Eric G. Wilson - How to Be Weird: An Off-Kilter Guide to Living a One-Of-A-Kind Life

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D o you feel weird? I feel weird.

Yeah, I feel a little weird. Do you really feel weird?

I definitely feel weird.

So goes a regular tongue-in-cheek dialogue between myself and my sixteen-year-old daughter. We perform it as opportunities arise, perhaps during an awkward pause in a conversation about bunting, or at the close of a spooky Kate Bush song, or after a deadpan scene in a Jim Jarmusch film, or after weve read an evangelical bumper sticker on the black pickup truck in front of us at a stoplight: My Gods Last Name Isnt Damn!

It all started with far-out games wed play when she was a little girl. Whos Crying in the Closet? The Superfluous Professor! Barbie Brunches at the Crazy Zoo! In the thick of the playing, I would pause, raise my right eyebrow, and ask, in my best Dr. Freud voice, if she felt weird.

Yes! Again! Again!

A few weeks ago, my fiance asked why my daughter and I staged this shtick.

Because life is boring.

W eirdness: Is it not essential to a compelling life?

You doze while watching Donnie Darko on your laptop and you slip into a dream of your daughter singing, but she sounds like Jake Gyllenhaal. You jolt awake in wonderment.

During a hike you bound up boulders and find yourself on a cliff. You hear a voice to your right, turn, and there is a person in blue, and you have that sensation: this has happened before. Time is no longer a line but a spiral.

Go to a wax museum, primed for the campiness. But you look too long at Lorde. Was that a wink?

These feelings of thrilling uneasenot beauty, truth, or goodnessare what draw us to the museum, poetry, the art film, the alt music club. Study Basquiats King Alphonso or read Emily Dickinsons Theres a certain Slant of light or watch Jordan Peeles Us or listen to Lana Del Reys Video Games. For a breath, the world bends and then snaps back and all is new.

We crave the weirdthe quirky, the eccentric, the peculiar, the freaky, the far-outbecause it estranges us from our normal habits of thought and perception, nullifies old conceptual maps, and so propels us into uncharted regions, outlandish and bracing, where we must create, if we are to thrive, coordinates more capacious than the ones we already know.

T hink of all the strange moments that inspirit us: not only dj vu and the uncanniness of waxworks and the limbo between wakefulness and sleep, but also getting lost and returning repeatedly to the same spot, bumping into your double, the recurrence of the same number multiple times in one day, sensing the presence of a deceased relative, omens, signs, entering a dark basement, low-grade fevers, wandering through an unfamiliar city at twilight, vertigo, a solitary crow cawing in a winter field.

Great creators have made the outr their oeuvre. The eccentric artist is a clich, but not an inaccurate one. Truman Capote feared planes with two nuns on board and avoided rooms containing yellow roses. Este Lauder touched the faces of random strangers. Monkeys, peacocks, a bear, a crane, and a crocodile were the pets of Lord Byron, who imbibed wine from skulls. Frida Kahlo also enjoyed a menagerie, including a fawn named Granizo and an eagle called Gertrudis Caca Blanca, or White Shit Gertrude. Charles Dickens stuffed the paw of his dead cat Bob and affixed it to an ivory letter opener. Poet Grard de Nerval walked a lobster on a leash. Einstein gathered cigarette butts and smoked them in his pipe. Enamored of oxidization, Dal peed on the brass bands of fountain pens. Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery, practiced witchcraft. To finish The Hunchback of Notre Dame on time, Victor Hugo locked himself in his room naked. Nineteenth-century poet Friedrich Schiller stored rotten apples in his desk and inhaled them as he wrote. French composer Erik Satie consumed only white food and collected umbrellas. Steve Jobs ate so many carrots his skin turned orange. Buckminster Fuller, architect of the geodesic dome, wore three watches, slept only two hours in a day, and updated his diary every fifteen minutes. Maya Angelou wrote best in hotel rooms, from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.; she required that the sheets never be cleaned and that sherry, playing cards, and a Bible always be on hand. Yayoi Kusama, artist of infinite mirrors, chooses to live in an asylum and paint her world in polka dots. Tilda Swinton sleeps in glass boxes in the middle of museums. Bjrk crawls to rehearsals from her apartment.