I want life to feel steady and calm, with a powerful undercurrent of clear vision, animalistic intuition, and do-whatever-it-takes altruism. It's a sober feeling, but lightened by the feelings of dew and moss and paws and familiar smells. It begins with quietness -- it can't be found by taking human-style life and adding the animal feelings to it, it needs to be approached by stripping stuff away that, when looked at with a critical eye, really isn't necessary.

One cannot be serious all the time, but one can be serious *about* being playful, so that one's goal remains always for everything to be at peace and feel good. Every touch, every hug, everything done in play is done compassionately and is the completion of a right action.

Life hasn't been feeling like that -- it's been feeling ugly, and plastic, and an-eye-for-an-eye. This is my fault. I need to work on it. It's become very very hard to work on it, though. It used to be that when I did something good, I could feel good about it, and that made it easier to do the next good thing. These days when I do something good I just feel a slumping "gahhhh." feeling afterwards. I've lost the suspension-of-disbelief that lets me turn the good stuff into a positive feedback loop. I don't know what the answer to that is.

Me: Can I have a friend?
Coyote: Nope. -- Have a babyfur.
Me: Erf.
(time passes)
Me: Can I have a friend now?
Coyote: Nnnope. You should really try the babyfurs. They're delicious.
Me: *rrrgh*

I am a babyfur, to the very core of my being. I am also furry, with equal intensity. I don't, however, seem to be able to find those steady, calm, compassionate feelings in either the babyfur or the furry community. I don't know if that's because of them, or because of me. One of the insights I had while driving, about tailgaters, is that they're just as proud of their tailgate-y driving style as I am of my laid-back driving style. To them, it *is* beautiful. And that's really, when you think about it, just as valid as me thinking my way is beautiful.

I tried to apply that logic to my feelings about roleplayers, and I got the following: The people who have created "characters" are not, as it might look on the surface, digging themselves further away from their real selves. They are self-aware enough so that they *know* where that place in their brain is that says "yes, this is good, this is getting closer to being where i'm supposed to be", and they do what they do because they quite simply have figured out that while they are trying to be this character, that part of their brain tends to light up. Naturally, they follow the positive stimulus and continue the behavior. It's a *good* thing that they've figured out how to pay attention to that part of their brain, they just haven't figured out how to take the next step, and hook their real animal self directly up to their words and actions. For that matter, neither have I, really. It's an asymptotic process, and I will never be "finished".

Is all this moral relativism good? Bad? Is Coyote trying to get me so tangled up, painted so much into my relativistic corner, that I eventually snap and show my teeth and recant everything I've said in the past few paragraphs in one enraged heave?

One thing I do know is that all of this crap, whether it's to do with tailgating or roleplaying, is really unfortunate. It amounts to nothing more than shouting "You fuckers! You should be ashamed of yourselves! Do it my way!" and them shouting back the same thing, and neither side accomplishing anything except more and more strife. To me, that underscores the need to turn the other cheek, in an incredibly poignant way. But it's HARD. It's very, very hard to muster the will to turn the other cheek when I'm numb and confused with loneliness and all the other kinds of hurting. And even if I do it once, on one particular day, it's just as much of a struggle (and I'm just as likely to fail) the next time.