Spring: The Equal Opportunity Energizer

Spring.
Surely, people dance more and fall in love more and get outside more and smile more.

This is a great thing.

But it increases other externalized behaviors. THE CRAZIES are OUT, TOO!

And don't get me wrong, I like the crazies. They're people, too, they're just a little crazier.

I saw three guys in some sort of guitar trio on the subway break out into a power struggle, with one guy accusing the other guy of going all gangster. It felt like something was about to go down. And yeah, someone threw a punch and the brawl went into full swing. I got off at the next stop and changed cars. Who knows who has a gun these days?

In the next car, a man spoke gibberish and sang loud and asked for money loud and blamed people loud for his misfortune. All of this, in a sort of growling howling, a cry against injustice. He was not dangerous. He was just exceptionally unhappy.

He was easy, compared to the prim guy sitting next to me, ninety degrees, with an instrument in a case between his legs...it looked trumpety. He had on ear buds. He smelled of a perfume spill at a Macy's counter. If you didn't have sinus trouble before meeting this guy, you will be needing an E.N.T. almost immediately after. So as the homeless man was wailing, and the entire inside of my skull was contracting in olfactory disgust like a beaked mollusk around an echinoderm, the smelly trumpeter, ear buds in, started in with his volcalise. Quiet, at first. But pretending the ear buds blocked his inability to hear himself so he could sing louder than he should, or he really could not hear himself so he just sang louder than he should, I eventually had to jump up and escape down the way. Monster.

I was like a man being controlled in an obnoxious live-action app game where foul asteroids or color blobs of hell were trying to kill me and I simply had to get out of the way.

I survived, of course. And clearly ready for more, when the final thing happened in the village, when a woman, in crazy black mules not made for running, ran past me just a few feet to the building we were both going to so she could stick her key in and not have to wait for me to pass?--or something, and then we both got in the same elevator and she was about to start a fight or a good cry or a big gas ball, or miss an appointment, who knows?--I decided to get out a floor early and just walk the last flight up.

Be gone crazy early bulbs!

Of course, I love them all and wouldn't have traded it for anything. They're just crazy. And there is nothing holding them back now. They are coming at you and you better bob and weave. No complacency as the daffodils send out their yellow warning signs. When summer comes, and the crazy rompers all get turned up to boil, the fun thing will be to watch whose carapace turns a bright red, who gets overcooked and who, simply, wafts away in a bloof of steam.