Is It Bad Manners or Poor Manners?

It’s been a long year already, but what’re you gonna do? First thing, I guess, is to welcome new subscribers.

Welcome!

I’m thrilled to have you here and horrified that I genuinely can’t remember what my auto-generated welcome letter said. I had planned to revamp it over the New Year holiday, but, as I mentioned at the beginning, it’s been a long year.

Second thing, I guess, is to thank my less-new subscribers for continuing to open these emails, and also to invite them to finally take the plunge and join Substack (and by “join” I mean fill out a profile, there’s no charge for any of this). There are a lot of new faces here and it would be awesome if yours was one of them.

OK Everyone is welcomed and thanked.

I’ve returned to my notebook for ideas and want to share with you a story that’s been brewing for maybe two years.

We’d just finished visiting my daughter in Washington and were camped out in Spokane International Airport’s small departure terminal. My wife and I travel together as well as can be expected, she being one of those people for whom being on time matters.

We’d secured seats right near the gate with only hours to spare before departure and she’d settled in with her book. It was a working vacation for me, so I cracked my laptop and set to writing when the screaming started.

“Screaming” is an insensitive, ignorant, and maybe xenophobic way to put it. A person who I believe was of South Asian extraction was watching a sitcom in one of that region’s many languages on full blast.

Honestly, my first thought was that all sitcoms must have a “stupid beat.” I couldn’t identify the language, but I could identify the content by the laugh track every 85 seconds.

I thought at first it was a mistake, that he didn’t realize his headphones weren’t connected. Minutes passed and it was clear that he had every intention of just watching TV.

People are the second worst thing about airports. The worst thing, of course, is that they’re militarized (the airports, not the people, well, not all of the people). “Agents” who flunked the security guard test at the local mall are armed and empowered to send to Guantanamo Bay anyone who poses a threat.

Honestly, the threat of violence or delayed departure (or divorce) wasn’t really what kept me from asking him why he thought I wanted to hear his TV show and what was the matter with him. You can’t make people behave, you can only think poorly of them when they don’t.

Put another way: Manners are a gift you give yourself. So is self-righteousness. I went to find someplace else to work.

Once Mr. Sitcom was out of earshot, I found a pub stool and bellied up to one of the shelves the airport provided for weary working travelers like me. As I teetered myself a little closer to the shelf, shufflewalking six or so inches, a ball-capped guy in his mid-forties plugged in next to me and continued his conversation.

Well-tanned even against his fitted olive tee, he shoveled the contents of a one-pound bag of burnt peanuts into his mouth as he spoke. Burnt peanuts (also called French burnt peanuts) are small roasted peanuts red-stuccoed in candy coating.

Now, I like to think I can take a joke as well as the next guy, and since the universe was clearly fucking with me, I decided to try and laugh along. I pulled out my notebook and took notes of his half of the conversation. I figured he was anxious for me to hear what he had to say, so I should pay attention.

Arlo, as we’ll call him, was gossiping with a colleague, agreeing and occasionally saying, “He’s just sad” or “What do you expect?”

One of my notes, verbatim:

Will not run out of food?

Eventually, he lied about having to go and called his girlfriend, in whose ear he continued to chomp away at the candy. At this point, I felt like he was goading me. When he answered her question about what he was eating, I was sure he was.

“I’m eating Boston Baked Beans,” he told her.

I didn’t think I could like him less. But now I was looking for reasons and the fact that he didn’t know what candy he was eating qualified.

What a boor!

After maybe ten minutes, he rang off saying, “I’ve got to call my kids.”

Then he didn’t. He just sat there scrolling on his phone.

It felt so good to be so much better than another person.

I’ve been thinking about manners a lot. Like, as opposed to courtesy. There is something awful and colonial about manners, but they hold a real appeal. I think a huge part of it is just that sense of superiority, the idea that since you know better you are better.

I may be the youngest person you know who takes off his hat indoors. It drove my mother nuts to catch us wearing our hats in the house. It was a question of respect, I think, or maybe of a polite recognition of decorum; like a signal showing you’re going to behave in a certain way. It’s a question of courtesy more than of manners.

Arlo the peanut man, as distasteful as I found him, wasn’t being a jerk in his life, he was being a jerk in mine. I mean he wasn’t talking to me with his mouth full, he was talking to people who clearly weren’t bothered by it. Sitcom Man, on the other hand, was being a jerk in everyone’s life.

It makes me wonder at the things I do that I think are courteous and why I think that. In my mind, I behave the way I want other people to behave, but doesn’t everybody?

Just to harp on the phone thing, now that I think about it, people who have open conversations on their phones probably wouldn’t object if everyone did that. In my mind that would be an unacceptable cacophony, but they might experience the world very differently. I mean, they do, they must.

It’s so hard to remember to have these kinds of moments, though. I mean, the right move from the beginning was to bathe in the absurdity of that unintelligible sitcom, break the fourth wall in my mind, and know how funny it would be if it were happening to anyone else.

It’s not that I wasn’t right to be bothered or offended by Sitcom Man’s genuine lack of courtesy, only that my righteousness deprived me of a couple of giggles.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

In case you’re not subscribed to my “Object History” feed, I’m getting ready to wrap up my first story. It didn’t go the way I’d planned, but it’s not a bad read. I’m planning on finishing the text next week.

After that, though, I’m going to put together an audio version that’s cleaner. I didn’t write the story I intended, which is why it got a little clunky. I think I could bring more to it with audio.

Speaking of Absurd Things

I don’t really post to Facebook anymore, but I still do my “Best Sentence of the Day” schtick with some regularity on YouTube. If I get the decks clear I might find more goofiness for YouTube, like random short readings.

Notes: Here are some of the Notes I’ve liked (or written) recently as an enticement to poke around on Substack if you haven’t yet.

Finally, I do a weekly funeral news video that might be the only weekly funeral news video in the whole world. I haven’t checked, but how many could there possibly be?

TR