Did you ever notice that if you act strange and are known to have money and/or power, you are eccentric, but if you act strange and are poor, you are a nut? This statement seems to be true, no matter how far back we go in time. If we go back in history we will see many cases of people that certainly had a severe mental illness, but because of their station in life, sometimes they even ruled. Could a person with a severe mental illness get into a position of power today? Some say it has already happened with Adolf Hitler, but was he eccentric or mentally challenged, in my humble opinion the answer is no, he was just plain evil. There are people like that you know, but lets get back to the topic.

Nero was said to be eccentric in his day. He was a blood thirsty brute that had no compulsion about even killing his own mother. First he sent her out in a leaky boat, hoping she would drown, but that never happened. Next he had a special bed made that would fold up and crush her, but again that didn't work. Finally he sent men into her room to beat her to death and that did the trick. If you went to the coliseum to see events like animals eating Christians or gladiatorial fights, you really took a chance when he was there. He was just as liable to pull you out of the stands and feed you to an animal, as not. Life just didn't mean much to him. It is said that he started the fire that burned most of Rome, so he could build a palace in the place of many of the houses that were in his way. Not only that, but the grounds were so large that they took up about one third of the city. Another trait he had was to perform. This was very unseemly for nobility, since the lowest form of Roman was considered to be the actor. When Nero performed he rambled on for hour after hour. Sometimes he would forbid anyone from getting up from their seats until his performance was finished, which could last all day and into the night. He was so crazed that when he was dying after being attacked, he said that the world was losing a great actor.

Did you ever see the movie Terminal, staring Tom Hanks? Did you know that this movie was based on a real person, Mehran Karimi Nasseri a/k/a Sir, Alfred Mehran, with a comma after the Sir, a person that was living in a terminal in a French Airport, Charles de Gaulle Airport to be exact, since 1988. When he was sent back to France from England because he lacked the proper papers, which he knew he didn't have, the French government put him into a waiting area for travelers. He remained there from 1988 until 1999 when he was offered a temporary residency permit. This would have given him the right to leave the terminal and get his life together. He refused to sign the necessary papers. He became a sort of unofficial greeter for arriving passengers. He was always clean and got up at 5:00 AM every day. He is no longer at the airport because he fell ill in August of 2006 and was taken to the hospital, where he remained until January 2007. The French Red Cross, Charles de Gaulle Airport branch, has put him into a hotel. Guess where it is located? Near the airport.

There is a man that lives in the Yukon, who believes that he is Elvis Presley reincarnated. When he first thought this, he started calling himself Tagish Elvis. His real name was Gilbert Nelles. He called himself Tagish Elvis because he came from and lived in, Tagish, in the Yukon. He is also a songwriter among other things. So how does he think that this transformation took place? According to the documents that I have found, he believes that he was hit with a beam from a ufo and this reincarnated him into Elvis. This method of reincarnation that he believes in, is a little unusual, even for those that believe in reincarnation. Maybe I should say that it is a LOT unusual. Needless to say, he dresses like Elvis. His belief that he is Elvis actually got him onto the stage where he performed with Chubby Checker in Las Vagas. For those of you who don't know who Chubby Checker is, he was a very famous singer in the late 1950 and 1960s. He made the dance, "The Twist", famous. If you would like to know how famous he was, he was the only recording artist to ever have five albums in the top twelve at once.

Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes was a genius. Howard Hughes was a very famous eccentric. As most of you know, he was a famous aviator, founder of Hughes Tool company, Hughes Aircraft and TWA's majority stockholder. He created Hughes Aerospace Group and Hughes Helicopters. Today the Hughes Aerospace Group is the Hughes Space and Communications Company. Hughes also acquired RKO theaters in 1953 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Does any of this sound like the work of a an incapable person? To the contrary, Hughes was extremely capable, when it came to business and flying, yet this capable person would not shake hands with anyone because he had a terrible fear of germs, locked himself in his room for days on end and some say, heard voices in his head. Not many people know that Hughes was a descendant of Catherine of Valois, Dowager Queen of England. So here we had this genius, there was no denying this, who exhibited severe eccentricity. Things were so bad with Hughes that as the years went by, he was reported dead several times by the newspapers. Hughes would obsess over the size of his peas. Before he would eat peas, which he liked very much, he world sort them by size on his plate. He had a fixation on not paying taxes. He even went so far as to donate all his stock in Hughes Aircraft to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, this turned a military contractor into a charitable institution. He would live in hotels because then he didn't have a legal residence and this enabled him to avoid taxes. Now don't get me wrong, he was not just trying to avoid taxes as many do, he was fixated on the idea of avoiding taxes and ready to do anything to accomplish this, even if it meant giving up substantial income.

Could some eccentric people have been taken for geniuses when they were really just eccentric? Look at the art world, no matter how bad a painting is, if it is painted by a desirable painter, then it is a must have. It is more of a question of impressing one's peers with the ownership, than the actual character of the work. Could Sigmund Freud have been eccentric? Could it have been the fact that he was famous that prompted everyone in his field to bow to his theories? Freud had become famous from his books and lectures. He said that there is a conscious and unconscious mind. This seems to be obvious, but then he said that the unconscious mind is many times the size of the conscious mind. Psychiatrists bought it, but how can that ever be proven. In illustrations the conscious mind is about 1/25 the size of the unconscious one, according to Freud. Then, he said, there is the preconscious mind that is roughly the same size as the conscious mind. Can you imagine if he just dreamed this up, because he was obsessed with the mind? According to Freud, many things we do are linked to sex. Could he have had some sort of preoccupation with this subject? I don't want you to think that I am saying that Freud had anything wrong with him, I am just postulating that if he did, it might have tainted his theories and we don't know this today. Look, if you read his theories, you will see what I am talking about.

I was reading one set of statistics that suggested that eccentric people have better health and live longer than non eccentric people. I don't know if these figures have any basis in fact, so I didn't list them, but it is an interesting theory. Maybe they worry less about the ordinary things that really bother us, who knows? I don't think that there is any reliable way of comparing life spans of eccentrics and non eccentrics, since it is sort of a subjective thing that we are talking about. Sure it is easy to spot those that are Very Eccentric, but what about those borderline cases and those other cases where people don't agree on whether someone is eccentric or not? Then there is the argument of whether a person is eccentric or just mentally ill, if there is a difference. I just don't know how we could ever sort these things out, do you? I tend to think that if you are just a little bit out of kilter you are eccentric, but if you are more than that, you are considered mentally ill, but this is only my opinion. Another thing, there are plenty of mentally ill people that are far more capable than some of the eccentric people, depending on what kind of eccentricity they have. There are many mentally ill sitting judges in this country that have their illness controlled by medication.