Normal?

The pole dancer in the previous post reminds of a funny story. Three or four years ago I was working in a chemical dependency unit. There was a new patient in the nurse’s station talking to myself and John, the charge nurse. As is common for alcoholics this early in recovery, he was explaining to us that he was not an alcoholic. In fact, he maintained that he was normal and was not sure how it could have happened that he could have ended up undergoing detox. He was gay. And he was telling us a little about his life to prove how normal he was. He said that some of his problems must have arisen from someone being injured on the pole. “What pole?” I enquired. And it turned out that he had a stripper pole in his front room. John and I were polite enough to not laugh too much. But we had to point out that if someone has a stripper pole in his front room anything he says about how normal he is cannot be taken very seriously