Marc was in a dead end job as an underwriter with a local insurance business. He would sit at his desk day dream the most amazing stories. Sometimes they were so elaborate and long that if he could manage to work less than a few minutes a day, spending the rest of it in a hypnotic daze imagining the wonders of India, or the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. After several years he started writing down his day dreams and found that they were entertaining. He’d show them to his wife and some to his friends and they enjoyed his writing. Before he wrote down a story, though, he had a ritual. He would sit at his type writer and type whatever came to his brain. He was a pretty fast typist and sometimes this helped him gather his thoughts, keeping it organized, so he could reference it later.
This unbelievably awkward looking man stunned Marc and he knew that he would be the epicenter of a perfect story. He couldn’t wait to come up with a plot but he needed to go through his ritual and let his brain dump out whatever it was that it wanted to say. After arriving at home from the airport and rushing through a take out dinner in four and half minutes flat he ran upstairs and loaded his typewriter with a clean blank sheet ready for his story.
Modern day…
James Bailey started his job as night manager of the South Dakota All-Stars minor league football arena…
The story shouldn’t be told here, this is how we will come up with the story, so who knows what the guy’s name is.
But we are going to put him in a situation where he needs to meet the most pathetic man in the world. That’s what we need him to do! This most pathetic man who I desperately want to write about is one whom you can’t look away from. Just stealing one look at him will burn his image in your mind’s eye forever.
Not the kind of pathetic that has someone on the city streets dumpster diving but that kind of pathetic that only a rich American can appreciate. The pathetic man that has no style. No style is what we find most pathetic. Why? Maybe because we try so hard for our style. Why do we try for style? We want to be accepted. We want to be loved, to have sex. To procreate! So this single man’s departure from style has in effect made us all realize that while this man has the ways and means to join the group, be loved and procreate he chooses not to. This goes against our very understanding and beliefs in logic. We must look and must remember because this can not actually be happening. No, no that’s cheesy, keep going, what else…
We then jump to the first and foremost obvious conclusion about men with no style that have the ways and means to achieve it. They must be mentally retarded, or in some way mentally hindered by some schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder that prevents them from understanding reality. The reality that we, as humans, were meant to form groups. To love and be loved, to have sex and procreate. Have I made that part clear?
So this story is not about the man with no style but how the man with no style affects our average Joe. Our James Bailey who started his job as the night manager of the South Dakota All-Stars minor league football arena!
What’s a man with no style doing at this arena? Well, he for some reason has the deep and ingrained love for the team. He’s followed them since his childhood and has made an effort to actually sleep in the stadium. Kind of Rudy like! He goes to games and he also has an obsession with hot dogs. So he loves eating the hot dogs at the games, so much so that he will stuff himself up through his own esophagus with hot dogs. After the games he wanders the bleachers looking for the left over hot dog remains of fans who couldn’t finish the hot and tasty treat. He even loves them cold or lukewarm as they seem to come after the game. Their fatty grease flows a little slower off his lips when he bites into them and he actually enjoys that feeling a little more.
Did he actually have a conscience? Would he look around before picking up the morsel? Did he EVER have a conscience for that matter? Did he know the terrible importance of style and what it means to our very society? It is the very reason we are! It is what binds us like a common language. Deviating from it means you are somehow against humanity! Even those that differed did so in groups. The punks, the mods, the beatnicks. All of them in groups together leaving the larger group.
But this man
Out on his island alone.
With no knowledge of the patterns evolving from the larger herd, or perhaps complete knowledge, follows only his own drum.
At first he’s disgusting, then inspiring, and finally we find ourselves looking right back inwardly and realizing that we are the pathetic ones. We are so pathetic as to follow the styles and patterns around us because deviating from it might make life difficult? Maybe? It’s hard to say what deviating from it really would do. What would it do?!
What would it do?
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Part III: Marc, decides to find out just what it would do!
Coming Next Week!
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