#580 Gesturing Bottle

After yesterday’s essay about bottled water, I was awash in comments. The consensus seemed to be Tumwater filtered tap water was better anyhow, so why bother. And that it would be easier to drink tap water and donate the money directly to cancer research.
I am heartily in concurrence with the aforementioned approaches. However, they ignore the biggest and, I think, most persuasive reason why bottled water has achieved its ubiquity.
The fiddle factor.
Yes the fiddle factor, that strange proclivity of nervous-jervous human beings to need something to mess with—to gesture with, to dink with when conversation lags or they need to look busy doing something, to fiddle with.
Jerry Seinfield was the first to recognize the fiddle factor power of bottled water. He used it for “action.”
Action is what actor types use to create meaningful pauses, both dramatic and comedic.
Action can put quote marks around spoken words. Punctuate them with meaning. Contrast these too sentences: My girlfriend and I were enjoying porkchops the other day; to, my girlfriend and I were...”enjoying porkchops” the other day.
See how the pause in the second sentence amplifies an imaginary meaning of your own creation. That space allows the mind to roam and invest emotion in the circumstance at hand.
That’s why dramatists use it, and especially why comedians do. Seinfield knew that it could make his ordinary show about ordinary things extraordinary.
In the old days, action was achieved by the use of the cigarette. Blowing and puffing and lighting and flicking, each stylized motion punctuating the dialogue.
And that’s how we use bottled water in ordinary life in smoke-free America today. Pointing with it. Screwing and unscrewing the top. Whetting our whistle when we’re ready to whisper.
It’s not the water after all. It’s the bottle—and our need to have something to fiddle with when the conversational going gets tough. When it feels like you’re a helpless babe in the social woods.
Schmoozing is hard and dangerous work.
When you need comfort, there’s nothing in the world like having an adult—“baba.”
America ya gotta love it