Residual Trace: The Taleworthy Catastrophes of a Thrillseeking Child

By Tracy Mansfield

This collection of loosely autobiographical short stories, essays, and recipes reflects on human diversity and the effects of a thrillseeking childhood on an adult's personality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracy Mansfield
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990499244

Book preview

The Nymphaeum

Residual Trace

Other Books by Tracy C. Mansfield

Prominence: from Sensation to Language (1997)

Lingering Suspicion: The Care and Feeding of Your Healthy Psychotic (as time and inclination permit)

Apps by Tracy C. Mansfield

Switch Access Training with Music (2016; iOS)

Switch Access Training with a Camera (2016; iOS)

Wordwise Reader (2018; macOS)

Calculator Unbound (2020; iOS)

Random Countdown Timer with Switch Access (2021; iOS)

PorkRinse Random Sentence Generator with Sensible Nonsense (TBD; macOS)

TellTale Mystic Divination Navigator (TBD #2; macOS)

Website by Tracy C. Mansfield

www.clyr.com

Residual Trace

The Taleworthy Catastrophes of a Thrillseeking Child

Title Page Pinstriping

Tracy C. Mansfield

Clyr Ink Press Colophon

Clyr Ink Press

MMXIV

Residual Trace: The Taleworthy Catastrophes of a Thrillseeking Child

by Tracy C. Mansfield

Please report errors to: [e-mail]

Copyright © 2014 Tracy C. Mansfield

Fifth Edition, Sixth Revision (August 2023); Smashwords Edition

Since the 1980s, some versions of some of the individual chapters that have been included in this volume were registered with separate copyrights, but they have not been previously published. The first edition of this book was originally published through the iTunes Store on June 6, 2014, under ISBN 978-0-9904992-0-6.

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CLYR and the Clyr Ink Press colophon are the author’s trademarks. The direct iconic proportion symbol is not a trademark, so feel free to use it as an operator, UFO silhouette, facial-hair tattoo, or whatever you like; consider it the author’s gift to the world.

Some or all of the following capitalized words are (in some cases registered) trademarks, service marks, or product names that do not reside with me: M&Ms, Emergency Severity Index, Frogger, Bailey’s, Cool Whip, Wizzzer, Shutterfly, Tupperware, Photoshop, Knott’s Berry Farm, Disney, Airstream, Talenti’s Salted Caramel, Frisbee, Styrofoam, Illumination, Guild Wars, Pixar, Mythbusters, Singer, Artex, Dilaudid, Buick, Fuzzy Wuzzy Bath Soap, Schwinn, Seabond, Camel, Google, DreamWorks, Nonoxynol-9, X-ACTO, WD-40, Disneyland, YouTube, LessEMF (Ex-Static, NatureShield), OS 7, Postal Instant Press, Wicker Man, Pendleton, Asgro, Star Trek, iPod Touch, Taco Bell, Oscars, Purina, Mazuri, Bailey’s, Duesenberg, Cricket Chow, Earthworm Chow, Land O’Lakes, Replacer, Spider-Man, Swiss Army, USGA, Pella, Cold Stone Creamery, Kelly Girl, and Fizzy Lifting Drinks. I use them (and any other trademarks that I have forgotten to list here) only in an editorial fashion, and not specifically to endorse them or to commercially profit by their mention.

Attributions

Epigraph: August, John (screenplay), and Burton, Tim (Dir.) Big Fish. (2003) Columbia.

Part 1 Epigraph: Mistler, Jean (1949) Benjamin Constant et Madame de Staël, Lettres à un Ami, Cent Onze Lettres Inédites à Claude Hochet. Bantam Classics: New York. (p. 10)

Part 2 Epigraph: Clarke, Arthur C. (1962) Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Nerve, in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. Harper & Row: New York. (p. 7)

Part 3 Epigraph: Bornstein, Ruth. (1976) Little Gorilla. Clarion Books: New York. (p. 1)

Part 4 Epigraph: Carrol, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1872) Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Macmillan and Co.: London. (p. 10)

Cover design: The Nymphaeum by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1878), with Photoshop liberally applied by the author. The cover fonts are Desdemona and Zapfino.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9904992-4-4

9 8 7 6

ʃ Contents ʅ

Front Matter

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue

Body Matter

Story Part

Safety First

The Cannon

Library Fine

Discoveries

Explorations

My Dog Has a Nose

I Am a Lucky Man

We All Scream

The Bridge of His Nose

The Thick End of the Wedge

A Process of Elimination

Graham Greene

Sharing a Ride

Theory Part

Losers Keepers

The New Genetics

Mermaids Are Practical

I Do Not Pledge

Isolation

Well, Duh

Restoration of Balance

Probe Test

Light Switch

Mysterious Sympathies

Semeiognomy Basics

School-Age Spectral Spelling Development

Orangutan Precognition

Cookbook Part

Rice Cake

Watermelon Pickles

Persimmon Cookies

Ice Cream Bread

Unreal Part

Seminoma Evening (You Will Meet a Stranger)

Distilled Advice

Chemo Journal

An Open Letter to My Exes

Back Matter

Epilogue: Epitaphy

Suggested Media

Colophon

About the Author

ʃ Foreword ʅ

"E nclosed you’ll find some random thoughts (memories) jotted down in the form of free writing. I hope that some of these inspire a written story or two. I was originally just trying to think of times that we put our lives in danger, and found my thoughts wandering more randomly. I began to remember things I haven’t thought of in years. I had started to think that I had a pretty strong block of any childhood memories, but as I started jotting them down, things just started popping up. I wrote them down as they occurred to me, so my train of thought might appear to be a bit confused, but there really is a relation for most of them. I put down almost everything, even embarrassing stuff, except for the time when [ nope , just... no]. That memory was pretty repressed.

Now that I’ve started, I’m having trouble shutting off the flow of thoughts and I find myself wishing that I had a pen and paper at weird times, like when I’m swimming; I get anxious, like if I don’t write it down really quickly I’ll forget and won’t be able to remember.

It has also been feeling rather therapeutic."

— Jeffrey A. Mansfield

In response to the author’s request for stories

ʃ Preface ʅ

Ihave been collecting personal anecdotes about childhood misadventures, usually as tied to an injury, ever since I was just a child. Reading about them is fun in its own right, and I wrote this book largely to be enjoyed solely as their archive. I’m hoping that these tales will lend you sympathetic squirminess.

And you might well stop right there at that story level, but I can’t. It’s impossible for me to gather so much of anything without resolving categories and patterns (which I am now told is one of my autism things), and writing it all down helps me to let it go (and fall asleep). When taken all together, these stories suggest that one’s approach to personal relationships matures somewhat systematically with (forebrain) development in risk-taking behavior. What you learn from these early explorations can influence how well you get along with other people as you get older.

So, what you learn as a kid from your dangerous interactions with things can affect the risks that you take in your relationships with people as you get older.

Yes, I could be wrong. But how would I know?

That’s where you come in; this book solicits your opinions just in case I’ve gone trippingly bweeeezorp. If that’s the case, then with your help my descent into madness might at least be modestly graceful.

That said, it’s not likely that I’m making up all of this insight out of whole cloth. Aside from plenty of personal experience in being the kid who was stubbornly bent on auxiliary self-obliteration, I’ve spent my life ankle-deep (upside-down) in the study and application of form-meaning systems (typical and diverse, human and not), most recently: Cognitive Science and Linguistics (doctorate); Communication Disorders and Sciences (additional master’s); a few years as a Chief Research Scientist for natural language processing projects; and nearly two decades as a Speech-Language Pathologist and Assistive Technology Specialist for a K-21 Life Skills education program. I’m not sure what that makes me, exactly, but it is surely something more along the lines of an expert in the field than a cake.

Well, probably, anyway. You see, the thing is...

(What follows gets dense, and many of you will be happier skipping straight to the Story Part.)

First of all, my cognition is not what you might call normal (unless you were in a contrary mood). I have worked my whole life on strategies to compensate for my strangeness, while at the same time my family (and many friends and associates) were dealing with their own variations on this relational challenge. In recent years, the literature has come to identify such efforts as camouflage or masking, which I largely refuse to do anymore. Radical visibiity and rightful presence are on the menu now.

As I became a special educator, my increasing experience with autism spectrum disorders supported a feeling of belonging somewhere on the edge of that fringe. You might be familiar with Kanner’s autism, or Asperger’s Syndrome, but you’re not going to find research on Trace’s Divergence (beyond this book, of course, or the CLYR website). There are just too few people to form a viable representative sample; that is to say, start with the set of natural-born thesaurus proofreaders in the world, then whittle your way down with the distinguishing characteristics described below, and see how many people you have left. (Then email both of us.)

Subsequently, in comparing Autism and the psychosis spectrum (a dozen years later), I finally came across a significant fit: I am (also) some sort of creative schizotype. A discussion of such reality shifting is going to require a separate book (with the working title, Lingering Suspicion: The Care and Feeding of Your Healthy Psychotic).

Second of all, it turns out that I am a Highly Sensitive Person or HSP. No one who knows me was surprised by that little discovery.

Third of all, while those two aspects can add up to an unusual sensitivity to imagistic patterns in these sorts of noisy data (or other random[-ish] stimuli), I tend to be fairly specific about the kind of thing that I accept as likely; in other words, I am not pareidolic or apophenic, and I don’t have to worry unusually much about Shermer’s patternicity and agenticity. Respectively, then:

a) while I might see a picture of St. Albert’s face in a cross-section of a fiveleaf yam, I don’t automatically assume that Albert personally bothered with that little bit of self-promotion;

b) while I can accept that humans have had an effect over time on Earth’s environment (and we need to do something to fix that), I feel no unexamined craving to gluttonously swallow the entire global warming pill buffet;

c) while twice in fifty years I have heard a very brief voice in my head that purely felt to be from an Outside Source, I can neither definitionally nor categorically verify it... nor would it seem appropriate to me to get all bottom up (or bottoms up) about these events; and

d) my life is so thoroughly fraught with wild coincidence as to make that of Dickens look positively tame.

In other words, I am (artist camouflaging as) scientist enough to have good use for proof-based arguments, and mystic enough to enjoy the benefits of faith-based explorations beyond those limits. I have played with the strengths and weaknesses of both types of systems deeply enough not to place bets on their thumb war, and prefer the emergent approach favored by their offspring. I tend to call that plausibility, one of my favorite aspects of which is coherence, but I expect that it might take several many decades for languages to catch up to where it’s easy to talk about.

In the meantime, we’re screwed.

Fourth of all, for well over thirty years of my life I was enormously sleep deprived, with interruptions occurring on a pretty consistent average of nearly eighty times per hour. I experienced fugue states, sleepwalking (of a type that included lucid conversation), and an inability to stay awake in class. Tests in my teens and twenties showed that I was spending almost all of my day down around 7 Hz (as opposed to a more typical 14-40). What confounds me is that no one managed to associate this syndrome with my sleep impairment until I was living in Canada, when a doctor told me (rather archly) that my ability to fall asleep under any circumstances was not a talent of which to be proud (...you idiot, he added for emphasis). In short: my first month on a CPAP profoundly rewrote my way of being in the world.

Fifth of all, there are some prominent variations in the way that some people develop their personal internal language, and they often have little notion that others don’t share their individual mode of self-talk feeling. Some think in music, for example, and can spontaneously compose a melody as easily as if someone else were simply describing their day. (Some are seemingly born to this language, some learn it, and others emerge into it.) Still others appeal to symbolic systems that are much more similar to math, olfactory matrices, tie-dyed lava-lampisms, propositions, flow charts, choreography, and so on. My own is almost entirely verbal with a strong auditory quality (but not like actual voices in my head), fanned out in networked arguments with the audible equivalent of megapaisleys of curlicued clausal subordination. That often makes it difficult for me to figure out how little I need to say (and will make more sense closer to the end of the book, after we’ve talked about symbolic systems).

Sixth of all, I am Empathic (both cognitively and affectively), which blends with being a HSP. For decades, I kept setting identification as Autistic well to the side (albeit not entirely out of the picture) because empathy was held to be anathematic to that way of being in thw world; however, recent research demonstrates that this is not the case: autism and empathy can readily co-exist.

Seventh of all, and finally (finally), Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria has suddenly (at age 60) made itself known to me as a thing (provoking in turn my strong suspicions about the existence of Acceptance Sensitive Euphoria). But RSD has only hit the journals in the last few years (and ASE only appears in my not-a-damnéd-blog), so what viable chance have I had to know about this before now? (Approximately, none at all.) So I wonder what else is going to hit the research in coming days that would have been very helpful for me to have known about many decades ago.

Which brings us to the third purpose for writing this all down: I would like you to learn more about people like me, and what we have to do about ourselves to get along well with people like you. That might be helpful for eveyone all around.

Which finally brings us to what this book is not for.

I did not write this book as self-help advice for other individuals who are trying to figure out how to navigate among folks whose cognition is less intensely divergent. I have no easy, global, transferable solutions. I only have some observations about the problem, some descriptions of the compensatory strategies that are helpful for me in specific, and occasionally a small bag of peanut M&Ms (that are likely to be gone by the time you find me anyway, so nevermind about them). So if anything that I happen to say helps you out, great, but that’s just a matter of luck rather than purpose.

That said, for those few of you for whom this material strikes a resonant chord, you might at least feel a bit less alone in regards to your individual version of this sort of Relational Being.

And don’t take what I have to say too seriously. Just enjoy yourself. If you’re not having fun reading this material, then for goodness’ sake put the book down.

Endnotes

Note 1: For further information on Charles Dickens’ views regarding the smallness of the world, and the many fateful coincidences influencing people’s lives (particularly his own), you can read his letters (to the likes of Browne, de Cerjat, Coutts, and Mackenzie), John Forster’s biography, and then those scholarly works that draw upon those sources. Dickens created locations, characters, and events to reflect his reality, so he appealed to coincidence because it was as natural a component as any architectural style or accent. That said, I know that this dynamic does not affect every person’s life equally, because (a) I meet many skeptics (or read their books), and (b) dozens of people have told me that they have had to get used to an increase in synchronic weirdness in their own lives as our emotional closeness increases.

Note 2: Narcissist is not eighth of all (but thanks for asking); in fact, I am strongly other centered when it comes to prioritizing my attention, and I know that my study of my self is of interest only to me (i.e., I do not feel important). This book exists because (a) I’m compelled to understand and systematize everything (including myself), and (b) I happen to be readily available and intimately familiar as an object of study; I mean, I’m around me all the damn time, and yes, I do find myself to be exhausting (which is one significant reason for my love of escaping into narratives). I published this all as a book because it has been a very fun art project (especially while I was stuck at home during cancer and various covids), where I could happily pursue all of the little details (like the colophon, epigraphs, precise word choices, and various ornaments). I do systematize other people as well, generally in parallel with how closely I have gotten to know them, and sometimes I also write that stuff down (e.g., evaluations, obituaries, editorials, and so on). That said, when it comes to what I have learned about other people, there is one whole hell of a whole lot that I do not write about, as it would breach their privacy. And while that imbalance leaves me looking narcy, well, so be it.

ʃ Acknowledgments ʅ

I would never have finished this work (nor in fact ever have tried to pull it all together as a unified book) were it not for the resolute assistance of a few terribly patient people, some of whom (it should in all fairness be noted) were not so terrible in their patience as others.

My parents, Lorna and Dewey, have re-re-(re-)read numerous drafts of various parts of this book for decades now, and have been unstinting in their support and keen in their feedback. Naturally, they are the primary people from whom I originally heard the family histories that fueled my miscreancy.

This book would be a whole lot shorter were it not for my brother Jeff and his childhood instigation and participation; he also sent me a list of memory joggers early on that gave rise to some of these retells. In a meaningful sense, this book is one big acknowledgment of him.

Camrin (my adult offspring) has been exposed to these sorts of family stories ever since he was little-little (which is as it should be), and an essential part of the value of this work is that he continues to enjoy them even into adulthood. I value his influence all the more because I hold his writing, drawing, and other artistic endeavors in such high regard.

Sara is a talented commemoration artist. I would have written this book just for the pleasure of hearing her laugh as she reads it, but I also felt like I should do something to match her efforts with all of her family story projects, such as the memory books, celebratory cards, event videos, and keeping our online photo accounts current. Now I can feel less like a slacker for a little while. Sara also gets credit for spreading some of these stories among her family members, who generously contributed their encouragement.

When I published the first edition of this work, Mariya and Keagan were still fairly early on in the process of learning who I was, just as I was learning about them, which entailed my learning more about myself. Camrin and I had our evolving stories about our family, and each other, and I was looking forward to what our family’s new tales would become. In that sense, it felt only fair to let everyone know what we were all getting into.

Katharine and Nathan, my nieph and nephew, are lovers of books, each in their own personal way, and they are crucial to this project because I know that about them. Clearly they live busy, curious lives to provide all sorts of fascinating material against a time when Tammy and Jeff produce their own family chronicle. Then again, this sort of writing often falls to the next generation (and in some sense always does).

My cousin Leslie read this all the way through and was nice enough to tell me (at a time when I was worried that I had flourished it into globnoxiousness) that while it might indeed be rarefied air, at least smart people would like it. (So if you don’t like it, then, well... just sayin’.)

There is someone who has always been gracious about my stories, but who might not want to be mentioned here by name. I have learned that some tales only become tellable with distance (often but not exclusively in the form of time), and some never get told, regardless, because you just had to be there.

A lot of my friends have read various parts of this book over the decades (and a few saw it closer to publication as a whole). Their long international nightmare is over, as I will finally quit pestering them for feedback. They’ve also made treasured contributions in being honest about how hopeless I am at writing fiction with people in it. You will be spared all of that rubbish due to the dogged diligence of brave people like: Dave, Judi, Mark, Nicole, Doug, Bertram, Carl, Greg, Jeremy, Jana, Florin, Zeno, Kate, and Evan (who also generously saved you from my poetry... every reader of this book owes him a big favor).

And now we come to Randy, upon whom settles the most recent blame for this work being finished. One day he said, You should write a book (the bastard), to which I replied, "Aaaaaaawww, I already wrote one," in the vainly whiny hope of never having to produce another. Then, a few days later, he said that he would read my blog if I had one (ditto), but I knew that there was no way that I could make myself keep something like that updated, so here we are: my second and last book... written to avoid a blog.

Finally, this book could not have been written were it not for the steadfast commitment of thrillseeking children everywhere, and the equally dedicated heroism of such innocent bystanders (and occasional accomplices) as their family members, friends, and neighbors, including the kind of parent that some of these children grow up to be.

ʃ Introduction ʅ

Marilyn Monroe was entombed on the day I was born. I’m about as old as the first computer video game ( Spacewar) , LEDs, The Jetsons , audio cassette tapes, the internet, Taco Bell, Spider-Man, and silicone breast implants. I’m about a year older than Doctor Who (the TV show), lava lamps, and the computer mouse.

And civil rights.

That’s my generation; I was a child in the 60s.

shrug

Yes, I probably should have written this when the anniversary would have been a nice round 50 years, but it took me longer than I was expecting to figure out what I wanted to say (and I continue to revise a decade later). Now, I know:

1) You have your nature.

2) You have your nurture.

3) You have your emergent properties of their interaction.

And that’s about it, really.

I know that it’s been said before, but I just wanted to say it too.

The rest of this book simply fills in the details.

* * *

So if you’re just here for the stories about my oddball life and you are not interested in the more systemic view that ties it all together, then you’ll want to skip ahead. The story chapters should be easy to identify within their first few lines, and you can just ignore the remainder (which would be almost everything outside of the Story Part).

After all, this book is quite like a chicken: some parts are lighter than others, some bits process more easily than the rest, and sometimes you need to bring home a whole bucket just so everyone can find a piece that they want (with the coating that they prefer) and then you can stick the leftovers in the fridge for when you get more desperate. Also, some folks like to eat gizzards, hearts, cartilage, or to obsessively worry away at the periosteum (and even dig into the marrow). Who knows, this book might lay an egg. Plus it pecks into crap to look for seeds.

Clearly, a lot of life fricasees down to deciding when to push an analogy too far.

* * *

It was perfectly safe for me and my brother (Jeff) to burn a gasoline-sprinkled, firecracker-laden, six-foot-tall toothpick sculpture in our backyard, because there was no reasonable way for us to predict such mystical influences as the flammability of the model glue, the jack-in-the-boxing of the flaming wreckage whenever one end of a springy arch burned away, the need to run over and pull the dog out of harm’s way, and the blazing bits that hurtled into the dry, dead tree in the neighbor’s yard whose branches dangled menacingly over the old leaf pile.

Talk about your dynamic opportunities for personal growth. If only this sort of thing had happened daily, instead of just a few times a week, I might have developed better strategies for coping with interpersonal rules.

Okay, that look on your face (well, not on yours perhaps, but most certainly on theirs) suggests that I’ve just leapt too far, so let me fill in the gap a bit.

* * *

What you learn about concrete objects will teach you something about dealing with more abstract ones. [Note 1] While this is true at any age, you have to start simply; after all, you can’t honestly expect a kid to thoroughly navigate a sophisticated set of branching consequences (i.e., to fully anticipate what the wind, dog, glue, and sudden-release-of-mechanical-energy-stored-in-an-elastic-object might do, both separately and in permutations). They first have to experience some of these sorts of complex events, and of course live through them, otherwise the point is moot.

(OK, here’s another chance to skip straight to the Story Part.)

Once survived, these concrete examples (ideally) warn them about the potential risks that might occur in similar circumstances, where those associations become more abstract over time. (Language development research shows that our appreciation for metaphor and other figurative forms grows over the entire course of one’s lifespan.) So the physical safety issues simply walk point on the kid’s need to develop mature strategies around less tangible types of risks, such as finding out whether their significant other (not just the sculpture) is held together with volatile adhesives before they take the risk of setting that person on fire. (Figuratively, one might hope.)

Therefore, I am a better person today for having laid incendiary siege to my learning environment. With that in mind, then, I can say with some confidence that the whole toothpick episode was entirely worth it.

So, as you grow (and not just get) older, the tricky part is to generalize this risk-assessment skill to run a different kind of maze, one that involves gracefully navigating emotional, spiritual, social, and other non-physical obstacles without subjecting your neighbors to a brilliant cascade of smoldering debris. In fact, the most common thread binding this story collection would be my (mis)adventures in and around the development of this (dis)ability. It’s about how my way of thinking/feeling/believing affects whether people and other things get (and not just grow) hurt or not.

Which is not an entirely obvious thing to point out about this book; that is to say, it’s not trivially true of every book just because almost all of them involve people and their problems (one way or another). Some folks are much better pilots than I am, so they are less likely to have any sort of unusual problems around this kind of pathfinding. Their stories, then, are much more likely to focus on more complicated skills; for example, even if you already communicate well with some people, there are higher-order problems that can crop up.

Which all comes down to saying that this book is about (a) childhood thrillseeking behavior (b) as it matures with the risk-assessment centers in the forebrain (c) as those risks shift to address increasingly complex matrices involving people’s feelings. Then add the bit about this happening (d) in a brain and body with relatively spectrumy/healthily-psychotic/empathic/highly-sensitive processing.

And while the physical aspects of these stories (such as the injuries and explosions) are all just metaphors for the process of learning to deal with non-physical challenges (like keeping a friendship from blowing up), I will not belabor that in the book, so you can read this material at whatever level you prefer without my pestering you about it one way or the other. (Usually.)

* * *

For what it’s worth, there is no cure for us, which is just as well (from my perspective) because I like being this way. Besides, any research efforts that I might have made in that direction would likely have involved dangerous experiments with dubious chemicals, whistlingly high voltages, various classes of fire, antiques of questionable provenance, increasingly sharp objects, and ruggedly individualistic lifestyle choices. I was once on the brink of developing a ten-point plan, but steps three through nine suffered severe burns when I took the case off of the laser printer to watch it work. (Step seven will never be the same.) It seemed like a good idea at the time.

That said, thrillseeking itself is a perfectly normal mammalian thing to do, and in fact it is so common that some less-than-perfectly normal mammalians do it as well. Just ask any (perfectly normal or not) mammalian to tell you their story, or stories, about how they almost died in childhood. I know very few who don’t have at least one such story of grievous injury, and the most intrepid surviving daredevils often have several such tales, each of which goes with its own set of scars. [Note 2]

Please keep firmly in mind that I’m not talking about anyone who has really suffered through some sort of illness or tragedy, fatal or otherwise, that wasn’t their own stupid fault. This book is not intended to make light of those people or events; it’s dedicated to all those kids like my brother and me who, for reasons not properly exposed until now (sorry about saying exposed), have time and again engaged in stunts from which any sane individual would have fled shrieking (or at least laughing maniacally), stunts which seemed to be designed from the outset to maim, bruise, mangle, ruffle, fold, scrape, staple, concuss, and mutilate their all-too-willing participants. Some of these events rise to a