The Freaks Are the Last to Go

There’s pleasure in having to work for something. Maybe not everyone thinks so.

There is a particular kind of nightmare: a movie where the protagonist spells out the entire backstory within the first two minutes. Or worse, a side character inserted for no reason except to transmit the plot, line by line, straight into your brain.

There’s a kind of magic when you watch something - or read something - that feels almost nonsensical and yet by the time it’s over, you know exactly what it means and you’ve been unwittingly forced to unlock new ways of seeing and feeling the world.

That is what the brilliant freaks among us offer.

Their minds generate near-nonsensical brilliance like it's on tap. The freak's gift is folding meaning into shapes so dense that unpacking them requires work. And it is fun. To engage a freak's mind is to submit to a series of enjoyable puzzles. Their brilliance is in encoding meaning just hard enough to decipher.

Compression is a hallmark of creative intelligence.

It is…