One person's freak is another person's friend. Ooh, that was clever at this time of day for me.
Anyway, I've thought about this idea of community before. Traditionally a community is a group of people living close to one another, e.g. a street or village. Alas that kind of community is less common these days, not because we don't live close to one another, but because so many people move house so often; not many people these days stay where they were brought up, and when they do move out of the area, they seem to move quite often, certainly working people with decent incomes in the UK.
So we form other types of community. We have work or school/college of course. That's a kind of
enforced community. Our neighbours at home we can ignore most of the time if we want to, but we can't do that at work or school. We all share something in common, perhaps we share a lot more than neighbours do, but we are forced to be together and have to moderate our true selves in order to 'fit in' much of the time. I'm sure anyone else who works will know how the blood boils when colleagues are inconsiderate, but you have to bite your tongue!
But then we also have communities where we share interests. People into sports form teams, or they go to matches together. You get church groups who meet up every week. You even get shared understanding in small ways such as when out walking, other walkers will say "hello" as you pass one another on a footpath. This is just another community with a shared interest. We aren't neighbours or colleagues thrown together through circumstance, and just because we don't (usually
) physically meet, doesn't mean that what we do is necessarily strange in any way. We are still socialising in the same way as any other community, it's just a new way of doing it!
What's freaky about that?