When Did You Figure You Were Kinda Weird?
"Werewolves, we didn't come up eating french fries through the ages" - Stephen Graham Jones, 'Mongrels'
But first, your bi-weekly Vine: Monday was Chapter 17, “Saint Louise of Vine.” Tuesday was Chapter 18, “Nearer My God To Thee.” Today is Chapter 19, “The Ghost & Edith.”
Longtime followers of my Instagram will know that I have a child. He won’t be important to this blog, don’t worry. All you need to know is he rules, I love him, he’s five years old, and he’s a big weirdo. Longtime readers of this blog will know that ‘weirdo’ is close to the highest praise I have for a person, and that I know I’m a weirdo (not necessarily high praise when I say it about myself, but we’re working on that).
(‘Weirdo’ to me is kinda like what ‘cute’ is to the marvelous poet Alina Pleskova, who was this week’s The Line Break podcast guest. She says ‘cute’ is her word for high praise either at the two-minute mark or the hour-ten mark, I’m not sure. Listen to the whole thing and let me know. No fast forwards, I could be off on those times)
Okay, enough self-promo. Time for self-reflection, huh?
The first thing I’ll say about my high school is that it wasn’t super cliquey. People hung out with other people they shared interests with, sure, but it’s not like band kids never spoke to athletes never spoke to stoners never spoke to theatre kids or whatever. That said, I consciously self-selected as an outsider, like I remember having this thought to myself. “You’re not like the popular kids, you’re punk as fuck,” I’d think, completely compartmentalizing that I’d been playing soccer or basketball with those same “popular kids” like the day before. I knew I liked different stuff, though. Not every 16-year-old is as singularly obsessed with putting jazz chords in punk songs.
That said, though, not every 16-year-old singularly obsessed with putting jazz chords in punk songs also can name every NBA champion dating back to 1978 off the top of their head also has read most of Anne Rice’s vampire novels.
Now, that’s an easy rhetorical trick. Pick three disparate things about yourself. Bet you seem out there! That doesn’t answer the question of how the hell I got this way.
Go back even further and my memory’s near-total fuzz. In elementary school, I liked reading. I liked comics and video games, sure, but not nearly enough for it to be personality-consuming. My main thing was athlete, and the fact that I never made a school team and was done with AAU basketball/travel soccer by age 14 should tell you I wasn’t great. But I was good, decent enough that sports could be my thing.
The easy, non-I-turned-out-5’9” answer for quitting sports is my friends weren’t doing sports, even though they were all pretty athletic, too—we’d play backyard football after band practice. You do what your friends do. Still, it says something that all my friends are also weirdos. There’s that self-selecting as an outsider thing, sorta like Jesus deciding to hang out with fishermen and sex workers.
Did my family make me a weirdo? I come from a two-parent, middle-class, white USian suburban household. Judge that demographic however. An old family friend once said “the thing about you Corlews is you all think you’re the normal one.” This is true on a lot of levels. Everyone in my family is a complete weirdo—the only one who has a case for not being a total weirdo is my mom, and she married my dad, so. This is also true because I absolutely think I’m the most sane one in my family, even though that is untrue by objective metrics. My parents were both in the medical field, my cousin owns her own hair salon, my aunt was a high school teacher and my uncle’s in school administration, and on top of that, they all go to church. One cousin’s objectively weirder than me, another’s still young but seems more normal. My brother is also an artist, but he does stuff like “plays instruments that sound nice” and “sings opera” and “trapeze.” Okay, that one’s actually not up for debate—David, you’re at least as weird as me.
Maybe I mention everyone’s jobs because I’ll always be a little insecure about never holding a job for longer than three years, or because I feel a little guilty I didn’t fit in better with corporate world stuff so that my wife could be the one who gets to stay home with the kid. There are also the inadequacies and shortcomings I’m not going simply share on a blog, for crissakes. As a writer, it comes into play with rejected submissions—“aw man, guess I’m either too much or not enough of a weirdo for that mag,” the Great Deceiver’s voice whispers.
“Dwell not on the dark self-talk,” the affable stoner vampire novel-loving voice calls me back. Let’s be crystal: I like being a weirdo. This is about as comfortable in myself as I’ve ever been. How the hell did I get here, though? It took a lot of work, from a lot of people, just for me to get here—both the weirdo part, and the being comfortable part of it. Will my kid be comfortable being a weirdo?
Sorry you got an email,
Chris