From Outlier to Reality to Everyone

Even though he stood smack dab in the middle of the aisle, caught in a reverie of self-deprecating debauchery, no one in the busy supermarket bothered to interrupt him. Shopper after shopper politely maneuvered the relatively new carts deftly around his large frame, always missing even the slightest possibility of touching him, even though to touch him now might be to save him from himself. They’d rather err on the side of caution, for he had the look of a psychopath what with the clothes he wore and the way his eyes seemed transfixed in his face,
focusing on things no one else could see. The horror in his mouth made it all too palpable that this guy was as close to a supermarket mass murderer as any of them had ever seen in their trips to the market and none of them would bother him as long as he continued this way without being a bother to anyone else.

Though silently frightening, he was no more a menace than the magazine aisle, which had to be passed in order to reach the cashiers’ lanes and which always seemed inappropriately to feature the most lurid covers at an average first-grader’s eye level. Once, Maple Kennedy’s grandson, Cleaver, spewed loudly, “Look granny, I can see her titties and they’re huge!” to a dismayed audience of other shoppers waiting in the line who had prior to his outburst been entirely unaware of any ill associated with the store having been set up that way. But that was always the way it was, or at least the way it seemed to be- that consequences led to improvements in the way things were done and almost never were avoided proactively. Those who acted deliberately and considered possible outcomes as a parameter of making decisions in the first place were often too risk averse and lost out against those who ran roughshod over possibility and were the beneficiaries of good fortune. This inevitably cost others, though, because it seemed always that these same winner-losers lacked the capacity for self-reflection and thus would lead others to follow their successful methods to those others’ demise. “It worked for me.” This was the mindset. It didn’t matter that taking the last $500 dollars a person had in the bank and converting it to lottery tickets wouldn’t- couldn’t- make everyone a millionaire just because it had made him a millionaire. A guru of this sort wouldn’t be undermined by statistical jargon and data- it had worked!

And still, he remained there, emulating an end cap to be ignored, even if interesting things were perched upon it.