We Are All Mad Here

But It’s Kept Us From Going Insane

Westerners come of age with the state of madness dangled before us like some glittering, exotic bauble. From the Cheshire Cat (“We’re all mad here”) to Norman Bates (“We all go a little mad sometimes, don’t we?”), the condition ripples at our consciousness’ peripheral, a hazard, a caution, a possibility ripe with peril and yet too a slightly seductive air of enigmatic allure that, whether mildly intriguing or wholly sinister, infiltrates the mind.

It is constantly proffered within popular culture; see, f’rinstance, that classic NYT hed “Creativity and Madness Linked, Study Says”; see Poe, Blake, Dali—riveting, deeply malfunctional figures all, subject to a gentle tide of social revision verging on normalization. It’s a two-way street, baby, and anyone can find themselves suddenly, albeit amiably, slouching along that route.

I recently did, and it was one mother of a psychic safari.

After swearing off intoxicants in mid-2023, life was a boundless frontier, the horizon a beckoning siren of irresistible appeal. But recovery is a condition where so much emotional information—past, present, aspiration, intent—collides, it becomes overwhelming.

Wending through this fog (following decades of assiduous debauchery) leaves one in a vulnerable, tender state; not in terms of potential relapse but in a weird, abstract sort of psychological vacuum—as Waylon Jennings told me, “When you spend that many years on drugs and get off, you don’t even know how to walk into a room or what to act like. You have to learn everything all over again.”

Having two autists within the immediate clan had already, in the unpredictable atmosphere of neural disorder, made life assume extraordinary new contours. One gains a singular perspective and endures inner turmoil which those outside the experience will never understand.

But, last Summer, just over a year sober, things began to unravel. An unexpected detour in the romance department left me drastically off balance, with a nominally stable psyche topheavy teetering, abruptly loaded with confusion and woe.

Suddenly the ultimate socio-domestic goal—homeostasis—seemed a monolithic ideal impossible to scale and conquer; an elaborate labyrinth of vex and obfuscation opened before me, all shadows and dead ends, one continuously exacerbated by both interior and exterior forces. Profoundly bewildered and frustrated, a chaotic state of panic, self-recrimination, loss and failure prevailed. Additionally, whenever I went up for air, the realization that we all exist in an overwhelmingly deleterious-by-design and painstakingly manicured climate of mis-dis-mal-information—was exacting a toll.

We all face it: the governing miasma of ceaselessly foisted lies, distractions and manipulation. This constant, calculated assault, reaching frenzy pitch during election season, only fostered and burnished deeper forays into the maze.

Reality seemed to increasingly expose itself as a deception. They have lied about pretty much everything during our lifetime. They lied about the Gulf of Tonkin (directly causing the death of multitudes), lied about recycling plastic, told you Assange was a rapist, lied under oath about the CIA’s robust torture program and illegal NSA spying, lied about the Affordable Care Act, lied about “horse paste”, lied about Biden (“sharp, intensely probing, detail-oriented and focused,”) lied about those New Jersey drones (UFOs? UAPs? Iranians?). And then there’s Trump.

But when Harris campaign manager David Plouffe admitted “we were never ahead” and that every election poll—universally trumpeted by the press—was entirely fictional, it was a big fat cherry crowning a fetid confection of mendacity, one that ignited endless speculation—if they admitted RFK had “15% or more” support, what was it actually—30%, 40%, 50%? And why hadn’t they released the pee tape?

As a tenured, card-carrying member of the Fourth Estate, long since inured to 21^st century media’s total abrogation of duty in favor of corporatist agenda boosting, I’d thought myself immune, but an increasingly profound, poisonous distrust began to permeate day to day existence.

Plundering philosophy for respite became a kaleidoscopic tilt-a-whirl; brief, tantalizing glimpses of Dharma, Gestaltism, the Dream argument—refusal to accept conscious reality as a given—flashed by and disappeared. The Dorothy Gale/King Kong/Travis Bickle fable (identical characters thrust, hopelessly lost, into hazardous, alien settings) roared constantly within my choo-choo train of thought.

You’ve always had the power. Twas beauty killed the beast. You talkin’ to me?

Re-watching Louis Malle’s 1981 My Dinner with Andre proved disastrous. “We’re all bored,” Andre says. “But has it ever occurred to you that the process which creates this boredom may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous, really, than one thinks? And that it’s not just a question of individual survival, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep? And somebody who’s asleep will not say no?”

Even worse: “It’s all, I think, to give you the semblance that there’s firm earth. I mean, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again, for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”

Ka-pow. Reality no longer existed at all. Plato was clearly on to something. Moreover, recovery itself seemed invalid, a static, performative ritual—just like everything else. Fatherhood, romance, creativity all went into the grinder, extruded as a quivering pasty mass of valueless intellectual self-deception.

A cursory examination of the contemporary school of Reality is a Simulation immediately escalated into a hogwild rampage. Surfing through a quasi-psychedelic blur of extra-dimensional, quantum mechanical theorizing and cosmological entropy seemed to provide a wildly elusive validation, but it was no comfort.

I had become a ghost.

Desperate to somehow reach a clear state of perception or, at least, once more accommodate a mental grasp on tangible existence, the sole anchor was weekly sessions with a brilliant, intuitive and skillful therapist, one assigned by the treatment center which provided my detox and rehab stints. She absorbed the latest upshift in my ravings, saying, “This is pretty deep stuff, we’re going to have to get into all of it next week.”

They fired her two days later.

News of the termination was stunning (not to mention ethically unconscionable in the way it was executed, but that’s a different story) and the coup de grace to my faltering, cattywompus condition. The volcano’s maw beckoned. I stepped in.

Humans are uniformly stupid, squandering the sacred gift of free will in a million ugly ways and I am no better than the worst of them. Still fruitlessly plundering Reality is a Simulation, a sudden collision with Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe threatened to provide my grim voyage a new course.

With an IQ in the 200 range, Langan is ballyhooed as “the smartest man in America.” A former bouncer, cowboy, farmhand and construction worker with zero academic accomplishments—pure white trash, from a badly broken home. My kind of guy.

This led me, thunderstruck, back to exactly where I should have been, the firm ground of invaluable knowledge that allowed me to get clean and stay that way; precious knowledge I had foolishly turned my back on, in a fever of spiritual torpor, which enabled the infernal web of calculated secular overstimulation to immobilize and bind me.

Langan, answering the question “What should I do with my life?” replies: “Search for God. Ask God to establish a personal relationship with you. It’s available. You’re attached to God by your soul. There’s your soul that attaches you to God, you can receive the will of God into yourself and, to some extent, the power of God into yourself, but you’ve got to be receptive. If you’re not receptive then you’re cutting yourself off from God. And once you do that, then you do not share the identity of reality itself, and you’re done. Once your physical body expires, there is nothing that will carry you because you’ve denied it and rejected it.”

I didn’t need to be told this, but damn sure appreciated the reminder. And I’ve never been more secure, joyful and content.

Descanso Gardens, 2 February 2025