Where Have All the Weirdos Gone?

Bored by the ugly blandness of most contemporary mainstream American culture, I keep seeking signs of beautiful weirdness. God knows the universe itself is an odd phenomenon. So you think there'd be fewer dull people hanging around trying to suck you into their dreary talk. "Where have all the weirdos gone?" I wonder.

My mission with Muse of the Weird is primarily to share my weird discoveries, musical & otherwise, with the world - or, rather, the worldwide web. To those of you hip enough to have located & followed this web-log (a slightly more elegant neologism than its more widely used abbreviated form "blog"), I say thank you for joining my literary journey to the Weird Side of Life. Heeding Virginia Woolf's wise advice, I write only what I like to write. Life's too short to do otherwise if you're a real writer. I hope that you enjoy how I write it, hyperbole & all.

So what do I mean by "weird" anyway? Since Shakespeare wrote about three witchy "weird sisters" in that murderous Scottish tragedy Macbeth, the word has come to mean strange, unusual or eccentric, especially in an eerie or frightening way. Originally, the dictionaries tell me, "weird" connoted destiny. Its etymology traces the modern adjective back to the Old English word "wyrd," a noun meaning fate or luck (often bad). Over time, "weird" has drifted towards a less ominous denotation, albeit one that's no less loaded. By way of illustration, here's an example of weirdness, which I came across in Joan Baez's memoir "And a Voice to Sing With" (1987; 2008 edition).

While filming Bob Dylan's weird film "Renaldo & Clara" during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975-76, Joan once dressed up as Bob (complete with fake stubble) & improvised a scene at a hotel in which she confronts her male mirror-image about their breakup ten years earlier. "Why'd ya lie to me about Sara?" Joan-Bob boldly asks Bob-Bob. "What would our lives be like if we had married?" Sheepish & surprised, Bob says nothing.

Kudos to gutsy Joan Baez. It ain't easy to out-weird Bob Dylan. As the old falsetto-voiced dulcimer-strumming folk weirdo John Jacob Niles once said (about a concert latecomer who'd provoked him into halting his performance in order to embarrass the poor fan): "Attention follows motion, not sound."