But first, a joke :

Atheist at Disneyland (through bullhorn) : That’s not the real Mickey, you know. It’s an actor in a costume. That’s not even what the real Mickey looks like. Because I have news for all you sheeple…. the real Mickey isn’t even here today. I checked and I didn’t seem him anywhere. So go ahead and worship your fake Mickey and your made up Snow White and your fairy tale Goofy, you mindless feeders! Meanwhile, my smart friends and I will be laughing at how stupid you are in the forums of my blog, WhatHaveYouDoneWithTheRealMickey,com. Man, people are so STUPID!

And that, my friend, is my idea of satire.

So anyhow, back to talking incessantly about how mad I am.

I figure this rage (against the machine)  marathon is something I was supposed to go through when I had my actual adolescence, back in the Eighties. The passive acceptance of one’s fate that comes with being a child and having a child’s conceptio of the world gives way to what one might call the Terrible Twos Part Two, where the teen realizes the world is not as they want it and they are not at all happy with their lot in life and they want to scream their bloody heads off till someone fixes it.

And that’s just the surface stuff. Under the hood, a lot of complex social needs are awakening in the teen’s mind and sending weird signals that make them do things they do not understand but know they just HAVE to do.

Suddenly, their peer group are the most important people in the universe and what their peers think of them is everything and they live and die based on events that seem quite trivial to the adults around them.

And then there’s the whole sex thing to deal with too. Urges. Attractions. Dangers. Desires. The breaking down of the homosocial peer group in favour of something with more access to potential sex partner. And so on and so on.

And now, here my dumb ass is, only getting around to all that shit when I am 45 and way past the point where people would tolerate acting like a teen male from me.

Goddamned differential development. Here I am, brain the size of a planet. Light years ahead of most of humanity in terms of intellectual development. Capable of astounding feats of mental magic and so far ahead of the average person in terms of understanding and insight that it gets hard sometimes not to think of them as children.

And yet, they are all league ahead of me in terms of emotional development. They went through all those stages of becoming an adult. They dealt with the hormones and the parental conflicts and the changing mental landscape while I was off in my tiny ice palace of the mind reading comics and playing video games and watching far, far too much television in order to pass the time.

They obeyed their instincts and grew up to be healthy, well balanced individuals who go on to do reasonably well in life.

Whether or not they had a choice in the matter is up for debate. ^[1]

The point remains that they, who are by the usual definition not nearly as “smart” as I am, go on to have happy, normal lives, whereas a genius like me ignored all those seemingly irrational urgings from my instincts and ended up so emotionally retarded that I am barely making it to social adolesence at the point in my life where most people start pondering their own mortality.

And all because I was “smart” and thought I knew better and was even patting myself on the back for not being like those “mindless” teens chasing their hormones around and doing all kinds of “pointless” things that seemed downright silly to me.

Pity those who are smart enough to be that stupid.

It never occurred to me that maybe all that stuff had some kind of purpose that I just could not see and that there was a very good reason that everyone else my age went through all that adolescent brouhaha and I just lacked the perspective to see it.

Sometimes, everyone does the same things the same way because it works.

Now, in my defense, there was the slight logistical problem that I was a gay teen in a small town in the 80’s, and so pursuing a sexual awakening under those conditions would have been complicated to say the least and quite possibly dangerous as well.

But I still could have tried something. I could have gone to events like dances where people my age congregated and tried to learn to navigate that social space. I could have looked around for people I might be able to relate to despite all my social damage and my inconveniently stratospheric IQ. I could have forced myself to stay in high energy social spaces until I was able to get used to them enough so that I was not freaking out all the damned time.

But no. I was so very damaged by then that, realistically speaking, that was never going to happen. Not back then. And the only reason I can contemplate such things now is that I have gone far enough down the road to recovery that I can see my own part in my isolation and imagine ways it might be overcome.

Back then, I didn’t stand a chance.

So here I am, at this absurd point in life where I am finally ready to be a teenager and in many ways it is far, far too late.

They say you’re never too old to have a happy childhood, but try telling that to the security guards at Gymboree.

That was another joke. Of sorts.

That’s my time, folks. You’ve been a great audience. Remember to tip your waitresses, and remember boys, better blatant than latent, but better latent than never!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.,