Some people are just weird

“He called you back, really? What a weird dude,” a girl says.

“He’s an idiot,” a guy says after her.

They don’t realize it. but they’ve failed to disconnect the call. I can hear everything they’re saying about me. I don’t know either of them, but the guy must have gotten a hold of my business card at a party the previous night:

He called me this morning at around 10am, left a rambling message about his paranoia and how marijuana fucks up the mind. I didn’t recollect meeting this guy, and the message sounded a bit like an ill-conceived prank, but I always call everyone back who contacts me on business. And yes, many times they are intoxicated or raving mad with paranoia.

I called. He picked up, no sound, no hello. I said hello. Silence. Sounded as if the guy saw that it was me and accidentally hit “accept” rather than “reject,” put the phone back in his pocket, and started talking shit about me to his girlfriend.

I think given the nature of my work and the nature of my mental processes, I am a bit of an unusual person. I have to put a lot of effort into normal human interaction. I have to filter A LOT to act normal, and that takes work. It’s distracting, always having to parse through the cascading catalogs of tangential this-or-thats, which regularly visit the brain. I want to interact, I have much to say, but I don’t want to say too much. I have to make myself keep things to myself, even if they’re not secrets. Even if they contain salient and topical information, I still have to keep some things to myself. Even if they’re in no way incriminating or embarrassing or non-sequitur or boring or too self-effacing or too self-adulating or too polite or not polite enough, I keep certain things to myself, even though sharing them would be in all ways “appropriate.”  So I write.  Writing is good for people like me.

In conclusion, as I told the shit-talkers, they’d be wise to read up a bit on my project, visit my website, maybe get my book, before they start calling me an idiot. I may struggle a bit relating to certain people (particularly cynical, judgmental people), but, ironically, I’m making my living right now relating to the people that no one’s ever been able to constructively relate to before. In two weeks out on the street, I’ve sold 35 copies of my book, grossing over $500. I have a surfeit of people—more than I can service– who want to work in my forums.

Incidentally I’ve exhausted my 250-count supply of business cards and had to order some more this morning. I’m going to put more information on the new business card, so hopefully people will be able to scrutinize my work a bit more thoroughly before deciding that I’m an idiot, crazy, weird, what have you. It’s better for them and for me if they take time to think about my project. It would also be better for the world in general if people weren’t quite as douchey. I would also suggest that people, especially douchey people, learn the basics of the standard mobile-phone interface before calling others idiots. Green means talk, red means reject. Even I know this.