Category: anti-humor

The Platypus Courtship Chronicle

RilalyLeave a comment

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 some 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 start gathering. He’s super-obnoxious about it too. He knows the best way to put exclamation point 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 that on him. 

“What’s going on here?” a late-comer asked, and the other guy shushed him and 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 seven 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 the platypus, 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, two minutes prior to the platypus putting on that show. She showed us a smile when we began talking to her, and we thought it was that smile, until we saw the smile 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. As she continued looking at the platypus, awaiting his next line, we saw that smile, the smile we wanted, return to her face. It strengthened to such a degree that we figured it wouldn’t 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 starts coursing through the veins. 

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 were not immune to his charisma, and if it wasn’t for Tiffany falling under his spell, we might’ve marveled at how a platypus can captivate a room of humans 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.  

You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

RilalyLeave a comment

“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.   

How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

RilalyLeave a comment

“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.” 

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?” 

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.” 

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter. 

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.” 

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”   

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.” 

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves.