Sweet Insanity

I decided to go crazy, it was a conscious effort, and it was an effort. You aren’t crazy until you can do away with social conventions and doing away with social conventions is harder then you would imagine. Having been raised as sane my whole life it was difficult to cast off that idea, as hard as I tried. For a long time I was considered simply eccentric, which wouldn’t do at all.

The idea of insanity first came to me when I realized how easy it was, I mean the life of a crazy person. When you are crazy then you don’t have to do anything, you sit in your room and people bring you food and take care of you, which sounded like a good life to me. No decisions to make, no work to do, no money to make, no bills to pay, that sounded beautiful. There was the problem with what my family would think if I suddenly went crazy but I soon realized that thinking about that was my first problem. If I was to go crazy then it would be their problem, not mine.

My first step towards insanity was that I started to wander the streets, digging through trashcans. I would sometimes not come home for days at a time, not go to work, and just wander the streets, talking gibberish to people. I think that my favorite line was “for I too can tell a hawk from a handsaw,” the only problem was when I ran into people who knew Hamlet.

Several times my wife sent the police to go find me and they would bring me home, lecturing me the whole time. My wife cried a couple of times, which made me feel a little guilty, but I told myself I wouldn’t feel bad once I was crazy. Other people’s feelings aren’t your business when you’re crazy. My children were just ashamed of me and that I didn’t mind at all, I didn’t care who didn’t like what I was doing, I was going crazy.

My next step in insanity, having gotten fired from my job and leaving home for a length of time, cleanly severing my ties to the sane world, was to surround myself with crazy people. I know that insanity isn’t contagious but I thought I might learn something from watching them. It’s harder to find crazy people then you’d think, there are people who others say are crazy but they usually aren’t. Finally I found a group of crazy people who hadn’t been found by the authorities yet and I got to know them pretty well.

There was one man who became my role model out of that group. He would stand on his head, every morning, and if you asked him why he would look at you like you were crazy. He drooled a lot, which always puts people off but looked like good fun to me. I tried it a couple of times but drooling voluntarily is harder then it looks. It looked as if being crazy was harder then it looked all around but I was sure that it would pay off in the end just like all hard work.

I finally went home after a few weeks of apprenticeship to the crazy men I had found. I had to admire the handy work I wrought on my family. Instantly my wife started to dial the mental health clinic and I had to stop myself from patting myself on the back, my plan had worked so well.

To be continued...