Not really. But it’s what I want to start telling people because it is actually a lot less scary and confusing than telling them I am just amazingly intelligent.

I’ve gone on and on about this subjects in this space before. About these weird moments in my life where people ask me weird questions, like….

Q : What makes you so smart?
A : I don’t know. I just am.

Q : Why are you so smart?
A : I don’t know. Why aren’t you? Why are any of us how we are? Why are some people bigger, stronger, faster, or more talented than others? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, I was born this way.

Q : How come you did so well on the test?
A : Because….that’s what the teacher said. The test asked questions about what the teacher told us and I remembered what they said. I’m sorry that I don’t have a trick I can teach you. I just do it.

…and my all time “fave”….

Q : How could you know that? You can’t know that! Nobody’s that smart!
A : Nobody but me, apparently.

That’s what happens when you are gifted with a genius IQ in a sleepy little backwater town, folks. You’re so much smarter than others that they refuse to believe you are real.

Back then, I was, of course, just trying to answer these existential questions as honeslty as I could. I know my answers might come across as snarky and sarcastic to some, but I swear to go, I was just trying to answer the question.

Questions like those have haunted me for my entire life because I can’t answer them to my own satisfaction, let alone the satisfaction of the average person.

And being the nerd that I am, questions I can’t answer have a way of lingering in my mind. On some level, we nerds know that our job in the metaphorical tribe is, on a basic level, to know things, and therefore questions we could not answer make us feel like we have somehow let down our tribe.

At least, that’s my theory.

And when it’s a question about oneself, the feeling of wrongness cuts deeper. In short (too late), questions like those can really mess with our minds.

Those questions and their ilk are what eventually, via a long and tangled path, to my thoughts on why high intelligence frightens people so much. It in, in short, the ultimate power to have over someone.

People can understand someone being stronger, faster,  more talented, or better at mechnical things than them.

But being smarter than someone means you see and understand more of the world than they do and that kind of power is terrifying. If someone is both quantitatively and qualitatively smarter than you, there’s no defense against that. It’s like being a two dimensional being trying to grasp a three dimensional one.

Damn it, I promised myself I would not explain the whole thing. Patient readers know what I am talking about. I hope the rest of you ger the general idea.

My point is that, having realized how scary someone like me can be to average folk, I then understood some of the ways people had reacted to me in the past. To a teacher, I was an unpredictable threat who might lurk in the shadows for a long time before suddenly asking them a question they can’t answer and thus challenge their authority, or openly defy them knowing there was nothing they could do about it, or otherwise upset the whole polished applecart of the classroom seemingly without effort.

It must be crazymaking to be teaching a kid who is smarter than you.

The fact that, at the same time, I was a mess of a kid who was pathetically emotionally dependent on my teachers only made things even worse because not only was I an unpredictable threat, I was impossible to respect too.

Damn it. I got sidetracked again!

Point is, me scary smarty guy. Want to get along with normal folk. Spend lots of time thinky on problem. Get frustrated. Come up with magic thing.

It’s sort of a joke and sort of serious. It’s an obscure as fuck joke to me because it is the punchline to a joke that would go something like…

Q : How do I get along with average folks?
A : Well, I could… no… there’s always…. no, that wouldn’t work either… how about I… hmmm…….fuck it. Tell them I have magic powers.

I gues you had to be there.

It’s serious in that it is meant as an answer to at least part of my life long quest to somehow justify my existence and explain myself to the world.

A lifetime of being a social outcast for many reasons and on many levels has left me with a giant looming question mark where my identity should be. Who am I? What am I? Were I not so rigorously realistic and pragmatic, I might have taken the route of imagining myself to be an alien or some other kind of otherworldly being.

As explanations go, it is not without merit.

But no, I am much too smart for such blatant and obvious a form of self-delusion. I see right through such childish emotional coping mechanism and instead deal with my issues in the most mature and adult way possible.

By ignoring them. And thus having virtually no coping mechanisms at all.

Except, of course, for silly ones like saying I have magic powers.

Yay, I made it back to the point!

I sometimes wonder if, historically, some of the people who actually did go around claiming to have magics powers, like psychics, mystic healers, sorcerors, witches, channelers, and so forth and so on were actually in the same pickle I am in, and “discovering” their powers was their minds’ way of making sense of it.

After all, from the point of view of the average person, I “see” things they can’t see, understand things which are beyond their comprehension, and know so much that it can seem like I am some kind of oracle or sage.

So in a Clarke-level sense, from the point of view of the average Joe or Jane, I really do have magic powers.

Now if only I knew what to do with them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.