the advantage of cool

I know that you are not a fan of cool.  You like systems and rules and cool is not only outside of that, it is even against them.  I'm sure you can see it, the way sometimes somebody enters a room and nobody notices, but then somebody else enters and heads turn.  It's there, but it's impossible to define.  If you analyzed it and come up with a lot of rules and somebody followed them to a T, as soon as somebody realized that they were following rules they would be revealed as a dork.  Following rules is dorky, breaking rules is cool. 

Not all rules, you kind of have to know which ones and certainly this is a situation where if you have to ask, you can never know.  The cool guy just knows instinctively what to do, he never has to think of what would be the right (or in this case wrong, not wrong call it bad, as in badass) thing to do or say.

Trump is undoubtedly the coolest man running, Sanders is a distant second, the rest of them are complete dorks, probably the big girl is the biggest dork of them all.  There is something evil in Lyin' Ted that gives him a little aura of cool, but when he speaks in that whiny preachy voice the cool melts away.  Uncle Johnny Ohio is like one of those old timey late night talk show second bananas, a certain element of the population might find him cool, but that element is all dorks.

We've spoken of the selfish gene before.  It has its roots in a field called environmental biology/psychology, which takes the attitude that we are the survivors of four billion, or in the case of the human natural, about a hundred thousand years of evolution, of the survival of the fittest, so it's only logical that any quirks we have, we must have them for a reason, they must have somehow helped make us fitter or else we wouldn't still have them.

So that's where I think cool comes in.  It's good for a tribe to have a ruler, it keeps it organized and whatever, a tribe with a leader does better than just a bunch of guys hanging around.  To get a leader the members of the tribe have to give up some of their freedom, which is a good deal because what they make up for it in successful raids is probably worth it.

But power corrupts right?  It helps the leader to have successful raids, but it helps him even more to take first picks of the goods of the raids and of the women.  At this point it's no longer in the interest of the tribesmen to have this particular leader. 

So what I think happens is the chief is giving one of his long winded speeches and one of the tribesmen, who by the way, is not wearing the feathers in his cap in exactly the way the chief requires them to be worn, makes some little joke at the leader's expense.  The chief, full of himself, doesn't notice, but the other tribesmen do.  Hey, they begin to think, that guy is cool, and the downfall of the chief is just around the corner.


What I meant about bathroom problems with the kids as a sub was loss of control of the class.  Maybe through herculean efforts on my part I had soothed the savage beasts and they were writing something on paper or maybe i was speaking about something, but all was well in my world, and then the time would come for their bathroom break.  I had to line them up somehow and march them through the halls in semi military order.  Those halls were just drab locker-lined passageways but the sweet wind of freedom blew strongly through them and went straight to the brains of the savage beasts.

Once we got to the bathroom I would allow the first four or five in and then others in as they left, which was sometimes hard to keep track of, and once they were in there they were out of the eyes of the despotic teacher and they could do whatever they wanted and stay in there as long as they wanted. 

Then there were the girls, sometimes the girls' room was by the boy's and you could sort of watch them both, but sometimes it was around the corner.  But they were girls.  Usually you could appoint one or two of the more responsible girls to oversee the operation and they would be ok, but not always, and if things went awry you couldn't charge into the room and yank them out like you could with the boys. 


That LBTTQ bathroom thing is not really an urban thing, it is more of a wealthy suburban thing.  There were surely kids in my sub classes and on your bus and in the halls of Gage and Tonti and Sawyer who thought they were really of the opposite sex and wanted to dress like it and act like it, but they knew that they could never get away with it in their current environment.   The ones we hear about are the kids of the wealthy and indulgent, and maybe that's good, but there aren't that many of them and the whole thing is not that big a deal either way.