I talk with my hands. At least I thought I did. More accurately, I thought I made gestures to reinforce what I was saying. I always assumed it was a carefully choreographed opera, precise, poignant and beautiful. A graceful display of suave, persuasive logic, punctuated by a uniquely independent semaphore into an irresistible piece of performance art.
I started to pay attention. Sometimes my hands would start “talking” before I had a chance to decide what to say, or how to say it. I would have to rush something out, just to keep up with my hands. No wonder I always sounded so foolish.
Most times my hands would still be going after I planned on stopping, forcing me to ramble on, aimlessly through long, incoherent paragraphs. You could watch people drift off. No wonder everybody thought I was so boring.
It was a strange, wonderful, satisfying epiphany. I wasn’t the flaky, impulsive dullard everybody thought. I was just experiencing a conflict between the left hemisphere (the part of your brain most responsible for speech) and the primary motor cortex (the part most responsible for movement) in my brain. For some reason they weren’t working together.
It was simple, I thought, I made a plan. It involved covertly taping myself while having conversations. I set up surreptitious cameras around the office, at home, in my car.
Every chance I got I would chat up a coworker, friend, family member, or a random victim trying to accumulate enough information to devise a way to match my motions with my meaning.
It turned out not only were my hands having a different conversation so was my mouth. It wasn’t saying anything I wanted it to. It was just going on and on about people not mowing their lawns or leaving the cart in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store, or the best way to simmer kidney beans in a Dutch oven. I was meandering through the flotsam of daily life in obsessive detail. It was awful.
Even worse, everybody I talked to was just as boring as I was. Everybody I know is a bland, lifeless, self-absorbed automaton. People are just going through the motions and making a big, stinking deal about it. And nobody knows.
I started taping people all over the city, discreetly of course. I expanded my surveillance to the tri-county area. It was the same thing everywhere. Foot pain, swollen ankles, varicose veins, the price of eggs, blanching Brussel sprouts. More awful than that, though, is the people they were talking to were having a completely different conversation, sore, puffy gums or psoriasis, a strange tingling in the fingers, or a ringing in the ears.
And it hit me. I am boring and foolish, but so is everybody else, it was such a relief. I started telling people. I thought they would be as happy to know as I was.
“Do you know how boring you are?” I would ask, helpfully.
“What?!?” Almost angry, and certainly defensively.
People would look at me as if I were insane. Before long I was an outcast. People began avoiding me. It was only a matter of time before they hung me in effigy outside my cubicle. I had to start working different hours, it was a risk walking in with other people. I started to take the bus, because they threatened to set my car on fire.
Eventually the company laid me off, they couldn’t handle the picketers surrounding the buildings or the threats of boycotts and legal proceedings. I was going to quit anyway, it was getting a too tense.
Now, I’m living in a cave in the hills of Utah, but I will have to move soon. At times I can hear the hunting parties, see the torches in the distance, getting closer. It’s a lonely, desolate existence. And I was only trying to be helpful.
I guess people just don’t want to know. I guess I should have kept it to myself.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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