Category: psychology

Expecting the Expected

RilalyLeave a comment

“Comedy is the imitation of the worst kind of men,” –Aristotle

“Dark humor is like food—not everybody gets it!” Josef Stalin

I was waiting on a friend who would never show when Marilyn Dartman sat down next to me. I spent the last half-hour looking back at the door whenever someone entered, when she sidled up next to me in an aged sports bar that the owner hadn’t renovated in twenty years. It happened so many times before, that I had the old ‘shame on me’ dunce cap on for expecting that this time would be different.

I don’t care how angry, bitter, resentful and just plain fed up I get here, the friend who wouldn’t show wasn’t an awful person. Was he inconsiderate, sure. Did he abandon me the second a hint of something better, more enjoyable, and just plain fun arose. He did, I’ll admit that, but he wasn’t rude. He was inconsiderate, unless the considerations involved himself. What’s the difference? I wondered sipping slow on a dark, stout beer. The difference is that he’s one of the expected, and I am the type that is always left expecting him to show up. I play the Charlie Brown character in this production, always running up to the football, expecting Lucy to continue to hold it, every single time, until you can’t bear to read any further. 

While sipping on that delicious brew, I thought about the few times in my life where I was expected to show up. They made plans, and those plans involved others, but they made it clear that they expected me to be one of the ones who showed up.

“Are you going to be there?” they asked with a small amount of plea in their voice. It felt odd being on the other side of this paradigm, and I assured them that I would be there. Throughout the course of that day, some double-checked, some even triple-check. Even though those triple-checks sounded cringey desperate, I understood. I’ve been there.

“I want to assure you that I would never do that to another person,” I said when they double-checked me, “because I’ve been on the other side of this so often that I could write an article on it.”

I’ve been the pre-teen soccer player expecting that the set of headlights that washed over me were from my father’s car, bringing a merciful end to me sitting there in the dark all by myself for nearly an hour. I’ve worn that expectant smile when the sounds of the bar or restaurant’s swinging door cue another’s entrance, only to see a foreign shape fill that space. I know how that expectant smile dissipates when the laughing, fun shapes fill that entrance. I know the sense of vulnerability that drives another to the proactive measure of triple-checking, and I know what it feels to sit there so long that I vow, once again, to never put myself in such a vulnerable position of counting on anyone for anything ever again. As deeply entrenched as those feelings of resentment are, I would never reveal them by triple-checking.

“I’d never do that to another,” I say to try to put an end to what I considered the painful revelations inherent in their triple-checking. “I’d never damage the expecting the way they’ve damaged me.”

How does a friend blowing off another at a bar do so much damage? I consider the general practice of no-showing abhorrent regardless the circumstances, but if I were to dig deep, I’m sure we’d find some pre-existing conditions that lead me to such straits, and my guess is that it’s this congealed ball of so many flavors that it’s impossible to nail one. It’s probably so deep-seated that it would take deep, intrusive therapy to fully define, but most of us are not so damaged by such matters that we seek therapy.   

“Sorry, I forgot,” is what the expected say the day after pulling a no-show, when they’re not lying or providing an excuse. The excuse I heard most often from this friend who would never show was that needed to spend time with his son. Who can argue against that, and how do we verify it? Years later, I found out he reversed this lie to his kid, telling him that he was hanging out with me on the nights in question. (On an illustrative side note, his kid, now a grown adult, still resents me for taking so much quality time away from he and his dad.)

“That’s fine,” we say after they apologize. It’s not fine but it feels odd, petty, and even a little dramatic for a grown man to say something like, ‘No, you know what, it’s actually not fine. You left me sitting there by myself, feeling like a fool, staring back at that ever-swinging door, thinking it might be you.’ We also know that it won’t prevent future incidents, and we know that holding onto that anger and resentment won’t do anything either, so we just say, “It’s fine.” If anyone else can call them out like that, I applaud them for being honest to the point of revealing how vulnerable they felt, but I just don’t do vulnerable well. I’ve also learned how skilled, and some might say artful, others can be when diminishing and dismissing another’s pain.

 It was in that void that a woman named Marilyn Dartman stepped.

“I’ll buy the next round for you for … your soul,” Marilyn Dartman said, stepping into this tangled web. She said it over my shoulder, with as much baritone as she could muster. She then extended a hand. “Marilyn Dartman,” she said. “May I sit next to you.”

I was in no mood for humor, but Marilyn sold that line so well, and she was so serious, that I burst out laughing. “Has that ever worked before, Marilyn Dartman?” I asked shaking her hand and inviting her to sit.

“Actually it did, yeah, it did sort of … on me,” she admitted, sliding into the seat diagonally. “I sold my soul to the devil a decade ago.” She stopped to mentally count, “Yeah, it was almost a decade anyway. I was all young and stupid, and I thought Beelzebub might be able to make me the greatest writer who ever lived. I’ll take the ‘L’ for it, my bad, but I thought I was so close to becoming the greatest writer who ever lived that I thought if anyone could put me over the top, it was Beelzebub. I now chalk it up to youthful exuberance, or naïveté, but if you’d ever read anything I’ve written since, I think you’d agree I got screwed.”

“I’m sure you’re not that bad,” I said.

“Well, I’m not that great either,” she said, “which is kind of the point.”

I enjoyed this beyond it being such a wonderful distraction from all my sulking, so I bit, “I’ve seen the movies and read the literature, but what are the procedures, or the process you have to go through to get Satan to grant you your wishes?”

“I did research on the best way to do it, but I don’t even remember where I read that to do it right you need to fly down to the corner of highway 61 and highway 49, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, but that’s what I did.”

“Robert Johnson,” I said. “Old blues singer, allegedly sold his soul on that corner.”

“That’s it. That’s the name everyone dropped on Reddit,” she said. “It’s so plain that it’s almost hard to remember some of the times. Other people, in line, mentioned the group Led Zeppelin, and some other guys named Niccolo Paganini, and Bill Murray who sold their souls, and we thought if he could do it for them, he might be able to spin some of his black magic on us.” 

“You said we,” I said. “There were other people selling their souls?”

“Oh my gosh, how about lines were around the block,” Marilyn said. “Had I not flown on such a limited round-trip and paid for a one-night stay, I would’ve turned around and come back another day when the lines weren’t so long. It was so ridiculous that Satan’s minions eventually installed a self-checkout aisle.”

“C’mon,” I said. “You had me till that. I can’t believe that they addressed customer complaints-”

“Believe what you want,” Marilyn said. “Someone in line said, and I quote, ‘it’s just good business, and they received a ton of complaints.’ Believe what you want though.”

“After standing in line for so long, I’ve since found that if you know what you’re doing, you can sell your soul to the devil from the comfort of your own bedroom, or you can find local chapters, or whatever, but I didn’t know any of that back then, and I was so dying to be a great writer that I would’ve done whatever it took, and I would’ve flown wherever just to get it done.”

“Did you get out of it?”

“Out of Satan owning my soul?” she said. “I did eventually. I told one of his minions, in his customer relations department that if Satan didn’t release me from my contractual obligations, I would accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior, and I’d go about saving all kinds of souls with my story of redemption. His minion says, but you don’t believe, and I said, and you’re going to love this, I said, ‘Does the car salesman really believe that the Smart Fortwo is the best car on his lot?’ I was so proud of that comeback, which I thought of on the spur of the moment, that I don’t remember much of what he said after that, but a week later one of his minions calls me back and says, ‘Satan says fine, he knows you’re coming to him anyway.’”

“That is such a bunch of …” I said, “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m not, unfortunately,” Marilyn said. “I wish I was. It was pretty dumb.”

“Because from what I’ve heard you can never get it back, or, at the very least, that it’s harder than you’re making it sound.”

“I’m condensing bit time, here,” Marilyn said. “After I submitted my request to his council, I had to go through all of the displays of the powers he uses to scare people. He put on a big show of letting me know his presence, with the theatrical opening and closings of doors, rocking chairs moving, and he even possessed my favorite aunt for a time. I wasn’t buying any of it. I knew he was just trying to scare me, but I didn’t fall for it. I laughed at it as a matter of fact, until he released me.”

“That is quite a tale Miss Marilyn Dartman,” I said. “Quite a tale.”   

“And it happened,” she said in closing story mode. “It all happened. So, what are you doing here all by yourself anyway? I’ve never seen you here before.”

“It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I don’t pick my friends very well,” I told her. I proceeded to tell her some of my tale, leaving out the vulnerable elements of course. I also told her the theories I developed, while sitting there for a half-hour, about the differences between the expected and the expecting.

And then, as if to prove to me that she was not one of the vulnerable, expecting types, Marilyn told me how she ghosted one of her friends, a woman named Andi, at a restaurant.

“She called me and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch at this place she really wanted to try,” Marilyn said. “I was hesitant, but I eventually said yes. She broke me down, made me feel guilty, and all that. I wasn’t into it then, and I really wasn’t into it when that afternoon rolled around. I just wasn’t in restaurant mode, if you follow.”

It wasn’t a test, and I looked for it. I scoured her face to see if she was somehow testing me, but it wasn’t there. It was impossible to know for sure, it still is, but I wondered if this was a simple case of me bringing up a subject that reminded her of a story from her life. I still wonder, to this day, if it was equivalent to the almost impulsive reaction some have to our warning not to touch that one very specific subject that bothers us most. If we tell people that we’re sensitive about lions, just to randomly pick a subject to set a premise, and we tell them that we’ll entertain stories about any animal in the animal kingdom, except lions, what do you think their first joke will be about? Lions, of course. It’s just what some types do, and I’ve met such a wide variety of those types. It’s almost equivalent to that wound you have in your mouth that you can’t stop licking, even though you know it will only make it worse. Except this is another person’s wound, and they can’t help but lick it with their infected tongues.

Even though Marilyn, and all her stories, proved a more than sufficient distraction from my feelings of anger and resentment, I was still in a particularly vulnerable mode, but I don’t get squishy and sad when I’m vulnerable. I grow resentful and even angry.

“When did you decide you wouldn’t be going to this restaurant with Andi?” I asked. I interrupted Marilyn after she started in on another subject. Her no-show at a restaurant tale was so meaningless to her that she tossed it out as if it were nothing more than another tale from her life, and she started in on another subject before I would bring her back. Her reaction was equivalent to ‘Hey, I’ve done that whole no-show thing to someone too, but what do you think of this weather, huh?’

“As I said, I wasn’t really into her whole luncheon plans to begin with,” Marilyn said with an almost playful smile, “but Andi sounded so needy that I just couldn’t say no. It was one of those moments we all have. When that afternoon rolled around, it was a weekend afternoon that followed such a rough week at work, and I just wanted to veg. I was so far away from restaurant mode that I just said nah.” 

“The point I’m trying to get here is did you tell her, this Andi, any of your feelings of nah at the time, at any time, before the fact?” She said she didn’t. “Did you, at any point, text her to let her know that you wouldn’t be there?” The answers to all of the above were no, followed by detailed explanations of the rough week she had at work, which led me to ask, “So, you just decided to leave your good friend sitting all alone in the restaurant?” Yes. Marilyn didn’t actually say the word yes, but it was pretty obvious, at this point, that a lack of no was tantamount to a confession.

At this point, it is safe to say that Marilyn and I were no longer hitting it off. She was giving me that scrunched up, “Move on!” look. Her no-show was so meaningless to her that she was trying to convince me that it should be just as meaningless to me. I mentally said, ‘Nah!’ My three progressive questions led to some silent tension between us. I didn’t care. I didn’t seek more information to make her feel bad, I wanted the mentality of the expected explained, framed, and enshrined in my head to help me try to see another side to it.

Marilyn said a whole lot of things to plead her case. She brought up things Andi did to her in the past, and those things were so meaningless and unrelated that it was pretty obvious that she was searching for circumstantial evidence to prove her case. She was no longer interested in me in anyway at this point, but she felt a need to clear her name. Marilyn was no different than any of us, and our need to prove that we are the good guys in our scenarios in life. Marilyn Dartman wanted her ‘good guy’ crown back.

“So, these things she did to you,” I said. “What you did, by ghosting her at a restaurant, leaving her to tell the wait staff to wait another couple of minutes, until she felt so foolish she either left or ate alone? This was your retribution?”

“Yes,” she said without conviction. “I mean, no, but she’s no angel. Let me tell you that much. If you’re trying to say that she never did anything to me you’re wrong.” She then went on a rant, continuing to talk about Andi, and all of her faults. 

Our conversation did not progress beyond this point. It was the contextual equivalent of yes huh and nuh uh that often concluded with me saying, “I still think it was wrong.” The only notable element of this part of the conversation was our tone, as it progressed from conversational to the two of us trying to speak over one another to the point of almost yelling.  

“I don’t need this,” she said to put an end to it. “What is wrong with you anyway? I sat down here to have a drink, and a decent conversation, and you’re all like … uh.” She made some kind of expression here to suggest I was badgering her, and making her feel bad about herself.

I knew this was the point of no return, and I knew she would be leaving in seconds, so I just launched: “I just don’t know why you people don’t just say no. That’s really the part I just don’t get. Would you like to hang out with me tonight? No. Now I might ask why, but all you have to say is I think you’re kind of boring, or you’re so boring that I cannot bear spending another hour with you. Or, I want to hang out with Steve, because he’s so much more fun. You know what I say? I say fine and dandy, because no is better than a no show. No leaves me wondering why, but I get over it just as quick. No-show leaves me in a bar, by myself, looking back at the door, like a damned fool. What’s wrong with me, you ask. I ask, what’s wrong with you? Why would you do that to another person, anyone, much less a friend, or a best friend?

“If your plans change, or you fall out of restaurant mode,” I continued, speaking over her. “Why don’t you pick up the phone and push a couple buttons that say, ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to go.’ Why, who cares, thanks for telling me bud, because I’d rather you text me that you’ve decided you don’t want to hang out with me, because I’m boring, that someone else is more fun, my breath smells like European cheese, or you’ve decided not be friends with me anymore, because you’re starting to consider me an unpleasant and smelly orifice on the human body. Would it hurt, sure, but it’s all better than leaving me sitting in a bar or restaurant, all by myself, looking at the door, feeling like an absolute fool for believing, once again, that you’re a good friend.”

“There is something wrong with this guy,” Marilyn said to the few patrons in the bar, to try to drive some kind of dagger home. “There is something so wrong with you that I don’t want to know anything more about,” she added picking up her drink and her drink napkin. She appeared all ready to march away, but she turned back, “I’m a good person, and you don’t know me. There’s something so deeply wrong with you that you’d say such things to a complete stranger. You don’t know me, and how dare you?”

Marilyn Dartman did not appear tears. It was all anger, disgust, or righteous indignation that drove her to sit in the opposite corner of the bar. The fella she sat next to in that dark corner gave me a look, nothing on it, just a look. I turned back to my beer, took a drink, and began watching the hockey match on the television set.

I’ve since told this tale to a wide range of people, and the reactions were mixed. Mixed. I didn’t bother keeping a ledger on their reactions, but they were about 50/50. I did everything I could to tell this interaction as objectively as possible to try to get true reactions. I included the stories Marilyn told me about Andi, and any information I could to support Marilyn’s cause, because I wanted an objective answer for what I considered a bullet proof case. Even though I didn’t think much of what she added, I tried hard to remove any tones to her story to seduce my listeners to my side. The 50/50 reactions shocked me. How could anyone agree with Marilyn? Some agreed agreed with me, but the others shocked me by saying, in various ways, that I was wrong. Some said I was harsh, and I admit that there were some time and place emotions that drove my spirit. Others said I was just wrong for calling out a complete stranger without knowing all the facts, and they admitted that aggressively saying such things to a woman prejudiced their opinions. “A man should never say such things to a woman,” they said, “and if you were near-yelling that’s just beyond the pale, and it’s just not something a man should ever do to a woman.” Still others said it was none of my business how anyone chooses to conduct their personal affairs. If her friend was upset by the matter that’s between Marilyn and Andi, and I had no business subjecting my views on her.

“Ok, fair enough,” I said, “but isn’t it about respect, or even basic human decency? If I say I’m going to meet someone at 7:00, I usually show up at about 6:50. That’s me. I understand not everyone abides by my self-imposed edicts, but a complete no-show? If you’re fifteen minutes late, I consider that a subtle show of disrespect, but it’s so negligible that I won’t remember it two minutes later. Thirty minutes doubles the disrespect, but a complete no-show, that’s when we move into the uncharted waters of basic human decency.”

Did I lay it on a bit thick? Probably, especially to a woman. As for all the other arguments, I just think I value friendship far more than most, and I now know how that puts me on the weak end of those relationships. There is this sense they must have that because I’ve always been there, I’ll always be there, and that leads them to value our friendship less. They don’t expect more, because they’ve never put that much thought into it. You’re a friend not a lover, so why should they bend over backwards to make it work? Then, after you’ve finally had enough, and you unceremoniously end that friendship, because you know they won’t show up, and you get back together with them, after ten years apart, you might expect some sort of nostalgic apology for all the violations of the conditional tenets of your friendship, but you find yourself left expecting, because they aren’t really that big on nostalgia. 

The Primal Instincts of Dog and Man

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We love our kids unconditionally, and we would love to love our dogs just as unconditionally, except for one nagging asterisk, the dog-eat-poop thing. “Why does he do it? How do I get her to stop?” It’s so gross that it’s tough to watch, tough to stomach, and even tougher to get over when it’s over, and we smell it on his breath. We’ve tried shaming them, using our words and those tones, and we’ve even reached the last resort of inflicting pain as punishment. No one I know wants to strike their pet, but it’s so gross that we’re desperate. Two minutes after we do that, we know that wasn’t the solution, but what is? The answers for why they do it are so wide-ranging that it’s safe to say no expert has a definitive answer, nor is there a definitive answer on how we can stop it. The best answer I’ve heard for why they do it is that their wild ancestors ate their puppy’s poo to prevent predators from knowing where they were, and if that’s the answer then the answer to the second question is that it’s almost impossible to get them to stop. It’s bred into them by their ancestors to protect their young. 

Even if we had one definitive answer everyone agreed on, and we knew how to train them to stop doing it, it wouldn’t change the fact that it’s just gross. When long-time dog handlers are asked what’s the one drawback to their job, they’ll almost immediately go to the dog-eat-poop thing. They might go on to list other matters that are just as difficult and more challenging, but most of them will say that the poop-eating thing is still, after decades of working with dogs, something they cannot get passed. 

“The grosser the better,” does seem to be the answer for the general practice of dogs sniffing material on the ground. If they spot an old, white and mostly crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, they might give it a whiff and move on, but a fresh, steaming pile flips some sort of an ignition switch in the need-to-know aisle of their brain. Their desire to learn every little nugget of information possible about that turd can require a muscular tug on the leash to get them away from it. Depending on the size of our dog, it might alter our preferred ninety-degree angle with the earth when they find a rotting, maggot-infested opossum corpse nearby. Our beloved little beasts can’t help it, it’s the way they were wired, but our hard wiring leads us to find the act of sniffing, sometimes licking, and even eating excrement so repulsive that it can temporarily alter our perception of them.

The Scene of a Car Accident

Most of us won’t sniff, lick, or eat the steaming carcass of a car accident victim, but we will slow our roll by the scene of the most horrific car accidents to satisfy our sense of sight and curiosity. Coming to a complete stop is beyond the pale for most of us, but how slow do we roll by, hoping to catch a little glimpse of something awful? The grosser the better.

To curb our enthusiasm, first responders assign some of their personnel to traffic control. They have to to prevent oblivious drivers from hitting the personnel on the scene, of course, but they also know that our desire to see something awful will cause traffic jams and accidents.

“I could put together a book of some of the things I’ve seen drivers do, some of the dumbest things, to see the horrors of a car accident,” a friend of mine, often assigned to traffic control, said. “I’m not talking about a top ten list either. I’m talking about a multi-layered, illustrative, instructional, and sad-but-true comprehensive book on the things I’ve seen.”

I realize that 20-30 minutes is a relatively minor traffic jam, compared to most cities, but the reason some of us live in big towns and small cities is to avoid the perils of over population. So, when we incrementally creep up on the scene of an accident, and we see no other obstructions in our lane, or the other three to our right, we realize that the sole reason we’re going to be twenty-to-thirty minutes late is that every other driver ahead of us had to slow roll their way by the scene to see if they could see something awful.

We get so frustrated with all the drivers driving so slow that it’s obvious that they hope we misconstrue their slow roll with a respectfully cautious approach to an accident. They just want to see something, and they hope they time it just right to see the first responders pull the bloody and screaming from the wreckage. 

As with the quick sniff in passing that dogs give a hard, mostly white and crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, we might give a “Nothing to see here folks, everyone’s fine” fender bender a glance, but we won’t even slow to survey for carnage. We won’t, because in our drive up to the accident, we saw no evidence of twisted metal, plastic shrapnel on the street, and no spider glass. We pass by without slowing, knowing that it’s not worth our time.  

When we see evidence of a catastrophic accident, we become what my great-aunt used to call lookie-loos. Lookie-loos feed this morbid curiosity so often, that we’ve developed a term for it, rubbernecking. Rubbernecking, the term, was developed in America, and the strictest definition of the term involves the straining of the neck to feed a compulsive need to see more of the aftermath of an incident.

A 2003 study in the U.S., suggested that lookie-loos rubbernecking was the cause of 16% of distraction-related traffic accidents. If you’ve ever been involved in a major accident, you know the scene attracts a wide variety of lookie-loos. Some of them do everything they can to assist, but most pull to the side of the road just to look, just to see. They, in their own strange way, want to be a part of the worst day of somebody else’s life. If you’ve ever witnessed this, you’ve seen some similarities between them and the information-gathering dog sniffing poo on a neighbor’s lawn.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say almost no one wakes up in the morning, hoping to see something awful, and we don’t purposely put ourselves in position to block emergency vehicles, or get so close to an incident that we run the risk of being a part of the carnage if the fire hits a gas line. We just sort of drift into a position for the best view of something tragic. These moments help us feel fortunate, because it isn’t happening to us, and how often do we have the opportunity to feel grateful and fortunate? 

Intra-Office Drama

On a much lower scale is the “Did you hear what Jane did to Jim last night?” intra-office drama. Until I saw the damage this gratuitous grapevine could cause, I must confess that I was a conduit of such salacious information. I heard it, I lifted an eyebrow, and some element of my storytelling nature couldn’t wait to pass it along. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but we’re all tempted by the siren of salacious information that someone doesn’t know, and we strive to have others view us as as a font of fun and interesting info. We have all heard people say, “I’m not one for the drama.” Yet, they’re often the first ones to pass these stories on. I love it, you do, and we all love a little drama in our lives. It’s sort of like our own little reality show in which we intimately know all of the players involved.

Then it hits us. We have to work with these people. We have to see, hear, and feel the aftermath of spreading this information, and the drama we so enjoyed yesterday can make the next forty hour work week so uncomfortable it’s almost painful. They can’t look us in the eye, and we have to live with the fact that we played a role in damaging their reputation. We realize that we inadvertently diminished our work space to feed into this need to know too much information about our peers.      

The Need to See

We also “need to see” videos of others doing awful things to others. As with the dog that is innately attracted to the steaming pile, we want grosser-the-better videos. Even our most respected journalists, in major and minor broadcast fields, feed the need, and they know they have to, but they dress it up with “a need to see it.” Why do we need to see it? “We’ve deemed it important to keep you informed,” they say. I read the article, I got the gist of it, someone did something awful to someone. I get it. “But it’s news, and it’s important.” This is a complete crock, I say as a person who has never worked in a news room. My guess is that they go behind closed doors to discuss the video of an atrocity. They weigh the business need to feed our desire to sniff the steaming pile of humanity against the journalistic code to not stoop so low as to air something just to get clicks or ratings, and the compromise they reach is to dress it up with a “need to see” tagline. Nobody is saying we should try to put the genie back in the bottle on this unfortunate side of humanity, but how about the broadcasters and podcasters be a little more honest. “Tonight, in our Feed the Need segment, we have the latest stranger doing awful things to other strangers video.”

Those of us who enjoy being happy, content, and feeling some semblance of safety don’t understand the “need” we all have to sniff the steaming pile of humanity. We understand that some of the times ignorance is bliss, but most of the time we don’t need to whiff of the worst of humanity to know it exists. Yet, I will concede that there are some who need to see it because they say, “It didn’t happen the way. Not the way they say it did.”

The dog can be a surprisingly complex animal, both intellectually and emotionally, we’ve all witnessed some inspiring feats in both regards, but they still have that primal wiring and structuring that define their needs. The human might be the most complex and intelligent animal in the animal kingdom, but we’re still animals. We have complex needs, desires, and thoughts, but no matter how much we’ve evolved, modernized, and advanced, we still have some primal needs and wants that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of no matter how advanced we become. Some humans have achieved some incredible things over the course of human history, but one has to imagine that if a genius the likes of Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he would be a lookie-loo if he saw a horrific, yet visually appealing car accident, and he would probably rubberneck the scene to the point that he delayed all of the drivers behind him. We can be the greatest species ever created, but in other ways, we’re no better than the chimpanzee, the dolphin, or the dog.  

The Platypus Courtship Chronicle

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Due to its proximity to the brain, the sense of smell is the most powerful for recalling memories, but when was the last time you used your ampullary electroreceptors to locate crustaceans in deep, dark water? You probably didn’t even know you had ampullary electroreceptors, and I don’t write that to display some sort of superiority, because I don’t have any either. Knowing that, a platypus might pull a power play on us by talking about how he uses them as a sixth sense. Just dropping those two words, sixth sense, you know this platypus is going to get some attention at the pool party. When he starts in on the mechanics behind his super-sensory skin on his duck-bill and its three distinct receptor cells that help it detect electrical impulses caused by movements of objects in the water, and how he’s one of the few mammals that have this ability, you just know people are going to start gathering. He’s super-obnoxious about it too. He knows the best way to put exclamation point on all of his claims is a party trick.

He tells a short fella, wearing a yellow shirt, to throw a worm in the pool, then he instructs us to blindfold him, nose plug him, and add some noise-canceling earphones just to prove he isn’t using any of his “pedestrian senses.” And what do you know, he just happens to have all that on him. 

“What’s going on here?” a late-comer asked, and the other guy shushed him and pointed. Other than that whisperer, the rest of us were silently watching that short guy in the yellow shirt spin the platypus around three times to disorient him. Yellow shirt then led the platypus to the edge of the water and pushed him in. After about seven seconds, the platypus emerged with a worm in mouth. He allowed it to dangle at the end of his bill for a couple seconds, for effect, then he sucked it in.

“Ta-dah!” someone called out to ignite the hooting and hollering. Free-flow laughter followed, as we followed the platypus, all but yipping with excitement, to a dark corner of the grotto.

We would have even joined in on all the adulation, if we didn’t see that smile on Tiffany. Tiffany was such a friendly woman, with such a warm disposition, and we were really hitting it off, two minutes prior to the platypus putting on that show. She showed us a smile when we began talking to her, and we thought it was that smile, until we saw the smile she gave the platypus. Then, when we added what we considered a clever, little joke after the show was over, her smiled ticked over to us while we spoke, but it lessened a little when she answered us in a polite, slightly dismissive tone. When the platypus added his own stupid joke about how he was a member of the relatively exclusive species of egg-laying mammals, “Other than the echidna, otherwise known as the spiny anteater.” Tiffany laughed. She loved it. As she continued looking at the platypus, awaiting his next line, we saw that smile, the smile we wanted, return to her face. It strengthened to such a degree that we figured it wouldn’t be long before we saw our first, live platypus love donut.

Even after Tiffany touched the soft, suede-like bill that she said she found quite pliable and fleshy around the edges, we maintained Walter Payton’s never-say-die motto. We could feel petty boiling up in our insides, but we didn’t want to become petty. We tried to maintain our smile to get that smile from Tiffany on us, but the one thing we know about petty is that it’s difficult to control once it starts coursing through the veins. 

When the platypus started flapping his flat pads of hardened gum tissue about being three different animals in one, he had the room. There were people I didn’t even know who were captivated by his, “We mimic the traits of the bird here, a reptile there, and a mammal like you everywhere else.” When he said you, he was talking directly to Tiffany. He proceeded to reveal his intentions by directing the rest of his stories, clever anecdotes, and descriptions of his prowess at Tiffany, and we felt that deep in our throat.  

Tiffany was all about short-term fascination in the moment, but I started thinking about how long-term calculations influence even the shortest short-term thinking. When Tiffany began gently stroking the platypus’s fur, while the platypus talked about how “science has found his fur displays bioflourescent properties under an ultra-violet lamp, and how that reveals that his fur can absorb short UV wavelengths and then emit visible light, fluorescing green or cyan,” and how “We camouflage ourselves from other UV-sensitive nocturnal predators or prey by absorbing UV light instead of reflecting it.”

“And then what?” was the question spinning around in our head. We were then going to further that question with a “What good does that do us, how can we use that piece of information?” to play to Tiffany’s long-term calculations. We didn’t ask it, because we knew how petty it sounded. If the platypus answered, it wouldn’t be a good one. If the platypus didn’t answer, we thought we might have had him, but silence can be a tricky thing. If the platypus was crafty, he would allow that silence to play out, until it came back on us and we were drowning in it.  

By the time he got around to talking about his tail, and how it isn’t just a rudder for swimming, we were no longer even smiling at the platypus. Our competitive juices were consuming us to the point that we didn’t like him when he said, “It’s like a fat storage depot, much like a camel’s. It’s almost like a secret snack drawer.” We were not immune to his charisma, and if it wasn’t for Tiffany falling under his spell, we might’ve marveled at how a platypus can captivate a room of humans so adeptly.

Even a man named Tom Fielder fell under the platypus’s spell, and Tom was one of those narcissistic types who doesn’t pay attention to anyone who cannot do anything for Tom Fielder, and yes, he spoke of himself in the third person. Even Tom “the caustic, cynic” Fielder couldn’t conceal his compliments, “You’re a delightful blend of quirkiness and evolutionary marvels—a true testament to nature’s creativity!”   

We’re not fools, we could see that we were nearing a point of no-return with Tiffany. She was about two flapping eyelashes away from enamored by this duck-billed beaver who European naturalists thought was a hoax when they first encountered one of his ancestors. The painful memories of losing out to the males of our species struck us in the moment, as we thought about how much more painful, bordering on humiliating, it would be to lose out to a male of another species. This humiliation led to the desperation of us saying whatever we could think up, at that point, to try to convince the contingent surrounding the platypus in the grotto to move into the light, so Tiffany could see that the product of her adoration didn’t have teeth. We knew that she was thinking short-term, as the platypus went on about how multifunctional his bill and fur were, but we all know that nestled within even the shortest, short time thoughts are long-term considerations. Women might be able to overcome the superficial qualities of the toothless, for example, but they have to factor in how embarrassing it might be to go out on a date at a restaurant and have the other patrons notice that her date has to use gravel as makeshift teeth to munch on his food. That just has to be consideration for her, we thought, as we continued to hint around that our conversation would be so much better in another, better lit location in the pool area.

My competitive juices were getting the best of me, but I didn’t say anything about his teeth, or lack thereof, because a friend and former co-worker of mine placed a warning sticker in my mind about letting my competitive juices getting ahead of me when it came to fighting for a woman that I’ve always tried to apply.

“Be careful when you’re competing,” he said when I was competing with another fella, and I was about to let that woman know everything she didn’t know about that man. “Be careful that it don’t get the best of you, and you say the wrong thing. You gotta be discreet, strategic, and methodical, or it’s gonna come back on you, like the boomerang. You gotta lay your scoop out organic, or as organic as you can make it, so she thinks she’s discovered it all on her own. You pointing out his vulnerabilities, blatantly, will boomerang back on you, and you’ll be the bad guy in her eyes.”  

It was great advice from a dishwasher, and we’re not cracking on him either, because he said it himself. He said, “How do I have all these women, and I’m a dishwasher? I must know what I’m talking about.” I kept his advice in throughout this disastrous evening, until Tiffany started fingering the horny stinger on the heel of his back feet. That pounded home the point that her interest was so far beyond superficial and zoological that it was almost game over.

We were losing so bad that our desperation eventually reached a point where we cast our dishwasher’s advice aside and shouted out, “But aren’t you a monotreme?” That silenced the contingent, and we temporarily buckled under the weight of the lifted eyebrows around us, but we maintained our stance, because we had a point that we needed to drive home. When he proudly said yes, because he was proud his species, we pounced before he could use our classification to pivot a conversation about how proud he was of his heritage. We added, “Monotreme is Greek for one hole, so that means you only have one hole for waste removal?”

Was it a party foul? Yes, and we knew it was on so many levels that we knew it wouldn’t be met with approval by those who cultivate group thought on conversation topics and social decorum, but we also knew it could prove a depth charge that once detonated could affect Tiffany’s short-term thinking.  

The problem with this is that individual methods of waste removal are not in a woman’s, but more particularly a young woman’s, top 100 list of considerations for a potential mate. The party foul also illustrated the dishwasher’s boomerang effect in that if we made a dent in the platypuses’ chances at Tiffany it did not have a corresponding effect on our own. We could even say, judging by the raised eyebrows arcing even higher, that they viewed the comment as mean-spirited.  

When the platypus answered that with an all too thorough and descriptive answer, that effectively neutered our attempt, he concluded it with a clever redirect about how “Some stupid humans try to cutesify, as oppose to classify, the baby platypus as a puggle.” Tiffany laughed hard at that again, too hard. It was an all-in and it’s-all-over-for-you laugh that those of us who’ve lost out on so many potential dates know well.

In a last-dying gasp, we asked the platypus to do his blind-folded, worm trick again. We didn’t do this, “Because, I found that first one so inexplicable that I need to see if you can do it again.” We did it, because we wanted him to remove his swim shirt again, and when he did, we were all ready for it. We clicked the flashlight on our cell phone on for the supposed purpose of shining some light on him so he could see, but we accidentally exposed the fact that he didn’t have nipples in the process.

We considered this our strategic and methodical way of allowing Tiffany to discover this information on her own. Were our motives pure, of course not. We were ticked off, and we thought if we could help her discover the platypuses’s incongruities, it could lead her to question his commonality. While I suspect that very few people would avoid dating someone with a subtle incongruity, such as a strange set or nipples, or no nipples, I hoped all these depth charges might lead her to add them all up to a discovery that the platypus might be incongruent.  

If you’re competing with a platypus for a human female, and you’re losing, you might have other issues, but we were willing to bet that a toothless, nipple-less competitor who poops and pees out of the same hole might cause a woman to second guess who they should consider the ideal mate with whom they might eventually plan to marry and procreate. We also thought those long-term considerations would have a powerful influence on her short-term thinking. You can call us mean-spirited, or whatever you want, but we were trying to help Tiffany see beyond her short-term fascination with the platypus to weighing the long-term consideration of the traits their shared children might inherit from their father.