# Old Stories - #18



## The Cack (Dec 21, 2011)

*Travelogue #29*
*The Measure of...**
*Did you ever hear someone describe themselves as "crazy" and thought that they were gloating? Crazy people often try not to _out_ themselves, so here's this person, all like "I'm crazy" and shit, and you're just like, man, I don't know ca-ray-zee, but I do know ka-ra-tee, so you best be dealing straight, son? And shit.

Of course, everyone loves someone taking a fall, but victory?

How crazy are you? What is crazy? What are social norms? Those norms that are okay in the street go out the bedroom window, and you find yourself on some drug they said would make you braindead, changing television channels to be intoxicated by the motion and the snatch of words that's come through like a drowning child in the undertow:

"...is Gerald going..."

"...free throw..."

"...bibliography, and now the officers must piece together..."

You're crazy, I'm crazy, believe it. Social norms are just foul attempts to catagorize your most occuring crazies. That, at some job, somewhere in the Midwest, it must be okay to snort up crystal meth in order to get your work finished in a speedy fasion? 

For me, its been ambition as the craziness. "Man, you must be dedicated to drag two instruments across the country," says some stoner in San Luis Obispo when I describe how I spend my days playing music with whoever comes along. I reply, "you should have seen me a month ago, with the musical saw and the kazoo I called the Hepetitus C Machine!" Even calling my kazoo _The Hepetitus C Machine_ seems like trying too hard.

No one laughs, and then I know that they think I'm crazy. And I am. What would you say to someone who felt compelled to bring a sousaphone on Portland's bus system during rush hour? Pregnant mothers shielded their bloated bellies and offspring-to-be, old people curse the prison of being alive, and some person who is crazier laughs in a friendly manner.

"Man, can you play a note on that tuba for me?" he says, hoping to reach the ecstacy of his satiated demands

"I wish I could, but its LOUD," I say, gesturing with my free hand for the sign language symbol for REALLY LOUD. "And its a sousaphone, not a tuba," I say...

But its lost. This is how teachers must feel in front of a class of disinterested morons. No one cares, they just care that you're crazy and that you're another obstacle towards Home. I am crazy. Crazy enough to say "yes". 

This is a bad thing. 
Only the rich have the luxury to be crazy. 
To be poor and crazy, popping lithium and gaining water weight, why, who will love you? You'll blend into the public transportation system, chugging an energy drink out of familiarity (not need), and fart silently. The boy with the sousaphone in the front of the bus is misguided, and you may half-wish to be that uninhibited, but there's bills and other cyclical things to strip your time into a maze of bureacracy. You'll be in queue for hours.

_That_ is crazy, and for that, I ride the rails. 


*Urea and How Are You?
*Mustafa came around the corner from down the main drag in Eugene, OR towards Riff and I. We were playing guitars, and she did not like the sight of Mustafa. His large orange beard melded with his balding hair line, mustache and all. On his chest was a shirt that he apparently had worn for weeks. Oscar the Grouch was peering his head in a grimace across towards the world. Let's not even mention his pants. Actually, let's: brown khakis with oily stains down the front. 

"Hey, can I play with you guys?" he asked, and we reluctantly agreed. I went to reintroduce myself. I had met him the day previous, but we never were fully aquainted with a handshake.

I reached out to him and before I could make a connection to Mustafa, someone shouted.

"Sir, we just witnessed you urinating in public in the alley over there. According to the statutes of Eugene's downtown public area, we are banning you for the day. You're luck it was us and not a police officer because you could have been charged with indecent exposure. You are not to be on the street here for the next 24 hours. Do you got that?"

Mustafa was speechless and stoic. Oscar's grimace became more of a look of disappointment. Mustafa's face looked like a lion against the overcast Pacific Northwest sky, finally excommunicated and poached and ostracized. He grabbed his buckets that served as impromptu drums and walked away. 

The officer looked down at us and said, with condescension, "you're lucky you didn't touch his buckets. He peed on them, too." Mustafa walked off with sunken shoulders and out of sight, northbound on Olive Street. Pity and relief rolled into my bloodstream like some _bourgeois_ transfusion and {Message truncated by excessive shitty ending alert}.


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