Not normal

Monday morning.

In today’s newspaper — I’ve got to have a newspaper every morning to feel normal — it says that more people are now committing suicide on Wednesdays than on Mondays. It's a story, I guess, because Mondays has always been number one for surfacing neuroses.

It’s normal to feel depressed on Monday, right?

Depends on what you mean by normal.

It’s not hard to imagine what’s normal for the only child of a Baptist minister from Des Moines whose values were formed in the middle of the 1950s. All I have to do is roll out of bed in the morning, any morning, to feel like someone’s probably already disappointed in me for not being as good as I should be.

Normal is like sprinkling seasoning on food to make it taste “right". So fear has been one of my normal ways of seasoning reality. I can see myself sprinkling a little of it onto all sorts of happy situations to make them feel “normal.”

And that’s crazy.

Thank goodness, that’s not all that’s normal for me. There are many other ways I bend reality to make it more of what I’m used to.

Sociologists and psychologists tell us normal is an artificial pattern we impose on the quirkiness of humanity to give us some safe places to stand.

I saw an outstanding new musical in New York a couple of weeks ago called Next to Normal. It suggested that going for normal can keep you crazy, that next to normal is better. That sounds right to me.