Mr. Q is Quiet 

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I couldn’t put my finger on it, when one of my friends threw me a beach ball, but I felt something, something deep that I needed to explore. Its texture felt so cathartic that I scrunched my fingers on it, which led to an almost inexplicable connection. The smell of it, fresh out of its package, was such a unique scent that I knew there was something more to it. I just couldn’t put my finger on it when I put my finger on it.

It also felt naughty to scrunch it, and I wasn’t sure if the sound or the feel of that scrunching drove that reaction, but I wouldn’t stop until I uncovered what caused me to do it.

“What are you doing?” my friends asked with some disdain. I couldn’t think of anything to say, but I feared that they might talk about this later. They might say something like, “You think he’s normal? I once saw him scrunch a beach ball for about two minutes straight with a look on his face that I’ll never forget. That boy ain’t right.” I saw those impressions starting to form on the faces of my good friends, and I knew I should’ve snapped out of it, but I just couldn’t stop searching for the connection.

“C’mon, throw it!” my friends finally shouted from the pool, snapping me out of it.

I probably should’ve obsessed over it for a little longer, when it was fresh in the mind, but I didn’t. I decided to return to the normal and enjoy the rest of my day at the pool. Yet, every time I played with a new beach ball, and it had to be new, because the new beach ball had that new beach ball smell, I experienced that odd, impossible to place memory. 

I don’t know how long it took me, decades at least, to remember that this unusual connection I had with that material harkened back to the days in kindergarten when I first met The Letter People.

***

“We’re not to touch The Letter People!” our real teacher, a Mrs. Chamberlain, informed us when she introduced us to the first Letter Person we met, a Mr. M. “We’re going to learn a lot about The Letter People throughout the year, and we’re going to learn a lot from them. They will become our friends, but we are not to touch them!” I didn’t know what Mr. M had going on, or what this was all about, but I was all into it.

By the time Mrs. Chamberlain introduced us to the second character, a Mr. T, I recognized the routine she was developing. We were going to meet a new character at various intervals, once a week it turned out. The second introduction wasn’t as overwhelming as the first, but I found so much comfort in this routine that I no longer cried when my mother left me to the charge of Mrs. Chamberlain.

By the time we moved past the introductory characters, I gradually moved past the carefully constructed mystiques Mrs. Chamberlain and company manufactured for us. I began to see them as the teaching tools they were, but I also began to think The Letter People visited us from another land, a Middle Earth of sorts, similar to the land J.R.R. Tolkien created with his own level of creativity. 

Before meeting the first Letter Person, I was horrible at managing expectations and anticipation. I must have been a miserable kid in that regard for my mom, as she taught me how to make X’s on a calendar, so I wouldn’t bother as much about how many days away expected days were. When I began anticipating the day of arrival of the next Letter Person in the same miserable manner I did the other hallowed days, my mom had a word with Mrs. Chamberlain, and we found out that Mondays were the new hallowed days in my life, and I would ‘X’ my way to Mondays.

I eagerly anticipated the day of introduction for each Letter Person, but to be quite honest most of them didn’t have the star power, the it factor that Mr. M and Mr. T had. I realized, on some level, that the rest of them were just learning vehicles for kindergarten kids that needed to know the spelling system of our language, and they needed to know the rules of how letters represent sounds, and how words are spelled. I might overestimate how advanced I was in kindergarten, but my mom was such an active parent that most of what my kindergarten peers were learning for the first time was retread for me. Whatever the case was, The Letter People lost some of their magic in the routine of the months that followed, until I met Mr. Q.

I still remember the day I met Mr. Q. He stood on the opposite side of the entrance with our new substitute teacher, a Miss Landow, standing sentry, obstructing our ability to form a complete sensorial connection with him.

Mr. Q felt rarely used, mostly ignored, and an underdog who is often misunderstood. Mr. Q felt like an avant-garde phoneme, before I knew what avant-garde and phoneme meant. He wasn’t the last Letter Person I met, and I don’t know if I knew all this, or sensed it, but I remember feeling a special connection to Mr. Q based on the subtle idea that no one else connected to him the way they did the other Letter People. 

Mr. Q was quiet. His special feature/superpower was silence. As my mother could surely attest, I never thought of being quiet before, and I never met anyone who operated in silence before I met Mr. Q. The concept was so foreign to me that I decided to try it out.

“What’s wrong?” my mom asked me. “You’re so quiet.” I don’t remember if that question validated my new existence, if it emboldened me to pursue the idea of silence, or if I thought I was really onto something, but I loved the power of silence in those moments.  

As opposed to the other Letter People, Mr. Q silently observed the people, places and things around him, and when he did eventually speak, it proved powerful. I found that concept intoxicating. I thought there was something more mysterious and cryptic about Mr. Q, than Mr. V, Mr. W, Mr. X, Mr. Y, Mr. Z and all the other, more obvious characters. Those characters arrived last, bearing cryptic gifts and challenging the orthographic orthodoxy. I found them mysterious, ironic, and possibly unstable.  

***

Other than Buggs Bunny, I don’t remember having unusual, almost spiritual attachments to cartoon characters before I met The Letter People. I may have been just as nutty over other things, but I don’t remember them having such a profound effect on me. I was so eager to meet these new characters that I managed to get over the idea that I could no longer spend every waking hour with my mom. I looked forward to going to school just to meet these new characters.

I tried to get to know more about them than anyone else did, just to increase my level of familiarity, but there wasn’t more to know. Knowing this made me feel so limited. There’s nothing to figure out about blowup dolls, and I know that now, but as a six-year-old kid these mysterious figures called out to me. They wanted to get to know me as much as I wanted to get to know them. Our kindergarten, class photo showed all the students and teachers saying cheese and smiling for the camera, but I was smiling at The Letter People near me.

Dogs have ways of making foreign objects talk to them. They sniff and sometimes inhale them, until they end up sneezing twelve times in a row. When their powerful sense of smell doesn’t help them understand a foreign object any better, they try eating it, urinating on it, or attempting to procreate with it. When they fail to arrive at some form of greater understanding of its purpose, they move on (Jack Russell Terriers and Beagles excepted). Their motto is “Try, try and try again, and then move on. No sense making a fool out of yourself.” I was not/am not wired that way. My obsessive brain could not let things go, for better and worse, and I obsessed over these mysterious figures called The Letter People.

When I couldn’t learn my individual definition of the essence of these Letter People from afar, I wanted to touch them and play with them to learn everything I could about them. I wanted to be their friends and spend time with them to get to know them better, but we were deprived our sense of touch.

As nice and sweet as Mrs. Chamberlain was, her, “They’re not toys, and we’re not to touch them” carried some weight with us. She either had an authoritative way about her, or her beauty and demeanor granted her authority. I write the latter in association with psychological studies that suggest kids, even as young as five and six, behave better when their teacher is young and beautiful, because they want to be her. Mrs. Chamberlain had those qualities, and she spoke in an ethereal tone that reminded us of Glenda the Good Witch. Whatever the case was, when Mrs. Chamberlain laid down the law, we listened.

My guess is that Miss Chamberlain and the school administrators probably developed their “No touching” rule based on precedent. Kids like me probably found that once they derived some sense of the essence of these characters, they couldn’t stop. They probably developed the rule to prevent us from even getting started down that road. Depriving me of the sense of touch only elevated the mystique of these characters, as I realized I would need to find other ways to learn more about them.

By the time we met Mr. F, Mrs. Chamberlain was no longer our teacher. She was pregnant, they informed us. I didn’t know what that meant, but I learned that being pregnant meant she was going to be gone for the rest of the year.

“Does that mean she’ll be gone for a while?” I asked my mom through tears.

“No, she’ll probably be gone for the rest of the year,” my mom said, and I assume she used more compassionate words to try to somehow soften the crushing blow for me.

A Miss Landow stepped in her place, and Miss Landow was a less attractive, more authoritative woman. Miss Landow informed us that Mrs. Chamberlain’s “No touching” rule for The Letter People would be upheld, and she meant that in no uncertain terms. Miss Landow, however, did not have the leadership mystique Mrs. Chamberlain did. 

I don’t know if it was Miss Landow’s first day on the job, or first week, but Tommy Spenceri decided to challenge her authority. Either that, or he didn’t have the patience I did to work through his progressions. Whatever the case was, Tommy could no longer abide by the “no touching” policy anymore when we met Mr. F, and his floppy feet. He rushed to the front of the classroom to employ what a defensive tackle in football would call a bull rush, and he knocked Mr. F off his floppy feet. He hit Mr. F square, drove him onto his back and popped him. Nobody screamed that I remember, but I was on the verge of it. Tommy ruined Mr. F before I got to know the man, and Tommy deprived me of developing whatever relationship I might have developed with Mr. F. 

Tommy Spenceri was six, I know that now, but back then I considered his flagrant violation of protocol so horrendous that I couldn’t look at Tommy without disdain for his inability to restrain his primal impulses. When Mr. F returned, the next day, his hole was taped to help him retain air pressure, but I couldn’t look at him, because he appeared weak to me now, tainted as it were, and I had no respect for him. It’s a bit callous, I know, but how many six-year-olds know anything about the complex emotion of sympathy?

The one thing that Tommy introduced to me was the concept of moderation. I was never going to commit what I considered a flagrant violation of protocol as horrendous as he did, but with Mrs. Chamberlain gone, her leadership mystique went with her, and to my six-year-old mind, that opened a window of opportunity. I don’t remember the exact timeline involved here, but at some point I conspired with my younger brother, a heist of a Letter Person. I wasn’t sure which Letter Person I would steal, or if I would steal all of them. I had favorites, but I didn’t want to play favorites. I didn’t want to leave a man behind, so my plan broadened out to stealing two of them, to three, to however many I could grab. I was not the type of kid who stole things, and I considered the whole idea shocking, and I considered how shocked and disappointed my mom would be if I was caught. I was so in love that The Letter People that it grew into an obsessive, unhealthy love that some might characterize as stalking.

Immediately after Tommy Spenceri committed his horrendous violation, I was disappointed that Miss Landow, and the powers that be, didn’t punish Tommy as severely as I thought they should’ve. They gave him what they called a “stern talking to”. Tommy violated the sanctity of The Letter People, and their primary “no touching” rule, and all they gave him was a “stern talking to”? Tommy maintained his smug smile throughout this “stern talking to”, and I watched it all thinking that they weren’t do enough to protect The Letter People.

When I began plotting and planning this heist, my perspective on Tommy’s soft punishment changed. I now realized that if they caught me, they might give me nothing more than a “stern talking to”.

While in the planning stages, I realized that I didn’t know where The Letter People went after our week with them was over, and I decided to start watching the routines of Miss Landow in the coming week to see what she did with The Letter People when our lesson plan concluded. I don’t remember how sophisticated my plans were, but I remembered those people who stole things in movies, and I saw how often their episodes ended in gunfire with the thieves who survived eventually going to jail. As much as I wanted to spend more time with The Letter People, and become better friends with them as a result, I figured that I wasn’t ready for gun play, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t do well in jail. I eventually chickened out, because as much as I wanted to spend the rest of my life with The Letter People, I couldn’t stand the thought of life without my mom. I tried to live a life without her once before, when I ran away from home, and she let me. Everyone considered thought it was so funny that I couldn’t get to the end of the block without her, and I found it humiliating to realize I wasn’t able to exist on my own. 

With that fantasy out of sight and out of mind, I moderated further. I developed a foolproof plan based on the patterns and behaviors I watched the various players in our school for the next couple of days. When we went to recess and played on the playground for however long it took, Miss Landow stayed with us, observing us. On the rare occasion someone had to use the restroom, she allowed them to go inside the school, unmonitored and unaccompanied, to use the facilities. Once I mustered up the courage, and that took some time, I asked to be excused from recess.

The path to the restroom and our classroom were the same, until we hit a fork in the hall, turn right and we’re headed to the open-doored classroom. Turn left, and we’re headed to the bathroom. I thought about this in the planning stages, and I followed my plan to the letter. After asking her if I could go to the restroom, I approached the fork in the hall as casually as I did any other time I went to the restroom, and I turned left to the restroom. I stood on that corner and looked back at Miss Landow. I could see her through a window in the door, talking to a fellow teacher and laughing about something. I carefully looked in every direction, and then I held my breath and crossed the hall and entered into our kindergarten classroom. 

I felt a “whoosh” of emotion when I crossed that threshold, as it was my first experience with committing something so wrong it felt right. I looked back down the hall and up the hall to see if anyone witnessed my transgression. The coast was clear. My immediate thought was to initiate plan A and steal Mr. Q, but I couldn’t think of a way to conceal him well enough to sneak him out the door. Years later, I wondered why I didn’t just deflate him and hide him in my shirt, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t know Mr. Q was inflated back then.

When I finally stood before Mr. Q, I didn’t know what to do. My plan B did not include any details of what I should do when I was finally alone with him, because I didn’t think I’d make it that far. I didn’t want to tackle him, or hurt him in the brutish manner Tommy Spenceri did. I just wanted to touch him little, and I did. It felt a little naughty, but it felt cathartic and pleasing in an almost spiritual manner to run my fingers across him. Then, I touched him so much that I began squeezing him softly, and when I did it made a scrunching sound that I enjoyed. I scrunched him a little more, and then I lowered to a knee and sniffed him, and Mr. Q’s scent was so unique and pleasing that I neared him even more and inhaled that smell deeply.

For most people, memories of childhood are relative. Some remember a few snapshots from high school, some go back further, but very very few can remember anything beyond sixth grade. This moment I spent with Mr. Q felt so special that I would recall it, decades later, when I held a beach ball for far so long for my friends gave me a look that suggested I was doing something concerning. I also remember that I would continue to use the restroom excuse to visit the other Letter People we met after Mr. Q, onto the final days with Mr. Z, but my sensorial and physical relationship with Mr. Q, who I knew would remain quiet about our interaction, was the most special.

When the class photo day arrived, months after we began meeting these characters, Miss Landow brought back Mr. T and Mr. M for the photo, because they were the most popular, but I wanted to spend more time with Mr. Q and the other Letter People that weren’t as popular. We didn’t spend as much time with them, and in my opinion, we never truly got to know them or learn their essence.

Years later, my brother discovered that there was a The Letter People television show. Back then, a kid in kindergarten spent a half-day at school, and he was able to watch that show while I was in school. That destroyed me a little, because I felt my relationship with these characters, three years out, still felt incomplete. I was so bitter and angry that I could barely contain myself. I eventually saw this show, and I don’t remember if it occurred in the first episode I saw, or soon thereafter, but my interest waned quickly. I was too young to know that someone wrote and directed these episodes, and I knew nothing about voice actors, or any of the players involved in such a production, but I thought they did it wrong, all wrong.

“There’s no way Mr. T talks like that,” I, a budding critic, told my brother. I also complained about the various interactions of these characters in whatever nine-year-old verbiage and understanding of the world I had at the time. I thought almost all of the characters were wrong, or different than what I imagined. It wouldn’t be the last time a production left me feeling disillusioned, but when my brother later urged me to watch another episode with him, I told him I wouldn’t be watching it again. I didn’t know it then, but watching these characters actually interact with one another ruined all the mystiques I built up for them when I imagined who they were, what they cared about, and how they might interact with me if I ever got the chance to meet them in real life. I was obviously a kid with an overactive imagination, but when I finally recalled why the feel and smell of a beach ball was so special to me, I realized what an incredible time I had being a kid, and I had The Letter People to thank for their small role in it. 

Hoomans, Ha!men, and Humans 

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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.  

Dead and Gone: The Rock Stars of Yesteryear 

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Some of my favorite artists are dead now, and some of them are just gone. What do we do when one of our favorite artists die. When they die at twenty-nine-years-old, it’s a time for mourning, and a time to think of what they could’ve been. When they’ve already been, and they haven’t been relevant for over forty years, and we learn that they had grandchildren, and in some cases great-grandchildren, it feels a little odd to mourn their passing. They gave us some great music, and perhaps the greatest homage is to simply listen to what they did and appreciate it for what it was way back then. It’s also weird to go back to their catalog and realize they haven’t come out with new music in thirty years. When we listen to them often enough, or they manage to keep their name out there is various ways, it can seem like they were putting out music as far back as a couple years ago.

Before dying, or finally leaving the stage after their fourth or fifth reunion tour, some of them braved “the age thing” and put out a new album. We went to their concert, because we loved them so much at one time, and we knew they were going to play their new songs, because they wanted to sell their last gasp album, but we wanted to hear their classics … until we heard them, and saw them sing that song we loved so much forty years ago. The reason that song was so compelling is that it was fun, obviously immature, and a rock-your-buns off classic. After the euphoria of hearing our favorite song from them died out, we realized that the man onstage is a seventy-year-old trying to recapture what made them “special” in their twenties. 

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Dating back to an era so long ago that I now feel so old writing about it, I played the song Toys in the Attic in my car so often that my girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter could sing the refrain. She probably had a vocabulary of less than 300 words, but she knew those lyrics from that song. I also named my first dog Tyler. Seeing as how this was between their creative peak, the Toys in the Attic and Rocks era, and their Permanent Vacation commercial peak, I might have been one of the few who had Aerosmith in his tape deck nonstop. Now that they’re done as artists, we can look back and think they should’ve been so much more. Would their creative output have doubled if they decided not to experiment with drugs? That’s impossible to know and probably unfair. Even if they stayed clean throughout, they probably would’ve experienced creative highs and lows, and how many relatively clean artists came out with five straight top-to-bottom incredible albums? I can think of two. There was a time when I thought Aerosmith might be one of them, the elite of the elite. They weren’t, but I still think they could’ve been so much better if they didn’t fall prey to chasing the dragon. Yet, that was the nature of the beast, back then.  

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Was there a rock artist who did more with less than John Michael “Ozzy” Osborne? We all know the icon that Ozzy became, the charismatic frontman who could put on some theatrical shows, but when we strip those elements away, we have a relatively untalented man who ruled rock music for over 50 years. He didn’t have great vocal range. Even his most ardent fans would admit that while Ozzy could sing, and he had one of the most distinctive voices in rock, his vocal range was extremely limited. His appearance, though suited for the role of a “Prince of Darkness”, was not what anyone would call pin-up material. According to his primary lyric writer early on in his solo career, Bob Daisley, Ozzy Osborne came up with melodies, but he didn’t write lyrics. Even with all that, I had friends and family who were diehard fans, and they said, “There’s Ozzy, and then there’s everyone else.”

There was no one quite like Ozzy Osbourne before he became “Ozzy!” He basically created this character, embellished it, and built it into something that no one will ever try to do again.   

He was a one-of-a-kind, charismatic showman who could dwarf just about anyone who stood on stage with him, but if we strip away the legendary aura that surrounds him, we have a giant in the industry who wasn’t very talented.

As a young man, Ozzy met a gifted lyricist named Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler, and they invited a guitarist named Tommy Iommi to join them in a band they eventually called Black Sabbath. Tommy ended up writing the music for the band, and Geezer Butler wrote 95% of the lyrics for the Black Sabbath songs. Ozzy did, according to those who’ve worked with him, have a gift for creating melodies for the songs that others wrote, and some say these melodies were often one of the reasons the songs and albums proved so successful. He’d often hum to the music, and his writers would write accordingly. So, John Michael “Ozzy” Osborne didn’t have dynamic vocal range, he couldn’t write lyrics, and wasn’t very good looking, but he ended up playing a prominent role in music that sold over 100 million albums. He was inducted in the U.S. and UK Hall of Fame, and he was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the Birmingham Walk of Stars. No one will deny that Ozzy was charismatic and a great showman, but he and his wife Sharon’s greatest talents may have involved spotting talented individuals and collaborating with them. To this day, I look at the man, listen to him talk, and consider his oeuvre, and I still cannot believe that he succeeded to the degree he did.  

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One of Ozzy Osbourne’s writers, Ian Fraser Kilmister, AKA Lemmy, would go onto form his own bands, Hawkwind and Motorhead. Lemmy Kilmister was another shouldn’t have been. As he proved with Ozzy, Lemmy could write lyrics. Other than that, he may have been further removed from pin-up boy than Ozzy. Those of us who try to figure out what women find an attractive man are often incorrect, but my guess is that few women would ever find Lemmy Kilmister an attractive man. 

The music of Motorhead had harmonies, but they would never be confused with the pleasing harmonies of The Beatles or an Air Supply. When we hear him sing, we imagine that that’s probably what zombies would sound like, if they existed. This is probably the sound that vocal cords, damaged by death, might sound like. If the listener prefers the pleasing sounds of a David Bowie or Thom Yorke harmoniously developing a relationship with the music, they probably wouldn’t understand how others could prefer Lemmy. 

He has the type of voice, similar in some ways to Tom Waits, though Waits found a way to make his gravel, growl, and guttural vocals harmonious and beautiful. We could also compare Lemmy’s gargling motor oil vocals with Captain Beefheart’s fragmented expressive vocal stylings, but Lemmy was more about brutish attitude and utter defiance than artistic technique.

“What is that?” is our reaction to hearing Lemmy sing for the first time. We might even consider it so bad as to be a joke, but Lemmy carved out an ever-expanding fanbase that put him in a relatively successful level that I doubt anyone would’ve predicted at the nascent of his career. He was also not a great interview for the softhearted types who favor artists that say wonderful and nice things.

There were no A&R guys in Lemmy’s camp early on in his career, and he had to almost do it all himself. I’m sure he had some undocumented assistance throughout his career, but by almost all accounts, Lemmy had to do it all himself. He was a self-made man. He expressed his disappointment in this regard when his career was eventually commemorated, and company men lined his audience. Lemmy did the opposite of thanking them for being there. “Where were you guys?” he asked them. We have to have some sympathy for those A&R guys though, because how could they sell this man to the public? If Lemmy wasn’t the most original and unique musical artists you’ve ever heard/seen, then you know far more about this world than I do. If Lemmy wasn’t an original, he gave new meaning to the Oscar Wilde quote, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” 

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Billy Joel was Billy Joel for those of us who were young in the 70s and 80s. He was so ubiquitous that we never really considered him a man who just happened to be an artist. We’ve all heard about how many records the man sold, and we just kind of yawned. Every time he cranked out another song, we all heard too often on the radio, it was but another Billy Joel song that we loved, but it left you with a “What do you want me to do with this?” response. When we’re there, in the moment, we don’t recognize how hard it is to keep creating great songs. We all thought it was just something Billy Joel did. Some men wash dishes for a living, others prepare taxes for others, and Billy Joel writes songs that stick in your head like peanut butter.

Seeing these songs chronicled in the And So it Goes documentary on Billy Joel, as opposed to hearing it in yet another greatest hits compilation, gave us a new perspective on this man. We watched it with a “I forgot about that song” and “That’s right, he wrote that one too” reaction that struck me as if I never considered that he wrote all of those songs. Billy Joel was so prolific for about twenty-two years, at a near album a year pace, that he defined a generation.  

Billy Joel was also trapped in the 70s and 80s when we could say there were so many great artists coming out with new music nearly every year. Even in that vein, Billy Joel was one of the few pillars of commercial dominance. He is the fourth bestselling solo artist in U.S. history, his Greatest Hits I and II still ranks as one of the bestselling albums of all time, and he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  

The market was so stratified back then that we were all satisfied; the pop fans, rock fans, punk rockers, new wavers, etc., all had their favorite artists. It was such a prolific era that we can only appreciate in hindsight. I loved it at the time, but it also felt like it was just that way, and it always would be. At the risk of sounding like an old man, I think it’s just different now.   

Even after watching And So It Goes, I still wouldn’t put Billy Joel in my personal pantheon of greatest musical artists of all time, but the magnitude of his discography, as displayed in And So it Goes, makes a compelling argument that he was one of the best of his generation, and if you told me you thought that before I saw this documentary, I probably would’ve scoffed at you. My biggest takeaway from this documentary was that this 70s/80s era was just packed with so many great artists coming up with song after song and album after album that we thought this was just the way things would be forever. It hasn’t worked out that way, but what an incredible time it was to be a kid listening to all of that incredible music for the first time. Those artists seemed like machines, but documentaries like this one, and others, remind us that real humans did this, and that we should cherish them for what did for us back then.