A Glimpse of Insanity

I've just shared a little about the different "me's" in my life. There are other parts that were just as real ... that I don't talk about.

Given that at heart I'm a journalist, one who longs for truth, as well as one who cares ... well, I have to share it all. Transparency. To ask it of others is unfair, but to ask it of myself is a necessity. I already know it all. Nothing I write here is anything that I haven't considered thoroughly. That is the way to take this piece. I honor this me because of who he was and what he was going through. I admire him for his courage, his resiliency to try when there was no reason to try at all, his strength to will his way through nothingness, and his genius in embracing irrationality when reason suggested that nothing meaningful exists, ever has, or ever could.

I reconsidered insanity since reason wasn't working all that well for me. Rather than viewing insanity as the serious mental health problem it is considered to be, I began examining the research. Guess what? It's incomplete at best. There are so many leaps of logic, gaps in knowledge, horrific misinterpretations, that anyone practicing a blind faith in the mental health industry is setting themselves up for disaster. You learn how to become helpless through the health care system and I, personally, learned first-hand just how underdeveloped and even abusive it is. But that's another story, one I'll tell another time. No, this is a story that explores alternative perceptions of reality.

I'm going to tell you a bit of my story of how I was living in Chicago, especially a few months after being separated when I realized my wife wanted a divorce, my health care ran out, and it looked like I might not be able to continue working enough to pay my bills. So, yeah, reason at this point ... it's giving me a pretty clear picture of how bad the situation is. I decided that since I lacked the physical, emotional, and intellectual resources at that time to make any healthy changes in my life, I made the one choice I could make: I abandoned reason.

The summer before I abandoned reason, before I found out I was getting divorced, I jogged and went for physical therapy to help with disc problems in my neck and back. I got counseling, family systems therapy. I changed the way I was eating and tried living small in a ratty, sparsely furnished studio (in a great neighborhood, though). I had just moved out of our luxury high-rise condo because ... I thought the separation was temporary.

But then I found out ... things that made me question whether I knew or understood anything at all. At all. That nothing, not one conception of my thought, had anything to do with reality as it actually was. Which caused me to then wonder from what foundation I could make any decisions at all.

I don't think this is the type of experience a person has unless everything is lost. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I can't know. But, for me, that was my experience. Did I actually lose everything? No. The truth was I never had anything. There is nothing to have. It's all transitory, it shifts and changes and nothing stays the same for very long except for beliefs which refuse to change well past the point that they lose resemblance to anything approximating life as it is.

When I woke up to this realization, well, I really have no idea what happened. It's a blank. An indefinite gap of inaccessible nothingness, a type of thinking or experience that a coherent mind can't fathom. Insanity is such a weak word, really.

As an aside, something to provide context, I'll tell you a short story about my maternal grandfather. I discovered not long before his death in the 90s that he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He tested at a genius level for physics as an adolescent. After the war ended he was driving from Los Angeles to Iowa. As he told me of his experience he had great clarity in his eyes and his voice was resolute and sure. He said, "Michael, I was driving back from L.A. to Iowa on Route 66. I was passing through Utah in the middle of the night. There had been no one on the road for at least fifty miles in either direction. No towns, nothing. Middle of nowhere. As I was driving along I saw a small blackness growing in the sky, becoming larger and larger, like a black liquid orb, bile-like and menacing."

He paused for a while and continued, "It was not growing, though. It was actually descending toward the road a half mile ahead of me. I slowed down and as I did I saw the orb open up and enormous wings spread out from either side, like the wings of a Pterodactyl, muscular with jet-black talons more dense than any other substance in the universe. Claws thrust from the front of it and dug into the road ahead of me, cracking the pavement. A head emerged from the top of the orb, a monstrous glob of magma that gave out a terrifying shriek."

He was about to say more, but my mother came into the room and abruptly shoved some juice in his face, telling him to drink more and talk less. After he drank he said, "She's right. I need to rest. Another time." He died before he could ever tell me more.

I wondered about that for quite some time, these revelations about my grandfather. I kept thinking, "What the fuck kind of shit do I have roaming around in my DNA? Mad genius with a proclivity for ecstatic mysticism? What sort of paint-by-the-numbers book am I supposed to pick up to figure all this shit out? What decisions should I be making? Based on ... what? Reason? Freedom? Responsibility? These things are not complementary. Freedom and responsibility have nothing to do with one another.

Fast-forwarding to my life in Chicago, my belief system crumbled after I learned I was getting divorced--plus a lot of other shit happening at the time. My values dissipated, ethics disintegrated, integrity collapsed, and dignity dissolved. I became a lump of goo. That's what first happens when everything breaks down, apparently. Lump of goo. Stage one of structural collapse.

I recall one particular moment in Chicago, about 4:00 AM some winter morning in early 2007, when I woke up in a pile of wood chips in a four-foot wide expanse of landscaping a brownstone owner might have been pretending was a yard. I saw a short black iron fence a few inches in front of my eyes--one of the bars of the little fence, anyway. I felt drunk ... probably because I was drunk and probably had been for weeks on end. Along with whatever else I'd been doing. I felt quite a lot of pain as well. In my knee, neck, right shoulder, jaw, lip, teeth, cheek, head, and all over my back.

There was snow on the ground, fluffy white snow, the snow that comes when there is no wind, when it is cold but not so cold, almost soft, feathery, falling from the sky like the down of a cloud pillow ripped open above the city. Probably a low-flying goose-down cloud that got stuck on one of those satellite antennas on the Hancock tower (or whatever it's called now—they seem to be renaming every building everywhere anymore as if buildings go through identity crises and decide they want to be perceived as something else entirely. "I am not the Chrysler Building. I am the Indignant Monstrosity and you will refer to me by this name from hence forth.").

The snow was so white. Everything everywhere was white. The brownstones and greystones were coated white with marshmallow fluffing. The tree branches had vanilla ice cream frosting. The streets and sidewalks were dunes of white sand. Cars and street signs were covered with volcanic ash.

But there was another color. Red. I kept thinking Citizen Kane's rosebud. It was the blood oozing from different areas of my face and other—at the time—unknown parts of my body. It was so pretty, though. It melted the snow and then when it got cold it coagulated and froze into a cherry snow cone. I guess it was really more of a bloodsicle or the beginnings of a bloodpuddle.

Experiencing this well after becoming radically untethered from any meaning or purpose and most if not all values had ceased? This happening occurring in a very strange time and a place that had inexplicably denied the possibility of the existence of memory before those moments? To describe it will be to distort it, but let me call it "birth" for lack of a better term. The experience was like that of being born. No, not "born again." And, no, not "born" in any reproductive sense. And certainly not "born" in any sense of transitioning from one state of being to another.

Born as in previously nonexistent. Something now existed where before there had been nothing existing. What existed was "white" and what existed was "red" and what existed was "shape" and what existed was "form" and what existed was "perception" and what existed was "experience" and what existed was "awareness."

What did not exist were any of those words representing conceptions. This writing is a crude reduction of an event that existed. This writing doesn't even have the living stench of urination within it let alone the smell of a rose in bloom or your bedroom right after you've had sex. Sterile, lifeless shapes, not even three-dimensional forms, pathetic wretched two-dimensional representations in the forms of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, syntax, the ideas that roll forth, all bullshit lies that impossibly want to be something they cannot be: The truth.

What, a photograph would tell a truer story? A video? A documentary film? Decades of research? An entire mythology that develops into a culture that transforms all of civilization to focus on the question of whether or not words can represent reality? Oh, wait, that is the history of civilization! My bad, just consider this another addition to the larger historical project of obfuscation.

For now ... words will be the form of distortion. I'll try to keep the reverb low--except for those of you who like that sort of thing. You want waa-waa? You want jazz? You want symmetry, harmony, melody, complexity, cacophony, screeching noise? I'll try a little of all of it and each of you can decide for yourself what you prefer, what you want to take home with you and bake into a pie and serve to someone you loathe because you know these ingredients are no good for pies. Probably a good way to end a relationship, if that's what you want. Just serve a slice of unsolicited information and you can almost hear the other person's taste buds convulsing in horror at both the bitter and the sweet. Hell, even the savory can be repulsive when you're craving a dry mouth.

Blood red on white carpet and quite a few droplets of red on the tip of the black iron tiny fency-thingy. Probably where some part of my face or body fell on it as I apparently tripped into it while stumbling home from ... where? I'm assuming I was stumbling home. I mentioned it was around 4:00 AM but that was something I discovered later. The moment I started to wonder about things of that nature, the pain returned with a flourish and I returned, obediently, to observing the contrast between red and white. What a wonderful thing that is. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, like differentiation to disperse the intensity of one's pain. Well, it's really about the focus of attention. But differentiation provides the possibility of changing the focus of attention. I chose, perhaps not all that consciously, to deeply examine the subtleties of differences not just between color, but texture, how temperature was changing the structure and form of the ... "objects"? What was this stuff in front of me?! Suddenly, I was fascinated by this stuff that was ... not me! It was gloriously not me. Wonderfully not me. Me? Fuck me! I was pure pain, a broken vessel, something lesser than this beautiful white-red visual in front of me. The only part of me that was worthwhile was the part observing the beautiful white-red snow.

All I saw was red ... and white ... and volcanic ash ... and a sky sharing cotton balls with the earth. I turned up to watch it, to watch golf balls and baseballs and volleyballs gently float toward my face. It felt oddly like I was standing up and the sky itself was instead the horizon. I started to actually experience a few desires again. I wanted to walk toward the horizon--in this case, the sky. I couldn't figure out a way to do it, though. Instead, I made strange guttural sounds. I did not move toward the horizon of the sky, but I did create a tiny red explosion just below my sight line. I felt the droplets and the strings of blood fall on my face. Warm. Felt good. I didn't like the taste of blood in my throat, but I focused my attention instead on a memory that was forming--I was recovering my ability to remember! The memory was of one of the arcs of blood that had shot out of my mouth. I can still see it vividly. It was like a crazy silly-string fireworks display. Pinkish-red, too, not that deep red that had been in the snow. And I thought "Whee! I have different shades of red within me!" I laughed hysterically for quite a long time and coughed up more blood and mucous in the process.

Eventually, I got up and assessed the damage. Not too bad. Cut on the cheek and lip. Got lucky. Some bumps and bruises, might have bit my tongue, but too drunk to tell if anything more serious had happened. I seemed mostly okay so I started walking home except ... where the fuck was I? I was in Lincoln Park, that was obvious enough from the brownstones and the tree-lined streets. I couldn't have been too far from Fullerton and Clark, close to where I was living. Where had I been? A haze. Lots of places. Lots of people. For days and nights. Not sure how many. Not sure where I'd been. All over the city, all over the suburbs, into Indiana at some point, probably up toward Milwaukee even.

I had been at a local bar one afternoon, I think the one that started the bender. I asked the bartender, a woman named Deb, to give me a shot of something that would make my eyes bleed. She gave me a look for a second, turned her back to the bar and bent over, grabbed some awful looking bottle of spicy tequila with a rancid worm and what looked like a peyote button in it, poured me three shots, filled me a beer, and said "Happy Kwanzaa." I pounded the drinks and gulped down the beer. My eyes didn't bleed. Tears flowed, though. It felt like a tribe of cavemen had discovered fire in my esophagus. It was perfect.

Beyond that, yeah, a haze. I recall being at some other bar on what I think was the same night, met a bunch of brokers off work from downtown who were getting smashed. Can't recall how I hooked up with them, but I believe there were wagers involved. It's easy to party with traders. The more outlandish the challenge, the greater the likelihood of revelry and massive swings of cash from one person to the next. Can you stand on your head and snort a line of coke? That could get you a hundred bucks right there. Willing to walk out on the ledge of a hotel balcony while completely naked to steal the flag jutting out from the corner of the building on that floor? Maybe no cash this time, but how about two hot escorts for the rest of the night?

I somehow wound up on the far north side, somewhere around Rogers Park but somehow not Rogers Park. Weirder. Scarier. Way more fucked up, way more run down. It was friends of friends of friends of those brokers and I wound up at some sort of "protected" house, a house really off the grid for what seemed to be Chicagoans with reputations and images and a lot to lose, a house in a neighborhood no one pays attention to at all except as a place to avoid. But, from what I gathered, this place was "protected" by important people in that area so suits and dresses walking up and down the dilapidated streets were not hassled. I have no idea the details, just hearsay that I heard in the house from strangers speaking in strange languages. It was an opium den, freebasing lair, and sex playground for the professional class. I have a vague memory of leaving shortly after an elegantly-dressed woman who was shooting up across the room screamed out desperately for someone to punch her in the face.

You know, there's always more to any story. This one? This one could be endless. To catalog it all would be like accounting for grains of sand around the globe. It's always shifting, anyway. Maybe I'll tell more of it, maybe I'll never write about it again. In a way, I'm always writing about it because it's never ended since it started. Things have just gotten weirder over the years.