There is something to crazy people.
Two stories, from two places, on this theme:
1. Costa Rica
I met a guy in a hostel who seemed crazy. He saw cosmic meaning in everything, from the arrangement of decorations at the bar, to times of day when the internet cut out.
He took my brother, me and a girl to a secluded beach. While we swam, he found a plastic spoon, a cigarette butt, and a medication wrapper, which he put into a coconut. He lit the coconut on fire and had the girl march into the ocean with it and let it float away.
“It’s just a little pollution, but it’s OK,” he said. “These represent man’s evil: plastic, pharmaceutical medicines, addicting drugs. In the future, we will purge ourselves of them.”
“The biggest lie is that we can’t break the cycle. That we have to keep on making mistakes.”
2. Buffalo, NY
A girl was sitting in a park, talking about how she hates her apartment because it has bugs in it – silverfish, cockroaches, ants, earwigs, the works.
A guy comes up to her and says, “You don’t really hate bugs, you just have probably been conditioned since childhood to say that you do. Bugs are so small, they can’t hurt you. When I see them, I say, ‘Oh, you poor thing, you probably want to go outside.’ And I take it outside.”
The girl walks away.
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We all agree with trite sayings: love nature, love your fellow man. But what happens when these sayings are taken to their extreme?
Extreme compassion, extreme environmentalism, looks a little crazy.
In truth, we’re not living by our stated morals a lot of the time. The world is unjust in a million ways and we numb ourselves to this on a daily basis. When people bring this fact up, it’s a defense mechanism for us conventional folk to label them as crazy in our heads.
In truth, crazy folk sometimes make good points. We should listen to them. They can be like cold water on our faces to wake us up.
It’s kind of like the Joker quote from Batman: You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when everything goes according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying.
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The picture is inspired by the song Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. The world is an eyeball with a yellow optic nerve coming out. This optic nerve might well be a “crazy” person, who is seeing things that other people won’t see.
Or they are a child.
Or an alien with an unbiased mind.
We get biased as we grow up. We don’t see the light a lot of the time. “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through” is the title of a Jeffrey Lewis album. But maybe they haven’t cracked. Maybe it’s just us who have stopped seeing.
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I am working on this — living within my morals. I don’t want to preach, but I have some control over not doing things that bother me just because they are convenient or accepted.
danscreativeoulet 