Training Max: Chapter 9

 

Having found that she referenced Sir Terry Pratchett so many times in her blog, for all that he had read of it (she wasn’t sure), and in all their conversations, (all of which he paid attention to) he commented to her one morning, “You really love Pratchett, don’t you?”, adding that he didn’t – or couldn’t – read Discword, and preferred Neil Gaiman’s American Gods instead.

“I have two things to say to that. One, I find that one outgrows Gaiman around the time of Trigger Warning. He is good only insofar as you are in your 20s. Second, I have read all of Sir Pratchett’s corpus, save one: his last book. I don’t want to say goodbye to him again. Not yet. My favorite book of his is Thief of Time, although it did not contain characters that I loved: Sir Samuel Vimes, Esme Weatherwax, Patrician Havelock Vetinari." She had planned to call her firstborn Havelock; he, Vlad. That ought to tell anybody all that they need to know about why they were dating.

"However," she continued, "my favorite quote is found in another book. It goes: Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo." She likes her cows.

“You would have dated Jacob,” he said, referring to his younger brother. “I think he read all of Pratchett, too.”

Being reminded of his younger brother, he now was reminded of his older half-brother, with distaste, who was blessed with an equally distasteful name, Danny. He was on the level of Andrew Tatehood, fashioning himself as the neoliberal, atheistic man-child who thought he was being clever by not attending their grandmother’s funeral and emailing everyone in his family the next day, informing them of how he spun a treatise coming from his deep-rooted Irish Catholicism. It was worse than seeing an actor wet himself on stage. It was worse than Max himself pretending to forget Chris’ name when fucking, then later admitting to her that he was being coy. He later learned that she hated coyness.

In an effort to forget this “nitwit,” as he referred to Danny, he turned to Chris’ blog, having a rare spare time from his two-week training. He read:

This is not another piece about gods: it is a piece about man.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche spoke of two moralities: that of a master and of a slave. It might be the closest we get to what can be his ethical system, as he prefers the former over the latter and powerfully encourages man to do the same.

Man - and in particular, men - should have master morality than slave morality, in other words. I would tend to agree with him, if only because slave morality degrades man into a softness not ultimately not acceptable if one is to hope for any kind of self-redemption.

As is my wont, I try to be privy to and figure out the engine behind things. And after perhaps three days of intermittent distraction that hides the dumb bulldozer of my brain, I figured it out: the engine of slave morality is insecurity.

I have been with insecure men before: and if I may be bothered to cast a warning flag for all of my sex, there is no worse fate than being with one.

For you see, insecure men will sully and hobble you in ways a pebble dripping with disease cannot: you will be the receiving end of such impotent fury against their own self-unworthiness. For they tend to resort to weapons, or ultimately weaponize themselves, against the projected enemy that is the world. It is weak men that hit you. It is weak men that bow to you, wanting full well for you to be at the ground with them. It is weak men, after all, that destroy. Weak men require weapons for they have no shields. Weak women are worse: they tend to take Nietzsche literally.

Dionysos, the Nietzschean cognate for the master, need no such weapons: all he needs is controlled insanity. He alone can accept his godhood with the grace and fervor of a child, laugh at himself - oh, how powerful laughter is! - and be a sense of stability no whimpering egomaniac could be. The ego of a god is not an ego, after all, it is a condition of possibility for transcending mere ego itself. It is that which ultimately defines strength, and worth, and awareness.

He read it twice, remembering that he had the then-justifiable temerity to suggest that Chris did not know her Nietzsche enough.

Something’s slightly wrong with this one, he thought. She never writes manifestos, or at least this strongly, not knowing that she did write that piece after yet another tearful conversation with her sister, who fated herself into a life of cuckoldry. Taking a look at her Facebook profile, he read the latest post: Chris consoling her sister (whose name was Allily, he found out) with the poignant song from Sara Bareilles, She Used to be Mine, while appending the note: “You never lost your fire. There is no 'used to;' I remember all of you, and you have been and will always be that beautiful pie.” This was long before Allily had her first tattoo, years after their mother’s death, reading “Still I rise,” in Morse code.

Chris’ number of tattoos outnumbered his by three (his was an amalgam on a wolf and a ram). Thinking of her now, he allowed himself some small space in his head to miss her. He remembered her left arm marked with two Latin sayings that ran up to her shoulders, (one of which was professionally and thus painfully tattooed by her eighth ex, by the name of Krypton, thus marking and sullying her for life) her right arm a beautiful mess of peonies, and her shoulder with her mother’s name, obtained mere hours after her funeral.

Gods, he missed her. Only very slightly, though, because his Captain, who was cursed with bad teeth and blessed with a perfectly balanced center of gravity (thus rendering his chakras all open) was approaching. He avoided his eyes, but then the Captain went straight toward him.