cockadoodledon't,
or annoyance avoidance
by phloiyd, siem reap, january, 2014
are chickens talking to each other? is the vocal spasm, the euphemistic "cockadoodledoo," just an instinctive, reflexive response to another chicken's strained retching? is it literally an echo that i cannot distinguish? has the same chicken run down the road and screeched from farther away to hack my brain and insert this conundrum?
my neighbors have a lot of chickens. statistically, i think, the one next to my house is usually the first to screech. about five seconds later an identical screech arises but apparently from farther away. occasionally, another screech from still farther emerges. this prompts me to suspect that there is a network of chicken gossip, and that chickens can hear other chickens from farther away than people can hear chickens (a hypothetical biology factoid like the factoid that owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.) the chicken network is online as i write this.
i have a pleasant solution to the chicken mess. i sleep with "earbuds" inserted, my galaxy (phone) sending me a dreamy "ambient space music" which has no percussive component or rhythm and which puts me to sleep in about 4 minutes, and i do this partly because the chicken network comes online at random times of the day and night, and the three layers of the network closest to my window are loud enough to wake me up from a benzodiazepine sleep. oh, i forgot to mention that one of the reasons the space music puts me to sleep so fast is that i pop a valium about half an hour before bedtime.
i live in a huge house, which looks like a huge house, but is in fact divided into about 12 small apartments and rooms for rent, in the very small and most corrupt country of cambodia. [this type of thing has often prompted me to wonder why people buy big houses with lots of rooms when they can only be in one room at a time. this is one of the reasons that i have only one room - and there is the fact that i have almost no money. but still it seems like a valid question. i can stay in my room and pretend it's the best room in a 45 room house. at least in my case i am glad that the owner of this big house has a lot of rooms so i can live here.]
often when i remove the earbuds in the morning, the chicken network is online, and my first conscious experience of the day is the gargled, strained, wretched, throat-gnawing screech of the chickens. a random event of evolution left this sad creature attempting to make a sound which it can't make, and combined this with an irresistible urge to try and try again until the intended correct sound is heard. if chickens are intelligent, they are making that heinous sound to make people think they are not tasty to eat. i am a vegetarian.
as if this super abundance of chickens were not bad enough, about the only other bird i ever see here is a sparrow. a family of sparrows lives in my broken a/c. the kids i worked with told me that they had killed most of the birds around our village and eaten them. i have seen several articles online attributing the absence of birds to wartime starvation. i have seen five of my own students each with a slingshot all trying to kill the same bird. it was so high in a cheuteil tree that i could not get a glimpse of it. so my neighborhood is devoid of "songbirds" and the kind of exotic beautiful birds i saw in costa rica. they were here, and people killed them all. that seems to be the trend globally.
before i get to the point, if there is a specialist in bird genetics and evolution in th audience, please write to dinosaur_eggs@yahoo.com and tell me why this heinous noise assists the chicken in survival and therefore reproduction. does this ugly noise scare away predators? is it a freak vestige of mutation? is it possible for us to teach chickens a new song? what are the boundary values and parameters? gallus gallus domesticus is in the same phylum as human beings. this must intrigue. now i shall attempt to weld this chicken story prosaically to my point about people never being satisfied with their situation.
in the usa, i have thought many times, there are gated communities where people pay millions of dollars to live in fine houses where agreements called "covenants" protect them from atrocities such as a neighbor painting a long stretch of "shadow box" style fence a deep hue of purple, or from neighbors having chicken, pig, or crocodile farms in their yards. more general covenants rule out unpredictable disturbances in advance by prohibiting noise in general, and whatever else people in power find annoying:
"For example, a racial covenant in a Seattle, Washington neighborhood stated, 'No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race.' These covenants are made by "home-owners associations." [SIC regarding the capital letters.] (wiki) covenants smack of an old movie with peck, gregory, entitled, "gentleman's agreement," where peck plays a news reporter disgusted with bigotry who pretends to be jewish and then writes about how people disrespect his human rights and humiliate him. i have never heard tell of any "home-owners association" in cambodia. everyone eats chickens, sells chickens, or their eggs. everyone understands that chickens are an essential part of life here, and their screeching is only annoying to me because i am a bubble-boy vegetarian who craves not to hear the screeching. no one else notices it. or they are very effective at disregarding the annoyance.
there is actually a point to this paper. the point is a question, "how much of one sort of pain are you willing to endure to avoid another sort of pain?" you can replace the word "pain" with the word "annoyance" if you believe as i do that most residents of california for example have never experienced actual pain, and their complaints can be distilled comparatively to the definition of the word "annoyance." the question is thus. people routinely change jobs because they hate their work, their boss, or their salary. they change jobs and enjoy the satisfaction of the change for about a week, and then realize they have traded one set of problems for another. without some analysis or "soul searching" this swapping process can continue for a lifetime. the chickens are loud. but i can set up a chair at another rental, sit for an hour and experience the new problems i would encounter if i moved there. the hope that there will be no problems after the switch is what keeps people in the mindset. this mindset also sells a lot of "self help" books, such as the paradoxical "how to think for yourself." so, how much of this annoyance will you endure to avoid that one? there are several important components of life which are involved in this question.
this question is also partly motivated by an ongoing, 30 year long, now quiescent argument between myself and my father regarding the value of "insurance." people don't have insurance in cambodia, so i will try briefly to clarify that "insurance" is a contract called a "policy," sold as a product by companies which guarantee recompense to the buyer in the event of the pre specified undesirable occurrence (such as "3rd degree burns across 90% of your body," as my father puts it, destruction of the home by fire, car crash, organ transplant, etc.) which both the buyer and the seller hope will not happen, but for mutually opposing reasons. the seller hopes the buyer will not crash the car, and the buyer hopes the same, but it is the buyer who loses the game. as such, insurance is a hedge or "hedging" investment (there is a link to "hedging" in footnotes below.) cambodian people know instinctively, or their hungry bellies tell them that insurance is a scam that wealthy people who burn money buy. cambodian people do not know that insurance is required by law in the usa, where i estimate my parents pay $12k annually for various kinds of insurance. the car insurance is the one required by law, and i guess this is the result of the financial power of the insurance lobby, as well as the fact that congressmen own insurance companies. like all pyramid schemes and ponzi scams, they pretend to be true believers when they are the only ones who benefit from the law.
the idea of insurance is to provide people a feeling of protection and security. the price of insurance is high, and most people have to work hard to pay for insurance. the problem is that the average result of buying insurance is a loss of 90 cents per dollar spent (statistically, that is. there are some chronically ill people whose insurance companies are being plundered by hospitals and pharmacies, and those companies pass those costs on to their customers in the form of "insurance premiums," the euphemistic term for the cost of insurance. in other words the well are paying the bills of the sick (in the subset of human beings who are "insured.") The proof of this statement is the obvious: if insurance companies were paying the bills then there would be no insurance companies. and this is why there is no insurance in 3rd world countries where everyone is already sick.
three monumentally stressful dramas that all people engage in regularly will converge with the insurance, covenant, and chicken dramas already described. i would like to describe changing jobs, moving house, and changing relationships (marriages or partnerships) as futile attempts to escape from problems. these changes are futile because they amount to trading a familiar set of problems for a new and unfamiliar set of problems. engrained in the forever search for higher income is the belief that more money will raise you to a higher power level in the game of annoyance reduction. it will not. more money only brings more problems and more headaches. but especially americans have been so utterly brainwashed by sophisticated marketing techniques that they can no longer implement their own original thoughts! They hop from one commercial promised land to another, meanwhile wasting the money they traded their irreplaceable time and worked so hard to get for nothing, no progress. a cycle.
so now it is time to listen to the chickens and try to decide how to answer the question: "if i pay $200k for an ivy league degree will it rocket me to the top of the job market so that i can haul in six figures, so that i can live in a gated community sterilized and free of all forms of annoyance, with an equally well-educated spouse or partner, so that i can pay 30% of my six figures to the federal and state governments, and another five percent to insurance companies to provide a sense of safety and security, and at the end of the day will i be better off than the guy who lives next door to the chicken mess?"
of course i am asking myself this question in reverse. but i have already answered the question for myself. when i hear the chickens screech i remember my bosses at xerox where i worked as a coder or software developer. i remember tim and mike, smiling as they lie to everyone about everything, their smug compliance in the machinery of capitalism. a day with heartless men like that makes me miss the chickens. i suppose there is a unique answer for each person out there in cyberspace. for some of my students in cambodia who are just starting out with ambitions of wealth have a long journey ahead. i wish that i could help them. but i agree with hesse that the real teacher is inside each person.
when i lived in the village in cambodia where i volunteered for 2 years, there was a whole team of eight screeching chickens roosting in a tree right outside my window. i thought they were "free range" chickens (a bogus green marketing term from the usa.) i attached a line from my window to a limb of the tree so i could yank the line, shake the tree, dispatch the chickens, and return to sleep. there was some evil satisfaction in watching them run away chaotically. i knew that they found their roost before sunset, and they sought a feeling of safety and security the same as every other sentient being. but when my sleep was disrupted i forgot compassion and sent them running in all directions. then one day i heard the mother of the woman i rented from why i was trying to chase her chickens away. i apologized quickly. i did not know the chickens "belonged" to her. i had never seen her exploit the chickens or in other words i did not see how she benefited from having eight screeching chickens installed in a tree so close to the house that its branches scraped the wall when the wind blew. that's the mindset of an american trying to adapt to life in a 3rd world village. even after three years of time spent adapting i still catch myself banging my head on the culture shock wall.
the unexpected beauty of living in cambodia keeps me here. the total lack of in-your-face christians of 40,000 varieties trying to convert me... i love that one. the near total absence of the enforcement of law... i know there is a written law here, but no one enforces it unless they can reap some corruption money in the process. however, the ironic benefit of living in a lawless land is that there are exponentially fewer crimes here than in the usa. i guess guns are too expensive when you are starving, and what's the point of having a gun when there is no one that you need to shoot? in the usa it seems that everyone needs to have a gun because everyone else has one. unintended consequences, serendipity, the upside-down view of all things, are among the daily surprises which keep life interesting.
i don't presume to have the answer for anyone else. i just watch the madness unfold around me and wonder why people do something instead of just sitting there. i can still remember when i used to do something. now i just sit here.
what inspired this journal entry? a friend just sent me a news article i had not heard of, and i realized how completely and happily out of the american loop i am. it was the story about ulbricht and his silk road. a google search of this topic produced 500,000 results, and i had never heard of the story! i love it.
notes:
*** for a definition of "hedging" see the second link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/07/hedging-intro.asp