Category: Platypus people

The introduction of the platypus was such a shock to the British scientific community, in the early 1900’s, that they considered the monotreme an elaborate, well-conceived hoax. They thought they had the animal kingdom all figured out. Those of us who know some platypus people empathize, for when they began to express themselves we thought they were joking. We thought we had human nature all figured out. As we learn more about them, we realize they’re not kidding, and our shock turns to intrigue, as we begin to think they might be able to teach us more about ourselves from their funhouse mirror perspective.

Art is Dog. Dog is Art

RilalyLeave a comment

A man let his pet out for a tinkle. Nothing strange about that, right? His pet was a rooster. I was the visitor walking my dog passed his property, witnessing a homeowner doing what he does from the comfort of his own home, so I was in no position to evaluate his activities. Watching the man do that, led me to feel that I was a stranger in a strange land, and I couldn’t shake it. Other than this small, relatively insignificant episode, it wasn’t a strange land to me. Even though I was born and raised in a relatively industrial city, my home state is generally considered an agricultural one, and just about everyone I knew and spent some time in and around the agricultural industry. The state was I was now walking my dog in was so close to mine that I didn’t expect to see anything different from what I knew, and I didn’t, until this rooster sprang out the backdoor that the homeowner held open for him. 

I tried to look away quickly, because I didn’t want him to know I saw it. I didn’t want to share that uncomfortable smile that we share with someone after they do something we consider embarrassing, and I didn’t want to have to come up with some comment to lighten the load for him. Just before I could look away, the homeowner waved. It was a hearty wave, strengthened by a pleasant smile. The man’s smile and the wave suggested that letting a rooster out in the backyard was nothing but routine for him, and there was no reason for me to stress out about it in the moment. I returned the smile, waved back, and continued walking my dog.

While attempting to force the conclusion of the episode in my head, I almost missed the rooster rush the fence after it saw how close my dog and I came to its territory. It quickly ambled down the considerable stairs that descended from the porch, and it sprinted across the yard to us, until its beak protruded through the fence. It eyed my dog, and it eyed me. It offered us an unmistakably foreboding eye to caution us against stepping any closer. It did not cockle-doodle-doo us, but some sound, like a bark, seemed like the next logical progression to punctuate its warning. 

It followed us along the fence line with that foreboding eye. The silent tension percolating between us was not one of fear, but I was so confused that I wanted to hurry up and end this episode before a more confusion progression occurred. The writer side of me wants to write that when we reached the end of its fence line, it stood there watching us as if it didn’t know what to do, but even though its actions were born of mimicry, the rooster appeared to know exactly what it was doing. The rooster’s actions were so foreign to my limited understanding of roosters that they unnerved me. They unnerved and confused me so much that I thought if I were a four-to-five-year-old when I experienced this episode, I might walk away in tears. Especially, I thought, if this rooster tried to bark. If it tried to bark, or make some sort of sound to punctuate its warning, I thought it might rattle my foundation in the same ways some of the early David Lynch films could. 

I forgot about this incident soon after that walk ended. I didn’t consider it a “You’ve got to hear this!” type of story for months. I considered it a “you had to be there” story where so many stories go to die. When one of my friends told me a story about an incident that “kind of freaked them out a little”, I dropped this story on them in that “You think that’s weird, get a load of what happened to me one day” vein that we do to outdo their stories. His reaction to this story was such that I began telling it so often that it became my story. I told it so often during the next year, that when I returned to the locale where it happened, I began telling it again without proper foresight.

“Oh, that’s my brother Harley,” a man said. “He has a pet rooster.”

Harley’s brother interrupted me in full story mode. I was in my element as a storyteller with a number of people listening in, and I was on a roll. Harley’s brother locked me up. I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was equivalent to driving down the street at eighty miles an hour and slamming on the brakes.

My favorite stories are of the “strange but true” variety that can stand on their own. They don’t require embellishment or a clever, fabricated conclusion. A more clever writer might’ve added something more to ignite laughter or some sort of other sense of satisfaction for their audience. They might have the rooster bark, or have it make some sound that it mimicked from the dogs it was obviously raised around. Strange but true stories like the-rooster-that-thought-it-was-a-dog are my favorites, not because they’re hilarious, but because they’re so true that they leave the listener with that “All right, but what do you want me to do with this?” reaction. When I’m in the middle of one of these stories, and someone interrupts the timing and emphasis I’ve developed after so many retellings, it annoys me. When that interruption deflates my story, I become visibly flustered.

I had a finger in the air, and a smile on my face, as I prepared to launch into my critically acclaimed conclusion, but this man’s intimate familiarity with the rooster’s owner brought me to that screeching halt. It locked me up so bad that for the next couple of guilt-ridden moments I wondered if there was a colloquial antonym for verbal diarrhea. I considered the term verbal constipation, but I wasn’t sure if that captured it.

“Harley had two dogs,” Harley’s brother added. “They died. That rooster is the only thing he has left.”

There was something in the man’s tone I couldn’t immediately place. I immediately assumed it was compassion that he was directing at his brother’s loss. The more I thought about it, however, the more I began to believe that he might have felt bad about ruining my story and causing me a mean case of verbal constipation. He might have noticed how much I enjoyed telling this story before his interruption, and he might have recognized that he had taken one hell of a good story away from me.

Whatever the case was, the man provided me an answer for why a homeowner would release a rooster in his backyard. The rooster grew up around dogs. The rooster either mimicked the patterns of those dogs protecting their property, for so many years, that it couldn’t stop after they passed, or the rooster thought it was a dog. I did not ask if the rooster scratched at the door when it wanted to go outside, or if it saw my dog and I approaching and began running in canine circles, until Harley picked up on the visual cues that the rooster mimicked when it wanted outside. I didn’t ask about Harley, and if Harley participated in this routine because he missed the dogs so much that continuing the routine provided some sort of therapy? I didn’t ask if Harley thought the rooster’s actions were kind of cute, or funny in the beginning, and he ended up doing it so often that whatever drove him to do it in the beginning was gone and the routine of it all took over, because by the time I saw Harley do it, I saw nothing but routine on his face. I wish I asked some of these questions, just to fill out the details of this story, but Harley’s brother caught me so off guard that I ended the moment with a mean case of verbal constipation.

The Art of the Nod 

A speaker began speaking about himself. He began informing us of his talents, what he planned to do with them, and all of his subsequent dreams and expectations. His life story was interesting in the beginning, but he just went on for too long. He was also the type of speaker who provides far too many details, and he provided so many alternatives that no listener would be able to maintain interest no matter how much they wanted Ari to like them. I managed to maintain the façade that Ari intrigued me, but it was a struggle. When everyone else failed in this regard, I became the center of his attention. When that happened, maintaining interest became more of a chore for me.

My friend, a third party in this conversation, was not as successful in her efforts to purport interest. She nodded off. I was, presumably, the only one who saw her nod off, and I was the only one to witness her artistic recovery.

When she nodded off, her head went down and some instinctual part of not wanting to appear so bored that she fell asleep took over, and she jerked her head up. The art of this nod occurred a second later when she nodded down again. This second nod was not a result of falling asleep, but an attempt to rewrite any theories we might have had about her falling asleep in the first place. She performed the second, voluntary nod to re-characterize the first one as nothing more than the first in a series of nods of agreement.  

She even added a “Yep!” to further characterize the hearty series of nods further. 

She had no idea what she was agreeing to, but she got away with it. I looked out at the faces of the others in the room. No one else saw it. I was impressed. I looked back at her, and she had not only maintained her agreement, she strengthened it, until she was garnering more attention from Ari than I was.

In the halls of social protocol, I considered this art.

I all but applauded her for this reaction when I asked her about it later. I mentioned that I didn’t think a person could carry something like that off once “That!” I said, “was too artistic. That requires practice!” I asked if she ever did this to me. She said she hadn’t. She said I was never that boring. I was grateful for the compliment, but I had to know how often she did that. She said as far as she was concerned it was the first time. She had no other explanation for it, other than the fact that she was trying to avoid appearing rude. She tired of my questions after a while, and she stated that the moment embarrassed her, and she asked that we move onto other subjects.

Old People

Old people? Old people? Let me tell you something about old people. Old people set the parameter. If it weren’t for old people, your nuance would have no contrast. All that rebellion you cherish, that avant garde comedy, would just be blather. Old people? Have you ever watched the movie Caddyshack? Did you find it humorous? Uh huh. Ask anyone that knows anything about the finer nuances of comedy, and they’ll tell you that that movie would not have been half as funny as it was, were it not for the old person in that production, Ted Knight, providing contrast. Without contrast in comedy, the movie is just a bunch of buffoons standing around reciting lines to one another. Contrast provides the pivot point for comedy, and that old man in Caddyshack, that fuddy duddy as you call him, set the standard for the role that straight men would play in comedy for the next four decades. The straight men set the parameters for other players to bounce off, and that’s what we old, boring types do. We set the parameters for the rest of you to appear funny, cool, hip and sexy. Try writing a cool, hip, funny scene without a Dean Wormer, and we’ll see how far you get.

Like Boxing for Writers

Some writers believe that what they write is witty, humorous, or a display of their as of yet undiscovered talent in the art of comedy? We’ve all watched them write about clouds and trees, and we’ve all let that go, because we know all writers have to preen themselves every once in a while, but when they attempt comedy some of us think these writers need an intervention. 

One of the dangers inherent in comedy is that it’s relative, and every audience member should acknowledge that before they castigate another’s attempt at being humorous, but some attempts at humor are so bad that I want to say that we can all see the writer’s haymaker coming.

When the author writes about a disagreement they had with their daughter about what television show to watch, we know to put our laughing galoshes on. We also know that every author, if they are male, will provide exhaustive detail about how they regard their daughter a superior intellect. They will provide us with eyewitness testimony of their daughter’s brilliance, and for some authors this will last for about a quarter of the story.

At this point, many of us envy those who can start a story and ‘X’ out of it when it fails to intrigue them. Those who are able to find their way through the maze of the author’s shame, apologies, and qualifiers are introduced to a flurry of jokes that are intended to impress the judges. There’s no power behind the punches, because the author doesn’t want to offend the reader, their daughter, or any judge that might happen upon their story. We see their effort dangling, and as the joke plays out we all learn what not to do when we’re looking for a laugh. The author is the butterfly that floats merrily through our head without the fear, or the need to fear, the bee sting. They’re the Pernell Whitaker, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Floyd Maywhether of the writing world that gets points from the judges, but bores those of us who don’t understand the art of boxing. We want something exciting to happen, the judge can call it blood lust if they want, but if the reader wanted to witness the majestic art of dance, they would’ve attended the ballet.

Find Your Own Truth

RilalyLeave a comment

“You need to find your own truth,” Ray Bradbury said to a caller of a radio show on which he was a guest. Mr. Bradbury expounded on the idea, somewhat, but he remained vague. He said some things about following the lead of influential masters of the craft, and all that, “But you’ll eventually need to find your own truth,”

We loathe vague advice. We want answers, thorough and perfect answers, that help us cross bridges. We also want those answers to be pointed and easy to incorporate, but another part of us knows that the seeker of easy paths often gets what they pay for in that regard.

When we listen to a radio show guesting a master craftsman, however, we expect nuggets of information to unlock the mystery of how a master craftsman managed to carve out a niche in his overpopulated craft. We want tidbits, words of wisdom about design, and/or habits we can imitate and emulate, until we reach a point where we don’t feel so alone in our structure. Vague advice and vague platitudes feel like a waste of our time. Especially when that advice comes so close to our personal core and stops abrupt.

Ray Bradbury went onto define his vision of an artistic truth as he saw it, as a guest on this radio show, but that definition didn’t step much beyond the precipice. I tuned him out by the time he began speaking of other matters, and I eventually turned the channel. I might have missed some great advice, but I was frustrated.

After I heard the advice, but I went back to doing what I was doing soon after hearing it, because he didn’t give me what I wanted and needed at the time. It did start popping up when I was doing something, and then it started popping up when I started doing something else. The advice initially felt like useless new-age advice we give to confused souls looking for guidance. It felt like sage advice from some kind of guru who never figured out how to succeed within normal structures in life, so he began dispensing gobbledy gook that others should interpret but never can, so they just label the guru a spiritual guide, because they don’t know what else to call him.  

It might take hours, it might take weeks, but this idea of an individual truth, as it pertains specifically to artistic vision, becomes applicable so often and, in so many situations, that we begin to chew on it and digest it. Others may continue to find this vague advice about an artistic truth nothing more than waste matter –to bring this analogy to its biological conclusion– but it begins to infiltrate everything the eager student does. If the advice is pertinent, the recipient begins spotting truths what should’ve been so obvious before. They begin to see that what they thought was their artistic truth, and what their primary influences considered true, is not as true for them as they once thought.

Vague advice might seem inconsequential to those who do not bump up against the precipice. For these people, a platitude such as, “Find your own truth” may have an “of course” suffix attached to it. “Of course an artist needs to find their artistic truth when approaching an artistic project,” they say. “Isn’t that the very definition of art?” It is, but if we were to ask an artist about the current project they’re working on, and its relation to their definition of an artistic truth, they will surely reply that they think they’re really onto something. If we ask them about the project after they finish the piece, we will likely receive a revelation of the artist’s frustration in one form or another, as most art involves the pursuit of an artistic truth coupled with an inability to ever capture it to the artist’s satisfaction. Yet, we could say that the pursuit of artistic truth, coupled with the frustration of never achieving it, provides more fuel to the artist than an actual, final, arrived-upon truth ever could.

Finding an artistic truth, involves intensive knowledge of the rules of a craft, locating the parameters of the artist’s ability, finding their formula within, and whittling. Any individual who has ever attempted to create art has started with a master’s template in mind. The aspiring, young artist tries to imitate and emulate that master’s design, and they wonder what that master might do in moments of artistic uncertainty: Can I do this? What would they do? Should I do that? Is my truth nestled somewhere inside all of that awaiting further exploration? At a furthered point in the process, the artist discovers other truths, including artistic truths that contradict prior truths, until all truths become falsehoods when compared to the current artistic truth. This is where the whittling begins.

In a manner similar to the whittler whittling away at a stick to create form, the storyteller is always whittling. He’s whittling when he writes. He’s whittling when he reads. He’s whittling in a movie theater, spotting subplots and subtext that his fellow moviegoers might not see. He’s whittling when we tell him about our experience at the used car dealership. He’s trying to get to the core of the tale, a core the storyteller might not see.

“I could tell you about the greatest adventure tale ever told, or a story that everyone agrees is the funniest they’ve ever heard,” she says, “and you’d focus on the part where I said the instead of the.” The whittler searches for the truth, or a subjective truth that he can use. Is it the truth, or the truth? It doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t believe that the storyteller’s representation of the truth is the truth.

Once the artist has learned all the rules, defined the parameters, and found his own formula within a study of a master’s template, and all the templates that contradict that master template, it is time for him to branch out and find his own artistic truth.

The Narrative Essay

Even while scouring the read-if-you-like (RIYL) links the various outlets provide for the books I’ve enjoyed previously, I knew that the narrative essay existed. Just as I’ve always known that the strawberry existed, I knew about the form some call memoir, also known as literary non-fiction or creative non-fiction, but have you ever tasted a strawberry that caused you to flirt with the idea of eating nothing but strawberries for the rest of your life? If you have, your enjoyment probably had more to do with your diet prior to eating that strawberry than the actual flavor of the inexplicably delicious fruit. In the course of one’s life, a person might accidentally indulge in a diet that leaves them vitamin deficient, and they might not know the carelessness of their ways until they take that first bite of the little heart-shaped berry.

“You simply must try these strawberries,” a co-worker said in a buffet line at the office. I have always loved strawberries, but I didn’t even notice these particular strawberries in the shadow of the glorious array of meats and carbs at the other end of the buffet. While I stood there, impatiently waiting for the slow forking procedures some have for finding the perfect piece of meat, she gave me a look. “Just try them,” she said. I did.

Prior to eating that strawberry, I knew nothing about chemical rewards the brain offers for fulfilling a need, and I didn’t know anything about it after I took that first bite either. The only thing I knew, or thought, was that that strawberry was so delicious that I experienced a temporary feeling of euphoria. I piled some strawberries on my plate, and ate a couple of them, but the line was so slow that I was allowed to eat a number of the strawberries on my plate before progressing. I normally do not do this, and I normally loathe those people who do. I prefer to assemble a meal for myself and wait until I’m at a table before I even take my first bite. My co-worker was so insistent that I try one, that I bit into to one to indulge her.

“These things are glorious,” I said.

“What are?”

“The strawberries.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “I told you.”

The sixth and seventh strawberries were as glorious as the first few, and before I knew it, I was gorging on the fruit when another friend behind me, in the buffet line, informed me that I was holding up the line.

At this point, the reader might like to know the title of the one gorgeous little narrative essay that spawned my feelings of creative euphoria. The only answer I can give is that one essay will not quench those suffering from a nutrient depletion any more than a single strawberry can. You might need to gorge on them in the rude, obsessive manner I did that day in the buffet line. One narrative essay did not provide a eureka-style epiphany that led me to understanding of all the creative avenues worthy of exploration in the form. One essay did not quench the idea depletion I experienced in the time-tested formulas and notions I had of the world of storytelling. I just knew I needed something more and something different, and I read all the narrative essays I could find in a manner equivalent to the effort I put into exploring the maximum benefits the strawberry could provide, until a grocery store checker proclaimed that she never witnessed anyone purchase as many strawberries as I was in one transaction. She even called a fellow employee over to witness the spectacle I laid out on her conveyor belt. The unspoken critique between the two was that no wife would permit a man to make such an exaggerated, imbalanced purchase, so I must be a self-indulgent bachelor.

An unprecedented amount of strawberries did not provide me with an unprecedented amount of euphoria, of course, as the brain appears to only provide euphoric chemical rewards for satisfying a severe depletion, but the chemical rewards of finding my own truth, in the narrative essay format, have proven almost endless. The same holds true for the rewards I’ve experienced reading the output of others who have reached their creative peaks. I knew narrative essays existed, as I said, but I considered most to be dry, personal essays that attempted to describe the cute, funny things that happened to them on their way to 40. I never thought of them as a vehicle for the exploration of the answers to our abundant questions on how to be, become, and live in  the stories written by those authors who accomplished it.

It is difficult to describe an epiphany to a person who has never experienced one or even to those who have. The variables are so unique that they can be difficult to describe to a listener donning an of-course face. More often than not, an epiphany does not involve the provocative shock of unique, ingenious thoughts. My personal definition involves all of the of-course thoughts nestled among commonplace events and conversations that one has to arrive at by their own accord. When such an explanation doesn’t make a dent in the of-course faces, we can only conclude that epiphanies are almost entirely personal.

For me, the narrative essay was an avenue to the truth my mind craved, and I might have never have ventured down that path had Ray Bradbury’s vague four words “Find your own truth,” failed to register. For those who stubbornly maintain their of-course faces in the shadow of the maxim the late, great Ray Bradbury, I offer another vague piece of advice that the late, great Rodney Dangerfield offered to an aspiring, young comedian: “You’ll figure it out.”

If advice such as these two nuggets appear so obvious that it is considered unworthy of discussion, or the reader cannot see how to apply it, no matter how much time they spend thinking about it, adding to it, or whittling away at it to find a worthy core, I add this: You’ll either figure it out, or you won’t.

A Simplicity Trapped in a Complex Mind

RilalyLeave a comment

“That’s David Hauser,” my friend Paul said when I asked about a man who sat in the corner of the liquor store talking to himself. “He’s crazy, an absolute loon. Went crazy about a year ago. People say he got so smart that he just snapped one day, like that!” Paul added snapping his fingers.

I loved The Family Liquor Store, because I loved anomalies, and The Family Liquor Store was a veritable breeding ground for them. I knew nothing about anomalies before I started going to The Family Liquor Store. I thought I did, but the patrons there informed me that I had no idea. I knew people who succeeded and others that failed, but my definition of the two measures was relative to my dad’s. We considered his friend’s promotion to department store manager the pinnacle of success. I knew as little about the definition of success as I did the depths of failure and despair I encountered in the liquor store owned by my friend Paul’s parents, where Paul was employed.

Even while immersed in that world of despair, I encountered pride, coping mechanisms, and lies. A customer named John told me that he once played against Wayne Gretzky in a minor league hockey match, Jay informed me of the time he screamed “Go to Hell JFK!” to the man’s face, and Ronny told me of the various strength contests he won. The fact that I flirted with believing these tales informed the regulars in The Family Liquor Store that I was as hilarious as the fools that told them.

“Why would they lie about things like that?” I asked to top off the joke.

“Wouldn’t you?” they asked when they reached a break in their laughter. “If you lived the life they did.”

The unspoken punchline to this ongoing joke was that I might be more lacking in street smarts than any person they ever met. The answer to the question that was never asked regarding my standing in their world was that a thorough understanding of their world could be said to be on par with any intellectual study of the great men of the book smarts world, in that they both involve a basic understanding of human nature.

“You see these guys here,” Paul’s father confidentially whispered to me on another day at The Family Liquor Store. “I could introduce you to them, one by one, and they’d tell you wild stories of success and failure, but the one thing you’ll hear, in almost every case, is the story about how a woman put them down. They all fell for the wrong woman.”

Knowing how this line would stick with me, I turned back to him in the moment, “What’s the wrong woman?” I asked.

“It varies,” he said. “You can’t know. All you can know is that you don’t know, because you’ll be all starry-eyed in the moment. Bring them home to meet your dad, your grandma, and all your friends, and listen to what they say.”

I met a bunch of fussy fellas, since hearing that advice. Some of them wouldn’t even look at a woman below an eight, on the relatively superficial scale of physical appearance. Others looked for excessive class, intelligence, strength and weakness, and still others were in a perpetual, perhaps unconscious, search for their mama. For me, it’s always been about sanity. I’ve dated some phenomenal women throughout my life, and I’ve also had an inordinate attraction to that sassy mama-who-could-bring-the-drama, but when those ultimatums of increased involvement arrived that sage advice from Paul’s father wormed its way into my calculations. I wouldn’t limit this warning to women, however, as I would put just as many men through the FrootLoopery index I developed for those with whom I choose to surround myself.  I did this, because as much I like crazy, and I do enjoy their company in near-spiritual manner that could only be called a like-minded bond, I did not want to end up in an incarnation of my personal visage of hell, otherwise known as The Family Liquor Store, where it appeared a wide variety of bitter, lost souls entered, but none escaped.

For all of the questions I asked in The Family Liquor Store, and I asked a ton of them, there was one question that I dare not ask: Why would a normal family, with normal kids, want to open a liquor store on the corners of failure and despair? I never asked this question, even as a young man with an insufferable amount of curiosity, because I knew that the answers I received would reveal some uncomfortable truths about the one who answered. One harsh answer I learned, over time, was that if we surround ourselves with failure and despair, we feel better about ourselves and our meager place in the world.

“How does someone become so smart that they go crazy?” I asked Paul, still staring at David Hauser, the man who appeared to be having full-fledged conversations with himself.

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “They say he had a fantastic job, prestige, and boatloads of money, but he got fired one day, and no one knows why. His wife divorced him when he couldn’t find other work, and he ended up sitting in the corner over there, talking to himself for hours on end, drinking his brew.”

Among the possibilities he listed was the idea that a woman might have led to David’s fall. I latched onto that possibility, because it bolstered Paul’s summation of the men in The Family Liquor Store. I was satisfied with the answer, but Paul and those who informed him, said it was more complicated than that. They wouldn’t let that too-smart angle go in regard to David Hauser’s condition. They declared that was the, “The nut of it all.”

Talking to yourself was a common practice of The Family Store patronage. Those who didn’t do so were the ones who stood out. The interesting and defining factor that separated David Hauser from the pack was that he not only talked to himself, he listened, and he appeared to be a good listener in those one-sided conversations, a characteristic that made him an anomaly in a world of anomalies. There were times when David looked to a speaker no one else could see, but he reserved those shared glances with the speaker for the introductory portion of the speaker’s conversation. When the purported speaker’s dialogue progressed, David Hauser’s gaze took a diagonal slant, and it morphed into an outward glance, followed by an inward one that suggested he was contemplating what the other was saying. At times, David Hauser and the purported speaker said nothing at all.

Prior to David Hauser, I assumed that everyone who spoke did so to fill a void. In a world of people with no listening skills, most intangible friends are excellent listeners. David Hauser filled that void, but he and his companion created other voids, what some might call seven-second lulls. At times, the lulls in those conversations ended with active-listening prompts on David’s part. This display suggested that the purported speaker ended the lull, and David’s listening prompts encouraged the speaker to continue. At other times, David stopped speaking abruptly, as if the purported speaker just interrupted him.

I was intrigued with David Hauser when he first sat down to discuss whatever he felt compelled to discuss with his imaginary friend, Paul’s description of the man’s fall fascinated me, but the more I watched the man and studied his progression, the more obsessed I became with him. I knew Paul would mock me for it, and I knew he could be brutal, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know what this guy was saying.

“I have to know what he’s saying,” I told Paul.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Paul said. “Why?”

I thought of telling him that I thought it was funny, but I tried that in the past and Paul spotted the ruse for what it was. He knew I was always on the hunt for primary source information that I couldn’t learn from books. I went through a whole cavalcade of excuses in the brief pause between us, and I came out of that saying, “I don’t know,” which was about the most honest answer I could’ve said, because I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. 

What I think I needed to know was if David Hauser needed to talk to an imaginary person to help him through this moment of devastating failure in his life, or if that moment led him to become mentally impaired “Like that!” as Paul described it. Did David Hauser speak to himself to sort through internal difficulties, as a form of therapy? Did he recognize how odd it seemed to us on some level, and he needed it so much that he didn’t care what we thought, or did he genuinely believed he was talking with someone else.

I didn’t know what I would see or hear to satisfy my questions, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t pursue this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Is there a word that can inform another that a person genuinely believes another person is there? I wondered. Is there a word, or series of words, that will inform an observer that a person has manifested another person to satisfy their needs? The latter was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, but I figured David’s mannerisms, his tone, and the context of his active-listening prompts would form some sort of conclusion for me.

“Be careful,” Paul said after mocking me. Those two words slipped out as if he was repeating a warning he received when he considered investigating David Hauser further. To pound his warning home, Paul dropped some dramatic repetition on me, “Be careful.”

I thought of mocking him for being so cinematic, but I couldn’t shake the idea that Paul’s warning held some merit, and my curiosity in this matter might prove dangerous. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What if he says something so intellectual that it gets trapped in your brain and you go insane trying to figure it out?”

“Could that happen?”

“How does a guy go insane by being too smart?”

Paul could’ve been messing with me, and my obsession with David Hauser kept me from seeing it, but it was more likely that he believed it. We were both avid fans of the horror genre, and we were both irrational teenagers who still believed in various superstitions, black magic, curses, elements of dark art, and the supernatural. Our minds were just beginning to grasp the complex, inner workings of the adult, real world, but we were still young enough to believe that that there could be a reality occurring in our world that operated from an altogether different premise.

Long story short, Paul’s attempts to warn me, followed by his questions, did set me back, and I did try to avoid the subject of David Hauser for a spell. I was not what one would call an intellectual young man. My curiosity was insatiable, and I was an observant sort, but tackling highbrow intellectual theory or highbrow literature was beyond me. I was ill equipped for that, ill-equipped, naïve, and vulnerable to the idea that a thought, like a corruptible woman bent on destroying, could leave a man incapacitated to a point that they frequent a low-rent liquor store for the rest of their days speaking to non-existent people.

In the brief moment that followed Paul’s warning, I focused on this idea that David Hauser reached some sort of intellectual peak and went over it. What is an intellectual peak, I asked myself. It seemed like one of those foolish, theoretical questions we ask ourselves just to be provocative, but I found it fascinating, and as Paul said I had a real life example of it before me.  If there was an intellectual peak, I figured that I hadn’t even come close to mine at that point in my life, but I thought that I should work through the dynamics of it in the event that I ever brushed against that border. Will a person know when they’ve arrived at the border of an intellectual peak? I wondered. Is there a maximum capacity one should be wary of crossing? If they do cross it, do they risk injury, similar to athletes who push themselves beyond the limits of their physical ability? I thought of a pole-vaulter, sticking a pole in the ground, attempting a jump he should have reconsidered and the resultant physical injuries that could follow.

When I put those irrational fears aside, other irrational fears replaced those, as I walked over to David Hauser. Paul’s “Be careful” played in my head, along with the realization that prior to building the courage to step near David Hauser my fear of him was speculative in nature. It dawned on me that all I was doing was braving the fears of the unknown. I had no idea how I would deal with whatever reality lay ahead, but I braved those fears and began to cautiously approach David Hauser.

David Hauser’s volume lowered a bit, as I neared his sphere of influence. I considered that a coincidence and I progressed, pretending to look at something outside the window behind him. As I neared closer, his volume dropped even lower, until he stopped talking. I didn’t think that was a coincidence, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if he was trying to prevent me from hearing what he was saying.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I was more than a little relieved. I felt brave for nearing him even though I was afraid. I was wary of getting too close, because I feared the idea of having one of his overwhelming theories implanted in my brain. I assumed such an implantation might be equivalent to an alien putting a finger on a human head and introducing thoughts so far beyond that brain’s capacity that it could cause the victim to start shaking and drooling, like what happened to that kid in The Shining. I considered it plausible that I could wake in a straitjacket with that theory rattling around in my head, searching for answers, until I ended up screaming for a nurse to come in and provide me some relief in the form of unhealthy doses of chlorpromazine to release the pressure in my head.

I later learned that David Hauser achieved an advanced degree in some subject, earned from some Northeastern Ivy League school. I never found out if that was a fact or not, but if it was, it placed him so far above those trapped in this incarnation of hell, known as The Family Liquor Store, that I figured everyone involved needed a way to deal with his story, and everyone loved the story.

I wasn’t there when David Hauser told the story of what happened to him, so I don’t have primary source information I wanted regarding his fall from grace, but the secondhand stories of how this once prominent man, of such unimaginable abilities, fell to a level of despair and failure was on the tip of the tongue of everyone that heard it. “Like that!” they said, with a snap of their fingers to punctuate the description. Bubbling beneath that surface fascination were unspoken fears, confusion, and concern that if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us. David was also our symbol for impairment, and the idea that the luxury of physical and mental health frees us up to achieve the luxury of individuality. This isn’t to say that impaired individuals can’t achieve individuality, but that they’re more distracted by trying to maintain health. We don’t appreciate this luxury as much as we fear the possibilities of the opposite. In doing so, we search for answers. No one knew who came up with our answer first, and no one questioned if that person knew what they were talking about when they dropped their prognosis, but no one truly cared whether it was a fact or not. We just needed an answer, or some way to cope with the enormity of it all.

My guess was that even if we could’ve convinced David Hauser to sit down, in a clinical setting, or create some sort of climate that would assure him that no one would use his answers to satisfy some sort of perverse curiosity, we still wouldn’t get any answers out of him, because he probably didn’t have any.

The man who spent most of his life answering the most difficult questions any of us could imagine, hit a block, a wall, or some obstacle that prevented him from finding the answer that could prove beneficial to his continued existence. His solution, therefore, was to talk it out with a certain, special no one for answers.

That led me to wonder if that had anything to do with David Hauser lowering his voice and silencing as I neared him. If David Hauser’s mind was once as strong and complex as those in The Family Liquor Store suggested, and he had one question stuck on repeat in his head, to the point of needing to manifest another presence to help him work through it, how embarrassing would it be for such a man to have an eavesdropping teenager, who knew so little about the world, find that answer for him? 

I had an answer for what happened to David Hauser, we all did, but I’m quite sure our answer didn’t come anywhere close to solving the actual question of how a man could fall so far. I’m quite sure it was nothing more than a comfortable alternative developed by us, for us, to try to resolve the complexities of such an complicated and intricate question that could’ve driven us insane “Like that!” if we tried to figure it out and it trapped itself in our brain.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy the other members of the seven strong:

The Thief’s Mentality

He Used to Have a Mohawk

That’s Me In the Corner

You Don’t Bring me Flowers Anymore!

… And Then There’s Todd

When Geese Attack!