Chatty McLoon
by Andy Bolt

I've just settled in at my table when the voice first grates along my eardrums. Behind me, a twenty-something man on a cell phone is describing his allergy to cats with such vehemence that I can only assume he was once mugged and savagely beaten by an adorable Calico. What's especially weird is that there are long pauses in his torrent of anti-cat speech, suggesting that someone else is actually contributing to the conversation with something other than apathetic grunts. My brain and I have talked it over and concluded that, until one or both of us is declared legally insane, we cannot accept the idea that there exists a person who is this interested in the specifics of another's feline related difficulties. I've attempted (and failed) to imagine the person who could, without choking to death on a noxious cloud of his own boredom, actually say something like, "Uh-huh. Wow, that allergic, huh? Really? What color sores? Like, pink-red, or more of a crimson?"
That leaves us with one of two options. The first is that this person belongs to a support group for oblivious psychotics, and the person on the other end is having his own, unrelated conversation, perhaps about the severity of his dandruff in the winter months. This type of thing is not as uncommon as you might think, and you've probably witnessed it yourself if you've ever watched a presidential debate wherein the candidates answer various accusations with irrelevant tales of their military experience.
The second possibility is that the person on the other end has been involved in some horrible industrial accident that has welded the phone to the side of his head, and the sadistic cat loather is only pausing when the screams for the sweet release of death get too loud to talk over. I'd ask which it is, but either way he'd probably answer with something like "Just a single cat hair on the underside of my shoe could cause a semi-viscous fluid to come streaming out of every orifice I have" and in order to make him shut up, I'd have to kill him, possibly by duct taping kittens to the side of his face.
Whatever the case, after my unfortunate co-customer has spent several impossibly long minutes relaying the precise details of every allergy symptom known to man, he moves on to a list of people that whoever he's talking to should sue. Apparently, the unseen-but-clearly-disturbed other half of this exchange has recently tripped over a small hole in the pavement near its home, which I assume is itself a small hole under a bridge somewhere.
The list includes a few of the people you might conceivably sue if you fell over a cement divot and also passionately hated all of humanity. But after the relatively standard diatribes against the city, the transportation authority, and "the asphalt guy", my cell-abusing friend, whom I've now nicknamed Chatty McLoon, has apparently decided that the potential for lucrative lawsuits should not be limited by basic human logic. He goes on to include the neighbors, a car dealership, and the insurance company. That last one in particular bothers me, because it seems to imply that something in their policy led Chatty to believe that his associate was covered for being unable to distinguish areas where the ground has disappeared. I know that insurance providers have become extremely flexible in recent years, but if, as Chatty suspects, companies have actually begun to insure against their obviously deficient policy holders' personal failings, then the industry as we know it is doomed.
At this point in the conversation, Chatty decides that we have not, in fact, been treated to enough of his hyper-allergenic antics, and his train of thought squeals into reverse. Factually, there's absolutely nothing left for him to say about his body's disdain for anything that purrs, so what we're getting is essentially a recapping of the previous discussion, only with increasingly inappropriate adjectives inserted. I miss a lot of it, because when he gets to the part about the insatiable nature of his eye-puffiness, my suppressed laugh reflex threatens to explode my skull. When I tune back in, Chatty has moved on to an angry condemnation the inherent greed of the people of Minneapolis, presumably including myself and the other occupants of the Cafˇ Tatta Bunna. Possibly suffering from some type of fast acting amnesia, Chatty has apparently forgotten that moments ago, he came up with at least six separate entities that were to provide monetary compensation for his friend's non-debilitating pavement tripping experience. This is so far past a plain vanilla egomaniacal lack of self-awareness that science has no way to quantify it. The most analogous thing to Chatty's thought process would be if Exxon and Texaco formed a coalition to protest the building of a solar power plant on the grounds that all the flashy sunlight might temporarily blind a few sparrows, file a twenty million dollar lawsuit against you for failing to sufficiently rinse out your recycled Coke cans, and close out the day by setting fire to PETA headquarters for no particular reason. If you can picture all that, you're on the right track, provided you imagine that both companies sneeze and scratch uncontrollably in the presence of small mammals.
At one point, Chatty utters, "They don't even call it Minneapolis, they call it Moneyapolis." I'm not sure who 'they' refers to, but I'm confident that if you assembled a crack team of multinational linguists, equipped them with a way cool cybernetic novelty-phrase sniffing bloodhound, and sent them all on an epic adventure through time and space, you would still be unable to locate anyone else who has ever used the term "Moneyapolis" in a serious context. My first sip drowns out Chatty's voice just as a woman two tables over begins her exciting tale of emergency gallbladder surgery.