It’s 5:09 in the morning, and I’ve had ideas buzzing around in my head literally all night. It’s now to the point where it’s disturbing my sleep.
And if I can’t sleep, then neither can any of you.
I have this whole playlist on YouTube called “Paranoia Fuel.” This was a snarky, sarcastic reaction to my newfound fascination with serial killers and rapists, and all the great and terrible evils of our world.
And then I realized that private playlists on YouTube aren’t necessarily hidden from public view.
Yeah. I can explain this if you’ll just give me twenty minutes of your time.
A large part of this newfound fascination is my crippling fear of failure, of falling short of my potential.
It springs from a need to study the mistakes of the past, and inform my self-destructive behaviors of the present to, all willing, avert the worst case scenario.
This fear has caused me to meditate a lot on lost potential, and I’ve come to realize that lost potential informs a lot of my more tragic fascinations to a degree that, quite frankly, relieves me on several levels.
Where does the paranoia fuel come in, you may ask?
Imagine if River Phoenix had survived his drug overdose, continued to abuse drugs, and acted like Onision.
Look at Richard Ramirez’s boyish face. Imagine he had much shorter hair and a sweet smile.
Imagine him approaching one of his young victims, patting her hand, and telling her she was beautiful.
Imagine Jeffrey Dahmer as an actor or a chemist. Or hell, while we’re imagining, why not both?
Imagine that H.H Holmes wrote horror plays, and imagine that Albert Fish wrote crime stories.
Imagine Christian Weston Chandler as a good-natured and enthusiastic ambassador for children with autism.
Imagine if James Dean had lived to become the second Marlon Brando.
Now imagine he ended up driving himself clinically insane, like Heath Ledger did.
Imagine if John Wayne Gacy and Dennis Rader actually gave a shit about their communities.
The first wave of Surrealists believed that schizophrenia was not a clinical condition, but simply a perception of life that neurotypicals, a term I begrudgingly fall back on as the best descriptor in this case, simply refused to understand.
What if genius, in and of itself, gives you a predisposition towards psychosis, and what if that predisposition increases the more genius you are endowed with?
What if all psychotics and sociopaths are just geniuses whose minds haven’t properly formed all the way?
Keep imagining, and sleep tight, everyone.