gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Hmmm...I don't know about this. Maybe "No man *should be* a cog." Or "No man *need be* a cog." I could even get behind "Treat no man like a cog" if it were a little pithier and not so damned biblical.

But I've been a cog and I've met cogs, so I have a little problem with that first assertion.

Colleen,

By that logic, you could also say, "No man *should be* an island."

You want to pith around with Donne as well?

You were never a cog. You were simply misinformed- either that, or playing Chicken with a self-imposed limitation..

No man (or woman) is a cog. Deal with it.

;-)

Ah. Got it. I concede the point.

On the other hand, from the woo-woo perspective (which is how I was looking at the Donne quotation in the moment), I still think that while we can elect to put ourselves in insalubrious or even unhelpful situations (cog paradigm), we cannot cut the Nietzschian, collective-unconscious type threads that bind us to humanity no matter how we physically or psychically try to disconnect ourselves.

But I'm too old and wise to go sledding down a semantic slope with you, Slick, so again, I'll just concede the point. :-)

Why fight the feeling of being a cog: go with it, man. At the end of the day, it's just a wrapper.