a sixty second story...'denial'

My name is Peter.  It used to be Bartholomew.  Or Bart for short.  My wife calls me Barty.  She is insane.  I remember now the children I went to school with used to call me Farty Barty.  They too were insane.  And mean.  Children for the most part are.  I have two of them, so you would think I should know.

In a matter of weeks I will reach the forty second anniversary of my birth.  I have been traipsing around a small area of planet Earth for forty one years! Where has all the time gone?  And has any of my traipsing been worthwhile?

Forty one, going on forty two – I am much less decisive than I was when I was young.  And spry, and sure of myself.  Sometimes I look in the bathroom mirror and wonder who the person is staring back at me.  Sometimes the morning light really shows my age. 

But at least I am saner! (or so I tell myself)

My father, whose name was also Bartholomew – Bart to his friends – had a pretty disastrous forty two years on planet Earth.  So disastrous, in fact, shortly after his forty second birthday he swallowed a bottle of Suma.  Suma is typically used to clean out blocked drains. 

By this time my father was a blocked drain, clogged full of bad chemicals and bad feelings.  It made sense. 

He also used to complain about gravity.  That it was too heavy.  That the world and everything in it was weighing down and squashing him.

Sir Isaac Newton once said he could ‘calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people’.  And this from the person who introduced us to the concept of gravity!

Indeed, there are times when I identify with Sir Isaac, even with my father, and wonder how anyone living in their right mind can feel a lightness of being.  Of course I never reach an answer, and for now have settled on this: that all the people I associate with – my wife, my two children, my work colleagues, my friends (of which there are a few), are all cuckoo.

Cock-a-doodle-do!!

It’s my way of self-preservation or self defence, of explaining away my blues and my way of keeping my feet on God’s good earth (ha).  But while he recognised madness, my father, God rest his soul (haha), adopted the opposite stance to me: that he was crazy and everyone else was pure of heart and clear of mind.  He is now, and has been for twenty three years, in heaven (hahaha).

Or, enough said.

Then again, perhaps I have not said enough.  What else, you might wonder, convinces me – as far as I am able to be convinced about anything these days – everybody (except me) is crackers? 

My wife, my dear wife.  We’ve been married sixteen years.  She maintains to our friends we are happily married.  And in turn they pretend of themselves the same thing.  And that our respective children are anything but mean and insane.  Ho hum!  It seems to me, my dear wife of sixteen years and our friends have all come to believe this.  They are convinced.  And they agree with one another.  Needless to see this kind of harmony seems to me the first sign of (or seedbed for) madness.

I see the second kind of madness in my two children – their desire to please, their alarming propensity to do what I say, and even more alarmingly, to do what my wife says (although given their mutual insanity, this is in fact entirely comprehendible).  At least in their relationship with so called adults my two children display the same simple minded obedience I used to see in patients during my visits to the state asylum.

The state asylum.

The state asylum, I have come to notice is something of a parallel universe with the university where I now work.  We are all cocooned in our own little offices (cells) with the same padded floors and surround walls.  We too wear a uniform (after a fashion), and we, for the most part, go meekly about our business, save the occasional deranged rant to apparently thin air (voice com).  Moreover, most of my colleagues cannot spell, don’t flush the toilet and repeat themselves, repeat themselves, repeat themselves (most of my students too).

As you would expect, my dear wife also repeats herself a lot.  A lot!  This is the third kind of madness.  My friends repeat themselves a lot as well (they have all run out of new lines of conversation years ago). 

My dear wife and our friends, at least our friends who are couples, also refer to themselves as ‘we’.  ‘We did this’, ‘We did that’.  The fourth kind of madness – never feeling as if we are alone! Or feeling as if we are part of something bigger, together (The Big Society, God’s People, tralalala).

..Look: if I sound like a pessimist.

A depressionist (sp?)

Or simply depressing.

Then I am sorry.

Listen for a minute: I apologise for being sane.

But you have to concede I have reason to say the things I do, be the way I am.  After all, given what happened to my father, you might expect to be rather more insane, and furthermore, as I have already mentioned, I am surrounded by, work and live alongside, in some cases together with insane people.  At every turn!! My wife, my two children, our friends, my work colleagues!

Yes, I am aware I am repeating myself here, but it is intended for dramatic effect.

And no, I don’t want to come across as a misery guts, because I want to please you, and want you to see things as I do.

For remember, as I said, my impression of my own sanity is an act of self-preservation.

A self-defence.

Which brings me to the fifth and most irrefutable sign of madness. 

Denial.

Cock-a-doodle-do!

(echo: denial, denial)