I’ve participated in several walks of life that required me to have my head on a swivel. I had to be on the lookout for anyone that was “Not Right.”
Not Right is a nebulous thing. It depended on the place, and time, and your responsibilities. Your Not Right Radar is different when you’re walking in a city with your wife and children than if you’re on your own out where the trolley don’t go. In the music business, you’re often in close proximity to crowds spangled here and there with Not Right. In places where liquor is served, some people’s innate Not-Rightness is amplified. Good bouncers have a very developed sense of Not Right, and I learned from them how to pick out ne’er do wells in a crowd before they got up to their hijinks.
In construction, you learn how to pick out the Not Right in the same way. If you’re supervising a gaggle of disparate crews, you have to scan the personnel horizon constantly for guys who are stoned or drinking at lunch, or on the prowl for stuff to steal. You learn to spot them when they’re still sitting in their trucks in the morning after a while. You learn because you have to. A Not Right guy in a front end loader can do a lot of damage before he gets the hook. Best to spot it early.
Dating is many furlongs back in my rear-view mirror, but back in the day I’d also spot Not Right in women pretty quick. Bunny boilers don’t hide their ‘tude all that well. They might be on their best behavior at the get-go, but no one is that good an actor. Not Right always leaks out, if you’re on the lookout for it.
It’s a snap judgment, deciding if someone’s Not Right or not. It has to be. I keep it to a pass/fail sort of measurement. You’re either OK until I find out otherwise, or Not Right. There are no shades of gray, and none needed. Of course you’re not supposed to notice things about people anymore, and pretend that florid mental illness is no big deal. I’m combing my mind right now, but I’m unable to remember any time I made the Not Right assessment of anyone in error. I’ve identified murderers in advance. Bad news was always written right on people’s faces figuratively, and now it’s often written there literally.
It’s not a style thing. I’m not grading people on a Marty Feldman to Cary Grant scale. I’m not a haberdasher with an attitude. By Not Right, I’m referring to someone who looks like they could become a whole lot of trouble at the drop of a hat. They’re “off,” and so best avoided.
If you pass the post of good manners into the land of true gentility, you understand that putting other people at ease is at the core of it. Nothing more than that, really. How you greet and treat people is the soul of society.
Very few people want to be genteel anymore, never mind manage it. Just the opposite. If you had to boil down the average person’s physical and sartorial appearance to one word, I’d use aggressive. The women are corpses in fright wigs, and the men want to look like death row inmates. It’s not just their appearance. People in customer service positions are much more likely to snarl at you than greet you properly. We called a professional office number the other day during normal business hours, and got immediately shunted to voice mail, so we hung up to send them an email instead. Before we could compose one, we received a text message that read, “I can’t talk right now.” That’s it. The sender didn’t even bother to identify themselves. They just hit reply on a cell phone and told us we were an imposition. I’m sure that she is described as a “people person” by her coworkers, and on their website, which begs you to call them.
Similarly, we’ve totally given up trying to talk to the nasty young woman who answers the phone at our car mechanic’s place. We just drive over and talk to the mechanic directly. He’s pleasant as hell. She’s a human porcupine, with the pins in her face to signal it. In a way, her kneejerk ferocity might be an assumption on her part that a goodly portion of the people she’s going to deal with will be Not Right, so a good offense is better than a good defense in the Not Right arena. I hope I’m not Not Right, but I’m sure the Not Right contingent just barks right back at her, and the Dodge caravan moves on to the lift anyway.
The ratio of Not Right carbuncles in a crowd of average citizens used to be very, very low. As a matter of fact, the Not Right often used to try to look and sound like normal people. They are like shills at carnivals. They try to look like everyone else to blend in, but they have an ulterior motive for being there.
So at this point, the average person gets their grooming, sartorial, and deportment tips from TV shows about jolly serial killers and noble meth dealers and hit men with hearts of gold and plastic surgery addicts and Goth you-go-girl slatterns. Most people earnestly desire to look Not Right as a fashion statement. Every day is Halloween. That’s neither here nor there. I’m not being fooled, one way or the other by what sort of Sons of Anarchy or Patrick Batemen Garanimals you’re sporting. But trying to look and sound crazy is starting to affect everyone. They’re actually becoming crazy to fill out their ensemble.
I was up a ladder painting my house this morning. Early, to beat the sun. I saw an innocuous guy walk by, alone. He was Not Right. A car passed. The driver was Not Right. I went to the Walmart to buy landscaping stuff. Nearly every single man jack and Shirley in that place was Not Right. Even what passes for normal looking women have a kind of pharmaceutical buzzing visible in their eyes. They’re all clutching their iPandora like it’s a dialysis machine for their mind, and in case they needed an instant transfusion of lunacy. There were more than a few meth wraiths. The children looked like they were as likely as not to sink their teeth into your legs as smile at you. These people don’t just look Not Right. They are Not Right.
When you’re unable to get along with society, you’re called a misanthrope. I don’t know what you are when society is uniformly misanthropic, and you’re not, but whatever it is, that’s what I am.
I’m a mismisanthrope, I guess. It’s lonely out here, but it’s cheaper than premium cable and full sleeve tattoos.
8 Responses
Ah, the tattoos. America’s favorite non-performing investment, practically guaranteed to attract Mr or Ms Not Right. Then, of course, there’s the facial fishing tackle and neon hair colors, just to seal the deal.
Here in the South, there’s an obvious WTF tell: it’s 99 in the shade, and our person of interest is wearing a hoodie, with the hood up. Definitely Not Right.
I’ve never understood the hoodie phenomenon in warm/hot weather. It absolutely does signal “Not Right.” If it is ninety degrees out and someone is bundled up in a hoodie, yea, something is Not Right, and it’s probably not fixable.
Hi Jim- Thanks for reading and commenting.
The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. Keep the radar running and the tools at condition one.
As a “cynosure of sartorial eloquence” (god’s teeth, I’ve wanted to use that phrase since I first read it) I may well come off as Not Right in a visual sense. I got to pick my fashion style back when I was 5 years old, and it consisted of cut-off shorts held up with a belt made of a scrap of rope. The rest of me was mostly covered in a mixture of dirt, mud, blood, scabs (hey, I’m a klutz) and poison ivy or itch-weed (bad vision, too). When I had to wear a shirt to come in for dinner (after washing most of the crud off) it was a grey t-shirt.
I haven’t changed. As I sit here hammering nonsense into the ‘net, I’m dressed in comfy old jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a beloved sweatshirt that has had most of the cuffs cut off the sleeves because they kinda-sorta disintegrated. The only difference now some sixty-mumblety-mumblety years later is that the clothes (and me) are clean. My closet holds a huge stack of grey t-shirts.
But the beard and ‘stache are trimmed, and the hair gets cut every few months whether I need it or not, and little children (mostly) don’t run screaming from the sight of me, so maybe it’s okay.
Living here in Tiny-Town in NW Wyoming I probably no longer need my megalopolis/Heart-of-the-Hive™ scanning for the Not Right with my head on a swivel, but I still do it. The best part is, if any of my neighbors happens to glimpse the .45 on my hip, rather than freaking out they’ll just nod and smile, since they’re probably carrying too, and keeping an eye out for the Not Right. This time of year, it would probably be a “tourist”.
Working for a Very Large (and growing) coterie of Ethiopians all over the eastern side of the Denver-Aurora metro area, I have never had any Not Right encounters.
In fact, those people are your missing “Reglar People”: honest, enterprising, God-fearing, family-raising ….
Aside from the cooking (not my fave odors), an entirely encouraging contingent of our sometimes Crazed populace!
My first experience with the Ethiopian community was in Seattle during the 1990’s. They are beautiful souls! It took that community about 10 years to become more westernized, but I never really saw them change the nature of their soul(s)!
I’ve been reading you off and on a long time, this was so true. I’m a 4th grade teacher, and already there is now and then a kid you love, (I truly love them all) but struggle to help, and if you were at the local shelter you would not adopt that pup. No matter how much coaxing one does with a premium treat, when that pup crawls out from under the porch it’s still going to bite you. It’s heartbreaking.
In your old “Blog for Boys” I loved that one with the boys’ slip and slide off the roof, one of them already sporting a cast. I wish I could find that post again.