Mechanical Animals

May 1, 2013September 22, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

The next time something near and dear to your heart falls apart just hire a professional to fix it. I know, I know, this goes against the grain of every do-it-yourselfer (DIY) that has experienced the satisfaction of fixing it yourself, but we’ve tried to be that guy and failed so often that it’s time we admit that we’re just not mechanically inclined. If we are able to endure the room silencing, dish breaking stares that follow such an admission (and there will be stares, condescending, shaming stares), we’ll find that most of the staring contingent are not as mechanically as they think they are.

Enter the mechanical animal. As in any arena of life, there are those that have an almost inexplicable ability to fix things and those who don’t. This particular breed of mechanical animal is not determined through genetic isolation or selective breeding but they like to think they are. Some breeds are able to fix things, because that’s what they do for a living, and some have done it so often that they’re just better at it. “It ain’t rocket science,” one mechanical animal informed me.

Within the mechanical animal genus, a variety of species exists under the same archetype. At the apex of this archetype is the truly industrious person who, through trial and error, has learned to fix most things. For the purposes of clarity and distinction, we’ll call this species of the genus the mechanical beast. The mechanical beast is not necessarily smarter than any of their offspring, but they distinguished themselves in one vital area, need. If they didn’t fix the matter, no one would, and they didn’t have the money to pay those who could. The beast then taught his offspring everything they needed to know about fixing things. After years spent learning on the beast’s knee, we can’t help but be impressed by the knowledge this mechanical animal has, but if we do anything beyond raising an eyebrow, we’ll learn the continental divide between those who know such information and those who know how to apply it.

Within every species lies some level of natural selection, but as some have found through trial and error, some are not as capable as others in their species were. To compensate for their lack of knowledge, the mechanical animal focuses their energy on the field of mechanical accounting. They can recite for us an itemized list of the expenses we will encounter if we decide to hire a professional. They have intimate knowledge of how much parts actually cost, and they know the retailers the professional in question chooses for their parts and resultant costs they pass onto their customer. They have also memorized how much each company charges for labor, and all related expenses involved in going with such a high profile company. “Do you know how much you’re paying for their brand name?” they will ask us.

The condensed version of their presentation is that not only are we foolish for even considering the call to an expert, but we are engaging in so many unnecessary expenses. The subtext of their presentation also suggests that those of us who are not able to fix it ourselves are less than male, if the audience of their presentation is male, and it often is in such discussions. If we stubbornly maintain a realistic limitation of our abilities in this discussion, in the face of the mechanical animal’s intimidation, the mechanical animal will add seven words that will forever taint our relationship with one another, “Hell, I can fix it for you.”

My advice to you, if you’re ever in this space, is to just let this mechanical animal go. Let him explain how much knowledge he has in this area. Let him provide his intricately detailed three-to-five-to-seven-to-nine point plans on how they would fix your dilemma. Smile a smile of appreciation as they verbally dance about in their wheelhouse, nod a lot, and say, “Holy Crackers!” and “Man, you sure know what you’re talking about!” Dazzle them with your lack of knowledge, and keep your head in a non-confrontational and subservient position, and you’ll have a friend for life, but do not take this guy home with you.

He might seduce the desperate us with his conversation points that express the love and care he will show our home’s bolts and nuts, but soon after the lubrication is applied, the mechanical animal will start wrecking everything we hold dear. When the job is “done”, the mechanical animal won’t mind leaving a fella incomplete because the homeowner’s satisfaction was never the reason the mechanical animal injected their ideas into our conversation in the first place. The plan never involved them driving over to our house, screwing or unscrewing, or saving us one, thin dime. The purpose of the conversation was the conversation. They’re mechanical animals.

Mechanical animals have had this money saving and time saving three-to-five-to-seven-to-nine plan programmed into their head, note-by-note in the manner programmers program the notes of a Rachmaninoff tune into a self-playing piano. Like any song, every problem is fixable in programmed notes, but the difference lies in the variables. Mechanical animals are often great at communicating the intricate details of their pre-programmed knowledge on a lawn with a beer in their hand, but they often fall short when variables arise. They’re mechanical animals.

Mechanical animals are also great at informing a group of fellas on a lawn, with a beer in hand, that the corporate guys we’re planning on hiring are not as qualified as we think. The mechanical animal will inform us that he had a friend of a friend of a friend that hired them once, fourteen years ago, and that man wasn’t satisfied with the work they did. If we’re brave enough to proceed headlong into this gale of wind, we’ll ask, “Well, who would you hire then?”

“You don’t hire anyone silly,” the mechanical animal says. “You fix it yourself.”

This all makes for excellent “males on the lawn, with a beer in your hand” conversation, but it’s been my experience that the least expensive course of action for a desperate homeowner to take, is to smile, finish that beer he was gracious enough to slam into our hand, walk into the house, and listen to the conversation the females are having about the finest upholstery known on Earth. This conversation might not be as engaging to the male mind, but it will end up being far less expensive in the end.

The homeowner should not ask for another beer, or listen to further “guys on the lawn, with a beer in the hand” conversations regarding the mechanical animal’s expertise, with a twinkle in our eye, because we think we’ve finally found someone who appears to have some expertise. Doing so will leave the desperate homeowner with a half-assed fix and an inoperable dullness in the eye that will last the rest of our life on earth.

Mechanical animals are our neighbors, our brother-in-law, that guy who stops to chat with us at the local Home Depot as we stand in the aisle of his particular expertise, and just about every male that we know beyond a smiling nod. They’re mechanical animals –often named Morty– who have encountered just about every obstacle in life, and they can properly diagnose any problem we put before them in T-Minus two minutes, but we make the mistake of turning a dime on them, we’ll be screaming: “Houston, we have a problem!” in T-Minus two weeks.

As discussed, this breed of mechanical animal often has an archetype male sitting atop their personal totem pole, the mechanical beast, who goes into beast-mode anytime a situation that plagues man arises. Also, as discussed earlier, the mechanical animal wants you to know what they know, but the beast is an amalgamation of need-to-know. If this mechanical beast didn’t know how to fix the plumbing in his house, in other words, the family would have to learn to live without plumbing. A Morty type mechanical animal will often tell the story of the mechanical beast, often their father, going to a hardware store, picking up a pamphlet, and wiring the family home for electricity based on nothing more than the instructions that pamphlet provided. The audience of this narrative may revere those industrious, rugged individual characteristics of Morty’s archetype male, but Morty will temper that awe with a conclusion, along the lines of, “It’s not as hard as one might think, all one has to do is …”

Throughout the course of a Morty’s testimonial to his father’s greatness, we learn that Morty’s archetype male was industrious, self-serving, patient with the trial and error variables involved in fixing things, and undaunted by matters that leave the rest of us breathless, but, again, that knowledge was borne out of necessity.

At some point, the import of Morty’s fixation on his archetype male will unfold when he attempts to fuse his knowledge with that of his father’s. “The man taught me everything I know.”

We might consider his adoration his father almost a romantic sentiment, and we might recount some of our own feelings for our father, or we might wish we revered our father in the manner Morty does. As our admiration for Morty grows, as we realize how much this man loved, and still admires his father, we have to be careful not to fuse their abilities with their father’s. If we fall prey to Morty’s pitch, and we invite him into our home to display his ability, we might wonder when we fell for what this well-intentioned man was saying. A moment such as this one will be it. For in our desire to be as industrious as our forebears, we identified with Morty’s romanticized portrayal of his father, and we conflated our desire with his, until we were convinced of his actual ability.

Morty’s generation, our generation, loves the convenience that technology has afforded us, but the luxury of technology has also deprived us of the need that drove our archetype males to become what they became.

Reliance on this greater technology has left most males feeling less than macho, when we compare our knowledge to what our archetype image of a man dictates what it should be. As a result, Morty types spend their lives trying to replicate their archetype’s model. At some point in their lives, most Morty types realize that they have fallen short of this idyllic image. They know how to wire cable to their TV sets … with some margin of error. They know how to change their own oil, spot a car, and they can relay some inane facts about some inane car. They know how to mow and fertilize a lawn, and perform some perfunctory plumbing chores, but they pale in comparison to the archetype male of their lives, often their father, because they don’t have a need to be as industrious. This is where the listener comes in. This is where the listener needs to list the distinctions and be mindful of them while playing the role of circuitous conduit to the goal of the mechanical animal’s conversation.

Playing the role of circuitous conduit to this goal of the mechanical animal, allows the mechanical animal to touch the face of their archetype male, even if it’s just for one moment, on a lawn with a beer in hand. It also forces the listener to play the role of the idiot in their story, but the mechanical animal will love you for it, for as long as it lasts.

“A trained chimpanzee could fix that,” is something they might say from their newfound stature atop the industrious male totem pole, a place that the obliging homeowner’s open-mouthed awe has created for them. “If they were willing to put forth a little effort, a trained chimp could fix that for a Frito reward. What kind of man are you that you can’t?” Morty types often don’t add the latter, for most of them are polite and fun loving, but their characterization of the listener implies it. At this point, the listener would love to have their own idiot among the other fellas standing on the lawn with a beer in their hand, but most of us don’t.

“All you need is a telescopic, shrub rake and a milled face, framing hammer,” is the manner in which a Morty type begin such assessments. “If you want to call a fix-it guy, be my guest,” they say in tones that provoke compulsory responses. “If you want to go into debt, and listen to a guy demean you for not being able fix your own home that’s fine, but if you stick with me we can fix this thing in a couple hours for less than a hundred dollars.”

To be fair to Morty types, there are Morty types and there are Morty types. Some Morty types will confess, in typical Morty type humor, that they know “just enough to keep out of trouble”, or “just enough to be dangerous”. They’re often fun-loving beasts that may rear their ugly heads after they’ve had a few, when they’re with a bunch of fellas, looking out on their dilapidated lawn. It is not the goal of these Morty types to make members of their audience feel stupid, inept, or less than male however.

“Hey, you know your stuff and I know mine,” they might say to reveal how congenial, patient, and humble they are. If, however, the listener doesn’t make it a practice of lowering their head to the subservient position, the mechanical animal might feel a need to take them deeper into their weeds.

There are other Morty types, and everyone knows one, that will cause those that know anything about mechanical animals to dive into a row of insulation, at Home Depot, the moment we spot them working their way down the aisle toward us. These Morty types will lock onto overwhelmed, vacant eyes and giggle: “Hey Martha, writer dude here doesn’t know what a milled face, framing hammer is.” To which a more cultured Martha type will instruct him to, “Be nice Morty!” and he will, if there are no other fellas around looking at a dilapidated lawn with beer in their hands. He will, if the experienced listener finds a way respond to all of Morty’s quick-fix theoretical fixes with careful responses that provide the mechanical animal the illusion that we know something about what he’s discussing. He will, if the experienced listener adds something that alludes to the idea that they have some knowledge of the telescopic, shrub rake, and the intricate web of seductive knowledge the mechanical animal has.

The thing is Morty types do know just enough to secure a crowned position on the conversational mountain of knowledge, with a beer in hand. The moment after the desperate homeowner joins them up there, they will note that the mechanical animal has all of the same brown patches in their yard, and a board they’ve had covering a broken window on their garage for over a year. The homeowner might not want to call Morty out on these inconsistencies, but if they’re considering asking this man to fix the headache in their home, these are crucial notes to make. We also need to make note of the fact that the bed in their spare bedroom collapses when a man that weighs under 200 pounds climbs on, and even though he installed his own saloon doors on all of his rooms, we need to make note of the fact that they won’t close properly.

Once a guy leaves the idyllic conversations on a lawn, and they remove their beer goggles, they witness the realities baked in a foundation of half-truths and makeshift aggrandizements. We do need to note, however, that Morty types are not attempting to deceive us into believing they know how to fix whatever ails our home. Most of them know what they’re talking about on this subject. They know the logistics of the fix, and they know how to go about getting things fixed, but they just don’t do it as well as we thought we were when we were all starry-eyed over their knowledge.

Those of us who have made the mistake of turning a dime on these conversations have realized our mistake soon after saying:

“Well, hell, if you can fix this for half the costs, then you are my man!”

If the reader is anything like me, it was never our intention to expose them for who they really are. We wanted our flawed home fixtures fixed, and we were so desperate that we didn’t take the time to look for the realities of the man’s ability in another man’s home, in his garage, or on the dilapidated outskirts of his lawn. If you’re anything like me, you’ve made the mistake of not knowing the difference between mechanical animals and the mechanical animal conversations that occur on a lawn, with a beer in hand, with a bunch of fellas standing around.

If you do let Morty-type mechanical animals in your home to fix the very basic tasks that you can’t, let them go. They love to talk about anything and everything throughout the chore they’ve been generous enough to fix for you. The mechanical animal might know what they’re doing in this arena, and they might even be able to fix what is required, but you should know that you’ll be making a huge mistake by leaving them alone in the room that needs some fixing. It would be rude, of course, to invite them into our loving home and just leave them to fix it, but that doesn’t cover what we’re discussing here. What we’re talking about is placating to the desires of a mechanical animal that is kind enough to attempt to relieve your headache without pay. To do that, those of us who have experienced such things firsthand, advise the reader to affix vacant and overwhelmed eyes on them, and say, “Wow!” and “Holy Crackers, you’re smart!” a lot. Let the mechanical animal provide detailed instructions on how to maintain, or fix, your problem in the future. The listener might not retain a single word of the diatribe, but that is not the goal of the mechanical animal. The reason that they collected the necessary tools for your project, and drove over to your home was to have you listen to all the knowledge that they’ve accumulated over the years.

My experience with Morty types is that it’s also not enough for them that their audience promise to pay them, for nine times out of ten Morty types don’t need the money, or the steak we’ve promised them if they can fix a something something that’s plagued us. It’s also not characteristic of Morty types to like the homeowner so much that they’re willing to fix something for them just because, and my advice is to keep filling those voids with various forms of those “Wow!” and “Holy crackers, you’re smart!” responses. Chances are, if the homeowner is an inexperienced observer, with no precedent, they might find these expressions tedious after a time, or they might believe that these mechanical animals will work harder, better, and/or faster if we leave the room to get them to stop talking about what they’re doing and just do it. That homeowner will realize the huge mistake they’ve made soon after the mechanical animal climbs down the ladder, saying they need to get a milled face, framing hammer from home, and the homeowner is left calling that “over-priced” professional three days later, paying far more than they would have if they had just called him in the first place.

Eat Your Meat! How Can You Show Appreciation for Life, If you Won’t Eat Your Meat?

December 7, 2012July 14, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

“You’d eat it if you were on the field of battle,” Dad said when I displayed preferences regarding the food he prepared. “You’d eat it if you were hungry, but you’ve never known hunger, not in the sense that others have.”

Convincing children to show appreciation for food is a time-honored concern that dates back to the cavemen. When the caveman’s children stated they were tired of eating Mammoth, their mother probably felt compelled to remind them of the sacrifice and danger their father faced to provide them with their meal of the day. In those days, acquiring food was much more perilous than a drive to the grocery store. We can assume what the tales were like, those stories of peril the hunters went through, but we can also assume that the stories eventually bored the children. Later in the timeline, parents informed their children of the lack of available preservation techniques: “Eat it all, or it will go bad.” Modern technology provides safer and easier access to food, as well as preservation techniques that have become so common for so many generations that most parents have never been hungry, not in the sense that others have, and they’ve taken food for granted for the whole of their lives too.

The trick to convincing children to appreciate food is more difficult today than ever before. Some parents inform their children of the plight of third-world children, hoping to instill appreciation for what’s on their plates. My dad knew little of that, but he knew the life of a military man. He knew C-rations, and he learned about the scarcity some endured during the Great Depression secondhand. He attempted to use that knowledge to stoke appreciation for food in his boys.

The theme of Dad’s stories was that the manner in which one eats is a window into their soul. He also believed it a testament to manliness and anyone who questioned his manliness need only look to the girth he carried for much of his life for answers. He was a human garbage disposal, and he expected as much from his sons.

“I never had to worry about you eating,” Dad said. “Your brother caused me some concern. He’s finicky.” That would prove to be one of the greatest compliments my dad ever gave me.

Finicky was the only F-word in my dad’s vocabulary. A finicky eater, to him, was that certain someone who thought they were so special that they took matters for granted. He considered them oddballs, and he viewed them in an unkind manner. My brother’s finicky nature reared its ugly head most often when onions appeared on his plate. His open disdain for them was a constant source of embarrassment for our dad.

Dad was Old World. He lived in an era when the gravest insult a man could heap upon a host was to leave a morsel of food on their plate. Most descendants of Depression-era-parents, the last American era in which food could was even remotely scarce, learned of the value of food. Any grown man that dared to display an eating preference disgusted them, because they could recite stories when such a luxury was not available to most. They also experienced their own limited selection in the military and the wars, and they hoped to instill an appreciation of food in the next generation. Our dad may have been more diligent in his efforts than others’, bordering on obsessed, but he considered it his legacy to pass this knowledge along to his boys.

Other than his concerns regarding my brother’s finicky nature, our dad was also concerned with the fact that he didn’t pay as much attention to his meal as our father felt was necessary. My brother was prone to pausing while he ate. He also enjoyed talking during meals, and he even had the audacity to glance at the TV set while we dined. This was anathema to our dad. When food was on the table, we were to nourish ourselves without distraction. Doing so, paid homage to all that went into the various lines of production that led to our bountiful meal food. An individual seated at my father’s table was to eat with time constraints similar to those of a soldier’s, who appreciates the fact that he has a limited amount of time to get the nutrients contained in those humble C-rations into his body if he wants the energize required to take on the day. He didn’t necessarily want us to eat fast, as much as he required diligence, because he believed it made a statement, a cherished response to eat as if we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. Consuming food in that manner, at Dad’s table meant that we had deep respect and appreciation of those who gave up their lives to provide us the freedom to eat whatever we wanted.

He never had a problem with me in this regard, as I said, but my brother needed constant reminders. Dad tried everything to get through to his boy. Along with all of the aforementioned techniques, he endeavored to instill appreciation in my brother by informing him of the preparation process involved in the meal before him. My brother was not disobedient or rebellious, nor was he unappreciative or ungrateful. He tried to remain focused on his meal and he attempted to finish it to adhere to that paternal guidance, but he inevitably fell back to his methodical approach to eating. This provided our dad such consternation over the years that he developed a bit of a ballad, what we called the “Eat, Tono, Eat” song. This song, much to my father’s consternation, would become something of hit among friends and family, and it had the following lyrics.

“Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Oh … eat, Tono, eat.”

Anyone eavesdropping on one of his limited engagements might have mistaken Dad’s “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate the man. He was a former military man and tool man. He created utility to fulfill need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating again, dad never sang it again. He may have sang the song a couple times, but the threat of it loomed forever more. He didn’t intend to be humorous, unless using humor furthered his goal of getting my brother to eat. As long he achieved that, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. Whether or not a listener enjoyed the tune was on them, as far as Dad was concerned, but they would find themselves wanting if they called for an encore.

Taste did matter to dad. He enjoyed well-prepared, flavorful meals as much as the next guy, but anyone can eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated one man from another, in my father’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to our ancestors who could afford little more than a meal of pork and beans on buttered bread. The pièce de résistance of his personal campaign to honor those who came before him arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in bread industry knew the manufacturer’s name.

Mustard and mayonnaise didn’t make it on dad’s sandwich either, for condiments were luxuries our ancestors never knew about, “back when times were hard”. My father wasn’t the type to pound a point home with a joke, but the thrust of his philosophical approach to eating was that if a man could eat a cheap, flavorless bologna sandwich, sans, condiments, it would put hair on their chest.

On the subject of humor, the reader might infer that part of Dad’s philosophical approach to eating involved at least humorous subtext. While many aspects of Dad’s philosophical approach to life were subject to interpretation that could lead to some unintentional humor, I can say without fear of refutation on this one subject, that the methods he utilized to pass on his deep appreciation of food were never funny to him.

With such a strict, uncompromising mindset drilled into one’s head over decades, one cannot help but feel disgust for those who display preferences. I didn’t draw a direct correlation to my dad’s philosophy for many-a-year, as we do not make connections to the conditioned responses we have. It did become an undeniable source of Dad’s repetitious conditioning, however, when it disgusted me that my brother and his wife allowed my nephew to subsist on a diet of macaroni and cheese, carbohydrates, and sugary sweets. I didn’t expect the young child to make informed, diverse choices, but I expected more of the grown man, my brother, inundated by our father’s unrelenting lessons and philosophical exercises. My concern was not limited to health, though that was part of it, but I couldn’t believe that my brother allowed his father’s grandchild to limit his diet to such a narrow list. I expected my brother, a student of our father’s no-excuses approach, to teach his son how to eat, and to drill into his son’s head the variations of what that meant. My nephew’s excessively short list of preferences disgusted me, but the idea that my brother allowed it percolated inside me until I had to say something.

Some part of me wanted to pass on the entire cannon of Dad’s philosophy, but I didn’t want to insult my brother in front of his wife and son. I bottled up most of the comments I wanted to make, and I drilled it down to one simple comment, “You don’t know how to eat.”

As soon as the words slipped out, I wanted to take them back. I wanted every thought and motivation behind that comment expunged from the record. Those words, along with the act of actually saying them, contradicted the worldview it took me decades to build. I abided by my father’s wishes, but I never did so in silence. I questioned him, analyzed his philosophies with words that could pierce and deflate, and often followed that up with ridicule and mockery.

I was the rebel in the household that swore my father’s ways were wrong, antiquated, and heavy handed. My life’s mission was to juxtapose myself to everything my father stood for, yet here I was attempting to pass on the most sacred tenet of my father’s gospel to his grandson. It was the most powerful encounter I would experience with the power of conditioning, and I shuddered within it.

Although my father never offered a philosophical pivot point for his beliefs on food in general or on and the appreciation thereof, I believe it all centered on individual preferences. Preferences, in his view, were an ostentatious display of luxury, and he chose to deprive himself, in a manner equivalent to a man who buys a moderate sedan when he could easily afford a luxury vehicle.

Another aspect of Dad’s code involved never calling another man out on his preferences. He recited tales of men with preferences, but he did so in the privacy of his own home, for the sole purpose of providing parables, to instill crucial lessons in his boys so we wouldn’t grow up to be like them. He was the product of an era that did not permit one man to comment on the ways and means of another, lest anyone interpret it as one seeking some form of superiority. When I dared to evaluate others failure to live up to dad’s credo, he scolded me for calling another man out like that.

That confused me, as I assumed that the mockery of others helped define the ideals our dad tried to teach us, but he would have none of it. “What a man does in the privacy of his own home is his business,” he said. Those days of appreciating the sanctity of one’s privacy are so far in the rear-view mirror now that no one remembers them anymore. In its place are endless lists of preferences and proselytizing of preferences, until one achieves the desired state of superiority.

This consideration for those beyond our address did not extend to his sons, however, for when we displayed preferences, his honesty was blunt, so much so that it might have appeared brutal to anyone outside our walls. Dad believed that what he did in his own home was his business.

The one asterisk in my dad’s otherwise strict and uncompromising rules on eating was that we could exhibit some preferences, as long as we preferred things in conjunction with an appreciation for the luxury afforded to do so. As long as we didn’t indulge in what he considered elitist preferences, and as long as we didn’t indulge in our preferences to achieve superiority and wander onto a plane of disgust for those of us who had no such luxury, he permitted our few discerning tastes.

“Those who had real-world concerns of the onslaught of Adolf Hitler and the subsequent spread of communism didn’t have the luxury of preferences,” Dad said on more than one occasion. “They had real-world concerns that plagued them to the point that anyone who engaged in such theoretical nonsense would be ostracized and castigated for the eggheads they were in my time.

“A person who engages in such trivialities has never known true scarcity and sacrifice. He leads the life of blissful ignorance, and we cannot blame him for that. He is a product of his time, but it is his parents, and grandparents, responsibility to inform him that his self-anointed superiority condemns not only those who don’t share his preferences but also those who might not have had the same luxuries afforded to him.”

Would You Eat Someone Somebody Cared About?

September 17, 2012December 31, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

Would you eat something someone cared about? Would you eat something someone whispered to sweetly?

On an episode of the brilliant, hidden camera show on TruTV called Impractical Jokers, the comedian Salvatore (Sal) Vulcano assumed the role of a worker at the counter of a bakery. In the course of his duties at the bakery, in an episode, titled “Who Arted?”, Sal spoke to one of the pastries a customer ordered before placing it in that customer’s take home pastry box. The implied joke, in this transaction, was that Sal developed a familiar bond with these pastries that went beyond the usual, professional association a baker has with his creations.

“I’m going to give you to this lady now, and she’s going to eat you,” he whispered to the pastry. In response to the confection’s purported plea, Sal Vulcano added: “I’m sorry, this is just the way things are.”

In reaction to this display, the customer on the other side of the counter, decided that she did not want that particular pastry. She didn’t reveal anything about her decision making process, but it was obvious that she was uncomfortable with the idea of eating that particular pastry. Without saying a word, Sal selected another pastry, and he proceeded to speak to that one too. The woman interrupted him saying:

“I don’t want one that you’ve spoken to.”

At the conclusion of the segment, all four comedians provided comment on the segment, and they admitted that they wouldn’t eat food that someone has spoken to either. Why, was my first question. I have no idea why, all things being similar, a person would prefer a pastry that hasn’t been involved in communication. We can only speculate why, because the show did not interview the woman after the segment, or if they did they did not air it, and the four comedians don’t say why they would reject the pastry either. My guess is that the four comedians wanted to let this woman off the hook.

In this space of philosophical confusion, I put the question to a friend. He said that his decision would be based on what the person said to the pastry.

“Okay, but what communication would you deem so unacceptable you wouldn’t eat it? It’s not something we see every day, I’ll grant you that. It might be weird, a little creepy, and I may join you in giving the man an odd look when he does it, but I would then sit and eat it without any uncomfortable feelings or guilt.”

The obvious answer is that Sal’s presentation animated the pastries in a manner that this customer found disconcerting. In her world, presumably, it had always been socially acceptable to eat pastries, and she wanted to return that world. She didn’t want the guilt associated with eating a product that had a friend, or that someone cared about, or at the very least she didn’t want to watch their interaction, or in any other way know about it. She was so uneasy with the association that she made a boldfaced demand that Sal give her another pastry, one that hasn’t been spoken to in any manner, and she did this without acknowledging the lunacy of such a demand.

Proper analysis of the segment is almost impossible, since we don’t know what was going on in this customer’s head, but it appears to be an excellent portrayal, albeit incidental, of an individual who over thinks matters. She appears to be an individual who cares about what others think of her. She appears to be the type who makes informed, compassionate decisions about her dietary preferences. When she watches documentaries on food preparation, we can guess that they affect her dietary choices

An author wrote a book that awarded “light counts” to each being. In this book, the author suggested that some animals are more aware of their existence than another, and that that awareness could be said to be a non-religious soul. Humans, he wrote, are the barometer, as they are the most aware of their existence. In the next tier of his “consciousness cone” he lists the dog, the cat, and various other animals that he considers more aware of their existence. The human is at the top, and the atom is at the bottom. The purpose of his piece, the reader soon learns, is to inform the reader what the author considers acceptable to eat. A plant-based diet is entirely acceptable, for instance, to eat plants, vegetables, and fruit, because they have very few light counts, and little to no soul.

Some have suggested that talking to cats and dogs animates them in a manner that improves their life. Others have suggested that talking to plants can improve their condition. Does this affect the way we care for them, is it all a myth, or are we, in essence, transferring some of our light count to them? What if a human decides to transfer some of their light count to a piece of pastry? Is that possible? Is it possible that this woman believes this on some tangential level, and she prefers to eat a pastry with no light counts attached to them?

If this woman knows about this multi-tiered philosophy, or thinks about it anyway, we can presume that prior to her interaction with Sal, she was always comfortable eating pastries, because she assumed they had no cognition or awareness of their own being. She is a woman who makes informed dietary choices based on similar compassionate bullet points. Thus, when Sal assigned the pastries such characteristics, it made her so uncomfortable that she asked him to give her one without communicating with it.

Who would eat something that someone cares so much about? A cad would. Someone who doesn’t care about a person, place, or thing would. They might even worry that doing so could reflect poorly on them if they eat the pastry without a second thought. You’re saying you would eat such a thing without guilt? What kind of person are you? How do we sell ourselves to our peers in the aftermath?

Would we eat a small child’s beloved dog? Most would say no, to quote Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield, “A dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.” If we agree with that sentiment, what are our parameters? Would we have any problems eating a small child’s beloved turkey? What if we met that turkey, and that turkey displayed some personality? What if that turkey displayed a little spunk that we couldn’t help but appreciate? What if that turkey befriended another turkey in a manner we found it endearing? What if the bird displayed an act of kindness that left an impression on us? What if it allowed us to fondle its wattle? What if that turkey had a name? How could anyone we eat a living being with a name? What kind of people are we? Would we rather eat a turkey that we’ve never met, that some individual in a factory farm slaughtered and packaged for us? We are informed, compassionate beings who don’t want to see anyone, any animal, or anything suffer, and when an individual does something that suggests they’ve bonded with something we plan on eating, do we consider how much pain that food might go through when we gnash it with our teeth, do we want to avoid thinking about that, and does it challenge what we think we know about light counts, the soul, and overall cognition.

The different between a quality baker and a top-notch one is the care they put into it. Some top-notch state that they put love into the confections they create. They care about their creations in the manner any other artist might. Sal’s joke might have been a spoof on the love and care some bakers put into their creations, and he did not expect the reaction this woman gave.

Once that reaction was out there, however, I would’ve been obsessed with drilling down to the woman’s philosophy behind rejecting the pastries to which Sal spoke. I would ask her if Sal redefined her philosophical stance on eating pastries in all the ways described above. If she said yes in any way, I would ask her why she considered another pastry acceptable. If he redefined it for her, wouldn’t that definition apply to all pastries? If she said no to this preposterous notion, I would ask her if she thought Sal transferred some of his soul, some of his light count to the particular pastry that she rejected. What’s the difference? Where is the line? It’s a pastry you say, and a pastry does not have the recognition of its own life in the manner a turkey does.

If a person has difficulty eating a pastry that someone spoke to lovingly, they may be a little too obsessed with their presentation. They may be as susceptible to commercialization and suggestion as those people they claim to hate. They may take the line, you are what you eat, a little too literally. They may consult websites that contain modern intellectuals who detail who we are by what we eat. They might refrain from eating a pasty, because of what it says about them if they do. They might be so afraid of what is says about them that they cannot sleep at night after taking a bite out of something that Sal appeared to love. Do they think too much, do they have too much time on your hands, and are they a result of the problem or part of it. If this woman was a spectator of the joke, as opposed to the subject of it, would she think less of the person who could eat such a confection without guilt?

How do we make our decisions on what not to eat? Does a vegetarian, or a vegan, make their dietary choices based entirely on a love of animals? Some of the vegetarians and vegans I’ve encountered initially say something along the lines of, “I don’t care for the texture of meat.” Or, they tell a story regarding the moment they made their decision and how they experienced a moment that shaped that decision in some way. Some others will detail for us the health related benefits they’ve explored. All but the very few will openly address anything political about their decision, and even fewer will state that they did it to achieve some level of cultural superiority by becoming a vegetarian or vegan. The minute we deign to put a piece of meat before our mouth, we will learn about their politics on the issue. We will also learn of their feelings of superiority over meat eaters before we learn their last name. If neither of these are the case, or if my experiences could be called anecdotal, why would a seemingly reasonable woman reject a pastry based solely on the fact that a Sal whispered sweet nothings to it before placing it in a pastry box?

If Sal had a Snickers bar perform the Can Can to animate that candy bar in a realistic, non-comedic manner would that woman, a vegan, or a vegetarian, be able to then eat that Snickers bar without regret or guilt? I realize that Snickers bars and pastries are relatively inanimate, but with proper, serious characterization would it be possible to animate them in such a fashion that a person, with susceptibilities to messaging, could be made to feel guilty about eating them? If that was successful, could an enterprising young documentarian launch a well-funded campaign, steeped in political pressure, to lead a segment of the population into avoiding eating Snickers candy bars based on videos about the inhumane manufacturing process involved in the creation and packaging of Snickers bars? With the proper documentarian displaying the inhumane process through which the peanuts and caramel are adjoined with the nougat in a final process that involves what could be called a suffocation technique employed by the layer of chocolate placed over the top, would it be possible to substantiate this cause to a point where a person would not only stop eating Snickers but denigrate those that do and anyone who supports Big Candy to be in line with evil? It’s not only possible, in my humble opinion, the seeds of it were on display in the inadvertent brilliance of this comic sketch on this episode of Impractical Jokers.