I’ve been catching up on Sherlock (the Cummerbund Bandersnatch version) via Netflix lately, and it’s got me thinking about my own life as someone who was far too smart for his own good.

I think the main reason Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed character in the history of the English language and still has a powerful legacy more than a hundred years after the original stories were published is that, for us intellectual types, Holmes is actually an “id” character.

He behaves more or less exactly like us smarty pants types secretly wish we could. He is eccentric and driven and follows the passions of the mind with very little restraint and uses his extraordinary mind in the most exciting and thrilling way possible : the pursuit of crime.

Now, depending on your Sherlock, exactly how eccentric he is varies. Some versions he’s more or less just a slightly eccentric proper gentleman who mostly does drawing-room deductions and his Watson is a bumbling fool only good for taking down notes and fawning over Sherlock and telling Sherlock how brilliant he is.

And that version of Sherlock can be quite entertaining in a mostly intellectual way. But I don’t identify with it. I have never had the luxury of being able to keep my overclocked brain from making me one very strange dude.

The Henderson Cabbagepatch version of Sherlock Holmes is far more to my liking. He’s eccentric to the point of being a barely contained lunatic a lot of the time. He is the sort of person who shoots his wall with a pistol (indoors, no less) when he gets bored and has a lot of trouble actually identifying with people and behaving like one of them despite his extraordinarily sharp understanding of them from an intellectual POV.

I can relate to that. In that, he is more or less a more severe and exaggerated version of me. I too have a great understanding of people that doesn’t actually make it any easier for me to get along with them. I could give you enormous detail as to why people do the things they do. I have never had trouble understanding people’s motives or actions, or at least, not as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am as socially isolated as any other breed of nerd. There is a vast gulf between the sort of intellectual understanding of people that I possess and the gut-level realtime understanding that a socially gifted person has. There are skills you can only acquire via proper socialization, and if you do not get that socialization at the right time of your life, you will be at a disadvantage till the day you die.

Luckily, those social circuits get repurposed into intellectual circuits (or maybe that was the problem in the first place) and so there is at least some compensation for being socially retarded.

And the Bumbershoot Cucumber version of Sherlock Holmes seems like that kind of person as well. It is clear to me that his Sherlock is not the sort of person who could just walk into a random pub and be chatting with the regulars like he’d been there for years within five minutes. He does not seem like the kind of person who is the life of the party wherever he goes.

He does not seem like the type who knows how to mingle.

Instead, he operates within his own icy “mind palace” that gives him a robust avenue for engaging with reality entirely on his own chilly intellectual terms, and even gives him a way to function at a very high level in society without actually having to learn to be a normal person at all.

Makes me kind of jealous, to be honest, inasmuch as it is possible to be jealous of a fictional character. I still have not found my weird little niche from which I can deal with society yet. Unlike luckier souls, I was left completely adrift at an early age. Nobody ever took an interest in me, or if they did, I was just too difficult and hard to reach for them to keep it up. I never had anyone to suggest I focus my enormous mental energies on some sort of goal.

And so I just drifted through life, and I am drifting still. One would hope that by now I would have learned to make my own structure and find my own goals to focus on, but no matter how much time you spend flapping your wings, you still won’t fly.

Plus, you know, mental illness. It’s a bitch.

I’d like to think that if a real world situation that required Sherlockian detective work came up, I could be as driven as he is to find the answers. I could never have his powers of observation, of course. All my skills are cerebral, not sense-based. I barely notice really obvious details of people, let alone subtle ones.

Actually, I am pretty good with sound. I suppose I’ve had to be, growing up as I did with poor vision. So I can notice things in people’s tone of voice that others might miss. I can certainly detect insincerity with great precision.

And it bugs the hell out of me. That’s why I can’t stand it when corporations force their employees to pretend to be more social and friendly than they are. I would much rather aloof but polite service from someone being genuine than artificially perky and over-familiar service from someone who is dying on the inside.

Anyhow, basically, watching Sherlock has prompted me to think of my own role as a maladjusted intellectual.

What we need is something like kindergarten for grownups. Someplace where we can go where there is not a lot of pressure, just cool stuff to do and nice people teaching lessons and lots of gentle encouragement to socialize and mingle.

It would be a rough place to run because a lot of us have some pretty deep issues that might well come out in antisocial behaviour, at least at first. A lot of us do not play well with others either.

But with enough kindness and patience, maybe we can all have that happy childhood that it is supposedly never too late for.

You and me, Sherlock. The game’s afoot!

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!