Mushrooms

[porphyry]

Yesterday when I picked A. up from school, there were two men there I had never seen before, fathers, evidently, picking up children usually picked up by their mothers. The first one had a lean and hungry look bespeaking a life time of poverty. The second was dressed in a business suit with an expensive haircut. He started talking to the other, at first about the weather, but within two minutes he had elicited his interlocutor's whole life story (he was born in small town in Indiana and had eventually come to St. Louis to find work where he was doing day labor), then their conversation turned to a detailed discussion of the intricacies of mushroom picking, which it turned out they both practiced: it was the case, the second one advised, that the weekend following the height of the spring season could be just as bountiful if one drove a hundred miles north because of the way the season spreads out across the continent. The ability to create this rapport must be connected with a lifetime in sales work: the ability precedes the career I would guess.

It was an amazing tour de force, and one I am sure he just could not help making, but not a very gratifying one to witness.

Comments

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

The ability to create this rapport: amazing indeed. And I see how it isn't very gratifying, but I wonder how come? He didn't actually try to sell or convince him of something, was he? Did he look desperate to make contact? Or was just the pointlessness of his "routine" in that situation repulsive? (The longer I think about it, the more reasons come to my mind to not like this...)

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

He didn't actually try to sell or convince him of something, was he? He wasn't actually trying to sell or convince him of something, was he?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

No, this man could obviously have bought nothing. It was just the other's routine, so ingrained that he couldn't help doing, and probably using it as a replacement for real human interaction. Now that you've helped me to think about, it was this mimetic quality, the conscious or unconscious attempt to fool the other into thinking that there was such real interaction, that offends.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I seem to have achieved this ability with patients and their relatives. It's the only thing in nursing I could say I'm really good at. I may one day try being a salesman, after the recession.

Why not gratifying to witness? Did it sound too fake?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Fake...mimetic...whatever.

It seemed manipulative. Clearly he had nothing to gain from this poor old mushroom picker, but he just could not help himself. Either his habit of setting up the sales pitch is so ingrained he does it compulsively, or else he was trying to make a genuine connection and there is nothing left inside him that is distinguishable from the sales pitch. Or so i fear.

[jouis-sens.livejournal.com]

"he was trying to make a genuine connection and there is nothing left inside him that is distinguishable from the sales pitch"

As astute and succinct a diagnosis of the present State of Things as one could hope to find. That terrible mimeticism all that is left to cover the void of the diremption from anything like actual b(B, if one likes)eing.... I am put perhaps too macabrely in mind of chickens, continuing to go about once separated untimely from their heads...

[jouis-sens.livejournal.com]

On a cheerier note, "the way the season spreads out across the continent" is always a lovely thing to think on. (I'm only macabre once a week, promise.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm macbre much more than that.