Rilaly's Blog
Simple Truths

Words: 2,815

Rating: G.  Appropriate for all audiences.

Riff Mortgensen

Riff Mortgensen is the original Walter Mitty.  For those who don’t know the story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, it featured a character in a 1939 Reader’s Digest short story by James Thurber.  The character is one of the grandest daydreamers ever put to paper.  He deals with the frustrations that life has to offer by supplanting them with grandiose visions of his daily life.  As opposed to most daydreamers, the dreams of Walter Mitty occur in the present rather than in the past or future.

How many of us have achieved the dreams we had for life when we were very young?  If you never had high-falooting dreams, then a better question might be how many of us thought we would be in the situation than we are in now?

Riff Mortgensen chooses to believe that he is anything but the common man.  He lives with the belief that he is a man of greatness even though he knows in his heart that he has not accomplished much.  It is a lie that he lives so thoroughly that he has begun to believe it in many ways.  A lie is not really a lie, if you believe it to be true, said another Walter Mitty.

By scale, Riff Mortgensen is nowhere near Walter Mitty.  Riff does not dream with the exaggerated details Mitty espoused, and that may be one of the keys to being a modern day Walter Mitty.  Riff keeps his dreams reasonable.  I’m sure that before the fictional depiction of Walter Mitty, there were a lot of Walter Mittys.  After Thurber set the precedent with the Walter Mitty story, all of the Walter Mittys that followed adjusted accordingly to avoid being called a Walter Mitty.

I was even called a Walter Mitty by my Great Aunt when I was a very young boy.  I had no idea what it meant, but I got a general idea from the context she used it in.  As a result, I adjusted my wild ideas accordingly, so that my grandiose delusions would not be rejected by incredulousness.

We all deal with these frustrations in different ways.  Some of us are embittered individuals who hate those in a better, or more prosperous, situation.  We develop scenarios in our mind that help us deal with the fact that others have succeeded where we have not.  We then engage in schadenfreude when others fail.  Some choose to hate the world in more general terms with the belief that the world is against them, and that circumstance has prevented them from gaining that jewel in life that they’ve always wanted.  Some of us devote ourselves to something else to distract us from our current situation in life, such as religion or conspiracy theories, and we fabricate our current situation, based on these distractions, to leave the lie that we are achieving something in life that isn’t apparent on the surface.  No matter the method we have chosen, we all have a way of dealing with our failures in life, and this defines who we are and what we are going to be.

Another friend of mine said: “I spend my life trying to live up to the lies I tell about myself.” Riff didn’t say this, but it sums up his life well.

Riff is a quiet man who appears to be a man of action not words.  He appears to be the strong, silent type who is laughing on the inside at the manner in which we meager humans struggle through life.  He appears to be the type for whom things come easily, and that’s exactly what he wants you to believe.  He doesn’t want you to know.

The little secret that he doesn’t know is that he has potential, and he knows it.  That contradiction was intended for I think it spells Riff Mortgensen out more than any other sentence.  He knows he has potential to get things done, but what things should he get done?  Better yet, should he try to get any of these things done?  Is it something to get things done, or is it better to know the potential one has to get things done?  Give Riff Mortgensen parameters, provide him focus within a given main frame, and the man will succeed.  The thing is that he likes the idea of his own potential so much that he’s a little frightened of the reality.  He’s a little frightened of knowing whether or not he will succeed, and this little granule of potential that he’s seen is, often times, enough for him to know.

He speaks about the awe his compatriots hold him in.  People are amazed by his exploits.  “I can’t believe you knew that,” says one character to him.  “You’re the best I ever saw,” says another.  One wonders if Riff has watched too many Tom Cruise movies.  I think he identified with Cruise’s characters so much that he has begun to see himself as “the best anyone has ever seen.”  I don’t hear these people say these things first hand, but I have them repeated to me by Riff.  In his mind, there is a daily parade put on by those who feel privileged just to have witnessed his day to day.  Some of it could be true, some of it could be exaggerated, and some of it may have never happened at all.

This aspect of his personality was not clear to me at first.  I knew he did it, he drove me nuts with it at times, and there were times when I wanted to pop his delusional bubble, but it was not clear to me how prominent it was to him until we hung out with two co-workers.  These people interacted with him on a daily basis at our place of employment, and I’m sure that they held him in high regard, but they didn’t know him outside of work to that point.  He’s a smart guy, and he’s good at what he does, but he has the same moments that the rest of the human race does.  He just doesn’t talk about those times.

“I don’t know if I want to hang out with them anymore,” Riff said of these co-workers David and May following that outing.  David held Riff to the mat that night on some matters that David considered pressing.  They were things that David had to get an opinion on, but Riff would not relent.  I could sense it was an issue to some degree, but I had no idea how much it meant to Riff, until he said that.

“Why,” I asked, “you two seemed to get along well.”

“He knows how I think on matters.”

Riff feared that the bubble of his carefully constructed mystique had been popped.  He feared that they would know that he wasn’t as great as he wanted them to believe he was.  I wanted to tell him that this was a very natural fear, and that we all have these fears of being found out.  That would not have been a quality answer for him though.

It wasn’t until that night that I learned Riff’s essence.  I learned that he lives in a shroud of secrecy erected so that others may never learn how dumb, how incompetent, how fragile, and how unsuccessful he is.  He isn’t any of those things, but he fears that he is, and his greater fears lie in the fact that people will find out that he is.

I live in a cloud of potential myself, but at least I can admit it, and I’m trying to do something about it.  Putting one’s self on the line is a scary thing, for potential can be so fun to dance around in, but there comes a point in everyone’s life where one must learn the answers to these questions of potential.  Riff has never wanted to reach that point.

The other day, Riff informed me that he had an interview with a high level person in our company.  This high level person apparently offered Riff a prestigious position in the company.  I was stunned.  I was excited for him.  “Go for it!” I said.

“It’s already closed,” he responded quickly.

I prodded him further, I encouraged him to seek a position somewhere close based on this person’s evaluation, Riff shot every one of these suggestions down with quick jabs.  I wondered how a person could turn down such a grand opportunity, until it dawned on me that it probably never happened.  I had ensnared myself in one of his delusions again.

That delusion pivoted our lifelong discussion.  He was no longer reasonable in his delusions.  He had become Walter Mitty with that delusion.  That interview had probably shattered some very elemental delusions Riff had of himself.  He couldn’t report such matters to me of course, so he decided to make himself a shining star.  She probably said something near the line he gave me, and he embellished it.  I wasn’t prepared for that delusion, and he knew it.

Riff brought this delusion up again, sometime later, in front of another co-worker.  This co-worker asked me about it later.  It was embarrassing.  The next time Riff brought up this delusion, I wanted to tell him not to bring it up in front of others, but that would’ve pulled a ripcord on this delusion.  The two of us probably would’ve shared some kind of smile, and I wouldn’t have been able to sleep that night.

Guilt would’ve kept me up that night.  Guilt would’ve plagued me for many days following that one.  At times, this world can be a cruel, little oyster.  At times, people climb all over one another to tell you that you’re not as successful as they are.  They pop your delusions and illusions, and then they smile with a degree of satisfaction I find unsettling.  I see these people trying to be “real” with one another in a manner that damages the other.  A “real” friend looks for a way to be brutally honest with their friend, until they have crushed that person down to a little pebble.  In the end of that conversation, the “real” friend feels better about themselves, and the other lays crushed beneath their feet.  I see friendship as an escape from the “real” world, where two people can lay out their dreams and fantasies to one another without the fear of being crushed in the aftermath.

That having been said, there have been a number of ocassions when I wanted to pull the ripcord on Riff’s delusions.  There have been times when I thought I was part of the problem, and the cure to this problem would be a dose of reality shot in his jugular, so that he didn’t go popping off in front of co-workers.  I didn’t want to see my friend float one of these delusions on someone less delicate than me.  I wanted to protect my friend, and prevent him from going through what I was sure was coming, but once you pull that chord there’s no turning back.  This has caused me to be silent in the face of these grand delusions, and this silence has given birth to a monster.  Riff now has the notion that he is superior to me, and his definitions of himself have increased twofold.  He now comments on my naïveté, and he comments on the fact that I don’t have a college degree.

Perhaps it is because I qualify many of my statements with the fact that I could be naïve, that Riff has begun to see me as naïve, but to project himself as a worldly, knowledgeable character to someone who knows him well goes beyond the definition of delusional at times.

My natural, competitive instincts may soon arise from these ashes, for I cannot take too much more.  I may be naïve, and I would never argue this fact, but it is only because I am honest with myself that I can admit this.  I try to view myself in a manner that others may see me, and I attempt to gauge such actualization on a constant basis.  I do not expect everyone to do so, but the exaggeration of the opposite grates on me at times.

The other day Riff informed me that our co-worker David was not intelligent, and as a result the two of them did not have intellectually engaging conversations.  I informed him that this may be due to the fact that David is considerably younger than us.  He agreed to an extent, but he stated that he thought it had more to do with the fact that David did not have a college degree.  He quickly informed me that this is not the case with me.  He says that even though I do not have a college degree, we have engaging conversations based on my well-rounded intelligence.   I smiled.  I don’t know why I smiled, but when he shared his delusional blanket with me, I found it quite warm and comfortable.  I felt like an absolute fool a second later, but the guilt thing would not permit me to lift the blanket from both of us and reveal us for who we are.  The laughable thing about that comment was that his greater goal was not to compliment me or insult David, but to lift up his own image of himself through comparative analysis.

I wanted to inform him that all of us progress through different channels of psychological dominance and subservience in different ways on different days.  The search for where we stand in this chasm of dominance verses subservience can be a difficult one to traverse, so we usually attempt to answer these questions on the backs of others.  This is a shortcut to self-examination and self-reflection.  Some feel superior to another, based on that other’s religion, their politics, their race, or in the case of Riff Mortgensen their education level.  There are some who probably base their search for definition on whether one brushes their teeth top to bottom or side to side.  There are probably some who base their comparative analyses on how a person shaves their body hair.  If one person leaves a strip and another person shaves Brazilian who is the superior and who is the subservient, and where does the person who lets it grow wild stand?  I met a guy one time who professed a preference for sitting on one cheek.  He would never try to call attention to himself by doing this, but he preferred sitting on one cheek.  I often wonder if he felt dominant to our kind in anyway.  I wanted to ask Randall if his psychological profile of me would change depending on how fast I moved down a hallway.  If I moved quickly without moving my arms at all if he would consider me an inferior or a superior.  “Or,” I would say nearing his face, “would you then consider me an equal?”

Riff developed a delusional fortress that he believes is constantly under attack.  If you were to ask him how many friends he has he would tell you that he has very few, but there is a subset of beliefs in Riff that this shortcoming is self-imposed.  He informed me once that I was one of the few that he allowed in.  I wasn’t aware that there was such a demand, but I played along.  He informed me that it didn’t matter how large their battering ram was, they weren’t getting in, but I had been granted the privilege of being in his inner circle.  I ascribe to the notion that anyone that chooses to call me friend has granted me just such a privilege, but it is rarely spelled out to me in such stark terms.  The truth is that his fortress was built in the middle of a desert, and it doesn’t matter how strong the fortifications no one will attempt to buttress it until he moves it to a better location.

He’s an excellent trivia master, until you play a trivia game with him.  He’s a lady’s man, until the ladies come around, and he used to be a ball of greatness until a certain something came up and plucked him from greatness.  The potential of one’s past can be as crippling as the potential one will dream up for their future.  One would think that a Walter Mitty, or a Riff Mortgensen, would reach a breaking point in which they had to do something, but with so many realities swimming around in one’s head it can become hard to pick just one.

Riff tired of the dominant and subservient games at one point.  He moved.  His desperation to move provided more questions than it answered.  Did he move, as he stated, because he couldn’t stand our city or our state?  He said our fair city didn’t have enough theater, or art, or that special metropolitan lifestyle that so many seek when they move.  It could’ve been all of those things, but I think Riff moved to escape that so many people knew him here.

He and I connected on many levels before he left.  One of the main things we connected on was that we both lost our mothers at a very young age.  I was a mess of emotions on the topic, Riff told me that he didn’t care.  I think that he was probably left with the notion that she didn’t care.  Most people don’t care.  Even mothers don’t care some of the times.  Riff was forced to endure a long hospital stay at one point in his life, and he had very few visitors.  Riff wouldn’t tell people his birthdate, and he stated various reasons for doing so, but I’m thinking that he feared people wouldn’t care at the end of the day.  He probably feared that it would pop another illusion or delusion he had if they allowed his day to pass without notice.  Maybe that’s why he eventually moved.  Maybe that’s why he became a modern day Walter Mitty with all of the illusions and delusions of who he was, to try to get people to care that he was here?