Chris Herrington decided years ago that his reality was much more fun…
and he’s ready to tell you why.
Sit back and relax.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Normal and the Pine Tree Zombies
I like normalcy, really; it’s just that I don’t read much fiction. My idea of the everyday guy is someone who secretly has in mind things that others would cringe at alluding to, let alone explaining to the thought police. Most people watch TV with a sort of passive vibration, waiting for the flip of the channel to reveal, if only for a second, that titillation that brings out their own awkwardness. They want to watch reruns of Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Dallas, only in their minds the scripts are all mixed up, and they call it “Dyna-fallous.”
When I visit people, I look at their book shelves. I check it all out. I don’t go looking in their medicine cabinets, because I don’t have to. I check out their video collection, and the CD’s. I off-handedly look on the iPODs, and all that, but I do the less obvious much more. I inspect the context.
Handwriting analysis is a wonderful information gathering device; I’ve been practicing this art for 40 years. Photo albums. Paintings on the walls. In fact, it’s as much about what you see as what you don’t see. I listen to what people say and what they don’t say, and every conversation is an interview to be compiled, compared, and contrasted with all other conversations I have ever had. I watch “The Mentalist,” “Lie to Me,” and “Castle;” I’m unrelenting when it comes to the thought that there is no normal; the average person just hasn’t gotten caught yet.
Normal is a fantasy that has yet to be infected with reality. I know almost every family in town on some level or another. I know the secretaries, the delivery people, and the janitors. If you really want to know someone’s values, look at his shopping cart and his trash can. Hidden in that cart with all of the goodies is that vice. Hidden in that trash can is what he hopes will never come to light of day. Just inside the doorway, on the other side of the window pane, underneath that Bible, under the seat, in the back of the closet, on a separate hard drive, in a box under a pile of junk in the garage, behind the wood shed, written on a scrap of paper in his wallet, folded up in a locket around her neck, is a secret that has been carried for a life time.
You can hear it in people’s voices when they react to triggers that remind them of their abandonment, shame, guilt, or abuse. Hidden in the vocabulary they cryptically skirt, behind the charm of their beguiling smiles, enfolded in the landmined facial images they attempt to obscure but which nevertheless reveal it all in absentminded moments of thoughtlessness, written in their gait, the style of their clothes, the kind of car they drive, the glasses they wear, their percentage of body fat, the tone of their arms, the placement of every hair, therein is the secret laid out for all to see if only we dare to look them directly in their psyche and see them for who they are.
I don’t fear the strange, exotic wilderness of humanity. If anyone is sane and human and tolerable, it is that crew that tells who they are by how they say it loudly. I know these folks for who they are. No, the really dangerous ones are the ones who protest most loudly just how sane and normal they are. “Me thinks the Lady doth protest too much….”
Why is it that we are totally taken aback when some minister, politician, or star of some sort falls head long into the abyss of fallibility? This should not be a moment of shock or surprise. The pure wonder of it all is that we are not all in jail for the things we have done. Justice in the letter of the Law is as blind as a bat. This brings me to my point: The Spirit of the Law.
I wonder what we think we are doing anyways. We call ourselves a “Christian nation,” but then we set ourselves up with rules that no one can keep. It’s like we just want to pretend to be normal, but then under our disguises we are disturbed, pine tree zombies. We go around waving the flag of tolerance, but we would not know Matthew 5 if it hit us in the 4-wheeler. Our conservatives conserve nothing at all, and our liberals are liberal with everyone else’s money. We believe in freedom of speech, hate political correctness, and take up offense at everything that is not us. We believe in freedom of religion, but we are tied down to rules that paint God as a Master of Disaster, and even the insurance companies call whatever they don’t want to cover an “act of God.”
We live on stress, over-consume coffee, and we can’t keep from doing the opposite of what we say we believe in to save our souls, and it’s all in the hands of the average guy, who can hardly get himself off of the couch, away from World of Warcraft, and out of the Google images files long enough to vote in someone who has not sold out to some corporation, special interest group, or methodical ideology meant to sell us all down the river to some non-American product. Even today they were voting on whether or not to uphold the tax decreases. We can’t even get the logic right.
To not keep the taxes as they are, to not extend the tax breaks everyone on the high end has been enjoying already, is not to raise their taxes; it’s to keep them at a lower rate. To let the taxes revert back to where they were is not even close to a tax hike. They will not pay more than they legally presently do minus the break; they simply will not continue to have that break that they were given, and which was supposed to be temporary! If they have “not enjoyed it so far or have gotten used to operating with that buffer” is for them to have missed the entire point of their having had it!
If the tax-cutting theory had worked then the schemes they had “having the money to come up such schemes” with should have gotten us to a higher economic stratosphere in the universe, but alas we find ourselves perplexingly genuflecting retroflective denials which constantly uphold the judgments of others who are guilty of exactly what they themselves are judging others as being guilty of! Don’t point fingers; it only makes you look like a target for condemnation.
We love to see others fall down in this modern world of rehab regeneration and deflective self-analysis. If this is normal, then what are we to say about the weirdoes?
runningturtle87
Having completed 32 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests. He teaches at the Martin School of Choice, plays racquetball, and enjoys his job.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
