A Conversation With A Friendly Schizophrenic

This past Sunday, I staggered out of the 930 club, in Washington, DC, and the warm smog and smoke-choked breeze greeted my skin heartily. I had just spent the better part of three hours having my bones massaged by beautiful bass, and endorphins were pumping through my bloodstream. We decided to head to McPherson square to check out the Occupy D.C. protest and I couldn't have been more content with how my night was going.

When we arrived at the protest I was glad to finally see a gathering of people who were not the "Tea Party", however, that cheerfulness was short-lived. As I stood, rather awkwardly surveying, a tall man approached me. He was head-and-shoulders taller than myself, with an equally large potbelly, dark brown skin, and a very protrusive goatee. His clothes were dirty and disheveled; his red shirt was faded to the point of being off-white, and he smelled as though he hadn't showered in a long time. It was quite clear that he was homeless.

He approached me muttering and, though I couldn't quite hear him, it sounded as though he was agreeing with a statement. He stopped muttering and looked at me.

"Tic tac toe, okay?" he said. He had a pencil and a small notebook in his hand. I figured I might as well humor the man. After all, who doesn't enjoy a quick game of tic tac toe?

"Absolutely," I said. The man opened his little notebook and drew two large intersecting, perpendicular lines. In each corner he drew another, smaller, set of the same two lines. It was not the tic tac toe I was used to. I drew little O's in some corners and he drew C's. I eventually drew four O's that could have, arguably, been in a row and declared "I win".

"'Lemme see," the man said, "You did, you did." I let out a little chuckle because he seemed genuinely surprised.

"Now we decode, you know," he told me. I was perplexed, but nodded in agreement. He began to scribble thoughtfully in the notebook beneath the "tic tac toe" drawing. When he was done he read aloud what he had wrote, repeating every line while nodding as if he were internally confirming that what he was saying was accurate. He had written the following:

"Two one two", "Lily Spun Leaf", "P.S Holy Flock", ""Dolble", "GASP", and "DKEX you/won!!!"

By this point, everything I had learned in psychology class about schizophrenia had been confirmed and I was now entirely more interested in the man in front of me than all the protestors I had originally come to meet. We continued to play his version of tic tac toe for the next ten minutes and he beat me every time by connecting his C's with jagged lines because the C's were anything but in a row. By the end of the third round he had written, or had had me write, the following:

"Iron tin man", "Metallic stone rage", "heavy metal groove", "PPS-DNld AT yahoo.com" (the word yahoo formed an acrostic poem which read: yield, allay, have, ottool, openl) "

I told him that my friends and I had to leave (and we honestly did) and he ripped out all the paper, plus an extra one and said, "Alright, do this for me: before you go to sleep, write something down. Remember this: zerox to the email machine" He then scribbled a few more things down and handed me all of the papers. On the final piece of paper there was an empty "tic tac toe" drawing, below which he had drawn a simple stick figure and written:

"Just You Him", "boyfriend she's Theme", "mole", "MAK"

I shook his hand and we left and as I walked through the rows of protesters all semblance of cheerfulness faded into ponderous curiosity. I wanted to see through his eyes, hear through his ears, and experience his consciousness. He clearly experienced the world radically differently than myself and most humans in general. This encounter brought to mind the idea of relative reality (the thing I have been harping on about since our first class) and I couldn't help but have an incredibly strong sense of synchronicity.

However, my brow soon began to furrow harder than usual; my jaw began to clench, my heart picked up its pace, and anger began bubbling up inside me. It sent my thoughts spinning into nothingness and I was encapsulated in rage. I was angry that that man had to live on the streets, with little to no access to healthy food or clean water. He didn't have a bed to sleep in or a nice warm shower at the end of a hard day's work all because his reality was radically different than ours.

In that moment, I understood the protesters more so than I had just a few minutes previously. They are fighting for a nation where people's needs would be considered more important than the acquiring and consolidation of money. In that nation, the amiable schizophrenic I had just met would not have to sleep on the streets and could receive psychiatric help for his mental disorder, so that his reality might seem a bit more like mine or yours.

Luckily, the anger did not last more than a few brief moments as I have, over the years, developed an unfortunate defense mechanism in which I instantly suppress any strong emotion, be it positive or negative. However, later that night, as I drifted off to sleep, my mind revisited my "tic tac toe" match. I realized then that I might be mere minutes away from experiencing life through a lens that was possibly similar to the disheveled schizophrenic's. My mind didn't disappoint. That night I dreamt of walking through a forest where every color was overly accentuated, as if it were a photo whose contrast had been dramatically increased. The trees all swayed with the exact same rhythm and off in the distance there was a chorus of timpani matching the beat to which the trees danced.

Upon awakening, I had an odd thought: if the man experienced the world in a way similar to how I experienced the world while dreaming, then my pity might be slightly misplaced.