Why Be Normal?

I haven't been on this blog in a month. I haven't been writing. This is an awful shame. Where does the creativity go if you don't pour it from your fingers and let it slip down and hit the page? It gets re-absorbed by the body, perhaps. It is lost forever, maybe. I don't believe it makes me a better writer the next time. It makes me worse. I become stiff, regular, normal. It is bad to be normal. When I was eight years old, I went to sleepaway camp and I had a bumper sticker above my bed (I had the top bunk). It said, Why Be Normal? I looked at it, staring into the pink and white of it before I would go to sleep as the girls slept soundly around me. It bled into my brain. It was the best mantra, the only mantra that always rang true.

So I'll ask this of you today, why be normal? Usual, the same? Any time you get too comfortable, jump to something uncomfortable. I'm not saying I do a good job all the time or even most of the time at this, I'm not saying there isn't something to be said for routine, I thrive on discipline in spurts. But I am a binge person. I binge on being movable. Stillness is not a move. Not for you, not for me. No moss. No cobwebs. Keep it moving. On to the next.

I've been off being weird, making moves. I have been neglecting things here though, and that's going to change right now. Where the heck have I been? I look out the window and down at a rumpled pile of clothes, a sunburnt nose, an empty wallet, ticket stubs, stick sandals, handprints on the wall, and I'm not sure I know. I don't know where I am right now. I don't know where I've been or where I'm going. I'm not a tourist though, I am an observer. I am a collector. I collect lives and try them on to see which one will fit for me. I have feet that work, half a mind, a nickel in my pocket and all the rest.

I am holding this summer until it fades like colored paper, until it becomes light and brittle in my hands and eventually, only dust like all the rest. This summer was hot and cold, bright and dark, thrilling and lonely, alone and surrounded by too many people, expensive, draining, invigorating, inspirational, scary, but never dull. That is something. There is always something.

Filled with flings and things, packing, leaving my beautiful, comfortable, nested, lived-in apartment for one brimming with light and bare walls, full of promise and too much white, too much sun, too much heat, much too much but then I am binging again and when you binge, too much is never enough.

I don't know why I did it. It isn't cheaper. There aren't trees. I guess I needed a change. I always need a change. I am a banana, I am an avocado, I get squishy when left in the same place for more than a few days. I am fruit salad. I am perfect in three hour increments. I am not everyone's taste but I am pleasing enough. I am palatable. I am watermelon. Fill me with vodka once in a while. I'm still good, I swear.

I was in the Catskills this weekend and I went to a square dance. I heard my friends have sex all night. It was so cold I could see my breath as I shivered under the blankets. There was a lot of steak. The morning brought an even colder snap and the sun reflected onto the glassy expanse of water until it looked like the end of the earth, this blue-gray expanse, it seemed all the problems were absorbed by the wind. I thought but did not say out loud, I want to be the ocean. Change, churn, slosh forward and retreat only after going fast and far. Twist around bends. Take the shape of anything, a tub, a glass, a straw, I will move like liquid if I can, wherever I can. I will be weird. I hope I can be weird forever.