Every time I read one of these articles about genius and madness, I become smug for a little while, then I get depressed because I realize that I haven't accomplished anything noteworthy, then I'm mildly reassured because occasionally my wife will spontaneously aver (contrary to all expectation) that I am a genius, then I get distracted and start chasing some ideas, then I get depressed again because, well, shit, I s…
You seem to have a fixation on the idea of genius. You are susceptible to momentarily convincing yourself that you're a genius, which is followed by feelings of inadequacy. Why don't you try to put this genius idea out of your head? Convince yourself that you are probably not a genius, but that's ok because you do your best. You may have to grieve for a bit as the loss of your genius fantasy sinks in. If you feel a…
Thankfully, I have a good counterbalance of extensive readings in philosophy and theology.
Now, for a real sense of loss, two days ago the grandmother of my best childhood friend died. She raised him since his mother was about 15 or 16 when he was born, and she was one of those influential adults from my childhood. She was 93.
I happened to be taking a driving trip from Iowa (where I was raised -- yes, by Swedish parents) to the east coast, so on the way I drove through the tiny town where I grew up. (I grew up with the people who made Templeton Rye when it was still bootleg. I recognize the people on the label, even though I haven't seen most of them for 40 years.)
When I drove out to my childhood best friend's farm (a mile outside of town), only two of the outbuildings were still standing. The barn is gone. The house is gone and the basement has been filled in and grass is growing there. Some of the old trees have been cut down. Even the old hand pump that was in front of the house is gone. (It worked when I was a kid.)
It's ridiculous, I suppose, but I cried, and I'm not at all what you might call "a crier." The memories were so thick and so . . . not painful, but acute. I am cursed with an extremely good memory. The sense of loss, or really I suppose the sense of the contrast of difference between reality and the ideal in my memory, made me cry.
I think that is what accounts for that sense that perhaps one is a genius: 1) the desire to be a genius, in order to impress your dead parents or perhaps your peers who have inordinate reverence for genius; 2) a better than average memory that creates a deep sense of time; 3) sensitivity to change; 4) as the article points out, noticing things others ignore.
Now that I'm mildly buzzed, I'm going to work on creating a triple boot of LinuxMint, Manjaro, and OpenSUSE on this shitty little ThinkPad T60 made in 2006 since the wifi has quit working with OpenBSD. I'm too tired to figure out why, and I've never tried any of these Linux distros, and who says doing stupid stuff like this is only for teenagers?
Please forgive me for drunken rambling on a Saturday night. I promise I won't do it again for at least a year.