I read a review of Watchmen and it said something about how the premise might be dated because it was written during the height of the cold war. It struck me because as far as I know almost nobody really thinks of 1985 as the raging year of the cold war. Normally they think back to tit-for-tat hydrogen bomb testing, Vietnam, the Missile Crisis, or Khrushchev getting shut out of Disneyland.

So what does that mean? I think that eras and ages amount to exactly dick. They are rhetorical devices that writers and politicians use to manufacture significance. Think about it, at the same time Americans were supposedly consumed by the darkness that brought us Watchmen, groupies were blowing stagehands so they could ‘bang the broads in Poison’ and John Hughes was shooting The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller back to back.

When was the last time you got up and actually felt the cultural consciousness pulling you this way or that? The underlying variable (people) are basically unchanged between now and then and 500 years ago, but we have no problem casually referring to the Decade of Greed or the Roaring 20s or the ‘Panic’ of some year the market crashed. The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what we’re talking about. We’re just trying make ourselves seem more important, like maybe if we give that generation an ethos someone will be kind enough to return the favor and that will somehow undo the fact that you’re dead and none of it matters.

Michelangelo once went at night to look at the near finished sculpture of a friend. As he examined it, he watched the man fiddle with the window for favorable light. Michelangelo stopped him and said “Don’t trouble yourself, the important thing will be the light of the Piazza.” Meaning that the public decides whether the work is good or bad. His posturing in the shop late at night was irrelevant.

I was thinking about how often we go around trying to just that. Have you ever heard someone describe themselves as eccentric? Or some community college professor put “philosopher” after his name? People like to revel in the status of titles that are inherently not theirs to give.

But it’s all just masturbation. In other words, they’re living in unreality. I’m not saying that someone else gets to decide if you’re a writer or not, but maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t call yourself a “social media expert” unless you get a paycheck with those words on it.

Here’s the thing: the delusion is your loss. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a joke. Giving yourself credit for something in advance does the opposite of encouraging growth, it breeds atrophy. And foolishness. And arrogance. And everything but the thing you want so badly to happen; that is, for people to respect you on your merits.

I think this ranks as one of the proudest moments in my life. That’s Hanno, slutting it up as a dog model.

If I do the math correctly, I believe that instantly makes her more popular and more accomplished than Maxie, Murphy or Buckley.

I think the most appropriate thing to do in celebration is mount a larger than life size portrait of the dog in the center of my apartment. Right near the books.