Raving Lunacy

by Javantea
Mar 18, 2009

I thought I should write this down although I'm not entirely sure that it's a good idea.

There's a certain combination of situations that a person reacts to in a very strange way. I watched 12 Monkeys last night at the long recommendation of my friend Discord. The guy at Scarecrow at the register said that he really liked the movie. After watching the movie my friend Discord calls me up and tells me he's done with his finals and that we should hang out next week. Today I took a catnap after dinner with my friendly neighbor cat. When I woke up I was feeling very healthy like having drunken coffee. I drank tea today. I walked to Scarecrow and saw my friend Rocky and asked how he was. I got two videos because it was 2 for 1 night (Wednesday). One was Welcome to the NHK 4 (which I have been watching since Sunday). The other was Linda Linda Linda. The guy at Scarecrow (different from the first) said that he really liked the movie.

On my way home, I saw two homeless guys who asked me for change. I said "sorry" and walked on. As I walked home I thought about the issues of homelessness, insanity, food, and money. My thoughts on the subject are thus: the argument for giving change is that I can spare the loss, the argument against is that by funding homelessness you are increasing the problem instead of decreasing it. I'm not actually confident that the argument against is valid but it stands because I have no evidence for or against (do you?).

12 Monkeys and Welcome to the NHK! both take a novel stance on insanity. 12 Monkeys shows the problem of an insane person trying to be believed (I know the plot is a lot more complex, but that's my synopsis in six words). Brad Pitt's character tries to explain that normal life is insanity while the insane people are really the sane ones. It's a pretty common philosophy of the 20th century (reminiscent of Fight Club). It's only convincing to those thoroughly sick of the capitalism (or communism, or socialism for that matter). People too young to be cynical of their society often think of this philosophy in terms too simple for such a wide philosophy. But that is why the punk lifestyle survives: young people are smart enough to question authority even though they don't have answers.

That's where food and money come into the equation. In Germany last year I found that a person could survive for days without much food. As a very well-entrenched 4 meals per day person, I survived for two or three days on one loaf of bread and water. This knowledge greatly changed the way I look at poverty and homelessness. Before my trip to Europe I thought incorrectly that after a day without food a person breaks down. I should have known from my research on hunger strikers that they break down only after weeks without food. After a day without food your expectation goes away which means that you are able to go on without food for the next day without devolving into lunacy. Which brings me back to homeless people and nations of poverty, they aren't so much doomed to instant death but instead they are walking the fine line of malnutrition. I shouldn't be so callous when I refuse to fund homeless people they aren't exactly having a good ol' time. And yet if statistics are correct, a panhandler makes as much money as I do hourly and their only job is preying on the pity of saps who don't understand economics.

Food and shelter are something that everyone has in common. If you don't have it, you probably need it. Hikikomori (young hermits) fill a strange niche. Wikipedia says that the phenomenon is funded by parents, but I'm not so sure. I went without a job for 1.5 years without parental money. I paid for rent and food with credit cards. I wasn't shut in or agoraphobic like the stereotypical hikikomori. But if you think about it, even hikikomori have to go to the store, right? I didn't have a cell phone and I didn't get calls on my home phone. I went to 2600 pretty much every month and I hung out with a friend or two sometimes. I went to protests (anti-war and so forth) but only met one or two people there. I wrote in my blog for several of the years I was living off credit cards. Note the desperation and naivety in the linked blog. No one really read my blog back then and the linked blog explains why. In Welcome to the NHK! the main character lives very similarly to me (minus the girls) in 2003-2005: trying to write a gal game, piling up garbage, and thinking about conspiracies. I racked up $14,000 in credit debt before my cards were all maxed and I had to move home. The short ending to the story is that I almost paid all my debt off in one year working for a programming company, but does that just mean that I didn't learn the moral of the story?

What was I trying to say in the previous paragraph? Even though you don't see a money trail, it doesn't mean it isn't there.

A character I designed Jun 7, 2005, Sara looks a lot like one of the main secondary characters in Welcome to the NHK! Coincidence or conspiracy? Of course it's a coincidence. If a person spends weeks drawing different looking people, they will eventually draw two that look very similar. This is not a conspiracy, it's a natural phenomena of people having only a certain amount of variety. Once exhausted, the supply of variety does not grow. Anime and manga understand this extremely well. Want to know why anime characters have strange hair colors and large eyes? It's so that viewers can tell the emotion of the character from a distance and that more detail can be given on wide shots so viewers don't get confused about which character they're seeing. If every male character had short black hair and wore a black suit and every female character had long black hair and wore a skirt, it would be so confusing and monotonous that people would not understand even with excellent voice actors. There are some anime and manga that break this model but that's mainly because the characters are so incredibly divergent. Even then many casual viewers of Azumanga Daioh will get mixed up.

David Bowie is an excellent example of how this same method can be used by American artists. David Bowie reinvented himself several times over the course of the 70's, 80's and 90's winning himself a ton of spots on Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. If you notice in each of his getups, he has consistent and extremely visible marks, not to mention that one of his eyes is permanently dilated due to a fight when he was 15. The eye patch he wore for a while is discussed comically in Flight of the Conchords Episode 6. David Bowie has excellent talent at writing moving poetic songs, writing great music, singing, and marketing. David Bowie continues to make awesome records and runs a popular website about his music that is very expensive. I can understand why my brother doesn't like David Bowie. It's hard to understand "Five Years" or "Suffragette City" without thinking about why someone would write such a song. Thanks a ton to Jonathan Greatorex for musical interpretation of Ziggy Stardust which is obviously extremely necessary even if it isn't the same as my interpretation.

And so where does the topic of raving lunacy come up? In case you have missed it I will leave you with this thought: the overuse of uncommon punctuation is a very common signal for insanity on the internet.

Javantea out.

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