Platypus People Need to Watch TV

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When my best friend’s mother pushed her husband down the stairs that wasn’t the only strange event I saw over the course of the years I spent in their household, but it was the exclamation point I needed to develop a new species to describe them. I called them Platypus People. They weren’t just weird, strange, and just plain different people. To my mind, they defied scientific categorization in the same manner the duck-billed, amphibious Australian mammal does. They were a housefire of strange, and I was the fireman, running into what everyone else fled. Yet, as with any veteran fireman who has run into so many fires that they become commonplace, I didn’t see their aberrant behavior for what it was back then.

When Ellis Reddick entered the room wearing his wife’s tattered, old wig and a pair of vampire teeth, I didn’t understand why it was so important to him to terrify us. He would walk slow, real slow to punctuate the terror. As a likely result, my favorite horror movies involve slow, subtle psychological terror that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks. 

His daughter, someone who knew him as well as anyone, was terrified too. If he did this on occasion, say on Halloween or something, that might make it funny, but he did this to us almost every weekend. When we grew too old to be terrified, he turned the show on my brother. We knew my brother was terrified, because he didn’t know what was going on, and that made it funny somehow, sort of, and in a roundabout way. We knew Ellis better than my brother did, but for reasons endemic to Ellis’ character, we were still a little scared. I don’t know what was going on in his daughter’s mind, but I always wondered how close he was to hurting us all. We would laugh when this was directed at my brother, as I said, but there were moments between the giggles when my mouth would freeze in a worried smile. I would look over at his daughter, with this look on my face, and she would have the same concern on her otherwise laughing face. We would take everything we knew about Ellis Reddick and put those facts and concerns in a hypothetical puzzle, and we would wonder how much truth there was in the in the otherwise comical horror we were witnessing. The pièce de résistance occurred soon after his daughter and I found his hiding place for the wig and the vampire teeth, and we tried to use them to scare my brother. He was so disappointed that he was angry. He chastised both of us, because he knew, kids being kids, we would overdo it and ruin the joy he experienced terrifying  us every weekend. 

The Carnelias were another strange brew. I met low-lifes before the Carnelias, but I never knew anyone who whole-hogged it. The philosophy of most of the low-lifes I knew was equivalent to that of cryptozoologists and conspiracy theorists. They believe some of what they say, but they form most of their ideology around the idea that the other guy is wrong. They define their rightful place in the mainstream by exposing their peers to try to push them outside the fringe. The Carnelias didn’t waste their time with individuals, they were out to get the world. I also met angry, bitter, and resentful people before, but I never met anyone who enjoyed pain so much. Painful mistakes exposed the fraudulent nature, and they delighted in it like no people I’ve met before. The Germans invented the word schadenfreude to describe the act of enjoying another’s pain but the Carnelias personified it. Most of us know about the fuzzy line between comedy and tragedy, but there was never a fuzzy line for the Carnelias. They considered all tragedy comedic. I never saw them happier than when someone else was falling, temporarily confused, stupid, and in pain. It was their reason for living, or as the French would say, their joie de vivre. 

“Your family is just plain weird my friend,” I told Matt after he apologized for an incident I witnessed in his home the day before.

“Oh, and your dad is normal,” Matt said. He was defensive. Why wouldn’t he be? I was insulting his family, and in some ways him, because some part of him knew that the peculiarities of his family would one day become his. The struggle to avoid familial institutions was best captured by the Alice in Chains lyric, “All this time I swore I’d never be like my old man, but what the hey it’s time to face, exactly what I am.”

“At least my dad knows he’s weird,” I said, “and he’s been fighting it his whole life. Your family doesn’t even see it.”

It was a harsh condemnation, and it was true. Matt’s family institutionalized their peculiarities in an inclusive manner that Matt would never be able to see without comparative analysis. Institutionalized peculiarities are as difficult for an insider to see as an accent for a native speaker.

“Everyone has an accent down here,” my very young brother innocently commented when we took a trip to see extended family members in Tennessee.

“Son, down here, you’re the one with the accent,” our cousin said.

Everyone laughed uproariously, until I innocently added, “No, you still have the accent. Don’t you watch TV? Everyone talks like us.” I don’t know what I expected them to say, but I wanted pushback. I didn’t mean it as an insult. I sincerely wanted someone to say, “Oh, and you think you speak without an accent? Just because you were born and raised in a certain locale, where everyone sounds alike, doesn’t mean you don’t an accent?” I wanted one of them to explain to me how they could think we have an accent.

They didn’t say anything.

An internet rambler said, “Middle Americans always try to say they have no accent, but …” After that but, they provided some anecdotal evidence that proved otherwise. It’s a natural inclination of ours to counter a generalized statement with extremes. If I say I don’t have an accent, you naturally point out some words or sounds to suggest I do in some cases. That’s fine and all, but I don’t think the argument is do Middle Americans speak without accents, but do they have the least? Is their language the most neutral, the most homogenous, and perhaps the most boring? An article I found, some years back, stated that actors who strive to appear in American movies and on American TV shows are taught to speak as Middle Americans, from a section of the country that stretches across Eastern Nebraska, Iowa, and Western Illinois. Most producers and directors want as little accent as possible in their productions to try to achieve mass appeal, so this is the most neutral form of speech they’ve found.

“You go around saying that everyone else is weird, but I could probably come up with about 100 people who think you’re weird.” Again, I wouldn’t say I’m not weird, but between the two of us, I would say I’m less weird. If you’re from areas of the country, such as Boston, Fargo, and Nashville, you might think you don’t have an accent, because everyone you know and love speaks the same way. There’s a certain inclusivity that prevents comparative analysis. As the old analogy suggests, they can’t see the forest for the trees. My innocent and naïve question asked our cousins if Tennesseans truly fail to recognize that they’re the ones with the accent? If they do fail in this regard, have they ever watched TV? I had a similar, unspoken query for the weird families I spent so much time around in my youth regarding their peculiarities.

I spent so much time around the Finnegans, the Reddicks, and the Carnelias that I recognized their familial peculiarities. They were some weird people. I can write that now, because I have decades of comparative analysis to back up that statement. At the time, however, I grew so close to them that I absorbed their peculiarities and developed my own lack of objectivity, until that conversation with Matt. When he pushed back with, “Oh, and your dad is normal.” I probably should’ve introduced him to the elusive baseline.

How do we compare one individual to another to derive a relative definition of weird. How do we compare A to B? Who’s the weirder of the two, and who’s closer to normal. We might take our question out to a third party, who establishes themselves as an agreed upon, baseline level of normal or relatively normal, on a day-to-day basis. Every region of the United States has some accent in their speech, indigenous to the area and the most common nationality of the settlers of the area, and everyone has quirks, but what person, or group of people, have the fewest quirks in the group we know, so we can establish an agreed upon baseline? We might say that B is definitely closer to C’s definition of normal than A is, and the best third-party, baseline barometer we have is TV.

I could see how someone might adopt a certain way of thinking, if that’s the way their parents and everyone else they knew thought, but at some point, they should’ve developed their own baseline and said, “Our whole way of thinking just isn’t right. I’ve seen the truth, and this ain’t it.”

These three families were weird, and they often failed to note anything unusual about their thought process, such that it leads to a philosophy, or their way of life. They couldn’t see it for what it is, because they were too close, and because their thought patterns were so institutionalized in their families they were  ancestral. I saw their weird, strange, and just plain different behavior at the time, so often I compartmentalized it and incorporated their reality into who they were. The Finnegans just did things like that, because they were the Finnegans. It’s just what they did, same with Carnelias, Reddicks, and my family. We all did what we did, and our actions and philosophies were reinforced by cousins, uncles, aunts, and our grandparents. I threw our big, old world soup recipes into a pot and arrived at what I thought explained the world.

My broken home was just as dysfunctional as theirs, but we had a big asterisk in our favor: my dad. Though he never said such things, and he abhorred analysis of any form, it was obvious to those of us who knew him intimately that he knew he was something of an oddball. If we sat him down and asked him piercing psychological questions about his mental DNA, we wouldn’t find it, because he would tell us everything we wanted to say and what he wanted us to hear. His oddball philosophies and psychology could only be found when he thought no one else was looking, and in the effort he made to appear normal.  

I went to receive Holy Communion one time, and my dad dressed me down psychologically for appearing in that line without a coat on, “Everyone else had their coats on, why didn’t you put a coat on?” That’s but a snapshot that I found quite humorous.

What difference does that make?

“You stood out like an oddball,” he said.

That’s but a humorous snapshot that provides some insight into the daily travails of my dad trying to fit in and be normal. I laughed about it then, and I laugh about it now, but I find myself examining the apparel of my peers before going out now. “All this time I swore I’d never be like my old man, but what the hey it’s time to face, exactly what I am.”

How many of us are able to objectively examine our way of thinking only to realize that we’re a bit off the track? How many of us can examine the way we’ve thought our whole lives and realize that we have some weird, strange, or just plain different ideas about the world? Due to the fact that just plain different people fascinate me, I’ve known more than my share in an intimate manner, and I can tell you that it’s rare for anyone to have substantive objectivity on these ideas and philosophies, because they’re often familial institutions. It often takes a number of people, a number so overwhelming that it becomes impossible to deny, from people we respect, to realize our thoughts are just plain different. By the time I was old enough to examine my dad with some perspective, it was obvious so many people told him “That ain’t what people think” that he knew he was an oddball. 

I didn’t think my dad had perspective when I was growing up, but I knew that term just crushed him. I don’t know if so many people he loved and respected called him an oddball, but we were raised to believe it was one of the the worst things we could call someone else. Most of us say, “You’re such an oddball” with a cringy smile, but my dad said it with the meanest face he could find. He also said, “That ain’t the way,” whenever I approached him with a relatively original thought. “That ain’t what people think.” He developed an unwavering trust of experts, and he repeated their lines word for word. By doing so, he probably hoped to mirror their baseline normalcy.

Original thoughts were outside his gameplan. He didn’t trust them, and he didn’t want to have them. Again, this reaction might have resulted from the pain he experienced whenever he tried one out and others told him that was oddball thinking. My guess is he lost those battles so often that he feared there was no hope for him, but he didn’t want his sons to have to go through what he did. He never said why it was so important to him that we fit in, and be normal, but he might have thought if his sons could turn out relatively normal, perhaps he could enjoy a legacy of normalcy posthumously. It’s possible, even probable, that his fears of others considering his sons oddballs altered the trajectory of his lineage.

The Finnegans, the Carnelias or the Reddicks obviously never had such fears, for they not only continued their institutionalized, familiar philosophies, they propagated them as the way, the truth, and the light. 

I had so many stories of these families lost to history, because I didn’t consider them noteworthy at the time. “Do you remember the time when the Reddicks did this?” I asked my brother decades later. He was there for much of it, as the Reddicks babysat us on weekends, and he remembered the stories. He spent time around the Carnelias too, and we both forgot more than we remembered about these people, but we both criticized each other for accepting their ways as commonplace.    

I didn’t tell the stories of the Finnegans, the Carnelias or the Reddicks the way I do now, because I didn’t see them the way I do now. Decades helped me remove myself from the limited perspective of seeing it so often that it felt somewhat normal to do them.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” my friends would say the next day, following an eventful evening in which his family exhibited exaggerations of their weird, strange, and strange behavior.

“See what?” I would ask. They would explain what they meant. “Oh yeah, that’s fine. So … what are we going to do tonight?”

Kids accept, adapt, and absorb most realities they’re forced to endure, and as my brother and I learned, they can easily forget most drama and trauma. I don’t know how my friends, the children who were forced to accept these realities on a daily basis, turned out. We’ve only had brief get-togethers since, but my guess is they were unable to correct the weird, strange, and just plain different course their parents put them on. My guess is that they didn’t see the odd thought patterns, strange philosophies, and just plain different ways of viewing the world, because their parents didn’t see it when their parents taught it to them, until it became institutionalized in the family tree. I could see how children born in ancient eras, Biblical eras, or even the William McKinley-era might fall prey to believing they don’t have an accent, or act in institutionalized, familial ways, as most of them didn’t travel more than thirty minutes from their home, but we have easily-accessed modes of transportation now, mass communication, and TV and movies to provide a baseline normalcy and comparative analysis for our family’s ways of thinking. I understand that parents provide the greatest influence on a kid, and how extended family members might reinforce that influence, but how can you still try to maintain that your family is normal? Don’t you watch TV?

Was Y2K an Unfixable Problem, Hysteria, or an Easy Fix?

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“You never get credit for the disasters you avert,” Technology forecaster Paul Saffo told the New York Times in 2013. 

The greatest fear of the Y2K (Year 2000) bug was the fear of the unknown. In 1999, we thought “the unfixable” Y2K bug was a first step in our dystopian future. We can all have a laugh about it now, but very few of us were laughing in December 1999. We didn’t know, and that’s what scared us.

The crux of the fear, for those who didn’t live through it, was that computer programmers didn’t bother listing the full four numbers of a year. 1995, for example, was listed by most computers as 95. 1996 was listed by computers as 96, and so on and so forth. The fear was that when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, computers might not be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000, because computers, in computer-reliant industries, might not be able to distinguish between the years, since they had, to this point, only listed years as two digits.

If it was fixed, did it require a collective effort from private companies, government expenditures that some estimate in the range of $400 to $600 billion, and independent engineers, or was this largely exaggerated problem a relatively easy fix? Was the problem greatly exaggerated and overhyped?

Some of us had our own, internalized doomsday clock in December of 1999, because we feared the unknown. Did we fear it from the comfort of our own home, because we were told to fear it? We were told it would affect every human’s daily life in one way or another. Large or small, we thought every day life wouldn’t be as great as it once was in December 1999. Some of us thought the electricity grid might go down, we heard planes might fall from the sky, our cars and unprepared computers would become inoperable, and our bank’s automatic teller machines (ATMs) would not dispense money. We all laugh about it now, but some maintain that tragedy was averted, and when tragedy is averted without a noteworthy event, we quickly forget how tragic it could’ve and probably should’ve been.

If any problem solver fixes a problem before it ever becomes a problem, they receive no credit for it. If they’re concerned with receiving some form of credit, the most advantageous route is to forestall a solution to allow noteworthy events to occur, and then fix it and save the world. As we all know, this did not happen in the Y2K scare.

I knew people who stocked their pantries with bottled water and grain pellets, I knew others who withdrew extra cash from their bank’s ATM, and I knew a number of people who bought Y2K software updates for their computers. No one knew everything, but we all knew some things, and everyone knew that we had to be prepared for anything. Our reaction to the scare defined us in 1999, but it further defined us on January 1, 2000, as it was noteworthy what we did to avoid becoming a victim of something that never happened. Whatever you did became the subject of ridicule.

The theoretical question we asked one another in 1999 was not when it would affect us, because we all knew that. The question was how much would it affect our daily lives? Few reasonable and rational adults asked the question if it would affect us. Due to the fact that computers were still relatively new to us, we considered it a fait accompli that it would affect us. We grew up with science fiction movies that revolved around a plot that that which can help man today could one day, and in some way, ruin man in a dystopian manner that no one saw coming.

In those movies, the proverbial, street corner bell ringer was always the best-looking actor in the movie (which lends their character more gravitas) warning the less attractive (and thus less aware) side characters of impending doom. None of the average-to-ugly actors in the movies recognized the true, impending threat for what it was until it was too late. We didn’t want anyone to consider us average-to-ugly, so we mentally prepared for the day when an attractive person lofted a preposterous notion to us.

In 1985, someone posed a theoretical question about how Y2K might affect computers when the century switched, but the problem for us was we didn’t know how attractive that theoretician was, so we didn’t take it seriously. Their theoretical notion hinged on the idea that for decades computer programmers wrote the year in shorthand. They didn’t write out the year 1985, they wrote 85. Some claimed the shorthand was done to save memory space. Thus, when the year flipped from 99 to 00, we feared that all of our computers would believe the year was 1900, 1800, or even year 00? Most of us didn’t believe that computers would transport us bedside, next to the baby Jesus, but we feared that our computers would fail to recognize the logic of the switch, and that the bug it created might introduce such internal confusion in the computer’s mainframe that they would simply shutdown. We feared any human input introduced to combat this inconsistency would prove insufficient, and that human interference could lead to some unforeseen complications, and we feared our computers would be unable to sort it out? The theoretical question reached hysterical proportions in the fourteen years between 1985 and 1999, as America grew more and more reliant on computers for everything from its most important activities (travel) to its most basic (ATMs and the electrical grid).

My guess is that the recipient of that first theoretical question brought it to a closed-door boardroom, and some of those board members took that question out to other parties, until someone in the media heard the question and thought it might prove to be an excellent ongoing question to ask an audience in ongoing features every week. They could start a Tuesday Tech story of the week in which they asked the informed and uninformed what they thought of a problem that wasn’t a problem yet, but could be a problem when the calendar flipped.

Media figures play two roles in our lives, they tell us what we need to hear, read, and see, and they tell us what we want to hear. We don’t want to hear eggheads talk 1s and 0s, unless they can make it apply to our lives with a quality presentation. That, in my opinion, provides stark clarity on our mindset, because we prefer the presentations inherent in science fiction to the hard science of the actual factual.

“Nobody cares about computer programming,” we can guess a network executive informed that ambitious reporter’s Tuesday Tech proposal. “Why should I care about this?”

“The angle we’re proposing is more granular,” this reporter said. “The first network focused on the larger question of computer technology in their Tech Tuesday reports. In our Tech Thursday features, we’ll explore how much of our lives are now dependent on computers. Our energy grid, the tanks at the gas station, and the ATMs. We plan on bringing this theoretical problem home to where people live. We will say this Y2K bug is not just going to affect Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it could have far-reaching implications for citizens watching from Pocatello, Idaho to Destin, Florida, and here’s how …”

As usual with hysterical premises of this sort, the one component most news agencies, and the word-of-mouth hysteria that follows, fail to address is human ingenuity. Rarely, do we hear a reporter say, “We’ve all heard the problem called the Y2K bug, but we rarely hear about proposed solutions. Today, our guest Derrick Aspergren will talk about proposed solutions to comfort the audience at home.” The problem for news agencies is that the Derrick Apergrens of the world are often not very attractive or charismatic, and they speak in ones and zeroes. Even though most computer problems and solutions involve a lexicon of ones and zeroes, no one wants to hear it, and few will remember it. As a result, news agencies rarely give Derrick Aspergrens airtime, and they focus on the dramatic and provocative, proverbial bell ringers standing on a street corner.

In 1999, we rarely heard the question, can hardware engineers and electrical engineers fix a problem they created? The learned fear we’re conditioned to believe, based on the plot lines of so many science fiction movies, is that if we dig deep enough, we’ll discover that this isn’t a human problem at all, but a problem generated by a scary conglomeration of ones and zeroes we call AI (artificial intelligence). We knew little-to-nothing about the potential of AI in 1999, but we feared it, and its potential, because we feared the unknown. “AI is here, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” was (and is) the battle cry of conspiracy theorists on radio, in our neighborhoods, and in our work place. The truth is often much less dramatic.

The truth, we now know, was somewhere south of the hype. The truth lived somewhere in the question of whether the Y2K fear was real. If it required a big, worldwide fix, as some suggest happened, how come there were no Nobel Prizes handed out? “That’s because it required a collective effort from so many minds, around the world that there was no individual to accord credit.” Or, was the fix so easy that any hardware engineer, worth half of his college tuition payments, was able to do it?

Was the Y2K scare a tragedy averted by hardware engineers enduring mind-numbing hours of editing, or was the entire affair hyped up through media mis, dis, or mal-information? I don’t remember the reports from every media outlet, but how much focus did the round robin hysteria generated by the media place on possible and probable fixes? Some suggest if there was a need for a fix, it could be easily accomplished by hardware programmers, and others suggest it was never this world-shaking threat we thought it was.

The problem for us was that the problem was so much more interesting than the fix. Take a step back to December 1999, and imagine this news report, “Here we have a man named Geoffrey James, who says, “If Y2K experts (some of whom have a software background but none a hardware background) ask some electrical engineers about date checking in embedded systems, they will learn that only a complete idiot would do anything resembling the conversion and comparison of calendar dates inside a chip. We use elapsed time, which is a simple, single counter; it takes ten seconds to add to a circuit.

“I may oversimplifying but ultimately the reasoning doesn’t matter,” Geoffrey continues, “the unfixable system problem either isn’t real or isn’t significant enough to spawn a disaster. Because there aren’t any.” That rational and reasonable explanation from someone purportedly in the know would’ve gone in one ear and out the other, because for some of us there are no absolutes, and there are no quick fixes. When someone dangles the prospect of a simple solution to the simplest problems, we swat them away:

“You mean to tell me that all they have to do is add to a circuit. I ain’t buying it brother, and if I were you, I wouldn’t buy it either. I wouldn’t go out into the world naked with the beliefs of some egghead. We all have to prepare for this, in one way or another, we must prepare.”

Some of us thought the Y2K bug would force us to back to the primal life of the cavemen, or at least to the latest and greatest technology of the McKinley administration of 1900. Friends of mine thought those of us who know how to hunt and forage for food would once again take their rightful place atop the kingdom of those who grew so accustomed to the comfy life of a visit to the neighborhood grocery store. More than one person I knew thought our appliances might explode, and that Americans might finally know what it’s like to live in the poorest third-world nations in the world. They thought we would return to our primal life, and our TV shows and movies reflected that fear, anxiety, and (some say) desire to return to our primal roots.

News reports stated that hardware engineers and other electrical engineers were working on the problem, but they’re not sure they’ll have a workable in time. We knew the line: “For every problem there is a solution,” but when you’re in the midst of hysteria, lines like, “This was a man-made problem that requires a man-made solution” provide no comfort. We all know that tangled within mankind is a ratio of geniuses who not only know how to propose solutions, but they know how to apply and implement them. We know this, but humans suffer from an ever-present inferiority complex that suggests no mere mortal can resolve a crisis like this one. We know this because no self-respecting science fiction writer would ever be so lazy as to suggest that a mortal, whether they be a military leader with a blood lust who wants to detonate a warhead on the monster, a policeman who believes that a bullet can kill it, or an egotistical scientist can resolve this particular dystopian dilemma.

Even though this was a man-made problem, few outside the halls of hardware engineer offices believed man could solve the problem. We heard about geniuses who brought us incredible leaps of technology so often that it was old hat to us. We knew they could build it, but there was this fear, borne in the human inferiority complex, and propagated by the sci-fi movies we loved, that technology had spiraled so out of our control that it was now beyond human comprehension to fix it.

Was Y2K overhyped as an unfixable problem, was the solution so elementary that it simply took a mind-numbing number of man hours to implement it, or was it a simple hardware fix? I don’t know if the numerous media outlets who ran their Tech Tuesday features ever focused on the idea that the Y2K problem, of two digits vs. four, was generated by a theoretical question someone asked fifteen years before, but I told my terrified friends as much. “If this whole thing is based on a theoretical question, what is the theoretical answer?” With fellow uneducated types, I furthered, “And if we search through the theoretical answers, we might find an actual one.” The theme of my response involved the hope that we weren’t so terrified by the questions that we failed to seek answers, and I was shouted down. I was shouted down by uneducated types, like me, and I was, am, and forever will be woefully uninformed on this subject. They told me that I didn’t understand the complexities involved, that this situation was far more serious, and that I was underestimating it. I’d love to say that I adjusted the focus of my glasses, as I attempted to adjust theirs, but when the screaming majority in your inner circle is convinced to consensus those who are relatively uninformed either silence or buckle. I cowered, and I regrettably conformed to some of their fears, but I didn’t know any better. None of us did. The one takeaway I have from the hysteria we now call Y2K is that we should use Y2K hysterica’s fears as a precedent. If we have theoretical questions based on theoretical questions we should ask them of the more informed, more educated “experts”, because theoretical questions could eventually lead to some actual answers. The alternative might result in us shutting down the world over some hysterical fear of the unknown.

The Hat on the Bed Hex 

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“You just jinxed us!” my friend said to explain why everyone was groaning at me and making the meanest faces they could find. 

“You think this is funny?” my friend’s dad said. I did, until the whole room turned against me, and I realized this man was asking me this in a very confrontational manner. “People here depend on the income from these games,” he added. In that brief window of silent tension I continued to believe I was the butt of a joke that would end in a big old “Gotcha!” followed by uproariously laughter. As our silent stare continued, and the dad’s confrontational stance appeared to only strengthen, I realized this was not fun and games to them.  

What I said to ignite this uproar, while watching an otherwise meaningless football game in my friend’s family home, was, “Well, it looks like we’re going to win here!” I violated the tenets of the jinx after our team scored a touchdown to put our team up by twenty-one points with less than two minutes left in the game. Lifelong football fans have seen some wild swings in football, but a comeback of historic proportions, but that meant nothing to them. When my friend not only joined the crowd, but led the charge, I thought he was joking, but he obviously read the room better than I did. 

The furor that line generated couldn’t have been too much worse if I went to the bathroom, stripped down naked and sat among these people as straight-faced as I could.  

In the aftermath of the silent tension between the dad and I, about five mouths around us continued to hang open. They were silently aghast at my utter stupidity. One of the attendees sat back with his hands splayed, as if to ask, “What are you doing to me here?”

Another said my comment was, “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some really dumb things.”

My friend just sat there in the midst of all this shaking his head. After it was over, my friend reiterated that this football game wasn’t just a game to these people, they depended on the income from the outcome.  

I understand that anything can tip the precarious balance in sports, but I had no idea how instrumental I was in it, until they educated me. I would’ve maintained my I’m-not-falling-for-this stance if it were just my friend saying these things, as we joked about it many times before, but the adults in the room not only shared my friend’s condemnation, they taught it to him. Adults who had twenty-five-years experience on me and knew far more about the world than I did, were saying what I considered incomprehensible, and they were shaking their heads with their eyes closed, whispering my name through clenched teeth as if it were an unquestioned truth. 

You might think that I was the butt of some Jedi mind tricks, and that they would all have a good laugh later, but they wouldn’t. They genuinely believed it, all of it. They believed that sitting half-bun on a chair while watching a football game on TV, clothed in team-related regalia, while singing the team’s fight song to send a telepathic message of love and truth to our boys fighting on the gridiron would make a difference. 

After that incident, years of repetition informed me that these forty somethings were serious, “serious as a heart attack”. They also informed me, without saying these exact words, that I was to respect the ways and traditions of their home. 

My family wasn’t of sound mind. My dad was as quirky if not more than my friend’s dad, but he didn’t abide by these superstitions. I never experienced anything like this before, but I never spent time around big-time gamblers either. The adults basically informed me that I sat on the threshold of being banned from their home if that other team came back. They didn’t. Our team won, but they said, “You got lucky … this time, but don’t ever say anything like that again.”

The next time they invited me to their home to watch a game, the dad remained in the doorway for an uncomfortable amount of time, blocking it, saying, “You’re not going to say anything stupid this time, are you?” I assured him that I wouldn’t, and that I learned my lesson last time. He backed away and allowed my entrance.

The Drugstore Cowboy 

This friend and I later watched the movie Drugstore Cowboy together. In this movie, a character introduces the concept of a 30-day hex that results from leaving a hat on a bed. “Why a hat?” a side character asked. 

“Because that’s just the way it is sweetie,” the main character responded. “Never talk about dogs, and never look at the backside of a mirror, because it will affect your future, because you’re looking at yourself backwards … No, you’re looking at your inner self, and you don’t recognize it, because you’ve never seen it before. But the most important thing is the hat on a bed. The hat on a bed is the king of them all. Hell, that’s worth at least 15 years bad luck, even death, and I’d rather have death, because I couldn’t face no 15-year hex.”   

The hat-on-the-bed hex seemed so arbitrary and quirky that it was hilarious, kind of cool, and interesting. The characters in the movie were drug dealers, and we assumed that this explanation offered us some insight into their damaged brains. To prove the theory that a hat-on-a-bed could provide anywhere from 30-days to 15-years of bad luck, the movie characters’ lives fell apart, and they all realized their run of bad luck started after one of the other characters left a hat on the bed.    

That movie is decades old now, but I can still see that hat sitting on the bed. It provided a crucial turning point in that movie. The characters’ lives were progressing as well as any drug dealers could before a stupid and naïve character haphazardly left a hat sitting on a bed, as if it were nothing more than a hat resting on a bed. I remember that narrative so well because my best friend talked about it all the time, and anytime we entered his home, we were to abide by his incorporation of this rule into his life. 

“Are you serious about this?” I asked this otherwise rational human being when he introduced it to us all.

“Why would you want to risk it?” he asked. 

“Because it was a movie,” I said, “and not only that, it was a joke in the movie that the writers inserted to show how hilariously insane their characters were.” 

If he laughed and said, “I just thought it was kind of cool and funny.” I would’ve said, “Thank God, because I thought you were serious.” Unfortunate to his legacy, he told me he was serious. It should’ve been obvious to my otherwise intelligent and rational friend that the movie makers didn’t believe this superstitious nonsense any more than I did, as they arbitrarily edited the definition of looking at the backside of a mirror, and the length of the hat-on-bed hex, but my friend was born and raised in a home of very superstitious people, and he believed that a hat-on-bed could alter his life in the same manner the scene altered the trajectory of the characters in the movie. No one ever put a hat on his bed, as far as I know, but he made us all aware of the consequences of doing so on numerous occasions over the years. 

The Swanny

Propagandists say that if we repeat the same lie often enough, enough people will believe it to make it true, and my friend, his family, and their friends genuinely believed in hexes, jinxes, and superstitions. In their home, I learned that no matter how great the momentum, a few choice words from a teenage male, who doesn’t know anything about the world yet, can alter the course of a history.

One of those who insulted me, in my friend’s home, said I committed a Swanny. A Swanny, they explained, was a term they coined after a man named Ron “Swanny” Swanson said something as dumb as I did once, and they informed me that the other team miraculously came back shortly after he said it. “It happened,” they said, and after it happened, they labeled anyone prematurely calling out a victory and thus jinxing the team “a Swanny”.

“I’m not denying that “the Swanny” happened,” I said to my friend, after the whole incident was over, “but how many times has it happened since humans started watching sports on TV? How many television spectators, hundreds of miles away from the action on the field, have prematurely called out a victory only to have the outcome flip? Don’t you see how we could view Swanny’s “Swanny” as a coincidence?”

They could not. That inexplicable loss was marked in the annals of sports’ history as far as they were concerned, because it proved their contention that when anyone says a most unfortunate thing at a most inopportune time, they can alter the course of history as we watch it play out on TV, hundreds of miles away from the action on the field.

“What would happen if Swanny committed “a Swanny” while watching a documentary on World War II?” I asked, “and three-fourths of the way through that production he mentioned that he thought it was pretty obvious that the allied powers were going to win? Would we all be speaking German now?” 

“That is so ridiculous,” my friend said with laughter. “World War II is already over. The analogy doesn’t apply.”  

“Sometimes, the best way to prove how ridiculous something is,” I said. “Is to provide an analogy that is more ridiculous.”

If I thought my friend was an unmovable moron, I wouldn’t have pleaded my case against “The Swanny”, but my friend was a logical, reasonable man who just happened to be well-educated. On the subject of hexes, superstitions, and jinxes, however, he proved an immovable object. He had a blind spot, we all have them, but this one was so confusing to me.   

I might be one of the least superstitious beings on our planet now, and I’d love to write that even as a teenager, I was immune to such ridiculousness. I watched so many football games at my friend’s house for about a decade though, with his superstitious parents and their superstitious friends. They were rabid fans, and they loved gambling. They were some of the few I met who were into these games as much as I was. Watching sports in my teen years was tantamount to life and death. They were big fans, but they had a financial stake in victory too. Though we approached watching sports from different angles, the outcome was the same, and their fervor made watching games at their home so much fun. 

After committing “the Swanny”, I learned to watch my tongue when we were watching sports on TV. As ridiculous as I considered their rules, if I had respect for my friend and his family, I had to respect the rules of their home. This respectful silence had an accumulative effect over the years, as anytime I entered their home to watch a game, I learned to never say anything premature, or joke about it, and that led me to avoid even thinking that even the most obviously decided game was decided. Little by little, game after game, their repetitive messaging progressively seeped into my brain and morphed what I once considered a joke into a new reality for me. I don’t remember ever making a conscious flip in this regard, but I eventually took their ridiculous hat-on-the-bed type superstitions home with me, and I chastised my brother for making an inopportune comment at an inopportune time when the two of us were watching a football game on television together. “You just jinxed us!” I said. 

“Seriously?” he asked. “You’re serious? Take a step away from what you’re saying, and I think you’ll realize how ridiculous that sounds.” I didn’t, I wouldn’t, until I did, and I entered into a lifelong cringe for ever somewhat, sort of, and temporarily slipping under the power of group-think and repetition.