I’ve been watching a documentary called My Own Man via Netflix and it’s got me thinking. (Which is good, because that’s what documentaries are supposed to do. )

In it, this documentary film maker named David is prompted by turning 40 and by finding out he’s to be the father of a baby boy that go on a journey to find out how to be more of a man so he can raise his boy right.

You see, David’s always been a timid, cowardly fellow who has a lot more feminine qualities than masculine, and he is worried that this leaves him inadequate to the job of raising a boy.

One thing he tries is hunting. He actually goes out into the woods, learns to shoot, and kills a young stag. (Luckily, it’s a clean kill, so the deer does not suffer much. Bullet to the heart (or is that hart), game over. )

A younger me would have said, with total conviction, that I would never hunt. But as I get older and get more in touch with my primal id, I am not so sure any more.

There is nothing inherently wrong with hunting food that isn’t also wrong with eating meat. Either way, an animal dies for you to eat it. It might be argued that David’s stag had a much better life than most cows or chickens. It just fell to a different kind of predator than usual.

David does this to feel more like a man, but it doesn’t take. He feels the same afterwards as he did before. And I am pretty sure I know why.

It’s because he maintained emotional distance from what he is doing. He’s a nerdy liberal-ish guy who, like a lot of us intellectual types, is not comfortable with strong emotions that put him in a position where he has to go from the gut because the emotion suppresses reason.

This is true for all us intellectuals, and it is especially true when it comes to instinct. We have instincts for aggression, struggle, dominance, submission, and all kinds of other things that come from a place far deeper than reason and therefore make people who “lead with their head” extremely uncomfortable.

We only trust impulses from the intellect. That’s why we tend to intellectualize everything. David did not get a primal rush of masculinity from the hunt because his mind fiercely suppresses that kind of thing.

That’s why there is this dichotomy between intellectual liberals and primal conservatives.

Conservatives are comfortable with deep, instinctual emotions like ambition, love of family, fear of change, and greed. And they are not at all comfortable with acting on products of reason, which can be confusing and upsetting. So they strongly suppress their reason and listen only to their instincts, or their “gut”.

Liberals are comfortable with the products of reason (and compassion and cooperation and so on) but like I said above, they do not trust impulses than come from deeper than reason and suppress them strongly.

But the thing is, you need both. As we learned from the Star Trek : The Original Series episode “The Enemy Within” (aka the one with two Kirks), you need your primal aggressive side in order to be decisive, in order to be fully in touch with yourself, and most importantly, you need it if you want to feel truly alive.

The id is not the enemy.

So David got no rush from his deer hunt because he didn’t open himself up to the experience. He approached it as an intellectual exercise, and suppressed the very manly emotions he was seeking.

This intellectual approach at the cost of suppressing primal motivations is at the heart of what is wrong with modern liberalism. The liberals are, unquestionably, the side of the angels. But without their primal ids to drive things, they end up diffident, uncertain, and unable to stick up for themselves, let alone aggressively pursuing their agenda with no apologies.

So liberals are wimps, and get bullied by the stupid but definitely in touch with their ids conservatives, and it is the schoolyard writ large upon the globe.

Of course, we can’t visit the topic of manliness and such without touching on my own gender confusion, or is that gender diffusion. I have never felt myself to be strongly in either camp. If I had to tally it up, I suppose I have more feminine traits that masculine, but it’s a pretty close call.

As with a lot of things, I am in the middle somewhere.

There are times when I feel very manly. Aggressive, directed, killer instinct in full effect. Ready to take on the evils of the world and kill them one by one. Ready, in that sense, for war.

But there are other times when I feel quite womanly. Deeply sensitive, with great emotional depth, and caring about every little thing. Wanting everyone to get along and be happy.

So my position is this : cooperation and accommodation up to the point of facing evil, and then it is time to stop cooperating and bust some fucking heads.

As for my own gender identity, I really can’t say. Or perhaps I just don’t want to. To pick either side seems like it involves suppressing a vital part of myself, and given the choice, I decline to do so.

I sometimes think of myself as a maternal male, which sounds like a contradiction in terms to those still trapped in an outdated gender binary. But I am a man who is not afraid to be loving, nurturing, supportive, and even submissive (though not necessarily obedient, if that makes sense).

I don’t always have to be on top.

I love kittens and cats and other animals too. And not in some lame “I guess they’re okay” defensive male way either.

Throw in advanced communication skills and a certain flamboyance, and by gender binary standards, I am practically a woman.

But I’m not a woman, and I am not a man. I am both, in full force.

In the end, I am simply myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And manifold and diverse topics of general interest.

Just finished watching How To Train Your Dragon 2. It was quite awesome. I would say it’s ninety percent as good as the original, and it loses that ten percent only because we already know that dragons are good and Hiccup is awesome and so on at the beginning of the movie, and other revelations can’t stack up to that.

When I saw the original in the theater, I knew nothing about it (always the best way to enjoy a movie, in my opinion) and so I was completely convinced by the opening scene that these dragons were evil beasts from the Devil’s nightmares.

So when they pull a Lassie Meets Alien Mine and had Hiccup befriend Toothless and found out that dragons weren’t so bad after all, I was totally with him on that journey. And being an animal lover, it is the sort of journey that really struck a chord in me. I should have known better than to attribute evil to an animal. They are only as good or bad as we have been to them.

And it was humbling, but in a very good way, to be reminded of that.

One irony that struck me while watching 2 about 1 is that in the first movie, the Viking of Berk are at war with the dragons because the dragons attack their village out of nowhere, burn everything down, and take their cattle and anything else they take a fancy to.

That is only a handful of anatomically improbable rapes away from being pretty much what the Vikings are famous for doing.

And who bore the brunt of the Viking raids? Northern Scotland, which to this day is half Viking. Some of the people are more Viking than Scot, and a lot of the villages and towns there have Norse names and even Norse festivals and holidays (along with the proper Christian ones, of course).

They even say that it was the Vikings who introduced the redheaded gene to the UK.

And so it makes perfect sense that all the Vikings have Scottish accents. I don’t know enough to say if they are Northern Scottish accents, but I like to imagine that they are.

The only Scottish accent I can recognizes is the Glasgow one, and that’s because it is practically its own fucking language.

Other than my dealings with dragons, it’s been a typical quiet Saturday. Joe and Julian are off at Joe’s parents’ house for board games, and I am left alone in the apartment.

On the one hand, it’s kind of lonely. I grew up in a busy household and so the sounds of other people moving around and doing their thing is normal to me. Saturday nights are always a little too quiet for me.

On the other hand, if I want to sing along with my music or make weird silly noises to amuse myself, I can. without worrying that my roomies will think I am that other kind of insane.

You know…. the reality issues kind. Depressives interpret reality in insane ways, like thinking some random person they are passing on the street who is laughing is laughing at them because they know how stupid and disgusting and lame and pathetic you are and thinks you should just crawl under a rock and die.

I know that one all too well.

But thankfully, except for a few moments when I was falling asleep or waking up and I thought I heard someone say my name, I have never had that kind of insanity. Depression is a horrible illness, but it’s no psychosis.

Although I dunno. Maybe psychosis would be better if it was a happy psychosis.

That’s why I always keep going completely and utterly crazy as an option. If life becomes too fucking horrible to endure, I can always pull the plug and go to Crazytown.

I’d rather it didn’t come to that, obviously.

I can’t say my mood is wonderful right now. In fact, lately, I always seem to get depressed after I eat. Maybe it’s just the product of my blood sugar spiking than crashing. I don’t know.

But right now, I feel quite melancholy and very fragile. That seems to be a pattern with me too. After I make any significant progress towards recovery, I have a period of mild depression as I recover from the surgery, so to speak.

I feel quite emotionally cold. I really feel like my recovery involves birthing the cold dark void within me. I have to let the cold out, and thermodynamics be damned. That’s how it feels to me : like I am radiating the cold out of me like a reverse space heater and when I do, I thaw a little more inside.

I still have so much of it inside me that sometimes it seems like I will never be rid of all of it.

But it doesn’t matter if I am ever rid of it all. Who knows, maybe I need to keep some of it around to continue to be me. What matters is that getting rid of it makes things better for me in the long run, and that is more than enough to make it worth doing in my books.

I’ve written four of them.

But it is painful and redious to disgorge an iceberg an ice cube at a time. I am always looking for things which speed up the process. This is usually some form of media that moves me deeply and thus provides the necessary heat energy to melt a big chunk of my personal glacier.

After that, I just have to hold on till the flood recedes, and I witness a new and better land.

Strong urge to link Peter Gabriel’s song Flood yet again. But no.

I will just quote it.

If again, the seas are silent
And any still alive
It will be those who gave their islands to survive.

Drink up, dreamer, you’re running dry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.