Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [58]
Slowly it dawned on me that the voice belonged to a guy I had met a few nights before at a dinner party. Apparently he had gotten my number from mutual friends and decided to call. The content of the message, when I boiled it all down, was basically that he thought it would be a good idea for us to spend some time together. Nothing scary there.
The bloodcurdling part, however, was in the way he chose to express that thought to me. Here is the actual transcript: “Hello, Merrill? I’d like to see you sometime, the earlier the better. Right now would be perfect. If you’re in the mood to do something tonight, that would be good. Because my moods shift so dramatically these days that it’s easier for me to go on impulse than to make a date with someone and then realize when the time comes that I am not really in the mood to do anything. So that’s kind of the way I want to operate.”
He might as well have said: “Hey, Merrill … if you have a ton of free time and would like to babysit a self-absorbed, needy, demanding middle-aged adult who is only interested in using you as a sounding board for his neurotic problems, you can look long and hard but I doubt you’ll find anyone better than me.”
His words were immediately filed for posterity in my very special pantheon of unintentionally revealing statements, right next to those of the seemingly nice woman I met at a job who told me that she spoke with her shrink every day on the phone and then went on to ask, “Can I have your phone number? I love to talk on the phone, but I wore a lot of my old friends out.”
One of the prime achievements of my adult life, right up there with owning my own washer and dryer, has been learning to read the warning signs broadcast by an asshole. With all the social networking going on, the importance of watching and listening for pernicious symptoms when you first meet someone is more important than ever, because these days the lines have become so blurred that it’s easy to find out you are “friends” with all kinds of people you simply have no reason to trust, beyond a stated appreciation of Radiohead.
Somewhere between our Neanderthal beginnings and the twenty-first century, the instructional software that was supposed to be installed in each of us to teach us how to connect with appropriate members of our species for the purposes of mating seems to have been infected with some kind of virus. Every other species on planet Earth received their behavioral software, plus tutorials. Take the buff-breasted sandpiper male, for example, who arrives straight from the manufacturer knowing how to flash the undersides of his wings and make those special clucking sounds that magnetize the female and fill her with lust. Or the male porcupine, who somehow understands, despite unfavorable odds, how to successfully pass on the family lineage through the porcupine female, a creature covered with needlelike sharpened quills who is receptive for a few hours a year.
Only we human beings, working with a nearly nonexistent connection to our own instincts, seem to grow increasingly more clueless about basic behavior as we evolve. By the time every religion and governmental body going back to the beginning of civilized life on planet Earth got finished adding its own personally designed improvements to the instruction manual, the rules regarding human mating had become as self-contradicting and confusing as a Japanese game show.
For a look at how things used to work in the simpler but not particularly good old days, witness the past and present women of Kyrgyzstan. Here is a community of lucky gals who, according to The New York