Are We All Crazy?

Part 28 of 30 -- Psycho Squad

Are we all crazy? Who’s asking? If we're all crazy is there someone sane enough to ask? Sounds like a thought puzzle, like we had in college, talking in some guy's dorm room. The weird philosophical discussions we had! Then an orgy would break out and the time for talk had passed. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, an occasional priest. Completely carnal except for the intellectual talk and a dash of spirituality.

A few of the discussions centered on interests like this, How do we know what we know? Where do we independently stand to know the truth? This stuff usually came out of philosophy, which I still don’t get entirely. Except it's meant to tie you up in knots and get you flunked. Technically it's the love of wisdom, but since it’s so hard to state the terms and definitions describing reality (which is a mystery), it’s every person, object, or concept for itself. That’s what I got out of it, and it’s helped me immensely with the Psycho Squad. “Screw the rules. The rules are ‘Battle stations, entities of every stripe!'”

I can simplify things: Clinically speaking, we’re divided into two basic groups, the much smaller group, normal people like me. Then the vaster group, those who are abnormal in one respect or another. They may have eaten one too many TV dinners or maybe they were born with it, but they’re decidedly different, confirmed wacko. One problem with me, and I don’t admit anything bad very often, is I only have one Psycho Squad ambulance. If I really applied myself I could have a thousand ambulances and a million employees! But the few employees I have now pilfer me almost to death, so if I were any more successful I'd be completely broke.

Think of the dilemma from this angle: With that many people lost in their mental problems and essentially incapacitated — except for their strange unerring ability to act as criminals — I couldn’t afford to screen a staff with the percentages; they themselves would be 80% psychotic! Just keeping track of who’s nuts enough to be semi-normal would be too much. The only solution would be to have a vast facility and an unlimited number of holding cells for when they acted out. But getting staff who aren't sadists, sheesh!

Anyway, I guess I'm happy enough with operations the way they are. Small enough to be flexible and big enough to keep myself neatly dressed. Plus, it does allow me enough free time to chart out how massive my problems are. I keep a blackboard in the garage and update it daily depending on the previous day’s experience. My PQ rating (psycho quotient) goes up and down, which is my take on the social environment. I buckle down when it’s high and loosen up when it’s low. It's about even now, so I'm simultaneously buckled and loose.

But it's all good. I get a few days rest, the PQ goes up, we work like dogs, then enjoy a few days downtime. It’s a great job. Although I'm stuck with the sneaky feeling that I may wake up someday and discover the real truth, that I've been locked up and sedated my whole life.

Be Normal, It's Not That Hard

No. 9 of 30 -- Psycho Squad

I always try to be an encouragement to my psycho friends, "C'mon, be normal! It's so easy! Try it ... Put one brain cell in front of the other and think! If you try it, you'll find it's just like ice skating. You put one foot forth and tippie-toe along -- have confidence! -- and pretty soon you're sailing across the beautiful ice! Gliding like that..." When naturally they crumple. So much for my theory that good coaching solves everything, when you're talking to a guy whose head's stuffed with mush, and maybe even the mush isn't connected.

But, patience, I keep trying. I'll always believe, Put your mind to it and great things will happen. And don't we all have aspirations? I was taught that. And if I didn’t believe it, I’d give up. I’d hate to look out on life’s landscape and see nothing looking back. Rather, I look out and I’m part of it, along with everyone else, with hopes, dreams, and possibilities. The overall prognosis is good. If we could just get rid of the pessimism which so often marks our lives on a day to day basis. Think, people!

It probably should be established what the baseline in life is, what we should all be or strive to be. It’s called Normal. A very simple word, huh? Although normal doesn’t always mean perfect or completely whole. It means not too many challenges, not too much personal hot water or stewing in it, but a basic path right down the middle. Like a karate chop, split the difference. Someone holds up four fingers, you don’t bite them off.

The big emphasis needs to be on our mental life and maintaining a decent enough standing. A guy has a stick. He does things with the stick as a sort of tool. All normal enough to understand. But he doesn’t poke his eye out. That’s far from normal, unless it’s an accident, then it’s a normal consequence of life when it’s gone bad. But once you've literally poked out an eye, all kinds of nasty things can easily follow, and I'll probably have to wrestle you to the ground.

So what about mentality when it’s off the normal track? It’s normal in the sense that things can go wrong. But it’s abnormal if the organism is out of whack and doing things against its well-being. Without giving an exhaustive description — which would be dry and boring — this is where the Psycho Squad springs into action. We look out on the world as though with an all-seeing eye. What we see looking back is a more or less normal sector. With a fairly large abnormal sector, causing crazy havoc for itself and others.

It's great to rev up the siren and make our wondrous forays into the night, because we're hoping to bring wayward minds back toward the norm. We give a quick diagnosis, say, holding up two fingers pointing to my eyes and theirs, hoping to see something registering, and if not, that’s a moment of crisis. Is the person armed? Can he or she be a threat to our normal lives and limbs? From there many paths present themselves, which we see in a flash. “Get this person to the hospital! Hup to! Hup to! ... And while you're at it, if you've got a sec, check again for guns."

Say you're the victim, the patient. You'll be happy when you’re back to normal. And, really, normal’s not so hard. Fingers to eyes, try to keep up. Let these things register in your psyche. Like falling off a log. Which takes absolutely nothing but gravity and the normal imbalances we all have, the normal inability to keep our footing on normal rotating slippery logs.

I'm Perfectly Normal

 

No. 12 of 30 -- Guidance Counselor series

This isn’t a good day. I’m feeling mucho funky about myself. Usually everything's great and I have the world’s best self image, perpetually, depending on which parts of the world we’re talking about. But not today.

And, yes, this cross on my back -- this guidance counselor series -- is bringing out the best and the worst in me, depending on how it hits me at any given moment. Some days I’m on top of the world; there were a couple fleeting moments yesterday. Then other times I’m sinking somewhat, but still bobbling along like the red red robin. Other times, unfortunately, like today, I’m a wild-eyed mad man, in one of my budget barn Elvis costumes, wild-eyed as I said, bad complexion, and eyes going crazy wild, wielding a sword and swishing it madly through the air, cutting everything in sight!

Call it what it is, some sort of dissociative dysfunction, I think, crabgrass of the brain. I’m having a hard time scooping out memories of the guidance counselor and dumping them before the public. And most of you have been sympathetic and encouraging, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a small group — like always — that comes down on the side of the guidance counselor... The guy could’ve flayed and panbroiled me and these buzzards would see no problem at all: "Don’t question your betters!" Their twisted myopic view is guidance counselors can do no wrong! Let's flip 'em off!

Dredging up any detail of the past for me has karma the size of the Titanic. If I'm thinking of some innocent thing, like us kids threatening a Nude-In in high school, I would associate it now in a negative way. Instead of the great joy it was. Certainly, then, something as tumultuous and negatively memorable as the guidance counselor making me his personal punching bag, all while keeping it psychological and therefore hard to prove, has a hurtful side.

One of my doctors thinks my flailing about with the sword is healthy and one strenuously disagrees. So with one doctor, I’m sitting there with it proudly. With the other I’m a little more reticent, because I hate being judged, as I know this guy is no doubt thinking in his mind, “This dude’s squirrelly. His stupid sword. His stupid guidance counselor issues. How insipid. Let’s move on, pal. Give me a break. Pay the bill and make another appointment.”

And I don’t have the slightest clue how dismissive he is of me and my ever-present traumas. Giving me, unbeknownst to him, yet another grievance that someday if I live long enough I’ll also be working through.

I'm Blessed To Be Normal

I visited another guy's blog a little while ago. We individual people who have our individual blogs need to stick together. It's good that we choose to go to each other's blogs, to look around for a minute or so before leaving. I appreciated seeing his posts. I didn't really read them or get a full sense of it, because I'm very busy with my own life and can't be wasting my time like that.

Anything, the thing that stuck out, that I noticed, was that the guy has something wrong with him. An illness or condition that's serious enough and important enough (apparently) to have not just its own name but an organization for those coping with it, battling it, and explaining it. He had links to it. Maybe it was some kind of mental thing. Or a blood disorder. Or an aversion to particular things in life. I can't remember. I just remember it was something, and something important enough for him to identify with it.

When I see that business about a disease, condition, aversion, or complex big enough and bad enough to identify with, I usually leave. I left in this case. And you might leave now, too, since that's my complex. Part of it. But there's no organization for it that I know of, and I'm not battling or coping with it in an association with other sufferers. I'm not even formally diagnosed, but obviously I am concerned with explaining it, at least sufficiently to get to my point, which is how normal I am.

[A Couple Hours Later -- I may have lost the mojo for this post. Because I got as far as the last sentence above and the phone rang, and a dear friend of mine died and that was someone with the news. This is a true statement. So I've been gone maybe close to two hours. I'll read over what I've got above and try to finish it out, because I thought this was a pretty good post.]

OK, I've always considered myself normal and blessed to be normal. I've always considered myself the right height, the right weight, to have been born in the right place to the right people. When it comes to normal, as far as I'm concerned, I am the standard, I set the pace. It's right, good, and proper, in my opinion, for everyone else to be compared to me to determine the degree of normalcy they enjoy.

I eat particular things, normal food. I think particular things, normal thoughts. I go to all the usual places and do all the usual things. There's nothing abnormal about me, except perhaps the mere face that I am so normal. More so than most people.

I'm mentally all together. We don't need organizations to battle that. We've got -- I've got already in my possession what the poor unfortunates are battling for.