About five and a half years ago, I posted a video to YouTube in which I referred to a Swiffer mop pad as a “Maxipad mop,” and while most people thought it was funny, a few didn’t. One person told me that I debased all women. I asked how, but they were not open to a dialogue with me.

Comments on that video waned over time, as one might expect, but I still get a few now and then. Today, I saw one that asked me not to say “Maxi Pad mop,” and that’s the first time someone has commented about it in years. I was surprised, not just because I hadn’t seen a “Maxi Pad” comment in a while, but because people are still getting their panties in a twist about it.

I can’t understand what the controversy is. I think some women must think that I’m making fun of them somehow, but I only called it a “Maxi Pad mop” because it looks like a giant fucking maxi pad!

The other day, I was watching an interview with Robert Crumb where he was talking about the controversy and backlash he received from his work over the years, and like me, he was stumped, although I can’t imagine why; his shit was really provocative. His brother told him that people like “happy talk.” This wasn’t revelatory or anything like that. I’ve known for a long time that people don’t want to see or hear things that pull them from the fantasy world they’ve created for themselves to cope with the world, but for some reason, the term “happy talk” resonated with me and made the whole subject clear to me.

Actually, what it did was connect two phenomena that I have observed over the years, but never realized were related. The first is what the noted sociologist Erving Goffman called “front stage” persona, where people cultivate a character that they present to the world. I first noticed this behavior in my wife’s friends. As I got to know them deeper than acquaintances, I realized that they were pretending to be someone they weren’t. I called it “living the fantasy.” One of my wife’s friends fancied herself a rugged, outdoorsy woman, but she was the most prissy, high-maintenance person I’ve ever known.

I realized that the further the person’s fantasy was from reality, the more insufferable they were. I had no idea anyone else had noticed this phenomenon, let alone had studied this behavior. Then, I read Gone Girl, and I couldn’t believe someone had written a book about a part of human behavior that I had noticed, but never heard anyone else talk about before. It was a few years later when I learned about front-stage and back-stage personas.

The other phenomenon that I had noticed for years was how people would act strangely when I spoke honestly. I’m always honest, and I’ve always had a hard time in social situations because for most of my life, I never knew that everyone was lying to everyone else about everything all the fucking time. I didn’t know people were formulating responses to questions based on how the person asking the question might react or how the person answering the question might want them to react. It’s all very insane to me.

A couple of months ago, an old friend came to visit. He’s Mormon and a lifelong practitioner of both of these phenomena. He asked me if everyone was happy and healthy. I said, “No one’s happy,” with a tone of incredulity that he would ask such a question after half an hour of telling him about how much life sucks right now. “Everyone’s healthy, but nobody’s happy,” I said when I saw the look of horror on his face. I always forget how delicate he is.

Now that I’ve connected the dots between the way people present themselves to the world, and they way they want the world to present itself to them, I think I will better be able to navigate the ridiculous theater of human social interactions… just in time for AI to destroy us all. Perfect time as always.