Being alone in the dark
Sanity is more of a shopping cart than a highway.
Metaphorically, I think people think of being sane as being on a certain road. The normal road. You cruise along, keeping it between the yellow lines and everything is fine. But suddenly there's a problem, a big mess up on the road causes you to go outside the lines.
Before you know it you're sitting in your shed building statues of Brett Hart out of old insulation and chicken wire. You talk to yourself, wear socks on your ears, and piss in a giant plastic tank buried in your basement. You've become insane.
You're off the road, crazy as a loon, a couple of cards short of a full deck. But is the road metaphor really all that fitting?
Is sanity a road, I say it isn't. I think our minds are like shopping carts, we push them around the world tossing in stuff we want to keep. Things we take a liking to we toss in the cart, money, cars, pets, music, sex, alcohol, violence, you name it. If the packaging catches our eye we pick it up. Sooner or later our cart/mind is full of all sorts of things. For example we may have rap music, chicken cacciatore, honda civics and black vinyl genital caps in our cart. I don't, but anyway you can see where I'm going. But what if put things in our cart that don't represent the normal mix, like sex + amputation? Then our cart is a little different from most other peoples. But not all that different.
Maybe we like books, so we start to read a lot, but then reading fiction becomes stale, so we start reading about anatomy, then we start reading about welding, and then we start trying to weld things to our anatomy.
What's my point? There is no such thing as sane, just shades of weird. Everyone has weird shit in their cart.
As it happens I wish I could be some sort of aquatic or woodland mammal, like a seal or a badger. Does that make me insane? Or more any more insane than another man, one who has Eiffel 63 and a desire to play professional football? I may want to be a badger, but I don't know how that's any weirder than the dreams of anyone else. I don't have a great interest in conveying and air filled oblong piece of leather across 100 yards of fake grass and into a special zone, thereby earning an arbitrary number of point units for my gathering of teammates under the collective organizational banner of the "Spokane Eagles" or whatever our team is called.
Anyone who studies psychology may see all kinds of signs of dementia in my writing, and presume anyone who wrote it must be insane. But I say studying psychology is insane! So take that you head shrinker!
This has ended on an entirely different theme than I was going for. Well, back to my plastic tank.