How to Succeed at Small Talk
In a divided America
I am not adept at small talk, in fact I’m pretty bad at it. Someone could tell me they’re enjoying how their daffodils are blooming in their flowerbeds and I’ll pivot the conversation to abortion within three moves like a chess master.
I’ve recently reflected on why I’m awkward at this when I have pretty solid improvisational abilities, which would seem to be the requisite skill.
At first, I thought I could chalk it up to not liking ninety percent of people I don’t already know, but that’s not the issue. I often wish to make a good impression on people I don’t like or respect, like an Instagram influencer or someone who could hire me, and fail.
The root reason is that I don’t enjoy having the same conversations and hearing the same things repeatedly. This might be related to my being from Alaska and being subjected to the exact same moronic questions almost daily for the past several decades.
But that’s also not entirely fair. Unless you’re the most uninteresting person of all time, such as someone from Orange County or Brooklyn, you probably have a characteristic outside of the norm that you get repeated questions about, i.e., “What is that thing on your face?” “Where is Bangladesh?” or “Are you required to purchase two seats on the airplane?” although I think Alaska has a particularly strong intersection between uniqueness and outside interest and does pique the curiosity of overconfident dullards like few other topics.
This is opposed to the average Gen Zer who really wants to talk about something very common that absolutely nobody cares about, such as their gender identity or bisexuality.
I have also known a lot of women throughout the years, and they tend to repeat the same things constantly. Once I had this girlfriend and she didn’t like Chinese food, I think she had a bad experience once, many moons before I met her. I went out to dinner with her a few times a week for about two years. While having the perfunctory discussion of “Where should we go tonight?” she would, every single time, say,
“Not Chinese food.”
It bothered me more than it should have and I grew resentful (often suggesting Chinese adjacent cuisine such as Vietnamese, or fusion restaurants which incorporated Chinese, and I don’t especially like Chinese), and for this combination of reasons as well as my latent lead-poisoning, I just can’t tolerate talking to someone whenever I can predict what they’re going to say next, like I’m watching The Big Lebowski or, yeah I’ll own it, Donnie Darko, and have the dialogue memorized.
I don’t just mean predicting exactly when a MAGA person is going to throw out a Hunter Biden whataboutism (immediately) but any number of platitudes (whelp, everything happens for a reason) common misconceptions (the military is fighting for our freedom) conspiracies Joe Rogan recently said, and, jokes…? (opinions are like assholes…)
In combating the mundane I have a few facts in my back pocket which I like to throw into conversations in an attempt at spicing things up. It doesn’t always work, but once I talked to a guy at a bar while watching a major volcano eruption on TV, and I said, “Whoa, are you seeing this?”
And he said, “Yeah, it’s a brand new TV, they just got it.”
I’ll totally risk alienating this guy or freaking out a group of college girls or ammosexuals with the following “talking points” if it means not having another conversation about the UFC or the scourge of immigrants who are frying the chicken wings you are currently rubbing all over your beard.
1. If I was a rapper my name would be Roast Grief.
2. If I was a porn star my name would be Oral Roberts.
3. There is a psychiatric condition called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. It’s rare. People suffering from it do not have any mental impairments and are rational, free-thinking people. They aren’t suicidal, at all. They could otherwise lead normal lives, but they have an irresistible compulsion to injure themselves, violently. So, an otherwise normal guy would just be pottering around as a young man and then decide to shoot a nail gun into his hand or throw himself down a flight of stairs or repeatedly smash his head into a cinderblock wall until they lose consciousness. It only affects men, not surprisingly. Two guys, Lesch and Nyhan started noticing these people in the middle part of the last century, because they were usually tied permanently to gurneys and had no lips (because they tend to chew them off), but due to the freakish nature of their behavior, people in the psych wards never had any interest in talking to them. Lesch and Nyhan started talking to them at first because they noticed that their eyes looked like those of rational, even-keeled men, and the guys would say things like, “Bro, I really miss watching the Wheel of Fortune every night. I’m not sure why I can’t stop slamming my balls into the car door. One moment I feel totally normal, and next thing you know, I’m sticking an ice pick in my ear.” It turned out to be the side effect of a buildup of uric acid in their blood. You don’t see it as much anymore, in America.
4. There is a town called Vernon, Florida. It is a poor town, where most people live in trailer parks. In the late 1960s one of the residents accidentally, or not, depending on who you believe, lost a limb in a farming accident. The man immediately became the richest guy in town due to an insurance settlement. Within years, Vernon had earned itself the name Nub City, and to drive through it reckoned of a leper colony, because, in a town of eight-hundred people, it accounted for two-thirds of all missing limb insurance claims nationwide. People would say they accidentally shot their arm off in a hunting accident while aiming at a turkey. There were a few things to factor in before committing mayhem on yourself: A dominant hand is worth more than your left. A leg is worth more than am arm. The most common arrangement people arrived at was to cut off their right leg and left arm, as this maximized the payout while allowing one to maneuver around on a crutch. Erol Morris, the famed documentary maker, heard about this and went down to Vernon to check it out, where he immediately got his ass kicked by locals who didn’t want anyone drawing attention to their scheme. The insurance companies eventually caught on, in the 1980s, meaning there was probably one guy who was the first to not get paid after cutting off his leg above the knee (a 30 percent payout compared to below.) Nobody was ever convicted of insurance fraud, because juries would not believe that anyone would purposefully maim themselves like this, and the town is still largely comprised of cripples who own nice vehicles.
5. There used to be an Olympic medal in the events of Poetry, Architecture, Town Planning, Literature, Drawing, and other non-sports. This is the opening line of the poem that won a gold medal: “Oh, Sport, you are Beauty! You - the architect of this house, the human body, which may become object or sublime according as to whether it is defiled by base passions or cherished with wholesome endeavor.” Trash.
6. ‘First responders” usually aren’t the first responders to an emergency situation. Usually, it’s a citizen who is close to the situation who is the first to respond, rendering aid, or at the very least calling the police or fire department. First responders should be called ‘secondary responders,’ so that we can give some love to the real heroes out there who don’t have bloated pensions.
7. Isn’t it weird that JD Vance got a major publishing deal for writing a book about his mundane life (he grew up somewhat disadvantaged in Southern Ohio then went to college) while he just happened to be friends and ideological cohorts with gay billionaire Peter Thiel (with whom he was most likely providing sexual favors?) It’s not like he climbed Mount Everest or knew how to juggle, why was Hillbilly Elegy given a tremendous marketing release before Vance, who had no writing experience, became powerful, both politically and in the self-loathing futurist gay shame parade of the PayPal Mafia?
8. Anthony Curcio was a gifted football player who became the quarterback for the University of Idaho. He sustained an injury and became a drug addict, eventually spending $15,000 a month on pills. While living in Idaho in a crappy apartment overlooking a creek, he began planning to rob a bank, or, more accurately, the Brinks truck that picked up money from the Bank of America up the creek. He then began to manually dredge out the creek, every day, for a period of several weeks, with a pickaxe. Nobody noticed him or cared what he was doing. His initial plan was to ride a jet ski back to his apartment after robbing the truck, but that was too ambitious, so he designed a pully system to pull himself back home on an innertube after robbing the truck and jumping in the creek. The day before the robbery he placed an ad on Craigslist, promising to pay workers a solid hourly wage for a nonexistent cleanup project, and instructed them to wear jeans, an orange safety vest, goggles, and a painter’s mask, and meet in the Bank of America parking lot. Curcio then showed up wearing the same outfit, pepper sprayed the truck driver, and made out with $400,000. He then repelled down the creek, took off his velcro work clothing revealing a different outfit underneath, and got way. He only got caught because a homeless guy saw him return to the scene of the crime and took down his license plate.
9. Fiddle and Violin are the exact same instrument.
10. The seminal alternative band REM was originally called Buckets of Piss.
11. Jessica Alba has half the chromosomes of a normal person. She claims to have cured this condition with beet juice.
If you’re anything like me, having this knowledge can regularly save you from uncomfortable interactions with people who have no idea what they’re talking about who say things such as, “The Democrats always run up the national debt!” WRONG, MORON! “Planned Parenthood be doin’ partial birth abortions!” WRONG, YOU SHOULD BE AN ABORTION.
These people are a step away from espousing the medicinal virtues of rhino horn, and changing their mind with facts is not an option. Maybe some of you can handle it, but I can’t. Sometimes changing the topic necessitates introducing weird, macabre, creepy talking points.
This strategy can serve two purposes, A) You might end up having an interesting conversation with a bastard, and B) You may creep them out enough that they’ll move. If you ever find yourself at a country music festival, as I did last month, try one of the following on for size, and make sure an introduce the talking point with zero warning while holding eye contact:
1. Scallops have two-hundred eyes.
2. They used real corpses as extras in the film Poltergeist.
3. Over the course of your lifetime you shed about forty pounds of skin.
4. The FDA permits a certain amount of rodent hair in peanut butter.
5. Serial killers often have souvenirs from their kills. A lot of times this is a clothing item, or jewelry, but a surprising percentage keep nipples.
I apologize if any readers were looking for constructive advice on how to deal with a casualty of propaganda. I believe most of them are beyond helping, I’m just trying to speak my truth as to how I get through the day.
If there are any further tactics you utilize, feel free to drop them below, and God Bless America.