Check Please!

There was philosophy, and then there was philosophy. That’s how he explained it. With his mouth chewing on a mix of meat and bread. He pointed the fork at you and swallowed. He wanted you to acknowledge that people had a hard time making choices in accordance with what they claimed to believe. You had two glasses of wine in you, red from grapes grown just about as far away as you felt from him, psychologically, at that moment. Maybe, you offered, softly, so not to alarm him with your disagreement, what people believe is more like a goal that guides them toward the kind of person they want to be. Like a lighthouse, it keeps you off from rocks of real bad behavior.

“Real bad behavior?” He said it and licked his lips clean of that last bite, but you could tell he liked that. He wanted to know what you knew about quote unquote real bad behavior. So you told him about some people say it takes a deviant mind to understand one, and whether or not that was true, in your line of work you it was actually — literally, you said — your job to understand. Or at least try. In his line of work, he designed abstract structures that moved information from one place to another within a network of electrical components. It seems unrelated, he said, but actually we are both interested in eliminating bad behavior. In computer programming, we call that debugging. And maybe you as a psychologist or therapist or whatever are also tasked with designing structures that intervene in the electrical components albeit biological that make up a brain, thereby removing the “bugs” — he air quoted that phrase loudly — in human behavior. 

To which you replied with a big old maybe and debated between a third glass of wine or a check, because you suddenly felt tired from all this. You knew there was a moon outside, above your heads, and it was practically glowing it was so full of silence. You knew you could take his hand and tell him he was a genius, that his smarts were sexy, and if you lowered your voice you could ask him if he wanted to see real bad behavior. Then when he assented you could take that fork with the glossy shiny of meat grease on it and plunge it directly into the flesh of his hand, and maybe even hard enough to pin his hand to the table, and casually ask if he liked this kind of bad behavior, if this is what he meant. Because it was your job to understand, and understanding requires identification. You had to get him by seeing yourself in him, and sometimes there was no better way than going right inside, past all the boundaries, and watch what comes rushing out.