March 2: Strange Old Man, Weirdos, Penis-Shaped Rockets

Santiago knows that he is a weirdo . . . 

"I told the boy I was a strange old man," he said. "Now is when I must prove it."

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

I have been strange my whole life.  I've never really had to prove this fact.  I'm a poet and actor and musician and blogger and podcaster and theater director.  That's not even half of my weirdo credentials.  I love books about talking bears and ghosts.  I sometimes cry when I read poetry.  My entire way of interacting and understanding the universe is filtered through words.  If I don't write about something, it simply didn't happen.

My kids know I'm weird.  They see me sitting on the couch every night, tapping away at my laptop or scribbling in my journal.  I've gone into my daughter's grade school classrooms and made her classmates squish bananas between their fingers and then write about it.  I've made my son's classmates write about Bigfoot.

There is nothing wrong with weird.  Being weird is simply a natural adaptation to the current state of the world.  I would say that, if you are not weird in some way, there's something severely wrong with you.  Vladimir Putin is invading Ukraine, threatening an entire population with military genocide.  That's majorly fucked up.  If your reaction to this fact is simply to pour yourself a cup of tea, watch a rerun of The Golden Girls, and go about your normal day-to-day routine, then you are insane or a Trump supporter.

Weird means that you care about the plight of the vaquita porpoise (there's only ten left in the entire world).  Weird means that you would willingly travel to California and sit in sulfur baths naked to meet your favorite poet.  Weird means that you believe building a rocket launch pad on the shores of Lake Superior is an inherently bad idea.

If you care about any of those statements in the previous paragraph, you are weird.  Fly your freak flag proudly.  Because it's the weirdos who are going to save the world.  Not billionaires who send themselves into orbit in penis-shaped rockets.  Or cozy up to Russian dictators in order to be elected President of the United States.  Weirdos know good weird and bad weird.

Saint Marty is proud to be the patron saint of weirdos.