I can’t picture a journey on foot, on a bus or in the car, or a session at the gym, without music, and when the battery dies or my earphones decide they’d rather stay at home than come with me, it doesn’t quite qualify as a tragedy, but nearly. You could call it taste. I suspect it’s so I don’t have to be alone with what’s in my head.
For some time now I’ve been keeping company with Mr. Know It All, by Teddy Swims, backed up by The Night We Met, by Lord Huron, and Self Aware, by Temper City. If you’re here, you can very probably work out the thread that joins them, and perhaps even the order in which I started listening to them. I’m not going to confirm anything.
To a distracted ear, Mr. Know It All might sound like a complaint from someone fed up with a smart alec, or like one of those men who notice what others take a while to process. I hear something else. I hear a man complaining about himself, about that habit of assuming, before taking the first step, that he already knows what’s going to happen, how things will end, and that there’s basically no need to walk in order to meet the disaster ahead. A rather fatalistic view, harsh and perhaps self-pitying; draw your own conclusions. All of it dressed with human relationships, which to this day I don’t fully understand.
But this isn’t a piece about her, or about why I shouldn’t have gone near her in the first place. Let’s leave that for later, with a little barley juice and a Julio Jaramillo record in the air. This one is about the times when, before starting anything at all, we’ve already assumed the most spectacular of disasters.
You surely have more than one or two memories of something you wanted to do and, for fear of failing, never even began: the business of your life, the course that would give you the title you longed for, that activity that wasn’t going to solve your life but would probably make it easier to bear. In another thread we talked about a brave entrepreneur who meant to build her financial success one made-to-measure card at a time, until walking her pet, a touch of hunger and uncooperative weather clipped the wings of so gallant a venture.
I laugh, but I could draw up a list of my own ventures orphaned in advance, and there may be more of them than I’d care to admit, especially given that my dreams took no part in the universal handing-out of realistic limits. They start with tremendous enthusiasm. I research them, I find them a name that sounds very good in English, and just as they begin to take shape I become obsessed with trifles that to others are decoration, and I start imagining everything that could go wrong. It sounds like a virtue, believe me, but over time it turns into a small self-inflicted torture. That’s when the funeral begins: discreet, administrative, no flowers. The idea moves from a folder called “Projects” to one called “Someday”, which is an elegant way of building a cemetery. A marvel of efficiency: failing without investing any resources.
Except here comes the twist. As you know, and if you don’t I’ll tell you, my working life has settled into project management, an activity where anticipating isn’t a defect but a virtue that spares future pain. What ruins my Sundays pays my rent. Colleagues, at different times and without comparing notes, have told me more or less the same thing: “Have you got a crystal ball? How did you know this was going to happen?”
Here I could easily pin on medals I haven’t earned, because there’s a trick to it. I don’t predict anything. I do a rough analysis, compare it with other projects of a similar kind, add that touch of freshly ground black pepper and present a menu of what might happen: that such and such will fail, that the assumption everything depends on won’t hold or, the classic, that the client thinks we’re the only ones who work on projects. Sometimes I surprise myself by reaching outcomes others wouldn’t arrive at in their wildest dreams. I’m also wrong, often, and that calms me, because if I was wrong the catastrophe didn’t happen. That’s why, whenever I carry out this work of divination and futurology, I end the same way:
“I hope I’m wrong.”
Writing this, I got curious about where the song came from, and I was in for a surprise. Swims has said he became obsessed with the prophet’s dilemma, an idea from Robert K. Merton, the sociologist who named the self-fulfilling prophecy. The dilemma goes like this: doctors announce a flu epidemic, people rush to get vaccinated, the epidemic doesn’t come and the doctors are treated as alarmists. Heeding the prophecy is what makes it false. In other words, my job. A sociologist described my trade decades ago, and there I was thinking I had a difficult personality.
Swims takes the idea into love and that’s where it gets ugly: you can protect something so much that you lose it, or see it coming and lose it anyway. That’s why the song wouldn’t let me go. It’s the same habit with the result reversed. In a project, announcing the disaster prevents it. With a person, announcing it produces it: you start measuring silences, interpreting what wasn’t said, drawing up the contingency plan before the first coffee, and one day the other person gets tired of being managed and exactly what you predicted comes true. What a fine crystal ball. At work my pessimism is the vaccine. Everywhere else it’s the flu.
So much for theory. What I didn’t expect was to have it complicated by a lady who buys biscuits.
Today, like every day for some time now, you open your shop. You’ve spent some months keeping up that slightly capricious dream that someone will walk in, try something you made and have a few seconds of happiness, and you know more or less how the day will go. With new customers there’s a script written nowhere but in your head: a cordial greeting, some options for the undecided and, why not, a special recommendation to see if you can shift that product that for operational reasons needs to go soon. With the regulars the script runs deeper, it’s no longer just goods for money: how have you and your wife been, haven’t seen you in days, what’s happened to Fido that he isn’t with you today.
And there’s the other script, almost theatrical, belonging to that austere lady who at any hour of the day is fully made up, in outfits the year 1992 might like to reclaim. For the purposes of this account we’ll call her madame, although I suspect she’d find our pronunciation offensive. Madame doesn’t greet, she complains. Today about the gardener, that young lad of fifty-something who cut back the petunias she worked so hard to grow, though she’s never given them a drop of water in their lives. That the young lad on the sixth floor is a good-for-nothing who doesn’t even say hello in the lift. That the young girl on the fifth, yes, that one from somewhere out on the coast, has her on the verge of madness, gathering with those people from early on to make noise, laugh and cook, and they’re surely the sort who inject marijuanas. For madame, sustained happiness is reasonable evidence of criminal activity.
You listen attentively to that morning’s statement of grievances while she studies the display with the enthusiasm of a health inspector who has just received an anonymous tip-off, and uses the pauses in her address to ask whether that’s today’s.
—It came out this morning, ma’am.
—Well, it looks like yesterday’s.
That one has too much sugar, that éclair is misspelt and mispronounced, because she lived in France, we don’t know whether for fifteen years or a four-hour layover at Charles de Gaulle, and there she learned from chef so-and-so what good food is, and here there’s nothing but botched jobs and second-rate imitations. Then she orders the usual: artisan bread and wholemeal biscuits, the same ones she’s been buying for months, which she’ll never admit she adores and whose quality she insists on doubting. There’s something touching about such loyalty to discontent.
But today you decide to go one step further. You’ve already packed her order and, in a small plot twist, you’ve written a note on the kraft paper: “We’re honoured that you choose us. Have an excellent day, and remember you’ll always be welcome here, in your home.”
At first she doesn’t notice. She’s looking in her purse for the banknote she set aside, because she already knew what she was going to buy and carries the exact amount so that no one has to give her change, since coins have no place in her fine handbag. After the transaction she looks with puzzlement at those letters on a paper that’s supposed to be free of any imperfection. She reads them. For a second her face seems to let a shy smile through. And immediately:
—You people shouldn’t be writing nonsense to customers. Spend that time making better products.
And off she goes, without saying goodbye, naturally.
It took me a while to see the thing about the banknote.
Madame leaves home knowing what she’ll buy, how much it costs and that she won’t get any change. She knows what the fifth floor is on, how to pronounce what we can’t pronounce and that the thing in the display looks like yesterday’s. She arrives with her disappointment planned, confirms it, pays the exact amount and leaves with nothing having touched her. I’ve spent this whole story laughing at her, and it turns out she’s the person most like me in this text.
Now look at what you did behind the counter. Exactly what I do: you noticed a pattern, compared it, got ahead of it, had the order ready before she walked in. Same technique, same pepper. With one difference that has kept me thinking more than I’d like: all my plans are made so that something doesn’t happen, and that note is the first I’ve seen made so that something does. “You’ll always be welcome here, in your home” is a forecast with no support whatsoever in the record. Merton said that sometimes it’s enough to treat something false as true for it to end up being so, and he said it as a warning. Nobody told him it could also be used on purpose, on a paper bag.
Did it work? I have no idea, and I’m the one who made madame up. That smile may have been affection, or the memory of someone, or she may have been about to sneeze and I, with my certain fondness for finding meanings, may have built a sentimental theory around a muscle contraction. Some people are simply unbearable, and there’s no need to invent a tragic childhood for everyone who treats others badly. Nor did I become a new man: I still make lists, I still imagine scenarios and I have no intention of giving up a habit that pays my rent. All I know is that madame has spent months coming back to buy biscuits she says are bad, in a shop she finds a disgrace, when she could go anywhere else. There are very strange ways of saying thank you, and some can’t be told apart from a complaint.
I wrote mine too, and not on kraft paper. I’d already done the analysis, compared it with situations of a similar kind, added the pepper, and I wrote it anyway. I’d love to tell you there was a shy smile, or at least a sneeze. What I got wasn’t so poetic: it was a blow that joined the others that lately have left my nose flat and that I’ve grown used to taking. The crystal ball was right. Rarely has being right made me so angry.
But if I don’t try I start out losing, and my skin, though tired, is thicker now. I already have another note written. I’ve done the analysis and I know exactly how it ends.
I hope I’m wrong.