The Outsiders
the fools who might be cool
When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher who, after some sort of careful analysis of my schoolwork, surmised that I was “special.” Thanks to my early propensity to enjoy flattery (despite my future unease with it), I walked around for a while feeling like I was just a wee bit taller. It felt like I was giving off a faint but visible glow. That is, until it all came crashing down in a flash of realization.
That realization came in the form of my witnessing the special education kids walk by on their way outside for recess. It dawned on me in that moment that “special,” the (less pejorative) term people used to describe those kids, was the same term my teacher has ascribed to me. We were all special.
My hubristic acceptance of being called special suddenly ran head-on into the concept that being different might also be regarded by most people as lacking.
This exposed two important things to me in a blast of immediate clarity.
One, that people who are referred to as being “special,” were really just lumped into a category of “different,” which was a short distance from being called “weird” (another term with which I am acutely familiar). In other words, being seen as special wasn’t necessarily intrinsically good or bad, it was more a form of categorization, labeling, culling the weak from the herd.
The second thing that occurred to me was that I was just as guilty as everyone else for seeing people who are cognitively challenged as disadvantaged first and people second. It’s pathetic to realize this about myself, because I suddenly understood that they are people with lives, feelings, self-perceptions, strengths and, yes, weaknesses, just as much as anyone else, and to see them otherwise is unfair and often cruel. Why did I realize this? Well, for the noble reason that now I was the one being called “special,” and I didn’t like being lumped in with them. Immediately following this came the shame of thinking this way in the first place. There was nothing “wrong” with them. I was the one with the shortcoming, judging others for being different, and only realizing how it was bad to do this when it affected me directly and not a moment before.
Realizing that I was seemingly different to most others in certain ways was a strange thing to absorb. Things like the storage and retention of trivial information, buckets of details, I found that I was a living storehouse of this crap. I have both an affinity for, and an ability to, draw on a massive mental file of arcane information. When it comes to being creative or to learning new things this is a huge plus. But when it comes to relating to most of the people I come across in my daily life, it is a pain in the fucking ass.
As an example, I am a storehouse for, and walking generator of, melodies. I can hear some songs once and memorize the melodies for good, often to the point of being haunted by them later in the form of mind worms. When I was still actively creating music, it was fairly common for me to work on something stuck in my head only to realize that it was only just another song that I didn’t write that got stuck up in there someplace along the way.
I also have a weirdly accurate ability to guess when rock records were made, as in to the year. No, it’s not encyclopedic, I’m not the Rain Man, but I do surprise myself with it. I think a lot of it has to do with my knowledge of rock history in general. in my mind, figuring out when a record came out is more about the math of genre and influence, and less about the sheer memorization of arbitrary numbers. It’s not like plugging an album title in: say, Neil Young’s “On the Beach,” and shitting out 1974 (I looked it up, my guess was 1976). It’s more like this: I know he was around back in the ‘60s, was well famous by the early ‘70s, was not at his commercial peak with “On the Beach,” and already had “After the Gold Rush” and “Harvest” behind him, which were massive hits, and now he was getting introspective, which must place us in the mid ‘70s.
I know people who are much better at this than I am. My point here is not that it’s a contest, only that I have very specific things at which I am pretty good.
Taking new things in, new ideas, new thoughts, new art, new music, new books, history, skills, whatever it may be, I love taking in new stuff. I’m sure having ADD has something to do with that. But I‘ve always chalked it up to a fascination with art, with creating. I get that in part from my dad, who is a highly skilled artist — much more skilled than I am, for instance. I also get it from my uncle, who is a very skilled electric guitarist. I grew up with those people in my life. Creating art in some form was normal in my family. No, it wasn’t like some sort of hotbed of artistic activity, our door always revolving with clever, smart, and artistic people, the dining room table buzzing with cigarette smoke and heady late night conversations. We were working class Midwesterners with a growing taste for art.
In France, dad had his studio with all his strange tools like brushes, solvents, canvasses, pens, pencils, drawing paper, strange little plastic containers of tiny rods of pencil lead, and so on. It was magical to me. I worshipped that dude because he was doing something fascinating and mysterious to me and I wanted to know how to do it too. I never asked him to teach me, though. It just never seemed natural to even consider it. We were all oddly private, together. This was just the way it always was. We all had our own lives, it just seemed normal to keep to yourself, which explains a lot about how I am now.
My internal world is rich and singular. It’s not that I hide who I am, although when I’m around most people, this is an absolute must. When it matters, like with friends and family, I share my thoughts. If you ask my wife, maybe I share too much, because I never fucking shut up. As we both grapple with the recent knowledge that we are both living with ADD, one of the benefits of this for my wife’s sake, is that she is a master as nodding and going “Mmmm-hmmm,” whenever I prattle on for ten minutes about philosophy as it pertains to a movie theme, which then morphs into a treatise of character actors, which then finds me obsessing about the height of actors for some reason (something which she reasonably finds strange), or whatever line of bullshit consumes me at those bothersome times. Dealing with me daily is a job. She deserves a promotion. Without her there to tolerate my weirdness, the echo chamber would be so much worse.
The original idea behind this post was another one of my ham-fisted analyses, which in this case was going to be centered around the differences between nerds, geeks, dorks, and doofuses.
I got pretty far into it before I realized that even I wasn’t that interested in it. And if I can’t get into it, the chances that anyone else would give a single mote of a shit were essentially zero.
Plus, and this matters, I could picture the debate this subject might start amongst my friends, many or most of whom are one, most, or all of those four things, and the thought of that seemed totally unbearable, so I scrapped that.
Ultimately, this is (yet another) post about how I feel like an outsider in this world. I’ve approached this topic in so many ways in my writing that I realize it is more of an undercurrent to my fundamental views than a subject for intermittent newsletter posts read by less than a hundred people on my best day.
Due to our inherent need to utilize symbols as a way of relating to the world we perceive as being outside of ourselves, there is this built-in sense of separation from “me” and everything else. Once you recognize that overlay implanted on our consciousness, it leads to an awareness of the endless ways that symbols affect us.
Language is the method of expression and recording of encoded information that allows us to apply meaning to perception. The most obvious form of this is via written and spoken language (alphabets, words, phrases, sentences, etc.). To communicate via language is what propels us into the modern version of ourselves. Beyond that there are countless other examples. This includes the earliest recorded form of the use of symbols: art. Cave art predates the written word by somewhere around 30,000 to 50,000 years, which is mind blowing.
The writer Alan Moore discusses the idea that the introduction of visual art in the form of cave art is the birth of magic in his fun magic primer, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. It’s a blast, and if that sort of thing interests you, check it out. And no, we’re not talking Chris Angel magic; and c’mon now, because that guy is a total knob. Think ceremonial magic.
Visual art (lines, brushstrokes, photographs, sculpture, and so on), and music (notation, phrasing, tablature, melody, atonality, riffing, songs, movements, etc), are the other two big creative uses of symbol that humans use to communicate.
These symbolic languages have become so ubiquitous that we even think with them. Words and images pass through our minds all the damn time, and for the most part that’s a non-negotiable undertaking. Once you acquire the language, it is a part of you.
I prefer to flip this idea on its head and say that the things we symbolize represent something that operates beneath the hum of our awareness as a constant flow in all directions. It was always there, we have just found ways to simulate the experience of interrelating with them. And seriously, what a fucking cool idea.
So yeah, I’m special, or something. But aren’t we all? I mean, by definition, this “I” that we employ to identify ourselves marks us all as special. Of course the truth is that there is nothing special about 1. The unity of all things doesn’t need a name, a symbol, or a language. it simply IS.
Now you might be thinking, “Wow, this guy is out of his fucking gourd,” and hey, you’re probably right.
It’s just that I prefer to think of myself as “special.”
Smoke that, paupers.
And buy me a coffee. I’m but a poor man, hobbled by idiocy and broken by the labors of ineptitude, and I really fucking love coffee.