I thought of the people who I met when I first started writing. There were no individual thinkers among them, save Li and a few others. My old peers, who I’d thought were so interesting and interested in thinking, who I’d misunderstood as being fundamentally weird, were, in reality, not interesting or interested in thinking or weird at all — they were entirely stupid and normal. Most writers, or writer types — most of them were not even really writers, but rather writer types — are not weird at all; in fact, they are utterly normal, I though, sitting at my kitchen table. They order a quirky drink at Starbucks, or wear slightly oversized glasses, or something else cosmetic, and all of their jokes, the entirety of their humor, and all of their output, their corrupt and childish output, which is anything but literary, is predicated on this ornamental weirdness, this faux individuality — they produce nothing substantial, nothing that doesn’t point back to themselves and their precious quirks. The punch line of every joke they tell is always Haha! Look at me! I’m so weird! but this weirdness functions only to point back to what is normal; the point of everything they write is Hey! Hey! Look at me! I’m so weird! What do you think of me?
Jordan Castro