People who know me vaguely do not wish to know me well. Perhaps it is my errant social behaviour, in general triggered by stupid repetitive questions and my attempts to avoid them. Perhaps my black clothes and bottomless supply of seemingly useless objects confuse and disturb them. Perhaps it’s the way I prefer to walk briskly through crowded areas rather than hobbling around as though I’ve been shot in the foot and had my hip replaced with rubbery tofu.
Whatever the reason, the general vibe I get is that I have “Creepy Serial Killer” potential. While I understand this is a cause for concern, it is completely unwarranted. Almost. I briefly considered giving in to others’ perceptions and becoming a vigilante, but after certain life-changing decisions decided I would just be nice to everyone and master the art of writing instead.
Even so I have a considerable backlog of aberrational behaviour that makes people uncertain of my social calling. For example:
- I tend to hang around in dark corners where nobody can see me until I am close enough to stab them.
To explain this, I have to point out that if you pull out a book and start reading in a visible location a neanderthal will wander by and ask you “Whut you reading?” every five minutes. They will then clump around you and begin talking to one another as though you aren’t there, because all you really want to do is read your book and maybe if you stare at the pages long enough they’ll go away. But they don’t. They just stand there and make conversation about Eragon and Twilight, and I would be perfectly inclined to join in if they stopped confusing what happened in the movie with what happened in the book.
- I wear black clothes – more specifically black chinos and long sleeve black shirts, even in summer. Only a psychotic stalker would do this so as to blend in with the surrounding darkness on moonless nights.
People don’t understand colours the way I do. Brown and grey are generally shunned as the ‘loser’ colours that have no friends because they are most frequently seen in faeces, chewed up newspapers and dreary skies (you’d be dreary too if people scowled and looked worried whenever they looked up at you). To me, these colours are a mark of deference. Black in particular strikes me as a deferential colour as it isn’t really a colour at all, but rather a lack of pigmentation.
All science geeks know that when you blend every colour in existence you get white, because white is the sum of the diverse colours that make up our visual reality. Painters should be well learned in the scale between primary colours and their corresponding mixes which can create any other colour by blending them together.
By choosing to walk around colourless, what I’m trying to say is “Hey, I’m young and I acknowledge I don’t have much rattling around in my head just yet. I have room to learn.”
My eventual plan is to ascend the spectrum. From black I’ll move on to brown, from brown to blue and, if by any chance I live to be ancient, from blue to white.
I think the main problem with this idea of self-classification is that onlookers associate black with the unknown rather than the unknowing.
- I write about complex subjects with seemingly thoughtless conviction and moral irreverence.
Yes, it has occurred to me that people who see a phrase like, “I concede, description is the root of all individuality, but you must also consider the nature of the subject. A cow, by common description, is a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped. This is the Idea; the rule on which all variations of the cow spread” posted in a blog will doubt the writer’s sanity and leave them wondering whether it’s something “the voices” told him. 90% of the time you can be certain they haven’t. Well, actually they have, but by logical processes I have either validated their statements or disowned them from my psyche.
The trouble is I don’t want to take up two hours of your time explaining a sentence where I have defined each word by strict limitations that differentiate it from near identical words. For example, to me ‘liberty’ is a pragmatic concept whereby a group of entities can react within a restricted environment without causing harm to one another, whereas ‘freedom’ is a boundless state whereby an entity may undertake any given action in order to achieve happiness regardless of consequences to other entities.
I’ve just turned two words into forty-six without even explaining the exact boundaries in which ‘entities’, ‘consequence’ and ‘happiness’ fall. The habit of shortening things works very well when you are thinking to yourself, and looks so neat on paper that any writer will feel the irresistible temptation to avoid the lengthy process of definition. I have seen it ruin countless debates before they can even begin, and people don’t even realise the cause of the conflict. They just think “That person isn’t using my definitions, and that means they are an idiot,” or in my case, “That means they are a loon.”
I’ll say it right now so people can quote my youthful wisdom when I’m famous: don’t assume that other people think like you do, and don’t hate them when you find out they think differently. Hating someone because they aren’t you is a terrible thing to do, and, I believe, the prime cause of Nazism.
- I am honest to a point of brutality.
If ever I do get into a conversation with someone, I inevitably will say something to which there is no correct social response. For example, if someone asks me “Is so-and-so a friend of yours?” I evaluate my high standards of friendship (being willing to die for a person in exchange for my own life under the condition that I will be happy with the general ins and outs of life if I do survive [barring the fact that in most cases I would do this out of a sheer desire to be polite rather than actually liking a person]) and I say something like “No, but we have a longstanding acquaintance.”
Then I think to myself that that suggests a certain animosity towards so-and-so which doesn’t exist, and to clarify I add, “I don’t really have any friends.”
Instead of making things better, I’ve made them worse, because not only have I said something awkward, I’ve pitted myself against the whole of humanity by having unreasonably high standards. All conversation ends, and I am left to face the truth: I haven’t any friends of no fault of my own, but because no-one I have ever met meets the base requirement for my friendship, and that is to need me. Nobody wants the truth unless it’s absolutely essential. They want convenient lies, and I am not prepared to give them any.
- People confuse Antisocialism with Asocialism
This one is a big problem. Since the dawn of man, or of Jesus anyway, people have said “You’re either with me, or against me.”
Life is not based on absolutes like this, no matter how many people wish to believe it is. Switzerland continues to exist despite the annoyance of politicians everywhere.
But despite the presence of Switzerland like a huge quartered paradise of sanity on the war-torn battleground of Earth, the rule of “With or against” survives. For example, a new movement begins to spread across the world suggesting we all wear alice bands and cummerbunds in a show of solidarity. 99% of the population now walk around like the over-accessorised maniacs they are while one or two people say “No thanks, cummerbunds are starchy and alice bands are just one step away from tiaras. I don’t think I’ll wear that goofy getup, thanks.”
These few go about their everyday lives as pariahs, because they are naturally upsetting the social order merely by not subscribing to it. They are ostracised for being ‘publicly indecent degenerates’ just because they couldn’t care less about the prevalent fashion. Then things get ugly and somebody hurls the word “anti-social”.
By the general use of prefixes, we can rest easy with these definitions:
Social – Approving of the culture and actions of a population.
Asocial – Not approving of the culture and actions of a population.
Antisocial – Disapproving of the culture and actions of a population.
Even here, the distinction is lost and I must return to my example.
The ASOCIAL member of society ignores the pressure to wear a cummerbund, because they wish to do otherwise. Perhaps they have a wide assortment of bowties they have collected over the years and do not wish to see them become obsolete.
The ANTISOCIAL member of society hates cummerbunds and the filthy bastards who wear them. He takes specific pleasure in setting fire to cummerbund factories and threatens to pickle people’s underwear if they don’t start wearing bowties.
This should make things a little more clear. Both the social and antisocial view themselves as members of society and actively try to manipulate people into being more like them, while an asocial doesn’t really care so long as they get to do their own thing.
Ironically enough, the most public supporter of asocialism was in fact Ayn Rand, who was undoubtedly anti-social. The reason asocials are allowed to be swept under the rug is because if they do intentionally draw attention to their activities, they become ‘antisocial’. Where that leaves me is ‘decidedly confused’. This probably demands its own post.
The point I intended to make is that prejudice is wrong, even if it prevents you from being stabbed in a dark alley one day.
