I Know Crazy When I See It

Good morning, y’all. It’s hotter here than a billy goat’s butt in a jalapeno patch. I’m staying cool watching CNN on the big screen here in the rec room. I’m not used to sharing the limelight on my blog, but a news item caught my eye and I thought a picture might save me a thousand words.

Seems that the State of California was able to give a half a million dollar reward to finally capture the freeway baby killer. I guess a quarter of million just wasn’t enough to get the concerned citizens involved. Things always cost more on the left coast.

Now before I get everyone all worked up, let me express my deepest sympathy to everyone concerned. There can be nothing harder than losing a child, and to lose one in such a senseless tragedy must be doubly painful. There’s a lot of blame to go around here, and I’ll talk about some of it, but look at the picture and tell me you think that man should have been walking free amongst us and able to buy weapons. Christ on a cracker, I can diagnose him from here, I have no clue why the people around him couldn’t get him help and avoid this tragedy.

Now before y’all start questioning my qualifications, let’s not forget who you’re dealing with here. No matter what they call it, if it’s got bars on the outside of it, I’ve probably been inside of it. That doesn’t even get into my bonafides as chief of psychiatry in my role of custodian here at TackyToo. I know there are some of you with a piece of paper declaring your expertise of things crazy, maybe even from my beloved UGA, but let me tell you there’s nothing like personal experience. I offer the following example:


We used to have an older resident, name of Dilbert Pickles, who had lived in the park longer than anyone could remember. No one knew for sure how old he was, but it was said that he had taught Methuselah how to ride a bike. Anyway, he lived next door to a lovely lady named Anita Goodman, who owned one of those sneaky terrier type dogs that’s all fur and bark. Well, we have a strict policy about cleaning up after your animal here at TackyToo; we even provide a dog walk for the ones who aren’t too lazy to walk their dog to the dog walk.

Ms. Goodman had gotten into the habit of turning out little Sparky to do his business on his own, particularly when she had a gentleman caller. Little Sparky preferred to do his business on grass, which was unfortunate because the only lot that had grass was old man Pickles. I guess Mr. Pickles had lived here long enough he’d figured out how to grow grass on rock, or maybe it had been “grandfathered in” at Creation.

As one could imagine, Mr. Pickles is proud of his yard, and there is nothing that will tarnish that pride like puppy poo. There had been scrapes and rumbles and phone calls and threatening letters, but as I told Mr. Pickles, “unless you catch him in the act I can’t evict them”. Mr. Pickles caught little Sparky in the act at 6AM one Sunday morning. Unfortunately, he caught him with a 14 gauge shotgun.

When I followed the sound I found Mr Pickles standing in the door to his trailer still holding the shotgun and what appeared to be hundreds of pieces of cotton blowing around his yard. Well, long story short, everyone recognized it was time for Mr. Pickles to move to managed care, unarmed, before his hit list evolved to a higher species.

In my professional opinion, there were warning signs with Marcus Anthony Eriz, too, before his road rampage. It’s our responsibility to help the sick, even if we have to take care of them all of their life. After all, it’s the Christian thing to do, and in this case would have saved the life of an innocent little boy.