To my mind, it is an inalienable right of living in this city: ready and regular access to the antics of crazy people.
I was afraid that my move a little further uptown would limit such access. It has not.
There was the guy, just a couple of weeks ago, that did pirouettes on street corners and spoke to himself. He was unkempt. His gravely voice was also giggly, which indicated a genuine enjoyment of his own ramblings. He seemed to change what he was saying based on who was passing by, and yet none of it made sense. I think at one point he told someone that walked by that their parents would never be proud of them. His stream-of-conciousness style was unwavering. It was more of a river. The River Non-Sequitir, leading to the Sea of Incoherence. Also, he smelled.
He wasn't as great as they guy I ran into on my street, though. He was was walking towards me pushing a green shopping cart overflowing with aluminum cans. This, in a very real sense, is the crazy person's standard. The sound of aluminum cans can sometimes indicate the approach of someone who
may be (not always of course) off-kilter. A sort of crazy-person rattle, or Nut Knell. As it were.
As he came alongside me, he stopped but did not make eye contact. Then, in charmingly colloquial terms, he said that he would never again have intercourse with a Spanish woman. Then he moved on. Edified, I moved on as well.
Another time, I was walking through the park. Looking to my right, in the middle of the street, there was a man listening to a portable radio by himself. And dancing. It's not really that he was dancing... it was the way he was dancing. It was a gleeful, hopping dance--the kind that someone might engage in if they were singing in the rain or had a bluebird on their shoulder. And it was done repetitively, hopping from one foot to another, as if he were the only person on the planet.
It's great to see these people on occasion. To hear them giggle and pontificate, to see them marvel at their own feet or tell stories to fire hydrants. They walk with purpose and they laugh with abandon. They dance for no reason and joke around with the sky.
Which, come to think of it, begs the question:
Who's calling who crazy?The answer is that I am calling them crazy. They can call me crazy on their blogs if they want.
