All about the crazies
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003 - 10:53

"Today's topic: insanity" she wrote while lying on her bed eating a piece of chocolate with roasted almonds in it -- yum, delicious. (Geez that's annoying, that whole "'Blah blah blah' she wrote while..." thing. I mean once was okay, but that's twice now and it's getting out of hand. I hope I don't do it again. I should just erase it but, perversely, I won't.) (Why have I been writing about myself in the third person lately? There must be some crazy psychological explanation for that.)

I've always thought half the world was insane and now I have irrefutable evidence to back up this claim: of the four girls in my room here, two are insane. (This is begging the question of my own sanity, which I, as an unobjective participant, cannot vouch for. My sanity will come into question in a few paragraphs but please, for now, for the sake of nice statistics, pretend I'm one of the sane ones.)

The Japanese girl is insane. She stands on her bed to get dressed. She hangs out with a dirty old man. She always turns off the ceiling fan at night even though it's stiflingly hot. She is extremely loud with her stupid sandals that she can't walk around without clip-clopping whenever she gets up in the middle of the night, which she does entirely too frequently for a sane person. She keeps her clothes folded neatly in stacks on her bed, even when she's in it, and under her bags on the floor she has newspaper spread out. Apparently she has issues with the floor.

The German girl is also insane. She talks twice as much and twice as fast and twice as loud as anyone -- all in a shrill whiny baby voice. Have you ever heard baby talk with a German accent? Her hair is Raunchy Red, says the bottle of hair color in the bathroom. She must be near deaf, too, because when she gets up early in the morning she puts on her headphones and the music is so loud I can hear it perfectly with my head under my pillow. And she sings along, too, loudly.

The Manx girl and I are the only bastions of sanity in the room. (Do you call people from the Isle of Mann Manxes?)

Half the world is insane!

Yesterday, in order to escape from a loud fast heated debate auf deutsch between Crazy Raunchy Red and some stick-wielding German guy about the role of foreigners in German society, I went to a park near here and there was a man sitting on a bench under a tree in the middle of a field with a ghetto blaster loudly blasting the Rolling Stones throughout the ghetto. (On a side note, wouldn't "ghetto blaster" be a better name for a weapon than for a personal music device? I realize this question is a couple decades late.) (Richie, sweating and gasping for breath, ran towards the dark alley, pulled his ghetto blaster from his pants, and pointed it at Jose, shouting "Give me back my personal music device or I'm going to blast you, you motherfucker!") So this guy, by himself, on a bench, the loud Rolling Stones, and he's yelling at the top of his lungs, yelling at the world. He was there when I got there and there when I left a couple hours later, yelling his head off the whole time.

I don't even remember the last time I yelled. That's the thing about adults -- they never yell, and when they do, people think they're insane. Kids yell whenever they want. My sister and I used to have screaming sessions, just standing there screaming at the top of our lungs -- the harmonics of two dueling blood-curdling screams in a small room were very interesting.

Adults never run either, they only walk, and walking takes so long sometimes. Occasionally you see an adult running, stressed out and in a hurry. It's so silly and awkward you wish they'd stop, and they know they look silly and awkward, which makes it even worse. But I think it's just because they're out of practice, and if they did it more they'd get better at it.

Like the guy yelling his head off in the park yesterday... he didn't sound silly or awkward, just insane, probably because he yells a lot. But get some lady in her heels and business suit who can't remember the last time she yelled and make her sit in the middle of a park and yell her head off and she'll probably sound pretty ridiculous.

So after I left the park, after lying among the roses in the sun and wind for an hour or two, I went to the store to replace a box of cereal that was stolen from my locker in the kitchen of this increasingly hostile hostel -- Who steals cereal? And who steals organic cereal? Come on, organic consumers! We need to support each other, not tear each other down, stealing each other's cereal! It was expensive too, and it had a very funny name which I can't remember now. I hope you enjoy it and reap all the healthy benefits from it, you bastards! -- um, oh, I was in the store and then something started hurting on my leg, in my hamstring area. So I scratched it but it kept on hurting. So I was walking trying to rub this burning stinging spot on my leg and then it started doing it on the front of my leg higher up. And then another place, like by my knee, so I became convinced I was under attack by a crazy Australian ant or something, and I was scratching and hitting my leg trying to kill it and moving my pant leg around trying to dislodge the creature.

On a related note, one time when I was little, like 2 or 3 (I didn't have any little sisters yet -- ah, those were the days, the '70s, when it was always sunny), I went somewhere, like a mountain or forest, and I peed on a tree stump (because that's something kids do) and in the truck going home something on my butt started stinging, so I reached into my pants and found an ant who, in his final desperate moments before being crushed under my massive weight, had managed to sink his teeth into one of my firm young buns.

So, okay, I'm in the store under attack by an unknown entity but still determined to buy some cereal when I remembered that I'm in Australia and there are scary unfamiliar things here --I saw an orange and black spider as big as my palm in a huge web right by the sidewalk the other day -- and also I realized that I probably looked a little weird hitting and scratching myself -- so I gave up and went to find a toilet. (They call them toilets here. I'm not being crass, really.) And this bathroom I found was so cool -- the toilet was all stainless steel, and the light was blue. It was awesome.

(Speaking of bathrooms, wow I found the coolest bathroom ever in Sydney on Finger Wharf in Woolloomooloo Bay. The lights above the toilets were pink, and the tile was blue, and the sink was just a big straight slab of black granite sloped back into the wall -- no basins, no drains -- and the faucets just came out of the mirror. This bathroom was so cool, words can't do it justice. I felt like ordering a martini and lounging about at the Wharf -- that bathroom like totally made me more cultured. But it wasn't the best bathroom in the world, no. That honor still goes to the Alpenzoo in Innsbruck. Now that bathroom was spectacular -- self-cleaning seats! Stall doors that squirt air freshener! ... Just some vacation ideas for bathroom connoisseurs.)

Anyway, so after buying some cereal, after the blue bathroom (the world was so yellow when I came back out) (and no I never found my assailant, but I didn't just imagine it because there were bite marks on my leg) I bought a pizza bread thing and a Coke and I sat down on a bench next to the shopping centre to eat but I felt like a bum so I went back to the park to eat in peace (does that make sense?).

The crazy man was still there yelling his head off, and there was another crazy man sitting on the ground near the park entrance rocking back and forth and twitching a little. Then this large crow-like black and white bird flew towards me and started hopping up really close like it wanted to make friends with me, but please, I'm sure, I only make friends with ducks or small polite birds, definitely not crowy birds. So I started shaking my box of Special K at it to make it go away, but it wouldn't, so I kept shaking my cereal at it.

I was sitting in a park madly shaking a box of cereal at a bird.

The bird finally got the hint and left.

Then the crazy guy who'd been sitting by the park entrance walked by and said something and I couldn't understand him -- Australians, you know? You never know what they're going to say, especially the crazy ones -- so he said it again, "Pizza and a Coke?" and I said, "Oh, yup," and he laughed and I laughed. He was nice.

Insanity doesn't preclude niceness.

(That doesn't quite sound right. Niceness, is that a word? Maybe I could say "Being insane doesn't preclude a person from being nice" but that's lame, I want "insanity" and there's got to be a word that means niceness. But whatever.)

So that's about it. Oh, some crazy guy broke into our dorm room the other morning at like 5:30 and tried to make Naomi the Manx (really, is that what you call them?) get into a cab. It was after the police left and we were sitting around laughing at Naomi wanting to go into witness protection that I decided to stay here a little longer than I'd originally planned. And the other day I was at a pool and some crazy Korean guy asked me if he could take my picture. Why, I have no idea. He was crazy.

So things are pretty interesting in Brisbane and I am loath to leave.

(Wow I'm so pretentious. I hate that last clause -- "I am loath to leave" -- I mean alliteration is nice and all but that's just pompous. Arghh.) (Loath, which I thought sure was spelled loathe. Why isn't it?)