The Hearty Handshake Handbook

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A stranger I’ve never seen before, and I’ll probably never see again, wouldn’t shake my hand, ‘Because COVID!’ I can only assume it was COVID, because he never said or gave me any hints that it was related. He just wouldn’t shake my hand. Fine, it meant anything to me, but what does it say about you? As Jack, the bellman, said, “COVID is over, and we have to get back to shaking hands again.” We’re men and this is what we do. I don’t like this any more than you men, but this is what we do. We look men in the eye and offer them a firm handshake, and firm does not mean that we drop them. “That’s for tough guys,” Bill, the waiter, told me one time in the break room, “and when I say tough guys, I’m talking about the rah-rah fellas in locker rooms, who don’t know nothing about what to do in the ring.” Even when I went through my most confident period in life, I wasn’t a big handshaker, and I didn’t really grasp the whole theatrical production of the hallowed first impression. First impressions, to my mind, are largely phony. I’m huge on second impressions and third impressions. I prefer to let the game come to me, and I can do some great, unforgettable when I’m immersed in the shadow of lowered expectations, but they taught me that that’s not the world men live in.  

I had my game all figured out at one point, until Ken dropped a big old, “I never trusted a man who wouldn’t shake your hand, and look you in the eyes while doing it,” on me. I’m not up to something, I wanted to tell Ken, and I never have been. I’m not shady, and I’ll prove that to you over the long haul, but you cannot say that to a man like Ken. Ken is a serious man, a man’s man if you will, and you don’t try to realign a man like Ken to suit your needs in his home. You shake Ken’s hand, and you look him in the eye, because that’s what he considers a respectful greeting from another man. To a man like Ken, handshakes build a connection between men, and as he says, it forms a level of trust that you cannot build with him in any other way in the initial greeting. A man like Ken sees through you when you don’t shake his hand and look him in the eye while doing it, and you won’t like what he sees.  

That stranger I’ll probably never meet again had his whole routine down though. Before your hand is unholstered, he flips out a quick “Hello, how are you?” and it’s very warm, polite, and standoffish at the same time. ‘I need distance,’ that quick greeting said. ‘Because COVID, because have you read the literature on communicable diseases? Even if it’s not COVID, you could have something crawling all over you that will get on me with the proximity, and touch, required in a handshake.’ Hey, I wasn’t raised to shake a man’s hand either, but I learned, stranger I’ll never see again. They taught me over time that this is just what we men do to one another, and we learned this tradition from the Ancient Greeks, it’s in their art, so it’s just too late to go back now. And I don’t care about COVID, or the literature.

Another kid’s parent shot me a condescending ‘Haven’t you read the literature?’ smile when I went to shake his hand, but my hand was already out. He wasn’t as quick as the stranger I’ll never see again. He dropped his name in that space, and my hand instinctively went out. I apologized with my hand out, and I withdrew it in the shadow of his condescending smile. “No, it’s ok,” he said putting a hand out to shake it. He didn’t look me in the eye when he did it. His handshake was fastidious and obligatory. ‘I’ll let it go,’ I wanted to say, ‘but that would not have impressed a man like Ken.’

I’ve heard about power handshakes that involve the lefthand cupping the handshake, a power move. I’ve never experienced a cupper before, but I have to imagine that that would completely 360 Ken’s notion that the cupper was up-to-something shady, and yes, I meant 360 as opposed to 180, as Ken’s suspicions would return tenfold after a cupping. I’ve heard some handshakers move that left hand up to the elbow, and one famous/infamous handshaker went all the way to the shoulder. The higher the lefthand moves up, I’ve heard, the greater the power play. I don’t know how I would address such a handshake, but I can’t imagine a situation in which I didn’t consider that unnecessarily intimate.

No, when you meet a man who is not distracted or rushing off, you press palms with them for no longer than three seconds, you look him in the eye, and you drop an interested smile on them. When you’re in another man’s home, or in some other relatively subservient position, you wait for him to extend his hand first. If he doesn’t, that’s on him. If you’re seated, you stand, and there’s no reason to get too close, because no one likes a nose-to-nose handshake. If you’re sweaty, you just coughed, or you just wiped your nose, you discreetly wipe it off before extending the hand. There are rules, laws, and by-laws in this whole handshaking world, and you learn them as you go. Even if you think some of these rules are silly, as I do, you learn them and follow them, because it’s not about you. These things mean something really important to some men, and if you refuse to take part, you’ll mean nothing to them.    

You shake a man’s hand, because it says you’re glad to be here, and you’re interested in meeting them, and you look them in the eye to say, “Yes, I mean you!” The non-shakers accidentally send a message that reads, “I kind of dismiss you.” Even if your transgression involves health-related concerns, based on literature, it still sends that message that you’ll never be able to properly address. The old saying on gifts, ‘Tis better to give than receive,’ does not apply in the handshake world, for if you do not give respect, in a respectful handshake, you’ll never receive.

The three exceptions to the rule are age, gender, and culture. If you’re in a culture in which the handshake is not the proper greeting, then you respect and follow the rules and traditions of that culture. If the person you meet is female, then you follow her lead. If she’s a hugger, you hug, but most women are big on smiles and eye contact, and some of them flash a wave. Kids aren’t big handshakers either, but I often make a production out of shaking the hand of a young male, because I deem it a sign of respect. “Welcome to the club!” my handshake says. I try to attach some element of silly to it, because I know how uncomfortable those first few steps into this world can be, but I maintain that my handshake is serious. I usually follow their lead on how much seriousness or silliness I attach to it, but I think I’m doing my part to welcome them into this world of respectful first-impressions among men.  

So, Mr. Stranger I’ll probably never see again, you ain’t Joe Cool, Mr. Snoopy with sunglasses on, and you never will be, with your COVID, learn-the-literature non-shaking hand codes of conduct, because shaking hands is just what men do. The respect you give will be the respect you receive.   

The Disappointing Rock Star Bio

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One of my favorite genres in the book store/library is the rock biography. I love learning more about those rock stars and musicians I grew up with and continue to play in all of the various machines we can now play music on. My favorite chapters involve their early years in which nobody believed in them, because “Why would they?” I love the stories about how the musician we know today wouldn’t be half of what he is if he didn’t end up with the four-to-five other guys we know as their band. The four-to-five of them developed an unusual level of belief and focus that eventually helped them attract an audience of 100 people in a dive bar that is now boarded up. I also love to hear about the unending hours they spent just jamming in a parent’s garage. These are the stories most of us don’t care about, because nothing substantial happened there. They were just jamming, in the manner the basketball athlete spent so many hours/years in a gym perfecting their jump shot. I love these chapters because they demystify the notion that they were just born different, and they bolster Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that we’re all capable of great things if we devote 10,000 hours to it.

We all live with this notion that Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger were just born with “it”, and they’ve always kind of had “it”, because they’re just different. The point of these early chapters is to illustrate that they might be different now, but that’s only because they’ve done it so often that it’s just easier for them to do now.    

Every top-notch singer-songwriter and musician we know and love had a point in their life when they strummed a guitar, played a piano, and sang some original creation from their heart, and someone they loved and cared about giggled and said, “That kind of sucked!” I love stories about that stench of failure, not based on some sense of schadenfreude, but to see what the musician did with that all of that frustration and pain. Why did they continue to create when everything they did, back then, was pretty sophomoric. They couldn’t see it then, of course, because they thought they were writing masterpieces, until someone a little heartless came along and said, “You’re not ready.” How did they maintain that belief in themselves when everyone who heard these “songs from their soul” and instructed them go back to school so they don’t end up in manual labor, until they achieved what we now know as their magnum opus?

After the “rise to stardom” chapters, most of those who write rock bios fall prey to the temptation of writing what’s called a hagiography, or a sympathetic, idealization of the subject. The hagiography term began as a description of a tome written about a person declared a saint. Thus, if a hagiography is the description of a writer anointing a man a rock god, then the opposite of a saint is a sinner, and the antonym of hagiography is synography or hamartography, meaning “in error, sinful”. There are some synographies, or hamarographies, written about rock stars that focus on drug, alcohol, and other forms of abuse, but their intent is to glorify the rock star through the lifestyle they led in their heyday.  

As much as we criticize the way the writer crafted their subject’s material, it has to be difficult to find the line between hagiography and biography when the primary reason we buy these books is that we all kind of worship the subject. Let’s face it, when we read a biography on Chris Cornell, we’re not seeking hardcore investigative journalism. We just want to know a few things about what made him tick, and how we can relate to him as a fellow human being who had huge dreams, but his just happened to come true. We don’t care if the writer tends to overdo it, and we even kind of expect that. We want to know the minutiae of how he overcame everything a teenager with nothing more than a guitar and a dream had to overcome to write and create Badmotorfinger.

The problem that would probably chase me through such an effort is how much material is there on the process and philosophy of creating a rock album. How many rock songs were inspired by “A time when I saw a chick in a red sweater and a tight, leather mini-skirt.” On the opposite side, we have the pretentious musician who tries to claim some sort of significant political, socioeconomic inspiration. There are also those obnoxious artistes who try to tell us every interpretation of their lyrics are wrong. “That’s so not what it’s about,” they say, but they never offer us the true origin of the song. This leads me to think the inspiration for the song was either relatively mundane, embarrassing, or at least not as creatively brilliant as we thought. They probably fear that anything they add to the discussion will only diminish our joy of the song, and they just prefer that we continue to regard them as misunderstood geniuses. Those who have offered a specific explanation, on the other hand, often leave me wishing they never said it. I can’t remember ever finding a songwriter’s explanation of their lyrics as an inspirational work of uncommon, creative genius, so I can understand why its sometimes better to leave it to our interpretation. 

Another disappointment I encounter when reading rock star bios occurs when the discussion of my favorite song begins. If you bought this bio, you love the band almost as much as you love man, but you can’t wait to read the discussion on your favorite song from them. Did you skip a couple chapters to get to it? Did you go to the table of contents to find the chapter that discusses it? I’ve done it, you’ve done it, because we want to get that chapter out of the way, so we can read the rest of the bio without anticipating the thorough discussion of it. How many times have you been disappointed to learn that your favorite track from an artist was a last second, “what-the-hell, let’s add another track” song? Out of everything Chris Cornell did in his relatively short life, in his brilliant Soundgarden albums, his Audioslave albums, and even his solo stuff, Temple of the Dog is, his deepest, most meaningful, and most beautiful album. Some of the tracks were written in honor of his then-recently-deceased friend and colleague Andrew Wood. At the end of their reportedly somewhat spontaneous production of this album, it reached a point of completion. The primary writer on that album, Chris Cornell, felt that nine tracks just didn’t feel complete. He wrote another song to have ten songs as opposed to nine, and that track was Hunger Strike. Hunger Strike would eventually prove to be one of Cornell’s most popular songs, but it was one of “my songs” from the moment I first heard it, and I couldn’t wait to read an in-depth discussion of it in a bio that ended up offering nothing but a short paragraph, and to be fair to the author there wasn’t much to say about Hunger Strike, other than it being a “what-the-hell, let’s add another track”.   

These artists mine their mind, heart, and souls for another song, and some of that material provides great material for the writer of their biography to explore with us, but the song everyone wants to read about? “Yeah that was a “what-the-hell, let’s add another track” song.      

The “after they made it” portion of the hagiography then talks about how “the star” always sang on stage with his shirt off, or how he once climbed atop a speaker one time and sang from there, and “It was a hell of a show.” Because he climbed up on something, or purposefully broke a guitar on stage, or purposefully jumped into a drumkit? We also read about how he climbed into the rafters of a concert hall, against the wishes of his manager and the Fire Marshall, and he swung from those rafters, which were thirty feet off the ground. I hate to be trite, but I could do all that. How is that artistic brilliance, or a brilliant interpretation of chaos? “Well, it’s better than some guy who just stands there and sings.” Okay, but I paid a lot of money to hear a man sing, and I don’t want to watch him climb on stuff the way my second-grade kid does, and I’ve also discouraged my kid from breaking his toys too, because it makes no sense. I understand that everyone is bored during guitar solos and drum solos, and the singer is just trying to maintain the audience’s interest, but I’ve never considered such antics mind-blowing or even interesting. I’ve always found them a little boring.

I honestly don’t know what I expect from a rock-star bio, but I’ve been disappointed so often that I’ve started thinking maybe rock-star bios just aren’t for me anymore.   

The Metaphysics of Marriage

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“The difference between marriage and cohabitation is nothing more than a piece of paper,” they’ve told me for as long as I remember. I believed that so much that I didn’t just repeat it and preach it, I lived it. I loved it too, for a short time, until my cohabitant turned combatant. She and I got into one of those mean and dirty “I’m not sure the relationship is going to survive this, and if it does, I’m not sure I want to carry on” fights. Our breakup was a “no harm, no foul, and it was nice learning how a relationship can fail with you” breakup. It was so easy, it was too easy. “These things don’t work out some of the times. See ya, sista.” When I married, however, I learned that after a big fight, both parties go to their respective corners, talk to their managers, and develop a game plan to use in the next round. The next round can involve better strategies to win that round, or it can involve a series of compromises. I’m sure long-time cohabitants go through all the same issues, but at the end of the day, it just seemed so easy for me to walk away. Marriage just felt more substantial, and I found myself working harder to make my marriage survive and thrive. I didn’t want the big “D” on my docket, so I learned that I would have to make what proved to be difficult compromises to make it work. Trying to understand how another person thinks led to me becoming well-rounded, more mature, and a better person. I advanced to a stage they call: adulthood.

Radio talk show host and writer, Dennis Prager talks about these matters, as evidenced by the quotes below, from Dennis Prager’s Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but Mr. Prager is not an expert on marriage, a marriage counselor, or a psychologist. He’s a radio talk show host and author who has been involved in two divorces. “He’s been married three times? Why would you consider his advice on marriage valuable?” I think we can all admit now that we’ve learned more from our failures in life than our successes, and Mr. Prager has also been married to his current wife for sixteen years at this point, which shows that he obviously learned from his personal failures in that regard.

“Either marriage gets better or it gets worse. Couples need to constantly work on their marriage to make their marriages strong.”

To my mind, the idea that marriage gets better or worse with age is almost exclusive to young marriages. I realize that all marriages, like all people, get better or worse with age, but if I married in my early twenties that poor marriage wouldn’t have had a chance. I changed so dramatically between twenty to forty that I was almost a completely different person. I was more stable, confident, and I knew myself better. I also liked myself better at forty, which might sound foo foo, but if we don’t like ourselves, we’re probably not going to like, much less love, another. Second marriages, or those who wait until their mid-thirties to forties, tend to last, because we make rational and less emotional decisions in life. Love is no longer the lone driver, as forty somethings have learned from the mistakes of impulsive actions and reactions based on short-term thinking. Having said all that, marriages between forty-somethings are just as apt to get worse with age for those who don’t constantly work on their marriage to make it better.

“Some romantic ideas can really hurt your marriage. Romance is good but romantic thinking can be damaging.”

“How can romance hurt a marriage? What an odd thing to write.” There’s a difference between romance and romanticizing. We all romanticize the idea of love, relationships, and marriage, and romanticizing them often leads to unreasonable expectations. The culprit for these unreasonable expectations, in my experience, is the love story. How many unrealistic expectations of romance and love are born in the love stories that movies and books provide? They give us the idyllic images we want, need, and begin to believe is out there waiting for us. “I deserve better,” we say when our very specific visions of a very specific Mr. Right don’t pan out. We all have our bullet points, of course, but did we create them, or were they created for us? When Mr. Right fails to meet our idyllic bullet points, captured in the scripts and rewrites of love stories, we venture back into the field. While there, we discover that Mr. Right is largely a fictional character born and raised to feed our need for Mr. Perfect. We all know Mr. or Miss Right is out there, we’ve seen them, but was our mental processing of this issue is a result of digital processing? Those idyllic images they planted in our head messed with us, until we created our own idyllic images that no one born of physical processing can achieve. 

“No human being can fulfill all of your wants or all of your needs.”

Calling upon our wife or husband to fulfill our wants and needs is normal, but demanding that they meet them all, with ultimatums attached, is shallow narcissism. When we enter into a long-term relationship, with expectations for marriage, we expect our prospective other to accept us as is, yet we set conditional expectations for them. We expect them to know us, as is, but we don’t place reasonable expectations on ourselves to know them as is. If we did it right, we should know our potential spouse before we marry them. We should know them warts and all, and we should know that as Dennis Prager points out the term “soul mate”  is equivalent with “clone” and unconditional love should be a term reserved for our children and pets. Relationships between full-fledged, complicated adults come loaded with a myriad of conditions, and we need to sift through the conditions we establish for them to make sure they’re fair, and if they are, we should require them to meet them and vice versa.

“Being in love means always having to say you’re sorry. The three words “I am sorry” can be more powerful than “I love you.””

The ability to apologize often comes in direct conflict with the ego. The ego is that evil, little guy who rests on our left shoulder, just below the ear, whispering, “Don’t let her get away with that.” The ego also characterizes what she said and defines and redefines it. “We firmly established our set of ground rules and our turf, and her words and actions just violated them.” It turns out, she didn’t say what we thought she said, or she didn’t mean it the way it sounded to us, and at some point our over-protective, super sensitive ego took over and led us down a bad road. “I’m sorry, and it will never happen again.”

“We need to teach him how to treat us,” her ego whispers to her. In the early stages of a marriage, or any relationship for that matter, we set out to establish ground rules for how we want to be treated. Those ground rules also come equipped with that one big, no compromising taboo. “You can violate everything else on my list, with some exceptions, except that. I’m very sensitive about that.” For a variety of reasons, and I don’t know if it’s psychological or philosophical, but when someone makes the mistake of telling us where it hurts, that’s the only wound we want to pour salt in.  

I’ve witnessed this peculiar predilection among every demographic, be it old, young, male, female, married, single, and everyone in between. I’ve seen it happen so often that I’ve toyed with it. “It’s hard to make me mad, seriously. I’m basically impervious to teasing, ribbing and razzing, but don’t make fun of my obsession with peanut butter. I’m very sensitive about that.” It’s a joke of ridiculous extremes of course, as I like peanut butter, but I have no unreasonable attachments to it. I throw that out there to see what “they” do with it. It might take an hour, a day, or even a couple days, but someone, somewhere will come up with a clever shot about my obsession with peanut butter, and you can see it on their face that they think they’re hitting us where we live, and they don’t give a durn how bad it hurts. We all do this, our great aunts, our lovers, and even our moms can’t seem to resist the temptation. Knowing about this strange psychological predilection is half the battle, and putting our loved ones through a test of their loyalty is another strange psychological predilection we all partake in, as we’re basically putting them in a position to fail. 

We’ve covered four of the eight points Dennis Prager covered in his Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but one of the most crucial characteristics I think he missed is the need to find someone who doesn’t mind being boring every once in a while. We need to find someone we enjoy spending substantial amounts of time around, and some of that time is going to be spent doing relatively boring things. That sounds obvious, but when we sift through our list of applicants for marriage or cohabitation, we find very fun and exciting men and women who can be extremely funny and wildly entertaining. The idea that a prospective mate can add some fun and excitement to our lives can plant the seeds for a whirlwind romance, as long as they’re in their element. The latter is the key for displays of charisma and energy requires a right time, right place setting, and we might need to take them out of their element to see if they can be boring. If you’re considering a substantial move with another person, you might want to find out how they conduct themselves on a lazy Sunday afternoon, playing parcheesi? Do they need a little sip of alcohol while doing it? They might not be alcoholics, but they can’t do something like play parcheesi without a little edge. Some might need a wager to pique their interest because they can’t imagine playing parcheesi just for the fun of it. Bill Murray once suggested traveling with someone before you marry them to take them out of their element, and to show you how they interact with service industry personnel. The point is we can learn a lot about loved ones at parties and other social functions, but we can learn a lot more about them by cooking a meal with them, raking the lawn, or sitting out on a deck with them and nothing more than a bottle of water.