Crazy Real

Crazy is its own reality.

Consider the fact that some people think Justin Bieber is talented. Some people share this perception. Some do not. Are there multiple Justin Bieber's? (I hope not.) No. There is one Justin Bieber; a Justin Bieber singularity from which no talent can escape. 

Did Ed Sheeran's duet with the Beebs make me question reality?

Yes.

And by questioning reality, I also questioned my sanity. 

Is the world round (oblate, to be specific)? Is water wet? Is the sky blue?

Is color-blindness a kind of madness? Is that really what Van Gogh saw when he looked at that starry, starry night?

Who built the pyramids?

Did Oswald act alone?

Crazy - and it's associated realities - is a spectrum, rather than an absolute. Well, there is the far end of the spectrum where you are absolutely crazy, of course, but most of us are only a little bit crazy. The kind of crazy that makes us download - and listen to - Justin Bieber music but doesn't necessarily impair our ability to drive to the store and buy groceries. Certainly not the kind of crazy that would lead us to shoot a President. 

There have always been outliers, of course, living on either poles of the crazy spectrum; the Einsteins and the Rasputins (and where you put those two on the crazy spectrum says more about you than I'd really like to know). But what happens when the shared reality is fractured? 

I'm looking at you Galileo.

Was the Church worried about maintaining its political power and fund-raising demographics or was it actually concerned with the impact of this "new reality" of science, the ever expanding observable, of factual evidence on the people they had spent centuries lying to about the Sun, the Moon, and the stars?

(Okay, that seems like a big, important question but ultimately the answer is always the same: Money. No matter how crazy your reality is, you still need to make bank. So, the correct answer is (b) Fund-Raising.)

If you lie - create alternative facts for your crazy reality - and you get caught in the lie right away, you can say it was a mistake, it was taken out of context, you were being sarcastic, or maybe you have an evil twin who's out to destroy you. Maybe you even offer up a "I'm sorry if…" apology. And now you'd just like to move on, move forward. And we do. Reality has tolerances built in for small amounts of crazy. So we move on, move forward.

But...

If you repeat the lie so many times that it becomes the truth for you and your followers, you may just find yourself standing on the edge of a flat earth. There may be no way to come back from that. You may have to spend the rest of your life listening to nothing but Justin Bieber's music. And yes, there may be some folks who gather there with you who don't believe Oswald acted alone.

But I won't be one of them. 

My crazy is spherical and it's waiting for the aliens to realize first contact won't make this fractured planet any crazier than it already is. And I'm hoping they know the truth about the Kennedy assassination.