They’re Horrible People

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Horrible people are fascinating. They confuse us, they entertain us, and fascinate us. We talk about them all the time. “Did you hear what Sandy did the other day? Ohmigosh, how could she do that? How can she sleep at night?” We love shows and movies about them doing horrible things to one another. We can’t understand them, and how they think they can get away with it. They do. They think a lot about this. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they figure out the best way to do something awful to us without ramifications. It took me a while to figure out it’s not about me, and I’m here to tell you it’s not about you either, or whatever innocent victim they prey upon. It’s about them. They’re horrible people. 

When we talk about horrible people doing horrible things in such discussions, we often limit our discussion to there dastardly doing dastardly things, as opposed to violent criminals committing violent acts. We talk about people who legally manage to ruin the lives of those around them. We talk about a nephew who drains an uncle’s life savings, before forcing him into a care facility; a sister who steals her mentally deficient brother’s inheritance; and a man who poisons the neighbor’s dog. We talk about little people who do little things, because they are so frustrated with their station in life that they develop a twisted logic and justification for what they do.

How many horrible people know they’re horrible. I’m sure they are out there, but I’ve never met one. The most horrible people I’ve met can’t understand why I would say that. They seem genuinely perplexed by the charge. “Well, what about the time you did this?” we ask. “I mean c’mon, even you can see that was pretty awful.”

“What was he going to do with it anyway?” they say. The only thing missing from their ability to pull justifications on us is the “Ta-dah!” punctuation. They rarely if ever address the moral turpitude of their actions. It’s dog-eat-dog to them. It’s take, take, take. They have no conscience, no guilt, and no shame. It’s about getting theirs before anyone else can. 

They tell us a story of a dastardly figure doing something dastardly. “Wait a second, you did that. It wasn’t the exact same thing, but you did something so close that I can’t believe you’re calling this other person out.” They don’t see it. They don’t think the way we do.  

Is it wrong to put Uncle Joe into a subpar care facility after taking all of his money? “If he goes into a care facility, the state will take his estate to help pay for his care?” they say.

“Okay, but he could’ve afforded a better facility.” They didn’t even consider that. We can see it on their face.

“What’s the difference?” they say. “He still gets his pillows propped, three square meals a day, and a couple Jell-O squares.” They don’t consider the role this man played in their maturation. They don’t think about those times their uncle bought them peanut M&M’s in the gas station, or the fishing trips he took them on when he was in his prime, and they were very young. He’s a feeble senior citizen now. He’s not the same man he was in their youth.

“But this is our Uncle Joe?” his sisters say, “and you were his favorite.” 

They have answers, scripted answers that they developed long before this confrontation. It doesn’t matter what they say, because it really doesn’t matter to them what they say. They probably won’t even remember what they said five minutes after they said it, because they just don’t care. We might call them psychopaths, sociopaths, or level some charge of narcissism at them, but those are just names. Kids called them names on the playground, and it hurt back then. We’re adults now, and names are meaningless to us now. So, we back it up with detail, detailed descriptions of what they did, and the loved one to whom they did it. Pfft, it means nothing to them, and we know these people. We know some of them better than anyone else in the world, and we now know that they’re horrible people. It undercuts everything we thought we knew.

Uncle Joe wasn’t a rich man. His life’s savings proved embarrassingly paltry, but it’s theirs now, and they managed to secure the transfer of wealth in such a legal manner that the sisters’ lawyers inform them that it would be wildly expensive and ultimately foolish to challenge it.

They’re going to get theirs before you do.

The sisters could try to trap the nephew with some damning portrayals of what he did, but how do they trap someone who has no conscience, feels no guilt, and has no shame? Even if they were to corner him in a casual conversation that they could not make legally binding, they wouldn’t get anywhere, because it would basically turn into a war of words in which one party wins, and the other party loses, and he can’t lose that argument, because he doesn’t care.

I prefer to think that most people are good, and while I’ve been dealt a barrage of “you’re so naïve”, it has served me well. Having said that, I’m not blind to the fact that there are some horrible people we call friends, in our families, and those waving to us with a mower in front of them. I’ve talked to them so often I know how they tick, I’ve met their mothers and talked to that cousin who cemented that logic in their head. 

When you sit down and talk to them, with mugs of beer between you, they say the most wonderful things. Some of the times, they even manage to drop a few words that expand our philosophy and rationale. Unbeknownst to us, they know right and wrong, but they obviously don’t think it applies in all situations, everywhere in life. “We all experience updrafts and downdrafts in life,” they say, “and you deal with them accordingly.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” they continue, “and it wasn’t built in one way, or the way they tell you.” This philosophy aligns with the narrative that some of the times you have to do things you don’t want to do to build an empire. It also aligns with the idea that most rich people got theirs by doing awful things to whomever stood in their way, and our friends want to climb that ladder by whatever means necessary.

Horrible people sell their soul for money, but when we see the jet skis sitting next to the brand new mower, we think, “You sold your soul for this?” No, they have a motor boat sitting at a dock, and next month they’re headed to Cancun. So, we’re inching toward the five figure territory for turning your back on one of the few people on the planet who actually cared about them. They don’t mind the fact that in the aftermath of their theft, they will turn their whole family against them, and they don’t mind damaging their soul. They don’t believe in all that schmuck.   

Horrible people tell their family, at the last second, that they cannot attend a family dinner to honor their recently-deceased mother. “I’m sorry, I have a conflict.” Then, when the family sets out for the restaurant, she enters the family home, knowing that they will be out, and she steals all of her mother’s most valuable items. She obviously doesn’t think about how she’s disgracing her mother’s memory in some way and how that act could lead others to think she might be awful. Those thoughts don’t even enter her mind. She was just getting hers before her brother could stake a claim to one of the items. “The funny thing is if she challenged me on these items,” the brother said, “I would’ve let her have all of them.” We don’t know what happened in this situation, but anyone who knows anything about the collectible’s market knows that if she pawned everything she stole, she would probably end up enjoying one Burger King value meal.

Some people believe karma holds some kind of existential power. I don’t. I’ve seen far too many people escape awful deeds unharmed to believe that if we do bad things to people bad things will happen to us. The most successful refutation I received arrived after I had a brief, tumultuous confrontation with an unusually awful person was, “He has to live with himself.” 

“You think he feels guilty?” I asked, “because I got the feeling he doesn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.”

“Oh, I don’t either,” he said. “I’m not talking about guilt. I’m talking about how he must live. A person who acts like that cannot be happy. Something drives a person to act like that. I’m guessing he either has an awful wife, or he treats her horribly. Either way, if someone was dumb enough to marry him, they probably now live a life of abject misery. And if she agreed to bring children into their world with him, imagine how miserable they must be. Most of all, think about what must be like for him to live with himself. Outbursts like that are not common. Internal misery causes people like that to unleash on the world around them. You talk about final damnation, and all that. I think it’s much simpler than that. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He’s living his own version of hell every day of his life.”

How do awful people live with themselves? First, they don’t consider themselves awful. They don’t think about what they’ve done as bad, or if they do, they punctuate it with bromides, such as, “It’s only bad if you get caught.” They say that as a joke, but they say it so often that we can’t help but think that they believe it. “It’s not a lie if you believe it,” is another bromide they might ask their loved ones to chisel into their gravestone, or, “It’s not stealing if you take things from those who have if you are a have-not.”   

Even those of us who ascribe to some of these tenets of moral relativism must recognize that there has to be an internal accumulation of misery to be that miserable, and it manifests itself in a variety of ways.

One of my office managers was not what anyone would call an awful person. He devoted his life to his son, he laughed a lot, and he had such wonderful views that those making bullet points would insist that they absolutely prevent him from ever being on a list of horrible people. When the opportunity arose, however, he did every awful thing he could think of to me, as my manager, and within the constraints of the company handbook. I found out later that he committed suicide, and no one knew why. My best guess is that it wasn’t any one thing in particular. It probably had more to do with the accumulation. 

The one thing I learned from working with this manager was that it’s never enough. He asked me questions about my current straits in the workplace. I had no idea that he was looking for some satisfaction. I now believe that he thought if he could transfer some of his misery to me, he might be a little less miserable, and it might quench a thirst of some sort. He learned that genuinely happy people can be happy no matter what type of misery we try to put them through. In the aftermath of our tenure together, I think he expected me to hate him. I didn’t. I greeted him as I had the day before we started working together. My guess is he was very disappointed by that. 

Does it help us to think that horrible people lead horrible lives? Does it help us to think that the reason they hate us so much is because they hate their home, their family, their career, and themselves? We all have insecurities, and when someone develops that much animosity for us, we’re inclined to look inward. Based on my limited experience with horrible people, they think that way too. They think it’s our fault that they’re temporarily miserable, and if they can fix us, they can fix themselves. If they had the ability to acknowledge the source of the problem, they might have fixed it long ago. They don’t, so they focus their energy on fixing us in the most awful ways they can manage within corporate constraints. 

How do they sleep at night? How can they do such things and think nothing of it? If it’s not entertaining, it’s a least fascinating to think that more often than not, these people get away with it, and they have no remorse. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they take, take, take, and they try to make us as miserable as they are.  

My advice, based on my brief experience with this type of person is try to do everything in your power to make them irrelevant in your life. This is impossible in some cases, as some of the times horrible people have the power and ability to make our lives more miserable, but in cases like these, happiness can, indeed, be the best revenge.  

Beagle Buyers Beware Beelzebub Boy 

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“Aww, look at the little fella, how can you call him the spawn of Satan? He’s so cute!”

Max is a beautiful Beagle. He is well-marked with long, thin legs, and he has that award-winning Beagle arch. He has a dog-smile on his face almost twenty-four seven, and he has an excellent disposition.

The idea that a breeder would sell him for a third of what his brothers and sisters were going for confused us? The breeder said she could only guess that most Beagle fans want a female, or they want a Beagle that was more white than black coloring. She said she was as confused as we were. My best guess, four months in, is that the potential buyers knew more about Beagles than we did. My guess is they know, like we all do, that although all Beagles are high energy, very intelligent and stubborn, there’s always one in the litter who is a little more of all of the above. My guess is that they sensed that Max might be a little crazed, and they know to be wary the runt of the litter. My guess is they know that the runt of a Beagle litter, more than any other type of dog, might just be the spawn of Satan. 

The Beagle Smile

Those in our house who don’t close their bedroom door know that something they hold dear will be ripped to shreds within the hour. We know that it’s in our best interests to keep him on-task, interested and engaged, because if he grows bored in any way, he’ll fill the void.  

“Give a Beagle little to no exercise at your own peril,” Beagle experts warn. Okay, but how much exercise does the average Beagle need? Whatever that number is, go ahead and triple that for Max. We walk him twice a day, play with him constantly, and we have a huge backyard that he spends most of his day in, zooming back and forth in at top speed, and it’s never enough. If you don’t know what the zoomies are, get a Beagle

After he spends a good ten minutes zooming back and forth, you might think, as we did that he’d come back in exhausted, spent, or physically satisfied. He comes in jacked up, jamming a toy in our face, ready to play for the next half-hour. A half-hour doesn’t seem like that much, until we learn that it’s a minimal requirement for him on a daily basis. Four months in, we’ve yet to see him pant with exhaustion. My high energy, high functioning child can’t keep up with this dog. 

“They’re hunters,” experts say. “They’re have a strong sense of smell.” Most dogs walk with their heads up, but Beagles walk with their head down because they don’t want to miss a scent. I’ve yet to see Max take more than ten steps with his head up. When I leaned over to watch his schnoz in action, the rapid speed of his nose touching ground reminded me of a hummingbird’s wings, moving so fast it’s almost hard to see. If we dabbed some paint on the end of his nose, we could probably use it to find our way back home. 

We’ve had him roughly 120 days, and I’ve probably pulled 100 things out of his mouth. A sample includes hair scrunchies, innumerable COVID masks, already been chewed gum (more than six times), other dogs’ waste matter (more than ten times, and one of them was stomach churning long!) a wide variety of plastic items, coins, candy, various parts of whatever carcasses he finds along the way, and day’s old, rotting rice. That’s a very small sample of what I can recall pulling out. He’s like the bull shark of dogs, he’ll eat anything and everything, and he growls angrily when I pull it out. He also bites at the hand that feeds it, or unfeeds it by pulling trinkets out. 

I know a dog’s sleeping patterns are probably as relative as humans, but this dog rarely sleeps. I can count, on one hand, the number of times that he wasn’t up for at least nine hours straight. Nine hours doesn’t seem like much in human terms, but imagine trying to entertain a high energy, high functioning dog for nine straight hours. When he’s up, he’s not watching TV, looking out the window, or playing with his toys. Max knows how to play by himself, and he does, but he gets bored easily and very quickly. The time between one stretch of playing time and another, takes about as long as your sigh of relief. When he gets bored, he gets into things, causing trouble, and doing anything and everything he can to gain our attention. One day, he was up for eleven straight hours without a nap. Needless to say, it can be exhausting and frustrating, and it can consume your life.

Most dogs are on our schedule. When we’re ready to play with them, or entertain them in any way we dream up, they respond eagerly. I understand and appreciate the fact that puppies are more energetic than adult dogs, but even most puppies sleep until you’re ready to play with them. Not this guy.  

When I searched for a new puppy, I put together a mental checklist. I wanted a playful dog (check), I wanted him to be high energy (check, check), I wanted him to always want to be around me (check), and I wanted a dog who wanted to sleep on my lap while I watched TV (check). I got everything I wanted in this dog and then some, but it’s the “and then some” that I’m writing about today. The “and then some” portion occurs after we’ve played ball for 15-20 minutes, and he’s racing the ball back to me with as much speed and energy as he had when we started. I know, I know, the puppy thing, but it’s impossible to exhaust this dog. I’ve yet to see him run out of energy. 

I read all of the “read this before you buy a Beagle,” warning lists. I read literature stating that due to their high level of energy, their nose, and their heightened sense of adventure that the owner will need to keep them leashed them at all times, and that they will want to kennel train them immediately after bringing them home, because a Beagle needs to be kenneled when they sleep and when their owners leave. Doing anything less is just asking for trouble. I read all that from what I considered a knowledgeable perspective. I owned a Puggle (part Beagle, part Pug), so I thought I knew what I was getting into. I don’t know if the Pug characteristics softened the Beagle traits in my previous dog, but I wasn’t ready for this fella. 

He is a good puppy, and he will eventually be a great dog. He runs and plays keep away with the neighborhood kids. He greets every new person as if they’re the greatest person on Earth. He loves meeting kids and other dogs, and he has a very sweet disposition, but he is CONSTANTLY on.  

Walking him is an excellent workout for anyone who wants to focus their workouts on their forearms, as he wouldn’t know a straight line if he tripped over it. Every dog I’ve owned went from two pulls on the leash, as a puppy, to one pull as a full grow adult dog. The average walk with Max reminds us of a dance step, “It’s one step, two step, pull, pull, pull, three step, four step, pull, pull, pull.” If he’s mildly interested in something, it might require three tugs on the leash, but if he’s intensely interested in something, and this usually happens two to three times a walk, I have to pull him from it with great force. At this point in his puppyhood, I am the only one in the neighborhood who can walk him. No one else is focused enough to distract him, when necessary, as often as it’s necessary to prevent him from ingesting something he shouldn’t, and no one is strong enough to keep him in line when required. And it’s not as if he’s heavy, because he’s not, but even twenty pounds becomes taxing after the rigors of repetitive motion begins to kick in. He exhausts kids as easily as adults. A discarded, half-full milkshake cup required so much pulling that I almost considered calling for assistance.    

I’ve read some Beagle owners write, “Toughen up buttercup!” when a Beagle owner complains. And they add, “You should’ve known what you were getting into. You should’ve done your research!” I thought I had. I read all the literature I could find on the breed, and I prepared my friends and family for him, but I now think I was the least prepared of all because I thought I was.  

Maybe Max is an anomaly, and that might be my fault. I love playing with dogs, and I can get rowdy, so it’s possible that I jacked him up to another level. From what I read now, from my current perspective, I don’t think so. Maybe I’m not disciplined enough to keep Max disciplined. Maybe I’m just not a very good trainer. This is not only possible but plausible, but I ask the novice, dog enthusiast how many of us have the time, patience, and discipline necessary to train such a dog?

“My college roommate had a beagle,” a friend, who purchased a Freagle (French bulldog, Beagle mix) told me. “I said I would never buy a Beagle after what I saw that dog do. That dog got into everything. Every day there was something new with that dog.” I wish I would’ve talked to her first before purchasing this one. I might not have listened, but I probably would’ve been better prepared. 

This warning is being sent out to those who are interested in purchasing what I consider the most beautiful, friendly, and loyal breed of dogs, be careful what you wish for. You might have more energy than I do, and you might love dogs so much that you’re willing to spend hours with that dog entertaining him, and if you do, you’ll absolutely love the experiences you have with your new, little pooch 80% of the time, but you will run out of gas eventually. They won’t.

Chapter Two: Emotional Intelligence

“Dogs just want to make their owners happy,” a friend of mine said one time when I was complaining about my dog (a cairn terrier named Tyler).

“My dog doesn’t give a turd if I’m happy, he does what he wants” I said. “I appreciate what you’re saying, as I think you’re right with most dogs, but some dogs do whatever they want.” Through the three dogs I’ve owned I maintained that argument without a good argument. I just knew that the three of them responded to me differently, and I maintain that saying ‘all dogs just want to make their owners happy’ is a simple argument that suggests that all dogs are simple. I developed an argument based on an article I read that suggested, “Dogs, like humans, have varying degrees of emotional intelligence.” It sounds like something your stoned uncle would say at the campfire, or that thing your lunch bucket co-worker said after he read a book. 

If you believe her argument I would ask, have you ever tried scolding a dog for misbehaving? I’m not talking about physically disciplining a dog. I’m talking about verbally scolding them. Their theory holds that if you’re happy, they’re happy. I challenged that theory when I first heard it, but I kind of believed it for most of the decade I owned Tyler. Then I met a Puggle named Fehrley. When I scolded Fehrley, it appeared to hurt his feelings. For the most part, Fehrley’s self-esteem appeared based on what I thought of him. If he did something wrong, and I was disappointed in him, he not only displayed feelings of shame, he never did that thing again. My current dog Max, like Tyler, doesn’t appear to care too much what I think.  

Both Tyler and Max put their heads down and stopped doing what they were doing in the moment, but they forgot about it soon after the drama/trauma concluded. Fehrley remembered. Does this mean that Fehrley was more intelligent than the other two? I don’t think so. I think Max might be the most intelligent of the three, but he’s clearly not nearly as sensitive as Fehrley was.

If you told me that dogs are sensitive, I might’ve agreed with you to an extent. I probably would’ve said that I think you’re overplaying your hand, but I’ve seen evidence of what you’re saying. After owning three different dogs, however, I now have a fully-formed and well-informed opinion on the matter. Mr. Fehrley was clearly the most sensitive of the three. He was more proud when he did something that earned a reward. He got far more excited over the prospect of going bye-bye, a treat, and the prospect of experiencing something new. He was more ashamed of doing something wrong, and as a result he learned how to comport himself accordingly for more freedom and more happiness. He was also less impulsive and more calculating based on rewards and punishment. Was he more emotionally intelligent than the other two dogs I’ve owned?  

As a writer who tries to avoid foo foo as often as I can, I hear people say that we underestimate the intelligence of animals. “Foo foo,” I say. I think we overestimate their intelligence so often that we begin to believe it. In movies, we see dogs respond to complex human conversation, and we laugh, and we believe that dogs can understand human conversation. So, in real life, do they pretend they can’t. We see dogs in cartoons act in a very human manner when we’re not around, and we wonder if they do that in real life. We say it as a joke, over and over, until someone says, “That’s funny, but you don’t believe it do you?” 

“Well, why not?” they ask. “Who’s to say dogs aren’t far more intelligent than we can conceive?” 

I don’t believe dogs are more intelligent than we think, but I reserve some space on every issue for fallibility.  

We hate to compare animals to children. It’s unfair, inexact and tedious. Yet, we all do it. As I wrote, Max appears to be the most intelligent with his ability to create his own situations, the ability to adapt, and the way he pays attention to things. I’ve never owned a dog who heard a plane fly overhead and watched it, and he’s done that more than twice. He appears to be trying to figure it out. I’ve never owned a dog who looked up. They might stop whatever they’re doing and look out momentarily, but then they go back to what they’re doing. Max looks up and continues to look up for about three seconds. Is he trying to figure out what it is? Who knows, but he’s definitely more curious about it than any other dog I’ve owned, and I equate curiosity with intelligence. He watches TV longer than any dog I’ve owned. He saw images of dogs on the set run right to left, and he looked at the spot beyond the TV to see what, if anything, would come out. He also studies me and my reactions longer than any dog I’ve owned, but he doesn’t appear to care near as much as Mr. Fehrley did what the end result of my reactions are. 

As evidenced by Max, I think our relative definition of their intelligence is based on how acutely they study us. If you are the head master, lead dog, or alpha in their lives, their emotions are dependent on yours. I know now what subtle cues I give when I’m angry over relatively innocuous things, like a driver waiting too long to turn right on red, by how Max reacts to my subtle displays of frustration, impatience, and anger. When it’s obvious it’s obvious, but most of us offer subtle cues of emotion, and Max is acutely attuned to all of mine. He looks back at me, ears slightly perched, waiting for me to inform him that my display of emotions have nothing to do with him. Is that a display of general intelligence, emotional intelligence, or a greater sense of awareness. I don’t know, but some dogs have it more than others. 

My evidence for the intelligence of dogs is based on the last three I’ve owned. Mr. Fehrley was the most sensitive of the three, but where does sensitivity rate on the intelligence scale? Max is by far the most curious and aware, but where do these traits rank on the same scale? Are dogs more intelligent than other animals. Some suggest that the inability to train/domesticate an animal is a sign of intelligence. If that’s the case, the cat is smarter than the dog, but part of training involves praising and/or scolding. A cat, generally speaking, does not respond to training, so are they more intelligent or less sensitive? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but prior to owning three dogs of varying intelligence, I must say that I’m more interested in this discussion and more open to hearing the various where, when, and why’s of how I’m wrong.     

The Alternative Explanation

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Jerry Martin tried too hard to make friends with far too many people. Was he obnoxiously superficial and a phony, yes, but we now see that there was a enviable, simplistic quality to Jerry Martin that we didn’t appreciate at the time. He just wanted to have fun.  

The prime directive is fun when co-workers gather. The work they do can be stressful, tedious, and pressure-packed. They need an outlet, and for 90% of those who worked with us that outlet involved a bar and massive amounts of alcohol. If nothing else, alcohol lubricates the mind, unlocks inhibitions, and makes a fun night even more fun. At some point in the evening, and no one knows when or where it will happen, someone gets serious. Did Jerry up and leave the table, every time someone turned the tide of the evening? No, but when it became apparent that no one was going to change the topic back to something fun, Jerry was no longer there.

We complained about that, but we also complained about Jerry being too much like David when David was around. It made us a little ill, until we saw him change a little too much when he was around Shannon. We didn’t really see him for who he was, until he sat down with us, and he tried to be like us. Someone mentioned that Jerry was something of a shape-shifter, and another said he was a chameleon. I agreed with both of those characterizations, because I know what I saw. I considered Jerry too easily influenced, naïve, and a little too eager, but no one ever offered me an alternative explanation for why someone might do this before.

“If you ask me, he’s a bit of a brown noser, a kiss up, and a little too eager,” Rick Becker said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “and eager doesn’t work well when you’re trying make new friends.” Everyone smiled and nodded at Rick’s assessment. Rick didn’t add that we want cool, detached, and ambivalent, because that probably would’ve been too on the nose. He also didn’t allude to the idea that we want to befriend someone who is not there, or that we want someone who forces us to try to gain their attention and their approval.

Jerry was always there when we went to the bar after work, and he was always laughing too hard and hanging on our every word. He always appeared to be having a great time with us, but he was also on the lookout for a better time. At some point, and no one knew when it happened, Jerry would float away to some other table in the bar, and he appeared to be having such a great time over there with a group of complete strangers that some of our people were a little insulted by it. Yet, his trips to other tables never appeared to be a purposeful migration, as if to suggest we were boring and someone else appeared more interesting. He just developed a loose connection with some complete stranger at another table, and he attempted to strengthen it by moving to their table.  

When he moved to another table talk to a girl that made more sense to us. We thought we knew his motive, and some of the times we were right. When he moved to talk to a guy, it threw those readings off, but when he eventually established the fact that there were no patterns to his migrations, we were confused and a little hurt by it.

“Are we just not interesting enough for him?” Angie asked.

“Why does he always do that?” Tiffany asked. “Why does he even come out with us if he’s always going to do that?”

“I think he just gets bored easily,” I said.

“Yep,” Angie added. “He’s probably a little ADD.”

“I’ll tell you what he is,” Derek said. Derek was an outspoken type who loved to think he said what everyone was afraid to say. “He’s a damned phony.”

“He’s not phony,” I said.

Derek argued with fingers. He pointed to one finger and listed one element of his argument, then another, and another. “One plus one, plus one, equals phony,” he said with his three fingers up.

“I don’t know what he is, or what he’s doing,” I said, “but he’s not a phony.”

“My guess is he didn’t come to us fully formed,” Shannon said, referring to the fact that he was relatively new to our team. We looked to her with confusion, awaiting further explanation. “Did you guys see that shirt he wore last week? That shirt had a huge emblem on it? It was so busy. I asked him about it, and he answered in a very insecure way, and he hasn’t worn that shirt since. He also has about twenty pairs of shoes. I don’t know a guy who has more than three pairs of shoes. He seems to have a different pair of shoes on every day.”

“It’s to go with his socks,” Tiffany said and everyone started pointing at her, laughing, and adding comments. “I thought they were Christmas socks at first, until he walked in with brown and pink striped socks on in February. Did you guys see those? I had to ask him where he got them, and I said, and I quote, ‘You’re a brave man Jerry Martin. A grown man, wearing pink and brown striped socks, brave, and who makes them? Because I can’t imagine a manufacturer brave enough to put those out for sale, in a store, in the men’s section.’”

“Was he insecure when you teased him about it?” Shannon asked.

“He was,” Tiffany said. “I expected him to be bold, or as bold as anyone who would wear pink and brown striped socks should be, but he was the opposite.” 

“Exactly, I think Jerry is an empty vessel,” Shannon said, “and I don’t mean that in a hugely offensive way either. I just think he’s the type of person who tries people on, the way we would try a pair of brown and pink socks on. He probably thought he was making a fashion statement wearing such a busy shirt and wild socks, and when we told him he wasn’t, he never wore them again. I think he tries to talk like David and laugh like Angie, because he’s trying them on. It’s as if he’s in a fitting room with our personalities, trying us on to see if he likes us on him. I think he takes little nuggets from each of us to try to complete a picture. I don’t know his history, but I’m guessing he probably has a hole in his soul that he spends his life trying to fill. I’m guessing he doesn’t like himself very much, who he is, where he’s from, or where he’s going, so he looks to everyone else to find something different. He tries us on for a bit to see if he likes that, and if he doesn’t, he puts someone else on. Or, maybe, like I said, he’s looking for a bit of each of us to form some kind of final formation of a personality, because he feels like his is not complete.”

That silenced us. We knew we weren’t fully formed, and we knew the she who-smelt-it-dealt-it principle of making charges about another person’s character. Our guess suggested that when someone spots a flaw in another, they spot it because they suffer from it more than most, and it makes it easier for them to spot it in others. 

Shannon soaked in that silence for a spell and added the following with a cringe/smile, “All right, that might be a bit much, but I agree with you. He’s not a phony.”

No one wants to hear such a serious, alternative explanation at a bar with drinks in hand without a joke to punctuate it. Participants in bar conversations are to incite the mob by narratives to jokes or add jokes to narratives. We view deep, insightful comments with disdain and fatigue. They’re thought-provoking and serious buzzkills, in an unserious climate.

We thought we knew this new guy named Jerry Martin. We thought he was a phony, a brown-noser, who was a little too eager. What else could explain a man who does such things? Was there an alternative explanation? Some of us eagerly seek alternative explanations to tweak our frame of reference, but most reject them just as quickly, especially when we have a beer in hand.

We didn’t think Shannon’s alternative explanation nailed Jerry in the short-term, and it wasn’t a theory to leap on, ask a million questions about, and chew on and sleep on, until we had it all figured out. We dismissed it as beer talk. We might have laughed about it at the time, but we laugh about just about everything when we have a few beers in us. Then, when we wake with our punishments from the night before, we try to wipe everything said from our night before from our database. 

The next time I met a Jerry Martin type, however, Shannon’s theory came back at me. I tried to apply it to that person, but the circumstances were so different that it didn’t snap in. By about the fourth or fifth Jerry Martin I met, I became obsessed with her alternative explanation. One of the reasons I was a better at stupid and superficial bar conversations was because I hung around a guy named Ben. Ben was one of the most superficial conversationalists that I’ve ever met. He could talk to anyone about just about anything. If a girl had some frayed yarn on her sweater, he could do a half an hour on it. He had a knack for making trivial conversation topics interesting, and I still consider that trait enviable. I realized that I had been using a bit of Ben’s recipe for years combined with a bit of Nolan’s sauce. Nolan had an air about him that suggested he knew more about you than you ever could. Was he right? It didn’t matter to either party. The women we guessed about were more interested in correcting him than they were deriving insult from his bad guess. Nolan taught me, more than anyone else, how interested people were in talking about themselves. As opposed to Ben, Nolan listened and observed. He was genuinely curious, and he approached us in the most objective manner possible. It was just some intangible element of his nature that he wore well. Angie had a sense of authority about her that affected her walk. She looked to be the type who always had a destination, and Gil Burkett always tilted his head and pointed a finger outward, as he waited for you to finish a point so he could talk. It was a tiny, insignificant gesture that I picked up.

The primary reason I absorbed their traits into mine was that I was not fully formed, and I was subconsciously looking for characteristics, large and small, into mine. The more parking slots we have to fill, the more they will be filled as the event time nears. How many characteristics of our personality do we develop organically, and how many do we pick up from others? Jerry Martin’s ability to absorb the characters around him might have appeared obnoxious to us at the time, but was he an exaggerated example of all of us?  

We’re all empty vessels at one point, soaking in tiny blocs of inspiration, no bigger than the smallest Lego. If we now view our makeup as 100% complete, what percentage of our routines, reactions, and other such minutiae are composed of the 1% influences we gather like a snowball rolling downhill? 

As we mature and gain greater confidence in ourselves, we might not be empty vessels anymore, but we are still open to suggestion that we could be doing the things a little different. Even the most fully formed have missing elements that they look to others to complete.

Is Shannon’s little theory about such people always right? Of course not, but I found it so interesting that I thought the best way to prove it was to attempt to disprove it. To do so, we must first admit that people like Jerry aren’t fully formed, and they’re looking to others to help him fill their missing characteristics. If that is the case, how would a more fully formed individual approach us? Would he seek any influence on any matter? If he were extremely well formed, would he even speak to us? “He’s a real snob,” we might say.

“No, he’s not,” they might reply. “He just doesn’t need us, and he doesn’t seek to influence his personality any more. He’s fully formed.”

What does that mean? If you’re full formed what would be the point of interacting with anyone? My projection of a fully formed person would involve them knowing what they want to do at a very young age and never altering from that path. It involves an individual knowing who they are so completely that they never allow personalities to alter their core, or the formation they developed before they met us. They know where they were, who they are, and who they’re going to be. The only challenge left in life for them is getting there. It might also mean never trying anything new, because if you’re going to try something new, you’ll want to know how to do it by watching others and learning their approach. 

I tried to think of one fully formed personality from which to solidify this need to disprove Shannon’s little aside, but every time I thought I had one, I kept coming up with their frailties and vulnerabilities. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so secure in their own identity that they exhibited some sort of imperviousness to influence, but I’m sure they’re out there.

When we meet a Jerry Martin it’s so obvious to us why they are the way they are. We all have our go-tos to explain why someone acts in a particular way, but does that explain why they act that way, or why we don’t? Are we so intimately familiar with the characterizations we make of others, based on our he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it familiarity with those characterizations. Are we so familiar with those characteristics, because we’ve spent our whole lives trying to avoid them, so no one will ever call us a phony, a brown-noser, or the eager, easily influenced? When others don’t properly avoid such characteristics, our intimate familiarity spots that failure immediately and pinpoints it for what it is.

Another unpopular element of the alternative explanation is that it might upend our feel-good go-to explanations. Our explanations often involve insults to the other person, and insulting another person often makes us feel better about ourselves. “They’re doing it wrong, right?” “Right.” “Right!” The alternative explanation is not always right, of course, but it seeks to understand the moment and the motive from a perspective we never considered before. We prefer the one plus one, plus one, equals phony answer, because it’s so obvious to us what he’s doing. It’s so obvious to us that we don’t need an alternative explanation, because our world makes more sense to us when it has fixed parameters. We immediately dismiss alternative explanations as thinking too much about an issue, until we hear it. It might take one night, or a couple months for we slow learners, but we might eventually see that there is something there to explore about them, us, and human nature in general.