In Philadelphia last week, Mesco and I had a brief discussion of how introverted I really am. Somehow Myers-Briggs personality types came up and she took issue with my deep-seated introversion as part of my general INFJ personality type. (I think a lot of psych stuff is bunk, but I’m actually a reasonably big believer in some of the insights of Myers-Briggs, at least as far as my own personality.) Citing the fact that I have a good number of friends and enjoy spending time with them, she questioned whether I’m really the type who’d be just as happy at home with a book or a puzzle as out on the party scene.

Consider this my stirring rebuttal to her questioning my introversion. Although, as this will illustrate and we even sort of agreed on before I departed Philly, there is a wide gulf between how I regard my friends and how I regard strangers. Herein, as they say, may lie the rub.

The last time I was in New York City – a place I already have serious qualms with – I went to a bar in Manhattan in mid-afternoon with Drew and Greg. I’ll give you a few moments to digest that sentence. … Yes, Greg and I went to a bar in Manhattan. Before dark. We were looking for a distraction that had less overhead expense than basketball or bowling, but provided a similar level of entertainment in the relatively short time the three of us had together. A game of pool seemed as likely a candidate as any other activity.

Greg, despite being a tenured college professor and the lead singer in a band, is a bit of an introvert. Actually, I’d probably put him squarely on the fence between extroversion and introversion, but I’d bet his gut inclination is towards the latter. He likes people, but would rarely be the kind to go up and initiate contact, unless there were some sort of dispute he could mediate. Drew, on the other hand, is to extroversion what Michael Jackson was to dance. Not only does he embrace others with gusto, he embarks on mind-bending tours of personal exploration with total strangers to fulfill his inner curiosity. He is one of two people I’ve heard admit that they truly enjoy making other people uncomfortable in social situations and/or discussions. And unlike the other, I’ve seen it in action many a time.

Perhaps none was so personally felt as our encounter in this Manhattan bar where the three of us went in search of a pool table. The bar was half-empty, replete mostly with dingy career drinkers, most of whom were more than happy to be glued in equal parts to their stool and the crazily mounted televisions over the racks of bottles. Greg and I were both heartened to see that two of the three pool tables in the place were wide open.

But not Drew. He strode straight toward the one occupied table and introduced himself. Wearing a Red Sox cap in April in Manhattan, he couldn’t wait to make the acquaintance of the rail-thin elderly gentleman and his somewhat portly female companion, both teetering under a regimen of midday alcohol. Within seconds, he had challenged them to a battle of skill on the green felt.

Greg and I, hanging back, were horrified as the man (probably 68 going on 92) started blurting out random threats of our downfall and explaining, for the second time already, that he was called “Minnesota Skinny” for both his poolhall acumen and slender frame. A brief sidebar with Drew failed to convince him that we should refrain from poking this elderly badger. It was going to be a long day.

We proceeded to annihilate Minnesota Skinny and his counterpart, who proved to be his wife of some indeterminate number of years. M. Skinny’s primary contribution to the game was an unending stream of vitriol and putrid jokes at the expense of Mrs. Skinny, as his personality quickly revealed itself to be somewhere between a low-budget raunchy teen comedy and what I imagine 1940’s lounge acts were like. Greg and I were both a few years out of our last pool game, so the match was interminable as four of us bounced errant shots and waited for Drew’s next turn in the rotation to hear that pleasant sinking sound. Between shots (both his and ours), Drew would turn to us with his irrepressible face-wide grin and say “I love this guy! Isn’t this great?” To which Greg and I strained to make our looks blander and more slightly pained than thirty seconds prior.

To extroverts, it may be hard to explain exactly what made the experience so excruciating for me. Or it may be completely obvious that playing pool with a hypercompetitive elderly drunk stranger while he peppers us with sexist jokes and bad breath would be unpleasant. I really don’t know, because I don’t know what it’s like to look at a stranger and think the odds are better of enjoying interaction with them than not. As you may recall, I have a hard enough time thinking that about people I vaguely know.

(Incidentally, the linked post above is 8th out of 9,000 webpages for the phrase “ducking behind pillars”. Neat. Perhaps even more fascinatingly, all of the other top-page references are about first-person shooter experiences, 8 of them in video games and one in Baghdad. Hm.)

Fast-forward to today. I walk Emily to her first class in Math Camp, a three-week session that serves as the prelude to her two-year Master’s Program at the Woodrow Wilson School (and also explains why we’re here already in mid-August). Being still without a coffee-maker until mine (probably smashed, but who knows) shows up tomorrow, I head out to Panera, which has become our coffee stop of choice on and after this trip. After acquiring a coffee and cinnamon roll, I am searching for some reading material near the newsstand before heading outside to sit. Sitting nearby, an elderly gentleman with a cane and a strange curmudgeonly smile (think twilight-years Kurt Vonnegut if he were shorter, overweight, and seemed slightly autistic) says “Hello” a little too loudly and I realize he must think that I’ve come to sit in his vicinity. Being both uncaffeinated and me, I decide to pretend I haven’t heard him and dash outside.

I’m sitting outside, contemplating a recently developed idea for a short story (I have finally hit the point in my life where I’ve detoxed enough from work to clear my mind out and am hit almost daily with new ideas, which is extremely exciting and inspiring [I note with some chagrin just now that Mozilla Firefox’s spellcheck seems to have no problem with “detoxed”, which is both colloquial and based on an abbreviation, but cannot accept “webpage” {perhaps more disconcerting, it also seems to not have “spellcheck” in its, well, spellcheck dictionary (I guess the real issue here is whether or not these words require hyphens, which is probably begrudgingly acceptable)}]) and watching the drowsy citizens of Princeton try to put some morning spring in their step, when out wanders Pudgy Vonnegut, slow-stepping it with his cane and a look that the whole world makes him grumpy.

At first I assume he’s leaving Panera, since I’ve been out there for a good ten minutes and he was pretty clearly there before I was. But something about the way he glances at me and then flits his eyes away tells me otherwise. And sure enough, he’s shuffling over toward the only table that’s open of the three outdoor offerings, gradually settling in the equivalent chair to mine at the neighboring mesa. We’re now separated by about three feet, each with our back to the restaurant’s front windows, gandering at passers-by (oh come on, Firefox, “gandering” is no good either?).

I dare not look over overtly, though I’ve already noted with some chagrin that he doesn’t even have a comestible with him. He’s just got his cane on the tabletop in front of him as though that were sufficient reason to take up a table at Panera. And just as I’m making peace with the idea that he’s come over to pursue small-talk with me, he utters the dreaded words: “Nice day, isn’t it?”

It isn’t that I have some social anxiety disorder (if such truly exist, which I doubt) or eternal dread of human contact. It’s that conversations which start with bland observations about the weather are insanely unlikely to produce anything other than drivel throughout their course, and I detest drivel. There’s something about the act of making small-talk with a stranger or a small-time acquaintance that makes me yearn for the opportunity to sweep floors or do dishes or perhaps pick the lint off of a couch cushion. Not only is there nothing redeeming about the activity, but the activity strips me of my belief that anything good can come out of this species. Some of this is irrational and extreme (I know, you can’t believe it), but it’s rooted in how meaningless small-talk makes my soul feel: small and meaningless.

I admit that it’s a nice day and already I’m starting to sweat. (Stop diagnosing me – I just feel uncomfortable when I sense that I’m either talking to someone who is disinterested in talking to me and thus burdening them, or the reverse. I think this feeling is a perfectly reasonable reaction to human autonomy, dignity, and courtesy.) It quickly becomes clear that this guy is a serial conversation-starter (on the east coast – how bizarre) as I learn that he is about to turn 67, has a girlfriend, his wife is deceased, his friend died of diabetes, he has diabetes, his diabetes isn’t that bad, one should really watch their diabetes if one has it, his girlfriend is 65 and is working three jobs, the location of each of these three jobs in proximity to our present location at Panera, that he is looking for his friend who is portly and 72 (here he actually pauses to wait for me to say something, wherein I inform him that no, I have not seen this gentleman this morning), that his friend comes by sometimes zero, one, or two times per day and he was hoping to see him, that his friend lives in an assisted living facility where you can come and go as you please up to twice a day, that his friend often goes twice a day and has to be home by eleven, that it costs $1450 – can you believe it, $1450! – a month to live in this place, the specific itemized prices of each of the additional utilities that his friend pays, that he himself wouldn’t mind living in such a place but that $1450 plus utilities is just out of the question, and so on.

Now my staccato listing of the ground covered in our “conversation” may make it seem like this went by in a hurry. Quite the contrary was actually the case – this man took his sweet time saying things and would often pause looking for the right word and repeat his information a couple times just to make sure it was clear. Which was just as well, since he had little idea of the appropriate volume at which to communicate verbal information, the product of either hearing impairment or too much time talking to himself (or very likely both). I often missed details or whole pieces of information as trucks were going by or some other conversants passed in front of us at high volume, but I was deep into smile-and-nod mode and was not really wild about dragging out the narrative or the pained nature of the interaction by asking for clarification.

It may occur to my readers that I am, in fact, heartless and cruel for begrudging this painfully lonely man a slice of my quiet morning contemplation time. Indeed, pangs of guilt overrode my general discomfort (I actually sweated through my shirt, which is challenging for someone as chronically cold as I am) at times, especially the times he said he would “leave [me] to whatever [I was] doing” and would “be quiet now and leave [me] alone”, both clearly products of feeling like he had imposed on other conversation partners before with his slow streamy monologue. Granted, he followed up those decisively conclusive comments with resumption of his meandering narrative almost immediately, and I didn’t really have reason to feel guilty since I was humoring him to the utmost. Although, to be humored isn’t really what we want, is it?

At the same time, he was pretty well precluding the chance of a traditional two-way conversation with the pace of his own commentary and his inability to really distinguish between the vaguely affirmative things that I said in response. It became fairly clear to me that his approach to oral communication was more or less hard-wired into this dysfunctional morass of information to be glacially ejected at passive listeners, the ironic product of not finding enough listeners in the past and being medically incapable of listening properly (he did admit to a hearing impairment at some point, indicating his right ear, which was sadly devoid of a hearing aid, making me again contemplate why so many elderly seem averse to such devices, prioritizing some weird perception of dignity over having functional interactions with others through speech … the second that my hearing starts to fade, I’m getting two big hearing aids, preferably in teal or forest green).

The question that develops from all this comes in two parts as I see it. One, how can an introvert properly treat strangers with the dignity they deserve and still escape soul-crushing small-talk? Two (and much more importantly, for my money), what can we do for the desperately lonely elderly in our society to build friendships and community as they become increasingly isolated by their own dispositions and the inevitable deaths of their existing network of friends and associates?

The first query is really unimportant and easily dispatched. While I am tempted to say that the answer is for me to wear a T-shirt when alone in public that states my status as an introvert and kindly requests that others refrain from initiating small-talk with me, I can actually imagine no better way of attracting the attention and verbiage of others than by doing precisely that. Maybe I should design and sell such T-shirts so that others may engage in this experiment, but I will personally refrain. The real answer is that I (and others like me, such as there are any) need to suck it up and deal. After all, this experience gave birth to this narrative exploration, which you are still reading and thus getting something from.

No, the important issue is what to do with an aging populous that seems almost predestined to be its own worst enemy in staving off the isolation and breathtaking loneliness of advanced age in America. I am not so short-sighted as to be unable to imagine myself in Pudgy Vonnegut’s place, approaching young strangers who remind me of myself from half a lifetime prior and besieging them with details of my rapidly becoming less interesting existence. (I am after all, a writer, and one who through this very medium here [the blog] turns the pen [keyboard] on my own life a fair bit.) And as fewer people feign interest, the frenzy to hurry the narrative and get the information out to someone, anyone, dear God please just listen to me for five minutes so I don’t have to tell my cat or the wall again, well this is just human nature.

This is the portion of our program where I should present to you some futuristic invention, such as the ListenerBot 9000 TM, which placates grandma so you don’t have to, or I unveil some wise social practice that seems so simple and was universal amongst the Huguenots of sixteenth-century France before they were persecuted for their compassion for older generations. Sadly, dear readers, this problem seems intractably elusive of either such quick-fix. I am tempted to say that the burden to solve this problem rests more heavily on the shoulders of those such as Drew, who at least seem to derive some utility from random interaction with what Barenaked Ladies termed “the old and the bored”. Of course, I also know that some modicum of Drew’s entertainment from these interactions is that he can gently poke fun at such people… I think he would have been far less likely to take on Minnesota Skinny without the ability to both make Greg and I feel uncomfortable and socially challenged and to make some sly jokes at Minnesota Skinny’s expense, while winking to Greg and I. Nothing against Drew – we all have our ways of making pedestrian aspects of our lives more palatable to ourselves and I would do the same were I naturally more extroverted.

But I’m not. And so I will cringe away from Minnesota Skinny and Pudgy Vonnegut and give the name “Jimbob” wherever I have to do so to order food so I don’t have to explain the story behind Storey (or worse yet, answer to Torrey, Stormy, Stony, or Stuart). And Pudgy Vonnegut will continue to accost strangers while his girlfriend works three jobs and his friend goes for walks around Princeton and wonder if anyone is really hearing him when he talks about the importance of staying on a proper diet for diabetics.

Good luck, Pudgy. I wish I had better answers for us both.