The Other Side of the Tape

It has become clearer to me over time that no one in this world can call themselves “sane”. Everyone’s at least a little bit crazy. Having a slightly screwed up mind is really the only way to insure survival in a society as dysfunctional as ours. Bizarre rituals, twisted ideas, and horribly skewed beliefs offer a mental air bag to the daily 30 car pile up that is American life. For example, a co-worker of yours gets the boss to dump an extra load of work on you by telling them you’re a “specialist” in that kind of task. What makes it worse was that you got assigned this crap before your regular morning coffee with cream and two sugars, each stirred in separately. The usual fantasy of crushing their skull under the lid of the copy machine dances through your mind until you’re belief structure kicks in and you say to yourself, “they’ll get theirs in Hell”. You have just dealt with a backward situation, in which a supposed ally turned against you by making you look “good”, that interrupted your bizarre ritual, by imagining their gruesome demise and trusting an invisible deity will somehow smite them. Sounds pretty damn crazy to me. The problem is not that people are crazy; that’s inevitability. The problem is the level of crazy a person shares with the world. When someone “snaps”, it’s really not a pleasant time to be around them. Unfortunately, for many the perfect time to lose one’s marbles is when they try to ship. It happens more frequently then one might think; an over-stressed business man or woman rushes in to complete a complex shipping task where these forms need to go here and these forms need to go there but those forms need to be notarized first and then re-routed to a second destination… A father or mother with three hyperactive children screaming and tearing up the store is just trying to get in touch with the receiver but they’ve moved and they can’t find the right address… A hard working laborer who spent the week getting screamed at and eventually fired has been fighting with the state for the paperwork for their divorce and payments for child support that needed to be shipped yesterday… You can feel the tension around them. The stench of dried flop sweat and the worn lines of pressure across their face signal that their crack up is imminent. Of course these people are going to lose it. It’s the ones that saunter in, smiling and whistling, that scare the shit out of you when they go nuts.