Hep Cats and Pack Behavior

Everybody wants to be a cat. Because a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at.

You can never really find a large group of individuals. The best you can ever find, for large groups, is a gathering of them. Take an art retreat, a weekend convention, or an occasional bust by a single British agent while innocently planning the downfall of the western world. The reasons for this are two fold. One, your true individual is more comfortable as a single entity, doing their own thing at their own pace. The desire for self determination is stronger than the desire for company, and as such they rarely (or at least, not as often) want to follow along as other people fulfill their self fulfillment programs. The second of course is once you become a large group, you are defined by whatever narrow thread connects the group and as such, no longer individuals. At that point you become “Artists” or “Entrepreneurs” or “War Criminals” or whatever thread connects you.

Now when I say individual, I of course mean it in the semi-classical sense of the Romantic Movement. The obvious images should, of course, be floating to your head already. The solitary poet, the lonely cowboy, the distant painter, the mad scientist planning to show them… show them all. These images are obvious, but they are by no means the only ones. Your individual need not be entirely alone, after all. However, they’re not regularly found at the head of large groups, as I’ll describe here. I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going with this, because most of you are clever people who have at least mastered pattern recognition.

The individual is a cat.

You could almost take this to the extreme of talking about the hep cat rather than the normal person. A hep cat is already a thing after all, but I’m keeping deeper with my cat metaphor. Also, this is so clearly part of a series, where cats are already a theme and if I suddenly make this all about hep cats at this stage then someone’s brain will throw a rod and we’ll all be in trouble by then.

Follow me for a moment, see where this leads. The world loves and individualist in theory, but very few people have the patience to actually put up with one in practice. And in a very real sense, why should they? Take Byron as an extreme example and ask why on earth anyone would tolerate his antics for more than a few weeks. Sure, there are reasons, but they’re not good ones. However, Byron was fuzzy and had big eyes and would only occasionally turn and suddenly bite you for touching his belly. The point is that the individual is hard to deal with because of their wish for individuality. There is a separate point about this metaphor becoming stretched, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Even without the antics of Byron (really? We’re gonna keep going with calling what Byron did “antics” here?) the individual has a hard time being tolerated. There is a constant pressure to fall in line, follow the norm, be part of the group. There is a lot of pack mentality in here, an awful lot of people wanting those around them to conform. Oddly though, they often want the individual near them to conform while admiring the distant individual. The pack must be maintained and the order of the pack must be preserved. So most people are dogs, while the individual is a cat, and chicken tastes of human*. Good, I’m glad you’re going with me on that.
*In actuality, mister Izzard was wrong about this. Human tastes of pig, and the cannibals who ate it called it Long Pork.

Most people are, like dogs, essentially pack animals.

Keeping pack structure is desperately important to those who are invested in it. I’m not talking about children here, who barely understand the structure and simply understand pecking orders and how to maintain them. I’m talking about adults here, the sort of adults who will try and dissuade and young person from taking a path that isn’t one of the acceptable paths. This is best seen in the parent trying to stop a child from majoring in art history and demanding they go into accounting like their parents did. It extends far outside that realm though, as anyone generally feels they can comment on someone who fails to conform to the standards set by their own pack structure. People get told a dozen times a day that they’ve got blue hair, or that they wear clothes outside the norm, or even that their body structure has variances outside their internally set mean in one way or another. I’ve heard people scream that someone is fat about as many times as I’ve heard people scream that someone has a great ass.

In simple terms, most people are dogs. They are tamed, but trapped in a pack and feeling the constant pressure from both sides of the hierarchy. As a result of this, most people long to be that solitary cat. Cats are not tame animals. They are, at best, acclimated to humans. They only cling to us in the first place because our stores of grain made for an interesting abundance of rodents. They don’t perform tricks without direct reward. Even when they do perform those tricks you’re basically working on the sympathies of the cat and asking it to take pity on you. The cat has some society when in the company of other cats, but not a rigid structure where alphas get to eat before the rest of the group followed by betas. Cats are far more interested in pleasing themselves and will eat the food right off your plate while you are eating if you don’t defend your piece of chicken.

The twin result of being trapped in a hierarchy, and seeing someone who is not trapped is envy. People long to be the lone mariner, the solitary cowboy, the… isolated… Antarctic penguin botherer? Yeah, I ran out of things. Interestingly though, as I said, cats are always solitary. They have society, like artists have communities and writers have circles and even lone mariners have that one bar they all frequent. These are the places where the hep cats gather, and perform whatever strange requirements they have for their social structure.

Most dogs really want to be cats.

The interesting thing about all of this, is how much people long to be the individual in conceptual terms. They long to get a sail boat and just sail around the world, but never actually do it. They’d like to get a Walden-esque cabin in the woods, but they like cable tv too much. They want to get a Harley and ride cross country, but the kids need braces or they’ve got that project to do, or something else comes up. There are often practical obstacles in the way, but there are also pack reasons why they can’t do these things. The neighbors would talk, the in-laws would disapprove, their friends would laugh… and so on.

They want to be like cats, but deep in their hearts they are dogs. They conform to a standard that was set long before they were even born and trying to break out of that standard takes more then just an ounce of courage. Most people are aware of the pain, the genuine isolation, the misery, the hunger and the fear that can come with breaking pack behavior. It’s not something to be taken lightly. In many cases, you can’t do it halfway because doing it for real is the only way to do it. So the longing remains.

The longing to be like these people, sometimes leads certain people to hang out in the places where the cats gather. They are not truly cats, they are not hep, but they are dogs that respect the cats (as dogs should) and group around those individual cats, hoping to catch a wif of the freedom they enjoy. They are so known for their grouping behavior, that one might call them groupies. Yes, groupies, let’s go with that. Someone call Webster’s, I’ve got a new word for them.

Large group leaders, however, are dogs and not cats.

When you’ve got a leader of men, he’s rarely an individual in the romantic sense. Your cats are far too self indulged, too self directed, not interested if someone else lives or dies. Most the big leaders in the world are like alpha dogs. The may seem like romantic individuals, but often that’s simply because there is no one above them in the hierarchy to direct them. They are forced to make some decisions on their own. However, they do much to keep the pack structure. They keep those who agree with them at the top of the heap, they keep down those who deviate, and they mark their territory by pissing on things. Seriously, if you don’t have a big estate to keep them on, CEOs are terrible pets. I don’t know how those people who keep them in small apartments can live with themselves knowing they’ve got them cooped up all day.

There are some perks to being on top though, and one of those perks is not worrying about what the people above think. There is no one else to tell you that you can or can’t do this or that, but much of that pressure is replaced by a doubling of pressure from below. There is the twin problems of those who want to be top dog nipping at your heels, and then there is the second subtler group which is far harder to deal with. That second group is the people who don’t want to be on top, but want you to be a good leader. Everything top dog does is going to engender disappointment in someone from that second group, no matter what. Sometimes it will even be anger and hostility before you even begin. See Also – Barrack Obama. In those cases, it can be very easy to just simply ignore the complaints of anyone criticizing them and behave more or less like the sort of sociopath most people think cats are. This might include invading a nation no one wants to invade or telling the enemy to bring it on. See Also – George W. Bush.

These are not the behavior of a cat though, as a cat has no interest in leading anyone anywhere. Besides to their food bowl in or to demand to know why it’s empty. And cats don’t actually act with sociopathic disregard, they just have limited a capacity for solving people’s problems and they know it. So they behave in a manner that best suits their abilities and if that sometimes clashes with the needs of others they’re sort of sorry about it, but there’s only so much they can do. Yes, they could try and be a little less solipsistic, but that’s really more effort than they can manage right now.

The cat does care, but has limited ability to help

And they’re way too cool to try helping if they knew they’d fail.

The Geek World is Not My World

I’ve often said this to people, but probably not enough. I am not actually a geek. Some people think I might be, because I know a lot of stuff. Useless, pointless, meaningless stuff, but more stuff than almost anyone else they know. Of course, every once in a while, they’ll need to actually know something and I’ll still have the answer to that. However, you just need to meet me for a few minutes on a good day to know I’m not a geek.
On a bad day, I’m so withdrawn that I might be mistaken for one, or I could be a mountain dwelling goblin unused to all the fresh air and sun light.


Now I know what you’re going to say. “Weirdo, you’ve got geeky interests. You’ve got lots of geeky friends. You only sleep with geeks as far as I know. How can you not be a geek?” Well, I only sleep with bisexuals or people with strong bi-curiosity as well. Does that make me bi? I used to hang out with a lot of black people, does that make me black? Most my friends are women, does that make me a woman? The thing is, there is something I’ve often noticed about the geek world, or rather geeks as people. It’s one of the things that keeps me out of their world.

Geeks aren’t very smart, or at least not smart in the right ways.

People who are part of the geek world cling to their intelligence like a life ring in a storm. They have a nasty tendency to act like they’re the only smart people in the world, and are unable to understand why the rest of the world regularly dumps on them. Of course, the rest of the world knows why they dump on geeks, and it’s got nothing to do with the glasses or liking Star Trek.

Lots of really cool people wear glasses these days. Doctor Who is pretty close to a mainstream interest and Star Trek has been mainstream for decades. Everyone knows Star Wars, and lots of people like Wil Wheaton, not just geeks. Wil might be seen as a cool geek among geeks, but he sort of left geekery back in the dust sometime ago. He became a cool person, who has geeky interests. Here is the thing, Wil Wheaton is smart in two ways. He’s smart in Cool Person ways and he’s smart in Geek Ways. He’s good with rules that can be written down and rules that cannot be written down.

Social Rules can never be written down because the way you understand them is by smell and feel. People who understand the rules understand there is no way to write them down because the information can’t really be written down. There are too many fiddly bits, too many complications, too many factors that adjust other factors and too many factors that adjust because the other factors have adjusted to the adjustments made by other factors that are always adjusting because why the hell not? You have to feel your way along, you have to read tiny subtle signals and you have to adjust constantly.

What I've mainly noticed about geeks, is that they're not very good at Social Rules because those can't be written down.

Computers aren’t like this. The rules of computers can be written down, and easily understood. The thing is, computers are far less forgiving than social situations. If you screw up with a computer, you kind of have to stop and start again from the beginning. Socially, you rarely really have to do this. You aren’t regularly cast from and entire circle of friends, having to start with completely new people just because you failed to use a slash when you were supposed to use a backslash. You’re not required to find that one damn slash and turn it into a backslash before anything else can move forward.

This is one of the reasons people who are good at Social Rules freak out on computers. They don’t understand why we can’t just forget that one error and move on. If it were a social situation, they’d take a little shit, and then we’d all move on. In the Geek World however, a mistake is a big thing that must be corrected. It must be documented, it must be categorized, it must be fixed before we can move on. This has crippled more than one geek before they even start. They see that they’ve made an error in a social situation and try to apply computer rules to it. They think they can’t fix it, because everyone else has ignored it, and think they’re being shunned. This is a problem because in reality, they fix it by ignoring it.

Geeks make a Social Error and flip out because they think it’s like a Computer Error and worry they won’t be allowed to fix it.

Of course, one problem is that Social Rules are a constantly shifting ice flow of contradictions and hierarchy. People who play that game badly think it’s about pushing those around you down lower so they can be higher. People who play the game well know it’s about raising people so that you can stand on their shoulders and you’ll all go up together. People who play the game abysmally, think it’s about making yourself like the guy you want to raise you up. And then you have the fear that one person will get raised and you’ll be ignored. That was, greatly speaking, the point of my last post.

The game has no formal rules though, because if people could read the specific rules, with each little detail there for them to see, they would start acting differently. Once they were conscious of their behavior, they would strive to change it. Try this as an experiment sometime, make mention of someone’s little verbal tick. Mention that they say “Exactly” a whole hell of a lot. Then watch as they strive to cay “Certainly” or “That’s Right” instead. When a normal person realizes their behavior can be tracked and predicted, they will start doing something else. This is another part of the rules, but one that can be written down because it’s large enough not to be specific. You can have the big unspecific rules written down because they don’t help much anyway.

No part of the Social Rules may be written down, or the rules cease to work. Including this one.

This is why I can’t really be a geek, or part of the Geek World. I can’t be part of the Normal World either though, in case you’re wondering. I understand both sets of rules and play each world with a combination of rules from both sides. I feel my way along in computers and science, and I use the strict written rules as a wedge to get into people’s heads. I understand enough about both worlds to float around and be a strange, quixotic character for either group, mainly by playing opposite strengths around each group while demonstrating an understanding of the rules of the current group.

Mind you I also have paranoia, A.D.D. and social anxiety disorder to work with here. So it’s very possible that my mind is cracked in just the right way that I can both exist and not exist in whatever world. I understand the rules quickly, but have a totally inability to really play by any of those rules. I don’t belong, but I can be here as an observer. I am accepted everywhere I go, but not really a member of any group.

I am, socially speaking, Schrödinger's Cat.

Which proves that maybe it wasn’t such a dumb idea and that things really can exist in two forms at once. But probably not, I suspect Schrödinger was right and the cat would either be alive or dead.

I can smell fear, and it smells like Drakkar Noir

Once upon a time, I knew some rich people. Not 1% rich, but 5% maybe 10% rich. Trophy wife and private school rich. Yacht and second house bigger than most people’s first house rich. So rich, but not mega rich. Rich enough that they’ve become terrified about their relative postions.

I was 15/16 and a friend of a friend introduced me to a friend and I was informally adopted for a couple of weeks during a couple of summers when someone was home from school. The details are unimportant and hazy, and I’m not interested in talking about that right now anyway.

The story I want to tell is when I was chosen as an escort to some… thing or other. Someone was getting an award and there was going to be a dinner afterward and I wasn’t told I would be in a room full of suits until we were on our way or I might have not worn purple sweatpants. However, I did, and I’m not ashamed of that fact because I’m not ashamed of much at all.

Shame doesn’t get you very far in life kids.

So I’m sat at a table, while the girl who in retrospect had a crush on me the size of Mt. Rushmore and was aching for me to make a move, went off with her mother to talk about something. I’m not entirely sure what they were talking about, but she wasn’t getting in trouble for bringing me because I think her mother was hoping to pick up a bit on the side when she was done with me. Also, she would have mentioned if her mother had been annoyed because she was reveling in annoying her mother that year. I do believe, I was part of that, but that’s not important right now.

As a result of her being called off, I was sat at a table with seven other guys. Five of them were employed by the company that was giving someone an award, one was their boss and the last one was a college kid who was interning with the company, but because of college he didn’t have the full suit but only a shirt and tie. The boss was one of those silvering haired jackasses that likes to be an executive, and likes to tell people he’s an executive and has been an executive so long he has truly forgotten people like me exist.

So we’re sitting there, and it’s a no-booze do because of all the college kids and people like me. So the executive orders a Slice with “lots of ice” requesting the waitress to “fill the glass” and I can see a couple of the guys sort of squirm. They hate Slice, but they’re going to drink it because Bossman drinks it. I’m not joking, as she goes around the table it’s “Slice, lots of ice.” “Slice, lots of ice.” “Same for me.” and my heart is filled with contempt for these people. I can tell damn well that one wants a Pepsi, that one wants some root beer and that one wants a needle filled with heroin and a line of cocaine to chase it with.

It’s about this time that I start to notice that unlike most places I’ve been, the colognes of the men aren’t mingling into a strange mixed scent. It’s only Drakkar Noir at table five, no other scents prevail, perhaps mine. But my scent was a faint hint of shampoo and not much else because I hadn’t even shaved. It’s about this time that I realize the thing that separates me from everyone else.

I’m the only person at this table who isn’t terrified.

Everyone else, even the bossman, is afraid. They’re afraid of not being on the right track. Sure, they all drive Fords, but are they driving the right Ford? Does a winner drive an Explorer? Surely, only a looser drives and Escort. What about a Mustang, or a Thunderbird? Can a winner really be seen driving those? Remember this is the early 90s, when neither car had any balls to speak of. Is this the right shirt? Should I have an oxford collar? What if only a loose uses a Windsor knot? High School is merciful, compared to the management track. There is as much information to understand as there is in the geekworld, it’s just the rules aren’t written down and you have to be smart in a different way. More about that in my next post.

And then there was me…

I don’t care how these people view me, I don’t care if they like me or not, I’m not thinking about anything they can do to me or for me. They can’t do anything to or for me. Even if they could, I don’t much care. I’m not worried about it, I know what I need and I know what they need and I get things done. I am, in a few words, the man without fear. I have never been concerned with the stupid little things that need to be done, should be done, ought to be done. I have no respect for social levels, or how much someone makes, or if I’ve impressed so and so. Ask Syd how easy that makes me to live with sometime. Weddings are a chore because “fuck wearing a tie, I don’t give a shit about those people” and so on. The thing is, the lack of fear mixed with the not giving a good god damn, makes other people want to sit next to me.

A lack of fear might be a sign of psychosis, but it is also perceived as a sign of being big dog on top.

When the waitress came to me, I decided to buck trends and stick to my guns and stay the course and not actually think about it and just order like I always do. “Coke no ice.” Oh how easily the words tumbled from my lips. Nothing major, not for me, but conversation at the table stopped. Someone put on a record, just so they could do that sound of yanking the needle and making a record scratch sound.

“Really?” one of the scared dogs men at the table asked. I looked at him for about two seconds longer than I needed to before smiling and saying “Yeah, I don’t like my pop watered down.” He looked at me, and I looked at him and he broke eye contact first and nodded, which caused the Bossman to laugh. He actually threw his head back and laughed. One single solid “HA!” and that was it. Now, I’m not sure my dears, my darlings, what I said that was so funny. All I can figure is that I’d stared down a guy who had perceived himself as a sergeant at arms and given him an answer that couldn’t be balked in a polite setting. I’d worked out a way around him and no one could do anything about it. His only real reaction was one of fear and bluster, and I have no fear to react with so he broke first.

As a result of this, the bossman started talking to me. Instead of talking about my plans, what school I was going to, where I would work, and what road I would eventually take to get from here to there, I spoke about what interested me. I told him about a documentary I’d recently seen about the evolution of mankind and how we pertained to apes. By refusing to talk about what he wanted to know about, and only talking about what I wanted to talk about, I managed two things. One, avoiding boredom. Two, and this would have been important if I’d had any use for it, which I didn’t, I established for the table which of us was the bigger dog. I was on top of the conversation, I was leading the bossman around the room with my fresh knowledge about human behavior being like that of chimps, and I was holding the table.

You could see it in their eyes, I was clearly a bigger, more important dog than their boss. Their boss was the biggest, most important dog they knew, and I was dominating him. I could see a couple of guys, particularly the one who wanted a root beer, thinking that maybe turning their loyalties toward the kid in the flannel shirt was the way to go. So much so that when the waitress came back to freshen drinks, the root beer kid did the bravest thing he’d ever done in his life. He ordered another Slice, but this time without ice! I wanted to berate him, I wanted to bang the table and demand he order the root beer he wanted, but I couldn’t. That would have been pack behavior, that would have been showing concern for another member of the group, and I don’t have pack behavior. I’m not a group member, not of any group, but I am pretty and fuzzy and will let the right people pet me while biting everyone else.

I’m not a dog, I’m a cat.

That’s what they didn’t understand, that’s what almost no one ever understands. I’m not looking to be the top dog in the hierarchy, I’m looking to be the most honest cat who just doesn’t give a shit and will tree a bear if provoked. My wants and needs are so far different from everyone else’s that while they might try and act like they get what I’m saying when I say this, their actions prove that they haven’t the first notion what I mean.

I can’t honestly suggest this to you as a career path, because it doesn’t work for al people. You have to be smart enough, strong enough, interesting enough, and pretty enough all at once to pull it all off together. Also, you have to understand the difference between tough and mean, between clever and cruel, and most of all between honesty and douche baggery. Hang on a second, that needs to be a bigger point, it’s far more important.

You have to understand the difference between tough and mean, between clever and cruel, and most of all between honesty and douche baggery.

Also, don’t use Drakkar Noir, because it smells like fear.