Category: anti-humor

Welcome to the Bruhniverse 

RilalyLeave a comment

“It’s not bra, it’s Bruh!” Scott Greenlee said. “It has nothing to do with women’s undergarments. You have to add an ‘H’ to the end of it.” * 

Ask a Gen Z (Generation Z, born between 1997-2012) to Gen A (Generation Alpha, born after 2013) what they watch, and it’s all about YouTube. They might add Netflix with a sigh, and a few others, but YouTube is so popular among these generations that cultural observers call them the YouTube generation.  

So, if a kid you know uses some derivation of brother (bruh, brah, bro, bruvvy or bruv) you know who to blame.** 

The language some influencers (AKA hosts, talent, or content creators) use on YouTube involves an inclusive, exclusive way of truncating language to form an inclusive, exclusive path to a fraternal order. What’s the difference between these truncations of brother and man, buddy and dude? Short answer the differences are as common as the similarities, or “It is what it is bro.” 

We might consider their linguistic adaptations worrisome, as we fear no one will take them seriously, but linguists find nothing unusual about the derivations. Every generation makes subtle changes to the language to create something they can call their own. By defining how their audience should use the lingo they make language more interesting and individualistic. 

As with other generational terms of endearment, their inclusive exclusivity prohibits participation of other generations. Any attempts to participate, observe, or analyze their language results in a cringe, subsequent violations lead to derisive laughter, until they drop a “Stop saying that!” on us to try to prevent us from tainting the Bruh.

A linguistics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Scott Kiesling, states there might be something deeper to linguistic adaptations. He suggests that the various forms of usage might also ease the transition into adulthood. “‘I’ve got [it] together,’ or ‘I’m going to get what I want and I don’t have to try too hard,’” Kiesling explains. “It’s almost like a swagger. I think about powerful men in suits, but sitting in a laid-back, relaxed way, because they don’t have to be in the job interview, sitting straight-up, right? Then this idea that I’m going to be able to just say things and they’re going to happen.   

“Basically, [using such terms is] just another way of “being in the club,” he continues, “which is most clearly indicated by knowing how to use it the right way. They’re all the kind of thing where you’re showing solidarity with a person. I kind of have a theory about how masculinity also has this valence of masculine ease. People talk about masculinity being associated with power, but it’s not just about trying to be powerful, but how easily it comes for me.” 

How hard was it for us to work our way through the complicated algorithms of youth into adulthood? What rhetorical devices did we use to form some sort of brotherhood with our peers? We weren’t concerned with overwhelming questions regarding what we were going to do for a living at that point. We just wanted friends, and to accomplish that we needed to learn how to talk like them. Making friends established a certain, unspecified level of confidence that led to a swagger that benefitted us greatly in life. If we could convince them we were confident, how far away were we from convincing ourselves?

How many successful people say, “If we can get out of our own way, we might actually become successful.” Doing something substantial in life might not be half as difficult as developing the confidence to do it, in other words, and the confidence that comes from language can be a powerful force in this regard.  

* The slang term Brah originated in Hawaii.    

** Bruv is a British truncation of their terms bruvver and bruvvy. 

Further reading on this topic can be found at: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/bro-brah-bruv-bruh-and-breh-meanings-explained 

Horrible People: Abram and the Princess

RilalyLeave a comment

“How can you not hear that?” Abram asked his wife after Princess woke him from another evening nap with all of her barking, yipping, or whatever we call the sound that spirals into our thoracic vertebrae.

“I guess I hear it so often that I just don’t hear it anymore,” she said. “It’s like white noise to me.”

“It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me,” he said. “How in the world can you get used to that?”

Princess didn’t bark at anything in particular. She just enjoyed hearing herself bark. Abram was done with it. Princess just tapped his last nerve. Waking him from this evening’s nap was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Everyone has a threshold, and Princess just met his. He couldn’t nap with her around, he couldn’t watch his shows without that sound drowning out punchlines, and he couldn’t even enjoy a pizza roll. Once he began eating one, she’d start in, and he’d throw a three-quarters full box of pizza into the waste receptacle. He couldn’t even enjoy a peaceful moment of solitude in the waste removal room without hearing that yip. “I can’t enjoy a good BM anymore,” he told his wife after a particularly obnoxious night of yipping. “How can you not hear that?” He worked hard, and the otherwise uneventful evenings were his rewards for hard work, but Princess would have none of it.

Abram had a word with them over the fence, the neighbor’s, the owners of Princess, and it was a nice word, because he was a very nice man, good man. They said they would do something about it. And they did, for about two nights.  

Princess had a regular bark that she yipped throughout the night, but she let you know when someone was approaching with a more shrill and rapid yip. When that person reached a point where they were close enough to pet her, Princess stopped barking. The yip was replaced by a soft, earnest whine. The ten seconds or so that person spent petting her were the only breaks Abram had from her barking throughout the night. 

Everybody loved Princess, and Princess loved everybody. She didn’t care for Abram though. Even though he never did a damned thing to her, Princess refused to let him pet her. He reached over to pet her a number of times, while speaking with her owner, because that’s what a very nice, good man does when they’re talking to a neighbor, and their dog is present. When Abram reached over to pet Princess, however, she growled her cute, little Poodle growl and backed away barking with her teeth showing. Every time she did it, and she did it every time, why her owners were just aghast. “Princess?!” the owner said with shocked dismay. “I’m sorry, she’s never done that before.” They said that every time.

Nightly evidence bolstered that characterization. Abram was seemingly the only person on the planet Princess didn’t like. It humiliated and embarrassed him. She sidled up to his wife, the kid, and every stranger who happened to pass by, but she didn’t like Abram, and he hated her all the more for it. 

He was used to it though. When his manager needed to fire someone, and it happened. It happens in every business. The manager slash owner (his nickname was Slash)  of the local Lube Your Lube scheduled that person to work with Abram. 

“He was in on it,” Charlie “Slash” Hyde said. “Abram enjoyed being that guy. It all started when he was new, about six months into his job, and he started to get real comfortable with the fellas at Lube Your Lube. He started becoming more comfortable being himself, which we learned was the worst thing for the business. I know that sounds harsh, and I apologize to Abram if he ever reads this, but full on Abram is a disagreeable sort. He had an ability to get under people’s skin. The problem for me, as an owner slash manager was Abram outworked every single person on our staff. He was dependable and willing to sacrifice whatever it took for the business. He’d work weekends, overtime, and if someone called in sick, he’d be there for me within the half hour. No matter if it was his day off, or if he just clocked out less than thirty minutes ago. The problem I had was that if I wanted to keep a full staff, Abram couldn’t be comfortable being himself, because no one wanted to work with him. So, he and I devised a six-point plan to keep him employed. I won’t provide the details of that confidential plan, but Abram followed it to the letter for me.

“Flash forward about three months, and I had to fire someone,” Slash continued. “The problem for me was that I wanted Lube Your Lube to be a family. We all got along at The Lube and we had numerous get-togethers, holiday parties, and after work bar nights. I never had a big family, so the fellas at The Lube were my extended family. They were my brothers, cousins and nephews. I got to know their wives, their kids, and their dogs. So, when it came time to fire one of them, I pictured their kids, and a crying, desperate wife, and I just couldn’t do it. I should’ve never got that close to them to begin with. ‘Remember that six-point plan we developed months ago,’ I told Abram in a one-on-one. ‘Yeah, turn that off for about two weeks. Open the spigot, be full-on Abram with this guy I put in the pit with you.’ Long story short, I didn’t have to fire anyone for about three and a half years, thanks to Abram.” 

*** 

When the yipping drowned out  his favorite sitcom, he cranked the volume, when he tasted it on his pizza roll, he threw three-fourths of a box into the garbage, but when he dreamed about Princess sitting at the bottom of a tower, yipping at him while he tried to climb Rapunzel’s hair, he knew something had to be done.  

“How does a cute, fluffy little dog’s bark drive someone so crazy?” was the question put to Abram by one of the Lube Your Lube fellas. 

“You ever hear about how the Chinese water torture technique can drive a person insane?” he said. “It’s like that. Except Princess’s version of the insanity-inducing drip, drip, drip is yip, yip, yip.”

He knew he got a little too hot and bothered by it at times, but who wouldn’t be at least a little ticked? After the patterned barking established itself, he shared a kind word with the owners. They didn’t do anything about it. They did in the beginning, for a couple days, and then they forgot. He thought about stressing the point angrily, but he wasn’t a confrontational guy. The city had noise ordinances that specifically addressed dog barking, a three-step plan that could lead to the owners losing the dog if they didn’t address the issue properly. The problem was that noise ordinance dealt with dogs barking after 10 p.m., but Princess didn’t bark until 10 P.M. She stopped barking, or her owners brought her back in at 8 P.M. He wouldn’t have initiated that process anyway. He was no snitch.

They don’t know who they’re messing with, he thought watching Princess bark at nothing from behind the drapes. They don’t think I’ll do anything. They don’t know me. I’m fixing to do something. I’ll take matters into my own hands. It’s what a man does, he takes care of matters. He takes care of matters himself. There are extremes, of course, but a very nice, good man, doesn’t take matters involving a snowy white, ten-pound little puppy to extremes. A man handles matters in such a way that is impossible to prove or trace, and everyone knows that there will come a day when Princess will no longer able to control her bowels. It happens, maybe it’s age, and maybe she got into something. No one knows why it happens, but it happens. It even happens to cute, snowy white Poodles named Princess. 

***

“We’re moving,” the neighbor told Abram’s wife over the backyard fence, weeks later.

“Are you serious?” she said. “You haven’t been here that long? You’re such nice neighbors. What happened?”

“I don’t know if something around here is making Princess sick,” the neighbor said, “but she’s such a big part of our family now, and we can’t just get rid of her for pooping. Who gets rid of a family member who can’t control her bowels?”

“She’s pooping?” his wife asked, confused.

“It’s diarrhea,” the neighbor said, “and it’s bad. Every time she barks, it comes out. She doesn’t just poop either. It’s projectile pooping.” The neighbor paused here. “You can laugh. We did, at first. We thought it was kind of cute and funny, her pooping every time she barked. We could tell she was a developing a bit of a complex about it, and that kind of made it more cute and funny, but it’s been going on for so long now, for weeks. It’s not funny to us anymore, but you can laugh if you want to. I know it’s funny to everyone else, but there’s poop stains on our carpet, in our carpet, that we’ll never be able to get out, and it’s all over our walls too. She’s so tired now that she never wants to do play anymore or do much of anything, and she’s still, technically, a puppy. And when you pick her up, you have to be careful not to touch her tummy, because she screams and tries to bite you. Whatever is wrong with her has caused stains, and a smell in that house that is so bad that the owner is probably going to have to hire professional cleaners to get it all out. It’s bad.”

“I am so sorry,” Abram’s wife told her.

“It might seem silly to move over a dog,” she said, “but we’ve tried everything. We took her to the vet, we tried to change her diet, but she’s not eating much anymore, and well, we can’t just get rid of her. We had a big blowout about it, Stan and I, but we can’t get rid of Princess. She’s part of our family now, and you can’t just put your family dog in the pound, or give her up for adoption. Who does that? Right? What kind of people would get rid of a dog because she’s sick? I’m thinking a move will do her some good. I don’t know. Plus, we’re only renters, so we’ll just rent somewhere else. The owner was kind enough to let us out of our lease, minus our deposit, so it was nice chatting with you over these last couple of months.”

When the wife told Abram about that conversation, she was broken-hearted. “Can you believe that?” she said. “It’s so bad that it’s just so sad, and it’s almost painful to me. It’s such a mystery too.”

“The only mystery to me is why anyone would go to the expense and the pain in the butt of moving over a dumb dog with diarrhea.”

“They said it’s been going on for weeks Abram,” she said, and when she went into more detail about how the dog was pooping every time she barked, and how it was projectile poop that stained their walls, and was probably deep in their floorboards now, Abram couldn’t help but giggle. When she relayed the fact that the dilemma was such that it was actually causing the couple marital strife, Abram lost it. When she looked at him with confusion and some disgust, he almost fell to the floor in laughter. 

“Why is this so funny?” she said. “I don’t find this one bit funny. I think it’s kind of sad actually, really sad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping away the tears. “It’s just that, well, I may have played a bit of a role in all of this.” 

“You played a ..?” she asked. “What?”

“I might have cooked up some of my delicious burgers for Princess over the last few weeks, and it could be alleged that I might have crushed some Ex-Lax in it,” he said, and he expected her to smile a little at that. If nothing else, he thought his presentation of that information might make her laugh. She didn’t. She just looked more confused.

“You might have what?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re saying?” She mouthed the words he said when he repeated them. It was an unusual tic of hers to ask someone to repeat what she obviously heard, and she mouthed the words when person repeated them. This was her way of trying to grasp what the other party was saying. 

“That dog was driving me absolutely crazy,” he said, “and you knew that. I told about my anger. I told you all about it, and you did nothing. I told you about it numerous times, for months. Hell, I even told them about it, and when they wouldn’t do anything about it, I took control of the situation. Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“You didn’t do anything of the sort,” she said. “You’re messing with me. Tell me that you’re kidding.”

“We finally bonded Princess and I,” he said pumping his eyebrows. “Did I tell you that? Yeah, she loved these burgers so much that she actually looked forward to seeing me. You remember how she hated me, and she wouldn’t come near me, no matter what I did. Well, when I had a burger in hand, she was all hopping and yipping her excited, little yip when I approached, and her tails wagging about a hundred miles an hour. We were the best of buddies there for a while.”

He thought she might laugh at that too, but she didn’t. Her face went through so many contortions, as she tried to grapple with this information, that he began to feel bad. He thought of backtracking and saying, I’m just kidding, but it was too late now.

“You poisoned a dog, because it wouldn’t stop barking?” she asked him. “Who does that? That’s like David Berkowitz, Ted Kaczynski stuff.”

“I didn’t poison the dog,” Abram said. “I gave it Ex-Lax, and Ex-Lax is not poison.”

“Not to us,” she said, “but it could be to a dog? Plus, you caused her a severe case of diarrhea, which could cause severe dehydration. What if you permanently ruined the lining of her stomach or intestines? Dogs can’t handle our medications Abram. What if you killed that dog, Abram? Did you ever think of that?” 

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You have never done anything that disgusted me before,” she said after a pause. “I’ve been disappointed with you before, and I said nothing. I’ve experienced some unhappiness with some of the decisions you’ve made, and the things you’ve done, the normal things a husband and wife go through, but I’ve never been disgusted before. This disgusts me. Those were some good people and they were good neighbors.”

“No, they weren’t,” he said. “They had a dog who barked for hours on end at nothing, at nothing, and they did nothing about it, nothing. She just barked to hear herself bark, and no one did a damn thing about it. You did nothing. If you think about it, you’re partly to blame for this.”

“They were nice people Abram,” she said, all but spitting at him. “They were nice, young, and polite people. I liked them. You liked them. Everyone liked them, and you ruined their lives so much that you caused them to move. Don’t give me this, I’m partly to blame. You did this Abram.”

“Who moves over a dog with a case of diarrhea?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

The Alternative Explanation

RilalyLeave a comment

Jerry Martin tried too hard to make friends with far too many people. Was he obnoxiously superficial and a phony, yes, but we now see that there was a enviable, simplistic quality to Jerry Martin that we didn’t appreciate at the time. He just wanted to have fun.  

The prime directive is fun when co-workers gather. The work they do can be stressful, tedious, and pressure-packed. They need an outlet, and for 90% of those who worked with us that outlet involved a bar and massive amounts of alcohol. If nothing else, alcohol lubricates the mind, unlocks inhibitions, and makes a fun night even more fun. At some point in the evening, and no one knows when or where it will happen, someone gets serious. Did Jerry up and leave the table, every time someone turned the tide of the evening? No, but when it became apparent that no one was going to change the topic back to something fun, Jerry was no longer there.

We complained about that, but we also complained about Jerry being too much like David when David was around. It made us a little ill, until we saw him change a little too much when he was around Shannon. We didn’t really see him for who he was, until he sat down with us, and he tried to be like us. Someone mentioned that Jerry was something of a shape-shifter, and another said he was a chameleon. I agreed with both of those characterizations, because I know what I saw. I considered Jerry too easily influenced, naïve, and a little too eager, but no one ever offered me an alternative explanation for why someone might do this before.

“If you ask me, he’s a bit of a brown noser, a kiss up, and a little too eager,” Rick Becker said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “and eager doesn’t work well when you’re trying make new friends.” Everyone smiled and nodded at Rick’s assessment. Rick didn’t add that we want cool, detached, and ambivalent, because that probably would’ve been too on the nose. He also didn’t allude to the idea that we want to befriend someone who is not there, or that we want someone who forces us to try to gain their attention and their approval.

Jerry was always there when we went to the bar after work, and he was always laughing too hard and hanging on our every word. He always appeared to be having a great time with us, but he was also on the lookout for a better time. At some point, and no one knew when it happened, Jerry would float away to some other table in the bar, and he appeared to be having such a great time over there with a group of complete strangers that some of our people were a little insulted by it. Yet, his trips to other tables never appeared to be a purposeful migration, as if to suggest we were boring and someone else appeared more interesting. He just developed a loose connection with some complete stranger at another table, and he attempted to strengthen it by moving to their table.  

When he moved to another table talk to a girl that made more sense to us. We thought we knew his motive, and some of the times we were right. When he moved to talk to a guy, it threw those readings off, but when he eventually established the fact that there were no patterns to his migrations, we were confused and a little hurt by it.

“Are we just not interesting enough for him?” Angie asked.

“Why does he always do that?” Tiffany asked. “Why does he even come out with us if he’s always going to do that?”

“I think he just gets bored easily,” I said.

“Yep,” Angie added. “He’s probably a little ADD.”

“I’ll tell you what he is,” Derek said. Derek was an outspoken type who loved to think he said what everyone was afraid to say. “He’s a damned phony.”

“He’s not phony,” I said.

Derek argued with fingers. He pointed to one finger and listed one element of his argument, then another, and another. “One plus one, plus one, equals phony,” he said with his three fingers up.

“I don’t know what he is, or what he’s doing,” I said, “but he’s not a phony.”

“My guess is he didn’t come to us fully formed,” Shannon said, referring to the fact that he was relatively new to our team. We looked to her with confusion, awaiting further explanation. “Did you guys see that shirt he wore last week? That shirt had a huge emblem on it? It was so busy. I asked him about it, and he answered in a very insecure way, and he hasn’t worn that shirt since. He also has about twenty pairs of shoes. I don’t know a guy who has more than three pairs of shoes. He seems to have a different pair of shoes on every day.”

“It’s to go with his socks,” Tiffany said and everyone started pointing at her, laughing, and adding comments. “I thought they were Christmas socks at first, until he walked in with brown and pink striped socks on in February. Did you guys see those? I had to ask him where he got them, and I said, and I quote, ‘You’re a brave man Jerry Martin. A grown man, wearing pink and brown striped socks, brave, and who makes them? Because I can’t imagine a manufacturer brave enough to put those out for sale, in a store, in the men’s section.’”

“Was he insecure when you teased him about it?” Shannon asked.

“He was,” Tiffany said. “I expected him to be bold, or as bold as anyone who would wear pink and brown striped socks should be, but he was the opposite.” 

“Exactly, I think Jerry is an empty vessel,” Shannon said, “and I don’t mean that in a hugely offensive way either. I just think he’s the type of person who tries people on, the way we would try a pair of brown and pink socks on. He probably thought he was making a fashion statement wearing such a busy shirt and wild socks, and when we told him he wasn’t, he never wore them again. I think he tries to talk like David and laugh like Angie, because he’s trying them on. It’s as if he’s in a fitting room with our personalities, trying us on to see if he likes us on him. I think he takes little nuggets from each of us to try to complete a picture. I don’t know his history, but I’m guessing he probably has a hole in his soul that he spends his life trying to fill. I’m guessing he doesn’t like himself very much, who he is, where he’s from, or where he’s going, so he looks to everyone else to find something different. He tries us on for a bit to see if he likes that, and if he doesn’t, he puts someone else on. Or, maybe, like I said, he’s looking for a bit of each of us to form some kind of final formation of a personality, because he feels like his is not complete.”

That silenced us. We knew we weren’t fully formed, and we knew the she who-smelt-it-dealt-it principle of making charges about another person’s character. Our guess suggested that when someone spots a flaw in another, they spot it because they suffer from it more than most, and it makes it easier for them to spot it in others. 

Shannon soaked in that silence for a spell and added the following with a cringe/smile, “All right, that might be a bit much, but I agree with you. He’s not a phony.”

No one wants to hear such a serious, alternative explanation at a bar with drinks in hand without a joke to punctuate it. Participants in bar conversations are to incite the mob by narratives to jokes or add jokes to narratives. We view deep, insightful comments with disdain and fatigue. They’re thought-provoking and serious buzzkills, in an unserious climate.

We thought we knew this new guy named Jerry Martin. We thought he was a phony, a brown-noser, who was a little too eager. What else could explain a man who does such things? Was there an alternative explanation? Some of us eagerly seek alternative explanations to tweak our frame of reference, but most reject them just as quickly, especially when we have a beer in hand.

We didn’t think Shannon’s alternative explanation nailed Jerry in the short-term, and it wasn’t a theory to leap on, ask a million questions about, and chew on and sleep on, until we had it all figured out. We dismissed it as beer talk. We might have laughed about it at the time, but we laugh about just about everything when we have a few beers in us. Then, when we wake with our punishments from the night before, we try to wipe everything said from our night before from our database. 

The next time I met a Jerry Martin type, however, Shannon’s theory came back at me. I tried to apply it to that person, but the circumstances were so different that it didn’t snap in. By about the fourth or fifth Jerry Martin I met, I became obsessed with her alternative explanation. One of the reasons I was a better at stupid and superficial bar conversations was because I hung around a guy named Ben. Ben was one of the most superficial conversationalists that I’ve ever met. He could talk to anyone about just about anything. If a girl had some frayed yarn on her sweater, he could do a half an hour on it. He had a knack for making trivial conversation topics interesting, and I still consider that trait enviable. I realized that I had been using a bit of Ben’s recipe for years combined with a bit of Nolan’s sauce. Nolan had an air about him that suggested he knew more about you than you ever could. Was he right? It didn’t matter to either party. The women we guessed about were more interested in correcting him than they were deriving insult from his bad guess. Nolan taught me, more than anyone else, how interested people were in talking about themselves. As opposed to Ben, Nolan listened and observed. He was genuinely curious, and he approached us in the most objective manner possible. It was just some intangible element of his nature that he wore well. Angie had a sense of authority about her that affected her walk. She looked to be the type who always had a destination, and Gil Burkett always tilted his head and pointed a finger outward, as he waited for you to finish a point so he could talk. It was a tiny, insignificant gesture that I picked up.

The primary reason I absorbed their traits into mine was that I was not fully formed, and I was subconsciously looking for characteristics, large and small, into mine. The more parking slots we have to fill, the more they will be filled as the event time nears. How many characteristics of our personality do we develop organically, and how many do we pick up from others? Jerry Martin’s ability to absorb the characters around him might have appeared obnoxious to us at the time, but was he an exaggerated example of all of us?  

We’re all empty vessels at one point, soaking in tiny blocs of inspiration, no bigger than the smallest Lego. If we now view our makeup as 100% complete, what percentage of our routines, reactions, and other such minutiae are composed of the 1% influences we gather like a snowball rolling downhill? 

As we mature and gain greater confidence in ourselves, we might not be empty vessels anymore, but we are still open to suggestion that we could be doing the things a little different. Even the most fully formed have missing elements that they look to others to complete.

Is Shannon’s little theory about such people always right? Of course not, but I found it so interesting that I thought the best way to prove it was to attempt to disprove it. To do so, we must first admit that people like Jerry aren’t fully formed, and they’re looking to others to help him fill their missing characteristics. If that is the case, how would a more fully formed individual approach us? Would he seek any influence on any matter? If he were extremely well formed, would he even speak to us? “He’s a real snob,” we might say.

“No, he’s not,” they might reply. “He just doesn’t need us, and he doesn’t seek to influence his personality any more. He’s fully formed.”

What does that mean? If you’re full formed what would be the point of interacting with anyone? My projection of a fully formed person would involve them knowing what they want to do at a very young age and never altering from that path. It involves an individual knowing who they are so completely that they never allow personalities to alter their core, or the formation they developed before they met us. They know where they were, who they are, and who they’re going to be. The only challenge left in life for them is getting there. It might also mean never trying anything new, because if you’re going to try something new, you’ll want to know how to do it by watching others and learning their approach. 

I tried to think of one fully formed personality from which to solidify this need to disprove Shannon’s little aside, but every time I thought I had one, I kept coming up with their frailties and vulnerabilities. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so secure in their own identity that they exhibited some sort of imperviousness to influence, but I’m sure they’re out there.

When we meet a Jerry Martin it’s so obvious to us why they are the way they are. We all have our go-tos to explain why someone acts in a particular way, but does that explain why they act that way, or why we don’t? Are we so intimately familiar with the characterizations we make of others, based on our he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it familiarity with those characterizations. Are we so familiar with those characteristics, because we’ve spent our whole lives trying to avoid them, so no one will ever call us a phony, a brown-noser, or the eager, easily influenced? When others don’t properly avoid such characteristics, our intimate familiarity spots that failure immediately and pinpoints it for what it is.

Another unpopular element of the alternative explanation is that it might upend our feel-good go-to explanations. Our explanations often involve insults to the other person, and insulting another person often makes us feel better about ourselves. “They’re doing it wrong, right?” “Right.” “Right!” The alternative explanation is not always right, of course, but it seeks to understand the moment and the motive from a perspective we never considered before. We prefer the one plus one, plus one, equals phony answer, because it’s so obvious to us what he’s doing. It’s so obvious to us that we don’t need an alternative explanation, because our world makes more sense to us when it has fixed parameters. We immediately dismiss alternative explanations as thinking too much about an issue, until we hear it. It might take one night, or a couple months for we slow learners, but we might eventually see that there is something there to explore about them, us, and human nature in general.