When Fish Look Back

April 20, 2020October 26, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Some of us enjoy watching fish swim around in an aquarium, because it gives us some inexplicable sense of superiority, but most of us find it one of the simplest pleasures in the world. There’s nothing to analyze about a person who enjoys the simple pleasure of watching fish swim around an aquarium, there are no social attachments to it, no cultural definitions to be found, nothing political about it, and no one can attach double entendres to it. It’s not complicated, it’s simple, and that’s why we do it. For those of us who find some way to feel guilty about just about everything, we can find some very creative ways to feel guilty, but to my knowledge no one has been able to associate watching fish swim in an aquarium with something for which we should feel some guilt. Is this guilt-free pleasure based on our idea that most aquarium dwellers don’t appear to want more freedom. They don’t appear to love life or loathe it, as they seem to have a comparatively limited sense of their life, so is that why we feel no guilt watching them swim around in a limited space, or is it because they don’t look back?

When we own a dog, we love watching them run free around our huge backyards, but there’s always some level of guilt we feel for fencing them in. We take them on long walks and to dog parks to allow them more freedom, but there’s always this sense that we’re depriving them of the full extent of a dog’s glorious life. There are some trade-offs of course, as we provide them food, comfort against the elements, and protection from predators, but when we compare them to their wild ancestors, we can experience some pangs of guilt.

It might have something to do with their comparative lack of intelligence, but we experience no such guilt owning a fish. Some even find some medicinal qualities to owning a fish. Some psychology articles even suggest that watching fish swim around has medicinal qualities, as it can provide some relief to those suffering from depression. Family physicians and dentists often find purchasing an aquarium a worthy investment, because it relaxes their clientele before visits. Some homeowners find feeding them and watching them so relaxing that they want an aquarium in their home. Are these properties attained in the relative silence of an aquarium, does the order of fish in an aquarium provide some relief to chaotic minds, or does it have something to do with the fact that fish rarely look back at us?

There are moments in life, and for some it’s more than moments, but most experience moments in life when they feel trapped. They feel trapped into high-stress, relatively confrontational jobs, but they can’t quit because they have responsibilities and obligations. Those people might enjoy seeing another being trapped by glass, because it makes us feel freer by comparison. Both parties know we are the superior being, but some fish look back, and some of those looks become stares, challenging stares.

We don’t expect fish to look back, but some of the times they do, and some of the times it’s quite cute. Sometimes, we tap on the glass to try to get one fish to give us one quick look to acknowledge us in some quick, meaningless way. They usually swim away in quick, jetting motions, but some of the times they look back. “Look at this, Myrtle, he’s looking back at me!” we say to their casual, happenstance glance they offer us. When that casual glance holds, and that cute, little look back becomes a stare, it can begin to feel unnatural. Even though it feels a little odd at the outset, we stare back. We don’t have any reason for continuing to stare back, but we do, until we achieve some inexplicable and unnerving connection. If this odd connection continues, we think that they’re testing the boundaries and borders nature inflicted upon them, regarding our respective roles in the food chain. We know it’s foolish to assign human characteristics to such a brainless creature, but the otherwise enjoyable stare can lead us to consider questions that which we’ve never asked before.

Our first instinct is to believe the fish just happens to be looking in the general direction we’re standing in, and that the stare we share is nothing more than a happenstance glance. Something about this particular stare unnerves us though. We remind ourselves that they have no eyelids. They might have a membrane to protect their eyes from water, but they have no eyelids, so they cannot blink. They have pupil, and they can move their eyes, but this particular fish doesn’t even move his pupil. It’s staring right at us and through us.

What does it think it’s seeing? Is it really looking at us, or just toward us? We make a jutting motion toward the fish to establish the fact, in our minds, that it is indeed staring at us. Another, relatively embarrassing component of that motion involves our need to establish dominance, so the fish doesn’t forget what we can do to them if driven to act. The fish will react to our jutting motion, but what happens in our interiority if after the fish flinches, it assumes its former position and resumes staring? Do we complain to the management of the pet store? What if the fish stopped staring the moment we brought the manager over to the tank and it resumed staring after the manager leaves? It looks at us, as if it thinks it knows us, and it’s unafraid. There are times when it’s okay to remind other creatures that we’re their superiors, and there are times when we consider it necessary to do so. You wouldn’t be so bold if I reached into your tank, grabbed you, and did awful things to you? we think its way. We think that hard, as if to send a telepathic message. If that message is receive, the fish remains unmoved by that threat.

We know we can’t do such things, no matter how long this thing looks at us. We know those looks the other patrons of the pet store will give us if we do. We also know what we would go through on the drive home, in bed, staring up at the ceiling, remembering what a fish drove us to do. We know no one would understand, and something about that fish’s stare suggests that it knows that too. At some point in this staring contest, it strikes us that the hundreds of thousands of years of our respective conditioning inform both parties who is superior. Yet, this means nothing to this particular fish. Its stare suggests that it is challenging that conditioning, because it knows there’s nothing we can do about it.

Pet psychologists tell us that if we own a dog who is particularly disorderly and disobedient that one of the ways to re-establish dominance is to engage it in a staring contest. If confronted by a wild animal, they tell us, the worst thing we can do is look that animal in the eye, because both parties know, on some primal level we know nothing about, that we’re challenging their essence, and any hint of this challenge enrages such beasts.

If we try to engage in a staring contest with a lion, in the lion’s den at the zoo, most lions won’t even bother looking back at us. They have hundreds of people confidently challenging them in this way every day, and both parties know there’s nothing they can do about it. They can charge the borders of their enclosure, and if you’ve seen a gorilla do this, it can be intimidating, but both parties know, on some level, that we’ll walk away laughing at their meager attempts to challenge us. That interaction is flipped by some measure, because we’re challenging their physical superiority. We’re informing them that we’re not afraid of them, but when we’re the superior in every way, as we are with the fish, what goes through us when they stare at us so long that it starts to become uncomfortable? Is it mere happenstance, or is the fish challenging our nature? Are we so confident in our stature that we continue to stare back? How long do we participate in this staring contest, to establish our superiority, and what happens if we lose?

After such a devastating loss, what happens the next time a host asks us what we think of their brand new aquarium? More often than not, we don’t invest ourselves in situations like these, but there are days when we’re feeling particularly vulnerable. There are days when the “theys” of our lives break us down, and we feel relatively small and insignificant, so we approach that trapped fish with a smile, because we know that they are a they that is unquestionably inferior to us, but there is always one fish who won’t bow down to us. These meager, inconsequential, and perhaps coincidental challenges that we dream up can affect us so much that the next time a friend invites us to look at their fish in the fish tank they have in their home, we hesitate. We know that if we begin shrieking, the fish wins. Our reputation would not only suffer at the hands of our host, but the ten people interested in her retelling of the story. Offering our host, a simple, “No thank you,” might open a big bag of questions we don’t want to answer. Yet, acquiescing to their request might bring us right back to that day at the pet store when a fish’s stare served to undermine our confidence. When we glance over at our friend’s tank, considering her proposal, we see those probing eyes, and we remember the day when we thought we knew our place in the animal kingdom. We remember how confident we were in our respective roles in the animal kingdom before that staring contest began, and though we know we can’t put all the blame for our insecurities at the fins of that fish in the pet store, its rebellious stare unearthed something in us that we never confronted before. We know how revealing it is to have a staring fish lead us to such existential questions, but it shook our confidence down to its foundation, and we politely refused our host’s request, fearing what another loss might do to our confidence.

Yesterday I learned … II

February 5, 2020November 29, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

1) Yesterday, I learned that some love to hug, and they hug so long that it starts to get weird. We can feel the message they want to convey. We know that they want to tell us that they’re fond of us, that they miss us, and that they want to reignite, even for just a minute, the bond we once had. In the midst of moment, trying to create a moment, we overdo it. ‘Why are we still doing this?’ we ask, and they’re probably asking themselves the same question. How do we end this? Is he going to end this, or should I? ‘Is this becoming more meaningful to them, or did they lose themselves in the moment? Would it be impolite if I started patting their shoulder here to signify that this is over for me? Why are we still hugging? They didn’t fall asleep did they?’

Today, I learned that a hug is not just a hug. For a greater portion of my life, the hug was largely indigenous to the female gender. We knew males who hugged. We called them “huggers”, as in, “Watch out for that one, he’s a hugger.” At some point, a shift began to happen. Suddenly, men were hugging one other to say hello, to celebrate their favorite team’s touchdown, or to say goodbye. No one knows when this shift started, but I blame the NBA. We teenagers could distance ourselves and mock the huggers we knew, but NBA stars were the essence of cool in the late 80’s-early 90’s. When they hugged, it took an arrow out of our quiver. For these NBA players, a hug was nothing more than a physical form of saying hello. It was a step above a wave or a handshake, but to us, it was a deep and meaningful physical embrace. We didn’t have anything deep and meaningful to convey to our friends. Others did, and they appreciated the NBA influence. They took these “hello” hugs to another level.

“We’re cousins,” huggers would say. “Cousins don’t shake hands. Cousins hug. Get in here bro.” Cousins love each other, they’re family, and some of them want to punctuate that love with a hug, but what’s the definition of love? I love my wife, my child, and my dog, but I also love a juicy, medium rare ribeye, a cold beer, and most of the great David Bowie songs. Loving a cousin is all about hoping they’re doing well in life, that they’re happy and healthy, and the hope that nothing bad ever happens to them. It’s not hug love though. Some of them embrace us when it hasn’t been that long since our last hug. Their hugs are deep and meaningful, and they thwart our attempts to break free. Some hugs bordered on combative. “I think the world of you bra.” We non-emotional, non-huggers learned to adapt to the breed that has to hug, but we never fully embraced it, and they can feel it in our hug. When they finally allow us out of the embrace, we have to look at them and talk to them. What do we say? We have to say something to justify that embrace. We’re blushing because we’re embarrassed. It’s not our fault, though, they made it weird. They later adapt to our adaptation. “All right, I won’t hug ya’,” they say, and they stop, and we sigh in relief, until we were the only ones they won’t hug. We never wanted back in, but we recognized the strange way abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

2) Yesterday I learned that “a little after three” can mean 3:23. In what world is 3:23 a little after three? When I hear a little after three, I think 3:01-3:10. Anything after that should be a little more vague, such as “after three”. The next time block, the 3:23 time block, should list at “around three-thirty”. Today, I learned that we become more aware of time constraints and the relative definition of time blocks when a six-year-old is tugging at our sleeve.

3) Yesterday, I learned that pop culture defines deviancy upward by defining any actions a criminal uses to evade law enforcement as those of a criminal mastermind. True crime authors characterize actions such as wiping fingerprints off door handles as brilliant. When a criminal puts some thought into their crime, perhaps it’s worth some sort of notation when compared to typical impulsive acts, but I’m not sure if I would call them brilliant criminal masterminds. If we take a step back from our desire to view them as brilliant, we might see that their methods are relatively mundane, based on information available to anyone with a TV and access to the internet.

Today, I learned that criminals don’t want to get caught. They want to be free, and they want to be free to continue to hurt, maim, and kill as many people as they can. The Unabomber, for example, enjoyed the characterization of a secluded genius with a cause, but court documents of his trial reveal that he was “often unconcerned” with his targets. They reveal that he was meticulous about the construction of his bombs, and he went to great lengths to avoid capture, but he didn’t really care who the victim was as long as he maimed or killed someone. He basically wanted to shower in whatever rained down upon him in his elaborate fireworks show, and for that we call him a criminal mastermind.

4) Yesterday, I learned that criminal masterminds enjoy have a cause to justify their actions. They might not be able to justify their actions to anyone but themselves, but they do seek the satisfaction a cause provides. No self-respecting criminal mastermind would say that they did it, because they enjoy hurting, maiming, and killing people. That would diminish their value, their self-esteem, and their historic notoriety.

Today I learned that criminal psychologists say that we can learn more from their initial crime than those that follow, because impulses drive the initial crime. If this is true, we find that most criminal masterminds are petty people who resolve internal and external, disputes in a violent manner. They also have a bloodlust, and as this bloodlust escalates so does the need for a cause, until they slap a sticker on their actions to satisfy those questions we have about their motive, or why they did it. It strikes me that everything these criminal masterminds say is window dressing to conceal their simple, primal bloodlust. They want to put a cause on it, because we want the cause. It wouldn’t be very satisfying, or entertaining, if a mass murderer, or serial killer said, “I just had some basic psychological, primal need to hear people scream.” No matter how many causes we assign to people hurting people, the simple truth is that some of us enjoy hurting people, and the rest of us enjoy reading and watching everything we can about it.

5) Yesterday, I learned that bad boys fascinate all of us. The only reason it’s noteworthy that bad boys fascinate women is that it goes against stereotype. Some of us want to know more about them than otherwise peaceful, normal individuals who accomplish great things. On a corresponding scale, too many of us want to know about the minutiae of the Unabomber’s actions, the motivations, and the aftermath of his terror, and too few of us, by comparison, are as fascinated by the actions and motivations behind Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic output. We label them both brilliant in their own, decidedly different ways, but the Unabomber fascinates us more.

Today, I learned that I’m no different. Most of the people who fascinated me in my youth had violent tendencies. Some of my friends in high school, and some of my parents’ friends had violent tendencies on a much lower scale of course, but they fascinated me. I found their ways hilarious and engaging. Is this human nature, or do some elements of our culture promulgate this mindset? Most of our favorite critically acclaimed movies have something to do with some low life committing violent acts. When someone found out that I listed the simple, feel good movie Forrest Gump among my favorite movies, they asked, “Why?” with a look of disdain. When I told her that I thought it was a great story, that didn’t help my cause. When I told her all of the others I had on my list that mollified her, but she still couldn’t understand why I would list a feel good movie like Gump among them. Today, I learned that the fascination with violence is universal and cool.

6) Yesterday, I learned that I’m no longer interested in writing about politics.

Today, I realized that I am far more interested in the psychology behind why every day citizens decide to become so political that they’re willing to create a divide between those who think like them and those who don’t.

7) Yesterday, I learned that psychologists state that we have a “God spot” in our brain.

Today, I realized that this spot is inherently sensitive to the belief in something, if the rational brain accepts the rationale for doing so. This view suggests that the brain needs belief in a manner similar to the stomach needing food. We seek explanations and answers to that which surround us. Some of us find our answers in God and religion and others believe answers lie in a more secular philosophy, and the politicians who align themselves with our philosophy. They seek a passionate pursuit of all things political, until it becomes their passion, because they need something to believe in.

8) Yesterday, I learned that there were as many differing opinions about Calvin Coolidge, in his day, as there are our current presidents.

Today, I realized that no one cares about the opinions opinion makers had 100 years ago, and few will care about what our current opinion makers write 100 years from now. Some of those writers passionately disagreed with some of Coolidge’s successes, and history exposed some of their ideas as foolish. The historical perspective also makes those who passionately agreed with Coolidge seem boring and redundant. Once a truth emerges, in other words, it doesn’t matter what an opinion maker thought of the legislation at the time. Most opinion writers are less concerned with whether legislation proves effective or not, and more concerned with whether their philosophical views win out. In one hundred years, few will remember if our political, philosophical, or cultural views were correct or not, and even fewer will care. Yet, some of us believe in politics, because politics gives us something to believe in.

9) Yesterday, I learned that Tim Cook is an incredible, conventional CEO of Apple. Former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, was the company’s incredible, unconventional leader, and he helped build the company from scratch. Steve Jobs was a brilliant orator, a showman, a marketer, and a great motivator of talent. If we went to an It’s a Wonderful Life timeline, in which Steve Jobs never existed, Apple wouldn’t exist. I had a 200-word list of superlatives describing Steve Jobs, but I decided to delete it, because it didn’t add any new information we know about the man and what he did. I decided to leave it at those two sentences. Better, superlative descriptions of the man, and what he did, are all over the internet. Walter Isaacson’s book might be the best of them. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created and oversaw a team of talent that created the most innovative company of our most innovative era of America, but Tim Cook has proven to be an incredible steward of that technology. If we flipped the timeline around, and Tim Cook was the first CEO, Apple wouldn’t be the innovator it is today, but I wonder if the less conventional and more mercurial measures Jobs employed would translate to the same consistent levels of growth of Apple we see today under Cook.

10) Yesterday, I learned that Apple’s stock was ready to fall. Anyone who reads independent analyses from stock market analysts thinks that not only is the smartphone market capped out, but Apple’s position atop this industry is also nearing an end. Reading through some of the analysis of Apple’s projections for their various quarterly reports through the years, we arrive at some common themes. “There’s no way the iPhone (insert number here) can deliver on the projected sales figures Apple is promising,” they write. “Everyone who wants an iPhone already owns one, and numbers show they’re not going to upgrade. Those who don’t want an iPhone are loyal to another brand. The market is saturated, and Apple’s reign is about to end.” Today, I learned these analysts began making such predictions years after Apple began controlling the market between 2008 and 2012. Some of the times they were right, in the sense that Apple missed some quarterly projections, but most of the time they were wrong. Some think that there might be an anti-Apple bias, and there might be, but I think it’s human nature to cheer on the little guy and despise the big guy. I also think analysts/writers want us to read their articles, and the best way they’ve found to do so is to feed into our love of doom and gloom. These stories have a natural appeal to anyone who owns Apple products, Apple shareholders, and everyone else in between, because we love the prospect of the leaning tower. Apple will fall too, for what goes up must come down, particularly in the stock market, but the question of when should apply here. After it falls, one of the doomsayers will say, “I’ve been predicting this would happen for years.”

“Fair enough, but how many times did you make this prediction? How many times were you wrong? How many times did a reader act on your assessment and miss some gains? Nobody asks the doomsayer analysts these questions, because most of us don’t call doomsayers out when they’re wrong. The answer to this question was that on 2/3/2010, Apple stock closed at 28.60 a share, adjusted for dividends and stock splits, per Yahoo Finance. If one of the doomsayer analyst’s customers purchased 35 shares for a total investment of $1,001.00 that investment would be worth $11,170.60 on 2/4/2020. Anyone who invests in the stock market relies on expert analysis to know when to buy and when to sell. We consider the positive assessments and the negative, and some of the times, it takes an iron stomach to read the negative and ignore it. These negative stock analysts had all the information the others had, and yet they consistently predicted Apple would fall, because they knew a negative headline would generate a lot more hits than a positive one.

In our scenario, Apple experiences a significant fall in stock price, and the analyst finally proved prophetic. How many times were they wrong in the interim? It doesn’t matter, because a doomsayer need only be right once, for they can then become the subject of email blasts that state, “The man who correctly predicted Apple’s downfall, now predicts the fall of another behemoth.” The penalties for incorrectly predicting doom and gloom are far less severe than incorrectly predicting good times ahead. The former doesn’t cost you anything except potential gains, which most people inherently blame on themselves, regardless what anyone says. There’s the key, the nut of it all, an analyst can predict doom and gloom all day long, and no one will blame them for trying to warn us, but a positive analysis that is incorrect could cost us money.

The prospect of investing our hard-earned money in something as mercurial as the stock market is frightening. We’ve all heard tales of the various crashes that occur, and we know it will occur again. Most of us need Sherpas to guide us through this dangerous, dark, and wild terrain, and most of them are quite knowledgeable and capable. There are a few who will tell you that it’s so dangerous that you should get out now, and some might even tell us that it’s so dangerous that we shouldn’t even consider making the journey. Those with an iron stomach will tell us that we can get rich working for money, but we can get filthy, stinking rich when our money is working for us.

They’re Platypus People! They’re Platypus People! It’s a Kookbook!

October 15, 2019February 18, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“Doesn’t he have cable?” Rodney asked, referring to our co-worker Russell Hannon. Some laughed hard, the rest of us tittered through our cringe. We couldn’t help but laugh, because it was spot-on, but it was so spot-on that we thought it could be misconstrued as a little mean, which made us uncomfortable. I tittered after a pregnant pause. I was so drenched in thought that I didn’t hear anything said afterward, because I thought Rodney nailed it so well that he probably didn’t know how hard he nailed it.

Russell was so weird, strange, or just plain different that we didn’t even bother analyzing it, discussing it, or devoting much thought to it. It was such a given that when someone dropped a “Man, he I weird,” or “He says such weird things,” we just dismissed it with a “That’s just Russ.” We never considered the idea, until Rodney alluding to it, that the man could be operating from a different frequency. We never considered the idea that with some small variations, we’re so on the same wavelength that we’re speaking the same language, and we don’t even notice it anymore, until a disruptor comes along and defines it by contrast.

Everyone liked Russell, he was a nice guy. Uncomfortable? Yes. Easily embarrassed, unsure of himself, needy, all that, but he was such a pleasant and unassuming type that we were all cheering for him. His over-the-top efforts to fit in with the rest of us were often so cringeworthy, however, that Rodney’s comment echoed what we were all thinking.

Prior to Rodney dropping that line, someone else called Russell Hannon “the round joke killer.” That joke didn’t land in the moment, in the manner Rodney’s would. It was true, but it wasn’t hilarious. “It’s what we call a snowball joke,” Clark Dunn said after a few of us began using it when Russell killed another one of our round of jokes. “It’s a joke that gathers as it gathers.” A round of jokes can be similar to singing in rounds in that they often start with someone telling a slightly humorous story from their day. These stories are often so true that they’re humorous but not laugh-out-loud funny, until listeners begin adding their comments and/or potshots directed at the storyteller. These rounds also gather as they gather, until they eventuate into a big old ball of laughter.

Anyone who has worked an overnight shift knows how starved the staff is for entertainment, and the rounds can be the cure for all what ails us. We cherish every joke, appreciate any decent form of entertainment, and we all want to add to keep the ball-a-rolling as long as we can. As such, it can be almost impossible to kill the momentum and the stop the laughter, but Russell brought all the laughter to a crashing halt, night after night. He often added comments that were so weird and so incongruent that we’d all stop laughing just to try and figure out how they fit. “The round killer strikes again!” someone whispered to another when he did it once. On another occasion, when someone started in on his story of their day, someone said, “Beware, the round killer!” in a voice as loud as the storyteller. We cringed. We didn’t look at Russell, fearing that any glance might give the joke up, but we cringed in his general direction. Thankfully, Russell was oblivious to the idea that the snowball joke was all about him.

Some of us laughed politely, sympathetically, at his round-killing comments, because we knew how hard Russell was trying. Others thought he was being obnoxious, but we knew better. We knew Russell Hannon, and we liked him. Our polite laughter must have encouraged him, because he kept killing our rounds. He did it so often, over time, that all of the round-killing and “lack of cable” jokes lost steam.

“What are you talking about?” Sherri Kudron asked him, and she had a mean face on when she asked it. “I swear you say some of the weirdest things, some of the times.” She later told me that she said that to try to encourage him to stop trying so hard.

Russell tried to explain his round-killing jokes at times, but most of the time, he tried to shrug off the silence that followed with notable embarrassment. Those of us who knew Russell better than Sherri knew he wasn’t trying to be weird, strange, or just plain different. He was trying to fit in. He just wasn’t very good at it, and I thought that was key to understanding the man.

The “Doesn’t he have cable?” comment didn’t put an end to our attempts to understand Russell, but it framed the situation so well that some of us thought it whenever Russell said something weird from then on. The comment also contained some multifaceted subtext that suggested one of the reasons we didn’t understand Russell was that we were all operating on the same mainframe, because we all grew up watching way too much TV. The brilliance of the comment, whether he intended it or not, was that it poked fun at Russell, Rodney himself, and us.

Whereas Rodney eased the confusion we felt by suggesting that the only reason we didn’t understand Russell was that he didn’t waste his life watching TV, I thought Russell’s oddities were more fundamental than that. I knew Russell better than Rodney did, and I heard him make so many odd, incongruent comments that I didn’t think a lack of cable growing up captured the essence of Russell’s nature. Russell, I thought, wasn’t just the odd duck Rodney made him out to be. Russell Hannon was a Platypus Person.

The Weird, Strange and Just Plain Different

Platypus People do not have a duck’s bill or an otter’s body, but in many ways they are almost as foreign to us as the semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammals were to members of the scientific community in Britain when they were first introduced.

FullSizeRender_1__l These weird, strange, and different people tend to stray from a premise we might not even know that we share, until we hear someone say something so shocking and so far outside the mainframe that we think it suggests they’re operating from an altogether different one.

Members of Britain’s scientific community were so rocked by the appearance of the platypus that they thought it was an elaborate and well-conceived hoax stitched together through taxidermy. It shocked them, because they thought they had a comprehensive catalog of the animal kingdom before its introduction. Those of us who have had some experience with Platypus People empathize, for before we met them, we thought we had a decent catalog of human nature.

We did not physically dissect the Platypus Person to try to discover the truth. We did probe, however, and we came away thinking they were genuine, unlike those Brits who remained skeptical even after seeing a live platypus, but we had no idea how to process the things they said. The more we learned more about our Platypus Person, the more that shock turned to intrigue as we began to think that their funhouse mirror perspectives might tweak our worldview.

The Different and The Different

Platypus People are perfectly normal in their own home, but if we’re on the outside looking in, they appear weird, strange, and just plain different. We won’t know why they’re different if we see them in a supermarket aisle, but we know it when we see it. If we meet them in the workplace, at school, or in any venue where we can sit with them, talk with them, and really get to know them, we begin to see their duck-like bill, the webbed feet, and the beaver-like tail.

Through them, we also see the difference between those who exhibit organic differences and those for whom weird, strange and just plain different thinking is a bit more contrived. The latter are weird for the sake of being weird, they disagree just to disagree, and they follow the edicts of their overlords to become cool. “Dare to be different,” they say, but what is different? Their definition of different is often the same as everyone else’s, and we learn this by comparing and contrasting them to those who genuinely operate from a different premise. When viewed through this looking glass, we learn that if we’re all the manufactured the free-thinking, independent spirits we see on TV, then none of us are, and the channel the Platypus People are on affects us in a manner that motivates us to learn everything we can about their philosophy before we reach whatever version of a philosophy we consider our own.

When we meet someone who appeared to go through the same intellectual progressions we did, only to arrive at an entirely different conclusion, we want to know how they did that. When we meet someone who obviously went down so many different roads, we don’t know how to approach them, and they make us feel uncomfortable. Some of us shut them off. “He is just so weird,” they say when they explain why they leave the room as soon as he enters. Some of us enter that room he’s in, because we want to know what makes him tock (as opposed to tick), and we want to know the anthropological origins of his thought process.

As much as we tried to defend Russell Hannon, we knew he was “just so weird,” and operating from a different premise. The question was how did he arrive at such sensibilities? The reflexive reaction is to suggest that “he didn’t have cable?” growing up, but I thought it went deeper than that. I might’ve been wrong then, and I could be wrong now, but I wonder if someone as different as Russell Hannon, and his Platypus People peers, are born and raised from a different premise. If we were able to gain an intimate perspective on his parents and grandparents, would we see evidence of some of the hundreds to thousands of tiny, day-to-day adjustments he made to their vision of the world? Do the underpinnings of the Platypus Person lay deep in the roots, past the parents, to the grandparents, great-grandparents and beyond?

Such a discovery process would be complicated, fraught with a battle against subjective search for answers, and possibly a need for some large earth moving equipment to dig through the layers, but we might find an answer beyond “Doesn’t he have cable?”

Jokes, like those, help us avoid the need to understand better, it allows us to dismiss what we cannot understand. “You’re right. He is just so weird. Buh-bye!” It’s rare that we consciously dismiss another based on a couple jokes, but when those jokes are so spot on, we will have them bouncing around in our head in all future interactions we have with the Platypus Person. The next time he says anything off the wall, we can just say, “Aren’t you the guy who didn’t have cable growing up?” and walk away laughing.

Some witty types, like Rodney are so quick that they can sum up an hours-long discussion in one, quick hilarious line. Some of us are processors who need time to process information, and we enjoy hearing from numerous sources before forming a conclusion. We might obsess over such matters so often that we’re considering a search through their family tree for answers, but we can’t understand how someone can come up with a quick, almost-reflexive line like “Doesn’t he have cable?” and consider the matter settled. Do they develop this ability, because they are more comfortable in their own skin and that confidence allows them to swat different, complicated thoughts away? Or, do they develop this ability to come up with a quick assessment of a person, because they are so insecure that they need to thwart unusual thoughts before they question the fundamentals of their being? Is it a defense mechanism they use to help them avoid dwelling or obsessing on such topics, or do they consider most of the mysteries that plague the rest of us settled?

Being Weird is a Choice

I realized this matter was far from settled for me when I met some weird, strange, and just plain different types in the years that followed my interactions with Russell Hannon. One of the best ways I found to define a relative term like weird is to define what it is not. It is not, for the purpose of this discussion, strange. The term strange, by our arbitrary definition, concerns those afflicted with natural maladies. They had a variance inflicted upon them that they could not control, and they could not escape its influence. As opposed to a person we might consider strange, a person who chooses to be weird, can easily find their way back to the premise. They simply choose, for a variety of reasons, to step away from it for a moment. Platypus people, however, have no natural maladies, but they cannot find their way back for reasons that are less philosophical and more anthropological, as their philosophical makeup has been passed down their genealogical tree.

We don’t define these separations to be nice, though we do deem it mean-spirited to mock, insult, or denigrate anyone who arrives at their differences in a more natural manner. We don’t create this rhetorical device for our readers to consider us wonderful, more understanding, or compassionate, but we deem those who go out of their way to poke fun at the strange to be lacking in basic human decency. We also don’t want to leave the reader with the impression that we might be more normal, or more intelligent, than any of the species on display in these articles. We design this arbitrary separation for the sole purpose of providing classifications for those who had no choice in the matter, against a backdrop of those who inherited their oddities or chose to be weird through the odd decisions they make in life.

The Strange Psychology

We might think anyone who chooses to be weird must suffer from a strange psychology. In my experience, it’s quite the opposite. For most of us, our decision-turned-need to be something different started out as a form of rebellion in our youth. Our parents, and various other authority figures, had a strong philosophical and spiritual hold on us. They set the premise from which we were to operate for the rest of our lives, whether we enjoyed it or not. Most of us didn’t enjoy it, of course, and we sought to break those shackles in any way we could. For some of us, this involved momentary and situational breaks, but the rest of us sought total philosophical freedom. We wanted to be perceived as weird, strange, and just plain different as those we were conditioned to dismiss and avoid by our friends and family.

My dad sensed this early on, and he did everything he could to guide me toward a more normal path. Through the decades that followed, he attempted to correct my weird ideas with more sensible, normal lines of thought. “That isn’t the way,” was a phrase he used so often that my refusal to acquiesce to his more structured ways of the world was one of my primary forms of rebellion. There were so many intense arguments, and debates in our household that no observer could escape it without thinking that it was, at least, combustible. Before we explore the ways in which the old man was strange, I would like to offer a posthumous thank you to the man for putting so much effort into trying to make me normal. I now know, through decades of reflection, that he did his best to overcome his own obstacles to provide his children the most normal upbringing he could.

I rebelled to the relatively strong foundation he built without recognizing the luxury I was afforded. The primary reason for my gratitude is that some of the more organic weird and strange Platypus People I’ve met since I left my dad’s home led chaotic lives that can be a little scary. They came from very different homes, with a less than adequate foundation, and they ended up expending as much effort trying to prove they were normal as I did to be considered weird.

This premise is often generational, as our parents pass on the fundamental knowledge they learned from their parents. As we age, we begin to see the cracks in that foundation. At some point, we assume our parents are so normal that they’re boring. They might have some quirks but who doesn’t? They might even have more quirks than others, but doesn’t that just make them quirky? When we add these quirks up, as we age and gain a more objective perspective, and we compare them to others’ parents, an uncomfortable, irrefutable truth emerges in this dichotomy: Our parents are very strange people. They aren’t just mom-and-dad goofy weird, like we thought, they might have some serious, bona fide, almost clinical, deficiencies. If we reach that very uncomfortable conclusion, we know we can no longer find comfort in the idea that our parents just have some different ideas about some subjects.

This revelation can shatter many of our “that’s just dad” illusions and delusions that we had when we witnessed, firsthand, so many confusing elements of their thought process, but it wasn’t until we put all the pieces together that that uncomfortable truth emerged.

After that relatively daunting epiphany clears, a sense of satisfaction takes its place. Our rebellion to their quirky ideas was the right course for us to follow, and we now see how justified we were. At some point in our various stages of processing this newfound information, we realize that for much of our life, our parents were our beacon of sanity in an otherwise confusing world they were charged with helping us understand. When we couple that information with everything else we’ve realized, it’s no longer as funny as we thought it was. We reach a point where we want/need them to be normal, and we ask them not to express themselves in front of our friends, because if our friends learn how strange our parents truly are, how long will it be before they connect those dots back to us?

My dad was abnormal, to say the least. Some might say he was a kook, and others might suggest he was an odd duck. In the frame we’re creating here though, he was a Platypus Person who was difficult to classify. Either he was born with certain deficiencies, or they were a result of self-inflicted wounds. One could say that those self-inflicted wounds were choices he made along the way, and if that is true, I believe he made them as a result of some of his natural deficiencies.

The point of writing about the man’s deficiencies is not to denigrate the man, but to point out what separated him from what one would call a normal man. Those deficiencies plagued him, and he put forth a great deal of effort to convince the world around him that he was as normal as they were. The trials and tribulations he experienced in this regard marked his life, and he didn’t want his children to have to go through what he did. He didn’t want anyone to consider us as abnormal as he was, so he tried to establish a normal home without too much chaos. In his subjective approach to life, he thought fitting in with others and being normal were the keys to happiness, and he tried to pass that along to us. I rebelled to those teachings, because I couldn’t see his efforts for what they were at the time. From his perspective, he provided us a graduated premise of a more normal premise, a luxury that we chose to violate by being weird.

Even after years of reflecting on this, and recognizing what my dad’s efforts for what they were, I still like to dance in the flames of the weird, but once the lights come up I’m as normal now, and as boring, as everyone else. As hard as my dad tried to force normalcy on me, however, he couldn’t control the impulses I had to indulge in the artistic creations that glorified life outside the norm. I knew weird ideas were out there, and I pursued them with near wanton lust.

When I left the relatively normal home my dad tried to create for us, I ventured out into a world outside the realm of his influence. I lived the life I always wanted to live, and I found weird, oddball philosophies so intoxicating that I had trouble keeping them in the bottle.

My dad’s overwhelming influence on my life was such that I preferred the company of normal people long-term, but I was always eager to invite weird people in for a brief stay to challenge my status quo. Their brief stay would present me with different and weird ideas of thinking, weird platitudes, and oddball mentalities that shook the contents in my bottle a little bit more. I needed to know what made them tock (as opposed to the ticks we knew all too well). I became obsessed with the abnormal to find out what made them different, or if they were, and I had to deal with him, my friends, and other family members telling me that I should be avoiding these people, because they weren’t just weird. They were strange. I couldn’t, I said, not until I consumed all that they had to offer.

A Piece of Advice to the Young Weird Wannabes

If there are any young people seeking to disappoint their parents, and anyone else who has expectations of them, in the manner we did, we have one word of caution. Pursue the life of a freak, become that rebel that makes every square in the room uncomfortable. Violate every spoken and unspoken cardinal rule of our culture, and become that person everyone in the room regards an oddball. Before going down these roads, however, an aspiring rebel needs to consider learning everything they can about the conventional rules that they plan to spend the rest of their life violating. Knowing the rules provides us a blueprint for successful rebellion.

All rebels think they know the conventional ways of the conventional, and they might think there’s no point in studying them, but if there’s one thing that I learned as an aspiring rebel, and in the many conversations I had with other rebels since, it’s that a rebel needs to know the rules better than the squares do. The violation of rules and social decorum comes with its own set of principles and rules for those seeking to violate in a constructive and substantive manner. Failure to learn them, and the proper violation of them, will allow those who set the rules to dismiss a rebel as one who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and a rebel without a cause.

Most rebels seek clarification and inspiration for the best way to rage against the machine, and their preferred source of inspiration are the screen stars who violate standards and upset the status quo in their presentations. These stars provide color by number routes to rebellion that are provocative and easy to follow. These manufactured rebellions also look great on a screen, but those seeking inspiration often fail to account for the fact that the screenwriters and directors of these productions manipulate the conditions and side characters around the main character to enhance their qualities. We all know this is true, on some level, but most of us do not factor it into our presentation. In real life, there are situations and forces that even a rebel with strong convictions cannot control. There are people who will present the rebel with scenarios for which they’re unprepared, and a failure to study the conventional rules from every angle possible, will often lead the audience of the rebel’s argument to forget it soon after they make it.

James Dean was A Rebel Without a Cause, though, and James Dean was cooler than cool. For ninety minutes he was, and with all of conditions and side characters portraying the perfect contradictory behavior he was. If you study films, books, and other stories from a perspective other than the offered one, we learn how the subtle art of manipulation can lead us to find the main character funny, fearsome, and cool. In these productions, the main character interacts with the side characters who represent the straight men, who represent the status quo. Those straight men are cast in their roles, because of their ability to sacrifice themselves to enhance a James Dean character’s rebellion as cool. The real life rebel cannot manipulate his conditions and side characters in such a manner to enhance their presentations in the manner all the behind the scenes players did in that movie. In real life, the extraneous players who outdo the uninformed rebel with corrections consider the rebel, a rebel without a cause, and a rebel without substance. They might even regard him as uninteresting, after the initial flash of intrigue with their rebelliousness subsides.

Our advice to all aspiring rebels is to listen to those squares who are so normal they make them throw up in their mouth a little, for they may teach a rebel more about what they’re rebelling against than those who feed into their confirmation bias.

Everyone has that aunt, uncle, or friend of the family who knew everything there was to know about “Good and honest living”. They teach us the elements of life that bore the (fill in the blank) out of us with their preachy presentations. They don’t know where it’s at, as far as we’re concerned. We seek entrée into the “Do what you feel” rock and roll persona that leaves carnage in its wake, and we debate her point for point in our ‘shake up the premise’ argument. We know the elements of our rock and roll lifestyle well, and they know their “Good and honest living” principles, but they can’t debate us point for point. When compared to the rock and roll figures of our culture, out aunt has poor presentation skills. She’s overweight and an unattractive child of farmers, and our favorite entertainers are attractive and thin who have strong jaw lines.

Our rock and roll philosophers taught us that life should be easy, judgment free, and fun. It shouldn’t involve the moral trappings of what is right and what is wrong. As long as no one gets hurt, a person should be able to do whatever they feel like doing. Viewing all of this in retrospect, however, we realize that our boring, pedantic, obese, and unattractive descendants of farmers family members taught us more in ten minutes than any of the entertainers did. The entertainers were just better at packaging their presentations.

The crux of our rebellion was that we wanted to expel whatever our body couldn’t use into the face of the mainstream. We want to be so weird that the “theys” could taste it. The responsible grownups who played such a prominent role in our development had a boring sameness about them, and the prospect of doing something different led to some growth in our undercarriage. They vied for this sameness in life, and they wanted the same for us, but no matter how hard they tried to make us normal, we continued to explore the abbie normal side of humanity.

A Conversation with the Weird

If we want to make friends and learn more about anyone who surrounds us, we need to gain their trust. The walls that Platypus People build around their vulnerabilities are more fortified than most. Building this level of trust requires spending quality time with a Platypus Person, and the only occasions I have been able to achieve an environment in which they feel free to speak their mind was in the prolonged confines of shared employment. On one occasion, I developed what we could call a cerebral crush on one of my fellow employees. We had numerous, fascinating conversations on a variety of unrelated topics. In one of our last non-work-related conversations, she replied to one of my stories with a, “Wait a second, did you just say you want to be weird? You actually want to be weird? People don’t want to be weird. They either are, or they aren’t.”

Her response wobbled me. I thought she was trying as hard as I was to be weird. I thought we were soulmates in that regard, laughing at all the other people climbing all over one another to achieve absolute normalcy. I thought she was weird in all the same mechanical and inorganic ways I was. She laughed as hard as I did at some of the thoughts we shared. I thought she was being self-deprecating. I thought she was messing with peoples’ heads in the same manner I did. I thought she wanted to be considered weird too. I had no idea that the things she did and said were more organically weird, strange, or just plain different. Her response informed me that not only was this not a game to her, but I had no business playing with her toys. It also wobbled me, because I never heard anyone defend the organic nature of being weird before. The conversation went on for a couple minutes, but no matter what I said, she kept cycling it back to this two sentence theme: “People don’t want to be weird. They either are, or they aren’t.”

I would try, numerous times, after that conversation to steer her back to what I considered a fascinating topic, but she would have none of it. I wanted to know what she considered weird and what she thought it meant to be weird. I wanted her to point out all the differences she saw between between her and me, but unbeknownst to me, she considered that conversation over, and she found all of my subsequent questions on the topic condescending.

Therefore, I can only guess that the condemnation of my efforts was based on this idea she thought weirdness should be a birthright. It should be natural and organic. It was a ‘how dare you try to be one of us, if you’re not’ reaction to those who regard the organic nature of their oddities a birthright. She presumably regarded this as equivalent to a person who wears glasses to look sexier when they don’t have to wear them, an act that ticks off those required to wear them.

I felt exposed in the moment. I thought of all the attempts I made to have another consider me weird, and I thought of how inorganic they were. I felt like a fraud. As I said, my dad raised me in a manner that forced me to accept the norms, and I’m going to take another moment out of this piece to say something I didn’t when he was alive, God bless you Dad for forcing a foundation of normalcy down my throat. God bless you for teaching me the premise from which we should all operate and for creating a base of normalcy from which I rebelled, for without that base I wonder what I may have become if left to my own devices.

My guess was that this woman’s upbringing was probably chaotic, and she spent most of her adult life striving for what others might call normal. She was weird in a more natural and fundamental sense, and she condemned anyone who might dare play around in what she proclaimed her birthright, but there was also an element of sadness and misery in her being that was obvious to anyone who knew the details of her struggle.

Those of us who had enough involvement with her to know her beyond the superficial, knew that chaos dominated much of her life, and we learned that it led her to desperately seek the refuge of any substance she could find to ease that pain.

I realized through this friend, and all of the other Platypus People who have graced my life before and after, that there was weird and there was weird. There is a level of weird that is fun, a little obnoxious, and entertaining in a manner that tingles the areas of the brain that enjoy roaming outside the nucleus. The other level of weird, the one that we could arbitrarily define as strange, is a little scary when one takes a moment to spelunk through the caverns of their mind.

Was this woman a little weird? Was she so weird that we could call her strange by the arbitrary definitions we’ve laid out, or were her sensibilities so different from mine that she was operating from an altogether different premise from which I sought to classify her in some way to help me feel normal by comparison? Or did she just not have cable TV growing up?

When compared to all of my other experiences with Platypus People, she was an anomaly. Was she weirder than I was though? “Who cares?” we might say in unison. She did. It may never have occurred to her –prior to this particular conversation– to use the idea of being weird as a cudgel to carve out some level of superiority. In that particular conversation, it was for her, and she didn’t appear to feel the least bit unusual doing so. It appeared, in fact, to be vital to her makeup that I acknowledge that she had me on this topic. She was weird, and I was trying to be weird. Who tries to be weird? Phony people. That’s who. Check, check, check. She wins.

What did she win though? Some odd form of superiority? How long did she search for some point of superiority? How many topics did we cover, in our numerous, unrelated conversations, before she was able to spot one chink in my armor? If either of these questions wreaks of ego on my part, let’s flip it around and ask how many battles did she lose trying to appear as normal as her counterpart was? She needed a victory. I had numerous conversations with this woman before we drifted apart, and I never saw this competitive side of her again. She thought she had me on this one weird, strange, or just plain different topic, and I can only assume it gave her some satisfaction to do so.

Are you weird, strange, just plain different, or an unclassifiable Platypus Person? No one cares, you might say, and quit judging people with labels. Fine, but our subjective reactions to define anomalies helps us defines us. Some of us try to cut analysis short with a well-placed, quick joke, and others accuse anyone who obsesses over differences judgmental and lacking in compassion. Those of us who dwell (obsess) over these topics don’t understand how others can turn this part of their brain off, because we think our story lies somewhere in the sedimentary levels of the strange and weird Platypus People.

We all know some weird people, and we’ve encountered those who are strange, and some are so different that they’re difficult to classify. The one answer we could provide is that we all have a relative hold on the various truths of life, and those answers help us keep the idea of random chaos at bay. If you have had any prolonged involvement with a Platypus Person, however, you know that they have their answers too. Those answers might be different from everything we’ve heard before, but does that make them weird, strange or just plain different? The frustration that those of us who search for answers in life know is that some of the times there are no concrete answers to some questions. Some of the times, questions lead to answers and some of the times, answers lead to other questions, intriguing, illuminating questions. Am I weird, strange, or so different from everyone else that British naturalists might have trouble classifying me? Do these questions require the level of exhaustive analysis we devote to it, or does it have more to do with the idea that some of us didn’t have cable growing up?