Showing posts with label insane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label insane. Show all posts

Monday, September 13, 2010

Insanity and Underpants

So there we were, it was a dark and stormy night. Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Actually it was light and sunny and we were doing laundry at a truck stop but that’s not the point.

The point is that there are some seriously crazy people in the world. We spent an hour with their leader in the laundry room.

We meet lots of truckers that say crazy things or talk just to hear themselves talk. These guys will just walk into a room and start talking to no one in particular, fishing for conversation.

Well, conversation is the wrong word, what they are looking for really is a set of ears with feet. These guys have been in the truck too long alone and are desperate for human contact.

The fella doing his laundry at the same time we were, he was more than just lonely, he was stone cold crazy.

It all began innocently enough.

He asked if we knew today was the anniversary of Sept. 11.

I said, "Uh, today is the 12th."  He looked blank for a moment.

Then came the story.*

See what happened was, that he, CrazyMan, used to live in Houston. He found out about a bad cop down there who liked to play with people’s bones. Did it all the time. CrazyMan saw him bash in a man’s skull and play with the pieces and when he tried to tell the authorities about it they blew him off. Word got out to the bad cop so he tried to set CrazyMan up on fake rape charges. See, CrazyMan lived in Washington DC during Watergate and his dad started the National Organization of Women as a fraternal order so they could buy government bonds and shelter the money. He went into a Catholic church there and the crucifix was upside down, so he knew it was a satanic cult because it happened back in Houston when he was nine. In fact, when he was nine he delivered newspapers to George Bush Jr and bought pot from him, are you following this so far? He asked us sincerely if we could follow along.  Himself, ever the gentlemen said "a little, there’s so many details." I said, "Dude, seriously, you have got to be kidding."

No. In fact he was not.

He recapped the story for us, so we could better follow along.

See, he bought pot from George Bush when he was nine and then Bush became governor and CrazyMan’s dad founded NOW (National Organization for Women) and satan worshipers were everywhere and he found out that George Bush and Bill Clinton were second step cousins and that right there is fratricide but only he and his family knew it.

Well then, along comes this bad cop who tried to set him up on a rape charge but it turns out the woman was a hermaphrodite and had a penis. So see he couldn’t have raped her.

Well this was in 1998 and he knew that the World Trade Centers were going to be bombed by the fraternal order of the National Organization of Women and all the bad cops that were involved and the CIA and he wrote 5,000 letters to every police department in NYC but no one would listen.

The FBI opened a file on him and told him to leave it alone, quit stirring things up. His step mother worked for the phone company and had inside information on the CIA trying to take over the phones so they could listen in and buy government bonds and blow up the World Trade Center but no one would listen. He did everything he could to prevent it from happening, he said, his conscience was clear.

At some point I said if all that was true, why hasn’t the CIA just killed him to keep him quiet. He looked surprised, like he hadn’t thought about that, then he shook his head sadly and said they usually just try to get  you to kill yourself.

Up until this point I thought he was just a nutty driver trying to get a rise out of people by telling stories. But CrazyMan believed what he was saying. He kept coming back to the hermaphrodite and fake rape charge and equating it with Sept. 11. See it’s all because she had a penis.

I couldn’t wait to be done with the laundry.

He talked the whole time. See, all that because she had a penis. Sept.11 never had to happen.

It was getting creepy.

Have you ever had to fold your underpants in front of a crazy person? It’s quite unsettling.

Trust me.

*I wrote everything down the moment I got back in the truck, but this is only a tiny bit of it. I kid you not.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


I just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

I'm going to say right off the bat that 2/3 of this book was really hard to read and more than a little over my head.What is Quality? Aristotle versus Plato. Romantic viewpoint in philosophy versus Classic. Chautauquas whatever they are. Thinking so deeply the author went insane. ( I do a lot of thinking but it's mostly about food) But besides having the coolest title ever, it was a good read.

A man and his 11 year old son are on a motorcycle trip, along with another couple, from Minnesota to California. The narrator is the dad and he gives little lectures to the reader in between the story of the road trip. These lectures are pretty wordy and academic but thought provoking.

The biggest thing I got out of the book was his idea that working with your hands, fixing things, taking things apart and figuring out how they work, making things work again is an art. In the same way a sculptor or painter creates so does a mechanic. There's a part in the book where he says something like, watch the face of a beginner or an unskilled mechanic (plumber, electrician, etc) and compare that with the craftsman. The unskilled follows a single line of pursuit, step 1, step 2 not able to see the big picture or wholeness of the project.The craftsman is absorbed in what he's doing making decisions as he goes because he is one with the machine. He knows it, can see what the relation is of all the pieces and what the outcome of each step will be. I'm a little biased in this area because I have the good fortune to be married to a craftsman of mechanics. He would roll his eyes if I said that but it's true. He understands how things work in a way that I just don't get. We all know people like that, they can take a thing apart, figure it out, fix it and put it back together. Not because they learned it, they way you learn multiplication or grammar but because they know it. They do have to learn of course but this comes from a different place than just rote memorization. I think this kind of skill deserves respect.

I have always been in awe of people who have this natural ability fix things things. It's a combination of curiousness and confidence. They are curious about how things work and confident in their ability take it apart and put it back together. I don't think we give enough weight to being skilled this way. College is the big dream and it has it's place but it's not for everyone. I don't know how it is everywhere, but when I was in high school the shop classes were not something to be proud of. The burnouts and losers took shop. You were either on the path to college or you were nothing. It shouldn't be that way. The world needs mechanics, plumbers, electricians, welders, builders every bit as doctors, teachers and (yuck) lawyers. Equally.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of those books that aren't that much fun at the time but you feel better having finished it. It will make you think and that's a good thing, even if it's not about food.

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind."