The Sunday before last, I was sleeping soundly and dreaming about something pleasant when I was awoken by what sounded like a large explosion in the apartment below mine. It happened so fast, and I was so out of it, that I couldn’t tell at first if it was real or part of my dream. Then I heard a man’s voice through the floor: “Holy shit!” I looked out the window to look for fire, smoke, debris or other telltale signs of an explosion. The Rottweiler on the deck below howled a couple of times and was quiet. Sunday morning and all was well.
I tried to go back to sleep but my heart was pounding; I was in fight-or-flight mode. If there had, indeed, been an explosion, then there was, by my estimation, a reasonable a chance that a fire could break out and destroy my stuff and force me to jump down onto the deck below, where the Rottweiler was. Or maybe some deranged terrorist had broken into the apartment below and, if so, then I was vulnerable because there’s really no barrier between the two apartments except a door that locks on their side, not ours. Presently it dawned on me how ridiculous and unsafe such an arrangement was; I mean my downstairs neighbor is, at best, eccentric, and rents out the various extra bedrooms in her apartment to a rotating and somewhat sketchy array of characters, all of whom—except for a man that smoked cigars and looked like Tony Danza, and a large, middle-aged dentist who evidently only slept there on the weekends but received prodigious amounts of mail—have been female. So, wait, who was the guy that yelled “Holy shit”?
Sometimes we're ridiculous and know we're being ridiculous, but there’s nothing we can do stop it because the only thing to do is be ridiculous. The classic example of this is Pioneer Park 1991. I was at a campground with my friend Robb and his family and members of his family’s church (Robb’s dad was/is a minister). Robb and I shared a tent and, like, instead of actually sleeping, stayed up late talking about music and Whitley Strieber alien-abduction novels and something we’d concocted called the “roving discotheque” (don’t ask). Somewhat after we decided to go to bed, a new, unfamiliar voice joined the muted cricket-and-various-other-bug chorus enveloping our particular hillside and tent: an echoing kind of almost hoot (but not quite a hoot) bearing uncomfortable similarity to the spacey “human voice” sound on my Casio SK-1. One quasi-hooting sound became two and before long a whole quasi-hoot chorale was echoing through the hills of Pioneer Park. At first I tried to ignore it but pretty quickly my thoughts entered into downward spiral of paranoia and fear. The fight-or-flight response kicked in. Before I could say something, Robb did:
-Hey man, do you hear that sound?
-I was gonna ask you the same question.
-What do you think it is?
-I don’t know. It sounds like wolves.
-I don’t think it can be wolves.
-Coyotes?
-I think they only live in, like, Arizona.
-Do you think it’s The Visitors?
-Aliens? -Yeah. -Shit man, I hope it isn’t.
-Dude. You don't really think it's aliens, do you?
-No, do you?
-But, like, what if it is aliens?
-Hey man, do you want to go to my parents’ tent?
-Yeah, kind of.
Etc.
Robb’s mom explained to us as uncondescendingly as possible that the alien voices were, in fact, geese honking. As a bonus, she told us that our totally unreasonable behavior (aliens?) was a small-scale example of “mass hysteria,” i.e. the abandonment of reason for the lack of a solid reference point + reading too many Whitley Strieber alien-abduction novels*. In this case, the cost of safety was the burning sensation that inevitably follows all public or semi-public displays of foolishness.
The same burning feeling flashed through me the Sunday before last when, as I sat on my stoop in a hastily-put-on pair of jeans and no socks about three minutes post-“explosion," my landlord walked past with a newspaper and nodded like it was the normal totally uneventful morning that it, of course, was. He said good morning.
-Good morning, I said, casually as possible, trying to play it off like I was out there trying to cool my feet (?).
I still don't know what hell happened that morning. It's disappointing (and somewhat disconcerting) I'll never have the satisfaction of knowing for sure. I do have some theories, of course.
* For whatever this is worth, which doesn’t seem like a ton, the Web page for the “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” (ewwkaay) rejects Robb’s mom’s definition of “mass hysteria: “The term mass hysteria is often used inappropriately to describe collective delusions, as the overwhelming majority of participants are not exhibiting hysteria, except in extremely rare cases.
I tried to go back to sleep but my heart was pounding; I was in fight-or-flight mode. If there had, indeed, been an explosion, then there was, by my estimation, a reasonable a chance that a fire could break out and destroy my stuff and force me to jump down onto the deck below, where the Rottweiler was. Or maybe some deranged terrorist had broken into the apartment below and, if so, then I was vulnerable because there’s really no barrier between the two apartments except a door that locks on their side, not ours. Presently it dawned on me how ridiculous and unsafe such an arrangement was; I mean my downstairs neighbor is, at best, eccentric, and rents out the various extra bedrooms in her apartment to a rotating and somewhat sketchy array of characters, all of whom—except for a man that smoked cigars and looked like Tony Danza, and a large, middle-aged dentist who evidently only slept there on the weekends but received prodigious amounts of mail—have been female. So, wait, who was the guy that yelled “Holy shit”?
Sometimes we're ridiculous and know we're being ridiculous, but there’s nothing we can do stop it because the only thing to do is be ridiculous. The classic example of this is Pioneer Park 1991. I was at a campground with my friend Robb and his family and members of his family’s church (Robb’s dad was/is a minister). Robb and I shared a tent and, like, instead of actually sleeping, stayed up late talking about music and Whitley Strieber alien-abduction novels and something we’d concocted called the “roving discotheque” (don’t ask). Somewhat after we decided to go to bed, a new, unfamiliar voice joined the muted cricket-and-various-other-bug chorus enveloping our particular hillside and tent: an echoing kind of almost hoot (but not quite a hoot) bearing uncomfortable similarity to the spacey “human voice” sound on my Casio SK-1. One quasi-hooting sound became two and before long a whole quasi-hoot chorale was echoing through the hills of Pioneer Park. At first I tried to ignore it but pretty quickly my thoughts entered into downward spiral of paranoia and fear. The fight-or-flight response kicked in. Before I could say something, Robb did:
-Hey man, do you hear that sound?
-I was gonna ask you the same question.
-What do you think it is?
-I don’t know. It sounds like wolves.
-I don’t think it can be wolves.
-Coyotes?
-I think they only live in, like, Arizona.
-Do you think it’s The Visitors?
-Aliens? -Yeah. -Shit man, I hope it isn’t.
-Dude. You don't really think it's aliens, do you?
-No, do you?
-But, like, what if it is aliens?
-Hey man, do you want to go to my parents’ tent?
-Yeah, kind of.
Etc.
Robb’s mom explained to us as uncondescendingly as possible that the alien voices were, in fact, geese honking. As a bonus, she told us that our totally unreasonable behavior (aliens?) was a small-scale example of “mass hysteria,” i.e. the abandonment of reason for the lack of a solid reference point + reading too many Whitley Strieber alien-abduction novels*. In this case, the cost of safety was the burning sensation that inevitably follows all public or semi-public displays of foolishness.
The same burning feeling flashed through me the Sunday before last when, as I sat on my stoop in a hastily-put-on pair of jeans and no socks about three minutes post-“explosion," my landlord walked past with a newspaper and nodded like it was the normal totally uneventful morning that it, of course, was. He said good morning.
-Good morning, I said, casually as possible, trying to play it off like I was out there trying to cool my feet (?).
I still don't know what hell happened that morning. It's disappointing (and somewhat disconcerting) I'll never have the satisfaction of knowing for sure. I do have some theories, of course.
* For whatever this is worth, which doesn’t seem like a ton, the Web page for the “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” (ewwkaay) rejects Robb’s mom’s definition of “mass hysteria: “The term mass hysteria is often used inappropriately to describe collective delusions, as the overwhelming majority of participants are not exhibiting hysteria, except in extremely rare cases.
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