BOLTON, ON ― Friends of local landscaper Riley Landry report that the 32-year-old has developed a new hypothesis that he is currently in the process of testing, which is that he is “simply on another wavelength” from everyone else, rather than chronically bad at communicating his thoughts in oral or written form.
Landry, who, along with all his closest acquaintances, has English for a first language and therefore can offer no excuses, is notorious for his tendency to ignore direct, simple, procedural questions in texts. His friend Francis Kovac, 34, notes that this often results in him getting meet-up locations or times wrong, causing confusion and sometimes cancellations of plans. Landry, when questioned, shrugged. “I’m not a details guy, you know? More of a conceptual thinker.”
Although Landry is better at responding to more personal questions, he often tends to do so only after two weeks, despite the fact that he will respond instantly to any meme that is sent him (except, uncannily, those sent as “bait traps” to get him to respond to real texts). In both cases, however, the response is usually something along the lines of “k” or an emoji, which he refers to as “concision,” reminding his critics that “brevity is the soul of wit.”
Landry has not told a joke that landed, nor got one without it being painstakingly explained until it is no longer funny, since 2018, according to the consensus of his friends.
“Grammar is a social construct. You have to know the rules to break them correctly,” the man who frequently uses the phrase “I could care less” lectured one of his friends. He waved away his syntactically mutilated text messages on similar grounds. “You don’t get it. It’s alright, most people don’t, just like they don’t get Shakespeare, either ― a man, whom [sic], like me, invented tons of words and phrases. This is just my albatross to bear.”
Landry has taken his experiment seriously, running trials where he explains that “my natural interpersonal style doesn’t conform to society’s boxes” to everyone he meets, and counting every time his interlocutor politely neglects to punch him in the face as evidence for his hypothesis being an acceptable one.
“To be honest, he’s actually got a lot better these last few years. We’ve all been working hard on him, and at least now he admits that it isn’t a double entendre to use the wrong ‘their,’” mused Landry’s sister, Tara Laval. “It’s not like it bothers me that much. I see bad grammar everywhere. I just wish he would stop insisting that he’s an authorial genius instead of just wrong.”
However, Laval fears this is just the beginning. “He’s been branching out into other revolutionary theories lately, like ‘I’m the pensive, brooding type’ instead of just not knowing how to show or ask for affection.”
