Rules Of The Game #17: Punks and Cats

[koganbot]

This week's column is something of a repeat of last week's, elaborating on both the functionality and dysfunctionality of sticking with our own (with our own people and their ideas). So, any thoughts about how to overcome the dysfunctionality, given that social clustering is necessary and inevitable?

The Rules Of The Game #17: Punks and Cats

I make no effort to justify the last three words of the piece. I just toss them in.

(Still don't know if I should ask the Web guy to insert the italics. Also, they added a strange paragraph break in the middle of a quote, and made "Net" lower case, which turns it into a mere piece of netting, whereas I was trying to have a double meaning, a normal net and an Internet. Last week I snapped at the fellow for dropping the final three paragraphs, and he objected to the snapping, which he should have, since he's always been friendly and cooperative and treated me with respect. It's not his fault they're understaffed. I don't know how far I should press him. But the editor-in-chief tells me I really should ask to get the italics included.)(EDIT: But they made "Web" lower case too, so lower case is probably just their style. Maybe I could have them put an apostrophe in front of "net.")

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I liked the bit on normality and punk and terror (even though it was 20 years old!) - what would it mean to accept terror as normal? What music would result?

Is it desirable (even possible?) to feel and live subcultural difference in ways that don't end up comfortable?

Earlier this week I posted this on FT, about my gaming experiences in the 90s - http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/09/i-was-a-goblin-herd-mentalities/ - seemed vaguely relevant.

[koganbot]

Another reason I abandoned the book was that I had some very unresolved issues with my parents that the book was acting out and trying - not successfully - to deal with. Also, I was realizing I was maybe too immature (at the not-so-young age of 32!) to pull off a book. Rereading some of that first chapter was an ordeal.

The book opened with a couple of incidents that I simply wasn't ready to write about. A kindergarten teacher - a genuinely bad-tempered woman - had criticized me to my mother, which mortified me, my mother told my pediatrician, and both the pediatrician and my mother agreed that the teacher was at fault and had it in for me, and the result was that I was put on tranquilizers. The second incident was my terrorizing some kid in kindergarten. But of course the two incidents were actually the same one seen from two different perspectives. (The terrorization incident did have an interesting outgrowth, which is that several months later I actually taught the kid how to be less vulnerable to terror, how not to panic when kids were calling him names.)

[koganbot]

Is it desirable (even possible?) to feel and live subcultural difference in ways that don't end up comfortable?

In last week's column I was saying that adventurousness in one aspect of my life (say music listening and writing) was dependent on conventionality in others, and here I'm saying that there are patterns of conventionality even in the adventurousness.

(Stream-of-consciousness thought: by denying people welfare and guaranteed health care and a social safety net in general, you may goad some people into taking the risks and learning new skills that will get them a livable income, so they don't hang around in manageable poverty; but by providing welfare and a social safety net you may give some people the security to take innovative and creative risks that might get them fired.)

[koganbot]

"conventionality in others" = conventionality in other aspects of my life (not conventionality in other people)