The Creativity

July 30, 2013December 11, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Bill Cosby had a show called Kids say the Darndest Things, and they did say the darndest things on the show. We all did at that age, but we all knew that we would have to grow out of that if it was our goal to be taken serious. Those of us who wouldn’t, had to be institutionalized into the ways of human operations (i.e. school), if we ever hoped to mature properly. Some of us matured into good business assets, fathers, and occasional games men. For the most part, however, those fantastical ideas were required to be laid by the roadside in the pursuit of a quality, adult life.

Some of us remain trapped in a fantastical mindset, and while we led a good life, and had a good wife, we haven’t matured to the point that we can meld a serious life with a fantastical mindset. We all know people who cling a little too much to fantasy, and while we try not to think less of them, it can prove difficult to take them serious. These people are apt to have an unhealthy addiction to gaming, science fiction, vampires, and now zombies. These people, depending on the progression of their fantastical mind, often have little to nothing to offer corporate America.

Others have all the foolishness of unconventional thinking, and fantasy, behind them early on. They are often children of ultra-serious parents who want their children devoid of foolish thinking. These people eventually get so locked in on serious, or conventional, ways of thinking that they end up neglecting that part of their brain that indulges in fantasy, art, and creativity for so long that they ignore a huge ingredient of what it means to be human. They eventually veer so far into the serious side of life that they become disgusted by creative thinkers. They “don’t have time” for such silliness. They have developed the tunnel vision necessary to compete in the corporate world, and they can’t understand people that don’t have a master plan. These people usually have a mathematical equation for life.

They prefer the absolutes inherent in the Superman story over the cloudy interpretations offered by the Batman character. They prefer the concrete absolutes of standard music over any creative music that messes with the formula, and they prefer the more standard comedy of Everybody Loves Raymond over the comedic study of intangibles on Seinfeld. These are bottom line people who will tell you all you need to know in life to succeed are two words: “Yes and sir!”

At some point, this type usually crashes and burn under the weight of all that seriousness. The purchases they’ve made to substantiate their status begins to lose their luster, the family no longer interests them in a substantial manner, and the career they’ve worked their whole lives for has suddenly become meaningless to them. When they reach that point, they either seek the fantasy of an adulterous affair, a job change, a move to another state, or all of the above. At some point, the master plan loses value, and they become perpetually unsatisfied with their direction. These people can be just as unhappy as the fantastically minded, and neurologists say that the only thing keeping them from utter insanity is the fantasy they experience in the dream world while sleeping. Everyone tells artists to have something to fall back on, in case their creative pursuits never come to fruition, but you rarely hear anything like this directed at conventional thinkers that succeed in conventional ways with nothing fulfilling the side of their brain that contains healthy ingredients of play and fantasy.

The healthiest mindset, and the one probably most difficult to achieve is the matured, creative mind. The matured, creative mind is one that has progressed beyond the fantastical thoughts of youth to a more practical hybrid of conventionally unconventional thinking. The problem they generally have is how to make their unconventional thoughts productive, practical and profitable, for as anyone who has worked in a corporation knows it’s not exactly a conducive climate for unconventional thinkers. In this equation, of course, the onus is on the creative mind to make their talents know to their bosses.

Some, like CEO Steve Jobs suggests that anyone unable to reach their creative peak, should try hallucinogenics. This statement made some creative types think that Steve Jobs wasn’t as creative as we had all been led to believe. It made some of us think that he views creative types from the same, jealous distance conventional thinkers view creative types. How many times have we heard non-creative types assign drug usage to creative types? “They had to be on something to make that,” they say. “No normal human could create something like that, sober.” Those of us who have flirted with creative thought encounter epiphanies on a much lower scale, know that the mind can be mined with constant work, and it can produce incredibly creative thoughts without artificial aid. Jobs’ comment was such a shock from such a creative mind that we wondered how creative he was. If he were that creative, why would he feed into that cliché?

Those who know the story of Apple, know that Steve Wozniak was the creative genius behind the Apple I and II, and he had a major influence on the Apple Macintosh. We didn’t know the instrumental role Jonathon Ive played as the chief architect of the iPod, and that he was a part of a team that included: Jon Rubenstein, Scott Forstall, Michael Dhuey, and Tony Fadell. We learned that while Jobs may have overseen the project, but we had no idea these names were the creative types behind the final product we know today.

Jobs’ role in the insurgence, and resurgence, of Apple is unquestioned, but the undue credit he received (see took) for the iPod outraged those on the creative team who sweat blood over it. Jobs was the leader of the company at the time, and he changed the company’s culture to “think different”, and he eliminated distractions to provide more focus. He may have been overly demanding with the aesthetics, the processes and the machinations, and he may have remained stubbornly unsatisfied with what he termed “unfinished” products. He may have gotten more out of his creatives than anyone in his market, and in the end he was the “guy in charge” of the company that created products that were unmatched in its field, but Steve Jobs did not deserve the amount of creative credit he took for the products it produced. And some creative types were partial to the complaints his creative teams made, after Steve Jobs said all creative types should take drugs to increase their creativity.

The primary reason it bothered us is that it’s the typical charge that all conventional thinkers make about creative types that create something conventional thinkers consider inhumanly creative. I don’t know if this “They had to have been on some wild drugs” cliché began with The Beatles, but it does appear to be one of the origins of the charge. The other reason that it bothered creative types is that it allowed non-creative types to feel more comfortable in their serious, mathematical world: “Well, I could’ve created something like that too, if I decided to take all those drugs.”

When it first came out that Led Zeppelin sold their souls to the devil, that made sense to a number of my friends, because, “No one could come up with that many great songs on their own.” When these friends grew out of such fantastical notions, they changed their minds on the subject saying that “corporate guys, or unaccredited songwriters, must have stepped in there and changed, mixed, altered, or finessed the final product, because there’s no way Page and Plant wrote all those songs alone.” Or, they say, “They must’ve been stoned out of their minds to think up things like these.” It bothers creative minds, because we know it’s possible to reach unbelievably creative planes without artificial substances, and those who have tried some artificial substances don’t see how an altered state of consciousness can lend itself to productive creativity.

It’s possible that mind-altering drugs can introduce thoughts to a brain, but how many of those thoughts are absolute nonsense? It’s possible that they can lead the brain to “Think different”, but my guess is that it takes a sober brain to sort through those different thoughts to help them make sense. I wonder if we were the tamper with the timeline and The Beatles never touched a drug, how much different would their discography be? As with using ‘save your hair’ products, it’s almost impossible to know if the mind-altering drugs did it, or if the drugs gave the mind the perception that they were free to do something wildly different than they ever tried before. It could be that continued use of hallucinogenic drugs teaches one to finesse creativity in an altered state, but most truly creative minds only experiment with altered states, and most of them found that it didn’t enhance their creativity. Unfortunately, in the case of The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, it appears as if they either created, or fed into, this misconception.

That cliché was born, in my opinion, based on the frustration that non-creative types have for those that are excessively creative. These people can accept that a bunch of fellas could sit around and write Back in Black, or Eliminator, but “You’re trying to tell me that three guys (John Paul Jones) came up with Led Zeppelin II, Zoso, and Physical Graffiti? Sober? With their souls still intact? Come on!? There’s just no way.”

Some non-creative types make the same charge with Albert Einstein. They state that the autopsy performed on Einstein’s body showed traces of LSD, as well as Dimethyl-triptimene in his system. They also state that his heart exploding could’ve easily have been caused by years of cocaine use. This led all non-creative types to almost leap with joy, as it confirmed for them the fact that no one man could think all that stuff up, not sober, with his soul intact. As we all know, these opiates were common, at the turn of the century in medicines and painkillers, so the fact that they were in his body, at the time of his death, doesn’t necessarily indicate that Einstein used them recreationally, or to enhance his creativity. “It was still in his system,” non-creative types would argue, “and whether he took these opiates for medicine or recreationally, it’s possible that it affected him.” It’s also possible that it didn’t.

How many people looked up to the stars and tried to figure out the ways of the universe prior to Einstein? How many of them ingested the same opiates, whether or not it was deemed medicinal? How many of those same people had all of the same information on the abstract concepts, and couldn’t make meaning of them in the categorical manner Einstein did by picturing himself riding a light ray bareback? “By picturing himself riding a light ray bareback, you say? Yeah, he had to be on some serious stuff to think like that. That ain’t normal.”

Einstein also said that playing the violin helped him make sense of the universe by helping him make a connection with sense-experiences. Is that something a drug-user would say? Perhaps, but here’s something that could blow your mind, so if you’re not prepared for it read no further, but it’s possible, possible that a person could indulge in different thoughts so often, that they produce creative ideas that are unimaginable to those who have never indulged in creative thinking.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Einstein once said to define insanity.

Einstein thought differently, and he thought so differently, so often, that he was able to approach the problems from so many different angles that he ended up approaching these problems in ways conventional thinkers couldn’t fathom. They still can’t fathom it, so they suggest that it had to be drugs.

Those of us who routinely think different know where the mine is. In our experience, it’s not chock full of illustrative colors. It’s just a mine. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been surface mapping and sampling that mine your whole life, so you know exploring and exploiting the mine will be worthwhile, because you know the ore and minerals in there, all you have to do now is drill deep to start the discovery phase, the development stage, until we reach the production stage. It’s not simple or immediate, but the hard work we put into excavation will produce results.

The results for the reader will be the highlight reels of all of our effort, as we learn to edit and delete until the effort is removed. The excised material is the nonsense we developed in childhood, and the whimsical inanities we created on mind-altering substances, be they drugs, beer, or other stimulants. Most of the time, we just write poor sentences, be they littered with errors, or those not as engaging as we originally thought. We’ve all unearthed bizarre ideas, sober and otherwise. An overwhelming majority of them, about 99%, are cast aside, but there are some valuable nuggets in that mine that needed to be cultivated and cleaned up. We won’t have fans in the stands who “were there” when the star was born, because most artistic endeavors occur in quiet corners when no one else is around. Most of it is finessed, staring at a poor sentence, trying to approach it in multiple ways to make it make sense, and most of the finished product, an article, essay, or novel is an assemblage of highlight reels that appears inhumanly creative.

It would be foolish to say that some brilliant creative types don’t find refuge in mind-altering substances from The Beatles to Edgar Allen Poe, but did their alteration of choice enhance the thoughts or form them? It’s the 100 monkeys on typewriters joke that suggests one of them could accidentally write Hamlet. Anyone could write Sergeant Peppers or The Raven on the right drug. Everyone could be creative, brilliantly creative, if they had the time and resources necessary to devote time to it. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, or if most people have no idea how hard it is to create something beautiful, but I think we should all drop our ideas about shortcuts regarding the creative process and just recognize brilliance for what it is.

Most creative people came about their matured creativity naturally, for creativity cannot be taught. It can be workshopped, and it can be finessed day by day and interaction by interaction, but no one can teach another person how to be brilliantly creative. For that reason, and for all the reasons listed above, creativity remains a largely unexplained phenomenon, but those of us who have spent most of our lives honing the science and math parts of our minds would much rather think mind-altering substances spawn that which separates them from creative brilliance.

An Argument About Arguing

July 6, 2013March 24, 2017 RilalyLeave a comment

“You just love to argue!” a friend of mine said to me.

To me!?

To that point in my life, I had been that person that avoided arguments. I often walked away from them. When that wouldn’t work, I was prone to level the “You just love to argue!” charge against them.

I don’t think even this friend of mine would accuse me of being a hyena, in the world of arguers, but I was once a limping antelope caught up in a pack of hyenas. It got so bad, at times, that I would examine, and reexamine everything I planned on saying. I feared everything I said would provoke an argument. I just wanted to have one peaceful day at work. When that wouldn’t work, I just stopped talking. I didn’t understand how everything I said could be so wrong, so controversial, debatable, and subject to argument. At one point, I gave up trying to figure it all out.

It was obvious to this pack of hyenas that I didn’t know how to argue, because I wasn’t used to everyone challenging every idea I had, but the fact that they were so confrontational about damning my ideas told me more about arguing than any debate class could.

Being the recipient of such a charge, after those dark years, taught me something. I liked it. It was shocking, but it was also pleasing.

When this accusation began popping up more often, and I began to reflect on the nature of the charge, it dawned on me that there are those that love to argue and the vulnerable subjects of society that they pick on. Some of these vulnerable subjects were less intelligent, but most of them didn’t spend every waking moment of their life arguing, so they weren’t as equipped as those that did. The question I had, now that I was being accused of being the former was, am I guilty of preying upon the vulnerable?

The difference between a healthy debate and an out and out argument is seismic. Even if some of these healthy debates are characterized in this manner, by the hyena that won’t leave you alone, you’ll find yourself leveling the “You just love to argue!” charge to end all future debates, healthy debates, and out and out arguments, and you will grow frustrated when it doesn’t work.

The question the vulnerable subject will have is why do they keep coming back to me with new information, new points to ponder, and a never-ending cycle that appears to be redundant to all observers? Why me? Why don’t they bother Suzy Q over there? She appears to enjoy arguing as much as they do? Yet, they keep coming back to me.

After receiving the charge that I’ve made against many, for so many years, I found the answer. I found the answer to why they sought me out, in my search for why I sought some of them out: I like to win.

Those that hate arguing, hate losing. They fear entering into an argument with a worthy opponent over subject ‘A’, and the revelations that will occur when they find out that the worthy opponent prove to know more about that subject than they do. The worthy opponent has proven, in the past, to be a worthy opponent. Most arguers do not enjoy arguing with a worthy opponent. The best way to avoid such embarrassing and stressful revelations, they think, is to just avoid arguing altogether.

Those that love to argue, on the other hand, appear to think that they learn things about all the players around them, and they may feel they learn things about themselves by arguing. It might all be a complex pursuit of intellect and psychology, for them, but it might also be something very simple: it may be all about winning and losing.

Most arguments seem so simple that they’re not worth having, but some people love to win arguments so much that they seek out the one person in the room that feeds their bear better than anyone else. Is this you? Do you have a person, that no matter how many times you say you don’t want to argue about it, won’t leave you alone about an about an annoying amount of everything? It may be that you’re better at feeding their bear than anyone else. Either you walk away, or you let it be known that you just don’t like arguing. Whatever the case is, they must find your reactions nourishing to their ego, or they wouldn’t keep coming back.

“Why do you insist on arguing about everything?!” is something you might say, in the face of their constant badgering. Or, “Does everything an argument to you?” You may even decide that you just don’t enjoy being around them, that they make you uncomfortable, and that you don’t enjoy their company. You may know that they enjoy watching you scream and squirm on a certain level, but you’ve provided yourself some comfort in stating that there must be something wrong with them if they enjoy doing that. If you’re one of these people, and you’re getting lost in the forest of their argumentative minds, you may want to start looking for the signs that say: “Don’t feed the bears!”

“I know I shouldn’t walk away,” you may say. “But it can just get so exhausting arguing with them.” The problem with this line of thought, as anyone that knows anything about bears will tell you, is that when you feed a bear they keep coming back. It’s the nature of the beast to keep coming back to the spot where their ego was nourished with the least amount of effort involved. They will no longer go out into the wild, where they belong, to keep their instincts shiny and honed, and they will become fat, and lazy, subsisting on your ineffectual, but nourishing responses.

There are some bear feeders, and we all know one, that believe that an argumentative bully can be put down with one clever turn of a phrase, or a well-timed, well-placed shot on the chin. If you’re one of those people, you may want to consider the idea that you’re watching way too much TV. In the fantasy world of television, where the screenwriter of that show has their character deliver that one shot, clever turn of a phrase they wished they said to their bully, that puts their bully in his place. In the fantasy world of television, the bully comes to respect the victim for their moxie, and the two of them may skip off together, hand in hand, in an eventual pursuit of the conflict that led this complex bully to be so insecure that he felt compelled to pick on his victim. If you’re one of these people, you may want to consider either turning the TV off, or switching the channel. The Lifetime Network is doing you more harm than good at this point.

In the world of reality, your single shot results in little more than putting the smell of gun powder in the air. The reason that you fired that shot was not to hurt them, but to try and scare them off a little. As anyone that knows anything about bears can tell you, the smell of gun powder triggers an instinctual mechanism in the bear that will cause them to keep coming at you until you are forced to recognize that it’s going to take a strategic concentration of blows to be delivered over time to put them down. It’s going to take a thorough understanding of the bear, and an ability to defeat them, with repetition and patience, until that moment of truth arrives when they bring up an argument and they try to avoid looking over at you while doing it. Either that, or they will avoid broaching that topic that they know is in your wheelhouse.

You will know that you’ve stuck a dagger in their purported “lifelong love of the arguing” when they give visual cues that they’re relieved that for the first time in a long time, you have said nothing to contradict them. These moments, when you become the bear, don’t come around often, and you should feel free to rub it out on the nearest tree as a reward for your constant, and confident, and strategic defeats, of every argument they left by the trash can for your nourishment.

Some unfortunate, and lifelong, victims believe that I am 100% incorrect in my assessment that constant, confident, and calm refutation has any merit, and they opt for a more high-pressured, high-volume attack that they believe will whip the head of the argumentative bully around to a realization that all victim’s desire: the ‘You don’t wanna go messing around with me no more’ realization. This attack often involves a lot of swear words, a red-face, and some ultimate ultimatum. This tactic has never proven effective, in my experience, and I have witnessed it attempted many times, from all sides of the paradigm.

There have been times when I’ve been on the casual observer side, and I’ve heard these argumentative bullies whisper: “Watch this!” before launching on you people. I’ve heard them state with pride that they can get a rise out of you, when you’re not around. They love this, is what I’m saying. They take great pride, almost to the point of arousal, in the fact that they are one of the few people that can cause you to get hysterical.

“Why do you give them that?” I’ve wondered aloud on more than a few occasions. In a few of these occasions, I have been a disinterested, neutral party. I don’t care about the well-being of the vulnerable subject, and I didn’t find the bully’s persecution particularly funny. I just wanted to know if the vulnerable subject understood the dynamic of the situation. The reactions I’ve received are just as red-faced, and laced with profanity, and high volume. It has led me to believe that some people are victims as a matter of happenstance, and some are a species unto yourselves.

Some arguments are germane and vital to a person’s existence, and the best argument I’ve heard for never walking away from them is that you have to teach people how to treat you. Those that love to argue will put a person through the ringer, just to see what they’re made of. These types disgust those that don’t enjoy being tested. They want to live in a world where everyone treats everyone else in the manner they want to be treated. They want to live in a land of peace of harmony. Too bad, say those that love to argue. This is the real world, and we’re going to force you through this tiny, revelatory hole just to see what you come out looking like on the other side. These arguments are often of a more personal nature, and they cannot be avoided. You have to teach others how to treat you.

If a person enjoys arguing, and they seek out arguments of all stripes, they will eventually encounter a person that argues about everything and nothing, and they will do so in the same argument. My advice to those that have any regard for their mental health, is to simply pack up your belongings and walk away. These types of arguments are indigenous to an annoying species of bear called the plane switchers. The modus operandi of the plane switcher is to start an argument. If they find that they have tripped upon a subject their counterpart is well-versed in, until an argument that began with a discussion on the homeopathic uses of emu urine somehow switches to the origins of the Wiccan religion. How did these people do that, might be the first question we ask, as we begin to see all the “Don’t feed the bears” signs around us in the dark and sparse forests of the plane switchers. Further inspection of the argument reveals the fact that the question regarding their ability to deflect doesn’t matter near as why they do it, and I can answer that question with one word: victory.

My advice, again, is to simply walk away. If, however, it is impossible to walk away, as the person may sit in an adjoining cubicle in an office place, or they may be a loved one. In some cases, I have found that the task of switching the topic back to the germane topic takes a steady, subtle hand, and on other occasions I have found that it calls for brute force. If we are able to manage switching the playing field back to the subject at hand, we might find our way out of one argument, on one day, in the everlasting arguments with these exhausting people, and all exhausting arguers, until we run across the person that mistakes us for being a person that loves to argue.

I remember that day, oh so long ago, when that first person accused me of being an argumentative person. I almost laughed in her face. When she did that, they had no idea how many times I said what I said just to get the other guy to shut up for five minutes. They had no idea how many times, I packed up my stuff and walked away from an argument I found tedious, and they had no idea how many times I lost arguments. They also had no idea how many times they presented me an argument, and all I was doing was countering that argument. They had no idea that they just wanted me to lie down, and roll over, and accept their argument in the manner they presented it. If they knew the painful and emotional road I traveled on to get to the point where I received their wonderful compliment, they would have never said it. They just knew the finished product that stood before them arguing against their argument. They didn’t know how many years I spent in the loser’s bin, unable to compete, not knowing the right thing to say, and trying every possible method I could think up just to shut just one of them up. They just knew the finished product. They didn’t know about all the Dr. Frankenstein’s that gave the beast life.

Very few arguers know the argumentative beast living inside them. They don’t know the maturation process that their beast went through, or the weaponry their beast purchased with intangible experience, but they do know that they like to argue with you over any other individual in the room, because they love to see someone else do the squirmy, screamy dance that they used to do when arguers chose them over everyone else in the room. They may not know any of the complex, intellectual, and psychological algorithms of their beast, but they do know that they like to win, and that you –the person that doesn’t like to argue– will always give them that.

Food Glorious Food

May 14, 2013October 11, 2017 RilalyLeave a comment

We all love food, but what’s the difference between someone that loves a great steak, and a foodie and foodist. Foodist.ca defines these terms as “a collective of like-minded food worshipers that breathe and sleep in order to eat and drink.” We can all appreciate this classification, to some degree, because we all love food, but at what point in history did those that have an unabashed love of food become so unusual that it was necessary to separate them out with a specific designation?

We could argue that everyone was a foodie, or a foodist, for most of human history, in that they knew that food was so elemental to their survival that they would do anything to get it. Some will say that this obsession with food, such that it can lead to obesity, began when food was so scarce that those of a bygone era gorged themselves to prepare for scarcity cycles. They say that modern man has not evolved past this pattern even though Science and technology have made scarcity a thing of the past for the most part. Some of us might feel guilty about this now, because we no longer need to gorge, but that guilt hasn’t slowed us, it’s just made us feel guilty about talking about it so much. Thus, the birth of the designation foodie, or foodist, to describe those that don’t feel the need to qualify their love of food.

Most foodists and foodies, we should note, don’t necessarily eat more than the average person does, but when they do eat, they’re very selective about what they put in their body. Some have said that foodies are so vocal about their preferences that they come off as snobs that fail to recognize the privileges that modern science and technology have afforded in their chosen lifestyle. Some have said that foodies use their “healthier” lifestyle choices as a hammer of superiority against anyone that doesn’t follow their dietary codes. Some have also suggested that foodies approach you with a “you live your life and I’ll live mine” motto, but that their actions suggest that this is anything but the case with them.

For the rest of the non-foodie population, our love of food is a guilty pleasure that we conceal for fear of having our peers view us as a gluttonous slob. Most people don’t love food so much that they close their eyes when they eat to savor the initial act of digestion as it sends those succulent, savory messages to their brain. Most people won’t take the time to let a piece of food lay on all of the quarters of their mouth for ultimate sensory excitation. Most people won’t inhale and exhale the flavor of their food for just a moment before allowing it into the second stage of digestion. Most people won’t nix the first seven choices of a restaurant, because at a certain age, they know they can only eat one meal a day, and that meal has to be special, different, or at least somewhat memorable. Most consider this mindset odd. Most non-foodies, if you speak with them on this level, will tell you that eating is just an activity one must endure to sustain life.

It makes normal people feel more normal to say they don’t share your love of food. It makes them feel skinny to say that you’re a bit of a freak for loving food so much. It makes them feel rational to say it’s just another bodily function. Whether they believe this or not, we do know that if a fat person dares to mention how much they love food in general, they become a punch line. “That’s obvious,” we say with a laugh. We fear that we might become that punch line if we say that we love a relatively innocuous piece of food on a level that approaches spiritual appreciation, especially if that food is fried and considered generally unhealthy. We know that we would be entering the lion’s den of laughter if we suggest that one great meal is something we can point to in a day when we’ve accomplished little else.

Discussions of food provide us a quandary, as we don’t want to appear too excited when the subject comes up. We run the risk of sounding gluttonous when we become too excited. Yet, food is the event in life that we all share, or that we want to share, and that which we do when we’re bored, and that which gives us comfort when times are bad, and that we would rather die than give up. Life is not as important as food to most of us, and we see that when overeating threatens to damage our quality of life and we can’t stop, or when someone threatens to take our joy of eating away from us.

“By threatening to only feed me intravenously, you are threatening to deprive me of the one joy I have left in life,” my uncle wrote, through a lawyer, in a letter that threatened to sue his health care facility if they went ahead with their plans to begin only feeding him by means of intravenous fluids. I didn’t understand this at first, as I considered the actions of the health care facility to be in my uncle’s best interests. I didn’t understand, because it’s hard to identify with someone threatening to sue another that takes away their oral eating privileges, because most of us have never been in that place in life. Most of us, when told that our life is on the line, will acquiesce to whatever prescriptions our doctors order.

For this reason, and others, it was hard for me to identify with my uncle in this particular situation. My first thought was that I had the food at his health care facility, and it wasn’t worth dying over. This was a joke I made at the time that should’ve procured the response, “But what food is?” It’s just food, they might say, and no food is so good that I’d rather die than not eat it. We might joke that some food is so good, it’s “to die for”, but when push comes to shove, we think we could live without eating orally if it meant our life was on the line. That’s because, my uncle would challenge, no one’s ever threatened to take it away from you … for the rest of your life.

Imagine having a muscular degeneration disease that has deprived you of most of what you enjoy in life. Imagine being a person that is so limited that you just cannot go certain places. A resilient person attempts to wipe such activities from the mind, but people keep bringing those places up. Imagine being the person that works up the courage to go to those places anyway, only to have people stare. “Kids are the worst,” he said. “Kids don’t understand how their naïve, confused stares hurt. They don’t understand that when they ask their parents about you that it hurts to be a product of such curiosity.” Imagine having coughing fits that makes everyone so uncomfortable that they don’t want to be around you when it happens.

These coughing fits made the young, minimum wage workers at his health care facility so uncomfortable that the corporate board of the facility decided to go to the intravenous feedings. The coughing fits also prompted me to ask, “Don’t you see what this is doing to you?” I asked this of my uncle after a particularly grueling coughing fit that resulted from oral feeding. He shrugged. He had obviously weighed the consequences, and he deemed them acceptable in lieu of the alternative. The alternative involved a probable shortening of his life, but it also involved giving up food, “The one joy I have left in life.” It’s hard for a healthy person to identify with that.

It’s easy to think about giving up oral eating, in the short-term, at a health care facility that serves average food at best, but when you add perspective to it, you realize how much my uncle would’ve been giving up if he acquiesced to their wishes. He would be giving up the “event status” of life that is normally associated with food.

“Do you want to go out to eat?” we ask one another on an almost daily basis. “What do you want to eat?” we ask. “What did you eat today, and how was it?”

We not only talk about going out to eat, we talk about what we had to eat, and then we rate it for our friends. “You simply must try the Philly with Cheese at the Sandwich Market, it’s incredible.” We even consider the act of complaining about food an event in life, and food supplements just about every event we attend in life.

Do you cherish the popcorn you eat while watching a movie? Most people don’t. Most people don’t close their eyes and savor the flavor of movie theater popcorn. It’s just something you eat while watching a movie. We don’t put any thought into you. We don’t value it. We just eat it. “I don’t need popcorn to enjoy a movie,” others say. Now try to imagine being deprived of that choice. Imagine being ordered not to eat it…for the rest of your life. That popcorn, you’ve eaten your whole life without really thinking about it, would take on qualities we can’t imagine. We’ve all decided to reject certain frivolities in life, while on a short-term diet, but most of us have never had another force us to abstain from all oral eating for the rest of our lives.

How miserable would it be to attend a baseball game with a friend, when that friend turns and offers to buy us one of those average to poor stadium dogs, and we have to tell him that not only would we prefer not to eat such an average to poor hotdog, but that we can’t eat anything orally based on doctor’s orders. How awful would it then be to tell that concerned friend that the doctor forbids us from ever eating orally again, if we want to live, when he asks, “How long is this doctor saying that you have to be fed intravenously?” In the short-term, it’s easy, as I said. In the short-term, we may get some sympathy for our plight in life, and we may even enjoy that sympathy in the short-term, but after that rubs off we feel like a carnival freak, a plugged in hospital patient, an outsider in the events of life, and our love of life may be a little diminished over time.

We may want that friend to say, “Screw it!” and have that friend buy us that dog and feed it to us anyway. If that happened that average-to-poor stadium dog would likely taste so good that we would suffer the consequences of that one meal with a smile. We might even accidentally cry a little right in front of that macho, manly friend that we’ve never been anything less than macho and manly around. We might want to die that night with that smile on our face as the health care workers lower us onto the pillow, because for at least for one day we felt normal, and we had one normal meal on one normal day in our life.

Eating food orally made my uncle feel a little more human in a manner that only a man stuck in a wheelchair for most of his life can appreciate. It gave him an event in life that was otherwise lacking in event. It gave him something to look forward to, something to appreciate or complain about, and something that made him feel more like a cog in the machine of humanity.

It never dawned on me what a central staple food and eating are, until my uncle went through all that. It never dawned on me how a person, on an enforced diet, could feel left out of humanity, until my uncle directed his lawyer to draw up that document that released his health care facility from any responsibility for anything that resulted from his oral feedings.

How many conversations do we have regarding our overall diet? What’s in certain foods, and what is not in the other, healthier foods that foodies enjoy? How often do we brag that we have the latest and greatest cooking utensils that some other, poor slob has never even heard of? Want to insult a friend that was kind enough to have a cookout, insult his food, or his method of preparation. We can tell him that his conversation topics are relatively boring, that he doesn’t maintain his lawn well, that his kids are obnoxious, or his wife is not as pretty as he said she was, and we might receive defensive replies, but they will pale in comparison to the insults about his food. We might end up in you losing a friend. That was the event he planned, the labor he engaged in, and that which he used to please his guests.

How often do we notice that something like a ham sandwich just tastes better in a park, at a picnic, with friends and family around us, and kids playing in the park, and dogs running around? Is it the smell of the outdoors that enhances the flavor of the meat, or is it the fact that we’re outdoors, involved in the event at which the eating occurs? “Where’d you get this ham?” we naively ask. “At the supermarket,” they reply. We may go home with the realization that we forgot how much we love ham, until we eat it, and we realize it’s just ham. I’ve never seen statistical analysis on our conversations, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that about forty percent of our conversations involve food. We can see this reflected in our TV shows. How many TV shows discuss food preparation, and the warnings of unhealthy food? We used to have a food preparation break in morning news shows once a week. They proved so popular, that the producers of those shows called for daily segments, until those segments became a staple of morning broadcasts. It wasn’t long before we had entire shows devoted exclusively to food preparation, and then entire networks. We’re a nation obsessed with food in ways we won’t admit in polite company, until someone threatens to take it away from us, and we realize that we can’t comprehensively enjoy our lives without being a part of the group that’s eating food.