbound mind simply does not and cannot exist.

So let us resolve to abandon this fruitless talk of objective and subjective reality, and the juvenile dickering and bickering over which one is “better” or “more real”.

Because no matter what we conclude, no matter how elaborate or clever our sophistry or devastating and witty our rationalist putdowns might become, at the end of the day, we will still be living in same mishmash of inner life and outer world we have always lived in.

It’s the only reality available to us : human reality.

And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can move on.

Look… we have enough democracy. Just accept it.

Granted, it’s hard to imagine having less democracy. After all, we only get to vote for one person to represent all our interests at the highest levels of government once every four years or so. We don’t even get to vote on specific issues most of the time. We just get one vote on who will go to the capital city and try to represent thousands of us, and just hope that they will choose what we would choose more often than not.

And of course, we all know that once they get there, they will start living a fancy life, with limousines and parties and people with a lot of money spending it to get their attention. And those people will be right there all the time, with lots of great things to offer to make the politicians feel grateful, whereas we the people won’t get a say in the matter for another four years or so.

What chances does one say every four years or so have against money and status and fancy life right now? They’re only human.

So it’s hard to imagine how we could have less democracy and still think we live in a democracy. Elections every six years? Just getting to vote for King, and that’s it? Would it really make that big a difference?

Still, that’s more than enough democracy for the likes of us, right? We should be glad that the people in power give us any democracy at all, and let us feel all powerful and special because every once in a while, we each get to have a tiny say in which ones of them will be officially in charge.

After all, they don’t have to let us play at all, right? With all their power, they could run things without us. But they have decided we will be easier to manage and control if we are given the absolute minimum amount of the illusion of control over our destinies, and so they have graciously allowed us the rare and unheard of privilege of participating in the most minimal way possible in our own governance as infrequently as they can get away with.

We should just be happy we get anything at all, and not complain or cause trouble.

And after all, it’s only been a century or two since they gave us this tiny, precious gift of voting. We can’t be tired of it yet, and we certainly can’t start thinking that we want more democracy than that. They gave us the least they could give us hundreds of years ago, and already we want more? How ungrateful!

And sure, the system they set up for themselves just a few centuries ago was based on a time when the fastest way for information to get from place to place was by horse and buggy, and so the best you could hope for was to get people to come into town once in a while and pick some guy to make the long journey to the capital city and make all our choices for us.

And obviously, we could do a lot better now. Well, we’ve been able to do better since the invention of the telegraph, really, but especially now, with cell phones and the Internet and the automobile, it seems pretty silly to send some local person who nobody really likes anyhow all the way to the middle of the country to make a bunch of votes on things we the people could decide ourselves with nothing more complicated than a phone call, or getting money out of an ATM.

I mean, in a world where you can buy a car over the Internet, how hard would it be to let us vote that way?

But still, we should be glad we get asked what we think (well, not what we think, but who we think might think the same thing, now and then) at all. With all the money and power concentrated at the top these days, they could take what little democracy they have allowed us back at any time.

We shouldn’t be talking or even thinking about asking for some more democracy. We should just thank the people in power very kindly for letting us pretend to be involved, clutch our precious tiny occasional ineffectual vote to our chests firmly and reverently, and quietly go back to our orderly and obedient lives.

After all, what more could be possibly want?

Over my life, I have encountered some questions which never fail to aggravate me when people ask me them, because they have no decent answers and are never productive at all.

Here’s some of them.

What makes you think you’re so smart?

Standardized testing? High marks in school? A string of unprompted testimonials throughout my life? Puckish glee at annoying people like you?

There’s really no good answer here. (Thought that last one is probably worse than the others. ) No matter what you say, the person simply will not be happy. They have reached the point of asking you this because you have committed a mortal sin in their ears, namely acting like you think you’re smart or that you know something, and any honest, truthful answer will simply enrage them further.

So why do they ask it? I am only guessing here, but I think in their world, this question usually prompts the person to disclaim any impression they might have inadvertently given that they thought they were smart in any sense, and thus serves as a classic macho dominance move.

In their world. But in my world, between honesty and ego, I am never going to disclaim my intelligence. I do think I am “so smart” and I am perfectly willing to back up whatever I say with arguments or evidence or whatnot. I don’t think I am the smartest person in the world, but I am quite confident that I am a smart type person, and so all you are going to get in answer to this attempt to put me in my place is an answer composed of honesty and smartassery. Only the proportions will vary.

If you disagree with something I’ve said, or think I am attempting to dominate your group, feel free to disagree with me. I could be completely wrong. I am at times quite clever and even somewhat wise, but equally as often, I am completely out to sea. And if I am wrong, I’ll admit it, no problem.

But don’t ask me stupid questions like this one and expect me to back down. Homey don’t play that.

What do you think you’re doing?

Boy, do I hate this one. I’m a lifelong total klutz with three older siblings, the closest one being 4.5 years older than me, so I got to here this one way too often as a wee kid, usually when I was faithfully and carefully trying to do some task or chore and making a complete hash of it.

And like the other questions on this list, there is no good answer. Merely meekly stating what it is, literally, that you think you are doing (Washing the dishes?) does not satisfy.

And obviously, being a smartass does not help the situation.

“Well, I think I’m doing a very slow version of the “Boston Bop”, but I can’t seem to time the dip properly.”
“I think I’m being yelled at by someone bigger than me who is too impatient to explain to me how to do things so I am forced to wing it. That sound about right?”
“A poignant question. Does anyone truly know what they are doing? You know, I think it was Descartes who said ‘To be is to do…. ‘ ”

Not going to help you out, but when you’re at the bottom of the pecking order, you’ve got to fight back however you can, and sometimes, being a smartass and making your oppressors angry is the only kind of revenge you ever get.

“What, you don’t like what I said? It hurt you, and made you angry? GOOD!”

And then you just take whatever consequences may come, knowing you earned them.

Who do you think you are?

I don’t think anyone likes this one. It combined universal aggressiveness of intent with completely baffling vagueness and is nonsensical on the face of it to boot.

Again, my instinct is to give an answer which combines honesty and being a smartass.

“I don’t know, who do YOU think I am?”
“Are you asking me for ID?”
“I think I’m the Queen of the Pleasure Planet, but my underwear says my name is Tuesday…. ”
“Could you rephrase that in the form of a question with an answer?”

… or really, what I consider to be the definitive answer….

“I think I’m me. ”

I mean, what else can you think?

But obviously, none of these answers will actually help the situation. Nothing will. It’s just so incoherent and aggressive a question that just asking it is a conversation killer.

Now, being a lifelong smartass, I figure that whenever there is no good answer, you have every right to give whatever answer you will enjoy the most. I mean, you’re screwed anyhow, might as well have fun.

But I would much rather I had never been asked the question in the first place.

Who put you in charge?

OK, this one I bring on myself, though usually only by accident. I almost never actively seek a leadership position. It’s just too much of a commitment, too much of a complication, too much…. just too much, you know? But I end up in leadership positions sometimes because I have a big mouth, I’m opinionated, I express myself well, and I have natural knack for sounding like I know exactly what I am talking about.

So many is the time in my life when I have, without meaning to, ended up with everyone listening to me and following my advice and more or less electing me leader by primate consensus when I, clueless wonder, think all I am doing is stating my opinion just like everyone else.

And for someone who thinks a lot more about leadership and dominance than I do, it must seem like I am making an obvious play for power (possibly unwittingly taking it from them) and then compounding my crime by pretending innocence.

Through the years, I have learned how to do a little fancy footwork to try to avoid the situation whenever possible. But it’s always a possibility.

You can always verbal-judo the question and say “Nobody. Why, what makes you think I am in charge?”, but that will likely only make the asked confused and hence angrier.

Well, there ya have it, a random assortment of non-productive questions that I strongly dislike being asked. They have no good answers and serve only to make things worse.

I imagine I will continue to fence with questions like these my whole life. I suppose everyone does. It’s not like I am some kind of special case.

I mean, who do I think I am, anyhow?

Well, here it is, the first day of 2011,  and I have registered a new domain and blog (both named after me, because creativity is so 2010) and now I am writing its inaugural entry.

Hearts are aflutter through the blogosphere, I am sure.

For those of you who do not know, my last crazy endeavor was a project in which I attempted to write one million words in a year, called (wait for it) The Million Word Year Project. Sadly, I totally failed to write a million words in a year.

I did it in eleven months instead. Oh yeah. Hear the strut.

In order to gain a little historical context for this slightly new thing, I decided to go all the way back to my very first entry, written one year ago today.

Despite the many little errors, it still stands up quite well, I think. Reading stuff I have written is often a dicey thing with me, being the high strung and sensitive artist type. I can never entirely be sure whether I will be filled with the warm glow of accomplishment for having written something so charming and interesting and fun, or whether instead I will be visited by the deep dark demon of self-loathing and artistic dissatisfaction and be thrown in a pit of despair and depression by the mere fact that I ever penned something so completely and utterly insipid, moronic, and talentless, let alone let the world see it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again : being sensitive is not for wimps.

But I like my first entry from way back when, a year ago today. It’s a good sample of my style. Roughly hewn in terms of structure and coherence, and a little too personal to be interesting to a wide market, but it has my wit and warmth and wordplay, so what the heck, it’s not bad for a start.

It’s a little sad to see how rip-roaring full of enthusiasm I was to change everything about my life back then, compared to how very little has actually changed as of right now. I completed the task, writing a million words (in only 11 months, strut), and that’s certainly something to be proud of, but I didn’t do much else in that time.

I didn’t learn to promote myself, for example. That whole crippling shyness thing continues to plague me. I know what excuses I used last year to keep putting it off, so that’s something, but still, I am disappointed that I did all that work and only a relatively small number of people know because I still have not developed the gumption to just go out there and spread my work around.

My plan, such as it is, for this year is to a) automate the process as much as possible via WordPress plugins, so that anything I post to here automatically gets crossposted to as many services as will let me autopost to them, and b) for the rest, developing a sort of “route”, a series of websites I visit and post my daily output to on a regular basis without stopping to think about it. That should take at least some of the tension and anxiety out of the process, and if I post regularly to the same spots every day (instead of posting once, getting no reply, and never posting there again) I might even develop a following, or at the very least, a list of persistent enemies who make it their business to flame everything I do.

Honestly, even negative attention looks good to me around now.

In the future of this site, I plan to nudge myself gently in the direction of writing more article-style entries and fewer “randomly blogging my thoughts” style entries. Things with a thesis presented in some sort of logically coherent package, with a beginning, middle, and end. But still with my signature style of warm witty bitter sarcasm. Or whatever.

Probably should cut back on the use of “or whatever” too. Whatever.

Plus, I plan to add some fancy stuff like forums and picture galleries and such in the future. I’m going to try to avoid the trap of thinking this website has to follow some strict and formal, restrictive definition of what it is supposed to be.

It’s my personal website, with my name on it and everything. So it’s whatever I want it to be at any moment, a place for me to experiment and play around and find out what works.

I figure, the important thing is to keep the site fun and full of good content and reasonably easy to navigate. As long as I stick to that, I should be OK.

One thing I definitely need to avoid is overloading myself with ambition (pressure) and so many ideas all at once that I collapse from option paralysis. There’s no blinding hurry, no need to do everything all at once and make it all perfect right from the get-go. That’s a recipe for instant failure.

So today, I write a chatty little opening entry in my usual blog style just to prime the pump, and if I feel like it later, I will poke around with the look of the site, some features, or whatever. Who knows what fun stuff I’ll add to this place eventually? There’s a lot of groovy fun stuff out there, both for WordPress and for any PHP enabled web host, and there’s nothing stopping me from giving some of it a try.

All that is required is that it works and it’s fun. That, I think, I can handle.

I just have to repeat to myself, “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be fun”, like a mantra, until it is burned into my brain and I stop trying to take things so seriously and just do whatever strikes me as fun at the time, with just enough control to keep it from veering off into pointless self-indulgence.

Sounds doable to me.