Category: Philosophy

Drinking Me Under the Table 

RilalyLeave a comment

“There were only two people I couldn’t drink under the table,” Ozzy Osbourne once said. “(Lead singer of Motorhead) Lemmy Kilmister and Wrestling Great Andre the Giant.”  

“I could so drink you under the table,” Angie said. 

“I’m sure you could,” I said, and I turned away to do whatever I was doing prior to her challenge. That discussion was over … for me, but our friends stared at me, waiting for me to add something to it.

Nat broke the silence, saying, “So, you’re chickening out? You’re chickening out to a drinking contest against a girl who’s … what are you Angie ninety-five pounds?” 

I would love to write, right here, that I had a clever reply or something that put me back in a position of power. I didn’t. I said something along the lines of, “Well, I’m an extremely competitive person, and a light weight. That combination often leads me to drink so much that I’ll probably do something that we will never forget.”

“Isn’t that why we’re here, my brother?” Nat said with a gleam in his eye, “to do unforgettable things?”

“I’m talking about embarrassing, sloppy drunk things, like vomiting all over this beautiful carpet of yours. If I don’t vomit, and that alcohol stays in my system, I’ll probably fall into your precious glass table, pass out in your bedroom, or proposition one of your good friends. Depending on what I end up doing, you’ll all probably have a good laugh at my expense, but I will have to live with it. Admitting that a ninety-five pound girl could probably drink me under the table is the least humiliating course for me to take here.” 

If you’ve ever seen those Old West movies where a fella backs down from a shootout, you know the eyes I saw that day, those silent, judgmental eyes. Those eyes tell us that we’re not matching up, fitting in, and we just don’t have what it takes to be a fella. There were probably four people in the room at the time, but in my memory there were at least twenty, condemning me for my weaknesses. Even in the moment I knew that those judgmental eyes were much better than the eyes I would’ve received after that drinking contest, and all the things I would’ve said and done with massive amounts of alcohol unlocking them. “That man cannot handle his alcohol,” would’ve been the refrain they shared at work that Monday.   

I’m one of those guys you hate playing with or against, because I don’t play games to have fun. I play to win, and if I don’t win, I freak out. It’s childish and pathetic, and I’ve learned to control it to a degree. I no longer make a spectacle out of myself anymore, but it’s still such a part of me that if I were involved in a game of Barbies, I might try to find some way to win. 

I grew up playing every major sport except hockey, and I would throw tantrums if I lost. I’ve flipped playing boards, stormed out of rooms, and knocked something off the wall on my way out after losing games of Tiddlywinks and Chutes and Ladders. I know this about myself, and I know that if I entered into a drinking contest, a game I really don’t enjoy, I would have to win. I did it before, and if I felt some level of conquest or glory, I don’t remember it. The one time I did know the glory of victory, it was fleeting, as the embarrassment of blowing chunks across a table that sat before the couch I passed out in superseded it.   

With as much training as I put in, you’d think I would’ve developed a greater tolerance to alcohol eventually. I never did. I don’t know if the ability to drink more than others has something to do with genetics, but if it does, how  did my ancestors do? Alcohol and drinking were important when I was younger, but it was almost mandatory when they were young and kicking it. Did they avoid drinking alcohol? It might have had something to do with the pack my dad decided to run in, but when I was a kid, every adult I knew drank something. We all knew everyone’s drink of choice, because it defined them. 

Our history with alcohol is not recent, as archeologists have found evidence of humans intentionally fermenting beverages as far back as 13,000 years ago. So, somewhere just below our hierarchal need for fire, was our need to get wrecked, and sometime shortly after we experienced the euphoria of killing brain cells for the first time, someone probably challenged someone else to a test of tolerance, and the victor felt vindicated. Did this help our species evolve, or did it inhibit evolution? Who cares brutha, why you always talking such nonsense? Let’s get ripped.  

We tried –the United States, inspired by efforts in other countries tried— to curb our enthusiasm for alcohol, in a temperance movement that culminated in The Prohibition in the U.S. It failed in historic proportions, because “You can’t legislate morality.” That was the takeaway anyway, but the other takeaway might be that we love alcohol so much that we were willing to fight for it. We fought the law, and we won! We then celebrated that victory hard for nearly 100 years. (Recent polls suggest drinking alcohol is now down to 54% among young people, in favor of smoking pot.)  

TIM 

“We have food and beverages for everyone,” one of the primary organizers of our kid’s school event said after stepping to the fore, “but there is no alcohol.” The parents groaned, some sarcastically, others not, and the organizers apologized. I empathized a little, as school functions are almost always so painfully uncomfortable for parents who barely know each other that alcohol lubricates our anxiety.  

I knew that of course, but as I worked my way around the social circles of parents in attendance, I was pretty sure that the “no alcohol” complaints were nothing more than conversation starters. Some were genuinely ticked off, however, and they reminded me of the kids at my friend’s seventh birthday party. We fellow seven-year-olds knew Scott Taylor’s parents were anti-sugar, because Scott was not allowed to eat the desserts on his lunch tray, so we’d trade him for his sugary snacks. Their sugar prohibition never affected us until we attended their son’s birthday party, and we learned that everything from the candy, to the birthday cake, and ice cream at the party would all be sugar free. And it was not surprisingly good, it was gross, and we were as disappointed, angry, and ready to revolt as those adults at the alcohol-free kid’s function, which is fine when viewed through that lens, but when we flip it around and compare the adults’ reaction to the kids’ it’s illustrative.

Amidst our groans and complaints, that guy stepped forward. I’ve now been among parents at a kid functions often enough now to know they all contain that guy. That guy, in this alcohol-free production, was played by a man named Tim, and we began to view Tim as our superhero when he gathered us up and led us to his locked and loaded SUV. I didn’t hear the angels sing others swore they heard when Tim opened his hatchback to reveal three coolers. I also didn’t feel the warm, gold glow wash over me that others did when they saw the wide array of alcoholic drinks he had in them. I did find it hilarious that this forty-year-old man was so prepared for the administrator’s alcohol restriction that he loaded up his car before leaving home. Even though I wasn’t seeking alcohol as much as the other parents, I enjoyed being included in Tim’s select group.

I felt naughty too. I felt like a naughty teen sneaking hootch into the high school dance. I felt twenty years younger, and I must admit that when I mixed Tim’s naughtiness with the organizer’s lime-aid, it tasted so much better for all of those wrong reasons. It felt like we were undermining authority and challenging the establishment. The first sip tasted dangerous, and the second one had a shot of humor in it, but every drink after that tasted a little foolish. We were forty-year-olds at our kid’s function. What were they going to do to us if they caught us? Their best punishment, I decided, would involve them reminding us that we were forty-year-olds at a kid’s function. 

What the administrators didn’t understand was that alcohol was never just a rite of passage for us, it was the reason to get together. Once we got together in that “Event of the week” there was always one party goer who drank responsibly. They drank in moderation. I met one woman who managed to milk a hard seltzer for two hours. When she was “done” she had a fourth of a bottle left. I’m a little embarrassed to write these lines now, but I thought there was something wrong with her. I thought she didn’t know how to live. We were entertaining, healthy, and young people, why wouldn’t she want to maximize all that while it lasts? “Don’t you want to have fun?” I asked her. “I mean c’mon.” She was an attractive, but I could’ve never imagined a relationship with her or anyone else who was alcohol-free.

The Definition of Drinking  

We defined ourselves in drinking contests and games to try to outdo each other in the ancient tests of tolerance. Our definition of victory involved leaving our opponent so incapacitated that they lost control of their functions, fell off a chair, and ended up under the table. “Huzzah!” we shouted in unison, when the defeated vomited little orange pellets across the floor.

“I think it was cereal,” Patrick said.

“Yeah, those little pellets were tiny marshmallows,” Brian responded. “I think the orange coloring was whatever he drank. Wasn’t he drinking orange coolers?”    

The defeated never recovered his reputation, and the victor lived on his victory for months, as if drinking twenty beers in an hour was a physical accomplishment. It was a physical feat, but it was an unnatural one that required training, and no one wanted to watch a montage of his training exercises. No one wanted to see the man sitting quietly in his favorite Barcalounger sipping quietly between tears. We wanted to live the Bachelor Party (the 1984 film starring Tom Hanks) lifestyle, and this is how we imagined we were living.

I can’t remember all of the parties, but there were some killers. The one party I will never forget is my first adult, non-alcohol party. There were probably twenty people there, and no one was drinking. I asked where the beer was, and no one answered. I asked what was going on, and no one answered. Their silence was uncomfortable for both of us. We were in our early thirties, so we were still young enough to recover from whatever damage alcohol inflicted relatively quickly. We had no kids at the time, and a long weekend, so the idea that we were going to spend an evening around other adults talking about our day seemed inhuman to me. I realized that I didn’t like any of these people that much. We drank bottled water and other non-alcoholic refreshments, while talking about our day, as if it were a Thanksgiving Day reunion with the extended family. I hate to sound like an alcoholic, but this party was such an aberration that I talked about it for weeks. I wanted someone to back me up on what an aberration that was. I wasn’t ready to curb my enthusiasm just yet, and I couldn’t believe my friends were. I wanted to ask when the decision to go alcohol-free was made, and how come I wasn’t part of it?  

It didn’t take long for me to recognize that there was something afoot. My friends were implicitly stating that not every get-together had to involve alcohol, and that there was probably something wrong with drinking massive amounts of alcohol. Though I was a little late to this particular party, we began drawing a new demarcation line in the sand. The hilarious hyjinx of the inebriated was becoming a little sad at some point. I should’ve seen that coming, because I saw my dad get wrecked so often that it wrecked our relationship, and most of my friends saw similar things with their parents. It wrecked us to chase our parents out of bars, to hear their alcohol-induced gibberish on the ride home, and it did some lasting damage to our relationship with them when we had to put them, our parents, to bed.  

Now, we drank, and we wrecked our teens and thirties, but by the time we decided to have kids, we decided that we didn’t want to put them through the confusion and the role reversals we experienced. Our kids have never had to spend the precious hours of our childhood in a bar, bored, begging to leave. Our kids see us get together, and they see us drink a beer or two, but they don’t see their guides and role models getting hammered every weekend. 

As we criticize our parents, and their generation, however, we should note that they saw things. We led cushy, comfortable lives because of them and thanks to them. We never knew The Depression, a real war, or any of the other things that they needed to forget, and we were too young to understand the what fors. All we saw was the drinking, the laughing, the absolute blast everyone was having, and all of the connections we made. We also saw the aftereffects, the “Don’t tell anyone about this,” embarrassing aftereffects. The chasing of imaginary windmills, the crying, and their inability to climb the stairs to get into bed. How does an adult ever reclaim their rightful place atop the hierarchy of a home after their kid has to clean up their puke, wipe their tears, and fight to get them into bed? 

I could be off, but I think my generation were the pied pipers in the move away from alcohol. We give younger, twenty-somethings all of the credit for cutting ties to alcohol to 54%. They deserve some of the credit, of course, but we started to see the light and learn our own lessons, inspired by the idea that we didn’t want our kids to see us in weakened, pathetic states. Our kids never had to see us chase imaginary windmills, and they never had to sit in a sad, lonely, and pathetic dive bar begging us to leave. They didn’t have parents whose whole lives centered around alcohol.  

Minimum Weight 

Bob was an elegant drinker. He had fun, but he never made a fool out of himself, and he never had bad hangovers. He was the life of the party that I always wanted to be, but I was a sloppy drunk who could never handle his alcohol. I envied him at the time, but now that it’s all over, and we’re old, I wonder if Bob still has a problem with alcohol? My body informed me, early on, that we didn’t have either the genetic constitution, or the will to do what it took, to become a quality drinker, but he did it so well in the window in time that I knew him that I seriously wonder if he has a tough time quitting, cutting back, or leading a more responsible life?  

Bob was a fun drunk for hours. The man could drink. I was a fun drunk for a little while, but my tolerance was such that I often turned the smiling faces in the room to cringes. Bob almost single-handedly proved that when it came to drinking games and contests, it didn’t matter how much I trained, I would have to artificially reengineer my genetic chromosomes to achieve the term lightweight.

According to BoxBets.com, there are now eight weight classes listed below lightweight, including featherweight, flyweight, light flyweight, and minimum weight. In the drinking and drunk world, I would probably list myself somewhere between light flyweight and minimum weight, because I could probably handle most of the 90lb. females who’ve never had a drink, in the minimum weight class, but after witnessing my performances in those bouts, my manager would probably caution me against challenging for even that meager belt. My competitive spirit, combined with my stupidity, would have me challenging and winning that ignoble belt from a 90lb. female, but I would not do well among the 100lb., light flyweight females.  

If a genie offered me a once-in-lifetime chance to fix 100 of my flaws, moving up in weight classes would not make it on that list. I enjoyed the way alcohol allowed me to shed inhibitions, and the laughing and fun that almost always followed beer consumption, but I never really enjoyed drinking it. I might be rewriting my past, but I don’t remember wanting to become a better drinker who could outdo opponents. I viewed alcohol as a social lubricant, and I considered it an opportunity to become someone else, anyone else, someone like Tom Hanks in the Bachelor Party.

I didn’t want to be a minimum weight of course, as that has connotations to lacking masculinity, but I never wanted to do what was necessary to become a heavy weight either. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I would’ve been capable of it, as I think our constitutions are relative, based on genetics. Some of us will never be able to competitively run 26 miles, no matter how hard we train, some of us just don’t have the mental acumen necessary to compete in big-time chess matches, or the physical gifts some seem born with to dominate in fencing, and some of us have a genetic disposition that leads us to problems trying to outdrink a parakeet, no matter how hard we train.  

I was a fun drunk, but I didn’t know when to say when, because I always wanted to have more fun, and more alcohol equals more fun when you get that close to having more fun. It made sense to me when I could see the crest of the hill on the horizon, until I looked around to see the sympathetic and horrified faces informing me that I was already careening wildly down the other side of that hill.  

I silenced the room by conceding that Angie could probably drink me under the table. I damaged my man points, and there was a palpable sense that our mutual friends were embarrassed for me. They couldn’t believe that I would admit to such a thing, and they began attempting to impress each other with how much they could drink. I checked out of the conversation, because I fell for various peer pressure tactics so often in a previous life that the accumulation of decades of tiny doses of it inoculated me to immunity.

“I feel bad for people who don’t drink.” Frank Sinatra once said. “When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’ve going to feel all day.” That quote is funny in a cringey sort of way, because we all know that alcohol makes us feel better. It makes us funnier, livelier, and more social. We also become “the drunk,” which can have negative and positive connotations. In this case “the drunk” is our other persona, and who we can become with a couple of belts in our system. The problem, we realize after several attempts, is that we can never become that person. We eventually have to return to that person who isn’t that funny, social, or as lively. We also know that we will never become the celebrated drinker who puts that other guy under the table. At some point, we need to learn to say something along the lines of: “I’m going to say no to your drinking challenge, because I’m just a casual drinker who drinks for fun. I can’t handle massive amounts of alcohol.” 

Ozzy Osbourne said that he only met two guys he couldn’t put under the table, and while I would never belittle anothers’ accomplishments in life, I can’t imagine that being a note I would want that to be one of the things my family remembered about me. I had fun drinking alcohol, and I’m quite sure Ozzy, Lemmy, and The Giant had more fun than I did, but the two rock stars were informed that they wouldn’t continue to live if they continued drinking alcohol (there’s no documented evidence of such a warning issued to Andre). Ozzy eventually achieved sobriety late in life, but Lemmy refused to listen to the men in white coats. When they issued their warning, Lemmy switched from whiskey to vodka), and when they informed him that he needed to drink more water, he put an ice cube in his vodka. It’s funny, and some might raise a fist in solidarity for a man living, even in his last days, on his own terms. He openly bragged about drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, and he died with one in his hand. He never apologized for his drinking habits, never quit, and he never said he regretted it. It’s not only possible it’s likely that that’s all true, and we’ve all known people like that, but I wonder if people like Lemmy, and the aforementioned Bob, knew they couldn’t continue to life with alcohol, but they couldn’t imagine life without it. 

Hoomans, Ha!men, and Humans 

RilalyLeave a comment

Taxonomists and biological anthropologists classify modern humans as the Homo sapiens sapiens species. No, that is not a typo. The reason for the double-word is that we are a subspecies of the Homo sapiens species. Taxonomists and biological anthropologists created this distinction to separate Homo sapiens sapiens species from the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, the Homo sapiens idaltu, or Herto man, and the debatable inclusion of the Homo sapiens denisova, or Dragon man. We’re all homos, in other words, under the genus Homo, and the biological anthropologists break us down after that.

Our Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies is characterized by advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures. We’re the most complex subspecies in this regard, but if aliens from another planet were to meet us, greet us, and play in all our reindeer games, they probably wouldn’t agree that we all belong in the same categorization.

When we talk about Alien Life Forms (ALFs) here, we’re talking about Spock, S’Chn T’Gai Spock from the original Star Trek. Spock was half-human, half Vulcan, but we’re going to characterize our ALF as a full-on Vulcan, a full-on reason and rational thinking Vulcan with no empathetic or sympathetic emotions. In this ALF’s After Earth report home, it would write, “Even Earth’s scientists refrain from proper delineations in their Homo sapiens subspecies, because the scientific community thinks that a proper breakdown of various individuals in their subspecies might hurt feelings, but there are clear delineations. Some Homo sapiens sapiens have not fully evolved to the point that they belong to that species. Others have.”

If we never meet Spock-like ALF, or fail to prove they exist, we’ll never be able to verify this characterization. Thus, we will have to turn to the closest thing we have to an Alien Life Form in our universe, one with intimate knowledge of the Homo sapiens sapiens that is dispassionate enough to provide objective analysis. I would nominate the cat. Anyone who has owned a cat knows that we share an off again relationship with them. The cats definition of our relationship might even be punctuated with a “I really don’t care that much what happens to you” exclamation point that is furthered by a “As long as I get some milk and food every once in a while, and someone or something keeps me stimulated every once in a while I’ll continue to exist near you.”

Some might say the dog has as much, if not more, knowledge of our species as the cat, but the dog is biased. Dogs love us. They are so loyal that if they were commissioned to analyze our species, they would tell us what we want to hear. There’s a reason we call them man’s best friend, and it is largely based on the idea that they accept us for who we are. They don’t analyze us in the manner a cat will, and they know nothing about our inadequacies or failures, because their sole goal in life is to make us happy. They know when we’re happy, they’re happy. Cats are almost 180-degrees different.

Instagram posters have characterized this on again, off again, “I really don’t care that much what happens to you” relationship we have with cats with a somewhat humorous, somewhat condescending term that their cats use to describe us, hoomans. Hoomans is a cutesy eye-dialect, similar to that of the “No Girlz Allowed” sign that moviemakers put outside the door of a boy’s clubhouse. The cutesy error is employed to enhance the cutesy idea that cats and young boys can’t spell. The moviemakers might even add a backwards ‘R’ to further emphasize the cuteziness of the boy’s sign.

Another intent behind the cutesy hoomans contrivance is to inform us that we’re not viewing this interaction from the customary human perspective. We’re viewing this particular interactions from a perspective we may not have considered before, the cat’s.

In that vein, the unsympathetic delineations of the cat would suggest there are Homo sapiens sapiens who fail the “advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures” standards put forth by biological anthropologists. They might suggest we introduce a Homo sapien confusocortex, or Confused Man, subspecies for those who haven’t evolved completely. 

These hoomans were born at full capacity, and their schooling years proved that they were able to achieve full functionality, but as with any muscle, the brain can deteriorate with lack of use. We’re not attempting to make fun of them, but there is a delineation between those who know how to operate at an optimum, and those who fail to make necessary connections.

In the cat-world, I’m not sure if they would characterize me as a human or a hooman. I think they might develop a separate category for those of us who measure up, but we enjoy disrupting the meticulously crafted model they’ve created for human actions and reactions. The cats view such joyful interference with their carefully designed understanding of human nature and its patterns with something beyond skepticism. They’re alarmed. If we watch cats in the wild, they study their prey carefully to gauge whether or not they’ll get hurt. If after examining us completely, they developed a full categorization, it might be ha!men. My brief experience with cats informs me that they don’t have a sense of humor, so it would be impossible for them to properly categorize ha!men without some form of condescending insults. My guess is they would spit out something like, the symbolic, or ironic inversion of their cultural input often critiques the very idea of cultural output, then twist it into recursive satire. Their social systems resemble Escher prints—technically sound, emotionally disorienting. “They are players, jokesters, and fools,” the cats would conclude, “and we say that in the most condescending way possible.”   

Ha!men know that pets and children create profiles of humans based on patterns, and I think cats are quite comfortable with the thought that hoomans were put on this planet to serve them. Hoomans are to provide the cat food, milk, a place to relieve themselves, and various forms of stimuli. It’s a tenuous relationship that suggests if hoomans fail to fulfill the expectations of their relationship the cat will simply go to another hooman who can. Those hoomans who fulfill expectations can, could, and probably should receive the reward of affection. They know adult hoomans need this every once in a while, and they don’t mind occasionally playing that role for them, as long as the bullet point, requirements are met.

They also know we arrive home at around 5:30, feed them and themselves, and sit before the glowing box for a couple hours before it’s time to go to bed. They grow accustomed to these patterns, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we make sounds at one another, and our gait pattern. When we meet their criteria, they might sleep or find some other stimuli to occupy them, as they probably find most hoomans as boring as any other superior would find the actions of their underlings.

I don’t know cats would characterize me, but I highly doubt they would consider me boring. I’ve been their sole focus more times than I can count, and there have been occasions where these rooms housed a half-dozen people. I noticed how cats study us with more intensity than any other pet at a very young age, and I found it creepy in the beginning. “What are you looking at?” I wanted to ask, as if that would help matters. I noticed, early on, that when I acted somewhat out of sorts it only intensified their study of me. After numerous interactions over the years, I found their study of me fascinating, and I began tweaking my actions to destroy their research.

Just to be clear, I never touched one of these cats. I just enjoyed playing the role of their anecdotal information, their aberration. I exaggerated my differences just to be different than any other human they’d ever met, just to see how they’d react. The minute the cat owner I was dating left the room, I would walk across the room in a decidedly different gait pattern. I might slow turn my head to them in the manner an alien would in a movie, and I’d repeatedly stick my tongue out at them. I might even take a drink coaster and throw it across the room in an erratic manner. The list of things I did just to mess with their heads is long, but those are a few examples I remember. I’ve found that all we have to do is act a few deviations away from the normal hooman actions to make their pupils expand with increased scrutiny or fear.

Do the same things to a dog, and they might raise their head for a second, their ears might even perk, or they might even bring us a toy, thinking we want to play. Whatever they do, their reactions suggest they’re either less alarmed by abnormalities among the hoomen population, more forgiving of those who suffer from them, or they’re less intelligent than the cat and thus less prepared for an eventual aberration that cats foresee. Cats immediately switch to alert status. They don’t care for these games. If they don’t run from the room to avoid what they think could happen, they watch ha!men with unblinking, rapt attention. Even when they realize it’s just an act, as evidenced by our return to normalcy when the woman-owner returns to the room, they continue to study us. “I’ve decided that I don’t like you,” is the look they give us ha!men throughout.

***

Suzy Aldermann wasn’t a ha!men, but we thought she was. When we heard what happened at a corporate boardroom, we thought Suzy’s portrayal of a ha!man might’ve been one of the most brilliant portrayals we ever heard. Prior to that meeting, she appeared to abide by so many of the tenets of human patterns that when she deviated, we thought Suzy was employing a recursive inversion technique known to all ha!men as the perfect conceptual strategy for dismantling normative frameworks from within.

Prior to her “full-fledged panic attack!” Suzy successfully presented herself as an individual of advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures. So, when she experienced this panic attack, this “full-fledged panic attack!” after she opened the door to a meeting room and saw Diana Pelzey conversating with her chum, we thought she brilliantly portrayed a ha!man to the uninformed. As the report goes, Suzy whispered to a friend that she would not be attending the meeting because Diana was present. “BRILLIANT!” we said. “Absolutely brilliant that Suzy would pick the least threatening person in the room to initiate her alleged panic attack!” We all agreed to keep Suzy’s ruse secret to see how it would play out, and we expected a lot of hilarious high-brow hi-jinx as a result. The joke, it turned out, was on us. We either overestimated Suzy or underestimated her, I’m still not sure which, but it became clear that Suzy decided to run away rather than up her game to match, and/or surpass Diana’s presentation. It was, according to Suzy, a full-fledged panic attack.

In the aftermath of our misreading, anytime we met a melodramatic hooman who was having a “full-fledged panic attack!” over a relatively insignificant issue, our instinctive response, based on our understanding of human patters is to think either she’s a ha!man who is joking, or she probably needs to experience some real problems in life to gain proper perspective.

Yet, when we’d talk to Suzy, she’d detail a relatively rough upbringing that included some eyebrow-raising experiences. Those incidents were real issues that Suzy had to manage, and she had to claw through the tumult to reach a resolution. The normal human progression, for those of us who study humans with relative intensity, is that when a human experiences a number of real problems, they become better at resolving them through experience. Suzy worked her way through all of those problems, but she never developed better problem, resolution skills.

We’ve all heard from other souls who purport to travel some tumultuous avenues. Wendi Hansen, for example, detailed for us her “rough life,” but when she was done, we couldn’t help but think that much of her self-imposed trauma was the socio-political equivalent of first-world problems. Suzy was no Wendi Hansen. Suzy’s issues were real and severe, and they were backed up by eye-witness testimony. Our natural assumption is that if she’s experienced problems far worse than a colleague purportedly interested in stealing her job, it would be nothing compared to what she’s experienced in real life.  

If we were to view the humans, the ha!men, and the hoomans from the perspective of the Alien Life Form (ALF), or the cat, without empathy or sympathy, we would conclude that some humans get stronger, better, or gain a level of perspective that allows them to see minor problems for what they are in the moment. Some hoomen, on the other hand, deploy the tactical maneuver of retreat, and they do so, so often that they never fully develop their confrontational muscles.

After experiencing so many different souls who maneuver around their tumultuous terrains differently, I now wonder if hoomans, who’ve experienced real problems in life, blow otherwise insignificant issues up into real problems, because they’re more accustomed to handling their problems at that level. Either that or they know if they retreat during the relatively insignificant phase, it might never progress into more severe phases. Whatever the case is, their experiences have taught them that they can’t handle problems, and as a result of retreating so often, they never do.

***

“It’s a lie,” Angie Foote told me, regarding something Randy Dee told the group.

“It’s not a lie,” I said. “It might be an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or something he believes is true but is in fact false. It’s not what I would call a lie.”

“Barney, he told everyone that this is what he does, and I’ve seen how he does it. He doesn’t do it that way. He’s a durn liar is what I’m saying.”

Angie is what we in the biz call a simple truther. She sees everything in black and white. A truth is a truth, and a lie is a lie. There is no grey matter involved in her universe. I respect simple truthers in this vein, because I used to be one. I’m still one in many ways, but experiencing precedents in life can wreck the comfortable ideas we develop in our world of simple math and science. Facts are facts and truth is truth is their mantra.

Some of us hear a lie, and we know it’s a lie. When we’re telling lies, we know we’re lying, and we can’t help but view the rest of humanity from our perspective. When they’re lying, they know that one plus one equals two. I know it, you know it, and most importantly, they know it. We witnessed them doing one thing, and we heard them say they do something else, and they said it as if it was something they truly believed happened! How can they do that with a straight face?

My asterisk in the ointment, my new definition of a lie, is that a lie is something someone says that they know to be false. There are good liars who are so good at it that they can convince themselves that it’s true before they try to convince us. The other liars, the fascinating ones, fall into a greyer area. They don’t know they’re lying.

One of the most honest men I ever met, a Randy Dee, taught me the grey. Randy Dee told some whoppers. He told some untruths to me, regarding events that happened the previous night, and I was there for those events. 

He misinterpreted the truth so often that it affected how I viewed him. When I viewed him, and the way he’d lie, I’d watch him with the rapt attention a cat would when encountering a ha!man who proved an aberration to my study of human patterns. While involved in this study, I became convinced that we could put a lie detector on him, and he’d pass with flying colors. “He’s just a durn liar!” I said to myself. Yet, if you knew this guy, and I did, you’d know he’s not lying, not in the strictest sense of the word. By the standard of taking everything we know about lying and inserting that into the equation, Randy Dee never told a lie.

I knew Randy well for a long time. I knew him so well that I learned he was incapable of lying. He was a law-and-order guy who despised deception and all of the other characteristics inherent in criminality. Yet, by our loose standards of truth v. lying, the man was a big, fat liar.

He was incapable of detecting the lies others told him, because he just didn’t think that way. He was somewhat naive in that regard, and after getting to know him well, I considered it almost laughable that anyone would consider him a liar.

Randy Dee was an unprecedented experience for me, and I would have a lot to sort through before I fully understood what I was experiencing with him. If we took this to a social court with a simple truther sitting in the role of a judge, we would experience an exchange of “He’s lying.” ‘I’m telling you he’s not. You have to get to know him.’ “You’re over-thinking this.” ‘If you know the guy as well as I do, you’d know he’s incapable of lying.’ “All right, he’s an idiot then.” ‘If idiot suggests a lack of intelligence,’ I would reply, ‘You have to meet him to know he’s anything but.’

If this argument reached the point of no-return, one of us might suggest using a lie detector. If Randy Dee passed the lie-detector test, the simple truther would then suggest that there was something wrong with that mechanism, and there might be.

When lie detectors first entered the scene, their findings were considered germane to cases. Judges, lawyers, and juries not only thought their findings should be admissible in proceedings, they considered them germane to findings. 

“Did he take a lie detector test?” a judge might ask. “Yes, your honor,” the defense attorney said, “and he passed with flying colors.” Lie detectors eventually became less prominent, because they were deemed wildly inconsistent. How can a machine with no powers of empathy, sympathy, or any emotions differentiate between hoomens, ha!men, and humans to produce inconsistent findings? What progressions occurred? Were so many Ha!men and Hooman able to beat lie detectors so often that the machines lost their relevance in criminal cases?

Randy Dee, a man who was so honest that it seemed almost ridiculous to suggest otherwise taught me that the reason lie detectors are wildly inconsistent has more to do with the idea that we’re wildly inconsistent. We can convince ourselves of a lie, so thoroughly, that it’s not a lie anymore, and we can do it without ever trying to deceive anyone or anything in the case of lie detectors. Ha!men might do it just to see if they can defeat the machine, and its ability to detect different biological reactions, but hoomens might do it because they lose the ability to make those necessary connections that produce truth. The latter provides a wild ride to those of us who once viewed human nature in the ritualistic patterns cats will, and if we continue to view hoomens with the rapt attention a cat gives a Ha!man, until we find the truth, it will wreck every simplistic truth we thought we knew about lying liars and the lies they tell.  

I am a Cookie, It’s Good Enough for Me

RilalyLeave a comment

“Do you have any cookies other than chocolate chip?” I asked the cashier of a popular sandwich chain.

“We don’t,” he said with a smile. The smile appeared to accept the complaint for what it was, but it also asked me why I was just being difficult. ‘Why would you want anything other than chocolate?’ that smile asked me. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’

Age has taken away a few of my favorite things (more on that never) and chocolate is one of them. I get minor headaches whenever I eat it, but those minor headaches carry the implicit warning that the more I eat the worse the headache. I farted around found out that my body was serious, serious as a head attack.

I usually simply say no thanks when people offer me some, but some people won’t take no for an answer. ‘Why don’t you want any chocolate?” they ask. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’”

When I tell people why, they feel bad for me. Their sympathy is not directed toward the headaches, but the idea that I will no longer be able enjoy chocolate as much as they do. “I don’t think I could do it,” some say with a self-deprecating smile.

“Of all the things age has taken away from me,” I tell them, “I probably miss chocolate the least.”

“How could you not miss it the most?” they say with the same look that that cashier gave me.

“I used to go to the candy aisles at gas stations to pick from their chocolate selections,” I tell them. “Now, I move down the aisle to their non-chocolate ones. It’s easier than you think.”

Prior to that forced transition, I had no idea candy aisles at gas stations were 90% chocolate, not counting gum. The selections at various get-togethers are about 95% chocolate, and the desert items on a restaurant menu are nearly 100% chocolate. Now that I was on the outside looking in, I wondered if we all loved chocolate this much, or if it reminded us of our grandmother, and all of the confections she used to bake, and all of those glorious smells. Did it become such a staple in our diet, because it reminds us those days at the pool with all of our friends, or do we just love it that much? Some questions are complicated that require scientific research, and some are simple. The simple truth about chocolate is we like eating it, because it’s delicious for criminy’s sake!

“It’s all about the chocolate,” a friend of mine, who used to be an event planner, said. She learned the hard way when she offered her client “cookies” for their event. She neglected to inform her client that her cookie offerings would not include chocolate chip cookies or any chocolate. She just listed cookies on the menu items, and her client signed off on it

“Nobody wants sugar cookies, peanut butter, or oatmeal raisin!” her client screamed. “My attendees were like, where’s the chocolate chip cookies? They blamed me for this, not you. We were expecting chocolate chip cookies, chocolate strawberries, chocolate pastries, and even a chocolate fountain. You didn’t give us any chocolate? What kind of outfit are you running here?” 

A poll suggested 35% of respondents said chocolate chips cookies were their favorite cookie, and almost half (46%) said they ate chocolate chip cookies frequently in their childhood. My guess is the latter number was skewed by the vagueness of the question. If the pollsters asked the specific question, “For those of you who had the capability, or permission to eat cookies on a regular basis, how many of you ate chocolate chip?” By better defining that question, me thinks that 46% number might double.

After a couple incidents, my mom learned to preempt our disappointment when she brought cookies home. Before opening the package, she’d tell us that the cookies weren’t chocolate. She had nothing against chocolate. She just thought we might want some different every once in a while. We didn’t, we wanted chocolate. We were disappointed, but she knew if she told us beforehand that we wouldn’t be so angry to find out there wasn’t any chocolate on the way.

That forced transition away from chocolate informed me that we don’t want chocolate. WE WANT CHOCOLATE! If someone doesn’t learn how to soften the blow that there won’t be any chocolate, we’re disappointed, confused, and outraged. “Who do you think you are? What kind of outfit are you running here?” I don’t know if this has always been the case, or if I only see it now because of my new perspective, but it is all about chocolate.

***

We don’t need a different perspective to know that the chocolate chip “cookies” of our world dominate rooms. They are the beautiful men and women who walk among us. We see what happens when they walk down the hall, or into our corporate meeting rooms. If we’re able to view reactions from the outside looking in, it can be quite humorous to watch reactions to them.

Some of us cringe, as we try to deny them entry in our space by telling everyone how awful we think they are, but when they talk to us, we feel an unusual and embarrassing blush come on. They can make us feel, “I can’t believe I’m admitting this,” special for just a moment. Some of us smile and laugh at everything they say, even though we just talked about how we hate them seventy-five minutes ago.

I don’t know if this is endemic to the human being, or if cicadas, squirrels and amoebas share our reactions to the beautiful beings of their species, but I’m more inclined to believe it has something to do with cultural conditioning. The chocolate chip cookies of our society appear to have it all, and as hard as we try to make dents in their impact, no societal cynicism can tear down that wall. We’re not talking those store bought, dry, and crumbly cookies that look so appealing on the shelf, because they’re manufactured and marketed so well. We’re talking the individually wrapped, freshly-baked variety that most sandwich shops offer as a side-item. We’re talking about the type of chocolate that appears so moist that we swear we can see our reflection in it. They’re the most popular, the prettiest on the shelf, and the definition of quality by which all of the others are compared.

Most of us grew up other thans who saw the power of beauty, natural athleticism, and money in our cookie-cutter in our world. We watched those chocolate chips cookies fly off the shelf, and we wanted to be them for just a moment, just to know what it felt like to be a chocolate chip cookie. After learning the harsh realities of the never-will-be’s, we learn to live the life of an other than, until we convince ourselves that we’re a don’t-wanna-be. Our people, along with the cynical comedians, don’t encourage this. They prefer the ‘if you can’t beat them, hate them’ route. Hating them is supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, but it never does. Instead of correcting the course, we double down. We tell one another these lies to help us help others appreciate our gifts and our other indefinable traits to elevate our status from other thans to better thans.

Chocolate chip cookies don’t have doors slammed in their face, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We externalize our hatred to try to minimize our struggle. Yet, we had opportunities, fewer by comparison, but we had some. How many paths were available to us? Did we choose the one we’re currently on, or was it thrust upon us?

Adaptation to the limits of being an other than often requires creativity, and creativity comes and goes. We can also feel it fade with age. Our bountiful brains were once filled with fantastical ideas about how the world could work, and how different it could be if it was different. When that didn’t work, we doubled down, almost in rebellious reaction, until we stepped beyond the border and lost our anchor. Stephen King developed odd theatrics, but he maintained a common man premise from which the spectacular rose. We learned from that, and we adapted, but we were so creative that we could grow a little too creative at times. When we finally found our niche, we enjoyed it, but a niche is a niche, an “other than” as it were that rarely produce a chocolate chip in our nacre formation.

That frustration leads us to wonder how many chocolate chip cookies are 100% pure, and how many are tainted? We take what we want to take from everything, and we want to believe that our favorite chocolate chip cookies were wholesome? The cynics would say that the only 100% pure chocolate chip cookies are those that came from our grandmother’s oven, and the rest are all tainted in the manufacturing process.

“Nothing is pure, and nothing is absolute! You still admire that chocolate chip cookie? Did you know he cheats on his taxes, steps out on his wife, and his children never felt close to him?” This is the cynical side of the “other thans”, and I’m not even sure if those nattering nabobs of negativity truly enjoy twisting their handle bar mustaches in this manner. They enjoyed doing this in high school, we all did, because it made us feel better to know more than the simpletons who believe in nouns, but when does continuing to do what we did in high school becomes so high school?

“There are matters where this matters, but we’re talking about a television star from a television show. Why don’t we just let that guy enjoy his chocolate chip cookie in peace,” we say.

“BOO!” they say. “I’m not going to let that television star off the hook, because that he wasn’t the wholesome cookie he portrayed, not in his personal life.”

“Our friend needs to bake an other than?” they say. “Everyone bakes chocolate chip cookies. He needs to try something different?”

“But everyone loves chocolate chip cookies,” we say. “They’re delicious for criminy’s sake!”

***

As an other than, we learn to use our personality to create something that serves a purpose. We then do what we do, until we reach that “Why am I still doing this?” question. Then we reach a point where we’ve answered every possible question we can think up. At another point, beyond that question, we realize that as confusing and disjointed as all this can be, it’s us. It’s who we are, what we are, and how we conduct ourselves. It’s our element, and how we conduct ourselves when we’re in our element, and until we reach a point where we can all learn how to bake bakery fresh, chewy chocolate chip cookies, through some sort of genetic modification, driven by AI, we’ll be forced to admit that we cannot all be chocolate chip cookies.

Some people actually prefer peanut butter cookies, sugar, oatmeal raisin, and all the other thans. I’ve met them. They don’t develop biological reactions to chocolate later in life. They just prefer an other than, because they find them delicious. They’re anecdotal evidence that not every person in the world prefers chocolate, but if you’re a restaurant, a gas station, or an event planner, you know it’s all about the chocolate.

We all have moments when something other than chocolate chip cookies appeal to us, but do we ever look back with regret that we didn’t try harder to be a chocolate chip cookie in a chocolate chip cookie world? Do we regret not pursuing their ingredients for success, success, SUCCESS? Some of us not only moved past all the resentment and regret, we moved into a middle ground of our own choosing. We’re the ones they call one strange cookie. We not only accepted this idea that we’d never be chocolate chip cookie, we embraced it. Some characterize this midlevel existence as a stuck-in-the-middle one, with its own unique level of suffering, but we chose to view it as us being baked differently. We used our ingredients to come up with something different. I’m not claiming that I built a better cookie, and I can’t say if it’s worse, but it took me a long time to reach a point where I can say it’s mine, “I am a cookie, and it’s good enough for me.”