The Outsider

I finished The Outsider aka The stranger on my flight from Portland to San Francisco. It was a short flight, and a short book. Camus writes about Meursault as a man who seems to see through everything, as if he’s pulled his soul out of his body and let it float in the air, observing the world from an almost absolutely rational perspective. At that moment, the body is just a body, a vessel that only perceives heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.

I once felt I’d reached that point when I got too high on shrooms. Then I realized how deeply I hated myself and the people around me, and since then I’ve tried to avoid shrooms as much as I can.

When I was young, I mean, young as a child, I somehow discovered the trick to being funny. I came to believe that humor, especially the kind of dry wit people can get, is something almost everyone accepts. But when I grew up and looked back, I realized that I never truly laughed at my own jokes while I was telling them.

I see people’s sense of humor as a reflection of how open they are to the world, because most jokes exist only to serve their audience. If you tell a joke to yourself and laugh about it alone, people start to call it autism. In the long river of my life, I’ve tried my best to keep up with the flow and not be left behind. So I pretend I don’t do it.

Now that I think about it, it was, in truth, a kind of cowardice. The strong create the rules of this world, while the weak are bound by them. If I stop judging myself on behalf of the world, perhaps I will have reached what people call self-reconciliation, a term that’s definitely been overused on social media. If I don’t feel sorry when I say I’m sorry. If I invite my enemies to come to my funeral. If I just keep my mouth shut, smoke a cigarette, and look at the space between their brows so I don’t have to explain myself. If I let everything happen to me, as it should, as they should, as I should. Because I had been right, I was still right, and I was always right. And yes, I do hate most people in this world. And so?

That’s the only way I know how to love this world.