Easy laugh

I told Griffy, my building’s janitor, that traditional Chinese medicine abhors masturbation on the grounds that the practice drains yang without an influx of yin (I think).

Griffy:  “Fuck traditional Chinese medicine.”
I’m still a sucker for that kind of line: “fuck” vehemently attached to some Margaret Dumont of a subject.

Overheard

My neighbor Henri, while watching the scene in Godfather where Don Corleone views his son’s body: “When you’re dead, they don’t take care of you, they get rid of you.”
He expands on the theme a while. “When a cow is dead, you say get rid of that fucker. You do not keep it around, no.” The whole speech is typical of him, because he’s pretending you treat a dead person the way you treat a dead animal. Henri wouldn’t visit his stepfather at the hospital when the old man was dying, and as a result Henri’s daughter wouldn’t talk to him for two years. It’s just a month or so that she started again.
Henri is talking to the guy from Apartment 3 while I do my qi gong. The Godfather that’s playing is from Henri’s collection of old video tapes and the colors have gone blurry, like the print was made of toilet paper.

Finding examples of bullshit

Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.

That’s how I remember a key line from Adaptation, the movie by Charlie Kaufman. The movie’s second half is a point-by-point parody of a typical modern-day Hollywood popcorn film, with beats and pivots and so on. There’s the fake plot breakthru (the villainess says she’d like to have dinner with Jesus or John Lennon, so now the heroes know she’s a big liar and that she’s up to something), the race against time, the quiet heartfelt moment before the big action climax. During the quiet heartfelt moment, the dopey brother tells the smart brother (the arc is about two brothers who must be reconciled) that in high school, sure, he had a crush on that hot girl even though she made fun of him, that he kept loving her even after he caught her and her friends laughing about him and what an idiot he was. Why? And then the line given above, a really fine pastiche of a dopey Hollywood pseudo-profound gnomic utterance. 
I would have thought that was a perfect example of bullshit, as the word is used in H. G. Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit.” I mean a supposed statement that actually says nothing. This kind of bullshit is to statement what a slug (by which I mean a round, blank disc, not a garden slug) is to a coin. The slug does nothing that a coin is supposed to do except feel like a coin. Someone who isn’t paying attention will put it in his pocket and believe he has a coin there. But it’s all a fraud. The same with a sentence of bullshit: You hear it, and it feels just like something has been said. A lie, on the other hand, does say something, but something untrue.
I’ve been looking for examples of bullshit, finding them, and then having them squirt away from me. When you go down a few layers, there’s always some specific lie hidden away. It’s just that the lies have to do with heady matters that don’t get looked at directly most of the time.
For example, “Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.” Compare that with the following:
So, this momentary ego approval was not as great as the feeling of loving her! As long as I was loving her, I felt so happy. But when she loved me, there were only moments of happiness when she gave me approval. … Her loving me was a momentary pleasure that needed constant showing and proving on her part, while my loving her was a constant happiness, as long as I was loving her
I concluded that my happiness equated to my loving! If I could increase my loving, then I could increase my happiness!  *
The speaker is a man discussing the great change in outlook he underwent during his 40s. I think a lot of people would agree with what he said. I haven’t read the book in question, just glanced at a couple of pages, but I gather that the speaker goes on to draw many sweeping, straight-line conclusions from this discovery. They may be right or wrong, I have no idea. But his starting point would strike many people as correct: not just that it’s better to love than to be loved, better as in morally desirable, but that you get more out of loving than being loved. There’s more return.
With that point established, the Charlie Kaufman line looks a bit different. All of a sudden I can see how it might actually mean something — something highly debatable, not to say false (that the benefits accrued from loving have nothing to do with the person being loved, with whether they return the love or treat you decently, and so on), but something that can be turned into a statement.
Thinking about it, there’s another heady claim that the line could be based on: the idea that everything about you is somehow your property and that the key thing is to make sure no one else ever has a say in its disposition. That sounds a bit Ayn Rand-ish, but Hollywood goes in for a debased form of self-actualization that could also give rise to a claim like that, at least if a screenwriter was desperate enough.  
* From Happiness Is Free and It’s Easier than You Think by Hale Dwoskin and Lester Levenson. Achmed, a cafe rat I know, pressed the book on me, he said sheepishly.

Good example

Lawrence, a very well-read cafe rat I sometimes bump into, was pouring scorn on the way Republicans pretend that Joe Biden’s run-off-at-the-mouth tendencies are proof that Sarah Palin isn’t stupid. Lawrence said Biden could talk for an hour on any given political/policy topic and make sense, whereas Palin would fall apart 10 seconds after her sound bites ran out. Good point!

The problem with Biden isn’t that he’s ignorant or muddleheaded, it’s that his mouth goes way too fast. Occasionally he’ll get some matters of fact garbled, like someone committing a spoonerism even though he knows where the syllables are supposed to go. More often he says something that’s simply impolitic. Michael Kinsley likes to say most “gaffes” are statements that are true but politically inconvenient. If someone asks you what magazines you read and you reply, in effect, “Uh, all of them?” that is not a gaffe. But if someone asks you what you, as vice president of the United States, think of the situation with Russia and you say:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

… that would be a gaffe. But as a lucid, straight-from-the-shoulder overview of an economic-political situation it’s not bad. At least he knows about population bases and banking structures and stuff. I like that in a political leader.
(Via Sullivan, with Biden interview here.)

Milton, you’re a genius!

I’ve mentioned my cafe buddy Milton a couple of times. He’s not dumb, but he’s usually a couple beats behind in a conversation. Worse, he doesn’t take his lag into account. He jumps in with irrelevant questions, he sums up what you’re saying and gets it wrong — things like that.

The other day we were talking about the girls who work in the cafes where we hang out; that’s a favorite topic, of course. I told him about Emily, who was greatly loved and admired before she went home to Vancouver. She worked the early morning shift, so Milton had never met her. 
Emily had a fabulous, sunny personality and greeted everyone walking thru the door like they were an old friend. The old Quebecois gents — retirees or fellows headed to work at 7 in the morning — would all call out “Abientot, Emily, au revoir” as they left, and she would give them a big wave and smile. Very sweet.
She was also very good looking, in a blond, broad-shouldered, farm-girl way. A lot of times people say “big boned” when they mean fat. Emily actually was big boned. 
I made the above points to Milton. “… when they mean fat, but she actually was big boned,” I said, winding up.
Milton:  “Oh, I know who you mean. Pam.”
Pam was a big favorite of ours, but she didn’t work the early morning shift or call out to customers as they walked in the door. Also, she was noticeably fat, not big boned. “Well, no,” I said to Milton. “Because Pam, you know, she actually was pretty overweight.”
Milton:  “Yeah. When you said ‘big boned,’ I just thought that was what you meant.”
Milton, you’re a genius!

Victory

On line at the Cafe Depot today, the woman ahead of me was talking on her cell phone so hard she couldn’t follow what was going on. When she was fumbling around for her money, and still talking, I got mad and reached over to touch her shoulder. Me: (level but stern):  “You’re taking my time. Stop talking.”

The woman was perfectly polite about it. She got her money out, and noted that she had been reaching for it, then paid and took her coffee before she started talking on the phone again.
I always feel silly after I get angry, so it touched me when Lynn, the young monarch of the Cafe Depot counter people, thanked me for saying something. The cell phone people drive the Depot staff crazy, she said, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Then, over by the milk and cream pitchers, a young fellow on staff appeared at my elbow and thanked me too. I had no idea I’d been doing the right thing! I thought I’d just got mad and lost my cool.

Barstool embarrassments

Milton, one of my cafe buddies, claims he heard the following at the Bifteck, our local bar. A fellow was trying to pick up a girl. He told her about how he was an actor, mainly, but he did some work as a shoe salesman too.

Girl:   “Isn’t that frustrating? I mean, you being an actor but having to sell shoes.”
Guy:   “No, no, not really. There are a lot of parallels, kind of a strong connection really. Because when you’re selling, you’re performing. I mean, from my perspective, it’s essentially retail theater.” 
Milton claims that the man, at this point, lifted both hands to make the air quotes gesture. That sounds too perfect, but Milton swears by it. The man went on to use the “retail theater” phrase four or five times before the girl excused herself to visit the ladies room and then disappear.