Welcome to the wonderful world of insanity. You are about to take a trip through those precious moments in life that stop you dead in your tracks, make you snap your head around and exclaim “WHAT THE F%&*?” We all have these moments since it is human nature to not only question the utterly nonsensical but to actually perpetrate it.
In order for you to fully understand how I view the world, and it does not involve psychopharmacology except in the medically necessary sense, you have to understand what it means to be Insanely Normal. The good news is that, if you have enough sense to ask that question, odds are you probably are Insanely Normal or at least have the potential to become one of the “IN” Crowd. It’s difficult to describe the Insanely Normal person because at first glance they look like everyone else. They come in all shapes and sizes, races and social scenes. They could be total hotties, geeks, jocks, or just plain fugly. There is no way to tell exactly who is Insanely Normal and who isn’t. At least until you hear them speak. They say the most unbelievable things and it is within these humble utterances we discover who is truly part of the IN Crowd. There are surprisingly many famous people who are part of the IN Crowd; Robin Williams, Lewis Black, George Carlin, Whoopie Goldberg, Penn and Teller, et al. They get paid millions for their musings and do it on a world wide stage while the OUT Crowd laughs cluelessly at the joke without realizing that they ARE the joke. They speak the truth with amazing clarity and those of us who are truly IN hear them loud and clear. So if you are part of the IN Crowd, this is the place for you to find a voice and others of your kind who spend their days wandering the Earth muttering “what the f%&*?.....

As I sit at my desk at work and stare at my computer screen at work, I struggle to find the right words to describe my daily presence in this internment camp for the working middle class. I can’t find them anywhere. When words fail us human beings, we tend to describe intense situations or experiences in our lives that leave us dumbstruck by comparing them to things that elicit the same reactions in us but from a different medium. For instance, the soft purr of a kitten can invoke maternal instincts and bonding in women. A rich, fabulous piece of chocolate or sumptuous treat is sometimes described as being orgasmic or sexual in how it slides across your tongue. Silk sheets can make you feel as if caressed by a lover. In fact being in love is often described as being on a never ending roller coaster of alternating pain and pleasure. For four months I have sought and searched through every experience I have ever had in my life to find the one that would adequately describe the feelings this place evokes in me. It was with great surprise that I finally realized, I had never experienced anything even remotely resembling my employment here. I would most certainly have to look elsewhere for inspiration so I turned to my most beloved hobby to guide me. I read books. Given my predilection for horror fantasy novels, you can surmise the sort of imagery I was subjecting myself to. But lo and behold, my taste in books provided me with the perfect means to express my appreciation for my current job.

Picture yourself hanging naked from a tree in the Amazon jungle. You are dangling from a vine that has little red flowers along its length that chatter and mimic human voices. It is crawling with stinging red ants and you are suspended over a murky brown bog bubbling with man eating piranhas. They jump greedily from the water and chew away bits of your flesh with every leap while the little flowers mimic your cries of pain and laugh at you. At the top of this vine sits a troll in a business suit with a grin like a shark wearing Jimmy Choos and an outdated designer outfit. Each time the fish eat away at you to the point where they can no longer reach you, you feel a tremendous sense of relief as the pain momentarily subsides. But then the troll turns a crank and you drop down another few inches. The fish begin to feast on you yet again and the troll chuckles and gurgles while you writhe in agony and flowers continue to mock your every scream. Once you have this image firmly visualized and can actually feel the despair and hopelessness that such an embodiment of evil can produce, you will understand exactly what it is like to walk through the front door of my office and hear that ominous click as the door locks behind you......

You may think I am being a bit melodramatic but the cocktail of high blood pressure pills and anti-depressants that my doctor has insisted I take before I have a stroke would indicate otherwise.

On the flip side, Insanely Normal people are those who find a way to exist in the world without warping their sense of identity. They show restraint when necessary but they do not sacrifice honesty for required deception. They are true to themselves to the extent that, when they do or say something that totally boggles the mind in its political incorrectness, it is nevertheless indisputable in its truth. They are who they are and don't fear asking the obvious question or pointing out the simple absurdities of a situation or phrase simply because it isn't proper to do so. They scoff at the allegedly well bred and sneer with disdain at the professionally pressed. The best of them become stand up comics. The rest just throw great parties. They are the socially subversive who spend their lives realizing that humanity is a cosmic joke and that the Earth is the Universe's Comedy Central.

This page is my homage to my IN Crowd who far too often go ignored and when they are not being ignored they are being shunned as the destructors of the delusion of normalcy that human beings struggle so viciously to maintain. God bless you all and welcome to my dementia.

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.