…and I do literally mean mentally ill-grade crazy.
Let’s see. Where shall I begin?
Last weekend.
Crazy #1: I’d gone for my big weekly walk-and-talk with SP (no grief, please – it’s therapeutic), and after we were done walking and having a bite to eat and a beer to drink, SP checked his phone. Sure enough, his son was up to something insane that required SP to cut our lunch short, stir a bunch of drama that I won’t get into deeply. Let’s just say that SP’s son is on his way to one of three outcomes: (1) homelessness, (2) back in a mental health facility, or (3) jail. Heartbreaking to say, but he is seriously out of control and SP is doing all he can not to get pulled under.
Crazy #2: Is really an amalgamation of all of the crazy homeless who live in my neighborhood. They panhandle and sometimes follow me around a bit, but generally cause no huge harm – it’s just uncomfortable and kind of disturbing. As I walked to the Farmers Market last Sunday, I encountered no less than two dozen of these folks. The worst of the bunch was the crazy redheaded screamer. He did scare me and forced me to walk on the other side of the park and hurry across the block. He was screaming about being pissed off at something. When they are pissed off, you definitely should move away quickly.
Crazy #3: The poor, drugged out of her mind woman in the skimpy shorts on my walk back from the Farmers Market. She had a beautiful but vacant face. A very lovely body – but unfortunately, she was sitting on a ledge next to a building, one leg hiked up and the other leg down on the ground and every bit of her vadge was exposed. I would have said something, but she was too enthralled with the sign behind her. Just staring. Not me…her.
This weekend:
Crazy #4: Leaving my apartment building (which is a government building), a woman was sitting against the stairwell just red-faced and bawling about lost love while her…I don’t know, boyfriend (?) just sat there while she wailed. And OH did she wail. She was screaming bloody murder and I thought she was going to pass out by the look on her face. Maybe she did. I was late for an appointment and had to rush by.
Crazy #5: My weekly walk ended once again with SP’s son’s phone call. Long, long story, but SP had worked out a deal for him to work in Savannah, GA for a few weeks during his school’s break (before the Fall classes start – yes, he’s 18 but was kicked out of his last school without graduating, so SP picked him up and put him in this military school). Anyway. SP lined up this job with a friend of his where his son is able to stay in a hotel while he works some kind of construction job, yada yada. So. I guess he worked for two days before being fired. It took SP an hour to get that confession out of his son. But not only that. I guess he trashed the hotel room so badly that the hotel had to call the police to get him OUT of the place! UGH. I heard all of this through lunch and on the drive back to my place.
Crazy #6: I took a walk this afternoon to the park and then decided that I needed to go to CVS to pick up some necessities. The CVS is the opposite direction of the park and past my building. As I was walking past my building, a woman was walking up to me from the other direction. I have seen this woman before. I believe she’s homeless, and I may have even given her a couple of dollars one day as she seemed normal but looked like she was having a bad day. So she’s walking my direction and she’s holding one of those Starbucks cold drink cups – you know, the clear ones? And it’s the Venti size. And I can tell it’s a clear liquid like water with some ice in it. She’s shaking the cup like swirling the ice around in the cup, and as she passes me (she and I are the ONLY two people on this block), she FLINGS the ice water in my face! And then she kept walking! I was so shocked that I turned around and was like, “OH MY GOD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??! “
And she just turned around and shrugged and said, “I’m sorry.”
I said, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”
And she said, “I said I was sorry.”
And I said, “WHAT THE HELL??!”
And she said, “Look, there’s no lid on this cup and I said I was sorry.”
There is NO WAY IN HELL that it was not done deliberately. I really wanted to run up to her and scream in her face, but I was so totally freaked out by this that I was wondering if that was even really water that she splashed in my face.
Crazies #7 & 8: The sorry losers who asked me for money after the water episode. One guy came out and asked for “five or six bucks” and I said, “Are you shitting me?” And the other guy was literally standing in the doorway of the CVS asking for handouts and I just about blew a gasket inside.
Guys, I don’t know what it is. Karma? Is it because I’ve been thinking about mental illness soooooo much lately that it’s just coming at me through everything I experience? I wish this didn’t take up so much of my energy and brain power, but it just seems that crazy is all around. It makes me sad and angry and confused all at once. I’m heartbroken and so bothered by all of this.
And I don’t know what to do with this. What can I do? Because I want to somehow resolve this issue in my own mind – yet I know it’s not resolvable. The more SP’s son gets help, the worse he is. The more I try to help the local homeless (give them snacks and a few bucks here and there), the worse it gets around here. It’s idiot compassion, isnt’t it? It’s enabling poor/unacceptable behavior. It’s such a hopeless feeling, so how do I resolve this issue in my own head? What can I do?
Because even if I move away from it, it’s still there. Even if I do something, it’s not resolved.
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