Letter home...

Dear all,

I'm weird.

It’s that introspective, retrospective time of year again. A time to take stock and to take a long hard look at yourself, at least it is for me. It won’t lead to any resolutions about losing weight or becoming teetotal on New Year’s Eve, but it will help me to understand myself better, maybe even to make some readjustments, some tiny repairs to the jumbled mass of weirdness that I am. Time, maybe, to call the police again.

Simply using the word weird implies that there is a norm. Well, from someone who has not been ‘quite right, not normal, peculiar’ (as my parents put it) all my life I’d like to take issue with the idea that there is a norm. Sorry folks, but the people that think they aren’t weird are just about as weird as weird can be.

‘Normal’ is simply a set of conventions, rules, expectations, and doctrines driven by fear and an expectation that we must all conform to what society (whichever society that may be) expects us to. If I had been born into a Pygmy tribal environment in the 19^th century it would have been ‘normal’ to wear shrunken human heads on my belt and eat my enemies for dinner. If I were Japanese I wouldn’t be normal unless I frantically gave everybody I met a business card. I won’t even talk about religion, but suffice it to say that telling some guy all the bad things I’ve done and then saying a few words of repentance wouldn’t make me feel any better about myself.

The truth is the world is weird and each and every one of us in it is weird too. This is because we all create our own worlds, are each are own world, and in reality it is only our own view of the world that makes another person’s world seem weirder than ours. Of course there are extremes, dangerous violent extremes, cold empty extremes, but in the main most people share some sort of commonality and our weirdness is simply defined by what someone else finds acceptable.

Well, I’ll define myself any way I want if that is okay with you; because frankly I don’t give a flying fuck about what you think about me.