Ocean View is reproduced with permission from Gary Kibbins.

And he might reply, employing his extended spiritual vocabulary, that all raw experience contains the potential for developing a compelling alternative, like that offered, for example, by the communists, who believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our personal sufferings, thinking that mankind is wholly good, but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature, as again and again we find fault with our civilization for the pitiless imposition of instinctual renunciation, and for promoting the self’s selfish negativity in a social world which, as everyone knows, is weakened and degraded by such actions, even while knowing that no ego can mature and flourish without first exposing itself to the cruel disenchantments enforced by civilization, while simultaneously competing with other often belligerent egos for the scattered scraps of satisfaction which can be scavenged there, as Bob, who has now acquired a motive for keeping custody of his female, understanding that historically the process of founding families was connected with the need for continued genital satisfaction, envisions himself gazing out on a vast and melancholy landscape of ill-fated protagonists, all those now defeated, bitter species-males enthusiastically responding to the call for retribution, contriving elaborate strategies for securing the loyalty of their sexual objects in order to prevent them from being seduced or seized by interlopers, only to succumb to the heartbreak of their never-ending ordinariness, and the knowledge that they represent nothing more than hopelessness and negativity, scavenging, again, for those voluptuously empty experiences that can only defer the inevitability of disappointment, knowing (while not really “knowing”) that disappointment will be ingeniously (but transparently…) disguised as blissful sensation, where the only recourse is to seek fulfillment in aggression, as a defense against suffering, as that is the one choice remaining to those whose only real commitment is to survival and reproduction, which may seem a reasonable alternative to giving in to hysterical fear, whose shrill, needy victims whine with disheartening predictability:

“But what about me?

What about my primary drives?”

Ocean View from Gary Kibbins on Vimeo.

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