That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard

Cafe Society
1

Okay, so last night I went to a local bar after work and met up with some friends. At some point in the conversations, three of us were discussing the beers they had, and one mentioned “Arrogant Bastard Ale.” J.D. (we’ll call him) made the comment "Yeah, it’s like the Devil on the bottles just calling out to me saying “DRINK ME!” to which G-Funk (we’ll call him) says:

“Actually, if you look at the skin tecture, it’s more a gargoyle than a devil. I know because I believe in a past life, I was a gargoyle.”

Okay, now, I’ve always had some reservations about G-Funk. He kinda creeps me out, you know? He and my friend A-Cat dated for a good while, then broke up, and as she put it, he was always “One step away from psycho stalker guy.” But in the past few months, he’s calmed down a bit, sobered up some, got a full time job and started bathing regularly, so he’s not so creepy. But upon hearing this, all that newfound faith that he’s getting on the right track went out the window. He continued:

"Actually, I was first a dragon. Dragons were originally protectors of mankind, until humans got frightened of them and started hunting them down because they were terrified of their great size and power. Then there came out a whole bunch of stone figures that people thought were carved by people…but I don’t believe it. The dragons made themselves smaller and stone so they could continue to protect people, and that’s where gargoyles come from. The proof I have that I was a dragon, is that I was born in 197X, which according to the Chinese calander is the year of the dragon. That, and the real proof, is I have what I call “Dragon Speech.”

“Dragon Speech? What’s that?” says J.D.
“Dragon Speech? Have you been snorting coke again?” I think.

So, G-Funk clears his throat, and procedes to blurt out silly “ancient” speech reminicent of the best Saturday morning cartoon dealing with Druids or Wizards in this, admittadely impressive, deep voice.

I then left the conversation.

What gets me is…he honestly believes this stuff. A good number of my friends believe in reincarnation, so to think that you are the reincarnation of something isn’t that bad. But come on! Just because in the Chinese calander I was born in the year of the ram and I can do a pretty good goat impersonation doesn’t mean I was one of the Billy Goats Gruff in a past life. It was just one of those conversations that, just when you think someone is actually getting better and not quite as dumb as you think, they really just prove you were right all along.

I swear, if it weren’t for my horse, I never would have spent that year in college.

2

Are you sure he really believes it? This strikes me as something people say when they want other people to think they’re weird.

3

I had a friend who was convinced he could see magical wards and was regularly visited by Cthulhu mythos creatures in the middle of the night. He’d also wander around making prophecies to random people. No drug use that I know of, although I strongly suspect someone slipped him acid at a party without his knowledge.

He cleaned up eventually–now, when you bring it up, he looks faintly embarassed and changes the subject.

4

Yeah, that is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.

BTW: I love that comedy routine. I’ve actually used that line when I knew people where evesdropping on my conversation.

5

I’m inclined to agree with you.

6

Your friends all have cool names!

7

I have to agree with you. Although…

(underlining mine)

Are you sure you weren’t a computer chip instead (as long as were talking being an inanimate object in a previous life) :smiley:

8

I had a friend who was so into Lovecraft, he got us in on a Ouija game and was so obviously shifting the pallette around to spell Lovecraft’s name, we laughed him silly. He was swearing up and down he didn’t do any pushing. Like slortar’s friend, he doesn’t talk about it anymore.

9

Isn’t that the story behind the Disney cartoon TV show? (I’ve never actually seen it, but I know it’s about living gargoyles, maybe that’s where he got the idea.) I was the Little Mermaid in a previous life. No, really, I was.

10

If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.
[/Lewis Black]

11

I love that line. Lewis Black kicks ass.

Legomancer you’d be surprised the depths of bullshit people believe. I’ve noticed the stupider one’s beliefs the less likely one is to bath regularly. I think the common factor is a lack of social skills. As a result they have inadequate feedback with regards to their beliefs.

I’ve mentiond a former friend of mine before with regards to his spiritual beliefs. He also fancied himself a philosopher and was working on theory of language and it involved words in a “cognitive space” with gaussian distribuitions and a whole lot of fancy math thrown in to cover up the fact he had no idea what he was talking about. He hadn’t read any research on language and had just read the earlier work on philosophy of language. I wanted to beat him about the face with my Intro Linguistics text book.

12

Oh I know a lot of people believe some stupid stuff. But I also have known my fair share (and more) of people who really really want people to think they are weird. I briefly dated a girl who claimed that demons were trying to get her soul at night. At first this alarmed me, but then it annoyed me because she didn’t really think this, she just wanted the attention that came from it. She was incredibly insecure and refused to believe that she was interesting all by herself without having to make up weird things to claim to believe.

“Lewis Black” recently addressed this phenomena:
http://truemeaningoflife.com/wisdom.php?topid=36765&responses=2

13

IMO he’s either nuts or has an overactive imagination.

14

I used to know a guy who refused to look at the moon at night. He’d take any chance he could get to mention that he couldn’t look at the moon because it “disturbed” him. It took a while for someone to take the bait and ask him WHY he was frightened of the moon. He proceeded to tell us, in a low, dead-serious tone, that he used to be a werewolf. Yes, a real, live, Lon Cheney werewolf! Wow! Ahem.

Anyway, I wondered for a while whether he was truly nuts or just faking it. I finally concluded that it was the latter when I noticed something interesting – doing his little weirdo routine was the ONLY WAY he would get attention from the opposite sex. I know, I know – what female in their right mind would find an alleged ex-werewolf appealing? Well, you’d be surprised. He got one very rational, intelligent girl to fall head over heels for him, and a couple years later worked his spell on another. They are now married and have a daughter.

Now THAT’S scarier than any werewolf!

(No word yet on whether the kid gets unusually cranky and hairy during a full moon.)

:smiley:

15

[beer hi-jack] Mmmmm Arrogant Bastard Ale [/beer hi-jack]

good stuff!

:slight_smile:

16

My brother and I used to claim we used to be werewolves. Course, we were 7 and 5 at the time.

17

I had a paranoid schizophrenic friend who said that witches in some cult called ‘The Family’ were spying on him, and there was this one guy with glasses who kept creeping around his apartment. He heard voices, and he said that it was because one of those witches put a bug in his food so they could listen to him, and it was part of the reason why he had stomach problems. He was going on about that one time when I said to him ‘Jeff, if there is a listening device in your stomach, why do you hear them instead of the other way around? There wouldn’t be a speaker in a bug’. He stood there, staring, for about ten seconds, and then said that they must have got the bug and the receiver mixed up and gave him the wrong one, and that’s why he could hear them.