Dudu and Didi

Below is a deleted scene from Leave Society. This scene occurs in a park by Li's parents' apartment in Taipei. Didi was edited out of the novel. The only dogs in the novel now are, I think, Dudu and Momo.  

*

They encountered Didi, a small, male, shirted dog. Dudu and Didi seemed uninterested in each other. “From behind, they look very similar,” said Li’s dad, as he did every time the two dogs met. 

            The walk continued. 

            Li’s dad called Didi "dāi bǎn." 

            “Dāi means stupid, right?” said Li. 

            “Right,” said Li’s mom. “Bǎn means board.” 

            “What kind of board? Wood?” 

            Li’s dad said a cutting board. 

            Li asked if dāi bǎn meant conventional and unexceptional. 

            Li’s dad said it meant “unable to change” and “goes by rules.” 

            Li’s mom said it meant “not flexible.” 

            "Dad called Didi dāi bǎn," said Li, amused. 

            "He has to criticize everything,” said Li’s mom.

Links

I blogged about ily at htmlgiant. Hobart published my poem "Antirelationship Period." I found a paper someone wrote about my Twitter account. I've read a little of it.

I enjoyed the documentary Plandemic. It discusses petroleum-based drugs, Bill Gates, the CDC, the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, Alphabet (Google's parent corporation), and other things. 

I read Alan Rossi's blog today. He is forty and doesn't use social media and has never used it except Twitter for a month it seems. I recommend his novel Mountain Road, Late at Night.

It's 9/11. I posted nonfiction titled "My 9/11 History" on Patreon in April. It required a membership to read, but recently I made my Patreon posts free. I'm probably not going to use Patreon anymore.

I finished two mandalas recently. I would like to publish a book of my mandalas one day. 

Calmness

On December 10, 2019, I tweeted "My novel Leave Society is a threat to everyone including me" but now after two more drafts I think it's more of a gentle, calm suggestion or idea. 

The protagonist of the novel, Li, views leaving society as "a relative thing." He has lived in NYC since 2001 and in midtown Manhattan since 2011, and has been immersed in pessimistic, neurotic, nature-ignoring cultures and subcultures for decades, and so he feels that "almost any change would qualify."

In my novel, leaving society is mostly viewed as a mental and chemical and cultural thing. One can leave society to varying degrees by changing what one reads, for example. By replacing—to any degree—newspapers with nonfiction books that reference outside the mainstream, one is leaving society.

My novel defines "society" as "dominator society"—the thing almost everyone seems to have been embedded in for around 6,000 years. The other end of the continuum of social organization from "dominator" is "partnership." Riane Eisler invented these terms in The Chalice and the Blade (1987).