A Little Place Called Crazy Town

“Two one way tickets to Crazy Town please,” Heidi said at the bus station in San José earlier this year, and we shrieked with laughter.

It’s raining and thundering and huge bolts of lightning are descending all over Mysore. The sky is at war with us. The power just went out in the middle of a Skype conversation with my sister in the U.S. and now I can’t finish my work. All my editing and design software seemed to crash this week too and I wonder if it’s time to simply throw the laptop into the Kaveri River. Or into the Ganga up north. I wouldn’t even bother with a puja. That is so tempting. Then I could just read and write poetry in notebooks, take naps and sit in meditation all day long. Like a monk or a shrub. 

The topic I wanted to cover today is of the utmost importance.

Crazy Town is both a place and a state of mind. If you’ve ever been a journalist then you would know this town very well.

It pops up behind you like a movie set when the world picks you up in a whirlwind and you’re forced to give up control and things start to spin wildly around you and mad laughter rises like soap bubbles from the depths of your soul. It may include PMS symptoms such as crying wildly in pristine beaches or yelling at innocent taxi drivers. Feeling completely at ease and not giving a damn about any consequences are required to gain admission into Crazy Town. In Crazy Town you’re always despeinada.

You may find yourself there because life has just tossed you around like a salad and then barfed up non vegan ranch dressing all over you. Or perhaps you were born wearing Picasso goggles. Born and bred in the C.T.

Last October, my best friend Heidi, a guy I liked and I went to the beach. It may sound like I’m always liking guys but come on, he’s only the second one I’ve mentioned on here. And really, that’s what happens when you’re a single, heterosexual girl. A woman, to be exact.

Anyway, we were in Cahuita, which is a gorgeous Caribbean beach town in Costa Rica, like the beach towns in your dreams, where they cook rice and beans in coconut milk and the sand is marshmallowy white.

This guy, to whom I wrote a beautiful love letter on the back of a world map that had to be read above 10,000 feet, he was so organized, methodical and practical in his approach to life. He was an engineer and he must’ve thought that we were lunatics. (He actually confirmed that later). Anyway, he had to leave the following morning and as he was walking away from our cabina I told Heidi, “He was just a visitor here…in Crazy Town.”

That is to say, he was not a resident, he’d simply dropped by for a weekend visit but his home was actually somewhere that he later christened Organization Town. I go visit there sometimes.

This is how Crazy Town was born.

That day, Heidi and I laid our sarongs on the sand and sat in front of the ocean to compile a list of people we thought might be Crazy Town residents, visitors, and people we’d probably never, ever see in this town. We texted a few people to confirm. Then we stumbled into the home of a famous, very old Costa Rican Calypso legend named Walter Ferguson and Heidi, who has a beautiful voice, sang to him, we took photos and decided to interview him on the spot.

Crazy Town may sound childish or insane and it is, I’m not going to lie.

It will make you sing “We didn’t start the Fire” at the top of your lungs and strike up a conversation with attractive Spanish men sitting in the car next to ours in the middle of a traffic jam. It makes you scribble “Toxoplasmosis of the crotch” in notebooks and then laugh about it for years to come.

It’s whatever makes you feel ALIVE like one of these Mysorean lightning bolts, crashing and sparkling and being, just BEING, fiercely, unapologetically.

It may be emotionally exhausting to live here year round, but I do hope everyone gets to visit, at least once in their lives.

And if you decide to make it, Heidi and I will be waiting. We’ll hold up signs saying: “Welcome to Crazy Town” and maybe we'll serve you complimentary drinks.