Well to the Left of Normal - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

"Well to the Left of Normal" purports to be an autobiography. So let's have the "author" describe it: Chapter 1. I'm writing this against my will. I'm doing it because my shrink wants me to. He's at a loss about how to help me better relate to people, given what he calls my personality disorder. He thinks that writing out my life story might help us find the key. The problem with that is: I don't have a personality disorder. Everybody else does. I know what you're thinking: that crazy people always say that. Okay, maybe they do. But what if they're on to something? What if we are all crazy, myself included? And what if we're all sane, too? Not in the same way, or to the same degree, or at the same time, of course. But don't we all occasionally deviate from so-called "normal" behavior? And if we didn't, wouldn't we be boring, mental clones of one another? And more than that, aren't such mental excursions what make us human? I mean, how often does your dog have unaccountable mood swings? The question then is: Are we crazy during those off-the-track episodes or are we sane? The problem, as always, is with definitions. For example, what does the word "normal" mean, if anything? And who gets to define it? My shrink, for one, I guess. He jokes that my behavior is "well to the left of normal." By which he means that I'm ab-normally governed by left-brain logic. If that were true, it would imply that I'm deficient in right-brain creativity and the like. Except I'm not, and he knows it. Which is part of the reason he's so-far failed to diagnose me, much less help me in the way I'd hoped he would.

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