When I sat down at my friend Pete’s dinner party I noticed a particularly weasly fellow sitting to my left. I ignored him for most of the meal, trying to entertain my wife, whose English is not perfect. A chubby Australian chump sat to her right, and had surely already offended her when he told us he'd divorced his Korean wife prior to meeting the lanky, film scholar Negress perched at his left. He recommended a winery in my hometown, and at the end of the meal lamented the mediocrity of espressos in America. Apparently the espressos in Australia are something to behold, and apparently that unique breed of South Pacific white trash appreciates said espressos. But why had he ignored the general mediocrity of the meal as a whole? Why hadn’t he condemned the crap faux-Tuscan atmosphere? The ludicrious waitress with the red curly hair? The three slices of salty ham they called proscuitto and sold for $10? Why hadn’t he critiqued the fact that at a table of Descartes and Hegel scholars, at a table of people who give Japanese lesbian authors translated into French (not English) to a birthday boy who doesn’t speak French, a table of former child actors turned film PhD getters, that no one had the guts to step forward and order a bottle of wine when the time came to decide?
I suppose that somewhere within me, there is a wannabe academic. The life of the academic appeals to me, if for nothing else, they’re seemingly important and don’t really work. Probably more accurately, they are clearly self-important and work very hard. The worm sitting to my right in the mediocre Italian restaurant was studying, as I recall, post-Darwinian psychology, or, anyway, how cognitive psychology had evolved post-Order of Species.
My friend Pete? He interviews people who channel, meaning, as a verb; they talk to spirits. Or, spirits talk through them. He’s spent countless hours talking to people who do this. He interviewed one guy in South Florida who claimed to be a Dolphin named Sea Spray. His message was: “BE HAPPY AND FREE.” I’d like to think Pete was happy, but I’m not sure. On the outside he was effervescent, decisive, and present…in the most neo-Buddhist sense of that word. He was bald, perfectly, and had a gigantic Croatian cranium. But in his darker moments he has revealed himself as calculatingly aloof, and once ranted at a coffee shop for 30 minutes about how he had asked and answered life’s existential questions, how could his mother not allow him to save face by offering to fly him out to Indianapolis to see his ailing father? He analyzed things without censoring himself and is surely convinced he is one of Nietzche's supermen. What a bitch to be in a relationship, where pure logic rarely prevails, with Pete, or quite possibly anyone sitting at that table that night. A pacifist to the extreme, I can’t help buy think the woman who finds herself in a relationship with Pete would feel mentally inadequate, small, and might prefer to be abused physically by brainless brute in a white tanktop than to be intellectually eaten alive by Pete.
And live eating was precisely on the menu at the shitty Italian joint in a freshly gentrified section of Oakland.
No one was talking to the worm on my left. He remarked that he was precisely in the middle of the table, and was caught between two conversations. “Two vortexes,” I said. “Two galaxies!" He corrected me. Two galaxies in…” he trailed off into some sort of vocabularic diarrhea that I can’t recall now. His obvious attempt to better what was my remark me wasn’t as annoying as it was alarming. Why would someone who is obviously being left out of the conversation for a precise reason attempt so directly portray himself as a victim of the situation, yet alienate the one person taking pity on him by playing a pithy game of one-upmanship? And perhaps more importantly for my stake in this, why the hell didn’t I turn back towards my companion and continue to ignore the chump?
Bored in general with the entire situation I engaged the fuck, much to my chagrin. “Are you an academic?” I said, foolishly admitting to the understood parameters of the situation by calling him by his preferred species name. “Yes,” he said, sheering down his thoughts into a concise, definite affirmation. It would be the single simplified thought that would slip from between his lips for the rest of the night, and the rest of his life as far as I was concerned.
I followed with the next obvious question, inquiring as to what subject he had sacrificed his social grace to. What theory, what errant claim to history, and what sad lifelong attempt at permanence had he devoted his entire value to anyone to?
At this point there was no understanding him. He was propelled into a flight of fancy where he and he alone, could masturbate in the outer reaches of galaxies that only he had discovered. More to the point he was clearly trying to alienate me, a social masochist of the highest order, he sought to enlighten himself and feel included in something by excluding me. And it worked, to some degree. I wanted nothing to do with him and asked no questions when he’d finished his plea. I simply stared through his black rimmed glasses into the eyes of a man lost in his own time, certifying that I had paid my due and given him his full airtime, and slowly turned back to my mediocre Italian meal in gentrified Oakland, just as my companion had done long before, finished the meal, plopped down my $100, and left.