Occupation of Independence

I am going to continue with the subject of civilizing conversation because this is the only time of year when a backwoods camper snowbird desert rat actually talks to other human beings. As Swift pointed out in his essay, all human beings are capable of making big improvements in their conversational habits, and with only moderate effort. Consider how easy it is easy to break some of these bad habits compared to giving up smoking. And yet millions of people have succeeded at giving up smoking. When you consider the advantages of improving conversational habits, relative to the effort involved, and look at it from a rational economic cost-benefit perspective, it is hard to think of any project more worthwhile. Referring back to the list in the previous post, today's sins are: #5. The Chronic Contradictor. #3. Talking for Victory. These have been paired up because they overlap. You could even think of #5 as the short term or tactical version of a more persistent #3. Year

A commenter pointed out that another category was needed for the list in the previous post: the One-Upper. I invite you to read his comment in the previous post. And I overlooked the most ubiquitous of all conversational rogues: the Interrupter. At least these people are pretty easy to forgive. They are a bit like a dog who barks when nervous, but not at other times. Let the Interrupter calm down after a minute, or let them see the look on the face of their victim, and they will soon correct themselves. There is a marvelous bit of acting by John Goodman in the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink", showing him to be the victim of an over-eager, know-it-all, intellectual playwright, who won't listen to the John Goodman character tell his story. But I'll bet you too have run into Interrupters who don't calm down and back off, but rather, keep interrupting forever. I simply don't know how to explain that. Are they insisting on being the dominant one? Their prob

When thousands of campers are congregated in a town like Quartzsite, and have the opportunity for campfires and conversation, it would be nice to believe that it leads to better conversations than usual. But maybe that is just primal-ism and romanticism. The retrogrouch in me yearns for conversations in olden times, when there was more formality and a tighter consensus about the rules of proper behavior. Come on now, admit it, don't you feel a little of that when you watch the polite rituals in the movies called historical 'costume dramas?' But the standards of yore haven't survived a couple hundred years of democratic leveling. But maybe this presents an opportunity to reconstruct rules of conversation from a blank piece of paper. And this time, we will do it right. Shouldn't the aim of conversation be good will, a bit of entertainment, and subtle education? If we get good at this, we can enjoy full-bodied conversation about non-trivial subjects. Imagine conver

There are some disparities that are made to poke fun at: men versus women, old versus young, northern Europeans versus Mediterraneans, city slickers versus rural hayseeds, and even newbie campers versus grizzled old "mountain men." A long term bicycle club friend of mine visited my camp recently. She and her significant-other were embarked on their maiden voyage in a converted van. They don't know of my blog. So hopefully I can write about their experience with candor. Although it may seem like I am poking fun at them, their foibles and mistakes are no different than any other newbie, including myself at one time in history. They both have a lot of practical skills, and I suspect that their RV careers will be a great success if they keep with it. The idea here is to describe a newbie's ideas, habits, and mistakes, in order to let the reader flush out the principles and draw their own conclusions. I will try to suppress my own shop-worn sermons. They reminded me