Madness

When I was a young man I was crazy.   But nobody really noticed it all that much because I had sort of a bland, All-American Boy persona. . .   I remember some times I would be walking around in public, tripping on LSD, and my brains would be dripping out of my ears, and I’m in just a completely psychotic and hallucinatory state.  But as long as my hair was neat and I wasn’t drooling, nobody really noticed.  You realize most people pretty much live on the surface level of life.

But as I get older it gets harder to keep up that façade of normality.   My face is beat up from age and from the wear-and-tear of street-living.  And I got glaucoma in one eye which gives me a cock-eyed and lop-sided countenance (Bukowski once opined that what most  people consider “human beauty” is really nothing but “dull symmetry”).

I had this friend back in the “fanzine days.”  A very nice person but a little odd looking.  She one told me: “I always wanted to be famous.  Because that way, when people are staring at me, I could say it’s because I’m famous and not because I’m weird looking.”  I think most people become famous in the first place for variations of that basic reason.

And I think that’s the reason I hoped I could pull of the “artistic genius” routine.  I always knew I was nuts.  But maybe I could find some socially-redeeming form to my madness by being a mad genius or something.  At least that way, when people were staring at me, there might be something positive about the deal.

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