"Normal" is purely statistics, nothing noble or benign about it.

A man I once admired taught a class in psychology when I was 14. He set us loose in a college library and told us to prove we knew how to use the research tools available to us. He said the subject matter was up to us. Of course, I investigated "abnormal' sexuality, because I was trying to figure out why all the people who knew what I liked (tying up girls, being tied up by girls) was "abnormal" - except they called it "sick", "dangerous", "demented" and ... of course... PERVERTED. And when i read the first dissertation I found on "abnormal psychology", it shifted my world. "ABNORMAL", it said, was purely a statistical definition. It did not imply or indicate malevolence or even a threat. What was "normal" was the greatest number of people engaged in one type of behavior in the sample, and to various degrees, everyone outside that grouping was "abnormal" So if your'e in a group of cannibals, and you don't eat other humans, you are "abnormal" in that small subgroup; although (hopefully, please), back in the general population the cannibals are typically at the fringes of the bell curve. To be a Nazi in Germany in 1939 was "normal" And so when we see Matthew Shepherd tied to a fence and left for dead by two guys who considered their own sexual behavior as "normal", but Matthew Shepherd as the freak and the threat - it gives me pause and grave thoughts to realize that we have a mob mentality that is becoming the norm. A year after Matthew Shepherd's death, about the same time abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was assassinated by a military-trained sniper while eating in his own dining room by a guy who said he was "saving the lives of the unborn", two U.S. Marines who were attending the same University as I was under the G.I. bill told me that killing the doctor saved lives. This was how they justified their morality. Killing gays was OK, because their god was going to send they gay guy to hell anyway; killing him now just proved that God had the right idea and so did whoever followed "G"od to hasten the inevitable. That's the same kind of irrational rationalization that allowed this one guy to suggest that all the Jews must die and gather a crowd to help him to those ends. I don't want to be "normal" in many social contexts, because I can see the mob doing much more horrific things than I would ever conceive or condone by my own moral code; and the people who claim that their morals are superior to mine just because they say it is.....seem to be able to justify some gruesome and horrific behavior all in the name of the statistical dominance provided by the shelter of the bell curve. I don't do meds, either. I balked when I asked them why a person who takes opioids is an addict, and a person who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic, but somehow when I take your little blue pill that makes big pharma rich and my penis go to Neverland, somehow this is a noble way to believe that 2 + 2 = 714 because that is what the mob prefers that I think the answer to be. The answer to 2+2 is always 4; no matter what the mob wants it to be. And just because I follow the mob so they don't beat the shit out of me, I cannot make 2 + 2 = 714 on any day, on any planet, to satisfy any mob. Normal is a statistical category, not a psychological declaration of anything benign, noble, or desirable. In a society that can pervert so much logic as this one does, being abnormal is probably the last desperate act of a man who really is trying to salvage his sanity, and even if the mob disembowels me and puts my head on a pike, I can die with a clean conscience Some religious zealot told me that conscience was pretty important to him. I agree with him, even when he is trying to blow mine all to hell.

I should have listend to myself long ago; and JD Salinger too

When J.D. Salinger died last year a lot of time was spent discussing how reclusive he was. There was one interview he gave  - the most recent recorded was I believe in 1969 - where he answered a question about why he had not published anything since "Catcher In The Rye" - (I'm paraphrasing now because I'm too lazy to look it up)

If you publish, then people think you owe them something. Not publishing is much more satisfying personally, because it belongs to you alone

I've spent most of my life alone, so I thought publishing would be a nice way to find common ground and some encouraging feedback. A few people - maybe a half-dozen or so - have commented in the past and suggested that I was a good writer. Every one of those people, when it came time for me to write something to them or about them, turned on me and made it quite clear that whatever skill I had as a writer were washed away by my capacity to be an insufferable asshole.

So be it.

I think this is the post where I set my life straight on a few things:

Whether or not anyone agrees with my point of view, my life still belongs to me. I see clearly with my eyes, I hear fairly well with my ears - I absorb a lot from my world. I react to it. I am a product of my world. I did not become the person that I am while living sequestered, in seclusion and isolation, on some distant island or world.

Cogito, Ergo Sum - I think, therefore I am.

How to erase a human being, leaving a shell

This is not a new story. Mine is not the most horrible story - much worse has happened to people much more noble and less deserving than me. But this is my story. To the story of what happened to me, this is an integral link in an unbroken thread of experience (so far, *wink*) that is my life.

I will be told that "we treat everyone like this, so you're not getting any worse treatment than anyone else"

"we all experience that emotion to one degree or another"

"this is the human experience, you are not unique"

Well, fuck you. I might not be unique as the only person to experience it, but my experience by itself is  -  can only be -  unique. No other human soul sees life from the precise perspective that I do. And every other person, living or dead, can say precisely the same. We all share similar experiences in their vague structure and the components that make up a human life, but each one is absolutely unique. There is no way for them NOT to be unique.

(Johnny Hart cartoon)

I will come back and flesh this out. Right now I need to write, I need to be heard, and I will be god damned *(by a fucking non-existent god that I don't 'believe' in, such denials would seem to be absurdly unnecessary, and yet...) if I am going ot let Facebook tell me what parts of my life are permitted by their community "standards.

...as if that community of fucking nitwits can claim that they have standards....

* guy posts a picture of a dead coyote that he shot with his Glock pistol on a Glock Facebook group, bragging about the size of the "exit hole" that it blew through the animal - and to make it worse -

so much worse

"I doubt the coyote was so happy"

So I wrote. About the motherfucker who wrote that. And how he ought get up off the old lady and let the poor bitch rest, because she's got to be tired, and dry, and bleeding after all the time he's been at it.

Oh, that was over the top?

But blowing a hole through a living animal and bragging about the ragged edges of the exit wound is something that is perfectly acceptable in our society. Got it. I am sorry I misunderstood, I will do better next time, teacher.

I'll leave this as a stub....seed....

work starts at 6 Am on fridays. ALarm goes off at 4.

Someone on Facebook in a public group, in a public posting, put up a picture with a caption that triggered a horror experience from my childhood It was a picture of a wild coyote with an "exit hole" blown completely thorough it by a bullet. The hole was the size of a baseball. This post was in a group dedicated to a particular brand name of firearm that rhymes with "clock".

When I was a kid not more than 8 years old, while hiking at my grandparent's house on a holiday, I came across a beautiful German Shepherd in the woods, lying dead only a hundred yards from my grandparents house. I can't forget the image of the hole in the side of the dog, filled with blood and flies. It was a pool the size of a drinking glass.

That was almost the same image that this guy posted in his gun group of a wild coyote, bragging how proud he was of his kill, how the gun which the group was named after created this "exit hole", and then he said,

"I doubt the coyote was so happy"

That's a dark and empty soul, in my opinion. And since that post was public, which means he who uploaded the picture and wrote the caption wanted all members of the internet-viewing public to know of his achievement and his pride, I was in his audience.

so I responded in kind, using words that rhyme with "other trucker". I should re-post the words verbatim, because Facebook wants me to know that my words crossed their lines of appropriate social decorum.

and of course, he reported me to Facebook, who has censored my posting capacity for three days, and told me that since this is my third occasion, that my account risk permanent deletion if there are more. Lesson: you can kill animals, post pictures of your achievement, and brag about the size of the hole you made, and how the dead animal is probably "not happy" while lying dead for your photo, full of lead and your macho ego. But if you use the 1st Amendment (the one right before the 2nd, which guarantees the right to the gun that made the hole in the dead animal) to say that the animal killer is a sick motherfucker ....well, NOW you've gone too far.

My question to you - and Facebook - is this -

Why are we having this measuring contest to rank who offended and horrified who more? Did me calling this guy who delights in the death of animals a profane word cause him more pain than his gory picture of the dead animal that awoke a 40 year old flashback of childhood horror in my life?

So that's what Facebook is all about now. A "community" with "standards"

two words that are as vague and amorphous to a society as diverse as the Internet as "pain" and "joy" - - who gets to measure one against the other and declare winnners and losers?

Facebook, that's who.

he who reports first, wins. After that, nobody answers the door in the judicial chambers to explain their decision, and no appeals are granted.

Funny, don't you think? People arguing about free speech that uses a platform that has arbitrary and capricious censorship, that -

in it's most tragic applications

can amplify horror, and silence objective critics.