I have met a few crazy people in Seattle. Some are illusions of course. You can always spot the people who are only representations of human beings. I keep an eye out for these types. I assume that some of them are angels, and perhaps some are extraterrestrials here to scout us out. And then there are the human beings who really are human beings but their brains are billions of light years away in another dimension. I know a guy like that. He told me the other day that he was standing at a bus stop in the rain and the nephew of Jimmy Hendrix gave him a pure silver serving spoon. The nephew said Hendrix had not meant to kill himself. So, I suppose that is why the nephew feels it is necessary now to go around Seattle with a wood case and give random silverware to strangers. It makes so much sense. I asked my crazy friend how he was certain it was Hendrix's nephew, and he said he knew because it is a small community, and all the musicians know one another. He said he should know because he was a music producer. I asked him what studios he'd worked in or what musicians he had produced and he got irate and stormed away, saying that was all in the past, and besides, none of that mattered anymore. He also claims to be a film producer but he's not produced any films. He is trying to get me to edit a screenplay from a guy I've never met and if I ask him who is this guy and how my crazy friend knows him, he walks off and spews a litany of swearwords. He says there are little helpers sent from God and if I knew anything I'd know that. I guess I just fell off the turnip wagon; I didn't know God was in the business of using crazy people to witness to strangers with silver spoons. Who knew?
I have wondered why the universe delivers crazy people to me. It is as if I have an invisible neon sign above my head that only crazy people can see. The sign, in glowing blue letters, reads: Nut-jobs Welcome.
I used to jest that I was God's jester. I complained I hadn't even applied for the job; God decided that I was going to amuse the universe at large and so he made me a writer who writes whatever comes into my head, like a writing machine (in the parlance of Kurt Vonnegut).
One of things I wrote about today had to do with the nature of God. Most thinking people have done a fair amount of serious thinking about God. And because I am into profundity, today I wrote about the probable philosophy of lepers. In this imaginary leper colony, I described the lepers, who through no fault of their own, had contracted this horrible disfiguring disease. The lepers, seeing the God of the world outside the leper colony had forsaken them, had made up their own version of God. Their God was also a leper and losing his limbs. The leper God had no limbs at all and was mostly spirit, except for a large gap in his front teeth. The gap was actually a black hole, and when the lepers died they would be sucked into the black hole to reach Leper Heaven.
I came up with this interesting take on understanding God from a piece of paper I found under a table in the Portland airport a couple of days before Christmas. The paper was neatly folded, so I unfolded it and found a crude concentric line drawing, in blue pen, that was either done by a six-year-old or by an elderly brilliant physicist. From what I could discern, the drawing indicated that the world, as we know it, is made up of orbiting objects around a black hole. The hole is to be worshipped. Thus the leper colonies' religious slogan must naturally be, "Life Sucks!"
There are black holes everywhere in this economy. There is a phrase we often hear, "Whatever floats your boat." At the VA hospital in Seattle, there are a lot of leaky boats that have been scuttled. They will probably never float again. These veterans row into the hospital from all over the area. They know they are doomed to sink, and that their crazy ideas about life have been formed by years of homeless living, and drug and alcohol abuse. They cannot do anything about their plight. They are also being used by God for the amusement of the universe. Out there they are laughing at us, we just can't hear them.
While I was waiting my turn at the hospital, an older man in a dark trench coat asked me how he might get out of the building, and get to his car. His glassy eyed stare reminded me of my father's Alzheimer's. I told the man I thought the way out was to go up one floor, and if he followed me I would help him get out of the building. We stepped into an elevator half filled with people. The elevator went down one floor before it went up. The man got out before I could stop him. "Bon voyage!" I said as he slipped away. Then I arrived in a room where all the crazy people were. I overheard a Vietnam veteran man named Wild Bill tell a thin older black man that he felt the country would be right as rain if doing random acts of kindness earned the doer a tax write-off. He had the black man stand and he gave the man a back rub. "There!" he said, "now if everyone did that to one another, we'd all be better off!" The feeble looking black man smiled and agreed. I am guessing the black man was God in disguise. God gets a lot of back rubs from unsuspecting masseuses.
It is hard to argue with a crazy person. I do not recommend it. I think we all could use a few more back rubs. I would vote for any politician who ran on a platform based on random acts of kindness and back rubs. Or, simply on a silver spoon giveaway methodology.
But I'm crazy that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment