Pretentious Absorbers

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“You’re what’s called a pretentious absorber.” Stewart Griffin

“What’s that?” Brian the Dog

“You remember how Madonna lived in London for, like, a month and then started talking with a British accent? It’s that.” Stewart Griffin

“The easy life?” Betty Bettle asked her friends in college. “You think I led an easy life? My family had a small, family farm. If you know anything about farming, you’d know what a stretch it is to call that the easy life.” It was probably her fault they thought that. She told them too much about herself. She complained about how her overprotective dad strongly encouraged his daughters to stay home most nights. She made the mistake of confessing that her brother helped tend the farm, while she and her sister helped their mom in the home. She then compounded her mistakes by complaining about being cooped up, “I never experienced the world.” The idea that they didn’t see that life as an awful experience didn’t shock her, but she couldn’t see how anyone might mistake that for an easy life.

“I’m free,” Betty whispered to someone she didn’t even know at her first college party. Throughout that first year, she met so many different people from so many different backgrounds that she grew to love college parties. Betty got wasted at the first couple parties she attended, but she didn’t enjoy those nights the way those who unleashed did. She didn’t enjoy getting drunk or stoned, but she attended every party she could find. Betty found that she could be whoever she wanted to be at these parties, because no one knew her. She eventually ruined that by telling them everything about her, but she developed so many friends before doing so that they still welcomed her to every party they had.

These college parties introduced Betty to a slice of life she never knew, and she didn’t to just want to nibble at this newfound freedom, she wanted to explore it as much as she possible could. She wanted to meet more people, different kinds of people, have more experiences, and grow, but the problem was she never had any money. Her family never had any money, and even if they had, there was too much work to do at the homestead to travel. When her new, college friends introduced her to their friends from other countries, Betty thought she found something of an end around to her desire to travel.

For a variety of reasons, Betty was more attracted to people from other countries than she was anyone else she met in college. She wanted to be there when they dropped tales about life in other countries, because she wanted to learn everything she could about the world outside the Bettle homestead.

It confused her when her foreign friends began accusing her of living the easy life. She was so confused that she found herself becoming defensive. She lost those arguments so often, with so many foreign-born people, that she became convinced that they were right. No matter how many hardships the Bettles experienced on the farm, they paled in comparison to what some of these people had to go through. Over time, she found the best way to avoid being so defensive all the time was to go on offense. She found herself becoming so sympathetic to their plight that she became empathetic. She learned their plight so well that she joined her foreign friends in arguments they would have with any newcomers.

“You don’t understand how that offends my people,” Betty said when she returned home on a break. We knew nothing about her foreign-born friends at college, but we knew something changed her. We assumed that she heard that line so often that it became a reflexive response to her. The offensive statement she was addressing had nothing to do with the Irish, the Germans, Americans, farmers, or the Bettles. The statement was referring to involved the home country of her new foreign friends. When she informed us what she was learning in college, we assumed that this Irish/German woman was falsely attempting to assume the characteristics of her new friends, but we knew her so well that we couldn’t believe this was the case.

The only thing we could assume was Betty heard so many of their tales, and learned so much about their culture and customs that she began adopting them as her own. She learned how to prepare their dishes, and she eventually learned how to speak their language on a less than fluent basis. She did everything she could to have them accept her as one of their own, and when they did, she felt like she was one of them.

“Aren’t you Irish and German?” one of us said, in the midst of one of her rants. It shocked her. She said yes of course, and she blushed a little, but it was obvious that what shocked her was that anyone would call her out. One might suggest that she enjoyed the company of her foreign-born friends so much that she bonded with them, and that bond was so strong that she considered any offense made against them as an offense against her.

At some point, the revelations she learned led Betty to believe that her parents lied to her. Either that, or she believed her small-town parents just didn’t understand enough about the plight of human existence. When she learned “the truth”, she thought anyone who approached the issue from a different perspective was either as passively uninformed as she used to be or willfully ignorant. To further their knowledge, she used a “must” or “should” pulpit to help us all view matters from her new perspective as a foreign-born citizen.

Betty Bettle graduated near the top of her class, and she immediately entered into a career that paid her relatively well. She saved every dollar she could to travel to experience the world in ways she never could as a kid. She hoped to use the college degree and the extensive travel to establish a status in life that might lead to a station. From this station, she developed an approach, based on a level of pretentiousness she didn’t intend, whenever someone argued with her. “How do you think you know so much?” she said one day. “You haven’t traveled.” Her book smarts proved a little intimidating at first, and she sought to round up whatever street smarts she might lack due to her upbringing, by traveling.

As intelligent as Betty was, she wasn’t a great debater, particularly on this topic. When someone scratched at the surface, just a little, Betty crumbled. Most of her conviction was tied up in the talking points her foreign friends, books, and TV provided. She had no firsthand experience being a foreigner of course, so she could not answer follow up questions or challenges to her newfound passion, and we walked away from her thinking she was someone who did what she was told.

Betty’s sympathy for citizens from other countries and cultures was genuine, but it was also conditional. The foreign-born citizens she met in college provided her a prototype. Betty met foreigners who strayed from that model, later in life, and she developed narratives for why some might succeed where others didn’t, but she preferred to focus on those who required sympathy, and she developed a certain criterion of musts for them. She also developed a list of shoulds that they should exhibit. She considered successful immigrants anecdotal evidence of the foreign-born experience.

Betty Bettle always knew she was of Irish and German descent, but she ignored this fact so often and thoroughly that she viewed reminders as unnecessarily confrontational. As odd as it sounds for someone to try to convince themselves they are another lineage, how often do we become so convinced of something to the point of developing convictions? How many of our convictions are based on personal experience? How many of us use literature or philosophical text as a conduit to conviction? By doing so, aren’t we, in essence, using another’s experiences to modify our thoughts from theory to fact? How many of us absorb so many of our parents’ ideas and platitudes that we accidentally become them? Betty didn’t agree with her parents’ worldview, and she didn’t want to model herself after them. She agreed with her foreign-born friends in college so much that she ended up adopting their culture and characteristics as her own. Cultural appropriation was not a widely recognized term back when Betty was in college. As a person who abides by the prevailing winds, we can only guess that Betty now has a tough time squaring everything she did back then. She might suggest that she views her approach as complimentary, as she only sought to understand other cultures better, and if she accidentally adopted some of their customs and characteristics, it was unintended. To which the cultural appropriation crowd might say, “That’s what everyone says.”

Betty didn’t intend to be a pretentious absorber. It just sort of happened. It was an accident. It was something that happened in that way we incidentally mimic and imitate our parents, our teachers, and anyone else we admire. Betty never admired anyone to the point that she would mimic or imitate them, until she met those foreign-born students in college. She was so fascinated by their ways and customs that she hung out with them almost exclusively. She met their parents, and partied with their aunts and uncles, until she eventually gained acceptance among them. She never felt so accepted by a group of people before. She never truly believed she could change her ethnic heritage. It just sort of happened.

For reasons endemic to their upbringing, people like Betty Bettle choose to imitate and emulate sympathetic characters, and they do this so often that they begin to absorb their traits and characteristics until they exhibit them. The first question that runs through our mind when we watch this happen is how does an otherwise intelligent person begin to believe they are different? The next question is why do they do it? Are they trying to achieve some level of superiority? If that’s the case, why would they imitate and emulate people they regard as sympathetic? Are these sympathetic characters flawed, or in some ways relatively inferior? If they weren’t, why would Betty feel sorry for them? Most of us spend most of our lives trying to emulate and imitate the successful. Our desire to find some relative measure of success through money, love, or some other form of happiness drives us to imitate those who experience some measure of success in that regard. It has given birth to numerous multi-million-dollar industries online, in seminars, and in the book industry. Do we do it to one day achieve some level of superiority? Perhaps, if we consider it superior to conquer our personal flaws better, quicker, or in some ingenious ways others haven’t considered before. Pretentious absorbers believe that by imitating and emulating other cultures, they derive virtue. If we ask how they can abandon their own customs, tradition, and culture, they might provide a wide variety of reasons, but those answers won’t be clear or direct. Their answers won’t revolve around what it says about them that they do what they do but what it says about you that you don’t. They are pretentious absorbers.

Ruminations on Kafka

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Reading Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis story is akin to eating a delicious sandwich. As with a couple of great sentences, one delicious slice of salami can define a sandwich. Others rely on the relationship fresh, crisp cuts of lettuce have with the other ingredients. As with a great sandwich, we can almost taste the craftsmanship of a great story. Those of us who never worked in the sandwich industry, don’t know the symbiotic relationship these ingredients should have with one another, but we know it when we taste it. Those of us who worked in the industry, and have an intimate level of familiarity with the art of the sandwich, know that even the perfect symbiosis of the freshest, most delicious ingredients don’t matter without great bread. The quality of the bread is the great divide between an average sandwich and a delicious one.

The consensus on author Franz Kafka is that his craftsmanship did not involve writing great sentences. His prose was characterized by a Stanley Corngold as “luminous plainness”. I understand the ambiguity of that description, but while I concede that there were very few, some of these were great ones. Anytime we read a great story, like Metamorphosis, our inclination is to add some “could’ve been, should’ve been” lines. Maybe that’s the egotistical writer in me, but I do that with most stories. Yet, every time we think of a great line, it doesn’t seem to fit quite right. Where would we add, what would we delete, and how would any of it improve the prose, the rhythm, and the setting of Metamorphosis? In the course of our imagined efforts, Kafka is unveiled, his economy of words, and the meticulous choreography of his story.

I would love to see some early drafts of Metamorphosis, just to see what Kafka added and deleted in the course of his revising and editing. Did he have great sentences in the first draft only to realize they damaged the otherwise “luminous plainness” feel of the story? Did Gregor Samsa’s family have greater, more comedic reactions to Gregor transformation into an Ungeziefer ‘a beast unfit for sacrifice’? Did he vie for greater entertainment in the story, or did Kafka have a religious zeal for the story’s mundane feel? My guess is that in the early drafts of this story, Kafka had to battle with an egotistical need to add something more to Metamorphosis to make it more, because we all live by the credo that more is always more. Did he initially have one of the characters make an incredibly insightful comment about humanity that illuminated us on how insightful Kafka was? Most authors cannot avoid the conceit of informing their readers how smart and brilliant they really are, and they do so by creating hyper intelligent, incredibly insightful, and unbelievably brilliant characters. In lesser hands, the characters always know, because the author knows, and we know, and neither of us wants to think anyone involved is dumb, uninformed, or stupid, because that might reflect poorly on us and the author. In the context of the lesser stories, some characters know things they couldn’t possibly know, but the author has spent so much time helping us relate to and identify with their character that if she doesn’t know it’s an incriminating comment from the author on her, and everything she’s about. It could also be twisted and mangled into the author’s thoughts on us. Is the author talking down to us, no, that character “only be playing” because it’s later revealed to us that she knew all along, because she’s an anointed intellect just like us, and the author. 

Most people aren’t hilarious, charming, and wonderful people, yet we don’t really want to read about the characters who aren’t? We know this to be true, but in the ever-changing mind of the great author, some of the times story is sacred. 

Were Kafka’s characters funnier, more charming, more compassionate, more wonderful, or more something that every author wants their readers to think of them in those initial drafts? My guess is that Kafka probably had hundreds of versions before it reached final form, and that final form of Metamorphosis we know today is an exhibition of ego-less restraint.

Great writers work through their strengths and weaknesses in pieces no one will ever see. Some of them learn that their path to a great story hinges on great sentences. Others find that the devotion to ideas and style pays greater dividends. Some might suggest this is an author finding their voice. They do so in the course of reading others, trying to duplicate them, and eventually realizing what their own greater strengths and weaknesses are.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think any reader will finish Metamorphosis with a “Holy Crud!” reaction. The reader might start the story in that vein, but Kafka diminishes the shock of a human transforming into an Ungeziefer with a level of choreographed reality the reader might find mundane. Thus, when we finish the story, it sits on a shelf in our mind like preserved meat, until we process and digest it, in the manner we will a great sandwich. It might take a while, it might take an incident, but at some point concept of the story will hit us, and we’ll realize what a unique, and uniquely crafted story it was.

Whenever we read a great story, like Metamorphosis, we seek a reference point, a doorway into the mind of the author. Most great stories are about us, in some tangential manner. Some stories are so foreign to our experience that we cannot find our point of reference, because we can’t possibly find ourselves in such a ludicrous story. The brilliance of Kafka is that his writing relies on an axis of narcissism and objectivity. Is it narcissist to believe that every story is about us, or is it narcissist to believe that none of them are? How do we define a great story? How does a great story define us? Do we know someone for whom the author speaks, and do we wish they would read Kafka to understand themselves a little better? How would they do that, what do we hope they might understand, and are our answers to those questions autobiographical?

To paraphrase author David Foster Wallace, readers should imagine a door when they approach a Kafka work. We seek a doorway into Kafka’s mind so that we can understand his works a little better. We seek a reference point, a point of entry. When we think we’ve found the doorway, we start “pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.” 

One of the primary duties of every writer is to elicit emotion in the reader. How well they do this defines them. For one writer, it might be about the sentences, and for another it might be the idea that story is sacred. Some stories elicit instantaneous reactions, and some require some slow roasting. Some people don’t want to think too much. They want instant stories that provide a clear path from clear A to Z that culminate in an exciting conclusion. Millions of these books move from writer to reader, and the readers love them. Some of us prefer stories, like the ones Franz Kafka wrote, that reach in and fiddle with some different switches embedded deep in our psyche.

Kafka was an impersonal writer who chose to ground his greatest fantastical tale in reality. Prior to Kafka, and since him, most writers felt a need to form the basis for the fantastical with the fantastical. It just doesn’t seem realistic that something so uncommon should happen in a common home of common people. Kafka doesn’t fight against commonality in the manner some will by suggesting that the common can become uncommon. He chose to wrap his ingredients of “luminous plainness” in the idea and style, two slices of bread that made his story Metamorphosis historic.  

The Pit Stops of Life

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The Pit Stop

The destination is the destination of our planned vacation. We pack the belongings, the kid, and the dog with a destination in mind. When someone suggests that we take a pit stop, we say, “Why? We’re making good time here. At this rate, we should arrive at our destination by four p.m., with plenty of time to do much of what we planned.” The fun and frivolity we dreamed up, when we dreamed up this vacation, all took place at the final destination. Pit stops seem like a waste of the precious time we could spend having fun. The dilemma arrives when we arrive at our destination, and we have nothing to do for the first couple of hours.

“[He] never made pit stops,” a woman said of her now deceased husband. “He thought pit stops were a waste of time. He wanted to get there.” 

Well, he’s there now, I thought of joking. He’s at his final destination. It would’ve been an awful, cruel joke. No one would’ve laughed, of course. No one would’ve so much as smiled. How many pit stops did he make to his final destination? Did he go quickly? He wasn’t the type to stop at a lakeside pit stop. “He wanted to get there.”

I didn’t say any of that, but in the midst of my scheme to drop that room-silencing, reputation damaging joke, I realized that I’m a no-pit-stops destination traveler too. I don’t stop to smell the flowers, look at a lake, or carpe diem the moment. I get there, wherever there is. I want to have fun, and I don’t want something like a pit stop to get in the way of it. 

When we map out our vacation, it often involves lengthy travel times. Even on paper, we know we’re signing on for a long journey, even when they’re all interstate miles. It doesn’t get any better when we’re doing it. As the miles click by, it begins to feel like a Sisyphean trial of humanity to sit in a small car for that many hours in a row, and it doesn’t matter how large the interior of an automobile is, they all feel small after eight hours. The family might want to smell the flowers and look at a lake, but I’m the “Let’s just get there for all that’s holy. Let’s get this drive over” type of traveler. 

The volume of the consensus breaks us down, however, and we take a pit stop. Their primary goal, after such long car ride, was to get out and stretch the legs a little, go to the bathroom, get the kid out of the car for a while, and let the dog pee. We’re not for it, but we strike a deal with those who are dying to get out of the car. We decide we won’t stay long. We’ll look at stuff, we’ll walk down to the lake and throw some stones in it. We’ll talk to some of the other people who made a similar pit stop, we’ll let the dog run around with whatever joy he always runs around in, and the kid can have some spontaneous kid fun. Then we’ll take that almost cinematic portrait with that crystal blue lake in our background, and we’ll all get back in the car for another three hours. 

I don’t know if I needed the break more than I knew, but I was peaking at this particular pit stop. Some of the times, we have mental peaks, some of the times, we have physical ones, but every once in a great while they come together. Before we turn 25, our whole life is one peak after another. The only stories we tell involve those moments when we weren’t peaking. After 40, we are so impressed with our peaks that we tell everyone we know. Everything in between involves noticing peaks after the fact. I was peaking at that little pit stop. I was in the moment, the moment I stepped out of the car. I wasn’t thinking about the car ride ahead of us, how this pit stop might hamper our pre-planned schedule, or anything else for that matter. Once I stepped out of the car, I wanted to make this stupid, little pit stop as fun as it could possibly be. 

We had so much fun at that little pit stop that it proved one of the best we have ever experienced on vacation. When we finally arrived at our proposed destination, we had all the fun we planned to have, and I remember that vacation as one of the better ones we’ve had. We may have spent four days at our proposed destination, and we only spent 30 minutes at that non-commercial pit stop, but the time we spent there will forever stick out in my memory.

City on a Hill

I love a great line. A great line can make a movie (90 minutes long, on average) or a series (roughly 47 minutes per episode, with ten episodes on average) seem worth it. Anyone who reads this will probably say that it says a lot about me, but my favorite lines are the obnoxiously offensive and repugnant lines of vulgar cruelty. Some heart-warming, positive lines, reach me, but nothing causes me to pause and rewind more than an awful line from an awful character. 

I also prefer shows and movies that depict people doing and saying awful things to one another. There are exceptions, of course, as some shows are awful for the sole purpose of being awful. The great shows, about awful people doing awful things to one another, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men always managed to preserve some relatable integrity in their characters while doing and saying awful things to other characters. We learn to cheer the main characters on, and when they did awful things to other characters, we cheer that on too. 

The Showtime series City on a Hill is not as great as those shows, of course, but it did have one great, repugnant, moment of vulgar cruelty. 

“I can hear it now. The eulogies, the hymns, the bagpipes, everyone forgetting what a lousy piece of [dung] you’ve been your entire life,” the Jackie Rohr character says to his rival J.R. Minogue, on an episode of the TV show City on a Hill. The Minogue character lies in the ambulance, and we know he’s not going to live long enough to see the hospital. We know Rohr’s cruel sendoff will be the final thing the Minogue character hears. “Your wife’s going to be upset [after you die] for about five minutes, and I will … eventually, but this should be a comfort to both of us. There’s no hell. There’s only this life, right here, right now, and the last thing that you’re going to see in your lousy life is my ugly face.”

Seconds before this scene, Rohr eagerly leapt into the ambulance that carried J.R. Minogue, before the EMTs could close the door. We know this scene. We’ve seen it all before. The main character, a law enforcement official, leaps into the ambulance to hold a fellow cop’s hand, as the man succumbs to death. Even though they’re bitter rivals, Minogue’s a fellow cop, and that goes along way to forming some solidarity between the two. That’s the typical scene, in the typical cop movie, but the writers of City on a Hill had other plans for Rohr. They have him mock his rival on his deathbed, and he lays into Minogue with vulgar cruelty.

Ever since Sopranos, and perhaps beyond, viewers have come to accept the idea that their favorite main characters on their favorite productions can be morally ambiguous, if not downright awful people. Through a dizzying array of scenes, we accept the idea that Jackie Rohr is one such character. Yet, what motivates this character to be this spiteful? We’re to read into it. We’re to wonder if we could ever be that spiteful. We’ve all had people we dislike in a competitive manner, and we dislike others in a more personal manner, but have we ever hated someone so much that we wanted to taunt them into death? Most of us haven’t. I obviously considered this scene an interesting nugget to chew on, and I wanted a more thorough psychological exploration of why, or how, even a Jackie Rohr could be that spiteful and that hateful. Scenes like these remind me why I prefer books to movies.

We understand that when Rohr says, “This should be a comfort to both of us. There’s no hell,” he does so to inform the viewers that he knows that he’s as awful as J.R. Minogue is. That line sets up the next line well, but after I paused the series at that point and rewound it a number of times, I thought up a better line. 

“There is no heaven, and there is no hell. There’s no such thing as an afterlife.” If the writers seek spite, this might be an altogether different level of spite, because as awful as J.R. Minogue apparently was, he likely tried to counter those evil deeds with some good ones throughout his life. It might be even more spiteful to inform him that those good deeds he performed, and any other attempts Minogue made at good and honest living, were a waste of time, because “there is no heaven.”

Rohr then alluded to the idea that his main point for jumping in the ambulance was to make sure that Minogue’s loved ones weren’t the faces he remembered. Rohr wanted his face, Minogue’s most hated rival, to be the last face he saw. I see the writer(s) working here. I know that they’re vying for one of the more spiteful moments in TV history, but if there is no afterlife, and J.R. Minogue turns to dust, there will be no way for Minogue to remember the final moments that Rohr hoped to ruin. He’ll turn to non-existence, and Rohr’s awful sentiments will die as soon as Minogue does. A better line might have been, “There is an afterlife, and we don’t know where you’re going yet, but if they somehow determine in their mysterious ways, that a piece of [dung] like you is worthy of eternal paradise, I’m here to ruin all that for you by providing you your own personal definition of hell, knowing that my ugly face was the last thing you saw in your time spent on Earth.”

I read an interesting complaint regarding individuals who follow religious philosophies. The complainant suggested that religious people fail to appreciate their lives on earth as much as they should, because they place inordinate focus on achieving eternal paradise in the next life. Whether there is an afterlife or not, even if it involves a level of paradise beyond our wildest imagination, something tells me that we’ll look back on our lives on earth with some regret if we don’t make more time to enjoy the pit stops in life, en route to our final destination.