I'M SANE, BUT I'M NOT SURE ABOUT THEM

Grown men should NOT observe little children doing their own thing. Primarily because we tend to forget that they aren't fully formed human beings yet, and consequently will regard them as little psychopaths. Which they are. They haven't figured out how to behave in a rational and self-aware fashion, and instead radiate frightening lunacy.


Item one:

Chiu Ming's little brother cannot be more than four years old. He stares at me, obsessed and silent. When directly addressed, he utterly refuses to answer, but his eyes start bugging out, precisely like a street-corner booby. His unwavering gaze is disconcerting.
He's an adorable little tyke.
And quite insane.
For now.


Item two:

She sat on a bench lifting up her noodles, then dropping them back in the cup. And she was talking to herself. Occasionally she flapped her arms, or engaged what must have been invisible interlocutors in conversation. Suddenly she got up and danced around the bench. Then, having satisfied whatever urge that was, started scooping some of the noodles into her mouth. There was much going on inside her head.

She did not appear very clean, from my distance. I had been observing her for a long time, and grew increasingly worried that she was a runaway all alone in a park filled with crazy people.
I was standing outside the perimeter smoking my pipe, which was just one reason not to go in. Can't smoke in San Francisco public parks.
Another reason not to enter is that conversations in Portsmouth Square tend toward surreal. Complete craziness in English, off-kilter screaming in Cantonese. Some of the card-playing old Chinese people are vicious.
But I was watching her, along with the cluster of unclean druggy-wuggies in the middle distance.

All the while she seemed to be counting windmills.

An eight or nine year old crazy lady.


It wasn't until an old woman who had circled the park several times with her metal walker approached her that she returned to earth. Together they slowly left the park, and the child kept a firm hand on the walker until the street was clear, whereupon she helped her granny cross.

I'm not sure who was watching whom.




Statistically, the chances are that both of these little people will grow up to be well-adjusted and no more loopy than anyone else. Which is not entirely reassuring -- many people are quite normal, even if socially awkward, perverse, and eccentric to boot, no finger pointing -- but there is no cause for worry. They're still just children.



APPENDIX

Heading into C'town late last night, on the other hand, offered an opportunity to review a wide spectrum of adult crazy.

Angry young man arguing with empty boxes at Polk Street. Frustrated Asian lady obsessively, harassingly, calling someone on her cell-phone, then snarling at the bus driver. Fat potato woman of indeterminate shape, age, and even gender, calling him a racist bastard, then insisting on the lift to get off, despite being quite able to locomote. Windmill woman arguing with invisible audience at Washington and Grant, paper shredder talking to himself on the other side of the intersection, camped out female behind a shopping cart in a doorway screeching that somebody should NOT do something, a giggling and drooling troll between Jackson and Pacific, random loon at Broadway and Columbus, misdirected pizza snarfer further down the street, effing this and effing that effing bros on the mezzanine in Vesuvio, a karaoke joint full of besoffen cornfed bros, someone headhunting while plastered out of his little Lebanese gourd, and, to top it all off, a woman asking the bookseller and myself for a cellphone before squatting and relieving herself.

Plus a half naked man strewing garbage along Larkin.
Every single container spread out.
Treasures!

Yo, amphibian, have I forgotten anyone?




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