Monday

I don't think I'm crazy.

A lot of people tell me, "Where do you come up with that stuff? You're crazy." Or, "Your mind is warped. You're crazy." But I don't think that I'm crazy. Or maybe it's that I'm just crazy enough to not realize that I am.

When I think of crazy, I think of a guy I saw in New York one time while I was walking through Hell's Kitchen on my way to the Javits Center. He wore a purple suit and had either filled his hair with gel or had bought a James Brown wig because he looked just like him. He had dark sunglasses on that looked like they might have been gotten from a rack in a CVS and had a 100% UV protection sticker on the lens that left a little glue when he quickly tore it off and headed to his street corner. He held a bullhorn in his left hand that came with an attached handset, the ones that you see on CB radios. I could hear the rings he wore tapping on the plastic.

He stood on his corner, fidgeting with the handset, staring into the glass of the building across the street so he could see the reflections of people approaching on his side. When he spotted his target, he waited until they were almost about to make their turn or begin watching their step as they got near the crosswalk and jumped out at them. "OH LORD, HELP ME JESUS. OH JESUS HELP ME! HELP ME, BROTHER JESUS! AHAAAHAAHHAHHAHA HEYEEEYAAAA!" He had clearly practiced his James Brown impression. He scared nearly everyone that he ambushed and the results after the initial shock ranged from laughter to violent anger. Funny thing was, in the time I spent watching him--roughly 10 minutes or so--he never asked for money. He just wanted to scare people with a bullhorn and a James Brown impression.

Crazy is often connected with severe mental or emotional issues. Issues that pharmaceutical companies make a medicine for. Not Tylenol for general aches and pains, the run-of-the-mill worries, but the drugs created for that specific disease or syndrome. The stuff I won't even pretend to understand. The stuff that you think of when you see a man ambushing people while wearing crushed velvet.

I wonder what a doctor would've said about my street corner friend. Given the chance, would someone try and put him away, reducing his otherwise interesting existence to a series of small cups filled with medicine? I can accept the fact that he was crazy, sure. I can accept it because he was scaring people on the street, dressed as James Brown, with no visible intentions of doing anything but that. But at the same time, his purple suit and spot-on impression allowed his madness to come out with a context and meaning. If he had been wearing a white hospital gown, I'd feel differently. But to me, it just seemed like what he should've been doing. In a strange way, he made sense.

Maybe people are right and I am a little bit crazy to think the way I do and see things the way I do from time to time. But since I'm not brandishing a bullhorn on a street corner, blitzing the sidewalk roamers, or sitting in a ward somewhere waiting to be handed a small cup with unknown medications, it might just mean that there are different kinds of crazy. If there's good cholesterol, there's a strong possibility that there's such a thing as "good crazy," or "stable crazy." Maybe crazy is like snake venom: just a little bit will do ya. You get that bite and it jolts you, skews your perception so that the color of the sky, as the neurotoxins begin taking effect, looks just different enough that you need to stop for a second to write a compelling poem about it before you head off to get a healthy dose of anti-venom and not die. You've got to ride that razor's edge to make it work right.

These are the things I think about on my way to work on Monday morning. I'm battling insane multi-tasking drivers and yet the bulk of my thoughts are devoted to reminiscing about a nutjob James Brown impersonator. Perhaps I need to start drinking less coffee, or more. All I know is that when I looked through those barren trees lining the road and that puffy purple sunrise-cloud caught my eye, the only thing I could think of was him, and that I kind of wanted to buy a bullhorn and join in.