It’s Just Gross to Say it’s Gross

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“You’re just gross,” Sheila said.

“I’m gross? Me?” I asked. Sheila confirmed she was talking about me, and she went through her assessment in detail, and I … I was not insulted.

“How could you not be?” How could I be? Had Sheila called me disgusting, revolting, repellent, or even stomach-churning, my shades of embarrassment might have blossomed, but gross? Gross is gone. It just is. Overuse and abuse have drained it of all value. Everything is gross now. In the ever-changing and relative world of the new and improved hygienic standards, everyone and everything is gross now, and if everyone is gross no one is.

“If you don’t do this, you’re gross.” “Doing that is just plain gross?” “And if you do that without doing this first, you could become absolutely gross.” Some of you might find it gross, but the rest of us don’t understand how all of these this and that’s not only fail the new hygienic standards but they’re gross. How is it gross? Define gross. 

“I’m glad you asked,” an arbiter of gross once responded. “If you do this without knowledge, you’re a little icky, but we’ll withhold judgment, because you might just be ignorant, and we’ll be happy to teach you. If we teach you, and you continue to do it, you’re gross my friend, and I won’t want to be around you anymore.”

Gross, thanks to the new and improved hygienic standard, is now the most used and abused word in the English language, and we’re all scrambling to develop exciting and new uses of it. One would think that someone might step up and say, ‘Okay, I understand he failed to abide by your prescribed steps to achieving hygienic excellence in a manner you’ve defined, but he’s not gross. How is he gross?’

We all thought we had a pretty firm grasp on gross, decades ago, but something happened. There are some very insightful and well-researched explanations of the word’s evolution, but I wanted to know what influenced my friends and my generation to start using and abusing this word. I don’t know if it started in the once-ubiquitous “As Seen on TV” infomercials depicting the absolutely miserable black & white, “Before” man using a traditional mop, but I think they contributed. Before the advent of cable, there used to be shows we were “forced” to watch. Check that, we were never “forced” to watch anything, but our antidote to insomnia was mindless TV, and nothing was more mindless than those 30-minute “As Seen on TV” infomercials. To enshrine their latest and greatest product in the halls of gloriousness, the marketing teams displayed for us a reasonable facsimile of us in black and white “before” videos. We knew the anguish of the traditional mop firsthand, but we had no idea that it was the bane of human existence that might, might have been have been the second worst infliction beset upon man, behind the gods subjecting Prometheus to the sentence of having a eagle eat his liver out for the rest of time. As chilling and horrific as those “before” videos were, they were not a condemnation of man, but an invitation to join the “after” woman, in her bright, colorized visage. On this woman’s face, we could see the science behind the land of milk and honey through her incredible, beaming smile. Her beaming smile didn’t intimidate us, but it led us to believe we could join her in the land the gospels promised for living a moral life.

On another note, in the same lane, government bureaucracies informed the marketing agencies trying to develop the next, great beer commercials that they could not depict the actors  actually drinking beer in their commercials, the adjustments those teams made revolutionized marketing. It may not have been the first time a marketing team sold a lifestyle over a product, but few commercials beat you over the head with this concept as often as beer commercials. The “As Seen on TV” infomercials followed suit by selling the glorious lifestyle their product could offer by resetting the base of the traditional, laborious task of mopping to gross.

Those of us who regularly worked with traditional mops, never found them gross or that laborious, but we fell for their punctuation-free pitches that only paused for applause, and after we purchased their “As Seen on TV” mops, we found that they were not that much better. They were just different, but how do you sell ‘just different’? You can’t, so you don’t, so the only tool at your disposal is to exaggerate the differences to gross to get a reaction. The marketeers decided to go so far over-the-top that it bordered on hilarious, but somewhere deep inside your psyche, you repeated their “it doesn’t have to be this way” mantra the next time you worked with a traditional mop. You pictured yourself in black and white, and no one wants to be depicted in black and white, so you dialed that 1-800 number, because you didn’t want to be gross in the manner your black and white mothers and grandmothers were. It was such a gross exaggeration of something that was ‘just different’ that we bought it, and we’ve tried to sell ever since. We might be giving these companies too much credit for influencing the culture, or too much blame, but if there were hundreds of seeds that affected this change, this was probably one that hit fertile soil and blossomed into everything else becoming so gross. 

The origin of gross began a rather solitary existence as a term we used to describe size. A friend of mine informed me that he just purchased “a gross” of our favorite fireworks. I could tell that Mark had no idea what gross meant in this context. There was just something about the way he said it that made it sound exciting and new. It was as if he couldn’t wait to start using this word in this manner, going forward.

I laughed, but my laughter was born of confusion. He saw my confusion and clarified that gross was a term used to describe big. “There’s big, big and fat, and then there’s a gross!” he explained. I didn’t know, and neither did he, that retail fireworks shops sold their products by the gross, meaning a dozen of a dozen, or 144 items.

Gross then made its way into accounting, and if an accountant called some level of our finances gross, they were talking about our take home pay before anything else was taken out. Our gross paycheck, for example, is what our employer paid us before the government reached in and took a huge chunk of it out, so they could spend our hard-earned money on what they wanted. Net, by contrast, is what we take home after taxes and various deductions.

At another point in its evolution, gross was a superlative to describe something greater than great, but not tremendous. That’s right, according to a version of the Oxford English Dictionary, gross used to be something short of a tremendous compliment. The progression of the compliment went from good >>>to great >>> to gross >>> to tremendous. So, if someone said, “You’re just gross!” at this point in its evolution, it was almost a tremendous compliment. So, how did we take this French word to describe big, large, and fat, or the Latin word grossus, which means thick, evolve to describe something that is just short of disgusting and grotesque? Based on this context, we can only guess that when someone saw someone else who was large and fat, and they called him gross, a third party probably misinterpreted that to mean he was messy, disgusting, and all the things that are now gross.

The exact timeline on the various evolutions, or devolutions, of a word like gross are almost impossible to define, as most deviations occur in casual conversations, but we can always count on hipsters to redefine a word, such as bad being good, as in “He’s a bad man!” but who did this to gross and why? If you do any research on it, you’ll find some blame directed at everyone from Shakespeare to the movie Valley Girls. Whatever the case, we all gathered together and decided to mangle, wrangle, and tangle gross to describe everything from big, and big and fat, to crude and unsavory behavior >>> to poorly cooked food >>> to what the cat leaves in the litter box >>> to the utterly unsavory man who doesn’t use a hand towel to open a bathroom door.

“He’s just gross!” 

“Oh, I know it, and he doesn’t even seem to care.”

We all use the subtle art of manipulation, or if manipulation is too harsh a term, how about coercion to influence our peers. We know certain words elicit better reactions than others. We see this most often in the teenage world. Everything is a superlative to them. Everything has at least two audio exclamation points behind it!! We know this, because we knew it in our teens. When we hit that vulnerable valley between youth and adulthood, we do everything we can to impress our peers with our opinion. We didn’t have a firm grasp on language at the point to form quality expressions, so we substitute words to colorize our attempt to master the art of persuasion. Most of us get better at that with age, and this ardent need to impress might subside, but it never dies.

The need to get reactions and impress in the teen world can overhaul everything we’ve learned about the psychology of language, or psycholinguistics. We speak, almost exclusively, in superlatives in our teens. Everything is classic, sick, lit, and the best thing to happen to humanity and the worst. These words get reactions, and we rarely turn away from them, no matter how old we are. Even though the average adult learns 40,000 words by age 24, we cling to the teen words awesome, sucks and gross for most of our lives, because they are time-tested and peer-reviewed.   

Something awful happened to gross, on its path to overuse and abuse, but at its worst, it never made it to disgusting. As we see in the progression from yesterday, bad >>>to worse >>> to awful >>> to gross >>> to disgusting, we once had a scale by which we could rein gross in, but some of us decided to render all other adjectives obsolete. Listening to this abuse, the listener might think the founders of our language didn’t provide us with any other adjectives to describe something beyond bad, or if they did, they didn’t do a very good job to it. 

If someone says, “You know what, I think my lima beans are slightly undercooked.” Our reaction would be, “Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that?” and everyone goes back to their meal. I mean, what’s the difference between a slightly undercooked lima bean and a fully cooked one? If she says that her lima beans are gross, however, what do we do? We don’t require further description, and we don’t need to interrogate the witness. We crinkle the nose. 

The crinkled nose now plays a prominent role in the conditional social compacts we share with one another, as the purveyor of gross might deem the conspicuous absence of a crinkled nose a personal insult. When someone says their lima beans are gross, we are to offer sincere, sympathetic, or empathetic, apologies followed by a crinkled nose to punctuate that apology. We offer them this to validate their complaint and offer real, material substance to their exaggeration of a slightly undercooked lima bean. Then, if she offers further description, and it can be anything, we know this requires us to go beyond the crinkled nose to some derivative of the empathetic, “Ewww!” 

We all know the laws and bylaws of our unspoken compacts that are expected of us on a certain level, but we may not ever see them for what they are, until we experience an exaggeration. 

***

“Best onion rings in the Southwest!” a restaurant submitted in their ad. In her attempts to convince us that we should go to this restaurant, Laura told us about that ad. She knew the price of onion rings, and she knew these were overpriced, but if they were the best onion rings in the Southwest, Laura was willing to pay that price for them. 

I only knew Laura on a superficial level, but dined with her often enough to know that there was no way that those onion rings would achieve the “Best onion rings in the Southwest!” in Laura’s after-bite report. The moment she ordered those onion rings, I could feel the barometric pressure in the restaurant drop, as the complaint cloud loomed over us. I correctly predicted the precipitation cycle from Laura’s first bite to the server coming over to check on us after we received our orders. I’m not a meteorologist, but I didn’t have to be to know what happens when dark, foreboding clouds begin to form. 

As if on cue, the complaints rained down on the server after Laura took her first bite. There’s nothing wrong with a complaint of course, but Laura could’ve limited her complaint to, “I paid for the best onion rings in the Southwest, and these are not that.” She could’ve sent them back and received another plate, or another item as a substitute, but Laura opted to display her standards of excellence by putting on a show. 

In her report to the server, Laura could’ve described her plate of onion rings as room temperature, but that term has no attention-grabbing exclamation points, so what did she say? She said, “These onion rings are ice cold!” to superlative her way to the crinkled nose. The onion rings were not ice cold. We could see no ice crystals hanging off them, and there was no dry ice-like smoke wafting off them. Yet, when she finished displaying her mastery of provocative adjectives, we feared touching her onion rings the way we do dry ice, because we all know the physics behind something being so cold that it could burn. 

To further bolster her characterization, and the resultant sympathy that naturally, and contractually, follows, she added that her slightly above room temperature onion rings were, “Gross!” Was it a gross exaggeration to call them gross? Yes, yes it was, but that didn’t stop her from saying it. It doesn’t stop any of us, because we want/need those reactions. No, when Laura declared her onion rings gross, we crinkled our noses and sympathetically “Ewww’ed!” her, because we wanted to form some level of solidarity with Laura and her complaints, so she would continue to be our friend. No one would dare challenge her gross assessment, because how do you challenge another person’s subjective opinion, and why would you want to interrupt a perfectly enjoyable meal with friends by saying, “They’re not gross, Laura, they’re just a little undercooked. Send them back to the line, have the chef cook them a little longer, or get some new ones, and shut your trap!” 

Another thing we know without knowing is that gross assessments carry an unspoken quid pro quo. If we offer Laura’s gross exaggerations visual and audible support, we expect her to offer her support of our complaints if they should ever come about. Most complainers, in Laura’s league, don’t. They refuse to abide by the unspoken tenets of our social compact, or our quid pro quo, because they don’t view our complaints as significant, as germane, or as informed as theirs. We all know someone like this. They say everything from an undercooked lima bean to finding a stray French fry in their pasta is gross, or absolutely gross, and we support her to fulfill our obligations in our shared compact. When we complain about something that we might later admit is relatively inconsequential, such as, let’s say, slightly undercooked red meat. They dismiss our complaint. 

“It happens when you order red meat,” a Laura-type might say. “When you’re ordering food, particularly red meat at a restaurant, you’re allowing someone else to cook it for you, and chances are,” the Lauras of the world say, emphasizing those two words sardonically, “chances are, they’re not going to cook it to your satisfaction. Just eat it, or send it back and have them cook it more and shut your trap.” The crinkled nose we give that is not a gross one, but one of insult and confusion. 

“She doesn’t see it,” we whisper to ourselves in wonderment. “She doesn’t know that she’s one of the biggest complainers in the Southwest.” Is it that, or is her dismissal fueled by the fact that if she allows us to complain and call everything gross, unimpeded, that might somehow diminish her assessments?

If you’ve ever gone this deep into the social compact we have with others, an exaggeration like this makes it apparent to us. Yet, when we recognize it, most of us sit in silent stupor and comment on it later to those close to us. Few of us would be so bold as to say, “Hey, I crinkled my nose for you when you complained about your onion rings, and I even said “Eww!” when you wouldn’t shut up about it. I think I’ve at least earned a crinkled nose from you woman.” Not only does their very public dismissal of our complaint violate our social compact and the quid pro quo we thought we had with them, but they’re totally oblivious to all of their complaining over the years. If we wonder how oblivious some of them can be, they’ll add an “I’m sorry, I just hate complainers” atop the pie, and if that don’t crack your dam, then you have far more control of your facilities than I do. 

After hearing Laura-types use and abuse the word gross for years, I briefly considered it my prime directive in life to mount a personal campaign against the power the word wields over our public discourse. I started small and polite, but at some point, I started trying everything I could think up to limit the use of the word in my social circles, for the purpose of giving it some of its power back. My modus operandi was that if we could all get together and limit the supply, it might have a corresponding effect on its demand. I didn’t do it for self-serving reasons. I did it for the word. Even though I knew that was a self-serving lie, I made some strides in my battle against the ‘ly words, literally and actually, in my social circles, and I thought my experience in this arena might translate to some success on the battlefield against the word gross. I lost. I lost so badly that … Have you ever heard of the infamous Battle of Little BigHorn? Yeah, like Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, I severely underestimated my opponents. I was bull rushed at times, and outflanked by others. It was a bloodbath. As with Custer, my troops abandoned me, all my Captains and Majors, retreated when they saw out how outnumbered we were in our initial skirmishes, and my fight proved pointless and pitiful, even among my closest friends and family.

The word is gone, I say to you now in my after-action report (AAR). I didn’t think anyone still used the musket, and when I saw that they did, I grew over-confident, but when so many use it, it leads even the best of leaders to acknowledge that some of the times even the best laid plans should, for the sanity and happiness of everyone involved, end in retreat.

I Love to Drink!

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“Do you love to drink?” Barry told a Pocatello, Idaho audience. “Of course you do. Everyone does. We’re not talking about Kool aid, or anything that hydrates you either. We’re talking alkie hall, girls and boys. The National Food and Nutrition Board recommends that we drink eight glasses of alcohol a day, and I think that’s a bit excessive, but I … what? Oh, they were talking about water, eight glasses of water a day. Water. Thank you for the correction.  “Eight glasses a day,” they say. “It cures what ails you.” All that. We know it, we’ve heard it, we got it. We should drink more water, we know we should, but it’s just so blah.

Now, I have had some incredible, absolutely unforgettable glasses of water, and they came out of the tap. How could a glass of tap water be so incredible that I’m still talking about twenty years later? You ever drink alcohol to excess? You ever drink so much the night before that that morning glass of water teaches you what euphoria means? You ever dehydrate your body so thoroughly that when you finally drink that glass of water, it’s … it arouses you a little? I’ve put those eight glasses down in the space of about ten minutes before, but that first glass? That first glass makes you happy you survived the night before. It’s like a reward for damaging your body. If you do it right, you can feel that first glass soothing your throat, hydrating and healing whatever ball of hell we threw into it the night before. We can feel it circumnavigating the stomach putting a cool coat on all the wounds our violent, projectile vomiting caused. Do you love to drink? Let me hear you knock one back. Let me hear that after-the-drink sigh.   

“Very few people applaud that line wildly, especially on a date. We might love to drink, but we don’t love telling people that, especially on a first date. It’s not a good look. ‘You like what you’re hearing here? I’m pretty charming, right? Enjoy it while you can, because in about a half an hour, I’m going to have trouble remembering your name, Jennniferr?’ 

“I’m not an alcoholic anymore, but I used to be (pause here) I used to be (add menacing soft chuckle that lasts a little too long). I am probably going to hit on some other girl on our way out, just so you’re prepared, and let’s see here, oh, oh and I almost forgot I’ll probably fall on someone on the way out too. I do that silly stuff like that all the time. I just fell on someone last weekend. I almost forgot about that. Yeah, he was on a date with a certain  someone he considered special, and he threatened to have me prosecuted, because he said (stifle laughter here) he said that he thought I fell on him on purpose.” Barry looked over both shoulders and leaned in to whisper to the audience, “And, just between you and me, I kind of did. That’s right, I picked out some fella who appeared to be having a very pleasant date with a polite, young woman, and I fell on him for no reason. Just to see what he’d do. It’s not funny, I know, but I wanted to hear this little feller scream a muffled scream under my shoulder as I writhed around like a turtle on its back trying to regain its footing.” Barry reenacted the effort of a turtle with its arms flailing. “I was almost blackout drunk, so that might be why I did it, but I was also so bored with everyone filing out of the comedy club single-file, like fourth graders. I wanted to see how it would affect his date’s impressions of him when she heard him scream his muffled scream. So, just to let you know, I probably have a trial date in my near future, but they got nothing on me. It was an … accident,” Barry said to the audience with an exaggerate wink. 

“That was me. I was what you would call a happy, fun drunk when I was about … your age,” Barry said, picking a random member of the audience, “but I hate the ‘I was so drunk the other night, that I …’ tales now. Are you with me here? I loved them when I was your age. Hell, I was probably telling them most of the them, because I was a sloppy, pathetic drunk, but I had a big old smile on my face when I was falling all over your tables, and I was usually the only one laughing when all your drinks crashed around me. Why were people so disgusted with me, because sloppy drunks aren’t funny in the present tense. They’re kind of sad and pathetic in the present. I didn’t care about any of that at the time. I was having a blast, and I was feeling good. He knows what I’m talking about. High five? Air high five? No? First date? Ok, well, he knows alcohol makes us feel better, even if he doesn’t want to shout loud and proud … stupid, yeah, but better. We love to hear about alcohol stories from the past, because we love to hear about stupid people doing stupid things … if it’s from the past. Some of us are old and boring now, because we’ve learned our lessons, but our stories, the one’s we try to frame in a serious way to teach lessons, they’re knee-slapping-hilarious. If we’ve learned our lesson, it sort of gives us all a pass to laugh, because the guy telling the story is all clean and sober now. What if I told you I’m still quite the drunk? What if I told you I’m tanked right now, as a matter of fact, and I’m working on my tolerance level, so I can drink you under the table? Not funny?

“How did that start? How did that almost universal ‘drink you under the table’ challenge catch on?” Barry asked the audience. “I think the modern incarnation in the United States tradition started in the Old West. We romanticize the Old West now, but if you’ve ever studied it to any degree, one word comes to mind: boring. Boring and grueling. The primary jobs in the Old West were either farming or mining. You could also be a blacksmith, a lawman, a teacher, a prostitute, or a bar owner or banker. All of those jobs, except maybe the teacher, involved consuming massive amounts of alcohol either because it was part of your job, or because it was so boring or grueling that you needed alcohol at the end of the day just to convince yourself that you should go back to your miserable existence tomorrow. They didn’t have the internet, TV, or even books. Books, their sole source of entertainment, were so scarce that most families had the book. The book was called the family book, and everyone had to share the family book, or read it aloud, and they usually had enormous families so that the children could help out on the farm. The book was often some compilation of Shakespeare’s greatest plays or The Bible. They also had little in the way of transportation. If you were wealthy enough to own a horse, you were usually limited to traveling to and from town, and that could take hours depending on your location. So, when the twelve hour day of farming was over, and you couldn’t travel, and you couldn’t read the book, because one of your thirteen brothers or sisters had it, you drank and played cards. And anyone who has played cards, a serious game of cards, knows the rule. You can’t just play cards for an hour or so, especially if you’re lucky enough to win a couple hands. It’s an insult to everyone at the table. You have to give the other guys a chance to win their money back, and that can take hours, five to six hours. So, what do you do in those five to six hours, you drink, and if you drink enough for long enough, even that can get boring, and when your sole source of entertainment gets boring, what do you do? Anyone? Anyone? Drinking games and contests. And contests. That’s right. The act of consuming more alcohol defines your character, and the starting gun for these contests is, “I can put your ass under the table.” 

“I was really clicking with this woman in that manner that men and women sometimes click. We all know that moment when a conversation with the opposite sex clicks just past harmonious enjoyment to hormonal. Nothing we say is half as intelligent or as funny as we think it is when this happens, but we’re both in the zone. While she and I were in this meticulously balanced aphrodisiacal, nearly anatomical, part of the conversation, she drops it on me, ‘I might be a ninety-pound woman, but I can put your ass under the table.’ Why? Where the hell did that come from? I should’ve given her a: ‘I don’t give a crap. I’m sure that you can drink more alcohol than me, and I don’t give a crap.’ We can’t say that though, because we’ve trained one another to accept that these moments define our character, and we can’t give up the dream that we’re the Clint Eastwood, John Wayne character in this production. We’re not the supporting actors who revere the main character. We’re the confident, she-doesn’t-know-who-she’s-messing-with Clint Eastwood character.    

“I was tempted to play this stupid game with more than just this one woman. I’d have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure women have challenged me as often, if not more than men. They think that just because I’m staggering and slurring my words after three beers, they can take me, and you know what they’re right. I have always had the tolerance of a sixteen-year-old girl who hasn’t tried alcohol before. No matter how often I drank, it never translated to a greater tolerance. If a guy challenges me to a drinking contest, I say no thank you fine gentleman. That’s usually not enough, because I’ve usually done something to make this guy challenge me. It’s so stupid. For some reason, they need you in a supine position with unconditional surrender in your heart. You’re going to put me under the table, you’re superior, and … and what else you want? You’re the better man, how about that? Is that enough? Whatever I have to say to avoid drinking whatever the hell a man challenges me to drink, I’m going to say. I truly don’t care what some guy, I’m never going to see again, thinks of my drinking tolerance. It’s different when a woman challenges you though, it’s tough. Even if you’re not attracted to the woman, it’s tough. It’s tough, in general, for any guy to say no to a woman. 

“And then there’s Bob. Bob. I got along with Bob. He was a nice guy, deferential, and all that. Bob showed us all the roadmap to becoming Clint Eastwood. It involved drinking massive amounts of alcohol, massive, my-brain-is-probably-half-gone amounts of alcohol to increase the tolerance level. Everyone knew a Bob, back in the day. The Bob I knew was the man when it came to drinking. Someone said he put beer in his Cheerios. Did anyone ever actually do this? I can’t count how many times I heard that such and such was such an alcoholic that he put beer in his Cheerios. I don’t know if anyone ever did this, or if Bob did it, but Bob was our king of the hill, top of the heap, an ‘A’ number one drinker. It didn’t matter what the drink was, Bob could put you under the table. When we spoke of Bob, we did so with reverence. We townspeople whispered tales of the legend of Bob in the hopes that Bob would not hear us and become so enraged that he might challenge us to a drinking game, because Bob could, repeat it with me now, drink twenty beers without even getting a buzz. I will now allow for an obligatory moment of silence to allow you to gasp. I think it’s a rule or something that we’re supposed to gasp here and consider all the ways in which Bob is one of our betters.

“Every culture had a Bob. In Ancient Greece, Bob was the smartest philosopher in the cave; Bob was the greatest gladiator known to man in Rome; and the Spanish Bob was the greatest matador in the ring. When we all came here, we decided to give up on all that junk, because they’re all so hard and time-consuming. We’d much rather commit our lives to destroying as many brain cells as we can. We’d much rather celebrate and venerate a Bob who can drink people under tables. If someone vouches for us and says, “Don’t challenge Bob, he’ll put you under the table,” that’s probably one of the top 100 compliments we Americans can say about another. 

“If the bar is our arena, Bob taught me one crucial element to defeating an opponent in drinking contests, stats. What’s more satisfying than actually defeating an opponent in drinking contests, or any contest, drinking or not? Anybody? Anybody??” Barry asked the audience. “Intimidating an opponent from even daring to challenge us. Bob had his twenty beers-without-a-buzz stat line, and everyone knew it. If you didn’t know it, we told you, warned you. Don’t mess with Bob. He’ll put you under the table. But I don’t have stats, you say, I have the tolerance level of a sixteen-year-old who’s never drank a beer before. How do we normal people, who don’t put beer in our Cheerios, intimidate someone from challenging us? Get some stats and make them up if you have to, because very very few will call you out on it. My encounter with Bob taught me that stats silence the mob. I never challenged Bob’s reign, because Bob’s twenty beers without even getting a buzz stat line intimidated me, because anyone can say I’ll put you under the table, but stats prove that you are so capable of it that no one will dare challenge you. 

“I used to have a 150 I.Q.,” I told this ninety-pound woman, “but I’ve dropped down to a ninety-seven.” Then I gave her one of these intimidating looks,” Barry said glaring at the audience with raised eyebrows. “It was one of those Clint Eastwood, quietly confident raised eyebrows. The raised eyebrow asks us to ask ourself, ‘Do you who you’re messing with here?’ She asked how an I.Q. score mattered, and I said, “I’ve destroyed more brain cells than everyone in this whole bar put together, and if you think you can put me under the table, sweet mama, you got another thing coming.” I thought of dropping my improvised I.Q. score to the mildly impaired or delayed levels, but I realized that that would probably do more harm than good, so I decided to go from some gifted or very advanced level to just a tad below average, and it worked. Now, she didn’t want to date me after that revelation, but she didn’t go anywhere near trying to drink me under the table either. She was intimidated by my stats.  

“I never had Bob stats, or any other kind of stats, but I did my darndest to work on a tolerance level. I didn’t drink the massive amounts of alcohol I did for the expressed purpose of increasing my tolerance level, but it would’ve been a nice byproduct. It never happened for me though, and this aspect of my life comes with a big old asterisk. At the bottom of that page, is a short paragraph that reads, “I don’t care. I have a number of character deficiencies, missed opportunities, and things I wished I did sooner and better. If I had a time machine I would go back and try to fix all of them, except for my ability to consume massive amounts of alcohol.”

“Whatever problems I may have had with alcohol, I had my high school buddy to thank. I don’t blame him, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have to drink, I could’ve made other friends, but Lou was so well-schooled, and so gifted in the art of persuasion that I fell in line. He and I didn’t drink all the time. We played sports every chance we could. We watched sports, read about sports, and talked about sports when we weren’t playing it or watching it. Sports is so compelling, because it’s a natural, adrenaline high. Competing against your fellow man, and defeating them in what they practice at as hard as you do is an adrenaline rush to adrenaline junkies. The one negative element to sports is that you can’t play them all the time, so what do adrenaline junkies do when they can’t play? They do drugs, they drink, they gamble, or whatever they can find to try to replicate that high. 

“When Lou and I drank, we put that stuff away! We didn’t consider ourselves alcoholics, of course, because we only drank on weekends, at parties. Alcoholics, to our mind, were people who drank alone, because they either enjoyed the taste, the high, or the combination thereof. We didn’t drink, because we liked the taste. We drank alcohol as a social lubricant to unlock those incredibly fun personalities that only come out at night. We drank what we could afford, and the stuff we could afford was the kind of alcohol that we had to force down until we couldn’t taste it anymore.

“I don’t know if the term binge-drinking was invented in those years, but if it was, we never heard about it. When we did, and we went through the bullet points, we were like check, check, check. Woops! We were party fellas. 

“Where Lou and I parted ways was his desire to see to it that others got hammered too. I didn’t really care if others drank, and I didn’t understand his obsession with it. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to drink alone, and I never did, but I didn’t really care too much if you knew when to say when. Lou did, and he was so skilled at his trademarked brand of peer-pressure that he should’ve probably considered putting a college course together. He could’ve called it Killing Them Softly 101. He didn’t mush us in the manner mushers will in the Iditarod with those kissy sounds. Lou’s mush words were, “Drink!” and “Drink gawdamnit!” and he considered me the international pace car of his parties. If Barry doesn’t get hammered quick, no one else will, or so he feared, and Lou feared that if we didn’t all get hammered quickly, we could, could end up talking about deep thoughts and feelings. To further prevent this, he refused any requests to play Pink Floyd at his parties. He liked Pink Floyd, in casual moments, and in his car? But Parties? Drinking parties? “Nope, Pink Floyd leads to thinking. It causes deep conversations.” 

“Don’t think! Drink!” would be the first thing Lou wrote on that college chalkboard, and, I know, they don’t have chalkboards anymore, but he would probably have those words displayed behind him in some manner, for his Killing Them Softly 101 lectures. “Don’t think! Drink!” He’d say pounding each word with his professorial pointing stick. “It’s what you say loud and proud, if you want your party to be considered a success.” 

“If you’re a proper host, you’ll work the room, asking them, ‘How much have you had to drink so far?’ And don’t believe what they say, check. Ask to see their bottle in a polite, interrogatory manner. Tell them you’re just curious. “Let me see your bottle, Barry?” Then, when they show you, you not only condemn him, but his mother for ever giving birth to him, and whatever the hell he drove in on. “What are we doing here tonight, Barry? Drink. Drink gawdamnit!” We’re to say that as if we’re disgusted by their pace, and we’re always disgusted by their pace. Never satisfied. That’s vital. Focus your condemnation on someone who can take it, and the weaker ones will fall in line to avoid your condemnations.

“Your drink of choice should be whatever drink gets your party goers get so hammered that the fun portion of your party only lasts about a half an hour. If you do it right, that half hour will be the only thing anyone remembers anyway. You might want to refrain from confrontationally shouting “Drink!” in their faces when they’re drinking the hard liquor that you two fifteen-year-olds found in old, aged decanters in his parent’s basement. We grew up hearing that alcohol gets better with age. They vintage right? It turns out that that depends on how they’re stored. Yeah, so that bourbon your parents housed in decanters, in some dark, dank closet in the corner of a basement no one has opened for thirty years might not be vintage. They might’ve been fermenting, and some fermenting processes can kill you. “Rock on!” the fifteen-year-old says when they’re downing eleven shots of fermented bourbon in a little over two hours. The proper host should know that if that happens, their party goers will probably learn less about hooking up and fighting, and more about creating interesting murals on your walls with projectile vomit.”  

“Who loves to drink!” Barry asked the audience. “Let me hear you!”

I Love to Eat: Part Deux

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“You don’t know how to eat,” a friend of mine said. She wasn’t talking about health and nutrition, or the staples necessary for informed eating. She was talking about the method I used to eat food. I chopped up my spaghetti strands, and this offended her Sicilian spaghetti sensibilities. 

“You’re supposed to fork twirl the strands on a spoon! Like so,” she said, showing me. “It’s so much more elegant.”

When I said, “Nah!” she hit me with another:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“Have you heard this line? People love it. It’s sweeping the country. They have this method of eating that if you just followed it, or tried it out, it would unlock the floodgates to the glory of eating. My dad used to tell me to combine roast beef and mashed potatoes on the same fork. He considered it divine. I disagreed.

“You don’t know how to eat.”

When a friend told me about his ingenious method of combining marshmallow and chocolate on a graham cracker, that we would all later call a s’more, I said, “Nah!” Boom:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“I don’t know if they say this to humiliate us or just break us down, but I rebelled against the whole notion of it. I kept eating the way I enjoyed eating my whole life. My dad was the exception. He was so constant, and so insistent, that it’s basically his fault that I eat the way I do,” Barry said, “and it’s his fault that I place such value on food and eating too. My mom shares some of the blame. She was a pretty decent cook, and she made some decent choices for our meals, but she decided to die, so we were stuck with my dad’s definition of a meal.

My dad was an old man when he took the reins. He lived through The Depression, he was a military man, and he spent the next twenty years a hard-working bachelor. My dad spent the majority of his life eating whatever was placed before him, and he was grateful, so grateful that he’d eat just about anything. 

“Dad didn’t understand this notion of preferences. Finicky was the ‘F’ word to him. We displayed some preferences, but in the grand scheme I’d argue that we weren’t finicky. We just preferred to avoid eating crap whenever we could. “You’d eat that,” he’d say over his schlop, “if you were starving in The Depression, or all you had to eat were C-Rations.” 

“So, if you were to put two plates before us, one with this piece of crap on it, another plate of worse crap, and nothing at all, we’d choose your plate?” we would ask. “You’re right, we’d probably choose yours, but that’s not what I’d call a brilliant marketing strategy.”  

“This isn’t to say that my dad didn’t enjoy a well-prepared and flavorful meal. He enjoyed it as much as the next guy, but in his mind, any man could eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated the men from the boys, in my dad’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 his ancestors.  

“You ever see those Old West movies with characters eating pork and beans on a slice of buttered bread? That was my dad’s definition of nirvana. We all know this image of a bunch of carriages surrounding a cook, usually named Schmitty, who cooked up some beans and put it on bread. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I have to believe the traveling cowboys would’ve loved it if Schmitty dropped some fried chicken in their lap.

“The pièce de résistance of my dad’s personal campaign to pay homage to 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 the bread industry even knew this manufacturer’s name. Did he enjoy a condiment or two, well sure, but he didn’t need one. The notion of needing condiments was my dad’s definition of inherent privilege. “You mean to tell me that you can’t eat a roast beef sandwich without barbecue sauce?” 

“No, dad, but we prefer to eat it with a little barbecue sauce on it,” we said. “That makes the sandwich taste better.” He tried to break us down on the differences between need and want, and we conceded that it was all about want. He backed off a little, but he was disgusted by our preferences, because we never could’ve survived on World War II’s battlefields with our preferences.  

“Even with all that, though, it was obvious that if he had his choice, he wouldn’t eat his own schlop, and he made that apparent when an aunt informed him that she wanted to come over to our house to prepare a meal for us. 

“Your aunt has agreed to prepare a meal for us,” he mentioned to prepare us for the moment of her arrival. Nothing wrong with that, right? Like just everything else my dad did, he overdid it, “and it might just be the last decent meal we ever eat.” His intention was not to scare us, of course, but to instill in us a sense of gratitude for all of her efforts. He scared the hell out of us. I considered it possible that I might never eat another quality meal for the rest of my life after we finished The Last Supper of any quality.

“Comparing this meal to The Last Supper might sound like hyperbole, but that was my dad. He had us so amped up for the arrival of that meal that when it was placed before us, my brother leaned over to whisper something to me, I shushed him. “Shh, for God’s sake, eat. This could be the last decent meal we ever eat.” And, boy, did we laugh. My aunt laughed, my dad laughed, and we all had a whale of a time analyzing my admonition. I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t even smile. I didn’t get it. I thought it was almost a guarantee that I would end up eating schlop for the rest of my life after this meal, and I wanted to silently enjoy every last bite, as if it might be my last.

I didn’t care about the quality of the food but what kid does? If we drill a kid down to their basics, it’s all about Burger King, McDonald’s and Taco Bell for them. They’re forced to eat just about everything else. A nice, home-cooked meal is little more than a mandatory break from playtime. “Kids, it is now time to eat!” Aw, crap. You have to eat when you’re a kid. You have to take a break when it’s time to eat. You don’t care about quality. You just eat to shut your parents up, unless those who know the definition of quality food insinuate that it’s possible you never will. 

“My dad’s war on food, namely eating, and the proper procedures therein, might lead one to believe that he was a strict father. He was anything but. In every other area of life, my brother and I had total freedom, perhaps too much. By the definition of our friends, we lived an almost parent-free existence, but they didn’t have to abide by my dad’s near-militaristic meal time rules that would’ve been welcome in most penitentiaries throughout the world. 

“Much later in life, decades later, I found out my dad was actually quite proud of my eating habits. He didn’t say anything about the emotional or financial stability I achieved as an adult, and he never mentioned my ability to attain consistent employment through the years. For him, it was all about eating. “You’d eat anything,” he said to begin the greatest compliment he ever gave me. “I never had a problem with you, but I had to constantly be on your brother at the dinner table, or he’d drift off into la-la land.” My brother would chat at the table, he’d pause for a brief period of time that drove my dad crazy, and he’d drift off, or space out, as we called. My dad called it going off into la-la land. My brother didn’t do this to rebel, or to be naughty. He’d just forget to eat in the systematic keep-your-utensils-locked-and-loaded procedures my dad required. If he slipped into la-la-land, my dad would pounce, “Eat Arnie!” My brother would shake out of whatever daydream he was in and resume eating. My dad tried everything to keep my brother on task. He tried patient reminders, and he tried heavy-handed scolding. Nothing worked. His frustrations eventually drove him to develop a little ditty that we now call the Eat Arnie Eat song, and it went a little something like a this,” Barry said clearing his throat and humming out a couple chords, until he could find the right one. “Eat Arnie eat, eat Arnie eat. Eat Arnie eat, Oh, eat Arnie eat.” 

“Anyone eavesdropping on this one-off performance might have mistaken my dad’s brilliant “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate this tool man. Creating tools was his profession, and it defined him, outside-in and inside-out. He created tools to fill a need. His whole world was about need, not want, need, and he created that song to fulfill a need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating, dad had no further use of it. He never sang the song again. He didn’t create this brilliantly simplistic song to be humorous. If you laughed, or thought it was funny in any way, that was your preference, but that wasn’t why he created his incredible Eat Arnie Eat single. If humor, or the looming threat of it, got my brother to eat then his brief foray into the world of art was worth it. Once that tool fulfilled its utilitarian purpose, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. When we called for an encore at get-togethers and company functions, he shot them all down. He was not one to perform on demand, even with a couple of beers in him. 

“I wish that I could look you all in the eye tonight and say that all these exaggerated concepts and rules of food appreciation are complete nonsense. I wish I could say that I considered them such nonsense, and the minute I became an adult I laughed them all off as so over-the-top foolish that is nothing more than halfway decent material for a joke.

“I mean, who cares if we chit-chat when a meal is before us? Who cares if we look around the room when we should be eating? The big difference between my dad and I is I don’t talk about this nonsense, because I know it’s nonsense, but that super-secret part of me that no one will ever see or hear is absolutely disgusted by signs of a lack of appreciation for the food before you. I cannot stand it when you chit-chat with a perfectly good meal before you. When you take a break, I have to swallow my disgust if I want to have friends, or I want to avoid having others consider me a special freak. “Your entrée is getting cold!” I want to scream. The idea that you can’t, or won’t eat food without condiments absolutely disgusts me. I’ll talk about the need, need, that you have for mayonnaise on a ham sandwich for years. Want is fine, but need? C’mon, isn’t mayonnaise a first-world preference? Then if you dare to commit the cardinal violation of food appreciation, according to my dad, of leaving a restaurant with some food on your plate, and you don’t ask for a doggie bag? I will secretly decide, without noting it for you in any way, that I might never be able to dine with you again. Seeing it once will forever affect our relationship, but putting myself in a position to view it twice is a shame on me, in my book.”

“I still don’t understand why my dad was willing to go to war over food appreciation and eating, and I’m sure if some psychiatrist asked him why he did all that, he’d say, “Hey, I don’t get them all either.” The question I have for myself now, standing before you tonight, is why did I start doing it, why do I still do it? Why, after I spent my teens and twenties trying to do everything 180 degrees different from my dad for the expressed purpose of doing it different from him, do I now mimic all of his quirks and eccentricities? The only thing I can come up with is his great-granddad probably did it to his dad, and his dad did it to him, and he did it to us, and I now do it to you. I would love to be that fella who broke the chain and allow my friends and family to eat normally without some form of internal, critical analysis, but it’s too late for me now. It’s ingrained the way propaganda ministers once taught us that if you repeat the same line often enough, it becomes true to you. And if you insist on eating the way rational, well-adjusted people eat, I’m eventually going to implode in such a way that a “You don’t know how to eat” comment is going to rain down on you in the fallout.  

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.]