L'enfer, C'est Les Autres

Friday is garbage day so on Friday morning I went outside to take the empty cans back to the garage. I saw a neighbor on her lawn across the street brushing her dogs so I waved and yelled "Hi!" She waved back and said "How're you guys doing?" I am blessed with a rapier-sharp and lighting-quick wit so I instantly came up with the best response. I said "I feel like I'm living out Huis Clos." She looked at me and smiled while tilting her head, her demeanor indicating that she was trying to be polite but had no idea what I was talking about.

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I realize what was happening (this happens frequently, my neighbors don't read anything more complicated than coloring books) so I said "Did you ever read the book No Exit?" This particular neighbor is a teacher so I thought I had a shot here, but she said "No."

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I decided to make my wittiness clear. "It's a book by Jean-Paul Sartre. He was a French Existentialist author."

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"I had to read it in high school." (I left out the part where I read it in French, not English. I knew that wouldn't help me.)

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"It's about three people locked in a room and they can't get out. Eventually they realize they are in hell and one of them says 'Hell is other people.' That's what this is like!" (This is witty because being trapped inside with my kids is hell, but we have to do this because if we don't we'll catch a deadly disease from one of the people outside our house, so those people are hellish too. It's a really smart quip.)

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She failed to see the wit. I think she thought I was just complaining about my kids and that I really felt like I was trapped in hell. My neighbors are very literal, but not literate. Obviously.

I am positive that if I said that to any number of gheorghies I would get a chuckle and a wittier reply. Dave would likely throw back some veiled Camus reference involving death, maybe dead mothers in nursing homes. Whit would've made a comment in French (I assume he read it in high school French class too). TR would've called me a pussy, dragged me into my own house and jammed me in the powder room shitter--but he would've gotten the reference.

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Perhaps the niftiest part of this story is that Sartre said "hell is other people" because everyone has angst about they way other people perceive them. He wasn't writing in favor of isolation, but just explaining what social interactions do to our heads. Which is exactly what happened when I tried to make a joke with my neighbor and ended up feeling like a tool.

All this is to say I appreciate all you clowns. And this is why I've been practicing social distancing in my neighborhood for years.