So I just got back from Bloomington, Indiana, where I spent four days trying to help a gay friend find a gay bar and surveying folks, including a murderous hobo (sorry, "rail rider") and a 74-year-old woman who explained how often she gets to have sex with her lover in Vancouver.

Now I'm sitting back in my un-air-conditioned Logan Square apartment drinking an Indiana-microbrewed wheat ale, ignoring the cat, checking on the condition of the expanding Incredible Hulk toy my roommate is trying to grow and figuring out where I can safely throw my boomerang.

My life isn't crazy enough.

That wasn't an example of litotes, which Schott's Original Miscellany tells me is a rhetorical device using "deliberate understatement for dramatic or comic effect." I really don't think my life is crazy enough.

(Side note: I just got a Facebook notification from one of the other Indiana-trippers about how, if we stayed one more day, we could have seen a Chick-Fil-A promotion where people dressed like cows get free meals. I still don't think things are crazy enough.)

Maybe I'm tired from drinking last night as the only liker-of-girls in Bloomington's sole gay bar, but I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed by this experiment. I've enjoyed the things I've blogged on: the punk poets, the science geeks, the naked bikers and so on. I've loved this summer to pieces. I just haven't been shocked by anything.

Maybe my weird, pointless-in-the-good-way life has inured me to shock. Watching a friend design and build an amped musical saw or the incident with the masturbating Jamaican might have put me in a more competitive league in terms of being shocked by crazy.

Or maybe it's because when you get the right eyes, the world isn't shocking. It's a beautiful, wonderful place filled with abject horrors, but it all sort of makes sense in a way. No one really knows what to do, and we're all figuring it out on the fly. We do what seems to fit at the moment. For some, it's getting married and growing some kids. For others, it's dressing up in pajamas and goggles and getting into a fight at the Columbia (Missouri) Mall over who is, in fact, the Burger King.

That was my birthday present to him.

I didn't bat an eye when the rail rider answered the survey question "If retired, former occupation" with "So when I was 15, I killed a guy." We actually went on to have quite a nice conversation. He lives in the woods outside Bloomington and gets his hair cut more often than I do.

Tonight, I could go to a barbeque at a former dominatrix's house (we went to high school together) or to a party celebrating Alaska before the ice caps are expected to melt this summer. I'm thinking of skipping both and seeing if my roommate wants to go see the new Hellboy.

Maybe I'm tired from plastering Bloomington with surveys.

Maybe I'm an absolute lunatic who got a blog just to chart his full decline into that guy at the old folks' home who just keeps giggling.

Or maybe the world is chock-full of strangeness, and once you start to equate it with normality, things just make more sense.

I'm going to check on the Hulk once more and start tabulating survey data. Like I said, we're figuring it out on the fly. A nice, boring night just seems to fit.

And the old lady visits Vancouver three to four times a year.

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