The Muddled Male

Psychotic Personality

Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

 

         Ann, my wife, has always considered me to be tilted a little off-center.  Part of her concern came from paying too much attention as I bragged about childhood memories during the times we were getting to know each other.  Take my ingenious invention for catching lizards, for example.  The mountains around Devils Slide were covered in cement dust and lizards.  A newcomer to lizard hunting would automatically assume that catching a lizard skittering through the dust only required one to grab the tail, since that was the last thing to leave the scene and the closest thing to the hunter.  But a serious hunter quickly learned that lizards have this clever ability to shed their tail and flee the scene leaving the hunter in the dust holding a tail but no lizard.

 

            Then it came to me.  I could modify one of my mother’s four-tine forks to create the perfect lizard catcher.  First I bent the outer tines outward to increase the spacing between those two tines to a little more than the width of an adult lizard.  Then I bent the inner two tines backward so that if I stuck the outer tines perpendicularly into the ground, the inner tines would be parallel to the ground.  By tying the modified fork to a stick I could use it like a spear except that if I aimed carefully I could plant an outside tine on each side of the lizard with the inner tines pressing down snuggly on the lizard’s back and holding him against the ground until I could safely get him into a quart jar.  The problem was that there was only a fraction of an inch between a good aim and a lizard with a terminal tine wound.  When I admitted to Ann that occasionally my aim was poor she immediately jumped to the defense of the lizard and threatened to terminate our courtship even though this had happened several years before we even met.  The only thing that saved our relationship was when I explained that my mother eventually found out why her forks were disappearing and closed down my lizard trapping business.

 

            Ann and I had a good relationship after that, until the Kent cat caper stressed our marriage more than forty years ago in Washington State.  There was a cat that took a liking to lying in our driveway in the warm sun.  Each time we came home from shopping and I started into the driveway Ann would make me stop, get out of the car, and carefully guide the cat off the driveway to safety before I was allowed to get back into the car and pull the car into the driveway to park.  Well, it was my driveway, and cats are supposed to be smart, so one day we arrived home from shopping and instead of getting out of the car to guide the cat to safety I just started driving slowly into the driveway expecting the cat to be smart enough to get up and move.  We buried Tiger in grass town, an area in the woods where the neighborhood dumped their lawn trimmings.  It was a nice funeral except for Ann screaming over and over, “You murdered the cat, you murdered the cat you Kitty killer.”  She also said, as I recall, “I wish I had never asked you to marry me.”

 

            Well it has been more than forty years and she had mostly forgiven me.  At least she only reminds me about that mistake once in a while when we are having an argument.  That is until this past week when she came upon the results of study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.  According to the study, researchers analysed comedians (and she is assuming that includes people who write humour columns) and found that “The creative elements needed to produce humour are strikingly similar to those characterizing the cognitive style of people with psychosis- - both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”  And now she just looks at me a hisses like an angry cat who has come back from grass town to haunt me.  More than that, she has hidden all our forks.  Have you ever tried to eat steak with a spoon?