My bee fact…
“It’s funny you should mention that actually because the reason why people use smoke when they try to take honey out of a bee hive is because it gets them high. They get the munchies, and start gorging themselves on honey until their abdomens are so full, they can’t engage their stinger. You waste a bit of honey mind, but it’s better than getting stung a hundred times, and losing a hundred of your bees in the process.”
This is my bee fact. I learnt it a few years ago, and I’ve been shoehorning it into conversations ever since. I don’t often tell women my bee fact, normally just men. I’m not sure exactly when or why it happened, but my conversations with other men have now become almost entirely fact-based, and bee-themed.
My conversations go as follows: A noun is introduced into the ether, and then we all impatiently wait our turns to blurt out our facts before the conversation moves too far along.
Someone could be tearfully recounting the death of a loved one due to a fatal bee sting when I’d probably cut them off about halfway through so I could get my bee fact in. I never know what to say at a funeral, especially when I haven’t been invited, so I go and watch the football at the pub, hoping a bee might fly into the camera lens.
Alan Shearer once poignantly observed that football is a game, not only of one half, but two halves. It’s also a game of a trillion facts, which are constantly evolving, providing probably the most fertile environment for men to come and plant their facts; this may go some way to explain the game’s popularity.
Speaking of evolution, did you know that the reason our hands prune up in the bath is because water dwelling humans evolved this way so that they could grip things better when in the water. There’s more fresh water in the atmosphere than all the rivers on the planet combined, and God is a flying spaghetti monster. How? He just bloody well is, all right!
But what about a group of women? Well, I think women have a very different style of discourse. Unlike men, they primarily talk about themselves, but they open doors for their contemporaries to either give their opinion on the matter, or to tell almost exactly the same story with themselves this time as the protagonist.
Female conversations can be on the side of narcissistic, but at least they have a general narrative to them. In the world of fact based conversations you’re left with two choices. One is to say, ‘oh really’ and the second is to offer up a fact of your own, which isn’t too tenuously related to original fact. It doesn’t even really matter if it’s true, he won’t be listening; he’ll be lining up a playlist of facts, which you’ll simply validate by listening to them.
Perhaps I should write my bee fact down on a piece of paper, and every time I manage to work it into a conversation I’ll ask the listener to officiate the transaction with a signature.
So why all the facts? Well, I think men are generally uncomfortable talking about themselves all the while so they use things like facts and the fortunes of their football team in order to talk without speaking.
