COLUMN: Slightly Off Center
People sometimes ask me what “Slightly Off Center” means, and all I can say is it has nothing to do with geometry or politics. Since I’m someone who has always been a little down the slope on the bell curve of normalcy, I have nurtured a good set of comebacks to these accusations.
Are you going crazy?
“No, but it’s only a $2 cab ride away.”
“No, I’ve been there and I didn’t like your mamma’s cooking.”
“No, but if you’re going can I hitch a ride?”
“No, this week I decided to go on a guilt trip instead.”
“No, all the good rooms are booked and besides, I like it just fine here with you.”
I don’t mind this sort of banter because we all know none of us knows who the real loonies are until they show up in the headlines. As long as people keep telling me I’m a little tweaked, I feel that I, and the rest of the community, are in safe territory. I sometimes wear funny hats and mutter to myself just to complete the effect.
All kidding not aside, how exactly does one know if one is going crazy? Well, for one thing you probably start using “one” as an indefinite pronoun because you are afraid of using he or she. But that is part of the point, though we don’t have an adequate legal definition craziness, there are a cornucopia of clues in the language.
Probably my favorite descriptions of mental irregularities are those that describe craziness as some level of incompleteness: A few cards short of a deck, a few fries short of a happy meal, a few slices short of a loaf, a few beers short of a six pack, a few shingles shy of a roof, a few bricks shy of a load, a few beads short of a rosary or – for a local twist – a few marshmallows short of a Jell-O dessert.
Then there are the descriptions that describe an unlikely dysfunction: The elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top; the lights are on, but nobody is home; not firing on all cylinders; swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool; his antenna doesn’t pick up all the channels.
And incongruous analogies: Sharp as a sponge, bright as Alaska in the winter, dumb as a sack of hammers, dumb as a post, mind like a steel sieve.
And just miscellaneous creative: Reading from an empty disk and he drank from the fountain of knowledge but only gargled.
Despite how perceptive we seem to be about other people’s failings, the real crazy people seem to be going unnoticed until they go on a rampage. Then when we really need a colorful phrase to break the tension, all people can say is that he was “a quiet guy who kept to himself and mowed his lawn regularly.”
This itself seems crazy when we have enough definitions of craziness to give everyone their own designation. And, well, if we are all crazy, then nobody is crazy. And if nobody is crazy, then just stop looking at me like that, all right?