aiming low

there is a guy.

well, there may be a guy. i can't be entirely certain because i have not seen him. however, given that this person's zone of operation is the men's bathroom, i am going to assume for the purposes of this post that there is in fact a guy (though i readily concede that it may be an unusually stealthy girl).

ok. so here we are in the bathroom. there was a guy in the bathroom previously, but he is gone now. he has, however, left indelible traces behind. the word "curley" is scrawled everywhere - scratched into the stalls, the mirror, even the porcelain. i have two ideas about this:

the first is that "curley" is an old man. his wife died from cardiac amyloidosis when he was a young man and the chemotherapy she received during treatment left her sterile. he never came to terms with her death, so he remained childless and alone. his friends became distant and eventually melted away as he allowed his grief to overwhelm and consume him. now an old man, shriveled and alone, he feels the icy touch of the reaper. he will never have children, but he wants - he needs - to leave something behind. so, like borf or that guy my roommate knows who's thing is the big boy with three eyes, he has adopted an alias and taken a stab at immortality. he has aimed low. he knows that.

my second idea is that "curley" is not a sobriquet. his father, an illiterate man, gave him the name after seeing punch drunks for the first time. his mother was against it, but his father was a forceful man. a reserved sensitive child, curley never demonstrated an aptitude for physical comedy. this lack opened a rift between him and his father, who took to drinking and domestic abuse. curley's feelings of inadequacy and persecution intensified following his introduction to the school system. children are indiscriminate in their cruelty, but once his fellow students learned his ridiculous name, that cruelty was distilled, focused on him. battered at home and school, curley began to create elaborate revenge fantasies. blaming the three stooges for his nightmarish childhood, but unable to take revenge on the dead, he set out to destroy the film industry entire. having grown up in such a stultifying environment however, curley's plans were relatively uninspired. defacing movie theater bathrooms is the best he could come up with. he has aimed low, but he doesn't know that.