Weird, Right?
Thoughts from the childless lady's cats
”I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.” - Creep by Radio Head
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word, “weird” ever since
published his piece entitled, Trump is Weird on July 27th. At the time I thought it was funny, but now I’m realizing that there’s much more than comedy going on here.Having been labeled “weird” most of my life for having chlorine-green hair (competitive swimming), preferring the company of animals to people, and caring not a wit about fashion, I know how that word can sting. For years the word defined me like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. And lest I forget just how peculiar, strange, and unpopular I was, my sister (a socialite extraordinaire) told everyone we met that we were not related, despite having the same last name. By the time we reached high school she’d became a maven of put downs and unkind jokes, using humor and thinly veiled insults to make herself sound clever and superior. Now who does that remind you of?
Something Mary Trump (a psychologist) said about her uncle, Donald Trump struck me as important and insightful. “Certain feelings were not allowed. Sadness. The impulse to be kind, the impulse to be generous. Those were things that my grandfather (Donald’s father) found to be superfluous, unmanly."
Which brings me to the point of this piece, which is so painfully captured in the song Creep by Radiohead. Take a moment to listen to it - to feel the sadness and angst of the singer who knows he’ll never be acceptable in the eyes of the person he loves. He’s a creep - a weirdo.
“I wish I was special. I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul. I want you to notice when I'm not around. But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.”
MAGA Republicans are creeps and weirdos. They feel overlooked, unseen, and as if they don’t belong. The only way they know to get the attention they crave is by acting out like three year olds. If they were children, they would throw and breaks their toys, hit their siblings, scream, and make life difficult for their parents. Unfortunately MAGA Republicans are adults, and both their toys and their behaviors are more dangerous than those of actual kids. To make matters worse, they’ve grown accustomed to and now crave the attention generated by their bad behavior. They feed off the indignation, outrage, and condemnation their words and actions evoke in others.
The Weird Mirror - A Proposal
Rather than feed MAGA Republicans’ need for attention, I propose that we use the word weird to recall them to their senses. Since they don’t listen to a word their leader says (if they did they’d know that he lies and makes zero sense most of the time) let’s hold a mirror up and say, “Look at yourself. You’re behaving like a weirdo.”
Weird may be the one word that can pierce the armor of anger, judgment, and self-righteousness they’ve donned to protect themselves against their own pain. Because make no mistake about it, they are in pain. I am hoping that once they are able to take an honest look at themselves - to see how childish they are behaving - they will realize temper tantrums are unnecessary. They CAN and will be heard by their fellow Americans as soon as they start behaving like adults.
To be clear, my goal in creating this post is not to use the word weird as my sister did to inflict emotional paper cuts. I want to use it, along accompanying images, to diffuse the firestorm of negativity that swirls around MAGA Republicans.
Right now, they’re not listening to facts or to our shock, outrage, and indignation. They are feeding off of the emotional negativity. Let’s stop adding fuel to that fire and begin holding up the Mirror of Weird. “This is what you look like,” we’ll say. “If you saw your own child behaving this way, what would you do?”
Jena
P.S. Weird image suggestions for commentary by my cats are welcome. DM me please.
Copyright 2024 by Jena Ball. All Rights reserved.
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Well done, Jena!
A different take on weird.
I remember discovering Hunter S. Thompson when his articles first started appearing in Rolling Stone magazine. It was the early 70s, and his writing was like nothing I had ever read before—raw, unapologetic, and utterly captivating. In 1971, his most famous work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," was serialized in Rolling Stone before it became a book. I devoured every installment.
Thompson had this way of making the bizarre seem almost normal, like he was peeling back the layers of reality to show us the weird and wonderful underbelly of life. He once wrote, "Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten." That really stuck with me. It was his way of saying that intelligence often shows itself in unconventional ways, something I’ve always believed.
Then there's that classic line, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." It was from "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl," and it captured his belief that when life gets chaotic, those who thrive in the madness will rise to the occasion.
Another gem is, "The only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over the edge." This was from "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs," and it highlighted his view that to understand the limits of normalcy, you had to experience the abnormal.
"Too weird to live, too rare to die." That line from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" perfectly described those unique individuals who don’t quite fit the mold but are all the more fascinating because of it.
And then there's, "There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment." This one’s from "Kingdom of Fear." It wasn’t directly about being weird, but it spoke to the precariousness of life, something I think we all feel from time to time, especially when you're a bit different from the norm.
Thompson’s work wasn’t just about the weirdness—it was about embracing it, finding deeper insights, and showing us that what society often labels as weird can actually be a sign of adaptability and brilliance. His writing felt like a call to see the world in all its chaotic, messy glory and to find our place within it.