Category: Humor

Klosterman’s The 90’s: A Book. A Word Salad.

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“What’s historically distinctive about the [Generation] X era is the overwhelming equivocation toward its own marginalization,” Chuck Klosterman writes in his book The 90’s: A Book. We understand Klosterman’s point, but we would write it another way. We would write that the art of equivocation may have led to Generation X’s marginalization. As evidence of this, Klosterman then writes, “The things uninformed people said about who Gen Xers supposedly were often felt reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” 

No one in my inner circle said anything bold in the 90’s. There were exceptions of course. We called them the “say anything” crowd, because they’d say anything. The rest of us were either scared, or conditioned, to qualify, equivocate, or obfuscate the meaning of everything we said to try to jam our thoughts into every square hole before us. We edited our thoughts in real time, so that no one could accuse us of generalizing. I talked to other generations, and they didn’t worry about generalizing, stereotyping, or any other accusation our crowd could dream up. They said bold things, and they could back them up, some of the times. Some of their opinions were controversial, and some of them weren’t. Some of their opinions were wrong, and some of them weren’t. They didn’t care. They weren’t afraid to share. They’d say anything. How do they get away with that, we wondered.  

Someone accused me of generalizing once, as if it were the ultimate condemnation of my assessment. By that time, we were all sick of the accusation. Being so careful became tedious after a while. I turned to my accuser and said, “I am generalizing, because I find this to be generally true.” She was shocked, presumably because no one ever fought back against her charge. Had she pressed me, I would’ve added, ‘When we generalize, we say things we believe are generally true. If something is true 50.0001% of the time, it is generally true, in general, and that is a generalization.’ “There are no absolutes,” the absolutes crowd say. We might try to argue that line, but the idea they loft is because something is not 100% true 100% of the time, then we should not discuss it until we qualify it to make considerations for the 49.9999% times it might not be true. How does anyone think, talk, or formulate conversation if they’re worried that some statement doesn’t account for the 23.1% of the population to which it doesn’t apply? You don’t. You sit back, in marginalized and intimidated corners to allow the unintimidated to continue unencumbered. The fear of condemnation leads us to say things like, “reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” We enjoyed saying such things initially, as it led to some level of “intellectual status”, but we eventually discovered how discombobulating and tedious it could become.      

2) “The most compelling aspect of The Gen X Reader is not what the writers got right or wrong, but the intensity of their search for meaning,” Chuck Klosterman writes of Douglas Rushkoff’s compilation of essays Gen X Reader (an anthology devoted to dissecting Douglas Copeland’s book Generation X). 

If all theory is autobiography, and all analysis is self-analysis, Klosterman reveals his raison d’etre in that sentence. If he did this to himself, in a public park, in the state of Alabama, they would probably ring him up on at least a half-dozen misdemeanors. 

3) “[The book Gen X Reader is] a fossilized example of how understanding the present cannot be achieved until the present has become the past,” Klosterman further writes. 

What? 

He writes, “Times, change, because that’s what they do.”  

In another space, on another subject, Klosterman asks, “Now … were these assessments accurate?” He answers: (Yes.) (No.) (Sometimes.)” 

The first thing that comes to mind when reading these particular lines is, the only person who might be more exhausted in a conversation with Chuck Klosterman, other than the audience to his conversation, is Chuck Klosterman himself. Those unfamiliar with Klosterman’s style might think he is trying to add words to fluff his word count, or they might think he’s trying too hard to be inclusive or sound intelligent. Those of us who read his books, listen to his podcast, and/or watch interviews with him know this is Chuck Klosterman. It’s the way he writes, and it’s the way he talks.  

I tried to come up with an assessment of these particular elements of Klosterman’s writing. “Word Salad,” I whispered. What’s a word salad? Wikipedia defines word salad thusly: “A word salad, or schizophasia, is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”, most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder.” This is not Chuck Klosterman in total. He is very intelligent and insightful, but he has moments.

I recommend just about every book he has authored. Klosterman’s writing is not a word salad in this sense, but some of his sentences contain iceberg lettuce. I love iceberg lettuce. I always have. I love it as much as I do Chuck Klosterman’s work. After decades of eating the leaves, I found out that iceberg lettuce has little nutritional value. It provides vitamin A and K, and some fiber, and it has a high-water count, but compared to other lettuce leaves it is very low in nutritional value. 

Many Klosterman essays have living lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, and other leaves with nutrients, but he adds black olives. “You can never have too many black olives,” his writing says. Yes, we can. Then he adds far too much cheese, a half-pound of bacon bits, and everyone knows you don’t need that many cucumbers and croutons to make a salad, but Klosterman wants to make sure readers get value for their money.     

4) One interesting insight Klosterman writes that aligns with thoughts I’ve explored is: “[Older generations] perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.” 

For most of my life I wanted others to consider me weird, strange, or just plain different. Whatever I achieved in this regard, it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted it all. I never realized what an enviable position this was, and I had no idea that it was an offshoot of my dad’s ability (financially and otherwise) that led me to a varying degree of certitude that I belong. My dad grew up in a location just south of the “other side” of the tracks. He grew up, and spent the entirety of his adulthood, trying to fit in. A portion of my desire to engage the minds of the weird, so that I might become one, could have been borne through rebellion to my dad’s obsessive desire to have others consider he and his son’s normal, but I now think he laid a foundation of norms at my feet by raising me in a normal climate that I desperately tried to escape. 

5) Klosterman also has a unique gift for making seemingly irrelevant (to me anyway) events in history cultural touchstones that either influenced, changed, or revolutionized the culture. Klosterman writes that Nelson Mandela going from jail to the Nobel Peace Prize and then to the presidency of South Africa as “the most momentous global event of the nineties.” Klosterman lists the cultural influence as initiating the art of the conspiracy theory, as conspiracy theories suggested Mandela died in a prison cell. I don’t know if Klosterman ran around in different circles, or if he is attempting to rewrite his past and assign his thoughts greater significance, but I don’t know anyone, personally, who ever talked about Nelson Mandela in the 90’s.  

6) Klosterman is a few years younger than me, and we share some similarities in our background, so when he writes what he considers the cultural touchstones of the last sixty years, I’m intimately familiar with almost everything he discusses save for one: Reality Bites. I was that Blockbuster guy we now see in retrospective videos of a guy who stood in their aisles far, FAR too often, in the 90’s, trying to find something unique and entertaining, but I never selected Reality Bites. To read Klosterman, the idea that someone who paid a ton of attention to the culture, through entertainment venues, the idea that a man my age never saw this movie is his equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. This isn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last he writes of this movie, as he believes it either captured the narrative of the 90’s in America, better than any other movie, or drove it. I wouldn’t know, because I never saw it.  

Regardless what I’ve said above, I respect Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I think he’s an excellent writer, and a challenging intellect. When one of his books come out, I’m one of the first in the intangible line to pick it up. If anyone thinks I’m too negative, or cynical, I am. Whenever my friends and I would walk out of a quality movie, we would dissect it, and we were always negative and cynical. We would criticize the acting, the plot, elements of the dialogue, and anything else we could think up. If the movie just sucked, we didn’t waste any more of our lives on it. We just said, “Well, that sucked!” The great ones were the ones we picked apart. Our conversations went something like this: “I hated it when he did that!” “Oh, I know it. What about that time he did this?” “Great movie though.” “Yeah, it was.”  

The Sellout, Fraud, Fake, Phoniness of Keeping it Real

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“You’re a sellout!” We would say when we wanted our fellow teens to cower. It’s what we did in the 1990’s. Back then, sellout, and its various derivatives, were the most powerful words in the English language. No one could pinpoint what those relative and arbitrary terms meant, but everyone could. Everyone knew how to move the couch to suit their situation, but no one knew where the grooves in the carpet were. We didn’t know what keeping it real meant either, but to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice’s statement on porn, “We knew it when we saw it.” The only thing we knew for sure was that our favorite musicians, actors and writers were all about keeping it real.  

The term sellout was not as ubiquitous in the halls of our high school, but its derivatives haunted us. Calling someone a suck ass, kiss ass or phony was as damaging to us as calling a punk rocker a sellout. We did everything we could to avoid someone dropping these terms on us. It was our equivalent to the cinematic portrayals of the red scare from the 1950’s in which everyone did everything they could to avoid being called red. We avoided superficial conversation, for example, fearing that someone somewhere might unload a derivative on us.  

There were several shows and movies that taught us how to be real. We had iconic figures who could teach us how to be real, and the prototypes also lived among us. It was up to us to find our role models, but they were out there, keeping it real. If you haven’t spotted the flaws inherent in our system, we didn’t either. We were were scared, confused young people in the 90’s, and just like every kid of every other era, we sought some form of identity to escape that confusion that we hoped others might accept.

Jennie and I worked for an online company. She informed me that she had utter disdain for our boss. I found her screed funny, righteous, and all that. Then that boss (who was actually a nice fella, but he was the man) walked by our desk and dropped a polite, somewhat humorous anecdote on us. Jennie nearly fell out of her chair laughing. What a fraud, I thought. I maintain that she failed to act in a consistent manner, but who cares? Jennie was constantly getting in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. She probably feared losing her job, and she probably thought a little laughter would ingratiate her to the man, or she might have thought the polite, somewhat humorous joke was a lot funnier than I did. Who cares? To my mind Jennie was a sellout, a phony, and a fraud for sucking up to the man. Her laughter shaped what I thought of her forever after, because I thought she wasn’t being real. I thought her laughter was for sale, and she was commodity.  

One of the job duties of my new job as a front desk employee at a hotel was to engage our guests in polite, superficial conversations. I was to make them laugh, feel comfortable, and make them feel at home. “I’m not going to talk to every guest,” I said, believing the boss was shredding my integrity.  

“Well then, you’re fired,” she said.  

“What?”  

“It’s one of your job duties,” she said. “When a guest tells you a story, you are to respond in a way that makes them feel interesting. If they tell a joke, it’s the funniest damn thing you ever heard. If you’re not willing to make an effort in this regard, tell me now, and we’ll start looking for someone who is.”  

It was difficult to shed the artistic personae I spent so much time manufacturing, but I learned to tap into the superficial side of my personality for eight hours a day, five days a week. No one was paying me for my artistic personae anyway, so why was I clinging to whatever arbitrary definition of what it means to be real? No one really cares either. No one dropped to a knee when they heard me pontificate the virtues of the real. They probably considered me a scared little kid who was looking for pointers on how to be a cool individual in an otherwise dark, unmapped location of my life. The breadth of that took me a while to fully appreciate. I thought they appreciated my ability to stay true to the Keeping it Real commandments. They didn’t. When we were sitting at a breakroom table of real people, and someone expressed real virtues, people yawned and moved the conversation forward. If we dared express a view that they might view as the fraudulent, phony view of a sellout, all conversation stopped. We could hear the clinking of glasses and the sizzle of a griddle in the wake of such comments, but no one knew why it was so important that a service employee at a restaurant keep it real during the Sunday breakfast rush.  

I learned to start chit chatting up every hotel guest about every stupid thing I could dream up, and it wasn’t that hard. In some dark recesses of my mind, I would never reveal in closed locations, I actually enjoyed it. My high school buddies probably would’ve turned seven different shades of red if they witnessed it. They would’ve been embarrassed for me, and angry that I sold my soul for a buck, or they might not have noticed it at all. It’s possible that no one was paying half as much attention to me as I thought, and I dreamed up all these elements and definitions of those elements in my head.  

I initially refused to take this newly manufactured ability to tap into the “chat chat, chit chat!” part of my personality out into the real world. My initial vow was to “keep ‘em separated”, until I saw my friends engage in superficial conversation with strangers who weren’t female. They just enjoyed superficial chit chat, talking about nonsense, and they appeared to be having a whale of a good time. “Wait a second!” I wanted to scream. “Didn’t you guys see that one movie, with that real, cool one who refused to chat nonsense? He said that Americans talk too much, and he said that we should all learn to shut up for a minute. Who cares?! What are you talking about? You are in violation my friend!”   

That composite character of our movies, shows, and songs removed himself from pedantic concerns, and he was the quiet, cool prototype dragon we all chased. He effortlessly managed the center of attention by letting his supporting actors fill in the blanks for him and fluff his image. We wanted one person, somewhere, to confuse us with this archetype.  

There was no specific actor, movie, or show we consciously mimicked, but if we built a pyramid, Matt Dillon’s role in The Outsiders might have sat somewhere near the top. It might have been the initial spark, but we didn’t consciously mimic him or any of the other actors who played similar roles. We absorbed these undefined, intangible qualities, however, movie and movie, show after show, song after song, and book after book, until we thought we created something others might buy. When no one did, we probably should’ve put together a different sales strategy, but what would Matt Dillon, Kurt Cobain, and Johnny Depp think? We were brooding shoegazers who didn’t care what anyone else thought, and we repeated that so often that we revealed ourselves as composite caricatures.   

One of the most famous quotes of all time from the Old Testament of the Keeping it Real bible occurred in the movie The Wild One. In that John Paxton, Ben Maddow script, the Mildred character reads the line: “What are you rebelling against Johnny?”  

The Johnny character reads the line: “Whaddya Got?”  

In the real world Mildred would not say anything to preserve Johnny’s reply in a cool liquid that real worlders might want to bathe in. In the real-world Mildred says, “I’m sorry to say I got nothing Johnny.” 

“If you got nothing, don’t say anything Mildred,” the real-world Johnny might say. “You saying something just killed my whole mystique. Imagine if you said nothing. Imagine how powerful that line would’ve been.”   

“I’m sorry Johnny,” Mildred says, clearly shaken. “I’m just a bit actress in this scene.”  

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I coulda been real, instead of a service industry worker, which is what I am.”

Tag lines such as keeping it real, selling your soul to the highest bidder, and the more concise sellout are evergreen, of course, but those of us who were hit with them way back when now see the illustrative and inconsistent dichotomy of trying to become real.

Misty “The Witch” vs. Michelle “The Cyclops”

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“I’m a witch,” Misty said to throw a big old matzo ball on the restaurant table between us. She didn’t throw that into her intro, but I learned that she was a witch before I learned that she was an Anderson, a Smith, or a Jones. If she mentioned her last name, I don’t remember it. I remember that she was a witch, however, because I never met a witch before, self-proclaimed or otherwise. It was also such a noteworthy characteristic to me, because it was to her. Being a witch was more important to her than being an Anderson, Smith or whatever her last name was. When I asked her what she did for a living, she answered, and when I asked her who her friends were, she answered that too, but she didn’t answer any of those questions with the same passion, spirit, or animated enthusiasm she had for her decision to become a witch. When I told friends, family, and co-workers about my date, I referred to Misty as Misty “The Witch”. When they found that characterization so entertaining, I kind of dropped back. I felt a little guilty for characterizing such a nice woman in such a manner, but when I dropped further back and put some thought into it, I realized that’s probably how she would’ve wanted it. 

Misty didn’t list this particular nugget of information on her online, dating profile. Who would? Green people who wear pointy hats probably don’t get asked out very often, but she wasn’t one of those typer of witches. “I’m a Wiccan,” she explained. “It’s a modern, nature-based pagan religion. I have a twenty-four quart, deep cooking pot, but I don’t own a cauldron. I own my own home, but there’s no candy plastered on the outside to lure unsuspecting children, and I don’t think I’ve ever cackled,” she said to try to put me at ease. 

I don’t know if it’s based on the shows we watch, but when we meet someone who thinks so different, 180 degrees different from us, we expect to learn that they made calculated, well-informed decisions in life, especially when it concerns spiritual and mystical pursuits. In my experience, most of them are like most of us. They drift around searching for something meaningful in life, to give their live meaning, until they find something. Some try to find something that aligns with their personal beliefs, others align their personal beliefs with something they found. In my brief interrogation of Misty, I found that she was a little of both. She decided to become a Wiccan for some of the same reasons I played Donkey Kong when I was a kid. She thought it sounded fun and cool. She was as uninformed, insecure, and vulnerable as the rest of us at one point in her life, then she joined that group. Did find a part of herself that she never knew in that group, and she loved being that in front of other like-minded people, or did she stay so long that she either conformed to group thought and became who they wanted her to be? Regardless, she developed strong bonds with her fellow Wiccans that lasted years.

As with most insecure and vulnerable people, Misty put her best foot forward on our first (and as it turned out our only) date. She threw that big old matzo ball out there with some conviction framing it. ‘I’m a witch, deal it!’ her expression said, and deal with it I did, in my own obsessively curious way. I don’t know what was on my face, but her smile told me she knew she struck a chord. 

“And now for something completely different,” I thought, recalling that old Monty Python line. I was so fascinated that I dove right in. I asked superficial questions, in-depth questions, and then questions that made her so uncomfortable that she laughed before answering them.  

Most of my questions were self-serving. I didn’t really care that Misty chose what I considered an alternative religion, but I did want to know why. I wanted to know why she joined, how her views changed over the years, and I wanted to see if her beliefs could challenge mine. The questions I asked weren’t the polite type everyone asks, and I didn’t ask leading questions to have her view me as compassionate or open-minded. I wanted answers to this curious, life-altering decision of hers, and I went for the jugular, asking questions that we’re not supposed to ask.

Most people refrain from asking uncomfortable questions, because they don’t enjoy watching other people squirm, but Misty made it quite clear she wasn’t a squirmer. She might have been squirming, uncomfortable, and vulnerable when we first met, but who isn’t? By the time I worked my way past the obligatory, nice questions and worked my way into the questions we’re not supposed to ask, Misty was chuckling (as opposed to cackling). Some of the questions I ask offend some recipients, and that’s fine with me, unless they offer me a specific reason for why the question hurt their feelings. It’s happened, and when it does I back off and apologize when warranted and without excuses or qualifiers. Most of the people who intrigue me enough to work past the initial questions, prove to me that they enjoy questions that test their meddle.   

“I don’t know how you get away with asking such things,” a witness to some of my questions said. 

“I think they know I’m just curious,” I said. 

Due to the fact that Misty loved talking about her decision, and I was absolutely obsessed with wanting to know what drove her to that decision, the idea she was a witch dominated our conversations. I was so excited by this conversation topic that Misty couldn’t tell if I was more interested in joining her religion or her, so she asked me if I wanted to join her religion. I said no. I told her I was just curious. She smiled at that. I didn’t know why she smiled at first, as I thought it should’ve disappointed her that I had no desire to become a warlock, but I realized that she thought she had her answer. It was an excited smile, until I eventually informed her that I wasn’t interested in her either. 

The Real Eye 

Michelle had no secret potions, magical spells, or natural elixirs to help me, but she did have “friends in the industry” who she thought might be able to help end my desperate search for a quality apartment at a reasonable rate. She said she knew people in real estate who specialize in helping prospective clients find quality apartments at below market rents. “My friend can not only help you find a top-of-the-line apartment,” she said, “but she will haggle with the landlord over rent, and her fee for doing so will be paid by a landlord who will be grateful that she found a tenant for them.” That made total sense to me. Who wouldn’t jump at such an offer, I thought, until Michelle brought up her finder’s fee. 

“Your finder’s fee?” I asked. “What are you doing here? You’re not helping me find an apartment. You’re pointing me to someone who can. How much do you want for your ability to point?” 

“I tell you what,” she said with a grin. “You take me to lunch, and we’ll call it square.” 

In the space of fifteen seconds mired in uncomfortable silence, I developed about three different attack strategies to illustrate the absurdity of her proposal. These attacks would’ve also informed her that I wasn’t as naive as she thought I was, but I also knew that one of the only reasons she wanted to help me was that she appeared to have something of a crush on me. I ended that silent stand off with one word: “Fine!” 

Moments after we sat at the restaurant, Michelle wet her eye with a bottled solution, and that bottle was generic except for a small prescription tag. No big deal, I thought, until she put the solution in two more times before the server could take our drink orders. If she needs to water her eye once in such a short time span that’s a thing, because I don’t know when she watered it last, twice might suggest she’s experiencing a particular dryness, but three times is a big old matzo ball to put in the space between us.

“Why do you keep doing that?” I asked. I could’ve, and probably should’ve just ignored it, but I live by the rule that it’s better to ask questions, even embarrassing “I don’t want to talk about it” questions, than it is to remain silent about the elephant in the room, or a big, old matzo ball hovering atop a table. A matzo ball isn’t an ugly thing, and it isn’t beautiful. It’s also not a stand alone meal. It is what we make it, when we surround it with tasty items. Until we do that, it’s just a bunch of ground up crackers and eggs. If we avoid asking about it, or we purposefully avoid talking about it, it amasses its power through silence, until it’s the only thing we want to talk about, and it influences every conversation we have, until one of us develops the fortitude to address it. It gathers a life of its own in our conversations, until both parties are so uncomfortable that someone has to put a pin in it.  

“I have to. It’s what they call an ocular prosthesis,” she said, using the compassionate, sympathetic term for an artificial eye, “and if I don’t keep it wet, it gets irritated, it burns, and there’s a possibility that I could lose it.” 

As if to bolster her contention, she wet it a fourth time. I don’t know much about an ocular prosthesis, but I understand that we probably don’t have the technology at this point to have them produce their own liquid. I also understand why a sufferer needs to keep it wet, but I don’t know how often their physician directs them to wet it, but Michelle was dousing it at such regular intervals that it was obvious that she wanted us to address the matter before we moved on. 

“What happened?” I asked. 

“It was … a car accident,” she replied. She swallowed those words, as if they were so weighted with trauma that I should just drop it. My obsessive need to ask questions people are afraid to ask weren’t applicable here, because she did not choose a lifestyle, an alternative way of thinking, or a different religion. This injury was the result of an accident that obviously still haunted her and damaged her quality of life. She made it clear any questions would not be appreciated, except the look on her face suggested she did want to talk about it, but she wouldn’t answer any questions. It was so confusing that the tension couldn’t have been more weighted if she body slammed the carcass of her dead aunt on our table, wet and festooned with seaweed and added, “And I don’t want to talk about it.” She hit me from so many corners so quickly that I didn’t know how to approach this matter. I felt trapped between what I wanted to do, what she apparently wanted me to do, and what she apparently didn’t want me to do. I was so cautious that my sense of caution obviously spoke volumes, and it appeared to wound her.

Those of us who have been in life-altering, soul-crushing accidents know that the only cure is to relive an accident so many times, over so many years, that you’re eventually desensitized to it. The vein-straightening daymares and nightmares I had actually helped me drain the shock, but that took decades. Back when I was sitting in this restaurant with Michelle, I was still a mess of emotions on the topic car accidents. I developed my own I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it phobia of car accidents. Even with all that, the idea that a car accident robbed Michelle of an eyeball rattled me.

I was a wreck mentally, on the topic, but she was physically impaired. What’s worse, I asked myself while she spoke. I still had all my appendages and organs in working order, but her impairment reminded me how easily our situations could be reversed. It wasn’t fate, I decided as she spoke, and it didn’t have anything to do with skills, smarts, or stupidity. The reason she sat on one side of the table without an eye, and I sat with two full functional ones, was luck. The officer at the scene of my accident told me that. “You’re lucky,” he said, “You could’ve and should’ve been hurt much worse.” Lucky, I thought, how could I be lucky? My mom died in this car accident. What’s the definition of lucky? Michelle, and her ocular prosthesis, gave me a definition of lucky.

Anything can happen in a car accident, could turn out to be an excellent, working title for the first chapter of my autobiography, and the exploration of the aftermath would’ve littered the next three to four chapters that followed. A driver can hit someone from behind, at a relatively slow speed, and both drivers could incur once-in-a-lifetime, freak injuries. It happens. It happens every day. It happened to Genie. Genie was a co-worker who became a good friend over time and through numerous conversations. Genie and I spoke at least once a day for about a decade. We became such good friends that I finally broke her down one day and asked her a question we’re not supposed to ask, “What happened to you?” 

“I got into a car accident.” Her words didn’t contain Michelle’s foreboding drama and trauma. Genie was a “just the facts” kind of gal. “I don’t remember anything about it, mercifully,” she added. “All I can tell you is what the policemen told my parents. I can tell you that I never sped. I memorized the speed limits of every street I traveled on. I never rolled through a stop sign, and I always turned on my blinker, even when it was obvious which way I was turning. The police say it was a simple fender bender that happens every day, but the force of the impact caused my head to hit in the windshield just so.” Genie didn’t add that the definition of “just so” would leave her with a lifelong mental impairment, but it wasn’t necessary for her to complete those dots. 

I thought about the terrifying car accident I was involved in that took my mother’s life. “You are so lucky you lived through this?” the one-scene officer said to presumably distract me from the fact that I just lost my mother. I also thought about Genie, and Genie’s lifelong mental impairment based on the fact that she hit her head on the windshield “just so”, and as those terrifying thoughts left my brain, I accidentally looked into Michelle’s fake eye. The trauma I experienced when someone said those words car accident my empathy went beyond anxiety to phobia.

“It was almost as if he intended to drive into me,” an elderly woman told the police officer, responding to the call of our accident. It was the elderly woman’s fault, as she crossed the centerline into my lane of traffic, but I could’ve avoided it. I, of course, did not intend to drive into her, but I choked, froze, or whatever you want to call it when I saw her headed toward me. My anxiety/phobia incapacitated me so much that I was not mentally capable of twisting the wrist in such a way that I would’ve avoided that accident, so I could see how she would come to that conclusion that I intended to drive into her. I remembered freezing, and I didn’t at the same time, as if I subconsciously edited that portion of that fender bender out to avoid me having to ask those questions about myself. A simple twist of the wrist would’ve avoided the accident. I wasn’t drunk, or in anyway impaired. I was just terrified. To my lifelong embarrassment, I choked, froze up, or however one wants to put it.  

Freezing up like that is so weird, and so embarrassing that we never talk about it. How does one talk about deep psychological scars that lead to an embarrassing silent scream that can cause it to appear that we’re intending to drive into another car? It’s so confusing that we choose not to deal with it or talk about it, until someone says something we’re not supposed to say, like, “There’s something wrong with you my man.” That’s something the careless say if we ever are dumb enough to reveal our wounds to them. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with you, something deep in your layers that you might want to seek counseling to rectify that before it’s too late.” 

Most good friends and family don’t say such things, but if we offer them our vulnerabilities, they duck into a hole and come out with eyes that say so much more. We all know that look. Michelle knew that look too, and she saw it when I looked into her artificial eye. 

Once I got over the daymare, Michelle started dotting her eye with the bottled solution again. I tried to be sympathetic, or empathetic regarding the nature of her injury, but I obviously couldn’t keep “the look” off my face. I don’t know what look I had on my face, but “the look” appeared to either disappoint or insult Michelle. I tried to get the look off my face, and I succeeded, then I failed. I tried talking over the the look, around it, with it, and through it with various conversation topics, but she just kept dotting. I could see her ingesting each look, and I knew that my looks meant more to her than any words I said. 

I knew Michelle had romantic aspirations long before our lunch, and I knew the looks I gave her put an end to that, but she wouldn’t stop dotting, and I couldn’t stop looking. 

After our lunch was over, I drove Michelle to the location of the cherry apartment she promised to help me find, and the real estate agent was there with her pitch. It was a cherry apartment, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to rent the first apartment on the agent’s list. I wanted a menu of options from which to choose, and these two women had me all hopped up on the idea that this real estate agent was something of a Helen Keller type miracle worker for those seeking quality apartments. I made a mistake believing that I might have a menu of options, and Michelle eventually seized on my hesitation. 

In the aftermath of the afternoon, I don’t think I devoted a half-hour of thought to any events that occurred that day. When I did think about it, I didn’t think good thoughts or bad thoughts. It was just something that happened. 

It wasn’t until about a week later, when I ran into Michelle, “Hey, whatever happened to that apartment?” I asked.

“Apartment?” 

“The one your real estate agent showed me,” I said. “If it’s still available, I think I’ll take it. Tell your friend.”

“I took it already,” she said. “I moved in yesterday. I’m living there now.” She searched my face for a look. I might be mischaracterizing it for my own narrative, but I think she was searching for a look of pain that matched the pain she presumably felt from my looks. I think she took the cherry apartment to spite me and the looks I accidentally gave her and her fake eye.    

Did Michelle sign that lease to be vindictive, I don’t know, but we’ve all had loads of people do some of the oddest things to “getevenwithem”. What was she getting even with, I wondered, because the worst charge you could make against me was that I unintentionally gave her looks I couldn’t control that she could interpret as condescending compassion. The funny thing about spiteful intent is that it rarely hits in the ways we dream up in vindictive daydreams. We dream up “When he finds out … Oh, it will be delicious” theatrical reactions. 

Michelle and her friend found me an apartment that I considered a cherry location. When she took it, I found another one. She basically forced me to do my own homework, which I started before she brought up her friend. Women have broken my heart more than once, two put a dent in my heart that might never heal, but Michelle did not accomplish either of those feats. I didn’t think about this moment for decades, until I sat down to write this. Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if Michelle ever thinks back on her attempt to create this big, old matzo ball to place between us and deliciously alter our relationship in her favor. I wonder if she celebrates this moment as her victory now, or did that rational wisdom that only comes with age catch up to her to re-characterize her actions as a little pointless and pretty petty?