Category: psychology

Getting the “REACTION!”

RilalyLeave a comment

Why did I wiggle and shake the book rack of my fellow high school student in front of me, because it was annoying. I didn’t just want to be annoying I didn’t just want to annoy them either, I wanted to hit something deep in their psyche to find that deposit of anger they had buried for so long that it gushed out of them like a pressurized oil deposit being struck for the first time. There was something wrong with me back then, but here’s the concerning thing, I still consider those shimmy shakes hilarious. Except my enjoyment now comes from the idea that most people think I should feel bad, apologetic, or some level of guilt for doing all that. I don’t. I still think it’s hilarious.

*** 

“I need to pay attention in this class, I need the grade,” Willie said when I ignored his initial, very polite pleas to stop shaking his book rack. “I’m trying to get into Georgetown.” He was trying to get into Georgetown by paying attention, and presumably getting an ‘A’ in an elective class that Georgetown probably would’ve dismissed either way. Yet, he did it. He got into that prestigious school with a full-ride scholarship. He did it by paying attention to the little details that I didn’t, and he probably went on to lead a prosperous, happy life, but I got the giggles watching the otherwise placid expression he wore on his face 24-7 turn from pleas, to frustration, and then anger. My peers were shocked. Not only had they never heard Willie speak, they didn’t even know who he was. When they found out who he was, and that I drove him so crazy that he eventually started screaming at me, they were astounded. It was my biggest accomplishment in life at that point, and I considered it on par with his full ride to Georgetown. 

*** 

“You might want to stop doing that to Max,” a kid named Joe warned me in a different year. “I know him, and he’s nuts. I’m not talking a little off. I’m saying, I went over to his house a couple months ago, and he had what looked like a science exhibit in his room. He had this cord laid out on his bedroom floor, a cord that he cut open on one of those little, oscillating fans in his bedroom, and he pinned that cord back to expose the wires within, and then he plugged it in. ‘What is that?’ I asked him. “My sister keeps coming in my room when I’m not here,” he said. “I want to give her the shock of her life.” That’s what he said, the shock of her life.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “but what does it mean to me?”

“Well, I find it hilarious when you wiggle his chair,” Joe said, “but you might want to be careful doing it to him, because if he’s going to do that to his own sister, what is he going to do to you?”

In my twisted sense of reality, I considered this a challenge to continue, until I saw how much Joe enjoyed it. “Do it again!” Joe whispered between giggles. That whisper ruined the whole aesthetic value this act had for me. I didn’t do it to entertain others, as your garden variety bully might. I did this for my own personal amusement. 

In my non-scientific studies to understand the fragility of the human psyche, my subjects pleaded with me to stop. When that didn’t work, they would resort to some display of frustration that would often evolve to uncontrollable rage. “Stop wiggling my chair!” one fella shouted loud enough for the teacher to hear. After the teacher admonished me, I stopped … for the day. The next day, I was at it again with a vengeance. Another guy tried punching me in the chest. I laughed, but I stopped … for the day. The next day he shouted, “You might be the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” between clenched teeth, and I stopped wiggling his chair or anyone else’s for that matter. His level of rage was one I’ve never seen without a physical followup. We both stared at each other in silence, waiting for a progression, and when it didn’t happen, we went on with our day. Seeing that level of rage gave me an unusual feeling of satisfaction, coupled with this idea that he basically handed me a crown of being the best/worst there ever was at something satisfied a number of needs I never considered before.

Every subject is one great teacher away from being interesting

As I scour my brain to understand who I was, and why I did all that, the best answer I can come up with is that I considered it an antidote to boredom. The structured learning they employ in school wasn’t just boring to me, it was a violation of my constitution. We were all bored in school, of course, but my boredom went beyond an itch to do something, anything else to something that bordered on a hostile rebellion. I considered forcing me, a bubbling cauldron of energy and testosterone, to sit and learn for eight hours a day a violation of nature. It’s okay to do that on a blah day, when you’re not feeling it, but there are days when we’re just on. When you’re having one of those glorious days, it almost feels like a waste to spend them sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture from a teacher who doesn’t want to be there any more than we did. 

I considered school a prison of the mind that I needed to escape, even if just for a moment. I didn’t have an alternative, of course, but I didn’t want to do that. The prison guards held my aimless aspirations in check with attendance records, “Fail to attend and there will be consequences!” I attended class, but one revelation led to another. The first revelation I had was that I was a poor student, but that didn’t move anything, as my grades proved that. The earth-shattering revelation that changed everything for me occurred when someone said, “Did you ever consider the idea that we just didn’t have quality teachers!” This didn’t nullify the idea that I was a poor student, because I could’ve and should’ve found a way to overcome that, but it did relieve me of some of the guilt and embarrassment I felt for getting such poor grades in school. It wasn’t all my fault, in other words, that I was so bored, easily distracted, and anxious that I ended up wiggling the bookracks in front of me.    

I know we’re supposed to praise teachers for the sacrifices they make to teach young minds how to be well-informed, responsible adults, but most teachers, like most people, lack the energy, passion, and charisma necessary to reach students. School administrators know this, of course, so they try to make their teacher’s job easier by providing them a lesson plan and a structure for their lectures. Even with that, most of them cannot avoid speaking in monotone. Most teachers, like most people, also cannot take a step outside the box to provide a brief, interesting vignette from their lives, or the stories they’ve heard, to prove a point or make a lesson plan more interesting. 

I feel for teachers in one respect, I cannot imagine teaching the exact same thing over the course of five to thirty years. I also understand now that part of their job is to teach to the slowest learners in the class. If I was fresh out of college, and someone hired me to teach something as boring as Economics or Anthropology, I have to imagine that I would struggle to come up with an interesting presentation. I would also find it difficult to muster up some passion for the topic. If I did it, it might take me a year or two to develop a level of confidence that could lead to a passionate presentation of the facts. If I were able to accomplish all that, and I understand that’s a big if, I have to imagine that my passion would begin to wane by about year five or six. “You’ve been teaching the same subject for thirty-five years? Congratulations, and I feel sorry for your students.” 

The Glorious Mr. Schenk

When Mr. Schenk entered the classroom, he did not excite that passion. He was not a person who anyone would confuse with an imposing character. He was short, soft-spoken, and mousy. He wore stereotypical school teacher sweaters, and he wasn’t one to look people in the eye. Mr. Schenk was also not a passionate, charismatic speaker, but the difference between Mr. Schenk and all of the other teachers we had prior to Mr. Schenk, was he knew it. He appeared to know that he couldn’t keep students awake during lectures, so he decided to forego the traditional lecture format. 

“Just write!” he said that first day. “Write, write, write!” Just write became his mantra throughout the semester, and just write we did. Anytime we hit a brick wall, he instructed us to “Write your way through it. I’ll correct it, then we’ll correct, and you’ll learn from it.” I can’t remember how many different pieces we wrote, but there were a plethora of them. Mr. Schenk’s modus operandi was that you can’t teach writing. It’s just what you do. It involves something we call kinesthetic learning, or doing it so often that you learn. 

“You should learn how to spell, how to conjugate a verb properly, and you should know the fundamental rules of grammar,” Mr. Schenk said on day one, “but that’s something for other teachers in other classes. For us, it will be about learning everything you can outside this classroom, learning from our mistakes, and learning from others. We’ll spend a majority of our classes dissecting and critiquing what we’ve all written in the prior week.” 

Creative writing was not a subject I found particularly thrilling when I walked into Mr. Schenk’s class, but I might’ve tried to run through walls for him at the end, without questioning why we consider this such a great analogy for loyalty. Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek out alternative sources for knowledge on the subjects we would cover. He provided a list of suggestions, but “These are just suggestions. As you work your way through our ‘just write’ format, I think you’ll find that the more alternative, the better. We’re seeking creativity here.”

I excelled in that class. The method of seeking alternative sources for knowledge fit into my wheelhouse. I learned more from those dynamics than I did any other class I ever took. Mr. Schenk’s class is one of the primary reasons I’m writing this article today. Mr. Schenk assigned one paper exclusively focused on storytelling, another on style, and one specifically devoted to pace. There were so many more themes that I can’t remember most of them, but Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek outside sources to understand these disciplines better. The day after would involve a “What did we learn from our studies?” intro. “Drop the hads!” one student who had understood the assignment would say. “No more you-yous,” you might add, and “You must try to avoid using the word that too often,” and that student would continue to try to avoid that which avoided referring to that too often.  

I wanted Mr. Schenk’s undisciplined, chaotic style of teaching to succeed so much that I chose to succeed within it. I understand that this teacher was a community college teacher, teaching an elective, but I wanted him to trumpet this idea that one of the laziest, most ADHD students who ever sat behind a desk actually excelled in his idea of a lesson plan. I wanted him to spread the word among his colleagues that this might be the key to unlocking the minds of poor students and prevent them from being so bored that they distracted their fellow students by wiggling their book racks.

It probably wouldn’t work, seeing as how lazy and undisciplined young people are, myself included of course, but I thought his teaching style of offering a subject and then allowing the students to learn it on their own, from alternative sources, could succeed in the internet world of charismatic influencers on YouTube. Teachers have some performance reviews, especially in college, but how many teachers are actually fired based on the idea that their lectures are boring and tedious? In the capitalistic struggle for hits and subscriptions, a YouTube influencer needs to find unique ways to maintain an audience, and their struggle involves spending money on graphics and clips that make their presentations interesting and fun. The teacher could say, “This week’s assignment is King Henry VII, go learn everything you can about him, and we’ll discuss it next Tuesday.”  

It’s too late for me now, of course, but this idea goes out to poor students who think different. We all know how individualistic the human brain is. I’m not informed on the science behind it, but for some reason we all learn in different ways. Some are audio learners, visual, and kinesthetic. Minds like mine will never succeed under the current format, but I don’t write that to suggest that I was a misunderstood genius or a prodigy. I may have been such an anxious kid with so much nervous energy that I may not have succeeded regardless the format, but I had teachers who hit me where I lived. Mr. Schenk, Mr. Reardon, and that one woman who interpreted and defined Hamlet for me. So, some teachers woke me up, and they reached me on a level that should’ve defined for me sooner that I wasn’t the horrible student I thought I was. Were they more energetic, I don’t consider that debatable. Were they more passionate and informed, again, not debatable, but they reached me on a level that I still remember with a large asterisk in my life.

To escape what I considered the life-draining minutes of structured learning, I wiggled and shook the book racks of the students in front of me to get some kind of “REACTION!” from them. That was really what it was all about for me, the reaction. The more frustrated and angrier, the better. I thought it was funny most of the times, but I did it so often that it began to lose its edge. I continued to do it, because that’s just the type of (fill in the blank with your favorite invective) I was, am, and forever will be. The difference between then and now is that I’ve learned how to channel all that nervous energy.  

Those Funny, Funny Faces of Death

RilalyLeave a comment

Do you crave a story so side-splitting, funny and unbelievably wild that it doesn’t matter if it’s true? We all do. We’ve all been there, laughing hysterically until someone chimes in with, “That story you’ve been telling,” they whisper to us in confidence. “Yeah, it’s been thoroughly debunked.” We all probably know at least one debunker. They might spare us the embarrassment of debunking us in public, but that doesn’t change the fact that they love debunking us. They study our face and smile at us with compassion that borders on condescending glee. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, but they obviously cannot stand the laughter we receive telling a side-splitting tale that is so wild and funny that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s true. Yet, the storyteller and the debunker both know that it does matter in the sense that the difference between true and it kind of doesn’t matter if it’s true is the difference between hilarious and “It’s still funny, regardless,” and the debunker enjoys dragging our side-splitting story into the latter category.

It’s our fault, we should fact check these stories to see if they’re true, but when a storyteller gets ahold of a great, side-splitting story, we get all jacked up, and we can’t wait to share them. It’s in our blood, and it’s such a part of our identity that we end up laughing harder than anyone else, because it appeals to our storytelling nature.

Most of these stories, just to be clear, are so dumb and inconsequential that we don’t really care if they’re true, and they’re so funny that a part of us doesn’t want to check, because we hope that they’re true. That’s when the “truth trolls” come marching in to destroy our story’s comedic value. Why do they do it, they probably don’t even know the finer, psychological motivations behind it. It’s just something they’ve done for so long that it’s just kind of what they do.

Fact-checkers love to tell us that these fun stories just happen to be false, debunked, or an urban legend. If this is you, you might just want to consider moving along, because we find you exhausting. About three beats after we unleash our side-splitting yarns, their faces get hued by smartphones. “Umm, not true,” they say when they manage to become unhued, “according to (fill in the blank.com) that story has been debunked as an urban legend.” To put an exclamation point on their attempts to suck the fun out of our story, they show us their phone.

Some of us enjoy hearing, and reading, a great story almost as much as we enjoy telling them and writing them, and it’s not a gift given at birth. It’s a methodical process fraught with failure, but those who love it, learn it, and learn to love it. It’s not something that we learn so well that we never make mistakes either. It’s an ongoing process. As much as we storytellers enjoy that process, fact-checkers enjoy their end of it almost as much, as they’ve found it to be an excellent way to discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny, storytellers they just don’t like.

“I just get so tired of their BS,” they add after sucking the smiles off everyone’s face. 

Feature Story #1

A zoo keeper grows concerned with how constipated his beloved elephant is. He and his fellow zoo keepers, management, and the zoo community try everything to provide her some relief. In total desperation, the man learns of an effective, all-natural cure of herbs and oils. He places it on a wire brush and inserts it, and it works. It works so well that the elephant unloads on the zoo keeper. The zoo keeper is hit by the violent discharge so perfectly that it knocks him down, and he hits his head so hard that he unfortunately experiences a temporary and fatal moment of unconsciousness, as two hundred pounds of dung suffocates him.

What we’re talking about here are silly, inconsequential stories that we share in employee cafeteria. We’re talking about those stupid stories that no one will remember thirty seconds after they’re told. We’re talking about telling stories that might cause some to smile, others laugh, and still others to roll around with hysterical laughter, and the minute the truth trollers pull out their phones, everyone groans. The truth trolls cannot abide by all that laughter. They need to thoroughly vet a story before they can even smile, and they won’t even smile if they happen to find out it’s actually true. “Well, it turns out that one is true,” they say with same look they have when eating a sandwich. If they find out one of your stories doesn’t pass the test, they have a smug, “I’m just calling you out on your BS!” look on their face. That appears to be the only source of satisfaction they gain from their otherwise joyless existence. 

Feature Story #2

A man in Oklahoma, enters the highway, and after a couple of miles, he clicks his Recreation Vehicle (RV) into cruise control. Nothing different than anything any of us have done over a hundred times. Except, this driver, allegedly unaware of the full functionality of the cruise control feature on his RV, walks into the kitchen area of his RV to make himself a sandwich. We have to imagine that the man didn’t have enough time to get the meat between the slices of bread when all hell broke loose, as the RV drove off the road and into the ditch. Some versions of this story suggest that the man died as a result of the ensuing accident. Others claim that he not only survived, but he won a settlement with the manufacturer $1,750,000 and a new RV, because the manufacturer did not specifically document for him the full functionality of the RV’s cruise control. This story isn’t half as funny as it once was, based on the current technology that allows some cars self-driving functionality, but back when I first heard this tale, it seemed impossibly hilarious that a grown man (or woman, depending on the version of the story) could think that they could make a sandwich (or cup of coffee) in the back while the car was in cruise control. 

Some great stories combine fiction and non in a manner we call creative non-fiction. I remember mentally toying around with the concept of the total capacity of cruise control, soon after I bought a car that had a working one. I thought the possibilities of a fella over-estimating its capacity could be funny, and I’ll be damned if someone didn’t consider the same plotline, either fictionally or in non-fiction. Is this story 100% true, tough to know 100%, but does it have enough truth in it to be funny? At some point, I think we should all hit that “off” switch in our cranium that analyzes, deconstructs, and refutes such stories. Just laugh or don’t laugh, but they can’t. They love pretending that they’re a reporter, and that they’re taking a story, or its storyteller, down. 

Feature Story #3

Elvis Painting in Cheese

Elvis Presley had a soft spot for cheese. His favorite sandwich, according to sources, was the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis was from the deep south, and the home he grew up in an environment that was anything but rich. After achieving a level of fame and fortune those who were never a Beatle or the primary singer on the album Thriller would never understand, he probably enjoyed the finest delicacies in the world, but he couldn’t kick his love for the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis ingested so many drugs, and so many different kinds of drugs, that we cannot dismiss them as a contributor to his eventual demise, but what does cheese do? It stops us up, and among the numerous other things Elvis poured into his body was a truckload of cheese. As Dan Warlick, chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, stated, Elvis’s death was brought on by something called the Valsalva’s maneuver. “Put simply, the strain of attempting to defecate compressed the singer’s abdominal aorta, shutting down his heart.” The coroners found that Elvis had “Compacted stool that was four months old sitting in his bowels.”

Did cheese take The King down? These stories are snowball stories. As they roll from one storyteller to another they gather facts, details, jokes, and out and out fabrications, until they arrive at some finished form of funny. I don’t want to know most of the time, because most of these stories are so dumb that I honestly don’t care, and the primary reason I’m writing this article is that I don’t understand why those with a dreaded and incurable hued nose disease do.  

I just want to laugh, but I’ve been fact-checked me so often that I now wonder if what I’m being told is 100% true. I want to laugh, but more than that, when I hear a great story, I want to repeat that story so often that it becomes mine. If it’s going to be mine now, I have this newfound urge to fact-check it, so I don’t get fact-checked, and I so want to go back to “Who cares, as long as it’s funny!” mindset.

“The idea that you loathe fact-checkers so much only makes them seem a little more legitimate to me,” third parties say when we complain about truth trolls checking our stories.

I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that I’m Irish, but there are few things I enjoy more than sitting in a circle of friends, all with beer in hand, telling a story that has but one agenda, to make them laugh. “There’s no way that’s true,” they say between laughs, and I have no problem with that because I know that for most people that line gives them license to be free from naiveté, and it also frees them to laugh harder. We all know that that story is so sensational that it can’t be true, but we don’t care in that small space in time where all we can do is laugh about it. “That guy is so full of crap, it’s not even funny,” we might say to a third party after the storyteller leaves the room, but the next time he enters, we’ll be all over it when he tells us he has another story to tell. 

Truth trolls won’t go through any of this with us. They might want to, but they can’t. They have some odd belief, probably born of some childhood experience that left them vulnerable to the charge of naiveté, that if they believe that, they’ll believe anything. They believe that if they believe our silly, stupid story, their credibility is on the line. Their noses contract a blue hue, and they come out, “Not true!” Now I will grant you that if a story is 100% true, it might slide it a little higher on the funny scale, but by how much? Does it lift such a story from funny to knee-slapping hilarious? If we add, “It’s true, all the fact-checkers checked it and sourced it out, and they found that it’s 100% factual.” How much does that truly add to the entertainment value? If you’re a hue-faced truth troller who has neck problems, because your head is permanently fixed in the 45-degree position, will you go back to 90-degrees with an “It’s true” and laugh? No, and you might even be a little disappointed by your findings, right? Yeah, I’m looking at you. 

Feature Story #4

A raging alcoholic was informed by his doctor that he had a form of throat cancer that would end his life quickly if he chose to continue to drink alcohol. The alcoholic peppered the doctor with questions, “Cut back, wean myself off of it over time?” 

“I don’t think you understand the severity of this,” the doctor said going over the biopsy and the image test results with the alcoholic. “This is what we call stage four cancer, and if you quit now, cold turkey, you have a chance, about a 39.1 percent chance to live five years. Keep drinking, even a little amount, and you’re likely dead in months.”

This scared the alcoholic. He did not want to die, but he couldn’t imagine going weeks and months without a small swig of alcohol here and there. In some respects, it was psychological torture to him to see everyone around him drink so casually, and have so much fun, but he kept coming back to the idea that he didn’t want to die.

It hurt to drink alcohol too, and that was really one of saddest things in this alcoholic’s life. It was the only reason he went to see that doctor. Once the doctor took alcohol away from him, he realized that he never learned how to live. He didn’t have any hobbies, friends, and he didn’t know how to fix things. He had family, but they distanced themselves from him a long time ago. He was a man who worked his tail off and came home to drink alcohol with his beloved wife while the two of them watched TV together, and he couldn’t even enjoy that. In short order, this man became depressed and desperate to live the only life he knew. He did some research on his computer and discovered something called butt-chugging, or boofing.

“We’ll be using this device,” he informed his wife, “to deliver alcohol to my system by enema. It won’t touch my throat and exacerbate my condition.” His wife was hesitant, but the alcoholic broke her down. “What most people don’t know is we all have enzymes in our stomach and liver that break alcohol down and dilute it. Regular butt-chuggers say that it stings a little, initially, but after a while some say that they start to enjoy the sensation. They even have a term for those people. They’re called klismaphiliacs. Due to the fact that you’re essentially bypassing all of the biological protections our body has in place by going the enema route, they say there’s no hangovers and no puking involved.”  

Some dispute whether or not the wife obliged the alcoholic, but she was charged with negligent homicide for delivering what turned out to be a lethal and fatal dose of two 1.5-liter bottles of sherry into her husband’s system. In her defense, the wife claimed innocence by declaring that he did it himself. “He did it all the time,” she pled. “He was always giving himself enemas. Coffee enemas, alcohol enemas, and even soap enemas. He even had enema recipes.” The case against the wife was dropped due to insufficient evidence. 

One of the primary lessons this alcoholic-turned-butt-chugger didn’t consider is that puking, while uncomfortable, disgusting, and painful, it serves a biological purpose as important as coughing, sneezing, and bumps on our arms. It is the body attempting to push what it cannot dilute, absorb, or handle out. While we’re puking, it’s difficult to consider that this is probably our body protecting us from the damage of what we do to it, and that it’s actually a good thing that our body knows how to protect us from the debilitating and at times, fatal things we do it.    

I am not a regular patron of the sites and shows that feast on the misfortunes of others in this manner, but I used to occasionally enjoy an episode of Thousand Ways to Die, and The Darwin Awards email lists we used to pass around the office. Their entertainment value, while short and limited, can produce a guilty smile or a laugh behind a hand. There’s really no sense in trying to deny that we love stories involving the misfortune of others, “You mean he died?” we say with an oh-my-gosh face on, and we experience a hybrid of laughter and horror. It’s a part of us.

In researching some of the new ‘believe it or not’ sites for this article, I found some new sites I never heard of that preyed on our misfortunate few, and they had “100 percent true” stamps all over them, as if that’s the primary purpose of their existence. The administrators, and authors, of the stories on these sites are careful to properly source each story with links, footnotes, and various other forms of attributions to perpetuate this idea that they’ve learned from those past publications we all enjoyed that focused on sensational stories that had little-to-no foundation of truth in them. Thus, we can gather that the older sites and publications probably got fact-checked to irrelevance, which, in essence, opened up a niche for these new guys to prosper, but the problem is their stories, while guaranteed and certified to be 100% true, are actually kind of blah and mundane. Their stories amount to, “There was this one guy, from some town in a state who made an unwise decision,” and we un huh them with some excitement as we read on, “and well, no one was hurt or anything, and no one died, but wasn’t that a foolish decision?” Well, yeah, it was, but I was kind of looking for some entertainment here. These sites learned from the past, and they decided to forego the sensational for the factual. As much as it pains me to see this need to have certified 100% guarantees, I understand it’s now the price of doing business in this arena, because in this incarnation of the Information Age, everyone has a phone, and everyone has a site to help them bunk, debunk, or take the bunk out of things, and in this case, it’s better to give than receive, because it can be embarrassing and even a little intimidating at times when fact-checkers discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny every stupid, silly, and inconsequential story we tell, but that’s just what they do, they’re fact-checkers.

Gorillas’ Guacamole and Yogurt 

RilalyLeave a comment

When I first tasted guacamole, I was suspicious. How could something other than the strawberry, taste so good and be so healthy for you? I understand that kale and watercress are healthier, but they taste healthy. Guacamole is loaded with healthy fats, potassium, and vitamins C, K, and B6? It’s an excellent source of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, and it tastes so good? What is going on here? The one negative I found is its fat content, it can be high in calories, but as long as you eat it responsibly, you can enjoy all the health benefits coupled with its almost unrivaled glory in the mouth.

Do you love guacamole? Who doesn’t in the great Southwest? Right? Let’s hear it for guacamole! Everyone put your hands together and pay tribute to the mashed-up avocado. How many people applauded? What was that about … 50/50? It’s slimy, and there’s some kind of unusual aftertaste that you can never quite get out of your mouth. I get it. It’s an acquired taste. I don’t think anyone tastes it for the first time and thinks yum! When you get older and health and nutrition become more important, however, and you think of all the choices you have before you, avocado and guacamole isn’t that bad, until you actually start to like it. That’s where I’m at now. I’ve heard all of the ‘Guacamole is slimy, unappealingly green, and it just looks like vomit’ charges, and I actually defend it now. Yes, I’ve put my reputation on the line to defend some pretty stupid things before, but defending a fruit to the point that I get all amped up about it is strange, even to me, but I thought it was one of nature’s most perfect products. Screw the egg. Give me guac on toast, and guac from Chipotle’s in particular. I tried to put it on top of everything, from every sandwich I’ve ever put in my mouth to pizza to soup. Soup doesn’t work so well, by the way. 

Avocado is a fruit. Does that sound strange? Look at it, that’s a fruit? Would the appeal factor go up, if it was a vegetable? Vegetables are supposed to be green. The fruity world is all vibrant with a dizzying array of colors, they’re all juicy, and most of them share a satisfying texture (I’m looking at you apple boy!) The texture of the avocado is just weird. It’s not all soggy and gross, like the peach, but it’s not slide your teeth along the texture apple either. Everything about it says vegetable to me. I’m wrong, and I must admit I’ve been wrong for an embarrassingly long time. The avocado comes from a flower, so it’s a fruit. Anyway, who cares, I read the literature on the avocado, and I fell headlong in love with the fruit, until I went to the zoo. 

You know where I’m headed here, I say to those who know where I’m headed. At the zoo, I saw a beautiful gorilla with a mean case of diarrhea. Now, if you’re anything like me, you appreciate the good, the bad and the ugly of nature, but this was so runny and so guacamole-colored out that if I was the type who lost my appetite over disgusting matters, I might not be able to eat guacamole for the rest of my life. You didn’t know that’s where I was headed? Well, buckle up, because you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Another gorilla stepped in, and I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, because I didn’t check, but we’ll call him Hank for the purpose of distinguishing him from Diarrhea Dan. Hank appeared to have a hankering for the food that went through Diarrhea Dan’s intestinal fermentation process, except Hank didn’t go to the guacamole-colored dung pool just below his brother’s anus. Hank preferred a more personal approach. He preferred that which still clung to the hairs just outside his brother’s anus. I debated whether or not this was a product of evolution, because gorillas, as smart as they are, never figured out how to make their own toilet paper, or if this gorilla just fancied the taste of dung.

We know that the primate is not alone in enjoying the byproducts of the gastrointestinal system. Dogs love it, rabbits and rodents don’t mind a nibble here and there, and they all have their reasons for doing so, so why don’t we?  

‘Because they’re animals,’ we say, trying to distance ourselves from them and any definition of us as descendants, ‘and they don’t know any better.’ That’s fine and true, but we confuse kids when we talk about how cute and incredibly intelligent they are. Kids combine what we teach them with of all the anthropomorphic actions they see in cartoons, and they’re stunned when they see gorillas and chimpanzees get so violent with one another, masturbate, and eat each other’s crap. ‘They’re animals, and that’s just what they do,’ we say to help them achieve distance. When they do cute, anthropomorphic, almost human things, we inform our children how intimately related with are to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. When they eat other’s crap, they’re primates, and that’s what primates do. We sever all ties and any links. 

“Hey, if you want in the family, you’re going to have to keep yourself clean back there, and learn how to use toilet paper or something, for God’s sakes. If you’re not going to abide by our customs in this manner, you will need to refrain from eating it, and I don’t care if you have a problem cutting back Hank. I’m sure we could develop a program or something if you need it, but if you continue down this road, you’re out of the family.” 

If we are such close relatives, why did we choose to invent a device, the toilet, to take our waste matter as far away from us as possible? Some of us might look at it for a second for health-related reasons and pure curiosity, but then we want it taken out of sight, out of mind. Why did we invent toilet paper, for that matter, and why do we use it so often? ‘We want to keep our backsides clean,’ you answer. Well, they do too. They just have a different means of doing so, and their method might be some sort of evolutionary tactic they developed to protect members of their clan from health related concerns and predators. Is that why we do wipe and flush it from memory, or do the links to the chimpanzee on the Hominini genera still pop up after four million years in odd moments and weird times in the form of us considering our neighbor’s waste matter visually stimulating. “Hey, Dan, you still have some serious dung hanging. Could you do something to get it out of my sight my man. I can’t take it anymore.” 

When we view animals like humans, in certain ways, we call it anthropomorphism, right? When humans act like animals we call it zoomorphism. We’re not talking about mascots or furries. We’re talking about the little things we do, like a child nibbling on a nut, like a squirrel. These links are everywhere, some real and some imagined, but if we watch an ape long enough, we’re going to see some fascinating anthropomorphic links. 

Some of the times, we choose to pursue our links. Like when we go camping in the wild, nature hikes, or in some way we think brings us closer to our native origins, getting closer to nature, and our natural beginnings. We also go on primal diets, like the paleo diet, and our primary reason for doing so is to ape the diet of those more closely related to the ape, the paleolithic man. The entrepreneurs of the paleo diet pitched it saying that these early humans had lower rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions due to their differences in diet. You can say that you bought into the diet to thwart diseases and the other conditions, and you probably told your friends that too, but you know, down deep, that you just wanted to be as skinny as the picture of that paleolithic man. It made sense to us too on some level. I mean, have you ever seen a fat paleolithic man? We also know that all the sugars, like fructose syrup, are man-made, unnatural chemicals. It makes sense when we learn that these are things our body doesn’t know how to digest properly, and we know that all these chemicals and enhancements make us fat. The paleolithic man ate natural foods, because that’s all they had. 

It all sounded great, and I had people from various walks of life talking about it, pitching it, and telling me that the paleo diet should provide a pathway for all humans. “We’re all going to be on it soon,” one of my friends said. “Soon after we cross the big 4-0.”    

I spotted the fly in the ointment right away, from the get, and I’m not saying I’m a genius, or that my initial reaction was ingenious. I thought it was a common-sense question, ‘Wasn’t there life expectancy thirty-five?’ That’s a fly in the soup, right? It’s something that we might need to fully explore before completely overhauling our diet. Some didn’t, and we all know one. They went whole hog into it without asking that question. They saw the images of the paleolithic man, and they said, you can say what you want about his intelligence and the fact that he probably needed a full body wax, but that man was slim and trim. 

Dietitians now say that one of the problems with the paleo diet is that it can lead to cancer, heart disease, loss of bone density, and fatty liver. They don’t mention the life-expectancy of thirty-five, but I think we all get the point. Now that the paleolithic craze is mostly behind us, the question is what did we go wrong? We did it to get skinny, and it worked, but that whole heart disease and loss of bone density got to us. What if the one thing we missed in the overall diet of the paleolithic man was coprophagia, or the eating of another’s dung? That’s right, scientists developed a term for it, and yes, I had to look it up, because I’m not so well versed in the language that I knew we coined a term for it. 

I also never knew that a guy developed this term coprophagia. It had to be a guy, right? Someone had to say, ‘Hey how about coprophagia?’ and the others in the group had to say, ‘All right, Oskar, we’ll give you this one.’ Except there wasn’t an Oskar, or anyone else who wanted credit for coining the term. I never found a name in all the research I did, because the guy who invented it obviously didn’t want credit for it, and we can only imagine that he didn’t want credit because he didn’t want to face all of questions regarding why he coined the term, including the most prominent, why? All we get is a group of Austrian psychiatrists developed it, but we have to think there was one individual who stepped forward and linked the Ancient Greek terms kopros (feces) and phagein (to eat), but that individual’s name is lost to history, and it’s probably because he wanted that way.  

What if all of the flaws inherent in the paleolithic man’s diet and our attempts to mimic it could be resolved with a little coprophagia? Eating our neighbor’s guacamole, or allocoprophagy, or eating our own autocoprophagy (other “why?” terms). Nutritionists would immediately nix autocoprophagia, because that would be redundant, but what about allocoprophagy, eating your neighbor’s poop? What if paleo-diet researchers found that by eating your neighbor’s poop, you could nullify the unhealthy elements of the diet? Would we still follow it?

“Hey Darryl, I’m on this diet now … This is so embarrassing, but the wife thinks I need to drop twenty pounds, and I cannot shake my Frito’s addiction, so I hope this doesn’t put a strain on our friendship, or you think less of me, but … but could you start saving your … bowel movements. I know this is a hell of an ask … but I brought my own Tupperware …” What if autocoprophagia fixed some of the flaws of the paleolithic diet, and you could live the 72.81 years as skinny as the Paleolithic man? We all want to be skinny, but at a certain point, I think we would start asking ourselves about quantity of life versus quality. 

And speaking of quantity versus quality, what do we think of Hank the gorilla’s primary concern with the dung in his brother’s anus? Quantity or quality? Quantity, right? He’s a gorilla, more is more. They’re not smart enough, or cultured enough to have preferences. Am I alone in limiting their species in this regard? They eat to survive and thrive. Fatty foods might taste better to them, but that’s because they need it to stay warm for the winter, but does the bear notice that salmon tastes better than the low-fat alternative tilapia? If they caught a tilapia, would they throw it back? Whatever the case is, I found out how wrong I was after Hank scooped out Diarrhea Dan’s moist dung and ingested it. The point of this observation is not whether or not he’d go back to the source for more, it was how fast he went back. More is always more, right? If Hank enjoyed Dan’s product as much as we think he did, our next guess is he would go back for more as quick as possible to beat all of the other allocoprophagics in his enclosure who were looking to get in on the action. I was wrong. I was so wrong that I think my mouth actually opened when I saw Hank take his time while ingesting his brother’s byproduct, in the way I will when I happen upon a guacamole or that perfect strawberry. Mother Nature is imperfect, but every once in a while, she produces something close to perfection. Have you ever had this strawberry? There’s always at least one a bushel. It’s not too sweet and not too dull. I call it the Goldilocks strawberry. When I taste a Goldilocks strawberry, I take a moment to savor its absolute perfection. I roll it around on my tongue, so it hits every sensor while I chew. I close my eyes, and I flutter. I find it euphoric, and I’m glad I lived long enough to experience this moment. It’s almost instinctual, and it can be embarrassing, but I can’t help it. 

Hank did this. I might be exaggerating a little, and the correlation might not be 100% exact, but I swear I saw Hank roll his brother’s waste matter around on his tongue to let it hit every sensor. Then, he closed his eyes slowly, like I do with the strawberry, and I swear on my mother’s rotting carcass that I saw some fluttering of the eyelids. There wasn’t much fluttering, but the one thing I will write without equivocation is that I wasn’t looking for it, because I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see Hank do that in the first place, but to see him savor it was almost too much for me. Before that afternoon, I didn’t think gorillas savored. We’ve all seen dogs lick their lips, but is that savoring, or is it the dog making sure there isn’t a drop of food they missed? Whatever the case is, I wasn’t looking for a sign of an ape’s relative definition of quality versus quantity, and the eye fluttering or any form of savoring. I wasn’t looking for anything that I wanted to see. The whole moment, every little thing Hank did, convinced me that this was his definition of ecstasy. 

I didn’t want to see what I saw. Not only did it gross me out, but seeing this little slice of anthropomorphism actually made me a little uncomfortable. I instinctively moved to shield my kid’s eyes, because it made me so uncomfortable to watch the ape enjoy that so much that I didn’t want to answer my kid’s questions in the aftermath of it.

Now, was I uncomfortable watching it because I wanted to give Hank his privacy? I don’t know, but when we see someone experience a moment of ecstasy, we want to leave them alone in it, especially when they’re displaying it in public. I wasn’t sure if he knew he was in public, but I had what I considered the instinctive response that displays like these should be kept in the privacy of our bedrooms, and bathrooms, and then I thought well, this is kind of his bedroom slash bathroom, and I wondered if zoo animals realize they’re in public. Think about that for a second, if you were being watched 24/7, you might become so accustomed to it that you forget that at any given time, ten people could be watching you. 

As I stepped away, it dawned on me that this whole experience might be a message from God that I am to deliver to you here tonight, and that message is this, your whole definition of taste, flavor and preferences is in need of a complete philosophical overhaul.  

Seriously, think about your tastes and preferences for just a second. What’s the first thing we think about when we think about taste? Eating and drinking right? Well, taste and flavor apply to the arts too, when we’re talking about appeal. In the arts, one man’s dung is another man’s Goldilocks strawberry.  

Everyone is trying to appeal to someone else’s taste when they write, paint, sing, and cook, and some of the times we change what we do to try to appeal to taste, but what does the everyman find appealing? Something that we enjoy so much it makes our brain tingle, does not do anything for our brother. Do you have this brother, raised in the same home, you talk all the time, and he’s almost 180 degrees different from you? How does that happen? That’s an entirely different article, but the point is that taste is so relative that it’s almost impossible to create a flavor that has widespread, universal appeal. The word flavor should have a capitalized (‘F’) on it, as it focuses on such a wide spectrum of taste. It should be an umbrella term for all sensorial sensations. Food and drink have a flavor of course, but so do music, literature, and all of the arts in the sense that some of it creates the same but different brain tingles and eye fluttering.  

Some taste is a reward for fulfilling a need. Have you ever heard that? I find it fascinating that our brain rewards us for fulfilling a biological need. The brain convinces us that by fulfilling a need that item of food tastes better. It’s sort of the brain’s way of tricking us into eating, drinking, or otherwise ingesting more of whatever that was that we just ingested. I eat one strawberry, and it tastes like the greatest piece of food I’ve ever eaten. It’s glorious. Why? Because I’m fulfilling a need the body has for vitamin C. I don’t know if this is an exact correlation, but it seems like the greater the need, the greater that strawberry tastes. The brain rewards us for satisfying a need. That strawberry tastes like the best fruit, the best piece of food we’ve ever had. It’s euphoric. It can almost feel like a religious experience.

Which brings us back to Hank. Was Hank experiencing a nutritional depletion that his brother’s guacamole satisfied. Is that why he not only ate it, but savored it to the point that his eyes fluttered? The roles those two gorillas played in that enclosure defined for me what proved to be similar to what I consider one of the most unusual and successful pairings in music history: Ben Folds and William Shatner. 

Do you know Ben Folds? I’m a fan, and I’ve been a fan for a long time, but my taste in music is such that he’s never been one of “my guys”. He has had some fantastic songs, but if I were to run into Ben Folds, and I informed him how close he comes to reaching me, so often, with so many of his songs, I’m sure he wouldn’t care. Not only would he not care, he shouldn’t care. If I met him and told him that most of his music just barely misses the mark for me, he should say, “That’s on you brother. I can only do what I do. I can’t worry about pleasing you, offending you, or entertaining you. If it pleases enough people that I can make a living at this game, that’s great, but I’m not going to change what I do to please you or anyone else.”  

William Shatner is not one of “my guys” either, but he’s always been around. He’s the green bean casserole of the entertainment world. I doubt anyone who has yet to try green bean casserole would look at it and think, “Oh, sweet savior, give me some of that!” I thought it looked gross when I was a kid, but it was always there, and it has always been there for corporate functions, family get-togethers and potluck dinners. When we eventually “what the hell” it, we discover it’s not that bad. Then, as long as we don’t overdo it, repetition can even lead to some level of fondness, until we find ourselves looking forward to the next get together or potluck dinner that has a tray of it. That’s William Shatner. He has his die-hard fans, but most of us don’t love him. He’s never bothered me, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything he’s been a part of just because he’s in it. He’s not the worst actor, or the greatest, but he has been in so many movies, TV shows, and other formats that we now look forward to seeing him pop up in various productions. 

No one should confuse the term “my guys” with an analysis of talent. I’ll drop the typical line that people drop to explain this discrepancy. “I respect the heck out of what Folds and Shatner do, and I always have, but they just don’t reach me on a personal level.” They’re both so talented that they’ve carved out prolific, decades long careers in their own cut-throat business, and I’ve enjoyed their output, but neither of them are my guys.

Some purists think that if you like this guy, then you have to loathe that guy. You ever play this zero-sum game, where you have to take sides. People zero-sum John Lennon and Paul McCartney all the time. We can’t like both of them in certain social circles. We have to pick, because they take sides. I prefer John Lennon. Okay fine. “Yeah, but I don’t think Paul McCartney is talented at all.” I understand that we all take sides in any competition or rivalry, but to suggest that a talent on par with Paul McCartney has no talent is ludicrous. Yet, the Silly Love Songs vs. Important Songs debate rages on in some quarters, as Lennon fans suggest Lennon was not only more creative, he was more important. These people relate more with Lennon, and because of that Lennon was “their guy”, but to prove that point, they belittle McCartney’s Silly Love Songs talent. The man is in the Guinness Book of World Records for most songs written. Don’t tell me he doesn’t have any talent for God’s sakes. 

I missed the Folds and Shatner collaboration for years, because they weren’t “my guys”. When I eventually heard the album Has Been, however, I was blown away. Forgive me for mixing metaphors here, but it reminded me of one of my favorite concoctions: cranberry granola and banana flavored yogurt. Banana flavored yogurt is too sweet for me on its own, and while the cranberry flavor of granola is tasty, I probably wouldn’t eat it as a standalone. When I put the two together, however, I enjoy it so much that I’ve considered submitting it to the overlords as my reward for living a decent, moral life. When I pass on, I want to meet my long-deceased relatives of course, and I wouldn’t mind it if someone played me a Braham’s Sonata on the harp, but if they’re wondering how best to reward me for a life well lived, might I suggest that the floors and walls of my reward taste like the banana-flavored yogurt and cranberry granola concoction I created.  

When we eat concoctions like these, we spoon too much of one flavor most of the times. Some of the times, we spoon too much yogurt, and some of the times, we spoon too much granola, but there are occasions, at least once a container, when we hit a Goldilocks spoonful. The album Has Been is the Goldilocks concoction of talent for me, and when I listened to it often enough to recognize its brilliance, I fluttered my eyes and savored the moment. I did so, figuring that this pairing would be a one-off. I loved Has Been so much that I went back to the other concoctions they’ve made together, and then I went back to their solo work to see if I missed something, but none of them hit the mark in quite the same manner. On their own, Shatner and Folds create interesting, quality material that doesn’t quite hit that Holy Crud, brilliant mark for me, but together they created what I consider their Goldilocks moment. I would think that such moments are so fleeting in any artist’s career that when they hit one, they would immediately run back into the studio to dispense another collaboration, but perhaps they don’t think they can create another Goldilocks moment together. I know they did singles together before and after Has Been, but that album was so good that I would think it would drive them right back into the studio to do another collaboration. We know that Folds’ affinity for Shatner brought them together, and that their work together impressed Shatner so much that he called Folds a genius, but we don’t know why they don’t make more albums together. Perhaps they think that fate and whatnot only permit one Goldilocks moment a life. 

Now, you might go home to your gramophone and place the Has Been phonograph on it, but before you hand crank it to life and place the needle where ever you place it, just know that you might not like the Has Been. It’s silly in parts, and our synonym for silly is stupid. It might never appeal to your refined palette, and you might mock me later for loving such silly songs. To combat such artistic differences, I used to turn on my tormentors and ask, “Oh yeah, well, what’s your favorite album? Yeah, that album is crap.” I’m beyond that now. I’d prefer that you dig deep to find your jewels, but you don’t care what I think, and I don’t care what you think. I don’t care who your favorite artist is anymore, as long as you’re not an “I dunno” gal. We all go on autopilot to some degree, but “I dunno listeners” miss months and years, because they’re not plugged in. It doesn’t have to be albums or music, it can be an absolutely beautiful book, a painting that moves you, or a small, seemingly insignificant scrape of dung from your brother’s anus. Find something that moves you, is my advice in life, and makes you think something different about your world. You might never experience euphoria when you hear music or taste a strawberry or a container of cranberry granola and banana flavored yogurt, but if you don’t passionately seek output from others’ dispensaries, how superior are you to our distant brother Hank? He enjoyed something so much that he fluttered his eyes to savor what he found for just a moment. We might consider that weird, gross, and disgusting, but he experienced a relative level of natural euphoria that most of us never will. He experienced a slice of life that we might never find, because we’re not looking for it, because we’re a bunch of ‘I dunnos’. Knowing how varied tastes are, and that God sent me here today to deliver the message that your whole definition of taste needs an overhaul, is why I’m not afraid to put on a show like this here tonight.