This week, Peter Segal set up per­fect exam­ple of the human desire to fill in holes. In this case, how­ever, the sleuthing drive was put to cre­ative use.

On the 13th of Decem­ber — the night of the Chicago Com­mu­nity Trust’s 96th anniver­sary event — Mr. Segal was serendip­i­tously in a posi­tion to take a pic­ture of Yo-Yo Ma on a bath­room floor with a wom­bat. Because he is a kind, gen­er­ous and some­what mis­chie­vous soul, he shared his cap­tioned photo with thou­sands of Twit­ter fol­low­ers.

Yo Yo Ma on the floor of a bath­room, with a wom­bat. twitter.com/petersagal/sta…

— Peter Sagal (@petersagal) Decem­ber 14, 2011

Before long, Red­dit picked it up, and a mostly amus­ing train of spec­u­la­tion was cre­ated: Peo­ple didn’t know why Yo-Yo Ma was on a bath­room floor with a wom­bat, but they wanted to guess why more than they seemed to sim­ply want to know why.

I envy this cre­ative bent. I am able to muster a sim­i­lar sense of play­ful guess­ing for Yo-Yo-Wombat-type holes in my under­stand­ing: Sure, fill those with non­sense! It’s fun! But when the infor­ma­tion gaps are per­sonal, or have a bear­ing on my life or the lives of fam­ily mem­bers and friends, my instant reac­tion is to fill them with worst pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios. Why shouldn’t/can’t I instead fill them with mar­su­pial dae­mons and beau­ti­ful cello lan­guages that only wom­bats under­stand? Is it the fear that, should I be opti­mistic, the real facts will be a let-down? Well, per­haps they might be if I were too pollyanna in cre­at­ing my own take… It is never wise to fill a hole with rain­bow glit­ter and uni­corn rides. Instead, a sur­re­al­ist approach might be bet­ter suited to my depres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ties: Fill in the fright­en­ing unknown with rain­bow chicken-snails and uni­corn farts, and the idea will be amus­ing until the facts arrive, and will then be eas­ily traded for real­ity, since they were hardly pos­si­ble to begin with… except in Lau­rie Pink’s drawni­verse.

Res­o­lu­tion: Next time the boss has his door closed, I am going to assume he is prac­tic­ing park­our with the rest of the man­age­ment team. Yes. Much bet­ter. Now, does any­one want to join me in cre­at­ing a ver­sion of Clue where “It was Yo-Yo Ma in the Lava­tory with the Wom­bat” could be a pos­si­ble outcome?