Who is crazy?

i forgot to say.. a lot of the craziness I observe seems to happen on a mass cultural level rather than in individuals I meet.. as though it's hard wired into cultural values themselves.

I've known a few guys who went what I could only describe as somewhat 'crazy'. One did the classic "took (lots of) acid (continously) and decided he was the second coming of Jesus" thing. Back in Byron Bay in OZ in 2001. If you know Australia, such an occurance in Byron isin't that strange.... it was kind of funny. He didn't seem that gone, but he really seemed to believe it... and he decided his girl was Mary, and that I was the reincarnation of John Lennon for some reason.. probably because I played guitar...? He got over it.

I saw a headline yesterday on google saying 40% of cigarette smokers are seriously mentally ill. Which seems a bit strange to me.. smokers really are among the most demonised and hated groups on earth right now.. They probably kill babies and sacrifice cats and dogs aswell.

The vast majority of Terence fans I've met have seemed pretty sane to me, but perhaps I'm infected... then again, a few weeks ago I spent a weekend with Dennis Mckenna, and he smokes cigarettes, so there you go...

Nice, thanks for the more effective memory, James.

As for crazy... of course, usually when I actually use the word "crazy" it's as a compliment. :)

I met a bunch of homeless alcoholics as part of a psych research project. They had been selected on the basis of, essentially, being the most fucked up homeless people in the city. Horrible physical health problems in many cases. The amazing thing to me was that actually a few of them, at least some of the time, sincerely seemed to think they had beaten the system and found a way to live free from the Man and party all the time. Do I think they were crazy? Well, that's a hard one. Clearly their lives were filled with what objectively appeared to be suffering (i.e. frequent and intense pain) but they seemed to believe they were at an optimum. Perhaps only a local optimum, but it seemed to be what they wanted.

I think it becomes less of a problem if you acknowledge that no matter how crazy someone is, sometimes you can only help them through compassion. Clearly these people would not have benefitted from any kind of compulsory mental care, they were too clearheaded and certain, and they would have believed that you were persecuting them, not helping. But the hope of the project was that by offering them non-judgmental support the quality of their lives might improve, and their attitudes might eventually soften enough to be able to change to something more healthy.

BTW - The website was isaacsword.com, or .org, something like that, but I can no longer find it which means it is probably gone. I met him to tell him he needed to stop putting that stuff in the stranger, and that he was scaring people. I think he stopped shortly after that.

I met that guy who took out all those ads in the stranger. He was crazy. He is one of the few people I met who was "perfectly fine" before he first took mushrooms (had a successful business and everything), and by the time I met him he was convinced he was the messiah and was in psychic contact with various celebrities who would hold a press conference to announce he was the messiah and prove him right any day now. Do I need to add he was a huge Terence fan? He also thought people should kill their egos by destroying their frontal lobes with high dose amanita trips (his idea, not mine, I did not make that up). He was a nice guy, perfectly functional, dressed well, groomed himself and everything. However, he was clearly bat-shit crazy.

I can't claim to define crazy, but most often when I see others use it, it is to dismiss another's difference from their own with a wave of the hand, or rather, with the voicing of a word. It seeks to understand only to bring about change. It has been conceived of as folly, lack of reason, and/or mental illness, mental illness perhaps not being far off from your seeing it also as "self-destructive behavior". So many times people have said "that's crazy" or "that's insane" when it does not fit their vision of what is acceptable, or moreso, normal. Has it also not been used in a way to reform others, to show them how wrong they have been or are being, to fix and standardize them, bring 'em back into the fold, and if not to further ostracize them? Often times it fails to look at another's so called craziness as a legitimate response to events in their life that influenced them towards acting the way they do, perhaps even as a set of choices leading to such.

Also, I've known a few houseless people (wouldn't necessarily call all of them homeless, it's just that their homes are more transitory), some of them just despise work and/or being owned by a single house and a landlord.

Some friends of mine perform body suspensions, that is, hanging from trees or scaffolding with hooks in their flesh, swinging about while doing so, gleeful look on face. Most people I've met think them crazy for doing so, because they believe it may be harmful to them, and why would anybody wish to bring such upon themselves?
Does the same not happen with drugs, "oh, MDMA'll make you an emotionless robot," "LSD'll make you go nuts, batso," on and on, but such statements tend to come from those who only care to see that which is harmful, and use such to de-legitimize said actions.
Is cigarette smoking insane because it may lead to lung cancer and poorer physical performance? What about polluting the air we breath and the water from which we drink, for whatever reason?

Oof, that all came out probably more rant'ish than I wanted it to. Definitely not meant as an attack.