What does it mean to be IN? Well, the simplest way to examine what the Insanely Normal person is all about is to examine his or her polar opposite; the Normally Insane person. You exist in a state of Normal Insanity if you spend your life trying to convince the world that you are something you’re not. Don't laugh just yet. We all do it to some degree but for most of us it is a situational necessity. We are all expected to behave and speak a certain way when we are in different situations or social groups.

For instance, when you go to church services or sponsored religious events, you are expected to be on your best behavior. So you clean up your language and try to look respectable. Women leave the padded bra and thongs at home. They ditch the come-fuck-me-pumps for sensible one inch heels or flats and use a small brush instead of a spatula to apply their makeup. Guys set aside the construction crack jeans complete with beer stained wife beater tees (that have been 3 sizes too small since their first parole hearing). They put on their best un-faded denims or clean Dickies that they only break out for funerals and court appearances and on occasion they actually shave. You are in the house of the Lord so straighten up your act lest you incur the wrath of clergymen, your fellow parishioners with their impressionable children and gossiping wives, or at worst (or best depending on your sexual proclivities) a nun with a yard stick and a spanking fetish. You suspend your rational disbelief and say amen to every metaphor. You absorb enough dogma to scare you into behaving yourself, at least for the next 2 hours. Then it’s back to the real world where football reigns supreme and damnation is all but assured.

When you enter therapy, whether voluntary or otherwise, you put on an act because ........ let’s face it ........... no one goes to group therapy intending to let the other mental defectives know just how far off the rails you’ve jumped. Maintaining an air of controlled eccentricity allows you to convince yourself that you’re not anywhere near as crazy as the other guys! Therefore you must be getting better hence you don’t really belong in group therapy and it’s all a cosmic injustice. Superiority among the Insane is kind of like Honor among Thieves. It works great in theory but in practice …

When you go to work you have to put on a happy face that broadcasts "I am a happy well-paid worker who loves my job and believes that my purile and mudane duties will ultimately improve mankind." You have to do this despite the fact that you hate your job, your co-workers are back stabbing gold bricks, your boss is a greedy, megalomaniacal, two faced letch, your salary is barely enough to cover your weekly bar tab, and your work is repetitive and less life altering than a box of Ex-Lax. Pity the workers that have to add "Political Correctness" to their normal insanity. They have to somehow suppress every bias, prejudice, or unkind secular thought (innocently conceived or otherwise) and present a persona that has all the warmth and brevity of a plastic hairbrush. Honestly…..vibrators have more personality and are more fun to hang out with from 8-5!

We all have to adopt these fake personalities for the majority of our waking hours without somehow suffering a Schizoid Dissociative Event. I'd say only about 30% of us are successful and exist in a state of Normal Insanity, although about 80% of that 30% are sociopaths (hey, everyone thought Jeffrey Dahmer was normal). The rest of us buy hand guns and wait for the intellectual apocalypse that is surely coming in 2012. We read every day about seemingly sane people going completely mental and popping the sanity cork. The government agency that gave birth to that bastion of mental health, the Unites States Postal Service, held the Guinness title for Schizoid Events for decades but the economy and the internet forced the Postal Service to lay off most of them and now they work in customer service for Microsoft. The Santa Claus killer, Bruce Pardo was one such ray of sunshine. Nobody could believe that he was completely crazy. They all kept saying "but he went to church and prayed every week." What makes people believe that going to church makes a person sane or normal? One reason is that people see the phony face you are forced to adopt to be there. The truth is that going to church doesn't change the fact that you dissect people’s pets for fun, stalk 8 year olds because you couldn’t get laid if someone glued a thousand dollar bill to your forehead and hung the keys for a Porsche around your neck, or that you honestly believe that with the right sauce and seasoning, people really do taste like chicken! It only threatens you with eternal damnation if you actually show people these sides of your personality. It’s no wonder that with all the roles we are forced to play, 70% of the population is utterly and completely insane.