Category: anti-humor

Gomers’ Piles

RilalyLeave a comment

If I enter a public restroom and see you, you’re guilty of whatever happened in there until proven innocent, and the more you plead your innocence, the more guilty you look.  

The Gomer

Most of us have been insulted so often and in so many creative ways that it’s almost impossible and pointless to catalog. Nestled within those insults are a few jewels that are so colorful and intriguing that we cannot wait to use them. I’m not exactly sure why I latched onto this particular slang insult from the 90s, but when Ty said, “You’re such a Gomer!” it sounded so much like an insult I would use that if an insult can ‘fit like a glove’ I could almost feel the leather sucking on my contours.    

“Gomer?” I asked. “What is a Gomer?”  

“If you have to ask,” Ty said. “You’re a Gomer.” That reply wasn’t new to me of course, but it informed me that I was stepping into a kafkatrap in which I was The Trial’s Joseph K., accused of an infraction against cultural awareness, and any effort I put into clarifying the situation only deepened my apparent guilt and reinforced the accusation. It also created the perfect insult loop, because any questions I asked only further authenticated the insult and somehow brought the condition into being.  

Most subjects of this insult loop would recognize the kafkatrap for what it was and drop the line of questioning there, which would allow the accuser to bask in their glory. Yet, I found it so delicious that I thought I might want to test drive it on my own one day, so I wanted to fully understand its power base. “Does it date back to the 60s television show Gomer Pyle?” 

“I don’t watch TV.” It was cool back then, as it is now, to feign ignorance.  

“Well, what does it mean then?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said with impatience. “But it fits.”  

After obsessing over this, I discovered that the term began after the prophet Hosea’s wife, Gomer, acted unfaithfully, and it thus served to symbolize God’s relationship with unfaithful Israel, but I was pretty sure that didn’t form the basis of Ty’s insult. I was also sure Ty wasn’t referring to the emergency room jargon from House of God by Samuel Shem that referred to them shouting, “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” to annoying patients who repetitively took beds that should’ve been reserved for more deserving patients. No, I decided, the term was derived from the TV show Gomer Pyle, a character played by Jim Nabors, as a clumsy, unsophisticated fella who was folksy and awkward.

Even though the truth was somewhat anti-climactic, as I expected a more sophisticated and nuanced answer, I still enjoyed the sound of the insult “Gomer”. I don’t know if it was the syllabic nature of the word or the enunciation, but “You’re such a Gomer!” just felt like such an airtight insult that I couldn’t wait to use it on the unsuspecting. It just seemed so me. To my memory, I never got around to it. I know it’s not too late, but I forgot to use it back when it had the flamboyant style and battlefield visibility of prominent feather plumes (AKA panache), and it’s one of the great regrets of my life.

Dads

We all enjoy hearing about the father of an extremely successful person remaining stubbornly unimpressed by their son’s success. The rest of the world cannot believe how talented this man is, but his dad, the man he probably strove to impress more than anyone else in the world is, “Meh.” It’s your child, the little fella you could hold in one hand while you changed his diaper with the other, all growed up ruling Hollywood, and you’re, “Meh.” It’s funny and sad at the same time. 

After reaching the pinnacle of success in Hollywood, Jerry Lewis decided he wanted to share the wealth that came with such sucseess with his father. Lewis came up with what he considered the perfect way of doing it. He approached members of the General Motors corporation and asked them to build his dad the finest automobile they could possibly build. When the father, Danny Levitch, was presented with this gift, he said, “What you couldn’t get me a convertible?” That’s so cynical, it’s funny, right? It’s Seinfeld funny. We can’t decide if it’s so funny it’s sad, or if it’s so sad it’s funny, but it strikes us as sounding so true that it is funny … and a little sad.   

This story provides a small window into Jerry Lewis’s relationship with his dad. Due to the comedic nature of it, we might consider it a highlight, but what happened in the days in between? What happened to Jerry Lewis when he was too young to understand it all, then old enough to know that he was being raised in  a loveless home? The car story provides a laugh, but what happened on those boring Thursdays and during the Holidays in that home Jerry Lewis grew up in? According to Lewis, he was never close to either of his parents. Danny Levitch was a failed vaudeville actor who may have been jealous of all of Jerry’s success, and he may have considered the car an example of Jerry Lewis rubbing his father’s nose in his success. Hard to know what happened in the inner sanctum of the family dynamics, but Jerry and his parents never reconciled, and Jerry was later known to be a distant father to his own kids, as all six of them had a strained relationship with him throughout his life. He even went so far as to cut them all out of his will before he died. 

I don’t know if Mr. Levitch was a “tough love” proponent, who was constantly pushing Jerry harder, because he thought praise weakens, or if he did what he did to try to keep his wildly successful son grounded, but at some point he probably should’ve closed the loop. These loops are facades we create to force our children through for their betterment. Some parents create beautiful! and wonderful! facades of too much praise, because they believe it strengthens their child’s self-confidence, their morale and resolve, and some parents do the opposite to keep their kids grounded and to prepare them for the perseverance required for the rough world that awaits.  

My dad was an opposite. Whenever we accomplished what we accomplished, he spotted the possible fly in the ointment that no one considers while in the glow of accomplishment. He often talked about how luck always plays something of a role, and the lucky should always prepare for the times when they aren’t so lucky. “It’s great advice dad, but how about we take a moment to bask?”  

Whenever we saw an individual driving a high-priced vehicle, my dad would say, “We don’t know how much he owes.” When everyone else was buttering our bottom, our dad was warning us about the other foot landing a solid blow to the keister. It was what he considered “the real” side, which just happened to be the critical, cynical side. He did this throughout our maturation and into adulthood. The difference between my dad and Mr. Levitch, and all those negative Nancies who focus far too much on the dark side of life, is that he eventually closed the loop.

“I’m so proud of you and your brother,” he said one day, almost out of the blue. If someone threw out a hypothetical scenario, beforehand, in which my dad offered me unqualified praise without conditions, I would’ve said, “First of all, it will never happen, but if it did, it probably wouldn’t mean a lot to me.” Much to my surprise, it turned out to be one of the more meaningful moments of my life. I still remember the intersection we were approaching when he said it, and it’s been fifteen years since that happened.  

Did Mr. Levitch built a facade for his son by withholding praise, love and forgiveness for the expressed purpose of making his son a hard man who is invulnerable to insults and criticism? And did he maintain that facade, even on his deathbed? We don’t know, but we know Jerry Lewis did by cutting his children out of his will. While I’ve never been on a deathbed, I have to imagine that would be a pretty good time to let bygones be bygones and let our guard down to express love, pride, and forgiveness. It’s also an excellent time to close all the loops we’ve created for their own good, and … it’s actually hilarious when we don’t. Except to those who want to hear their loved one say one kind thing to them before they go to the great beyond. I didn’t have to go through this, because my dad eventually closed that loop, but if he didn’t, I can only imagine that all of the holes in my soul would’ve coalesced into one big, hilarious black hole. 

Mary

“You don’t like Mary?” I ask. “I can understand not liking Trisha and Natalie, they’re 50% people; 50% of us like them and 50% don’t, but Mary? How can you dislike Mary?” Mary has her flaws of course, and we all become qualified professionals when it comes to spotting other people’s flaws, but with Mary, we really need to dig deep to find them. The next question we will ask ourselves, soon after we start spelunking through Mary’s caves and caverns, is why am I here again? That’s right, we started this whole expedition because there was something about Mary that exposed something we didn’t like about ourselves.  

Funny is a Funny Thing

I knew a life-of-the-party type who could just dominate a room when he was “on stage” at various get-togethers and various shindigs, but he couldn’t even make you smile one-on-one. I knew “a quiet guy” who could drop you with a perfect comeback, a great one-liner, and an incredible story. Call him out at a party, and he clams up. He said things, but they were all self-conscious. “I get nervous,” he’d say. He basically experienced stage fright in front of seven or eight people, even when they were just family members. I met a guy who was a hilarious writer, but in person he could never quite pound a joke home. He was one of those joke tellers who was always editing, and by the time he got to the punchline, we were basically exhausted, and we laughed sympathetically. As an amateur student of psychology as it pertains to humor, I’ve never met anyone who was funny in person, on stage, and on the page.

Your Fly is Down 

As a failed student of comedy, I cannot abide by the “Your fly is down!” joke. One character in the series Stick made a funny, insightful comment about how wolves must be embarrassed to see what we’ve done to manipulate their species into yorkies, pomeranians, and shih tzus. The other character says, “Your fly is down.” This is now so common that it’s a trope in most comedic productions, and I don’t understand how it became something we consider a pointed, substantive, or even clever comeback?  

If someone asked me my least favorite joke, I probably couldn’t come up with it on the spot, but if someone else said, “What about the ‘Your fly is down’ joke?” 

“That’s it!” I’d say. It’s one of those jokes that only works in-person. In a situation comedy, written in, presumably, a writer’s room, how does this get a thumbs up from a head writer? How does the head writer not say, “We can do better than that, c’mon guys. That’s a Friends joke. Surely, we can do better than recycling a Friends joke.” If I were writing this exchange, I would have the butt end of this fly joke say, “Okay thanks,” as he zips his zipper up, “but that doesn’t take away from my observation.” This rebuttal is somehow viewed as one character putting another in their place, and it must be viewed as effective in some quarters, because so many writers write it in as dialogue. Personally, I’d like to have a word with the world to have them help me finally put this insipid “Your fly is down” joke out of its misery. 

Tictacs de un Reloj 

The ticks of the clock in Mr. Harrington’s Spanish II class were so painfully slow that I still remember looking up at that clock with clenched teeth. When the second hand descended from one to six, that clocked performed its functions as we’d expect. When it ascended from six to twelve, the most important part, it struggled. It bounced a little, as if the mechanisms behind its ascent were lacking power. Even though I had nothing better to do at the time, I thought nothing was better than anything we did in that classroom.

As we age and look back at our schooling years, most of us regret not paying more attention in school. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else, but after crossing that bridge o’ regret, I now recognize that I would be just as bored in Mr. Harrington’s class today as I was as at sixteen-years-old. I now have corporate boardroom meetings to remind me how slow a clock can tock. 

Prison guards often say that after spending years in their profession, they often begin to feel held captive as much as the prisoners. Mr. Harrington was our warder, as he appeared to loathe being in the class as much as we did. He often joked about how many hours he was away from his retirement package, and he obnoxiously calculated that over the course of two years of in-class hours. 

Now that I’m old and happy, time ticks away so quickly that the only thing that makes me a little unhappy is watching how efficient our clocks are now. Yet, if I were on my death bed watching those clicks of the clock bounce by far too quickly, and an entity appeared offering me six more months of life, I would accept it of course, until  he offered me the requisite “catch” of those type of offerings. “The catch is you have to go back in time and attend Mr. Harrington’s class for one hour for each day you’re being offered.” I would still eventually accept his offer, because life is life, and I have to imagine I would recognize its value in that moment, but I might ask the entity to explain the glory of the unknown to me to weigh it against my personal definition of earthly hell.   

Permission! Permission

“It’s pointless to give advice to young ‘un’s,” old people often say about the young. “They don’t listen.” True, but we didn’t listen either. We heard them, but everything they said went in one ear and out the other. Before it went out the other, however, it did hit a way station. We were teenagers, we had our first job, and we were cashing our own paychecks, so of course we weren’t listening.

I’m not going to say, “I never got nothing,” but everything I got, before those paychecks, came with a whole lot of begging, pleading and badgering. I’m not still complaining about that but illustrating that everything “I got” came with the most evil word in the teenage lexicon: Permission. 

Those first, sweat-drenched paychecks taught me about something I only heard about when I was a teen, purchasing power. Purchasing something without permission was the greatest high I received to that point in my life, a high no drug or alcohol could duplicate. To me, it was better than a girl’s smile. And the “Theys” in my life tried to coach me into being more responsible with my money. It didn’t happen right away, as the dizzying feelings of euphoria lasted long after I went broke displaying that power. It took a number of paychecks and repetitive feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, and feelings of utter powerlessness before I tried to find that way station again and the advice therein to try to put it back in the other ear. If that young ‘un you’re trying to advise is anything like I was, give them that advice and realize that “they won’t listen,” until they make their own mistakes so often that they try to remember what we said.  

The Relative Quality of Relative Quality

“That’s such an awful book (album or movie),” they say about the works with which I develop a relationship. “I can’t believe you liked it.” Tommyknockers is often deemed one of the worst books Stephen King ever wrote. The ending was so anticlimactic that I think it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, but there were moments, in the buildup, when Tommyknockers captivated mein a way few books ever have. Rock critics and KISS fans say that their Music from The Elder album was not only KISS’s worst album, but it might be one of the worst rock albums ever made. I’ll never know the truth, because my connection to that album is so strong I’ll never be able to analyze it objectively. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the greatest divide between my friends and members of family and I arrived with a production called The Blair Witch Project. I’ve never watched the movie again, after seeing it at midnight on the night (morning?) of its release, but that movie reached me on a level no other movie has. “Isn’t that the whole point,” we ask critics and fans. To paraphrase Picasso, “The writers’ job is to create something and then give it away.” When they create it, it’s a nutshell of their passion, and they hope to give that passion away to us. Those of us who love these artistic creations cannot answer questions of quality in a dispassionate manner, because the authors of these creations reached us in a way that led us to fall in love with them in a manner similar to teenage, puppy love that is so irrational that it cannot be factually supported or refuted.  

Fix-It Man!

Some of us are perpetually caught between our inability to fix our things and not wanting to spend the money to have another fix them. It’s always kind of embarrassing to admit we were not born with the ability, or more importantly the patience, to fix things. I make a mistake, and it becomes clear to me that I’m a total screw up who can’t do things. Other people make the same mistakes, and they simply start over from scratch and fix it correctly. My inferiority complex leads me to panic when I don’t do things perfectly. 

The Conditional Secret

Just out of curiosity, I read Secrets to a Happy Marriage articles. I’m not going to write that they’re totally useless, but they contain advice that falls under the term The Forer Effect. The Forer Effect is most often witnessed in horoscopes, in which their writers apply descriptions, advice, et al. that could apply to everyone. Personally, I think the best advice I’ve ever heard is that relationships between adults are not unconditional. My guess is that most marriages end because the participants mistakenly believe that their marriage should be unconditional, and one or more of the spouses fail to express what their conditions are. Unconditional love should be reserved for the parent/child relationship. As fortune seekers often say, in their quest for treasure, more adventure and glory is found in the chase than in actually securing the pot of gold. If we want to make an individual, who happens to be our spouse, happy, we should know that there are super-secret elements to a happy marriage to be found every day. If you’re a great spouse who wants to have a happy marriage, you’ll seek those super-secrets and capitalize on them when they make their appearance, but there will probably be more glory found in the chase.  

Hiding in Hyde

In the movie Entourage, based on a TV series of the same name, the main character secures the rights to a movie called Hyde. The main character (of Entourage) informs his agent that for him to participate in Hyde, he wants to direct it. The agent begrudgingly concedes, and to make a long, boring story short, Hyde turns out to be: “Brilliant!” of course. If you watched the TV series, you know the main character is a leading man who has leading man, movie star good looks, and he gets everything he wants in life. No one, agents, directors, friends, family, or women, dare say no to the man. He’s the top of the list, king of the hill, and an a number one of the charmed life demographic. 

Those of us on the outside-looking-in know such people exist. We’ve met them, viewed them from afar, and we’ve even developed relationships with some of them. Some of them are athletically gifted, intellectually superior, and/or charismatic types who light up every room they enter, but in my experience, they’re almost never creative types.

The typical creative type is not born with the gifts of the charmed. Their creatively is honed through effort, failure, and the struggle to succeed. Failure is often the key, because the typical creative type starts out awful, laughably awful, and some of their beta readers are not afraid to laugh. The typical creative type perseveres, not because they want to prove their detractors wrong, but because it’s who they are, or who they’ve become.  

Those of us on the outside looking in must grapple with the idea that we’re jealous of “IT!” guys, because we are. Who wouldn’t want to live one day of their lives? If we can step beyond that argument and have a rational discussion, I don’t see how anyone can lead such a charmed life and be creative. We all know there are exceptions to every rule, but it just seems implausible that this charmed individual can create something “Brilliant!” in his directorial debut. (It should be noted that the Vincent Chase character did not write the screenplay for Hyde, but there are so many ways in which a director creatively shapes a script that requires creativity.) 

If Entourage: The Movie wanted to have a deep, psychological hook, it should’ve carried a central message that this main character could have it all, in all of the believable ways he did, but he could not achieve creative brilliance too. He’s never had to struggle to develop such skills, and he’s never failed to the degree that he scorched the earth of his initial plans, started over, and learned from all that humiliation and embarrassment to create something “Brilliant!” It should’ve carried the message that something “Brilliant!” is often created in the ashes of all that. 

The main character, as depicted throughout the eight seasons of the Entourage series, never had much of a struggle. The fictional film in the movie, Hyde, should’ve bombed critically and commercially, as a superficial film of no substance. It didn’t, of course, as the star proved his detractors wrong, which in effect made the film Entourage: The Movie, a superficial film of no substance. 

Hoomans, Ha!men, and Humans 

RilalyLeave a comment

Taxonomists and biological anthropologists classify modern humans as the Homo sapiens sapiens species. No, that is not a typo. The reason for the double-word is that we are a subspecies of the Homo sapiens species. Taxonomists and biological anthropologists created this distinction to separate Homo sapiens sapiens species from the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, the Homo sapiens idaltu, or Herto man, and the debatable inclusion of the Homo sapiens denisova, or Dragon man. We’re all homos, in other words, under the genus Homo, and the biological anthropologists break us down after that.

Our Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies is characterized by advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures. We’re the most complex subspecies in this regard, but if aliens from another planet were to meet us, greet us, and play in all our reindeer games, they probably wouldn’t agree that we all belong in the same categorization.

When we talk about Alien Life Forms (ALFs) here, we’re talking about Spock, S’Chn T’Gai Spock from the original Star Trek. Spock was half-human, half Vulcan, but we’re going to characterize our ALF as a full-on Vulcan, a full-on reason and rational thinking Vulcan with no empathetic or sympathetic emotions. In this ALF’s After Earth report home, it would write, “Even Earth’s scientists refrain from proper delineations in their Homo sapiens subspecies, because the scientific community thinks that a proper breakdown of various individuals in their subspecies might hurt feelings, but there are clear delineations. Some Homo sapiens sapiens have not fully evolved to the point that they belong to that species. Others have.”

If we never meet Spock-like ALF, or fail to prove they exist, we’ll never be able to verify this characterization. Thus, we will have to turn to the closest thing we have to an Alien Life Form in our universe, one with intimate knowledge of the Homo sapiens sapiens that is dispassionate enough to provide objective analysis. I would nominate the cat. Anyone who has owned a cat knows that we share an off again relationship with them. The cats definition of our relationship might even be punctuated with a “I really don’t care that much what happens to you” exclamation point that is furthered by a “As long as I get some milk and food every once in a while, and someone or something keeps me stimulated every once in a while I’ll continue to exist near you.”

Some might say the dog has as much, if not more, knowledge of our species as the cat, but the dog is biased. Dogs love us. They are so loyal that if they were commissioned to analyze our species, they would tell us what we want to hear. There’s a reason we call them man’s best friend, and it is largely based on the idea that they accept us for who we are. They don’t analyze us in the manner a cat will, and they know nothing about our inadequacies or failures, because their sole goal in life is to make us happy. They know when we’re happy, they’re happy. Cats are almost 180-degrees different.

Instagram posters have characterized this on again, off again, “I really don’t care that much what happens to you” relationship we have with cats with a somewhat humorous, somewhat condescending term that their cats use to describe us, hoomans. Hoomans is a cutesy eye-dialect, similar to that of the “No Girlz Allowed” sign that moviemakers put outside the door of a boy’s clubhouse. The cutesy error is employed to enhance the cutesy idea that cats and young boys can’t spell. The moviemakers might even add a backwards ‘R’ to further emphasize the cuteziness of the boy’s sign.

Another intent behind the cutesy hoomans contrivance is to inform us that we’re not viewing this interaction from the customary human perspective. We’re viewing this particular interactions from a perspective we may not have considered before, the cat’s.

In that vein, the unsympathetic delineations of the cat would suggest there are Homo sapiens sapiens who fail the “advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures” standards put forth by biological anthropologists. They might suggest we introduce a Homo sapien confusocortex, or Confused Man, subspecies for those who haven’t evolved completely. 

These hoomans were born at full capacity, and their schooling years proved that they were able to achieve full functionality, but as with any muscle, the brain can deteriorate with lack of use. We’re not attempting to make fun of them, but there is a delineation between those who know how to operate at an optimum, and those who fail to make necessary connections.

In the cat-world, I’m not sure if they would characterize me as a human or a hooman. I think they might develop a separate category for those of us who measure up, but we enjoy disrupting the meticulously crafted model they’ve created for human actions and reactions. The cats view such joyful interference with their carefully designed understanding of human nature and its patterns with something beyond skepticism. They’re alarmed. If we watch cats in the wild, they study their prey carefully to gauge whether or not they’ll get hurt. If after examining us completely, they developed a full categorization, it might be ha!men. My brief experience with cats informs me that they don’t have a sense of humor, so it would be impossible for them to properly categorize ha!men without some form of condescending insults. My guess is they would spit out something like, the symbolic, or ironic inversion of their cultural input often critiques the very idea of cultural output, then twist it into recursive satire. Their social systems resemble Escher prints—technically sound, emotionally disorienting. “They are players, jokesters, and fools,” the cats would conclude, “and we say that in the most condescending way possible.”   

Ha!men know that pets and children create profiles of humans based on patterns, and I think cats are quite comfortable with the thought that hoomans were put on this planet to serve them. Hoomans are to provide the cat food, milk, a place to relieve themselves, and various forms of stimuli. It’s a tenuous relationship that suggests if hoomans fail to fulfill the expectations of their relationship the cat will simply go to another hooman who can. Those hoomans who fulfill expectations can, could, and probably should receive the reward of affection. They know adult hoomans need this every once in a while, and they don’t mind occasionally playing that role for them, as long as the bullet point, requirements are met.

They also know we arrive home at around 5:30, feed them and themselves, and sit before the glowing box for a couple hours before it’s time to go to bed. They grow accustomed to these patterns, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we make sounds at one another, and our gait pattern. When we meet their criteria, they might sleep or find some other stimuli to occupy them, as they probably find most hoomans as boring as any other superior would find the actions of their underlings.

I don’t know cats would characterize me, but I highly doubt they would consider me boring. I’ve been their sole focus more times than I can count, and there have been occasions where these rooms housed a half-dozen people. I noticed how cats study us with more intensity than any other pet at a very young age, and I found it creepy in the beginning. “What are you looking at?” I wanted to ask, as if that would help matters. I noticed, early on, that when I acted somewhat out of sorts it only intensified their study of me. After numerous interactions over the years, I found their study of me fascinating, and I began tweaking my actions to destroy their research.

Just to be clear, I never touched one of these cats. I just enjoyed playing the role of their anecdotal information, their aberration. I exaggerated my differences just to be different than any other human they’d ever met, just to see how they’d react. The minute the cat owner I was dating left the room, I would walk across the room in a decidedly different gait pattern. I might slow turn my head to them in the manner an alien would in a movie, and I’d repeatedly stick my tongue out at them. I might even take a drink coaster and throw it across the room in an erratic manner. The list of things I did just to mess with their heads is long, but those are a few examples I remember. I’ve found that all we have to do is act a few deviations away from the normal hooman actions to make their pupils expand with increased scrutiny or fear.

Do the same things to a dog, and they might raise their head for a second, their ears might even perk, or they might even bring us a toy, thinking we want to play. Whatever they do, their reactions suggest they’re either less alarmed by abnormalities among the hoomen population, more forgiving of those who suffer from them, or they’re less intelligent than the cat and thus less prepared for an eventual aberration that cats foresee. Cats immediately switch to alert status. They don’t care for these games. If they don’t run from the room to avoid what they think could happen, they watch ha!men with unblinking, rapt attention. Even when they realize it’s just an act, as evidenced by our return to normalcy when the woman-owner returns to the room, they continue to study us. “I’ve decided that I don’t like you,” is the look they give us ha!men throughout.

***

Suzy Aldermann wasn’t a ha!men, but we thought she was. When we heard what happened at a corporate boardroom, we thought Suzy’s portrayal of a ha!man might’ve been one of the most brilliant portrayals we ever heard. Prior to that meeting, she appeared to abide by so many of the tenets of human patterns that when she deviated, we thought Suzy was employing a recursive inversion technique known to all ha!men as the perfect conceptual strategy for dismantling normative frameworks from within.

Prior to her “full-fledged panic attack!” Suzy successfully presented herself as an individual of advanced cognitive abilities, language, and complex social structures. So, when she experienced this panic attack, this “full-fledged panic attack!” after she opened the door to a meeting room and saw Diana Pelzey conversating with her chum, we thought she brilliantly portrayed a ha!man to the uninformed. As the report goes, Suzy whispered to a friend that she would not be attending the meeting because Diana was present. “BRILLIANT!” we said. “Absolutely brilliant that Suzy would pick the least threatening person in the room to initiate her alleged panic attack!” We all agreed to keep Suzy’s ruse secret to see how it would play out, and we expected a lot of hilarious high-brow hi-jinx as a result. The joke, it turned out, was on us. We either overestimated Suzy or underestimated her, I’m still not sure which, but it became clear that Suzy decided to run away rather than up her game to match, and/or surpass Diana’s presentation. It was, according to Suzy, a full-fledged panic attack.

In the aftermath of our misreading, anytime we met a melodramatic hooman who was having a “full-fledged panic attack!” over a relatively insignificant issue, our instinctive response, based on our understanding of human patters is to think either she’s a ha!man who is joking, or she probably needs to experience some real problems in life to gain proper perspective.

Yet, when we’d talk to Suzy, she’d detail a relatively rough upbringing that included some eyebrow-raising experiences. Those incidents were real issues that Suzy had to manage, and she had to claw through the tumult to reach a resolution. The normal human progression, for those of us who study humans with relative intensity, is that when a human experiences a number of real problems, they become better at resolving them through experience. Suzy worked her way through all of those problems, but she never developed better problem, resolution skills.

We’ve all heard from other souls who purport to travel some tumultuous avenues. Wendi Hansen, for example, detailed for us her “rough life,” but when she was done, we couldn’t help but think that much of her self-imposed trauma was the socio-political equivalent of first-world problems. Suzy was no Wendi Hansen. Suzy’s issues were real and severe, and they were backed up by eye-witness testimony. Our natural assumption is that if she’s experienced problems far worse than a colleague purportedly interested in stealing her job, it would be nothing compared to what she’s experienced in real life.  

If we were to view the humans, the ha!men, and the hoomans from the perspective of the Alien Life Form (ALF), or the cat, without empathy or sympathy, we would conclude that some humans get stronger, better, or gain a level of perspective that allows them to see minor problems for what they are in the moment. Some hoomen, on the other hand, deploy the tactical maneuver of retreat, and they do so, so often that they never fully develop their confrontational muscles.

After experiencing so many different souls who maneuver around their tumultuous terrains differently, I now wonder if hoomans, who’ve experienced real problems in life, blow otherwise insignificant issues up into real problems, because they’re more accustomed to handling their problems at that level. Either that or they know if they retreat during the relatively insignificant phase, it might never progress into more severe phases. Whatever the case is, their experiences have taught them that they can’t handle problems, and as a result of retreating so often, they never do.

***

“It’s a lie,” Angie Foote told me, regarding something Randy Dee told the group.

“It’s not a lie,” I said. “It might be an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or something he believes is true but is in fact false. It’s not what I would call a lie.”

“Barney, he told everyone that this is what he does, and I’ve seen how he does it. He doesn’t do it that way. He’s a durn liar is what I’m saying.”

Angie is what we in the biz call a simple truther. She sees everything in black and white. A truth is a truth, and a lie is a lie. There is no grey matter involved in her universe. I respect simple truthers in this vein, because I used to be one. I’m still one in many ways, but experiencing precedents in life can wreck the comfortable ideas we develop in our world of simple math and science. Facts are facts and truth is truth is their mantra.

Some of us hear a lie, and we know it’s a lie. When we’re telling lies, we know we’re lying, and we can’t help but view the rest of humanity from our perspective. When they’re lying, they know that one plus one equals two. I know it, you know it, and most importantly, they know it. We witnessed them doing one thing, and we heard them say they do something else, and they said it as if it was something they truly believed happened! How can they do that with a straight face?

My asterisk in the ointment, my new definition of a lie, is that a lie is something someone says that they know to be false. There are good liars who are so good at it that they can convince themselves that it’s true before they try to convince us. The other liars, the fascinating ones, fall into a greyer area. They don’t know they’re lying.

One of the most honest men I ever met, a Randy Dee, taught me the grey. Randy Dee told some whoppers. He told some untruths to me, regarding events that happened the previous night, and I was there for those events. 

He misinterpreted the truth so often that it affected how I viewed him. When I viewed him, and the way he’d lie, I’d watch him with the rapt attention a cat would when encountering a ha!man who proved an aberration to my study of human patterns. While involved in this study, I became convinced that we could put a lie detector on him, and he’d pass with flying colors. “He’s just a durn liar!” I said to myself. Yet, if you knew this guy, and I did, you’d know he’s not lying, not in the strictest sense of the word. By the standard of taking everything we know about lying and inserting that into the equation, Randy Dee never told a lie.

I knew Randy well for a long time. I knew him so well that I learned he was incapable of lying. He was a law-and-order guy who despised deception and all of the other characteristics inherent in criminality. Yet, by our loose standards of truth v. lying, the man was a big, fat liar.

He was incapable of detecting the lies others told him, because he just didn’t think that way. He was somewhat naive in that regard, and after getting to know him well, I considered it almost laughable that anyone would consider him a liar.

Randy Dee was an unprecedented experience for me, and I would have a lot to sort through before I fully understood what I was experiencing with him. If we took this to a social court with a simple truther sitting in the role of a judge, we would experience an exchange of “He’s lying.” ‘I’m telling you he’s not. You have to get to know him.’ “You’re over-thinking this.” ‘If you know the guy as well as I do, you’d know he’s incapable of lying.’ “All right, he’s an idiot then.” ‘If idiot suggests a lack of intelligence,’ I would reply, ‘You have to meet him to know he’s anything but.’

If this argument reached the point of no-return, one of us might suggest using a lie detector. If Randy Dee passed the lie-detector test, the simple truther would then suggest that there was something wrong with that mechanism, and there might be.

When lie detectors first entered the scene, their findings were considered germane to cases. Judges, lawyers, and juries not only thought their findings should be admissible in proceedings, they considered them germane to findings. 

“Did he take a lie detector test?” a judge might ask. “Yes, your honor,” the defense attorney said, “and he passed with flying colors.” Lie detectors eventually became less prominent, because they were deemed wildly inconsistent. How can a machine with no powers of empathy, sympathy, or any emotions differentiate between hoomens, ha!men, and humans to produce inconsistent findings? What progressions occurred? Were so many Ha!men and Hooman able to beat lie detectors so often that the machines lost their relevance in criminal cases?

Randy Dee, a man who was so honest that it seemed almost ridiculous to suggest otherwise taught me that the reason lie detectors are wildly inconsistent has more to do with the idea that we’re wildly inconsistent. We can convince ourselves of a lie, so thoroughly, that it’s not a lie anymore, and we can do it without ever trying to deceive anyone or anything in the case of lie detectors. Ha!men might do it just to see if they can defeat the machine, and its ability to detect different biological reactions, but hoomens might do it because they lose the ability to make those necessary connections that produce truth. The latter provides a wild ride to those of us who once viewed human nature in the ritualistic patterns cats will, and if we continue to view hoomens with the rapt attention a cat gives a Ha!man, until we find the truth, it will wreck every simplistic truth we thought we knew about lying liars and the lies they tell.  

I am a Cookie, It’s Good Enough for Me

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“Do you have any cookies other than chocolate chip?” I asked the cashier of a popular sandwich chain.

“We don’t,” he said with a smile. The smile appeared to accept the complaint for what it was, but it also asked me why I was just being difficult. ‘Why would you want anything other than chocolate?’ that smile asked me. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’

Age has taken away a few of my favorite things (more on that never) and chocolate is one of them. I get minor headaches whenever I eat it, but those minor headaches carry the implicit warning that the more I eat the worse the headache. I farted around found out that my body was serious, serious as a head attack.

I usually simply say no thanks when people offer me some, but some people won’t take no for an answer. ‘Why don’t you want any chocolate?” they ask. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’”

When I tell people why, they feel bad for me. Their sympathy is not directed toward the headaches, but the idea that I will no longer be able enjoy chocolate as much as they do. “I don’t think I could do it,” some say with a self-deprecating smile.

“Of all the things age has taken away from me,” I tell them, “I probably miss chocolate the least.”

“How could you not miss it the most?” they say with the same look that that cashier gave me.

“I used to go to the candy aisles at gas stations to pick from their chocolate selections,” I tell them. “Now, I move down the aisle to their non-chocolate ones. It’s easier than you think.”

Prior to that forced transition, I had no idea candy aisles at gas stations were 90% chocolate, not counting gum. The selections at various get-togethers are about 95% chocolate, and the desert items on a restaurant menu are nearly 100% chocolate. Now that I was on the outside looking in, I wondered if we all loved chocolate this much, or if it reminded us of our grandmother, and all of the confections she used to bake, and all of those glorious smells. Did it become such a staple in our diet, because it reminds us those days at the pool with all of our friends, or do we just love it that much? Some questions are complicated that require scientific research, and some are simple. The simple truth about chocolate is we like eating it, because it’s delicious for criminy’s sake!

“It’s all about the chocolate,” a friend of mine, who used to be an event planner, said. She learned the hard way when she offered her client “cookies” for their event. She neglected to inform her client that her cookie offerings would not include chocolate chip cookies or any chocolate. She just listed cookies on the menu items, and her client signed off on it

“Nobody wants sugar cookies, peanut butter, or oatmeal raisin!” her client screamed. “My attendees were like, where’s the chocolate chip cookies? They blamed me for this, not you. We were expecting chocolate chip cookies, chocolate strawberries, chocolate pastries, and even a chocolate fountain. You didn’t give us any chocolate? What kind of outfit are you running here?” 

A poll suggested 35% of respondents said chocolate chips cookies were their favorite cookie, and almost half (46%) said they ate chocolate chip cookies frequently in their childhood. My guess is the latter number was skewed by the vagueness of the question. If the pollsters asked the specific question, “For those of you who had the capability, or permission to eat cookies on a regular basis, how many of you ate chocolate chip?” By better defining that question, me thinks that 46% number might double.

After a couple incidents, my mom learned to preempt our disappointment when she brought cookies home. Before opening the package, she’d tell us that the cookies weren’t chocolate. She had nothing against chocolate. She just thought we might want some different every once in a while. We didn’t, we wanted chocolate. We were disappointed, but she knew if she told us beforehand that we wouldn’t be so angry to find out there wasn’t any chocolate on the way.

That forced transition away from chocolate informed me that we don’t want chocolate. WE WANT CHOCOLATE! If someone doesn’t learn how to soften the blow that there won’t be any chocolate, we’re disappointed, confused, and outraged. “Who do you think you are? What kind of outfit are you running here?” I don’t know if this has always been the case, or if I only see it now because of my new perspective, but it is all about chocolate.

***

We don’t need a different perspective to know that the chocolate chip “cookies” of our world dominate rooms. They are the beautiful men and women who walk among us. We see what happens when they walk down the hall, or into our corporate meeting rooms. If we’re able to view reactions from the outside looking in, it can be quite humorous to watch reactions to them.

Some of us cringe, as we try to deny them entry in our space by telling everyone how awful we think they are, but when they talk to us, we feel an unusual and embarrassing blush come on. They can make us feel, “I can’t believe I’m admitting this,” special for just a moment. Some of us smile and laugh at everything they say, even though we just talked about how we hate them seventy-five minutes ago.

I don’t know if this is endemic to the human being, or if cicadas, squirrels and amoebas share our reactions to the beautiful beings of their species, but I’m more inclined to believe it has something to do with cultural conditioning. The chocolate chip cookies of our society appear to have it all, and as hard as we try to make dents in their impact, no societal cynicism can tear down that wall. We’re not talking those store bought, dry, and crumbly cookies that look so appealing on the shelf, because they’re manufactured and marketed so well. We’re talking the individually wrapped, freshly-baked variety that most sandwich shops offer as a side-item. We’re talking about the type of chocolate that appears so moist that we swear we can see our reflection in it. They’re the most popular, the prettiest on the shelf, and the definition of quality by which all of the others are compared.

Most of us grew up other thans who saw the power of beauty, natural athleticism, and money in our cookie-cutter in our world. We watched those chocolate chips cookies fly off the shelf, and we wanted to be them for just a moment, just to know what it felt like to be a chocolate chip cookie. After learning the harsh realities of the never-will-be’s, we learn to live the life of an other than, until we convince ourselves that we’re a don’t-wanna-be. Our people, along with the cynical comedians, don’t encourage this. They prefer the ‘if you can’t beat them, hate them’ route. Hating them is supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, but it never does. Instead of correcting the course, we double down. We tell one another these lies to help us help others appreciate our gifts and our other indefinable traits to elevate our status from other thans to better thans.

Chocolate chip cookies don’t have doors slammed in their face, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We externalize our hatred to try to minimize our struggle. Yet, we had opportunities, fewer by comparison, but we had some. How many paths were available to us? Did we choose the one we’re currently on, or was it thrust upon us?

Adaptation to the limits of being an other than often requires creativity, and creativity comes and goes. We can also feel it fade with age. Our bountiful brains were once filled with fantastical ideas about how the world could work, and how different it could be if it was different. When that didn’t work, we doubled down, almost in rebellious reaction, until we stepped beyond the border and lost our anchor. Stephen King developed odd theatrics, but he maintained a common man premise from which the spectacular rose. We learned from that, and we adapted, but we were so creative that we could grow a little too creative at times. When we finally found our niche, we enjoyed it, but a niche is a niche, an “other than” as it were that rarely produce a chocolate chip in our nacre formation.

That frustration leads us to wonder how many chocolate chip cookies are 100% pure, and how many are tainted? We take what we want to take from everything, and we want to believe that our favorite chocolate chip cookies were wholesome? The cynics would say that the only 100% pure chocolate chip cookies are those that came from our grandmother’s oven, and the rest are all tainted in the manufacturing process.

“Nothing is pure, and nothing is absolute! You still admire that chocolate chip cookie? Did you know he cheats on his taxes, steps out on his wife, and his children never felt close to him?” This is the cynical side of the “other thans”, and I’m not even sure if those nattering nabobs of negativity truly enjoy twisting their handle bar mustaches in this manner. They enjoyed doing this in high school, we all did, because it made us feel better to know more than the simpletons who believe in nouns, but when does continuing to do what we did in high school becomes so high school?

“There are matters where this matters, but we’re talking about a television star from a television show. Why don’t we just let that guy enjoy his chocolate chip cookie in peace,” we say.

“BOO!” they say. “I’m not going to let that television star off the hook, because that he wasn’t the wholesome cookie he portrayed, not in his personal life.”

“Our friend needs to bake an other than?” they say. “Everyone bakes chocolate chip cookies. He needs to try something different?”

“But everyone loves chocolate chip cookies,” we say. “They’re delicious for criminy’s sake!”

***

As an other than, we learn to use our personality to create something that serves a purpose. We then do what we do, until we reach that “Why am I still doing this?” question. Then we reach a point where we’ve answered every possible question we can think up. At another point, beyond that question, we realize that as confusing and disjointed as all this can be, it’s us. It’s who we are, what we are, and how we conduct ourselves. It’s our element, and how we conduct ourselves when we’re in our element, and until we reach a point where we can all learn how to bake bakery fresh, chewy chocolate chip cookies, through some sort of genetic modification, driven by AI, we’ll be forced to admit that we cannot all be chocolate chip cookies.

Some people actually prefer peanut butter cookies, sugar, oatmeal raisin, and all the other thans. I’ve met them. They don’t develop biological reactions to chocolate later in life. They just prefer an other than, because they find them delicious. They’re anecdotal evidence that not every person in the world prefers chocolate, but if you’re a restaurant, a gas station, or an event planner, you know it’s all about the chocolate.

We all have moments when something other than chocolate chip cookies appeal to us, but do we ever look back with regret that we didn’t try harder to be a chocolate chip cookie in a chocolate chip cookie world? Do we regret not pursuing their ingredients for success, success, SUCCESS? Some of us not only moved past all the resentment and regret, we moved into a middle ground of our own choosing. We’re the ones they call one strange cookie. We not only accepted this idea that we’d never be chocolate chip cookie, we embraced it. Some characterize this midlevel existence as a stuck-in-the-middle one, with its own unique level of suffering, but we chose to view it as us being baked differently. We used our ingredients to come up with something different. I’m not claiming that I built a better cookie, and I can’t say if it’s worse, but it took me a long time to reach a point where I can say it’s mine, “I am a cookie, and it’s good enough for me.”