Life's Lunacy 6/08/09

We build where monsters used to hide themselves.

Longfellow
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Welcome to my cage.
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I think it's possible that we are all born screaming, drooling, pooping mad, which is why, like any mental case, we have to be confined to cradles, cribs and carriages, and growing up is simply a process of trying to get sane. The questions are: Why, with all of our civilization, education, culture and society, does it take so long and why do some people never do it.

Within hours after it's born a deer knows it's a deer and has the fundamentals of survival down already. Whereas we humans just screw up our faces into an ugly mask and scream as loudly as we can. And the only thing we think we know is that if we do it long enough eventually someone will come by to do something. Meanwhile the fawn is cavorting in the forest with glee. Surely we, as the supposedly more intelligent creature, can come up with a better way of dealing with life. But no. We hold on to our insanity for as long as we can.

People do crazy things their whole lives and never question them. They will become so passionate about a ball game as to actually get violent. They will sit for hours and watch a film, which is nothing more than a two dimensional moving mural, and think they're seeing real life. What's the difference between the crazy old bag lady pushing her shopping cart full of who knows what down the sidewalk and the guy who fills up his garage with stuff he will never look at again to the point where there is no room for his car? Bungee jumping. What could be nuttier than that? Politics perhaps.

We are all born with monsters in our heads. That's the only way I can explain it. We have awakened from some desperate nightmare into the bright light of the living. We emerge into reality, bruised and battered, after doing battle with some savage, chimeras and we want to let everybody know about it. So we lie there crying and kicking.

Then, as we grow, we go from lying around to crawling and then to walking, we translate drooling gibberish into actual speech, get something which is called "an education" and join the community of other mad men in the cuckoos nest.

And if perhaps some genius gains enough enlightenment to be able to lead us back into the sunshine of sanity by his clear golden rationality he frightens us. We eschew his company, confine him to the crib of a tenured university professorship and forget about him. Why? Because he's not normal, he doesn't conform, he doesn't think and do the things the rest of us do. He's crazy.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
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May you find what you are looking for.
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