When Shame Disappears

Talking Poodles and the Perfect Drug

I got a quick question I’d like to throw out to the Great Algorithm Gods, because it’s been puzzling me. I’ve spent a lifetime studying human languages, but recently it has come to my attention that I don’t understand 99.9 percent of what 99.9 pecent of you motherfuckers do in that egg-shaped thing above your tits all day, but anyway:

Why is money better than self-respect?

One silver lining to this decennium horribilis—remember when we thought COVID was going to be the Big One,?—is that the lockdowns triggered an unprecedented leap of citizen-involved science into animal cognition (I use the weasel-adjacent phrase “citizen-involved” because there are scientists examining the data, but a horde of individual pet owners are used to collect it). But uh, we started seeing how smart dogs are.

The research is scientist-led, but those scientists are also stalking their own dogs online. By mid-pandemic, so many lonely people had gotten new pets, I couldn’t even get one of those vet appointments where they made you sit outside. Being trapped in a box with all of your loved ones and their quirks forced scientists as well as us randos to start wondering if our favorite person in the family isn’t the Maine Coon with a personality disorder who wandered in one day and started demanding food. At least she didn’t drink all the Franzia. And somehow this led to… somebody inventing a sort of communications device you can use to find out whether your pet is bothering you for a snack, or whether she’d prefer a cuddle.

And this led to… finding out that there are Sheepadoodles who can conjugate verbs in the past tense, as long as something fascinating like social defecation is involved.

Boy, don’t you feel like you wasted the quarantine now!

The research and anecdotal evidence are both exciting. Well, if you only think about animals, it’s exciting. But then I have to talk to ye all. The comparison is… not flattering.

Quick, take your shot, call me a crazy cat lady; I wouldn’t dodge a turd to hear about your monkey opinion, but after having gone as looney-tunes with cloistering as anyone else has this decade, I have come to the premature and fantastical tentative hypothesis that human language use is not the be-all and end-all, particularly since we are so prone to bullshit.

(Yes, that paragraph was one sentence, Hemingway. Monkey.)

I hate me when I bullshit, I hate you when you bullshit. Sometimes I hear myself pushing the envelope merely because I’m fascinated by people’s crazy reactions to the sane and more accurate version. Animals do enjoy lying from time to time, but they lack our flair for lying againt the spirit of the law. True, my cat has a head the size of a croquet ball, so maybe that impedes his bullshitting. But when it’s a question of something he really wants, he outwits me in a humiliating fashion. We don’t love cats for their lack of cunning or guile.

I could get more useful information by watching the deer in the park than by asking you anything, because most of the time you don’t even say what you think is true. You say the most palatable-to-you version you can come up with of whatever you think the other person wants to hear.

I mean, I understand why. Because if I tell any of you something you don’t want to hear, you go into that tiresome routine, sniffing and snorting and nostril flares, like I couldn’t see a booger already, maybe a few ill-chosen words… because you’re the center of your own large-mammal, important-person universe, and I have questioned your deity. If you’re larger than I am, you try to look even taller. If you’re smaller, you show your unwashed teeth. If the sharpness doesn’t get me, the bacteria will!

I assume you get the same repulsive reaction from each other, although lately I’ve been feeling like even the most basic assumptions I make about you are merely an attempt to predict your behavior based on myself. And I keep finding out how many different ways I am an anomaly. This is uncomfortable.

So I get why I can’t get a straight answer out of you most of the time, except most of the time what I want to hear IS the truth, either that or a really funny story. Why do I want to hear you telling boring lies? Do you have any idea how short life is—I turned 50 last week and motherfucker, ten days ago I was 25. Proust was right, Huysmans was right, youth is a fever dream that passes before you grasp it.

Life is storming the beach at Normandy by parachute—you are dropped into a place where you can’t see, you don’t know what’s going on, you have less than a second to get your bearings, you’re shot before your feet even touch the ground.

In a fragile, short, and beautiful life for all the tragedy, why do you…

OK, OK, speaking of wasting time, I’ll get to my specific question:

What exactly do people get out of doing repulsive things to get money?

Come back, this is a serious question. Yeah, obviously, money. They get lots and lots of money. The envy of their enemies, and all the greed-indulgence, sex, and social approbation they think is going to come with their pile of money. I like money, too! If I had a million dollars I’d pay someone to invent me the perfect drug to fix, I don’t know, fix all these dumb questions I’ve got, but not zomb me out. I get it, je pige,, c’mon, man.

But what about the value of your self-respect? There are decent ways to get money. Maybe not as much, but you'll save on the drugs.

If you’re lucky (I guess?) enough to suffer not at all over your own vomitatiousness (these insults are not nearly as fun without a concrete target, but I genuinely don’t have a specific individual in mind, except maybe you), I guess the real question is for the rest of us:

Why do we let you stay here? There are plenty of people. We don't need you. Why do we put up with it? Especially if your repulsiveness is so severe, some of us are dying because of you. Is this a trolley problem? How do you feel about the insurance murderer?

Somebody is going to smugly tell me that disgusting people are in the vast majority and I'm thinking about a thing that isn't real, aren't they?

Maybe I ought to start humblebragging that perhaps there's something wrong with me, that I need to have self-respect in order to function. I typed the core of that sentence sincerely without the “humblebragging” disclaimer, then realized that most people will probably assume I’m bullshitting, because I have seen some certified smarm-pots saying stuff just like this…

Good grief! See? I can’t stand the Internet, but hating the quicksand doesn’t save you—it inexorably gets you to worrying about everyone else’s dumb brain instead of your own. Maybe I should re-read Oedipus Rex and just give in.

Maybe I would, except… with all these super-rich people around, why is there no perfect drug?

I wonder what happens when shame disappears?

I am asking the cats as fast as I can.