Normal People vs. Screwed-up People

Christopher Titus said it best when he said, "Be normal and the crowd will accept you; be deranged and they will make you their leader." If one were to take the time to sit down and think about it, America is really divided between two groups and two groups alone. No, these groups have nothing to do with race, origin, skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, sex preference, or the way you part your hair. The division is as simple as normal people versus screwed-up people.

Normal people will get into an argument, talk it through, and solve the crisis as easy as that. Screwed-up people get into an argument, try to talk it through, and wind up on that evening's episode of Cops. If a normal person sees a crisis, they attempt to come up with ways to make it better. On the other hand, if screwed-up people see a crisis they prefer to think of ways to make it more entertaining. Anything that lands the winner in jail or requires police intervention is seen as a success. Bonus points if the family knows one of the cops that arrives because he or she has locked up a relative or two or ten at some point.

Normal people will go to a family reunion to eat great food. They reunite with lost family that they haven't seen in years and have a fun, calm evening. When it ends they go on their way looking forward to coming back next year. Conversely, screwed-up people go to a family reunion to drink beer. They reunite with second cousins they hadn't realized their cousins had married. There is always at least one explosion and someone gets thrown through a wall at some point during the evening. When it ends, they can count on one person being at the door shouting, "You damn well better not come back next year!"

When Normal people draw their family tree it has a distinctive downward flow and everyone can see where one generation ends and another begins. There are no surprises and no major fluctuations. Screwed-up people, though, try to draw their family tree and give up after they realize that too many people were married countless times and are related to themselves in a myriad of ways. Eventually, the whole system just becomes too complicated to handle.

When it comes to sports, normal people comment on how much fun they are having and congratulate each other on doing a good job even if they lose. There are no grudges held from year to year; each party or reunion is a fresh start for a healthy game of whatever sport they decide to play. When screwed-up people play sports, however, they comment on how much the earth is moving and then they taunt the sober people for losing to a bunch of no-good drunks. Horseshoes are transformed into weapons and are "accidentally" thrown haphazardly at "those no-good, cheating bastards for their win back in '95".

Normal people have a baby and try to think of a beautiful name that they'll love for the rest of their life. They want this name to bestow a sense of elegance that they are sure their child will have. Screwed-up people, on the other hand, have a baby and worry about finding a name that will cause the child to be ridiculed and taunted for the rest of their life. The more times they get beat up for it the better because then it will instill in them a sense of toughness and the ability to fight. Hence the song 'A Boy Named Sue'. No normal person could've come up with something like that.

Safety for their children comes first for both normal and screwed-up people, but it comes in different forms. Normal people worry about having seatbelts for their kids just in case they get into an accident. Screwed-up people are worried about having a rollcage so their kids won't get crushed when they roll down that hill they swore wasn't too steep to drive up while they were off-roading.

As Christopher Titus put it, "the normal make a living; the deranged make history." He noticed the distinction between the two groups and wasn't afraid to point it out. Proudly, he divulged the secrets behind the deranged and screwed-up group to the normal group from the viewpoint of his own family. Just as equally proud, I have done the same. Face it, every reader had to know that this was written from the point of view of a screwed-up person because a normal person never could've managed it. A normal person would have started listing the differences and would have realized everything that was wrong with the world and they would run off to go make it better. We screwed-up people have long ago realized everything that is wrong with the world and we are still trying to come up with a way to make it more interesting.