Have You Heard

After my water heater burst a few weeks ago, I went into the basement to try to clean things up and I realized that I had a Gibson Melvyn Franks R9 sitting on the floor less than a foot from standing water. Eek. Time to start rearranging the basement in earnest.

This evening, therefore, I managed to fill a 96-gallon Rumpke trash can and a Rubbermaid 55-gallon one to the brim with trash. I estimate that I’ll be able to do this at least five more times over the next month. Why did I have this much trash? Well, the answer to that question is simple: it’s not trash. Or, at least, it wasn’t always trash.
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By now, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about Justine Sacco, the South-African-born PR person who made a joke about AIDS before getting on an international flight and landed to find that she had lost a job and gained thousands of death threats. Unlike Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson, another person who shot off his mouth in public and has been economically sanctioned as a result, Ms. Sacco hasn’t found too much support from any corner — but the two cases are more alike than one might think, and they are both disturbing glimpses into the surprisingly intolerant world of the future.
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I have not forgotten the last time I killed an animal in cold blood, though it was half my lifetime ago. It was not the last time I killed an animal, of course; we all kill animals by proxy, we all command the steak and deputize the death. Even if we are vegan we consent to the distant dispatch of foliage-threatening deer and marauding mountain lions and unwanted pets. But this was the last time I pulled a trigger and deprived another creature of life for sport, on a whim, for pleasure. And there are evenings when I remember it, though it is counterproductive to do so, though it is meaningless, though it is weak.
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“This,” the voicemail barks, “IS AN ATTEMPT TO COLLECT A DEBT.” It’s perhaps the third call like this I’ve gotten this week. And my mailbox is filling with threatening-looking letters from nebulously-named corporations threatening all sorts of punishments for failure to pay. Two days ago, I got a “pre-approval” for a secured credit card in the mail — a sure sign that my beacon score has fallen off the end of a very high cliff.

But how did this happen?
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My (very few) real-life friends know that I’m prone to excessive broken-record peroration on a select group of topics that are near and dear to my heart. One of them is my long and often unsuccessful struggle to understand human behavior. I’ve read everything from Winning Through Intimidation to Freakonomics in the hope that the actions and motivations of my fellow man and/or woman would eventually become transparent to me.

This is, of course, because as someone who resides on the far end of autism-spectrum behavior, I’m frequently totally wrong about what normal people are going to do in any given situation. I’m not alone in this: the entire “manosphere” and “PUA” scene is full of guys who are struggling mightily night and day to write the API for the gentler sex, so to speak. We’d all be completely gratified if women turned out to be as easy to understand as, say, machine-language instruction for the Motorla 68k series of processors.

Frankly, that Holy Grail of bioware programming is unlikely to arrive any time soon. But after considerable thought and research on the matter, I’ve come up with a working model of human motivations that applies to men and women. It both explains puzzling behaviors and helps predict future ones. And you can have the fruits of my research for free, because you were kind enough to sit through the 2000-word thing I wrote about quilt maple.

Oh, wait. I haven’t published that yet. Well, you’d better fucking read it when it does come out, okay?
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