From: tomf@gte.com (Tom Fawcett)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Re: clueless
Date: 18 Dec 92 22:15:08 GMT
Reply-To: tomf@gte.com
Organization: GTE Laboratories, Inc.
In-reply-to: thchemb4@oxford.ac.uk's message of 16 Dec 92 18:08:08 GMT


> Tell me.
> Give me a clue.
> I deserve it really.

Talk.bizarre is like one of those hill towns way the hell up in Vermont tucked
away in a forgotten valley of the Green Mountains on a back road somewhere
where everyone has lived for generations and generations and generations and
have endlessly intermarried and all stayed in the same place, and there is,
yes, as you can imagine, full-blown genetic defects, whole chromosome
subchains just stripped away from the helix like a shredded tire on the
highway (the scientists say they've never seen anything like it, but of course
none of them want to come anywhere near here, no not after that time when we
set fire to the hair of one of their field technicians, so now they're happy
just to stay south and examine the tissue cultures we mail back.  Sometimes we
send DNA samples from my dog but that's just for fun, I mean, I'm pretty sure
they can tell the difference).  Everyone here speaks with grunts and whistles
and gestures, and the communication is really terribly abbreviated and
efficient -- which isn't made any easier by most of us being computer people,
hell I don't have to tell you that. One week somebody proved that there was
nothing new to say and we all just stopped talking completely until someone
else showed there was a flaw in the argument.  But yes, we can all understand
each other really really really well, but the disadvantage is that sometimes
it's like a village with lots of village idiots, it's like, you know, well,
it's been so long since we've seen an outsider that we're not really sure what
they look like anymore, and yes, every so often someone comes up from the
city, usually lost or something, but we just give them wrong directions and
send them down the old county road where the bridge is out but there's no sign
so they drive right over the cliff into the river and later we come around and
pry off the steering wheel for the collection we have in the town hall,
plaques with names and dates and everything, it's the main tourist attraction
here, or it would be if we ever had any tourists.  But nobody, hardly ever
nobody, comes to stay.  I mean sure OK, there was that one time when Dan said
he had a girlfriend from the city who comes up to see him and they were gonna
get married and settle down in our village, but we said oh sure and how come
we never saw her, and ol' Dan said well umm she always comes around when you
guys are away, away we said, what do you mean away, we live here and we never
ever ever leave.  So yeah, Dan's just a braggart and a liar, but the fact is
that we're all braggarts and liers, all different types in different stages,
and we tell each other stories and play these complicated games with long
histories and some of us end up taking them really seriously and even believe
them, but the fact is that we're all just imaginative liars with an odd
facility for language that most people can't understand.
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre