Notes from the Petting Zoo

I think the phrase “hair-trigger” is funny. Not because hair-triggers are funny, but because of what it suggests about the person (when it is applied to a person, that is — when it is applied to a machine, my thinking is “crappy calibration” [which might still be appropriate to people, now that I think about it]).

When people are known as being on hair-triggers, it’s a way of describing them as volatile, ready to explode, right on the edge, and so forth.

Thinking about hair-triggers made me wonder about pressure in general, and how it manifests in people. More particularly, in what direction people are feeling pressured.

I’ve met a lot of folks who seem to — when tapped just the right way — fire off in some sort of defensive fashion. It’s as if they are already being pressed to be beastly, but are only waiting for one or more predetermined cues. If any of those cues fire off, they launch the tactical strike that’s been humming in the hangar. Doesn’t even matter the reasons — the strike is ordered and executed. In seconds, the brain, like some sort of stunned diplomat, hastily constructs a reason from available data, confabulating where necessary, ignoring data if inconvenient, and so forth.

There’s just no rationalizing with this sort of mentality. It took me a long time to realize this. What took me so long to understand was that the cause and effect were REVERSED. There was a defensive strike launched, so there MUST be a reason, and if the obvious reasons aren’t making sense, then there must be some OTHER reason not yet understood. If no one is accepting the reasons, then they must be part of the reason. The logic is completely backwards, and freakishly bulletproof. About the only thing one can do in the presence of such pressure is to either leave, or develop a fondness for stepping on eggshells, with occasional storms.

Now, me, personally, I think it would be great if the whole hair-trigger phenomenon operated in the other direction, too. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if someone was hair-trigger with their compliments? Or hair-trigger with helping others? Or hair-trigger with smiles and friendly greetings? Someone who has lots of neat, pleasurable stuff, good news, happy tidings, playfulness, smiles, laughter, and so forth, just WAITING for an excuse to launch.

I think that would be a neat counterbalance to the more common hair-triggers.

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Okay, I’ll start out by making one thing clear — crazy people need love too. I understand that. They do. That said, now a cautionary note.

Do not mistake “crazy” for “love.” They are not the same thing.

Don’t feel bad if this doesn’t make sense yet — you have to understand that “crazy” and “love” possess many common features, so it’s quite natural to mistake one for the other. They possess common attributes, but that makes them equivalent in the same way that a coffee cup and that guy on the CB radio are equivalent because they both have handles. That is to say, none at all.

Just to make it very clear, here’s another example: Love makes your heart race. So does drinking six cups of coffee. Coffee, however, is not love.

Sure, there are a lot of definitions of love, and quite a few of those definitions include passion, a willingness to let hours and other responsibilities slip by unnoticed, a driven singlemindedness toward pleasing someone and so forth. I’m not saying this IS the definition of love, of course, just that there are quite a few people out there who believe that a definition of love ought to contain this kind of energy. And hey, to each their own — I happen to think that love CAN make the world stop between beating hearts, and that love CAN contain a kind of singleminded focus on each other, and that love CAN include astounding passions the levels of which would sunder the heavens. Huzzah love and all that.

But I ALSO know that crazy can make people do exactly the same thing. Crazy can make something ordinary into a great and overriding passion (such as sex, or brushing your teeth), crazy can allow a person to ignore their responsibilities and focus on something exclusively (such as a lover, or the secret messages in the salad bars across America), and so forth.

In other words, crazy, if viewed the right way, looks an awfully lot like love.

This can be a dangerous place for people who are looking for love-that-is-passionate, because they’ll see something that LOOKS like it, and then get hooked into that juice, and then before they know it, they’ve been hung out to dry on meathooks in a distant cabin in the woods where no one can hear them scream and scream and scream until their throat bleeds.

Pay attention. Watch for signs. Sometimes, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s still not a duck — it’s a hunter’s decoy.

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