Here’s to being weird

I like being weird. 

Most never see this side of me; they see a balding, middle-aged man with 20 pounds to lose (I’m working on it). A respectable dad who works in healthcare marketing to raise two children who are now young adults and nearly fully raised, but is now shifting responsibilities to elderly parents. A dude who lounges around a house in baggy jeans and a flannel shirt, at the balloon end of a respectable cul-de-sac in old blue Massachusetts. Who likes to mind his own business. Crack a few dad jokes and a few beers on the weekend.

Average, boring.

But if you look closely enough you might see a few cracks in this not-carefully crafted façade. 

I don’t watch sports (though I do hold an unhealthy relationship with the Buffalo Bills; please win one Super Bowl before I die). I don’t have a woodshop or a golf bag or fishing rods or a sports car.

I have a combination basement office and barroom hangout full of books. Fantastic artwork adorns the walls—here a Frank Frazetta print, there a Tom Barber skeletal warrior, and a tapestry advertising Iron Maiden’s Stranger in a Strange Land. In one corner, a CD tower of heavy metal music. A decent sized collection of Savage Sword of Conan magazines. DVDs and VHS tapes of The Lord of the Rings, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max, Jaws, The Shining, Blade Runner, and odd horror films.

Scattered on my bookshelves are a few odd items. Skulls. Viking warriors. A painted candle carved as a dark wizard. 

All of this office stuff might give someone pause, my in-laws for example. But inside of me is where things truly get weird.

I am a hopeless romantic. In the old and true sense of that word. I am in love with stories of heroism and adventure. I see the world as enchanted (though that enchantment is largely vanished from sight, subsumed by modernity and the machine). I believe in the existence of objective morality, of good and evil, and that some type of omnipotent creator probably exists. 

I can’t explain the world otherwise. And so I’ve taken the inward journey, deeper into the weird than most. 

I once explored imaginary dungeons of my own making. Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop RPGs were a formative experience in my youth, and I played again in young adulthood. Video and computer RPGs are abandoned childhood pursuits. Even today I wouldn’t say no to either of them; I just prefer to read and write about weird things. In the pages of books I let my mind explore other’s creations and wander in strange worlds.

I have been to the steppes of the Hyborian Age and the deep woods of Middle-Earth. Prowled the dank streets of Lankhmar with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Listening to the songs of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, I am a Trooper charging on horseback in the Crimean War, a Sentinel in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

I have been these people, inhabited these places. Have you? 

I remember thinking in my teenage years that one day this would all wear off. That my musical tastes would soften to top 40. I’d drink Miller Lite and grill and play golf.

I hate golf. God is it terrible.

I do enjoying grilling and I’ll drink a Miller Lite if pressed. But I never gave up heavy metal or sword-and-sorcery. You can take my SSOCs when you pry them from my cold dead fingers. I know I’ll be weird forever.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be normal. More than once I wished I was born with a fix-it gene, but the physical world is sadly not my forte. I wonder what it would be like to be more interested in the events of the world, a political junky. To enjoy pop culture, TV shows like Ozarks or Breaking Bad, or take interest in the lives of celebrities. It would make awkward conversations easier. I hate those too.

I might have achieved more in my professional life if I made money my master KPI.

But in the end I could not do these things. The weird kept calling. 

For a short while I denied this, as I transitioned to adulthood. In college I tried to be someone else. It did not work; the weird came back. It never left.

I’m proud to be weird. Today I embrace it; I wear Conan the Barbarian or KISS t-shirts and listen to metal and don’t give a fuck. I write a dusty old blog about old shit very few care about. Because it’s who I am. Maybe it’s who you are, too.

We need weird people. The world would certainly be a lot less fun if everyone were normal. Maybe, interminable.

Here’s to being weird.