The Weirdness On The Wind

A couple years ago, I thumbed through my diaries and picked out some of my favourite scribbles, which I typed out on the intersnacks. These rather short writings have been stored away in a super secret blog that no one has ever read. Except me, of course, which is a mighty relief, to be honest, considering how painful it is to even glance at these posts. No, seriously. Even my most favourite entries are so tedious they make me want to weep tears over how I massacred the English language. 

Anyhow, tonight I found myself going through these handful of writings. Why? That's not too clear. Maybe I wanted to revisit the tortured years of my youth, or maybe I wanted to do some serious mental cringing. If the grotesque grammar and preposterous punctuation weren't enough to cause me to recoil, then the subject matter would have done the trick. 

Every last entry was an ode to forlorn love, being wronged, not liking the girl I used to be, and how heartbreaking the world is. Needless to say, I haven't always been a bright ray of sunshine. Most of my youth was spent feeling lost, uncertain and angry - how I imagine a lot of people feel in their younger years. Still, not everyone wrote down their inner turmoil to read through and relive later on in life. Lucky them. 

If you think I'm going to be sharing any of these embarrassing excerpt with you, think again. No one of them is good enough to show to a blind and deaf mule, let alone a unprepared reader. Having clarified this, there was one line that caught my attention.  

I can hear the weirdness on the wind and my heart echoes the sound. 

Something about this line made me smile. Truth be told, it's very hard for me to look at anything I've written and think it holds any sort of merit. To find this line, especially in writings well over a decade old, is a miracle in and of itself. It simply struck me as a beautiful observation. 

Yes, I am weird, but so is the world. It's in the wind. And I hear it. If weirdness is all around us, inside all of us, then we are never alone in our strange ways. Of course, I can't even remember writing the damn thing, but I must have, because it's here in my super secret online diary, riddled with typos even grade schoolers wouldn't make.  

And yet, in all the messy words, choppy paragraphs and complete lack of white space, I found a golden sentence. 

There is something very comforting in thinking the common thread binding us together is our weirdness. How perfectly abnormal we are. It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? To think we are all colouring outside the lines together.   

Master of Macabre

Today is Edgar Allan Poe's birthday. As some of you may know, I believe in celebrating births, especially of creatures so near and dear to my heart.

This writer of the weird. Maker of mystery. Master of the Macabre. Well, he's a special sort of somebody.

In a world where there are two sorts of people, those trying to fit in and those trying to stand out, we often forget the forefathers of going against the grain. Born in 1809, one must admit, this gentleman is truly one of a kind. Though his work is saturated with loss, forlorn hearts, and a darkness not even a floodlight could dissipate, he himself is deeply loved by many. And, despite the attempts of his rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold who worked diligently to ruin Poe's reputation after he died, Edgar remains one of the most shared and celebrated poets of all time.  

Even his signature is a delight:

I could certainly detail out his life here. His stint in the military. His marriage to thirteen year old Virginia, who happened to be his cousin. His interest in cryptography. But you can read all about it in several books. Here, today, I will simply say, he is by far one of my most favourite people to have ever roamed this earth.

Aren't we lucky to be able to indulge in his legacy of poems and stories?

There is beauty in the darkness. Beauty in the oddities. A simple beauty in the macabre. The morbid. The grim. The ghastly.

And those who can show you that beauty, like Poe, are truly artists. Wielders of the Weird. Servants of the Strange.

They inspire me.