The Wungbat

I am now, and have always been, a judgmental person.  Usually based on whim, impulse or my mood, I will categorize a person, a place or a thing, within moments of having first encountered it.  One of two things generally results from this: either remarkably astute clarity and perception, or a mistaken assumption that comes back to embarrass, disgrace, belittle or endanger me.  My lifetime score on this is probably pretty close to fifty-fifty.


On the down side for me is the fact that I have a penchant for judging complex people in a very superficial manner, and sometimes in the same breath, infusing simple and basic situations with incredible (and unnecessary) elements of complexity.  Take that last sentence, for example.  Anyway - after fifty years of seeing things this way, there is one thing that I have learned -- and that is, that I will always tend to see things this way.  So I am determined to just live with it - sometimes I impress, sometimes I leave myself open to well-deserved ridicule.  In a few minutes we will know which of these categories this blog entry belongs in.  Sigh.


Growing up in a very small town in a very rural area, exposure to other people tends to be very limited.  Exposure to other people who are fundamentally different than oneself is almost unheard of.  When I was a kid virtually everyone around me, young or old, had always been there.  You knew everybody, everybody knew you; you walked down the street and every single person you saw was someone you knew, and knew things about (often too many things). If somehow there was cause for new people to move to town, new kids to enter the school, it was generally a big deal.  The core group of residents almost never changed, other than by birth or death. But the small percentage that were transient were generally the most interesting and talked about people around - at least when they first arrived, and especially when they weren't listening.


I used my "talent" for quickly categorizing (read, judging) people to good effect, in that nobody who moved to our town was there more than a few hours before I had (a) given them a nickname, (b) made up stories about their past or their future behavior, and (c) decided whether they were on my good list or my bad list.  It wasn't impossible for somebody to move from one to the other, but it was uncommon.


I'm pretty sure I was on a lot of people's bad list.  And with good reason.


I was part of a small group whose fantasy-filled imaginations resulted in us talking or acting in a way that made no sense to many of our peers.  In fact, I was one of the "leaders" of this group, if you can say there were any leaders - my vivid and perverse imagination provided a lot of grist for the mill of idiocy that we so tirelessly toiled at.  Basically we were weirdos.  And basically I was the Head Smartass.  The more normal kids (read: mundane, boring, of no real interest) either ignored us or did not care too much for us.  We had a knack for making people think they were being made fun of, even in the rare instances when it was not so.


All of this leads me to the brief and curious case of the Wungbat.


When I was in junior high school, we got a new student teacher - I do not even remember for sure what class or classes he was teaching in, probably English.  I remember this fellow's name but I'm not going to use it - at this point he should probably be allowed to rest in peace.  He was a young fellow who looked like he could be a bit of a misfit - but he was a pretty nice guy who didn't really rub anybody the wrong way.


First time I saw him I decided he was a dork or a doofus or something of the sort.  I started calling him "Wungbat" and three or four of my cohorts picked it up - and we were off to the races.


Like I said, he seemed like an OK guy - but of course he was a teacher; or worse yet, a "student" teacher - so we kind of had to let him have it.  He became the object of various kinds of low level ridicule and creative "fun" on the part of my pals and I (probably he got some of it from other sources too, being a novice teacher and all).


I was a character; I surrounded myself with friends who were characters, and I made other people into characters - or sometimes caricatures - through no fault of their own.  Wungbat was totally unassuming, he went about his business without making any waves.  We rewarded him by making fun of the way he walked, giving him a funny voice and then acting out scenarios where he said or did something ridiculous, nonsensical, humorous or just dumb - we built a whole fantasy world around this poor guy (well OK, mostly I did, but others helped) and had a running dialog with each other concerning the escapades and pitfalls in the life of Wungbat.


And don't ask me what this word means.  I don't have any idea now and I didn't have any idea then.  I just made it up, pinned it on him and never looked back.


Even before his term of service as a student teacher was up, we started to get tired of picking on this poor guy.  He was probably at the pinnacle of our creative abuse for several weeks, then most likely somebody else came along for us to direct this sort of foolishness towards.  So we started paying less and less attention to him.  He kind of drifted out of the daily regimen of harassment, mockery and abuse that pretty much defined my life at the time and filled most of my idle minutes and hours (but most of it actually was pretty funny, so don't forget that part when you start condemning me for this admittedly uncalled for behavior.  In fact ask any of the small group of people who tolerated this sort of thing - dare I say, enjoyed it and actively participated.  If you want names - well, start with my cousin, or the Senator).  The newness kind of wore off and so did the ludicrous fantasies.  He was just a normal guy, after all - although as a teacher he was a pretty inviting target.  And he never knew what sort of ridiculous scenarios he had been thrust into, in the imaginations of a bunch of creatively abusive junior high school idiots.


This sort of thing happened over and over, with me and my pals operating like some sort of humor and sarcasm infused herd of jackals, feasting on the flesh of our victims and then moving on.  I have forgotten many of the people we picked on or made up jokes and fantasies about.  I remember a few who kicked my ass for it, but mostly these people have vacated my memory and drifted on into obscurity.


One more thing about Wungbat, though, and it's part of the reason I remember him in this context.  I remember sometime near the end of his student teaching gig, he was standing in front of the class and started telling us about this event that he had witnessed.  And it was a very odd moment, and so I remember it still.


Wungbat, for some reason I cannot recall, started telling a story of something that he had seen happen in Great Falls.  It went something like this:


"I was at the court house in Great Falls and I was out front, by the steps leading up to the front doors.  There were a bunch of people around, and this lady came out of the court house doors and started down the steps.  She slipped and fell, and she tumbled all the way to the bottom of the steps.  She was lying there on the sidewalk and looked like she might be hurt.  But nobody went over to check on her, nobody would approach her, because she was such an ugly woman.  It was odd but no one would go and see if she needed help.  She was just too ugly."


Now can you imagine this guy telling this story, casually, to a bunch of junior high school students that he doesn't really know? There was no indication that he was helpful - just observant, I guess.  And I'm telling you, this guy was a really nice guy as far as anybody could tell.


But I guess this is the sort of thing you might do if you are, in your heart of hearts -- a Wungbat.


And I still don't know if this one goes in the win column or the loss column.

September 9 2010 - STARBUCKS And the Battle Between Chaos Theory and the Deterministic System

Without ritual, life cannot progress and stay static at the same time.  Here is the coffee shop where I regularly go to hide my mind.  I know there are people looking for it and I know that I am close to losing it.

 

Every day a man comes in here.  He is wearing running shorts, his hair is a mess and he has a ritual.  He orders a sandwich, a prefab concoction which requires that some heat be applied by a microwave device.  While this is accomplished, the man chooses a particular overstuffed armchair which for some reason is always vacant when he arrives.  From a nearby table he slides a standard wooden kitchen chair across the floor – noisily.  


Today the noise is drowned out, however, by skull shattering, high pitched wails from some child armed with a prodigious lung capacity, and also some crayons.  I often wonder, what is the goal behind loading a child with crayons and then watching (or even helping) him explode willy-nilly across some cartoony page of black and white line art?  Is it to establish that the natural state of Man is one of chaos?  Is it an attempt to override this natural state, to corral the imaginations of this child within the predetermined boundaries of our society?  He will no doubt grow up to do more diligent and acceptable work in his cubicle if he learns to stay within the lines.

I decide that today I despise children, in all their forms and identities.

Meanwhile the man with the ritual has positioned his wooden chair in front of his overstuffed armchair.  He selects a section of the daily newspaper and places it on the wooden chair.  By now his sandwich is sufficiently irradiated; he retrieves it and seats himself in the armchair.  Leaning forward he peruses the newspaper while jamming the article of food into his mouth by way of jagged, irregular bites.  This task, this seemingly impromptu exercise in random chaos theory, takes only a very few moments to complete.

There is nothing in all of this that is really noteworthy.  Up until this point in the ritual, that is.  But now the dichotomy of simultaneous chaos and order is gloriously manifested.  There are multiple layers to this daily ritual; it has been honed and perfected by this gym-shorts guy and almost certainly without him giving it a second thought (which underscores the symbolic significance, in my mind).

Every day, at this point, with the sandwich consumed and some small random bit of news presumably absorbed – the man stands up and promptly leaves the premises.  He tosses his sandwich wrapper in the trash bin by the door.  But he does not restore the order which he has intentionally disrupted.  He does not replace the newspaper on its rack.  And he most assuredly DOES NOT put the wooden chair back where he found it!  He simply leaves as if it was perfectly natural, completely acceptable, to just take something from its rightful place, use it for a purpose other than the one for which it was conceived and built, and then just leave - just leave it there, out of place, askew, tilted away from its natural place in the world, and with no thought of what comes next.  Once the door has closed behind him, this intrepid, shorts-wearing, messy-haired guy has removed the chair from the world of his conscious or unconscious thought.  He has effected a small chaos and then he has left it there, in this unnatural (or perhaps natural?) state of disorder.

A few minutes later, Katie comes out from behind the counter to pursue her own ritual – at about this time each day an employee will move through the store with a broom and dustpan, and sweep up whatever disorder is visibly strewn about the commercially tiled floor.  In the course of this, she returns the newspaper to its proper location, and she moves the wooden chair back to the little table where it – we have no choice but to conclude this – where it BELONGS.

The drama and the wonder involved in predictably repeating the exact same act of chaos, day after day, is the strictest demonstration of ritualistic activity that can be imagined or performed.  A ritual would not be termed as such, if it were merely a repetitive act that everyone performs.  Breathing is not a ritual.   The element of eccentricity is a necessary component.  Ritual requires a recognizable act of chaos as a part of the recipe.

WHAT IS RUMINATA Besides, maybe, a made up word or something

I am creating this blog as a repository for writings that come out of me which don't fit my definition of "creative writing", which is the foundation of my primary blog, NO BONES IN MY ICE CREAM.  


I am following the lead of my very smart friend Roberta, who has done a similar thing with her blog(s).  I intend for observations (ruminations?) on this blog to be of a more day-to-day and personal nature.  I expect that entries will be irregular, depending on what happens to me.  Since virtually nothing ever happens to me . . . please don't hold your breath.  But thanks in advance to any who might be throwing their perfectly good time and energy away by reading this stuff.