Cafe Zoo

Dear fellow zoos, zooey allies, and confused others.

Yes, backdating again! But I have a good excuse.

I have decided to take up writing narratives. This is destined to the same fate as my sketching, though: for now, it will only be shared with a few close friends that are interested and who understand me. Weirdly, it is easy for me to write nonfiction and to publish my feelings and my opinions. When it comes to creating art, I am very shy.

Or maybe the reason why I only share my artistic efforts with my friends is that, for me, art is a very personal endeavor. It constitutes a baring of my heart, and it is a way that I reveal very personal parts of myself.

For instance, I tend to write a lot of work that uses the anthros v. ferals motif. The reason why I do goes back to Animal Farm by George Orwell. Animals represent the absence of a voice, which can extend to a lack of a voice in society. Well, George Orwell was really just attempting to give a voice to people that may have not really gotten out of Bolshevism what they were promised, but on the other hand, they had never really been treated very well by the Tsars, either. Those people could have become the darlings of the right-wing by saying, "we want the Tsars back," but in the long-run, there was little worse, just as there was little better, about Bolshevism. It was not that Bolshevism had made things worse: they had just failed to really make things better, and the problems that people were trying to solve by it were still there and were still issues that needed to be addressed. Putting an animal's face on this point-of-view says, "nobody is really listening to me."

For a concept of how we can treat humans like animals, refer to the song, "The Boxer" by Paul Simon. There are millions of people like that person in human society, and while all of them have a story, it can be very hard to get them to tell that story, maybe because they are convinced that nobody is really prepared to listen to that story and understand its real significance. The hero from the story has always had his story, but it took a special kind of storyteller to learn what that story was and to find the words to tell it.

In the same spirit, the ferals (non-morphic furries) in my invariably deleted or unfinished bits of writing tend to have an old and mature culture among themselves, but they seldom share it with society at large, tending to keep that culture private and among themselves. They are inward-looking, and in practice, they can be profoundly conservative. For instance, I envision feral rats as having a penchant for adorning themselves with many piercings, but nobody in anthro society really gets them: most people think it's an expression of "toughness," but among themselves, the feral rats use those piercings to represent a relationship in their lives that they feel has changed them forever, on the inside. They are nevertheless intensely misogynistic, but oddly, rather than oppressing homosexual males, they just treat gay males the same as straight females: officially, they are "to be seen and not heard," although only when people outside the family are around, and on the family's private time, they may have authority. The culture is intensely inward-looking, but their moral hang-ups and taboos are different from those of the dominant anthro society, not really more severe.

I think that the value of using these animal-like characters is that it shows how they can be seen, on the surface, as simple and primitive and backwards, but when someone looks closer, they really have an ancient and sophisticated culture but also one that, like ours, has problems of its own. To me, that kind of story would have power.

That brings to mind Houyhnhms and Yahoos.

Anyhow, I don't know if I'll ever share any of my writing publicly, but for now, I'll keep running my ideas by my friends. Maybe, in a few weeks, I might polish off my narrative skills enough to start sharing my work with others. We'll see.


Until next time,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others.

I have been enjoying the fourth book in the Pit Dragon Trilogy, by Jane Yolen. I was reluctant, at first, to read a fourth book in what was originally intended to be a trilogy. I have always tended to suspect those extra books of being mismatched with the original spirit of the series. However, I decided to give Jane Yolen the benefit of the doubt, here, that maybe she genuinely believed that something had been left unsaid. I knew Jane Yolen. I knew her well enough that I did not really think that she would have tacked on an extra book unless she really felt that there was something she still wanted to say.

The cover art features the dragon Heart's Blood standing behind...or protectively over...the two kids from the original books. Since she was dead from much earlier in the series, I felt particularly touched by the cover art. I really think that cover art is underappreciated. They say "don't judge a book by its cover," but I partly disagree. I think that, in some cases, cover art can betray how the artist felt moved by the contents of the story. The sweetly sentimental scene of the valiant Heart's Blood, maternally standing guard over her human children, is not something that I think would have been produced if the artist had not felt moved, in some way, by the story. The artist clearly sees a powerful connection of love.

I was having a discussion with a friend, earlier today, about how dark a lot of youth literature really is. This is a part of why I am so drawn to youth literature. This is not really because I have a pessimistic worldview. The opposite is true. I see the human race as being profoundly capable of change. However, I also believe that we can very quickly change for the worse.

I do not see any improvement, in the conditions of the human race, as a passive product of the passage of time. Much as I admire the great American President, Barack Obama, I think that the most vapid thing that Barack Obama said was, in response to homophobia, "It's 2013." Looking back, I was thinking, "uh-oh." As soon as that sense of happy fatalism invades the hearts of society, then troubled waters are ahead.

We think that antisemitism is evil because Jewish people, in the wake of World War II, worked their asses off to make sure that people understood what it was like to be a Jewish person during the Holocaust. This was not just something that inevitably happened. It was not fated to happen. The Jewish survivors of the Holocaust busted their asses for it.

Jane Yolen did not just write tales about telepathic dragons on distant worlds, but remember, Yolen was also the author of The Devil's Arithmetic, which was really a seriously messed-up story to be selling to children but one that children needed to read. However, if it had just been Jane Yolen publishing a book, that would not have been enough. Besides her just publishing that book, there were Jewish people and their allies going around the country raising awareness and promoting any kind of literature that anybody ever wrote that told people the truth about the terrible thing that happened in Europe during the early 20th Century. They refused to let this event in their history get erased or brushed under the rug.

Likewise, the gay rights movement did not just happen because it was fated to happen, but LGBT in the western world busted their asses for it. They had felt what it was like to be persecuted, and they had decided that they did not like it. They had decided that they were going to change that fact.

What I think happened to the zooey community, during the late 20th Century and in the first generation of the 21st Century, was that the hard work of these other groups getting so much work done, all at once, on human rights created a false sense that this movement toward liberalization was somehow an inevitable, tidal change in how people thought about things. I think that we zoophiles came down with a sense of happy fatalism, and because of that, everything fell apart.

There really is no "slippery slope." There is just the fruits of people that are passionate about protecting their freedom and their livelihoods laboring to change the world in order to make the world a safer place for them to live. That has always been the truth.

Changing the world is not just something that happens. Anyone can do it if they really want to, but it's damn hard and takes a very long time.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to seeing how this book goes, and I hope to be about halfway through it in a week. I will have more to say about it then.


Your faithful zooey blogger,
Sigma

Dear zoophiles, zooey allies, and confused others.

I suppose that, at some point, I should share what kind of childhood literature led to me being able to love myself completely, as a zoophile, in an era where zoophiles are being ruthlessly demonized in almost every quarter of society. There is certain literature that has helped to insulate me.

Today, I am not going to talk about a specific book, but I am going to talk about a literary trope that has had immense staying power and which continues to preserve its sense of being a fresh idea, and that is the idea of dragons as either literary protagonists or as otherwise benevolent characters, sometimes playing in the traditional role of a Jungian anima figure in spite of being male or masculine. I am going to examine why I think this trope has such appeal, at least to me.

In the medieval Christian world, though, dragons represented everything that was evil, and the image of St. George slaying the evil dragon represented, to medieval Christians, the triumph of "good" Christianity over "evil" everything else.

I think the rehabilitation of dragons was partly a reaction, by female authors, to the built-in misogyny of traditional Christian culture. Anne McCaffery and Ursula K. Le Guin were feminist writers that had become intensely anti-clerical due to them having seen one too many holy wars in their lifetimes, and I think that the rehabilition of dragons was an attempt to call traditional Christians to account.

However, the idea of benevolent dragons actually goes back to Kenneth Grahame, who wrote, in a children's book, about a meek and scholarly dragon that befriends a young boy. To understand this character, it helps to understand Kenneth Grahame, himself: Kenneth Grahame's outward persona, which he showed in his everyday life, was a seemingly deliberate caricature of late 19th Century masculinity. The school that he went to as a child was a brutal environment for a young boy to grow up in. In his personal life as an adult, Kenneth Grahame was regarded by his wife as a sexual underperformer, showing little or no interest in sex, and his poor wife, Elspeth, dwindled into a wraith of a person and spent her adult life in a state of misery. The Reluctant Dragon comes across to me as a reflection of a person that is tormented by the pressure of his society to perform publicly as a masculine caricature but who really feels, on the inside, like a persecuted and hunted animal. Kenneth Grahame even owned a dollhouse, and his greatest literary triumph The Wind in the Willows, was one of the greatest works of furry fiction that have ever been written. When I put together all of the other pieces of Grahame's tragic life story, I quite honestly think that the relationship between Mole and Rat may symbolize a same-sex relationship that Grahame secretly spent his life longing for. I honestly and truly think that The Reluctant Dragon, insofar as his personality, was a self-portrait of the kind of person that Kenneth Grahame really wished he could have been.

Le Guin's dragons were portrayed as neither good nor evil but as creatures that must inherently be understood outside the context of moral values. This is a take-off on the Leviathan poem from the Book of Job, which is a primitive beast that cannot be tamed by human beings, being neither good nor evil but merely beyond the control of human power. The poem from Job was really a morality tale directed at the entire human race: no matter how powerful you are, you must accept that you are not really all-powerful, and there are some conquests that really are beyond your ability. The poem from Job is really about humility. In a way, Le Guin either consciously or unconsciously makes her dragons in a similar image.

In Anne McCaffrey's world, the human race could not have survived without the help of dragons, and dragons were the only creatures in the world that could help them fight against the natural menace that threatened their very survival. Humans could not have possibly survived on this world without the very symbols of their darkest instinctive fears. However, Anne McCaffrey might have hinted at her reasons for using dragons in much of her work when she said, of the Christian god, "More horror and death has been done in His name than for any other reason."

Oddly, Le Guin and McCaffrey make their dragons in somewhat opposite molds. To McCaffrey, dragons are more than ordinary animals but still animals. To Le Guin, dragons are such creatures that would look upon humans as humans look upon squirrels. They are starkly different from each other and clearly not the same creature.

During my childhood, though, I had my most influential encounter with dragons in American literature, and the author was a woman named Jane Yolen. Jane Yolen's best known work and the work that constituted required reading during my education was The Devil's Arithmetic, which was a book about a young woman that had fallen into a coma and woken up as a Jewish girl in the midst of the Holocaust. This book, in itself, was really influential to me, and because of it and other Holocaust-inspired literature, I have an almost instinctive sense of sympathy for any persecuted or downtrodden people. There were no dragons in this book, but I read it at about the same time as I read one that was about dragons.

Within mere weeks of me reading The Devil's Arithmetic as part of my required reading, though, Jane Yolen also struck a chord with me through the Pit Dragon Trilogy. Jane Yolen's genius, as an author, is that she does not always tell you everything there is to know about her characters right away, but she always keeps several cards in reserve to play later. She almost never has all of her cards out on the table, and she always leaves many unanswered questions and keeps you guessing. In the Pit Dragon Trilogy, the dragons are not obviously intelligent, and when you find out that they might be at least slightly more intelligent than a common animal, the limits of their potential intelligence are still left unexplored. What is important about this story is not what humans know about dragons, but what is important about this story is what humans do not know about dragons. At the beginning, though, the dragons are being treated as if they had no more mind and barely more feelings than cattle: they are fought against each other for the sake of shallow entertainment, and they are slaughtered for meat. At the beginning of the book, Yolen barely hints at all about the possibility that these dragons are better than cattle. She reveals this information about them only slowly.

What makes Jane Yolen's strategy so effective is that it can make you horrified at YOURSELF. At the beginning of the book, you are lured into feeling a sense of casual acceptance of how these animals are treated, but by the end of the series, you realize that you would have approved unquestioningly of an intelligent, beautiful, and sensitive creature being slaughtered like cattle. I think that someone has reached the height of masterful storytelling if one can succeed at making their readers question themselves and rethink what they assume about others. Yolen's magic is that she restrains herself from telling you everything at once. Eventually, she does tell you everything, but a part of the story is how you react to these characters and these situations when you do not really have complete information. Jane Yolen's storytelling technique helps people understand what monsters people can become because of their own ignorance, even ones that believe they are good people.

In the end, I find Jane Yolen's dragons to be the most effective. While Anne McCaffrey's dragons are also friendly toward humans, Jane Yolen's dragons are clearly being done a grave injustice by humans, and Jane Yolen clearly demonstrates how even the reader would permit the same injustice if the reader did not have the same extraordinary experience as the story's heroes. Jane Yolen's story-telling changes something in us by teaching us something about ourselves. Jane Yolen's story is one that inspires personal transformation. I believe that, between Yolen, Le Guin, and McCaffrey, I admire all of them, but I regard Yolen as being absolutely unparalleled as a storyteller.

It was really because of Yolen that I came to identify as strongly as I do with dragons. To understand me, understand Jane Yolen's dragons. Their story is my story. The word "heart" is used in two of her titles. The story has dragons in it, but the story is about opening the human heart. What the story is really intended to be about is right there in the title of Heart's Blood. The story is cruel. The story is morbid. The story drags the reader's heart over broken glass. It makes the reader want to become a better person.

The rehabilitation of dragons, in literature, is a criticism of prejudice. The first rehabilitated dragons of literature came only a generation in the wake of the Holocaust, a decade in the wake of the Red Scare, and amid the ongoing blight of Jim Crow. People were fed up with the evil that was being done in the name of attacking false demons. It was becoming increasingly self-evident that "evil" is nothing more than that thing we do when we become convinced that our fellow man is evil. "Heartlessness" is that thing we do when we become convinced that our fellow man is heartless.

Dragons therefore remain very special to me because, to me, they symbolize an uncompromising opening of the heart.

If you are a zoophile, then it has never been more difficult to remain optimistic about society, but if you revisit some of the most powerful literature of the 20th Century, you will start to understand how much this sort of literature changes you on the inside. If this literature can change you, then it can change the world. In our case, our society may have faltered, but there is hope for them. We do not have to give up on them.

Great literature is literature that genuinely changes you forever, and when you feel a change within yourself, it is hard to not have hope that society can also change. Go and find that literature which changes you inside the most, and I can guarantee that you will be able to end the day believing that, someday, everything will be okay.

To me, dragons are almost the definitive symbol of great literature, but I feel that way about dragons at least partly thanks to a person named Jane Yolen.

Keep on reading, my friends, and until next week, I remain


your doggedly faithful zooey blogger,

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I finished that series, but what I want to talk to you about is the protest that I went to yesterday evening. I was there, and I am going to give my opinion on it.

The police bring the looting and the graffiti on themselves.

This is not to negate the responsibility of the protesters for instigating it. The protesters want to make a point, which is that their combined numbers put together is a more powerful force than the police, and they are right: with adequate organization, an uprising could win against police. They do this, though, by goading the police into starting to fire off CS gas, usually by pelting them with water bottles.

However, the police know that, in the opinion of the protesters, the CS gas gives the moral justification for looting and the smashing of windows. They know this. They also know that those protesters would rather not really escalate tensions into genuine endangerment of human life. They made the decision to start using CS gas, and it backfired because it was supposed to backfire. It backfired because the protesters correctly believed that they could beat tear gas and other crowd dispersal tactics.

The protesters won, and the cops lost because there were more than a thousand protesters there AT ANY GIVEN TIME. People were coming and going constantly throughout, so there were a lot of people out that had just come in fresh. If you have never been to one of these protests, something you need to know is that the protesters are really in more control than the police when the numbers swell to more than a thousand, at any given time, in a police precinct that only has a few hundred, most of whom are not really mentally equipped or trained for something of this magnitude.

At one point, less than three dozen police were surrounded by nearly one thousand people that were all in one place and chanting the same chants over and over. They were actually trapped, and I am sure they found this to be very stressful. I do not feel sorry for them.

The Hong Kong protesters are proving that the people can win against police, even armed police, and the only way the police can win is by picking the right side.

Police should care more about the accountability and respectability of their occupations more than anybody.

Anyhow, the kind of balls I saw at that protest are the kind of balls I want to see out of zoophiles everywhere, someday. If we stand up with enough pride and with enough conviction, then we can win.

You can start by taking part in that survey if you have signed up for it, already.

Thank you for following me this far, and I remain


Your weekly zooey blogger,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others.

Yes, back to back-dating, and I have no good excuse whatsoever.

I have this terrible lifelong habit of getting sucked into novel series, and the saving grace is that I don't do it very often. I will just put it that way.

The really captivating thing about this series, by Gordon R. Dickson, is how he talks about the relationship between humans and dragons.

The dragons really brought their bad relationship with humans upon themselves. When humans became available as prey, the dragons just hunted them the same way that they would hunt any other animal, and this was not more unusual for them than it would be to hunt pigs, cattle, or any other game that was convenient and easy to catch. Dragons thought nothing more of it, and they probably felt that this would always be the case.

When the humans learned how to fight back, though, the dragons began slowly to develop an almost superstitious fear of humans. There was talk of how going after any human they did not have to was surety that they would get skewered violently upon that human's "horn," generally to refer to a lance.

However, there are some dragons that are talking about the idea of making peace with the humans, which they refer to as "Georges," and at times, they succeed, by manipulating the laws and the personal interests of dragons, at getting large numbers of dragons to fight on the same sides as humans, in one case against an equally supernatural foe.

The relationship is not just happening on its own, though. It is happening one friendship at a time, and it is happening one alliance at a time.

To many readers, the dragons might eventually become just an accessory to the series in the later novels, perhaps a decoration that is preserved only as a charming antique ribbon to tie around the story, but I keep on following any part of the story where the dragons become a part of the story, even though those are increasingly small parts. To me, they ARE the story.

Blood feuds are cruel and inherently despicable. At some point, some of us have to be brave enough to start sticking our necks out to start putting an end to it. It takes a lot more courage to make friends that are hard to make friends out of than it does to do almost anything else in the world. It is also the most useful thing you can ever do.

Thank you for sticking with me, friends.
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

As I continue reading through the Dragon Knight series, by Gordon R. Dickson, I think that Gordon R. Dickson was one of those men that feel attracted to women that are attracted to animals. In at least once case, he seemed to express a sense that he might be particularly attracted to the idea of a woman being attracted to himself while he was transformed into an animal, particularly a dragon.

I think that there are many women who tend to have a negative point-of-view on these sorts of men. I think that they tend to have many prejudices. I will not paint any particular portrait, since prejudices are as diverse as people, but prejudice is always the same in one regard: a prejudiced individual tends to assume that they truly have a clear perception of reality and that anybody that is not inclined to share that prejudice merely does not see the world as clearly as they do.

In the case of Gordon R. Dickson, they would be thinking that of a man who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, proceeded to live his life as a successful and award-winning author, was known to everybody as a truly gracious and charming man, and survived to a ripe, old age in spite of his lifelong asthma. While the one marriage he ever entered did not last for very long, this man strikes me as a very positive individual.

I think that the world needs more people like Gordon R. Dickson and fewer of the kinds of people that would have judged him for his feelings.

I am a scaly, which is a kind of "furry" that tends to identify with scaly beasts instead of ones that actually have fur. Specifically, I like to imagine myself in the body of a dragon.

When I am roleplaying as a dragon, though, the irony is that I come across to other people as more authentic, more likable, more open, and more compassionate. In-character, I tend to be less aggressive toward others, and I tend to be more open to other people's ideas. I can even get along with a conservative libertarian gun nut, while I am in-character, in spite of the fact that I am almost the opposite. Getting into character makes me more open-minded, more agreeable, and really more of a person that deserves to be liked by somebody, and I think that that is very special.

I think the reason why it worked was that the things that I think make a human being worth a crap as a person are really the things that human beings can...if they choose to...have in common with a good animal.

Our animal virtues are really indispensable to our character, and we are really lost without them. Without those qualities, even being extremely intelligent really just makes you come across as a pompous, intellectually overbearing wazzock. Without those qualities, being moral just makes you come across as self-righteous and sanctimonious. Without those qualities, even having good manners makes you come across as greasy and manipulative. Without those qualities, a sense of maturity just makes you come across old and bitter. Without those qualities, being cultured makes you come across as hidebound. It is really impossible to have a marketable personality if you do not have something in common with an animal that eats his own shit.

Pretending that I am a dragon is like a piece of string around my finger that reminds me of this very important point. Without the virtues that make someone say, "good dog," there is really no reason why I deserve for anybody to like me. It is a mnemonic device. It helps me remember.

As I grow older, I need that as a crutch less often, but I still like it. It's fun. It's fun for the same reason that playing touch football is just as fun when you are 60 years old and a grandfather as it was when you were 8 years old. There was a time when that simple sport helped you learn fair play and how you could sometimes have a lot more fun if you tried to follow the rules. Maybe you eventually get to a point in your life where you don't need it for that reason anymore, but it never stops being fun. Likewise, something that once helped me figure out how to be a decent human being still has meaning to me.

There are many furries that try to deny the relationship between zoophilia and furry, but I think that they are fools. The relationship is a simple one.

There is nothing that distinguishes a man from a dog that means that he deserves for me to ever feel attracted to him. It is pardonable for a man to be different from a dog, but it is only that and nothing more, pardonable.

It makes just as much sense if I love one as if I love the other.

Being a "furry" just means that I feel the same way about myself. If I cannot be liked for the same reasons why someone would like a dog, then I do not really believe that I deserve to be liked.

The difference is merely in the direction in which it is viewed.


Until next time I remain your devoted zooey blogger,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I am abysmally tired of the back-dating. Look, if I have to come home from my morning thing on Saturdays and have no place away that I can sit down, then I am always going to get sucked into whatever is going on at home or get entranced with something or other that is not even slightly related to blogging. I could keep on doing Saturdays only as long as that cafe and bakery was open and I could sit there without interruption away from everybody.

I am moving the blog to Sunday until my hangout opens back up. At minimum, Sunday is my single day of the week that I have that I am not working in one way or the other, merely having a routine lunch with a local friend and not for very long. Anyhow...

This week's SUNDAY blog is going to be made as a formal apology to the tune by Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1. To all of those that have respect for this tune and its meaning and purpose and its intrinsic beauty, I am sorry. At times, I get caught up in my own fiery passion, as an activist, and at those times, I can forget how quickly a flame of passion can burn itself out if it is not tempered with kindness. The tune Gymnopédie No. 1 is kindness itself, even as overplayed as it is. Some songs truly are overplayed in spite of having no redeeming qualities at all, but this is not the case here. The song, if played properly and with a sense of heart and soul and personal authenticity, teaches us to care, and it could never truly be played in the same way twice and still be Gymnopédie No. 1 as it was intended to be, a true baring of the heart.

Us activists who have a desire to change things for the BETTER can never do so without kindness as a part of what we do. Without kindness as a part of what compels us forward, we might change things, all the same, but we could never change things in a way that we ought.

Defiance and anger and passion are an inevitable consequence of what us zoophiles are going through. We are being defamed. Prejudice and lies are getting spread about us to every quarter of society. We are being cast as ogres, in the public eye, villains of seemingly superhuman heartlessness, and naturally, we are pissed. This is pardonable.

However, there is a difference between pardoning anger and believing that anger really helps us. It does not. Anger is the bleeding of a wound, and if we do not staunch it, we will drain ourselves of the last strength that can hold us together. We should no more feel guilty over our anger than someone that has been stabbed should feel guilty over bleeding, but to let the life blood flow out of us without doing anything to try to slow it down is self-defeating madness.

Giving ourselves a chance to heal and remember what we really believe is the only victory that human beings can have against prejudice and hate. Freemasonry, which is--in the most broad sense--the pursuit by a group of people of becoming better citizens for the betterment and unity of all of society, is only possible if we open up our hearts to each other and let friendship and kindness in.

However, while anger is not really an effective weapon against evil, our own pride in ourselves is. We must learn to be unwavering in our fundamental beliefs. We must learn to defend ourselves with intelligence and maturity. We must learn to stand up for civil discourse as the only permissible discourse that must ever be accepted as valid. We must learn a dedication to good taste. Evil-doers prey the most readily upon those that do not take pride in themselves.

The spirit that lies at the heart of Gymnopédie No. 1 only answers a part of what it means to take pride in ourselves, which is to return ourselves to a sense of civility and therefore squash the infantile reflex to cry out in anguish, but it cannot stand alone. Pride really has five basic dimensions that are reflections of our five senses. Gymnopédie No. 1 speaks only to that which represents hearing. It is a good start, but it is only a start. There is much more left to do.

Thank you for continuing to follow my weekly ramblings. Someday, I hope that my own voice will be lost and forgotten among a mighty throng of more eloquent and effective voices than my own, but until then, I remain


your diligent and devoted zooey blogger,

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! I know that's not what the date on the blog's title says, but as sure as I stop back-dating these things and say, "I will just do it on Tuesdays," I will be the Saturday afterward before I get them out. I will not have that.

I will start releasing these things on Saturday again when my favorite cafe and bakery finally reopens, so I can start sitting there reading and blogging through the afternoon again. Once I get home, on Saturdays, I am surrounded by distractions, including my charming cat...

The Dragon and the George, by Gordon R. Dickson, turned into me reading the entire series. His admiration of science, though, often exceeds his knowledge of it. You cannot really use moldy bread and urine to treat an infected wound. The mold often harbors dangerous neurotoxins, and the components of the penicillium mold that sometimes act against bacteria are not concentrated in high enough quantities to overcome the potential dangerous effects of stuffing moldy bread into an open wound. Furthermore, urine only has a high ammonia content after it has aged, and until then, it is not really sterile. Even then, it would need to be filtered carefully. They used to put stale urine into small beer, calling it "lant," because the ammonia tended to make the product slightly safer to drink (not by much) than local drinking water, but they at least bothered to age it and hopefully at least tried to filter out the impurities. In any case, Gordon R. Dickson is an excellent storyteller, but do not take his advice on bush medicine, please.

The very simplicity of his storytelling style is really what attracts me to Dickson. I have read more sophisticated literature, yes, but I found it less heartening and to be less useful as a distraction from the fact that the world around me was burning. Where is that gif that everyone posts of a little guy casually drinking coffee as his house burns around him. Anyhow, I have been enjoying the book.

However, I really ought to get the literature off my brain on the job. Literature does not help you get highly physical work done, and chants to the three-headed goddess that dances among the corpses of the dead do help you get highly physical work done. The chant was conceived by people that worked in similar occupations. I help run an equestrian center, you see.

I can assure you that I have a very strong sense of professionalism, and my occupation is not ever used as a venue for exploring my zooiness. I have very strong feelings about professionalism! It constitutes a part of my personal beliefs.

Okay, fine, I kiss them occasionally! But just that! *blushes hotly*

Anyway, if you are a zoo or a zoo ally, I strongly recommend reading The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson if you are inclined toward pure pleasure reading. The scenes in which the wolf Aragh interacts with human/humanoid women are substantially zooey, and perhaps there could be something about himself that Gordon R. Dickson never told us overtly. Also, I find it very curious that the hero of the storyline actually gave serious consideration toward transforming his wife and himself into a dragon, kiting off to a cave somewhere, and laying a clutch of eggs together.

However, I am giving far too many spoilers, there! Read the book yourself!

As far as how this book affects my thoughts on zooey advocacy, I feel strongly that the 1970's may have presented the zooey community with several opportunities for zoophiles of the time to start a movement of their own. Subtle or none-too-subtle references to the idea of animal sexuality, at least, in a great deal of literature provided us with fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of a movement. There WAS a movement, of sorts, but it was...sleepy. Too sleepy.

We cannot have a movement that gives us the sense that we are listening to Erik Satie's Gymnopedie no. 1. After all, the song reflects the fact that the man sat and drank himself to death and is therefore in its way sinister in its own right! Someday, we will have another generation like the Boomers come through, and we must be prepared to move with fire, passion, and defiance. We must be ready for rebellion!

However, rebellions are not built at a moment's notice, and truly effective rebellions are really built out of teamwork and cooperation. When rebels figure out how to show up on time and learn how to act as team-players, then rebellions are always successful. The Nordic socialist states were so successful at fulfilling the core aims of Marxist philosophy because the people that live in those nations are rule-followers, by nature. They made social revolution work because they did not act like typical rebels. They worked as a team, and when they made agreements, they stuck to those agreements. When people that are forced, by the unfortunate circumstances of their culture, to be rebels are really rule-followers and team-players, by nature, then their rebellions are always successful.

The hero from Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George did not go it alone, but he was not even allowed to move forward without learning how to work well with his companions as a member of a team. He did nothing alone. He was often guided by his allies. Such thinking constitutes the makings of a movement.

Anyhow, I will at least try to get my next entry out by the posted date, this Saturday. Until then, I remain


Your dedicated, although consistently tardy, zooey blogger,
Sigma

P.S.: I want to note that Gymnopedie no. 1 is really one of my favorite songs, and I really have no animosity toward it.

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I am totally loving the Dragon Knight series, by Gordon R. Dickson. It is a very simple storyline. The good guys are good. The bad guys are bad. It is soothing and pleasant fantasy literature, and it has this really sexy English wolf in it, named Aragh! While the plot is relatively simple on the face of it, it reflects how people, during the 1970's, were people that craved a sense of a spiritual journey or transformation.

At the time, the fantasy genre, in general, was incredibly niche. An author like J.K. Rowling would not have become a billionaire in any length of time at all. Authors, in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, published to a very small audience within a very small subculture, and while more successful ones like Gordon R. Dickson could sometimes make an actual living off of their fiction, this was not the rule. In fact, literacy was not really held in the same high esteem, in general, that it is held today.

It might be a misnomer for me to identify as a "furry," actually, even though I have thought that I was one in the past. I think that I am really just a sci-fi and fantasy fan that loves dragons and enjoys some light roleplay. To be perfectly honest, I still identify a lot more deeply with the great fantasy and sci-fi literature, which influenced the humble beginnings of the furry fandom, than I do with other aspects of the furry fandom today. I was in my twenties before I looked at very much visual furry porn, and I frankly regret ever coming down with that addiction, which I have weaned myself off of. To this day, literature still has a substantially greater depth of meaning to me, and I feel that I have lost myself at times when I have drifted away from that.

I also feel that I am, deep down, a child of the 1970's, and I don't think that I will ever feel that I have truly had my time in the sun until we have had another generation like that one. I feel that such a generation only comes but once in every lifetime, and because of that, I think that I will be quite old before a time comes when I can feel truly young. For some reason that I may never fathom, literature from that time-period makes me feel that I have come home, not just in the sense of being in the right place but being in the right self.

I think that it was a much more spiritual generation, and the current generation is perhaps the least spiritual generation that has ever existed. These days, people have become so materialistic and so selfish and so shallow that even the best of them cannot fathom sticking out their necks to help someone less fortunate than themselves unless it served their own interests in some way. Millennials have many selling points, but at heart, they are selfish and shallow.

My sense of disaffection with our culture is only amplified by the fact that I am a zoophile living in a culture that has decided to throw zoophiles under the bus with both hands. Other minority groups, in the country, have become so selfish and so self-protective that they are willing to sit by and let us get shit on, even though many of them know that what is being done to us is wrong.

I don't think it's really their fault, though. I think that they have just gotten caught up in the general shallowness and selfishness and pettiness that has been perpetuated in our culture. I think that we have a long time to go before they start to recognize how much this really hurts them also, not just those of us whom they choose to throw under the bus. Their self-mechanizing culture is not really sustainable.


Our culture has a long way yet to go before I can feel that I have come home in body, not just in spirit. Until then, I remain

your devoted zooey blogger, social critic, and literature-fiend,

Sigma.

Dear zoos, allies, and confused others,

I am back to back-dating blog posts that are really a couple of days late. I do not really have an excuse, this time. I could chalk it up to the fact that I was shoving around half-ton blocks of hay last week and strained my back, but that's not really why.

I work at this great equestrian center, and as a matter of fact, I do not have any interesting stories to tell about that. I have a creature of my own that does more for me than an entire herd of thoroughbreds.

I am going to discuss an actual book, this week. I have not read it yet, but one book that I want to read soon is The Dragon and the George. I have always been drawn to books about people getting transformed into animals. In fact, I really got interested in the furry fandom through transformation literature, and I still think that transformation literature has a lot more heart and soul in it than most ordinary furry fiction out there. Stories about transformation are often a sort of spiritual journey.

The particular theme of being transformed into an animal is often a part of a spiritual journey, and the reason why is that our humanity really comes in two parts, according to a growing number of social psychologists. One part of our humanity is our "human nature," which is actually the part of our human nature that we have in common with animals, such as the capacity for feeling, individuality, personal warmth, or even the capacity for learning new things. The other part of our humanity constitutes the qualities that distinguish us from animals, though, and that is called "human uniqueness": this would be qualities like civility, rationality, moral sophistication, or maturity.

Weirdly, though, many of us do successfully learn how to understand our human uniqueness, but we can go through our entire lives without understanding the good things about us that we have in common with animals. I think that the process of learning to understand these more primal things about ourselves is often called a "spiritual journey."

In a story where someone is getting transformed into an animal, I think that the point of the story is, "Alright, you have figured out your human uniqueness, and maybe you have even gone overkill with that. There is still a whole lot you have left to learn about yourself before you can feel like a whole person."

That is a meaningful sort of story to me and one that I have always been drawn to. As an intellectual sort of person, I feel that I can be at the greatest risk of forgetting to appreciate the parts of my nature that I have in common with a dumb animal, and I have even been through the grievous experience of denying or suppressing those aspects of who I was, at least around the people I knew in person. These animal transformation stories and later roleplaying as a dragon helped me develop and understand a part of myself that I was really fearful of exploring in my day-to-day life.

While I have moved past the point in life where I was so repressed, those sorts of stories still hold tremendous sentimental value for me. I think that The Dragon and the George will turn out to be a slam dunk insofar as satisfying that inclination in me, and I think that it's going to turn out to be a great read.

By the way, The Dragon and the George was the basis for the Rankin and Bass film, The Flight of Dragons. If you have not watched that film, then you should fix that. The intro by Don McLean is fantastic.



Until next time,
I am Sigma!