Crazy or just growing older?

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, April 29, 2008

In a burst of good intentions, I have embarked on a mission to determine whether I am going crazy or just growing old, and a little goofy. It isn’t clear whether there is any consolation to be found in coming to either conclusion. Neither is it clear that there is any advantage or disadvantage to knowing you’re goofy because you’re crazy, or goofy because the years are adding up and your brain cells aren’t.

Really, society expects a little goofiness from its aging population, so as if the whole problem isn’t already complicated enough, now one has to sort through a sliding scale of goofiness, meaning—how goofy are you; how much will they put up with.

One thing must be made clear: In no way here am I making light of all this. You’ve got your problems; I’ve got mine. These are mine we’re talking about. You have to figure out yours on your own. At this point, everything that exists seems to exist in a teeter-totter balance of some kind or other, with humans having advanced to such a high point in civilizing themselves that we no longer worry about what to eat so much. That leaves time for introspection.

No one is really certain that all that leisure time spent scrutinizing ones inner motivations and past experiences has any real advantage over chasing away lions and tigers and discovering fire. Uncertainty is likely the only characteristic that has truly survived humanity’s progression to where we now are.

There are, if you remember, five categories of symptoms that describe whether or not one is crazy. Well, insane is the real word, but there are others which seem less critical, word-wise: Goofy, loony, etc. For some reason, I like those better.

The categories are: Voices, like, there’s a narrator talking to you, telling you what’s going on around you. I’d like to know if it’s better or worse if this voice just talks to you or if it matters that it asks you questions. How about if you answer? Does that place you closer to batcrap crazy, or further away? How about if you ask the voice questions? One question I’ve always wanted someone else to answer for me is that all-time puzzler: Paper or plastic? I do so want to know the correct answer to that. Questions like that can drive you crazy.

Another category is disorganized behavior, like, undressing to go to bed in the Super Value grocery store. (A variation of this, although only barely, is guys going around with their zipper down, which, although embarrassing to the viewer, may actually be a solution to a ventilation problem in the lower body parts during a summer heat wave.) “I’m not crazy. I’m letting the breeze in.”

Something else: A reader let me know that the female equivalent of the zipper down is a broken or fallen bra strap, which, in her words, “lets one of the girls sag.”

She seemed quite convinced that women should get equal time on this subcategory of possible goofiness. I’ve never seen a sagging “girl.” Societal standards of modesty force me to say that I have in fact never oogled womens’ bosoms, and you cannot prove that I have. Maybe you have, but not I. There. Equal rules of fair play have been applied, and that gender which feels qualified to enter this particular category of craziness is welcome. Welcome, “girls.”

Hallucination is the third category. One might guess that the main difference between hearing voices and hallucinations is that now one advances from radio to movies. I haven’t had a real good out-and-out hallucination for a long time, but isn’t it kind of difficult to tell dreams from hallucinations? For example, I remember eating a big piece of watermelon before going to bed once, and dreaming that I was peeing.

Well, call me crazy, then, I guess, because reality isn’t all that hard to determine at a time like that. Or just after, perhaps. Perhaps as old age gets a firmer grip on me, I’ll have to start wearing dark pants, and interpreting all this as raging paranoia. Enough. On to the last category.

The last category is affective flattening, which is a nice way of saying that someone is not reacting to circumstances quite normally. You’re not happy when you should be; you’re not sad when you should be, and so on.

If I don’t figure out the paper or plastic thing pretty quickly, one of these days a check-out clerk at the grocery store will ask me that, and look up to see me frozen into a waxy coma, a condition into which I will have retreated after a lifetime of indecision about which one is best.

Paper or plastic. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.