1.
One dark and glistening night, while I calculated
percentages and busied myself in other ways, I
was visited by two friends, Sergei Glup and
Debbie Development.
Sergei liked Debbie very much, and wanted to get
in her shorts. I suspect he rather wished I wasn't
present because then it would have been easier to tell
her so. Although god knows why, since I was hardly in
the competition, and we were all on relatively intimate terms.
They engaged in conversation, ignoring me, but
preventing me from doing my work.
"I'm an authority,"
Sergei would announce.
"Oh, I don't know about that,"
Debbie might reply,
coyly.
At other times the exchange went like this:
"I'm an authority."
"Yes, I see. Maybe you are after all!"
Sergei seemed to think that if he could finally
establish his authority he might have a good chance of
getting Debbie into the boudoir with him.
This was
hardly likely, but they spent much time detailing the
requirements to be met by all those who would be
allowed into bed. Sergei made sure that all his
categorical qualifications included Debbie, or someone
like her; Debbie offered that her standards were
pretty high.
At times I made the mistake of commenting.
"'Love' as a word often confuses the issue,"
I
said at one point, adding: "What we're talking about,
in the abstract, is the delicate negotiations that
occur.... the two sides allow each other to save face
for as long as they both want the bargaining to go on.
They beat around the bush trying to con each other
with vague terms, thinking it's diplomatic. Say one
wants the other to be at his beck and call while the
other doesn't like the idea.... these types of conditions
are established, perhaps, by gossiping about others...."
I was interrupted by a wave of the hand from
Sergei, who translated for Debbie, telling her,
"I'm
the authority around here."
It carried on like this. Once in a while I popped
in and got minor slaps on the wrist to remind me to
keep my mouth shut unless I had something to say that
would augment Sergei's standing.
2.
After a while I grew sleepy, although I was
keeping an eagle eye out, practicing. It was entertaining
to consider the combinations, and it gave me a
thrill when my silent predictions were fulfilled. But
my tiredness led me to make the same mistake over
again: I kept commenting, and they began to focus on
me.
In a politically-related discussion of motive, I
couldn't let them continue with the hogwash they were
spouting; if I had it would have meant complete capitulation
to a doctrine I don't hold, and I would at
some future point have been called on it.
"Oh come
on,"
I said, "People basically do what they want to,
within certain limits."
That's when Sergei really cut loose. It was more
of an error than I at first supposed, because it
should have been obvious that Sergei wasn't doing
what he wanted to do by any stretch of the imagination.
He got angry, probably imagining that I imputed
to him some lack of desire to pork the babe in our
midst.
"What do you mean, certain limits!"
he roared.
"Anything can be within your supposed certain limits!"
If there wasn't a rug on the floor he might have spit.
"You conveniently ignore the operative clause and
seize on the qualifying one,"
I snapped back irritated that
he would have the effrontery to escalate
but even more irritated at myself for failing to have
Seen what was coming. "I'm talking about not going
out for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup when you've just
fallen into an earthquake divide! It's by definition,
discovered in retrospect, that's all! They do what
they want to because if they didn't do it they didn't want to!"
It got worse. Sergei pulled out all the stops
after seeing my acrimony. He interrupted me, not
allowing the last words to be heard, and said my
proposition was stupid. After he had finished (he
said, "That's stupid, that's stupid!" twice), he
talked about contradictory motives and hierarchies of
desire, and I threw in a contemptuous statement to the
effect that, if an action be taken, one value has by
default taken precedence and can be viewed for these
purposes as the prime motive in the case.
Then Sergei drew an example, which I demolished;
he said that someone Who writes a bad check for a hat
they want has contradictory motives and isn't really
doing what they want to do. I nearly laughed out
loud, recalling Freud and wondering if this example
didn't have some bearing on his relationship with
Debbie.
It appeared to me to be quite simple, that
what he meant by confused motive was the event-
description of lies. One lies to oneself so as to lie
more effectively to the other person. Sergei had
designs he couldn't reveal.
But what I said was that, in the first place,
error in judgment is not mutually exclusive with
volition as the sine qua non of action; and that, in the
second place, people who aren't fucking autistic
generally know the results of their fucking actions
and in fact desire those fucking results.
But Sergei wouldn't brook the idea that some
people enjoy being unhappy, even when I backed it up
With the proof that exhibiting symptoms of unhappiness
is a common tactic for eliciting specific responses
from others.
He began getting incoherent and continued insulting me,
asked what I was talking about (to which I
threw in, "Commenting on the bind," which was ignored), and somehow devolved into asking me why I
was disagreeing with him.
"I was defending a statement!"
"What statement, what statement!"
he yelled, evidently having an adrenaline rush and thinking that if
he could get me tongue-tied over some particular he'd
have won a victory valuable enough to offset the cost
to his dignity of having stooped to such a tactic. I
suppose it had become a case of getting me to shut up
at any cost.
I realized too late what I had done, and that now
the process had become a contest to the end since
Sergei was out to re-establish authority and had
nothing to lose. Not wanting to lose too much myself
I decided to cut it off, get it over with by resigning,
and I waved my hand in dismissal and shut up.
There was no way I was going to get in a fist fight,
and this was probably the next escalation.
After a few minutes during which Debbie respectfully
listened to Sergei as he cleared up such questions
as why people die with smiles on their faces and
whether this was proof of an afterlife, Sergei turned
back to cauterize my lips for good.
"You were resisting,"
he said, somewhat calmer.
"You got irrational, and you wouldn't listen to me
because when people get to the, ah, root of the irrationality
of their position, they get emotional.
They get more excited the closer you get to their
point of vulnerability."
Besides projecting, (it was beautiful, clinically
perfect), he was giving me more reason to suspect that
he actually was familiar with police method from spy
interrogation training, and he was showing an interesting
ability to forget what don't come in handy,
like the Marin County Relationships jargon he'd been
spewing earlier; if he truly thought he had me in a
corner, according to his Beauty of Personhood Becoming
bull-shit, he would have backed off. But this stuff
only comes into play when bamboozling a potential
Piece of ass.
Then again, some of the other schools
of new age thought apparently hold that the only way
you can be friends, really friends, with somebody, is
to dominate them at every opportunity, destroy their
defenses, leave them no privacy, secrets, or pride.
I was somewhat more irritated at this point than I
had been throughout the meat of the contest, mainly
with myself because I regretted ever having challenged
his authority. I wasn't a contender for the girl, yet
I had put our friendship to an unnecessary test.
I
suppose that the demand for equal footing on an
intellectual basis was misinterpreted as a demand for equal
footing in the quest for lonely ova, probably because
Sergei was using his intellectual prowess as a selling
Anyway, worse was to come, because I had made a
dual error and exposed myself to discovered check.
Debbie turned on me with this cutting motherly line,
seeing she could fend off the invites tactfully by
scoring points on me. This way she could bask in the
Cheap warmth of being desired by keeping negotiations
open.... which was her only interest, since anything
beyond negotiation was going too far for her taste.
"What would you say if I told you that I love you
as you are,"
she began, making me wince, and evidently
dismissing from memory her sage nods at my explication
that 'love' is a worthless bargaining chip, seeing as
how it remains undefined until the trump is played,
and even then is defined by the person who first anted
UP. "...But..."
(and here the buzzwords came thick &
fast) "...you cannot ever be my political leader.
You're too young, your ideas are too radical, but I'd
like to keep a dialogue open with you even though I
don't plan on ever agreeing with you on any particular,
especially the important ones and you will in
fact be wasting your time to talk to me, but I know
you'll never let your frustration show because then
I'll be able to hit you over the head with having hurt
my feelings."
In all, the raving took about five
minutes, and five minutes of acute discomfort are a
small price to pay to stave off a month-long campaign.
Sergei stared at me to gauge my facial response to the
onslaught, so I did my best catatonia, making with the
blank stares, which is known in the trade as clamming
up or diminished affect.
In the end I shrugged, since the thrust was clear
before she had finished and I'd had time to figure out
which act would neutrally signify recognition that it
was over. Her pitch constituted an insult the likes
of which I have seldom received, and they both thought
they were loving friends... It was almost terrifying.
I sat still for a while. Any material counter-attack
would have given them an excuse to resume the
fusillade.
Moving around while they babbled, collecting
coffee cups and straightening up papers, served to get
them standing and moving towards departure. They both
knew it was getting late and I wasn't done with my
work. They haggled over the literal content of religion
(which keeps some people busy for centuries),
mostly to the effect that Debbie hoped to get the
newly-ordained authority to endorse her delusions
about god and happiness when you're dead.
As it turned out, Sergei tired of this before
Debbie did, perhaps realizing that he'd been taken for
a ride. He bowed out, and Debbie stayed on to repeat
her line about not having the slightest respect for my
politics, but at the same time wanting to keep an
interesting whipping boy or clown to call on for
occasional entertainment, and by the way, proofs of
god, reincarnation, and similar patronizing shit.
I did my best to keep writing at my desk and
patently ignore her, but she really must have had a
blood lust. She went and made a new pot of coffee and
brought a cup over to sit and drink it while reciting
some disordered litany. I stopped working and listening
long enough to formulate the necessary shrapnel
grenades.
"Look,"
I said, with a fierce glare and a commanding
tone that was unusual between us but functional now
that I was bent on ridding myself of this
insect as quickly as possible, "All you are trying to
do is find some smart people who will tell you that
what you read in crank paperbacks is true. You continue
to refuse to look at the uses of your beliefs
despite the clear necessity of doing so when evaluating
them overall. I find it obnoxious that you try
to pester me into sanctioning this bullshit consolatory prattle.
Go away and drown in your doubts if
you want to, I'm not an authority to be called on to
allay your fears, quit harassing me."
"H'm..."
she said, at a loss for words. Not long
after, she left.
I recalled the time when I had given Sergei's
brother, Rinzai, a briefing on the content of Jay
Haley's masterwork, "Strategies of Psychotherapy".
"H'm..."
he said, at a loss. Maybe if Jo'Shu had said
it.
"Yeah,"
I carried on, ignoring the "H'm". "When I
read it I thought I'd never be able to carry on a
normal relationship with anyone ever again."
But who
wants to? Hierarchies are the norm here in human-
land. In hierarchies, as they say, you either lick
boot or kick face.