The Crazy Meter
I just wanted a hot dog. A chili dog to be exact. Innocent enough, right?
After dropping off my daughter to her Junior High School prom, I found myself around the corner from the original Nathan’s in Coney Island, Brooklyn. So naturally I had to stop there. Anything else would be tantamount to sacrilege. I promised myself that I’d only get something if the line wasn’t ridiculous. We pull up and it was practically empty.
It was meant to be.
So I’m waiting on the relatively short line with my nephew in tow and I hear a steady beeping. I immediately recognize it as my Crazy Radar, or CrayDar, that’s set off when a crazy person (hereafter referred to as a “Crazy”) is within 10 meters. It’s dude ahead of me in the line.
Now, it had nothing to do with the fact that he had only one strand of hair "styled" in a comb-over"; didn’t matter so much that he was wearing open toe Birkenstock sandals showcasing yellow toenails practically scraping the ground; wasn’t even because of his Capri-like army fatigue pants topped off with a Hawaiian shirt so small and tight it could be mistaken for his daughter's midriff. Nothing to do with any of those things, per se.
He just reeked crazy.
So after attempting to order something off the menu - like Beef Wellington or something equally absurd - does he just wait for his food in silence? No. Crazy doesn't do that.
“They profiled Nathan’s on Food Network yesterday so I just had to get here tonight,” says prospective Crazy Person, attempting to make conversation. It started off sanely enough, you know, something to reel you in to question if your CrayDar might have been set off accidentally.
The Golden Rule with how to treat a Crazy is the same when dealing with a rabietic dog: Don’t make eye contact.
For a millisecond I break the rule and sure enough Crazy launches into some absurd, unrelated, irrelevant - “how the hell did we get here?” - tirade about his Battleship being sunk and the price of pomegranates in Sheepshead Bay.
Rule #2: Don’t ever answer back.
So now it’s clear what I’m up against so I just totally ignore him, cross my arms and start tapping my forefinger against my pursed lips and stare at the wall menu as if in deep contemplation.
Should I get the hot dog…or…the…hot…dog…?
It’s working - as the How to Deal with a Crazy manual implies it would - dude gets his order and is about to leave when I hear my nephew offer “I love pomegranate juice!” thereby encouraging the Crazy.
“I guess you don’t have one of these,” I say to my nephew motioning to my internal CrayDar as we’re getting back into the car. “You can’t buy one. You kinda like, just have to have one. It’s hard to explain. Either you have one or you don’t.”
I think you have to be born with one.
My daughter has it, the older one. The younger one might be a Crazy herself but that’s the topic of another conversation.
When my elder daughter was about 4, she’d point out peculiarities in people.
“Daddy, that man is talking to himself.”
“Of course he is, sweetheart,” I’d say, “he’s a crazy person.”
I know Crazy; been around it all my life. When I was a kid, there was local guy named Marty that was a known Crazy.
A Crazy so crazy other Crazies called him crazy, Marty was known to shout out at unsuspecting passersby “You don’t tell me what to do!”
When his second floor apartment caught fire, Marty went out to his window ledge in an apparent attempt to jump to safety - nothing wrong with that. The problem was he used the window ledge as leverage to jump upward, making his head parallel to the third floor, thereby adding an extra 10 feet to the drop. So then a 20 foot leap turned into a 30 foot plunge.
“Of course he did,” I said to myself as Marty plummeted to the ground breaking both ankles.
While I may have a successful CrayDar, I’m also a very potent magnet, as well.
A Crazy person on the train will shimmy their way through a crowded, rush-hour subway car to find me and ask me some insane question; a Crazy on a packed sidewalk in London will stop only me and ask me for the time - even as we stand in front of Big Ben.
I’m not even safe in the hospital.
During my only ever hospital stay, I’m IV’d up and enjoying that I at least had my own room. That is until the third night. At about 2AM they wheel him into the room. He’s a young guy, late 20s probably and he’s hunched down low in the wheelchair reminding me of when Tupac got shot and still showed up to his trial a couple days later, albeit wheelchair bound.
Anyway, so he gets to his bed and belying the pathetic figure he was less than a second ago, he suddenly leaps out of the wheelchair and dives into his bed. Then he just lays there in a fetal position and starts moaning until the nurse puts the covers over him and draws the curtain closed between us.
“OK. Borderline batty,” I say to myself as the nurse leaves the room shaking her head.
About an hour and a half later, I’m awakened by CrayDar and look up to find Crazy standing over me.
“Did I wake you?” he asks holding two 8x11 frames. I look at my watch and it’s 3:30am.
“What can I do for you, Crazy?” I ask politely.
“I want to show you my Degrees,” he says.
I wasn’t the least bit angry or upset. Nor was I surprised or taken aback that a total stranger would want to show me his Degrees in a dark hospital room past 3 in the morning. Of course he’d do that. Anything less would be out of character for a Crazy.
The next day, he’s visited by a beautiful woman. This girl was breathtaking. I assumed it was his cousin or some relative until she grabbed his face and kissed him long and hard. Then he gave me this “I bet you want to know how I pulled this one off” grin while slowly closing the curtain, not breaking eye contact with me until the curtain was fully drawn.
And I did want to know.
So I asked him.
“I was suing someone for stealing this patent I created for this video game and needed a lawyer to represent me,” he explained. “I contacted her firm, she represented my case and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Of course he pulled that bad, successful chick.
One thing about Crazy people - they have absolutely no fear of failure. Other guys would see this beautiful and seemingly successful woman and be paralyzed with fear to approach her. But Mr. Crazy… he just comes by and probably starts in on the middle of some far-fetched bizarro conversation, she thinks he’s funny, he invites her to a comic book convention or something and the rest, as they say, is history. And she’s about to be history too, I assumed. She was probably vulnerable at the time. Crazy charmed her, she came to visit him out of a false sense of duty, but soon she’ll tire of all his absurdity and be done with him.
“So how long have you guys been together?” I ask my new crazy friend.
“Me and my fiancé? Hmmm…about…”
Of course she’s gonna marry him, I think to myself.
Of course!
After dropping off my daughter to her Junior High School prom, I found myself around the corner from the original Nathan’s in Coney Island, Brooklyn. So naturally I had to stop there. Anything else would be tantamount to sacrilege. I promised myself that I’d only get something if the line wasn’t ridiculous. We pull up and it was practically empty.
It was meant to be.
So I’m waiting on the relatively short line with my nephew in tow and I hear a steady beeping. I immediately recognize it as my Crazy Radar, or CrayDar, that’s set off when a crazy person (hereafter referred to as a “Crazy”) is within 10 meters. It’s dude ahead of me in the line.
Now, it had nothing to do with the fact that he had only one strand of hair "styled" in a comb-over"; didn’t matter so much that he was wearing open toe Birkenstock sandals showcasing yellow toenails practically scraping the ground; wasn’t even because of his Capri-like army fatigue pants topped off with a Hawaiian shirt so small and tight it could be mistaken for his daughter's midriff. Nothing to do with any of those things, per se.
He just reeked crazy.
So after attempting to order something off the menu - like Beef Wellington or something equally absurd - does he just wait for his food in silence? No. Crazy doesn't do that.
“They profiled Nathan’s on Food Network yesterday so I just had to get here tonight,” says prospective Crazy Person, attempting to make conversation. It started off sanely enough, you know, something to reel you in to question if your CrayDar might have been set off accidentally.
The Golden Rule with how to treat a Crazy is the same when dealing with a rabietic dog: Don’t make eye contact.
For a millisecond I break the rule and sure enough Crazy launches into some absurd, unrelated, irrelevant - “how the hell did we get here?” - tirade about his Battleship being sunk and the price of pomegranates in Sheepshead Bay.
Rule #2: Don’t ever answer back.
So now it’s clear what I’m up against so I just totally ignore him, cross my arms and start tapping my forefinger against my pursed lips and stare at the wall menu as if in deep contemplation.
Should I get the hot dog…or…the…hot…dog…?
It’s working - as the How to Deal with a Crazy manual implies it would - dude gets his order and is about to leave when I hear my nephew offer “I love pomegranate juice!” thereby encouraging the Crazy.
“I guess you don’t have one of these,” I say to my nephew motioning to my internal CrayDar as we’re getting back into the car. “You can’t buy one. You kinda like, just have to have one. It’s hard to explain. Either you have one or you don’t.”
I think you have to be born with one.
My daughter has it, the older one. The younger one might be a Crazy herself but that’s the topic of another conversation.
When my elder daughter was about 4, she’d point out peculiarities in people.
“Daddy, that man is talking to himself.”
“Of course he is, sweetheart,” I’d say, “he’s a crazy person.”
I know Crazy; been around it all my life. When I was a kid, there was local guy named Marty that was a known Crazy.
A Crazy so crazy other Crazies called him crazy, Marty was known to shout out at unsuspecting passersby “You don’t tell me what to do!”
When his second floor apartment caught fire, Marty went out to his window ledge in an apparent attempt to jump to safety - nothing wrong with that. The problem was he used the window ledge as leverage to jump upward, making his head parallel to the third floor, thereby adding an extra 10 feet to the drop. So then a 20 foot leap turned into a 30 foot plunge.
“Of course he did,” I said to myself as Marty plummeted to the ground breaking both ankles.
While I may have a successful CrayDar, I’m also a very potent magnet, as well.
A Crazy person on the train will shimmy their way through a crowded, rush-hour subway car to find me and ask me some insane question; a Crazy on a packed sidewalk in London will stop only me and ask me for the time - even as we stand in front of Big Ben.
I’m not even safe in the hospital.
During my only ever hospital stay, I’m IV’d up and enjoying that I at least had my own room. That is until the third night. At about 2AM they wheel him into the room. He’s a young guy, late 20s probably and he’s hunched down low in the wheelchair reminding me of when Tupac got shot and still showed up to his trial a couple days later, albeit wheelchair bound.
Anyway, so he gets to his bed and belying the pathetic figure he was less than a second ago, he suddenly leaps out of the wheelchair and dives into his bed. Then he just lays there in a fetal position and starts moaning until the nurse puts the covers over him and draws the curtain closed between us.
“OK. Borderline batty,” I say to myself as the nurse leaves the room shaking her head.
About an hour and a half later, I’m awakened by CrayDar and look up to find Crazy standing over me.
“Did I wake you?” he asks holding two 8x11 frames. I look at my watch and it’s 3:30am.
“What can I do for you, Crazy?” I ask politely.
“I want to show you my Degrees,” he says.
I wasn’t the least bit angry or upset. Nor was I surprised or taken aback that a total stranger would want to show me his Degrees in a dark hospital room past 3 in the morning. Of course he’d do that. Anything less would be out of character for a Crazy.
The next day, he’s visited by a beautiful woman. This girl was breathtaking. I assumed it was his cousin or some relative until she grabbed his face and kissed him long and hard. Then he gave me this “I bet you want to know how I pulled this one off” grin while slowly closing the curtain, not breaking eye contact with me until the curtain was fully drawn.
And I did want to know.
So I asked him.
“I was suing someone for stealing this patent I created for this video game and needed a lawyer to represent me,” he explained. “I contacted her firm, she represented my case and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Of course he pulled that bad, successful chick.
One thing about Crazy people - they have absolutely no fear of failure. Other guys would see this beautiful and seemingly successful woman and be paralyzed with fear to approach her. But Mr. Crazy… he just comes by and probably starts in on the middle of some far-fetched bizarro conversation, she thinks he’s funny, he invites her to a comic book convention or something and the rest, as they say, is history. And she’s about to be history too, I assumed. She was probably vulnerable at the time. Crazy charmed her, she came to visit him out of a false sense of duty, but soon she’ll tire of all his absurdity and be done with him.
“So how long have you guys been together?” I ask my new crazy friend.
“Me and my fiancé? Hmmm…about…”
Of course she’s gonna marry him, I think to myself.
Of course!
posted by mrpunchcar @ 12:36 AM
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