Having been a 24/7 eighty-four-horsepower fruitcake all my life, I feel a great deal of affinity with my fellow crazies. They’re less insane and more singular, with which I mean that they carry on in a way that is only really applicable to them. It’s like in those movies where the hero is the only one that knows a tide of radioactive zombies are going to storm the town, and he’s running around screaming while the police are chasing him with a straitjacket and half the town’s all OHOHOHO THERE GOES THE CRAZY GUY.
High school is the perfect medium for me to study such crazy, it being such a condensed environment of social conundrums. The kids are clinically sane, but there are those midstream society feels are inadequate (meaning they shouldn’t be touched without some strong antibacterial solution and a pole long enough to cover the distance to the sun). These “inadequacies” don’t need your pity, however, as they feel exactly the same way about their antagonists. In fact, both parties are consumed with a distaste for each other that, when concentrated, is probably enough to kill a rodent. Of course, it’s not really distaste per se, since neither has had more than a ten word conversation with the other (ie “pass me a pencil” “you’ve got something stuck in your braces” “nice weather we’ve been having”), but a hormone-charged compound of amassed reputation and physical appearance that is used to classify each individual according to some highly complicated (and illogical) criterion.
We’ve come to the point where everyone has something to say about anyone (usually negative, as should be obvious), and during what I like to call “my experiments” (meaning conversations, but “experiments” denotes a certain special quality, which I can assure you high school conversations do not possess) I’ve noticed an extreme liking for labeling people as crazy. THAT GIRL IS A CERTIFIED NUTJOB, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Yes, the all-caps are quite necessary. Adolescents speak in permanent comic sans capslock.
These little comments make me wonder whether or not we can talk as if people are crazy if they don’t fit our model of reality. Surely reality is not singular? Being a fruitcake, I know my version of reality is pretty bizarre according to a general standard. I find it funny that people would try to shooooooooosh everything into one kind of being, which is what reality is.
ALSO: PLAGUE OF MUTANT UNDEAD TOMORROW, NOON, LET’S EMIGRATE TO ALASKA!
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