Psychos and Coco Puffs

OK, this wasn't the original Chuck Klosterman-like entry I wanted to write, but what the hey:

My friends used to wonder whether I created drama wherever I went, or if drama followed me around. Now, the whole heartwrenching clusterfuck that was a Certain Someone that has me in therapy (without any pharmaceuticals yet, thank you very much) was what made everyone, including myself, think that I inevitably create the drama in my life. On the surface, this makes some sense. My pal Dubois thinks the creative inclination comes from people who want life to be something else–not really a dissatisfaction with life, but instead the ability to see other possibilities in life. And all those possibilities just happen to be better than whatever routine counts for the aspiring artists’ life. Thus, entering into an unwise, unhealthy relationship with a woman who was unhappy with her then current relationship, a woman significantly younger than me, a woman who I worked with and related to the boss, might have been a mind-blowingly big fucking mistake. But in that artist’s calculus, the excitement and inevitable catastrophic results of bad nights, worse phone calls, and even worse scenarios that ran through my head of easy roof access and the properties of gravity were all much better than the ten hour daily grind of getting in pissing contests I had no vested interests in (better known as the legal profession) and going home to beer and internet porn. (Though I still have to say, there was a brief time where a Certain Someone and I loved each other very much. Plus, the sex was oh so very good.) So, the theory goes, is that I get myself tangled into bad drama because bad drama is better than no drama.

But now that I have more time again, and that I’m writing again, I’m beginning to think that this explanation might be a bit, well, if not facile, at least incomplete. This is because throughout my life, I have had plenty of completely tweeked, wholly unmoored, unstable people enter into my life without any volition from yours truly.

Back when I was in high school, I met this girl at a high school Model U.N. conference (hey, you guys know I was, am and forever will be a geek). I think her name was Becca. She wasn’t unattractive. Look wise, she’d be the type of plain girl a relative might set you up with, you’d sigh inwardly with disappointment when you met her and resolve to grin and bear it for your Aunt Priscilla, and then after three or four drinks, make out with her like a crazed mink and then both of you would be really embarrassed afterwards and vow never to talk about it again.

But ANYWAY, I spoke with Becca for maybe thirty minutes total at the conference. She went to high school in a township all the way at the other end of the county, which might as well be in another state back then. I have no idea why we exchanged numbers, but we did. And then we didn’t speak to each other except for brief five minute conversations about nothing. Oh yeah, she had a beau anyways.

Then, when I went to college, things got scary wiggy. The summer after my junior year, she got my number from my folks (who must’ve been ecstatic that some random chick was asking for me). Now, at this point, I hadn’t spoken with her for about three years, and the sum total–both in person and on the phone–of my conversations with her was about 45 minutes. Becca called me out of the blue, and for the next two weeks over some really intense and (for her) personal conversations, she informed me that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but that she refused to take her medication. She informed me that she dropped out of college because it was too much pressure. She informed be that one of her friends passed away, which then led her to tearfully ask what was the point. All this with a guy, me, who previously spoke with her for 45 minutes total. Holy fucking shit. You can’t tell me that I created that piece of drama.
Hey, I too have made the tearful intense psycho phone calls, but that’s generally with people I’ve known for years. But I can’t imagine calling up some random person I met at jury duty last week and waylaying all my personal crap and darkest thoughts on her. That takes some massive instability, instability that even I don’t have.

And that wasn’t the only unstable person in my past–there was Hunter, who looked like an average white guy from Virginia who ostensibly wanted to talk about Curve, the Pixies, Echobelly and shoegazing music but ended up ranting in such a depressing manner that made Robert Smith look like an Up With People dancer on a prozac/paxil cocktail. There was Spaz in law school who believed with such certainty it could only be pathologic that every single woman who walked path wanted him and his greasy ponytail. My first year roommate law school turned out to be a schizophrenic who stopped taking his meds a month before graduation (and had to be escorted out of finals by security due to his erratic behavior). Oh, and let’s not forget my stalker a couple of years back, who talked to herself and believed that Richard Gere and Tom Cruise were misappropriating her astral image for their own nefarious purposes.

Certain Someone was my own damn fault, but Becca, Hunter, Spaz, Schizo and Stalker? I can’t control who meets me. And yet, at the same time, it is rather disconcerting that some twigged person’s unstable orbit enters mine every two years. Maybe I should take solace that it isn’t just me who feels unmoored, adrift every once in a while, or that I don’t always create the drama around me. Or maybe I should move to some shotgun shack out in the desert, away from all the freakin’ wackjobs.