Real Screwup

I have known a man for a long time whose life seems to defy any easy explanation. I feel for him because he is a friend, but I also feel quite powerless to know how to befriend him because of the tangles that his life entails. Let me introduce him to you and share the problem. Maybe you have some advice.

Meeting "Frank"

Let me call him Frank (not his real name). He is a man in his mid-fifties, well-trained, apparently accomplished in his field, the father of two, with health, a good self-presentation and confident manner, so that one would think he was on the high end of average or even the lower end of above-average in skill, knowledge, education and potential accomplishment. But, for some reason, everything that Frank does ends up in disaster. His marriage ended in a strange and painful way. He has been fired from every job he has ever held. He can't seem to keep friends. He has managed to burn bridges with every kind of institution that might conceivably hire him. Yet, when you meet him you feel instinctively that you are in the presence of a calm, accomplished, capable person, one whose charm, wit and intelligence should have landed him in CEO positions twenty-years ago. In fact, he struggles to make ends meet, cobbling together part-time jobs with no benefits and trying to develop some ideas on his own that he hopes will some day help him "hit the jackpot." But, with his dismal track record over his life, it is highly unlikely that he will ever cash in.

More Specifics

A few of the things that Frank can't seem to be able to do are to fill out forms and to follow directions. He also gets confused very easily when people speak. I used to think that there was some kind of hearing deficiency that he had, but I have concluded that Frank is this way because he is so smart and so literal in his thinking. That is, he becomes frustrated in filling out forms because he notices the way that words are used throughout the form, and he spots contradictions or tensions between the terms or, on some occasions, he notices logical gaps in what is being requested, and it frustrates him. Or, because his life experience has been so varied, with no steady or predictable "curriculum vitae" in sight, he can't fit his experience into the small blanks on the application forms that ask him what he has done.

He also becomes frustrated when listening to people, primarily because he notices immediately the logical and historical gaps in peoples' accounts of things, and feels he has to interrupt in order to get things straight or else he gets confused. That is, often people will speak and use a lot of "he's" and "she's," without being expressly clear on who is meant. Or, more usually, people tell stories of the past, but their chronology is out of whack or isn't precisely told--often leaving gaps of time or suggesting a rapid completion of events when the events probably would take longer to complete than was indicated. This frustrates Frank, and he has to ask the person to slow down so that he can get things straight. He has to do this in order to appreciate the story.

And then, things get worse. He wants to stop the person and ask them about that experience in the past, even if the person seems hellbent on rushing forward to the present for some reason. Frank has such a vivid imagination that he simply gets caught up in other people's narratives, when he finally can understand what they are saying, and feels he has to breathe life into every morsel of the past that has been dropped along the path of narration.

Thus, people get the impression that Frank is a kind of strange space cadet. He obviously is a good listener, but he seemingly wants to use peoples' stories as a means for reflecting on the human condition and not really to get to the "bottom line" of today. That is, people often tell their stories so that they can receive guidance for today or so that they can explain what they are doing today. Even though Frank is interested in those things, he will not let the person get to the present, so caught up is he in his imagination by trying to fill out the meaning of the person's narration of past events.

But, people couldn't be more wrong about Frank. Frank is no space cadet. He has a mind like the proverbial steel trap. He never forgets anything. Once you tell him your biography, you can be confident not only that he will remember what you told him but he will have reflected on it to such an extent that the next time you talk to him, he will ask you perceptive and penetrating questions about your past. And, he wants to learn things about today. The truth is that Frank has a near photographic memory, and can learn things of today with ease, but he just isn't always interested in living in 2005.

Frank's Thinking Process

I can tell you how Frank thinks because he shared it with me on more than one occasion. He has this view of history which says that since our life is less than 1% the length of recorded human history, if you go back to maybe 4000 B.C., then you should spend less than 1% of your time thinking about the time in which you live. That is, he has this weird sense of proportionality that suggests that since the last year only occupies .0001% of all recorded history, you shouldn't spend too much time getting caught up in events of the past year. Thus, he will read about the Pope's failing health or Terry Schiavo's death, and he will come up with a quick explanation of things, or his "theory" of the "meaning" of the Pope's life or of Schiavo's death in the context of various kinds of debates in American culture, but he will not want to spend too much time thinking about this. After all, there are events in the 4th century that repay consideration.

He once shared the following story with me, which I will tell you in the next essay.