Weird is as weird does

My daughter Zoe is going to college this fall. It will be impossible to survive her leaving, but at least we are determined to have as much fun as possible before she goes Well, she and her brother are I am in a season of loss my true-love cat, my paddleboard fin, my Apple Watch, my lotion, my first born but Max and Zoe are gathering up good times They have a four-and half-year age difference, which means sometimes they’re closer than other times, but right now, they’re close. Every morning, they go to Dunkin for coffee. I ask them to bring a reusable cup They say they will; they never do. Zoe can afford these fancy drinks because she works many hours at Chipotle. For breakfast/lunch, Zoe makes green smoothies Max makes ramen They go to the Athletic Club. Later, basketball practice for Max, work or hanging out with her friends for Zoe. But they’ve done some non-routine hanging out, too One day, she took Max and his friends to the tunnels. Max taught Zoe what I call the wiggle-knee dance. It may have another name possibly Billybong? Max and Zoe drove to Lake Mary to swim. Zoe sent a Snap about it, and her friends said it was weird

“Why’d they think it was weird?” I asked her.

“I have no idea. But it’s not weird to hang out with your brother, is it?”

“Maybe because they don’t have siblings? But also, weird is just a word that people use when they don’t really know what else to say.”

When I was twelve, I also called everything weird. “Our neighbors are so weird,” I’d tell my mom She’d respond with “everyone is weird,” which is true but beside the point. I was trying to explain that the way the neighbors went to church on Sundays or sometimes on Saturdays felt weird to me Ken and Gigi, who flew hot air balloons and trained falcons, were weird. Roger drove a VW Cabriolet up and down the street. That was weird. Jed smelled weird. Grandma gave me a weird look. Mom was right. Everyone was weird, but they were weird in precise ways I just didn’t have the words to name that precision.

I don’t know if I’ve gotten much better at defining weird, but I do know I’ve changed my attitude about it. Where it used to connote something negative about someone, now I think it’s a positively charged word.

I used to live in Portland where Keep Portland Weird bumper stickers were as common as Imagine Whirled Peas, My Other Car Is a Broom and Mean People Suck How weird was Portland? Portland is not that weird. It’s a pretty city with a now-beautiful riverfront, lots of breweries and restaurants, dormant and mostly dormant volcanoes to hike and eight cool bridges crossing the Willamette It holds its grungy/punk-rock angle, but like cities everywhere, rich people knock down the punk rock mainstays like Satyricon and dance clubs like Embers to build luxury apartments The people are the real hope for weirdness My roommate Rhett rode a unicycle before it was normal. He also took ketamine before everyone took ketamine. He had a cat named Smile that only drank water from the bathtub faucet Maybe weird means to be at the forefront of the future just a click or two out of step with everyone else but also, maybe, a click or two ahead.

Does the phrase “Everyone is weird” makes no one weird? I don’t think so To call someone or something weird is to distinguish someone from your normal experience. Normal experience, when you are a kid, is something you’re trying to establish. When you get older, at least, as I got older, normal came to mean something rote and robotic Or, maybe spending nine years in Portland helped me come to that meaning. But even as a teenager, I had begun to think that normal meant obedient, willing to work for the man, boring If normal is how most people live then I’ll take weird any day.

It’s hard to persuade people to be weirder. In my classes, I try to get students to look for the unusual detail. To try a strange sentence structure. Have your character do something weird The world is a pretty weird place if you look at it closely enough. It rained most of May. It barely got warm enough in June to turn the heat off. Then, July reached record-breaking temperatures. Weird flowers are showing up in the forest and on campus, trees are weirdly producing fruit. Weird is neither good nor bad on its own. It’s a characteristic, like blue or cold. It’s outside of my known experience. By noting weird, you’re saying this place is wild and unusual When people say Keep Flagstaff Weird in that same manner that they mean Keep Portland Weird, I think it means that we can find little details around town that are surprising: a man who paints with fluorescent inks and sells his paintings in the square, a cat that doesn’t live in one particular home but downtown business owners feed, basement shops and underground tunnels, turkey vultures and horny toad lizards, bike shops and bicycle parts on brew pub tables. Weird means worth noticing and worth noticing means worth talking or writing about, and perhaps, it also means we should take our siblings to the lake more often. All we have to do to keep Flagstaff weird is keep our eyes open.