DAMMIT.
When did the realization occur to make me realize I was not normal? I grew up like this.
It is in my family. If ever there was a curse placed upon a group of people, it is my kinfolk.
My first year of college only confirmed my views on my own sanity.
But then again, if you find yourself wondering if you are insane, it means you aren't.
or does it?

The gift of Malkav is one of the most difficult gifts to possess.
Artists, Visionarys, Idealists, Dreamers, Tyrants, Dictators, Psychopaths.
We all share the touch of the deranged.
A story I discovered expresses the simplistic beauty behind the madness.

Fresh Eyes: The Evolution of Vision

Once, There were little buggies, little one-celled creatures
that could bump about and smell a few chemical changed in their
world of organic soup. "This is all there is to be known," they
declared, and went about their contented existences, absorbing
and dividing, absorbing and dividing, and making a lot more of themselves.

But a radical few somehow knew there was more out there than proteins
and amino acid chains. They could sense it in their cilia, feel it in their
flagella and know it in their nucleus. They could not prove it, but they
knew there was more to be known about What Is Out There. Though
most of the bacteriological community rejected this radical thesis and
thought them mad, a precious few wanted to lift the veil on the rest of
their universe.

So they put their potentially eternal life on the line and, in fear and hot water,
they organized themselves into multiple-celled critters. In that transcendent
moment they OPENED THEIR FIRST EYE! Not an actual eyeball, of course,
but a collection of real working nerves.

Good Move! Now they could FEEL their connection to the chemical soup that
swarmed about them and knew far more about What Is Out There. This gave
them a tremendous advantage over the sense-less ones, whom they ate. The dark,
quiet, still, flavorless pool of slight chemical variation became an active sensory bath
of pinches, bumps and strokes. Quite inflamed by this new flood of data, the nematode
nation invented sex. Another good move, because not only did they multiply like
crazy, but in that magic moment of frenzied fornication, they also came into contact
with a quiet feeling deep within their nerve clusters.

There was still more to know! Through the rest of the worms scoffed and called
them mad, the pioneering few concentrated their nerves in the direction of the faint,
faint, impossibly faint stimulus that beckoned to them and, in a transcendant moment,
OPENED THEIR SECOND EYE!

Light! Sound! Color motion pictures! Good move again! More of the universe
unfolded, a sensual cornucopia of information about What Is Out There and their
connection to it: and they gorged themselves on it -- eating, reproducing, and watching
500 channels of cable TV. One frenzy of sensual fun later, the organic soup was filled
with these Children of the Organized Nerve Cluster.

Though deep within their ganglia they knew there was more to be known, most of them
made the mistake their single-celled ancestors made so long ago. They scoffed at the
notion that there was any more to be known and any more ways of knowing it, and called
any dissenters madmen. Well, sir, a pioneering few again concentrated their awareness on the
still, sweet sound that lay across the chasm of sensory awareness, stirred something somewhere
within the recesses of the glandular system and in a transcendent moment, OPENED THE THIRD EYE!

Good move yet again! They received messages and sensory information unknown to the
average cow or market anylyst and just as hard to explain to them as it is to explain trigonometry
to a meal worm. They took another quantum leap forward in knowledge about What Is Out There
and their ineffable connection to it. But the rest of the cows and market analysts call them mad.
Well, twenty-three zillion bacteria said the same thing a hundred million years ago. And guess
where they are today? They're still bacteria!

So I say to you, be Mad! Be willing to be insane before the rest of the world. Wear your
individual madness proudly! Overcome the tyranny of your current neurological input
devices and Take Leave Of Your Senses!