Due to its proximity to the brain, the sense of smell is the most powerful for recalling memories, but when was the last time you used your ampullary electroreceptors to locate crustaceans in deep, dark water? You probably didn’t even know you had ampullary electroreceptors, and I don’t write that to display some sort of superiority, because I don’t have any either. Knowing that, a platypus might pull a power play on us by talking about how he uses them as a sixth sense. Just dropping those two words, sixth sense, you know this platypus is going to get a ton of attention at the pool party. When he starts in on the mechanics behind his super-sensory skin on his duck-bill and its three distinct receptor cells that help it detect electrical impulses caused by movements of objects in the water, and how he’s one of the few mammals that have this ability, you just know people are going to be gathering around. If he’s super-obnoxious about it, and he is, he knows the best exclamation point to put on all of his claims is a party trick.

He tells a short fella, wearing a yellow shirt, to throw a worm in the pool, then he instructs us to blindfold him, nose plug him, and add some noise-canceling earphones just to prove he isn’t using any of his “pedestrian senses.” And what do you know, he just happens to have all if that, a blindfold, a nose plug, and some noise canceling earphones on him!

“What’s going on here?” a late-comer asked, and the other guy just pointed. Other than that whisperer, the rest of us were silently watching that short guy in the yellow shirt spin the platypus around three times to disorient him. Yellow shirt then led the platypus to the edge of the water and pushed him in. After about twelve seconds, the platypus emerged with a worm in mouth. He allowed it to dangle at the end of his bill for a couple seconds, for effect, then he sucked it in.

“Ta-dah!” someone called out to ignite the hooting and hollering. Free-flow laughter followed, as we followed him, all but yipping with excitement, to a dark corner of the grotto.

We would have even joined in on all the adulation if we didn’t see that smile on Tiffany. Tiffany was such a friendly woman, with such a warm disposition, and we were really hitting it off, until that platypus decided put on the show. She showed us a smile when we began talking to her, and we thought it was that smile, until we saw what she gave the platypus. Then, when we added what we considered a clever, little joke after the show was over, her smiled ticked over to us while we spoke, but it lessened a little when she answered us in a polite, slightly dismissive tone. When the platypus added his own stupid joke about how he was a member of the relatively exclusive species of egg-laying mammals, “Other than the echidna, otherwise known as the spiny anteater.” Tiffany laughed. She loved it. She looked back to the platypus after that joke, and she laughed hard, way too hard, and that smile returned. That smile even strengthened as Tiffany waited for him to say something, anything else. It strengthened to such a degree that we knew it would probably not be long before we saw our first, live platypus love donut.

Even after Tiffany touched the soft, suede-like bill that she said she found quite pliable and fleshy around the edges, we maintained Walter Payton’s never-say-die motto. We could feel petty boiling up in our insides, but we didn’t want to become petty. We tried to maintain our smile to get that smile from Tiffany on us, but the one thing we know about petty is that it’s difficult to control once it start bubbling to the surface. 

When the platypus started flapping his flat pads of hardened gum tissue about being three different animals in one, he had the room. There were people I didn’t even know who were captivated by his, “We mimic the traits of the bird here, a reptile there, and a mammal like you everywhere else.” When he said you, he was talking directly to Tiffany. He proceeded to reveal his intentions by directing the rest of his stories, clever anecdotes, and descriptions of his prowess at Tiffany, and we felt that deep in our throat.  

Tiffany was all about short-term fascination in the moment, but I started thinking about how long-term calculations influence even the shortest short-term thinking. When Tiffany began gently stroking the platypus’s fur, while the platypus talked about how “science has found his fur displays bioflourescent properties under an ultra-violet lamp, and how that reveals that his fur can absorb short UV wavelengths and then emit visible light, fluorescing green or cyan,” and how “We camouflage ourselves from other UV-sensitive nocturnal predators or prey by absorbing UV light instead of reflecting it.”

“And then what?” was the question spinning around in our head. We were then going to further that question with a “What good does that do us, how can we use that piece of information?” to play to Tiffany’s long-term calculations. We didn’t ask it, because we knew how petty it sounded. If the platypus answered, it wouldn’t be a good one. If the platypus didn’t answer, we thought we might have had him, but silence can be a tricky thing. If the platypus was crafty, he would allow that silence to play out, until it came back on us and we were drowning in it.  

By the time he got around to talking about his tail, and how it isn’t just a rudder for swimming, we were no longer even smiling at the platypus. Our competitive juices were consuming us to the point that we didn’t like him when he said, “It’s like a fat storage depot, much like a camel’s. It’s almost like a secret snack drawer.” We’re not immune to his charisma, and if it wasn’t for Tiffany falling under his spell, we might marvel at how a platypus can captivate a room so adeptly.

Even a man named Tom Fielder fell under the platypus’s spell, and Tom was one of those narcissistic types who doesn’t pay attention to anyone who cannot do anything for Tom Fielder, and yes, he spoke of himself in the third person. Even Tom “the caustic, cynic” Fielder couldn’t conceal his compliments, “You’re a delightful blend of quirkiness and evolutionary marvels—a true testament to nature’s creativity!”   

We’re not fools, we could see that we were nearing a point of no-return with Tiffany. She was about two flapping eyelashes away from enamored by this duck-billed beaver who European naturalists thought was a hoax when they first encountered one of his ancestors. The painful memories of losing out to the males of our species struck us in the moment, as we thought about how much more painful, bordering on humiliating, it would be to lose out to a male of another species. This humiliation led to the desperation of us saying whatever we could think up, at that point, to try to convince the contingent surrounding the platypus in the grotto to move into the light, so Tiffany could see that the product of her adoration didn’t have teeth. We knew that she was thinking short-term, as the platypus went on about how multifunctional his bill and fur were, but we all know that nestled within even the shortest, short time thoughts are long-term considerations. Women might be able to overcome the superficial qualities of the toothless, for example, but they have to factor in how embarrassing it might be to go out on a date at a restaurant and have the other patrons notice that her date has to use gravel as makeshift teeth to munch on his food. That just has to be consideration for her, we thought, as we continued to hint around that our conversation would be so much better in another, better lit location in the pool area.

My competitive juices were getting the best of me, but I didn’t say anything about his teeth, or lack thereof, because a friend and former co-worker of mine placed a warning sticker in my mind about letting my competitive juices getting ahead of me when it came to fighting for a woman that I’ve always tried to apply.

“Be careful when you’re competing,” he said when I was competing with another fella, and I was about to let that woman know everything she didn’t know about that man. “Be careful that it don’t get the best of you, and you say the wrong thing. You gotta be discreet, strategic, and methodical, or it’s gonna come back on you, like the boomerang. You gotta lay your scoop out organic, or as organic as you can make it, so she thinks she’s discovered it all on her own. You pointing out his vulnerabilities, blatantly, will boomerang back on you, and you’ll be the bad guy in her eyes.”  

It was great advice from a dishwasher, and we’re not cracking on him either, because he said it himself. He said, “How do I have all these women, and I’m a dishwasher? I must know what I’m talking about.” I kept his advice in throughout this disastrous evening, until Tiffany started fingering the horny stinger on the heel of his back feet. That pounded home the point that her interest was so far beyond superficial and zoological that it was almost game over.

We were losing so bad that our desperation eventually reached a point where we cast our dishwasher’s advice aside and shouted out, “But aren’t you a monotreme?” That silenced the contingent, and we temporarily buckled under the weight of the lifted eyebrows around us, but we maintained our stance, because we had a point that we needed to drive home. When he proudly said yes, because he was proud his species, we pounced before he could use our classification to pivot a conversation about how proud he was of his heritage. We added, “Monotreme is Greek for one hole, so that means you only have one hole for waste removal?”

Was it a party foul? Yes, and we knew it was on so many levels that we knew it wouldn’t be met with approval by those who cultivate group thought on conversation topics and social decorum, but we also knew it could prove a depth charge that once detonated could affect Tiffany’s short-term thinking.  

The problem with this is that individual methods of waste removal are not in a woman’s, but more particularly a young woman’s, top 100 list of considerations for a potential mate. The party foul also illustrated the dishwasher’s boomerang effect in that if we made a dent in the platypuses’ chances at Tiffany it did not have a corresponding effect on our own. We could even say, judging by the raised eyebrows arcing even higher, that they viewed the comment as mean-spirited.  

When the platypus answered that with an all too thorough and descriptive answer, that effectively neutered our attempt, he concluded it with a clever redirect about how “Some stupid humans try to cutesify, as oppose to classify, the baby platypus as a puggle.” Tiffany laughed hard at that again, too hard. It was an all-in and it’s-all-over-for-you laugh that those of us who’ve lost out on so many potential dates know well.

In a last-dying gasp, we asked the platypus to do his blind-folded, worm trick again. We didn’t do this, “Because, I found that first one so inexplicable that I need to see if you can do it again.” We did it, because we wanted him to remove his swim shirt again, and when he did, we were all ready for it. We clicked the flashlight on our cell phone on for the supposed purpose of shining some light on him so he could see, but we accidentally exposed the fact that he didn’t have nipples in the process.

We considered this our strategic and methodical way of allowing Tiffany to discover this information on her own. Were our motives pure, of course not. We were ticked off, and we thought if we could help her discover the platypuses’s incongruities, it could lead her to question his commonality. While I suspect that very few people would avoid dating someone with a subtle incongruity, such as a strange set or nipples, or no nipples, I hoped all these depth charges might lead her to add them all up to a discovery that the platypus might be incongruent.  

If you’re competing with a platypus for a human female, and you’re losing, you might have other issues, but we were willing to bet that a toothless, nipple-less competitor who poops and pees out of the same hole might cause a woman to second guess who they should consider the ideal mate with whom they might eventually plan to marry and procreate. We also thought those long-term considerations would have a powerful influence on her short-term thinking. You can call us mean-spirited, or whatever you want, but we were trying to help Tiffany see beyond her short-term fascination with the platypus to weighing the long-term consideration of the traits their shared children might inherit from their father.