The Silence of the Sheep

Can you still hear them screaming, TC?

Heads up: This article is filled with a lot of whining and whinging but try to bear with me as there’s a point to it (hopefully some funny whining and whinging). Also, fair warning: it’s not about nutrition or taking care of your body because, goddammit, I’m multifaceted, I’m a utility player and occasionally like to write about other stuff that matters to me. So there. That being said, I don’t know if I pulled off what I set out to do. Oh well, I have to continue to cast the literary nets into the sea, even though I occasionally pull up nothing but a few license plates and a dead gangster.

Baahhh! Baahhh!

The bleating of the sheep! Nothing like a farm. Nothing like growing things. And you should see the winter wheat. Greenest stuff you ever saw.

Only I'm not on a farm, I’m at the goddam post office.

This happened a few years ago, but I was in line to mail a package and there was an Asian woman standing directly in front of me with someone who appeared to be her teen-agerish daughter. Nothing unusual there but the girl was consistently digging at her nose and inexplicably making sheep noises, loud sheep noises.

Baahhh! Baahhh!

Rather than endure this uncomfortable situation with some polite indifference, nearly everyone in the post office was sneaking glances at the faux sheep. The rudest by far was the old coot standing directly in front of the two-legged sheep-girl hybrid.

He made no attempt to mask his rubbernecking. In fact, he did a full 180-degree turnaround and his face was only inches away from barnyard girl. He looked a lot like Droopy Dog, only his mouth was wide open-- either out of sheer astonishment or the inability of his aged facial muscles to keep his gaping pie hole shut.

But Dolly the sheep was oblivious. She scooped a bugger out of her nose, examined it with all the wonder of a child watching Winnie the Pooh for the first time, and wiped it on her defeated Tiger mother’s dress before continuing her bleating.

Baahhh! Baahhh!

I figured she was making like a sheep for one of four reasons:

1. She put a chopstick in the ear when she was a child and tried to see if she could push it to the other side.

2. She was making a shrewd social commentary on how modern man has been reduced to sheep.

3. She was plain bat-shit loopy.

4. She was mocking me.

Given my state of mind back then, I was inclined to choose door number 4.

Sure, why not? The whole world was mocking me anyhow.

It has to do with what was in the box I was holding and why I was standing in line at the Post Office alongside with what could have been the cast from a remake of Twin Peaks.

Three weeks prior to that episode, on Ground Hog's Day, my first book was printed. I've toyed with several in the past, but this was the first that made its way to print. For a writer, having your first book published is a big deal. It's probably like the feeling an athlete gets when they sign a pro contract, or like Olive felt when she learned she'd get to compete in her first Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

I absolutely thought the world would change after my book was published. There'd no doubt be lots of what Gen Z calls guap (ridiculous amounts of money)! I'd surely field offers from talk shows and podcasts. And, at the very least, I’d get congratulatory and insightful emails or texts from friends and family, all of whom had presumably rushed to read my book.

But the world didn't change. Not one lick. No offers from talk shows or podcasts. And the notes from friends and colleagues? I got one from my attorney and the Danish stoner who cuts my hair offered me a congratulatory joint. That was it. Few friends or family members even bothered to mention the book, let alone read it. Even the people I thanked in the goddam forward of the book didn’t appear to have read it.

And that was what stung the most but rather than give up just yet, I was standing in line at the post office with the sheep woman to send another copy of the book to yet another content manager.

Kill me now, I thought. Or jam a pen in my brain and let me become a ruminant-like sheep person so me and the sheep-girl can blissfully bleat at the world and spend the evenings taking baths together in Woolite.

Anyhow, I’d largely forgotten about that particular hurt. All the emotions had scarred over and my ego, despite still being a little punch-drunk and unable to eat pea soup at the diner without having some of it dribble down its chin, had largely regained its equilibrium.

But sigh, after all these years, the pain has returned. Like a long-dormant but recently reawakened herpes virus on my pee-pee, my psyche and ego are again covered with painful lesions.

And it’s all because of because of my Substack page, the one you’re presumably reading now.

Again, I foolishly thought things would change after I started the page. I thought my articles would be shared by hundreds and then, thousands, and then exponentially until they were being read by every man, woman, child, mammal, and marsupial who had some of that-there Internet. If not that, maybe a few thousand people at least.

But, of course, that didn’t happen. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing so much whining and whinging about it. But the worst part, again, was that I didn’t/haven’t, except for a few exceptions, get/gotten any acknowledgement from friends or family.

This I don’t understand.

I’m not the only one who’s victim to this kind of insensitivity, though. I can think of dozens of examples. My wife, for instance, was a former Miss California bodybuilding champion and could have been a pretty good powerlifter had she chosen that weighty path. She still trains every day, much the same as she has for over 30 years but no one – not her friends or her family – as ever asked her single question about this important part of her life.

Similarly, a friend of mine is a music composer. He manages a coffee shop, but he spends his nights and off-days writing and performing music. None of his family or friends have ever bothered to listen to his compositions, either.

You can probably think of several examples too. You might even be the victim of this kind of indifference from friends and family. You might be a good at your job, good at freakin’ golf, or, I dunno’, maybe you take some pride in how you cook up roadkill and serve it up with all the fixin’s and can make it taste as good as restaurant food.

It doesn’t matter the activity or skill, most of us are starved for a little bit of consideration or courtesy but most of all, starved for a little caring.

If you can’t relate to what I’m talking about, imagine that your passion was photography and you had a room in your house where you hung up each of the framed photos you’d taken. Now imagine no one in your family, none of your visiting friends, had ever bothered to crack open the door to so much as peek at your work – even the non-pornographic stuff -- let alone comment on it.

How would that make you feel? They surely can’t be that insensitive, can they? Or is that they’re just too self-centered to show some caring to others they supposedly care about? I suspect it’s an unsavory blend of the two.

Maybe you’re thinking that the indifference me and others I know experience is caused by a lack of talent on the part of the writer/weightlifter/musician/roadkill chef; that if anybody was pretty good at what they do, friends and family would surely take notice.

It’s possible, but that’s not the point. Friends and family are supposed to look through that door.

Here’s where I distinguish between two important words: approval and acknowledgement. Approval means a favorable opinion or commentary, while acknowledgement means noticing what someone has done and expressing some interest in it.

Granted, I’ll occasionally get approval from people who care about me. It usually consists of something like “great article!”, or the least analytical and most frustrating critique of all, “It was interesting.”

That kind of stuff is okay and appreciated, but here comes the big difference between approval and acknowledgement: We all want approval, but we all need acknowledgement. The latter is a simple, powerful way of showing respect and, more importantly, showing caring while the former is a toss-away compliment given without thought, like saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes.

I’ll give you an example that most of you have probably experienced somewhere along the line, either as an adult or child: Children want approval from their parents and most non-crack-addict parents dole it out in playground-sand shovel-fulls.

“Oh, that’s a great drawing of a horsey, Kevin.” “You struck out so nicely at the end of your T-ball game, Tobey.” “Oh, look at how well you stayed in the lines when you colored those pictures of genitalia from Daddy’s anatomy textbook.”

We/they talk to kids as if they were Billy Mumy in that classic Twilight Zone episode where the little monster can use his mind to turn people he doesn’t like into a human Jack-in-the-box or transport them into the cornfield.

It's good that you made all the cats in the neighborhood explode, Anthony, It’s real good!

But what children need is acknowledgement. Fuck Anthony. Let him send you into the cornfield. Adults need it too. Approval, on the other hand, is hollow. It doesn’t take any thought. It often reeks of horseshit. And the recipient of such approval, be they child or be they adult, ultimately knows it too.

Besides, give too much approval to everyone for anything and you end up with a society in the throes of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is pretty much where we are today.

Acknowledgement, however, shows interest. It often gives constructive criticism that helps children/people improve. Most importantly, it shows caring and in all probability causes the recipient of such caring to blossom.

So, how do we give acknowledgement? Simple. We ask thoughtful questions. “What is the horsey doing in your drawing, Kevin?” “Why did you color the genitalia green, Tobey?” “Why do write 200-word sentences in what ends up reading like the patter of an auctioneer at a cattle auction and why do you use so many obscure cultural references in your articles, TC?”

Those kinds of questions tell the recipient that you actually might have taken a moment to consider the item, topic, or act; to have thought about it a moment and that you might actually care about the person of whom you’re asking the question.

Why bother asking these questions?

Because it’s what friends do, it’s what caring family members do.

That, ultimately, is a lot more useful and satisfying than approval. Now, no one expects strangers or casual readers/observers/passers-by to express this kind of caring, but you have the right to expect it from friends and family.

You may wonder what gives me the emotional cojones to write about this stuff. After all, social media is infested with Gomers who think, just because they lift weights or make their own granola that they somehow have wisdom to share. 

Fair enough. I studied mental and emotional development for almost 9 years under the tutelage of people who’d devoted their lives to that science. As such, I feel compelled to sometimes write about what I learned.

Anyhow, at this point of the article, you may want to ask, “So, Clarice, er, I mean Terrence, have the lambs… I mean the sheep, stopped bleating?”

Yeah, they have (although I don’t know the current whereabouts of Sheep Girl). I currently write for myself, which is ultimately what every writer must do lest they lose their sanity. I realize that getting acknowledgement from friends and family is, after all these years, unlikely to happen and as far as getting more readers, I really haven’t done a lick of marketing so that’s on me.

I take solace in the idea that you, perhaps from reading this article, might start to ask questions of people you care about instead of tossing out rote and often insincere compliments.

If the recipient of such acknowledgement is an adult, it’ll mean more to them than you can realize. If the recipient of such acknowledgement is a child or young person, it may help them to grow up to be a better human being, one who knows their strengths and weaknesses and knows that they were raised by people who actually demonstrated caring.

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