Piss & Vinegar

There’s this thing that happens to me about once every few months where I get mistaken for service staff while I’m patronizing a restaurant or brewery. That it even occurred with some frequency through a pandemic — where I was only in such places once every few weeks, and generally only long enough to pick something up — suggests that it would happen even more often if I spent any more time in public.

It’s probably something that’s been happening throughout my post-pubescent life, but I only started keeping track after a notable experience in 2018. Ever since then, I’ve been completely amused by these interactions where somebody tries to give me their check or empty glasses, or asks me where something is in a space that I’ve never been in before.

To me, the most interesting part about all of it is how people react when I have to tell them, “I don’t work here.” It feels like I’m catching somebody in a vulnerable moment when they’re being made conscious of their own assumptions. I obviously can’t tell exactly what they’re thinking, and I’m sure it lands differently with different people, but I do think it has a disarming effect across the board. 

There are a few reasons that I kind of live for these recurring interactions. The first is the one I’ve been conscious of for a while: It makes me feel secure in my proletarian breeding. And whenever I get a tinge of paranoia that people who know me might think I’m getting too big for my britches (which there is minimal risk of, by the way, as I am forever uncool, unfancy, and remarkably unskilled), it does me good to know a random member of the public could mistake me for somebody present only to serve them on a given day.

The second reason I really get off on these cases of mistaken identity and/or purpose is one that I’ve only really grown into in the past few years. That is, I appreciate opportunities to more or less explicitly tell people that I’m not there for their comfort and convenience. It’s the one context where I find it extremely satisfying to disappoint people. And it feels significant that I’m at the point in my little soul journey where that’s the case. My most succinct explanation for why it wasn’t that way for such a long time is that my rising sign is Gemini. Now, I realize that may be cryptic to some folks who stumble into this corner of the internet, so allow me to break it down.

For probably the first 25 years of my life, I put a metric fuck-ton of energy into trying to do right by everyone, and in trying to be everything to everyone — somewhat indiscriminately, and often quite unsuccessfully. Any adult reading this is probably aware that there is no context under which that is sustainable, or even healthy. But that used to be my MO.

It probably doesn’t track for anybody who’s met me in the past few years or just knows from my weird internet presence that I’m a Sagittarius. But as I understand it now, that behavior was one of my tenuous coping mechanisms for not really having much brain function around self-awareness. That’s most likely a tragic adaptation from childhood trauma, but for years, my workaround was to essentially work overtime to please everyone. My whole public persona was kind of anchored to maintaining this veneer of social ease and being performatively gregarious.

It’s strange to look back on how much effort I put into being that way when, nowadays, if somebody’s main impression from an interaction with me is that I’m friendly, I’d feel pretty insulted. It actually makes me think of the friend who was with me the last time I was mistaken for service staff in public. We were at a brewery in Port Townsend that, in fairness, I patronize frequently, so I could see how one might attribute my apparent level of comfort in the space to staff-status even though the place is operated exclusively by its two proprietors.

Anyway, separate from an interaction where somebody tried to offload their empty glasses on me as I was bussing my own, my friend and I were talking about her dad. He’s a low-key king of one-liners (like, almost Bob Green-level), and one of my personal favorites of his is how he always used to describe his relationship with his late mutt, Milo: “I can’t hear. He doesn’t listen. We’re perfect for each other.”

My friend and I had a chuckle remembering that one, and then she mentioned that the new dog in her dad’s life is a golden retriever named Maisie. Apparently, his sole complaint is that she’s too friendly. It’s precisely the impression I hope I never give people at this point in my life — not because I’m a cold or combative person. Quite the contrary, I think anybody who interacts with me over a sustained period and has a sense of my values now probably gathers that I’m kind of a foul-mouthed Mister Rogers. But what I’m realizing is that people tend to think that things like that — curiosity and kindness rendered through an unrefined presentation — are fundamentally at odds, when they are absolutely not in my experience.

Something that I don’t really talk much about these days, but has been pretty formative in how I deconstruct interactions comes from a lot of what I studied in undergrad, which is rhetorical analysis. It’s been north of seven years since I’ve thought about this framework, but one of the things that’s foundational to the study of rhetoric are its five canons. I won’t list and explain them all here, but the one thing worth noting is that the message, style, and delivery are examined distinctly. That’s always made sense to me, but it resonates with added force now because it’s a reminder that the possible permutations of an idea and the way it’s transmitted are legion.

In other words, not every disciple of Fred Rogers rolls up in Keds and a cardigan, or using sanitized, FCC-compliant language for that matter. I think I’ve always known this intuitively, but in addition to having Gemini as a rising sign, my Neptune is in Capricorn — which often expresses itself in the fact that I tend to repress my intuition. It’s something I’m desperately trying to remedy now, but it really burned me for a lot of years. One of the ways I think I suffered the most with this predilection was actually in yet another academic part of my life I don’t talk much about, my experience in an MFA program.

It’s easy to see now that I probably didn’t talk much about my graduate writing program while I was in it or in the immediate aftermath because it kind of fucked me up. In any other area of my life, I would know to interpret the way I clam up amidst talk of MFA programs as a post-traumatic response. And yet, I have to admit that I didn’t really give myself permission to think of it that way until back in June when I was at a retreat on Whidbey Island with other writers and kind of had to admit to them — and really to myself fo the first time — that my last experience with writing in academic settings had done some damage.

One of the things that stung the most from my MFA experience was this sustained insinuation from some peers and even some instructors that the mix of high and low diction in my voice was a flaw. And I specifically say “my voice” and not just “my writing” because I pretty much write the way I talk. The Neptune in Capricorn comes into play in that I do know on an intuitive level that something as personal as a voice contains a lifetime of experience, and in most cases, a lifetime of contradictions and trauma that somebody has had to inhabit and make sense of. I know that, and yet my reflex even up until three years ago wasn’t to see a criticism of my voice as an erasure. My reflex was to think I was too stupid to recognize a difference between the crude idioms in my lexicon and words that have little modern application outside of Decemberists songs.

It’s easy to look at that recurring criticism now and recognize it as an erasure, whether perpetrated consciously or not. I would go so far as to say it’s at least mildly violent, too, because it does seem to rest on an assumption that people have to choose a lane and that their multifaceted interior can’t necessarily be expressed without being questioned. It’s something I hadn’t thought much about before this year outside of one time I broke open about it in 2019 with my then-therapist. But I’ve been thinking about it recently because earlier this year, I was reminded that there are folks out there who see a voice that’s layered, referential, and maybe multiphonic and contrapuntal in the way jazz music is as an asset and not a hindrance.

Some months back, I got a message out of the blue from one of my high school English teachers. She’s been a forever-favorite of mine for years, but my appreciation for the way that she approached English instruction has only deepened with time and retrospect. She really taught English in the most multi-disciplinary way you can get away with in modern public school curricula, always with a deep grounding in literature and not just the classics you’d expect. Whenever I think about it, I can’t help but believe that it probably opened up new worlds, ideas, interests, and possibilities for her students — whether they realized it or not. It certainly had that effect for me. So you can imagine my delight when I got a message from this person in response to a piece I had written and shared at the end of 2020. This bit from her response hit me especially hard:

The mixture of high and lowbrow language is just a beautiful representation of what results when one grows up in rural Montana and receives an education back East. Place matters and it never leaves us.

She keyed in on such a simple truth, and yet, it felt novel to hear it from somebody for the first time in several years. Maybe this just speaks to the kind of people who would be lured in to teach or enroll in arts and humanities classes where I went to undergrad in the Shenandoah Valley, but that was really the last setting where my particular cocktail of “high and lowbrow language” was validated. In an MFA program in DC, it was still a talking point, but not really a favorable one.

That perception — that there was perhaps something fugitive, misplaced, or pathological about the way I express my ideas and experiences — that in itself didn’t have to be so damaging. But the way I internalized it and felt like I had to censor myself definitely was.

I’ve heard this anecdote (which you can find among these tributes) a few times wherein the late Bill Kittredge encouraged his former creative writing student, Andrew Sean Greer, to figuratively stop trying to throw with his non-dominant hand. Basically, he could see that Greer had something to say and his own way to say it, but was holding back. In hindsight, a lot of my experience in an MFA program was feeling like there was something wrong with my dominant hand and trying with disappointing results to fling things around with the other one.

My past tendency to assume that my natural inclinations were the problem, and that the onus was on me to rectify that and basically make myself palatable for other people has to owe somewhat to the crosshairs of my aforementioned Gemini Ascendant and Neptune in Capricorn. In my case, the assemblage and position of dead star matter that has manifested as human Jackie for this terrestrial lifetime was clearly bound to struggle with pleasing everyone and repressing intuition — a pretty lethal combo. No wonder self-sabotage really shaped up to be my early-life superpower. It’s why I’ve begun to liken most of my years up to this point to an extended series of “the call is coming from inside the house” scenarios.

But what I think has shifted in the past few years goes back to why I love being mistaken for service staff. I look forward to being in the room when somebody learns that they are sorely mistaken, for one. But I particularly enjoy this kind of literal expression of telling somebody no, and effectively refuting the proposition that I’m in service of other people or have to fashion what I say and do to satisfy them.

Something that’s interesting to me is that I can relate this dynamic to my own experience as a person, but I think these expectations that we project onto folks in perceived positions of service also get projected onto landscapes. In fact, I think the two can kind of feed one another. I’m probably sensitive to that because I’m from the Mountain West, a place where hifalutin types famously go to “escape” their lives or whatever. And, of course, they expect that dissociation from reality to be accommodated in every way. I use the word “dissociation” because that escape mentality reliably discounts the day-to-day minutiae and struggle for folks whose lives continue in spaces that some folks can afford to treat like amusement parks.

Somebody who I think has articulated this dissonance quite insightfully is Arvin Ramgoolam, a bookseller in Crested Butte, Colorado. Arvin is among the marvelous cast of characters that appears in an excellent High Country News story from the beginning of this year by Nick Bowlin. The story hit a collective nerve for people from all over the Mountain West that I’m connected with. It’s absolutely worth a read to find out why, but the way Arvin’s thinking is referenced in the final paragraph is worth citing here:

It’s…a shared life across time and a shared fate in a specific place…that eludes the second-home owners. By virtue of their wealth, their permanent residency stamped elsewhere, they remain removed from the fate and well-being of the people who live full-time in the valley. They can escape in a way that Ramgoolam cannot. There’s an entanglement with the fate of his neighbors, he said, that fundamentally is not shared by someone with the opportunity to pick up and leave when troubles come. What happens to Crested Butte, good or bad, happens to him.

To any reasonable person, it makes no sense to isolate the entertainment and comfort of any people in a place from the needs of the beings whose fates depend on its long-term sustainability. People throughout the Rockies are talking about this in the context of second-home owners now, and that’s huge. It’s something that folks have been silent or defensive about for a long time, and stories like Bowlin’s about Crested Butte highlight the way locals are disrupting the Disneyland bubble of many second-home owners in the Mountain West. You love to see it, and it’s precisely why I was amused to no end to find an extremely tongue-in-cheek sign in Cooke City during a recent sojourn to my home area in southern Park County, Montana.

I was immediately struck by the humor of the sign. But the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that what I admired most about it was just how damn clever and self-aware it was. For context, you probably don’t hear Cooke City and Silver Gate — the erstwhile mining communities between Yellowstone’s northeast entrance and the Beartooth Highway — cited specifically in this conversation about where folks are building second homes like they’re going out of style. But if you’re familiar with the area, the visible amount of development that’s happened in the past five years is pretty staggering. And I think it’s a safe bet that the folks building shit aren’t setting up shop to send their kids to Cooke City’s one-room schoolhouse for grades K-8.

The east-facing side of that structure with the sign, which I neglected to photograph while I was out there, betrays its true age and condition. But I think that what I did manage to photograph does give the impression that this structure would be a bit of a fixer-upper if it were going to be used for anything other than a tack shed or some other kind of storage. The sign would be hilarious on any apparently vacant property, but the fact it got affixed to this structure is darkly funny to me.

I interpret it as locals — or at least one local with a sterling sense of humor — clapping back. It hints at a self-awareness that the folks who run the post office, cafes, bars, gift shops, lodges, and general stores who’ve always served tourists to make a living are now also perceived by a growing contingent of ultra-wealthy, cosplay-cowboy pseudo-residents as present for their comfort and convenience. It also hints that some of these hardscrabble folks who brave the heavy snow of winters at 7,600 feet aren’t afraid to show some personality. And more and more, I feel like what we cite as personality or even intensity — particularly from folks that uppity types might would like to view as servile — is really just a show of humanity and agency.

I guess I feel a sense of solidarity with towns like Crested Butte and Cooke City because of the parallels with my personal trajectory. We’ve all had to throw off the shackles of pleasing people when we’ve realized that it’s created an untenable way of living. I recognize mountain towns that depend on tourism can’t afford to totally alienate everyone who can afford to treat pristine landscapes like their playground — not as long as we’re stuck under the reign of unfettered capitalism. But on a personal level, I’m realizing that I can afford to alienate people. And I’m quite alright with that.

I think what’s been most liberating about reacquainting myself with the difference, in rhetorical terms, between my values and how I express them is that I understand the nuance. And I know I can trust people who are on the same page to understand the nuance, and even appreciate the off-kilter way I let my own light shine. So I’m not super concerned about the people who are intimidated or put off by it at this point. If they can’t recognize the underlying program of reciprocity and honesty in what I say and do, that’s a failure on their part. It’s not my job to cater to them. It’s nobody’s job to.

However, there is a paradox baked into all of this that I think is quite wonderful. Even while I may not be living for other people’s comfort and convenience, I am still the way I am for their benefit — whether they appreciate it or not. People who challenge assumptions and the normalized violence and dehumanization built into the way we interact and behave can only be good for the survival and edification of the group. I think everyone has the ability to bear the load in their own small way. But I also think some of us weirdos have a unique constitution for it, and I guess I feel kind of lucky that I’ve lived hard enough to embrace mine. The reign of my Gemini Ascendant made me reject it for years, but I get the sense that some people were always polling for me to get out from under it.

One way that somebody described me to a crowd when I was 18 that still makes its way back to me occasionally is “full of piss and vinegar.” The expression has largely positive connotations, but is most often a reference to spunk and youthful energy. Even if the description weren’t recited to me time and again from somebody who heard it said about me, I’d probably still think about it. I tend to brown out a little bit when people talk about me while I’m present, especially if they’re saying nice things. That’s likely a symptom of internalized self-loathing that I need to work on, but I mention it only to share that I retain almost nothing of what other people say when I’m in that state. For whatever reason, I did manage to hear “full of piss and vinegar” loud and clear in spite of that.

It’s only because of self-awareness that I’ve grown into recently that I realize how much insight the person who said it actually had. People’s impression of me nowadays is characterized by my intensity, which feels like a healthy trajectory for somebody who was described as full of piss and vinegar 10 years prior. In retrospect, that description signals to me that at least one person had some impression of what I was becoming and not just the bullshit I was presenting back then.

I’ve kind of intentionally buried the lede at this point, but the person who opined the piss and vinegar assessment about me was Margot Kidder. Since I’m aware that hers is a household name for my parents’ generation, it always feels awkward to drop it. But it feels necessary to cite Margot because I do think about her often, especially now that she’s no longer with us. For the longest time, I assumed her remarks about me were based on my conversational use of coarse language (even back then) while talking about pretty high-minded stuff during a scholarship interview. But I now see that as a misattribution.

To again invoke my earlier references to rhetorical analysis, I don’t think my delivery was what Margot found compelling. I think it was my intensity that stood out, and perhaps gave the impression that, even if I were willing to suffer fools gladly at that point, that probably wouldn’t be the case in 10 years’ time. And for the record, I include myself in that contingent of fools I was willing to suffer for as long as I was hellbent on being friendly and accommodating.