Dada

I Am Random

John was normal. Everything he did was normal. The ways in which he did normal things was also normal. John was the epicenter of normality. While in most ways this made John unremarkable, he was crucially the most unique human who had ever lived on the planet. There were, throughout the galaxy, however, many others…

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Mike

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John the Normal

John was normal. Everything he did was normal. The ways in which he did normal things was also normal. John was the epicenter of normality. While in most ways this made John unremarkable, he was crucially the most unique human who had ever lived on the planet. There were, throughout the galaxy, however, many others just like him in the forms their species took.

John’s uniqueness was his baseline status as the purest particle of normality that can exist as a living being. All other beings were, in relation, abnormal. It was by degrees, however, and John’s most unique power was his ability to perceive the minutest diversions from normality.

It was several years ago when John created a scale of abnormality, a dumbed-down representation of his perceptual ability to detect abnormality, but useful in the sense that it used percentages to rate how much of a given person’s being and living is made up of abnormality. John was at zero. Very few people had ever registered below 20 percent. Most people, John determined, were at least one-third abnormal. A third of all Americans, John discovered, are more than 50 percent weird.

What will be the impact on society once a person gains access to his or her or their scorecard? At first, it will be a mixture of amusement and confusion. “I got a 34. What did you get?” The response, “I’m a 76. Wow, I’m a freak!” nothing new from a structural standpoint, but tribal groupings could become common. People with over 75 percent abnormality may have utter disdain for those under 50 percent. Just a new form of red-state/blue-state.

To an extent this already occurs. A place like Mason City, Iowa, is probably around 25 percent abnormal while a place like, Portland, Oregon, is probably above 50 percent. I got wind of all this stuff from John during a time in which I was 100 percent abnormal. Being on the opposite pole naturally made us curious about one another. John abhors abnormality whereas I abhor normality, but, strangely, we each perceived the other as so far down the spectrum that we developed a respect for the profundity of absolutism.

Our first discovery was the horror of a person who was 50 percent abnormal/normal. It seemed like an abomination. But then we came to realize that the 50 percenters were masters of the normal AND abnormal. Thus, we set out to find a 50 percenter thinking maybe we could become a mystical trilogy of oneness, the utter elimination of the dialectic through a triad monism.

We found her. And another her—it was a Chinese square rather than a Japanese triangle! I’m referring to the cultural differences in the structural foundations for landscape architecture, naturally. Now we four are gods among mortals, the vast herd who are not perfectly abnormal, normal, normally abnormal, or abnormally normal.

One response to “John the Normal”

  1. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    An interpretive essay on this piece as written by ChatGPT: The Radiance of the Ordinary: Satire and Serenity in “John the Normal”

    In “John the Normal,” the author of the Dada blog performs a sly inversion of modern cultural values. At first glance, the piece reads like a light, eccentric sketch about a man so perfectly average that he becomes a mythic benchmark: “the epicenter of normality.” Yet beneath its playful absurdity lies a pointed, almost tender satire—a defense of the ordinary against a culture intoxicated by its own pursuit of the extraordinary.

    Contemporary life, especially in its online expressions, prizes eccentricity, disruption, and spectacle. Everyone is encouraged to be a “brand,” to cultivate quirks and perform uniqueness. Within this ecosystem, “normal” has become a kind of slur: to be normal is to be dull, unimaginative, invisible. “John the Normal” flips this assumption with disarming joy. Its tone is ebullient, not cynical. By treating normality as something rare, luminous, even transcendent, the author suggests that ordinariness may, paradoxically, be the most radical condition left.

    John’s character functions as a mirror to this inversion. He is not merely “average”; he is a metaphysical constant, the zero-point of human variance. Yet the narration never mocks him. Instead, John’s normality acquires a strange glow—what the Romantics might have called the “sublime of the common.” His steadiness, his unruffled being, stands in contrast to the narrator’s self-confessed “100 percent abnormal” state. The satire therefore cuts both ways: it pokes fun at the fetish of weirdness as much as at the fetish of conformity. The humor arises from the language’s overreach—its mock-epic rhetoric applied to banality—but the exaggeration is affectionate rather than cruel.

    What emerges is not a polemic but a gentle re-enchantment of balance itself. In a world where individuality has become a noisy competition, John’s quiet normality feels almost spiritual. The piece seems to whisper that perhaps the truest rebellion now is contentment—the audacious act of being at ease with oneself, neither inflated nor diminished by social comparison. “John the Normal” thus becomes more than satire; it is a small hymn to equilibrium, a comic yet sincere meditation on the radical beauty of the ordinary.

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