Oct. 05, 2002 - 9:35 a.m.
Genius VS Normalcy

I'm sorry my entries are few and far between. I have no incentive to sit in front of my computer these days. Now that Chris isn't around, we don't spend time sitting together in the home-office on our respective computers, I'm not at work so I am not forced to sit blankly in front of one. I'm free! For the time being. I'll be back in captivity soon enough. You'll get more of me then.

The one thing I know to be true about myself is that I am more creative when I am alone. Depression is the best muse I've known. My writing gets better, maybe deeper, my art becomes more passionate. You might say I'm more inspired by sadness and lonliness than anything else. It's familiar to paint and draw through tears for me, or write. Though I haven't been crying for a long time now. I suffered from depression through my teen years and early twenties, even took medication for a year and a bit. I stopped when I met Chris, he seemed to balance me out. Now that he's gone I seem to go back to my old habits and patterns of manic depression.

This seems to be true of a lot of brilliant artistic people. Maybe we can attribute artist ability to insanity. It's seems that the weirder or more unpredictable you are, the more brilliant an artist you are. Look at all these actors that are excellent actors but have terrible self destructive habits and behaviours and dependencies. Robert Downey Jr, though what he has is a drug habit, there are emotional reasons that he has this problem to begin with. He's running away from himself with the drugs and it's saving him from being with himself, which me may very well be afraid of. Van Gogh was a nutbar. All these musicians who are slightly mad, or bad tempered or obsessive. Mozart was obsessive. Thom Yorke of Radiohead is a suicide waiting to happen. Lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins, SO depressed. Leonardo DaVinci was obsessive and socially withdrawn. That guy in "A Beautiful Mind", his ability to discover mathematic patterns, crack codes etc was unfathomable, and he was schizophrenic. When he medicated himself, he became mediocre, he couldn't do it anymore. Stephen King, well you can't deny that he's a little on the weirdo side.

I read a study in Time magazing on autism. It seems that Silicon Valley is producing a high percentage of autistic children. There is a substantially high collective IQ in the Valley, and these people are having babies. So it sort of illustrates that fine line between genious and madness. Autistic people usually have something that they are exceptional at, beyond all human comparison. Math, music, drawing etc. So their brains are so attuned to functioning for this one purpose at a beyond genius level, that all their other functions suffer heavily.

Think about it. Think about all the people in the world that have been touted "genius" or who have excelled beyond possible expectation in any field and you will most definitely find that they were eccentric, weird, depressed, socially stunted, or downright insane.

Normalcy = mediocrity. I have to say that I would rather be a depressed weirdo and experience all my stuff to the fullest (barring that my physical safety was in jeopardy) than be mediocre. What about you?

old bitching - random - new bitching

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