BARNABAS RISING

I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of the good guy vampire meme. Only in the post-modern world could a creature that personifies disease, rape, and cannibalism become an international sex symbol. In a world overcrowded with glamorous Hollywood vamps, from True Blood and The Vampire Diaries to that godforsaken mess known as Twilight, it is always nice when someone comes along to remind us that the vampire is a man-eating ambulatory corpse. A zombie with fashion sense. Most recently that man has been Tim Burton, whose Dark Shadows closes a forty-six-year-old circle. By choosing to portray vampiric leading character Barnabas Collins as a pale, cadaverous ghoul with a Max Shreck manicure, Burton and Depp have succeeded in making the very vamp who started the whole "new school good guy bloodsucker" old school again.

You probably know the story. In 1966 Dan Curtis launched a gothic daytime soap that was basically "Maine Eyre," Charlotte Bronte transported to the Pine Tree State. A young orphaned governess arrives at a decaying family estate inhabited by the last scions of the proud Collins dynasty, each of whom harbors grim secrets. Various soap opera shenanigans follow. But eight months later the ratings were flagging and Curtis decided to spice things up by going completely off the deep end. He introduced a vampire into the plot. Ancestor of the modern Collins family Barnabas wakes up after having been chained in a coffin for two hundred years and immediately begins a killing spree while also pursuing the woman who looks suspiciously like his lost love. Canadian actor Jonathan Frid was hired to play the role for thirteen weeks, but the ratings took off like a rocket and Frid's Barnabas was an unexpected sex symbol. He was subsequently provided a compelling back story and evolved into the protagonist of the series.

It was the kind of thing that only could have gone down in the sixties, the kind of stereotype busting that gave us an African woman as a starship officer and a cute blonde housewife who was a witch. Barnabas Collins marks the arrival of the vampire as leading man, a figure we identify with and cheer for rather than a monster to be destroyed. Without Barnabas, we don't have Lestat, Saint Germain, Angel, Bill Compton, or Edward Cullen (whose surname even reminds us of Mr. Collins). Barnabas was the mutation that started a whole new strain.

But he was not some awful sparkly James Dean wannabe. Barnabas entered the show as a monster, and even though he evolved into a sympathetic one, he was still basically an American Dracula (ironically, since Dark Shadows even Stoker's inhuman Count has gotten the good guy treatment). One of the things that pleased me about Burton's Shadows was that it was very up front about Barnabas' monstrous nature, far more so than the glamorous Ben Cross Barnabas of the 1991 mini-series. Depp's version of the character looked like the love child of Jonathan Frid and Count Orlock.

The movie has received mixed reviews, but all in all I was pleased with it. Condensing 1225 half-hour episodes of storyline into a two-hour film was no easy task, but even with the added doses of farce and satire it was still recognizably Dark Shadows. Fans of the original no doubt were amused by the Maggie Evans/Victoria Winters amalgamation and Caroline's microphone query about her missing father. Danny Elfman even did a fair job or recalling the original TV score. But what will stay with me is Depp's rather complex Barnabas, who shifts between 30 Days of Night mass-murdering construction workers and hippies to devoted family man. If you want one scene that summed up the ambiguity of this Barnabas, it has to be when Barnabas is concerned for the welfare of neglected nine-year-old David Collins, but in looking after him casually uses mind controlling hypnosis on the boy as if it were nothing at all. I couldn't tell if it was touching or creepy. I settled on both.

In the end, the best thing about 2012's Dark Shadows is that it indicates there is still some life in the old gothic vampire yet. Figuratively speaking, of course.

A BRIEF WORD FROM TOLKIEN

Children (and adults) are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. (Tolkien "On Fairy-Stories")

HATS OFF TO DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Wisconsin, a pair of men printed out a thousand or so copies of a game. It was amateurish and badly-edited, a Frankenstein’s monster of historical war-gaming (where grown men use miniature soldiers to re-enact battles like Thermopylae and Waterloo), world mythology, J. R. R. Tolkien, pulp fiction, and fairy tales. In my mind’s eye I like to imagine its creators wearing white scientist smocks, in a ruined castle or dungeon, bringing it to life during a thunderstorm. Looking back, I cannot help but wonder, did Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson know, could they have ever even imagined, that their little folio-sized game was about to change the world?

Mere hyperbole? No. That game, Dungeons & Dragons, not only went one to earn more than a billion dollars in sales over the years, it also helped generate hundreds of billions more in video games and online gaming like World of Warcraft. You could not have played WoW, or something like Fable or Final Fantasy, if Dungeons & Dragons had never existed; the stamp of D&D is on almost every aspect of such games. And then there is publishing. D&D practically reinvented the fantasy genre, which prior to the game had been lumped in with somewhat better received sibling science fiction. Inasmuch as most fantasy series are bad recyclings of The Lord of the Rings, most also show the hand of D&D, which has produced hundreds of novels tied-in to the game and its settings.

But let’s back up a second for the non-geeks in the audience (and if you stuck around this long, more power to you). Dungeons & Dragons, aka D&D, is a “role-playing game.” In fact, it invented the role-playing game, a pursuit that might best be described as “improvisational radio theater.” In D&D, one person takes on the role of creating a story, with a setting, characters, and very open-ended plot. The others each create a single character, to act as their alter-egos or personae in the game. In effect, they are each responsible for a protagonist in a story, while the fellow running the game sets the scenes and plays the role of the antagonists. There are of course rules, and numbers, and dice, and these define what a character is capable of doing. For example, all characters had have attributes like “Strength” and “Intelligence.” These come with a numerical value, so a character with Strength 16 is stronger than one with Strength 9, while one with Intelligence 12 is brighter than Intelligence 7. All this should be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever even been near a computer RPG. But unlike a computer game, the action is described verbally, and takes place more or less in everyone’s heads. It is a social experience that focuses on cooperation, communication skills, imagination, and math. All of which in my humble opinion makes it an infinitely superior experience to sitting in front of the video screen.

I owe my introduction to D&D to my elementary school, and to Ms. Virginia Nyahay. My mother had suggested the game to me before, after seeing an advertisement for it in Boys Life magazine. But my real introduction came later. Brought into the school’s “Gifted and Talented Education” program (and really, don’t those words just describe me perfectly?), G.A.T.E. coordinator Ms. Nyahay (who I learned recently went on to become a school principal) gave us a set of the 1977 revised D&D “Basic” rules, revised and edited by neurology Professor and child development expert John Eric Holmes. This was just before the D&D backlash, when grieving mother Patricia Pulling, understandably struggling to come to grips with her son’s suicide, decided to very publically blame the game for his death. It was also before the Christian Right started accusing it of teaching witchcraft (the way the same idiots blame Harry Potter today). No, in those days, it was seen as a good thing for kids, pretty much for all the reasons I mentioned above. Because of my interest in telling stories (or running my mouth and making up things, if you prefer), I took on the job of “mastering” the game. It was the dawn of a life-long love affair.

Aficiandados will of course know that the game has undergone several revisions and changes over the last 36 years, and that there are quite literally hundreds (if not thousands) of similar games produced by other companies. The internet is filled with long and often heated debates between fans of one incarnation or another arguing the inadequacies of all other versions. For my part, I will be the first to admit that I have played and preferred many other role-playing games to D&D, but this does nothing to dilute my affection and respect for the game. The latest version, the very badly named “4th Edition” (there have been at least 8 or 9 major versions, not 4) has been sharply criticized for making several changes to the game, and wildly cheered for the same reason. Playing it last year, however, was like being ten years old again, a heady whiff of nostalgia. No matter how much she has changed, the old girl is still at the core the same.

I mention all this now for a reason. Some time back I returned the favor Ms. Nyahay did for me all those years ago by starting a D&D club at my school. Dungeons & Dragons is, after more than three decades, still going strong enough that the latest version always gets translated into Japanese, and I thought it would be a good way to shift kids’ interests from PlayStation and Nintendo into something a bit more educational. The mother of one club member bumped into me in the hall this morning and ended up thanking me. Her son, who had always been ostracized and a loner, prefering to stay in his room with the computer, now has friends. They come over to play D&D. She says it has completely changed him. He laughs, jokes, has fun with them. He used to dread coming to school but now looks forward to it. I suspect that for every Patricia Pulling, there are a hundred other mothers with stories like the one today.

For me, I remain convinced that D&D helped strengthen my communication skills, and by running all those games and teaching others to play, the ease with which I can walk into a classroom and get kids to learn things I owe in part to the game. I also wonder if I ever would have gotten a Master’s in the field of religions and mythologies if not for D&D and its cousins. Nor do I think I am alone. Heather Burton, who has become a remarkable artist, told me playing D&D all those years ago helped spark her imagination. And I know a lot of other people reading this will have similar accounts (feel free to share).

And so I say, three cheers to the grand old game.

MIRIAM AND ME

I was just reading online that MGM is planning a remake of one of my all-time favorite movies, the 1983 thriller, The Hunger.

I hesitate to call it a "vampire" movie; after all, the "V" word never appears once in the film, there are no coffins or crucifixes, and the protagonists seem obsessed with seeing themselves in mirrors. But then again, if you were David Bowie and French national treasure Catherine Deneuve, why wouldn't you be gazing at your reflections all the time?

Proving "Bela Lugosi's Dead," Bowie and Deneuve reinvent the vampire

Bowie and Deneuve play John and Miriam Blaylock, an ultra-wealthy Manhattan couple who own a brownstone in Sutton Place, collect thousand-year-old antiques, and give classical music lessons to the spoiled rich girl next door. But like most beautiful people, John and Miriam have an eating disorder; once a week they go trolling in goth clubs and bars picking up young couples to slit their throats and drink their blood (no fangs for the Blaylocks...they carry little ankh-shaped knives on pendants around their necks). Miriam, we learn, has memories as far back as ancient Egypt. John she picked up in England about three hundred years ago, offering him the chance to live for ever.

Smoke and Mirrors: Deneuve lights up "The Hunger"

Miriam, however, lies. While she goes on ageless century after century, the lovers she cons into becoming like her only endure a few centuries before--in the space of just days--their internal clocks speed up and they age centuries. Problem is, they can't die. These poor bastards turn into weak, living mummies which Miriam keeps locked up in boxes in her attic.

John in the Box

If you want to know the rest, rent the DVD. Rounding out the cast, however, is a young Susan Sarandon.

Don't expect the movie to explain why Miriam gets to live forever while all her lovers wither; the Whitley Streiber book it is based upon--which is really more science fiction than horror--explains that Miriam is one of the last survivors of a parallel, blood-drinking species. Transfusing humans can help them live longer, but not indefinitely like her. The movie throws all the boring science out the window and replaces it with what REALLY matters; billowing curtains, superb classical music, and the lesbian love scene to end all lesbian love scenes.

F$@k Twilight. Like the Swedish Let the Right One In, The Hunger is vampire cinema for adults. Granted, it hit me like a ton of bricks when I was all of 15, but it has lost none of its power in the hundred or so times I have seen it since then.

The only thing that has changed for me since then is my understanding of the metaphor at the heart of the film. As a kid, I thought it was about the horror of getting old (watching David Bowie go from 30 to 110 in a few short days is horrifying cinema indeed, and the best age make-up ever put on film). Today, I suspect it is about relationships. I know how Miriam feels. There are the yummy people that you pick up and devour in clubs (tossing the empties into the incinerator you keep in your basement), and there are the ones you fall for. You tell them (like Miriam) "forever and ever," but then they end up getting old and stale. Sure, you keep them tucked away in the attic, and go up to whisper to them sometimes in the dark (classic Miriam line, talking to her mummified exes, "I love you, I love you all"), but you are already out there looking for the replacement.

I used to feel sorry for John. Now i identify with Miriam.

WICCA....THE OTHER WHITE MEAT

I ran into a witch the other day. Not the broom-stick riding, cauldron-stirring, poison-apple kind; she was the Goddess-worshipping, matriarchy, earth-power variety. In short, a Wiccan.

I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with Wicca, a modern religion with somewhat nebulous ties to traditional witchcraft. My affection is based on its core assumption, that each of us possesses the power “…to initiate change. This recognition of ‘power within’ moves us from mass passivity to personal responsible action. We are co-creators and must act with knowledge and responsibility…” (Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, Foreward, The Grimoire of Lady Sheba But this notion is common in most so-called occult traditions, which in general prefer magic (the concept that ritual action can allow the individual to affect the outcome of events) to prayer (the concept that ritual action can beseech higher powers to intervene in events). Wicca is hardly unique, therefore, in shifting focus from priests, ministers, and prophets to the individual person. But where my affection for Wicca ends is in its constant attempts to gain mainstream acceptance, forcing it to adopt more and more traits of conventional religions like Christianity or Judaism, and to “tone down” elements that might make the suburban middle class uncomfortable.

In its early stages, from its emergence in the 50s up until its explosion in the 80s, Wicca was charmingly loopy, making absurb claims and littered with a colorful cast of characters. It was more likely to just call itself Witchcraft in those days, and as a new faith worked overtime to suggest it was in fact an ancient tradition handed down in secret from ancient times. But we can hardly fault Wicca for this; all religions at the start concoct colorfully absurd origin stories. In the early days of Gerald Gardner, Alexander Sanders, Sybil Leek, and Lady Sheba, nobody seemed to be content to “just” be a witch, they had to be “kings and queens of the witches,” boasting that their families had been practicing the Craft in secret for generations and carrying out shouting matches and character assassinations against others with identical claims. As silly as this was, the tabloid spectacle of it all was still more amusing than what came later, as humorless feminists and crystal-clutching New Agers got their mitts on Witchcraft and made it painfully bland. Early on, one might catch witches dancing naked around a bonfire, howling at the moon on a spring night. Later on, they were far more likely to be in their jeans and t-shirts, sitting around a lump of quartz in the living room, holding hands and honoring “womyn power.” The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer pefectly summed up the 90s witch-scene in the fourth season episodeHush;

Buffy: (to Willow, who has just come from her first college witch circle meeting) “So, not stellar, huh?”

Willow “Talk, all talk. Blah, blah, blah Gaia. Blah, blah, blah moon. Menstrual life-force power thingy.”

Buffy: “No actual witches in your witch group?”

Willow: No. Bunch of blessedwannabes. You know, nowadays, every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister to the dark ones.”

It was largely the mass-marketing of Wicca that leeched it of any color it once had. Where in the beginning you needed to seek out a coven and hand-copy their ritual book, the post-80s scene saw bookshelves groaning under the weight of self-help witch books, all of which had carefully exorcised “questionable” elements. It wasn’t enough to be about casting spells; Wicca needed to be feminist, politically correct, and environmentally conscious to sell. As it down-played spell-casting, backed away from practicing rituals in the buff, and did away with hiearchy and degrees, Wicca became acceptable to shy, mild-mannered boys and girls who wanted to be “different” without actually being different at all.

Despite the concessions it had to make (or more likely because of them), Wicca did succeed, far better than any other occult tradition could claim. It’s slow metamorphosis from lunatic fringe to pop phenomenon mirrored the journey of early Christianity (“Gee, if you guys could get rid of all those uncomfortable Jewish elements I’m sure the Romans would buy it”). Soon, with practioners estimated in the millions (high or low millions depending on who you ask), Wicca was head and-shoulders above similar alternatives to mainstream faith, and those others could not fail but take notice. In blatant imitation of Wicca’s success, Aleister Crowley’s own Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) has been restructuring and repackaging itself as a “Church,” with priests, bishops, and masses (ironic considering Crowley’s dim view of Christianity). Pointing out the fact that in his Magick Without Tears Crowley had disapproved of calling his philosophical system a “religion,” an O.T.O, member replied to me without blinking “but its more acceptable to the public if we call it that.” Had he not been cremated, ole’ Aleister would be rolling in his grave. It’s getting to be these days that the only occult traditions out there still willing to be politically incorrect, anti-consumerism, and unapologetically antagonistic towards conventional religions are Anton LaVey’s Satanists and the chaos magicians, God bless ‘em.

In short, I suppose I like my alternative religions alternative. I’m kind of crazy that way. While I have fond memories of my adventures in Wicca (dancing all night on May Eve, high in the Adirondacks, wearing nothing but a loin cloth and blue spirals all over my skin springs to mind), the bulk of the tradition has become something so tame and tidy it leaves me cold. To my mind, the whole point of magic is to steal fire from the gods, so an alternative religion based on worship and prayer hardly seems worth leaving mainstream faith for. To each is own, of course, but as even alternative religions go mainstream, I find myself being pushed further out into the fringe.

Which is good. I like it there.

ON THE "GOTHIC"

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House”

Though I don’t recall the percise wording, it was Clive Barker who described Gothic fiction as an art form which rejects psychological and pseudo-scientific explanations in favor of poetic, magical thinking. It earns the label, “gothic,” because it recreates the Dark Ages, a time of brooding uncertainty and dark superstition. Gothic came into its own with the Age of Enlightenment; as people turned increasingly towards rationality and reason in their daily lives, the superstitious and the sinister was repressed, predictably to find expression in art. Naturally it was in England—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—that it found its strongest voice and attracted its greatest practitioners before seeping out to infect the rest of the world.

I’ve written all sorts of things since I started around the age of 12, but it is invariably the Gothic that draws me back to write again. My attraction is twofold. On one hand, I write the Gothic because I am intellectually a rational materialist. My worldview does not generally include the supernatural (though I remain open to the possibility should evidence ever present itself). I don’t believe in the notion of devils, spirits, and gods except as projections of the human condition on the cosmos at large. Because of this, I suppose, the notion of them existing is particularly terrifying to me. Which brings me to the second point. I find it very difficult to understand people who do believe in the supernatural. That people chose to live in worlds where the disembodied dead continue to exist, where evil finds genuine personification in the guise of demons, where a single spiritual dictator sits in absolute judgement over all boggles my mind. Writing “Gothic” therefore is a way to explore that side of myself I usually deny, and to try to crawl into the worldview of people I do not easily understand.

My personal feeling is that man is by nature an amphibious being that swims in the lagoon of dreams and irrationality only to emerge and crawl about on hard, dry, logic. This seems natural and necessary: otherwise there would be no art, mythology, or religion. People with no poetry in their souls as at least as broken as those who cannot separate fantasy from reality, and the worst doom I can imagine is to “grow up” and become one of those 9 to 5 people who never allow themselves moments of childish terror and wonder. To characterize such pursuits as mere “escapism” is to mark yourself not as a human, but as some gray-faced automaton.

Aside from writing and telling stories, one of the ways I keep in touch with my irrational side is my “ritual chamber.” I keep a room in my house set aside for this, as what Anton LaVey so wonderfully called an “intellectual decompression chamber.” Inside that room, the unseen universe of devils, ghosts, and angels is real, and fantasies are indulged in. But these get left by the door. What happens in that room happens to scratch a primal, primitive itch, and when I emerge I can fully be the 21st century rationalist again. The same process occurs when I sit down to write (or role-play). I switch off the part of me that says “Humbug, bah!” and allow myself to think as a child again. I suppose because my world view is in general so bleak (we exist to propogate, life has no intrinsic meaning other than living, death is the end), I need these bouts of irrationality to vent off steam.

If I found religion, perhaps I would no longer need to write at all.

MY OBJECTION TO "OBJECTIVISM"

Don’t get me wrong; I am a fan of Ayn Rand.

Though a mediocre and exceedingly long-winded novelist, Russian born Rand (1905-1982) made a name for herself primarily via her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. These works reflected and put before the public her personal philosophy, a system which eventually became known as Objectivism. When famously asked by a reporter to define her philosophy while standing on one foot, Rand replied; “Metaphysics = Objective Reality; Epistemology = Reason; Ethics = Self-interest; Politics = Capitalism.” Or to put it another way, reality exists independently of human thought or existence, reason is the only way to understand reality, the purpose of human existence is to find happiness and self-fulfilment, and a hands-off free market society facilitates the rest. For Rand, the most important thing was to think for oneself and never let those in authority—government, religious, or otherwise—dictate truth. Her “rational self-interest” included within it full respect for the individual rights of others, and encouraged people to take their ideals and through the manipulation of reality imbue them with physical form—art in the highest sense. Rand’s is an attractive, reasonable philosophy that would do away with a great deal of the idiocy we live with today. It is hard NOT to agree with her.

But the problem with Rand is that she died before the Gospel According to Bjork;

If you ever get close to a human, and human behavior, be ready to get confused. There’s definitely no logic to human behavior…

That Rand spectacularly misjudged the human animal is clear from her own personal life. For her, human beings could be taught to rationally judge their actions and act in their best interests. What she failed to consider is that a substantial portion of human behavior, quite possibly even the bulk of it, is instinctual, and that our actions tend to be dictated by subconscious impulses rather than rational and considered responses. I would submit before the court exhibit A, Rand’s own infamous affair with Nathaniel Branden.

Twenty-five years her junior, Branden was a follower of Rand’s and one of the arch-advocates of Objectivism. The two became close, and then romantically involved, despite the fact that both were already married and the considerable age gap between them. Both managed to convince their spouses, however, that their affair was supremely logical. It was only reasonable that two intellectuals of their calibre be drawn to one another. Thus the relationship went forward with spousal consent, and Branden rose to become Rand’s second-in-command and “intellectual heir.”

Nothing wrong with this; everyone seems happy. But wait…here comes the punch line.

Eventually similar “logic” convinced Branden it was time for him to take up with an attractive younger model, in addition to his wife and Rand. Furious, Rand made a public spectacle of disowning Branden and villifying him, the Ur-Objectivist proving the old cliché about hell, fury, and scorned women holds true for even the supremely rational. Her pain and rage devastated the organization they had built together, causing a rift amongst Objectivists. To my mind, there is no clearer indication that Objectivism is deeply flawed when its two highest advocates were incapable of acting in their own rational self-interests.

Message, Spock? “Humans, Ayn, ain’t Vulcans.”

No system of philosophy can succeed so long as it fails to take into account our animal natures. Behaviors demonized by religions and ignored by Objectivism have in fact contributed to the survival of our species, otherwise, either they would no longer exist orwe wouldn’t. Even the most basic understanding of natural selection bears this out. We may tell ourselves that our territoriality, violent impulses, and over-powering sexual urges are—like the appendix—useless vestiges of a primal past, but very little in human history or current events bears this out. As uncomfortable as “civilized” people are with the fact, there is very little in modern human behavior that is functionally any different from other pack-mammals. Like chimpanzees or wolves we have hierarchically organized packs, we remain fiercely territorial, will kill to defend our territory, and once our bellies are full spend considerable amounts of time thinking about breeding. If modern Americans, ancient Romans, and a band of gorillas all have much the same behaviors, perhaps it is time to acknowledge they are vital aspects of our being.

Rand also makes the mistake of assuming everybody wants to be “John Galt.” The truth is, there are many types of people, some of whom are fiercely independent, some who want to lead, and some to whom the idea of standing out fills them with mortal terror. Again, we see the same in other species, and it may be something in our DNA. I’ve heard the arguments that if we teach people to think for themselves, they all would, but such egalitarianism excludes the possibility that many people like to be told what to do. And while I would agree that our current education system is designed to create workers rather than free thinkers, isn’t it odd that some free thinkers still emerge from the system? Perhaps free-thinking is something inherent in their natures, something that cannot be beaten out of them even through the banality of modern education.

It would be nice to think that everyone could learn personal responsibility and act rationally. But there are a great many people who will have sex without that condom knowing the dangers, people who smoke knowing it might kill them, people who reach for the sixth or seventh drink before they have to drive home. Surely they have been educated to the dangers, but the fact is the urge to feel good often triumphs over reason. It may well be that before we can improve the human condition, we need to figure out some way to safely satisfy and indulge our animal behaviors. Ignoring them hasn’t seemed to have worked so well, not for Rand or anyone else.