On weirdness and weirdos

Greetings, my friends. I am still neck-deep in all of the chaos that comes with a move-out/move-in. My son and I are leaving to take him down to college a week from tomorrow. I’m out of my apartment the next day. I may sleep clean through Labor Day afterwards. In the meantime, I have a little reader-participation post for you. You get to weigh in on a question central to my future plans.

I have a rough concept in mind. It is very simple. I recently ran the general gist by someone. They thought the whole idea was weird and thought I was weird for not thinking that it was. I said I didn’t find it weird at all. They then countered with a line that made me laugh so hard, I had to write it down.

They said:

“Of course, it doesn’t seem weird to you. Weirdness never seems weird to the weirdo.”

‘Weirdness never seems weird to the weirdo.’ I am 100% going to get that on a t-shirt

Now, for context, the idea this person found weird was me simply… getting out into life; meeting people; having human experiences; and writing about some of them along the way.

Does that seem all that weird a concept to you? I dunno… it just doesn’t seem so to me.

John Steinbeck did exactly that in ‘Travels with Charley,’ and he was my age when he did it. Anthony Bourdain did nothing *but* that for the whole back half of his life.

What’s so weird about getting out into the world and meeting some of the other 8 billion people inhabiting the same planet?

What this particular person seemed to find strange about the whole thing was the idea of just meeting strangers and… talking to them.

Y’all, I do that… all the time NOW.

[Well, except for over the last couple years, but let’s never discuss The Dark Time again, shall we? It was an outlier. A horrible, horrible outlier.]

Now, just so I don’t come off as someone who really IS weird, I don’t just go walking up to people all like “Hello, stranger. I would like to engage you in a substantive, personal dialogue. What’s your afternoon like?”

I just… end up talking to people… and once I have, I usually can’t even remember how we went from “can’t believe this mall is closing…”/”me either” to having heard their entire life story.

I just encounter someone in passing somewhere and either a) make a casual, friendly comment; or b) ask an entirely rhetorical-sounding question that leaves room for a real answer if the person wants to offer one.

“How are you doing this evening?”

“How’s your day going?”

“Any fun plans for the weekend?”

These are not exactly blindsiding personal interrogations.

I just offer light banter to people I meet and then… things… just… happen. Twenty minutes later, I’m so relieved that their daughter beat the odds or am looking forward to meeting their partner because she sounds lovely or… or… or…

It just… happens.

It’s just human conversation. It’s effortless. I enjoy it.

Is that really such a weird thing – to like people and like hearing whatever it is they choose to offer about themselves? *Actual human lives* are the most cinematic stories that could ever be written. Is it so odd to enjoy coming to know them?

There is a woman who works at the convenience store in my town. One night a few weeks ago, I asked her how she was doing. She said she was tired. I empathized and asked if she had anything fun coming up for the weekend. Fast-forward to a week later and she was showing me pictures from her trip with seven of her friends. They roadtripped to Tennessee and went white water rafting and ziplining and… she was… just… so… happy. She’s young and a first-generation immigrant. For a few days, she had the pure joy of community as company in a life where that is wealth.

I just asked her, “How are you doing tonight?” one time… and now she asks me “How are *you* doing today?” whenever she sees me. It is incredibly sweet. She asks with a playful pressing that says “This works both ways. You don’t get to just care. You have to share too.”

Basic humanity. Simple connection. Life made better by it. An anecdote of only a paragraph. Give me a handful of those and a little longer though, they become stories… and even if they don’t, a clerk at a counter is now a person I know.

Is that really such a weird thing to want more of?

I just think that we are at a time when we are drowning in contact and starved for connection. We have endless exposure to other humans but less and less in the way of shared experiences. We observe a million faces on screens. Yet we barely see the people we actually encounter.

While I may very much be a weirdo blind to my own weirdness, I just think wanting to walk out into the world present in my humanity and open to the humanity of others – while writing about that walk – isn’t a weird thing to want at all. I think there is a life in it. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if there is a living in it, but I think there’s a life… and it’s the one I want to live.

If that makes me weird, so be it.

But, hey, y’all can be the judge.