Yes, yes, yes… give me 200 pages of always superfluous & sometimes superlicious style and this blind pig will find the acorn. Or maybe a nugget. So it is that Michael Chabon writes a bit about feeling outta place whether in his cradle of Berkeley or on a business trip to a euphemistically christened Middleburg, USA. “You have to be weird somewhere,” he writes, “might as well be here.”
The take-home tidbit here (Would you like a doggy-bag, sir?) is that it is our shared culture that provides us with the cues and the shibboleths — political, socio-economic, religious, etc. — that either allow us to belong or push us outside. In other words, if we didn’t know each other so well, we wouldn’t know how much we were different.
Well sir, that makes sense. And in the hopes of making this world a better place, I leave you with the words of the visionary Perry Farrell:
Wish I knew everyone’s nickname,
all their slang and all their sayings.
Every way to show affection,
How to dress to fit the occasion…
Blacks call each other brother and sis’
Count me in ’cause I been missed.
I’ve seen color changed by a kiss.
Ask my brother
And my sister.
Wish we all waved…
All waved…
All waved…
And now I’m feeling free to be me.
