Otitis Mobile Media

Use to be, you could tell who the crazy ones were. They'd be on the street, talking and gesticulating wildly, to no one. They'd be alone in their madness, conveying vital correspondence to their troubled, twisted minds, which had the courtesy to understand them right back in kind.

And then technology caught up with the rest of us. With us sane people.

Now you can't tell who's crazy and who isn't. They are both there, walking, talking and gesticulating wildly, seemingly to no one. Then you'd see the small white buds in a person's ears. They, too, were conveying vital correspondence over the airwaves instead of the air of personal space.

My system was a failure.

One day I was walking behind a well-dressed man who was talking, alone. What I heard was just vocalized jibberish; I would have to get closer. I couldn't see around him to identify earbuds parked in his ear canals, so I closed the gap. It wouldn't take hearing many words to know if he was out of his mind. However, you don't want to get too close to a crazy person. You certainly wouldn't want a paranoid fretting over your closing your distance from him.

Yet, I couldn't resist.

Closer, I could pick up a word or two, but he had an accent, throwing me off. Then he turned his head to check out his pursuer, so I had to assume the most non-pursuing gait I could: I sped up to overtake him as if I were just someone in a hurry to get somewhere.

When I caught a better gist of his conversation, he was crazy for sure. This is why I was surprised to glimpse the earbud in his ear.

I know what I heard, though. Crazy. Insanely crazy stuff. Wild gesticulations that pitted arm flexors against arm extensors, jerkily managed at best.

But he was definitely talking with someone because he did what crazy people who talk to themselves don't; he waited intermittently for replies.

My conundrum was solved: he was a crazy man talking on his mobile phone, hands-free for gesticulation, via earbuds, with his crazy friend.

When I started talking to myself, the first thing I did was buy some earbuds.