« ok, it's not the holidays that suck... | Main | errr... »
extemporaneous insanity
December 20, 2005
there have been times, plenty of them, when i've thought of going completely mad, just to try it out. this would not be such a novelty if i were not so much more sane than most people. sure, there's been the occasional violent outburst, some hallucinations (usually voluntarily induced), and the occasional blacking out to find myself in the trunk of a car with a dead animal. but these things, of course, are all part of growing up in one's thirties, in these times, bombarded as we are with thetan microwaves.
so, there i was, when opportunity struck. in the bar. at the bar. the bar in the coffeeshop. making sandwiches. there's this guy that delivers from a local pastry shop. the bakery's quite good, and the scones distract me, especially the chocolate chip ones, even though i know they're just made with bisquick and decent-quality chocolate chunks.
anyway, he comes in. the Whistler. i wonder if his mother is someone in a bonnet in a rocking chair, because he is the Whistler, and his mother would be, you know, his mother. i used to hate being shift manager on weekends, because it usually meant making sandwiches at the back bar, and that meant talking to the guy. he really liked talking to the girls, but he'd talk to me, too, because, i think, god hates me.
he'd bring the pastries in shortly before we opened in the morning. he'd get a decaf coffee, stroll languidly through the shop, peruse a paper he wouldn't pay for, then set up camp, often at the back bar. there, he'd bring up random, uninteresting bits of the day's unpaid-for news. he'd talk about how he was once an electrical engineer, but that now he liked delivering pastries. of course, i myself was an attorney working in a coffeeshop, but, of course, he was clearly insane.
he had often regaled amber, my odd minnesotan coworker, with tales of the several women who had restraining orders against him, as if the intervention of the justice system was an intrinsic and charming part of the romantic process. she often told me that he frightened her more than i did, which i took to mean "more than not at all," and which i understand to be her shy and awkward attestion of her love for me.
when the Whistler wasn't frightening the girls or boring me, he'd insist on whistling harmonies to every song we played. we'd try to confuse him. we played mars volta. obscure prince songs with lots of dissonance. tuvan throat singer music. static. conservative talk radio.
and still, he would whistle. at times, i would reach out, grab a bottle of the torani flavored syrup, usually "orgeat." amber would quietly and gently grab my wrist, and shake her head.
but on this one morning, i was still all jicked-up on the crank from the office party the night before, scored off of some 15 year-old lacrosse player from westlake high school, my proudly elitist alma mater. i understood that there were trade-offs for the intangibility the stuff offered me. there was the sweating, and the craving for fresh wombat, and the slight change in my level of patience. but still, the verve it offered me to proclaim in public spaces, "i'm intangible!" was worth the minor costs to me.
that morning, i was making the chicken-provolone sandwich, with the sun-dried tomatoes and a really good basil pesto. it's a very popular seller at the coffeeshop, though i can't help but think these days of the intricate and beautifully efficient machines in arkansas that suck in scores of live chickens and spit out boneless chicken breasts. it makes me want to be both chicken and machine.
i had plugged my iPod into the stereo system. it was coltrane going off on "naima." unwhistleable.
he was whistling. i remember looking up and smiling at him with an intense hatred, then things get kind of fuzzy. they said that the plastic spatula still had a well-sized dollop of the tasty basil pesto on it, and that the spatula with the well-sized dollop of the tasty basil pesto on it wasn't really sharp enough for what i apparently used it for, and it more ripped through the jugular and trachea than it cut through it. i do also have a vague memory of seeing the vivid green pesto and bright red arterial blood and thinking, "ahh, christmas!"
this would seem shocking and horribly violent to me, if i hadn't done it before. just think of how shocking sneezing would be if you didn't do it so darned often.
there was the tedious bit with the competency hearing. i am, in fact, obviously, entirely competent. but the day before the sandwich-making, i had treated myself to two quarts of quik chocolate milk, some tacos, and the law and order: svu marathon on a cable network, and it had really grounded me.
i remember bits of my time in law school, and the documentary is so enjoyable, and it's always on any of 23 different cable channels, and both of the assistant district attorneys they've had have been so beautiful and admirable, and so not like my mother or any of the girlfriends i've had who i can't seem to get in touch with anymore.
because i am competent, i did not go into the courtroom expecting to see assistant district attorney alexandra cabot. this is because even if i have certain feelings about the way my socks feel, i am nothing if not un-nondelusional. like anyone else, my grasp on reality informs me that ADA cabot is still in the witness protection program, and has been replaced by another very capable woman, ms. casey novak, with whom i have had an on-again, off-again relationship over the past five years.
so, clearly, i was going to be distraught when casey failed to appear to cut me a deal. i think this is going to be the final straw in our relationship, which has been marked by repeated infidelities on her part, mostly with bono, an irish singer and politician, and her unwillingness to pitch in for the cable at my apartment, where she regularly crashes on the couch to watch herself on the television.
i believe that the lucidity of my comments in the courtroom that day carried tremendous weight, impressing the judge, and endearing me to all involved. i know that my mother cried, even though she tried to hide it by calling me many vile names, and saying i was a "worthless abomination" that made her wish that god had not cursed her with functioning ovaries.
it is my further belief that the judge was intelligent enough to see, if not completely grasp the scope of, my level of enlightenment and psychological clarity. i recall her saying something about my commitment, which i believe was a question. having never had a fear of commitment, i offered my services, and was sent here, to this clean white summer home, to minister to the people i now find myself temporarily living among. however, i do not hold a doctorate degree in psychology, and while i have, at times, held myself out in public, i do not feel it is proper to falsely hold myself out in public as someone so credentialed.
the staff here have admitted, introduced, and treated me as another of the mental patients, in what can only be a clever ruse to promote the ability of the other patients to relate to me, so that i may better heal them. i do, though, tend to think that the electroshock therapy sessions and the late night visits to my room by a burly male nurse named johann are rather extreme efforts to maintain the charade.
nevertheless, over the past weeks and/or years here (in a fit of novelty and devil-may-care, i neglected to note what each tic-mark cut into my thigh with sporks stands for), i have decided to use the time to my own full benefit, as well, to do all the things that i had been curious about, but never felt the freedom or had the opportunity to do.
so, on march 2, a couple of years ago, fifteen years and seven days before my birth, i decided to stare at a piece of lint on the floor and do nothing but drool. there was a bit of risk in picking the object of my fixation, because lint is usually prone to the whimsy of air gusts and mops. but in this case, the bit of lint was actually a dust bunny that had agglomerated around a piece of half-gone hard candy that janet had spat at me before lunch one day. when i came out of a week or hour of well-deserved alone-time for my measured and dignified response to her act of self-expression, the candy was still in the corner, swept there by the lazy orderlies, and overlooked by my many peers who might have eaten it or shaved and worshipped it.
days and/or a year and 32 days passed, but i had a point, and a message of peace and perspective to convey, so i stuck with it. on march 9th, 2003, or thereabouts, i received a line, or rhombus, of visitors, none of which included dead or imaginary people whatsoever, as my doctors claimed, but most of which included everyone else.
my mother arrived, and poked at me with a pencil, muttering inanities. eventually, she got bored and left.
the human resources director from my state job, whom i had always believed was actually dead, came to explain to me the sacred mysteries of the family medical leave act. i wanted to cry at the beauties revealed to me then, but instead of tears, only saliva puddled in my lap.
katherine hepburn came, and tried to hoist me over her shoulder, declaring that we were going out to play a brisk game of golf. apparently though, in my hours at this odd hotel, i had gained several hundred pounds, and even her amazonian frame suffered under the strain. even as she grunted obscenties, i drooled on her shoulder and back, and stared at my holy dustbunny. eventually, she left.
several days later, i became terribly dehydrated from all the drooling, and while i had been able to hold back on excrementalizing, urinationalizing was something that i had little control over, and the damp gown had caused some nasty sores on my ass.
that aspect of this statement/experiment led to another. a week or so later, i waited until 2:43, the critical point of crisis in the daily showing of "the love boat." i had eaten nothing but eggs and pudding for several days, and had denied myself the release of, well, release. just as charo began to tear up, my own flood of emotion seeped over the edge of my chair and across the floor.
once again, my efforts were applauded, literally by my new friends, and then symbolically by the doctors and orderlies. i must say, however, that it seems horrifically elitist and unfair for the intellects of the psychiatric world to withhold the wonder of padded walls. while the vast majority of this planet's population sleep on small bits of padding set on the floor, in rooms where the sexual habits of their neighbors are oppressively, deliciously accessible, i was treated to the novelty of sleeping on the walls and ceilings of my temporary home within the home. so restful was this new reality, that i believe i may have slept for several days and or years, as the doctors, on my emergence from slumber, were no longer tadpoles, but beautiful princesses.
clearly, all involved in this place were enlightened enough to understand that these experiments tested the boundaries of human freedom. none of the supervisors in my previous careers would have understood the way drooling for two weeks affirmed their own humanity, as well as my own. and even i had never considered the potential of liberating myself from the tyranny of my own bowels, and their totalitarian restriction on the natural flow of life through my body.
still, i tire of this existence. one can only sleep on the ceiling so much, and drool, and soil oneself so much for the sheer novelty of it all. what good is freedom if it is held to oneself?
yesterday, in an attempt to spread the freedom i have discovered, i liberated one of my peers from the oppression of his nose, using the rook from my friend john's chess set. it took a good fifteen minutes, but fortunately, the orderlies gave us the time in the television viewing room to finish our cooperative effort before they broke the door down. i will eventually educate them in basic logical function, so that they will understand that a door is locked precisely so it cannot be opened, and therefore does not need to be opened.
i am tired. i am in the sleepy room again. some time back, i loaned johann my pen by inserting it into his temporal lobe. rudely, he did not return it. afterwards, the staff challenged my creative writing ability by giving me a bit of dull yellow crayon with which to continue to chronicle my time here. the crayon does dull from time to time, and i cannot sharpen it with my teeth, since using my teeth to sharpen the doorknob did not work out so well a few decades ago last week. but i shall persevere, and one day, i will be able to give back to my friends here the story of my own experience as their peer, friend, and saviour, in a radio play starring katherine hepburn.
Posted by Rob at December 20, 2005 01:13 AM
Comments
Good stuff, Rob. Keep it up!
Posted by: h at December 20, 2005 09:34 AM
the writing or the drooling and soiling myself?
Posted by: rob at December 20, 2005 09:36 AM
The writing, fool. Although drooling and soiling is always a good converstion starter...
Posted by: h at December 20, 2005 10:31 AM