Cancel or Decouple, that is the question

 

Cancel or Decouple?

Have you been cancelled? I believe we all have in one way or another. We were cancelled by our neighbours. I don’t know why although my wife blames the dogs, particularly Pippa, our female cairn terrier who likes to pee on Gordon’s pristine lawn. They used to like Finian, our male dog, because he would visit them and watch the goldfish in their pond. Then, Finny pooped on the lawn and that was the end of his visits. But they’d still say hello when we’d catch the other’s eye while out gardening, hanging laundry, weeding the stones or whatever. I do that on the street. If someone catches my eye, I say hello whether I know them or not. It must be an old man thing.

One day, they just stopped saying hello or acknowledging our existence whatsoever which isn’t easy because there isn’t a fence. (Weird as it may seem, the only line differentiating our property from theirs is a slightly different arrangement of rocks on the ground.) Betty especially has ignored us. Nicola’s wondered if something else is going in her world which could easily be the case. We’re not the centre of it. Nevertheless, given the physical geography of our location, it’s harder to ignore one another’s existence than recognize it with a quick nod or wave.

There is an alternative reaction to being cancelled or cancelling someone else. That is, to decouple.  In simplest terms, decoupling means to “separate, disengage, or dissociate (something) from something else” and it’s used both in both a physical and social context.  Like at the beginning of the Big Bang, all the photon particles were super close to each other, and they were constantly interacting. And then, everything cooled down and they spread apart, they decoupled. Spreading apart is not possible with Gordon and Betty.

Fortunately though, decoupling in a social context has slightly different connotations. We can simply decouple our neighbour’s habit of ignoring our existence and focus on their more positive qualities such as the fact that they don’t make much noise, their garden and, of course, the lawn are immaculate, Gordon has helped me with a couple of jobs around the house before we got cancelled and they allowed us to leave three goldfish in their giant fishpond over the winter.

I don’t feel special or particularly annoyed by getting cancelled by our neighbours. It happens all the time. We had a neighbour in Slave Lake who I waved to a couple of times when he was out front washing his car. He didn’t return the wave, ever and that was weird but Larry was weird, and I didn’t think a lot about it. But Gordon and Betty have me flummoxed.

Of course, celebrities get cancelled all the time and for reasons widely known. Mostly guys but not all; Harvey Weinstein, Michael Jackson, J.K. Rowling, Ellen DeGeneres (for a toxic work environment), Bill Cosby, Rosanne Bar (for a racist tweet), Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Pablos Picasso (for his abuse of women and appropriating the primitivist images of African Art), Woody Allen, Mel Gibson and the list can go on and on.

If we are to decouple these individuals from their reason (or reasons) for being cancelled, then we can continue to enjoy their accomplishments. Or is that right? Should we still enjoy the movies produced by Harvey Weinstein or the music of Michael Jackson or the Harry Potter series of books or Bill Cosby and Louis CK’s humour (probably not) or Kevin Spacey movies or the Pablo Picasso’s Guernica? For me, the answer is mostly yes although for others, not so much.

And, can I decouple the cancelling behaviour of my elderly neighbours and appreciate all their good sides while ignoring the fact that I’ve been cancelled. I say, “definitely yes.”