Either/Or: #1

The subject of todays post, and indeed the man who sparked the entire idea for Either/Or is Ulrich Haarbürste; a man who appears to be someones alter ego, but I'm having a hard time figuring out to whom he's sprung from.  Apparently, he's fooled some newspapers and zines into believing that he's a real person, but I refuse to believe anyone, even a lousy kraut would have a last name that would translate roughly to hairbrush.

None the less, Haarbürste's simple website knocks you for a loop within the first two  sentences of content;

Hello and welcome to my homepage. My name is Ulrich Haarbürste, and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped in cling-film.

His stories are dream-like encounters between Haarbürste, his pet terrapin named Jetta, and Roy Orbison and an inordinate amount of cling-wrap that, through a set of means ranging from moderately irrational to ragingly psychotic, finds itself applied en mass to Orbison's body.

Every character Haarbürste writes about reminds me of Mike Myers' Sprockets persona, Dieter, only they are exceptionally emotionless and rational.

The long and short is that you can only truly get a handle on this phenomena by reading a couple of the stories. Of course, I'd recommend all of them, but it's really not necessary.

• Roy gets duped
• Save Roy's Life
• A Life and Death Affair
• A Fool's Blinded Eye
• Avante Gard

So I'm forced to leave it up to you.  Is the man behind Ulrich Haarbürste a genius, or batshit insane?

Either/Or: An Explaination

Unlike my cohort, Clownbaby, I will not start a 'weekly feature' that I have no plans to continue. Because when you promise a new Nicolas Cage clip every week, some people like me start to salivate, and it's just not nice to make them wait. And boy am I waiting...

That's why I'm not going to call this a weekly feature.  I'm just gonna go ahead and say that any time I find a prime example, I will post it under the Either/Or subject.

When you get down to the meat and potatoes, using either/or statements is a way to trap someone falsly into a strict set of options; either it sucks or it's awesome, she's hot or ugly, he's a bro or he's lame, obviously there's a continuum of emotions that fall between those designations, but you haven't been given the chance to develop those distinctions, because, well, either you'd bang her or you wouldn't.

So with my Either/Or, I'd like to take a hotly contested  determination, one that has been outlined in just under a thousand complex pages which to this day remains a controversially stratified topic, and I'd like to break it down into two breathtakingly simple choices: crazy or genius?

It's not new or dificult concept; that highly intelligent and creative people tend to stand on a precipice overlooking a canyon of intense insanity or other emotional anguish. Off the top of my head, I come up with Kurt Cobain, Brian Wilson, Syd Barret, and the guy who invented that awesome flying car from the Discovery Channel

Fucking Awesome...

I won't outwardly make a determination as to how I feel each topic scores on the crazy/not crazy scale, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure out exactly what camp I've parked my flag in after reading each entry.