An exuberant command for that tricky predicament of needing someone’s response before you can go forward—but you’re damn sure not going backward.
When Lover Boy George inadvertently Kramer’s his way into having not one but two girlfriends—because he can’t bear to break up with the one, Moira, to exclusively date the Newfound Other—he finds himself in a pickle of a bind. Sour indeed goes all-the-things when he goes to finally, indubitably break up with Moira…so he once again draws moxie-that-he-doesn’t-have from Jerry’s sage advice:
A mutual break-up, Aristo-Jerry opines to Po’ Boy George, is really like being on a nuclear submarine going to “code red” to launch missiles: you both need to turn your keys at the same time.
The final countdown—where True Moxie Moira’s reaction looked like Captain Costanza was again going down—buoyed this Georgie-boy clarion call.
Collaboration. It’s one of the most tiresome, overused words in the corporate world (like robust or reengineer, socialize or incentivize)—and it wasn’t even coined as an industry term until the 1980s. Since the dawn of time though, collaboration has been present in relationships even if the word itself has been absent; by another name, it’s compromise and solidarity and camaraderie all rolled into one. Or, if you dig far enough back: prehistoric grunts and gestures amounted, signaling “Can’t we all get along?”
George’s failure to get Moira to go along should be the clarion call buoying us in any circumstance where we need someone to turn their key dammit.
Granted, rarely in Life does a significant “turnkey” event actually require two keys; nuclear ops control, for one, being one of the rarities. Yet here’s George bringing the rare—think “delicate genius”—down into the norm: nuke control in the relational world.
Because sometimes, in a relationship, disarmament isn’t in order; sometimes, figurative preemptive “war” is—an Oppenheimer-esque deterrent that ends the relationship before it’s really begun. Or goes any further than it needs to. And any discussion about it. Immediately and in perpetuity.
No need to discuss the “bonds of our filial matrimony” if they’ve been blown to a billion bits–the sad synchronicity of keys turned–by circumstances beyond either one’s control.
Collaborations—vocational, relational, or otherwise—are such curiosities. Even the most copacetic of them. Collective achievements tinged at some point by so much jabberwocky and peccadilloes, hullabaloo and horseshit. It’s the Eighth Wonder of the World, really, that anyone gets along across x number of days or months or years and gets anything done together–much less successfully.
And if we do succeed, it can be a certain sort of success alright.
Emphasis on the suck.
“The Strongbox”
Season 9
Episode 14
Seinfeld-ism 