John was normal. Everything he did was normal and the ways in which he did normal things was also normal. John, in fact, was the epicenter of normality. While in most ways this made John unremarkable, he was crucially the most unique human who had ever lived on the planet. There were, throughout the galaxy, however, many others just like him in the forms their species took.
John’s uniqueness was his baseline status as the purest particle of normality that can exist as a living being. All other beings were, in relation, abnormal. It was by degrees, however, and John’s most unique power was his ability to perceive the minutest diversions from normality.
It was several years ago when John created a scale of abnormality, a dumbed-down representation of his perceptual ability to detect abnormality, but useful in the sense that it used percentages to rate how much of a given person’s being and living is made up of abnormality. John was at zero. Very few people had ever registered below 20 percent. Most people, John determined, were at least one-third abnormal. A third of all Americans, John discovered, are more than 50 percent weird.
What will be the impact on society once a person gains access to his or her or their scorecard? At first it will be a mixture of amusement and confusion. “I got a 34. What did you get?” The response, “I’m a 76. Wow, I’m a freak!” nothing new from a structural standpoint, but tribal groupings could become common. People with over 75 percent may have utter disdain those under 50 percent. Just a new form of red-state/blue-state.
To an extent this already occurs. A place like Mason City, Iowa, is probably around 25 percent as a whole while a place like, Portland, Oregon, is probably somewhere above 50 percent. I got wind of all this stuff from John during a time in which I was 100 percent abnormal. Being on the opposite pole naturally made us curious about one another. John abhors abnormality whereas I abhor normality, but, strangely, we each perceived the other as so far down the spectrum that we developed a respect for the profundity of absolutism.
Our first discovery was the horror of a person who was 50 percent abnormal/normal. It seemed like an abomination. But then we came to realize that the 50 percenters were masters of the normal AND abnormal. Thus, we set out to find a 50 percenter thinking maybe we could become a mystical trilogy of oneness, the utter elimination of the dialectic through a triad monism.
We found her. And another her—it was a Chinese square rather than a Japanese triangle! I’m referring to the cultural differences in the structural foundations for landscape architecture, naturally. Now we four are gods among mortals, the vast herd who are not perfectly abnormal, normal, normally abnormal, or abnormally normal.
