Make Your Fun: Mental Health Is Relative

WELL! What a day I had last week.

WEDNESDAY

I started last Wednesday with being a midwife’s first patient of the day (absolutely no news to share there) and later had a pharmacist suggest I’m insane.

That was funny as the woman ahead of me in line at the pharmacy with people selling drugs right outside the door was throwing a f-bomb tantrum and then I stepped up

(NEXT!)

and was all “Hello! Rough day? Well, I think you’re great.”

And BOOM I’m the crazy one.

Naturally.

Sanity is so very relative.

And, in between the midwife and the pharmacy, I had spent my day just kind of hanging around New Berlin

where I cautiously visited the local library and then re-read the first few chapters of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes in a corner of the Children’s Department

and then… trying to burn more time… went on to slowly drinking iced coffee from a local coffee place in an unfamiliar park… waiting for “Zack” the Worst Hire Anyone Ever Hired, to not call me so I could pick up some rolls of vinyl.

I was picking up vinyl for my husband who had asked me to do this at the last minute without any idea about what I would be picking up so he sent me nine emails containing invoices and I compiled a list of the various vinyl colors I was to be picking up while I was at Subway:

And then I took that napkin-list to the vinyl warehouse.

Zack never did call me as his company had promised but I received a final emailed invoice which let me know that the final sheet of vinyl which I had been waiting on had arrived so I drove to the warehouse where I roused Zack from whatever he was doing that wasn’t his job and then — suppressing my anger — teased him for being terrible at his job

Me: “ZACK YOU DIDN’T CALL ME”

Zack (in laughing/pleading voice): “But I just got that roll like two seconds ago!!”

(Invoice says vinyl was received 45 minutes ago but I let it slide and continued to give Zack a hard time)

My eyes were shining sadistically and I went through my list of colors because I trust that kid’s ability to measure and count about as far as I can throw him and Zack then slit open boxes and checked numbers and verified and grinned and blushed and I’m pretty sure he didn’t get what was happening and instead thought an old tired woman was flirting with him.

Then I left New Berlin with all my boxes of vinyl and drove back to Milwaukee.

But Wednesday was not about to be over.

No, because — an hour or so later — I found myself hanging on a corner (leaning against the wall in the recess of a building so as to not be mistaken for being a sex worker because it’s *that* kind of neighborhood) with “Marco”.

I was standing there because I was waiting for a place to open (though by this point I thought it was Thursday and it was in fact still Wednesday so the place wouldn’t open for another 24 hours but… before I knew that… ) I was waiting and hanging out with Marco as he had been walking by me when a police cruiser turned on its lights and sirens right in front of us.

Marco said his heart stopped but his terror turned to glee when we saw that the cruiser was pulling over a car who had just blown through the four-way stop intersection without stopping.

Seeing this caused Marco and I to cheer because the police were hassling the right people for a change.

There is allegedly a traffic task force which was created by the police to address the batshit driving here but we hadn’t seen any change in it until…

Wednesday.

Right after Marco and I made our introductions, another police cruiser pulled up to the stop sign at our corner and Marco walked right up to the open window of the police car to suggest that they – the much-hyped Milwaukee Traffic Task Force – consider sticking around our neighborhood or even this exact intersection because cars repeatedly kept blowing right through the intersection, ignoring all its stop signs and narrowly avoiding collisions.

“STAY WHERE U GOING HERE IS THE ACTION SPOT MAKE YOUR MONEY”

-Marco

And I’m still just leaning against the wall saying “YEAH!”

and then — after shooting both of us a super suspicious look —

the cruiser started driving and we thought he had just ignored us but then he

TOTALLY PUT ON A SHOW

The officer, squealing his tires, performed an illegal and very dramatic u-turn in the middle of the street ahead and then impressively parallel parked his vehicle in a very tiny space on the opposite side of the street.

Marco and I howled and cheered. A small crowd of locals gathered.

And right then a car blew by us and through the stop sign and intersection as if none of it was there and the officer ROARED from his spot — doing another illegal u-turn, tires squealing, police car sirens now wailing — and pounced on them.

These suburban moms didn’t know what hit them.

As I’ve ranted before, it’s a little anarchic here in Milwaukee with the driving.

And our neighborhood has kids and schools and churches and parks and… yet…

well, I didn’t see myself cheering on the giving of tickets with a stranger yesterday but…

I’m crazy.

Ask the extremely stressed-out drug-pusher at Life Change.

Crazy, sane, well, sick… often it all comes down to relative perspective.

So, take a page from the book of Andy Dwyer/Zack the kid at the vinyl warehouse:

And keep doing as you do because life itself is batshit crazy.

And, if you’re crazy… well, you’re just fitting in.

🖤