Shaving Cream, Be Nice and Clean...

Let's just say someone opened the big chest of fragments played by Dr. Demento.

So I was out cruising around Blogtopia™ (thank you, Skippy) and got shards of something that when pieced together illuminated an odd posting and a couple of not-so-stray comments I saw later and a nice thick steak with mushrooms, wild rice, string beans, and--  

Sorry.  That last was a hallucination.  Cholesterol issues.

Anyway.  What I noticed was that one person, who may well have felt attacked, was insisting in comments to one of the posts that the bone of contention was x and responses to the person asserted y.  (If you thought I was going to get into details and maybe a link so you could check this out, you're reading the wrong vampire.)  It was just fascinating in the way that games of Invisible Idiot are ("Invisible Idiot" is a mistranslation of "Out of sight, out of mind" and is the name of a game in Spider Robinson's books about Callahan's Place).  I have been known to do that myself occasionally, which is why I tend to drop out of arguments.  

Anyway, larger issues were lurking beneath the surface.  

Larger issues usually are.  Most larger issues are turtles (or terrapins or tortoises)--shelled, slow-moving, preference or need for water.  Some of them bite, but most put up a head, say, "You're not solving me today, but I'll take that fish you're holding," take the fish, and wander off.

The troublesome larger issues, however, are sharks.  (Yeah, another cheap shark metaphor.  Don't call the lawyers.)  You know they're out there, the fins are visible, and the minute there is blood in the water the feeding frenzy--I mean the thousand comments complete with trolling, counter-trolling, talking past each other, ruptures of real-time friendships, involvement of other blogs/LiveJournals/mailing lists--goes on until everyone is either too exhausted or too disgusted to continue.

(No, I'm not talking about the intersectionality business, although that shark doesn't usually wait for blood in the water.  Our own selves are pie charts of many slices, and the slice of greatest importance and easiest misunderstanding is exactly the one you just said doesn't matter.  Say hello to Bruce the Shark.)

One of lo squalo di tutti gli squali ("shark of all sharks" although there are several because sharking is non-hierarchical in that regard) is any form of discrimination, touched upon here (because I was present on the day someone posted a "can we talk about this?" on a newsgroup and even with topic drift, there was still yelling three months later) by Twisty Faster:  

She (the reader) will necessarily come to her own conclusions; I am not insensitive to the possibility that these will not precisely mirror my own. Such a contingency will sorely harsh my mellow, since I desire nothing more desperately than to be agreed with unconditionally by everybody in the world, Internet entities I don’t know and never will included, but, you know. Life’s a journey or something.

Another shark, which nibbles on your legs a lot, surfaces at Off Our Pedestals here, with this:

The person I referred to earlier was well-intentioned. I even believe that person’s work will eventually produce some real, concrete good in the world. But it wrecked my real, concrete self anyway, because I experienced it as having a fairly major chunk of my life winked out of existence for the sake of intellectual exercise. I’m not saying intellectualism is bad (although, you watch, someone will write a vague post insinuating that I have said exactly that). I am saying intellectualism requires care and grounding in practice. It requires heart. Because in practice, you are almost always going to come back at some point to dealing with people, and people are not ideals, references, theories, culture, class, race, intersectionality, or any of that. They are people, and as such, they can often surprise you with their confounding ability to speak for themselves.

A lot of "intellectualism" is credential worship, unfortunately, and I wish I remembered where I saw the account of people (who had been doing a good job working with people) pushed out in favor of credentials and "professionalism" toward the "clients."   

None of this has anything to do with the Journey videos.  

Naming no names, I followed a link to a non-video video which led to other videos and eventually to this one.  (The Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 2005 behind "Don't Stop Believing.")(It was news to me because there had been a death in the family around that time and I was less than attentive.)  Which in turn reminded me that the first video on MTV that made an impression on me (when I lived in NYC, for considerably less than $500,000, I might add, I spent the occasional weekend with the parents, who had that newfangled cable arrangement) had been the one for "Oh, Sherrie."  I've always been a sucker for "breaking the fourth wall."

This post entitles the bearer to sleep through the Oscars and to read about it in the paper Monday morning.