Who’s the Crazy One?

When someone is swimming in an environment of the mentally ill, it’s only natural to begin to feel that you are the crazy one. Often, the pervasive anxiety and disconnection palpable throughout a community like Los Angeles can be traced to an unmooring of shared values, where each person is self-defined in the extreme without regard for any requisite conformity, even in areas where a shared view of reality is fundamental to a functioning society.

I attended a local comedy show recently and saw a couple sitting in the front row, their backs to me. I saw a man sitting next to a woman with curly, shoulder-length hair, wearing a dress. Several times, the woman turned around and looked in my direction. Each time, I saw a man’s face staring back at me. The experience was jarring. I felt disoriented, as I do when I see a dog’s face Photoshopped onto the head of a child. Later, one of the comedians—a self-identified bisexual Mexican man—addressed the couple in the middle of his act. He asked if they were gay. The man who dressed like a man said yes, they were. Then the comedian asked if the two lived together. The man dressed as a woman said no, they did not, that they were work colleagues, that his colleague is married to someone else, and that the dress-wearer is a trans woman. His explanation described much of what is broken in society today.