“I think we have cockroaches,” a friend of mine said to a black person.

“Why are you telling me this?” the black person asked.  “Is it because I’m black?  You think I know something more about cockroaches because I’m black?  Or do you think that, based on the fact that I’m black, that I should be the one to clean it up?”

“Did I tell her that, because I’m a racist?” this friend asked me.  She told me that she hadn’t told anyone else in the firehouse about the cockroaches, and she had no idea why she singled the black woman out about it.  My friend was worried.  She and the black woman had been good friends prior to the comment, but her comment put a strain on their relationship.  My friend worried that they would never be good friends again.

We all think we know what’s going on in another person’s head.  We think we can derive their motivations for what they say, and we think we know what another person is thinking while they’re talking.  We have come to these conclusions about the people that surround us based on our experiences in life, but what if we’re wrong?  What if we have no idea what they’re thinking?  Would we rather make changes in the way we approach people, or does the satisfaction we gain from our “knowledge of people” provide a degree of control over the random override giving that person the benefit of the doubt?

In his book You are Not so Smart, Gerald McRaney cites a psychological experiment in which one person taps out a song on a desktop, and the listener tries to figure out the song they’re tapping.  The tapper is not allowed to hum or signal the listener in anyway.  They are to pick out a song that everyone is familiar with, say The National Anthem, and they are to tap it over and over, until the listener gets it.  In the course of this experiment, some tappers got frustrated with their listeners, and they tapped slower and slower, until their listeners got frustrated with the whole process and quit.  Are they just plain stupid the tappers began to wonder.  How could they not get The National fricking Anthem?  Are they unpatriotic, do they simply not know The National Anthem when they hear it, or are they just not paying enough attention?  The truth was that these listeners simply didn’t know what the tappers were thinking.  We all attempt to communicate to one another in a way that is crystal clear to us, but our listeners don’t get it.  It’s frustrating, but it clues us into the fact that most people don’t know what we’re thinking.

Have you ever tried giving directions to a person that is totally unfamiliar with your town?  As a hotel front desk clerk, I learned very quickly how difficult it can be to give someone directions.  I was born and raised in this town I describe, and I know it like the back of my hand, but I learned very quickly that this was a disadvantage rather than an advantage when giving directions to a person who has never been to my town.  After a few unsuccessful and very frustrating trials, I learned to try to put myself in their frame of mind and give directions from that point.  You don’t know how often you give instructions and directions from your point of view, until you’ve done it hundreds of times, and prepared yourself for incoming calls or questions from people totally unfamiliar with it.  What helped me progress to this point, more than anything else, was the refrain these people began giving me when they asked for directions: “You have to treat me like a total idiot here.”  These were usually frequent travelers that said this, and they had presumably been given directions hundreds of times.  They knew the mentality I was going to have to have if I was going to properly guide them to the hotel.  They knew how their mind worked, and they taught me how to deal with it.

A wife tells a husband she knows exactly what he was thinking when he said something that she regarded as a transgression.  The husband knows that that is not what he meant at all, but he relents when he considers that she might know him better than he knows himself.  An online computer company gives their employees sensitivity training on personal emails sent to other employees.  Their primary warning: “Your recipient does not know what’s going on in your head.  Every personal email that you send can be read ten different ways by ten different people based on their individual, life experiences.”  Conservatives mount a defense against hate-crime legislation based on the fact that we can’t know what was going on in the assailant’s mind.  We can know that the assailant killed the victim based on the evidence put forth, but proving that they did it with a specific motivation is almost impossible to prove in most cases.  As much as we intelligent beings hate to admit it, we know very little about what goes on in other human minds, and what we don’t know we make up by assigning them our thoughts.

We see thought patterns and speech patterns everywhere we go and in every person we encounter.  When someone fails to follow our pattern, we give them our pattern, and we predict what they’re going to say.  It gives us pleasure to know their pattern, and it gives us some semblance of control over the powerlessness we otherwise feel in the face of the random.

We look up into a night-time sky, and it initially see what appears to be a random mess of little lights.  It’s overwhelming.  It’s too random.  We shut down.  Why try understanding anything that has no order to it?  When it’s pointed out to us that there is a pattern to the little lights, we find pleasure in spotting the big dipper and a little dipper.  We suddenly feel the power of categorization and organization at our fingertips, and it is no longer so overwhelming.

When we see a child act in a disorderly fashion, we provide them our knowledge of the orderly system, so their world is not so confusing and random to them.  When the child proceeds to do something random that might cause them harm.  We don’t understand this.  “Why would you do that?” we ask genuinely confused by their regression into the random.  “I’ve already taught you this,” we say with exhausted frustration.  We’ve known this child for so long, and we’ve taught them the order of the universe so many times that we’re exhausted with effort.  The answer is that it’s not necessarily their progress that we thought we witnessed, it’s ours.  We accidentally assigned them our order and our thought patterns in their presumed progress, and we thought they grasped it.

Why would a child purposefully harm themselves when they know better?  The answer is they don’t know better.  They don’t understand the ramifications of their actions.  Some studies have suggested that humans don’t fully come to grips with the ramifications of their actions, until they’re roughly eighteen years of age.  Impossible, we think.  When we were eighteen, we had a full grasp on the consequences of our actions.  If we think that, we’re usually assigning our current brains to our younger brains.  It seems impossible, I know, but science is suggesting that we assign our current brains to our past brains all the time to help us make sense of who we are today.  We usually think, based upon our current mindsets, that we’ve been pretty consistent throughout our lives.  In truth, we’ve made huge leaps of progress in our understanding of the world and our progress in it, but we accidentally expect children to make the same leaps we thought our young brains made when we were their age.  When they go back and do a random thing, we view them as being purposefully stubborn and rebellious to what we’ve already taught them.

When we see a male penguin have sexual relations with another male penguin, we assign our motivations to them.  They must be gay.  If a human male has sex with another human male, they’re gay, and one plus one always equals two.  We know their motivations, like we know our motivations.  The question of whether or not the idea of gay exists in the penguin species is a concept that doesn’t compute to us.  The very idea that penguins would have random sex with other penguins, regardless of their gender, is just too foreign a concept for us to deal with.  The order that we require extends downward to our children and outward to the other beings in the animal kingdom.  It all has to make sense to us on a certain level.  There is no random.

We assign characteristics and thought patterns to groups, because it helps us make some sense of the variations in their psychology, and it helps us make sense of our own psychology.  We have an “OH!” moment when we think we spot a pattern.  We have a “That makes sense now!” moment, and we feel better about the order of the universe and our understanding of it, regardless if this pattern is true or not.

A person randomly comes up to us and says that there are cockroaches in the firehouse.  Why did they pick us, in such a seemingly random fashion?  If we’re a woman, and they’re a man, it makes sense to us that we should be insulted.  We know this pattern, and we know that the only reason he told us about it is that he wants us to clean it up.  If we’re black and they’re white, we’ve been down this road before.  We know that they think blacks are more familiar with cockroaches, based on the fact that blacks used to live with cockroaches.  Otherwise, it would make no sense to us that someone would randomly walk up to us and say such a random thing, so we categorize and organize them in our brain and project our thoughts into theirs.  What doesn’t factor into our equation is that some of the times our world is just random, because random is impossible to grasp.

If we were all in a science fiction movie, and I had the ability to transport in time, I may have shut down the system with all of the simultaneous time leaps I was working through. The rapid leaps through time may have combined with all of the memories to cause a foreign substance to congeal in my brain until an embolism set off warning signals in the programmers’ algorithm, and forced them take me off the grid for my well-being.

We are always manufacturing memories for good and evil in the past, present and future. We recall a time when Missy McNasty said something awful to us.  We remember how that comment ruined a future moment we had with Patty Pleasantpants, and how that could’ve been a beautiful moment the two of us shared, frolicking through the aftermath of used cups and popcorn boxes of a minor league hockey match. Missy wouldn’t allow us to enjoy that moment with her previous comment. It just ruined the mood for us, and it ruined that moment. We wish we could go back in the past and tell Missy what an equally awful person she was, so the next time we frolic with Patty we can laugh, and be happy, and have a great and memorable moment. Plus, we think if we could start confronting Missy types more often, we could be happier people in general.

The idea that we consult our memory for mood is a construct that we devise for ourselves in the present. We normally love frolicking through used cups and popcorn boxes of a minor league hockey match, but for some reason we can’t enjoy that moment in time. We know that we shouldn’t let Missy’s comments get to us like we do, but we can’t help it. We can’t enjoy happy moments when we decide that we’re going to be miserable.

You read that correctly, we decide to be miserable and happy based upon the memories we decide to construct at the time.  If we decide were going to be happy today, we will construct good memories that allow us to be happy. If we decide that we’re going to be in a bad mood today, regardless how much fun we’re having, we’ll construct the bad memories that we need to create to support the bad mood we’ve decided to be in.  We select memories that we’re going to construct. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and we normally use the term “selective memory” as a pejorative to describe someone that puts everyone else in a bad light while casting themselves in a favorable light, but if recent findings in psychology are correct, we all have selective memory.

In the paragraph above, I originally used the word ‘consult’ more often than I should’ve when writing about how we select memories, for it’s an incorrect term to describe how we remember. When we remember we don’t consult a memory bank, so much as we construct one…on the fly…regardless of the moment we’re in. We’re in total control of what we think, regardless what we think.

The incorrect word ‘consult’ also gives the image of one going to a video vault to find a specific memory, or going to a file on a hard drive. Memory is selective in a sense, but it is a selective in the sense that we reconstruct memory rather than reproduce it.  At the hockey match, we see someone who is wearing a David Bowie T-shirt, this reminds us of Missy McNasty, the David Bowie fan.  We can’t help but think about the awful thing she said to us, and we’re in a bad mood.  You were not in control of that memory, because it was right there in front of us.  To this degree, you’re not in charge of what triggers memory, but you are in total control of the construction team of your brain that puts the memory together.

In the book, You are Not so Smart Gerald McRaney gives the analogy that memories are equivalent to a bucket full of Legos. We select the individual pieces from the bucket to create the product that we want to create at any given moment. We decide to locate the individual Lego pieces we want to create a memory that provides us either satisfaction or sorrow, depending on the mood we want to be in at any given moment.

This isn’t to say that all memories are incorrect, but they can be influenced. If memories were files from a hard drive that we simply had to locate, we would never be incorrect once we located them. If memories were videos from a video vault, we couldn’t enhance a memory to be happy and undress a memory to be sad. When we construct the same memory two different ways, depending on our mood, it should be obvious to us that we’re constructing these memories on the fly, but we usually qualify our minor errors by saying, “Well, that’s just how I remember it.”

How many of us have heard a friend recount a moment we’ve shared with them, and those memories run contrary to how we remember them? How many of us have believed that that friend was lying? “He knows how it happened,” we tell a third party. “He just knows that how it really happened makes him look like a fool.” How many of us have confronted that friend, only to find that they were genuinely shocked at the manner in which we remember things? It happens all the time, and some of the times they’re not purposely lying. They’ve just constructed their memory to keep them happy in their world. It may be delusional, but it happens to us more often than we might think.

Talking heads often speak of a narrative that a politician creates for the voters. The narrative that the politician creates is the story of what happened as they see it, or as they want you to see it.  The narrative usually contains a grain of truth to it, for if it didn’t we would locate all the Lego pieces in our bucket that refutes everything the politician said. A smart politician, with a smart team of advisers and speech writers, will assemble a narrative, that has just enough truth to get us nodding our heads in agreement with what they’ve done in the past. They will then add a wrinkle to the narrative that enhances our memory and in doing so they add a memory to our Lego bucket when it comes time to vote. They will then repeat that enhanced narrative so often that it creates a construct in our brain that is almost impossible to defeat by those who remember things differently. With politicians, and their narratives, we all have selective memories. If it is a politician that we favor, we decide to remember the past in the light the politician provides, but if don’t favor them we may construct a memory that runs counter to everything the politician tries to tell us. As McRaney says throughout his book, we’re not as smart as we think we are when it comes to our memory.  Memories can be influenced, manipulated, refuted, and changed entirely.

I couldn’t get over what a pleasant day I was having at that ice cream parlor with my Brother and his boys. I had all my memory constructs lined up in a fashion that made me happy.  If I had died right then and there, it would’ve taken a coroner a week to pry the smile off my face. I remembered laughing with my Brother and my Dad, as I laughed with my Brother and his boys. I remembered a sense of being rewarded for being good when I was eating ice cream as a boy. I remembered how long it took my Brother to finish his ice cream cone and how that started a cavalcade of jokes about how long it took my Brother to complete anything. The day was shaping up to be a memorable one that I thought I could call upon if I was ever feeling down, when one of the kids started to act up.

He started screaming for no reason. He started rough housing with his younger brother, he started disobeying his Dad and talking back.  He started screaming for more ice cream, and he did anything and everything he could to be unruly. I would’ve never done such a thing. My Dad would’ve tanned my hide. Especially in public, I thought. I would’ve been more respectful to those around me, I thought. How dare he ruin this perfect moment was my first thought.  He’s ruined our moment, my moment, and I was angry at him for that.

Until, I started taking a more realistic look at my past. I started to remember that I was just as unruly as my nephew at his age, in this very same ice cream parlor. I remembered being bored, just sitting there, while the adults tried enjoy a moment of tranquility. My juvenile mind had been racing at a hundred miles an hour trying to create excitement for myself, and I wanted more ice cream, and I started rough housing with my younger brother just to make something happen. When I got in trouble for doing it, I started to mouth off, until a screaming match ensued, and my Dad marched us out of the place angrily. I ruined that moment, just like my nephew ruined this moment.

I was no different than him at his age. We both suffered from the oldest boy syndrome of seeking attention by selfishly trying to entertain ourselves by being naughty and unruly during the slow moments, with no respect for the others around us who are trying to enjoy a moment of tranquility at an ice cream parlor. Prior to my nephew’s outburst, I had been constructing a narrative of the pleasant moments of my life that were, in retrospect, not as pleasant as I wanted to remember them being.

The home is always sound, regardless of the amount of spending he engages in; the food is always on the table, regardless how many hours the wife is forced to work; and the kids are always well-tended to, regardless of the amount of involvement he has had in their rearing.  Oh, she may harp, but she gets over it once she’s said her piece.  And to have a happy home, you do have to let her say her piece, and you have to say the woman is always right.  A nice “Yes dear!” here and there will do wonders to quell her insecurities.  It makes the clocks run on time, it balances the books, and it makes sure that the kids are off to school at the appropriate time.

The adult baby usually has no powers of reflection, until they’re forced to look at how life works around them.  The word ‘around’ is purposefully selected here to describe how the adult baby’s life works regardless of their involvement in it.  No matter what they do, how much they spend, or who they take to bed, at the end of the day their lives magically rebound to responsible living.

“I used to love getting flowers,” Sheila said, “Until I found out that I would have to pay for them.”

Craig was her ex.  Craig used to bring her flowers.  Craig was never one to just bring his wife flowers everyone once in a while.  He brought flowers.  He decorated rooms.  He made cinematic statements about the love he had for his wife.  He was a good man.  He tried.  He loved his wife, and what better way to tell a woman you love them than through flowers?  He wanted to make that statement, regardless what it said on their financial statements.

Craig would be the first to tell you, he knew nothing of finances.  The wife took care of that, he would say, and she could be a real drill sergeant.  She could drain the intrinsic and symbolic value of flowers and turn them into economic values that drained them of their romanticism.  She could be so anal-retentive, she reminded one of Monica Geller from Friends.  She was always harping about money, and how he couldn’t control his spending habits, and how he spent money like a child with no regard for the home’s finances, but he made good money.  He worked his tail off.  He was a grown man.  Who did she think she was trying to always tell him how to live?  Craig lived by his own set of rules.  He was his own man.  No woman, not even his wife, should tell him how to live.  He may have had some impulse control issues, but who didn’t?

Spending money, and purchasing things, gave Craig a rush he couldn’t really explain.  “You’re selfish,” Sheila informed him one day after he went through another spending spree.  “You’re the most selfish person I‘ve ever met.”

“Only to you guys,” Craig said, referring to Sheila and their two daughters.  He said this as a point of fact.  He said this without emotion or reflection.  He said this to let her know that he was not such a bad guy.  People love me, he basically said, and while I may be a little self-involved with you three,  I’m not such a bad guy.  I know better.  I help people.  Your opinion extends only as far as these four walls, so don’t try to tell me you know who I am.

We all say things to win arguments of course, but what we say defines us.  We all have images of ourselves that we portray to others, and they aren’t lies.  We honestly believe them.  Every once in a while, though, we accidentally step on a landmine that exposes us for who we are, and some of us are adult babies.

The term adult baby is not a term specifically targeted at males, but most adult babies tend to be males.  They’re usually forty-something males that have been controlled by women for the whole of their lives.  They’ve usually had women tell them to share, they’ve usually had females set their clocks, do their accounting for them, and raise their children.  Adult babies are usually good men who provide for their families, but that sense of responsibility usually ends when they punch out for the day.

Women have it good, the adult baby says when confronted by their situation in life.  They get to sit home and watch their shows while the man goes to work and caters to the whims of a boss.  The man is the king of the castle, and he gets to do whatever he wants.  If he wants the motorized vehicles, he gets it; if the man wants electronics, he gets it; and if the man wants some article that his male friends have, he gets it.  The woman is in charge of the accounting, and she balances the books.  “I don’t know how she does it,” the adult baby says, if he is ever forced to reflect on their financial status, “but she makes it work.”

The adult baby has usually had a good woman cater to his needs for his first eighteen years, and then the responsibility for his well-being is transferred to the good woman he marries straight out of college.  He probably marries his high school sweetheart.  He probably marries a woman who reminds him of his mother.  He probably wanted someone to take care of when he married, so that she could take care of him.  He was probably crazy in college.  He probably got drunk a lot when there was no one there to remind him to act responsible.  He probably engaged in a number of sexual liaisons, until he met a good woman who could cook like his good old ma’.  He never lived alone.  He never knew the brunt of responsbility.  He never knew that freedom.  He never knew how to succeed on his own, and he never knew failure.

No one wants the crazy college years to end.  Even when we marry, and buy a house, and have kids, there is that constant craving for the crazy days of youth.  We are adult enough to enjoy some of the complexities life offers in this era of our lives, but we’re young enough to shrug them off without consequences.  We’re able to show people we’re no longer a child, but we’re young enough to avoid the ramifications that come with continuing to live like one.  We’re finally able to flex the muscles of independent living, while getting our parents to pay the bills.  We’re also in a narrow zone life, between adulthood and childhood, that allows us the freedom to form an identity without the responsibilities that form it for us.

Everyone wants this time period to last forever, but few have the resources to make it so.  No one wants to grow up and become financially responsible and moral and in control of our impulses, but most of us do, because we know we can’t live like a child forever.  For some of us, this is a long, arduous process.  For others, it never happens.  They are never left to our own devices.  They never fail, and they are never exposed to the harsh reality financial failure can bring.  They are saved.  Their inadequacies are tolerated.  They are good boys, good sons, good men, good providers, and they are the other half of the relationship that doesn’t have to account for their failings.

Their mothers were their lone judge for much of their life, but they weren’t a good judge, because they loved their boy for who who he was.  They knew their boy had flaws, but they also knew he was a good boy, in his heart, and she would fight anyone who said anything to the contrary.  They knew their boy was financially irresponsible, that they weren’t the best and most attentive student, and they didn’t have a very good work ethic, but they were kind to their mothers, and at the day that was all that mattered.  The boy knew how to hit all of his mother’s bullet points in other words.  He knew how to make her happy, even if it didn’t improve his character much, and she thought that said a lot about him.

She wanted her son to find a good woman straight out of college, or this was her dream.  She wanted him to find happiness, regardless of his failings.  She wanted her boy to have a house, a white picket fence, a dog, and to provide her with some grandchildren.  She wanted her boy to find that one, special woman who would give it all to him, and that probably placed a lot of pressure placed on that fiancée to be.

“He’s a good boy,” the mother instructed the fiancée.  “He needs someone to take care of him.”  The fiancée may have spotted some flaws early on in the good son, and she may have  brought them up accidentally, in a string of jokes being told about the good son, but when she added her bit it angered the mother.  Her joke was a direct reflection on how the mother raised her son, and she took exception to that.  It drove a spike between the mother and the daughter-in-law, until the daughter-in-law learned to keep her trap shut, if she wanted to get along with her husband’s family.  “Don’t tick ma off,” said the good son, sticking up for his beloved mother.  “She means well.”

“How do we continue though,” this good wife asks the good husband.  “Your spending is out of control.”  The good man usually controls his spending in the short-term, when such an ultimatum is delivered.  He usually avoids buying the big, luxurious items when they hit ground zero, and he usually buys her flowers to put a band aid on the wounds his worried wife has exposed to him.

“You can’t buy me flowers anymore,” she shrieks when he presents them to her with a smile.  “We’re broke!”  He means well, and she feels bad for shrieking at him, and she used to love flowers, until she realized how much she would have to pay for them.

The adult baby is not a fundamentally flawed man.  Just like the insane are not crazy all the time.  They have their lucid moments.  They have blips on the calendar when they can control their crazed behavior.  They have moments, such as those that occur when the wife finally confronts him with their situation, and he knows he needs to grow up and be more responsible, but both parties know that he will eventually revert back to who he is.  For he will eventually reach a point where he feels he has no control, because he’s never had control.  Because his mother always controlled him, and now his wife controls him, and it seems everyone in his life feels a need to control him in some way that drives him crazy, until he searches for a way to get a little bit of this power back.  Money is power, money is freedom, and what better way to express one’s individual power and freedom than through making purchases?  It may cause the wife to grieve over the books, it may cause his family to have to sacrifice a little, but at the end of the day she’ll make it all work out in the end.  “She always does.”

This sentiment was echoed by the maid of honor, “I like Mark. I think he’s a nice guy. I found out he used to have a Mohawk, and it used to be blue. I couldn’t believe it.”

There is something wrong with a guy who used to have a Mohawk, but I know him, and he’s nice.  It used to be a blue Mohawk, but he’ll talk to you just like any other feller.  And it used to be spikey, but once you get to know him you’ll see how nice he is. He used to have a Mohawk, and he used to have some serious, psychological issues.

If he used to have a Mohawk, he used to have identity issues. He used to be the type of guy no one would take seriously. He probably used to punch people, and he probably had to have a fiery temper that you didn’t want to mess with, but even that probably failed to get him the attention he needed. He could probably be in a sparsely populated room, and you still didn’t know he was there. When he used to have a Mohawk that probably all changed.

He used to spend hours in front of a mirror, gelling the hair up and spiking it, so someone would look at him. They might think him strange. He might even be an outcast in some social settings, but at least someone, somewhere would look at him. At least someone, somewhere gave him a reaction. “For God’s sakes, Helen, the boy’s got a blue Mohawk!” He probably got aroused by all that.

“It turns out the guy has a great heart, and he’d” –sing it with me here folks–“give you the shirt off his back.” That was the best-man again. The best man said he “was attracted to Mark, because Mark used to have a Mohawk.” The best man said: “It wasn’t one of those flat, more acceptable Mohawks. This one was spiky, and high. It was even blue at one point. It was a Mohawk!” The best man placed pronounced emphasis on the words ‘was’ and ‘Mohawk’ for the purpose of selling the joke. Laughter made its way around the room. It was polite laughter, and there was nothing raucous about it. All the shock value was gone. The Mohawk was gone. Mark just sat there nodding, soaking in the silence of the moment. His nodding had a ‘yep!’ to it that either regretted losing the Mohawk or trying it out. My money is on the former.

He used to have a Mohawk. He probably still tells people this.  “I’m an old married man now, but I used to have a Mohawk.” When people ask him what he does for a living, I’m sure he tells them. He seems like a nice enough fella, but he probably ends all that with, “But I used to have a Mohawk.”

It was a beautiful ceremony. Mark and Mary expressed their love for each other in a way only Mark and Mary can. A song was sung by Mary’s sister, and someone else. They were hooked up to the church speakers. The song had musical accompaniment. It was not Gershwin or Schubert. It was hip and friendly. It was terrible, but it was Mary expressing her love for the man who used to have a Mohawk in the only way she could or would. The song wasn’t a brief interlude. It was played in its entirety. The voices were off. It was amateurish. It was endearing. It was embarrassing. I can’t sing, but even this made me cringe.

But, it was sung from the heart. Fine, keep it under two minutes. This was their ceremony, and you’re not a professional critic. Get over yourself man!

The two girls sang another song, ten minutes in. It was painful. It interrupted the flow of the ceremony. It was agony for those of us who didn’t know Mark and Mary. It took the moment Mark and Mary were supposed to cherish for eternity and altered it into an early segment of American Idol for all of us to critique and badger, Simon Cowell-style.

There were risqué moments at the reception. The father-in-law turned the iron, fold out chair towards him, and he scooted it across the room, so he would have a scandalous view of the bride when the groom removed the garter from her leg. “You should be embarrassed,” the groom said to his father with good humor. We all laughed politely.

I thought of a comment: ‘How do you live with yourself father?’ or ‘how do you sleep at night?’  How about a right cross? Not an angry one, a symbolic one, an obnoxious one? How about you make some funny, yet obnoxious comment about paternal infidelity. How about, “I hope you rot in hell! Dad!” followed by a right cross? Then when the screaming bride, and her family, break up the melee, the father and son could come up laughing. I am so bored. Someone do something.

“I should be embarrassed?” the father says. He’s aghast. He’s winking. “I thought Mary would have the decency to wear some under garments.” We all laugh in good humor. Boring.

The good man, who used to have a Mohawk, shot gunned the garter to the one person who didn’t want it. Mark flung this to this person after having everyone line up ceremoniously for the flinging of the garter. The groom laughed obnoxiously to give the moment a sense of obnoxiousness it lacked. Why did you have everyone line up in such a fashion if you were just going to fling it to someone who wasn’t a part of the group lined up for the flinging of the garter ceremony? It was one of those jokes that looks great in the head, but rarely translates in action. It probably works well in the aftermath though. “I flung it to Johnson, because I knew he didn’t want it.” Not even the bride could work up a smile.  Even a man who used to have a Mohawk couldn’t make this funny. He was a fish flopping out on the dance floor for all to watch quietly and mourn.

A young kid, too young for any kind of critique on my part, stood on the dance floor and laughed too hard and danced too crazy.  He dropped his shoulders too low in his dance steps, he clapped too hard, and he laughed too much.  He probably never had a Mohawk. When he smiled, and his face crinkled beneath bullet-proof glasses, I knew he had a hard time making friends. He sat quickly, after a few uncomfortable, overly emotional dance steps drew him out as a kid who didn’t belong. He sat and continued to laugh too hard at the festivities that occurred on the dance floor. That’s me over there, I thought, watching him. He was participating too much in something he wasn’t participating in, and he wanted to be comfortable getting nuts in context. He was me at nine years old, or however old he was. He watched people get nuts in context on TV, and he always imagined himself being one of those kids, but he never could. Everything was choreographed on TV to make you feel a part of it all, and that’s what that kid sitting in a chair, watching, knew. He didn’t know how to participate. He wasn’t good at that part. That kid was me, and I couldn’t stop watching him.

I only knew two people at the wedding, and they barely knew the bride. I was bored. I turned to one of these two: “I’ll give you ten bucks to dance with the groom,” I said. “You put one in the wedding pot, and you keep nine of it,” I said.

“I don’t know him at all,” my friend pleaded, as if this was information I didn’t already have.

“All the better,” I said. “Ten bucks. You go up there and dance seriously. You have to make a serious face when you’re doing it, and you can’t say you were just kidding later. This has to be a memorable, emotional dance that says you want to belong. You have to make eye contact with the groom and hold it while you two dance.”

“I don’t know the groom,” he said. “I barely know Mary,” he said.

“Ten bucks,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

The groom, who used to have a Mohawk, cried during the ceremony. He was so shook up, he couldn’t recite his vows. He wanted a moment. We all want a moment. We all dream of a moment. We all want this moment to be greater than any moment we’ve ever had. His moment was stolen by the two four minute songs that the bride had concocted for the ceremony. The bride, the groom, and the priest were forced to sit up there like jack asses, staring at one another while the songs dragged out, uncomfortably, to four minutes a piece.

Less is more when you’re looking for a moment, I wanted to say. A moment is what you create. It’s something you define. This moment was defined by these two, four minute songs. When our moment is taken away from us and defined by others, we try to steal it back. Cheesy lyrics about togetherness, love, and always being there for your partner look awesome on paper. In reality, they’re show stopping moment killers. You regret them later, even if you’ll never say it aloud. You’re left trying to remove the definition of the cheesy lyrics in any way you can, until you’re left with nothing but tears of frustration at your inability to disassemble and recreate the moment when you used to have a Mohawk.

The key to great fiction is streamlining your story. Cut the fat! Some of the greatest authors of all time have said that the best additions they made to their novel were the parts they deleted. Somewhere along the line, in their writing career, they achieved objectivity. Somewhere along the line, they arrived at the idea that not all of their words were golden. Somewhere along the line, they realized that some of their words, sentences, paragraphs, and even some of their chapters were simply self-indulgent, wastebasket material. These self-indulgent portions, or the “ninety-one pages of (poor fiction),” of any novel are usually found in the asides.

But asides are what we enjoy in a novel you say. Asides can provide setting, pace, and drama. Asides can also build suspense and fortify the characteristics of a character, but they can also kill your novel. Most asides are unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. As anyone who has read a novel can attest, most novels could be written in forty pages, but that’s a short story, and short stories don’t sell as well as novels. They don’t sell as well, because readers love involvement. Readers don’t usually want snapshot stories. They want a world. They not only want to know the humans that they are reading about, they want to be involved with them. They want to see them breathe, they want to hear them talk to an employee at a Kwik Shop, and they want to feel the steps they take from place to place. They want to know the minutiae of the human they’re reading about, but they don’t want to get so caught up in the minutiae that they’re taking off pace, and they don’t want to read a self-absorbed writer that thinks it’s all about them.  Cut the fat!

“I’ve met a number of intelligent people throughout my life, and I’ve met a number of people I consider brilliant. I’ve met very few that were able to combine the two.” –Unknown.

This desire to be perceived as intelligent is a strong driving force in all of us. How many stupid and overly analytical things do we say in one day to try to get one person to think that we’re not a total idiot? This desire to prove intelligence is right up there with the drive to be perceived as beautiful and likeable. It’s right up there with the desire to be seen as strong, athletic, independent, and mechanically inclined. We spend our whole lives trying to impress people. Even those who tell us that they don’t care what others think are trying to impress us with the fact that they don’t care.

In my first era of writing, I wrote a lot of these self-indulgent asides that contributed little to the story. I was a new student to the world of politics, and I was anxious to show the world what I learned. I also wanted to show that half of the world that disagreed with me how wrong they were. So, I put my main character through an incident, and I had him come out of the incident enlightened by my political philosophy. In various other pieces, I wanted to inform the world of all of this great underground music I was experiencing. My thought process at the time was: “Hey, Stephen King can get away with it. Why can’t I?” Copy the masters right?  I wanted people to see both sides of my brain in the same venue. After taking a step back, and rereading these novels, I achieved enough objectivity to realize that it was all a big ball of mess.

If I was going to clean this mess up and start writing good stories, I was going to have to divide my desires up.  I was going to have to cut the fat.  I would have to discipline myself to the creed of all storytellers: Story is sacred. I would have to learn to channel my desire to be perceived as smart into political and philosophical blogs. My desires to have people listen to my underground music were channeled away into Amazon.com reviews, and my desire to tell a story was devoted to the files that contained my novels and short stories. In this way, I would be able to proselytize on the role of the Puggle in our society today, and the absolute beauty of Mr. Bungle’s music, without damaging my stories or boring the readers of my stories. I learned the principle the esteemed rock band Offspring tried to teach the world when they sang: “You gotta keep ‘em separated.”

There’s one writer, whose name I will not mention, that never learned this principle. This author presumably got tired of being seen as just a storyteller. This author knew he was intelligent, and all of his friends and family knew he was intelligent, but the world didn’t know. The world only knew that he was a gifted storyteller, and they proved this by purchasing his books by the millions, but they didn’t know that he was so much more. This author achieved as much in the industry, if not more, as any other writer alive or dead (It’s Not King!), but he remained unsatisfied with that status. He needed the world to know that he wasn’t just a writer of fiction. He needed the world to know he was as intelligent as he was brilliant, and he wrote the book that he hoped would prove it. It resulted in him ticking off 50% of his audience. 50% of his audience disagreed with him, and his politics, and they (we!) vowed to never read another one of his novels again. This is the risk you run when you seek to be perceived as intelligent and brilliant in the same work.

But politics makes for such great filler, and to quote the great Thomas Mann: “Everything is political.” Well, there’s politics, and then there’s politics. If you’re one of those that don’t know the difference, and you don’t think your politics is politics, you should probably be writing something political. If you’re one of those who wants to write politics simply because it makes for great filler and great asides, however, then you should try to avoid the self-indulgent conceit that ticks off the half of the population that disagrees with your politics. You’ll anger some with this, you’ll bore others, and the rest of us won’t care that you think it’s vital that your main character expresses something in some way that politically validates your way of thinking. We will just think it’s boring proselytizing from an insecure writer who needs validation from their peers. Stick to the story, we will scream, as we skip those passages or put your book down to never read anything you’ve ever written again.

You will need to be somewhat intelligent though. You’ll need enough intelligence to know your punctuation and grammar rules, you will need to know when and where to make paragraph breaks, and you will need to know how to edit your story, but these aspects of storytelling can be learned.

“I am not adept at using punctuation and/or grammar in general…” A caller to a radio show once informed Clive Barker. She said that she enjoyed writing, but it was the mechanics of writing that prevented her from delving into it whole hog. “Are you a proficient story teller?” Clive asked her. “Do you enjoy telling stories, and do you entertain your friends with your tales?” The woman said yes to all of the above. “Well, you can learn the mechanics, and I encourage you to do so, but you cannot learn the art of storytelling. This ability to tell a story is, largely, a gift. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Be brilliant first, in other words, and if you can achieve brilliance, you can learn the rest. You can gain the intelligence necessary to get a thumbs up from a publisher, an agent, and eventually a reader, but you cannot gain brilliance. You cannot gain artistic creativity, and it’s hard enough to prove artistic brilliance. Why would you want to further burden yourself by going overboard in trying to also prove intelligence, and thus be everything to all people?

Let the people see how brilliant you are first! Gain a following. Once you have achieved that pied piper plateau, you can then attempt to display your intelligence. The preferred method of achieving all of your goals is to ‘keep ‘em separated’, but there are always going to be some who need to prove their intelligence and brilliance in the same Great American Novel. Those people are going to say Stephen King is a much better example to follow to the best-seller list than I am, and he achieved his plateau with a little bit of this and a little bit of that sprinkled in his prose. The question you have to ask yourself is, is he the rule or the exception to the rule? If Stephen King’s model is your preferred model, and these political and music parts are so germane, so golden, and so uniquely special to your story, keep them in.

As Oscar Wilde says, “You might as well be yourself, everyone else is taken.”

Do you have a great story to tell?  Is it good?  Do your friends find it mildly amusing, somewhat sad, or really good in parts, or do they find it great?  Most aspiring writers don’t write great stories right out of the gate, and aspiring writers are a dime a dozen. Great stories litter our  libraries and bookstores. Do you have a great story to tell? Most people do.  There’s nothing special about you, or your “great American” story, not yet.

But you are a great storyteller. Your Aunt Clara told you so. You have a  gift for storytelling that crushes those around you. You get the reactions and laughter that others can’t, and you get amazement directed at  your storytelling aptitude. The only problem is you don’t have the material. You  may have  enough material to entertain your Aunt Clara, because she knows you and  she knows the characters in your life, but you don’t have the type of material  that will entertain a wider audience. That’s a problem, but it’s a problem that has haunted storytellers all across the spectrum from the aspiring storyteller to the legend.

It is a fact of life though that some of us are just better at telling stories than others. It’s a fact of  life similar to the fact that some people are just better at basketball and football than others.  Some would say that this ability to tell a story is a gift, but I’m more inclined  to believe that some people just enjoy it more. When you enjoy something more  than anyone else around you, you work harder at it. You study it, you finesse  it, and you learn from those around you who do it better. Even in its most  primitive form, such as the sharing of memories with friends and relatives, some of us are just able to tell a story better than others.

Before entering into these stories with our relatives and friends,  however, we must make time for the obligatory kid and pet stories. It never  ceases to amaze me that a room can be full of highly-evolved, well-educated  adults, and everyone spends so much time obsessing over pets and children. When  we’re done obsessing over our kids and pets, we share memories. It’s in these  moments that a true storyteller is separated out from those who struggle with  details, timing, the proper emphasis, and the number of syllables to use to  punctuate a punch line. It’s in these moments that we learn the art of presentation.

On the art of presentation, comedian Steve Martin once compared comedy to  music: “There is a harmony to comedy,” he said, “in that three beats are always  funnier than two and four beats is a bit too much.” Only someone who gets off on  telling stories, and trying to make people laugh, would focus on the minutiae of  presentation so much that he focuses on beats.  I cannot tell you how many times  I’ve changed a word, a phrase, or a paragraph to get the rhythm right, or the beat down. I can’t tell you how often I’ve added or deleted an infinitive  in a sentence because the alternative just didn’t feel right to the harmony of a paragraph. It’s that attention to detail, that Martin alluded to, that makes  storytelling an art form we all enjoy so much.

Once you get a feel for presentation, the next question is how do you come up with that material that reaches that wider audience and eventually lands  you on the best-seller list? Having never achieved the best-seller list, I must  admit I have only one secret answer to that: hard work. Unless you find a genie  in a bottle, or steal an idea from someone else, I can think of no better way to  give birth to an idea than through writing a ton of  material.

Creative Writing teachers say, “write what you know”, and that is an  essential activity in getting us to point A. How many of us have written those “what I  did on my summer vacation” stories for our English Composition teachers? How  many of those of us who wanted to write the next Crime and Punishment considered these pointless exercises?  “Get me to the meat!” we mentally scream.  I want it all, and I want it now!  The exercises weren’t entirely pointless of course.  They got us thinking, and writing, and a springboard to something.

That springboard launched those of us who wanted it to the idea that we  could write something fantastic…if we honed that artistic muscle in our brain.  If we wanted that something fantastic, we learned that the best way to springboard to it was to read some of the masters that sprang from their own  springboards. If we wanted it bad enough, we learned that the best way to  achieve it was to launch ourselves into more writing and reading, and even more writing and more reading, until we eventually and accidentally landed upon an idea. Some of us took that little springboard to greater heights and more material, and others considered it a useless exercise required by a teacher who knew as much about achieving the best-seller list than we did.

This leads us to one of the most vital questions all fiction writers  must ask themselves: “Will anyone care what I write?” The immediate answer to this question is no. Unless you’re already famous, people won’t care what you think, what happened in your daily life, or if you have a propensity for  catching colds that your mom says is epic in proportions.

From  Ron Shelton’s script for Bull Durham:

“Your  shower shoes have fungus on them. You’ll never make it to the bigs (major  leagues in baseball) with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you’ll be  classy. Win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press’ll  think you’re colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it only means you  are a slob.”

Until you get famous, and those who care about celebrities care about you, you’ll have to write in a manner that gets somebody to care. Nobody cares, for example, that your friend has a propensity for lying, unless you can add that characteristic to one of your characters to make them more colorful. Nobody cares that your aunt is ultra-sensitive, even though everything she has in life has been given to her on a silver platter, unless you can infuse that  characteristic into a character in a manner that is entertaining to a greater  audience.  Nobody cares, unless you can translate these characteristics in such a  manner that reminds us of our lying friend, or our hyper-sensitive  aunt. Or, if you can’t make this crossover, then you must make that character so damned entertaining that we won’t care when we can’t relate.

Philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said that the key to convincing  another person of your point of view is to make them believe that they arrived  at that answer themselves. In fiction parlance, this is called manipulation  of the reader. When most people see that word manipulation, they think evil.  They think of a totalitarian leader manipulating their citizens to think a certain way, but you can use your powers of manipulation for good, if you do it right.

How many of us have laughed at a funny book, cried during a dramatic one,  or were scared by a horror? If you went through any of these emotions after reading a series of words on a page, you were manipulated by the author. You were made to care about the central character in ways that caused you emotion when the author decided to eventually spring an event on them. The author painted a picture with their words, and you fell right into their trap when you started to care.

It’s  the job of the writer to manipulate the reader into believing that they care.   It’s the writer’s job to create an  environment through which a reader is willing to suspend disbelief. Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested that  “if a writer can infuse a human interest and a semblance of truth into a fantastic tale, the reader would  suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.” In other words, you may be the oddest,  smartest, most sensitive storyteller that your friends have ever seen, but we don’t know you, and we don’t care about you, or your wacky takes on life, until  you can convince us that we’ve decided that your wacky tales are ours in some manner that you’re in charge of creating.

The  leads us to the next question: What  kind of liar are you? When you were younger did your relatives and friends  constantly accuse you of fudging the truth? If that’s the case, you may  be a writer. Did they question everything you said, based upon your history of  exaggeration and fabrication? If they did, you may be a writer.  Were you so good at lying that they were willing to suspend disbelief for a moment, because some part of them wanted it  to be true? If that happened to you, you may be a writer.  If you’re a born liar that needs some venue for channeling that inclination to exaggerate your truth to entertain  those around you, welcome to the world of fiction. You can let your freak flag  fly here, and we’ll welcome you with open arms. You can be crafty in our world.  You can lie, embellish, and exaggerate to entertain. Story is sacred in our  world, the truth isn’t.

Being entertaining is far more important than being honest in our world.  You may have interesting stories that have occurred in your life, and they may  be worth telling, but they may not be great without some lies, exaggeration,  and embellishment. And we won’t care about any of that if you’re writing  fiction. We simply want the great story. We simply want to be entertained.

This search for the great and entertaining  story has even plagued the masters. Due to circumstances beyond his control,  even the great Ernest Hemingway reached a point where he could no longer come up with great stories, and some have said that this search was one of the  contributing factors in his decision to take his own life. Before this tragic event occurred though, Hemingway said: “Everyone has one great story in them.  The trick is to have two.” You can find that one great story you have in you,  but it’s going to take a lot of writing, and a lot of reading to eventually and  accidentally make it happen.

I would love to have you picture me in a Gatorade commercial that depicts me writing with colored beads of sweat pouring down my face as a voiceover says: “Rilaly says never say die!”  I look to the camera at that point.  I look mean, I look mad, and I look driven. “Quit?  The word is not even in my vocabulary!” I would say this with a look of disgust for you for even asking a question you haven’t asked, “I haven’t even quit smoking!”  I would love to present that image to you, but it’s not true.  I have quit.  I’ve quit more times than I care to discuss.

I’ve grown tired of writing fiction, and I’ve felt more dejected trying to succeed in this field than I have in any other areas of my life, including my dating life.  I’ve gone through bouts of insecurity that double those I’ve endured in any other areas of my life, and I’ve worked in numerous fast-paced, hyper-critical jobs.  If you ever met me, you would know that I’m a relatively confident guy, and I love my life.  Writing novels, short fiction, creative non-fiction, political blogs, and little entertaining, philosophical vignettes has made me happier, more miserable, more disgusted, and more proud of myself than anything else I’ve tried in my life thus far.

If that’s the case you say, then why should I try it?  Why do I need the headache or heartache?  Why would I even entertain the idea of writing a novel?  How do I know if I’m good enough to even start?    I’ve never done anything like this before.  The very prospect of starting down such a road is a little scary to me.  Scary, you say, and a little exciting at the same time.

Writing a novel is hard, don’t let anyone kid you.  I’ve written four novels, and three short story collections, and just about every one of them has been difficult to complete.  Very few of them have flowed so well that I thought I made it look easy.  George Kennedy star of Naked Gun, Cool Hand Luke, and over 200 films and television productions, wrote one book in 1983.  After writing this novel, called “Murder on Location”, Kennedy said it was the hardest thing he ever did.  “I do not envy those people who do it for a living,” he said.  “It’s the most trying thing I’ve ever done.”

Just because it’s hard, and just because it may be one of the most trying accomplishments you’ve ever attempted, does not mean it can’t be done.  The rewards for completion are satisfying, enriching, and in many ways therapeutic.  With that said, only you can know if this is the field for you.  Only you!  Only you can answer the mandatory questions that need to be asked in a manner that lets you know that you are a writer.

Leonardo da Vinci had a belief that the only method through which one could answer a question is by asking questions.  That may seem so obvious it’s laughable, but he asked himself hundreds of questions on every project he pursued.  His goal was objectivity.  He wanted to look at every project from every angle he could imagine to see if he could enhance his view of the project or find it pointless to pursue.  Some of these questions were harsh, some were leading, and others seemed to have no pertinence at all, until he asked them and tried to answer them.  You cannot worry about hurting your feelings when you ask yourself these questions.  You cannot worry if these questions change your opinion of yourself one hundred and eighty degrees.  The questions must be asked.

Most of us have little to no objectivity about ourselves.  Most of the questions we ask ourselves are leading questions.  Most of us ask ourselves the questions we enjoy answering.  “Do I really need to eat another piece of pie?” Of course I do.  I need those endorphins racing around in my brain like they did on the first slice.  That was nirvana!  “I deserve a second slice.  I’ve been good!”  Then we eat that piece and realize it wasn’t nearly as rewarding as we thought it would be.  We pay the price in sluggishness from the sugar lows, and we pay in weight gain and appearance, and we’re a little frustrated that we didn’t display more will power.  We obviously didn’t ask ourselves the right questions.

In the coming days, I will be asking you the questions about yourself that you may not want to ask about becoming a writer.  I may be a little harsh.  I may ask you to ask yourself some questions you don’t want to answer. If you really want to become a writer, however, you will need to ask them.  

When we tell people about a crucial, crisis moment of our lives, most listeners will openly side with us, regardless how they feel about it privately.  Not this old man.  It was annoying.  I wanted him to tell me I was right just once.  He did tell me I was right in circumstances, as long as all of the variables I produced for him were true, but he would always add that those variables were probably based on other variables that I hadn’t accounted for.  I never left his class, or subsequently his lunch table, feeling that that I was unequivocally correct about anything I did.  As a result, I sought his counsel on a number of issues that plagued me.

He never seemed pleased by my constant need to scurry over to his table with a question, but he never seemed annoyed by it either.  He never greeted me in a pleasant fashion, but he was never rude.  He was the type of guy that I’ve always tried to please, and I continually tried to gain his acceptance.  A dog acts this way, I realize before I started my question.  A dog finds that one person in the room that is ambivalent to their existence and attempts to befriend them.  This could be a result of that dog knowing how cute it is.  It could be a result of the fact that every human it runs across acknowledges its cuteness, until it runs across that one person that doesn’t overwhelmingly acknowledge it.  The dog then has an identity crisis, until it can flip that one ambivalent character.  Many people have commented on the objectivity I have about my life, and they’ve said that my powers of observation are beyond those they normally encounter, so why do I continually seek the counsel of the one person who never will?  Am I as inscure as this attention craving, identity crisis dog that wants the one ambivalent person in the room to pet them and tell them,“You’re the one living life the way it should be lived?”  The professor would answer this question and many others in one short, ambivalent sentence.

“My friend and I have been having a debate,” I say to this man I deem wise.  “I believe people are inherently good, until they prove otherwise.”  I went on to tell him that I thought living with an optimistic mindset, in this manner, was the best way to live.  I told him that optimistic people should be prepared to be wrong on humanity occasionally, but that those few occasions should not cause them to waver in their belief that most of humanity is good.  “My friend thinks this is a naïve way of approaching humanity,” I told him.  “He thinks it’s best to live by the idea that everyone you run across is corrupt, until they prove otherwise.  So you’re prepared, he says, for that slimeball that you will eventually run across that attempts to dupe you out of all of your money.  Not everyone you will run across is evil, he acknowledges, but it’s best to live with this mindset in preparation for those who are.”

“I’ll give you a third possibility,” my professor said chewing on some awful smelling sandwich. “Have you ever considered the possibility that most people don’t give a crap about you.”  It may have been twenty years since that professor dropped that line on me, but it’s had such a profound impression on me that I can’t shake it.  It’s as if he said it to me yesterday.

The world doesn’t approach you any differently based on your perspective of the world.  The slimeballs and shysters aren’t more wary of you if you are more prepared for them.  The very idea that you believe that you’re “more prepared” for them may, in fact, be your weakness.  The very idea that you believe in the worst of humanity, in preparation for someone like them, may be your undoing when they flip the page on you and become the guy that you want them to be.  They’re bad guys, and this is what they do.

Anyone who has worked a high stress, low paying sales job knows that a majority of the population is prepared for the slimeballs involved in sales.  Most people involved in sales aren’t slimeballs, but they’re prepared for you to think they are.  They have reactions given to them by the sales training team.  If a salesperson gets a no, for example, they’re told to turn to page 23 of the “reactions” section of their sales training book; if they get an adamant no, they turn to page 46 of the reactions section, and if they get that witty retort that you created that morning in the mirror, in preparation for someone like them, “if it’s so great why don’t you buy it” they turn to page 69.  If your reaction is a practiced one that basically calls them out for being the slimeball that they are, “because you know slimeballs,” they’re instructed to turn to page 92.  Your best defense is to take a step back and realize that you’re in the majority of those people who don’t trust salespeople, and you’re in a majority of the people that have witty responses that put sales people in their place.  You’re in a majority that thinks you can play this game better than them, even though this is specificially what they’ve been trained for.  This is their home turf, and they know how to play this game better than you.  They don’t care if you’re a good guy that knows the worst of humanity when you run across it.  They just want to make the sale.  If you truly want to separate yourself from the majority, you’ll drop the ego and just hang up on them.

In all the telemarketing, sales jobs I’ve had, there is one constant rule: you cannot hang up.  No matter what the customer on the other ends says, you cannot hang up.  As a sales rep, you also have sales quotas, and time allotments for each call, and the smart people who know “slimeballs when they run across them” are wasting everybody’s time by trying to outdo us.  By simply hanging up, you’re saving yourself and the slimeball salesperson a lot of time and frustration.  A majority of the people cannot do this, however, for they have too much invested in the fact that they’re one of those very few people who can spot a slimeball and beat them at their game.

Know this also, no matter how much worldly knowledge you bring to the sales call, if the salesperson backs off, their boss will give them coaching tips for the next time they run across an anonymous person like you that is prepared for their slimeball, salesperson approach.  If that sales person continues to be “unprepared” for someone like you, it may be because they are good people that don’t want to bother you, and they feel bad continually hitting you with the responses on pages 23, 46, and 69, and they’ll probably be out of job soon…and be replaced by someone who is.

For those slimeballs that excel in their craft, sales can be like a penitentiary to a convict that is believed to be impossible to escape.  Convicts don’t care that good men have spent their lives designing and fortifying a fortress to make it impossible to escape.  The very idea that it is impossible to escape is what intrigues them.  They spend their days and nights focused on finding that one weakness in the fortress good men built to keep them in.  Very few inmates believe they are bad guys that need to do time for the crime they committed.  They want freedom.  They want to escape.  Salesman approach sales in the same manner in that they don’t care if you think they’re good or bad, they spend their days and nights thinking about ways to flip you.  So the next time you enter their lot with all of your witty responses and refusals, remember that if they’re any good at what they do, they’re probably better at understanding the psychology of you than you are.  Like an inmate in a penitentiary dreaming of the day when they spot that one weakness in the inescapable fortress, this is what they think about twenty-four hours a day.  This is what they do, this is who they are, this is their obsession, and a well-trained salesperson will know how to turn all that you think you are against you.

When it comes to the anonymous characters that you will run across in life, they don’t care that you think you know who they are.  It doesn’t change their approach.  They don’t care that you think you are a good person.   Even the panhandler that gets cash from you doesn’t care that you think you’re a good person for giving them money.  They may manipulate that psychology of you for the period of time it takes to complete the transaction, but the minute you walk away, they won’t remember you.  If you give them a $20.00 bill, as opposed to the ones they’ve received from everyone else, they may remember you, and they may give you the obligatory response that you demand the next day when called upon to do so, but that’s only to feed into your ego and try and get another $20.00 out of you.  At the end of the day, however, they won’t remember you.  They won’t smile fondly in memory of you when they purchase their goods with the money you gave them.  They’ll probably laugh at you with their peers.  They’ll probably say something like, “That guy must’ve been feeling guilty about something.”  They don’t care that you’re a good person though that trusts them to do something good with the money you’ve given them.  As far as they’re concerned it’s their money now, and they’ll do whatever the hell they want with it.  At the end of the day, they won’t give a crap about you.

Nobody cares what you wear either.  You may think people think you only wear the finest duds available to man, but most people aren’t paying that much attention to you.  In a psychological study, cited in Douglas McRaney’s book “You are Not so Smart”, subjects were told to don an embarrassingly flamboyant Barry Manilow T-shirt.  The subjects were greatly embarrassed at the prospect of doing this, and some of them wouldn’t do it.  They didn’t think their pride could withstand it.  Those that would were told to interrupt a class in progress to ask the professor a question.  The result: 25% of the students in the class remembered any details about the flamboyant, Manilow T-shirt.  In a separate experiment, the subject was told to wear the finest duds available to man and interrupt the professor in the same fashion.  The result: 10% of the students in the class remembered any details about the finest duds available to man.  Very few people care about what you’re wearing, and even fewer care about you.

Nobody cares that you just messed up in your speech.  They don’t even care when you apologize for it, they just want you to get on with it, so they can go home to watch their shows.  Nobody cares that you have mustard on your collar, that you have mismatched socks, or that you haven’t talked all day because you’re upset about the fact that your puppy passed away that very morning.  How many times a day does a person say, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m so upset today?”  The honest response would be, “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.”  The more common, honest response would be, “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice, because I’ve had such and such happen to me.”  We all feel the need to tell other people we have problems, and in response those people give us their war story that they think is so much worse.  In the end, neither party cares, because most people aren’t paying that much attention to one another.  They just want their day to end, so they can get on with their meaningless lives that you honestly don’t care to hear about.

Most of my fellow classmates felt superior to those that didn’t go to our school.  This contemporaneous feeling of superiority was not an attitude that we gained accidentally.  It was taught to us in our school.  I never learned it however.  I had an outsider mentality that I could never shake for much of my time there.  I had a lot of friends, but most of these friends felt like outsiders too.  So, when I saw the punker at the end of the row in my Spanish class, I decided I would be friends with him.  He appeared to be one of the biggest outsiders in my circle of life at that point, and I thought he and I would have a lot in common.  After a couple attempts at making friends with him, he turned to me and said, “You don’t belong here!”  He said it loud enough that a third party overheard him.  The punker then laughed with that person, and that appeared to warm his heart a little.  This wasn’t racism of course, but it was similar in that I had probably done more to help that punker feel a part of the high school than anyone else.  He bullied me down to a place where he could feel like he was more a part of the group than someone, anyone.  Most people are familiar with this form of bullying, what could be called bullying down, but bullying up is a term that is referenced far less.

Class Envy: Bullying up is a term we can use to describe those bullies who feel like they know their place a little better, but they’re envious of a person, or group, that they believe is above them.  In high school, the classes are more stratrified than they are in adult life.  Adults tend to attempt to be more subtle, and their class envy tends to be directed more generally.  High school age students tend to be more insecure about their beliefs in life, and their place in society, so they tend to be more blunt and convincing when it comes to their interactions, as they try to convince themselves of their character.  In the hierarchy of the stratified classes, we tend to see the jocks and those from money at the top.  Since my group had no entrée into either of these groups, we pretended not to want into their group.  We  decided that there was something wrong with each of the members of these groups, and we ridiculed them individually.  We wanted it known that we wanted nothing to do with them, because we were sure of ourselves and our place in our group.  We didn’t need a group mentality to define us.  We were individuals.  It was a subtle form of class envy, even if we didn’t outwardly engage in it.

Bullying is not usually the term associated with class envy, but it is just as pervasive.  It just doesn’t make the same headlines in our lives, because we believe that those who are above us can afford to be bullied.

“They don’t care, they can afford it,” said a friend while raiding our rich friend’s refrigerator.  I found such an action distatefully funny.  I also saw it as a small way that we could get even with those who engaged in such frivolity.

When a burglar, on television or in the movies, says “I only steal from those who can afford it” we find this justifiable, and the character doesn’t lose the prestige they would normally lose by being a burglar in the first place.  Some of us actually see him as more righteous for his motivation of balancing the scales of economic injustice.  We don’t see the faces of those above us, and we don’t calculate the hard work they may have put into attaining status into our judgment of them.  They’re faceless entities that have accumulated wealth that we deem to be too much, and we justify our actions by saying that they must have been selfish to attain that plateau.

If we are able to justify our class envy through these various measures, how far do we take it?  Do we, as me and my friends in high school, hate them in non-confrontational manners, or do we escalate it into physical acts?  What do we call it when our friend vandalizes a rich person’s Hum-V, because Hum-V’s are harmful to the environment.  What if he pours animal blood on their fur coats, because they’re contributing to an industry that harms animals?  The implication that our friend wants us to have is that he could afford to buy those things too, and he could belong to their class, but he chooses not to for political reasons.  Could this be said to be a form of bullying?  Why didn’t he just have a political discussion with them?

Well, if he did have this political discussion with them, he would be humanizing them, and thereby be losing a vital component to his hatred.  If he did have this discussion with them, you can bet it would be snarky?  “Do you know what you’re doing to the environment driving that beast around?”  He would be attempting to take a step up on them from his communal, underdog status to attempt to level the classes with such a discussion by asking them to be what he terms “more responsible”.

What is he steals from them?  What if you catch him, and ask him what he’s doing, and he says, “Oh, they have money coming out of their orifices.  They’ll never miss this.”  Would you feel compelled to steal something too?  I know I did.  I’m ashamed to say I saw my friends rationale, and I welcomed it.  I didn’t actually steal anything, but there was a part of me that saw his actions as justifiable, because no one person needs that much money or that much wealth.  I saw this as a zero-sum game approach to fairness: if they were able to afford less, perhaps I would be able to afford more.  The rationale my friend gave me was very attractive.

Hatred of the Beautiful: Class envy was never more attactive to me than hatred of the beautiful however.  For some reason that hatred appealed to me more.  I would love to engage in a Greg Gutfeld joke here and say that people have hated me for this reason for much of my life.  Of course they haven’t.  One look at me would tell you that no one has ever hated me because I’m beautiful.  Perhaps this is why I instinctively blanche at the notion that someone is smarter than me, because they’re better looking, but it has happened on numerous occasions.

I don’t hate the beautiful, but it does annoy me when people act differently when they enter the room.  It does annoy me when I change in the same manner.  It does annoy me that we project qualifications on them that they don’t have based on their physical appearance.  It does annoy me that we pay more attention to what they have to say, and that we give their statements more weight.  It annoys me to hear that we, as jurors, tend to ask judges to grant the beautiful more lenient sentences based on physical appearance.  It annoys me that we judge candidates for office based on looks, and that we’ll pay to see the good looking walk and talk on our various screens.  We all know these truths, yet we keep doing it, and we continue to hate ourselves for doing it.

There’s a marginally attractive woman in England, Samantha Brick, who claims that women hate her, because she’s beautiful.*  She says that women won’t befriend her, or if they do they keep her away from their significant others.  The first instinct is to minimize her beauty.  We then attempt to minimize much of what she writes in her blog.  “I don’t do that,” we say in defense.  “I treat everyone the same, regardless of class, beauty or race.”  We don’t, but we don’t know it.  Most of us don’t actively hold a bias.  Most of us don’t purposefully bully another up or down, but we can’t help it.  It’s elemental to our makeup

I am not usually a victim of class envy, for I ususally feel there was something I could’ve done in life to join them.  It’s not my fault that I’m not beautiful though.  Sure, I could lay off the noodles and the salty products that I love with an undying passion, but even if I was as svelte and muscular as I could possibly be, I would still lack some of the natural gifts that the good Lord has endowed upon the beautiful.  If I left it at that, I could still be a great guy, but I have to take it a step further.  I have to get annoyed with my friends who say the things they say, because a beautiful girl is around.  I have to live with the fact that no one acts different around me when I enter a room, but if there is a beautiful person behind me, everyone will take notice.  Say what you want about the rich, and  powerful, but no one is more powerful in a room full of nobodies than a beautiful girl, and I hate that, and I hate myself even more for being a part of it.

*http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2124246/Samantha-Brick-downsides-looking-pretty-Why-women-hate-beautiful.html

I’ve been thinking about you

I was thinking of you the other day.  I was thinking about how special you are.  I was thinking that you are wonderful and generous.  I was thinking that I’ve never met a person as original and unique as you are, and I was thinking about how long it took you to become what you are today.  Seriously, look where you’re at now?  Compared to where you were even ten years ago?  You’ve made a lot of progress through the trials and tribulations you’ve been through.  We’ve all had our problems, but compared to you…we don’t even know what real problems are.  We thought we had it bad, until we heard the story of what happened to you.  It’s remarkable that you’ve been able to overcome all of that and not have a single personality weakness as a result.  I was thinking how well you knew yourself, and how long it’s taken you to know you in that special way you know yourself.  I know you don’t have a lot of “me time” to think about what you mean to all us, but I wanted you to know that we think you’re special, and original, and kind, and you’re the type that would give the shirt off your back to someone in need.  They usually only say such things about people after their dead, but I wanted you to know that I know this about you now, and I want you to keep on being who you are.  We need more people like you in this Godforsaken world full of self-serving types that wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.

The next time you feel a little down, read this, and know that someone out there knows you for who you are.  You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic1.  Does that sound like anyone we know?  Well, some of us out here want you to know that we’re paying attention, and we know that you’re trying, and your special, and you care.

I remember when you said that you hate people who argue with you when they don’t know what they’re talking about.  I know exactly what you’re talking about.  Some of the times, it feels like the world is against you.  Some of the times, it feels like the stars will never line up for you in your current perdicament.  I’m telling you to just keep doing what you’re doing, and things will work out eventually.  It will for you anyway, because no matter what anyone tells you, you’re doing it right.  Who are we to argue with the way you’re doing things.  We don’t understand your situation, until we walk a mile in your shoes.  Your situation is different in ways you can’t really explain to people who don’t know you.  Well, I know you, and I know that you’ve gone through a lot when you tell me the stories of your life?  Who do I think I am when I consider the other person’s viewpoint in your story, when you’ve made it abundantly clear to us that you know what you’re doing?  We’re the self-indulgent types that don’t see you for who you are.

You’re the one who thinks differently.  We believe what others tell us, when we should be listening to you.  You appear to have a better grasp on the issues, because you’ve lived life, and no one gives you credit for that.

You reached that point of hyper-awareness on that drug that one time that helped you understand a fundamental truth about life that we never would understand?  Then you couldn’t remember it the next day, you remember that?  Yeah, you got so obsessed with it that you started taking drugs so often that you forgot why you were taking the drugs in the first place.  I know that we shouldn’t laugh, but the only reason you took the drugs in the first place was to facilitate extraordinary thought in your brain, but you took so much that you ruined it.  There were a lot of people laughing at you for that.  That wasn’t you?  Oh, sorry.  You sure, because I could’ve sworn…

Then you were the one who described that one person in a sexually gratuitous manner.  I remember that, because we were all stunned, and that’s exactly what you wanted.  You wanted us to drop the pretense we had of you being all graceful and polite.  You wanted us to know that you were not constrained by the constraints of your gender, but we all thought you took it too far.  We kind of felt sorry for you in a way.  You thought it was daring and confrontational, but we thought it was kind of sad that you had to fight so hard to appear to be an individual. You danced around your lust to us, when you probably would’ve been better just stating that you lusted after that person blatantly.  That wasn’t you either?  Oh, sorry.  You sure, because I could’ve sworn…

1http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html