Notes from the Petting Zoo

Okay, I’ll start out by making one thing clear — crazy people need love too. I understand that. They do. That said, now a cautionary note.

Do not mistake “crazy” for “love.” They are not the same thing.

Don’t feel bad if this doesn’t make sense yet — you have to understand that “crazy” and “love” possess many common features, so it’s quite natural to mistake one for the other. They possess common attributes, but that makes them equivalent in the same way that a coffee cup and that guy on the CB radio are equivalent because they both have handles. That is to say, none at all.

Just to make it very clear, here’s another example: Love makes your heart race. So does drinking six cups of coffee. Coffee, however, is not love.

Sure, there are a lot of definitions of love, and quite a few of those definitions include passion, a willingness to let hours and other responsibilities slip by unnoticed, a driven singlemindedness toward pleasing someone and so forth. I’m not saying this IS the definition of love, of course, just that there are quite a few people out there who believe that a definition of love ought to contain this kind of energy. And hey, to each their own — I happen to think that love CAN make the world stop between beating hearts, and that love CAN contain a kind of singleminded focus on each other, and that love CAN include astounding passions the levels of which would sunder the heavens. Huzzah love and all that.

But I ALSO know that crazy can make people do exactly the same thing. Crazy can make something ordinary into a great and overriding passion (such as sex, or brushing your teeth), crazy can allow a person to ignore their responsibilities and focus on something exclusively (such as a lover, or the secret messages in the salad bars across America), and so forth.

In other words, crazy, if viewed the right way, looks an awfully lot like love.

This can be a dangerous place for people who are looking for love-that-is-passionate, because they’ll see something that LOOKS like it, and then get hooked into that juice, and then before they know it, they’ve been hung out to dry on meathooks in a distant cabin in the woods where no one can hear them scream and scream and scream until their throat bleeds.

Pay attention. Watch for signs. Sometimes, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s still not a duck — it’s a hunter’s decoy.

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