I feel like I am on the burn again lately.

By this, I mean I feel a kind of deep, intense burning way down in the guts of my soul. Like a well-stoked furnace, or perhaps more accurately, an incinerator running at maximum.

Or a crematorium oven. They are essentially the same thing.

And I am enjoying this inner fire, painful though it is, because I feel that it is slowly and steadily burning off some of the residue of old emotions, spent (or squandered) intentions, dead dreams, and other spiritual detritus that I have accumulated during the last forty years of repression via distraction.

I have lived most of my adult life as if I am just killing time waiting for something to happen. It is what I did all through my childhood. I killed time in class because I always had my work done within minutes and had no choice but to spend the rest of the time daydreaming, or whatever it is you might call it.

Somewhere between meditation, contemplation, and mental masturbation, I suppose.

I know it wasn’t daydreaming the way popular culture depicts it. I was never imagining myself having grand adventures while doing amazing things and fighting terrible enemies.

In fact, there was no wish fulfillment aspect whatsoever. And the same goes for my actual dreams. I never dreamed of a better life for myself. My dreams have always been both more complicated and more mundane than that. Often times, they are not even that weird.

And it’s not like I don’t have the imagination for it. I have a frankly amazing imagination. And yet never, in my daydreams or my night dreams, did I imagine my wishes coming true.

That seems important somehow. I was such a serious and sensible child, and trust me, that is a fairly appalling state for a child.

Children are not supposed to start out serious and sensible. They are supposed to learn to be serious and sensible via life experience, and then only reluctantly and as little as possible. That way they retain as much of their youthful vitality and energy as they can.

Sure, they might do things that are not all that smart. But there has to be some sort of moratorium on having to do the smart thing because you should know better, at least until puberty. There has to be some time for just doing things because you feel like doing them and taking what consequences may come.

Otherwise, how do you ever learn what you can get away with doing?

But I absorbed a painfully adult point of view at a shockingly early age. It must be somehow related to the trauma I experienced being bullied and isolated, but it feels like it started before that somehow.

Maybe it really is possible to be too damned smart for your own good. I have always had powerful inner perceptions and that passionate drive to know the truth of things, and I think that, combined with the ability to absorb a hell of a lot of information from all my reading and television viewing, caused me to know and understand things on a level far above what was appropriate for my age.

It’s distinctly possible that this did me a lot of harm and led me down this path of overdeveloped cerebral capacity and the tendency to use the cold clear light of reason in order to freeze unwanted emotions in place via the unblinking eye of rational analysis.

And don’t get me wrong. That is some heavy duty magic, that rational analysis stuff. Without ever planning it, I have been honing and honing my analytical blade for most of my life. I get the distinct feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of what I am capable of and that is both exciting and, sometimes, scary as hell.

But even the greatest genius who ever lived (whoever that is) could not successfully substitute his or her mighty intellect for all the other human needs like acceptance, community, companionship, sexual connection, romance, camaraderie, and all the other areas of human life which the cold clear light of reason can never touch.

They are part of the warm circuit, not the cold. And we cannot live without warmth. The intellect is all light and no heat. It can dazzle, it can entertain, it can distract, but it can’t stop you being lonely.

Being as bright as I am is kind of like being the rich kid with a million toys and no friends. I have always felt for characters like that, even when they are behaving badly. They are in a terrible trap with no obvious way out. Society says they should be the happiest people on Earth, that they “have everything”, and yet their over-privileged and often emotionally distant upbringing has left them without the necessary social skills to get the things they really want, the things that money can’t buy.

My unearned wealth was intellect. I was always so much brighter than the other kiddies that I couldn’t relate to them at all. It is really hard to get into playing in the sandbox when you would rather be in the library reading Bradbury and Asimov and books about animals.

And so sure I was that their activities were “pointless” (since when does everything have to have a point?) that it never occurred to me until it was far, far too late that maybe I just didn’t see the point in it and it was, in fact, quite fun.

Then again, as the biggest outcast in the school, it’s not like anyone wanted to play with me anyhow. Maybe my attitude was a reflection of my rejection. I don’t want to play their pointless games anyway!

But no. I remember it clearly. I literally could not understand why they would want to play with toy trucks or dolls or any of the perfectly normal things kids that age did.

Now I understand, of course.

But it’s a bit late for me to start hanging around in playgrounds.