On Seeing Something Bonkers

I think a lot (probably too much) about how used to everything we are these days. Whether it’s politicians acting like petulant children, Los Angeles getting a hurricane and an earthquake in the same day, or a regular-ass sandwich costing $14 before tip, we just kind of keep skating by because what else is there to do? But then, sometimes, you see something absolutely bonkers and it shocks you back into a state where you can take in the insanity of everything around you for a little while.

I had two of these incidents recently, the first of which began, as many crazy things do, at Target. We were minding our own business, probably buying berries or something like that (certainly not the ingredients to bake a cake we would eat 90% of that night because fuck it why not?), and when we rolled up to the counter, we could see that several security guards were standing by the door looking out. This in and of itself wasn’t that crazy because people shoplift from this Target pretty much every single day. One of the security guards turned and went back to his post, revealing a huge pile of trash across the street that was completely on fire.

Now, I don’t know about you all but I don’t see things on fire out in the world that aren’t supposed to be on fire very often so it took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. Once I did, I started looking at everything around me a little bit differently, I started thinking about how quickly they built this Target, how often it leaks, how parts of the ceiling are already falling apart even though its barely a few years old. Something about seeing this random street fire made think about how tenuously held together everything is.

The second experience was definitely more frightening and more jarring. Driving home from dinner in Hollywood, I was on the 101 freeway, one of the most highly trafficked freeways in the US. Suddenly the cars in front of me started to slow down, then they swerved left and I could see that there was a man…just walking on the freeway, at night. I slammed on the brakes and honked at him which seemed to shake him up just enough to get him to walk back to the hillside on the shoulder of the freeway. Needless to say, I was also shaken up!

This experience got me thinking, of course, about our complete lack of mental health facilities and our government’s unwillingness to help out the unhoused, but it also got me thinking about how insane it is that we all fly around these cement tracks in 2-ton vehicles with nothing but an understood social contract and an urge to not die in a fiery wreck keeping us “safe.”

There’s a joke going around the internet that roughly works out to, “a single large Baja Blast would destroy an entire medieval French village.” I can’t imagine how absolutely insane a freeway would look to a small French boy from 1430, but the sheer sight of it would probably turn his brain to gruel instantly.

So, have you seen anything really crazy recently? Did it make you take a step back from how crazy EVERYTHING seems to be these days?