Okay, so how do you know you’re not retarded?  Terrible word choice, I know, but since I am retarded it’s okay for ME to use it.  Not you, unless you’re also retarded.  Or at least half-retarded and willing to identify as such.

With the aid of $40 worth of hallucinogenic mushrooms, I came to the horrifying conclusion that I am in fact QUITE the high functioning retard.  And everything in my life is faked and staged to keep this truth from me.  My friends and family are just bullshitting me into believing I am “normal”.  Well, the jig, as they say, is up.  

I own and wear Velcro shoes (they’re Lacoste, so at least they’re designer Velcro) and I quite often have no grasp of social etiquette.  I have no rhythm or balance, but there I am on the weekends, trying to bring back the running man in many a crowded bar.  It is a painfully obvious conclusion.  I tried for an honest second opinion from an equally inebriated roommate and her response: Yeah, sometimes.  

Me = Short Bus  

I’m not surprised that it took over twenty years for me to come to this realization, I mean, how was I expected to know?  I’m retarded.  Too stupid to understand how truly stupid I am.  And all these people…these patronizing contemporaries of mine (see what I did there, with the big words; non-retarded people don’t think those words are so great, nor are they impressed with my proper use of the semi-colon), they are just jerks keeping me in the dark (like a mushroom, oh the irony).

I’ve initiated counter arguments, grasping at an intellectual defense:

I have a University degree, how could I be retarded?  

Well, what looks like a genuine degree to my retarded eyes is crayon and construction paper to everyone else’s.  I was never enrolled for real, I just thought I was and everyone played along.  It was just an English degree (ooh, I can read books without pictures, give me a career) so what’s the harm in humoring me?

Or worse yet, I do have a legitimate degree, but it means absolutely nothing because these things only matter in my retarded eyes and there’s a whole other world that exists beyond the one I am able to comprehend, like my concept of higher education is equivalent to those plastic phones that “call” Big Bird et al.  

I have/had a job.

So do other mentally challenged individuals.  That’s what makes me high functioning.

I don’t look like I’m retarded.

Not to my retarded eyes…

And it goes on.  And on.  And on.  Because it’s pointless repetition that is the true sign of the imbecile.  And I, for one, am wake-up-after-sleeping-in-my-contacts-and-think-I’m-miraculously-cured imbecilic.

The ONLY experience that gives me pause, which makes me realize this whole thing may be what’s retarded and I’m merely tactless and dim, is an abhorrent venture I avoid like Black Death:

Wal-Mart on a Saturday.  

It’s the golden snitch argument against my retardation.  I mean, Wal-Mart customers aren’t exactly congesting the Mensa registration list.  But then, faster than you can say rollback savings, my cart’s half full of 80% discounted pool noodles and I don’t have a pool…but my cart’s half full, so at least I’m an optimistic retard.