For the first time ever, I berated someone in public. And I couldn’t have picked a better day to do it. The sun was out in a cloudless sky and the temperature was holding at around 75 degrees Fahrenheit—the temperature at which most humans thrive. There was a gentle breeze to fan away the excess heat. It was a reminder that moments of perfection do, in fact, exist.
I walked by a popular, rustic-chic bakery. It was packed inside. Outside a crowd had lined up to wait for a seat, fit and free from issues of affordability. I decided not to go in for coffee and a cornetto, wanting to avoid a bustle that was at odds with the general tranquility of the morning.
As I passed a small, half-empty parking lot situated between two buildings, something caught my attention. At the far end of it was a cinderblock wall that backed the alleyway. An electrical wire ran horizontally under several braces (probably an earthquake retrofit) and just visible above the roof line was a small structure featuring a “throw” (stylized graffiti lettering) that read “VALEN.”
I wasn’t sure why that was interesting. I took VALEN to be an abbreviation of Van Halen, which dated the throw back to the late seventies or early eighties. I stood in the gravel meditating on VALEN and how close it was to the word valence. In chemistry valence is the attractive force of electrons. In linguistics it’s the number of noun phrases a verb can accommodate. In psychology it’s the intrinsic attractiveness of an emotion, event or object. The general (Merriam-Webster) definition of the word valency is “the relative capacity to unite, react, or interact.”
I decided to get a picture of VALEN for later reference and because I found it visually interesting. As I was adjusting the zoom on my camera, a black Mercedes SUV turned into the lot. The lot was mostly empty, so I ignored the car and kept fiddling with the camera. The Mercedes stopped about fifteen feet from me. Its window rolled down and a loud, flat, irritated voice said, “You are standing where I park.”
Normally, I would have immediately moved. But the voice had a condescending, contemptuous tone that befuddled me. It effectively conveyed the message that I was a piece of shit. Because people don’t usually address other people like that, I didn’t respond immediately. Instead, out of curious disbelief, I tried to get a look at the face that belonged to the voice, to see if there was an expression to match the voice.
She was a middle-aged woman with a blond bob, Ray-Ban Wayfarers and a long, thin mouth looked like it had been set by a stone mason.
“What?” I asked. I think I wanted to give her a chance to ask me politely if I wouldn’t mind moving so that she could park her car. I wanted to bring this interaction into the bounds of civility.
As if civility would have cost her twenty bucks, she repeated, this time with a little more condescension and irritation, “You are standing where I park.”
I’ve encountered a lot of rude people in my day. Angry bosses, coworkers, lunatics and assholes of every tint and shade. But most were rude for reasons I could understand. They were wasted or hungover or insane or frustrated or had suffered setbacks or were angry at something I’d said or done. This was a different kind of rudeness. It was the automatic rudeness that issues from superiority. Rudeness that tells you in a few words that you are a lowlife nonesuch standing where it wants to park.
“You have no common courtesy,” I said.
She stared.
“Is that how you treat people?” I asked. “No please? No excuse me?”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “An excuse for how you treat people.”
Her expression didn’t alter. She exuded the same supercilious contempt.
“Are you living in a space bubble?” I asked.
I’m not exactly sure why I used the phrase space bubble. It was about as devastating as “mustard tiger.” I guess it was the first thing I could think of to describe her remote, insular, disrespectful attitude.
The accusation had no effect on her, of course. Her mouth remained as level as the cinderblocks behind her car. Wanting nothing more to do with her, I walked off, turned the nearest corner and headed home.
I’d planned on a long walk that morning. But after encountering the space bubble I couldn’t stand to look at people. The brunch crowd loitering outside the breakfast restaurants, pedestrians prattling, digesting, farting along… All of it seemed like a mess of arbitrary egos, private requirements and public expectations, random personas adrift in their special space bubbles.
By the time I got home, I had lost all interested in encountering new people. Because of one space bubble, humanity in general had lost its valency.