Tightly-Knit Tribal Mind

“Man is a social animal.”

You hear that all the time. But what does it mean? I think it’s just a polite way of saying humans are high-order herd animals, our massive brains hardwired to bind us as close as possible to each other by rewarding us with pleasure as we socialize ourselves and punishing us with pain as we isolate ourselves.

It all makes a lot of sense, this social animal stuff. Who was more likely to survive and propagate – ancient humans driven by their natures to live in tightly-knit tribal units that effectively leveraged the comparative advantages of each of its members for the benefit of all, or ancient humans driven by their natures to wander off alone and do everything by themselves?

So we inherited the tightly-knit tribal minds.

Even me. Sure, I value solitude more than most, but my head is filled with basically the same standard-issue tightly-knit tribal mind that fills your head, and pretty much everyone else’s head who isn’t a total sociopath. It punishes me when I stray too far from the group, rewards me when I return.

This is how I explain my high school friends.

It all started 25 years ago, the beginning of our first year at high school, as the kids all split up into affinity groups, and within those groups into friendships, and I was standing on the sideline watching this game of musical chairs and getting this increasingly urgent sense from my tightly-knit tribal mind that I had to do something before the music stopped, so at the last minute I glanced around and glommed onto a ragtag group of social rejects much like myself, united in our inability to unite with anyone else, and that became my affinity group throughout high school.

It was better than nothing, I suppose, but it came at a cost. In order to maintain my membership in good standing, I actually had to do stuff with the group. If they wanted to see Ernest Gets a Hangnail or Porky’s XVII, I had to bite my tongue and fork over the cash and write off another two hours of my life. If they wanted to spend a weekend camping in a dust bowl in the middle of a boiling hot desert, I had to grin and bear it. If they wanted to spend a Friday night loitering in a dimly-lit parking lot debating what to do while bouncing an old golf ball around, I had to stand by alongside them. You know, the usual friend stuff.

If it sounds like I was a passive hanger-on, that’s because I usually was. Sometimes I suggested alternate outings, but I was usually voted down, and sometimes I refused to participate in an ill-considered venture, but I couldn’t make that a policy or I’d never do anything with them. Let’s face it: I had no choice. They were the only friends I had, so my tightly-knit tribal mind wouldn’t let me leave them.

Throughout high school, my relationship remained with the group, not with any individuals in the group. I never formed particularly close friendships with any of them. So when the group did stuff, the group included me. But when individual group members did stuff, they usually did not include me. I can’t really complain: when I did stuff, I never called any of them. You could say our relationship was one of mutual distance and diffidence.

After high school I left for college and made enough friends that my tightly-knit tribal mind allowed me to delete the group from my life. It would’ve happened anyways, I think, what with my relationship being only with the group as a whole and the impossibility (in the days before email) of dealing with the group as a whole from 2,000 miles away.

I figured I’d never see them again, but I returned home a few years after college and ran into one of them in a store and before I knew it I was sitting in a movie theater watching another crappy movie with the group.

What happened? I certainly wasn’t pining to be in their presence again. My best guess is that my tightly-knit tribal mind pushed me into it. I’d left my college friends behind and had few prospects of making new friends and my tightly-knit tribal mind couldn’t let me dangle any longer in this unaffiliated state.

So I slipped back into the group. It was as if I’d never left. I think my failure to connect with any of the members actually helped, for I didn’t sever any personal ties or hurt any feelings when I disappeared after high school.

Over the next few years I finished school, got a job, met my wife, moved to a different community, had kids and cocooned. I drifted away from the group again, but didn’t leave, still seeing them for weddings and the occasional backyard barbecue. I no longer needed to watch crappy movies on Friday nights or bounce a golf ball around a deserted parking lot in order to feed my tightly-knit tribal mind.

Or so I thought.

Recently, surveying some adverse developments in my head, I realized that my life had become increasingly isolated: no group affiliations, few friends, pretty much keeping to myself and starving the social receptors in my tightly-knit tribal mind. Is it any wonder my tightly-knit tribal mind rebelled, punishing me with such intense pain? “Feed me!,” it screamed.

It isn’t easy to reconnect with friends you’ve neglected, and it’s even harder to find new friends, especially when you feel like you’re being forced into it. A significant part of me still prefers to be alone, pain be damned. But just as I eat my vegetables, walk my daily mile and slather on sunscreen because they’re good for me, I keep an eye open for friendship opportunities because I know they’re good for me too.

So when I learned the other day that my high school group’s last singleton was getting married, my reflexive groan at the thought of an interminable night ducking the crowds in a windowless hotel banquet room quickly yielded to a grim steely-eyed determination to make the most of this rare opportunity to reconnect with the old group. At my age, how many more chances will I get? I’m determined not to blow it.

Sadly, my reconnection efforts aren’t going smoothly. Years of social isolation caused key parts of my tightly-knit tribal mind to atrophy so much that my self-centered side is now dominant and, as you’d expect, unwilling to share any of its power. So though my intentions are good, I’m constantly beset by obstacles, self-inflicted and otherwise. Individually, none of these obstacles are that troubling or unusual, but taken together they may scuttle my nascent diplomatic efforts.

I think the only way to explain this is to present three examples of the sorts of dilemmas I face on a daily basis as I attempt to reconnect.

Dilemma 1: The Toxic Tux

He asked me to be an usher. An unexpected honor, a promotion from my usual job of seat-filler at these weddings. Usually I’m fine with a reduced role, but on a few occasions I’ve been the only member of the group not in the wedding party. Even I see that as a dis, especially when it means I get stuck at the miscellaneous table with the other social misfits.

I agreed to serve as an usher on one condition: I get to wear my own tuxedo. Generally, I’m as flexible as the next guy, but when it comes to those ill-fitting polyester monstrosities with the lacquered black corpse shoes they peddle at those tuxedo rental shops, I draw the line.

He was taken aback, as if I was a Yankee who wouldn’t wear pinstripes.

Others strongly urged to abandon my position. Some in the group were offended; what was good enough for them clearly wasn’t good enough for the likes of me. Others pointed out that the day is about him, not me, and that we all dress alike in order to show our solidarity with the groom while not distracting from him and his lovely bride. “What kind of weird friend are you,” my wife asked, and I had to admit that maybe she was onto something, though still I refused to back down and eventually he caved.

Dilemma 2: Wenches and Stenches

Then the best man announced that the bachelor party would be a weekend in Las Vegas, a sequel, he promised, to the blow-out Vegas bachelor party he organized fifteen years ago when we were young pups. I remember that weekend: coerced tequila shots, in-room stripper, strip-club strippers, numerous propositions to women we saw on the street and in the casinos that they too become strippers. Dawn revealed ten alcohol-drenched and vomit-caked bodies passed out in a suite with windows that wouldn’t open, wallets empty, cigars still smoldering and our heads throbbing from protruding ice picks (at least that’s how the hangover felt).

And the stench. I cannot forget the stench. Mere words cannot do it justice; you could feel it swirling about the room, a physical presence, permeating everything and everyone, so strong it knocked grown men to their knees, so persistent it resisted the most determined shower. Something in the vomit, we concluded. But whose vomit?

You may be surprised to learn that I do not yearn to repeat that weekend. Having done it once, I see no reason to do it again. On my lifetime list, I’ve checked off the out-of-control near-death crimes-involving-moral-turpitude category of bachelor party experience. I’m done.

Apparently they aren’t. And, what’s worse, the plan calls for everyone to share one suite, just like last time, recreating the very conditions that led to the stench.

To go or not to go? I had to mull this one over. On the one hand, my tightly-knit tribal mind recognized it as a bonding experience and pushed me to go. On the other hand, the stench. Three seconds later I decided I wasn’t going.

I invented an excuse and ran it by my wife, as I’d need her to confirm that yes, that weekend I really was having open scrotum testicular surgery that cannot be postponed and would you like me describe it, but she refused to join my little conspiracy. In fact, she threatened to rat me out: “It’s his wedding. They’re all going. Some are flying across the country for this. What kind of friend skips the bachelor party because he doesn’t like the room?” I patiently walked her through each of the weekend’s descending levels of brain cell-destroying (and marriage-killing) debauchery, but her resolve only hardened. “If I can put up with losing you to strippers for a weekend, you can certainly put up with looking at them!” Hard to argue with that.

Then again, there is the stench. Time for Plan B: I’ll be there, but with my own room. And I’m not telling them, so when things start to spiral out of control, I’ll just offer to head down the hall for more ice then beat a retreat to my secret lair. Later I’ll tell them I got busted by hotel security, spent the night in the pokey, where the hell were you guys, just leaving me there like that. It’ll elevate my status and spread some guilt. Perfect.

Dilemma 3: Ban the Kids

Wedding week sure will be busy, what with the couples shower, the rehearsal dinner, the morning wedding ceremony, the evening reception, the late night after-party and the next morning’s brunch.

Of course, we have to attend each of these functions. Even I know that. (Well, maybe we can skip the brunch and cut out early from the after-party, but otherwise we’re committed.) It goes without saying, as my tightly-knit tribal mind keeps reminding me.

There’s just one little problem: Printed at the bottom of each invitation, and repeated on each reply card, is the following gentle, but firm, admonishment: “Please, no children.”

Well it’s a little late for that – we’ve already had kids. In fact, we still have them, we expect to keep them and, for the next ten years or so Child Protective Services expects us to take care of them.

So we’ll need a babysitter for at least 40 hours that week. It’s hard enough to find one for four hours, let alone 40, so I’m not sure what the happy couple expects us to do. I suppose we could stash the kids in the car with the windows cracked, or lock them in an empty room with a box of Cheerios, a bucket of fruit punch and a porta-potty in the corner, or freeze them in a state of suspended animation for the week, but would Child Protective Services approve? I don’t think so.

And I need my kids to be there. They’re crutches for this social cripple. Without them to occupy me, it will be obvious that I have no one to talk to.

The more I think of the kid ban, the angrier I get. What kind of twisted kid-hating soul would ban the fruits of marriage from a wedding? Since when did weddings, the ultimate celebration of family, ban families? Are we going to a wedding or a night club?

My first idea was to smuggle the kids into the wedding, pretending we didn’t know they were banned. My wife then offered to stay home with the kids while I attended the wedding and all wedding-related functions alone. Unable to bear the thought of 40 hours of wedding and wedding-related functions without any of my human shields, I am now desperately trying to convert her to a wedding boycott. “If you stay home with the kids, you’ll just be letting them and their kid-hating ways win. If we all stay home, that’ll show them.”

She shares my anger, so I might actually win this one. Which will only give my tightly-knit tribal mind, or what’s left of it, yet another reason to resume kicking me in the head.