What really sucks is when someone sees me doing this and thinks that I'm really having an imaginary conversation that I think is real. Which I'm totally not doing.

 

I suppose it doesn't matter that I don't get to plan out all my conversations ahead of time, although it would make things easier for me, especially considering how much more clever I am in my mind than I'll ever be in real life. In my mind I'm kind of like Pierce Brosnan, when in reality I am probably more like that "Hey Vern" guy on TV.

 

But I think that Hey Vern guy is dead, now that I think about it.

 

In the conversations that I have in my mind, usually I want to make a point or win an arguement, and I always present my case in such a brilliantly insightful way that my critics are struck dumb.

 

The fact is, when I do bother to argue with people at all, I am just exactly that brilliantly insightful. The problem with reality is that most people are too stupid to see it.

 

It's kind of like, imagine a super scientific genius who lands on a planet of monkeys. On The Twilight Zone, the man would become the Monkey God or something, at least until the monkeys chopped his head off or ate him or something.

 

(Note: That kind of thing always happened on The Twilight Zone, which was a great deal more realistic than, say, Star Trek, but then again, they had to have the same characters come back every week)

 

Anyway, the reality is that Mr. Super-Genius did somehow manage to be accepted by monkey society, assuming that he didn't have ray guns and stuff, they would all be way too stupid to ever realize how smart he is.

 

I mean, how would he ever show them? I mean, he couldn't demonstrate calculus to them when they don't even know what numbers are. Maybe if he could make gunpowder, or even fire, they would sit up and take notice. But then again we're talking about a people who would note with mounting alarm that the stranger in their midst was not flinging his own crap at them.

 

It's kind of like when you go to a party and you don't know anyone there and they're all having a good time, and all you can do is sit there and think, "If all these folks knew what a great guy I really am, we'd be having 100 times more fun than this!" Of course, you can't show them how much fun you are, not without looking like a total squeeb, so you just kind of sit there feeling stupid and wishing you knew anyone, or that they had even the faintest idea of what a great guy you are to be around.

 

So it's kind of the same way for me and my imaginary conversations, as it would be for the super-genius pagan monkey god, as it would be for the life-of-the-party guy.

 

And I don't mean to sound blasphemous or irreverant, but it just now occurs to me that this is exactly how it must be for God. I mean, He's always trying to talk to us and tell us stuff and no one ever really seems to get it or understands or even really cares. Kind of like the super-genius spaceman trying to explain calculus to monkeys. Only while God is always infinitely patient with us, I imagine that genius guy would start drop-kicking those monkeys after about an hour or so.

 

I'm not sure how I wound up on this subject when what I was originally talking about was how I talk to myself. And now I feel this overwhelming compulsion to clarify that I'm not talking about like homeless people who shuffle down the street staring at their shoes and muttering to themselves.

 

Once I had a friend who worked at a gas station and there was a homeless guy who used to sweep the floors for beer, and he used to talk to himself all the time. His name was Trampus, or at least that's what he told us, which I thought was an ironic name for a homeless guy to have. But I also thought it was a reallty stupid name for anyone to have.

 

This guy used to tell outrageously stupid lies just to impress us. He didn't seem to understand that when you lie, you can just say anything; he would tell us that he'd won a national chess tournament when he was in grade school, which 1) we might have actually believed, if instead of "chess" he'd said "projectile vomiting", 2) completely fails to impress anyone hanging around a gas station at 2:00 am, and 3) is easily verifiable and totally collapses when you start asking him about either the particulars of the tournament or the actual rules of chess.

 

You might say that Trampus was as misunderstood as the genius pagan monkey-god, except that it would be in the exact opposite way. And instead of the guys at the gas station not understanding how smart he is, it would be more like Trampus being incapable of understanding what a total squeeb he was.

 

 

 

I just made that up. Do ya'll think it'll catch on?