Blog 6: Meanderings around Talk and Language and Writing And Words and Meaning Part I

Talk is cheap. What the fuck are you talkin’ about? I was talkin to this guy and he said most everyone he knows is always talking shit.  I never want to talk to him again. There is no talking in this class. There’s no talkin’ to him. 

 Many people think–not without reason—that there’s too much talking littering the airwaves of America. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Noise pollution. Usually, the people who complain the most about the fact that there’s too much talking going on in the streets of America are doing most of the talking and are the source of most of the noise pollution that they’re complaining about. Why don’t they just be quiet? I suppose they would if they could. They can’t. A twelve-step program is in order. 

And It’s true—some people do talk too much. Some people talk too much because they’ fill up their loneliness with talk. If you just keep talking, you won’t notice the sadness that lives in you.  Some people talk too much because they cannot bear silence. They have no idea why silence scares the hell out of them. Some people talk out of their asses. That may be a terrible way to put it—but then again it seems accurate. You ask this type of person a question, they always have an answer that they just pull out of their ass. Their answers are generally wrong, but they are incapable of saying “I don’t know.”  These kinds of people always have to be right and consider themselves to be educated people despite the fact they don’t read books. They will generally climb a tree to tell a lie. 

Sometimes, we all talk too much. Sometimes we talk because we need to say something to someone. Sometimes that something is important. Sometimes, it’s not at all important. There are a great many people walking around this earth who talk a lot because they think every damned thing they have to say is crucial to the planet’s survival.  And sometimes, we talk because we don’t want to listen. We’re tired of listening to all that talk. When other people talk, we don’t listen—we  just wait their turn.

Some people don’t talk enough. They’re embarrassed to say anything because someone convinced them that they were worthless and anything they had to say had little or no value. Some people rarely talk because they’re shy. But some people don’t talk a lot when they’re around a lot of people because they don’t trust them—people that is. They don’t think people are worth trusting. Everywhere they go, they think they’re in a courtroom and everything they say will be held against them. Other people think they’re too good to talk. They like to keep people guessing. They like playing games. And they want people to think they’re deep. They wear t-shirts that say: I am unknowable. It’s too much work to talk to these people. And who wants to try to get to know someone who is unknowable?

Some people talk and don’t say anything. But they don’t know they’re not saying anything. But some people do know they’re not saying anything. Maybe they don’t say anything worth saying because they don’t want to say anything that’s worth saying. They do this to annoy you. They are not well-liked and they don’t want to be well-liked.

The people that don’t know anything talk the most. They think that everything they say is true. Their opinions are facts and talking is the same thing as research. These people think they are good debaters—and in their minds they win every argument. They often think they’re brilliant. They hate people who are, in fact, brilliant. They like to refer to really brilliant people as idiots. If the really brilliant person also has progressive politics, they refer to them as being libtards. They think using that word makes them appear smart. It only makes them appear mean. These kinds of people run for political office, and they most often run as Republicans. g And sometimes they get elected.

Talking to yourself is healthy. But arguing with yourself may not be a such good idea. You will always lose the argument. As a result, you will feel stupid. You will have no one to blame for feeling stupid except yourself. Some people think that feeling stupid is a kind of humility. That’s stupid.

Some studies show that people who are extremely intelligent make a habit of talking to themselves (and their dogs). This may be true, but I think it may have something to do with vocabulary. If you are always telling yourself that you are a fuck up, then it not only shows that you have a limited vocabulary, it also shows that you have a very poor self-image. Of course, there may some very solid evidence why some people feel themselves to be pieces of shit. But it’s stupid to hate yourself. That’s someone else’s job. Your supervisor at work is more than willing to take on the job of hating you. But your job is to love yourself. You should take that job seriously. Screw the people who don’t love you—though you should ask yourself if you acted like a piece of shit when you told the people who hate you that they were nothing more than a pieces of shit. Perhaps some apologies are in order. If you are not the kind of person who believes in apologizing to anyone for any reason, then you are very likely a piece of shit, and my guess is that you are incapable of hating yourself. These are complicated matters, and it’s never a good idea to believe everything you think and everything you tell yourself. But if you can’t believe yourself, who can you believe? The possibility exists that you are a pathological liar. But if you are a pathological liar, it is something you will never be aware of because you believe you are always telling the truth. You feel yourself to be a superior being. Every time you walk into a meeting, you believe you are the smartest person in the room. You will not notice that you are widely hated—but if you do happen to notice, you will feel yourself to be a target of judgmental people whose hobby is persecuting people like yourself because they feel threatened by you. Being honest about who you are is not necessarily a formula for happiness—but it is a formula for having a meaningful life.

People will talk. Let them talk. There’s talk of war. Oh, she’ll talk to anybody. That guy sure can talk. He’ll talk you out of your pants. And then he’ll talk you out of your underwear. I’ll give him something to talk about. Ah, he’s all talk. My father didn’t know how to talk. I need to talk to you. 

Of course, feeling superior to other people can be a source of happiness—that is if happiness is not connected to having friends. Friends tell you the truth. They also lie to you. The most important relationship we will ever have is the relationship we have with ourselves. While this may be true, narcissists take this idea and twist it to mean that only they, and they alone, are worthy of love. 

I Have spent every day of my life in the presence of myself. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but when it comes to myself, I wouldn’t know. And there’s that thing about how familiarity breeds contempt. It’s a wonder we don’t all hate ourselves. 

During the pandemic, I spent so much time alone that I would look at myself in the mirror and say to the guy I saw there: “Look at you! You’re a mess. That’s it. I’m done. I’m fucking tired of being around you. And, another thing, you’ve been a complete asshole lately. So just get the fuck out of my apartment. I want you out by sunset. And one more thing, take a shower.” I did take a shower. But come sunset, I was still there. Hanging out in my own body—the only place that truly belonged to me.

How come nobody at school talks to me? It’s like talking to a wall. That guy talks like a cement mixer. She’s the talk of the town. If walls could talk. . . .Let me talk to him. My mother was in the next room talking to my brother. I haven’t  talked to him in ages. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Yeah, yeah, everybody’s talking about that book—but nobody’s reading it. He’s one smooth talker. 

It’s not that I would want to be anybody else. Of course, I know people who are younger than me, smarter than me, better looking than me, work harder than me, are more charming than me, people who don’t have self-destructive issues, and don’t have gerbils named Al running in place in their brains and always thinking of ways to live in apocalypse. And of course, I know people who are much straighter than me and don’t have to deal with condescending remarks that appear to be benign jokes. A lot of people hate gay people, It’s a lot of trouble to hate us all. And where would the world be without us? Everyone would be wearing ugly shoes. Some people just love gay people. I mean they just love all gay people on principal. I find this a little bit strange. I mean, I don’t love all gay people. Gay people can be assholes. Same as straight people. It’s interesting that a lot of people talk to us gay people and they think they know exactly who we are. They do that to my Latino peeps as well. And there are a lot of young people who think they know a great deal about older people. And of course, there are a lot of younger people who think they know a great deal about older people. And they like to talk—about everything they learned about older people in that article they read in Newsweek—that and the fact they have a grandmother who’s old. And look at me, I like to talk as if I know everything about white people. I mean I am kind of an expert on the subject of white people. But still, I don’t know everything about them. Mostly everything—but not everything. 

Talk, talk, talk. Listen, I don’t want to be white—even though I talk like them. I don’t mind. And I don’t want to be younger, and I have a self-deprecating sense of humor that gets me through the day. And I no longer envy straight people and it doesn’t make me sad anymore that I am not like them. I don’t want to be straight anymore. I’m over it. And no, that doesn’t mean I chose to be gay—it just means I chose to be happy. 

I’ve learned to enjoy my own company. I’m something of a dork but I don’t mind. Listen, I was never hip. I was never Johnny to cool for school. When I was in high school, I believed a lot of the shitty things some people said about me. I listened to them talk about me, and I thought maybe they were right. If we listen to the wrong people, then for sure, we’ll learn to talk about ourselves the way that they do. It’s not a good idea to borrow someone else’s voice when we have a voice of our own.

I like who I am, and I like my life. It’s taken me a long way to get here. In fact, I can say with a real sense of honesty that I’m in love with life. Which makes nothing perfect—but I’m not going for perfect. I have more than my share of flaws, but I have enough virtues to keep the friends I make. And best of all, I’m not cheap. I have issues with cheap people. I don’t know why I go off on tangents. But I sort of like that I do that. I never took the shortest route when I walked home from school. 

You may wonder where I’m going with all these sentences that I’m placing next to each other as if those sentences were actually old friends I’d invited to a party that I didn’t want to disinvite. The truth of the matter is that I have just introduced these sentences to each other, and it makes me more than a little happy that they are falling in love despite the fact that they don’t have much in common and they know where they’re going. 

I can make words lose their way. I think that’s great. 

How can these sentences possibly know where they’re going if I’m the one writing them. 

*

I only text—I hate to talk on the phone. You like dirty talk, baby? She talks in her sleep. Talk about a piece of shit . . . We stayed up all night talking. When she gets mad at me, she doesn’t talk to me for weeks. Sometimes, it’s better not to talk. I went to this talk, and her talk, well, it was about talk—the lady behind me talked all the way through it. I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now. I could have listened to her talk for days. I always talk with my hands. 

I think I sat down to write some brief thoughts regarding language, about where it came from, how it evolved, and how it wound up living in our brains and on our tongues. It turns out that this work has already been done by brilliant men (the gender is maddeningly intentional, accurate and predictable), men with decidedly unAmerican names though some of them were/are American. (It’s a sad and overwhelming irony that a country made of immigrants is a country that more or less despises immigrants. Right now, at this moment in our history, we are decidedly anti-immigrant. Despite what our last names say about the originary homelands of our ancestors, we like to erase all of that bothersome history, by simply referring to ourselves as American. We’d like to believe we were always here. That’s why some people like to refer to Native Americans as immigrants. It makes me want to cuss and refer to these people as the stupid of the stupid. In Spanish I would call them pendejos. How can they not know the meaning of the word “Native?” Dictionaries are not that difficult to use—and they’re on-line. I usually refer to people who are this willfully ignorant as mother fuckers. Yes, I know that’s name calling—but I like to express my anger at mean spirited people who think they have virtues the rest of us should admire, and who obviously learned absolutely nothing when they attended school. In their defense, the culture around them taught them that the heart of the school was the football field when, in fact, the heart of every school is the library. (By the way I don’t think cuss words cheapen and corrupt language. What cheapens and corrupts language are coining phrases like “alternative facts.” The only thing that is alternative to a fact is a lie. When someone believes that facts are like a multiple-choice question on an exam and you can choose the answer you like and it is as good as any other answer, then the very idea of truth has disappeared. We are making truth extinct. These kinds of people do not even know they’re lying—and they are appalled when the rest of us are appalled. 

We feel entitled to decide who is and who is not a real American. And mostly, this attitude of believing that America only belongs to real Americans who just happen to be white people who refer to themselves as Christians. 

We have created a new tradition in America. We can claim to be anything we want—even if has no relation to the truth. I cannot be a Christian if I am a bigot and a racist. But there it all is, Racists insisting they are Christians. If someone proudly proclaims their Christianity in your presence, make the sign of the cross and get away from them as quickly as you can. 

My dad stopped talking. He didn’t talk for days—and then he died. If you listen to talking heads long enough, you know why they call them talking heads. I don’t like talking about people behind their backs. If my bed could talk, I’d burn it. There is no talking out of turn. Don’t give me no back talk. He talks about me like I wasn’t even in the room. I always had to talk him down from the tree. Who taught you how to talk that way? 

I began this piece of writing because I wanted to talk about language and how important it is in our lives. Language is made of words. And those words have a meaning we have agreed upon. It takes a long time for a word to come into the world. I believe that words and what their intended meanings should be respected. 

It seems to me that we have divorced ourselves from words and their meanings. We have come to believe that we can make words mean anything we want them to mean. We don’t have integrity because we have robbed words from heir honesty. We use words not to communicate as precisely as we can but to confuse. We use them to lie. We have grown to distrust language. One of the fundamental tasks before us is to understand who we are—and part of that understanding is the relationship we have with language. We have a need to understand and embrace the connection we have to our fellow human beings. Words and language are crucial to creating a civil society that is, in fact, civil.    

Theories about language abound, all of them attempting to grasp a fundamental part of who and what we are as human beings. Everett, Chomsky, Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner, all offer convincing—yet—competing—theories as to how language developed and how we acquired a system of communication based on symbols that represent sounds that have come to represent meaning and the way we think and act. Languages begin as oral utterances that name what needs naming. In the book of Genesis, Adam is the namer of all creation, giving names to all the plants and animals. In a variant version of Genesis, God breathes into Adam the gift of words. It is a rather inaccurate, if poetic, representation of language acquisition in human beings. Of course, the Bible wasn’t written as a linguistic primer, but it does point to the fundamental role of language when it comes to understanding the world around us. We develop words in dialogue with the landscape around us. Cultures that develop along the oceans need to have a name for oceans and need a name for boats and for fish. Cultures that develop in the deserts of the earth need a name for desert and the creatures that survive in those deserts.