In a strangely cheery mood for a dismally gray summer morning, I —resembling an over-medicated Orange County housewife— exited my friend’s San Francisco apartment and wandered about with smiles and an overly jaunty gait; trotting along aimlessly with nothing but the salty smell of the sea on my mind.

Left, right, straight, backwards? Who gives a shit – the direction of my trajectory was arbitrary; the seven square-miles, with all its zig-zags, one-ways, weaves and intersections were inundated with sparkly-eyed pedestrians, eclectic storefronts, and little green squares of park peaking through the urban sprawl; I’d be entertained for hours.

As I turned the corner onto Haight Street, a youthful yet bedraggled looking bum approached me. While his appearance was far from unusual (he would’ve inconspicuously meshed with the fabric of any Skid Row), his behavior was off kilter even by hobo mores. He incessantly pummeled the crown of his skull with his fist. Once. Twice. Three times, he hit himself. Then four… Five. Six. So relentless and unpredictable was his clobbering that I thought, with my luck, I’d soon be arrested on suspicion of murder.

But as soon as our eyes met, he retracted his hand and blushed like a schoolgirl whose skirt had fallen prey to an unexpected gust of wind in a crowd of boys. Ashamed and embarrassed, he hung his head low and simply muttered, almost inaudibly, “sorry.” He then gracefully picked up his pride and nonchalantly continued west as if nothing had happened.

I, on the other hand, was left incredulous and dumbfounded: what the fuck was that? Seriously? I’ve witnessed Tourette’s – profanities, vulgarities and four-letter words shouted, screamed, and randomly placed in sentences, disguised as adjectives, nouns or predicates. But never had I seen it in its brutal physical form (if that is indeed what I observed).

For whatever reason though, I began to think about other run-ins with the mentally ill or handicapped and the types of behaviors that are socially permissible only in so far as they’re performed by the mentally disabled. For instance, I once had a second cousin (or some other form of distant relative) with acute mental retardation who pleasured herself in public. It was near impossible to reprimand her, as she didn’t quite understand social norms and conventions, and therefore couldn’t see the fault of her action. Thus she’d go on rubbing it out wherever she became aroused – whether in the privacy of her bedroom or the not-so-private living room during a family gathering.

Sounds hedonistic, sure, but her mind couldn’t even wrap itself around the concept of hedonism. Instead, she thought in terms of sheer sensory excitement without any underlying philosophical principles. She, like a toddler, pursued whatever dazzled her senses at that very moment. In this case, it was sexual gratification.

Nobody acted surprised, nobody threw a fit, and most importantly, nobody tried to punish her.

Interfamily gatherings aren’t the only sanctuaries for socially questionable behavior; the law (and ostensibly therefore society at large) similarly tolerates unbalanced behavior so long as it stems from an equally unbalanced mind: a close friend of mine has been professionally diagnosed with just about every psychological disorder that’s graced the 886 pages of the DSM-IV – from psychosis to schizophrenia to bipolar to everything in between. He shovels an assortment of brightly colored pills into his mouth every morning; the confectionery of candy-coated pills realigns all his shoddy synapses and chemical imbalances and it’s only after taking them that he metamorphoses into a suitable member of society. Some eat fruit loops for breakfast to feel normal, some eat mind-altering chemicals. So be it.

During one of his unpredictable episodic rages, my friend fell into an altercation with a cop, punched him as hard as he could, and broke the guy’s jaw. Obviously any normal person would have suffered extreme repercussions (i.e., an inexplicably long stay in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison), but he got off on 6 months house arrest – reason being he didn’t take his potpourri of pills that particular morning. To top it off, he was allowed to work and support himself; his job being a traveling photographer, he somehow circumvented the house arrest altogether. Not too bad.

I can only imagine the high jinks I would seek out if viewed in the same light. I, like my friend, would certainly tell cops and adversaries my true opinions of them, and more likely than not use my fist as the vessel to deliver the message. Why not? I could laugh it off with great jubilance, feeling independent of “the man,” radically unlike all my surrounding subordinate sorry saps of peers. I mean, if Harvey Milk’s assassinator can get off murder by ingesting too many twinkies, think of the possibilities. Have the sudden urge to play with myself in public? Nobody’s going to stop me. Indulge away. Oh the joy of being able to act outside society’s burdensome rules and guidelines! To feel free and transcend repercussion! Sign me up!

But why do we blindly shy our heads away from these types and their corresponding (and otherwise socially intolerable) behaviors? We tolerate all the public displays of indecency because we feel superior. As a token of our pity, we grant them get-out-of-jail-free cards because, well, we can only imagine how terrible it must be to live in similar conditions. No, it’s not by a stroke of political correctness or genuine kindness that we pretend to ignore this behavior; rather, we snidely look down upon our mentally or chemically inferior peers from our high and mighty thrones of normality and feel bad for them, opting to turn our heads out of comfort for ourselves. But why should we? In many respects they’re far superior to the average person – they certainly have more liberties and are freer from restrictive social conventions than most; they can pursue happiness whenever and wherever they please while I am typically required to oppress mine in many social settings.

Whatever the case, during my San Franciscan escapades I solicited one such special-needs girl for some insight. Much to my dismay, rather than the erudite and eloquent response filled to the brim with profound offerings into the mind of a sub-genius I had anticipated, I was accorded a much simpler, albeit equally prophetic, answer: a slew of incomprehensible utterances varying in volume. With a language as unsophisticated as a newly born, she indicated her happiness with all the sophistication in the world; I, on the other hand, had to laboriously scour the city and all its twisting streets high and low for entertainment. Who’s the retard now?

–Kevin Duffel via pilingwiththepros.com