#6: The Self-Proclaimed 'Mad'

 -When asked to sum themselves up, certain people will jump at the opportunity to convey how ‘mad’, ‘wacky’, ‘crrrazy’, or ‘totally bonkers!’ they are.

-This is one of the most irritating ways in which socially maladroit people choose to introduce themselves.

-Generally, the people who do this work in professions that don’t quite correspond to how ‘barmy’ they apparently are, such as accountancy, human resources or management consultancy.

-‘Madness’ is an elusive concept anyway, and can act as a springboard for exploration into the individual’s perception of reality within a society that operates under distinct social and cultural conventions.

-For our purposes I’m going to use Charles Manson as a measuring stick for what constitutes actually being ‘mad’, because he arguably defied such social and cultural conventions when he established an esoteric cult based on the musical output of The Beatles and manipulated several women into committing a gruesome tally of high profile murders in order to spark a race war that he believed would be the precursor to Armageddon (as had supposedly been prophesized to him in the lyrics of the proto-heavy metal song Helter Skelter).  

 -By these standards, earnestly declaring yourself as ‘mad’ should carry some pretty heavy connotations. There’s about as much social appeal there as would be found in going to work wearing a pointy white pillow case over your head with eyeholes cut into it.  I would hate to think that middle management professionals who declare themselves ‘a bit bloody mental!’, upon meeting people in an All Bar One, are genuinely planning an apocalyptic bloodbath based on a delusional premise of racial bigotry encoded to them through the music of the biggest band in the world – which nowadays would probably be U2, sadly.

-I’m sure they aren’t, but I have always kept these people at arms length all the same. Generally, in my experience, people who try extra hard to be personable, funny and slightly off the wall, are doing this to conceal a hidden agenda, or a disposition that’s actually neurotic, uptight and flakey around money.

-This is exemplified by the fact that self-proclaimed ‘loonies’ and ‘total nutters’ are all fun and games when they feel it’s appropriate (regardless of whether or not anyone else does), but it doesn’t take much for them to switch back into the world of the non-mad when it suits them. The up-turned traffic cone will quickly be removed from the crown of the head, the finger-through-the-trouser-fly withdrawn, the moment they notice that someone hasn’t chipped in for the taxi.

-Would Charles Manson behave like this? It might be comforting to imagine so, but I really doubt it. And it’s irrelevant anyway, because, as previously mentioned, he is genuinely mad, and what with his never-ending onslaught of extended life sentences, I doubt we’ll be hearing much from him any time soon.