MADNESS IS THE GIFT
2/2/07
Several years ago I was browsing around a discount store and found a pile of graphic tee shirts on sale for a few dollars each. I went through the pile of X Large and found a shirt promoting a heavy metal band named DISTURBED. For some reason I was drawn to the design of the tee shirt, which had dark silkscreened images of the band members on it. I had never heard of the band, nor had anyone else. That was why the tee shirt was under a disheveled pile of other shirts selling at $3.00 each. The pile consisted mostly of promotional tee shirts of celebrities like BoBo the flying dog, young Britney Spears, unknown Rock, R&B and boy bands and defunct dot.com companies.
This particular DISTURBED tee shirt was far superior in design and quality and was a bargain regardless of who the band was. As I pick it up from the table I turned it around to look at the back. I read the following words printed in gold lower case letters, “madness is the gift.” The genius of this simple statement would have been enough for me to buy the shirt, but what cinched the sale was the gold line drawn through the words, “madness is the gift”. To this day I wear that shirt on special occasions, when I want to impress an uninspired maniac. I’m willing to bet that many of my readers are maniacs, I hope they are.
I don’t have a friend that I can think of that isn’t slightly tilted. I tend to gravitate towards unusual characters. Early in my life I had a friend who could stand on his head and eat a hot dog without throwing up. I had other friends who could juggle, invent strange and useless inventions, or draw and paint strange graffiti on public buildings. I was crazy about girls (and women) who could let their hair down on a dance floor, keep an honest beat to any music and insist on driving me home. I had friends who liked to public speak on town hall steps after doing a hit of acid. To this day they still make no sense, but are now respected politicians.
The point of this essay is to exemplify and congratulate everyone who has a large or small amount of madness in them. Madness is what makes them interesting. Madness is what makes them do things normal people don’t do; like run for President of the United States, or start up a company or a country on an insane idea. Getting together with other insane people and starting revolutions, or a new political party, or inventing a computer, or flying to the moon, or building a pyramid. I have always wondered what the friends and families of the first guys who invented physics and calculus thought about them. Imagine what the family and friends of Walt Disney must of thought; when he told them that his stick figure Mickey Mouse could create a multi billion dollar empire. Madness is the gift. Mediocrity is the curse. Anyone who doubts me just has to look around and see, that everything they now take for granted was first created in the mind of a madman.
L.A. STEEL
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