Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!

"Yeah, good things don't end with 'eum'. They end with 'mania' and 'teria.'"
~Homer J. Simpson

Good evening.

Tonight's message comes to you from the warm arms and soft back of Balthazar's red leather recliner. If I were a Wise Man of any respectable standing, Balthazar is indeed what I would insist on being called. Ideas above my station? Well... you only live once.

The more I come to know one Doctor H.S. Thompson, through his words, the more I am convinced that genius is both a blessing and a curse. More of a blessing, it must be said, but a curse nonetheless. I wonder at how genius genes are handed out, and what tiny, yet crucial, genetic difference is responsible for the establishment of a pure genius, or a pure nut case. A 'crazy'. A liability. There isn't much difference, a lot of the time, but what difference there is, is mighty important. But probably not to you, flower.

I spend my days in a haze of words and Venlafaxine-induced numb-skullery. To be artificially levelled out is to be castrated. I mean this both figuratively and literally. These toxins are not conducent to conquests of the flesh. And nor, more importantly for me at this time, of the mind. I miss my past lives with a wistful nostalgia, and I wonder to myself whether those times were so real that they now seem fake, or if indeed I dreamed them all inside my leaden head. But I can torture myself with these insignificances later, in my own time. Just tell me this: In theory we would all turn back the clock if given the option. But what would happen if those cherished moments - those minutes so tinged with frailty, or the times we wished to change - were to slip through our fingers for a second time? Do we then feel fulfilled, or like even more of a failure? You, my dearests, make the call.

I lack a sympathetic ear - someone similarly versed in the art of this sickness. Oh, I know many who have experienced it, but apart from one person, whom I don't know particularly well, we are not compatible. Maybe the trick is being able to handle it on your own, like some kind of lone traveller, swathed in your warmest rags and tottering across the cold countryside on your own mental highway - thumb hitched and waiting, but slowly realising that a ride just ain't comin'. Go on, son, get a move on. No one's gunna make this thing happen but you. Oh, to be so perceptive. To be so easily understanding.

It just isn't fair! they cry. Oh, darlings, it never is. I will bet my bottom dollar (for that is what I am down to) that it never will be.

Would you want it any other way?