All things being equal, I've got nothing against crazy people. So long as you're not the "break into my house and shoot me in the face while I'm sleeping" sort of crazy, I say live and let live.
However, I don't think that every crazy person in the world is some sort of divine sybil here to share with us a deep and secret truth if only, yes, if only we could get past our silly prejudices of speaking in coherent sentences and not smelling like vinegar and stale ramen noodles.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm talking about a certain kind of crazy person: the (probably homeless) neighborhood crazy. I mean, your mom is like crazy crazy: you know how she'd be standing in the kitchen staring out the window and you'd be all like "mom, mom I'm hungry? Mom, can I have lunch? Mom?" and she wouldn't answer, but just keep staring out that window? Or how your little brother doesn't like to be touched, and that one time in school an older kid was like "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you," but then actually touched him and your brother went apeshit and now he lives in one of those "alternative education safe houses" where everyone speaks in really soft voices and there are bunnies drawn on all the walls? Not like that.
Last night I go into Rite-Aid and there's this guy there: Black, 45-50, heavy-set build. He was wearing a leather jacket and black jeans, and he had this giant security chain around his neck - the thick-linked steel kind, like you go to the hardware store and you go "man, what would I do with a chain that big? Like, what do I care about that much that I would need a chain that would take an hour to saw through?" The chain was secured with a padlock. I thought he was maybe the security guard, but then I noticed that he was yelling out the names of '80's rap and adult contemporary artists.
Me to floor person: I need a replacement head for the Norelco Pube-Buster 9000?
Floor person: I'm deaf.
Chain Dude: CHAKA KHAN!
Me to floor person: Okay, thank you.
Floor person: (shrugs)
Chain Dude: KOOL MOE DEE!
Floor person: Here's a pen
Me: (writing)
Floor person: (reads note, shrugs)
Chain dude: AL B. SURE!
Me: Thank you again.
Floor person: (shrugs) I'm deaf
Chain dude: KURTIS BLOW!
He had an extensive play list. I heard every name in hip hop and R&B from the early "true school" all the way through New Jack Swing, but nothing gangstah. He was a classy crazy, keeping it real.
There's just something about these people hovering at the fringe of society, finding one place to frequent and one routine in which to fall. There was the lady* who used to hang out in front of Giorgio's pizza in East Lansing saying "It's my BIRTHDAY!" over and over again, the wheel-chaired bird woman of Munich who wheeled out to the middle of Marienplatz to pet pigeons, Ernie the can man (R.I.P. Ernie - mourn ya till I join ya). These are the people whom one might say have gone mad in the Victorian sense: you could talk about them being autistic, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, but there's something about shoving a pill in one of these people's mouths and making them "alright" that takes some of the color out of the world.
Of course, YOU can put the pill in their mouths. I don't want rabies.
Chain dude seemed a little unhappy about the current state of hip-hop, bird lady was upset she could only hold one bird at a time, and one day the lady at Giorgio's is going to be really upset when she figures out that, no it is NOT her birthday, but mostly they seem to just take things one day at a time. No, these people probably can't hold jobs. They can't care for themselves. Many of them either collect welfare or live in some sort of state-sponsored assisted living home. With medication, they could ostensibly become normalized and functioning members of society, filing papers, punching clocks, and generally shoveling shit.
But until they hurt someone, or prove to be a danger to themselves, you can't force someone to take medicine. I have very little doubt that all of these people were offered perfectly good drugs at one point or another, and then either turned them down or were unable to afford them, preferring either to live in their fractured solipsistic worlds or to keep the last of their money for food and shelter, or, you know, giant chains.
They hang out at the places we go: the store, the mall, the bank, the pharmacy, reminding us that we're all just one traumatic incident - one car accident, layoff, or protracted conscription - from climbing up a lightpole naked with our underpants on our heads**.
I, for one, welcome our new paranoid schizophrenic overlords. In a world where the dominant cultural paradigm fails the average person ever faster, why not just wig out? The rules of society are breaking - people buy things only to walk away from them, we start families and then break them up a few years later. We live nebulous and solipsistic lives - they're just doing it better than us.
*Stop calling all crazy women "Crazy Mary." I don't know who did it first, and I don't care. Stop. It's not original. Once Pearl Jam writes a song about a person by that name, it's completely over. Yes, this means you should also stop naming children Jeremy. I know you think it's a great thing to call a crazy person because you're all like "Oh wow, Mary was like the mother of Jesus, and like, Jesus was god, so like if god's Mom is crazy, that's like whoa, my whole world is upside-down!" If your favorite band is Creed, that's really deep. If you've actually read a book that doesn't start with the words "Chicken Soup" and end with "soul," knock it off.
**True story - this was a guy that my mom was dating back in like 88 or 89. He was nice enough, liked folk music, had this little efficiency apartment, then one day he went off his meds and did the aforementioned feat of urban scaling.
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