Drinking Me Under the Table

December 17, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“There were only two people I couldn’t drink under the table,” Ozzy Osbourne once said. “(Lead singer of Motorhead) Lemmy Kilmister and Wrestling Great Andre the Giant.”

“I could so drink you under the table,” Angie said.

“I’m sure you could,” I said, and I turned away to do whatever I was doing prior to her challenge. That discussion was over … for me, but our friends stared at me, waiting for me to add something to it.

Nat broke the silence, saying, “So, you’re chickening out? You’re chickening out to a drinking contest against a girl who’s … what are you Angie ninety-five pounds?”

I would love to write, right here, that I had a clever reply or something that put me back in a position of power. I didn’t. I said something along the lines of, “Well, I’m an extremely competitive person, and a light weight. That combination often leads me to drink so much that I’ll probably do something that we will never forget.”

“Isn’t that why we’re here, my brother?” Nat said with a gleam in his eye, “to do unforgettable things?”

“I’m talking about embarrassing, sloppy drunk things, like vomiting all over this beautiful carpet of yours. If I don’t vomit, and that alcohol stays in my system, I’ll probably fall into your precious glass table, pass out in your bedroom, or proposition one of your good friends. Depending on what I end up doing, you’ll all probably have a good laugh at my expense, but I will have to live with it. Admitting that a ninety-five pound girl could probably drink me under the table is the least humiliating course for me to take here.”

If you’ve ever seen those Old West movies where a fella backs down from a shootout, you know the eyes I saw that day, those silent, judgmental eyes. Those eyes tell us that we’re not matching up, fitting in, and we just don’t have what it takes to be a fella. There were probably four people in the room at the time, but in my memory there were at least twenty, condemning me for my weaknesses. Even in the moment I knew that those judgmental eyes were much better than the eyes I would’ve received after that drinking contest, and all the things I would’ve said and done with massive amounts of alcohol unlocking them. “That man cannot handle his alcohol,” would’ve been the refrain they shared at work that Monday.

I’m one of those guys you hate playing with or against, because I don’t play games to have fun. I play to win, and if I don’t win, I freak out. It’s childish and pathetic, and I’ve learned to control it to a degree. I no longer make a spectacle out of myself anymore, but it’s still such a part of me that if I were involved in a game of Barbies, I might try to find some way to win.

I grew up playing every major sport except hockey, and I would throw tantrums if I lost. I’ve flipped playing boards, stormed out of rooms, and knocked something off the wall on my way out after losing games of Tiddlywinks and Chutes and Ladders. I know this about myself, and I know that if I entered into a drinking contest, a game I really don’t enjoy, I would have to win. I did it before, and if I felt some level of conquest or glory, I don’t remember it. The one time I did know the glory of victory, it was fleeting, as the embarrassment of blowing chunks across a table that sat before the couch I passed out in superseded it.

With as much training as I put in, you’d think I would’ve developed a greater tolerance to alcohol eventually. I never did. I don’t know if the ability to drink more than others has something to do with genetics, but if it does, how did my ancestors do? Alcohol and drinking were important when I was younger, but it was almost mandatory when they were young and kicking it. Did they avoid drinking alcohol? It might have had something to do with the pack my dad decided to run in, but when I was a kid, every adult I knew drank something. We all knew everyone’s drink of choice, because it defined them.

Our history with alcohol is not recent, as archeologists have found evidence of humans intentionally fermenting beverages as far back as 13,000 years ago. So, somewhere just below our hierarchal need for fire, was our need to get wrecked, and sometime shortly after we experienced the euphoria of killing brain cells for the first time, someone probably challenged someone else to a test of tolerance, and the victor felt vindicated. Did this help our species evolve, or did it inhibit evolution? Who cares brutha, why you always talking such nonsense? Let’s get ripped.

We tried –the United States, inspired by efforts in other countries tried— to curb our enthusiasm for alcohol, in a temperance movement that culminated in The Prohibition in the U.S. It failed in historic proportions, because “You can’t legislate morality.” That was the takeaway anyway, but the other takeaway might be that we love alcohol so much that we were willing to fight for it. We fought the law, and we won! We then celebrated that victory hard for nearly 100 years. (Recent polls suggest drinking alcohol is now down to 54% among young people, in favor of smoking pot.)

TIM

“We have food and beverages for everyone,” one of the primary organizers of our kid’s school event said after stepping to the fore, “but there is no alcohol.” The parents groaned, some sarcastically, others not, and the organizers apologized. I empathized a little, as school functions are almost always so painfully uncomfortable for parents who barely know each other that alcohol lubricates our anxiety.

I knew that of course, but as I worked my way around the social circles of parents in attendance, I was pretty sure that the “no alcohol” complaints were nothing more than conversation starters. Some were genuinely ticked off, however, and they reminded me of the kids at my friend’s seventh birthday party. We fellow seven-year-olds knew Scott Taylor’s parents were anti-sugar, because Scott was not allowed to eat the desserts on his lunch tray, so we’d trade him for his sugary snacks. Their sugar prohibition never affected us until we attended their son’s birthday party, and we learned that everything from the candy, to the birthday cake, and ice cream at the party would all be sugar free. And it was not surprisingly good, it was gross, and we were as disappointed, angry, and ready to revolt as those adults at the alcohol-free kid’s function, which is fine when viewed through that lens, but when we flip it around and compare the adults’ reaction to the kids’ it’s illustrative.

Amidst our groans and complaints, that guy stepped forward. I’ve now been among parents at a kid functions often enough now to know they all contain that guy. That guy, in this alcohol-free production, was played by a man named Tim, and we began to view Tim as our superhero when he gathered us up and led us to his locked and loaded SUV. I didn’t hear the angels sing others swore they heard when Tim opened his hatchback to reveal three coolers. I also didn’t feel the warm, gold glow wash over me that others did when they saw the wide array of alcoholic drinks he had in them. I did find it hilarious that this forty-year-old man was so prepared for the administrator’s alcohol restriction that he loaded up his car before leaving home. Even though I wasn’t seeking alcohol as much as the other parents, I enjoyed being included in Tim’s select group.

I felt naughty too. I felt like a naughty teen sneaking hootch into the high school dance. I felt twenty years younger, and I must admit that when I mixed Tim’s naughtiness with the organizer’s lime-aid, it tasted so much better for all of those wrong reasons. It felt like we were undermining authority and challenging the establishment. The first sip tasted dangerous, and the second one had a shot of humor in it, but every drink after that tasted a little foolish. We were forty-year-olds at our kid’s function. What were they going to do to us if they caught us? Their best punishment, I decided, would involve them reminding us that we were forty-year-olds at a kid’s function.

What the administrators didn’t understand was that alcohol was never just a rite of passage for us, it was the reason to get together. Once we got together in that “Event of the week” there was always one party goer who drank responsibly. They drank in moderation. I met one woman who managed to milk a hard seltzer for two hours. When she was “done” she had a fourth of a bottle left. I’m a little embarrassed to write these lines now, but I thought there was something wrong with her. I thought she didn’t know how to live. We were entertaining, healthy, and young people, why wouldn’t she want to maximize all that while it lasts? “Don’t you want to have fun?” I asked her. “I mean c’mon.” She was an attractive, but I could’ve never imagined a relationship with her or anyone else who was alcohol-free.

The Definition of Drinking

We defined ourselves in drinking contests and games to try to outdo each other in the ancient tests of tolerance. Our definition of victory involved leaving our opponent so incapacitated that they lost control of their functions, fell off a chair, and ended up under the table. “Huzzah!” we shouted in unison, when the defeated vomited little orange pellets across the floor.

“I think it was cereal,” Patrick said.

“Yeah, those little pellets were tiny marshmallows,” Brian responded. “I think the orange coloring was whatever he drank. Wasn’t he drinking orange coolers?”

The defeated never recovered his reputation, and the victor lived on his victory for months, as if drinking twenty beers in an hour was a physical accomplishment. It was a physical feat, but it was an unnatural one that required training, and no one wanted to watch a montage of his training exercises. No one wanted to see the man sitting quietly in his favorite Barcalounger sipping quietly between tears. We wanted to live the Bachelor Party (the 1984 film starring Tom Hanks) lifestyle, and this is how we imagined we were living.

I can’t remember all of the parties, but there were some killers. The one party I will never forget is my first adult, non-alcohol party. There were probably twenty people there, and no one was drinking. I asked where the beer was, and no one answered. I asked what was going on, and no one answered. Their silence was uncomfortable for both of us. We were in our early thirties, so we were still young enough to recover from whatever damage alcohol inflicted relatively quickly. We had no kids at the time, and a long weekend, so the idea that we were going to spend an evening around other adults talking about our day seemed inhuman to me. I realized that I didn’t like any of these people that much. We drank bottled water and other non-alcoholic refreshments, while talking about our day, as if it were a Thanksgiving Day reunion with the extended family. I hate to sound like an alcoholic, but this party was such an aberration that I talked about it for weeks. I wanted someone to back me up on what an aberration that was. I wasn’t ready to curb my enthusiasm just yet, and I couldn’t believe my friends were. I wanted to ask when the decision to go alcohol-free was made, and how come I wasn’t part of it?

It didn’t take long for me to recognize that there was something afoot. My friends were implicitly stating that not every get-together had to involve alcohol, and that there was probably something wrong with drinking massive amounts of alcohol. Though I was a little late to this particular party, we began drawing a new demarcation line in the sand. The hilarious hyjinx of the inebriated was becoming a little sad at some point. I should’ve seen that coming, because I saw my dad get wrecked so often that it wrecked our relationship, and most of my friends saw similar things with their parents. It wrecked us to chase our parents out of bars, to hear their alcohol-induced gibberish on the ride home, and it did some lasting damage to our relationship with them when we had to put them, our parents, to bed.

Now, we drank, and we wrecked our teens and thirties, but by the time we decided to have kids, we decided that we didn’t want to put them through the confusion and the role reversals we experienced. Our kids have never had to spend the precious hours of our childhood in a bar, bored, begging to leave. Our kids see us get together, and they see us drink a beer or two, but they don’t see their guides and role models getting hammered every weekend.

As we criticize our parents, and their generation, however, we should note that they saw things. We led cushy, comfortable lives because of them and thanks to them. We never knew The Depression, a real war, or any of the other things that they needed to forget, and we were too young to understand the what fors. All we saw was the drinking, the laughing, the absolute blast everyone was having, and all of the connections we made. We also saw the aftereffects, the “Don’t tell anyone about this,” embarrassing aftereffects. The chasing of imaginary windmills, the crying, and their inability to climb the stairs to get into bed. How does an adult ever reclaim their rightful place atop the hierarchy of a home after their kid has to clean up their puke, wipe their tears, and fight to get them into bed?

I could be off, but I think my generation were the pied pipers in the move away from alcohol. We give younger, twenty-somethings all of the credit for cutting ties to alcohol to 54%. They deserve some of the credit, of course, but we started to see the light and learn our own lessons, inspired by the idea that we didn’t want our kids to see us in weakened, pathetic states. Our kids never had to see us chase imaginary windmills, and they never had to sit in a sad, lonely, and pathetic dive bar begging us to leave. They didn’t have parents whose whole lives centered around alcohol.

Minimum Weight

Bob was an elegant drinker. He had fun, but he never made a fool out of himself, and he never had bad hangovers. He was the life of the party that I always wanted to be, but I was a sloppy drunk who could never handle his alcohol. I envied him at the time, but now that it’s all over, and we’re old, I wonder if Bob still has a problem with alcohol? My body informed me, early on, that we didn’t have either the genetic constitution, or the will to do what it took, to become a quality drinker, but he did it so well in the window in time that I knew him that I seriously wonder if he has a tough time quitting, cutting back, or leading a more responsible life?

Bob was a fun drunk for hours. The man could drink. I was a fun drunk for a little while, but my tolerance was such that I often turned the smiling faces in the room to cringes. Bob almost single-handedly proved that when it came to drinking games and contests, it didn’t matter how much I trained, I would have to artificially reengineer my genetic chromosomes to achieve the term lightweight.

According to BoxBets.com, there are now eight weight classes listed below lightweight, including featherweight, flyweight, light flyweight, and minimum weight. In the drinking and drunk world, I would probably list myself somewhere between light flyweight and minimum weight, because I could probably handle most of the 90lb. females who’ve never had a drink, in the minimum weight class, but after witnessing my performances in those bouts, my manager would probably caution me against challenging for even that meager belt. My competitive spirit, combined with my stupidity, would have me challenging and winning that ignoble belt from a 90lb. female, but I would not do well among the 100lb., light flyweight females.

If a genie offered me a once-in-lifetime chance to fix 100 of my flaws, moving up in weight classes would not make it on that list. I enjoyed the way alcohol allowed me to shed inhibitions, and the laughing and fun that almost always followed beer consumption, but I never really enjoyed drinking it. I might be rewriting my past, but I don’t remember wanting to become a better drinker who could outdo opponents. I viewed alcohol as a social lubricant, and I considered it an opportunity to become someone else, anyone else, someone like Tom Hanks in the Bachelor Party.

I didn’t want to be a minimum weight of course, as that has connotations to lacking masculinity, but I never wanted to do what was necessary to become a heavy weight either. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I would’ve been capable of it, as I think our constitutions are relative, based on genetics. Some of us will never be able to competitively run 26 miles, no matter how hard we train, some of us just don’t have the mental acumen necessary to compete in big-time chess matches, or the physical gifts some seem born with to dominate in fencing, and some of us have a genetic disposition that leads us to problems trying to outdrink a parakeet, no matter how hard we train.

I was a fun drunk, but I didn’t know when to say when, because I always wanted to have more fun, and more alcohol equals more fun when you get that close to having more fun. It made sense to me when I could see the crest of the hill on the horizon, until I looked around to see the sympathetic and horrified faces informing me that I was already careening wildly down the other side of that hill.

I silenced the room by conceding that Angie could probably drink me under the table. I damaged my man points, and there was a palpable sense that our mutual friends were embarrassed for me. They couldn’t believe that I would admit to such a thing, and they began attempting to impress each other with how much they could drink. I checked out of the conversation, because I fell for various peer pressure tactics so often in a previous life that the accumulation of decades of tiny doses of it inoculated me to immunity.

“I feel bad for people who don’t drink.” Frank Sinatra once said. “When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’ve going to feel all day.” That quote is funny in a cringey sort of way, because we all know that alcohol makes us feel better. It makes us funnier, livelier, and more social. We also become “the drunk,” which can have negative and positive connotations. In this case “the drunk” is our other persona, and who we can become with a couple of belts in our system. The problem, we realize after several attempts, is that we can never become that person. We eventually have to return to that person who isn’t that funny, social, or as lively. We also know that we will never become the celebrated drinker who puts that other guy under the table. At some point, we need to learn to say something along the lines of: “I’m going to say no to your drinking challenge, because I’m just a casual drinker who drinks for fun. I can’t handle massive amounts of alcohol.”

Ozzy Osbourne said that he only met two guys he couldn’t put under the table, and while I would never belittle anothers’ accomplishments in life, I can’t imagine that being a note I would want that to be one of the things my family remembered about me. I had fun drinking alcohol, and I’m quite sure Ozzy, Lemmy, and The Giant had more fun than I did, but the two rock stars were informed that they wouldn’t continue to live if they continued drinking alcohol (there’s no documented evidence of such a warning issued to Andre). Ozzy eventually achieved sobriety late in life, but Lemmy refused to listen to the men in white coats. When they issued their warning, Lemmy switched from whiskey to vodka), and when they informed him that he needed to drink more water, he put an ice cube in his vodka. It’s funny, and some might raise a fist in solidarity for a man living, even in his last days, on his own terms. He openly bragged about drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, and he died with one in his hand. He never apologized for his drinking habits, never quit, and he never said he regretted it. It’s not only possible it’s likely that that’s all true, and we’ve all known people like that, but I wonder if people like Lemmy, and the aforementioned Bob, knew they couldn’t continue to life with alcohol, but they couldn’t imagine life without it.

Annie Cook III: What Drove Her?

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

In one specific retelling, Joe (Martin) Cook, recounts a sit down he had with Frank after Annie brutally whipped him with a stick “Why is Annie the way she is?” stepson Joe (Martin) Cook asked Frank after Joe endured one of Annie’s brutal beatings.

“I don’t know,” Frank said after a long pause. “When we were first married, she was a good wife. She worked hard and was never mean. Then she got sick and went down to Omaha to see a doctor. She was gone quite a while, and when she came back, she was –different. She went back to Omaha a few more times when she didn’t feel well, and every time she came home more –spiteful, meaner.

“You see,” Frank explained. “Annie isn’t happy, hasn’t been for a long time, and she doesn’t want anybody around her to be happy. All she’s thought of, or cared for, for years, Joe, is money. Money and the power over people to make them do what she wants them to do. It’s a sickness, boy, a sickness of the mind. I guess we should feel sorry for her, Joe. It is a terrible thing to be sick in your mind.”

There’s no question that Annie Cook had some sort of mental illness, but what drove that? In Evil Obsession, author Nellie Snyder Yost provides some informed speculation, based on Frank’s characterization, but she abides by Frank’s characterization that it was all about greed, lust for power, and blind ambition. I don’t question that that was Annie Cook’s primary driver, but it does seem a little too surface. It doesn’t explain why she enjoyed hurting members of her own family so much. It doesn’t provide answers for why she progressed from someone who worked hard, to a micromanaging superintendent that could be a little mean at times, to a woman who could be cruel, sadistic, and have no regard for the sanctity of human life.

If the reader suggests that Annie may have done so to manipulate her workers and family members, and keep them submissive, I understand that, but a controlling, micromanager could’ve accomplished that. Even a mean person could’ve found numerous other ways to achieve that. Only an unusually awful would do such things, the way she did them, because she clearly enjoyed humiliating and hurting those she considered her possessions. This, in my opinion, requires a deeper answer to Joe’s question, beyond the “greed and lust for power” answer.

Ms. Yost might say that it’s not the job of a nonfiction writer to provide answers through psychoanalysis and speculation. The quality nonfiction writer provides the evidence to allow their readers to draw their own conclusions. We all respect that answer, and most of us will agree, but there’s nothing wrong with providing some insight based on research.

If we take some of the bullet points of Annie Cook’s life and draw lines from her past to her present, we could speculate that spending an overwhelming amount of her life on farms may have influenced Annie’s views on the animals vital to a productive and profitable farm. That insight could lead an author to suggest that Annie Cook may have regarded the guests of her Cook Poor Farm as nothing more than another type of animal working on her farm.

Before we continue, I think it’s important to note that an overwhelming majority of farmers and their family and friends, are upstanding members of their community. I was going to write that the percentage of good people versus bad in farming communities is equal to members of every other demographic, but I knew some farm kids growing up, and I know some adults who spent their entire lives on farms. In my experience, most farming families don’t just turn out quality individuals on par with other families. They often turn out better people than most. There are numerous reasons why farm kids turn out to be better adults, but the first and most obvious reason is that most farmers work such long hours that most of them don’t have the free time the rest of us do, and as the old proverb states, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

As with most farm kids, Annie started out with a child’s innocent love of animals, but the harsh realities of farm life—harsh to an innocent, naive child anyway—hardened her. She probably fed and tended to the farm’s chickens, pigs, and other livestock so often that she developed a fondness for some of them. Their eventual deaths probably hit her hard, but she learned, as all farm kids do, that livestock not only provides food for the family but financial gain when they’re sold to the local butcher. It’s a way of life on a farm, that farm kids learn, but we can imagine that they had a tough time adjusting to that early on.

Everything that lives dies, and farm kids learn that earlier than most kids but they must also come to grips with the harsh reality that some animals live so long that they overstay their usefulness. Farmers must measure their livestock with a Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR). The FCR is a measure that farmers use to determine how much it costs to feed an animal versus their level of productivity and overall sense of usefulness. Thus, if Annie’s favorite chicken, pig, or whatever livestock she loved most on a farm failed to produce enough to outweigh what it cost to feed them, she knew they were not for long.

Most farm kids also have more pets than most kids, as farms need cats to keep the rodent population manageable, and they need dogs to protect their territory in other ways. They learn, as all kids do, that very few animals live as long as humans. Farm kids experience so much death on a farm that, for lack of a better term, they just get used to it.

After spending a lifetime on farms, experiencing and learning everything it takes to run a profitable farm, how much of a reach is it to ask if an unusually awful person, with a twisted perspective that could be the result of a mental illness, could view human beings as nothing more than a cog in the machine of farm production? How much of a reach is it to suggest that Annie viewed the humans on her property as her property, or something she owned in the same manner we own cats and dogs, goldfish and parakeets, and livestock. Every state now has their own variation of cruelty to animal laws now, but the laws of the 1930s were relatively limited in scope compared to modern standards. The 1930s citizen could do whatever they wanted to their pet parakeet back then, because they were the owner. How much of a reach would it be for an unusually awful person to suggest they own the guests of the Cook Poor Farm in the same manner, and they can do what they want to them using the Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) to determine how much it costs to feed them versus their level of productivity, or if they’ve overstayed their usefulness in harsh, stark, and unusually awful determinations of the profitability of the farm.

Humans are easier to train but harder to maintain. Humans are able to do the more complex work animals can’t, and most of them can outwork other animals, but unlike other animals, humans tend to stubbornly seek freedom, fun, and trying to get the most out of life. They also have a way of overstaying their usefulness that just doesn’t make sense financially. The first inclination we might have is to fire the personnel who don’t help turn the farm profitable, but Annie wasn’t paying her farm hands. They were either poor or indigent wards of the state, or family members working for free. The next logical next step, for the farm owner is to find a way to encourage them to work harder, and fear can be a great motivator. Annie believed that mental and physical torture helped keep her staff productive. If that failed to produce results, how hard is it to convince an unusually awful person that those farm hands are overstaying their usefulness?

Anytime we read a true crime book, like Evil Obsession, our goal is to derive motive and motivation of its monsters. As hard as it is for us to imagine how someone could be so callous, malicious and sadistic, it has to be much more difficult for them. “Well, I don’t think a monster like Annie spent one second reflecting on what she did,” you might say. I wouldn’t dispute that, except to say that you might be talking about moral justification. I don’t think Annie Cook spent a second trying to morally justify her actions, but she surely had some “I’m not a monster” moments before a mirror. I base that on my experiences with Beryl Carnelia, who she never tried to morally justify her actions, but she did try to square it in a way that made sense to her and those she respected.

Beryl Carnelia

I never met Annie Cook, or anyone who knew her personally, but I knew Beryl Carnelia, a woman so similar to Annie that reading Evil Obsession felt intimately and eerily familiar. Beryl ran a prostitution ring from her bar, and she exclusively hired less fortunate workers to do the manual labor chores that needed to be done at the bar and in and around her home. The less than fortunate workers didn’t require much money for their services, or respect, and she didn’t give them either. She beat them down mentally as opposed to the physical torture Annie would with her less than fortunate staff, but Beryl’s staff feared her in a manner somewhat similar to the manner in which the staff at the Cook Poor Farm feared Annie. No one feared Beryl ever putting them in an abandoned wagon box to fry in the sun and eventually starve to death, I should clarify, but they feared her abusive tongue. The portrait of Annie Cook that Ms. Yost paints reminds me of Beryl Carnelia most in the sense that they were colorless individuals who were fundamentally unhappy.

Those who had the opportunity to talk to Beryl learned that this woman had a rock solid personal constitution built on a foundation of solid moral values. Beryl followed the golden rule of treating others the way she wanted to be treated, as long as they were as respectable as she was. She knew the difference between right and wrong, in a philosophical sense, and she would drop the great declaration of human equity and universal rights that “all men and women are created equal.” Watching how Beryl treated the less fortunate, led some of us to think that if she ever read anything, she really would’ve enjoyed author George Orwell’s “but some are more equal than others” asterisk to that great declaration.

She would say things like, “Yeah, but I did that to John Wissam,” when we called her out on the inconsistencies of her philosophy when it came to the way she treated the less fortunate. “He’s an idiot.” She said that as if we should join her in recognizing the clear distinction between an upstanding man, one who may have experienced some rough times, and a total idiot like John Wissam. Anyone reading the characterizations Ms. Yost gathered of Annie Cook can see that she drew the same distinctions.

Beryl, like Annie, could not stand to see certain people happy. It just rubbed them the wrong way to see select people laughing, enjoying life, and acting the fool. As Annie’s husband Frank said, “Annie isn’t happy, hasn’t been for a long time, and she doesn’t want anybody around her to be happy [either].” Those who are miserable in their own skin are just like this, and they don’t even know they’re doing it. If we were to call them out on it, in the moment, they would deny it, or they would drop the line, “It’s John Wissam. He’s an idiot.” And we let it go, because John Wissam has adapted to this part of his existence, and we know it’s just a part of their relationship. When she does it to us, however, we realize that Beryl Carnelia just can’t stand seeing other people laughing, acting the fool, and enjoying life.

There’s a tale told in Evil Obsession of Annie’s daughter Clara purchasing a brand new paid of overalls for Joe (Martin) Cook. The two of them enjoyed the new overalls for what they signified and symbolized for a spell, until Annie ordered Joe to remove the overalls. She took the overalls and destroyed them. Another tale speaks of Mary proudly displaying a certificate of achievement from school, Annie took it from her and destroyed it. Another incident involving Mary, spoke of how Annie criticized her for spending too much time in front of a mirror. She cut the girl’s hair off at the ponytail.

“That’s too much,” her daughter Clara complained. ‘That’s too much?’ the reader asks. ‘Annie scarred Mary for life with a hot poker to the face, nearly burned her feet to frostbite when she was a five-year-old, and physically beat Mary with a buggy whip almost every say for sixteen years, and she mentally abused the young girl for sixteen years to essentially damage-to-ruin her entire life, and cutting her hair off at the ponytail is too much for Clara?

To despise others’ happiness that much, it has to be ingrained, right? The dark, colorless nature has to come from somewhere, and our first suspect is the family. Evil Obsession does not provide a thorough analysis of Annie Cook’s family, but we assume that they had to be a dark and colorless family, and Annie absorbed that darkness. As Frank characterized Annie, Beryl appeared to be a good person at one time. We never knew that to be fact, but we often caught glimpses of a kind, loving character, who was full of fun and frivolity. We knew that Beryl Carnelia was spared, or saved, in the past, but we never knew the specifics of what she endured in her youth, because she never talked about her past. Thus, we could only guess that she had whatever color she had taken from her, or stolen from her, through circumstances she couldn’t control.

What is a colorful character? We all define that term differently, depending on the character, but I have my own definition of a colorful character by way of contrasting it to the Annie Cooks and Beryl Carnelias of the world. Beryl laughed at times, we saw it, but it made us feel uneasy when she did, because we knew she wanted our jokes dark. “I have a very dark sense of humor,” she confessed, but we all say that. We all enjoy hearing stories about human foibles, but some like Beryl, and presumably Annie, need something more if they are going to be entertained. There are simple stories of degradations and humiliations, and we’ve all heard those so often that they’re just not as impactful or personal. Beryl types, Annie types, and the type of person we could call unusually awful consider those stories equivalent to cute and clever knock-knock jokes that might not even get a smile out of them. They want stories about human degradation and humiliation. They want pain, be it emotional or physical, in their punchlines. They want to hear a story that if repeated to the subject might cause a tear in their eye.

Beryl saw the world in black and white so often, and in so many situations that when we talk to her, we can see that she’s had the color drained out of her. She became black and white, colorless, vague, unmemorable and miserable. She became so consumed by bitterness that we can feel it shortly after we say, “Hey, how you doing?” and she responds with some witty, dark retort that she’s learned along the way. Again, we all do this to some degree, but something about the dark trail that followed Beryl’s response told us that somewhere along the way, darkness consumed her.

Final Days

“Evil always get theirs, in the end,” social commentators tell us. “It might take a while, but it always comes back, one way or another.” And it does …in the movies, and other fictional tales that are built to satisfy our need for substantial forms of retribution. We could say that the darkness so consumes souls, like Beryl and Annie, that we say, “Imagine having to live with them. Imagine being them.” That is its own form of intangible justice, but it’s not enough for us. We want real, tangible justice for the victims who suffered at their hands, and that does not always “come back, one way or another.” Sometimes, evil doers get away with it all, and they never pay a price.

When we immerse ourselves in the tale of an unusually awful person like Annie Cook, the reason it makes us feel so uncomfortable is based on the idea that they disrupt the moral architecture of our world, and we seek some form of retribution to provide a scaffolding that repairs it. We crave resolution not just for the victim, but for the symbolic universe their tormentors fractured. Annie never did time, she was never subjected to an official investigation of any sort during her life, and she never suffered in anyway that would satisfy those seeking some form of karmic justice.

As she laid on her deathbed, however, Mrs. Cook had very few visitors, the only documented one being Joe (Martin) Cook. The officials who befriended her in life were surely relieved that their secrets died with her, and they probably didn’t want their name associated with her legacy in a way that a hospital visit might invite. Her family and various other associates may have been just as glad to see her go for their own reasons. That latter line might straddle the line of speculation, but it’s based, in part, on those witnesses of Annie Cook’s life that Nellie Snyder Yost interviewed after Ms. Cook’s death. Thus, the only form of subtle retribution her victims and other observers felt at the end was that Annie Cook managed to estrange so many she spent her final days on her deathbed, friendless, alone, and unloved.

If we, somehow, found out that we would die alone and unloved, it might reshape how we live our lives going forward. Would it affect someone like Annie Cook? I can tell you that it didn’t affect Beryl Carnelia. What affected Annie, the woman who killed her daughter, and estranged the husband who once loved her with a malicious, unfounded charge of incest was the idea that she might lose her money. “Oh gawd, help me take care of my money, Oh Gawd help me take care of my money, Oh gawd…” Annie bawled over and over in an irrational state.

When Joe (Martin) Cook, her foster son, and her only documented visitor, heard her shout this, he probably thought about what Frank had said about Annie, “All she’s thought of, cared for, for years, Joe, is money. Money and the power over people to make them do what she wants them to do. It’s a sickness, boy, a sickness of the mind. I guess we should feel sorry for her, Joe. It is a terrible thing to be sick in your mind.” Poor old woman, he thought after leaving what they assumed her deathbed, all she had to show for eighty years of living was her farm, a little money, and the questionable loyalty of a dozen people she “bought”. Not a friend in the lot. Not a friend anywhere.

Dying without a loved one crying at your bedside, or even a friend visiting her in her final days is probably not what readers would call a very satisfying form of retribution, but when her final tears were cast for her money, the only thing that provided her life meaning and comfort, it does feel fitting and emblematic of her empty and meaningless existence.

“Evil always get theirs, in the end,” social commentators tell us. “It might take a while, but it always comes back, one way or another.”

The last vestige of hope readers cling to when we hear that “Evil always get theirs, in the end,” was did Annie Cook have a deathbed revelation? Did she find some way, even in an Annie Cook way, to seek some sort of redemption of some kind or ask us for forgiveness in a spiritual or more general way?

One of the former North Platters telling me this story knew a deathbed nurse who tended to Annie Cook at the end, and the nurse informed her that Annie Cook was unreasonably awful to and demanding of those who tried to offer her some relief from whatever pain she experienced in her final days. (Ms. Yost also alluded to this on page 255 of Evil Obsession.) We can also be sure that Annie did not link the pain she experienced with the physical and mental torture she inflicted on others. To her, it was probably just pain, black and white, and colorless pain, and all she had to do was call the nurse for more pain reliever. If the reader of Evil Obsession read furiously to the end to find her comeuppance, some form of retribution of any kind, they either have never known someone even close to Annie Cook, or they didn’t read carefully enough. Annie Cook, like Beryl, died quietly, unceremoniously, and without any hint of regret or remorse, because she never thought she did anything wrong.

The Unusually Awful Annie Cook

Annie Cook II: The Horror is in the Details

Hoomans, Ha!men, and Humans

August 31, 2025August 31, 2025 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.