The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Martian

It’s sort of fashionable nowadays to be a little bit mad. Sane people are dull but creative people are wild, eccentric, weird; a little bit gipsy, a little bit rock-n-roll, accountant on the outside and hippy on the inside. We ride the train in a suit but in our heads we’re dancing naked at Woodstock. We are all colours of the rainbow. We are free and we are brave and under our vest we have tattoos.

Well, OK. But aside from the fact that having a tattoo is now so normal it’s practically de rigueur (and I still really don’t like them) the emphasis is on the ‘little bit.’ You can dance a chakra dance so long as you do it on your own time and not in the office, and what you do at your mental Woodstock is your own affair. Just so long as you show up for work in the morning and don’t rock the boat.

But what about those of us who might desperately want to fit in and can’t? Some people seem effortlessly to belong – and OH and I just don’t know how they do it. They probably don’t know how they do it either, they just know what to say and how to behave. They talk the talk and walk the walk; they are in the swim. You get the idea.

Where is there a society for those of us who are actually insane, who don’t have tattoos because it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference and who absolutely must rock the boat because the boat is heading to the rocks and if we don’t rock it the rocks will hole the hull and the ship will sink? Where do we belong?

I guess we belong to ourselves – because let’s face it, no-one else’ll have us.

Kirk out