-I fear that I may have gone quite mad.
-Unfortunately, this isn't the first time. Or, perhaps I should be glad this isn't the first, for the logic of experience suggests that should help, in dealing with madness.
-Madness isn't logical.
-Madness is a lot like children - or, perhaps madness is a child, of a sort, a tiny thing on fast legs moving, each utterly alien from the next, all capable of more destruction and joy than form and structure would suggest.
-But there is such joy in madness. I mean, real joy, the kind that makes a man rip his shirt off on the top of a building and scream his lungs out, a primal sort of experience that keeps him laughing so hard that tears waterfall from the corner of his crinkled eyes as he pees his pants, because a cop is tasing him.
-Such sweet madness.
-I perhaps first came in contact at a very early age. The world as you might know it (who knows if anyone sees the world even near the same as another) never quite had the same grip on me as it did on others, you see. It was like trying to grip an oiled fish with buttered fingers. I'd just slip out and swim in what was, for the moment.
-Unfortunately, doing so much escaped swimming made life a more difficult, shuddering experience, akin to the violent back-and-forth jerking of manual transition under the shaky hands of a new driver. It gave me whiplash, that's what it did.
-This made school a series of unique experiences, as I was never quite on the same wavelength (mental or physical) as the other students, or the teachers. I could blame the Asperger's, but really I just didn't like them, and refused to condescend to their level (or perhaps rise to it - the jury is still out on that one). This isn't to suggest that I didn't have friends, I most certainly did, but at times I felt like a little monkey on a leash dancing for peanuts. Oh well. While they laughed, I filled my stomach and got some exercise.
-But I liked to entertain, still do. Those born strange either spend a lifetime entertaining, or else killing, so I chose the most pleasant sociopathic route and emulated a contemplative comedian, a thinking stand-up, the jester philosopher.
-I regret to say that puberty was a normalizing period in my life, though I can't say why (this cursed period of life tends to have the opposite effect on others). It was almost as if the collective, amorphous entity that represented me was shifted so far left that my body felt the need to harpoon it, pull me and trap myself in a physical fleshy prison. But harpooned isn't quite the right way to describe it, as I felt no pain (perhaps my body coated the harpoon with a powerful anaesthetic before launching it into my mind), Mayhaps I should say I netted me, and to drag me into the fuzzy fiction that is reality.
-Suddenly, life developed blurry edges, the world wasn't in quite as sharp contrast. No, I didn't need glasses or contact lens - I could see, I just couldn't see any longer. See?
-I missed the Strange and regretted my separation from it, have struggled to find myself after that (life made so much more sense when it was clarifying chaos). Or, has my self struggled to find me? I need to discover who is doing the finding and who is doing the struggling, and if they are the same individual, separate and distinct, but one (my mental trinity - me and me and me).
-But a slow-made point that can be taken away is, it's gotten harder to see, anymore, harder to be made to care. As always, there's a madness there, lurking behind my eyes, staring inward, but it's a new kind of madness. Heavier. Wetter. Thicker. Softer. Like a big quilt, anger without the sharp edges, all soaked in rum. But I can't light it on fire, no matter how hard I try.
-And I still can't taste the sweet, intoxicating alcohol madness.
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