Mr. Know-It-All, The Eccentric

This is a tribute to the person who inspired this blog long ago, back before we moved from the apartment we used to live in and I started taking a different bus. I haven't seen Mr. Know-It-All very often since then. I'll occasionally spot him at my stop downtown before I go home in the evening, but never again will I have the singular experience of keeping my eyes averted from his in hopes that he doesn't strike up a conversation with me. More on that later, but first we need a good working description.

Mr. Know-It-All is a white male in his early to mid twenties. He is average height, but probably forty pounds overweight. His usual attire consists of dark tennis shoes, dark pants, and a dirty, gray t-shirt stretched too tight over his bulging midsection. He often wears sunglasses and is just as often very sweaty. He has relatively short, curly, dirty-blond hair that is ALWAYS covered by a "pork pie" hat. If you don't know what that is, then see below. I had to look up what kind of hat it was too.

I would define him as a little eccentric, I think. Wikipedia (the best source of credible information) has this to say about Eccentricity.

Eccentricity is often associated with genius, giftedness, or creativity. The individual's eccentric behavior is perceived to be the outward expression of his or her unique intelligence or creative impulse. In this vein, the eccentric's habits are incomprehensible not because they are illogical or the result of madness, but because they stem from a mind so original that it cannot be conformed to societal norms.

I don't know what it is that motivates eccentrics to wear these types of hats (see: Blue Mustache Man), but if you find yourself wearing one anytime soon keep in mind that you might have slipped away from some "societal norms" - if that's important to you. Anyway, back to Mr. Know-It-All...

Despite his physical appearance he is very articulate ("genius?" " gifted?") - even if he cannot speak without leaving his counterpart incredibly uncomfortable, but we'll get to that in a second.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Know-It-All is a vagabond. It's probably not true, but that's what I can infer from his bus-riding habits. We used to ride the same bus three or four times a week. Sometimes he would already be on the bus when I got on at my usual stop. Sometimes he would be at my stop waiting. Sometimes he would get on after me. This all made it very difficult for me to pinpoint where he might be coming from, especially since I never actually witnessed him walking to the stop from any given direction. It seemed that he was always there. I suppose I could have asked him where he lived, but I admittedly like the idea of not knowing too much about most of these strangers I'm inextricably connected to on a daily basis, and really wanted to avoid communicating with him at all costs (see above).

While riding the same bus as Mr. Know-It-All, I had the awkward displeasure on several occasions of witnessing his method of stalking unsuspecting bus passengers and beginning conversations which, A. had no real direction or real end, and B. mostly involved Mr. Know-It-All giving express opinions on various subjects while the other person tried desperately to figure out how to end said conversation.

Let me demonstrate with a short story which represents the one and only time that I became the unwitting prey of our subject and not just an innocent observer (cue the violins)...

One hot summer afternoon (I was working a swing shift at the time and didn't leave for work until about noon), Mr. Know-It-All was at my stop when I arrived. No one else was there. As we stood waiting together in the sun - me in my sunglasses and he in his sunglasses and "pork pie" hat - I often peered anxiously down the street, hoping the bus would soon appear, trying to seem disinterested with anything else but the pending arrival of the bus.

Mr Know-It-All must have perceived my obvious attempts not to engage in any form of communication, and before the bus approached, he turned to me (almost in what seemed like slow motion) and said something to the effect of "It's hot today. I'm sweating just standing here."

An innocent enough statement, but I had seen his technique before, and was trying to do my best to not let myself be his next victim. I responded with a simple "Yep, it's sure hot," or something like that. But then came a new query which left me paralyzed.

"But I'll be sweating a lot more once we get into the air conditioning on the bus."

Do I respond to this? Should I just agree and let him assume I know exactly what he's talking about? Without thinking, and like so many animals lured by curiosity into the clutches of a waiting predator, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"Once I start cooling off, my pores will begin to close and push even more sweat out," came the paradoxical reply. (I didn't know if that was really true, but I guessed it could have been. That's part of the mystique of people like Mr. Know-It-All)

The bus came soon thereafter, and I prematurely thought that I had gotten off easily, but as we stepped on to the usually scantly-occupied bus, the only available seats were clumped together at the front. I sat down across the aisle from Mr. Know-It-All, and tried to focus on the pretty trees and shiny cars as they passed by my window. It was only a few seconds after we sat down, though, that Mr. Know-It-All resumed our conversation.

"Are you an alien?"

What? I was hoping that perhaps he had set his sites on another victim, but to my dismay I found Mr. Know-It-All's eyes underneath his "pork pie" hat, sunglasses off, fixated on me.

"Please make it stop," I thought to myself. But I knew that was no longer my decision to make. The most I could hope to do was to finish the conversation. The bus ride only lasted so long right? Right?

"An alien?" I responded casually, as if this were a question I received daily.

Then came Mr. Know-It-All's irrefutable pronouncement upon me, which fortunately ended our conversation - and my misery.

"Yes. You have big, black eyes (referring to my sunglasses, which I was still wearing), and you know nothing about human sweat."

The individual's eccentric behavior is ... the outward expression of his or her unique intelligence...

Yes, Mr. Know-It-All. I'm an alien.