The entire ordeal was punctuated by the simple dog’s high-pitched confusion alarm.
We were beginning to think that our dogs were permanently broken. Nothing we did helped at all to convince the dogs that we had only changed houses and our new house was not, in fact, some sort of death camp and we weren’t actually planning on killing them to fulfill an organ-harvest ritual. Despite our best efforts, they continued to drift around in a sea of confusion and terror, pausing only to look pitiful.
But while we were unpacking, we found a squeaky toy that had been given to us as a gift shortly before we moved. We offered the toy to the dogs. This may have been a mistake.
Upon discovering that the toy squeaked when it was compressed forcefully, the simple dog immediately forgot that she’d ever experienced doubt or anxiety ever in her life. She pounced on the toy with way more force than necessary, over and over and over. The logic behind her sudden change in outlook was unclear.
But at least she was happy again.
At some important point during my formative years, I accidentally demonstrated a mildly surprising fortitude against spicy food.
It wasn’t anything objectively amazing—more something to be quietly admired for a moment and then forgotten about forever. But it was the first time I had displayed any sort of discernible talent, so the incident was completely blown out of proportion.
The next day at work, my father exaggerated the story slightly.
Unfortunately, one of my dad’s coworkers, Mike, had built part of his identity around his ability to withstand spicy food. Not wanting to be outdone by a child, he attempted to one-up my father’s claims.
Things escalated quickly, and before the end of the day, my dad had inadvertently volunteered his eight-year-old to face off against a forty-five-year-old man in a hot-sauce-eating challenge.
I think my mom wanted to be against the idea. She made some cursory attempts to oppose it, but . . .
. . . maybe it would be good for my self-esteem.
They decided to approach me about it.
I considered the question carefully.
My competitive drive hadn’t fully developed yet, but, like most children, I yearned for attention and approval, and I couldn’t exactly afford to be picky about how I earned it.
The competition was scheduled for the following Friday. Mike arrived with his weapon of choice—a habanero pepper sauce. We agreed that we would eat increasingly large amounts of the sauce until one of us couldn’t take the pain anymore.
I remember being really surprised at how badly the sauce burned. But it was the first time I had ever really had the chance to win anything, and I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I’d rather allow the insides of my mouth to be liquefied than face the shame of defeat, so I carried on as if I didn’t even notice the fiery agony engulfing my face.
Mike became visibly uncomfortable pretty early on.
Still, his pride held out for an impressively long time. But he was an adult who possessed other skills that he could fall back on in the event of defeat, and that made him weak.
His resolve cracked just after the sixth spoonful.
Everyone was really impressed with me. Maybe I actually did have some sort of special ability. Enjoying their admiration, I showboated a bit.
And for that one tiny moment, I got to feel like a superhero. If it had all ended there, it would have been one of the great triumphs of my life.
But it didn’t end there.
My “talent” became a sort of party trick—something my family would pull out when the conversation died down at dinner.
I never objected because I didn’t want to come clean and ruin everyone’s perception of me as some sort of hot sauce savant.
Over time, the misunderstanding expanded. My family began to legitimately believe that my favorite thing in the world was hot sauce. If I “forgot” to put hot sauce on my food, they helpfully reminded me. They consistently brought home newer, spicier, weirder hot sauces for me to try. For Christmas that year, Santa gave me a whole case of hot sauce.
Being a child, I was devastated that a potential toy had been replaced by those bottles of painful torture, but I couldn’t let anyone know. At that point, I was starting to feel more and more at peace with the idea of admitting failure, but it was too late. I’d been pretending for long enough that it would be too weird and embarrassing to explain myself. There was no choice but to maintain the illusion.
But every time I pretended to love the stuff, it became a bigger part of my identity within my family. Distant relatives and family acquaintances related to me almost entirely through my perceived infatuation with hot sauce.
And through it all—no matter how ridiculous and tangential it got—I never told them the truth.
But here it is:
Dear family members and people whom my family members led to believe I adored hot sauce with the fiery intensity of ten thousand jalapeños: I lied. It was all an act. I only like hot sauce a normal amount, and that’s after twenty years of acclimating myself to it. You may never understand what would possess a person to lie about something so insignificant for over twenty years, but all I can say is that it spiraled and I was every bit as confused about it as you probably are now.
I have repeatedly discovered that it is important for me not to surpass my capacity for responsibility. Over the years, this capacity has grown, but the results of exceeding it have not changed.
Normally, my capacity is exceeded gradually, through the accumulation of simple daily tasks.
But a few times a year, I spontaneously decide that I’m ready to be a real adult. I don’t know why I decide this; it always ends terribly for me. But I do it anyway. I sit myself down and tell myself how I’m going to start cleaning the house every day and paying my bills on time and replying to emails before my inbox reaches quadruple digits. Schedules are drafted. Day planners are purchased. I stock up on fancy food because I’m also planning on morphing into a master chef and actually cooking instead of just eating nachos for dinner every night. I prepare for my new life as an adult like some people prepare for the apocalypse.
The first day or two of my plans usually goes okay.
For a little while, I actually feel grown-up and responsible. I strut around with my head held high, looking the other responsible people in the eye with that knowing glance that says, I understand. I’m responsible now too. Just look at my groceries.
At some point, I start feeling self-congratulatory.
This is a mistake.
I begin to feel like I’ve accomplished my goals. It’s like I think that adulthood is something that can be earned like a trophy in one monumental burst of effort.
What usually ends up happening is that I completely wear myself out. Thinking that I’ve earned it, I give myself permission to slack off for a while and recover. Since I’ve exceeded my capacity for responsibility in such a dramatic fashion, I end up needing to take more recovery time than usual. This is when the guilt spiral starts.
The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.
Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the Internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.
At some point in this endlessly spiraling disaster, I am forced to throw all of my energy into trying to be an adult again, just to dig myself out of the pit I’ve fallen into. The problem is that I enter this round of attempted adulthood already burnt out from the last round. I can’t not fail.
It always ends the same way. Slumped a
nd haggard, I contemplate the seemingly endless tasks ahead of me.
And then I rebel.
The toy parrot was given to us by a family friend who either didn’t understand children or hated my parents.
Imagine a grizzly bear. Now imagine that by some accident of nature, the bear sprouts wings and learns how to use a flamethrower. That would be a really unfair thing to have happen. Bears are already powerful enough without those things.
Similarly, children are already annoying enough without access to a toy that will record and repeat any sound in the entire world.
We began abusing the parrot’s capabilities almost immediately.
Suddenly, every sound sparkled with new and exciting possibilities.
The parrot gave us a sense of power we’d never experienced before.
Our parents hoped that maybe we’d get bored with it after a while and forget about it, but that’s not what happened.
Then one day, the parrot suddenly stopped working.
Several other toys had suffered similar fates, most notably our Bop It and a novelty toy called Crazy Singing Santa. And, as with the Bop It and the Crazy Singing Santa, our mom didn’t know how to fix it.
Neither did our dad.
The only other adult we knew who lived nearby was our crazy aunt Laurie. Laurie was quite handy, and sure enough, she found the problem almost right away.
In retrospect, I’m sure she figured out that the parrot’s demise wasn’t exactly an accident. But she fixed it anyway, probably just to see what would happen. Laurie always had a soft spot for chaos.
At this point, our parents were still unaware that the toy had been repaired, which provided us a unique opportunity to use it against them.
We began by recording the most confusing sound we could think of . . .
Then we waited.
It wasn’t a particularly brilliant plan. In fact, one could argue that nothing about it made sense at all. And we knew it wouldn’t end well. We knew we wouldn’t be able to escape once we were found. But we weren’t driven by logic. We were driven by something deeper—some desperate part of us that maybe just wanted to see exactly how obnoxious we could be.
We never saw the parrot again. I’m sure it was burned or angrily tossed out of a moving vehicle. Like a cursed artifact, the only way to be rid of it was to destroy it completely.
However, we soon discovered a substitute.
The noise started while Duncan and I were watching a scary movie. It was a scary noise—like metal grinding on metal—and at first, it was tough to differentiate it from the noises in the movie.
But it continued even when the action on screen was not supposed to be scary.
I hadn’t planned on investigating the source of the noise, because, as you know from watching scary movies, people who investigate noises die.
But then the neighbor’s dog began growling and yelping.
I looked at Duncan and said, “Do you hear that?” He said, “Hear what?” I told him I thought the neighbor’s dog was being murdered by something. He told me to stop being silly—the dog was probably just playing.
But I was sure there was something wrong.
I crept closer to the door, my mind flooding with horrible premonitions of what I might find on the other side.
The dog’s yelps suddenly went silent.
I braced myself for the disemboweling that was sure to follow and opened the door. But to my surprise, there was no immediate violence. I crept into the yard, scanning the darkness for the source of the sound.
The dog had run off, but as I edged closer to the far corner of the yard, a dark shape came into focus:
It was a goose, lurking nonchalantly in the shadows, pecking at the ground. As I was looking at it, it emitted a horrible noise that sounded like metal grinding on metal.
When it finally registered that the source of the sound was merely a honking goose, I was relieved.
Then I had a flashback to my childhood.
And I remembered that most geese are dangerous psychopaths that become extremely violent for absolutely no reason.
Shortly thereafter, it occurred to me that the goose was probably the thing that had been brutally attacking our neighbor’s dog.
I tried to sneak back inside before it noticed me.
But it was too late.
It had seen me.
It lunged at me and I stumbled backward.
I experienced a momentary feeling of relief as it lurched past me, but with sinking dread, I noticed that I had left the door to the house open.
If you were sitting quietly on your couch, waiting for your girlfriend to come back inside so you could finish watching your movie, and while you were waiting, someone called you up and said “I’ll give you a million dollars if you can guess what’s going to happen next,” you absolutely would not guess “I am going to be brutally and unexpectedly attacked by a goose in my own home.” Even if you had a hundred guesses, you would not guess that.
But that’s exactly what happened to Duncan.
I ran inside to find him yelling and throwing things at the goose while it chased him around the living room.
I had never taken birds seriously. They’ve always seemed like silly, innocuous creatures. I mean, their most recognizable traits are flitting about and singing, which is adorable. In school, I learned that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, though I never really saw the resemblance. But when I walked into my living room and found this thing chasing Duncan, I finally recognized it: the predatory gleam in its eyes and its jerky, robotic movements were straight out of the dinosaur documentaries I used to watch as a child.
The goose stopped and slowly shifted its reptilian gaze onto me and I understood with startling clarity exactly what it must have felt like to be a baby stegosaurus. I froze and whispered, “Oh no, what do I do?”
Duncan said, “Oh god, I don’t know, why is this happening? I don’t understand why this is happening! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME??”
It is difficult to flee effectively while inside a house. You can sprint across the room, but it won’t be long before you encounter a wall or a piece of furniture, and then you have to angle back toward your attacker if you hope to keep running. So you ricochet around, trying to make up a little ground, trying to get away. You cast various objects into your wake, hoping to inconvenience your attacker. But unless you can trap or otherwise disable whatever you’re running away from, it’s going to catch you eventually.
Earlier in the winter, we had tacked a blanket over the doorway to the kitchen to keep the heat in the living room. This fortunate arrangement gave us a tactical advantage and we were able to trap the goose in the kitchen by luring it in and then allowing the blanket to fall back over the doorway.
The lull in violence made the room feel far too quiet as we stood and stared vacantly at the blanketed doorway. The light in the kitchen cast a sharp silhouette of the goose against the blanket.
“What should we do with it?” said Duncan.
I said, “I guess it lives in our kitchen now.”
He paused thoughtfully. “We can’t just never go into our kitchen again.”
I suggested that maybe we could trap the goose in the basement, but that option was also ruled impractical. We’d have to find a way to get it far away from the house—far enough that it could never find its way back.
Before we could properly consider how to accomplish this feat, we noticed the goose’s shadow looming larger in the doorway.
It was moving closer.
We watched in horror as it began pecking the blanket—testing it to see if it could get through.
The scenario felt strangely reminiscent of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park: us crouched in terror as some raptor-like bird stalked us through our familiar and formerly peaceful environment.
There was an ominous pause, then its head poked out underneath the blanket.
A tense moment of inaction took hold of us as its eyes scanned the room and fi
nally settled on our crouching forms.
It teetered toward us and we fled upstairs into our bedroom, slamming the door behind us. Leaning breathlessly against the heavy door, we could hear the goose pecking the floorboards on the other side.
We sat quietly, not knowing what to do. Our box fan hummed in the window. Finally, Duncan whispered, “We could trap it with a blanket.”
I said, “This room is pretty big, right? We could just live in here.”
But I knew what we had to do.
We waited until we couldn’t hear the goose outside the door, then we armed ourselves with a down comforter and snuck a peek into the unlit hallway.
The goose wasn’t out there.
We crept down the stairs, holding the blanket out in front of ourselves like a shield. With every creak, we expected the goose to come lurching out of the shadows to peck us to death. Strangely, its lack of action was even more disconcerting. Every suspenseful second that ticked by without an attack felt like it was building up to a slightly more brutal surprise.