A Perfect Example

In my high school days, one of my best friends was nicknamed Dogs.In my college days, one of my best friends was nicknamed Cat. One fine day when Dogs came to visit me at college, I introduced the two, "Dogs, this is Cat. Cat, this is Dogs." Naturally they got along great.

Cat was the quarterback of our fraternity flag football team. He wasn't particularly big, fast, or strong armed but he had great savvy and he knew how to win.

Cat was a math major. He would quarterback math study sessions in his room before big exams. The sessions were called "Victory at Bat with Cat". Alas most victory sessions turned into all night euchre games and/or bullshit sessions so the academic victories in that particular arena were a bit sparse.

With all of this going for him, Cat loved to play tricks. You always had to be paying attention with Cat. One of hs favorite tricks was "the perfect example". Here's how it went. Three people would be in a space. Let's call them Murph, Cat and Red Hot. Two of the people ....Cat and Murph...would be hip to the trick. The innocent, unknowing third person Red Hot would make an innocuous, natural gesture like checking his hair in the mirror. At that point, Cat would nod at Red and say, "See".

Murph, in on the trick would nod and go, "Uh huh, oh yeah. I see"

Then Cat would continue, "yup that's a perfect example of what I mean."

Red Hot would come off the mirror and ask, "what are you guys talking about?"

Cat would look at Murph and reply to Red Hot by saying, "See perfect example."

Murph would laugh and reply to Cat's reply to Red Hot by saying, " I see exactly what you mean." They would nod knowingly with barely suppressed grins.

Red Hot would now be growing insecure and kinda angry, the more insecure and angry the better. Red might say something like, "why don't you assholes take a shit for yourselves."

To which, Cat would respond, "See I knew it....freakin perfect."

Murph would chime in "EXACTLY what we were talking about."

And on and on and deeper it would go until Red Hot finally caught on. Catching on was the initiation point. From that point on the Red Hot in this example could become either the initiator or the chorus of a "perfect example" of his own if he had another person in on it and another Red Hot out of it.

Perfect examples spread around the campus like wildfire. The process kept repeating itself like a virus.until eventually a third of the student body living on campus was affected. At that point, perfect examples were being indicated of professors, campus cops, bartenders, girlfriends, boyfriends. The same process...initiation and then collaboration. Some folks never "got" it and grew increasingly more insecure and angry as the persons pointing out each of their moves every day grew and they never knew why. A lot of those people went on to become bad teachers, so bad in fact that they went on to be college professors.

Then as the sixties took their dark turn, the news and the newspapers and the war and the draft became further perfect examples of perfect fookin examples of exactly what we meant. Of course, when we made that transition into reality rather than trickery, nobody really knew what the "fook" anything or anybody meant.

Johnson would come on teevee and talk about sending more troops to Nam.

We'd sit around the tube and say, "Perfect."

Even to this day, I still carry around a load of that insecurity, dark humor and anger around with me wondering if all this can actually be true and not some kind of joke. This story is a perfect "f**king example of it.