[797] Don't Mind If I Do

I'm hung up on the idea that I would ever consider myself, or call myself, “crazy.”

 

For me, “crazy” feels like a temptation. The better things are going on around me, I feel genuinely compelled to, mostly say, something ridiculous. For reasons I'd like to believe have to do with an appreciation for easily seen consequences, I don't. I flirt with saying crazy things, and to be sure, I try to push it when it comes to getting a laugh, but this annoying curiosity is a persistent devil in my ear.

I suppose I think about “crazy” because of how often it's used nonchalantly to describe aberrant human behavior. You'd have to be crazy to threaten to burn down your mother's house and hijack your kid to California, right? It's crazy to think about the confluence of forces that elect ignorant fascists. It was the craziest thing, he just swerved and I was almost run off the road!

 

Crazy suggests, at minimum, doing something unexpected and often destructive. Banal crazy is a bizarre song or off-putting set of noises and gestures that you can't make sense of. Crazy people “lose their mind,” suggesting it's a random assortment of behavior that could only result from dropping the responsibility to be coherent. That's what I find irrational compulsions to be. The gut “instinct” to burn something down, or be inappropriate, has nothing to do with talking through the feeling, or attempting to figure out if it can be eradicated.

 

There's a weird discussion about personal sovereignty and intention I could try to get into to muddy the waters, but I think it's enough to say, I like options, and I don't want to be too predictable. I like the idea of being the 1 in a million to do something, or prepared to do something, at any moment. That spark or creative energy runs both ways. While you can do something fun or goofy, like run into the direction sign while all the “normal” mall-walkers dutifully avoid, you can also scream bomb on an airplane, or opt for racial epithets in lieu of perfectly good four letter words, because “they're just words, man.”

 

Here seems to be where you distinguish between antagonism or provocation, and solicitation. The idea that you shouldn't be a dick seems rooted in the obvious idea that you don't like to be provoked. Solicitation street-walks a finer line, because maybe, just maybe, you're in the market for what someone is selling. People often want to laugh, and will forgive the bad taste if you acknowledge your pitch was sincere. People will denounce and avoid someone who gets off on the idea of everyone around them being angry.

 

I don't like the impulse. I think it's one of those unintended consequences of the strive to individuate your personality. Options, even bad ones, are just that. But even still, logically, behaving within a set of appropriate conversational and behavioral contexts will beget more options, so those can't be the pull alone. I'm pressed to ask, what is the impulse to destroy?

 

I think about this when it comes to eating like shit, being a little too loose with finances, and even picking at my skin. What prevents me from just “doing the right thing” all the time. That song still haunts me. Why would you ever seek to tarnish a legacy or identity?

 

I can speculate. One, you fundamentally don't believe in what truly constitutes a legacy or identity. Somewhere, not-that-deep down, I'm as fatalistic and “already dead” as they come. My infamy could get quoted in every book unto the ultimate heat death of the universe. And I won't even have to wait that long to stop caring. No matter how well things are going in my life, I'm pretty much always thinking about death. In that context, very little seems to matter.

 

More speculation, I'm afraid something may work. I'm deeply distrustful and very exhaustively tired of getting fucked by dumb foreseeable things. People who want to be my friend? People who want to show up? People I can talk to about anything indefinitely? I've fallen for everything before. I know I came out the other side touting my own openness and capacity to be a whipping boy, but why can't I protect myself and crack the whip first? I think of a video we watched in one of my job “trainings” of a kid who has experienced trauma and continues to do weird angry shit at her foster home. The parents don't understand her triggers, and the kid doesn't know how to cope. They all hug and still love her at the end! The message being the suggestion of unconditional love and the moral fortitude it takes to be a foster parent. They leave out how often kids like that rarely, if ever, get placed, and that trauma generally follows them the rest of their lives. This traumatized kid has resolved to go it mostly alone, write it out, and reduce things to dollar amounts.

 

Even further speculation, I resent the amount of responsibility I've taken on. Every new badge is one I watch people I'm endlessly frustrated with ignore. Why is it the responsibility of the few to carry so much weight? Is it literally the simplest explanation with math and Bell curves? Smart people have to carry the water because 60 million are ready and willing to Trump the place to hell? Motivated flirting-with-personality-disordered weirdos have to pass along the encouraging words and live to the fullest so the onlookers stay alive with half-hearted smiles and basic bitch dreams of their own? Where do I get off ever wanting “the world?” And why do I discover you're all exceedingly happy to let me try and take it?

 

Now, “crazy” for me looks like a test of my lashing out for sovereignty. That's right, it looks like we couldn't avoid going there. What's more different than what destruction looks like at the point all signs trend a single direction? Healthy relationships? Good habits? Money in the bank? Respect from your peers? Stuff galore? Looks good? Girl on your arm? It's tempting fate, so if you can bring it down first, you don't have to be surprised by the heart attack or car crash. You can inject death in a manageable way. Typing that sentence made me feel different.

 

While I respect and accept death, I don't really think I'm looking for it in any greater measure than it already occupies my thoughts. Occasionally, I even refrain from killing a bug and opt to let it back outside. I suppose it is noteworthy that at some level, I would like to be able to control what I see as inevitable destruction. Do you know how many times I've thought about my house burning down? Me creating an inventory is half OCD-adjacent fun, half hoping to make it easier to get my things back when they're gone.

 

How would this manifest in relationships? I actually do think open-ish relationships are natural and healthier, but would I press my luck with my ex knowing somewhere she wasn't really about it? I mean, that's arguably the relationship where my propensity to “get it over with” reached its most absurd and dangerous point. Housekeeping my facebook contacts is me not wanting to navigate the nonsense conversations pretending we still have anything in common besides drinking months or years from now.

 

It's such a cliché to be self-destructive like that, and I don't think I've gotten to the point of abject pathology for precisely that reason. Watching the idiots beg for punishment in my day job doesn't endear me to that behavior. I suppose in my language, I recognize them as wanting to die, they're just going about it in sloppier ways. Show up with a drug screen and 3 month backlogged therapy appointment to that environment...

 

Perhaps more innocently, I'm just bored with my own thoughts, and remain perpetually curious as to how they bounce off the things and people I like. If I like you, it's either because I exacerbate some level of pathological thinking in you, and make it fun, or maybe you're desperate to talk to someone who can't be triggered and needs to rush past the creative muck in order to get to a mutually understood exchange. You never find that place talking nice. You never share “the worst,” because, well, duh.

 

I'd still rather lose the thought to destroy and maintain the creative energy. I don't know that it can happen, but that I even wish for that makes me think I'm a centimeter better person than I considered myself before I thought to call myself “crazy.” I don't know that I really wish how my brain operates on anyone, so if you managed to get to the same places as mine all on your own, the possibilities between us are endless.