COLUMN: I’ll take crazy
One way of defining creativity is “seeing things for what they can be, not what they are.” When applied to humans or motivational speakers it usually means being able to see the potential for goodness and achievement in people. I’m just like that, except in the other direction.
I look at the nicest, most peaceful, seemingly together people and see nothing but a smoldering cauldron of funk just waiting to explode. I like to think that if Gandhi had lived long enough, he would have taken to cursing, drinking and kicking people.
I don’t know what this says about me. Am I a bad person because I want to get a yoga instructor to take a swing at me? Is it a bad thing that I want to argue with missionaries and tell children that their teddy bears might come alive and bite them?
Give me a crazy wild-eyed person any day, because you can be more certain they are releasing some of that vindictive bile a little at a time, rather than letting it reach critical mass until they go splat like a water balloon in a microwave oven. Recognizably crazy neighbors with unkempt lawns never turn up on the evening news as secret sex offenders or communists.
I take no pride in this seventh sense. I wish I were wrong but every perfect couple I know ends up getting divorced and most of serene people I’ve known end up talking crazy and wearing tin foil hats to keep evil vibes out of their heads. Most of the overweight, vulgar, opinionated people I know are living content lives. The people around them may not be content. The people around them are trying so hard to be non-judgmental and tolerant that the veins are pulsating on their skulls.
A little crazy is good. A little crazy is normal. It keeps you from falling off the slippery sidewalk of reality into the abyss of two-way conversations with God, medicinal herbs and becoming a talk show host. You have to be a little crazy just to let the daily news events pass by without ripping the wires out of the radio.
“There are lines at the gas stations in Iraq and we’re trucking in gasoline from other countries?” No that makes total sense…if you are crazy!
The Electoral College? It makes total sense to give more weight to a group of people who are living inside an imaginary set of lines that break the country into 50 chunks… if you are crazy. And, of course, the place where the White House actually is has no electoral votes. Yeah I totally understand that now after the skinny potato-headed guys in the UFOs abducted me and implanted that microchip in my bladder. In fact I now feel sane enough to argue in favor of higher salaries for major league baseball players.
Dennis Hinkamp denies knowledge of any documented cases of teddy bears actually coming to life and biting children.