Introspection.
I'm hard pressed to recall a single individual who has ever been so loud while being so subtle. He never explicitly expressed how he felt about being the way he was. We never were granted the sort of access that would have allowed us to take him in at a different angle. Cable television offers us a superfluous supply of gossip and "inside scoop" of even the least interesting personalities imaginable, many of whom boasted a smaller audience and level of cultural significance than Danny. Of course, none of this applied to Danny -- probably for the better. He never overtly told us, "I am happy" or "I am unhappy", but the subtext was there.
He didn't communicate like most of us do. He yelled curses and hit things, and at face value we saw an angry idiot. He simply spoke a different language. In the video below, I chose to include a scene in which a tardy-for-work Danny half-sleeps fitfully on his couch. The television blares a commercial indirectly pleading with him, in an abstract sense, to get up and make something of the day. Danny loved television almost as much as he hated taking guff from forces human or inanimate, and he makes it clear to us that he'll get up when he feels like getting up.
Danny's reaction, though, also strikes me as a half-conscious acknowledgement. He knows that the society in which he lives would laugh at him, and probably is laughing at him, for being the way he is. "Good point," he seems to say, "but fuck you. I know who I am."
In another scene, Danny offers us a full-throated musing: "Last time I gave a shit, I got fucked." It's hard for us to intelligently place this in the proper context. Does he mean "giving a shit" about life in general, or the ideal of fitting in, or something else altogether? While we can disagree with his philosophy, at the very least we can be impressed with his cavalier approach to his existence, and the self-confidence he possesses to stay put and make the most of it while the rest of us frenetically scramble about in pursuit of dreams that may not even be real.
"Fuck salt." Well, that's anyone's guess. Maybe he was concerned about his sodium intake. He wasn't stupid, folks. He talked and looked like an idiot, but he wasn't.