Mildly Psychotic

You see them all the time. They pass for the average person on the street. You think they are just like you in the movies, driving in the parking lot, ordering at the restaurant. These people are not the same as you and I. These people are afflicted with a disease. They are the mildly psychotic.

You might not be familiar with this diagnosis, so allow me to explain. The mildly psychotic are not bad people. They don’t mean you any harm or in fact mean to inflict harm on themselves. It’s just for whatever reason they have decided that they will put their good senses on the back burner for a time and go completely insane. Here are a few examples.

Parking lot psychotic. The parking lot psychotic should be well know to all of us. There is something that happens to the human brain when we are adrift in that sea of filled parking stalls. I have often found myself muttering or hollering to the car in front of me. This is semi normal parking lot behavior and somewhat expected. The mildly psychotic person will take it a step further.

If an open spot is seen twelve rows back the mildly psychotic person will stick their head out the windows and holler “THAT’S MINE!!” throw themselves into reverse and weave through the cars to get to that spot. This behavior does two things. Makes enemies with the other drivers, and initiates a domino effect of mildly psychotic behavior in others.

The mildly psychotic person can also be seen in the supermarket, buying up all the four for dollar containers of yogurt so the other customers cannot have any. The mildly psychotic person has trouble understanding that yogurt goes bad, and they cannot possibly eat the equivalent of eight gallons of yogurt, in half pint containers, in under a week. The mildly psychotic cares only for deals and not the harsh realities of a shelf life.

The mildly psychotic person tends to show up frequently at sporting events. There is something about the enthusiasm of rooting for your team that bubbles this behavior to the surface. Here they are easily spotted. Shirtless and painted with team colors holding large foam fingers, jumping and screaming. For the most part they are accepted in this venue.

In fact in someways we all have been the mildly psychotic person at some point in our lives. That person in the restaurant who changes their order four times before deciding on their first choice. The person who wears headphones and sings loudly on the street corner. The mildly psychotic person will realize hours or days later what has happened and then agonize over it. This is different than the severely psychotic person who wouldn’t even care if they did recall.

So remember when you see them on the street picking up all the dirty pennies, or the department store dancing to the contemporary music channel, they aren’t responsible for their actions. They have been possessed by some strange force that will grip us all at some point in our lives. For the moment they are mildly psychotic.