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The Disruptor in the shop

     ‘People are placed on Earth to be disruptors, and by extension, some people will commit atrocities,’ Harrari said.

Hakim nodded. He knew that Harrari was right. Having observed me for the last decade, he knew that I sometimes deliberately try to shake things up.

      ‘Some people, he whispered,'when they have been judged to be overly harsh in disciplining their children immediately jump up and protest, ‘You have to be cruel to be kind” He didn’t mean me. He knew that I don’t make excuses for being unkind. Quite simply, I don’t lie; If I did, I would ‘see’ far less; I would be merely a human; one of seven billion, and it had taken me over ten years of acceptance to become more than that.

Harrari, as usual, was patient.

     ‘The shaking up of society is necessary. You are stumbling through your lives barely conscious. Disruptions often result in knee-jerk reactions through the discomfort of having nascent proclivities and behaviour revealed to all of you. But this ultimately results in better overall behaviour in the community and the condemnation of both the revealed attitude and the knee-jerk response.’

I thought I got it. ‘Like an explosion in the rabbit population that is ultimately controlled by the amount of food available, disruption will reach a zenith and then there will be an adjustment,’ I mused.

I was in my local shop, next in the queue. A bit of a slight argument was coming to a climax before me. I couldn’t help but overhear it.

     ‘Nobody likes you here!’ The young shop assistant warned.

     'I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to disrupt.’

     ‘Disrupt what?’

     ‘You, plural. Your attitudes and habitual behaviours. Your blind adherence to a lifestyle that you incessantly shape to satisfy your desires to be left alone.’

‘Luxury’, I thought.

The shop assistant looked puzzled. Clearly, the advice I had heard on attackers works; if you are about to be attacked, do something weird so the assailant is bamboozled for a moment. However, this lads private school education had given him a confidence that the other ninety-three percent of us in Britain could never emulate. I could sense that he was about to throw the interesting little man out. I wanted to talk to him, but I needed to be served first. Well, I say ‘needed’, what I actually mean is, I couldn’t be bothered to leave my selected loaf of bread behind to follow the man out, and then have to come back again to buy the bread. Just lazy, that’s all.

     ‘I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening,’ I said. Neither of them were expecting me to speak. They stopped their intense staring at one another and looked at me. It works, do something out of the ordinary.

     ‘I don’t like repeating myself’, the man said.

I noticed now that he had a long-term suntan. We had recently experienced a long period of sunny and dry weather, but his suntan was not the glow that healthy skin gets from a seven mile walk in the sun without a hat. That tan only shows that the sunlight was coming from above for a while. His tan had been given a long time to spread, so there was just a general colour on his face, neck and arms; less so on his neck. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and the young lad behind the counter was probably about nineteen. There was, most assuredly, a clash of comprehension.

‘Neither do I,’ I responded, pleased that the attention was now on me.’But I like to be understood when I speak.’

I could see this chimed with him. Clearly, he wanted to be understood and often felt that he was saying things that others could not understand.

     ‘Whenever, I repeat myself, I raise my voice so I am heard, and then people tell me to stop shouting.’ He said to me, only half jesting.

     'Me too.’ I stopped, and then it hit me. ‘I think your IQ is bigger than you know what to do with.’

Admittedly, that is not something that anyone might ever hear. It may even be the first time it has ever been said. Yet, I was overwhelmingly compelled to say it, and it just came out. Suddenly, I was a passenger in my life journey; a person in a front-row theatre seat watching a scene in which I had a walk-on lead role. The man looked at me stunned for a few moments. Strangely though, I had no desire to explain or withdraw my comment, back-handed compliment that it was. He understood though; uniquely understood. This became apparent.

     ‘I think you also have a high IQ’, he said, a slight quiz on his face.

Aware that the puzzled shop assistant was observing this interplay, I cautiously offered, ‘Us aliens need to be able to spot one another.’ The now slightly nervous shop assistant let out something between a guffaw and a loud breath. Clearly, he thought this amusingly non-sensical. Harrari, had she been there, would have been insulted by my outspoken attempt to liken myself to her kind. But the man understood me, at least on the level I was on. He knew I wasn’t an alien but I couldn’t really say anything else to mean something entirely different.

     ‘Yes we do,’ he smiled. ‘It’s just that people have difficulty in understanding what I am saying. They...’

I interrupted him, fully on autopilot now. I had to tell him that I knew what he was going to say before he inadvertently insulted the shop assistant as well.

     ‘Hmmm, now that you have seen the world that humans see, you have moved onto something else. You see…..er…. beyond the veil.’

     ‘Yes, that’s it,’

He then went on to tell me who he was. I didn’t recognise anything he said until he finished with, ‘You know; like Elohim in the Bible.’

     ‘Ah! Now I know you. I know you.’ I said, more than a little discomfitted.

I don’t know if I was fearful of being thought to be a charlatan, or I was in the company of a madman, or a angel. But this guy’s spirit wasn’t holding a banner above his head to tell me something. I was hearing something in the actual words that came out of his mouth that weren’t the words that the shop assistant heard. If I could just focus a little harder I would be able to hear it more clearly.

Whereas, Hakim is my spirit avatar, and Harrari an abandoned alien I discovered in a wood I once lived in, this man was in a liminal position holding the door wide open to the spiritual world. But something was wrong. He wasn’t a friendly guide collecting tickets to a fairyland. He had torn the veil with an unfortunate slip or a hard, one-time only, thrust of anguish, followed by a series of clumsy visitations. Right before me was a spiritual vandal. It was as though he had, aimlessly wandering, actually stumbled across Mary Mapes Dodge’s boy, Hans Brinker, in her book, ‘Silver Skates’, with his finger in the hole in the dike to save Holland, and now he was repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. At the same time, he didn’t have access to all the aspects of the spirit realm so when he said to me, ‘I just hope this war is over soon,’ and then to the shop assistant, ‘He knows what I mean’ meaning I know, I had a glimpse that the confused lad was thinking that I am the cause of a war or even a participant in a war. Of course, the lad was right, but not really in the way he probably thought. I am not a neighbourhood menace; littering, swearing, spitting and illegally parking in other people’s spaces. I am quite simply not a liar. Messes people right up, that does. For me, I am at war with falsehood; lies that people tell themselves.

If this strange little man really had any connection to the spirit world I should be able to identify that. That was me thinking though and ‘thinking me’ was running through all the available clues to tell me what to do. Long-term suntan means outside a lot; reasonably well-spoken with good enunciation; bottle of beer in his hand; and a recent confession that he could not read the alcohol content on the bottles he was trying to choose from.

On the other hand, I was engaged in a disconnect of verbal communication that made sense somehow. This however, is how people with high IQ communicate. Connecting links are left unsaid because there cannot be any other solution. In other words, just making dots for the other person to join up. The problem for ‘thinking conscious me’ though, is that this is really similar to having a spirit conversation because there is no falsehood barring understanding between spirits. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that he looks through a glass darkly in the Bible. Putting aside falsehood is most certainly the step to take if you want to talk to God.

How do I know this? Not because I have a high IQ. No; because I know that a storyteller already knows the plot and often fails to provide adequate links in the story. A storyteller is prescient and the readers or listeners are not. Some of the dots need to be joined and some not.

Does this strange man already know the story? Or is he a brain-addled highly intelligent alcoholic that can’t afford more than one bottle of quite expensive craft beer? Could be, because his tan says he does not drive; but then why would he drive, if he lives near the village shop? And, why buy a strong craft beer and call it your favourite?

The only thing I could do was involve the shop assistant in a pseudo-conversation by making an obscure link to the strange man’s ‘He knows what I mean’.

     ‘I do,’ I said, ‘But he,’ meaning the shop assistant, ‘won’t remember the conversation we had yesterday if I say, Opportunity cost.’

     ‘Of course I do’, he burst out, insulted. To be honest, he might well feel insulted, because effectively I had just intimated that his current confusion was his own fault due to his inability to follow a conversation. However, it gave me enough time to pay for the bread, and follow the little man out of the shop.

Even without the watching shop assistant I could not get a better read on the man.

Some time ago, I could tell within the first two minutes of meeting someone if they had siblings; whether they were older or younger siblings; their siblings gender; and sometimes their age differences. The interesting thing is, a child adopted into a family of children gave the same clues as does an only child; none.

This man was indistinguishable from any other man hurrying on his way and muttering over his shoulder, ‘Good to meet you.’ Except he said it twice so I suppose he meant it.

When two people ‘rap’ it is like musicians ‘jamming’. You can’t suddenly start jamming or rapping, quite simply because someone needs to start and the threads need to be picked up by another. I had a work colleague with which we rapped, but we also spent most of our time just talking and working. This man outside the shop, back in the real world, was constrained by decades of social convention and just walked away. If there is a shroud to be pulled over someone’s spirituality, it was duly used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates