#106 - The Swashbuckling Shatterbrain Shane

Everyone knows a Shane. It’s inevitable. And when Shakespeare asked if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, what he meant was that what matters is what something is, not what it is called. But he was referring to roses, not dudes named Shane. Because every guy named Shane strangely has an identity that somehow quantifies him as a Shane.

So does a Shane make the name, or does the name make a Shane?

I don’t know. But I do know that if you call a fire ant a rhinoceros, it doesn’t make it any more of a rhinoceros than the name Shane makes him a Dave, or a Todd. You know a fire ant by observing what it is. Same for a guy named Shane.

And then you have a Shane who epitomizes Shaneness to the degree that the unmistakable attributes that ever were part of a Shane are plentifully apparent. What are these attributes? I don’t know. In the same way that I may describe the spiny legs and flaming red hue of a fire ant, there is no way to exactly capture the essence of that which the limitation of words will never overcome. You just know one when you see it.

I mean, it’s easy to explain why Davey Dabs assigned the adjective swashbuckling to his name. The dude has vaporized such copious amounts of shatter that his anachronistic personality has largely usurped his sense of modern reality. Like the man is trapped inside the body of Errol Flynn in one of his chivalrous mid-century flicks. And he is very good looking, which wouldn’t annoy Davey Dabs were it not for the throwing of more hair tosses than the entire lot of Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders during a playoff game.

Some may call it an identity crisis. Davey Dabs calls it shatterbrain.