Strange and Confused

I'm a reasonably intelligent person. I also like to think that I have a bit of creativity within me. However, I've never been very good at spur-of-the-moment creativity. I would have been horrible as a court bard. The king would say, "Sing me a song about hassenpheffer!" and then I would get pummeled by half-eaten turkey legs because I wasn't quick enough to come up with a word to rhyme with "rabbit." After all, any reference to "Charlie Babbit" would still have been several centuries off. If, however, I was allowed to take a bit of time for my composition, I would eventually come up with something ("dag nabbit!"). Such is the case with the topic of this week. Gudy sent us an email announcing the topic, and I spent the next few days allowing it to percolate in my head a bit. After all, we all can name things that we're thankful for, but what's the strangest thing for which I am thankful? I would go exploring down several different avenues of discussion. Some quite personal that I don't know I want to go down just yet and some that I know Anne would have a problem with. But I'm not mentioning either of those. It was starting to get to me. I mean, I had encountered writer's block before, but usually, the way my mind works, I'm able to get around it by coming up with some line to focus on or be driving towards. Then it hit me: my strange mind.

I've always known that I look at the world a little differently than most people around. Things will strike me funny for reasons that aren't apparent to anyone else in the general vicinity. There will also be times where something will strike me as interesting, and I internally take it on a very strange tangent. For instance, when I was in choir, we were singing some music where the bass cleft split into three parts, and we asked the director if he wanted us to have the tenors split and sing the top and the middle or if he wanted to have the basses split and sing the middle and the bottom notes. He thought about it for a minute and said, "I think we'll do a T-T-B di vici." The T-T-B di vici stuck with me. For some reason, an electric bass line started going through my head. You know the type: just a constant "Thump thump thump thump" that you'll find in pretty much any techno song in existence. Then I had a monotonic deep voice going over and over in my head: "T-T-B di vici...T-T-B di vici...T-T-B di vici...T-T-B di vici..." I went on to add in other parts all surrounding different directions that one finds in music such as "crescendo." It entertained me for days. No one else found it nearly as interesting, but I enjoyed it.

So, there you have it. The strangest thing for which I am thankful is my mind and how it works. It's allowed me to be entertained by things that are seemingly insignificant. It's allowed me to write a techno song that only entertains me. It's allowed me to come up with different ways to be romantic with my wife (though probably not as often as either of us would like). It's also allowed me to write different articles for this blog so that I have an outlet for creativity and you, hopefully, are being entertained by them as well.

Of course, with all of these things, it helps to be sleep-deprived.