Remedial Help With My Thinking

If you were cursed by some gnarled shaman (maybe you unknowingly stole his parking space) with creativity and counterintuitive insight, here’s what you can expect:

People will constantly explain to you, in stern, often condescending tones, elementary principles - the conventional thoughts you appear to have dementedly missed. You know, basic human stuff.

You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve had banal second grade precepts patiently explained to me. I suppose I should appreciate the effort. One, after all, is never so tall as when one stoops to help a child. And I am blessed with giants.

They try to helpfully revert me to the mean. To re-bread the cutlet. To get me straightened out and flying right, in proper conformity with “normal” people.

Occasionally, shrewdness is detected on my end, which briefly forestalls the tutoring. Maybe there’s actually something in there! But this buys me no credit whatsoever. No slack. I‘ve simply struck confirmation bias on a topic of interest. The clock is ticking, and, when I subsequently conflict with some less examined assumption, my spotty inconsistency is revealed. They’ll take out the crayons and construction paper and set about acquainting me with first principles re: life on Earth.

I’m actually describing the best-case scenario. For most people, I’m a babbler of nonsense. Mr. Random. Leave him be!

I don’t note any of this with a knowing mirthful wink. I always figured this sort of thing was noted with a knowing mirthful wink. No, it's noted with the facial tics and odd cringes common among the maladjusted - an affect that certainly doesn’t help with the aforementioned credit deficit.


Of course, I do not talk to people in real life anything like how I write in this Slog. I wouldn’t dare broach these subjects. No, I constrain myself to accessible, common interests. In fact, that’s how the whole food thing developed. “Everyone eats,” I figured early on.

But my creativity and expansive perspective inevitably insinuate themselves, skewing my take, my expression, my sense of humor, my affect. I don’t speak the normal, scripted lines, and I don’t emulate a soothingly familiar clone line personality - That Guy you’ve met a thousand times.

I saw the problem early on, and imagined I could squeak through, finding slack as “a real character”. But that route has dried up over the decades. This film no longer casts character actors. It’s all dramatic leads. No one’s here to enrich the story. There is no story; just protagonists striving anxiously for more flattering light.