When I first got to San Francisco, one could often ascertain who the unbalanced people were. Their clothes were often in tatters, and they spoke aloud to themselves.
Now, when I walk up Market street from the ferry building to the civic center in the morning, I see all kinds of people talking to themselves. There are the street people, still, although statistically there are fewer homeless now than there were in the past.
But I also see better-dressed, comparatively sane looking people out walking by themselves and inanely jabbering away like jaybirds.
If you look closer, you can see that they have little devices stuck to their ears like some bizarre new piercing, some high-tech bauble.
Such as the following young woman in a loud voice, ahead of me on the sidewalk whose half of a dialog went: “So then he goes, I’m a safe driver, and I’m like, you’ve rolled four cars, and he’s like, but that was a different situation!” She stepped into traffic without looking as she said, “and then he’s all, if there’s no trust then I’m leaving; can you believe it!… ”
She got honked at.
I take it as a sort of koyanisqaatsi societal moment, and proof that our lives are wobbling further out of balance. It is no longer so easy to tell the nutty folks from the rest.
Okay, I suppose cell phones have their place, like in emergency situations. But I do kind of miss the days when it was easier to diagnose the sane from the screw loose.
The lunatics are running the asylum, apparently.
Sometimes I’ve felt inclined to observe that the distance between a sane mine and one that’s jumped its tracks isn’t the chasm we like to think.
It’s less than a centimeter: The space of a synapse. The duration of a stroke or the momentary lifting of the veil that betrays all human endeavor as ants busily swarming on a small mound of earth.
Great comment, Esme, I am so with you on that. And not only is it very close, but it’s shades of gray, and sometimes folks vacillate back and forth, across the borders …
It really unsettles me that people try to fill the little scraps of in between we still have to think with the same crap that happens everywhere else.
I love walking from one place to another, and I don’t want it to be another place for doing business and chatting nonsense.
Well…maybe sometimes, but only with people I can see. Of course, if I could see them, was talking to them, but nobody else could, then I’d be back in the crazy category.
Still….I’d rather be crazy than be someone else, my time devoted to things not me, all my time, my every moment.
I’m with Esme, it’s a fine line. And I’m still not certain that most of us are on the right side of it.
Or even if there is a right side.
Alaby!
I think that puts it perfectly. Hadn’t thought of it in those words before, but you’re right.