Unleash The Crazy
By Rick Boettger
Last week I discussed the logical, “quit winners” reasons to flee Paradise. Cash in some lucky property investments, and wide world, here we come. The “Golden Cage” of Key West’s many perfections is all that’s holding us back. How can we break the golden bars?
Here’s where we employ the second of my two principles for a successful life: unleash the crazy. That is, when you are in a position any sane person would find enviable, let the wild hair at the core of your being say, “Screw it! Let’s see what’s next!” I’ve done this six times, and I think it’s time for another.
I left MIT and a career as a physical chemist, a security agency and top-secret clearance, Yale Law School, a tenured business school professorship, and a blossoming career as a national talk-radio host. I also divorced a model half my age and then an eight-figure heiress. My only regret is Yale, though I landed on my feet even after that blunder.
That’s how I ended up in Key West, and, hello, most of my friends have similar stories. This is not a logical place to live as much as the land of people who have unleashed their own crazies. That’s surely part of our mutual charms. So leaving Key West when we have made it here is actually a kind of logically-nuts progression: if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere, right?
Of course not. Ask Cynthia. I am trying to crank up her crazy, but it looks like a Herculean task. We get along so well. Why are we so different on this?
I had an epiphany while being righteously outraged over a rare, indeed unique, prejudicial slam on my tribe. We tall white males rarely enjoy feeling persecuted, but boy, did two Wall Street Journal Nobel winners lay into me. Ooooo, I have been so deliciously wronged!
They wrote that sure, human genetic engineering could eliminate cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, hemophilia, Huntington’s, etc. But worse than those tragedies is “the danger that these techniques will be used to engineer offspring to your liking–say, to produce a 6-foot-2-inch, blond, blue-eyed son with a 150 IQ.” Um, excuse me? Are you saying a human like me is worse than fatal congenital diseases? Now I know what it feels like to be scorned for simply being born the way you are.
Of course, I know no one is feeling sorry for me, which only increases my delicious sense of persecution. What makes this hilarious is knowing what I was like when I became all of the above. I grew to 6’2″ from 5’8″ with a six-inch spurt in nine months at 14. So I still weighed 123 pounds to go along with the coke-bottle-thick glasses, perpetual cold that had my cracked, red, sniffling nose with its giant zit on the end making me not just unattractive but close to grotesque, like a death-camp survivor. Zero dates and kisses throughout high school. Some designer baby, hey Nobel guys?
The epiphany was realizing how my life would have been less crazy if I’d had a 150 IQ. That is about the highest functional IQ. When you’re a few dozen north of that, in unmeasurable here-be-dragons territory, if you don’t win one of those Nobels, you are among the 99% of us who are lifetime underachievers. We fly all over the place, unable to stay with anything long enough to make a difference, in a non-bipolar version of a lifelong manic state.
I got here by getting drunk at a party one midnight at a boring Fort Worth cocktail party, packing up my mini-van in 15 minutes with my heiress ex-wife’s bemused assistance, driving up to US 30, making the career-killing call to my executive producer at the radio station, and deciding whether to go west to Berkeley, where my daughter, decades of adventures, and professor buddies were, or to Key West, where I had spent two days at the Fairfield Inn. I chose here, and it was the best decision of my life (after adopting my daughter). As in the other big quits, I had no idea what I’d do next, just a calm confidence I’d figure something out.
In that case, my ex-wife, after a tearful night when she realized I had really done it, said she was blown away and would follow me anywhere. And she did, enjoying the best years of her life here. Cynthia will be happy. She can always come back when I die. Until then, the world is our oyster. Anyone wanna buy a big old house in the Meadows?
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aha, the other shoe drops!
From many moons ago this thought: Margaret Mead’s daughter (Catherine Bateson), who, one would imagine, was familiar since childhood with living in interesting places, made the observation that we long for the familiar for the comfort it brings and we long for “difference” for the insight it affords (much more elegantly stated, but something along those lines). We are so privileged to be able to enjoy the melee.