mild psychosis

It's not so bad, really. Being mildly psychotic. Makes things interesting. If you're not blessed with my condition...are completely free of the symptoms...I do sort of pity you. You would be cut off from the strangeness of my world. You wouldn't have access to all my sparkling, sizzling thoughts shot up from daemonic depths toward the quaking, nervous moon. You wouldn't "get" the odd things that occasionally dribble out of my mouth. You would interpret them conventionally.

Actually, if I perceived normality and conventionality swirling around you like dry desert dust, I'd clam up forthwith. Wouldn't say anything. I'd just mumble like a zombie...maybe smile awkwardly until the encounter faded into the nightmarish past.

See...I know some stuff. Weird stuff.

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Eccentricity comes in different grades and flavors. Drooling hobos are superficially attractive to me. But I prefer that weirdness be complemented with sensibility. How does one acquire a sensibility? Thank you for asking.

If you aren't already freaked out by the bare, brute fact of existence -- realizing that your mind and flesh are RIGHT NOW moving around on an arbitrary planet while the vasty cosmos is RIGHT NOW swirling around you in violent palpitations -- then you need to set about freaking yourself out. That's the first step toward becoming an interesting human being.

Step 2: read Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Read it until your soul is sucked into its strange, poetic vortex. Until you "get it". You could, of course, read a bunch of other neat, oddball stuff. But I'm talking about a precipitous intervention: an emergency transfusion, replacing the dull liquid of the psyche with hot plutonium plasma.

And should you find yourself in ordinary, conventional situations, stop a moment to ask, along with David Byrne: "How did I get here?"

See...to be a first-class eccentric, you need to develop that inner eye: that squinched-up third eye that looks slightly (or muchly) askance at everything going on around you.

Now, it might be the case that you are satisfied being a normal, sane human being. You might be saying to yourself right now: "I don't want to be a mild psychotic." Fine. I'm just here to guide those who suspect something is amiss in a world of reality TV shows but who can't quite put their finger on it. I know a few weird things. I can assist in the transit through rabbit holes and looking glasses.

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Okay. Ghosts. If you believe that ectoplasmic resonances of previously breathing human beings could be a real phenomenon, well...that's just silly. Trust me: the TV show The Medium should not be viewed as a possible documentary. Dead people stay in the ground.

But...ghosts are important. They represent a means by which we're reminded of the freakishness of being. The ordinariness of experience gets juiced-up inside our unconscious. Those un-thought thoughts become liquefied in the back of our mind and eventually froth over: that frothing manifests as creepy symbols by which we remind ourselves that being is strange.

Bumps in the night? Moans outside the window? Footsteps in the empty hall?

Those are auditory hallucinations from our subconscious talking to itself. We occasionally creep ourselves out. And we have every right to do so. The nature of consciousness remains unknown...an enigma to philosophy and science, despite the confidence and brazenness of some silly neurological theories. Some (excuse me while I chuckle) think you can get from the physical to the experiential (to what it's like to be a paralyzed-with-fright armadillo caught in headlights). Nope. Read David Chalmers and stroll into the Mysterium.

What about visual manifestations? Look. A human being takes in 1 million bits per second of sensory data through the eyes. Only 40 bits per second gets squeezed into awareness. Ghosts are just the occasional peripheral data leaking into awareness from the large storage tank of unprocessed (unconscious) sensations.

But like I said: ghosts are important. They're a relief-valve. The steam of existential perplexity gets vented and forms into the vaporous symbols of the undead. Be nice to your ghosts. They're just here to prevent your moving from mild psychosis into full-bore madness.