A dear friend has made the point that many bloggers tend to classify themselves as ‘crazy’ in their profiles. Words like zany, nuts, lunatic, mad, dippy, and, well, insane, get used as badges of honour.
He was saying (to paraphrase) that a self-proclaimed ‘mad’ blogger does not necessarily write a good blog. Mad is just a word. Like ‘shy’, or ‘introverted’- most of us can nod sagely at those descriptions. If a gypsy in a caravan whose palms we had just crossed with silver said that we are ‘shy and misunderstood, full of potential and quietly gifted’, we’d think it money well spent.
I read an article today in the paper (just follow the link, ok?), which said that geniuses such as Dali, Einstein, and, curiously, Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, all had madness as a common thread to their creativity.
Yaaaay! Everybody wants to be mad AND creative. Nobody wants to be just plain mad, shoving a junk-laden trolley full of detritus down the sidewalks of life. Mad is only cool if it doesn’t involve physical pain and feral smells. It’s probably quite fun to hear people whispering behind your back that you are quite mad… but a creative genius.
But most of us aren’t. Most of us are neither classifiably insane, nor recognized geniuses. That’s fine. We can have lots of fun just pushing the boundaries a little, without having them push back. To be helplessly mad must be a terrible thing- wandering bewildered, not understanding how people live together without curling up into the foetal position, or wielding Samurai swords at social gatherings.
I disagree with my friend… I think there is an element of madness that bulges with tension at our tops, like a meniscus of the psyche. I think bloggers are thinkers, and hopers, and recorders, and that all of us are trying to gather the disparate threads of society into a fabric of which we can make sense… (What the heck is a good metaphor of you can’t mix it, hey?)
A slightly mad sense of humour will help you to be a better parent, wife, husband, son, daughter, partner and friend. If we were all identical, then sure, you could apply one set of socially acceptable rules, but we aren’t. We are a bubbling cauldron of moods and neuroses, shapes and sizes, joys and despairs.
I’m not mad.
I’m not crazy.
But I love bumping into the entire kaleidoscope of human experience that turns up here. I’m maybe just one twinkling shard reflecting off those mirrors, but together we make up our own world, and it is much brighter for it.
Neen got the hat for me in San Francisco. Apparently, if you see a hat like that, it makes you want to buy it for a husband like me. I’d like to think she was making a little joke…
He was saying (to paraphrase) that a self-proclaimed ‘mad’ blogger does not necessarily write a good blog. Mad is just a word. Like ‘shy’, or ‘introverted’- most of us can nod sagely at those descriptions. If a gypsy in a caravan whose palms we had just crossed with silver said that we are ‘shy and misunderstood, full of potential and quietly gifted’, we’d think it money well spent.
I read an article today in the paper (just follow the link, ok?), which said that geniuses such as Dali, Einstein, and, curiously, Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, all had madness as a common thread to their creativity.
Yaaaay! Everybody wants to be mad AND creative. Nobody wants to be just plain mad, shoving a junk-laden trolley full of detritus down the sidewalks of life. Mad is only cool if it doesn’t involve physical pain and feral smells. It’s probably quite fun to hear people whispering behind your back that you are quite mad… but a creative genius.
But most of us aren’t. Most of us are neither classifiably insane, nor recognized geniuses. That’s fine. We can have lots of fun just pushing the boundaries a little, without having them push back. To be helplessly mad must be a terrible thing- wandering bewildered, not understanding how people live together without curling up into the foetal position, or wielding Samurai swords at social gatherings.
I disagree with my friend… I think there is an element of madness that bulges with tension at our tops, like a meniscus of the psyche. I think bloggers are thinkers, and hopers, and recorders, and that all of us are trying to gather the disparate threads of society into a fabric of which we can make sense… (What the heck is a good metaphor of you can’t mix it, hey?)
A slightly mad sense of humour will help you to be a better parent, wife, husband, son, daughter, partner and friend. If we were all identical, then sure, you could apply one set of socially acceptable rules, but we aren’t. We are a bubbling cauldron of moods and neuroses, shapes and sizes, joys and despairs.
I’m not mad.
I’m not crazy.
But I love bumping into the entire kaleidoscope of human experience that turns up here. I’m maybe just one twinkling shard reflecting off those mirrors, but together we make up our own world, and it is much brighter for it.
Neen got the hat for me in San Francisco. Apparently, if you see a hat like that, it makes you want to buy it for a husband like me. I’d like to think she was making a little joke…
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All it needs is a psychedelic purple bobble on the top and it would be perfect :)
ReplyDeleteThe hat is awesome dude!
ReplyDeleteI think your post is spot on. I think a lot of us use words like crazy or insane to try and simplify how different we are determined to be.
PS
ReplyDeleteLove this:
But I love bumping into the entire kaleidoscope of human experience that turns up here. I’m maybe just one twinkling shard reflecting off those mirrors, but together we make up our own world, and it is much brighter for it.
@SMP: Or those twirly wings? It's a dull world if we are just one shard, and no mirrors.
ReplyDelete@Angel: We are all different, but that makes us human, not mad! But I can think of nothing more depressing than being cookie-cut outs, with nothing more than titles to separate us.