A man mounts a stage in the Catskills. He looks out at the audience but he can’t see much, because the lights blind him. Glasses clink, people look up expectantly. A drop of sweat falls from his armpit into his tee shirt. Another runnels down the side of his face. He contemplates telling a Jew joke. Instead, he says,
‘Do we have any mobile home park owners in the audience?’
A few middle-aged white guys raise their hands. An attractive woman-of-a-certain-age with a heavy upstate accent raises a hand. A young blonde woman of indeterminate eastern European origin raises hers. One of the men shouts, ‘Yes!’
‘Do we have anyone from Brooklyn?’
A beefy guy cups his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and shouts, ‘Yeah’!
‘Anyone from Cleveland?’
People laugh.
‘The Mistake by the Lake”?
More laughter.
‘Any Canadians?’
A few skinny people look at their shoes.
‘Park owners – what do you get when you ask a resident who is behind on rent to pay?’
A hand goes up. ‘I get smoke up my ass’, a park owner says.
‘What kind of smoke?’
The park owner shrugs. He does not understand the question.
‘What do you get when a contractor digs a septic tank late or over budget?’
‘I get stories. My truck broke down, my step uncle died, SafeDig didn’t show up.’
‘Smoke-up-the-ass, you mean?’
‘Yup.’
‘You must have a large bung-hole by now.’
The man looks out over the abyss, punctuated by cocktail tables and cigar smoke. So this is what it feels like to bomb, he thinks.
‘What if a contractor pours a pad that looks like oatmeal, or a paver pours one inch of asphalt instead of four?’
‘More smoke.’
‘What if a resident has a pitbull, or an unregistered car, or a pile of shit in his lot?’
‘Same.’
‘Canadians – you following this? I can speak louder and slower, if you like.’
.
Commit this ordered list to memory:
- Hydrogen
- Neon
- Xenon
- Lead
- Barium
- Iodine
- Antimony
- Tantalum.
You could memorize it, but it would be work. To do that, you would have to repeat the list to yourself several times, write it down and maybe chunk some of the elements together.
Now, imagine you are hitch-hiking near Alamogordo. You hear a bang and see a mushroom cloud. A neon sign flashes, RED ALERT. Xena, the Warrior Princess snaps into action. She whips out a pistol and plugs her ex husband, named Barry, with hot lead. He pours iodine on the wound. It hurts so much that even you can feel it – and you are a football field away, and you don’t know the guy. Xena starts in on Barry about the alimony he owes her. Then, she starts taking off her clothes. Each time he reaches out to grab her, she tantalizes him by moving in such a way that the part of her body that he reaches for remains half an inch away from his hand.
The list is easier to remember when it becomes a story with sense-hooks.
A common way to remember numbers is to construct mnemonic pegs on which to hang digits. This is done by associating classes of phonemes with numbers. For example, you can associate ‘t’ and ‘d’ (apical stops) with ‘one’, ‘n’ with ‘two’, and ‘m’ with ‘three’. ‘R’ is ‘four’, ‘l’ is ‘five’, ‘ch’ and ‘j’ (palatal fricatives) are ‘six’. ‘k’ and ‘g’ (velar stops) are ‘seven’. ‘f’ and ‘v’ are ‘eight’, and ‘p’ and ‘b’ are ‘nine’. Zero is ‘s’. Once the user associates these phonemes with these digits, she can commit strings of numbers to memory by converting them into words and phrases. For example, the number 82,590 can be remembered as ‘fun lips’, or ‘venal piss’. Either of those noun phrases are easier to remember than ’82,590’. Once the phrase is stored in your memory, it is easy to take it out when you need it and convert it back to digits.
A more powerful way to remember things is to construct a memory palace, and to use the memory palace to make stories. That is how people memorize decks of cards. To use this method, you remember a structure that you know well – the house where you live now, say, or the house where you were born. When you visit it in your mind, you always enter from the same place and you always proceed in the same manner – clockwise or counter-clockwise, first floor, basement, second floor, attic. When you need to commit something to memory, you walk through the house in your mind and distribute the things you want to remember. For example, if you wanted to remember the Periodic Table, you would first see a hydrogen bomb exploding at the foot of your driveway. A guy with a squeaky high voice – the kind you get when you inhale a helium balloon – bursts out of the Port-a-John stationed between the mailbox and the garage door. A homeless guy blitzed on Lithium sits by the flowers planted at the head of the driveway. When you open the door to the garage, Beryl Markham, naked, awaits you.
A naked English woman – who can un-remember that?
People are cognitively hard-wired to think in stories. Narrative thinking shows up everywhere. When a patient sees a therapist, the patient and the therapist work to construct a narrative of how the patient got to the here-and-now. When a litigator presents her case to a jury, she needs to put together a story. Substantive doctrines of law, court procedures and rules of evidence are important – but the way to convince a jury is to tell a story that makes sense and that appeals on a personal level.
Park owners in the audience – how many times in a day do you hear stories from residents who don’t pay or contractors who don’t deliver?
Quite a few.
When people fuck up, they fall back on the cognitive patterns that they are most comfortable with. We are most comfortable thinking in stories. That is why, when residents or contractors fuck up, they don’t give you the answer you want. They give you stories.
A month ago, I asked the maintenance guy at my park in central New York if he could check up on the water system for me. ‘I can’t do it right now’, he texted back. ‘I am at my brother’s bachelor party.’ I don’t care if you are at a strip club now, I thought. Just tell me when you can check the water pressure.
A resident in my park in central New York bounced a check this month. Because of that, she is short for this month and last month, too. When I asked Dee Dee, the manager at that park, what was going on, she said that the resident had changed jobs, she has other expenses, and her new employer is holding back her paycheck. ‘I don’t give a shit why she can’t pay’, I explained. ‘I want to know whether, and, if so, when, she will pay.’
When the maintenance guy at that park screwed up a cement job, I asked him what-the-fuck. He told me that the Readymix had delivered cement that was too thick. That’s bullshit, I thought. They will water it down, if you ask. And I don’t care how you fucked it up. I want to know how you will fix it.
When the former maintenance guy at the same park called to tell me why he had been away for a week, I was ready to tell him that I didn’t give a crap. I just wanted him to get his ass back to the park and get on top of things. Then, he told me that he had moved out because his wife had slept with his oldest son. He was staying with a friend for a week, but he was going to move back as soon as the mother and step-son moved out. This is not what I had in mind, I thought. But it is a hell of a story. I will strip-mine it.
People hate it when you derail their stories. That is because, when you do that, you rob them of their ability to frame the narrative and you take away their cognitive crutch. You are seen as cruel, the same way you would be if you told people that they had to drive by smell. It is the worst part of the job, but you have to do it. If you don’t, the good citizens – the people who pay their lot rent and who take care of their lots – will suffer. The issue is not one that is well-suited to narrative thinking. We are prey to several types of cognitive biases that were helpful when we were fleeing large cats on the savannah but that distort our views in everyday life now. Salience bias, survivorship bias, clustering, normalcy bias, confirmation bias – these are all cognitive shortcuts that are comfortable, but that can distort the truth in contexts that call for slower, more analytical thinking. So is thinking in stories. Saussure said that a language is like a chess game. To understand a chess game at any time, you do not need to know its history. You just need to know the configuration of the board at the applicable time. A language – he said – is the same. To understand its grammar, you don’t need to know how it got there. You just need to know what it is, now. A contractual default is the same. To understand it, you don’t need to know how it happened. You just need to know whether, and, if so, when, it will be fixed.
So – when a resident tells you that she can’t pay because her car broke down, or her father-in-law died, or the bank screwed up, or her benefits were cut off, or she didn’t get the hours she needed, or her daughter has COVID, or her son has a hole in his brain, or her HOB is screwing someone else, or she can’t use a mobile phone, or she gave the rent money to her twenty-year-old son because he wanted to go to Louisiana and it’s Christmas, you know, the proper response is a polite, ‘Dollar figure and date, please.’ The way the chess-game got here is beside the point. All that matters is how to win it. You will not be liked for doing this – but you owe it to the good citizens to hold everyone to their contractual obligations.
.
The man in the Catskills looks out over the audience and wonders if he will be big in France someday, even if Americans think he is meh. He contemplates kidnapping an older comic and blackmailing a television network. He imagines Sandra Bernhard dancing alone, in a skimpy bikini, in front of the older comic, tied to a bed. He thinks, ‘Life is easy. Comedy is hard.’ He hears crickets, and remembers that he forgot to take his blood pressure meds. He thinks, ‘Tragedy is a mobile home park resident walking through a park in northern New York. His girlfriend has kicked him out, the engine block of his truck is split in two, he has testicular cancer and his son is severely autistic. Comedy is the same guy walking down the same road, only he slips on a banana peel and falls into a sink-hole.’