1

     I’m not going to lie to you.  I am not normal in any sense of the word.

     Looking at me, all you would see is your typical, average guy.  I have an average build, an average height, an average weight.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  My hair is brown, not too short, not too long.  My eyes are mud brown.  My skin isn’t tan, but it isn’t white either.  I am perfectly ordinary.
     Normally, I wear jeans and a tee-shirt.  Nothing fancy, just whatever comes out of my closet first.  I keep a plain brown wallet in my back pocket, even though it almost never has any cash in it these days.  I don’t waste my money on things like clothes, so I wear Wally-world shoes.  Sometimes, if it’s sunny, I wear a baseball cap.  If it’s raining, I wear a black leather jacket.  I am perfectly ordinary.
     I work at Payless, because they were the only place hiring men with only a high school degree.  I’m taking a break from college, or at least that’s what I tell my mother.  I live in a crummy apartment building that should have been condemned back in the 1960s.  My landlord is an immigrant from Spain, and a jerk.  He doesn’t believe in grace periods for rent.  So sometimes, I get into shouting matches with him that rattle the windows.  Sometimes, he kicks me out.  I always come back, and he always lets me in.  Like everyone else, he thinks I am perfectly ordinary.
     I listen to some rap, some alternative, some rock.  I don’t care much for TV; it’s too expensive to get one right now anyway, at least, if I want somewhere to be able to plug it in and watch it.  Like most single, twenty-somethings my age, I spend most of my money on essentials.  Like the occasional pint at the local bar.  But again, my mother thinks I only spend my cash on “essentials.”  I am perfectly ordinary.
     At least, my appearance is.
     It’s my mind that’s different.  Broken.  Re-wired.  Screwed up, if you share the opinion of my high school psychologist.  You see, he believes that I made up everything I told him, for attention from my mother, who dotes on my sister and really doesn’t like me too much.  Bad divorce, but that really has nothing to do with me.  I couldn’t care less that my father is a dirt bag and left my mother with a toddler and a newborn to run off with his secretary and live in L.A.  I really don’t mind.  I know that he’s going to get his.
     And now we reach the “screwed up” part of my brain.  I can see things.  Not see, as in they happen in front of me and my eye sends the image to my brain who processes it.  I mean see, like understand.  I hear things.  Things that no one else hears.  I can touch things that don’t exist to other people.  I can smell, I can taste, things that no one else can.  It’s almost like I live in a crossway between our world and some other world that is ours and isn’t, because it’s sometimes days ahead, sometimes years ahead of our time.  It’s almost like there are thousands of parallel universes out there, some I can connect to at will, some that slam into me whenever they feel like creating massive upheaval in my life.
     So there you have it.  About this time is where the shrink nods, and hides a smile behind a clipboard, or the local evangelical pastor begins to preach about visions and God and Satan and angels and the Living Word and whatever else he has in his arsenal of spiritual assault.  It is also the point where I lost my last job.  Not that it mattered, I was going to quit anyway.  Who would want to be working at the Blockbuster counter during the explosion?