Out of the Darkness, into the Weird

And now for something completely different ...

It's been occurring to me recently that one can be closeted about anything. Sexual orientation is certainly common. But a person will basically "closet" any personal information they don't feel will be accepted/understood by their peers. In this case of sexual orientation, this is damaging, as feeling free to pursue a meaningful sex life is an important life. Actually choosing to pursue a meaningful sex life is another matter entirely (ahem).

One of the closets I've been hiding in concerns my interest in the paranormal. I feel like I somehow have to defend the fact that I like to read about UFOs and ghost stories, even though the vast majority of our pop culture entertainment is based on related topics. I like to read about UFO sightings, and ghost sightings and near death experiences. I don't think considering the possibility that there may be more to those things than mass delusion is completely unreasonable. And even so, these various phenomenons are interesting purely as a social psychology topic, if one must insist that nothing one has not personally experienced could ever possibly be real.

That said, and here is the defensiveness, there is such a thing as taking an interest in the paranormal too far. There are a lot of charlatans looking to sell lies (and associated products based on said lies) to the public that wants to believe a little too much. And there's are certainly people who fixate on these topics and associated conspiracy theories to a completely unhealthy degree. But the fact that charlatans exist does not mean that paranormal things are not "real." They might not be of course, but they might also be real events playing by rules we simply don't understand yet.  My simple theory is anything that seems to have happened, and turns out to have happened, however surprising, will have happened.

In this, as in many things, I do my best to remain agnostic. I don't see a reason to start a UFO cult, but neither do I feel the need to dismiss the huge number of weird encounters as delusions, simply because it's something I haven't experienced. Sometimes it's okay to say, "i don't know, but that's interesting to think about."

For me, I think a large part of the appeal is partly simply scientific curiosity, but also a deep dissatisfaction with modern life that powers a powerful desire for new information that would upset our collective applecart, be that confirmation of alien life or life after death or whatever. When I'm disenchanted by my choices, fanciful alternatives become more appealing. And friends, I am deeply disenchanted by the choices presented in modern life.

So that's all I have to say. I may mention the paranormal from time to time with the above mindset. I might not. Who knows. But I think it's silly to self-censor myself on a topic just because I'm afraid of not seeming rational. That hasn't stopped me otherwise, so why start now?

Bigfoot though, that's just bullshit of course.