wondering whether i'm crazy
For me, the Internet exists solely to search for the phrase Jim Goad. Since I'm so unforgettable, it also helps schoolmates and relatives from a distant past in a land far away to search for my name. Every couple of weeks, a blurry personage from thirty years ago will emerge like a ghost hitchhiker as I careen down the Information Superhighway. They'll tell me about their job as an administrator at a toilet-paper-packing company and how their first kid just had a kid, and how they're still in touch with everyone else from childhood, and all of their kids' kids, too. When I apprise them of my life since forcibly ejecting myself from Delaware County, PA, their response is always similar:
You are nuts...you've always been a little "out there"...well, I see you're still crazy.
Many online pundits say similar things...the boy ain't right in the head...he's absolutely insane...psychotic...psychotic psychopath...psycho-psychotic sociopath...Mr. Kookypants.
Much of it, undoubtedly, is tethered to the violence, the death threats, and the lifelong fixation on all manner of unsavoriness. Point taken. Point, set, match.
But I've never thought I was crazy in the sense of being irrational. To the contrary, I'm hyper-rational in an obsessive way that borders on its own kind of crazy.
I feel that if you give me five minutes and a cold interrogation room, I could dismantle nearly anyone's most cherished beliefs. Most people inhabit fantasy lands which my "crazy" mind would never be able to accept. I might be crazy, but most of you don't make any sense.
I think I'm perverse, but in a good way, and only because I dance the mazurka with the Thunder God and have been caught French-kissing the God of Fire. Perverse isn't the same as crazy, unless you're boring about it.
The psych tests they gave me in prison and during parole both suggested that your humble narrator is afflicted with Antisocial Personality Disorder and/or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Yeah. Tough ones to figure out, guys.
Lately there have been murmurs that my 100% self-absorption may be a sign of creeping autism, and I'm cool with that. I'd be absolutely happy in a Jim Goad world.
One thing's for sure: I know how to look crazy.
