You gotta serve somebody

I've been having all kinds of profound thoughts lately, but whenever I sit down to write on this blog, the only thing that comes to mind is a mental picture of a solar-system sized vagina. No, not a black hole. A real vagina, with labia and a clitoris and...well, I don't really know how to match the other parts to their names. I know some names of some other parts, but I don't really know what they are. Oh, wait...cervix! I know what a cervix is!

That's not really true. Well, it's true that I know what a cervix is, but it isn't true that I've been receiving mental images of vaginas that are measured in lightyears.

I have been thinking a lot about the Bob Dylan song, "You Gotta Serve Somebody." "It may be the devil, or it may be the lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."

In a world where things could be better, and in which making them better requires change, and in which change occurs through the actions of organizations, not individuals, just what is a self-absorbed contrarian skeptic to do? If you want to have an impact, you have to cooperate with other people, which means that you're going to have to COMPROMISE! You have to be willing to join a movement, an organization, that you might not agree with on a lot of things.

But, how the hell do you draw the line between responsible compromise and cowardly cave-in?

When I was briefly considering becoming an elementary school teacher, I had an interesting conversation with my dad. He never had any ambition to be anything other than a teacher. But, he had perrenial conflicts with his boss (whom he called Big Nuts, for his predilection for power tripping). In dad's view, Big Nuts saw Dad's intelligence as a threat to his power.

Anyway, Dad told me, "if you don't like having a boss, you only got one choice. You got to become the boss, which means you have to kiss ass and knot-up (where a tie)"

This, of course, is a variation on Rick Flair's famous line, "To be the man, you got to beat the man."

Not sure how to bring this all together. Something like, "if perfectionism prohibits you from joining a group and compromising, you'll never get anything done." And, "if you don't like compromising, but like the power of the group, you got to become the boss."

Plus, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I wonder what giant vaginas get?