A Drumbeat of Humiliation

Life can be difficult. Sure, there are triumphs and joys, daily victories, small moments of pride that swell our breasts and put a skip in our step. Some of us do better than others at the quotidian obstacle course that is life, some do worse, but in the end we all fail. We all die.

I subscribe to a Hobbesian view of life: the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Our various social contracts may have lengthened things just a bit and shielded us from some of the sharper stings but the basic shape of things has not really changed. I take a Half Empty Glass sort of view, if you will.

So for me, it’s a daily battle against petty humiliations. The big ones I no longer really see, they are the sea in which I sail my ship, but the small ones, they are the waves that wash over the sides of my metaphorical boat and slap me in the face. It is these little ones that make life nasty and brutish.

My most recent slap arrived last night. I lost at tick tack toe. That would be the elementary children’s game where, as wikipedia says:

Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is most often played by young children

How do you recover, and move on from losing a game “most often played by young children” because they have not yet figured out the game will always end in a draw.

Sigh.