You can lead a deer to a hole in the ground, but you can't make it be your friend.

When I was four I dug a hole in the woods. It was about 6” deep and at the bottom was a loop of tree root I had exposed. I had dug away with a stick until I could get my little hand through the loop which somehow then assured me it was deep enough. I packed up my stick and headed back to the house absolutely secure in my belief I would return the next day to find a deer caught in my ‘snare’. I returned the next morning a little worried about how to handle my newly caught deer only to find the hole much as I’d left it. Some of the dirt had sloughed back in, the root had dried out and it didn’t seem near as impressive as it had the day before. I was not disappointed as much as perplexed. I had assumed that merely creating the necessary conditions would cause an irrevocable chain of events – the deer would see the hole and think “Hey, that wasn’t there before, I better stick my foot in there and…ooh I’m stuck. Curse the humans and their big brains.” – and I could then come along and set it free so we could be friends and I’d be the star of the bus-stop with my own pet deer that came to play-school with me. My coat hook at play-school had a sticker of a playful Holstein calf above it and I was considering how to approach Mrs. Johnson about having it changed to a deer. Surely she’d at least have a Bambi somewhere.

Thirty odd years later I wrote a blog on a popular thing called the Internet, you may remember it. It was a service for your computer where you could buy crap, get instant weather information and view images of people having various objects stuffed up them. And on this blog I posted this image from Swedish National Geographic where I had added my own text which I translated into Swedish with some on-line translator. I have no idea if what the translator came up with actually makes any sense in Swedish but it didn’t matter. The idea was to make out like I’d been sent the image, which clearly mentions my name, but couldn’t read the rest because it was in Swedish. I figured at least one net-geek with nothing else to do would try to prove his or her on-line prowess by running the text through a translator and then telling me it said “Skookum Joe is a bad, bad man”, which is what it was supposed to say, or maybe something even better after it had been de-translated. Discussion would then ensue on what it meant, there would be material for more posts and the “fact” it had been published in the first place would slip quietly into acceptance. And that was the goal, to convince people something was real by distracting them with the details, in this case the translation problem.

As it turned out I don’t think anyone even read the text, as all the comments were then about polar bears. Once again my deer had escaped. It’s human nature to believe, or want to believe, that of all possible outcomes the one we want most is what will indeed transpire. And we are constantly thwarted by it. Many stories of disappointment begin with “I just thought…” and follow a chain of assumptions which lead ever deeper into the murky swamp of human wiring. The answer is simple, lower your expectations.

That doesn’t mean going around expecting the worst, for that would be just as foolish as always expecting the ideal outcome. No, what I mean is set up the conditions as best you can and if the deer does not come, well then maybe it’s a rabbit trap. I did not expect the Swedish thing to work, I hoped it would, I thought it might, but I did not expect it to and so I wasn’t disappointed. Besides, I got nothing against polar bears.