Desperate Art

The Art of Desperation

                Madness is the art of desperation. It is what separates the thinkers from the doers. You can think about licking the girl you just met, you can think about telling your boss off, you can think about finally giving up the Ghost, or you can do it.

I had never expected madness to feel so exhilarating.

It feels like wicked little indulgences. To actually do what you think about doing. And then you get addicted to the taste of electricity like white copper sizzling on your tongue, and you think “God, did I really just do that”? And the answer is yes, a thousand times yes, because you wanted to and you loved it and you’re mad.

And it makes you laugh these shy disbelieving little chuckles when you think about what you just did. Like the things you can read about but never truly come to regret doing yourself and then you realize you don’t regret it anyway because you did something in your life that made you sweat, and moan, and lie there helpless afterward in an incandescent bliss.

I don’t care what they say, reality and madness are the two most potent drugs there are.

Reality is a drug because it sometimes seems like madness but it’s there in all its hot and fleshy glory; and madness because it subverts and perverts reality like I lifted the skirt of that poor straight girl that lived up the street from me. I got her to kiss me first, because I’m no whore, but man was that a thrill. And sometimes I’m not sure it actually happened, but then I’m sure it did because I’m mad they tell me, so that means I do what I dream about but what I dream about never actually happens.

Or so it goes.

My life is a little riddle stuffed with drugs of all sorts; the real, the imagined, and the so real they must have been imagined but they weren’t. Those are the kinds that land you in a hospital bed under the brightness of the streetlamp outside and you can’t cover your face with a pillow to try and get some sleep because the nurses think you’re trying to suffocate yourself.

But the nurses only care because that’s what they’ve been instructed to do. I care because I know what it’s like to die a hundred deaths and live a hundred lives under the same moon. I know what it’s like to step into the water and hope it’s the last death you’ll die. I know what it is like to walk back and only feel, and be incapable of thought and words and just feel like fucking animals feel but can’t think with words.

And it’s sick what they do to us, the mad. They give us pills to swallow to make our dreams more like their reality. They pound Bibles in our presence and condemn us and make us swallow their judgment because ours counts for shit now. They can’t trust us, and they try to make us believe that we can’t trust ourselves either.

Because living to work and feed the pudgy faces of some ingrate kids until I wither up and the fat kids send me to a nursing home that the government says the government can’t afford is what makes life worth living, you know?

And the money I’ll make is what I’ll take with me to my grave and up to heaven, not the memories of what I did with my life until I couldn’t figure out what was living and dying anymore.

And those ungrateful kids that will hate my guts when I’m old and the house that sits on the land that I bought that the government owns is what I’ll have them cremate and sprinkle over my ten-thousand dollar funeral service as everyone stares open-mouthed at the sky where I was told I’m headed if I take my pills and fly straight.

But it’s not about my madness, or pills. It’s about the madness that consumes us all. The reality we have created and let rule us, the laws we have set forth in motion so that things work out for us the way everyone else told us they should. Instead of finding for ourselves what is real and true and false, we rely on others who cheat us for our definition of reality, and truth. That’s madness. 

Or, am I just crazy?