sheeple and wolves.3

There must be sheep. Wolves need to eat.

And then it was over, the overlord called the game.

A powwow was gathered, all of us Indians sitting in circle and then it got interesting.

Straight away the chief executive convoed the conflab. “What did you think about the fact that one person never stopped?” One woman puled, “I though he was an idiot, unable to understand the instructions. I kept wondering when you (the teach) would tell him what to do.” Several people their frustration and anger towards me. Another several people intimated their confusion over whether or not I was starting an already interrupted gambol. Even the overseer said, “that while she thought the range of responses was fascinating, she would prefer that we keep to her instructions so that pure chaos did not ensue.”

The she asked me what i thought, why I did what I did.

Twas simple. “As this is an improvisational class, I improvised.”

sheeple and wolves.2

I am no sheep. I eat no sheep. I fuck no sheep. I pity no sheep.

I take a class in improvisational comedy on Sunday night’s. In our first class, about half-way through, we were asked by the instructor to play a game.

The game would work as follows:

All in the class (about 30 of us) would dance around the room. Any person, could at any time, stop. When everyone noticed that someone had stopped they would stop. Soon everyone will have stopped and the freeze for a brief moment and then one person would start dancing and everyone would start dancing. The instructor predicted to that we would achieve synchronicity in our stopping and starting like good little sheep.

But no, not this boy chaos, not this wolf. I took the road less traveled, an unspoken fuck you.

As we began to move, our bodies twisting and turning in motion, I exaggerated, pushing my limbs to the edge of ugly. I became a big, flailing, awkward ballerina, and everyone saw me. Then it happened, the first sheep stopped. All the sheep followed until everyone was frozen in a cacophonous web. That was everyone but me. I did not stop but continued to swing my limbs around with grotesque ambiguity, I never stopped.

As the momentum grew, the energy of the stopping and the starting grew with it. The sheep fell into their comfortable rhythm of following the rules, they achieved, as the boss expected, harmony. Well, everyone but the wolf…

Sheeple and Wolves.

I am no sheep though I live on a great plain of grass and shepherds.

As Dylan Thomas wrote…

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We’ve been trained from birth that the rules of men must be followed and revered and never questioned. If we come to a red light at a four-way stop in a flat land visible from all directions for miles with no one around, we stop. We don’t think for ourselves, we are sheeps.