person toxic — 1 thorough investigation

person toxic, the inverted phrasing of the more familiar version, is something the autocomplete suggested at me unprompted as if it were trying to be helpful. the autocomplete was not being helpful. but i am going to use the inverted phrasing anyway today, because it sounds vaguely more legal in tone.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday at 3:14pm. carla is upstairs at a budget alignment that is, by the schedule on the door, an hour and a half. that gives me, generously, the rest of the morning before someone notices the back of my head is angled at a screen that is not the spreadsheet.

the apartment is also somewhere in this — by which i mean the draft started there last night and finished here this morning, which is the way drafts work when you live alone and the living room has a christmas tree skirt on the floor near the radiator with no tree on top of it. you can tell a lot about a person from what they refuse to put away. you can tell a lot about a search engine from the order it suggests words.

before any of this gets philosophical, the ground floor: the cluster pillar on gaslighting already maps the forensic side of all of this — the lying, the rewriting, the slow erosion of a person’s sense of what tuesday actually was. this post sits beside it as a footnote about word order, which is a smaller question with the same root.

person toxic, the disclaimer about word order

english, as a language, prefers adjective then noun. red car. tall building. toxic person. you do not, as a rule, say car red, or building tall, or person toxic. it sounds, in the mouth, slightly off. it sounds like the speaker is translating from another language in real time, or has been awake for thirty hours, or is dictating into a phone with one thumb while standing on a curb.

and yet. people type it. people type it enough that the autocomplete, which is a piece of software trained on what people actually type rather than on what people are taught to type, has decided that person toxic is a viable, suggestable, indexable phrase. five thousand monthly searches, by some count. five thousand people who put the noun first.

i have a theory about those five thousand people, and the theory is that they are all, every one of them, tired. you do not invert your own grammar when you are at full capacity. you invert it when the person you are typing about has used up the part of your brain that arranges words in order.

which is, in itself, the symptom. that is the post. but i am supposed to fill the post out, so let me do that.

the apartment where the draft happened next to a christmas tree skirt without a tree

the draft started at 11pm back at my place, on the couch, with the laptop balanced on a cushion and a glass of something on the side table that i was telling myself was hydration. across the room: the christmas tree skirt, on the floor, near the radiator. there has not been a tree on it since january of a year i am not going to specify. the skirt stayed because i moved a chair onto it once and forgot to move the chair back.

the skirt is what the apartment looks like when the apartment is a person. it is the thing that is in the wrong place, that nobody is making a case for, that is also not bothering anyone, that is also, technically, ruining the room. you walk past it forty times a week and you do not see it. someone visits and they see it in eight seconds. someone visits and asks, gently, “is that your tree skirt.” and you say, “it is january. it is also september. the skirt stays.”

the skirt is not toxic. the skirt is just there. but the skirt is what i thought of when the search query person toxic arrived at the top of the autocomplete: the wrong order, the worn-down logic, the thing that has been left in a place it does not belong because moving it would require a small confrontation with yourself about how long it has been there. (this is the seventh microwave i have killed, for what it’s worth, and the seventh microwave is currently fine, because the seventh microwave has not been asked any difficult questions yet.)

the dave-and-mom diagnostic, separately and together

dave called on tuesday on the second ring of his own line, which is a thing he does when he is bored at the insurance desk and wants to outsource his boredom. i told him about the autocomplete. dave said, “person toxic is what you type when you do not have the energy to be wrong twice.” i wrote that down. dave does not know he is being quoted. that is, i think, the only way to safely quote dave.

then on sunday mom called, the way mom always calls on sunday, and mom does not need to be told what i am writing because mom has a way of arriving at the topic without me bringing it up. she said, “are you sleeping.” i said, “of course i am sleeping.” she said, “okay.” then she said, “you sound like you are typing words in the wrong order.” she knew. mothers know. it cannot be defeated. i have tried.

between dave and mom you have, basically, the two diagnostic stations any person needs. dave will tell you what the symptom looks like. mom will tell you that you have it. neither of them will solve it. that is the deal. that is the family.

also, hot take: pineapple on pizza is fine. it is the only food question that gets people to invert their own grammar this aggressively, which makes it a useful control variable. if a person tells you, with a flat face, “pizza pineapple, it ruins,” that person is from the same exhausted cohort as the one typing person toxic. it is the same syntax under pressure.

signs 1 to 5, the apartment-grade ones

none of these are clinical. none of these are from a manual. these are back at home. you may also find them at the desk, at the bar, in the supermarket parking lot, and in the second-ring phone call from the man who calls and never leaves a message but whose voicemail box is, somehow, also full.

1. the conversation ends and you cannot remember what you agreed to. you remember agreeing. that is all you remember. you nodded a lot. the nodding is in your shoulders for the next two hours.

2. you draft a reply at 11:30pm. you do not send it. you draft a different reply at 12:14am. you do not send that one either. you eventually send a third reply that says “ok” and you spend the rest of the week wondering what the first two would have done.

3. you find yourself, at the supermarket, holding the wrong brand of mustard for the third time, because some part of your brain is still, three days later, running a script about a sentence somebody said. the sentence is short. the script is long.

4. the unopened mail pile has grown by a centimeter. you did not put anything new on it. growth has occurred independently. the growth is suspicious. the growth feels metaphorical. the growth probably is.

5. your search history has, on a wednesday, the phrase person toxic typed at 1:14am, with no follow-up click, because at 1:14am you typed it, you saw the autocomplete confirm it as a category, you closed the tab, and you went to bed feeling, for a moment, slightly less alone in the inversion. that is, also, the post.

this is the territory the cinema covers when it covers it well. the slow grind of a person being talked into being smaller is in whiplash, in the drum studio scenes that are not, technically, about anyone being toxic in the dictionary sense, and that nonetheless feel like the diagnostic for it. the rose petals and the suburban quiet of american beauty get at the other end of the same thing — the toxicity that lives in the kitchen with the lights too low and the conversation too polite. the cinema does not invert the words. but the cinema understands the cohort that does.

verdict — the syntax is awkward, the toxicity is plain

so here is the finding, presented to you, the reader, the jury, the autocomplete that started this. person toxic and toxic person are not two different things. they are two different states of the same person typing them. one is composed. one is not. the not-composed one is the one that ended up in the search bar, and the search bar, being a small honest mirror, suggested it back.

if you want the longer forensic on what the toxic version of the conversation actually does to your sense of what happened, the cluster pillar on the rewriting of tuesday covers it from the other angle. this post is the syntactic footnote. that one is the body of the report.

the skirt is still on the floor. it is still january. it is also may. the seventh microwave is still in the kitchen, behaving. the unopened mail pile has not been audited. the autocomplete will keep suggesting person toxic at 1am to people who type it, and i will keep writing footnotes about it from a desk while a budget alignment runs upstairs. this is, i think, fine. this is, also, the system working exactly as designed.

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