The Trouble with Being Buggy

I’ve had a heck of a time working on my “On Bugginess” essay lately and have finally decided the only way to figure it out is to take a step back and write about it while not writing about it, with none of the pressures of creating an all caps ESSAY, with Montaigne pointing a finger through the annals of history and, most likely, hell. In other words, I’ll blog to see why this is so hard for me to encapsulate.

Several years ago, months into our nascent relationship, Brock came up with the term “buggy” to describe how King would behave every time I visited their place. He would become ecstatic, nervous, he’d pace the room—he seemed to be on the verge of either vomiting or enveloping me in a two-pawed bear hug. Often he did both. This term, it has to be said, also converges with the new vocabulary I’d introduced to Brock’s life. I would bring him anywhere he wanted to go rather than take him. When I beckoned him to show him something super neat and needed him close by to inspect it, I’d say Come see. And when we went grocery shopping together, we’d use a buggy, not a daft old cart. These expressions were so endearing to him he could hardly take it (really—I was almost dumped for being too adorable), and this became part of our creation of each other.

Buggy eventually became what we’d call each other at our most loving moments, which then became our permanent reciprocal pet names. Couples do this, and it’s continually fascinating to me that it spans our genders and ethnicities and cultures—everyone who owns a language finds something unique and loving to call his lover. My former boyfriend called me Bay—the same name he called his ailing cat, and I called him Babe, which seemed to me alliterative and orthodox enough to be an acceptable counterpart. (People use all kinds of pet names, and I won’t even try to come up with more examples since they are infinite. If you are interested, though, check out Alain de Botton’s great book In Love which depicts the rise and fall of the protagonist’s first real relationship. The couple experiments with about two dozen pet names before finding the perfect one.) The Buggy between me and my husband certainly was not planned, but in dissecting the essence of the word, I must say I love the two syllables, the sing-songy quality of that. And also how it takes a traditionally negative vowel sound, the “uh” of the first syllable, and flips it on its ass in the second with the oh-so-positive “ee” sound. Though I didn’t pick buggy I couldn’t think of a better word.

(An incidental sidebar: my sister-in-law Jennifer is in love with a man who shares her brother’s name but not its spelling—he’s Broc. When the four of us are fortunate enough to spend time together, the bugginess inherent in each of us rubs off on the other, and the two of them become the rare couple who does not get on our nerves after forty-eight hours. Usually after a few hours together Jen will call her Broc “Buggy”, and while he’ll love it he’ll say, “No, that is theirs.” Then he’ll become her Babe again and the world will be as it should be.)

What I’m still not sure about is whether or not Brock created the bugginess in me or just enhanced it. Before meeting him I was generally a happy person, regardless of whether or not I was in a fruitless relationship (and more times than not, I was). But happiness, serenity is not bugginess. I like to think of bugginess as a fusion between optimism and elan. It’s an optimism that isn’t blind, but frenetic. It’s the realization that most things are fucked but you love unapologetically and remain positive anyway. Positive in a way you realize may piss some people off because, hey, that’s annoying, or hey, it’s so comfortable to be complacent. In a weird way, bugginess gets shit done, makes others love you or loathe you, without really doing anything tangible at all.

I’m positive, for instance, that bugginess has gotten me every job and every promotion I’ve sought. The cynic would say, No, it was your pretty face, dummy. But I reject that. Having known tons of pretty faces at two of the prettiest campuses in the SEC, I can guarantee that looks go sour after about a minute of sourpuss-dom. Or attitude. When I applied to be a waitress at T.J. Ribs in Baton Rouge, after years of being a professional teacher/writer and never having worked a service industry job ever, I had the manager perplexed at my existence in the seat across from him. You’re a teacher, he said. You’ve got a Master’s degree. Why are you here? I told him, “I want to be here—I want to be good at something new, I want to learn, I want to work as hard as possible and see an immediate reward!” The candor and exuberance won him over. Usually they only hired experienced servers at this restaurant—a minimum of two years—but I had bugginess on my side.

The main trouble with being buggy, with the exception of trying to articulate it, is that it creates in one the insistence on being eternally enchanting. Yes, this wears after a while. Let me show you an example from two jokes I made on our recent trip to Baltimore to visit Brock’s family, two jokes, by the way, I didn’t allow anyone to forget that I told:

Joke 1: Brock’s aunt, Kris, was describing her daughter Abigail’s pursuit of equanimity in every part of her life: that all family members get fed in equal portions at dinnertime, that all children share at school, that no one is ever left out of any endeavor. (It’s important here to know an important piece of context for this joke—Abigail’s last names is Marks.) My response to this was, “She’s a perfect Marxist!”

Joke 2: While drunk, most fittingly, a group of us began pontificating on the rise of alcoholism and prescription drug addiction in our generation. Diana, Brock’s mom, said the word “alcoholic” was literally not in the lexicon of her parents’ generation. “There were simply no alcoholics,” she said, “except for my parents and every single person they knew.” My response to this was, “Sure, there was absolutely zero alcoholism in the 1950s. Back then they just called it ‘nighttime.’”

One must realize that I know, I’m perfectly aware, that neither of these jokes are the epitome of wit or intellect. But, shit man—people laughed. Heartily. That’s the Achilles’ heel of any Buggy. I want more of it, all the time. I feel that in laughter everyone is achieving their best selves while simultaneously there is something highly egotistical and wrong about me trying to lay claim on their laughter. Bugginess cannot be spread at the barrel of the laughter-gun. Love me, please. Laugh at me, please. This is not the way bugginess works. But who said zen or bugginess was easy.

But of course there is no real trouble with being buggy, other than it’s a high standard to set for oneself in the day-to-day of captive tourists in Iran, and worldwide starvation and poverty, and partisan politics and racism and all the rest. And other than the need to articulate its importance has become another of my day-to-day obsessions. I’m just a person. I’ve got emails and phone calls and family. The spread of bugginess has to sometimes play second fiddle in an orchestra of pinging triangles.