Freedom From 'Harm' Means Freedom From Labels

You are not fragile (from Latin, frangere, to break). You won't break every time someone hits you with a label. 

You are not a victim, but you live in a spreading victim-culture. So step away from the miasma.

To see yourself as harmed or unharmed is a choice. No need to be on automatic pilot about it. Pilot the good ship "Unharmed". Skim over choppy waters, sail past slings and arrows. They call this "building resilience", and used to teach it to kids. Now schools teach them to worry about their mental health and to find their place in the victim-hierarchy. If they're not put high on the Trauma-Spectrum Disorder Scale, they feel disadvantaged and unprivileged. (And if they don't master this spectrum-game, they'll never succeed in the current University.)

Something will get us all one day ... disease, freak accident, nuclear war ... but until you really are mortally harmed (dead), why not aim to live harm-proof rather than harm-curating?

The Way of the Skeptic rejects group-think labels like "harmed", and its twin, "unsafe". We can choose to ignore labels as we do seagull droppings: unpleasant, but just step around them.

We needn't feel harmed by people who think differently, or look at them as the opposition. Other people's opinions are not weapons trained on you. They are just thoughts. We don't need to fear the thoughts of others; only your own thoughts can harm you.

And no one can oppose you if you haven't agreed to oppose them. Instead, you can agree to live and let live -- safely. Without labels, identity or other. The word "identity" comes from the Latin word "idem", meaning "same" -- like all the members of a tribe. It's better to be freely a no-name brand; be a one-off.

Real Poets Write Wine Labels

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down", opined Robert Frost.

Since he said that, poetic structure (not to mention content) has continued to -- let's say -- devolve. Dissolve. Much current verse sounds more suited to a therapy session than a poetry collection. 

"Serious" poets, often trained in Creative Writing departments, get away with turgid, tangled, concept-free feeling-pieces. Reading them is like staggering through a bramble-patch, clawed by cleverness and prickly diction. Let's take another path, think some readers. 

They might try strolling through a wine shop. They might conclude: real poets write wine labels! Some play around with comic sub-genres but most favour the romantic style. Like 18th-19th century Romantic Poets they draw on the language of nature: flowery and suggestive with a plethora of fruity scents and smooth flavours. Phrases like "dark smoky velvet" tempt the oenophile, and adjectives like "clean, fresh, and crisp", and "spicy, peppery, and bold" are popular. 

Wine labels also revel in synonyms and antonyms. So as to please every prospective buyer, presumably, and to tempt every sommelier, wine diction covers several bases at once: "sharp but generous", "balanced yet assertive". They are suggestive, lulling us with promises of the "juicy and tropical", others with the "musky and earthy".   

"Herbacious" is a favourite word; everyone likes some herb or garden plant which the term calls to mind. Its partners in rhyming language would be "vivacious" and the imprecisely teasing "bodacious". When the wine-label poet wants to invoke sensations, the encomium will brim with "hints" of things ... citrus, oak, cedar or honey. Overtones and undertones grace not only the wine but the wine-verse describing it.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" is one subtext; or perhaps the comparison is with a winter's evening before the fire. "Full-bodied" works for both. 

Alliteration is prominent in the products' names as well. Nature-based like the label descriptions, wineries' names have become whimsical: "Pink Poodle", "Crow Canyon", "The Black Chook" (an Australian reference to Australian poultry). Puns and wildlife are popular in naming, as in "Fish Hoek", "LAB", with a black dog graphic, and "Yellow Tail" (with kangaroo).

British Columbia wineries are not to be out-done in the lyrical/colourful nature-linked name game, offering "Blue Mountain", "Red Rooster" and "Blue Grouse", plus "Wild Goose", "Burrowing Owl" and more ...

What with poetic oenophilia combined with artful label design, a visit to a wine shop is like a visit to an art gallery. Even if you're not a wine drinker you could get drunk on the lyrical language of labels -- rather more than on the contorted ambitions of "serious" verse. And, unlike that (or Coleridge when visiting his dream-caves of Kubla Khan), your dip into the pleasures of wine-verse will allow you a "pleasing finish".

The Necessity of Inappropriate Laughter

If it was appropriate, it wouldn't be half as much fun. There's no such thing as inappropriate laughter of course -- laughter is so automatic that that would be like inappropriate breathing. Laughter bubbling up or bursting forth unplanned is a type of honesty. It bursts as a force of nature, not of manufacture. The world needs that safety valve.

Yet, in cartoons or performance, during a speech or at a party, some people do complain that a joke was "inappropriate". Tasteless it may have been, but it has a function: Neitzsche and other philosophers have mentioned the release of tension and the joy of surprise.

It's socially useful to have the ridiculous laughed at (from the Latin ridere, to laugh). It's more than a personal response, it's a social corrective.

When laughter is labelled inappropriate it's usually about sex, gender, race, religion, or something ending in "ism". One person's laughable "ism" is another's no-go area.

Yet laughter goes everywhere; that's why it's powerful. No one has been able to imprison it -- not chilly religions, dictatorial bureaucracy, humorless teachers or anxious parents, no matter how repressive their reactions are. Laughter Laughs Last.

Think of how dangerous the world would be without it. Neitzsche also pointed out is that to oppose a bad idea, laughter is more effective than anger. If we had only anger imagine how much more violent life would be, how full of warfare.

In former ages court jesters were a professional group. In ancient Greece, under the rule of Philip of Macedon they were linked with Court Poets and Philosophers. Likewise in the English Courts of Henry VIII, James VI, and Charles I, where William Summers, Archibald Armstrong and Muckle John performed respectively.

This was reflected in Shakespeare's plays, with their essential Fools. ("Fool", linked to "folly", comes from the Latin noun follis, meaning bellows -- which are full of air and provide oxygen, like humour does.) Being full of air, someone to be jeered at (Shakespeare also dressed characters in ass ears etc.), the Court Fool could say what no one else could, escaping the murderous censors of the time yet managing to tell truths. 

Some comics do that today. In their act (or writings or cartoons) they present a farrago of material (a "mixed medley", originally meaning a mixture of fodder:  "far-corn").

Humour too is food, for both personal and social nourishment. Spontaneous laughter might erupt when we don't know what to think about something ... and then our subconscious tells us. Conflict is short-circuited, resentment deflected and something else takes the blame ... and escapes. Call it the scape-joke.

My Cat Changed Their Identity

My cat decided to self-identify as human. Human he is, in his own view, whatever the real world might think. The real world (the human-humans with whom he lives) is a nest of wrongthought and denialism, in his view. To be human-identified is his "right", and his most strident miaow repeatedly proclaims it.

Two-spirited and species-fluid, he orders take-out (taken out of the fridge at any time of day or night), and claims ownership of any napping surface (humans' bed, laundry basket, front porch, all keyboards ...). Everyone else is a mere settler on the furniture.

He reserves the right to change his identities and his pronoun-wails at will (e.g. from king-cat to queen-cat, fur-baby to stalking lion, butterfly-batterer to couch potato). It's his right, the wail-miaow reminds us.

When identifying as Hunter, he de-colonizes the garden of rats. When cats of other persuasions enter the garden he avails himself of the right to hate-screech, and then de-platforms them off the fence -- although no other cat is allowed to utter hate-screech. His "positionality" is that the one privileged group is himself. He has no time for any confounding variables, and won't tolerate any concept-creep around it. At least you could never accuse him of micro-aggression, it's macro all the way with him, er ... them.

Perhaps he (sic) suffered betrayal trauma in his kittenhood, we think. Or maybe he has Borderline Personality Disorder due to some early stigmatization while still in the litter. We are committed to being tolerant. There could be a heartbreaking victim-narrative here, a real one; there's no deepfakiness about Chief Cat. 

I think I heard a miaow just now; it was the take-out order miaow. Do we respond too quickly to their demands, we humans ask each other? After all, look how obese they're getting. 

But wait -- sorry -- forget I said that. We don't do fat-shaming here. Fat beings are merely other-shaped ... at least, that statement is as reality-adjacent as we dare to get.