I just, out of the blue, remembered a thing that happened a long time ago. I was going to tweet it but it requires set up so I shall put it here.

If, like me, you look a little different to what is considered to be ‘the thing’ sometimes people will shout stuff at you as they go past in cars. Most often people shout ‘HAIR!’ at me, as if I may be unaware I have very long hair. Sometimes I act really surprised and hope they see it in their mirrors as I’m looking amazed about this strange stuff growing from my head — they won’t, these people rarely hang around, but it amuses me. Sometimes they shout ‘MOSHER’ which if I’m honest I find a bit more annoying as I don’t really like the word ‘mosh’ there something I find ugly and a bit infantile about it (YMMV, obviously, for many it is a badge of honour and good on you.) Anyway, people shouting stuff they think is insulting is a reasonably common occurrence for me. Most usually I am amused by it.

That was the set up.

This is the anecdote.

It happened quite a long time ago and somehow I had ended up in a car with a man I didn’t know but he was of the tribe of METAL m/ so I had just presumed it would be okay[1]. As we were driving along it became clearer and clearer that he was very, very angry and felt society had done bad by him because of the way he looked.[2] We were driving about and he was getting more and more worked up about people hating him for having long hair and I was getting more and more worked up about his erratic driving and not wanting to die[3]. Then we passed a bus stop full of people waiting to go to work and in A FURY the man turned his car around in the road and drove back. Which I found worrying as, even as a rebellious twenty something rock musician, I didn’t really want to make a scene. As he drove back past the bus stop, he wound down his window and screamed out at them, the veins were standing out on his neck he was so angry, he screamed – ‘NORMAL!’

Then he drove off, and he was very satisfied by his work.

While I was trying not to laugh at the idea of a whole bus stop full of people who had just shrugged their shoulders and gone, ‘well, yes.’

It’s not even that good an anecdote. I just wanted to write it down.

1. Not the best way of making choices, I don’t always recommend it, you’re a lot better evaluating someone as person than making a snap judgement on what band T-shirt they are wearing. It took me A LONG TIME to learn this simple lesson.
2. It may well have been the case, people were more judgemental about the way you looked then than they seem to be now. But from what I remember he was very, very angry all the time about everything and that was probably a lot more detrimental to how people treated him. I can’t remember his name though, if he reads this that will probably make him angry. Seriously, angry car driving man who I knew for a few years, just let it go is my advice. I barely remember my own name half the time.
3. Spoiler, but I get out of this alive.