Slaughterhouse 24

START TIME: 9:32
END TIME: 10:48
WORD COUNT: 548

Question: “What is ‘normal’?”

The hack thing to do would be to stroll over to dictionary.com and play cut and paste. These are fast and occasionally sloppy and disjointed, but I’m not a hack. If you don’t know what normal is and you want the easy definition, I’ll pause for a moment while you look it up.

I think normal is the enemy of interesting, the equivalent of plain, and yet still something worthy of aspiration. As a personality trait, it can either be an insult or a compliment.

Normal is coloring within the lines, driving the speed limit or right up against it, not because of a posted sign but because that’s what feels right. Normal is not sticking out in any manner, neutral shades against a riot of color, all peaceful white noise in front of a backdrop of every imaginable sound, from the cacophonous to the sublime.

There’s something about you that isn’t normal, and believe me, everyone around you is acutely aware of what it is. From how you look to what you do to how you talk or what you feel, the odds are pretty much a stone cold lock that it’s something the people around you could recognize. Could imitate. All of us, as human beings, start out as a little gob of meiotic cells that by every appearance is normal. The vinyl circle gets embossed with thousands of groves that turn two ounces of plastic into the Temptations. Or Tina Turner. Or the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Our grooves are DNA, and I guess “normal” is what makes up the canvas.

I don’t think I know anyone who’s “normal” as I don’t think that any of us are. I don’t run into a preponderance of abnormal people, but all of the people I interact with on a daily basis are normal enough to not be considered insane or troubled, but not so unusual that there’s orderlies with butterfly nets, chasing after them while they’re clad in a hospital gown.

And if the opposite of normal is considered crazy, or flawed, or imperfect, I happen to know a lot more people along those lines; does their existence as a majority make THEM normal, like a class-action kind of normalcy? Does normal get defined in increasingly smaller, concentric circles, so that the Venn diagram that makes me normal among my friends and family makes me abnormal by the standards of others? I write. I ride bicycles. I like pommes frites and an analgesic painkiller called Biofreeze. How many people are in that particular intersection of circles? That’s my normal, but I don’t think that’s the normal for a lot of other people.

So ultimately, I think trying to define what is “normal” without conext is the same as trying to define what is “blue” without context. What kind of blue are we talking? NO adjectives! Is it blue like the Cubs’ jerseys or blue like the Lions’ logo? Blue like the sky or blue like a cobalt glass vase? There’s so many variants that the word needs some help.

So with that, Nancy, I apologize; the definition was atrocious. The only thing that you can take away from this is the ability to say, “I asked him what “normal” was and he couldn’t answer it.”