The Other Side of the Bell Curve

I have recently discovered that most of my grievances with humans do in fact come from a veritable no-man’s land, a caustic damp place, a place where even ivy, bind weed, and introspection refuse to flourish.

A place where the single celled organisms feel themselves superior to the dominant complex multi-cellulars and refuse to become complicit in their deeds by rejecting the offer of symbiosis.

The air is thick with burnt sugar and diesel fumes.

A family of blind one-legged ducks long ago keeled over and died next to an exploded shell of a discarded Tesla. It was once rumored that the key opinion leaders would return, but then all of the birds died.

Welcome to the Other Side of the Bell Curve.

The discovery started off quite gentle. I was attempting to identify and describe the tight splintered frustration of why people wishing to share reading material with me bothered me so much.

Do other people feel the same? Is my reaction common? Do I have enough chocolate covered raisins before embarking on this marathon of thought?

The confusion I feel when approached in this apparent gregarious manner is due to feeling multiple thoughts at once and this annoys me. Why should I feel confused when somebody offers me a book and why is my first thought not to offer gratitude but to wonder if there is a Library of Congress code for filing the book away on the top of my compost heap?

I am immediately assaulted with how well do I know this person and why do they presume I have availability in my private life to read something that has nothing to do with any of the material or thoughts I typically decide to feed to my anxiety on a daily basis until I drop into the pit myself from exhaustion and wonder if I’ve reached the end?

It’s just bledy rude.

And yet there appears to be some cocktail of maladjusted personality traits shining in the dental plaque of this person as they bask in the glow of doing somebody else a favor.

My analysis continues.

You may or may not have read all of this book, yet you appear delighted in your adult years to have discovered the magic of reading and it is perhaps this joy that you want me to experience? I appreciate the thought, but you’ll have to forgive me because I’ve been sheltering in books my whole life.

You also appear to be offering me a book in an attempt to shoehorn in some familiarity to our relationship thus boosting the chances of my acceptance. I don’t know you and therefore your attempt to pass the thoughts of an unknown author to me are suspicious. There also appears to be some crazed delight in your eyes that you’re passing over to me something that you have already used and you feel smug that you may have talked me into sloppy seconds.

Are you even aware of the political nature of what you’re doing? Offering me this book under spurious circumstances is an act of hegemony. You want to take some ownership of my thoughts now or in the future. Are you not aware that reading is a solitary activity where each individual pursues their own interests away from the noise of the rest of the world? Forgive me for being candid, but as you’re not Susan Sontag, jog on.

The person before me quickly appears so alien that I’m not even sure the use of spoken words will penetrate their intentions.

They must be from the Other Side of the Bell Curve.