There's more to the story of my post from earlier today; truthfully, I have no problem tolerating whatever the blogging baby commentors dish out. But this morning I received an e-mail from a reader of this blog that inspired me to write that earlier post. I won't go into specifics, but it basically said that Juniper was almost certainly going to grow up to be a "freak," it made negative comments about how we dress her, and it criticized certain decisions we've made with our lives, and more.

After reading it I went out for a walk in some of the first sunshine to hit San Francisco in months.

The e-mail dredged up latent insecurities, I suppose. I won't bother you with a boring bildungsroman's worth of details of an adolescence spent coveting "normalcy" and never seeing that desire met. I did get called "freak" plenty myself and that was never by choice. I was never cool enough to turn it into a matter of pride. You can argue that I now submit myself to that designation in order to feel superior or "different" but that's neither here nor there. Lateblooming 23-year-old hipster Dutch might haven gotten all uppity about you saying so, but I'm comfortable with who I am now. When I was out walking today a man was going up the escalator while I was going down and I saw he was missing half of his face. In olden times they called people like that freaks. Sometimes I am struck with how people with physical deformities can be so beautiful, and how my heart warms when I see them. This attraction is probably offensive, but I swear that it does not arise from pity. My aesthetics are such that I find the vulnerability of a visible wound or scar or a limp almost erotic.

And yet my mind returned to a line from Whitman that has always puzzled me: "I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,/ And for the strong upright men I bring yet more needed help." I think what attracts me to the visibly deformed is that their wounds are on the surface. Diane Arbus could photograph them. See I feel wounded too, an almost-certainly-insulting, silent kinship. It is harder to see the wounds the rest of us carry, but I believe that under the clothes or in the hearts of most of us they lie hidden, even among those who are conventionally beautiful or even strong upright men. Somehow these wounds manage to make us all feel different, even alone, while also binding us to each other. Everybody, it turns out, is a bit of a freak [Which makes being a freak perfectly normal].

A few years ago I read all these books by astrophysicists and topologists written for laypeople that attempted to explain various theories of the universe without too many mathematical equations. I became captivated by the idea that maybe in an nth dimension people weren't so separate, but really connected to one another like fingers on an unseen hand.

Somehow you found this blog; when you found it you brought your weltanschauung and from the words and pictures here you have constructed an idea about mine: who I am, who my wife is, what we think, and what we and our little baby girl are like. Maybe you've left comments; maybe you've left a link to a blog of your own that has let me try to figure something out about you and yours. Maybe I went to high school with you and you come here just to make fun of me. Maybe I've met you in real life since we collided on the internet, or you're just here looking for "lactating granny porn." Even if you leave no trace, you've made judgments about me and what I have to say. We've smashed into each other, and just for that I am grateful.

If I come off sometimes like I think I know it all, or that I think I'm better than you because I casually drop annoying German loanwords, or if something I say insults a choice you've made, please remember that what I have written today is how I truly feel. I don't expect or even want people reading this to agree with me all the time. If you feel that I'm being a judgmental asshole, don't just ignore or insult me. Tell me why what I'm saying is wrong.

But please show me the courtesy of not telling me that my daughter will be a schoolyard pariah in terrible clothes, or I will hunt you down and stand on your front lawn with an old school bull horn reading from my 38,674 page manifesto about the evils of Wal Mart.

Thanks.