On Moving to Atlanta

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Chapter 1: These Homies are Chillin’ in their Low Ride!

U-Haul’s online, computerized reservation system sucks hefty moose willie.

I just want to get that out of the way before going any farther. U-Haul’s online reservation system is truly Teh Suck. It could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. If the suck of the U-Haul reservation system could be harnessed and used for good, it could replace gravity. It’s a good thing the rest of U-Haul’s customer service system blows to the same degree, to equalize the pressure.

As anyone who’s been reading this journal for a while knows, I’m in the process of moving. Specifically, to Atlanta. Two weeks ago, I found an apartment up there; last weekend came the Big Move. (Well, of my stuff, anyway; I’ll be staying in Gainesville for the next couple of weeks or so, and I’ll be in Tampa for Necronomicon next weekend.)

Anyway, before the move, I used U-Haul’s Web site to reserve a truck and one of those things you use to drag your car behind the truck, one way, Tampa to Atlanta. On the day of the reservation, I got a text message on my cell phone telling me the truck and car-towing-thingie were ready, and giving me the address of the place to pick them up. Got an email with the same information. Being the suspicious bastard I am, I called the location. “Oh, sure, come on down! We have the truck!”

They didn’t have the truck.

It took them a little over an hour to figure it out, but they didn’t have the truck. They did, however, have a slightly bizarre toy for sale: a plastic car that lights up and bounces up and down when you push a button, all while playing hip-hop music:

These homies are chillin' in their Low Ride

It’s a weird little slice of urban Americana. The three people in the car are racially balanced–one white guy, one Latino guy, one black guy–though I couldn’t help but notice that the black guy is riding in the back. The text on the bottom of the box reads “These homies are chillin’ in their Low Ride!” Now, for fifteen points: How many stereotypes can you find in this one toy, available for the low,low price of just nine dollars and ninety-five cents? I bet it’s probably made in China, though I didn’t think to check.

But I digress.

Anyway, after an hour of waiting, the U-Haul location determined that, text messages and email and phone conversation to the contrary, they didn’t have my truck. The guy called around a few places, found a place that did, and sent me over there.

Another hour in the second place, and we were ready to g–oh, no, wait, I reserved a hand truck, and they didn’t have one available. Some searching around, and…hey, wait, we have an appliance dolly, will you take that instead? Oh, and we don’t have that doohickey that tows your car by the front wheels, we just have one of the big flatbed things that you drive your car up onto. How’s that sound?

Appliance dolly in the back of the truck, flatbed trailer in tow, and joreth and I were off to the apartment for some backbreaking physical labor.

Chapter 2: In which we learn that Franklin sucks at moving heavy objects

There is a warning on the U-Haul appliance dolly. It warns that the dolly can be recognized as U-Haul property just by its design alone, and that anyone caught in possession of it without a rental contract may be prosecuted for possession of stolen property.

Now, the U-Haul appliance dolly has a very, very short foot. So short, in fact, that it’s very awkward to use. U-Haul specifically designed, engineered, and built a custom hand cart just so they could be recognized if someone walks off with one, but from all appearances, the usefulness of the hand cart in tasks such as, say, moving heavy objects was not a primary design consideration.

I have a bookshelf. It’s a very large bookshelf, about seven feet tall, made of dense particle board. It weighs more than I do. In fact, I believe it weighs more than Joreth and I put together. If a person were to, hypothetically speaking, load it on an appliance dolly, and then, just as a “for instance,” cart it over a doorstep, and this hypothetical doorstep were, say, about four inches high, and while doing this, if my thumb were to get between the appliance dolly and the bookshelf, so that the bookshelf dropped that four inches onto my thumb…if all these things were to happen, then one might expect a certain amount of hopping about and swearing might follow very shortly thereafter.

Hypothetically speaking.

This set something of a tone for the rest of the packing process. I tripped over, walked into, barked my shins on, and otherwise injured myself with approximately three-quarters of my possessions, and I own a lot of crap. joreth did her best not to laugh, a heroic effort that can not be understated.

About three hours into this process, I got a call from U-Haul. “We’re showing that you have an equipment reservation for today. Are you planning to come in and pick up your truck, or should we cancel your reservation?”

Looking back on it now, perhaps I should’ve told them to cancel the reservation, because then, hey, they’d probably forget they even owned the truck!

Chapter 3: Heisenberg

After she’d finished studying, Shelly came down from Gainesville to help finish the packing and whatnot, arriving just in time for dinner. The rest of the packing went quickly, if a little haphazardly, and in no time the truck was buttoned up and ready to go. Night had fallen with a particularly wet thud, so we finished up in total darkness.

And then came…time to load the car trailer.

Which is very large.

Back…no, no, pull forward just a hair…um, wait, right a smidge…no, your other right…um, forward…no, wait, the other way, I mean left…now back up a little…um, too far, forward a bit…

It’s actually possible to carry on a surprisingly lengthy conversation using only the words “back,” “forward,” “left,” and “right,” provided you don’t want to talk about anything other than moving backward, forward, left, and right. We did eventually get the trailer hooked up…not by any particular skill on our parts, I think, but rather through the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Automobile Motion. As anyone who’s ever passed the second grade knows, this uncertainty principle is given by

where delta-X is the change in the distance from the hitch to the trailer, delta-f is the change in frustration of the driver, i is the importance of getting the goddamn trailer hooked up right fucking now, U is the U-Haul Constant (a universal property subject to change without notice), n is the number of tries you’ve made so far, and lambda is the wavelength of light most likely to give you a headache. As is intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers, the more frustrated you are and the more important it is that you get the trailer hooked up right fucking now, the more tries it can take, all other things being equal.

Chapter 4: These Homies are Cranky in their Tall Truck

It’s about two hours from Tampa to Gainesville, and five more to Atlanta. This assumes, of course, that one is driving at a reasonable speed…say, fifteen miles per hour or so over the posted speed limit, the posted speed limit being a most unreasonable speed, all things considered.

In a desperately underpowered Ford POS towing a car on an absurdly large trailer, it’s a little more. Especially when one has not showered and feels like the inside of a yak’s armpit.

Shelly and I stopped in Gainesville long enough to fail to sleep because the cats decided that five o’clock in the morning would be an ideal time to start playing, and the game they agreed on was “let’s knock everything off all the desks and then chase each other over the human’s bed.”

The cats were asleep when we left, the furry little bastards. The trip to Atlanta wasn’t as bad as it could have been–we could have been on fire, for example–and the unloading of the truck once we arrived went smoothly and effortlessly.

As it turns out, there are people who will–get this–actually unload a truck for you, if you give them this thing called “money.” The joy I felt on discovering this can not be overstated. We’re talking the rapture of the angels, here. We’re talking music of the spheres, winning the Lotto, George Dubya’s term in office ending, and finding free pr0n on the Internet all rolled into one. Now that I have learned this Very Important Thing, I will never unload a moving truck again. “Not unloading a truck full of crap” ranks surprisingly high on the list of Things That Make Me Happy.

Pausing only to buy some new pants, fill up with gas, and leave my toothbrush and cell phone charger in Atlanta (goddammit), we headed back down to Florida at a much more reasonable speed, detouring through Tallahassee long enough to visit Shelly’s sweetie there. And when we got home…

Chapter 5: Fire Poi!

…fire poi!

The set of fire poi I ordered arrived. I need to practice with them sans fire until I’m reasonably sure I won’t set myself on fire when I use them (because it could always be worse until you’re on fire, and at that point it’s difficult to say ‘it could be worse’ any more). With a bit of luck, I can arrange to have smoocherie be there when I light them up for the first time, because after all, she is the reason I’m into poi spinning in the first place, and I did take her virginity and all. So how ;bout it, smoocherie, you going to be available before I leave Florida for good?

In which we learn that Franklin is disrespectful

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A short time ago, a lengthy and near-incoherent ramble about the dawning of a new age of divine government appeared in my inbox. This email was posted on an email list to which I belong, though not, to be fair, by choice–I was subscribed to the list by its owners without my knowledge. Anyway, I posted a rather lengthy reply poking fun at the original message, which was laced with absurdities galore.

One of the people on the email list responded quite angrily. She does not subscribe to the same…ahh, peculiar beliefs as the original poster, nor does she much seem inclined to believe in the coming of the Divine Government, but she was very angry nonetheless. She called me a long list of names, in fact, while saying that all beliefs should be treated with respect.

The list of names itself is not particularly interesting. Nor is the unconscious irony in the notion of a belief system that says all ideas should be treated with respect, and anyone who disagrees with this idea should be called names. Nor, really, is her apparent inability to distinguish between mocking an idea and mocking a person; many people have difficulty differentiating the two, and will often respond to an attack on their ideas as though they had personally been attacked.

What is interesting, though, is one of the names she called me. In with the list of other names was one that is absolutely on the mark. “Disrespectful,” she called me. And she’s right; I am.

The notion that all ideas deserve respect doesn’t hold much value to me. Even the notion that all spiritual ideas deserve respect doesn’t much agree with me; there are many spiritual ideas–for example, the notion that the world is hollow and populated by a race of aliens or superbeings (depending on the particular theory being presented) who will once again rise to reassert the primacy of the Aryan race…and no, I’m not making this up…doesn’t command much respect from me. Nor do spiritual beliefs such as the more extreme flavors of Christian Dominionism (some of which assert that whites are God’s chosen people) particularly deserve respect.

Now, does that mean spirituality as a whole is open to ridicule?

Not necessarily. The fact that human beings are spiritual animals sems written into our genes. Spiritual beliefs, properly applied, are not falsifiable; they make assertions which can not be tested, and which are impossible either to prove or to disprove. I don’t necessarily find all nontstable assertions absurd. For instance, the observation that certain constants (such as the speed of light, Planck’s constant, and so on) appear written into the fundamental laws of physics, and that if these constants were to change by even the tiniest amount the physical universe would not be possible, has led some people to assert that these constants were set by a creator divinity. This is a fundamentally untestable assertion, and I don’t spend any time ridiculing it; I’m actually neutral on whether or not it’s true, and have no opinion one way or the other on the existance of such a creator divinity.

But here’s the thing. Assertions of empirical fact are notthe same as assertions of spiritual belief, and when you make an assertion of empirical fact, now you’re playing with the big boys.

When you play with the big boys, you play by big-boy rules. When you make an assertion of empirical fact, now everything changes. Assertions of empirical fact do not get or deserve automatic respect. Assertions of empirical fact are evaluated by a ruthless meritocracy. They live or die by only one criterion–how closely they match the physical universe. All assertions of empirical fact start with zero credibility; they gain respect by matching observations of the physical universe, and lose respect by failing to match observations of the physical universe.

Some assertions of empirical fact are rooted in, or motivated by, spiritual beliefs. And sometimes, those who hold spiritual beliefs seek to have it both ways.

In the article Snake Oil and Holy Water, Richard Dawkins (a hero of mine) lays it out pretty succintly. Religion and spirituality, we’re told, inhabits one sphere of human thought, and observation of the physical world occupies another; you can not judge spiritual beliefs by scientific principles. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But what happens is that people who advocate spiritual beliefs make assertions about the physical world–assertions which, quite often, turn out to be wrong–and then when called on it, retreat into “You can’t judge me! You can’t tell me I’m wrong! You must respect my beliefs; spirituality is not the same thing as science!”

You can’t have it both ways. If you want to talk about spiritual beliefs, you can’t make assertions of empirical fact. If you do make assertions of empirical fact, you can’t then retreat into spirituality when you are called on any errors or fallacies in those assertions of empirical fact. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to play by big-boy rules.

The rambling New Age missive to which I replied looks like a statement of spirituality, but it’s not. It’s a statement of empirical facts–many of them, in fact. It asserts that on such-and-such a date and time, the world will be exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light, and that this light will originate with “the fifth dimension.” We have detection equipment capable of responding to ultraviolet light; if this assertion is true, it’s easy to test. It asserts that this beam of ultraviolet light is “highly charged,” which betrays a profound ignorance of the nature of ultraviolet light; photons have no rest mass and no charge, and thus a beam of light can not be “highly charged” by definition. It asserts that this beam of light will begin at the same time in all time zones and last for seventeen hours–an impossibility, as wolfger pointed out, because all the time zones span twenty-four hours.

And, most remarkably, it makes assertions about the way this beam of light will affect human beings, claiming that its presence will affect human behavior in very dramatic ways.

I have written before about the tendency of the human brain, when faced with a new idea, to fail open and default to accepting the idea rather than challenging the idea. This is a tendency I think it pays to be aware of, and I have developed the habit of “watchdogging” myself whenever I read an article or hear a story or see a new idea. I’ve sort of set up an informal hierarchy, which I use to determine how much credence should be accorded some new idea.

At the top of the hierarchy are ideas which agree with current theory, are supported by a large amount of empirical evidence, and are consistent with existing models of the way the universe works. Such an idea is not necessarily true, of course; but it is more likely to be true than ideas that don’t meet these criteria. It is true that existing models are incomplete and existing knowledge of the universe does not extend to everything; however, that does not invalidate these criteria. When Einstein came along and constructed new models which seemed to make Newton’s laws of motion obsolete, it’s important to understand that Einstein’s models extended our understanding into situations where Newton’s models don’t apply, but that Einstein’s models and Newton’s models make the same prediction when applied to, say, what happens when you throw a baseball. And they have to, because we already know that Newton’s models are smack-on when applied to baseballs. If someone comes along and proposes new laws of motion, they damn well better agree with Newton about what happens if I throw a baseball, too, because I’ve already seen that Newton gets it right. His model describes reality; any model that disagrees with his, doesn’t.

Next level down comes ideas that seek to extend current ideas or to propose new systems where current ideas don’t apply, but which are unsupported by empirical evidence; or ideas which are consistent with current models and current understanding, but for which evidence does not exist. The notion that there is life on other planets is a great example. It violates no laws of physics, it is consistent with our current working knowledge of the physical world, and indeed it seems quite likely given our current knowledge of the physical world–but it’s unproven.

Working farther and farther down the chain means getting closer and closer to ideas that are absurd or ridiculous on their face. Ideas which are not internally consistent, ideas which disagree radically with current knowledge about the physical world, ideas which make predictions radically at odds with observations of the physical world, and ideas which do not follow from their own premises are all ideas which do not deserve initial respect. The more an idea diverges from empirical observations of the physical world, the more an idea contradicts its own premises or its own assumptions, the harder that idea had better work if it wants to be accepted. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Eventually, an idea becomes so absurd that I feel confident in ridiculing it. And, sensibilities of the woman on the mailing list aside, ideas so absurd, so internally inconsistent, and so far out of line with the physical world as this New Age nonsense about ultraviolet light and divine governments deserve ridicule. This idea made statements of empirical fact that were manifestly untrue, as evidenced by the fact that it is now October 23rd and the world looks pretty much the way it did on October 17th, save for a few small details–the number of people dead in Iraq, the number of days left until George Bush is no longer in office, the number of times I’ve mistakenly left my cell-phone charger somewhere.

Ideas do not deserve automatic respect. There is no shame in calling “bullshit” on bullshit ideas. In fact, I submit that calling bullshit is the duty of anyone anywhere interested in truth. Truth comes only from the open and vigorous competition of ideas, and ideas which do not match reality in this meritocracy give way to ideas that do. We advance as a species by separating wheat from chaff, by testing ideas for weakness and inconsistency and discarding those that don’t measure up. An assertion of empirical fact that matches observed reality is superior to an assertion that does not; respect is earned, not automatic. Spiritual ideas exist in a sandbox, isolated from objective reality and not subject to the same rules as statements of empirical fact–but as soon as they leave that sandbox, they better be prepared to compete on their own merits, and that means being subject to inspection, and to scorn and ridicule.

Disrespectful? You bet. If you want my respect, you have to earn it. Learning about time zones is a good place to start.

More fun from my inbox

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So, this morning I woke to this delightful gem in my email. Snarkiness in italics. I <3 New Agers!

From: Patricia Cota-Robles Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:05:20 -0700
To: [munged]
Subject: A Cosmic Opportunity for Divine Government

A COSMIC OPPORTUNITY FOR DIVINE GOVERNMENT
by Patricia Diane Cota-Robles

An opportunity for divine government? Uh-oh. Isn’t that what the Christian Fundamentalists want, too? Divine government is always a bad idea…we’re off to an inauspicious start here!)

www.eraofpeace.org

We have a rare Cosmic event occurring on October 17th and 18th that will
give us a jump-start in manifesting the things we would like to cocreate
in our own lives and on this planet. There is going to be an ultraviolet
pulse beam from higher dimensions than we have previously been able to
experience crossing the path of Earth.

Uh-oh. An ultraviolet pulse beam? Better wear my sunscreen! And not just any ultraviolet pulse beam, but one from a Higher Dimension! I hope they have good sunscreen in those higher dimensions, too…I can imagine higher-dimension beings walking around all sunburned all the time. Might make them a bit crabby.

We will be held in the embrace of this highly charged ultraviolet beam of
Light for approximately 17 hours. The energy emanating from this beam
resonates with Humanity’s 5th-Dimensional Solar Heart Chakras.

Well, fuck. Remind me to stay indoors. Not only is it ultraviolet light, but it’s highly charged, too! So not only are we going to get sunburned, we’re apt to get radiation poisoning as well.

Ahh! Now I get it! It’s an act of war! The higher dimensions are declaring war on us, and when they’ve reduced all life on earth to crispy critters, they’re going to occupy the planet and impose their own divine government! Goddamnit, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about already.

The Beings of Light are revealing that during this 17-hour period the
ultraviolet pulse beam will have the effect of amplifying our thoughts and
emotions ONE MILLIONFOLD. This will be the case regardless of what our
thoughts and emotions are expressing. Needless to say, it is imperative
for all of us to be Peace Commanding Presences during this auspicious
time.

Amplifying our thoughts a millionfold? Seriously? A MILLIONFOLD? Well, Shelly should have no problem acing her physics test, then!

The ultraviolet pulse beam will be a wave of Light that traverses the
planet, so no matter what time zone you are in the important times will be
the same. For 17 hours, from approximately 10:17 a.m. on October 17th
until 1:17 a.m. on October 18th our thoughts and emotions will be
amplified ONE MILLIONFOLD. The peak time will be 5:10 p.m. on October
17th.

It’s that SPECIAL kind of ultraviolet light…you know, the kind that doesn’t travel at the speed of light.

And it keeps on going, and going, and going!

In Atlanta this weekend!

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I’m getting set to head up to Atlanta for the weekend; I’ll be staying in a hotel just off 85 by the Perimeter. On the off chance that anyone on my friends list happens to be in Atlanta and would like to meet for a late dinner this evening, or perhaps for lunch on Saturday, let me know! You can leave a comment here or send me an email at my AOL address (in my profile), though I’m not 100% sure I’ll have Internet access. Better yet would be to give me a call–813-833-6079.

The Weekend In Summation

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Enveloped in a sentiment,
a sound that rushes over me.
Engage an impulse to pretend
I have a faith as pure.
Not forgetting what it means to dream,
Indulging everything,
Entertaining thoughts that I’ve the strength
of those I yearn to be.

My iPod tends to get into moods. I listen to it whenever I do a lot of driving, using a gizmo that lets me play it over the car stereo. Saturday, I drove from Gainesville to Tampa for indigofae‘s birthday.

I didn’t actually listen to the iPod for most of the trip, as I spent the bulk of the journey talking to istislah, who I met just in time for her to move to Seattle, and as it turns out I stayed on the phone with her right up to the time I arrived at the restaurant to greet indigofae, her partner nekidsteve, and her friends for her birthday dinner.

I did, however, listen to the iPod after dinner, while we all travelled to the local goth club for some dancing. I almost always listen to it on shuffle, and (as I mentioned before) it tends to get into moods. It’ll get into an industrial mood one day, a neo-folk mood the next…it’s a moody piece of technology.

Anyway, the iPod was in a VNV Nation mood on the way to the club…which, as it turned out, would be the theme of the weekend.

When we arrived at the club, the DJ was playing–you guessed it–VNV Nation. We stayed until close (indigofae has a rather astonishing number of bandwidth-crushing images here), and the DJ played–wait for it!–more VNV Nation just before closing.

Later in the weekend, I got to help take smoocherie‘s virginity, and I got pictures. More on that in a bit.

I believe that we’ll conceive
to make in Hell for us a heaven.
A brave new world
A promised land
A fortitude of hearts and minds.

We no longer have a bed in the apartment in Tampa. The king-sized, cast-iron canopy bed I love so dearly is now in Gainesville, where it utterly dominates the living room. Shelly found a tiny, one bedroom apartment in Gainesville, not realizing we’d end up sharing it for a time, and there’s simply no room for it in the bedroom. So it occupies half the living room, where it makes an admirable conversation starter if nothing else.

So I brought an inflatable air mattress with me to Tampa. Sheets, too. And a comforter. What I did not bring was a pillow. And sleeping without a pillow sucks. Particularly when one does not get home ’til almost 4 AM as it is.

I did finally sleep, and woke up later than I intended on Sunday. This means I headed across the state to visit smoocherie later than I had planned to on Sunday. I did finally get there, though, a tribute to my nice new big hippocampus1 (thank you, World of Warcraft2!), and spent some quality time with her, another of her sweeties james_the_evil1, and mladypain. James made dinner for us, we watched a Showtime series about qa serial killer police officer (in Hollywoodland, every major city has at least three or four serial killers running around at any given time–it’s one of those unwritten rules, like the one that says the villain in action/adventure flicks always wears cool sunglasses), and we got some serious poi-spinning time in. More VNV Nation–poi spinning is always better set to music–and then smoocherie and I got to spend some rare alone time together.

I won’t disturb you with what happened next, because it would…disturb you. This isn’t the part where smoocherie loses her virginity; I’m getting to that.

Eyes betray the soul, and bare its thinking.
Beyond words they say so many things to me.
A stranger here, reborn, it seems
Awaking wonders deep in me.
If nothing’s ventured, nothing’s gained,
So I must seize the day.

Monday was surprisingly productive. I’d loaded the laptop with client files, so i was actually able to get quite a bit of work done. smoocherie worked in the office, I worked in the kitchen, and I was very pleased. Changing environments from time to time really does seem to help my productivity.

Later that night came the deflowering.

smoocherie has totally hooked me on spinning poi, and she and I have been doing it whenever we spend time together lately. That night, for the first time, she actually spun fire.

And I got pictures! Lovely pictures!

More pictures here

Oh, my GOD, funniest thing EVAR

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All the other things I’ve called the “funniest thing ever?” All lies. The real funniest thing ever:

The Nietzsche Family Circus

It takes a random Family Circus cartoon and pairs it with a random Nietzsche quote. merovingian, I think this is right up your alley. The Family Circus is arguably the most dreadful, insipid, flaccid, banal comic ever created by man, but Nietzsche makes it all good. A few of my favorites:

Continue reading →

Some thoughts on pets and polyamory

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My parents have two pets: a high-strung hunting dog (a German shorthair pointer, if you’re curious), and a psychotic cat with no claws who originally belonged to my sister. The dog is exuberantly, enthusiastically erratic, ninety pounds of jumping, barking, tearing around the house, freaking-out-without-warning teeth and claws that has actually injured my mother badly enough to require surgery on a morning walk. (“Oh look! A squirrel! I’m going to go chase it, oh boy oh boy!” led in very short order to a torn rotator cuff, when the dog hit the end of her leash.) The cat doesn’t much cotton to people, or to anything else really, and will growl, hiss, and generally make her displeasure known when one of us naked hairy apes intrudes into her presence.

This is actually a post about polyamory. I’ll get to that in a bit.

The dog doesn’t much like the cat, and the cat doesn’t much like the dog. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s probably more fair to say that the dog, being carefully bred for the purpose of hunting, rather does like the cat, in much the same way she likes any prey animal, and the cat hates the dog with a fury that is scarcely comprehensible to mere humans, but it’s a fury that is as impotent as it is malevolent. There’s no contest between the two. If the dog were actually to get at the cat, the dog would kill the cat in very short order–game over, the end–exactly as the dog has been bred to do.

For this reason, my parents carefully segregate the dog and the cat. The cat lives in one side of the house; the dog lives in the other, and doors are closed between them.

It would only take one mistake, one accidental slip-up, for my parents to own not two pets, but one pet and one collection of bloody scraps. So they are religious about keeping the animals separated. Doors and windows are checked after every passage (the cat’s domain includes the screened-in porch, which the dog is not permitted in). The habit of closing the door after every passage has become so strong that every door in the house is generally kept closed.

In some ways, this mirrors their relationship. My father lives on one side of the house; my mother lives on the other. They interact seldom and actually spend time together more rarely still. Even on vacations, they tend to go in separate directions.

A very large part of the poly community seems predicated on the same model as my parents use with their pets.

For many people, polyamory in practice seems a bit like owning a dog and a cat that don’t much get along, or in some cases might even try to kill one another. Each relationship functions as a separate entity, and doors are shut between them. If Alice is dating Bob, and Alice wants to date Bill too, and Bob and Bill don’t much care for one another, the solution is scheduling. Keep Bob and Bill away from one another, and it’s all good.

After all, Bob and Bill aren’t involved with each other, right? There’s no reason that Bob and Bill have to force a friendship, or even interact with one another at all, just because they’re both dating Alice, right?

Well, right. Certainly no reasonable person would suggest that Bob and Bill should try to be something that they’re not, or should attempt to force a connection or a friendship where none exists. that way disfunction lies.

But that misses the point.

Presumably, Alice has a choice. One would, generally speaking, probably assume that Alice can choose who she becomes romantically linked to. Alice can choose to date Bob and to date Bill, if she likes…but she can also choose not to.

I may be getting cynical in my old age, but it does seem to me that many people in the poly community approach their relationships from a desperate, starvation model. Connections are so rare, and the number of people who would actually want to date me so few, the reasoning seems to go, that if Bob asks me out, I have to say yes! If I don’t, I may never get another chance to start a new relationship again. Best to take every opportunity that comes down the pike; best not to risk never having a new relationship ever again.

And sure, it can work, in much the way my parent’s lives work–you learn to cope, you develop the reflex of shutting doors, you learn to police yourself constantly and to keep the things in your lives segregated. The habit of openness can be quashed, in time; you learn not to share things with Bill about Bob, you learn not to schedule things where Bob and Bill might interact. You develop a subconscious internal policeman, whose job it is to maintain that separation, to ensure that Bob and Bill forever occupy different spaces in your life.

But what the fuck kind of life is that?

It’s not necessary to try to make Bob and Bill like each other. Nor is it even possible, really. But what Alice can do is make choices. She is not obligated to date anyone who will have her; indeed, most people would argue that dating anyone who will have you is likely a symptom of a pathology.

What she can do is choose the kind of life she wants. She can, if she doesn’t want to become a devout follower of the Church of Closed Doors, evaluate as part of the decisions she makes what impact a potential new mate will have on her existing mates. She can say “I like Bob; I enjoy Bob’s company; but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life closing doors and policing my partners, so if Bob doesn’t fit well in my life, I will make another choice. I can develop a friendship with Bob that honors and respects the connection between us, without being involved in a relationship with him. I can choose relationships with people who complement my life and each other’s…even if they’re not actually involved in romantic relationships with each other. I can build a life without doors and walls.”

There are disadvantages to this approach. One may, from time to time, have to pass up the opportunity to sleep with someone one wants to sleep with. One may not be able to pursue every opportunity that presents itself. But in a world of six billion people, we have to make choices anyway; and love is abundant. There is no need to date whoever will have you.

The benefit to a life without doors and walls seems opaque to some people I’ve spoken with. I can’t rightly comprehend that, because it seems obvious to me. It means less headache and less hassle. It means less worrying, less policing one’s thoughts and deeds. I am very fortunate to have found in Shelly, and in my other sweeties, people who understand this intuitively. And I am fortunate in that there are certain things I do not have to worry about. I never have to worry about Shelly’s other partners; I can trust implicitly that when she chooses to open herself to other partners, she will make those choices in ways that consider my needs as well.

The benefits are wonderful. She has chosen other partners who have become friends of mine as well–people who add value to my life, even though I am not romantically or sexually linked to them. Relationships like this–relationships chosen to complement one another, not be separated from one another–are not zero-sum. Everyone benefits; when she chooses another partner, my life is enriched by it as well, and vice versa.

Happy birthday, Shelly. 🙂

GAAAAH!

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26

So Shelly and I are now addicted to the new Battlestar: Galactica series, and we’ve just finished watching the first season.

And. The. Local. Video. Rental. Store. Doesn’t. Carry. Any. More. Episodes.

Waugh!

Question to anyone who might know Gainesville…

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18

Shelly’s birthday is this Thursday. She would really like to have dinner at a place that serves bananas Foster–something about bananas on fire and the coming of the Great Cthulhu and something, I don’t know. Anyway, she has her heart set on flaming bananas, and I sadly don’t have the faintest idea where to find such things. Anyone?