This Side of Crazy
This post examines the line between eccentricity and insanity.
I enjoy talking to crazy people. They’re the only ones who make sense to me. People with big ideas are interesting, but people who are always talking about big ideas and never accomplishing anything are intriguing. These are the ones people give up on. These are the ones relegated to the fringe of society.
My buddy Bill is constantly talking about big projects he’s thinking about doing. I love talking with him, I love hashing through ideas and figuring out problems. It’s like a game, a hobby, a sport in which the ball is constantly in motion but never reaches a goal line. You see, Bill doesn’t actually do much of anything.
People like quirkiness as long as the quirkiness is big. People with banal quirkiness aren’t all that interesting. My friend, Brian, has some pretty quirky habits. He goes through a prolonged ritual before he goes anywhere; he orders four or five entrees at a restaurant. He says things with a confident certainty even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t always agree with him but I find him irresistibly fascinating because he speaks with such confidence.
As for myself, I’m too interested in seeing other people’s perspectives to be forceful in my own. Why should my opinion carry more weight than someone else’s? It seems like a reasonable, mature perspective but it makes me too thoughtful to be interesting. Interesting people take strong positions. They do things that are abnormal and don’t care what other people say. They’re convinced of their own rightness with an absolute certainty that defies reality.
Wearing a jumpsuit to high school every day. That’s odd. It’s odd enough to be quirky. Having an amusement park in your front yard or living in an old Boeing 747 carcass is quirky. They’re quirky because they’re unusual and intentional. But they have to be backed up by success. Showing up late for work, getting drunk at a party, misspelling words. Those things aren’t quirky, they’re just laughably, dismissably mundane. Nobody thinks the guy who always comes in late is making a statement, they just think he’s lazy. Driving a ten year old car is sad, driving a car sixty years old is awesome.
There’s a fine line between interesting and insane. Interesting people live outside the norm in a way that sets them apart from the rest of the world. But they accomplish things. Accomplishment is the key to sanity.
When I was eight my brother explained the world to me. He told me things I’ve never forgotten.
“If you’re rich,” he said, “you’re eccentric. If you’re poor, you’re crazy.”
That’s why Michael Jackson can have a zoo in his yard but the guy down the street can’t have twelve ostriches. My brother was the smartest person I knew. For three months out of the year he’s two years older than me.
For Their Own Good
My friend Bill Cavanaugh is always talking about changing the world. He hasn’t had a steady job in his life, can’t work in the same place for more than a year, but he knows how to change the world. I would tell you about some of his ideas but he’d sue me. I’m serious. He has ideas about LFTRs (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) and ammonia powered cars, about private internets and personal spy satellites. Ideas he doesn’t want other people to know about–I may have said too much already.
Some of these ideas are years old, he’s never done anything with them and I’d put money on the fact he never will, but if I told you what his ideas were I’d be letting the cat out of the bag. He shares them in the strictest confidence because every one of them would make billions if he were to get them off the ground. Of course it’s the getting off the ground part that is the problem.
His ideas are always big. I’ll give him that. And they’d certainly make him rich if any one of them actually worked. Not just a little rich either. He’d be super rich. That’s why he doesn’t want me to discuss his ideas. He doesn’t want to end up like the Winklevoss twins, settling for a few lousy million. There’s something grand about a person who doesn’t have any money being unwilling to settle for millions of dollars.
“What do you know about Sierra Leone?” he asks.
“It’s in Africa,” I say.
“It’s a poorly run African nation. One of the worst. But I think we could turn it around. With your understanding of economics and my business savvy, we could have the economy humming in a couple years. We would improve the infrastructure, improve the schools and then implement democracy. We’d be doing the Sierra Leonean a favor.
“Did you see their economy last year?” he continues. “Barely five billion dollars. The U.S. has 500 companies that made more money than that last year. We could definitely turn that place around.”
“How would we ever get into a position of power in the Sierra Leone?” I ask.
“Are you kidding me? We could just walk in and take it. Their military is only 15,000 strong and they’re undisciplined. You get 150 former special ops guys over there and you can have the place locked down inside a week.”
These are the kind of projects he works on. Not getting a job, not earning rent money, but taking over Sierra Leone.
Negotiation and Machination
Bill lives in a van. He doesn’t buy groceries. He eats one meal a day. At three in the afternoon he goes to the Golden Corral and stays a couple hours. He convinced the manager to give him the senior citizen rate even though he’s not even middle-aged.
“Look,” he told the manager, “you wouldn’t offer the rate unless you were making a profit. You can give me the rate.”
“No.”
“Okay,” he tried again, “I’m in here every day. Don’t you think I should get a bulk price discount?”
The manager was firm. “No.”
“Here you go,” Bill started afresh. “I’ll only eat the food you’re just about to throw out. You know you throw out a lot of food. I’ll just sit here and when the staff is getting ready to throw something out just bring it to my table first. Do we have a deal?”
This is what Bill does. He’s relentless, he’s logical, he wears you down until you can’t say no anymore.
“I know how we’ll do it,” he tells me when I see him again.
“Do what?”
“Take over Sierra Leone.
“We get permission to shoot a movie in the capital, Freetown. It’s a war film so all our ‘actors’ will need to have weapons. We set up to shoot near the Presidential Palace then the actors, who are really our hired special ops guys, attack the palace with their ‘fake’ weapons, subdue the guards and oust the president. It will be over so fast they won’t know what hit them.”
This is the way he thinks. Brilliant, tactical, logical. Even though he can’t make money off this idea he’s going to be mad that I shared it. “That’s a silver bullet,” he’ll say. “A one-time thing. Once someone does it everyone will be on the lookout for it. It will never work twice and you just gave it away.”
His intentions, by the way, are pure. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone; it would be a bloodless coup. And he only wants the best for the poor Sierra Leonean. He would do all this at his own expense for their benefit. Just to make the world a better place. In this scenario the liberated and enriched Sierra Leonean all love him after a few years and don’t want him to stop being their president because their lives are so much better.
Once in power he’d build a series of LFTRs and export ammonia. He’d take the profits and invest them in infrastructure and education. He’d bring Sierra Leone into the twenty-first century and have ubiquitous, free, high-speed, wireless internet. He’d crack down on crime and open more public libraries. They won’t do this on their own because they need someone to show them how, they need someone to set things right and then he’ll turn it back over to them.
All Bill has to do is come up with a few billion is seed money to get his military invasion funded. And he has a few ideas about how he can make that happen.
Mister Ambassador
If he ever gets it off the ground I know the perfect Ambassador; my friend Brian. I want him to be an ambassador like Africans want free internet. He seems like what I would imagine the ideal nineteenth century ambassador to be like. Amiable, interesting, intelligent but with a definite personality. He says brash things and then backs them up with thoughtful and intelligent observations. He makes you laugh at the absurdity of a position only to walk away a few minutes later nodding, thinking it sounds pretty reasonable.
And Brian is quirky. He is constantly late because he has to go through a ritual before he goes anywhere regardless of when he’s supposed to be there. He’s got this whole process he goes through before he’ll drive anywhere. He doesn’t let anything rush him. I suppose it’s his meditation, but it’s like watching water evaporate.
One day we’re meeting some friends for lunch. He walks outside and looks around. Not just a cursory glance, he takes the time to soak it all in. His eyes narrow like a soldier surveying a hostile horizon. As though everything within sight is being observed and analyzed. He’s standing, I should remind you, on his front stoop car keys in hand. I can’t tell what he’s thinking but he looks thoughtful. He pauses much longer than is comfortable, much longer than a normal person stops on their stoop to take in the neighborhood.
If he only did this when something was amiss I could get behind it. If he noted small inconsistencies in the neighborhood happenings that led to the discovery of a drug ring or a terrorist plot I’d say, take all the time you need. But although he looks pensive, he never notices anything. He’s not looking at specific details, he’s just taking in the beauty of the world. The joy of being alive. It’s kind of irritating really.
He’ll stand there for minutes just slowly breathing. Not meditating, not breathing rhythmically, just taking a few deep breaths like one does on a crisp fall morning when you first encounter the coldness of the air. For that moment you stop and breathe in deeply through your nose, your nostrils appreciating every bit of a long pull of autumn air, and you say “Ah, I love the smell of leaves.”
But he doesn’t say anything about the air or the smell. And he doesn’t just pause for a ten second deep breath. He stands there long enough to make me look at my watch and if he weren’t breathing deeply I’d check him for a pulse. But his deep breaths let me know he’s alive and they make me think he’s doing something important, something deeply thoughtful. At least they did at first, now I know they’re just his ritual.
After the looking, breathing, standing completely still routine we walk to the car. He clears his throat, says “hmmmm” to himself as though he just thought of something. His shoulder jerks in the spasm of a dog chasing a dream rabbit. He pauses with his hand on the car door handle. I could be anywhere while all this is going on. I could still be in the house. I could be across the yard. I could be sitting in the car with my seat belt on. Nothing I do seems to have any effect on the ritual.
Brian looks like a man who has accomplished things in his life. He’s a sturdy man with thin hair and glasses. He speaks intelligently on issues of importance. Brian will be rich one day I know that much. I’ve known it forever.
And On the Inside Too
Once in the car he sweeps the cockpit like a pilot. Left to right, checking the switches ensuring everything is in place. He touches everything. I imagine him going through a mental list. Windshield wipers off…check, blinker off…check, headlights off…check. Radio, climate control system, emergency brake. Everything in order according to some checklist in his brain. It takes minutes. Several minutes. Several minutes is a long time when you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a car with your seatbelt on. It’s a long time when you know you could have been at the restaurant fifteen minutes ago. When you know your friends were there five minutes ago and you still haven’t even left the house.
It’s not that he doesn’t care about other people or is unaware of their frustration. He just sees it as a choice they have to make. If they’re going to ride with him they know he’s going to go through this ritual and if they don’t want to they can find other arrangements. He may not even make it to the restaurant before lunch is over and our friends have left. He’ll still have lunch there. Without them. And yes, it’s too bad they couldn’t be there he would acknowledge. It would be much more fun if they were, but it’s like getting stuck in traffic. Once you realize there’s nothing you can do about it you just let it go and live with the situation.
He was that way in high school too. Maybe that’s when I decided I liked him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit to school. Yes, a one piece mechanic’s jumpsuit. Solid blue. He wore it every day. Just decided to wear it one day and then decided he liked it. Did the other kids think it was weird? Well, yes. But he didn’t care. He was just doing his own thing. Why would he care what other people thought?
His hair was a bit of a mess so he bought a ten dollar pair of clippers and took it all off. By himself in the bathroom mirror. Just put the number one guard on it and traced his head as though he were combing his hair only instead of laying it flat he was creating a pile in the sink. And then that was his look, buzz cut and blue jumpsuit. Every day of his high school career.
There’s something maddeningly frustrating about being disregarded. When someone doesn’t care what I think it gets under my skin. But there’s also something intriguing about that kind of independence of spirit. How can you just not care? Don’t you feel hurt, lonely, embarrassed? How can you just “do your own thing” all the time? I wish I could do that. I wish I were that confident in myself.
I’m at Brian’s house because I can’t be at mine. At my house I’m supposed to be writing but as soon as I walk in the door I can’t stand to think about writing. The piles of short stories I’m supposed to be reading, the million half-finished or barely started pieces that sit on my computer all weigh on me like a tank. The only thing I can motivate myself to do at my house is sleep, so I end up at Brian’s.
Brian is the most interesting person I know. He’s both quick and slow, mentally quick and physically slow. He moves deliberately and thoughtfully but not passionately or purposefully.
“I talked to some people today,” he tells me. “I think I did pretty well. At least judging by their facial expressions and the tone of their responses I think I did well.”
“What did you talk about?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “Something. Nothing. Everything. But I think I did well. I adumbrated an idea I had about pedagogy and the education system and I must have been compelling. There was a lot of head nodding and their faces looked like they were interested.”
It’s Always Important to Someone
Brian is a collector of ideas and I suppose that appeals to me. My dad was a collector too but he had a more tangible purpose. He was a collector of things. He collected things to recycle because recycling was good for the environment. It was an enlightened collecting. He kept his stacks clean and organized. His stacks didn’t smell like urine.
When I was a child someone broke into our house. They got in through a basement window and took all the bottles my father had been collecting for the deposits. There must have been $50 worth of bottles down there all lined up in rows and stacked neatly. They were all gone. He was working at the A&P back then and the next day some boys came in with the bottles.
Cartload after cartload of bottles all clean and neatly stacked, their faces beaming in anticipation.
“What’d you do?” I asked him.
“I gave them their money,” he said.
Because even though everything was about money with my dad, it was never about the money. Money was the kind of thing you dealt with when you had to but you couldn’t base your life on money. Money and stuff. It can’t be all about the addiction to possessions, man.
For Betty everything is a sign. If her neighbors lose their dog she shouldn’t take the new job at the hospital. Or she shouldn’t have. She did anyway and it turned out badly. After two weeks they let her go.
“I knew I wasn’t supposed to be working there,” she told me later. “When Branson came up lost I knew that was specially a sign to me. I knew God was telling me not to take that job. But what did I do? I went and took it anyways.”
Betty’s living room, and from what I can tell every other room, is full of stuff. Stacks of papers and boxes and things piled on furniture which more things get piled on top of.
“Oh, excuse the mess,” she says as though she’d left a dish towel across the back of a chair. There was in fact a dishtowel across the back of a chair but it looked like it had been there for quite some time. I have a feeling of compassion and revulsion.
There were stacks of newspaper she was going to recycle someday. A section for the aluminum cans that were worth ten cents in Michigan and a box full of instruction manuals she’d never read but kept on hand just in case. These piles always start out neat but over time things get cluttered. She’d put a book down on top of a stack of newspaper and then when she wanted to put the next newspaper down she didn’t want to put it on the book so she’d start another stack until she got around to moving the book.
There were passageways through the rooms around the piles of stuff. The house smelled vaguely of cat urine.
Operation Blockbuster
I wish I could change her life, put everything in order.
I could have this place cleaned up in three days. If she would let me I’d throw away the trash, put the clothes in the laundry, organize the rest. I’d make the house livable and get rid of the cat smells. I wish she’d let me clean her house. Every time I go over there I want to clean her house but I hope she doesn’t ask me. I don’t really have to worry, she would never ask. She complains about the mess, how overwhelming it all is, but she couldn’t possibly let anyone touch it but herself.
I don’t want her to ask me for help because I’ve been down that road before.
“Is this trash?”
“No, I want to keep that.”
“What about this?”
“No, keep that too.”
“Is there anything you want to throw away?”
“That pizza box, that can go. Oh, wait. Is there a coupon on it? Make sure you get the coupon.”
The coupon expired a year ago. The crusts inside have petrified. I pick up a piece and knock it against the table. Solid as a rock. They raddle around in the closed box like little soldiers running across a marble floor.
The only way to save Betty is to fix it for her without her permission or assistance. I need to get in there and save her from herself. With a team of hired cleaners I could have that place cleaned up in no time. And she’d be so grateful.
Betty isn’t crazy–at least I don’t think she is–but like, Bill and Brian she gets the stink eye from society because she hasn’t accomplished much. Not enough to be considered eccentric at least. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the people I’ve crossed paths with it’s that our intentions will always be interpreted by our productivity.
We live in a world were productivity is the social differentiator and quirkiness is tolerated only inasmuch as it doesn’t interfere with aggregate output.
[Photo by Richard Elzey]
