Sanity Is Highly Overrated
So many issues with mental health nowadays. There's a medication for everything. Something when you're sad to get you happy, something when you're a little TOO happy to even you out a little. Then if you're bi-polar and can't tell whether you're coming or going, happy, sad or mad most of the time, something you can take for that. Honestly,though, do you know anyone who's completely sane? I know I certainly don't. Everyone I know has at least a tiny bit of crazy in them and really, wouldn't it be a boring world without that? Think about it...
Edgar Allan Poe
Take Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, a brilliant writer and poet who was just a few beers short of a six pack. His mother died when he was very young, his father left the family, and he was taken in by a family who later broke up when the wife got sick of her husband fathering multiple children from extramarital affairs. Poe got admitted into West Point, but evidently hated it there and got himself kicked out on purpose. He went on to become a poet and marry his 13-year-old cousin when he was 26 years old. Although it was a happy marriage, she died of tuberculosis when she was only 24 and Poe was brokenhearted and unable to write. He wrote a story about taking a hot air balloon trip around the world and published it as if it were true, but it was a complete fake. Shortly before his death, he was found wandering on the streets completely disoriented, wearing someone else's clothes, and incoherent. Many people claimed that he was an alcoholic. He died at the age of forty.
Edgar Allan Poe
Albert Einstein
Then there was Albert Einstein. Could anyone have any doubt at all the man was crazy...I mean, look at his hair?! Yes, I know all about that whole theory of relativity thing and the fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1922, but seriously, he believed in some pretty outrageous theories. Some of his ideas were positively Star Trekkian...like parallel universes and such. It's said he didn't speak until he was three years old and barely made it out of high school, because he was thought to be not very bright. He was probably busy thinking up stuff that most of us will never understand...like how to make that transporter room thing work.
Albert Einstein...Proof Of Craziness
Vincent Van Gogh
Now I'll be the first to admit that I have his "Sunflowers" painting hung on one of the walls of my house and "A Starry Night" is one of my favorite painting, but really, he was pretty far out there. He drank absinthe to counteract the effects of his epilepsy, but absinthe was actually toxic and made him even worse. Sometimes when he was trying to kill himself, he was known to drink paint or kerosene. During an incident with Gauguin, he accidentally cut off part of his own ear and ended up in an insane asylum. He shot and killed himself two months after his release.
Van Gogh
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison was on the border of nuts from the time he was a kid. He started doing science experiments in his family's basement and put labels on all of his concoctions reading "Poison." He got thrown off of a train for creating a chemistry lab which caused a minor explosion and a fire. He read every book in the Detroit Library. He was said to be very ethnocentric and had an extreme dislike of immigrants, it was also said that he was afraid of the dark which could explain the light bulb. Seems that he was also a great doodler and pages and pages of his notes were written in all sorts of handwriting...all by his own hand. Hmmmm...
Crazy Is The New Sane
So as I look over all these folks, and think about others, like Kurt Cobain, Goya, Dali, Janis Joplin, John Belushi, Jimi Hendrix, and many, many others... I realize that if I'm crazy I'm in some pretty fine company. I'll just keep reminding myself that there's a fine line between genius and insanity and I shouldn't toe the line TOO closely or I could end up somewhere I've got no business. So maybe it's not a bad thing to be crazy. Just someone tell me that next time I say I'm going to write 30 articles in 30 days...