I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic. Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical. At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but most of the time they are on target and either wittily or sarcastically or vulgarly perfect. At least I believe they are. Furthermore, because I apparently need to be recklessly and ruthlessly funny, I long ago concluded that the condition is hard-wired into my DNA.
Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it. I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.
However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing. That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe. He is always on message and carefully in control of his words. It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time. But I am, it seems, that variety of schizophrenic.
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