'The Man with the Hook' stories

In late October 2006, my first daytime walk in Stuart, FL, was punctuated by a man on a bicycle riding in the roadway alongside the sidewalk dangling a fishhook on a pole behind him in the future bicycle lane.

Growing up in the northwestern PA mountains, 'man with a hook' stories usually described an angry man who would suddenly appear beside a parked car and rip open a door. The movie industry has given us performer Richard Harris filmed as 'A Man Called Horse' who was impaled with a giant hook during some kind of brutal tribal ceremony.

The 'hook' typical of such stories is also equated with the trigger of a gun, which can cause a great deal of tissue damage when the firearm discharges; and with tools such as blow-torches.

This region has accommodated the installation of numerous Asian-American restaurants as a ploy to assume university status, as actions which employ CA-origin Asian-Americans. The new bicycle path alongside the newly renovated roadway has been observed to hold various items such as nuts and bolts (one day a bag of onion rings) that riders must negotiate as they bike through the age 55+ condominium complexes beside the St. Lucie River -- complexes largely populated with retired military 'Honorable Discharges'.

The 'Honorable Discharges' for the most part do not have their own discrete organization where they can routinely rehash their military training without practicing it elsewhere, but array themselves in a variety of work-related groups such as AARP from which attitudes and emotions trickle into the larger population.

'Man with a hook' stories may have contributed to the sociological conditions which have fostered various school-grounds massacres.