Chasing Normal - Fried Chicken and Altar Boys : Mad Scribbler

Normal is a baffling term that is used with regularity as some form of penultimate goal of humanity, overshadowed only by having multiple members of the opposite sex (or same sex, depending on how your flag twists) clambering across your genitals in a lube-induced stupor. Best as I can understand it, the term ‘normal’ defines an average of action.

For example, slowly sliding fried chicken legs into your anus while maintaining eye contact with a news anchor on the television is not normal. If everyone does it, however, it suddenly becomes normal. Those not sliding fried chicken legs into their ani will then be made fun of ruthlessly for the entirety of their lives, while everyone points and laughs.

Discerning Normalcy

This is difficult for kids. Their only hope of being accepted at school is that their parents managed to glean enough normal behavior to conduct themselves normally when they confront peers. This can become an arduous focal point, depending on how much your parents like fried chicken and the local news. Children have their first contact with the human species with their parents, and that tends to be the primary influence on children until they’re old enough to realize they are allowed (and should be encouraged) to make their own decisions and form their own opinions.

Many don’t come to that realization, which is why certain political parties continue to exist 😠.

I’ve Been Attacked!

This is a fun statement to write because I have no interest in disclosing my personal political affiliation. With the neutral manner that sentence was crafted, ideally, should have ardent political supporters of whatever the fuck eagerly bashing the other side. If you thought the sentence was aimed at you, you should probably reevaluate some things and unfuck yourself.

If we add abuse into the mix, you have an otherwise perfectly developing human who thinks a bunch of weird shit is normal. This is how the cycle of abuse continues to propagate within family trees. Much like Matt Gaetz, however, we’re not entirely keen to have this waylaid by a discussion regarding the abuse of children.

This definition of normalcy tends to persist across generations, causing a form of entrapment for family’s regarding class, employment, and education. If a child is born to a teenage couple, for example, this can bring with it a metaphorical domino effect that lasts for generations. The Public Broadcasting Service for Washington, DC, found that one-third of dropouts in high school are related to early pregnancy and childbirth.¹

The Consequence of Normalcy

To the child, this could normalize the act of both dropping out of school 😠 and early childbirth – perhaps not on a clearly conscious level, however. It’s unlikely (though admittedly possible) that a young woman (who dropped out due to an early pregnancy) would encourage her offspring to knock up/get knocked up and/or drop out of schooling, yet the action has already been normalized through a pattern of a parental unit. The numbers, however, are not currently available within public-facing academic papers*, meaning we cannot argue with integrity beyond theory.

Kind of a Dummy

I don’t think dropping out of high school is the proverbial ‘end of the line’ for human success. I actually couldn’t complete high school and am the only one in my family who ended up dropping out. This likely directly ties into why I believe success can be found beyond traditional schooling, but holy shit does it make it harder.

Me dropping out was due to a litany of issues, ranging from abuse (and resulting homelessness) to seeking approval of ‘the wrong crowd’ that found me mired in drug use and its sale, and a litany of bizarre sexual interactions (I was paid for sex once as a young teen, it was weird, and I bought opium with the fee). The overall statement of me not graduating high school is accurate, as is the statement of me being the only family member that could not graduate high school.

I adore academic pursuits, however, a claim that must be made lest someone believe that I somehow abhor education due to historical difficulties. Yet that adoration only brings me so far in the eyes of the many – I’m likely one of the least-educated individuals that you’ll ever meet.

We can see this paradigm in effect, however, within other equations where defined normalcy for parental units results in sub-optimal choices in life by offspring. This is seen clearly within the prison system of the United States; money is made when people are locked behind bars for long periods of time thanks to privatization efforts under the guise of saving federal money, which notably hasn’t happened.²

Parents who end up in prison have unfortunate results for the children, including the fact that children with incarcerated parents are six times more likely to end up in prison themselves³. This is not the sole defining factor of impending imprisonment for youths with a parental unit, of course; the psycho-social consequences alone would be enough to unbalance a youth, already beset upon by puberty, grade-school education, and the sheer unbridled chaos of a world where there are no certainties. Yet the negative interaction with prison, and the arm of the law, reverberates throughout the lifespan of that child.

Adherence to normalcy isn’t necessarily restricted to children, although that’s a heft of consequence primarily due to the long-life spans ahead of those individuals. Thus, parental units have a daunting task ahead of them: to conduct themselves consistently in a manner that presumes that all actions taken by said parental unit will be repeated, ad infinitum, until the family line ceases.

In order to conduct themselves as such, a normalcy that is universally defined must be understood, yet there are a myriad of sources where children will learn a ‘normal’ from. These sources will come from peers, supervisory units, and simple reflection of the world about them (making environment a tremendous factor). Also defining normalcy is current events and how outlets propose them.

The first time that it came out that the best place for a young boy to get some quick action is within the diocese of the Catholic church, there was shock. An area within the world of chaos that is supposed to offer order and peace, instead offered rape. As news broke, the number of victims (on a fascinatingly international scale 😠) coming forth increased on an exponential scale, thanks to the normalization of coming forward regarding the abuses of the Catholic church.

The Other Body of Christ

The connection between men of the cloth, and child rape, is beyond wild. It’s almost like demanding celibacy of the diocese is untenable aside from a decree; dudes have dicks and the desire to use them is apparently stronger than leading the proverbial flock. Imagine how many children would have been saved from rape if some weirdo, eons ago, didn’t opt to include this.

Depending on where you receive scripture, even Jesus had intercourse with a woman he pulled from himself, and then promptly ate his semen, causing Mary Magdalene to faint.⁵ This is recorded by the Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, a church father of Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, as the belief of a libertine Christian sect known as the Borborites. The writing, within the book of The Greater Questions of Mary, is part and parcel of early Christian Scripture, in which the Bible is composed of – The Greater Questions of Mary have (strangely) not been included in the modern-day text.

As fun as this esoteric knowledge is, the reason it wasn’t normalized within the modern-day Bible likely has little to do with the idea that Christians don’t want to think of their savior doing…that. The only recordings we have of the Borborites is from the text of Epiphanius of Salamis, himself, and whether or not the related scriptures (though written around the same time as other books that now make the entirety of scripture) were written and recorded as such in an attempt to slander the name of the libertine sect.

Now, how the modern-day church reached this decision of celibacy is beyond my understanding – there is very little within the New Testament that governs priests in the New Covenant. The Bible does address the celibacy of the Church, but the diocese is a vague mention from Christ himself. Within 1 Corinthians, Paul expresses concern that a married man is more likely to be eager to please his wife rather than the Lord, and other apostles appear to generate their own beliefs, but nothing comes from a figure of authority.

It also normalized the news, however: less shock was expressed as additional reports poured forth until it became yet another news piece in the never-ending cycle. This makes it no less of a tragedy and travesty, but it has been normalized to the point that the Pope held a summit⁴ to discuss the symptoms of sexually assaulting children by people of the cloth (*that doesn’t read right)

Seeking Normal

Now, people tend to be reserved when introduced to a new environment to gauge the normalcy of the new environment, until they become acclimated to the metaphorical rhythm of said climate. The problem comes to a head, however, towards the more private moments of a humans’ life, such as masturbatory practices (not referencing social media here), or sexual interactions. A similar difficulty is reached during rare occasions, such as childbirth or a young one hitting puberty.

Personally, however, the entire gamut of culture manages to consistently elude me, like a young altar boy playing a harrowing game of hide and seek with a priest. While the claims of abnormalcy have haunted much of my past (and present, and future), it took me a long while to realize that the overall idea of normal is batshit crazy. If we’re supposed to gauge our conduct entirely on how others act, it seems a simple act of convincing everyone else that your version of normal is the best.

To this end, I encourage all readers to let their freak flags fly. It’s just a means of convincing everyone else to march to your beat, a prospect that frankly seems much easier if you have a bucket of fried chicken readily on hand.

Citations:

Shuger, L. (2018, June 17). Teen Pregnancy & High School Dropout: What Communities Can Do To Address These Issues. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/research/teen-pregnancy-high-school-dropout-what-communities-can-do-address-these-issues.
Basti, K. G. and V., & Ghandnoosh, N. (2018, August 2). Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/.
Megan Cox, The Relationships Between Episodes of Parental Incarceration and Students’ Psycho-Social and Educational Outcomes: An Analysis of Risk Factors (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2009).
Winfield, N. (2019, February 25). Analysis: Pope’s sex abuse summit: What it did and didn’t do. AP NEWS. https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-ap-top-news-international-news-sexual-abuse-sexual-abuse-by-clergy-befa18bf56224b9387f2eb15d5045f2b.
Schneemelcher, W., & Wilson, R. (2003). The Questions of Mary. In New Testament Apocrypha. essay, Westminster John Knox Press.

Feature Image: Dawin Rizzo: Barranquilla, Atlántico, Colombia

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