Harry

Harry often gets so angry that he punches walls. He also loves the symphony. Sometimes he wishes he had a dog so that he could kick it, but he understands that that would make him a really bad person and his psyche just couldn't handle that sort of blow. He has been known to force feed pigeons more crumbs of stale bread even after it is abundantly clear that they have had enough for the moment. To say that Harry is complex would be to use the wrong descriptive word. Harry is above a simple, dictionary definition. He is both modern and caveman-like, he is both an avid outdoors-man and yet he has spent many years perfecting the structure of the walls in his house and he is both rule-driven and an avid rule-breaker depending on the amount of testosterone screaming through his system. He loves eating eggs and yet he spends many hours looking at each one before cooking them searching for a personality within their protective shells. He is a man of contradictions and he loves that about himself.

Harry spends his days at the bank. He doesn't work there, and least not yet. Harry believes that if he continues to show up at the bank everyday then eventually people who work there will just figure that he does too. So far this hasn't happened and instead the employees treat him with a combination of pleasantness and fear with the scales tipped way towards the later. Most are thinking "who is the freak in the pinstriped suit with the clown-sized bow-tie, basketball high tops, with the headband and 1970s afro, walking around with the big smile and a huge exaggerated wink, pointing his finger like a gun at everyone like he is our best friend and also, who is that overly muscular dude next to him". Harry is encouraged because the staff seems to be growing slightly less worried looking each day. Today is day number 100 - "at this rate I should have a job in a few years" thinks Harry. Fortunately for him and unfortunately for everyone else, Harry has no real concept of the length of a year on Earth as he spent most of his youth believing he lived on Mercury. A cruel trick that his older brother and parents colluded on. This had originally started as a silly April Fools' Day trick his brother Oscar played on him, but once Harry bought in so easily, the whole family enthusiastically gone on board. They tried to remove all "Earthiness" to the house, living in extreme temperatures and wearing gas masks all the time, no radio or TV and lots of propaganda about the wonders of  the god Mercury and lots of hate literature about Earth set up around the house. This trick went on from age 8-18 until one day Harry opened the curtains. saw the world outside and immediately went to his brother and applied a thick smear of peanut butter to his face.

Harry is also in no rush for any real work because he was set for money after taking his family to court and suing them for all they were worth and winning. Little did he know but he caught a big break with the judge. Judge Elliott was actually quite pro-long, elaborate, ridiculously draw out pranks pulled on family members but, luckily for Harry, was even more so very anti-all things astronomical (he even hates the Houston Astros). The judge threw multiple books at Harry's family forcing his parents and brother into poverty.He hadn't seen them in many years - to say that things ended poorly would be either an extreme understatement or overstatement. Harry wasn't sure which as they also tricked him about the usage of both of those terms as well. 

Harry is a self-raised man and is always giving himself the advice to "man up" regardless of the situation."Manning up" seems to be his answer for everything and seeing that his life was basically okay (he had nothing to compare it to as he avoided making any comparisons at all in his life) he felt good about this philosophy. He walks around town yelling "Man Up!!!" all the time. Clearly, it draws some fairly odd, pseudo-sympathetic looks at the library while trying to check out books, at the start of a walk on the trails near his house, while putting out his recycling and especially when he volunteered with some youths who were learning how to write resumes online - those resumes were the most macho-sounding, aggressive and intimidating resumes and were surprisingly successful. In fact one work place wanted to hire the actual resume for the position as they were so impressed and scared. 

He loves giving nicknames to things around the house. He calls his toaster "the browning guy who takes the bread and makes it all hard and crackily", his bed "da thing I lie on that makes me all visiting the big green hill with the fancy squirrels", the sink "the cow with the metal tubes that is all like making water- mooooo!" and the TV "Sheila". Once he tried to give a nickname to his beloved pair of socks, but they got a hole in them and had to be thrown away. He was only able to calm down after bench pressing his bench press and eating a five pound bag of flax seeds. Incidentally his proposed nickname for his socks were "mom" and "dad" which was evidence to Harry that the electroshock therapy system that he built and administered to himself for 30 minutes before going to bed every evening was working. He no longer wanted to kill his parents. He now only wanted to see them wrapped in bacon and then severely maimed and beaten by his hungry, pork fat-loving neighbours. His goal is to get to the day when he can give each of them a hug and look in their eyes with love. This is his motivation each time he attaches the electrodes to various areas of his body before going to sleep with his stuffed elephant "Poochy".

He has always had a problem with lifting things, which is strange because he is "built". His muscles are glossy and smooth. In fact who are we kidding, his whole body is glossy and smooth, his muscles just demand more attention. He works out and is a member of the local wax consortium. He liberally covers himself with so much wax as he once read in one obscure Icelandic journal that it was inconclusively "not too bad for you" and the upside was that you were covered with wax. That was enough for Harry. His hands are always slippery so much so that when people approach him to shake his hand (which is rare, as he is not the sort of person anyone ever thinks of doing that to unless under some sort of mind control) and they have any forward momentum at all, they go slip, sliding away. Harry started the way many young men start, in the weight room. But this relatively normal start quickly branched off into lifting fallen tree branches, rocks of a variety of shapes and sizes (incidentally making a series of rock-art displays that the local art gallery showed some interest in, until he accidentally un-friended them online - he was actually just trying to buy some avocados to make a killer-guac), chunks of ice, chunks of cheese and larger-than-life ice sculptures in the shape of cheese.

Growing up he was always picking fights. First with his classmates, then his teachers, then fictitious human beings like Santa and his librarian and then, bored with humans and their silly emotions like crying and whining, he moved on to bigger and tougher battles. These included when to use capital letters (but to be clear, not the capital letters themselves, whom he had nothing but the greatest respect for), kale ("I'll superfood you!"), and his made-up alter-ego "Joey" and his impeccable, schoolboy-like dental hygiene (he often had dreams/nightmares about those gleaming, towering, transcending molars either rescuing him or torturing him depending on the size of protein shake be had after his workout).

But despite this harsh and tough guy demeanor is a man who just wants to find love. He has tried everything but there were no takers. Harry is leading a lonely existence. No family, days "working" at the bank, and all of the wax and no one special to share it with. He often has mock conversations with himself imagining what he would say to a nice girl he met. "Why yes, I do love electroshock therapy. What a surprise this would come up on our first date while waiting for the appetizer to arrive." or "You also cover yourself in wax most days too? I thought it was only me! I agree, I love the sheen as well." or "You also hate your parents and want your older brother to burn like the wet, gasoline soaked rag that he is? No way, me too!" These imaged meetings would lead him to banging his head against the wall shouting "Stupid! Moron! Idiot!" which, coincidentally, was also the name of the fictionalized account of his life he was working on. It was loosely based on his own life except it was about this incredible ladies man who travelled throughout the world meeting gorgeous women, taming wild animals, drinking amazing coffee, walking into random banks and refusing their pleas to employ him and educating the really really really dumb people he met on his travels.

Harry went to sleep each evening hoping that tomorrow would be the day when his life would change and yet it never did. Until one day after an exceptionally good sleep with dreams solely about the number eight and cashews set to the music of Brahms, Harry decided to break from his usual routine. He got up, did a few back flips, brushed his teeth, and knew that his life was going to change for the better. He was going to "climb" a "mountain" both figuratively and literally. He kissed his own nose in the large mirror by the door, swiftly broke the mirror on the floor and sprinted out the door never to look back.