You Can’t Return from Crazy.

The Return from Crazy Is Impossible

I don’t know anything about heroin or hard street drugs.  I do know about crazy. I have cursory research knowledge and general exposure to social media, so I sort of know that people do return from self-ascribed trips.  It is possible to overcome or learn to deal with addiction.  

Crazy is not an addiction or a street drug and once you’ve gone on a crazy trip, you don’t ever get to come back.  My father got malaria serving in the Philippines in WW II.  He would get chills even in merely chilly weather. He hated it.  As soon as he could, he retired to Phoenix, Arizona. He loved the heat.  He absolutely loved the searing head-pounding heat of that desert.  The only real cure he found for a condition that, it would seem, for which he could not find a cure, was to force expose himself to a condition as extreme in the reverse as the symptoms he despised.

The chills from the malaria would come in unpredictable waves.  The chills from the malaria were physical and my father found physical  means of living with them. Crazy, in my experience, can also occur in waves unpredictably.  And, means can be found to live with crazy.

(I hate snow and I hate winter.  Trees all naked like old people in the fitness center locker room.  Just looks unnatural to me. Conifers at least have the good sense to leave their clothes on.)

(Grey sky.  Dirty lint laden blanket overhead.  Squashing all sense of emotional flight.  Can’t get my spirit to lift off the ground to discover, to play along the wind currents.  Find the warm updrafts and soar a hundred feet straight up and glisté in sweeping curves to giddiness.  Giggly baby giddiness. Squirming away from the tickle monster. That’s all gone under dirty skies. No sense of morning, of noon time.  It’s 7 p.m. all day. Until after sunset when the sun rises somewhere else.)

(January through March, a tunnel.  A long mold covered tunnel. With the smell of mold soaking into every pore.  Skin feeling like it’s covered in algae. It’s wet underwear. No matter how many dry clothes you try to put over it, it stays damp and clingy, massively uncomfortable.)

(But right now, it’s February.  Nearly the end of February. Which isn’t so bad because it’s a very short month.  And then, it’s March; which is my very least favorite, and March is the longest month.  March just goes on forever, but March slams shut. March is not a gentle month. March hates you coming in the door, it sits like a pile of wet dirty laundry in the middle of the living room and glowers at you from breakfast to dinner.  Then one morning you come downstairs and March is gone. It’s just gone like it was never there.)

(April is the time of questions.  April is very strong and blots out most memory of March.  April is a liar, however. One morning there is a warm breeze and a faint smell of green and yellow and pink and that afternoon it turns to ice and snows.  The first cup of tea the next morning and it’s winter again until noon. At noon it’s Spring again and the day feels as long as a rope, a very long rope. The day after that May pulls in the long gravel road like the FedEx truck and delivers a gift of Spring daffodils everywhere.)

(But, in April, don’t step off the gravel in the road or you’ll sink to your knees in mud.)

(I have decided to move to a country on the Equator where everyday is the same length.  No Solstices. No short days and long days. Every day is just the same amount of daylight and nighttime.  The only difference between January and July is that it rains everyday in January. Only every other day in July.  And it’s windy in January. With fewer spiders.)