He’s completely oblivious of the world around him – so it seems. He struts on; on a mission only he knows the ultimate destination and speaks to his companions only he sees. He has conquered his environment and therefore unmindful of the prying eyes that appraise him and the wagging tongues that lash at him. Sometimes, stones and swash of miry garbage are pelted at him. Yet, he endures it all fully aware that the crowd of his empathizing assailants and belligerent admirers are what they claim he is: insane and only deserving of the confinement that they often haul him into from where he wisely escapes into the open sky maximum asylum.
He wears the regalia of his lunacy with tremendous candor and equanimity deeply troubled at the dishonesty and falsehood around him; not from the fauna that form the ambience of his environment, but from the gawking eyes of the self-assumed ‘saneness’ who, themselves, may have escaped from the mental asylum into the open prison of collective insanity. He does not wear any airs of propriety nor encumbered with any baggage of pretense. He carries himself with unashamed gait unmindful of and unconcerned with the feigning but largely flawed etiquette of his self-righteous sane-conscious neighbors.
He bestrides the streets often poorly clad in raggedly but covered attire fully aware that in the collective asylum that merely tolerates him and the rest of humanity, he is fully fulfilled. Any issues about this, he wonders, when his neighbors, pretentious of their mental clarity, also undress in the glare, half naked with their females bare breasted and the pictures pasted on their tabloids and posted on the internet for the gleeful admiration of even their priestly moral gatekeepers.
They tout him for his reckless garb but celebrate the open nudity of their feminine “stars.” Their men, now unsure of their masculinity, with plaited hairs and nose and ear studs, wear slacks half to their buttocks, a display of their newfound expression of backward freedom! Yet, they condemn the mad man, a free being that celebrates his liberty with unpretentious abandonment. He’s deeply worried by this hypocrisy.
Unimpressed by the barber’s blade of civility, he walks on with long untrimmed hairs, a habitat of many pests. They, his neighbors, laugh at this, too. But he’s worried that they admire his audacity as they now imitate him with their dreadlocks and borrowed (sorry, bought) hairs whether horse, Indian, Jamaican or Brazilian brands which, even one of their own, Fela, I heard, called were – madness. His, a natural black coated with a potpourri of environmental articles from his many sojourning; theirs, a mix-grill of confrontational colours – either blue, brown, green, pink, red, violet or just any colour and anything to poke accusatory and condemnatory fingers at their natural stability. But so long as they consider it fashionable, it is in order. Again, he wonders at their hypocrisy. What they condemn in him, they indulge in brazenly and justify with nonchalance.
A man of deep introspection, he often find solace in solitude, recluse in caves and abode in uninhabited nests far from the maddening crowd. But his compatriots, as if in a determined frenzy to denounce their mental equanimity, engage in a garrulous battle against quietude and stillness. Yet, they mock and pelt him with their high pitch clatter.
The tenacity of his thoughts sometimes busts words out of his listed lips, words that are, perhaps, too sublime and, therefore, incoherent to the raucous sane crowd who ridicule him for his lunatic impulse. Notwithstanding, they, his cerebral sane neighbors, also crave after him in their strident earsplitting wild lyrics – Hip up, Pop, Rap, Rock, R@B, and Reggae; music that lack the solemnity of their professed sanity.
In a state of hallucinatory delirium he, sometimes, cuts himself with sharp objects and his neighbors watch with wounded pity. But hardly after that, they too visit the beauty (maybe butchery!) salons where they pay, and with masochist glee, subject themselves to the pain of the tattooing knife. Little wonder, our derided friend, sometimes laughs, some other times he whines, all to himself, because of the hypocrisy of his traducers whose passion is to dethrone him from his cherished cocoon of “instability.”
Nor does he belong to any of their religious assemblies. How can he dare, to defile their pious and sanctimonious assemblage? Or who will even consider admitting him into the hallowed precincts of their gold-gilded cathedrals? Like whimsical Soapy in O. Henry’s The Cop and the Anthem, the moment of his sobriety may well be, for him, the time of official censure. However, he is confounded and even appalled by the deceit, the debauchery, the duplicity and vulgarity oozing around him, not from the open putrefying sewage (another evidence of their superior wellbeing!) but the public mockery of the pretentious piety of these religious bigots.
Not one to be distracted by the political shenanigans of his neighbors, he is completely insulated from any issues that bother on fraud, subterfuge and perjury. He neither bears ill to nor covets any man’s office or apparel safe, perhaps, only such as is good for the dunghill. He is contented by such as nature provides him and therefore unconcerned by the fripperies and fineries of other men’s ornamented toys either legitimately acquired or dubiously amassed from the till of our collective heritage.
