House of Eratosthenes

Because of some family obligations, I’m communicating with some people for the first time in many years. It’s not by choice, and even now this is being done through intermediaries. But I can pick up the vibe of some old resentments against my less enjoyable qualities, and being a flawed Son of Adam who ate of the fruit, I must concede there is some legitimacy to these resentments.

Even the people who tolerate me graciously repeat some of the litany: I don’t admit it when I’m wrong. There is some truth in this, although it doesn’t survive strict scrutiny. All it takes is one time for me to admit to a mistake, and that proves I’m at least capable. After reflecting on this, on & off for many years, I’ve come to the realization that the complaint is insufficiently precise. It has to do with how, and when, I admit to being wrong about something.

The complainers evidently have a script already written in their heads: I’m to be shown something, and then comment audibly something like, Heavens to Murgatroyd I must mend my ways. What actually follows is an explanation of why this new nugget of information doesn’t matter, or best-case scenario, a methodical re-examination of the true state of things followed by a rational, autonomous, non-instruction-driven declaration of my new revised opinion which might not fit the supplied stencil. So the real beef is not that I’m unwilling to alter a flawed opinion, but that I’m maintaining my own control over how I come up with these alterations. This is something all real grown-ups are supposed to be doing all the time, so with this understanding I suppose I’m magnifying my original sin. My interest level in possibly reforming, also, is slipping from its apex. From there, things deteriorate all-around.

So yes. I don’t get along well with mental midgets. It’s best we not have contact with each other.

But some labor under the onus of maintaining contact with me across vast expanses of time whether they want to or not. And for them there is an additional complication: As time goes on, these happy occasions on which I admit I was wrong about something and revise my opinion, become less and less frequent. Well…yes. That’s actually a feature and not a bug. If you apply your own critical thinking skills, make up your own mind about the true meaning of things as grown-ups are supposed to be doing, and you are capable of learning from mistakes but you apply those lessons in a way that makes the best sense to you — throughout a larger expanse of time, with nothing dramatically changing, you should reach correct conclusions about things more often and you should find it necessary to admit defeat less often. That’s actually the only meaningful definition of learning. So I conclude we’re dealing here with a mindset that demands from others a “healthy” admission of mistakes made, but is unready to deal with the natural consequences.

We just finished the latest available episode of The Ranch, and it’s been entertaining and everything because the jokes are genuinely funny and the writing is above par, but I have to say I’m somewhat relieved. Watching them back to back, you can see the slow but sure drift toward soap-opera dreck, and I’m tiring of the leitmotif of aggrieved, aggravated females getting fed up and leaving because of [blank]. It comes across like a creativity deficit in the writing pool, perhaps an outreach effort toward harridans who watch too much teevee and, in a related development, can’t manage to make their own marriages work. Or, if I’m conspiracy-minded, a blue-stater’s desire to infect the red state with the blue-state plague of broken families. And honestly, I find it rather offensive toward red-state women, who in my personal experience are not that delicate. I sympathize somewhat with Abby’s predicament with Colt’s deceptions, but I’ve never been entirely clear on what these various women find wrong with Beau. Something to do with waiting for something to change, and the thing not changing. Sorry, that’s just stupid. If you’ve got a ranch and women on the ranch act this way, eventually the whole damn country goes hungry. When is it time to leave? Abuse, physical or mental — and, no fair stretching the perimeter of “mental abuse” to cover “He doesn’t make me feel good ALL of the time.” Adultery. Lying, I suppose, if they’re really big lies and not just “No that dress doesn’t make you look fat.”

Short of that — sit down and STFU you dumb bitch. That’s what we tell your husband when he gets bored with family life, and desires a spectrum of options he no longer has.

I believe we’re just emerging from a sad chapter in our cultural history, in which we haven’t been able to get along with each other because it’s become fashionable to expect/demand so-and-so does such-and-such. Now this character that they’ve used Sam Elliott‘s acting talents to construct, to me, couldn’t possibly be easier to understand. He’s not a complicated individual at all, what you see is what you get. Perhaps I identify with him too much, because for me, he’s the central character and the soap opera angle of “The Ranch” is about this crusty old fart trying to bring beef to market in the middle of a bunch of estrogen-charged ditziness…which I suppose is not the intended thrust of the show. It seems everyone else is picking up on something that’s eluding me. The monologue from this or that woman lamenting how long she’s waited for something to change, and it never does, has always bored me. And I suppose my reaction isn’t the intended one either: “Well then GTFO, you silly twit.”

But these are scriptwriters who have managed to create an immensely popular show in a short amount of time. Their fingers must be on the pulse of somebody, if not on mine. This sad chapter is not yet closed. There has to be closure to this, because society cannot endure this way. We cannot keep a healthy culture going, when everyone with an opinion to offer about anything, is expecting everyone else with an opinion to offer about anything, to change for insufficient reason. Those who fancy themselves learned in all the interpersonal skills required in order to function, are going to have to get jiggy with the plain fact that people are people, and they don’t change their minds about things just because they’ve received an instruction that they should do so. There has to be a reason. And even if one emerges, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that that reason will be reconciled against their own life-experience, and not someone else’s.

There’s no such thing as being right all the time. But there is such a thing as thinking for yourself, as an adult…and the problem is, this works. If you’re truly capable of learning from mistakes, after awhile you make fewer of them, so if your aim is to regularly admit to mistakes so you can make other people happy, this is not for you. Making mistakes is just like anything else: If you want to do it often, meet some kind of quota, you have to put some effort into making mistakes.

Oh boy! A topic I love!

So let’s talk about writing. There’s the saying there are only 3 stories: Man against Nature. Man against Man. Man against himself. Or to put it another way: Man vs an indifferent reality. Man vs another’s motivation. Man vs his own desires.

It’s not hard to see that as civilization has grown MvM and MvH have grown in popularity. For one thing, they are easier. For another, we’re talking about people who don’t have to deal much with an uncaring nature.

This is where I think the difference between red state & blue state stories lies. Since stories need conflict and drama, blue states like MvM, I want something, you want something that interferes with it, we fight. Red states like a conflict of MvN, a massive problem is coming, how can we solve it?

That’s where I think you are getting at here. For MvN, you’ll probably notice that a group has to come together. A frontier family has to work together to survive, your desires mean nothing in the face of death. The circumstances draw the group together and makes it stronger. But for MvM, a group has to divide, become weaker.

And yes, this is what bugs me about the Ranch also. For a ranch family, the story should be MvN, and you’ll see hints about that in the earlier seasons with some stories like the drought. But beyond the writers probably not getting what that’s like, there’s also the problem that such drama is expensive. You’d have to go on location, get animals and animal handlers (as well as having PETA involved), put the actors at possible risk, raising insurance rates, etc. So then you have to try and put all that off screen. Which isn’t satisfying for anyone for drama

So they start doing MvM stories. Because those you can do on pre-built sets with the actors standing around. Cheap and safe. Thus as the show goes on (and costs go up because actors get pay increases) you have to keep saving money somehow…

Thus the show we have.
- Nate Winchester | 03/03/2019 @ 09:22

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Let Me Tell You What It’s Like to Be Right All the TimeSunday, February 17th, 2019

Let Me Tell You What It’s Like to Be Right All the Time
Sunday, February 17th, 2019