There is a guy walking his dogs across the street wearing a floor length fur coat and a fedora and walking two dogs who are probably mostly pit bull and he stops to pet most other dogs as his own pooches frolic and sniff around the park. His dogs are there to smell the smells, and he’s there for the dogs, but he seems mostly resigned himself until he sees me, and waves gleefully and excitedly. I walk over. Presumably I know this man, this very remarkable creature outfitted like a pimp in Moscow.
But no. He just wants to say hi. He likes my hat. I pet one of his dogs, I move quickly along.

Now, we all can pick out the freak in this situation. I don’t mean to be judgmental but I’d like to think in a freakathon line-up this guys gonna get fingered far before I will. You need a superfreak? He’s your man. Round up the usual suspects, you are probably going to grab the white man in the sweeping mink in the children’s playground, right?
And yet in a playground full of some other rather colorful characters, I’m picked out to share the wealth and I can’t help but to wonder if that is because I was the only one who walked over, willing to accept they might now this person, or if it’s simply a kinship of fuzz, if it’s the furry hat, yet again, or if it’s something more disturbing, more intrinsically bizarre that I just can’t hide.

I have this every once in a while. I wonder if it’s me. If I’m the freak. I look around. I think, hey, that was weird, right? Nobody notices. Oh hey, maybe it’s just me.
I try to look busy, Crap, I’m the freak, aren’t I?

Yeah, I don’t know what to do about that other than embrace it. Buy 12 dachsunds and pull the jumpsuits out of storage and strolll out the door, beads and feathers flapping in the wind, rockin’ out to split enz and the accordion top ten on my ipod, as I contemplate robin hood and statistical methods to correlate average length and frequency of other people’s sex lives whilst trying to keep my weiner dogs from tangling around my boots.