Me and the Cats
Whenever I walk around the yard and the back lots, the cats follow me. I think they’re hoping I’ll kill a gazelle and there will be something to eat. It’s never happened, but still they follow, in some instinctual dance I fail to understand and they do, without thinking. Luckily, as humans, we can decide who we follow around the yard and the back lots and move over and follow someone else if that doesn’t pan out. We can even go it alone, following no one.
But the following business is tricky because you have to make decisions, a lot of it’s personal, and unlike the cats, who don’t much care who joins them in their following, we care pretty intensely. Which is why I was able to make a living once as a music critic. All I needed was an opinion, I had them, and we were good to go. It’s the same for literature, arts, religion, and politics. Pick your poison and there will be someone there to tell you why you’re wrong or right, and people who want to read all about it so they can feel good about liking whatever it is they like.
Sometimes those followers will even clump together and demand that other people like what they like; I guess because they tried to persuade them, and it didn’t work. Normally, it’s not much of an issue, but sometimes it becomes life or death, and its usually religion and politics playing in that arena; the two subjects most likely to cause our brains to switch off and make us want to kill someone. There’s a mystery to be solved in there somewhere. Personally, I believe we should spend more time talking to one another. To make it work, I think the main requirement is you respect the person with whom you’re speaking. It might be a vain hope, but there’s a line in a song I like that says, Shoot for the moon; you wind up ‘mongst the stars.