Stranger Rants

Wow.

Here's something scary: what if I become one of those people who places long, rambling, overly emotional phone calls to service personnel? I have to ask because there's a guy doing it right now to one of my coworkers, and it started as a request to make an appointment with someone else. He's persistent, unstoppable, immune to polite coughing and "excuse me, sir"s and now, God bless him, he's on speaker phone. The three of us, my two coworkers and I, are being pulled along on a trip to a mysterious parade, an episode that the caller promises "explains it all" though it does anything but. PTSD is mentioned in an off-hand way, as is bipolar disorder, and I'm struggling to find some kind of frame to put this in, some way to think about the fact that we're all listening to this man and he's not aware of his expanded audience, even though he's the one who called, and who continues to ramble. Now someone's pissed on his floor at a house party, though he does a polite detour around the word-- "something not polite, something wet"-- and we can only assume. Surely this means he's at least partially aware that he has commandeered an audience...

This has happened to me before. I used to work at a bookstore that was a regular stop on the crazy/lonely call tree. A woman I'll call Phyllis used to call regularly from a halfway house to chat about her theories on particle physics, and then to whisper about how she was sure her roommate was stealing her medication. A man I'll call Walter used to call and order obscure war books he never came in to pick up, and then launch into lectures about battle strategies and how no one appreciates a genius.

Back then, I liked to think I lived in a rich stew of found art, and that if I just stopped and listened hard enough, I'd be rewarded with some small nugget of truth. So I listened to bums at bus stops, I let callers to my various jobs ramble on and on, I even suffered through a pancake dinner with a guy who claimed that ever since he was little, he'd been trained every summer by a secret paramilitary governmental organization-- he looked at me sadly at one point, while I drizzled syrup in a giant X over my blueberry short stack and said, "Do you know how alienating it is to me, knowing that I could kill you right now with my bare hands?" I was so bored and hungry by that point that I shoved a huge wad of pancake in my mouth and dared him to try it.

I wonder about being the crazy person on the phone for two reasons: 1) I am now 29 and my capacity for starry-eyed wonder at all the fascinating sub-species of crazy in other people has proportionately dwindled, and 2) my relative passion about my own obsessions and opinions has risen. Simplified, the equation looks like this: Your Crazy = Not As Interesting As Mine. This is an interesting shift in the balance of power between me and the outside world. I'm finding myself much more likely to commandeer conversations with elaborate metaphors taken from BBC nature programs, or to hold forth on the edicts of obscure dead dictators (Turkmenbashi), and less likely to listen politely to the glazed-over rants of strangers I meet in passing.

Which is not to say that I tune out the glazed-over rants of my loved ones. No, no. Pants can chant a string of military acronyms and profanity for nigh on twenty minutes and I will nod sweetly and absorb.

I'm just less interested in the stranger-rant as an art form these days. It takes more to impress me, frankly. Props, maybe. A sock puppet holding forth on the conspiracy of the flu shot and how it makes him sicker and sicker every year might hold my attention better than the slouchy looking dude in line ahead of me at the K-Mart. Otherwise, I'm finding myself closer and closer to pulling on my face and stamping my feet like a kid while I whine, "Shuuuuuutttt uuuuuuppppp!"

The inherent insensitivity in wanting to do this comes from not wanting to be a listener at that particular moment. But here's the rub: I think anybody who rants isn't interested in listening in the first place, and I worry sometimes that the urge to write is close to the urge to say exactly what you mean with no interruptions. Does being a writer make me more susceptible to rant-thinking, or bad listening? It can, sure. (Like just then, where I posed a question and then answered it myself). Since I've got the mike, I'll expand my thinking on this:

Writing is often necessarily a solitary pursuit, and a certain amount of talking to oneself is, in fact, occupational therapy. But when you do that to the exclusion of others, and when you stop really listening to the conversations around you, you get a closed feedback loop, and all the thinking goes stale. This, I believe is when people rant. When they get an idea, like a dead squirrel up in the ventilation, and instead of calling in someone for help on it, they shut all the windows and simmer.

With that pleasant image, I think I'll step back and hope someone else chimes in.