And yet…yours was by far the longest post. 
Kidding!!! I love your logic, you do indeed have that going for you, and very well indeed.
Damn girl, that was cold.
I suffer from keyboarditis. Once I start typing, I can’t stop.
Sucks to be all of you!
People like this annoy me because they often tend to be pretty girls. I want to be rude or stop listening, but my penis commands me to pay attention. 
Hobbyists. Socially inept middle-aged male hobbyists. These are the men at collector meets, fringe music or film shows who wear stained windbreakers, unfortunate T shits, and speak in high, pleading, bleating voices. These men are walking information fetishists, helplessly babbling you things you probably already know about whatever interest you may have in common in the hope that it will start you babbling the way they do and gain them some hot wet steamy gratification of their fetish. There is no nice way to get rid of them.
Well, just imagine how uncomfortable they must be. I’d bleat too! (But not near Hal Briston.)
My 4 year old nephew is doing this already. You can ask him to stop for a little while and have some quiet time, or let others have a turn talking but typically this will last about 5 seconds. There are stretches of quiet where he is reading or otherwise occupied, but these are few and far between. School is also fun for the teacher…at least he raises his hand. The teacher will ask the class a question and his hand will shoot up nearly breaking the sound barrier. His response? “I have a lot of dinosaurs in a basket in my room.” This kid is going to be dangerously close to Gavin. I just thank god that he doesn’t speak in ‘uptalk’ (every sentence having the inflection of a question). There haven’t been any incidents yet that would cause us to worry about any sort of disorder, I think it is just a personality trait.
I joke with my wife about him and will mime a remote in my hand trying to press a ‘Mute’ button at him. Damn thing must be out of batteries.
Funny thing about this kid, he is a dream when he is alone. He plays well by himself (although the voice is in constant action), but when he gets other kids around (well, maybe it’s just our two 4 year olds), invariably the bossing, yelling, screaming, and tattling starts up. Why, yes, he is an only child…
It runs in families too.
MIL talks so much you can hear her in the background when talking to FIL on the phone. But when I met HER mother it was even worse.
A learned behavior? Or genetic?
I’m still stuck on the “not reading body language” thing. I’m sitting quiet, baseball hat down low, sunglasses on, headphones over the ears, and reading my book, and the guy at work starts yapping at me (yes, I can do this at work). That’s not “unable to read body language”, that’s willful neglect of the body language he’s reading because he’d rather be yapping.
I’ve decided that the avoiding eye contact thing can be when the talker is purposely refusing to acknowledge the body language of those he is talking to by not looking at them so he/she can feel free to endlessly babble. It would be “rude” to know that you are being signaled (like in a normal conversation of give and take) and that your victim is about to respond and you ignored him/her. So, you can avoid this embarassing situation by always staring over their head or off to the side when you are talking. I concluded this after swimming for two years in a lane next to a woman who has this problem. She likes to think of herself as a sympathetic person, so this way she can avoid disrupting her self-image. How we delude ourselves.
My experience tells me it’s biological.
I was always a complete introvert all my life (really pathologically shy). Then one day I’m given an antidepressant which within a few weeks turns me into chatty Cathy. Much worse than that actually. I COULD NOT STOP TALKING. I would literally talk to anyone about ANYTHING ANYTIME. If a complete stranger asked me about my most recent sexual encounter I would not only discuss it, I’d give a half hour lecture on it and anything related to it. At times I would be aware of how strange I was acting. I certainly was aware of the difference from before. But it really didn’t matter because that awareness was quickly blotted out by an urge to keep talking about whatever went through my head. I had minimal control over it.
Anyway, that nearly overnight, 360 degree transformation caused by a single drug, makes me speculate - and this is total speculation- that probably there’s a rather simple neurological mechanism that either inhibits or disinhibits speech.
Also, QtM, FWIW I’ve known two borderlines who both got dramatically better as they got older. We’re talking over many years, though. Not something you could conjure up in an office visit or two I imagine. The one narcissist I’ve known got much much worse with age.
I don’t personally know anybody like this, but I see them sometimes on the bus. Usually they’re sitting in front yammering non-stop at the bus driver, with voices that really carry, so that even sitting way in the back, the noise distracts me from trying to read my book.
Myself, I’m the exact opposite. Since I’ve been pretty much a complete loner since grammar school, it takes a serious effort of will to say even one word to a stranger.
Sounds like you know my dad, too! I developed almost no conversational skills when I was growing up because of my ex-Marine dad. When my family had guests over, or we went to somebody else’s house, or when my family was at the dinner table, my dad completely monopolized every conversation. All I got to do was listen. And listen. And listen some more. I heard the same exact stories over and over and over.
My grandmother passed away a couple years ago, and my dad, my sister and I spent a night at her house while she was in the hospital a few days before she died. The three of us stayed up pretty late, and my sister and I got to listen to those same damn stories, which we had managed not to hear in the fifteen years or so that had passed since we grew up and moved away, again. Except now every one of them was embellished so as to make them even more impressive than we remembered them. We even heard a new Marine Corp story - it seems he had actually been sent to Vietnam and just hadn’t ever told us before. See, it was just a quick trip over to rebuild a radar installation, blah, blah, blah…
Anyway, it’s the reason why, to this very day, I feel terribly uncomfortable going anywhere with a group of people. I just know that I’m going to end up spending several hours bored out of my skull while everybody but me talks and talks and talks.
My FIL has had this problem for years. He does not know how to shut up. Unfortunately, he also does not know how to edit himself internally to tell you a story on a subject, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He’ll start on something, and give you every little detail of what he’s thnking, which leads to the wildest tangents that have nothing to do with the original subject. An hour later, he is still talking, nobody has got a word in, and you can’t remember what he started up about in the first place. We suspect that he can’t, either. And it’s not like he’s trying to get a million words in as quickly as possible. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool souitherner, who speaks slowly, with great deliberation. He just does not stop. You can’t have a conversation with this otherwise wonderful man - you must endure a pointless monologue. Then you must endure the next one, and the next one. It sucks to be his wife. It also sucks to be his audience.
His son, after being out in the world for a couple of years, came home on a layover between jobs on the road. We gather that he, somewhat indelicately, had been telling his dad that he goes on for too long about nothing, and that it’s incredibly rude and insensitive to hold people captive for hours, talking about every possible thought that could occur to him. Well, some of it seems to have stuck. On our last few visits, he doesn’t seem to be doing it anymore. He’ll actually ask you questions now, and wait for you to answer. So he may have got the message, and is trying to work on being more sensitive about other people.
He’s also one of those middle-aged hobbyists. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the other guys at a motorcycle or model train show. No, wait, yes I can. Sucks to be them, too.
This case verges into actual mental illness, but seems a bit relevant.
I work as a contractor at a small US government agency. The agency frequently gets calls for the Defense Department because its name contains the word Defense and the telephone information operators don’t look very carerfully.
The agency gets a certain number of essentially crazy callers. When I say crazy, I mean like the guy who says he was wounded in the Soviet nuclear attack on Sicily that brought Christ back to earth, and the woman who warns us that stars outside earth’s atmosphere are sending rays that cause helicopter crashes. You know, full-on nuts.
Some of these callers are one-time events, some repeat for a while, then fade, and some are regulars.
Of the regulars, there’s one guy I actually like. He calls weekly, identifying the agency by name, so we know he doesn’t think he’s talking to the Defense Department. His calls are always the same structure – he identifies himself, asks how things are at the agnecy, offers to help the agency wirth anything he can do for us, and then describes a walk around his neighborhood, talking about the weather and everything he sees. He’s cheerful and lighthearted. “The weather is sunny. There’s a dog playing frisbee. The neighbor is taking in the trash cans. Birds are singing.” And so on and so on.
He ususally calls when the agency is not open, and leaves a voicemail message. But every once in a long while, he will call while someone is present.
One time I happened to get him, live. I was amused to hear the familiar cheerful opening, but I did not interrupt him. He must have realized he had a live human being and not a voice mail box, because he stopped himself and asked “Hello?”
At that point I thought, what’s the harm? So I said “Hello X, how are you today?”
As soon as he heard my voice, he re-started his monologue from the beginning, and talked right over me. His voice no longer sounded cheerful, but strained.
I suddenly realized that although he sounds cheerful, he’s trapped by a rigid compulsion to repeat this call over and over again, and even if he’s talking to a real live person at the agency, he cannot deviate from his script.
It made me feel a lot sorrier for him.
Sailboat
That’s if you can get one into treatment at all- I never had much sucess with my BPD (ex)boyfriend.
What kind of psychological help do your “boys” get in prison if they are diagnosed with something like that? Is it voluntary or mandatory?