Am I a Lunatic Magnet?

           Seriously, I seem to have more crazy people in my life than anyone I know. Here’s my latest encounter.

          I am driving along and I see what looks like the most gorgeous lawn I’ve ever seen. As a gardening nut, I have to stop and tell the owner this. (See? Most of my encounters begin with absolutely kind intentions).

          No owner at home. So a week later I happen to be in the same area again, and this time the owner is in his driveway. I stop and he is as friendly as can be. He tells me it’s an artificial turf lawn. No way!  Yes way!  It’s the most realistic one I’ve ever seen.

          We chat about world events and the guy seems like a genius. Then he tells me he bought his house with bitcoin earnings. (I make a plan to go home and invest in bitcoins). Then he points out some boulders at the front of his property and wonders what they’re made of.

          Aha! I can now tell him that one of our sons is a professional geologist, and I can bring him by to identify them (they look like granite, but what do I know?) and he says great.

          I do this. I bring St. Bob AND Richie and the three of us pay a visit to this nice gentleman. Richie crouches down to examine the stones and explains the rock composition (yep, granite) and then the guy says, “Sometimes they oscillate.”  Uh-oh.  Richie doesn’t even look up, and just kindly says, “Well, we’ve had some earthquakes.” Not true, but it helps the guy save face.

          Just before leaving I notice little red blood spots seeping through the guy’s shirt, as if he’s been poking himself with a nail or something. Oh, dear.

          We get in the car and I say, “Honestly—he seemed really smart and all I wanted to do was tell him how nice his lawn looked.”

          “Which is exactly how half the Dateline episodes begin,” Richie says.

          And then we remember the cab driver in Italy, and a few other examples of people I have befriended who then turned out to be, let’s say, off their medication.

          But you’ve gotta admit, oscillating rocks would be pretty cool.   

          Have you subscribed to my Youtube Mom videos, yet? You’ll get fantastic life hacks once every two weeks—and I only need 50 more subscribers to hit the 10K mark!

A Visit to the Twilight Zone

                Have you ever had one of those days when everything goes wacko?  Okay, I suspect this happens to me more often than it does to regular people (people who do not have a craziness magnet implanted in them somehow).

                But here are three things that happened last week while running errands with St. Bob.  First, I had to return some things to Home Goods. I walked in, saw the line for the cashiers, and immediately crashed into a display of wind chimes on the end cap. BIG, NOISY wind chimes.  CLANG, BANG, BRRRANg!

          Granted, I do not have excellent hand-to-eye coordination (any other body parts can be substituted for these two), but why couldn’t it have been a stack of fluffy towels?  And, of course, everyone stared at the woman who can’t even navigate a check-out line.

          Then we decided to grab lunch. Bob ordered for us while I checked out the gift shop. I wasn’t that hungry, so I told him to just order a side of mashed potatoes for me. Those are always dependable, right?  But the elderly waitress said, “Oh, did she have dental work? I always have mashed potatoes when I’ve had dental work.”  Seriously?  You would ask this of a stranger?

          Then, as we were paying our tab and leaving, Bob noticed a man coming out of the restroom who seemed confused. He was knocking papers off a table. Bob went back as Mr. Good Deed of the Day, and asked if he could help.  The guy said, “No—leave me alone! Get away from me!”  Well, you try to be nice, right?

          Maybe we should just stay home and wait for this Twilight Zone day to be over.  You can do the same—read one of my books or watch one of my Youtube videos. They’re all right here, folks.

Call Me Crazy

          I think we’re all crazy.  I mean, a little bit.  For example, I have several friends who are afraid of irrational things, all of which can be traced to their childhoods. Here are just two:

          One of my friends is scared of eggs, because her big brother told her these are actually forms of chicken poop.

          Another one is scared of snakes to the point that she can’t even see a photo of one without getting hysterical (again, older brothers may be thanked for this neurosis). Here's a fake one, in case she's reading this:

          One is scared to sleep with her ears uncovered lest something creepy crawl into them (scary movies seen at a tender age are the culprit here).

          I am personally scared of cherry tomatoes.  Not seeing them or growing them, but eating them. I am convinced they will explode in my mouth and shoot tomato juice down my windpipe and choke me.  Even worse, this fear is confirmed by several people who’ve said, “I’ve had that happen!” This does not argue in favor of forsaking my phobia.

          Add to this every newly-labeled condition that comes down the windpipe, I mean pike. Someone who’s simply tidy thinks she has OCD.  Someone who tends to worry now describes herself as having Anxiety Disorder. People with messy houses think they’re Hoarders.  And a person who rightfully shouldn’t trust a crook now wonders if they have Trust Issues.

          I am first to agree that the whole world could benefit from therapy, but I think we need to stop collecting alphabetical letters that excuse our nutty behavior.  Let’s just agree that we’re all bent in some way—or several ways-- and admire the artwork of it all.  See? Doesn’t that take a load off your mind?

          Have you read Sisters in the Mix yet?  It’s about two crazy sisters who can’t stand one another. Find that comedy novel and more, right here.

Where are All the Crazy People?

          When I was a little kid my mom would take me shopping in a big department store downtown.  I looked forward to eating lunch in their ritzy restaurant, inhaling deeply as we swept by the perfume counter, and most of all: Seeing the Crazy Lady.  She wore a fur stole regardless of the season, a floppy black hat, and rode the escalators up and down all day, jabbering to herself.  

         For awhile I thought it was an incredible coincidence that she happened to be there every time we were, and then I realized she was probably there every day.  And kudos to the management for letting her do this.  After all, she wasn’t harming anyone, and why not indulge her whims if it made her happy?

          Years ago you’d see folks like this, sitting on park benches, wandering through stores, just being part of our landscape.  For whatever reason they’d lost their grip on reality and were conversing—often in very animated tones—with invisible associates.  I liked the idea that we didn’t hide these people away, but accepted their right to be part of the community, part of our big family.

          Only today you can’t tell who they are.  Everyone seems to be a crazy person.  It’s been approximately 800 degrees outside lately, so last night St. Bob and I went to get an ice cream.  

          And there was an older gentleman shuffling along, his hands in his pockets, muttering, “Yep.  Yep.  Yep.”  Years ago I would have figured him for the hat lady’s brother.  But today, he’s just another guy on his cell phone. 

          In the supermarket last week, another man was scolding someone as he marched along, throwing things in his cart.  “That is not what I told you,” he snapped. “That is not what I said.”  Was he talking to an employee?  A family member?  A space alien zombie of his imagination?

          “Oh, I know, it’s absolutely exhausting,” a woman said into the air as she passed by me at the shopping mall.  Was she musing to herself?  Comforting an invisible friend?  Or on the phone with an actual person?  Snippets of conversation float all around us, and we never know if these are evidence of psychosis or of Verizon’s Friends and Family Plan.

          And I miss the old days.  I miss smiling at the lost individuals to assure them all was well, and I was glad they were there.  Now if I smile at some muttering soul I appear to be eavesdropping or intruding into their Bluetooth conversation.

          Either that, or the entire population has lost its mind, something not entirely out of the realm of possibility.  Yep, yep, yep.

Tell your friends—invisible or real ones—to visit my youtube channel, where I dispense essential life skills three times a week, as the YouTube Mom.  Might even keep you sane, who knows?

          

Passing Up Hawaii

            As luck would have it, and luck always does, I know a lot of crazy people.  I don’t mean crazy as in, “Oh, you should meet Jen—she’s so fun and crazy.”  I mean crazy as in diagnosed with things like “borderline psychosis” and “schizophrenia.”

            I seem to attract them.  (NO COMMENTS FROM YOU MONKEY CHILDREN OF MINE).  I find them in all kinds of places, and sometimes I’m asked to visit them as a church assignment.  And once you have a crazy person in your life, they stay.  It’s one of nature’s laws, I think.  But I’m not complaining; I rather enjoy them.  Mentally ill people are often smarter than average and they lack the annoying pretenses you have to wade through with regular people. They tell you bluntly how they feel, they’re often quite insightful, and they’re almost always entertaining.  They don’t always understand social conventions which, I believe, is why Caller ID was invented.  And, okay, yes, they are scary from time to time, but so is eating at Taco Bell, and yet we do it.

            I have a senior citizen friend I’ll call Ruby, simply because I know no other Ruby’s.  (Rubies?)  Whatever.  She is married to an equally disturbed man I’ll call Rocky, again because I know no Rocky’s. (Rockies?)  Thankfully these people come in singular, rather than plural form.

            Rocky’s story is much worse than the paranoid, multiple-personality disordered Ruby.  He’s a registered sex offender, an alcoholic, a drunk driver, and a parolee who keeps going back to prison.  He speaks LOUDLY about these things when you take the two of them to the DMV for an I.D., since Rocky is not allowed to drive.  He then causes crowds to back away, and hives to appear on your neck.

            At any rate, Rocky recently came into a large inheritance and did what any crazy man would do, thus confirming a diagnosis none of us were questioning in the first place.  Did he pay off his bills?  Nope.  Did he invest it wisely?  Nope.  He gambled away a huge hunk of it and then spent the rest on a lavish trip to Hawaii.  And, of course, he wanted Ruby to come along.

            Ruby said no.  You can usually count on crazy people to do the opposite of what you expect.  Now, Ruby has had a hard life and deserves some R & R in my opinion, so I asked her why on earth she wasn’t taking advantage of the only chance she has ever had, to go to Hawaii.

            “Well,” she explained, “every time I’ve ever gone anywhere with Rocky, he leaves me and goes off on his own.”  Excuse me?  A crazy man takes you to Hawaii and then vanishes?  Is this not the very definition of a win-win situation?  You couldn’t get the world’s best travel agent to book you a deal like that.  In fact, it’s reason enough to do the hula whether you’re in Hawaii or not.

            I tried to get her to see the bonanza right within her grasp, but she shook her head.  “You think this is a blessing in disguise,” she said. 

“No,” I told her.  “There is no disguise here whatsoever.  The entire thing is a blessing inside and out.  You go to Hawaii and then whammo—you can snorkel, enjoy a luau, you-name-it, all without Rocky tagging along.  How could it possibly get better than that?”  I didn’t say it, but I was imagining him gloriously lost for days.

But Ruby would not budge.  She told Rocky to go by himself and so he did.  When I took Ruby to her next psychiatrist appointment, the receptionist asked her how she was feeling and Ruby explained that she felt fine, now that she had decided not to go to Hawaii.

And that, my friends, is precisely how you know that someone needs their head examined. 

Don't be crazy-- subscribe to Joniopolis in the little email box on the right.  Then you can have messages like this one pop into your inbox several times a week.  Granted, it's not as exciting as tickets to Hawaii, but I'm working on it.  (And if you are going there already, grab one of my 3 new novels to read on the beach-- check out Kindle and Createspace.com!)