An audio version of this essay is available on Substack here.
“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” - Edith Sitwell
I was listening to an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with the actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor today (click here to go there). I’ll pass on that, I initially thought, but so happy I didn’t. She comes from a fascinating Mississippi upbringing and shares that she felt weird as a child, just knew that somehow, in some ways, she was different than others; really different. I got that.
The term “weird” has suddenly taken on cultural significance in the current election. Tim Walz pegged JD Vance and his handmaiden take on family policy as just plain weird. Pundits from the right huffed back that Walz’s son was the truly weird one, for tearing up while his dad accepted the VP nomination. While these attempts to own the term reveal a lot about each party’s identity, I’d prefer that it not be hijacked at all by 2024’s political, ... weirdness.
Weird (adjective): of strange or extraordinary character. - Merriam-Webster Dictionary
I like weird people of the Merriam-Webster sort; the odd and the unconventional. A few of my most treasured friends fit that tag to a tee. The uncomfortably unfiltered, the guardedly mysterious, the unmoored pirate, the avid hedonist, the ever evolving. Some are my close pals, and some are their spouses or even kids (the Bill Magill family plan for friends). All thrive along uniquely colorful spectrums that defy measure and metric. All can drive one a bit mad with their eccentricities and bluntness. But none are boring, and there is inestimable value in that entertaining quality.
Friends will attest to my nuttiness and it’s differing manifestations. I’ve always been introspective and easily distracted, a navel gazer, which can be a healthy thing, and then not so much. My dad would tell the story of 12 year-old Bill sent to our lower field on a summer day to weed the potato patch. An hour later, on his tractor, Dad passed me cross-legged in a pasture of wildflowers, spellbound by the nature all around: the colorful flowers and buzzing bees and crawling beetles and soaring birds above, the warm breeze and smell of Central Pennsylvania farm country. I remember that moment well, waving to my dad and him nodding back, high up on his red International Harvester. He just shook his head and drove on. We all had a good laugh over dinner that evening.
Boredom was a common affliction for kids in small town America, pre-internet and cell phones. I would look for distraction through creativity. I had no talent for painting but found a groove in the graphic arts. Specifically, projecting images onto tee shirts, tracing the outlines with a charcoal pencil, then acrylic painting in the details. Album covers offered great inspiration. One of the cool jocks in high school once commented that my tee shirts were kind of crazy and would I do one for him. Later that day we passed in the hall and he cancelled. Magill, your shirts are pretty weird actually. YOU are pretty weird actually. My tribe of teenage friends didn’t mind being considered weird. We did hate being considered boring. That would have been a rusty shiv to the teenage heart.
Gus Walz’s unrestrained emotional display during the Democratic Convention reminded me of the beauty of weirdness and the singular splendor alive in us all. Edith Sitwell’s electric eel. Each other’s unique kookiness. Suppress that? Oh hell no. Lean into that. Show us your colors, paint that shirt with a palette only you posses. Get weird.
remember me in blazing shades of indigo and vivid red, not grey I never want to fade to grey (From Strange, off my 2018 album Last Night at the Ha-Ra.)
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