An Overview of Weird

weird

[weerd] adjective, -er, -est, noun 

adjective

1. involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny: a weird sound; weird lights.

2. fantastic; bizarre: a weird getup.

3. Archaic . concerned with or controlling fate or destiny.

Describing and then categorizing what is and isn't weird used to be a simple process; what isn't normal?  Despite no one knowing exactly what normal was, people knew what wasn't.  Whatever stood out wasn't normal.  Whoever stood out wasn't normal.  If you stood out you weren't normal.  The one thing everyone wanted to be was normal.

Somewhere along the way, be it the '60s, the Kennedy assassination, or the birth of David Lynch, things got weird.  People began standing out.  The devil was in the radio, evil lurked on-screen, and the world was no longer the safe, normal place it once was.  Where did this come from, and who was responsible?  Certainly it wasn't Ma and Pa idly withering away in Suburbia, nor was it the advertising executives selling America's soul on Madison Avenue; so, where was this weird bubbling up from?

Beneath the surface of normal suburban bliss there have always been strange and wonderful freaks communicating in a language foreign to most.  Their images can be bloody and horrifying, or they can be sedate and haunting; their noise can be piercing and abrasive, or it can be like a narcotic deceptively soothing you into a state of sublime dependence; and their words...oh how their words can tear at you until you're left questioning your place in this world.

This is a tribute to everything strange and bizarre and disconcerting and unsettling and wonderful and beautiful and weird.  This is about weird.