Grease? No Thank You, I Prefer to Squeak

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.–Earl Warren

I’m a great admirer of insanity and I am willing to bet that I am not the only one.  I find that the people I most admire in history were in some cases pretty messed up and in some cases absolutely bat-shit crazy.  When I am watching movies I find myself always becoming more fond of the character that leans way out on the edge.    My heroes hang out on the far ends of the bell curve I am afraid.  I am sure this explains a lot about me and perhaps by the end of this post I’ll figure it all out.

George S. Patton

Take Patton for example.  The man was a military genius.  He once urinated in the foxhole of another division commander, in defiance of what he called a ‘passive defense’.  He was convinced that he’d served in a past life as Greek foot soldier, an infantryman with Napoleon, a Roman Legionnaire and an English knight.  Laugh if you wish, but you have to admire an ego that isn’t content with being one of the greatest warriors in history, he was all of them.  Some would call him eccentric, and possibly that is true, if the current national deficit could be considered pocket change.  He competed in the Olympics and did well.  “Could anything be more magnificent? Compared to war, all other forms of life shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it!” he once said, as shells and gunfire erupted all around him and his troops.

No, you’d likely not invite Patton to a Sunday School brunch, but in a fight, this is the kind of guy you want around.

And since we are on egos:

Alexander the Great.  This guy takes narcissism to levels that would make the mental health industry light-headed.  But you cannot argue with results.  By the age of thirty-three he had conquered everything he touched naming two dozen cities after himself on the way.  The only real tarnishing of his image is the fact that we portrayed him in a movie using Colin Farrell (and flopped).  Another movie was considered, using Leonardo DiCaprio, until Hollywood relented and finally admitted that we just don’t have anyone bad ass enough to even pretend to be Alexander.

Ernest Hemingway (manic depression) has always has been a hero of mine.  Stonewall Jackson (Asperger’s).  Albert Einstein (Autism).   Theodore Roosevelt (Bipolar).

With age comes wisdom, and I am starting to detest the word normal.  And disorder.  And illness.  And no, I don’t believe that these people were crazy, nor do I think that people with autism, or depression, or bipolar, or even narcissism are ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’.  But that is the way a society that strives for normalcy views them sometimes.  We look at autistic children as though they’re handicapped.  Chances are friend they’ll be more successful than you, or I.  It seems like the more defined our so-called illnesses are the more they prevent us from fitting in.  The more they prevent us from pretending that we’re  the ‘sane’ and ‘normal’ people that most of us strive to be sometimes.  The more severe it is the more we embrace it, and in doing so, often they step off the same plane of ordinary that most of humanity exists on.  We become special. But not special in that pitiful way that most humans would consider.  Special in the sense they stepped off the train of some imaginary normalcy.

I’m also of the opinion that there is no normal.  It’s a utopian, or perhaps dystopian fantasy that doesn’t exist.  Science has given us the reasoning that these people, you, I, our kids perhaps, are different.  Without presenting the case of what  we are different from.  Where it this normalcy?  Where is this complete sanity that they speak of?   Where is this perfect example of humanity that we are measuring ourselves against?  Where is this person?  I want to meet them, even if it is just one of them.  I’m of the opinion we all have something.

I want to know what I am being measured against.  I want to know why we feel the need to medicate ourselves back into a sanity that is arbitrarily designed by equally if differently flawed people with no benchmark. There is no control group.  There are those with, those without.  Being in the minority doesn’t make you wrong.  It doesn’t make you odd.  Being different is the rule, not the exception.   Some of our greatest geniuses were autistic.  Some of our most brilliant authors and painters were manic depressive, and some were (are) on the verge of what we, not too long ago, labeled insanity.

And even if you are correct, and this fictional world of normal exists, why would I want to be that?  Why would I want to be normal?  Normal, by its very definition is average!  Plain.  Boring.  Tedious.  What I might have been given, true enough, might not be seen to another as a gift or a blessing, but it is mine.  I’ll own it, in my way.  I will embrace it.  If I am abnormal so be it. The greatest insanity of them all is struggling to become nothing.  To fight to become average.  Especially, when in many cases, you might be clawing downward.

Maybe it isn’t a gift or a curse.  Maybe it just is.  Maybe the things that make us who we are, imagined or real, normal or abnormal, are simply things that are.  And we can choose to deny them or to embrace them.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m certain there are disorders. And I am certain there are things that need to be treated.  Evaluated.  I’m just not convinced that the answer lies in some mythological sense or ideal of conformity.

And if I am truly a little bit off (or a lot), then I stand a much greater chance that the world will remember my name.  Because I’d rather have people look at me the way that I look at my heroes, even it is a little snicker as you recognize the genius that lies beneath the madness.  I’d much rather be remembered that way than to not be remembered at all. I might just be crazy

You may be right.

Save your grease.  I’m going to squeak all I damned want to.
And just for fun

My favorite character in Braveheart.  True this one is fictional, but it serves to prove my point (or maybe it doesn’t but consider the subject matter).  The safest place in any situation is next to the insane guy.   They’re indestructible.

And if you care to see disability in action: http://theautismnews.com/2011/03/25/autistic-boy12-with-higher-iq-than-einstein-develops-his-own-theory-of-relativity/