Good Weird

Apr 05, 2026

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been thinking about this sentence a lot. I used to think it was spot-on. It required precious little imagination to look at most people going about their wretchedly mundane routines and see that they would rather trade their spreadsheets for a wood shop or their sales draw for watercolors and an easel. I no longer think it’s entirely accurate. It needs a revision to remain in step with our current human condition.

Here’s how I’d update it: The mass of men lead lives of confused desperation. To put a finer point on it, most of us have a wound—a bottomless hole—and we don’t know where it came from or what to fill it with.

If you follow the news, you probably saw this confused desperation play out this week. I generally avoid writing about the news. Evergreen over ephemeral. This one is no different. But full transparency, the subject matter was inspired by Kristi Noem or, more specifically, Kristi Noem’s husband.

If you make it a point to spare yourself of the deluge of negativity, cynicism, and abject terror delivered by way of most news outlets, let me catch you as quickly as possible for our purposes here. Bryon Noem, now the most famous cuckold since Will Smith, was exposed as a participant in an online bimbofication fetish community.

Not familiar with the bimbofication fetish? Neither was I. Apparently, Bryon likes to dress up in pink hot pants while wearing prosthetic boobs. But not just, ya know, any old pair of prosthetic boobs. Massively huge, ridiculously large prosthetic boobs—the kind Jessica Rabbit would look at and think, That’s a little much.

The First Gentlemen of South Dakota, an interpretation.

Using the pseudonym Jason Jackson, the First Gentleman of South Dakota engaged webcam models and fetish performers as a submissive, seeking affirmation to the tune of $25,000, all in.

It’s weird, sure. But I’m all about weird. As long as it’s good weird. I have no problem with good weird. Consenting adults. Self-expression. Nobody hurt (as far as I know). So this seems like good weird.

Before you spring to judgment, remember your scripture. I believe it was in the Book of John, somewhere around chapter 8: “Let him who is without giant prosthetic tits among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” I’m pretty sure that’s what it says. I haven’t been to Sunday School in a while. But that morality checks out. Be as weird as you wanna be, provided you don’t hurt anybody or redirect your wound at other innocent weirdoes.

If you don’t relate to this, we can’t be friends.

Therein lies the rub, right? The Noems, as far as I can tell, are decidedly bad weird. They’ve made a career passing judgment—and crafting policy—against the very kind of weird they now find in their own home. I’ve made it a point to lean into good weird and surround myself with the good weirdoes.

It’s easy to spot a good weirdo. They’re not hiding anything. A few months ago, I took my wife and kids to see Amigo the Devil. One of his hits is a darkly comic folk song titled “I Hope Your Husband Dies.” We got in line for the venue, and I can confidently say the queue included millions upon millions of dollars in tattoos, piercings, leather, spikes, black makeup, therapy bills, and bail bonds.

My family didn’t exactly fit in stylistically. We looked like a handful of Skittles tossed into a bowl of black licorice and motor oil. But at the same time, we felt right at home. Every person we met was kind and polite with a great sense of humor and a desire to just be. I would have trusted any one of them to babysit my kids. By comparison, I wouldn’t trust the Noems to babysit my cactus. The poor prickly thing would end up pregnant and shot in the face.

Many people would look at Amigo the Devil’s fanbase and assume all sorts of horrors. And like any large swath of the population, there’s sure to be a turd or two. After all, humans are humans. But our experiences at the few shows we’ve attended have been nothing but fun and soul-nourishing. I can’t say the same about many of the more mainstream events I’ve been to, say, pro football or baseball games, where droves of insecure dipshits, apparently drinking the first beer of their lives, have committed any number of violent felonies.

This isn’t even bad weird. It’s Darwinian weird.

If you’ve spent time on social media in the last year or two, then you probably came across this refrain: Fuck your feelings. It’s a shorthand, seeming to suggest that practicality supersedes emotion and empathy. It reminds me of my time teaching research papers to community college students. I allowed my students to choose their own topics, and I encouraged them toward unusual subject matter. (Who needs to read another regurgitated pro-con research paper about abortion or gun control? Not this guy.) One semester, a student researched and wrote about foot fetishes.

I found this fascinating because I find feet—just about every foot I’ve ever seen—aesthetically repugnant. Certainly, anyone with a foot fetish is also a serial killer, I used to think. Then the student presented her research. One source suggested that foot fetishes began in infancy after babies were weaned from the breast, perhaps too early. Where does a baby go once it can sit up and hold its own bottle? On the floor, at mother’s feet. Suddenly, foot fetishists transformed in my mind from morally depraved toe-knuckle connoisseurs to hungry babies in need of comfort and nourishment.

Buy the Anthology

Feeling your feelings is essential. So is making it okay for other people to feel their feelings—and express those feelings in a healthy fashion. When you hinder the flow of emotion, it comes out sideways, as cockeyed as the nipples on Bryon Noem’s knockers.

Most creatives know this, I think. Creativity is one of those channels for good weird. But it takes courage. It requires openness and vulnerability. That vulnerability has come easy to me for the most part. I was blessed to have some short-sighted, hard-hearted critics in my family snap this into focus.

I got good grades when I was young, and I was always drawn to artistic hobbies. At one point, I wanted to illustrate comic books for a living. I told as much to one relative, and she said, “That’s stupid. Why would you waste all those brains on something like that?” This was her equivalent of Fuck your feelings. She made that comment with a cigarette in one hand, a bottle of pills in another, and a stack of losing lottery scratchers beside three fingers of gin. If she was the paragon of brains, I knew that I would be syncing my life to the rhythm of my heart. Good weird or go fuck yourself.

The only response to someone asking you to not be you.

Another seminal moment happened in my first Creative Writing Workshop. If you’ve never been part of one, just know that everyone reads everyone else’s material and provides feedback, written and oral. After workshopping one of my recent stories that was particularly R-rated, one of my peers wrote me a note: I admire how bold your choices are. I could never be that honest. It stuck with me, mostly because it broke my heart. How tragic for a person to take a creative writing class and feel that he couldn’t express himself in a make-believe fashion (let alone in the real world)? It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.

Stephen King has an essay called “Why We Crave Horror Movies.” Here’s an excerpt:

For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them — Dawn of the Dead, for instance — as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.

Those of us who are good weird keep the gators fed. More importantly, we don’t beat our chests—prosthetic or otherwise—when other people keep their gators fed.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?